Perhaps I'm overly cynical of input technologies, but my take from the movie is that this is a *disaster*.
Start with the best configuration the company could manage for the demo, with in-house software, and an experienced user. The system is still laggy and periodically jerky. It has the same lack of feedback as the Wiimote, so you need similarly simple gestures to make it usable. Their one advantage is that the position sensor should be orientation-independent, whereas the Wiimote's camera needs to see the sensor bar.
If memory serves (and it often doesn't) the two major problems with EMF position sensing in AR are range and interference. Range should be solvable for a local input device. Interference worries me. With a near-optical system, interference sources are obvious: if your Wiimote has problems, look around for the strong light source.
Of course the blog-based press releases do not bother communicating actual benefits or limitations of the technology, beyond "ooh, shiny!" and "ooh, revolutionary!".
<<But uncreative non-shrinkwrapped software is OK?>>
More that I was being unnecessarily caustic. When most of the value of a solution is collaboration with the client, the software doesn't need to be innovating to compete.
I should have toned down my flamebait before posting. "They's takin' our jobs!" arguments tend to get me spooled up.
<<Some good developers don't even have basic typing skills. I don't care if developers who "refuse to learn" still get paid, although I've never met one in my 20+ years of experience.>>
Sorry, ambiguity on my part. The "more then basic typing skills" was intended to get parsed as more skills than, rather than better typing.
Hopefully I'm too cynical. The teams I've worked with in industry have been excellent. That's offset by some depressing discussions, and watching undergraduate CS back during the boom.
If an innovation can be easily duplicated by hobby coders, or a bunch of outsourced code monkeys, it was not much of an innovation.
If a business model depends on monopolizing a handful of easily-duplicated "innovations", it is not much of a business model.
And if the only way a country can compete in software development is via protectionism, it is not much of a country.
Here's hoping the companies producing uncreative shrinkwrapped software go under.
Here's hoping the developers who refuse to learn more than basic typing skills go to other fields.
And here's hoping that intelligent, capable, and dedicated individuals can contribute to CS -- no matter where they were born.
As with any security in real life, when the potential cost of a compromise is less than the cost to correct the next round of flaws, you *stop*.
So no, I don't care if there are gaping security flaws. When the cost/benefit ratio approaches infinity, it's really time to do something more useful with your billable hours than duplicating the vendor's job.
The tool. Joy of rootkits: whichever gets installed first usually wins.
I'll admit a strong suspicion that attacking the tool in memory could compromise it, however that guess is awfully dated. As long as the obvious web searches turn up ineffective rubbish, it's good enough for primary and secondary students. No government secrets on the lab machines:)
Hmm, interesting. What was sucking in the restore-on-boot stuff?
We started using a tool which does instant restore on boot, so that we could leave the systems open for everyone to explore. Student files wind up on a network drive. Having administrator access seems, IMO, a better deal for learning internals than being able to keep local files across a reboot.
Have not needed to think about it yet, but I would seriously consider designing a school Linux machine in a similar way. The users can ignore the details. The hackers can fiddle to their heart's content. And the crackers get repaired as soon as they hit logout.
In my reading, the complaint talks about opening up bidding so that local companies can offer solutions. Maybe those would be F/OSS, maybe they would be Microsoft, more likely they would be a mixture. Really doubt anyone thought opening bidding would create openings at the _government_ office... at the local VARs seems a more likely possibility.
Unfortunately, many professionals shouldn't be sysadmins either.
One side of the coin is that folks with honest training and experience can sift through a wide range of possible technologies, then find and properly maintain the best one for the situation. The other is that the amateurs have a motivation for easy, so seem less likely to dig themselves incredible, embarrassing, money-sucking pits...
And this is government. If you're not cynical about the kind of professionals they hire, you're not paying attention:)
By that definition, few standards more complex than 7-bit ASCII have ever been implemented...
Of course, one would generally draw a distinction between working to be compliant with a standard, and ignoring a standard designed to be compliant with the application.
The alternative makes almost as much sense as the claim that no valid ODF document exists because there are ambiguities in the esoteric details.
There are lots of research labs working with low-cost multi-touch-sensitive tables. At this point, one can practically build such a table for a few hundred dollars (plus a computer).
I literally spent today demonstrating my lab's table. An early prototype is shown at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doK66IYG0Ug, and instructions for building one are at http://open-ftir.sourceforge.net/. Unfortunately the pictures and video from today's open house are not up yet, but they should be shortly (search for "Equis lab").
