I'm a libertarian so now I feel justified in supporting open borders. Having enough money to live in a gated community and owning machine guns is a private matter.
I, on the other hand, characterize myself as a "Law 'n Order Anarchist" (or "Law 'n Order Minarchist" on even-numbered days). That means I think we should get rid of all (or all but the minimum necessary) of the laws - but believe it must be done in the right ORDER or it makes things worse rather than better.
(Actually, I'm more of a "Constitutional Law 'n Order Anarchist/Minarchist" Let's get there by legal means, such as repeals and amendments.)
A prime example of this order-dependence is the immigration barriers. Open borders would be nice. But you have to remove the cancerous overgrowth of the social services first. Otherwise you get an inrush of people who put a far larger load on the services than any taxes on them cover, while depressing wages and breaking unions. A double pick of the workers' pocket - for the dubious "benefit" of giving employers a break on wages. The mass of workers gets hit twice - once in the paycheck, again in taxes. A perfect, though indirect, example of "corporate welfare".
Then the citizens retaliate in elections. Libertarians, with their track record of going after any piece of their agenda without regard for the consequences of the order, become further marginalized. Naturalizing the incoming won't help Libertarians either: The bulk of their votes will go for more benefits for themselves.
Your situation is another example: To do what you want you need to get rid of the laws that make owning a machine gun or using it for home defense nearly impossible before you retreat to your fortress neighborhood and open the borders. B-)
If events are scheduled using UTC, then timezone and dst make no difference.
Given that events (such as periodic meetings) are normally scheduled in local time, that's bogus.
In fact, having the calendaring tool store them in UTC breaks things even more. It means that the tool will convert them to UTC to store them and alarm them, then back to local time to display them. So when DST starts (even if at the EXPECTED time) a periodic meeting moves by an hour.
DST is an unmitigated disaster for programmers who write scheduling software (as I once did for a client). Changing it compounds the problem.
When you merely fail to meet your obligation to stop destruction, you're not liable. Just ask New Orleans about Bush/Brown/Chertoff/FEMA.
Actually, ask them about Governor Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin.
Making the disaster plan, and executing the plan for the first three days WITHOUT external help, was the responsibility of the locality. FEMA assistance wasn't supposed to be counted on until the fourth day - and even then it's just materiel and money to HELP the state and locality run THEIR plan, not a federal takeover of their responsibilities.
Guess what day they showed up?
Under the Posse Comitatus act the fed can't even send in people without permission from the governor (or a declaration of war against a rebellion). (That's why they gave a bunch of supplies to groups like the Salvation Army to take in - groups which the local officials then blocked from going to the area.)
What, exactly, does this have to do with my rights online?
- You have a right, when suing other people, to force them to retain their online correspondence, so that you can use discovery to find evidence against them among it.
- Others have a right, when suing YOU, to force YOU to retain YOUR online correspondence, so that THEY can use discovery to find evidence aginst YOU among it.
- These override the defendant's "right to privacy" as related to his online correspondence in the civil suit.
Maybe it's just me but, for curiositiy's sake, has anyone ever tried using a public IP schema in place of a private (on wireless, behind a router, essentially on any non-public facing interface)?
As a matter of fact, *I* do.
I have a couple class-Cs from before the rise of ISPs. When I first hooked up with an ISP I was able to use them because the ISP would route them for me.
But my present ISP will not route them. So I have a small range of fixed IPs from the current ISP's address space and NAT on the firewall. (This lets me keep the configuration correct on the rest of my internal net for an eventual switch to a new ISP that is more reasonable.) For "guest" computers (such as my laptop from work) I run DHCP but hand out addresses from a pool within my private address space.
So if I were to run KaZaA on my net the MediaSentry tool would find one of my fixed addresses from my ISP's "public address space" on the packet, and a different "public address space" IP address in the KaZaA data, this time from one of my personal Class-C networks.
An expert who ignores that there is a subnet mask that gives you a full 4th octet under a single IP either hasn't ever worked with networking, or is not aware of the knowledge they are shelling out to first year students in technical institutes;
The record doesn't show anything like that.
