I have an idea that would work as an extension to torrent clients without requiring extra darknet software and that would be backwards compatible with existing torrent software.
All you'd need to do is have the ability to route your torrent's traffic through a relay. A relay would be someone else running a torrent client with this "Relay" extension enabled. They'd pick up your torrent hash table and pretend to be you on the tracker, relaying the traffic to you. So long as their client only cached things in RAM and did not save anything then a scan of their hard disk would show no trace whatsoever of their ever visiting a link to, or having a local copy of, the files in question. It could probably even relay encrypted torrents because it wouldnt need to know what was in the packets, only where to send them.
To connect to a relay you could enter its address directly if you know it, or enter multiple relays. You could also extend the abilities of trackers so you could register yourself with the IAmARelay list on the tracker, and pick out relays at random to connect through. Sure it'd be a bit slower to complete a transfer, but someone snooping would be clueless, you'd have to connect to each node and try to work out who was an actual peer and who was a relay by their response times. Clever clients would use geolocations of IPs to relay through someone in another jurisdiction, that way when the People's Party connect to the tracker for Tibet-Riot-Photos.zip.torrent they only "see" peers on other continents.
I'm working on a web page with a proxy built in. A single ASPX with no external css,javascript, image or library dependencies. At the moment it can do links but i've deliberately shied away from being able to execute javascript or show images. It's ultimate goal is to allow google searching and reading of wikipedia (forms wont be too hard, just need to harvest their data into key/value pairs). When it can do that it'll be at version 1.0. The fun part is that by default it obfuscates its own traffic via Base64 but you can use your own PGP key pair to actually encrypt your requests (fast javascript interpreter required!)
Because it's a single page, and bypasses HTTPS it means *anyone* running a.Net/Mono 2 web site can just drop it in and link to it. Bish bash bosh - a zillion web sites containing proxy engines. I'll stick it on google code sometime this year, probably.
This is hardly revolutionary technology the Sony MZ R700 MiniDisc walkman came with a rechargable battery and a charging circuit so you can charge it from the wall wart. The best part is that its an AA battery, so not only can you swap it out for a standard AA in a pinch you can also stick any other rechargable AA in and use that/recharge it internally. And that came out in 2001 and is the tiniest most amazing piece of electronics i've ever laid hands on, I bought a "new" one off ebay just a couple of weeks ago.
Why (philosophically, rather than bounded by spaghetti-code-kernel-reality) should a plugin that would like full screen video output and audio/video input also be able to download executables and get the OS to run them on boot up with full system rights?
It is not firefox's job to decide what video content i can and cannot watch. If the site serves the video and i have installed (legally, illegally or outside of juristiction) the required codec to render it then the video should play. 'nuff said.
Problem is, whether we like it or not, h264/mp4 is the standard, because every dvd player, blu ray player, laptop and toaster oven already support it. The same reason Mp3 became the standard portable audio format, not because it's free, or better or gives blow jobs but because everything and everybody already supported it.
No amount of bitching and whining on slashdot or the w3c mailing list will change the reality of the remainder of the planet. It's the way it is and at the end of the day it's a video codec, not genocide, so there's really no harm in accepting it and getting on with supporting it ourselves.
I was going to make the exact point. If they can manage to bill seperate rates for calls, texts and internet then they should easily be able to seperate an entry for "handset"
We also had an issue where something stopped working on 2010-01-01 because it was so far off in the future that it wouldnt matter. When was this code written? 2006! On the other hand the dev responsible no longer works here so the Make-It-Someone-Else's-Problem method worked perfectly...
I'm amazed that 95% of the posts here are moaning that the plot was too boring/simple/old. Seriously, what's wrong with knowing the plot up front whilst enjoying watching it unfold.
Never watched the scenery while travelling, despite knowing the destination?
Never enjoyed cooking a meal, rather than just the eating part?
Never engaged in heavy petting or foreplay rather than just going for the orgasm as fast as possible?
(cue/. no-sex jokes...)
