I have a very simple script that runs scanimage, then processes the output through convert to make it a rasterized postscript output, then processed that output through ps2pdf (part of ghostscript).
My scanner (epson 1640U) has a document feeder so the command line options for scanimage reflect that. A simple loop in the script handles all the pages.
The net result is a script called "scan2pdf" that I just specify the output PDF file name (something helpful, like the name of the document and the date). I've processed over a decade of financial records, easily 1000s of pages, in a day with this simple setup.
One of the arguments for not destroying the current stock of smallpox is that it might be needed at some future time for research.
With a proven and consistent ability to recreate a virus from its known DNA sequence, the actual viruses themselves could be safely destroyed without impacting the ability to resurrect them in the future. As well, it's probably considerably harder to recreate a virus this way than to steal existing stock.
So while this opens the door to manufacturing viruses for biowarfare, it also makes it possible to destroy current stocks that might be stolen and used for such purposes.
A few years ago I got to meet with some folks from Eveready and a number of charge controller companies, and trust me, there's quite a bit of R&D that goes on.
For disposables, consider that we've gone from carbon-zinc to alkaline to lithium chemistries. In the case of Eveready, they have the L91 lithium AA, and it's pretty amazing in terms of power density and battery life (about 3X alkaline.) It's now about 10 years old.
Rechargables have gone from lead-acid to Nickel-Cadmium to Nickel Metal Hydride and also Lithium-Ion.
Keep in mind we're talking about a chemical device here that's storing larger and larger amounts of energy as times goes on. More energy = more potential for bad things to happen. Since it's chemical we're dealing with chemistry, materials science, and environmental factors (heat/cold, issues of outgassing, etc.) There's a lot more going on than a simple metal tube here.
A lot of the work that goes on is hidden -- it's hidden in the fact that the battery works for more than a few cycles. Many battery chemistries are very touchy when it comes to repeated cycling, for example, while others if not formulated (or charged) correctly would outgas or swell and explode. If any of you remember the good old days of carbon-zinc, it was routine to have things destroyed by leaking cells. That's one of the reasons the battery manufacturers actually offer warranties on the devices using them. (Think about that: It's like Exxon giving you a warranty on your engine if the gas harms it.)
While the future is probably fuel cells (I'd bet on methanol cells in particular, perhaps like Neah Power is working on) it'd be wrong to think that batteries aren't improving -- or that they won't be around for a long, long time.
In the mid-1990's my company did quite a bit of high-profile graphics card benchmarking. Because we focused on testing chips just going into production we'd usually get alpha and beta revs of boards from the well-known board vendors at the time. It was routine for the boards that were sent for testing to have custom BIOS that set the clocks on the hardware well above specifications.
For vendors that did this chronically we switched to getting boards through other channels -- but we needed the hardware as soon as it was released, so we'd usually have pending orders with the retail arm of a board manufacturer. They got wise to this and started doing the same thing with retail boards being sent to us.
Then we switched to straw buyers. Since there were only a few preorders made in my state (AZ) they started doing it to all boards destined here, which was pretty entertaining. We'd wait a month and buy the board from a storefront and it'd be clocked 10-20% slower.
I won't even begin to go into what we saw happen with drivers...
I've done something similar using black and white video cameras as I needed really good low-light capability. My solution ended up using Philips+Nogatech based video capture-to-USB dongles and Video 4 Linux drivers.
As someone else mentioned, forget it if you want motion. In that case, PCI/1394 is the only way to go.
Amazon would more likely want this not to create barriers for tiny upstarts, but to sell services to those tiny upstarts. Think about it: amazon can easily manage the tax-keeping burden for them as part of their "Amazon Marketplace" program where they set up small sellers with simple internet stores. Make it a hassle for small businesses by requiring tax collection for 3700 jurisdictions, and those sellers are incentivized to have someone else do it for them.
I wonder if this wouldn't be a good application for.torrent -- I'd gladly trade the bandwidth I lose to spam for sharing parts of a RBL file. This would be similar to the freenet proposal but without having to commit to storing any class of content.
Intel is also making every effort to emphasize that all the trusted/digitial restrictions infrastructure can be disabled as well.
The fiasco with digital serial numbers and the impact that had on potential sales is very clear in their minds, and they don't want a repeat. It's clear that there are markets for TCPA, etc AND markets for free computing. No sane company is going to make a move that limits their markets.
