Um, they have something wrong here, because requests to the Wayback Machine don't show up in the site's web server logs themselves. Who are they talking about, Harding Earley or the Wayback Machine's robot archiver?
For example on Max OS when you minimize a Window it does a fancy dgeni efect which allows your eyes know that the window just didn't go away but it shrunk into a spot on the dock.
This is more important than you think--many people don't understand the concept of multitasking or switching/minimizing windows. To use the classic family tech support example, my mom still cringes if I minimize her work or open something on top of it. It's gotten better since we have a Mac, though that probably has to do with the fact that on a PC, if you minimize a window, there's a 50% chance the program will crash before you restore it again.
I can think of a better compromise, like saying that "a copyright owner must show that the technology developer had (1) knowledge of specific infringments (2) at a time when it could do something about those infringements."
That's not good enough, because even a company that creates software that is blatantly obviously targeted for only illegal uses can get away with it by saying "oh, we didn't know". It should be a judgement of whether the manufacturer's intended use was copyright infringement or not.
You're doing the same thing I was complaining about--requiring an answer at one extreme or the other.
Is a P2P company responsible for the copyright-infringing acts of its users?
It depends! It in fact does depend on the intent of the manufacturer. To make YACIA (yet another crappy, irrelevant analogy), if you make cooking knives, it's not your fault if someone stabs someone else with them. But if you make knives and advertise them by saying "Stab your enemies 20% quicker than the competition," then you are liable, since you encouraged it.
You would complain if they made a broad, overarching decision, especially if it was anti-P2P, but you are now complaining because they made a reasonable, balanced decision. Why do we need one answer for all situations? It works better if we examine each situation individually and make a relevant decision instead of saying "Well, it's debatable if it's foo or bar, but (precedent|law) says foo, so I have to say foo."
They're good at weaseling out of such decisions these days - quite a shame.
I don't think they weaseled out of anything this time. By framing it as "the P2P question" and complaining about "weaseling", you are suggesting that you want either a unanimous "yes, any P2P is fine, even if it blatently encourages infringing uses" or a unanimous "no, P2P is horrible, even for solely legal uses". Neither is okay: yes to all P2P is bad because, even if "music should be free, etc...", copyright law still exists; no to all P2P is bad because it gets rid of legitimate uses like torrenting Knoppix ISO's. They came up with the best possible outcome, which is a compromise, stating that pitching software as primarily a way to infringe copyright is not okay. This is good. You shouldn't be encouraging the Supreme Court to make extreme decisions just to avoid "weaseling"!
I mean, with hard disk sizes in the hundreds of GB and growing, who really cares?
Once we get to terabytes, you'll care. As the units go up, the disparity between binary and metric starts to widen. With megabytes, the difference is 4.6% of your space. With gigabytes, it's 6.9%. With terabytes, it's 9.1%. With petabytes, it's 11.2%. And so on... It gets worse and worse.
And just because disk space keeps increasing, it's not going to be infinite. There's a saying that "operating systems and files will expand to fit the available media". It's true. If hard drive sizes were suddenly ten times bigger, people would start storing their music files at higher bitrates, storing their pictures as TIFF's or RAW's instead of JPEG's, keeping journaled copies of old files (isn't it odd that with all these increases in space, automatic versioning of files hasn't come back into popularity?), and so on. And when you go to archive some files and they're 153 GB and you happily buy a 160 GB drive and it doesn't fit, that's the problem.
Introduction This web page is a little raw because I just got the camera and I'm leaving on a trip soon. So, I'll be brief and hopefully informative.
If you're not familiar with the camera, here is a good review.
Disassembly Here's a photo gallery of the disassembly of my unit.
Similar in constructioon to the PV2, this unit is rugged and can be easily recycled.
Preliminary Analysis Others found that pressing the Record and Delete buttons while turning on the camera yields a special diagnostic page. Mine said:
FW-VERSION: 03.40 CAMERA ID: 6B7051xxxxxx PCB VER: B2
FLASH Memory Analysis NEW I was able to get my videos out of the camera and onto my home computer by removing the 128MB flash memory chip and putting it into my home-built flash reader. I originally built the system for the PV2 camera -- here's some more info on it. The only modification I had to make was for the increased memory size of the new part. The reader is nothing special -- just a cheaper (and slower) version of comercially available units.