Why does a film have to be a puzzle to be solved, or a challenge to overcome? Do people really think they win points for guessing the endinge before someone else?
every so often someone round here stumps up the suggestion that we hack the firmware in all our wifi gear and just mesh the lot, then they got shot down in flames because it might be a bit slow and unreliable. Avoiding parent poster's vision of the 2020 internet seems worth the effort IMO.
There was a titlebar button (where minimize is on windows) that rotated the z index of the window, it didnt automatically shunt the in-focus window to the front of the screen. You've no idea how obviously useful the seperation of these two things are until you use the system in anger. Personally i'd like modern desktops to allow you to control the z index of a window by holding the left mouse button down on the title bar and letting you use the mouse wheel to pull it closer r push it backwards (seen as you can already move it in the X/Y plane by dragging the title bar the step isnt that massive)
you could get what was called a commodity on amga to fine tune the z index interaction, i had it set up so that double clicking a title bar would bring that window to the top, and see no reason why this cant be emulated also (KDE, at least, allows you to do this)
Personally I'd like to edit all 6 films into two in the style of kill bill, even keep some of the music from that and have volume 1 end with the I am your father revelation... Most of eps 1/2 would be contained in a few flashback chapters, heck they've both got the same 4/4 character pattern in the titles...
I have three brothers and we were quite the reverse, having a home LAN we played coop through Doom, Doom2, Quake, Quake 2 and Duke Nukem 3D. It took us a while to figure out why there were no monsters in Multiplayer mode in Half Life.
I've only been complaining about this since Win95 came out, i'd like to be able to grab the title bar of the app and alongside being able to use the 2d movement of the mouse to move it on the screen use the mouse wheel to adjust the z-index, how hard can it be!?
Heh, I have this exact model typewriter (Olivetti Lettera 32) in my loft, in pristine condition (i check on it a couple times a year, wouldnt want it to get rusty/moldy), works fine. Had planned to write a novel on it but turns out my writing skills suck. Wander how much it'd ebay for? Hmz
I had an idea to solve this problem, and further hide identities in the process.
You (through a nice friendly interface) get it to generate a Pri/Pub key pair. Then the public key is used to both encrypt traffic that is for you AND to id your node on the network. You then send your public key to your trusted friends out-of-band (OOB) e.g. by having a button that exports the key and your current internet-facing IP (grab it automatically from whats-my-ip.com or suchlike) in a way that's dead easy to paste into an email, or save as a.txt to a usb stick and snail-mail. The receiver reverses the process by pasting it into a text box. Once you've both exchanged keys in this way your clients will connect, perform an encrypted handshake to rule out man-in-the-middle attacks and from then on update each other if your IP lease expires.
Of course if both your leases expire when you're both offline you'd have to do the OOB exchange again but that should be nice and easy with the right UI.
The next bit is to hide traffic/routing from snoopers by having you define your upload/download rates (e.g. 32 and 128 KB/s) and have the client constantly communicate with all your friend nodes (so if you have two friends this becomse a constant 16 and 64 each, respectively) all the time with random encrypted garbage. Only inserting real packets when needed. This might not be mega fast but it prevents a malicious snoop node from requesting a large file and then watching who's traffic spikes to traceroute it.
- The biggest hurdle for the content companies is that encrypted BT makes it almost impossible
- to see what people share between them. Its impossible to distinguish a bittorrent of a Linux ISO
- from your latest blockbuster. Disallowing filesharing alltogether wont make an ISP that popular.
Except for the web page with the link to spiderman4-xvid-ROTFL.avi.torrent. Your ISP's DPI will be able to report if you clicked that link or not. Until both traffic AND searching are anonymised via onion routing, and your connection is filled to your rate limits with random garbage upstream and downstream even when you're not transferring then the encryption of the traffic is meaningless.
