It's not like all of them are built around the stone-age MCS48 or MCS51 architecture; and if you visit current conferences on chip-level security then you will notice that the world indeed moved on since the 1970s.
I don't think it would be possible to extract keys from hardware,
What you think and what is possible does not necessarily match...
Obviously, you never heard about the whole BSkyB "war" about a decade ago. Even with later, well-implemented cards there still was a market to take a subscription card and just read the ROM using an electron microscope or whatever tools.
Expensive? Yes. But as long as there is a market... And I tell you something: I'd happily paypal 10 Euros to whereever when they provide me the current HD-DVD key in return so that I can play and convert the content I *bought* in whatever way I like.
Microsoft created the low end PC vendor market by taming all sorts of diverse bios, video cards, disks and peripherals.
You must be rather young -- or old enough that you start forgetting things.
(1) There were standardized platforms before the PC. Apple II would come to my mind, but also don't forget the CBM 2k/3k/4k/8k line of machines. What the PC in the end did was wiping out this wonderful heterogeneous world to install a monoculture. And yes, back then software standard existed so that you could take the Vizawrite file from machine X and import it on another Vizawrite running on machine Y. Btw, there even was a cross-platform operating system around which you might or might not remember as CP/M for the home consumer or Unix for the crowd with deeper pockets.
(2) Peripherals were already standardized before the PC. In fact, the PC started to disregard these standards by mingling the Shugart bus standard into which became the "PC floppy drive cable" or introducing IDE where SCSI was already an adopted standard. Heck, it even introduced an own (analog) joystick interface where the rest of the world adhered to Atari's de-facto standard of digital joysticks.
Microsoft did not create a "low end PC vendor market" as this market was already there -- we just called it "homecomputers" back then rather than "PCs". When the homecomputers (because of blatant failures in the management of various companies) didn't catch up with the technology development cycle, this void was filled by the PC which wasn't all that low-priced in the beginning anyway -- despite the fact that it was technologically inferior compared to modest homecomputers for quite some time.
What created the low end PC vendor market was IBM's failure to patent the BIOS and the PC architecture, opening the market for 3rd party PC board and chipset manufacturers. In the end, the PC platform won against the others because of its open architecture. Whatever component became obsolete could be exchanged.
But that was not Microsoft's achievement... Still in the late 1990s Microsoft was struggling to reach a level Apple, Atari and Commodore already had reached in the mid 1980s. Heck, even today they hardly come close to the look'n'feel of an Apple or the stability of a Unix machine.
Was Microsoft able to exploit its niche and become the world-dominating player in operating systems and office software? Definitely. But in no way they created the low-end PC vendor market.
That may be true for the US where the fuel prices were somewhat frozen on that level, hence people still drove their rusty old carburator-based, 6.3l engine, 4400lbs Yank Tanks.
In Germany, for instance, we faced a constant -- tax-driven -- raise of the fuel prices since the late 1980s. When I got my driver's license, I still paid EUR0.45 (DM0.89) per liter. It quickly rose to EUR0.54/0.61/0.77 (DM1.05/1.20/1.50) and was around EUR0.92 (DM1.80) at 1998 when they kicked in the "eco tax", i.e. an auto-increasing tax adding another EUR0.4 (DM0.07) per liter in each of the next 5 years bringing us to EUR1.03 (DM2.01) per liter.
So in 20 years the fuel price was more than doubled just by tax, but we also faced prices around DM1.80/l in the mid-80s when the Dollar exchange rate was around DM3.50... At 2001, the oil price started rising dramatically resulting in a peak price of EUR1.48 per liter. A level, which it right now already has reached again.
Does it matter to me? Not really. In 1989 I had a car which made about 400km out of the 50l. Now I'm driving a car that makes about 1000km out of the same amount. And no, this is not latest state-of-the-art technology but a car which is already 9 years old.
The US could have done the same. Instead, you are still obsessed with trucks and minivans, 5.7l hemi-powered engines, etc. And no, with modern car mechanics it doesn't really matter whether you have a 1.4l engine or a 3l engine, in case you want to kick in the high mileage of the average US driver.
