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Censoring a Number
Rudd-O writes "Months after successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, an unprecedented campaign of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices by the MPAA, has hit the Net. For example Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15,500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?" How long before the magic 16-hex-pairs number shows up in a comment here?
It's amazing to see just how worthless and futile DRM is. It penalizes the poor saps who don't have the know-how to override it. As for the rest, and that includes the pirates, it's no obstacle at all.
If you had a lock that kept out only the people you actually wanted in, but couldn't keep out those that were actually going to rob you blind, one would think that your solution might be a little more robust than "I'll see anyone who reports how badly my lock works".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Time to get out and use the old pen to write a nice little letter to my congress critter.
I'm all for someone using their rights to protect what is their's. Not a problem, but when it dictates what they can do with the things they own, and speech, I think it has crossed a line I'd rather it not cross.
Some say Americans just take the abuse and can't see what the big deal is, unless it might cause re-runs of Friends to be pulled. Some people say Americans are sheep and will go where a select class of people point for them to go. I have sometimes seen these rights dry up a little when not constantly defended, and I start to think American's are lemmings, not sheep.
I guess I'm just as guilty as everyone else. I'm no fool. I can see I'm like that also, but I'm trying really hard to be different.
Short Answer: It all stops when we all stop it.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
I've been frenetically digging up incoming stories about this. This is nolonger about the key itself but one's freedom of speech. This demonstrates the worst of the DMCA and how it's being used to harm people's freedom and fair use rights.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 Seriously, tag it.
games journalism blog
The media processing key for AACS is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
When I read this slashdot post, the first thing I thought was "I bet there's a wikipedia article on it!" Sure enough, either somebody has posted one and it's been deleted and protected, or the editors went ahead and jumped on it and protected it. (I haven't checked yet, though there are "additional information links. Nor have I check it in other bases.)
Guess I should look into postng this to one of the "anti-censorship on wikipeida" sites.
For what it's worth, this is utter crap, but it shows a severe weakness in copyright law. Anything that can be represented with data, anything at all, can be encoded/encrpyted on anything else, given an arbitrary coding mechanism. For instance, let us create "sabre86's stanard coding scheme": add 1 to any number. After encoding we have 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1. Look, it's a different number! I guess it isn't a circumvention. Or is it?
You can extend this logic arbitarily to anything, so that not only can any string represent any other string (and thus be a "copy"), any string can be the key to an encoding scheme, meaning that posting any string is "circumvention" if I see fit to describe my encryption process such that it encrypts/encodes a copyrighted work using that string as a "key."
So all strings are copyrighted because they can derived from other copyrighted strings through an arbitrary encoding scheme and all strings are potentially circumventions of DRM/CRAP because they are both a representation of a known key in a different encoding and the key for some other arbitrary encryption algorithm that "circumvents the copyright protections."
Bullshit
--sabre86
Everything digital is as a number (hence the name "digital").
Circumvention software? A long number. PDFs with classified military information? Long numbers. Child porn? Long numbers. Having those illegal numbers on your hard drive will get you convicted.
So, if you are going to argue that numbers can't be illegal, think about the above examples, and reconsider your arguing strategy -- you will not win that argument with a judge.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
I'm sorry, but you can't claim Copyright on a randomly generated cryptographic key. That is because a randomly generated key does not meet the minimum creativity requirements of Copyright law. No creative input == No Copyright. The bar is very low but a randomly generated key patently does not meet it.
A novel way of saying it.
add hl,bc
ld sp,hl
ld de,09d02h
ld (hl),h
ex (sp),hl
ld e,e
ret c
ld b,c
ld d,(hl)
push bc
ld h,e
ld d,(hl)
adc a,b
ret nz
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Did you mean 10 base 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640 ?