Not all of these are electronically transmittable, it's just a list i've been working on that i've lazily copy/pasted
- Details of the surprise party you plan to throw for someone
- Contact details for your friends and family
- Tobacco and associated parafanalia
- Bank balance
- Bank details
- Credit card numbers
- Passwords and burglar alam codes
- Political alignment and voting preferences
- Relegion and Relegious materials
- Photographs of your children
- Photographs of your children in the bath, the pool, at the beach
- Appointment details for doctors, psychologists, councillors, treatment centres
- Medication for depression or any other illness
- Prescriptions for the medications
- Details of your next AA or Diet club meeting
- Condoms
- Dirty letters, emails or texts to or from a spouse or lover
- Sexy underwear
- Sex toys
- Porno mags or videos
- Subscription details for the porno mags or videos
- Stained underwear (due to an accident or some other activity)
- Invoices and receipts detailing purchase of various items in this list
I remember them days.... Win 96 was essentially win 95b, IMO the best of the 95 branch, it went something like
1995 - Win 95 (No IE integration)
1996 - 95B (essentially SP1)
1997 - 95C (Introduced IE4 integration, evil!)
1998 - 98
1999 - 98SE - with IE5 built in
2000 - ME
So there was a flavour of the 95 family for each of those years, up until 2007 i was using a bizzare mix of 95B and 98SE courtesy of 98lite. I suspect your "Win96" was 95C, being the first attempt to lock-in IE before 98 proper came along
My LDAP/Mail/SMB server is an 800MHz Compaq Presario minus keyboard and screen - so the entire heatsink is open to the air. It's also sans floppy, battery and cd drive giving plenty of airflow. Unless it's very busy the only sound it makes is the HDD spindle and you can only hear that when your head is under the desk - it sits on a shelf about 6" under the desk and is connected up to the KVM for when i really need to be at the system and webmin or ssh wont do, but 99% of the time they do. Does the job very nicely
I'm a kind of cross Dedicated + Casual gamer in that i'm happy to play a longish game through but might spend years doing so. currently about 3 years into Tomb Raider II and Suikoden on the PS1, for example and only just recently acquired a Dreamcast. On the other hand i recently played HL2 almost straight through in one sitting - which for me means taking less than 3 months to do it
I have a full time job and a family and do not have more than a handful of hours a week to spend in front of the goggle box so whilst i do not want to play a game that requires oodles of time and or skill i do want to be able to progress without feeling like i'm restricted because i'm not hardcore enough. Some examples i can think of are golf - where i have to be super hole in one on some challenges to unlock certain courses, or skateboarding/snowboarding where i'm stuck with 3/4 out of a dozen areas to play on because i cant remember the correct multifinger button combos to pull off the raddest moves to get a high enough score to unlock them.
At the same time though, whilst wii bowling or mario kart is fun and something even the wife is up for it's only good for a bit of mucking about while drinking beer, not really rewarding or immersive enough.
basically i want games to cater to the hardcore gamer but please let the casual gamer get to those unlocked levels without dumbing down the mechanics to get me there. I was able to ENJOY half life 2 (and halo 1 and 2) because i was able to play - and feel suitably challenged - on Normal skill, but i had the choice to play Hard skill, other game genres might do well to adapt to that, find other things and rewards to unlock to give the hardcore gamers something to earn (like gold plated shit, i dunno) without withholding 80% of the actual game THAT I PAID FOR from me.
All it needs to make it seamless is a registration button (like the Wii uses for its controllers) you press a button (or select a software option) on device A at the same time as device B. Bish bash bosh they're "associated" and have agreed an encryption scheme, and the simultaneous-button-press algorythm can be written to fail if a third party tries to join in the proceedings (like, i dunno, someone with a telescope and a directional wifi antennae pointing towards you waiting for you to press the button)
In fact i'd prefer the above approach to general household wireless networking, rather than relying on DHCP and having a TXT file on a usb stick containing the encryption keys to talk to my own network i could just press said button on the master router at the same time as my new laptop.
wouldnt it be cool if there was a neural net search engine, so rather than everyone training up their own individual image recognition bots in isolation they cook work together in a supernet when training but still be disconnected when in use. Prior art would be the matrix: "I know Kung Fu!"...
Smart programmers having taken the time upfront to design the system in a modular and flexible manner are already aware that requirements ALWAYS change down the road. So when the eleventh hour rolls around and the requirements have shifted the code requires only minimal adjustments to meet them. Agile is more than a buzzword, it already had a meaning in the dictionary before the PHBs got hold of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have an idea that would work as an extension to torrent clients without requiring extra darknet software and that would be backwards compatible with existing torrent software.
