The security "features" are designed to make a compromise between developers and users like you and me. So there are two options you can take. You can take the blue pill, and have XPe pre-installed, but have a locked console that you can later unlock with a card. Or you can take the red pill, and get a console with no OS, but unlocked. From the cost perspective to us, the price is about the same. However, XPe is not free to us, so we have to pass on the cost of that to users somehow, hence the unlock card.
The unlock card architecture is not designed to be bulletproof. It is hackable. Making it unhackable would be too expensive. However, I'm placing bets that the unlock card will be cheaper and easier to use than a mod. Plus, the unlock card contains some useful features for other useage contexts (I'm not saying that everyone will find it useful) that are essentially irreproduceable.
So--hackers who want to explore, they are free to explore and have fun. The security architecture of the console will be fully disclosed, I'll even tell you how you could mod it, but that might ruin the fun. Users who just want to extend the console hardware and software, have an easy path to do so from day one. It only helps me if the guys here want to slap a keyboard on this or build a beowulf or drive a toaster--I'm trying to provide hardware, other people make the apps. And users who just want to play games in a traditional model can do so too.
I'd also like to point out that this is not an iOpener because it's not sold at a loss. Think of it like a portable DVD player, when they first came out. They were larger and heavier than this, had a shorter battery life, and sold at around $1000. Now, they are *still* larger than this (the DVD format fundamentally limits your size...) but at least some of them are as cheap as $200, most of them hovering around the $300-500 price point. Do these sell at the million per month rate? no. Is this meant to sell at the million per month rate? no. Unfortunately, with all the hype these days around the PSP and DS, people try to compare it to these consoles, thinking we're in the same market they are. We aren't. The upside is if mass market starts adopting the product, but our business model is flexible enough to survive on a smaller market.
It is me. The security "features" are designed to make a compromise between developers and users like you and me. So there are two options you can take. You can take the blue pill, and have XPe pre-installed, but have a locked console that you can later unlock with a card. Or you can take the red pill, and get a console with no OS, but unlocked. From the cost perspective to us, the price is about the same. However, XPe is not free to us, so we have to pass on the cost of that to users somehow, hence the unlock card.
The unlock card architecture is not designed to be bulletproof. It is hackable. Making it unhackable would be too expensive. However, I'm placing bets that the unlock card will be cheaper and easier to use than a mod. Plus, the unlock card contains some useful features for other useage contexts (I'm not saying that everyone will find it useful) that are essentially irreproduceable.
So--hackers who want to explore, they are free to explore and have fun. The security architecture of the console will be fully disclosed, I'll even tell you how you could mod it, but that might ruin the fun. Users who just want to extend the console hardware and software, have an easy path to do so from day one. It only helps me if the guys here want to slap a keyboard on this or build a beowulf or drive a toaster--I'm trying to provide hardware, other people make the apps. And users who just want to play games in a traditional model can do so too.
Thanks for the consideration. I've been reading the constructive and candid comments in this forum.
Anyways, I had a few things I'd like to point out with regards to this console:
- this console is targetted at retro-gamers, commuters, and moderate gamers. It's nice to see that the folks on/. instantly picked up on its potential as a retro-gaming platform. The console is a fun project to build, and I think I'd have a lot of fun playing with it myself once its done. I'd like to offer it to others who might also enjoy playing with it, but I can't afford to wrap a $200 bill with every machine. - that being said...comparing this console to the PSP or the DS isn't quite right. This console isn't trying to go up against them. To even think that someone like MoMA--a small company--can take on such a task is pretty crazy. This console caters to a more high-end, niche interest. To that respect, the console has to make money on its own without gaming revenue, hence the price tag. Given that the console isn't trying to sell a million a month like the PSP, but rather a few thousand a month would be extremely good, the price is probably about right. - on the price subject, the whole console being locked on boot is a bit of an interesting dilemma for me. You guys know as well as I do that a locked console sucks. So there's two ways you can get the console. (1) get it with XPe, it's locked, and you have to buy an unlock card. (2) get it with no OS, you install one yourself, but its unlocked by default. You also loose a little bit of the security functionality, but I presume most of the readers here wouldn't care about that! The price of the unlock card is about that of the OS installation (insert smarmy comment here). In other words, we've gotta find a way to recover the cost of paying out to M$ (which unfortunately a lot of people demand) and the lock is one way to do it. As for the security of the lock, it's going to be insecure (its difficult to secure an x86--read my book:-D). Unlock hacks will be developed for it. Will we care? no. In fact, we're counting on that. Linux is welcome here, but unfortunately Linux isn't a popular gaming OS, so it doesn't make sense to provide it as a default option. At any rate, by offering an unlock option for the console I'm hoping that both developers and gamers can find their ideal solution at a fair price to everyone. -on the performance subject: I find it interesting that people think the console might have bad performance for a handheld platform. The 533 MHz processor in this console is probably quite competitive, if not much better, than the 333 MHz PSP processor. The graphics in this machine aren't cutting-edge, but that's not the point. It will play half-life, diablo II, starcraft, etc. quite accepatbly. Think Riva-TNT-ish performance, and holding its ground against a PSP--on some specs, the PSP is better, on some, the Eve will be better. The other thing is that you can reasonably expect that effective price of a game for this console will be much less than that for the PSP or DS. - as for the form factor--comfort was a premium over portability. That decision seems to be unpopular here. I have found that playing extended games on the tiny screens and form factors of a pad-style console is tough on my hands and my eyes. My console is designed to be easy to hold and play for a long time--I value my eyesight and my hands too much to use those cramped handhelds. To help with the portability, the screen is detachable. The screen unit contains the guts of the system, so the joystick part is pretty much nothing more than a glorified docking station. Since the screen unit has the guts, you can carry the screen unit around and just use that on its own as a portable media player, for example. The connector between the screen and the base is very robust as well (since the connection is very low bandwidth), so no concerns about dirt or breakage there. The screen could be clipped onto the joystick unit so you don't lose it. It's a hard que
Wow. News to me...I have no involvement with the security that will be in the Phantom console that's showing at E3. *sigh* the press has a wonderful way of spreading misinformation at times.