Microsoft doesn't give a damn about some guy installing Ubuntu on his laptop. It cares about governments and corporations, it's major customer base, turning to OpenOffice and Linux.
Au contraire. It's not the governments and corporations which made Billy Boy the richest man on earth and two of his pals from good old Albuquerque times at least among the Top 20 billionaires. Sure, they still would be rather wealthy, but what made them filthy rich was something different.
It's the Microsoft tax paid by mom and pop and whoever buys a Brand X PC with the unavoidable Microsoft Windows preinstalled. It's the Microsoft tax, companies buy with their Brand X PCs even though they might have a volume license anyway, therefore paying double.
Would be my favorite idea. Work in a field for a couple of years, then learn new/other stuff, then maybe change the entire area of work.
Another thing is, that with people living longer (not to mention forever) the monetary system would break as everyone would be able to accumulate wealth and become filthy rich over a long enough period of time. Hence, inflation will have to rise in a similar way -- or we just switch over to a new system where unused, deposited money decays instead of accumulates.
Not to mention societies not being based on money anymore but the fun of doing things. Star Trek universe, here we come.
Our current life expectancy is already putting such a burden on our social security system. When will people realize that quality of life != quantity of life? How is our great-grandkids' generation supposed to support millions of supercentenarians?
Well, the point here is not to prolongue the life for the sake of staying merely alive, i.e. losing your mind and control over body functions, but instead staying *young*. What good is it to become 250 years old, when the last 180 years of that you spend in the clinic section of a retirement home not knowing what happened 5 minutes ago -- which is a good thing cause you don't remember that you just got new diapers cause you lost control over bladder and sphincter almost two centuries ago.
I wouldn't mind if my age would be biologically frozen at about 50 (I'm 35 now and I think that 15 years is about as fast as possible in developing such an anti-age cure) where I then have another 50-70 years of staying 50. If they can make it within 5 years, even better. As a 50-year-old becoming 100-120 I wouldn't be a burden on the social security system or medicare, as I will be still able to maintain a job -- or just retire and live self-sufficient after I accumulated enough money.
With a longer and healthier lifespan maybe the interest of humankind then changes back from the fast buck to things which are profitable to the entire race, like basic research (which might result in a useful product 50 years later), keeping this planet inhabitable, exploring the solar system and space, and spread the human race to some more planets.
Even if they manage to build a 19-atoms transistor, I figure that leakage will turn out to be a way bigger problem than it is already today.
There was a time when (almost) all that counted was the switching power. These days leakage power is coming close, from a certain temperature on it becomes even dominant. Now imagine how this picture will look like at 4nm when no significant fabrication technology change happens.
The human body wasn't meant to last for 80 years. That's way past warranty [...] We're actually more built for about 40-50 years.
That's not true. The human body has a designed-in lifetime of about 120 years. This is, what you can reach with most optimal medical treatment, going beyond 120 would requiring some more magic. The 40-50 years you're talking about is the life span you get if you really ill-treat your body, mostly "food abuse". Not so much putting too much of everything in (although this is bad also), but putting to little of certain stuff in. Or living in cloaca.
You shouldn't take modern misbehavior and declare it as the norm. People living in slums, people having no money for decent food -- here you will find the 40-50 year life span, yes. But with just appropriate food and proper living conditions, people were able to live way past that age -- yes, already at the dark ages of middle age and also during Roman or Greek times.
Yes, people died younger back then as well. Just like they do today. Despite all advances in medicine, people still die at age 40, 50 of heart attacks etc.
Regarding (1) and (2), you gotta replace the pickup of your CD player as well, although, admittedly, on properly designed players it takes a tad longer. Last year I had to perform this stunt on my 1988 Sony CDP470; before, I already fiddled with the laser diode's current, tracking, and focus but this didn't help for long -- and the wear-out problems came back and got worse.
Anyway, 1988-2006 is a fairly nice period. A pickup is, depending on your machine and from who you buy, an item costing between $20 and $120.
