I'd be willing to bet that the cost to produce AACS was pretty high in the grand scheme of things. AACS was created by a consortium consisting of IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Disney, and Warner Brothers. Granted that huge corporations like those can afford to throw tons of money and resources at a project like AACS, but the bottom line is that it probably cost a pretty penny. Consider the person-hours involved in just high level meetings among all those companies to hash out the AACS specification. If you get one person from each of those 8 companies to spend one full week of work (assuming 8 hour days) just on hammering out the specification then you're talking about 320 person-hours. Assuming those people have average annual salaries of $80,000 (SWAG) and work 40 hour weeks then that's over $1500 a week for their salaries, or $38/hour. 320 person-hours at $38/hour equates to $12,160.
Now obviously I'm pulling all these numbers out of you-know-where, but the point is that these companies invested a lot of manpower and a lot of time to create AACS. It may not seem like a lot to their respective bottom lines, but it does add up to a lot of salaries paid specifically on AACS, and most likely a lot of investment in hardware for development, testing, etc. It certianly wouldn't have been an insignificant ammount if you could do a full audit of all their books. I'd say (another SWAG) that the total cost of developing and implementing AACS would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000,000 when you include hardware & software design/development as well as the salaries, etc. of the people involved.
a 60 degree rise in a quarter ton of cooling water
A cubic foot of seawater weighs approximately 64 pounds. A quarter ton, or 500 pounds, means this thing would raise less than 8 cubic feet of seawater by those 60 degrees. (A cubic foot of fresh water is 62 pounds, so the difference is negligible) That's a miniscule amount of global warming that this thing will add to the ocean each time it fires. And with entire oceans to heat up I doubt the Navy is too concerned about that environmental impact.
Quite simple. The content industry will simply dump the format, after all, there's an alternative. Now it's high time to show that BluRay is just as "consumer friendly" and break it for good, so there is no alternative left, and if the studios want to get their content to the customer, they have to accept that DRM is useless in their strife to protect their rights.
Except for the fact that HD-DVD is cheaper for the consumer, and also has the backing of the porn industry since Sony is prohibiting porn on Blu-Ray. So consumers will continue to buy HD-DVD players to watch their porn in HD and Blu-Ray usage will continue to flounder. Sales of mainstream titles on Blu-Ray will do poorly and the movie studios won't make any money. They'll either have to offer titles on HD-DVD or give up on HD sales altogether. On top of that, it's only a matter of time before Blu-Ray protection is cracked as well. IIRC, the Blu-Ray encryption is similar to HD-DVE encryption, so it shouldn't be all that difficult.
There have been cases in the US where thieves have gone as far as setting up real ATM's in places like shopping malls in order to con people out of their bank cards & PIN's. They just buy/steal a machine like you see in a convenience store, rig it so that it looks like it's working but displays an error message instead of dispensing cash, then wait for people to try to use it. It records the bank card info & PIN's that are entered, so when the crooks come and retrieve the machine they have a bunch of accounts & PIN's to go have fun with.
If thieves are smart & brazen enough to do this with full ATM machines then doing it with one of these small terminals is a virtual no-brainer for high-tech thieves. They just need to figure out how to locate them where people are likely to trust & use them.
Somebody got some really good video footage of this thing breaking up in the atmosphere. It was a series of streaks of fire against a dark sky. Probably just a matter of time before it starts showing up on youtube, etc.
There are plenty of documented cases of compromised Windows machines being used for file sharing. My brothers was compromised and used to share porn. Demonstrate how easy it is for a Windows machine to be compromised. Provide documentation as to how compromised machines can and are used by script kiddies to share porn, warez, movies, etc. and you've got a pretty good argument that this could be the case for what happened here.
The question will be, did this person probably download the music or is it more likely that a hacker broke in to the computer and downloaded the songs.
If the machine was directly connected to the internet without any sort of hardware firewall or NAT-ing firewall in between, then I'd say it's an even bet, if not more likely that the machine's been compromised. It'd be very simple to demonstrate this to a jury. Take brand new PC hooked directly to the internet, do a fresh install of Windows, and wait to see how long until it starts getting infected by spyware. It's already been done and documented quite a bit. I think the average time for infection in this case is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 5 minutes.
