Re:There's not a chance that this is real.
on
Bugged Canadian Coins?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's of course true, the whole idea of RFID chips is they are inductively powered and don't have to carry their own power source.
(I happen to be a Canadian RFID researcher, of all things)
But the article sounds like BS to me. Let's say the coins did have an RFID chip on their surface, perhaps in one of the quarters with a poppy cut-out in the center (or the two dollar coin which also has a center that can come out). What would you DO with the "spy chip"? You're going to record audio or video? Fine... then do what with it? You don't have enough space to store it, and you can only transmit it a few feet away.
It might be a practical way to track where coins go, but I can't see how it could be used to "spy". It's really no different than say a serial number stamped on currency, which we do have on paper bills. I just don't see the point.
I live and work out of Canada... in the past I have visited the USA as part of some contract work. I often go to conferences in the states. I've also considered relocating to the United States for my job as the pay is marginally better down there.
The post-9/11 world has changed my views on this, and it just keeps getting worse!
There is no way I will go to the United States to work! I am even avoiding it for the holidays. 10 years ago, we used to just drive south of the border for shopping or recreation - day trips. It's becoming a scary police state and now I'm avoiding travel down south whenever possible.
I guess that's the intended effect of these xenophobic laws, right... keep the law-abiding professional workers (and wealthy tourists) out of your country. Good thing the US economy is so healthy. Ooops
We didn't have any of these madcow/BSE problems when these animals were fed a natural diet. In western countries, we have been force feeding these animals materials which they are not designed to handle - like tissue and blood from other animals.
As the parent said, yes cows can live entirely on grain and grass and they taste damned good after wandering around eating that stuff all day.
But in the name of cost effective feed, the industry continues to pursue this kind of garbage input instead of grains/grass. It's all about cost and the throughput.
I am concerned about my own health and I am eating less meat because I don't think the animals are given appropriate feed. If I encounter a smaller meat shoppe who can assure me the animals have been fed on a natural diet, I would still buy that meat in a heartbeat.
I think a credit check is better. One check and it will tell you the likelyhood of Scientist x selling yoru secrets to the chinese/russians/islamists/EU. People who tend to do these things tend to have financial problems ot start with. lol, yeah implement credit checks in the USA aka creditland... everyone will be a suspect! The average US household requires debt to operate daily (we have a negative savings rate) and millions of homeowners have no hope in hell of paying off their IO mortgages which will reset to higher interest rates this year.
A point that is often lost on people is that Champagne (as it can only be called when originating from the Champagne region of France) is just a "sparkling wine", and sparkling wine is produced by many countries... it's called Cava in Spain, Sekt in Germany, and sparkling wine in USA.
And really you can find excellent quality sparkling wines that are not called 'champagne'. The term Champagne is kind of like a trademark, and France fiercely defends the name.
But you can buy quality sparkling wines made in many different places in the world
Wouldn't it suck to have your HD-DVD player stop working for new titles, because someone was using its key? Sure it might suck, but it's one of those little annoyances we live with because we know that Theft is Theft. We're only too happy to pay for a product and then have it cripple apart before our eyes. Sure, I might no longer be able to use the equipment I paid big money for, but will sleep comfortably at night knowing that at least the companies have protected their profits, just a little bit.
Report is from NPD Group, well who are their clients... EMI Music (a large RIAA member).
This is not an unbiased research firm, they are a marketing company and will serve the interests of their clients.
Probably just another arm of the RIAA/MPAA. I don't see how it would possibly serve this for-profit company's interests to say anything other than downloading is theft
I admit I rent old movies and copy them. I would voluntarily pay a royalty on the media. If you're in Canada you are paying a built in royalty on the blank media, so you are paying for this privilege. Keep doing it, I do too.
It is insulting to be put through an educational lesson on the industry's demands. So stop buying the DVDs, that's what I did. (Rent second-hand to keep money away from the industry). I'm not going to pay to be talked down to... and when I do go to movies, it's second run theatres
The leap that the media industry makes is that these "downloads" are DISPLACING sales (zero evidence of this). I think that's bogus. For several years now I have neither bought nor downloaded audio music. If I stopped being able to find movies on torrents tomorrow, I guarantee you I would not go and buy the DVDs. I might go and rent them from my local small store for $2, but I sure as hell won't buy them.
My best guess is, the industry is facing decreasing sales as a result of declining quality and excessive prices that are way out of line with what the market is willing to pay. So they are suffering declining sales, while downloads are of course increasing. They would like to blame the lack of sales on the downloads, but it's not a 100% transition from one to the other.
