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although not the result of disease, this dog can also walk upright.

The Pentagon is producing kiddie-porn!

That's some fucked-up shit. Totally unacceptable.

Well, they can't do anything about DVD-Jon (who wrote the code that VLC/m4p2mp4/PlayFair/Hymn uses) since he's out of Apple's reach.
He has even released a new tool which gets the DRM keys directly from Apple's servers. So Apple's crushing efforts are rather futile.

Anyway, I agree with your post. The "DRM and DMCA is evil unless it comes in a shiny package from Apple" attitude around here is sickening.

The websites I frequent most are ones that constantly update content, ie, Slashdot, Fark, Boing Boing, etc...

I have multiple folders of bookmarks with these sites, and use the convienent "Open all bookmarks in tabs" option when reading them. I think, however, that it would be more convienent if the tabs were ordered by how recently content on the site had changed, or by how much, or some sort of metric that would place newly updated sites further to the left or right, so that I don't have to view a site to know that its content has not been updated since my last visit.

Well, libdvdcss is developed by VideoLAN. DVD-Jon is a VideoLAN developer and is even listed in the libdvdcss AUTHORS file. So how "independently" is up for debate. It certainly wasn't developed in a vacuum.

From a legal perspective it doesn't matter. DeCSS has been ruled legal in Norway. If DeCSS is illegal in a non-free country like the US, then libdvdcss most likely is illegal in the US too.

Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen has released FairKeys, a program for extracting your iTunes DRM FairPlay keys from Apple's servers.

You should see a shrink about your envy, and a lawyer who can explain to you the concept of libel.

DVD-John stood up in court for what he believed in. Not only did he win, he's still at it providing Fair Use for people around the world.

PS: The "pestering Apple's fair copy prevention system" really gives you away, Apple zealot.

He did however hack Apple's FairPlay DRM system.

The hymn utility (aka playfair) uses his GPL'ed code. He's credited in the hymn manual.

This guy made up a kinda cool ipod pirate radio bumper sticker for his car. Course, the range isn't great.. I guess that's what this is for. I wonder how many people have tuned in having no idea what it is. They'd lose the signal pretty quickly depending on traffic.

Live coverage is pathetic on the net. For example, the live coverage of the SpaceShipOne 100km space shot consisted of a webcast of the Space Show where the onsite reporter was using a cell phone to relay back what was happening.

By the way, take a look at Bush's interview with an Irish journalist. A real journalist, not one that has to submit questions three days ahead of time.

Other sources (MSNBC) have already pointed out that the motives ascribed to the record companies in this article are just not there. Rather, it was a screw-up in their allocation scheme

But when the first shipments began arriving last week, some librarians suspected that the companies -- the Bertelsmann Music Group, EMI Music Distribution, Warner-Elektra-Atlantic, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment -- were dumping CDs that had been gathering dust in warehouses when they received hundreds of copies of some titles for which there is little or no demand.

The good news is that the mystery has been solved and the source of the overabundance has been determined to be nothing more sinister than a computer-programming glitch that will soon be fixed, law enforcement officials say.

The bad news is that libraries that were among the first to receive their free CDs are now going to have to figure out what to do with all the duplicates.

So, nothing to see here. Just keep moving. [via BoingBoing and my weblog]

The format needs to be opened, and it needs to happen soon.

DVD Jon on VLC and Apple's iTunes singles
Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen writes, in reference to VLC's support for iTunes's M4P DRM format:

In case you didn't know, I'm a VideoLAN developer. I reverse engineered FairPlay and wrote VLC's FairPlay support. It's been available in VideoLAN CVS since January, but the first release to include FairPlay support is VLC 0.7.1 (released March 2.).

Just wanted to let you know that once you have generated the user key file(s), you can copy them to as many computers you want and play your M4P files there using VLC.

DVD Jon on VLC and Apple's iTunes singles
Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen writes, in reference to VLC's support for iTunes's M4P DRM format:

In case you didn't know, I'm a VideoLAN developer. I reverse engineered FairPlay and wrote VLC's FairPlay support. It's been available in VideoLAN CVS since January, but the first release to include FairPlay support is VLC 0.7.1 (released March 2.).

Just wanted to let you know that once you have generated the user key file(s), you can copy them to as many computers you want and play your M4P files there using VLC.

http://boingboing.net/2004/06/11/new_beasties_disc _ha.html

Someone please tell me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the copy protection is *only* on non-US and non-UK discs. I also believe that this protection is "EMI policy", and nothing specific to Beastie Boys' disc.

