So what's to prevent hacker group x from modifying the software on the disc so it doesn't check for the keys anymore?
Noting but time. The software developer can make it hard to figure our how to modify the software.
For example, back in the late 80's, Deluxe Music Contruction Set for the Mac was a pain to crack, because most of the code was encrypted, so disassemblers, even great ones like MacNosy, were not too useful. The decryption key was derived from a checksum of the code that loaded and decrypted the encrypted code segments, and since the 68k did not have hardware breakpoints, setting a breakpoint in a debugger involved writing a breakpoint instruction into memory, which changed the checksum, which borked the decryption.
The loader/decrypter also took steps to kill any debuggers that were running, so that you could not just hit the interrupt button after the program was decrypted and dump memory.
They didn't quite cover everything....there was a place you could put a breakpoint that was outside the range of memory that was checksummed, but was executed after the key had been derived, so crackers got in...but it was clear that with a bit more effort, they could have delayed cracking for a lot longer.
Remember that the software developer doesn't have to make their program uncrackable. They just have to make it so time consuming as to not be worth the effort.
I think an even better example would be things that you don't care about. I care about my refreshing drinks, and tend to develop brand loyalty. Getting a drink you don't like really sucks, so it takes a lot to get me to try something else. Coke can advertise their ass off, and they aren't getting me to switch from Pepsi and Dr. Pepper.
However, consider something like dishwashing detergent. I don't give a damn about dishwashing detergent. I have ZERO brand loyalty there.
When I buy diskwashing detergent, I am most likely to simply buy the one that seems most familiar and isn't too much more expensive than the ones I've never heard of. In short, the one that has advertised the most.
It's the same with people looking at their watch. Ask someone who checked their watch what time it is, and see how many have to check again
It can work that way with your wallet, too. I once wondered if I needed to go by the ATM on the way home, so checked my wallet.
About 30 minutes later, I wondered the same thing, and checked my wallet again.
About 30 minutes later, I again wondered the same thing, and was about to check my wallet, when I remembered that I had already done this twice, and also remembered that between now and the last check, I'd passed an ATM and not stopped, and so deduced that I must have decided last time that I didn't need to visit the ATM.
I don't know what this means. I suppose it is pretty bad that I kept forgetting what my checks had shown...but it's a good sign that I still had the mental capacity to reason around the problem.
That wouldn't be a Libertarian issue. The quickest way to get a bunch of Libertarians arguing among themselves is to bring up intellectual property. Half of them will be against it, and half will be for it.
Second, how well will sound work? I haven't done much Linux multimedia for a while...last time I looked, things like surround sound were a bit lacking. NWN has some pretty good use of surround sound, and I'd hate to give that up.
Yeah, I know this is kind of off topic...but directed relationship graphs remind me of something kind of amusing.
Back in school, one evening, for entertainment, a few of us made a directed relationship graph of the people in our student house (about 60 or 70 people). An arrow from X to Y meant that X was interested in Y in more than a just friendly way.
We then made a copy, with the vertices of the graph unlabeled, and posted it on the house bulletin board, as a puzzle.
People did a lot better than I would have expected at finding their vertice on the unlabeled graph.
What they'd do, upgrade from 20mhz Sun boxes to Pentium III 933's?
These kind of performance comparisons are just SILLY
Actually, they aren't that silly. One of the advantages of Linux over the proprietary Unixes is that Linux runs on commodity hardware, allowing for more frequent hardware upgrades, which means that you can generally run on faster hardware.
One of the studios that switched from SGI to Linux on Intel for rendering a while back pointed this out. With the expensive SGI hardware, they could afford to replace the rendering farm something like every six years, so on average they were using three year old hardware. With Linux on Intel, they will be able to replace machines on, I think they said, a two year cycle, so on average, they will be rendering on one year old hardware. One year old Intel hardware kicks the crap out of three year old SGI hardware.
I just know someone is going to complain about the phrase "very unique", and say that unique means one-of-a-kind, and can't be qualified with "very".
So, this is a preemptive strike. It is perfectly logical to qualify unique. In some sense, everything is unique. E.g., the UniBall Micro pen sitting on my desk is unique...it's the only one in the world that is sitting on my desk, afterall. However, that uniqueness is not significant. If the pen falls off my desk, it loses it. If someone puts another pen on the desk, and takes the first one, the uniqness is transferred. Etc.. So, it would make perfect sense to say that while my pen is unique, it is not very unique.
Qualifying unique serves to indicate the significance of the uniqueness, or how long it will last.
