Posts by Charles 9

Re: Sounds good to me!

You know Japan and South Korea are a) small and b) dense. Show me a large, sparse country with better Internet, then we'll talk (you won't--Canadians complain more than Americans and let's not start with Russia).

Re: Sounds good to me!

Then counters on the grounds that privately-owned data lines are both an unfair labor practice and a potential threat to national security.

But those same states typically charge you for obtaining an ID card. If it's a requirement to vote to possess such an ID, that amounts to a poll tax, and that runs afoul of the forbidden laws list of Article I, Section 9.

Re: Wouldn't work there, unless I planned on living there until the end

Well, even cosmetic house improvements need to be checked they don't pose other risks. For example, you have to keep a certain amount of open space between you and any adjacent streets so people and cars can properly see around corners. You can't put up anything fragile and likely to fall off or fly in the wind and hit someone. And so on.

Re: USD $24 for 10 gallons of gas

"Gas prices went up in California, because we use a special gasoline formulation to reduce smog, so gas normally sold outside of California can't be loaded on a tanker truck and sold in-state."

That's also why most cars in the US are built to the tighter California emission standard (anyone watching an American game show with a car in it may have once heard "California emissions" being listed as the features on the cars, meaning the additional stuff needed to make the car California-compliant).

Re: Business as usual then...

So you fire back you're a caeliac with a religious objection to the soup. See how they fire back.

(That's how some people can get food into a cinema or sports arena—medically-ordered diets mean they can't have anything else, so taking the food away becomes a crime.)

Re: fug ESPN

Only two problems.

One, ESPN is one of the earliest and most popular cable channels. Basically, any sports fan will demand it as a prerequisite. If ESPN can command a princely sum, it's because the demand is there.

Two, ESPN is owned by Disney, who also owns ABC, one of the big broadcast networks. ABC is basically a must carry so Disney can leverage this in negotiations. Not to mention Disney is ANOTHER of those highly-popular "prerequisite" channels.

If the pirates obtained TWO copies, they could run a picture delta analysis to determine off frames and work from there: keeping edits from BOTH copies to throw off the forensic identification.

But watermarking of this nature is basically a variant of steganography, and there are already various techniques in the know to mangle stego. Even the vaunted Cinavia audio watermark has been shown to be vulnerable.

Re: Here's an Idea...

No, it's not common sense. That doesn't give enough time for advertisers to get the time they pay for, and recall that advertisers can usually pay more than any group of end-users can come up with, which is why many systems today are ad-based even when users are willing to pay (because the amount they'd have to pay to make up the difference would make them balk).

Re: Obvious idea.

It's a technique used for product placement these days, but IIRC they don't do it yet for HD broadcasts due to the re-encoding load this places.

Re: individual copies? easy then

Unless you BAKE the watermarks into the actual encode, anything you try will be easy to strip. And once you bake them in, you'll fall into the pit of having to encode the episode multiple times for each screener, which given they're 1080p will take a noticeable amount of time even with professional hardware, and even then the pirates have been noted to take watermarked copies and work on scrubbing them later.

Re: Translation

And here are why your ideas won't work:

"1. Get the translators to come to your studio to do the translation and don't let them in or out with any media or recording equipment. I believe Apple had this approach when previewing the Watch to some devs."

They'll refuse to put down the travel expenses because it wouldn't be worth it for them. It's MUCH easier and less expensive to send a disc or hard drive than a translation team. If they're THAT paranoid, they can courier the copy with an agent from THEIR studio, with all the expenses that implies.

"2. Remove all the bits where nobody is speaking before sending it for translation. It would probably make the movie unwatchable."

Don't forget signs and other visual translations, at which point it would probably become barely watchable and worth a pirate's time.

"3. Obscure a significant portion of the image with a big black rectangle. Again, it would make it unwatchable."

It also removes key context needed for some translating to make sense. Recall that English isn't exactly the most precise of languages.

"4. Send each scene to a different translation bureau - chances of them all being dishonest is smaller."

As another poster noted, consistency is essential for a good translation, which means it has to be a single firm throughout the run or else inherent translation variations build up to result in misnterpretation which can occur at key plot points, ruining the experience.

Re: @LucreLout - @Gordon

"But this case *isn't* about a phone being stolen, it's about the Police very probably using illegal methods to snoop on phones in the same way that GCHQ and NSA want to snoop on what everyone does online in the hope that, in the massive haystack of data they collect, there may be a needle."

