Slashdot Mirror

If you'd like to discuss reading, I suggest you join a reading discussion forum. For example:

SF/Fantasy - http://www.sffworld.org/forums/

NY Times Book Forums(all sorts of genres) - http://www.nytimes.com/books/forums/

etc.... I'm sure a Google search can get you in touch with people who'd like to investigate and critique books with you. Slashdot just doesn't seem like the place for good literary discussion.

It will definitely be different, and it's got some cool advantages. The announcement from IBM Research labs in Zurich talk about a data storage density 20 times that of today's best magnetic storage. Briefly, tiny V shaped heads make holes 10 nanometers wide in a plastic film - there are a number of interesting stats and potential applications described in the article, as well as some animations (1,2). The story is also reported in The NY Times and C|Net.

The creator's point of view. And not just any average creators.

in the article, did david say he's going to give away his future creations for free, in the name of public good? nope. so does that mean this mega mega talent is pro-RIAA? don't think so too. to david bowie - based on my reading anyway - it's not a black [RIAA darth vader] or white [supposedly altruistic free-music advocate] issue. it makes perfect sense to me that bowie is neutral on the issue. afterall, he has survived 4 [!!!] decades as a multi talented, multi-disciplinary artist, and seen it all.

i'm a working professional creator for more than a decade now, and have quietly watched this copyright and intellectual property ownership media/internet war go on for a few years now. i observed one extreme side milking the creations to death in the name of greed-is-good and the other extreme side's [not any better] wish to enjoy the goods for nothing, in the name of......"public"[yeah right] benefit.

ironically, opinion of one most crucial party - the creators of the fought-over goodies - are rarely sought. and when they do speak out occasionally, for their slavemaster recording company or their own [very very valid because it's very very limited] financial self-interest, they get public wrath...

still, am glad, finally, bowie speaketh.

so where does an accomplished, artist of this calibre really stand in this?

let's take a good look at these excerpts from the david bowie article:

-"I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."

keyword: bashing.

generally, the word "bashing" implies that the speaker thinks that there's unfair/unjust treatment of that particular object/subject. either bowie thinks this, or at most, he's neutral. what is certain is, he is not the one doing the bashing

- "Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he added. "So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again.

keyword:"take advantage of"

obviously, bowie perceives copyright ownership and having control over his own recorded works an "advantage", something positive, at least for him

but then, why would he perceives ownership of his creative babies any other way? of course having control over his own work is an advantage - to him, to begin with. but the question is, are fans and new technology going to deny him that possibility? his verdict is, yes. but he didn't say it is right or wrong. he just says, i'm facing an inevitable. he did not say whether this free-flowing-ness of musical information is going to do him good or bad, but he certainly said he needs to take advantage of whatever little time he has left. doesn't that mean he actually implies the opposite: that free-flowing-music arnachy is not an advantage?

is the future brighter for david bowie? at least, the recording companies pay the creators *something*, however pathetic the ratio to real profit. still that's definitely better than the [a] non-creatives [b] wannabe creatives who preach "all private creations should be owned by public" and "be made freely avaible by law"?

it's understandable if we think those damn CDs cost too much - but have we consider the interest of the creators - who create the stuff we desperately want? don't know about you or mary or tom, but i got a feeling, my own genuine feeling, that i do not want my musical idols to suffer for his/her wonderful, inspiring, valuable creative urges. i may have received and enjoyed mp3s from my family and friends, but i will not advocate for free goodies.

david bowie uses an interesting analogy of music [or created art works in any form] as water or electricity. do we ever get [or expect to get] these vital things, water or electricity, for free? right....but why?

the most important question, for the "real general public which consist of creators, producers, endusers, and marketing and distribution gurus, will we continue to see newer and more inspiring david bowies in the future, if the RIAA continues its short-sighted tyranical ways and the "fans" insist on wanting all these enjoyment for free?

these are the questions i ask myself....

my 2.2 cts ;)

I was surfing nytimes.com right before I clicked onto slashdot. I noticed this article about David Boies on the front page.

David Boies, you know, the famous lawyer who represented the government against Microsoft, and Al Gore versus Florida.

So when I read the blurb on slashdot, I figured that someone important had something logical.

My mistake.

Is VA so hard up it's resorting to advertorializing for totally worthless junk?

Oh, and if you think the rich actually buy crap like this, do yourself a favor and read The Millionaire Next Door. Most millionaires would never say something like this is "cool".

First of all, Michael is right..."blog" has become extremely overused, much like "P2P." But that's besides the point.

Merely linking to news does not equal journalism. Slashdot isn't journalism. Kuro5hin isn't journalism. Yahoo's Full Coverage site isn't journalism. Hell, Fark isn't journalism. They are link farms. They find and post links to actual news stories across the world. While this makes for an easy-to-read digest of news and information, it does not mean the site becomes a seeming bastion of original journalism.

Real journalism, IMHO (speaking as one), is going out, researching a story, interviewing people, and putting together a concise unbiased story (keep your media bias arguments until the end of class kids). Journalism is not posting a link to a news story elsewhere, and then adding your own personal opinions or thoughts. While the Berkeley school is trying to avoid this, putting a "blog" label on it won't make any difference. Major news sites, like the New York Times and the Washington Post already post their news to the Internet in real time. Some even include "Comment on this story" links as well.

Take away the personal opinions and rambling links, and you don't have a so-called "blog." You have an online news site, just like the big boys. Calling it a "blog" doesn't give any more "hipness" or credibility.

I wish everyone would get over this stupid "BLOGS ARE THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM" crap. You know what? They aren't.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/05/technology/05DIG I.html

Same story, different spin.

And wouldn't you know it, one exists!

I caught this discussion at Ars Technica last month. It refers to a cool-sounding program called "Dead Man's Switch (DMS)", which caught the attention of the New York Times.

Just a few issues...

• Don't go on vacation for a longer period of time than you have the 'bot set for
  (see either link, "If you're reading this, I'm dead!" type goofs have happened!)

• What happens when you actually do pass on to the great unknown, don't manage to pay your bills, and your (ISP | power company | shell host) kills your service?

• Or, more simply, what if your next of kin just tag the 'ol power switch?

Hey ozzie, I get a kick out of the the old 'Merican pissing on the rest of the world show as much as the next US citizen, but I'm a little nervous about this sort of thing ever since I found out that we're dependent on the rest of the world to the tune of 1.2 billion of foreign capital a day to finance our trade deficit.

Lately, it seems that our leaders are trying awfully hard to convince the rest of the world that we're all a bunch of violent dim-witted corporate scam artists. We citizens might not be able to do much about our leaders (what with the Supremes deciding who they are and all), but at least we don't have to help out so much ... ;-)

To sum it up, the techie user can purchase blank cards, shipped to anywhere in the world; buy a card hardware-programmer to reset the card when it gets periodically zapped by the tv companies; you can easily get new programming updates to defeat said electronic zaps/bombs/bullets/pulses via the Web from fellow pirates^Wunathorized users. Oh, originally, blank cards where had by the layman from low-balled Walmart dss receiver offers. Walmart specials, iow, where had for $100USD+, the cards were ripped out, and the receiver itself was discarded. Read the piece, it'll become clearer.

We can have all sorts of stories posted about the latest Linux kernel patch level, but when it comes to important matters of freedom... the Slashdot editors turn the other way ("Oooh! Puppies!"). Sorry for the OT, but this is for those interested in the fight to keep freedom in and censorship out of libraries...


* 2002-06-01 13:41:19 Courts Strike Down Law For Library Filters (yro,news) (rejected) According to this story over at the NewYork Times (free registration automatically generated for you), a "federal court panel struck down a law requiring libraries to filter the Internet for material harmful to minors yesterday, saying that the technology blocks so much unobjectionable material that it would violate the First Amendment rights of library patrons." I think we all know what a great win this is, especially if you've ever had a search struck down when doing research on breast cancer or the Holocaust (such nasty topics children should never be exposed to, appearantly).

