This year the DEF CON badge is electronic. Designed by Joe Grand, it features two blinking blue LEDs (almost bright enough to see the printer tracking dots; maybe we just need to drive the badge with a higher voltage). The badge seems to contain a secret message; since I'm missing Joe Grand's talk to write this blog post, I can't go ask him for hints.
The badge has five modes, controlled by a tiny momentary switch on the back. The modes are off, both LEDs on steady, both LEDs blink together, both LEDs alternate, and what I call the data mode.
In the data mode, the LEDs appear to flash a long preprogrammed message, over 100 bits in length, using a data representation that I'm still not sure of. I managed to find a repeating feature that I could recognize by sight (four flashes on the right LED, followed by both on followed by right LED on followed by both on followed by left on followed by right on followed by both on). The baud rate is something over 2 (I should measure it more carefully), and hence the bit rate is over 4. The pattern repeats with a period of 58 seconds. It's possible that it was meant to be one minute and that the clock rate was affected by problems with the supply voltage or the tolerance of some component.
Actually, that means that there are over 232 bits in the message. I imagine that 256 bits is a likely number.
I'd like to digitize the data coming out of the badge without having to have a person transcribe it by hand. Possibly I could find some kind of photodiode that I can get in a circuit near TTL levels for a parallel port.
Joe Grand says that the information coming out of the badge is pseudorandom (which doesn't really explain why it repeats with a period of less than a minute, but maybe his pseudorandom number generator is not so great).
I completed my training and have become a San Francisco Neighborhood Emergency Response Team volunteer. If you live in the Bay Area, you too can get trained for free; there are lots of other similar programs around the U.S., so, if you live in the U.S., you can probably find one in your area.
I also got a stylish safety vest and hard hat!
Fred noticed that my picture is on Engadget, illustrating a story that doesn't have anything to do with the Apple protest. (The story is about CEA criticism of legislative campaigns on digital radio by the recording industry.) Nonetheless, the commenters are pretty much all commenting on the picture (and our criticism of iTunes) rather than the article.
The newest criticism: that I misspelled Steve Jobs's name. Nope: that's the wind's fault. The "s" is there on the sign, hidden by my colleague's leg. Behold the actual original file I used to create the sign with Rasterbator.
I hasten to assure all critics that nobody at that protest supports, recommends, endorses, commends the creation of, or hopes for the success of Microsoft's PlaysForSure project. Nor does any of the participants agree with Microsoft's attempt to define "standards", "choice", "flexibility", etc., as supporting Windows Media. That's why the same campaign started by protesting Microsoft's DRM initiatives at WinHEC.
See also my earlier responses to commenters who were unhappy that Defective by Design protested Apple.
Ed Felten says DRM advocates are moving away from claiming that DRM is about copyright and toward bare claims about business strategy.
I recall Fritz Attaway seeming to agree. Deep Links found someone from Universal abandoning the "copyright" claim.
From attending some DRM meetings, I suggest that the code words to watch for are "business models" (cf. Cory's comment on this rhetoric), "rich" ("rich set of rights", "rich set of choices"), and "consumer choice" (as among a set of versioned information products, a la the advice to sellers in Information Rules). But the main term seems to be "business models" and "new business models" and "variety of business models".
What kind of doublespeak is this?
The media companies
asked us to do this and said they don’t want any of their high definition content to play in x32 at all, because of all of the unsigned malware that runs in kernel mode can get around content protection, so we had to do this.
"Malware?"
It reminds me of an even more egregious case where a CA system engineer referred to software tools that save copies of unencrypted television programming delivered over an open interface as a "hack" because some of the television providers didn't want the software to do that.
