He called it either a Mediator or a Cypherclerk. Its job was to authenticate, verify, encrypt, decrypt, submit to the network, retrieve from the network, and other general security functions based upon a civilization of sentient software. Although Egan leaves much to be desired about the details, he seems to indicate that it is also semi-sentient, as it learns. Nothing can be "run" on it, as we can do with our computers these days.
In one book, an outsider reads the mind of one citizen and duplicates the "tag" that identifies a citizen who is not present. After citizens request crypto tags proving who or what he is, the tags fail and they immediately know that the "outsider" is not as he claims.
Do better than that. Leech off of others wifi, or use public free wifi to do "high risk downloading".
Frankly, nobody cares about crap group or god_awful_teevee show. It's the Wolverines, Cams and leaks the biggies care about. If you rapidshare a book once in a while, or download unlicensed anime/foreign tv shows, nobody cares. It's when you hit the dangerous stuff, or are blatantly peaking usage caps (if you ARE the top user in the city, or near it).
Now, if you hit high usage, throw ubuntu package rsyncing in there as a big data-sink so you have plausible deniability. An open wifi would help too.
What I got from his commentary was that people only know what has been mass-pushed via the major media channels that the RIAA/MPAA member companies control.
The Pirate Bay, and others show a different world-view, in which popularity and coolness is king. There's no payola to dish out, nor is there record execs to please in deals they made or not.
The ratings, especially for the top 100, are just that: ratings of what millions of users agree what is popular at that moment. Right now, this popularity is an intersection between what is free music and what is corporate for_pay music. We can only expect the decline of RIAA member companies will lead to less advertising revenue. That will lead to the indies and the amateur musicians to start to dominate.
It will take time, but there's no way to stop this. It's a culture, not just a program or website. All I can say is to hold on to your seat while on the crazy copyright ride of your life.
Well, if he's using the TPB top 100 as a barometer for what's "Hip", then why doesnt he add a crapload of clients to upload, and then forge upload and download stats to push himself to top 100.
You know, if you're on a LAN and have BT clients, you could share via the LAN and have it count towards ratio;)
And it would be one hell of a "What The Hell is that Group??" (begins download). Cause, I check out what's the buzz on general top 100, music top 100, and movie top 100 all the time.
However, you make the assumption that all 10M people reading here are actively polling right now from any one of those torrents. You'd be mistaken.
Some of my favorites exist from back in the '20s when rip roaring jazz was abound everywhere. We see avant jazz go all the way up to present, with other counties spawning jazz musicians. Classical has mostly stagnated, but those who like those "stuffy sounds", that music has existed from the 1700's when the Church commissioned those pieces to begin with. We really start to get to the heyday of music, from the rock era starting in the 60's to the 70's. And we all know the groups that came from that time.
Now, if my numbers are correct, nearly every work published since 1/1/1922 is under full copyright protection. So... most "popular musics" are covered by somebody's copyright. And it turns out, if the record companies didn't own it, they bought it or sued for it. Big surprise.
Of course, you have indies and such, but they really dont matter (sorry). Yeah, if they organized into a force to fight against the ilk of the RIAA, they might have a chance, but then they would turn in to what they hated and originally fought against.
If you havent realized it already, but copyright is really useless in its present form.
*said while listening to music from ocremix.org , a free music site in dedication to remixing game music.
The stuff you pay for has even a greater cost. For example, take a recent 50$ game.
If you have high morals and wish to pay for the game, so be it. I hope it works for you. If the game is released buggy, then there's a decent chance that something wont work for you. Well, you can always take it back.... NOPE. No returns on open software. And about activations... I hope that you dont reinstall more than the number "They" allow, or plan to play the game 10 years from now.
The pirates get the goods first, and have them fixed so annoyances that paying customers deal with arent even there. Restrictions preventing legit customers are gone, hacked out. There was no money traded hands, so if it doesnt work, just delete it.
The companies are hard against the customers due to perceived "pirates". That's called cost of doing business when a few friends share a game between each other. Smarter people call that mindshare. However, as long as these companies see potential (and successful) customers as the enemy, then they will become one, either by choice or by force.
Well, you cant buy it for any price. So you Bittorrent it.
And if prices are stupid, like a soundtrack going for 17.99 vs the movie itself going for 15.99, guess what? Piratebay here we come.
