Seriously, I have no pity at all for these immensely stupid people who broke the law and now are being punished financially. I think it's fantastic. I can't wait for them to ramp it up further.
I'm making a deal with you guys. With Webslum 3, I am going to try to find a way encrypt all access logs and user directories. The
only people who will ever know what's on your site and what's been downloaded from it is YOU. The feds can subpoena all they like: Ican't give them records I don't keep.
Oh, and IM me for access to my major elite 150 gigabyte music server. Email me to join my mixology club (one free CD of rocking
music in the mail every month, out of consanguine kindness). Gonna get my rocks off before donning these Sennheisers means prison.
It is my opinion that if your prize your privacy so much that you can't voluntary give it up, you're
probably paranoid on an anti-social level.
Quoting somebody named Dasmegabyte: "I mean, there's paranoia, and then there's preparation." It is not likely in any given day that the data you in your naivity so cheerfully disclose about you, for few quids, will be used against you. But when it happens, you will wish you had some foresight.
Or, no licence means your IP will be blocked/marked as such.
Don't be so harsh. Make a mandatory minimum knowledge standard for helpdesk access; if anybody without the "licence" calls any kind of techsupport, the support person is authorized to hang the phone on their discretion, without any repercussions. That way the dangerous systems die out on their own. Remember, it's mostly Windows.
As a bonus, the more knowledgeable people, who usually know more than the helpdesks, won't have to have to cope with yet another piece of already annoyingly big bureaucracy. (Shooting a bureaucrat should be a justifiable self-defense.)
Inside your own body (Hey, you can live quite a while with your digestive organs carefully removed and replaced with explosives, and these people have proven themselves willing to die for their cause)?
Better: Use somebody fat. Removal of body fat by liposuction is a well-known low-risk technology.
You can improvise a sharp blade by tearing apart a Coke can. Last time I flew, such cans were commonly served. A plastic cup can provide sharp shards that can serve as a pointed blade; lousy one, but I won't want to have it against my jugular artery. And then there are those pesky karate black belts...
*Anything* can become a weapon. The airport issue shouldn't be as much how to prevent bringing anything that can be a weapon on board. Keep guns and explosives and long knives out, and the rest should be covered by incident response policies (also known as "throw a blanket on him and beat him senseless").
Alternatively, drug the passengers to sleep before the takeoff and handle them like cargo. They will need less space, would pose less threat, will be less bitchy at the stewards, and there will be cost savings in catering and maintenance of in-flight amusement (movie/music) systems.
They can only get away with it when the people just don't care.
And don't have an alternative system of their own. Which in turn makes boycotts much easier.
On a side note, the technology is impractical - buffering doesn't matter - unless the stream is multicasted, a large enough group will either bring down the server/s, or impose a huge bill for bandwidth.
PeerCast. Somebody suggested it here earlier too. Or capture the stream to a file and Bittorrent (or Freenet) it out - not exactly realtime, but close to that.
It may catch on with the tech crowd. However, someone has to pay for the bandwidth, and I can't imagine it being reliable, so...
Better than nothing, and gives immediate results. Good enough buffering could even make it quite reliable.
You want to end this "We bought exclusive rights for North America" crap? Do it the ole fashioned way - fight through congress, by sending letters to the companies, by boycotting as much as you can (since in these days of corporate owned everything, you're bound to boycott too much for it to be practical).
Congress is bought. Companies will either throw your letter away or hire a crisis PR specialist. Boycott product A, buy B instead, later figure out that B is rebranded A.
The old ways don't work anymore, we are on our own. But we have the technology, so it isn't all that bleak.
The EU will be an Islamofacist regime within 10 or 20 years anyway.
As the unwilling resident of the EU (I didn't pick it, it grew around me, I voted against), I am not worrying about islamofascism. I am worrying about fascism.
I can't wait. I will laugh and laugh and laugh.
And you won't dare to not laugh, because then your government would put you on a no-fly list.
