Actually, basically the same thing happened here in the Netherlands, except that the kid was not wearing a uniform (many regular drivers don't, either), and was only 14 years old.
The bus company said they were glad he didn't have any accidents, and offered him a job when he turns 18 and has a license to drive a bus.
I just wonder how the passengers could not have noticed the kid was only 14?
I think it's only a matter of time before the US copyright law says "life +2500 years", and is retroactively applied, making it illegal to preach the contents of the New Testament without paying royalties.
The Toward Freedom article that both TFA and wikipedia link to as a source, is unavailable.
I find it hard to believe that Sony is using so many of these capacitors in the PS2 that the production would cause a world-wide shortage. So the demand went up around the time Sony started mass-producing the PS2. That is, at most, a correlation, but certainly not a causation with any further information.
Around the same time, Nintendo and Microsoft were mass-producing their consoles, and about a million other companies were producing other electronics using the same kind of capacitors.
I fail to see why Sony is being singled out for the blame. Sure they may have contributed, but so have many other companies. Producing anything requires resources.
Personally, I'd publish the details the very same day, just because they tried to screw them with a court case. They could have just asked nicely.
On the other hand, these are not a bunch of semi-anonymous hackers, these are academics who have to think about their own future as well, which may explain this "no hard feelings" attitude.
The good news in this story is that we somehow seem to have at least one sensible judge left.
If they did "what any Kazaa user can do", wouldn't that mean that they used the Kazaa software to determine which files the user was sharing, and what the IP address was? Wouldn't they have to prove the Kazaa software is trustworthy for such purposes?
"This Evil software that we have not inspected, we have no control over, and we cannot vouch for, told us that your client was sharing these files"
"all standard forms of defence against auditory input" probably means anything in or covering your ears. The tinfoil hat only blocks electromagnetic waves, which is what they are supposedly using.
The tinfoil hat might actually be one of the few ways you can block this without any special materials or equipment.
If they see someone with a tinfoil hat, they'll probably just yell at him.
As it is officially a crime to steal wi-fi in the US, maybe.
Some people actually do live outside the US. This may come as a surprise to you, be we even have electricity and computers.
Also, in many places, the law is quite a bit more reasonable. Where I live, it is only illegal to access a system when a reasonable effort has been made to protect it (so an open access point doesn't count), and even then, they have to prove you intentionally did that.
I don't know the current gas prizes in the UK are, but here in the Netherlands, the current price is 1.62 euros per litre, which Google calc converts to...
9.50 USD per gallon.
I can't recall when we had gas for 0.68 per litre (=4 USD per gallon), that must have been like 10 years ago.
Quit whining.
I can see some applications for this in 3D modeling, where latency isn't really an issue.
The solitaire game at 2:10 has some scary similarities with Minority Report.
Indeed. Ofcourse, when they argue that it would "hamper investments in networks", they mean that the providers won't be able to extort money from content providers *and* consumers at the same time, money which, obviously, would be spend on improving the network.
I would think not having such a bill would hamper investments. There is much money to be made in creating an artificially low supply of bandwidth.
The same mechanical output power for one-tenth of the electrical input power? Interesting, since conventional electric motors can achieve about 90% efficiency. I guess one-tenth would make that motor 900% efficient. Ofcourse that means free energy! Hook this motor onto the drive shaft of a regular generator, which can easily provide the power to keep the motor running, and still has a lot to spare for doing other useful work!
It's such a touching story about a man's passion and how he sacrificed everything because he believes in what he has invented. Either this man really is a poor bastard because he has devoted his life to something that he doesn't understand, but also doesn't do what he thinks it does, or it's just a scam a little more elaborate than usual.
I wonder why he doesn't show the whole setup, without wires running out of view, and why he doesn't run it with any coils near the wheel with the magnets. I wonder what the equilibrium speed would be in that case.
One thing that could be happening, is that the seemingly cheap multimeters he uses are not measuring the true current to the motor (they are rarely accurate for inductive loads), and/or that he is using a cheap motor with a very weak rotor, which becomes a little more powerful because he effectively increases the field strength in the rotor. Ofcourse that doesn't mean it becomes more efficient.
