...besides, they often forget the conventional bombing of many other Hiroshima-like cities, where the degree of destruction was similar, only much more bombers and bombs than one were used.
He's living back in Vegas and I wish the gov't regulations didn't forbid me to tape his stories while taking the monthly free tour of the Nevada Test Site.
Considering the amount of common consumer devices capable of audio recording, from some MP3 players to digital cameras to camcorders, it shouldn't be too difficult to violate the government regulation without significant risk of being caught. Especially if hidden in a bunch of tourists, and if the device would be carried in a way that would allow a cover story of an accidental triggering the recording. (A camcorder with lens cap on, recording blackness and sound, could be a good cover - who would use a camcorder for audio only, anyway?)
Then there is the possibility of calling out with a cellphone, if the area has coverage, and record on the other end of the call. One-button quick-dial is a function especially suitable for this purpose. The advantage here is the impossibility to seize the recording locally, as it won't be on your person, even if caught.
There are many quite safe ways to get audio recording from a weakly secured area. The world is crammed full of spy toys.
Two things. First, you need to upgrade your libdvdread to the "illegal" one that supports decrypting. Second, you have to make a symbolic link from your DVD drive device (/dev/scd0 or/dev/hdc or something like that) to/dev/dvd (eg, as a root, ln -s/dev/scd0/dev/dvd so the software would find your DVD drive where it expects it to be by default).
So, you don't believe in following published standards then?
Depends on what's their purpose.
If their purpose is streamlining data exchange and storage, then they are good and should be followed. (Exception: unless they are seriously botched, which means another standard is necessary.)
If their purpose is cramming ads down our throats, then an alternative or a standard extension (like the skip-ads patch) should be offered.
One of the morals of the Atlanta story is to print out things in small font, so the snitches can't spot subversive materials so easily.
If reading itself won't become suspicious; according to a report in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald, the number of Americans regularly reading printed materials is slightly beyond 50% and slowly declining.
I am afraid there won't be a real fix to this. While it makes a lot of sense to try to find one, we shouldn't forget to use simple workarounds meanwhile.
Or you can publish from some country where Oracle lawyers have weaker position than in the US, and perhaps EU. I am pretty sure Oracle runs at exactly the same speed in Philippines or Indonesia as in the "developed" (read: overlawyered) countries.
Alternatively, you can use the same approach local "banned" authors used to use to get published during the Communism; write the specs, and get somebody other to publish it under their name.
Now I just need a 4way (or better) svideo switch, that speaks serial (since we damn well know that even if I got that $70 remote controlled one, my universal remote can't speak that).
Or build it from scratch. It's a few connectors and a handful of small relays. They typically have smaller crosstalk than solid-state chips.
We have the LIRC project. The software is open, there are large sets of existing remote commands there, a way to acquire more of them. Either you can use a PC (which tends to be a bit bulky, though), or write a program for a microcontroller using the sequences, and build your own universal remote, configurable by a PC.
For better effect, it could be built on an open breadboard, protected and insulated with thick layer of protective varnish. Or the breadboard could be put into a transparent plexiglas case, in the Apple style.
The components that fail most often are usually switched power supplies.
I personally prefer things that have controls on the front panel. Remotes are kludgy, tend to fail, tend to get misplaced or run out of batteries. Is the couple pushbuttons really that much expensive? Material cost is about a dozen cents a piece, and that's the more expensive kind.
Or if the vendors are THAT MUCH cheap, they could at least offer a set of solder pads on the board and a downloadable schematics for a do-it-yourself panel controller.
The Linux SMS Cryptophone open source project. Encrypts voice/SMS, can anonomise the phone.. Anyone?
There is a bunch of problems with the technical realization, at least for the GSM system I am familiar with.
For SMS, the 160 characters is not enough. You could use a stripped down version, though, and send the message with the format of AES128 key (16 chars), optional signed hash of the message (another 16 chars), and the rest encrypted text. Many phones have Java inside. There is a problem with this, though: you need to have access to the received messages, which most phones (except the ones using OpenAPI and running Symbian or Linux or - shudder - WinCE) typically don't have. The main obstacle here is that both sides of the conversation need the phone with the capabilities. Another problem is with maintaining the secrecy of the messages; as SMS is de facto offline comm, you don't have the option of key negotiation by eg. DH, so once the goons get access to your private key and rubberhose the passphrase out of your brain, they can decode all the messages you received and they intercepted.
