Indeed. And that hardware SIP devices start adopting it (some should be able to adopt it via firmware, not that the hardware manufacturers will actually DO that).
I hope my ATA has the grunt to do both the codec work and the crypto and they adopt this if it is ratified. I've seen some tables which outline the approximate CPU requirements of various codecs against various CPU architectures often used in embedded (like MIPS). Those tables are apparently intended for choosing CPU's for VoIP devices. I hope my ATA designers were not too cheap to have this crypto.
I can remember Phil's PGPfone which was released before VoIP was "the next big thing."
Me too. However try as I might, with a friend at the other end of a 28.8 connection and also locally in my home between two PC's with 100Mbit/s connections, I could not get anything better than short bursts of audio to either end. It seemed like a duty cycle of about 1 block of sound out of 5 or 10 blocks of silence. A conversation could not be made.
Did you have any luck with PGPfone? I tracked it down and tried it again years later with much faster PC's and had the same disappointing effect. I think I tried it with the V1 series however.
I hope a Zfone proxy is made so that hardware ATA's can be secured?
I read your linked blog entry and you are clearly not comparing equivalent items on either sides of your comparison.
First of all, yes you own that oil, but you also do own that CD. You don't own the design of that oil (assuming it is synthetic) and you also do not own the performance embodied within the recording stored on the CD. The labour of the mechanic doing the oil change is equivalent to the labour of having the CD's built and packaged and they do both incur static fees, although obviously economies of scale can be leveraged to great effect for the latter. The artists development and performance of their music is equivalent to the R&D of the design of the oil (obviously much more costly than a bunch of muso's making music).
As is typical though, analogies often don't work very well. Because the issues on both sides often don't mesh perfectly, even if the complexities on both sides do equate to about the same in total.
I agree that not being allowed to play a CD to others is ridiculous and not being able to sing Happy Birthday is absolutely ludicrous. However distributing material against what is allowed by that materials copyright terms, deprives all those involved in bringing that material to market, of income from a potential customer who should have purchased the material in a normal legal manner. There is a huge difference between a performance by artists and a bunch of folks singing happy Bday, so these are two things at opposite ends of sanity. Copyright working well and then copyright being abused. Obviously copyright laws should be revised to bring portions of them into reality, but The Pirate Bay and the like are obviously unreasonable on the opposite end of the insanity.
Are you going to go to the trouble of copying that synthetic oil and selling or giving it away to others? Of course not, that would be ridiculous, as is the analogy.
Protecting IP is about protecting the investment of time, effort and money that is put into developing something. That is important for those individuals involved and also important for technology to advance. People won't want to go to that trouble if it ends up being worth nothing to them in the end. Much of the technology you probably love so much, could not exist to the level where it currently is without the protection of IP. Certainly this is sometimes abused by corrupt people, but corrupt people will always corrupt systems for their own gain. Just because this sometimes happens in the World of IP does not make the protection of IP itself a bad thing.
I believe (and I write often about) that Intellectual Property
Lots of people write about various things, but that does not automatically make them correct, no matter how much they might write (take Dvorak for example). If a person cannot understand why the complexities of two issues prevent an analogy from working, then they are probably not fit to be ranting about either of those issues and then being taken seriously.
I don't believe in the right to force others to pay you residual income on past work.
You willingly do it all the time with almost every product you buy. BTW, the loose lawn-mowing analogy also misses the point. Mowing your own lawn is labour you do that is equivalent to labour for making the CD media, it is NOT equivalent to writing and performing the music. If you are capable of making that music, then do so, but no matter how hard you try, you are not going to perfectly replicate the best of U2. So if you want to enjoy their music at any time of your choosing, please pay them and the rest of the people who can make that happen for you legally.
You can connect several machines to one network port, you know.
People often like to have small machines with at least two NIC's for firewalls. External interface and Internal interface as a bare minimum. I have 5 NIC's in my Sun Ultra 10 firewall, all being used for seperate segments.
You're assuming that the company has a chain of possesion tracking procedure, and that the computer in question is recovered via it and sent straight out for forensic investigation.
If chain of custody can't be shown, the evidence should not be admissible. The chain of custody might not be able to be proven up to a point prior to forensics people gaining access to the machine, but forensic analysts who get the machine, should typically be able to determine when it was last used. If it was so much as switched ON AFTER the suspect lost possesion of that machine, that will go into their reports and the suspects council will push to have the evidence taken from that machine struck off from being used in court. That evidence would be deemed to have become contaminated and therefore could not be used.
The vast majority of companies don't have such procedures in place, an in the ones that do, chances are that it is not properly carried out most of the time.
