The Register is reporting that game makers have been hit with graphics patent violation suit. This one relates to rendering of 3D scenes on a 2D monitor. The patent, 4,734,690, is assigned to Tektronix and was filed in 1987. See also my earlier comments on software patents.
In Macs do Star Wars dirty work on the BBC’s news site, the work of Lowry Digital Images [a company that does not seem to have a web presence?] in scanning and cleaning the Star Wars films ready for use in digital form on the DVD set is described. Lowry took the original Star Wars film spools and scanned them all for the DVD set. So what? Well, old film, especially old film that has been handled a lot, is covered in dirt and scratches that scanners will see. Additionally, older sci-fi movies with complex special effects that were created using layers of film tend to be grainier and softer focus than we are used to with today’s CG effects.
Lowry Digital Images uses a bank of 600 dual CPU Mac G5 boxes to clean up the frames once the film has been scanned at very high resolution. Each frame occupies 70MB (and there are around 180,000 frames in each Star Wars movie). This calls for a lot of storage, but Lowry has 400TB online.
In addition to the story at the BBC, there is an article about John D. Lowry, and one specifically about the Star Wars work on the Apple website – both worth reading (the Star Wars one even has some before and after stills and a QuickTime 360 degree look inside the CPU room).
Wi-Fi Networking News has a posting about more cities promising free Wi-Fi for everybody. Included in the list this time is San Francisco where the mayor, Gavin Newsom stated: “We will not stop until every San Franciscan has access to free wireless Internet service.”
Other cities are looking into this too. It will be interesting to see how they deal with the reaction of commercial hot-spot operators like T-Mobile and SBC’s FreedomLink. Then there are the security issues asssociate with having open and anonymous access to the internet from anywhere in the city. Will these wireless cities simply become havens for the spammers?
Over at the Register they have published a security report comparing Windows and Linux [PDF]. The results are as expected, but the report does a good job of debunking the FUD that Microsoft is spreading about the security of their excuse for an operating system.
Those system administrators out there still running Microsoft based servers for anything need to read this and then install something that actually might be able to do the job in a secure fashion. Windows will never be secure until it is completely redesigned and rewritten to be so. The design of Windows is simply flawed in such a way that it can never be secure. Above all though, remember that no software, including operating system software, is 100% secure. Keep watching for updates and make sure you install them (Linux, or perhaps even better FreeBSD system, will significantly reduce the amount of work you have in this area though!).
For desktop users the problem is a little more complex as the only really viable alternative for general use is Mac OS X, but it requires special, and often expensive hardware. The problem is that Windows requires more attention than any other OS I’ve used, but most of the people using WinXP do not have the required skills to maintain it securely – myself included much of the time. Keeping up with all the flaws is a full time job, and I don’t want a second job!
Six Steps You Can Take to Secure Your Wireless Network at The WiFi Weblog lists the steps that TechRepublic recommend for securing your wireless network. Some I agree with, some are very dated even for home use, and some are just plain wrong, especially for corporate use (even in small businesses). So, here’s my corrected six steps:
In addition, WPA2 is on the way. As soon as your access point(s) and clients all support it, then switch to further improve the security of your network. You can phase this in as most APs offer an option to support legacy WPA clients at the same time as WPA2 ones.
Finally, don’t be fooled by proprietary solutions like Cisco’s LEAP though – WPA is a better choice than LEAP and will be more widely supported. Indeed, Cisco’s CCX certification programme even requires WPA certification.
An article at Gizmodo talks about the fake iPod shown to the right. They provide a link to the full size ‘ad’ image too which includes a spec. While this is clearly a joke, I would have changed a few things to make this more realistic:
They are spot on with the OS though. There is no reason at all, at least not once you move to a real CPU, to have a port of the BSD/Mach based Mac OS X on a handheld device like this. I run the Familiar distribution of Linux on my iPaq which has a much lower spec than even today’s PDAs and it works just fine. NetBSD proves that BSD can be ported to many platforms (they claim more than Linux, though that must be getting close now). Why not have Mac OS X on a handheld?
