I'm sure the long cable emits a plenty strong signal, but with a sensitive enough antenna (and you always assume your enemy is omnipotent and -present) picking up the output from the decryptor should be doable.
However, (and I'm fairly certain I read a comment to this effect already, so I'm redundant) if you combine decryption with decomression in one sheilded chip, the best you can intercept is decompressed signal. So then you'd have to suffer the loss of quality from recompression if you were to tap it there, or you could just not recompress and hope that eventually storage tech caught up with you.
Oh this can get really sick: you could also try to undecompress the signal -- not recompress ('cause then you're compressing rounding errors => loss of quality) -- but try to find the unique(?) compressed signal so that its decompression yeilds bit-for-bit the uncompressed signal you intercepted. This would be mega expensive (less/more than cracking encryption? probably more expensive, given 56 bit keys), but it'd work -- you'd get a perfect digital plaintext copy of the compressed and encrypted content.
As an attack against this, the sheilded de(compress/crypt)or chip could add random lowest-order bit noise to its output -- adding entropy w/o noticably harming display. Now you as the copier have a dilemma. You can't claim a "perfect digital copy" unless you keep all of the intentional entropy, but that would mean a much larger file than the original encrypted format (and making the job of undecompressing even harder -- before, at least you knew there existed an input stream with certain properties (bandwidth limits, what not)). Or you could back down from the "perfect" claim, but that is a slippery slope.
This is fun, but in all likelyhood, just bruteforcing the key is easiest.
.. who was interviewed an advogado (posted slashdot y-day? day before?) made the claim that with his wiz bang pentium-3, he could re-tex and xdvi preview changes in a 50 page document almost as quickly as a WYSIWIG machine.
Bollocks, as the WYWSIWIG program never makes syntax errors, but he at least thinks so. But he's biased.
There is obviously a continuum (I cannot spell that word, your honor) between systems languages (such as java) and scripting languages (such as bash).
Typically, a scripting language has automatic variable declaration, doesn't need to be compiled before running, does little type checking, has high-powered built in types (assoc arrays, f.ex) and is easy to connect to prebuilt components (such as system libraries written in C or small helper programs such as grep). Python and perl both qualify.
Python (and these days perl) also have system language features such as OO and modules. In my very predjudiced taste, python's ortogonality ("there isn't more than one way to do it" -- none of this "current line" or "default argument" or "side-effecting comparisons" stuff that perl has) makes it more of a systems language than perl. In perl's defence, these very featuers make it very convenient for a wide array of tasks -- tasks that I don't do much, and hence my preference for Python.
This is a subject that has started more flame wars than any other language feature except maybe LISP's parens.
JPython is almost exactly like CPython, appart form the lack of certain default modules. Oh, and JPython can interface trivially with java -- this is a BIG win for me. I use it alot.
In general, I prefer science fiction that takes the technology for granted and focusses on the social ascpects of the fictional setting. In this light, I'd like to recommend both
Beggars and Choosers (a trilogy that follows the best to worst progression) by Nancy Kress which postulates that "free" energy would basically lead to cultural breakdown, and also
Distraction by Bruce Sterling, which has socialist tribes as a major political force -- tribes use reputation servers to track individuals' statuses.
Of course, now you have to recommend me something.
PS, if you're sick of SF, Don DeLillo's White Noise is a really good read (at least so far -- half way through).
Re:Part of a four-volume trilogy ...
on
The Star Fraction
·
· Score: 1
Or is it Iain M Banks? One writes ok fiction, the other writes really amusing space opera. And they bpth live in the same body! But I can never remember which is which.
I disagree. It is the responsability to verify (and in the case of REUTERS, proofread) any articles for accuracy. If they decide to trust REUTERS implicitly, they are betting their reputation on that trust -- which is why you so rarely (ever?) see respectable newspapers print raw REUTERS stories.
Could you ever imagine a newspaper running a raw REUTERS/AP article on their front page? Not only is the english at an almost pre-literate level (spelling and grammar is routinely atrocious), but as we've all noticed the factual elements leave alot to be desired. Not to mention any analysis. Shudder.
Everytime I read some online news, and think to myself "my gawd this is poorly written," I look at the top of the story, and it is almost always a wire news story -- and most often REUTERS. You've done this too.
On a related note, have you ever read a Newspaper story of something you were [tangentially] involved in? They always (well, I used to live in a smallish town, so the bar for "news" was pretty low) emphasize the "wrong" points. It's kinda sobering to extend this to news in general -- it's all wrong, at some level.
