This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard - wanting to use a hard disk-based iPod as an FDR?!? The stupid things are unreliable enough as consumer devices! I'm regularly having to "tap" mine on the desk to get the hard disk going again after it's paused itself in the middle of a song - how's it going to fare in a high-vibration aircraft environment, with regular pressure and temperature changes to boot!?
A lot of Dell computers ship with DMS-59 connectors and a dongle cable that breaks out to one or two VGA connectors, but it's actually dual DVI-I on the backplane. Probably all you need is a different dongle cable from Dell or eBay that breaks out to one or two DVI connectors.
Now, this being Slashdot, of course I didn't RTFA, so I don't know how long ago these hackers provided the manufacturer with the details, but in case it was recently (or worse: not at all) calling them unresponsible is not uncalled for. In case they did not intend to tell the manufacturer prior to the announcement at the conference at all, "unresponsible" is an understatement.
Allow me to quote some snippets from TFA to answer your questions and show how HID is behaving:
"They've known about this for years and years," Moss said. [Jeff Moss is the founder and director of Black Hat]
Kathleen Carroll, a spokeswoman for HID's Government Relations group acknowledged that a letter was sent to IOActive but that it did not mention patent infringement. She said that the company has long been aware that its proximity cards are vulnerable to hacking but does not believe that the cards are as vulnerable as Paget suggests. [Chris Paget is the IOActive employee who was to be making the presentation at Black Hat.]
[After talking about various RFID lack-of-security demonstrations over the years...] All that attention hasn't sparked much change at companies like HID, which makes fifteen different types of proximity cards in their Prox Products and Indala Prox Products lines, all of which are believed to be vulnerable to cloning, according to Paget.
Asked why HID hasn't addressed the issue in more recent proximity card systems, after knowledge of RFID threats became common, Carroll said that doing so would cause "major upheaval" among customers.
It's probably too late to be worrying about it now, but do some research on the people already working/studying there and see if you can get yourself involved or make yourself useful to them somehow. Get a foot in the door. The axiom, "it's not what you know but who you know" is often used negatively but there's no reason you can't turn it to your own ends.
Aside from the immobility of a Police Office, it wasn't actually the Georgia couple who brought it to the department's attention but the police officer himself.
The target zone is apparently a path from Siberia leading ESE through North America around to the west coast of Africa. I don't understand it myself, since the uncertainty should be a conic region giving us a more-or-less circular target zone on the surface of the Earth (not linear).
So far as the report on New Scientist goes, I guess they just decided to say it would hit the Pacific off the coast of California. The artists' impression picture is also not to scale - an asteroid that big relative to Earth would be around 600km in diameter, not a mere 250 metres.
Windows Search is a piece of crap - it can't even understand Unicode text files! You have to go to the commandline and use FIND or FINDSTR if you need to search Unicode files and this has been a problem oft reported since Windows NT 4.0.
Try this: open Notepad and type in the text "hello world". Use File/Save as... to save this as "ANSI", "Unicode", "Unicode big-endian" and "UTF-8" encodings into an isolated directory. Now use Windows Search to find files containing "hello" in that directory - it only finds the ANSI version and the UTF-8 version (and that only by accident). The situation gets even more dismal if you start using international characters.
I know it's not a model listed on the https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/ website, but they do state many batteries were sent out as replacements too.
Dell records the serial numbers on every single item they send out - computers, power bricks, batteries, software bundles - it's all there on their pick lists. Why is it that consumers have to contact Dell to find out if a particular item is under Recall status, why aren't Dell actively contacting them?
I think it's exposure that people need to be worried about. No matter how much people whinge and bitch about it, their governments (and even private enterprise) keep databases about them.
These databases *should* be secure, to prevent unauthorized access, but there have been many cases over the years demonstrating that they aren't: VA contractor takes home notebook containing records of thousands/millions people, notebook gets stolen, database gets compromised; disgruntled data-entry subcontractor in another country attempts to bribe a hospital over medical records in her posession; disgruntled/poor government employee sells tax records database contents to marketing to affiliates to help pay their bills; etc.
Whilst on the surface this Chinese example of being able to confirm a person's ID by supplying the name and ID number to receive a photo back for visual verification sounds reasonable one has to wonder how long it will be before it gets compromised. The underlying database no doubt contains far more information and would literally be a gold mine if it could be compromised, for example: if the web service were vulnerable to SQL code injection, an attacker could quite literally setup their own search engine to lookup details of anyone of their choosing, or worse still, make off with the entire database.