Actually I was limiting the list to standalone chips. If you include integrated chip sets, Intel leads and VIA and SIS are much more significant -- in the desktop market, SIS is almost the size of ATI if you count chip sets.
As others have pointed out, there are more than two players in the market. In addition to Nvidia and ATI, other players with measurable shipments in the market include SIS/XGI (actually the third larget player today), Matrox, Silicon Motion, Trident, and S3/VIA. 3DLabs also ships as well, but only into the workstation market as their most recent consumer product never materialized.
A few others have had credible success recently as well, notably ST Micro which manufactured Videologic's KYRO design for a while a couple years ago -- in volumes large enough for them to get noticed by Nvidia and ATI resulting in a pretty agressive competitive response.
Who knows how the S3 chip will pan out -- but keep in mind that Nvidia came out of nowhere to claim the leading volume position in the market, and ATI came back from a pretty low place to compete with Nvidia today. Never count on anything staying the same in PC Graphics.
No, but once you have the keys, that copy of PGP will decode it.
There's no need for you to spend a bunch of time/money rewriting something that already works -- you can concentrate on the hard problem of figuring out the key instead.
Re:GSM ... and CDMA?
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You're not thinking like a hacker would on this.
Think about it -- all the hardware you need to demodulate and decode a CDMA signal in realtime is present in a CDMA phone, so it's only a matter of understanding/controlling the hardware and figuring out how to capture the right spreading code and any other keys in use.
Given that, the hardware is probably close to free once you've figured out how to control a phone or download new software to it.
I'm getting a bit tired of people applauding DOS attacks on blocklists. Many of us run small mail servers for ourselves and/or small companies where EVERYONE who recieves email is in agreement that blocking spam is the right thing to do. When everyone chooses to do this, it's not censorship. Seriously -- the volume of spam is overwhelming, and in a small business there is no one delegate managing email to, and it's consuming precious bandwidth. Spam is the problem, not block lists. No spam, no blocklists, simple as that.
My server has seen as many as 500 spams a day directed at it -- for just two email accounts releated to my business. I had little choice but to elect to use drastic measures and escalate them until the spam became manageable -- and the best defense due to bandwidth issues (we run on just 128K because that's all that's available to us) is blocklists. The problem has been so bad that I maintain an internal block list that uses iptables to simply not route packets from IP blocks (/24) for any email that gets through the first layer of blocklists that sendmail checks.
Osirusoft in particular was very, very useful to me, because they maintained a number of DNS mirrors of other blocklists, so you could pick and choose how drastic you wished your blocking to be. I will miss their service greatly -- and can already notice it as my spam has doubled since it was removed from my sendmail config.
Without blocklists, email for my small business at least would be useless. I know that I've lost business using them, but I'd lose more business/time/money without -- there's no friggin' way I'm going to search through (and accept the bandwidth hit from) five hundred messages to find the few legitimate ones and still have time to get real work done.
Generally, no. I work with NDA material that's subsequently leaked (by other parties) all the time, and usually it's the leak-er that's considered at fault, not the person who republishes the leak. Presumably SCO could go after whoever sent the powerpoint pitch or took digital photos of the slides if they could find them.
Most of the companies I know that find sensitive material that is still marked "confidential" re-published by the press simply request that it be removed, but it appears that the reporting on the material itself is fairly well protected; I would imagine Bruce's commentary would fall under the reporting but things like slide photos or the slides themselves (if the "confidential" remained on the slide during the presentation) might be iffy.
As an aside, a lot of companies knowingly let "confidential" documents leak as a way of unofficially distributing the information. SCO could be hoping that this would result in very damaging reports without ever having to provide the code snippets publically -- it leaves an out of deniability "that was an internal document never meant for the outside world and it wasn't reviewed by our lawyers for accuracy, yada yada"
But this is SCO, so the fact that Bruce used the same alphabet as SCO in his report is probably grounds enough for them.
I had an original "Book PC" that I downgraded from Linux to XP Home Edition before giving it to a family member. Microsoft Windows Update (but not the XP Installer itself) misidentifies the modem hardware, and if update installs its driver, the modem is lost -- and it's the only network connectivity the device has in this application.
So, basically, Windows Update will take this thing permanently off-line until a fairly advanced user can get the original driver re-installed.
It's not how often it causes the problem, but the severity and frequency of updates. Every case I've seen windows update NOT work (and they are rare) has been a situation where the system is taken completely out of service. If this happens with even 0.01% of users we're talking about tens of thousands of systems *per update*. This is a major tech support issue.