For the kinds of purposes I'm interested in (research, science) this will make workers question the priorities of the operating system they are using. Is the priority to have maximum flexibility, performance, compatibility and extensibility (*nix) or to have maximum convenience for consumers (Windows).
Without a doubt, Windows is still the most convenient platform for consumers. But the priority behind the design is not purely performance and flexibility, but protecting content and other commercial interests.
We already know where the zombies are. Hard working volunteers collect and publish (among other things) zombies, an ever growing list of the nodes used to carry out spam runs, DoS attacks, and other mischief.
I don't doubt they are terrible implementations (I happen to think that the key entropy is way too small on the e-passports I have studied). I am just pointing out the difference between RFID chips and contactless smart cards.
There is a huge difference between "RFID chips" and "contactless smart cards"! They both use the same frequency band and similar communication protocols, but RFID chips have no crypto while contactless smart cards have all the AES, MAC, etc. stuff plus secure filesystem storage.
There is a huge difference, I keep posting this but nobody seems to get the point: the walmart RFID chips have zero crypto, but the passport, payment cards have a ton of crypto. You can't just dump their contents
The government calls them contactless smart cards because that is what they are, of course the media and everyone else uses the blanket term "RFID" to refer to all of it and works themselves up into a frenzy while not understanding the characteristics of the technology.
There is a serious misunderstanding of the technology, yes even among slashdot users. The problem is that the media and slashdot refer generically to 'rfid' when they talk about two different things:
1) Simple RFID chips that can be scan and read by anyone 2) Contactless smart cards (ISO 14443 etc), with crypto
Both use the same frequency band and similar hardware, but they are different beasts: one has crypto and the other doth not.
Identity information can be put on a contactless smart card but depending on how it is implemented (hopefully securely) you probably will NEED A KEY otherwise the crypto will prevent access. Take a wireless payment card or credit card (#2 category) for example. You can't just read/dump the bank account numbers on it. There is a crypto protecting the data.
On the other hand, walmart uses the non-crypto rfid chips. Yes you can just read the info on them, there is no encryption.
So when you say "RFID is terrible for personal security" you're right, RFID (#1 above) is completely inappropriate for privacy. But contactless smart cards (#2 above) is totally appropriate, and the passports use #2
As you point out, HD TV may be marginally more "beautiful". But really the HDTV hype and rollout has to do with a media industry's effort to plug the remaining analog hole. Once a critical mass of consumers are able to handle DRM protected digital TV (as HDTV allows), then the justification will exist to remove unprotected analog signals. A lot of you people are being suckered. Just watch, the filings with the FCC will begin. "There are enough digital receivers now" they'll say, no need for non-DRM TV.
I'm surprised this isn't discussed more on slashdot. As you know, one of the big beefs the MPAA & friends have with "those consumer assholes" is that we still have analog means to receive signals, copy them or otherwise use them as we wish. Digital TV - encoded broadcast signals - are really what the media companies are itching to see, because of the obvious protective measures and lockdown that the DMCA will provide.
There is no real interest in furthering technology here. The marketing hype for HDTV is to try and reduce the hurdle to finally eliminating analog TV. They want a critical mass of people to go digital, so it finally * would * be feasible to eliminate analog TV and only send TV in digital, encoded, DMCA and broadcast flag-protected format.
Face it, the average person doesn't notice the higher res of HDTV. Evidence? Many people buy HDTVs without the HDTV signal needed for higher res. They just don't notice what's missing, because... (drumroll) analog TV is good enough.
And this article indicates HDTV isn't that meaningful from a business perspective either. The real push behind this is the media industry
It's hard to imagine a better way of drawing attention to the government.Maybe that's the point of it: a message to others thinking of disgracing the state, "who do you THINK could use this to poison him, of course it's us". Kind of a classy (in a twisted psycho way) to do a state execution before the world's eyes
That being said, I take anything in the media with a grain of salt. The west (incl UK) isn't exactly friendly to Russia. They would probably rather make it sound like a Russian hit given a chance
First of all, the article summary seems a bit misleading because people might think we're talking about "stock picking" as in analyst opinions/monkeys picking stocks. That's not so, this is about software driven trading. Often this is of a very short term nature, so in a way the growing use of program trading is the "new day trading" fad.
In the industry it's called "program trading" and refers to automated, algorithmic trading of instruments such as stocks, futures, forex. This is regularly done by many banks and large funds, and also small investors. In fact there is a discount brokerage which I'll just call IB here, that has an API which lets anyone program their own computerized trading. It's a bit "too easy" to do.
That doesn't mean it's always profitable in the long term, but without a doubt people are profiting at least in the short term. The software has multiple strategies, well documented approaches and algorithms. Generally the trading robot is trying to ride trends.
