If they really decide to be dicks about this "through the wall" surveillance shit, I'll definitely open up a market for me. I'll buy rolls of copper cloth, sew it inbetween pieces of fabric, and start marketing my new and exciting line of Faraday Clothes.
Soon after I do this, weavers of copper cloth will be required to report all their sales over fifty square feet to the DEA. Wearing faraday clothes will be considered evidence of guilt, like an encrypted hard drive. If you install fine-weave copper mesh in your walls, it will be used to get a warrant for a midnight raid. Y'know, like if you use too much power today.
I'm only half joking... I actually think making faraday-cage clothes would be neat just to have them.
I want to find whoever came up with "kibi, mebi, gibi" and strangle them. Until marketoids screwed it up, everyone knew that a megabyte was about 1000000 bytes but was defined as exactly 1048576 bytes. Nerds were here first, marketoids can go jump in that giant burning lake of gasoline over there.
Along these lines, we must never forget Penny Arcade's description of 4chan/b/. To paraphrase: "/b/ isn't the bottom of the internet barrel; It's more like if the bottom of the Internet barrel had it's own barrel, and the bottom of *that* barrel leaked out into a set of festering, pustulent ooze. That ooze would be/b/."
What specifically killed it was the US signing the 1963 partial test ban treaty, which made any above-ground use of nukes illegal. The US government actually tried to get an exception for nuclear propulsion, but the Soviets refused. It's estimated that a launch would cause about ten fatal cancers in people over time (probably 100 for the 8000000 ton super-orion).
Because until then, you're still paying $10000 per kilogram to low orbit where you can engage the photon drive, which means that no meaningful exploration is gonna happen.
Did I mention that 45 years ago the USAF tested a nuclear thruster that almost reached 1:1? And how fifty-five years ago they drew up plans for an 8 million ton nuclear-driven starship as part of Project Orion?
Go to the "raw images" pages and look at pages 10-11, they've got some awesome "death star" pics. And images 305-320 have some "inky stains" that might make good desktops...
By creating the ruckus that made/. post this story, you led me to read the comments, which led me to Mike's adblocking hosts file. I'd been thinking about something like that, but didn't care enough to bother before.
I've assembled a small SRAM memory circuit as part of a computer and I've observed at least part of the behaviors he describes. In the circuit, both my address counters always initialize to zero. The first byte of the ram chip is always 11111111, the second always 00000000, and after that they are apparently random. But if you're going to *powercycle your ram* to get randomness, wouldn't it be simpler to just use a hardware stream generator?
It was one of the wonderful ideas they started implementing (for PCs at least) when they moved from AT to ATX power supplies in computers. Your power switch no longer turns the device off, it puts it in a low-power mode that waits for a wake signal. Go into BIOS configuration and you'll probably see options for wake-on-lan and wake-on-modem - the big button on the computer's face is just one more "wake-on" button now. Haven't you noticed that your computer's power switch no longer has a big, burly multi-amp cable but two puny little signal wires that plug onto a motherboard header?
Now that "turn off" really means "enter standby mode," it's an obvious next step to run simple batch jobs (like fetching email) while in standby mode. Most phones are this way, too - At the least, they probably transmit to locate cell towers while off. It's potentially useful, but I prefer "off" to mean "Vcc = Vdd, the device is powerless and inert."
Well, if you didn't mind paying thousands of dollars, you could certainly have had a data-recovery service remount your dead drive's platters with a new r/w head and get the data out...
I'm not by any means experienced at modern ASM and low-level stuff; The only instruction set I recognize is 8085. But why wouldn't it be possible to run Windows98 inside something like Bochs, and then just halt the VM and take the keys out of it's memory and order the botnet to self-destruct? Will the worm check for subtle processor state aspects that Bochs misses and not run? That this hasn't been done already implies that I'm missing something...
A good CLI audio player you say? Ever looked at mp3blaster? Not sure if it meets your definition of full-featured. I used it happily for quite some time before I installed Gentoo, then I discovered Amarok and fell in love.
Why this this cross-platformness farce even exist? Just use an open standard/codec - boom, problem solved, noone is forcibly excluded. Or even use something like Flash video. Hell, it's not like there's any shortage of audio/video formats to choose from which run on multiple platforms and architectures.
If I were to look, would I be likely to discover the involvement of a certain company known for pushing closed, incompatible data formats centered on it's closed operating system?
According to your train of thought, the War On (Some) Drugs should have ended in the 80s when all the former pothead hippies from the late 60s came of age. Yet it's still up there with the War On (Some) Terrorists as the government's most commonly invoked reason for assraping our rights. On the other hand, this may be a different scenario because hippies came and went, whereas technology is only going to get more ubiquitous as time goes on, which should make for a continuous impetus to expose DRM as the sham it is.
In any case, I anticipate massive backlash against DRM once it makes it's presence felt. If not that, then all major media will be DRMed, sales will continue to fall into the shitter, and the MAFIAA will be exposed for the liars they are.