But I agree. It's very rare that I see decent tech news. The Register, wired (but a shadow of its former self), and the always interesting salon (with a much nicer URL now that they dropped the "mag" suffix) seem to do the best jobs. YMMV
I'd imagine that atmospheric effects (even with post-processing to recognize known straight lines and correct locally for distortion) would make anything smaller than about a foot hard to identify. Ok, I might even buy -- just maybe -- 6 inches. Tops
Does anyone know what the period of orbit of this thing is? A couple of hours? What is the bandwidth of picture download and what res are they? How quickly can it change orbits (can it, or does it merely precess around the earth?) Is there only one or several.
If there were several and they were able to download a pic/s (or better yet, encode them into diffs against the last second's pic) you might be able to get a pretty good surveillance of one part of the earth.
their PR department are truly geniuses. This is what, the third time they successfully reinvent themselves?
Brilliant
Re:Why not just use the Crusoe as a G4?
on
Darwin on Crusoe?
·
· Score: 3
Hrm. Don't agree with you there. Well, I can't argue the facts of RISC and CISC, but...
The main thing about risc is: each instruction takes one cycle to complete. This has secondary implications on the instruction being simple, but the whole point is the uniform length. This is used in:
Superscalar processors have multiple issue for risc; the hardware necessary to translate the sequential instruction stream coming in to an equivalent 4 way (optimally) parallel instruction streams is VERY hairy. Note that this is really only possible if we know that each instruction is the same size (completes in the same number of cycles).
Note also that ALL modern x86 processors translate x86 to some internal risc code, and then use exactly this technique to keep those functional units busy.
However, Crusoe has VLIW instructions, which basically are X way parallel instructions. The mophing software does the superscalar issue statically (at translation time) rather than at issue time, but still; crusoe is a multiscalar RISC cpu (+ other cruft). When Crusoe morphs x86, it first riscifies it, and then schedules it. So it is easier for crusoe to translate RISC instructions, as they are already RISCified.
Now, it is hard to do as good a job of issuing instructions statically as you can do dynamically, but it does simplify the chip a lot, which I guess you can use to make it less power hungry.
You wouldn't happen to have any historical data on this would you? It'd be funny to see the industry try to attribute the [completely made up] 20 % decline in sales in 1989 and (again) 1993 to mp3 pirating.
If the 30 % reduction is true and if it is due to mp3s (I must admit to being more than slightly sceptical about this. Is it industry wide or due to people listening to more small-label acts? Here in boston, you hear less and less corp rock on the radio -- even WBCN! Also, is this counting only new releases? This has been a bad year for big name music, so apart from local acts, I'm buying mostly used CDs, stocking up on old Elvis Costello and Tom Waits)then what this says about the demographic is really interesting.
30% of the sales have gone to people who a have a computer located close to their primary listening area (count me out), and b are so cheap that they'd rather go through the hassle of finding (and downloading) the songs they want on mp3 than spend the $12 a CD costs at newbury comics, and then be forced to listen to it at that place only.
Basically, I can only think of one demographic: college students living in dorms. Of course not 100% of their CD purchases have gone to mp3s, so they must have been responsible for a HUGE portion of CD sales.
On the other hand, maybe a significant portion of the decrease in sales is due to people downloading mp3s for evaluation purposes and then deciding that the album really blows, so then they don't buy it. That'd be a shame, as some of my [now] favorite albums (XTC's English Settlement and Leftfield's newest one) I hated on the first listening.
uhh. I think I had a point to make, but now I want lunch.
You forgot to mention that they had this great "Cat" logo (in the same font and box as the "Gap" logo afterwards.
But yeah, their promos are kick ass. I'm not to fond of the Johnnys but the "Power puff girl" promo with these not-quite-slim women in green leotards run around is hillarious. Also the Dexters is great.
Or what about the scooby doo project, with Shaggy going on about "oh I am soo scared" and a little scooby doo totem made in the same style as the one in the blair witch. Brilliant
Before anyone starts yelling about audible effects, I'd like to point out that white 1-bit noise is already added; a paradoxial effect of sampling and quantiziation is that a small amount of white noise will actually enhance weak signals.
Mind you that is _adding_ noise, wereas the watermark would imply _replacing_ the lowest bit with noise. But still. Just goes to show how inaudible that sort of thing is.
This is a great point. If I hadn't already posted here I'd have modded you up.
Mainly, I think this is great point because I hadn't thought of it before: by decrypting the data stream, it becomes possible to make zero-degradation onto other formats.
