This has been done before, it's been around since at least the mid 1980's possibly earlier - it was caleld Core Wars. This evolved into another similar more advanced version called CRobots... Short programs are written to "attack" the other by overwriting the other's memory space. They must alternate between "defending" their own space and "attacking" the other guys's... First to blow stack loses!
Not in the USA. Here 1 pulse = Number 1, through 9, and 10 pulses = Number 0. Some other countries Japan, Korea, and parts of EU use 1 to equal the number 0, and 2 for 1, through 10 for number 9.
I've dialled that way slapping the paddle on a payphone before!
Back in 1985, there used to be a device made by a company called Tellular that replaced the handset on the brick-phones of the day. That had a dial tone and loop current generator, and sensor for off-hook, (and of course dial pulses, which are rapid hookswitch pulses), and DTMF's. The device would also generate a 100V ring pulse for incoming calls. The net effect was you could plug a standard rotary or DTMF house phone into the box and it would fake a network interface, dial the cell phone and hit send automatically.
I co-designed a system called "Limo-Phone" that interfaced between the phone and the Tellular box to time and charge for the call. This would let a Limousine have a standard TrimLine or Princess phone in the back, the fare could place calls while there like a normal phone, and the device would tally up the bill at the end of the ride!
Although I love Bob Marley and the Wailers, and I'm sure Bob loved Cannabis, I'm pretty sure the "seed" he was referring to there was a metaphor for freedom of ideas, not just weed...
Take that to the next level - If virus scanners are "OK" to use, then why don't we build a disassembler/decompiler that works on the same principles?
Oh, here we have the "signature" of a printf routine, here we have an sbrk subroutine, etc. By "virus scanning" all the functional modules of a program, and detecting "signatures" of various program pieces, the "scanner" program could produce a flow chart or pseudocode output that reports the gist of a program.
Har! Back in 1986 when I was on the road making locale-specific engineering modifications to a pay telephone system I designed, I had an 8085 emulator-in-a-briefcase and a full-size Compaq "Luggable" (8088 12 Mhz 40 MB HD) that I used to plug into airport AC outlets and play Chess and Rouge (Epyx's version for PC) with it while waiting for flights!
You see, I had no "Geek Shame" back then, and nowadays no one would give me a 2nd look, except perhaps the wonderful TSA folks...
It also had a nice clock on the screen by a TSR program of some sort, which would remind me when to pack up and go to the gate. Unfortunately, once, after a couple of cocktails, I forgot completely about the whole time zone thing, and missed my flight clean by an hour! But that is another story...
Some deviant ass-crust actually re-wrote each of those variants to be different, i.e. varying payloads, damages, etc. So, yes, they are unique and thus have different signatures. The different names the various anti-virus makers use to refer to the SAME variant obviously should not be counted, but all the variations of a given virus should be, because they ARE in fact different virii than their original versions.
First, let me say if you base anything important on what you see here on Slashdot, you're biggest problem is not what your friends think of you.
Second, let me say that information here is not verified or corroborated in any way, in fact if the editors even clicked on the links, your're lucky.
Third, this was a pretty good professional hoax. The multiple views had superimposed clocks, random cars and air traffic, star patterns and garage doors in various states to make the fact that there were only 12 repeating views harder to notice. The hoax was good enough to fool every major news agency in the US that reported on it, so why not the self-admittedly unauthoritative Slashdot?
Fourth, why would this in any way reflect negatively on you? Because you got taken in like everyone else? Lighten up, Francis.
You want to capture signal, not noise. In order to do that, you need to tune the circuit. A wire will pick up all signals, but also all noise. There's no gain. In order to capture a part of the spectrum you're interested in you have to give up the rest in order to make the part you're interested in discernable. You trade off bandwith for gain.
You see this in antennas, too, with the physical aspect of directionality. You can trade off a circular omni signal on a vertical antenna for a directional beam, and thus concetrate all your energy in a single direction instead of everywhere. This is also called gain!
It won't do that. At least not what you are thinking it might, It won't help to DECRYPT digital (TV) information.
It does receive RF signals and convert them to a digital bitstream, but any further processing, such as demultiplexing the data streams and further decrypting the signals has to be done using the current crop of ASIC's you'll find in a standard set-top DTV box.
The RF receiver portion (that this GNURadio could replace) is only about 1/2 of the crap inside a box. The other half is devoted to decryption, video decompression, macrovision generation, RGB output conversion/DAC, audio, modem and power supply.