All you'd need to do is have the ability to route your torrent's traffic through a relay. A relay would be someone else running a torrent client with this "Relay" extension enabled. They'd pick up your torrent hash table and pretend to be you on the tracker, relaying the traffic to you. So long as their client only cached things in RAM and did not save anything then a scan of their hard disk would show no trace whatsoever of their ever visiting a link to, or having a local copy of, the files in question. It could probably even relay encrypted torrents because it wouldnt need to know what was in the packets, only where to send them.
To connect to a relay you could enter its address directly if you know it, or enter multiple relays. You could also extend the abilities of trackers so you could register yourself with the IAmARelay list on the tracker, and pick out relays at random to connect through. Sure it'd be a bit slower to complete a transfer, but someone snooping would be clueless, you'd have to connect to each node and try to work out who was an actual peer and who was a relay by their response times. Clever clients would use geolocations of IPs to relay through someone in another jurisdiction, that way when the People's Party connect to the tracker for Tibet-Riot-Photos.zip.torrent they only "see" peers on other continents.
I'm working on a web page with a proxy built in. A single ASPX with no external css,javascript, image or library dependencies. At the moment it can do links but i've deliberately shied away from being able to execute javascript or show images. It's ultimate goal is to allow google searching and reading of wikipedia (forms wont be too hard, just need to harvest their data into key/value pairs). When it can do that it'll be at version 1.0. The fun part is that by default it obfuscates its own traffic via Base64 but you can use your own PGP key pair to actually encrypt your requests (fast javascript interpreter required!) Because it's a single page, and bypasses HTTPS it means *anyone* running a .Net/Mono 2 web site can just drop it in and link to it. Bish bash bosh - a zillion web sites containing proxy engines. I'll stick it on google code sometime this year, probably.
This is hardly revolutionary technology the Sony MZ R700 MiniDisc walkman came with a rechargable battery and a charging circuit so you can charge it from the wall wart. The best part is that its an AA battery, so not only can you swap it out for a standard AA in a pinch you can also stick any other rechargable AA in and use that/recharge it internally. And that came out in 2001 and is the tiniest most amazing piece of electronics i've ever laid hands on, I bought a "new" one off ebay just a couple of weeks ago.
Why (philosophically, rather than bounded by spaghetti-code-kernel-reality) should a plugin that would like full screen video output and audio/video input also be able to download executables and get the OS to run them on boot up with full system rights?
It is not firefox's job to decide what video content i can and cannot watch. If the site serves the video and i have installed (legally, illegally or outside of juristiction) the required codec to render it then the video should play. 'nuff said.
Problem is, whether we like it or not, h264/mp4 is the standard, because every dvd player, blu ray player, laptop and toaster oven already support it. The same reason Mp3 became the standard portable audio format, not because it's free, or better or gives blow jobs but because everything and everybody already supported it.
No amount of bitching and whining on slashdot or the w3c mailing list will change the reality of the remainder of the planet. It's the way it is and at the end of the day it's a video codec, not genocide, so there's really no harm in accepting it and getting on with supporting it ourselves.
I was going to make the exact point. If they can manage to bill seperate rates for calls, texts and internet then they should easily be able to seperate an entry for "handset"
We also had an issue where something stopped working on 2010-01-01 because it was so far off in the future that it wouldnt matter. When was this code written? 2006! On the other hand the dev responsible no longer works here so the Make-It-Someone-Else's-Problem method worked perfectly...
I'm amazed that 95% of the posts here are moaning that the plot was too boring/simple/old. Seriously, what's wrong with knowing the plot up front whilst enjoying watching it unfold.
/. no-sex jokes...)
Never watched the scenery while travelling, despite knowing the destination?
Never enjoyed cooking a meal, rather than just the eating part?
Never engaged in heavy petting or foreplay rather than just going for the orgasm as fast as possible?