The change in output power seems very low, as the system is only accelerating very slowly. It might also have something to do with the fact that the motor doesn't have a real load, apart from a little air resistance and drag in the bearings. I'd like to see this with the motor at a full, mechanical load (a hydropump, for instance), at a speed well below the maximum speed of that motor.
Also, it would be interesting the measure the torque in the driveshaft, to actually see what is happening there. If it is true what he says, the torque should be increasing when he short-circuits the coils, while the speed of the system also increases.
He should be measuring the current with a proper measurement device, which can be an expensive piece of equipment, or simply a resistor with a known electrical en thermal resistance, in which case you measure the temperature difference between two points on the thermal path. This is, still, the most reliable way to measure true current.
So, basically, they are just triangulating every node on the network, and detecting when a node is outside a given range (outside the building?), or seems to suddenly jump to another location (session hijacking)?
Would this still work if the attacker is using a directional, high-gain antenna to prevent effective triangulation? Also, varying the signal strength and round trip time could throw this off, but even if the exact location of the attacker cannot be determined because of it, the alarm could still be raised.
Since the keys and the encryption algorithm both reside on any given system, the decryption must take place within a (hardware embedded) subsystem in order to prevent the system software from being compromised.
No, it is perfectly safe to do this encryption / entry point calculation in software. The moment someone can run code on your system, you're screwed anyway. But in order to run code, they must 1) load the code to be executed into system memory, and 2) get the CPU to execute the code.
Step 1 is still possible with a buffer overflow, but step 2 becomes a lot harder and very unreliable, or possibly even practically impossible. This is at a stage of the exploit where the attacker does not have any code running on the target machine.
I like the idea of introducting artificial biodiversity to slow down the spreading of worms and viruses, but I think it is very unlikely that microsoft would implement something like this, considering they seem to be incapable of getting regular code to work. Randomly mangled and rearranged code must be a support employees worst nightmare.
Most exploits are nowadays are buffer overflows. some 90% of those are stack-based buffer overflows (heap-based overflow are significantly harder to exploit). So by just mangling the stack a little, we might see a very significant drop in successfull exploits.
Ofcourse it's not an end-all solution, as it is not impossible to exploit a system, but it might be enough to stop the tupid ones from succeeding.
One a side note: it is possible to get around the NX (no-execute) protection in XP SP2. The short story is that it is possible to overwrite the pointer to the exception handler that is called when the NX bit is violated. The long story is in The Shellcoders Handbook.
The DRM you propose, a 2 week license, would probably be cracked in a couple of days. It is impossible to allow someone to listen or view something, and the revoke that license later on. If it's encrypted, the user must have a valid key and a key is not going to vanish into thin air after a set time.
I wonder if it is legal to download a piece of a song, say, 30 seconds. They don't seem to mind the 30 second previews on many websites that sell CDs. If you would only download 30 second pieces from several different people, than perhaps nobody is illegally distributing anything.
One other thing I don't like about the file swapping / downloading lawsuits: they say someone downloaded something illegally. The problem is, there is no way for the user to determine exactly what a given file contains before fully downloading it. And even then, it is practically impossible to know for sure if something is copyrighted or not.
If you wanted to route files between different units, you could have units record information about other units it connects to on a regular basis. For example, unit X wants to send something to unit Y (why you would want to do that is irrelevant for now). Unit X could query other units saying something like "I want to send a file to unit Y, have you seen it recently?". Units might even share information about which units they have connected to recently, making it possible to route information more than 2 hops far. It would be somewhat difficult and unreliable to route through many hops, but maybe you don't really need to. After all, they say everyone is related to everyone else through 6 other people. Likewise, maybe you could find a route from one unit to any other one in less than 6 hops. Ofcourse, there would need to be some kind of gateway for long distances (say, across oceans). Also, say every unit has some information about the geographical locations it regularly stays at. That way, a file might try to find a route to it's destination by riding with people who live or work near the destination of the file, or at least travel in the right direction.
