I know the parent knows this, but for everyone else...
The reason you'd want greater depth of field with a macro setup is that macro photographs have incredibly short depth of field. With a good set of bellows (mine are probably the length of a pringles can), your depth of field can easily be only 1mm. This makes photographing things that are 2-3mm big a challenge because you have to have the object perpendicular to the lens to be in focus -- that's a pretty boring straight-ahead shot. Extra depth of field lets you look at whatever it is off-axis, which is usually much more interesting.
I think if everyone works together, launching payload into space will be easy. If you got everyone in a medium-sized town (54,000 people) to cooperate and have each person lift just 6 feet, you could get the payload into space without expensive rockets. I am stepping up to the plate and personally offering to lift the payload from 5400 feet to 5406 feet. Any takers for "5394 to 5400" or "5406 to 5412"?
NEW YORK (1926) - The radio industry could find itself at the kids' table in the media garden party, as new technology threatens the business.
Television, Printing presses, and even the gramophone are slowly encroaching on traditional radio's stronghold on local entertainment and advertising. Plus, radio ads themselves are less memorable and creative, compared to the in-home experience a qualified door to door salesman can provide.
"Radio is at the center of a perfect storm of technological threats," said David Verklin, "It has to reinvent itself."
He noted that Gramophones and other music players like it have given listeners the ability to listen to what they want when they want.
Newspapers offer all the day's news an an easy-to-read format. You can skip forward or backwards, and even re-read portions. Archiving the paper is as simple as putting it away (try to listen to last weeks news on a radio - it can't be done!). And for disposal, who can't use more kindling? Color printed is soon expected to come down in price, and a "smell-o-print" service is being tested provide perfume samples in magazines. Again, try that with radio!
Recent televisions use an "electronic eye" to see and transmits 30 lines of high quality imagery at 5 times a second! Radio has no picture, so people have to delude themselves or pretend to see an image in their minds.
To address these concerns, the top U.S. radio company said last month that 95 percent of its 1,200 stations would be upgraded to stereo by 1930. If successful, the company could offer free picture frames to stick on the front of the radio - the listener could put in a picture of Roy Rogers when his show comes on, and it would be like the cowboy was in your living room!
With high-power chips like this one, you'll definitely ruin the chip when you SEM it. Like all chips, the transistors are on the bottom-most layer underneath the metal routing. Besides signals, this routing delivers power and ground to the whole chip. In power-hungry parts, a *lot* of wiring is required to do this. These signals are usually placed on the upper layers where the wires are typically slightly thicker and wider - they block the view of the good stuff.
So, there are at least two programmable chips in there. Why?! - surely there is some reason; otherwise it would be cheaper to stick everything in the FLASH memory. The existence of the EEPROM seems to indicate that the serial number/key isn't built in to the CPU. It would only take ~48 bits of programmable memory to put a decent key in the CPU, and use that to decrypt and/or validate the FLASH - so if that was done, there would be no need for an EEPROM.
An alternative could be that the CPU ROM wasn't big enough or they wanted some flexibility in getting the FLASH memory loaded. But, this could be kept on the GPU in some ROM (the code would only change if the CPU changed). If it is verified with a secret CPU-held key, it would still be reasonably safe and much harder to spoof than the EEPROM.
Either way, both memories could be encrypted with a constant-key held in the processor ROM, and that key is still needed. I doubt MS is going to put init data in the clear again after (that's how Bunnie cracked the original xbox).
I agree. I'm sure they did their homework, so the key/serial won't be readable over JTAG - there is no reason to do so in production, and it's an obvious security risk. It's probably one-time-programmable and can be read only by code executing out of processor ROM (and maybe with some other restrictions, like in the first 200 cycles since reset). There are other simple things to do, but I don't want to give any ideas (argh, sorry - I'm usually for free flow of ideas, but I don't want to make reverse-engineering this thing any harder for others).
There are people with SEMs and lots of time (wish I was unemployed and independently wealthy). They are just buying time before it is broken -- if it takes 10 years to do, then MS wins.
Interesting source of the information: I met someone on the IRC the other day who told me the following...
The biggest thing I wonder about in "The key is stored inside the CPU". This adds cost, but it is possible. It means that to execute your own code, the serial number must be determined so that a replacement flash chip can be properly encrypted. I'm betting it's pretty hard to find this number out without taking apart the processor.