I sometimes get called by companies who THINK something illegal MAY have happened and wish me to image a machine and find out what if anything did happen. They don't know for certain because they dare not look. They have other reasons to suspect something may be there. These are companies with IT departments who might be able to figure those details out. But these companies usually have lawyers which they consult, who typically would advise that the machine should not be looked at or used by anyone other than independent forensics people. If this procedure is not adhered to, chances are that the evidence will be inadmissible.
That's where keeping your mouth shut comes into play. I think the idea is to minimise the avenues of discovery until you can get a lawyer to handle that aspect of the situation, if needed. If the entire case boils down to wether the supplied passwords were correct, its going to be a tough case to make.
Forensics people may be able to determine when the encrypted files were last modified or accessed, depending on the crypto software as to whether it prevents time-stamps being updated etc. If they can show that the encrypted files were accessed recently leading up to the end of when the suspect had the machine, then suspect is likely to not be believed.
As for being treated as a hostile witness, if the AC takes the stand and testifies that s/he gave the correct password and doesn't know why it doesn't work any more, how is that hostile?
Well the star witness when being cross examined by the other side is going to be presumed to be hostile anyway. In my part of the World (au), a lawyer told me that a witness who is not willing to co-operate can be considered a hostile witness. But... "If they ask for the passphrase, make one up." looks hostile to me. Especially if he accessed that data shortly before loosing the machine and then claims that he can't remember the password or gives one which does not work. And "What did you do to it? You must have screwed something up." is just not going to fly when the forensic report details that the machine was not even switched ON after the suspect lost access to it.
I've found this method pretty effective to protect yourself against the situation described in TFA:
Use encryption wherever possible. Don't tell a soul you are using encryption. When it comes time to return the computer, don't volunteer any info about the encrypted data. If they ask for the passphrase, make one up. When they come back to you later and tell you the passphrase doesn't work, you say, "It worked when I had possesion of the computer. What did you do to it? You must have screwed something up." That's your story and you're sticking to it (OJ style).
So you've actually done that have you?
For these sorts of things to hold up in court, 3rd party independant computer forensics analysts are used. They first and foremost forensically image the drive using write blocking techniques and then make multiple copies, to go to both sides of the case and the court. Complete with hashes. The original computer is then LOCKED AWAY as evidence and the analysts start to work on only the images.
Those arguments just simply won't hold any water and you will be treated as a hostile witness. You can't just say something like "I forget" or start accusing the 3rd party independant analysts, because THEY are not on trial, their integrity is not in question and it only ends up making YOU look bad. These analysts are there to assist the court and typically have a history of assisting the courts in other cases. They are trusted. YOU also have a duty to assist the court. Pointing blame to a well trusted independant witness will get you no brownie points.
If you really want to get away with storing data in a secret and secure manner, you should use steganography WITH encryption (and never without), through the use of a program which does not need to be installed and is only ever run from external media which you own and control and can wipe and discard at any time if need be. I work in computer forensics and this is the one thing that I can see as being super secure when done properly.
If all they could hope to find is apparent noise (encrypted data) in all the places where noise is expected to be (within the noise floor of noisy file formats), then you should be fine. They can't say with any level of confidence that THAT "noise" is actually encrypted data, so they can't get past that first step. If you do this, make sure that you choose your steganography host files carefully. Don't choose well known files, like those which come with a system install (like Windows sound, image of video files for example) and try to stay away from files which are publically available. Since they can compare the known files against yours and find discrepancies. Having a large collection of personal images that can be found nowhere else can help you here.
A better solution would be to ghost the hard drive when you get the laptop at your new job. Returning the computer to them in EXACTLY the same condition that it was given to you (data-wise) would then be trivial. How can they punish you for that? They can't. In fact, you can even prove that it IS in the same condition!
Be careful with Ghost though. It can work for you, but also work against you. Ghost does not work at forensic levels by default. Meaning it only copies files that are not deleted. That is why Ghost is so fast. If you have incriminating files on a drive and then restore a clean ghost image to that drive, some of your older incriminating files may remain on the old filesystem. This can be harder to restore from depending on what forensics software you use, but some software can do it easily. Interestingly, a cheapy file recovery program (Get Data Back) does an excellent job in that regard where some of the super expensive forensic analysis software even fails completely (since this is my industry I'll refrain from naming names:).
The safest way to use Ghost would be to zero out the drive and then restore the clean image. However if using a secure delete program is considered "damage", then using Ghost and/or zeroing out the drive could be considered much the same. The end result is practically the same, where you have lots of non-incriminating files, yet NO deleted files remain and instead there are lots of zeroes on the drive. It looks like a secure deleter configured for zeroing was used.
Ghost does have forensic level abilities as an option. But I usually use other programs for that assurance, since I'm not sure or confident in how it will react. For example, how will Ghost forensically restore an image that was saved without the forensic option set? Will it write zeroes where data is not required to be written? I could find out but I'd rather just use dd. dd images by the way, are accepted as forensically sound images and I know that the Forensic Took Kit at least accepts them.
