You can indeed record it..... you can record anything which has a SCART connector. You probably will need to connect the Moviebeam receiver to a timebase corrector {which removes any artefacts in the retrace period that might fuck up the automatic gain control on most VCRs}, and the timebase corrector to the SCART on the VCR / DVD+R.
The bad part? The Moviebeam player also requires a connection to a phone jack -- every fortnight the box dials a toll-free number in the middle of the night to tally how much you've spent on movies so far, for the benefit of your monthly statement.
Am I the only person who thinks this is going to be spectacularly easy to hack?
You will need one of these handy little gadgets plugged into your PC, a copy of Asterisk, and you're almost good to go. Just convince the Moviebeam player that your PC is the Moviebeam central office. It'll phone through and report your usage. But your PC isn't the Moviebeam central office, so no bill will be generated. You may also have to get your PC to call the real Moviebeam central office and report no usage.
Old-timers will have heard of various coloured boxes in connection with the phone system: Black Box {free incoming calls}, Blue Box {in-band signalling generator}, Red Box {payphone coin-insertion signal generator}, Beige Box {croc-clips to phone socket adaptor} and so on. More esoteric ones included the Jade {timer to avoid itemised bill threshhold}, Primrose {phone-line powered battery charger} and Violet {line holding circuit, defeats money-run-out on some subscriber-owned payphones} Boxes {all the good colours were already taken by the time they were invented}. But this setup truly is the fabled "sky blue pink box with yellow spots on"!
Firstly, we need a law which binds anyone who acquires any kind of used memory device to absolute secrecy over the contents. You can read it, but you'd better not disclose it, directly or indirectly {i.e. by acting on any information so discovered}, to anyone. This is how it already works with stuff like radio broadcasts: if you hear something you weren't supposed to, you have to keep your trap shut. Even slowing down for a speed trap, is considered "acting on information received without authorisation".
Secondly, we need everyone to memorise the following procedure. Works for any HDD that can be got to spin up and doesn't need any extra software.
Save much {innocuous} crap on the hard drive till it's full and won't fit anymore. Ripping CDs as.wav files, or scanning images as.bmps, is good for this. You want there to be no free space at all on the drive.
Delete the stuff you don't want found. Now the only place there is any room to save anything is where the stuff you just deleted used to have been.
Save more crap on the hard drive till it's full again. Now you have definitely overwritten the stuff you deleted before.
Delete all the crap you saved.
Easy; and leaves the drive in reusable condition, even with your operating system still in place.
You could use DBAN but don't bother with more than two overwrite passes; even the second might be overkill. Throughout the last fifty years, there have been many computer storage technologies based on magnetism. Not a single one of those has taken advantage of remanence phenomena to increase storage density. About the nearest thing I've seen was a "trick record" switch on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which cut off the power supply to the erase head {remember energised-field erase heads?} allowing you to create a sort of primitive overdubbing effect; if the first recording was cranked up till the bright green bands met and tried to cross over, you might hear a faint ghost of it under the second. Of course, an analogue tape recorder is working in linear mode, where saturation is undesirable. As opposed to a digital device, which drives everything hard into saturation by deliberate design.
Wrap a few small chunks of calcium carbide {used in caving lanterns} in toilet paper. Put 0.5L water in the bottom of a 2L coke bottle. Use bottle lid to trap TP with carbide in neck of bottle so it is clear of water.
Set fire to an oily rag or something and place on floor.
Invert coke bottle and place it next to fire. Run away.
Water soaks through paper and reacts with Calcium carbide to form ethyne gas. Heat of fire softens bottle and probably helps speed up reaction. Pressure of ethyne builds up until bottle bursts. Escaping ethyne ignites.
I had a chemistry teacher who, every year when the kids from the local primary school who would be joining the First Year come September were visiting, used to get an old pair of boots; and place them together in the chemistry lab, with a beaker of concentrated HCl in one, and a beaker of ammonia in the other. The invisible NH3 and HCl fumes reacted to produce visible white "smoke", looking for all the world {to a bunch of ten- and eleven-year-olds} as though some poor unfortunate had just blown himself up.
