You can use a radioshack scanner and plug it into a computer running pd with a DTMF decoder patch and get anyone's voicemail password who has a cordless phone. For some cordless phones, you can even use an old TV set that goes up to channel 83!
You can also get long distance calling cards this way too, I'm paranoid and I now dial these on the cord phone, then pick up the cordless. Are user's responsible for using encrypted phones?
AT&T is clearly at fault for accepting the charges. That is the part of the system that is the weak link, not the voicemail passwords. Someone could have hung an answering machine on their phone line. It's a ridiculous hole.
As for SBC, Their system asks you for your password BEFORE your mailbox number, and if it's right for the phone you're using, it doesn't ask for the mailbox. So, if you have the same password as the person whose phone you're using, you hear THEIR messages, and there is no way to listen to your own! It's rare, but it happens. Telcos are lame.
=Rich
BTW, pd is the greatest, coolest, amazingest piece of linux software there is and hardly anyone seems to use it. You can make a DTMF decoder in no time, or generate any tones you need, and so much more! See the examples.....
Now that the phone companies are excercising their freedom of speech, and selling everyone's call data, the buyers of the data can do this in the real world, with people's real friends, and it's likely to be easier than doing it with buddy lists.
You really have to dig on the PCI-SIG site to find the three words, Peripheral Component Interconnect. It's conspicuously absent from the front page. Those are probably too generic to defend, if it stood for something really wierd and logically unrelated like Papaya Canola Interface then it would be more defensible.
For example, you can't trademark Wrench brand wrenches, you CAN trademark Wrench brand apples.
The three letters are easier to defend as a trademark if they're just three letters, not if they stand for something related.
(That's a tough one though, there's alot of action over three letter trademarks right now.)
Either way, three letters are pretty generic, so they probably CAN'T get you on that, strictly speaking, but they're bigger and have more money, and he who has the gold makes the rules, so therefore, they can.
Nope, it's the real thing. There are alot of heat ripples in the picture, giving it that effect. The whole unit is not that big, and smaller than alot of burningman projects, so it wouldn't really make much sense to fake the picture.
Excellent use of the Anti-Noid Stilt as an origami display stand in the last link! Bravo! I've been wondering what to do with those things. Also makes a good cantina table for your Han and Grito figures to sit at. I suppose it's no accident that someone who makes sci-fi origami eats alot of pizza.
I read about this a few weeks back. There's a new trend in american retail, which is not the least bit secret, to try to move as much of the store's labor as possible onto the customer. It will be interesting to watch this unfold, they'd make us clean the floors and stock the shelves if they could figure out a legal way to do it. For now we can just watch little Johnny lug a 400lb item 100 yards to the checkout counter, and check out our own products.
Home depot is never a pleasant experience. Now in order to shop there, you're supposed to work for them too. I will not be shopping there.
Here's a link about the 'Home Depot Bill of Rights' which doesn't include safety. It doesn't really include service either, you're just entitled to the 'expectation' of service.
http://www.seinigerlaw.com/homedepot/Customer%20 Bi ll%20of%20Rights.htm
Modern retail has been converted to warehouses, with the customers soon to be converted to workers, but without the safety requirements.
Here's a nice one on falling merchandise deaths, with Home Depot getting '185 injury complaints a week' in a certain year. http://www.fallingmerchandise.com/acrobat/l atimes8 -16-00.asp
Why pay someone to work, and spend money on their safety, when you can just get a customer to do it for free?
Yup, IDE is under a buck a gig. This is half the cost of tape, without the overhead of the expensive drive.
The problem with tapes that I've seen is that people get rid of their old systems, AND the drives, but keep their tapes. There's a whole industry in collecting ancient drives to restore data from tapes and strange disks, assuming it's even good.
I decided to switch to hard drives recently, but what do I put them in? A removable enclosure is not a solution to that same problem.