I've placed my analysis of the camcorder's flash memory on its own page. That page also has sample videos I have recovered from my camera.
Resources The most current discussion that I follow is on the Camera Hacking message board. There is also discussion on Dakota PV2 discussion board.
contact me: my email address is my first name (john) at my last name (maushammer) dot com.
Is this legal? Yes. Info on the original most recent still disposable digital camera other systems I've played with visit my homepage
<statement of="obvious">Well, it doesn't seem like they did any of that, did they?</statement>
The "cause to malfunction" line is possible, but the ideas of proper function and malfunction are defined by what the user is doing, so if they want it to turn off filters, it's not malfunctioning. Other than that, they didn't erase data (aren't 1 and 3 the same?), transfer funds, or cause physical injury.
That's great for them. Now I will just tell anyone who gives me a Hotmail address that I need another address. There's a point where we have to put our feet down and just call their bluff of "if you don't use this, you won't be able to talk to anyone". Let's hope there's a big backlash and they can't keep this idea.
I don't know when, but the reason was this: Instead of having a 2.6 and 2.7 branch, they wanted to be able to accelerate integration of new developments. So the 2.6 series is under heavier development, and sometimes requires very minor bugfixes and such. Those go in the fourth part of the version number. I personally like this strategy since it means you can still rely on stable versions when you need them, but you also get to use nifty new features without waiting years for the development branch to become stable.
Big retailers suck... they're slow-moving, and easily suckered into spending all their time on marketing and none on educating their staff or customers. (Micro Center is an exception--I've never found someone stupid there, and only once was someone a little pushy. Still not nearly as bad as Circuit City and Best Buy can be if you get a sales-droid.)
The way Linux will become popular is places like PC's For Everyone--friendly, local computer stores, where you talk to people who know their stuff and aren't just programmed to sell you the most expensive system. I bought my notebook from them and purchased it OS-free, saving $110 over buying it with XP Home. If you combine a friendly store like that with a distro like Ubuntu that is very familiar and usable to Windows users, you could easily start converting users.
(Coincidentally, they're also very nice about supporting Linux: I installed Gentoo--not the world's stablest distro by a long shot--and when I started getting segfaults and such, they easily could have blamed me, the compiler, or my choice of distro. Instead, they fixed it in a weekend, and I had it back with working RAM. Right now it's in for a new hard drive, since it suddenly stopped working unless I rock the laptop to keep it from stalling.)
They also have a much prettier and less cluttered website than Micro Center, and a much easier (and less slimy--it shows real-time price instead of waiting for you to customize your "dream box" and then telling you it costs $4500) customization then Dell. And did I mention they support Linux?
(Some of this praise is due to the fact that, after dropping off my laptop, one of their employees caught me on the way out and sent me home with an Intel hat, polo shirt, and travel mug as thanks for all the feedback I gave them on their website.;-)
If you stumble upon the supervisors first, they're actually quite knowledgable. I managed to get half of a discount back on a product after it expired (I was going to buy this GPS last Saturday for $80, but by the time I got there on Monday it was $100... the guy sold it to me for $90). The guy was quite nice and reasonable, in contrast with the numerous zombies of which you speak. It's nice to know that there are still some decent, smart, helpful people left in the retail world.
I thought of an interesting way to do this the other day: PSK31. It's a data encoding used in ham radio and designed for keyboard-to-keyboard (i.e., relatively slow) communications. It is based on phase-shift keying, uses variable-length (Huffman encoded--the character set is called Varicode) symbols and uses only 31 Hz of bandwidth, hence the name. It is famous for its ability to be completely lost in static and still be received for the most part. I was playing with it, sending PSK31 along with music (between computers in the same room) to see if it could survive it. It was clearly more susceptible to QRM (man-made interference, like music) than QRN (static or natural interference) but it is clear that you can play loud music and choose a frequency at which it wouldn't be noticed, and still copy 60%-80% of the data. Heck, if it's techno music, it will just blend in, since it's a two-tone chirping/warbling. But if you just embedded a message in a song, repeating, you could easily get it out without much trouble, and it would almost definitely survive digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital conversion, since it does when used on the radio. It, or something similar, could be a really easy and sneaky way to tag media files. It can be easily removed, of course, with a notch filter, but it could be encoded at various frequencies. (There's an idea, encode it at 5 to 10 harmonically unrelated frequencies, try decoding all of them, and choose the most audible or least disrupted to use as you go along. That way, if the music lands on top of one signal, the others will still be readable.)
