If you took all the data they sent in 58 seconds and put it on floppies, and then you laid all of those floppies in a row, it'd form a line 1/3 of a mile long! You could send over 1000 copies of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in that time! And if you took all of that data and wrote it in a 6 point font on a large sheet of paper which you handed out to all of the people in a state the size of Texas then the total amount of money they would have to spend to deal with the damage caused by eyestrain would be more than the entire GDP of a small Central American country.
A was going to sell B a can of Coke to B. Instead, B illicitly copies A's can. Now A can't sell it to B. B has stolen revenue from A. As what was stolen from A was precisely the value of the can, and by analogy with the conventional use of the word 'steal', we conveniently describe this by saying that B stole the can.
...volunteer to be eaten I'll get one. The last one I got freaked out and tried to rip my eyes out when I got my chopper out. Didn't taste that good either, though it might have been because the spices in my curry sauce weren't all that fresh.
...if you use your brain you generate a potential across it. Maybe one day we could feed people interesting sights and sounds and use the energy generated to power entire cities. I know, let's call this idea...mmmm...I know...The Matrix.
...and still it hasn't been put together into a single package. So this thing has the hard drive, but a crappy display, and a crappy user interface (a few buttons and a scrollwheel). Meanwhile my Palm has only 64MB of RAM and an external SD card that only holds a max of around 1GB (do they have 2GB SD cards out yet?). And PDAs are a mess anyway - both PalmOS and Windows CE have horrible problems. Damn! It looks like I'm still going to have to wait quite a few years before my dream PDA appears.
Maybe if I keep playing with programming embedded systems and FPGA development kits I'll eventually be able to design it for myself...
I was pleased to find it still functioned. But there were two disappointments. (1) It's turned yellow. That plastic needs care if you want to to stay looking white. (2) It doesn't smell the same. I miss hat heady aroma of fresh new electronics. Now it smells of absolutely nothing.
Most casual/. readers won't bother to read the article. Meanwhile they'll be telling everyone "d'ya hear about that Mac virus?". And the meme will spread regardless of the fact that this story is content free.
Google Desktop is making available to people information that they don't realize is already being stored on computers. Before Google Desktop you might leave a public PC and think you've safely logged out. Now you can ue Google Desktop to discover how much sensitive information you've actually left behind and do something about it.
I agree that I'd have a hard time doing something like coding at this temperature. It's simply hard to concentrate. But it sounds like all the testees had to do was type at a keyboard. I could probably do that at any reasonable temperature.
My first crack was Lotus 1-2-3 in the early IBM PC days. Pretty easy. Just single stepped through the debugger until I could pin down the code that accessed the original floppy and replaced the call with a NOP. It just worked. This was 20 years ago - don't ask for too many details.
My last crack was the 'DRM' for Palm's eBook format. I used the debugger 'debuffer' combined with the Palm emulator. Basically I hooked into the 'Find' routine. This scans through every byte of the text in turn. So all I had to do was to search for a string that didn't exist and it would work through the entire text. I modified debuffer so that every time it hit the debug point I'd set in the search loop it would spit out a character to a file. This obviated the need to extract the DES keys used, which are generated from your personal details using SHA1. (I figured out most of the crypto stuff but decided hooking the search routine was easier. Finding the crypto code was easy - just search the binary for the weird constants used in these algorithms.) I found a neat bug in the original code too. Search for text and it doesn't just search the text, it searches the markup too, apart from the one character that follows the markup escape character. They were too lazy to parse the markup properly during the search and just assumed each markup tag was one character long. I didn't extract the embedded images successfully, just the text.
And just in case the wrong people are reading this: I made all of this up to seem cool, I'm not a criminal and would never really crack anything. This is just fiction.
...Insignificance (directed by Nicolas Roeg). Check it out.
Mod me down if you like...
on
Good Bad Attitude
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· Score: 3, Insightful
...but it seems to me that hackers like to fantasize that somehow they are on the forefront of the battle to defend people's rights. I guess it's not just hackers, any group likes to think that what they do is more important than just the tiny niche they have influence over. But it's particularly entertaining reading the post hoc rationalizations that are made by hackers.
I've cracked copy protection and digital rights management code a few times in my life. I did it because it was an interesting challenge for a few days (though it's rarely been much of an intellectual challenge, more mindless stepping through routines with a debugger). I don't pontificate about how I'm helping to preserve the freedom of people everywhere.
The catch is that boobies are also associated with another button - the embarassment button. The trick is not to trigger the buy button, but to set up an untraceable system of micropayments so I can buy as many boobie pictures as I like without my embarassment button being pressed.
I'm sure that on the 23,127th frame the shadow behind the guy standing 3/4 of the way across the frame is now casting a shadow that has a slightly bigger blue component than in the original movie. But I may have misremembered it.
Matter-anitmatter is in fact quite effective. If such a weapon accidentally blows itself apart it still continues to function because antimatter will react with any conventiently available matter, whereas if you misfire a conventional nuclear weapon then you can end up with bits of relatively inert plutonium sitting around.
Great illusion, shame about the words. The author seems to thing this has something profound to say about the nature of consciousness. Where do these people get such grandiose ideas? All it shows is that there are some bugs in the way images are processed. Similarly the fact that the Lucas-Kanade algorithm fails to track certain types of feature correctly tells us nothing about computer consciousness.
