Valer BOCAN’s Web Log

The other day, a friend of mine called and asked for advice on how to operate her shiny brand-new SONY DVX-800 camera that she bought off the street. Over the phone, my friend’s complaint was that the camera could only record for 1 minute then it stopped. After a lenghtly discussion in which I guided her through the camera menus and because I have never dealt with a tapeless camcorder before, I decided to go and take a look at it hands-on. Here is what I have found.

I immediately googled for “SONY DVX-800″ and found a bunch of them for sale on auction sites. Not being convinced, I then turned to the official Sony website and looked specifically for this model. As I expected, I couldn’t find any reference to it. Presumably, this camcorder is a fake and it’s using the SONY name to increase the sales.

Since my friend has already paid for the “Sony camcorder”, I was curious whether it could be used at all. The carrying case looks like a cheap one and did not impress me, however it is functional and well suited for its purpose. Inside I found a USB cable, the power adapter and a CD with software which I honestly did not dare load into my computer.

The camera came with a SanDisk 2.0 GB SD card which seemed great. However, when I inserted the card into my USB card reader, I learned that it was a mere piece of plastic with a few metal contacts attached. There was no flash memory inside and my computer had nowhere to write. To the untrained eye, the card looks almost like the original, but the roughy edges and the light weight are signs of counterfeiting.

The fact that the camcorder is a fake is very easy to spot. All it takes is a little attention and common sense. The Sony logo is nowhere to be found although I turned the camera upside down and looked all over place. The manual is a sheet of paper which is nothing more than an advertisement for the camera priced at 899 euros. Also, the camera menu has poorly drawn icons plus the navigation is awkward, unlike any other Sony device I ever had my hands on.

Looking at the bottom of the camera, I noticed the odd way in which the palm strap was tied to the body (see the picture). Not only this offers little protection in case the camers turns upside down, but this is against the commonly employed sense when designing security features for a device. All these defects are nothing compared to what follows: the camera is endowed with a built-in flash which protrudes from the body when a button is clicked, but the flash remains in an oblique position and it is so tiny that I doubt it could shed the light onto something farther than 50 centimeters. Also, the camera has some sort of detachable front LED ring, probably for lighting the scene.

All in all, the camcorder is a fake. There is no DVX-800 on the market and the design and the quality of the device is questionable at best. I suggest you stay away from this and choose wisely on what you spend your money.

[Edit July 31st, 2007] I recently installed a post counter and I am stunned by the number of views this post has. I checked the logs and people reached my blog by searching for DVX-800 and/or SONY, so for some reason there must be a lot of public interest for this fake camera.

(55 votes, average: 4.36 out of 5)

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Mathematicians have bad news for those relying on 1024-bit asymmetric cryptography. On March 6th, 2007, computer clusters from three institutions (EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, University of Bonn and NTT in Japan), at the end of 11 months of number crunching they found the factors of a large, hard to factor prime number. The number is 2¹⁰³⁹ - 1 and is 307 digits long (1023 bits). The entire computation effort was 100 years computer time.

Read the entire story here.

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While I was taking my regular dose of IEEE Security & Privacy, I stumbled upon an ad for the NATO “Science for Peace and Security” Grants. Basically, this NATO programme offers grants to scientists in NATO, Partner and Mediterranean Dialogue countries to collaborate on priority research topics, which include NATO priorities and additional Partner country priorities. Grants are also offered to assist the academic community in Partner countries to set up computer networking infrastructure and to optimize their use of electronic communication.

There are 4 advisory panels:

• Chemistry/Biology/Physics (CBP)

• Environmental Security (ESP)

• Human and Societal Dynamics (HSD)

• Information and Communications Security (ICS)

The ICS advisory panel is suitable for people working in the computer industry and this is very good news. In fact, this alone determined me to write this post, so that people learn about this great funding opportunity.

I would like to hear from someone willing to jointly participate in a grant proposal. As I live in a NATO country (Romania), I need a person who is from a NATO partner country: Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Moldova, Montenegro, Russian Federation, Serbia, Tajikistan, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Should you be interested in a collaboration, do send me a message on my contact page.