One of the few things he did right was determine that the IP address was assigned to the computer, that NAT wasn't in use. The tool he used does this by extracting and displaying both the "from" IP address on the packet and a copy of the interface's IP address that KaZaA helpfully records in the data part of at least one of the packets of the exchange. This eliminates NAT on routers and wireless access points.
Since the connection was a dialup with a DHCP-assigned dynamic IP address, it would have a single IP address - which eliminates multi-address subnets. The combination of that with "no NAT" eliminates wireless access points and multi-computer home networks. (The computer that dialed up COULD be NATting and forwarding for others, but it WAS the one that ran the KaZaA client.)
But it doesn't eliminate the possibility that the IP was actually assigned to the defendant. There are a lot of ways that could happen. For instance: Maybe the clocks were off between the ISP's logger and the tool that captured the IP address of the "pirate publisher". Maybe the ISP's logs weren't high enough resolution and there was a logon-logoff event. Maybe somebody typoed the IP address somewhere. And a bunch of other possibilities. The MAC address wasn't recorded (or recordable remotely) so they don't have a unique identifier of the computer's wireless card, and even if they did it's possible to hack 'em.
Given that there's no sign of a KaZaA client or music files on the captured hard drive, it seems likely that th identification of the defendant's computer from the ISP's logs and the IP capturing tool output was somehow in error, and they got the wrong victim.
Way off-topic, but programming desperately needs the kind of accountability and professionalism that 'real' engineering has.
There was a move to create such a certification back in the '70s or so. Had it gone through you'd have to understand JCL and be a moderately proficient COBOL programmer to be certified.
The phenomenal explosion of software functionality has occurred largely because such concrete-setting certification systems have NOT been applied to programming. Attempts to write requirements for such certifications into law were recognized as counter-productive, job insurance for mediocre programmers, and extortion by the self-appointed certification "authorities" that were the main lobbyists for the legislation - and were beaten back.
This is why (in most jurisdictions) "software engineer" or "computer engineer" is the only title containing "engineer" that one can apply to himself without any certification whatsoever.
A number of free-market certifications (other than degrees) exist, for companies that want some well-defined skill tested by a reputable organization, and for practitioners who want to prove their talents by other than job experience and recommendation. But unlike engineers in other fields, lawyers, doctors, and other professions, computer engineering certifications are not part of the legal system.
... isn't the illusion of water on the road a product of light reflecting off of the air?
No.
It's caused by the curvature of light refracted by the difference in refractive index between the hot air near the sun-heated surface and the cooler air above it. The light bends back up without "touching" the underlying surface.
You only get a little bend. This is why you need a very hot surface to get enough of a bend to be visible at all. It's also why you only get it at large distances, where the line of sight is nearly parallel to the ground.
It looks like water because you look at the ground and see a a region of like of the sky's color, shimmering due to convection current - generated patches of uneven refractive index in the air rather than surface ripples.
Of course, two options exist that can still make inflatables work. One is to bury them after inflating them, so that the layer of soil stops the micrometeors. The other is to inflate a structure having multi-layer walls, with gaps between the layers and the outer layer made of aluminum foil.
A third is self-sealing materials, such as the coatings on the inside that get sucked into any hole as with tires.
By the way: Your second option conflates two systems (both of which should be used, of course): Ablative coatings (not necessarily airtight - just something to absorb the projectile's momentum and disperse it broadly enough that you don't get a puncture) and redundant airtight layers.
Yes. As soon as your XB360 attempts to connect to Live (which even without you paying, it will do if you signed up for it) it will demand you update or it will disconnect you (which with Live-connected dashboard accounts signs you out of your local XB360 profile too)
Any bets on whether code running in hypervisor mode can create a virtual machine environment where the updated Microsoft code can think it's running the show when it's actually king of a sandbox?
Wait. Don't you mean this allows an Xbox 360 user to run arbitrary code such as alternative operating systems with full privileges and full hardware access on the machine they rightfully own ?
It's a joke!
The guy who caught the bug is using techie humor in perfect hacker tradition. He's pretending to take things utterly literally and following them to a redicuilous extreme.
In this case he's doing it by publishing a report of how to crack an Xbox and run an arbitrary OS on it - with complete details on how to replicate it - as a bug report. And he went through the entire procedure:
- Identify and diagnose the problem.
