Ah this version of the story is missing the really juicy part that is mentioned in other related stories,
And that is that the BBC effectively threatened to put out of buisness any ISP that dares to try to throttle its iPlayer service by 'naming and shaming' any that do, and suggesting that all other content providers do the same.
I imagine that having trailers appear on bbc tv saying "and you can also watch this episode again via iPlayer (except on the following ISPs)" is going to be pretty damaging to business.
how about a new analogy, using now obsolete technology but i think it fits.
Say you have a microsoft VCR, it claims that its VHS and takes VHS tapes, and so over the years you record many of your favourite shows and they all play back perfectly.
A few years down the road and the vcr breaks down one day, so you go out and look at the market and you find that lots of people make vhs vcrs and the microsoft ones seem particularly expensive given their feature set, so you buy some other brand, say a Sony.
you take your shiny new Sony VCR home, and you put in your favourite recorded VHS tapes, and wtf! the sound isnt right, the picture has an odd wobble, it just doesmt come out right. so you try a commercial prerecorded tape, plays perfectly no problem, but all your microsoft tapes are hosed.
In the end your forced to return your sony and buy another overpriced microsoft vcr, as its the only thing that will play your hard earned collection of tapes properly, even though they claimed they were VHS standard.
-thats- what microsoft are like, consumer lock in, make sure that all those precious files you create will only work properly with them, so your forced to come back into the fold or start again from scratch.
Why buy a Eee PC when I can get a Dell cheapie of the moment with 12X the power at the same or LESS price. Because you, like so many other people, and some of the 'rival' manufacturers miss the point of why this appeals to quite so many people.
Its fairly cheap, sure, but as you point out its not the best value for money on that score.
It is because it is also small, and light, at under one kilogram and smaller and a A4 pad it easily slips into a satchel, or messenger style bag that many people carry around these days, making it much more practical to keep with you than a traditional large heavy laptop.
You can of course buy small sleek laptops with more features, but they tend to cost more, a LOT more.
Its the balance point of price and size and features that makes it so popular, alter any one of those very far and you lose that unique selling point.
It certainly used to be the case in the UK that the 10p per sms message fee was charged entirely by the senders network provider. Network providers charged no fee to recieve incoming sms messages from other providers. The amount of inter-network traffic was fairly even, so the fees gathered on each message leaving the network covered the costs of delivering those that entered.
However, there was an increasting number of bulk-sms (ie spam) sending companies, these companies were generating lots of messages, which the networks would deliver for free, but never got any sent to them, so the networks were loosing out.
So the networks declared that they would split the fees, 5p in, 5p out. This means that the total costs for sending a text between network providers remained the same, but the bulk senders now had to pay costs.
The end user billing has remained the same as it always was, sender pays.
and if you programmed an fpga to just have say a single adder per clock instruction then yes it would suck. but thats not what you do, you program them to do lots and LOTS of operations simultaneously in that one clock cycle.
so where as your general purpose cpu might have done one multiply, your fpga could have done an entire convolution matrix, or
This is why a section of fpga, if it had enough gates, would be really cool in a cpu. or at least as a standardised co-pro in some manner, so that you could rely on mass-market deployment. You would be able to configure that fpga seqment to either do a block of very small operations, or one really complex one per clock cycle. At the moment MMX and its variants provide only a very limited subset of the operations that could be possible, and then only the ones the chip manufacturer thought of.
I was watching some london cops in action kind of show on tv a few weeks ago, sorry cant remeber what it was called, the central london police already have a huge array on ANPR cameras which are scanning for number plates of known stolen and other suspect vehicles. The show followed the cops as the system flagged up a stolen car which they chased down and cornered, and also alerted them to the presence of a van wanted in relation to some crimes, but they quickly figured out that the occupants wernt the people they were looking for and the reg number they were looking for was likely a phoney.
How abouting using somethign that the brain perceives differently to what is actually measurably there, for example, optical illusions using colour.
