Vigik were at first designed to allow mailmen and other utility workers to access the common spaces of a building securely. Before this, in the 90s, they had a metal key pass who could open any front door of most parisian buildings. Of course, after some years this pass was easy to obtain for anyone. The Vigik was conceived as a time limited pass, as to make any lost/stolen/cloned badge useless.

Then a access control targeted at regular people living in the building was added, using the same hardware, but no being Vigik proper. Often it's coupled with an intercom system (sound only or video+sound).

The resulting system is quite useful to avoid some intrusions, but for from hacker proof and without privacy issue :
- It's not so difficult to clone a dongle.
- There is a central database on the provider website (Intratone), which includes an access log with the badge number and the registered owner (often wrong).
- Too many people use the PIN code instead of the intercom or badge. It need to be changed often.

I'm quite OK with it for the main doors of a building. It limits the nomber of scammers, thieves, sellers, crazy people who can enter it. But using for MY door ? No way in hell. It's trivial to bypass it for a milcly competent intruder.

I forgot to tell it does also depend on the card. When I was a student, I had a "Visa Electron", which always needs authorization, so I had to be careful in conventions and other venues without net.

I live in France. I have a VISA (chip+PIN) card since the start ot this century and never once had to pay cash because of a faulty POS terminal. Sometimes I had to try several time, but it's always was because the POS was slightly damaged (too many rough customers ?).

Impressive reliability I would tell.

Depends of the amount. Small amounts do not need authorization. Big amounts almost always need it. And there is also some random checks from time to time. You can tell because the transaction is (slightly) longer.

Reminds me strongly of the butter bugs from Vorkosigan saga. The ick factor was also quite high until they genetically redesigned the insects to look less like cockroaches. Truth in fiction ?

Montreuil has a lot a gentrification currently going on. So, even if there still quite a lot of poor people, and a huge Malian community, there is also more and more wealthy people there. And quite a lot of jobs too, with all the offices of BNP Paribas.

But, in fact, it's not really relevant here, Montreuil is where the court is, not the datacenter. The later is in La Courneuve. I know less well this city, but there it seems there is also quite a lot of gentrification and (new) jobs there.

You have no idea how many biologist you can find, working with COBOL Java and XML, because they were are very few jobs in Biology, and a lot more in Computer Engineering.

They will go work in libraries.

The problem with making user to pay for YouTube is quite simple : Brand recognition.

YouTube was a huge success thanks to stupid short videos with bad to just correct video quality. See it, laugh at it (or facepalm) and forget it.

There is certainly a market for flash streaming of premium content (movies, series, animes, shows...), but not with the youtube name. Create a new site, allow only professionnal or professionnal-looking content on it, raise the minimum quality requirements to 480p H.264, find a cool name, and it should work.

The other problem is the insane CPU eating habit of the flash player, but that's quite another story.

AAC decoding was possible thru FAAD (GPLv2). Now, FFMPEG can decode it natively with its own LGPL code.

Not a big difference for a lot of people, but quite important for some third parties using FFMPEG.

At first they use the AVI container because they came from the windows world. Then they extend it ("DIVX Container") to support subtitles and menus without breaking compatibility with the first hardware players. MP4 would have been easy to implement on PC, but not for hardware players (not enough memory for example).

But today, since they use H.264, they have to break compatibility, and current hardware players are more versatile, enabling theme to support more recent container formats. That's why they discarded AVI. The choice of MKV over MP4 is debatable, but not illogic. MKV natively support more formats for audio and subtitles, is largely used for "Rips"...

That's simple : DivX is a video software, not a video format. It always has been. DivX 4-6 is based on one standard format : MPEG-4 Part 2 (aka MPEG-4 Visual, aka MPEG-4 ASP). So they are just updating their software to support the latest standard format, H.264 (aka MPEG-4 part 10, aka MPEG-4 AVC).

The equation video codec = video format is just a bad habit, and most of the time false today with proprietary things like Indeo ou RealVideo less and less used.

Governments have to understand cartography can no longer be restricted to military or other officials.

GPS, camera, satellites are ubiquitous, and we can see the result with things like Google Earth or wiki-like mapping. You can no longer make imprecise or secret maps. You can no longer forbid photos of any place you can see from a public location. You can no longer base your security on obscurity.

After all, the bad guys probably already have all this information. You have to assume they have it, or your doomed to failure. Just make officially all those things public, and find new ways to implement security for your important places, for people, for the country...