In addition to the efforts going on in Ottumwa, there is the already-existing American Classic Arcade Museum, located inside Funspot in New Hampshire. This arcade was prominently featured in the cult-favorite documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. I don't think their mission is to collect every single game ever (that would be a lot of them) but they sure have a huge collection of both popular and obscure games.
The museum is really just one floor of the arcade (there are three) featuring many, many classic arcade games in excellent working order. I imagine the maintenance is a perpetual nightmare, but they do what they can. There is no admission fee, just ordinary tokens to play the games. Most still cost one token (each token costs a quarter, or less if you buy in bulk), and let me tell you $20 goes a long, long way there. For maximum childhood regression, they keep the lights down and play awesome 80s tunes over the sound system. I was there a couple months ago and got to play some games that I had not laid hands on for a long time: Elevator Action (last played at Fuddrucker's), Missile Command (pediatric dentist's office), Sinistar (Lamppost Pizza), Dragon's Lair (Chuck-E-Cheese), Star Wars (basement of the local Sears), Tapper (local bowling alley), Crystal Castles (by the front door of the local Alpha Beta supermarket) and so on. A few machines I had never seen before in person (a stand-up Pong machine, Satan's Hollow). They even have a friggin' Computer Space, but alas it was broken when I visited. The fact that you're even allowed to touch it is amazing.
I also got to play the infamous Donkey Kong machine, where I was proud to hold the high score (a piddly 18,000) for probably five minutes, and the same Pac Man machine where Billy Mitchell played the world's first perfect game of Pac Man (I think I cleared about 3 boards).
It's a real experience - if you're in the area I highly recommend stopping in.
Am I the only one who's paranoid of entering my PayPal or CC info on an unencrypted public access point? I don't care if it's an AP ran by some mega-trusted corporation, the signal is still out there and anyone can get it.
Um, do you really enter your PayPal or CC info on a non-HTTPS connection? Because if you're on an HTTPS connection, there shouldn't be an issue. Your browser and the site itself have done a key exchange with RSA and are communicating with a very secure block cipher at that point. It doesn't matter whether the connection to the router is encrypted or not, since you've already got very strong encryption within the signal itself. If the signal is also encrypted with WEP or WPA, then you're doubly encrypted, at least for that first hop.
I had this sort of thing happen to me several years ago. I bought a video board from a major COMPuter retail store located in the USA, brought it home, and opened it. I noticed that while the shrinkwrap was intact, there was a little clear round seal under the shrinkwrap to hold the boxflap shut. It had been cut. Ah, well, I got a previously returned product. I hope it's OK inside.
There was a card inside, which was good. The bad thing was that it was a crap PCI board worth about 10% of what I paid for the new board. I took it back the next day, and the manager et. al. wanted to take down MY information "to make sure it didn't happen again." I refused, took a new board, and walked out. They didn't stop me. One of two things happened:
1. They took an open-box return, inspected it, saw a card in there, and reshrunk it. 2. They took a sealed return, inspected it, saw it was sealed, and reshelved it.
Either way, this was not my fault and there's no reason for me to go on the "suspicious persons" list. There are several ways they could handle this that would be better than what they were actually doing:
1. Don't reshrinkwrap open box returns. 2. Send all returns back to the manufacturer. 3. Train your employees to check that the actual product, rather than something that looks vaguely similar, is in the box on a return. 4. Put a one-time-use company sticker on the outside of the box. When it comes back without said sticker but in shrinkwrap, it's been opened (or it wasn't bought there).
Somebody defrauded them, and then they transitively defrauded me. Either way, I'm the only one who didn't defraud anybody, and so I'm sorry this sucks for the store, but it's their problem.
Here we have two mail clients, based on the same codebase but with different branding and different features, that aren't used together, that are billed as "complementary."
Hogwash.
These two can do nothing but compete. If the answer was "we're going to be merging Eudora and Thunderbird in the 3.0 release" then I might buy it. But otherwise, this is doomed to failure, and could have a substantial negative impact on both communities.
Consider the ill-fated Wordstar vs. Wordstar 2000 products, released under similar circumstances. Although not quite based on the same codebases (I believe Wordstar 2000 was actually based on a Wordstar clone that they had bought from some company), both had similar-but-not-quite-the-same user interfaces, ostensibly did the same things but-not-quite, and were released at the same time. In the end, amidst endless user confusion, features that were available in one but not the other (and vice versa) and a confused marketing strategy, everybody went and bought WordPerfect and Wordstar went straight into the shitter.
Eudora had some very innovative features for its time, certainly not seen in today's Thunderbird releases. I'm a Thunderbird user because I like the simplicity and I could never get Outlook to behave quite as I wanted to. However, let's not pretend that Thunderbird is really anything other than Netscape Mail 1.0 (circa the Communicator days) with IMAP support, a better HTML engine, and SpamBayes built in. I'd love to have more Eudorish features in my Thunderbird, but please provide them as an extension and not a wholly separate (and competing) product.
