When you say "but if I'm able to run these things out of the box without re-booting nightly, you should be able to as well" I must respectfully disagree with you, simply because of all of the diverse things one does with each of those three products (I did mean IIS, apologies). My experience, as I said, has been unequivocal. Both firsthand and 2nd hand, watching some extremely bright people with excellent familiarity with the product suite, I have come to expect NT4 production environments to be tainted by disaster (often repetitive disaster), where I have observed and participated in complex Linux rollouts with a significantly superior track record. You must decide whether or not you think me honest or my judgment sound, but I am certain on the point.
To your comment about "ya' gotta reboot it every night" being FUD, I can only once again respectfully disagree; I have heard this exact statement from a number of (apparently) competent professionals responsible for major IT efforts in the fortune 500, and if I were able to name names, I'm sure you would be familiar with at least several of them. I, too, took it with a grain of salt until I observed its necessity on projects of my own using NT4, IIS and SQL Server, and more than once. Older versions of IIS and VBScript just leak like crazy and that's the beginning of their troubles. Fortunately, my experience with my Microsoft-or-death clients has improved under the Win2k regime.
I am not making this stuff up. It is not rhetoric, but actual repeated professional experience. I should perhaps add "painfully" repeated.
Are you not aware of Microsoft's spectacular failure while attempting to migrate hotmail from Solaris to NT4, IIS, and SQL Server? This is often my case-in-point when discussing building large applications with NT4. I understand that they did stick with it and eventually got it going with Win2k.
I don't assume such instability is an OS problem until I see it on a variety of hardware, which I have.
Nonetheless, I'm glad things are working out for you. The system is complex enough I'm sure rather subtle differences in usage patterns can be responsible for problems...
What if that app you're running is ISS? Or SQL Server? Or Exchange? Or another of the other Microsoft solutions, system services, patches, service packs, or other miscellany? But I suppose that's the "relying on coders who are [pretty much incompetent]" part you mentioned.
I'm very familiar with both sides. If you're open-minded enough to try, when you finish learning how to administer Linux, you will find it far more stable and maintainable, and the set of tools you'll use on it an order of magnitude more secure and reliable, than Win2k. _Let alone NT4._
I'm convinced the people who still run around touting NT4's reliability are either incompetent or not tasked with any particularly complex applications involving microsoft tools or both, not to mention not reading the news... Remember the hotmail disaster? And that was Microsoft's own team.
I will certainly grant that Win2k is a significant improvement, and perhaps an order of magnitude more reliable than NT4. I don't generally count Win98 in these comparisons; even very few slashdot trolls will stand up and try to make a go of claiming Win9x/Me exhibits reliability of any kind.
However, to put it in perspective, doing normal development with Java, VBScript, IIS, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Flash (I am deliberately excluding crashes that occured while coding C/C++ and other "non-safe" systems), I observe Win2k either bluescreening, spontaneously rebooting, or getting to a state where it needs to be power-cycled approximately 2-4 times a month. This seems like heaven compared to NT4, which I I used to crash daily while doing Java development and writing ASP pages for IIS. Most NT4 production servers I am aware of are rebooted regularly, often nightly, to prevent them from falling apart altogether. My experience with NT4 has been unequivocal. Don't use it in production unless you want to suffer.
That's not counting Win2k's constant explorer crashes, which are generally not disruptive but still a bit unsettling. The majority of the problem appears to come from Microsoft being unable or unwiling to sanitize the GUI code and protect failures to handle the GUI layer correctly from killing the entire system. That, and I still see the standard device-related problems. Burning CDs and attaching new mice have both proved catastrophic for Win2k, in the latter case requiring a complete reinstall of the operating system. No, I didn't build the mouse myself; it was a Logitech mouse.
I also note that, as with all other versions of Windows, Win2k still has a tendency to "decay;" that is, to continually develop small but uncorrectable problems until reinstall is eventually required. However, the decay rate also seems to have been slowed.
Compare this to Linux, which I also give daily and roughly equivalent use, and which _never_ crashes. _Ever_. In fact AFAIR the last time I had to deal with unexpected shutdowns on Linux was due to a foolish attempt to build a complicated high-speed SCSI chain a year or two ago. I am not aware of any problems on Linux which cannot be corrected without a reinstall of the OS, but perhaps there are exceptions in the crowd who can share experiences.
So... Win2k. Finally usable. But still not competitive.
To all knee-jerk anti-MS-criticism-on-slashdot and pro-MS trolls... if you're just skimming, now is the part where you hit reply and do your thing.
Yep. Think of DRM more like a container. The music industry will put things inside it, and hope it'll be strong enough to keep them in. It wont do any good for what's already escaped.
