My vote goes to the E61i as well; I also like the fact that it's got a huge battery compared to most other smartphones, and also that it's relatively thin, so it doesn't bulge in your pocket.
I've found out that filing a ticket on the company's public issue tracker (so that their other customers can see it, too) helps.
Also, writing a polite email which details exactly how they are breaking the GPL and which steps they should take to correct the issue, might help a lot. It's sometimes just simple misunderstanding of the GPL. Sometimes on the part of the author, sometimes on the part of the user - but in any case, the act of detailing the alleged breach of license will clarify the issue.
Of course, the rest of the world is still screwed, because Amazon sells their digital music to the US only. I think you can expect that this DRM-free thingy is temporary until either
a) Apple agrees to license FairPlay to everyone else, or b) WMA players gain market dominance (e.g through cell phones)
Except that you can use #2 with no crypto or bad crypto as well. Which is exactly what the epassports are doing. They have such bad keys that it is easy to brute-force crack them open in a couple of minutes. Most well-designed systems using the same standard have non-trivial keys, which makes them a lot more secure than the ICAO epassport standard.
The fun thing is that the moment the standard was created, everyone said that this is going to be a field day for the press when the first researcher figures out that the keys are so weak. The day has arrived:)
In reality the issue is blown out of proportion: the epassport is not that much of a privacy issue. Tourists can be spotted by a mile away by simply the way that they look and walk, and the smart tourist will leave the passport in the hotel safe anyway, carrying only a photocopy with him. You are in far more trouble if your passport gets stolen than if it gets copied: if you do not have your passport, dealing with any authorities in a strange country is going to be a problem, whereas if your passport gets copied, you still have the original.
Also, forging a passport is no easier than before - in fact, getting the digital and the physical passport data to match becomes a lot harder with the epassports. Reading something does not mean you can change it and write it back, as surely is well understood by anyone familiar with digital signatures.
NFC is many things (see http://nfc-forum.org/), but one of the things it does is that it enables your cell phone to masquerade a contactless credit card. A contactless credit card is pretty much the same as a regular credit card, except that instead of a magnetic stripe it is using a way more complicated (and secure) protocol to authenticate itself to a reader device.
NFC also allows your cell phone to be a reader/writer device, though if you do not have the correct software, keys, and authorization in place, you won't be able to read anyone else's credit cards (rather obviously). But you would be able to read RFID tags that have been placed around in the environment. Instead of worrying that the government is going to track the RFID tags placed on you, you could actually take them into good use for your own purposes (certain limitations apply: NFC works on a particular frequency, and not all RFID systems work on the same frequency.)
NFC also allows two NFC devices to communicate bi-directionally, so you can have a very short range radio communication between two cell phones, for example. Not for talking, obviously, but for no-nonsense data transfer. Bluetooth is great, but it suffers from long range - you'll have multiple devices in your read range which makes an UI necessary for device selection. With NFC you can just bring two devices close and have files transferred.
I personally think it's got a lot of good, old-fashioned hacking potential;-)
Yup. I did SW testing on the ENVISAT-1 satellite, and we had a 16-bit CPU with 64k of RAM for use (including code, data, heap and patch store). Code was in Ada (very tight code for a language with lots of features), and the OS was a custom operating system called "ASTRES", which took 1.5 kbytes (you could compile out all the features you didn't need). Did co-operative multi-tasking and memory management, which was pretty impressive...
Note: This was in 1997... I believe that 32-bit space-hardened CPUs didn't become available until after that time. And they're still a rare breed. The more transistors you have, the more likely it is that one of them develops a fatal flaw...
Um. If you take a closer look at the proposed law, you will see that it takes quite a lot to be qualified as a "web publication". USENET and any private message board maintained by an individual are not within the purpose or reach of this law. However, the definition of a "web publication" is faulty within the proposed law, and that should be re-examined before it actually becomes official.
What they are trying to do is to apply the same kind of rules to web-based publications as to print publication: if you are a company that publishes also on the internet, AND you allow people to discuss within your web page, you should keep track of what they say and apply some sort of filtering - much like what the current opinion sections in the newspapers are like.
Especially anonymous commenting allows all sorts of crap, personal abuse, etc. to appear on those sites, since not everyone has a slashdot-like moderation system.
It's difficult to prove that you actually were in possession of the said cell phone (unless you of course call it: "Hey sir, you are speeding, please slow down.":-)
But on the other hand, the whole discussion about how it would make speeding more difficult is a bit absurd. The speed limits were put in place for a purpose, and violating them is an offense. Nobody is objecting to the use of radars - so why would using a cell-phone based solution any different? All you really need is information that "someone is speeding" and his approximate location, and the police could take it from there... Automatic systems would however be open for all kinds of abuse:-)
The average number of people in a car is quite predictable, and they're interested only in the relative density of cell phones and their average speed, which helps in traffic planning.
