The problem is the US idea that bandwidth is free. Like I said, it cost me $100 to download them.
When we rebuild boxes, we throw the latest stable release on it, our own software and then run extensive tests. If the patches cause problems, we should find out about it then (unless they are real spooky failures)
Also since we are only running way less than 5% of whats on the disk, there seem to be very few updates to the bits we use.
"The Dish" is a good techie movie. Its mostly right on its facts and there isn't any technobabble.
What happened in the movie (and real life) was that the 210 ft dish (aka radio telescope) wasn't pointing at the correct spot. The reason they can't hear pioneer is that the signal is so weak that it can't be picked up with most sensitive recievers ever built. The gear that they are using to find pioneer's singal could pick up an Apollo 11 type signal without much effort at all.
What Pioneer 10 (&11) have proved is we don't know about gravity. We understand how it effects things but we don't know what it is and we don't know how it works. There are many theorys but none of them even come within 10% of variations of reality. There are several sats that show these gravity problems including the gps sats. The interesting bit is you can prove to your self that gravity isn't what we've been lead to believe simply with the right kind of pendulum durring an eclipse.
We buy solars subscriptions for our low end x1 style sun boxes already. Its sold as hardware support without the hardware support but we get access to the current releases.
What I would like is a subscript deal where we get a copy of the current version (what ever it is and with all the patches applied) when its shipped. I only want the install cd, I don't need the other cd's they like shipping out. Right now it costs me about $100 to download a cd at current rates and it it shouldn't cost Sun Australia more than about $20 to send a real CD to me. I only need one media subscription so this is different than the license issue.
Do you know what the w3c is? Its a group of control freaks that wanted to be in charge but the industry chose to ignore them. So far it looks like the industry has suppored 0% of their standards even when the standards were based on what the major web browsers were doing. Maybe if w3c adjsuts their standards to the industry they can improve on that 0% a bit. They are irrelevant except for buzword bingo.
They should sell all of it or buy back all of it. The current situation is a joke and helps no one.
Telstra making money? Of course... when your a monopoly phone company and your the most expensive phone company in any developed country, its going to be profitable. Your phone bill is simply a luxury tax.
I hear lots of excuses like Australia has lots of rural areas and it cost too much to run lines since they have to support everyone. So does Alaska except it also has to deal with ice and a population density that makes Oz look overcrowded. Take any state in Australia and you can find one in the US that has about the same population covered over the same area. For example Missouri and Vcitoria have the same area and poulation, its just the population base in Missouri is more spread out. That makes phone service more expensive to operate but the local utilites commission (something the Aussies don't have because the phone co is the goverment). The PUC says a monopoly phone company must make a 10% profit on its investment. Thats to ensure that the company will continue to provide services and can get investors to fund that development. The result is phone costs in Missouri are much lower than Australia.
One other gripe is I can call Missouri from Melbourne on a mobile phone for 1/2 the cost of calling a local landline. To me that says something is very wrong with the price structure. If you hunt for special deals, you can call the US on a land line cheaper than you can call a town 51km away.
Just to put it context, bills I've seen for the last month thanks to the local phone co... $110 for a mobile phone. $10 for the montly fees , 10 calls (less than 2 minutes) and lots of sms messages. $300 for a different mobile phone for work. Used like the one I used to have the US that cost me us$29/mo. $115 for land line phone including local calls. There was about $20 in internatioanl calls in that. $90 for cable internet + $65 or so for cable tv. Thats nearly $700. (about us$400)
Having lived in the US and Australia, I can say that Telstra gets a larger amount of my money than any other phone company ever has. To put it a different way, at work we would have had a extra $24,000 in the year end bonus pool if Telstra would have charged a fair price for their services.
Telstra is about 51% owned by the goverment. They sold off the other 49% to retired people who will lynch the local goverment if the prices drops much more. Of course they bought at the height of the dot com bubble so its a wonder that the shares are worth anything at all.
Telstra (and the reglators) are all tring to serve two (or more) masters and it doesn't work. Until they sell off all of Telstra but they won't do that since the rural people think once that happens, they won't be able to get service anymore.
