Your problem is that you want to get network access to all parts of your home with a minimum of fuss, ideally wireless.
The walls prevent a single wireless access point from working throughout your home.
Your implicit question is: How can I, without investing in more equipment, get wireless throughout the home?
The answer is: You cannot.
Solutions:
1) Place multiple access points throughout the home. Honestly, you can get one for $19 now - why are you so worried about it?
2) Wire passive repeaters throughout the home. Get two 802.11 antennas, put one on each side of the various offending walls, and connect them with their very short cables through the wall. Not great, causes other small problems, but recent radios and APs can sort those out with some loss in quality and speed.
3) Use APs with two antennas, and mount an antenna on each side of one wall. Means you don't have to have an AP for each section, one AP can serve two sections.
4) Use wireless bridges and repeaters - again, one antenna on each side of a wall.
5) Use an amplifier with your AP. DLink, Linksys, etc - they all have amps. Mount the AP and both antennas in the attic. Spread the antennas out, 20-30 feet apart to get the largest cover area.
6) Use a powerline to wireless adaptor, and place them all over the place. Should be able to buy these very cheaply online now.
There are many other solutions, but these are the ones that come to mind readily and should be easily implementable by even the most technophobic individual.
Hopefully you know how to repair cracks and holes in plaster.
When you are a salaried employee, in most states, then you do not 'clock in' and 'clock out' of work - you may be thinking about a work problem in the shower, and the company still benefits.
This has the implication that any work you do within the scope of your job description, possibly within the scope of the employer's products or internal services, and possibly anything you think about at all, belongs to the company.
This is what a salaried employee is in most states.
I've talked to some people who work as consultants on the side in addition to full time employment. Most make certian their employer is aware of their side business. One provided a CD of all the generic code and libraries they'd developed over the years, and wrote on the contract that anything developed before employment did not belong to the company. It takes some time to go through this sort of process, and some employers may balk at it, but it may be the only way to overcome this 'problem'.
You seem to have placed heavy focus on my mis-statement, where I should have written,"Many prox card systems are simple RFID." and then pointed out that a huge variety of generic RFID read only or read/write systems could be read and spoofed by this simple system.
RFID is not just a general concept, but a relatively narrow field of wireless communications. I would take issue with your claim that a cell phone and GPS unit could be considered RFID, though I'm sure many companies will purposefully mis state that something is RFID when it is not, such as your example.
RFID does come in many 'flavors' and capabilities as you have otherwise well summarized.
Regardless of the definiton of RFID, my primary point was that most cheap tags are read only or read write with no intelligence, and that they can easily be copied and spoofed. My hope is that manufacturers will not choose cheap where security should be used. If they use better challenge response tags then they will become cheap and there won't be a reason or need to use the easily spoofed tags.
RFID is ther same technology as proximity cards used to access many buildings.
And here - also cached at - is a proximity/rfid copier and spoofer. It can read cards passively (while another reader interrogates them) or actively, and can later pretend it's the card when interrogated.
Of course, this can be defeated by a challenge/response system, which is available, but lower costs will probably dictate the cheaper ID only rfid.
I've known it can be done, and have had a desire to do it, but this guy already did. Now if this becomes common enough then the manufacturers will be forced to use more secure RFID mechanisms.
Unless the fastener costs less than a few cents, they are only going to have very specialized applications. Further, with a vibrant aftermarket repair and service industry it will be impossible, legally, to prevent people from understanding how to actuate these fasteners.
Of course, a hacker might also have fun and disassemble the neighbours car. While driving. On the freeway.
It'll be nice for the one or two niche applications that it was meant for. Beyond that, it's nothing more than a curiosity.
Well, what do you really think about this? Sure, our culture seems to have an aversion to blood, but if you could create meat without having a living animal (loosely defining living here) then are you saying we should still stick with live cows?
I agree with titus that it is important to know where your food comes from - it seems like it would be an instinctual desire.