Some comparisons in his rhetoric and how it has (not) changed...

"I am just a simple caveman..."

Valenti, 1982 - I am not a lawyer; I beg to ask the forgiveness of all of you in the UCLA Law School. If I was smart enough maybe I would have been a lawyer and then I would feel more comfortable about presenting this case. "

Valenti, 2000 - "I am not a lawyer. I wanted to be one; go to Harvard Law School. Ended up at Harvard Business School - if I am arrogant, that's what they taught me - haha. "

"We are a poor industry..."

Valenti, 1982 - "Now, let me tell you something about the high-risk business that we are in. This may be one of the most precarious business enterprises which a man or a woman can enter. Movie making is a high-risk business. Let me cite you some examples. The average film costs $20 million...And 6 out of 10 films do not retrieve their total investment period. Now, what are you going to do right on top of that? There is going to be a VCR avalanche."

Valenti, 2000 - "For the movie business in the Internet era, a threat on opening nights is someone copying the new movie and sending it out over the Internet. An average movie costs $52 million to make. Only two in ten ever profit from theatre sales."

Demonizing the perceived Enemy as "deadly", "pirates", "stranglers", "terrorists", etc.

Valenti, 1982 - "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

Valenti, 1982 - "The public interest is at stake here. It is the public interest that you have by solemn oath sworn to serve because what I am talking about and what the rest of these witnesses are talking about is making it possible for a steady stream of quality entertainment to reach people through their television sets....

Valenti, 1997 - "It was a historic meeting...a first-time commitment of full government support at the highest level of the Russian leadership to a long-term plan to decrease surely and radically the deadly hold of pirates on the intellectual property community

Valenti 2002 - "There are more than nine and a half million broadband subscribers now. Once those large pipes and high-speed access subscribers begin to increase, we can be terrorized by what's going on."

Valenti 2002 - "We're fighting our own terrorist war."

But some things have changed...or have they?

Valenti, 1982 - "Now, these machines are advertised for one purpose in life. Their only single mission, their primary mission is to copy coyrighted material that belongs to other people..."

Valenti, 2000 - " Look at Sony-Betamax. The VCR had substantial non-infringing use. For example if you time-shift (tape now and playback later). But the court in Sony-Betamax did not rule on shifting to ten million people. So watch how you cite Sony-Betamax. Napster is not time-shifting - but sharing with anonymous millions."

Interesting.

W

Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 10:41:18 -0400
From: Seth Finkelstein
To: Seth Finkelstein's InfoThought list
Subject: IT: Federal censorware law down! (and Seth Finkelstein's reports!)

I'm ecstatic that the court seems to have used my pioneering [sethf.com] efforts in anticensorware work [sethf.com] as one factor in its decision, in passages such as these:

"Another technique that filtering companies use in order to deal with a structural feature of the Internet is blocking the root level URLs of so-called "loophole" Web sites. These are Web sites that provide access to a particular Web page, but display in the user's browser a URL that is different from the URL with which the particular page is usually associated. Because of this feature, they provide a "loophole" that can be used to get around filtering software, i.e., they display a URL that is different from the one that appears on the filtering company's control list. "Loophole" Web sites include caches of Web pages that have been removed from their original location, "anonymizer" sites, and translation sites.

Caches are archived copies that some search engines, such as Google, keep of the Web pages they index. The cached copy stored by Google will have a URL that is different from the original URL. Because Web sites often change rapidly, caches are the only way to access pages that have been taken down, revised, or have changed their URLs for some reason. For example, a magazine might place its current stories under a given URL, and replace them monthly with new stories. If a user wanted to find an article published six months ago, he or she would be unable to access it if not for Google's cached version.

Some sites on the Web serve as a proxy or intermediary between a user and another Web page. When using a proxy server, a user does not access the page from its original URL, but rather from the URL of the proxy server. One type of proxy service is an "anonymizer." Users may access Web sites indirectly via an anonymizer when they do not want the Web site they are visiting to be able to determine the IP address from which they are accessing the site, or to leave "cookies" on their browser.(8) Some proxy servers can be used to attempt to translate Web page content from one language to another. Rather than directly accessing the original Web page in its original language, users can instead indirectly access the page via a proxy server offering translation features.

As noted above, filtering companies often block loophole sites, such as caches, anonymizers, and translation sites. The practice of blocking loophole sites necessarily results in a significant amount of overblocking, because the vast majority of the pages that are cached, for example, do not contain content that would match a filtering company's category definitions. Filters that do not block these loophole sites, however, may enable users to access any URL on the Web via the loophole site, thus resulting in substantial underblocking."

This is an aspect which I've been trying to get into the censorware debate for ages. I'm overjoyed that the court heard, they got it, they listened, and it helped strike down Federal censorware law! These are the reports which seem to have made a difference in the above:

BESS's Secret LOOPHOLE: (censorware vs. privacy & anonymity) - a secret category of BESS (N2H2), and more about why censorware must blacklist privacy, anonymity, and translators
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/loophole.php [sethf.com]

BESS vs The Google Search Engine (Cache, Groups, Images) - BESS bans cached web pages, passes porn in groups, and considers all image searching to be pornography.
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/google.php [sethf.com]

SmartFilter's Greatest Evils - why censorware must blacklist privacy, anonymity, and language translators
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/smartfilter/greate stevils.php [sethf.com]

The Pre-Slipped Slope - censorware vs the Wayback Machine web archive - The logic of censorware programs suppressing an enormous digital library.
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/slip.php [sethf.com]

-- Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer http://sethf.com [sethf.com]
Anticensorware Investigations: http://sethf.com/anticensorware/ [sethf.com]
Seth Finkelstein's Infothought list - http://sethf.com/infothought/ [sethf.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/19/technology/circu its/19HACK.html [nytimes.com]

Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 10:41:18 -0400
From: Seth Finkelstein
To: Seth Finkelstein's InfoThought list
Subject: IT: Federal censorware law down! (and Seth Finkelstein's reports!)

I'm ecstatic that the court seems to have used my pioneering efforts in anticensorware work as one factor in its decision, in passages such as these:

"Another technique that filtering companies use in order to deal with a structural feature of the Internet is blocking the root level URLs of so-called "loophole" Web sites. These are Web sites that provide access to a particular Web page, but display in the user's browser a URL that is different from the URL with which the particular page is usually associated. Because of this feature, they provide a "loophole" that can be used to get around filtering software, i.e., they display a URL that is different from the one that appears on the filtering company's control list. "Loophole" Web sites include caches of Web pages that have been removed from their original location, "anonymizer" sites, and translation sites.

Caches are archived copies that some search engines, such as Google, keep of the Web pages they index. The cached copy stored by Google will have a URL that is different from the original URL. Because Web sites often change rapidly, caches are the only way to access pages that have been taken down, revised, or have changed their URLs for some reason. For example, a magazine might place its current stories under a given URL, and replace them monthly with new stories. If a user wanted to find an article published six months ago, he or she would be unable to access it if not for Google's cached version.

Some sites on the Web serve as a proxy or intermediary between a user and another Web page. When using a proxy server, a user does not access the page from its original URL, but rather from the URL of the proxy server. One type of proxy service is an "anonymizer." Users may access Web sites indirectly via an anonymizer when they do not want the Web site they are visiting to be able to determine the IP address from which they are accessing the site, or to leave "cookies" on their browser.(8) Some proxy servers can be used to attempt to translate Web page content from one language to another. Rather than directly accessing the original Web page in its original language, users can instead indirectly access the page via a proxy server offering translation features.

As noted above, filtering companies often block loophole sites, such as caches, anonymizers, and translation sites. The practice of blocking loophole sites necessarily results in a significant amount of overblocking, because the vast majority of the pages that are cached, for example, do not contain content that would match a filtering company's category definitions. Filters that do not block these loophole sites, however, may enable users to access any URL on the Web via the loophole site, thus resulting in substantial underblocking."

