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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?"
I think the first is more likely - although the second could be useful in other ways (the Kindle could automatically correct errors in books as they are found).
...and they are internet capable? I'm going to laugh my ass off when some hacker reduces every ebook on every Kindle in the world to a useless pile of bits.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I was going to get my wife a Kindle for her birthday. She asked, "What's the point? The books are almost as expensive, and I can't send them to my mom or sister when I'm done. And what happens when the hardware breaks, and I need to get a new one? I don't want to be forced to get a Kindle just because those are the books I bought before. Fuck 'em."
My wife, the non-geek. She gets it.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I don't smoke marijuana; however, I know plenty of people who do. This situation has existed since before I was born. People, and politicians (they don't count as people), have discussed making marijuana legal. It may never happen in my lifetime. That does not stop people from recognizing bad law.
Copyright is there to protect the artist. I see little artistic protection in copyright law. I see corporate protection. I don't think I am the only one who sees this, hence all the downloads.
People will NOT obey an unjust law. When corporations declare that they sold you a license instead of a product and start turning off access to what the customer paid for...well, you reap what you sow. There are not enough lawyers out there to sue everyone who downloads. Ask the RIAA if you don't believe me.
Besides, downloaded stuff just works better. I hate to tell all those coke-sniffing, mistress pampering executives at all those corporations that their business model sucks donkey-dick, but I have to. Downloads don't pester people with advertisements. They start up immediately. They play the entire content. You can change direction when you want. You can shift the content to other media. Shit! What's not to like? Except that we do cheat the artist. That cannot be denied. We must find a way to support the arts, and dump the middle-man. That middle-man is getting in the way of culture.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Can't one of those Blind Advocacy groups sue them for discrimination?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I mailed a cheque to the Merkin Vinyard in Arizona for the 10,000 Days album I downloaded.
It was never cashed, but I feel good about it anyway.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Well, considering that the kindle is already powered by linux, it's completely idiotic to assert that he's "shoving your pet OS down your throat" because you're already running linux on the Kindle.
Also, there is a text-to-speech is a standard package in one of the most common desktop managers for linux. I use the text-to-speech sometimes while I'm doing the dishes, etc. It does about as well as most text-to-speech programs do. You don't have to use kde to do it, ktts is just the front-end, it uses the festival synthesis system, so a front end might be out there can use a less full-featured OS than kde, which might be faster and hence more suitable for an e-book reader device. I wonder if it's possible to get the festival speech synthesis system running on it and bypass amazon's DRMed solution all together.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
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.
In terms of being locked into something like the Kindle, I sure as hell would not pay money for something where the terms of my purchases can be changed after they take my money.
And I find it a bit ironic you trust pirates of all people to deliver you a product free of root kits and trojans.
The people who copy content aren't the ones who add that crap, it's just another attack vector for malware authors to use. i.e. They find out what a popular download is, then create malware to masquerade as that download.
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.
It has a lot to do with both working better and being free. Copyright law is horribly flawed, to the point of being nearly completely unjust. I can't say that they're better than piracy at this point. It's just different people getting fucked in each scenario, either the public or the industry, but it's the industry that has brought us to where we're at through their constant lobbying for more and more monopoly powers over copyrighted works and durations that last generations. It's disgustingly corrupt and I think that's why people don't really respect copyright anymore.
And I find it a bit ironic you trust pirates of all people to deliver you a product free of root kits and trojans.
It's certainly not trust. Don't trust anything you download unless you verify that it's clean. There are some distributors that have earned a level of trust because they have consistently only distributed clean copies, but by and large you shouldn't trust anything you download. The fact that people will take the risk is simply due to the fact that the industry has ensured that they can screw us over with impunity.
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.
The artists have become collateral damage in a struggle between the middle men and the public. The middle men try to grab more and more power and control from the public and give the artists as little as possible. I think that they need to be killed off and copyright law reformed if artists are ever to get a fair shake and if the public is ever to start respecting copyright again.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
This is old news. The whole brouhaha over this happened months ago. The Kindle 2 came out, with text-to-speech. The Author's Guild whined like little babies claiming it would reduce audiobook sales (presumably they also want to charge you for reading to your kids.) They wanted the functionality removed completely. Amazon reached a compromise, that publishers could opt-out by requesting that it be disallowed on their books.
There's no point getting your panties in a bunch *now*. The horse is out of the barn. Nor is Amazon the one to complain to. The publishers and the Author's Guild are the ones to complain to.
If anything, Amazon deserves credit for putting the feature in in the first place without restrictions. Given their business model, you might have expected them to proactively design the feature to the publishers' requirements long before it was released. They might have been like Microsoft who preemptively crippled the Zune's sharing feature.
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Except the artist, unless they happened to make anywhere near the "advertising fees" extortion.
Bands make money from concerts* and merchandise, not albums. Exceptions are indie and wildly wildly successful mainstream bands that make enough to pay back the fees and/or are popular enough to negotiate a fair contract.
* Often the things they sell there as well as the tickets, many times they keep a greater deal of profit sold at concerts.
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To me, this flagging ability should be viewed as a good thing.
All books should be available from the library FOR FREE. You go to the library, you borrow the book, and you return it in two weeks. You can re-check it out again for another 2 weeks if you want.
This flagging ability COULD allow this to be done without driving to the library. You COULD use this to NEVER buy a book. You simply "check it out" for 2 weeks and then it vanishes.
Now I'm skeptical that it will ever be allowed to work this way, but this is the way such devices SHOULD work. If I can go check out a physical copy for 2 weeks, why not a digital copy? If it's free, I don't mind if it vanishes in 2 weeks, just like a library loan would.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Now, I don't have a problem with the production company making money. That's a good thing.
I have a problem when they step on my rights to make that money. We can argue all day over what my legitimate rights are and get nowhere. I just think you should pop over to The New York Time's web-site before too long. On Monday they had a really cool article on how production companies are requiring artists to produce two CDs worth of material for every CD they market. It usually takes twelve songs to make a CD. The production companies are now requiring artists to produce as many as twelve additional songs so that Target can have two exclusive songs to match the two exclusive songs on the Best Buy version, and so on.
Wait a minute! Who's getting screwed here? I'm starting to lose track.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
It's probably better no one touches it. The kindle is a cool concept but it is being sold into the hands of avid (book) readers, who on average open up to a much wider audience that are likely on average more intelligent then bloggers ;)
Let them get burned they are smart enough to take care of these things on their own. Sometimes I think these companies sell all this DRM crap because they know it will be cracked. This way a large portion of the suckers will get caught on the treadmill and the ones who other wise would have asked for the companies head on a steak, will default to cracking their device to get it to work and keep quiet.
I personally hope all of the tech savvy back away from this and for once let a company release something and let their customers suffer for a bit. When Jane Doe pays for something and finds out the company doesn't want her to have certain options available to her that's when you will have a good reason to fight back. It's not so easy to do that when you've already hacked the crap out of it and its downloading torrents while calculating your BMI after your breakfast reading.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.