Um... if I had clients that were afraid of tatoos, I would try my best to get rid of them if possible (assuming it wouldn't incur a huge financial loss... but grannies probably aren't that profitable). That's just stupid.
They allow unrestricted access to their entire LAN, which I believe includes the DNS server. What's weird is that they're picky about security on the Internet connection but downright careless about security on the local side. (I became the Samba master browser with little effort, and everything is unrestricted...) I would expect the opposite.
Yeah, 53 is DNS, not SAMBA... It listed as "domain" in nmap and I erroneously assumed it was "windows domain controller"-type stuff and that DNS would be called simply "dns". I don't know why they allow DNS to the internet, though, because when you connect, it sets their DNS server using DHCP.
I don't have anything running on port 443 now, so I might run a proxy. Any recommendations? Any sort of tunnelling/VPN thing that's easy to set up?
It is internet only, so email needs to be via a web-based provider.
No. You mean that it has a crappy, overrestrictive firewall that allows access only to the few ports required for HTTP access to web sites. Internet-only would simply suggest that it doesn't allow access to other networks, such as LAN's. Don't get the two mixed up.
I really wish people would stop putting in neutered, free "Internet" access. I use the BPL, and their system allows full access to anything on their LAN, but allows only ports 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS), and 53 (SMB!) to the outside world. I asked, and they said the reason they restricted it was that a lot of people liked to come in and screw around with it. The answer to that would seem to be restricting access to the *local* network, and allowing full Internet access, not the other way around! It's a pain in the ass to be able to browse the web but not use IMAP, SSH, or anything other than what the dumb 90% of the population thinks is "teh intarweb".
Slashdot Mirror
Um, they have something wrong here, because requests to the Wayback Machine don't show up in the site's web server logs themselves. Who are they talking about, Harding Earley or the Wayback Machine's robot archiver?
This is more important than you think--many people don't understand the concept of multitasking or switching/minimizing windows. To use the classic family tech support example, my mom still cringes if I minimize her work or open something on top of it. It's gotten better since we have a Mac, though that probably has to do with the fact that on a PC, if you minimize a window, there's a 50% chance the program will crash before you restore it again.
That's not good enough, because even a company that creates software that is blatantly obviously targeted for only illegal uses can get away with it by saying "oh, we didn't know". It should be a judgement of whether the manufacturer's intended use was copyright infringement or not.
You're doing the same thing I was complaining about--requiring an answer at one extreme or the other.
It depends! It in fact does depend on the intent of the manufacturer. To make YACIA (yet another crappy, irrelevant analogy), if you make cooking knives, it's not your fault if someone stabs someone else with them. But if you make knives and advertise them by saying "Stab your enemies 20% quicker than the competition," then you are liable, since you encouraged it.
You would complain if they made a broad, overarching decision, especially if it was anti-P2P, but you are now complaining because they made a reasonable, balanced decision. Why do we need one answer for all situations? It works better if we examine each situation individually and make a relevant decision instead of saying "Well, it's debatable if it's foo or bar, but (precedent|law) says foo, so I have to say foo."
I don't think they weaseled out of anything this time. By framing it as "the P2P question" and complaining about "weaseling", you are suggesting that you want either a unanimous "yes, any P2P is fine, even if it blatently encourages infringing uses" or a unanimous "no, P2P is horrible, even for solely legal uses". Neither is okay: yes to all P2P is bad because, even if "music should be free, etc...", copyright law still exists; no to all P2P is bad because it gets rid of legitimate uses like torrenting Knoppix ISO's. They came up with the best possible outcome, which is a compromise, stating that pitching software as primarily a way to infringe copyright is not okay. This is good. You shouldn't be encouraging the Supreme Court to make extreme decisions just to avoid "weaseling"!
Once we get to terabytes, you'll care. As the units go up, the disparity between binary and metric starts to widen. With megabytes, the difference is 4.6% of your space. With gigabytes, it's 6.9%. With terabytes, it's 9.1%. With petabytes, it's 11.2%. And so on... It gets worse and worse.