Last year you could buy a 155mb link from Calif to Sydney for about AU$60,000/mo (US$25k). Since there are now several other compaines that have upgraded their lines, the costs have gone down.
However years ago, Telstra (the phone compnay) set the rate for 64k ISND link to be about AU$.20/megabyte. When they did that, the rate to get a US carrier to call Australia and ship a 64k stream over was about the same. Also for that 64 K channel, you get to pay about au$300/mo if you transfer 0 bytes. The result of their high prices is that no one else would need cut their prices so the "discount" services are now charging amounts about the same. Now that Telstra has cut prices, the discount services are typically more expensive than going with the monoploy.
Today the prices are dropping. The Kiwis (who share the link to the US) now can get 2 mb shared unlimited services for a only about NZ$500/mo (us$200ish).
If your new ad-hoc cipher is used few enough times (and only once per key), it may effectilvy be a one time pad and suffer from the same level of uncracability. Its like Paul Revere's "one if by land and two if by sea". That was a one time pad and was used once. If they keep using the system, then it would be weak but the algorithm is secure if the key gen was done properly (like a coin toss). They were only transmitting one bit of data and had a one bit cypher. Assume a modern counterpart was going to send "land" or "sea" with a something like 3DES. If the attacker knows the encrypted stream, the cypher method and the two good results, they could attempt to find keys the give those two results and then look at the keys to figure out ones looks like line noise and the other is ascii "nukem". It would be farily clear which one was the key. This is a weakness of many modern crypto systems. If your only sending 10 bits of data, use a 10 bit cypher. Some very well funded ecommerce systems likes to use hashs outside of encrypted packets. It turns out that guessing the data and verifing it aginst the hash is much faster than brute forceing the crypto.
The interesting thing about this attack is that its very much like an attack aginst most smart cards except that they lock out after 3 to 5 tries. If you have access to a point of sale network that uses lots of smart cards (say a large food store) and you can keep track of people who come in often and don't get their pin number wrong then you can try 2 guesses per visit. The interesting bit is that once you have the pin code and account number, you can program your own chip card for about $10 if your bank is nice enough to send you your very own chip card writer.
This is what happens when the patent office changes its mind and starts allowing something new. Since no one had been sending in software patents over the last 50 years, they don't have a ready supply of prior art in the form of thousands (or millions) of declined patents.
Once the business rules patents get into full swing, no small business will be allowed to operate at all without some risk of being sued out of existance. Once that happens, then the patent office will get fixed but I figure thats a few decades away.
The REAL purpose of the BIOS should be: initialize the hardware up to a point so that it can boot the OS. This means memory initialization, some timer and interrupt related stuff and whatever code is required for the boot devices Can someone tell me why the bios needs to look at all 512+ meg of memory?
Why does it play with the floppy drive or CD rom at all if its told to just boot C:? It should just do what it needs to do to load the OS. If that means waking up the disk controller, and reading in a few sectros without starting up the screen, great. I don't need the screen... I need the os loaded in the machine and I'm assuming it will reset up everything else again.
I used to work for the 2nd largest CC company. I know the fruad levels and the fake strip stuff is no where near what the pay TV comapines are dealing with. Fake cards that get used are in the Evolis card printer and as far as I can tell, it will not make a card that a real EFTPos terminal will accept.
While a mag stripe writer (that might be able to write a credit card or not) lists for about $300, my bank just sent me a gemplus pc430 smart card writer. The serial version of this is what people used to make smart cards with for the TV market.
I currently work at a place that does point of sale gear. In theory we sell mag stripe writers but our sales of that is close to zero. If you look at the total number of mag stripe writers made and compare it to the the number of gemplus smart card writers, you will see that there are far more people with the gear to write smartcards than mag stripes.
So why does the truth about security always get moded -1 flamebait?