Actually, if you run TCPDUMP on a new with hotmail users, you'll find the only thing encrypted is the username/password when someone first signs in. Afterwords all the mail is sent using unencrypted HTML, it's a breeze to read the plaintext email from tcpdump's output when the ascii switch is turned on.
So, for hotmail at least, the only security advantage is not sending the password as plaintext.
About 3/4 of VIA's business is C3s, the other 1/4 Eden (which is pretty much as C3 as well.) Nearly all of the "other" category is VIA, not Transmeta.
I have several Eden-based systems here under test, EPIA mini-itx based. They're cute and very low power, and it appears there is a small but growing niche for them based on the stats I've compiled.
The statistics relate to what they are labeled as: x86 CPUs. This isn't a report on PC unit shipments, it's a report on x86 processors.
As an aside, the document these figures are from includes Apple processor shipments as well -- which have been roughly 800K-1.1 million units per quarter since 1995. But the statistics here are x86, and that't not what Apple uses.
I can also assure you that the statistics Mercury produces are far from bought and paid for by Intel. We've documented both Intel and AMD's rising and falling shares for the past 10 years, as well as those of VIA, Transmeta, and a number of now-defunct suppliers. It would take an imaginative conspiracy theory to believe that Intel and AMD coordinated transfer of "sponsorship" to coincide with share changes.
The market share is computed on units, not dollars. Intel doesn't get any more of a boost than AMD.
The methodology doesn't ignore any trends -- that's why it's done in units. As mentioned in a previous posting the one-tenth of a percent gain in the "Other" segment was VIA, which is definitely benefiting from the lower-cost computing trend.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone mentioned .PDFs. This was my solution
I have a very simple script that runs scanimage, then processes the output through convert to make it a rasterized postscript output, then processed that output through ps2pdf (part of ghostscript).
My scanner (epson 1640U) has a document feeder so the command line options for scanimage reflect that. A simple loop in the script handles all the pages.
The net result is a script called "scan2pdf" that I just specify the output PDF file name (something helpful, like the name of the document and the date). I've processed over a decade of financial records, easily 1000s of pages, in a day with this simple setup.
One of the arguments for not destroying the current stock of smallpox is that it might be needed at some future time for research.
With a proven and consistent ability to recreate a virus from its known DNA sequence, the actual viruses themselves could be safely destroyed without impacting the ability to resurrect them in the future. As well, it's probably considerably harder to recreate a virus this way than to steal existing stock.
So while this opens the door to manufacturing viruses for biowarfare, it also makes it possible to destroy current stocks that might be stolen and used for such purposes.
A few years ago I got to meet with some folks from Eveready and a number of charge controller companies, and trust me, there's quite a bit of R&D that goes on.
For disposables, consider that we've gone from carbon-zinc to alkaline to lithium chemistries. In the case of Eveready, they have the L91 lithium AA, and it's pretty amazing in terms of power density and battery life (about 3X alkaline.) It's now about 10 years old.
Rechargables have gone from lead-acid to Nickel-Cadmium to Nickel Metal Hydride and also Lithium-Ion.
Keep in mind we're talking about a chemical device here that's storing larger and larger amounts of energy as times goes on. More energy = more potential for bad things to happen. Since it's chemical we're dealing with chemistry, materials science, and environmental factors (heat/cold, issues of outgassing, etc.) There's a lot more going on than a simple metal tube here.
A lot of the work that goes on is hidden -- it's hidden in the fact that the battery works for more than a few cycles. Many battery chemistries are very touchy when it comes to repeated cycling, for example, while others if not formulated (or charged) correctly would outgas or swell and explode. If any of you remember the good old days of carbon-zinc, it was routine to have things destroyed by leaking cells. That's one of the reasons the battery manufacturers actually offer warranties on the devices using them. (Think about that: It's like Exxon giving you a warranty on your engine if the gas harms it.)
While the future is probably fuel cells (I'd bet on methanol cells in particular, perhaps like Neah Power is working on) it'd be wrong to think that batteries aren't improving -- or that they won't be around for a long, long time.
In the mid-1990's my company did quite a bit of high-profile graphics card benchmarking. Because we focused on testing chips just going into production we'd usually get alpha and beta revs of boards from the well-known board vendors at the time. It was routine for the boards that were sent for testing to have custom BIOS that set the clocks on the hardware well above specifications.
