Luckily, pictures, movies and sounds that are not computer-generated are bound to contain a certain amount of noise (at the very least from the necessary quantization). Noise is perfect for hiding encrypted data since noise is random, and strongly encrypted data also appears random unless you have the encryption key.
In a human language that has no possibility for redundancy (allows anything to be described in only one way) there wouldn't be space for steganography at all. Combined with the fact that most languages at least pay some attention to being efficient, it's no surprise that human language is terrible as a carrier for hidden data.
Um, well, you're probably right... but let's not forget that the X Window system refers to the display as server, the same line of reasoning could be applied here.
Thanks for the tip, never thought of that. And the prospect of a lot of slashdotters suddenly deciding to make their own pr0n was just a little too much:-)
Incidentally, it's steganography, not stenography, a common mistake. Stenography is a system for writing really fast...
So could the lists of nonsense words used to defeat SPAM filters.
In fact, when I first saw these random word lists the first thing I thought of was hidden communication, NOT defeating filters...
Btw, Usenet also makes a great medium for this since it's possibly even harder to discover the intended recipient (especially when you encode the message in some pictures posted to an alt.binaries.erotica group...).
An MP3 server doesn't need to have the monitor on for more than maybe ten minutes per bootup, which saves quite a bit of electricity.
It doesn't really need a videocard either. Or a harddisk, if you already have a server for other purposes that can provide an NFS root filesystem. My MP3 (or rather OGG) server is a Pentium 75 with a fanless lightweigh PSU, an AWE 64 Gold soundcard, a network card and a floppy drive for the kernel (which I could replace by a boot ROM if I ever get to it). As a side note, the lower CPU requirement for OGG decoding (vs. MP3) really shows on this system (any background task causes MP3 playback to stutter, while OGG playback still goes fine).
Can anyone show me an easy-to-setup MP3 streamer for Linux?
I simply installed Debian Sarge with some useful player programs. I can't give you a complete HowTo, but once you've got the base system running it should be trivial to browse through the Debian "sound" section of programs and find whatever you need.
... is the technique of hiding certain information in other information. As opposed to encryption, which just makes the information unreadable without the correct key. Steganography & cryptography make a very nice combination since the random-like nature of encrypted data makes it easier to hide.
In fact, I feel this should be the *first step*. There are huge amounts of lead in many other products, making this a relatively small improvement when viewing "the big picture". However, power requirements have skyrocketed since the computer became a common household device. Laptop tech shows it's possible, why not apply that in desktops as well?
I cannot be sure about that, for I have no idea who you are, now can I?
Nope.
Incidentally, if you'd like to know exactly when and why your good friend GooberToo made me his foe,
Sorry, not interested. I made him a friend because he also seems capable of useful & insightful comments; which I wouldn't want to miss; even though might have trouble remaining calm in flame-like threads.
It bothers me because I would prefer a constructive critic.
Ofcourse, so would most people. And I like a good discussion as much as the next person (probably more). But sometimes I simply don't have the time to reply to everything I don't agree with in all discussions I follow.
Any privacy of those lists would be impossible with "foes of friends" and "friends of friends"
Yes, ofcourse. It would make those systems impossible. I still think "privatizing" the lists might be good.
I cannot agree. It is like using postcards most of the time and envelopes only when there is something sensitive in your letter. It would draw attention only because of being used less frequently.
My "system" relies on using open communication most of the time, and undetectable communication when needed. The closed envelope analogy would only be correct if I simply encrypted some of my e-mails, when in fact, I make sure to hide the presence & path of a specific message entirely. It will definitely fool automated systems, and for real persons, tracing my "hidden" communication will quickly become a dead end. This is quite possible using steganography or the networking algorithms employed by Freenet.
As I said elsewhere, I'm quite sure there are aspects of technology that are definitely positive.
But the absence of, say, a working television suddenly seemed to turn the most dull couch potato into an inventive and outgoing person.
I still wouldn't think of completely giving up all the technology around me. But I'm also pretty sure that not all technology we use today makes us better off.