This is an aspect which I've been trying to get into the censorware debate for ages. I'm overjoyed that the court heard, they got it, they listened, and it helped strike down Federal censorware law! These are the reports which seem to have made a difference in the above:

BESS's Secret LOOPHOLE: (censorware vs. privacy & anonymity) - a secret category of BESS (N2H2), and more about why censorware must blacklist privacy, anonymity, and translators
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/loophole.php

BESS vs The Google Search Engine (Cache, Groups, Images) - BESS bans cached web pages, passes porn in groups, and considers all image searching to be pornography.
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/google.php

SmartFilter's Greatest Evils - why censorware must blacklist privacy, anonymity, and language translators
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/smartfilter/greate stevils.php

The Pre-Slipped Slope - censorware vs the Wayback Machine web archive - The logic of censorware programs suppressing an enormous digital library.
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/slip.php

-- Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer http://sethf.com
Anticensorware Investigations: http://sethf.com/anticensorware/
Seth Finkelstein's Infothought list - http://sethf.com/infothought/
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/19/technology/circu its/19HACK.html

As many of you are aware, our righteous pursuit of organized crime in Boston has led to unwarranted criticism since our agents had to become one with the Mob in order to fully develop our intelligence sources within it. We will henceforth improve our public relations posture by returning to the policy of J. Edgar 'There-Is-No-Mob-in-America' Hoover, and refocus on developing intelligence sources within the Islamic Fundamentalist, Catholic Pedophile, and Hippie Treehugging communities.

Pursuant to the new policies, deep cover may require our good agents to occassionally take part in IF and CP activities in order to go after the true heads of those nefarious movements. However, special care must be taken not to go too far.

Get busy! And remember, the sacrifices freedom requires may seem at time distasteful, but to guard the largest number of the American citizenry, we must sometimes prove our trustworthiness to our intelligence sources by aiding in the sacrifice of lesser numbers, such as those jailed and killed to protect our Boston associates. It is a small price to pay.

Remember to wipe the Crisco from your foreheads before undertaking undercover activities. We must not gloat that we are the annointed ones.
___

Those were the days.

Now CDs cost $19 or $20. The dot-com boom is, well, you know. Napster's gone. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has survived a legal challenge, which has only encouraged our fine Congress to pile on more onerous legislation.

Granted, none of this is as alarming as the apparent suspension of habeas corpus in the extended detention of more than 1,000 unnamed people in the U.S. since 9/11, but it's pretty darned ominous just the same.

Added to this heady mixture in recent weeks is a new generation of digital copy protection that's been showing up on music CDs distributed by Sony in Europe. Fast becoming known as the case of "Celine Dion Killed My iMac," initial reports indicate that these discs are not only unreadable by computers, but may actually crash them and prevent them from rebooting, necessitating a service call.

Aside from the immediate hardware questions--"Where the !@#$% is the iMac's manual CD eject hole and how the !@#$% do I get to it?!?"--several major questions about this situation have gripped the Mac universe. Here, without further ado, are the Curmudgeon's curmudgeonly answers to the top five. Some are techical, some are legal, some are political, some are a mix of all three.

Dayplanner note: if you already know exactly how CDs and copy protection work and you're pressed for time, feel free to skip right on down to Question #3. That's where things get, as they say in New England, wicked controversial.

QUESTION #1: Why do Macs and other computers choke on copy protected CDs?

When you look at the business side of a normal audio CD, you see one continuous semi-glossy surface that contains the audio information, or the "program". Bracketing the program are the lead-in and lead-out sections, which are the high-gloss rings at the inside and outside edges of the disc, respectively. The CD's audio tracks are not arranged in a particularly orderly fashion on the disc. As Robert Starret explains in an old but still definitive Emedia Professional article:

Red Book [i.e Audio CD] tracks are not files, per se. They are made up of a bunch of data that is meant to stream, and within the stream there is more than music. ... Data on an audio disc is organized into frames in order to ensure a constant read rate. Each frame consists of 24 bytes of user data, plus synchronization, error correction, and control and display bits. One of the first things that it is crucial to understand about CDs is that [their] data is not arranged in distinct physical units. Instead, the data in one frame is interleaved with the data in many other frames so that a scratch or defect in the disc will not destroy a single frame beyond correction.

Audio discs were designed to be read sequentially, in real time, with the digital data converted to an analog signal that would be played through a stereo's speakers. There was no need to have data on the disc to pinpoint the exact location of the beginning of a song. It is good enough just to get close. That extra data containing an exact starting address for each song takes up space that could otherwise be used for musical data.

So what a computer sees when it looks at an audio CD is not a foreign language, as when a Mac sees a DOS-formatted disc. Rather, it sees no language at all. There's no map, no file cabinet. Everything's just strewn out on the floor. This is why you can't just double-click an audio CD's icon in the Finder and drag one of the files to your hard drive. (If you do, the copied file will be zero k and contain no data.) Instead, you have to "rip" the file with a special digital audio extraction program or utility that manually searches out and extracts the tracks on the disc. That, by the way, is most likely why the term "ripping" came about. The kind of translation necessary for digital audio extraction no doubt struck many folks as analogous to the process of printing postscript-encoded fonts and images on a printer. Converting postscript to bitmap (so a printer can shoot ink droplets or laser-heated toner dots onto the paper) requires a Raster Image Processer, or RIP; hence "ripping."

Now, the key thing to understand here is that since audio CDs have no filesystem, and therefore no real data files, audio CD players do not need to be able to read data. Any data on an audio CD is ignored.

Computers, of course, come at CDs from the opposite perspective: data is their first order of business. So computers look for--and, if they find one, read--a data track on a CD before they look for, or read, an audio track. Data first, audio second, with each being treated separately.

You will be able to see this separate treatment in action if you have an "Enhanced CD" that contains bonus data material in addition to the audio program. Sara McLaughlin's 1999 release Mirrorball is one of the best-known Enhanced CDs. Stick it in your Mac and you'll see two separate CD icons, or volumes, show up on your desktop, one for the audio CD tracks and one for the data.

Look on the underside of the CD and you'll see that a very shiny band interrupts the normally continuous semi-gloss surface. This band is the lead-out for the audio disc, which is normally at the edge of the disc. But on an Enhanced CD, there's a second patch of program material after the lead-out. This is the data portion. Now look at a picture provided by German Magazine Chip of the underside of a disc that uses the Key2Audio copy protection technology Sony has employed most famously on the European release of Celine Dion's most recent album (ignore the disembodied hand holding the felt-tip marker for now).

Note the shiny band about 1/4 of the way in from the outside edge of the disc, just like you'd see on the underside of Mirrorball. The material from that band out to the disc's edge is a data track. Unlike a normal Enhanced CD, however, the data track on this CD is corrupt. I don't know exactly how it works, but it is formatted in such a way that a computer will initially recognize it as a valid data track but will not in fact be able to read it successfully. This situation will result in: the computer endlessly trying to read the disc; the computer giving up and ejecting the disc (or asking you to eject it); or the computer giving up with the disc sitting in the drawer, unmounted on the desktop and invisible to the OS. The second possibility is annoying; the first and third possibilities are potentially disastrous.

So computers choke on Sony's copy protected discs because (1) computers read data tracks first, and (2) Key2Audio data tracks are corrupt. Audio CD players, on the other hand, aren't capable of reading data tracks--remember, audio CD tracks lack a filesystem and there are no directories or headers to read. So audio CD players simply ignore the data track, just as they do for normal Enhanced CDs.

QUESTION #2: What's with this magic marker trick to defeat copy protection? Does it really work?

You betcha. Computers read data tracks first, but the data track has to be located at the end of the CD. Sounds confusing, but it has to be that way. In computer parlance, an Enhanced CD is a form of multisession CD. The CD is written to more than once; in the case of Enhanced CDs and Mac-PC hybrid CDs, this happens because you want to write two different types of data to the same CD. Audio CD players can only read the first session on a CD--again, no need or ability to know what multiple sessions are since an audio CD is expecting to see only audio CD tracks. So the audio content has to be the first thing on the disc, located on the inside of the disc surface. The data track is on the outside.