Because the pretense that your computer is still for making "art" of your own must be maintained, the system will be capable, as you describe, of hosting "escaped" content.
There are two big points to keep in mind about DRM:
As you are no doubt already aware, it's a stupid idea - it will never work.
They're going to do it anyway, and if our government is foul enough to force the issue, they'll completely fuck up the computer industry in the process.
The big news is in the potential for abuse; DRM will make it much harder if not impossible for MS's competitors to interoperate legally, and surveillance and censorship will become commonplace.
If I understand the standards that have been proposed, hardware level DRM is just a set of features that the operating system can use or not.
I think it's possible for what you descibe to happen. It would be difficult; the closest systems we have to this right now are consoles, which attempt to use public key cryptography and tamper-proofing on the BIOS. Currently the best such systems look unlikely to withstand the onslaught of the Linux community. Microsoft will sue the people that port Linux to the xbox, of course, but then we're back into legal rather than technical speculation.
I think the biggest thing working for us is that, where not owned by the same parent company, the manufacturers aren't really that hot on the content people. Hardware needs content, but the hardware industry is worth orders of magnitude more. And they're afraid (and with good reason) that people won't buy PC's that are crippled to only run Windows 1984 (and perhaps they will trot out a few symbolic, never-ran "alternatives" in deference to the recent anti-trust suit). They may hedge their bets, but I doubt they'll bet the farm.
Unless congress forces them to, that is.
Think in terms of data "movement" (i.e. backups)
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Digital Dark Ages?
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· Score: 2
Remember, if you think your being shortchanged by your hard drive's operation life, read the manual!
You're supposed to keep backups, silly!
Redundant copies of the data, on other HDs or tape or any other media, will allow re-dupblication when one of the redundant pieces fails. Keep that up and your only worry is a catastrophic failure that kills all of your redundant pieces at once.
You reduce the chance of that, BTW, by trying to keep your backups in more than one place.
Now I grant you, no one does backups properly. At least, until after the first few times they get burned.
Hard drive DRM - consequences
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Digital Dark Ages?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There are several ways this could go. Obviously, we have to be circumspect, since the U.S. gov't is literally considering copy-control legislation that would make Linux illegal.
You can say it'll never succeed - won't all Linux's rich patrons prevent it? But I would have said the same about quite a few other things that have already happened... and it's in our interests to act as thought it might.
However, assuming something slightly less than the worst, DRM will of necessity be something which you can enable or not. IOW, as long as they'll let you, buy all the fast, new DRM drives you want, and use Linux to run them. Linux will simply ignore the DRM features and use the drive normally.
The problems come when you're forced to use a DRM operating system with your DRM hardware (quite a reversal from the old antitrust days, eh?); you will find it very difficult to take some/all of your data back to Linux/other non-DRM OS.
You can probably see why MS loves this now; DRM technologies, even optional ones, will have the nice effect of preventing interoperability with open source operating systems, thereby locking everyone in even further. Let alone the myriad other possibilities for abuse, censorship, and bottlenecking...
If we allow our government to do this, both in the context of MS's current status as a monopolist, and in the ongoing (anti-) regulation of the media industries, we are doing the gravest disservice to future generations.
This is really important stuff. You may very well be right, and I'm extremely interested in what you're saying, but with specific information like this (where everyone's memories are contradicting each other) it's all meaningless unless you site your sources!
I gracriously concede the point. FYI, UCITA was orchestrated through the NCCUSL. They're marketing it to all the states. A number of others are considering it - the big selling points seems to be "attracting software industry to your state."
Have you looked at what software companies have set up offices in those two states lately?
Once again, IANAL, but it seems plausible to me that if the company that makes the software decides that their case against you should be tried in their "home state" of MD or VA, it really matters whether your own state has adopted UCITA or not.
As troll's go, you have good style, my friend. Feels like shades of Huxley and Orwell... What have you been reading lately? But I digress.
I give you only a seven because, while creative, your position is too blatant; anyone with even a made-for-TV level of familiarity on the last few decades, ehh, months of this country's history, will know whose kool-aid you're drinking.
Anyway, I hearby bestow the coveted Richard M. Nixon Good Citizen's Award for trying.
IANAL, but until very recently, your suspicions were basically correct; company lawyers have their field day with shrink-wrap licenses but they're very very careful not to test the more exotic provisions in court.
That is, until they're safely set up inside a UCITA-adopting state.
Why, you ask? What's this UCITA anyway? Not another acronym. I'm too lazy to write another letter. Trying to keep my phone bill down. And I can never keep my boycotts straight once I get to the store.