With modern equipment, especially those integrated-into-anything CD players you will hardly achieve that as they are specifically designed to wear out (i.e. the laser diode is always powered on, not only when you actually play the CD, current set just a tad to high, etc.). Sometimes you can just install your favorite OEM drive as a replacement, sometimes you won't even get laser pick-ups for sensible prices.
Bottom line: CD players wear out, too. Especially the cheap ones.
Regarding (5), Btw, also the CD is a rather delicate media. Just scratch it on the wrong side. Or bend it a bit, so that improperly fabricated ones start to intake some air and let the reflector rot away. Or just scratch it on the bottom side and hear your CD player jump or hang just like a record would do. The only pro here is, that I eventually be able to repair such a damaged CD, something which would be rather hard with a record.
(4) is a moot point. Just attach a RIAA preamp, if your amplifier doesn't support records.
And concerning (3), you can also introduce hum with *any* sort of audio equipment once you manage to get ground loops. They may come from your PC, your mixer, heck, even from a CD player which is powered from an outlet which belongs to a circuit different from the one you power the amp with.
Finally, (6): Frankly, in times of MP3 players I don't care for portable devices involving mechanics, be it the good old cassette walkman, a CD walkman, or a portable record player.
No exceptions, no "most of the time" situation, no "power users only" weasel words. Config files and command lines are OK for developers, but not for mainstream users -- end of story.
Which is why DOS and Windows became so utterly popular. Where other platforms already offered plug'n'play (called e.g. "AutoConfig") and had full graphical system administration, the DOS and Windows crowds still competed on the smallest, but most complete CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT resulting in the least memory pre-occupation in the oh-so-precious 640kB memory space.
Read my lips: mainstream users don't care about easy configurability. As long as basic tasks like adding/removing USB devices works out of the box, that's all they care for.
For anything else mainstream users then and now let their "power user friends" do the administration for them.
...then make sure that everything is channeled via ssh to an outside machine.
You don't want people to see that you're visiting nasty web sites? Well, set up a machine outside running Squid, drill a little hole into the firewall using ssh to connect the outside Squid with your favorite local port, which you now use as your web proxy.
And yes, this is also a wise thing to do even if you *not* visit nasty web sites but just sit in a company network which has an overly sensitive firewall e.g. blocking your attempts to search for a connector's "sex" and reporting you to the company authorities...
In summary: Your statistical analysis on a sample size of one showed a 100% failure rate, so Samsung are crap. You found some other people also had failed Samsung drives, so Samsung are crap.
Well, I had a failure. Thinking about handing it in for the extended warranty which Samsung is nice enough to give (and which made me buying the thing cause a company wouldn't give a 5-year warranty when they aren't convinced about their stuff) I made a quick search and discovered that indeed this very model *was* flawed. Just like the ZIP drive was flawed in a way that quite a number of people experienced the "click of death".
I'm not sure how big a statistical sample must be for you that it counts as valid and not just being some ranting of a single person...
I had such a drive. Started making ticking noises while getting dog slow. SMART reported zilch... No reallocation count going up, no seek times going up, nothing... And just before I could copy it to another drive, it died.
So much for ever buying a Samsung drive again, as I noticed after a short search on the net that I'm not the only one experiencing such problems.
Over here, you can't avoid the sales tax, not even by accidentally forgetting to declare. If you order inside the EU, you pay the sales tax of the originating country (which makes it favorable these days to mail-order things in Luxembourg as they still stick to 16% sales tax). If the destination country (i.e. the orderer's country) should have a lower sales tax, then you will get back the original sales tax, then pay the local sales tax.
If you import from outside EU, your order will be held back by customs anyway where you then have to pick it up and pay import tax (=sales tax) plus eventual customs fees. Some companies (like Amazon) pre-process that for you so that you pay everything (including import tax & customs) in advance and it is mailed directly to you.
This has gotten rather nasty; when I got a pair of boots *as a gift* I never the less had to pick it up, declare it, and pay tax/customs for anything that exceeds 45 Euro in value.
