Yes there is a Xing angle and I've heard rumors that they have been fined, penalized, etc according to the terms of their contract. But the press has muddled this angle rather badly. If everyone else were doing his job properly they might have been able to simply ostracize Xing and continue to go about their business. That is, future DVD's would not contain the key information needed by Xing players but everyone else would be fine. Xing would have to deal somehow with all their upset customers.
But they limited their key size to 40 bits. So brute force would inevitably yield all the other player keys. Also their stream cypher had some rather severe weaknesses which allows attacks even more effective than brute force. Allegedly, given the weaknesses of the CSS cypher a program running on a standard PC could yield all the relevent keys in a few minutes once those weaknesses had been analyzed. Again, this is probably related to their unwise decision to use 40 bit keys and their continuing moronic faith in the principle of security through obscurity.
Please pay attention if you want to participate intelligently. There is a particular law from 1998 involved. It's based on the WIPO treaty. Many think it is a piece of crap (wouldn't withstand review by the Supreme Court, etc, etc) but whether that is true or not, it does include several important caveats to its attempts to outlaw reverse engineering. Here is the text from the act:
''(f ) REVERSE ENGINEERING.--(1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs,...
So while I would agree with you that Real is not forced by law to produce player software for a particular platform, they are prevented from making claims of illegal reverse engineering by others who make it interoperable with other programs. Which is why I also expect Real to forfeit their $1,000,000 bond in the case they filed yesterday. So whether you think much of the claim (of decrypting for linux compatibility) or the law, the law does seem to recognize the validity of the claim.
I wanted to avoid posting to this thread so I could use my moderation option but there is just too much mindless paranoia here. Before everyone runs away and screams there's no hope let us please not forget the recent RIAA vs. Rio court case. The big corporate interests had aligned to shut down a small company (because in the immortal words of Mel Brooks "We have to protect our phony baloney jobs"). They tried to interpret a 1996 law to justify their position and they utterly lost. I suppose RioPort might implement the RIAA measures in future machines but they'll have to compete with other companies that have the full benefit of the legal precedent that was set in that case. I think there are some similarities and I think the basically incompetent corporate interests are about to get bitch slapped again.
Does it make sense to reply to someone who is either too lazy or too slippery to login? What "outright theft of the Xing key"? Leaving that aside they include the 40 bit hash of the title key which can be brute forced with a complexity of about 2^25 due to flaws in their algorithm so the title key can be computed in less than a second on most modern computers without the aid of Xing's key (is a second really that much longer?). The closer you examine the issues the dumber they look.
Nonsense, there is nothing to prevent an individual or publisher from creating unencrypted DVD's that play just fine on any DVD player. Authoring software and hardware aren't exactly cheap yet but that has nothing to do with CSS.
My problem with your screed is that you either know a lot more specific details or you are rather clueless. I have trouble with either alternative. Were you aware of LiViD and the similar community efforts to reverse engineer DVD and similar hardware? These people have been putting in an effort over an extended period of time. Individual small steps were being made and reported. Source for AC3 decoding was being maintained in a CVS server. Crudely disassembled code was being rewritten in C with comments to allow others to read and analyze the details of the stream cypher. Programs were written and submitted to the mailing list showing how to use chosen plaintext attacks to compute player keys in fractions of a second running time. I'm fairly certain there was even source code (using x86 assembler) for an MPEG2 player that would play unencrypted DVD's at slow frame rates on linux boxes. There were many steps in solving this problem and they weren't all accomplished by someone who happenned to catch Zing's blunder.
In fact, if it were not for all the other effort there might not be an effective crack today. Zing's player key would be (and probably is) invalidated, not be included with new DVD's and you might be stuck running a 17 hour program in order to brute force a new disc. There was lots of effort from many people, many of them from the linux community specifically, and I don't think you really know what you're talking about when you try to dismiss it. I think you have some other issues and this is where it is popping up (btw I am not a member of the linux community).