There are about 3000 bands in Melbourne and I expect about the same in Sydney. Many of these bands give away their tracks because it promotes their tours small international tours. For example there are 5 bands in this list and four out of 5 of them travel around the world and play either as a band or as support for other bands. Based on the stats from the web page, I can can tell where in the world the different bands are (unless it gets/.ed). These bands make money by selling their CD's when they play and one sells two online but they make their money by playing gigs.
(and I am looking for assitance in maintaining the site for any live music lovers Downunder)
There are some theories that state that when they put the lines in the public right of way they then become public property. So far this hasn't recently ended up in court (since Edisons stringing the wires any way they could days). The utilites maintain them because they are required to maintain service and you've got to maintian the stuff int eh middle to do that.
Think about a developer that builds a new subdivition. The streets become the propery of the city after the construction is finished even though they developer paid for them to go in.
Other states have done this in the past with power compaines and water compaines.
Anytime a monoploy gets out of hand, they should have their network (cables in the ground, exchange buildings) grabbed under the concept of imminent domain and then they can either provide the service the state PUC agreeded to or take their switching gear and leave. There are other people who can get a phone excahnge up and running real quick and theres in nearly infinite supply that would be willing to sign up under these rules.
What store can you buy a mag-stripe writer? I know exactly two people have writers in their collection of stuff. People doing creative writing on their cards is rare compared to the millions of fake "smart" cards used by the cable TV compaines every year. smart card fraud is way ahead of mag card fraud and its getting larger every day.
The problem is I can't trace my vote back to where its been counted. Now if an electronic system gives me a vote reciept, then I can go to a web site later and say 'Tell me who "0304756745383834743646374" voted for'. If I've got that ticket in my hand and my votes don't match whats in the database, then I've got reason to complain. This has other problems because its trivial in small towns to figure out which IP address goes with which household but any verificaion system will have massive risks.
What scares me is I used to work for a largeish credit card company. They would lose records from time to to time. Thouse records invovled real money but sometimes they just disappeared without any ability to trace them. Everytime I've audited a system that logged in two places, some records just don't end up in both place. The best ones seem to have about one in a hundred million go missing, but they are still lost. I want the voting system to be at least that good.
In 1987 the virus compaines used to pay $50 for each new virus you turned in. One of the guys that I shared an office with at the universiy computer lab used to turn in a few new ones every week and sometimes 5 or six in a day if he was low on cash.
Many newer laws are slowly nibbling away at the rights hackers have had in the past and some new laws are clarifying the fact that some rights we thought we had don't exist.
Right now if I get a program and I suspect has GNU code in it and its "protected" via something as simple as xor encrption, I can't verify its got stolen colde it in because I can't get at it because of things like the reverse engineering bits of DMCA.
What is being done to protect the rights of people that successfully verify a comercial closed source program has GPLed code it in?
When I found out that GNU Zip was included in the program, I asked its copyright holder for premission to reverse engineer.
Your assumption about adding the reverse-enginerring clause is wrong. Without it, you can't touch the code at all if its been compiled (a good lawyer woucl convice a jury that its been locked up by the compiler). Thanks to DMCA, you have no legal right to disassemble anything that you don't own the copyright for. Those rights must be supplied from somewhere in order to protect aginst code theft.
If the clase was int the GPL, it still won't give you rights to disassemble photoshop. Reverse engineering their code would be a violation of the license unless you found something, then you have a way out. As it is now, if you disassembled photoshop and found part of the linux kernel, Linus could sue adobe but you would end up like Dmitry Sklyarov but with a high chance of the charges not getting dropped.
While the program in question does produce tar.gz files, the string "You should have recieved a copy of the GNU GPL" in the executable is a clue that they jsut ripped it off. Same thing with the IMAP tool kit.
So is there any chance that they will ever move the instruction set away from its 16 bitness? To load a 64 bit constant, you either have to have a relative memory address or use 5 instructions with the 64 bit PPC modules. Jumps are great too as long as they are within something like 21 bits. While you can deal with massive amounts of memory, it takes hacks that make the segment offsets in the 8086 look like an elegent solution.
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The problem is the US idea that bandwidth is free. Like I said, it cost me $100 to download them.