I don't understand why they cap the uploads, anyway. Aren't most larger pipes syncronous
It's irrelevant what "most" pipes are. Most cable systems were designed for TV, with most channels being downstream only. They did include upstream channels, but those were designed for interactive TV. Accordingly, they allocated much less bandwidth for upstream than for downstream.
This limit is built into the equipment on these systems. (Basically, they use frequencies below some magic frequency for upstream, and frequencies above that for downstream. The magic frequency is low enough so that TV channel 2 will be on the downstream side).
So, don't expect assymetrical cable speed to go away anytime soon.
It appears that their definition of supporting wireless sharing is that they didn't find any obvious prohibition in whatever copy of the TOS they could find on the web, if they could find one.
The example where one book was made available for free download and that caused sales of the other books of that author to go up is not necessarily relevant.
The important question is what would have happened if all the books from that author had been available for free download.
Another possible problem with the comparison is that books on computer are usually much less convenient than regular books. With music, MP3 format is often as convenient as CD format, and it is easy to burn CDs from MP3s.
I suspect that this is NOT about whether deep linking is illegal, but rather about what it was being used for.
Note that this concerns a site deep linking to news stories. Note also that most of the other deep linking cases in other parts of the world have ALSO concerned this very same thing.
Finally, note that there were similar cases long before the web. They didn't involve deep linking, of course, but rather involved newspapers getting their information from other newspapers. They were only getting the facts, not the expression of the story, so there was no copyright problem. Nevertheless, they were found to be violating the law.
So, what I suspect is that this is about unfair competition, or whatever the Danish equivalent is, NOT about deep linking. Deep linking was merely the means used.
It's important to keep in mind when considering how laws should apply to new technology is that in many cases the laws are concerned with the result, not the means.
While getting 25 hours in a day is impressive, it's not as good as getting 96.
However, if whatever technique you applied to stretch 24 hours into 25 could be applied to the Timecube days, perhaps that would give us 100 hours...metric time!
My guess is that this is not something worth worrying too much about, from a fire-hazard point of view.
If it was a significant problem, there would be more stories of it happening. "My fan died and burned my house down" is the kind of story that would spread pretty well on the net.
Japan has one lawyer for every 10,000 people. The US has one lawyer for every 300 people
Wrong! Those figures come from using different definitions for "lawyer" when counting.
In the US, to get that number, they count everyone who basically has gone to law school and passed the bar exam and is practicing law. Prosecutors, defenders, tax lawyers, patent lawyers, real estate lawyers...all of them.
The Japanese number comes from counting only one or two of those (the ones who prosecute and defend criminal cases, I believe).
We are a culturally poorer country for the damage the RIAA has inflicted on our rights to fair use
Sharing complete songs in order to avoid having to buy a copy yourself is a fair use right????
Re:Luke, use the source...
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 2
The main concern is that if I install OpenSSH from source on all 50 of my servers when it comes time to patch it I've got myself a little inconvencience. I would most likely compile it on one machine, tar up the source directory (complete with new binaries) and do a 'make install' on all 50 machines so I don't have to recompile for each box. But this is still going to take me a lot of time.
Have you considered making your own RPMs? It's actually pretty easy, even if you start from the original tarball. If you start from your distribution's RPM, it will be even easier.
The article is riddled with errors. Here are the ones I found in the first pass.
Section 1 complains about failed dependencies when installing binary packages. Failed dependencies are a problem with any packaging system (or source distribution, for that matter) that does not include everything in the package.
Section 3, claims that RPM creates fragmentation between distributions. No evidence is offered. The author appears to be making the mistake of assuming that since several distributions that use RPM are different, RPM must be the cause.
Section 3.1, claims that upgrading is not supported with RPM, but is with DEB. This will come as a great surprise to the hundreds of thousands of Linux users who regular update everything, including kernels, via RPM. Not fully sure how the author got this part so wrong, but I think part of it is that Debian is not commercial, so when they say something is "supported", that means something different than when, say, Red Hat says it.
Section 3.2, complaining about different versions of RPM causing problems. Changes quote about why Beehive doesn't use RPM or DEB to just talk about RPM. Greatly exaggerates the problems that were caused by the one time RPM underwent a change that was not backward compatible. Again attributes to RPM along problems that every packaging system has.
Section 3.3. Continues blaming RPM for the differences between distributions.
It basically continues on that way, making these same mistakes over and over, so I'll stop now.
