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The Day The Music Died: Windows Media and DRM
SampleMinded writes "The Guardian reports on an early glimpse of what a DRM controlled future looks like. Imagine backing up your files, reformatting your hard drive, then copying the files back over only to find your music no longer works. It happened to this guy. Now That's what I call Xperience!"
It happened to my fiancee. She backed up her music made using Real Jukebox to her D drive. We re-formatted drive C and re-installed Windows. Of course, not having saved the security key, when she restored her music files she couldn't play them.
As always, the honest people suffer.
have been collecting music using Windows Media Player to copy from CDs.
That was the first mistake...
What I am more worried about is iTunes going that way. It is probably the best mp3 player and disk ripper out there (at least for mac). The RIAA can't be happy with how easy it is to 'mix, rip, burn.'
I wonder if Apple has thought about iTunes for Windows. They have iPod for windows and iPod and iTunes play so well together I couldn't imagine one without the other.
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
You don't even have to try to reload backed up data to get bit by this. Not too long ago, I upgraded my processor and was subsequently locked out of all the media files I made using Media Player.
I was less then pleased, for obvious reasons. It was just a minor headache remaking files using other programs and such, but it was a minor headache I could have lived without.
I formatted, transferred everything over my LAN, opened up winamp, tried to play something, and nothing happened!!! I was dismayed!!!
:)
Then I installed the sound card drivers, and Poof! it worked!!
And yes, that WAS a joke.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Of course it may not really be that easy, and it still is a pain, but that doesn't seem like that big of a deal, IF what they say is true in this case. Yes, this is a pain, but it could've been worse. If that's the future, it doesn't look as bad as I thought it did.
Thank goodness I only use it to play porn clips from the internet, and use WinAMP and RealPlayer for anything important.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
it did sound like updateing the licenses for the "new" computer was pretty simple.
What I don't understand is the reason the files could be "re-licensed" was because they were legit in the first place. Well.... isn't this true for any copy? (at some point down the line it was legit)
-... ---
So the user in question didn't follow the procedure for either turning off the DRM protection or backing up his licenses. I'm no fan of DRM, but RTFM still applies in a "DRM controlled future". Maybe even more so!
1) Now Joe Public starts understanding and disliking DRM
2) Techies that already hated DRM but are not listened to by Joe Public don't use silly WMP and are not hindered by this.
What's the problem again?
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Updated? How did they get the original and how would they know that your files are the right files, etc... because they are watching what you are listening to. Time to read that EULA Mr. End User. Problem is, most bloody end users really don't care. I've talked to many a person and they really think it's ok. I guess that means that I _can_ put that hidden camera in their daughter's bathroom Boy, I certainly hope noone takes that one literally. ;)
How is Microsoft planning on competing with all the legacy hardware out there? Say the first Palladium equipped boxen emerge.....a large portion of america (the napsterites) upon learning what it means for their (illegal) mp3's....aren't going to want said boxen. There becomes a huge market for the remaining non-DRM enabled hardware......so what does MS do? (Wait for the government to MANDATE drm in a similar fashion to whats happening with HDTV??)
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Imagine backing up your files, reformatting your hard drive, then copying the files back over only to find your music no longer works.
Hard drives never fail? Right!
This is crap and will never happen. As long as there are people out there making up new ways to distribute data (a la Ogg) then people will be able to share it. Now, they may do so illegally, but so be it.
~ now you know
I wish MS would go even further, like automatically delete the music files after a set period, or when you reinstall Windows, Word will stop working, and you need to rent a new license etc.
You know that line from Star Wars applies (paraphrasing): The more control they take over your system, the more users they will lose.
Je ne parle pas francais.
The direction M$ wants to take the world in (not where we might want to go today,) is one where PCs boot off of a network and have no local storage.
Of course its THEIR network and you pay for the connection, the storage and for every hit, every app and file load. And people who want to sell their software have to pay M$ for "retail shelf-space" at least until they suddenly find their product co-opted and integrated into the, uh, collective.
Complete and total, anal-retentive, obsessive control. Its the bully's way.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
* If certain software becomes hostile to copy survivability, switch to more user friendly software.
* If a file format becomes undesirable for some reason, switch formats. The shift from GIF to JPEG was accelerated when CI$ wanted royalties for GIFs. if MPEG becomes untenable, switch to a format WMA/Windoze, etc, wouldn't tell from any other binary.
I think all people are proving is that they can muck up a file format or two. But there are a number of ways of encoding music after the fact. Just, you may need to convert your precious MPEGs to a more modern (and less policed) format.
I'm sure that posters after this one will highlight the solution presented. I just want to add this: when did our computers stop working for us, and change to us having to work for them?
And if that yahoo can't get the solutions to work, I hope he thinks about a Mac, or Linux, for each CD (of his own music! already encoded, even!) that he has to reload. If his time is worth something, that Mac looks cheaper every day...
--
$tar -xvf
People don't realize that they can't do these things until AFTER they have purchased the computer and OS.
By then they don't care anymore.
The real problem is not that windows is controlling her, that she's trying to control windows. Anyone with any common sence knows that windows xp provides a superior user experience and that it's rock solid reliability eliminates the need for tenous reinstalls. Not only is it never neccessary, but only hackers, pirats, and the dark forces of the universe would try to get control over windows for their own selfish gain. In my opinion, she got what she deserved. That filthy evildoer
..need to get the following tool, ASAP: CDex.
This format might tickle your fancy a bit more than WMA ever did. It sure as heck sounds better.
From the MS web site:
...
When this feature is enabled, each track that is copied to your computer is a licensed file that cannot be played on any other computer unless you backup and restore your licenses on the other computer.
Even if you forget to disable the feature, there is still a way to transfer the licenses. It's not as if they are forcing it on anyone. Seems pretty fair to me
(Score:-1, Wrong)
DRM will happen. Deal with it, Michael. What other solution would you offer to deal with the rampant piracy and IP theft that escalates every single day?
People shoplift from grocery stores every day also, but I don't have to get new licenses for my soup if I move it from one cabinet to another. Let the RIAA etc. do what grocery stores do and add the "losses" due to piracy onto everyone else's bill.
Looking at the price vs. cost of production of CDs, it appears that they must already do this. Not to mention that they get a chunk of every blank CD Audio disc sold. Bingo, problem solved. Now quit with the DRM shit, you bastard record companies!
Seriously, how can they expect consumers to put up with that much hassle to "protect" their multi-billion-dollar industry from the miniscule sales they really lose to piracy?
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
We all know the pros and cons but your average jane/joe in the street doesn't. Without this message getting across to them with clear examples of what may/will happen we'll be shouting the message to ourselves.
If your local/national newspaper has a tech section where you can ask questions, drop them a line.
Get the word out!
The Gift Economy
(and yes, I know it looks odd in Konqueror ..... )
Lessee:
1. 'When you first run Windows Media Player, it will ask if you want to keep copy protection on, and you can turn it off if you wish.'
and
2. 'We did anticipate this scenario and developed a tool to help them update their licenses: the Personal License Update Utility.'
What's the big deal here?
p.s. What's funny is, My Lyra requires a funky DRM'd MP3 format that only uses their propietary software to create it...those files won't work on anything else either. BUT, copy any kind fo WMA file directly to the CF card and it works fine.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
According to Microsoft's lead product manager of Windows Digital Media:
There is still a way to get these licenses back and it is pretty easy using our Personal License Migration Service (PLMS), [which] was designed to address the exact situation you outline.
It's morning and I'm still feeling pretty alert, but even the acronym PLMS is enough to make me think, "this is going to be a gigantic pain in the ass." Would it be possible to come up with a more intimidating bit of tech-speak for a product's name?
More to the point, can you picture an inexperienced user having to track down the Personal License Migration Service utility and get it working? Just the name of it alone makes it sound like an afternoon's project.
Looks like Windows users who want to maintain rights to their music libraries are going to have to regularly clear some rather intimidating hurdles every time they buy a new system or reformat their drive. I wonder how Apple will handle the same situation. Somehow, I can't picture Steve announcing iPLMS at an upcoming MacWorld ;)
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
But what if they had paid for them? Even a trivial amount like 25 cents adds up extremely quick. At least in their case, though, they still have the files. Hard drives fail.. the Windows Registry can be corrupted.. what then? Do you re-purchase all the files you've already bought once?
This should be yet another compelling reason to dump Windows in favor of Linux on your PC's.
* I can't feel too sorry for anyone using Windows Media Player Spyware.. Is it really Microsoft's business that I spend a large part of my work day writing code and listening to (legal) mp3 rips of my Ozzy Osbourne cd's?
Actually - he did bring up some new information which was that RealPlayer displays this functionality as well as Windows Media Player.
people are eventually just going to quit buying music and stick to listening to what they already own. I have already started to do this
By any chance, are you in your in your mid- to late- twenties? Many people stop getting into new music in that timeframe, and have been for 25-30 years.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
I've made similar comments like this before, but in this case it is worth repeating (well, I'll find out whether it is).
The sooner the general public begins to experience the real issues behind DRM, DMCA, Palladium, UCITA (or whatever they're calling it this week), etc, the sooner the issue will rise to the importance of other issues that get real (ie political, financial) attention.
