Re: Just to make your life more paranoid:) Re: Surreptitious Tor Messages?
On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, Steve Furlong wrote: On 10/4/05, gwen hastings [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Troll Mode on: TOR was originally developed as a result of CIA/NRL funding:) ... BTW running TOR makes you very visible that you are running tor even as a client.. its quite a noisy protocol Well, of course that feature is built in. The NSA wants to be able to easily find anyone who's running it. The noisy protocol has the added benefit of causing the network cable to emit lots of radiation, frying the brains of TOR users. The only defense is a hat made of flexible metal. Don't do it! That acts as an antenna and only increases the damage! -- Invoking the supernatural can explain anything, and hence explains nothing. - University of Utah bioengineering professor Gregory Clark
Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Re: Wikipedia Tor]]]
- Forwarded message from Jimmy Wales [EMAIL PROTECTED] - We are not looking for a perfect solution. Yes, Wikis will be vandalized. We're prepared to deal with that, we do deal with that. But what I am seeking is some efforts to think usefully about how to helpfully reconcile our dual goals of openness and privacy. Wikipedia should allow Tor users to register Wikipedia nyms. Then they could block: Tor users trying to edit without a nym; Tor users trying to edit with a nym that has a bad reputation; and they could rate-limit Tor users trying to edit with a nym that has insufficient history to be classified as good or bad; while not blocking Tor users trying to edit with a nym that has a good reputation. This will require some changes to the MediaWiki software that Wikipedia uses. AFAIK, there's currently no way to rate-limit nyms that have insufficient history, and blocks on IP addresses are currently all or nothing. --apb (Alan Barrett)
RE: Researchers Combat Terrorists by Rooting Out Hidden Messages
On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 23:21 -0800, Steve Schear wrote: At 02:07 PM 2/1/2005, Tyler Durden wrote: Counter-stego detection. Seems to me a main tool will be a 2-D Fourier analysis...Stego will certainly have a certain thumbprint, depending on the algorithm. Are there certain images that can hide stego more effectively? IN other words, these images should have a lot of spectral energy in the same frequency bands where Stego would normally show. Images that ideal for hiding secret messages using stego are those that by default contain stego with no particular hidden content. A sort of Crowds approach to stego. If you really want to send secret messages, just send it in the chaff in spam. Everyone is programmed to ignore it or filter it out. -- When a student reads in a math book that there are no absolutes, suddenly every value he's been taught is destroyed. And the next thing you know, the student turns to crime and drugs. - Mel Gabler - Censor
Re: This Memorable Day
On Wed, 3 Nov 2004, Tyler Durden wrote: Well, this may actually be less hard than we thought. Indeed, it's the one vaguely silver lining in this toxic cloud. Outsourcing to India will actually add a lot to world stability. Of course, we'll loose a lot of jobs in the process, but in the long run we'll eventually have another strong trading partner like Japan or France or the Dutch. Bush will sell us out to big business and all of the less-well-off will suffer like crazy in the process, but it will actually make things better in the long run. The only thing we need to worry about is not melting the ice caps in the process. You forget that Bush and his cronies are Evangelical Christians. They believe that the world is going to end *soon* and that it is a good thing. These are people who are doing everything they can to make the world a less stable place because in doing so they bring about armagedon. (Then Jesus will come back and they will be rewarded for bringing about the deaths of billions. Sometimes i wonder if they worship Jesus or Cthulhu. (Maybe they are the same. How else could he walk on water?) -- Q: Why do programmers confuse Halloween and Christmas? A: Because OCT 31 == DEC 25.