There are some classic optical illusions where the brain percieves a different colour to the one that is actually there, because of backgrounds and other visual clues in the image. an automated program that simply measured the value would give a different answer to the human one.
According to TFA current generation camera phones are too poor a quality to read this barcode. Also they imply that the entire code system is vendor locked to a central database. I expect they even charge royalties on it via their patent.
where as qr-code contains just a url (no vendor lock in) is royalty free (and an ISO standard) and has worked on phones and pdas with cameras for a number of years now.
way to go microsoft, always pushing the boundaries (not)
There is one possible useful thing to come of this, perhaps now more western countries will realise this stuff exists and start using it, camera phones have become ubiquitous across europe and are just crying out for this kind of practical use.
As I see it there are two main possibilities:- 1. Global Warming is entirely human driven 2. Its partly if not entirely a natural process.
if its entirely human driven then considering human nature theres no way you would ever stop it happening, slow it down some maybe, but not stop it. if there is a natural component to it then no matter how much you try to do to reduce the human component its going to happen anyway.
so its going to happen either way, get over it and start planning how best to cope.
if it was so hard to forge a passport then they wouldnt need the extra security they claim the rfid chip gives. but guess what, passports are already being forged.
the rfid chip contains photo biometrics certainly (not a high res picture either, theres only a tiny amount of storage space), but fingerprints arent included yet in many cases (and were never mandated by ICAO) it also doesnt include your signature.
so somebody that looks a bit like you, enough to pass casual observation (we all know computer face matching is very unreliable, people are even worse at it), can have a passport with your details on and their own choice of signature, which world+dog will assume is totally authentic, and which they can now use to claim your name and address as their own identity.
ironically you have to stick these rfid passports through a slot reader anyway.
an optical reader decodes the printed values on the bottom edge of your passport in order to construct the key to connect to and decrypt the rfid data.
that can happen if you go 'off piste' and start using repositories and packages that werent built for that distribution.
if you really cant find the package you want from one of the versioned repositories like freshrpms.net or rpmforge.net then you really should be looking for the source-rpms instead, sometimse i have to use rpmfind or pbone to find a package, grab the srpm and 'rpmbuild --rebuild' it, or grab the tarball and see if it has a *.spec file in it and then build that (rpmbuild -tb) into an rpm
in the majority of cases that works just fine, but there are always corner cases, like mandrake srpms, which have extra non-standard spec macros, they are a pain and you have to start to understand whats going on to fix them, but thankfully its pretty rare to need to go that far.
This kind of service has been available for years with ordinary GSM phones, no embedded GPS system required. All of the major mobile phone networks (in the UK at least) offer commercial SMS location services, that will tell you the location and an error margin, you just have to know the phone number of the device, and supposedly have the consent of its owner. It may not be as accurate as a GPS device might be, with the accuracy ranging from a few hundred meters to a few kilometers depending on terrain, but then it doesnt require any special features like gps in the phone, which is a feature i havent heard of in this country yet.
it has been done already using bluetooth as the rfid technology.
the kid wears a bluetooth tag, as a pendant or bracelet or somesuch, base stations all around the park means the kid is always within range of one of them.
when your issued with the tag your also issued with a security code.
theres a web/wap page you can browse to from your phone, input the code you were given and it tells you where your kid is.
so yes, if close enough someone could directly track the signal from the kids tag, but then they would have had to have been close enough already that they could have done that by eye. but to get a location from a distance you would need the associated access code.
I use an adaptor that makes my ipod appear as a unilink (sony) cd changer, hooked to a pretty generic sony head unit. The interface is pretty decent, you can select between playlist, artist and genre mode, then next/prev disc buttons scroll through the selection, and prev/next track goes through the tracks in that selection.
the sony protocol means that the track name, artist and album names are all fed to the head unit properly, so the head unit can show you them as you like.
the only thing that particularly sucks is scrolling through a list of several hundred artist names if you have a big collection, but with the kind of buttons available in a car theres not much scope for improvement.