(cue
Why does a film have to be a puzzle to be solved, or a challenge to overcome? Do people really think they win points for guessing the endinge before someone else?
every so often someone round here stumps up the suggestion that we hack the firmware in all our wifi gear and just mesh the lot, then they got shot down in flames because it might be a bit slow and unreliable. Avoiding parent poster's vision of the 2020 internet seems worth the effort IMO.
There was a titlebar button (where minimize is on windows) that rotated the z index of the window, it didnt automatically shunt the in-focus window to the front of the screen. You've no idea how obviously useful the seperation of these two things are until you use the system in anger. Personally i'd like modern desktops to allow you to control the z index of a window by holding the left mouse button down on the title bar and letting you use the mouse wheel to pull it closer r push it backwards (seen as you can already move it in the X/Y plane by dragging the title bar the step isnt that massive) you could get what was called a commodity on amga to fine tune the z index interaction, i had it set up so that double clicking a title bar would bring that window to the top, and see no reason why this cant be emulated also (KDE, at least, allows you to do this)
Personally I'd like to edit all 6 films into two in the style of kill bill, even keep some of the music from that and have volume 1 end with the I am your father revelation... Most of eps 1/2 would be contained in a few flashback chapters, heck they've both got the same 4/4 character pattern in the titles...
I have three brothers and we were quite the reverse, having a home LAN we played coop through Doom, Doom2, Quake, Quake 2 and Duke Nukem 3D. It took us a while to figure out why there were no monsters in Multiplayer mode in Half Life.
I've only been complaining about this since Win95 came out, i'd like to be able to grab the title bar of the app and alongside being able to use the 2d movement of the mouse to move it on the screen use the mouse wheel to adjust the z-index, how hard can it be!?
Heh, I have this exact model typewriter (Olivetti Lettera 32) in my loft, in pristine condition (i check on it a couple times a year, wouldnt want it to get rusty/moldy), works fine. Had planned to write a novel on it but turns out my writing skills suck. Wander how much it'd ebay for? Hmz
I had an idea to solve this problem, and further hide identities in the process.
.txt to a usb stick and snail-mail. The receiver reverses the process by pasting it into a text box. Once you've both exchanged keys in this way your clients will connect, perform an encrypted handshake to rule out man-in-the-middle attacks and from then on update each other if your IP lease expires.
You (through a nice friendly interface) get it to generate a Pri/Pub key pair. Then the public key is used to both encrypt traffic that is for you AND to id your node on the network. You then send your public key to your trusted friends out-of-band (OOB) e.g. by having a button that exports the key and your current internet-facing IP (grab it automatically from whats-my-ip.com or suchlike) in a way that's dead easy to paste into an email, or save as a
Of course if both your leases expire when you're both offline you'd have to do the OOB exchange again but that should be nice and easy with the right UI.
The next bit is to hide traffic/routing from snoopers by having you define your upload/download rates (e.g. 32 and 128 KB/s) and have the client constantly communicate with all your friend nodes (so if you have two friends this becomse a constant 16 and 64 each, respectively) all the time with random encrypted garbage. Only inserting real packets when needed. This might not be mega fast but it prevents a malicious snoop node from requesting a large file and then watching who's traffic spikes to traceroute it.
- The biggest hurdle for the content companies is that encrypted BT makes it almost impossible
- to see what people share between them. Its impossible to distinguish a bittorrent of a Linux ISO
- from your latest blockbuster. Disallowing filesharing alltogether wont make an ISP that popular.
Except for the web page with the link to spiderman4-xvid-ROTFL.avi.torrent. Your ISP's DPI will be able to report if you clicked that link or not. Until both traffic AND searching are anonymised via onion routing, and your connection is filled to your rate limits with random garbage upstream and downstream even when you're not transferring then the encryption of the traffic is meaningless.