He also told us how to distil alcohol, make explosives and what various organic chemicals smelt like.
All priests in all denominations, except those which specifically exclude minors, are child-abusers. Presenting mythology as though it were fact, to minds too young to know the difference, is child abuse.
You are indeed missing something. The same CD now doubles as both an installation CD and a live CD. What's more, unlike ordinary Debian, the packages are right there on the CD; so you don't need a working internet connection just to install it.
Check out this this interesting link, which -- as usual -- I found while looking for something else.
As an aside, you can get most of the ingredients you need for making simple explosives from sources beneath the authorities' radar. Even sulphuric and nitric acids can be obtained by reacting sulphates and nitrates with hydrochloric acid. And if you don't know where to get that, I'm not going to tell you.
The first time I went to London, I innocently asked a woman in a shop if her pricing gun was broken, because she wanted 27p for a Kit Kat.
Re:Why is this on the front page...
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 1
Nobody has ever recovered data that has been overwritten just once. It may have been possible to do, back in the days of 20MB 5.25in drives. Storage density has increased since then. That means the tracks wander less.
All computer memory used to be magnetic, before they could make transistors small enough and cheap enough that it was viable to use flip-flops {SRAM} for anything bigger than registers, and with high enough input impedances so as not to discharge a tiny capacitor {DRAM} before there was time to recharge it. A weird and wonderful array of storage devices have been constructed with tape loops, revolving drums, discs and arrays of ferrite cores. No device has ever been built that used magnetic remanence phenomena to increase storage density; though this almost certainly would have been economically viable at some stage before solid-state memory took over.
Even the data recovery specialists admit that they can't recover once-overwritten data.
The criminal destruction of perfectly serviceable drives by the military is a propaganda exercise. It's saying to the enemy "We have the technology that could have recovered this". It's also saying "We eventually recovered the information from a used hard disk, and definitely not by torturing the suspect".
Re:Not so funny when/if the seller commits suicide
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Indeed. If you're going to put child porn on a computer, at least encrypt it. I'm not going to say anything bad about people who just look at pictures: at least if they're getting their filthy little rocks off into a box of Kleenex, I know my kids are safe.
BTW: how to delete stuff and make sure it stays gone. First, save {innocuous} crap on the hard drive till it's full and won't fit anymore. Ripping CDs as.wav files, or scanning images as.bmps, is good for this. You want there to be no free space at all on the drive. Second, delete the stuff you don't want found. Now the only place there is any room to save anything is where the stuff you deleted used to have been. It's still there really; just marked as "free space, but only to be used as a last resort". Third, save more crap on the hard drive till it's full again. Now you have definitely overwritten the stuff you deleted before. Last, delete all the crap you saved. Anyone trying to recover deleted files will end up recovering the last thing you saved, not what you saved it over the top of, which is lost for all time whatever Guttmann says. Nobody has ever done it in practice.
If you know someone who works in retail and can get you an out-of-date stop list from a credit card company, so much the better..... type this up as a spreadsheet, and save several copies.
Well, if you thought about shoplifting it but were physically unable to do so, chances are you'd be more likely just to do without it than buy it.
Is Charlie Dimmock harming the bra industry?
Does masturbation harm the prostitution industry?
Ask yourself some questions. Why is there no rampant piracy of newspapers, magazines and books, despite there being a photocopier in nearly every newsagent's shop? Do you think the same principle could be applied to movies and music?
PirateBay is just a high-tech, "white-collar" version of shoplifting DVD's, however you justify it to yourself.
Except that, unlike traditional shoplifting methods, this way the DVDs actually remain on the store shelves to be sold, thereby not hurting the retailers.
Side note, what do the Master Bakers' Association of America {or whatever they call themselves} think about the popularity of home bread making machines? Should a levy be imposed on every kilo of Strong Flour to pay for the business they are losing?
The format of sendmail.cf made perfect sense when sendmail was written, however many years ago it was. In those days, people were smart and machines were stupid.
