GOOGLE returns 1270 hits on "full albumz", so obviously there are quite some places where entire albums are available for download. Also, on some P2P networks albums are shared as.RAR.
I expect this trend to become more common also among paying online music consumers, when downstream bandwidth increases and prices settle to an acceptable level (today online music is more expensive than physical media).
I saw the other poster got +5 funny for suggesting to download the entire album for.99 Cents, but the truth is in between!
The files were created with Protel Advanced PCB, a program to design printed circuit boards (PCB). You can probably forward them directly to a board house and have them made (such as http://www.pcb-pool.de/us_index.htm ). Note that they will produce a blank board without any components on it. With a bit of practice, you can solder them yourself. http://www.farnell.com is a company that sells electronic components. If you still have no idea on how to proceed, it's probably better to order a ready-made board from that aussie company. It will save you lots of hassle, and when you have your girlfriend order it for you, you won't even end up in their customer database.
> One problem might be corporate customers who have to pay for their bandwidth
Actually I was working on a P2P software that solves this problem, by introducing "neighbourhood". That means, when several machines in the same LAN receive the update, they will prefer to connect to each other rather than to a machine outside on internet. This SAVES money (on ingres), provided that exgres bandwidth isn't excessively donated back to the P2P community.
I begin to wonder whether the power efficiency of CPUs as radiating element starts to exceed that of traditional heating elements? Imagine embedding into the floor 2 AMD CPUs per square meter, with the marble floor plate serving as "heat sink" (for the CPU) and "heat source" (for the house). Now, that would probably make quite an energy-efficient radiator, which as a side-product is also able to perform massive-parallel computations such as cracking crypto-keys or google-type database lookups.
> I forgot the mention the eavesdropper, E. S/he doesn't know which schemes are > in use, and she can't validate her scheme with the sender, so her data's useless.
The point is that, after the data has been transmitted to B, B will announce "I have read bit 0 with method #2, bit 1 with method #2, bit 2 with method #1" etc. A then knows what information B has. The attacker E doesn't. She knows only those bits where she (luckily) read the bits with the same method as B.
Statistically, she knows only 50% of the information that B knows.
She would know 100% if she would announce back to A how SHE has read the bits. But then B would not know the secret, and thus is not able to receive data from A (when it is encrypted under the secret key).
> Sample the photons and generate new ones of the same type.
You can't.
The sender assigns two bits of information to each photon. However, you can only measure one. This is similar to the Heisenbarg relation of uncertainity, where you can EITHER measure the position OR the impulse of an electron.
The sender generates a long stream of random information. The receiver reads in either way, according to (other) random. An attacker would not know in which way the receiver has read the information. However, if the attacker has read the photons himself, he has destroyed every other bit. Thus, about 50% of the bits that the receiver gets, are wrong. This is easy to detect.
As a result, you can't passively tap such a communication line. The only thing you can do, is to impersonate the receiver, so that the sender communicates (untapped) with the attacker. The attacker could then establish a second (also untapped) channel to the original receiver, and relay all data back and forth on the logical level.
This is called a man-in-the-middle attack, and works for many crypto systems, not just quantum.
There are crypto protocols that try to prohibit this attack. PGP for example relies on the "web of trust" with signed public keys. HTTPS/SSL uses CA's who sign certificates.
The quantum communication channel does not solve this problem. It solves another problem: it enforces that the channel can not be tapped without being noticed.
> I nominate "Hexidecember". It has a nice ring to it, and my trademark registration has already been filed.
Following the tradition of submarine patents, you should keep your trademark stuck in the middle of the registration process until the new name has been widely adopted by industry and literature. Then you complete the pending registration and claim licensing fees from just about everybody on earth! Grrrrrr-reat!
Designing a CPU is not difficult. What IS difficult, is to design something sophisticated like a Pentium-4. But a simple CPU can be done in 1-2 days. Basically, when you already know a hardware language like VHDL or Verilog, and know how a CPU works in general, it's just as simple as designing a software virtual machine (like JAVA) or an interpreted tokenized language (like some BASIC dialects).