But it does bring to mind the magic cow: Riff: Torg, you traded our magic beans for a cow? Torg: It's a magic cow! Torg: (whispered) It's full of steaks! Riff: Whoa!
Us poor sods in the USA have to wait, what, another 70 years or so? Who knows anymore. It's safer and easier to assume we can't do something than it is to assume that we can...
Also keep in mind that a cheap 'hot-swap' alternative is an external firewire drive. Plug it in while the system is active and make some commands to find it and replicate to it. Then you don't have to shut down as much. Perhaps even consider putting in several firewire cards and having a completely external raid array - hotswap problem solved.
There are many manufacturers that make raid cases and rack mounts to hold many hard drives. They are usually meant for companies that want a complete supported solution, though, and not available barebones to hobbyists. They contain everything, including the drives, management software, etc.
You can find RAID cards that will support up to 8 drives, but few that will support more, and often those that support multiple drives cost more than the drives themselves.
Your best bet, I suspect, is to make a dedicated RAID server. Buy a tower case, and mount the hard drives in there - there are brackets that fit three 3.5" drives into a full height 5 1/4" slot, and a full tower should be able to fit 3-4 of these for a total of 9-12 removable drives. Then use your favorite OS that has software RAID and add a gigabyte ethernet card for a direct connection to the computer you will primarily access this array from, and another for a network connection. You'll need to add additional IDE adaptors, but they are inexpensive. I'd shy away from using raid cards or onboard raid, and then raiding the resulting fewer drives in software - too many layers to keep track of. This is not meant for hot swap usage, so plan in extra unused drives so you only have to shut the machine down once a year to replace 1-3 drives.
Be sure to use a beefy power supply, and hard drive holders with fans built in - you need lots of power and lots of cooling, even when the array is idle.
I recommend OpenBSD, mainly because you know that only the things you install yourself are active. If not, then go to freebsd-stable.
It is already a war, but the first shots in this type of war are always to seek public support and 'education.' Apple has fired the first shot by calling Real's tactics Unethical, Hacker-like, and possibly Illegal. This in attempt to get the public to believe that they are the 'good guy' and were wronged.
Whether they are right or not is immaterial - if they can engender public support against Real the battle is half won - Real would simply settle.
If they can't engender enough support then a court battle would simply make them out to be the bad guys.
Thus the first shot is always - always - always PR.
The point Apple is trying to make is that they admire and appreciate innovation, so long as it is their own
Let me modify that a bit:
The point Apple is trying to make is that they admire and appreciate innovation, so long as no one else profits off their innovation
See, there are all sorts of single person or small group projects to modify Apple hardware to do all sorts of useful things. At worst, Apple doesn't care - at best they give these groups a little nod. Either way Apple profits because it's the Geeks and Hackers who buy hardware first, and keeping this group happy and sated means more money for Apple in a variety of ways.
However, when a company does the same thing then Apple responds - usually precisely and quickly. Real is trying to eat Apple's lunch (iTunes) to their way of thinking. And if successful, whether through lower pricing, higher quality, larger selection, etc then Apple loses out big time.
Apple doesn't want to be an IBM making hardware, a Microsoft making software, or a Google selling a service. Apple wants to be the complete market to their customers along the continuum. They want to be the ultimate service industry - $1000 a year subscriptions to the "Apple Experience".
Load another OS on their computer as a hobbyist and they smile and look the other way (carefully to catch if you turn into something they can't control). Start a company which replaces the hardware underneath their OS and suddenly you've got the proverbial 800lb gorilla at your back door.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that these corporations are "good" or "bad" or "indifferent". They are corporations, and Apple can be as bad or good as google or microsoft, IBM or Oracle, etc. They have slightly different methods and plans, but they all want to maximize their pie and will do what it takes to get the biggest share of essentially the same market.
In court, if needed. Until then a person is innocent until presumed guilty.
You are perpetuating the belief that humans will take advantage of one another given any little opportunity to do so with little chance of being caught or minimal consequences if caught.
If this is true of humanity in general, then I must be an exception. Yet I know many, many trustworthy people who also act according to the laws of the land.