When you look at modern programs with their fancy-pants SQL and XML configurations, they may be easier for a human being to understand; but they're also a hell of a lot of work for the computer to understand, precisely because of all the human-readable cruft. Twenty or thirty years ago, there wasn't the computing power to waste on processing such a config file; it was simply less effort, and more productive, to get a human being to bond well enough with the computer to be able to create a sendmail.cf from scratch.
Exim is easier to configure than Sendmail {not that that's really saying much}. At least, it always used to be -- till they broke up the configuration into lots of little files. You always knew where you were with exim.conf.
However, Exim is licenced under the GPL {which insists for you to respect other people's code}, so probably not a good choice for a BSD system. And you probably also won't want to use it if you went to Oxford.....
The whole aim of the Free Software movement is that there should be no such thing as closed-source software. So why should we in the Movement do anything that makes it easy to allow closed-source software to exist?
Instead, what we should be doing is writing to our MPs and pushing for legislation that would oblige software vendors to supply the source code for all software, even that which is not licenced for redistribution. And we deserve it, by simple majority rule: users outnumber developers. This would be a real solution. Have you ever encountered a problem with closed-source software which could not have been fixed if you, or a competent programmer of your choosing, had only had access to the source code? It also would open up a secondary market in software support services: third-party bugfixes and the like.
Well, if you can't be bothered to compile your own software, then just pick a distro that does it for you! When you download pre-compiled binaries from a distribution, you are downloading files that have been chosen and built to work together. Anything that needs to be changed because something else was changed, will be updated automagically.
If you compiled something yourself from source, then of course you don't have such a safety net. But that's the only way you would get incompatible versions of anything on your system. And if you already compiled it the first time, what's to stop you doing it again?
It's on Linux that you see APIs and even ABIs break with every other release of some library or other critical package.
You do know that broken APIs are easily cured just by re-compiling, yes? Just do
$ cd/usr/src/directory_created_by_unpacking_tarball $ make clean $./configure $ make put the kettle on and skin up a fat d00b $ su give root password # make install
Most of these steps {i.e. the ones not in bold} are similar to what you did when you first installed the package anyway.
If you don't like compiling by hand, use a distro known for its big binary repository {Debian, Fedora Core or nowadays Mandriva with the full Easy URPMI and PLF stuff}; or use Gentoo and have everything compile itself automatically on demand. Either way, the automated update handling tools will take care of it all for you.
Raise your hands if you really didn't see this coming.
For one thing, the closed-source nature of the whole anti-malware market is a fertile breeding ground for exactly this sort of problem.
Fort another thing, if your whole business depends on the very existence and high market penetration of malware, you stand to lose out massively if you actually manage somehow to eliminate it altogether. Symantec et al need the virus writers, the script kiddies, the crackers and the spyware merchants. If it wasn't for them, and the fact that they have such an easy time thanks to closed-source software, then there would be no need for anti-malware services.
Symantec et al are basically providing the electronic equivalent of a huge steel lock fastened onto a cheap balsa wood door with blu-tack. A computer doesn't have, and cannot ever have, any way to distinguish a "good" program from a "bad" one: that has to be determined by a human being somewhere along the line. Nothing anyone can invent will overcome this: it is not a limitation of existing technology, but a limitation of the universe.
It is only because of the existence of closed-source software that hardware has to be binary-compatible, in order to allow execution of foreign binaries. And binary compatibility is the whole reason why viruses and worms work at all. If you are compiling everything locally, nobody else needs to know the instruction set and addressing schema of your hardware; and if all computers were different, code compiled on one machine would not be able to run on any other machine. The only ways around this would be to write malware in interpreted languages {and so allow white hats access to the source code, thereby mitigating the threat greatly} or somehow to persuade users to compile it and run it {and again allow white hats access to the source code}.
The malware problem won't begin to go away till we ditch the 80x86 architecture and all closed-source software altogether. Build every machine to be fundamentally electronically incompatible; and probably with an actual physical switch, hardwired to the motherboard, that needs to be operated to allow the computer to compile anything. That will solve as much of the problem as can be solved in the machine domain. Whatever remains as a problem exists in the human domain and needs to be solved there.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do think that the recipe for Nutella should be made available to the general public. Then we could make our own improved version. Like a nut-free version for nut allergy sufferers.