Well, I suppose to be fair I should try to point out fallacies regardless of the implication. I also thought that any practical "pirating" was at least years away. However, there is a tape drive called OnStream that costs between $300 and $500 depending on the interface technology (IDE or SCSI) and whether it is a standalone external or bare internal. Check at www.onstream.com. The tapes per gigabyte are rather inexpensive. So by borrowing DVD's from friends or renting for $4 or so you could conceivably build up a large library of digital tapes of exact digital duplicates. There is someone on the newsgroups who claims he does this routinely and that it works just fine. The OnStream web site quotes a $40 price for 30 gB which seems at least a little more than I'd like to pay. On the other hand it would be a great way to avoid late return rental charges (assuming you have another good reason to be spending that initial $300 - $500 for the drive).
The important point is that it may be at least slightly disingenuous to claim there are no economic copying techniques available today. My own perspective is that this lends itself to nothing much more than fair use. But I suspect the intent of the industry was to effectively stamp out the entire issue of fair use by trumping it technologically. "Sure, you have a right to make a copy under the fair use doctrine. Go ahead. Ha." But due to the incompetence of the crypto, reducing an already limited 40 bit key space to an effective 16 or 25 bit (depending on the specific attack) they are going to have to continue dealing with the issue of fair use. This is not a good first step.
Oh, please! "How Things Work in the Real World!!!" My, we must be in the presence of an adult. I can imagine all sorts of rude and satisfying things to fling at your idiocy, but number one is to point out your not being an adult, just a brown-nosing lackey.
Just an historical anecdote to put this in context. In the sixties in Minnesota the dairy farmers got upset that people were viciously purchasing margarine rather than butter and thus undermining the family farm. So their running dog lackey legislators passed a law making it illegal to buy and sell colored margarine. At that point retailers made available white margerine with a color packet that the customer could squeeze and distribute through the whole container. In the meantime Minnesota was held up to ridicule for the stupidity and boorishness of its provincial laws which had to be abandoned eventually.
Having your bought and paid for legislators pass laws making gravity illegal may allow you to strut around talking about "How Things Work in the Real World", but it isn't going to change anything fundamental.
Just a few graphics apps from Adobe? What about Metrowerks? Metrowerks CodeWarrior has been multiprocessor capable for many releases. This seems such an obvious and important observation for slashdot that I can't believe no one else has made it.
I've had the flu for two days so maybe I should just read and disagree quietly but this sort of theme is recurring ad nausiem. So some wise guys on Sand Hill Road decide we aren't bright enough to handle the PC's and Mac's we've so foolishly purchased and they insist on funding information appliance companies which each sell us a copy of the same capability in a dozen slightly different boxes. Thanks, but no thanks. The other darker side to this is the unspoken determination to keep that digital bit stream out of the hands of the unwashed multitudes, EVEN if it is only being digitized inside the box you've bought and paid for. As the complete unravelling of CSS has demonstrated they show little capability to manage their desired trick of maintaining essential control over what you can do with the signal they send to your home. No, the real challenge they face isn't the so-called clueless user calling tech support, it is the all too well informed user trying to explain basic facts to under-paid and under-trained tech support. A 10 base T port snuggly hidden inside the box in warranty revocation area would change this from a curious but inadequate consumer product to an irresistable hacker delight. Buzzt! Sorry but thanks for playing. Please go stand over there with all those other wildly successful information appliances.
I get to the office, mount the drive that has the archive of the earlier release of CodeWarrior and discover it is PR4, NOT PR3. I don't think anyone has had the opportunity to try what I described but I wanted to make certain accurate information was left here.
Before I start complaining I'll try to answer some questions. The ".as extension" is a question I had and posted to some newgroups. I didn't get an answer there but in an email exchange with someone in Australia I learned it stands for AppleSingle which is used to encode binary files when they are stored on file systems that don't support resource forks. If one is sufficiently curious to examine the AppleScript file in the root directory (I wasn't because it promptly crashed and/or failed when I rashly ran it), it is fairly clearly indicated what that extension means. Oh well. The only utility I could find initially to decode the binary files is StuffIt Deluxe which I don't own. I know Eudora Pro handles it in attachments and some CVS clients will also but the user interface is wrong. (Commit the files to a CVS archive and when checked out they are converted to customary Mac files). Anyhow that is only one problem and there is a more serious problem with the Mac archive (and probably the Windows archive also). They didn't post enough of the source tree to allow for successful compilation. If you get the full source archive for all the PGP products from www.pgpi.com (available already for Windows and soon for the Mac) those missing directories are supplied. Hint number three is to use Metrowerks PR3 unless you enjoy the challenge of porting to the most recent version of universal headers and the current PowerPlant. (Throw in internet config headers and libraries for best results). Anyhow I have a DiskCopy archive of PR3, I managed to ftp a fairly current source tree from Switzerland and voila the Mac version compiles and runs.