However, an old Pentium is FREE! They've got tons down at the junkyard for a few bucks, same yard that has all the old tape and syquest drives. I've been putting two 80gig drives in the old suckers and putting them in the attic! (yeah yeah fire.) Done five so far, for me and some friends. Well, four. I shoulda had the fifth one done last month.
I figure, stiction won't hit me for at least ten years because I've got some drives that old that work. Also, sticktion comes from heating the lubricant over time, and I'm not running the drive. I don't know if they still have that problem anyway. Ask me in ten or fifteen years.
Also, I've spun up some stuck drives in NeXTs just by tapping them on the side really hard when you power up.
So, I've got backup boxes that are a little large, with two drives each. All they need is power, and you can get into them with ethernet after they boot slackware. Might be tough to find an analog monitor or a serial terminal but I'm not too worried. I'm not worried about the CMOS batteries either, I tested that.
The other question is, how long does eeprom last anyway? It's not permanent, you know! This worries me most. The firmware may rot before the media!
But, $1/gig, no tape drive to break or find, or BUY for thousands, I like this solution alot!
When something better comes along I'll copy it all to that. Or somebody else will, if I'm pushing up digital daisies. But, Digital media just isn't permanent! You have to copy it at least every 10 or 20 years or it's gone....
This one had better links and stuff, like the CCRMA home page.
WWWeeee! We got./'d!
Of course I'm biased 'cuz I WORK there and Chris Chafe is an awesome guy and the project is super cool...
'skyooz me while I go watch our webserver get CRUSHED!
Seiously though, the page may be kinda dry, but if you dig you'll find some great stuff. There are links to all the top sound software for Linux and ways to optimize your system for sound and music. Check out
It's an amazing lab, doing great work and producing some amazing open source sound software, as well as testing and distributing the work of many others in the field. And there isn't a windows box in the entire place!
I love to ask other techs what their harddrive superstitions are, you always get different answers. I recently told a client not to worry if people told him his new drive brand was bad, you can find a horror story on any brand.
Everyone's got a jilted lover somewhere.
Now, my experience has been very good with fujitsu, with the exception of the ones from the junkyard, which can't really count. It's just a coin toss! If one has a 5% failure rate and another has a 1% failure rate, who cares? It will either fail or it won't. 50% chance.
My IBM IDEs have failed 3 out of 6, but actually, it was TOTAL failure on any system that is regularly cycled and total sucess on systems that are always up. Hmmm....
I've been burned by every major brand except one fujitsu that was my fault for hitting the circuit board with the shield of a USB cable by accident. Luckily had an identical drive, swapped the boards, no sweat.
All IDE hardware seems to have moved into the CONSUMER area of things, and it's all really equally crappy, (except DeskStar really sucks) I have about a dozen Seagate and IBM 9 gig SCSI drives, no problems there! Been royally burned by both their IDE's, though I don't shun Seagate, but when they started to look like Connors (they bought connor) a few years back I lost some faith.
So, my rule is, RAID-1 if it's important, even the best drives will fail. Standalones are disposable, back 'em up to RAID and when they get even a little wierd, open up the window and throw 'em out!
=mortimer
Hope the Napster movie is like Freaked!
on
Napster: The Movie
·
· Score: 1
Well that would never work.
But Freaked, though it's a dumb, fun movie, is really brilliant. It's an incarnation of the cartoon genre in live action, WITHOUT computer graphics (I'm pretty sure) That's really cool. I'm surprised more people haven't seen this movie.
Amazing. I had been told by many people that this was a British Naval Connector. I was once asked this as a trivia question, answered 'British Naval Connector' and was told I was correct!
Goes to show you how incorrect info can become official if no one checks. Kind of like the origins of the names of files and directories in Unix, like/var and/usr. No one seems to agree. It's very new technology but the truth may already have been lost.
I've been using LOTS of those four pin power connectors lately, since they're free at the junkyard.
It seems that the exact same connector used to be almost standard on TURNTABLES all the way back to the war, and maybe before. They're almost all like that in the old console units. There was separate power for the motor and the preamp, and separate grounds.