I'm a big fan of the BSD and BSD-style licenses. I have written a lot of code under the BSD-style license and been happy about it. It has let me apply that code in places where corporate policies are too anal to allow GPL code. The extensions that ARE made are so application-specific that nobody else would want them anyway. However, my code would never have been used at all in these circumstances if it were GPL licenced.
"No, I'm sorry, you can't integrate my small component into your giant proprietary and ITAR-restricted satellite system unless you agree to give away the entire code to your giant ITAR-restricted satellite system to anybody who wants it. But hey, RMS says that freedom is good, so you can do that, right?"
Does the BSD license allow people to make extensions and GPL the base code plus those extensions? Absolutely. Do BSD-style developers, then, have a right to be miffed if this is what happens? It's a hard question.
I think most of the miffed-ness of the situation comes from the attitude of GPL zealots. A basic tenet behind their license is "if you take code then you have to give it back under the same terms under which you got it." A part of their philosophy seems to be "you should not be allowed to benefit from our code without giving back improvements to it." They are the ones who decided on this policy, and they claim a moral (yes, moral) high-ground because of it. But really, they only mean this within the context of their own ideological community. It's really a difference of attitude.
"Hey, thanks for the code; we are going to use it to further our cause of announcing to the world how much better we are than you."
As an analogy, let's say I go up to you and ask for $20 for an art project. You oblige. For my art project, I make up posters around the city that say:
"[YOU] IS A GIANT ASS"
with your face on them, and plaster them around town. Now, you didn't explicitly stipulate I couldn't, and I was certainly within your legal and artistic rights to do what I did. You have no cause to be angry, right?
I remember a documentary I saw once about land mines. They showed a small mine being dismantled by some poor sap whose job it was to go out and dismantle land mines. In it was a Motorola chip. It was probably some terribly generic part like a 555 timer or 4-input NAND gate or something; it's not like Motorola was in the business of making land mines.
Now, if Motorola saw this, do they have a right to be a little miffed? "Ah," say the slashdotters, "Motorola sold their 555-timer on the open market to any buyer, they have no right to be miffed when someone uses it in a device that blows the legs off little children!" Right?
It's a fantastic time to be a mouse. Mouse with cancer? No problem. Mouse with alzheimers? No problem. Mouse with diabetes? Go ahead and have that Snicker bar, we have the cure for what ails ya.
Ah, another piece of childhood nostalgia gone. Who will I call to test if my landline is working now?
I always remembered the SoCal number (853-1212) because it makes a 'T' (like Time) on the telephone keypad. And now my Grandmother has to stop reminding me that the number is "UL3-1212," as she is wont to do.
"Exhibit 6: Sci-Tech November 23, 2003 article from CTA News Staff reporting a driver of a motor vehicle engaged in internet child pornography utilizing a laptop computer and Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) card to crack into a computer in a nearby home."
The text you cite is, as I explained, separate at the end of the article.
"Many computers can be connected to the Internet with identical IP addresses as long as they remain behind control points."
Yes, we all know this is true from a technical perspective. However, the RIAA is not as dumb as to ignore it. From the depositions in the Lindor case (posted earlier by NewYorkCountryLawyer) they are also relying on the fact that Kazaa (and workalikes) apparently include the local IP in the protocol. So if I'm behind my router, and my IP is 192.168.1.1, but my router's IP is 123.45.6.78, then the RIAA will see BOTH addresses and know whether there's some NATting going on with a pretty high degree of certainty. However, if Kazaa reports the local IP as 123.45.6.78 as well, then it's highly unlikely any more than a single computer is behind that IP.
Reading the report, the "expert" here appears to be completely ignorant of this fact.
Also, some of this is really atrocious. Early in the report it cites an example of someone downloading child pornography sitting in a car by "hacking" a wi-fi network. Only at the end of the report does it admit that the network was unsecured. If you connect to 'linksys' are you "hacking" that network? Would you use that term No. No "hacking" (in any reasonable sense) is going on.
Is the "expert" a native English speaker? "Botnet, Trojan, and Back Door are example of malicious codes..." Aside from the grammatical atrocities, I have never heard of my fellow software engineers referring to software programs as "codes." A back-door is not a "code" or a program, nor are botnets. Bots are, Trojan (Horses) are, and they can open back doors. Precision, please?
Do look at the expert's biography page on the site shilling his book. Plenty of asserted qualifications and certifications, although I don't see any formal degrees listed anywhere. It also asserts that "One final note Jayson was chosen as one of Time's persons of the year for 2006." (hint: so were you). The grammar in the bio is even worse than in the expert brief. Do a search for his name and you'll find precious little at all.
I'm not saying that the RIAA is doing due diligence; the Lindor briefs leave a lot in question (although less than most slashdotters would like). However, fighting back with equally specious and unresearched information doesn't seem to be a much better strategy.
