Re:Sorry, what you're asking for is too easy to ab
on
Reusing Old TiVo Hardware?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you're using a TiVo, as a TiVo, without paying TiVo, you're 'stealing'.
No, you're not. If you paid $ for a piece of hardware, that's your hardware. Perhaps you mean attempting to access TiVo's schedule/listing service with an unofficial client, or otherwise outside the terms of its contract. Alternate, platform-neutral and OSS-friendly listings services do exist, try http://www.schedulesdirect.org/ .
He found that if he created certificates for his own Internet domain that included null characters -- often represented with a \0 -- some programs would misinterpret the certificates.
That's because some programs stop reading text when they see a null character.
This is the same exploit used in an older Nintendo Wii jailbreak - people just keep on using strcmp and its cousins to compare hashes.
With the ADD world we live in, the investment needed to see results in a 3D graphics world is going to be a hard sell.
Couldn't agree more. Much as the Real Programmer in all of us wants everyone to start with a course in computer architecture followed by data structures, something more immediate and gratifying has a much better chance of holding a first-time programmer's interest. Hello World in 3D with laser effects. Buffer overruns and lambda functions can come later.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Processing yet. It's specifically written as a "beginner's language" as well as a rapid-prototyping language (immediate gratification) for everyone else. Under the hood it's Java, with most of the annoying crap (public static void...) hidden away from non-advanced users, and library functions to handle most of the common gratifications (drawing attractive 2d/3d graphics, openGL, reading/writing to Web pages / sockets, grabbing data from Webcams, serial port, etc.)
What I like is that it comes with an exhaustive set of examples, those who learn best from example will pick things up quickly. Plus, once the kids have a program they are proud of, they can export it as a Java applet and blog it, it'll run for their friends right in their browser windows.
It seems that for the past few years, more and more "average" sites (blogs, web forums, straight HTML pages) have SSL turned on for no particular reason. They're not banking sites, and some do not require/use any kind of authentication whatsoever. Most likely they have it on simply because they read somewhere "it's more secure", or because it's a 1-line edit in httpd.conf so why not, or to proactively opt out of all current and future mid-pipe page-rewriting shenanigans (BT/Phorm and alikes), not realizing how many clicks of busywork and Dire Warning desensitization this is causing for Firefox users everytime they want to read some guy's anonymous blog post.
Thus, I have no doubt people have become used to clicking away all these warnings, even to the point of getting themselves into trouble when a legitimate one appears on a site where they might actually enter confidential information.
Maybe they need to simply start treating self-signed sites as indistinguishable from plain HTTP (no Dire Warnings, no padlock symbols, broken or not, etc.), or save the Dire Warning dance until the first time the user attempts to submit data (e.g. clicks to type in a textbox). If they're not submitting *any* data, they're not submitting their financial data...
He does mention it's an audio program, not a paint program:-) If it 'just' edited spectrograph images it would be pretty useless (you can do that in Photoshop easily enough, or just create your own by feeding data to any MATLAB-esque graphing software). If the OP is trying to make money on it, I'd guess the software has to make itself useful by tying its output back to audio somehow.
The spectrograph is really just a visual representation of the Fourier transform of an audio sample - this process is ideally lossless, so if correctly applied, the data can be transformed between the time and frequency domains arbitrarily without degrading it. So I'm hoping this is the idea behind the software, and not a simple Paint program:p
Why would anyone want to edit audio? Sound editors' only purpose is to construct fake interviews from pre-recorded speeches, not for noise removal, creating virtual instruments/samples or any kind of legitimate artistic purpose.
Maybe it's for the same people who use ordinary time-domain sound editors (Audacity, etc.) but find it more intuitive to work in the frequency domain. Want to boost treble in specific spots? Select the lighten brush and paint in the top of the spectrogram. Like Photoshop for sound.
Or, maybe for customers who want to do something like NIN did in Year Zero, create noise samples that literally show up as an image in common spectrographs (often displayed by visualization plugins for common audio player software).
