Posts by Suricou Raven 1643 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007
So let the ants spoof it. Lay some stripboard, hook alternating tracks up to live and neutral mains with a suitable limiting resistance, and put it in an enclosure to keep kiddie-fingers out. Ant goes in, ant goes pop, more ants are attracted, cycle continues. You won't wipe out a whole colony with an ant-trap, but even just killing a few thousand ants will slow their growth and make them a bit more manageable.
I'd use a simple standard:
- If attempting to access a blocked site gives a clear 'This page has been filtered, by this organisation and for this reason' page, it's not stealth filtering.
- If packets are silently dropped, RSTs spoofed, or a falsified 4xx error page with no information about the filter returned, then it's a stealth filter.
Here in the UK, some ISPs use each approach on Cleanfeed. Virgin returns a false '404' error page, but some others have the decency to explain that the page was intentionally blocked.
Obsidian. It'll take an edge so sharp it's smooth even on nano-scale. Puts metal blades to shame. Tricky to work, but it'll cut someone with much less effort than a metal blade. Put a bit of mass behind it and you could probably lop someone's head off without too much effort.
Very hard to make, but if you're planning a stealthy assassination in an secure facility I think you can afford to pay for the best tools.
More precisely, to qualify for a Darwin award a person must meet two criteria:
1. Through an action of stupidity they must remove themselves from the gene pool, either via death or (more rarely) injury that renders them incapable of breeding.
2. The action by which this is achieved may not also remove any other person from the gene pool.
Eg: If a person tied a hangglider to the roof of their car and drove it off a cliff expecting it to fly, only to land in a burning wreck and die, they would qualify. If their car happened to land on the busy beach below and squish someone who just wanted to go sunbathing, they would not qualify.
In the case of the bullet suicide, he doesn't even come close: Even if he'd succeeded, intentional suicide doesn't count.
Not much, really - but a 3d printer is potentially much cheaper and smaller. If 3D printing can make some of the more fiddly bits, then at least it could make underground gun manufacturing cheaper and easier to hide.
Not that there's any need for underground gun manufacturing in the US - the factory-made guns are quite cheap and readily-available.
It wasn't so much a seizure. The Department of State* simply requested politely that the plans be pulled from distribution while they were attempting to decide if any laws had been violated. It wasn't even a legally binding request, just some strong advice. It just got exaggerated soon after by lots of paranoids screaming 'The Gubmint is comin' for our guns!'
*I have no idea why they were interested, rather than the ATF or even DHS.
They also have the backing of the US because they are a slightly-oppressive, democratic state very friendly to western culture, while the rest of the region is mostly composed of much more severely oppressive, non-democratic states in which even government officials routinely declare the important of defending Islamic values from the corrupting sin of the infidel media.
On a purely pragmatic level, it's probably a good idea to support the country you'd best be able to coexist with in future, even if their human rights record is less than perfect.
Maybe they should work on an automated organism scanner: Freeze worm, then slice it a layer at a time and scan. That way it'd be possible, with enough refinement, to capture very precise data about the neural wiring. Which cell goes where. The first step towards brain uploading. First the worm, then me.
Assuming people have transformers and batteries ready. Actually searching a whole town in a day would be a logistical challenge, but I can imagine them doing it on a district-by-district basis. Remember that these are not the most sensible of security forces: They are paranoid to an extreme, and act accordingly. Measures we would reject as comically over-the-top might seem entirely reasonable.
If Israel wanted to reduce Palestine to corpses and rubble, they'd have gone so by now. They've got more advanced weaponry, an advanced air force, allies in just about the entire western world... oh, yes. And nuclear bombs.
If they were willing to treat this as an open war, it'd have been settled in 1967. But in these political times, it isn't so much of an option to win the war by wholesale slaughter of the opposing country's population. It tends to result in bad PR. So instead we get this continuing fight - Hamas or whatever organisation is leading the fight lob rockets into Israel, Israel occasionally sends a few aircraft the other way, but one side lacks the military strength for a true victory and the other is constrained by the need to avoid mass civilian deaths. So on and on it goes, until we all grow entirely sick of hearing about it, all because a well-connected religious-ethnic group claims having ancestry in the area entitles them to occupy it. Given the human rights abuses on the other side, I don't like either of them.
I don't care that one faction claims the land is theirs because their great-to-the-nth granddaddy killed off the old tribe and was personally handed the land by God himself.
I don't care that the other faction claims the land is theirs because their people owned it more recently.
Just sort something out, and stop bothering me with all these incessant news stories about the latest rocket to go flying one way or drone to go flying the other. Get rid of all the annoying news columns asking 'Will Obama be loyal to Israel?' and questioning his theological commitment. Put an end to these mountain-from-molehill outrages every time someone decides to change their terminology a little.
I'm fed up. Please, make it all go away. Get the nukes out if you must. This has gone on long enough now.