Just keep it all on an external usb/firewire drive. You can take it with you to your friends, plug it into their computers, and do all your downloading from there!
I would ask him about the possibility that the hard drive was reformatted in the process of re-installing Windows, via an normal Windows CD or especially a "restore CD".
Excellent points, and a perfectly valid line of reasoning. This goes perfectly in hand with my last post. After my brother determined that his Windows PC had been hijacked by some malicious software to use it as a P2P site for porn he decided to wipe the drive and re-install from scratch. If it had been sharing mp3's instead of porn then he could very well have ended up in the same situation - a machine that the RIAA thinks was sharing music that my brother knew nothing about, and that there was no evidence of since the drive had been recently reformatted.
Is it possible that the defendands computer was compromised in some way by a third party without their knowledge, and that the third party was the one who put the music on the computer and set it up to be shared?
I was at my brothers house over the xmas weekend and he was complaining about odd behavior on his Windows PC. The mouse simply stopped functioning properly in a number of applications, etc. He's on a DSL line but behind a router/firewall, with a software-based firewall and virus scanner installed. I decided to do a thorough check myself, however, and discovered that there was a directory containing over 2 gigabytes of porn that he knew nothing about. It was quite obvious that some sort of malicious software had made it onto his PCand turned it into some sort of porn file server, probably for some P2P network. Now my brother is no Windows expert but he's fairly savvy technically (college grad with a computer science major, MBA from a well respected business school). If he couldn't detect this going on with his own computer then how could a computer-illiterite person be expected to?
If I doctored a screenshot to include a list of songs, how would you discover the doctoring?
Even more importantly, what if the actual files were doctored. If I were to create a file named "Around the World - Red Hot Chili Peppers.mp3" and put it on the Kazza network how would you determine if it's actually that song? Are you relying on just combinations of filenames and checksums/hashes? Hashes like those used by Kazza can be replicated with a bit of effort. Maybe I set up a phony Kazza server to flood the network with bogus copies of files. They'd need to download the actual files and listen to them in order to verify their authenticity.
Virtually every advertiser in the world wants the ability to target their ads since it's more economical. Other search engines have been doing it for years. Companies like DoubleClick, etc. have been doing it for years. The advertising that's starting to appear on mobile phones (like Tuesday's article about Verizon Wireless) is all targeted as much as possible. The only way you can target ads is by using some sort of personal information, whether it's anonymous cookies, the physical location that your cellphone happens to be when an ad is delivered, the area code of your phone number, some demographic information you may have entered into a partners website, or a combination of all of the above.
A lot of people, especially younger ones, weren't aware that Ford was the only US president who was never elected to office. When Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned over charges of tax evasion, Nixon chose Senator Ford to replace him. Then when Nixon resigned over Watergate, Ford took the top job. I think most people these days only know of Ford through accident-prone appearances on shows like the Simpsons and impersonations by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live reruns. Some people believe that his unremarkable term of office was just what this country needed after the previous administraitons focus on Viet Nam, Watergate, etc.
Back in 1999 a company called Direct Hit Technologies developed what they coined a "popularity engine" that ranked results based on tracking user behavior. They basically partnered with existing search engines and mined their web logs looking for patterns among users. If a lot of people who entered search term "A" went to website "X" but within a minute or two went to website "Y" then "Y" would be ranked higher than "X". Direct Hit was bought in the middle of the internet boom by Ask Jeeves for a cool $512 million. Some of that technology likely still exists within their full search engine, and I'm sure others like Google, Yahoo, etc. all use similar methods of tracking user behavior for helping with their rankings.
Can the Samba team do that? Samba is released under the GPL, and even though Novell may be violating the intent of the GPL it's not violating the actual license agreement itself. I don't think the Samba team can unilaterally tell Novell they no longer have the right to use Samba. I suppose they could release new versions under a modified GPL license that specifically excludes Novell, but Novell could still use the current version and modify it on their own. It'd just end up in a split of the Samba project - the full GPL'd version and the bastardized Novell/Microsoft hybrid.