Think your EULA's not binding? UCITA gives it all that 100%-All-American Bought and Paid For Congressional Stamp of Approval. Some democracy we have, huh?
I'd say the architects of this bit of propaganda are rather on the sophisticated side. They distract you with a few dishonest suggestions about the progress of Linux and its competition with Winodws, but the real news is their blatant whitewashing of Microsoft's monopolistic practices (and their conviction in federal court).
The news is that there is no "competition" in the PC OS space because MS has a monopoly.
I hope someone saves this article. Quite often the congolmerate-owned news media is unethical in what they don't print, but this is a good example of the opposite. Someday there might be a chance to debate the de-regulation of the networks in Congress (I know, wishful thinking), and such evidence will be important.
Even the DMCA has provisions allowing reverse-engineering for interoperability purposes. The problem is that this is what legislators and lawyers like to call a "phantom exception" or a "bait exception."
DeCSS is an excellent example of the problem. DeCSS is required to decrypt DVD's so they can be watched on Linux. Of course, once the data's unencrypted, it's also possible to DivX it and put it on the internet.
Of course DeCSS's primary purpose is interoperability - this is the oldest story in open source operating systems; we have to reverse engineer proprietary systems that vendors have designed in order to keep us out (because they don't want to worry about competition). But the architects of both Europe's and America's IP-protectionism laws knew that when faced with the dilemma of deciding what a program's "significant use" was, the courts could easily be made to err on the side of "caution." Besides, how many private citizens can even afford the first round of the fight?
Hence, no free DVD players (and none at all on Linux), and programmers all over the world in jail, in court, or living in fear. Many of them in Europe. So please, if this issue concerns you, don't rest on your laurels, no matter which side of the pond you're on.
Write a letter or make a phone call to your elected representatives now. What we all need is to have the DMCA (and its European equivalents, if any) repealed, and the members of government who created these laws properly investigated for corruption.
That's very interesting. Thank you for replying. I find this very thought provoking. Please allow me to continue playing devil's advocate.
I'm just thinking "out loud" here. There are two ways to do this. One is that you trust the client (Windows DRM), in which case the client processes the keys against high-level activities and just sets a flag on packets or not.
This would be trivial to forge. Of course, maybe the government would develop a massive enforcement regime to bust DRM forgers. But then they could already develop a massive enforcement regime against the existing software. So why wait?
The other way is that you don't trust the client, and all packets are themselves signed (!), allowing for more robust external verification - until someone cracks the key, that is. But barring that, at least I can shut you off quickly if you break the rules.
But in addition to the already mentioned enforcement dillemma, all that real-time cryptography (signature verification for every packet on the internet?) is impossible without a significant new investment in infrastructure (billions of dollars?) - and even in the worst scenario I can envision, where the bad guys have carte blance, you're still looking at an orders-of-magnitude reduction in routing capacity if you want to use any reasonably strong math.
People will say this isn't technically feasible. It's certainly complicated. Who generates the DRM flag? Windows XP 2006? Maybe. Who stops them from hacking the system to forge it? No one, necessarily...
But you're right in principle, and I'll tell you why.
Since deregulation is now just a codeword for laissez faire;), the cable trust already has, and the baby bells are about to get, 100% freedom from competition, guaranteed by the FCC. In some cases the media companies already own the cable themselves. But in any case it's pretty easy to get all the relevant parties in a room and work out a deal.
P2P software is kind of a drain on bandwidth. And how hard will it be to get the broadband ISP monopolists to raise their rates, to start charging per K? They were planning on doing it anyway, once they eliminated the competition!
This, my friends, is much better than censorship. It's cen$or$hip. Cheap internet data delivery hurting your real-world data delivery (i.e. RIAA) business? Don't compete! Just make the internet expensive!
The baby bells and cable companies will even whine that without the price hikes, they'd go out of business, and they'll talk about northpoint, or qwest. Pay attention, because that's going to be some high-art corporate cheese. Those are the TA-1996 "client-competitors" the baby bells just murdered with their own bare hands.
Here's a hint. When a big stinking monopoly tells you they need to raise their rates, they're lying, unless they're willing to open their books.
Watch the FCC. Oh yes, and if you have ISP service through a DLEC, get ready to switch.
WHOIS Surveillance
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· Score: 3, Insightful
At first I thought this was a BS article bemoaning the special treatment the rich get when arbitrating domain name disputes. But they save a very big surprise for the end.
