I have other things to do and a limited amount of time to do them. Let's see, when I get home from work, I can watch TV, surf the Net, listen to music, read a book, get started on that programming book I've been meaning to work on, spend time with my wife, sit out on my porch, go to the park, go to the gym (I _really_ need to do that), play with our cats, cook, call up some friends on the phone, go visit friends, go out to eat, and many other things.
It's not like I have all this free time to fill. In fact, it's just the opposite, and, the thing is, many of my alternative activities are free. So try and gouge me for more money. You aren't going to sell me a movie I wasn't planning on buying anyway, and I have plenty of other things I can do, many of which are more rewarding in the long run than watching some piece of shit movie.
So, to all those greedy studio execs: You need me far more than I need you. If you try to screw me, I'll just find another thing to do, but if I disappear as a customer, then your profits decline, and without those, you're bankrupt.
No, no, no, stop being so rational. With concepts like you posted, you'll never understand the mindset of the media execs. They aren't unaware of the concept of customer service you're writing about; they simply disregard it. In their mind, they own the content, and from about a century of experience, they've come to the conclusion that consumers want the content to the extent that our entire culture has been built around it, so they figure they can demand whatever they damn well please, and we'll bend over and take it.
Remember in the movie "National Lampoon's Vacation" where the Griswold's car breaks down out in the middle of nowhere, and Clark asks the sleazy mechanic how much it's going to cost to fix it? The guy answers, "How much you got?" Clark then says, "No, how much will it cost?" And the mechanic repeats, "How much you got?" Well, that's the attitude you're dealing with here.
The way I understand it, it doesn't work that way. With this system, you give THEM your service subscription info, and they tell the providers you subscribe to that you're allowed to view this content. So you'd have to give them the account info to everyone on the planet if you wanted those people to access the content.
Now that I think of it, this raises all sorts of privacy and security concerns. First, do you want Disney and the other affiliated studios to have all that info? Second, what if there's a data breach? Suddenly, all that information is floating around out there.
Keychest, indeed! More like a treasure chest of everyone's account information to a myriad of services. The number of attack vectors this potentially creates is staggering.
I don't care what the ads say. The only thing that will matter is what's in a legally-binding contract. Not a TOS that Disney will doubtless reserve the right to change, but a contract. And in case you're wondering about the possible limitations that will likely come along, let me throw out a few:
1. Sure, you get perpetual viewing rights, but they only last for as long as the Keychest service does. Anyone who bought DRM'ed music from MSN or Yahoo got a taste of what could happen if the DRM servers are taken down. And, as someone else already pointed out, there's nothing to stop Disney from pulling the plug if profits aren't to their liking. Does that mean you'll lose access to all the stuff you bought? Yes, but here's a book of discount coupons so you can save a few bucks on all the DVDs you're going to have to buy to rebuild your movie collection.
2. Would you like to sell that movie you've grown tired of? Not with Keychest, you can't. Suddenly, used DVD sales go away, which is something the studios have wished for for quite a long time. See, wishes can come true!
3. It's a fact that studios love trailers and commercials. Actually, trailers ARE commercials, and a service like Keychest allows the ads to get changed out at any time, and I'd be willing to bet that you won't be able to skip them. Are there no ads before that movie you just bought? Maybe not now, but they could appear any time down the road.
The thing is, Keychest is meant to solve the studios' problems, not mine. I have no problem with the ownership model, thank you very much. I also have no problem with playing the movies on my shelf in any device I want. If I want to load them onto a laptop, I'll either burn a copy to a blank disc (so the DVD can stay safely at home) or rip it and load it on the hard drive. Does that violate the DMCA? Maybe, but it solves my problem very nicely, it doesn't distribute the movie to anyone who hasn't paid for it, and I don't need a crippled service like Keychest to accomplish it, so I'm just fine with it.
I don't care if Disney sees this as a DVD killer. They may want to kill the DVD, but I don't, so they can go pound sand for all I care.
I agree with everything you said. I don't think any of this is insurmountable, but I think that there are certain things that might get in the way. Publishers are the big obstacle, mainly because they see DRM on the one hand preventing someone from making unlimited copies of a work and on the other hand allowing for all these interesting new revenue streams.