I had to take a statistics course in college. The very first thing the professor did on the first day was to demonstrate that statistics show the divorce rate is directly proportional to the number of golf courses in any given area. It was a pretty good demonstration of how statistics can be twisted to show whatever you want.
Met her 20 or so years ago - remember it well
on
100 Years of Grace Hopper
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· Score: 3, Interesting
When I was a sophomore in high school our school dedicated its computer lab to her. Her family had a summer place near where I went to school, and she came to the school for the dedication. As one of the geekiest computer people in the school I was chosen as the token pupil to be with her when pictures were taken, etc. I think she was 80 years old when that happened, and she was still sharp as a tack. Her official title at the time was Commodore, and I remember referring to her that way. I also recall her making some comments about programming, etc. that I think helped push me into a career of computer programming before I even realized it. I really wish I had known more about her at the time I met her since I probably would have paid a lot more attention...
Because it's probably far easier to set up a dedicated firewall/router/traffic shaper (not to mention much more highly customizable) on a linux box than it probably will be to do the same thing on a Vista box.
Where I grew up we had our own well and a pump that would automatically fill a pressurized water tank whenever the pressure got too low. If we lost power when the pressure was low we'd end up with very little available water. That's one of the reasons my dad got an electric generator and a transfer switch wired into the house. That way we could run the water pump if we needed water.
plugin usb charger into my car and charge it through that
I doubt everybody affected by the 2006 blackouts in NYC had cars in which to do this.
use the handcrank telephone charger I bought a while back which does work eventually
Smart of you to be prepared! I doubt the vast majority of cell phone users are as prepared as you.
Emergency battery pack (usually a couple of AA batterys in a case)
Key word: "Emergency". The point I'm trying to make is the availability of a hardwired phone during a power failure in the event of an emergency. If you lived in the middle of Queens, New York, in July 2006 when power was out for upwards of a week and needed to call 911 for whatever reason (somebody in your apartment is suffering from heat stroke since the blackout occured in the middle of the summer) and your cell phone is dead then what would you do? Are you going to run around looking for your emergency battery pack and some spare AA batteries? Or would you run to the phone in your kitchen that's wired directly to the telco and much more likely to be working despite the power failure? What if you were the one suffering from heat stroke and a friend needed to call 911 for you? You wouldn't be able to tell him where your cell phone, emergency charger, and spare batteries are. Unfortunately I can't find any references, but these are the sorts of things that the government considered when they mandated that the original Bell Telephone ensure phones continued to work in times of emergency. Any individual should be able to pick up any hardwired phone and, barring the CO or the lines to the phone being destroyed, the phone should just work so they can call for help.
anybody with half a brain would put their VOIP phone and their router on a $25 UPS.
A $25 UPS would power a router for perhaps an hour or two. UPS's don't simply provide power on demand, when the street power fails the UPS immediately switches to its batteries, powering an inverter that uses up the batteries even if there's no load to power, so the batteries in a $25 UPS will be drained within a few hours. True that'll help for short power failures, but not for prolonged ones like I initially described. I'm thinking more in lines of the 2006 power failure in NYC that lasted a week in some places, the great northeast blackout of 1965, etc. Show me a consumer UPS for under $100 that'll provide enough power for your router to survive as long as those backouts. Copper POTS lines remained functional during those blackouts. I doubt many, if any, VOIP lines lasted.
As Verizon rolls out FTTP, some are speculating that they will eventually let the copper system rot. Why maintain them both?
Very good point, and a perfect example of how newer tech could easily force telco-powered phone lines into the realm of obsolesence. Fiber provides the telcos with a lot more speed & capacity than copper, so it's probably just a matter of time before it becomes the standard for all new installs.
The customer must supply power herself.
Perhaps it's time to invest in manufacturers of portable generators.
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Zber nccebcevngryl:
Guvf pbzzrag vf ebg(13*a) rapelcgrq. Ol ernqvat guvf pbzzrag, lbh unir ivbyngrq gur QZPN.