XML is available. See http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/
I while back I threw together a quick n dirty script that queries the NDFD every few hours and drives an LED weatherball in front of my house. Keeps me from having to remember to check a weather report every night:-)
If you back up to the main page, there are even links to view the forecast models themselves.
Sadly, the "DMCA-enabled battery" asshattery is not a new idea - well-known chipmakers such as Dallas-Maxim have been pushing cryptographic battery-lockout and ID chips directly to electronic engineering departments for years now. I've been personally seeing these ads in EE trade rags since at least '06. And yes, they trot out the claim that it will "improve safety" by locking out "inferior knockoff" batteries (or more to the point, shield you from liability), and that it's totally not a vendor lock-in thing at all. Sadly, part of me is actually surprised that it took this long for a mainstream manufacturer to take the bait.
Anyway, we know how it will end (Sega v. Accolade, Lexmark vs. SCC, Magnuson-Moss Act, as other posters have pointed out), but you already know who foots the bill for the de rigeur years of lawyering it will take to reach that zero-sum result.
No, magnets around CRTs (even little ones) are bad because they will semi-permanently magnetize any ferrous bits inside the CRT (or surroundings), slightly deflecting the output of the electron guns. (Or in case of big magnets, deform/rip the shadow mask off.) The amount of magnetization does not have to be much - on a color CRT, you only have to collectively kick a pile of these electrons over about one phosphor dot's worth (some microns) to completely screw up the colors.
It took a while to RTFAC, but one of the major "decisions" I drew away from this was that the brief recommends against taking up the case because it is not a good test case, not because they believe the **AAs are twisting arms. Specifically, the fact that the parties waived claims for contributory infringement and fair use, respectively, was an important factor in the decision. FTFAC:
"Network-based technologies for copying and replaying
television programming raise potentially significant
questions, but this case does not provide a suitable occasion
for this Court to address them. The Second Circuit
is the first appellate court to consider the copyright implications
of network-based analogues to VCRs and settop
DVRs, and its decision does not conflict with any
decision of this Court or another court of appeals. The
partiesâ(TM) stipulations, moreover, have removed two critical
issuesâ"contributory infringement and fair useâ"
from this case. That artificial truncation of the possible
grounds for decision would make this case an unsuitable
vehicle for clarifying the proper application of copyright
principles to technologies like the one at issue here."
It sounds as though they are expecting this case to essentially repeat for an arbitrary future combination IP holder and cable company, without the peculiar waivers of contributory infringement claims and fair-use counterclaims, and are simply waiting for that no-holds-barred case to be settled by a lower court. The extreme quibbling over (to quote the brief) âoewhoâ would âoemakeâ the copies that would be
stored does not inspire my confidence, as all this decides is whether the alleged infringement should be considered as direct or contributory. The cynic in me says that a pro-RIAA author would rather the latter be the ultimate test case since the bar for arguing secondary/contributory infringement is much lower. (You stored arbitrary data which included the pointer to a pointer to data that a 3rd-party chose to infringe? You're a contributory infringer!)
Hey now, don't give porn sites and the money-grubbing companies that leech on them any ideas. Remember "Adult Check"? Pretty soon there will be a $19.95 a month "Human Check" service that verifies you're a human by your ability to pay your credit card bill each month (and maybe has an agent call/email you every few months with a brief quiz, kinda like they do in MMORPGs if they suspect a player is a bot).
The one time recently I've had Flash memory fail (an SD card in this case, FAT formatted) due to natural causes, i.e. other than ESD or hardware-development abuse, it grew a at least one defect which acted just as a HDD 'bad sector' would - with a catch: The communication between an SD card and the PC is essentially SCSI, and the card may (and should!) return an error flag in the SCSI packet if a read/write failed. My PC's Flash reader interprets such an error as a sign that it should crash outright. Maybe it is trying to re-read the sector infinitely many times until success, or maybe just throws in the towel altogether, but the upshot is that the card/reader goes catatonic on the first read error and must be recovered by plugcycling it. So 'chkdsk' or other tools which would mark off bad sectors at the filesystem level will not recover it as they perform a read-read or read-write-compare test and inadvertently crash the reader just before they could have fixed it.
