Reuters CD-copy protection system said to have simple flaw Tuesday October 7, 2:21 pm ET By Ben Berkowitz
LOS ANGELES, Oct 7 (Reuters) - A Princeton graduate student said on Monday that he has figured out a way to defeat new software intended to keep music CDs from being copied on a computer -- simply by pressing the Shift-key. In a paper posted on his Web site late Monday, John Halderman said the MediaMax CD3 software developed by SunnComm Technologies Inc. (OTC BB:STEH.OB - News) could be defeated on computers running the Windows operating system by holding down the Shift key, disabling a Windows feature that automatically launches the encryption software on the disc.
Halderman said the protection could also be disabled by stopping the driver the CD installs when it is first inserted into a computer's drive.
Computers running Linux and older versions of the Mac operating system are unable to run the software and are able to copy the disc freely, he said.
The CD in question, Anthony Hamilton's "Comin' From Where I'm From," was released by BMG's Arista label in late September. Music retailers praised the release, which BMG touted as a breakthrough in the industry's efforts to prevent music piracy.
"SunnComm's claims of robust protection collapse, when subjected to scrutiny, and their system's weaknesses are not only academic," Halderman said in the report.
A spokesman for SunnComm was not immediately available to comment on the report. A spokesman for BMG, a unit of Bertelsmann AG (BERT.UL), said the company viewed the software as a "speed bump" to prevent mass piracy of the disc.
"We were fully aware that if someone held down the Shift key the first and every subsequent time (they played the disc) that the technology could be circumvented," BMG spokesman Nathaniel Brown told Reuters, adding the company "erred on the side of playability and flexibility."
Halderman, who has previously done research on CD copy-protection techniques and their effects on consumer sentiment, called the latest protection attempts into question.
"CD copy-prevention schemes that (depend) solely on software, as SunnComm's does, will be trivial to disable, and alternative strategies that modify the CD data format will invariably cause public outcry over incompatibility with legitimate playback devices," Halderman said.
The music industry has blamed piracy and online file sharing services for a prolonged slump in CD sales. Software like that from SunnComm has been seen as a way to slow down the tide of CDs being ripped into digital format and uploaded to the file sharing platforms.
Instead of finding a way to stop pirates (which you won't do), find a way to catch them. Quit throwing bad films and good money down the drain by giving pirates another hurdle to jump. I'd rather see these people caught. Stop ruining my music and films because you don't want them pirated. If someone keeps robbing your house, do you just keep adding new alarm systems time and time again, or do you try to catch the bastard? It's just stupid, IMO.
I use Verizon Wireless (I live near Albany, NY) and cannot dial out on my cell phone, nor can I get calls (it dishes out an 'all circuts are busy' double-time busy signal), so anyone trying to get ahold of a loved/cared/liked/missed one via their cell, it might not work.
Anyone know the extent of this outage for cell phones?
From what I heard, terrorists working for SCO were exploiting port 135 worms after declaring their hatred for IBM on Friendster (of course, they were disguised as John Ashcroft and their accounts were cancelled) and, from all accounts, they were just "testing a random number generator". Where does it all end?!?!?
As with banned books, controversial music and NC-17 movies, negative press will definitely hurt them where it counts.
The only way that spammers will stop sending you email is when people stop complaining about it (because that means it's working) and stop replying to it or responding to it in any way. Much like a 5 year old child, the only way to shut them up, IMO, is to just ignore them. Pretend they don't exist. Stop spam locally, ignore spam globally.
Look at single people like Ani DiFranco who made it through just touring around the country living out of your car and passing out (selling) tapes/CD's out of the trunk. Go on college radio stations, find indie record distributors like cdbaby.com. I have found massive numbers of record producers in, oddly enough, the bars of airports across the united states. Always have a copy of your CD on you. Give it away if you have to -- people will be more likely to get ahold if it if it's free -- or press cd-singles and pass them out. Whatever it takes man. Saturation will put you into the market somehow. Then, let the public decide.
Or, you could join next year's "American Idol".:-)
Admiration? Adoration? Acknowledgement? A sysadmin craves not these things.
If those are the things you want, J Crew Boy, you are in the *wrong* line of work.
The tradeoff of getting to do your thing with others that are like minded (or solo) in an enviornment that is very much your own and on one bothers you is that no one knows what you do (or cares..let's face it) until it's broken and they run at you like they are on fire in trade for a job where you get to do something you are good at, get paid for, and get to play with new toys all the time.