When we rebuild boxes, we throw the latest stable release on it, our own software and then run extensive tests. If the patches cause problems, we should find out about it then (unless they are real spooky failures)
Also since we are only running way less than 5% of whats on the disk, there seem to be very few updates to the bits we use.
"The Dish" is a good techie movie. Its mostly right on its facts and there isn't any technobabble.
What happened in the movie (and real life) was that the 210 ft dish (aka radio telescope) wasn't pointing at the correct spot. The reason they can't hear pioneer is that the signal is so weak that it can't be picked up with most sensitive recievers ever built. The gear that they are using to find pioneer's singal could pick up an Apollo 11 type signal without much effort at all.
What Pioneer 10 (&11) have proved is we don't know about gravity. We understand how it effects things but we don't know what it is and we don't know how it works. There are many theorys but none of them even come within 10% of variations of reality. There are several sats that show these gravity problems including the gps sats. The interesting bit is you can prove to your self that gravity isn't what we've been lead to believe simply with the right kind of pendulum durring an eclipse.
I wonder of Cheops had similar thoughts about his his creation and what would follow.
We buy solars subscriptions for our low end x1 style sun boxes already. Its sold as hardware support without the hardware support but we get access to the current releases.
What I would like is a subscript deal where we get a copy of the current version (what ever it is and with all the patches applied) when its shipped. I only want the install cd, I don't need the other cd's they like shipping out. Right now it costs me about $100 to download a cd at current rates and it it shouldn't cost Sun Australia more than about $20 to send a real CD to me. I only need one media subscription so this is different than the license issue.
Do you know what the w3c is? Its a group of control freaks that wanted to be in charge but the industry chose to ignore them. So far it looks like the industry has suppored 0% of their standards even when the standards were based on what the major web browsers were doing. Maybe if w3c adjsuts their standards to the industry they can improve on that 0% a bit. They are irrelevant except for buzword bingo.
They should sell all of it or buy back all of it. The current situation is a joke and helps no one.
Telstra making money? Of course... when your a monopoly phone company and your the most expensive phone company in any developed country, its going to be profitable. Your phone bill is simply a luxury tax.
I hear lots of excuses like Australia has lots of rural areas and it cost too much to run lines since they have to support everyone. So does Alaska except it also has to deal with ice and a population density that makes Oz look overcrowded. Take any state in Australia and you can find one in the US that has about the same population covered over the same area. For example Missouri and Vcitoria have the same area and poulation, its just the population base in Missouri is more spread out. That makes phone service more expensive to operate but the local utilites commission (something the Aussies don't have because the phone co is the goverment). The PUC says a monopoly phone company must make a 10% profit on its investment. Thats to ensure that the company will continue to provide services and can get investors to fund that development. The result is phone costs in Missouri are much lower than Australia.
One other gripe is I can call Missouri from Melbourne on a mobile phone for 1/2 the cost of calling a local landline. To me that says something is very wrong with the price structure. If you hunt for special deals, you can call the US on a land line cheaper than you can call a town 51km away.
Just to put it context, bills I've seen for the last month thanks to the local phone co...
$110 for a mobile phone. $10 for the montly fees , 10 calls (less than 2 minutes) and lots of sms messages.
$300 for a different mobile phone for work. Used like the one I used to have the US that cost me us$29/mo.
$115 for land line phone including local calls. There was about $20 in internatioanl calls in that.
$90 for cable internet + $65 or so for cable tv.
Thats nearly $700. (about us$400)
Having lived in the US and Australia, I can say that Telstra gets a larger amount of my money than any other phone company ever has. To put it a different way, at work we would have had a extra $24,000 in the year end bonus pool if Telstra would have charged a fair price for their services.
Telstra is about 51% owned by the goverment. They sold off the other 49% to retired people who will lynch the local goverment if the prices drops much more. Of course they bought at the height of the dot com bubble so its a wonder that the shares are worth anything at all.
Telstra (and the reglators) are all tring to serve two (or more) masters and it doesn't work. Until they sell off all of Telstra but they won't do that since the rural people think once that happens, they won't be able to get service anymore.