Propaganda was unnecessary. I placed their government in the "axis of evil" catagory all by myself. The Chinese Fascist Party (No point pretending that they're communist anymore) is the antithesis of everything that the concepts of freedom and human dignity stand for: Rewriting history, massive censorship, "re-education," the murder of dissenters, the mass murder of pro-democracy advocates at Tiananmen Square.
The only thing that makes me sicker than the Chinese government is that the US supports them by trading with them.
We all know that Microsoft corrupts and destroys standards from the outside in. Java comes to mind, as well as the maliciously-compliant dhcp client in Vista. But this would be new (at least to me) - an attempt to corrupt a standards body from the inside out.
Luckily, it seems to be more difficult to trick engineering standards groups.
If you can't keep your ADD in check long enough to read a one-page article, it's not like you'll provide any useful feedback or do anything about it anyway. If you want to know what it says, take some goddamn ritalin.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The situation here isn't like getting scammed your first time behind a till. It's like you were scammed on a regular basis, and failed to learn anything no matter how many times they did the same thing. Likewise, I'd forgive someone for getting infected if it was the first time they were using email or on the Internet. But if your machine regularly needs to have accumulating malware removed despite years of experience, then yes you are an idiot, because one of the defining characteristics of idiots is that they don't learn from their mistakes.
Frankly, the solution to this is simple: You fuck your computer up, I WILL NOT fix it for you no matter how you whine or scream at me. If you want a computer that works correctly, educate yourself. The war against malware will be won when doing stupid things online is made to carry consequences for the person being stupid.
Wikipedia's article has values for 6 and 7 sigmas; I can't find confidence intervals for 8 or more on Google. I suppose you could use the GNU scientific math library and a step size of 1e-9 or 1e-10 to find it out... Anyway, 6 = 99.99999980268%, 7 = 99.99999999974%.
PS: Why is slashdot afraid of characters outside UTF-8?
Unwirer - The mini-sized mobile wifi devices described in it were the first thing I thought of when I read this story. Personally, I think it's an absolutely *fantastic* idea. Slap solar panel, battery, regulator, and WiFi in ad-hoc mode together, liberally slather with silicone sealant, and attach to roof of buildings!
But the idea of putting a solar power unit and radio together isn't new - so why is this news?
Slashdot Mirror
If the NSA leaned on them to go out and commit murder and they did, saying "but the NSA made me" wouldn't be accepted as an excuse.
If they really decide to be dicks about this "through the wall" surveillance shit, I'll definitely open up a market for me. I'll buy rolls of copper cloth, sew it inbetween pieces of fabric, and start marketing my new and exciting line of Faraday Clothes.
Soon after I do this, weavers of copper cloth will be required to report all their sales over fifty square feet to the DEA. Wearing faraday clothes will be considered evidence of guilt, like an encrypted hard drive. If you install fine-weave copper mesh in your walls, it will be used to get a warrant for a midnight raid. Y'know, like if you use too much power today.
I'm only half joking... I actually think making faraday-cage clothes would be neat just to have them.
I want to find whoever came up with "kibi, mebi, gibi" and strangle them. Until marketoids screwed it up, everyone knew that a megabyte was about 1000000 bytes but was defined as exactly 1048576 bytes. Nerds were here first, marketoids can go jump in that giant burning lake of gasoline over there.
Along these lines, we must never forget Penny Arcade's description of 4chan/b/. To paraphrase: "/b/ isn't the bottom of the internet barrel; It's more like if the bottom of the Internet barrel had it's own barrel, and the bottom of *that* barrel leaked out into a set of festering, pustulent ooze. That ooze would be /b/."
What specifically killed it was the US signing the 1963 partial test ban treaty, which made any above-ground use of nukes illegal. The US government actually tried to get an exception for nuclear propulsion, but the Soviets refused. It's estimated that a launch would cause about ten fatal cancers in people over time (probably 100 for the 8000000 ton super-orion).
Because until then, you're still paying $10000 per kilogram to low orbit where you can engage the photon drive, which means that no meaningful exploration is gonna happen.
Did I mention that 45 years ago the USAF tested a nuclear thruster that almost reached 1:1? And how fifty-five years ago they drew up plans for an 8 million ton nuclear-driven starship as part of Project Orion?
Go to the "raw images" pages and look at pages 10-11, they've got some awesome "death star" pics. And images 305-320 have some "inky stains" that might make good desktops...
By creating the ruckus that made /. post this story, you led me to read the comments, which led me to Mike's adblocking hosts file. I'd been thinking about something like that, but didn't care enough to bother before.
You are now officially victims of the Streisand Effect.
I've assembled a small SRAM memory circuit as part of a computer and I've observed at least part of the behaviors he describes. In the circuit, both my address counters always initialize to zero. The first byte of the ram chip is always 11111111, the second always 00000000, and after that they are apparently random. But if you're going to *powercycle your ram* to get randomness, wouldn't it be simpler to just use a hardware stream generator?