I can tell you for a FACT that Beastie Boys didn't want this and fought against it, but lost this battle with their label.

We encourage you to buy a non-protected US or UK disc. We understand that in today's world Slashdotters are going to do whatever it is they usually do to get music, and this post isn't going to change that. But when we've done so much progressive work in this space over the last 10 years it sucks to see a Slashdot post claiming we're "Evil".

See you at the live shows, ian

Found this attached to BoingBoing's writeup of the same thing:

Update: Ian sez, "Hi, I'm not sure who posted re: Beastie Boys copy protection, but I just spoke with Mike D and their management and they wanted me to pass along that a) This is all territories except the US and UK -- US and UK discs do not have this protection on them; b) All EMI CDs are treated this way, theirs isn't receiving special treatment; c) They would have preferred not to have the copy protection, but weren't allowed to differ from EMI policy."

Definitely worth checking out Danny O'Brien's (NTK) "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks" speech (given for O'Reilly and at NOTCON '04), in which he argues on the basis of research that the most prolific programmers/hackers/geeks organise themselves via... text-based todo lists!

Check out
A summary or shorter summary

He said himself that he gave this talk at Microsoft.

Most media SF is 30-40 years behind written SF, both in topics and style. Few current SF movie or TV shows show concepts that weren't already old-hat in the 1970's SF literature. This museum doesn't seem to be afraid of gently pointing this out. As many board members are SF writers I could guess how they'd push giving credit where it is due. Of course the movies have had much more influence in terms of numbers of people seeing them (I read a calculation saying 23 of the top 25 movies by popularity have been SF/fantasy).

But for influence on science and technology- the books and stories have done quite a lot more. For one example, I like a quote that Cory Doctorow (who does fine post-singularity writing) has on Neuromancer:

"Neuromancer didn't predict the future. Neuromancer *created* the future. If you would understand the past twenty years' technological advance and retreat, this book is required reading. I re-read it every year, just to get an edge on the year that's coming, and to glory in Gibson's prose and cunning artifice."

(1) When talking about SF topics, pop writers can get away with a show of ignorance that wouldn't work for many other genres. How many reviewers compare a movie to anything more than other movies and/or "the Time Machine, F451, Ray Bradbury, Star Wars, the Matrix [and if they've done extra research] P.K.Dick"? That'd be like mystery reviewers starting with A.C. Doyle and ending with Agatha Christie. How many reviews of books like "Prey," "Oryx and Crake," "Children of Men" or "Fatherland" mention anything about similar SF books (books written in some cases decades before) and instead talk about how original the popular author's idea is? (For example CoM published in the early 90's, vs Greybeard published in the early 60's. Many reviews of the former didn't mention the latter.)

did you lift this write-up from BoingBoing, or vice-versa ?

BoingBoing noted that an obvious use for this would be heckling. Probably not something the marketing types thought of... :)

Does /. really count as a weblog anymore? For that matter, do any of the sites mentioned? It's a hard call - BoingBoing and similar sites seem to fit the bill for collaborative weblogs far better than discussion forums like /. I think the sites listed have really moved beyond weblog status. They really seem to be closer to forums and aggregators. This isn't a bad thing - it's just different and may require independant analysis. They've grown beyond (and in many cases existed before) what is commonly considered a weblog these days.

Interestingly, this month's Wired had an article on weblogs / nanopublishing and highlighted a variety of collaborative weblogs, likely as a tie-in to the conference.

I think that is exactly what their leadership wants. The idea that outsiders' cell phones won't work there -- and their citizens' cell phones won't work elsewhere -- has great appeal to a totalitarian government.

Criminy, doesn't anyone look at Boingboing?

...is like a computer without a keyboard, or some other dumb analogy.

See a picture of those t-shirts here.

And Fark swiped it from Boing Boing. I think. Whatever, it's still funny.

But not all blogs are journals. Some, like boingboing and memepool post interesting links with brief commentary. And don't forget Roland P.'s Technology Trends. By reading these blogs, I can find out about cool new stuff hours before it reaches Slashdot, and weeks before it hits the regular media.

Basically, blogs help me refine online content and figure out what's worth reading.

I'm actually a moderately well known individual in the security community, but I'm posting this anonymously because, well, the subject line (and, I suppose, Author field).

