Hang on, are there cables or are there not? If this is wire-less (something like IR) and reliable then that sounds like quite a big achievement, if not then it just sounds like fibre optics with a bit of a twist. I can't tell from the description or the article whether this new "Light Peak" is a system over wires (at which point why trumpet the mobile applications?) or some big jump in wireless peripheral connection.
Nice headline! "250-Foot Hybrid Airship To Spy Over Afghanistan In" - in what? In November? In 2010? In next ten years? In mission to provide big target in sky? In huge ball of flames? In super-secret mission that no-one knows about?
No I didn't, that was point b) in the first three flaws with the "DRM stops whistleblowing". If you're sharing a document with a partner company for the purposes of a contract then DRMing it could let you limit its use to the length of the contract and with most documents then photographing it wouldn't be useful for continued corporate work in breach of the contract. Whistleblowing, on the other hand, could use a photograph of the document to leak enough that the important details got out.
d) if you've got the right policies on your network (disabling USB media, filtering of all out-going mail, filtering of web content and no uploads - basically all of the controls they have in place where I work) then the whistle blower couldn't leak the document anyway because there wouldn't be a way out of the network (especially when combined with unprintable PDFs or similar).
Classical example against DRM is whistleblower leaking documents concerning illegal/unethical stuff happening inside company. DRMed document would be unreadable for outsiders, requiring DRM-breaking and if DRM system supports it, document could be remotely nuked.
Except that a) the DRM system couldn't nuke it if it wasn't connected to the right systems (or you could have a backup if it was a "three strikes and I nuke"), b) no matter what your DRM is on documents, at the end of the day the whistle-blower can fall back to screenshots/photos - enough for whistle blowing, but not necessarily enough or the right formats for breaching contracts, c) PDFs already have a form of DRM in their controls to stop you printing or editing them, d)
Besides which, by your example ACL are bad because you might known that there's information that could be used in whistleblowing, but you don't have access to it because you're not on the right ACL. Ditto for encryption - you can do all sorts of illegal stuff hidden in encrypted files, so we must stop that. Oh, and the Internet and email, after all you can discuss all sorts of illegal stuff with anyone on there and even have it encrypted as you do it...
formerly their content (until they sold it to you), their terms and the terms of whatever local equivalents there are to "first sale doctrines" in the US, you do not really need to have access to it but they sold you a copy of it that you now own.
Music lobbiests to ISPs is likely to be indirect. The lobbiests lobby the government that "all file sharing is illegal" and "BitTorrent is illegal", the government doesn't have a clue and follows the line, the government legislates against "illegal file sharing such as BitTorrent", Microsoft then says "ours is okay, because we have DRM", the government puts in an exception for "controlled and approved P2P" and everyone at a large corporation cheers.
Yes, the ISPs want to cut the use of their network by removing people's huge use of P2P anyway (and if it is illegal downloads then that's fair enough), but the music lobbyists are already getting to the point of dictating to the ISPs with the recent suggestions of ISPs doing the monitoring for them.
There's no place for DRM in the world. It's fundamentally flawed at its principles.
Just to play devil's advocate, there is a place for DRM in the world, just not in the consumer space. While I hate DRM on my music/games (especially since I use Linux and other alternate devices) it could be suitably applied on corporate documents to enforce access controls. In that situation it could still be cracked, but you've then got a very obvious and often quite large legal entity to point the finger at and sue for breach of confidence or contract or whatever, which means that they're far less likely to crack it (plus you're likely to trust them to some degree anyway, since you have a business relationship with them). For "B2B" situations it would provide extra protection on top of a contract that would stop accidental leaks (or at least make the leaked document less usable)
If we have a DRM-free p2p protocol like BitTorrent, why on Earth does Microsoft think that people are going to flock to their proprietary, restricted protocol?
ISPs.
Or, more specifically, if Microsoft can make this completely different in packet appearance to "open" protocols like BitTorrent then the ISPs could very well end up throttling BitTorrent back to nothing (under the flawed argument of "pirated content" - Linux uses BitTorrent legitimately, you know) and leave the DRMed version running a full speed. It would in no way be under pressure from corporate lobby groups and music labels who want to blanket ban anything that they don't control, of course, and would purely be because "our customers feel secure with the additional 'protection'".