I guess when they made the first disk drives, they were looking at turntables, which is reasonable. And so the connector lives on... And on and on...
=Rich
P.S. If you ever see one of those console units, you know, the piece of furniture with a stereo in it? GRAB IT! They're old and ugly but they sound great and they make a fantastic stereo computer speaker!
Damn! I'm back to the days of my double cassette deck! I have to copy my music in real-time again!
The five minute copy was nice while it lasted.
As for the watermark stuff, yes, these will fail more readily if scratched. But, that was all part of the CD plan. In the 80's they said, "they'll never wear out!" From *PLAYING* that is. Of course they'll wear out!
Once they're on a hard drive, I have no more use for the original disk except as a backup copy. I don't think that will change.
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS! I don't trade music except in rare instances, I just don't feel like getting up and changing all those damn disks all the time! And I'm not gonna dammit!! A little analog loss is not enough to make me do it!! HA!
I'm amazed that everyone seems to view floppies so favorably.
All these good things are true, but they are incredibly unreliable. I make a boot disk on a brand new floppy, and in two weeks, WITHOUT USE, it goes flakey. THey're not reliable enough for encryption keys despite their convenience.
I don't remember them being quite so bad in the old days. Some have said there were higher manufacturing standards. Someone else suggested that it's because we use them infrequently that they are less reliable, because crud accumulates in the drive.
Either way I have been desperately trying to banish them from my home and my work, keeping only systems that boot from CD, and even getting bootable NICs for emergencies. But, so far, they are still necessary evil.
I use alot of junkyard computers. I can personally attest, that I have had AT's with high power needs that had noisy fans. I just cut the fan lines. ONe has been working 24/7 for a few months. Makes a great silent computer. I have also put a PS in a vertical duct with no fan and it self cools with convection, for a silent PC.
I have blown one up that was inside a suitcase, and another that just got too hot. I have also poured a cup of water on one. It died a quick but very boring death.
I tear apart those things all the time. They have thermal fuses, and they also have fusable resistors in addition to ordinary current fuses.
If the temperature of the switching transistors gets too high, they lock up and create a direct short. If the fuses don't blow the resistors do, or the board traces, or the transistor itself, as the last line of defense.
The transistors become direct shorts LONG before the flashpoint of anything reasonable, even paper. I believe it's about 180 or 200C.
The worst you will get is a horrible smell. You cannot get the power supply to go up in flames. It just won't do it.
Now, I HAVE seen crt monitors actually go up in flames, but they were fairly old ones.
Try it! It's fun! and after all, computers are free.
This premise of trusted computing, as seen in the TCPA link, assumes that there is some hardware inside the machine that cannot be emulated in software.
THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE!!
Just what kind of embedded hardware on the motherboard are they talking about? It takes input, runs some algorithm on it, and gives output. SOFTWARE, on a different medium.
It just comes back to a private key, which would work fine anyway. Hardware just means that the USER cannot know their private key, or have access to the software that reads it. The MANUFACTURER does know it. It has to be stored in software somewhere, in Redmond or Taiwan or Palo Alto or Armonk. It can be discovered in some obscure way, and emulated.
If the USER has control, and true ownership of what they've paid for, then they can know their key, and the manufacturer cannot. So, software would work just fine, or user programmed hardware.
The only way something like this can work and also be fair is to use software keys. A user registers a key pair, or at least their public key, and buys content and uses trusted services with it. They get a new key pair after some time interval or if their key gets stolen and then migrate their content to their new key set.
It's not anonymous either, but it's identification, so it can't be. At least the user can control when a public key is sent.
We each get a private key and do everything we can to keep it PRIVATE. There would have to be laws against stealing people's private keys to back this up, and INDIVIDUALS would be authenticated by their private keys, NOT hardware. You can't do it with hardware on an open source system, and you just can't 'trust' someone else's closed system.
No system is perfect.
So, slashdot, please tell me if I'm wrong. Is there a type of hardware which cannot be satisfactorily emulated in software, which can be used for this?