Not all of these are electronically transmittable, it's just a list i've been working on that i've lazily copy/pasted
- Details of the surprise party you plan to throw for someone
- Contact details for your friends and family
- Tobacco and associated parafanalia
- Bank balance
- Bank details
- Credit card numbers
- Passwords and burglar alam codes
- Political alignment and voting preferences
- Relegion and Relegious materials
- Photographs of your children
- Photographs of your children in the bath, the pool, at the beach
- Appointment details for doctors, psychologists, councillors, treatment centres
- Medication for depression or any other illness
- Prescriptions for the medications
- Details of your next AA or Diet club meeting
- Condoms
- Dirty letters, emails or texts to or from a spouse or lover
- Sexy underwear
- Sex toys
- Porno mags or videos
- Subscription details for the porno mags or videos
- Stained underwear (due to an accident or some other activity)
- Invoices and receipts detailing purchase of various items in this list
I remember them days.... Win 96 was essentially win 95b, IMO the best of the 95 branch, it went something like
1995 - Win 95 (No IE integration)
1996 - 95B (essentially SP1)
1997 - 95C (Introduced IE4 integration, evil!)
1998 - 98
1999 - 98SE - with IE5 built in
2000 - ME
So there was a flavour of the 95 family for each of those years, up until 2007 i was using a bizzare mix of 95B and 98SE courtesy of 98lite. I suspect your "Win96" was 95C, being the first attempt to lock-in IE before 98 proper came along
My LDAP/Mail/SMB server is an 800MHz Compaq Presario minus keyboard and screen - so the entire heatsink is open to the air. It's also sans floppy, battery and cd drive giving plenty of airflow. Unless it's very busy the only sound it makes is the HDD spindle and you can only hear that when your head is under the desk - it sits on a shelf about 6" under the desk and is connected up to the KVM for when i really need to be at the system and webmin or ssh wont do, but 99% of the time they do. Does the job very nicely
I'm a kind of cross Dedicated + Casual gamer in that i'm happy to play a longish game through but might spend years doing so. currently about 3 years into Tomb Raider II and Suikoden on the PS1, for example and only just recently acquired a Dreamcast. On the other hand i recently played HL2 almost straight through in one sitting - which for me means taking less than 3 months to do it
I have a full time job and a family and do not have more than a handful of hours a week to spend in front of the goggle box so whilst i do not want to play a game that requires oodles of time and or skill i do want to be able to progress without feeling like i'm restricted because i'm not hardcore enough. Some examples i can think of are golf - where i have to be super hole in one on some challenges to unlock certain courses, or skateboarding/snowboarding where i'm stuck with 3/4 out of a dozen areas to play on because i cant remember the correct multifinger button combos to pull off the raddest moves to get a high enough score to unlock them.
At the same time though, whilst wii bowling or mario kart is fun and something even the wife is up for it's only good for a bit of mucking about while drinking beer, not really rewarding or immersive enough.
basically i want games to cater to the hardcore gamer but please let the casual gamer get to those unlocked levels without dumbing down the mechanics to get me there. I was able to ENJOY half life 2 (and halo 1 and 2) because i was able to play - and feel suitably challenged - on Normal skill, but i had the choice to play Hard skill, other game genres might do well to adapt to that, find other things and rewards to unlock to give the hardcore gamers something to earn (like gold plated shit, i dunno) without withholding 80% of the actual game THAT I PAID FOR from me.
All it needs to make it seamless is a registration button (like the Wii uses for its controllers) you press a button (or select a software option) on device A at the same time as device B. Bish bash bosh they're "associated" and have agreed an encryption scheme, and the simultaneous-button-press algorythm can be written to fail if a third party tries to join in the proceedings (like, i dunno, someone with a telescope and a directional wifi antennae pointing towards you waiting for you to press the button) In fact i'd prefer the above approach to general household wireless networking, rather than relying on DHCP and having a TXT file on a usb stick containing the encryption keys to talk to my own network i could just press said button on the master router at the same time as my new laptop.
Someone reversing the odd circuit? Planning to start taking things out?
wouldnt it be cool if there was a neural net search engine, so rather than everyone training up their own individual image recognition bots in isolation they cook work together in a supernet when training but still be disconnected when in use. Prior art would be the matrix: "I know Kung Fu!"...
Smart programmers having taken the time upfront to design the system in a modular and flexible manner are already aware that requirements ALWAYS change down the road. So when the eleventh hour rolls around and the requirements have shifted the code requires only minimal adjustments to meet them. Agile is more than a buzzword, it already had a meaning in the dictionary before the PHBs got hold of it.