It was one of the wonderful ideas they started implementing (for PCs at least) when they moved from AT to ATX power supplies in computers. Your power switch no longer turns the device off, it puts it in a low-power mode that waits for a wake signal. Go into BIOS configuration and you'll probably see options for wake-on-lan and wake-on-modem - the big button on the computer's face is just one more "wake-on" button now. Haven't you noticed that your computer's power switch no longer has a big, burly multi-amp cable but two puny little signal wires that plug onto a motherboard header?
Now that "turn off" really means "enter standby mode," it's an obvious next step to run simple batch jobs (like fetching email) while in standby mode. Most phones are this way, too - At the least, they probably transmit to locate cell towers while off. It's potentially useful, but I prefer "off" to mean "Vcc = Vdd, the device is powerless and inert."
I'm not sure whether to run away screaming and burn my eyes out with an acetylene torch, or post this with "rule 34" to 4chan to see what happens...
Well, if you didn't mind paying thousands of dollars, you could certainly have had a data-recovery service remount your dead drive's platters with a new r/w head and get the data out...
I'm not by any means experienced at modern ASM and low-level stuff; The only instruction set I recognize is 8085. But why wouldn't it be possible to run Windows98 inside something like Bochs, and then just halt the VM and take the keys out of it's memory and order the botnet to self-destruct? Will the worm check for subtle processor state aspects that Bochs misses and not run? That this hasn't been done already implies that I'm missing something...
My God... if your worm melds with the Irish Virus, it'll be unstoppable.
A good CLI audio player you say? Ever looked at mp3blaster? Not sure if it meets your definition of full-featured. I used it happily for quite some time before I installed Gentoo, then I discovered Amarok and fell in love.
Why this this cross-platformness farce even exist? Just use an open standard/codec - boom, problem solved, noone is forcibly excluded. Or even use something like Flash video. Hell, it's not like there's any shortage of audio/video formats to choose from which run on multiple platforms and architectures.
If I were to look, would I be likely to discover the involvement of a certain company known for pushing closed, incompatible data formats centered on it's closed operating system?
According to your train of thought, the War On (Some) Drugs should have ended in the 80s when all the former pothead hippies from the late 60s came of age. Yet it's still up there with the War On (Some) Terrorists as the government's most commonly invoked reason for assraping our rights. On the other hand, this may be a different scenario because hippies came and went, whereas technology is only going to get more ubiquitous as time goes on, which should make for a continuous impetus to expose DRM as the sham it is.
In any case, I anticipate massive backlash against DRM once it makes it's presence felt. If not that, then all major media will be DRMed, sales will continue to fall into the shitter, and the MAFIAA will be exposed for the liars they are.
Obligatory link to "Fuck the MPAA" (#5)
And on what logical grounds do you base this eloquently worded rejection?
Propaganda was unnecessary. I placed their government in the "axis of evil" catagory all by myself. The Chinese Fascist Party (No point pretending that they're communist anymore) is the antithesis of everything that the concepts of freedom and human dignity stand for: Rewriting history, massive censorship, "re-education," the murder of dissenters, the mass murder of pro-democracy advocates at Tiananmen Square.
The only thing that makes me sicker than the Chinese government is that the US supports them by trading with them.
Personally, I'd sooner see the Internet destroyed than under the control of the copyright mafia.
We all know that Microsoft corrupts and destroys standards from the outside in. Java comes to mind, as well as the maliciously-compliant dhcp client in Vista. But this would be new (at least to me) - an attempt to corrupt a standards body from the inside out.
Luckily, it seems to be more difficult to trick engineering standards groups.
If you can't keep your ADD in check long enough to read a one-page article, it's not like you'll provide any useful feedback or do anything about it anyway. If you want to know what it says, take some goddamn ritalin.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The situation here isn't like getting scammed your first time behind a till. It's like you were scammed on a regular basis, and failed to learn anything no matter how many times they did the same thing. Likewise, I'd forgive someone for getting infected if it was the first time they were using email or on the Internet. But if your machine regularly needs to have accumulating malware removed despite years of experience, then yes you are an idiot, because one of the defining characteristics of idiots is that they don't learn from their mistakes.
Frankly, the solution to this is simple: You fuck your computer up, I WILL NOT fix it for you no matter how you whine or scream at me. If you want a computer that works correctly, educate yourself. The war against malware will be won when doing stupid things online is made to carry consequences for the person being stupid.
Wikipedia's article has values for 6 and 7 sigmas; I can't find confidence intervals for 8 or more on Google. I suppose you could use the GNU scientific math library and a step size of 1e-9 or 1e-10 to find it out... Anyway, 6 = 99.99999980268%, 7 = 99.99999999974%.
PS: Why is slashdot afraid of characters outside UTF-8?
Unwirer - The mini-sized mobile wifi devices described in it were the first thing I thought of when I read this story. Personally, I think it's an absolutely *fantastic* idea. Slap solar panel, battery, regulator, and WiFi in ad-hoc mode together, liberally slather with silicone sealant, and attach to roof of buildings!
But the idea of putting a solar power unit and radio together isn't new - so why is this news?