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Remote Kill Flags Surface In Kindle
PL/SQL Guy writes "The Kindle has a number of 'remote kill' flags built in to the hardware that, among other things, allow the text-to-speech function to be disabled at any time on a book-by-book basis. 'Beginning yesterday, Random House Publishers began to disable text-to-speech remotely. The TTS function has apparently been remotely disabled in over 40 works so far.' But what no one at Amazon will discuss is what other flags are lurking in the Kindle format: is there a 'read only once' flag? A 'no turning the pages backwards' flag?"
for when we vote stories down. "Stupid" kinda works, but IMO it's not specific enough.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Sometimes I wish Slashdot had a "baseless speculation" flag.
The article doesn't talk about the Kindle's other technological back doors at all, so colour me disappointed.
Still, as a parent of an autistic child, I know how valuable the TTS function can be in our computer programs. As an author, I'm saddened that Amazon's rolled over on this for the publishers' and Author's Guild panic. TTS is not the same as an audiobook performance, nor does it have that possibility any time soon.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Well, that's what you get for buying content instead of just copying it from pirate bay or whatever.
True. Except when that option can get you in more serious trouble than a copyright suit, e.g. losing your job.
I pre-ordered a Kindle DX. Thanks to the information in this article I have changed my mind and I'm now canceling my order. I would be stupid to pay $500 for a device that can be remotely crippled, when cheaper ebook readers give me full control. What was I thinking?
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
This is a law suit waiting to happen if there is no disclosure that the books will have these "flags" at the time of purchase.
(the Kindle could automatically correct errors in books as they are found).
Yeah, especially the inconvenient ones in history books.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The book file has to be redownloaded. But you can take all of your book files and archive them to a computer before turning on the cell connection, just in case.
If book publishers start acting like software publishers, you can always just skip to pirating the books, this doesn't affect user added files(with or without paying, depending on the color of your hat).
This is a law suit waiting to happen if there is no disclosure that the books will have these "flags" at the time of purchase.
Big fucking deal. If history is any guide, the affected consumers will get a credit for $0.99 off their next purchase from Amazon while the law firm who initiated the lawsuit will walk away with millions. Amazon will just write it off as a cost of doing business and go right on screwing their customers, albeit this time with a disclaimer about the DRM flags clearly displayed in a 2pt font.
Call me cynical.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Don't worry, I'm sure there is something about it buried in the 20 page license agreement.
True. Except when that option can get you in more serious trouble than a copyright suit, e.g. losing your job.
I fail to see how getting busted on copyright infringement will somehow cause you to lose your job - it's not a felony, so as I understand it, it'd have no bearing with your employer.
Yes, and I hope one does, and soon. People need to know the risk of all these kill switches everything is getting.Better the learn it now when it only impacts a relatively few people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Don't use amazon as your book source use TPB, it has a rather nice selection
Reminds me of Fahrenheit 451.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I fail to see how getting busted on copyright infringement will somehow cause you to lose your job
Two words: company policy.
You're comparing people who are demanding a proscribed product that they purchase and consume outside the law with people who just don't like how much the product costs or how its distributed. The government denying you access to a good or service you demand is not the same thing as a private company offering a good or service in a way or at a price you don't like.
Furthermore, you have a legitimate means to air your grievances: don't buy. Not only do you send the clear message that you are unhappy with the product or service, you maintain the legal AND moral high ground in the debate.
Your post is labeled insightful. It is not.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
No shit.
I have not bought a Kindle. This nutter thinks that newspapers could "save" by distributing over Kindle instead of on paper.
Guy down later in the forum has it exactly right. You can't put a Kindle in your waiting room. If your "copy" of the paper is on a Kindle, you can't read the sports page while someone else has the world section or the comics. You can't hand "your copy" of the paper to someone else, or leave it behind once you're done with it if it's on a Kindle (something I do regularly - hey, I don't know the next person coming by, but I imagine they might want to read something too).
Hell, if it's on a Kindle, we lose yesterday's newspaper - so how will we wrap today's fish?
In all seriousness, that's the problem with DRM. It's never about "protecting copyright." It's always about some more nefarious purpose, like destroying the doctrine of first sale. Remember how $ony patented a method to have video games "signed" by the first console they were put in, and subsequently refuse to run on any other console? That was just one of them.