It's called competitive pressure, and that's how the free market works. If copyright and patents were more sane, they'd be more respected and crap like this wouldnt happen. So, the path of least resistance is downloading.
Those who call me names: I dont care. I have what you spend money on and mine isnt crippled.
Those who say I need to change the law: Fine. Give me a few million to shove in the congresscritters pockets. Then, they MIGHT listen.. Then again, maybe not.
---One of the ways that I manage my systems is to create a zone where hackers may go, and not go.
The only way to guarantee that is by an air gap. If data can travel in both directions, it can gone to.
---For example, I use a good firewall. That firewalls is allowed to communicate to another firewall. Between the two firewalls is my take down zone. This means if they happen to break through the firewall all they will get are servers that can be taken down anyways.
---These take down servers are virtual machine based. So if a machine goes down, who shives a ghit because you just shut down the VM, copy the old one and restart it.
Lets assume what you say is correct. First, what protections do you have vs the hypervisor running the VMs? How do you prevent starvation of resources by de-fragmenting ill formed packets? If you don't "correct broken packets", then what prevents a fragrouter-like attack right through your network?
As per your answer of shutting down and reloading, that is not an answer to bad rules that can almost never work, for they will persist until you fix them. Then, when you bring them up, they will be hopped over again.
(trimmed gobbledegook about unhackable firewalls)
You can think that you have an unhackable setup. Fine. Perhaps you will investigate what I said, and might take action to test what I claim. But aside that you are probably just as vulnerable as the rest. All that has to really be done is your border router feed bad updates to machines requesting OS updates. Of course, crypto signatures will catch that they don't sign, but that's where we use old packages with known vulnerabilities. I'm sure in your course of duty you don't check the package date, nor do most update programs. Or, perhaps somethings watching for passwords on your external firewall. There's a nice tool called dsniff that does just that.
In the real world, if you want an unhackable network, you build the network with no external connections. It's as simple as that. The military understands that. Power companies understand that. Industrial control designers understand that. If you want to have a facade that you somehow can super-firewall so that no hacker can get in, so be it. Whatever you put on the internet can potentially end up everywhere. Just look at Wolverine Workprint or multitudes of sex tapes or other media. I'm sure there's some Presidential Helicopter schematics going around in Islamic areas right now, according to my sources.
Until a subversive deems it necessary to rescind the keys associated to His Holiness, The Dali Lama and his people.
I'm sure the Chinese government could make a deal with Microsoft to make multiple govt offices Vista Based (with appropriate studies to woo others) for a deal to shut down keys.
Then your answer should be rather clear. That is, to purchase a CoLo server in another country with no easy links back to you.
Something of the sort would start with a purchase of a anonymous Visa card from a place like Wal-Mart, load it with funds, purchase DNS/CoLo from another country, and set up shop via local free wifi points or use TOR to upload the required starting material.
Heh. What a joke, unless you have a few million to toss in the congress or senators front pocket. We, the people are NOT represented. The corporate interests are represented, and they go against the populace.
The length if copyright protections are set in law by Congress.... 150 years does not approach infinity. Maybe you should go back to high school and retake the mathematics courses.
You really are stupid. If we add 20 years of protectionist copyright every 19 years, can you guess what will happen? Hint: it doesn't take a mathematics PhD to figure that out.
The only problem with your little scenario is that the later is giving away the work and product of the former without regard to the wishes or rights of the former.
Then perhaps the media companies ought to COMPETE. Which is what they are precisely not doing. And if they wish for their works to remain "secret", they perhaps ought not disseminate it in every Wal-Mart. And I think the media companies have a little problem about keeping secrets themselves, by just looking at the Wolverine Workprint.
And I just looove your personal attacks, moron. That's a sure way of winning an Internet Argument. Somehow, I think you're still that proverbial retard.
Copyright is broken. We have a barometer of if copyright is broken by checking if this phrase is correct or not.
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;", Ar1,Sect8,para8.
We aren't promoting profit. We're promoting the progress of the sciences and useful arts. Patents, being broken by allowing living creatures to be patented, have done a decent job in the arena of promoting the sciences. Abuses like mathematical and business procedure patents have been recently looked at and many of them are in danger of being thrown out. Patent times are still in the area of reasonable, perhaps a little too high. However, 17 years is a long far cry from 150+ years.