Not sure whether it is brain-dead. In a world of gross-pricing you also never know how much of tax is on it -- too few people have a look at the end price to see how much tax is included. That makes it easier for politicians to raise taxes because the constant "darn, it said it costs $X, but I had to pay $X*1.2 in the end!" feeling is missing.
Besides, in the US you have this wonderful law so that you have to pay no sales tax on trans-state sales (at least true for mail/internet orders), so apart from your daily groceries there is hardly any need for paying big bucks on electronics etc.
Now some people from Microsoft gets assigned to implement this new feature, and for extra credit also write a patent application (or submit the idea to the people who write the patent application).
Well, yes, but you know that it's the company's internal and externally hired patent lawyers who check (1) whether that idea is patentworthy and (2) whether it is sensible to go the patent trail, i.e. it is *their* job to ensure that the patent has at least some remote substance and will not be dismissed by *obvious* prior-art claims right away.
> The real news was back when the HD-DVD protection was broken.
Well, that still remains to be news. As of now, the protection remains valid. It's just a player software which got broken (or was designed so anyway...) so that it was possible rip decryption keys from memory.
It's like calling a lock broken cause you were able to pick the keys out of the owner's pockets.
But: It shows that HD-DVD protection is inevitably doomed, because people will *always* be able to do that as long as there is player software in the wild. It might take longer in the future with that very software version getting its key revoked and future versions taking more caution, but it still will be possible.
Haven't read the AACS spec: to my understanding those player keys are so-called group keys. So, in principal, all it would take is to get hold of the group key generation algorithm, then AACS is doomed because they can't change the group algorithm without rendering *all* players out there useless.
The CD was safe until we started to accumulate several Gigabytes of storage space. Noone was going to distribute CDs when a single CD would occupy at least a third of the entire drive, not to mention the fact that every measly Megabyte travels at least one minute via Modem.
The latter again was true for the DVD, which was safe until more storage, bigger bandwidth, and also enough CPU power to en- and decode the rips was there: Here, I'd say, one driving factor also was that people were pissed with region codes and CSS, some of them seeing copying/distributing as a way to express their feelings towards such methods.
Now with the HD-DVD we had the storage, we had the bandwidth (what are 19GB these days of flat rates...), and it was *all* about the sports, i.e. how and when the encryption will be at least circumvented. (Still needs to be broken, but then, it's broken by design -- I severely doubt that consumers will tolerate key revocations for standalone players.)
There was a time when I sat down at my computer, switched it on -- and could start programming (or loading programs) right away. I could also switch it off at any time without damaging some precious file system.
We laughed at you PC guys cause you had to "boot" your machine prior to doing anything useful with it. (Later we bought Amigas or Atari STs and were in the same camp.)
Maybe it's time to go back. Most people need a browser (file, graphics, web), an e-mail client, a DVD/CD/MP3 player. So just slam that -- together with some stripped down multitasking OS (heck, you don't even need multiuser on the average Joe's machine, they would run anything as root or in administrator mode, just because...) -- into a nice FlashROM, add a harddrive and a DVD player and that's about it.
Wait a minute.
Those things were around about 15 years ago. But neither the CDTV nor the CD32 were a success. So much for the price of being ahead of time.
By the time people have hard drives this huge, I bet there will be even better lossless compression algorithms available for video and audio data. I don't know why someone would want to store huge amounts of A/V data WITHOUT using some sort of compression. It just becomes silly after a certain point.
I don't now why I should bother with *lossless* compression especially on streaming media. That will, if ever, give compression rates of 25-50%, taking a buttload of computation power to compress. Lossless compression works only on data with low levels of entropy such as text or stupid zero-filled formats coming from Redmond.
All what lossless compression can do is finding a more suitable alphabet to code this very data into, and identifying identical/repeating regions so that only "repeat this!" is stored instead of the actual data.
