I'd argue that there were indeed "sniper" rifles of a sort prior to the 19th century - crude scopes and rifled barrels for starters. I'm not so sure that a hunting rifle complete with scope is going to be so terribly different than a sniper rifle except to the degree of accuracy at VERY long distances.
Just a nit, I think it's pretty awesome someone read through the thing as closely as you did BTW and found tidbits to share...
Actually not 100% true. Watching the news the other day I actually read about a guy in a town who was ticketed fro not wearing his shirt. Seriously! I want to say it was up in the NorthEast like in Maine but I could be wrong. Small town for sure though, pretty sad.
I'm willing to bet that if you examine this phenomenon for most any big issue you will find much the same behavior. Oil, automotive, energy, media, name any BIG well funded topic and I'm betting you will see this same sort of activity occuring. In fact I think articles pointing this out for the RIAA\MPIAA have been posted in the past.
Bravo that there's a big spotlight on this but I'll be WAY more excited when this hits mainstream press. Unfortunately the mainstream press is as much a PART of the problem as they are a potential way of informing the public - especially now that ownership rules have been relaxed
Ditto! Although mine is slightly overclocked. I do see a 100kbps drop vs going straight to my upstream primary router but it does handle Torrents and VOIP no problem. I think having enough bandwidth is part of it, another LARGE part is throttling my Torrents - I use uTorrent. I use way less than half of my available bandwidth for torrent uploads - patience is a virtue.
Oh indeed that would have been fun! However on a switched network it might have been a bit difficult without the site owner's assistance. tipping over the switch to a hub mode could possibly have been done but that sort of garbage spewed onto an already heavily worked network would have been cause for the Goons to come hunting us with a big stick. We generally enjoy span port access to the switches these days which is nice but if we cause issues we'll be kicked off as fast or faster than the rest. Really we just look for the low hanging fruit and try not to screw up the network while collecting data. Even just going after clear text and easily decrypted passwords we get plenty of them every single year. We've even gotten hold of credit card transactions via vendors and POP creds for some of the Goons! Stuff happens but the SSL thing was pretty damned amusing and happened to be applicable here:-)
In English... They were apparently presented with a cert (we were when we tried the site) but they apparently turned it down. Why apparently? Because we saw their password exchange in CLEAR TEXT. We posted it to the wall shortly thereafter. So yes it seems there was an HTTP version of the site waiting for them when they turned down SSL it seems.
We saw others access the site - their exchanges were encrypted SSL and not captured.
Well familiar with MITM attacks thanks - been pointed out already as well. Denying the SSL cert meant they were vulnerable to everyone with NO protection, accepting one would have been the lesser of the two evils even ASSuming I had a MITM setup - which on the DEFCON network is actually pretty likely:)
Can't tell you exactly how they did it, only that we saw a request in cleartext and that when we attempted to goto the same URL to see WTF was going on we got hit with the 3rd party SSL cert. I believe we canceled that and still got the page but I may be mistaken, I know we got their data cleartext though:)
Excellent point! I hadn't thought about it from that standpoint but you're correct that they had no REAL way to know it wasn't a MITM offering the cert. However by turning down the cert *everyone* on the network got to see what they were doing! Verifying with the operator would indeed have been smartest!
While at DEFCON working the Wall of Sheep one year we discovered that someone had setup a WEB site on the network to bet on the outcomes of the hacking contest - they used a self signed SSL cert. Now some people, being paranoid on a VERY hostile network, turned down this certificate and promptly created\used the WEB site sans SSL - exposing their creds clear text. We promptly snarfed these and posted them on The Wall. 0wned!
All they had to do was accept the cert and they would have been protected. But I guess since seeing that pop-up was out of the ordinary and being on a network that was so nasty they thought they would play it safe and say NO, how stupid....
AC won out over DC because it could be transmitted over long distances with less loss. Using DC meant there had to be power generation stations all over the place. Not so unlike what we'll have if everyone puts up solar panels actually. DC makes some sense with local generation.
It's a sharp light with a limited spectrum. The bulbs I have are "white" but they have a blue tinge like many white LED. It's also a very directional light and not terribly diffused. Just have to be careful where you use it is all...
