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Microsoft Ties DRM Technology To Windows
Andy Tai writes: "This InteractiveWeek article describes how Microsoft, without much public attetion, has built multimedia content protection technology into Windows, thus encouraging the movie and music industries to adapt the Windows Media formats for their content. Microsoft's offering is not very different from other DRM (Digital Rights Management) technologies, but MS has the advangage of being able to place it in the OS, which gives it credibility in the eyes of content providers. 'What's novel is that it's built directly into (Windows Media) that is quickly gaining ground on its own, and that the two (DRM and media) technologies are inextricably linked. The technologies, in turn, are being set deeply into the Windows operating system. Other technologies being built into Windows further boost content-protection features, such as the so-called Secure Audio Path, which scrambles output from a computer sound card so that music streams can't be tapped and copied at that point.'"
the correct link
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Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I only partially agree, the beauty of WMP is that it accept both secure (content provider friendly) data, and open data (cosnumer friendly).
When the client sees this, s/he won't think, "Oh, Microsoft is evil!" they would think that the one who sold them the media (file, cd,dvd, whatever) is evil.
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Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
I support artists by buying CD's. Quite literally NONE of the music in my collection's come from any source OTHER than my own private CD collection or tape collection (in cases where no CD-version's available).
I want to be able to move the music that I paid for wherever I want. If that means off my desktop system to a laptop, so be it. If that means off to a CD/DVD for a "compilation album", I have that right.
Or am I supposed to pay the artist for each and every instance in where I listen to their music?
Nobody gives a flying fsck about them limiting piracy. But their methods also take away rights given to us to utilize this media for personal use in any way we see fit. They're treating the symptoms, and not the problem.
THAT is what we're griping about.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Huh? They didn't get more market-share then Netscape until they had a better product than Netscape.
* They screwed up Netscape, which in the past had 70% market share
Sorry, but they didn't screwed up Netscape.
Netscape did it to itself all by its own.
It started with total ignorance of standards, went on to *two* years (what is that in internet years?) with no meaningful update. It was buggy as hell, heavy, and unfriendly.
MS had a superior product since 4 versions.
That Netscape did nothing to improve their browser while MS worked on making IE the best browser they could produce, is Netscape's fault.
If they hadn't abused their users for so long, this wouldn't have happened.
I remember using NS 3.?? and I loved it, the only times I would've used IE 3 was to get the superior View Source (open in editable notepad window, instead of the ugly netscape one) feature.
But since versions 4? IE got better, Netscape didn't.
It also doesn't help that NS (especially 6)devour memory like there is no tomorrow, minimum requirement for Netscape 6 is two to four times those of IE 5.5.
And it gets worse if you open several windows at the same time, I've opened three NS6 windows and watched as it ate 65MB. I currently have 5 IE windows open, and IE takes 9MB (peaked at 20MB)
I sometimes has up to 20 - 25 windows open, I don't feel like buying Gigabytes of RAM just to accomedate NS.
When I'm on a *nix, it's lynx or konquerer (usually lynx), Netscape doesn't come *near* my servers.
Isthere lynx for windows?
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Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
What makes you say that?
Consumers have accepted encrypted and regional encoded DVD players. As most consumers use Windows, this probably makes perfect sense because it will encourage Windows to be used in home computers and internet appliances.
Remember when all the parts in a computer were about Computing?
Seems that the "Evil© Media(TM) Companies®" want computers to be about protecting them from something I haven't even done to them.
What are the chances that we'll see price increases in computer parts because of this? :(
Now you certainly aren't going to be watching Windows Media under linux...
Actually, the Windows Media Format is properly known as ASF - Advanced/Active Streaming Format. Microsoft claims the codec is open and documented - which is true, in an MS like way...i.e, without a licensing agreement and NDA, the only publicly avaliable documents descrive ASF version 2. This would bea good thing if 100% of the content found on the Internet wasn't in ASF 1 format, which is is.
Luckily some smart folk have reverse engineered and documented the ASF 1 format and are using it to make the avifile project (which currently plays DivXs and ASF using thin layer of Wine to implement the Win32 avifile API) actually implement its codecs natively.
This is a good thing. So help them out.
And don't make a player. We have enough. Port more codecs and fix the existing players.
Why does this absolutely not surprise me? All that it's going to do is stop lamers from copying/pirating stuff. Anybody who really wants to dupe stuff is going to find A Way(tm). All they're doing is pushing Windows Media format which in turn just proves how monopolistic they are.
Now you certainly aren't going to be watching Windows Media under linux...
MicroSoft makes me mad sometimes...
-Andy
Take a minute and look at how consumers have soundly thrashed other lame single-provider "solutions" such as DivX. If the consumers have demonstrated anything over the past few years, it is that they will not allow themselves to be blackmailed into these kinds of situations. If Microsoft attempts to succeed where Circuit City has failed, then let them try. Their inevitable failure will only be more humorous.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I don't know why they're even bothering trying this... the only way to secure streaming media from being copied is to use 100% proprietary hardware, right down to the speakers. As it is now anyone can hook up the audio out of their sound card to the audio in of another computer and record to their heart's content.
I'm not advocating proprietary hardware, of course, but MS trying to make it secure at the OS level won't change anything; it's like if you put bars on the window of your house if it doesn't have a functional front door lock.
# debian/rules
anything that's coming out of the sound card itself is not going to be scrambled if you want anyone to be able to hear it through speakers.
My guess is a Macrovision type method - experiement until you find an inaudible signal that screws up recording. The format could sent lots of data beyond the range of human hearing. Would a large chunk of data beyond the extreme range (say 30khz?) of most mp3 encoders do? Badly written ones might choke.
Yes, that solution isn't perfect. Make another encoder. But copy protection isn't about making it impossible. its about making it difficult enough.
Or just start seeling consumers, new cooler `Windows Media Enabled!' speakers which only decrypt on the way to the speaker cones. Add some real features in there so people will but them.
"Secure Audio Path, which scrambles output from a computer sound card so that music streams can't be tapped and copied at that point."
o ved-media-format based music onto a TDK D cassette tape and there isn't a damned thing anyone can do about it. Want better quality sound? Use a metal formula tape and it'll be near-digital.
I think this must be some kind of misunderstanding. I can see how the internal software level stream might be scrambled, but anything that's coming out of the sound card itself is not going to be scrambled if you want anyone to be able to hear it through speakers.
Got tape deck? Then you too can record your favorite super-duper-crackproof-secure-hollywood-RIAA-appr
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Ermm.. hardware based attacks are wiretaps to the speakers. Nothing can stop that.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Okay - I can't just let some broad open-ended statements like these stand.
For the record, I'm not a musician myself but I have a lot of friends that are. I find it amusing that RMS says, "Programming has an irresistible fascination for some people, usually the people who are best at it. There is no shortage of professional musicians who keep at it even though they have no hope of making a living that way," as most of the professional musicians I know spend their nights & weekends doing music, but they program durring the day to pay the bills.
My 2 bits,
-"Zow"
Have you ever programmed a sound card?
Ultimately, there is a 16-bit hardware register which receives this 1/44000sec sample of sound level, which will soon be converted to a voltage, amplified, and fed to your speakers.