As for data longevity, this is something we've truly been horrible at. If I could find my Master's thesis from 1994, which was written in WordPerfect 5.1, I'm pretty sure I could open it, provided I can find a computer with a floppy drive, but I'm pretty sure the formatting would be pretty messed up, requiring lots of tweaking to get it to print in a format closely resembling my bound copy. And this is a file created in a program that was the king of word processors. Most of the stuff I did as an undergrad is pretty much lost, since I wrote it using Mass-11, which I could never get to output a file that could be opened in anything else with all its formatting intact.
Finally, I think that we need one and only one e-book standard. If e-books are to succeed, there needs to be the utmost assurance that any file can be opened on any reader, period. The only differences allowed should be add-ons, like Internet connectivity, the ability to directly beam a file from one reader to another, and maybe a monochrome vs. color screen.
You know, maybe this is an area where the OSS community can really come into its own. One body could develop a single yet flexible file format, and other groups, such as Project Gutenberg, could convert as many of their public domain works as possible into this format. Since many of these works are classics, the new format would immediately have a huge base of books that people would want to read, all available for free.
I just don't see e-books catching on. Even if the technology matures to make them just as legible as a printed book, that isn't the thing that will make them popular. It's a convenience thing. For example, my wife just bought a few books the other day. Yesterday, she loaned one to her mom, who read it and returned it. And today, she loaned it to her sister, who took it back home with her, which is several hundred miles away. Now, while this process COULD be easier with an e-book, since you could easily transfer the file over the Internet, the publishers will never allow this. Not only that, but good luck selling e-books you've already read to someone else.
Finally, there's the issue of longevity. Books can last for hundreds of years if they're printed on acid-free paper and properly cared for. With an e-book, while the file could be preserved, you run into the issue of making sure a reader manufactured, say, 200 years from now can still open it. I'm sure you could write data conversion software to keep the files current, but I think the publishers would resist, since they'd want you to buy new versions of the same work. And, unless you have multiple backups, one catastrophic media failure could wipe out your entire library.
I administer a domain using Google Apps, and I got a notification by e-mail a few days ago. Here is the text of it:
Hello Google Apps admin,
We wanted to let you know about some important changes around published documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
In a few weeks, documents, spreadsheets and presentations that have been explicitly published outside your organization and are linked to from a public website will be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines. There is no change for documents published inside your organization or shared privately.
If you wish to prevent users from publishing documents to the public internet, we now offer an admin control in the Google Apps Control Panel that allows users to continue to 'share documents outside the domain' without allowing them to publish the files to the public Internet. To change this setting, follow these steps:
- Login to your admin control panel - Select Service Settings > Docs - Un-check the option 'Users can publish documents to the public internet'
If a user does not want their published Docs to be crawled, then the user must unpublish them by doing the following:
- Go to the 'Share tab' - For documents and spreadsheets, choose 'Publish as web page'. For presentations choose 'Publish/embed' - Click on the button that says 'Stop publishing'
I was also there. In fact, I still have the boxed software in the bottom drawer of my computer room file cabinet. Got it, along with the BeOS Bible, for $50 at Best Buy just a few weeks before Be died. Installed it, and it was amazing. I even upgraded my NIC for an IBM one because the no-name one SBC gave me with my DSL modem wouldn't work properly. At any rate, it was an amazing OS. I loved showing people how I could run a video, play an MP3, and spin that wireframe teapot at the same time without any kind of lag.
Like I said, I still have the software. I just can't bring myself to throw it away.
I completely agree with you. And, continuing down that path of logic, if you're going to cultivate an image of always being right, then you'd better not go out of your way to piss off those under you, since they almost always know your mistakes better than those above you, and those little tidbits of information could mysteriously find their way to your superiors. And if your department suddenly looks like a bus with the wheels coming off, and especially if those failures can't be tied to one of your subordinates, they're going to land at your doorstep. You're going to be labeled a bad manager, and that will be the end of your career in management at that company, unless, of course, you have something on your boss.:)
Yep, I'm the guy down in the basement doing two jobs, one of which involves trying to figure out why, with all the computers I bought earlier this year, some of them seem to have all the software issues. Hmm, or is it the user that's the variable. And I'm the one who's getting ready to do battle with Dell support about a computer I thought they fixed a few months ago that just developed the very same instability problems.
