It's been stated that Activision doesn't even verify the cards, they're just checking the number, so any generator should work for this.
But for other purposes, like buying AdultCheck IDs, why not just get one of the little cash-reloadable cards? A few years back, 7-11 had AmEx "gift cards" that you could add value to just by handing cash to the clerk. There was no ID or age check to get one.
That pilot program ended, but I think recently there've been a few other cash-card systems that appear as a CC to the merchant. If there's no ID check to get the card, then any kid could plunk down $20 for one and "age-verify" to all sorts of sites, particularly the AdultCheck network.
Oh man I'm a moron, I saw the different post IDs in the links and thought they were different threads. Duh. I linked to the second page of the first thread. Disregard that.
Here's another CDFreaks thread that goes into a little more depth. The format is almost certainly CD-BGM, but all the authoring software is years old.
Anyone who makes progress getting this stuff to run, let me know, it'd be great to carry a few "muzak that doesn't suck" CDs in the car at all times, and offer them to repressed workers in such environments.:)
News for Google fanboys. Stuff that doesn't matter.
I mean seriously, Slashdot posts a story every time someone at Google sneezes. I'm a little sick of it. Trouble is, most of the stories don't go under the Google category, so it's impossible to filter them out.
It just wouldn't do to say how many feet tall the telescopes are, since nobody knows how big a foot is. No, we have to specify height in relation to a goalpost, since obviously everyone reading Slashdot is intimately familiar with football goalposts (is that american football, or soccer?) and how to convert them into other common measurements.
Keep this in mind: Fireproof files are designed to protect paper. All they have to do is keep it below the point where paper combusts or degrades, and they've done their job. Of course, your CDs, backup tapes, and plastic-encased flash devices have long since become a puddle at the bottom of the box.
A "media safe" uses evaporative elements in the housing, such as water-impregnated foam, to resist temperature rise past a certain point for a certain amount of time. They must be replaced after a single fire, because the thermal parts are exhausted. Media safes are many times the cost of regular fire safes.
Geographically distributed backups, or those kept on your person, are a much better idea. Do you have a trusted friend who lives more than 500 miles away?
Considering that WAAS was announced in 1994 and AOR-W went up in 1997, I don't see much reason for new firmware updates unless there are bugs in the old stuff. There simply hasn't been a lot of change lately.
That being said, WAAS was specifically designed to be usable by existing Navstar receivers, with only a firmware upgrade. Other improvements, like DGPS and LAAS, require specialized hardware and cooperation from a nearby reference station.
A new civilian frequency will require new receivers. The clocks on the new satellites might be a smidge more stable than the old ones, but in order to squeeze more accuracy out of the signal, you'll need a new receiver.
Why throw your money at Sony, who does their best via DRM and everything to keep you out, when open platforms like the Tapwave Zodiac invite developers in?
Of course, this "feed the hand that bites us" behavior among gamers has already forced the Zodiac off the market -- nobody was buying it.
Ditto XBox! Why do geeks, who should oppose every shred of DRM and proprietarism that the green thing embodies, go out and buy the thing only to turn it into a set-top linux box? Hello? You're throwing money AT the evil empire.
I understand there's a certain challenge to "owning" such a closed system. Fine, show Microsoft and Sony you're better than them. But at the end of the day, all this activity does is encourage MORE of exactly the wrong behavior on the megacorps' part.
"The main question that I had for the rep was this: what's to keep someone from haX0ring up some sort of rank, rotting flesh smell and mailing it to someone with a name like "spring showers" or something so that they wind up stinking up their workstation? The rep tried to assure me that this was somehow impossible because the machine didn't carry those categories of rank odors like rotting flesh, flatulence, etc. Still, I remained unconvinced. Then he started talking about Digiscents' designs on the gaming market, and I pointed out to him that a developer like iD would definitely want the smell of rotting flesh for their games, so the machine would, in fact, have to support such smells eventually. He agreed, and then tried various other angles on convincing me that there's no way you could prank someone by e-flatulating in their cubicle."
This just occured to me: Simply give each student a set of several RFID tags and an Altoids tin. When they figure out how they want to respond, they leave the appropriate tag on the desk while putting the others inside the tin.
After a moment's countdown, an RFID reader scans the room and tallies up all the tags it saw. Simple, cheap, and ought to raise awareness of the privacy implications and countermeasures!
Around here, commercial power isn't very reliable. Every summer storm produces at least a few momentary dropouts, and we're typically out for a few hours each year. Sometimes several days, but that hasn't happened recently.
