You are assuming a cell phone originated this call. From the story, that is not in evidence.
He was a Voip engineer. Don't you suppose he was running VOIP phones in his whole house? These are cheap, calls are cheaper than cell, and records may or may not be available anywhere that contain an exact indication of which handset (or computer based softphone) was used to place the call.
True, but a cheep router is handy for it because you can use it then toss it in the dump. There are many out there that are relatively cheep and can be modded with custom firmware.
Set a router up with the right firmware, configuration, and connections and I can easily see a VoIP engineer using it for that general purpose, then tossing it in a dumpster never to be seen again.
Except you don't need a special router for this. Voip/Sip is just not that hard.
Cary police investigators have theorized that Brad Cooper, an engineer in Voice over Internet Protocol, had the expertise and ability to use the router to stage a remote call from his home phone to his cellphone so that it appeared that Nancy Cooper, 34, was alive on the morning that she disappeared
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
I too don't understand what is so special about this router.
Well he probably had his own router at home anyway. There is nothing special about VOIP or SIP phones that require anything beyond what is available in your average user grade home router. Even for simulating a call from a remote location; opening a simple inbound SSH port would allow you to make an outgoing call by launching a soft-phone clients on a computer in the house.
On the other hand, the prosecution seem to be arguing crime of passion in the early hours after she was partying with neighbors, and at the same time that he had the foresight to borrow a router specifically for this task.
If your video chat is so long that it threatens either of those limits, simply find some wifi.
The key thing here is Skype is dead. Too slow to implement, huge memory hog to run. Now its all built in, and integrates with the GMAIL via a browser plug in, on tablets via Honeycomb, and now phones.
If you have friends or family over seas this is a godsend.
Without any kind of (force) feedback, I think the normal keyboard paradigm sucks, even if it allows using multiple fingers at once.
Some keyboards have haptic feed back on each key entry, which use the handset vibrator to indicate key press. Other simulate a click sound, which can substitute for the force of a key press.
How well this scales to a large device, such as a 17 or 24 inch screen is anyone's guess at this point.
There is also this problem of on-screen finger prints and smudges, which is likely to be more of an annoyance than actually having a keyboard at a desktop setting. Constantly wiping my tablet is pretty annoying. I've gotten in the habit of running my fingers over my trousers or shirt prior to touching the tablet. (At last a use for a Tie?).
All in all, its not clear to me that there is any reason for on-screen keyboards on the desktop. Hand held, certainly. But the whole ergonomics of the desktop computer screen need to be reworked to switch to on-screen keyboards and mouseless pointing.
Swype would never work screens much larger than a cell phone or a small tablet. Even on tablets of 10 inch size it takes way more effort sliding your finger, (which due to the screen size requires moving your whole arm) across the screen than simply typing.
Any time you have real estate approximating a small laptop, swype makes no sense at all.
Speed comes with better language prediction, as opposed to spelling prediction. Language prediction, like Swiftkey, knows what you are likely to say before you even finish the prior word. As a result you end up selecting entire words (or just hitting to space bar to accept the suggestion) often obviating the need to type even the first character.
Swype is a small device solution, designed for single digit typing forced by the small screen size. It won't scale to 17 or 24 inch monitors.
From the fine article: "With this approach at the laboratory scale, Xu and colleagues were able to obtain a light-to-power conversion efficiency of 3.2 percent compared to 1.8 percent efficiency..."
So, with a ridiculously bad solar cell, they could increase the efficiency to something that's still ridiculously bad.
Exactly. It was miserably inefficient previously, and now now its 180% of miserable. If the same techniques could work on the top-end PRODUCTION solar cells, which hover around 20% you could perhaps approach 35%. But the whole idea of % efficiency is fraught with peril. which is why people usually revert to dollars per watt per square meter or some such.
True, but again, this is a cell phone app. You don't expect document management system level capabilities, especially not in release 1.0. If you want that level of quality you bring something more than a cell phone to the task. Maybe a flatbed or something.
My point here is this: I've had much better luck going direct to PDF On the phone than via Google Docs.