Have you ever designed a hardware peripheral? The CPU puts an address on a bus which announces to any piece of hardware in the machine that there is data on the data bus which might be of interest to it. The CPU does not know and does not care which or how many devices grab the output of a write, and if multiple devices respond to a read there is nothing it can do to stop the resulting data corruption when both devices try to assert an answer at the same time.
Unless, as another poster has suggested, the decrypter is built into the DAC, which would be a radical change of architecture requiring (at minimum) for everyone in the world to buy a new sound card, there is nothing at all the industry can do to stop you from adding a piggyback card to pick off the outgoing audio stream and make it available to some other totally unrelated piece of software for recording. This requires a board to be built, which is why it is called a hardware hack.
Picking off the sound at the driver is a software hack, and it is remotely possible that uSoft might prevent you from doing this for, oh, a few months until someone hacks the OS itself and provides a patch which prevents it from realizing that output is going to unsigned drivers. Unless uSoft decides to encrypt the whole damn operating system, there isn't much they can do to prevent this, either.
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I'm sorry to disappoint you, but MP3 sounds like crap.
WMA is only just tolerable crap, but it is most certainly better than MP3. A WMA encoded stream at 160kbps sounds about like a MP3 stream at 256kbps.
Even VBR MP3 doesn't help... the 160kbps WMA stream sounds better than MP3 VBR at 320kbps top encoding.
Ermm.. hello?? Real world calling head-in-sand Slashdotter. Have you actually spoken with any people outside the ones who visit you in your basement? Microsoft makes BILLIONS of dollars by selling their operating system. Rather well for a complete failure, isn't it?
Mmmm.. Donuts
Actually, it's likely that they are doing us a favor by preventing us from using unsigned drivers. I'm pretty shure that it's easy to get ring zero in ALL microsoft products (Bo2K can do it to 98 and NT right?), so you cna just write a patch for the running code to totally disable to DRM software. This is a superior solution to just capturing the output stream since it will enable to you copy files instantly instead of taking 3 min to play.
I would bet that the visualization/EQ plug-in authors will have stripped the necissary code from Bo2K to get ring zero and writen hacks to disable DRM long before we ever see much music distributed under Microsoft's DRM.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
A similar technology exists for monitors.
Because the basic cost of hosting an auction is cheap, it works well. Everyone in the world gets US$10.00 in credit. (You didn't used to even have to give them a credit card #, and now they require it mainly for ID, not for payment security.) You post auctions. You are charged US$0.25 each time you do. You are charged more if there is a successful bidder.
When your balance reaches US$-10.00 you either stop holding auctions or pay up. You can send a cheque, or use your CC. I don't know if they have an automatic CC charge but another "business," a local toll bridge, does -- when my toll tag account gets in breathing distance of zero they run another receipt.
If the music were fairly priced -- I'd call US$0.25 per song very fair, considering the ease of distribution; much higher than US$0.50 would probably not be accepted, because of the amount of music you're likely to download before finding out how little you like it -- then a system like this would probably be widely accepted.
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The next consumer version of Windows will unify the code base. That means that grandma will be using Win2k technology.
This argument against Windows stability is really getiing old.
"It doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to see how Microsoft, as the sole "signer" of drivers, to favor its own hardware/software over other third party products. "
Yep, those Microsoft sound cards will get top priority over anything made by Creative!
Of course since Microsoft doesn't make sound cards, top priority really isn't all that important, is it?
Maybe you ought to leave the conspiracy theories to the more experienced kooks.
The answer, of course, is that the Internet is the great enabler and you don't have to be a big company to provide content anymore. I think eventually we'll start to see professional grade productions being put on the Internet. Again, the danger here is that the industry will try to tie up the formats you can release the content in. I'm sure it'll be quite a fight.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Are the corporations going to hand over the keys to the public so we can copy the music freely? Are they going to fulfill their side of the social contract that copyright is supposed to be - a limited period of monopoly in return for the public good? If their past exploits are any indication, they'll just keep buying politicans to extend the "limited" term of copyright in perpetuity, and if you choose to listen to the music of your ancient forebears you'll pay whatever they demand.
In Britain in 1534, as the printing press became more available, the Crown made it illegal for anyone to publish without a license. In 1557, the Crown granted a monopoly to the Stationers' Company - only one guild had sole right to publish books, by royal decree, in return for censoring any works the Crown disapproved of. It didn't matter if the authors had been dead for a thousand years, only the guild could publish their work. It didn't matter if the authors were alive and well either!
See any similarities in where we're heading? It's congress instead of royalty, and corporations instead of a guild, but only the names have changed.
I found it interesting to discover that the Stationers' Company still exists today, more than four hundred years since its incorporation. Maybe if I manage to live that long, I'll be able to listen to music created today without having to pay a corporation for the privilege. Oh, wait. I'll still need the decryption keys.
No. That's what "watermarking" is about. The idea is that cracked, but watermarked, content won't play on an unmodified player. Thus, it can't be widely distributed. The cracker community can play it, but only on a "hacker system", like Linux.
There's a further step, and we may yet see it. Only signed content will play at all. It's quite possible that consumer tools will never be allowed to create HDTV-quality content that will play on consumer players. Already, Whistler (Microsoft's next OS) doesn't like to run unsigned software.
I see, if someone can't think of the mystic google search terms, they must be a moron. *sigh*
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Why reverse engineer when you can read the ASF patent.
I can just see it now, "all you need to copy music illegally is an EE degree, an ASIC burner and some software that's been banned - build your own ripper - yours for only $1,299.95"
Alternatively, maybe the price of CDs will come down when people stop ripping off the labels...
MSFT: Or you could just save us the trouble and send us all your money now. We're going to get it anyway, so why make things hard on yourself?
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When it is sanely priced. $4.00 for a song is pure stupidity, and the record companies/microsoft know this. This is one of the reasons why napster/GnuTella and all the other music sharing systems that existed before it came about. Example: A cassette costs more to make than a CD, yet a CD is more expensive? now here's a digital transport that removes any manufacturing and the price jumps higher? If My kids could buy the latest Nsync (Yuck) cd for 10 bucks, they'd buy it. Now? they record it off of the radio,DMX,friends,etc... because $20.00 to a $9-13 year old might as well be $1000.00. (Except for you spoiled rich kids out there twenty bucks is alot of money to a child, and most adults that work for a living)
No matter what they come up with, it will be hacked minutes after release (Time registered WMA's can be converted to wav and then MP3 by using winamp - copy an older version of winamp over the current version and voila, the file out works again!)
I hope thy keep trying, as it will keep us real hackers entertained.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ever try to play one of these in Win98 with Windows Media Player? No sound.....
Sorry, but you're making the all-too-common on /. mistake WRT Windows. Not that I blame those who make it, because you're already living with Linux, so you don't come from the same perspective as a Windows user or even a (shudder) Mac user.
/. This was ~late 1998/early 99. I'd been reading /. based on the recommendation by a Linux-running friend. For more than two years now, I have known about Linux, and have dabbled in Linux, but never switched, even though I agree with much of the philosophy behind it and would on some levels like to switch. So, I just got my new computer, a KT7-RAID with a proc that easily overclocks to 1GHz without even getting as hot as my old k6-2 did at its measly 400MHz--in honor of the occasion I backed up all my data files onto the new HD and reformatted my two old small ones. What operating system did I choose to install as my main one? I had copies of Windows 98SE, Win2k, Win 2k Advanced Server (pirated, of course), and recent versions of Mandrake, Corel Linux, BeOS, and some other various stuff.