There are also lots of free libraries for handling the input. Mine (EquisFTIR) happens to be Windows-only and aimed at Microsoft XNA developers. There are lots of portable ones, often built on Intel's OpenCV library: check out http://nuigroup.com/ for more information.
Couple the table with some object-recognition libraries, and you could probably build yourself a Surface-equivalent with a few hundred dollars and nothing but FOSS.
The government passes laws designed to protect corporations from people.
Some corporations abuse these laws to make a larger profit (why not? it's legal!).
People demand more laws to protect themselves from the corporations.
Somehow, I think I can see which groups are benefiting here. Not people or corporations, and certainly not small business.
It would seem that the solution to pirate radio is very simple. Look at why they are circumventing the regulations in the first place: expenses and rules. And more the former than the latter.
The FCC's complaint is interference with licensed stations and/or emergency/critical services. So push prices down for low-wattage transmitters, and the FCC might find that they get more small radio stations following their rules... and that has got to be cheaper than crews in million dollar vans running all over the country playing whack-a-mole.
Hang on a second -- Copyright is a regulation, and infringement is investigated and punished by government agencies. So how are the abuses surrounding the music industry qualify tied to a *lack* of regulation?
I would advance that legislation is by definition regulatory, and all of the ongoing litigation is driven by regulations. The stupid agreements that musicians make with major labels are probably the only non-regulatory thing in the whole mess. Price fixing depends entirely on creating barriers to competition, many of which are regulatory even in music, and most of which are destroyed by ye'ol Internet.
A lot of that could probably be improved with more powerful algorithms. One of the problems encountered in the Quake demo was that minor twitches threw the gun all over the place. As a result, there is a fairly simple damping (AFAIK just a threshold) in effect to make the game playable.
An algorithm to differentiate unconscious twitches, instantaneous glances, and actual targetted gaze would probably produce a much more impressive control system. My personal feeling is that the best environments will be those where the direction of view is decoupled from the direction of movement, e.g. looking around in first-person, selecting things in a 3rd person, etc.
(Disclaimer: I know the folks behind the paper, but was not involved with the experiment)
From TFA: "Based on those keywords being monitored, 99.9% of IRC traffic to the top 60 channels is 'illegal'."
How about: 99.9% of IRC traffic mentioning commercial software in channels dedicated to trading illegal software is related to trading illegal software.
Largest number of users. Humans, fservs, or both? After a rigerous analysis I have discovered that file trading channels tend to (wait for it) have many file server bots...
And the author could do with an introduction to use of IRC by viruses. Nothing like using Google, or even talking to the folks on each network that deal with the infections, before writing an article.
Assuming that analysis is correct: "ssh root@localhost 'chown foo:bar file'" to infringe. That's definitely got the user, priviliedged daemon, and parameters.
As long as "administrative method" is not somehow defined to exclude "things other than the Windows API"...
And I always thought it would have been spelled "pwnership".
"Immunity's findings clearly show that the best platform for your targets to be running is Microsoft Windows,allowing you unparalleled value for their dollar." Beautiful. Really.
The Toronto solar car, and similar vehicles at universities around the world, serve as rolling testbeds for high-performance solar technology. They are not intended as commercial vehicles, being rather long-distance race cars designed for competitions like the World Solar Challenge) and SunRace.
For a collection of photographs, see the WSC photos from 2003. To keep the scale intact (and because it is the vehicle I have easy numbers for), the "Queens" car in the lower-left corner of the page is approximately 6m long, 2m wide and 1m high. The vehicles are extremely light, with the Queen's car coming in at 410 kg (902 lbs) without driver. [1]
Periodically (*) the Canadian vehicles tour regions of the country to provide a conservation and engineering presentation aimed primarily at high school students. I doubt that CBC's comment relating the tour to last summer's blackout has any basis. It appears that the tour kicked off at the end of July.
My heart goes out to those who knew Andrew Frow.
*: Possible annually, the Canadian Solar Tour site I found is currently down.
[1] Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. <http://www.solarcar.queensu.ca>. Referenced numbers from <http://130.15.142.62/solar/CurrentCar>. (Both will slashdot really easily, so not linked)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I'm overly cynical of input technologies, but my take from the movie is that this is a *disaster*.
Start with the best configuration the company could manage for the demo, with in-house software, and an experienced user. The system is still laggy and periodically jerky. It has the same lack of feedback as the Wiimote, so you need similarly simple gestures to make it usable. Their one advantage is that the position sensor should be orientation-independent, whereas the Wiimote's camera needs to see the sensor bar.