Even when the DTV hacking was at it's heyday, you could use a software emulator to do 99% of the work, but you still needed that custom ASIC in the card to do the actual public key decrypt on the video stream. There just isn't a substitute (hardware or software) because no one outside of the manufacturer knew the exact polynomials and algorithms used to do the scrambling.
So, as you say "Software Decoder", well, it is in the same way that your table radio is a "Hardware Decoder" of RF signals into audio. Most of the "Decoding" still needs to be done downstream to make the decoded RF (now a digital bit stream) into something more useful, like video or audio.
Oh come on. Like we all didn't think it for a moment, at least. I'm not completely insenstive, and I'm very sorry that some have died, but if you can't laugh once in a while, you have some serious issues. Lighten up, Francis.
Ann Arbor, MI has something like this in place. Late at night when there is no cross-traffic on the sensors, if you approach a red light and maintain constant speed at the speed limit (or below), it will turn green in time for your arrival at the intersection!
My old roommate was from there and told me about it, and I had a hard time believing him, but I went up there with him, and got to see them firsthand - they do work, but only at late night when there's no cross-traffic.
What traffic control signals need to do is a "greatest good for the needs of the many" calculation, so if a group of 5 cars approach from one direction and a group of 2 from the other, the group of 2 gets a redlight, and the 5 get a green.
This was covered nicely in Star Trek:TOS episode, where two societies had removed the bloodiness of war between them and "sanitized" it to the point where there was no price to pay for waging the war - and then it then went on for centuries in stalemate......Until dashing Capt. Kirk and crew put an end to it, of course.
I do see the use of these robots to be expendable instead of humans for hazardous duties in the military or normal civilian life as a good thing. For ordnance disposal, mine sweeping, hazmat cleanup, etc. they're perfect, but not to replace soldiers outright for waging war directly, mostly for the reasons you bring up.
A little below the 6 meter band, the Illinois State Police still uses stuff around 42 Mhz for point-to-point dispatches between districts, but within the local districts they have gone to 800 Mhz trunked systems.
Michigan and Wisconsin (possibly Indiana too) have also gone the same way, with 800 Mhz statewide trunked systems, some of them APCO digital (similar to digital cellular service). Illinois is implementing a new statewide digital system called StarComm (sp?) that will unify all the districts onto a massive state-wide system with voice and data.
Well said. Remember, Ham radio is an expensive hobby, and tends to attract well-to-do people that were raised properly and know how to bathe regularly.
There are exceptions, of course, just like in any corner of geekdom, just like there are ones that stlll live at their parents house past the age of 30.
Also BTW, HF is the only useful band for long-range communications, the higher frequencies are only good for 50-100 miles max reliably. That may not be enough to get out of the disaster area.
Actually, I do. I have the complete MSDN release kits from 95-99, so it has the NT4 disc and PPC releases within, amongst mucho other crapola.
What I don't have is a boot disk, and I think the machine may be too old to know how to boot from CDROM by the BIOS.
Any good software hoarder has all the necessary OS disks, but the custom drivers and setup/boot disks are the devil in the details.
Oh, and I'm not being haughty at all, it's sitting under an inch of dust in my "museum of technology" (i.e. basement). I just thought it was worth keeping because a) it works, and b) I had never heard of or seen one, even having worked both at an IBM dealer and Motorola back in the days when it was made.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming you're not a troll, I'll bite...
Tinfoil hats are the preferred apparel of paranoid conspiracy theorists, who think that if they don't wear them that:
a) the aliens will hit them with a "mind control ray" of some sort, or
b) the evil government will use a "mind reading ray" on them, or
c) it will prevent you from rebroadcasting Major League Baseball (tm) transmissions on your dental fillings.
This has been done before, it's been around since at least the mid 1980's possibly earlier - it was caleld Core Wars. This evolved into another similar more advanced version called CRobots... Short programs are written to "attack" the other by overwriting the other's memory space. They must alternate between "defending" their own space and "attacking" the other guys's... First to blow stack loses!
Here's some links:
Corewars:
Home Page
Source Forge Page
CRobots:
CRobots Home Page
(In Goofy Deep Voice)
That's Mr. Bean.
Thank you...
It reminds me of the "Opti-Grab" glasses from Steve Martin's "The Jerk"...