... and some required logging in as administrator to install them.
I've got no problems having to install apps/games using an admin account. I think that's a good thing, stopping kids from installing crap for one thing, and a lot of setups will actually prompt you for admin-level credentials if you're not already running with them. But you shouldn't have to run them as admin to use them - Palm f'n Desktop, for example.:(
Use TIFF or RAW, as these do not use lossy compression. The files are much larger, but they don't use lossy routines (LZW is lossless compression, and RAW doesn't compress at all.).
If you're at all serious about digital photography, particularly if you're leaning towards scientific applications like astrophotography, I'd recommend giving TIFF the flick. TIFF supports many different compression schemes including LZW (lossless) and JPEG (lossy). A number of cameras I've seen supporting TIFF are actually using TIFF/JPEG because they can use the same CODEC for generating their JPG files. TIFF is also limited to 8-bits per channel. Stick with your camera's RAW format, or if it has it FITS (unlikely).
What you use to edit your pictures will directly affect their quality as well. Sure, GIMP is free and I like it, but it is also limited to 8-bits per channel and so is again useless for quasi-scientific stuff. Photoshop still reigns here, but there are other free applications coming out that support 16-bits per channel like Krita (which actually supports up to 32-bits per channel in some color spaces).
Interesting to find out that Hubble can not do it. It really makes a case for continual improvements of camera (lighter weight and smaller / pixel resolution) for using to send to other planets.
Maybe for surface imaging but for (stellar) astronomical cameras bigger pixels are actually better. The larger the surface area of a CCD pixel the more photons it is able to collect thus making the imaging array more sensitive, even if that means lower resolution. To give you an idea, if you make a CCD array the same physical size overall but halve the horizontal and vertical resolution (hence, a quarter resolution) you're effectively making the pixels 4x the size, 4x more sensitive and able to detect light sources 1/4 as bright.
The Yahoo! News article got the figures wrong. To get only 2,000 words (a computer term, not a linguistic one) out of 160-kbits they'd have to be 80-bit words.
The article at Technology Review has better maths and more information to boot.
Consider not only the possibility of the single pixel image sensor failing, but the possibility of one or more of the MEMS mirrors getting stuck in the "on" position. A single mirror would cause the entire image to brighten (by how much depends on what it's looking at), multiple pixels could actually saturate the image. Mirrors stuck in the "off" position wouldn't pose such a problem - they'd present a "black" pixel in the output image but wouldn't affect anything else.
Ballmer's Keyboard Fantasy
on
iPhone Roundup
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ballmer also specifically pointed to the iPhone's lack of a keyboard as a potential drawback for heavy e-mailers. "If you want to send e-mail, touchscreens are okay," he says. "We have touchscreen-based devices, but I think keyboards are generally preferred for people who do much typing."
I have to call BS on this one. We've got plenty of corporates using Windows mobiles (I'm not one of them, thankfully) and the serious e-mailers do prefer a keyboard - a Bluetooth keyboard, not the built-in ones. You can even get them in pocketable folding formats. iPhone has Bluetooth? Check!
I agree that this will help with the take-up of Linux, but I don't see how you can equate DRM with proprietary codecs.
Proprietary codecs often have some benefit to end-users in the form of improved quality, improved resolution (not the same thing) and/or improved compression. SVQ (Sorenson video) codecs in Apple Quicktime certainly helped to make that product popular for some of those reasons, at least until it was surpassed by MPEG-4.
DRM is a benefit to nobody, except when it comes to lining the pockets of content producers. I equate DRM with user-inhibiting and the theft of pre-existing rights.
The bill is meant to secure music libraries and broadcasts, but there's nothing there about exclusions for educational (non-music) streams and podcasts like JapanesePod101.com. They also go on to say this:
The bill also contains language to make sure that consumers' current recording habits are not inhibited.
Ok then, what the hell is DRM if it's not inhibiting the consumers' recording habits??
Even if there was a tagging standard, the choice of tag(s) will still be up to the people applying the tags. Different people will have different interpretations. Just look at how well Genres worked out for MP3-ID3, especially on services like Gracenote where people would just upload any old cruft.
*The all time crown for worst tire service goes to my local Midas.
I'll second that.