I guess it is rather obvious, in retrospect, but ta all the same.
IANAL, and I'm really a bit of an info-libertarian (ie, you might break laws obtaining or transfering information, but the bits themselves are never illegal), but arguing the devils advocate:
I'd try to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the behavior of your program was so unlikely to have happened by chance that you must have designed it that way.
Once I'd shown that, I'd then claim that the input video + the program was in fact just on way of storing the illegal information. I'd make the analogy to encryption; just because you'd obfuscated the info didn't mean that you didn't have it.
As a defense you'd have to show that the effect did indeed happen by accident, which would be hard as the probabilites of that are VERY small.
---
In line with your gedanken experiment, conscider this:
There are three of us; each with a sequence of bytes of the same length. A xor B produces illegal DeCCS, B xor C produces a JPG of legal pr0n. A xor C is garbage.
Now which of us is guilty of storing DeCCS?
AFAICT (Can Tell) it'd be almost impossible to find anyone guilty. At first sight, A and B are seem rather co-guilty, and C is in the clear. Cool. But then the defence introduces D, which also C xor D producess DeCCS. Now by the previous argument, C and D are also guilty.
What? C goes from being innocent to guilty through the introduction of other information? But he was holding an innocuous pr0n, for gods sake.
This sort of wrangling gets really interesting, as you're often able to give at least one or two laywers coronaries if you play it well. And that is a Good Thing (tm):-)
The explosive growth of cellular telecoms has obsolesced iridium in all but the most remote of locations; if you are an iridium customer, you are because you have no other choice, not because it's convenvient or cheap. I think it's fair to assume that the days of the mobile iridium handset are numbered in the low tens. However, I'd imagine that as a semi-permanent or transportable base unit iridium would be a great solution. However, these user can supply their own gas generators.
Mind you, if iridium added a data service, it'd become even more attractive as a semi-permanent base station. Think of all the places in the world where it's infeasible to lay cable to (the jungle, the desert, sparsely populated russian steppes) but you want to do research or drill for oil.
Laying cable is expensive as hell, and iridium could keep their prices really high before losing these customers.
Of course, I'm just second guesing them here, I have no hard figures about relative costs.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure the long cable emits a plenty strong signal, but with a sensitive enough antenna (and you always assume your enemy is omnipotent and -present) picking up the output from the decryptor should be doable.
However, (and I'm fairly certain I read a comment to this effect already, so I'm redundant) if you combine decryption with decomression in one sheilded chip, the best you can intercept is decompressed signal. So then you'd have to suffer the loss of quality from recompression if you were to tap it there, or you could just not recompress and hope that eventually storage tech caught up with you.
Oh this can get really sick: you could also try to undecompress the signal -- not recompress ('cause then you're compressing rounding errors => loss of quality) -- but try to find the unique(?) compressed signal so that its decompression yeilds bit-for-bit the uncompressed signal you intercepted. This would be mega expensive (less/more than cracking encryption? probably more expensive, given 56 bit keys), but it'd work -- you'd get a perfect digital plaintext copy of the compressed and encrypted content.
As an attack against this, the sheilded de(compress/crypt)or chip could add random lowest-order bit noise to its output -- adding entropy w/o noticably harming display. Now you as the copier have a dilemma. You can't claim a "perfect digital copy" unless you keep all of the intentional entropy, but that would mean a much larger file than the original encrypted format (and making the job of undecompressing even harder -- before, at least you knew there existed an input stream with certain properties (bandwidth limits, what not)). Or you could back down from the "perfect" claim, but that is a slippery slope.
This is fun, but in all likelyhood, just bruteforcing the key is easiest.
Johan
.. who was interviewed an advogado (posted slashdot y-day? day before?) made the claim that with his wiz bang pentium-3, he could re-tex and xdvi preview changes in a 50 page document almost as quickly as a WYSIWIG machine.
Bollocks, as the WYWSIWIG program never makes syntax errors, but he at least thinks so. But he's biased.
Johan
There is obviously a continuum (I cannot spell that word, your honor) between systems languages (such as java) and scripting languages (such as bash).
Typically, a scripting language has automatic variable declaration, doesn't need to be compiled before running, does little type checking, has high-powered built in types (assoc arrays, f.ex) and is easy to connect to prebuilt components (such as system libraries written in C or small helper programs such as grep). Python and perl both qualify.