The main problem with self-designed CPUs is that you don't have any support tool chain. You have to write your own assembler (and possibly disassembler), or adapt one of those meta-assemblers (eg XCASM). And you have to write your own C compiler, or port one of the free ones (LCC or GCC), if you want to do larger projects with your CPU.
In most cases it is not worth the hassle to design your own CPU, because recently the FPGA vendors started to give out CPUs for free (eg NIOS, or MicroBlaze/PicoBlaze) with free toolchain support (usually GCC).
When you start a CPU design TODAY, it's usually for one of these reasons:
- educational (many textbooks design a CPU while teaching logic)
- prototype a new revolutionary approach (like eg PACT's XPP)
- you need a little bit more than a statemachine, but the smallest "real"
CPU is already too big for you (in this case, the toolchain problem is
non-existant - you can code the "firmware" manually)
Given all the effort that was put into aimbot network proxies, reverse engineering graphic card drivers etc, I don't think that this will hold.
As soon as a Trusted Computer is enforced on the masses and keeps geeks from doing geeky things (cheat on games, watch Startrek, listen to Linkin Park, read NY Times, run Linux on XBOX), it will be cracked in no time.
The past shows that secure AND cheap chips do not exist. Google for the BSkyB desaster in UK, if you're not convinced. Or read up this PDF to learn how hi-tech security smartcards and chips are dissected and cracked in a home lab:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/sc99-tamper-slide s. pdf
How much do you want to pay for a Trusted mainboard? Some extra $1 US (cheap PIC)? Some extra $10 US (estimated price of BSkyB smartcard)? Or do you want just the "Trusted" stuff to _exceed_ the price of the whole mainboard and use a physically tamper-hardened (yet cracked) device like IBM 4758?
See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/descrack/ibm4758.htm l
As long as you're fighting against the geeks, you're on the loser side.
I don't think that you are serious about.txt - it is a good format to deliver textual information. But a good book contains more than just that. The layout, font and style makes reading easy or difficult, whatever publisher intended. Illustrations and other artwork (eg formulas) improve accessibility of the delivered information.
A.txt hardly does this.
Except for being a proprietary thing, I consider.PDF (not the ebook variant) a good format for books. It's not perfect, and its outstanding advantages over other formats seem to degrade and vanish with every new version of the format & reader. PDF 1.3 was a good thing (Acrobat 4.0) and I would really like to see PDF 1.3 or a carefully selected subset of PDF 1.3 being standardized for ebooks. In my dreams..:(
Actually, I have no doubt that the new formats offer better quality, and that audiophiles can distinguish them from the old formats. My impression however is that the music industry is neither audiophile nor out to improve the world. They produce what they think will sell best, no matter if it is of good sound quality or bad sound quality. They point out that the new formats are better, because this may attract new buyers. And people are used to pay higher prices for newer/better formats than for the "same old stuff" they always had. In my opinion this is the driving motor for the music industry to develop and promote new formats. The higher quality is a side-effect, a necessary one to achieve the set goals, but not the primary incentive of doing it.
> Even the audio industry is now switching to new formats, such as SACD and DVD Audio.
I don't see that the audio industry cares about quality. If they did, they wouldn't produce so many TOP40 CDDAs with clipping.
They care about revenue, and selling the same stuff again (on different physical media) is is a good way to produce revenue. That's IMHO why they promote SACD and DVD-Audio.
> Of course, if it works better with benchmarking software than it does > with real-world applications, that is cheating, isn't it?
I like it when card manufacturers optimize their driver to achieve high Quake III Arena frame rates, because coincidently Quake III Arena is my favourite game (and actually the ONLY game I play). I don't care if the drivers are good by thoughtful design, or by re-engineering the Q3A code path and then constructing a driver that is an exact fit (possibly with penalties for other games).
While your favourite game probably is not "Futuremark", I can see that a lot of people (including buyers) are happy when their card performs well with that application. So, I won't consider this cheating.
Take advantage of this race: promote your own favourite game until it is popular enough to be included in mag benchmarks. Then the card manufacturers will optimize their drivers for YOUR game, too!...to such a breath-taking degree, that others will bash on them for "cheating".