- Build a proof-of-concept test.
- Check it against the latest release (and find the bug still there).
- Notify the vendor (who ignores the report, as usual).
- Give him time to respond (which he doesn't).
- Give a public demonstration.
- Respond in friendly fashion to the vendor-initiated contact (after the public demo lights a fire), giving him the details of the proof-of-concept.
- Give the vendor some time to generate and publish a patch.
- Publish the complete details of the exploit. He did this just as if it were a bug, rather than a "feature".
Now there is "improved" firmware that fixes the hole. And the complete details are out there. If anybody who actually owns an Xbox who doesn't want to "fix" the "bug" and leaves his firmware backdated, so he can "be exploited by himself" by loading Linux, *BSD, or whatever on his own Xbox, well, that's what he gets for not staying up to date on patch levels.
ROTFLMAO!
Meanwhile the "anonymous hacker" has published (on Bugtraq no less) complete details of how to crack the Xbox (with a backdated firmware load) and run an arbitrary OS on it with full privileges. Yet when it comes to the DMCA he's squeaky-clean. The MAFIAAs and Microsoft have absolutely no claim against him if anybody out there happens to "exploit himself" and use this "bug" to break their "trusted" computing platform.
But there's one thing I don't understand:
Why didn't samzenpus use "The Foot" when he approved this article? B-)
Rubbish. Example: Podcasts. Most of them are mp3/aac, yet they load on the iPod just fine.
From the iTunes online store or from other sources?
My impression from reading the article was that you can load them just fine from your local disk (or perhaps a remote source) using the iTunes client software on your computer, but that (Apple / TFA claims) the store's software isn't (currently) set up to handle a non-DRMed download.
(Of course I don't have the iTunes software - and can't, short of buying a new computer, installing Windoze, or Apple coming out with a Linux iTunes client. Did I misread the article?)
So how do you load unprotected content into iPod?
on
Apple's iTunes DRM Dilemma
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The article talks at length about issues with making it possible for other vendors to sell PROTECTED content that can be loaded PROTECTED onto an iPod. OK, fine.
But what about loading UNprotected content onto an iPod?
If I read this correctly:
- iTunes can't sell UNprotected content and
- Other tools can't load UNprotected content into iPods because:
- the iPod's onboard software is designed to only be loaded by iTunes software,
- the iTunes store is not designed to serve unprotected content and the iTunes application is not designed to download unprotected content from the store (although it will load unprotected content from the user's machine)
- both are designed to be automatically updated when used if Apple believes it desirable (whether because the protection is cracked or because people are using it in unapproved ways), and
- Apple won't publish an API for loading UNprotected content or commit to stabilizing it.
This means third-party tools, even if trying to load unprotected content, are trying to hit a moving target.
But Apple only makes the iTunes client available for Mac and Windows (linux, non-Mac unix, etc. users need not apply), and only in association with a user account registration.
Which brings me to my situation:
- I have a video iPod (given me as a gift).
- I have only Linux machines, so can't run the Apple iTunes clients.
- I would like to load unprotected content onto the iPod.
- I have no desire to ever buy anything DRM encumbered, which means I will not be buying anything DRM-infested from iTunes, ever (even if I COULD load it under Linux).
- Thus I don't need an iTunes account, which means:
- for me the iPod software will NOT be updating intermittently, but forms a fixed target.
So how can I (and others in a similar situation) load unprotected content onto the iPod?
I had hoped TFA, self-billed as "(Understanding) How Apple's FairPlay DRM works" might give me some insight. But it says nothing about the guts. It just meanders around the high-level design issues of key management.
Does anyone know a solution - or where to look for one?
now they are lobbying to get laws passed to force us to switch to the new and higher profit margin product which they have the patent on so there will be limited competition.:-)
No.
Somebody ELSE is lobbying to force people to buy CFLs.
GE's incandescent lamp people are lobbying to have the law written to allow them to sell LOWER profit margin super-incandescents IF they have an energy efficiency in the same ballpark as CFLs, rather than being excluded from the market entirely and having to downsize or shut down.