Python (and these days perl) also have system language features such as OO and modules. In my very predjudiced taste, python's ortogonality ("there isn't more than one way to do it" -- none of this "current line" or "default argument" or "side-effecting comparisons" stuff that perl has) makes it more of a systems language than perl. In perl's defence, these very featuers make it very convenient for a wide array of tasks -- tasks that I don't do much, and hence my preference for Python.
This is a subject that has started more flame wars than any other language feature except maybe LISP's parens.
JPython is almost exactly like CPython, appart form the lack of certain default modules. Oh, and JPython can interface trivially with java -- this is a BIG win for me. I use it alot.
... saw him pass out at 31 flavours last night. I guess it's pretty serious.
Beggars and Choosers (a trilogy that follows the best to worst progression) by Nancy Kress which postulates that "free" energy would basically lead to cultural breakdown, and also
Distraction by Bruce Sterling, which has socialist tribes as a major political force -- tribes use reputation servers to track individuals' statuses.
Of course, now you have to recommend me something.
PS, if you're sick of SF, Don DeLillo's White Noise is a really good read (at least so far -- half way through).
Or is it Iain M Banks? One writes ok fiction, the other writes really amusing space opera. And they bpth live in the same body! But I can never remember which is which.
I disagree. It is the responsability to verify (and in the case of REUTERS, proofread) any articles for accuracy. If they decide to trust REUTERS implicitly, they are betting their reputation on that trust -- which is why you so rarely (ever?) see respectable newspapers print raw REUTERS stories.
Could you ever imagine a newspaper running a raw REUTERS/AP article on their front page? Not only is the english at an almost pre-literate level (spelling and grammar is routinely atrocious), but as we've all noticed the factual elements leave alot to be desired. Not to mention any analysis. Shudder.
Everytime I read some online news, and think to myself "my gawd this is poorly written," I look at the top of the story, and it is almost always a wire news story -- and most often REUTERS. You've done this too.
On a related note, have you ever read a Newspaper story of something you were [tangentially] involved in? They always (well, I used to live in a smallish town, so the bar for "news" was pretty low) emphasize the "wrong" points. It's kinda sobering to extend this to news in general -- it's all wrong, at some level.
But I agree. It's very rare that I see decent tech news. The Register, wired (but a shadow of its former self), and the always interesting salon (with a much nicer URL now that they dropped the "mag" suffix) seem to do the best jobs. YMMV
that's a good point
I'd imagine that atmospheric effects (even with post-processing to recognize known straight lines and correct locally for distortion) would make anything smaller than about a foot hard to identify. Ok, I might even buy -- just maybe -- 6 inches. Tops
'k I'm lazy.
/s (or better yet, encode them into diffs against the last second's pic) you might be able to get a pretty good surveillance of one part of the earth.
Does anyone know what the period of orbit of this thing is? A couple of hours? What is the bandwidth of picture download and what res are they? How quickly can it change orbits (can it, or does it merely precess around the earth?) Is there only one or several.
If there were several and they were able to download a pic
:-)
yes,
their PR department are truly geniuses. This is what, the third time they successfully reinvent themselves?
Brilliant
Hrm. Don't agree with you there. Well, I can't argue the facts of RISC and CISC, but...
The main thing about risc is: each instruction takes one cycle to complete. This has secondary implications on the instruction being simple, but the whole point is the uniform length. This is used in:
Superscalar processors have multiple issue for risc; the hardware necessary to translate the sequential instruction stream coming in to an equivalent 4 way (optimally) parallel instruction streams is VERY hairy. Note that this is really only possible if we know that each instruction is the same size (completes in the same number of cycles).
Note also that ALL modern x86 processors translate x86 to some internal risc code, and then use exactly this technique to keep those functional units busy.
However, Crusoe has VLIW instructions, which basically are X way parallel instructions. The mophing software does the superscalar issue statically (at translation time) rather than at issue time, but still; crusoe is a multiscalar RISC cpu (+ other cruft). When Crusoe morphs x86, it first riscifies it, and then schedules it.
So it is easier for crusoe to translate RISC instructions, as they are already RISCified.
Now, it is hard to do as good a job of issuing instructions statically as you can do dynamically, but it does simplify the chip a lot, which I guess you can use to make it less power hungry.
Johan
Now this is Funny. Someone modded up the request to mod up the parent? Don't mod me or this parent up, but DO mod the parent^2 up please.
Ok, one last thing before I go eat (promise)
You wouldn't happen to have any historical data on this would you? It'd be funny to see the industry try to attribute the [completely made up] 20 % decline in sales in 1989 and (again) 1993 to mp3 pirating.