Many years ago I took my first car to Midas for a general service and oil change. With an oil capacity of 2.3 litres it somehow wound-up with a whole 4 litres in it. The car ran like sh*t until we drained the oil and put the correct amount back in. Wouldn't be so bad if they advertised themselves as tyres-only, but they advertise themselves as general mechanics as well.
SED's were supposed to be in mass production and shipping in Japan in early 2006. I can see now why they haven't been actively marketed, and have even been pulled from US trade shows.
The original image, an oblique shot of the phone with no brand marking between the screen and keypad, that was uploaded on 28-Nov-2006 18:15:15 GMT.
The user-supplied image by Ben Boyle, a "full frontal" shot of the phone with an "iPhone" brand marking between the screen and keypad, that was uploaded on 19-Dec-2006 06:53:16 GMT.
When I call my bank, they never ask me for say, my full telephone pin. They ask for 2 random digits.
This would concern me to no end - it sounds like the bank staff can see your PIN on their screens. What's to stop staff looking-up people's PINs and either using them themselves or even selling them to someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard - wanting to use a hard disk-based iPod as an FDR?!? The stupid things are unreliable enough as consumer devices! I'm regularly having to "tap" mine on the desk to get the hard disk going again after it's paused itself in the middle of a song - how's it going to fare in a high-vibration aircraft environment, with regular pressure and temperature changes to boot!?
It's just like this story on Slashdot this morning. Even links to the same story on BBC.
A lot of Dell computers ship with DMS-59 connectors and a dongle cable that breaks out to one or two VGA connectors, but it's actually dual DVI-I on the backplane. Probably all you need is a different dongle cable from Dell or eBay that breaks out to one or two DVI connectors.
Allow me to quote some snippets from TFA to answer your questions and show how HID is behaving:
Bottom line: HID are being Ass Hats.
I hear the UK Navy will be looking for a whole bunch of shipbound IT people when their next generation of Windows-based warships go to sea. :)
It's probably too late to be worrying about it now, but do some research on the people already working/studying there and see if you can get yourself involved or make yourself useful to them somehow. Get a foot in the door.
The axiom, "it's not what you know but who you know" is often used negatively but there's no reason you can't turn it to your own ends.
Aside from the immobility of a Police Office, it wasn't actually the Georgia couple who brought it to the department's attention but the police officer himself.
The target zone is apparently a path from Siberia leading ESE through North America around to the west coast of Africa. I don't understand it myself, since the uncertainty should be a conic region giving us a more-or-less circular target zone on the surface of the Earth (not linear).
So far as the report on New Scientist goes, I guess they just decided to say it would hit the Pacific off the coast of California. The artists' impression picture is also not to scale - an asteroid that big relative to Earth would be around 600km in diameter, not a mere 250 metres.
Windows Search is a piece of crap - it can't even understand Unicode text files! You have to go to the commandline and use FIND or FINDSTR if you need to search Unicode files and this has been a problem oft reported since Windows NT 4.0.
Try this: open Notepad and type in the text "hello world". Use File/Save as... to save this as "ANSI", "Unicode", "Unicode big-endian" and "UTF-8" encodings into an isolated directory. Now use Windows Search to find files containing "hello" in that directory - it only finds the ANSI version and the UTF-8 version (and that only by accident). The situation gets even more dismal if you start using international characters.
Dell records the serial numbers on every single item they send out - computers, power bricks, batteries, software bundles - it's all there on their pick lists. Why is it that consumers have to contact Dell to find out if a particular item is under Recall status, why aren't Dell actively contacting them?
I think it's exposure that people need to be worried about. No matter how much people whinge and bitch about it, their governments (and even private enterprise) keep databases about them.
These databases *should* be secure, to prevent unauthorized access, but there have been many cases over the years demonstrating that they aren't: VA contractor takes home notebook containing records of thousands/millions people, notebook gets stolen, database gets compromised; disgruntled data-entry subcontractor in another country attempts to bribe a hospital over medical records in her posession; disgruntled/poor government employee sells tax records database contents to marketing to affiliates to help pay their bills; etc.
Whilst on the surface this Chinese example of being able to confirm a person's ID by supplying the name and ID number to receive a photo back for visual verification sounds reasonable one has to wonder how long it will be before it gets compromised. The underlying database no doubt contains far more information and would literally be a gold mine if it could be compromised, for example: if the web service were vulnerable to SQL code injection, an attacker could quite literally setup their own search engine to lookup details of anyone of their choosing, or worse still, make off with the entire database.