I'm pretty talented and I'd like an xbox 360 to hack;-) Because Microsoft now has a custom processor, they probably won't make the same mistake of putting the initial boot code off-chip. This is the link Andrew "S" Bunnie snooped on to do the the original xbox hack (and on the 360, there was no attempt to hide the traces, so I don't think any decryption keys will travel over them). So, to dissect this box it will probably take a software exploit (like the PSP hacks), or a de-layering of the processor chip. The second approach sounds more fun, but will cost $$.
The GPS signal strength is actually below the noise floor*, so obviously steel won't work because it's already below the noise. But aluminum amplifies the government citizen control signal, drowning out the GPS.
(*The signal rises above the noise floor when the radio's signal processing decodes the chips - GPS uses a form of CDMA)
Or, put another way, the bottom-of-the-line AMD 3800+ is less than 1/3rd the price of the top-of-the-line Pentium 840 EE ($328 vs. $999), yet it still beats it in most of the benchmarks.
Too bad they didn't compare the Pentium D 830 in the benchmarks - this is closer in price to the AMD 3800+
all those reasons, plus one more: when I moderate a funny comment that offers obviously wrong advice as "informative", I smirk a little bit. I figure I can have some fun, too.
I had the same problem, but I solved it. I added extra things on my schedule the potential thief would be sure to find...
-.357 magnum arrives in mail - decide which gun i should sell (if only they made gun racks that could hold 25 guns instead of 24!) - speak at the academy about my personal experience of the stopping power of armor-piercing vs. hollow point. Bring a few guns for the demo. - Building inspector arrives - remember to disable the booby traps near the garage - Feed the man-eating lion in the basement. Secure door so he doesn't get out again. - Tell whacky Dave across the street that he can't stay up all night practicing for sniper school. It's not funny when he draws a bead on me at 3 am when I go to the bathroom.
Yep, it is a single crystal of Aluminium oxide, which is pretty much the definition of sapphire. It's grown the same way the semiconductor industry grows silicon crystals - more info.
It is brittle and will shatter -- because of this, it is not used on many of the "real" military watches. They would rather have a scratched face than shards all over the place (and a broken watch!).
I don't have a scanner handy (and actually, I'm traveling and forgot to pack the color laser printer!) but suggestion A worked like a champ with the Gimp and EFF's example picture. That example picture was underexposed and taken slightly off-axis (with a camera instead of a scanner), so it's not ideal, but still got good results.
Hmmm... I wonder why that wasn't used more. Maybe there is a difficulty detecting the dots among other colored backgrounds (such as red).
The basic conclusion is that many of the watermarked printers share a Canon print engine -- he suspects it is this engine that is doing the watermarking. The US Government just had to convince the critical-equipment supplier to add the tracking - not all the printer companies. He also notes that the Tek Phaser printers don't have this because they were developed before the Canon engine. (Oh, how I longed for a phaser back in the day!)
For A and B, the contrast/resolution may not be enough to detect the smallest droplets of yellow ink.
I also thought of C, but that's an expensive process - I'm sure that you would get many messed-up pages afterwards while the new toner feeds through. Or, maybe not - depends on how the toner is fed in. This would be hard to do when you're testing Kinko's printer, though.
D is a good idea, but the idea is to also make it monochromatic light - the blue plastic might let in too many different colored lights, even though it looks the same to the eye.
Also interesting is Andrew Bunnie's flat bed page scanner mod to use blue light instead of white. This made the yellow tracking dots easier to see, and the whole page could be seen at once to determine the pattern they made.
You can already buy a watch with a synthetic diamond face for $5 - the Rado V10K. Rado is the leader in scratch-proof watches.
I wear a watch with a sapphire face and a nitrogen-hardened titanium body. I don't know the physics, but the metal is as hard as sapphire - I can scratch glass with it! So far, five years old and not a single scratch. But I do have a small dent in it from an emergency landing in a hang glider... ah, good times.
I know that I'm not the oldest person here, but I've been using GPS since before all the satellites were up (~1992?).
The main problem is that you need a larger view of the sky to see the minimum number of satellites (3-4) -- indoor reception was difficult because you were limited to seeing 1/2 of the sky.
With fewer satellites, their geometry in the sky can become a problem -- if they are too close together, you'll get more measurement error (or, technically, GDOP).
Back then, if you really needed a gps fix, there were orbit prediction programs... you could input your general location, and it would tell you what the availability would be at different times in the day.
Anyone can do a test with their own GPS. I often see 6,8, or 10 satellites. If half of those satellites failed, I would still be able to get readings in open sky (with less precision, of course, because of GDOP).
