ezrec - Slashdot User

Comment Roku is a perfect example of 'Meh' (Score 5, Insightful) 501

by ezrec on Sunday September 27, 2009 @10:25AM (#29556001) Attached to: AU Government To Build "Unhackable" Netbooks

The Roku vidio player is an excellent example of security through "meh". It's almost an ideal box for a Boxee or MythTv frontend, but it is pretty much unhackable (cryptographically signed u-boot, kernel, and ramdisk). They've released their sources (but not their crypto key) months ago, yet not one single crack is available for it.

Why? Because (a) they don't make a big deal of the security features to the public, b) it's stupid cheap ($99 USD), and (c) It Just Works.

The combination of all three make 'meh'. Due to (a) there is no implicit challenge to the security community, (b) trumped the TiVo problem of trying to get 'more value for your money' out of an expensive piece of kit, and (c) prevents your Average Joe hacker from wanting to break a working (and useful to him) device.

Good counterexamples are TiVo, Linksys routers, and the Wii.

For TiVo, it was expensive enough that people wanted to get more value for their money, and felt it was time well spent to hack it.

With Linksys routers, It just Doesn't Work caused people to spend a lot of time finding a way to make some perfectly good equipment work at all for them.

The Wii advertised to the community that it was unhackable, which promptly cause all manner of security professionals to take up arms and figure out how to hack it.

Comment Re:Strange Leap (Score 1) 264

by ezrec on Monday August 24, 2009 @10:33AM (#29172967) Attached to: Fully Functional Bioengineered Tooth Grown In a Mouse

Parts: the Clonus Horror

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parts:_The_Clonus_Horror

Great movie idea. Horrible execution.

Heavy Rain, BioShock 2 Delayed 61

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @04:16AM from the pulling-a-duke dept.

Quantic Dream has announced that their much-anticipated thriller Heavy Rain is being pushed back to 2010. Co-CEO Guillaume de Fondaumiere said that the game is on-time and on-budget, but also that they don't want it to come out at the same time as many other high-profile games. "Most publishers today realize that it's not ideal to release a new IP or a new genre just before Christmas. It's a very crowded place to be, and certain games need more space to live their life. Everybody at working on the project, both at Quantic and Sony, believe this is the right time." Meanwhile, Take-Two announced that BioShock 2 would be delayed as well, backing off from their October 30th EU release date and saying it will come out during the "first half of calendar 2010."

Video Game Use Linked To Breast Feeding 94

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 03, 2009 @05:50AM from the intentionally-retarded-titles dept.

In order to demonstrate the ridiculousness of some recent studies which grabbed media headlines by claiming "links" between video games and all sorts of negative behavior (such as violence and the lower-quality relationships), Ars Technica's Ben Kuchera did an experiment of his own: "I started calling people I knew, and I asked if they had one or more video games in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered 'yes' to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after their child's birth, and told me that they didn't play video games. The data, based on my first round of calls, was conclusive: if you play video games, you are much more likely to breast-feed your children. You're probably ready to shoot five thousand holes in my argument. ... I did my job though, and you clicked on the headline." He goes on point out flaws in media reports and legislation involving such claims.

Here Comes iPhone Nano, But Not In the US 177

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 12, 2009 @04:11PM from the rampant-speculation dept.

jehovajerieh writes to us in the time-honored tradition of rampant Apple speculation, pointing to an article over on IBTimes suggesting that while the iPhone Nano may be on the way, the US might not be the first to experience this gadget bliss. "Despite limited information in the supplier channels and typical secrecy with new Apple products, insiders have confirmed that the iPhone nano is not yet in the testing labs at AT&T, Marshal says, leading him to believe that the launch will most likely be with a non-US carrier. 'Obviously, the best-case scenario here would be a China launch (~600mil+ wireless subscribers total in the country), but we have no definitive knowledge of this and are working on identifying the [locale] of launch and other pertinent details,' he said."

Thieves Take the Cake 91

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 22, 2008 @06:39PM from the just-eat-it dept.

Two very hungry German couriers ate a fruit cake destined for a German newspaper and in its place mailed a box of credit card data. The data including names, addresses and card transactions ended up at the Frankfurter Rundschau daily. The mix-up triggered an alarm, and police advised credit card customers with Landesbank Berlin to check their accounts for inconsistencies. Fruitcake must be different in Germany for people to want to use it as something other than a paperweight.

The Best Burglar Alarm In History 137

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 15, 2008 @08:07PM from the suck-it-Edison dept.

Sportsqs writes "When Nikola Tesla got creative with transformers and driver circuits at the turn of the 20th century he probably had no idea that others would have so much fun with his concepts over a hundred years later. One such guy is an Australian named Peter who runs a website called TeslaDownUnder, which showcases all his wacky Tesla ways, or rather electrickery, as Peter calls it." Very cool stuff, I wish I would have had something like this to protect my comic books from my little brother when I was a kid.

Sleep Mailing 195

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 15, 2008 @06:14PM from the better-than-drunk-dialing dept.

Doctors have reported the first case of someone using the internet while asleep, when a sleeping woman sent emails to people asking them over for drinks and caviar. The 44-year-old woman found out what she had done after a would be guest phoned her about it the next day. While asleep the woman turned on her computer, logged on by typing her username and password then composed and sent three emails. Each mail was in a random mix of upper and lower cases, unformatted and written in strange language. One read: "Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4.pm,. Bring wine and caviar only." Another said simply, "What the......." If I had known that researchers were interested in unformatted, rambling email I would have let them read my inbox. They could start a whole new school of medicine.

Ants Used For Mind-Controlled Robotic Limbs 82

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday December 10, 2008 @11:45AM from the i-can't-feel-my-arms dept.

mr sanjeev writes "Australian researchers are reducing the divide between science fiction and science reality by bringing the development of mind-controlled robotic limbs a few steps closer. Even the most fertile science fiction imagination might not see a link between the behavior of ant colonies and the development of lifelike robotic limbs, but that is the straightforward mathematical reality of research underway at the University of Technology, Sydney. The technology mimics the myoelectric signals used by the central nervous system (CNS) to control muscle activity. Artificial intelligence researchers have long used the complex interactions between ants to construct a pattern recognition formula to identify bioelectric signals. PhD student Rami Khushaba said 'swarm-intelligence' allows scientists to understand the body's electrical signals and use the knowledge to create a robotic prosthetic device that can be operated by human thought."

Black Hole At Center of Milky Way Confirmed 392

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday December 10, 2008 @10:00AM from the i-can-see-it-from-here dept.

Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that a German team has confirmed the existence of a Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the center of the Milky Way, using the 3.5m New Technology Telescope and the 8.2m Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Both are operated by the European Southern Observatory (Eso). The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal. According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit."

William Gibson's AGRIPPA Recovered and Revealed 98

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday December 10, 2008 @09:16AM from the gripping-hand dept.

Bud Cook writes "While the text of William Gibson's elusive electronic poem AGRIPPA is widely posted around the Web, it has not been seen in its original incarnation — custom-built software designed to scroll the poem through a single play before encrypting each line with an RSA algorithm — since 1992. Today is the 16th anniversary, to the day, of the poem's initial release. A team of scholars at the University of Maryland and UC Santa Barbara used forensic computing to restore the code from an original diskette loaned by a collector and have placed video of the complete 'run,' as well as never-before-seen footage from the night of AGRIPPA's public debut in 1992, up on a Web site called the Agrippa Files. There's also a detailed essay documenting the forensic process, plus a mess of stills, screenshots, and a copy of the disk image itself."

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