Last year you could buy a 155mb link from Calif to Sydney for about AU$60,000/mo (US$25k). Since there are now several other compaines that have upgraded their lines, the costs have gone down.
However years ago, Telstra (the phone compnay) set the rate for 64k ISND link to be about AU$.20/megabyte. When they did that, the rate to get a US carrier to call Australia and ship a 64k stream over was about the same. Also for that 64 K channel, you get to pay about au$300/mo if you transfer 0 bytes. The result of their high prices is that no one else would need cut their prices so the "discount" services are now charging amounts about the same. Now that Telstra has cut prices, the discount services are typically more expensive than going with the monoploy.
Today the prices are dropping. The Kiwis (who share the link to the US) now can get 2 mb shared unlimited services for a only about NZ$500/mo (us$200ish).
If your new ad-hoc cipher is used few enough times (and only once per key), it may effectilvy be a one time pad and suffer from the same level of uncracability. Its like Paul Revere's "one if by land and two if by sea". That was a one time pad and was used once. If they keep using the system, then it would be weak but the algorithm is secure if the key gen was done properly (like a coin toss). They were only transmitting one bit of data and had a one bit cypher. Assume a modern counterpart was going to send "land" or "sea" with a something like 3DES. If the attacker knows the encrypted stream, the cypher method and the two good results, they could attempt to find keys the give those two results and then look at the keys to figure out ones looks like line noise and the other is ascii "nukem". It would be farily clear which one was the key. This is a weakness of many modern crypto systems. If your only sending 10 bits of data, use a 10 bit cypher. Some very well funded ecommerce systems likes to use hashs outside of encrypted packets. It turns out that guessing the data and verifing it aginst the hash is much faster than brute forceing the crypto.
The interesting thing about this attack is that its very much like an attack aginst most smart cards except that they lock out after 3 to 5 tries. If you have access to a point of sale network that uses lots of smart cards (say a large food store) and you can keep track of people who come in often and don't get their pin number wrong then you can try 2 guesses per visit. The interesting bit is that once you have the pin code and account number, you can program your own chip card for about $10 if your bank is nice enough to send you your very own chip card writer.
This is what happens when the patent office changes its mind and starts allowing something new. Since no one had been sending in software patents over the last 50 years, they don't have a ready supply of prior art in the form of thousands (or millions) of declined patents.
Once the business rules patents get into full swing, no small business will be allowed to operate at all without some risk of being sued out of existance. Once that happens, then the patent office will get fixed but I figure thats a few decades away.
The REAL purpose of the BIOS should be: initialize the hardware up to a point so that it can boot the OS. This means memory initialization,
some timer and interrupt related stuff and whatever code is required for the boot devices
Can someone tell me why the bios needs to look at all 512+ meg of memory?
Why does it play with the floppy drive or CD rom at all if its told to just boot C:? It should just do what it needs to do to load the OS. If that means waking up the disk controller, and reading in a few sectros without starting up the screen, great. I don't need the screen... I need the os loaded in the machine and I'm assuming it will reset up everything else again.
I used to work for the 2nd largest CC company. I know the fruad levels and the fake strip stuff is no where near what the pay TV comapines are dealing with. Fake cards that get used are in the Evolis card printer and as far as I can tell, it will not make a card that a real EFTPos terminal will accept.
While a mag stripe writer (that might be able to write a credit card or not) lists for about $300, my bank just sent me a gemplus pc430 smart card writer. The serial version of this is what people used to make smart cards with for the TV market.
I currently work at a place that does point of sale gear. In theory we sell mag stripe writers but our sales of that is close to zero. If you look at the total number of mag stripe writers made and compare it to the the number of gemplus smart card writers, you will see that there are far more people with the gear to write smartcards than mag stripes.
So why does the truth about security always get moded -1 flamebait?
There are about 3000 bands in Melbourne and I expect about the same in Sydney. Many of these bands give away their tracks because it promotes their tours small international tours. /.ed). These bands make money by selling their CD's when they play and one sells two online but they make their money by playing gigs.