Hrm, that's a damned neat idea but every single time he wants light he burns 400W. What if he only wants one room lit - that would take what maybe a couple of 75W bulbs? I guess if it's like an office or something that it would make sense but for a home I can see where it might not be perfect - especially if Halide has any warmup time. Still, a neat idea!
Well this won't help since you are in Japan but the best ones I've gotten have been from Costco. (lol) The worst from Walmart and they are pushing these HARD. Some hope I've seen on the horizon is a new bulb that has an incandescent bulb in the middle for fast light off and then it goes out as the CF warms up. What you'll do when that inner incandescent fails I dunno'
Light pipes are cool in that unlike skylights you can have the roof some distance away from the diffuser. My roof is a good 8 feet away from my ceilings but the light quality is excellent. You can also route them around a little bit but performance will go down. Some of them use flexible pipes too with aluminized foil but these do NOT transmit nearly the same amount of lumens - but perhaps good for tight spaces. I worried about heat loss through it in Winter but so far it seems fine, both ends are pretty well sealed and I have spray foam insulation sealing it to my ceiling so no drafts that way either. Certainly something worth considering if you ever have a chance to use them!
Good luck finding inspectors that know anything about DC wiring. And yeah, apparently DC wiring has it's own set of tricks that need to be followed that are separate from AC wiring - circuit breakers for instance act differently on DC than AC. Heck in my area two inspectors couldn't even agree on the right way to do something when asked by my contractor! We waited till post inspection to do the work as a result these two inspectors literally had an argument on the best way to solve the problem right in front of my contractor - it was pathetic.
Sorry but axial generators are NOT an ideal solution at all - very inefficient. You will also find that your neighbors may not like you putting up a tower that sits so high above the surrounding trees - as it must in order to get clean air and be free of debris. On top of that the cost of the crane required to loft many of these is expensive. Add to that the fact that not *many* areas get enough wind to be useful and you'll find that wind isn't too great - especially for just a shed!
P.S. Wind isn't 24X7 in many places either. I have a wind gauge on my roof on top of a pole and can go for hours with ZERO wind, I go DAYS without useful winds for power generation too.
Oh yeah! Great source for strong magnets too! Those guys do some really cool stuff but sadly I'm not located where I can do any of it myself. Their waterwheels in particular interest me since that's pretty steady power. Look into the Indian and other knockoff slow speed diesels for some really cool reading. They can be run on bio too but sadly it looks like importing them is no longer so easy due to recent emission constraints:-( One of those in the garage would ROCK for power outages!
Properly disposed of and recycled I'd argue that lead cells aren't nearly so bad. Throwing them in the trash on the other hand would NOT be a good idea....
Not nearly enough amperage to power anything with these - I know because I have a couple. You might get AN LED or two going but not nearly enough to be happy. You could use these to recharge a couple of 12 volt batteries that would provide you with more amps for more LEDs but I do not think those panels have much in the way of protection from overcharging nor would there be protection from drawing the batteries down too far which will damage them. The panels are really just designed to help keep a charge while the car is being transported or parked for long periods of time - things like the ECU and clock draw some power and these offset that. You can find them from VWs on eBay pretty easily and they aren't expensive - but not ideal either...
Amen! This magazine can be found at many good bookstores and subscriptions aren't too bad either. This is an invaluable source of information on ways to save money and power IMO. I do wish they would bring back their guerrilla power features though:-)
Actually this is a pretty big problem! One of the things I have consistently read in magazines like Home Power is that 12volt devices can be a problem with regard to sockets and plugs. Lighter sockets do not carry current very well and are flimsy for one thing. Using standard 120 sockets is simply asking for it because as soon as you turn your back a guest or baby sitter is going to make a mistake. Lots of things have been tried but so far I've seen nothing really good.
I DID just read the other day about some new power standard being adopted by some companies to help get rid of wall warts. You'd have some sort of power strip that could power multiple devices using a standard power and it would completely shut the device down when not being used. I didn't pay much attention to that but perhaps that is a ray of hope? Whatever plugs they use might be useful for this. Best part of it is that hopefully all of those devices will use the SAME power instead of one being 9volts, another 13, yet another 12, and so on. It's crazy to have to have an entire BOX of chargers and wall warts (seriously)...