Podcasts are also often (but not always) delivered via RSS feeds, so you can keep up to date with a regular "radio show" over the Internet.
I agree, though, what is wrong with giving a transcript as well? I get the British Computer Society emails and occasionally go "that looks interesting" only to go "it's in the 'podcast' section? oh well, never mind".
To say "we never needed them before" to technological help is like saying that cars are bad, we have horses and never needed them before.
Except that cars provide a benefit over horses (speed, long-distance travel, cooperation) with no real cons (except the larger-scale "global warming/emmissions" issue) and no obvious alternative (unless you want to count planes).
Child tracking devices like this provide one possible benefit (tracking your child's movements to the metre when you don't trust them enough to have them tell you where they're going) with a raft of cons (children feel that mummy and daddy are always watching them, parents don't trust children, children get used to being spied on, etc) with more constructive alternatives (like building trust with your child).
Directed energy and keeping an eye on them is the best way, but the harness is still a sensible safety precaution near roads. It's not something to keep them on at all times, and it's only something for when they're old enough to walk but not old enough to start understanding not to run away, (which isn't the age that they'd go for a watch), but it'll keep them safe from physical danger by stopping them running in to its path. That's not degrading, it's physical security.
The watch, on the other hand, is all about trust and undermining it by saying "we don't trust you so we'll keep a track of you as well". It's useless in most of the scenarios that people have said (things like "your child is in the next isle over because they saw something interesting").
As for the tantrum, just leave them to it and don't let them think it has an effect. If their efforts come to naught and you just carry on with a calm "can we carry on walking now?" then they'll learn that they don't always get their own way. That's what my mum did with me and I soon learned that tantrums didn't get me anything.
Fair enough that some people may be over anxious, but I still can't see it helping the kid in the long run. That plus even if it starts of as "for the over anxious" then it'll become the norm and be for every child (which is what the company wants anyway). Just look at the way that children can't be "trusted" on the Internet, at least according to all of the media outlets.
Maybe I was just a strange child for actually paying attention to my parents and understanding that leaving my parents when we were in busy places or not being where I said I'd be when I said I'd be there were bad things, but I don't remember causing any major moments of anxiety. I know I'd have felt smoothered, cocooned and like my privacy was being violated if my parents had basically said "know we know we taught you to only go where we know you're going, but we don't trust that you're going to do that and we're paranoid of the big-bad-evils, so we're going to monitor your every movement as well, just to make sure".
2 years old? So young toddler (my kid is ~16 months and isn't walking very far on his own yet). That'd be about the point where I'd rely on physical controls (either hand holding or one of those harnesses). Either one gives the child a bit of freedom to walk on their own while still keeping them under your control.
I only got lost in a shopping centre once that I know of when I was a kid and it wasn't that big a panic - that's why shopping centres tend to have "lost and found children" points. That plus I hadn't even gone out of the shop, just around the corner.
We also live in a world where the parents are still on five year old Nokia 3510s with Pay As You Go sim-cards that get topped up every six months or so;) Some might have iPhones, but others won't be getting mobile phones for a long time to come, and even then they'll be cheap ones.
It might not harm them directly (except for taunts from other children about how they're still being watched by their parents, any possible effects of having a GPS transmitter strapped to a wrist, and the degredation of their self-belief, self-reliance and understanding of personal space) but it'll harm the parent's bank balance.
£150 for a watch for a kid (not known to be the most careful of individuals with items of worth), plus a monthly contract?!?
What is it with the large proportion of parents who feel it suddenly is necessary, though? I'm a parent, and he may still be less than 18 months old and so not going very far, but both me and my wife feel that a lot of this stuff (including net nanny monitors) is overkill and is just going to destroy the child's concepts of trust, personal space and self-reliance.
Instill good values in your child and do your job as a parent and you can't go far wrong. Start to let technology do your job for you (because, shock-horror, the other alternative is putting in effort and teaching stuff to kids) and it'll all go wrong.
It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft took the easy way out because it put more strength behind patents. A cry of "look - even we comply with patents, so we must keep them" or something similar.
I can't think what I registered with recently, but some places do it as "we don't allow under 13s because of COPPA", so start in 1996, then go back 100 years from there. Why stop at, say, 1930 and lock out the 80+ age group?