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Roy M. Silvernail wrote: On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 21:10 -0700, James A. Donald wrote: -- James A. Donald: Moral equivalence, the rationale of those who defend tyranny and slavery. Roy M. Silvernail Moral superiority, the rationale of both sides of any given violent conflict. The winner gets to use the victory to proclaim the correctness of their interpretation. A claim that presupposes that the west is just as totalitarian as its enemies, that well known reality is not to be trusted, that newsmen and historians are servants of the vast capitalist conspiracy, No claim in evidence. Just the observation that any justificaton for a violent conflict is necessarily subjective. It does not have to be *true*, you just have to get others to believe it. Of course, the current administration has been handing them example after example to point to to make the point... -- chown -R us ./base
Re: Cash, Credit -- or Prints?
On Tue, 12 Oct 2004, John Kelsey wrote: but there doesn't seem to be a clean process for determining how skilled an attacker needs to be to, say, scan my finger once, and produce either a fake finger or a machine for projecting a fake fingerprint into the reader. .. or a replacement reader that fakes the signals to the rest of the security system. --apb (Alan Barrett)
Re: Cryptographers and U.S. Immigration
On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, R. A. Hettinga wrote: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0407.html#3 Cryptographers and U.S. Immigration Seems like cryptographers are being questioned when they enter the U.S. these days. Recently I received this (anonymous) comment: It seems that the U.S. State Department has a keen interest in foreign cryptographers: Yesterday I tried to renew my visa to the States, and after standing in line and getting fingerprinted, my interviewer, upon hearing that my company sells [a cryptography product], informed me that due to new regulations, Washington needs to approve my visa application, and that to do so, they need to know exactly which companies I plan to visit in the States, points of contact, etc. etc. Quite a change from my last visa application, for which I didn't even have to show up. I'm curious if any of my foreign readers have similar stories. There are international cryptography conferences held in the United States all the time. It would be a shame if they lost much of their value because of visa regulations. It makes you wonder what they are going to do to cryptographers that try to leave the country. Please step onto the square marked 'trap door'.
RE: Texas oil refineries, a White Van, and Al Qaeda
On Tue, 20 Jul 2004, Trei, Peter wrote: -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Thomas Shaddack Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2004 3:48 PM To: Justin Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Texas oil refineries, a White Van, and Al Qaeda On Tue, 20 Jul 2004, Justin wrote: HOUSTON (Reuters) - Law enforcement officials said on Monday they are looking for a man seen taking pictures of two refineries in Texas City, Texas. The person in question was just somebody with a weakness for industrial architecture. Indeed. Among the endless variety of things people do with their spare time are trainspotters and planespotters. This seems to be more popular in Britain than in the US, but I wonder if even over there people who park themselves near airports railway statiions, obsessively noting the arrival and departure of each vehicle, attract the attention of security? Maybe the Patriot Act can get struck down because it violates the American's With Disablities Act. It discriminates against obsesive-compulsives.
Re: USA PATRIOT Act Survives Amendment Attempt (fwd from brian-slashdotnews@hyperreal.org)
On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, Thomas Shaddack wrote: On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, Steve Schear wrote: Quite a few book stores (including the local Half-Priced Books) now keep no records not required and some do not even automate and encourage their patron to pay cash. In California book sellers to such used/remaindered stores must identify themselves for tax purposes. The Patriot gag orders lead me to a thought. Is it possible to write a database access protocol, that would in some mathematically bulletproof way ensure that the fact a database record is accessed is made known to at least n people? A way that would ensure that either nobody can see the data, or at least n people reliably know the record was accessed and by whom? When somebody comes with a paper and asks for the data, the one currently in charge of the database has to give them out, and may be gag-ordered. However, when way too many people know about a secret, which the protocol should ensure, it's better chance it leaks out, and less likely to identify the one person responsible for the leak, who could be jailed then. Especially when at least one of n is outside of the reach of the paws of the given jurisdiction. The question is this: How to allow access to a specific file/db record in a way that it can't be achieved without a specified list of parties (or, for added system reliability, at least m of n parties) reliably knowing about who and when accessed what record? With any attempt to prevent the parties from knowing about the access leading to access failure? Note a peculiarity here; we don't ask for consent of the parties (that would be a different threat-response model), we only make sure they know about it. (We can deny the access, when at least (n-m)+1 parties refuse to participate, though.) That would crash the system.