A bigger problem is that they cannot determine the type of the vehicles from the cell phone signatures, and thus they have to combine this with the old sensors-under-the-road counting technique, which can give a good estimate of the vehicle size as well. A sudden insurge of trucks on the highways is much more important information than the fact that you are travelling with a friend. Of course, since the relative location error available from GSM cell phones is about 100 metres or so, it is unlikely that you could say who is riding in which vehicle.
I wonder how much of the observed decline in sales of CDs and DVDs and other such media is not due to piracy, but simply the fact that it is now quite simple to exchange old records via eBay and similar places? I know also of DVD swapping circles, where you essentially buy one DVD with another DVD, you both go and watch them, and trade on. Those sales and "sales" are never recorded by recording companies. And they're almost certainly more common now than what they were a few years ago...
I am only in my second year of computer science, so I don't know a lot about these things.
Why don't you go and talk to your professor, then? At least someone from the CompSci faculty should be able to help you. If not, then you're probably studying at the wrong university:-).
Someone modded the parent up as funny, but having played Quake on a 3 metres by 3 metres screen, from about 1.5m distance, I can assure you that the impact is far greater than from a normal TV screen. You can get nauseous really fast, especially if the room is darkened and all you have is this pixel-mass moving around, telling your brain that you're really moving even when your ear tells your brain that you're not...:-)
(Really, this is the reason why I try to sign as few NDAs as possible nowadays. Sooner or later you come to a situation where you would know how to efficiently solve a problem, but you can't do it because of an NDA. And that is incredibly frustrating - knowing that you could do better, or different, but you cannot because you're afraid of breaking an NDA.)
Here's my situation: I have a dual-booting Linux/Win98 machine at home, a Win98 laptop, a Linux server sitting in some network in a galaxy far, far away; and a bunch of other computers around the world.
At one point, managing all my data (I would change a bit here, and a bit there, then try to copy and synchronize by hand) was manageable, but I got real tired of it real fast. I considered putting together a CVS server, and then synchronizing that way, but it's really overkill and not a very user-friendly solution anyway.
Enter Unison. Now I just have a few directories designated as shared, and they get synchronized by Unison automatically. At home, my data is on a FAT partition, which is accessible to both Linux and Win98.
The good thing about this is that since I synchronize with the laptop when I'm connected, I get to use my data even when I'm on the move - not so with NFS. And I get free backups as well - I do have roughly 2Gigs of data, which would be a hassle to backup any other way. Besides, if I took tape backups, I would have to manually carry them off-site in case of a fire; now Unison takes care of backups to and from my remote machines.
...that the USPTO is not responsible for the patents it has granted. If they were responsible, then someone could sue them for issuing a bad patent. That would certainly get their attention.
Hey, you issued those guys a bad patent, causing our company to go through a very expensive legal process. We are suing you for $25M damages and legal fees that we wouldn't have suffered if you hadn't screwed up.
Actually, something survived: StrongARM. Rumour has it that this is what Compaq was originally after, since they realized the value of embedded computers and the fact that there are much more embedded processors being sold yearly than desktop systems.
Compaq had StrongARM for a while, then sold it off to Intel (who were probably VERY happy, since they had nothing that could really compete with StrongARM in the low end). Note, however, that Compaq still uses ARM chips in all their iPaqs... My guess is that they have a really nice deal with Intel about them:-).
150.000, that is roughly, what, $120,000? Yeah, we use a comma to separate decimals, and a dot to separate thousands - sometimes you get confused when writing English:-).
Note that the price actually gets spread out throughout all your life. If you started now, you'd need only about $5000 every year to buy the necessary hard drives. And considering the speed at which prices have been going down per Megabyte, it is likely that the original estimate of $120,000 is the upper bound, and the REAL price is a lot lower.
According to this paper, the entire human life takes roughly a petabyte of storage.
Using the current prices, this amounts to roughly 150.000. It's not that impossible to store your entire life on a single computer anymore. These guys show that such a thing can be built.
SECURITY SYSTEM STANDARDS. -- In achieving the goals of setting open security standards that will provide effective security for copyrighted works, the security system standards shall ensure, to the extent practicable, that --
...
(2) any software portion of such standards is based on open source code.
Wouldn't this make DVDs illegal?:-)
But seriously - if there is something good about this bill, this is it.
Slashdot Mirror
My vote goes to the E61i as well; I also like the fact that it's got a huge battery compared to most other smartphones, and also that it's relatively thin, so it doesn't bulge in your pocket.