Johan
If the 30 % reduction is true and if it is due to mp3s (I must admit to being more than slightly sceptical about this. Is it industry wide or due to people listening to more small-label acts? Here in boston, you hear less and less corp rock on the radio -- even WBCN! Also, is this counting only new releases? This has been a bad year for big name music, so apart from local acts, I'm buying mostly used CDs, stocking up on old Elvis Costello and Tom Waits) then what this says about the demographic is really interesting.
30% of the sales have gone to people who a have a computer located close to their primary listening area (count me out), and b are so cheap that they'd rather go through the hassle of finding (and downloading) the songs they want on mp3 than spend the $12 a CD costs at newbury comics, and then be forced to listen to it at that place only.
Basically, I can only think of one demographic: college students living in dorms. Of course not 100% of their CD purchases have gone to mp3s, so they must have been responsible for a HUGE portion of CD sales.
On the other hand, maybe a significant portion of the decrease in sales is due to people downloading mp3s for evaluation purposes and then deciding that the album really blows, so then they don't buy it. That'd be a shame, as some of my [now] favorite albums (XTC's English Settlement and Leftfield's newest one) I hated on the first listening.
uhh. I think I had a point to make, but now I want lunch.
and
You forgot to mention that they had this great "Cat" logo (in the same font and box as the "Gap" logo afterwards.
But yeah, their promos are kick ass. I'm not to fond of the Johnnys but the "Power puff girl" promo with these not-quite-slim women in green leotards run around is hillarious. Also the Dexters is great.
Or what about the scooby doo project, with Shaggy going on about "oh I am soo scared" and a little scooby doo totem made in the same style as the one in the blair witch. Brilliant
Before anyone starts yelling about audible effects, I'd like to point out that white 1-bit noise is already added; a paradoxial effect of sampling and quantiziation is that a small amount of white noise will actually enhance weak signals.
Mind you that is _adding_ noise, wereas the watermark would imply _replacing_ the lowest bit with noise. But still. Just goes to show how inaudible that sort of thing is.
HTH? That's a new one for me
that's so baaad. (ok, so that's a lamb/goat, but goats have cheese too)
This is a great point. If I hadn't already posted here I'd have modded you up.
Mainly, I think this is great point because I hadn't thought of it before: by decrypting the data stream, it becomes possible to make zero-degradation onto other formats.
I guess it is rather obvious, in retrospect, but ta all the same.
I'd try to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the behavior of your program was so unlikely to have happened by chance that you must have designed it that way.
Once I'd shown that, I'd then claim that the input video + the program was in fact just on way of storing the illegal information. I'd make the analogy to encryption; just because you'd obfuscated the info didn't mean that you didn't have it.
As a defense you'd have to show that the effect did indeed happen by accident, which would be hard as the probabilites of that are VERY small.
---
In line with your gedanken experiment, conscider this:
There are three of us; each with a sequence of bytes of the same length. A xor B produces illegal DeCCS, B xor C produces a JPG of legal pr0n. A xor C is garbage.
Now which of us is guilty of storing DeCCS?
AFAICT (Can Tell) it'd be almost impossible to find anyone guilty. At first sight, A and B are seem rather co-guilty, and C is in the clear. Cool. But then the defence introduces D, which also C xor D producess DeCCS. Now by the previous argument, C and D are also guilty.
What? C goes from being innocent to guilty through the introduction of other information? But he was holding an innocuous pr0n, for gods sake.
This sort of wrangling gets really interesting, as you're often able to give at least one or two laywers coronaries if you play it well. And that is a Good Thing (tm)
and tires. You couldn't get the large quantities of black choking smoke w/o the tires.
Oh how morbid. See you in hell.
The explosive growth of cellular telecoms has obsolesced iridium in all but the most remote of locations; if you are an iridium customer, you are because you have no other choice, not because it's convenvient or cheap. I think it's fair to assume that the days of the mobile iridium handset are numbered in the low tens. However, I'd imagine that as a semi-permanent or transportable base unit iridium would be a great solution. However, these user can supply their own gas generators.
Mind you, if iridium added a data service, it'd become even more attractive as a semi-permanent base station. Think of all the places in the world where it's infeasible to lay cable to (the jungle, the desert, sparsely populated russian steppes) but you want to do research or drill for oil.
Laying cable is expensive as hell, and iridium could keep their prices really high before losing these customers.
Of course, I'm just second guesing them here, I have no hard figures about relative costs.
Just wanted to thank you for the first Value adding post. What it emitted was omitted, so to speak, from the article