One more set of targets for the laser: the manufacturers who want to get "inventive" and come up with Yet Another Screw Head Shape. My collection of special screwdriver tips must have already cost more than a GNP of a smaller country, and they STILL manage to come up with New Inventive Shapes!
Sometimes all you can do is to take a drill and drill the screw head off, then get the rest of the screw shaft out somehow, then find it's goddamned Whitworth because metric threads were apparently too unoriginal, and then cut new thread, this time metric, in the resulting hole.
Another big gripe, and a wish to live in really interesting times, comes to the vendors who put all the functions of their devices into one black flat undocumented vendor-specific chip with lots of legs and no chance to reverse-engineer, rendering the device much more difficult to enhance and, consequently, much less worthy.
The last black eye goes to the keyboard manufacturers. I still keep (and use almost 24/7) an ancient keyboard that came with my 286. It was the time when keyboards used real pushbuttons, instead of the wimpy pair of silkscreened foils, were repairable, felt MUCH better on touch-typing, and were made with a REAL circuitboard to which new buttons could be glued; having a Tab and Esc keys right next to the cursor keys turned out to be more than helpful, especially in the days when the IDEs were rather standardized on (I think) TurboVision set of objects. (Sheesh, I feel like an old fart now.)
Which reminds me about a partially successful attempt to turn a dotmatrix printer into a scanner for a C64. Attached a phototransistor and a LED on the printer head, connected them to the joystick port, removed the tape from the printer, set the printer to very small line spacing, and then scanned line by line by printing two dots at the very ends of the line, while reading the joystick port input during the head movement. Good old times...:)
Ancient Dancall cellphone; added a handsfree for a PC-style headset, replaced proprietary (and dead) NiMH cells with regular AA-sized ones and lots of duct tape, added a high-power amber LED to use the phone as a flashlight, added red LEDs for display backlight (after accidentally killing (the transistor was nicely burned into the circuitboard) the electronics that controlled the original diodes; had to add a pushbutton to control it then - the cool factor was high then, as there were no phones on the market with other than green or amber backlights, it was years ago).
Device with 8 monitor inputs and 4 outputs (2 used), connected to several computers and monitors and connecting them any-to-any. With a pair of BCD selectors to pick the signal (which turned out to be easier than other methods of switching). (No wonder - couple transistors, couple analog multiplexers, a board with some simple logic.)
Device with one keyboard input and 6 outputs, connecting the keyboard to one of them, according to which monitor was set as primary on the previous device and what computer was connected to it. (Again, no wonder - a handful of relays and some trivial logic.)
Coffee pot; glued a pushbutton under the lever that snapped back when the water boiled, connected it to the server's parallel port; when the water was ready in the kitchen, the computer in the lab beeped. Then beeped once again two minutes after the pot was put back to the holder, reminding me to take out the tea from the cup.
Lots of various voltage convertors, usually based on 780x chips. (Hint: you can raise the output voltage by putting a Zener diode or a LED between its GND pin and the ground, making the ground float. Useful when you need 7 volts and have just a 7805 and a yellow LED.)
Lead cell battery for an ancient Nokia communicator; the old lithium battery died, so after finding I'd pay for the replacement much more than I paid for the entire phone, I took the lithium cells out, connected a 7.2V stabilizer circuit to the terminals of the Nokia proprietary electronics board the cells were connected to, and fed the assembly from a small 12V/1.5Ah gel cell. It turned out later that a lead cell is heavy, but well-worth of carrying - gives a lot of power when needed (eg. for a small soldering iron). The assembly looks like a bomb, but who cares, it was cheap.
Polyswitch fuse on the mentioned battery, after I ripped off the connector and shorted the wires and they caught fire (well, just a lot of smoke, but it wasn't exactly public-friendly in a subway). Super-bright white LED and a pushbutton, mounted on the same battery, as a tiny flashlight (I didn't have the old Dancall phone anymore).
LOTS of various cables and wiring convertors.
A gadget with LEDs that shown all the RS232 port signals. Very valuable toy.
19" rack case for the computer. All made of solid aluminum L rails and 1mm sheet metal, with hard drives on springs and in rubber foam. Later survived fall from stairs; the disk assembly itself survived impact from 4 feet onto concrete.