Cryptography, digital signatures, and checksums can only take you so far. They can detect tampering pretty easily. However, crypto can't prevent someone from deleting a file, although by checksumming or signing a whole bunch of files you could at least detect deletion of one of them. Ultimately, if you really want permanence, you need to write it out (as an above poster suggested) to some sort of write-once media. CD-Rs or DVD-Rs would obviously fit the bill here, although one can indeed delete a CD-R by simply throwing it out, of course.
Another cheap write-only medium is paper; I suppose you could purchase a laser printer (or even a line printer), and have it spit out the logs as they occur. If you kept the printer in a locked transparent box, nobody but people with the keys would have access to the output.
You could burn the logs onto PROMs as well, that's pretty permanent:)
Anything on magnetic or flash media can be erased or tampered with somehow, unless the drive controller hardware itself prohibited overwriting existing data. Even then you're relying on someone not being able to replace the drive controller or take the drive apart and diddle the platters/flash chips directly (although I suppose a decent amount of epoxy could thwart this). Any software-based solution can be tampered with in theory. One hacker favorite (which may be a legend or not) is that people used to get root on other people's boxes and then replace their copy of PGP with an instrumented copy. Thus, even the encryption software became compromised.
For compliance, though, I'm not sure what kind of oversight you have to have. At the end of the day, somebody has to be trusted with these logs, and that person would almost assuredly have the power to destroy them, or at least portions of them.
I know why they picked that key!
on
Censoring a Number
·
· Score: 0, Troll
It turns out that the key is the MD5 hash of "SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE"
It's not like we come up with acronyms and abbreviations and new words for things because we're snobbish, we do it because we are inventing new things and have to call them something. Contrast this with the military, which renames ordinary things that have perfectly good names already...it's not a bathroom, it's a "latrine;" it's not a wall, it's a "bulkhead."
What else would you call a device that records television and other video programs digitally using an internal hard drive, and can be personalized to record only what you want? What's the clever name for that that's somehow better than 'PVR?' Should we refer to things in terms of other devices that we already know? Maybe we should call it a "Hard-Drive Digital VCR"...yeah, that's it! Well, of course, there's no casette, so that C is sort of out of place...
What else would you call a service by which you can send text messages to a specific person instantly? Maybe something like "instant messaging?" Oh wait, apparently that's snobbish.
What they're likely talking about is technology like Chimney, which, barring lawsuits, will be coming out in or around the time of Windows Vista. Effectively, instead of the TCP/IP stack coming from the OS and running on the main processor, the network card will have a processor and memory and run the TCP/IP stack there. This increases efficiency and reduces reduces latency because the main CPU doesn't have to get involved as much. In the future we will probably see things like SSL encryption being performed on the card as well.
I've recently investigated the possibility of building my own MythTV (or similar)-based PVR machine. My requirements are pretty simple:
1. Onscreen guide with no ads showing only the channels I actually receive 2. Ability to record as much video as the hard drives in the box will hold 3. Multiple tuners so I can watch and record a couple different channels simultaneously.
I would also optionally like the ability to record HDTV content in the anticipation that someday I will have an HDTV.
I do not want to do a single illegal thing with my DVR. I want to do timeshifting of programs. That's all. I promise I will not even copy them to my computer or share them with friends. This is a purely selfish project.
I can get a dual-tuner DVR from my cable company for $SMALLNUM per month, but they've recently put ads on my non-DVR box's guide, won't show me just the channels I get (instead of channels I don't get, which are an ad for those channels), have limited storage capabilities, and a maximum of two tuners.
Unfortunately, it's 100% impossible to build such a box - at least, not cost effectively. In my area, they've basically cut analog cable service down to channels 2-13, plus eight bible stations, five home shopping stations, and ten foreign language stations. So, if you want to watch, say, Mythbusters, you MUST subscribe to digital cable. You have no choice.
I could get a decoder card that can decode a digital cable signal, which may or may not work, depending on whether my cable company has decided to encrypt the signal. If I'm extraordinarily lucky, I will be able to decode basic cable, but I will not be able to ever decode a premium channel like HBO. Even if I'm lucky, my cable company could (without notice) decide to encrypt the channels at any moment.
But but but, you say, CableCARD is coming, and that will let you get three CableCARDs for your three tuner boards and then build your ultimate DVR! Ah, if this were true. Sadly, it looks like you won't be able to install CableCARDs in anything the Cable company doesn't sell or authorize. Oops.
The only reasonable option is to rent one cable box per tuner. For a three tuner system, I'd need three digital cable boxes. Even if I were willing to pay the exorbitant monthly fee, then I will only be able to record HDTV from a small number of channels and not premium channels. And then only if I get the cable box that already has a DVR built in, because that's the one with the firewire port on it.
As much as it sucks, the DVR from the cable company gives me a two-tuner DVR that can tape all my premium channels, even HDTV programs, directly off the digital signal (i.e., I don't even believe it's turned into analog as it would be in a MythTV setup) with a single box. This is just plainly unacceptable.
