ddt_Osprey

Seriously. These "enumeronyms" drive me batty.

All things considered, 84 bit encryption is pretty impressive, considering DES was still considered "okay" even into the late 1990's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Crack

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

  If they ever...

Boiling frogs, my friend.

Boiling frogs.

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

I would not say a brute force copy must be necessarily lossy by default.

In theory, if the picture is revealed on a display, upon which the full pixel raster can be distinguished for every frame (in real time or slower), an optical capture may be performed, which preserves the original fidelity of the image, and one need not recompress as lossy for peers who have the capacity to receive the full duplicate.

All images are eventually revealed optically somehow. Such images may be captured directly, and corrected and restored according to original quality, if you have good video equipment.

Only one good copy needs to make it into the open, and then the cat's out of the bag.

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

  a typical cinema release is a 
  pretty big file - frame-by-frame 
  encoded as jpg2000 in 4k. Often 
  shipped on hard drives, or 
  downloaded via dedicated fiber 
  lines.

This is not a show stopper. All you need is one unlocked copy to drop in the open, and then everyone can work on it, and get it packed up in a more reasonable format.

  This all works due to proprietary 
  hardware - the modifications to the 
  4k cinema projectors that enable 
  decryption almost at the lens/imaging 
  chip can cost as much as the projector 
  itself, doubling the price of the 
  projector (last I heard from around 
  15k to 30k USD).

So, yeah, that's great, but the only level of piracy that could deter is the pixel-perfect variety. A motivated individual with a comparable budget could probably optically extract a high quality duplicate with an expensive digital video camera (and perhaps even a beam splitter), and pull signal from the speaker transducers with professional audio recording equipment.

There'd be no real need to tamper with proprietary hardware or intrude on the chasis of the projector. With reasonable equipment, it's likely that a person could reproduce a re-recording of a movie that is very-nearly indistinguishable from the factory source, perhaps except for negligible artifacts that might irritate only the holiest of true believers.

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

  Modern DRM schemes like AACS 
  employ methods to change keys 
  for new works. So when crackers 
  find a key that allows them to 
  circumvent the DRM scheme they 
  can't publish it or it would 
  soon get useless and they would 
  have to do the work to extract 
  a key again.

Okay, just think about this for a minute.

Who would EVER care about a cipher key, when YOU STILL NEED TO EXPOSE THE RAW PIXEL RASTER, AND AUDIO CHANNELS TO THE END USER, IN ORDER FOR ANYTHING TO BE VALUABLE AT ALL?

Users will always eventually get the whole thing in the clear, in straight-up plain text somehow, eventually anyway. And all anyone needs is a buffer big enough to capture it, and it's trivial to assemble one.

You need to be able to watch a movie with the naked eye, and hear the sound with your ears. That's how movies work.

It's trivial to capture the raw data, and people have been living with NTSC quality picture and sound for decades.

This is not about perfectly matching the SHA256 hashes of the original MPEG artifacts. People just want a copy, and it's easy to skim one, somehow, one way (cracking) or another (brute force direct copies of the image frames and pulse code samples, at the signal source).

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

on the security side

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)

http://nymag.com/news/features/michael-hastings-2013-11/

http://i2.wp.com/www.dcclothesline.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

Here it comes. The next wave of propaganda, in favour of precogs. The concept of precrime will save us from ourselves.

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

I think some people know exactly what that situation involves and they are inviting it with open eyes.

When you want to stay clean, you have others do the dirty work.

The ones that volunteer for the dirty work are usually regarded as equally disposable as those getting "cleaned."

Those calling for volunteers view this as a transitional period, from which they will emerge, unscathed. Unscathed, why? Madness is not to be ruled out. Nor hubris.

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

NO U

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

Not useless. Just less useful.

It pushes the capacity for your adversary to operate into (slightly) slimmer confines, which is a marginal improvement.

Otherwise, your adversary can behave in an unrestrained manner. No?

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

Jesus, I wasn't even going to read this article, but holy shit, am I glad I did.

  Using more precise sensors, the same MIT 
  researchers went on to develop systems that 
  can distinguish between different people 
  standing behind walls, and remotely
  monitor breathing and heart rates with 99 
  percent accuracy.

  A system called “WiKey” presented at a 
  conference last year could tell what keys 
  a user was pressing on a keyboard by 
  monitoring minute finger movements. 

  And a group of researchers led by a Berkeley 
  Ph.D. student presented technology at a 2014 
  conference that could “hear” what people were 
  saying by analyzing the distortions and 
  reflections in wi-fi signals created by their 
  moving mouths.

Man, I was about to blow this off as yet another MAC address sob story. I totally was not anticipating doppler effects and radar-style reflection/signal strength analysis.

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

There's worse things than Snowden's revelations though, like cheerfully donating your organs to a government that executes you over some religious aerobics classes. [1]

I hope this whole panopticon thing doesn't get finished until after we can grow organs in vitro, rendering my donations moot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

Oh, clickbait. Nevermind.

I suppose maybe this identifies the polarity of backchannel.com's political alignment.

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

Boy, just like so many MP3 sharing services of yester-year. What a curious development!

Standard practice to poison the well of your enemies.

This is a phased approach by the way, and malware is a preliminary step. Next come reputation smearing forms of pornography, and hardware destroying payloads for the ones that have no reputation to smear.

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

I'm sure that's what the robot voices are for.

The problem is, they only have ten or fifteen pre-sets, and all of them are useless.

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

Perception in humans seems capable of grasping data sets with billions of pieces of information each second, and distilling it all down to intuition.

All this information is serialized onto pretty much 5 channels (excluding things like one's sense of balance, or the awareness of how your body is posed), all streamed concurrently.

Sounds like a recipe for high bandwidth consumption. Many cycles per second.

Based on this, I'd wager we (and our perception of self) only exist in the ether between our body's neurons.

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

People literally take shits in subway cars, especially at night. When people aren't taking a dump in the corner, the new subway cars have air conditioning systems that smell like stale halitosis.

But, the worst part about the new subway cars is that the robotic johnny cab voice doesn't have a weird accent. I actually enjoy the strange unintelligible squawking in a Brooklyn accent, drenched in the electromagnetic feedback of unshielded motors. Mostly because the robotic voice never has anything to useful or relevant to say, and if someone's going to say something pointless, I'd rather not understand it, and hear some kind of funny accent.

  THIS THE NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY SYSTEM WITH AN 
  IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM THE MTA. KEEP YOUR 
  VALUABLE BELONGINGS OUT OF SIGHT. PROTECT 
  YOURSELF. STAY ALERT, BE COURTEOUS AND HAVE 
  A SAFE DAY.

Sure thing, HAL.

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

If you like that, you'll love this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair

ddt_Osprey

10년 전discuss

Certainly an easy way to keep people who suck from producing children.

ddt_Osprey

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