Depends how it's done. A little symbol or number in the corner is easily removed, but what about.. say, a 1% modulation in frame brightness, spreading a 128bit ID over 128 minutes of runtime? It's be far too slow to notice, and endure almost any form of transform. Reencode, flip, rotate, mirror, show the thing on a TV and film it, add some noise, it'll still be there.
Of course you can do this with any codec, but it'd be easier with one where you can adjust brightness in the compressed stream rather than have to encode for every user individually.
I just realised while soaking in the bath - there is an application of this in RAID. It can correct the single-sector read errors encountered during an array rebuild.
Also, why do none of your tablet accessory reviews include the most useful accessory to me, the watertight food bag from Asda?
Wow, that's nasty... some of it has echos of reed-solomon, but that's all I can follow once it gets past defining conventional RAID in matrix terms.
I can tell you that this stuff is obscure. Really obscure. This isn't just your regular nasty math that any professor can figure out - this is cutting-edge research maths. There have only been a handful of papers I can find on the subject. There are probably about ten people who really understand this right now. It doesn't look impossible to follow, just arcane enough that even a professional mathematician is going to need to slog over it for an hour.
I can tell you the big catch though - and it's a really big catch. Failure model. These codes are made for correcting unreadable blocks on a hard drive, and depend upon the rest of that hard drive still being accessible. They won't do you a lot of good when two whole drives die at once. At least, that's as far as I can follow it. I'm not entirely confident, but I think that's how it works.
Might be applicable to flash controllers though - while drives tend to fail in a 'clunk-bzz-dead' manner, flash memory is more likely to lose individual cells.
I'm surprised sites today run on modern browsers half the time. No-one hand-codes sites any more, and even the most basic sites seem to demand an ugly wad of code to handle interactive menus and dynamic content.
What happened to simple design, centered around the content being presented?
Assuming that voice becomes a primary way to interact with mobile technology, and that this lasts for a few decades, could this actually alter pronounciation of some words to better fit the foibles of the technology? Once someone gets used to asking their phone for information on transport disruptions in 'South-Wark,' the new computer-friendly pronounciation may well slip into use in conversation too.
He isn't saying that there's a problem with people looking at pornography in public. His argument, and that of the Children's Charities Coalition on Internet Safety who are the real force behind this announcement, is that blocking pornography is required to protect children from accidentially stumbling across images that might scar their innocent little minds. This is the internet - risque advertising, frank discussion of sexuality, and lots of trolls who like plastering porn all over public forums just as a joke.
It won't end here, of course. Block porn now, and next year there will be calls to block sites containing racism or religious hatered, then libelous content, sites promoting copyright infringement, sites explaining how to get around the censorship, pro-suicide sites, unregulated forums... anything not suitable for ages three and up.
An interesting idea, but this being in the US there's an issue you overlooked: Ownership by 'the people' really means operation by the government, which means a very politicised internet. Most US states already have laws that forbid tax funding to libraries unless they install pornography filters on their network - it's a near-certainty that some (R-suffixed) lawmakers would introduce something of similar nature, possibly inspired by the old Comstock laws. Internet service providers are not prohibited from imposing manditory censorship on their networks, but there's long been an informal agreement that they won't (child porn blocks aside), and they have little business incentive to do so. Not so the government, where a good moral scare and crusade is a proven successful route to reelection.
Do any armchair lawyers know why the $1 payment? I've seen similar things in other US legal situations - the Boy Scouts renting public land and various public buildings for $1/yr to use as regional headquarters, for example. Why this curious small payment.
I've always assumed there's a law somewhere that forbids the government from simply handing over public assets to private owners and the $1 token fee is just a sneaky way around it, but that seems far too simple an explanation - even congress would hesitate to write a law quite so trivial to circumvent.
The complexity of car charging isn't just about the billing. It's only mostly about the billing. There's also a matter of compatibility: Some charger physical connectors can carry different types of power, and needs communication between car and charger to establish what voltage the car wants and how much power the car can safely draw without blowing the fuse.
"I'm a car. Feed me. I can take 110AC, 220AC or 500V DC, maximum 100A. "
"You must be joking. Idiot's got me plugged into some pathetic little American socket - I can give you 110V at 10A, or 220V at 5A, and I only do AC."
"Give me the 220, and tell the owner we'll be done this time next week."
There is a billing and metering system, so you'd have to hack it.
You could do that by the high-tech method, but in this case I'd look at the low-tech way first: Get a triangle key, pop the cover. Somewhere in there will be a high-current relay. Just jab a wrench in between the big terminals. Hello, power!
Well, it might be a bit more complicated than that, really... but probably not much. It's basically just a big power supply, and you can't encrypt electricity. Find it, tap it, steal it.
Nice idea, with a small problem: That means caching a lot of writes in RAM for some time, which means lots of nice fun data corruption in the event of an interuption in service. It leaves your data in a quite fragile state - better make sure your UPSs have good batteries and hope nothing breaks down.
All the PCs, laptops, external hard drives, CD/DVD-R, and your mobile phone. It isn't practical to go through everything in forensic detail at the scene of the crime, so standard police procedure is to confiscate anything and everything that could be used to store data and hold it until the specialists have done their thing.
