The Amstrad 6128 did not have an integrated serial port, although one was available. The only thing it had was a parallel port, and that was only 7 bits (+1 bit for strobe). I wrote a bit banging transfer protocol (4 bits at a time - w00t!) to move a heap of data from the Amstrad to an Amiga. Not too fast but we're only talking something like 160kb/disk. I was about 12 at the time too:)
Those disks are pretty robust so there's a good chance you won't have too much of a bitrot infestation. In the ~5 years that we owned one we had a single disk failure, and we were on a dirt road and the dust just got everywhere.
Finding a working drive or 6128/664 might be your biggest hurdle though, as most people have pointed out. You might need to get a bit creative... I wonder what the track width is? Could a 1.44" floppy drive be butchered to be able to read a disk? You'd have to crack open the disk case to have any luck though.
If only your stuff was stored on tape. I don't have it any more but I wrote a little program years ago under Linux to read amstrad tapes via the sound card. Only took a few hours. Tapes might be more likely to have bitrot by now though, unless you rewound them regularly:)
Yes, with skull mounted trackers we'd finally have the correct answer to the question "It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are?". You'd just whip out the offspring locater, press a few buttons, and you'd know instantly where they are.
That's exactly right. Police can look out for your car registration number (even easier if you go through a tollway), look through cctv systems for your face, monitor the use of your credit cards, and probably a heap of other things. Maybe they need a warrant for some of them but not for just putting out a call to keep an eye out for your car registration number. It's not like your phone is some sacred thing.
If you really wanted to go 'missing', maybe try telling someone first, just to let them know that you don't want to be found. Just going missing without telling anyone is a pretty selfish thing to do, and can tie up a heap of resources trying to find you again.
Are there any states or countries where it is a crime to go missing? I don't think it is in Australia, although if it looked like you were deliberately wasting police/rescue workers time you might be charged with that.
You need to make sure that the boxes are cheap and plentiful, so that stealing them is about as exciting as stealing a plastic bag from a supermarket.
How much battery would be required to run something like a WRT54GL at reasonable latitudes assuming the only external power input is solar? I would think that the batteries and solar cells would be the more attractive things to steal, and if you can make them as cheap as plastic bags from a supermarket then you've solved a whole load more problems than community wireless:)
I think in Australia (and, being slashdot, someone will correct me if i'm wrong:), you need a carrier license to supply a communication service to the public.
Also, I think ISP's can't advertise something like 'Unlimited', and then add conditions in small print. The conditions have to be as visible as the 'Unlimited' text, although i'm less certain about that one... it may have been a proposed law.
Planting trees in cold climates would increase warming not decrease or slow it.
Hmmm... hadn't thought of that. Are tundra areas typically covered with snow most of the time? I just had a look in wikipedia and a lot of the examples were more rocky than snowy, and also with grasses and small plants. It also depends on how much difference a few trees would make to the albedo of the earth at that latitube vs the lower carbon footprint of the data center (due to less cooling requirements) and the carbon that the trees themselves are sucking out of the air.
What percentage of the power consumption of running a data center is cooling? If they were to build a data center in a really cold environment, I wonder if they could pump the resulting heat under the ground in the immediate area, warming it up enough to plant trees...
Although the other thing typical of tundra environments is the lack of sunlight, which may be more of a problem than the cold.
Based upon the value of what? Are you saying Fedex or UPS should know what's in the package?
That's an easy one. Either the package clearly states the price of the package, and the tax that applies (and the sender gets in _big_ trouble if the information is incorrect), or some silly flat tax applies, eg the greater of $50/kg or $5/1000 cubic cm.
Of course having the value of the package clearly obvious on the outside makes it easier for the thieves to select the best packages to steal... oh yeah... and all the other problems associated with such an idea:)
I've wondered this too, although more along the lines of what if 'war were declared'? Really cloak and dagger cold war stuff where we're never sure who is friend and who is foe, and even if we are sure it changes on a daily basis anyway. Suddenly the only people you can really trust to build your stuff are the people born and bred inside your borders. It would change _everything_, even if a shot were never fired or a bomb was never dropped...
Didn't Bruce Willis teach you anything? If the same discovery were made by the employee of a security firm, the employee would be hunted down and killed.
How is it going to be obvious? The spoofed website will look exactly like the original, the computer you are on will trust the spoofed certificate, and will have been doctored to show you the same certificate as you would have gotten from your bank.
If it's done properly, you'll be 'in the box' and will never know the difference.
Still wouldn't be that secure. Whatever you were trying to access, your captured password could be reused by the keylogger immediately to give them access to whatever you just connected to.