I'm also wondering--is it normal for criminal misdemeanor remedies to be applied for trademark infringement, as is the case here? Or is it more typically a civil penalty?
I think it's fine for universities to own their IP. They do need money to stay alive, and we live in a money-driven economy.
Sports and football, sure, they can protect their name too against other sports teams or football teams using their names.
But if I start a website like "beaversSuck.com" or "tritonsSuck.com", is that illegal? Can a university defend its name against defamation in a website title?
I do like the comment made earlier in this thread that trademarks are there to prevent confusion/dilution of brands, so perhaps a disclaimer at the top of the website that says that this website is not run by UCSD is good enough.
As another note, is nobody bothered by the fact that using the UCSD name in vain is instantly a misdemeanor? Is is usual to create a criminal charge for trademark mis-use?!!
One thing perhaps you do not realize is that the comments after a posting in regular case, not italics, are from the moderator, and not from me. I did *not* say that:
"UCSD" is clearly not an abbreviation of "University of California", so what's the problem?
That was Michael, the moderator for the forum. When I wrote the post, I was fully aware of the real conflict for the UCSD name because it is a well-known and established acronym, and I reiterate that I am not claiming that UCSD should not have a claim to defend that acronym in some contexts or that they should not be associated with it. Rather, I am asking, is the name "ucsduncensored" sufficiently satirical or socially commentative that it should be protected by free speech, and what that boundary should be?
I'm not clear on what your point is. I fully realize that UCSD stands for University of California San Diego and it is in fact covered by the cited law. If you had read through my entire post and response, you would realize that I am NOT saying that "UCSD" is a "free" acronym and that "maybe it stands for something else, so anyone should be able to use it". Other people in the thread have suggested this, but that is not my argument.
I'm asking if a public entity can enforce its trademark and name and/or acronym, especially in the context of satire or protest. More to the point, "ucsduncensored" sounds like a satire or protest of the state of things on that campus--administrative censorship. For example, would "iHateMicrosoft.com" be a valid name? I guess Microsoft is trademarked name, but what are the laws that govern using such a name in protest or objection, or expression thereof? Furthermore, UCSD is a publicly funded institution, so I think that it would have even less of a defense against public satire or commentary.
The point that a university may or may not be able to own its IP and football team names does not seem to interact too much with this thread. Universities do need to make money; I have no problem with them licensing IP so long as the inventors are also rewarded in some amount. I also have no problem with universities branding their football teams. But if you want to create a website called "beaversSuck.net" or "MITisLame.org" then is that illegal? Can you not use the name of your school in protest?
It seems from reading comments that most people think that publicly funded institutions do have a right to branding and brand-name defense, and that right outweighs the right of students to satire or poke fun at the university, although in this instance there is a fuzzy line because the website also provides "useful" services as well.
I guess I find that sad, but so be it. I also find it sad that people are so reactionary and do not read through the posts with a clear head, but rather weighted with their own assumptions of the poster's intentions.
The reason I submitted this story to YRO is not the details of the law, but rather, that the law exists. Can a publicly funded institution really enforce trademarks and their name against public use and possibly defamation? What right does UC have to "own" this name, paid for by the public? And if UC has a right to "own" such names, can other government braches do the same? For example, what is the difference if the feds decided that the "United States" or any acronym derived from that could not be used in conjunction with endorsement of a website or political cause? (well, I guess we do try to pass that flag-burning amendment every now and then...:-D) I thought public and political figures gave up some kind of right to their name, so that satire and similar commentary could exist.
Some point out the issue with "confusing" students with the UCSDuncensored website with official UCSD material, and hence the reason to defend the name. Here are my counter-arguments: (1) the name itself-ucsduncensored-is a political statement about how the campus administration restricts information flow (2) UCSDuncensored does not sound like a pro-UCSD or UCSD-endorsed website. Does it? I find it hard to believe that someone would really think that an educational instution would create a website admitting that it otherwise has a censorship problem. So I think that this website does pass both the political statement test for free speech and it also does not aim to confuse or misguide its users into believing that it is an endorsed website. If the website were named, for example, the "ucsdexchange" or the like, then that might be a problem.