I'd be willing to bet that the cost to produce AACS was pretty high in the grand scheme of things. AACS was created by a consortium consisting of IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Disney, and Warner Brothers. Granted that huge corporations like those can afford to throw tons of money and resources at a project like AACS, but the bottom line is that it probably cost a pretty penny. Consider the person-hours involved in just high level meetings among all those companies to hash out the AACS specification. If you get one person from each of those 8 companies to spend one full week of work (assuming 8 hour days) just on hammering out the specification then you're talking about 320 person-hours. Assuming those people have average annual salaries of $80,000 (SWAG) and work 40 hour weeks then that's over $1500 a week for their salaries, or $38/hour. 320 person-hours at $38/hour equates to $12,160.
Now obviously I'm pulling all these numbers out of you-know-where, but the point is that these companies invested a lot of manpower and a lot of time to create AACS. It may not seem like a lot to their respective bottom lines, but it does add up to a lot of salaries paid specifically on AACS, and most likely a lot of investment in hardware for development, testing, etc. It certianly wouldn't have been an insignificant ammount if you could do a full audit of all their books. I'd say (another SWAG) that the total cost of developing and implementing AACS would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000,000 when you include hardware & software design/development as well as the salaries, etc. of the people involved.
a 60 degree rise in a quarter ton of cooling water
A cubic foot of seawater weighs approximately 64 pounds. A quarter ton, or 500 pounds, means this thing would raise less than 8 cubic feet of seawater by those 60 degrees. (A cubic foot of fresh water is 62 pounds, so the difference is negligible) That's a miniscule amount of global warming that this thing will add to the ocean each time it fires. And with entire oceans to heat up I doubt the Navy is too concerned about that environmental impact.
Quite simple. The content industry will simply dump the format, after all, there's an alternative. Now it's high time to show that BluRay is just as "consumer friendly" and break it for good, so there is no alternative left, and if the studios want to get their content to the customer, they have to accept that DRM is useless in their strife to protect their rights.
Except for the fact that HD-DVD is cheaper for the consumer, and also has the backing of the porn industry since Sony is prohibiting porn on Blu-Ray. So consumers will continue to buy HD-DVD players to watch their porn in HD and Blu-Ray usage will continue to flounder. Sales of mainstream titles on Blu-Ray will do poorly and the movie studios won't make any money. They'll either have to offer titles on HD-DVD or give up on HD sales altogether. On top of that, it's only a matter of time before Blu-Ray protection is cracked as well. IIRC, the Blu-Ray encryption is similar to HD-DVE encryption, so it shouldn't be all that difficult.
There have been cases in the US where thieves have gone as far as setting up real ATM's in places like shopping malls in order to con people out of their bank cards & PIN's. They just buy/steal a machine like you see in a convenience store, rig it so that it looks like it's working but displays an error message instead of dispensing cash, then wait for people to try to use it. It records the bank card info & PIN's that are entered, so when the crooks come and retrieve the machine they have a bunch of accounts & PIN's to go have fun with.
If thieves are smart & brazen enough to do this with full ATM machines then doing it with one of these small terminals is a virtual no-brainer for high-tech thieves. They just need to figure out how to locate them where people are likely to trust & use them.
Somebody got some really good video footage of this thing breaking up in the atmosphere. It was a series of streaks of fire against a dark sky. Probably just a matter of time before it starts showing up on youtube, etc.
There are plenty of documented cases of compromised Windows machines being used for file sharing. My brothers was compromised and used to share porn. Demonstrate how easy it is for a Windows machine to be compromised. Provide documentation as to how compromised machines can and are used by script kiddies to share porn, warez, movies, etc. and you've got a pretty good argument that this could be the case for what happened here.
The question will be, did this person probably download the music or is it more likely that a hacker broke in to the computer and downloaded the songs.
If the machine was directly connected to the internet without any sort of hardware firewall or NAT-ing firewall in between, then I'd say it's an even bet, if not more likely that the machine's been compromised. It'd be very simple to demonstrate this to a jury. Take brand new PC hooked directly to the internet, do a fresh install of Windows, and wait to see how long until it starts getting infected by spyware. It's already been done and documented quite a bit. I think the average time for infection in this case is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 5 minutes.