And I don't get paid enough, and I have no window, but I have one hell of an Internet connection.:)
This is a situation that usually can't happen. The reason is that jerks are very often wrong, but, because of their personality type, they won't admit it. Even if a nice guy is wrong, he will more often than not own up to his mistakes instead of charging blindly ahead.
And I don't think being a nice guy and being competent is some rare thing. In my experience, people who are extremely competent have nothing to prove and are therefore pretty easygoing. The jerks are usually the ones who don't know shit but want to make everyone think they do. They're the ones who kiss their superiors' asses and have them believing they know what they're doing. They also belittle their underlings, who are often the ones who actually do the work.
Well, in a way, they are. What I'm trying to say is that they couldn't care less if you tweet to your friends or post to Facebook.
What they ARE interested in is controlling coverage of the game that competes with that of CBS. If you happen to be working for a newspaper, Web site, TV station, blog, or podcast that hasn't been blessed by CBS and/or the SEC, they're gunning for you. After all, you might do something crazy like publish real-time coverage of a game, a frequently-updated scoreboard, or, heaven forbid, you might interview a player. Want a video clip to use? Pay up. Want to post that footage you got of a player sucker-punching an official? Not unless you get approval. Want to do anything that CBS or the SEC doesn't want you to do? They'll show you the exit and place a boot in your ass at no extra charge.
If you want to really piss off the SEC, forget a mass tweet protest. No, start an unauthorized Web site providing coverage of SEC events, and make it better than what the SEC and CBS offer. That'll get their attention in a big way.
Nope, it's Digital Rights Management. The entertainment conglomerates get to manage what rights you do and don't have as they see fit. It isn't unlike your boss at work managing what you can and can't do. They manage, and you obey.
As I recall, early HD gear used just that, but the powers-that-be got worried that component video didn't do DRM, so those nasty evil pirates would have a far too easy time copying the video, so they decreed that any device that could output 1080 must do it only via HDMI, which supports HDCP. The side effect of this was that the early adopters who spent the really big bucks for HDTV sets got royally screwed, since no new gear that output video over 720p would connect to them. No 1080i/p cable or sat boxes, and no Blu-ray or HD-DVD. So you paid to get this tech first? Sucker!
Forgive me for not having kept up with the progress of HDMI, but wouldn't it have made infinitely more sense to have simply used gigabit Ethernet for all this? The data is all digital anyway, and networking technology is quite mature, so why did these folks feel the need to reinvent the wheel? Right now, you have to worry about whether your new TV will have enough HDMI inputs for the devices you have or might get later, or you need to get an HDMI switcher. With Ethernet, you just connect everything to a switch or router, and you're all set. One connection per component is all you need, and, if you use a router, everything immediately gets connectivity to the home network or Internet. And if a new component comes out that needs to talk to another component in a different way or using more bandwidth, that can all be handled in the firmware. As long as you don't flood the local network with more data than it can handle, everything is fine, and the rest of the networked devices, including the router and cables, can stay exactly the same.
Or did someone in the entertainment industry worry that using Ethernet for connecting entertainment devices would make it too easy for those evil hacker types to connect a computer to the setup and break their DRM? Or maybe that if this gear was too easily networked, we might...GASP!...use it to send video from our Internet-connected computers out into the living rooms, undermining traditional TV?
Sure they did. If all it had to do was phone home with some standard info, then they could use the same software any time they needed to. All they'd need to do is insert it into the Web site they wanted him to download it from.
Doesn't seem like it was too complex. Sounds like they simply used some sort of drive-by download to install it on his system, and the program simply phoned home with the infected computer's IP address, MAC address, and a few other identifying pieces of info.
Indeed. As long as a warrant was lawfully obtained, and as long as only the suspect was being targeted, I don't see a problem. From the article, it looks as if the software was passed to him through the private site that he demanded be set up, so it's extremely unlikely, possibly impossible if it was password-protected, that any random person could have stumbled upon it.
As much as I hate AT&T, this just isn't their fault this time.