Those promotions are supposed to be guaranteed by limited times of exclusive control. 150+ years and whenever Congress wants to up the times does not make limited. Any schmuck knows that terms approaching infinity are not limited. Yes, SCOTUS found that times approaching infinity are still in the technical jargon "Limited". This judgment is also coming from the same SCOTUS that said that companies can eminent domain your property.
And aside all pirate reasons, lets go back to that thing called the Free Market: Someone who offers good that costs X, forces ads (more cost), and has lockout/anticopy annoyances (more cost) vs. Someone who gives it free ( 0 cost), ads removed ( more value) and easy to copy ( more value): Now, which one are you going to "Buy"? If it was cost alone, I think we can agree that those who do make media are by in part usually worth money. But the second those people who are asking for our money then scream PIRATE, well I'm sure as hell not going to go there any more.
And you can still say trite sayings like "Youll just download it pirate". I do better. I teach those that are good with technology that there is a world of free. I may be one pirate, but I will show the way for those that agree, but don't quite understand.
I have no problem with paying a fair price for my content. Laws are skewed heavily for the media companies. Technology to allow us backups and commentary are skewed heavily against the citizens. BitTorrent and likes are some of our only leverages against the legal vehicle used against us. Or... dont you remember the record companies claiming once that cd's are dominant that their prices would drop to 9$ ?
The European Union sounds like what our federal system should have been.
Instead, we have idiots like Bush and Obama. Those people should never have any sort of power other than the basic rights delineated in the Constitution.
I know it's a few days after the fact, but the lawyer explained what it meant to have a city be negligent. It was then my decision to determine if the city was at fault, considering my injury (bicycle riding).
The perceived negligence is that a bicycle/walking trail abruptly ends at a very nasty intersection. If you care to see, it's Columbus, IN at the intersection of 2'nd, 3'rd, and State St. at the intersection of the river. I ended up following bicycle rules going down 3rd st, but decided to take it to the sidewalk quickly due to all 3 lanes of traffic. From then, I took what looked like a safe way to the sidewalk but was thrown from the bicycle. I landed on my shoulder, receiving a posterior dislocation, tear of the superspinatus (sp), and a break below the ball of my shoulder.
After careful consideration, I had to come to a conclusion that even though the city did fail to properly have a safe bicycle trail, I also was partially responsible for operation of my vehicle (and stupidity).
So, I sucked it up and am paying on medical bills.
A good lawyer and a friend advised me that unless the city is at extreme fault (ie: negligent or like) that is was near worthless to pursue a case. I could simply say that they weren't negligent, so I took his advice.
I pay 10$ for 113g (4 oz). pure powder. None of this pill shit.
I can mix it with anything I have a knack for. I can make caf-soap, caf-beer, caf-water, caf-apple/orange juice, caf-soup, extracaf-coffee, you name it.
I routinely take about 1-2g per day. I take it with water, in the terms of pure powder. It dissolves right in. And I like mine with a bit of fresh squeezed lemon juice, as it helps cut the bitter.
I know you'll probably say that's a dangerous amount, but my tolerance and weight allow the much higher LD50. By LD50 alone (calculated as 192mg/kg), for my weight would be 26.1g. And I know what to expect.
And as a last resort of ODing, I carry a few activated charcoal pills, provided you get them in time.
**last time I was in surgery, I held the powder under my tongue till it dissolved in my mouth. no water needed.
Caffeine powder is actually pretty good, if not a bit bitter.
I mix my own levels of caffeine depending how I feel. Some days, it's a.25g for my glass of water... sometimes it's 2g. Sometimes, not a bit at all. But I never feel "sleepy".
One good thing to mix with caffeine is hydrocodone, IF you have a prescription for it (which I do:). The bitterness of hydros are very similar to that of caffeine.
You can buy 4oz and 8oz sizes on unitednuclear.com for ~10$substance.
Slashdot Mirror
Greg Egan had a similar idea for his books.
He called it either a Mediator or a Cypherclerk. Its job was to authenticate, verify, encrypt, decrypt, submit to the network, retrieve from the network, and other general security functions based upon a civilization of sentient software. Although Egan leaves much to be desired about the details, he seems to indicate that it is also semi-sentient, as it learns. Nothing can be "run" on it, as we can do with our computers these days.