If I were this poor guy, I would have removed the drive from the laptop and installed it into a machine which would not mount it as a system drive. I would then scan that drive for deleted files with a program which is able to securely delete deleted files selectively. I would carefully review which files are incriminating and then only securely delete them. This way, when a forensics person examines the drive, they will see that deleted files remain (so they can't prove that a secure deleter was used), there will be no evidence of a secure deleter being installed, because none was installed on THAT drive and of the deleted files which do remain, none are incriminating.
It seems to me that there might be a market for a secure deleter which 1/ does not need to be installed and 2/ is capable of selectively erasing file data (deleted or not), but not with zeroes or random data, but rather other file data randomly found around the same disk which would look like normal old, unincriminating deleted files or portions of files.
In the late 70's, my cool Mum took me to our friends house for a bit of a party. Not a childrens party, more of a get together for the adults, although I knew some children there. I was about 7. During the party, some of the adults played some poker with 1c and 2c coins. ; ) Australian, Bondi Beach. At the time I thought it was really cool that I was playing cards for money with these really cool adults. However when I got older, it became much cooler for me, since I found out that some were members of AC/DC (and some other Aussie band members).
Telco exchanges around the World are largely running on DC (last time I looked). From memory 50V DC provided by huge banks of 2V lead acid batteries, which are kept charged from an electricity supply from the street. This 50V DC being carried around the building through huge copper "bus bars" from memory which were about 1cm thick by maybe 15cm tall. We called them "buzz bars" because of the incredible power they could carry. All those batteries were capable of vaporizing a misplaced shifting spanner, no problem. I remember seeing warning photos of a guys hand, after he was careless with a shifting spanner. His hand looked like lightly cooked pork.
At any rate, with the amount of electrical gear in telco exchange buildings, they choose DC probably because it is efficient for the short power runs which they use within a building (no pun intended, short is bold because the DC voltage drop on these short runs does not pose a problem). However, since PC's use different voltages for different parts, +12, -12, +5, -5, +3.3, etc, DC to DC conversion is still required. Common computers as they currently exist (those used in server rooms, desktops and peoples homes) are not as suited to a single DC supply as telco equipment is and could only provide a very small efficiency gain. I don't see these sorts of computers being designed for this sort of supply, because they would be going back to specialist designs for those systems, which would be moving away from the economies of scale benefits which current server gear gains from using mainstream computer part designs.
If you set Linux for 24-bit desktop, the machine just pigs down to a crawl, doesn't matter if it's trying to get at the display memoy or not, the amount of access to RAM that is available is just about zero. But put it in 800x600 with 256 colors, and it just flies along (it's a 3 GHz machine, it should!)
Yes, I have never liked a portion of main memory being used as actual frame buffer memory. It must be one of the worst money grabbing cludges of a design the computer industry has ever seen. In good company with WinMODEMS and brain dead GDI printers. But that is expected more often the cheaper you go. I am surprised the old SCSI loving, Firewire pushing Apple, of all companies, would stoop that low.
If someone were to actually use this new Mac Mini at the highest advertised resolution of 1920x1200 with 24bit colour and a typical 60Hz (for LCD's), this equates to a CONSTANT bandwidth requirement from main memory of about 396Mbytes/sec for 3 bytes per pixel or about 527Mbytes/sec for 4 bytes per pixel (which is sometimes used for alignment performance advantages).
~400 to ~500 Mbytes/sec taken from your main memory bandwidth. Yikes. Even with that fast 667MHz DDR2 RAM that's a pretty hefty chunk.
What I would really like to know, is if the older surplus PPC Mini's are still available, possibly at a reduced cost? I would like another Mini as my home web and mail server, since the power is so low I wouldn't feel bad about leaving it on constantly (I would replace the HDD with CF and mostly run out of a ramdisk under OpenBSD). I'll have to watch eBay.
Windows has had what, like 200,000 Virus's in the last year? Apple has had two or three theoretical exploits that either require the user to run code by hand or else target services that most mac users don't turn on. Sounds like Apple is doing its job to me.
Why does Apple not pull out a big can 'o legal whoop ass? These claims by "say anything to sell product" Symantec are bogus. Surely this is illegal behaviour? They are trying to sell product under false pretenses.
Symantec speaking baddly of Macs should work for them both ways. Prevent people from switching away from the arch they sell most product for AND frighten Mac users into buying their crap.
They will only be able to demonize Mac's for so long, until people realise that they are harder to exploit on a large scale because they come with less insane defaults.
BTW, if you really REALLY want to fuck up your Mac install... install some Symantec products. A serious downgrade.