For voice, there is another set of problems there. When you dial a voice call, you can't switch it to data call in the middle of the connection, and using software acoustical modulation of data through GSM codec is a bit difficult and unreliable and it's hard to push through sufficient bitrate.
I'll be thankful for any suggestions for these problems.
Banning crypto is going to be fairly difficult. MMS messages are becoming common, and steganographing an encrypted sentence into a grainy photo of your kitten is not anything impossible.
No. But isn't it rather easy to automagically detect and remove the codes from the "bootlegged" version? How do they even began thinking it could be an effective measure?
You can't actually drink alcohol in theaters out in LA. We had a new theater open up that actually has a bar inside, however they give you drinks in glasses and you aren't allowed to take them out of the "bar area".
Isn't it what that kind of flat metal bottles with the size suitable for the back pocket is extremely suitable for? Easy to smuggle through noninvasive visual checks.
This is certainly subject to debate. How starving do you have to be to justify illegal behavior? The human body can go quite a long time without food.
That's true, however one's performance tends to continuously deteriorate. After a week of starving, it's difficult to perform more laborious or mental tasks. But I agree, the line of decision isn't clearly defined.
What if I need my food to survive, are you justified in taking it from me? Who decides who is more worthy? Are we back to "might makes right?" Rejecting the basic laws and morals of society for your own survival is to reject civilization and your own humanity and become an
animal.
Are we anything more than animals? Once the layer of civilization breaks down, the parallels between humans and the other animals tend to show up.
You are using the common straw man argument of concocting a scenario where either you steal or you die. Real life is not this simple, there are always other options.
Usually yes. Not always.
As a quick example, in the US we have government welfare and unemployment programs. Even in other countries there are charities (such as religious missionaries) who will help, and there is always begging.
This is true, but only for the more peaceful zones. There are also areas from where the missionaries bugged out or got shot. With sufficiently wide areas of conflict, you get the problems of getting out of there (and the question where to go).
Show me a real life situation where people are starving and in danger of their very survival, and you will see that the vast majority of them do not resort to stealing.
Large areas of conflict in Africa; East Timor; and there are others that are easy to find with just a bit of Googling. BY FAR not every place is as peaceful as you are used to. Quite sizeable chunk of people is not only stealing there, but also killing the previous owners before.
Even in more peaceful areas of the world you can't always use the more legitimate options, eg. when you are on the run.
THE limiting factor is not storage space. It's the quality of the optics. At such small sizes, getting true flat-field optics is tough. Not impossible, but harder than shrinking a 1gig card...
I fully agree. However, for a crappy movie preview (and pissing off Disney) it should be good enough anyway.
There is also the option of correcting the suboptimal optics by software, but I don't think that will be exactly easy. Maybe it appears in some future electronics. Neural networks in biological eyes do it routinely, though, as "wetware" eyes have rather lousy optics.
This is true, but what is your point? Are you attempting to justify any short term solutions, regardless of legality or morality, as long as you eventually implement a legal and moral long term solution? Or are you trying to justify theft in general?
Survival is above the law. If I have the choice between dying of hunger and acting against legality/morality, I pick the one that lets me survive one more day and hope the overall situation improves tomorrow.
And how does that justify stealing from others to acomplish your goals? As I said in my original post, stealing is not the only option and never a good one.
Depends on how fundamental goal it is. Survival is a goal fundamental enough to justify just about anyting. Sometimes there just isn't another option available in sufficiently short term.
People, including the moralizing ones, tend to dismount (and eat) their high horses once they get sufficiently hungry. Those who won't, die and remove themselves from the gene pool.
The next minimum-wage spotty cinema attendant who tries to spy on us with night vision goggles is gonna find out what a life with smoking holes where his retinas were is like.
That won't work as expected; the maximum light output of the image intensifier just isn't high enough for that. However, you can expect success in burning out some cells in the image intensifier itself. Which is better, because instead of hurting an easy-to-replace low-wage employee you cause damage to the equipment owned by the actual perpetrator of evil - the studio and/or the theater.
The night vision systems tend to be easy to damage with light.
You can also use photoflash. That could work even better.
For added kick, you could use an infrared laser rigged to a pointer. Then the glasses operator won't have much chance to see where the beam came from. A photoflash with some optics to focus the beam and a filter to remove the visible part of the spectrum and keep only the infrared could be a good option as well.