Flash can handle a large, but limited number of erases, so bulk Flash media (SD, CF, etc.) use a wear-leveling system to ensure some physical sectors don't get written to much more frequently than others. A table of the logical sector numbers (as the OS sees them) points each number to a "randomly"-selected physical address, which is re-selected to another free sector on every write.
There are many other ways Flash can fail (e.g. page/column driver failures taking out large swaths, possibly GBytes of media at a time), but for single-sector failures, if you are able to write to the bad sector (without reading first, if your reader hangs up on reading one), the fault will appear to 'go away' since a fresh new physical sector was selected. But beware, the bad sector is still in the pool, so it WILL come back to bite you sometime in the future. If the bad sector can be marked off at the filesystem level, in theory nobody will ever attempt to write to it (thus changing the wear-leveled physical sector the logical 'disk' sector number points to), and it will remain safely excluded.
Some types of Flash media will attempt to mark sectors 'bad' at the device level and exclude them from the physical sector pool, but I would not rely on this.
As the law was probably meant to be enforced (bought and paid for by Hollywood, not gadget makers), yes. Unfortunately, it's quite often (mis)applied to cover encrypted or access-controlled firmware, claiming that the unrestricted *use* of the gadget (i.e. executing the firmware) meets the definition of "access" under the DMCA, regardless of whether said firmware or anything it protects is ever actually copied, viewed or otherwise reduced to human-perceivable form. See Every Game Console Maufacturer vs. Every Homebrew Device Ever Made.:-(
There once was a time when the basic anti-death-and-injury bootstrapping (water and electricity don't mix, leaves of three let it be, don't pick up rattlesnakes, look both ways...) was passed down by oral tradition, in particular from parents to children. If some family lines have reached the point where these vital nuggets are no longer being propagated, maybe it is just time to take the warning labels off everything and see what happens.
I kid thee not, on the last condensed milk I bought: ALLERGY WARNING: CONTAINS MILK
I am guessing that the update is DRM updates... something like the ability for the player to identify copied disks, or maybe blacklisted keys or something.
Precisely; the manufacturer does not generate revenue by paying $$$ to push out unsolicited features on a product that is already bought and paid for. The 'update' probably has more to do with Certificate Revocation Lists, a requirement of every HDCP-capable technology including Blu-Ray players. Quoth Wikipedia, "If a particular set of keys is compromised, the keys' corresponding KSV is put into a revocation list, which is written on newly-produced discs, examples of such discs include DVD and Blu-ray."
I didn't see it in the article, but I would really like to know who makes a piezo generator that produces the kilowatts of power they are claiming. With the commercially-available piezo energy harvesters I develop for, a playing-card sized wafer ($50) generates not much more than 10mW under ideal conditions (continuous sinusoidal vibration from a lab shaker). Wouldn't I like to get me a few of theirs! (Goodbye epaper, hello giant LED matrix...)
These recent privacy modes (Chrome's Incognito, FF Private Browsing) seem to miss the point. What's the great importance of keeping my browsing history off my local disk (I already know I surfed porn), when the evilclick.net advert in Window #2 can still read a cookie set by the evilclick.net advert in Window #1?
There is a more detailed description elsewhere, but here is a brief description of the feature I really want to see in a good browser stealth mode: Each clickstream is its own session. For example, I create a new window/tab from scratch - it may as well be a brand new universe. In a proper 'privacy mode', it should not have access to data generated by any previous or subsequent surfing in other tabs (e.g. cookies, authenticated sessions). Same goes for clicking a link to a different domain, or being redirected by non-click means (meta-refresh, etc.).