If I expect 0's 50% of the time from my questions and 1's the other 50%, then my computer can do half of its work while switched off! Now I somehow just have to figure out how to make the computer turn itself on when a 1 is expected. Or otherwise queue all the "zero work" to be done over night while the systems are "off" and leave the "ones work" for daily hours. Oh and the zero work should all be completed in zero seconds regardless of how much zero work there is to be done! I'm gunna be rich! I better go and patent this. Shhh, don't tell anyone.
Come to think of it, I have an old analog watch which is broken. It is however correct twice every 24 hours.
Maybe old analog phones. Modern digital phones are rated at a maximum output of 200 milliwatts. I've read that the typical output is somewhere between 1 milliwatt and 5 milliwatts. I've studied more about CDMA phones than other technologies, and I think they adjust the output power every 40 milliseconds, based on the signal strength of the receiver (tower).
Actually you are wrong. Some GSM digital phones DO get well above 1W. The specification in fact has the handsets limited to 2 Watts. And I have one which goes that high. Look a the GSM Wiki entry.
According to specifications for my old digital GSM Nokia 2110 (for just one example of a high power handset) and also according to the Nokia NetMonitor software, the 2110 can emit 2Watts on it's own. For a very long time, 2W and 600mW were the two typical maximum power levels used in GSM900 digital handheld mobile phones.
I can say that at least some Nokia phones are not capable of transmitting at less than 12mW and seemingly the GSM900 spec requires a minimum transmit power of 20mW to be used. Minimum, meaning the phone should not drop below that even though it is capable by design and by current call conditions.
I beleive these figures are the peak output power though and not the average. Since GSM has a time shared duty cycle, the average is lower.
Open Hardware to go with our Open Source Software?
This simply drops Linux and Open Source off the edge of the world.
Why? If the Open Hardware is not compatible with any other arch, then we'd just have a new target arch. If the Open Hardware is compatible, say with IA32 or some other popular arch, then we'd merely have some machines which might not be bleeding edge, but at least would be without TC. Also, we don't even have to use an FPGA if TC is kept out of the CPU and left in the motherboard chipset and firmware. I mentioned the use of FPGA's only as the worst case.
Also, consider DVD players. They have been available region free for a long time, from nations which will provide desired products as long as there is a market. The whole World will not just roll over and pander to the US. The EU will become stronger as the US continues to piss everyone off and the days of this sort of shit will be numbered. I hope.
That only applies to OEM copies of Windows, not boxed. Still sucks, I know.
If I have to change motherboards or upgrade overall to a better machine and I want to transfer my retail boxed copy of Windows XP Pro to the new machine, will I be able to do it without having to ring Microsoft and pay to talk to one of their trained monkeys?
Surely Microsoft are playing with more fire here with Apple doing so well and looking to do better with comparably performing machines. Especially if in the future Apple provide a Win32 API emulation layer like Wine to allow Win32 apps to run under OSX at approx native speeds (on average, I've seen performance benchmarks for Wine which vary from slower to even faster under Wine).
Open Hardware to go with our Open Source Software?
I imagine the smaller hardware shops like Soekris will become more popular and be able to ramp up production, become cheaper and more viable. I realise that Soekris make stuff for embedded and router type hardware, but surely there will always be desktop and laptop machines available without built in DRM?
Hmm, maybe some motherboards put out with some powerful FPGA's for the CPU and maybe some other parts for controllers and graphics.
Slashot readers discuss the idea that John C. Dvorak may be mentally retarded in a recent story: "The idea that John somehow became an IT journalist through sheer luck came to me from Yakov Epstein, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, who wrote to me convinced that the man was a fruity fruit loop. I was amused, but after mulling over various coincidences, I'm convinced he may be out of his fucking mind. This would be the most phenomenal acheivement in the history of computing science."
Open-apple + i (for get info) eliminates having to right or control click at all.:)
Just for the silliness...
I assume you meant option-apple + i. That is four button presses, as opposed to 3 for control clicking with a single mouse or 2 with a 2 or more button mouse. ; )~
Option-apple + i : Mouse click to select file (1), hold option (2) and hold apple (3) and then press i (4). Control clicking: Hold Control (1) and mouse click file (2), mouse click Get Info (3). Right clicking: Right mouse click file (1), mouse click Get Info (2).
Shit is this what happens when you become a Mac user?
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Indeed. And that hardware SIP devices start adopting it (some should be able to adopt it via firmware, not that the hardware manufacturers will actually DO that).
I hope my ATA has the grunt to do both the codec work and the crypto and they adopt this if it is ratified. I've seen some tables which outline the approximate CPU requirements of various codecs against various CPU architectures often used in embedded (like MIPS). Those tables are apparently intended for choosing CPU's for VoIP devices. I hope my ATA designers were not too cheap to have this crypto.