Marc
PS: Hey, this FPS shooter cheats, too. It's not modeled down to the molecule,
but rather makes up the characters from triangles. Bah, CHEATING!:-)
> Or mabye that microscope that was invented, for some reason, doesn't > work. As long as you were consistent with all the given physics of > the simulation, no one would notice.
I peeked through microscopes myself already, so I take this as proof that we don't live in a simulation. At least not one of those corner-cutting el-cheapo simulations.
Or, wait.. Maybe THEY have temporarily put me into the "extended detail" processing queue back then?
> Well, you see, the funny thing is that you don't need to simulate the atoms > at all. All that you need to simulate visually is the smallest object a > person can resolve with his unadied eyes. Everything else is simply mapped > on top of that.
From a programmer's point of view, this is a bad idea. After all, you will need special plugins for every device that aids the eyes. You have to check if any of your simulated physicians invents a tool like a microscope, and then hot-upgrade your simulator to provide consistent results to him. Although more work at the beginning, you save yourself a lot of time and hassle when you just do it right from the start.
Careful... Given Windows' bad security record,/dev/zero might have accidently been written to by an unrelated application, thanks to a missing file-attribute check. You might just install the latest boot virus to your harddrive on Windows machines, instead of cleaning it up!
Expiration of files on portable devices can only happen, if the portable device has either
- a real time clock (RTC), or
- a communication channel to a server, or
- non-volatile memory for counters.
Otherwise it would suffer from the "same state problem". That is, everytime when you ask it to play a song, it would not know if you ask the first time, or the 100th time.
The small matchbox/pen-sized MP3 players have no RTC. Their comm channel is established only sporadically (when you're fed up with the songs and push new ones). The only possible way is to use the non-volatile memory.
I don't consider this a particularily good solution. It's easily hackable, and works only for those devices that integrate and virtualize their storage. Otherwise you could just take out that CompactFlash card, connect it to the PC and make a backup of all files (including the DRM counters). You could restore the backup after 100 playbacks (effectively resetting the counters), and then "give back" the files from the DRM MP3 player to your DRM PC with 0 playbacks used.
Obviously M$ is targetting at players with more sophisticated hardware. It appears to me that they will fail like with their Smartphone initiative. All the extra constraints on hardware make those devices non-competitive. They are heavier, bulkier, waste more battery energy and all for the sole purpose of enforcing more restrictions to the user.
> since sending someone email automatically adds them to your whitelist.
Oh, so you like their products so much that you not only use their mailreader, but also their newsreader, their sms-to-email gateway, their home surveillance system with email alarm, and even their internet-enabled fridge.
> > challenge-reply is a VERY half-baked idea. > > How so? It seems like a great solution to me.
1. You use a challenge-resonse system. 2. I use a challenge-resonse system. 3. You post a message in usenet. 4. I reply (privately) to your posting. 5. Your challenge-response system challenges me. 6. My challenge-response system challenges yours. 7. Your challenge-response system challenges mine. 8. My challenge-response system challenges yours. 9. Your challenge-response system detects a loop and discards
further messages from me without notice.
> But yes, I would be surprised if it were legal to use *your* airbag > module against you. That would be personal data.
Umm officer, well, this blood-dripping knife is *mine* and you may not use it against me.. That would be personal data. So please.. you know where the door is, don't you?
Slashdot Mirror
GOOGLE returns 1270 hits on "full albumz", so obviously there are quite .RAR.
.99 Cents, but the truth is in between!
some places where entire albums are available for download. Also, on
some P2P networks albums are shared as
I expect this trend to become more common also among paying online music
consumers, when downstream bandwidth increases and prices settle to an
acceptable level (today online music is more expensive than physical
media).
I saw the other poster got +5 funny for suggesting to download the entire
album for
Marc
The files were created with Protel Advanced PCB, a program
to design printed circuit boards (PCB). You can probably
forward them directly to a board house and have them made
(such as http://www.pcb-pool.de/us_index.htm ). Note that
they will produce a blank board without any components on
it. With a bit of practice, you can solder them yourself.
http://www.farnell.com is a company that sells electronic
components. If you still have no idea on how to proceed,
it's probably better to order a ready-made board from that
aussie company. It will save you lots of hassle, and when
you have your girlfriend order it for you, you won't even
end up in their customer database.
