epsworth - Slashdot User

Apple Awarded Anti-Sexting Patent 184

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday October 13, 2010 @12:24PM from the don't-do-that dept.

eldavojohn writes "If your parenting skills aren't up to snuff, Apple's got a patent on the device that will allow you to control what your child sends and receives. Entitled 'Text-based communication control for personal communication device,' this patent uses examples like increasing the number of Spanish words your child receives so that they can better learn Spanish. You could even use it to control your child's grammar and spelling in outgoing text messages. But news sources seem to be focusing on the censorship issue that Apple has been criticized for before: 'The control is in line with earlier efforts adopted by Apple like Playboy which entered into a deal with Apple to censor its content to secure a place in App Store.' Perhaps the wives and agents of popular athletes would be more interested in this technology? Apple is certainly sending a message opposite to the one Microsoft advertises."

Australian Gov't Offers $560k Cryptographic Protocol For Free 163

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @10:21AM from the as-in-beer dept.

mask.of.sanity writes "Australia's national welfare agency will release its 'unbreakable' AU$560,000 smart card identification protocol for free. The government agency wants other departments and commercial businesses to adopt the Protocol for Lightweight Authentication of ID (PLAID), which withstood three years of design and testing by Australian and American security agencies. The agency has one of Australia's most advanced physical and logical converged security systems: staff can access doors and computers with a single centrally-managed identity card, and user identities can be automatically updated as employees leave, are recruited or move to new departments. PLAID, which will be available soon, is to be used in the agency's incoming fleet of contact-less smartcards that are currently under trial by staff. It will replace existing identity cards that operate on PKI encryption."

Does Obama Have a Problem At NASA? 479

Posted by timothy on Friday December 12, 2008 @09:44AM from the hey-what's-a-few-trillion-in-deficit? dept.

MarkWhittington writes "Has NASA become a problem for the Obama transition? If one believes a recent story in the Orlando Sentinel, the transition team at NASA, led by former NASA Associate Administrator Lori Garver, is running into some bureaucratic obstruction." Specifically, according to this article NASA Administrator Michael Griffin made calls to aerospace industry executives asking them to stonewall if asked about benefits to be gained by canceling the current US efforts to revisit the moon; we mentioned last month that cutting Aries and Orion is apparently an idea under strong consideration by the Obama transition team.

Researchers Calculate Capacity of a Steganographic Channel 114

Posted by timothy on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @11:32AM from the intentionally-not-left-blank dept.

KentuckyFC writes "Steganography is the art of hiding a message in such a way that only the sender and receiver realize it is there. (By contrast, cryptography disguises the content of a message but makes no attempt to hide it.) The central problem for steganographers is how much data can be hidden without being detected. But the complexity of this problem has meant it has been largely ignored. Now two computer scientists (one working for Google) have made a major theoretical breakthrough by tackling the problem in the same way that the electrical engineer Claude Shannon calculated the capacity of an ordinary communications channel in the 1940s. In Shannon's theory, a transmission is considered successful if the decoder properly determines which message the encoder has sent. In the stego-channel, a transmission is successful if the decoder properly determines the sent message without anybody else detecting its presence (abstract). Studying a stego-channel in this way leads to some counter-intuitive results: for example, in certain circumstances, doubling the number of algorithms looking for hidden data can increase the capacity of the steganographic channel"

Comment Re:Time (Score 3, Informative) 218

by epsworth on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @03:39PM (#6009896) Attached to: Explaining WLAN Chips' Poor Linux Support

I think you may be confused between the 650 and 650+. Despite the similar names, they use entirely different chipsets. I think the 650 has very good Linux support, but I know for sure that the 650+ has major problems under Linux, since I bought two of them only to find they don't work!

The 650+ uses the Texas Instruments ACX100 chipset, and they are not willing to release the necessary specs to write drivers for it. Check the ACX100 project on sourceforge to get the details. The only known driver is a binary-only module that will only work for an obscure Mandrake kernel version (PCI version only), and I have only heard of one person who got it to do anything at all.

You might be right about the (lack of) speed difference between the 11Mbps and 22Mbps products, but I haven't tested them. As always, take marketing-speak with a pinch of salt... It can't be entirely bullshit though, or I would have expected to hear a lot more complaints. Does anyone know more about the difference between the two standards that could explain?

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