I've found out that filing a ticket on the company's public issue tracker (so that their other customers can see it, too) helps.
Also, writing a polite email which details exactly how they are breaking the GPL and which steps they should take to correct the issue, might help a lot. It's sometimes just simple misunderstanding of the GPL. Sometimes on the part of the author, sometimes on the part of the user - but in any case, the act of detailing the alleged breach of license will clarify the issue.
Of course, the rest of the world is still screwed, because Amazon sells their digital music to the US only. I think you can expect that this DRM-free thingy is temporary until either
a) Apple agrees to license FairPlay to everyone else, or
b) WMA players gain market dominance (e.g through cell phones)
Check out Niceplayer. VLC on OSX is quite bad, I admit, but Niceplayer is pretty, well, nice.
Bravo!
Except that you can use #2 with no crypto or bad crypto as well. Which is exactly what the epassports are doing. They have such bad keys that it is easy to brute-force crack them open in a couple of minutes. Most well-designed systems using the same standard have non-trivial keys, which makes them a lot more secure than the ICAO epassport standard.
:)
The fun thing is that the moment the standard was created, everyone said that this is going to be a field day for the press when the first researcher figures out that the keys are so weak. The day has arrived
In reality the issue is blown out of proportion: the epassport is not that much of a privacy issue. Tourists can be spotted by a mile away by simply the way that they look and walk, and the smart tourist will leave the passport in the hotel safe anyway, carrying only a photocopy with him. You are in far more trouble if your passport gets stolen than if it gets copied: if you do not have your passport, dealing with any authorities in a strange country is going to be a problem, whereas if your passport gets copied, you still have the original.
Also, forging a passport is no easier than before - in fact, getting the digital and the physical passport data to match becomes a lot harder with the epassports. Reading something does not mean you can change it and write it back, as surely is well understood by anyone familiar with digital signatures.
NFC is many things (see http://nfc-forum.org/), but one of the things it does is that it enables your cell phone to masquerade a contactless credit card. A contactless credit card is pretty much the same as a regular credit card, except that instead of a magnetic stripe it is using a way more complicated (and secure) protocol to authenticate itself to a reader device.
;-)
NFC also allows your cell phone to be a reader/writer device, though if you do not have the correct software, keys, and authorization in place, you won't be able to read anyone else's credit cards (rather obviously). But you would be able to read RFID tags that have been placed around in the environment. Instead of worrying that the government is going to track the RFID tags placed on you, you could actually take them into good use for your own purposes (certain limitations apply: NFC works on a particular frequency, and not all RFID systems work on the same frequency.)
NFC also allows two NFC devices to communicate bi-directionally, so you can have a very short range radio communication between two cell phones, for example. Not for talking, obviously, but for no-nonsense data transfer. Bluetooth is great, but it suffers from long range - you'll have multiple devices in your read range which makes an UI necessary for device selection. With NFC you can just bring two devices close and have files transferred.
I personally think it's got a lot of good, old-fashioned hacking potential
Now that explains why that guy was asking a few months back about "nuclear vessels". *slaps forehead*
Yup. I did SW testing on the ENVISAT-1 satellite, and we had a 16-bit CPU with 64k of RAM for use (including code, data, heap and patch store). Code was in Ada (very tight code for a language with lots of features), and the OS was a custom operating system called "ASTRES", which took 1.5 kbytes (you could compile out all the features you didn't need). Did co-operative multi-tasking and memory management, which was pretty impressive...
Note: This was in 1997... I believe that 32-bit space-hardened CPUs didn't become available until after that time. And they're still a rare breed. The more transistors you have, the more likely it is that one of them develops a fatal flaw...
Saw Innocence about a month ago in Japan - in an IMAX theatre even.
It's breathtakingly beautiful, yet sad. At times, I wasn't quite sure whether the puddle on my lap was drool or tears.
Highly recommended.
Um. If you take a closer look at the proposed law, you will see that it takes quite a lot to be qualified as a "web publication". USENET and any private message board maintained by an individual are not within the purpose or reach of this law. However, the definition of a "web publication" is faulty within the proposed law, and that should be re-examined before it actually becomes official.
What they are trying to do is to apply the same kind of rules to web-based publications as to print publication: if you are a company that publishes also on the internet, AND you allow people to discuss within your web page, you should keep track of what they say and apply some sort of filtering - much like what the current opinion sections in the newspapers are like.
Especially anonymous commenting allows all sorts of crap, personal abuse, etc. to appear on those sites, since not everyone has a slashdot-like moderation system.
Good point.
:-)
:-)
It's difficult to prove that you actually were in possession of the said cell phone (unless you of course call it: "Hey sir, you are speeding, please slow down."