Try this test if you have a Google Docs account, (even a free one):
Upload some PDF, even one created using something on your phone like CamScanner.. Then, once you have a document in Google Docs, select it and from the menu choose Make a Google Docs Copy. It will OCR it for you.
Now if you uploaded a quality PDF (say something scanned to pdf directly from your scanner) the OCR will be close to flawless. But even those shot with the camera and cleaned up by CamScanner will be better than the ones created directly in Google Docs on the android, probably for some of the reasons mentioned in TFA.
Just how many of such documents do you expect to have to index taken with a cellphone? Seriously, this is a toy. Don't go all corporate archives on me here.
Google DOCs will use the flash or not, based on user settings, so, yeah, he just missed that.
But In my tests with Nexus One, (Not Nexus S), using the flash at the range needed to see the picture just puts a white blob in the center of the shot and is actually worse than using bright room lights.
The five cops at the door with a search warrant goes unreported. This is seldom reported, even by the victims.
But it still costs you time and money to defend against it, and you surrender your computers (all of them) for as long as it takes them to dig thru them in their forensics lab.
Many modern routers support a "guest connection" with a separate SSID and allow limiting the bandwidth available to the guest(s). You can offer an open wifi connection without compromising your bandwidth beyond what you are comfortable with.
As long as the Guest account is on a separate VLan from your internal lan AND you can in fact limit both speed and total data download per session this might work. My neighbor advertises such a network.
However, leaving that un-password protected still violates your TOS from most service providers that I know of. Check your contract.
And it still leaves you open to the possibility of police knocking on/down your door. They can't tell which SSID the child porn was downloaded from, all they know is your public-side IP was used to do it.
Only the WIDE and COMMON deployment of such open access (in flagrant violation of your TOS) will make no-knock search and seizure unproductive. But that will take a while to sink in and cost a lot of people a lot of grief and expense. Its kind of like the EFF is advocating a mass charge into the machine guns so as to hopelessly plug the shooting lanes. We all know how well that worked in the first world war.
First off, at least in the United States, police cannot prosecute for a retrospective crime.
That statement gets my vote for the silliest post on Slashdot this month.
So you are saying they can only prosecute crimes that you might commit in the future? So just send in 10 years worth of "potential future" speeding fines, and we will call it good, m'k?
I am an apple apologist, I guess. The reason is that I see the fact that Apple stores your location data on your cell phone when you are using their _location_ services as less serious than TomTom _giving_away_ your data to the authorities on a general basis, with no warrant or anything of the sort. Funny thing is, I don't even have an iPhone myself, and even I think that analogy fails pretty miserably.
I couldn't agree more. Apple simple created a security weakness on your phone and on your own computer, but didn't (as far as anyone has shown) upload this data to anyone.
TomTom has just joined my permanent Do Not Buy list. Their allegations that it can't be tracked ring hollow.
Just because they take the A+ cert course doesn't mean they passed. These are usually existing agents that are pressed into cyber duties and no one is going to dump an agent with years of experience because they we we over their head in a area that takes years to master.
They need to by hiring IT people first and make them into agents. Not the other way around.
If you don't know who is out there, how can you be sure you are more advanced?
What about the civilization of in search of other naive civilizations of easily harvested edible individuals with high quantities of their favorite condiment, sulfur. Love the taste of meat-sticks pan seared with sulfur. So crunch on the outside and chewy on the inside.
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You are assuming a cell phone originated this call. From the story, that is not in evidence.
He was a Voip engineer. Don't you suppose he was running VOIP phones in his whole house?
These are cheap, calls are cheaper than cell, and records may or may not be available anywhere that contain
an exact indication of which handset (or computer based softphone) was used to place the call.
True, but a cheep router is handy for it because you can use it then toss it in the dump. There are many out there that are relatively cheep and can be modded with custom firmware.
Set a router up with the right firmware, configuration, and connections and I can easily see a VoIP engineer using it for that general purpose, then tossing it in a dumpster never to be seen again.
Except you don't need a special router for this.
Voip/Sip is just not that hard.