Appreciate me by not sending 100M email attachments to distribution lists. That'll do.
They try to air politically and socially mocking ads of huge companies, but networks find a way to not book the ads. Check out http://www.adbusters.org for some great anti-ads (and ways to get copies of 30 second spots to send to networks to try and get them to be aired!).
Mr. Gates? Is that you? Awww...look everybody. He wants to be happy! Isn't that cute. The spyware programmer wants to be happy. Apparently, that requires making money. Sorry all of you fellow linux programmers. Looks like we're doomed to a life of suck writing code for free that's even ethically responsible.
They'll make everyone want one of these, and since they conveniently can't tell you where the device is that triggers this event because then the burglars would know, they could monitor you at any time. What's to say that they don't set it off saying "Hey..I'm going over the speed limit here. Come arrest me". And of course we can't put these things into computers first or some other segment of society where there might have been a chance of the person getting nabbed wasn't brown. Let's exploit minorities even further. Yay. Now, I know that maybe -- just maybe he would have taken a car no matter what, but you could make the argument that maybe crack wouldn't have been such a hit if we didn't push that into the black community too, or maybe they would have found it anyways and exploited it on their own. And why don't we do this with guns? Things that kill people, so we could know where they were at all times, but I'm sure the NRA wouldn't hear of that. I think this is going too far.
Okay. So 47% of consumer complaints to the FBI were about Internet auctions, and 20% of that was complaints about merchandise that was never shipped or paid for. So, out of all the complaints, 27% of them are people that, I will assume, paid for items but never got them, or had to complain to get them or get a refund. This is all IFCC data, which pulled it's data from a pool of fewer than 50,000 complaints. This should tell you why percentages are bad and misleading. They don't state in the article anywhere (save for the very bottom) that these percentages are based on a sample of the total data, not the sum of the data itself. Maybe it should read, "Of a pool of 50,000 complaints from the total number, the percentages read..." [soapbox] Statistics are misleading. Just like those auctions you never take any precautions on. 5 steps back for eveloution. And for this, we keep euthenasia illegal in the U.S.? [/soapbox]
Quoting from Yahoo!'s privacy policy: Yahoo! does not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or nonaffiliated companies except to provide products or services you've requested, when we have your permission, or under the following circumstances:
Wouldn't them resetting your preferences, marketing or otherwise, not fall into these circumstances? None of the "or under the following circumstances" choices involve them resetting your preferences, server crashes, software glitches or what have you. They all regard any legal issues (your hawking warez or child porn and the feds find out, etc). I don't think that, even by their defintion, this would be considered a legal 'opt-in' for 3rd parties to be able to get ahold of you.
Of course, IANAL, but I can read. It's just that the fine print requires a magnifying glass.
When did it become the problem of the ISP that child pornography, or any illegal items for that matter, is being distributed on the Internet? No mention of file sharing programs, search engines, news reading software, etc...or [insert your diety here] forbid that us as a society address the root of the problem itself to try and stop children from being exploited, or working with adults who are ill, and make no mistake, they are very very ill. If the government cared at all about the children they wish to protect, they would funnel more spending into studying this problem at it's root cause, IMO. All countries. Not just the United States...or one state in the U.S.. Also, let me get this right. You can show a picture of a child being murdered, so long as they are not being sexually abused? This is not protecting children so much as it is giving everyone out there who falls for this warm fuzzies since, "If the problem isn't visable, it must not exist" (copyright 1492-2002 United States Citizens for Ignorant Bliss).
Never teach everyone everything you know because you'll be replaced.
You are apparently not a part of the open source movement whose motto equates to the exact opposite of that statement.
Teach anyone who wants to know everything you can. The more hands coding software that doesn't belong to Microsoft, the better. Those who can teach. Those who can't work for Microsoft.
Not necessarily true. The phone still needs a lot of power to carry out it's "idle" tasks.
By far the most important thing it does is to wake periodically and turn on its receiver briefly to see if it has been paged, which means to find out if there is an incoming call. This happens on what is known as a slot cycle, and the period of the slot cycle is controlled by the cell (for all intents and purposes). Slot cycle indices are numbers from 0 to 7, and for any index the period is 1.28 seconds multiplied by 2^index. In North America, by far the most common slot cycle indices are 1 and 2, which indicates a period of 2.56 seconds or 5.12 seconds respectively. I haven't heard of anyone using anything longer than this, though the specification supports slot cycles of 163.84 seconds.