There was a time when even 25% compression rate was a great thing cause it made things fit on a 170kB/360kB/720kB/1.44MB disk drive, but today it's just not worth the hassle anymore -- only for very big data, which usually are multimedia files and therefore a very bad application for lossless compression algorithms.
Do you care whether a file has 2MB or 1MB these days? I don't. It takes a second longer to download, but apart from that you don't feel the file size anymore. You do care, though, if a movie can be shrunk from 4GB down to 700MB -- cause then it fits on a CD, cause then it takes just a fraction of time to download, to burn, plus 3.3GB is a difference you still feel on today's harddrives.
As for lossy compression, there is always a catch. I'm one of the people out there who are able to actually hear MP3 artifacts. I also easily spot DCT-related artifacts. Besides, lossy-compressed data is harder to postprocess. (If you want to hear some really strange effect, do a 128kbit-MP3-coding of Art of Noise's "Moments in Love" and feed it through a Hush surround sound processor. However, these side-effects are not always that pleasant/interesting.)
So, to make it short: you don't want to archive in a lossy format, cause when the newer, better format appears, you transcoding makes no sense anymore cause you're stuck with the limitations of your original format. Whatever bad that format did to your data will remain. You can't "repair" lossy-compressed data. And no, low-pass-filtering ("blurring" for you video guys) is no option.
In a couple of years we all are networked with gigabit fibers, we have several Terabytes home storage. Then we just don't care about these 3.3GB as we today don't care whether a file is 1 or 2MB in size. By then we probably care that a HD++ video takes just 50GB instead of 300GB...
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Depends on what you consider a smartcard.
It's not like all of them are built around the stone-age MCS48 or MCS51 architecture; and if you visit current conferences on chip-level security then you will notice that the world indeed moved on since the 1970s.
What you think and what is possible does not necessarily match...
Obviously, you never heard about the whole BSkyB "war" about a decade ago. Even with later, well-implemented cards there still was a market to take a subscription card and just read the ROM using an electron microscope or whatever tools.
Expensive? Yes. But as long as there is a market... And I tell you something: I'd happily paypal 10 Euros to whereever when they provide me the current HD-DVD key in return so that I can play and convert the content I *bought* in whatever way I like.
(1) There were standardized platforms before the PC. Apple II would come to my mind, but also don't forget the CBM 2k/3k/4k/8k line of machines. What the PC in the end did was wiping out this wonderful heterogeneous world to install a monoculture. And yes, back then software standard existed so that you could take the Vizawrite file from machine X and import it on another Vizawrite running on machine Y. Btw, there even was a cross-platform operating system around which you might or might not remember as CP/M for the home consumer or Unix for the crowd with deeper pockets.
(2) Peripherals were already standardized before the PC. In fact, the PC started to disregard these standards by mingling the Shugart bus standard into which became the "PC floppy drive cable" or introducing IDE where SCSI was already an adopted standard. Heck, it even introduced an own (analog) joystick interface where the rest of the world adhered to Atari's de-facto standard of digital joysticks.
Microsoft did not create a "low end PC vendor market" as this market was already there -- we just called it "homecomputers" back then rather than "PCs". When the homecomputers (because of blatant failures in the management of various companies) didn't catch up with the technology development cycle, this void was filled by the PC which wasn't all that low-priced in the beginning anyway -- despite the fact that it was technologically inferior compared to modest homecomputers for quite some time.
What created the low end PC vendor market was IBM's failure to patent the BIOS and the PC architecture, opening the market for 3rd party PC board and chipset manufacturers. In the end, the PC platform won against the others because of its open architecture. Whatever component became obsolete could be exchanged.
But that was not Microsoft's achievement... Still in the late 1990s Microsoft was struggling to reach a level Apple, Atari and Commodore already had reached in the mid 1980s. Heck, even today they hardly come close to the look'n'feel of an Apple or the stability of a Unix machine.
Was Microsoft able to exploit its niche and become the world-dominating player in operating systems and office software? Definitely. But in no way they created the low-end PC vendor market.