So if you take a magic marker--or, more dangerously a piece of electrical tape or a Post-it note--and use it to cover over that shiny band that divides the audio program from the data track, your computer won't realize that there even is a data track as it scans from the beginning of the CD--the inner part where the audio stuff is--to the outside looking for data. What your computer will see is a final audio track that seems to go on and on until it reaches the edge of the disk. This will put a whole lot of silence at the end of the last track when you rip the CD (a problem you can rectify using the Quicktime Player as an audio editor), but otherwise you'll be good to go.

QUESTION #3: Is Apple liable for the damage caused to my iMac by these CDs?

The answer to this one as far as the Curmudgeon is concerned is a big fat hairy NO. Before I explain why, I must say that I find it disheartening that so many folks on Usenet and the Mac Web are complaining about Apple in regards to this issue. Yes, it sucks to have to take your iMac to a repair shop and pay something on the order of $250US just to get a stuck CD removed. Yes, it's annoying that modern Macs have manual-eject holes that are difficult to see and hidden behind decorative outer CD doors. But I think the root of folks' complaints is that some Apple machines seem to be damaged more seriously by these disks than most WinTel PCs (largely, from what I can tell, by the aforementioned difficulty in detecting and accessing Macs' manual eject holes). While I don't want to downplay the real expense and misery some folks have experienced, it seems to me that the knee-jerk blaming of Apple comes from a kind of Mac inferiority complex run amok: "Why do Apple machines have to react worse to this than WinTel machines?!? My PC friends are going to rake me over the coals on this one! I thought Macs were supposed to be easier to use and better-built, and yet my PC just let me eject the CD!" And so on.

These sentiments are understandable, but they don't form the basis for a proper understanding of whether or not Apple should pay to fix this problem. Putting aside the question of legal liability for the moment, it's just not right to expect Apple or any computer manufacturer--or any CD player manufacturer whose machines won't play these new CDs, for that matter--to anticipate technology that hadn't been invented when the machine was designed. Early CD players were confused by Enhanced CDs; many home and car CD players still can't play CD-RWs; many DVD players (which are always labeled "DVD/CD/VCD") can't handle CD-Rs. In fact, the different CD formats are covered by different technology standards: Red Book for normal audio CDs, Yellow Book for data CDs, Orange Book for CD-R and CD-RW, and Blue Book for Enhanced CDs. Incidentally, the fact that CD-R and CD-RW are grouped together under a single standard explains why manufacturers are hesitant to certify that their CD and DVD players will play home-brewed recordable CDs: unless a player can handle both CD-R and CD-RW discs, it's not Orange Book compliant.

Now the funny thing is that much of the debate over Apple's responsibility here has skipped over this simple, and to my mind obvious, fact. Instead, the debate has proceeded to another, related question:

QUESTION #4: Are these new Sony discs really CDs or not? Should Apple support them even if they're not CDs?

Here's where the Curmudgeon throws you a curve ball, because contrary to what you've read, it's entirely possible, even likely, that these copy protected discs are in fact CDs.

Of course, Apple's position, as stated in a now-infamous Knowledgebase article is that Key2Audio discs "are technically and legally not Compact Discs (CD format)" because they do not conform to the CD audio format, and so Apple is under no obligation to make Macs work with them.

Sony agrees, having removed the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" badge and logo from discs that use the Key2Audio system.

But I don't think that really settles the matter. Attentive readers of the Mac Web might recall that the first draft of Apple's knowledgebase article stated that inserting such a disc into a Mac constituted misapplication of the product (the Mac, not the disc) and therefore any resulting problems were not covered under warranty. Apple has since removed that portion of the article, no doubt on the advice of legal counsel.

I don't know why that paragraph got removed from the article, but I have a hunch it's because the question of whether or not a Key2Audio disc is a CD has not come close to being settled.

Consider this: while the Sony discs don't conform to the Red Book CD standard, they appear to conform to the Blue Book standard--the one that governs Enhanced CDs. It's not possible to look at the full specs for CD standards without paying Philips (co-creator of the CD format along with, ironically, Sony) quite a bit of money. But available summaries of the Blue Book standard indicate that the standard does not say what has to be on that data track. Philips presumes that data tracks on Enhanced CDs "will in general contain items like disc and track titles, lyrics, and background information on the music," (quoted from here), but the Blue Book spec doesn't actually prescribe specific uses for the data track. The only requirement, as far as I can see, is that the data track be formatted with a known filesystem, typically ISO-9660 (DOS), and/or HFS. Since the Key2Audio system works precisely by getting the computer to "take the bait" by first recognizing the data track, and then confuses it by messing up the actual structure or nature of the data, it's reasonable to assume that the Key2Audio system does in fact conform to the Blue Book standard. (In other words, if the data track was not formatted with a valid filesystem, the computer would ignore it or spit the disc out.) Aside from the obvious marketing nightmare ("Our Enhanced CDs are unique because they diminish the product!") The only difference between a Key2Audio disc and an Enhanced CD is that the Key2Audio CD's data track is used to implement copy protection rather than to provide song lyrics, videos and other more traditional Enhanced CD data content.

Now, you might think the Curmudgeon is splitting hairs here. Who cares if you call it (A) an out-of-spec disc that's not a real CD, or (B) an Enhanced CD with a screwy data track?

It seems to me that there's a huge difference. It might seem like Sony is shooting itself in the foot by omitting the official "CD Digital Audio" badge from its copy protected discs. But to my eyes it's the opposite: Sony is weaseling out of the truth, which is that its discs are in fact Blue Book-compliant CDs that are not out-of-spec but rather are defective, and have intentionally been made defective, using the Blue Book format as a trojan horse to disable the user's hardware when that hardware is a computer.

Insofar as these discs damage or disable computers, they operate like computer viruses, except that instead of working on the software side, they attack via hardware and firmware. Their method of copyright protection is less like MacroVision and CSS (the copy protection mechanisms used on VHS and DVD), and more like the "zapping" techniques used by cable companies to disable cable boxes in homes where cable service or premium channels are being received illegally. In those cases, however, there's a way of distinguishing between legal and illegal activity. Legal cable setups don't get their boxes zapped. With Key2Audio, the technology behaves as though inserting a CD in your computer makes you a criminal.

Now, if a court were to agree with my argument that Key2Audio discs are in fact really CDs, then Sony (and Key2Audio) could be liable to lawsuits from computer users who lost time, money and perhaps data as a result of damage done to their computers by these discs. Conceivably, Sony could also be liable to suits brought by computer manufacturers for sabotaging their machines or interfering with their business practices. By saying these discs aren't CDs, Sony hopes to extricate itself from such liability. One can only hope that Sony gets its ass handed to it by the European Union courts--which are routinely more consumer-friendly than their U.S. cousins--before this situation gets out of hand.

This brings us to the second part of this question: Should Apple support these discs even if they're not really CDs? To which the Curmudgeon replies: Heck No! Key2Audio discs do not represent a new technology or a new CD spec. They are a malicious corruption of an existing spec. Without manual intervention by the user on a disc-by-disc basis, it's impossible to design drive firmware or CD driver software that can differentiate between an Enhanced CD and a Key2Audio CD.

That said, it would be nice if drives used in Macs had their firmware updated so that insertion of a Key2Audio disc would generate a normal "This disc is unreadable" message from the OS, allowing for a smooth and uneventful eject procedure.

Even better would be a user-selectable option to "ignore data volumes on multisession CDs" via a CD Preference Pane (OS X) or Control Panel (OS 9). You could select that option and use Key2Audio discs to your heart's content. If you needed to use an Enhanced CD, you could uncheck the option. It would be a bit of a kludge, but that's the best that can be done given the insidious nature of the Key2Audio technology.