Just keep it all on an external usb/firewire drive. You can take it with you to your friends, plug it into their computers, and do all your downloading from there!
I would ask him about the possibility that the hard drive was reformatted in the process of re-installing Windows, via an normal Windows CD or especially a "restore CD".
Excellent points, and a perfectly valid line of reasoning. This goes perfectly in hand with my last post. After my brother determined that his Windows PC had been hijacked by some malicious software to use it as a P2P site for porn he decided to wipe the drive and re-install from scratch. If it had been sharing mp3's instead of porn then he could very well have ended up in the same situation - a machine that the RIAA thinks was sharing music that my brother knew nothing about, and that there was no evidence of since the drive had been recently reformatted.
Here's one for you:
Is it possible that the defendands computer was compromised in some way by a third party without their knowledge, and that the third party was the one who put the music on the computer and set it up to be shared?
I was at my brothers house over the xmas weekend and he was complaining about odd behavior on his Windows PC. The mouse simply stopped functioning properly in a number of applications, etc. He's on a DSL line but behind a router/firewall, with a software-based firewall and virus scanner installed. I decided to do a thorough check myself, however, and discovered that there was a directory containing over 2 gigabytes of porn that he knew nothing about. It was quite obvious that some sort of malicious software had made it onto his PCand turned it into some sort of porn file server, probably for some P2P network. Now my brother is no Windows expert but he's fairly savvy technically (college grad with a computer science major, MBA from a well respected business school). If he couldn't detect this going on with his own computer then how could a computer-illiterite person be expected to?
If I doctored a screenshot to include a list of songs, how would you discover the doctoring?
Even more importantly, what if the actual files were doctored. If I were to create a file named "Around the World - Red Hot Chili Peppers.mp3" and put it on the Kazza network how would you determine if it's actually that song? Are you relying on just combinations of filenames and checksums/hashes? Hashes like those used by Kazza can be replicated with a bit of effort. Maybe I set up a phony Kazza server to flood the network with bogus copies of files. They'd need to download the actual files and listen to them in order to verify their authenticity.
Virtually every advertiser in the world wants the ability to target their ads since it's more economical. Other search engines have been doing it for years. Companies like DoubleClick, etc. have been doing it for years. The advertising that's starting to appear on mobile phones (like Tuesday's article about Verizon Wireless) is all targeted as much as possible. The only way you can target ads is by using some sort of personal information, whether it's anonymous cookies, the physical location that your cellphone happens to be when an ad is delivered, the area code of your phone number, some demographic information you may have entered into a partners website, or a combination of all of the above.
A lot of people, especially younger ones, weren't aware that Ford was the only US president who was never elected to office. When Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned over charges of tax evasion, Nixon chose Senator Ford to replace him. Then when Nixon resigned over Watergate, Ford took the top job. I think most people these days only know of Ford through accident-prone appearances on shows like the Simpsons and impersonations by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live reruns. Some people believe that his unremarkable term of office was just what this country needed after the previous administraitons focus on Viet Nam, Watergate, etc.
Back in 1999 a company called Direct Hit Technologies developed what they coined a "popularity engine" that ranked results based on tracking user behavior. They basically partnered with existing search engines and mined their web logs looking for patterns among users. If a lot of people who entered search term "A" went to website "X" but within a minute or two went to website "Y" then "Y" would be ranked higher than "X". Direct Hit was bought in the middle of the internet boom by Ask Jeeves for a cool $512 million. Some of that technology likely still exists within their full search engine, and I'm sure others like Google, Yahoo, etc. all use similar methods of tracking user behavior for helping with their rankings.
Can the Samba team do that? Samba is released under the GPL, and even though Novell may be violating the intent of the GPL it's not violating the actual license agreement itself. I don't think the Samba team can unilaterally tell Novell they no longer have the right to use Samba. I suppose they could release new versions under a modified GPL license that specifically excludes Novell, but Novell could still use the current version and modify it on their own. It'd just end up in a split of the Samba project - the full GPL'd version and the bastardized Novell/Microsoft hybrid.