If anyone has a good alternative for me or will point out something I'm missing, PLEASE let me know.
Here's the main problem with this idea: the vast, vast majority of people, even smart Slashdot readers, have no idea how to read a patent. Sure, they read the abstract and that might bring to mind some other invention that's sort-of-like the one described in the patent, and that is helpful to a small extent. However, did you know that the abstract has little to no bearing on what the patent actually covers?
Patent claim language (the actual property rights granted by the patent) is byzantine and ugly. Besides that, there are all kinds of nuances. Do you know the difference between an apparatus and a method patent? The terms used in the claims may (nay, probably) don't mean what you think they mean. The applicant doesn't even know what they mean, since the legal claim construction process only occurs when the patent is challenged. Then, if the applicant (as many do) uses USC 30 S112P6 "means-plus-function" language, you're in a whole other world of indirection and confusion.
Patents need reform, but having a million uneducated people looking at the applications is only part of the solution. Reforms to patent law itself, such as:
- Making applicants provide a binding glossary of terms
- Making applicants identify corresponding structure for means-plus-function elements
- Reforming the byzantine nature of claim language
would go miles and miles to easing the process and squeezing out inefficiency
I looked at the DualHead2Go product a while ago, and it's a nifty trick. It takes one really wide VGA signal (say, 2048x768) and splits it into two 1024x768 signals. This one splits it three ways. Windows thinks you still have the one monitor. This is not an ideal multi-monitor setup, as your poor video card still has to drive this insane resolution.
Running three monitors these days is not hard with desktop machines, you can easily run your primary display off your AGP card and get a cheapo PCI dualhead for side displays. Using a Dell C/Dock (which has a PCI slot), I even run three monitors off my old Dell Latitude C640 laptop at work using a $50 Radeon 7000 DualHead card.
Posit: Parallel processing can solve certain types of problems much faster than serial processing. Posit: The Cell architecture is highly parallel. Posit: Most programmers today are good at writing serial, not parallel, code.
Hypothesis: A compiler can be developed that takes serially written programs and auto-transforms them into parallel programs to exploit the benefits of parallelism.
Now comes the research to attempt to validate that hypothesis. Will it succeed? We'll find out in several years. There are likely to be some suprising results, and maybe even a paradigm-shattering breakthrough. Or, this line of research may just peter out. It happens.
If I recall correctly, in 3001 Arthur C. Clarke asserts that a petabyte is enough to store the information comprising a single human (mind, body, etc.) You could store the art and the artist, as he put it.
A lot of stories of this ilk about Wikipedia seem to imply that Wikipedia is sort of a black or white thing - it's either authoritative or not, it's either correct or not, it's either a good resource or it's not.
In reality, it's (of course) some of all these things. Sure, it may be less correct on average than some other source, or it may be less authoritative, but that doesn't make it any less useful (especially on topics that are new, esoteric, or emerging - where else could you find well-written, generally correct information about Leeroy Jenkins or the GNAA?)
Honestly, I think having something where a slightly greater burden lies on readers to evaluate the quality of information is probably a good thing - we should really be doing that more with all "authoritative" information sources anyway.
While an alternative "free or low cost" version of Windows supported by ads might be attractive for some users, I have a really big feeling that if this actually gets implemented, the normal versions of Windows are going to start having ads too.
Right now, I can buy a Dell Dimension with XP home preinstalled, spend a half-hour uninstalling all the useless crap they load on there, and get the machine into a relatively professional state. If I want a machine that comes in a professional state, I have to pay a significant premium for an OptiPlex or something.
How much you want to bet that as soon as this gets implemented the next "home" version of Windows will have ads all over the place with no option to turn them off?
This is a seriously insane museum collection of computer history. Apparently $45K wouldn't do it, but I certainly think getting saving all these old machines for posterity would be worth it.
I'm not sure what reading "skills" are. What would acquiring these "skills" really give me? I'd have better recall of the events that happened in a book? A slightly different insight as to the motivations of fictional characters? Certainly there have been *bad* movies made of books, ones that lose the gestalt of the story entirely. In these cases, when I read the book, it's almost like seeing a remix of the movie with more deleted scenes:)
Is what's contained in the book really detail for detail's sake, or is it important? Good fiction (of which there's strikingly little and it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between the good and the bad without plowing through it all) makes the details important.
Yes, seeing an elephant's shadow is not the same as seeing an elephant, but reading is usually like looking at an elephant and then looking at it again with a microscope. Sure, I get more detail out of looking at it with the microscope. I might see the grass stuck between its toes and the snot hanging off its trunk. But the important part is generally the elephant.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to the efforts going on in Ottumwa, there is the already-existing American Classic Arcade Museum, located inside Funspot in New Hampshire. This arcade was prominently featured in the cult-favorite documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. I don't think their mission is to collect every single game ever (that would be a lot of them) but they sure have a huge collection of both popular and obscure games.
