"If you release your shiny new DRM system under the GPL, you need to release the source-code for it. Releasing the source-code for a DRM system is a pretty stupid thing to do since it will make your DRM system a lot easier to circumvent. Why would you even consider releasing a DRM system under some sort of open source license?"
Actually I think that way lies a *MORE* secure DRM system. In the same way that DES, RSA and others are well documented the security does not lie in obfuscated code, and secret modules but in a well designed system that is designed to be so computationally intensive that is it not worth attempting to reverse.
Repeated real life examples, studies and common sense determine that the best security is achieved by letting people know what you are doing and designing it to be computationally difficult or near impossible.
Why? because as stated by many posters better informed by me it would start the mother of all legal wars as the big Linux backers would promptly retaliate with their own patent arsenals.
There is another word for this whole sorry escapade...... FUD.
By injecting doubt into Linux in the eyes of the big corporations, they attract them towards their own offering. Yet another example of M$ cleverly using FUD as advertising and marketing.
BBC covered this in detail, one of their reporters tried it out. She was less then enthusiastic about office work whilst using the thing "Shame my hands can't keep up, it took me almost five minutes to key in the above without a single mistake." (from the linked article below).
Same old, same old. Politicians to not understand how technology can come back to haunt them. In the internet age things are rarely gone for good.
In the past politicians have released word doc press releases where journalists have been able to check the history and see what was originally typed, and I have lost count of the number of PDFs with redacted text that can be easily recovered (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/22/13 8210).
When will politicians learn?
What I don't understand - perhaps an american can explain this to me - is how the White House was in a position to be able to delete emails? Surely a better system would be to require (by law) a neutral party to oversee, backup and archive all political information. After all in a hundred years it will be a valuable part of your national history and heritage - instead its just an embarrassment.
They..
Get behind their new technology and push
Use every leverage they can to promote it to their "partners"
Give away source code under a restrictive license
Give away development tools
Wait until it is a eb de-facto standard ...
Then refuse to allow it on any operating system but Windows?
Flash works, Flash movies work, Flash is ubiquitous, Linux/OSX support it, Everybody knows it. So why do we need anything else?
The underlying argument goes like this: when a technology is established and "good enough" for everyday use then nobody needs to fix what is not broken.
from TFA "The iPlayer computer application will only be initially available to those with Windows PCs. But the trust has asked the BBC to ensure that the iPlayer computer application can run on different systems - such as Apple Macs - within 'a reasonable time frame'. "
So how long before we can get this on Linux? or the PS3?
And how long is 'reasonable'...?
Suddenly my TV License payments seem more reasonable.....
True Philips did state that any CD that did not conform to the Red Book specification exactly could not use the CD logo, but the response from the music industry was less then thrilling. They reply was basically "so what?" - the argument was that if it was 12cm wide and shiny people would put in their player anyhow, and they did.
Copy Protection on audio CDs was always a less than satisfactory method anyhow - relying on part Orange Book multi session TOCs with looping or non-existent sessions or degraded EFM, interleave or error correction (of course Red Book players would ignore such things and data players would kill the audio or disc). What has killed audio copy protection is market forces, some labels have already dropped it and others look to be doing the same.
Conventional CD audio player (Red Book) are largely removed from the market, nowadays all CD player also play MP3 - in other words they are data CD players (Orange Book) in order to read the ISO9660 or UDF format and hence read the MP3 files. When this shift happened - we started dropping classic audio systems from the CD players we made in about 2002, and the market took a few years to follow - the industry suddenly found that a *very* large percentage of the hardware could not play their discs so the copy protection was dropped. That and the fact it was massively unpopular.
I remember sitting in lectures from the IPFI when they clearly stated that the CD patents from Philips would expire some day and people did not give a damn about the logo or not. The IPFI certainly did not, and as long as Philips got the license money neither did they. Certainly CD copy protection never made the job of building CE audio equipment any harder - we ignored it largely.
Now we have the same again, as Sony has changed the format of the DVD system slightly for *enhanced* copy protection - there is a slight difference as they also have patents on DVD as well as Philips and others. There are only a few things that can happen here:-
1. The people who make DVD systems will alter their FW and that takes a while to reach the market - but (trust me on this) the teams involved in most firms have had sample discs with encoding on for quite some time.
2. Market forces will force Sony into a humiliating reverse *if* sufficient publicity and bad press can be generated. What is takes is a very large number of bad tempered people and some media backing. I would be confident that Sony has tested this new system on a wide variety of player to get a feel for the market first.
