Slashdot Mirror

WTF is this trying to say...

"You weren't compatible, anyway"

http://n8o.r30.net/dokuwiki/doku.php/unityfallacy

Did you know that The TCG/TCPA specifications create a technical definition of the "owner" of device? It could be the manufacturer, the reseller, a sysadmin, a user, or someone the user loans the machine to. It all depends on who "takes ownership" (also technically defined in the spec) first. The "owner", in this sense, is the one who gets to specify which signing keys are needed to sign code that the owner wants to allow to run. This can include vendor keys, and even a user's own signing key.

Whether TC is considered "evil" always seems to depend on differences between who uses the device, and who "owns" it in the TC sense. If the TC "owner" matches the consumer who bought the device, there's little problem. But if the TC "owner" is actually the vendor of the device, users can get the shaft if the "owner" elects to restrict native capabilities of the device.

The case of enterprise sysadmins taking "ownership" of company devices away from users is a borderline case that most people can go along with. After all, the device is company property on loan to employee users.

More here:

http://n8o.r30.net/dokuwiki/doku.php/blog:trustedcomputingnotaryinabox

But then again, hypocrisy knows no bounds on Slashdot.

Sometimes I don't get it... /.ers complain because there are thousands of unpatched Windows bot-boxen out there spewing spam... Yet any hint of any kind of auto-update and they complain again?

http://n8o.r30.net/dokuwiki/doku.php/unityfallacy

Who's "we"?

Another notch for this entry...

Aside from that, though, I don't get it. What's inconsistent about praising moves toward openness and criticizing moves away from it?

Ed Felten took a whack at this question a while back that stuck with me in the context of HDCP DRM.

First: Why is the weak system worth spending 10,000 gates for? The answer doesn't lie in platitudes about speedbumps or raising the bar -- any technical bumps or bars will be obliterated when the master secrets are published. ...

So temporary piracy prevention doesn't seem like a good explanation.

A much more plausible answer is that HDCP encryption exists only as a hook on which to hang lawsuits. For example, if somebody makes unlicensed displays or format converters, copyright owners could try to sue them under the DMCA for circumventing the encryption."

Because if there's anything a tech mogul hates worse than his own customers, it's his competition.

DRM in a Nutshell:

An encryption system is a way to deliver information securely, even through the hands of the thieves.

A DRM system is a way to cut out the middleman, and deliver information securely into the hands of thieves directly.

See the problem?

Confusing the thief for the customer is why DRM can never work.
Confusing the customer for the thief is why DRM can never sell.

In review of my last post about Steve Jobs' DRM position, I have distilled a better summary:

Steve Jobs has not called for an end to DRM. What he said was he'd cooperate if ALL of the major labels threw out the idea. Not just EMI, not 3 out 5, not so long as one holdout remains. In other words, in the end, Apple will be the only one left standing that still wants to use DRM. That's not exactly what I call leading the charge to ditch DRM. What he's saying is that he will be the last to give it up.

We'll have to peel it from his cold dead, fingers.

In review of my last post about Steve Jobs' DRM position, I have distilled a better summary:

Steve Jobs has not called for an end to DRM. What he said was he'd cooperate if ALL of the major labels threw out the idea. Not just EMI, not 3 out 5, not so long as one holdout remains. In other words, in the end, Apple will be the only one left standing that still wants to use DRM. That's not exactly what I call leading the charge to ditch DRM. What he's saying is that he will be the last to give it up.

We'll have to peel it from his cold dead, fingers.

Unity Fallacy

"We all" aren't throwing up our hands about anything. I'm not really concerned about having one less vendor for support contracts I don't need to begin with, and I'm certainly not entertaining a big server migration away from Debian because of it.

Maybe I'm alone, but I really doubt it.

Take care that you're not falling prey to the
Unity Fallacy. It's quite possible this particular poster is consistent in asserting there's no such thing as the OSS community in cases where it's squaring off against proprietarian vendors. Just because such a view is unusual on Slashdot doesn't necessarily mean there's any personal inconsistency in thinking.

Inconsistent views from one person is hypocrisy, but inconsistent views among people is just disagreement.

http://n8o.r30.net/dokuwiki/doku.php/unityfallacy

Why do you think that the same people are guilty of this hypocrisy? I would imagine that some gamers like the old stuff, while others prefer new stuff.

It takes a special kind of dedication to think that just because two mutually exclusive conclusions have been reached in the wild, everyone must think exactly the same way.

I realize the industry is consolidating into a greedy enterprise that demands maximum profit through appealing to the largest possible market, but sometimes the market doesn't all want the same thing. Get over yourself, and try specializing.

Uncritical implementation of the Unity Fallacy

I propose The Unity Fallacy to name the phenomenon of people calling hypocrisy on groups of people who simply disagree.