This reminds me of a story from a few years ago about a project in some third world country where they used a truck that delivered goods to remote villages to deliver emails as well. The truck was equipped with a laptop computer with a wireless network card. Whenever it got in range of one of the villages, it would download outgoing emails from the local computer. The next time it got back to the city, it would relay the messages to a computer with an internet connection. Incoming emails were delivered to the villages in the same way.
Would you somehow be seeing through the copies eyes? Yes and no. Someone would be looking through "your" eyes, and someone would be looking through the copies eyes, and that someone would be you in both cases. The real paradox is not in the teleportation, but in the definition of "you". After the copy, there is more than one "you". So there would be two you's, each looking through another pair of eyes, at different places, but with the same memories.
Two other things come to mind: You might consider "you" to be a class, which, in our current world without teleportation and perfect copies, is a singleton class (only one can exist at any time). When it is copied atom-by-atom, you could consider the copies to be objects of the same class (two instances). Teleportation, on the other hand, could be considered serialisation, the act of storing the internal properties of an object and destroying it afterwards, only to recreate is using the stored information at another place or time.
Also, I was thinking of the parallel universe concept; everything that can happen, will happen somewhere. The point is, that from any given state (any moment during a persons life), that is a number of ways that persons life can continue, and, eventually, end. For the person cloned, two of those possible ways will be lived, at the same time. It is as if the person is given his or her very own, personal parallel universe. It's basicly a form of nesting; the existance of a parallel personality in one of the parallel universes.
So why don't they just seize the hard drives and ask for the key?
If it really is a crime, I assume the police have to prove it. That means they have to *prove* that there is encrypted data on a drive. Without the key, it is impossible to tell encrypted data from any random data. This means that if you have any file they can't make sense of, they can claim it's encrypted and charge you for not giving up a key that doesn't even exist.
As many people have pointed out, the encryption isn't going to stop anyone.
The watermarking, however, would stop the reviewers from distributing copies since they can be traced back to them.
What if you could get your hands on 2, or maybe even 3 copies?
With 2, you could compare them frame-by-frame, and try to remove the watermarking that way, if you can tell which frame is watermarked and which one isn't. With 3 copies, you could probably use a 2-out-of-3 vote for every single pixel.
The watermarks must ofcourse be different for every copy, which can be used against them by removing all differences between separate copies.
You have triple redundant storage of certain critical data. Write a subroutine that takes three 32 bit integers and produces a result where each bit is "voted on" by the corresponding bit in the three inputs.
I'm not quite sure (haven't tested it), but I think this should work:
The idea is very simple: isolate the bits, so that the left neighboring bit is 0. Than add the bits from the three inputs (A, B and C). If the bit was set in at least 2 of the 3 integers, the neighboring bit will be set. This bit is then moved to the original bit location by first shifting, and than ANDing with the original mask.
Note that, in the second line, where the other half of the bits are isolated, each input integer needs to be shifted, because otherwise the most significant bit wouldn't have a left neighbor.
Does anyone know whether there is an upper limit to text compression?
That, ofcourse, strongly depends on the entropy of the text to be compressed. When you're talking about the current president's email, well, there can't possible be a whole of entropy in there, so it should be really easy to compress.
Strange, though, that the line above the one you quoted reads "capping retail pricing in the United States at US$9.72 per CD".
If you're talking about the revenue of the store, it is the sum of the retail value of all products that were sold (he wrote revenue, not profit). However, if the author was referring to the revenue of the record company, it would be quite a bit lower than the actual sales price.
It makes me wonder how accurate the rest of the figures in the article are, if he can't even get the average sales price of CDs right.
I don't buy CD's anymore, simply because they are ridiculously expensive.