The receiver consumes quite a lot of power. relatively speaking, and the purpose of the slot cycle is to permit the phone to keep the receiver turned off most of the time. This is vital to extend battery life. When the phone first registers with a cell, the cell and phone determine which paging channel the phone will use (if there is more than one) and what phase of the slot cycle that phone will use. Thereafter, the phone wakes periodically, turns its receiver on briefly to see if it has an incoming call or if there is other traffic from the cell it must respond to, and if there is nothing then it shuts the receiver down again and waits until the next slot time.
When an incoming call arrives at the cell for a given phone, the phone system generates the sound of a phone ringing as a comfort tone back to the caller, and the cell waits until the slot time for the phone. When it comes around, the cell sends a message to the phone telling it that there is an incoming call. This causes the phone to waken and set up the call, and to begin to ring.
If the phone doesn't respond to the page, the cell may try again on the next slot.
The advantage of a longer slot cycle is that the phone spends a lower percentage of the time with its receiver on and thus the battery will last longer. It also means there is more capacity on the paging channel. The advantage of a shorter slot cycle is that the phone gets more chances to receive the page, and will receive the page sooner.
When the cell system needs to send out that page, it obviously needs to know where to broadcast it. The cell system as a whole will be divided into zones, and when a phone is paged, every sector of every cell in the zone it's in will carry the page. This means that no matter where the phone is located in that zone, it will receive the page. When the phone moves from one zone to another, it registers again, which permits the cell to know where it is located. The size and layout of the zones is another tradeoff: if the zones are large, the traffic channels will carry a great deal of redundant paging information and can become overloaded, but the phone doesn't have to perform zone-based registration very often as it moves around, which means its battery will last longer. On the other hand, if the zones are small then the paging channels are used more efficiently but the phone will need to register more often and thus will use more battery power.
You may have noticed that when you turn your phone off it takes several seconds for it to actually shut down. That's because it is sending a message to the cell to tell the cell that the phone is going offline. However, the phone can go down unexpectedly without having the chance to send this to the cell (for instance, the battery could be popped from the phone unexpectedly while the phone is operating, which is generally not recommended), and in that case the phone would be offline but the cell wouldn't know it. That would then mean that the cell would try to handle an incoming call for that phone by paging it even though the phone was off, and it generally means that the cell's database would be loaded with entries for phones which aren't available. As a long term recovery for that, the phone is required in most systems to do timer-based registration, which means that every ten or twenty minutes it turns its transmitter on to let the cell know that it's still there. If the cell misses a couple of these registrations in a row, it decides that the phone has gone offline and removes it from the database of "phones which are currently turned on".
Under some circumstances, the cell system can directly challenge the phone for a registration. This happens on the paging channel at the slot, and when the phone receives this message, it turns its transmitter on and sends a registration immediately.
If there is pending voice mail for the phone, the phone will be told on a slot to alert its user of this fact.
All of these registration messages sent by the phone are nearly identical, and they simply identify the phone and contain a few other important pieces of information about it. Despite how it sounds, they (deliberately) don't happen very often and (deliberately) represent a negligible impact on standby time. But they are necessary for the phone system as a whole to work properly.
Of course, the phone is also updating its display to show the current date and time and signal strength and amount of energy remaining in the battery, and perhaps other things depending on the phone model.
It shouldn't be tolerated. People shouldn't be informed they are being spied on and say, "Eh, I figured as much anyway." Would you say that if you found that the CIA had been wiretapping your phone line and/or DSL/Cable line for the past 6 months? I haven't read the licence agreement to Netscape 6 recently, but I don't care if it says anything about monitoring your browsing trends (it's hard to call them 'habits' due to the very definition of the word). It almost appears as people are becoming complacient about this. If you get used to it, they will just push further once they have their hand in your privacy and you don't flinch. Eventually, it may come down to a/. headline, "MS-AOL using tiny dust-sized robot probes that ship with Windows 3K that get into your nostrils, sit behind your eyes and monitor everything you do." *shutter* Once more a large company is stepping on your rights and your privacy, and while maybe you shouldn't be suprised, you should be outraged. Please? Pretty please?