I feel that both GE's weak attempt at politically influencing a delay in the inevitable transition to CFL's
Not inevitable. (For starters, LEDs (or something like them) seems the logical next step, and they might eclipse CFLs before the latter get fully deployed.)
Also: If GE is saying "Mandate reasonable efficiency standards, we think we can meet them." rather than "Don't do it!", it might SPEED the legislation.
Legislation initially setting the bar above ordinary incandescents but below where the first production models of these improved versions will fall - even if below CFLs - will still be an incandescent ban until the new-tek ones arrive.
maybe because these bastards have probably been sitting on this technology for years and only brought it out when their business was threatened.
Assuming they WERE sitting on it:
Maybe they were sitting on it because the bulbs would be somewhat more expensive than ordinary incandescents - enough that they'd never sell even one of them when regular ones were in the market.
With regular ones gone - due to a new law - these might now be profitable and cost-competitive, or could become so with a little more work. Provided, of course, the new law doesn't ban them despite their performance.
What if there is some big elite conspiracy sitting on all this technology already but refusing to release it to the public? Like say efficient light bulbs,...
What if they're sitting on it because the cost of the bulb would be enough higher that it wouldn't justify the switch, so they couldn't sell it if they made it.
And then a big state like California starts working on legislation that would shut down sales of the ordinary bulbs. And with the competition from regular bulbs gone, the new one might be a good deal. (Especially if, once they're selling millions per year they can spend some of that profit improving the process and getting the costs down.)
But the legislature is wording the new law so it would ban the dandy new bulb, too!
Wouldn't YOU put out a press release saying "Hey, waitaminute! We've got this thing coming out of the labs that will do what you want! How about wording the bill so it doesn't ban the technology, just sets performance requirements?"
It's _not_ available, and won't be until 2010. The threat of bans may have been a reason for the press release, though.
It's also a good reason to rehack the legislation as GE would like: Mandating efficiency levels but not technology.
If they suddenly can't sell ordinary incandescents in, say California (with something like a fifth of the US population), but COULD sell twice as pricey high-efficiency bulbs (which aren't a good deal in competition with ordinary types), bet on a crash program to get the fancy-dans into production.
And once you're selling 'em by the millions you can justify spending some bux to improve the process and reduce the cost.
They might be using tungsten photonic lattice technology. Note that this is an article from 2002, and claims a similar efficiency.
That sounds like a match for the claims.
At first I thought they were talking about another, lower-tek way they've had for decades to get the same boost - also by trapping the IR until it happens to come back out as visible light - but that one makes the bulbs more expensive to fabricate. (It didn't deploy because the power savings didn't justify the extra cost. But if the basic bulb was banned by cost-is-no-object legislation it might make it a practical alternative to shutting down the production lines.)
The older device consisted of a spherical bulb with the filament at the center and a layered dilectric coating that reflected infrared and passed visible. The reflected infrared focuses back on the filament, heating it (and thus replacing the power that would have been wasted making infrared that just flies away). Neglecting inefficiencies, heat energy can only radiate away in the visible, rather than mostly as useless heat-lamp infrared.
Same basic idea, except that instead of trapping the IR in the filament in the first place this older system returns it after it leaves.
Two, it gets very cold very fast; meaning the heat from the sun is not penetrating all that deeply.
And that water has a density maximum at about 4 degrees C. So (to a first approximation, ignoring issues like salinity gradients) 4 degree C water sinks below water at any higher or lower temperature, regulating the deep-ocean temperature - until you get down to where the ocean bottom is heating it faster than it can float away.
Heat input at the top just changes the level where it reaches 4 degrees, not what the temperature below that point is.
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I'm a libertarian so now I feel justified in supporting open borders. Having enough money to live in a gated community and owning machine guns is a private matter.
I, on the other hand, characterize myself as a "Law 'n Order Anarchist" (or "Law 'n Order Minarchist" on even-numbered days). That means I think we should get rid of all (or all but the minimum necessary) of the laws - but believe it must be done in the right ORDER or it makes things worse rather than better.
(Actually, I'm more of a "Constitutional Law 'n Order Anarchist/Minarchist" Let's get there by legal means, such as repeals and amendments.)
