Better still, all the emergency password has to do is to run shred several times on:
MBR & partition table
Actual public & private keys for encrypted filesystem(s) (not the passphrases)
Just as effective as deleting the data itself, and much faster, assuming the filesystems have been encrypted with reasonably strong encryption.
Ironically, this is a 'good' application of a TPM platform -- protecting your sensitive data (e.g. corporate trade secrets, personally identifying info, medical records etc). Since in a proper TPM system you shouldn't be able to take the hard disks out, clone them and keep a backup, you could be reasonably certain that the distress password actions were being run against the only useful data.
(Hmmm... even more powerful distress password action: activating a 'self-destruct sequence' in the TPM itself... bricking the computer permananently!)
The only problem I see is running a clock high enough in an fpga to capture all that data. I mean, I don't know what HD-DVD resolutions will be, but even 1600x1200 32-bit pixels would be 61,440,000 bits per pixel per plane. At 24 fps, that's 1,474,560,000 bits per second. That's also at least how fast your clock would have to run at.
(1) At the screen, only 24 bits are meaningful.
(2) You're thinking sequentially; FPGAs carry out operations in parallel. If you can design your FPGA to use an 192-bit input channel (not at all unreasonable) then your pipeline needs to carry out 14.4 million instructions per second -- and with some creative pipeline design you could probably get away with 28.8 MHz. Bearing in mind that modern FPGAs run happily up to a couple of hundred MHz, there's quite a lot of headroom there.
a control card (including a SIL DVI receiver (which decrypts the content), a video scaler/controller) then goes over some sort of wire to the LCD which needs un-encrypted data.
guess where the interested "pirate" would connect ?
Hmm... it is a cunning plan. LCD timing schemes are usually nice and simple, too. Whaddya reckon: bunch of FPGAs to capture and recompress the signal? Would require custom hardware, but all you need to do is to capture enough data from each side of the HDCP hardware to implement your own HDCP decoder (probably in another FPGA)... then you're laughing. Of course, it requires specialized skills, but it's possible to do it if you're motivated enough.
What did you think EFI was for, shits and giggles?
Vista is going to trust EFI, right? It's theoretically possible to subvert EFI by writing an custom EFI extension, which will get loaded before Windows boots. Since hardware vendors will apparently want to install their own EFI extensions for supporting their particular hardware, it would be difficult for MS to make Vista b0rk at the sight of unrecognized extensions, I think...
I admire your optimism, but I don't share it. You should read up on Treacherous Computing. There are two key aspects of it that pretty much blow the idea of "getting the keys involved" out of the water:
It's hardware based. The key that you need is embedded in a chip such that you need a million-dollar laboratory to get at it.
I have a cunning plan:
Run Treacherous Computing-protected software on a Windows computer
"Hibernate" computer
Boot into alternative operating system, copy RAM image
Extract unencrypted executable code from RAM image
You now have ciphertext+cleartext, attack is made much simpler: proceed to recover keys
Profit!
Get sent to jail by DMCA (or equivalent)
Obviously, it would be slightly more complicated than that, but I don't see any problem in principle. Of course, now MS are going to make Vista refuse to hibernate if Treacherous Computing applications are running... *rolls eyes*
My Grado SR-60s are absolutely fantastic; I've never used a pair of headphones that sounded better. One of my friends had a pair of extortionately priced Sennheiser 'phones, and had to concede the fact. As another poster mentioned, the downside is the open backs; it means that they get better frequency response, but at the cost of being pretty much unsuitable for work. If you're playing your music at any sort of volume above whisper quiet, everyone can hear it.
Why not maintain -- and advertise -- a local FTP mirror of things that people might legitimately want to download from BT? My university does this for Linux ISOs, Gutenberg, and a bunch of other stuff. In fact, why not go one stage further and advertise that if someone has something legitimate they want to download over BT, you'll do it for them and place it on the local FTP mirror.
That way you'll save bandwidth and have a legitimate reason for blocking BT entirely: it's unnecessary!
You would think that running konqueror, kontact, gimp and gnumeric on Enlightenment or Window Maker would suck down resources. It does, but it might not be enough to get you into swap space. Just run top and see.
I find it quite ridiculous that logging into Windows XP -- which has very few programs installed on it, basically AV + some games -- causes my pagefile to start grinding, while I can run many instances of Konqueror, KDevelop, OpenOffice.org and watch a DVD and listen to music all at the same time on my Linux installation without swapping anything at all...
If you've ever: tried to synthesize FPGA code... Most of that stuff is FREE to corporate customers, companies will voluntarily lose money just to get people to try to use their product. However for people on the street, or companies too small to be "real", they will charge thousands upon thousands of dollars for these materials, if they will let you have them at all.
Xilinx provide the basic ISE synthesis tools[1] for their smaller FPGAs for free, no matter who you are, and for their more powerful tools/larger FPGAs it's ludicrously expensive no matter who you are.