Thievery is never the only solution, nor is it ever even a good one. Further, stealing is not even a long term solution.
But it's a short-term solution, and often a short-term solution is what you need at the moment in order to survive until you manage to implement the long-term solution.
Stealing food will feed you one day, but you will be hungry the next and be right back where you started, except now you will have hurt others.
But perhaps you manage to find work the next day, and be strong enough to do it and earn the food for that day and perhaps the next day too.
You want the highest amount of photons getting out of the LED. For that, I'd suggest a narrow duty cycle - short pulses separated by periods of inactivity for cooling the chip, with frequency of couple kHz. A 555 with a FET transistor for driving the LEDs would do.
Then we want the Macrovision pattern, for switching the bank of LEDs on and off; standard square wave should do. The duty cycle and frequency would have to be adjusted for the internal time constants of the adversary's night vision equipment. I'd suggest to start from about 5-10 Hz and 1:1 cycle. We want all the image in the field of vision to get periodically lighter and darker.
We can also try to find a "sweet spot" frequency with suitable physiological response, eg. causing nausea.
The cams are going to be MUCH MUCH smaller soon. There are already high-end cam-cellphones with very usable resolution; the chip itself is about half-inch wide/high/deep - at most. The limiting factor is the data storage, but the signal can be stored on a 1.5" disk or on a solid state device. The cam and the data storage may be separated; the cam can be hidden in eg. a necktie or a jewel, the storage device fits the pocket. With a good heat dissipation system, the wearer's body heat can effectively mask the device's signature.
Would it be possible to wear an outfit with a large number of IR LEDs implanted into it, with battery power source? It'd be like looking at the sun with those goggles, but nobody else would even know.
It is possible. You can also blink the LEDs in a pattern similar to Macrovision pulses in VCRs, in order to confuse the automatic amplification circuits in the goggles.
If such crap comes here, I'll do it.
Re:The silver lining in the falling sky...
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· Score: 1
It's a good paper; taking things a bit to extreme, but it was necessary to illustrate the point clearly.
But things won't get that bad. In the very worst case, there will be always ways of person-to-person connections; many IM programs offer file transfer, even direct UDP connectivity is being demanded in the form of support for various Internet-enabled games. The gaming and chatting community is big enough to create a commercially viable market segment to which the ISPs will have to cater.
We also have email; which is enough for smaller files.
And in the worst case, when we won't have the Net at all, there is always the possibility of using the telephone to negotiate fedexing of a pack of DVD-Rs.
While the paper is correct in the description of things getting worse, my personal bet is that instead of hitting the worst, a kind of dynamic equilibrium well-above the bottom will be established. Also, don't forget the possibility of community-wide mesh networks, outside of the scope of the Big ISPs policing.
Re:You US'ians sure have a twisted law system
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You don't think that some soldier in some tank in downtown Metro, USA ordered to fire on a crowd of people isn't going to be thinking that their own family and friends could be in that crowd of people.
I am not sure about this, but I think this is one of the reasons why the soldiers are usually deployed for such "policing" actions in places far away from their home towns (I don't mean Iraq here); it could be interesting where the soldiers who turned Kent State University to a shooting range were from.
An idea for you high powered rocket guys is to go with a method of fueling rockets with gunpowder.
There's an another option, the saltpeter-sugar (or a better one, saltpeter-sorbitol) solid fuel. Recipes are all over the Net[1], including variants that solve some problems like radiation heating of the engine (the stuff is translucent and the heat radiated from the burning core tends to overheat and destabilize the outer parts of the engine rod).
According to what I heard somewhere, for Mr. von Braun V2 was a step on his way to the Moon. He was skilled enough, so at the end it didn't matter what side he started on - he ultimately achieved his dream.
Slashdot Mirror
...besides, they often forget the conventional bombing of many other Hiroshima-like cities, where the degree of destruction was similar, only much more bombers and bombs than one were used.
Considering the amount of common consumer devices capable of audio recording, from some MP3 players to digital cameras to camcorders, it shouldn't be too difficult to violate the government regulation without significant risk of being caught. Especially if hidden in a bunch of tourists, and if the device would be carried in a way that would allow a cover story of an accidental triggering the recording. (A camcorder with lens cap on, recording blackness and sound, could be a good cover - who would use a camcorder for audio only, anyway?)