Actually it is their fault. AT&T disables the ability of their phones to display a proper roaming banner. Regardless of which network you are on your phone will always say "AT&T". On the other hand, T-Mobile will show the name of the actual network you are connected to, i.e: "T-Mobile", "AT&T", "Cellular One", etc, etc. Given that AT&T removes your ability to know when your phone is roaming I would say that it's very much their fault when people rack up roaming charges by accident.
I was on a cruise last year, and my alpha tag read "cellular@SEA". As long as we were within range of a land-based network, the ship's network was switched off. It only came on when we were several miles from shore.
However, something else is at work here. The guy's data card should not have registered on a roaming partner as long as it could connect to its home network. Therefore, if the AT&T network was available, he should have stayed connected to it. This means that one of three things happened: AT&T's coverage is nonexistent in the port area (not likely unless a cell site was down at the time), the AT&T signal was overpowered by the ship's microcell, or the guy was actually already out at sea and lied about it. I sort of doubt that last one, since it'd be easy to determine the time the data was used and find out where the ship was at the time, but something odd must have happened to cause this.
It's interesting that most media outlets are ignoring this. Of course, it took them a little time to get onto the original NSA/AT&T story, which broke online (at Wired, I think) before it went mainstream. When I read it online, I made sure to send messages to several media outlets, including CNN, about this. I never got any replies, but it was nice to see them pick up on the story, and I like to think that maybe I helped the process along.
What I'm trying to say is that it wouldn't hurt for some folks here to take a few minutes to contact one or more news outlets and send them links to the video interviews on MSNBC, Wired articles, etc. Whether this story is real or fabricated is unknown at this point, but it's potentially big enough that it needs wide coverage.
So let's all send this in to CNN, the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. and see if they haven't covered it because they aren't aware of it or because they're deliberately ignoring it.
I think it can be useful on mobile devices, but that doesn't mean it has to be built into the browser. An extension will do just fine. If you want to meet half-way, then have the extension preinstalled on the upcoming Firefox for mobile platforms, but, since it would still be an extension, users could remove it if they want to do so.
I'm just quite puzzled that Mozilla sees the need to build this into the browser. Even if this means nothing here in North America and Europe, can you imagine what this will do to Firefox adoption in a place like China? Would you want to be a dissident with something like this installed on your laptop? I wouldn't. I'd be nervous enough as it is, so I sure as hell wouldn't want this "feature" potentially telling the Chinese government where I was while I was blogging about human rights. As for how they could implement this, all they'd need to do is require users to click through a page that collects this info before they're allowed on the Internet. It'd be just like logging into a commercial hotspot here, except that the Chinese version would reappear every now and then to refresh its data.
I can't speak for the parent, but my problem with it is the possibility of abuse. You're installing an app that can pinpoint the location of your computer, at least to some degree. If someone wants to exploit this "feature", you've already done most of the work for them. All they have to do is find a way to tap into the data that app gathers.
But regardless of that, my other objection is having such an app included in the browser. If it's an extension, I can choose whether or not I want to install it, but if it's in there, I have no way to remove it. And why should it be in there by default? What's wrong with it being left as an extension? I honestly can't think of a good reason.
I think the folks at Mozilla had better take a giant step back and do some serious soul searching. If they think the dust-up over the click-through EULA was ugly, they ain't seen nothing yet. Believe me, guys, you _don't_ want to go down this road.
I'm also boycotting it because of its overcommercialization. The Olympics has become a sad parody of itself. It exists solely to sell its own brand to sponsors, who then try to ram it down our throats. Do you think the IOC really gives a damn whether China censors the Internet? Only to the extent that it hinders Olympic coverage.
If the IOC was so worried about censorship, why do you think it has historically been so quick to censor athletes' blogs and bloggers' coverage of the games? Simple. These things might somehow compete with the coverage provided by traditional outlets who paid the IOC for the privilege. Never mind that uncensored blogs might give people around the world a better glimpse into the games and the behind-the-scenes goings-on. These things might annoy sponsors, and that can't be allowed to happen!
So, fuck the Olympics. I won't watch, and I honestly don't give a damn who wins.
