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... the author in all likelihood dead, but his heirs or other owners of the copyright may be difficult or even impossible to identify or find. The copyright term should be shorter."

Oh please we all know why copyright terms are continuously increased. Because of companies like Disney do not want to lose one of their most profitable franchise (The Mickey Mouse Protection Act). Also the MPAA, RIAA and the like do not want to compete with public domain work that are just 14 or 24 years old (which was the original copyright terms, and that in a time where the most advanced copy-machine was the printing press).

I just wait until 2019, in which year we get the Protect Mickey Mouse to the End Of the Universe Act of 2018, in which the copyright terms are increased to the life time of the sun, which is per definition limited to just a few billion years and as such in bounds of the constitution*. Of course it will not end in the USA, because of some "free trade" treaty the copyright terms will be all "aligned" across the EU, Japan, Australia, Canada.

Also just forget about your rights to privacy and due-process. Because Mickey Mouse is one of the most important national treasures, there is no freedom that can be sacrificed to ensure future profits. Personal computing is also overrated, to protect our artists we need to put everything in a walled garden with Trusted Computing Chips and open source operating systems will just be made impossible to install. We already put teenagers in jail for copyright infringement. Due-process is already gone for good, and who cares about privacy and guaranteed rights, like private copy and format shift? We just declare everyone a pirate, that's easier anyway.

[*] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

... by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

I think this short sums up trusted computing pretty well.

So the technology on top of TCP fucks with my freedom and I'm supposed to consider it useful? No way, thanks.

Saying that Digital Restrictions Management is bad is not FUD, it's a simple fact. You may want to watch this animated short: http://www.lafkon.net/tc/

I think this is going to become relevant again: The Problem With Trusted Computing

Ok... TPM, and trusted computing and la grande chipset and vpro.. not to forget the current Sandy Bridge chipset... with this stuff implemented in the name of "protecting video streams".

able to remotely disable the device over the network. Each netbook is also fitted with a passive RFID chip which will enable the netbooks to be identified 'even if they were dropped in a bathtub.'

Ahh... trusted computing and PCs with TPMs in them. Take a look folks, your new PC is going to look like this very soon. More and more

I agree with you. A few years old video about tpm: http://www.lafkon.net/tc/

This might be a bit offtopic, but the story really reminded me of Treacherous Computing (aka Trusted C.). There is a really insightful film (under a CC license; torrent) about - it explains the concept (and that in less than 4 minutes). Really worth seeing!

This might be a bit offtopic, but the story really reminded me of Treacherous Computing (aka Trusted C.). There is a really insightful film (under a CC license; torrent) about - it explains the concept (and that in less than 4 minutes). Really worth seeing!

An excellent movie about Trusted Computing that I like sharing whenever this comes up.

It's quite helpful to watch as a primer/refresher: the wonderful animation about Trusted Computing. Simple, good, understandable.

Except we have different predators now -- nanotech particles,
    "Office printers 'are health risk'"
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6923 915.stm
**AA and "Trusted Computing",
    http://www.lafkon.net/tc/
bureaucracies which use robots with guns,
    "First Armed Robots on Patrol in Iraq"
    http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/08/httpwwwnatio nal.html
Fox News, compulsory schooling,
    "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
and so on. Think of modern day humans like early small mammals and big multinational corporations as dinosarus made up of eating such small mammals.

A sabertooth tiger seems much more manageable by comparison, doesn't it? Especially when approached by a village of people.

I don't think life expectancy past age five was all that different (that brings down the "average" even if most people past age five lived into their fifties or sixties). Many of us now just get an extra decade or two of frailness and senility tacked on the end, part of it bedbound in a nursing home.

Nice quote at the end. Personally, we can't go back and still have big populations, and people get used to the new toys. But I am responding so much on this thread because without understanding where people have been, I think it is harder to see what we want to get out of technology to bring us full circle back to the leisure and meaning and relative freedom which many people had many thousands of years ago. Likely, so much of what it used to mean to be human (and part of a village or tribe) has been forgotten and propagandized -- some for the good, but also some for the bad.

Who said they were necessarily eco-friendly? The Hunter/Gatherer lifestyle does not scale to todays' population sizes (at least, until we get cheap solar panels and 3D printers); that' s one of the reasons it isn't around much anymore. Still, just because it doesn't scale, it still might have been nicer for the people who lived it 50000 years ago than a standard mainstream US life centered around watching actors or animation on the tube (assuming you survived past age five).

Why don't I live that way? For much the same reason I don't move from the USA to, say, the Netherlands, even though it is rated as pretty much the number one place to live in the world for families.
    "U.S. on List of UNICEF's Worst Countries for Kids"
    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=7407245
    "Why Dutch women don't get depressed"
    http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/06/news/happy. php
Unless you are born and raised in a place or time or way of life, you are always an outsider. You will never have the easy fluid interactions and skills and human relationships a native to that time and place has. To live in the wilderness well also takes a village. And almost all land in the world of any value as far as wildlife or edible plants has been claimed by one militarized bureaucracy or another, and they tax it. That's what drove most hunter/gatherers off their land and out of their way of life. If the **AA groups succeed in pushing "Trusted Computing" down everyone's throat with lobbying dollars and legal firepower to their own profit, does that mean everyone will be happier?
    http://www.lafkon.net/tc/
So too, if militarized bureaucracies destroyed the hunting/gathering way of life, does that mean people living in them are happier? Might may historically make right, but it doesn't necessarily make happiness.

