You can generally pay some amount and get an ISO document - for the JBIG2 standard document I think it was something like 180 CHF.

According to JPEG (the standards group, not the file format)

There is a difference between the (patented) arithmetic coders used in JBIG and the later JBIG2 standards. JBIG uses the QM-Coder and JBIG2 uses MQ-Coder. They are not technically the same. It is believed that patents for the QM-Coder are owned by three organaizations (IBM, Mitsubishi, and Lucent) and patents for the MQ-Coder are owned by two organizations (IBM and Mitsubishi) .

Free licenses should be available for MQ-Coder (used in JBIG2 and JPEG2000) although a license should still be requested, but one-time payments to three organizations are necessary for QM-Coder (used in JBIG and JPEG-Arithmetic). At one stage these were of the order of a single one time license fee of 5000 US$, but the relevant companies should be contacted for their current pricing. If these have changed substantially, we would appreciate it if you could inform the webmaster so that the site can be updated accordingly.

Our understanding is that the license conditions of these coders are limited to the case where products are fully compatible to the standards. However, if it looks like you are within the academic sector and if you implement the coder for purely academic purposes (not for commercial use), you may be able to get free licenses.

Yes, the mistake was mine. I did mean to say JBIG2 which is, as you say, lossy. It's also been an ISO standard since 2001.

Re: their lossless mode - if they can mathematically guarantee that the output == the input under all input conditions, then we're safe with it. If it uses pattern matching and substitution (like the lossy mode does) then all bets are off.

I wonder why ImageMagick doesn't support JBIG2 - from the wikipedia article, Patents for JBIG2 are owned by IBM and Mitsubishi. Free licenses should be available after a request. JBIG and JBIG2 patents are not the same.

Yes, faxes? Remember them?
They're still widely used in many industries today. In fact, I applied for an Apple Developer account in a company name not too long ago and, unlike with an individual account, there is some paperwork involved that Apple insist must be faxed to them. Apparently it's more secure. Anyway, I'm not ranting about that issue today, but more the widespread use of faxes in the area of Law.

Lawyers love faxes. They fax everything they can. A lot of them are using email more and more these days, but faxes are still a critical part of their business.

Most faxes can use JBIG compression. High-end faxes use JBIG2 compression. This compression is what's been blamed in this Xerox issue. How many faxes have been received over the years that have been subject to silent modification of the information?

It's not hard to imagine a legal situation where just one number modified on a page could prove to be very expensive...

You only need to look at a modern photocopier to see that this is a highly plausible method of operation.
There is no direct optical path between the glass on the top of the copier and the drum that is used to print the image.

Or, see what happens when you put a document in the feeder and ask for 10 copies. You get them all nicely collated.

Older analogue copiers can not do this, without a collating output tray, as they can only directly make a copy of whatever's on the glass.
In a digital copier (just about every copier you're likely to see today) it scans the entire document into memory (often compressing it so that you can fit bigger documents in the limited memory) and then prints the multiple copies with all the pages in the right order.

Yes, I used to work for a copier company and I have direct technical knowledge of how this stuff works.

Invent some half-assed lossy compressor, such as JBIG which is an ISO standard that was ratified so long ago that the patents applying to it have all expired?

One thing of note is that JBIG is very commonly used in higher-end faxes as it's significantly quicker than previous lossless compression algorithms. I wonder how many faxes have been silently modified in transit by this compression?

And, before you ask, there are many industries where faxes are still heavily used, such as in law - where silent modification of numbers in a table could prove to be very expensive...

I'm pretty sure that Sun have done all the layoffs that they're ever going to do...

It can do these kinds of transfer rates, however SAS enclosures (with built-in RAID controllers) tend to be more expensive and then you also need a SAS interface card, whereas Thunderbolt is now being built into motherboards.

This is starting to get to the upper limits of what SAS can do. Only Fibre Channel and Thunderbolt will do these kinds of rates with room to grow.

Ummm. No.
That enclosure doesn't do RAID, it's a JBOD enclosure. The peak transfer rate for the mini-SAS interface is 3Gbs (3 Gigabits, not bytes, per second) this is an absolute maximum of 375 MB/sec. The real-world performance of the unit will then depend on the RAID card you're using and will typically be somewhere lower than the peak theoretical performance of the interface. I don't know what drives you're putting in there that can each do 500MB/sec (SSD?) and I don't know what RAID card you propose to use that'll let all eight SSDs run at their peak rate.