.rtf or text. Likewise, betwen Media Player and RealPlayer I can open all the audio formatsI'm likely to run across--but even so, since I'm used to WinAMP and have used it since before it was bought by AOL, I still use the latest WinAMP to play mp3s. And even though any of the three players I just mentioned can now play audio CDs, I still install Virtuosa to play them for me, because it's what I've always used, I like it, and it works and is pretty while doing so. I use ACDSee to view image files, IrfanView to open weird formats that ACDSee can't decode, and have done so for years. I edit images with an older version of Photoshop, though I do use the Win32 port of GiMP for some of its special script-fu. I use Scramdisk for security and GetRight for managing downloads, WinZip and WinRAR to uncompress stuff. It's what I'm used to and I can operate any one of these apps without even thinking about it, andsince I'm just an end user who only needs a few hours at a time with his computer I haven't seen a single BSOD in over a year if you discount the few times I've put a badly damaged CD in the drive and ejected it while Windows was still trying to read it since it was taking too long to try. Even though I do video capture and use my PC as my DVD player, I still never have BSODs or conflicts or any other stereotypical Windows ills, except for that CD problem I mentioned. Now, with all this experience invested, why would I want to switch to Linux and have to pick out apps all over again, basically starting from scratch and throwing away all my former computer experience?
/., and do it every day, for more than 2 years. Yes, I agree with most of the philosophy expressed here against the practices of certain patently unethical corporations. I don't buy Intel, beause I can just buy AMD and still run the apps I'm used to. I hate Disney, so I don't buy Disney stuff--I get other types of toys for the kids. I support the EFF monetarily. Etc. etc. But, even though I dislike the tactics used against Netscape and OS/2 and the other tresspasses of Microsoft, I still use Windows because it works, it's unified, standardized, and above all else it's what I'm used to and I don't have to throw out years worth of apps.
So, here's your mistake: you think most end users care about stability and an overwhelming breadth of apps and the ability to make custom changes thanks to access to the source code. Well, sorry, but we don't care about any of that.
Here's why--but first, some background, so you can see where I come from. I've been using computers since my first day at college in 1995. I started out at the lab with a 20MHz 68k Mac running, I think, System 7 with a plethora of tools like Netscape 1, Fetch, and NCSA Telnet to grab my e-mail off the campus VAX. Being a Mac campus, and having no previous computer experience, I learned to use Macs and was happy with them--except that they always seemed to lock up every hour or so whenever I was doing more than one thing. OS 8 and PPC 7200 Macs in the lab changed that in coming years, and things were stable enough. When I graduated I needed my own computer, so I bought an old used WinBook XP laptop running Windows 95, because I couldn't afford a Mac. Soon after I started being actually interested in what the computer did, what settings I could tweak and why, etc. So, I became computer literate under Windows. I started collecting and using lots of apps. When the laptop dies of old age, I bought a brand-new k6-2 400, based in part on a dislike of Intel's P!!! ID number and its possible misuse if adopted, which I learned about by reading
I installed Windows 98SE as my primary operating system, although I cheated a bit and used 98lite to allow me to install it without Internet Explorer and most of the other useless crap, and I use Powerdesk 4 as my file browser instead of Explorer/IE. But why would a partially-sane, fairly computer literate guy like me, who's played with all the operating systems I listed above on spare drives and what not, do such a thing?
Because, like most people, I don't need uptime measured in months, weeks, or even days--an uptime of 3 or 4 hours is more than sufficient, unless I'm leaving the computer on all night to download something huge in which case it isn't doing anything that will make it crash. I turn my computer off whenever not in use, as do most people. Giving the computer a minute to boot up isn't at all annoying to me or most people--press the button, go get a soda or take a wee-wee, and by the time you get back it's ready to go.
Now, even so, why on Earth would I install Win98SE, out of all the possible choices? Simple: It has all the apps I like to use, and is compatible with almost every bit of software and hardware I would like to use, without much fiddling about and such. End users don't care about having all the software that's available with Linux--we just want to use what's easy and familiar. Linux apps are usually neither. Every app I'm running on my machine, and almost every app I could possibly download for it, uses the same key combos, and most of them have a consistent and predictable UI, and consistent and predictable install options. We don't want to apt-get-make-etc-etc anything; we want to download it or browse to the CD that has it, and double-click. The vast majority of people never ever ever would want to compile something even if they knew how, so the source code is meaningless to almost all end users. And the breadth of software available to end users with Linux is also largely useless--most of it has incomprehensible names which are useful if you're a hacker typing all day on your CLI but a total hindrance if you're an end user who just wants to download and click on something intuitively-named, like "Media Player," or something whose name is common parlance like "WinAMP" or "Napster." There's no wondering, "uhh, what's slrn do?"
The most important part of all that is that end users value consistency, both amongUI features and shortcuts and the ability to cut and paste between apps and the like, and consistency with whatever software they're used to. Which gets me back to why I chose Win98 from among all possible worlds: It runs every app I have ever used. Win2k may be more stable, but it won't run all of my old games, even though most of the other apps I use will run or have versions for it. People don't like to throw out stuff they like, and that goes for software. I mean, I *could* change to an open-source or Linux-supporting word processor like Star Office or WordPerfect, but why give up the same Word97 I've been using for years? When in college even, I was using Word for the Mac. It's comfortable. I'm used to it, and everyone can read it, though if sending to a guy who uses Linux or is mindful of security I just save in
Like most end users, I wouldn't. There has to be a compelling reason to upgrade, to make me throw away all my beloved apps and go wandering around for new ones. Sure, I like reading
That's why end users aren't flocking to Linux and never will. End users don't flock--they just use what they're used to and what works. Windows works well enough. You're never going to woo most users with technical superiority. Lots of superior tech ends up in the dustbins of history. The only way to get most users is to get in touch with new computer users. Get into as many schools and universities as possible, and you'll indoctrinate fresh users who have no predisposition, and they'll probably use Linux for the rest of their lives. The only way to win over old users, people who already have used Windows or Mac for a long time and have a bunch of software they're happy with, is to have a very compelling reason to undergo the upheaval of change. Being able to run your PC rock-solid stable for a month without rebooting isn't a compelling reason, since Windows is stable *enough* and Mac OS X will probably be nearly as stable as Linux. You mentioned having to wait ages for tech support for Windows--also not a compelling reason, since most people either learn Windows or Mac in school, or have a knowledgeable friend to help them learn. The same can't be said about Linux--I have only 1 friend who uses it, and most people have none.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
I have heard acts in Holiday Inn bars that were clearly more talented than some pop stars. Some of them weren't interested in fame, but most simply lost out in the lottery that leads to superstardom.
You said: Obviously talent is still required on the part of the musicians.
Well, duh. The same is true of writers, actors, directors, and many others who create entertainment media. The middleman distribution industry we all love to hate does, unfortunately, serve a useful function, by directing us to artists who have been pre-selected out of the vast sea of wannabe's as being superior and worthwhile. The fact that this industry is biased, self-serving, and rapacious is irrelevant; we still need it.