Well, I managed to print some important things while on UPS power, so that I could still work on them with pen & paper.
But as I said elsewhere in this thread, the fact that I experienced very few of the possible negative sides to the blackout was mostly luck. Still, it allowed me to witness a rather rare situation, since in this case, most people made do quite succesfully during that short blackout. Given some preparation and the same weather conditions, I think going through a far longer blackout without serious problems would be quite feasible.
Yes, sudden absence of something you never learned to live without can always be a problem; I just had the luck "my" blackout occured during a very nice summer period.
But if your town had never even had power; you would have been relying on other means of survival anyway. People have lived without power in extreme environments for ages.
Supposedly, the energy required for pumping the gas is lower than the energy lost due to the resistance of power lines.
And remember that the gas pipe lines are there & being used anyway, might as well move as much as possible into a single transport system to reduce overhead. (the alternative to use electricity instead of gas is far less attractive since electric heating is very inefficient)
On the other hand, the system might indeed be utterly useless; not everything they say on TV is true;-)
I agree that there are elements to technological progress that are positive no matter how you look at them.
I get the feeling that in the more "doubtful" cases, it's not so much that the technology in itself causes the problems (such as stress), but rather the fact that people are given the idea that to be cool, they have to use the newest tech as soon as it's available, rather than take their time to get accustomed to each technological "step" before advancing to the next.
What would the alternatives be? Household generated power? As long as your electricity is generated centrally (regardless of the source), you will always need powerlines. And as long as the population keeps growing, the demand for more power will require more powerlines.
Interestingly, I just heard something interesting on a local news bulletin about a gas-operated (real gas, not the American word for fuel) electricity generator that could be placed in every house that has a gas pipe connection.
Should be more efficient since it removes the energy loss due to power lines.
Since I live in the Netherlands, I didn't experience the blackdown this article is about. There was, however, a local blackdown here shortly before that, and it lasted 24 hours.
My experience: Absolutely fantastic. People who are normally spending all day watching TV or behind a computer (yes, I'm guilty too) sat outside reading books, playing games, enjoying the sunset or taking a stroll through the forest.
And the sight of an entire town lit by nothing but moonlight is not something I'll easily forget. I'm probably sounding like a whiny bastard, but that event made me seriously doubt whether all the technology we have today have actually made life better as we like to tell ourselves.
As much as I'd love to believe otherwise, it suerly looks more like something personal.
Since I don't know you personally, that would be impossible.
I don't know what are you talking about.
Very well, it was just my impression. The only alternative I see is that someone is playing some boring practical joke on you.
If I ever stop making sense again, please tell me about it before calling me a foe in front of the whole Slashdot community.
The different lists are personal; and although they are visible to everyone, I can't imagine people regularly look at other people's friends/foes list. They are really only useful to others in the form of friend of friends/foes of friends lists (as a sidenote, you still apear on my foes of friends list since mr. GooberToo has made you a foe).
But still, I don't really see what bothers you about all this. I have four freaks vs. only one fan and couldn't care less. Like moderation, it's not intended to judge you personally; it's only a system to improve people's Slashdot Experience (tm) by letting them customize things a bit. But to be honest, I think it might have been better if the friends/foes lists had been entirely private.
Your felling is not as paranoid as it might seem. I actually made some experiments and their advertisements seem to be correlated with the keywords I use in my searches. That's why I routinely change cookies and User-Agent headers, using lots of automated searches with random keywords. It seems to work so far. But I often think that maybe if I wasn't using anonymous proxies, they could track my IP. I don't know.
Yes, I'm quite sure they can. I usually just accept this and happily let them track me. However when I decide I want to keep a piece of information private I switch to using strong encryption, steganography and related technologies (Freenet and such). I figure that having a clearly recognizable and easily traceable online identity that I use most of the time draws less attention than always trying to avoid tracing and being suspiciously absent from statistics...
I see another benefit: this should also put less strain on the hard disk itself, thereby possibly letting it last longer.