While you're at it - light tubes!
on
DIY Solar Resources?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I have three light tubes aka light pipes in my home. They consist of an acrylic dome on the roof, a mirrored rigid pipe, and a diffuser at the end facing the inside. I often do not need to turn on lights with these suckers - very nice! Some tips - do NOT put them anywhere near a ceiling fan unless you want a disco and do NOT put them in your bedroom lest a full moon have you howling all night - yes moonlight is strong enough to light the room!
Other than that yeah go compact fluorescent or MAYBE LED. I have both and find that the LED is pretty directional and very stark white with a tinge of blue. The CF stuff lasts a good while but be careful not to get the crappy ones that take forever to light up:-( I have one of these and it pisses me off but it fits the fixture, the LED lights I bought wouldn't fit in the "can" fixture.
BTW notice that many holiday lights and tube lights are LED. These actually work pretty good for lighting some areas!
The point is right now my video card isn't doing the work - my 3Ghz C2D is instead. I'd REALLY rather offload that work to the GPU as would MANY others who wish to build cheap HTPC. IF ATI actually supported hardware accel of video on Linux then I might switch but if it's much like the closed NVIDIA drivers and simply supports a limited feature set then I might as well stick to NVIDIA and brute it with the CPUs cores. Right now the NVIDIA drivers are stable and working, ATI on the other hand has been no end of issues for the users and apparently some added work for the developers to support. Where's the beef?
Since they are claiming Linux "parity" with NVIDIA's LINUX feature set (gee....) then IMO they aren't supporting acceleration like they *DO* on Windows already - in which case this announcement is so much a hand job bullshit thing. Give me feature parity with WINDOWS drivers - that means hardware acceleration of HD video codecs like H.264 and MPEG - and I'll be tempted to switch from my already working card and risk their drivers.
Do you get HD acceleration offloading computation from the CPU? If so is it supported by the likes of ffmpeg etc.?
Lots of folks using the XBMC Linux port have had NOTHING but problems with ATI, meanwhile NVIDIA is damn near PnP using ENVY to load their drivers. Frankly I do not care wo's card I buy, I want it to properly support my HTPC setup and right now that is NVIDIA even though it's not got hardware acceleration working - I've got the CPU to decode it instead.
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I'd argue that there were indeed "sniper" rifles of a sort prior to the 19th century - crude scopes and rifled barrels for starters. I'm not so sure that a hunting rifle complete with scope is going to be so terribly different than a sniper rifle except to the degree of accuracy at VERY long distances.
Just a nit, I think it's pretty awesome someone read through the thing as closely as you did BTW and found tidbits to share...
Actually not 100% true. Watching the news the other day I actually read about a guy in a town who was ticketed fro not wearing his shirt. Seriously! I want to say it was up in the NorthEast like in Maine but I could be wrong. Small town for sure though, pretty sad.
I'm willing to bet that if you examine this phenomenon for most any big issue you will find much the same behavior. Oil, automotive, energy, media, name any BIG well funded topic and I'm betting you will see this same sort of activity occuring. In fact I think articles pointing this out for the RIAA\MPIAA have been posted in the past.
Bravo that there's a big spotlight on this but I'll be WAY more excited when this hits mainstream press. Unfortunately the mainstream press is as much a PART of the problem as they are a potential way of informing the public - especially now that ownership rules have been relaxed
Ditto! Although mine is slightly overclocked. I do see a 100kbps drop vs going straight to my upstream primary router but it does handle Torrents and VOIP no problem. I think having enough bandwidth is part of it, another LARGE part is throttling my Torrents - I use uTorrent. I use way less than half of my available bandwidth for torrent uploads - patience is a virtue.
Oh indeed that would have been fun! However on a switched network it might have been a bit difficult without the site owner's assistance. tipping over the switch to a hub mode could possibly have been done but that sort of garbage spewed onto an already heavily worked network would have been cause for the Goons to come hunting us with a big stick. We generally enjoy span port access to the switches these days which is nice but if we cause issues we'll be kicked off as fast or faster than the rest. Really we just look for the low hanging fruit and try not to screw up the network while collecting data. Even just going after clear text and easily decrypted passwords we get plenty of them every single year. We've even gotten hold of credit card transactions via vendors and POP creds for some of the Goons! Stuff happens but the SSL thing was pretty damned amusing and happened to be applicable here :-)
In English... They were apparently presented with a cert (we were when we tried the site) but they apparently turned it down. Why apparently? Because we saw their password exchange in CLEAR TEXT. We posted it to the wall shortly thereafter. So yes it seems there was an HTTP version of the site waiting for them when they turned down SSL it seems.
