Try to get some util for interrogating the SMART data of the disk. Disks that aren't hopelessly obsolete usually support SMART, and keep records about things like recoverable and unrecoverable read errors, seek errors, and many more.
The Ultimate Bood CD mentioned earlier here has such utility on it. Smartmontools for Linux/unix is another tool to achieve that.
But you have more choice in graphics software; eg, it'd be cold night in hell before this misfeature would be built into eg. Netpbm package. You can also code some pixel-banging yourself. You have much less choice with scanner firmware.
If you manage to get the printer to print into exact location on the paper, you can work around even the printer firmware limits, by overprinting the image multiple times, a "subcritical" part each time.
Or you can hack the printer driver, damaging the recognition function, avoiding calling it, or forcing a negative result; that could actually improve the printing performance, especially on slower machines. If it's in the firmware of the printer itself, then you'll probably have to resort to overprinting. For which you need the howto anyway, because of two-sided printouts.
Overprinting could be an interesting technology if coupled with ink cartridges with more kinds of ink - from magnetic ink to iridescent or metallic or ultraviolet ones. Opens a whole wide scale of possibilities...
Then all the graphics industry will desert the region, people with digital cameras will get mightily pissed that they can't print the pics of their children with sufficient clarity, and drug couriers will switch to shipping chips.
If you ban a technology, only criminals will use it. If you ban a popular technology, you turn most of the population into criminals.
Sure it would. I didn't intend to screw with gamma to remove the marking, but to see it.:)
If the printers would print only at lower quality, there would be no reason to buy high quality ones and the Holy Forces of Market would correct this situation rather quickly.
That is defeatable by chipping the printer. You can check if it happens by scanning a source, printing it, scanning the result, and then fine-aligning and then subtracting the second scanned image from the first one. Or just by manipulating gamma on the CMYK channels. Common printers can go up to 1200 DPI, higher-end office-grade scanners can go up to 4800 DPI. I already used a scanner successfully when I wanted to amplify a weak pencil image left after its erasing, so it could work.
Or cover the offending piece of the image with a cut-off mask of paper, breaking part of the design, then do the same inversely, as a result getting two partial (but overlapping) scans, then assemble them together into one image.
Problems appear when this gets implemented in printers. A countermeasure could be similar, but there is a problem with maintaining *exact* alignment of the paper for subsequent overprinting.
If you go head over heels to save every defective being born, then because of the higher ratio of negative mutations over positive ones you get deevolution. Exactly what we see now - the number of people with diabetes and various other genetic disorders grows, because the selection factors that would kill the carrier of the faulty genes before s/he can reach maturity and pass them to offsprings are offset by the advancements of medicine. (And then more advancements come, with promise of directly correcting such damages, and the same groups that are so vocal about caring about carriers of damaged genes get loud about how it's bad to even think about touching the Holy Genome. Weird...)
The worse for Microsoft, the better for the world.
The more problems MS installations have, the higher the pressure for migrating away. The more systems migrated away, the higher heterogenity of the Net ecosystem, the higher overall resistance to platform-specific threats - and the higher pressure for compatible, standardized data-exchange formats; proprietary ones could then become a disadvantage instead of a lock-in advantage.
The computer world needs to be pushed into different dynamic-equilibrium mode. The sooner, the better.
Re:Or, this can IMPROVE your car
on
Hack Your Car
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· Score: 1
It was common with the computers for some models of Skoda cars here. Some owners deployed a countermeasure: they swapped the power lines in both the car connector and inside the computer unit, so when a thief came and plugged his own unit in, it fried instantly.
Will we have to find-and-remove tags frou our clothing and possessions to maintain privacy? Will we have to organize "swap-meets" of banknotes, similar to what's already being done with loyalty cards?
Hey - we can finally put religion to some good use! I suppose there is something in some holy text that could be interpreted in the way that being subjected to this kind of tracking is against the basic premises of the given faith, then use the Constitution-guaranteed freedom of religion to back the objections.
Spray the chemical *on the reader*. NOBODY can get out then. The likely outcome is that it will be shrugged off as just "another problem with that piece of crap", or fallback to manual processing (which is likely to make the people angry against the technology, making it less appealing politically to deploy even more widely).
What about "passive jammers"? De facto modified What about a passive solution? RFID tags that won't honor the collision detection and just transmit on full power, drowning the signal of other tags, but only when subjected to the reader's field, not having any power supply of its own? Suitable construction of the tag's antenna, being more effective than the "default" one (which may not be difficult because of the size constraints of the "default" configuration) should provide in order(s) of magnitude more power for the tag.
Forging this kind of tag seems to be quite simple. There is no encryption there, the tag can be read raw. The tag is cheap to produce, essentially by printing. A big black market with tags will emerge, first fueled by employees with access to expensive printers, then by just about everyone, as the cost of the printers will go down with the growing market.
What program would you have used to scan for a virus on a *nix box should you require doing so?
Ummmm... eg. checking the MD5 checksums of the system files, eg. by Tripwire, or comparing them against the installation medium or a known-good machine? There are also some native *nix scanners.
What website could you trust to look through to figure it out?
Just about any of any reputable member of the antivirus community.