Slashdot Mirror
I know the parent knows this, but for everyone else...
The reason you'd want greater depth of field with a macro setup is that macro photographs have incredibly short depth of field. With a good set of bellows (mine are probably the length of a pringles can), your depth of field can easily be only 1mm. This makes photographing things that are 2-3mm big a challenge because you have to have the object perpendicular to the lens to be in focus -- that's a pretty boring straight-ahead shot. Extra depth of field lets you look at whatever it is off-axis, which is usually much more interesting.
9 2.063551 10.1.1.113 -> 64.202.167.129 HTTP GET / HTTP/1.1
.... ..0. = ECN-Capable Transport (ECT): 0
.... ...0 = ECN-CE: 0
.1.. = Don't fragment: Set
..0. = More fragments: Not set
10 2.104156 64.202.167.129 -> 10.1.1.113 HTTP HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Frame 9 (312 bytes on wire, 312 bytes captured)
Arrival Time: Dec 8, 2005 17:20:12.255431000
Time delta from previous packet: 0.000944000 seconds
Time relative to first packet: 2.063551000 seconds
Frame Number: 9
Packet Length: 312 bytes
Capture Length: 312 bytes
Ethernet II, Src: 00:0a:95:f1:d3:e8, Dst: 00:09:0f:87:3b:a6
Destination: 00:09:0f:87:3b:a6 (Fortinet_87:3b:a6)
Source: 00:0a:95:f1:d3:e8 (AppleCom_f1:d3:e8)
Type: IP (0x0800)
Internet Protocol, Src Addr: 10.1.1.113 (10.1.1.113), Dst Addr: 64.202.167.129 (64.202.167.129)
Version: 4
Header length: 20 bytes
Differentiated Services Field: 0x00 (DSCP 0x00: Default; ECN: 0x00)
0000 00.. = Differentiated Services Codepoint: Default (0x00)
Total Length: 298
Identification: 0x2381 (9089)
Flags: 0x04
Fragment offset: 0
Time to live: 64
Protocol: TCP (0x06)
Header checksum: 0x2290 (correct)
Source: 10.1.1.113 (10.1.1.113)
Destination: 64.202.167.129 (64.202.167.129)
Transmission Control Protocol, Src Port: 62721 (62721), Dst Port: http (80), Seq: 3475988893, Ack: 2316008146, Len: 246
Source port: 62721 (62721)
Destination port: http (80)
Sequence number: 3475988893
Next sequence number: 3475989139
Acknowledgement number: 2316008146
Header length: 32 bytes
Flags: 0x0018 (PSH, ACK)
Congestion Window Reduced (CWR): Not set
ECN-Echo: Not set
Urgent: Not set
Acknowledgment: Set
Push: Set
Reset: Not set
Syn: Not set
Fin: Not set
Window size: 65535
Checksum: 0x8bee (correct)
Options: (12 bytes)
NOP
NOP
Time stamp: tsval 2035949578, tsecr 2035949578
Hypertext Transfer Protocol
GET / HTTP/1.1\r\n
Request Method: GET
Accept: */*\r\n
Accept-Language: en\r\n
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate\r\n
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/416.12 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/416.13\r\n
Connection: keep-alive\r\n
Host: www.photosparks.com\r\n
\r\n
Frame 10 (127 bytes on wire, 127 bytes captured)
Arrival Time: Dec 8, 2005 17:20:12.296036000
Time delta from previous packet: 0.040605000 seconds
Time relative to first packet: 2.104156000 seconds
Frame Number: 10
Packet Length: 127 bytes
Capture Length: 127 bytes
Ethernet II, Src: 00:09:0f:87:3b:a6, Dst: 00:0a:95:f1:d3:e8
Destination: 00:0a:95:f1:d3:e8 (AppleCom_f1:d3:e8)
Source: 00:09:0f:87:3b:a6 (Fortinet_87:3
I think if everyone works together, launching payload into space will be easy. If you got everyone in a medium-sized town (54,000 people) to cooperate and have each person lift just 6 feet, you could get the payload into space without expensive rockets. I am stepping up to the plate and personally offering to lift the payload from 5400 feet to 5406 feet. Any takers for "5394 to 5400" or "5406 to 5412"?
NEW YORK (1926) - The radio industry could find itself at the kids' table in the media garden party, as new technology threatens the business.
Television, Printing presses, and even the gramophone are slowly encroaching on traditional radio's stronghold on local entertainment and advertising. Plus, radio ads themselves are less memorable and creative, compared to the in-home experience a qualified door to door salesman can provide.