I'm with you on this. If I ever come across child porn, I'm going to ignore it. I don't want to get pulled into an investigation for something like that.
This is Zigbee, not powerline networking. It runs over 2.4GHz, via an ultra-low-power, low-bandwidth and correspondingly low-speed protocol. It's main use is in industrial automation - tying networks of temperature/humidity sensors around a site back to an environmental monitoring station, that sort of thing. It's ad-hoc self-organising mesh topology is good for covering sprawling, constantly-changing sites.
The only use I see is in pairing with switches - the low-power zigbee stuff can give you light switches that run for decades on a battery, or even be powered by the action of flicking the switch. That means you can make the switches moveable: Wonderful for those doing a bit of DIY who'd rather not knock half a wall down to install new cables.
1. They get a super-expensive precious metal, but hide most or all of it from view. You might as well use steel!
2. If it does catch on, you'll find a hundred factories open making knock-offs that do use steel. And it'll be impossible to tell them apart without destroying the jewelry.
Politics aside, China and the entire western world have an economic relationship that both find very beneficial - so much that they are willing to largely overlook political differences. Companies of the west demand cheap labor and lax regulation in order to produce the dirt-cheap goods that consumers expect, while China needs rapid industrial growth and investment to turn what was a land of impoverished subsistence farmers only a few decades ago into a modernised industrial powerhouse. The economic exchange is simply too great for either side to sacrifice it over something as petty as an ideological conflict, or even rampant human rights abuse. If China were to stop doing business with the 'capitalist pigs' then their economy would instantly collapse leading to massive rioting, unemployment and poverty. If the US were to outlaw importing the products of cheap Chinese labor and a poison-the-earth environmental policy, the population would cheer... for about two days, before they realise that almost every product they could want to buy suddenly costs ten times as much. So both sides continue to exchange heated rhetoric and maintain an active process of intelligence-gathering, but can't afford to go without the other.
It's open source, no prospect of hiding backdoors. They'd be noticed eventually. I view this as more defensive: China has just as much reason to distrust the products of American companies as America has to distrust the products of Chinese companies. Even if Windows is free of backdoors right now, one could be Windows Updated in easily should hostilities break out.
Whenever I see something that incomprehenseable, I attribute it to one of the super-mathhead cosmologists trying to explain things to us common folk in much the same way we might try to explain the concept of a computer to the first member of a jungle-dwelling tribe to make contact with civilisation.
Doesn't work. First sale applies to physical purchases of a copyrighted work, but with digital sales like iTunes there is never actually a legal 'sale' to apply first sale too. It's a license, under contract. The first sale doctrine doesn't apply. Some stores generously permit you to transfer your purchases to other customers, but they are under no obligation to do this.
In 2015 you get home from work. You take your mobile phone out and connect it to your charger, take off your watch and connect it to another, then your bluetooth earpiece. In a few more years you can add your eyepiece, either Google glass or one of the rivals that will doubtless spring up. The end-of-day charge is looking like quite a ritual, and in a household of four people you'll have to devote at least a shelf to the array of chargers needed to host all the devices. Wireless charging is starting then to look less like the gimicky luxury for the lazy it is now, and more like an essential feature to save the five-minute delve through the wormery trying to work out which cable leads to the end you want.
But the number of workers displaced is less than the number of new workers needed to maintain the equipment. You've replaced a large number of low-skill positions with a small number of medium-skill positions*. That's where the cost-savings come from. The total number of jobs created has still gone down.
*And a tiny number of high-skill positions to design the things, but that number is tiny indeed.
Like what? Once the drivers, cleaners, assembly-line operators, street sweepers, fast-food servers, lower-cost restraunt chefs and shelf-stackers are all out of work, there may just not be enough skilled work to go around even if you could somehow come up with enough money to pay for a few years of training for all.
Text or phone you. Give warnings at half-hour/20min/20min/5min/arrived. Come the arrival time you just go out to the truck, enter your security code or insert bank card to verify identity, and the robotics inside will move your parcel to the collection window. Once the parcel is removed the truck resumes, towards the next customer.
Get a nice large television, sit someone a bit too close to it, and they are still going to have a hard time telling 720p from 1080p. The presence of compression artifacts is more of a bother than limited resolution. 4k and up could have its niche in production and the cinema, but would the typical viewer even be able to notice the difference at home?
Depends upon the district. Many police departments regard speed traps as a handy money-maker, and so position them in areas where people are likely to speed but pose no risk of an accident, such as at the bottom of a straight hill - drivers pick up a little speed on the way down, enough to go over the limit. The same thing happened for a time with speed cameras here in the UK, until public outrage pushed the practice out of favor.
Switch to a one-wire bus with the DS18S20 temperature sensors and you'll be able to hook a lot of sensors up to it - I used to have them all over the top floor of my house, poking through holes in the ceiling with the bus in the loft. That way your thermostat can more inteligently decide when the heat is needed, and analysing the sensor logs will tell you which rooms are losing the most heat to the outside world.
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