If you don't write code as your job, it's irrelevant for the management if you saw it or not. Besides, meetings don't tend to be recorded, at least not all and not the less formal ones. Ever had one?
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I suppose it depends more on what's displayed on the monitor.
Offtopic: Sounds like the probability Windows will ever get bug-free.
So when they grow older, they will have healthier teeth and healthier opinions.
Ummm... webdesign?
The Ultimate Bood CD mentioned earlier here has such utility on it. Smartmontools for Linux/unix is another tool to achieve that.
If you manage to get the printer to print into exact location on the paper, you can work around even the printer firmware limits, by overprinting the image multiple times, a "subcritical" part each time.
Or you can hack the printer driver, damaging the recognition function, avoiding calling it, or forcing a negative result; that could actually improve the printing performance, especially on slower machines. If it's in the firmware of the printer itself, then you'll probably have to resort to overprinting. For which you need the howto anyway, because of two-sided printouts.
Overprinting could be an interesting technology if coupled with ink cartridges with more kinds of ink - from magnetic ink to iridescent or metallic or ultraviolet ones. Opens a whole wide scale of possibilities...
If you ban a technology, only criminals will use it. If you ban a popular technology, you turn most of the population into criminals.
If the printers would print only at lower quality, there would be no reason to buy high quality ones and the Holy Forces of Market would correct this situation rather quickly.
That is defeatable by chipping the printer. You can check if it happens by scanning a source, printing it, scanning the result, and then fine-aligning and then subtracting the second scanned image from the first one. Or just by manipulating gamma on the CMYK channels. Common printers can go up to 1200 DPI, higher-end office-grade scanners can go up to 4800 DPI. I already used a scanner successfully when I wanted to amplify a weak pencil image left after its erasing, so it could work.
The vendors would hate it. The good part is that nobody asks them, nor should.
Problems appear when this gets implemented in printers. A countermeasure could be similar, but there is a problem with maintaining *exact* alignment of the paper for subsequent overprinting.
What happens if you turn the head assembly 180 degrees, so the scanned image comes out mirrored, will the detection firmware still work?
More fast displays on one machine? Great for virtual reality! :) Now only if the VR displays would not be THAT AWFULLY expensive...
If you go head over heels to save every defective being born, then because of the higher ratio of negative mutations over positive ones you get deevolution. Exactly what we see now - the number of people with diabetes and various other genetic disorders grows, because the selection factors that would kill the carrier of the faulty genes before s/he can reach maturity and pass them to offsprings are offset by the advancements of medicine. (And then more advancements come, with promise of directly correcting such damages, and the same groups that are so vocal about caring about carriers of damaged genes get loud about how it's bad to even think about touching the Holy Genome. Weird...)
There is no good. There is only evil in many shades, forming an equilibrium; if the evil plays for us, it's called good.
Immune system is good for you, but bad for the pathogens. If you die in the woods, it's bad for you, but good for the ants.
The more problems MS installations have, the higher the pressure for migrating away. The more systems migrated away, the higher heterogenity of the Net ecosystem, the higher overall resistance to platform-specific threats - and the higher pressure for compatible, standardized data-exchange formats; proprietary ones could then become a disadvantage instead of a lock-in advantage.
The computer world needs to be pushed into different dynamic-equilibrium mode. The sooner, the better.
It was common with the computers for some models of Skoda cars here. Some owners deployed a countermeasure: they swapped the power lines in both the car connector and inside the computer unit, so when a thief came and plugged his own unit in, it fried instantly.
In that case it's time to either change the management for more trusting one, or be thankful for living in a country with less lawyers per capita.
Hey - we can finally put religion to some good use! I suppose there is something in some holy text that could be interpreted in the way that being subjected to this kind of tracking is against the basic premises of the given faith, then use the Constitution-guaranteed freedom of religion to back the objections.
Spray the chemical *on the reader*. NOBODY can get out then. The likely outcome is that it will be shrugged off as just "another problem with that piece of crap", or fallback to manual processing (which is likely to make the people angry against the technology, making it less appealing politically to deploy even more widely).
A 3-or-more-megapixel camera makes a good-enough image of an A4 page to be perfectly legible. A copier-equivalent device fits a shirt pocket today.
What about "passive jammers"? De facto modified What about a passive solution? RFID tags that won't honor the collision detection and just transmit on full power, drowning the signal of other tags, but only when subjected to the reader's field, not having any power supply of its own? Suitable construction of the tag's antenna, being more effective than the "default" one (which may not be difficult because of the size constraints of the "default" configuration) should provide in order(s) of magnitude more power for the tag.
Forging this kind of tag seems to be quite simple. There is no encryption there, the tag can be read raw. The tag is cheap to produce, essentially by printing. A big black market with tags will emerge, first fueled by employees with access to expensive printers, then by just about everyone, as the cost of the printers will go down with the growing market.
Ummmm... eg. checking the MD5 checksums of the system files, eg. by Tripwire, or comparing them against the installation medium or a known-good machine? There are also some native *nix scanners.
What website could you trust to look through to figure it out?
Just about any of any reputable member of the antivirus community.
If you don't write code as your job, it's irrelevant for the management if you saw it or not. Besides, meetings don't tend to be recorded, at least not all and not the less formal ones. Ever had one?