Once more, with feeling:

Slashdotters don't all think alike.

http://n8o.r30.net/doku.php/unityfallacy

Interesting that in the rationale, they decided against taking action to close the web services/remote execution loophole.

It's doubly interesting that, while they made some changes to combat DRM, they said nothing at all about Trusted/Treacherous Computing, which is the foundational layer enabling most modern DRM.

I think that's good, because I believe you can use the latter to combat the former, just by leveraging existing terms in GPLv2, combined with the public's natural interest in retaining privacy.

I saw this yesterday on Ars Technica. It wasn't slashdotted then! :)

The blog by the CTO was actually quite extensive and open, leading me to believe that this is legit, just not ready yet.

The app uses bittorrent protocol, but simply integrates a "buddy list" style private network, such that you can't share with the public. I'll be interested to see how (or if) it traverses NATs. The copyright cartel doesn't have much to worry about, unless public sharing can be hacked into this through some kind of re-broadcast mechanism. I doubt Allpeers will put it in there, as that's clearly not what it's targeted at.

I'm fully convinced that Trusted Computing architectures can be used to protect the little guys as well as the large corproate interests. It's just another tech that can be used for good or ill.

For example, we might be able to use TC to close the web serivces loophole in the GPL. Others have also suggested that TC could be used to insure the purity of participants in a p2p network, to prevent cheating, data gathering (ironic, considering this story), pollution (despite Overpeer's recent shutdown), or even - get this - the installation of DRM rootkits!

wait - isn't that backwards? ....

Possibly there's a crime, but it's not so-called copyright theft. Many readers find this term as stupid and insulting as you probably find some Slashdot comments.

Also IANAL but I think The Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 allows you to prevent reverse engineering, but does not forbid the making of a temporary copy for other lawful purposes such as identifying it for a spyware list. As I read it, people don't need permission from the copyright holder to do this.

Regardless of Stallman's personal views, I tend to think the GPL itself ended up being a functional adaptation of the software market to restore competition. The result of it's effects wasn't to socialize software, but to restore what benefits competitive capitalism actually offers.

A proposal that doesn't involve enforcing features.

This reminds me of some speculation on the rate of innovation in reaction to the attention Neil Gershenfeld's Fab Labs have been getting.

Fab Labs are USD$20,000 boxes of equipment that can be used, with an afternoon of training, to cook up many inventions, including basic electronics. This is the beginning of something that eventually might resemble a desktop nanofactory like this one proposed by Chris Phoenix of The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

In short, the premise (open for debate, at present) is that personal fabricators ("PFs") in every home could do for patents what personal computers (PCs) in every home have done for copyright, when combined with the Internet. If the tools to innovate material things were distributed to non-commerical users, the amount of non-commercial innovation increases, whether we're talking about software or gizmos. For twenty years, incumbent comemrcial patents might dominate, but once they expire, openly-licensed patents could dominate through sheer numbers.

The popularity of open source licensing has largely solved the copyright problem; there are plentiful alternatives for those who insist on software freedom, and more are arriving daily. PFs could extend this to physical inventions, as well.

Huebner's choice of "major innovations" and patents as his measures of innovation just prove his bias is slanted toward the fact that innovation is decreasing because it's concentrating along with the wealth that results from it.

Very small man made things have been around much longer than the term "nanotech". Before that, it was called "chemistry". It still is.

"The term Nanotechnology was created by Tokyo Science University professor Norio Taniguchi in 1974 to describe the precision manufacture of materials with nanometre tolerances. "

Drexler further popularized the term to describe very small *manufacturing*. It has since been hijacked by media and scientists alike in order to attract grant money, most notably from the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which ignores molecular manufacturing entirely in favor of buzzword-compliant "nanomaterials" research.

Sure, if you accept that popular usage is what defines a term, then Nanotech has supplanted chemistry. That's not where it came from, though.

More info on this confusion, and the Eddie Bauer "nude-ins"
here.

SALT!

Not to mention the protocol. ...and the fact the vendor is currently being sued into oblivion over their other product, Kazaa, in Australia.

Nothing says stable technology like a wonderful closed-source product whose vendor might just soon evaporate.

Why don't we try this instead?

A proposal for a collective licensing scheme, complete with technical infrastructure.

Criteria:

1. minimizes the changes required to existing and future software
2. capable of being securely implemented in software released under open-source licenses.
3. runs on existing hardware and networks without modification
4. preserves the capability to innovate new software and hardware
5. provides consumers with the digital content access to which they have become accustomed with file sharing
6. provides publishers and artists with the access to consumers and promotion to which they have become accustomed (whether they admit it or not).
7. fairly compensates publishers and artists for providing digital access to their works based on popularity of the works.
8. does not interfere with consumer's established fair use rights, including those of first sale, or the abilty to make copies for purposes of research, education, citation, review, format, device- or time-shifting, or data backups.
9. is reasonably robust against technical attack.

Send me some feedback.