In one book, an outsider reads the mind of one citizen and duplicates the "tag" that identifies a citizen who is not present. After citizens request crypto tags proving who or what he is, the tags fail and they immediately know that the "outsider" is not as he claims.
Do better than that. Leech off of others wifi, or use public free wifi to do "high risk downloading".
Frankly, nobody cares about crap group or god_awful_teevee show. It's the Wolverines, Cams and leaks the biggies care about. If you rapidshare a book once in a while, or download unlicensed anime/foreign tv shows, nobody cares. It's when you hit the dangerous stuff, or are blatantly peaking usage caps (if you ARE the top user in the city, or near it).
Now, if you hit high usage, throw ubuntu package rsyncing in there as a big data-sink so you have plausible deniability. An open wifi would help too.
What I got from his commentary was that people only know what has been mass-pushed via the major media channels that the RIAA/MPAA member companies control.
The Pirate Bay, and others show a different world-view, in which popularity and coolness is king. There's no payola to dish out, nor is there record execs to please in deals they made or not.
The ratings, especially for the top 100, are just that: ratings of what millions of users agree what is popular at that moment. Right now, this popularity is an intersection between what is free music and what is corporate for_pay music. We can only expect the decline of RIAA member companies will lead to less advertising revenue. That will lead to the indies and the amateur musicians to start to dominate.
It will take time, but there's no way to stop this. It's a culture, not just a program or website. All I can say is to hold on to your seat while on the crazy copyright ride of your life.
Well, if he's using the TPB top 100 as a barometer for what's "Hip", then why doesnt he add a crapload of clients to upload, and then forge upload and download stats to push himself to top 100.
You know, if you're on a LAN and have BT clients, you could share via the LAN and have it count towards ratio ;)
And it would be one hell of a "What The Hell is that Group??" (begins download). Cause, I check out what's the buzz on general top 100, music top 100, and movie top 100 all the time.
However, you make the assumption that all 10M people reading here are actively polling right now from any one of those torrents. You'd be mistaken.
Some of my favorites exist from back in the '20s when rip roaring jazz was abound everywhere. We see avant jazz go all the way up to present, with other counties spawning jazz musicians. Classical has mostly stagnated, but those who like those "stuffy sounds", that music has existed from the 1700's when the Church commissioned those pieces to begin with. We really start to get to the heyday of music, from the rock era starting in the 60's to the 70's. And we all know the groups that came from that time.
Now, if my numbers are correct, nearly every work published since 1/1/1922 is under full copyright protection. So... most "popular musics" are covered by somebody's copyright. And it turns out, if the record companies didn't own it, they bought it or sued for it. Big surprise.
Of course, you have indies and such, but they really dont matter (sorry). Yeah, if they organized into a force to fight against the ilk of the RIAA, they might have a chance, but then they would turn in to what they hated and originally fought against.
If you havent realized it already, but copyright is really useless in its present form.
*said while listening to music from ocremix.org , a free music site in dedication to remixing game music.
But that's exactly it.
The stuff you pay for has even a greater cost. For example, take a recent 50$ game.
If you have high morals and wish to pay for the game, so be it. I hope it works for you. If the game is released buggy, then there's a decent chance that something wont work for you. Well, you can always take it back.... NOPE. No returns on open software. And about activations... I hope that you dont reinstall more than the number "They" allow, or plan to play the game 10 years from now.
The pirates get the goods first, and have them fixed so annoyances that paying customers deal with arent even there. Restrictions preventing legit customers are gone, hacked out. There was no money traded hands, so if it doesnt work, just delete it.
The companies are hard against the customers due to perceived "pirates". That's called cost of doing business when a few friends share a game between each other. Smarter people call that mindshare. However, as long as these companies see potential (and successful) customers as the enemy, then they will become one, either by choice or by force.
Well, you cant buy it for any price. So you Bittorrent it.
And if prices are stupid, like a soundtrack going for 17.99 vs the movie itself going for 15.99, guess what? Piratebay here we come.
It's called competitive pressure, and that's how the free market works. If copyright and patents were more sane, they'd be more respected and crap like this wouldnt happen. So, the path of least resistance is downloading.
Those who call me names: I dont care. I have what you spend money on and mine isnt crippled.
Those who say I need to change the law: Fine. Give me a few million to shove in the congresscritters pockets. Then, they MIGHT listen.. Then again, maybe not.
