I recommend mass deployment of those cheap disposable cameras at the next march.
while a couple of them might get away, I doubt they would be much point - your chance of success is low.
Better approaches are:
* Wireless/WiFi devices that dump the images back to a laptop in a nearby location, where they are uploaded to many locations on the internet. Encrypt the hard drive so the sites can't be extracted easily. Store the keys on an external device such as a thumb drive, floppy or CD that can be physically destroyed at the slightest problem (actually the key device doesn't even have to be taken to the site - as long as the computer can be left turned on for the whole operation). Downside: a jammer will kill this far too easily, and your laptop will be located and taken unless it has a receive-only wireless connection of some kind.
* just sit way back with a big zoom lens - and have the pictures pop up from time to time on free web spaces (accessed only from public locations). Whenever they take pictures of demonstrators, just upload a few more of your own. They have no way to even know who you are, or which events you attend until it's way too late! Downside: A lot harder to get a good angle for the shots you need.
C'mon, if the data is going to escape into the wild, it will do so - no matter how DRM'd it is. (just look at the attempts to protect audio and video data)
If they keep this up it'll be illegal to watch movies or listen to music anywhere other than the theatre!
wifi = re-emitting as electromagnetic radiation, light = electromagnetic radiation, therefore your television = broadcast station, same as an AP.
Now if we can just fool them into legislating that you can't watch movies at the theatre, or listen to a home stereo either, we'll have em.
Somebody want to invent / commercialize an ultrasonic WiFi or bluetooth protocol compatable network? That should trigger legislation to kill all audio systems:-)
Riiiiight.... but aren't they supposed to actively enforce these patents, or is that copyright?
Java is just an emulator for a processor that never actually existed....
Thus ALL emulators violate this patent - and depending on how you read it, all software that calls other software, including shell scripts, binaries, operating systems which call the BIOS, any BIOS that calls the BIOS on another board - eg SCSI controller, about the only things that don't infringe are self-contained firmware that can't have third party add-ons.
But back to emulators - when was the first emulator released? surely a long time back - I remember something called "executor" that emulated a Mac on a PC back about '96 or so... and there must have been well established game console emulators around at the time.
A bit of googling reveals emulators for things like Z80 processors and CP/M that were last developed in the late '80s - meaning there is an easily established prior art against a patent filed in 1993
According to This Page. (scroll down to 1962/1965) IBM are fools for licensing emulation from anybody...
By 1986, everybody was emulating all sorts of things.
Emulation was well documented since before I was born, and yet Sun thinks a 1993 patent by Kodak is valid to the tune of 90+ million? Something STINKS!
Other concepts in the patent date back to the 1960s! (from This article)
Other interesting points: Java applets don't ask for help - they simply are there - it is the web browser or operating system that figures out that help is required, and loads up Java to help it. As such, a java applet is a document, in the same way a Shockwave/Flash file is a document, and so are most other file formats. One wonders where this leaves Micro$oft's patent on embedding code in a document.
Not sure about US law (or realy even the local ones) but they tend to distinguish between stuff the owner has / has not attempted to secure.
ie if the doors and windows are locked, and you bypass them to get in, it is break-and-enter, but if the door is not locked, it's different.
Turning on WEP could be seen as locking the door - if you are determined to get in it won't really stop you, but it is illegal to enter because the owner has tried to stop you/informed you they do not want you to get in.
Re:It's not like this is new logic...
on
Fluid Logic Chips
·
· Score: 1
How long does your cold cup of coffee stay cold when being microwaved on high?
probably a LOT longer than a CPU....
It is more a matter of having something that can last longer than the pulse you can generate. If it can last say 10 or 100 times longer than a copper chip, it is an advantage - one that anyting that used copper chips might not have.
Experiments that could not be measured close up with electronic circuits could now be measured/observed.
Just imagine if we had computerized war machines that could survive EMP for ten times as long as the opposition's - you could emit an EMP that would take them out and leave you perfectly happy.
