The US – The Worlds Copyright Police?
by Ryan Jones on Sep.20, 2010, under General, News, Personal
I have just been reading a rather interesting article on TorrentFreak about a new law that the US government hopes to pass, for which I quote the title of the post on TorrentFreak.
United States lawmakers have proposed new legislation today that would allow the Department of Justice to take over domain names of websites that promote copyright infringement. The proposed bill would allow for court orders against domestic as well as foreign sites, which could potentially shutter many torrent sites including The Pirate Bay.
What the hell does the US think they are doing? Until now no political body has owned the rights to control the internet on that level, for whatever reason, and suddenly the US comes along and decides they have that right? How is it that the US feels they have the right to decide to impose their laws in other countries? Copyright law does not apply everywhere and it varies greatly from country to country… I fail to see how they can claim to remove a copyright infringing website from a country that may have a different idea of copyright violations.
Someone really needs to slap some sense into the US, they are starting to cross lines that are better left alone. Leave the internet free of political influence or beware the consequences.
Working on a New Image Encryption Tool
by Ryan Jones on Sep.16, 2010, under News, Personal, Projects
Hi everyone!
Since I now have some more spare time I have been working on a new tool that allows you to securely hide at most 4 pieces of information (each a maximum of 255 characters in length) inside a random pixel image. I am working on ways to use this technique inside real images, but that is somewhat more difficult and it may take a while to perfect, if it works at all.
The image appears to be a random pixel generated image with varying colours, usually with 50×50 pixels in dimension (but this is not required to be so). The image looks something like this:
… And when you open it in the decoder tool you get something like this:
The program is actually quite simple but the way in which the information is stored should make it quite difficult to break. However with the decoding tool I have designed, you need only open the image to retrieve the information. If anyone is interested in hearing more or has some ideas to contribute, please let me know. I will release more information about the system used and so on at a later time when I stabilize the idea and format.
End of Future Jobs Fund (FJF)
by Ryan Jones on Sep.05, 2010, under Personal
Unfortunately my Future Jobs Fund (FJF) placement has now finished – which is a real shame since it was a really good scheme. So I am now once again looking for a job until the funding for CCC comes through.
I should have more time to post here in the interim in any event.
Found a Prime!
by Ryan Jones on Aug.15, 2010, under General
I’m quite happy to have found my first prime as part of PrimeGrid!
I got the following e-mail this morning:
Congratulations! Our records indicate that a computer registered by you has
found a unique prime number. This computer is running BOINC, is attached to
the PrimeGrid project, and is assigned to the Sophie Germain Prime Search. What makes
this prime unique is that it’s large enough to enter the Top 5000 List in Chris Caldwell’s
The Largest Known Primes Database.Since you have auto-reporting selected, the following prime was submitted on your
behalf:Added 94172 : 7318825406445*2^666666-1 (200701 digits)
On other news I will soon be starting work on an online recycling database for CCC. Keep checking for updates on that.
BOINC Contributions
by Ryan Jones on Jul.31, 2010, under Personal
Hi everyone!
I am once again contributing my spare CPU run time to the BOINC PrimeGrid project once again with my new PC. And I have the cool signature image to show for it:
Keep an eye for my new contributions and milestones!
My New PC Has Arrived!
by Ryan Jones on Jul.31, 2010, under Personal
Hi everyone.
Just a quick post to let you know that my new PC has arrived and it is stunning, not to mention fast. It has:
- A 64GB SSD primary hard drive
- A 2TB secondary hard drive
- 12GB of 1600MHz RAM
- An Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 graphics card
- An i7-930 processor
And much more!
New PC!
by Ryan Jones on Jul.24, 2010, under Personal
Hi everyone!
Well. I have finally ordered my new PC and it is going to be a monster. It will have 12GB of 1600 MHz memory, a solid state hard drive and liquid cooling as an i7 processor. I can’t wait for it to come back, it should be here sometime next week.
I will post about my experience with the new system when I get it.
Busy, Busy!
by Ryan Jones on Jul.11, 2010, under Personal
Hi everyone!
Sorry for the lack of blog posts recently. I have been quite busy with CCC related work. Now that we’ve sent off the 90k bid to the CoalFields Regeneration Trust and the 45k bid to the Rhonda Trust I have a little more free time. I will be getting a new computer in short order and then I should be able to continue work on CSIT (and hopefully provide some updates for you guys!).
Hopefully I will talk more soon!
Localization using WPF and C#
by Ryan Jones on Jun.23, 2010, under General, Tutorials
For anyone who is interested I have posted a tutorial on building a localizable application using C# and WPF here for anyone who is interested. I will hopefully post a copy here in time but for the moment I see no need to duplicate the content.
If you have any comments, suggestions or improvements please let me know!
CSIT and Network Information
by Ryan Jones on Jun.17, 2010, under Code Snippet, Projects
Hi guys!
Network information is a complex subject at the best of times and simplifying it for the average user is no simple feat. Even harder it seems is actually writing code to get this information programatically! I was quite disappointed to find that there was no simple way to get an IP address via code – mainly since Windows does not actually know it until a request is made. I eventually made a work around and used a web script to scrape the information. It saved a lot of time and effort in the end.
Getting the internal IP address was also quite interesting. It involved using some built-in .NET code. The only issue is that there were nearly always IPv6 addresses returned first. Since these are not well known (yet) I decided to list only the IPv4 address instead. The code I came up with is listed below – hopefully it will help someone else.
1 2 | IPHostEntry localIPAddresses = Dns.GetHostEntry(Dns.GetHostName()); string localIP = (from ip in localIPAddresses.AddressList where (ip.AddressFamily == AddressFamily.InterNetwork) select ip).First().ToString(); |
As you can see I also use LINQ there instead of a foreach loop since I find it much more readable. I am nearly finished with the main basic info page now so pretty soon I will have some new screen shots to demonstrate the new design of CSIT!