Kids go the other way, though. Because of the US COPPA legislation my wife's website doesn't allow under-13s. What you find is that kids want to pretend to be older than they are, sign up as 15, 16, 17 or 18 year olds because they think it is cool (and they can get to stuff that they shouldn't).
Either that or kids don't have the imagination to lie like that, and most people can't be arsed either.
I end up the other way and just going "I'm over 18, so why do you need to know my DoB?" and proceed to just hit "end" on their day/month/year picker and end up somewhere in the region of 113 having been born on New Year's Eve!
For some people, it's a significant amount, yes. Not everyone gets big salaries.
And yet lots of people afford mobile phones, broadband and other expenses that are often way higher. Quite often there seems to be some kind of bucket-shaped graph of "expense of phone versus salary", where those on benefits have flash phones with bluetooth headsets, as do those with lots of money, but those in the middle stick with something cheap that just does what they need (or stick with PAYG)
Their news is biased, 'decent presenters'? I'm not sure how their presenters are any better. And the BBC are constantly hyping new stuff, much of which I consider to be drivel.
Can't say I've noticed any bias, but then I can't stand watching any other news channels. Sky seems like you're watching some American crap (not quite as bad as Fox, but getting there). Five hardly did any news. ITV and C4 are like the red-tops - "OMG! Lets sensationalise the news and blow it all out of proportion".
Okay, so "Strictly Come Dancing" isn't the epitomy of quality TV, but it's several steps up from X Factor and thousands of steps up from watching dumb attention-seekers scratch their arses in a house all day.
Teletext/Ceefax is faster
Bahahahaha, people still use that?
Daily. There's normally more news articles than they can cover in the main show (and that's just when reading the UK and World news pages) and you can still have them chattering away about the main story in the background if you want. It's like adding the website or an RSS feed on top of the news.
BBC has four different news feeds, so you can always get things like weather forecasts without having to wait
The internet is much better for this kind of stuff.
And if you don't have the Internet? After all, if you don't want to shell out the ~£10 per month for the TV license then why would you shell out the ~£20 per month to get enough bandwidth to do everything the TV does? You did say that people on high salaries couldn't afford that kind of expense, didn't you?
Also, which starts up quicker - a TV or a computer and Internet connection?
all for the price of a cheap digibox.
And a licence fee.
I was comparing terrestrial TV to Digital, so the license fee is a given;)
Slashdot Mirror
It's a shame /. has a lot of Americans - they must miss the accuracy of the humour :D
Hang on, are there cables or are there not? If this is wire-less (something like IR) and reliable then that sounds like quite a big achievement, if not then it just sounds like fibre optics with a bit of a twist. I can't tell from the description or the article whether this new "Light Peak" is a system over wires (at which point why trumpet the mobile applications?) or some big jump in wireless peripheral connection.
Nice headline! "250-Foot Hybrid Airship To Spy Over Afghanistan In" - in what? In November? In 2010? In next ten years? In mission to provide big target in sky? In huge ball of flames? In super-secret mission that no-one knows about?
No I didn't, that was point b) in the first three flaws with the "DRM stops whistleblowing". If you're sharing a document with a partner company for the purposes of a contract then DRMing it could let you limit its use to the length of the contract and with most documents then photographing it wouldn't be useful for continued corporate work in breach of the contract. Whistleblowing, on the other hand, could use a photograph of the document to leak enough that the important details got out.
Ooops, missed d) at the end of it all!
d) if you've got the right policies on your network (disabling USB media, filtering of all out-going mail, filtering of web content and no uploads - basically all of the controls they have in place where I work) then the whistle blower couldn't leak the document anyway because there wouldn't be a way out of the network (especially when combined with unprintable PDFs or similar).
Except that a) the DRM system couldn't nuke it if it wasn't connected to the right systems (or you could have a backup if it was a "three strikes and I nuke"), b) no matter what your DRM is on documents, at the end of the day the whistle-blower can fall back to screenshots/photos - enough for whistle blowing, but not necessarily enough or the right formats for breaching contracts, c) PDFs already have a form of DRM in their controls to stop you printing or editing them, d)
Besides which, by your example ACL are bad because you might known that there's information that could be used in whistleblowing, but you don't have access to it because you're not on the right ACL. Ditto for encryption - you can do all sorts of illegal stuff hidden in encrypted files, so we must stop that. Oh, and the Internet and email, after all you can discuss all sorts of illegal stuff with anyone on there and even have it encrypted as you do it...