-- Imagine a beowulf cl... sorry, this one was just begging for it
Re:Wide industry support != consumer adoption
on
WiMax: When, Not If
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Right now there are two reasons I can NEVER get ADSL, both based on the distance of copper that ADSL can handle:
* Lack of population - there are not enough houses within ADSL range of my exchange to warrant the upgrade, even if they all get broadband. This is not likely to change in the next 10 years.
* My own distance from the exchange - at 6km of copper, it is unlikely I will be able to get it even when the exchange is upgraded.
WiMax will fix that nicely.
Also ADSL2 is in the pipeline - at speeds of at least 6Mb each way, 802.11 can't keep up unless you're in the same room.
Ironically, if Telstra were to hang a wireless transmitter on an existing phone tower 30km away, I could have broadband that day by putting an AP on a hill on our land (I have good radio line of sight from there)
Current hardware can transcode to DIVX in real time - but you wouldn't do that, you'd just do the resize to lower resolution (ie to about DVD resolution - less than 6 gig file).
Then you could run the rest of the process at your leisure.
and then that same human in that same office has to type the same hundreds of nine-digit codes perfectly every day.
hence the need for little bits of plastic with some magic number on them.
Of course it will take some geek all of 30 seconds to learn to change that magic number, and randomly have you charged with everything from traffic offences to tax evasion, but gee, how often would that happen? (given that wizards have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten).
Instead of having 15 distros I like, I'd kill to have 3 that I love.
and 5% of people that like them...
It would be far more beneficial to have 3 or more distros, one or two of which you love and the rest which you like/dislike/hate (and someone else loves).
This we already have (well sort of anyway)
What we really need is somewhere that objectivly lists the strong / weak points of each distro in various scenarios - so that people don't have to try them all themselves.
I just bought one of these - no DL burning, but that wasn't something I was worried about getting (I do want mega-capacity, but when they become available a blue-ray drive is more appropriate for that goal)
Unfortunately Linux doesn't support ATAPI on SATA (yet - the libata people are working on it) so I haven't been able to check it out.
I just finished getting the promise PDC20378 driver working under kernel 2.6 so I can use the PATA ports (seemed to hold up ok under stress-test last night). This driver has ATAPI support, so I well try the plextor on the SATA ports in the next day or two.
I'm running that driver on an ASUS P4C800 - if anyone want's a copy drop me a line - I may email promise a diff in a week or so - but I can't guarantee they will make it available on their site.
Actually, I quite enjoyed the last few of these - you string them along for as long as possible, run them around in circles, even try to confuse them.
Ask them where they got you details from ("they'll say we buy a list from a company") Harrass them for details of which company sold them your details (this is after you have "written down" their own details:)
After several minutes (personal record is 15) they realise what is happening (you can hear it in their voice) - gradually they begin to realise that they should have made 20 or 30 other calls (they obviously get paid by call or by success) in the time that some heartless prat has had them getting nowhere.
Yes, you are pissing off some poor schmuck that is only doing their job, but it feels good to get that "goodbye [click]" or better still "[CLICK]".
Of course I never do this to charities and the like - just a polite "not interested, thankyou" is fine for them.
I've often wondered what would happen if EVERYONE allocated just 5 minutes per day to "responding" to spam... heck we spend that long deleting the stuff or updating mail filters anyway.
Just pick a couple of spams and:
- View the web site
- If you can find an email address or contact form for the seller, abuse it. (do not use your own email address if possible)
- If you can find a free-call number, ring it - and keep them busy as long as you feel the need to - the company is paying for your call.
- Request free samples, forms to fill out or advertising material (printed form only, email is pointless). Fake the address, or if you like, grab the freebie:)
- Waste their time - time costs them more than anything else if they have to put on employees to deal with the crap.