We saw others access the site - their exchanges were encrypted SSL and not captured.
Well familiar with MITM attacks thanks - been pointed out already as well. Denying the SSL cert meant they were vulnerable to everyone with NO protection, accepting one would have been the lesser of the two evils even ASSuming I had a MITM setup - which on the DEFCON network is actually pretty likely :)
Can't tell you exactly how they did it, only that we saw a request in cleartext and that when we attempted to goto the same URL to see WTF was going on we got hit with the 3rd party SSL cert. I believe we canceled that and still got the page but I may be mistaken, I know we got their data cleartext though :)
Excellent point! I hadn't thought about it from that standpoint but you're correct that they had no REAL way to know it wasn't a MITM offering the cert. However by turning down the cert *everyone* on the network got to see what they were doing! Verifying with the operator would indeed have been smartest!
While at DEFCON working the Wall of Sheep one year we discovered that someone had setup a WEB site on the network to bet on the outcomes of the hacking contest - they used a self signed SSL cert. Now some people, being paranoid on a VERY hostile network, turned down this certificate and promptly created\used the WEB site sans SSL - exposing their creds clear text. We promptly snarfed these and posted them on The Wall. 0wned!
All they had to do was accept the cert and they would have been protected. But I guess since seeing that pop-up was out of the ordinary and being on a network that was so nasty they thought they would play it safe and say NO, how stupid....
AC won out over DC because it could be transmitted over long distances with less loss. Using DC meant there had to be power generation stations all over the place. Not so unlike what we'll have if everyone puts up solar panels actually. DC makes some sense with local generation.
It's a sharp light with a limited spectrum. The bulbs I have are "white" but they have a blue tinge like many white LED. It's also a very directional light and not terribly diffused. Just have to be careful where you use it is all...
Hrm, that's a damned neat idea but every single time he wants light he burns 400W. What if he only wants one room lit - that would take what maybe a couple of 75W bulbs? I guess if it's like an office or something that it would make sense but for a home I can see where it might not be perfect - especially if Halide has any warmup time. Still, a neat idea!
Well this won't help since you are in Japan but the best ones I've gotten have been from Costco. (lol) The worst from Walmart and they are pushing these HARD. Some hope I've seen on the horizon is a new bulb that has an incandescent bulb in the middle for fast light off and then it goes out as the CF warms up. What you'll do when that inner incandescent fails I dunno'
Light pipes are cool in that unlike skylights you can have the roof some distance away from the diffuser. My roof is a good 8 feet away from my ceilings but the light quality is excellent. You can also route them around a little bit but performance will go down. Some of them use flexible pipes too with aluminized foil but these do NOT transmit nearly the same amount of lumens - but perhaps good for tight spaces. I worried about heat loss through it in Winter but so far it seems fine, both ends are pretty well sealed and I have spray foam insulation sealing it to my ceiling so no drafts that way either. Certainly something worth considering if you ever have a chance to use them!
Good luck finding inspectors that know anything about DC wiring. And yeah, apparently DC wiring has it's own set of tricks that need to be followed that are separate from AC wiring - circuit breakers for instance act differently on DC than AC. Heck in my area two inspectors couldn't even agree on the right way to do something when asked by my contractor! We waited till post inspection to do the work as a result these two inspectors literally had an argument on the best way to solve the problem right in front of my contractor - it was pathetic.
Sorry but axial generators are NOT an ideal solution at all - very inefficient. You will also find that your neighbors may not like you putting up a tower that sits so high above the surrounding trees - as it must in order to get clean air and be free of debris. On top of that the cost of the crane required to loft many of these is expensive. Add to that the fact that not *many* areas get enough wind to be useful and you'll find that wind isn't too great - especially for just a shed!
This isn't the best chart but perhaps this will help http://www.awea.org/faq/usresource.html
P.S. Wind isn't 24X7 in many places either. I have a wind gauge on my roof on top of a pole and can go for hours with ZERO wind, I go DAYS without useful winds for power generation too.