For example there are 5 bands in this list and four out of 5 of them travel around the world and play either as a band or as support for other bands. Based on the stats from the web page, I can can tell where in the world the different bands are (unless it gets
(and I am looking for assitance in maintaining the site for any live music lovers Downunder)
There are some theories that state that when they put the lines in the public right of way they then become public property. So far this hasn't recently ended up in court (since Edisons stringing the wires any way they could days). The utilites maintain them because they are required to maintain service and you've got to maintian the stuff int eh middle to do that.
Think about a developer that builds a new subdivition. The streets become the propery of the city after the construction is finished even though they developer paid for them to go in.
whats the going monthy rate on a party line these days? The thought just occured to me that a party line and ADLS aren't incompatable.
Other states have done this in the past with power compaines and water compaines.
Anytime a monoploy gets out of hand, they should have their network (cables in the ground, exchange buildings) grabbed under the concept of imminent domain and then they can either provide the service the state PUC agreeded to or take their switching gear and leave. There are other people who can get a phone excahnge up and running real quick and theres in nearly infinite supply that would be willing to sign up under these rules.
What store can you buy a mag-stripe writer? I know exactly two people have writers in their collection of stuff. People doing creative writing on their cards is rare compared to the millions of fake "smart" cards used by the cable TV compaines every year. smart card fraud is way ahead of mag card fraud and its getting larger every day.
The problem is I can't trace my vote back to where its been counted. Now if an electronic system gives me a vote reciept, then I can go to a web site later and say 'Tell me who "0304756745383834743646374" voted for'. If I've got that ticket in my hand and my votes don't match whats in the database, then I've got reason to complain. This has other problems because its trivial in small towns to figure out which IP address goes with which household but any verificaion system will have massive risks.
What scares me is I used to work for a largeish credit card company. They would lose records from time to to time. Thouse records invovled real money but sometimes they just disappeared without any ability to trace them. Everytime I've audited a system that logged in two places, some records just don't end up in both place. The best ones seem to have about one in a hundred million go missing, but they are still lost. I want the voting system to be at least that good.
In 1987 the virus compaines used to pay $50 for each new virus you turned in. One of the guys that I shared an office with at the universiy computer lab used to turn in a few new ones every week and sometimes 5 or six in a day if he was low on cash.
Many newer laws are slowly nibbling away at the rights hackers have had in the past and some new laws are clarifying the fact that some rights we thought we had don't exist.
Right now if I get a program and I suspect has GNU code in it and its "protected" via something as simple as xor encrption, I can't verify its got stolen colde it in because I can't get at it because of things like the reverse engineering bits of DMCA.
What is being done to protect the rights of people that successfully verify a comercial closed source program has GPLed code it in?
When I found out that GNU Zip was included in the program, I asked its copyright holder for premission to reverse engineer.
Your assumption about adding the reverse-enginerring clause is wrong. Without it, you can't touch the code at all if its been compiled (a good lawyer woucl convice a jury that its been locked up by the compiler). Thanks to DMCA, you have no legal right to disassemble anything that you don't own the copyright for. Those rights must be supplied from somewhere in order to protect aginst code theft.
If the clase was int the GPL, it still won't give you rights to disassemble photoshop. Reverse engineering their code would be a violation of the license unless you found something, then you have a way out. As it is now, if you disassembled photoshop and found part of the linux kernel, Linus could sue adobe but you would end up like Dmitry Sklyarov but with a high chance of the charges not getting dropped.
While the program in question does produce tar.gz files, the string "You should have recieved a copy of the GNU GPL" in the executable is a clue that they jsut ripped it off. Same thing with the IMAP tool kit.
And how many plants are in the works now? is it still 0?
So is there any chance that they will ever move the instruction set away from its 16 bitness? To load a 64 bit constant, you either have to have a relative memory address or use 5 instructions with the 64 bit PPC modules. Jumps are great too as long as they are within something like 21 bits. While you can deal with massive amounts of memory, it takes hacks that make the segment offsets in the 8086 look like an elegent solution.