I would guess that Nutella's main competitors probably are the supermarkets wanting to punt an "own brand" alternative {a.k.a. legal counterfeiting} which they will then peg a few pence cheaper than the price of "real" Nutella; and they aren't short of a bob or two with which to get the "real" thing analysed in a well-equipped lab.
The people who lose out in this are the ones who rush out and buy Nutella -- not some third-party alternative which they believe, rightly or wrongly, is inferior -- instead of eating something less expensive and more nutritious.
Slashdot Mirror
The script "ps2pdf" has been part of the Ghostscript package installed on every Linux, Solaris and BSD system for a long time.
What do Adobe think of that?
You can indeed record it ..... you can record anything which has a SCART connector. You probably will need to connect the Moviebeam receiver to a timebase corrector {which removes any artefacts in the retrace period that might fuck up the automatic gain control on most VCRs}, and the timebase corrector to the SCART on the VCR / DVD+R.
A fortnight is the amount of time that elapses between successive giros.
You will need one of these handy little gadgets plugged into your PC, a copy of Asterisk, and you're almost good to go. Just convince the Moviebeam player that your PC is the Moviebeam central office. It'll phone through and report your usage. But your PC isn't the Moviebeam central office, so no bill will be generated. You may also have to get your PC to call the real Moviebeam central office and report no usage.
Old-timers will have heard of various coloured boxes in connection with the phone system: Black Box {free incoming calls}, Blue Box {in-band signalling generator}, Red Box {payphone coin-insertion signal generator}, Beige Box {croc-clips to phone socket adaptor} and so on. More esoteric ones included the Jade {timer to avoid itemised bill threshhold}, Primrose {phone-line powered battery charger} and Violet {line holding circuit, defeats money-run-out on some subscriber-owned payphones} Boxes {all the good colours were already taken by the time they were invented}. But this setup truly is the fabled "sky blue pink box with yellow spots on"!
Secondly, we need everyone to memorise the following procedure. Works for any HDD that can be got to spin up and doesn't need any extra software.
- Save much {innocuous} crap on the hard drive till it's full and won't fit anymore. Ripping CDs as
.wav files, or scanning images as .bmps, is good for this. You want there to be no free space at all on the drive. - Delete the stuff you don't want found. Now the only place there is any room to save anything is where the stuff you just deleted used to have been.
- Save more crap on the hard drive till it's full again. Now you have definitely overwritten the stuff you deleted before.
- Delete all the crap you saved.
Easy; and leaves the drive in reusable condition, even with your operating system still in place.You could use DBAN but don't bother with more than two overwrite passes; even the second might be overkill. Throughout the last fifty years, there have been many computer storage technologies based on magnetism. Not a single one of those has taken advantage of remanence phenomena to increase storage density. About the nearest thing I've seen was a "trick record" switch on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which cut off the power supply to the erase head {remember energised-field erase heads?} allowing you to create a sort of primitive overdubbing effect; if the first recording was cranked up till the bright green bands met and tried to cross over, you might hear a faint ghost of it under the second. Of course, an analogue tape recorder is working in linear mode, where saturation is undesirable. As opposed to a digital device, which drives everything hard into saturation by deliberate design.
Wrap a few small chunks of calcium carbide {used in caving lanterns} in toilet paper. Put 0.5L water in the bottom of a 2L coke bottle. Use bottle lid to trap TP with carbide in neck of bottle so it is clear of water.
Set fire to an oily rag or something and place on floor.
Invert coke bottle and place it next to fire. Run away.
Water soaks through paper and reacts with Calcium carbide to form ethyne gas. Heat of fire softens bottle and probably helps speed up reaction. Pressure of ethyne builds up until bottle bursts. Escaping ethyne ignites.
I had a chemistry teacher who, every year when the kids from the local primary school who would be joining the First Year come September were visiting, used to get an old pair of boots; and place them together in the chemistry lab, with a beaker of concentrated HCl in one, and a beaker of ammonia in the other. The invisible NH3 and HCl fumes reacted to produce visible white "smoke", looking for all the world {to a bunch of ten- and eleven-year-olds} as though some poor unfortunate had just blown himself up.