Re: For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi
On Sat, 26 Jun 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Eventually the cellphones will be able to tell another phone approx where they are. [...] The marketing reason would be to help people find others geographically. At least with GSM, the base station always knows the approximate distance to the phone (this is needed by the GSM protocol, for reasons related to time slot management in the presence of finite speed of light, but it might be possible to hack the phone's firmware to fool it, or to register with fewer base stations than usual). The GSM network's database knows the exact locations of all the base stations. Add a little software to do triangulation from multiple base stations, and the GSM network knows the location of the phone, to an accuracy that depends chiefly on the base station density. Add a layer of user interface software, and you're done. No cooperation from the phone is necessary, except what the phone would normally do in order to register itself with base stations so that it can receive calls. No GPS or other non-GSM protocols are necessary. This is already offered as an extra cost service (branded Look for me) by Vodacom in South Africa. It's targeted at parents who want to know where their children are, and the phrase with their permission is included in current advertising. As the seeker, you send an SMS (text message) to a special number to register your phone as a user of the locator service, and to ask for the location of another phone. The network sends a message to the target phone, and the user must reply to give permission to be located. Then the network sends a text message to the seeker, telling them the location of the target. I don't know whether the target's permission is asked every time, or just once per seeker; I do know that it's not just once globally. In any case, the permission is just a flag in a database, and is not really needed by anybody with back-door access to the GSM provider. --apb (Alan Barrett)
Re: Citizen Chics Must Put Out
On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, Jay Goodman Tamboli wrote: On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 01:45:19PM -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: OK...so say an officer is at the beach and spots some hot chick in a bathing suit, with obviously no ID on her person. And let's say this officer believes that this chick has a bag of pot at home. Can he just go and arrest her? That doesn't sound like reasonable suspicion to me. Police need reasonable suspicion to stop the person and ask their name. Not anymore...
Re: [osint] Assassination Plans Found On Internet
On Mon, 14 Jun 2004, Tyler Durden wrote: Remember too that terrorism is really a form of PR, rather than (in most cases) an actual destruction of infrastructure or whatnot. Smart terrorists will obviously leverage any channel available to cause a population to view their world as unstable. Also remember too that plans such as this may be fishing...in other words, communications in the hope that somebody out there (not directly known to the issuer of the communique) will take the info and work out his own plans for attacking the target. I'm sure our boys at the School of the Americas (or whatever it's called now) use these mthods all the time. In fact, they're probably the ones who taught the Mujahadin (and bin Laden) a lot of these techniques. Also don't forget that by telling people where you plan to attack, you get them to spend a bunch of money that they would not have already spent. Give them enough targets and they will be chasing shadows all over the place. When they have done this enough, the oposition will not know what to believe. A mind-fuck is a terrible thing to waste. -TD From: R. A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Thomas Shaddack [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [osint] Assassination Plans Found On Internet Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 17:05:53 -0400 At 10:45 PM +0200 6/14/04, Thomas Shaddack wrote: It may be also a very cheap method of attack. True enough. Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _ Stop worrying about overloading your inbox - get MSN Hotmail Extra Storage! http://join.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200362ave/direct/01/
Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 22:20, bgt wrote: On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 10:48, cubic-dog wrote: in force, because, we finally get slave, indentured servants who will either take the 90 cents and hour or be deported. This kind of rhetoric is extremely irritating. If they can be deported, they are neither slaves or indentured servants. If they voluntarily came to this country, and voluntarily accepted 90 cents/hr, If they do it under threat, then it is not voluntary. They may have come here voluntarily, but that was probably due to the false advertising that America is a Land of Opportunity(tm) and other such rot that our country has used to sucker people to come here. That is like saying that just because the kid got in your car voluntarily, you are not responsible for what happened to him when you molested him. -- Push that big, big granite sphere way up there from way down here! Gasp and sweat and pant and wheeze! Uh-oh! Feel momentum cease! Watch it tumble down and then roll the boulder up again! - The story of Sisyphus by Dr. Zeus in Frazz 12/18/2003