A prime example of this order-dependence is the immigration barriers. Open borders would be nice. But you have to remove the cancerous overgrowth of the social services first. Otherwise you get an inrush of people who put a far larger load on the services than any taxes on them cover, while depressing wages and breaking unions. A double pick of the workers' pocket - for the dubious "benefit" of giving employers a break on wages. The mass of workers gets hit twice - once in the paycheck, again in taxes. A perfect, though indirect, example of "corporate welfare".
Then the citizens retaliate in elections. Libertarians, with their track record of going after any piece of their agenda without regard for the consequences of the order, become further marginalized. Naturalizing the incoming won't help Libertarians either: The bulk of their votes will go for more benefits for themselves.
Your situation is another example: To do what you want you need to get rid of the laws that make owning a machine gun or using it for home defense nearly impossible before you retreat to your fortress neighborhood and open the borders. B-)
If events are scheduled using UTC, then timezone and dst make no difference.
Given that events (such as periodic meetings) are normally scheduled in local time, that's bogus.
In fact, having the calendaring tool store them in UTC breaks things even more. It means that the tool will convert them to UTC to store them and alarm them, then back to local time to display them. So when DST starts (even if at the EXPECTED time) a periodic meeting moves by an hour.
DST is an unmitigated disaster for programmers who write scheduling software (as I once did for a client). Changing it compounds the problem.
When you merely fail to meet your obligation to stop destruction, you're not liable. Just ask New Orleans about Bush/Brown/Chertoff/FEMA.
Actually, ask them about Governor Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin.
Making the disaster plan, and executing the plan for the first three days WITHOUT external help, was the responsibility of the locality. FEMA assistance wasn't supposed to be counted on until the fourth day - and even then it's just materiel and money to HELP the state and locality run THEIR plan, not a federal takeover of their responsibilities.
Guess what day they showed up?
Under the Posse Comitatus act the fed can't even send in people without permission from the governor (or a declaration of war against a rebellion). (That's why they gave a bunch of supplies to groups like the Salvation Army to take in - groups which the local officials then blocked from going to the area.)
What, exactly, does this have to do with my rights online?
- You have a right, when suing other people, to force them to retain their online correspondence, so that you can use discovery to find evidence against them among it.
- Others have a right, when suing YOU, to force YOU to retain YOUR online correspondence, so that THEY can use discovery to find evidence aginst YOU among it.
- These override the defendant's "right to privacy" as related to his online correspondence in the civil suit.
Make sense now?
Hasbro should make Nerf chairs for people to throw at meetings. (Like whenever the subject of Microsoft comes up.)
Maybe mini, hand-sized ones.
They can give the first case of 'em to Steve for a promo.
Maybe it's just me but, for curiositiy's sake, has anyone ever tried using a public IP schema in place of a private (on wireless, behind a router, essentially on any non-public facing interface)?
As a matter of fact, *I* do.
I have a couple class-Cs from before the rise of ISPs. When I first hooked up with an ISP I was able to use them because the ISP would route them for me.
But my present ISP will not route them. So I have a small range of fixed IPs from the current ISP's address space and NAT on the firewall. (This lets me keep the configuration correct on the rest of my internal net for an eventual switch to a new ISP that is more reasonable.) For "guest" computers (such as my laptop from work) I run DHCP but hand out addresses from a pool within my private address space.
So if I were to run KaZaA on my net the MediaSentry tool would find one of my fixed addresses from my ISP's "public address space" on the packet, and a different "public address space" IP address in the KaZaA data, this time from one of my personal Class-C networks.
An expert who ignores that there is a subnet mask that gives you a full 4th octet under a single IP either hasn't ever worked with networking, or is not aware of the knowledge they are shelling out to first year students in technical institutes;
The record doesn't show anything like that.
One of the few things he did right was determine that the IP address was assigned to the computer, that NAT wasn't in use. The tool he used does this by extracting and displaying both the "from" IP address on the packet and a copy of the interface's IP address that KaZaA helpfully records in the data part of at least one of the packets of the exchange. This eliminates NAT on routers and wireless access points.