That may be true for the US where the fuel prices were somewhat frozen on that level, hence people still drove their rusty old carburator-based, 6.3l engine, 4400lbs Yank Tanks.
In Germany, for instance, we faced a constant -- tax-driven -- raise of the fuel prices since the late 1980s. When I got my driver's license, I still paid EUR0.45 (DM0.89) per liter. It quickly rose to EUR0.54/0.61/0.77 (DM1.05/1.20/1.50) and was around EUR0.92 (DM1.80) at 1998 when they kicked in the "eco tax", i.e. an auto-increasing tax adding another EUR0.4 (DM0.07) per liter in each of the next 5 years bringing us to EUR1.03 (DM2.01) per liter.
So in 20 years the fuel price was more than doubled just by tax, but we also faced prices around DM1.80/l in the mid-80s when the Dollar exchange rate was around DM3.50... At 2001, the oil price started rising dramatically resulting in a peak price of EUR1.48 per liter. A level, which it right now already has reached again.
Does it matter to me? Not really. In 1989 I had a car which made about 400km out of the 50l. Now I'm driving a car that makes about 1000km out of the same amount. And no, this is not latest state-of-the-art technology but a car which is already 9 years old.
The US could have done the same. Instead, you are still obsessed with trucks and minivans, 5.7l hemi-powered engines, etc. And no, with modern car mechanics it doesn't really matter whether you have a 1.4l engine or a 3l engine, in case you want to kick in the high mileage of the average US driver.
Au contraire. It's not the governments and corporations which made Billy Boy the richest man on earth and two of his pals from good old Albuquerque times at least among the Top 20 billionaires. Sure, they still would be rather wealthy, but what made them filthy rich was something different.
It's the Microsoft tax paid by mom and pop and whoever buys a Brand X PC with the unavoidable Microsoft Windows preinstalled. It's the Microsoft tax, companies buy with their Brand X PCs even though they might have a volume license anyway, therefore paying double.
Another thing is, that with people living longer (not to mention forever) the monetary system would break as everyone would be able to accumulate wealth and become filthy rich over a long enough period of time. Hence, inflation will have to rise in a similar way -- or we just switch over to a new system where unused, deposited money decays instead of accumulates.
Not to mention societies not being based on money anymore but the fun of doing things. Star Trek universe, here we come.
I wouldn't mind if my age would be biologically frozen at about 50 (I'm 35 now and I think that 15 years is about as fast as possible in developing such an anti-age cure) where I then have another 50-70 years of staying 50. If they can make it within 5 years, even better. As a 50-year-old becoming 100-120 I wouldn't be a burden on the social security system or medicare, as I will be still able to maintain a job -- or just retire and live self-sufficient after I accumulated enough money.
With a longer and healthier lifespan maybe the interest of humankind then changes back from the fast buck to things which are profitable to the entire race, like basic research (which might result in a useful product 50 years later), keeping this planet inhabitable, exploring the solar system and space, and spread the human race to some more planets.
Because you read the wrong publications. Try IEEE and ACM digital library.
Doug Burger's work is known to computer scientists for years...
Even if they manage to build a 19-atoms transistor, I figure that leakage will turn out to be a way bigger problem than it is already today.
There was a time when (almost) all that counted was the switching power. These days leakage power is coming close, from a certain temperature on it becomes even dominant. Now imagine how this picture will look like at 4nm when no significant fabrication technology change happens.
You shouldn't take modern misbehavior and declare it as the norm. People living in slums, people having no money for decent food -- here you will find the 40-50 year life span, yes. But with just appropriate food and proper living conditions, people were able to live way past that age -- yes, already at the dark ages of middle age and also during Roman or Greek times.
Yes, people died younger back then as well. Just like they do today. Despite all advances in medicine, people still die at age 40, 50 of heart attacks etc.
Regarding (1) and (2), you gotta replace the pickup of your CD player as well, although, admittedly, on properly designed players it takes a tad longer. Last year I had to perform this stunt on my 1988 Sony CDP470; before, I already fiddled with the laser diode's current, tracking, and focus but this didn't help for long -- and the wear-out problems came back and got worse.