[If folks over at Apple are reading and like the idea, perhaps I could do the port for you – I have been porting operating systems to embedded platforms for much of my career!]
One of my favourite tech-news sources, The Register, was hit by a DDOS attack yesterday. I noticed that the site was inaccessible in the early hours of the morning here in California.
It is sad that there are people out there who think that it is smart to take down somebody else’s site. It’s a shame that those people cannot spend their time contributing their own content to the world instead of just destroying other people’s. And why attack a news site like the Register?
Of course, it would also help if the thousands of zombie Windoze boxes that enable people to run these attacks so easily were not on the internet. I think it is about time that Windoze boxes were banned from connection to the internet until MS completely re-writes the whole OS in a secure way (assuming that they know how to do that). Either that, or bill them for each one of these attacks that originates from machines running their crappy excuse for an OS.
And, while we’re on that subject, I have a better plan for controlling spam too. Rather than Bill’s plan that would have us all pay him to send email, I propose something that would charge MS for every spam email sent via a zombie Windoze box. That should be enough of an incentive for MS to actually plug the holes in the OS.
An article at Wired News describes a remote control that sends out a stream of ‘off’ commands for television sets, one manufacturer’s code after another, with just a single press of the button. The device, called TV-B-Gone [the site was down for exceeding its daily bandwidth allowance at the time of writing], is a key fob sized device that will turn off most TVs with a single click. This could be a fun thing to carry around, especially in places where there are banks of TVs churning out promotional content loops all day 🙂
In addition to an increasing number of Nigerian/419 scam emails arriving in my mailboxes, I have noticed that there are a lot more phishing emails.
According to the folks over at the Anti-Phishing Working Group, these attacks are on the rise. In July 2004 they had almost 2000 attacks reported, almost a third of which were against Citibank. My experience would go much further than that since almost all the phishing emails I see are Citibank ones, including the one I received tonight that prompted this posting.
I have a proposal for dealing with these in a more pro-active way… I think that one way to make these attacks less useful to the criminals behind them would be to flood them with false information. That would make finding the real card details in their data much, much harder. Since most are simple CGI or PHP scripts processing HTTP post forms, it is a simple matter to extract the names of the form fields that they are interested in (username, password, account number, PIN etc) and create a script that generates random responses for usernames pulled from a dictionary of common names. More sophisticated solutions might also verify that the credit card number being submitted is actually a valid number (i.e. it passes the Luhn algorithm validation), or perhaps provide username variations (e.g. adding a numeric suffix to the username).
Finally, an old article at BankersOnline.com talking about a phishing attack that took place on January 25, 2004, seems to go way over the top. The introductory paragraph states that “terrorists leveraging resources in Korea, and posing as United States government representatives, attacked our country in an attempt to undermine the security of our banking systems.” It goes on to say that the “reaction should be immediate neutralization of the threat.”
Update [October 21, 2004]:The BBC is running a story about the sophistication of phishing attacks now, and also some possible techniques that they might employ in the future. Seems that phishing is in the news these days. Let’s hope that the message gets out to as many potential victims as possible.
Saturday night we checked out the Gyro’s 3D Fear Factory Haunted House event at the end of Pier 17 in San Francisco. Tickets are a rather high $17.95 per person, cash only. That gets you two mazes. For the first one you wear those odd 3D glasses (the polarising kind, not the dual colour ones). That has the effect of making lots of the decorations jump off the walls and floor – this was well done. The second maze does not have the 3D effects which made it less impressive.
While walking around both mazes, costumed actors jump out at you, hammer on the walls above your head, or drop upside-down from the roof. This seemed to be moderately effective for some, and had no effect on others. If you’re not easily scared by these things, take somebody who is so you can enjoy watching them jump if nothing else! There did not seem to be many other special effects (I was expecting some animatronic spiders, for example, rather than just static models).
If you want my recommendation, I’d suggest passing on this one for the price. If it was under somewhere in the $5 to $10 range it might be worth it, but at almost twice the price of a movie I’d say it was definitely over priced.