According to the article, the average price of a CD was $10.95 (CAD) in 2004, and it has gone down since then. With the current exchange rate (1 EUR = 1.57716 CAD 1 CAD = 0.634051 EUR ), that is about 6.94 EUR. I would happily pay 7 euros for some CD's. The thing is, the average CD price here (the Netherlands) is about 20 euros! (source: dutch free record shop website) Would you pay 31.50 CAD or more for a frigging CD?!? I mean, that's only 354% more expensive.
Screw you guys, you're not getting any more of my money.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, this seems like a rather desperate call for attention. Besides, everybody knows that the Dark Templar are far more powerful.
Actually, basically the same thing happened here in the Netherlands, except that the kid was not wearing a uniform (many regular drivers don't, either), and was only 14 years old.
The bus company said they were glad he didn't have any accidents, and offered him a job when he turns 18 and has a license to drive a bus.
I just wonder how the passengers could not have noticed the kid was only 14?
I think it's only a matter of time before the US copyright law says "life +2500 years", and is retroactively applied, making it illegal to preach the contents of the New Testament without paying royalties.
The Toward Freedom article that both TFA and wikipedia link to as a source, is unavailable.
I find it hard to believe that Sony is using so many of these capacitors in the PS2 that the production would cause a world-wide shortage. So the demand went up around the time Sony started mass-producing the PS2. That is, at most, a correlation, but certainly not a causation with any further information.
Around the same time, Nintendo and Microsoft were mass-producing their consoles, and about a million other companies were producing other electronics using the same kind of capacitors.
I fail to see why Sony is being singled out for the blame. Sure they may have contributed, but so have many other companies. Producing anything requires resources.
Personally, I'd publish the details the very same day, just because they tried to screw them with a court case. They could have just asked nicely.
On the other hand, these are not a bunch of semi-anonymous hackers, these are academics who have to think about their own future as well, which may explain this "no hard feelings" attitude.
The good news in this story is that we somehow seem to have at least one sensible judge left.
If they did "what any Kazaa user can do", wouldn't that mean that they used the Kazaa software to determine which files the user was sharing, and what the IP address was? Wouldn't they have to prove the Kazaa software is trustworthy for such purposes?
"This Evil software that we have not inspected, we have no control over, and we cannot vouch for, told us that your client was sharing these files"
"all standard forms of defence against auditory input" probably means anything in or covering your ears. The tinfoil hat only blocks electromagnetic waves, which is what they are supposedly using.
The tinfoil hat might actually be one of the few ways you can block this without any special materials or equipment.
If they see someone with a tinfoil hat, they'll probably just yell at him.
This is just going to be yet another arms race, although the stakes are quite a bit higher for the consumers this time.
Not living in the USA, I never understood why you people were complaining about Fox news.
I understand now...
I wonder how these people survive. Are they actually smart enough to breathe on their own?
Some people actually do live outside the US. This may come as a surprise to you, be we even have electricity and computers.
Also, in many places, the law is quite a bit more reasonable. Where I live, it is only illegal to access a system when a reasonable effort has been made to protect it (so an open access point doesn't count), and even then, they have to prove you intentionally did that.
I don't know the current gas prizes in the UK are, but here in the Netherlands, the current price is 1.62 euros per litre, which Google calc converts to...
9.50 USD per gallon.
I can't recall when we had gas for 0.68 per litre (=4 USD per gallon), that must have been like 10 years ago. Quit whining.
I can see some applications for this in 3D modeling, where latency isn't really an issue. The solitaire game at 2:10 has some scary similarities with Minority Report.
Indeed. Ofcourse, when they argue that it would "hamper investments in networks", they mean that the providers won't be able to extort money from content providers *and* consumers at the same time, money which, obviously, would be spend on improving the network.
I would think not having such a bill would hamper investments. There is much money to be made in creating an artificially low supply of bandwidth.