If not, it's a good thing. This means that the answer to this design contest, if the user is to have any control, is a SOFTWARE system, possibly with a nice hardware trick for storing and protecting the private key. This is very good because it means that the design winner can run on existing hardware, possibly the stuff strewn all over every american city and most others. That would be nice.
The hardware solution is just another dongle, and no more effective than any other dongle. It's not a new idea.
Well all I know is some of it went to me, because I either help people with buggy software, or help them with its alternative that would never have caught on unless the first stuff was crap.
I think crappy software generates $60 billion a year in business.
If computers worked, I would starve.
This is a total non-issue!
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It makes sense for an organization to dislike deep linking because
A. It can make their content appear to be someone else's and
B. They have no control over broken links when they change their content and this makes their site look broken and stupid.
C. Framing someone else's site is bullshit, and people who don't like it can do what it takes to stop it.
However, is it really all that hard to redirect foreign deep links to the main page? Is it? Or to send the not founds there so they don't just send most people to microsoft? Come on kids, read your docs! Learn your trade!
If you still want the search engines to deep link, it's a little more work, but it can't possibly be more of a hassel than a lawsuit you probably won't win.
As for the main page, I think it's as simple as asking for 'the right not to be refered to', which it's been shown repeatedly that you just don't have.
If only people would quit wasting time and just move on to something beneficial, like harnessing the power of stupidity, the earth would be a better place.
Slashdot Mirror
You can use a radioshack scanner and plug it into a computer running pd with a DTMF decoder patch and get anyone's voicemail password who has a cordless phone. For some cordless phones, you can even use an old TV set that goes up to channel 83!
You can also get long distance calling cards this way too, I'm paranoid and I now dial these on the cord phone, then pick up the cordless. Are user's responsible for using encrypted phones?
AT&T is clearly at fault for accepting the charges. That is the part of the system that is the weak link, not the voicemail passwords. Someone could have hung an answering machine on their phone line. It's a ridiculous hole.
As for SBC, Their system asks you for your password BEFORE your mailbox number, and if it's right for the phone you're using, it doesn't ask for the mailbox. So, if you have the same password as the person whose phone you're using, you hear THEIR messages, and there is no way to listen to your own! It's rare, but it happens. Telcos are lame.
=Rich
BTW, pd is the greatest, coolest, amazingest piece of linux software there is and hardly anyone seems to use it. You can make a DTMF decoder in no time, or generate any tones you need, and so much more! See the examples.....
Hey-
Just helped a school with the pppoe SBC problem. They had no budget, and a linux box was not practical.
The D-Link router/hub with pppoe, connection sharing, and a print server, and it was on clearance at fry's for $29.95!
Now that the phone companies are excercising their freedom of speech, and selling everyone's call data, the buyers of the data can do this in the real world, with people's real friends, and it's likely to be easier than doing it with buddy lists.
You really have to dig on the PCI-SIG site to find the three words, Peripheral Component Interconnect. It's conspicuously absent from the front page. Those are probably too generic to defend, if it stood for something really wierd and logically unrelated like Papaya Canola Interface then it would be more defensible.
For example, you can't trademark Wrench brand wrenches, you CAN trademark Wrench brand apples.
The three letters are easier to defend as a trademark if they're just three letters, not if they stand for something related.
(That's a tough one though, there's alot of action over three letter trademarks right now.)
Either way, three letters are pretty generic, so they probably CAN'T get you on that, strictly speaking, but they're bigger and have more money, and he who has the gold makes the rules, so therefore, they can.
I'm not an expert, but I do play one on TV.
Nope, it's the real thing. There are alot of heat ripples in the picture, giving it that effect. The whole unit is not that big, and smaller than alot of burningman projects, so it wouldn't really make much sense to fake the picture.
and there's still nothing on.
Excellent use of the Anti-Noid Stilt as an origami display stand in the last link! Bravo! I've been wondering what to do with those things. Also makes a good cantina table for your Han and Grito figures to sit at. I suppose it's no accident that someone who makes sci-fi origami eats alot of pizza.
the service is definitely a regional thing.