Oh, give me a break. It has little to do with working better and more to do with people not having to pay for stuff and little chance of getting caught or punished. Copyright laws may be flawed, but they are not completely unjust. The people who use things without paying their fair share are the unjust ones...not rebels against an unfair law.
And I find it a bit ironic you trust pirates of all people to deliver you a product free of root kits and trojans.
I don't totally disagree with you, though. We do give the middle man too much and the artist too little. But pirating gives the artist less.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
AFAIK Amazon clearly wants to have text-to-speech enabled for all books. It's the publishers (and their threat to remove works if speech is enabled) you should be mad at. Amazon is trying their damnedest to make a compelling ebook product, and like Apple with iTunes, trying to drag the publisher's kicking and screaming onto the internet.
Like music, I expect once the market is there, people will demand the functionality (or pirate for it, or sue for it) and it will become commonplace.
If Amazon took a high and mighty moral stand, they would just be killing the market (and their own business opportunity) and letting another eBook maker who WILL compromise their morals take over the market.
At least we know Amazon is trying to open things up as much as they can.
Very astute of you to make the comparison between iTunes/iPod/iPhone creating the market for digital music and the resulting consumer demand that allowed them to drop DRM.
It does indeed sound just like Amazon's Kindle creating the market for E-Books and the resulting consumer demand (and default of enabled) resulting in Text-To-Speech being standard on all E-Books and E-Book readers.
Oh wait, or were you trying to say there's something wrong with the iPhone and Kindle?
Kindle in a doctor's waiting room?
Gah! I wouldn't touch that thing, knowing that every germy hand had picked it up and played around with it.
And I find it a bit ironic you trust pirates of all people to deliver you a product free of root kits and trojans.
Like Securom or Sony's crap? Yeah, I trust the pirates more than the original.
If you're really worried, look at the feedback for the torrent. Or look for names of groups who pride themselves on the quality of their cracks. There's an entire subculture based on that.
And if the whole release is a .avi, there's not much to talk about anyway.
AFAIK Amazon clearly wants to have text-to-speech enabled for all books. It's the publishers (and their threat to remove works if speech is enabled) you should be mad at.
If Amazon wants us to direct our ire towards the publishers, then they should have come clean about these flags before selling the Kindle. Except, wait... then it would have flopped, and hard. Instead, they pulled a bait and switch fraud on their customers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"may have a clause in his contract saying he cannot accept money directly for his music."
Or maybe because he has some integrity?
I know when I was a performing musician, we could buy extremely discounted albums from our label, but it was considered by most to be slimy to go to the local duplicator and get a thousand or two printed up for your tour. Yet, some thought they could be a little cheaper by doing so.
It also means that everyone that worked on the album and were not paid outright get screwed...often times, if you only pay the artist, folks like the songwriters and the producer and even the little guys that did something for substandard pay because they believed the work was good and would eventually get paid for it -- those folks get nothing when you send them the money directly.
Honestly, this would be like stealing a Mac and sending Steve Jobs a check for the price of the machine...he is the one with his name out front, but it takes a LOT of work to bring something to market and with rare exceptions, it is not a one man show.
Or use most other e-readers. The local library is free and paper backs are cheap - I don't have to worry about someone messing with what I am reading...and if they do I can use the book to beat sense into them (please note hard covers are better for this option than paper backs).
Doesn't really seem possible. If they are wrong then that is the last thing that history will judge them as. If they are right then history won't remember them at all.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
If I choose to obtain a digital copy of a work I would never pay for, I am not actually depriving the creator of anything. It doesn't matter why I would choose not to pay. It might be because I am cheap, poor or lazy. It might be because I find something about the creator or publisher to be morally objectionable (like say, abuse of copyright). As such, I find no moral objection to obtaining an illegal copy, often made illegal through a law I find morally objectionable.
You realize that you lose half of the audience every time you write "M$" or "$ony" in a post right?
I read the internet for the articles.
Thank you! Specifically, it's not there to protect the artist's source of income, or guarantee the artist any income, for that matter.
You think this is funny, but I'm not laughing. Right now, in my mind, amazon is no better than Mr. Soprano.
I bought a bunch of books to use the "text-to-speech" software while driving to work, and now suddenly that's been disabled, which makes those particular books practically worthless to me. Is Amazon going to issue a refund? No, because just like every other media company, they think it's okay to sell goods without warranty. Hell even the lowly food industry says, "We hope you are satisfied with you're candy bar, but if you're not, return unused portion for refund." Only the iuck-lcikers in the rcord companis, game cmpanies, and book sotress think it;s perfectly acceptable to FORCE customers to keep a product they don't want. No returns.