And just because disk space keeps increasing, it's not going to be infinite. There's a saying that "operating systems and files will expand to fit the available media". It's true. If hard drive sizes were suddenly ten times bigger, people would start storing their music files at higher bitrates, storing their pictures as TIFF's or RAW's instead of JPEG's, keeping journaled copies of old files (isn't it odd that with all these increases in space, automatic versioning of files hasn't come back into popularity?), and so on. And when you go to archive some files and they're 153 GB and you happily buy a 160 GB drive and it doesn't fit, that's the problem.
Disposable Digital Camcorder Interfacing
Pure Digital's Single Use Camcorder for CVS
[PureDigital CVS camcorder]
Introduction
This web page is a little raw because I just got the camera and I'm leaving on a trip soon. So, I'll be brief and hopefully informative.
If you're not familiar with the camera, here is a good review.
Disassembly
Here's a photo gallery of the disassembly of my unit.
Similar in constructioon to the PV2, this unit is rugged and can be easily recycled.
Preliminary Analysis
Others found that pressing the Record and Delete buttons while turning on the camera yields a special diagnostic page. Mine said:
FW-VERSION: 03.40
CAMERA ID:
6B7051xxxxxx
PCB VER: B2
FLASH Memory Analysis NEW
I was able to get my videos out of the camera and onto my home computer by removing the 128MB flash memory chip and putting it into my home-built flash reader. I originally built the system for the PV2 camera -- here's some more info on it. The only modification I had to make was for the increased memory size of the new part. The reader is nothing special -- just a cheaper (and slower) version of comercially available units.
I've placed my analysis of the camcorder's flash memory on its own page. That page also has sample videos I have recovered from my camera.
Resources
The most current discussion that I follow is on the Camera Hacking message board. There is also discussion on Dakota PV2 discussion board.
contact me: my email address is my first name (john) at my last name (maushammer) dot com.
Is this legal? Yes.
Info on the original most recent still disposable digital camera
other systems I've played with
visit my homepage
Politicians suck and have no qualifications to write laws.
<statement of="obvious">Well, it doesn't seem like they did any of that, did they?</statement>
The "cause to malfunction" line is possible, but the ideas of proper function and malfunction are defined by what the user is doing, so if they want it to turn off filters, it's not malfunctioning. Other than that, they didn't erase data (aren't 1 and 3 the same?), transfer funds, or cause physical injury.
That's great for them. Now I will just tell anyone who gives me a Hotmail address that I need another address. There's a point where we have to put our feet down and just call their bluff of "if you don't use this, you won't be able to talk to anyone". Let's hope there's a big backlash and they can't keep this idea.
There is a double-click event, but IE won't trigger on the second click. Normally it goes like this:
click onclick click onclick ondblclick
but I guess in IE it's
click onclick click ondblclick
So it doesn't consider a double-click to be 2 clicks, just a double-click.
I don't know when, but the reason was this: Instead of having a 2.6 and 2.7 branch, they wanted to be able to accelerate integration of new developments. So the 2.6 series is under heavier development, and sometimes requires very minor bugfixes and such. Those go in the fourth part of the version number. I personally like this strategy since it means you can still rely on stable versions when you need them, but you also get to use nifty new features without waiting years for the development branch to become stable.
Big retailers suck... they're slow-moving, and easily suckered into spending all their time on marketing and none on educating their staff or customers. (Micro Center is an exception--I've never found someone stupid there, and only once was someone a little pushy. Still not nearly as bad as Circuit City and Best Buy can be if you get a sales-droid.)
The way Linux will become popular is places like PC's For Everyone--friendly, local computer stores, where you talk to people who know their stuff and aren't just programmed to sell you the most expensive system. I bought my notebook from them and purchased it OS-free, saving $110 over buying it with XP Home. If you combine a friendly store like that with a distro like Ubuntu that is very familiar and usable to Windows users, you could easily start converting users.
(Coincidentally, they're also very nice about supporting Linux: I installed Gentoo--not the world's stablest distro by a long shot--and when I started getting segfaults and such, they easily could have blamed me, the compiler, or my choice of distro. Instead, they fixed it in a weekend, and I had it back with working RAM. Right now it's in for a new hard drive, since it suddenly stopped working unless I rock the laptop to keep it from stalling.)