If memory serves (and it often doesn't) the two major problems with EMF position sensing in AR are range and interference. Range should be solvable for a local input device. Interference worries me. With a near-optical system, interference sources are obvious: if your Wiimote has problems, look around for the strong light source.
Of course the blog-based press releases do not bother communicating actual benefits or limitations of the technology, beyond "ooh, shiny!" and "ooh, revolutionary!".
So you have some governments that issue high-quality reliable certificates.
And some corrupt ones which can be bought for peanuts.
So someone has to choose which root certificates to trust.
Someone, probably being the browser makers.
So what would it solve?
How long until someone finishes a project to fix the public fairsoftware.net site for users with Javascript disabled? :)
I find it downright hilarious every time I see <a href="#" onclick="...> used for a basic link.
<<But uncreative non-shrinkwrapped software is OK?>>
More that I was being unnecessarily caustic. When most of the value of a solution is collaboration with the client, the software doesn't need to be innovating to compete.
I should have toned down my flamebait before posting. "They's takin' our jobs!" arguments tend to get me spooled up.
<<Some good developers don't even have basic typing skills. I don't care if developers who "refuse to learn" still get paid, although I've never met one in my 20+ years of experience.>>
Sorry, ambiguity on my part. The "more then basic typing skills" was intended to get parsed as more skills than, rather than better typing.
Hopefully I'm too cynical. The teams I've worked with in industry have been excellent. That's offset by some depressing discussions, and watching undergraduate CS back during the boom.
If an innovation can be easily duplicated by hobby coders, or a bunch of outsourced code monkeys, it was not much of an innovation.
If a business model depends on monopolizing a handful of easily-duplicated "innovations", it is not much of a business model.
And if the only way a country can compete in software development is via protectionism, it is not much of a country.
Here's hoping the companies producing uncreative shrinkwrapped software go under.
Here's hoping the developers who refuse to learn more than basic typing skills go to other fields.
And here's hoping that intelligent, capable, and dedicated individuals can contribute to CS -- no matter where they were born.
As with any security in real life, when the potential cost of a compromise is less than the cost to correct the next round of flaws, you *stop*.
So no, I don't care if there are gaping security flaws. When the cost/benefit ratio approaches infinity, it's really time to do something more useful with your billable hours than duplicating the vendor's job.
The tool. Joy of rootkits: whichever gets installed first usually wins.
I'll admit a strong suspicion that attacking the tool in memory could compromise it, however that guess is awfully dated. As long as the obvious web searches turn up ineffective rubbish, it's good enough for primary and secondary students. No government secrets on the lab machines :)
Hmm, interesting. What was sucking in the restore-on-boot stuff?
We started using a tool which does instant restore on boot, so that we could leave the systems open for everyone to explore. Student files wind up on a network drive. Having administrator access seems, IMO, a better deal for learning internals than being able to keep local files across a reboot.
Have not needed to think about it yet, but I would seriously consider designing a school Linux machine in a similar way. The users can ignore the details. The hackers can fiddle to their heart's content. And the crackers get repaired as soon as they hit logout.
In my reading, the complaint talks about opening up bidding so that local companies can offer solutions. Maybe those would be F/OSS, maybe they would be Microsoft, more likely they would be a mixture. Really doubt anyone thought opening bidding would create openings at the _government_ office... at the local VARs seems a more likely possibility.
Unfortunately, many professionals shouldn't be sysadmins either.
One side of the coin is that folks with honest training and experience can sift through a wide range of possible technologies, then find and properly maintain the best one for the situation. The other is that the amateurs have a motivation for easy, so seem less likely to dig themselves incredible, embarrassing, money-sucking pits...
And this is government. If you're not cynical about the kind of professionals they hire, you're not paying attention :)
By that definition, few standards more complex than 7-bit ASCII have ever been implemented...
Of course, one would generally draw a distinction between working to be compliant with a standard, and ignoring a standard designed to be compliant with the application.
The alternative makes almost as much sense as the claim that no valid ODF document exists because there are ambiguities in the esoteric details.
There are lots of research labs working with low-cost multi-touch-sensitive tables. At this point, one can practically build such a table for a few hundred dollars (plus a computer).
I literally spent today demonstrating my lab's table. An early prototype is shown at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doK66IYG0Ug, and instructions for building one are at http://open-ftir.sourceforge.net/. Unfortunately the pictures and video from today's open house are not up yet, but they should be shortly (search for "Equis lab").