He also told us how to distil alcohol, make explosives and what various organic chemicals smelt like.
All priests in all denominations, except those which specifically exclude minors, are child-abusers. Presenting mythology as though it were fact, to minds too young to know the difference, is child abuse.
You talk to an imaginary friend, and you're asking someone to grow up?!
You are indeed missing something. The same CD now doubles as both an installation CD and a live CD. What's more, unlike ordinary Debian, the packages are right there on the CD; so you don't need a working internet connection just to install it.
Check out this this interesting link, which -- as usual -- I found while looking for something else.
As an aside, you can get most of the ingredients you need for making simple explosives from sources beneath the authorities' radar. Even sulphuric and nitric acids can be obtained by reacting sulphates and nitrates with hydrochloric acid. And if you don't know where to get that, I'm not going to tell you.
Sixth Form college is where you take your A-levels.
For London, maybe.
The first time I went to London, I innocently asked a woman in a shop if her pricing gun was broken, because she wanted 27p for a Kit Kat.
Nobody has ever recovered data that has been overwritten just once. It may have been possible to do, back in the days of 20MB 5.25in drives. Storage density has increased since then. That means the tracks wander less.
All computer memory used to be magnetic, before they could make transistors small enough and cheap enough that it was viable to use flip-flops {SRAM} for anything bigger than registers, and with high enough input impedances so as not to discharge a tiny capacitor {DRAM} before there was time to recharge it. A weird and wonderful array of storage devices have been constructed with tape loops, revolving drums, discs and arrays of ferrite cores. No device has ever been built that used magnetic remanence phenomena to increase storage density; though this almost certainly would have been economically viable at some stage before solid-state memory took over.
Even the data recovery specialists admit that they can't recover once-overwritten data.
The criminal destruction of perfectly serviceable drives by the military is a propaganda exercise. It's saying to the enemy "We have the technology that could have recovered this". It's also saying "We eventually recovered the information from a used hard disk, and definitely not by torturing the suspect".
Indeed. If you're going to put child porn on a computer, at least encrypt it. I'm not going to say anything bad about people who just look at pictures: at least if they're getting their filthy little rocks off into a box of Kleenex, I know my kids are safe.
.wav files, or scanning images as .bmps, is good for this. You want there to be no free space at all on the drive. Second, delete the stuff you don't want found. Now the only place there is any room to save anything is where the stuff you deleted used to have been. It's still there really; just marked as "free space, but only to be used as a last resort". Third, save more crap on the hard drive till it's full again. Now you have definitely overwritten the stuff you deleted before. Last, delete all the crap you saved. Anyone trying to recover deleted files will end up recovering the last thing you saved, not what you saved it over the top of, which is lost for all time whatever Guttmann says. Nobody has ever done it in practice.
..... type this up as a spreadsheet, and save several copies.
BTW: how to delete stuff and make sure it stays gone. First, save {innocuous} crap on the hard drive till it's full and won't fit anymore. Ripping CDs as
If you know someone who works in retail and can get you an out-of-date stop list from a credit card company, so much the better
Well, if you thought about shoplifting it but were physically unable to do so, chances are you'd be more likely just to do without it than buy it.
Is Charlie Dimmock harming the bra industry?
Does masturbation harm the prostitution industry?
Ask yourself some questions. Why is there no rampant piracy of newspapers, magazines and books, despite there being a photocopier in nearly every newsagent's shop? Do you think the same principle could be applied to movies and music?
Side note, what do the Master Bakers' Association of America {or whatever they call themselves} think about the popularity of home bread making machines? Should a levy be imposed on every kilo of Strong Flour to pay for the business they are losing?
The format of sendmail.cf made perfect sense when sendmail was written, however many years ago it was. In those days, people were smart and machines were stupid.
When you look at modern programs with their fancy-pants SQL and XML configurations, they may be easier for a human being to understand; but they're also a hell of a lot of work for the computer to understand, precisely because of all the human-readable cruft. Twenty or thirty years ago, there wasn't the computing power to waste on processing such a config file; it was simply less effort, and more productive, to get a human being to bond well enough with the computer to be able to create a sendmail.cf from scratch.