The museum is really just one floor of the arcade (there are three) featuring many, many classic arcade games in excellent working order. I imagine the maintenance is a perpetual nightmare, but they do what they can. There is no admission fee, just ordinary tokens to play the games. Most still cost one token (each token costs a quarter, or less if you buy in bulk), and let me tell you $20 goes a long, long way there. For maximum childhood regression, they keep the lights down and play awesome 80s tunes over the sound system. I was there a couple months ago and got to play some games that I had not laid hands on for a long time: Elevator Action (last played at Fuddrucker's), Missile Command (pediatric dentist's office), Sinistar (Lamppost Pizza), Dragon's Lair (Chuck-E-Cheese), Star Wars (basement of the local Sears), Tapper (local bowling alley), Crystal Castles (by the front door of the local Alpha Beta supermarket) and so on. A few machines I had never seen before in person (a stand-up Pong machine, Satan's Hollow). They even have a friggin' Computer Space, but alas it was broken when I visited. The fact that you're even allowed to touch it is amazing.
I also got to play the infamous Donkey Kong machine, where I was proud to hold the high score (a piddly 18,000) for probably five minutes, and the same Pac Man machine where Billy Mitchell played the world's first perfect game of Pac Man (I think I cleared about 3 boards).
It's a real experience - if you're in the area I highly recommend stopping in.
"and only the most facile of analyses would claim that it is.'"
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Um, do you really enter your PayPal or CC info on a non-HTTPS connection? Because if you're on an HTTPS connection, there shouldn't be an issue. Your browser and the site itself have done a key exchange with RSA and are communicating with a very secure block cipher at that point. It doesn't matter whether the connection to the router is encrypted or not, since you've already got very strong encryption within the signal itself. If the signal is also encrypted with WEP or WPA, then you're doubly encrypted, at least for that first hop.
I had this sort of thing happen to me several years ago. I bought a video board from a major COMPuter retail store located in the USA, brought it home, and opened it. I noticed that while the shrinkwrap was intact, there was a little clear round seal under the shrinkwrap to hold the boxflap shut. It had been cut. Ah, well, I got a previously returned product. I hope it's OK inside.
There was a card inside, which was good. The bad thing was that it was a crap PCI board worth about 10% of what I paid for the new board. I took it back the next day, and the manager et. al. wanted to take down MY information "to make sure it didn't happen again." I refused, took a new board, and walked out. They didn't stop me. One of two things happened:
1. They took an open-box return, inspected it, saw a card in there, and reshrunk it.
2. They took a sealed return, inspected it, saw it was sealed, and reshelved it.
Either way, this was not my fault and there's no reason for me to go on the "suspicious persons" list. There are several ways they could handle this that would be better than what they were actually doing:
1. Don't reshrinkwrap open box returns.
2. Send all returns back to the manufacturer.
3. Train your employees to check that the actual product, rather than something that looks vaguely similar, is in the box on a return.
4. Put a one-time-use company sticker on the outside of the box. When it comes back without said sticker but in shrinkwrap, it's been opened (or it wasn't bought there).
Somebody defrauded them, and then they transitively defrauded me. Either way, I'm the only one who didn't defraud anybody, and so I'm sorry this sucks for the store, but it's their problem.
Here we have two mail clients, based on the same codebase but with different branding and different features, that aren't used together, that are billed as "complementary."
Hogwash.
These two can do nothing but compete. If the answer was "we're going to be merging Eudora and Thunderbird in the 3.0 release" then I might buy it. But otherwise, this is doomed to failure, and could have a substantial negative impact on both communities.
Consider the ill-fated Wordstar vs. Wordstar 2000 products, released under similar circumstances. Although not quite based on the same codebases (I believe Wordstar 2000 was actually based on a Wordstar clone that they had bought from some company), both had similar-but-not-quite-the-same user interfaces, ostensibly did the same things but-not-quite, and were released at the same time. In the end, amidst endless user confusion, features that were available in one but not the other (and vice versa) and a confused marketing strategy, everybody went and bought WordPerfect and Wordstar went straight into the shitter.
Eudora had some very innovative features for its time, certainly not seen in today's Thunderbird releases. I'm a Thunderbird user because I like the simplicity and I could never get Outlook to behave quite as I wanted to. However, let's not pretend that Thunderbird is really anything other than Netscape Mail 1.0 (circa the Communicator days) with IMAP support, a better HTML engine, and SpamBayes built in. I'd love to have more Eudorish features in my Thunderbird, but please provide them as an extension and not a wholly separate (and competing) product.
I'm a big fan of the BSD and BSD-style licenses. I have written a lot of code under the BSD-style license and been happy about it. It has let me apply that code in places where corporate policies are too anal to allow GPL code. The extensions that ARE made are so application-specific that nobody else would want them anyway. However, my code would never have been used at all in these circumstances if it were GPL licenced.