My two latest HDD features occured during periods of intensive random seeking so I'm quite willing to believe this might have a significant effect on HDD life. Even if it's not enough statistical evidence, common sense also tells me things wear faster when they're doing heavy work...
But it would still be an interesting experiment: operate a number of identical servers and let them do something that generates a lot of small random reads (such as a simulating a heavy duty Usenet server). Run half of them on 2.4 and half on 2.6, and see if drives fail significantly quicker in the 2.4 systems. Anyone got some spare HDD's left?;-)
Luckily, it seems like that the people who scream the loudest about implementing DRM everywhere generally seem have a rather weak link to The Real World (tm)...
I'd hardly consider a publicly viewable, personal "foes" list in any way related to a (possible) hidden world-wide list of suspects. Just like I don't mind giving people personal information, as long as I'm not forced to.
The essential difference is whether or not an entity (google, me,...) abuses its power (in the form of google: lots of statistical information, in the form of me: none) over the subject.
As I said, there's no way a similar restriction can exist in the linux world, because the players are open-source.
First off, similar restrictions could always be implemented using watermarking technology. Though that's not the point here. The point is that if a manufacturer releases closed-source drivers, any restrictions it can implement are very hard for the user to work around.
My point was that having open source drivers on a closed-source OS will only just begin to solve the problems. Chances are, in a near-future version of windows, it won't accept unsigned drivers anyhow, so open source drivers won't even be an option. Hence the point that just drivers won't solve the problem. Windows IS the problem.
Okay, agreed. Seems like I misunderstood your first post.
Don't bother calling me ignorant just because you don't understand something.
You're right, that was a slight overreaction on my part. Sorry.
First off, I don't believe the driver is open-source at all. You are still stuck with using some firmware you need to take from the Hauppauge driver CD.
The Windows driver is ofcourse closed-source, but the Linux driver is not. Also, firmware != driver; in fact most devices (even those with perfect Linux support) use closed-source firmware. This is no real problem as long as the protocol for the driver to interface with the firmware is known.
Second, and perhaps more important, I want MPEG1/2 playback, but I don't want to be limited to only that. I also want to be able to display the desktop, and videos in other formats (MPEG4, Theora/VP3, Quicktime, etc), and I don't believe the PVR-350 supports that. (The newer 250s don't have TV-out, I have one myself)
The PVR-350 output can be used as output from the MPEG decoder as well as framebuffer, as explained in this Howto. (disclaimer: I haven't tried this myself since I don't have the card (yet), but the Howto clearly implies it is possible)
This is one of the things I hate most... Complaining about problems without solutions. If you think the binary-only driver is bad, why aren't you doing something about it?
If I understand it correctly, you think only developers, not users, are allowed to discuss this subject? I strongly disagree. Many (most?) open source projects rely on users to report problems. Users expressing a preference for something are usually a strong motivation for developers, and I don't see how this would be different.
Who cares? This pretty much only applies to Windows drivers, so you're already willing to put up with that,
The official Nvidia Linux driver is also closed-source. The fact that they haven't tried to implement weird restrictions in this doesn't say they won't.
having an open-source driver isn't going to magically change everything.
Why not? Probably not magically, but if the driver source had been freely available this wouldn't have occured since someone would have hacked the Macrovision code out in a fraction of the time it took to hack Nvidia to hack it in. Are you trolling or just plain ignorant?
Besides, this is just typical/. over reaction. Without binary-only video-players, there's nothing to tell the driver it should be macrovision paranoid in the first place.
I'm not sure I get your point here. You state yourself that without binary-only drivers the driver wouldn't be macrovision paranoid. Then why is my post "typical/. over reaction"? We both still agree that Macrovision == bad, right?
I'll be the first to admit that it sucks to have binary drivers, but I think it sucks even more to buy hardware that you can't use for a couple years until a driver comes out.