My point was that the main building supply would be the giant UPS, or generator, either of which can fail in various ways. Two small UPS units, one per power supply, would just add expense. All you need is one, to sustain the server until the generator kicks in, or the main UPS is back online, or the server shuts itself down.
I've been saying this for years. Unfortunately my only multiple-power supply box (second-hand, cheap) has a single inlet plug, so it would take some work to run each power supply from its own UPS.
In the telecomm infrastructure, everything runs from a DC battery bank, which is maintained by rectifiers. (Or you could say it runs from rectifiers, backed up by batteries. Semantics.) All the equipment has 2 power supplies, and is always fed from two separate DC inputs, known as A and B. In very small (remote equipment hut) installations, sometimes A and B are both fed from the same battery bank, but in most buildings, there are two strings of batteries. You could concievably blow a main fuse on one side, and the whole office would run from the other. (Everything's fused high enough that it can draw all its power from one side or the other, but in normal use, they split the load evenly.)
The DC infrastructure makes telco central offices ideally suited to solar-electric installations, since the inverter is a large part of the cost of a residential photovoltaic installation. (I don't know why we don't see this more often.)
Back to servers. I've got very little experience with redundant power supplies in the PC world. Is the APM/ACPI driver aware that one power supply has failed? Suppose you had one power supply plugged into the "house power" feed, and the other into a small "personal" UPS. Could software notice the failure and begin an orderly shutdown, or would the small UPS have to tell the server, via USB or RS232, about the fact that it's now running on battery?
Don't even think about doing this without talking to your city's electrical inspector. She will, of course, laugh you out of her office.
The UPS is an appliance, not a fixture. It has to be separable from the building wiring by a plug. It doesn't carry the appropriate ratings and classifications for being wired-in. Use the appropriate output cords and power strips.
That being said, you might want to do some research into generator transfer switches, and the idea that some of the house's loads would be on a separate panel that gets backup power.
I'd suggest vehicle keyless entry transmitters, except for the interference issue. (just think, a lot of students have them already, and you could just enroll the existing transmitters into the system, nothing to buy, nothing extra to carry!)
A dozen receivers scattered around the room might actually do pretty well in a situation like that. Discard the dupes, and assume you got most of the rest. Or once a few dozen responses have been tallied, throw up a list of student IDs on the projector for "response not received yet", and if you see your ID there, click again?
The clickers must have some way of managing contention, a backoff algorithm or polling of some sort, otherwise they'd just all collide if everyone clicked at the same time, and the results wouldn't be discernable.
So, it appears that all you'd need is to hotwire a single clicker into transmitting continuously, and it would inhibit all the others.
Of course, your idea of crashing the software is cute, but it just takes one software patch and you're back to the drawing board. Attacking the RF layer is more likely to yield a permanent solution.
Better yet, if one of the supposed advantages of a clicker system is anonymity, why not build a receiver that lets you eavesdrop on everyone else's clicks and serial numbers?
Aha, you beat me to it. Everyone's got laptops already anyway, right? Get the network group to rig it so that only laptops currently associated with APs in this building can access the appropriate page.
And to answer you question, CowboyNeal's mom brushes her teeth every morning, yes.
Take a look at Semacode, which is a 2d encoding standard for URLs, and decoding software for Symbian phones that can automagically load the URL into the phone's browser.
The idea behind Semacode is to tie URLs to places, for things like self-guided city tours, etc.
It always seemed to me that ISP-based filtering, be it spam filtering, port filtering, adult content filtering, should simply be enabled by default with a simple way for the subscriber to turn it on or off at will.
Most subscribers would never bump up against most restrictions, and would remain walled off. Power users could easily open up as much as they need.
Are there any existing ways to give individual subscribers control over these things, that ISPs could be pointed to and told "implement THIS."?
There's an "AIRBAG TEST" menu in the TECH-2 which does precisely that. Techs have a "dummy airbag", which is more or less an LED with a dropping resistor, that they drop in place before running that test. But the control module doesn't know the difference.
Now of course, the TECH-2 won't let you perform the airbag test (or the ABS wheel solenoid test) while the vehicle's in gear. But is that limitation built into the ECM, or just the TECH-2's user interface?
Because if your computer can send arbitrary audio out your cellphone's speaker, things just got a lot more interesting.
Also from the "bluetooth pairings you wish you could do" department, why can't a pair of earpieces act as walkie-talkies?
For that matter, if a building was blanketed with Bluetooth accesspoints, could this be used to route local voice traffic over an in-building PBX, while letting cellphones behave normally when they were away? I got into just such a discussion last week, but the bluetooth documentation I read led me to believe that phones can't act as generic audio I/O for other devices.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been stated that Activision doesn't even verify the cards, they're just checking the number, so any generator should work for this.