I can remember Phil's PGPfone which was released before VoIP was "the next big thing."
Me too. However try as I might, with a friend at the other end of a 28.8 connection and also locally in my home between two PC's with 100Mbit/s connections, I could not get anything better than short bursts of audio to either end. It seemed like a duty cycle of about 1 block of sound out of 5 or 10 blocks of silence. A conversation could not be made.
Did you have any luck with PGPfone? I tracked it down and tried it again years later with much faster PC's and had the same disappointing effect. I think I tried it with the V1 series however.
I hope a Zfone proxy is made so that hardware ATA's can be secured?
I read your linked blog entry and you are clearly not comparing equivalent items on either sides of your comparison.
First of all, yes you own that oil, but you also do own that CD. You don't own the design of that oil (assuming it is synthetic) and you also do not own the performance embodied within the recording stored on the CD. The labour of the mechanic doing the oil change is equivalent to the labour of having the CD's built and packaged and they do both incur static fees, although obviously economies of scale can be leveraged to great effect for the latter. The artists development and performance of their music is equivalent to the R&D of the design of the oil (obviously much more costly than a bunch of muso's making music).
As is typical though, analogies often don't work very well. Because the issues on both sides often don't mesh perfectly, even if the complexities on both sides do equate to about the same in total.
I agree that not being allowed to play a CD to others is ridiculous and not being able to sing Happy Birthday is absolutely ludicrous. However distributing material against what is allowed by that materials copyright terms, deprives all those involved in bringing that material to market, of income from a potential customer who should have purchased the material in a normal legal manner. There is a huge difference between a performance by artists and a bunch of folks singing happy Bday, so these are two things at opposite ends of sanity. Copyright working well and then copyright being abused. Obviously copyright laws should be revised to bring portions of them into reality, but The Pirate Bay and the like are obviously unreasonable on the opposite end of the insanity.
Are you going to go to the trouble of copying that synthetic oil and selling or giving it away to others? Of course not, that would be ridiculous, as is the analogy.
Protecting IP is about protecting the investment of time, effort and money that is put into developing something. That is important for those individuals involved and also important for technology to advance. People won't want to go to that trouble if it ends up being worth nothing to them in the end. Much of the technology you probably love so much, could not exist to the level where it currently is without the protection of IP. Certainly this is sometimes abused by corrupt people, but corrupt people will always corrupt systems for their own gain. Just because this sometimes happens in the World of IP does not make the protection of IP itself a bad thing.
I believe (and I write often about) that Intellectual Property
Lots of people write about various things, but that does not automatically make them correct, no matter how much they might write (take Dvorak for example). If a person cannot understand why the complexities of two issues prevent an analogy from working, then they are probably not fit to be ranting about either of those issues and then being taken seriously.
I don't believe in the right to force others to pay you residual income on past work.
You willingly do it all the time with almost every product you buy. BTW, the loose lawn-mowing analogy also misses the point. Mowing your own lawn is labour you do that is equivalent to labour for making the CD media, it is NOT equivalent to writing and performing the music. If you are capable of making that music, then do so, but no matter how hard you try, you are not going to perfectly replicate the best of U2. So if you want to enjoy their music at any time of your choosing, please pay them and the rest of the people who can make that happen for you legally.
You can connect several machines to one network port, you know.
People often like to have small machines with at least two NIC's for firewalls. External interface and Internal interface as a bare minimum. I have 5 NIC's in my Sun Ultra 10 firewall, all being used for seperate segments.
You're assuming that the company has a chain of possesion tracking procedure, and that the computer in question is recovered via it and sent straight out for forensic investigation.
If chain of custody can't be shown, the evidence should not be admissible. The chain of custody might not be able to be proven up to a point prior to forensics people gaining access to the machine, but forensic analysts who get the machine, should typically be able to determine when it was last used. If it was so much as switched ON AFTER the suspect lost possesion of that machine, that will go into their reports and the suspects council will push to have the evidence taken from that machine struck off from being used in court. That evidence would be deemed to have become contaminated and therefore could not be used.
The vast majority of companies don't have such procedures in place, an in the ones that do, chances are that it is not properly carried out most of the time.
I sometimes get called by companies who THINK something illegal MAY have happened and wish me to image a machine and find out what if anything did happen. They don't know for certain because they dare not look. They have other reasons to suspect something may be there. These are companies with IT departments who might be able to figure those details out. But these companies usually have lawyers which they consult, who typically would advise that the machine should not be looked at or used by anyone other than independent forensics people. If this procedure is not adhered to, chances are that the evidence will be inadmissible.