But when the needle's made of explodium so it doesn't react to magnets or x-rays, making it indistinguishable from the haystack, how do you find it before it explodes, takes hundreds of people with it, and YOU get the blame for not finding it in time?

Re: A solution for the wrong problem

nVidia already has a toehold in the portables with their Tegra SoC. And their APU lines points to a similar direction for AMD. Sounds to me like that base is covered. Meanwhile, in performance gaming, the PC will still have a place for years to come, and as long as there's a demand for performance gaming, the incumbent (Windows) will always have the edge. Portables will never take that away or everyone would be gaming on laptops now.

What nVidia did with Valve was simply a CYA move, but they could easily abandon it, especially if Windows X boosts the PC profile again.

Re: A solution for the wrong problem

When the Steam OS comes of age, nVidia and AMD will make Valve bend over. Valve needs them for good graphics performance. They can stick to Windows.

Re: No camera?

But that means having a second device to power the camera, which they'll just own first. And running extra data channels gets expensive, so it's one channel or bust.

Re: Excellent!

More DISCLOSED vulnerabilities which would in turn be patched up. I'd call that a better shot than fewer disclosed vulnerabilities and a whole bunch of undisclosed zero-day bugs hiding in the darknet.

Re: Excellent!

"LOL @ Android and secure in the same sentence."

As I recall, there was no hide or hair mentioned of the Android application framework, only the Linux core behind that framework, which last I checked is still pretty tight. The last vulnerability I could pick up came from the baseline Linux kernel, not from anything Google did to it, and that's since been fixed.

IOW, perhaps the article's rather misnamed as the new OS is closer to Chrome OS (a web-based thin client) than Android.

Re: “Humanity is wasting its time on monitoring life rather than getting on and living it.”

But what happens when the moment symptoms appear is already past the point of no return? Isn't that why there's a concern for checking out every little variance? In case it's something extremely serious where time is of the essence?

"f that's the case then why not leave it in there for a couple of years more to allow the sys admins time to beg the PHB for money to redevelop the applet that should never have been written in the first place."

Because Catch-22 applies here. As long as NPAPI works, the PHB will never see a reason to put down for a new version. PHB's are reactive, not proactive and will only put down when their own neck's on the line: IOW, when something breaks.

Re: Although plugin vendors are dancing to Google's tune

Unless Google is claiming NPAPI is too old TO sandbox properly. We don't know if Apple's approach is breaking stuff since the MacOS presence is relatively small. Meanwhile, like I said, Firefox's is off by default, which leads me to suspect it's likely to break things. If the only way to properly sandbox NPAPI breaks too much, then perhaps Google has a point.

Re: Not the end of the world

Trouble is, non-interactive web pages are more trouble then they're worth now, so you're caught between Scylla and Charybdis. The ONLY way you can attract enough e-business is to render yourself vulnerable. So do you sink or swim with the sharks?

Re: Goodbye Chrome

But what happens when the only alternatives lead to pwning, which leave users in a bind: the ONLY browsers they can use to work leave them with their butts in the breeze, so to speak, basically putting am minefield between them and their work and in the dilemma of neither being able to stand still nor move forward.

Re: Although plugin vendors are dancing to Google's tune

Java's supposed to be sandboxed, too. Guess what happened? Malware found ways to escape sandboxes, so perhaps Google doesn't consider a sandbox much of an assurance. Firefox added the capability, too, but it's not on by default. Probably because of the risk of the access restrictions breaking essential plugins: another concern of any form of new access restriction.

Re: Sigh...

Except because we're only human, every single implementation would be vulnerable to some human mistake. The chief (and irremovable) reason software is vulnerable is because it or something else along the line is made by humans.

Re: Not https as it is right now

"Self Signed plus DNSSEC plus a signature in DNS is enough to verify that the site is what it claims to be at least as far as DNS goes (which is good enough for 99% of cases.. it flags MITM and government/corporate snooping which is what we're interested in).. DANE solves the same problem."

What about government MITM using the actual key, which they can co-opt? They can flood a web of trust and spoof any lighthouse sites, too.

Self-generated certificates and offline key exchange?

But REAL real security usually involved hoop-jumping the general public isn't willing to jump. You have to come up with a system that's BOTH extremely secure AND ridiculously easy to use. Given the normal scale of secure-vs-ease of use, I don't think that's possible.

Re: Fact and fiction mix

But now the casinos have to watch out for linked smart watches and camera glasses (the latter in particular because there could be actual prescription lenses in the frame, rendering them a medical necessity due to otherwise-poor vision).