Quick example: In a moment of weakness sometime ago you signed up for a Gmail account. Today you open up your browser in privacy mode (fresh start; per-session cookies, whee!), and go surf some raunchy porn sites (ads served by AdSense; stores a session ID cookie pointing to the adserver's record of URL each ad appeared on). Later in the day (forgetting about the porn), you log in to Gmail. Whoops! Adserver's randomly-assigned SID (originator: google.com) is now readable by scripts in the Gmail window (originator: google.com), a strongly authenticated session - your midget horse porn addiction can now be linked to your email address. (But no deep-introspection ad relevance hivemind would actually store that data, right?)
Disclaimer: I'm an electronics engineer at a company that develops (among other things) piezo energy harvesting devices, though not at nanoscale. Without naming the company I can say that it is near the top of the pack, and from the typical devices I work with, a typical 10mil thick, playing-card size piezo wafer driven close to its breaking point, one can expect power levels on the order of 10s of milliwatts, being generous. Assuming 10mW, P=I*V -> 2.7mA @ 3.7V, the voltage of a typical cell phone battery. Meanwhile, my cellphone lasts for optimistically 5 days on a charge if I am close to the tower and don't make any calls on it. The rated battery capacity is 1000mAh. Dividing 1000mAh by 120 hours estimates an average draw of 8.33mA from the phone while idling under ideal conditions. In other words, this energy harvester does not come close to powering even an idling a cell phone while sitting atop a continuously operating jackhammer. A "100%" increase in power (ahem, 20mW, for the above-mentioned dimensions) will not power a cell phone idling (let alone during active conversation) from a jackhammer, let alone the miniscule energy available from the human voice.
In other words, if you were smelling a BS-powered device, you were right:-)
Slashdot Mirror
If you're using a TiVo, as a TiVo, without paying TiVo, you're 'stealing'.
No, you're not. If you paid $ for a piece of hardware, that's your hardware. Perhaps you mean attempting to access TiVo's schedule/listing service with an unofficial client, or otherwise outside the terms of its contract. Alternate, platform-neutral and OSS-friendly listings services do exist, try http://www.schedulesdirect.org/ .
He found that if he created certificates for his own Internet domain that included null characters -- often represented with a \0 -- some programs would misinterpret the certificates.
That's because some programs stop reading text when they see a null character.
This is the same exploit used in an older Nintendo Wii jailbreak - people just keep on using strcmp and its cousins to compare hashes.
'They' aren't trampling your rights to mod the hardware you own. They're trampling this guys (non-existent) right to mod consoles for profit.
First they came for the Communists...
With the ADD world we live in, the investment needed to see results in a 3D graphics world is going to be a hard sell.
Couldn't agree more. Much as the Real Programmer in all of us wants everyone to start with a course in computer architecture followed by data structures, something more immediate and gratifying has a much better chance of holding a first-time programmer's interest. Hello World in 3D with laser effects. Buffer overruns and lambda functions can come later.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Processing yet. It's specifically written as a "beginner's language" as well as a rapid-prototyping language (immediate gratification) for everyone else. Under the hood it's Java, with most of the annoying crap (public static void...) hidden away from non-advanced users, and library functions to handle most of the common gratifications (drawing attractive 2d/3d graphics, openGL, reading/writing to Web pages / sockets, grabbing data from Webcams, serial port, etc.)
What I like is that it comes with an exhaustive set of examples, those who learn best from example will pick things up quickly. Plus, once the kids have a program they are proud of, they can export it as a Java applet and blog it, it'll run for their friends right in their browser windows.
It seems that for the past few years, more and more "average" sites (blogs, web forums, straight HTML pages) have SSL turned on for no particular reason. They're not banking sites, and some do not require/use any kind of authentication whatsoever. Most likely they have it on simply because they read somewhere "it's more secure", or because it's a 1-line edit in httpd.conf so why not, or to proactively opt out of all current and future mid-pipe page-rewriting shenanigans (BT/Phorm and alikes), not realizing how many clicks of busywork and Dire Warning desensitization this is causing for Firefox users everytime they want to read some guy's anonymous blog post.