Lot's of uninformed pontificating. No reason why I can't get in on the action. The source code for PGP products always gets posted publicly since at least version 2.6. That is nothing new. What Phil (no, I don't know him personally) seems to be indicating is that the particular status of PGPfone is likely to be changing soon. So he is informing everyone sooner rather than later when the lawyers have dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's. That way you can start working with the source code now (which is always posted in any case) in anticipation of participating in the future plans. This isn't some cheesy perl script gluing together some barely adequate command line tools. The goal here is a robust, interoperable attractive application that your mother could use if she were so inclined. The nature of the challenge seems not to be appreciated by many who so readily offer their innocent (of any real knowledge) opinions. Sheesh!
p.s. Didn't mean any nasty crack at Lucas who was just trying to be helpful.
Re:Too bad S.u.S.e doesn't boot PowerPC's :(
on
SuSE Coming on DVD
·
· Score: 1
You make that statement as though you were conversant with all the details. What piece of $400 software are you talking about? There was decoder hardware that I believe came on a PCI board that might correspond to your claim but that is no longer an issue. Current Macs that come with DVD-ROM drives include software decoding DVD player software. It is most likely the case that with a G3 you could download this software from Apple (or a friend) and you should be fine.
It can get weary how often these things change but you've fallen behind. The current thread manager does support preemptive threads on the ppc. This is the case with 8.6 but not previous versions due to the inclusion of multiprocessor support. Only one of the threads can include most calls to the toolbox but this should be acceptable for many server applications.
Without wishing to get into this mud wrestling contest I'll just offer the information that multi-processor support is already in MacOS and you can get multiprocessor boards for existing Macs. However, the G4 is supposed to be much more amenable to multiprocessing which I think means it will be easier to get the expected boost in performance. Among existing applications which take good advantage of multiprocessing with the current MacOS are PhotoShop and Metrowerks Codewarrior.
Yes, you can run seti clients using linuxPPC and MacOS X. Both produce speeds that I recall as being about 6 to 8 hours (I remember 6 but others thought it might have been closer to 8). Of course the next question is whether the G4 running OS X might crank them out at a rate closer to 1 or 2 hours?
I know this is hard to believe but get ready for a world far different from the one we grew up with in the 60's and 70's. The best silicon is going to show up at Toys R Us and the minions of the central authorities will get to play with it after they've put in their $10 deposit. OK, I'm exaggerating slightly but this stuff is being driven by economics, not enlightened despots. The same forces that bring frenetic focus to 3D graphics today will affect the development of all useful advanced technology, including the so far largely mythical quantum computer.
Personally, I think the most insidious influence reducing peoples inclination to secure their own privacy is glib cynicism. The tools are there if it matters but if you don't want to bother you can claim, "they could use their superior technology to beat anything I'd try"
Damn, this is really getting sloppy. No, what you described is not "key escrow" and not even particularly close. With public key cryptography it is crucial that the private key be kept entirely secret. If data were encrypted with a 'govt public key' then only someone with the corresponding 'govt private key' could decrypt it which would be approximately no one. Not much of a distribution scheme. If you include a session key which is encrypted with a 'govt public key' then a govt agent could use the govt private key to recover the session key which could be used to unencrypt the content which had been encrypted with a different algorithm (probably a stream cypher like RC5) by that session key.
Anyhow the relevent fact from the world of cryptography is that Sony is shipping silicon that enables encrypted IEEE 1394 (aka firewire or i.link) links which might enable secure delivery down to the powered speaker level eventually. On the other hand the CSS key exchange mechanism for DVD-video has recently been cracked (or exposed) so there are no guarantees that such a scheme can remain uncompromised.
Re:Video Editing is easy.
on
Digital VCRs
·
· Score: 1
>We have been using VCRs and Windows software for 2 years now doing what this thing does.