Cary police investigators have theorized that Brad Cooper, an engineer in Voice over Internet Protocol, had the expertise and ability to use the router to stage a remote call from his home phone to his cellphone so that it appeared that Nancy Cooper, 34, was alive on the morning that she disappeared
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
I too don't understand what is so special about this router.
Well he probably had his own router at home anyway. There is nothing special about VOIP or SIP phones that require anything beyond what is available in your average user grade home router. Even for simulating a call from a remote location; opening a simple inbound SSH port would allow you to make an outgoing call by launching a soft-phone clients on a computer in the house.
On the other hand, the prosecution seem to be arguing crime of passion in the early hours after she was partying with neighbors, and at the same time that he had the foresight to borrow a router specifically for this task.
It's already in honeycomb tablets. Used it yesterday.
If your video chat is so long that it threatens either of those limits, simply find some wifi.
The key thing here is Skype is dead. Too slow to implement, huge memory hog to run.
Now its all built in, and integrates with the GMAIL via a browser plug in, on tablets via Honeycomb, and now phones.
If you have friends or family over seas this is a godsend.
Without any kind of (force) feedback, I think the normal keyboard paradigm sucks, even if it allows using multiple fingers at once.
Some keyboards have haptic feed back on each key entry, which use the handset vibrator to indicate key press. Other simulate a click sound, which can substitute for the force of a key press.
How well this scales to a large device, such as a 17 or 24 inch screen is anyone's guess at this point.
There is also this problem of on-screen finger prints and smudges, which is likely to be more of an annoyance than actually having a keyboard at a desktop setting. Constantly wiping my tablet is pretty annoying. I've gotten in the habit of running my fingers over my trousers or shirt prior to touching the tablet. (At last a use for a Tie?).
All in all, its not clear to me that there is any reason for on-screen keyboards on the desktop. Hand held, certainly. But the whole ergonomics of the desktop computer screen need to be reworked to switch to on-screen keyboards and mouseless pointing.
And when you type something in manually, it's automatically added to the dictionary for next time.
So what? Virtually all smart keyboards do that.
Swype would never work screens much larger than a cell phone or a small tablet. Even on tablets of 10 inch size it takes way more effort sliding your finger, (which due to the screen size requires moving your whole arm) across the screen than simply typing.
Any time you have real estate approximating a small laptop, swype makes no sense at all.
Speed comes with better language prediction, as opposed to spelling prediction. Language prediction, like Swiftkey, knows what you are likely to say before you even finish the prior word. As a result you end up selecting entire words (or just hitting to space bar to accept the suggestion) often obviating the need to type even the first character.
Swype is a small device solution, designed for single digit typing forced by the small screen size. It won't scale to 17 or 24 inch monitors.
From the fine article: "With this approach at the laboratory scale, Xu and colleagues were able to obtain a light-to-power conversion efficiency of 3.2 percent compared to 1.8 percent efficiency..."
So, with a ridiculously bad solar cell, they could increase the efficiency to something that's still ridiculously bad.
Exactly. It was miserably inefficient previously, and now now its 180% of miserable.
If the same techniques could work on the top-end PRODUCTION solar cells, which hover around 20% you could perhaps approach 35%.
But the whole idea of % efficiency is fraught with peril. which is why people usually revert to dollars per watt per square meter or some such.
True, but again, this is a cell phone app. You don't expect document management system level capabilities, especially not in release 1.0.
If you want that level of quality you bring something more than a cell phone to the task. Maybe a flatbed or something.
My point here is this: I've had much better luck going direct to PDF On the phone than via Google Docs.
Try this test if you have a Google Docs account, (even a free one):
Upload some PDF, even one created using something on your phone like CamScanner..
Then, once you have a document in Google Docs, select it and from the menu choose Make a Google Docs Copy. It will OCR it for you.
Now if you uploaded a quality PDF (say something scanned to pdf directly from your scanner) the OCR will be close to flawless.
But even those shot with the camera and cleaned up by CamScanner will be better than the ones created directly in Google Docs on the android, probably for some of the reasons mentioned in TFA.