Thus, I have no doubt people have become used to clicking away all these warnings, even to the point of getting themselves into trouble when a legitimate one appears on a site where they might actually enter confidential information.
Maybe they need to simply start treating self-signed sites as indistinguishable from plain HTTP (no Dire Warnings, no padlock symbols, broken or not, etc.), or save the Dire Warning dance until the first time the user attempts to submit data (e.g. clicks to type in a textbox). If they're not submitting *any* data, they're not submitting their financial data...
He does mention it's an audio program, not a paint program :-) If it 'just' edited spectrograph images it would be pretty useless (you can do that in Photoshop easily enough, or just create your own by feeding data to any MATLAB-esque graphing software). If the OP is trying to make money on it, I'd guess the software has to make itself useful by tying its output back to audio somehow.
The spectrograph is really just a visual representation of the Fourier transform of an audio sample - this process is ideally lossless, so if correctly applied, the data can be transformed between the time and frequency domains arbitrarily without degrading it. So I'm hoping this is the idea behind the software, and not a simple Paint program :p
Why would anyone want to edit audio? Sound editors' only purpose is to construct fake interviews from pre-recorded speeches, not for noise removal, creating virtual instruments/samples or any kind of legitimate artistic purpose.
Maybe it's for the same people who use ordinary time-domain sound editors (Audacity, etc.) but find it more intuitive to work in the frequency domain. Want to boost treble in specific spots? Select the lighten brush and paint in the top of the spectrogram. Like Photoshop for sound.
Or, maybe for customers who want to do something like NIN did in Year Zero, create noise samples that literally show up as an image in common spectrographs (often displayed by visualization plugins for common audio player software).
XML is available. See http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/ I while back I threw together a quick n dirty script that queries the NDFD every few hours and drives an LED weatherball in front of my house. Keeps me from having to remember to check a weather report every night :-)
If you back up to the main page, there are even links to view the forecast models themselves.
Sadly, the "DMCA-enabled battery" asshattery is not a new idea - well-known chipmakers such as Dallas-Maxim have been pushing cryptographic battery-lockout and ID chips directly to electronic engineering departments for years now. I've been personally seeing these ads in EE trade rags since at least '06. And yes, they trot out the claim that it will "improve safety" by locking out "inferior knockoff" batteries (or more to the point, shield you from liability), and that it's totally not a vendor lock-in thing at all. Sadly, part of me is actually surprised that it took this long for a mainstream manufacturer to take the bait. Anyway, we know how it will end (Sega v. Accolade, Lexmark vs. SCC, Magnuson-Moss Act, as other posters have pointed out), but you already know who foots the bill for the de rigeur years of lawyering it will take to reach that zero-sum result.
No, magnets around CRTs (even little ones) are bad because they will semi-permanently magnetize any ferrous bits inside the CRT (or surroundings), slightly deflecting the output of the electron guns. (Or in case of big magnets, deform/rip the shadow mask off.) The amount of magnetization does not have to be much - on a color CRT, you only have to collectively kick a pile of these electrons over about one phosphor dot's worth (some microns) to completely screw up the colors.
"Network-based technologies for copying and replaying television programming raise potentially significant questions, but this case does not provide a suitable occasion for this Court to address them. The Second Circuit is the first appellate court to consider the copyright implications of network-based analogues to VCRs and settop DVRs, and its decision does not conflict with any decision of this Court or another court of appeals. The partiesâ(TM) stipulations, moreover, have removed two critical issuesâ"contributory infringement and fair useâ" from this case. That artificial truncation of the possible grounds for decision would make this case an unsuitable vehicle for clarifying the proper application of copyright principles to technologies like the one at issue here."