However, corporate users do get support for free, where as hobbyists and students don't. But that seems like good business practice, if you ask me; spend your time with the people most likely to spend lots of money!
[1] Which are buggy as hell when I was using them last year (and I was using the full version of ISE and paying through the nose for it).
Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes added that users needed more than just the code - they also need comprehensive instructions that would allow them to develop software compatible with Windows systems.
Ummm...there are plenty of instructions already available. Go to any bookstore. Buy a Technet subscription. Surf to MSDN.net. RTFM! Where did all these non-MS Windows apps come from, if we don't know how Windows works???
You clearly can't even read the bit you quoted, it seems. It says, "... They also need comprehensive instructions that would allow them to develop software compatible with Windows systems." This is not about making software that runs on Windows systems. This is about making software that is compatible with Windows systems.
The main objectives of the EU are to get the documentation required for alternative server software to be written that works with Microsoft clients, and for alternative client software that works with Microsoft servers. Example: a proper AD implementation.
Bearing in mind that just about all of TMM's posts in this discussion have been factually accurate (and this kind of thing is my area of study, so I should know)...
... why don't you go and boil your head?
Re:Don't suppose the No Nukes freaks will apologiz
on
Pluto Probe Launches
·
· Score: 1
Now I don't really care what it's powered by and what's on it. But will you and the parent poster apologize if one of these probes do explode on lift off?
I don't have the citations right now, but the following has been the case for many years now:
Radioactive power sources are packaged for launch in containers that are designed to withstand reentry intact. If the launcher blows up on lift up, you wait for the fires to die down, walk in, pick up the capsule, stick it on a shelf, and put it into the next probe.
I really hate knee-jerk reactionists. If someone's worried about something, why don't they go and find out the facts before making a big song and dance about it?
Our university does this too, to a certain extent -- for most users, all stuff has to go through an HTTP proxy behind a NAT, which kinda sucks, but they don't seem to be hugely fussed about checking what you're doing apart from that. I think it's mostly to reduce the chance of students' compromised boxes doing much damage.
On the other hand, if you can convince the IT staff that you can keep your box secure, and that you need to use protocols other than HTTP, then you get totally unrestricted access to the 'net, with a public IP address registered with DNS.
Of course, even then they monitor the university subnets for suspicious traffic (worm attacks, nmap scans, ping floods, etc), but that seems like a sensible security precaution to me.
Hopefully receivers will have the ability to integrate Galileo and GPS signals without troubling us about the details unless the answers they give are widely divergent.
One would hope so; the ability to do that is part of the Galileo constellation's design spec!
Navigation was originally via inertial guidance or celestial tracking, but newer warhead buses use GPS.
Are you sure? MIRV warheads generally do final trajectory insertion maneuvers just after entering the atmosphere, using hypersonic aerofoils (it's a more efficient use of payload mass; thrusters are heavy). The electromagnetic environment during re-entry is extremely harsh -- warheads have a much more aggressive re-entry profile than spacecraft with human or scientific payloads, and they're enclosed in a sheath of high-energy plasma for most of the way down, that acts very much like a Faraday cage. I'd be very suprised if they were able to use GPS for terminal guidance.
However, I wouldn't be suprised if the payload bus uses GPS to give the warhead guidance computers a final position update before separation.
(BTW... my interest is mostly scientific payloads, but if I was designing a MIRV payload that's the way I'd do it)
Steam deserves to be criticized, because it stinks worse than a skunk two weeks dead. Conventional DRM is annoying enough, and all but the weakest DRM (like that found on Galactic Civilizations) is enough to break the sale. Blizzard's DRM is such that if they go out of business, I cannot play my games anymore.
Um... no. If Valve (not Blizzard) go out of business, you won't be able to play your games online anymore. You'll theoretically still be able to play LAN games and single-player. But I share your concern.
However, as far as DRM goes, Steam seems pretty inoffensive to me. You can make & restore backups of the data, you can install the game on more than one computer (but you can only play multiplayer on one computer at a time). I don't think Valve could have made the DRM any weaker without having Half-Life 2 cracked and illegally distributed on a massive scale within minutes of release.
I think the case for DRM on games is a lot stronger than for DRM on movies. In the case of games, most are bought by teenagers who would have the time and motivation to go and hunt down a pirated/cracked copy with pretty much no remorse. I know very few of my peer-group at school would have gone out and bought a game if there was any way on earth to avoid paying. In the case of movies, the majority of sales are to adults, the majority of whom I believe will go for what's most convenient -- and heavily DRM'd movies aren't convenient in the slightest.
The big reason I like Steam is that it makes it possible for small studios to distribute their games worldwide without having to worry about fickle publishers, and Darwinia's release on Steam is a good example of why that's a good thing; before the Valve deal it had very few sales outside the UK, and since then many thousands of copies have been sold worldwide. And over 50% of the retail price goes to Introversion, rather than the typical ~20% that the studio receives in a normal publishing deal.