3. The number of players that refuse to play them will be small enough that the MPAA/Sony/Others will be able to railroad in this change over a year or so (after all some people will assume that their player is fucked and just get another cheap one) - but as the hackers of this world have a formidable reputation for cracking these things in a week or so the status will largely return to normal in due course.
Ok, so AMD aren't doing this because it makes their customers happy. Given the choice between two identically performing chips, one of which restricts your ability to do something, I'd bet most people would choose to get the unrestricted one.
So what? Given the choice most consumer electronics manufacturers and large corporations would choose the other one, and they are the ones making equipment.
I think you'll find that what the people want really does not matter.
Mainly these systems are despised by people that have something to hide.
What you dont see in these sensationalist posts are some of the good things that have come out of these systems.
For example:-
There was a case about a year ago when a man attempted to abduct a girl and the CCTV systems cought it, summoned the police and then guided the police to where he had run off.
There have been murders solved by the ubiquitous CCTVs, simply wind the tapes back, study. We are not talking the odd anecdotal story here CCTV is a very major crime prevention and solution tool.
Talking cameras is already proven to but down on crime before it happens and free the hard working police force to concentrate more on where they are really needed. Besides they are only in public areas anyhow where anybody is free to watch in any case.
It disturbs me when people hark on about their privacy and how unfair it is to be snooped on constantly - the system is reducing crime and making the streets safer.
On the same vein we know have computerised vehicle licensing, insurance and MOT (road worthyness test) system - so the police can check your cars details in a fraction of a second - if it cuts down on car theft, joy runners and illegal uninusred vehicles then I cam all for it.
The UK has a very fast growing DNA database, its added to constantly by the police among others. So far it has solved numerous crimes, even when a perfect match is not found a close enough family match is generally found to help track down the perpatrator. Every few weeks there is a story about some decades old crime solved by modern techniques and the database.
ID cards will inevitably come into force in the near future - well if that cuts down on benefit fraud, illegal immigrants and helps catch wanted criminals then I am all for it.
My point is that people will get up on their soapbox and rant about the state of the nation, how crime is prevelant and people should do something about it, then refuse to allow technologies that are doing something effective about it.
I agree with the parent on a number of points. A CS degree is not the most important criteria in a number of SW/IT jobs, and secondly - we all have to do work that it not enjoyable to pay the bills.
My main degree is in engineering (not CS, or EE or any even related field) but I have been a programmer for 10 years. My chosen field is firmware, mostly my work involves assembler, electronics, C and some win32 support apps. In this time I have worked with and interviewed many CS graduates who have all been largely unskilled in this field - the ones we have had have not understood resources, interrupts, reentrency, real-time or many other important factors in firmware. Yet some have behaved as though the great steaming brown mounds of code they have pumped out should be worshipped just as much as the ground apon which they have most recently walked. EE graduates have been by far the most promising recruits, though I have worked along side former carpenters, plumbers, and even car mechanics and dustbin men.
Judge someone by the skillset they possess, not some (largely meaningless) paper qualifications. Above all enforce a strict, well thought out interview regime full of relevent questions to weed out the dross.
I personally loath some of the jobs I have to do - but I recognise that any job is not all 100% coding and I accept that any project life-cycle will require some more boring jobs. As a respectable programmer I just get on with it to the best of my ability.
The last stage of your apt introduction is the bit where Microsoft appropiate the technology as their own having removed the original innovator.
They remove the original innovator by a number of means: outright purchase and asset strip (stacker?), use their monopoly (netscape, firewalls, antivirus), FuD (linux - thats not working so well for them)... Have I missed any?
But once the original innovator is gone they can claim it as their own. And force us to use their cack-handed implementation in (to paraphrase the parent) "an annoying format". And what is worse, we let them.
There was a very well publicised petition on the new proposed road charging system that got 1.7million supporting votes cast, it had little noticible effect on the goverment. Infact all it caused was alot of publicity and condemnation in the Labour ranks that some 'prat' (direct quote) had created this tool that could be used to bash them.
To put it in perspective the whole population in the UK is 60million in total, so 1.7million is ALOT of the driving adults.
I think Labour saw it as a exercise in good relations and checking the boxes. Certainly there is no sign of them doing anything about the petitions that people actually support.
I'm confused here, maybe some of you poeple who use virtual machines (more than me) can help me out. I've posted a few questions and points I am either interested in, or do not understand..
=============
Where is the boundary between a "virtual machine" and a "real one"?
After all, the BIOS is definately part of the machine/motherboard and thats SW. If there is another layer of SW inbetween your OS and you HW why should that be any different? I would treat a "virtual" machine as essentially the same as a "real" one - surely in the eyes of the law they must be the same, no?