For vendors that did this chronically we switched to getting boards through other channels -- but we needed the hardware as soon as it was released, so we'd usually have pending orders with the retail arm of a board manufacturer. They got wise to this and started doing the same thing with retail boards being sent to us.
Then we switched to straw buyers. Since there were only a few preorders made in my state (AZ) they started doing it to all boards destined here, which was pretty entertaining. We'd wait a month and buy the board from a storefront and it'd be clocked 10-20% slower.
I won't even begin to go into what we saw happen with drivers...
I've done something similar using black and white video cameras as I needed really good low-light capability. My solution ended up using Philips+Nogatech based video capture-to-USB dongles and Video 4 Linux drivers.
As someone else mentioned, forget it if you want motion. In that case, PCI/1394 is the only way to go.
I found this very cool "toy" the other day ( http://shop.store.yahoo.com/airgundepot/eaa-drozd. html )
Not every day you run across a selective fire BB gun.
Imagine how "The Christmas Story" would have gone with this instead of the Red Rider BB gun.
Amazon would more likely want this not to create barriers for tiny upstarts, but to sell services to those tiny upstarts. Think about it: amazon can easily manage the tax-keeping burden for them as part of their "Amazon Marketplace" program where they set up small sellers with simple internet stores. Make it a hassle for small businesses by requiring tax collection for 3700 jurisdictions, and those sellers are incentivized to have someone else do it for them.
I wonder if this wouldn't be a good application for .torrent -- I'd gladly trade the bandwidth I lose to spam for sharing parts of a RBL file. This would be similar to the freenet proposal but without having to commit to storing any class of content.
I'm sure he's referring to the VIA C3 CPU, and yes, they're availably in the US. Note that they use socket 370 (pentium III) motherboards.
The system is probably the cheap Lindows/etc systems sold through walmart.
Intel is also making every effort to emphasize that all the trusted/digitial restrictions infrastructure can be disabled as well.
The fiasco with digital serial numbers and the impact that had on potential sales is very clear in their minds, and they don't want a repeat. It's clear that there are markets for TCPA, etc AND markets for free computing. No sane company is going to make a move that limits their markets.
Actually I was limiting the list to standalone chips. If you include integrated chip sets, Intel leads and VIA and SIS are much more significant -- in the desktop market, SIS is almost the size of ATI if you count chip sets.
BTW, I just checked w/ New Frontier Media (they provide those porn channels) and the channels have already been rerouted to Telstar 6.
:-)
Obviously the satellite industry has its priorities straight.
This is a crisis of earth-shattering proportions for many.
:-)
One of Telstar 4's nicknames in the industry is "nookiesat" -- as it carries several of the leading porn channels in the US.
As others have pointed out, there are more than two players in the market. In addition to Nvidia and ATI, other players with measurable shipments in the market include SIS/XGI (actually the third larget player today), Matrox, Silicon Motion, Trident, and S3/VIA. 3DLabs also ships as well, but only into the workstation market as their most recent consumer product never materialized.
A few others have had credible success recently as well, notably ST Micro which manufactured Videologic's KYRO design for a while a couple years ago -- in volumes large enough for them to get noticed by Nvidia and ATI resulting in a pretty agressive competitive response.
Who knows how the S3 chip will pan out -- but keep in mind that Nvidia came out of nowhere to claim the leading volume position in the market, and ATI came back from a pretty low place to compete with Nvidia today. Never count on anything staying the same in PC Graphics.
This is why there's a market for low-power servers. I migrated my web/email server to a VIA EPIA platform - just 12 watts. Minimal power issues here.
No, but once you have the keys, that copy of PGP will decode it.
There's no need for you to spend a bunch of time/money rewriting something that already works -- you can concentrate on the hard problem of figuring out the key instead.
You're not thinking like a hacker would on this.
Think about it -- all the hardware you need to demodulate and decode a CDMA signal in realtime is present in a CDMA phone, so it's only a matter of understanding/controlling the hardware and figuring out how to capture the right spreading code and any other keys in use.
Given that, the hardware is probably close to free once you've figured out how to control a phone or download new software to it.
I remember it as well. I think this is the one:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html
I'm getting a bit tired of people applauding DOS attacks on blocklists. Many of us run small mail servers for ourselves and/or small companies where EVERYONE who recieves email is in agreement that blocking spam is the right thing to do. When everyone chooses to do this, it's not censorship. Seriously -- the volume of spam is overwhelming, and in a small business there is no one delegate managing email to, and it's consuming precious bandwidth. Spam is the problem, not block lists. No spam, no blocklists, simple as that.