800 MHz cellular has a wavelength of approximately 37 centimeters, about 15 inches. So an ideal antenna would be half that, about seven and a half inches. This refers to the dipole, the distance from the tip of the antenna to the opposite end of the antenna buried inside the phone somewhere (usually near the bottom). 1900 MHz PCS has a wavelength of approximately 16 centimeters, about six inches. So the ideal antenna dipole is about 3 inches.
The ideal antenna performs best if it is exactly perpendicular to the impinging waveform. In practice the orientation of the phone is somewhat random; the antenna will be pointed approximately upward, but probably at a slant. So cell phone manufacturers generally try to make the antenna 5/8's of a waveform, because if the antenna is at a slant, its cross-section relative to the impinging waveform will be near to the ideal half a wavelength. For a dual-band phone, one which operates at both 1900 and at 800 MHz, it's obvious that determining the antenna length is a bit of a problem. (But not insoluble; it's just a compromise. Since digital is usually more resilient than AMPS, usually the length is optimized for 800 MHz.)
Making the antenna shorter will both decrease the amount of incoming signal the phone receives, and will make the phone's transmitter less efficient. But CDMA operates over a very wide range of effective powers, and it can usually compensate. That's why the phone will usually work with the antenna down. And because it's digital, if it is working it will sound exactly the same. This has lead some people to conclude that the antenna is not actually doing anything for them, which is not quite correct. While the phone can operate with the antenna down, it's easier on the phone if you raise the antenna; it has more signal ceiling to work with and will be less likely to drop the call. Also, it will use somewhat less transmit power, and your battery will last somewhat longer.
Making it longer with some sort of extension is worse than useless; it actually degrades the signal. If the antenna is exactly one wavelength long and is exactly perpendicular to the impinging waveform, it will pick up essentially no signal at all.
When it reaches one and a half wavelengths, signal strength is again maximized, but for physical reasons it's a bit lower than the strength with a half-wavelength antenna. (The physical reason is that the antenna is not an ideal conductor.)
A much as I hate it, having Rupert Murdoch (the owner of Fox News) on your side, who also happens to have congressmen of his own in his pocket as well as a few Supreme Court Justices and House members, may be helpfull if papa murdoch happens to agree with this. Either that, or Fox news wants some mainstream attention and is trying to break their opinion on the story early. I still feel dirty. Greasy law, or greasy businessmen on your side against the law. It's like Olestra. Nothing good will come from any of this.
The link to amazon.com that I submitted with the story doesn't benefit me in any way -- I'm not *that* much of a whore;-)
The link was actually just the first, fastest link to an easy list of technical details about the movie, though I'm jealous that I didn't think of that (jk)
It probibly was in poor taste to link it to amazon, but linking to the IMDB would also have a link to amazon as well.
At least the first link was to an independent source:)
Slashdot Mirror
it was fun to watch all the backspacing everyone did do to poor spelling.
;-)
Didn't help with the grammar though, did it?
Now you've got it! ;-)
(From biz.yahoo.com)
Video Games and Guns cause violence like condoms cause sex like a car causes auto accidents like a knife causes you to be a chef.
I'm so sick of scapegoating. Nothing but a nation (or planet) of less immature children on a proverbial schoolyard.
Stop. Just, stop.
Instead of finding a way to stop pirates (which you won't do), find a way to catch them. Quit throwing bad films and good money down the drain by giving pirates another hurdle to jump. I'd rather see these people caught. Stop ruining my music and films because you don't want them pirated. If someone keeps robbing your house, do you just keep adding new alarm systems time and time again, or do you try to catch the bastard? It's just stupid, IMO.
I use Verizon Wireless (I live near Albany, NY) and cannot dial out on my cell phone, nor can I get calls (it dishes out an 'all circuts are busy' double-time busy signal), so anyone trying to get ahold of a loved/cared/liked/missed one via their cell, it might not work.
Anyone know the extent of this outage for cell phones?
From what I heard, terrorists working for SCO were exploiting port 135 worms after declaring their hatred for IBM on Friendster (of course, they were disguised as John Ashcroft and their accounts were cancelled) and, from all accounts, they were just "testing a random number generator". Where does it all end?!?!?
1,2,3,4,5???? /spaceballs refrence
That's the combination to my luggage!
As with banned books, controversial music and NC-17 movies, negative press will definitely hurt them where it counts.