As someone who follows these things, here are a few criticisms I'm aware of:
1. These short term trading activities require high leverage, because trades have to be for large amounts of money to make them worthwhile. You need large amounts of money to make this work, because things like trading costs eat into profits tremendously. Again, like day trading.
2. High leverage is risky because one big mistake or unpleasant event could wipe out tons of past small gains. Risk management becomes a key issue. Some would argue that perceived risk in markets these days is unreasonably low. Does this unbalance the risk/reward equation?
3. Market-wide, we know program trading has increased dramatically on US exchanges. Add to this the undocumented program trading (smaller traders who don't have to report it to anyone) and basically there are a ton of computer algorithms out there today trading stocks. Everybody can't make money at the same time, so to profit the participants have to use even greater leverage = more risk.
4. Programming flaws, bugs, or improper risk management could have tremendous market-wide implications. Take for example the huge market moves in 1987; the drop was a "20-sigma" event and not anywhere within the realm of possibility back then. Obviously the models failed to handle it. Similarly, the next time we have a "big event" in markets, today's algorithms might fail. If a large number of computers choke while trading, could bad things happen?
5. So under unstable market conditions, the program trading could lead to increased volatility (like daytrading caused volatile markets during the crash). But under stable market conditions, like we have today, program trading seems to smooth out daily movements. Notice that the US markets hardly move as much as 1% in a day; trends are smooth and volatility is extremely low. The VIX, a volatility measure, has hit historic lows.
Robotic stock analyst (disclaimer: for entertainment only, this is not investment advice... some people email me and think these are REAL analyst statements). The point of this "joke" is to demonstrate who stupid most analyst statements are, they are just the same perpetually positive endorsement for stocks. Remember that analysts are employed by investment firms or banks and have a conflict of interest, they are overwhelmingly leaning in favour of telling you to buy stocks. Always.
With all those highly educated leaders of tomorrow (a ton of other students) at UCLA
How come nobody spoke up or came to his defence?
These college kids talk the talk but when the time comes, they do nothing. I heard someone asking the cops for their info, that's good, but ultimately the crowd's response was "yes sir" I'll shut up and watch you assault my fellow student. We're in our 20s but are too weak or spineless to stand up to rent-a-copy authority.
This is the same reason I chose to avoid it. I develop all kinds of applications, some are for internal use, some are heavily commercial. Learning and developing with Qt is a bad investment because their licensing severely limits my ability as a creator (since I am not going to pay for the commercial license); I am not going to tolerate those limitations when I can use free libraries like wxWidgets
Slashdot Mirror
That's of course true, the whole idea of RFID chips is they are inductively powered and don't have to carry their own power source.
(I happen to be a Canadian RFID researcher, of all things)
But the article sounds like BS to me. Let's say the coins did have an RFID chip on their surface, perhaps in one of the quarters with a poppy cut-out in the center (or the two dollar coin which also has a center that can come out). What would you DO with the "spy chip"? You're going to record audio or video? Fine... then do what with it? You don't have enough space to store it, and you can only transmit it a few feet away.
It might be a practical way to track where coins go, but I can't see how it could be used to "spy". It's really no different than say a serial number stamped on currency, which we do have on paper bills. I just don't see the point.
I live and work out of Canada... in the past I have visited the USA as part of some contract work. I often go to conferences in the states. I've also considered relocating to the United States for my job as the pay is marginally better down there.
The post-9/11 world has changed my views on this, and it just keeps getting worse!
There is no way I will go to the United States to work! I am even avoiding it for the holidays. 10 years ago, we used to just drive south of the border for shopping or recreation - day trips. It's becoming a scary police state and now I'm avoiding travel down south whenever possible.
I guess that's the intended effect of these xenophobic laws, right... keep the law-abiding professional workers (and wealthy tourists) out of your country. Good thing the US economy is so healthy. Ooops
We didn't have any of these madcow/BSE problems when these animals were fed a natural diet. In western countries, we have been force feeding these animals materials which they are not designed to handle - like tissue and blood from other animals.
As the parent said, yes cows can live entirely on grain and grass and they taste damned good after wandering around eating that stuff all day.
But in the name of cost effective feed, the industry continues to pursue this kind of garbage input instead of grains/grass. It's all about cost and the throughput.
I am concerned about my own health and I am eating less meat because I don't think the animals are given appropriate feed. If I encounter a smaller meat shoppe who can assure me the animals have been fed on a natural diet, I would still buy that meat in a heartbeat.