You need to dissolve only the magnetic layer, which is usually a metal oxide. However, there is a problem there, the plates are covered by a thin protective layer, either some polymer, or glass. The acid will have to eat through this passivation. Perhaps addition of a suitable organic solvent (for polymers) or hydrogen fluoric acid (may be even just a fluoride, HF will be created naturally by the other strong acids in the mixture).
Balls yeah. Now let's go one further by suggesting this: Elected officials must be constantly monitored, and audiovisual recordings of all things that the person does during the course of his job should be presrved in an archive for posterity.
In other words, do to them like they do to us with the "security cameras" metastasing all over the streets and data retention of telco logs.
But back to the original issue. Their political speeches can be considered a "work for hire", where the hiring party is the People. Hence the speech should automatically go to public domain.
If the corporation can own the products of its employees, why shouldn't the people own the products of their politicians?
Local smokers are getting irritated with the warning labels. The most recent fashion is stickers with alternative texts to be glued over the original warnings. See here.
If your computer is fast enough, great, but shut the hell up about underclocking, it was a joke when the first guy mentioned it, and no one needs to be taking it seriously....
You may want to lower the thermal output and power consumption, possibly quite dramatically. You may want to prolong the lifetime of your CPU - with the current densities in the modern chips the electromigration effects start to show up in few years, and lowering the currents should reduce this problem.
Overclocking gives you higher speed. Underclocking gives you higher reliability, lower thermal output, and higher lifetime. Pick what you need.
Another possibility. A "carpet" of balls, with small motors to spin them in X-Y. Kind of a trackball with motors instead of sensors. Considering we won't need them to be controlled individually, we'd need just two engines for the whole board, and a grid of perpendicular pairs of axes to put the balls on, controlled by the motors. The balls would then sit in the intersections of the pairs of the shafts.
This would work for straightline-movement only, though. For things like spinning you would need to either control the balls individually, or at least in groups significantly smaller than the whole surface. (Or spin the whole base.)
The feedback for the motors then can be maintained by optical tracking of the movements of the person, or by torsion sensors in the axes.
But even nicer is a system that fits in a RJ45 jack.
When they hit the market I'm getting a job as a cabling contractor:)
Don't worry about the size and about RJ45s. Build such toy into an Ethernet switch, then cause the original one to fail in order to replace it with your compromised one. Same functionality, more ports available to watch, no issues with power supply nor heat.
You then can have the job as a networking contractor.
If one was to obtain (peel or print) an appropriate sticker, it would be relatively easy to create an ethernet or wifi card with a sinister personality.
With the proliferation of the do-not-photograph-here areas, a CF card that would look like "empty" despite keeping data stored on could be a neat toy for every amateur spy. Take pics, and let the "CF card" encrypt them with a public key, and "stealth" them in the VFAT. Keep the private key off-camera. Then come home, put the card to the reader, enter a PIN or passphrase, retrieve and decrypt the data.
The recording has hidden water markings in the audio, which list your friend as the legal licensee of the music. By pulling the track off the P2P network it's easy to find who's copy it is, and hence who has been copying it illegally.
That can be potentially countered in multiple ways.
The best way is to sidestep linking between the watermark and the physical identity. Perhaps by buying a physical medium with cash, or secondhand. The other best way is to remove or "jam" the watermarks. Whatever can go in, can go out.
Then there is the possibility to jam the system as a whole. A dark-side method is a worm, randomly stealing and distributing the watermarked files. Dozens of millions of innocent people looking like the Evil Infringers could be a decent smokescreen. Bring doubts to the enforcement.
You want to export, you build to the requirements of the export market. Products that can be legally imported and in numbers which are commercially significant.
You design the product in a way that's "legal" but which is sufficiently easy to be broken to spur a market with "aftermarket mods" in the target country. Then you're legally clean, while the consumers can get what they want.
Perhaps you overlooked the development of digital speakers with built in encryption chips. Tapping the speaker wires gets you nothing but pure noise.