Ofcourse it's better than nothing. I never said otherwise. I was merely pointing out that this article is confirming exactly what opensource proponents have been warning about all along. If everyone simply uses the binary driver and never even thinks about creating an opensource alternative, it will remain all there is.
Find me a good videocard, with high-quality TV-out, hardware MPEG1/2 playback, and open source drivers, and I won't buy from NVidia anymore. Unfortunately, all the alternatives I've found are worse, not better.
If you don't need VGA-out in addition to the things you mention, you should try the PVR-250/PVR-350 cards from Hauppage; their TV-out quality it better than the TV-out from Nvidia cards. If you also want VGA-out you're indeed pretty much stuck with Nvidia, which is exactly why it's so important that we avoid being completely locked into the binary driver.
Slashdot Mirror
... under my tinfoil hat!
In a human language that has no possibility for redundancy (allows anything to be described in only one way) there wouldn't be space for steganography at all. Combined with the fact that most languages at least pay some attention to being efficient, it's no surprise that human language is terrible as a carrier for hidden data.
Let's call it an MP3 playing server :-)
Incidentally, it's steganography, not stenography, a common mistake. Stenography is a system for writing really fast...
In fact, when I first saw these random word lists the first thing I thought of was hidden communication, NOT defeating filters...
Btw, Usenet also makes a great medium for this since it's possibly even harder to discover the intended recipient (especially when you encode the message in some pictures posted to an alt.binaries.erotica group...).
It doesn't really need a videocard either. Or a harddisk, if you already have a server for other purposes that can provide an NFS root filesystem. My MP3 (or rather OGG) server is a Pentium 75 with a fanless lightweigh PSU, an AWE 64 Gold soundcard, a network card and a floppy drive for the kernel (which I could replace by a boot ROM if I ever get to it). As a side note, the lower CPU requirement for OGG decoding (vs. MP3) really shows on this system (any background task causes MP3 playback to stutter, while OGG playback still goes fine).
Can anyone show me an easy-to-setup MP3 streamer for Linux?
I simply installed Debian Sarge with some useful player programs. I can't give you a complete HowTo, but once you've got the base system running it should be trivial to browse through the Debian "sound" section of programs and find whatever you need.
A google search for "steganography" yields a lot of useful documents on this.
In fact, I feel this should be the *first step*. There are huge amounts of lead in many other products, making this a relatively small improvement when viewing "the big picture". However, power requirements have skyrocketed since the computer became a common household device. Laptop tech shows it's possible, why not apply that in desktops as well?
- I cannot be sure about that, for I have no idea who you are, now can I?
Nope.- Incidentally, if you'd like to know exactly when and why your good friend GooberToo made me his foe,
Sorry, not interested. I made him a friend because he also seems capable of useful & insightful comments; which I wouldn't want to miss; even though might have trouble remaining calm in flame-like threads.- It bothers me because I would prefer a constructive critic.
Ofcourse, so would most people. And I like a good discussion as much as the next person (probably more). But sometimes I simply don't have the time to reply to everything I don't agree with in all discussions I follow.- Any privacy of those lists would be impossible with "foes of friends" and "friends of friends"
Yes, ofcourse. It would make those systems impossible. I still think "privatizing" the lists might be good.- I cannot agree. It is like using postcards most of the time and envelopes only when there is something sensitive in your letter. It would draw attention only because of being used less frequently.
My "system" relies on using open communication most of the time, and undetectable communication when needed. The closed envelope analogy would only be correct if I simply encrypted some of my e-mails, when in fact, I make sure to hide the presence & path of a specific message entirely. It will definitely fool automated systems, and for real persons, tracing my "hidden" communication will quickly become a dead end. This is quite possible using steganography or the networking algorithms employed by Freenet.Browsing at +5 -- check.
+3 bonus to funny -- check.
-3 penalty to everything else -- check.
Let the comments roll in!
... only outlaws will have pr0n.
But the absence of, say, a working television suddenly seemed to turn the most dull couch potato into an inventive and outgoing person.