But on the other hand, the whole discussion about how it would make speeding more difficult is a bit absurd. The speed limits were put in place for a purpose, and violating them is an offense. Nobody is objecting to the use of radars - so why would using a cell-phone based solution any different? All you really need is information that "someone is speeding" and his approximate location, and the police could take it from there... Automatic systems would however be open for all kinds of abuse
Statistics.
The average number of people in a car is quite predictable, and they're interested only in the relative density of cell phones and their average speed, which helps in traffic planning.
A bigger problem is that they cannot determine the type of the vehicles from the cell phone signatures, and thus they have to combine this with the old sensors-under-the-road counting technique, which can give a good estimate of the vehicle size as well. A sudden insurge of trucks on the highways is much more important information than the fact that you are travelling with a friend. Of course, since the relative location error available from GSM cell phones is about 100 metres or so, it is unlikely that you could say who is riding in which vehicle.
I wonder how much of the observed decline in sales of CDs and DVDs and other such media is not due to piracy, but simply the fact that it is now quite simple to exchange old records via eBay and similar places? I know also of DVD swapping circles, where you essentially buy one DVD with another DVD, you both go and watch them, and trade on. Those sales and "sales" are never recorded by recording companies. And they're almost certainly more common now than what they were a few years ago...
Why don't you go and talk to your professor, then? At least someone from the CompSci faculty should be able to help you. If not, then you're probably studying at the wrong university
I think I'll be waiting for the "Nac". :-)
Someone modded the parent up as funny, but having played Quake on a 3 metres by 3 metres screen, from about 1.5m distance, I can assure you that the impact is far greater than from a normal TV screen. You can get nauseous really fast, especially if the room is darkened and all you have is this pixel-mass moving around, telling your brain that you're really moving even when your ear tells your brain that you're not... :-)
Think of the Dasher as a racing game... It really helped me achieve fast speeds. :-)
Been there, done that.
Didn't get the job.
(Really, this is the reason why I try to sign as few NDAs as possible nowadays. Sooner or later you come to a situation where you would know how to efficiently solve a problem, but you can't do it because of an NDA. And that is incredibly frustrating - knowing that you could do better, or different, but you cannot because you're afraid of breaking an NDA.)
Here's my situation: I have a dual-booting Linux/Win98 machine at home, a Win98 laptop, a Linux server sitting in some network in a galaxy far, far away; and a bunch of other computers around the world.
At one point, managing all my data (I would change a bit here, and a bit there, then try to copy and synchronize by hand) was manageable, but I got real tired of it real fast. I considered putting together a CVS server, and then synchronizing that way, but it's really overkill and not a very user-friendly solution anyway.
Enter Unison. Now I just have a few directories designated as shared, and they get synchronized by Unison automatically. At home, my data is on a FAT partition, which is accessible to both Linux and Win98.
The good thing about this is that since I synchronize with the laptop when I'm connected, I get to use my data even when I'm on the move - not so with NFS. And I get free backups as well - I do have roughly 2Gigs of data, which would be a hassle to backup any other way. Besides, if I took tape backups, I would have to manually carry them off-site in case of a fire; now Unison takes care of backups to and from my remote machines.
...that the USPTO is not responsible for the patents it has granted. If they were responsible, then someone could sue them for issuing a bad patent. That would certainly get their attention.
Hey, you issued those guys a bad patent, causing our company to go through a very expensive legal process. We are suing you for $25M damages and legal fees that we wouldn't have suffered if you hadn't screwed up.
Actually, something survived: StrongARM. Rumour has it that this is what Compaq was originally after, since they realized the value of embedded computers and the fact that there are much more embedded processors being sold yearly than desktop systems.
:-).
Compaq had StrongARM for a while, then sold it off to Intel (who were probably VERY happy, since they had nothing that could really compete with StrongARM in the low end). Note, however, that Compaq still uses ARM chips in all their iPaqs... My guess is that they have a really nice deal with Intel about them
150.000, that is roughly, what, $120,000? Yeah, we use a comma to separate decimals, and a dot to separate thousands - sometimes you get confused when writing English :-).
Note that the price actually gets spread out throughout all your life. If you started now, you'd need only about $5000 every year to buy the necessary hard drives. And considering the speed at which prices have been going down per Megabyte, it is likely that the original estimate of $120,000 is the upper bound, and the REAL price is a lot lower.
According to this paper, the entire human life takes roughly a petabyte of storage.
Using the current prices, this amounts to roughly 150.000. It's not that impossible to store your entire life on a single computer anymore. These guys show that such a thing can be built.
Wouldn't this make DVDs illegal?
But seriously - if there is something good about this bill, this is it.