> One problem might be corporate customers who have to pay for their bandwidth
Actually I was working on a P2P software that solves this problem,
by introducing "neighbourhood". That means, when several machines
in the same LAN receive the update, they will prefer to connect to
each other rather than to a machine outside on internet. This
SAVES money (on ingres), provided that exgres bandwidth isn't
excessively donated back to the P2P community.
I begin to wonder whether the power efficiency of CPUs
as radiating element starts to exceed that of traditional
heating elements? Imagine embedding into the floor 2
AMD CPUs per square meter, with the marble floor plate
serving as "heat sink" (for the CPU) and "heat source"
(for the house). Now, that would probably make quite an
energy-efficient radiator, which as a side-product is also
able to perform massive-parallel computations such as
cracking crypto-keys or google-type database lookups.
Marc
> How about running Linux on Windows?
Here it is:
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
..a Federal Express aircraft full of DVD's. Although ping latency is horrible :(
> I forgot the mention the eavesdropper, E. S/he doesn't know which schemes are
> in use, and she can't validate her scheme with the sender, so her data's useless.
The point is that, after the data has been transmitted to B, B will announce
"I have read bit 0 with method #2, bit 1 with method #2, bit 2 with method #1" etc.
A then knows what information B has. The attacker E doesn't. She knows only
those bits where she (luckily) read the bits with the same method as B.
Statistically, she knows only 50% of the information that B knows.
She would know 100% if she would announce back to A how SHE has read the bits.
But then B would not know the secret, and thus is not able to receive data from A
(when it is encrypted under the secret key).
> Sample the photons and generate new ones of the same type.
You can't.
The sender assigns two bits of information to each photon. However, you can only
measure one. This is similar to the Heisenbarg relation of uncertainity, where
you can EITHER measure the position OR the impulse of an electron.
The sender generates a long stream of random information. The receiver reads
in either way, according to (other) random. An attacker would not know in which
way the receiver has read the information. However, if the attacker has read
the photons himself, he has destroyed every other bit. Thus, about 50% of the
bits that the receiver gets, are wrong. This is easy to detect.
As a result, you can't passively tap such a communication line. The only thing
you can do, is to impersonate the receiver, so that the sender communicates
(untapped) with the attacker. The attacker could then establish a second (also
untapped) channel to the original receiver, and relay all data back and forth
on the logical level.
This is called a man-in-the-middle attack, and works for many crypto systems,
not just quantum.
There are crypto protocols that try to prohibit this attack. PGP for example
relies on the "web of trust" with signed public keys. HTTPS/SSL uses CA's
who sign certificates.
The quantum communication channel does not solve this problem. It solves another
problem: it enforces that the channel can not be tapped without being noticed.
Marc
> Haven't they already got the information at that point?
What you can do to prevent this is the following:
1. select a random key
2. transmit the random key to your partner
3. check if the transmission has been tapped by an attacker. if yes, go back to 1.
4. encrypt all following data with the key (which is not known to the attacker)
The transmission is as secure as the weakest of the following items:
- encryption algorithm
- random key selection process
- "check if tapped" procedure (that quantum stuff)
The chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Marc
> I nominate "Hexidecember". It has a nice ring to it, and my trademark registration has already been filed.
Following the tradition of submarine patents, you should keep your trademark
stuck in the middle of the registration process until the new name has been
widely adopted by industry and literature. Then you complete the pending
registration and claim licensing fees from just about everybody on earth!
Grrrrrr-reat!
> Yes, but did you design your own CPU?
Designing a CPU is not difficult. What IS difficult, is to design something
sophisticated like a Pentium-4. But a simple CPU can be done in 1-2 days.
Basically, when you already know a hardware language like VHDL or Verilog,
and know how a CPU works in general, it's just as simple as designing a
software virtual machine (like JAVA) or an interpreted tokenized language
(like some BASIC dialects).