The unit I was talking about (http://www.areca.com.tw/products/thunderbolt.htm) on the other hand, with 8 drives in it has a measured real-world performance of 650MB/sec read or write via a single Thunderbolt cable, using RAID 5 that's done in hardware in the enclosure itself.

This 650MB/sec is the actual performance that the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test gave me on a MacBook Pro 13" laptop connected to the RAID with 8x 1TB Western Digital hard drives in it.

Thunderbolt is faster than SAS, SATA and SATA II. Thunderbolt is faster than 2, 4 and 8 Gb/sec Fibre Channel - Thunderbolt is a 10Gbs full-duplex interface, so can transfer 20Gb/sec at it's peak. That's 2.5 Gigabytes per second (1.25 in each direction).

There's some really good storage available with Thunderbolt now. I can get an 8-bay RAID enclosure with Thunderbolt for around a grand (bare enclosure with no drives) put 8 drive mechanisms in it and get a multi-terabyte array that delivers around 650MB/sec (megabytes, not megabits) per second read and write on my MacBook Pro.
Prior to this you needed really expensive FibreChannel equipment to deliver the same kind of performance.

If you have it set, the device PIN unlocks the AES key that decrypts the phone's filesystem.
If you allow unlimited guesses at the PIN, you can unlock the AES key and decrypt the filesystem.

If you erase the phone (reset all content and settings) the phone securely wipes it's AES key - the filesystem is from that point forwards nothing more than random data. If you have an attack against AES256 then you stand a chance at recovering something, but you don't...

There's no use in guessing the PIN as the encryption key that the PIN unlocks has been erased.

Yes, this 1000 times. I'd happily rather have a 256kbs AAC that's mastered properly than have a 24/96 lossless track that's mastered badly with all the dials turned up to 11.

Yes, but no-one is arguing you should record and mix at 44.1/16 - on the contrary, there are well established and accepted reasons for recording and mixing at, say, 96/24 and only mixing down to 44.1/16 at the very end of the process.

If you compare the raw bitrate, and you're mixing at something like 192/24 and the final mixdown gives you 44.1/16 then the size of the output will be on the order of 15% - and that's a good thing, as it means that CDs aren't the size of LPs and MP3 players can store more than three songs.

Where he's wrong (Neil Young) is assuming that he can hear every fine nuance of the high-res audio (he can't, no argument there, he simply can't) and that as the redbook CD audio is 15% of the size, then somewhere along the way you're throwing away 85% of the sound. Now, that's simply crazy talk (and, let's face it, Neil Young has done more than his fair share of substances that may induce a hint of crazy)

In a word, yes.

You'd be crazy to record, mix and master all at 44.1/16 as you need the headroom to work with, to adjust the volume, to mix things together.
The final result that people end up listening to though is just fine as redbook CD audio.

There are also good and not so good ways to do sample rate conversions. High-quality sample rate conversions take quite literally one or two orders of magnitude more processing power to do than a quick one, and the effects of a poor quality SRC can have a dramatic outcome on the sound.
Refer to some of the graphs on the SRC Comparisons page for some good converters (eg, Apple's afconvert in bats mode, iZotope's converters) versus some really bad ones (FL Studio 10 6-point, ffmpeg 1.1.1 swr etc)

You might be onto something here - and this is why Apple have their Mastered for iTunes program - where instead of getting your masters, decimating them and dithering them down to 44.1/16, you can either supply Apple with high-res masters (and they will re-convert them for you if their mastering process changes, or if they up the quality again on the iTMS) or you can use the same tools that Apple uses to directly convert your high-res audio to AAC 256.
When you use the tools Apple provides, they take the high res audio and convert it to 32-bit floating point, apply a "mastering quality" sample rate conversion (and, yes, it is a very high quality SRC - refer to the afconvert examples at the SRC Comparisons page) and then make the AAC from this. They also have a plugin for the workflow where you can get a preview of how the audio sounds when converted to AAC, so you can preview the tracks and adjust it to get the best out of the AAC after it's converted.