Look at the situation with books. Now that the publishing industry is consolidated into abou 1.5 houses it is nearly impossible for an unknown to get a novel published. But wait, you say, you can publish your novel on the Web! Well, that's true -- if you don't care about getting paid -- but have you read much of the free fiction that's out there on the Web? Most of it is bad. Even though some of it may be worthwhile, without an editor to preselect it -- even a biased, greedy rapacious editor -- it just isn't worth the effort. Which is why I still buy the latest Grisham instead of surfing up free entertainment. At least I can expect the Grisham to be entertaining.
What we really need is a replacement for the entertainment industry. But we also need a way for artists to be paid. It takes a lot of time and effort to write a novel or a set of decent songs. (The shareware software industry can give you a good idea of the rate of payment in voluntary systems. We studied it in Calculus under "limits.") Perhaps there is a way to do this over the 'net, with volunteer editors and some kind of honor system for rewarding the good artists, but I haven't seen it yet.
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Microsoft doesn't have to invent an uncrackable scheme; they just have to invent one that makes it a bit more difficult and annoying to steal, while at the same time they make it as easy as possible to just pay for the song. I'm all in favor of this. (I want this to work on Linux too, so I don't really want Microsoft to control it. But the idea itself isn't evil.)
I disagree. The best way for the record labels to make money off of their music on the internet is to release high quality, unencrypted digital music that can be played on all hardware, all OS's, everywhere. Currently that format is MP3.
They bundle the music, they use Akamai so the downloads are fast, and they sell an album or a song for a small fraction of the price they charge for an album or a single.
They stop worrying about Napster and other P2P because they know that real fans of the music won't mind paying for it if it's EASY TO DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE ALBUM, EASY TO PAY FOR, and most importantly, EASY TO PLAY ANYWHERE THEY WANT!
All encryption does is prevent honest people from using the music they paid for in the manner they wish. It doesn't stop the lamers who want to steal the music, because they will still circumvent the protections and encryptions.
ALWAYS.
-thomas
"And like that
As for USB digital speaker systems, they still rely on an analog speaker. If need be you can get one of these, open it up
And in the process, breaking the tamper-evident seal, which is detected by the hardware, and the speaker no longer decrypts audio.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
How aboot a more stable OS for the consumers?
Is this really helping anything at all? Maybe they should spend more time making there OS better rather than try to monopolize the OS market even more.
What happens when technology advances to a point where high-end music making equipment is dirt-cheap?
Ain't gonna happen without a fight. Four years ago, I thought the same thing about video/film/animation when I saw what technologies were under development. Today, those technologies are (barely) starting to reach the market, but the cripples that have been put in place (ostensibly to prevent piracy) have been placed such that you still pretty much have to buy production rather than consumer gear. For example, while computer equipment is normally the exception, even that wonderful DVD writer in the new Apple computers that allows you to make your own DVD movies is so heavily crippled that you can't even use it master your own work.
Think about:
1) there is a huge financial incentive to preserve the huge price difference between consumer gear and production gear.
2) there is a huge financial incentive to avoid a world where a consumer can either pay $5 to see the latest hollywood drek, or tune his cable to the latest commercial-quality yet free content (imagine productions like "Troops" at DVD quality, instantly availible on your big screen TV).
If amature content ever became dirt cheap to produce and dirt cheap to distribute, content sellers would not be unaffected. I sure as hell already prefer intelligent material made by people like me over most of the crap hollywood spews. Currently however I don't have a choice. Hollywood would like to keep it that way.
3) the difference in the actual technology between consumer and production gear is now sometimes non-existant - the only change is that the production gear has a plug wired directly to the digital output of the circuitry, wheras the consumer version interposes a DAC between the plug and the digital output purely to deny the consumer digital reproduction. (Sure, you might try to make a case around the SCMS for something like a sony minidisc doing this, but it is also happening in devices that would comply with the SCMS regardless).
I'm not suggesting the industry is going to make blood pacts and send in the troops to keep content production and distribution out of consumer hands, but I think it is already the case that industry players are taking advantage of the "happy coincidence" that anti-piracy measures can be so easily tweaked to also discourage commercial quality production and distribution. Discourage is the word here - the price of production will fall, but not as far as technological progress would suggest, and it will be a major difficulty to set up a rig from consumer gear such that the units can talk to each other with few enough copy control cripples to allow commercial quality content production. Production gear will remain the way to go, despite consumer gear being same tech inside a different case (just fewer plugs).
Be it for reason (1) or reason (2), almost everyone has a good reason to make sure their content control goes above and beyond what is needed to deter piracy.
It's also a mistake to think that we'll always be able to get around copy-control. Sure, that might be true, but it's irrelevant - it's opting out of the fight and letting them win, because it doesn't matter if we (the tech elite) can enforce our rights (or whatever) if no-one else can - we will never achieve that world where there is a free, commercial-quality amature alternative to Hollywood if cheap content production is availible only to us, and not to all the people out there would actually make great films and music and the like.
The "All Purpose Magic Cure-All Elixir" salesman never lets his customers know how to make it themselves. Indeed, he goes to lengths to prevent people finding out. As the copy-control mechanisms increasingly exceed what is actually needed to enforce copyrights, I think it's looking less and less paranoid to suspect a wider agenda. An agenda that is defintiely not in our favour.
Watermarks can be removed by point-and-click tools.
There's also the likelihood that someone will design another point-and-click tool that disables the D"R"M in your average user's system, even if just to restore the fair use rights that have been stolen from us.
As I was writing, you said you wanted to go on fact, not FUD. Well, those are the facts. Most of the advantages of Linux are irrelevent to the average end user, while most of Linux's shortcomings are in areas end users need to have strong, like program standardization and interoperability and in a clean and serviceable GUI that behaves predictably and has standard features adhered to by most apps.
When those issues are resolved--hopefully soon, with Ximian seeming to gain steam--Linux will be ready for most end users. That's when there needs to be a real push to get Linux into every school and university possible.
Now, with all my naysaying above and my tacit approval of Microsoft by virtue of using Windows, I have to throw this in as a counterweight: I do think that Linux will reach the stage where people like me, even us people who have been using certain software for years and don't want to have to switch to something new, will upgrade to Linux. It *will* happen--but how quickly depends on how quickly people start realizing that technological superiority means absolutely nothing against an entrenched marketplace in which the competition is *good enough* and easier to learn. End users used to MS and Apple aren't going to switch over in droves to something which asks them weird questions about whether to install emacs or xemacsor vi or slrn etc. etc. End users are not going to be happy with something in which the file menus and widgets are very different from app to app, and where not all apps can cut and paste between each other. This of course means standardization on a particular set of desktop components for end-user oriented distros, which seems a very contentious issue still.
So, it'll happen--but how soon is enturely dependent on how soon the Linux community can resolve petty bickering over whether this or that is an acceptable inclusion with certain distros and such, and decide that taking control of the desktop away from Microsoft is more important than arguing ad nauseam over whether such-and0such should go into free or nonfree on the Debian CD or whether Gnome or KDE or Ximian should be the desktop shipped as standard on consumer oriented distros. Up to y'all...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
I don't think that the DRM is more secure because it is tied to the OS; it is more secure because it is buried under megabytes of mess. Competitor's DRM technologies could be hidden in a big mess too, but people wouldn't appreciate having to run a 64MB binary. Microsoft's advantage comes from the fact that they already have a mess installed on every desktop they can use to hide stuff.