Furthermore, a previous post in this thread indicated that the web designers did contact UCSD about their website's launch, but UCSD sat on the issue. To some extent, it is unfair to the public that UCSD can just sit on their butt until the website is up and running, and people have invested their time and interest in it, and then just expect to come in with the Hand of Righteousness as Writ in Law and wipe it all out. UCSD owes the public its diligence and vigilence.
Finally, I have conflicting information from the university itself about the useage of the name UCSD. For example, when I enrolled into a UCSD extension school class, I was told by a supervising administrator that UCSD Extension has nothing to do with UCSD, that it is its own financial entity and it is not beholden to public tax dollars (and hence I had no right to complain about how they botched my registration). So then why is it that the extension school website (http://extension.ucsd.edu/ sorry to lazy to put in tags) tries so hard to make it seem as if it is affiliated with the university? It seems like deliberate misrepresentation of a not-so-good institution by riding on the coattails of the UC system's good name.
Perhaps UCSD extension has a license for the name, but I feel that at least morally, creating such a high barrier of entry (such as requiring lawyers to negotiate name licensing) for the public to create useful services affiliated with the university is not right.
These kids probably created this website in their spare time; if the UC system had to do a similar site, I'd wager it'd cost hundreds of thousands of dollars: contractors, administrators to manage the contractors and ensure that all minorities are fairly represented in the project, the IT infrastructure to adapt to such "new" technology as a web forum. It just seems a shame that the UC system chooses to squander its resources shutting down useful services instead of building competitive services.
Then again, owning a monopoly on your name, your students, and controlling the flow of information within the system (I remember hearing how at least until recently, UC's financial books were not open for public audit) just encourages mediocrity.
I completely agree with your point about everything eventually requiring "trust". I am fearful of this whole trusted computing movement for the very reasons you have stated.
However, to be fair, I think with Seth's tweaks to the attestation policies, you could have trusted computing without the intrusion on user's rights. Could, I say. I'm still not decided if in practice it would actually end up that way.
One of the things I would like out of the trusted computing initiative is the guarantee against keyloggers and/or a way to securely store my private keys. If you saw the recent news on Valve's software break-in, part of the break-in was a result of keyloggers...we are too vulnerable to really simple attacks such as keylogging.
To wit, Seth points out in the article that Trusted Computing still allows you to do with your computer what you want; there is nothing that prevents you from just turning off the trust mode outright and running it like a normal PC.
It is a misconception that the trusted PC hardware will be unable to run your custom code. I have been guilty of propagating this misconception as well.
More significantly, the trusted PC now enables a set of security primitives with implicit security policies that you can choose (or choose not) to subscribe to. By subscribing to these policies, you are choosing to risk being non-interoperable with software that operates outside of the prescribed policies. Consumers will decide on the benefits of this risk.
Unfortunately, corporations form a large "voting block" of consumers, and they are likely to receive the Trusted PC quite well. Perhaps the question then is can a company *force* employees to also subscribe to security policies that limit the employee's ability to interoperate with the employee's favorite set of personal tools and software; i.e., will you be allowed to run cygwin and use perl scripts to post-process "trusted" excel spreadsheets, csv files, databases, etc.? Now, your numbskull manager can set arbitrarily strict security policies on secure-domain documents...this will be a fun battle.:P
I'm actually still working on trying to get it published by someone, but I'm not pinning my hopes on it...hopefully in a few weeks someone will pick it up and I won't be printing the book myself anymore. It's a bit too time consuming. On the other hand, I feel like if I don't get the book out myself, it'll never get out...it could end up in legal review la la land for months, maybe years...whereas if I just print it and start selling it, and I don't end up in jail, maybe that will give some comfort to publishers...
Anyways, why is it that you'd rather see me trying to get the book published by a third party? Wondering if there is some greater significance to having a third party publish than my limited perspective is providing...
Aw come on now:-) when you're spending 80 hours a week writing code and papers, you're entitled to a couple of weeks to dink around with hardware. Besides, my advisor encouraged all of us to look at existing hardware for examples of how to do (or not to do) things. e.g., video game consoles represent the best performance/price point on the market, and the architecture of some of the machines, such as the Gamecube, is actually quite impressive (the Gamecube's main memory is composed of 10ns random-access latency devices--in other words, the Gamecube's main memory was as fast as the L2 caches on some mainstream processors back when the Gamecube was released. Processors that cost more than an entire Gamecube did, incidentally).
My thesis was on supercomputer architecture. http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/phdt hesis.pdf if you care to read about it...abstract below.
The furious pace of Moore's Law is driving computer architecture into a realm where the the speed of light is the dominant factor in system latencies. The number of clock cycles to span a chip are increasing, while the number of bits that can be accessed within a clock cycle is decreasing. Hence, it is becoming more difficult to hide latency. One alternative solution is to reduce latency by migrating threads and data, but the overhead of existing implementations has previously made migration an unserviceable solution so far.