Standard USB-B port built into (or rather onto - hot glue rules) a secondhand digital camera. Gods how I hate proprietary unobtainium connectors!
A diode bridge and a stabilizer built into a walkman/radio, to allow feeding it from any 6-15V power supply regardless of polarity. Together with the lead cell battery it turned out to be valuable; I never ran out of juice when outside.
A cooling fan mounted on a cap, for hot days. Powered from the same battery, aka Personal Energy Supply. Surprisingly effective. Next Summer I'll replace the big one from a power supply with a smaller CPU one. (Please don't comment about propellerheads.;) )
Another cooling fan, this time mounted over a big mug with tea, to cool it down faster. Again, surprisingly effective. Wire rails added to the fan after it ended up in tea after I knocked it; fast-spinning bl
A small resistor connected to the series with the fan can achieve this too (good for the small CPU fans where you can't easily connect it between +5 and +12 V); pick the value somewhere between about 47 and 330 ohms, according to your fan type and airflow and noise required. Did it just yesterday, after getting some nice but noisy fans as a gift.
As added value, you may like to bridge the resistor with a transistor, which would be opened by a thermistor attached to the heatsink; so when the heatsink is cold, the fan cools it just slightly, while the hotter it gets, the more current flows through the fan (which makes it noisier, but also makes the cooling more effective). If you like it digital, a suitable comparator will do; hysteresis is advised, though, to avoid switching the fan on/off erratically just around the preset temperature.
There's no question that China owes the U.S. an apology and reparations.
There is reportedly some small island in that sea, a meaningless pile of rock China claims ownership of (no, I don't mean Taiwan). If they really own it, the spy plane was in their air space. So it's quite possible it was them who was right. Scary, isn't it?
Besides, spying on neighbors is considered impolite between the people. Why it shouldn't be considered impolite between the countries?
...powdered disk is gone, but the fragments could be read if it was important enough
If the layer on the platters stays intact in large enough areas. You may of course combine the explosive with a vat of acid to which the fragments fall; the data-carrying layer is thin and may get dissolved pretty quickly, and there is NO way how to retrieve them from a solution of iron-chromium-nickel salts.
As to the electromagnets...
You're correct there; they may help, but a really determined adversary with unlimited budget will be most likely just slowed down.
As to a battery-backed RAM drive... better hope you don't have a long power outage.
You can combine the techniques. A big RAM drive takes too much of energy, even if it's just CMOS SRAMs. However, you may use an IDE controller with a FPGA that encrypts/decrypts the data during read/write, and keep only the key in the RAM. You can even keep it in a special RAM-based tamperproofed device that will forget its content under certain conditions, eg. when it's moved without proper authorization, repeatedly accessed without the proper PIN, or somebody attempts to open it. Not even the Feds can break AES-256 yet, and shouldn't be able for couple many more years; their shiny new quantum computers will help them with RSA and DH, but will give them at most couple orders of magnitude of speed-up against symmetric algorithms.
This is the reason why eyes move a little when you look at something. Somebody else mentioned nystagmus here, as a correction mechanism for people with damaged retina. Multiple sweeps of the camera over the field of vision, so the part of their vision that's sharp covers everything that seems interesting, can correct most of this.
Eyes are specifically designed for this behavior; the center of vision is sharp and sensitive to color, while the peripheral areas are more specialized to sensing motion.
You can do the same with bunch of time and non-photographic memory as well. There are very good 3D scene modelling systems in the wild - map editors of first-person shooters are common and good. Distance measurement in steps isn't exactly accurate, but it's still better than nothing. In many cases, the larger distances that are difficult to assess but are dependent on the building dimensions can be measured from publicly available satellite or aerial pictures.
Piece by piece, you can reconstruct a detailed 3D image of more or less any facility you attend often, with nothing than your eyes necessary on the scene itself. There is no way to prevent this.
The public takes stand with every Apex player bought, with every player dezoned under the table in a shady shop, with every Xbox chipped. On a higher level, with every homemade device built.
The content cartels aren't the single source of information for the public, however they would like to. A word of mouth can travel quickly in the cubicle space, especially when people tend to brag about special functions their chipped underground-market device can do.
The bad thing is that DRM is bound to be everywhere. The good thing is that there will be workarounds. The ugly thing is that everybody will be a criminal - but at least there won't be so many people saying they don't have anything to hide from 'Bro.