It will probably be painful for a while, since the entire public won't realize the impact of this sort of thing at first, but give it time... the general public let their opinion be known about DivX and it didn't take long for CC to back down and toss that idea (or at least table it for a while).
This too shall pass? I hope so.
Just imaging the fun when the library of Congress does the same thing....
(Well, maby they have a smarter boyfriend who anticipates these things...)
-On a Mr. fixit note, NEVER destory your source. Copy info to new media, and verify functionality on that new media, THEN format the source...)
The easy solution here for people who like WMP but dislike DRM is to use .ogg and and get the WMP plugin.
While those things may apply to this case, DRM is a scary thing where it would be very easy to make it so it doesn't matter what app you use, DRM could be embedded in your processor (Palladium). They could make it so that you can't turn off DRM in the apps, or there is no manual to read, it will all just be built in so you don't have to "worry" about it.
And since when did it become a REQUIREMENT to be connected to the internet to listen to music that you own?! Sure, internet access is more widespread than ever, but required? That's BS. That just means that Microsoft is watching and controlling what you are listening to. How long before it goes beyond that to cover every app on your system?
I talk to some of my friends about this stuff, and they think it will never happen. They also don't know about the DMCA and the CDPDTA-E-I-E-I-O. This shit is real, and it is very scary. I have heard people say "Well, I don't care if they know what I do." Well dammit, I DO! It is none of their business, and that is the first step down a long, dark path. You want to tell them what you are doing, what web sites you are visiting, where you are shopping? Fine. Opt-in. But don't force that on everyone. Some people may actually want some of these dumbass services that Microsoft and other companies offer. Maybe they like targeted advertising. I don't, and I should not have to jump through hoops to NOT get it.
Think it won't happen? Who is going to stop them?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Think of it like a cage. It's meant to let us see what's inside, but not let what's inside get out. It can never effectively be used to get back what's escaped. And something only needs to escape from it once to be outside, fruitful and multiplying and all that, forever.
It's an absurdly complicated cage, with hundreds of potential points of failure. Even if it's the best designed cage in the world, with encryption and booby-traps at every joint and hindge, someone in a good lab in Hong Kong is going to arrange a jailbreak anyway. And you know it's not going to be the best designed cage in the world. It's going to suck, maybe slightly less than CSS sucked.
Once the content is out of it, that's it. You can't make a computer that refuses legacy data and applications (mp3s). That might be what Hollywood wants, but it's the only thing Microsoft can never do. At least not in the next 10-20 years - they'd have to work up to it very gradually. And even then, there are a million problems.
The real purpose of DRM is to act as a shield against free software technologies interoperating with commercial products. MS has been considering fighting compatible free software with patents and bribes and EULA suits (and probably would, but for the awkwardness of doing it during their anti-trust trial), but by far its best weapon is to pretend to ally with the content people. They, after all, own Washington, and they were the geniuses that engineered the DMCA. The law that will make Samba, or the encrypted-WindowsDRM-filesystem module, or any number of other enabling technologies illegal... because it's trying to "bypass Microsoft's access control features."
People will point out that the DMCA has provisions for allowing interoperability. That's right, it does. That's called a "bait exception." Sort of like the distributor price caps in the California electric utility deregulation, they're there for show; they can have no real effect. DeCSS, after all, is meant to allow free softare to interoperate with DVD's. But tell that to all the people in court all around the world right now. When deciding on whether there's a "significant non-infringing use," it turns out that it's quite easy to make a non-savvy judge (and how few of them are savvy?) believe the worst. DVDs are case in point.
DRM will accomplish none of its stated goals. But it will be great for Microsoft. Paladium is a big deal to them because it will be the first Windows which can't be emulated by Wine, for instance, or interoperated with by other software, without risking the appearance that one is interoperating in order to open the cage. And if you mess with cages, you know we're not just talking about a civil trial and bankruptcy. We're talking about a good long stretch in federal prison.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
People shoplift from grocery stores every day also, but I don't have to get new licenses for my soup if I move it from one cabinet to another.
Yes, but there are no "Soup-uters" out there that allow you to make unlimited, perfect copies of your can of soup and instantly deliver the soup to millions of people around the globe for free. If there were, you can bet Campbells would be very interested in controlling what you did with your can of soup.
When updating my soundcard drivers recently, I discovered a notice of Digital Rig^H^Hestrictions Management from Creative Labs. Apparently copy protected "intellectual property content" causes the digital output of the sound card to be shutoff. Of course this only works on WMAs, so I believe this fits in the context of this article. For more information visit this URL Creative Labs: DRM with WMA
There is still a way to get these licenses back and it is pretty easy using our Personal License Migration Service (PLMS), [which] was designed to address the exact situation you outline. The customer just has to be connected to the internet, then they can automatically restore their licenses just by playing the music files in question.
How exactly did Microsoft get the job of maintaining my licenses? If I pay for a cd and rip it to mp3 for my own use, why do I need MS to "license" me the ability to play it? They didn't pay for the cd, I did! How is it that the duty of maintaining my licenses for non-MS data can belong to MS? This is just silly...
do not read this line twice.
"You can also choose to turn off copy protection when you create your music collection, which can be done easily in any version of [WMP7.x or later].
When you first run Windows Media Player, it will ask if you want to keep copy protection on, and you can turn it off if you wish. If you missed that dialog box, it is still easy to turn off copy protection by going into the Tools|Options menu. Click on the Copy Music tab, and under Copy Settings, uncheck the 'Protect Content' box. In previous versions, this box was called the 'Enable Per sonal Rights Management' check box." Turning off copy protection would seem the best idea.
<grub> Reading
Doc: Well don't do it!
Seriously, why the hell is anyone using WMF? MP3 has wide hardware support, obviously great software suppport, and sounds great. What compelling argument is there for using WMF? Some people claim superior sound quality.....just ask the guy in the story how good his music sounds since he can't play any of his files.
-ted
By any chance, are you in your in your mid- to late- twenties? Many people stop getting into new music in that timeframe, and have been for 25-30 years.
Gawd, ain't it the truth.
It's disturbing me, but after college it's really difficult to get exposed to new music. The death of napster doesn't help.
On the other hand, I think the late-90s/early-2000s might've been a particularly soso time for new music. On the radio, I still here the same songs I heard played in the gym in 1997, along with what to me sounds like pretty anonymous modern R+B. Other electronica stuff I find interesting, but genre-wise it's all firmly planted in the 90s.
Sometimes I really wonder how the hell my cd collection got as big as it did (it's not even that big, like 300 give or take 50)
And more often these days, new albums I buy are pretty big dissapointments. From N.E.R.D. to the new Alanis.
I really miss the party rap of the early 1990s, pre-gangsta. That was good stuff to dance to.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The idea, of course, is to get people used to it, so when it does come time to shove it down people's throats, there won't be much resistance.
... so what looks fair on the outside is actually pretty sneaky and deceptive.
I don't know about you, but I find that the phrase "Protect My Music" is a bit deceptive. Admittedly, "Make it so my music will only play on this computer" is a bit of a mouthful, but at least it's not misleading.
If someone like my little sister (who is a fairly average computer user) sees that checkbox, they don't know what it means, but they generally leave it checked because it sounds positive. A power user (who has some experience with recent commercial software) may be more inclined to be a bit suspicious about the vague and somewhat ominous "Protect My Music." Sadly, most users are the average kind and not the power kind
I have been told, and I believe even read in dead-tree publications, that the reason the DivX plan died was that people were creeped out by having to dial someone up and transfer information. Even with the *promise* of anonymity, this is guaranteed to scare some people away, since they worry "What if?" (Like "What if the company goes bust and they sell their database to someone that doesn't make the same promise?" or "What if they get hacked and someone takes my credit card number or personal viewing habits?")
Add into this that much of media innovation and format decisions are apparently driven by the porn production industry, and the reason for media without a tether to home base becomes more clear. No one wanted to buy a DivX disc that phoned home to validate and no porn movie maker really wanted to go that route because they know their audience.
Having to phone home has got to be the Achilles' Heel for this kind of stuff. I sure as hell don't want it, and I imagine most people would feel the same way, even if they aren't watching dirty movies.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Does every music file have to be re-licensed individually? Can you imagine doing that with, say, 20 or 30 gigs of 3 minute long songs?
This simply will never work in the long run. Customers will give up in frustration and use some other way to listen to music.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
In this case, an unobvious (mis-)feature caused a user to lose hours of work. That's a software problem, and specifically, a problem with a particular software feature, DRM. It shows that DRM reduces usability in practice. The burden of proof that this isn't necessarily true is on proponents of DRM to find workarounds.
Also note that this particular implementation of DRM is deliberately not secure; an implementation of the form that the music industry might like might simply not let the user recover their music when they reformat their drive no matter what they do. That is, after all, effectively how CDs used to work (if the medium went bad, you lost the music), and the music industry would love to get back to that kind of environment.
Funny how you only see this with winblows machines. No linux, mac, BeOS, amiga, dos, or abicus user ever has the issue. *softly pats his new iMac and SuSE machine* I know it's been said over and over and over again but I will just say it again, M$ seems to think it knows whats best for the user. Of course using WMP was a mistake to copy music but thats beside the point. Software of this nature should never do this. The user nows what he/she is doing and if its illegal and thats between the user and the copyright holder. Anyway I am going to shutup now. This is a pointless rant. Windows is going to be like the US government and decide to police the world at everyone elses expense.