Speaking of AVI, do you know any way of converting MPEG to AVI in Linux?
I know of avi2divx and mpeg2divx, available here.
They use a similar WINE based interface and motion JPEG as an intemediary format, using a Morgan Multimedia demo codec.
In addition, it can be hard specialised work being a _plumber_, or a toilet maintenance expert, or a long distance truck driver, or a pallet loader at UPS. Nobody behaves like these people are deities, but they sure are useful.
In my way I am an artist. I can honestly say that I work at it as hard as any top-of-the-line plumber, or UPS pallet loader. There's a lot that goes into it, and it costs a lot for equipment, and requires some pretty serious dedication to learn the craft. I think it is absolutely absurd to expect to be treated like Picasso just for being _an_ artist (thing about Picasso is, not only was he an absolute virtuoso but he kept it up his entire life), but I do expect to get as much respect as a UPS pallet loader or long distance trucker- and, in turn, extend it instead of getting all haughty and Mick Jagger about it ;)
The fact is, any artist who's any good either is a bit of an idiot savant or put a lot of work into their craft or both. I admit to both. But I only want the _chance_ to earn respect over my lifetime as a music creator (not 'career', music business careers are about 2 1/2 years now if you're lucky).
That isn't the same thing as saying I want the chance to earn _money_. If digital copying means almost nobody makes or is forced to spend lots of money as a musician, I can accept that. But in order to have the chance to earn respect I need to continue to be able to produce digital music myself and have people download it. That's what's at risk now- the danger is, the content controls will lock down so much that people won't be _allowed_ to listen to what I'm able to produce unless I go through channels. That's bad.
>rationalize your 40 gig divx/mp3
Sure, why not. My collection includes:
- Free promotional material.
- Fair use MP3 backups of all my CDs.
- Time shifted videos that I still need to watch.
If that ain't legal then sue me.
>but please don't ignore the fact that you are really stealing.
Huh? Say what? Oh, I see. You're confused about the distinction between format (MP3/DiVX) and the content.
Okay, I'll clear it up for use in terms you might understand.
A long time ago there were these "VTR Format Wars" in which the Beta format (owned by Sony) and the VHS format (freely licensed by JVC) were competing. I'm sure some people confused the VHS format with stolen content, since VHS was used for many things, including Home Recordings, and "unlicensed" distribution of movies [as JVC was fully open with their format]. Sony, on the other hand, preferred a stranglehold grip on the market (at first). So, if one couldn't make the distinction between casette size, then YES, Beta only held "legal" movies.
But once consumers got over these hangups in the late 70's/early 80's they realised how much nicer it was to have the _format_ abstracted from the _content_ and simply chose VHS.
Another example:
TVs vs. Theaters. At a theater you'll notice that only licensed content is shown. On a TV any content can be shown, legal and stolen. So one might, erroneously, conclude that the Theater format precludes the possibility of showing stolen material.
Let me clear that up. If you were to purchase the equipment to make your own ceullulite movie strip, then all of a sudden the theater is a "stolen" format only, right?
Nope, because you have to make the abstratction between content (stolen vs. legal) and format (VHS, Beta, TV, Teater, DiVX, MP3).
Does that clear it up at all for you? I'm sure I can come up with more examples if that doesn't explain it.
>just because a post has the word "microsoft" in it doesn't necesarily mean you need to bash it.
I was looking for the keywords "Rights Management", "Secure Audio Path", "scrambles", and "content-protection", simply because I don't agree with these ideas. I couldn't care less if Linus integrated these into Linux. These words make anything they touch suck, IMHO.
Microsoft chose to use them. Their problem, not mine.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Please. If IBM hadn't handed MS a monopoly in the PC market and MS hadn't spent a lot of time squashing the alternatives they would have disappeared a long time ago. The appalling quality of their software is made up for by their brilliant marketing and their pushing alternatives out of the market.
BTW how do you know that your blue screens were caused by bad drivers? Does Win2K have core dumps and a good syslog? NT4 certainly doesn't.
I hate Microsoft because so many better alternatives have been crushed due to their abuse of their monopoly.
They are mostly interested in people making copies of the media that are undiscernable from the original
I can hear the quality degradation from a CD to a 128 Kbit/s MP3 stream, even with the excellent LAME and Fraunhofer encoders and cheap-@$$ Sony Walkman headphones. 128 Kbit/s MP3 files are common on Napster, but they're not "undiscernable from the original." So, from your argument, why in the world is RIAA going after Napster?
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
People want that audio on their stereo, on headphones, on their belt as they jog, and they aren't gonna buy it if they can't get it there. And as soon as you put a headphone jack on your secure digital speakers, they aren't secure any more. Even Joe Doofus can run an attenuating patch cord from the headphone jack back to the input of his real sound card, and sure he'll lose a little quality (the .MP3 compression doesn't bother him though, does it?) he won't lose any more quality when he passes further copies to his 12,000,000 closest friends on Napster.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Unless your line out is in a digital format, that's lossy.
(It won't be digital because of Secure Audio Path.) But the quality degradation from using an audiophile-quality analog setup is still a couple orders of magnitude less than the degradation from encoding to 128 Kbit/s MP3 format (the most popular format on Napster) even with excellent LAME or Fraunhofer encoders.
Even then, you run into the SDMI watermarks on new content.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
That is EXACTLY what Linus did, you ignorant fuckhead. That is why Linux is called
drumroll please
an OPEN SOURCE operating system.
What Linus doesn't do, it turns out, is put his personal blessing on hacks/mods that don't meet his personal standards. This doesn't mean that you or I can't download the code and do whatever we want with it under the GPL.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
somebody never took econ as a kiddie. price is set by demand and supply, not cost.
In a truly competitive market with unlimited supply, cost does indeed becomes the driving factor in price. As you point out, the music industry is not competitive. You'll notice that as much as the new copy prevention schemes battle fair use and piracy, they also raise the barriers to entry in digital music. The latter is probably the real point, since otherwise, their market maigh (GASP) become competitive.
This on itself is bad. But check out this story to find out what might happen with your mandatorily provided registration data...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
But, no matter how different the HCI of the web page, you're still going to be able to highlight something and hit Ctrl-C to copy it in Windows; You're still going to have a file menu with filey-stuff on it, and an edit menu with edity-stuff on it.
The web page HCI is only layered on top of the familiar HCI of whatever desktop you are running, and I think the author has a valid point.
-
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Well, if you're at all like me, the phrase "Secure Audio Path" raised a lot more questions than it answered, so I've done a little digging around the msdn site and found some information. My apologies for the blockquote spam, but I think they explain it quite well:
The best information seems to be in their SDK documentation for windows media:
A quick glance at the latter's diagrams shows that, if nowhere else, they are clearly vulnerable to hardware based attack, but of course, the whole scheme, as has already been pointed out in this forum, is also vulnerable to a $15 tape recorder. :) At any rate, just some extra info for those similarly piqued.
> Of course, clever intelligent people will be
> able to hack it. But the question is whether
> your average Joe Punter is going to.
All it takes is one clever, intelligent person writing a little tool that does the hack and making it available for Joe Punters everywhere to download (somewhere out of the reach of the DMCA).
The "economic argument" just doesn't hold up in a world where everything can be automated.