Anyway, 1988-2006 is a fairly nice period. A pickup is, depending on your machine and from who you buy, an item costing between $20 and $120.
With modern equipment, especially those integrated-into-anything CD players you will hardly achieve that as they are specifically designed to wear out (i.e. the laser diode is always powered on, not only when you actually play the CD, current set just a tad to high, etc.). Sometimes you can just install your favorite OEM drive as a replacement, sometimes you won't even get laser pick-ups for sensible prices.
Bottom line: CD players wear out, too. Especially the cheap ones.
Regarding (5), Btw, also the CD is a rather delicate media. Just scratch it on the wrong side. Or bend it a bit, so that improperly fabricated ones start to intake some air and let the reflector rot away. Or just scratch it on the bottom side and hear your CD player jump or hang just like a record would do. The only pro here is, that I eventually be able to repair such a damaged CD, something which would be rather hard with a record.
(4) is a moot point. Just attach a RIAA preamp, if your amplifier doesn't support records.
And concerning (3), you can also introduce hum with *any* sort of audio equipment once you manage to get ground loops. They may come from your PC, your mixer, heck, even from a CD player which is powered from an outlet which belongs to a circuit different from the one you power the amp with.
Finally, (6): Frankly, in times of MP3 players I don't care for portable devices involving mechanics, be it the good old cassette walkman, a CD walkman, or a portable record player.
Maybe it's just that we're more anal as in "leck mich am Arsch" :)
Read my lips: mainstream users don't care about easy configurability. As long as basic tasks like adding/removing USB devices works out of the box, that's all they care for.
For anything else mainstream users then and now let their "power user friends" do the administration for them.
...then make sure that everything is channeled via ssh to an outside machine.
You don't want people to see that you're visiting nasty web sites? Well, set up a machine outside running Squid, drill a little hole into the firewall using ssh to connect the outside Squid with your favorite local port, which you now use as your web proxy.
And yes, this is also a wise thing to do even if you *not* visit nasty web sites but just sit in a company network which has an overly sensitive firewall e.g. blocking your attempts to search for a connector's "sex" and reporting you to the company authorities...
I'm not sure how big a statistical sample must be for you that it counts as valid and not just being some ranting of a single person...
So much for ever buying a Samsung drive again, as I noticed after a short search on the net that I'm not the only one experiencing such problems.
Nasty.
Over here, you can't avoid the sales tax, not even by accidentally forgetting to declare. If you order inside the EU, you pay the sales tax of the originating country (which makes it favorable these days to mail-order things in Luxembourg as they still stick to 16% sales tax). If the destination country (i.e. the orderer's country) should have a lower sales tax, then you will get back the original sales tax, then pay the local sales tax.
If you import from outside EU, your order will be held back by customs anyway where you then have to pick it up and pay import tax (=sales tax) plus eventual customs fees. Some companies (like Amazon) pre-process that for you so that you pay everything (including import tax & customs) in advance and it is mailed directly to you.
This has gotten rather nasty; when I got a pair of boots *as a gift* I never the less had to pick it up, declare it, and pay tax/customs for anything that exceeds 45 Euro in value.
Not sure whether it is brain-dead. In a world of gross-pricing you also never know how much of tax is on it -- too few people have a look at the end price to see how much tax is included. That makes it easier for politicians to raise taxes because the constant "darn, it said it costs $X, but I had to pay $X*1.2 in the end!" feeling is missing.
Besides, in the US you have this wonderful law so that you have to pay no sales tax on trans-state sales (at least true for mail/internet orders), so apart from your daily groceries there is hardly any need for paying big bucks on electronics etc.
I wish we had the same in the EU.
Boy, would I love to have just 10% sales tax. In Germany, they just cranked it up to 19% this January.
> The real news was back when the HD-DVD protection was broken.
Well, that still remains to be news. As of now, the protection remains valid. It's just a player software which got broken (or was designed so anyway...) so that it was possible rip decryption keys from memory.