My suggestion. Get a Mac. Its a UNIX and doesnt have the bull floating thru it like any PC with windows installed on it. Even a linux user should be able to admit that Mac would be the simpler move for a person use to windows. Linux is great for the more advanced users.
Honestly I think its time windows users started complaining about software like this. It wouldnt sell on the open market. Why attach it to a OS? Or maybe thats reason enough.
Oh well.
It's not shut off, it's emitted with a copyright bit (part of the stream format) set. It's the "client" end (a DAT recorder, for instance) which does the prohibiting. This is all well-trodden ground to anyone who's messed with audio DAT drives or audio CD recorders: it prohibits you from recording copyright-asserted content from one to another digitally.
Peter
There is one solution to this (that could be used dozens od other ways, too) that many people won't like: Universal IDs. If everyone was issued a unique personal sequence (Long enough to be virtually impossible to remember) these issues would never occur.
The UID should include personal space as well - so I could have several different accounts (home, job1, job2, hobby, oss project1, etc) without losing the access to my media/data.
Log on at work with your work UID. Your work UID server authorizes your log on and file access. It also knows you have access to your HOME UID systems, and sets up a VPN connection, allowing you access to your home computer & MP3s.
Log on at another company's office with your work UID. The local UID server doesn't know you. The UID Root Servers are queried for your UID's ownership. It returns your work UID server and your home UID server. The company's server recognizes that you work for a "trusted" company and allows you acces to certain portions of their network, as well as setting up VPN to your work and your home.
The UID could be attached to a fingerprint identification database, to a magnetic stripe card, to a SD card for login identification. The UID would make easy permissions tracking. Use any cellphone on your account, as long as you insert your UID chip. It could be great.
Alternately, it could be used to track your movements, your whereabouts, everything that you do and have electronically. This is why the Root UID servers should be set up on floating installations with Satellite connectivity in International Waters...
--
Or maybe I'm insane.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Legally, a user that does not read the EULA then can not fiegn ignorance later if they break the license. It was presented to them at the pre-installation. It is there responsibility to make sure they legally understand what they are getting into.
Having said this, the way most EULA are presented are HOSTILE to the user. Confusing legalese language presented in a tiny scrolling text box smaller than the text area I'm writing this response in. What is your recourse if you have a question about a clause? Stop the installation and e-mail MicroSoft? You bought the software today and would probably like to use it today. Waiting for a response from MS and then possibly consulting your private lawyer is a laughable action to take for minor piece of software. Then step it up a notch: Window's Media Player is tightly integrated. You can't PATCH the system properly unless you take all of the parts which requires reading multiple EULA which are all different. What happens if you agree to one but not another? Your installation (and your computer) is probably now unusable or will have incompatible hiccups.
I am still waiting for EULA in general to be challenged in court. Where did the consumer right for quality assurance and regress go? Why does one have to sign away more rights to get bug fixes?!?
Btw, just so I know what to use and what crap to avoid -- does Roxio EZCD Creator 5.0 have DRM stuff built in?
I used to copy my CDs onto tape to listen to in my car. Now I make MP3s so I can carry my music collection around with me. I have never copied someone else's music, and I've never allowed friends to copy mine. The same goes for movies. By insisting on copy protection, groups like the RIAA and MPAA are calling me a liar and a thief. This pisses me off enough that I have not bought nearly as much music and video in the past couple years that I might have otherwise.
I hope these groups understand that if fair-use copies are some day not allowed at all, I will no longer buy their recordings. Period. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.
I've build a few XP systems for friends who are newbies but know how to use (office, kazaa, e-mail, www, etc.), I installed winamp and a few other programs for multimedia. Three of them ripped their collections with media player and didn't even realize that it was saving them as windows media format.
What if I want to listen to one track from one CD, and two tracks from another CD, and maybe a few from a third one as well? So I have to open and close my CD drive every few minutes and waste the time and effort in putting in the new CD and changing the tracklist? The technology exists that allows me to digitally encode all of those CDs and put them on my computer and enjoy my music the way *I* want to own it. Note that *I PAID FOR* my CDs, they are *my propert*, and I am attempting to protect my rights. I don't use filesharing apps, and I don't share my MP3s with other people on usenet or by burning CDs for them. My wife and I each have our own computers and we can both access our home MP3 server and listen to whatever we want whenever we want. And that is exactly what the RIAA wants to prevent. They don't want to protect their property or their rights, they want to control what you listen to and when and how you listen to it.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
I had a similar thing happen to me. In win2K you can encrypt your files. So I naturally encrypted the file I store all my passwords in. But without extensive understanding you will never know that the certificate needs to be stored in order to decrypt the file.
:D (unburned)
So when I did my yearly reinstall, I no longer had access to my password file since I didn't save my certificate (not that its easy to locate anyway)...Thank God that I hadn't bought the shredder yet and I found an old copy of my passwords in the fireplace
Your comment about tiny text made me wonder - could a user unable to read the EULA (because of the type font size) call up a software company and ask for them to read them the EULA out loud? Is this not a reasonable accomodation to a common disability (inability to read 6pt type, or whatever is used)? Is there some reading disability that would make it impossible to read and understand something presented only one line at a time (because of a really small scroll window)?
Most EULA dialogs I've seen have been very limited in functionality - no chance to, say, copy the EULA text into a program and change the font size. That being said, they usually appear to be in about ten-point type. This is much better than the font that used to be used on the break-this-seal-to-agree envelopes. (Which I actually had to pull out a magnifying glass to read)
I've been concerned about the entertainment giants being able to dominate and control all information in the future, through DRM schemes and other usage-control schemes.
However, I think now that none of these schemes are likely to be widely adopted by the public as they are all WAY too complicated to understand, let alone use.
For example, here is Microsofts page for its
Personal License Update Wizard, which apparently will let you transfer DRM limited music from one machine to another. Of course you need to run it before you transfer the music, so if your installation of Windows dies, but the hard drive is still readable you have still lost all your music.
Read the page and see how many times you say 'huh?' (for me it was about 8)
Compare this to MP3s, which work transparently across PC, Macs and portable devices without difficulty, and can be shared by people without having to transfer their 'Digital Rights' to another machine. It's going to take a lot of armtwisting to make people pay for entertainment products, which are more difficult to use and less useful (if they're tied to single devices) than current major formats, eg CDs and DVDs.
Talking of arm twisting, anyone interested in the UK 'equivalent' of the DMCA should read an overview of the implementationof the EU directive on Copyright Harmonisation. This is very probably going to become UK law before Christmas and basically makes it illegal, to intefere with any DRM schemes. So for example if a music CD has a program that phones home on it, whenever the disc is played in a PC, it's going to be illegal to use a firewall from stopping it from sending any information out.
Oh and btw, of course everyone copying music from CDs to a computer in the UK is breaking the law anyway, as we appear not to have a doctrine of fair-use (or fair-dealing as it's known in the UK). oops.
also btw Microsoft has slightly modified the Eula for this update wizard, from the horrendous 'by using this software you allow Microsoft to run any software on your machine or stop you running any software' to being able only to affect software that is concerned with security for the DRM.
Owners of Secure Content ("Secure Content Owners") may, from time to time, request Microsoft to provide security related updates to this Software ("Security Updates") that may affect your ability to use this Software. Such Security Updates would be provided only for the purpose of controlling the use of security technologies in this Software and would not affect other software or content on your computer.
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
Sure there are.
One of them is called allrecipies.com.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I agree -- nobody has a right to tell you what you can do with your property. I was taking issue with the original poster's misrepresentation of the article, which gives the impression that the music was blocked permanently.
As a moral conservative you should have more constitutional awareness. Music != property. It never really did. This is just recent propaganda recently perpetrated by media conglomerates and software industry shills.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Many, but not all! I'm almost 30 now, and I finally have the income that allows me to buy new music regularly, and I've matured enough to become interested in older stuff that I wasn't much aware of before (eg. older punk & industrial, Nick Cave, the Velvet Underground, even some cheesy 80's pop just for fun). Not to mention, I've made so many diverse friends in school and work that I am exposed to a lot of weird stuff I wouldn't have thought to check out myself. As a result, I have a rapidly mushrooming music collection, encompassing death metal, industrial, classical, trip-hop, acid jazz, house, classic jazz, classical, folk, rock, etc. and I love it!
:-) Crap is crap, new or old.
Now, if by "new music" you meant "Britney, Pink, Creed, Eminem, P. Diddy", then yeah, I'm not too into that
Freedom: "I won't!"
Use CDex to rip your MP3. It's free too.
Gorkman
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and it happening to the general masses is a very very good thing. The more this stuff pisses off journalists, writers, average joe the better...
Me? I rip everything to mp3 with lame and the proper settings to get the absolute best copy I can get. (I dont use OGG and probably never will because my car stereo,audiotron and 2 portable devices never will play OGG. No DRM crap to worry about, no mysterious "licenses" or other crap needed.. and finally I use a non-bloated fast responding media player.. it's call winamp, freeamp(or Zinf now) and XMMS. winamp os starting to get bloated so all windows boxen I touch get Zinf instead now.. and linux boxes get either zinf or the default XMMS install.