Why are you forcing your cynical view of the world on us? Must you treat us like bad people just because there are bad people in the world?
One might say that some overly broad laws prevent true freedom - but if everyone followed the laws then there would be no need for DRM, and I would say that the outcome is even more free than the situation which you paint.
However, I still code protect my microcontrollers when I send them out in the world. There is a certian reality and practicality to what you are saying - but I don't believe it's nearly as prevalent as you assume. It's more likely that 99% of the piracy is only performed by 1% of the population. Or maybe I'm optimistic...
And how do you sell or give away an eBook? What physical property is transfered?
The same way software is resold - All backups and other copies are destroyed except those transferred to the new owner. Of course, many EULAs have clauses preventing first sales, but I don't think this has ever been successfully challenged in court... yet. EBook providers hope to overcome this issue by making it impossible via DRM.
The same argument asserting that one can't "steal" music renders other such transactions impossible as well.
Depends on your definition of steal. Here on slashdot it means to deprive someone else of their property, but conventionally it means to unlawfully take something which you have no right to, regardless of the damage to the entity you stole it from.
In Mozilla (and, I assume, Firefox) you can use CTRL-U to get the source of a window that has no toolbar or menu.
Poke around in the source for the file you want (whether it's swf, mov, avi, etc).
I'm sure someone has a fullscreen swf player, but I simply use the fullscreen mode of my browser, whcih still leaves some toolbar items at the top of the screen.
the space telescope has produced far more useful information than the space station ever will.
This depends completely on your point of view. I suppose if you are only interested in knowing that a certian sun has a certian K, or counting galaxies, studying gravity bend, etc then the telescope has produced a ton of useful data and science.
Perhaps you discount the hundreds of experiments run on the space station because you can't look at a pretty picture.
Regardless, I'd be willing to bet that more papers on a wider variety of topics have been written from data gained by experiments on the space station than on data gained from the Hubble.
Besides, you're really comparing apples and oranges. The science gained from the hubble is nice, but you can't perform even a miniscule amount of the experiments on the hubble that can be performed on the station. Likewise, it would be stupid to bolt a super telescope to the space station - everyone hold your breath and don't move while we image galaxy X's sun again in a different band...
There are stores that sell both gorceries and hardware, but the selection sucks, the prices are high, or the service is poor. It's arguably better to have two different stores for two different purposes rather than having only one which serves both purposes, or completely miss out on the products of the second completely.
It's easy (bu incorrect) to discount the space station because you do not see its benefit.
I stopped using it when it went non-free...
on
Komodo 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I stopped using it when they stopped updating the free (as in beer) version - which appears to have completely left their website now. It simply wasn't worth the money with so many other free alternatives.
It's nice to see tools for open source software being updated, but this is almost a commercial - why is a komodo update important enough for a slashdot post when no other commercial IDE gets articles? Is it because it supports Perl, and slashdot code maintainers like it? Recall that it uses the Mozilla engine as its core...
If it was simply trying to bring google down, it would randomize the search requests so it wasn't so easy to filter searches containing "email" and a period.
So it looks like Google is primarily stopping searches that are typical of this virus, but they may also have automated filtering that stops searches which are too many from IPs and netblocks. This part is probably something they implemented long ago.
But google is going slower for me today, and sometimes it stalls (some of the frontend machines dropping out a bit more frequently than usual?)
Slashdot Mirror
He may have more serious problems with PETA.
From disclaimer:
Several animals were maimed during the production of this website, including this hamster. [picture]
-Adam
Your problem is that you want to get network access to all parts of your home with a minimum of fuss, ideally wireless.
The walls prevent a single wireless access point from working throughout your home.
Your implicit question is: How can I, without investing in more equipment, get wireless throughout the home?
The answer is: You cannot.
Solutions:
1) Place multiple access points throughout the home. Honestly, you can get one for $19 now - why are you so worried about it?