QUESTION #5: What about Fair Use?

The much-ballyhooed concept of "fair use" is much more complicated than it seems, and much too complicated to cover fully here. Its value in helping us fight the good fight against Sony is significant but limited.

It is of course true that it's not a violation of fair use to rip a CD and load its songs onto your hard drive or mp3 player, or onto a mix CD-R. The essence of the famous, then obscure, now famous again "Betamax" case (in which Sony was the defendant, ironically, and which was decided by the Supreme Court exactly one week before the release of the first Macintosh) is that it is permissible for you to record or copy copyrighted material so long as it does not deprive the copyright holder of revenue it could obtain if your copy did not exist. So in that sense we all do have a legal "right" to rip CDs.

At the same time, fair use does not obligate Sony to make its music CDs technologically compatible with your Mac, particularly if Sony gets away with claiming that these things aren't really CDs. Technological compatibility is a matter for the market, not the courts: if enough people refuse to buy such discs, Sony will stop making them. If folks buy them, then they'll keep on making them.

The tragedy here is that the market doesn't work like a democracy. Consumers will never have the ability to choose between copy protected and non-copy protected versions of the same CD. You won't see Virgin Records marketing their non-copy protected version of the Celine Dion CD against Sony's copy protected version. It's that old problem of copyright.

So if we leave the fantasy world of economics textbooks and travel to the real world, in which demand is not merely met but created, shaped and channeled, we see that relatively few people--especially children and teens--want or "demand" a non-copy protected CD. What they desire is the music that happens to be on the CD (or the persona, or fame, or body, of the person who makes the music). So the kid hears Britney on the radio or sees her in a video on MTV, or sees her in that Pepsi commercial on broadcast TV, and then goes to the store to buy the music. Upon arrival, our young consumer is presented with a CD. The fact that it costs $18.99 even though it cost Sony about 99 cents to manufacture isn't really relevant. The fact that it's copy protected probably isn't relevant either. The $19 copy protected CD is the product, end of story. There's no other legal way to get the music. Thus, there's no way to gauge the consumer's preference for copy protection, because the consumer isn't choosing or rejecting a content-delivery medium; rather, the consumer is choosing (or rejecting) the music.

So fair use gets lost in the muddle of the market. But we can try to find it again if we take a gander at the reason Key2Audio exists in the first place: online music swapping.

The record industry says that CD ripping and music piracy go hand-in-hand; hence the need for digital copy protection. Yet a moment of reflection yields the following observations:

(A) Most noncommercial piracy these days (i.e. mp3 sharing) does indeed involve ripping CDs onto computers.

(B) At the same time, most ripping does not lead to piracy.

(C) Virtually no commercial, for-profit piracy involves ripping CDs onto someone's computer and distributing them via file sharing. Instead, it is likely that commercial, high-volume piracy involves mass copying of audio CDs via standalone CD duplicators that can copy any kind of copy protected disc as easily as they copy Playstation CDs (which use a similar copy protection mechanism). To stop this sort of pirating, the record companies will have to continue to rely on the same law enforcement agencies and tactics as clothing manufacturers and electronics manufacturers do in their efforts to shut down counterfeit designer jeans plants and "Sorny" or "Sonee" Walkman manufacturing operations.

(D) No more than one successful rip of a song from a CD is necessary in order for it to be disseminated all across the internet. In order to accomplish such a successful rip, a person can spend less than $300 for a standalone CD duplicator or less than $3 for a Sharpie felt-tip marker.

These observations all point to one undeniable conclusion: digital copy protection schemes like Key2Audio will not stop illegal music copying. So not only will Key2Audio infringe on fair use, but that's all it will do.

The "casual" illegal copyer, who rips a CD, makes a mix CD for his or her car, puts another copy on an mp3 player, and gives three CD-R copies of the original CD to three friends, may in fact be prevented by Key2Audio technology from using his original CD to engage in this mixture of legal and illegal uses. But as long as someone, somewhere, has managed to rip the CD, this person will still be able to download the album and make that mix CD, copy that file onto an mp3 player, and make those CD-R dubs for friends. The source material, being in mp3 format, will be of slightly inferior quality, but it will hardly be noticeable, let alone objectionable, to most people listening with most audio equipment.

With all this in mind, a new picture emerges. We no longer see a push-pull between fair use and copyright, or between consumer desire and intellectual property. Instead, we see piracy continuing more or less undisturbed, with fair use being seriously disrupted.

It would be paranoid and silly to think that Sony and other record companies would want to destroy fair use just for the heck of it. There has to be a method to their madness, yes?

Let's return to the Betamax case. There was an equally important, but lesser known, second prong to that case. As detailed on this helpful web page, Sony was sued by two movie studios, not two television networks. One of the studios' major complaints was that Sony's Betamax allowed for the creation of a video rental market, which allowed video stores to buy one copy of a movie on tape and rent it out hundreds, even thousands, of times until the tape wore out, without ever paying an additional dime to the movie studios. The Supreme Court ruled that this kind of video rental business was covered under fair use by what's known as First Sale Doctrine, which in essense means that when you buy something you can do whatever you want with it (as long as it's the original, not a copy). That's right--it's legal for you to rent your music CDs to your friends for fun and profit, as long as you're not renting them CD-R copies or keeping a copy for yourself while you rent the original. First Sale Doctrine, it turns out, is what propelled the Betamax case to the Supreme Court: it was the part of the original District Court Decision that was overturned at the Appelate level, enabling Supreme Court review of the entire case. First Sale Doctrine, by the way, is also why you can "license" as much software as your bank account will allow, but you cannot actually buy any.

It is First Sale Doctrine, rather than the more well-known "personal copy" rule, that is ultimately under attack by the record industry. For what reason could there be to prevent you from ripping your own CDs, except to offer you the "opportunity" to purchase multiple versions of the same music so you can listen to that music in ways that currently are defined as fair use: a CD for your stereo; an mp3 for your hard drive, and a "secure digital" copy for your record-industry approved portable digital music player? With a CD priced at $19, an mp3 at $5 (which would include a royalty to counteract the inevitable hard drive-to-hard drive copying), and a secure digital version priced at $2.50, that'd be $26.50 for one music album. No doubt you'd be able to buy all three togeter in a package deal for "only" $25. Or maybe you could license all three formats for the low, low price of $9.95 a year, for the rest...of...your...life--remember DivX DVDs?

Key2Audio is the first step in a dreadful double perversion of Fair Use. The first perversion is the idea that by making a copy of music for yourself, you are depriving the copyright holder of the ability to obtain revenue from selling you additional copies of the same music. The second, linked, perversion is that by destroying your ability to exercise fair use, the record company extends its copyright power beyond the content (the music) to the delivery medium (the CD).

There's no doubt this will all be fought out in the courts. And a recent New York Times article indicates that tech companies might finally be waking up to the threat posed by Hollywood and the RIAA.

But more than that, this requires grassroots action by all of us. As I wrote at the beginning of this column, Key2Audio isn't the worst threat we face by a long shot. But it's ominous as one more little indication of the broad threat to notions of freedom and privacy that are crucial to the quality of life in our country as we know it.

For more information, or to get involved, try The Campaign for Digital Rights at http://uk.eurorights.org/, the Electronic Frontier Foundation at http://www.eff.org/, or the ACLU at http://www.aclu.org/.

We have nothing to lose but most of our rights.

log on to this NYT forum, which is populated with billygate's owned paid2post ?pr? talknician WhoreDoggIEs, & help stamp out evile MiSleading FUDgePacking in our lifetime.

In today's NYTimes (registration blah blah) there's a big op/ed piece on the subject of Hollywood versus, well, everyone else, and why the public and it's representatives in Congress just don't get it.

Low-level format in the BIOS is typically (in my experience) found for SCSI devices; very rarely is there a low-level format option for IDE drives. And besides, you're wrong, fdisk isn't a Microsoft thing; fdisk exists for *nix as well.