The only way that spammers will stop sending you email is when people stop complaining about it (because that means it's working) and stop replying to it or responding to it in any way. Much like a 5 year old child, the only way to shut them up, IMO, is to just ignore them. Pretend they don't exist.
Stop spam locally, ignore spam globally.
Look at single people like Ani DiFranco who made it through just touring around the country living out of your car and passing out (selling) tapes/CD's out of the trunk. Go on college radio stations, find indie record distributors like cdbaby.com. I have found massive numbers of record producers in, oddly enough, the bars of airports across the united states. Always have a copy of your CD on you. Give it away if you have to -- people will be more likely to get ahold if it if it's free -- or press cd-singles and pass them out. Whatever it takes man. Saturation will put you into the market somehow. Then, let the public decide.
:-)
Or, you could join next year's "American Idol".
Admiration? Adoration? Acknowledgement? A sysadmin craves not these things.
If those are the things you want, J Crew Boy, you are in the *wrong* line of work.
The tradeoff of getting to do your thing with others that are like minded (or solo) in an enviornment that is very much your own and on one bothers you is that no one knows what you do (or cares..let's face it) until it's broken and they run at you like they are on fire in trade for a job where you get to do something you are good at, get paid for, and get to play with new toys all the time.
Appreciate me by not sending 100M email attachments to distribution lists. That'll do.
They try to air politically and socially mocking ads of huge companies, but networks find a way to not book the ads. Check out http://www.adbusters.org for some great anti-ads (and ways to get copies of 30 second spots to send to networks to try and get them to be aired!).
--Larry
Mr. Gates? Is that you?
Awww...look everybody. He wants to be happy! Isn't that cute. The spyware programmer wants to be happy. Apparently, that requires making money.
Sorry all of you fellow linux programmers. Looks like we're doomed to a life of suck writing code for free that's even ethically responsible.
Whoops.
They'll make everyone want one of these, and since they conveniently can't tell you where the device is that triggers this event because then the burglars would know, they could monitor you at any time. What's to say that they don't set it off saying "Hey..I'm going over the speed limit here. Come arrest me".
And of course we can't put these things into computers first or some other segment of society where there might have been a chance of the person getting nabbed wasn't brown. Let's exploit minorities even further. Yay. Now, I know that maybe -- just maybe he would have taken a car no matter what, but you could make the argument that maybe crack wouldn't have been such a hit if we didn't push that into the black community too, or maybe they would have found it anyways and exploited it on their own.
And why don't we do this with guns? Things that kill people, so we could know where they were at all times, but I'm sure the NRA wouldn't hear of that.
I think this is going too far.
Okay. So 47% of consumer complaints to the FBI were about Internet auctions, and 20% of that was complaints about merchandise that was never shipped or paid for. So, out of all the complaints, 27% of them are people that, I will assume, paid for items but never got them, or had to complain to get them or get a refund.
This is all IFCC data, which pulled it's data from a pool of fewer than 50,000 complaints. This should tell you why percentages are bad and misleading. They don't state in the article anywhere (save for the very bottom) that these percentages are based on a sample of the total data, not the sum of the data itself.
Maybe it should read, "Of a pool of 50,000 complaints from the total number, the percentages read..."
[soapbox]
Statistics are misleading. Just like those auctions you never take any precautions on. 5 steps back for eveloution. And for this, we keep euthenasia illegal in the U.S.?
[/soapbox]
Quoting from Yahoo!'s privacy policy:
Yahoo! does not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or nonaffiliated companies except to provide products or services you've requested, when we have your permission, or under the following circumstances:
Wouldn't them resetting your preferences, marketing or otherwise, not fall into these circumstances? None of the "or under the following circumstances" choices involve them resetting your preferences, server crashes, software glitches or what have you. They all regard any legal issues (your hawking warez or child porn and the feds find out, etc). I don't think that, even by their defintion, this would be considered a legal 'opt-in' for 3rd parties to be able to get ahold of you.
Of course, IANAL, but I can read. It's just that the fine print requires a magnifying glass.
The article mentions that they couldn't see the meteor because it came from the same side of the planet as the Sun...the Sun is a blindspot??
Yikes!