But for other purposes, like buying AdultCheck IDs, why not just get one of the little cash-reloadable cards? A few years back, 7-11 had AmEx "gift cards" that you could add value to just by handing cash to the clerk. There was no ID or age check to get one.
That pilot program ended, but I think recently there've been a few other cash-card systems that appear as a CC to the merchant. If there's no ID check to get the card, then any kid could plunk down $20 for one and "age-verify" to all sorts of sites, particularly the AdultCheck network.
Oh man I'm a moron, I saw the different post IDs in the links and thought they were different threads. Duh. I linked to the second page of the first thread. Disregard that.
Here's another CDFreaks thread that goes into a little more depth. The format is almost certainly CD-BGM, but all the authoring software is years old.
:)
Anyone who makes progress getting this stuff to run, let me know, it'd be great to carry a few "muzak that doesn't suck" CDs in the car at all times, and offer them to repressed workers in such environments.
News for Google fanboys. Stuff that doesn't matter.
I mean seriously, Slashdot posts a story every time someone at Google sneezes. I'm a little sick of it. Trouble is, most of the stories don't go under the Google category, so it's impossible to filter them out.
It just wouldn't do to say how many feet tall the telescopes are, since nobody knows how big a foot is. No, we have to specify height in relation to a goalpost, since obviously everyone reading Slashdot is intimately familiar with football goalposts (is that american football, or soccer?) and how to convert them into other common measurements.
Where does one find Gold discs these days? Just search the web for "Gold archival CD-R" and you'll find plenty of sources.
Keep this in mind: Fireproof files are designed to protect paper. All they have to do is keep it below the point where paper combusts or degrades, and they've done their job. Of course, your CDs, backup tapes, and plastic-encased flash devices have long since become a puddle at the bottom of the box.
A "media safe" uses evaporative elements in the housing, such as water-impregnated foam, to resist temperature rise past a certain point for a certain amount of time. They must be replaced after a single fire, because the thermal parts are exhausted. Media safes are many times the cost of regular fire safes.
Geographically distributed backups, or those kept on your person, are a much better idea. Do you have a trusted friend who lives more than 500 miles away?
Considering that WAAS was announced in 1994 and AOR-W went up in 1997, I don't see much reason for new firmware updates unless there are bugs in the old stuff. There simply hasn't been a lot of change lately.
That being said, WAAS was specifically designed to be usable by existing Navstar receivers, with only a firmware upgrade. Other improvements, like DGPS and LAAS, require specialized hardware and cooperation from a nearby reference station.
A new civilian frequency will require new receivers. The clocks on the new satellites might be a smidge more stable than the old ones, but in order to squeeze more accuracy out of the signal, you'll need a new receiver.
Why throw your money at Sony, who does their best via DRM and everything to keep you out, when open platforms like the Tapwave Zodiac invite developers in?
Of course, this "feed the hand that bites us" behavior among gamers has already forced the Zodiac off the market -- nobody was buying it.
Ditto XBox! Why do geeks, who should oppose every shred of DRM and proprietarism that the green thing embodies, go out and buy the thing only to turn it into a set-top linux box? Hello? You're throwing money AT the evil empire.
I understand there's a certain challenge to "owning" such a closed system. Fine, show Microsoft and Sony you're better than them. But at the end of the day, all this activity does is encourage MORE of exactly the wrong behavior on the megacorps' part.
But who needs a mouth? Seriously, with abilities like that...
(Link NSFW. Obviously.)
Ooh ooh ooh! *bouncing in seat* I know this one!
This just occured to me: Simply give each student a set of several RFID tags and an Altoids tin. When they figure out how they want to respond, they leave the appropriate tag on the desk while putting the others inside the tin.
After a moment's countdown, an RFID reader scans the room and tallies up all the tags it saw. Simple, cheap, and ought to raise awareness of the privacy implications and countermeasures!
Around here, commercial power isn't very reliable. Every summer storm produces at least a few momentary dropouts, and we're typically out for a few hours each year. Sometimes several days, but that hasn't happened recently.
My point was that the main building supply would be the giant UPS, or generator, either of which can fail in various ways. Two small UPS units, one per power supply, would just add expense. All you need is one, to sustain the server until the generator kicks in, or the main UPS is back online, or the server shuts itself down.
I've been saying this for years. Unfortunately my only multiple-power supply box (second-hand, cheap) has a single inlet plug, so it would take some work to run each power supply from its own UPS.
