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Another Class Action Over Crippled Music Disks
pulaski writes "Here's a link to an interesting Baltimore Sun story. It's about the case of two Californians trying to take some major record companies to task for selling copy protected CDs. It's got the classic Cary Sherman whine but the plaintiffs apparently have some legal muscle." A similar suit was settled with the defendants agreeing to make changes in their practices.
"...If you use an Apple computer, you can't even get the disc out of the tray. It requires the time and cost of taking the computer into a repair shop and having it removed that way..."
Or you could just hold the mouse button down whilst rebooting...
Apple really needs to provide an obvious external means of ejecting CDs.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
I for one am hoping this case either ends in a positive settlement for the lawfirms involved, akin to the way Charley Pride's label caved in over his CD when a California woman sued them for deceptive trade practices and other goodies.
I run FatChucks.com and get a ton of e-mail over the Corrupt CDs issue every week. It would be nice if this case makes my site obsolete because big, fat warnings would have to appear on the CDs themselves (rather than Joe Public having to know about my site).
Last, the warnings you see on corrupt CDs are so far *not adequate.* They need to warn the potential buyer of the following:
1. Will not play on your computer.
2. Will not play on your DVD player, Discman, CD-Duplicator (like the kind put out by Sony, Harmon-Kardon, Pioneer, etc), high-end stereo CD player, car CD player, game console (PS, PS2, XBox, etc) or MP3-CD player.
3. Using this CD in any of the devices above may damage that equipment.
To see this in action, check out this image for the Rosa CD in Europe:
The Image
In Spanish, it translates to this:
"This disc is equipped with a device to prevent digital copying, which could impede the playback of the recording in personal computers and/or harm such devices, in videogame consoles, in automobile CD and DVD players and multi-changers, as well as other CD-ROM and DVD-ROM players."
The record labels probably have a legal right to corrupt their CDs, but they need to *fully* warn consumers about what they are buying.
Peace,
Chuck
Free Mac Mini
Better yet, the manufacturers should be permanently enjoined from using the term "Compact Disc", the familiar logo form of those words, or the abbreviation "CD" anywhere on the disc or packaging, because they deliberately violate the standards specified by the owner of those Distinctive Marks ... Phillips, the only big company in a position to use IP law to protect dilution of its work to fight this crap. I don't believe they have tried to do that just yet, but the company has at least made public statements that sound promising.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
It doesn't always have to be taken back to get the disk out of the tray. On restart, though, the crippled disks will often so confuse the CD drives, that they continually thrash on the disk. Apparently they continually bang either disk inserted or drive busy messages back to the OS, because in OS X, it will get hung up on a gray screen, and go no further in the boot process. It doesn't even get to the point where a mouse button eject works. Sometimes, if you hold down X during a restart, you can bypass the problem, and get it into OS X. The other option is to drop the machine into open firmware before it tries booting, and eject the disk from there. Alas, there are situations where even this won't work, and the data integrity and convenience of CD eject under software control becomes a liability, and the machine has to be opened up to get the CD out. I've got one of the new iMacs, and the CD eject hole is nowhere to be found.
But to continue my curmudgeonly morning...
Linux sucks!
You are entitled to your opinion, however unfounded, foolish, inflammatory, or indefensible it may be.
They say its uncrashable! THEY ARE LYING!
Who is this infamouus they?
Nothing is uncrashable. Perhaps this is merely a small hyperbole about the comparison to certain OS that crash so often that crashing is considered normal and acceptable.
They say its unhackable! THEY ARE LYING.
Again. Who's they?
Linux isn't unhackable, just much harder to hack when properly configured than any of the Micro$oft OSes, which are riddled with security problems.
Security patches are also available within a few hours or days for linux, instead of having to wait weeks or months for Windows...
(If you really want an 'unhackable' system, use any pre-OS X Macintosh OS. They don't natively support the IP port structure, so they simply don't have the associated vulnerabilities. OS X (based-on FreeBSD) is now succeptible to similar attacks as BSD itself, however.)
They say its FREE. They are lying. The Mandrake linux prostitute will set you back $179.99 the same as windows does!
Again, they? In this case, they are completely correct.
If you want to buy Mandrake off the shelf (which includes manuals, media, and actual human tech support) you can choose to spend money on it. Tech support for Windows, incidently, starts at $35 per incident for XP if you want to talk to a generic drone, or $245 if you want to talk to an actual professional who might be able to help you resolve something more complicated than adding paper for your printer...
BUT, alternatively, you can download the .iso images of the CDs for Mandrake or virtually any other flavour of Linux from the internet for free.
Get over yourself. It is free...
WELL NOW YOU can fuck it up with these techniques! Just type these commands into your terminal emulator. Commands with a * need root access.
Yes. It will allow you to shoot yourself in the foot. But you have to actively attempt to. Let's take a look at what your examples really do...
To crash it /dev/mem
yes >
This attempts to pipe 'yes' directly into core memory dump file.
If you're a normal user, nothing happens except that you generate a 'permission denied' error. If you are root, not surprisingly, this initiates a kernel panic because you've used /dev/mem incorrectly. If you deliberately write garbage to core memory on ANY system it will croak. Linux, like unix, presumes if you're root that you really WANT to shoot yourself.
To rape it* /
chmod -R 000
Chmod changes security permissions for files. 000 removes all access, which brings things pretty much to a halt. Again, you have to be root before you can chmod things you don't own. And again, if you really want to shoot yourself, if you're root you can. This is a feature, not a bug. Children shouldn't play with root, any more than they should with matches...
To delete* /
yes|rm -R
This pipes 'yes' as a reponse to the query confirming that you really want to erase files. Not a very elegant way to delete [remove eg. rm] everything, but is effective. Again, you have to have root privileges, and you have to be a moron.
A somewhat more elegant way to do it would be to use:
Ironically, this is actually yet another diplay of superior efficiency for linux. Why? Because it is more efficient than Micro$oft's: because rm will completely erase files on all connected mountpoints, whereas 'del' can only erase one logical disk at a time.To hack it
su -c command
su is the superuser command. The -c switch passes a single command using different security credentials than those of the current user. (The default user for su is root, but it can be used for any account.) Since you must have the password of the user you want to issue the command as, this isn't really a hack at all. Again, it's a feature. In actuality, having the su command allows the system to be better secured because normal users are given only limited access so they can't easily cause problems.
Even MicroSoft has acknowledged it's a superior model and has now implemented a limited form of su on NT4 (as a supplemental utility), on Win2K, and on XP.
To use your system PROPERLY insert windows XP setup disk and reboot your system.
Let's look at what that accomplishes. But first, learn to punctuate.
Without a comma after 'PROPERLY', I could ask how you think you properly insert a disk...
If you want your computer to have training wheels, by all means, spend a lot of money on XP. It just makes it all that much more useful to the script kiddies who want to take advantage of all of the available exploits.