When did it become the problem of the ISP that child pornography, or any illegal items for that matter, is being distributed on the Internet? No mention of file sharing programs, search engines, news reading software, etc...or [insert your diety here] forbid that us as a society address the root of the problem itself to try and stop children from being exploited, or working with adults who are ill, and make no mistake, they are very very ill.
If the government cared at all about the children they wish to protect, they would funnel more spending into studying this problem at it's root cause, IMO. All countries. Not just the United States...or one state in the U.S..
Also, let me get this right. You can show a picture of a child being murdered, so long as they are not being sexually abused? This is not protecting children so much as it is giving everyone out there who falls for this warm fuzzies since, "If the problem isn't visable, it must not exist" (copyright 1492-2002 United States Citizens for Ignorant Bliss).
Color me stupified.
Never teach everyone everything you know because you'll be replaced.
You are apparently not a part of the open source movement whose motto equates to the exact opposite of that statement.
Teach anyone who wants to know everything you can. The more hands coding software that doesn't belong to Microsoft, the better. Those who can teach. Those who can't work for Microsoft.
Not necessarily true. The phone still needs a lot of power to carry out it's "idle" tasks.
By far the most important thing it does is to wake periodically and turn on its receiver briefly to see if it has been paged, which means to find out if there is an incoming call. This happens on what is known as a slot cycle, and the period of the slot cycle is controlled by the cell (for all intents and purposes). Slot cycle indices are numbers from 0 to 7, and for any index the period is 1.28 seconds multiplied by 2^index. In North America, by far the most common slot cycle indices are 1 and 2, which indicates a period of 2.56 seconds or 5.12 seconds respectively. I haven't heard of anyone using anything longer than this, though the specification supports slot cycles of 163.84 seconds.
The receiver consumes quite a lot of power. relatively speaking, and the purpose of the slot cycle is to permit the phone to keep the receiver turned off most of the time. This is vital to extend battery life. When the phone first registers with a cell, the cell and phone determine which paging channel the phone will use (if there is more than one) and what phase of the slot cycle that phone will use. Thereafter, the phone wakes periodically, turns its receiver on briefly to see if it has an incoming call or if there is other traffic from the cell it must respond to, and if there is nothing then it shuts the receiver down again and waits until the next slot time.
When an incoming call arrives at the cell for a given phone, the phone system generates the sound of a phone ringing as a comfort tone back to the caller, and the cell waits until the slot time for the phone. When it comes around, the cell sends a message to the phone telling it that there is an incoming call. This causes the phone to waken and set up the call, and to begin to ring.
If the phone doesn't respond to the page, the cell may try again on the next slot.
The advantage of a longer slot cycle is that the phone spends a lower percentage of the time with its receiver on and thus the battery will last longer. It also means there is more capacity on the paging channel. The advantage of a shorter slot cycle is that the phone gets more chances to receive the page, and will receive the page sooner.
When the cell system needs to send out that page, it obviously needs to know where to broadcast it. The cell system as a whole will be divided into zones, and when a phone is paged, every sector of every cell in the zone it's in will carry the page. This means that no matter where the phone is located in that zone, it will receive the page. When the phone moves from one zone to another, it registers again, which permits the cell to know where it is located. The size and layout of the zones is another tradeoff: if the zones are large, the traffic channels will carry a great deal of redundant paging information and can become overloaded, but the phone doesn't have to perform zone-based registration very often as it moves around, which means its battery will last longer. On the other hand, if the zones are small then the paging channels are used more efficiently but the phone will need to register more often and thus will use more battery power.
You may have noticed that when you turn your phone off it takes several seconds for it to actually shut down. That's because it is sending a message to the cell to tell the cell that the phone is going offline. However, the phone can go down unexpectedly without having the chance to send this to the cell (for instance, the battery could be popped from the phone unexpectedly while the phone is operating, which is generally not recommended), and in that case the phone would be offline but the cell wouldn't know it. That would then mean that the cell would try to handle an incoming call for that phone by paging it even though the phone was off, and it generally means that the cell's database would be loaded with entries for phones which aren't available. As a long term recovery for that, the phone is required in most systems to do timer-based registration, which means that every ten or twenty minutes it turns its transmitter on to let the cell know that it's still there. If the cell misses a couple of these registrations in a row, it decides that the phone has gone offline and removes it from the database of "phones which are currently turned on".
Under some circumstances, the cell system can directly challenge the phone for a registration. This happens on the paging channel at the slot, and when the phone receives this message, it turns its transmitter on and sends a registration immediately.