"No, I'm sorry, you can't integrate my small component into your giant proprietary and ITAR-restricted satellite system unless you agree to give away the entire code to your giant ITAR-restricted satellite system to anybody who wants it. But hey, RMS says that freedom is good, so you can do that, right?"
Does the BSD license allow people to make extensions and GPL the base code plus those extensions? Absolutely. Do BSD-style developers, then, have a right to be miffed if this is what happens? It's a hard question.
I think most of the miffed-ness of the situation comes from the attitude of GPL zealots. A basic tenet behind their license is "if you take code then you have to give it back under the same terms under which you got it." A part of their philosophy seems to be "you should not be allowed to benefit from our code without giving back improvements to it." They are the ones who decided on this policy, and they claim a moral (yes, moral) high-ground because of it. But really, they only mean this within the context of their own ideological community. It's really a difference of attitude.
"Hey, thanks for the code; we are going to use it to further our cause of announcing to the world how much better we are than you."
As an analogy, let's say I go up to you and ask for $20 for an art project. You oblige. For my art project, I make up posters around the city that say:
"[YOU] IS A GIANT ASS"
with your face on them, and plaster them around town. Now, you didn't explicitly stipulate I couldn't, and I was certainly within your legal and artistic rights to do what I did. You have no cause to be angry, right?
I remember a documentary I saw once about land mines. They showed a small mine being dismantled by some poor sap whose job it was to go out and dismantle land mines. In it was a Motorola chip. It was probably some terribly generic part like a 555 timer or 4-input NAND gate or something; it's not like Motorola was in the business of making land mines.
Now, if Motorola saw this, do they have a right to be a little miffed? "Ah," say the slashdotters, "Motorola sold their 555-timer on the open market to any buyer, they have no right to be miffed when someone uses it in a device that blows the legs off little children!" Right?
It's a fantastic time to be a mouse. Mouse with cancer? No problem. Mouse with alzheimers? No problem. Mouse with diabetes? Go ahead and have that Snicker bar, we have the cure for what ails ya.
Ah, another piece of childhood nostalgia gone. Who will I call to test if my landline is working now?
I always remembered the SoCal number (853-1212) because it makes a 'T' (like Time) on the telephone keypad. And now my Grandmother has to stop reminding me that the number is "UL3-1212," as she is wont to do.
Page 7:
"Exhibit 6: Sci-Tech November 23, 2003 article from CTA News Staff reporting a driver of a motor vehicle engaged in internet child pornography utilizing a laptop computer and Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) card to crack into a computer in a nearby home."
The text you cite is, as I explained, separate at the end of the article.
You're correct, 'example' was my typo. My bad.
"Many computers can be connected to the Internet with identical IP addresses as long as they remain behind control points."
Yes, we all know this is true from a technical perspective. However, the RIAA is not as dumb as to ignore it. From the depositions in the Lindor case (posted earlier by NewYorkCountryLawyer) they are also relying on the fact that Kazaa (and workalikes) apparently include the local IP in the protocol. So if I'm behind my router, and my IP is 192.168.1.1, but my router's IP is 123.45.6.78, then the RIAA will see BOTH addresses and know whether there's some NATting going on with a pretty high degree of certainty. However, if Kazaa reports the local IP as 123.45.6.78 as well, then it's highly unlikely any more than a single computer is behind that IP.
Reading the report, the "expert" here appears to be completely ignorant of this fact.
Also, some of this is really atrocious. Early in the report it cites an example of someone downloading child pornography sitting in a car by "hacking" a wi-fi network. Only at the end of the report does it admit that the network was unsecured. If you connect to 'linksys' are you "hacking" that network? Would you use that term No. No "hacking" (in any reasonable sense) is going on.
Is the "expert" a native English speaker? "Botnet, Trojan, and Back Door are example of malicious codes..." Aside from the grammatical atrocities, I have never heard of my fellow software engineers referring to software programs as "codes." A back-door is not a "code" or a program, nor are botnets. Bots are, Trojan (Horses) are, and they can open back doors. Precision, please?
Do look at the expert's biography page on the site shilling his book. Plenty of asserted qualifications and certifications, although I don't see any formal degrees listed anywhere. It also asserts that "One final note Jayson was chosen as one of Time's persons of the year for 2006." (hint: so were you). The grammar in the bio is even worse than in the expert brief. Do a search for his name and you'll find precious little at all.
I'm not saying that the RIAA is doing due diligence; the Lindor briefs leave a lot in question (although less than most slashdotters would like). However, fighting back with equally specious and unresearched information doesn't seem to be a much better strategy.
Cryptography, digital signatures, and checksums can only take you so far. They can detect tampering pretty easily. However, crypto can't prevent someone from deleting a file, although by checksumming or signing a whole bunch of files you could at least detect deletion of one of them. Ultimately, if you really want permanence, you need to write it out (as an above poster suggested) to some sort of write-once media. CD-Rs or DVD-Rs would obviously fit the bill here, although one can indeed delete a CD-R by simply throwing it out, of course.