Furthermore, people can get data back after a low-level format. Forensic labs have been doing that for years. From the New York Times article "The Mole in the Macine":

"It's very difficult to be sure data is ever actually taken off a hard drive," Garfinkel says. "You might think you could just wipe the disk but that won't do it." The reason is that a six-gigabyte drive often has an additional four gigabytes of storage. The excess, which is invisible to the software, replaces "blocks" of storage capacity on the drive when they begin to fail. As a block goes bad, the disk copies data from the failing block to the reserve blocks. Disk-wiping software typically erases only the roster of good blocks, ignoring hidden blocks, which may still contain data.

On the other hand, The New York Times seems to confirm McIndoe knows something about Echelon (though it doesn't call him the architect): "...Mr. McIndoe, who previously helped develop the National Security Agency's Echelon II program and also founded a company that develops computer intelligence-gathering systems." That seems to me like a pretty major claim (in light of the insistence that Echelon doesn't exist) and the reporter should qualify the source of his info, but he doesn't.

The Washington Post ran one of its standard "check out this company" profiles on iJet, though it makes no mention of Echelon or McIndoe's intelligence background. It's still an interesting read.

Then again you could be wrong:

"Army recruiters like Sgt. First Class Jeremy Burton are pitching a new program that offers direct enlistment in the Special Forces."

Godless Capitalist has followed up the post you referenced by pointing out that a committee has been formed. This was mentioned earlier, but the Times article seems more informative and names the high profile members of the committee. .

Use this link to automatically generate a login and view the article.

I can't figure out what his motive could be. Like Godless mentioned, he was destined to be found out when engineers attempted to create products. I wonder if he was trying to gain riches or fame, or if (unlikely) he believed so much in the new technology that he wanted to see it attempted even if he had to fudge some results.

Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine and the Skeptic Society (Skeptic.com) sent this essay to the email list he runs. ADIEU STEVE

By now almost everyone has heard about the death of Stephen Jay Gould. My phone has been ringing all day so tonight is the first moment I've had to sit and think about the meaning of Gould's life and death. I won't bother here with the basic details of his life, which can be found at www.nytimes.com/2002/05/21/obituaries/21GOUL.html.

Instead I'll provide some general commentary along with a few excerpts from a forthcoming paper I have written analyzing Gould's work.

Steve told me about this latest bout with cancer back in March, and I was amazed at his stamina and strength when, after having brain surgery on Monday, May 1, I spoke with him at his home in Cambridge four days later. He had just finished giving a lecture at Harvard! This cancer was a totally different type than the one he had back in the early 1980s. He was symptom free and went in for a routine check-up in February when they discovered a couple of masses in his lungs. Further investigation revealed that he also had tumors in his brain, and "something going on with the liver," he said. As he characteristically told me back then, "we're still in the data-collection stage, no conclusions yet." Spoken like a true scientist.

Steve seemed hopeful the past couple of months, but I could hear in his mother's voice the past few weeks that the end was coming soon. We can only rejoice in the fact that he lived long enough to see his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, published and widely reviewed. Still, his death was something of a shocker because I just spoke with his family on Saturday morning, and they were bringing him home that afternoon to spend the rest of his days there. I got the impression that there were weeks to go. As Gould himself might have said, life is so very fragile and contingent.

Gould was so famous that when asked to do something that he could not, he would send out the following form letter, which I myself received in 1988 before I knew him very well. (He later became a friend and huge supporter of Skeptic magazine, and he wrote a brilliant essay as a foreword for my book Why People Believe Weird Things.) The rejection note is written in vintage Gouldian style:

"I can only beg your indulgence and ask you to understand an asymmetry that operates cruelly (since it produces tension and incomprehension) but that leads to an ineluctable (however regrettable) result. The asymmetry: you want an hour or two, perhaps a day, of my time--not much compared to what you think I might provide (exaggerated, I suspect, but I won't struggle to disillusion you). From that point of view, I should comply--not to do so could only be callousness or unkindness on my part. But now try to understand my side of the asymmetry: I receive on average (I promise that I am not exaggerating) two invitations to travel and lecture per day, about 25 unsolicited manuscripts per month asking for comments, 20 or so requests for letters of recommendation per month, about 15 books with requests for jacket blurbs. I am one frail human being with heavy family responsibilities, in uncertain health and with a burning desire (never diminished) to write and research my own material. Thus, I simply cannot do what you ask. I can only beg your understanding and extend to you my sincere thanks for thinking of me."

I wrote a chapter on Punctuated Equilibrium ("The Paradox of the Paradigms") in The Borderlands of Science, and one on Gould's emphasis on contingency in evolution ("Glorious Contingency") in How We Believe. There is an interview with Gould in Skeptic, Vol. 4, #1. I thought I would share with you an excerpt from a paper I have written on Gould's work, soon to be published in Social Studies of Science, entitled "This View of Science: Stephen Jay Gould as Historian of Science and Scientific Historian." It is an attempt to tease out deeper meaning on Gould's work through a quantitative content analysis of his writings. The original material for this was compiled for the Festschrift we held for Gould at Caltech last year. This is the section on his 300 consecutive essay streak in Natural History magazine (figures not included). Enjoy.

And adieu Steve. We'll miss you.

There is longer and more complete obituary at the New York Times.

Most science fiction work says more about the times that create it than about the times they claim to be writing about - and in turn, can actually create the future as much as report it. Check out The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of by SF writer Thomas Disch for a funny and insightful take on the relationship between SF and society.

This is not a troll, and it's not offtopic, if Slashdot is truly about "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters":

The greatest evolutionary theorist since Charles Darwin died of cancer at his Manhattan home today... here's the New York Times obituary.

I submitted this story and it was rejected. Apparently Nintendo price cuts and the latest Star Wars box office figures are big news today, but not this.

I suggest that when Slashdot editors reject stories, they put their names on them, so we the submitters can start to figure out who ignores this kind of hugely important news in favor of trivia. Anonymous users are labeled as "cowards"... seems to me the same applies to anonymous editors.

Of course I fully expect this story WILL appear on the front page later tonight, or tomorrow, or better yet, in two or three days, after another 50 people have submitted it, and Taco or Timothy or somebody finally recogizes its significance.

For those looking for this story, it is posted on the IBM Research website. There are also news stories on the NY Times and C|Net.

Junis has an Amiga, quite a video-ready machine. Though he may have some problem with the popular pirate codecs, Junis could well be in the streets of Afghanistan, selling boots of AotC.

We will know as soon as Junis is ready for the Q&A Katz promised the NY Times would occur once things calm down in Afghanistan.

Though I'm not sure why things have to be calm for Junis to engage in further email. This does puzzle me. As time goes on, my faith in Junis does occasionally falter.

May Katz forgive me.

"There's also some stuff like "Watch when retrofitting parts of an old system with new technology"

Tennessee is just about to do something similar with a
nuclear power plant. This plant has been mothballed since 1985 but they want to bring it back online. Oh yeah, they also want to overclock it by 30%; it was originally designed for 1000 megawatts production but they are going to crank it up to 1300 megawatts.

The plant had caught fire in 1975, causing a series of problems leading to the shutdown in 1985. Now they want to extend it's orginal 40 year design for another 20 years. A nuclear-safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists figures that a new plant would be safer and cheaper. From an engineering point of view, "It's like trying to dust off an eight-track tape player rather than buying a DVD system..."

First Three Mile Island. Then Chernobyl. Is Tennessee next?

Press reports of private censorship:

The London Daily Telegraph: High clearance fees inhibit the work of art historians.(John Whitley, "Protection - or racket? How they're keeping art out of sight--Art historians and biographers are going to the wall as the high-finance stranglehold on copyright tightens.", The Telegraph, "11/09/1999" -- I think in a UK context that means September 11th, not November 9th.)