2) Wire passive repeaters throughout the home. Get two 802.11 antennas, put one on each side of the various offending walls, and connect them with their very short cables through the wall. Not great, causes other small problems, but recent radios and APs can sort those out with some loss in quality and speed.
3) Use APs with two antennas, and mount an antenna on each side of one wall. Means you don't have to have an AP for each section, one AP can serve two sections.
4) Use wireless bridges and repeaters - again, one antenna on each side of a wall.
5) Use an amplifier with your AP. DLink, Linksys, etc - they all have amps. Mount the AP and both antennas in the attic. Spread the antennas out, 20-30 feet apart to get the largest cover area.
6) Use a powerline to wireless adaptor, and place them all over the place. Should be able to buy these very cheaply online now.
There are many other solutions, but these are the ones that come to mind readily and should be easily implementable by even the most technophobic individual.
Hopefully you know how to repair cracks and holes in plaster.
-Adam
Why is it a company can own my ideas...?
When you are a salaried employee, in most states, then you do not 'clock in' and 'clock out' of work - you may be thinking about a work problem in the shower, and the company still benefits.
This has the implication that any work you do within the scope of your job description, possibly within the scope of the employer's products or internal services, and possibly anything you think about at all, belongs to the company.
This is what a salaried employee is in most states.
I've talked to some people who work as consultants on the side in addition to full time employment. Most make certian their employer is aware of their side business. One provided a CD of all the generic code and libraries they'd developed over the years, and wrote on the contract that anything developed before employment did not belong to the company. It takes some time to go through this sort of process, and some employers may balk at it, but it may be the only way to overcome this 'problem'.
-Adam
You seem to have placed heavy focus on my mis-statement, where I should have written,"Many prox card systems are simple RFID." and then pointed out that a huge variety of generic RFID read only or read/write systems could be read and spoofed by this simple system.
RFID is not just a general concept, but a relatively narrow field of wireless communications. I would take issue with your claim that a cell phone and GPS unit could be considered RFID, though I'm sure many companies will purposefully mis state that something is RFID when it is not, such as your example.
RFID does come in many 'flavors' and capabilities as you have otherwise well summarized.
Regardless of the definiton of RFID, my primary point was that most cheap tags are read only or read write with no intelligence, and that they can easily be copied and spoofed. My hope is that manufacturers will not choose cheap where security should be used. If they use better challenge response tags then they will become cheap and there won't be a reason or need to use the easily spoofed tags.
-Adam
RFID is ther same technology as proximity cards used to access many buildings.
And here - also cached at - is a proximity/rfid copier and spoofer. It can read cards passively (while another reader interrogates them) or actively, and can later pretend it's the card when interrogated.
Of course, this can be defeated by a challenge/response system, which is available, but lower costs will probably dictate the cheaper ID only rfid.
I've known it can be done, and have had a desire to do it, but this guy already did. Now if this becomes common enough then the manufacturers will be forced to use more secure RFID mechanisms.
-Adam
That way, they won't have to worry about alignment problems and such!
Yeah, instead they can worry about interference and remote listening.
-Adam
Unless the fastener costs less than a few cents, they are only going to have very specialized applications. Further, with a vibrant aftermarket repair and service industry it will be impossible, legally, to prevent people from understanding how to actuate these fasteners.
Of course, a hacker might also have fun and disassemble the neighbours car. While driving. On the freeway.
It'll be nice for the one or two niche applications that it was meant for. Beyond that, it's nothing more than a curiosity.
-Adam
Well, what do you really think about this? Sure, our culture seems to have an aversion to blood, but if you could create meat without having a living animal (loosely defining living here) then are you saying we should still stick with live cows?
I agree with titus that it is important to know where your food comes from - it seems like it would be an instinctual desire.
But it does bring to mind the magic cow:
Riff: Torg, you traded our magic beans for a cow?
Torg: It's a magic cow!
Torg: (whispered) It's full of steaks!
Riff: Whoa!
-Adam
Our australian friends can read Orwell's 1984 at Project Gutenberg of Australia.