I feel that Wikipedia article is biased (there's a lot more evidence than that -- see for example the average height of skeletons before and after agriculture). It's likely biased for the same reason almost all of the replies sound the same drumbeat -- people want to believe life is better now and all the suffering they experience (including years of boredom and terror in schools) or the painful uncertainty from possible biowarfare or nuclear warfare is somehow justified.

As for "Nanook" -- in the movie, it showed the clash of the old ways -- tracking a Polar bear for days after hurting it, and the newer ways -- using a gun. It's true hunter/gatherers are often wiped out by guns. But it is also true that the **AA societies have the money and legal power to hurt grandmas on the internet -- so what? Does that prove the **AA are creating a better world for everyone with a happier way of life based on "Trusted Computing" http://www.lafkon.net/tc/ (other than perhaps for themselves)? So someone starved two years later -- so what -- he died in the context of a clash of cultures -- where the militarized one was forcing him onto worse and worse land. You can see the same things in the fate of most of the Native Peoples of the USA -- doesn't prove they were less happy, just perhaps that Europeans were more vicious and greedy (and is that the basis of happiness, especially if that viciousness and greed turns into global warfare?)

Has someone created something like this, except in support of NN? Something along the lines of this would be great. If enough money (think big-name musicians) was banded together, something like that could possibly make it on mainstream T.V. as a commercial.

I think this video explains it very well.

all "political" ads like this just say "don't understand it, just be against it".

Unfortunately, geeks can be just as bad sometimes. Consider the We Are the Web video that purports to promote net neturality; if those freaks are the Internet, maybe I should just unplug. I doubt people watching the video are going to learn much from it. Or consider the much-lauded anti-trusted computing animation from a few years back that can be summarized as "The Man doesn't trust you, and The Man is going to hijack all your equipment not to trust you either". A pretty shallow analysis if you ask me. But what can you expect? TV commercials are for selling, not deliberating.

Film

Advocacy

My first thought when reading this article was that it was meant as a roundabout way to bring up the subject of Trusted Computing.

For those who haven't seen it yet, this is a very concise video to show to your friends and relatives about Trusted Computing - http://www.lafkon.net/tc/

...combine with similar movies about software patents and trusted computing.

Reminds me of the Lafkon video about trusted computing.

http://www.lafkon.net/tc/

Torrent just in case it gets popular ;) http://www.lafkon.net/tc/trusted-computing.torrent

Reminds me of the Lafkon video about trusted computing.

http://www.lafkon.net/tc/

Torrent just in case it gets popular ;) http://www.lafkon.net/tc/trusted-computing.torrent

We need more content like that at http://www.lafkon.net/tc/ which make this kind of knowledge accessible, clear, and simple to understand.

[LAFKON] - A movie about Trusted Computing

If it is, I can live without it.

This is a most exelent littel movie clip that explains the issues in terms a non computer geek can understand. It well made and it realy points out the real issue. Trust...

http://www.lafkon.net/tc/

Excellent video to share with your friends who aren't clear on what "trusted computing" has to offer: http://www.lafkon.net/tc/. Very scary stuff if you have half an imagination as to what big companies like to do when they have control.

I think you'll enjoy this as much as I did:
http://www.lafkon.net/tc/

Trusted Computing...

I think this lil video on Trusted Computing is perfect at explaining trusted computing.

I leave it running on the computers on display in my store. Hopeing that I can educate enough people in my small section of the world about the follies they are about to embark on.

go here for a movie which describes how TCPA works: http://www.lafkon.net/tc/

After the tipping point, on the other side of whatever puts us into the new track, we'll all accept traffic only from people we know, according to degrees of membership in our validated "web of trust".

Nonsense. Or perhaps an attempt to spread some propaganda here to prepare the ground for so-called trusted computing? Or a misunderstanding of some high-level discussions between people who never had to deal with real-world security issues?

There is an obvious flaw in your argument: What you describe requires a secure component that manages trust relationships, and decides whether to accept traffic or not from a particular source. You silently assume that this component cannot be manipulated, abused or attacked. Now if we are able to create such a component and integrate it with our computers in a meaningful way, without making it less secure through bugs outside the component itself -- why can't we build secure systems then?

Another flaw lies in the expectation that people have a web of trust, and that it can be mapped onto the network traffic they produce or accept and such mapping helps to achieve any security goal. I don't and it can't. I'm paranoid, I trust nobody. However, I am willing to accept traffic from entirely untrustworthy sources like, say, pr0n sites. Which does not imply I trust them.