Since the connection was a dialup with a DHCP-assigned dynamic IP address, it would have a single IP address - which eliminates multi-address subnets. The combination of that with "no NAT" eliminates wireless access points and multi-computer home networks. (The computer that dialed up COULD be NATting and forwarding for others, but it WAS the one that ran the KaZaA client.)
But it doesn't eliminate the possibility that the IP was actually assigned to the defendant. There are a lot of ways that could happen. For instance: Maybe the clocks were off between the ISP's logger and the tool that captured the IP address of the "pirate publisher". Maybe the ISP's logs weren't high enough resolution and there was a logon-logoff event. Maybe somebody typoed the IP address somewhere. And a bunch of other possibilities. The MAC address wasn't recorded (or recordable remotely) so they don't have a unique identifier of the computer's wireless card, and even if they did it's possible to hack 'em.
Given that there's no sign of a KaZaA client or music files on the captured hard drive, it seems likely that th identification of the defendant's computer from the ISP's logs and the IP capturing tool output was somehow in error, and they got the wrong victim.
Way off-topic, but programming desperately needs the kind of accountability and professionalism that 'real' engineering has.
There was a move to create such a certification back in the '70s or so. Had it gone through you'd have to understand JCL and be a moderately proficient COBOL programmer to be certified.
The phenomenal explosion of software functionality has occurred largely because such concrete-setting certification systems have NOT been applied to programming. Attempts to write requirements for such certifications into law were recognized as counter-productive, job insurance for mediocre programmers, and extortion by the self-appointed certification "authorities" that were the main lobbyists for the legislation - and were beaten back.
This is why (in most jurisdictions) "software engineer" or "computer engineer" is the only title containing "engineer" that one can apply to himself without any certification whatsoever.
A number of free-market certifications (other than degrees) exist, for companies that want some well-defined skill tested by a reputable organization, and for practitioners who want to prove their talents by other than job experience and recommendation. But unlike engineers in other fields, lawyers, doctors, and other professions, computer engineering certifications are not part of the legal system.
... isn't the illusion of water on the road a product of light reflecting off of the air?
... It's caused by the curvature of light refracted ... ...or, it's caused by actual water on the road.
No.
1960s: "Reality is an illusion!"
2000s: "Illusion is reality!"
"History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme." B-)
... isn't the illusion of water on the road a product of light reflecting off of the air?
No.
It's caused by the curvature of light refracted by the difference in refractive index between the hot air near the sun-heated surface and the cooler air above it. The light bends back up without "touching" the underlying surface.
You only get a little bend. This is why you need a very hot surface to get enough of a bend to be visible at all. It's also why you only get it at large distances, where the line of sight is nearly parallel to the ground.
It looks like water because you look at the ground and see a a region of like of the sky's color, shimmering due to convection current - generated patches of uneven refractive index in the air rather than surface ripples.
Of course, two options exist that can still make inflatables work. One is to bury them after inflating them, so that the layer of soil stops the micrometeors.
The other is to inflate a structure having multi-layer walls, with gaps between the layers and the outer layer made of aluminum foil.
A third is self-sealing materials, such as the coatings on the inside that get sucked into any hole as with tires.
By the way: Your second option conflates two systems (both of which should be used, of course): Ablative coatings (not necessarily airtight - just something to absorb the projectile's momentum and disperse it broadly enough that you don't get a puncture) and redundant airtight layers.
It was a WiFi-borne hack and he was at Black Hat. So there were lots of sniffers going and everybody gets a copy of whatever he does.
So he just demoed (and thus released) the DoS, not the root exploit - which he DID have the code to perform but didn't want to release (by demoing).
Apple admitted the vulnerability WAS a root exploit.
Does MS force updates for things like this?
Yes. As soon as your XB360 attempts to connect to Live (which even without you paying, it will do if you signed up for it) it will demand you update or it will disconnect you (which with Live-connected dashboard accounts signs you out of your local XB360 profile too)
Any bets on whether code running in hypervisor mode can create a virtual machine environment where the updated Microsoft code can think it's running the show when it's actually king of a sandbox?
One problem with your amusing story: Microsoft did respond with a patch that closed the hole.