I present an architecture, implementation, and mechanisms that reduces the overhead of migration to the point where migration is a viable supplement to other latency hiding mechanisms, such as multithreading. The architecture is abstract, and presents programmers with a simple, uniform fine-grained multithreaded parallel programming model with implicit memory management. In other words, the spatial nature and implementation details (such as the number of processors) of a parallel machine are entirely hidden from the programmer. Compiler writers are encouraged to devise programming languages for the machine that guide a programmer to express their ideas in terms of objects, since objects exhibit an inherent physical locality of data and code. The machine implementation can then leverage this locality to automatically distribute data and threads across the physical machine by using a set of high performance migration mechanisms.
An implementation of this architecture could migrate a null thread in 66~cycles -- over a factor of 1000 improvement over previous work. Performance also scales well; the time required to move a typical thread is only 4 to 5 times that of a null thread. Data migration performance is similar, and scales linearly with data block size. Since the performance of the migration mechanism is on par with that of an L2 cache, the implementation simulated in my work has no data caches and relies instead on multithreading and the migration mechanism to hide and reduce access latencies.
The book does contain a section about possible attacks against Palladium and TCPA, as well as a discussion of non-cryptographic alternatives to Trusted Computing that provide good security without the bitter taste of DRM.
The hope is in part to establish some kind of precedent about fair use, whether or not it sticks around long enough to matter when Trusted Computing hits full stride. At least, it will provide a solid starting point for arguments;-)...these days, it seems public opinion is guided mostly by speculation and FUD...
Many have observed that SCO is pretty much dead, so why boycott it?
Instead, boycott Canopy, the VC firm that is in part responsible for SCO's strategic business practices. Don't do business with Canopy, or any of their holdings. SCO is listed bottom center on Canopy's front page.
One thing that is not mentioned in the paper, as far as I can see, is that the NRE cost of making a 0.13u ASIC is almost a half million dollars these days, I think. This doesn't count the other two or three million dollars for cadence licenses, backend tools, verification, server farms, and engineers necessary to produce a chip of such complexity. It also does not account for the cost of test and package, which can be quite high for such a high performance chip.
There are a few other technical errors in the paper, at first glance. The large stations seem to call for 2000 banks of tiny DRAMs. Unfortunately, DRAM on an ASIC is not available at such a fine granularity. He would have to use SRAMs to implement this memory, and lose quite a bit on area. One could argue for a custom DRAM implementation, but DRAMs are black magic in the process industry and you really don't want to get into that business if you can avoid it, especially at half a million bucks per spin of the chip!
otoh, the architecture looks pretty systolic and repeated, so yield can be made near-perfect if some kind of fault-detecting bank-switching scheme is designed into the chip.
These ancillary costs start to grow in comparison to the 10 million dollar figure to crack RSA-1024, and it is enormous in comparison to the numbers quoted for cracking RSA-512 and RSA-768. In particular, the observation about how the cost of the machine would be smaller than the prize money awarded for breaking RSA-768 should include the non-recurring costs, since presumably the only reason for someone to build such a cracking machine would either be to break a challenge such as this (public awareness), or to perform real espionage (you're funded elsewhere). In the case of real espionage, you probably wouldn't publicize the power of your machine by claiming the RSA-768 prize, anyways, so the cost of the machine relative to the prize amount is not as relevant:-)
unfortuneately, law cases often degenerate into pissing battles on who can spend more money on a lawyer. being a grad student, I'd say M$ could smack a law-firm intern on me and still defeat me in court.:-P I have a weak position for posting copyrighted binaries for *open*;-) circulation...
Yes, but then you must pay nintendo royalties if you use their patent. if you can RE the xbox, as it stands, you can probably get away without paying royalties since it is just trade secret and not patented.
Custom chips make a box cheaper to produce at these production volumes. Nintendo doesn't have to pay Intel, Nvidia, Connexant, Seagate, etc. a cut...they instead have a few very close partners who are pure-play fab or design guys; their chips take less silicon overall than the intel-based solution (I'd wager there's as much silicon area in the five Nintendo chips as there is just in the pentium and Nvidia chips combined). Plus their console draws way less power, making physical design easier. The XBOX also has a motherboard that's like 3x the size of a gamecube...and the hard drive...ohh...the hard drive.:-P a reliability and cost nightmare.
In the end, I wouldn't be surprised if nintendo even made a profit on the consoles. I mean, open up a DVD player and look inside, it's got about the same basic parts (okay, maybe not a.25u copper-tech CPU--but those are cheap) and people make a profit selling them for around $100.
I have a page I made that shares some of my experiences with the xbox and gamecube hardware.
Of interest to those reading this thread is the XBOX rom extraction. I have the ROM binaries...but holding off on posting them on a large forum due to worries over legal ramifications...
Have you read out the ROM contents? I have the ROM removed and a socket installed, and I'm reading the contents out but I'm puzzled by some of the stuff I'm seeing.
The flip side is that if you can figure out enough about the XBOX internals, you could potentially write an XBOX emulator, and all those great XBOX titles can run on your home PC:-)
If they are using a relatively standard PC-style API, it might not be infeasible...the trick is probably figuring out what tweaks are in that nvidia gfx and sound chip.