I still wouldn't think of completely giving up all the technology around me. But I'm also pretty sure that not all technology we use today makes us better off.
But as I said elsewhere in this thread, the fact that I experienced very few of the possible negative sides to the blackout was mostly luck. Still, it allowed me to witness a rather rare situation, since in this case, most people made do quite succesfully during that short blackout. Given some preparation and the same weather conditions, I think going through a far longer blackout without serious problems would be quite feasible.
- Seriously, as a society we consume the amount of electricity we do because we demand the standard of living that we do.
Sure, but that's no reason to ignore opportunities to reduce energy consumption.But if your town had never even had power; you would have been relying on other means of survival anyway. People have lived without power in extreme environments for ages.
And remember that the gas pipe lines are there & being used anyway, might as well move as much as possible into a single transport system to reduce overhead. (the alternative to use electricity instead of gas is far less attractive since electric heating is very inefficient)
On the other hand, the system might indeed be utterly useless; not everything they say on TV is true ;-)
I get the feeling that in the more "doubtful" cases, it's not so much that the technology in itself causes the problems (such as stress), but rather the fact that people are given the idea that to be cool, they have to use the newest tech as soon as it's available, rather than take their time to get accustomed to each technological "step" before advancing to the next.
- What would the alternatives be? Household generated power? As long as your electricity is generated centrally (regardless of the source), you will always need powerlines. And as long as the population keeps growing, the demand for more power will require more powerlines.
Interestingly, I just heard something interesting on a local news bulletin about a gas-operated (real gas, not the American word for fuel) electricity generator that could be placed in every house that has a gas pipe connection.Should be more efficient since it removes the energy loss due to power lines.
My experience: Absolutely fantastic. People who are normally spending all day watching TV or behind a computer (yes, I'm guilty too) sat outside reading books, playing games, enjoying the sunset or taking a stroll through the forest.
And the sight of an entire town lit by nothing but moonlight is not something I'll easily forget. I'm probably sounding like a whiny bastard, but that event made me seriously doubt whether all the technology we have today have actually made life better as we like to tell ourselves.
- As much as I'd love to believe otherwise, it suerly looks more like something personal.
Since I don't know you personally, that would be impossible.- I don't know what are you talking about.
Very well, it was just my impression. The only alternative I see is that someone is playing some boring practical joke on you.- If I ever stop making sense again, please tell me about it before calling me a foe in front of the whole Slashdot community.
The different lists are personal; and although they are visible to everyone, I can't imagine people regularly look at other people's friends/foes list. They are really only useful to others in the form of friend of friends/foes of friends lists (as a sidenote, you still apear on my foes of friends list since mr. GooberToo has made you a foe).But still, I don't really see what bothers you about all this. I have four freaks vs. only one fan and couldn't care less. Like moderation, it's not intended to judge you personally; it's only a system to improve people's Slashdot Experience (tm) by letting them customize things a bit. But to be honest, I think it might have been better if the friends/foes lists had been entirely private.
- Your felling is not as paranoid as it might seem. I actually made some experiments and their advertisements seem to be correlated with the keywords I use in my searches. That's why I routinely change cookies and User-Agent headers, using lots of automated searches with random keywords. It seems to work so far. But I often think that maybe if I wasn't using anonymous proxies, they could track my IP. I don't know.
Yes, I'm quite sure they can. I usually just accept this and happily let them track me. However when I decide I want to keep a piece of information private I switch to using strong encryption, steganography and related technologies (Freenet and such). I figure that having a clearly recognizable and easily traceable online identity that I use most of the time draws less attention than always trying to avoid tracing and being suspiciously absent from statistics...My two latest HDD features occured during periods of intensive random seeking so I'm quite willing to believe this might have a significant effect on HDD life. Even if it's not enough statistical evidence, common sense also tells me things wear faster when they're doing heavy work...
But it would still be an interesting experiment: operate a number of identical servers and let them do something that generates a lot of small random reads (such as a simulating a heavy duty Usenet server). Run half of them on 2.4 and half on 2.6, and see if drives fail significantly quicker in the 2.4 systems. Anyone got some spare HDD's left? ;-)
As discussed previously.