I'm just hoping and praying that with OS 6 they clean up the horrible accreted apology for an operating system that is OS 5. But chances are PalmOS 6 will just be the same mess as before with even more extra functions and layer after layer of backwards compatiblity functions and even more horribly it will be both little endian with big endian for the legacy functions and so on. Yeuch! Asking for a C++ API is like asking for sugar coating on a turd.
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If you took all the data they sent in 58 seconds and put it on floppies, and then you laid all of those floppies in a row, it'd form a line 1/3 of a mile long! You could send over 1000 copies of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in that time! And if you took all of that data and wrote it in a 6 point font on a large sheet of paper which you handed out to all of the people in a state the size of Texas then the total amount of money they would have to spend to deal with the damage caused by eyestrain would be more than the entire GDP of a small Central American country.
A was going to sell B a can of Coke to B. Instead, B illicitly copies A's can. Now A can't sell it to B. B has stolen revenue from A. As what was stolen from A was precisely the value of the can, and by analogy with the conventional use of the word 'steal', we conveniently describe this by saying that B stole the can.
Yup, the Psion III was in many ways the best PDA there has ever been.
...volunteer to be eaten I'll get one. The last one I got freaked out and tried to rip my eyes out when I got my chopper out. Didn't taste that good either, though it might have been because the spices in my curry sauce weren't all that fresh.
...if you use your brain you generate a potential across it. Maybe one day we could feed people interesting sights and sounds and use the energy generated to power entire cities. I know, let's call this idea...mmmm...I know...The Matrix.
Maybe if I keep playing with programming embedded systems and FPGA development kits I'll eventually be able to design it for myself...
Would Jesus?
I was pleased to find it still functioned. But there were two disappointments. (1) It's turned yellow. That plastic needs care if you want to to stay looking white. (2) It doesn't smell the same. I miss hat heady aroma of fresh new electronics. Now it smells of absolutely nothing.
Most casual /. readers won't bother to read the article. Meanwhile they'll be telling everyone "d'ya hear about that Mac virus?". And the meme will spread regardless of the fact that this story is content free.
Google Desktop is making available to people information that they don't realize is already being stored on computers. Before Google Desktop you might leave a public PC and think you've safely logged out. Now you can ue Google Desktop to discover how much sensitive information you've actually left behind and do something about it.
I agree that I'd have a hard time doing something like coding at this temperature. It's simply hard to concentrate. But it sounds like all the testees had to do was type at a keyboard. I could probably do that at any reasonable temperature.
My last crack was the 'DRM' for Palm's eBook format. I used the debugger 'debuffer' combined with the Palm emulator. Basically I hooked into the 'Find' routine. This scans through every byte of the text in turn. So all I had to do was to search for a string that didn't exist and it would work through the entire text. I modified debuffer so that every time it hit the debug point I'd set in the search loop it would spit out a character to a file. This obviated the need to extract the DES keys used, which are generated from your personal details using SHA1. (I figured out most of the crypto stuff but decided hooking the search routine was easier. Finding the crypto code was easy - just search the binary for the weird constants used in these algorithms.) I found a neat bug in the original code too. Search for text and it doesn't just search the text, it searches the markup too, apart from the one character that follows the markup escape character. They were too lazy to parse the markup properly during the search and just assumed each markup tag was one character long. I didn't extract the embedded images successfully, just the text.
And just in case the wrong people are reading this: I made all of this up to seem cool, I'm not a criminal and would never really crack anything. This is just fiction.
...Insignificance (directed by Nicolas Roeg). Check it out.
I've cracked copy protection and digital rights management code a few times in my life. I did it because it was an interesting challenge for a few days (though it's rarely been much of an intellectual challenge, more mindless stepping through routines with a debugger). I don't pontificate about how I'm helping to preserve the freedom of people everywhere.
The catch is that boobies are also associated with another button - the embarassment button. The trick is not to trigger the buy button, but to set up an untraceable system of micropayments so I can buy as many boobie pictures as I like without my embarassment button being pressed.
I'm sure that on the 23,127th frame the shadow behind the guy standing 3/4 of the way across the frame is now casting a shadow that has a slightly bigger blue component than in the original movie. But I may have misremembered it.
Maybe to 68000. There's isn't a version of Windows for that is there?
...collide with. I hope the idea of nanosats doesn't get too popular or it's going to get pretty scary trying to track all of the junk in orbit.
...so there's no need for this gadget.
...by the same people who determined that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
Matter-anitmatter is in fact quite effective. If such a weapon accidentally blows itself apart it still continues to function because antimatter will react with any conventiently available matter, whereas if you misfire a conventional nuclear weapon then you can end up with bits of relatively inert plutonium sitting around.
That looks pretty nice. Doesn't look like it makes things like wide screens and the DIA any easier though.
Great illusion, shame about the words. The author seems to thing this has something profound to say about the nature of consciousness. Where do these people get such grandiose ideas? All it shows is that there are some bugs in the way images are processed. Similarly the fact that the Lucas-Kanade algorithm fails to track certain types of feature correctly tells us nothing about computer consciousness.
I'm just hoping and praying that with OS 6 they clean up the horrible accreted apology for an operating system that is OS 5. But chances are PalmOS 6 will just be the same mess as before with even more extra functions and layer after layer of backwards compatiblity functions and even more horribly it will be both little endian with big endian for the legacy functions and so on. Yeuch! Asking for a C++ API is like asking for sugar coating on a turd.
Come on! Couldn't they overclock it just a tiny fraction of a percent more to get it to a nice round number like 625MHz?