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A Wireless Alliance Forms
MikeD83 writes "A wireless alliance has formed between the likes of Nokia, Microsoft, Intel, Walt Disney Co., and almost 200 other companies. Their mission is to develop an open standard for how wireless phones can be used on any network." Whoo-hoo! DRM for cell phones! The group's website has some more information.
more and more componies are banding together nowadays, is this good or bad? maybe they can enact positive change
Why the dig? Because crap like DRM is what typically happens when big corps. get together under an "open" standard for a particular technology - they get together to figure out how to "leverage" (read: screw) customers into a particular standard that then becomes impossible to escape. Naturally, this isn't always the case, but doesn't it ever-increasingly feel like it?
;)
It was a cheap shot, but remember, this IS slashdot.
The Free desktop that Just Works
1) As has been previously stated (and will be again ad nauseum) some of the major players in this consortium have a horrible track record of user's rights. You can be sure the ulterior motive of this group has to do with profits than with end-user convenience. Technically, sure, that is the purpose of business (big or otherwise) but I don't remember anyhing in the rules the says they can't do things for the greater good...
2) Certain parties who shall remain nameless (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) have long had a problem with "maintaining standards." Maybe being part of the defining committee will go some ways towards alleviating the Not-Invented-Here Syndrome, but ultimately I think that any mythical "standards" produced from this will invariably produce a dozen variants of the original. Anyone who's used IE's interpretation of HTML knows this...
Essentially, I suppose I'm saying that when this many 800lb. gorillas get into a room together, the only thing that came come out of it is a more worries for us bananas^H^H^H^H^H^H^H customers.
This stuff is ancient history really, if you look at things like internet protocols and RFCs, the documents that suggest exactly how to solve this sort of problem.
The problems happen when a vendor or group of vendors try to cram standards down the throats of the users.
Anyone else here remember when your typical office email package didn't speak RFC822 and you couldn't mail anyone outside your network?
Eventually, real standards always develop. Doing it early just saves everyone a lot of money and bother.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Whoo-hoo! DRM for cell phones
You might be joking, but the horror is that DRM actually work well with mobile phone.
I've been working with people bidding projects for mobile computing. Mobile business is an area where you find eveyrthing proprietary.
First you must sign NDA to be allowed to program a GSM sim, then when you've done with the sim you must sign a partnership(aka pay them big bucks of money) agreement with telcos and mobile makers so that they'd ever consider recognize the sim cards you made. Otherwise they can always deny your sim from accessing their network. The problem is that when you asked one Telco/mobile maker to sign an agreement with you, they'll probably include in the agreement forbid you from signing a similar agreement with their competitors. There goes the market penetration.
That's why you don't see much special purpose sim card around. Unlike PC market, the business of mobile markets are controlled by the telcos and mobile makers.
DRM would probably not work in PC market, but it would succeed in such a business environment where the business are controlled by several big corps.
While the notion of an ad-hoc public network created by people running wireless networking devices in their homes and on their mobiles I'll admit is quite compelling, it does have some major problems. They are, essentially, distance and density. The cross large distances would require a huge amount of power, such that it's no longer reasonable for a guy living in the suburbs to be providing the connectivity for free, paying his own electricity bill. And because none of these links are going to be extremely high bandwidth (compared to fiber), to get current internet-like performance you're going to need a massive amount of independent connections especially across the large gaps. The biggest obstacle to this People's Internet are the Oceans. After that comes places like Wyoming, where anything as developed as a -gas station- is 60 miles apart.
Which is a shame, because I'd love for it to happen.
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