There, fixed that for you.
Music lobbiests to ISPs is likely to be indirect. The lobbiests lobby the government that "all file sharing is illegal" and "BitTorrent is illegal", the government doesn't have a clue and follows the line, the government legislates against "illegal file sharing such as BitTorrent", Microsoft then says "ours is okay, because we have DRM", the government puts in an exception for "controlled and approved P2P" and everyone at a large corporation cheers.
Yes, the ISPs want to cut the use of their network by removing people's huge use of P2P anyway (and if it is illegal downloads then that's fair enough), but the music lobbyists are already getting to the point of dictating to the ISPs with the recent suggestions of ISPs doing the monitoring for them.
Just to play devil's advocate, there is a place for DRM in the world, just not in the consumer space. While I hate DRM on my music/games (especially since I use Linux and other alternate devices) it could be suitably applied on corporate documents to enforce access controls. In that situation it could still be cracked, but you've then got a very obvious and often quite large legal entity to point the finger at and sue for breach of confidence or contract or whatever, which means that they're far less likely to crack it (plus you're likely to trust them to some degree anyway, since you have a business relationship with them). For "B2B" situations it would provide extra protection on top of a contract that would stop accidental leaks (or at least make the leaked document less usable)
ISPs.
Or, more specifically, if Microsoft can make this completely different in packet appearance to "open" protocols like BitTorrent then the ISPs could very well end up throttling BitTorrent back to nothing (under the flawed argument of "pirated content" - Linux uses BitTorrent legitimately, you know) and leave the DRMed version running a full speed. It would in no way be under pressure from corporate lobby groups and music labels who want to blanket ban anything that they don't control, of course, and would purely be because "our customers feel secure with the additional 'protection'".
And, of course, that kind of key system isn't going to suffer from the "insufficient seeders" problem at all :D
Your children multiple at uncontrollable rates without any external interaction? Wow, I'd certainly be worried.
Podcasts are also often (but not always) delivered via RSS feeds, so you can keep up to date with a regular "radio show" over the Internet.
I agree, though, what is wrong with giving a transcript as well? I get the British Computer Society emails and occasionally go "that looks interesting" only to go "it's in the 'podcast' section? oh well, never mind".
It's okay, we've got a few e-coli infested "petting farms" in the UK at the moment ;)
Except that cars provide a benefit over horses (speed, long-distance travel, cooperation) with no real cons (except the larger-scale "global warming/emmissions" issue) and no obvious alternative (unless you want to count planes).
Child tracking devices like this provide one possible benefit (tracking your child's movements to the metre when you don't trust them enough to have them tell you where they're going) with a raft of cons (children feel that mummy and daddy are always watching them, parents don't trust children, children get used to being spied on, etc) with more constructive alternatives (like building trust with your child).
Directed energy and keeping an eye on them is the best way, but the harness is still a sensible safety precaution near roads. It's not something to keep them on at all times, and it's only something for when they're old enough to walk but not old enough to start understanding not to run away, (which isn't the age that they'd go for a watch), but it'll keep them safe from physical danger by stopping them running in to its path. That's not degrading, it's physical security.
The watch, on the other hand, is all about trust and undermining it by saying "we don't trust you so we'll keep a track of you as well". It's useless in most of the scenarios that people have said (things like "your child is in the next isle over because they saw something interesting").
As for the tantrum, just leave them to it and don't let them think it has an effect. If their efforts come to naught and you just carry on with a calm "can we carry on walking now?" then they'll learn that they don't always get their own way. That's what my mum did with me and I soon learned that tantrums didn't get me anything.
Fair enough that some people may be over anxious, but I still can't see it helping the kid in the long run. That plus even if it starts of as "for the over anxious" then it'll become the norm and be for every child (which is what the company wants anyway). Just look at the way that children can't be "trusted" on the Internet, at least according to all of the media outlets.