"Copyright interests now view expanded WHOIS functionality as a way to identify and serve process upon the owners of allegedly infringing Web sites," writes Mueller. "That is, 'technical coordination' of the domain name system is already being leveraged to police the content of Web sites as well as their domain names. Moreover, public law enforcement agencies, notably the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, have become deeply interested in the use of WHOIS to supplement their law enforcement activities. Ultimately, the intent seems to be to make a domain name the cyberspace equivalent of a driver's license. Only, unlike the driver's licenses database, this one would be publicly accessible to anyone and everyone to rummage through as they pleased."
People will draw different conclusions from this. But it's certainly not just about trademarks.
First of all, I want to thank you again - I really appreciate your comments.
That being said, my ISP is not my main income source, it is more of a hobby, lead in for consulting work.
Maybe that's the ISP business model now.:)
They are more affordable then you might think.
I've tried a lot of crazy options for connectivity, believe me. Sometimes I find a way to save money, often not.
Most of the bankrupt DSL providers probably never realized just how bad Verizon could screw them
I would put it even more explicitly; Verizon et al were strong-armed into supporting 3rd parties by the regulators, but rapidly brought all their (considerable) wealth to bear on buying their way out of that arrangement. They got their way; first tacit approval that the feds would look the other way while they murdered their competition, and now the coming stamp of official approval on the new monopoly.
The ISP buisness is a giant pryamid scheme.
:) Yes; it's true, or more accurrately it's based on usage patterns totally different than from what's now being seen with P2P applications (which, instead of discrete "transactions," basically use all the bandwidth all the time).
What makes me suspicious (in addition to long experience with the parties involved) is that the system is operating quite well. The major infrastructure investments have long since stopped. They're not frantically building to keep up with demand. The broadband networks, especially cable, have plenty of capacity today, despite the current level of P2P adoption, so it's not clear to me where the crisis is.
Someday there may really be a chronic bandwidth shortage. But there's no reason not to simply shape traffic as an alternative to hiking prices. If the caps are wrong, change the caps, or make them smarter by specializing the limits for different kinds of traffic. At universities, which sometimes really do have such shortages, this is what they do, and it works fine.
In principle you're right, but in practice, I think this is a phantom shortage, engineered to allow monopolies to hike prices (now that they've disposed of the competition) and if there's some synergy with the media companies (often the same as the ISP), so much the better.
$50 x millions of users is a lot of money. I'm having trouble believing that the majors can't break even on it. And as for the bandwidth shortages on the big broadband ISPs, I'll believe it when I see them.
What you say is really interesting, and I want to thank you for sharing your ideas.
I want to ask you a blunt question - I have several friends in the small-to-medium-sized ISP business, and everything I'm seeing tells me that their days are basically numbered, because you can't compete with the phone company you're buying services from - especially when there's complicity among the regulators.
So my question is, what do you see in the future for your business? It seems as though the efforts to keep independents out of broadband are going to be successful, and modem customers will continue to shrink, so... that leaves business services, I suppose. But that's pretty thin ice these days. What's the answer, long term, for someone in your position?
I'm saddled with Verizon too; complaining to the PUC... that's a good joke, my friend. Very funny. I know some people who may have more luck trying to sue them (along with the phone company), actually, but that's another story, and one I can't really talk about here.
I know that $1000 a month for a T1 is too much money. (I know, sometimes you can get it for a bit less, often it's more, but 1,000 seems to be about the rule where I am.) I've dealt with the staff a lot over the years and I know how the CO works. I wouldn't say their _margin_ on it is great, because they're a massive, idiotic bloated monopoly, but I would say that it's costing hundreds of dollars more than it needs to.
The question is, for residential service (which as you point out doesn't need the reliability - hah - and quality of a Verizoned T1), what is the real cost? Is it really over $50 per person per month? Over $100? Remember, there are big economies of scale at work here - you're providing service to a significant percentage of an area.
I figure a big piece is paying loans on capital expenditures. This is to be expected. Then you have ongoing maintenance of your equipment and customer support, and then you have the cost to your upline provider. Finally you have utility costs of your own (power, etc) which are basically negligable and administrative overhead.
I couldn't guess what the loans work out to a month. You'd be better prepared than me to talk about maintenance and support costs for broadband equipment and customers; for my part, I haven't talked to my provider in over a year, in no small part because I can't get them on the phone.:) I don't think there's an exceptional level of hardware attrition but correct me if I'm wrong.
That leaves the uplines. What they charge, or pay, is constant voodoo as far as I'm concerned. But I welcome any insights into what it costs to bring any significant portion of traffic from a DSL block to the backbone.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but this rather goes without saying.
Fortunately, on both NT4, 5, and Linux, I haven't seen unrecoverable filesystem corruption absent a hardware failure of some kind.
I appreciate your civility and open-mindedness.