I've been an Apple user, off and on, since the IIgs days. There's always been a good amount of zealotry about the product line, but what can you say? The gear is pretty good, and has a good reputation. Unfortunately, no small amount of that reputation is maintained through absolutely vociferous defense of any arbitrary behavior.

I'm not just talking about buffer overflows. When Apple's DHCP implementation made it trivial for anyone on the LAN (even a coffee shop wireless network) to remotely take full control of the machine, the response was not one of confident correction but defensive redefinition -- "It's not a bug, it's a feature, you unintelligent carbon rod." And when Apple became the first operating system ever to be exploitable via its generic text forms -- the response really was yet another circle-the-wagons-and-apply-the-double-standard. And in case you don't believe me about the obsessive, O'Reillyian hijinks going on here -- look at the Boingboing response to what's just an open-and-shut data/executable confusion vulnerability. "OS9 is vulnerable too" is not a defense. "But you need to GET the file first" isn't a defense either -- that is , um, sort of the point of a Trojan horse. "An antivirus company came up with this" -- no way, you mean antivirus companies actually try to find security problems? This type of alternation between non-sequitor and ad-hominem is par for course. And don't say it's always this way -- there's no other operating system vendor who either themselves or through their users reacts to security risks like this. Not Microsoft, not the various Linux distributors (who really are getting hammered), not Sun or SGI, and certainly not Theo or his security-obsessed users. Everyone else seems to have realized it's safe to openly acknowledge and repair faults. Apple is the exception. "Like pulling teeth" comes to mind.

People, this is technology, not politics, and I don't even like this kind of behavior in politics. The more apologism there is for Apple failures -- and yes, even the eternally scrappy upstart from Cupertino can screw up, just look at your Powerbook monitors -- the less likely we are to actually see what ultimately we all want, which is correctly behaving technology.

That's all I have to say on this.

That goes for iTunes Music Store, too. It's amazing how many suckers were surprised at Apple tightening the noose last week.

've found that the inherent problem in communism lie in scale. A village can subsist as a commune, as African tribes, an indeed some places in America even. A country, however can not. As a commune grows past the ability for everybody to recognize every other person, the free rider problem grows geometrically. More people assume they can get away with doing less and taking more without their neighbors retalliating, resulting in a tragedy of the commons type scenario. The fact that people will always seek to maximise their personal utility is, in fact, a cornerstone of economics.

Because the notion of "fairness" is highly subjective, free riding is usually only considered to be an economic "problem" when it leads to Pareto inefficiency.

Crap is crap, if you send it to Japan its still crap.

Unless of course, it's gold.

missing link

In fact, (from BoingBoing):

BoingBoing reader Jesse Mazer says, "The guy who put up that Back to the Future DeLorean for auction is actually not the one who made it, and apparently he's using the creator's copyrighted photos of the car without permission, which previously resulted in a similar auction being taken down...also, according to the creator, he sold it to the guy because it had "a totally junked frame". The info is here.

Sorry for the repost...

The parent post has this right. Apple's iTunes already allows you to strip DRM from a track. Playfair just makes the process a bit easier.

Apple only installed DRM because the RIAA insisted. Apple made the DRM strippable because Jobs has a clue - he realizes that music with both DRM and a price tag can't compete against free music ripped from a CD. But the procedure for stripping the DRM was obscured, so that the intended market (RIAA executives and the technologically uncurious, or (ahem) both) wouldn't notice.

The problem with Playfair is that it rips away the obscurity and exposes the fact that iTunes DRM is easily removed. Naturally, the RIAA will want Playfair shut down and the obscurity restored. Apple, of course, doesn't want Playfair shut down because Playfair is a tool which makes Apple customers very happy, thus promoting Apple products. Jobs' role is to walk the line between these two rivals.

The obvious answer is to publicly oppose Playfair while keeping it available behind the scenes. I will now play my role in this Kabuki dance by stating that Playfair is absolutely terrible and I'll never use it in public. It has bugs too. Really nasty bugs that will send you spam and make your computer explode. Of course, I believe that software = free speech and that engineers have a right to own Playfair, just as they have a right to own other ungodly writings. But I would certainly never let it be known that I use Playfair to remove the DRM so I can keep my music even after my Macintosh crashes. No, that would obviously be wrong, just like sex and bad language are wrong.

Never mind the whole hullabaloo about the Orkut TOS...

Don't forget that the BBC made a special deal with real for a "expiry-free, spyware-free and nuicance-free" version. download here - thanks, BBC!