I had to take a statistics course in college. The very first thing the professor did on the first day was to demonstrate that statistics show the divorce rate is directly proportional to the number of golf courses in any given area. It was a pretty good demonstration of how statistics can be twisted to show whatever you want.
When I was a sophomore in high school our school dedicated its computer lab to her. Her family had a summer place near where I went to school, and she came to the school for the dedication. As one of the geekiest computer people in the school I was chosen as the token pupil to be with her when pictures were taken, etc. I think she was 80 years old when that happened, and she was still sharp as a tack. Her official title at the time was Commodore, and I remember referring to her that way. I also recall her making some comments about programming, etc. that I think helped push me into a career of computer programming before I even realized it. I really wish I had known more about her at the time I met her since I probably would have paid a lot more attention...
Because it's probably far easier to set up a dedicated firewall/router/traffic shaper (not to mention much more highly customizable) on a linux box than it probably will be to do the same thing on a Vista box.
"I had no idea what the software I installed would do."
"I didn't know that I was downloading copyrighted files. Their software should have prevented it."
Where I grew up we had our own well and a pump that would automatically fill a pressurized water tank whenever the pressure got too low. If we lost power when the pressure was low we'd end up with very little available water. That's one of the reasons my dad got an electric generator and a transfer switch wired into the house. That way we could run the water pump if we needed water.
plugin usb charger into my car and charge it through that
I doubt everybody affected by the 2006 blackouts in NYC had cars in which to do this.
use the handcrank telephone charger I bought a while back which does work eventually
Smart of you to be prepared! I doubt the vast majority of cell phone users are as prepared as you.
Emergency battery pack (usually a couple of AA batterys in a case)
Key word: "Emergency". The point I'm trying to make is the availability of a hardwired phone during a power failure in the event of an emergency. If you lived in the middle of Queens, New York, in July 2006 when power was out for upwards of a week and needed to call 911 for whatever reason (somebody in your apartment is suffering from heat stroke since the blackout occured in the middle of the summer) and your cell phone is dead then what would you do? Are you going to run around looking for your emergency battery pack and some spare AA batteries? Or would you run to the phone in your kitchen that's wired directly to the telco and much more likely to be working despite the power failure? What if you were the one suffering from heat stroke and a friend needed to call 911 for you? You wouldn't be able to tell him where your cell phone, emergency charger, and spare batteries are. Unfortunately I can't find any references, but these are the sorts of things that the government considered when they mandated that the original Bell Telephone ensure phones continued to work in times of emergency. Any individual should be able to pick up any hardwired phone and, barring the CO or the lines to the phone being destroyed, the phone should just work so they can call for help.
anybody with half a brain would put their VOIP phone and their router on a $25 UPS.
A $25 UPS would power a router for perhaps an hour or two. UPS's don't simply provide power on demand, when the street power fails the UPS immediately switches to its batteries, powering an inverter that uses up the batteries even if there's no load to power, so the batteries in a $25 UPS will be drained within a few hours. True that'll help for short power failures, but not for prolonged ones like I initially described. I'm thinking more in lines of the 2006 power failure in NYC that lasted a week in some places, the great northeast blackout of 1965, etc. Show me a consumer UPS for under $100 that'll provide enough power for your router to survive as long as those backouts. Copper POTS lines remained functional during those blackouts. I doubt many, if any, VOIP lines lasted.
As Verizon rolls out FTTP, some are speculating that they will eventually let the copper system rot. Why maintain them both?
Very good point, and a perfect example of how newer tech could easily force telco-powered phone lines into the realm of obsolesence. Fiber provides the telcos with a lot more speed & capacity than copper, so it's probably just a matter of time before it becomes the standard for all new installs.
The customer must supply power herself.
Perhaps it's time to invest in manufacturers of portable generators.
Take a look in your house and tell me how many telephones you own that do not require an AC adaptor of some sort.
I, and all my immediate family members, and a few friends I know, all have one that doesn't require any additional power specifically for this reason.