"Sounds like a great idea, but your eyes are drawn to it... then you wind up cock-eyed!"
Not in the USA. Here 1 pulse = Number 1, through 9, and 10 pulses = Number 0. Some other countries Japan, Korea, and parts of EU use 1 to equal the number 0, and 2 for 1, through 10 for number 9.
I've dialled that way slapping the paddle on a payphone before!
Back in 1985, there used to be a device made by a company called Tellular that replaced the handset on the brick-phones of the day. That had a dial tone and loop current generator, and sensor for off-hook, (and of course dial pulses, which are rapid hookswitch pulses), and DTMF's. The device would also generate a 100V ring pulse for incoming calls. The net effect was you could plug a standard rotary or DTMF house phone into the box and it would fake a network interface, dial the cell phone and hit send automatically.
I co-designed a system called "Limo-Phone" that interfaced between the phone and the Tellular box to time and charge for the call. This would let a Limousine have a standard TrimLine or Princess phone in the back, the fare could place calls while there like a normal phone, and the device would tally up the bill at the end of the ride!
Although I love Bob Marley and the Wailers, and I'm sure Bob loved Cannabis, I'm pretty sure the "seed" he was referring to there was a metaphor for freedom of ideas, not just weed...
Righetous Good Jam, Tho', Mon!
Plant another kind seed and go to jail, too... How about cannabis sativa (or do you prefer indica?)
Assholes always keep trying to make nature illegal. Har!
The best one I've heard was from a buddy who is into wardriving... he said he found one that was:
"GetTheFuckOffMyNetwork"
Take that to the next level - If virus scanners are "OK" to use, then why don't we build a disassembler/decompiler that works on the same principles?
Oh, here we have the "signature" of a printf routine, here we have an sbrk subroutine, etc. By "virus scanning" all the functional modules of a program, and detecting "signatures" of various program pieces, the "scanner" program could produce a flow chart or pseudocode output that reports the gist of a program.
All without traditional disasembly techniques?
Har! Back in 1986 when I was on the road making locale-specific engineering modifications to a pay telephone system I designed, I had an 8085 emulator-in-a-briefcase and a full-size Compaq "Luggable" (8088 12 Mhz 40 MB HD) that I used to plug into airport AC outlets and play Chess and Rouge (Epyx's version for PC) with it while waiting for flights!
You see, I had no "Geek Shame" back then, and nowadays no one would give me a 2nd look, except perhaps the wonderful TSA folks...
It also had a nice clock on the screen by a TSR program of some sort, which would remind me when to pack up and go to the gate. Unfortunately, once, after a couple of cocktails, I forgot completely about the whole time zone thing, and missed my flight clean by an hour! But that is another story...
Some deviant ass-crust actually re-wrote each of those variants to be different, i.e. varying payloads, damages, etc. So, yes, they are unique and thus have different signatures. The different names the various anti-virus makers use to refer to the SAME variant obviously should not be counted, but all the variations of a given virus should be, because they ARE in fact different virii than their original versions.
First, let me say if you base anything important on what you see here on Slashdot, you're biggest problem is not what your friends think of you.
Second, let me say that information here is not verified or corroborated in any way, in fact if the editors even clicked on the links, your're lucky.
Third, this was a pretty good professional hoax. The multiple views had superimposed clocks, random cars and air traffic, star patterns and garage doors in various states to make the fact that there were only 12 repeating views harder to notice. The hoax was good enough to fool every major news agency in the US that reported on it, so why not the self-admittedly unauthoritative Slashdot?
Fourth, why would this in any way reflect negatively on you? Because you got taken in like everyone else? Lighten up, Francis.
That's an excellent analogy!
One other way to look at it is gain.
You want to capture signal, not noise. In order to do that, you need to tune the circuit. A wire will pick up all signals, but also all noise. There's no gain. In order to capture a part of the spectrum you're interested in you have to give up the rest in order to make the part you're interested in discernable. You trade off bandwith for gain.
You see this in antennas, too, with the physical aspect of directionality. You can trade off a circular omni signal on a vertical antenna for a directional beam, and thus concetrate all your energy in a single direction instead of everywhere. This is also called gain!
It won't do that. At least not what you are thinking it might, It won't help to DECRYPT digital (TV) information.
It does receive RF signals and convert them to a digital bitstream, but any further processing, such as demultiplexing the data streams and further decrypting the signals has to be done using the current crop of ASIC's you'll find in a standard set-top DTV box.