Anyways, DRM cant and wont bother anyone that makes sure they know what they are using and doing. As it is easily avoided without causing any discomfort. Non-techies? it's gonna bite them in the ares and bite them hard... and I hope that it start biting people at a rapid rate... that's the ONLY way to get the word out...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"If the reader is connected to the internet and this is still not working, it is most likely because they created their music collection with an earlier version of Windows Media Player (7.0) and then upgraded on top of that collection. We did anticipate this scenario..."
Yes, we did not anticipate the scenario that you would ever need a media player other than WMP 7. What were they thinking? This right here should be enough of an example to show Joe Public/Congressman why DRM is bad.
Of course, it probably won't.
...it would have been funnier. How bout:
"The more you tighten your grip, the more Dell Systems slip through your fingers."
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When in windows, the only answer to the question of which ripper to use is CdEx.
Besides, that Roxio stuff does strange sh~t to your ASPI layer.
If you're lazy and use MS products just because they're already there, you're likely to keep running into this problem.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
what part of do NOT upgrade to the latest MS product did you not understand?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Certainly nothing to do with punitive prices for cds, right?? 22+ freakin' Euros for a CD where I come from.
Why is it that CDs are waaay more expensive than cassettes to buy, yet cassettes are way more expensive to produce in terms of materials, complexity, etc ...??
Let me answer - they charge what they do, because they can, plain and simple .... people are slowly wising up & sales figures are falling. The free market sux, eh?
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
This is a good example of why this technology is doomed from the start.
Can you imagine what will happen when Mary Jan Mathteacher and her husband Joe Sixpack run into this? I mean, you and I are above average with respect to our computer knowledge and this is a pain the in the butt even for us. To Mary and her brethren, this is just one more reason why "the computer hates me". I can't thing of any better way to stifle online music sales (if there ever becomes a market for them)
Jack Schofield, the Jack in "Ask Jack," the title of this Q&A, is a notoriously pro-MS cheerleader. It's almost sickening, in fact, having read his articles over the years. Many newspapers have these sort of "Doctor PC" columns, and they give Microsoft a free ride in terms of customer support and advertising. But how is it these columns don't ever advise: "Internet Explorer really sucks, you should download Mozilla" or whatever superior Open Source alternative there is. Certainly Jack never does.
In fact, last week the section's letters page got a letter from a reader asking why "Ask Jack" never answered any Mac queries, or any other OS for that matter. The reply was, oh Jack's a real expert, you can ask him anything. So, please, go ahead, why not "Ask Jack" your deepest questions about some tricky Debian or Slackware problem, I'm sure he'll be just delighted to answer. Email him at: jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk
That's the golden opportunity in this. We will never secure our rights online until the general populace gets upset. Right now, all they care about is getting their Must-See TV and their low-fat chips. But the Content Cartel is pushing harder and faster and making more and more intrusive policies. Some day -- perhaps soon -- they will step over the line and change something that people actually do care about.
Denying people access to their own, legitimate copies might be the thing.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
This is one case where immaturity has its uses, and being overly sympathetic to clueless users is damaging.
We dont need laws against DRM, we dont need huge consumer outcries about this. There is no need for having a campaign against DRM.
The appropriate responses are:
Once people realize that Microsoft is not on their side, and that those clue-possesing individuals they know are not going to make it all better, then maybe theyll put forth the effort to get an user-rights-friendly OS on their next machine.
All the pieces are in place for a change on the desktop. (Palladium,WinXP,DRM,etc)
how are you going to get this nomad to play the new file format?
I'm not sure when something that benefits the RIAA but can only cause headaches for end users started being called a "feature."
If you build a car that is incapable of going over 65mph do you advertise it as an anti-speed ticket "feature"?
nonsense.
ôó
So how does this so-called DRM actually provide any security whatsoever for the copyright holders? It doesn't. It is irritation-ware pure and simple. Just another totally unnecessary hoop to jump through.
<PARANOIA>
Or is it? How about this for a totally irrational paranoid fantasy: could it be that by clicking the "turn off DRM" button you are circumventing the copy-protection and so, technically, in breach of the DCMA? Just how twisted would MS have to be to implement a honey-trap just so they could sell the RIAA a list of the theoretically guilty?
</PARANOIA>
Disclaimer: no, even I don't really believe this. But, hey, food for thought, eh?
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
You actually agree with me, but you cannot see the forest for the trees.
People ARE wising up... they are downloading music and copying CD's instead of purchasing them. Why is this so difficult to accept?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The day this happens is the day I move to a small hut just outside Ulan Baator, surrounded by three walls of electrified barbed wire, with a very large Doberman leashed to the doorknob. I'll use only software that takes no input and produces no output and do my networking via encrypted smoke signal - and my packets will walk uphill both ways! On their knees! Backwards!
Geez, how come he didn't turn copy protection off? I mean come on, it's not that complicated. Besides, from what I remember, the first time I tried copying music files onto my PC, WMP asked me if I want the content to be protected from now on or not.
Sure am glad that I run Linux now... this whole DRM thing is going to get out of hand within the next 2-5 years.
:)
Of course, when TCPA/Palladium hits it'll be integrated into hardware and will probably kill off any solution that ISN'T Microsoft-based. I sure hope some other hardware manufacturer will make non-TCPA-compliant hardware during the fallout.
Welcome to hell. Here's your copy of Windows.
-- Jim
If I can relicense my music so easily, what's to stop someone else from doing it? What's the point in "protecting" a file with a license, when anyone can relicense the file whenever they wish?
Does this make sense to anyone? Am I missing something here?
Given the state of most web pages, it appears to be <body> ... </body>.
You can turn it off, and as soon as you can't people will start using another media player that doesn't limit their freedoms which is a good thing (IMO). The only way I see this being newsworthy is if steps are being taken to make it a law that all media players must implement this feature, that would be really bad for the windows users. Of course the linux users could just download a GPLed media player and disable the feature by editing the source and recompiling. Wouldn't even be that hard for non programmers most likely, anyone designing an open source media player for linux would probably put something like this into the source:
//ATTENTION: delete the next three lines to disable the annoying copy protection.
so this is really only a problem for windows users, and if you voluntarily use MS Windows as your primary OS then you should already be used to giving up your freedoms.
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
I'll try to shine some light, since you seem to be pretty dim.
0 0. htmle porter /music/brief_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1600689
h ttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/193 2344.stm6 7,36961,00 .html
A double digit drop is when the quantity of some falls (or goes down, or is less) by more than -9.9%.
-3.0% would be a single digit drop.
-11.0% would be a double digit drop.
Sources:
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,18693,
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hollywoodr
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,13
More sources can be found at http://www.google.com
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Oh, so you're a food pirate! Stealing your recipes instead of supporting the chefs that give you those recipes, by eating at their restaurants.
I bet you even have a "burner" in your kitchen, you THIEF!
signed,
President, Chefs Association of America
The first time someone wants to replay their child's birth (or conception :o)) MPEG and they are informed they can't unless they use the internet or they jump through the right hoops. Then at that point will DRM be an infringement on a person's own right to play their own content on any machine they want?
What about burning the image of a child, as an example, playing little league you want to send to the folks at home? Does this DRM mean that those images can only play on the originating computer?
I guess in MS's world, content managament means they can manage any content that plays on any of their licensed products. Wasn't this, like, declared illegal summer 2001? Help me out here, you folks who are so in love with Redmond's products... Enlighten me...
You know MS is so fixated on digital rights management they don't even consider what their obligations are to the world at large, the obligations that though the new paradigm is they own the software you are using and you have only those rights they grant you, at some point there must be a delineation of responsibilities by MS: that they may not interfere with your online or offline activities, EVEN IF ILLEGAL, unless they go through the same processes that law enforcement agencies must go through to build a prima facie case; where is MS's obligation? Doesn't their use of the internet to manage XP constitute broadcasting and is subject to the same strictures that everyone else is under the FCC? Even in computers it would seem to me that citizens in a republic such as ours (USA) must be protected from outlaw contracts such as EULAs.
Dawn of the Dead
A solution to this is to engage in online voice chat. My brother, who on the outside looks like one of the dryest, most boring people in the world actually got hooked on metal and especially Dreams of Sanity + Iron Maiden because of stuff he heard while using voice chat. But you'd never guess it by looking at him.
Man FUCK THAT SHIT
I have iTunes!
I tell people that WMA is not to be trusted, its a closed codec that's designed to trap you in MS bullshiat, but they never listen. Mp3s forever, seriously. They work great and never give you any hassle. Who needs WMA? All your PC licence gibberish gives me an instant headache.
--hongpong.com
"The Day The Music Died: Windows Media and DRM"
I don't think anybody ever thought of Windows Media as a vital organ to music. That's like saying "The Day Movies Died: The Cinema Hotdog"
"Derp de derp."
To avoid any chance of this (except per-track water marking) I never do a straight disc-to-disc copy.(*) I always rip the tracks to .wav and make a new compilation.
(*)This copy, of course, would be so I can play the CD in the car and keep the legitimately purchased original at home on the shelf.