The main problem with self-designed CPUs is that you don't have any support
tool chain. You have to write your own assembler (and possibly disassembler),
or adapt one of those meta-assemblers (eg XCASM). And you have to write
your own C compiler, or port one of the free ones (LCC or GCC), if you want
to do larger projects with your CPU.
In most cases it is not worth the hassle to design your own CPU, because
recently the FPGA vendors started to give out CPUs for free (eg NIOS, or
MicroBlaze/PicoBlaze) with free toolchain support (usually GCC).
When you start a CPU design TODAY, it's usually for one of these reasons:
- educational (many textbooks design a CPU while teaching logic)
- prototype a new revolutionary approach (like eg PACT's XPP)
- you need a little bit more than a statemachine, but the smallest "real"
CPU is already too big for you (in this case, the toolchain problem is
non-existant - you can code the "firmware" manually)
Marc
> Trusted clients for multiplayer games
e s. pdf
m l
Given all the effort that was put into aimbot network proxies, reverse engineering
graphic card drivers etc, I don't think that this will hold.
As soon as a Trusted Computer is enforced on the masses and keeps geeks from doing
geeky things (cheat on games, watch Startrek, listen to Linkin Park, read NY Times,
run Linux on XBOX), it will be cracked in no time.
The past shows that secure AND cheap chips do not exist. Google for the BSkyB
desaster in UK, if you're not convinced. Or read up this PDF to learn how hi-tech
security smartcards and chips are dissected and cracked in a home lab:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/sc99-tamper-slid
How much do you want to pay for a Trusted mainboard? Some extra $1 US (cheap PIC)?
Some extra $10 US (estimated price of BSkyB smartcard)? Or do you want just the
"Trusted" stuff to _exceed_ the price of the whole mainboard and use a physically
tamper-hardened (yet cracked) device like IBM 4758?
See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/descrack/ibm4758.ht
As long as you're fighting against the geeks, you're on the loser side.
Marc
> What about .txt?
.txt - it is a good format to
.txt hardly does this.
.PDF (not the ebook :(
I don't think that you are serious about
deliver textual information. But a good book contains more than just
that. The layout, font and style makes reading easy or difficult,
whatever publisher intended. Illustrations and other artwork (eg
formulas) improve accessibility of the delivered information.
A
Except for being a proprietary thing, I consider
variant) a good format for books. It's not perfect, and its outstanding
advantages over other formats seem to degrade and vanish with every
new version of the format & reader. PDF 1.3 was a good thing (Acrobat 4.0)
and I would really like to see PDF 1.3 or a carefully selected subset
of PDF 1.3 being standardized for ebooks. In my dreams..
Marc
> If you still don't believe me
Actually, I have no doubt that the new formats offer better quality, and that
audiophiles can distinguish them from the old formats. My impression however
is that the music industry is neither audiophile nor out to improve the world.
They produce what they think will sell best, no matter if it is of good sound
quality or bad sound quality. They point out that the new formats are better,
because this may attract new buyers. And people are used to pay higher prices
for newer/better formats than for the "same old stuff" they always had. In my
opinion this is the driving motor for the music industry to develop and promote
new formats. The higher quality is a side-effect, a necessary one to achieve
the set goals, but not the primary incentive of doing it.
> Even the audio industry is now switching to new formats, such as SACD and DVD Audio.
I don't see that the audio industry cares about quality. If they did, they wouldn't
produce so many TOP40 CDDAs with clipping.
They care about revenue, and selling the same stuff again (on different physical media)
is is a good way to produce revenue. That's IMHO why they promote SACD and DVD-Audio.
Marc
> Of course, if it works better with benchmarking software than it does
...to such a breath-taking
:-)
> with real-world applications, that is cheating, isn't it?
I like it when card manufacturers optimize their driver to achieve high
Quake III Arena frame rates, because coincidently Quake III Arena is my
favourite game (and actually the ONLY game I play). I don't care if the
drivers are good by thoughtful design, or by re-engineering the Q3A code
path and then constructing a driver that is an exact fit (possibly with
penalties for other games).