They also have a much prettier and less cluttered website than Micro Center, and a much easier (and less slimy--it shows real-time price instead of waiting for you to customize your "dream box" and then telling you it costs $4500) customization then Dell. And did I mention they support Linux?
(Some of this praise is due to the fact that, after dropping off my laptop, one of their employees caught me on the way out and sent me home with an Intel hat, polo shirt, and travel mug as thanks for all the feedback I gave them on their website. ;-)
If you stumble upon the supervisors first, they're actually quite knowledgable. I managed to get half of a discount back on a product after it expired (I was going to buy this GPS last Saturday for $80, but by the time I got there on Monday it was $100... the guy sold it to me for $90). The guy was quite nice and reasonable, in contrast with the numerous zombies of which you speak. It's nice to know that there are still some decent, smart, helpful people left in the retail world.
I thought of an interesting way to do this the other day: PSK31. It's a data encoding used in ham radio and designed for keyboard-to-keyboard (i.e., relatively slow) communications. It is based on phase-shift keying, uses variable-length (Huffman encoded--the character set is called Varicode) symbols and uses only 31 Hz of bandwidth, hence the name. It is famous for its ability to be completely lost in static and still be received for the most part. I was playing with it, sending PSK31 along with music (between computers in the same room) to see if it could survive it. It was clearly more susceptible to QRM (man-made interference, like music) than QRN (static or natural interference) but it is clear that you can play loud music and choose a frequency at which it wouldn't be noticed, and still copy 60%-80% of the data. Heck, if it's techno music, it will just blend in, since it's a two-tone chirping/warbling. But if you just embedded a message in a song, repeating, you could easily get it out without much trouble, and it would almost definitely survive digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital conversion, since it does when used on the radio. It, or something similar, could be a really easy and sneaky way to tag media files. It can be easily removed, of course, with a notch filter, but it could be encoded at various frequencies. (There's an idea, encode it at 5 to 10 harmonically unrelated frequencies, try decoding all of them, and choose the most audible or least disrupted to use as you go along. That way, if the music lands on top of one signal, the others will still be readable.)
"Now, our normal rate is $15 an hour, but" [makes menacing glance at worried granny "this was particularly hard work, so is $20 okay?"
Hehehe, good point!
You're right, and I don't want to be ;-) I wanna be the geek in the back writing the code that makes everything tick.
I don't run Windows, you insensitive clod! I run Gentoo!
And I don't play Freecell, I play BZFlag!
Um... if I had clients that were afraid of tatoos, I would try my best to get rid of them if possible (assuming it wouldn't incur a huge financial loss... but grannies probably aren't that profitable). That's just stupid.
What would a computer program do with $100,000? Build a cluster to run itself on?
You mean HTTP, right?
They allow unrestricted access to their entire LAN, which I believe includes the DNS server. What's weird is that they're picky about security on the Internet connection but downright careless about security on the local side. (I became the Samba master browser with little effort, and everything is unrestricted...) I would expect the opposite.
A few corrections...
Yeah, 53 is DNS, not SAMBA... It listed as "domain" in nmap and I erroneously assumed it was "windows domain controller"-type stuff and that DNS would be called simply "dns". I don't know why they allow DNS to the internet, though, because when you connect, it sets their DNS server using DHCP.
I don't have anything running on port 443 now, so I might run a proxy. Any recommendations? Any sort of tunnelling/VPN thing that's easy to set up?
Damn, you beat me to it. I just posted this comment about exactly the same thing.
Don't you think it's a pain in the ass when they restrict things like this?
No. You mean that it has a crappy, overrestrictive firewall that allows access only to the few ports required for HTTP access to web sites. Internet-only would simply suggest that it doesn't allow access to other networks, such as LAN's. Don't get the two mixed up.
I really wish people would stop putting in neutered, free "Internet" access. I use the BPL, and their system allows full access to anything on their LAN, but allows only ports 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS), and 53 (SMB!) to the outside world. I asked, and they said the reason they restricted it was that a lot of people liked to come in and screw around with it. The answer to that would seem to be restricting access to the *local* network, and allowing full Internet access, not the other way around! It's a pain in the ass to be able to browse the web but not use IMAP, SSH, or anything other than what the dumb 90% of the population thinks is "teh intarweb".