I wonder how bad it is.
Ill find out cause Im downloading it now. Thanks Romulation.net and M3 DS Real!
---One of the ways that I manage my systems is to create a zone where hackers may go, and not go.
The only way to guarantee that is by an air gap. If data can travel in both directions, it can gone to.
---For example, I use a good firewall. That firewalls is allowed to communicate to another firewall. Between the two firewalls is my take down zone. This means if they happen to break through the firewall all they will get are servers that can be taken down anyways.
---These take down servers are virtual machine based. So if a machine goes down, who shives a ghit because you just shut down the VM, copy the old one and restart it.
Lets assume what you say is correct. First, what protections do you have vs the hypervisor running the VMs? How do you prevent starvation of resources by de-fragmenting ill formed packets? If you don't "correct broken packets", then what prevents a fragrouter-like attack right through your network?
As per your answer of shutting down and reloading, that is not an answer to bad rules that can almost never work, for they will persist until you fix them. Then, when you bring them up, they will be hopped over again.
(trimmed gobbledegook about unhackable firewalls)
You can think that you have an unhackable setup. Fine. Perhaps you will investigate what I said, and might take action to test what I claim. But aside that you are probably just as vulnerable as the rest. All that has to really be done is your border router feed bad updates to machines requesting OS updates. Of course, crypto signatures will catch that they don't sign, but that's where we use old packages with known vulnerabilities. I'm sure in your course of duty you don't check the package date, nor do most update programs. Or, perhaps somethings watching for passwords on your external firewall. There's a nice tool called dsniff that does just that.
In the real world, if you want an unhackable network, you build the network with no external connections. It's as simple as that. The military understands that. Power companies understand that. Industrial control designers understand that. If you want to have a facade that you somehow can super-firewall so that no hacker can get in, so be it. Whatever you put on the internet can potentially end up everywhere. Just look at Wolverine Workprint or multitudes of sex tapes or other media. I'm sure there's some Presidential Helicopter schematics going around in Islamic areas right now, according to my sources.
Well, next time, we're going to try their OS in a nice VM where we can test such behavior... while using Ubuntu or other choice Linux distro.
Until a subversive deems it necessary to rescind the keys associated to His Holiness, The Dali Lama and his people.
I'm sure the Chinese government could make a deal with Microsoft to make multiple govt offices Vista Based (with appropriate studies to woo others) for a deal to shut down keys.
Then your answer should be rather clear. That is, to purchase a CoLo server in another country with no easy links back to you.
Something of the sort would start with a purchase of a anonymous Visa card from a place like Wal-Mart, load it with funds, purchase DNS/CoLo from another country, and set up shop via local free wifi points or use TOR to upload the required starting material.
Looks like fascism.
Smells like fascism.
Acts like fascism.
Nawww... Its Republicans and Democrats usual interference. Its "FREEE MARKET!!!"*
*with collusion from govt.
Bla bla bla why dont you change the law bla bla..
Heh. What a joke, unless you have a few million to toss in the congress or senators front pocket. We, the people are NOT represented. The corporate interests are represented, and they go against the populace.
You really are stupid. If we add 20 years of protectionist copyright every 19 years, can you guess what will happen? Hint: it doesn't take a mathematics PhD to figure that out.
Then perhaps the media companies ought to COMPETE. Which is what they are precisely not doing. And if they wish for their works to remain "secret", they perhaps ought not disseminate it in every Wal-Mart. And I think the media companies have a little problem about keeping secrets themselves, by just looking at the Wolverine Workprint.
And I just looove your personal attacks, moron. That's a sure way of winning an Internet Argument. Somehow, I think you're still that proverbial retard.
Copyright is broken. We have a barometer of if copyright is broken by checking if this phrase is correct or not.
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;", Ar1,Sect8,para8.
We aren't promoting profit. We're promoting the progress of the sciences and useful arts. Patents, being broken by allowing living creatures to be patented, have done a decent job in the arena of promoting the sciences. Abuses like mathematical and business procedure patents have been recently looked at and many of them are in danger of being thrown out. Patent times are still in the area of reasonable, perhaps a little too high. However, 17 years is a long far cry from 150+ years.