That's where keeping your mouth shut comes into play. I think the idea is to minimise the avenues of discovery until you can get a lawyer to handle that aspect of the situation, if needed. If the entire case boils down to wether the supplied passwords were correct, its going to be a tough case to make.
Forensics people may be able to determine when the encrypted files were last modified or accessed, depending on the crypto software as to whether it prevents time-stamps being updated etc. If they can show that the encrypted files were accessed recently leading up to the end of when the suspect had the machine, then suspect is likely to not be believed.
As for being treated as a hostile witness, if the AC takes the stand and testifies that s/he gave the correct password and doesn't know why it doesn't work any more, how is that hostile?
Well the star witness when being cross examined by the other side is going to be presumed to be hostile anyway. In my part of the World (au), a lawyer told me that a witness who is not willing to co-operate can be considered a hostile witness. But... "If they ask for the passphrase, make one up." looks hostile to me. Especially if he accessed that data shortly before loosing the machine and then claims that he can't remember the password or gives one which does not work. And "What did you do to it? You must have screwed something up." is just not going to fly when the forensic report details that the machine was not even switched ON after the suspect lost access to it.
I've found this method pretty effective to protect yourself against the situation described in TFA:
Use encryption wherever possible.
Don't tell a soul you are using encryption.
When it comes time to return the computer, don't volunteer any info about the encrypted data. If they ask for the passphrase, make one up.
When they come back to you later and tell you the passphrase doesn't work, you say, "It worked when I had possesion of the computer. What did you do to it? You must have screwed something up."
That's your story and you're sticking to it (OJ style).
So you've actually done that have you?
For these sorts of things to hold up in court, 3rd party independant computer forensics analysts are used. They first and foremost forensically image the drive using write blocking techniques and then make multiple copies, to go to both sides of the case and the court. Complete with hashes. The original computer is then LOCKED AWAY as evidence and the analysts start to work on only the images.
Those arguments just simply won't hold any water and you will be treated as a hostile witness. You can't just say something like "I forget" or start accusing the 3rd party independant analysts, because THEY are not on trial, their integrity is not in question and it only ends up making YOU look bad. These analysts are there to assist the court and typically have a history of assisting the courts in other cases. They are trusted. YOU also have a duty to assist the court. Pointing blame to a well trusted independant witness will get you no brownie points.
If you really want to get away with storing data in a secret and secure manner, you should use steganography WITH encryption (and never without), through the use of a program which does not need to be installed and is only ever run from external media which you own and control and can wipe and discard at any time if need be. I work in computer forensics and this is the one thing that I can see as being super secure when done properly.
If all they could hope to find is apparent noise (encrypted data) in all the places where noise is expected to be (within the noise floor of noisy file formats), then you should be fine. They can't say with any level of confidence that THAT "noise" is actually encrypted data, so they can't get past that first step. If you do this, make sure that you choose your steganography host files carefully. Don't choose well known files, like those which come with a system install (like Windows sound, image of video files for example) and try to stay away from files which are publically available. Since they can compare the known files against yours and find discrepancies. Having a large collection of personal images that can be found nowhere else can help you here.
A better solution would be to ghost the hard drive when you get the laptop at your new job. Returning the computer to them in EXACTLY the same condition that it was given to you (data-wise) would then be trivial. How can they punish you for that? They can't. In fact, you can even prove that it IS in the same condition!
Be careful with Ghost though. It can work for you, but also work against you. Ghost does not work at forensic levels by default. Meaning it only copies files that are not deleted. That is why Ghost is so fast. If you have incriminating files on a drive and then restore a clean ghost image to that drive, some of your older incriminating files may remain on the old filesystem. This can be harder to restore from depending on what forensics software you use, but some software can do it easily. Interestingly, a cheapy file recovery program (Get Data Back) does an excellent job in that regard where some of the super expensive forensic analysis software even fails completely (since this is my industry I'll refrain from naming names:).
The safest way to use Ghost would be to zero out the drive and then restore the clean image. However if using a secure delete program is considered "damage", then using Ghost and/or zeroing out the drive could be considered much the same. The end result is practically the same, where you have lots of non-incriminating files, yet NO deleted files remain and instead there are lots of zeroes on the drive. It looks like a secure deleter configured for zeroing was used.
Ghost does have forensic level abilities as an option. But I usually use other programs for that assurance, since I'm not sure or confident in how it will react. For example, how will Ghost forensically restore an image that was saved without the forensic option set? Will it write zeroes where data is not required to be written? I could find out but I'd rather just use dd. dd images by the way, are accepted as forensically sound images and I know that the Forensic Took Kit at least accepts them.
