Glassbook Reader Paranoia

Linh Ngo writes "To follow-up on your recent Stephen King electronic book, you might be interested in a story I wrote at open content.net which brings to light the absurd copy protection that Glassbook Reader uses. In short, you must call customer support if you change your hard-disk or upgrade your cpu, and copying the book from one computer to another is a no-no. The built-in copy protection renders your ebook useless. This is son of DIVX all over again. "

Comments

Re:Copy protection online.

[Anonymous Coward]

And we must decide EQcfg

Let's Talk to Mattel!

[Anonymous Coward]

<Foreword>
Yes it's off topic, but don't moderate this down, or you will consign this important message to the very same "dead media" state this news story rallies against!
</Foreword>

I have a feeling that Mattel really is behaving unacceptably in this matter! But what if I'm wrong?

As a potential Cyber Patrol customer, I am sure that they would be more than happy to entertain an intensive dialogue with me (via phone and e-mail) in order so that I can better understand why it is that I should not know what sites their product will prevent me from seeing and why they are abusing the legal system in an attempt to supress customer-benefiting Consumer Reports-style reviews and analyses of their products.

During my lunch hour, I will call their Tech. Support dept. so I can get their side of the issue, and express my side. Who knows... I might even have to ask to speak with a "supervisor" (and perhaps even the supervisor's supervisor). If I can think of something to say to them tomorrow that I hadn't thought of today, then I will call them again. And so on.

Tonight, when I arrive home, I will send the company an e-mail. If and when they reply, I will send them another e-mail, responding to their points and adding any additional ones of my own. (And if they do not reply I will of course e-mail them to enquire as to whether or not they received my original e-mail). And so on. I think that it would mean a lot to them to know that I cared enough about their company and its product to want to get into a long-term e-mail Pen Pal-esque relationship with the company and its employees.

As as an added convenience -- that is to save them the trouble of having to Xerox(tm) duplicate paper copies of my enquiries for their files, I will send a fax version of each of my e-mails as well.

I will take advantage, so to speak, of Mattel's open invitation for me to submit recomendations for sites to be blocked via a website application (http://www.cyberpatrol.com/forms/lists ub.asp) by using this interface to pose press-conference style questions such as: Why does Mattel take insult the good faith of its customers by making additions to its ``CyberLISTS'' for purely political reasons?

I assume that if they had wanted this form interface to strictly support only the transmission of URL's (and not insightful questioning) they would have programmed out the polymorphism that permits the latter.

Mattel has a corporate interest to serve the customer. And that's why I am sure that they would be most appreciative if YOU, humble Slashdot Reader, were to likewise contact them in order to let them know that you are interested in finding out more about how their software works and to express to them that it not acceptable for them to pad their list of blocked sites merely for the sake of corporate censorship.

Mattel / Microsystems / The Learning Company ... wants to hear from you! Call them, write to them, e-mail them! Let them know what they can do to better serve you, their (potential) customer!

They will thank you for it! :)

--------------------------------From the cyberpatrol website (http://www.cyberpatrol.com/central) :

If you're looking for support on your Cyber Patrol product, please contact:

Cyber Patrol technical support at (319) 247-3333 Monday thru Friday, 9am to 9pm EST,

or email help@tlcsupport.com, fax 319-395-9600,

or mail The Learning Company 1700 Progress Drive P.O. Box 100 Hiawatha, IA 52233-0100

-----------------------------

P.S. If using the website interface (http://www.cyberpatrol.com/forms/lists ub.asp) to pose your questions (instead of URLs)is the only convenient way for you to contact Mattel, I am sure that they will understand. The important thing, as I am sure they would heartily agree, is to get the communications flowing! Let's make contact!

Re:Copy protection online.

[Anonymous Coward]

Technology can't prevent piracy, since a computer doesn't know whether a copy is authorized. Cassettes are extremely easy to copy too, but the record industry survived. They should just make it easy to buy music online, without worrying about this "protection" garbage. Copy protection always ends up screwing the consumers. They're the ones with the copy-protected media. The pirates trade their cracked versions easily, while paying customers have to deal with all kinds of copy protection problems (the article describes them). Eventually, they may just stop buying music, since the pirated version is so much more convenient.

At most, a copy protection system should just educate the user on what is and isn't legal, and let them make the call. When you want to make a copy, the software should explain what you can and can't do with it, and then let you do whatever you want (CD copying software already does this). It could be done with an MP3 file containing copyright information in an ID3v2 tag.