M$ changing the license restrictions seems as though they are essentialy stepping outside the OS box and determining the physical HW you are and are not allowed to run on. Whats the legal situation here, has this been tried and testing in a court?
Can they actually prevent any version of Windows from running in a VM if that version of Windows cannot detect it?
At the end of they day if a court rules a VM and a real PC are legally the same, where would that leave M$?
not all SW can be reused.
on
Finding New Code
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I am an embedded engineer. Various firms I have worked for have tried to implement some kind of "reuse" code store.
But every time real-time considerations and platform specifics have derailed it (thankfully) in the early stages.
At the low-level so called "code reuse" is (IMHO) a nothing short of a right royal pain in the neck. It looks good on paper, managers like the concept - but it is impossible to implement without large amounts of hardware abstraction.
Maybe it makes more sense further up the SW tree, at a higher level when things are not so resource critical.
Slashdot Mirror
from the parent:
"If you release your shiny new DRM system under the GPL, you need to release the source-code for it. Releasing the source-code for a DRM system is a pretty stupid thing to do since it will make your DRM system a lot easier to circumvent. Why would you even consider releasing a DRM system under some sort of open source license?"
Actually I think that way lies a *MORE* secure DRM system. In the same way that DES, RSA and others are well documented the security does not lie in obfuscated code, and secret modules but in a well designed system that is designed to be so computationally intensive that is it not worth attempting to reverse.
Repeated real life examples, studies and common sense determine that the best security is achieved by letting people know what you are doing and designing it to be computationally difficult or near impossible.
I thought you could license from a patent for 20 years, no? The patent was in 1999 - but the design was WW2?
WTF?
hello, the horse has bolted, shutting the door now does nooothing.
besides Russia telling you to pay licensing fees is like being told to sit up straight by the hunchback of notredame*.
*shameless rip of a fine George Galloway poke at the senate there, sorry.
------
Besides, in Soviet Russia the Gun licenses you..... (kinda obligatory here.. sorry again)
Nah, don't worry it'll be back. I've lost count of how many times that shows been pulled, revived and then cancelled again.
Mind you, there must be a limit that even a time lord can regenerate.
The monsters were scarier in the 1980s though - or was that because I was much younger?
I'm not interested in M$ won't sue.
I'm only interested in M$ can't sue.
Why? because as stated by many posters better informed by me it would start the mother of all legal wars as the big Linux backers would promptly retaliate with their own patent arsenals.
There is another word for this whole sorry escapade...... FUD. By injecting doubt into Linux in the eyes of the big corporations, they attract them towards their own offering. Yet another example of M$ cleverly using FUD as advertising and marketing.
Some more info.....
BBC covered this in detail, one of their reporters tried it out. She was less then enthusiastic about office work whilst using the thing "Shame my hands can't keep up, it took me almost five minutes to key in the above without a single mistake." (from the linked article below).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6656631.stm?ls
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6657305.stm
Same old, same old. Politicians to not understand how technology can come back to haunt them. In the internet age things are rarely gone for good.
3 8210).
o use-finds-someone_b_46344.html
In the past politicians have released word doc press releases where journalists have been able to check the history and see what was originally typed, and I have lost count of the number of PDFs with redacted text that can be easily recovered (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/22/1
When will politicians learn?
What I don't understand - perhaps an american can explain this to me - is how the White House was in a position to be able to delete emails? Surely a better system would be to require (by law) a neutral party to oversee, backup and archive all political information. After all in a hundred years it will be a valuable part of your national history and heritage - instead its just an embarrassment.
And as for blaming it on a dead woman who cannot defend herself, thats just wrong. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/toby-barlow/white-h
who's interested in that geriatric?!!?
...will the fit babe terminator from T3 be in it?
a more pertinent question is...(call me a shallow geek if you wish)
total rubbish.
....but I do hope you were not expecting the answer quickly, I might be a very looooong time..... :-)
of course I can.
a fitting quote might be:-
"what physical science can devise and synthesize, physical science can analyse and duplicate" - e. e. doc smith (one of my favorite authors).
sorry almost forgot the obligatory 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0!
Call me cynical, but...
...
Then refuse to allow it on any operating system but Windows?
They..
Get behind their new technology and push
Use every leverage they can to promote it to their "partners"
Give away source code under a restrictive license
Give away development tools
Wait until it is a eb de-facto standard
Flash works, Flash movies work, Flash is ubiquitous, Linux/OSX support it, Everybody knows it. So why do we need anything else?