To this day, Microsoft has produced over 12,000 pages of documentation that DID NOT EXIST a year ago. The EU refused to state WHAT specifically is inadequate about this documentation, rather they just say it is unusable. What measure did they choose to decide the usability of the documentation? They gave someone with no background in the relevent technology a week to implement everything required to add a user to a domain from scratch.
At the start of this case Microsoft were asked to select a number of independant parties that they felt could fairly evaluate their compliance, the EU chose one from the set (Prof Neil Barrett) to be the one. He is the one that has declared that the documentation is not upto scratch. So MS have nobody but themselves to blame.
If i understand this correctly, traditionally you use steganography to hide the secret (another image) inside an existing (host) image, with a key to decrypt it, the draw back being that someone might accidentally spot the steganography.
This technique doesnt put any data in the host image at all, the keys contain all information required to distort the host image into the secret image, thus given the host image, you cant accidentally stumble across the secret, and likewise the keys are of no use unless you also have the host image.
Its akin to having a text encryption system where the key is the offsets into a known document where the letters can be found, the known document can be public, but unless you know what both it and the key neither is of any use.
I have dealt with a few of the credit card transaction companies, whilst setting up shopping carts for people, and i just dont see how these kind of scams can be happening, as there are mechanism in place to stop it.
The card processing rules are pretty strict: As a supplier you are not allowed to take money from the card until you have shipped the item, you can only issue a funds check and reserve transaction.
Should you take the money and not ship, or the item doesnt arrive, or the customer has any other kind of complaint, like they didnt order the item, the credit card company can take the money straight back off you with a charge back, and their t&c's usually say they can do this anything upto 6 months after the initial transaction, they also tend to load it with an extra fee/fine.
So to get out of this scam all the customer had to do was phone up their card company, tell them whats happened, and their money will be returned, and i know people who have sucessfully done just that when goods went missing in the post or didnt turn up.
Exactly what the current generation DVD players do.
There was an increasing trend for dvd's to include code in their menu setup that looked for the common region-hacks, for example by setting the disc region to 0, then asking the player which region it was, assuming that a hacked player would answer with the region number that was on the disc.
Very quickly the manufacturers started building in (or start releasing the IR remote activation codes for already builtin) hacks that defeated the anti-hack code.
These days you can buy a dvd player from the supermarket for 30ukp and expect it to play all regions, vcd, divx, mp3, and just about everything else.
This is not a weakness in the protocol or the crypto used. Its about manufacturers cutting corners.
This works on devices which do not need to be put into a special mode to be paired, and which are using a fixed same-for-every-unit pairing password.
this software just requests a pairing with every handsfree device it sees, and tries the standard password. If the device had bothered to need physical confirmation for pairing (like any decent headset) or used a random printed-on-the-box password then this wouldnt be happening.
this also isnt about just listening in on other peoples phone conversations, its about listening to ANY conversation, as once you have paired with the device, if it is for example an in car hands free device, you can turn on the microphone and listen to anything said in the car cabin.
Sophos http://www.sophos.com/ have been doing a linux version of their commercial AV software for years. Weve used it to impliment virus scanning of emails and network file stores.
Happy hacker
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The bunch that make the Happy Hacker Keyboards also make a version with blank key caps. They are quite expensive but well made.
There is an already existing plan to give digital projectors to 250 cinemas throughout the UK.
This is being funded by the Arts Council, on the principle that it lowers the cost barrier for entry to smaller independant film makers, as reels of 35mm film are quite expensive to duplicate.
You just select the text with the left button, give focus to the destination then middle click.