While your favourite game probably is not "Futuremark", I can see that a
lot of people (including buyers) are happy when their card performs well
with that application. So, I won't consider this cheating.
Take advantage of this race: promote your own favourite game until it is
popular enough to be included in mag benchmarks. Then the card manufacturers
will optimize their drivers for YOUR game, too!
degree, that others will bash on them for "cheating".
Marc
PS: Hey, this FPS shooter cheats, too. It's not modeled down to the molecule,
but rather makes up the characters from triangles. Bah, CHEATING!
> Or mabye that microscope that was invented, for some reason, doesn't
> work. As long as you were consistent with all the given physics of
> the simulation, no one would notice.
I peeked through microscopes myself already, so I take this as proof that
we don't live in a simulation. At least not one of those corner-cutting
el-cheapo simulations.
Or, wait.. Maybe THEY have temporarily put me into the "extended detail"
processing queue back then?
.. "THEY" are probably nervously aiming their tentacles at the "stop simulation"
button. So damn near to the truth, we're becoming a danger..
> Well, you see, the funny thing is that you don't need to simulate the atoms
> at all. All that you need to simulate visually is the smallest object a
> person can resolve with his unadied eyes. Everything else is simply mapped
> on top of that.
From a programmer's point of view, this is a bad idea. After all, you will
need special plugins for every device that aids the eyes. You have to check
if any of your simulated physicians invents a tool like a microscope, and
then hot-upgrade your simulator to provide consistent results to him.
Although more work at the beginning, you save yourself a lot of time and
hassle when you just do it right from the start.
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512
/dev/zero might have
Careful... Given Windows' bad security record,
accidently been written to by an unrelated application, thanks to
a missing file-attribute check. You might just install the latest
boot virus to your harddrive on Windows machines, instead of
cleaning it up!
Expiration of files on portable devices can only happen, if the portable
device has either
- a real time clock (RTC), or
- a communication channel to a server, or
- non-volatile memory for counters.
Otherwise it would suffer from the "same state problem". That is, everytime
when you ask it to play a song, it would not know if you ask the first time,
or the 100th time.
The small matchbox/pen-sized MP3 players have no RTC. Their comm channel
is established only sporadically (when you're fed up with the songs and
push new ones). The only possible way is to use the non-volatile memory.
I don't consider this a particularily good solution. It's easily hackable,
and works only for those devices that integrate and virtualize their storage.
Otherwise you could just take out that CompactFlash card, connect it to the
PC and make a backup of all files (including the DRM counters). You could
restore the backup after 100 playbacks (effectively resetting the counters),
and then "give back" the files from the DRM MP3 player to your DRM PC
with 0 playbacks used.
Obviously M$ is targetting at players with more sophisticated hardware.
It appears to me that they will fail like with their Smartphone initiative.
All the extra constraints on hardware make those devices non-competitive.
They are heavier, bulkier, waste more battery energy and all for the
sole purpose of enforcing more restrictions to the user.
Marc
> since sending someone email automatically adds them to your whitelist.
Oh, so you like their products so much that you not only use their mailreader,
but also their newsreader, their sms-to-email gateway, their home surveillance
system with email alarm, and even their internet-enabled fridge.
> > challenge-reply is a VERY half-baked idea.
>
> How so? It seems like a great solution to me.
1. You use a challenge-resonse system.
2. I use a challenge-resonse system.
3. You post a message in usenet.
4. I reply (privately) to your posting.
5. Your challenge-response system challenges me.
6. My challenge-response system challenges yours.
7. Your challenge-response system challenges mine.
8. My challenge-response system challenges yours.
9. Your challenge-response system detects a loop and discards
further messages from me without notice.
Marc
> But yes, I would be surprised if it were legal to use *your* airbag
> module against you. That would be personal data.
Umm officer, well, this blood-dripping knife is *mine* and you may not use
it against me.. That would be personal data. So please.. you know where
the door is, don't you?
> (I was having a debate with someone as to whether "nekked" or "nekkid" was more commonly used... no, really!)
1 =n ekked&q2=nekkid&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langu e=us
"nekkid" wins. See yourself:
http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q