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I have other things to do and a limited amount of time to do them. Let's see, when I get home from work, I can watch TV, surf the Net, listen to music, read a book, get started on that programming book I've been meaning to work on, spend time with my wife, sit out on my porch, go to the park, go to the gym (I _really_ need to do that), play with our cats, cook, call up some friends on the phone, go visit friends, go out to eat, and many other things.
It's not like I have all this free time to fill. In fact, it's just the opposite, and, the thing is, many of my alternative activities are free. So try and gouge me for more money. You aren't going to sell me a movie I wasn't planning on buying anyway, and I have plenty of other things I can do, many of which are more rewarding in the long run than watching some piece of shit movie.
So, to all those greedy studio execs: You need me far more than I need you. If you try to screw me, I'll just find another thing to do, but if I disappear as a customer, then your profits decline, and without those, you're bankrupt.
No, no, no, stop being so rational. With concepts like you posted, you'll never understand the mindset of the media execs. They aren't unaware of the concept of customer service you're writing about; they simply disregard it. In their mind, they own the content, and from about a century of experience, they've come to the conclusion that consumers want the content to the extent that our entire culture has been built around it, so they figure they can demand whatever they damn well please, and we'll bend over and take it.
Remember in the movie "National Lampoon's Vacation" where the Griswold's car breaks down out in the middle of nowhere, and Clark asks the sleazy mechanic how much it's going to cost to fix it? The guy answers, "How much you got?" Clark then says, "No, how much will it cost?" And the mechanic repeats, "How much you got?" Well, that's the attitude you're dealing with here.
The way I understand it, it doesn't work that way. With this system, you give THEM your service subscription info, and they tell the providers you subscribe to that you're allowed to view this content. So you'd have to give them the account info to everyone on the planet if you wanted those people to access the content.
Now that I think of it, this raises all sorts of privacy and security concerns. First, do you want Disney and the other affiliated studios to have all that info? Second, what if there's a data breach? Suddenly, all that information is floating around out there.
Keychest, indeed! More like a treasure chest of everyone's account information to a myriad of services. The number of attack vectors this potentially creates is staggering.
I don't care what the ads say. The only thing that will matter is what's in a legally-binding contract. Not a TOS that Disney will doubtless reserve the right to change, but a contract. And in case you're wondering about the possible limitations that will likely come along, let me throw out a few:
1. Sure, you get perpetual viewing rights, but they only last for as long as the Keychest service does. Anyone who bought DRM'ed music from MSN or Yahoo got a taste of what could happen if the DRM servers are taken down. And, as someone else already pointed out, there's nothing to stop Disney from pulling the plug if profits aren't to their liking. Does that mean you'll lose access to all the stuff you bought? Yes, but here's a book of discount coupons so you can save a few bucks on all the DVDs you're going to have to buy to rebuild your movie collection.
2. Would you like to sell that movie you've grown tired of? Not with Keychest, you can't. Suddenly, used DVD sales go away, which is something the studios have wished for for quite a long time. See, wishes can come true!
3. It's a fact that studios love trailers and commercials. Actually, trailers ARE commercials, and a service like Keychest allows the ads to get changed out at any time, and I'd be willing to bet that you won't be able to skip them. Are there no ads before that movie you just bought? Maybe not now, but they could appear any time down the road.
The thing is, Keychest is meant to solve the studios' problems, not mine. I have no problem with the ownership model, thank you very much. I also have no problem with playing the movies on my shelf in any device I want. If I want to load them onto a laptop, I'll either burn a copy to a blank disc (so the DVD can stay safely at home) or rip it and load it on the hard drive. Does that violate the DMCA? Maybe, but it solves my problem very nicely, it doesn't distribute the movie to anyone who hasn't paid for it, and I don't need a crippled service like Keychest to accomplish it, so I'm just fine with it.
I don't care if Disney sees this as a DVD killer. They may want to kill the DVD, but I don't, so they can go pound sand for all I care.
I agree with everything you said. I don't think any of this is insurmountable, but I think that there are certain things that might get in the way. Publishers are the big obstacle, mainly because they see DRM on the one hand preventing someone from making unlimited copies of a work and on the other hand allowing for all these interesting new revenue streams.