Thats the only 'cut and paste' mechanism ive ever needed to use, and it works, -everywhere-, wether the application is aware of cut+paste concepts or not.
afair the application knows nothing of it as its handled in the Xserver itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah this version of the story is missing the really juicy part that is mentioned in other related stories,
And that is that the BBC effectively threatened to put out of buisness any ISP that dares to try to throttle its iPlayer service by 'naming and shaming' any that do, and suggesting that all other content providers do the same.
I imagine that having trailers appear on bbc tv saying "and you can also watch this episode again via iPlayer (except on the following ISPs)" is going to be pretty damaging to business.
how about a new analogy, using now obsolete technology but i think it fits.
Say you have a microsoft VCR, it claims that its VHS and takes VHS tapes, and so over the years you record many of your favourite shows and they all play back perfectly.
A few years down the road and the vcr breaks down one day, so you go out and look at the market and you find that lots of people make vhs vcrs and the microsoft ones seem particularly expensive given their feature set, so you buy some other brand, say a Sony.
you take your shiny new Sony VCR home, and you put in your favourite recorded VHS tapes, and wtf! the sound isnt right, the picture has an odd wobble, it just doesmt come out right. so you try a commercial prerecorded tape, plays perfectly no problem, but all your microsoft tapes are hosed.
In the end your forced to return your sony and buy another overpriced microsoft vcr, as its the only thing that will play your hard earned collection of tapes properly, even though they claimed they were VHS standard.
-thats- what microsoft are like, consumer lock in, make sure that all those precious files you create will only work properly with them, so your forced to come back into the fold or start again from scratch.
Its fairly cheap, sure, but as you point out its not the best value for money on that score.
It is because it is also small, and light, at under one kilogram and smaller and a A4 pad it easily slips into a satchel, or messenger style bag that many people carry around these days, making it much more practical to keep with you than a traditional large heavy laptop.
You can of course buy small sleek laptops with more features, but they tend to cost more, a LOT more.
Its the balance point of price and size and features that makes it so popular, alter any one of those very far and you lose that unique selling point.
It certainly used to be the case in the UK that the 10p per sms message fee was charged entirely by the senders network provider. Network providers charged no fee to recieve incoming sms messages from other providers. The amount of inter-network traffic was fairly even, so the fees gathered on each message leaving the network covered the costs of delivering those that entered.
However, there was an increasting number of bulk-sms (ie spam) sending companies, these companies were generating lots of messages, which the networks would deliver for free, but never got any sent to them, so the networks were loosing out.
So the networks declared that they would split the fees, 5p in, 5p out. This means that the total costs for sending a text between network providers remained the same, but the bulk senders now had to pay costs.
The end user billing has remained the same as it always was, sender pays.
and if you programmed an fpga to just have say a single adder per clock instruction then yes it would suck.
but thats not what you do, you program them to do lots and LOTS of operations simultaneously in that one clock cycle.
so where as your general purpose cpu might have done one multiply, your fpga could have done an entire convolution matrix, or
This is why a section of fpga, if it had enough gates, would be really cool in a cpu. or at least as a standardised co-pro in some manner, so that you could rely on mass-market deployment. You would be able to configure that fpga seqment to either do a block of very small operations, or one really complex one per clock cycle. At the moment MMX and its variants provide only a very limited subset of the operations that could be possible, and then only the ones the chip manufacturer thought of.
I was watching some london cops in action kind of show on tv a few weeks ago, sorry cant remeber what it was called, the central london police already have a huge array on ANPR cameras which are scanning for number plates of known stolen and other suspect vehicles. The show followed the cops as the system flagged up a stolen car which they chased down and cornered, and also alerted them to the presence of a van wanted in relation to some crimes, but they quickly figured out that the occupants wernt the people they were looking for and the reg number they were looking for was likely a phoney.
How abouting using somethign that the brain perceives differently to what is actually measurably there, for example, optical illusions using colour.
n s/illusions.htm
There are some classic optical illusions where the brain percieves a different colour to the one that is actually there, because of backgrounds and other visual clues in the image. an automated program that simply measured the value would give a different answer to the human one.
e.g the colour perception ones here http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusio
but of course as long as people are being tricked into answering captchas for the spammers there will never be a way around it.