At one moment, the signal has to reach the transducers. Take the device apart, and solder wires right onto the coils of the speakers. May be a little complicated work if the devices are built as tamper-resistant, which the cheaper Taiwanese models are unlikely to (or at least unlikely to be designed to resist a determined college-student-level attacker) as it makes them more expensive.
You still have the microphone route, but there have been some absurd (but serious) discussion of laws to make such microphones and recording hardware illegal unless they have embedded DRM-detection circuitry to kill any such attempt at recording.
Which won't work as well. Visit the nearest Radio Shack, build the simplest phone scrambler, run the signal through it - which renders the eventual watermarks unrecognizable. Then run the digital signal through a software descrambler, recovering its original form.
There is always a way through, if you are willing to pay with a little loss of quality.
Had you been paid that money instead as salary, you could've pocketed most of that money and used the remainder to make a lunch for yourself, saving yourself money in the long-run.
How much do you value the time you have to spend shopping and preparing your food? How much do you value the annoyance of cooking (presuming you don't enjoy it)?
There are more things to consider than just money - regardless what the economists, even the Nobel-laureates, may spew.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a do-it-yourself GPS jammer, published in Phrack.
Somebody said elsewhere:
You may like to look.
Quoting somebody named Dasmegabyte: "I mean, there's paranoia, and then there's preparation." It is not likely in any given day that the data you in your naivity so cheerfully disclose about you, for few quids, will be used against you. But when it happens, you will wish you had some foresight.
I'm not afraid of anything.
Maybe except flying or lightnings?
Maybe you are just blind to some risks - you can see, and perhaps overestimate, other ones. Hope it won't cost you too much when you get burned.
Don't be so harsh. Make a mandatory minimum knowledge standard for helpdesk access; if anybody without the "licence" calls any kind of techsupport, the support person is authorized to hang the phone on their discretion, without any repercussions. That way the dangerous systems die out on their own. Remember, it's mostly Windows.
As a bonus, the more knowledgeable people, who usually know more than the helpdesks, won't have to have to cope with yet another piece of already annoyingly big bureaucracy. (Shooting a bureaucrat should be a justifiable self-defense.)
Better: Use somebody fat. Removal of body fat by liposuction is a well-known low-risk technology.
*Anything* can become a weapon. The airport issue shouldn't be as much how to prevent bringing anything that can be a weapon on board. Keep guns and explosives and long knives out, and the rest should be covered by incident response policies (also known as "throw a blanket on him and beat him senseless").
Alternatively, drug the passengers to sleep before the takeoff and handle them like cargo. They will need less space, would pose less threat, will be less bitchy at the stewards, and there will be cost savings in catering and maintenance of in-flight amusement (movie/music) systems.
And don't have an alternative system of their own. Which in turn makes boycotts much easier.
On a side note, the technology is impractical - buffering doesn't matter - unless the stream is multicasted, a large enough group will either bring down the server/s, or impose a huge bill for bandwidth.
PeerCast. Somebody suggested it here earlier too. Or capture the stream to a file and Bittorrent (or Freenet) it out - not exactly realtime, but close to that.
Better than nothing, and gives immediate results. Good enough buffering could even make it quite reliable.
You want to end this "We bought exclusive rights for North America" crap? Do it the ole fashioned way - fight through congress, by sending letters to the companies, by boycotting as much as you can (since in these days of corporate owned everything, you're bound to boycott too much for it to be practical).
Congress is bought. Companies will either throw your letter away or hire a crisis PR specialist. Boycott product A, buy B instead, later figure out that B is rebranded A.
The old ways don't work anymore, we are on our own. But we have the technology, so it isn't all that bleak.
As the unwilling resident of the EU (I didn't pick it, it grew around me, I voted against), I am not worrying about islamofascism. I am worrying about fascism.
I can't wait. I will laugh and laugh and laugh.
And you won't dare to not laugh, because then your government would put you on a no-fly list.