In the telecomm infrastructure, everything runs from a DC battery bank, which is maintained by rectifiers. (Or you could say it runs from rectifiers, backed up by batteries. Semantics.) All the equipment has 2 power supplies, and is always fed from two separate DC inputs, known as A and B. In very small (remote equipment hut) installations, sometimes A and B are both fed from the same battery bank, but in most buildings, there are two strings of batteries. You could concievably blow a main fuse on one side, and the whole office would run from the other. (Everything's fused high enough that it can draw all its power from one side or the other, but in normal use, they split the load evenly.)
The DC infrastructure makes telco central offices ideally suited to solar-electric installations, since the inverter is a large part of the cost of a residential photovoltaic installation. (I don't know why we don't see this more often.)
Back to servers. I've got very little experience with redundant power supplies in the PC world. Is the APM/ACPI driver aware that one power supply has failed? Suppose you had one power supply plugged into the "house power" feed, and the other into a small "personal" UPS. Could software notice the failure and begin an orderly shutdown, or would the small UPS have to tell the server, via USB or RS232, about the fact that it's now running on battery?
Don't even think about doing this without talking to your city's electrical inspector. She will, of course, laugh you out of her office.
The UPS is an appliance, not a fixture. It has to be separable from the building wiring by a plug. It doesn't carry the appropriate ratings and classifications for being wired-in. Use the appropriate output cords and power strips.
That being said, you might want to do some research into generator transfer switches, and the idea that some of the house's loads would be on a separate panel that gets backup power.
I'd suggest vehicle keyless entry transmitters, except for the interference issue. (just think, a lot of students have them already, and you could just enroll the existing transmitters into the system, nothing to buy, nothing extra to carry!)
A dozen receivers scattered around the room might actually do pretty well in a situation like that. Discard the dupes, and assume you got most of the rest. Or once a few dozen responses have been tallied, throw up a list of student IDs on the projector for "response not received yet", and if you see your ID there, click again?
The clickers must have some way of managing contention, a backoff algorithm or polling of some sort, otherwise they'd just all collide if everyone clicked at the same time, and the results wouldn't be discernable.
So, it appears that all you'd need is to hotwire a single clicker into transmitting continuously, and it would inhibit all the others.
Of course, your idea of crashing the software is cute, but it just takes one software patch and you're back to the drawing board. Attacking the RF layer is more likely to yield a permanent solution.
Better yet, if one of the supposed advantages of a clicker system is anonymity, why not build a receiver that lets you eavesdrop on everyone else's clicks and serial numbers?
Aha, you beat me to it. Everyone's got laptops already anyway, right? Get the network group to rig it so that only laptops currently associated with APs in this building can access the appropriate page.
And to answer you question, CowboyNeal's mom brushes her teeth every morning, yes.
so I can just point at the underside of a CD, click the shutter button, and have some software read the image and assemble the .iso for me.
Take a look at Semacode, which is a 2d encoding standard for URLs, and decoding software for Symbian phones that can automagically load the URL into the phone's browser.
The idea behind Semacode is to tie URLs to places, for things like self-guided city tours, etc.
It always seemed to me that ISP-based filtering, be it spam filtering, port filtering, adult content filtering, should simply be enabled by default with a simple way for the subscriber to turn it on or off at will.
Most subscribers would never bump up against most restrictions, and would remain walled off. Power users could easily open up as much as they need.
Are there any existing ways to give individual subscribers control over these things, that ISPs could be pointed to and told "implement THIS."?
There's an "AIRBAG TEST" menu in the TECH-2 which does precisely that. Techs have a "dummy airbag", which is more or less an LED with a dropping resistor, that they drop in place before running that test. But the control module doesn't know the difference.
Now of course, the TECH-2 won't let you perform the airbag test (or the ABS wheel solenoid test) while the vehicle's in gear. But is that limitation built into the ECM, or just the TECH-2's user interface?
If it's the combo I remember, it wouldn't write to 360k floppies either. It could read from them, but refused to write.
Hell, even LS-120 drives won't do 2.88's. Good luck!
I seem to remember a vertical one years back, but I can't find reference to it anywhere.
I did find a five-into-one unit though, check it out.
Because if your computer can send arbitrary audio out your cellphone's speaker, things just got a lot more interesting.
Also from the "bluetooth pairings you wish you could do" department, why can't a pair of earpieces act as walkie-talkies?
For that matter, if a building was blanketed with Bluetooth accesspoints, could this be used to route local voice traffic over an in-building PBX, while letting cellphones behave normally when they were away? I got into just such a discussion last week, but the bluetooth documentation I read led me to believe that phones can't act as generic audio I/O for other devices.