"Radio is at the center of a perfect storm of technological threats," said David Verklin, "It has to reinvent itself."
He noted that Gramophones and other music players like it have given listeners the ability to listen to what they want when they want.
Newspapers offer all the day's news an an easy-to-read format. You can skip forward or backwards, and even re-read portions. Archiving the paper is as simple as putting it away (try to listen to last weeks news on a radio - it can't be done!). And for disposal, who can't use more kindling? Color printed is soon expected to come down in price, and a "smell-o-print" service is being tested provide perfume samples in magazines. Again, try that with radio!
Recent televisions use an "electronic eye" to see and transmits 30 lines of high quality imagery at 5 times a second! Radio has no picture, so people have to delude themselves or pretend to see an image in their minds.
To address these concerns, the top U.S. radio company said last month that 95 percent of its 1,200 stations would be upgraded to stereo by 1930. If successful, the company could offer free picture frames to stick on the front of the radio - the listener could put in a picture of Roy Rogers when his show comes on, and it would be like the cowboy was in your living room!
With high-power chips like this one, you'll definitely ruin the chip when you SEM it. Like all chips, the transistors are on the bottom-most layer underneath the metal routing. Besides signals, this routing delivers power and ground to the whole chip. In power-hungry parts, a *lot* of wiring is required to do this. These signals are usually placed on the upper layers where the wires are typically slightly thicker and wider - they block the view of the good stuff.
I like the FAQ wiki discussion better:
Q: Is the Xbox 360 dangerous?
A: If the Xbox 360 console falls and hits someone, especially a small child, it could cause serious injury.
That's really interesting, thanks!
So, there are at least two programmable chips in there. Why?! - surely there is some reason; otherwise it would be cheaper to stick everything in the FLASH memory. The existence of the EEPROM seems to indicate that the serial number/key isn't built in to the CPU. It would only take ~48 bits of programmable memory to put a decent key in the CPU, and use that to decrypt and/or validate the FLASH - so if that was done, there would be no need for an EEPROM.
An alternative could be that the CPU ROM wasn't big enough or they wanted some flexibility in getting the FLASH memory loaded. But, this could be kept on the GPU in some ROM (the code would only change if the CPU changed). If it is verified with a secret CPU-held key, it would still be reasonably safe and much harder to spoof than the EEPROM.
Either way, both memories could be encrypted with a constant-key held in the processor ROM, and that key is still needed. I doubt MS is going to put init data in the clear again after (that's how Bunnie cracked the original xbox).
I agree. I'm sure they did their homework, so the key/serial won't be readable over JTAG - there is no reason to do so in production, and it's an obvious security risk. It's probably one-time-programmable and can be read only by code executing out of processor ROM (and maybe with some other restrictions, like in the first 200 cycles since reset). There are other simple things to do, but I don't want to give any ideas (argh, sorry - I'm usually for free flow of ideas, but I don't want to make reverse-engineering this thing any harder for others).
There are people with SEMs and lots of time (wish I was unemployed and independently wealthy). They are just buying time before it is broken -- if it takes 10 years to do, then MS wins.
;-) thanks!
Interesting source of the information: I met someone on the IRC the other day who told me the following...
The biggest thing I wonder about in "The key is stored inside the CPU". This adds cost, but it is possible. It means that to execute your own code, the serial number must be determined so that a replacement flash chip can be properly encrypted. I'm betting it's pretty hard to find this number out without taking apart the processor.
I'm pretty talented and I'd like an xbox 360 to hack ;-) Because Microsoft now has a custom processor, they probably won't make the same mistake of putting the initial boot code off-chip. This is the link Andrew "S" Bunnie snooped on to do the the original xbox hack (and on the 360, there was no attempt to hide the traces, so I don't think any decryption keys will travel over them). So, to dissect this box it will probably take a software exploit (like the PSP hacks), or a de-layering of the processor chip. The second approach sounds more fun, but will cost $$.
Oh, also the mac mini has composite & s-video outputs, but you need to buy a $19 cable.
I'm confused - is that to power the trailer, or to sterilize the guy that steals it?
Oh wait, now I get it. You put the electronics inside the reactor's "Tamper proof cask", kinda like making a plane out of black-box material.
300 GB of storage/disk ramping up to 1.6TB, no DRM It's still not available (so that's an issue), but neither are Bluray or HD-DVD.
This just confirms the article!