- Waste their resources (web server time/bandwidth doesn't count, printer ink & shipping does)
If even 10% of their spam results in time wasters, the economics go right out the window:-)
Unfortunately many spams link to a "insert credit card here, we will send goods" page with no other contact info, but many have links to the companies web site, and even an email to abuse (or better still anonymous contact form to prevent spam).
Any company that suffered such a manual DDOS attack would likely stop spamming - and as the spammers got less, the effect would get worse (well, better actually).
yes, some idiot will send out a spam on behalf of someone else just to get them attacked, but at least using human attakers there will be some basic checking. As with all wars there will be casualties. At the moment that casualty is email, and EVERY internet user suffers for it.
now there's a target for a man-in-the-middle attack!:-)
About the only use for that is if a migrant wants to be tried by his/her peers (ie same religion or nationality) - and you can usually source some locally anyway.
I used to know a couple of people who kept a valve amp around specifically to pass digital sound through and add that "warm" effect - then back into the the mix.
You have to be careful how much you let it affect things (by adjusting the controls on the amp, keepign a good signal/noise ratio on the input etc) but if done right it can do a nice job.
I haven't looked recently, but over ten years ago I got one of the last self-winding watches - they had stopped making them back then because everyone wanted quartz ones.
The reason I wanted self-winding is every few years for whatever reason, I wore a watch for maybe a week. I never remembered to wind it because I hardly ever wore a watch, and for the same reason a battery powered watch would be flat every time I wanted it.
Strangely, manual-wind versions have always been available. It's odd what people consider "not worth having" sometimes.
or it's just been slashdotted..... where else would you find a vast army of DDOS clients willing to request lewd content from arbitary web sites on demand:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I recommend mass deployment of those cheap disposable cameras at the next march.
while a couple of them might get away, I doubt they would be much point - your chance of success is low.
Better approaches are:
* Wireless/WiFi devices that dump the images back to a laptop in a nearby location, where they are uploaded to many locations on the internet. Encrypt the hard drive so the sites can't be extracted easily. Store the keys on an external device such as a thumb drive, floppy or CD that can be physically destroyed at the slightest problem (actually the key device doesn't even have to be taken to the site - as long as the computer can be left turned on for the whole operation).
Downside: a jammer will kill this far too easily, and your laptop will be located and taken unless it has a receive-only wireless connection of some kind.
* just sit way back with a big zoom lens - and have the pictures pop up from time to time on free web spaces (accessed only from public locations). Whenever they take pictures of demonstrators, just upload a few more of your own. They have no way to even know who you are, or which events you attend until it's way too late!
Downside: A lot harder to get a good angle for the shots you need.
Since when was API documentation sensitive?
Are they afraid we'll find more exploits?
C'mon, if the data is going to escape into the wild, it will do so - no matter how DRM'd it is. (just look at the attempts to protect audio and video data)
In other words, we will likely see a P9-Q coprocessor, or a P10 with inbuilt quantum coprocessor.
We certainly won't be seeing the P7 quantum CPU though.
nah, that's unicast (point to point) not broadcast
If they keep this up it'll be illegal to watch movies or listen to music anywhere other than the theatre!
wifi = re-emitting as electromagnetic radiation,
light = electromagnetic radiation,
therefore your television = broadcast station, same as an AP.
Now if we can just fool them into legislating that you can't watch movies at the theatre, or listen to a home stereo either, we'll have em.
Somebody want to invent / commercialize an ultrasonic WiFi or bluetooth protocol compatable network? That should trigger legislation to kill all audio systems
Riiiiight.... but aren't they supposed to actively enforce these patents, or is that copyright?
Java is just an emulator for a processor that never actually existed....
Thus ALL emulators violate this patent - and depending on how you read it, all software that calls other software, including shell scripts, binaries, operating systems which call the BIOS, any BIOS that calls the BIOS on another board - eg SCSI controller, about the only things that don't infringe are self-contained firmware that can't have third party add-ons.