My uncle always talks about the nice knowlegeable people there, but then he's in florida and the sales guy's a retired engineer.
I'm in San Francisco, and it's another thing entirely. The cashiers are ok, but the kids on the floor just wish the customers were dead.
I read about this a few weeks back. There's a new trend in american retail, which is not the least bit secret, to try to move as much of the store's labor as possible onto the customer. It will be interesting to watch this unfold, they'd make us clean the floors and stock the shelves if they could figure out a legal way to do it. For now we can just watch little Johnny lug a 400lb item 100 yards to the checkout counter, and check out our own products.
0 Bi ll%20of%20Rights.htm
l atimes8 -16-00.asp
Home depot is never a pleasant experience. Now in order to shop there, you're supposed to work for them too. I will not be shopping there.
Here's a link about the 'Home Depot Bill of Rights' which doesn't include safety. It doesn't really include service either, you're just entitled to the 'expectation' of service.
http://www.seinigerlaw.com/homedepot/Customer%2
Modern retail has been converted to warehouses, with the customers soon to be converted to workers, but without the safety requirements.
Here's a nice one on falling merchandise deaths, with Home Depot getting '185 injury complaints a week' in a certain year.
http://www.fallingmerchandise.com/acrobat/
Why pay someone to work, and spend money on their safety, when you can just get a customer to do it for free?
Yup, IDE is under a buck a gig. This is half the cost of tape, without the overhead of the expensive drive.
The problem with tapes that I've seen is that people get rid of their old systems, AND the drives, but keep their tapes. There's a whole industry in collecting ancient drives to restore data from tapes and strange disks, assuming it's even good.
I decided to switch to hard drives recently, but what do I put them in? A removable enclosure is not a solution to that same problem.
However, an old Pentium is FREE! They've got tons down at the junkyard for a few bucks, same yard that has all the old tape and syquest drives. I've been putting two 80gig drives in the old suckers and putting them in the attic! (yeah yeah fire.) Done five so far, for me and some friends. Well, four. I shoulda had the fifth one done last month.
I figure, stiction won't hit me for at least ten years because I've got some drives that old that work. Also, sticktion comes from heating the lubricant over time, and I'm not running the drive. I don't know if they still have that problem anyway. Ask me in ten or fifteen years.
Also, I've spun up some stuck drives in NeXTs just by tapping them on the side really hard when you power up.
So, I've got backup boxes that are a little large, with two drives each. All they need is power, and you can get into them with ethernet after they boot slackware. Might be tough to find an analog monitor or a serial terminal but I'm not too worried. I'm not worried about the CMOS batteries either, I tested that.
The other question is, how long does eeprom last anyway? It's not permanent, you know! This worries me most. The firmware may rot before the media!
But, $1/gig, no tape drive to break or find, or BUY for thousands, I like this solution alot!
When something better comes along I'll copy it all to that. Or somebody else will, if I'm pushing up digital daisies. But, Digital media just isn't permanent! You have to copy it at least every 10 or 20 years or it's gone....
=Rich
This one had better links and stuff,
./'d!
a /
like the CCRMA home page.
WWWeeee! We got
Of course I'm biased 'cuz I WORK there and
Chris Chafe is an awesome guy and the project
is super cool...
'skyooz me while I go watch our webserver get
CRUSHED!
Seiously though, the page may be kinda dry, but if you dig you'll find some great stuff. There are links to all the top sound software for Linux and ways to optimize your system for sound and music. Check out
http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/guides/planetccrm
It's an amazing lab, doing great work and producing some amazing open source sound software, as well as testing and distributing the work of many others in the field. And there isn't a windows box in the entire place!
=mortimer
I love to ask other techs what their harddrive superstitions are, you always get different answers. I recently told a client not to worry if people told him his new drive brand was bad, you can find a horror story on any brand.
Everyone's got a jilted lover somewhere.