So did you install it? Without a way to back out if it broke something? B-)
Wait. Don't you mean this allows an Xbox 360 user to run arbitrary code such as alternative operating systems with full privileges and full hardware access on the machine they rightfully own ?
It's a joke!
The guy who caught the bug is using techie humor in perfect hacker tradition. He's pretending to take things utterly literally and following them to a redicuilous extreme.
In this case he's doing it by publishing a report of how to crack an Xbox and run an arbitrary OS on it - with complete details on how to replicate it - as a bug report. And he went through the entire procedure:
- Identify and diagnose the problem.
- Build a proof-of-concept test.
- Check it against the latest release (and find the bug still there).
- Notify the vendor (who ignores the report, as usual).
- Give him time to respond (which he doesn't).
- Give a public demonstration.
- Respond in friendly fashion to the vendor-initiated contact (after the public demo lights a fire), giving him the details of the proof-of-concept.
- Give the vendor some time to generate and publish a patch.
- Publish the complete details of the exploit.
He did this just as if it were a bug, rather than a "feature".
Now there is "improved" firmware that fixes the hole. And the complete details are out there. If anybody who actually owns an Xbox who doesn't want to "fix" the "bug" and leaves his firmware backdated, so he can "be exploited by himself" by loading Linux, *BSD, or whatever on his own Xbox, well, that's what he gets for not staying up to date on patch levels.
ROTFLMAO!
Meanwhile the "anonymous hacker" has published (on Bugtraq no less) complete details of how to crack the Xbox (with a backdated firmware load) and run an arbitrary OS on it with full privileges. Yet when it comes to the DMCA he's squeaky-clean. The MAFIAAs and Microsoft have absolutely no claim against him if anybody out there happens to "exploit himself" and use this "bug" to break their "trusted" computing platform.
But there's one thing I don't understand:
Why didn't samzenpus use "The Foot" when he approved this article? B-)
Rubbish. Example: Podcasts. Most of them are mp3/aac, yet they load on the iPod just fine.
From the iTunes online store or from other sources?
My impression from reading the article was that you can load them just fine from your local disk (or perhaps a remote source) using the iTunes client software on your computer, but that (Apple / TFA claims) the store's software isn't (currently) set up to handle a non-DRMed download.
(Of course I don't have the iTunes software - and can't, short of buying a new computer, installing Windoze, or Apple coming out with a Linux iTunes client. Did I misread the article?)
The article talks at length about issues with making it possible for other vendors to sell PROTECTED content that can be loaded PROTECTED onto an iPod. OK, fine.
But what about loading UNprotected content onto an iPod?
If I read this correctly:
- iTunes can't sell UNprotected content and
- Other tools can't load UNprotected content into iPods
because:
- the iPod's onboard software is designed to only be loaded by iTunes software,
- the iTunes store is not designed to serve unprotected content and the iTunes application is not designed to download unprotected content from the store (although it will load unprotected content from the user's machine)
- both are designed to be automatically updated when used if Apple believes it desirable (whether because the protection is cracked or because people are using it in unapproved ways), and
- Apple won't publish an API for loading UNprotected content or commit to stabilizing it.
This means third-party tools, even if trying to load unprotected content, are trying to hit a moving target.
But Apple only makes the iTunes client available for Mac and Windows (linux, non-Mac unix, etc. users need not apply), and only in association with a user account registration.
Which brings me to my situation:
- I have a video iPod (given me as a gift).
- I have only Linux machines, so can't run the Apple iTunes clients.
- I would like to load unprotected content onto the iPod.
- I have no desire to ever buy anything DRM encumbered, which means I will not be buying anything DRM-infested from iTunes, ever (even if I COULD load it under Linux).
- Thus I don't need an iTunes account, which means:
- for me the iPod software will NOT be updating intermittently, but forms a fixed target.
So how can I (and others in a similar situation) load unprotected content onto the iPod?
I had hoped TFA, self-billed as "(Understanding) How Apple's FairPlay DRM works" might give me some insight. But it says nothing about the guts. It just meanders around the high-level design issues of key management.
Does anyone know a solution - or where to look for one?
now they are lobbying to get laws passed to force us to switch to the new and higher profit margin product which they have the patent on so there will be limited competition. :-)
No.