...and the average X-box user is...going to place the console on the floor, where baby brother gets to run past, catch feet on the cords and drag the box on the ground...mmm...hard drive.
it's pretty ridiculous out here. I refuse to buy a bundle...but things are so backed up some people are taking pre-orders for allocations now.:-P could be weeks...one vendor says not till after thanksgiving.
more business for nintendo?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
The security "features" are designed to make a compromise between developers and users like you and me. So there are two options you can take. You can take the blue pill, and have XPe pre-installed, but have a locked console that you can later unlock with a card. Or you can take the red pill, and get a console with no OS, but unlocked. From the cost perspective to us, the price is about the same. However, XPe is not free to us, so we have to pass on the cost of that to users somehow, hence the unlock card. The unlock card architecture is not designed to be bulletproof. It is hackable. Making it unhackable would be too expensive. However, I'm placing bets that the unlock card will be cheaper and easier to use than a mod. Plus, the unlock card contains some useful features for other useage contexts (I'm not saying that everyone will find it useful) that are essentially irreproduceable. So--hackers who want to explore, they are free to explore and have fun. The security architecture of the console will be fully disclosed, I'll even tell you how you could mod it, but that might ruin the fun. Users who just want to extend the console hardware and software, have an easy path to do so from day one. It only helps me if the guys here want to slap a keyboard on this or build a beowulf or drive a toaster--I'm trying to provide hardware, other people make the apps. And users who just want to play games in a traditional model can do so too. I'd also like to point out that this is not an iOpener because it's not sold at a loss. Think of it like a portable DVD player, when they first came out. They were larger and heavier than this, had a shorter battery life, and sold at around $1000. Now, they are *still* larger than this (the DVD format fundamentally limits your size...) but at least some of them are as cheap as $200, most of them hovering around the $300-500 price point. Do these sell at the million per month rate? no. Is this meant to sell at the million per month rate? no. Unfortunately, with all the hype these days around the PSP and DS, people try to compare it to these consoles, thinking we're in the same market they are. We aren't. The upside is if mass market starts adopting the product, but our business model is flexible enough to survive on a smaller market.
It is me. The security "features" are designed to make a compromise between developers and users like you and me. So there are two options you can take. You can take the blue pill, and have XPe pre-installed, but have a locked console that you can later unlock with a card. Or you can take the red pill, and get a console with no OS, but unlocked. From the cost perspective to us, the price is about the same. However, XPe is not free to us, so we have to pass on the cost of that to users somehow, hence the unlock card.
The unlock card architecture is not designed to be bulletproof. It is hackable. Making it unhackable would be too expensive. However, I'm placing bets that the unlock card will be cheaper and easier to use than a mod. Plus, the unlock card contains some useful features for other useage contexts (I'm not saying that everyone will find it useful) that are essentially irreproduceable.
So--hackers who want to explore, they are free to explore and have fun. The security architecture of the console will be fully disclosed, I'll even tell you how you could mod it, but that might ruin the fun. Users who just want to extend the console hardware and software, have an easy path to do so from day one. It only helps me if the guys here want to slap a keyboard on this or build a beowulf or drive a toaster--I'm trying to provide hardware, other people make the apps. And users who just want to play games in a traditional model can do so too.
Thanks for the consideration. I've been reading the constructive and candid comments in this forum.
/. instantly picked up on its potential as a retro-gaming platform. The console is a fun project to build, and I think I'd have a lot of fun playing with it myself once its done. I'd like to offer it to others who might also enjoy playing with it, but I can't afford to wrap a $200 bill with every machine. :-D). Unlock hacks will be developed for it. Will we care? no. In fact, we're counting on that. Linux is welcome here, but unfortunately Linux isn't a popular gaming OS, so it doesn't make sense to provide it as a default option. At any rate, by offering an unlock option for the console I'm hoping that both developers and gamers can find their ideal solution at a fair price to everyone.
Anyways, I had a few things I'd like to point out with regards to this console:
- this console is targetted at retro-gamers, commuters, and moderate gamers. It's nice to see that the folks on
- that being said...comparing this console to the PSP or the DS isn't quite right. This console isn't trying to go up against them. To even think that someone like MoMA--a small company--can take on such a task is pretty crazy. This console caters to a more high-end, niche interest. To that respect, the console has to make money on its own without gaming revenue, hence the price tag. Given that the console isn't trying to sell a million a month like the PSP, but rather a few thousand a month would be extremely good, the price is probably about right.
- on the price subject, the whole console being locked on boot is a bit of an interesting dilemma for me. You guys know as well as I do that a locked console sucks. So there's two ways you can get the console. (1) get it with XPe, it's locked, and you have to buy an unlock card. (2) get it with no OS, you install one yourself, but its unlocked by default. You also loose a little bit of the security functionality, but I presume most of the readers here wouldn't care about that! The price of the unlock card is about that of the OS installation (insert smarmy comment here). In other words, we've gotta find a way to recover the cost of paying out to M$ (which unfortunately a lot of people demand) and the lock is one way to do it. As for the security of the lock, it's going to be insecure (its difficult to secure an x86--read my book
-on the performance subject: I find it interesting that people think the console might have bad performance for a handheld platform. The 533 MHz processor in this console is probably quite competitive, if not much better, than the 333 MHz PSP processor. The graphics in this machine aren't cutting-edge, but that's not the point. It will play half-life, diablo II, starcraft, etc. quite accepatbly. Think Riva-TNT-ish performance, and holding its ground against a PSP--on some specs, the PSP is better, on some, the Eve will be better. The other thing is that you can reasonably expect that effective price of a game for this console will be much less than that for the PSP or DS.