:)
Another cheap write-only medium is paper; I suppose you could purchase a laser printer (or even a line printer), and have it spit out the logs as they occur. If you kept the printer in a locked transparent box, nobody but people with the keys would have access to the output.
You could burn the logs onto PROMs as well, that's pretty permanent
Anything on magnetic or flash media can be erased or tampered with somehow, unless the drive controller hardware itself prohibited overwriting existing data. Even then you're relying on someone not being able to replace the drive controller or take the drive apart and diddle the platters/flash chips directly (although I suppose a decent amount of epoxy could thwart this). Any software-based solution can be tampered with in theory. One hacker favorite (which may be a legend or not) is that people used to get root on other people's boxes and then replace their copy of PGP with an instrumented copy. Thus, even the encryption software became compromised.
For compliance, though, I'm not sure what kind of oversight you have to have. At the end of the day, somebody has to be trusted with these logs, and that person would almost assuredly have the power to destroy them, or at least portions of them.
It turns out that the key is the MD5 hash of "SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE"
Well, July 21, 2007 is 7/(7+7+7)/07...
Or (7+7+7)/7/07 elsewhere
Or 2007-07-(7+7+7) if you want to make it sort
It's not like we come up with acronyms and abbreviations and new words for things because we're snobbish, we do it because we are inventing new things and have to call them something. Contrast this with the military, which renames ordinary things that have perfectly good names already...it's not a bathroom, it's a "latrine;" it's not a wall, it's a "bulkhead."
What else would you call a device that records television and other video programs digitally using an internal hard drive, and can be personalized to record only what you want? What's the clever name for that that's somehow better than 'PVR?' Should we refer to things in terms of other devices that we already know? Maybe we should call it a "Hard-Drive Digital VCR"...yeah, that's it! Well, of course, there's no casette, so that C is sort of out of place...
What else would you call a service by which you can send text messages to a specific person instantly? Maybe something like "instant messaging?" Oh wait, apparently that's snobbish.
What they're likely talking about is technology like Chimney, which, barring lawsuits, will be coming out in or around the time of Windows Vista. Effectively, instead of the TCP/IP stack coming from the OS and running on the main processor, the network card will have a processor and memory and run the TCP/IP stack there. This increases efficiency and reduces reduces latency because the main CPU doesn't have to get involved as much. In the future we will probably see things like SSL encryption being performed on the card as well.
I've recently investigated the possibility of building my own MythTV (or similar)-based PVR machine. My requirements are pretty simple:
1. Onscreen guide with no ads showing only the channels I actually receive
2. Ability to record as much video as the hard drives in the box will hold
3. Multiple tuners so I can watch and record a couple different channels simultaneously.
I would also optionally like the ability to record HDTV content in the anticipation that someday I will have an HDTV.
I do not want to do a single illegal thing with my DVR. I want to do timeshifting of programs. That's all. I promise I will not even copy them to my computer or share them with friends. This is a purely selfish project.
I can get a dual-tuner DVR from my cable company for $SMALLNUM per month, but they've recently put ads on my non-DVR box's guide, won't show me just the channels I get (instead of channels I don't get, which are an ad for those channels), have limited storage capabilities, and a maximum of two tuners.
Unfortunately, it's 100% impossible to build such a box - at least, not cost effectively. In my area, they've basically cut analog cable service down to channels 2-13, plus eight bible stations, five home shopping stations, and ten foreign language stations. So, if you want to watch, say, Mythbusters, you MUST subscribe to digital cable. You have no choice.
I could get a decoder card that can decode a digital cable signal, which may or may not work, depending on whether my cable company has decided to encrypt the signal. If I'm extraordinarily lucky, I will be able to decode basic cable, but I will not be able to ever decode a premium channel like HBO. Even if I'm lucky, my cable company could (without notice) decide to encrypt the channels at any moment.
But but but, you say, CableCARD is coming, and that will let you get three CableCARDs for your three tuner boards and then build your ultimate DVR! Ah, if this were true. Sadly, it looks like you won't be able to install CableCARDs in anything the Cable company doesn't sell or authorize. Oops.
The only reasonable option is to rent one cable box per tuner. For a three tuner system, I'd need three digital cable boxes. Even if I were willing to pay the exorbitant monthly fee, then I will only be able to record HDTV from a small number of channels and not premium channels. And then only if I get the cable box that already has a DVR built in, because that's the one with the firewire port on it.
As much as it sucks, the DVR from the cable company gives me a two-tuner DVR that can tape all my premium channels, even HDTV programs, directly off the digital signal (i.e., I don't even believe it's turned into analog as it would be in a MythTV setup) with a single box. This is just plainly unacceptable.
If anyone has a good alternative for me or will point out something I'm missing, PLEASE let me know.