Those promotions are supposed to be guaranteed by limited times of exclusive control. 150+ years and whenever Congress wants to up the times does not make limited. Any schmuck knows that terms approaching infinity are not limited. Yes, SCOTUS found that times approaching infinity are still in the technical jargon "Limited". This judgment is also coming from the same SCOTUS that said that companies can eminent domain your property.
And aside all pirate reasons, lets go back to that thing called the Free Market: Someone who offers good that costs X, forces ads (more cost), and has lockout/anticopy annoyances (more cost) vs. Someone who gives it free ( 0 cost), ads removed ( more value) and easy to copy ( more value): Now, which one are you going to "Buy"? If it was cost alone, I think we can agree that those who do make media are by in part usually worth money. But the second those people who are asking for our money then scream PIRATE, well I'm sure as hell not going to go there any more.
And you can still say trite sayings like "Youll just download it pirate". I do better. I teach those that are good with technology that there is a world of free. I may be one pirate, but I will show the way for those that agree, but don't quite understand.
I have no problem with paying a fair price for my content. Laws are skewed heavily for the media companies. Technology to allow us backups and commentary are skewed heavily against the citizens. BitTorrent and likes are some of our only leverages against the legal vehicle used against us. Or... dont you remember the record companies claiming once that cd's are dominant that their prices would drop to 9$ ?
The European Union sounds like what our federal system should have been.
Instead, we have idiots like Bush and Obama. Those people should never have any sort of power other than the basic rights delineated in the Constitution.
I know it's a few days after the fact, but the lawyer explained what it meant to have a city be negligent. It was then my decision to determine if the city was at fault, considering my injury (bicycle riding).
The perceived negligence is that a bicycle/walking trail abruptly ends at a very nasty intersection. If you care to see, it's Columbus, IN at the intersection of 2'nd, 3'rd, and State St. at the intersection of the river. I ended up following bicycle rules going down 3rd st, but decided to take it to the sidewalk quickly due to all 3 lanes of traffic. From then, I took what looked like a safe way to the sidewalk but was thrown from the bicycle. I landed on my shoulder, receiving a posterior dislocation, tear of the superspinatus (sp), and a break below the ball of my shoulder.
After careful consideration, I had to come to a conclusion that even though the city did fail to properly have a safe bicycle trail, I also was partially responsible for operation of my vehicle (and stupidity).
So, I sucked it up and am paying on medical bills.
mmMMm.. Hot coffee.
Hopefully, with a touch of cream and loads of sugar :D
aww. Isn't that cute. CTS got another account.
mmmMMMmmmmm... Moonblood never tasted soo good :)
and yes, I do that. and she's very grateful.
I had an injury on city property.
A good lawyer and a friend advised me that unless the city is at extreme fault (ie: negligent or like) that is was near worthless to pursue a case. I could simply say that they weren't negligent, so I took his advice.
I bought my supply from unitednuclear.com . It is ACS/reagent grade, the highest grade purity one can purchase.
Considering the amounts I ingest, I have no issue in the quality. I did not have it tested though.
Fuck. You got ripped off.
I pay 10$ for 113g (4 oz). pure powder. None of this pill shit.
I can mix it with anything I have a knack for. I can make caf-soap, caf-beer, caf-water, caf-apple/orange juice, caf-soup, extracaf-coffee, you name it.
You'd need more than .25-.5g for me.
I routinely take about 1-2g per day. I take it with water, in the terms of pure powder. It dissolves right in. And I like mine with a bit of fresh squeezed lemon juice, as it helps cut the bitter.
I know you'll probably say that's a dangerous amount, but my tolerance and weight allow the much higher LD50. By LD50 alone (calculated as 192mg/kg), for my weight would be 26.1g. And I know what to expect.
And as a last resort of ODing, I carry a few activated charcoal pills, provided you get them in time.
**last time I was in surgery, I held the powder under my tongue till it dissolved in my mouth. no water needed.
Caffeine powder is actually pretty good, if not a bit bitter.
I mix my own levels of caffeine depending how I feel. Some days, it's a .25g for my glass of water... sometimes it's 2g. Sometimes, not a bit at all. But I never feel "sleepy".
One good thing to mix with caffeine is hydrocodone, IF you have a prescription for it (which I do :). The bitterness of hydros are very similar to that of caffeine.
You can buy 4oz and 8oz sizes on unitednuclear.com for ~10$substance.