- as for the form factor--comfort was a premium over portability. That decision seems to be unpopular here. I have found that playing extended games on the tiny screens and form factors of a pad-style console is tough on my hands and my eyes. My console is designed to be easy to hold and play for a long time--I value my eyesight and my hands too much to use those cramped handhelds. To help with the portability, the screen is detachable. The screen unit contains the guts of the system, so the joystick part is pretty much nothing more than a glorified docking station. Since the screen unit has the guts, you can carry the screen unit around and just use that on its own as a portable media player, for example. The connector between the screen and the base is very robust as well (since the connection is very low bandwidth), so no concerns about dirt or breakage there. The screen could be clipped onto the joystick unit so you don't lose it. It's a hard que
Wow. News to me...I have no involvement with the security that will be in the Phantom console that's showing at E3. *sigh* the press has a wonderful way of spreading misinformation at times.
Frob,
Thanks for the helpful and insightful response...
muchly appreciated.
-bunnie
I'm also wondering--is it normal for criminal misdemeanor remedies to be applied for trademark infringement, as is the case here? Or is it more typically a civil penalty?
I think it's fine for universities to own their IP. They do need money to stay alive, and we live in a money-driven economy.
Sports and football, sure, they can protect their name too against other sports teams or football teams using their names.
But if I start a website like "beaversSuck.com" or "tritonsSuck.com", is that illegal? Can a university defend its name against defamation in a website title?
I do like the comment made earlier in this thread that trademarks are there to prevent confusion/dilution of brands, so perhaps a disclaimer at the top of the website that says that this website is not run by UCSD is good enough.
As another note, is nobody bothered by the fact that using the UCSD name in vain is instantly a misdemeanor? Is is usual to create a criminal charge for trademark mis-use?!!
One thing perhaps you do not realize is that the comments after a posting in regular case, not italics, are from the moderator, and not from me. I did *not* say that:
"UCSD" is clearly not an abbreviation of "University of California", so what's the problem?
That was Michael, the moderator for the forum. When I wrote the post, I was fully aware of the real conflict for the UCSD name because it is a well-known and established acronym, and I reiterate that I am not claiming that UCSD should not have a claim to defend that acronym in some contexts or that they should not be associated with it. Rather, I am asking, is the name "ucsduncensored" sufficiently satirical or socially commentative that it should be protected by free speech, and what that boundary should be?
I'm not clear on what your point is. I fully realize that UCSD stands for University of California San Diego and it is in fact covered by the cited law. If you had read through my entire post and response, you would realize that I am NOT saying that "UCSD" is a "free" acronym and that "maybe it stands for something else, so anyone should be able to use it". Other people in the thread have suggested this, but that is not my argument.
I'm asking if a public entity can enforce its trademark and name and/or acronym, especially in the context of satire or protest. More to the point, "ucsduncensored" sounds like a satire or protest of the state of things on that campus--administrative censorship. For example, would "iHateMicrosoft.com" be a valid name? I guess Microsoft is trademarked name, but what are the laws that govern using such a name in protest or objection, or expression thereof? Furthermore, UCSD is a publicly funded institution, so I think that it would have even less of a defense against public satire or commentary.
The point that a university may or may not be able to own its IP and football team names does not seem to interact too much with this thread. Universities do need to make money; I have no problem with them licensing IP so long as the inventors are also rewarded in some amount. I also have no problem with universities branding their football teams. But if you want to create a website called "beaversSuck.net" or "MITisLame.org" then is that illegal? Can you not use the name of your school in protest?
It seems from reading comments that most people think that publicly funded institutions do have a right to branding and brand-name defense, and that right outweighs the right of students to satire or poke fun at the university, although in this instance there is a fuzzy line because the website also provides "useful" services as well.
I guess I find that sad, but so be it. I also find it sad that people are so reactionary and do not read through the posts with a clear head, but rather weighted with their own assumptions of the poster's intentions.
The reason I submitted this story to YRO is not the details of the law, but rather, that the law exists. Can a publicly funded institution really enforce trademarks and their name against public use and possibly defamation? What right does UC have to "own" this name, paid for by the public? And if UC has a right to "own" such names, can other government braches do the same? For example, what is the difference if the feds decided that the "United States" or any acronym derived from that could not be used in conjunction with endorsement of a website or political cause? (well, I guess we do try to pass that flag-burning amendment every now and then... :-D) I thought public and political figures gave up some kind of right to their name, so that satire and similar commentary could exist.
Some point out the issue with "confusing" students with the UCSDuncensored website with official UCSD material, and hence the reason to defend the name. Here are my counter-arguments: (1) the name itself-ucsduncensored-is a political statement about how the campus administration restricts information flow (2) UCSDuncensored does not sound like a pro-UCSD or UCSD-endorsed website. Does it? I find it hard to believe that someone would really think that an educational instution would create a website admitting that it otherwise has a censorship problem. So I think that this website does pass both the political statement test for free speech and it also does not aim to confuse or misguide its users into believing that it is an endorsed website. If the website were named, for example, the "ucsdexchange" or the like, then that might be a problem.