So run WIndows 2000 in a virtual box on VMWare and write a hardware emulation of an "approved" soundblaster soundcard (ie: with signed drivers).
It's almost always possible for programs to discern whether or not they are run under emulation (VMWare is a virtualizer, that is, a motherboard emulator). For example, check out this four-line 6502 assembly segment that determines to 99.x% certainty whether it's running on a real NES or the NESticle emulator. There will probably be several similar flaws in VMWare that Microsoft can detect, and Windows will refuse to enable the Secure Audio Path in those cases.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Windows Media Player runs pretty well under Wine, oddly enough...
It doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to see how Microsoft, as the sole "signer" of drivers, to favor its own hardware/software over other third party products.
Same goes for software -- since visualization/EQ plug-ins, etc. need access to decoded raw audio, you can bet that MS will enforce a similar signing policy for such software before allowing API-level accesss to decrypted bitstream.
MS could oh so conviently "delay" signing of say, WinAmp's plugins, while MS's own Media Player can work with these formats right out of the box!
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Just remember what happened when CDs were released. We were told "the price will go down as they gain acceptance and producing them gets cheaper". Now they're almost universal, and I don't see a price cut anywhere nearby, do you? The music industry seems to want to be able to force people to buy their products and only their products (want to be that, to be able to distribute properly encrypted audio, you're going to have to wade through enough red tape to make DVDs seem open?) for insane prices. One has to hope that they'll die, and die fast.
-RickHunter
You say that when costs fall, prices always fall... This is not how the music industry has worked to date - the production cost of CDs is tiny compared to vinyl LPs, but a typical CD costs the same as an LP. So why should they massively reduce costs for online delivery?
Of course, if copy protection works badly enough, these higher prices create an economic incentive for hackers to get round the various mechanisms.
Luckily some smart folk have reverse engineered and documented the ASF 1 format and are using it to make the avifile project (which currently plays DivXs and ASF using thin layer of Wine to implement the Win32 avifile API) actually implement its codecs natively.
Of course Microsoft could claim DRM is a copy-protection scheme to "effectively" enforce the copyright on the works, and this effort would become a felony under the DCMA. (Running somebody ELSE's software under WINE might skate by, but doing your own would run right into the Feds.)
This strikes me as Microsoft trying to sweet talk the move studios into putting all their content out on their proprietary format. (It shouldn't be too hard, given the association in the studio execs' minds between Linux software and DeCSS.)
If they succeed, they've set up a situation similar to the way VHS pushed out Betamax: The Beta format was better, but VHS had all the movies.
Linux as Betamax, Windows as VMS, and the DCMA to make it a federal felony to fight back.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Using one monopoly to gain another", I think it means. They're using their O/S monopoly to establish a digital media monopoly. Playing digital media content is definitively an application function, not an operating system one, more clearly so than the browser thingy IMO.
Uh duh.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
(note: I'm not going to even go near the ethics of using a method like this to pirate media. I'm just commenting that it's possible)
"Secure Audio Path" will not work. All I have to do is play whatever godawful WMA+DRM "content" I want, connect the line-out of my sound card to my line-in, and hit record. Quality is not an issue here (at least not with a good sound card); I'd wager that the quality loss would be less than that sustained by the watermarking/compression process.
Even if they somehow manage to mess with this (disabling recording to a sound card while it's playing their shit), there are solutions... two sound cards... two computers... Sure, using two computers (or even connecting line out to line in) isn't something you're average Joe will do... but that doesn't matter. Once a few people defeat the DRM and make Ogg Vorbis / MP3's out of their WMAs, everyone else can get them via Napster or whatever peer-to-peer method they want. (Side note: The day they start charging for Napster, www.napigator.com is going to suffer an unintentional DoS. Opennap can't be sued out of existence so easily.)
That last hop from computer to speakers is an unencrypted analog one, and will likely remain analog for a long time. That means that it can be redirected and recorded. The *ONLY* way for the XXAA to stop people from copying their "content" (how I hate that word) is to make piracy not worth it. There are two ways of doing this: increase the (opportunity) cost of piracy and decrease the cost of music/videos. The opportunity cost of piracy keeps going down, and attempts like DRM won't stop it... there's only one solution left to them. If their "business model" can't stand up to the Internet, it should die an ungraceful death.
"Napster is not an evil thing for content owners," [..] "It's just that it doesn't have any DRM in it."
.NET distibuted application framework and their upcoming "one CD-key per computer" licence model - and I can just imagine the next step:
Translation: We're not making money out of it, but we want to.
It's hard to start charging people money for things that they can get for free. But if they're already paying for something, it's easy to get them to pay a little more. If digital content management is deeply embedded into the OS - figure in the
"With your Windows Subscription(TM) [a mere $40 per month, major credit card required for automatic paperless billing], just point and click to download and listen to music - and the fee will automatically be charged to your account!"
And then what next? A small fee for each and every time you listen to a song - even if you've already downloaded it? As far as I can tell, this is spookily close to being possible, and there could be some messy privacy intrusions if that was the case. 1984 and "Big Brother"? More like Win2k and the omnipresent Willy G... it's not hard to imagine.
(Posting anonymously because Microsoft [indirectly] gives me money. I'm so sorry..)
Actually, there might be software hacks which do not require faking a signed driver. Specifically, Windows has never been very good about keeping ring zero to it's self. BO2K (open source) can get ring zero in 98 and NT right? Anyway, it's highly unlikely that they will monitor the checksum of running code, so you can just disable all the rights managment stuff in the OS on a running system.
You could also just use protected mode to redirect the sound card IO ports, but I'd consider this and hardware hacks to be inferior solutions compaired with just "fixing" the running DRM code since you could only transfer music from secure to insecure at playback speeds. If you just fix the DRM then you can copy anything that you want to copy.
BTW> I will laugh my ass off if they try to add runtime monitoring of code. That would be so much work for such a bandaid fix for the fact that they can not improve their protected mode handling.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
"
:)
1) there is a huge financial incentive to preserve the huge price difference between consumer gear and production gear.
"
In my experience there is a huge quality difference between pro and consumer gear. Pro stuff is designed to be taken apart and fixed, not chucked and replaced. It comes with big size circuit boards, screws with standard heads, steel cases and rack mountable. They also often come with controls that can be read in the dark and don't break when dropped on the floor.
The build quality between pro and consumer gear is substantial.
Also, pro gear never ever has a big logo on the front labelling it a pro version
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Don't forget the proposed changes to the ATA (IDE) protocols, and accepted changes to the SCSI and Firewire protocols, which allow third parties to control access to sectors on your disk. With compliant software (and you can be damn sure Windows 2002 will support it!) sectors can be rendered unreadable, even un-deletable, to every other program.
On my darker days, I suspect Windows will flip that secure bit on the boot sector for "protection" from "malicious" software such as Linux or *BSD. But I digress..
It's clear that this is a nearly end-to-end solution for "secure" media - you <b>can't</b> read the data from the disk without one encryption key, you can't read the bitstream without a second encryption key, and while first-generation drivers will decrypt the datastream in software, it's not hard to predict that the decryption will be pushed onto the sound card in the near future. You don't have to modify the codec itself, all you need is a bit of silicon between the bus and the codec which handles the decryption.