The underlying argument goes like this: when a technology is established and "good enough" for everyday use then nobody needs to fix what is not broken.
They are also looking at releasing the whole BBC archive to viewers as well.
see http://www.pandia.com/sw-2004/33-bbc.html
Xbox 360, PC, MEdia Center and other devices?
from TFA "The iPlayer computer application will only be initially available to those with Windows PCs. But the trust has asked the BBC to ensure that the iPlayer computer application can run on different systems - such as Apple Macs - within 'a reasonable time frame'. "
So how long before we can get this on Linux? or the PS3?
And how long is 'reasonable'...?
Suddenly my TV License payments seem more reasonable.....
.... strongly think we need a new tag for this case.
"justdeserts" should do it nicely.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/just_deserts
...they just became famous as a lesson in what not to do
all publicity is good publicity, right?
as the other poster said:- boy I would hate to be their QA at this time.
True Philips did state that any CD that did not conform to the Red Book specification exactly could not use the CD logo, but the response from the music industry was less then thrilling. They reply was basically "so what?" - the argument was that if it was 12cm wide and shiny people would put in their player anyhow, and they did.
:-
Copy Protection on audio CDs was always a less than satisfactory method anyhow - relying on part Orange Book multi session TOCs with looping or non-existent sessions or degraded EFM, interleave or error correction (of course Red Book players would ignore such things and data players would kill the audio or disc). What has killed audio copy protection is market forces, some labels have already dropped it and others look to be doing the same.
Conventional CD audio player (Red Book) are largely removed from the market, nowadays all CD player also play MP3 - in other words they are data CD players (Orange Book) in order to read the ISO9660 or UDF format and hence read the MP3 files. When this shift happened - we started dropping classic audio systems from the CD players we made in about 2002, and the market took a few years to follow - the industry suddenly found that a *very* large percentage of the hardware could not play their discs so the copy protection was dropped. That and the fact it was massively unpopular.
I remember sitting in lectures from the IPFI when they clearly stated that the CD patents from Philips would expire some day and people did not give a damn about the logo or not. The IPFI certainly did not, and as long as Philips got the license money neither did they. Certainly CD copy protection never made the job of building CE audio equipment any harder - we ignored it largely.
Now we have the same again, as Sony has changed the format of the DVD system slightly for *enhanced* copy protection - there is a slight difference as they also have patents on DVD as well as Philips and others. There are only a few things that can happen here
1. The people who make DVD systems will alter their FW and that takes a while to reach the market - but (trust me on this) the teams involved in most firms have had sample discs with encoding on for quite some time.
2. Market forces will force Sony into a humiliating reverse *if* sufficient publicity and bad press can be generated. What is takes is a very large number of bad tempered people and some media backing. I would be confident that Sony has tested this new system on a wide variety of player to get a feel for the market first.
3. The number of players that refuse to play them will be small enough that the MPAA/Sony/Others will be able to railroad in this change over a year or so (after all some people will assume that their player is fucked and just get another cheap one) - but as the hackers of this world have a formidable reputation for cracking these things in a week or so the status will largely return to normal in due course.
Ok, so AMD aren't doing this because it makes their customers happy. Given the choice between two identically performing chips, one of which restricts your ability to do something, I'd bet most people would choose to get the unrestricted one.
So what? Given the choice most consumer electronics manufacturers and large corporations would choose the other one, and they are the ones making equipment.
I think you'll find that what the people want really does not matter.
Mainly these systems are despised by people that have something to hide.
What you dont see in these sensationalist posts are some of the good things that have come out of these systems.
For example:-
There was a case about a year ago when a man attempted to abduct a girl and the CCTV systems cought it, summoned the police and then guided the police to where he had run off.
There have been murders solved by the ubiquitous CCTVs, simply wind the tapes back, study. We are not talking the odd anecdotal story here CCTV is a very major crime prevention and solution tool.
Talking cameras is already proven to but down on crime before it happens and free the hard working police force to concentrate more on where they are really needed. Besides they are only in public areas anyhow where anybody is free to watch in any case.
It disturbs me when people hark on about their privacy and how unfair it is to be snooped on constantly - the system is reducing crime and making the streets safer.
On the same vein we know have computerised vehicle licensing, insurance and MOT (road worthyness test) system - so the police can check your cars details in a fraction of a second - if it cuts down on car theft, joy runners and illegal uninusred vehicles then I cam all for it.
The UK has a very fast growing DNA database, its added to constantly by the police among others. So far it has solved numerous crimes, even when a perfect match is not found a close enough family match is generally found to help track down the perpatrator. Every few weeks there is a story about some decades old crime solved by modern techniques and the database.