If they go out of business, it will be their own stupid fault due to ignoring that age-old rule, "The customer is (almost) always right." Screw your customer by selling them product as "text-to-speech" and then disable that product, and you've effectively screwed yourself. Customers have a long, long memory. They will not come back for further frakking. Even the most rudimentary business class teaches you this.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"Reprobates like you" then you tell him to eat a bullet?
You need serious psychological help.
I need less people thinking they can freeload off creative works because they rationalize that they "never would have paid for it."
If you won't pay for it, don't take it. It's not rocket science.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Nobody is "offended", rather they look at the post and see a 35 year old with a neckbeard in his mother's basement railing against the machine.
I read the internet for the articles.
You still need psychological help if you can't see that telling them that, then telling them to eat a bullet isn't....off your fucking rocker crazy.
It has nothing to do with depriving the creator of anything. It has to do with the creator's rights to have his creations distributed on his terms.
It's not a "natural" right in any way shape or form, it is inherently an unnatural right. You're not depriving the creator of any liberty, you're only going around the purely legal bargain between the people, and content creators, to give them this unnatural "right" with the hopes that in the end it will benefit us more than if we didn't relinquish our own natural right to do whatever we wish with our own possessions.
Since the whole concept behind this bargain is that the copyright will help the creator make money and thus be incentivized to create, but in the case in question the person is most definitely not depriving the creator of any money, where exactly is this moral issue that you're so upset over?
Is it simply that this is the law, and breaking the law is amoral? I certainly don't agree to that, but I will as always agree to have you be the first one subject to the world you wish for, and encourage you to eat a bullet the next time you break any law at all. Since you've certainly already done so willfully, I expect no further posts from you.
The enemies of Democracy are
Welcome to the Internet, where frivolous discussions about anything elevate to the point of wishing death upon someone who has a different opinion than you. You obviously haven't been desensitized.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
You still need psychological help if you can't see that telling them that, then telling them to eat a bullet isn't....off your fucking rocker crazy.
More redneck than anything else, I'd say. The United States was built on people objecting to laws on moral grounds, and flagrantly violating them. Generally the laws that originally governed this country when it was a colony were wholly unfair. They are unfair again, and I see little benefit to bowing to the whims of the filthy rich.
No. The customer is right unless them being right interferes with another, bigger customer being right. Or it interferes with a number of other customers being right. That's the way it really works.
The way it should work is, the customer is only right if they are not wrong. In most of Europe, if you go into an establishment looking to have your butt smooched and every single one of your sniffy little needs met, you will be shown the door rather than letting you waste the employee's and other customer's time.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
In the article (someone has to read it, but what the hell, this is /.), the subject of piracy is not an issue.
The point you're all missing is that any legally downloaded copy of a book can be prevented from being accessed via TTS by a customer with some form of reading disability.
I have no axe to grind regarding the merits (or otherwise) of the technology, but the point is that if you have paid for the content, you should be allowed to access it however you want. Deliberately locking out legitimate users with disabilities is seriously bad medicine, and anyone who does so deserves all the bad karma he'll get.
Unfortunately they won't go out of business over stuff like this. Most consumers don't care about consequences of their purchasing choices, the reasons for which are numerous -- too dumb, busy, or simply apathetic. "The customer is (almost) always right" only applies if the available customer pool is small enough for that to matter; once a market grows beyond a certain size, companies only have to make X % of their customers happy, and marginalize or ignore the rest.
I'd love for things to be different, for for a completely DRM-free eBook to be available, but I'm also too cynical to believe this could ever happen.
The entire reason we bought Kindles was the text to speech function. Our school teaches dyslexic kids and any technology that allows these kids to read ANY book, whether or not an audio book version is available, is extremely useful.
Without unlimited text to speech kindles are reduced, from a useful teaching tool, to simply a nifty gadget. Without TTS, there is very little to justify the cost of these over other e-book readers.
Good job Amazon! You've just allowed your book publishers to kill a potentially HUGE market for these things - schools.
-ted
I think he's smoking the Constitution.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Copyright only exists to encourage content creators to create more work, not to guarantee them money for the rest of their lives (and that of their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc...). When Disney decided that copyrights should be perpetual and bought a bunch of politicians to make it so, THEY didn't uphold their part of the bargain (as stated in the Constitution).