Then there is the possibility of calling out with a cellphone, if the area has coverage, and record on the other end of the call. One-button quick-dial is a function especially suitable for this purpose. The advantage here is the impossibility to seize the recording locally, as it won't be on your person, even if caught.
There are many quite safe ways to get audio recording from a weakly secured area. The world is crammed full of spy toys.
Two things. First, you need to upgrade your libdvdread to the "illegal" one that supports decrypting. Second, you have to make a symbolic link from your DVD drive device (/dev/scd0 or /dev/hdc or something like that) to /dev/dvd (eg, as a root, /dev/scd0 /dev/dvd
ln -s
so the software would find your DVD drive where it expects it to be by default).
Depends on what's their purpose.
If their purpose is streamlining data exchange and storage, then they are good and should be followed. (Exception: unless they are seriously botched, which means another standard is necessary.)
If their purpose is cramming ads down our throats, then an alternative or a standard extension (like the skip-ads patch) should be offered.
If reading itself won't become suspicious; according to a report in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald, the number of Americans regularly reading printed materials is slightly beyond 50% and slowly declining.
I am afraid there won't be a real fix to this. While it makes a lot of sense to try to find one, we shouldn't forget to use simple workarounds meanwhile.
Alternatively, you can use the same approach local "banned" authors used to use to get published during the Communism; write the specs, and get somebody other to publish it under their name.
Or build it from scratch. It's a few connectors and a handful of small relays. They typically have smaller crosstalk than solid-state chips.
For better effect, it could be built on an open breadboard, protected and insulated with thick layer of protective varnish. Or the breadboard could be put into a transparent plexiglas case, in the Apple style.
I personally prefer things that have controls on the front panel. Remotes are kludgy, tend to fail, tend to get misplaced or run out of batteries. Is the couple pushbuttons really that much expensive? Material cost is about a dozen cents a piece, and that's the more expensive kind.
Or if the vendors are THAT MUCH cheap, they could at least offer a set of solder pads on the board and a downloadable schematics for a do-it-yourself panel controller.
There is a bunch of problems with the technical realization, at least for the GSM system I am familiar with.
For SMS, the 160 characters is not enough. You could use a stripped down version, though, and send the message with the format of AES128 key (16 chars), optional signed hash of the message (another 16 chars), and the rest encrypted text. Many phones have Java inside. There is a problem with this, though: you need to have access to the received messages, which most phones (except the ones using OpenAPI and running Symbian or Linux or - shudder - WinCE) typically don't have. The main obstacle here is that both sides of the conversation need the phone with the capabilities. Another problem is with maintaining the secrecy of the messages; as SMS is de facto offline comm, you don't have the option of key negotiation by eg. DH, so once the goons get access to your private key and rubberhose the passphrase out of your brain, they can decode all the messages you received and they intercepted.
For voice, there is another set of problems there. When you dial a voice call, you can't switch it to data call in the middle of the connection, and using software acoustical modulation of data through GSM codec is a bit difficult and unreliable and it's hard to push through sufficient bitrate.
I'll be thankful for any suggestions for these problems.
Banning crypto is going to be fairly difficult. MMS messages are becoming common, and steganographing an encrypted sentence into a grainy photo of your kitten is not anything impossible.
No. But isn't it rather easy to automagically detect and remove the codes from the "bootlegged" version? How do they even began thinking it could be an effective measure?
Isn't it what that kind of flat metal bottles with the size suitable for the back pocket is extremely suitable for? Easy to smuggle through noninvasive visual checks.
That's true, however one's performance tends to continuously deteriorate. After a week of starving, it's difficult to perform more laborious or mental tasks. But I agree, the line of decision isn't clearly defined.
What if I need my food to survive, are you justified in taking it from me? Who decides who is more worthy? Are we back to "might makes right?" Rejecting the basic laws and morals of society for your own survival is to reject civilization and your own humanity and become an animal.
Are we anything more than animals? Once the layer of civilization breaks down, the parallels between humans and the other animals tend to show up.
You are using the common straw man argument of concocting a scenario where either you steal or you die. Real life is not this simple, there are always other options.
Usually yes. Not always. As a quick example, in the US we have government welfare and unemployment programs. Even in other countries there are charities (such as religious missionaries) who will help, and there is always begging.
This is true, but only for the more peaceful zones. There are also areas from where the missionaries bugged out or got shot. With sufficiently wide areas of conflict, you get the problems of getting out of there (and the question where to go).