According to TFA current generation camera phones are too poor a quality to read this barcode.
Also they imply that the entire code system is vendor locked to a central database.
I expect they even charge royalties on it via their patent.
where as qr-code contains just a url (no vendor lock in) is royalty free (and an ISO standard) and has worked on phones and pdas with cameras for a number of years now.
way to go microsoft, always pushing the boundaries (not)
There is one possible useful thing to come of this, perhaps now more western countries will realise this stuff exists and start using it, camera phones have become ubiquitous across europe and are just crying out for this kind of practical use.
As I see it there are two main possibilities :-
1. Global Warming is entirely human driven
2. Its partly if not entirely a natural process.
if its entirely human driven then considering human nature theres no way you would ever stop it happening, slow it down some maybe, but not stop it.
if there is a natural component to it then no matter how much you try to do to reduce the human component its going to happen anyway.
so its going to happen either way, get over it and start planning how best to cope.
if it was so hard to forge a passport then they wouldnt need the extra security they claim the rfid chip gives. but guess what, passports are already being forged.
the rfid chip contains photo biometrics certainly (not a high res picture either, theres only a tiny amount of storage space), but fingerprints arent included yet in many cases (and were never mandated by ICAO) it also doesnt include your signature.
so somebody that looks a bit like you, enough to pass casual observation (we all know computer face matching is very unreliable, people are even worse at it), can have a passport with your details on and their own choice of signature, which world+dog will assume is totally authentic, and which they can now use to claim your name and address as their own identity.
ironically you have to stick these rfid passports through a slot reader anyway.
an optical reader decodes the printed values on the bottom edge of your passport in order to construct the key to connect to and decrypt the rfid data.
that can happen if you go 'off piste' and start using repositories and packages that werent built for that distribution.
if you really cant find the package you want from one of the versioned repositories like freshrpms.net or rpmforge.net then you really should be looking for the source-rpms instead, sometimse i have to use rpmfind or pbone to find a package, grab the srpm and 'rpmbuild --rebuild' it, or grab the tarball and see if it has a *.spec file in it and then build that (rpmbuild -tb) into an rpm
in the majority of cases that works just fine, but there are always corner cases, like mandrake srpms, which have extra non-standard spec macros, they are a pain and you have to start to understand whats going on to fix them, but thankfully its pretty rare to need to go that far.
This kind of service has been available for years with ordinary GSM phones, no embedded GPS system required. All of the major mobile phone networks (in the UK at least) offer commercial SMS location services, that will tell you the location and an error margin, you just have to know the phone number of the device, and supposedly have the consent of its owner. It may not be as accurate as a GPS device might be, with the accuracy ranging from a few hundred meters to a few kilometers depending on terrain, but then it doesnt require any special features like gps in the phone, which is a feature i havent heard of in this country yet.
L ocation_Based_Services
an example service gateway is this one, it gives plenty of info about range, pricing and restrictions. http://wiki.triangle-solutions.com/index.php/SMS_
it has been done already using bluetooth as the rfid technology.
the kid wears a bluetooth tag, as a pendant or bracelet or somesuch, base stations all around the park means the kid is always within range of one of them.
when your issued with the tag your also issued with a security code.
theres a web/wap page you can browse to from your phone, input the code you were given and it tells you where your kid is.
so yes, if close enough someone could directly track the signal from the kids tag, but then they would have had to have been close enough already that they could have done that by eye. but to get a location from a distance you would need the associated access code.