Somebody ELSE is lobbying to force people to buy CFLs.
GE's incandescent lamp people are lobbying to have the law written to allow them to sell LOWER profit margin super-incandescents IF they have an energy efficiency in the same ballpark as CFLs, rather than being excluded from the market entirely and having to downsize or shut down.
I feel that both GE's weak attempt at politically influencing a delay in the inevitable transition to CFL's
Not inevitable. (For starters, LEDs (or something like them) seems the logical next step, and they might eclipse CFLs before the latter get fully deployed.)
Also: If GE is saying "Mandate reasonable efficiency standards, we think we can meet them." rather than "Don't do it!", it might SPEED the legislation.
Legislation initially setting the bar above ordinary incandescents but below where the first production models of these improved versions will fall - even if below CFLs - will still be an incandescent ban until the new-tek ones arrive.
maybe because these bastards have probably been sitting on this technology for years and only brought it out when their business was threatened.
Assuming they WERE sitting on it:
Maybe they were sitting on it because the bulbs would be somewhat more expensive than ordinary incandescents - enough that they'd never sell even one of them when regular ones were in the market.
With regular ones gone - due to a new law - these might now be profitable and cost-competitive, or could become so with a little more work. Provided, of course, the new law doesn't ban them despite their performance.
What if there is some big elite conspiracy sitting on all this technology already but refusing to release it to the public? Like say efficient light bulbs, ...
What if they're sitting on it because the cost of the bulb would be enough higher that it wouldn't justify the switch, so they couldn't sell it if they made it.
And then a big state like California starts working on legislation that would shut down sales of the ordinary bulbs. And with the competition from regular bulbs gone, the new one might be a good deal. (Especially if, once they're selling millions per year they can spend some of that profit improving the process and getting the costs down.)
But the legislature is wording the new law so it would ban the dandy new bulb, too!
Wouldn't YOU put out a press release saying "Hey, waitaminute! We've got this thing coming out of the labs that will do what you want! How about wording the bill so it doesn't ban the technology, just sets performance requirements?"
It's _not_ available, and won't be until 2010. The threat of bans may have been a reason for the press release, though.
It's also a good reason to rehack the legislation as GE would like: Mandating efficiency levels but not technology.
If they suddenly can't sell ordinary incandescents in, say California (with something like a fifth of the US population), but COULD sell twice as pricey high-efficiency bulbs (which aren't a good deal in competition with ordinary types), bet on a crash program to get the fancy-dans into production.
And once you're selling 'em by the millions you can justify spending some bux to improve the process and reduce the cost.
In particular, rather than banning incandescents, a simple tax based on energy usage would have a much higher impact on creating alternatives.
I already pay such a "tax" - and so do you. It shows up on your electric bill.
More energy, more bux.
They might be using tungsten photonic lattice technology. Note that this is an article from 2002, and claims a similar efficiency.
That sounds like a match for the claims.
At first I thought they were talking about another, lower-tek way they've had for decades to get the same boost - also by trapping the IR until it happens to come back out as visible light - but that one makes the bulbs more expensive to fabricate. (It didn't deploy because the power savings didn't justify the extra cost. But if the basic bulb was banned by cost-is-no-object legislation it might make it a practical alternative to shutting down the production lines.)
The older device consisted of a spherical bulb with the filament at the center and a layered dilectric coating that reflected infrared and passed visible. The reflected infrared focuses back on the filament, heating it (and thus replacing the power that would have been wasted making infrared that just flies away). Neglecting inefficiencies, heat energy can only radiate away in the visible, rather than mostly as useless heat-lamp infrared.
Same basic idea, except that instead of trapping the IR in the filament in the first place this older system returns it after it leaves.
Two, it gets very cold very fast; meaning the heat from the sun is not penetrating all that deeply.
And that water has a density maximum at about 4 degrees C. So (to a first approximation, ignoring issues like salinity gradients) 4 degree C water sinks below water at any higher or lower temperature, regulating the deep-ocean temperature - until you get down to where the ocean bottom is heating it faster than it can float away.
Heat input at the top just changes the level where it reaches 4 degrees, not what the temperature below that point is.