A point that is often lost on people is that Champagne (as it can only be called when originating from the Champagne region of France) is just a "sparkling wine", and sparkling wine is produced by many countries... it's called Cava in Spain, Sekt in Germany, and sparkling wine in USA.
And really you can find excellent quality sparkling wines that are not called 'champagne'. The term Champagne is kind of like a trademark, and France fiercely defends the name.
But you can buy quality sparkling wines made in many different places in the world
I haven't studied this implementation, but techniques like salts can easily avoid known PT/CT pair attacks
Report is from NPD Group, well who are their clients ... EMI Music (a large RIAA member).
This is not an unbiased research firm, they are a marketing company and will serve the interests of their clients.
Probably just another arm of the RIAA/MPAA. I don't see how it would possibly serve this for-profit company's interests to say anything other than downloading is theft
It is insulting to be put through an educational lesson on the industry's demands. So stop buying the DVDs, that's what I did. (Rent second-hand to keep money away from the industry). I'm not going to pay to be talked down to... and when I do go to movies, it's second run theatres
The leap that the media industry makes is that these "downloads" are DISPLACING sales (zero evidence of this). I think that's bogus. For several years now I have neither bought nor downloaded audio music. If I stopped being able to find movies on torrents tomorrow, I guarantee you I would not go and buy the DVDs. I might go and rent them from my local small store for $2, but I sure as hell won't buy them.
My best guess is, the industry is facing decreasing sales as a result of declining quality and excessive prices that are way out of line with what the market is willing to pay. So they are suffering declining sales, while downloads are of course increasing. They would like to blame the lack of sales on the downloads, but it's not a 100% transition from one to the other.
For the kinds of purposes I'm interested in (research, science) this will make workers question the priorities of the operating system they are using. Is the priority to have maximum flexibility, performance, compatibility and extensibility (*nix) or to have maximum convenience for consumers (Windows).
Without a doubt, Windows is still the most convenient platform for consumers. But the priority behind the design is not purely performance and flexibility, but protecting content and other commercial interests.
We sure know the priority isn't security either
We already know where the zombies are. Hard working volunteers collect and publish (among other things) zombies, an ever growing list of the nodes used to carry out spam runs, DoS attacks, and other mischief.
cbl, sorbs, uceprotect, wpbl, and others all publish this info in near realtime
That's where the info is. A responsible ISP has to search the lists for their hosts and then go from there.
I don't doubt they are terrible implementations (I happen to think that the key entropy is way too small on the e-passports I have studied). I am just pointing out the difference between RFID chips and contactless smart cards.
There is a huge difference between "RFID chips" and "contactless smart cards"! They both use the same frequency band and similar communication protocols, but RFID chips have no crypto while contactless smart cards have all the AES, MAC, etc. stuff plus secure filesystem storage.
There is a huge difference, I keep posting this but nobody seems to get the point: the walmart RFID chips have zero crypto, but the passport, payment cards have a ton of crypto. You can't just dump their contents
The government calls them contactless smart cards because that is what they are, of course the media and everyone else uses the blanket term "RFID" to refer to all of it and works themselves up into a frenzy while not understanding the characteristics of the technology.
There is a serious misunderstanding of the technology, yes even among slashdot users. The problem is that the media and slashdot refer generically to 'rfid' when they talk about two different things:
1) Simple RFID chips that can be scan and read by anyone
2) Contactless smart cards (ISO 14443 etc), with crypto
Both use the same frequency band and similar hardware, but they are different beasts: one has crypto and the other doth not.
Identity information can be put on a contactless smart card but depending on how it is implemented (hopefully securely) you probably will NEED A KEY otherwise the crypto will prevent access. Take a wireless payment card or credit card (#2 category) for example. You can't just read/dump the bank account numbers on it. There is a crypto protecting the data.
On the other hand, walmart uses the non-crypto rfid chips. Yes you can just read the info on them, there is no encryption.
So when you say "RFID is terrible for personal security" you're right, RFID (#1 above) is completely inappropriate for privacy. But contactless smart cards (#2 above) is totally appropriate, and the passports use #2
Heh we did this in 2003 and our VoIP implementation with NAT compatibility outperformed Skype at the time, had much better audio quality. (Old news).
Hello, Human Fly here! Come on, I spent all night dying my underwear.
As you point out, HD TV may be marginally more "beautiful". But really the HDTV hype and rollout has to do with a media industry's effort to plug the remaining analog hole. Once a critical mass of consumers are able to handle DRM protected digital TV (as HDTV allows), then the justification will exist to remove unprotected analog signals. A lot of you people are being suckered. Just watch, the filings with the FCC will begin. "There are enough digital receivers now" they'll say, no need for non-DRM TV.