When you say "but if I'm able to run these things out of the box without re-booting nightly, you should be able to as well" I must respectfully disagree with you, simply because of all of the diverse things one does with each of those three products (I did mean IIS, apologies). My experience, as I said, has been unequivocal. Both firsthand and 2nd hand, watching some extremely bright people with excellent familiarity with the product suite, I have come to expect NT4 production environments to be tainted by disaster (often repetitive disaster), where I have observed and participated in complex Linux rollouts with a significantly superior track record. You must decide whether or not you think me honest or my judgment sound, but I am certain on the point.
To your comment about "ya' gotta reboot it every night" being FUD, I can only once again respectfully disagree; I have heard this exact statement from a number of (apparently) competent professionals responsible for major IT efforts in the fortune 500, and if I were able to name names, I'm sure you would be familiar with at least several of them. I, too, took it with a grain of salt until I observed its necessity on projects of my own using NT4, IIS and SQL Server, and more than once. Older versions of IIS and VBScript just leak like crazy and that's the beginning of their troubles. Fortunately, my experience with my Microsoft-or-death clients has improved under the Win2k regime.
I am not making this stuff up. It is not rhetoric, but actual repeated professional experience. I should perhaps add "painfully" repeated.
Are you not aware of Microsoft's spectacular failure while attempting to migrate hotmail from Solaris to NT4, IIS, and SQL Server? This is often my case-in-point when discussing building large applications with NT4. I understand that they did stick with it and eventually got it going with Win2k.
I don't assume such instability is an OS problem until I see it on a variety of hardware, which I have.
Nonetheless, I'm glad things are working out for you. The system is complex enough I'm sure rather subtle differences in usage patterns can be responsible for problems...
What if that app you're running is ISS? Or SQL Server? Or Exchange? Or another of the other Microsoft solutions, system services, patches, service packs, or other miscellany? But I suppose that's the "relying on coders who are [pretty much incompetent]" part you mentioned.
I'm very familiar with both sides. If you're open-minded enough to try, when you finish learning how to administer Linux, you will find it far more stable and maintainable, and the set of tools you'll use on it an order of magnitude more secure and reliable, than Win2k. _Let alone NT4._
I'm convinced the people who still run around touting NT4's reliability are either incompetent or not tasked with any particularly complex applications involving microsoft tools or both, not to mention not reading the news... Remember the hotmail disaster? And that was Microsoft's own team.
I will certainly grant that Win2k is a significant improvement, and perhaps an order of magnitude more reliable than NT4. I don't generally count Win98 in these comparisons; even very few slashdot trolls will stand up and try to make a go of claiming Win9x/Me exhibits reliability of any kind.
However, to put it in perspective, doing normal development with Java, VBScript, IIS, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Flash (I am deliberately excluding crashes that occured while coding C/C++ and other "non-safe" systems), I observe Win2k either bluescreening, spontaneously rebooting, or getting to a state where it needs to be power-cycled approximately 2-4 times a month. This seems like heaven compared to NT4, which I I used to crash daily while doing Java development and writing ASP pages for IIS. Most NT4 production servers I am aware of are rebooted regularly, often nightly, to prevent them from falling apart altogether. My experience with NT4 has been unequivocal. Don't use it in production unless you want to suffer.
That's not counting Win2k's constant explorer crashes, which are generally not disruptive but still a bit unsettling. The majority of the problem appears to come from Microsoft being unable or unwiling to sanitize the GUI code and protect failures to handle the GUI layer correctly from killing the entire system. That, and I still see the standard device-related problems. Burning CDs and attaching new mice have both proved catastrophic for Win2k, in the latter case requiring a complete reinstall of the operating system. No, I didn't build the mouse myself; it was a Logitech mouse.
I also note that, as with all other versions of Windows, Win2k still has a tendency to "decay;" that is, to continually develop small but uncorrectable problems until reinstall is eventually required. However, the decay rate also seems to have been slowed.
Compare this to Linux, which I also give daily and roughly equivalent use, and which _never_ crashes. _Ever_. In fact AFAIR the last time I had to deal with unexpected shutdowns on Linux was due to a foolish attempt to build a complicated high-speed SCSI chain a year or two ago. I am not aware of any problems on Linux which cannot be corrected without a reinstall of the OS, but perhaps there are exceptions in the crowd who can share experiences.
So... Win2k. Finally usable. But still not competitive.
To all knee-jerk anti-MS-criticism-on-slashdot and pro-MS trolls... if you're just skimming, now is the part where you hit reply and do your thing.
Because the pretense that your computer is still for making "art" of your own must be maintained, the system will be capable, as you describe, of hosting "escaped" content.
There are two big points to keep in mind about DRM:
- As you are no doubt already aware, it's a stupid idea - it will never work.