Luckily, it seems like that the people who scream the loudest about implementing DRM everywhere generally seem have a rather weak link to The Real World (tm)...
The essential difference is whether or not an entity (google, me, ...) abuses its power (in the form of google: lots of statistical information, in the form of me: none) over the subject.
- As I said, there's no way a similar restriction can exist in the linux world, because the players are open-source.
First off, similar restrictions could always be implemented using watermarking technology. Though that's not the point here. The point is that if a manufacturer releases closed-source drivers, any restrictions it can implement are very hard for the user to work around.- My point was that having open source drivers on a closed-source OS will only just begin to solve the problems. Chances are, in a near-future version of windows, it won't accept unsigned drivers anyhow, so open source drivers won't even be an option. Hence the point that just drivers won't solve the problem. Windows IS the problem.
Okay, agreed. Seems like I misunderstood your first post.-
Don't bother calling me ignorant just because you don't understand something.
You're right, that was a slight overreaction on my part. Sorry.- First off, I don't believe the driver is open-source at all. You are still stuck with using some firmware you need to take from the Hauppauge driver CD.
The Windows driver is ofcourse closed-source, but the Linux driver is not. Also, firmware != driver; in fact most devices (even those with perfect Linux support) use closed-source firmware. This is no real problem as long as the protocol for the driver to interface with the firmware is known.- Second, and perhaps more important, I want MPEG1/2 playback, but I don't want to be limited to only that. I also want to be able to display the desktop, and videos in other formats (MPEG4, Theora/VP3, Quicktime, etc), and I don't believe the PVR-350 supports that. (The newer 250s don't have TV-out, I have one myself)
The PVR-350 output can be used as output from the MPEG decoder as well as framebuffer, as explained in this Howto. (disclaimer: I haven't tried this myself since I don't have the card (yet), but the Howto clearly implies it is possible)- This is one of the things I hate most... Complaining about problems without solutions. If you think the binary-only driver is bad, why aren't you doing something about it?
If I understand it correctly, you think only developers, not users, are allowed to discuss this subject? I strongly disagree. Many (most?) open source projects rely on users to report problems. Users expressing a preference for something are usually a strong motivation for developers, and I don't see how this would be different.- Who cares? This pretty much only applies to Windows drivers, so you're already willing to put up with that,
The official Nvidia Linux driver is also closed-source. The fact that they haven't tried to implement weird restrictions in this doesn't say they won't.- having an open-source driver isn't going to magically change everything.
Why not? Probably not magically, but if the driver source had been freely available this wouldn't have occured since someone would have hacked the Macrovision code out in a fraction of the time it took to hack Nvidia to hack it in. Are you trolling or just plain ignorant?- Besides, this is just typical
/. over reaction. Without binary-only video-players, there's nothing to tell the driver it should be macrovision paranoid in the first place.
I'm not sure I get your point here. You state yourself that without binary-only drivers the driver wouldn't be macrovision paranoid. Then why is my post "typical- I'll be the first to admit that it sucks to have binary drivers, but I think it sucks even more to buy hardware that you can't use for a couple years until a driver comes out.
Ofcourse it's better than nothing. I never said otherwise. I was merely pointing out that this article is confirming exactly what opensource proponents have been warning about all along. If everyone simply uses the binary driver and never even thinks about creating an opensource alternative, it will remain all there is.- Find me a good videocard, with high-quality TV-out, hardware MPEG1/2 playback, and open source drivers, and I won't buy from NVidia anymore. Unfortunately, all the alternatives I've found are worse, not better.
If you don't need VGA-out in addition to the things you mention, you should try the PVR-250/PVR-350 cards from Hauppage; their TV-out quality it better than the TV-out from Nvidia cards. If you also want VGA-out you're indeed pretty much stuck with Nvidia, which is exactly why it's so important that we avoid being completely locked into the binary driver.