My server has seen as many as 500 spams a day directed at it -- for just two email accounts releated to my business. I had little choice but to elect to use drastic measures and escalate them until the spam became manageable -- and the best defense due to bandwidth issues (we run on just 128K because that's all that's available to us) is blocklists. The problem has been so bad that I maintain an internal block list that uses iptables to simply not route packets from IP blocks (/24) for any email that gets through the first layer of blocklists that sendmail checks.
Osirusoft in particular was very, very useful to me, because they maintained a number of DNS mirrors of other blocklists, so you could pick and choose how drastic you wished your blocking to be. I will miss their service greatly -- and can already notice it as my spam has doubled since it was removed from my sendmail config.
Without blocklists, email for my small business at least would be useless. I know that I've lost business using them, but I'd lose more business/time/money without -- there's no friggin' way I'm going to search through (and accept the bandwidth hit from) five hundred messages to find the few legitimate ones and still have time to get real work done.
Generally, no. I work with NDA material that's subsequently leaked (by other parties) all the time, and usually it's the leak-er that's considered at fault, not the person who republishes the leak. Presumably SCO could go after whoever sent the powerpoint pitch or took digital photos of the slides if they could find them.
Most of the companies I know that find sensitive material that is still marked "confidential" re-published by the press simply request that it be removed, but it appears that the reporting on the material itself is fairly well protected; I would imagine Bruce's commentary would fall under the reporting but things like slide photos or the slides themselves (if the "confidential" remained on the slide during the presentation) might be iffy.
As an aside, a lot of companies knowingly let "confidential" documents leak as a way of unofficially distributing the information. SCO could be hoping that this would result in very damaging reports without ever having to provide the code snippets publically -- it leaves an out of deniability "that was an internal document never meant for the outside world and it wasn't reviewed by our lawyers for accuracy, yada yada"
But this is SCO, so the fact that Bruce used the same alphabet as SCO in his report is probably grounds enough for them.
I had an original "Book PC" that I downgraded from Linux to XP Home Edition before giving it to a family member. Microsoft Windows Update (but not the XP Installer itself) misidentifies the modem hardware, and if update installs its driver, the modem is lost -- and it's the only network connectivity the device has in this application.
So, basically, Windows Update will take this thing permanently off-line until a fairly advanced user can get the original driver re-installed.
It's not how often it causes the problem, but the severity and frequency of updates. Every case I've seen windows update NOT work (and they are rare) has been a situation where the system is taken completely out of service. If this happens with even 0.01% of users we're talking about tens of thousands of systems *per update*. This is a major tech support issue.
Actually, if you run TCPDUMP on a new with hotmail users, you'll find the only thing encrypted is the username/password when someone first signs in. Afterwords all the mail is sent using unencrypted HTML, it's a breeze to read the plaintext email from tcpdump's output when the ascii switch is turned on.
So, for hotmail at least, the only security advantage is not sending the password as plaintext.
About 3/4 of VIA's business is C3s, the other 1/4 Eden (which is pretty much as C3 as well.) Nearly all of the "other" category is VIA, not Transmeta.
I have several Eden-based systems here under test, EPIA mini-itx based. They're cute and very low power, and it appears there is a small but growing niche for them based on the stats I've compiled.
The statistics relate to what they are labeled as: x86 CPUs. This isn't a report on PC unit shipments, it's a report on x86 processors.
As an aside, the document these figures are from includes Apple processor shipments as well -- which have been roughly 800K-1.1 million units per quarter since 1995. But the statistics here are x86, and that't not what Apple uses.
I can also assure you that the statistics Mercury produces are far from bought and paid for by Intel. We've documented both Intel and AMD's rising and falling shares for the past 10 years, as well as those of VIA, Transmeta, and a number of now-defunct suppliers. It would take an imaginative conspiracy theory to believe that Intel and AMD coordinated transfer of "sponsorship" to coincide with share changes.
The market share is computed on units, not dollars. Intel doesn't get any more of a boost than AMD.
The methodology doesn't ignore any trends -- that's why it's done in units. As mentioned in a previous posting the one-tenth of a percent gain in the "Other" segment was VIA, which is definitely benefiting from the lower-cost computing trend.