Oh yeah! Great source for strong magnets too! Those guys do some really cool stuff but sadly I'm not located where I can do any of it myself. Their waterwheels in particular interest me since that's pretty steady power. Look into the Indian and other knockoff slow speed diesels for some really cool reading. They can be run on bio too but sadly it looks like importing them is no longer so easy due to recent emission constraints :-( One of those in the garage would ROCK for power outages!
Properly disposed of and recycled I'd argue that lead cells aren't nearly so bad. Throwing them in the trash on the other hand would NOT be a good idea....
Not nearly enough amperage to power anything with these - I know because I have a couple. You might get AN LED or two going but not nearly enough to be happy. You could use these to recharge a couple of 12 volt batteries that would provide you with more amps for more LEDs but I do not think those panels have much in the way of protection from overcharging nor would there be protection from drawing the batteries down too far which will damage them. The panels are really just designed to help keep a charge while the car is being transported or parked for long periods of time - things like the ECU and clock draw some power and these offset that. You can find them from VWs on eBay pretty easily and they aren't expensive - but not ideal either...
Amen! This magazine can be found at many good bookstores and subscriptions aren't too bad either. This is an invaluable source of information on ways to save money and power IMO. I do wish they would bring back their guerrilla power features though :-)
With enough amperage even 12volt wiring can start a fire. Don't think so? Go short the terminals on your car battery sometime...
Actually this is a pretty big problem! One of the things I have consistently read in magazines like Home Power is that 12volt devices can be a problem with regard to sockets and plugs. Lighter sockets do not carry current very well and are flimsy for one thing. Using standard 120 sockets is simply asking for it because as soon as you turn your back a guest or baby sitter is going to make a mistake. Lots of things have been tried but so far I've seen nothing really good.
I DID just read the other day about some new power standard being adopted by some companies to help get rid of wall warts. You'd have some sort of power strip that could power multiple devices using a standard power and it would completely shut the device down when not being used. I didn't pay much attention to that but perhaps that is a ray of hope? Whatever plugs they use might be useful for this. Best part of it is that hopefully all of those devices will use the SAME power instead of one being 9volts, another 13, yet another 12, and so on. It's crazy to have to have an entire BOX of chargers and wall warts (seriously)...
I have three light tubes aka light pipes in my home. They consist of an acrylic dome on the roof, a mirrored rigid pipe, and a diffuser at the end facing the inside. I often do not need to turn on lights with these suckers - very nice! Some tips - do NOT put them anywhere near a ceiling fan unless you want a disco and do NOT put them in your bedroom lest a full moon have you howling all night - yes moonlight is strong enough to light the room!
Other than that yeah go compact fluorescent or MAYBE LED. I have both and find that the LED is pretty directional and very stark white with a tinge of blue. The CF stuff lasts a good while but be careful not to get the crappy ones that take forever to light up :-( I have one of these and it pisses me off but it fits the fixture, the LED lights I bought wouldn't fit in the "can" fixture.
BTW notice that many holiday lights and tube lights are LED. These actually work pretty good for lighting some areas!
The point is right now my video card isn't doing the work - my 3Ghz C2D is instead. I'd REALLY rather offload that work to the GPU as would MANY others who wish to build cheap HTPC. IF ATI actually supported hardware accel of video on Linux then I might switch but if it's much like the closed NVIDIA drivers and simply supports a limited feature set then I might as well stick to NVIDIA and brute it with the CPUs cores. Right now the NVIDIA drivers are stable and working, ATI on the other hand has been no end of issues for the users and apparently some added work for the developers to support. Where's the beef?
Since they are claiming Linux "parity" with NVIDIA's LINUX feature set (gee....) then IMO they aren't supporting acceleration like they *DO* on Windows already - in which case this announcement is so much a hand job bullshit thing. Give me feature parity with WINDOWS drivers - that means hardware acceleration of HD video codecs like H.264 and MPEG - and I'll be tempted to switch from my already working card and risk their drivers.
Do you get HD acceleration offloading computation from the CPU? If so is it supported by the likes of ffmpeg etc.?
Lots of folks using the XBMC Linux port have had NOTHING but problems with ATI, meanwhile NVIDIA is damn near PnP using ENVY to load their drivers. Frankly I do not care wo's card I buy, I want it to properly support my HTPC setup and right now that is NVIDIA even though it's not got hardware acceleration working - I've got the CPU to decode it instead.