I bought Darwinia using Steam (an unjustly slandered distribution platform IMHO) and well -- it's fantastic! I recommend it strongly. The gameplay does get a little repetitive after a while though -- I don't think there's very much in the way of replay value unfortunately.
The nice thing about the game is that it doesn't have a huge amount of art assets, which means that within 10 minutes of purchasing it was fully downloaded and ready to play. (Unlike Day of Defeat: Source, which took several hours).
Unless you're mixing tracks together, there's nothing you can't do with some software that the average music-spewing DJ can do, to wit, beat matching and crossfading. Might as well do it on the computer, and have the old technology for backup.
With Ableton Live I can do one hell of a lot more with some software than the average music-spewing DJ can do. It's one hell of a nice piece of gear, and lots of big-name professional DJs are using it instead of vinyl these days.
If you're a "DJ" and your equipment consists of an iPod, I'm guessing you're not exactly a professional.
If you're a "DJ" and your equipment consists of a high-end laptop with multiple sound cards, a MIDI mixing controller, a copy of Ableton Live, and several gigabytes of high-quality digital tracks you recorded from your vinyl collection, I'm guessing you might be.
Vinyl is expensive enough already -- I don't have the cash to go out and by very expensive promo release records and then have to pay an extra fee on top of that, for the few gigs I do.
In fact, if you're not redistributing someone elses' work, but instead have released your own software under a GPL redistribution license, nobody can redistribute your software unless they have the source code, and you are completely free to decide whether or not you're going to give anyone your source code.
Not true: if you release your own software under GPL, you must release the source code. Otherwise you haven't released it under the GPL, and FSF can sue you for trademark violation.
Slashdot Mirror
Better still, all the emergency password has to do is to run shred several times on:
Just as effective as deleting the data itself, and much faster, assuming the filesystems have been encrypted with reasonably strong encryption.
Ironically, this is a 'good' application of a TPM platform -- protecting your sensitive data (e.g. corporate trade secrets, personally identifying info, medical records etc). Since in a proper TPM system you shouldn't be able to take the hard disks out, clone them and keep a backup, you could be reasonably certain that the distress password actions were being run against the only useful data.
(Hmmm... even more powerful distress password action: activating a 'self-destruct sequence' in the TPM itself... bricking the computer permananently!)
(1) At the screen, only 24 bits are meaningful.
(2) You're thinking sequentially; FPGAs carry out operations in parallel. If you can design your FPGA to use an 192-bit input channel (not at all unreasonable) then your pipeline needs to carry out 14.4 million instructions per second -- and with some creative pipeline design you could probably get away with 28.8 MHz. Bearing in mind that modern FPGAs run happily up to a couple of hundred MHz, there's quite a lot of headroom there.
Obviously, it would be slightly more complicated than that, but I don't see any problem in principle. Of course, now MS are going to make Vista refuse to hibernate if Treacherous Computing applications are running... *rolls eyes*
My Grado SR-60s are absolutely fantastic; I've never used a pair of headphones that sounded better. One of my friends had a pair of extortionately priced Sennheiser 'phones, and had to concede the fact. As another poster mentioned, the downside is the open backs; it means that they get better frequency response, but at the cost of being pretty much unsuitable for work. If you're playing your music at any sort of volume above whisper quiet, everyone can hear it.
Why not maintain -- and advertise -- a local FTP mirror of things that people might legitimately want to download from BT? My university does this for Linux ISOs, Gutenberg, and a bunch of other stuff. In fact, why not go one stage further and advertise that if someone has something legitimate they want to download over BT, you'll do it for them and place it on the local FTP mirror.
That way you'll save bandwidth and have a legitimate reason for blocking BT entirely: it's unnecessary!
Xilinx provide the basic ISE synthesis tools[1] for their smaller FPGAs for free, no matter who you are, and for their more powerful tools/larger FPGAs it's ludicrously expensive no matter who you are.
However, corporate users do get support for free, where as hobbyists and students don't. But that seems like good business practice, if you ask me; spend your time with the people most likely to spend lots of money!
[1] Which are buggy as hell when I was using them last year (and I was using the full version of ISE and paying through the nose for it).
I'll bite.
You clearly can't even read the bit you quoted, it seems. It says, "... They also need comprehensive instructions that would allow them to develop software compatible with Windows systems." This is not about making software that runs on Windows systems. This is about making software that is compatible with Windows systems.
The main objectives of the EU are to get the documentation required for alternative server software to be written that works with Microsoft clients, and for alternative client software that works with Microsoft servers. Example: a proper AD implementation.
I really like Konqueror -- it integrates far better with my other applications (including non-KDE apps) than any other browser I've tried on Linux.