Re: Lunar Colony
On Thu, 2004-01-15 at 16:11, Justin wrote: Trei, Peter (2004-01-15 21:39Z) wrote: Interesting OpEd piece in the NYT today pointing out that a manned Mars expedition becomes *much* more affordable if no return trip is planned. This is obvious. More affordable, but more risk. We might end up with a bunch of dead Mars colonist-hopefuls. Actually I can think of a number of people we could send. The current administration comes to mind. Mr. Cheney, we have a new undisclosed location for you. Mars needs NeoCons. -- Push that big, big granite sphere way up there from way down here! Gasp and sweat and pant and wheeze! Uh-oh! Feel momentum cease! Watch it tumble down and then roll the boulder up again! - The story of Sisyphus by Dr. Zeus in Frazz 12/18/2003
Re: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project
On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Bill Stewart wrote: The reason it's partly a cryptographic problem is forgeries. Once everybody starts whitelisting, spammers are going to start forging headers to pretend to come from big mailing lists and popular machines and authors, so now you'll not only need to whitelist Dave Farber or Declan McCullough if you read their lists, or Bob Hettinga if you're Tim (:-), you'll need to verify the signature so that you can discard the forgeries that pretend to be from them. You'll also see spammers increasingly _joining_ large mailing lists, so that they can get around members-only features. This has already happened: Krazy Kevin pulled this stunt 5 years ago on at least one list I was on, joining the list to harvest the most common posters, then spamming using them as sender envelopes after he'd been kicked off. At least one large mailing list farm on which I've joined a list used a Turing-test GIF to make automated list joining difficult, ..discrimination against blind users - this is legally actionable in several countries. There is a blind group in the UK taking action against a number of companies for this and the Australian Olympic committee ended up being fined several million AU$ for the same offence in 1999. and Yahoo limits the number of Yahoogroups you can join in a day, but that's the kind of job which you hire groups of Indians or other English-speaking third-world-wagers to do for you. To underscore that point, I've _watched_ cybercafes full of SE asians(*) doing exactly this kind of thing for the princely sum of US$5/day - twice the average wage of the area, even after the cafe fees were deducted. (*) Philippines and east Malaysia. AB
Re: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project
On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Eric S. Johansson wrote: the easynet.nl list (recently demised) listed nearly 700K machines that had been detected (allegedly) sending spam... so since their detection was not universal it would certainly be more than 700K :( that is a nasty bit of news. I'll run some numbers based on that and see what the ratio of spam to stamp engines would be. gut sense is that it's still not horrible, just not as advantageous. but you never know until you run the numbers. Intelligence from DSBL indicated that there were _at least_ 350k compromised machines in the USA Roadrunner network alone at one stage. They are currently tracking around 1.5 million compromised machines. The Swen and blaster worms install various spamware and backdoors. These have been estimated to have infected millions of machines worldwide and later versions removed characteristics which removed tellltale compromise signs when scanned - now they mostly phone home, instead of listening for commands. The pool of infected machines is huge. I just hope you're right about the CPUs burning up - it doesn't happen when machines are running OGR calculations, so I suspect that you just ran into a particularly badly built example. AB
Re: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project
On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Eric S. Johansson wrote: But using your spam size, , the slowdown factor becomes roughly 73 times. So they would need 73 machines running full tilt all the time to regain their old throughput. Believe me, the professionals have enough 0wned machines that this is trivial. On the flipside, it means the machines are burned faster. unfortunately, I think you making some assumptions that are not fully warranted. I will try to do some research and figure out the number of machines compromised. The best No. I had seen to date was about 350,000. It's at least an order of magnitude higher than this, possibly 2 orders, thanks to rampaging worms with spamware installation payloads compromising cablemodem- and adsl- connected Windows machines worldwide. AB
Re: Spending a billion dollars an hour produces a hell of a lightshow!