Looking just a wee bit further ahead, why do you need a sound card at all? USB speakers, with decryption and codecs in the speaker itself!
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Interesting that you accuse me of trolling.
Maybe you should go educate yourself before posting as an Anonymous coward.
As much as I can't stand Spears' style, I must
respect her vocal range and quality. I' afraid
I do respect her as a musician. She would have
made a fine mezzo, had she only studied real
music instead of this horrid tripe they call pop.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I personally have a couple of microsoft.com and msn.com addresses in my etc/host file. They all point to 127.0.0.1. This is not a problem for me since I never go to Microsoft's websites. But if I had to, I think I would use an anomyzer site to keep some distance between the beast and me. Better to remove that TCP-IP route between MS and me since I don't need it. But maybe Microsoft does...
I'd expect someone with such a low /. number to be smarter than that. Of course it cannot be trusted on all machines. That's why there is the hardware compatibility list. Don't even try to tell me Linux is not the same. You must make sure all your hardware will work with Linux, otherwise you will have problems.
It never ceases to amaze me the number of /.'ers who have the dumbest problems with Win2K. They have no problems recompiling kernels, patching BIND, or hunting down obscure equipment that has Linux drivers for it, but when it comes to ensuring they have compatible equipment and drivers before installing Win2K, well that seems to be too much to ask.
So, here in a nutshell is your guide to a stable Win2K. 1) Check the HCL and make sure you have compatible equipment and drivers. 2) Check any software that you have so to make sure there won't be any surprises with Win2K. 3) Install.
Use common sense like you would with Linux and you can get a very stable system.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Heh. Reminds me of Dire Straits' Money For Nothing:
Look at 'em yo-yos, that's the way you do it
You play the guitar on the MTV
That ain't working, that's the way you do it
Money for nothing and chicks for free
(...)
The little faggot got his own jet airplane
The little faggot is a millionaire
Thank you for the correction. You are, of course, correct. The main point I was trying to make is that you're depriving the owner of revinue illegally - revinue that the (copyright) owner is entitled to. I would contrast this with the Warez community, much of which collects Warez not to use, but just because that's what they do. I believe the statement that the SPA's claim of millions of lost sales of some software packages is overstated because an unauthorized copy doesn't mean that software is being used (and by extention, that it should have been purchaced).
Good point. Will this still be possible with the content "protection" that the RIAA wants ?No. But I will go a step further and note that this level of content protection will not be achieved as it requires rather severe measures such as tying the song to one playback device (so you need a separate copy for home, car & office) or authorization at the time of playback (like Circuit City's Divx did). Consumers have rejected both models repeatedly and I expect (hope) that they will continue to in the future.
-"Zow"
Here's why that's important: of that $20, artists see less than a dollar, and typically less than $.25.
Excellent point! Now I feel better because I'm stealing not from people but huge corporations.
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Let me put it this way: I have music at besonic.com/chrisj for free downloading. There's a lot there- put a lot of effort into it because it's what I love to do and I can't get music like what I want out of the major labels anyhow, gotta make it myself.
That said, there comes a point where I don't even care if people go listen to this music- what I am appreciating is a situation where people can go listen to it, if they like, without costing me anything. I can't maintain a distribution network that would put physical CDs in people's hands all over the world for pennies or for free- the CDs that I have made are white elephants, physical media isn't as popular as it used to be, it's a losing deal. Internet distribution is so much better because it's so much more flexible...
So, my primary concern here is not to get better access to major label stuff (I don't even care- it basically sucks, who wants it?) or to gain equal access for my stuff. I'm perfectly happy to have a situation where my stuff can only thrive on its own merits, always out-publicised by other stuff. What I don't want is to be outflanked- don't want to lose the distribution media (redbook CD audio, mp3, internet file distribution) that I _do_ have available at this time.
I consider that a very serious risk- after all, every single one of those taken-for-granted technologies is under attack, up to and including redbook CD audio (see BMG's attempts to introduce a copy protected version). So from my perspective, I totally, completely agree that the music industry wants to be able to force people to buy their products and only their products. As an independent musician, studio owner, recording and mastering engineer not affiliated with the RIAA, I really don't like the idea of the general public being forced _not_ to buy/use _my_ products. Call that capitalism? *spit*
It's a 'boiling the frog' problem- do it slowly and steadily enough and the general public doesn't really notice, particularly when they're not told. The general public does not, for instance, understand exactly what 'music CDRs' are, or why they are more expensive, where the money goes, why some newer players may refuse to play music off 'data CDRs'. None of this is done in daylight- it's done in scheming silence as a fait accompli. It's done through totalitarian processes rather than capitalistic processes, and the intended result resembles state socialism as practiced by the USSR rather than capitalism.
It's funny how much respect I've gained for capitalism once I figured out we Americans don't have it. I'd like to see us have more of it, in addition to the socialist tinge that moderates our government. There's no freaking point in proceeding with a corporate oligarchy totalitarian state and then grudgingly slapping a coat of social-policy socialism onto it to cover up the uglier bits. If we expect to be considered 'capitalist' by history we'd better shape up and start considering the nature of power and where it settles, and take steps to establish that we do have something at least vaguely resembling a free market.
I'm here to tell you that a world in which the only way you can distribute music content to consumers is through corporate-controlled encrypted formats backed by law is not even vaguely resembling a free market from where I'm standing. Please do everything possible to prevent things ever getting to that state, even to the point of boycotting the RIAA labels and intentionally pirating their wares to injure their profit, which is being used against capitalism and for totalitarianism.
I won't be doing that part because I have my hands full simply taking care of my side of things- upgrading my studio, producing music intended to be circulated freely, keeping informed of how things are in the music business. But because of the direction I see things going, I have to say I completely support and respect anyone who's actually trying to use music piracy as a weapon to hurt the RIAA labels. Hey, name one other weapon we have? I don't see any other defense against them, and just because it's not being fought in _your_ trenches doesn't mean it's not a war.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Really, no shit sherlock. Every windows browser I have seen has them though, and that is what we were talking about.
-
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Its interesting how many of these media access control architectures that the various large corporations are pushing are built around software.
What these big corporations are forgetting is that software is just a bunch of bits stored on some magnetic media somewhere. These bits can be looked at, pondered over, duplicated and modified.
Yes, your operating system may verify that your software is special in some way. Perhaps your programs must be signed by one of these corporation's master keys before the program can even begin play with the imprisoned audio and video. But your operating system itself is just a bunch of bits, and bits can be changed. How can an operating verify it has not been altered or even verify that it verified itself?
Of course, there is always hardware. Sure, your hardware may insist that your software meets some specific, magical criteria before the software gets the privilege of looking at that imprisoned song, book or movie, but the hardware still depends upon the software. And software is just a bunch of bits. And bits can be learned from or changed. And hardware can be deceived.
And then there is the hardware itself. The opaque, unchanging, mysterious hardware. Or is it? Opaque? No, hardware can be studied as well. Logic analyzers, in-circuit emulators, oscilliscopes and other toys allow for the exploration of the depths of the machines. Unchanging? Also wrong. Flash memory, EPROMs, and soldering irons abound. Nothing is immutable. Mysterious? No as well. Someone designed it. Somewhere out there exists the source code to the firmware and the VHDL for the chips themselves. Nothing can go undiscovered forever.
So where does this leave us?
