I'm pretty sure EFF, DemandProgress and the like are doing exactly that.
Or are you saying they should form a Super PAC? But in that case, it won't exactly be "traditional lobbying", would it? It would be just paying politicians to do what they're asking them. I don't know whether that would be good or bad given the current corrupt lobbying system that the government has gotten accustomed to, but at least we should call it what it is before we dive in.
> What I find strange is that (Please correct me on this one) there just doesn't seem to be a political group of technologist who lobby(the original meaning) against politicians.
Thank you. As I've stated I am rather ignorant of such groups. I stand corrected.
I hope you guys won't stop at pushing just for the USA Freedom Act, which sounds pretty decent, but not like it's going far enough. To me Rush Holt's Surveillance State Repeal Act sounded close to ideal, but he's going to need some co-sponsors for it.
Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Rand Paul's bill also I think sounded better than the USA Freedom Act. I always forget its name because they chose a pretty bad and long one ("intelligence oversight something"). So I hope you keep working on passing those (or others like it), too, and don't stop at the USA Freedom Act (or try getting some amendments to that pushed, too).
Also, if you think them knowing your location like this is scary, wait until we have self-driving cars, that will have built-in kill switches in them or some kind of remote control, you know, for "updates". Getting rid of people (journalists especially - Michael Hastings anyone?) in "accidents" will never be easier.
I saw the Omni when it was announced, but I was never convinced of it's potential. A few things about it bother me:
1) Strafing is extremely unnatural. It involves standing still in the center, lifting one leg to the edge, and "swiping" it down towards the center. It's a very impractical move for any type of game where strafing is strategic.
2) Backwards motion is extremely difficult. Try to find a video of someone doing it effectively. It's rarely shown because it's not easy to do. This removes this movement as well from any game where backwards movement is strategic.
3) http://i.imgur.com/tsccO4H.jpg Not trying to be mean, but the visual of an adult using the Omni looks very much like a baby using a walker. I believe this limits the Omni to a product you'll only want to use by yourself, when nobody is around, because it looks silly.
4) The current version looks flimsy. Maybe they've beefed up the structure of the thing, but any video that I've watched has shown serious strain on the upright portions of the Omni itself.
5) The fact that you have to wear special shoes, and perform a procedure to get the Omni within reaching distance of a keyboard/mouse, and lock yourself in to the mechanism... seems like quite a bit of overhead to play a game essentially handicapped in terms of movement.
My prediction is that some people are going to be excited about Omni, buy it, try it a few times, and realize how limiting it is in actual gameplay, how limited they are in using their computer, the fact that they look silly to others, and the overhead involved in getting dressed and locked, and realize it isn't worth it. They'll push it to the side to collect dust, or try to sell it on craigslist.
(1) The way you strafe is to run in one direction but turn your torso (and the gun and the Oculus) to look to the side. You may have to tweak the game's control schemes to accomodate this, but it seems doable.
(2) I don't disagree, but it's basically going to be awkward to handle any in-game motion that isn't realistic, whether it's backwards motion or unlimited running and six-foot jumps. I suspect that you'll need to specifically design your game for the Omni in order for it to work well.
I hope that while they're putting the finishing touches on the current product, and work on deploying it soon, they will also keep in mind what the guys at Avegant are doing, and either do their own R&D with this type of technology for future products, to completely eliminate the screen and the need to use UHD or higher resolutions in the future (or at least not for sometime), while making it easier for the eyes, or they buy them out.
The technology does have some major disadvantages like a smaller field of view compared to Oculus, but perhaps they can fix that. After all, VR headsets like Oculus also had very small field of views before, too.
To me, having the image projected onto your retina seems like a technology that has greater potential for virtual reality, even if it starts with a slightly bigger handicap than Oculus did.
Carmack has been talking about OLED for VR headsets for quite some time, and I'm sure Palmer and the rest were considering it, too. But I think it wasn't very accessible to them until recently. They're a start-up so they can't exactly go an order a few thousand 1080p OLED panels. This may have been possible now due to Samsung making the Galaxy S4 with a 1080p panel last year, and perhaps other launched some, too, and it pushed the prices down for such a panel, enough to make it viable for Oculus Rift.
I saw a video of some of the Verge guys trying it out at CES, and pretty much all of them were like "I don't want to take this off" at the end. It sounds like Oculus Rift will change gaming forever, and not just gaming.
There could also be done a lot of revolutionary new things with movies, like seeing through a character's eyes, etc (cameras mounted to the main character Google Glass style?). Even watching a normal movie on Oculus Rift is probably going to be a better experience than going to the cinema, because you could virtualize the cinema in front of you, and recreate that atmosphere.
I suspect the Rift will force an interesting battle between pre-rendered and realtime graphics in film. Because of parallax effects, there is no way to pre-render footage for the Rift while still maintaining the level of geometric correctness the Rift provides. I suspect we'll see some pre-rendered 3d movies for the Rift, but they'll feel pretty weird.... It will be pseudo 3d, like current 3d films, not the true binocular, immersive, persistent-world effect that Rift games provide.
With realtime rendering, however, you will get the complete, geometrically correct 3d images with head tracking. I suspect what this means is we'll start to see 3d films that are rendered in realtime. Essentially like the cutscenes we see for AAA video games, except they'd be feature length without any gameplay in between. If VR really takes off, we might even see companies like Pixar re-release their films for realtime viewing.
I would love to see a company like Pixar produce new realtime 3d films for the Rift, but it seems unlikely that would make financial sense for them. I suspect what we'll see instead is indie shorts first, followed by larger and larger budget films. The same trajectory that CG films took in the first place.