However, firmware patches are occassionally available for download. Many things have a workaround. Phones these days run on things like Arm controllers, with documented instruction sets; firmware can be disassembled and modified.
The next step will be cryptographically signing the firmware, so the cellphone refuses to accept unofficial firmwares. The question is how difficult it will be to convince the phone to not do the check, or if/how it will be possible to desolder the Flash right from the phone board and reprogram it in a standalone programmer. Also, it's possible not all manufacturers will do the signed-firmware thing, as unsigned firmware may be a big market advantage under such conditions; especially smaller Asian manufacturers could benefit from this. And maybe one of them even opens the source of at least parts of the firmware...
Lots of cookies to filter, one of them to allow. That could be allowable, it's to be configured only once. But much more serious problem is their complete and blatant lack of support for non-graphics non-javascript browsers. For reading larger amount of texts I prefer Links, as I way too often do things over a terminal, and the console is more comfortable to read. Also, for the users of mobile devices who are connected over GPRS, graphics-loaded pages are expensive and slow.
Remember that not everyone can use (or likes to use) GUI and that not everyone is on broadband.
That's true. Still, in a low-intensity conflict when a whole army is not involved, even farmer-equipment weapons pose tremendous advantage over no weapons at all.
Besides, pretty similar situation is in the US now. The population can have handguns, but handguns won't do much against the adversary equipped with missiles and helicopters. (Though it isn't *that* hopeless, if enough luck would get involved.)
The peasants weren't allowed to carry weapons. The only possible result was the appearance of fighting techniques not relying on weapons per se, but either using bare hands and feet, or using agricultural equipment as weapons. Nunchaku being a prime example what can be done with a farmer's tool. A scythe can become a formidable weapon as well, as many government goons found out when facing a peasant uprising.
Wood doesn't have to conduct. It's enough it polarizes; the wooden stool then acted as a dielectric in a capacitor. Capacitors can make pretty flashes, both when you charge them with high-enough voltage source, and when they discharge. Hint: Don't touch a high-voltage capacitor before you shorted its terminals with a screwdriver; if the device you just opened was powered off just a while ago, you may avoid a sparkly surprise.
Capacitors also make good coupling between AC lines and other wires in their vicinity. I had a case when we got a grounding wire broken in a wiring cabinet, and all the computers connected to that circuit had slightly "live" cases - enough to light up a neon bulb slightly, enough to feel "live" on touch when you have high-enough skin resistance, enough to show on a high-impedance digital multimeter (some 60V AC), but not enough to show on a lower-impedance multimeter of a technician the building maintenance person called in after we complained. I had to borrow them my own multimeter.
When a well-known mobster with a squad of goons behind him approaches you with a "polite request", can you afford to say no? Doesn't the very presence of the goons, in this case the lawyers, automatically imply a threat, turning the politeness into a meaningless gesture?
Winners do drugs. See doping scandals, especially the one with the steroid molecule modified to break up different way during mass spectroscopy, so not showing up in tests unless you knew what to look for.
Actually, I saw the unskippable preview thing yesterday for the first time. It was the first time so far I saw a DVD played on a stock, unhacked player. These are rare here and I am thankful for that.
Looks I got a player dezoning gig. Easy money, thanks to Hollywood lobby. Not all things they do are bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes all you can do is to take a drill and drill the screw head off, then get the rest of the screw shaft out somehow, then find it's goddamned Whitworth because metric threads were apparently too unoriginal, and then cut new thread, this time metric, in the resulting hole.
Another big gripe, and a wish to live in really interesting times, comes to the vendors who put all the functions of their devices into one black flat undocumented vendor-specific chip with lots of legs and no chance to reverse-engineer, rendering the device much more difficult to enhance and, consequently, much less worthy.
The last black eye goes to the keyboard manufacturers. I still keep (and use almost 24/7) an ancient keyboard that came with my 286. It was the time when keyboards used real pushbuttons, instead of the wimpy pair of silkscreened foils, were repairable, felt MUCH better on touch-typing, and were made with a REAL circuitboard to which new buttons could be glued; having a Tab and Esc keys right next to the cursor keys turned out to be more than helpful, especially in the days when the IDEs were rather standardized on (I think) TurboVision set of objects. (Sheesh, I feel like an old fart now.)