Copy protection online.

[Big Boss]

*sigh*.

And here I thought that the oldest media was going to be the first to grasp how to market to the latest one.

Proposal:

Get a group together (maybe through opencontent.org) and try to create a distribution system that we can live with but still have some way to go after copyright violators.

We need to realize that they are very concerned about theft online. Look at MP3s, whatever your stance on them you have to admit that they are stupidly easy to copy and pirate. We need to have something that will allow them to have some protection while still allowing us to use the info in a reasonable way. It will have to be some interesting technology to get them to buy off on it. It must be open source and not worry about debuggers.

The fact is, nothing can ever contain it totally. But maybe we can help develop something we can all live with. We need to get them to realize that draconian restrictions for legimate users isn't the answer either. But we should be willing to come up with a middle ground soultion too. If all we are willing to do is trupmet full openness with no protection whatsoever we will get nowhere. With paper they have some assurance that it's probably more expensive to copy than to buy it. With bits and bytes where it's a mouse click worth of effort to copy, they don't get the warm fuzzy. We need to find a way to satisfy both sides. Tricky, but I think it can be done. Any takers? If there is a discussion on this topic allready in place on the net someone post a link!

Re:Copy protection online.

[ripicheep]

This is following a somewhat disturbing trend of mainstream media trying to have their cake and eat it too with respect to the internet and digital formats.

Music, television, and print media companies are realizing that there is a demand and a market for their works in a digital format. These companies want to offer their products to us the consumers over a digital medium, but they don't want us to be able to take advantage of any of the benefits that come with digital media, such as ability to copy, edit and distribute at will.

The same reasons that digital distribution appeal to the media, are a concern to them once the product has left their clutches.
The e-book industry wants a format that they can send to you over the internet, that gives high quality text, and that costs little or nothing for them to produce and reproduce. But they don't want the format to be readily coppiable or distibutable by the end user. An appropriate solution has not yet been found.

So, as a solution that shows little chance of being effective, laws such as the DMCA are being passed to try to limit the technology in stead of developing technology that works.
Laws that limit the legal use of technology are unconscienable. If coppying a friends CD is illegal, then it is illegal whether I do it with a computer, or by taping it onto a cassette, or a DAT copy off of the radio. Making it illegal to use a computer to do something that is already illegal makes no sense. Especially when these laws are written so broadly as to limit legal as well as illegal activities.

Why copy protect something free?

[raygundan]

What am I supposed to do with an electronic book I can't move from even from one HD to another? What if I upgrade my CPU? I have to call tech support? This is absolutely ridiculous. Especially for a free book-- why copy protect something that is being given away for free? I would happily buy all my books electronically, and anxioulsy await the day that I can get any book I want, instantly, online with my credit card. There are quite a few out-of-print vintage sci-fi books I'd love to get my hands on, if only old books would be made available electronically! If the electronic book is not AT LEAST as usable as its paper counterpart was, then I will NOT even consider buying it. This includes, loaning it to a friend, reading it at work, at home, in my car, on vacation, and in a foreign country. It also includes the ability to keep on reading the book for centuries regardless of what changes I make to my computer. (Just like a real book. My paperbacks don't seem to mind if I upgrade my processor and hard drive-- why should electronic versions of the same books care?) I am appalled.

Publishing companies, sign me up for electronic books the second you have a clue. Until then, I'll be (grudgingly) purchasing (wasteful and degradeable, but functional) paperback copies of books I want to read, because at least they will be usable to me after I (most definitely) upgrade my computer in the next 6 months.

No debuggers!

[wnissen]

I would point out that another interesting condition is that you cannot run Glassbook when a debugger is running. This is presumably to prevent something like DeCSS where the key was stored unmunged in a variable. However, how could they ever hope to be considered for technical books with this restriction. Besides the obvious problems with detecting a debugger, what about having an O'Reilly book open in the reader at the same time as debugging some code? You'd have to close one before being able to open the other. It's a tremendous pain in the ass, especially since EBX'll probably get broken anyway.

Walt

And privacy concerns?

[zlexiss]

I haven't downloaded the reader, but couldn't find anything on the website about whether or not the reader is sending any personal or other info back to glassbook. Anyone see anything on this?

zlexiss

No Debugger?

[DaveHowe]

On the other hand, CyberPatrol were sure you couldn't reach their encrypted files either. I suspect a few people will be playing with the code in a suitable environment already....
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