Now, my experience has been very good with fujitsu, with the exception of the ones from the junkyard, which can't really count. It's just a coin toss! If one has a 5% failure rate and another has a 1% failure rate, who cares? It will either fail or it won't. 50% chance.
My IBM IDEs have failed 3 out of 6, but actually, it was TOTAL failure on any system that is regularly cycled and total sucess on systems that are always up. Hmmm....
I've been burned by every major brand except one fujitsu that was my fault for hitting the circuit board with the shield of a USB cable by accident. Luckily had an identical drive, swapped the boards, no sweat.
All IDE hardware seems to have moved into the CONSUMER area of things, and it's all really equally crappy, (except DeskStar really sucks) I have about a dozen Seagate and IBM 9 gig SCSI drives, no problems there! Been royally burned by both their IDE's, though I don't shun Seagate, but when they started to look like Connors (they bought connor) a few years back I lost some faith.
So, my rule is, RAID-1 if it's important, even the best drives will fail. Standalones are disposable, back 'em up to RAID and when they get even a little wierd, open up the window and throw 'em out!
=mortimer
Well that would never work.
But Freaked, though it's a dumb, fun movie, is really brilliant. It's an incarnation of the cartoon genre in live action, WITHOUT computer graphics (I'm pretty sure) That's really cool. I'm surprised more people haven't seen this movie.
Definitely rent it!!
Amazing. I had been told by many people that this was a British Naval Connector. I was once asked this as a trivia question, answered 'British Naval Connector' and was told I was correct!
/var and /usr. No one seems to agree. It's very new technology but the truth may already have been lost.
Goes to show you how incorrect info can become official if no one checks. Kind of like the origins of the names of files and directories in Unix, like
=rmortyh
I've been using LOTS of those four pin power connectors lately, since they're free at the junkyard.
It seems that the exact same connector used to be almost standard on TURNTABLES all the way back to the war, and maybe before. They're almost all like that in the old console units. There was separate power for the motor and the preamp, and separate grounds.
I guess when they made the first disk drives, they were looking at turntables, which is reasonable. And so the connector lives on... And on and on...
=Rich
P.S. If you ever see one of those console units, you know, the piece of furniture with a stereo in it? GRAB IT! They're old and ugly but they sound great and they make a fantastic stereo computer speaker!
Damn! I'm back to the days of my double cassette deck! I have to copy my music in real-time again!
The five minute copy was nice while it lasted.
As for the watermark stuff, yes, these will fail more readily if scratched. But, that was all part of the CD plan. In the 80's they said, "they'll never wear out!" From *PLAYING* that is. Of course they'll wear out!
Once they're on a hard drive, I have no more use for the original disk except as a backup copy. I don't think that will change.
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS! I don't trade music except in rare instances, I just don't feel like getting up and changing all those damn disks all the time! And I'm not gonna dammit!! A little analog loss is not enough to make me do it!! HA!
SO now my tapedeck can eat my MP3's too!
The question now is whether the RIAA will lobby for the right to remotely cause your tapedeck to eat your mp3s....
Only for national security, of course!
>How much will the refill cartridges cost for the >robot?
Just a little more than half the price of a new robot, of course!!
Not only that,
but they're full of great parts that can be put to better use, especially the mac ones!!!
I'm amazed that everyone seems to view floppies so favorably.
All these good things are true, but they are incredibly unreliable. I make a boot disk on a brand new floppy, and in two weeks, WITHOUT USE, it goes flakey. THey're not reliable enough for encryption keys despite their convenience.
I don't remember them being quite so bad in the old days. Some have said there were higher manufacturing standards. Someone else suggested that it's because we use them infrequently that they are less reliable, because crud accumulates in the drive.
Either way I have been desperately trying to banish them from my home and my work, keeping only systems that boot from CD, and even getting bootable NICs for emergencies. But, so far, they are still necessary evil.
It drives me nuts.
I use alot of junkyard computers. I can personally attest, that I have had AT's with high power needs that had noisy fans. I just cut the fan lines. ONe has been working 24/7 for a few months. Makes a great silent computer. I have also put a PS in a vertical duct with no fan and it self cools with convection, for a silent PC.