If I were this poor guy, I would have removed the drive from the laptop and installed it into a machine which would not mount it as a system drive. I would then scan that drive for deleted files with a program which is able to securely delete deleted files selectively. I would carefully review which files are incriminating and then only securely delete them. This way, when a forensics person examines the drive, they will see that deleted files remain (so they can't prove that a secure deleter was used), there will be no evidence of a secure deleter being installed, because none was installed on THAT drive and of the deleted files which do remain, none are incriminating.
It seems to me that there might be a market for a secure deleter which 1/ does not need to be installed and 2/ is capable of selectively erasing file data (deleted or not), but not with zeroes or random data, but rather other file data randomly found around the same disk which would look like normal old, unincriminating deleted files or portions of files.
how?
AC *lightningbolt* DC
In the late 70's, my cool Mum took me to our friends house for a bit of a party. Not a childrens party, more of a get together for the adults, although I knew some children there. I was about 7. During the party, some of the adults played some poker with 1c and 2c coins. ; ) Australian, Bondi Beach. At the time I thought it was really cool that I was playing cards for money with these really cool adults. However when I got older, it became much cooler for me, since I found out that some were members of AC/DC (and some other Aussie band members).
Telco exchanges around the World are largely running on DC (last time I looked). From memory 50V DC provided by huge banks of 2V lead acid batteries, which are kept charged from an electricity supply from the street. This 50V DC being carried around the building through huge copper "bus bars" from memory which were about 1cm thick by maybe 15cm tall. We called them "buzz bars" because of the incredible power they could carry. All those batteries were capable of vaporizing a misplaced shifting spanner, no problem. I remember seeing warning photos of a guys hand, after he was careless with a shifting spanner. His hand looked like lightly cooked pork.
At any rate, with the amount of electrical gear in telco exchange buildings, they choose DC probably because it is efficient for the short power runs which they use within a building (no pun intended, short is bold because the DC voltage drop on these short runs does not pose a problem). However, since PC's use different voltages for different parts, +12, -12, +5, -5, +3.3, etc, DC to DC conversion is still required. Common computers as they currently exist (those used in server rooms, desktops and peoples homes) are not as suited to a single DC supply as telco equipment is and could only provide a very small efficiency gain. I don't see these sorts of computers being designed for this sort of supply, because they would be going back to specialist designs for those systems, which would be moving away from the economies of scale benefits which current server gear gains from using mainstream computer part designs.
iPatch
ROFL.
Microsoft claims a lot of things.
If you set Linux for 24-bit desktop, the machine just pigs down to a crawl, doesn't matter if it's trying to get at the display memoy or not, the amount of access to RAM that is available is just about zero. But put it in 800x600 with 256 colors, and it just flies along (it's a 3 GHz machine, it should!)
Yes, I have never liked a portion of main memory being used as actual frame buffer memory. It must be one of the worst money grabbing cludges of a design the computer industry has ever seen. In good company with WinMODEMS and brain dead GDI printers. But that is expected more often the cheaper you go. I am surprised the old SCSI loving, Firewire pushing Apple, of all companies, would stoop that low.
If someone were to actually use this new Mac Mini at the highest advertised resolution of 1920x1200 with 24bit colour and a typical 60Hz (for LCD's), this equates to a CONSTANT bandwidth requirement from main memory of about 396Mbytes/sec for 3 bytes per pixel or about 527Mbytes/sec for 4 bytes per pixel (which is sometimes used for alignment performance advantages).
~400 to ~500 Mbytes/sec taken from your main memory bandwidth. Yikes. Even with that fast 667MHz DDR2 RAM that's a pretty hefty chunk.
What I would really like to know, is if the older surplus PPC Mini's are still available, possibly at a reduced cost? I would like another Mini as my home web and mail server, since the power is so low I wouldn't feel bad about leaving it on constantly (I would replace the HDD with CF and mostly run out of a ramdisk under OpenBSD). I'll have to watch eBay.
Windows has had what, like 200,000 Virus's in the last year? Apple has had two or three theoretical exploits that either require the user to run code by hand or else target services that most mac users don't turn on. Sounds like Apple is doing its job to me.
Why does Apple not pull out a big can 'o legal whoop ass? These claims by "say anything to sell product" Symantec are bogus. Surely this is illegal behaviour? They are trying to sell product under false pretenses.
Symantec speaking baddly of Macs should work for them both ways. Prevent people from switching away from the arch they sell most product for AND frighten Mac users into buying their crap.
They will only be able to demonize Mac's for so long, until people realise that they are harder to exploit on a large scale because they come with less insane defaults.
BTW, if you really REALLY want to fuck up your Mac install... install some Symantec products. A serious downgrade.