- They're going to do it anyway, and if our government is foul enough to force the issue, they'll completely fuck up the computer industry in the process.
The big news is in the potential for abuse; DRM will make it much harder if not impossible for MS's competitors to interoperate legally, and surveillance and censorship will become commonplace.If I understand the standards that have been proposed, hardware level DRM is just a set of features that the operating system can use or not.
I think it's possible for what you descibe to happen. It would be difficult; the closest systems we have to this right now are consoles, which attempt to use public key cryptography and tamper-proofing on the BIOS. Currently the best such systems look unlikely to withstand the onslaught of the Linux community. Microsoft will sue the people that port Linux to the xbox, of course, but then we're back into legal rather than technical speculation.
I think the biggest thing working for us is that, where not owned by the same parent company, the manufacturers aren't really that hot on the content people. Hardware needs content, but the hardware industry is worth orders of magnitude more. And they're afraid (and with good reason) that people won't buy PC's that are crippled to only run Windows 1984 (and perhaps they will trot out a few symbolic, never-ran "alternatives" in deference to the recent anti-trust suit). They may hedge their bets, but I doubt they'll bet the farm.
Unless congress forces them to, that is.
Remember, if you think your being shortchanged by your hard drive's operation life, read the manual!
You're supposed to keep backups, silly!
Redundant copies of the data, on other HDs or tape or any other media, will allow re-dupblication when one of the redundant pieces fails. Keep that up and your only worry is a catastrophic failure that kills all of your redundant pieces at once.
You reduce the chance of that, BTW, by trying to keep your backups in more than one place.
Now I grant you, no one does backups properly. At least, until after the first few times they get burned.
There are several ways this could go. Obviously, we have to be circumspect, since the U.S. gov't is literally considering copy-control legislation that would make Linux illegal.
You can say it'll never succeed - won't all Linux's rich patrons prevent it? But I would have said the same about quite a few other things that have already happened... and it's in our interests to act as thought it might.
However, assuming something slightly less than the worst, DRM will of necessity be something which you can enable or not. IOW, as long as they'll let you, buy all the fast, new DRM drives you want, and use Linux to run them. Linux will simply ignore the DRM features and use the drive normally.
The problems come when you're forced to use a DRM operating system with your DRM hardware (quite a reversal from the old antitrust days, eh?); you will find it very difficult to take some/all of your data back to Linux/other non-DRM OS.
You can probably see why MS loves this now; DRM technologies, even optional ones, will have the nice effect of preventing interoperability with open source operating systems, thereby locking everyone in even further. Let alone the myriad other possibilities for abuse, censorship, and bottlenecking...
If we allow our government to do this, both in the context of MS's current status as a monopolist, and in the ongoing (anti-) regulation of the media industries, we are doing the gravest disservice to future generations.
;-P
This is really important stuff. You may very well be right, and I'm extremely interested in what you're saying, but with specific information like this (where everyone's memories are contradicting each other) it's all meaningless unless you site your sources!
-Dave
I gracriously concede the point. FYI, UCITA was orchestrated through the NCCUSL.
They're marketing it to all the states. A number of others are considering it - the big selling points seems to be "attracting software industry to your state."
Well, their lawyers at least.
-Dave
Have you looked at what software companies have set up offices in those two states lately?
Once again, IANAL, but it seems plausible to me that if the company that makes the software decides that their case against you should be tried in their "home state" of MD or VA, it really matters whether your own state has adopted UCITA or not.
-Dave
As troll's go, you have good style, my friend. Feels like shades of Huxley and Orwell... What have you been reading lately? But I digress.
I give you only a seven because, while creative, your position is too blatant; anyone with even a made-for-TV level of familiarity on the last few decades, ehh, months of this country's history, will know whose kool-aid you're drinking.
Anyway, I hearby bestow the coveted Richard M. Nixon Good Citizen's Award for trying.
Happy hysteria,
-Dave
IANAL, but until very recently, your suspicions were basically correct; company lawyers have their field day with shrink-wrap licenses but they're very very careful not to test the more exotic provisions in court.
That is, until they're safely set up inside a UCITA-adopting state.
Why, you ask? What's this UCITA anyway? Not another acronym. I'm too lazy to write another letter. Trying to keep my phone bill down. And I can never keep my boycotts straight once I get to the store.
From the mouth of the beast...
And on a slightly more ethical tip...
The FSF's writeup
And the CPSR's writeup...
Google will give you more.
Think your EULA's not binding? UCITA gives it all that 100%-All-American Bought and Paid For Congressional Stamp of Approval. Some democracy we have, huh?