The rest of pop music is not much better, though. You've punk from the late 70's, the New Wave of the early 80's, and then... nobody ever breaks any new ground ever again.
Euro pop is even worse! Sure Kylie Minogue is nice eye candy, but her songs are utterly soulless.
So, I kind of agree that it has been a so-so time for music, except I think that pop music has been kind of so-so for at least 20 years.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
How hard would it be to build a 'black box' with an SPDIF input and and SPDIF output that strips the copyright bit from a digital audio stream as it passes through?
Here's Microsoft's version of Apple's ad:
Rip. Mix. Burn. Spend half a day jumping through Microsoft-induced hoops that are forced on you by your own computer.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Yes, and it is called Ogg Vorbis. It scares the sh~t out of the industry because it has no DRM and no legal restraints. The sound quality in the 1.0 release is amazing, especially at low bitrates.
Probably a CIA plot to make the Chinese, Brazilians, and Sub-Saharan Africans look bad, right?
668: Neighbour of the Beast
If you look at the history, pop music runs in cycles, usually about 10-12 years long. In the early 90s we were exactly where we are now. Teenie groups, no real innovation. Then Nirvana and "grunge" came along and started on a new cycle. 10 years before that it was 80s breaking out of what was left of disco. And it keeps going back. So I am being patient, because I know the next break is right around the corner.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
Thanks for confirming what I'd already suspected for other reasons: my next sound card will NOT be from Creative. (And I have just notified their public relations dept. of this, and why.)
That said, what sound cards (and they *must* be fully DOS-compatible to be useful to me) don't have such BS built in??
A legal can of worms comes to mind: if the hardware performs DRM, and the DRM itself fails to prevent copying, does that make the hardware mfgr legally liable for any acts of "copyright infringment" that occur because of said DRM failure?? (Note that in my scenario, circumvention is NOT used so is not relevant, nor is user intent addressed.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Of course you are correct, but the music industry would beg to differ.
They have 1 ultimate goal in all this: They want to make us pay a fee every single time we play any 'licensed' (not bought, but licensed) content.
The intermediate step is that they want us to buy a copy of the CD for the car, one for at work, one for at home, etc. Once we are used to buying multiple copies, they will then try to make our lives 'easier' by offering some sort of 'pay for play' system where you just license the music/video/holorecording/etc and then money goes from your bank account to theirs whenever you hit play.
This implies, of course, that all the content that you access has to be linked to your ID on whatever system they use, plus your bank/CC payment information and your address, so they can profile you very easily and send you marketing pablum every day. Nice.
Because when it drops it will look something like this:
The Software players themselves will clock out and have to be relicenced. This licenced code will recognize that all of the media files are 'old' and they have to be relicenced as well. And Oh did I mention that the licence to the objects will use a 3 way handshake that couples a corresponding key in the OS itself and will embed a keyed licence in the objects themselves so they will only play on a machine that already has a licenced OS with a licenced player playing licenced media files.
And if you had three legs the third shoe will look like this.
All media files will be 'owned' by someone else, probably the DMCA licence owner and they will have the ability, through your licenced OS to revoke the licence of a media file at any time for any reason. You will receive a bill in the mail, like your phone bill, that charges you for listening to or watching those media files and it will be 100% usage based.
And if you had a fourth leg the last shoe dropping will look like this.
All Libraries will be privatised and they will charge you to borrow books which will be slowly phased out anyhow in lieu of digital media. They will charge you for each viewing of each page on a per view per page basis.
And if you are a starfish it will loko like this.
Eventually there will be a literate class and an illiterate class distinguished my wealth just like in Medieval times. Long live the revolution!
No, M$ was buying time and free PR, so that they could decide on the best way to profit from DRM.
No corporations are against it, those that say they are simply haven't figured out how to use it to their own advantage.
Duh.
(Probably different genre, but same principle, so pay attention.)
I'm a metalhead, but I didn't have enough underground exposure, and let me tell you: the early/mid 1990s were hell. Since metal was being pushed in the 1980s, I had lazily gotten into the bad habit of relying on a very twisted and distorted intel source: the radio (and even worse at one point: MTV headbangers ball -- this is fucking embarrassing to admit in public). That was how I heard new music. When the push switched away from metal in the 1990s, I came to the same conclusion as you: all the new music is shit. So I just stuck with what I knew, and only kept up with the same old aging American thrash bands from the 1980s (e.g. Flotsam and Jetsam, Testament, etc.). Those guys were actually making pretty good music IMHO, but there just wasn't very much of it. It was a sad feeling, knowing that someday the 1980s metal bands would all die off, and then that would be the end of an artform. Mankind would descend into a dreary soulless nothingness.
There's just one problem: across the pond, metal was thriving. Even here in America, there were some damned fine bands making great music. I just didn't know about it, because my intel source (commercial mass media) was rotten, and they weren't covering it.
In '98, thanks to the internet, I finally found out and was saved. My CD collection blossomed from a couple hundred to around a thousand or so, I guess. Turns out that not all new music was shit, I just had to go looking for it, that's all.
Maybe metal isn't your thing. I don't know what your thing is. But I bet someone out there is playing it. So get off your ass and find it, and lose that nostalgia. I'm not saying you have to give up the classics, but if you're waiting for the shit to blow over, you're going to miss something you'll regret.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Pollution (of the artificial varieties probably being measured here) is more dependant upon production than on population, and the relation between high population and pollution is only indirectly through the fact that often more population means more production. In the case of India, the population/production ratio is rather high, so NO they should not be statisticly expected to produce 15-20% of the world's pollution unless they had more industry than they do. For the amount of industry they have, they should be producing less pollution. I knew a co-worker at a previous workplace (a small software company) who hailed from India and before becoming a programmer had previously worked in the shipbuilding business in India. His lungs were all shot to hell from the horrendous working conditions they had, where improper ventallation meant the workers had to breathe in byproducts of welding, various glues and dies, and so on. He had to go slow walking up stairs. Despite the fact that he was an otherwise fit-looking small man probably weighing under 130 pounds, he wheezed like an overweight asthmatic.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
MS doesn't want to tell this to people, but it obviously must be archiving your list of songs on their servers somewhere. Remember the EULA of WMP that says you give MS the right to 'spy' on what you are playing? I think this feature might be the reason why that clause was there. They know that you had played that song in WMP once before.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
It's disturbing me, but after college it's really difficult to get exposed to new music.
Not always. Just in the last month, NPR introduced me to two new composers, and I'm not much older than 25! (don't dismiss me just yet for listening to both NPR and classical music; I think my last couple paragraphs turned out pretty well)
I think a part of the general difficulty for older people to find new music is due to the fact that nearly all new music is targetted to teenagers. Most new music gets very boring to adults after listening to it just once, because it is just so damn transparent and unoriginal.
The music that has proved timeless, whether it was created in 1790 or 1990, is still pretty easy to find. If something has become difficult to find, then it either was bad and was quickly forgotten, or it was very good but appealed to such a small audience that it didn't catch on.
For the very good music that didn't really catch on, the public domain (Napter, et. al.)is a clear answer. This sort of music has a loyal following but doesn't generate the revenues that the RIAA wants, so the individual musicians should have full freedom to distribute their own or put it into the public domain.
This is yet another good example why current ideas about DRM could harm a perfectly good and healthy part of our culture. Until DRM schemes allow convenient and unencumbered use of both DRM-protected content and content from indpendent distributors or the public domain, it will never ever be successful.
DRM could adversely interfere with the free market in ways that will bias new music and other content even further than we face today. People who create new works, music and otherwise, should be allowed to not choose DRM as well as choose DRM. The market, then, will most likely bury DRM where it belongs, and we all can go onto better things.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Nobody is going to like this, but I'm going to say it anyway. These sorts of problems wouldn't exist if computers had a unique serial number in them.
I work a lot with SGI computers. Software on SGIs is licensed with FlexLM, and FlexLM depends on this thing called the license host ID number. On an SGI, that host number is burned into a special chip on the midplane called the NIC, for number-in-a-can. (Yeah, another instance of an overloaded acronym.) SGI's have had these for years and years.
When you get a software license, you provide the vendor with your license host ID, which is that number-in-a-can number. The vendor generates a license that will only be valid on your computer. Because the NIC is a piece of hardware, you can wipe your disks to your heart's content, and your license keys (as long as you keep copies of them) will continue to work.
It's a pretty foolproof system. I don't know precisely how it works, but there are at least two NICs in each computer, and new components are shipped from the factory in a special blank state, such that the old, failed part can be replaced with the new part and the system will flash the new NIC chip with the system's license host ID at power-up. Or something like that. All I know for sure is that I've had virtually every piece of my SGIs replaced at one time or another, and I've never had a problem with the license host ID.
I want to re-emphasize that this is not a new thing. SGIs have had NIC chips on them for as long as I can remember. Computers from other vendors may have them, too, but I couldn't say.
Now, if PCs had NIC chips in them, or the equivalent, the sort of problem described in the article would never arise. Copy-protected music files could be linked to a specific license host ID, which is stored in hardware. Wipe your drives, upgrade your machine, whatever, as long as you keep the same license host ID, the licensed stuff on your computer will continue to work.
Of course, you'd be unable to move your music files from one computer to another, but that's the whole point of the system, isn't it?