No you haven't. Are you even paying attention? Let's say you come home 30 minutes late to watch a 2 hour movie. If your TiVo or ReplayTV has been set to record the show you can start watching it immediately while it continues to record. That is probably the biggest deal about these devices. You can completely unhook from the schedule. With a $200 VCR or your who knows how expensive 500 Gb RAID array you have no choice but to wait for the entire program to finish before you can start watching. You can easily say you don't care about this detail but if you want to get up at 5am the next morning it's a pretty nice feature.
Re:Are you sure you want to get excited about this
on
Digital VCRs
·
· Score: 1
>This Tivo thing is evil - check this out at Wired. Go for the ReplayTV or wait a bit for the STB MPEG2 recorder card then write your own apps. Sorry, I dont want anyone to have a clue what I watch on TV....
Hey, wait a minute; if what you are saying is true, I still don't care. (Yes, I stole that retort from a popular TV program).
>I guess anyone who thought linux sucked at multimedia is proved wrong with this thing, eh? Proof through example!
>Example of what?
Pause for a moment. Try to remember that the entire thread is about a linux box that does some fairly amazing simultaneous mpeg2 compression and decompression while digitizing analog video. I bet that is the example the first writer had in mind. That's the proof by example that linux is capable of multimedia (for no more than $500 including the hard drive). When I first read about TiVo and ReplayTV I was certain they must be using OS-9 or some other realtime operating system. I'll be very interested in seeing the modifications they've made to make this work.!
Not really ("you have to trust someone..."), but you do have to not distrust everyone. If the source code is open then anyone can examine it including people with sufficient mathematical knowledge. If any such person finds something of "interest" it will quickly become a matter of intense discussion on relevent newsgroups, mailing lists, and hallway conversations.
There seems to be a repeated effort to convince people that an all powerful NSA will thwart any attempts to insure privacy. I guess the hope is that people won't bother to use what is easily and in many cases freely available thus making the prediction true by default. If people want to wallow in their cynicism, that is their privilege. I think the efforts to evesdrop promiscuously are doomed and the listeners know it. It is mainly a question of how long they can get away with their claims to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain..." (quoting from the Wizard of Oz)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes there is a Xing angle and I've heard rumors that they have been fined, penalized, etc according to the terms of their contract. But the press has muddled this angle rather badly. If everyone else were doing his job properly they might have been able to simply ostracize Xing and continue to go about their business. That is, future DVD's would not contain the key information needed by Xing players but everyone else would be fine. Xing would have to deal somehow with all their upset customers.
But they limited their key size to 40 bits. So brute force would inevitably yield all the other player keys. Also their stream cypher had some rather severe weaknesses which allows attacks even more effective than brute force. Allegedly, given the weaknesses of the CSS cypher a program running on a standard PC could yield all the relevent keys in a few minutes once those weaknesses had been analyzed. Again, this is probably related to their unwise decision to use 40 bit keys and their continuing moronic faith in the principle of security through obscurity.
Please pay attention if you want to participate intelligently. There is a particular law from 1998 involved. It's based on the WIPO treaty. Many think it is a piece of crap (wouldn't withstand review by the Supreme Court, etc, etc) but whether that is true or not, it does include several important caveats to its attempts to outlaw reverse engineering. Here is the text from the act:
...
''(f ) REVERSE ENGINEERING.--(1) Notwithstanding the provisions
of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained
the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent
a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular
portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying
and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary
to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer
program with other programs,
So while I would agree with you that Real is not forced by law to produce player software for a particular platform, they are prevented from making claims of illegal reverse engineering by others who make it interoperable with other programs. Which is why I also expect Real to forfeit their $1,000,000 bond in the case they filed yesterday. So whether you think much of the claim (of decrypting for linux compatibility) or the law, the law does seem to recognize the validity of the claim.
I wanted to avoid posting to this thread so I could use my moderation option but there is just too much mindless paranoia here. Before everyone runs away and screams there's no hope let us please not forget the recent RIAA vs. Rio court case. The big corporate interests had aligned to shut down a small company (because in the immortal words of Mel Brooks "We have to protect our phony baloney jobs"). They tried to interpret a 1996 law to justify their position and they utterly lost. I suppose RioPort might implement the RIAA measures in future machines but they'll have to compete with other companies that have the full benefit of the legal precedent that was set in that case. I think there are some similarities and I think the basically incompetent corporate interests are about to get bitch slapped again.