It's like calling a lock broken cause you were able to pick the keys out of the owner's pockets.
But: It shows that HD-DVD protection is inevitably doomed, because people will *always* be able to do that as long as there is player software in the wild. It might take longer in the future with that very software version getting its key revoked and future versions taking more caution, but it still will be possible.
Haven't read the AACS spec: to my understanding those player keys are so-called group keys. So, in principal, all it would take is to get hold of the group key generation algorithm, then AACS is doomed because they can't change the group algorithm without rendering *all* players out there useless.
Could anyone shed a bit of light here?
Is this news?
The CD was safe until we started to accumulate several Gigabytes of storage space. Noone was going to distribute CDs when a single CD would occupy at least a third of the entire drive, not to mention the fact that every measly Megabyte travels at least one minute via Modem.
The latter again was true for the DVD, which was safe until more storage, bigger bandwidth, and also enough CPU power to en- and decode the rips was there: Here, I'd say, one driving factor also was that people were pissed with region codes and CSS, some of them seeing copying/distributing as a way to express their feelings towards such methods.
Now with the HD-DVD we had the storage, we had the bandwidth (what are 19GB these days of flat rates...), and it was *all* about the sports, i.e. how and when the encryption will be at least circumvented. (Still needs to be broken, but then, it's broken by design -- I severely doubt that consumers will tolerate key revocations for standalone players.)
We laughed at you PC guys cause you had to "boot" your machine prior to doing anything useful with it. (Later we bought Amigas or Atari STs and were in the same camp.)
Maybe it's time to go back. Most people need a browser (file, graphics, web), an e-mail client, a DVD/CD/MP3 player. So just slam that -- together with some stripped down multitasking OS (heck, you don't even need multiuser on the average Joe's machine, they would run anything as root or in administrator mode, just because...) -- into a nice FlashROM, add a harddrive and a DVD player and that's about it.
Wait a minute.
Those things were around about 15 years ago. But neither the CDTV nor the CD32 were a success. So much for the price of being ahead of time.
I don't now why I should bother with *lossless* compression especially on streaming media. That will, if ever, give compression rates of 25-50%, taking a buttload of computation power to compress. Lossless compression works only on data with low levels of entropy such as text or stupid zero-filled formats coming from Redmond.
All what lossless compression can do is finding a more suitable alphabet to code this very data into, and identifying identical/repeating regions so that only "repeat this!" is stored instead of the actual data.
There was a time when even 25% compression rate was a great thing cause it made things fit on a 170kB/360kB/720kB/1.44MB disk drive, but today it's just not worth the hassle anymore -- only for very big data, which usually are multimedia files and therefore a very bad application for lossless compression algorithms.
Do you care whether a file has 2MB or 1MB these days? I don't. It takes a second longer to download, but apart from that you don't feel the file size anymore. You do care, though, if a movie can be shrunk from 4GB down to 700MB -- cause then it fits on a CD, cause then it takes just a fraction of time to download, to burn, plus 3.3GB is a difference you still feel on today's harddrives.
As for lossy compression, there is always a catch. I'm one of the people out there who are able to actually hear MP3 artifacts. I also easily spot DCT-related artifacts. Besides, lossy-compressed data is harder to postprocess. (If you want to hear some really strange effect, do a 128kbit-MP3-coding of Art of Noise's "Moments in Love" and feed it through a Hush surround sound processor. However, these side-effects are not always that pleasant/interesting.)
So, to make it short: you don't want to archive in a lossy format, cause when the newer, better format appears, you transcoding makes no sense anymore cause you're stuck with the limitations of your original format. Whatever bad that format did to your data will remain. You can't "repair" lossy-compressed data. And no, low-pass-filtering ("blurring" for you video guys) is no option.
In a couple of years we all are networked with gigabit fibers, we have several Terabytes home storage. Then we just don't care about these 3.3GB as we today don't care whether a file is 1 or 2MB in size. By then we probably care that a HD++ video takes just 50GB instead of 300GB...