I've got no problems having to install apps/games using an admin account. I think that's a good thing, stopping kids from installing crap for one thing, and a lot of setups will actually prompt you for admin-level credentials if you're not already running with them. But you shouldn't have to run them as admin to use them - Palm f'n Desktop, for example. :(
If you're at all serious about digital photography, particularly if you're leaning towards scientific applications like astrophotography, I'd recommend giving TIFF the flick. TIFF supports many different compression schemes including LZW (lossless) and JPEG (lossy). A number of cameras I've seen supporting TIFF are actually using TIFF/JPEG because they can use the same CODEC for generating their JPG files. TIFF is also limited to 8-bits per channel. Stick with your camera's RAW format, or if it has it FITS (unlikely).
What you use to edit your pictures will directly affect their quality as well. Sure, GIMP is free and I like it, but it is also limited to 8-bits per channel and so is again useless for quasi-scientific stuff. Photoshop still reigns here, but there are other free applications coming out that support 16-bits per channel like Krita (which actually supports up to 32-bits per channel in some color spaces).
Maybe for surface imaging but for (stellar) astronomical cameras bigger pixels are actually better. The larger the surface area of a CCD pixel the more photons it is able to collect thus making the imaging array more sensitive, even if that means lower resolution. To give you an idea, if you make a CCD array the same physical size overall but halve the horizontal and vertical resolution (hence, a quarter resolution) you're effectively making the pixels 4x the size, 4x more sensitive and able to detect light sources 1/4 as bright.
The Yahoo! News article got the figures wrong. To get only 2,000 words (a computer term, not a linguistic one) out of 160-kbits they'd have to be 80-bit words. The article at Technology Review has better maths and more information to boot.
It'll be a darn side worse with this.
Consider not only the possibility of the single pixel image sensor failing, but the possibility of one or more of the MEMS mirrors getting stuck in the "on" position. A single mirror would cause the entire image to brighten (by how much depends on what it's looking at), multiple pixels could actually saturate the image. Mirrors stuck in the "off" position wouldn't pose such a problem - they'd present a "black" pixel in the output image but wouldn't affect anything else.
I have to call BS on this one. We've got plenty of corporates using Windows mobiles (I'm not one of them, thankfully) and the serious e-mailers do prefer a keyboard - a Bluetooth keyboard, not the built-in ones. You can even get them in pocketable folding formats. iPhone has Bluetooth? Check!
I agree that this will help with the take-up of Linux, but I don't see how you can equate DRM with proprietary codecs.
Proprietary codecs often have some benefit to end-users in the form of improved quality, improved resolution (not the same thing) and/or improved compression. SVQ (Sorenson video) codecs in Apple Quicktime certainly helped to make that product popular for some of those reasons, at least until it was surpassed by MPEG-4.
DRM is a benefit to nobody, except when it comes to lining the pockets of content producers. I equate DRM with user-inhibiting and the theft of pre-existing rights.
The bill is meant to secure music libraries and broadcasts, but there's nothing there about exclusions for educational (non-music) streams and podcasts like JapanesePod101.com. They also go on to say this:
Ok then, what the hell is DRM if it's not inhibiting the consumers' recording habits??
Even if there was a tagging standard, the choice of tag(s) will still be up to the people applying the tags. Different people will have different interpretations.
Just look at how well Genres worked out for MP3-ID3, especially on services like Gracenote where people would just upload any old cruft.
I'll second that.
Many years ago I took my first car to Midas for a general service and oil change. With an oil capacity of 2.3 litres it somehow wound-up with a whole 4 litres in it. The car ran like sh*t until we drained the oil and put the correct amount back in. Wouldn't be so bad if they advertised themselves as tyres-only, but they advertise themselves as general mechanics as well.
Good ad for Calvin Klein, but what's with the leaf blower?
SED's were supposed to be in mass production and shipping in Japan in early 2006. I can see now why they haven't been actively marketed, and have even been pulled from US trade shows.
Yes, it's true, I'm a dumbass for not properly reading your post. *slaps head*
The actual Linksys iPhone page on Amazon has two product images on it:
This would concern me to no end - it sounds like the bank staff can see your PIN on their screens. What's to stop staff looking-up people's PINs and either using them themselves or even selling them to someone else.