Live data from Hacker News

Displayport: A Better Video Interface

hackaday.com

341–350 of 426 posts

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#341
post #280
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also has side-channel implications, and is a reason why eDP is recommended in voting applications. https://www.eerstekamer.nl/nonav/overig/20160428/richtlijnen... >DisplayPort uses a scrambler as part of its line encoding in order to flatten the Fourier spectrum of its emissions and suppress spectral peaks caused by particular image contents. This reduces the chances of any particular image content causing a pro…

Voting computers are not recommended anyways.

It should be a national citizen identity logon system, which a voting web site uses, everyone can vote from home or from a laptop provided by the independent voting facility.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#342
Praise displayport all day if you want, but the connector sucks and the protocol is too complicated (protip: when something in IT is called "powerful" you probably want to steer clear of it).

It is much more convenient and practical to have data streams like VGA and DVI have.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#343
post #326

This is a really well written article. If you haven't bothered reading about DisplayPort because you knew VGA, somewhat knew DVI and thought that HDMI is the culmination of it all, where then DisplayPort is just some further kind of evolution, this article does a really good job at explaining how DP is very different and something new, something worth knowing about. The core sentence which made me actually read the a…

I've run into problems repeatedly when it came to DP cables. The issue is always the same: lack of enforcement and no barrier to entry allows for too many entrants, whose motives are up to consumers to discern, wasting time and money in the process. What I originally saw as a benefit of an open standard, as it turned out, was in fact a benefit (for consumers like myself) of the closed/high priced standard—which ended…

Thank you for writing this down. I’ve had very similar experiences with DP and been on the HDMI train since.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#344

This is a really well written article. If you haven't bothered reading about DisplayPort because you knew VGA, somewhat knew DVI and thought that HDMI is the culmination of it all, where then DisplayPort is just some further kind of evolution, this article does a really good job at explaining how DP is very different and something new, something worth knowing about. The core sentence which made me actually read the a…

Do you know what sucks? DisplayLink. It's 2023, and the best we have for 3 monitors (MacBook Pro, and 2 external monitors) is basic screen scraping with software drivers if you want to use a single cable... otherwise you have to fall back to 2 cables (one for power + first monitor, and one HDMI).

The other reason why DisplayLink sucks is performance (or lack of) - what they don't tell you on the box. Video is like 16FPS on my third monitor!

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#345
post #200

The amazing thing about DVI, and by extension HDMI, is that it's just VGA but digital, with all the timing and synchronisation complexity that implies. Recall that DVI can have both an analog (VGA/DVI-A) and digital (DVI-D) signal in the same cable. They aren't independent; they share some pins and have the same timing. You could have made a CRT monitor that used DVI-D just by adding a DAC, though I'm not sure if any…

This also has side-channel implications, and is a reason why eDP is recommended in voting applications. https://www.eerstekamer.nl/nonav/overig/20160428/richtlijnen... >DisplayPort uses a scrambler as part of its line encoding in order to flatten the Fourier spectrum of its emissions and suppress spectral peaks caused by particular image contents. This reduces the chances of any particular image content causing a pro…

You mean election type voting?

Screen scraping is the least of the problems.

Voting machines are simply not trustworthy given these requirements for a free and fair election:

0. Freedom to vote or not

1. Anonymity in that no vote may be associated with the voter who cast it

(These two are most of why e-voting is not trustworthy and are what differentiates banking from voting.)

2. Transparency. The law, means, methods must all be known to the voting public. It is their election. In particular, seeing how a cast vote moves through the entire process and into the final tally is necessary.

3. Oversight. The first two of these foundation requirements necessary for free and fair public elections have an important ratification:

The record of votes cast must be human readable and said record must be used directly to realize the final tally of all votes cast.

There is a chain of trust between voter intent and the vote cast. When one casts a vote on physical media, that is a direct record of voter intent. The voter can be sure their intent adds to the tally because they can directly verify their votes cast.

Electronic votes are a vote by proxy. The direct expression of intent is not kept and exists as a bit of skin residue left on the machine interface. Put simply, we ask people to vote and then we discard their expression!

What gets used instead is whatever the machine thought the voter intent was!

Consider this: You have a machine in front of you with two buttons. One brings the world into harmony, the other casts it into war, grief and darkness.

You can:

A. Submit a paper form you fill out manually indicating your choice

, or

B. Press one of the buttons and get a receipt for your records.

Say this machine has an indicator showing your choice and a third "approval" button you use when you feel good about the machine getting your choice right.

How do you the voter know the receipt and or indicators match what the proxy machine says your choice was.

What happens when we have a dispute? We know the machine can't be trusted to match receipts. With the direct expression of intent lost, what do we bring to court?

We can and have brought paper ballots into court to resolve and election facing genuine ambiguity.

I submit to you we can't really be sure who wins an electronic election, unless we also associate your identity with the vote.

Say a bunch of people get to choose the fate of the world this way. What is your confidence level?

How do we know the machines tallied up the winning choices correctly?

What do the tests for that look like and how do they get around the forced trust problem we have with all electronic inputs today?

There is a lot more trouble to discuss. What I put here is the core trouble and computers have always had this problem too.

It just does not present any real difficulty, until elections are brought into the discussion.

Display trust issues are well above the core tech trust issues we face today.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#346
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voting computers are not recommended anyways.

It should be a national citizen identity logon system, which a voting web site uses, everyone can vote from home or from a laptop provided by the independent voting facility.

No.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#347
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voting computers are not recommended anyways.

It should be a national citizen identity logon system, which a voting web site uses, everyone can vote from home or from a laptop provided by the independent voting facility.

Sounds nice, but computer based voting systems, no matter how secure, clean or simple, are fundamentally opaque to the average citizen. That alone undermines the very democracy it tries to support. Paper based voting systems may be bloody tedious but they’re simple, and anyone can participate.

As a programmer myself, I have to say no to electronic voting systems. We need to keep it low tech.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#348
post #227

> However, I’d like to tell you that you probably should pay more attention to DisplayPort – it’s an interface powerful in a way that we haven’t seen before. Lines like that really show just how long it can take for standards to get on the radar of mainstream tech culture. I remember hearing about and being excited about DisplayPort's move to packetized digital video in college in 2008, and seeing the first Macs with…

Same. I live in the Mac world. When I took a job where I had to use PCs at work I was surprised to see they were mostly using HDMI with some people using older DVI equipment. I had just assumed everyone had transitioned similar to Macs has years before. Nope. Lots of people use/want HDMI to this day.

> Lots of people use/want HDMI to this day.

I’d wager this is less about HDMI, and more about the fact that people want their old DP-less monitors to work.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine. Let me rephrase: if you're not using the latest and greatest HDMI protocol you're not getting full fidelity audio.

Besides the DTS passthrough (which works just fine), it supports 48kHz PCM from my media-center, so I don't know what more is needed.

Again, that is fine. Besides getting an uncompressed 2 channel signal; anything above 2 channels is going to be compressed and frequencies carved out of the additional channels due to the encoding process. Thus a loss of fidelity. You "may" get a multi channel signal, but it is not 1:1. There are plenty of papers written about the subject since it's nearly a 50 year old technology.

Re: Displayport: A Better Video Interface

#350
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you consider how ~1:18 is considered visually lossless for x.264, a compression of 1:3 is very very likely can be achieved visually lossless indeed.

Is it not compressing an already compressed image though?

No, without DSC the host sends raw pixel data over DisplayPort.
Post reply on HN