On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Tyler Durden wrote: As the Iraqis themselves said, and I paraphrase (because the quote is not handy): If the U.S. says they know the locations of secret weapons projects, of underground bunkers, etc., why don't they simply give the locations to the U.N. weapons inspectors who can then go to those sites? Come on now! The Iraqis should have proven that they DON'T have any nukular weapons. They were unable to prove that they don't have any WMDs, so now it's their fault they're getting invaded. How do you prove non-existance of an item? (Especially when the other party is willing to lie and forge evidence to the contrary.) I don't believe that there was *anything* that Iraq could have done to stop the invasion. If Saddam left with all his sons, we would have gone in to provide stability. If they had bent over and lubed up, we would have still claimed that they were hiding something on mobile bases or had it hidden underground or some other excuse. Because, in the end, all Bush wanted was an excuse. But don't think it stops here. As it has been said before: Rome wasn't built in a day.
Re: Bush's Moment of Truth
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Bill Stewart wrote: Bush said this was going to be the Moment of Truth. Well, we haven't had a moment of truth from his administration yet, so I guess that's a welcome change... I wonder if it will be like a moment of silence?
Re: Brinwear at Benetton.
On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Adam Shostack wrote: On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 01:22:44PM -0500, Trei, Peter wrote: | You're not thinking this through. As the item goes through the door (in | either direction) the check is made Is this individual tag on this store's | 'unsold inventory' list?. If so, raise the alarm. The tags are not fungible; | they each have a unique number. When you purchase an item, it's tag | number is transfered from the 'unsold inventory' list to the 'Mike Rosing' | list, or, if no link to a name can be found, 'John Doe #2345'. | | As you walk up to the counter, the tag in your jockey shorts is read, | and you are greeted by name, even if you've never been in that store | before. People will find this spooky, and it will stop, but how much you've spent over the last year will still be whispered into the sales clerk's ear bug, along with advice the woman in the green jacket 12 feet from you spends an average of $1,000 per visit, go fawn on her. And remind her that the jacket is nearly a year old. Very last season. Day of the RIFDs I can also see an even nastier probable RISKS article. You buy an item. The system is either down or crashes soon after the item is purchaced. (Or better yet, gets wiped out after a restore from an old backup tape.) It never makes it to the master database. You are now marked as a probable shoplifter. Now prove that you are not.
Re: Brinwear at Benetton.
On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Tim May wrote: Regarding TEMPEST shielding - there is another, complementary approach for shielding: jamming. There are vendors selling devices that drown the RF emissions of computer equipment in noise, so TEMPEST receivers get nothing. Are there any publicly available specs of such generators, or even building plans? Jamming is grossly less efficient than detection. If you want an explanation, let me know and I'll spend 10 minutes writing a small piece on it. But first, think deeply about why this is so. Think especially about recovering signals from noise. It sounds like there is an opertunity here for the right person. Open up a place to clean your clothes of all those little RFID tags and other buglets people are so interested in attaching to any object (nailed down or not).