-David
I liked Salon. There was some real talent over there. If a magazine like that can't stay in business it hurts my faith in the world.
I'd say the architects of this bit of propaganda are rather on the sophisticated side. They distract you with a few dishonest suggestions about the progress of Linux and its competition with Winodws, but the real news is their blatant whitewashing of Microsoft's monopolistic practices (and their conviction in federal court).
The news is that there is no "competition" in the PC OS space because MS has a monopoly.
I hope someone saves this article. Quite often the congolmerate-owned news media is unethical in what they don't print, but this is a good example of the opposite. Someday there might be a chance to debate the de-regulation of the networks in Congress (I know, wishful thinking), and such evidence will be important.
But you should know, solid, logical, and well-spoken rebuttals only encourage them.
;)
-Dave
Even the DMCA has provisions allowing reverse-engineering for interoperability purposes. The problem is that this is what legislators and lawyers like to call a "phantom exception" or a "bait exception."
DeCSS is an excellent example of the problem. DeCSS is required to decrypt DVD's so they can be watched on Linux. Of course, once the data's unencrypted, it's also possible to DivX it and put it on the internet.
Of course DeCSS's primary purpose is interoperability - this is the oldest story in open source operating systems; we have to reverse engineer proprietary systems that vendors have designed in order to keep us out (because they don't want to worry about competition). But the architects of both Europe's and America's IP-protectionism laws knew that when faced with the dilemma of deciding what a program's "significant use" was, the courts could easily be made to err on the side of "caution." Besides, how many private citizens can even afford the first round of the fight?
Hence, no free DVD players (and none at all on Linux), and programmers all over the world in jail, in court, or living in fear. Many of them in Europe. So please, if this issue concerns you, don't rest on your laurels, no matter which side of the pond you're on.
Write a letter or make a phone call to your elected representatives now. What we all need is to have the DMCA (and its European equivalents, if any) repealed, and the members of government who created these laws properly investigated for corruption.
Good form. All of your arguments are transparent enough to need little rebuttal, but I would add one thing:
Do you think trying to reverse-engineer MS's encrypted DRM-able filesystem will be branded as "interoperability" or "a federal crime" under the DMCA?
-Dave
That's very interesting. Thank you for replying. I find this very thought provoking. Please allow me to continue playing devil's advocate.
I'm just thinking "out loud" here. There are two ways to do this. One is that you trust the client (Windows DRM), in which case the client processes the keys against high-level activities and just sets a flag on packets or not.
This would be trivial to forge. Of course, maybe the government would develop a massive enforcement regime to bust DRM forgers. But then they could already develop a massive enforcement regime against the existing software. So why wait?
The other way is that you don't trust the client, and all packets are themselves signed (!), allowing for more robust external verification - until someone cracks the key, that is. But barring that, at least I can shut you off quickly if you break the rules.
But in addition to the already mentioned enforcement dillemma, all that real-time cryptography (signature verification for every packet on the internet?) is impossible without a significant new investment in infrastructure (billions of dollars?) - and even in the worst scenario I can envision, where the bad guys have carte blance, you're still looking at an orders-of-magnitude reduction in routing capacity if you want to use any reasonably strong math.
People will say this isn't technically feasible. It's certainly complicated. Who generates the DRM flag? Windows XP 2006? Maybe. Who stops them from hacking the system to forge it? No one, necessarily...
;), the cable trust already has, and the baby bells are about to get, 100% freedom from competition, guaranteed by the FCC. In some cases the media companies already own the cable themselves. But in any case it's pretty easy to get all the relevant parties in a room and work out a deal.
But you're right in principle, and I'll tell you why.
Since deregulation is now just a codeword for laissez faire
P2P software is kind of a drain on bandwidth. And how hard will it be to get the broadband ISP monopolists to raise their rates, to start charging per K? They were planning on doing it anyway, once they eliminated the competition!
This, my friends, is much better than censorship. It's cen$or$hip. Cheap internet data delivery hurting your real-world data delivery (i.e. RIAA) business? Don't compete! Just make the internet expensive!
The baby bells and cable companies will even whine that without the price hikes, they'd go out of business, and they'll talk about northpoint, or qwest. Pay attention, because that's going to be some high-art corporate cheese. Those are the TA-1996 "client-competitors" the baby bells just murdered with their own bare hands.
Here's a hint. When a big stinking monopoly tells you they need to raise their rates, they're lying, unless they're willing to open their books.
Watch the FCC. Oh yes, and if you have ISP service through a DLEC, get ready to switch.
At first I thought this was a BS article bemoaning the special treatment the rich get when arbitrating domain name disputes. But they save a very big surprise for the end.