There are also lots of free libraries for handling the input. Mine (EquisFTIR) happens to be Windows-only and aimed at Microsoft XNA developers. There are lots of portable ones, often built on Intel's OpenCV library: check out http://nuigroup.com/ for more information.
Couple the table with some object-recognition libraries, and you could probably build yourself a Surface-equivalent with a few hundred dollars and nothing but FOSS.
The government passes laws designed to protect corporations from people. Some corporations abuse these laws to make a larger profit (why not? it's legal!). People demand more laws to protect themselves from the corporations.
Somehow, I think I can see which groups are benefiting here. Not people or corporations, and certainly not small business.
It would seem that the solution to pirate radio is very simple. Look at why they are circumventing the regulations in the first place: expenses and rules. And more the former than the latter.
The FCC's complaint is interference with licensed stations and/or emergency/critical services. So push prices down for low-wattage transmitters, and the FCC might find that they get more small radio stations following their rules... and that has got to be cheaper than crews in million dollar vans running all over the country playing whack-a-mole.
Hang on a second -- Copyright is a regulation, and infringement is investigated and punished by government agencies. So how are the abuses surrounding the music industry qualify tied to a *lack* of regulation?
I would advance that legislation is by definition regulatory, and all of the ongoing litigation is driven by regulations. The stupid agreements that musicians make with major labels are probably the only non-regulatory thing in the whole mess. Price fixing depends entirely on creating barriers to competition, many of which are regulatory even in music, and most of which are destroyed by ye'ol Internet.
A lot of that could probably be improved with more powerful algorithms. One of the problems encountered in the Quake demo was that minor twitches threw the gun all over the place. As a result, there is a fairly simple damping (AFAIK just a threshold) in effect to make the game playable.
An algorithm to differentiate unconscious twitches, instantaneous glances, and actual targetted gaze would probably produce a much more impressive control system. My personal feeling is that the best environments will be those where the direction of view is decoupled from the direction of movement, e.g. looking around in first-person, selecting things in a 3rd person, etc.
(Disclaimer: I know the folks behind the paper, but was not involved with the experiment)
From TFA: "Based on those keywords being monitored, 99.9% of IRC traffic to the top 60 channels is 'illegal'."
How about: 99.9% of IRC traffic mentioning commercial software in channels dedicated to trading illegal software is related to trading illegal software.
Largest number of users. Humans, fservs, or both? After a rigerous analysis I have discovered that file trading channels tend to (wait for it) have many file server bots...
And the author could do with an introduction to use of IRC by viruses. Nothing like using Google, or even talking to the folks on each network that deal with the infections, before writing an article.
When did Slashdot become a college newspaper?
Well, since the server is suffering already, let's finish it.
Direct to the photo
Bet'cha the other images are nearby too
I upgrade when my parents get money.
Assuming that analysis is correct: "ssh root@localhost 'chown foo:bar file'" to infringe.
That's definitely got the user, priviliedged daemon, and parameters.
As long as "administrative method" is not somehow defined to exclude "things other than the Windows API"...
My god, it must have loaded!
And I always thought it would have been spelled "pwnership".
"Immunity's findings clearly show that the best platform for your targets to be running is Microsoft Windows,allowing you unparalleled value for their dollar." Beautiful. Really.
The Toronto solar car, and similar vehicles at universities around the world, serve as rolling testbeds for high-performance solar technology. They are not intended as commercial vehicles, being rather long-distance race cars designed for competitions like the World Solar Challenge) and SunRace.
For a collection of photographs, see the WSC photos from 2003. To keep the scale intact (and because it is the vehicle I have easy numbers for), the "Queens" car in the lower-left corner of the page is approximately 6m long, 2m wide and 1m high. The vehicles are extremely light, with the Queen's car coming in at 410 kg (902 lbs) without driver. [1]
Periodically (*) the Canadian vehicles tour regions of the country to provide a conservation and engineering presentation aimed primarily at high school students. I doubt that CBC's comment relating the tour to last summer's blackout has any basis. It appears that the tour kicked off at the end of July.
My heart goes out to those who knew Andrew Frow.
*: Possible annually, the Canadian Solar Tour site I found is currently down.
[1] Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. <http://www.solarcar.queensu.ca>. Referenced numbers from <http://130.15.142.62/solar/CurrentCar>. (Both will slashdot really easily, so not linked)