The only thing that would secure the authentication session is a challenge/response system where the challenge is printed on the screen, you enter the challenge onto an external token device, and key in the response. I'm not sure that a 'man in the middle' couldn't get the challenge, issue it to you, wait for the response, and then log in on your behalf (pretending you mistyped the password). ssh guards against this thing by authenticating the remote end first to make sure it is who it says it is, but remember you're on someone elses system here, and they could binary patch putty (or another ssh client) on the fly even though you are loading it from a memory stick.
Of course every attempt you make to increase security for you requires a more and more specialized solution to break, eg keeping track of what version of putty you are using etc. If the bad guys can get what they want from enough people without increasing their level of sophistication to match yours, then you are probably safe:)
Hell, there could be a program on there that silently redirects you to bogus lookalike sites that steal your info. Not that this is likely, but it's possible.
That would be dead easy to do on the part of the public terminal provider... Figure out the top (say) 10 banks that visitors normally use. Set up local DNS records that point to your phishing site, or just use IP DNAT to redirect them. Install certificates for each of your phishing sites on the public terminal so that they are trusted.
Unless you knew the fingerprint for your banks certificate you'd never know the difference, and even that could be spoofed if they had complete control. If they were using IP DNAT then even the IP address would appear correct.
In short, there is no solution if you don't have complete control over your terminal!
In the above example, if the phishing site was acting as a 'man in the middle' then even 2 factor authentication on logon wouldn't help you. Once you'd logged on the phishing site could just report 'Connection error - please try again later' and then go off and do stuff on its own. If you had it set up so that any funds transfers required another authentication with your 2nd factor device then that simple hack wouldn't work but it wouldn't be too hard to come up with something that did.
I'm not sure how much the effect diminishes with range, but the sort of blinding caused by the lasers covered by this sort of legislation can be anything but temporary...
Slashdot Mirror
Do you remember Windows NT on Alpha? MIPS? PowerPC? SPARC? i860/i960?
I think Microsoft dropped everything except Alpha by sp6a though.
So they actually did try and capture some other markets, although you're right in that they would never have gotten people off of x86.
Actually, none of the Amstrad CPC464, CPC664 and CPC6128 had serial ports anyway. A serial interface was an optional extra that plugged into the back.
The Amstrad 6128 did not have an integrated serial port, although one was available. The only thing it had was a parallel port, and that was only 7 bits (+1 bit for strobe). I wrote a bit banging transfer protocol (4 bits at a time - w00t!) to move a heap of data from the Amstrad to an Amiga. Not too fast but we're only talking something like 160kb/disk. I was about 12 at the time too :)
:)
Those disks are pretty robust so there's a good chance you won't have too much of a bitrot infestation. In the ~5 years that we owned one we had a single disk failure, and we were on a dirt road and the dust just got everywhere.
Finding a working drive or 6128/664 might be your biggest hurdle though, as most people have pointed out. You might need to get a bit creative... I wonder what the track width is? Could a 1.44" floppy drive be butchered to be able to read a disk? You'd have to crack open the disk case to have any luck though.
If only your stuff was stored on tape. I don't have it any more but I wrote a little program years ago under Linux to read amstrad tapes via the sound card. Only took a few hours. Tapes might be more likely to have bitrot by now though, unless you rewound them regularly
So which is it? Is it "sorry we did this", or "sorry we got caught?"
Yes, with skull mounted trackers we'd finally have the correct answer to the question "It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are?". You'd just whip out the offspring locater, press a few buttons, and you'd know instantly where they are.
Or at least where their skull is.
That's exactly right. Police can look out for your car registration number (even easier if you go through a tollway), look through cctv systems for your face, monitor the use of your credit cards, and probably a heap of other things. Maybe they need a warrant for some of them but not for just putting out a call to keep an eye out for your car registration number. It's not like your phone is some sacred thing.
If you really wanted to go 'missing', maybe try telling someone first, just to let them know that you don't want to be found. Just going missing without telling anyone is a pretty selfish thing to do, and can tie up a heap of resources trying to find you again.
Are there any states or countries where it is a crime to go missing? I don't think it is in Australia, although if it looked like you were deliberately wasting police/rescue workers time you might be charged with that.
The advantage of heating water overnight was that you would be using 'off peak' electricity.
On that subject... doesn't anyone know what the losses are on a well insulated water heater?