As for data longevity, this is something we've truly been horrible at. If I could find my Master's thesis from 1994, which was written in WordPerfect 5.1, I'm pretty sure I could open it, provided I can find a computer with a floppy drive, but I'm pretty sure the formatting would be pretty messed up, requiring lots of tweaking to get it to print in a format closely resembling my bound copy. And this is a file created in a program that was the king of word processors. Most of the stuff I did as an undergrad is pretty much lost, since I wrote it using Mass-11, which I could never get to output a file that could be opened in anything else with all its formatting intact.
Finally, I think that we need one and only one e-book standard. If e-books are to succeed, there needs to be the utmost assurance that any file can be opened on any reader, period. The only differences allowed should be add-ons, like Internet connectivity, the ability to directly beam a file from one reader to another, and maybe a monochrome vs. color screen.
You know, maybe this is an area where the OSS community can really come into its own. One body could develop a single yet flexible file format, and other groups, such as Project Gutenberg, could convert as many of their public domain works as possible into this format. Since many of these works are classics, the new format would immediately have a huge base of books that people would want to read, all available for free.
The standard could even be called OpenBook. :)
I just don't see e-books catching on. Even if the technology matures to make them just as legible as a printed book, that isn't the thing that will make them popular. It's a convenience thing. For example, my wife just bought a few books the other day. Yesterday, she loaned one to her mom, who read it and returned it. And today, she loaned it to her sister, who took it back home with her, which is several hundred miles away. Now, while this process COULD be easier with an e-book, since you could easily transfer the file over the Internet, the publishers will never allow this. Not only that, but good luck selling e-books you've already read to someone else.
Finally, there's the issue of longevity. Books can last for hundreds of years if they're printed on acid-free paper and properly cared for. With an e-book, while the file could be preserved, you run into the issue of making sure a reader manufactured, say, 200 years from now can still open it. I'm sure you could write data conversion software to keep the files current, but I think the publishers would resist, since they'd want you to buy new versions of the same work. And, unless you have multiple backups, one catastrophic media failure could wipe out your entire library.
I administer a domain using Google Apps, and I got a notification by e-mail a few days ago. Here is the text of it:
Hello Google Apps admin,
We wanted to let you know about some important changes around published documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
In a few weeks, documents, spreadsheets and presentations that have been explicitly published outside your organization and are linked to from a public website will be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines. There is no change for documents published inside your organization or shared privately.
If you wish to prevent users from publishing documents to the public internet, we now offer an admin control in the Google Apps Control Panel that allows users to continue to 'share documents outside the domain' without allowing them to publish the files to the public Internet. To change this setting, follow these steps:
- Login to your admin control panel
- Select Service Settings > Docs
- Un-check the option 'Users can publish documents to the public internet'
If a user does not want their published Docs to be crawled, then the user must unpublish them by doing the following:
- Go to the 'Share tab'
- For documents and spreadsheets, choose 'Publish as web page'. For presentations choose 'Publish/embed'
- Click on the button that says 'Stop publishing'
For more details, please see this Help Center article: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60781
This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team
I was also there. In fact, I still have the boxed software in the bottom drawer of my computer room file cabinet. Got it, along with the BeOS Bible, for $50 at Best Buy just a few weeks before Be died. Installed it, and it was amazing. I even upgraded my NIC for an IBM one because the no-name one SBC gave me with my DSL modem wouldn't work properly. At any rate, it was an amazing OS. I loved showing people how I could run a video, play an MP3, and spin that wireframe teapot at the same time without any kind of lag.
Like I said, I still have the software. I just can't bring myself to throw it away.
I completely agree with you. And, continuing down that path of logic, if you're going to cultivate an image of always being right, then you'd better not go out of your way to piss off those under you, since they almost always know your mistakes better than those above you, and those little tidbits of information could mysteriously find their way to your superiors. And if your department suddenly looks like a bus with the wheels coming off, and especially if those failures can't be tied to one of your subordinates, they're going to land at your doorstep. You're going to be labeled a bad manager, and that will be the end of your career in management at that company, unless, of course, you have something on your boss. :)
Yep, I'm the guy down in the basement doing two jobs, one of which involves trying to figure out why, with all the computers I bought earlier this year, some of them seem to have all the software issues. Hmm, or is it the user that's the variable. And I'm the one who's getting ready to do battle with Dell support about a computer I thought they fixed a few months ago that just developed the very same instability problems.
