For now, if you want an invite, post your e-mail address and I’ll see what I can do

This brings up an interesting opportunity for some new domain uses we’ve never seen before.  Imagine, for example, that Canon bought .canon.  Sure, they would probably setup store.canon and support.canon, but what if we thought outside the box a bit more?  What could we do with an unlimited supply of .canon domains?

Here’s what I imagine: (serial number).canon.  What if instead of stumbling though a support site to find support for your product, you could just type in the serial number, followed by .(brand), and be given support information?  This is something we’ve never been able to do with traditional TLDs, buy company-oriented TLDs would make this simple.

What about tracking numbers?  Google makes it simple to get tracking information from almost any shipping company (just search Google for the tracking number and you’re given a link), but custom TLDs could make this even easier.  (tracking number).ups should take me right to the page to figure out where that book I ordered is.

How about finding out what’s around you?  It’d be neat to see some company snatch .gps, then allow some standard coordinate format to give a map and perhaps some useful information about what’s nearby.  Perhaps .gps could also allow city names.

Maybe you want to know the weather.  (City name).weather should be able to take you right to useful information.

Opening up the allowed TLDs allows a world of possibilities.  I’ve just listed a couple simple examples here, but I’m sure folks that are much more creative than I could come up with even wilder examples.  What would you like to see done with this new world of domain names?

Comcast’s caller ID encryption has been broken!  It’s actually a very simple AES256-CTS encryption.  The tricky part is getting the key and the caller ID information.  Getting the encrypted information is actually very simple: just connect to the right XMPP server.  Getting the key, however, requires decrypting a flash file.

Anyway, with the help of a guy who calls himself Henry (if you want any more credit/a link to your site/whatever, let me know!), I’ve gotten a small python script working which will connect to the correct server and listen for the encrypted info.  When it’s found, the information will be decrypted, and displayed in the terminal.  Basically, we can get the unencrypted information!  From here, it should be trivial to do whatever we want with it!  I plan on attempting to write a Network Caller ID server with the current code as the base, but I’m not sure how much time I’ll really have to work on that/how far I’ll get.

Anyway, you’ll need this zip file and the salt Comcast uses.  In the interest of not getting sued, I’m not going to post the salt here (I’m attempting to come up with a tricky way to generate the salt currently…).  You’ll need to grab the correct SWF file, decode it, and find the salt.  The air app can be downloaded from here.  This is actually just a zip file.  Inside you’ll find a bin folder, and inside that, you’ll find cid.swf.  Decompile this file with whatever flash decompiler you want.  In the actionscript in this file, you’ll see a package “com.machenmusik” and a class “CM_IM_Decrypt”.  In this class, look for the following code:

com.hurlant.util.Hex.fromString(theSalt != null ? theSalt : “(…)”)), arg1);

I’ve put a (…) where the actual salt is.

Last steps to get this working: open up decode.py and place the salt where it says “PLACE THE SALT FROM COMCAST’S AIR APP HERE”, and open test-combot.py and place your comast username and password in that file.  You’ll need the python twisted library, and the M2Crypto library installed, but that should be all you need!  Run test-combot.py and you should see caller id information coming in when you get a call!

Good luck!  Thanks to everyone who helped with this!  If you found this helpful, please consider donating something!  Just click the button on the right!  If you have any questions/comments, I’ll do my best to answer them!

[edit]Here’s a Comcast to NCID gateway, written in python… Complete with init script for Linux!  Thanks here goes to Feathers!  Just grab this zip file, set the correct variables in the python script, and place the other file in /etc/init.d!  Note that you’ll need the previous zip file to take care of the decoding work — this script is just the interface between Comcast and NCID.  Thanks to all who helped with this!

Wait… WHAT?  The hardcover is actually CHEAPER than the Kindle version?  I’m going to ignore shipping for argument’s sake.  This means that it costs less to cut down a tree, turn that tree into paper, print words on the paper, and glue the pieces of paper together than it does to send you a bunch of ones and zeroes.

Can anyone explain this to me?  I mean, really.  I’m pretty sure writers type on computers in today’s world, and I’m sure Amazon has some software to automatically take whatever and turn it into a Kindle book.  Of course you’re in part paying for the development of such software, but there’s a LOT more to a hardcover book than there is to a digital copy of the same thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the Kindle is an awesome platform, and I hope we see more and more e-readers.  But, until the pricing scheme gets fixed… they’re not going to take off.

It isn’t about whether you should or shouldn’t excersise.  It’s about how excersise is used as a punishment throughout middle school and high school.  Today, my class went out to play tennis.  As a warmup, we had to run down to the end of the tennis court and back twice (I use run lightly here, we could have jogged and been fine).  Eager to play tennis, I was the first jogging, and quickly got the two rounds complete.  A friend of mine, and another kid in my gym class were on pace with me, and we all three were done.

However, some of the other kids in my class are lazy.  I see this all the time: they either just walk, turn around half way, or find another way to pretend that they ran what was required.  As I was coming back the second time, I heard my gym teacher yelling something to the effect that they weren’t running, so had to redo the run.  Fine, whatever.  I had done what was required, so I shouldn’t have to worry.

Here’s where the problem comes in.  As I get back to my teacher, she tells me (and the other two kids running with me) that we’ll have to do one more time there and back.  I ask her why, noting that we had already ran there and back twice, and she tells me something along the lines of this:

Yeah, I know, but some of your classmates feel they didn’t need to do the whole thing, so now everyone has to run more.

And, here’s where I find the problem.  I ran what was required of me.  I know this, I’m sure the class knows this, and the teacher knows this.  Yet, because one or two people in my class are lazy (the teacher even named who the person was), I have to run more.  So, I propose a hypothesis to everyone reading this: group punishment does not work.

Teachers seem to love it.  Why single out kids, and deal with them individually when you can just make everyone do more work?  On top of that, peer pressure should cause the others to do what’s required of them in the future, right?

Wrong.  I have zero influence on the kids in my class who are lazy.  This is due to multiple factors: they are in a different social group than I am, I try to avoid associating myself with them, and (not trying to sound conceited here… you have to trust me that this is true) they are on a lower intellectual level than me.

In most classes, I don’t have this problem.  I take honors or AP classes, so I generally am in a class of smart people who are willing to do work required so they don’t have to face the punishment.  However, I have two classes that go outside this norm: gym physical education (my commentary on this correction is saved for another post), and my lit class (again, my commentary on this will be saved for another post).  Somehow, it seems that, when scheduling classes, they ignored intellectual level, and just stuck whoever in whatever gym class.

However, here’s where it stops making sense to me: there is another gym class the same hour that I have my gym class which has at least three people that are on the same intellectual level as me.  In my gym class, I can think of one person, maybe two people, that fit this description.  It seems that they took this group of people who they knew would goof off, and stuck me in with them.

So, while group punishment hinges on the assumption that peer  pressure is the greatest form of influence, this is not always true.  So, how can punishment be implemented to be successful?  Single the person out.  My school does this often for postive accomplishments, why not do it for negative influences?  Make the person do thirty pushups while everyone else just watches.  This will cause embarassment, distress, etc., hopefully fixing the behavior.

Of course, this keeps the idea of using excersise as a punishment.  But, perhaps that’s OK for people who are going to goof off anyway.  We can let them think of excersise as a punishment, and let them grow fat and stupid as the rest of us thrive.  As my Physics teacher so often says:

We call that natural selection.

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