I use an adaptor that makes my ipod appear as a unilink (sony) cd changer, hooked to a pretty generic sony head unit. The interface is pretty decent, you can select between playlist, artist and genre mode, then next/prev disc buttons scroll through the selection, and prev/next track goes through the tracks in that selection.
the sony protocol means that the track name, artist and album names are all fed to the head unit properly, so the head unit can show you them as you like.
the only thing that particularly sucks is scrolling through a list of several hundred artist names if you have a big collection, but with the kind of buttons available in a car theres not much scope for improvement.
BBC News carried a story about this back in June.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5106598.stm
At the start of this case Microsoft were asked to select a number of independant parties that they felt could fairly evaluate their compliance, the EU chose one from the set (Prof Neil Barrett) to be the one. He is the one that has declared that the documentation is not upto scratch. So MS have nobody but themselves to blame.
If i understand this correctly, traditionally you use steganography to hide the secret (another image) inside an existing (host) image, with a key to decrypt it, the draw back being that someone might accidentally spot the steganography.
This technique doesnt put any data in the host image at all, the keys contain all information required to distort the host image into the secret image, thus given the host image, you cant accidentally stumble across the secret, and likewise the keys are of no use unless you also have the host image.
Its akin to having a text encryption system where the key is the offsets into a known document where the letters can be found, the known document can be public, but unless you know what both it and the key neither is of any use.
I have dealt with a few of the credit card transaction companies, whilst setting up shopping carts for people, and i just dont see how these kind of scams can be happening, as there are mechanism in place to stop it.
The card processing rules are pretty strict:
As a supplier you are not allowed to take money from the card until you have shipped the item, you can only issue a funds check and reserve transaction.
Should you take the money and not ship, or the item doesnt arrive, or the customer has any other kind of complaint, like they didnt order the item, the credit card company can take the money straight back off you with a charge back, and their t&c's usually say they can do this anything upto 6 months after the initial transaction, they also tend to load it with an extra fee/fine.
So to get out of this scam all the customer had to do was phone up their card company, tell them whats happened, and their money will be returned, and i know people who have sucessfully done just that when goods went missing in the post or didnt turn up.
Exactly what the current generation DVD players do.
There was an increasing trend for dvd's to include code in their menu setup that looked for the common region-hacks, for example by setting the disc region to 0, then asking the player which region it was, assuming that a hacked player would answer with the region number that was on the disc.
Very quickly the manufacturers started building in (or start releasing the IR remote activation codes for already builtin) hacks that defeated the anti-hack code.
These days you can buy a dvd player from the supermarket for 30ukp and expect it to play all regions, vcd, divx, mp3, and just about everything else.
This is not a weakness in the protocol or the crypto used. Its about manufacturers cutting corners.
This works on devices which do not need to be put into a special mode to be paired, and which are using a fixed same-for-every-unit pairing password.
this software just requests a pairing with every handsfree device it sees, and tries the standard password. If the device had bothered to need physical confirmation for pairing (like any decent headset) or used a random printed-on-the-box password then this wouldnt be happening.
this also isnt about just listening in on other peoples phone conversations, its about listening to ANY conversation, as once you have paired with the device, if it is for example an in car hands free device, you can turn on the microphone and listen to anything said in the car cabin.
Sophos http://www.sophos.com/ have been doing a linux version of their commercial AV software for years. Weve used it to impliment virus scanning of emails and network file stores.
The bunch that make the Happy Hacker Keyboards also make a version with blank key caps. They are quite expensive but well made.
UK Distributor: http://chygwyn.com/products/hardware/#pid52842
There is an already existing plan to give digital projectors to 250 cinemas throughout the UK.
This is being funded by the Arts Council, on the principle that it lowers the cost barrier for entry to smaller independant film makers, as reels of 35mm film are quite expensive to duplicate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4297865.stm
Why is this such an issue ?
You just select the text with the left button, give focus to the destination then middle click.
Thats the only 'cut and paste' mechanism ive ever needed to use, and it works, -everywhere-, wether the application is aware of cut+paste concepts or not.
afair the application knows nothing of it as its handled in the Xserver itself.