The Irish Times: The James Joyce estate prevents the performance of a song. (Medb Ruane, "The war of words over Joyce's literary legacy" Irish Times, June 10, 2000.)

The Irish Times: As a result of Joyce estate threats, Cork University Press decides that it must excise Joyce's works from a "comprehensive" anthology of 20th century Irish literature. (Terence Killeen, "Copyright row over Joyce excerpts", Irish Times, February 19th, 2001.)

The Irish Times: The Samuel Beckett estate suppresses a 1988 French production of Endgame and a 1994 London production of Footfalls. These incidents are mentions in the article's next-to-last and 4th-to-last paragraphs.(Louise East, "All Beckett's plays to be filmed here for millennium", Irish Times, July 17th, 1999.)

The Guardian: Peter Schaufuss rewrites a ballet under pressure from the Elvis Presley estate.(Jann Parry, "Thin Elvis--Copyright problems have made rock'n'roll spectacular The King a pale shadow of its subject", April 30th, 2000.). Richard Morrison of The London Times comments on the same incident here. (Richard Morrison, "Why Elvis will never leave the auditorium", London Times, April 20th, 2000.)

The Shawnee (Oklahoma) News-Star: The Martha Graham Trust suppresses the production of Graham's Panorama at a Frostburg State University summer workshop. ("Officials try to shield school from fight over dancer's, legacy", Shawnee (Oklahoma) News-Star. The web page's graphics give a date of May 2, 2000, but the story's correct date is July 18th, 2000, as can be verified by examining the page's html source.) The New York Times article (free registration might be needed) is here. (Doreen Carvajal, "Symposium's Vision Fades in Fight Over Martha Graham's Legacy", New York Times, July 17th, 2000)

Animerica Magazine: Special Sailor Moon issue delayed due to rights clearance complications.(Julie Davis, "Sailor Moon Blues", Animerica Magazine, Volume 9, Number 5.)

Historically, Star Wars movies have not been critically acclaimed by critics. For example, Here's a line aboout the Empire Strikes Back from the New York Times:

Confession: When I went to see "The Empire Strikes Back" I found myself glancing at my watch almost as often as I did when I was sitting through a truly terrible movie called "The Island." The Empire Strikes Back" is not a truly terrible movie. It's a nice movie. It's not, by any means, as nice as "Star Wars." It's not as fresh and funny and surprising and witty, but it is nice and inoffensive and, in a way that no one associated with it need be ashamed of, it's also silly. Attending to it is a lot like reading the middle of a comic book. It is amusing in fitful patches but you're likely to find more beauty, suspense, discipline, craft and art when watching a New York harbor pilot bring the Queen Elizabeth 2 into her Hudson River berth, which is what "The Empire Strikes Back" most reminds me of. It's a big, expensive, time-consuming, essentially mechanical operation.

Yet, mostly everybody agreess that ESB is the best Star Wars film. And most critics hated the original Star Wars. Of the reviews I've read of the original trilogy, only Roger Ebert seemed to really get it.

Just keep this in mind when reading reviews of the latest Star Wars.

--

don't forget to visit this NYT forum where billy's paid2post ?pr? WhoreDoggIEs have been/are MiSleading uninformed folks for over 4 years now. nothing GNU about that.

There's a report over at the NY Times (Free reg, blah blah) announcing that Attorney General John Ashcroft has declared possesion of Sharpie(TM) and Marks A'Lot(TM) permenant markers a felony crime in the United States under the latest anti-terrorism law. He also announced that pending a ruling expected sometime tomorrow Post It(TM) notes and certain colors of dry erase markers may soon be added to the list. When asked for comment Mr. Ashcroft said "All your I-Mac are belong to us!" and declined making any further statements.

I started a thread on MacNN about the fact that any cocoa application can read a new Macintosh's unique serial number. I even wrote a sample program that accesses and displays it.

I thought that others might be as concerned as I was. Instead, someone confirmed that, yes-- the Mac's GUID is globally accessible, yes-- it's on the motherboard... but no need to worry because "As much as you feel that the serial number can be abused it won't. No vendor has shown any indication that they will use unique IDs in their programs and all we can do is hope that they won't."

Uh yeah right. Except for Windows 98, RealNetworks, Word for Mac, etc.

Why is that Intel's GUID problems were such a big deal and this barely gets a shrug?

W

In a 1998 copyright law, Congress gave Webcasters an automatic license to stream copyrighted music so long as they paid a royalty fee to be agreed on later. Like broadcast radio stations, Webcasters already pay about 4 percent of their revenue to compensate composers and music publishers. But American broadcasters have never paid a royalty for using sound recordings, which are typically owned by a record label, successfully arguing that record labels are already compensated by the promotional benefits of having their music played over the air.

Webcasters argue that the recording industry should recognize that it derives a similar benefit from music that is streamed over the Internet. In an arbitration panel proceeding supervised by the copyright office, the Webcasters proposed a royalty rate about equal to those paid to composers and publishers, 5 percent of revenue. The recording industry asked for 15 percent of revenue, or a comparable per-performance fee.

In February, the arbitration panel proposed a formula of 0.0014 cent per song, per listener. Conventional broadcasters who stream simultaneously on the Internet would pay half that rate. The rate falls between what the two sides asked for. But because there is no option to pay a percentage of revenue, and because so few Webcasters are making money on advertising, it works out in some cases to far more than a station's total revenue.

a manufacturer who had read the paper said it believed its products were not vulnerable to the attack.

I love how the smart card manufacturing companies are just denying that this is a problem and saying that they've already looked at that issue. Do you really think they feel that way and have covered this problem already, or off the record they are panicking to find a way to fix the problem? I would guess that this is new to them, but that they don't want to admit their cards are vulnerable.

BTW, The story is taken from the NY Times, so if you have problems getting to the Yahoo! version of the story, try this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/technology/13SMA R.html?todaysheadlines

Dude, it's obviously not a "mouse-type interface" where "you have to watch a pointer". I mean, c'mon, the interface might suck, but BMW isn't so completely demented as to make you manuever a mouse pointer around on a screen, trying to click on something while you are driving.

If you had used your mouse-type interface and watched your pointer click the link given in the post, or maybe this other link given in the post, you would have read that you just bump the control in a certain direction, or twist or push it. From the NY Times article:

"To operate innumerable other iDrive features -- including the audio, climate and navigation systems, the built-in phone and all sorts of programmable settings for the locks, the lights and the like -- you use the disk on the armrest, called the iDrive controller. First you tug it one of eight directions that correspond to the points of a compass. To call up the navigation system, you push the controller to the right. Then you scroll through menus and submenus on the central screen by twisting, twirling or pressing the knob. It is not a hands-free process."

So, to get to each of the major systems, you bump the knob in a particular direction. After you learn the bump direction for each major system, you wouldn't even have to look at the screen. Same thing goes for the other twists and pushes, they are always the same every time and can be done without looking when learned.

Even while you are learning, you certainly don't guide a pointer around like a computer mouse while driving, trying to click on things. I'm not saying that the iDrive is great--in fact, it sounds like a bitch to learn. But please, take the 30 seconds or so to peruse the articles before posting, so you know what you are discussing first.

Be sure and click on the "related article" too, Menus Behaving Badly:

My beagle, whose job description is "scan roadsides for squirrels," is in the back, moving from one side window to the other. Each time he shifts, sensors in the seat take note, and the right rear headrest whirrs up as the left one whirrs down. For the next two hours, the headrests dance in tandem, as if trying to provide comfort for restless spirits.

Registration-free link

The US Government recently legitimized plans to invade the Netherlands

When the Netherlands declares extraterritorial jurisdiction over Americans and brings them to trial there, I'd damn well expect the US to do what was necessary to get them back.

--
Benjamin Coates

Notice how we're all posting anonymously on this topic? Scary times indeed - lots of people are afraid to so much as criticize the Bush administration. Fifties flashback for sure.

The US Government recently legitimized plans to invade the Netherlands.