Furthermore, a previous post in this thread indicated that the web designers did contact UCSD about their website's launch, but UCSD sat on the issue. To some extent, it is unfair to the public that UCSD can just sit on their butt until the website is up and running, and people have invested their time and interest in it, and then just expect to come in with the Hand of Righteousness as Writ in Law and wipe it all out. UCSD owes the public its diligence and vigilence.
Finally, I have conflicting information from the university itself about the useage of the name UCSD. For example, when I enrolled into a UCSD extension school class, I was told by a supervising administrator that UCSD Extension has nothing to do with UCSD, that it is its own financial entity and it is not beholden to public tax dollars (and hence I had no right to complain about how they botched my registration). So then why is it that the extension school website (http://extension.ucsd.edu/ sorry to lazy to put in tags) tries so hard to make it seem as if it is affiliated with the university? It seems like deliberate misrepresentation of a not-so-good institution by riding on the coattails of the UC system's good name.
Perhaps UCSD extension has a license for the name, but I feel that at least morally, creating such a high barrier of entry (such as requiring lawyers to negotiate name licensing) for the public to create useful services affiliated with the university is not right.
These kids probably created this website in their spare time; if the UC system had to do a similar site, I'd wager it'd cost hundreds of thousands of dollars: contractors, administrators to manage the contractors and ensure that all minorities are fairly represented in the project, the IT infrastructure to adapt to such "new" technology as a web forum. It just seems a shame that the UC system chooses to squander its resources shutting down useful services instead of building competitive services.
Then again, owning a monopoly on your name, your students, and controlling the flow of information within the system (I remember hearing how at least until recently, UC's financial books were not open for public audit) just encourages mediocrity.
I completely agree with your point about everything eventually requiring "trust". I am fearful of this whole trusted computing movement for the very reasons you have stated.
However, to be fair, I think with Seth's tweaks to the attestation policies, you could have trusted computing without the intrusion on user's rights. Could, I say. I'm still not decided if in practice it would actually end up that way.
One of the things I would like out of the trusted computing initiative is the guarantee against keyloggers and/or a way to securely store my private keys. If you saw the recent news on Valve's software break-in, part of the break-in was a result of keyloggers...we are too vulnerable to really simple attacks such as keylogging.
To wit, Seth points out in the article that Trusted Computing still allows you to do with your computer what you want; there is nothing that prevents you from just turning off the trust mode outright and running it like a normal PC.
It is a misconception that the trusted PC hardware will be unable to run your custom code. I have been guilty of propagating this misconception as well.
More significantly, the trusted PC now enables a set of security primitives with implicit security policies that you can choose (or choose not) to subscribe to. By subscribing to these policies, you are choosing to risk being non-interoperable with software that operates outside of the prescribed policies. Consumers will decide on the benefits of this risk.
Unfortunately, corporations form a large "voting block" of consumers, and they are likely to receive the Trusted PC quite well. Perhaps the question then is can a company *force* employees to also subscribe to security policies that limit the employee's ability to interoperate with the employee's favorite set of personal tools and software; i.e., will you be allowed to run cygwin and use perl scripts to post-process "trusted" excel spreadsheets, csv files, databases, etc.? Now, your numbskull manager can set arbitrarily strict security policies on secure-domain documents...this will be a fun battle. :P
Hey there Troed,
I'm actually still working on trying to get it published by someone, but I'm not pinning my hopes on it...hopefully in a few weeks someone will pick it up and I won't be printing the book myself anymore. It's a bit too time consuming. On the other hand, I feel like if I don't get the book out myself, it'll never get out...it could end up in legal review la la land for months, maybe years...whereas if I just print it and start selling it, and I don't end up in jail, maybe that will give some comfort to publishers...
Anyways, why is it that you'd rather see me trying to get the book published by a third party? Wondering if there is some greater significance to having a third party publish than my limited perspective is providing...
Aw come on now :-) when you're spending 80 hours a week writing code and papers, you're entitled to a couple of weeks to dink around with hardware. Besides, my advisor encouraged all of us to look at existing hardware for examples of how to do (or not to do) things. e.g., video game consoles represent the best performance/price point on the market, and the architecture of some of the machines, such as the Gamecube, is actually quite impressive (the Gamecube's main memory is composed of 10ns random-access latency devices--in other words, the Gamecube's main memory was as fast as the L2 caches on some mainstream processors back when the Gamecube was released. Processors that cost more than an entire Gamecube did, incidentally).
t hesis.pdf if you care to read about it...abstract below.
My thesis was on supercomputer architecture.
http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/phd
The furious pace of Moore's Law is driving computer architecture into
a realm where the the speed of light is the dominant factor in system
latencies. The number of clock cycles to span a chip are increasing,
while the number of bits that can be accessed within a clock cycle is
decreasing. Hence, it is becoming more difficult to hide latency. One
alternative solution is to reduce latency by migrating threads
and data, but the overhead of existing implementations has previously
made migration an unserviceable solution so far.