And I don't get paid enough, and I have no window, but I have one hell of an Internet connection. :)
This is a situation that usually can't happen. The reason is that jerks are very often wrong, but, because of their personality type, they won't admit it. Even if a nice guy is wrong, he will more often than not own up to his mistakes instead of charging blindly ahead.
And I don't think being a nice guy and being competent is some rare thing. In my experience, people who are extremely competent have nothing to prove and are therefore pretty easygoing. The jerks are usually the ones who don't know shit but want to make everyone think they do. They're the ones who kiss their superiors' asses and have them believing they know what they're doing. They also belittle their underlings, who are often the ones who actually do the work.
Well, in a way, they are. What I'm trying to say is that they couldn't care less if you tweet to your friends or post to Facebook.
What they ARE interested in is controlling coverage of the game that competes with that of CBS. If you happen to be working for a newspaper, Web site, TV station, blog, or podcast that hasn't been blessed by CBS and/or the SEC, they're gunning for you. After all, you might do something crazy like publish real-time coverage of a game, a frequently-updated scoreboard, or, heaven forbid, you might interview a player. Want a video clip to use? Pay up. Want to post that footage you got of a player sucker-punching an official? Not unless you get approval. Want to do anything that CBS or the SEC doesn't want you to do? They'll show you the exit and place a boot in your ass at no extra charge.
If you want to really piss off the SEC, forget a mass tweet protest. No, start an unauthorized Web site providing coverage of SEC events, and make it better than what the SEC and CBS offer. That'll get their attention in a big way.
But are you getting 1080 or scaled-down 720?
Nope, it's Digital Rights Management. The entertainment conglomerates get to manage what rights you do and don't have as they see fit. It isn't unlike your boss at work managing what you can and can't do. They manage, and you obey.
As I recall, early HD gear used just that, but the powers-that-be got worried that component video didn't do DRM, so those nasty evil pirates would have a far too easy time copying the video, so they decreed that any device that could output 1080 must do it only via HDMI, which supports HDCP. The side effect of this was that the early adopters who spent the really big bucks for HDTV sets got royally screwed, since no new gear that output video over 720p would connect to them. No 1080i/p cable or sat boxes, and no Blu-ray or HD-DVD. So you paid to get this tech first? Sucker!
Forgive me for not having kept up with the progress of HDMI, but wouldn't it have made infinitely more sense to have simply used gigabit Ethernet for all this? The data is all digital anyway, and networking technology is quite mature, so why did these folks feel the need to reinvent the wheel? Right now, you have to worry about whether your new TV will have enough HDMI inputs for the devices you have or might get later, or you need to get an HDMI switcher. With Ethernet, you just connect everything to a switch or router, and you're all set. One connection per component is all you need, and, if you use a router, everything immediately gets connectivity to the home network or Internet. And if a new component comes out that needs to talk to another component in a different way or using more bandwidth, that can all be handled in the firmware. As long as you don't flood the local network with more data than it can handle, everything is fine, and the rest of the networked devices, including the router and cables, can stay exactly the same.
Or did someone in the entertainment industry worry that using Ethernet for connecting entertainment devices would make it too easy for those evil hacker types to connect a computer to the setup and break their DRM? Or maybe that if this gear was too easily networked, we might...GASP!...use it to send video from our Internet-connected computers out into the living rooms, undermining traditional TV?
Sure they did. If all it had to do was phone home with some standard info, then they could use the same software any time they needed to. All they'd need to do is insert it into the Web site they wanted him to download it from.
Doesn't seem like it was too complex. Sounds like they simply used some sort of drive-by download to install it on his system, and the program simply phoned home with the infected computer's IP address, MAC address, and a few other identifying pieces of info.
Indeed. As long as a warrant was lawfully obtained, and as long as only the suspect was being targeted, I don't see a problem. From the article, it looks as if the software was passed to him through the private site that he demanded be set up, so it's extremely unlikely, possibly impossible if it was password-protected, that any random person could have stumbled upon it.
As much as I hate AT&T, this just isn't their fault this time.