ID cards will inevitably come into force in the near future - well if that cuts down on benefit fraud, illegal immigrants and helps catch wanted criminals then I am all for it.
My point is that people will get up on their soapbox and rant about the state of the nation, how crime is prevelant and people should do something about it, then refuse to allow technologies that are doing something effective about it.
I'm all for it, I have nothing to hide.
I agree with the parent on a number of points. A CS degree is not the most important criteria in a number of SW/IT jobs, and secondly - we all have to do work that it not enjoyable to pay the bills.
My main degree is in engineering (not CS, or EE or any even related field) but I have been a programmer for 10 years. My chosen field is firmware, mostly my work involves assembler, electronics, C and some win32 support apps. In this time I have worked with and interviewed many CS graduates who have all been largely unskilled in this field - the ones we have had have not understood resources, interrupts, reentrency, real-time or many other important factors in firmware. Yet some have behaved as though the great steaming brown mounds of code they have pumped out should be worshipped just as much as the ground apon which they have most recently walked. EE graduates have been by far the most promising recruits, though I have worked along side former carpenters, plumbers, and even car mechanics and dustbin men.
Judge someone by the skillset they possess, not some (largely meaningless) paper qualifications. Above all enforce a strict, well thought out interview regime full of relevent questions to weed out the dross.
I personally loath some of the jobs I have to do - but I recognise that any job is not all 100% coding and I accept that any project life-cycle will require some more boring jobs. As a respectable programmer I just get on with it to the best of my ability.
This is another case where we have to protect the stupid from their own actions.
Or educate them. Rapidly.
..or massively discounted.
But you pay the full whack for the rest, sonny boy.
Is is just me or have I seem the same tactic used to get people hooked on recreational pharmaceuticals?
--------------
Dirty pool, old man. Never again!
The last stage of your apt introduction is the bit where Microsoft appropiate the technology as their own having removed the original innovator.
They remove the original innovator by a number of means: outright purchase and asset strip (stacker?), use their monopoly (netscape, firewalls, antivirus), FuD (linux - thats not working so well for them)... Have I missed any?
But once the original innovator is gone they can claim it as their own. And force us to use their cack-handed implementation in (to paraphrase the parent) "an annoying format". And what is worse, we let them.
Fume. Froth. Soapbox.
I want simple controls:-
:-)
left, right, forward and of course.... fire!
get them to eat berries first for a full on multicolour pebble dashing.
and wait until my neighbour is washing his car.
(of course a small head mounted camera with crosshairs target scope would be good as well
ah, delight.
Dont expect too much of the petition system.
There was a very well publicised petition on the new proposed road charging system that got 1.7million supporting votes cast, it had little noticible effect on the goverment. Infact all it caused was alot of publicity and condemnation in the Labour ranks that some 'prat' (direct quote) had created this tool that could be used to bash them.
To put it in perspective the whole population in the UK is 60million in total, so 1.7million is ALOT of the driving adults.
see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6354735.stm
I think Labour saw it as a exercise in good relations and checking the boxes. Certainly there is no sign of them doing anything about the petitions that people actually support.
I'm confused here, maybe some of you poeple who use virtual machines (more than me) can help me out. I've posted a few questions and points I am either interested in, or do not understand..
=============
Where is the boundary between a "virtual machine" and a "real one"?
After all, the BIOS is definately part of the machine/motherboard and thats SW. If there is another layer of SW inbetween your OS and you HW why should that be any different? I would treat a "virtual" machine as essentially the same as a "real" one - surely in the eyes of the law they must be the same, no?
M$ changing the license restrictions seems as though they are essentialy stepping outside the OS box and determining the physical HW you are and are not allowed to run on. Whats the legal situation here, has this been tried and testing in a court?
Can they actually prevent any version of Windows from running in a VM if that version of Windows cannot detect it?
At the end of they day if a court rules a VM and a real PC are legally the same, where would that leave M$?
I am an embedded engineer. Various firms I have worked for have tried to implement some kind of "reuse" code store. But every time real-time considerations and platform specifics have derailed it (thankfully) in the early stages. At the low-level so called "code reuse" is (IMHO) a nothing short of a right royal pain in the neck. It looks good on paper, managers like the concept - but it is impossible to implement without large amounts of hardware abstraction. Maybe it makes more sense further up the SW tree, at a higher level when things are not so resource critical.
(foaming at the mouth mode cancelled, soapbox packed away)
In my defense, its something I feel *strongly* about.
..and I fscked up the html as well. They dont have a Preview for nothing y'know.