If I expect 0's 50% of the time from my questions and 1's the other 50%, then my computer can do half of its work while switched off! Now I somehow just have to figure out how to make the computer turn itself on when a 1 is expected. Or otherwise queue all the "zero work" to be done over night while the systems are "off" and leave the "ones work" for daily hours. Oh and the zero work should all be completed in zero seconds regardless of how much zero work there is to be done! I'm gunna be rich! I better go and patent this. Shhh, don't tell anyone.
Come to think of it, I have an old analog watch which is broken. It is however correct twice every 24 hours.
Maybe old analog phones. Modern digital phones are rated at a maximum output of 200 milliwatts. I've read that the typical output is somewhere between 1 milliwatt and 5 milliwatts. I've studied more about CDMA phones than other technologies, and I think they adjust the output power every 40 milliseconds, based on the signal strength of the receiver (tower).
Actually you are wrong. Some GSM digital phones DO get well above 1W. The specification in fact has the handsets limited to 2 Watts. And I have one which goes that high. Look a the GSM Wiki entry.
According to specifications for my old digital GSM Nokia 2110 (for just one example of a high power handset) and also according to the Nokia NetMonitor software, the 2110 can emit 2Watts on it's own. For a very long time, 2W and 600mW were the two typical maximum power levels used in GSM900 digital handheld mobile phones.
I can say that at least some Nokia phones are not capable of transmitting at less than 12mW and seemingly the GSM900 spec requires a minimum transmit power of 20mW to be used. Minimum, meaning the phone should not drop below that even though it is capable by design and by current call conditions.
I beleive these figures are the peak output power though and not the average. Since GSM has a time shared duty cycle, the average is lower.
I wonder how "recommended" it really is. I mean, you're recommended to give to the collections in church, but people give you dirty looks if you don't
Especially when you run away with the plate.
Kokomo.. didn't the Eagles sing something about that.. or was that somewhere in hawaii?
I think that was the Beach Boys. Although I think you're refering to Cocomug, which some of them might be sipping right now in their retirement home.
Open Hardware to go with our Open Source Software?
This simply drops Linux and Open Source off the edge of the world.
Why? If the Open Hardware is not compatible with any other arch, then we'd just have a new target arch. If the Open Hardware is compatible, say with IA32 or some other popular arch, then we'd merely have some machines which might not be bleeding edge, but at least would be without TC. Also, we don't even have to use an FPGA if TC is kept out of the CPU and left in the motherboard chipset and firmware. I mentioned the use of FPGA's only as the worst case.
Also, consider DVD players. They have been available region free for a long time, from nations which will provide desired products as long as there is a market. The whole World will not just roll over and pander to the US. The EU will become stronger as the US continues to piss everyone off and the days of this sort of shit will be numbered. I hope.
That only applies to OEM copies of Windows, not boxed. Still sucks, I know.
If I have to change motherboards or upgrade overall to a better machine and I want to transfer my retail boxed copy of Windows XP Pro to the new machine, will I be able to do it without having to ring Microsoft and pay to talk to one of their trained monkeys?
Surely Microsoft are playing with more fire here with Apple doing so well and looking to do better with comparably performing machines. Especially if in the future Apple provide a Win32 API emulation layer like Wine to allow Win32 apps to run under OSX at approx native speeds (on average, I've seen performance benchmarks for Wine which vary from slower to even faster under Wine).
What next?
Open Hardware to go with our Open Source Software?
I imagine the smaller hardware shops like Soekris will become more popular and be able to ramp up production, become cheaper and more viable. I realise that Soekris make stuff for embedded and router type hardware, but surely there will always be desktop and laptop machines available without built in DRM?
Hmm, maybe some motherboards put out with some powerful FPGA's for the CPU and maybe some other parts for controllers and graphics.
Surely the people can take the power back!
Slashot readers discuss the idea that John C. Dvorak may be mentally retarded in a recent story: "The idea that John somehow became an IT journalist through sheer luck came to me from Yakov Epstein, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, who wrote to me convinced that the man was a fruity fruit loop. I was amused, but after mulling over various coincidences, I'm convinced he may be out of his fucking mind. This would be the most phenomenal acheivement in the history of computing science."
Open-apple
Sorry, you meant the outlined Apple as opposed to the old outlined versus filled Apple.
So it's 3,3,2?
I really need to get to sleep. I think I've exceeded my stuff-up quotient for tonight.
Open-apple + i (for get info) eliminates having to right or control click at all. :)
Just for the silliness...
I assume you meant option-apple + i. That is four button presses, as opposed to 3 for control clicking with a single mouse or 2 with a 2 or more button mouse. ; )~
Option-apple + i : Mouse click to select file (1), hold option (2) and hold apple (3) and then press i (4).
Control clicking: Hold Control (1) and mouse click file (2), mouse click Get Info (3).
Right clicking: Right mouse click file (1), mouse click Get Info (2).
Shit is this what happens when you become a Mac user?