It sounds as though they are expecting this case to essentially repeat for an arbitrary future combination IP holder and cable company, without the peculiar waivers of contributory infringement claims and fair-use counterclaims, and are simply waiting for that no-holds-barred case to be settled by a lower court. The extreme quibbling over (to quote the brief) âoewhoâ would âoemakeâ the copies that would be stored does not inspire my confidence, as all this decides is whether the alleged infringement should be considered as direct or contributory. The cynic in me says that a pro-RIAA author would rather the latter be the ultimate test case since the bar for arguing secondary/contributory infringement is much lower. (You stored arbitrary data which included the pointer to a pointer to data that a 3rd-party chose to infringe? You're a contributory infringer!)
Hey now, don't give porn sites and the money-grubbing companies that leech on them any ideas. Remember "Adult Check"? Pretty soon there will be a $19.95 a month "Human Check" service that verifies you're a human by your ability to pay your credit card bill each month (and maybe has an agent call/email you every few months with a brief quiz, kinda like they do in MMORPGs if they suspect a player is a bot).
The one time recently I've had Flash memory fail (an SD card in this case, FAT formatted) due to natural causes, i.e. other than ESD or hardware-development abuse, it grew a at least one defect which acted just as a HDD 'bad sector' would - with a catch: The communication between an SD card and the PC is essentially SCSI, and the card may (and should!) return an error flag in the SCSI packet if a read/write failed. My PC's Flash reader interprets such an error as a sign that it should crash outright. Maybe it is trying to re-read the sector infinitely many times until success, or maybe just throws in the towel altogether, but the upshot is that the card/reader goes catatonic on the first read error and must be recovered by plugcycling it. So 'chkdsk' or other tools which would mark off bad sectors at the filesystem level will not recover it as they perform a read-read or read-write-compare test and inadvertently crash the reader just before they could have fixed it.
Flash can handle a large, but limited number of erases, so bulk Flash media (SD, CF, etc.) use a wear-leveling system to ensure some physical sectors don't get written to much more frequently than others. A table of the logical sector numbers (as the OS sees them) points each number to a "randomly"-selected physical address, which is re-selected to another free sector on every write.
There are many other ways Flash can fail (e.g. page/column driver failures taking out large swaths, possibly GBytes of media at a time), but for single-sector failures, if you are able to write to the bad sector (without reading first, if your reader hangs up on reading one), the fault will appear to 'go away' since a fresh new physical sector was selected. But beware, the bad sector is still in the pool, so it WILL come back to bite you sometime in the future. If the bad sector can be marked off at the filesystem level, in theory nobody will ever attempt to write to it (thus changing the wear-leveled physical sector the logical 'disk' sector number points to), and it will remain safely excluded.
Some types of Flash media will attempt to mark sectors 'bad' at the device level and exclude them from the physical sector pool, but I would not rely on this.
So... ICANN't say CUNT in ICANN, a-duh.
Read closer. First line of the article:
As an Internet Evolution contributor, I wrote last year about exploring port zoning as a way to protect kids online.
I "kid" you not.
In a coffeeshop or anyplace else with public Wifi, it also helps if the sticker is not actually true (no unpatched Windows Millenium boxes...)
In testing, batteries incorporating the electrodes discharged in just 10 seconds.
Bah, my laptop battery does that already.
As the law was probably meant to be enforced (bought and paid for by Hollywood, not gadget makers), yes. Unfortunately, it's quite often (mis)applied to cover encrypted or access-controlled firmware, claiming that the unrestricted *use* of the gadget (i.e. executing the firmware) meets the definition of "access" under the DMCA, regardless of whether said firmware or anything it protects is ever actually copied, viewed or otherwise reduced to human-perceivable form. See Every Game Console Maufacturer vs. Every Homebrew Device Ever Made. :-(
There once was a time when the basic anti-death-and-injury bootstrapping (water and electricity don't mix, leaves of three let it be, don't pick up rattlesnakes, look both ways...) was passed down by oral tradition, in particular from parents to children. If some family lines have reached the point where these vital nuggets are no longer being propagated, maybe it is just time to take the warning labels off everything and see what happens.