Now, how do you think the Slashdot audience would respond if somebody-- anybody-- advocated putting NIC-like technology in personal computers?
I think we're all going to have to acknowledge that some form of copy protection for media is necessary. The question then becomes, how do we (and I don't literally mean "we," but you get my point) devise a system that protects the media to the extent necessary, but that ensures as much convenience to the user as possible?
Next time somebody advocates something like the Pentium unique serial number scheme from a few years back, don't be quite so quick to flame them.
You take the SOURCE out of the system. (Image it off to a 2nd drive, if necessary)
You Install a new drive, or format the original if you are SURE you have a valid exact image off on the side, load windows, etc... then when everything works great on the new setup, THEN you can trash the source.
(Yes you have to have a spare drive around to do something like that...)
You mean like the "Word" format? Did people convert all their files to a different format? No, they just upgraded their version of Office. A few might go through the trouble of switching formats, but that isn't the solution - that is a workaround. I sure as hell don't want to convert all of my 10Gig of MP3s to another format, even though I could easily write a script to do it in the wee hours of the night. Nobody else wants to do this either, it is just too much of a pain. Once something gets settled in as the "industry standard" it is very hard to get away from it.
Microsoft is a lot like Michael Corleone. If you get kissed on the cheek, you had better start looking over your shoulder.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
or even better, give KEXP a listen. It used to be the radio of University of Washington, now it is a partnership with the Experience Music Project in Seattle. It has a VERY wide variety of music, and 95% of it is "good" in my opinion. I would bet you have only heard about 3% of the songs they play ever before.
The best thing about it though is that it is streamed in 3 or 4 different formats, plus their website has a realtime playlist so you can tell what you've heard. Oh, and did I mention no advertisments? You must listen!
KEXP
.....
Not always. Just in the last month, NPR introduced me to two new composers, and I'm not much older than 25!
Yeah, that's where I got introduced to N*E*R*D (album by the same guys who do a lot of the background work for many big pop stars) but you know, over all the album was kind of a bummer despite sounding so good on NPR...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
[No one wanted to buy a DivX disc that phoned home to validate and no porn movie maker really wanted to go that route because they know their audience.
:^)
Having to phone home has got to be the Achilles' Heel for this kind of stuff. I sure as hell don't want it, and I imagine most people would feel the same way, even if they aren't watching dirty movies.]
I believe you missed the point here. The original DivX (not to be confused with "get bootleg movies" DivX that uses mpeg with mp3 sound) died because it was a pain in the arse. People were used to going to the store to rent *and* return movies. They'd adjusted -- typically by just renting another when they went back, "saving" a trip.
People were not used to having to plug in a player to a phone outlet. Who has a phone outlet beside their TV? Heck, I still owe DirecTV for a few movies the receiver let me buy without a phone cord stuck in the back. (Someday I'll hook it up.) Who wants to rearrange their living room to save one trip to the Blockbuster [to return the movie]?
When things aren't a pain in the arse, like they aren't with Media Player in this example, people will blissfully (and to finish the cliche, ignorantly) go on reporting information on their computers to any server that'll listen on the Net. Heck, people on the up-and-up might concede that Microsoft is doing them a service -- for free!!
I think the article's mention of MS looking for a "honey-pot" might be closer to being on the money, however. At the very least, *you* decided to rip illegal CDs with Media Player, not Microsoft. MS is doing all they can to keep tabs on what you've done legally or otherwise, and I'm sure they'll be happy to help the authorities find a suspected pirate. Though I doubt the authorities are going to ask.
Finally, most/many porn users really don't care who knows. You think the mailman doesn't know that that brown wrapper's in your box holds Hustler? You think the porn industry's "pay-per-view" systems are suffering because people have to have an account? How about the Playboy channel? These places all keep tabs, and millions of honest porn lovers keep getting their fix.
It's not the anonymity that killed DivX; it was the paradigm shift (aka, "trouble hooking the danged thing up"). Sounds like you might be confusing "right to privacy" with "right to pirate", which is quite different. Really, what's the harm in Microsoft selling the information that I own a Britney Spears album? I mean, not that I do.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Pretty easy. Only problem is that it's currently a felony.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
it's a hard thing to be able to use a windows pc, I don't know how people do it.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
I know from my own purchasing that, rather than spending a few bucks/euros on a long shot, I can just as quickly go to somewhere like Amazon. There, I can listen to excerpts, decide it's crap & simply not waste my money on it. I'm finding more and more that good musicians are now signing up to multiple-release deals with record companies. They're obliged to release once or twice a year & this leads to many of them stuffing albums with one or two good tracks and about 10 turkeys.
The combination of spiralling prices and reduced value is just causing folks to stop buying. Law of Diminishing Returns and all that.Just my opinion, fwiw ...
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
RazzleFrog wrote:
n ni um/mgoals.html
o k under "Previous Projects".)
.Net, DRM, Palladium, Longhorn, they are definitely moving in that direction. And they have duped a group of open source developers into extending their Millenium to Linux and the Mac.
;)
(that crovira wrote:)
>> The direction M$ wants to take the world in (not
>> where we might want to go today,) is one where
>> PCs boot off of a network
> Actually, that is Sun Microsystem's catch line -
> The Network is the Computer - or at least it used
> to be. Sun was the one with the whole goal of
> going back to dummy terminals.
True, but there is a big difference between running programs off of a server while viewing them on a dumb terminal and the network really being the computer: ie. a distributed network that takes over your computer.
As it happens, Microsoft had just such a research project, called Millenium, back in the late 90's:
http://research.microsoft.com/research/sn/Mille
(Especially "What would such a system be like?")
http://research.microsoft.com/research/sn/
(Lo
From the technologies they have been introducing, or revealing as vaporware:
crovira was quite right about the ramifications as well. And the scariest thing is, Microsoft has rigged its EULA's in such a way that they can simply install it any time, without the PC owner's knowledge (they got their consent when they clicked through the EULA).
Please keep in mind that when Media Player plays a song and checks online to restore that license info, the user of Media Player has already given their permission to Microsoft to automatically upgrade their computer with new "security" features at that time. MSN users, well you've agreed to let Microsoft make downloads to your machine any time you connect to MSN. I believe a recent service pack ropes in XP and 2000 users as well.
We do have three hopes of escaping Microsoft's Millenial Kingdom:
1) Microsoft, being Microsoft, blunders Millenium so spectacularly badly that they sink under the weight of a thousand billion dollar lawsuits.
2) Linux gets on the desktop (really, what is keeping you?) and joins Apple in the fight to grab marketshare from Microsoft's monopoly. Without monopoly power, Millenium would never happen on a global scale.
3) At the very worst, if Linux and Apple are infected by Mono and get assimilated by Millenium, there is one last hope yet. Nintendo, I'd move your American offices out of Redmond, because an old (and highly radioactive) friend of yours will be coming to town. The One True Monster King has no intention of sharing his crown with the likes of Microsoft. (Or CGI iguanas for that matter.
Oh, and Microsoft, where did SQL Server (you know, the basis of Longhorn's file system) put the sacred nuclear materials of the Dreaded God of the Atom? He *really* wants to know.
"At this moment, it has control of systems all over the world. And...we can't do a damn thing to stop it."
Miyasaka, Godzilla 2000 Millennium (Japanese version)
(Note: I'm not associated with Toho in any way, besides loving their monster movies.
A better, or more prophetic, version of "Godzilla vs. Microsoft" than "Godzilla 2000 Millenium" could not be made.)
Civil Disobedience. They're breaking the law because they don't agree with it. IF this was truly such a dangerous thing to the economy (as the RIAA might like you to believe) you can bet your ass that the government would have already cracked down on everyone downloading MP3s. But this is just a matter of the demand being high, the supply being high, but a price floor being in place. When that happens (as any basic economics class will tell you), you create a black market. (Do a search for price floors to find some info)
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Yeah, what Sean said - USB (1.0) is *slow*. When I've got 2.6G of MP3s to copy to a device, ~1megabyte/sec is too slow.
Plus, the Nomad tends to crash both itself and iTunes (requiring a reboot of the Nomad, and force quit/restart of iTunes) if I try to copy more than 10-15 songs by highlighting them and drag/dropping. I've updated the firmware on the Nomad, but it hasnt helped.
If I had bought the Nomad, I would have bought an iPod instead. 8-) But, it was a gift....
How can you say that the massive double-digit drops in CD sales has nothing to do with piracy via computer?
t ml
Because I'd be more willing to bet it has something to do with the massive ammount of CRAP being put out there. Let's face it, rap is horrible and it's gettign old. Hip hop only apeals to teens on limited budget (and not many at that), techo really hasn't caught on big, pop is just plain shit for the most part, most rock is dead and the few good groups that are out there actualy take some time to put out decent music. Even the pouplar groups like Linkin Park have to put out filler (their new CD Reanimation is, as the ad says, Hybrid Theory revisisted). It doesn't take a foold to see there isn't much good being produced anymore, so it's not suprising that a $16 per CD price can't be maintained.
Only an idiot would buy something when it is available for free.