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Tyler Durden wrote: The M in M-Theory stands for Moron. I always thought it stood for Mescaline. ]:
Re: A Few Words About Palladium
On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Nomen Nescio wrote: According to the message below, Palladium will not include a serial number revocation list, document revocation list, or similar mechanism to delete pirated music and other unauthorized content. These claims have been made most vocally by Ross Anderson in his TCPA FAQ, http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html, and by Lucky Green in his DefCon presentation, http://www.cypherpunks.to/. Instead, the point of Palladium is to create a decentralized, trusted computing base... whose integrity can be audited by anyone. This is accomplished, as has been discussed at length here and elsewhere, by hardware which can compute a secure hash of software as it loads, and which can attest to this hash via cryptographic signatures sent to remote systems. This functionality allows software to prove to third parties that it is running unmolested, which is the basic functionality provided by Palladium. Unfortunately, the exaggerated and misleading claims in the links above are accepted as truth by most readers, and a false picture of Palladium is virtually universal on the net. Isn't it time for security experts to take a responsible position on this technology, and to speak out against the spread of these falsehoods? All of this is speculation until the system is actually implemented. The questions are Who do you trust? and Do their interests coincide with yours?. I do not trust Microsoft as far as I can throw them. They have demonstrated in the past that security for them means the check cleared. There have been too many holes, backdoors, and outright sabotage of competitors that they have lost any credibility with me. And since they are unwilling to publish source, the code is suspect from the start. (I doubt if they will let a third party that i trust audit the software without 42 levels of NDAs and a lein on their immortal souls.) There are other projects to insure that the software running at the kernel level is authorised via cryptographic checksums. (Both in BSD and in Linux.) What users are (rightfully) afraid of is that this is yet another effort to remove control from the users over what software they can use and how they can use it. Microsoft has already used this method to control just what types of protocols and video drivers could be used under Windows terminal server. (You had to have the app sighed by Microsoft in order to run and they wouldn't sign certain compeating protocols.) This method was bypassed by some interesting hackery, BTW. (Thou shalt not split thy open calls.) So far the only examples we have is that of Microsoft's past behaviour. It is not oriented for your security or mine, but of theirs. The fear is justified. (And ancient.) A Few Words About Palladium By John Manferdelli, General Manager, Trusted Platform Technologies, Microsoft Corporation As you may know, I spent some time on the road in the UK in November. During my visit, I had the chance to meet some of you at the Meet the Technologists breakfast at the Microsoft Campus in Reading. Thanks to those of you who were able to attend. It was a great chance to engage in frank discussions about some of the more controversial topics surrounding Palladium. One of the issues we discussed was whether Palladium would include mechanisms that would delete pirated music or other content under remote control or otherwise disable or censor content, files, or programs running on Windows. The truth is, Palladium will not disable any content or file that currently runs. Palladium was designed so that no policy will be imposed that is not approved by the user. Microsoft is firmly opposed to putting policing functions into Palladium and we have no intention of doing so. The machine owners - whether an individual or enterprise - have sole discretion to determine what programs run under Palladium. Programs that run under Palladium, just like programs that run under Windows, will do whatever they are allowed to do, based on the security settings on the user's machine. Palladium not only respects existing user controls, it strengthens them. What Palladium does change is the ability for software to be protected from other software. Palladium will enable and safeguard a decentralized trusted computing base on open systems. These security-oriented capabilities in Windows will be enabled by a relatively small change in hardware, and will help transform the PC into a platform that can perform trusted operations that span multiple computers under a trust policy that can be dynamically created and whose integrity can be authenticated by anyone. In addition, it will preserve the flexibility and extensibility that contributes so much to the entire PC ecosystem. I hope to have an opportunity to meet more of you in the New Year. We'll keep you posted about Palladium-related industry
Re: Yodels, new anonymous e-currency