The GPS signal strength is actually below the noise floor*, so obviously steel won't work because it's already below the noise. But aluminum amplifies the government citizen control signal, drowning out the GPS.
(*The signal rises above the noise floor when the radio's signal processing decodes the chips - GPS uses a form of CDMA)
Or, put another way, the bottom-of-the-line AMD 3800+ is less than 1/3rd the price of the top-of-the-line Pentium 840 EE ($328 vs. $999), yet it still beats it in most of the benchmarks.
Too bad they didn't compare the Pentium D 830 in the benchmarks - this is closer in price to the AMD 3800+
Your house must have been a real hit with the kids last night...
What did you get?
- A head of lettuce
Uh, better than what I got: a scoop full of detergent. It wasn't even "fresh scent".
all those reasons, plus one more: when I moderate a funny comment that offers obviously wrong advice as "informative", I smirk a little bit. I figure I can have some fun, too.
I had the same problem, but I solved it. I added extra things on my schedule the potential thief would be sure to find...
.357 magnum arrives in mail - decide which gun i should sell (if only they made gun racks that could hold 25 guns instead of 24!)
-
- speak at the academy about my personal experience of the stopping power of armor-piercing vs. hollow point. Bring a few guns for the demo.
- Building inspector arrives - remember to disable the booby traps near the garage
- Feed the man-eating lion in the basement. Secure door so he doesn't get out again.
- Tell whacky Dave across the street that he can't stay up all night practicing for sniper school. It's not funny when he draws a bead on me at 3 am when I go to the bathroom.
Yep, it is a single crystal of Aluminium oxide, which is pretty much the definition of sapphire. It's grown the same way the semiconductor industry grows silicon crystals - more info.
It is brittle and will shatter -- because of this, it is not used on many of the "real" military watches. They would rather have a scratched face than shards all over the place (and a broken watch!).
I don't have a scanner handy (and actually, I'm traveling and forgot to pack the color laser printer!) but suggestion A worked like a champ with the Gimp and EFF's example picture. That example picture was underexposed and taken slightly off-axis (with a camera instead of a scanner), so it's not ideal, but still got good results.
Hmmm... I wonder why that wasn't used more. Maybe there is a difficulty detecting the dots among other colored backgrounds (such as red).
I forgot to link to Bunnie's printer disassembly [via]
The basic conclusion is that many of the watermarked printers share a Canon print engine -- he suspects it is this engine that is doing the watermarking. The US Government just had to convince the critical-equipment supplier to add the tracking - not all the printer companies. He also notes that the Tek Phaser printers don't have this because they were developed before the Canon engine. (Oh, how I longed for a phaser back in the day!)
all good ideas, but some flaws.
For A and B, the contrast/resolution may not be enough to detect the smallest droplets of yellow ink.
I also thought of C, but that's an expensive process - I'm sure that you would get many messed-up pages afterwards while the new toner feeds through. Or, maybe not - depends on how the toner is fed in. This would be hard to do when you're testing Kinko's printer, though.
D is a good idea, but the idea is to also make it monochromatic light - the blue plastic might let in too many different colored lights, even though it looks the same to the eye.
For those interested in a quick summary, the docucolor example is the best place to look. (it has pictures!)
More information can be found on the EFF's printer-privacy webpage.
Also interesting is Andrew Bunnie's flat bed page scanner mod to use blue light instead of white. This made the yellow tracking dots easier to see, and the whole page could be seen at once to determine the pattern they made.
You can already buy a watch with a synthetic diamond face for $5 - the Rado V10K. Rado is the leader in scratch-proof watches.
I wear a watch with a sapphire face and a nitrogen-hardened titanium body. I don't know the physics, but the metal is as hard as sapphire - I can scratch glass with it! So far, five years old and not a single scratch. But I do have a small dent in it from an emergency landing in a hang glider... ah, good times.
I know that I'm not the oldest person here, but I've been using GPS since before all the satellites were up (~1992?).
The main problem is that you need a larger view of the sky to see the minimum number of satellites (3-4) -- indoor reception was difficult because you were limited to seeing 1/2 of the sky.
With fewer satellites, their geometry in the sky can become a problem -- if they are too close together, you'll get more measurement error (or, technically, GDOP).
Back then, if you really needed a gps fix, there were orbit prediction programs... you could input your general location, and it would tell you what the availability would be at different times in the day.
Anyone can do a test with their own GPS. I often see 6,8, or 10 satellites. If half of those satellites failed, I would still be able to get readings in open sky (with less precision, of course, because of GDOP).