Maybe I was just a strange child for actually paying attention to my parents and understanding that leaving my parents when we were in busy places or not being where I said I'd be when I said I'd be there were bad things, but I don't remember causing any major moments of anxiety. I know I'd have felt smoothered, cocooned and like my privacy was being violated if my parents had basically said "know we know we taught you to only go where we know you're going, but we don't trust that you're going to do that and we're paranoid of the big-bad-evils, so we're going to monitor your every movement as well, just to make sure".
2 years old? So young toddler (my kid is ~16 months and isn't walking very far on his own yet). That'd be about the point where I'd rely on physical controls (either hand holding or one of those harnesses). Either one gives the child a bit of freedom to walk on their own while still keeping them under your control.
I only got lost in a shopping centre once that I know of when I was a kid and it wasn't that big a panic - that's why shopping centres tend to have "lost and found children" points. That plus I hadn't even gone out of the shop, just around the corner.
We also live in a world where the parents are still on five year old Nokia 3510s with Pay As You Go sim-cards that get topped up every six months or so ;) Some might have iPhones, but others won't be getting mobile phones for a long time to come, and even then they'll be cheap ones.
That, plus if you look at the picture then there's no way in hell that any teenager would be seen dead with that thing on their wrist :D
It might not harm them directly (except for taunts from other children about how they're still being watched by their parents, any possible effects of having a GPS transmitter strapped to a wrist, and the degredation of their self-belief, self-reliance and understanding of personal space) but it'll harm the parent's bank balance.
£150 for a watch for a kid (not known to be the most careful of individuals with items of worth), plus a monthly contract?!?
What is it with the large proportion of parents who feel it suddenly is necessary, though? I'm a parent, and he may still be less than 18 months old and so not going very far, but both me and my wife feel that a lot of this stuff (including net nanny monitors) is overkill and is just going to destroy the child's concepts of trust, personal space and self-reliance.
Instill good values in your child and do your job as a parent and you can't go far wrong. Start to let technology do your job for you (because, shock-horror, the other alternative is putting in effort and teaching stuff to kids) and it'll all go wrong.
It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft took the easy way out because it put more strength behind patents. A cry of "look - even we comply with patents, so we must keep them" or something similar.
I can't think what I registered with recently, but some places do it as "we don't allow under 13s because of COPPA", so start in 1996, then go back 100 years from there. Why stop at, say, 1930 and lock out the 80+ age group?
Kids go the other way, though. Because of the US COPPA legislation my wife's website doesn't allow under-13s. What you find is that kids want to pretend to be older than they are, sign up as 15, 16, 17 or 18 year olds because they think it is cool (and they can get to stuff that they shouldn't).
Either that or kids don't have the imagination to lie like that, and most people can't be arsed either.
I end up the other way and just going "I'm over 18, so why do you need to know my DoB?" and proceed to just hit "end" on their day/month/year picker and end up somewhere in the region of 113 having been born on New Year's Eve!
And yet lots of people afford mobile phones, broadband and other expenses that are often way higher. Quite often there seems to be some kind of bucket-shaped graph of "expense of phone versus salary", where those on benefits have flash phones with bluetooth headsets, as do those with lots of money, but those in the middle stick with something cheap that just does what they need (or stick with PAYG)
Can't say I've noticed any bias, but then I can't stand watching any other news channels. Sky seems like you're watching some American crap (not quite as bad as Fox, but getting there). Five hardly did any news. ITV and C4 are like the red-tops - "OMG! Lets sensationalise the news and blow it all out of proportion".
Okay, so "Strictly Come Dancing" isn't the epitomy of quality TV, but it's several steps up from X Factor and thousands of steps up from watching dumb attention-seekers scratch their arses in a house all day.
Daily. There's normally more news articles than they can cover in the main show (and that's just when reading the UK and World news pages) and you can still have them chattering away about the main story in the background if you want. It's like adding the website or an RSS feed on top of the news.
And if you don't have the Internet? After all, if you don't want to shell out the ~£10 per month for the TV license then why would you shell out the ~£20 per month to get enough bandwidth to do everything the TV does? You did say that people on high salaries couldn't afford that kind of expense, didn't you?
Also, which starts up quicker - a TV or a computer and Internet connection?
I was comparing terrestrial TV to Digital, so the license fee is a given ;)