Which reminds me about a partially successful attempt to turn a dotmatrix printer into a scanner for a C64. Attached a phototransistor and a LED on the printer head, connected them to the joystick port, removed the tape from the printer, set the printer to very small line spacing, and then scanned line by line by printing two dots at the very ends of the line, while reading the joystick port input during the head movement. Good old times... :)
Device with 8 monitor inputs and 4 outputs (2 used), connected to several computers and monitors and connecting them any-to-any. With a pair of BCD selectors to pick the signal (which turned out to be easier than other methods of switching). (No wonder - couple transistors, couple analog multiplexers, a board with some simple logic.)
Device with one keyboard input and 6 outputs, connecting the keyboard to one of them, according to which monitor was set as primary on the previous device and what computer was connected to it. (Again, no wonder - a handful of relays and some trivial logic.)
Coffee pot; glued a pushbutton under the lever that snapped back when the water boiled, connected it to the server's parallel port; when the water was ready in the kitchen, the computer in the lab beeped. Then beeped once again two minutes after the pot was put back to the holder, reminding me to take out the tea from the cup.
Lots of various voltage convertors, usually based on 780x chips. (Hint: you can raise the output voltage by putting a Zener diode or a LED between its GND pin and the ground, making the ground float. Useful when you need 7 volts and have just a 7805 and a yellow LED.)
Lead cell battery for an ancient Nokia communicator; the old lithium battery died, so after finding I'd pay for the replacement much more than I paid for the entire phone, I took the lithium cells out, connected a 7.2V stabilizer circuit to the terminals of the Nokia proprietary electronics board the cells were connected to, and fed the assembly from a small 12V/1.5Ah gel cell. It turned out later that a lead cell is heavy, but well-worth of carrying - gives a lot of power when needed (eg. for a small soldering iron). The assembly looks like a bomb, but who cares, it was cheap.
Polyswitch fuse on the mentioned battery, after I ripped off the connector and shorted the wires and they caught fire (well, just a lot of smoke, but it wasn't exactly public-friendly in a subway). Super-bright white LED and a pushbutton, mounted on the same battery, as a tiny flashlight (I didn't have the old Dancall phone anymore).
LOTS of various cables and wiring convertors.
A gadget with LEDs that shown all the RS232 port signals. Very valuable toy.
19" rack case for the computer. All made of solid aluminum L rails and 1mm sheet metal, with hard drives on springs and in rubber foam. Later survived fall from stairs; the disk assembly itself survived impact from 4 feet onto concrete.
Standard USB-B port built into (or rather onto - hot glue rules) a secondhand digital camera. Gods how I hate proprietary unobtainium connectors!
A diode bridge and a stabilizer built into a walkman/radio, to allow feeding it from any 6-15V power supply regardless of polarity. Together with the lead cell battery it turned out to be valuable; I never ran out of juice when outside.
A cooling fan mounted on a cap, for hot days. Powered from the same battery, aka Personal Energy Supply. Surprisingly effective. Next Summer I'll replace the big one from a power supply with a smaller CPU one. (Please don't comment about propellerheads. ;) )
Another cooling fan, this time mounted over a big mug with tea, to cool it down faster. Again, surprisingly effective. Wire rails added to the fan after it ended up in tea after I knocked it; fast-spinning bl
As added value, you may like to bridge the resistor with a transistor, which would be opened by a thermistor attached to the heatsink; so when the heatsink is cold, the fan cools it just slightly, while the hotter it gets, the more current flows through the fan (which makes it noisier, but also makes the cooling more effective). If you like it digital, a suitable comparator will do; hysteresis is advised, though, to avoid switching the fan on/off erratically just around the preset temperature.
Do pacemakers come with a lifetime warranty?
Try to shoot it then. It worked for Elvis. :)
What one it was and how? There are good and bad ones here.
There is reportedly some small island in that sea, a meaningless pile of rock China claims ownership of (no, I don't mean Taiwan). If they really own it, the spy plane was in their air space. So it's quite possible it was them who was right. Scary, isn't it?
Besides, spying on neighbors is considered impolite between the people. Why it shouldn't be considered impolite between the countries?
If the layer on the platters stays intact in large enough areas. You may of course combine the explosive with a vat of acid to which the fragments fall; the data-carrying layer is thin and may get dissolved pretty quickly, and there is NO way how to retrieve them from a solution of iron-chromium-nickel salts.