"The right to do something does not mean doing it is right." William Safire
Maybe companies should understand that secure encryption is impossible when you have several thousand geeks running around with a computer, no social skills, and way too much idle time on their hands.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Perhaps I can be the first to post a pneumonic (subtract one from the length of each word):
"A linguistic characterization downgrades it to a wee difficulty, characterizing behemoth codes (extrajudicially made inside monopolizing, unincorporated conspires lying to impose devious macroeconomic tricks) through wise coding." -- Mocking Comically Absurdist Commercialism I.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
When you drive down the motorway, in general everyone is going to a different place and doesn't care about where anyone else is going to. You have to take into consideration what they're doing on the motorway, however.
When people work to crack something like this, they are all working to the same end, and do not necessarily know what each other is doing to that end, although sometimes people discuss their ideas to get feedback etc.
Maybe we need a new moderation: (-1, Car Analogy).
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
Geek and nerd used to be synonymous. The meaning of geek you describe was invented by geeks to reclaim the word geek, kind of like the queer community reclaimed the world "queer," except that the queer community didn't have to change the meaning of the word, merely the attitude behind it, since they were fine with being queer.
Unlike the gay-bi folks who reclaimed the word "queer," the geeks who reclaimed "geek" were self-haters. They were ashamed of being socially inept, excluded, and driven to alternative worlds by their treatment in this one. Fortunately, there were positive aspects of geekiness, so they simply threw out the negative characteristics and stressed the positive ones.
Ultimately, this will backfire. By attempting to erase their negative attributes, the geeks (nerds) will end up losing their claim on the positive attributes once associated with them. They will be defined solely by their negative characteristics. (I am serious about this. Bear with me while I explain.)
The rest of the world bears so little ill-will toward geeks (unlike queers, whom homophobes hate passionately) that they allowed geeks to redefine the word geek. After all, geeks (sorry, nerds) weren't trying to shoulder their way into the circles they were excluded from. Society didn't want nerds to be condemned and repressed; they just didn't want the nerds asking them for dates, sitting with them at lunch, and trying to go to their parties. Most nerds are quite happy living without those things, especially now that they have a positive label for themselves. Since nerds accept the boundaries imposed on them, society feels no need to remind them of what make them different.
(Technology nerds have been successful in business, where successful is idempotent with welcome, for over a century, maybe much longer. The rise of Bill Gates et al. was not an invasion of new territory.)
Ironically, stripping the negative aspects out of the word "geek" made it possible for non-inept, non-excluded people to accept the geek label and still enjoy their status as full-fledged people. That means that the excluded and inept can no longer comfort themselves with their geek status, because all the cool aspects of geekdom have been invaded by good-looking and/or confident people who are able to understand the mysteries of human interaction.
Geeks (ack! again, I mean nerds) no longer have any safe haven or any unique reason to live. They can't claim that the world would fall apart without them, except in the same sense that immigrant laborers can. (Who else is willing to pick strawberries and do the IT grunt work?) They can't even confidently stay out of the danger zone anymore. That guy with the faded Space Invaders shirt might look like a good guy for a nerd to talk to, but it's possible -- nay, likely -- that he is a normal person who will be put off by the nerd's social clumsiness, resulting in awkwardness and humiliation. Conversely, a badge of identity such as a D&D shirt that might in the past have protected a nerd from being approached by people with normal standards of social aptitude no longer conveys any protection. There is nothing for a nerd to do but attempt social intercourse and hope his interlocuters will not be horrified, or at least protect his dignity by hiding their horror.
I predict that a new way of labeling and sorting people will arise that will help protect normal and socially defective people from uncomfortable interactions. Naturally, the normal folks want to seem (and feel) fair, compassionate, and justified, so the criteria for exclusion, while remaining the same as ever, will be described in terms of mental illness and emotional intelligence. Mental illness will be cited in order to point out that social incompetence makes people dangerous, both in trivial ways (inappropriate, annoying behavior) and serious ones (stalking, spree killing). Emotional intelligence will be invoked whenever it is necessary to place responsibility for the exclusion on