I'm surprised this isn't discussed more on slashdot. As you know, one of the big beefs the MPAA & friends have with "those consumer assholes" is that we still have analog means to receive signals, copy them or otherwise use them as we wish. Digital TV - encoded broadcast signals - are really what the media companies are itching to see, because of the obvious protective measures and lockdown that the DMCA will provide.
... (drumroll) analog TV is good enough.
There is no real interest in furthering technology here. The marketing hype for HDTV is to try and reduce the hurdle to finally eliminating analog TV. They want a critical mass of people to go digital, so it finally * would * be feasible to eliminate analog TV and only send TV in digital, encoded, DMCA and broadcast flag-protected format.
Face it, the average person doesn't notice the higher res of HDTV. Evidence? Many people buy HDTVs without the HDTV signal needed for higher res. They just don't notice what's missing, because
And this article indicates HDTV isn't that meaningful from a business perspective either. The real push behind this is the media industry
It's hard to imagine a better way of drawing attention to the government.Maybe that's the point of it: a message to others thinking of disgracing the state, "who do you THINK could use this to poison him, of course it's us". Kind of a classy (in a twisted psycho way) to do a state execution before the world's eyes That being said, I take anything in the media with a grain of salt. The west (incl UK) isn't exactly friendly to Russia. They would probably rather make it sound like a Russian hit given a chance
First of all, the article summary seems a bit misleading because people might think we're talking about "stock picking" as in analyst opinions/monkeys picking stocks. That's not so, this is about software driven trading. Often this is of a very short term nature, so in a way the growing use of program trading is the "new day trading" fad.
In the industry it's called "program trading" and refers to automated, algorithmic trading of instruments such as stocks, futures, forex. This is regularly done by many banks and large funds, and also small investors. In fact there is a discount brokerage which I'll just call IB here, that has an API which lets anyone program their own computerized trading. It's a bit "too easy" to do.
That doesn't mean it's always profitable in the long term, but without a doubt people are profiting at least in the short term. The software has multiple strategies, well documented approaches and algorithms. Generally the trading robot is trying to ride trends.
As someone who follows these things, here are a few criticisms I'm aware of:
1. These short term trading activities require high leverage, because trades have to be for large amounts of money to make them worthwhile. You need large amounts of money to make this work, because things like trading costs eat into profits tremendously. Again, like day trading.
2. High leverage is risky because one big mistake or unpleasant event could wipe out tons of past small gains. Risk management becomes a key issue. Some would argue that perceived risk in markets these days is unreasonably low. Does this unbalance the risk/reward equation?
3. Market-wide, we know program trading has increased dramatically on US exchanges. Add to this the undocumented program trading (smaller traders who don't have to report it to anyone) and basically there are a ton of computer algorithms out there today trading stocks. Everybody can't make money at the same time, so to profit the participants have to use even greater leverage = more risk.
4. Programming flaws, bugs, or improper risk management could have tremendous market-wide implications. Take for example the huge market moves in 1987; the drop was a "20-sigma" event and not anywhere within the realm of possibility back then. Obviously the models failed to handle it. Similarly, the next time we have a "big event" in markets, today's algorithms might fail. If a large number of computers choke while trading, could bad things happen?
5. So under unstable market conditions, the program trading could lead to increased volatility (like daytrading caused volatile markets during the crash). But under stable market conditions, like we have today, program trading seems to smooth out daily movements. Notice that the US markets hardly move as much as 1% in a day; trends are smooth and volatility is extremely low. The VIX, a volatility measure, has hit historic lows.
Robotic stock analyst (disclaimer: for entertainment only, this is not investment advice ... some people email me and think these are REAL analyst statements). The point of this "joke" is to demonstrate who stupid most analyst statements are, they are just the same perpetually positive endorsement for stocks. Remember that analysts are employed by investment firms or banks and have a conflict of interest, they are overwhelmingly leaning in favour of telling you to buy stocks. Always.
With all those highly educated leaders of tomorrow (a ton of other students) at UCLA
How come nobody spoke up or came to his defence?
These college kids talk the talk but when the time comes, they do nothing. I heard someone asking the cops for their info, that's good, but ultimately the crowd's response was "yes sir" I'll shut up and watch you assault my fellow student. We're in our 20s but are too weak or spineless to stand up to rent-a-copy authority.
This is the same reason I chose to avoid it. I develop all kinds of applications, some are for internal use, some are heavily commercial. Learning and developing with Qt is a bad investment because their licensing severely limits my ability as a creator (since I am not going to pay for the commercial license); I am not going to tolerate those limitations when I can use free libraries like wxWidgets