PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Yeah well.... I know people who use hotmail, never visit boards such as this and get all their news from television. I feel sorry for them. You don't have to progress if you don't want to. I have 4 browsers and they all serve a purpose depending on what I'm doing. For instance Seamonkey is a great IRC client or sometimes sites won't stream well, then I open IE and they work fine. I'm into the free updates, it's better than the alternative which is paying! You pay for cable tv I am will to bet and 99% of it is crap or reruns. The ads alone should pay for it but they are greedy bastards. Now that broadcast tv has gone digital there are many more free stations and they are higher quality than a lot of cable but I bet not many people will watch it. They want to pay a lot. They are used to it and they are idiots.

In the US, as Comcast has expanded its digital cable offerings it's done so by increasing the levels of compression used. Which has resulted in the digital service often looking WORSE than the analog counterparts at the same resolution, and their HD offerings look worse than a downloaded divx movie quite a lot of the time. Verizon is much better with their FIOS HDtv service, but most other cable companies are following comcast's lead (time warner etc) with the larger companies going first.

that's progress.

the new comcast boxes have "sensors" which can tell who is in the room. the slightly older boxes have a microphone that listens for "keywords". the data is then sold to...

dvrs like tivo have a two way communication which allows the cable company and tivo to collect data on what is recorded. the data is then sold to....i'll bet most never wondered where the data on how mamy people tivo'd such and such comes from, huh? remember halftime at the superbowl and janet's wardrobe "malfunction"? figures were immediately on the news of just how many had recorded the event...

Let's see a photo of one of these microphones.

braincell wrote:Let's see a photo of one of these microphones.

hey, i got the info from comcast. i don't have cable. check your own box.

btw- they call them "sensors"......

the amazing thing to me is not whether or not the "sensors" exist, but that anyone would be amazed if they did...

Just 'google' for it braincell, it was a big issue several years ago, and generally denied or 'doubletalked' by Comcast (who incidentally did the same thing over the recent tcp RST resets of people using p2p software, denial then 'doubltalk' explanations). Really companies have been doing data mining for years, for all sorts of purposes. The plus side is that we have a vehicle now for communicating & facilitating the sharing of information that would have just petered out before (or taken 6 to 12 months to reach you by which time it wasn't relevant any longer). But wait! Enter network neutrality (or lack of it) and the reduction of 'the net' to 'the www' as a commercial space of consumption and "web 2.0" user "interaction". That kind of brings us full circle in half as many pages though...

done.

I *did* google it and their are no photos nor could I find any info on it on any major websites.

Google bigfoot and you will see that exists.

braincell wrote:I *did* google it and their are no photos nor could I find any info on it on any major websites.

Google bigfoot and you will see that exists.

sure, and mr rockefellor does everything he does out of the love of humanity and they haven't collapsed the us economy and building 7 came down because of bad bolts in the floor joists.

have you ever rightclicked on a flash app and noticed that it allows flash to use your pc's camera and mic? there are many nice and useful reasons for such tech, and many not so nice(but still useful) reasons. if you think the not nice uses aren't at least explored, then you're either naive or stupid. if flash webpages can access your computer's camera and mic, then other apps certainly can too, including and especially nsa tech....

have you heard of onstar? police have used it to lock people into their own vehicles and to spy on conversations in several well documented incidents.

it doesn't matter if you believe it or doubt it. it's good to be sceptical. here's an article including a repsonse from comcast about the sensors. this stuff really isn't secret, though it IS always spun....oh my, it seems applied digital solutions("digital angel", the people who want to chip everyone) are in on the project...

and maybe bigfoot IS real. what do you know about it, really? be honest! that's right, you know nothing except what you've been told, just like the rest of us.

better to be distrustful of these guys than to just give them the keys to one's life.

stardust wrote:Then google and comcast have conspired. conspired ? is that english ?

yes, "conspired" is proper english.

garyb wrote:

braincell wrote:have you ever rightclicked on a flash app and noticed that it allows flash to use your pc's camera and mic? there are many nice and useful reasons for such tech, and many not so nice(but still useful) reasons.

I don't recommend the use of cameras & mics attached to 'connected' computers.... EVER.
I don't advise using any of the so-called 'usefull' reasons to use webcams & mics such as MSN, Skype or other 'usefull' spy tools.

It all depends on your level of paranoia, but 'connecting' yourself to anyone who's interested is not advisable. (he says, connecting to the net)

On the plus side, if you avoid consumer gear it gets considerably more difficult for these things to exploit you. It's hard enough to get flash to 'see' my firewire input from the midi-dv cam to begin with, let alone routing a mic to the right bus on the mixer, and then select that input from the RME's routing/mixer and finally in my software...

Let a 'haxor' or 'fed' who is poking around in my system try to do THAT

Also there are other considerations of course. Rather than going for security through obscurity, or worrying about anonymity, I tend to think that making sure you have habits in place that form patterns that don't suddenly change is a form of obfuscation.

Think about the issue of using encryption. If you only encrypt a few messages here & there that you consider 'important', you might as well flag them 'important! pay attention to this one!' as well. However if you insure that even your most casual activities are encrypted at least some of the time, then the important 'bits' are slightly more obfuscated among the other traffic and your 'habits' are again somewhat obscured. Using several browsers and a variety of webapps (trillian/pidgen for your chat instead of a primary client from a service), cleaning cookies with CCleaner (or something similar), using ad & cookie blocking plugins etc... all good steps. Going to the extent of using tools like Tor and the various anonymizers, you're again 'flagging' yourself, at least potentially.