Here's the main problem with this idea: the vast, vast majority of people, even smart Slashdot readers, have no idea how to read a patent. Sure, they read the abstract and that might bring to mind some other invention that's sort-of-like the one described in the patent, and that is helpful to a small extent. However, did you know that the abstract has little to no bearing on what the patent actually covers?
Patent claim language (the actual property rights granted by the patent) is byzantine and ugly. Besides that, there are all kinds of nuances. Do you know the difference between an apparatus and a method patent? The terms used in the claims may (nay, probably) don't mean what you think they mean. The applicant doesn't even know what they mean, since the legal claim construction process only occurs when the patent is challenged. Then, if the applicant (as many do) uses USC 30 S112P6 "means-plus-function" language, you're in a whole other world of indirection and confusion.
Patents need reform, but having a million uneducated people looking at the applications is only part of the solution. Reforms to patent law itself, such as:
- Making applicants provide a binding glossary of terms
- Making applicants identify corresponding structure for means-plus-function elements
- Reforming the byzantine nature of claim language
would go miles and miles to easing the process and squeezing out inefficiency
I looked at the DualHead2Go product a while ago, and it's a nifty trick. It takes one really wide VGA signal (say, 2048x768) and splits it into two 1024x768 signals. This one splits it three ways. Windows thinks you still have the one monitor. This is not an ideal multi-monitor setup, as your poor video card still has to drive this insane resolution.
Running three monitors these days is not hard with desktop machines, you can easily run your primary display off your AGP card and get a cheapo PCI dualhead for side displays. Using a Dell C/Dock (which has a PCI slot), I even run three monitors off my old Dell Latitude C640 laptop at work using a $50 Radeon 7000 DualHead card.
Posit: Parallel processing can solve certain types of problems much faster than serial processing.
Posit: The Cell architecture is highly parallel.
Posit: Most programmers today are good at writing serial, not parallel, code.
Hypothesis: A compiler can be developed that takes serially written programs and auto-transforms them into parallel programs to exploit the benefits of parallelism.
Now comes the research to attempt to validate that hypothesis. Will it succeed? We'll find out in several years. There are likely to be some suprising results, and maybe even a paradigm-shattering breakthrough. Or, this line of research may just peter out. It happens.
If I recall correctly, in 3001 Arthur C. Clarke asserts that a petabyte is enough to store the information comprising a single human (mind, body, etc.) You could store the art and the artist, as he put it.
A lot of stories of this ilk about Wikipedia seem to imply that Wikipedia is sort of a black or white thing - it's either authoritative or not, it's either correct or not, it's either a good resource or it's not.
In reality, it's (of course) some of all these things. Sure, it may be less correct on average than some other source, or it may be less authoritative, but that doesn't make it any less useful (especially on topics that are new, esoteric, or emerging - where else could you find well-written, generally correct information about Leeroy Jenkins or the GNAA?)
Honestly, I think having something where a slightly greater burden lies on readers to evaluate the quality of information is probably a good thing - we should really be doing that more with all "authoritative" information sources anyway.
While an alternative "free or low cost" version of Windows supported by ads might be attractive for some users, I have a really big feeling that if this actually gets implemented, the normal versions of Windows are going to start having ads too.
Right now, I can buy a Dell Dimension with XP home preinstalled, spend a half-hour uninstalling all the useless crap they load on there, and get the machine into a relatively professional state. If I want a machine that comes in a professional state, I have to pay a significant premium for an OptiPlex or something.
How much you want to bet that as soon as this gets implemented the next "home" version of Windows will have ads all over the place with no option to turn them off?
"My Documents...sponsored by Coca-Cola!"
This is a seriously insane museum collection of computer history. Apparently $45K wouldn't do it, but I certainly think getting saving all these old machines for posterity would be worth it.
_ W0QQitemZ8706273723QQcategoryZ4193QQrdZ1QQcmdZView Item
http://cgi.ebay.com/Classic-Vintage-PC-Collection
(And no I'm not the seller, or related to him/her in any way)
I can see it now:
"The department of redundant acronyms department presents...the SPY ACT Act!"
I'm not sure what reading "skills" are. What would acquiring these "skills" really give me? I'd have better recall of the events that happened in a book? A slightly different insight as to the motivations of fictional characters? Certainly there have been *bad* movies made of books, ones that lose the gestalt of the story entirely. In these cases, when I read the book, it's almost like seeing a remix of the movie with more deleted scenes :)
Is what's contained in the book really detail for detail's sake, or is it important? Good fiction (of which there's strikingly little and it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between the good and the bad without plowing through it all) makes the details important.
Yes, seeing an elephant's shadow is not the same as seeing an elephant, but reading is usually like looking at an elephant and then looking at it again with a microscope. Sure, I get more detail out of looking at it with the microscope. I might see the grass stuck between its toes and the snot hanging off its trunk. But the important part is generally the elephant.