But back to emulators - when was the first emulator released? surely a long time back - I remember something called "executor" that emulated a Mac on a PC back about '96 or so... and there must have been well established game console emulators around at the time.
A bit of googling reveals emulators for things like Z80 processors and CP/M that were last developed in the late '80s - meaning there is an easily established prior art against a patent filed in 1993
According to This Page. (scroll down to 1962/1965) IBM are fools for licensing emulation from anybody...
By 1986, everybody was emulating all sorts of things.
Emulation was well documented since before I was born, and yet Sun thinks a 1993 patent by Kodak is valid to the tune of 90+ million? Something STINKS!
Other concepts in the patent date back to the 1960s! (from This article)
Other interesting points:
Java applets don't ask for help - they simply are there - it is the web browser or operating system that figures out that help is required, and loads up Java to help it. As such, a java applet is a document, in the same way a Shockwave/Flash file is a document, and so are most other file formats. One wonders where this leaves Micro$oft's patent on embedding code in a document.
Not sure about US law (or realy even the local ones) but they tend to distinguish between stuff the owner has / has not attempted to secure.
ie if the doors and windows are locked, and you bypass them to get in, it is break-and-enter, but if the door is not locked, it's different.
Turning on WEP could be seen as locking the door - if you are determined to get in it won't really stop you, but it is illegal to enter because the owner has tried to stop you/informed you they do not want you to get in.
How long does your cold cup of coffee stay cold when being microwaved on high?
probably a LOT longer than a CPU....
It is more a matter of having something that can last longer than the pulse you can generate. If it can last say 10 or 100 times longer than a copper chip, it is an advantage - one that anyting that used copper chips might not have.
Experiments that could not be measured close up with electronic circuits could now be measured/observed.
Just imagine if we had computerized war machines that could survive EMP for ten times as long as the opposition's - you could emit an EMP that would take them out and leave you perfectly happy.
--
Imagine a beowulf cl... sorry, this one was just begging for it
Right now there are two reasons I can NEVER get ADSL, both based on the distance of copper that ADSL can handle:
* Lack of population - there are not enough houses within ADSL range of my exchange to warrant the upgrade, even if they all get broadband. This is not likely to change in the next 10 years.
* My own distance from the exchange - at 6km of copper, it is unlikely I will be able to get it even when the exchange is upgraded.
WiMax will fix that nicely.
Also ADSL2 is in the pipeline - at speeds of at least 6Mb each way, 802.11 can't keep up unless you're in the same room.
Ironically, if Telstra were to hang a wireless transmitter on an existing phone tower 30km away, I could have broadband that day by putting an AP on a hill on our land (I have good radio line of sight from there)
It's not actually locked to MS-only.... well not successfully anyway
X-Box Linux
Current hardware can transcode to DIVX in real time - but you wouldn't do that, you'd just do the resize to lower resolution (ie to about DVD resolution - less than 6 gig file).
Then you could run the rest of the process at your leisure.
and then that same human in that same office has to type the same hundreds of nine-digit codes perfectly every day.
hence the need for little bits of plastic with some magic number on them.
Of course it will take some geek all of 30 seconds to learn to change that magic number, and randomly have you charged with everything from traffic offences to tax evasion, but gee, how often would that happen? (given that wizards have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten).
I see plenty of computers impaled on SPAM and spyware, and slowly dying...
seems to fit quite well to me...
mv "linux" "linux starter edition"
there ya go
(and with more features than winblows!)
Instead of having 15 distros I like, I'd kill to have 3 that I love.
and 5% of people that like them...
It would be far more beneficial to have 3 or more distros, one or two of which you love and the rest which you like/dislike/hate (and someone else loves).
This we already have (well sort of anyway)
What we really need is somewhere that objectivly lists the strong / weak points of each distro in various scenarios - so that people don't have to try them all themselves.