I have blown one up that was inside a suitcase, and another that just got too hot. I have also poured a cup of water on one. It died a quick but very boring death.
I tear apart those things all the time. They have thermal fuses, and they also have fusable resistors in addition to ordinary current fuses.
If the temperature of the switching transistors gets too high, they lock up and create a direct short. If the fuses don't blow the resistors do, or the board traces, or the transistor itself, as the last line of defense.
The transistors become direct shorts LONG before the flashpoint of anything reasonable, even paper. I believe it's about 180 or 200C.
The worst you will get is a horrible smell. You cannot get the power supply to go up in flames. It just won't do it.
Now, I HAVE seen crt monitors actually go up in flames, but they were fairly old ones.
Try it! It's fun! and after all, computers are free.
=rMortyH
This story shows the end of an era...
All those silly meaningless CNN graphics that accompany computer stories used to sport a Sun 3.
It's been replaced by the mirror image of a PC.
*Sigh.*
Interesting.
This premise of trusted computing, as seen in the TCPA link, assumes that there is some hardware inside the machine that cannot be emulated in software.
THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE!!
Just what kind of embedded hardware on the motherboard are they talking about? It takes input, runs some algorithm on it, and gives output. SOFTWARE, on a different medium.
It just comes back to a private key, which would work fine anyway. Hardware just means that the USER cannot know their private key, or have access to the software that reads it. The MANUFACTURER does know it. It has to be stored in software somewhere, in Redmond or Taiwan or Palo Alto or Armonk. It can be discovered in some obscure way, and emulated.
If the USER has control, and true ownership of what they've paid for, then they can know their key, and the manufacturer cannot. So, software would work just fine, or user programmed hardware.
The only way something like this can work and also be fair is to use software keys. A user registers a key pair, or at least their public key, and buys content and uses trusted services with it. They get a new key pair after some time interval or if their key gets stolen and then migrate their content to their new key set.
It's not anonymous either, but it's identification, so it can't be. At least the user can control when a public key is sent.
We each get a private key and do everything we can to keep it PRIVATE. There would have to be laws against stealing people's private keys to back this up, and INDIVIDUALS would be authenticated by their private keys, NOT hardware. You can't do it with hardware on an open source system, and you just can't 'trust' someone else's closed system.
No system is perfect.
So, slashdot, please tell me if I'm wrong. Is there a type of hardware which cannot be satisfactorily emulated in software, which can be used for this?
If not, it's a good thing. This means that the answer to this design contest, if the user is to have any control, is a SOFTWARE system, possibly with a nice hardware trick for storing and protecting the private key. This is very good because it means that the design winner can run on existing hardware, possibly the stuff strewn all over every american city and most others. That would be nice.
The hardware solution is just another dongle, and no more effective than any other dongle. It's not a new idea.
=rMortyH
So, the money went from the economy, to the...
To....
You see this kind of headline everywhere!
Well all I know is some of it went to me, because I either help people with buggy software, or help them with its alternative that would never have caught on unless the first stuff was crap.
I think crappy software generates $60 billion a year in business.
If computers worked, I would starve.
It makes sense for an organization to dislike deep linking because
A. It can make their content appear to be someone else's and
B. They have no control over broken links when they change their content and this makes their site look broken and stupid.
C. Framing someone else's site is bullshit, and people who don't like it can do what it takes to stop it.
However, is it really all that hard to redirect foreign deep links to the main page? Is it? Or to send the not founds there so they don't just send most people to microsoft? Come on kids, read your docs! Learn your trade!
If you still want the search engines to deep link, it's a little more work, but it can't possibly be more of a hassel than a lawsuit you probably won't win.
As for the main page, I think it's as simple as asking for 'the right not to be refered to', which it's been shown repeatedly that you just don't have.
If only people would quit wasting time and just move on to something beneficial, like harnessing the power of stupidity, the earth would be a better place.
=mortimer