Not really, people will break the law only when it's easier and more convinient than following the law. In this case $16 is a huge price tag for music, outwieghing owning an original copy (a big factor for colectors and music buffs) having the original album artwork (though a lot of that is crap, give me Jim Steinman's work any day) and outwieghing being within the legality of the law. Also keep in mind copy protection makes tech savy people shy away. Personaly, a $7 or even a $10 price tag might convince me otherwise, but $16 is just too much. Saving $16 far outwieghs the frustration of finding a decent rip.
As an example, the "singles" section of the music market is dead... sales are down as much as 80%. Why? Piracy.
At nealry $7 a single, I think it has more to do with no one wanting to pay $7 for one song, no matter how good it is.
Consumers are wising up. Those that remember when CDs first hit the market remember the promises that as soon as the market became saturated the price would go down (back then a new CD cost you $13-14). Newer people are realizing they don't have that sort of money to spend on that sort of crap. Supply and demand says when your sales are falling, but the demand is just as high or higher, you need to lower your prices. Sucks to be the RIAA.
read this for a better POV http://www.fastcompany.com/online/60/monopolist.h
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
An AC wrote:
;)
> The problem of preventing piracy is difficult.
But it isn't the responsibility of people who paid for their music to bear the burden of preventing copyright breaches. It is not *their* problem.
If I pay $60 for a 2 disk imported Mothra soundtrack (and I did), I should be able to simply rip the music onto my hard drive or do anything else with it (except break laws). It's mine. Why should I have to report to anyone (let alone Microsoft) if I have to restore the mp3's from it from a backup copy? And the only reason the person in the article was doing it in the first place was because Microsoft's software is crap!
Thank Mothra for Apple and iTunes. I had a most enjoyable time yesterday afternoon ripping that disk set and others. I'm listening to the "Godzilla 2000 Millenium" soundtrack now (which I also ripped from a CD I legally owned). This is how it should be! The artists (and even the greedy sharks) have their money, no laws are being broken, and I'm being entertained without hassle.
Last I heard, the one convicted of breaking the law was Microsoft. Funny how they are now the gatekeeper of DRM, and in charge of policing pirates.
Windows: "Go talk to my friend, an 800 pound monopoly-abusing gorilla!"
Mac: "And here's my good buddy, the 66,000 ton Godzilla!"
Godzilla: Stomp!
It is _not_ a recommended practice to re-encode MP3s to Ogg. And if you do, please don't distribute them, because then you're giving the public a skewed representation of Ogg Vorbis' real audio quality.
The bitrate reduction in Ogg Vorbis is called peeling, although, no real tool for peeling currently exists, and no one has really proven it works (only a small sample program that didn't sound that great)
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
I actually used to be a big fan of Microsoft. Evil Empire, shady business tactics, yeah yeah, whatever. I admired their goal of transforming the then-chaotic software world into a coherent, integrated whole that would do really cool things. Ask almost anybody at Microsoft ten years ago and they would have sincerely told you that was their mission.
... Personal License Migration Service blah blah... Personal License Update Utility yada yada... I translate these 4 or 5 paragraphs into one sentence:
But back then MS was still truly a geek-run company, headed by one particular geek who had figured out how to hack the business world. Today lawyers and bean counters are running the show, and making tremendous amounts of money is the only goal. Today we get root authorization snuck into security patches, and circle jerking with the entertainment industry.
Reading through all the MS instructions
Do not use Microsoft software.
A bomber the FBI was hunting recently discovered something similar about his cell phone.
He had driven halfway across the country from the area where he had been planting bombs in people's mailboxes. Somewhere in Nevada he powered up his cellphone. And when the cellphone identified itself to the network, the new "locate the 911 call" system (which actually tracks the phone any time it's on) reported his location to the cops (who had already notified the phone company to look out for him). They had him captured within half an hour.
Of course the first time the general population heard about this capability was when it was mentioned in a news story about the capture. (If the cops hadn't told the reporter it had been used, even those of us who knew it was possible wouldn't have known it was already deployed.)
This digital rights management registration has the same properties, but for any type of line:
Turn on your computer while it's attached to the internet and it "phones home" to check your licenses, which are identified to you personally.
This identifies the IP number you're currently using.
The IP number - even if it's dynamic - identifies the ISP, and the port within it.
The ISP can track the port to a physical connection - either hardwired or dialup - and can do this either in real-time or from logs after the connection is dropped.
The location can be identified immediately for hardwired connectinos. For dialups the phone company or companies handling the call can track it - again either real-time or from logs. (Both the ISP and the phone companies can tie this to your name, bank account, and so on.)
The entire process CAN be automated (if it has not been already), much like Carnivore, giving the FBI or others instant access to the information.
This may already have been authorized by the Patriot act. It's directed at enemy non-citizens and intended to be used by the "intelligence community" and so claims to escape many civil-rights safeguards (such as the need to get a warrant before using it), much like the incarceration without recourse to courts used against Johnny Walker Lindh and others associated with the Taliban.
Of course if this facility is used to capture an actual bomber and save lives, that's good. But if it's used to capture somebody some law-enforcement or spy agency THINKS is the bomber, it's not so good. And if it's used to harass opposition political figures, anybody some bureaucrat or cop doesn't like, or random citizens, it's called "a police state".
Please don't tell me "It can't happen here." Because it DID happen here. Repeatedly. (Look up COINTELPRO - or the general history of the FBI - for examples within the computer era.) And don't tell me it USED to happen but doesn't anymore, either. It takes decades for this stuff to come to light, so the recent stuff is still not general knowledge. (I remember people saying it doesn't happen anymore when COINTELPRO was happeneing.)
But the "digital rights management" hook is just the last straw, tying your personal identity to your computer's identity in advance. The bulk of this has already been deployed - at least in Microsoft systems and possibly in others.
Microsoft system installs attempt to configure your network connection. If they succeed, it's "PC Phone Home". They have your Software Product Key (a unique identifier for the software distribution), the serial number of your CPU if it exposes one, the MAC address of any ethernet cards (which can serve as a hardware unique identifier if your CPU doesn't expose a serial number), and any info you entered during the setup - like to sign up for network service. Of course the connection itself gives them your call trace information.
A few years ago Microsoft found a new use for spam: They sent out a series of "developer conference" adds. The remove-me email address would bounce. But the remove-me URL would load a mix of HTML, Javascirpt, and VBscript which would construct a URL containing your registry information and use it to query register.microsoft.com. (The registry contains your Software Product Key, ethernet card MAC address, etc.)
Some of the file formats used by Microsoft tools embed identifying information in files they store or exchange - which can also get it into email. An example is Microsoft Word, and the identifying information has already been use to arrest at least one macro-virus author.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A BBC News article today has this ironic quote from Bush's National Security Advisor, speaking about Iran:
"I don't think there's any doubt that we are concerned that Iran is a place where an unelected few are really crushing the aspirations of their people."
Unelected few? Gee, sounds awfully familiar to me, an American living in the good old USA. She continues...
"So what we are saying to the Iranians is act like elected leaders, and that these unelected few should not be permitted to hijack the aspirations of the Iranian people."
Senator Hollings, Congressman Boucher, are you guys listening?
Yeahbut...I don't know, for the dabbler in music, it still seems kind of tough...even if these sites have a good concept of "featured artist", you need to keep coming back to keep up.
In college, you're exposed to so many people, that you can rely on your pre-existing opiniin of them and their tastes as a way of prescreening all the music out there. There may be online near equivalents of this, getting involved in chatrooms and stuff like people have said, but you have to work at it a lot more than back in the day...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
In that case, all the WMAs you create are in fact still locked up, there's just a class of player that can be told to always unlock them. It would be very easy to update all players (by law?) so that all your 'unprotected' WMAs magically become protected, in this case, and you have already accepted license terms (if I'm not mistaken) allowing Microsoft to put out such an update, without telling you. It's all down to where in the process the authorization occurs- is it the encoder being told to do plain vs. locked versions of a file? Or is it the playback being told to lock the file vs. pretend there's no lock on it?
Fortunately it's easy to tell: read the source code for Windows Media Player.
Doh.
...copy CD's with Windows Media Player???
Zis Guy Wrote:
>I have been collecting music using Windows Media
>Player to copy from CDs.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
there are no "Soup-uters" out there that allow you to make unlimited, perfect copies of your can of soup and instantly deliver the soup to millions of people around the globe for free. If there were, you can bet Campbells would be very interested in controlling what you did with your can of soup.
And suppose there was? Suppose we had a way to make an infinite amount of food almost for free? A machine which can produce any meal you desire for a zero additional cost? I suppose you would want to outlaw it, or at least regulate it. Because after all, corporate profit is more important than feeding people right?
You might think this is a totally spurious argument, but it's not. Right now, the official US gov't stance is that corporate revenue from AIDS fighting drugs is more important than saving lives in Africa. When it comes down to saving lives vs. corporate intellectual "property" rights, the corporations want to let people die.
And in the future, when corporations decide that libraries are just piracy conduits, they will want to ban those too. Because corporate profits are more important than educating people. In the eye's of a corporation, profits are the single most important thing above all else. Feed the poor? Not if we don't get our cut. Fight an epidemic? Not if you can't pay for the patent rights. Educate the poor? Not if they can't afford the license for their books.
Congratulations. You have just discovered the reason why the childish meme, "Copying is Theft," has no basis whatsoever in reality.