On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Nomen Nescio wrote: According to this link, http://www.infoanarchy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2002/11/11/4183/2039, a new form of digital cash called yodels is being offered anonymously: [...] Supposedly, then, this is cash which can be transferred anonymously via IIP or Freenet. Leaving aside the question of trusting an anonymous bank (trust takes time), the sticking point for ecash is how to transfer between yodels and other currencies. Without transferability, what gives yodels their value? I believe that the Yodel bank does not have its own currency, but uses DMT Rands. DMT Rands are alleged to be backed by a basket of gold plus a few fiat currencies issued by nation states. See http://www.orlingrabbe.com/rand.htm for information about the currency, and http://www.orlingrabbe.com/dmt_guide.htm for information about the DMT system and its companions ALTA and LESE. --apb (Alan Barrett)
Re: Jamming camcorders in movie theaters
I read how they plan on doing this. I predict it will give a percentage of the movie-going public screaming headaches. (Or at least make them very uncomfortable.) These are the same people who are sensitive to the flicker of cheap 60 hz office lighting. Not that a bit of discomfort was any concern to the MPAA. Look at the movies they put out! On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, Major Variola (ret) wrote: [They want to exploit human persistance-of-vision vs. camcorder pixel differences. Seems to me that one could process the captured frames to eliminate artifacts, though that *is* another step required. In any case, insiders will have access to the playback codes opening the bits to duping.] Jamming camcorders in movie theaters By Evan Hansen Staff Writer, CNET News.com October 10, 2002, 4:00 AM PT As one of the key architects of the discontinued Divx DVD system, Robert Schumann knows first hand how hard it can be to sell copyright protection to the masses. Still, some three years after Circuit City pulled financial support for the limited-use DVD technology he helped build, Schumann and a group of former Divx engineers are hoping for a second act in Hollywood with the advent of digital cinema. Herndon, Va.-based Cinea, the company Schumann co-founded after Divx folded in 1999, is close to unveiling a beta for its Cosmos digital cinema security system that will help movie distributors keep track of how their products are used while protecting them from piracy. Meanwhile, Cinea this week scored a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Advanced Technology Program to develop a system that it claims will stop audience members from videotaping digital movies off theater screens. The company will modify the timing and modulation of the light used to create the displayed image such that frame-based capture by recording devices is distorted, according to an abstract for the winning NIST grant application. Any copies made from these devices will show the disruptive pattern. In an interview, Schumann compared the process with distortions that appear in videotaped images of computer screens, which may show lines that are invisible to the naked eye. Rather than produce accidental disturbances, he said, Cinea plans to create specific disturbances that it can control. Machines see the world more closely to reality than humans do. In the case of computer screens, if you track the energy from a phosphor coating (a light-emitting chemical used in cathode-ray tubes), you find that it begins with a strong burst followed by a period of decay and then another burst, and so on. But people see it as a single intensity, Schumann said. Cinea, a privately held company with backing from Tysons Corner, Va.-based venture capital firm Monumental Venture Partners, expects to have a working prototype within two years. It is partnering with Princeton, N.J.-based Sarnoff, which will conduct research on image manipulation and analyze distortion and possible countermeasures. The University of Southern California's Entertainment Technology Center in Los Angeles will evaluate the system in testing with human subjects. There's a difference in the way a camcorder and the human eye see the world, Schumann said. We've figured out some ways to exploit that. The trick is to make sure there is no negative impact on the viewing experience for the audience. snip http://news.com.com/2100-1023-961484.html?tag=fd_lede2_hed - Dear Mr Congressman, I am God -Jack Valenti
Re: Cryptogram: Palladium Only for DRM
Of course, those like Lucky who believe that trusted computing technology is evil incarnate are presumably rejoicing at this news. Microsoft's patent will limit the application of this technology. In what way is in the desktop of almost every naive user a usefully limited application?
Re: Backround checks are more important than education...
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thousands of teachers will not be able to take classes at the start of the new term because character checks on them will not have been completed, the government has admitted. [...] This is in the context of a knee jerk reaction to an apparent murder case of two young girls where one of the two accused worked in the girl's school. The requirement for background checks was in place long before the murder (and the local paper said both the accused had passed them - the man accused of the murder worked as a caretaker at the village college, and the woman accused of perverting the course of justice as a classroom assistant at the girls' school). (I live in a village next to Soham). The case has presumably influenced how seriously the checks are taken, though there are reports of some schools trying to skip them to get teachers working in time. http://www.guardian.co.uk/child/story/0,7369,780573,00.html -- Alan Braggins mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.ncipher.com/ nCipher Corporation Ltd. +44 1223 723600 Fax: +44 1223 723601