Show me a real life situation where people are starving and in danger of their very survival, and you will see that the vast majority of them do not resort to stealing.
Large areas of conflict in Africa; East Timor; and there are others that are easy to find with just a bit of Googling. BY FAR not every place is as peaceful as you are used to. Quite sizeable chunk of people is not only stealing there, but also killing the previous owners before.
Even in more peaceful areas of the world you can't always use the more legitimate options, eg. when you are on the run.
I fully agree. However, for a crappy movie preview (and pissing off Disney) it should be good enough anyway.
There is also the option of correcting the suboptimal optics by software, but I don't think that will be exactly easy. Maybe it appears in some future electronics. Neural networks in biological eyes do it routinely, though, as "wetware" eyes have rather lousy optics.
Survival is above the law. If I have the choice between dying of hunger and acting against legality/morality, I pick the one that lets me survive one more day and hope the overall situation improves tomorrow.
And how does that justify stealing from others to acomplish your goals? As I said in my original post, stealing is not the only option and never a good one.
Depends on how fundamental goal it is. Survival is a goal fundamental enough to justify just about anyting. Sometimes there just isn't another option available in sufficiently short term.
People, including the moralizing ones, tend to dismount (and eat) their high horses once they get sufficiently hungry. Those who won't, die and remove themselves from the gene pool.
That won't work as expected; the maximum light output of the image intensifier just isn't high enough for that. However, you can expect success in burning out some cells in the image intensifier itself. Which is better, because instead of hurting an easy-to-replace low-wage employee you cause damage to the equipment owned by the actual perpetrator of evil - the studio and/or the theater.
The night vision systems tend to be easy to damage with light.
You can also use photoflash. That could work even better.
For added kick, you could use an infrared laser rigged to a pointer. Then the glasses operator won't have much chance to see where the beam came from. A photoflash with some optics to focus the beam and a filter to remove the visible part of the spectrum and keep only the infrared could be a good option as well.
But it's a short-term solution, and often a short-term solution is what you need at the moment in order to survive until you manage to implement the long-term solution.
Stealing food will feed you one day, but you will be hungry the next and be right back where you started, except now you will have hurt others.
But perhaps you manage to find work the next day, and be strong enough to do it and earn the food for that day and perhaps the next day too.
Then we want the Macrovision pattern, for switching the bank of LEDs on and off; standard square wave should do. The duty cycle and frequency would have to be adjusted for the internal time constants of the adversary's night vision equipment. I'd suggest to start from about 5-10 Hz and 1:1 cycle. We want all the image in the field of vision to get periodically lighter and darker.
We can also try to find a "sweet spot" frequency with suitable physiological response, eg. causing nausea.
A bit expensive today. Cheap and common tomorrow.
It is possible. You can also blink the LEDs in a pattern similar to Macrovision pulses in VCRs, in order to confuse the automatic amplification circuits in the goggles.
If such crap comes here, I'll do it.
But things won't get that bad. In the very worst case, there will be always ways of person-to-person connections; many IM programs offer file transfer, even direct UDP connectivity is being demanded in the form of support for various Internet-enabled games. The gaming and chatting community is big enough to create a commercially viable market segment to which the ISPs will have to cater.
We also have email; which is enough for smaller files.
And in the worst case, when we won't have the Net at all, there is always the possibility of using the telephone to negotiate fedexing of a pack of DVD-Rs.
While the paper is correct in the description of things getting worse, my personal bet is that instead of hitting the worst, a kind of dynamic equilibrium well-above the bottom will be established. Also, don't forget the possibility of community-wide mesh networks, outside of the scope of the Big ISPs policing.
I am not sure about this, but I think this is one of the reasons why the soldiers are usually deployed for such "policing" actions in places far away from their home towns (I don't mean Iraq here); it could be interesting where the soldiers who turned Kent State University to a shooting range were from.
There's an another option, the saltpeter-sugar (or a better one, saltpeter-sorbitol) solid fuel. Recipes are all over the Net[1], including variants that solve some problems like radiation heating of the engine (the stuff is translucent and the heat radiated from the burning core tends to overheat and destabilize the outer parts of the engine rod).
[1] Google for keywords nitrate sorbitol rocket.
According to what I heard somewhere, for Mr. von Braun V2 was a step on his way to the Moon. He was skilled enough, so at the end it didn't matter what side he started on - he ultimately achieved his dream.