No matter what obstacles are thrown at us by those who espouse the ideal that absolutely no action should go uncharged, they will be overcome. There will always be a Jon Johansen or a Julien Stern and Julien Boeuf that step out of the corner and say "Hey wait, your system isn't so special at all."
Then those big corporations will start all over again. They will come up with their Next Great Thing, their New Magic Bullet, their Unbreakable Secure System. Their marketing departments and PR flaks will crow about how wonderfully great their new system is. Until someone else steps out of the depths...
Information is unstoppable.
---
The Hotmail addres is my decoy account. I read it approximately once per year.
You got that straight. The music industry has been ripping off the masses for years now. The only reason we accept CDs for $20 is because we've been trained to think thats how much they're worth, just like we've been trained to think how impossibly special and talented "artists" actually are.
Please don't preach to me about hard working artists. It's not hard work being an artist. Some record exec decides what songs you'll sing, what look you'll have, what demographic you'll be targetting. Some dip shit writes your songs. All the "artist" has to do is sing(wow, that's real hard to learn how to do) and go on Leno once in a while to demonstrate his/her stupidity in an interview ("I've been singing since I was 3!"). It's hard work being a pediatrician, or researcher, but instead, the artists are becoming billioners instead of these people, who are actually doing something for humanity.
And please, no business majors preaching about "supply and demand". $20 a cd is theft, in my book, and I dont care about anyone else's book.
gnapster and opennap is all I need. it will take a long while before the lawyers smash these up. poetic justice.
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python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Bzzzt! It's called Fair Use, You are allowed to make copies of copyrighted material for your own private use. In old tech, this was recording a TV show for later viewing, making copies of your CDs for your car, quoting a paragraph from a book for a book review, etc, etc. Copyright protection schemes are taking away the fair use Freedom that we have been taking for granted for years.
If someone streams something too you, you should be able to record it for later viewing/listening. This is fair use. On the other hand, if you turn around and give copies to other people, this is piracy.
Yes, and I heard Bill Gates mother is a member of the Costa Nostra.
It's funny. There's no shred of evidence that Microsoft engages in these practices today so therefore they must be true.
But while I was talking about the application division using undocumented calls in Win3.1, you were talking about third party companies supposedly having access to undocumented calls which are only documented if you give MS money.
Which seems rather loopy to me.
Look, not everybody in the world is conspiring to get you. Just remember that and live your life.
Jay Samit seems to get it.
Microsoft doesn't have to invent an uncrackable scheme; they just have to invent one that makes it a bit more difficult and annoying to steal, while at the same time they make it as easy as possible to just pay for the song. I'm all in favor of this. (I want this to work on Linux too, so I don't really want Microsoft to control it. But the idea itself isn't evil.)
But it won't work while the record companies try to charge too much money for the songs. $4 each? That's one-fourth the cost of a CD!
Whenever I consider copy-protection issues, I always remember the example Borland set in the mid-80's. At a time when other companies were charging high prices and using copy protection, Borland charged low prices and didn't use copy protection, and sold a ton of products. The lesson is clear: if you charge a fair price, most people will pay you instead of ripping you off.
So if Microsoft or anyone else can make a system as easy-to-use as Napster, which makes payment so easy it's automatic; and if this system is then loaded with music the average person thinks is fairly priced... it will be a gold mine.
But what makes a fair price?
Serving up music via the Net should reduce costs for everyone. No need to pay for warehouse space to store piles of CDs. No need to pay a CD manufacturer; no defective CDs to throw away. No guessing wrong what the people want, and having to destroy thousands of CDs no one would buy. No retail markup. The band makes the music, the web page sells it, the consumer listens. Not a middle-man in sight, which (as Scott McCloud says) is great news as long as you aren't one of the middle-men.
When costs fall, prices always fall too. If they can make money now selling a CD for $15, they ought to be able to make money charging a heck of a lot less just for a copy of the bits.
Well, here is the kicker: the record companies seem to want to lock the prices in where they are now, despite costs that will be lower to them. In other words, they want their profit margin to go up, a lot. And they seem to think that just by using the right copy-protection technology, they will be able to do it. It won't work.
In the future, the cost of music will fall. It's going to happen. The record companies can get on board and make money, or they can try to use copy-protection to prop up prices and go broke.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Which is just bullshit. The 'honest people' are going to get the decrypted versions of these files over systems like Napster or, since Napster is going full-on-corporate gnutella, cutemx, or whatever pop up to replace these if they disappear. They won't know or care that the original file had to be hacked using some obscure hacked Windows kernal with 'Secure Audio Path' code disabled. And I'm ignoring, for now, the fact that anyone can still just rip the original CD and ignore the music company's 'approved' digital version of the file (at least until they supplant CDs with something that has more protetion built in).
The core problem is this: Many people have already gotten used to the free distribution of this type of media...Since this is the case, systems designed only to keep 'honest people honest' are doomed to failure because the 'dishonest' people (the hacker/cracker/whateveryouwanttocallthem) will disable any protections and then get the unprotected versions out onto these distribution channels where the honest ignorant people are.
...when all devices in our lives are digital. All connected together on the same fiber-optic network. Data from any device could be routed to any other, anywhere on the planet in an instant. Think of the possibilities.
The downside however is that most of this data will probably be encrypted. The manufacturers will claim it's in the interests of fighting piracy, but it's more than that. In actuality, you won't be able to use the data in any way, shape or form without obtaining some kind of costly license, thus enabling the makers of these fine products to control innovation. In other words, they don't want to allow anyone to make a better product unless they get a cut.
If this scenario happens I can see two possible outcomes. Either the world will wake up and smell the feces, or those of us who cherish our freedom to create and interoperate will be labeled outcasts and outlaws.
But if you aren't already in the business of producing production gear, there is a huge financial incentive to sell production capable gear at consumer gear price. I think one of the famous communists said that when the time came to hang all the capitalists, you'd be able to find one of them prepared to sell you the rope.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Singing is real work. Having spent 8 years training with private teachers and professors at conservatories, Singing is a real career, and real work.
Granted, the manufactured spice girls/britney spears, etc... only work there is the choreography, which is no small task... I don't like their music, and don't really respect them as musicians, but they do know how to dance.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
I believe the word you intended there was "celluloid".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Yes, there is hope along these lines (and it's a lovely example :-), but off the top of my head, I can't think of any electronics manufacturers (even the smaller fish) that don't make money from production gear. Not that I'm an expert in the field. Hopefully someone who knows of more companies would be able to name some.
The problem is that it's the smaller companies that would benefit from "selling the rope", but by the same token, those companies aren't big enough to stand up to the threat of lawsuits.
But good luck playing digital content from RIAA companies on anything else.
*evil cackle*
I'm sorry, have you actually used win2K, or are you just assuming that it's win95 SP27. Win2k is stable. Very stable. I have seen 2 blue screens using, and both were do to a bad driver. It may not be as stable as every *nix varient out there, but it's close.
Also, comparing the stability of 9x to 2k, it is obvious that microsoft is working on making a better, more stable product (even if part of that is simply switching home users to the NT kernel... that said, 2k is leaps and bounds ahead of NT4).
Please, in the future don't just blindly flame Windows and MS, if they made products as bad as you potray then they wouldn't be in the position they are today... good (evil?) bussiness tactics can only go so far!
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