I use Konqueror all the time, apart from really broken websites which I use Firefox for, or avoid.
Actually, it's Proxima Centauri (we're not yet sure whether that orbits Alpha Centauri A/B). </pedant>
I think you're getting confused with the Stardust mission.
The sample return for that one wasn't so successful... the package ploughed into the ground and made a pretty crater.
Bearing in mind that just about all of TMM's posts in this discussion have been factually accurate (and this kind of thing is my area of study, so I should know)...
... why don't you go and boil your head?
I don't have the citations right now, but the following has been the case for many years now:
Radioactive power sources are packaged for launch in containers that are designed to withstand reentry intact. If the launcher blows up on lift up, you wait for the fires to die down, walk in, pick up the capsule, stick it on a shelf, and put it into the next probe.
I really hate knee-jerk reactionists. If someone's worried about something, why don't they go and find out the facts before making a big song and dance about it?
Our university does this too, to a certain extent -- for most users, all stuff has to go through an HTTP proxy behind a NAT, which kinda sucks, but they don't seem to be hugely fussed about checking what you're doing apart from that. I think it's mostly to reduce the chance of students' compromised boxes doing much damage.
On the other hand, if you can convince the IT staff that you can keep your box secure, and that you need to use protocols other than HTTP, then you get totally unrestricted access to the 'net, with a public IP address registered with DNS.
Of course, even then they monitor the university subnets for suspicious traffic (worm attacks, nmap scans, ping floods, etc), but that seems like a sensible security precaution to me.
One would hope so; the ability to do that is part of the Galileo constellation's design spec!
Are you sure? MIRV warheads generally do final trajectory insertion maneuvers just after entering the atmosphere, using hypersonic aerofoils (it's a more efficient use of payload mass; thrusters are heavy). The electromagnetic environment during re-entry is extremely harsh -- warheads have a much more aggressive re-entry profile than spacecraft with human or scientific payloads, and they're enclosed in a sheath of high-energy plasma for most of the way down, that acts very much like a Faraday cage. I'd be very suprised if they were able to use GPS for terminal guidance.
However, I wouldn't be suprised if the payload bus uses GPS to give the warhead guidance computers a final position update before separation.
(BTW... my interest is mostly scientific payloads, but if I was designing a MIRV payload that's the way I'd do it)
Um... no. If Valve (not Blizzard) go out of business, you won't be able to play your games online anymore. You'll theoretically still be able to play LAN games and single-player. But I share your concern.
However, as far as DRM goes, Steam seems pretty inoffensive to me. You can make & restore backups of the data, you can install the game on more than one computer (but you can only play multiplayer on one computer at a time). I don't think Valve could have made the DRM any weaker without having Half-Life 2 cracked and illegally distributed on a massive scale within minutes of release.
I think the case for DRM on games is a lot stronger than for DRM on movies. In the case of games, most are bought by teenagers who would have the time and motivation to go and hunt down a pirated/cracked copy with pretty much no remorse. I know very few of my peer-group at school would have gone out and bought a game if there was any way on earth to avoid paying. In the case of movies, the majority of sales are to adults, the majority of whom I believe will go for what's most convenient -- and heavily DRM'd movies aren't convenient in the slightest.
The big reason I like Steam is that it makes it possible for small studios to distribute their games worldwide without having to worry about fickle publishers, and Darwinia's release on Steam is a good example of why that's a good thing; before the Valve deal it had very few sales outside the UK, and since then many thousands of copies have been sold worldwide. And over 50% of the retail price goes to Introversion, rather than the typical ~20% that the studio receives in a normal publishing deal.
I bought Darwinia using Steam (an unjustly slandered distribution platform IMHO) and well -- it's fantastic! I recommend it strongly. The gameplay does get a little repetitive after a while though -- I don't think there's very much in the way of replay value unfortunately.
The nice thing about the game is that it doesn't have a huge amount of art assets, which means that within 10 minutes of purchasing it was fully downloaded and ready to play. (Unlike Day of Defeat: Source, which took several hours).
... "Ihre Erkennung, bitte."
With Ableton Live I can do one hell of a lot more with some software than the average music-spewing DJ can do. It's one hell of a nice piece of gear, and lots of big-name professional DJs are using it instead of vinyl these days.
If you're a "DJ" and your equipment consists of a high-end laptop with multiple sound cards, a MIDI mixing controller, a copy of Ableton Live, and several gigabytes of high-quality digital tracks you recorded from your vinyl collection, I'm guessing you might be.
Like Sasha, for instance.
Vinyl is expensive enough already -- I don't have the cash to go out and by very expensive promo release records and then have to pay an extra fee on top of that, for the few gigs I do.
Not true: if you release your own software under GPL, you must release the source code. Otherwise you haven't released it under the GPL, and FSF can sue you for trademark violation.