I present an architecture, implementation, and mechanisms that reduces
the overhead of migration to the point where migration is a viable
supplement to other latency hiding mechanisms, such as
multithreading. The architecture is abstract, and presents programmers
with a simple, uniform fine-grained multithreaded parallel programming
model with implicit memory management. In other words, the spatial
nature and implementation details (such as the number of processors)
of a parallel machine are entirely hidden from the
programmer. Compiler writers are encouraged to devise programming
languages for the machine that guide a programmer to express their
ideas in terms of objects, since objects exhibit an inherent physical
locality of data and code. The machine implementation can then
leverage this locality to automatically distribute data and threads
across the physical machine by using a set of high performance
migration mechanisms.
An implementation of this architecture could migrate a null thread in
66~cycles -- over a factor of 1000 improvement over previous
work. Performance also scales well; the time required to move a
typical thread is only 4 to 5 times that of a null thread. Data
migration performance is similar, and scales linearly with data block
size. Since the performance of the migration mechanism is on par with
that of an L2 cache, the implementation simulated in my work has no
data caches and relies instead on multithreading and the migration
mechanism to hide and reduce access latencies.
The book does contain a section about possible attacks against Palladium and TCPA, as well as a discussion of non-cryptographic alternatives to Trusted Computing that provide good security without the bitter taste of DRM.
;-) ...these days, it seems public opinion is guided mostly by speculation and FUD...
The hope is in part to establish some kind of precedent about fair use, whether or not it sticks around long enough to matter when Trusted Computing hits full stride. At least, it will provide a solid starting point for arguments
Many have observed that SCO is pretty much dead, so why boycott it?
Instead, boycott Canopy, the VC firm that is in part responsible for SCO's strategic business practices. Don't do business with Canopy, or any of their holdings. SCO is listed bottom center on Canopy's front page.
There are a few other technical errors in the paper, at first glance. The large stations seem to call for 2000 banks of tiny DRAMs. Unfortunately, DRAM on an ASIC is not available at such a fine granularity. He would have to use SRAMs to implement this memory, and lose quite a bit on area. One could argue for a custom DRAM implementation, but DRAMs are black magic in the process industry and you really don't want to get into that business if you can avoid it, especially at half a million bucks per spin of the chip!
otoh, the architecture looks pretty systolic and repeated, so yield can be made near-perfect if some kind of fault-detecting bank-switching scheme is designed into the chip.
These ancillary costs start to grow in comparison to the 10 million dollar figure to crack RSA-1024, and it is enormous in comparison to the numbers quoted for cracking RSA-512 and RSA-768. In particular, the observation about how the cost of the machine would be smaller than the prize money awarded for breaking RSA-768 should include the non-recurring costs, since presumably the only reason for someone to build such a cracking machine would either be to break a challenge such as this (public awareness), or to perform real espionage (you're funded elsewhere). In the case of real espionage, you probably wouldn't publicize the power of your machine by claiming the RSA-768 prize, anyways, so the cost of the machine relative to the prize amount is not as relevant :-)
unfortuneately, law cases often degenerate into pissing battles on who can spend more money on a lawyer. being a grad student, I'd say M$ could smack a law-firm intern on me and still defeat me in court. :-P I have a weak position for posting copyrighted binaries for *open* ;-) circulation...
Yes, but then you must pay nintendo royalties if you use their patent. if you can RE the xbox, as it stands, you can probably get away without paying royalties since it is just trade secret and not patented.
Custom chips make a box cheaper to produce at these production volumes. Nintendo doesn't have to pay Intel, Nvidia, Connexant, Seagate, etc. a cut...they instead have a few very close partners who are pure-play fab or design guys; their chips take less silicon overall than the intel-based solution (I'd wager there's as much silicon area in the five Nintendo chips as there is just in the pentium and Nvidia chips combined). Plus their console draws way less power, making physical design easier. The XBOX also has a motherboard that's like 3x the size of a gamecube...and the hard drive...ohh...the hard drive. :-P a reliability and cost nightmare.
.25u copper-tech CPU--but those are cheap) and people make a profit selling them for around $100.
In the end, I wouldn't be surprised if nintendo even made a profit on the consoles. I mean, open up a DVD player and look inside, it's got about the same basic parts (okay, maybe not a
I have a page I made that shares some of my experiences with the xbox and gamecube hardware. Of interest to those reading this thread is the XBOX rom extraction. I have the ROM binaries...but holding off on posting them on a large forum due to worries over legal ramifications...
Have you read out the ROM contents? I have the ROM removed and a socket installed, and I'm reading the contents out but I'm puzzled by some of the stuff I'm seeing.
The flip side is that if you can figure out enough about the XBOX internals, you could potentially write an XBOX emulator, and all those great XBOX titles can run on your home PC :-)
If they are using a relatively standard PC-style API, it might not be infeasible...the trick is probably figuring out what tweaks are in that nvidia gfx and sound chip.
...and the average X-box user is...going to place the console on the floor, where baby brother gets to run past, catch feet on the cords and drag the box on the ground...mmm...hard drive.
it's pretty ridiculous out here. I refuse to buy a bundle...but things are so backed up some people are taking pre-orders for allocations now. :-P could be weeks...one vendor says not till after thanksgiving.
more business for nintendo? ;-)