Us poor sods in the USA have to wait, what, another 70 years or so? Who knows anymore. It's safer and easier to assume we can't do something than it is to assume that we can...
-Adam
A direct link to the windows media 500k.
-Adam
Also keep in mind that a cheap 'hot-swap' alternative is an external firewire drive. Plug it in while the system is active and make some commands to find it and replicate to it. Then you don't have to shut down as much. Perhaps even consider putting in several firewire cards and having a completely external raid array - hotswap problem solved.
-Adam
There are many manufacturers that make raid cases and rack mounts to hold many hard drives. They are usually meant for companies that want a complete supported solution, though, and not available barebones to hobbyists. They contain everything, including the drives, management software, etc.
You can find RAID cards that will support up to 8 drives, but few that will support more, and often those that support multiple drives cost more than the drives themselves.
Your best bet, I suspect, is to make a dedicated RAID server. Buy a tower case, and mount the hard drives in there - there are brackets that fit three 3.5" drives into a full height 5 1/4" slot, and a full tower should be able to fit 3-4 of these for a total of 9-12 removable drives. Then use your favorite OS that has software RAID and add a gigabyte ethernet card for a direct connection to the computer you will primarily access this array from, and another for a network connection. You'll need to add additional IDE adaptors, but they are inexpensive. I'd shy away from using raid cards or onboard raid, and then raiding the resulting fewer drives in software - too many layers to keep track of. This is not meant for hot swap usage, so plan in extra unused drives so you only have to shut the machine down once a year to replace 1-3 drives.
Be sure to use a beefy power supply, and hard drive holders with fans built in - you need lots of power and lots of cooling, even when the array is idle.
I recommend OpenBSD, mainly because you know that only the things you install yourself are active. If not, then go to freebsd-stable.
-Adam
That way, it'll just become a compatibility war
It is already a war, but the first shots in this type of war are always to seek public support and 'education.' Apple has fired the first shot by calling Real's tactics Unethical, Hacker-like, and possibly Illegal. This in attempt to get the public to believe that they are the 'good guy' and were wronged.
Whether they are right or not is immaterial - if they can engender public support against Real the battle is half won - Real would simply settle.
If they can't engender enough support then a court battle would simply make them out to be the bad guys.
Thus the first shot is always - always - always PR.
-Adam
The point Apple is trying to make is that they admire and appreciate innovation, so long as it is their own
Let me modify that a bit:
The point Apple is trying to make is that they admire and appreciate innovation, so long as no one else profits off their innovation
See, there are all sorts of single person or small group projects to modify Apple hardware to do all sorts of useful things. At worst, Apple doesn't care - at best they give these groups a little nod. Either way Apple profits because it's the Geeks and Hackers who buy hardware first, and keeping this group happy and sated means more money for Apple in a variety of ways.
However, when a company does the same thing then Apple responds - usually precisely and quickly. Real is trying to eat Apple's lunch (iTunes) to their way of thinking. And if successful, whether through lower pricing, higher quality, larger selection, etc then Apple loses out big time.
Apple doesn't want to be an IBM making hardware, a Microsoft making software, or a Google selling a service. Apple wants to be the complete market to their customers along the continuum. They want to be the ultimate service industry - $1000 a year subscriptions to the "Apple Experience".
Load another OS on their computer as a hobbyist and they smile and look the other way (carefully to catch if you turn into something they can't control). Start a company which replaces the hardware underneath their OS and suddenly you've got the proverbial 800lb gorilla at your back door.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that these corporations are "good" or "bad" or "indifferent". They are corporations, and Apple can be as bad or good as google or microsoft, IBM or Oracle, etc. They have slightly different methods and plans, but they all want to maximize their pie and will do what it takes to get the biggest share of essentially the same market.
-Adam
And how does one prove that's been done?
In court, if needed. Until then a person is innocent until presumed guilty.
You are perpetuating the belief that humans will take advantage of one another given any little opportunity to do so with little chance of being caught or minimal consequences if caught.
If this is true of humanity in general, then I must be an exception. Yet I know many, many trustworthy people who also act according to the laws of the land.