As far as the codification of the first sale doctrine, the Association of Research Libraries [cni.org] would seem to disagree with you
Well, the Supreme Court disagrees with the Association of Research Libraries:
Congress codified the first sale doctrine in 41 of the Copyright Act of 1909, ch. 320, 35 Stat. 1084, and again in 27 of the 1947 Act, ch. 391, 61 Stat. 660.
It seems contradictory to Big N's massive anti-emulation stance to introduce the GBA as an emulator itself!
That's like saying it is contradictory to tell your wife not to go around having sex with random men, and then wanting to have sex with her yourself.
Anyone else miss the days when to be a technonerd or geek, you had to be smart enough to make simple inferences, such as that Nintendo's anti-emulation stance is not actually against emulation as a technology, but rather against certain uses of emulation? What the hell has happened to the nerd/geek population?
Slashdot Mirror
Or you are doing complex problems, using algorithms that you developed or that are otherwise likely to be unfamiliar to the reader.
Read the examples in Knuth's book. His system makes it much easier to understand what is going on, AND makes it much easier to write correct code.
Noting but time. The software developer can make it hard to figure our how to modify the software.
For example, back in the late 80's, Deluxe Music Contruction Set for the Mac was a pain to crack, because most of the code was encrypted, so disassemblers, even great ones like MacNosy, were not too useful. The decryption key was derived from a checksum of the code that loaded and decrypted the encrypted code segments, and since the 68k did not have hardware breakpoints, setting a breakpoint in a debugger involved writing a breakpoint instruction into memory, which changed the checksum, which borked the decryption.
The loader/decrypter also took steps to kill any debuggers that were running, so that you could not just hit the interrupt button after the program was decrypted and dump memory.
They didn't quite cover everything....there was a place you could put a breakpoint that was outside the range of memory that was checksummed, but was executed after the key had been derived, so crackers got in...but it was clear that with a bit more effort, they could have delayed cracking for a lot longer.
Remember that the software developer doesn't have to make their program uncrackable. They just have to make it so time consuming as to not be worth the effort.
However, consider something like dishwashing detergent. I don't give a damn about dishwashing detergent. I have ZERO brand loyalty there.
When I buy diskwashing detergent, I am most likely to simply buy the one that seems most familiar and isn't too much more expensive than the ones I've never heard of. In short, the one that has advertised the most.
It can work that way with your wallet, too. I once wondered if I needed to go by the ATM on the way home, so checked my wallet.
About 30 minutes later, I wondered the same thing, and checked my wallet again.
About 30 minutes later, I again wondered the same thing, and was about to check my wallet, when I remembered that I had already done this twice, and also remembered that between now and the last check, I'd passed an ATM and not stopped, and so deduced that I must have decided last time that I didn't need to visit the ATM.
I don't know what this means. I suppose it is pretty bad that I kept forgetting what my checks had shown...but it's a good sign that I still had the mental capacity to reason around the problem.
That wouldn't be a Libertarian issue. The quickest way to get a bunch of Libertarians arguing among themselves is to bring up intellectual property. Half of them will be against it, and half will be for it.
First, will there be a Linux port of the tools?
Second, how well will sound work? I haven't done much Linux multimedia for a while...last time I looked, things like surround sound were a bit lacking. NWN has some pretty good use of surround sound, and I'd hate to give that up.
Uhm...nope. It is using the media exactly as designed. The ability to place those restrictions on the disc is part of the DVD design.
Back in school, one evening, for entertainment, a few of us made a directed relationship graph of the people in our student house (about 60 or 70 people). An arrow from X to Y meant that X was interested in Y in more than a just friendly way.
We then made a copy, with the vertices of the graph unlabeled, and posted it on the house bulletin board, as a puzzle.
People did a lot better than I would have expected at finding their vertice on the unlabeled graph.
Actually, they aren't that silly. One of the advantages of Linux over the proprietary Unixes is that Linux runs on commodity hardware, allowing for more frequent hardware upgrades, which means that you can generally run on faster hardware.
One of the studios that switched from SGI to Linux on Intel for rendering a while back pointed this out. With the expensive SGI hardware, they could afford to replace the rendering farm something like every six years, so on average they were using three year old hardware. With Linux on Intel, they will be able to replace machines on, I think they said, a two year cycle, so on average, they will be rendering on one year old hardware. One year old Intel hardware kicks the crap out of three year old SGI hardware.
Gack...I feel old now. One of the posts in that thread was from me. Oh well, it's cool to know I participated in the first usenet Y2K discussion. :-)
So, this is a preemptive strike. It is perfectly logical to qualify unique. In some sense, everything is unique. E.g., the UniBall Micro pen sitting on my desk is unique...it's the only one in the world that is sitting on my desk, afterall. However, that uniqueness is not significant. If the pen falls off my desk, it loses it. If someone puts another pen on the desk, and takes the first one, the uniqness is transferred. Etc.. So, it would make perfect sense to say that while my pen is unique, it is not very unique.