An interesting implication of this is that live footage will be basically impossible to incorporate into a true VR setting. As video resolution gets higher we may see multiple angles of scenes being recorded in ultra-high-def, and then digitally combined into a voxel scene. Probably data from something like the Kinect would have to be mixed in too, to resolve all of the voxels. That could be replayed on a Rift, but the director would have to really constrain the kind of lighting, materials, and motion for that to work well. It would be extraordinarily difficult, and I suspect you'd still have a lot of strange artifacts.
This could actually be a big shot in the arm for pure digital film production!
I have a Rift and I'm bullish about its prospects for gaming, but I'm pretty skeptical about using this for non-interactive entertainment.
What would be the point of allow the user to move around (in a limited fashion anyhow) inside the movie? It doesn't improve storytelling (as games can by adding interactivity and perspective) - it strikes me as a gimmick, much like 3D films in general.
You get the whiz-bang coolness of "OMG I'm in this thing!", but ultimately it's a lot more gear than a straight-up television/movie screen for next to no gain. 3D movies had a few years of glory but is now deeply unpopular - I foresee the same for VR-movies.
I suspect there'd be a niche but viable market for non-interactive or semi-interactive content. Off the top of my head, I can see a handful of use-cases where immersive VR would be a huge plus over a two-dimensional image:
* Being able to view complex choreography (martial arts, dancing, etc.) from different angles
* Conveying a sense of size and scale -- e.g. Pacific Rim, Godzilla
* Recreating some emotion or feeling imparted by the surrounding environment -- e.g. the franticness of a war zone, the claustrophobia of a submarine
Absolutely. There is a ton of work going on to shoot a movie, camera angles, positioning, orientation, shaking, motion speed and smoothness. If you take this away it will be like hiring the most incompetent camera-man confined to a wheelchair to shoot all movies you watch.
You have to consider that from a consumer tech point of view, linking that film set to an Occulus Rift at the moment, is not a huge leap. In fact, it's so close, almost the biggest problem it faces is going to be on a creative level of re-thinking how to tell stories in a new medium. I don't think we're more than 5-10 years away.
There is already a demo for the Rift where you are placed in a virtual cinema complex (multiple screens, a patron walks past, the dorky carpet, etc). From the main hall, you can enter a cinema to watch an existing movie or choose one from your hard drive to play. It enables you to choose whichever seat you want which is a funny gimmick.
Or sports watching, Not sure if this is possible yet, but I'm imagining a 360 degree camera at the courtside of every sporting event. Then this is streamed to you at home so you can focus in on whichever part of the play you choose and feels like you are sitting courtside of a game.
Does anyone know if LTE security is that much better? I imagine that even if the ciphers are good, there are probably a ton of ways for agencies like NSA or even FBI to intercept the calls before being encrypted, even without warrants.
From what little I could find, it is generally agreed that LTE uses the "SNOW 3G" stream cipher as part of the UEA2 confidentiality and UIA2 integrity algorithms from ETSI. Another source claims Release 8 requires the UMTS AKA (authentication and key agreement) procedure to support AES and no encryption options as well.
But is SNOW better than KASUMI aka A5/3? Why not just use AES? When I see non-standard and untested encryption algorithms, I think of the NSA and GCHQ. In any event, that's why I want E-ULTRA (the LTE communications protocol) implemented in GNU Radio: to disable SNOW 3G and null ciphers.
I should also note that, from what I can tell, in GSM/LTE all keys (including that for the link between the cell and the tower) are (statically/algorithmically) derived from the symmetric private key shared between the SIM and the service provider's Home Subscriber Server. Which, if I understand correctly, means it would be trivial to decrypt any surreptitiously intercepted but encrypted communications by using a NSL or subpoena to obtain those keys from the service provider or the access provider (assuming it wasn't already lawfully intercepted by the access provider of course). I assume that also holds true for any Joe Blow with subpoena power and the ear of a sympathetic judge (think "Doe subpoena"). So make sure your service is from a company located in an unfriendly nation, even if your access already is!
But if they would have just used (ephemeral) Diffie-Hellman for the cell-to-tower communications, they couldn't do that. Which is why when I see any GSM/LTE standards, I think of the NSA and GCHQ. The same goes for IPsec and the magic numbers used in some of these encryption algorithms.
Edit: more technical and legal discussion of consequences
Yes. He (and other people) generated Rainbow Tables for the cracking of A5/1 and published them via Bittorrent.
His mainpoint was that tapping GSM convos is not only feasible, but reasonably feasible even for private persons.
Also, imo, the main problem with the GSM or mobile security schemes is, that they seem to have been _deliberatly_ weakened and/or use ciphers that were known to be insecure.
This news just reaffirms what a lot of people have been suspecting all along.
I don't think MITM is possible with LTE. My understanding is that it requires mutual authentication between the handset and tower/network. My guess is that 3G (UMTS and CDMA2000) is the same because they both use the 3GPP Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol.
But yes, the access provider can still tap the line.
Well it's not as crap as the original GSM, but it wasn't designed in the open (so may be backdoored) and the progression of attacks at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KASUMI#Cryptanalysis doesn't really inspire confidence.
TL;DR: GSM security is a joke. LTE is okay, except for two critical issues: One, an attacker can jam LTE and cause a downgrade to GSM. Two, it doesn't offer forward secrecy, so an attacker can record your traffic, obtain the private key from your carrier, and decrypt it. It's a reasonable assumption that NSA and your local sigint agency routinely make copies of your carrier's key database.