Does it make sense to reply to someone who is either too lazy or too slippery to login? What "outright theft of the Xing key"? Leaving that aside they include the 40 bit hash of the title key which can be brute forced with a complexity of about 2^25 due to flaws in their algorithm so the title key can be computed in less than a second on most modern computers without the aid of Xing's key (is a second really that much longer?). The closer you examine the issues the dumber they look.
Nonsense, there is nothing to prevent an individual or publisher from creating unencrypted DVD's that play just fine on any DVD player. Authoring software and hardware aren't exactly cheap yet but that has nothing to do with CSS.
My problem with your screed is that you either know a lot more specific details or you are rather clueless. I have trouble with either alternative. Were you aware of LiViD and the similar community efforts to reverse engineer DVD and similar hardware? These people have been putting in an effort over an extended period of time. Individual small steps were being made and reported. Source for AC3 decoding was being maintained in a CVS server. Crudely disassembled code was being rewritten in C with comments to allow others to read and analyze the details of the stream cypher. Programs were written and submitted to the mailing list showing how to use chosen plaintext attacks to compute player keys in fractions of a second running time. I'm fairly certain there was even source code (using x86 assembler) for an MPEG2 player that would play unencrypted DVD's at slow frame rates on linux boxes. There were many steps in solving this problem and they weren't all accomplished by someone who happenned to catch Zing's blunder.
In fact, if it were not for all the other effort there might not be an effective crack today. Zing's player key would be (and probably is) invalidated, not be included with new DVD's and you might be stuck running a 17 hour program in order to brute force a new disc. There was lots of effort from many people, many of them from the linux community specifically, and I don't think you really know what you're talking about when you try to dismiss it. I think you have some other issues and this is where it is popping up (btw I am not a member of the linux community).
Well, I suppose to be fair I should try to point out fallacies regardless of the implication. I also thought that any practical "pirating" was at least years away. However, there is a tape drive called OnStream that costs between $300 and $500 depending on the interface technology (IDE or SCSI) and whether it is a standalone external or bare internal. Check at www.onstream.com. The tapes per gigabyte are rather inexpensive. So by borrowing DVD's from friends or renting for $4 or so you could conceivably build up a large library of digital tapes of exact digital duplicates. There is someone on the newsgroups who claims he does this routinely and that it works just fine. The OnStream web site quotes a $40 price for 30 gB which seems at least a little more than I'd like to pay. On the other hand it would be a great way to avoid late return rental charges (assuming you have another good reason to be spending that initial $300 - $500 for the drive).
The important point is that it may be at least slightly disingenuous to claim there are no economic copying techniques available today. My own perspective is that this lends itself to nothing much more than fair use. But I suspect the intent of the industry was to effectively stamp out the entire issue of fair use by trumping it technologically. "Sure, you have a right to make a copy under the fair use doctrine. Go ahead. Ha." But due to the incompetence of the crypto, reducing an already limited 40 bit key space to an effective 16 or 25 bit (depending on the specific attack) they are going to have to continue dealing with the issue of fair use. This is not a good first step.
Oh, please! "How Things Work in the Real World!!!" My, we must be in the presence of an adult. I can imagine all sorts of rude and satisfying things to fling at your idiocy, but number one is to point out your not being an adult, just a brown-nosing lackey.
Just an historical anecdote to put this in context. In the sixties in Minnesota the dairy farmers got upset that people were viciously purchasing margarine rather than butter and thus undermining the family farm. So their running dog lackey legislators passed a law making it illegal to buy and sell colored margarine. At that point retailers made available white margerine with a color packet that the customer could squeeze and distribute through the whole container. In the meantime Minnesota was held up to ridicule for the stupidity and boorishness of its provincial laws which had to be abandoned eventually.
Having your bought and paid for legislators pass laws making gravity illegal may allow you to strut around talking about "How Things Work in the Real World", but it isn't going to change anything fundamental.
Just a few graphics apps from Adobe? What about Metrowerks? Metrowerks CodeWarrior has been multiprocessor capable for many releases. This seems such an obvious and important observation for slashdot that I can't believe no one else has made it.