Qualifying unique serves to indicate the significance of the uniqueness, or how long it will last.
It's irrelevant what "most" pipes are. Most cable systems were designed for TV, with most channels being downstream only. They did include upstream channels, but those were designed for interactive TV. Accordingly, they allocated much less bandwidth for upstream than for downstream.
This limit is built into the equipment on these systems. (Basically, they use frequencies below some magic frequency for upstream, and frequencies above that for downstream. The magic frequency is low enough so that TV channel 2 will be on the downstream side).
So, don't expect assymetrical cable speed to go away anytime soon.
It appears that their definition of supporting wireless sharing is that they didn't find any obvious prohibition in whatever copy of the TOS they could find on the web, if they could find one.
They didn't look hard enough.
I want to see "MENSA for Dummies".
The important question is what would have happened if all the books from that author had been available for free download.
Another possible problem with the comparison is that books on computer are usually much less convenient than regular books. With music, MP3 format is often as convenient as CD format, and it is easy to burn CDs from MP3s.
Note that this concerns a site deep linking to news stories. Note also that most of the other deep linking cases in other parts of the world have ALSO concerned this very same thing.
Finally, note that there were similar cases long before the web. They didn't involve deep linking, of course, but rather involved newspapers getting their information from other newspapers. They were only getting the facts, not the expression of the story, so there was no copyright problem. Nevertheless, they were found to be violating the law.
So, what I suspect is that this is about unfair competition, or whatever the Danish equivalent is, NOT about deep linking. Deep linking was merely the means used.
It's important to keep in mind when considering how laws should apply to new technology is that in many cases the laws are concerned with the result, not the means.
However, if whatever technique you applied to stretch 24 hours into 25 could be applied to the Timecube days, perhaps that would give us 100 hours...metric time!
If it was a significant problem, there would be more stories of it happening. "My fan died and burned my house down" is the kind of story that would spread pretty well on the net.
Wrong! Those figures come from using different definitions for "lawyer" when counting.
In the US, to get that number, they count everyone who basically has gone to law school and passed the bar exam and is practicing law. Prosecutors, defenders, tax lawyers, patent lawyers, real estate lawyers...all of them.
The Japanese number comes from counting only one or two of those (the ones who prosecute and defend criminal cases, I believe).
Flamebait? How the hell was my comment flamebait?
Sharing complete songs in order to avoid having to buy a copy yourself is a fair use right????
Have you considered making your own RPMs? It's actually pretty easy, even if you start from the original tarball. If you start from your distribution's RPM, it will be even easier.
Section 1 complains about failed dependencies when installing binary packages. Failed dependencies are a problem with any packaging system (or source distribution, for that matter) that does not include everything in the package.
Section 3, claims that RPM creates fragmentation between distributions. No evidence is offered. The author appears to be making the mistake of assuming that since several distributions that use RPM are different, RPM must be the cause.
Section 3.1, claims that upgrading is not supported with RPM, but is with DEB. This will come as a great surprise to the hundreds of thousands of Linux users who regular update everything, including kernels, via RPM. Not fully sure how the author got this part so wrong, but I think part of it is that Debian is not commercial, so when they say something is "supported", that means something different than when, say, Red Hat says it.
Section 3.2, complaining about different versions of RPM causing problems. Changes quote about why Beehive doesn't use RPM or DEB to just talk about RPM. Greatly exaggerates the problems that were caused by the one time RPM underwent a change that was not backward compatible. Again attributes to RPM along problems that every packaging system has.
Section 3.3. Continues blaming RPM for the differences between distributions.
It basically continues on that way, making these same mistakes over and over, so I'll stop now.
Well, the Supreme Court disagrees with the Association of Research Libraries:
Congress codified the first sale doctrine in 41 of the Copyright Act of 1909, ch. 320, 35 Stat. 1084, and again in 27 of the 1947 Act, ch. 391, 61 Stat. 660.
That's like saying it is contradictory to tell your wife not to go around having sex with random men, and then wanting to have sex with her yourself.
Anyone else miss the days when to be a technonerd or geek, you had to be smart enough to make simple inferences, such as that Nintendo's anti-emulation stance is not actually against emulation as a technology, but rather against certain uses of emulation? What the hell has happened to the nerd/geek population?