"Copyright interests now view expanded WHOIS functionality as a way to identify and serve process upon the owners of allegedly infringing Web sites," writes Mueller. "That is, 'technical coordination' of the domain name system is already being leveraged to police the content of Web sites as well as their domain names. Moreover, public law enforcement agencies, notably the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, have become deeply interested in the use of WHOIS to supplement their law enforcement activities. Ultimately, the intent seems to be to make a domain name the cyberspace equivalent of a driver's license. Only, unlike the driver's licenses database, this one would be publicly accessible to anyone and everyone to rummage through as they pleased."
People will draw different conclusions from this. But it's certainly not just about trademarks.
First of all, I want to thank you again - I really appreciate your comments.
:)
That being said, my ISP is not my main income source, it is more of a hobby, lead in for consulting work.
Maybe that's the ISP business model now.
They are more affordable then you might think.
I've tried a lot of crazy options for connectivity, believe me. Sometimes I find a way to save money, often not.
Most of the bankrupt DSL providers probably never realized just how bad Verizon could screw them
I would put it even more explicitly; Verizon et al were strong-armed into supporting 3rd parties by the regulators, but rapidly brought all their (considerable) wealth to bear on buying their way out of that arrangement. They got their way; first tacit approval that the feds would look the other way while they murdered their competition, and now the coming stamp of official approval on the new monopoly.
The ISP buisness is a giant pryamid scheme.
:) Yes; it's true, or more accurrately it's based on usage patterns totally different than from what's now being seen with P2P applications (which, instead of discrete "transactions," basically use all the bandwidth all the time).
What makes me suspicious (in addition to long experience with the parties involved) is that the system is operating quite well. The major infrastructure investments have long since stopped. They're not frantically building to keep up with demand. The broadband networks, especially cable, have plenty of capacity today, despite the current level of P2P adoption, so it's not clear to me where the crisis is.
Someday there may really be a chronic bandwidth shortage. But there's no reason not to simply shape traffic as an alternative to hiking prices. If the caps are wrong, change the caps, or make them smarter by specializing the limits for different kinds of traffic. At universities, which sometimes really do have such shortages, this is what they do, and it works fine.
In principle you're right, but in practice, I think this is a phantom shortage, engineered to allow monopolies to hike prices (now that they've disposed of the competition) and if there's some synergy with the media companies (often the same as the ISP), so much the better.
$50 x millions of users is a lot of money. I'm having trouble believing that the majors can't break even on it. And as for the bandwidth shortages on the big broadband ISPs, I'll believe it when I see them.
What you say is really interesting, and I want to thank you for sharing your ideas.
:) I don't think there's an exceptional level of hardware attrition but correct me if I'm wrong.
I want to ask you a blunt question - I have several friends in the small-to-medium-sized ISP business, and everything I'm seeing tells me that their days are basically numbered, because you can't compete with the phone company you're buying services from - especially when there's complicity among the regulators.
So my question is, what do you see in the future for your business? It seems as though the efforts to keep independents out of broadband are going to be successful, and modem customers will continue to shrink, so... that leaves business services, I suppose. But that's pretty thin ice these days. What's the answer, long term, for someone in your position?
I'm saddled with Verizon too; complaining to the PUC... that's a good joke, my friend. Very funny. I know some people who may have more luck trying to sue them (along with the phone company), actually, but that's another story, and one I can't really talk about here.
I know that $1000 a month for a T1 is too much money. (I know, sometimes you can get it for a bit less, often it's more, but 1,000 seems to be about the rule where I am.) I've dealt with the staff a lot over the years and I know how the CO works. I wouldn't say their _margin_ on it is great, because they're a massive, idiotic bloated monopoly, but I would say that it's costing hundreds of dollars more than it needs to.
The question is, for residential service (which as you point out doesn't need the reliability - hah - and quality of a Verizoned T1), what is the real cost? Is it really over $50 per person per month? Over $100? Remember, there are big economies of scale at work here - you're providing service to a significant percentage of an area.
I figure a big piece is paying loans on capital expenditures. This is to be expected. Then you have ongoing maintenance of your equipment and customer support, and then you have the cost to your upline provider. Finally you have utility costs of your own (power, etc) which are basically negligable and administrative overhead.
I couldn't guess what the loans work out to a month. You'd be better prepared than me to talk about maintenance and support costs for broadband equipment and customers; for my part, I haven't talked to my provider in over a year, in no small part because I can't get them on the phone.
That leaves the uplines. What they charge, or pay, is constant voodoo as far as I'm concerned. But I welcome any insights into what it costs to bring any significant portion of traffic from a DSL block to the backbone.
I'd love to get to the bottom of this.