How much battery would be required to run something like a WRT54GL at reasonable latitudes assuming the only external power input is solar? I would think that the batteries and solar cells would be the more attractive things to steal, and if you can make them as cheap as plastic bags from a supermarket then you've solved a whole load more problems than community wireless
I think in Australia (and, being slashdot, someone will correct me if i'm wrong :), you need a carrier license to supply a communication service to the public.
Also, I think ISP's can't advertise something like 'Unlimited', and then add conditions in small print. The conditions have to be as visible as the 'Unlimited' text, although i'm less certain about that one... it may have been a proposed law.
A brazillion is not a number, as evidenced by this joke:
"
Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed."
"OH NO!" the President exclaims. "That's terrible!"
His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands.
Finally, the President looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"
"
Hmmm... i guess we'd better let the permafrost stay frozen then
Hmmm... hadn't thought of that. Are tundra areas typically covered with snow most of the time? I just had a look in wikipedia and a lot of the examples were more rocky than snowy, and also with grasses and small plants. It also depends on how much difference a few trees would make to the albedo of the earth at that latitube vs the lower carbon footprint of the data center (due to less cooling requirements) and the carbon that the trees themselves are sucking out of the air.
What percentage of the power consumption of running a data center is cooling? If they were to build a data center in a really cold environment, I wonder if they could pump the resulting heat under the ground in the immediate area, warming it up enough to plant trees...
Although the other thing typical of tundra environments is the lack of sunlight, which may be more of a problem than the cold.
Ditto for going by sea, unless you can row!
That's an easy one. Either the package clearly states the price of the package, and the tax that applies (and the sender gets in _big_ trouble if the information is incorrect), or some silly flat tax applies, eg the greater of $50/kg or $5/1000 cubic cm.
Of course having the value of the package clearly obvious on the outside makes it easier for the thieves to select the best packages to steal... oh yeah... and all the other problems associated with such an idea
I've wondered this too, although more along the lines of what if 'war were declared'? Really cloak and dagger cold war stuff where we're never sure who is friend and who is foe, and even if we are sure it changes on a daily basis anyway. Suddenly the only people you can really trust to build your stuff are the people born and bred inside your borders. It would change _everything_, even if a shot were never fired or a bomb was never dropped...
Didn't Bruce Willis teach you anything? If the same discovery were made by the employee of a security firm, the employee would be hunted down and killed.
I actually have one of these... for some reason it's going off right now...
How is it going to be obvious? The spoofed website will look exactly like the original, the computer you are on will trust the spoofed certificate, and will have been doctored to show you the same certificate as you would have gotten from your bank.
If it's done properly, you'll be 'in the box' and will never know the difference.
Still wouldn't be that secure. Whatever you were trying to access, your captured password could be reused by the keylogger immediately to give them access to whatever you just connected to.
:)
The only thing that would secure the authentication session is a challenge/response system where the challenge is printed on the screen, you enter the challenge onto an external token device, and key in the response. I'm not sure that a 'man in the middle' couldn't get the challenge, issue it to you, wait for the response, and then log in on your behalf (pretending you mistyped the password). ssh guards against this thing by authenticating the remote end first to make sure it is who it says it is, but remember you're on someone elses system here, and they could binary patch putty (or another ssh client) on the fly even though you are loading it from a memory stick.
Of course every attempt you make to increase security for you requires a more and more specialized solution to break, eg keeping track of what version of putty you are using etc. If the bad guys can get what they want from enough people without increasing their level of sophistication to match yours, then you are probably safe
That would be dead easy to do on the part of the public terminal provider... Figure out the top (say) 10 banks that visitors normally use. Set up local DNS records that point to your phishing site, or just use IP DNAT to redirect them. Install certificates for each of your phishing sites on the public terminal so that they are trusted.
Unless you knew the fingerprint for your banks certificate you'd never know the difference, and even that could be spoofed if they had complete control. If they were using IP DNAT then even the IP address would appear correct.
In short, there is no solution if you don't have complete control over your terminal!
In the above example, if the phishing site was acting as a 'man in the middle' then even 2 factor authentication on logon wouldn't help you. Once you'd logged on the phishing site could just report 'Connection error - please try again later' and then go off and do stuff on its own. If you had it set up so that any funds transfers required another authentication with your 2nd factor device then that simple hack wouldn't work but it wouldn't be too hard to come up with something that did.
How about being stuffed and mounted on a hammock under that big tree? The view would be better!
I'd bequeath my body to science, but I have a feeling they'd bequeath it straight back again (apologies to DNA
They just need a warning label, like 'Warning: Do not point laser at remaining pilot'.
I'm not sure how much the effect diminishes with range, but the sort of blinding caused by the lasers covered by this sort of legislation can be anything but temporary...