Bah, I quoted the wrong article, here's the one that
quotes A Sony spokesman

And again, I stand by my assertion that the discs
themselves are the problem, regardless of who the
computer maker is. Why release a product to market
if there's a chance it's going to break equipment,
or not even work at all? Hell, the poor woman
mentioned in the above article can only play her
CD in her car!

I enjoyed the first 3 star wars movies. Lame, goofy, immature, weak story, poor acting... they were excellent "B" movies. Some of the best of the genre. And, best of all, they were fun to watch.

The last one was so horrible, so poorly constructed, so poorly written, so self-important, Jar Jar so flabbergastingly offensive... I half expected that it would be the end of the series. But tell people "it's the biggest movie event of the decade" and they line up to see it. Fortunately for the economy, people are morons.

A review I read not too long ago gave the best praise possible to this movie "Spielberg is too good a director to release two horrible movies in a row."

Well, some reviewers disagree; I'll definitely be taking my time thanks to this review (reg. required, blah blah).

Of course if it was legal to check out a crappy preview on-line at some fan's expense and the review turned out to be wrong, I'd be in line on opening day. I guess that epitomizes the MPAA's fears: we might see the crap for the hype before they get their cash... better put those pirates in jail - they're threatening the whole economy!

The below post was Necromancer's, but it is extremely important to point out this illegal act of Katz's:


I couldn't help but notice that Mr. Katz is not using his original thoughts, but plagirizing from an article posted here on /. earlier today.

Mr. Katz's quote:
most elemental tenets of myth, especially when compared to the increasingly elephantine Skywalker saga,

Quote from NY Times article, posted here [nytimes.com]:
and perhaps inwardly suspecting that the whole elephantine system is rotten.

Geez, stop stealing others' stuff and get an original thought, will ya?

Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart

I couldn't help but notice that Mr. Katz is not using his original thoughts, but plagirizing from an article posted here on /. earlier today.

Mr. Katz's quote:
most elemental tenets of myth, especially when compared to the increasingly elephantine Skywalker saga,

Quote from NY Times article, posted here:
and perhaps inwardly suspecting that the whole elephantine system is rotten.

Geez, stop stealing others' stuff and get an original thought, will ya?

John Katz, couldn't you have looked past the first goddamn paragraph of the NYTimes review of AOC to find some catchy word to snip? I mean, my God, the NYT review was announced on slashdot today?

...the American moviegoing public will line up out of habit and compulsion, ruefully hoping that this episode will at least be a little better than the last one, and perhaps inwardly suspecting that the whole elephantine system is rotten.

So, /. readers, from which articles did JK cut and paste to get his Spidey-man ideas?

I can't help but notice... First, two passages from the recently posted NY Times review:

"Clones" takes place 10 years after "Episode I -- The Phantom Menace," and it is as thick with exposition as an undergraduate history course.

Like weary Brezhnev-era Muscovites, the American moviegoing public will line up out of habit and compulsion, ruefully hoping that this episode will at least be a little better than the last one, and perhaps inwardly suspecting that the whole elephantine system is rotten.

Now take a look at Mr. Katz's blurb, where he opens up by describing the flick thus: "increasingly elephantine Skywalker saga" and "seems more like a graduate program." Coincidence, subliminal residue from a review he probably read 15 minutes ago, or something a bit more sinister?

Except when it is. The NYT does this all the time, very often with a significant tone change between revisions. I first noticed this during the coverage of the Presidential debates.

How hard would it be for these web sites to hold on to the old versions of the articles and have the front-page URL redirect visitors to whatever version is the "current" version? That way you could bookmark a version and have it stay _that_ version. When new versions of the article become available they could be added as links at the bottom of the older pages. I think this might be less work than explaining what's changed between versions because you don't have to mess with any actual content, it could be completely automated.

What I really meant was "effectively never".

Many things fall under fair use. Most specific examples are rare. Everybody uses fair use many times during their life, some people do it daily as part of their work or hobby. Multiply by hundreds of millions of people and "effectively never" is really every day.

I prefer to be realistic. I don't think our laws should cater to edge cases and idealists.

Sklyarov was arrested for making a bookreader for the BLIND. Oops, sorry, blind people are an edge case.

Laws are narrowly drawn to put people in jail for commiting bad acts. You do not put people in jail for doing things that are, by definition, fair.

If you're doing research into audio compression and you work for a major university, I'll bet you could persuade the major labels to help you out.

Please tell me you're joking. Try asking professor Felton. Recording industry lawyers where real helpful(sarcasm) with his legitimate research (audio, but not compression). Fair use means you have the right - you don't need permission, completely vital when it comes to criticism and satire.

>>attempt to dodge "fair use" objections by allowances
>>for specific cases of fair use. Bogus defense.
I disagree. If you want to be pragmatic (which I do), the specific cases matter a great deal. The fair use laws were developed years ago in response to specific circumstances at the time. The law needs to adapt as the circumstances change. Therefore, the specific situation that exists today is very relevant.

I think you missed my point. I was saying that DRM allowing a single backup is a bogus defence because it still blocks every other kind of fair use. Actually you supported my position even more. Fair use is very dependent upon specific circumstances. Even if a DRM scheme was magicaly designed to allow all known kinds of fair use, it would still block new kinds fair use. Courts regularly recognize new things as falling under fair use.

I don't know why you make such a big deal out of a "right" that
a) you happily lived without 10 years ago(before CD burners were common).

10 years ago all my music/movies were on cassette/vcr, and I certainly did have the right to make a backup again if the original was destroyed. I don't know why you feel you can take away my rights now.

b) you don't get with most other consumer products (e.g. a car).

Cars are not protected by copyright. Try a book. I can do anything I like with a book except distribute reproductions. I can change letters, rip out pages, chop it up in pieces and glue them back together in a diferent order. What makes you think that should be crime? Any DRM file (music, movie, anything) can be printed as letters on paper. It will look like gobbly gook, but it's the same information. I could change / rearrange the letters to make it play in reverse. I do it to characters on paper it's ok, I do the exact same thing to letters on my computer I go to jail??

I am not fighting for new rights. I'm fighting to keep the rights I have. Just because you don't care about or use some of your rights doesn't mean you can take mine away. And as a programmer, the DMCA affects my rights. I promise you, if they win, it will eventually affect yours. Ever buy or sell anything at a garage sale? Oops, they're also killing "right of first sale" which says you have a right to sell your old books and stuff. If you have DRM books/music/movies you lost the right to have a garage sale.

As far as I know, you wouldn't be guilty of copyright violation in this case.
Exactly my point - I'm not doing anything wrong.
You would be guilty of reverse engineering the DRM
I'm not commiting a bad act, so why are you putting me in jail?
makes me wonder why you enabled DRM for that file.
People do all sorts of unexpected things for perfectly good reasons. You couldn't imagine why a copyright holder would ever want to make a copy of an internet audio stream. I gave three perfectly good examples. You do not put people into jail for doing things outside your tunnel vision.

I doubt that anyone really believes that the copy protection is infallible.

Executives at the recording and movies industries have repeatedly demanded exactly that. There was a senate hearing on Feb 28...

Eisner: "If it's a fact you cannot protect intellectual property on the Internet, I do not accept that".

The president of Intel tried to explain it was impossible.

"Mr. Eisner suggested that computer manufacturers did not want to find a technical solution because they profit from piracy."

Hollywood studios have been promoting a project that would embed a "flag," or watermark in every piece of digital video content. Computers, digital video recorders and other devices would then be designed to play the material only if they detected the presence of the markers.

It's a New York Times quote. I am not being alarmist or extreme - the DRM lobby really truely does want something insane...

Read it carefully - if it's not tagged by hollywood, you can't view it. All of your existing files become unusable. You can videotape a wedding, but you're SOL as far as making copies.

When someone wants something insane, saying "NO" is not idealism, and being pragmatic and realistic does not mean you try to compromise on something only half as bad.

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