If there is pending voice mail for the phone, the phone will be told on a slot to alert its user of this fact.
All of these registration messages sent by the phone are nearly identical, and they simply identify the phone and contain a few other important pieces of information about it. Despite how it sounds, they (deliberately) don't happen very often and (deliberately) represent a negligible impact on standby time. But they are necessary for the phone system as a whole to work properly.
Of course, the phone is also updating its display to show the current date and time and signal strength and amount of energy remaining in the battery, and perhaps other things depending on the phone model.
It shouldn't be tolerated. People shouldn't be informed they are being spied on and say, "Eh, I figured as much anyway." Would you say that if you found that the CIA had been wiretapping your phone line and/or DSL/Cable line for the past 6 months? /. headline, "MS-AOL using tiny dust-sized robot probes that ship with Windows 3K that get into your nostrils, sit behind your eyes and monitor everything you do." *shutter*
I haven't read the licence agreement to Netscape 6 recently, but I don't care if it says anything about monitoring your browsing trends (it's hard to call them 'habits' due to the very definition of the word). It almost appears as people are becoming complacient about this. If you get used to it, they will just push further once they have their hand in your privacy and you don't flinch. Eventually, it may come down to a
Once more a large company is stepping on your rights and your privacy, and while maybe you shouldn't be suprised, you should be outraged.
Please?
Pretty please?
800 MHz cellular has a wavelength of approximately 37 centimeters, about 15 inches. So an ideal antenna would be half that, about seven and a half inches. This refers to the dipole, the distance from the tip of the antenna to the opposite end of the antenna buried inside the phone somewhere (usually near the bottom). 1900 MHz PCS has a wavelength of approximately 16 centimeters, about six inches. So the ideal antenna dipole is about 3 inches.
The ideal antenna performs best if it is exactly perpendicular to the impinging waveform. In practice the orientation of the phone is somewhat random; the antenna will be pointed approximately upward, but probably at a slant. So cell phone manufacturers generally try to make the antenna 5/8's of a waveform, because if the antenna is at a slant, its cross-section relative to the impinging waveform will be near to the ideal half a wavelength. For a dual-band phone, one which operates at both 1900 and at 800 MHz, it's obvious that determining the antenna length is a bit of a problem. (But not insoluble; it's just a compromise. Since digital is usually more resilient than AMPS, usually the length is optimized for 800 MHz.)
Making the antenna shorter will both decrease the amount of incoming signal the phone receives, and will make the phone's transmitter less efficient. But CDMA operates over a very wide range of effective powers, and it can usually compensate. That's why the phone will usually work with the antenna down. And because it's digital, if it is working it will sound exactly the same. This has lead some people to conclude that the antenna is not actually doing anything for them, which is not quite correct. While the phone can operate with the antenna down, it's easier on the phone if you raise the antenna; it has more signal ceiling to work with and will be less likely to drop the call. Also, it will use somewhat less transmit power, and your battery will last somewhat longer.
Making it longer with some sort of extension is worse than useless; it actually degrades the signal. If the antenna is exactly one wavelength long and is exactly perpendicular to the impinging waveform, it will pick up essentially no signal at all.
When it reaches one and a half wavelengths, signal strength is again maximized, but for physical reasons it's a bit lower than the strength with a half-wavelength antenna. (The physical reason is that the antenna is not an ideal conductor.)
[stolen directly from the CDMA FAQ
A much as I hate it, having Rupert Murdoch (the owner of Fox News) on your side, who also happens to have congressmen of his own in his pocket as well as a few Supreme Court Justices and House members, may be helpfull if papa murdoch happens to agree with this.
Either that, or Fox news wants some mainstream attention and is trying to break their opinion on the story early.
I still feel dirty. Greasy law, or greasy businessmen on your side against the law. It's like Olestra.
Nothing good will come from any of this.
Just view the source of the webpage. They are all embedded right in the code. Thank you and please drive through.
The link to amazon.com that I submitted with the story doesn't benefit me in any way -- I'm not *that* much of a whore ;-)
:)
The link was actually just the first, fastest link to an easy list of technical details about the movie, though I'm jealous that I didn't think of that (jk)
It probibly was in poor taste to link it to amazon, but linking to the IMDB would also have a link to amazon as well.
At least the first link was to an independent source
--Larry