Exim is easier to configure than Sendmail {not that that's really saying much}. At least, it always used to be -- till they broke up the configuration into lots of little files. You always knew where you were with exim.conf.
.....
However, Exim is licenced under the GPL {which insists for you to respect other people's code}, so probably not a good choice for a BSD system. And you probably also won't want to use it if you went to Oxford
The whole aim of the Free Software movement is that there should be no such thing as closed-source software. So why should we in the Movement do anything that makes it easy to allow closed-source software to exist?
Instead, what we should be doing is writing to our MPs and pushing for legislation that would oblige software vendors to supply the source code for all software, even that which is not licenced for redistribution. And we deserve it, by simple majority rule: users outnumber developers. This would be a real solution. Have you ever encountered a problem with closed-source software which could not have been fixed if you, or a competent programmer of your choosing, had only had access to the source code? It also would open up a secondary market in software support services: third-party bugfixes and the like.
Well, if you can't be bothered to compile your own software, then just pick a distro that does it for you! When you download pre-compiled binaries from a distribution, you are downloading files that have been chosen and built to work together. Anything that needs to be changed because something else was changed, will be updated automagically.
If you compiled something yourself from source, then of course you don't have such a safety net. But that's the only way you would get incompatible versions of anything on your system. And if you already compiled it the first time, what's to stop you doing it again?
If you don't like compiling by hand, use a distro known for its big binary repository {Debian, Fedora Core or nowadays Mandriva with the full Easy URPMI and PLF stuff}; or use Gentoo and have everything compile itself automatically on demand. Either way, the automated update handling tools will take care of it all for you.
Raise your hands if you really didn't see this coming.
For one thing, the closed-source nature of the whole anti-malware market is a fertile breeding ground for exactly this sort of problem.
Fort another thing, if your whole business depends on the very existence and high market penetration of malware, you stand to lose out massively if you actually manage somehow to eliminate it altogether. Symantec et al need the virus writers, the script kiddies, the crackers and the spyware merchants. If it wasn't for them, and the fact that they have such an easy time thanks to closed-source software, then there would be no need for anti-malware services.
Symantec et al are basically providing the electronic equivalent of a huge steel lock fastened onto a cheap balsa wood door with blu-tack. A computer doesn't have, and cannot ever have, any way to distinguish a "good" program from a "bad" one: that has to be determined by a human being somewhere along the line. Nothing anyone can invent will overcome this: it is not a limitation of existing technology, but a limitation of the universe.
It is only because of the existence of closed-source software that hardware has to be binary-compatible, in order to allow execution of foreign binaries. And binary compatibility is the whole reason why viruses and worms work at all. If you are compiling everything locally, nobody else needs to know the instruction set and addressing schema of your hardware; and if all computers were different, code compiled on one machine would not be able to run on any other machine. The only ways around this would be to write malware in interpreted languages {and so allow white hats access to the source code, thereby mitigating the threat greatly} or somehow to persuade users to compile it and run it {and again allow white hats access to the source code}.
The malware problem won't begin to go away till we ditch the 80x86 architecture and all closed-source software altogether. Build every machine to be fundamentally electronically incompatible; and probably with an actual physical switch, hardwired to the motherboard, that needs to be operated to allow the computer to compile anything. That will solve as much of the problem as can be solved in the machine domain. Whatever remains as a problem exists in the human domain and needs to be solved there.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do think that the recipe for Nutella should be made available to the general public. Then we could make our own improved version. Like a nut-free version for nut allergy sufferers.
I would guess that Nutella's main competitors probably are the supermarkets wanting to punt an "own brand" alternative {a.k.a. legal counterfeiting} which they will then peg a few pence cheaper than the price of "real" Nutella; and they aren't short of a bob or two with which to get the "real" thing analysed in a well-equipped lab.
The people who lose out in this are the ones who rush out and buy Nutella -- not some third-party alternative which they believe, rightly or wrongly, is inferior -- instead of eating something less expensive and more nutritious.