Meaning, I have no moral qualms pirating anything where the creator wouldn't receive any benefit from my purchasing it. Pirating Louis Armstrong songs is not morally or ethically wrong, for example, since purchasing it isn't encouraging his zombie to produce further work. The same goes for a stunning amount of music where the band receives very little to no benefit from album sales. For example, if you go buy a Beatles CD, no one from the band receives a cent, so why is pirating it wrong?
Copyright does not exist to guarantee a revenue stream for giant faceless corporations.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
As I stated above, I have no use for marijuana. I don't care one way or the other if marijuana is legalized. All I care is that people are not allowed to drive or operate machinery under the influence of it. After that I don't care.
Our problem is that so many other people care enough that they will smoke the stuff without your permission, or my permission, or the State's permission, or the Federal Government's permission. Regardless of how you and I feel about it, THEY feel it is unjust, and by sheer force of numbers (that is what counts in a Republic, right?) THEY are correct! The law is unjust.
Same applies to illegal downloads. You and I may not like them. It doesn't matter. Enough other people have a different opinion, and by sheer force of numbers they are correct!
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
If you have pirated materials on a computer other then your own, then you are an idiot...
Or they look at the post and see someone who doesn't like Sony or MS's business practices. Which is fine. A cantankerous connotation in a post does not him or her a troll make, nor does belittling a cantankerous post you a wiseman make. This is /. And if your user # is correct, then you should know better than raise your hoary head at this, of all things, to take potshots at.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I have a Kindle (2), purchased just under a month ago.
While it is annoying that these flags exist, it is part of the TOS that you have to agree to.
Personally, the TTS feature is not of great value to me. If I'd been concerned with audio books, I would not have purchased a device to read them. Besides, it is clearly stated on the product page that the TTS is experimental and available where allowed by the publisher.
However, I fairly certain that the flag exists in the book itself and not in the Kindle. If a publisher decides to withdraw TTS rights, Amazon only needs to update the book in you server side library and upon next sync, you receive the updated book that blocks TTS. Otherwise, the Kindle's minimal storage would need to be used to maintain a database of disallowed content for the TTS tools. From a developer standpoint, that is poor implementation.
Any large scale functionality changes require a firmware upgrade. Currently my Kindle is unable to receive these as I have a hack to use custom idle screens. I have to remove the hack in order to update.
It has to do with the creator's rights to have his creations distributed on his terms.
No such right exists. A temporary legal privilege exists, but only at the expense of our property rights. That is not an exchange I am willing to make.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You need, huh? What about our concerns? Think those concerns aren't legit, perhaps? We are the customers, have you forgotten? Our concerns come first, and we, not the mess that is the law, are the final arbiter of what is and is not a legit concern. We know quite well that the law has been tainted by special interest lobbying. We are more fair than the content providers. But you must provide good value. We will not part with our hard earned money for a bad deal.
If I'm going to make a legitimate purchase, I demand that the seller not cheat me. That means no tricks! No DRM, no remotely controlled off switch, no time bombs, no surveillance for marketing or any other purpose. No lock in, no trying to hook me in order to gouge me down the road, no hidden gotchas. And none of this dodging around the first sale doctrine by trying to tell me I bought a license, not a product, no long complicated EULAs full of unenforceable and untrue nonsense trying to claim that I have fewer rights than I actually do. Like, don't try to tell me I'm not allowed to reverse engineer or hack something. And most certainly no root kits! Do you not understand how much contempt you show your customers when you treat them so, and not see the repercussions that will lead to?
And, you know, there are people who don't buy or freeload either. What have you to say to that? That you don't think there's enough of those to matter?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Really that is a shame, you should call the police to help you recover this stolen work. It would be a shame for you to have deprived of it... wait, you mean you still have the work? Well if society (over 60 million downloaders in the US is enough to call "they" society or the people certainly) didn't steal the work then what did they steal?
So what happens if you buy a book and they disable the TTS capability 10 days later? You're SOL?
The pot laws are stupid. Vote against people who support them.
Want to support the artist instead of the corporation? Find an artist you like who gives his work away.
There is room in the world for both paid and free entertainment. Stealing from suits doesn't support anyone.
And please don't say books are like music. You play a song for your friends, they buy the CD, sure. You don't usually find people reading their favorite chapter from a book to a crowd.