The same mechanical output power for one-tenth of the electrical input power? Interesting, since conventional electric motors can achieve about 90% efficiency. I guess one-tenth would make that motor 900% efficient. Ofcourse that means free energy! Hook this motor onto the drive shaft of a regular generator, which can easily provide the power to keep the motor running, and still has a lot to spare for doing other useful work! It's such a touching story about a man's passion and how he sacrificed everything because he believes in what he has invented. Either this man really is a poor bastard because he has devoted his life to something that he doesn't understand, but also doesn't do what he thinks it does, or it's just a scam a little more elaborate than usual. I wonder why he doesn't show the whole setup, without wires running out of view, and why he doesn't run it with any coils near the wheel with the magnets. I wonder what the equilibrium speed would be in that case. One thing that could be happening, is that the seemingly cheap multimeters he uses are not measuring the true current to the motor (they are rarely accurate for inductive loads), and/or that he is using a cheap motor with a very weak rotor, which becomes a little more powerful because he effectively increases the field strength in the rotor. Ofcourse that doesn't mean it becomes more efficient. The change in output power seems very low, as the system is only accelerating very slowly. It might also have something to do with the fact that the motor doesn't have a real load, apart from a little air resistance and drag in the bearings. I'd like to see this with the motor at a full, mechanical load (a hydropump, for instance), at a speed well below the maximum speed of that motor. Also, it would be interesting the measure the torque in the driveshaft, to actually see what is happening there. If it is true what he says, the torque should be increasing when he short-circuits the coils, while the speed of the system also increases. He should be measuring the current with a proper measurement device, which can be an expensive piece of equipment, or simply a resistor with a known electrical en thermal resistance, in which case you measure the temperature difference between two points on the thermal path. This is, still, the most reliable way to measure true current.
So, basically, they are just triangulating every node on the network, and detecting when a node is outside a given range (outside the building?), or seems to suddenly jump to another location (session hijacking)? Would this still work if the attacker is using a directional, high-gain antenna to prevent effective triangulation? Also, varying the signal strength and round trip time could throw this off, but even if the exact location of the attacker cannot be determined because of it, the alarm could still be raised.
Doctor: Nurse, hand me the wand.
...
Doctor: Nurse?
No, it is perfectly safe to do this encryption / entry point calculation in software. The moment someone can run code on your system, you're screwed anyway. But in order to run code, they must 1) load the code to be executed into system memory, and 2) get the CPU to execute the code. Step 1 is still possible with a buffer overflow, but step 2 becomes a lot harder and very unreliable, or possibly even practically impossible. This is at a stage of the exploit where the attacker does not have any code running on the target machine. I like the idea of introducting artificial biodiversity to slow down the spreading of worms and viruses, but I think it is very unlikely that microsoft would implement something like this, considering they seem to be incapable of getting regular code to work. Randomly mangled and rearranged code must be a support employees worst nightmare. Most exploits are nowadays are buffer overflows. some 90% of those are stack-based buffer overflows (heap-based overflow are significantly harder to exploit). So by just mangling the stack a little, we might see a very significant drop in successfull exploits. Ofcourse it's not an end-all solution, as it is not impossible to exploit a system, but it might be enough to stop the tupid ones from succeeding. One a side note: it is possible to get around the NX (no-execute) protection in XP SP2. The short story is that it is possible to overwrite the pointer to the exception handler that is called when the NX bit is violated. The long story is in The Shellcoders Handbook.
Just some thoughts:
The DRM you propose, a 2 week license, would probably be cracked in a couple of days. It is impossible to allow someone to listen or view something, and the revoke that license later on. If it's encrypted, the user must have a valid key and a key is not going to vanish into thin air after a set time.
I wonder if it is legal to download a piece of a song, say, 30 seconds. They don't seem to mind the 30 second previews on many websites that sell CDs. If you would only download 30 second pieces from several different people, than perhaps nobody is illegally distributing anything.
One other thing I don't like about the file swapping / downloading lawsuits: they say someone downloaded something illegally. The problem is, there is no way for the user to determine exactly what a given file contains before fully downloading it. And even then, it is practically impossible to know for sure if something is copyrighted or not.