I just bought one of these - no DL burning, but that wasn't something I was worried about getting (I do want mega-capacity, but when they become available a blue-ray drive is more appropriate for that goal)
Unfortunately Linux doesn't support ATAPI on SATA (yet - the libata people are working on it) so I haven't been able to check it out.
I just finished getting the promise PDC20378 driver working under kernel 2.6 so I can use the PATA ports (seemed to hold up ok under stress-test last night). This driver has ATAPI support, so I well try the plextor on the SATA ports in the next day or two.
I'm running that driver on an ASUS P4C800 - if anyone want's a copy drop me a line - I may email promise a diff in a week or so - but I can't guarantee they will make it available on their site.
Things must be different there - I occasionally get them on my mobile.
Actually, I quite enjoyed the last few of these - you string them along for as long as possible, run them around in circles, even try to confuse them.
Ask them where they got you details from ("they'll say we buy a list from a company") Harrass them for details of which company sold them your details (this is after you have "written down" their own details
After several minutes (personal record is 15) they realise what is happening (you can hear it in their voice) - gradually they begin to realise that they should have made 20 or 30 other calls (they obviously get paid by call or by success) in the time that some heartless prat has had them getting nowhere.
Yes, you are pissing off some poor schmuck that is only doing their job, but it feels good to get that "goodbye [click]" or better still "[CLICK]".
Of course I never do this to charities and the like - just a polite "not interested, thankyou" is fine for them.
I've often wondered what would happen if EVERYONE allocated just 5 minutes per day to "responding" to spam... heck we spend that long deleting the stuff or updating mail filters anyway.
Just pick a couple of spams and:
- View the web site
- If you can find an email address or contact form for the seller, abuse it. (do not use your own email address if possible)
- If you can find a free-call number, ring it - and keep them busy as long as you feel the need to - the company is paying for your call.
- Request free samples, forms to fill out or advertising material (printed form only, email is pointless). Fake the address, or if you like, grab the freebie
- Waste their time - time costs them more than anything else if they have to put on employees to deal with the crap.
- Waste their resources (web server time/bandwidth doesn't count, printer ink & shipping does)
If even 10% of their spam results in time wasters, the economics go right out the window
Unfortunately many spams link to a "insert credit card here, we will send goods" page with no other contact info, but many have links to the companies web site, and even an email to abuse (or better still anonymous contact form to prevent spam).
Any company that suffered such a manual DDOS attack would likely stop spamming - and as the spammers got less, the effect would get worse (well, better actually).
yes, some idiot will send out a spam on behalf of someone else just to get them attacked, but at least using human attakers there will be some basic checking.
As with all wars there will be casualties. At the moment that casualty is email, and EVERY internet user suffers for it.
I found this site about 6 years ago...
they sell the filters, and give a good run-down on the theory.
This assumes the cracker can not / is unwilling to learn.
Not a good assumption - they were perfectly willing to learn how to get to their first target.
now there's a target for a man-in-the-middle attack!
About the only use for that is if a migrant wants to be tried by his/her peers (ie same religion or nationality) - and you can usually source some locally anyway.
I used to know a couple of people who kept a valve amp around specifically to pass digital sound through and add that "warm" effect - then back into the the mix.
You have to be careful how much you let it affect things (by adjusting the controls on the amp, keepign a good signal/noise ratio on the input etc) but if done right it can do a nice job.
I haven't looked recently, but over ten years ago I got one of the last self-winding watches - they had stopped making them back then because everyone wanted quartz ones.
The reason I wanted self-winding is every few years for whatever reason, I wore a watch for maybe a week. I never remembered to wind it because I hardly ever wore a watch, and for the same reason a battery powered watch would be flat every time I wanted it.
Strangely, manual-wind versions have always been available. It's odd what people consider "not worth having" sometimes.
or it's just been slashdotted..... where else would you find a vast army of DDOS clients willing to request lewd content from arbitary web sites on demand