I've had the flu for two days so maybe I should just read and disagree quietly but this sort of theme is recurring ad nausiem. So some wise guys on Sand Hill Road decide we aren't bright enough to handle the PC's and Mac's we've so foolishly purchased and they insist on funding information appliance companies which each sell us a copy of the same capability in a dozen slightly different boxes. Thanks, but no thanks. The other darker side to this is the unspoken determination to keep that digital bit stream out of the hands of the unwashed multitudes, EVEN if it is only being digitized inside the box you've bought and paid for. As the complete unravelling of CSS has demonstrated they show little capability to manage their desired trick of maintaining essential control over what you can do with the signal they send to your home. No, the real challenge they face isn't the so-called clueless user calling tech support, it is the all too well informed user trying to explain basic facts to under-paid and under-trained tech support. A 10 base T port snuggly hidden inside the box in warranty revocation area would change this from a curious but inadequate consumer product to an irresistable hacker delight. Buzzt! Sorry but thanks for playing. Please go stand over there with all those other wildly successful information appliances.
I get to the office, mount the drive that has the archive of the earlier release of CodeWarrior and discover it is PR4, NOT PR3. I don't think anyone has had the opportunity to try what I described but I wanted to make certain accurate information was left here.
Before I start complaining I'll try to answer some questions. The ".as extension" is a question I had and posted to some newgroups. I didn't get an answer there but in an email exchange with someone in Australia I learned it stands for AppleSingle which is used to encode binary files when they are stored on file systems that don't support resource forks. If one is sufficiently curious to examine the AppleScript file in the root directory (I wasn't because it promptly crashed and/or failed when I rashly ran it), it is fairly clearly indicated what that extension means. Oh well. The only utility I could find initially to decode the binary files is StuffIt Deluxe which I don't own. I know Eudora Pro handles it in attachments and some CVS clients will also but the user interface is wrong. (Commit the files to a CVS archive and when checked out they are converted to customary Mac files). Anyhow that is only one problem and there is a more serious problem with the Mac archive (and probably the Windows archive also). They didn't post enough of the source tree to allow for successful compilation. If you get the full source archive for all the PGP products from www.pgpi.com (available already for Windows and soon for the Mac) those missing directories are supplied. Hint number three is to use Metrowerks PR3 unless you enjoy the challenge of porting to the most recent version of universal headers and the current PowerPlant. (Throw in internet config headers and libraries for best results). Anyhow I have a DiskCopy archive of PR3, I managed to ftp a fairly current source tree from Switzerland and voila the Mac version compiles and runs.
Lot's of uninformed pontificating. No reason why I can't get in on the action. The source code for PGP products always gets posted publicly since at least version 2.6. That is nothing new. What Phil (no, I don't know him personally) seems to be indicating is that the particular status of PGPfone is likely to be changing soon. So he is informing everyone sooner rather than later when the lawyers have dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's. That way you can start working with the source code now (which is always posted in any case) in anticipation of participating in the future plans. This isn't some cheesy perl script gluing together some barely adequate command line tools. The goal here is a robust, interoperable attractive application that your mother could use if she were so inclined. The nature of the challenge seems not to be appreciated by many who so readily offer their innocent (of any real knowledge) opinions. Sheesh!
p.s. Didn't mean any nasty crack at Lucas who was just trying to be helpful.
You make that statement as though you were conversant with all the details. What piece of $400 software are you talking about? There was decoder hardware that I believe came on a PCI board that might correspond to your claim but that is no longer an issue. Current Macs that come with DVD-ROM drives include software decoding DVD player software. It is most likely the case that with a G3 you could download this software from Apple (or a friend) and you should be fine.
It can get weary how often these things change but you've fallen behind. The current thread manager does support preemptive threads on the ppc. This is the case with 8.6 but not previous versions due to the inclusion of multiprocessor support. Only one of the threads can include most calls to the toolbox but this should be acceptable for many server applications.
If you're calling Minnesota that might be your problem. LinuxPPC is located in Hales Corners, Wisconsin.