Just how many of such documents do you expect to have to index taken with a cellphone? Seriously, this is a toy. Don't go all corporate archives on me here.
Google DOCs will use the flash or not, based on user settings, so, yeah, he just missed that.
But In my tests with Nexus One, (Not Nexus S), using the flash at the range needed to see the picture just puts a
white blob in the center of the shot and is actually worse than using bright room lights.
There are a number of scanner apps in the market that do a much better job in the first step of this process, which is taking the picture. They then concentrate their efforts on producing a clean usable PDF of the document. I tested one of these and found that the PDF rendered by it was much better than the PDF produced by Google.
Everything is crisp and readable.
If the first fails, its no wonder the second OCR step fails.
Its also far from new. Didn't they get that from some long dead Open Source project?
Actually, he should have been on the first flight - sort of a quality of deliverables incentive.
Just be persistent in posting with your old account and in a few weeks you'll see the karma change.
Just be civil/informative/fawning in posting...
FTFY.
You only hear about the no-knock raids.
The five cops at the door with a search warrant goes unreported. This is seldom reported, even by the victims.
But it still costs you time and money to defend against it, and you surrender your computers (all of them) for as long as it takes them to dig thru them in their forensics lab.
Many modern routers support a "guest connection" with a separate SSID and allow limiting the bandwidth available to the guest(s). You can offer an open wifi connection without compromising your bandwidth beyond what you are comfortable with.
As long as the Guest account is on a separate VLan from your internal lan AND you can in fact limit both speed and total data download per session this might work. My neighbor advertises such a network.
However, leaving that un-password protected still violates your TOS from most service providers that I know of.
Check your contract.
And it still leaves you open to the possibility of police knocking on/down your door. They can't tell which SSID the child porn was downloaded from, all they know is your public-side IP was used to do it.
Only the WIDE and COMMON deployment of such open access (in flagrant violation of your TOS) will make no-knock search and seizure unproductive. But that will take a while to sink in and cost a lot of people a lot of grief and expense. Its kind of like the EFF is advocating a mass charge into the machine guns so as to hopelessly plug the shooting lanes. We all know how well that worked in the first world war.
First off, at least in the United States, police cannot prosecute for a retrospective crime.
That statement gets my vote for the silliest post on Slashdot this month.
So you are saying they can only prosecute crimes that you might commit in the future? So just send in 10 years worth of "potential future" speeding fines, and we will call it good, m'k?
I am an apple apologist, I guess. The reason is that I see the fact that Apple stores your location data on your cell phone when you are using their _location_ services as less serious than TomTom _giving_away_ your data to the authorities on a general basis, with no warrant or anything of the sort. Funny thing is, I don't even have an iPhone myself, and even I think that analogy fails pretty miserably.
I couldn't agree more. Apple simple created a security weakness on your phone and on your own computer, but didn't (as far as anyone has shown) upload this data to anyone.
TomTom has just joined my permanent Do Not Buy list. Their allegations that it can't be tracked ring hollow.
Just because they take the A+ cert course doesn't mean they passed.
These are usually existing agents that are pressed into cyber duties and no one is going to dump an agent with years of experience because they we we over their head in a area that takes years to master.
They need to by hiring IT people first and make them into agents. Not the other way around.
But you see it doesn't matter what your windows desktop does.
The web browser on the other end won't honor source routes.
Even Microsoft IIS servers don't honor this.
So you can't download anything served from a web server or ftp server.
This is one of those long since debunked myths that might have worked once in 1997.
That's just ONE vector, not the only one.
Hot glue the USB ports, or disconnect them from the motherboard.
Your employees have no business sticking USB drives into process control computers.
The preponderance of USB-Only keyboard/mouse machines is a problem.
Whoosh...
More advanced than who?
If you don't know who is out there, how can you be sure you are more advanced?
What about the civilization of in search of other naive civilizations of easily harvested edible individuals with high quantities of their favorite condiment, sulfur. Love the taste of meat-sticks pan seared with sulfur. So crunch on the outside and chewy on the inside.