Why are you forcing your cynical view of the world on us? Must you treat us like bad people just because there are bad people in the world?
One might say that some overly broad laws prevent true freedom - but if everyone followed the laws then there would be no need for DRM, and I would say that the outcome is even more free than the situation which you paint.
However, I still code protect my microcontrollers when I send them out in the world. There is a certian reality and practicality to what you are saying - but I don't believe it's nearly as prevalent as you assume. It's more likely that 99% of the piracy is only performed by 1% of the population. Or maybe I'm optimistic...
-Adam
And how do you sell or give away an eBook? What physical property is transfered?
The same way software is resold - All backups and other copies are destroyed except those transferred to the new owner. Of course, many EULAs have clauses preventing first sales, but I don't think this has ever been successfully challenged in court... yet. EBook providers hope to overcome this issue by making it impossible via DRM.
The same argument asserting that one can't "steal" music renders other such transactions impossible as well.
Depends on your definition of steal. Here on slashdot it means to deprive someone else of their property, but conventionally it means to unlawfully take something which you have no right to, regardless of the damage to the entity you stole it from.
-Adam
Link may be a bit flash heavy.
Link may be a bit flash heavy? That's like saying high fructose corn syrup may be a bit sweet!
4MB too big.
-Adam
In Mozilla (and, I assume, Firefox) you can use CTRL-U to get the source of a window that has no toolbar or menu.
Poke around in the source for the file you want (whether it's swf, mov, avi, etc).
I'm sure someone has a fullscreen swf player, but I simply use the fullscreen mode of my browser, whcih still leaves some toolbar items at the top of the screen.
-Adam
the space telescope has produced far more useful information than the space station ever will.
This depends completely on your point of view. I suppose if you are only interested in knowing that a certian sun has a certian K, or counting galaxies, studying gravity bend, etc then the telescope has produced a ton of useful data and science.
Perhaps you discount the hundreds of experiments run on the space station because you can't look at a pretty picture.
Regardless, I'd be willing to bet that more papers on a wider variety of topics have been written from data gained by experiments on the space station than on data gained from the Hubble.
Besides, you're really comparing apples and oranges. The science gained from the hubble is nice, but you can't perform even a miniscule amount of the experiments on the hubble that can be performed on the station. Likewise, it would be stupid to bolt a super telescope to the space station - everyone hold your breath and don't move while we image galaxy X's sun again in a different band...
There are stores that sell both gorceries and hardware, but the selection sucks, the prices are high, or the service is poor. It's arguably better to have two different stores for two different purposes rather than having only one which serves both purposes, or completely miss out on the products of the second completely.
It's easy (bu incorrect) to discount the space station because you do not see its benefit.
-Adam
Shockwave animation in question direct link.
I thought it was funny...
-Adam
I stopped using it when they stopped updating the free (as in beer) version - which appears to have completely left their website now. It simply wasn't worth the money with so many other free alternatives.
It's nice to see tools for open source software being updated, but this is almost a commercial - why is a komodo update important enough for a slashdot post when no other commercial IDE gets articles? Is it because it supports Perl, and slashdot code maintainers like it? Recall that it uses the Mozilla engine as its core...
-Adam
Seagate is clearly saying to its competitiors:
We uped our standards - now up yours!
-Adam
If it was simply trying to bring google down, it would randomize the search requests so it wasn't so easy to filter searches containing "email" and a period.
-Adam
It was a good poop, and I learned alot that day.
I hope you learned that plastic does absorb odors...
-Adam
Perhaps I'm simply 'located' better, but I can do regular google searches just fine.
But when I ask for "email slashdot.org" it returns a forbidden search page.
So it looks like Google is primarily stopping searches that are typical of this virus, but they may also have automated filtering that stops searches which are too many from IPs and netblocks. This part is probably something they implemented long ago.
But google is going slower for me today, and sometimes it stalls (some of the frontend machines dropping out a bit more frequently than usual?)
-Adam