The "Soup-uter" -- or replicator, if you will -- is coming. The first hints have been created in labs today. When that happens, there will be no more scarcity. People will be able to have as much as they want of whatever they want. After all, isn't that the goal technology has been striving for since the invention of the plow: Increased abundance at reduced cost?
But there's a teensy little problem: When the replicator arrives, the market-based economy will cease to exist, because its foundation in scarcity will cease to exist. That means a lot of people will lose a lot of power. Not only will manufacturing concerns be panic-stricken ("No one's buying our cars anymore; they're making their own copies!"), but so also will the government as they watch their taxes on commerce dry up.
They will look to preserve themselves. They will look for answers. They will turn to history for solutions. "Oh, look," they will say, "at how the 'problem' of software copying was solved." And before you know it, you'll have copy-protected food. (Oops! it's already here, courtesy of Monsanto.)
Well, all good and wonderful, one supposes, except... What do you say to that emaciated family starving in third-world Africa? What do you say to the millions suffering from medical shortages in South America? Where the fsck do we get off telling these people that they can't use their replicator to make food and medicines for themselves, to improve their lot in life, unless and until they pay us our, "rightful tribute?"
That is a perfect formula for social disorder. That's the stuff civil wars are made of. And that's exactly what we're facing, unless we get off this childish sense of entitlement and get it through our thick, whining skulls:
Copying Is Not Theft.
By arguing on the subject of, "intellectual property," you are (perhaps unwittingly) participating in the construction of a crucial part of your own future. Make damn sure you know what you're asking for; there are people out there all too willing to give it to you.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
And so on.
Let me get this right.
Having spent 25 years trying to make VCR's as simple as a CD player (ie. usable when drunk, rather than requiring rocket science to set the clock), CD players as simple as toasters; and turn personal computers into appliances (take a bow Steve Jobs); the entertainment industry is now trying to turn CD players into (drum roll):
Okayyyy. Sounds like consumer friendly to me.
Not
Seriously, the entertainment industry really needs to consider this aspect of things. We all know that Digital Rights Management is a usability nightmare, but do they?
How many of these devices are going to sell to consumers who are forced to 'manage' their "Digital Rights"?
A large part of the corporate software and services market revolves around tools and services to make management of assets (read rights-to-see-the-movie) easy.
Software customers purchase software and then find themselves spending much, much more on ancillary tools and services to remove the added cost and complexity from their lives.
In fact, a good definition of "service" is "cost to the customer". If a customer has to spend a lot of time/effort/additional money to deal with me or use my product, that's poor service. If it's easy for them, that's good service.
"Ease-of-use" is not a strong point of the software industry (in fact we should hang our heads in shame)
On the other hand, "ease-of-use" defines the entertainment industry. The key to their success is making discretionary purchase of luxury goods so easy we can't resist.
How much does it cost me to see a first run movie at the cinema, or buy a CD now?
My legs to carry me there and some loose change for the ticket/CD.
How much does Hollywood and RIAA want me to pay in the future?
A whole swag of licence management software, DRM-aware backup software, etc, etc, etc,
In other words, a distribution channel with extremely poor service characteristics.
They must be mad.
Not yet anyway...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
From the Winamp changelog:
Winamp 2.61:
* In accordance with Microsoft's license agreement, we no longer allow you to use DSP plug-ins or alternate output plug-ins when playing WMA files.
So you'd have to find a version older than 2.61 for that trick to work.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I trust said developer was immediately terminated for gross incompetence then. Come on, the person writing the spec, responsible for implementing this valuable new feature of unique document IDs, didn't even bother to examine the method by which the ID was generated?
If there was a better way of generating unique IDs on a computer, you can bet that it would have been used instead.
It's hard to believe that the spec writer looked very hard for alternatives when s/he didn't even examine the provenance of the original.
But hey, why look at it in a reasonable fashion when you can go off the deep end with conspiracy stories?
In this particular case, the conspiracy story is a lot more reasonable than the explanation you've offered. However, it's certainly possible that there's no malice here; maybe the development team simply didn't care about their customer's privacy. That's the explanation I favored at the time; however, the pattern of behaviour we've all seen since doesn't cast a kindly backward light.
More and more it looks like that was when they started moving step by step away from the shallow end.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that singles sales have dropped due to 'piracy'? It's not even a sensible theory. It's as easy to copy an album as it is to copy a single, and even the RIAA don't claim that album sales are down any 80%.
People don't like singles because it's a pain in the ass to keep changing out the media after every song. They cost almost as much to produce and distribute as an album and don't sell nearly as well. It's harder to make money on them, that's all, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with people copying them.
Speaking of the day the music died - I believe today is the 25th anniversary of the death of Elvis. Amazingly, he's still in the charts!
-----
For great justice!
Just want to correct your .sig:
The Write brothers where not the first to fly a heavier than air machine.
Their claim to fame is: First controlled flight by a human in a powered, heavier than air craft.
Many had "flown" but uncontrolled, many had put up heavier than air gliders, etc...
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Anyway this time I had another look at devices and this time WMP, of all programs, told me this device was recordable. I could scarcely believe it so I decided to put it to the test and inserted a blank. Sure enough the orange light came up, a sight I have not seen for almost a year, and eventually it claimed it had managed to copy one single track and run out of space. When I looked at explorer it confirmed this was a writeable device whereas before it was always in denial. Looking at the recording it could not read it however, but looking at the disk it had physically burned about half the surface.
Could it be WMP did not like the look of my VLK and decided to knobble my means of "piracy"?
Amen!
This is one of the primary reasons why I use Peer to Peer. Finding new music.
Personally, I like a lot of different music. (Basically everything but Country Music, though I will sample because you never know...) I go and look for something I am in the mood for targeting users that have a lot of it. Then checkout their other shared tunes to see if there are new ones.
I have found out about a lot of good music! (that is more often than not from countries than USA.)
For a long time I could never figure that part out. I know I want the CD if I hear it. Letting me hear a lot means I will buy more. The more you expose the more you get. I believe most people are this way, otherwise we would not tend to invest in large music collections. It is not all about the money though.
Control is a big part of things. We have all discussed that so enough for now.
Competition really is another. Our American labels don't want labels from abroad gaining much of a foothold here either. The business model is that we export our culture while only sampling others. Peer to Peer breaks this.
Thinking about it a little more, I realize that this really is just control again, but maybe from an angle that has not been discussed much. --Then again, maybe it is late.
Either way know this:
You begin to get old when you stop craving new music. There is something good in all music, you just have to learn to relate. Tough at first, but it gets easier.
I am 35 now. Still enjoy new music as much as I did as a kid. Better, my approach lets me enjoy good music with my kids and we can actually talk about it.
Don't miss out on things like that, life is too short.
Blogging because I can...
If you think FlexLM is spyware, then you obviously don't understand what it does or how it works.
Software needs to be nodelocked. That's the only way software vendors can prevent the sort of rampant piracy that's going on in the PC world right now. Piracy is an epidemic. In my office alone-- a small one, with about 12 employees-- I could probably find you 50 instances of pirated software. Not software pirated through malice, but simply through ignorance. People seem to honestly not understand that when you buy a copy of MS Office, you can run it on one computer. You didn't buy the right to run it on every computer in the office. Honestly, how could they understand that fact, unless they read every license agreement with a magnifying glass. It's an honest mistake.
So the end result of the situation is that every small and large company in the world, I'm willing to bet, has some degree of innocent software piracy going on within it. It's a bad situation all around, necessitating software license compliance audits and tons of money and effort wasted.
If every piece of commercial software were nodelocked, in some simple, foolproof way, this problem simply wouldn't exist. The guy down the hall would be unable to just grab the Office 2000 CD from the closet and install it on his new laptop without buying a license. The net result would be good, not bad.
The problem is that every attempt to nodelock software on personal computers has thus far been a miserable failure. Like the case described in the article that started this conversation, users end up fighting against the licensing mechanism, which is bad for everybody.
That's why I brought up FlexLM. I've been using it for years on SGIs, as I said, and it's painless. When you install new software, you just call the vendor up-- or, more often, go to a web page-- and give them your license host ID. They give you back a license string that will only work on that machine. You only have to do it once, but if you should happen to lose your license string for any reason, you just run through the process one more time to get it back. The whole thing takes about five minutes, and after that you forget about it.
I would love it if a foolproof mechanism could be found for nodelocking PC software. Sure, you're always going to have teenagers who try to steal software, and you're always going to have organized pirates in places like Malaysia who try to sell counterfeit licenses. You can never defend against those types perfectly. But-- and I know this sounds like doublethink, but just consider it-- you can actually help businesses by making it impossible, or at least disproportionately difficult, for them to make an innocent mistake that violates a software license. The good will far, far outweigh the bad.
>>I think a part of the general difficulty for older people to find new music is due to the fact that nearly all new music is targetted to teenagers. Most new music gets very boring to adults after listening to it just once, because it is just so damn transparent and unoriginal.
Well yes, that is true if you listen to Mainstream radio etc.
If you head out to live clubs it's a different thing, I realized quite a while ago that this is the best way to find new music, not necessarily always good, but definetly more interresting when you see the artist perform live in a small venue.
Never was a real fan of those huge soccer stadium like concerts.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.