Don't forget these edited video excerpts hosted at tamu -- good stuff. 9 or 31 MB, 19 minutes. Annoying beep tone at the beginning, but it doesn't last too long (just longer than you'd want)

• Yes, Apple's music files are encoded in AAC.
• Yes, AAC is an open standard, in that it is publically documented (for a reproduction fee to ISO), just not a free one, patent-wise or royalty-wise.
• Apple's AAC files are then protected with DRM using Apple's FairPlay (if this FairPlay is related to VeriDisc's FairPlay is unknown, Apple lists FairPlay under their Apple's copyright).
• If folks had bothered to read the article the DRM opportunity is pretty much what it was about, not the AAC format. FWIW FairPlay could be applied to mp3's too.
• As DRM goes FairPlay is pretty liberal and there have been few problems (Cory Doctorow's consistantly forgetting to un-license machines aside)
• Can FairPlay be broken? Probably, there are ways at getting to the AAC files via Apple's freely distributed QuickTime architecture (this is what iTunes uses).
• There's also the trivial exercise of using iTunes to burn a CD then re-ripping the music. Of course the music has then been lossily encoded twice, with different encoders, so it's sorta like listening to a copy of a tape of a FM broadcast.
• Ultimately though at US$1 a song & US$10/album most folks appear willing to own the music legitimately. Furthermore Apple has made it absurdly simple to share music locally via their iTunes software so most dorm & office style needs are handled that way.
• Of course, the article pretty much ignores if Apple wants to be in the Music or IP licensing business at all. They only gave MS their previous Apple-IP license when their mutual lawsuits seemed deadlocked for eternity. The Mac licensing program cannibalized their own sales before it was killed off, their FireWire licensing plan shot itself in the foot, there doesn't even seem to be much co-branding like used to happen with special speakers and such for Macs. These days Apple seems pretty intent on only doing things that directly support selling, or at least evangelizing, Mac hardware.

Check his view. Even THE Apple geek loathes Apple for their lock-in and DRM crap, and so should anyone. Just because it'S Apple doesn't mean "their" DRM is fine, while "other's" is bad.

Click here to read about Cory Doctorow's problems the iTunes DRM.

I think spammers are way ahead on that - Free pr0n for captcha

He is an author, advocate for the EFF, and blogger. He recently spoke at UNC-Chapel Hill, video of which is available from the great folks at ibiblio: video eff page and blog

Developer.

Pundit.

Hellraiser for the EFF.

SF author.

One of the administrators of BoingBoing.net.

Here is his home page:

http://www.craphound.com.

The machine is a 900Mhz Duron with 512MB RAM Running RHL. Nothing fancy, in fact most people have better desktops now.

The key seems to be a carefully configured Apache using in-memory caching where possible, generous "Expires" headers for caches, long keepalives, and having the server thrash as little as possible starting and stopping children. Even under the most extreme load the box tends to be responsive, and has impressed the hell out of me for doing so.

With cory moving from SSI-based pages to the DB-driven MT, it will be interesting to see exactly what happens to performance as his next /.-ing :)

Here's a discussion that talks about yanking the ($479.95) Hitachi microdrive inside. More discussion on my original source: boingboing

No sig for you!

On slow news days, /. has become a reposting ground for stuff seen two-three days ago on good blogs like boingboing.net.

Predictions for Slashdot headlines for Tuesday, Feb 17:

• Disney takeover photoshopping contest
  (Fark via boingboing.net)
• Amazon discloses many reviews written by insecure, sniping writers
  (NYT via boingboing.net)
• The Gameboy Music Club
  (via boingboing.net)

...all of which Timothy will repost on Friday ;)

On slow news days, /. has become a reposting ground for stuff seen two-three days ago on good blogs like boingboing.net.

Predictions for Slashdot headlines for Tuesday, Feb 17:

• Disney takeover photoshopping contest
  (Fark via boingboing.net)
• Amazon discloses many reviews written by insecure, sniping writers
  (NYT via boingboing.net)
• The Gameboy Music Club
  (via boingboing.net)

...all of which Timothy will repost on Friday ;)

He runs a fairly popular blog at BoingBoing.net where you can read about his exploits at the ETCON conference.
Also, his book is actually titled Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. More information about his original release of the book, and re-release with the Creative Commons license can be read on his blog, and give good insight into what authors can expect when they release a book with a less restrictive license.

I've been noticing boing boing feeding a lot of stories recently. And you shouldn't overlook the monthly "new stories on wired" karma whore feeding frenzy...