If you wanted to route files between different units, you could have units record information about other units it connects to on a regular basis. For example, unit X wants to send something to unit Y (why you would want to do that is irrelevant for now). Unit X could query other units saying something like "I want to send a file to unit Y, have you seen it recently?". Units might even share information about which units they have connected to recently, making it possible to route information more than 2 hops far. It would be somewhat difficult and unreliable to route through many hops, but maybe you don't really need to. After all, they say everyone is related to everyone else through 6 other people. Likewise, maybe you could find a route from one unit to any other one in less than 6 hops. Ofcourse, there would need to be some kind of gateway for long distances (say, across oceans).
Also, say every unit has some information about the geographical locations it regularly stays at. That way, a file might try to find a route to it's destination by riding with people who live or work near the destination of the file, or at least travel in the right direction.
This reminds me of a story from a few years ago about a project in some third world country where they used a truck that delivered goods to remote villages to deliver emails as well. The truck was equipped with a laptop computer with a wireless network card. Whenever it got in range of one of the villages, it would download outgoing emails from the local computer. The next time it got back to the city, it would relay the messages to a computer with an internet connection. Incoming emails were delivered to the villages in the same way.
(sorry for the totally incoherent story)
Would you somehow be seeing through the copies eyes?
Yes and no. Someone would be looking through "your" eyes, and someone would be looking through the copies eyes, and that someone would be you in both cases.
The real paradox is not in the teleportation, but in the definition of "you".
After the copy, there is more than one "you".
So there would be two you's, each looking through another pair of eyes, at different places, but with the same memories.
Two other things come to mind:
You might consider "you" to be a class, which, in our current world without teleportation and perfect copies, is a singleton class (only one can exist at any time). When it is copied atom-by-atom, you could consider the copies to be objects of the same class (two instances).
Teleportation, on the other hand, could be considered serialisation, the act of storing the internal properties of an object and destroying it afterwards, only to recreate is using the stored information at another place or time.
Also, I was thinking of the parallel universe concept; everything that can happen, will happen somewhere.
The point is, that from any given state (any moment during a persons life), that is a number of ways that persons life can continue, and, eventually, end.
For the person cloned, two of those possible ways will be lived, at the same time. It is as if the person is given his or her very own, personal parallel universe. It's basicly a form of nesting; the existance of a parallel personality in one of the parallel universes.
If it really is a crime, I assume the police have to prove it. That means they have to *prove* that there is encrypted data on a drive. Without the key, it is impossible to tell encrypted data from any random data. This means that if you have any file they can't make sense of, they can claim it's encrypted and charge you for not giving up a key that doesn't even exist.
How would they prove it's actual encrypted data?
What if you could get your hands on 2, or maybe even 3 copies? With 2, you could compare them frame-by-frame, and try to remove the watermarking that way, if you can tell which frame is watermarked and which one isn't. With 3 copies, you could probably use a 2-out-of-3 vote for every single pixel. The watermarks must ofcourse be different for every copy, which can be used against them by removing all differences between separate copies.
So, how about it? Am I hired?
Does anyone know whether there is an upper limit to text compression?
That, ofcourse, strongly depends on the entropy of the text to be compressed. When you're talking about the current president's email, well, there can't possible be a whole of entropy in there, so it should be really easy to compress.
If you're talking about the revenue of the store, it is the sum of the retail value of all products that were sold (he wrote revenue, not profit). However, if the author was referring to the revenue of the record company, it would be quite a bit lower than the actual sales price.
It makes me wonder how accurate the rest of the figures in the article are, if he can't even get the average sales price of CDs right.
I don't buy CD's anymore, simply because they are ridiculously expensive.
According to the article, the average price of a CD was $10.95 (CAD) in 2004, and it has gone down since then.
With the current exchange rate (1 EUR = 1.57716 CAD 1 CAD = 0.634051 EUR ), that is about 6.94 EUR. I would happily pay 7 euros for some CD's.
The thing is, the average CD price here (the Netherlands) is about 20 euros! (source: dutch free record shop website)
Would you pay 31.50 CAD or more for a frigging CD?!?
I mean, that's only 354% more expensive.
Screw you guys, you're not getting any more of my money.