You need to dissolve only the magnetic layer, which is usually a metal oxide. However, there is a problem there, the plates are covered by a thin protective layer, either some polymer, or glass. The acid will have to eat through this passivation. Perhaps addition of a suitable organic solvent (for polymers) or hydrogen fluoric acid (may be even just a fluoride, HF will be created naturally by the other strong acids in the mixture).
The higher data density and the more advanced modulation scheme, the more difficult it is for the adversary to recover overwritten data.
In other words, do to them like they do to us with the "security cameras" metastasing all over the streets and data retention of telco logs.
But back to the original issue. Their political speeches can be considered a "work for hire", where the hiring party is the People. Hence the speech should automatically go to public domain.
If the corporation can own the products of its employees, why shouldn't the people own the products of their politicians?
There is a drawback to this approach: human life averages between 4 and 5 patent expiration times (taking the 17 year period common in the US).
Local smokers are getting irritated with the warning labels. The most recent fashion is stickers with alternative texts to be glued over the original warnings. See here.
You may want to lower the thermal output and power consumption, possibly quite dramatically. You may want to prolong the lifetime of your CPU - with the current densities in the modern chips the electromigration effects start to show up in few years, and lowering the currents should reduce this problem.
Overclocking gives you higher speed. Underclocking gives you higher reliability, lower thermal output, and higher lifetime. Pick what you need.
This would work for straightline-movement only, though. For things like spinning you would need to either control the balls individually, or at least in groups significantly smaller than the whole surface. (Or spin the whole base.)
The feedback for the motors then can be maintained by optical tracking of the movements of the person, or by torsion sensors in the axes.
No.
When they hit the market I'm getting a job as a cabling contractor
Don't worry about the size and about RJ45s. Build such toy into an Ethernet switch, then cause the original one to fail in order to replace it with your compromised one. Same functionality, more ports available to watch, no issues with power supply nor heat.
You then can have the job as a networking contractor.
With the proliferation of the do-not-photograph-here areas, a CF card that would look like "empty" despite keeping data stored on could be a neat toy for every amateur spy. Take pics, and let the "CF card" encrypt them with a public key, and "stealth" them in the VFAT. Keep the private key off-camera. Then come home, put the card to the reader, enter a PIN or passphrase, retrieve and decrypt the data.
That can be potentially countered in multiple ways.
The best way is to sidestep linking between the watermark and the physical identity. Perhaps by buying a physical medium with cash, or secondhand. The other best way is to remove or "jam" the watermarks. Whatever can go in, can go out.
Then there is the possibility to jam the system as a whole. A dark-side method is a worm, randomly stealing and distributing the watermarked files. Dozens of millions of innocent people looking like the Evil Infringers could be a decent smokescreen. Bring doubts to the enforcement.
You design the product in a way that's "legal" but which is sufficiently easy to be broken to spur a market with "aftermarket mods" in the target country. Then you're legally clean, while the consumers can get what they want.
At one moment, the signal has to reach the transducers. Take the device apart, and solder wires right onto the coils of the speakers. May be a little complicated work if the devices are built as tamper-resistant, which the cheaper Taiwanese models are unlikely to (or at least unlikely to be designed to resist a determined college-student-level attacker) as it makes them more expensive.
You still have the microphone route, but there have been some absurd (but serious) discussion of laws to make such microphones and recording hardware illegal unless they have embedded DRM-detection circuitry to kill any such attempt at recording.
Which won't work as well. Visit the nearest Radio Shack, build the simplest phone scrambler, run the signal through it - which renders the eventual watermarks unrecognizable. Then run the digital signal through a software descrambler, recovering its original form.
There is always a way through, if you are willing to pay with a little loss of quality.
How much do you value the time you have to spend shopping and preparing your food? How much do you value the annoyance of cooking (presuming you don't enjoy it)?
There are more things to consider than just money - regardless what the economists, even the Nobel-laureates, may spew.
Then EPA could sue Galton & Helm for unlawful dispersion of toxic waste into the environment.
That depends. If he sues you for that, he proves it is truth, so it can't be a libel.