Slashdot Mirror
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/
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.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
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!