Actually it is their fault. AT&T disables the ability of their phones to display a proper roaming banner. Regardless of which network you are on your phone will always say "AT&T". On the other hand, T-Mobile will show the name of the actual network you are connected to, i.e: "T-Mobile", "AT&T", "Cellular One", etc, etc. Given that AT&T removes your ability to know when your phone is roaming I would say that it's very much their fault when people rack up roaming charges by accident.
I was on a cruise last year, and my alpha tag read "cellular@SEA". As long as we were within range of a land-based network, the ship's network was switched off. It only came on when we were several miles from shore.
However, something else is at work here. The guy's data card should not have registered on a roaming partner as long as it could connect to its home network. Therefore, if the AT&T network was available, he should have stayed connected to it. This means that one of three things happened: AT&T's coverage is nonexistent in the port area (not likely unless a cell site was down at the time), the AT&T signal was overpowered by the ship's microcell, or the guy was actually already out at sea and lied about it. I sort of doubt that last one, since it'd be easy to determine the time the data was used and find out where the ship was at the time, but something odd must have happened to cause this.
It's interesting that most media outlets are ignoring this. Of course, it took them a little time to get onto the original NSA/AT&T story, which broke online (at Wired, I think) before it went mainstream. When I read it online, I made sure to send messages to several media outlets, including CNN, about this. I never got any replies, but it was nice to see them pick up on the story, and I like to think that maybe I helped the process along.
What I'm trying to say is that it wouldn't hurt for some folks here to take a few minutes to contact one or more news outlets and send them links to the video interviews on MSNBC, Wired articles, etc. Whether this story is real or fabricated is unknown at this point, but it's potentially big enough that it needs wide coverage.
So let's all send this in to CNN, the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. and see if they haven't covered it because they aren't aware of it or because they're deliberately ignoring it.
I think it can be useful on mobile devices, but that doesn't mean it has to be built into the browser. An extension will do just fine. If you want to meet half-way, then have the extension preinstalled on the upcoming Firefox for mobile platforms, but, since it would still be an extension, users could remove it if they want to do so.
I completely agree with you.
I'm just quite puzzled that Mozilla sees the need to build this into the browser. Even if this means nothing here in North America and Europe, can you imagine what this will do to Firefox adoption in a place like China? Would you want to be a dissident with something like this installed on your laptop? I wouldn't. I'd be nervous enough as it is, so I sure as hell wouldn't want this "feature" potentially telling the Chinese government where I was while I was blogging about human rights. As for how they could implement this, all they'd need to do is require users to click through a page that collects this info before they're allowed on the Internet. It'd be just like logging into a commercial hotspot here, except that the Chinese version would reappear every now and then to refresh its data.
If a tool can be abused, it will be abused.
I can't speak for the parent, but my problem with it is the possibility of abuse. You're installing an app that can pinpoint the location of your computer, at least to some degree. If someone wants to exploit this "feature", you've already done most of the work for them. All they have to do is find a way to tap into the data that app gathers.
But regardless of that, my other objection is having such an app included in the browser. If it's an extension, I can choose whether or not I want to install it, but if it's in there, I have no way to remove it. And why should it be in there by default? What's wrong with it being left as an extension? I honestly can't think of a good reason.
I think the folks at Mozilla had better take a giant step back and do some serious soul searching. If they think the dust-up over the click-through EULA was ugly, they ain't seen nothing yet. Believe me, guys, you _don't_ want to go down this road.
I'm also boycotting it because of its overcommercialization. The Olympics has become a sad parody of itself. It exists solely to sell its own brand to sponsors, who then try to ram it down our throats. Do you think the IOC really gives a damn whether China censors the Internet? Only to the extent that it hinders Olympic coverage.
If the IOC was so worried about censorship, why do you think it has historically been so quick to censor athletes' blogs and bloggers' coverage of the games? Simple. These things might somehow compete with the coverage provided by traditional outlets who paid the IOC for the privilege. Never mind that uncensored blogs might give people around the world a better glimpse into the games and the behind-the-scenes goings-on. These things might annoy sponsors, and that can't be allowed to happen!
So, fuck the Olympics. I won't watch, and I honestly don't give a damn who wins.