The RF receiver portion (that this GNURadio could replace) is only about 1/2 of the crap inside a box. The other half is devoted to decryption, video decompression, macrovision generation, RGB output conversion/DAC, audio, modem and power supply.
Even when the DTV hacking was at it's heyday, you could use a software emulator to do 99% of the work, but you still needed that custom ASIC in the card to do the actual public key decrypt on the video stream. There just isn't a substitute (hardware or software) because no one outside of the manufacturer knew the exact polynomials and algorithms used to do the scrambling.
So, as you say "Software Decoder", well, it is in the same way that your table radio is a "Hardware Decoder" of RF signals into audio. Most of the "Decoding" still needs to be done downstream to make the decoded RF (now a digital bit stream) into something more useful, like video or audio.
Exactly. I was joking about the headline text, not the disaster. Geez, some people need to get a grip.
Oh come on. Like we all didn't think it for a moment, at least. I'm not completely insenstive, and I'm very sorry that some have died, but if you can't laugh once in a while, you have some serious issues. Lighten up, Francis.
At first glance, I thought this was about some new video game release!
Ann Arbor, MI has something like this in place. Late at night when there is no cross-traffic on the sensors, if you approach a red light and maintain constant speed at the speed limit (or below), it will turn green in time for your arrival at the intersection!
My old roommate was from there and told me about it, and I had a hard time believing him, but I went up there with him, and got to see them firsthand - they do work, but only at late night when there's no cross-traffic.
What traffic control signals need to do is a "greatest good for the needs of the many" calculation, so if a group of 5 cars approach from one direction and a group of 2 from the other, the group of 2 gets a redlight, and the 5 get a green.
This was covered nicely in Star Trek:TOS episode, where two societies had removed the bloodiness of war between them and "sanitized" it to the point where there was no price to pay for waging the war - and then it then went on for centuries in stalemate... ...Until dashing Capt. Kirk and crew put an end to it, of course.
I do see the use of these robots to be expendable instead of humans for hazardous duties in the military or normal civilian life as a good thing. For ordnance disposal, mine sweeping, hazmat cleanup, etc. they're perfect, but not to replace soldiers outright for waging war directly, mostly for the reasons you bring up.
A little below the 6 meter band, the Illinois State Police still uses stuff around 42 Mhz for point-to-point dispatches between districts, but within the local districts they have gone to 800 Mhz trunked systems.
Michigan and Wisconsin (possibly Indiana too) have also gone the same way, with 800 Mhz statewide trunked systems, some of them APCO digital (similar to digital cellular service). Illinois is implementing a new statewide digital system called StarComm (sp?) that will unify all the districts onto a massive state-wide system with voice and data.
Well said. Remember, Ham radio is an expensive hobby, and tends to attract well-to-do people that were raised properly and know how to bathe regularly.
There are exceptions, of course, just like in any corner of geekdom, just like there are ones that stlll live at their parents house past the age of 30.
Also BTW, HF is the only useful band for long-range communications, the higher frequencies are only good for 50-100 miles max reliably. That may not be enough to get out of the disaster area.
Actually, I do. I have the complete MSDN release kits from 95-99, so it has the NT4 disc and PPC releases within, amongst mucho other crapola.
What I don't have is a boot disk, and I think the machine may be too old to know how to boot from CDROM by the BIOS.
Any good software hoarder has all the necessary OS disks, but the custom drivers and setup/boot disks are the devil in the details.
Oh, and I'm not being haughty at all, it's sitting under an inch of dust in my "museum of technology" (i.e. basement). I just thought it was worth keeping because a) it works, and b) I had never heard of or seen one, even having worked both at an IBM dealer and Motorola back in the days when it was made.
I agree most heartily! Especially since I haven't got any installation media, if the image on the HD ever gets messed up, then that's all, folks...
If that ever does happen, the poor old machine is too slow and funky to run anything modern on.
I have a PPC laptop in my basement that was an IBM Thinkpad, jointly made by IBM and Motorola.
It has a BIOS that comes up by Motorola, similar to what they had on their desktop "PowerStack" line of PPC based PC's.
I believe the processor is a 100 Mhz PPC or so, the rest of the thing is almost exactly like a standard Thinkpad 655-750.
It still has the NT4 O/S on the HD that Motorola and IBM jointly developed, and it still does nothing useful.