Without wishing to get into this mud wrestling contest I'll just offer the information that multi-processor support is already in MacOS and you can get multiprocessor boards for existing Macs. However, the G4 is supposed to be much more amenable to multiprocessing which I think means it will be easier to get the expected boost in performance. Among existing applications which take good advantage of multiprocessing with the current MacOS are PhotoShop and Metrowerks Codewarrior.
Yes, you can run seti clients using linuxPPC and MacOS X. Both produce speeds that I recall as being about 6 to 8 hours (I remember 6 but others thought it might have been closer to 8). Of course the next question is whether the G4 running OS X might crank them out at a rate closer to 1 or 2 hours?
I know this is hard to believe but get ready for a world far different from the one we grew up with in the 60's and 70's. The best silicon is going to show up at Toys R Us and the minions of the central authorities will get to play with it after they've put in their $10 deposit. OK, I'm exaggerating slightly but this stuff is being driven by economics, not enlightened despots. The same forces that bring frenetic focus to 3D graphics today will affect the development of all useful advanced technology, including the so far largely mythical quantum computer.
Personally, I think the most insidious influence reducing peoples inclination to secure their own privacy is glib cynicism. The tools are there if it matters but if you don't want to bother you can claim, "they could use their superior technology to beat anything I'd try"
Damn, this is really getting sloppy. No, what you described is not "key escrow" and not even particularly close. With public key cryptography it is crucial that the private key be kept entirely secret. If data were encrypted with a 'govt public key' then only someone with the corresponding 'govt private key' could decrypt it which would be approximately no one. Not much of a distribution scheme. If you include a session key which is encrypted with a 'govt public key' then a govt agent could use the govt private key to recover the session key which could be used to unencrypt the content which had been encrypted with a different algorithm (probably a stream cypher like RC5) by that session key.
Anyhow the relevent fact from the world of cryptography is that Sony is shipping silicon that enables encrypted IEEE 1394 (aka firewire or i.link) links which might enable secure delivery down to the powered speaker level eventually. On the other hand the CSS key exchange mechanism for DVD-video has recently been cracked (or exposed) so there are no guarantees that such a scheme can remain uncompromised.
>We have been using VCRs and Windows software for 2 years now doing what this thing does.
No you haven't. Are you even paying attention? Let's say you come home 30 minutes late to watch a 2 hour movie. If your TiVo or ReplayTV has been set to record the show you can start watching it immediately while it continues to record. That is probably the biggest deal about these devices. You can completely unhook from the schedule. With a $200 VCR or your who knows how expensive 500 Gb RAID array you have no choice but to wait for the entire program to finish before you can start watching. You can easily say you don't care about this detail but if you want to get up at 5am the next morning it's a pretty nice feature.
>This Tivo thing is evil - check this out at Wired. Go for the ReplayTV or wait a bit for the STB MPEG2 recorder card then write your own apps. Sorry, I dont want anyone to have a clue what I watch on TV....
Hey, wait a minute; if what you are saying is true, I still don't care. (Yes, I stole that retort from a popular TV program).
>I guess anyone who thought linux sucked at multimedia is proved wrong with this thing, eh? Proof through example!
>Example of what?
Pause for a moment. Try to remember that the entire thread is about a linux box that does some fairly amazing simultaneous mpeg2 compression and decompression while digitizing analog video. I bet that is the example the first writer had in mind. That's the proof by example that linux is capable of multimedia (for no more than $500 including the hard drive). When I first read about TiVo and ReplayTV I was certain they must be using OS-9 or some other realtime operating system. I'll be very interested in seeing the modifications they've made to make this work.!
Not really ("you have to trust someone..."), but you do have to not distrust everyone. If the source code is open then anyone can examine it including people with sufficient mathematical knowledge. If any such person finds something of "interest" it will quickly become a matter of intense discussion on relevent newsgroups, mailing lists, and hallway conversations.
There seems to be a repeated effort to convince people that an all powerful NSA will thwart any attempts to insure privacy. I guess the hope is that people won't bother to use what is easily and in many cases freely available thus making the prediction true by default. If people want to wallow in their cynicism, that is their privilege. I think the efforts to evesdrop promiscuously are doomed and the listeners know it. It is mainly a question of how long they can get away with their claims to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain..." (quoting from the Wizard of Oz)