I kid thee not, on the last condensed milk I bought: ALLERGY WARNING: CONTAINS MILK
Gasp, they'd have to go back to actually sending the notices by mail like any other legal threat. (Certified Mail for added emphasis...)
I am guessing that the update is DRM updates... something like the ability for the player to identify copied disks, or maybe blacklisted keys or something.
Precisely; the manufacturer does not generate revenue by paying $$$ to push out unsolicited features on a product that is already bought and paid for. The 'update' probably has more to do with Certificate Revocation Lists, a requirement of every HDCP-capable technology including Blu-Ray players. Quoth Wikipedia, "If a particular set of keys is compromised, the keys' corresponding KSV is put into a revocation list, which is written on newly-produced discs, examples of such discs include DVD and Blu-ray."
"Dutch marketing and communications company Spranq has come up with
Their name ends with a 'q', that should have been everyone's first clue.
I didn't see it in the article, but I would really like to know who makes a piezo generator that produces the kilowatts of power they are claiming. With the commercially-available piezo energy harvesters I develop for, a playing-card sized wafer ($50) generates not much more than 10mW under ideal conditions (continuous sinusoidal vibration from a lab shaker). Wouldn't I like to get me a few of theirs! (Goodbye epaper, hello giant LED matrix...)
These recent privacy modes (Chrome's Incognito, FF Private Browsing) seem to miss the point. What's the great importance of keeping my browsing history off my local disk (I already know I surfed porn), when the evilclick.net advert in Window #2 can still read a cookie set by the evilclick.net advert in Window #1?
There is a more detailed description elsewhere, but here is a brief description of the feature I really want to see in a good browser stealth mode: Each clickstream is its own session. For example, I create a new window/tab from scratch - it may as well be a brand new universe. In a proper 'privacy mode', it should not have access to data generated by any previous or subsequent surfing in other tabs (e.g. cookies, authenticated sessions). Same goes for clicking a link to a different domain, or being redirected by non-click means (meta-refresh, etc.).
Quick example: In a moment of weakness sometime ago you signed up for a Gmail account. Today you open up your browser in privacy mode (fresh start; per-session cookies, whee!), and go surf some raunchy porn sites (ads served by AdSense; stores a session ID cookie pointing to the adserver's record of URL each ad appeared on). Later in the day (forgetting about the porn), you log in to Gmail. Whoops! Adserver's randomly-assigned SID (originator: google.com) is now readable by scripts in the Gmail window (originator: google.com), a strongly authenticated session - your midget horse porn addiction can now be linked to your email address. (But no deep-introspection ad relevance hivemind would actually store that data, right?)
Disclaimer: I'm an electronics engineer at a company that develops (among other things) piezo energy harvesting devices, though not at nanoscale. Without naming the company I can say that it is near the top of the pack, and from the typical devices I work with, a typical 10mil thick, playing-card size piezo wafer driven close to its breaking point, one can expect power levels on the order of 10s of milliwatts, being generous. Assuming 10mW, P=I*V -> 2.7mA @ 3.7V, the voltage of a typical cell phone battery. Meanwhile, my cellphone lasts for optimistically 5 days on a charge if I am close to the tower and don't make any calls on it. The rated battery capacity is 1000mAh. Dividing 1000mAh by 120 hours estimates an average draw of 8.33mA from the phone while idling under ideal conditions. In other words, this energy harvester does not come close to powering even an idling a cell phone while sitting atop a continuously operating jackhammer. A "100%" increase in power (ahem, 20mW, for the above-mentioned dimensions) will not power a cell phone idling (let alone during active conversation) from a jackhammer, let alone the miniscule energy available from the human voice.
In other words, if you were smelling a BS-powered device, you were right :-)