As to the electromagnets...
You're correct there; they may help, but a really determined adversary with unlimited budget will be most likely just slowed down.
As to a battery-backed RAM drive... better hope you don't have a long power outage.
You can combine the techniques. A big RAM drive takes too much of energy, even if it's just CMOS SRAMs. However, you may use an IDE controller with a FPGA that encrypts/decrypts the data during read/write, and keep only the key in the RAM. You can even keep it in a special RAM-based tamperproofed device that will forget its content under certain conditions, eg. when it's moved without proper authorization, repeatedly accessed without the proper PIN, or somebody attempts to open it. Not even the Feds can break AES-256 yet, and shouldn't be able for couple many more years; their shiny new quantum computers will help them with RSA and DH, but will give them at most couple orders of magnitude of speed-up against symmetric algorithms.
If not, could they raid the FBI warehouse and seize its content, until they find their equipment there?
Eyes are specifically designed for this behavior; the center of vision is sharp and sensitive to color, while the peripheral areas are more specialized to sensing motion.
You can do wonders with postprocessing. Human eyes have AWFUL optical parameters, but heavy-duty postprocessing.
Piece by piece, you can reconstruct a detailed 3D image of more or less any facility you attend often, with nothing than your eyes necessary on the scene itself. There is no way to prevent this.
The content cartels aren't the single source of information for the public, however they would like to. A word of mouth can travel quickly in the cubicle space, especially when people tend to brag about special functions their chipped underground-market device can do.
The bad thing is that DRM is bound to be everywhere. The good thing is that there will be workarounds. The ugly thing is that everybody will be a criminal - but at least there won't be so many people saying they don't have anything to hide from 'Bro.
However, firmware patches are occassionally available for download. Many things have a workaround. Phones these days run on things like Arm controllers, with documented instruction sets; firmware can be disassembled and modified.
The next step will be cryptographically signing the firmware, so the cellphone refuses to accept unofficial firmwares. The question is how difficult it will be to convince the phone to not do the check, or if/how it will be possible to desolder the Flash right from the phone board and reprogram it in a standalone programmer. Also, it's possible not all manufacturers will do the signed-firmware thing, as unsigned firmware may be a big market advantage under such conditions; especially smaller Asian manufacturers could benefit from this. And maybe one of them even opens the source of at least parts of the firmware...
Fundamental problem for the "little guy": the way to the ears of the elected representatives usually leads through their pockets.
Remember that not everyone can use (or likes to use) GUI and that not everyone is on broadband.
Besides, pretty similar situation is in the US now. The population can have handguns, but handguns won't do much against the adversary equipped with missiles and helicopters. (Though it isn't *that* hopeless, if enough luck would get involved.)
Whole East Europe and vast majority of Asia have enough experience with oppressive governments.
The peasants weren't allowed to carry weapons. The only possible result was the appearance of fighting techniques not relying on weapons per se, but either using bare hands and feet, or using agricultural equipment as weapons. Nunchaku being a prime example what can be done with a farmer's tool. A scythe can become a formidable weapon as well, as many government goons found out when facing a peasant uprising.
Capacitors also make good coupling between AC lines and other wires in their vicinity. I had a case when we got a grounding wire broken in a wiring cabinet, and all the computers connected to that circuit had slightly "live" cases - enough to light up a neon bulb slightly, enough to feel "live" on touch when you have high-enough skin resistance, enough to show on a high-impedance digital multimeter (some 60V AC), but not enough to show on a lower-impedance multimeter of a technician the building maintenance person called in after we complained. I had to borrow them my own multimeter.
Thought so, but got it only after submitting the reaction. Was too tired. Sorry. :)
A polite threat is no less a threat.
When a well-known mobster with a squad of goons behind him approaches you with a "polite request", can you afford to say no? Doesn't the very presence of the goons, in this case the lawyers, automatically imply a threat, turning the politeness into a meaningless gesture?
Winners do drugs. See doping scandals, especially the one with the steroid molecule modified to break up different way during mass spectroscopy, so not showing up in tests unless you knew what to look for.
Looks I got a player dezoning gig. Easy money, thanks to Hollywood lobby. Not all things they do are bad.