IBM came out with a rushed product called AIX/370. We ordered a copy to demo it, and it sucked. It was a dog.
This Linux port is actually the first credible Unix implementation for the 390. (i.e. something that systems programmers are excited about, as opposed to disgusted by.)
Haha. Obviously you've never seen a mainframe power cord.
It's about the thickness of your wrist, and uses a locking connector. I believe that it requires a wrench to detach the power cord from the motor-generator.
Yes... the motor-generator. The electricity from the power plant is not used to directly power the mainframe. Instead, the power is used to drive a motor, which turns a flywheel, which drives a power generator, which provides power to the mainframe.
If there is a power spike on the lines, the power spike is absorbed by the momentum of the physically rotating flywheel, thus protecting the mainframe. Beats the hell out of a "surge suppressor" any day.
This is standard equipment on a 3090.
Oh yes, and we have direct connections to two Commonwealth Edison power substations. If there is a blackout on our primary substation, a HUGE, frightening looking switch is automatically thrown, and the mainframe power is switched over to the other substation... theoretically without killing the mainframe. Theory is very nice...
We just rolled out our 3090 last week. Cut it up and sold it for scrap. $5,000,000 brand new in 1989. I think we got $3000 for it... or traded it for a PC, or something. In those 11 years, I think it crashed maybe twice due to a CPU hardware failure.
I don't miss the 3380s though. They were a different story. Those disk drives were NOT sealed, and we have a crappy, dusty machine room. We used to have a 3380 failure about once a week. Finally, we replaced our 3380 strings with 3390s, then Hitachis, which don't seem to crash (knock on beige colored steel...)
Not true. If you have a mainframe running two linux images, and one of those linux images is compromised, there is no way for the person to break out of his virtual machine and get into other virtual machines.
Why?
The concept of a "virtual machine" extends not only to the user-mode instructions, but to the system-mode instructions as well.
The standard end user operating system, CMS, runs entirely in system mode with memory protection turned off! Or at least it thinks it is... it's actually running in user mode, the control program actually emulates all of the privileged instructions on behalf of the virtual machine guest.
So, even if you found a way to inject executable code into the kernel, and get the kernel to run your code in system mode, the only damage you can do is to your running kernel. You are still kept inside of a black box, and can't interfere with any other virtual machines.
Yes, and there are companies that you can contract with that maintain entire machine rooms full of unused mainframe equipment. If your mainframe is put out of service -- say destroyed in a fire, you drive your backup tapes to the facility, and they configure their mainframe to do your work while IBM rushes in a team to install your new mainframe.
These are expensive contracts for big time players.
The main difference between the two formats is that Omnimax uses a dome screen, and IMAX uses a flat screen. An IMAX movie projected on an Omnimax screen will look distorted.
No kidding! We had an IBM RS6000 that took 36 minutes from power-on to login-prompt.
Needless to say, fixing boot problems on this machine was a nightmare. You would come in at midnight, bring the machine down, and have time for less then a dozen boot attempts in an 8 hour window before you had to have it working the next morning. That damn machine took years off our lives.
Some of you will, no doubt, remember the issue of whether or not Heisenberg was building an atomic bomb for the Nazis, and if so, was he actively interfering with the project because he disagreed with the Nazi's goals. It turned out that after the war, Heisenberg and some other scientists were being held in Britain. The British tape secretly recorded all of their conversations. The medium? Spools of wire. (Think of a spool of wire being used just like a magnetic tape.)
A few years back some scholars wanted to listen to these recordings and had a terrible time finding a player. Eventually they found a collector who had one in working order. Wire recorders have not been made since the fifties. But they eventually found a player and carefully transcribed them. (And it seems that Heisenberg was actively trying to build a bomb, but lacked the resources to do so.)
How interesting that they had problems finding a working wire recorder. At any time, there are between a half dozen and a dozen wire recorders for sale on eBay. The circuitry of a wire recorder is so simple that any good old-school tube radio repairman could get one working in an afternoon.
Wire recordings are an example of an early technology that turned out, unintentionally, to be a fantastic archival medium. Sure, the recording is monophonic, and the frequency response is limited, but for voice recording, those are acceptable compromises, considering that a spool of stainless steel wire can last for centuries. Short of physically destroying the spool, or deliberately erasing it, it will not decay. There's no plastic backing to decay. There's no oxide particles to flake off. Just corrosion-proof steel wire. Fantastic!
I have dozens and dozens of original wire recordings from the late 1940s and early 1950s, and they all sound as good today as a freshly recorded wire.
Did anyone else notice that this announcement was timed for release the day after the deadline for comments on excemptions to the DMCA provisions had passed?
Thus, no one will have commented on this important development.
They want to encrypt it to prevent you from recording it.
The real purpose of the DMCA is to eliminate the fair use provisions of copyright law by technological means.
Fair use doctrine says that you can record a video broadcast, so you can watch it later, or skip the commercials.
The purpose of this technology is to ensure that there is no place in the video chain where the video signal is available in an unencrypted code, so there is no place where you can insert a VCR.
The DMCA will make it illegal to bypass the video encryption, so no one will be able to legally manufacture an HDTV video recorder without the permission of the encryption cartel, and you can be sure that all "authorized" recorders include content management codes, so that you can only record when the broadcaster turns on the record-enable bits.
Repression never stops. The Spanish Inquisition comes back every few years. Right now it's the atheists and OSS zealots. In a few years it'll be the Blacks again.
Actually, right now it's drug users. As of a few days ago, the U.S. passed the two-million prisoner mark. According to the Department of Justice's own figures, one quarter of those, or one half million U.S. citizens are imprisoned for non-violent drug offences alone. Mandatory minimum prison sentences were applied in 64 percent of drug cases in 1998. The average length of imprisonment for drug offenses was 76 months; for firearms violations it was 63 months; and for manslaughter, it was 45 months. -- The Washington Post
Even if you find yourself with incurable cancer, like Steve Kubby, and all that is keeping you alive is regular use of medical marijuana, you are subject to imprisonment and likely death in prison from deprivation of your medicine if you are caught using an illegal medicine, i.e. one that is not patented by a campaign-contributing pharmaceutical company. Many medical marijuana patients, once discovered, find themselves under a court order not to use the only medicine that will keep them alive, and are subject to drug tests, and risk imprisonment and death in prison if they dare to continue using their medicine.
Drug users in general are subject to abuse and murder by the police. Their property is subject to seizure without trial, thus bankrupting them and preventing them from defending themselves. They are sent to special "drug courts" where they find that their constitutional rights don't apply. They are subject to "mandatory minimum" sentencing rules that forbid the judge from using any discretion in sentencing, hence the 76 month average drug sentence.
Back to the original point, if you go back far enough, the origins of most religions are based on the teachings of individuals who have had mystical -- i.e. hallucinatory, drug-like experiences. During the inquisition, someone who accidently ate the wrong mushroom, had a "mystical" experience, and claimed to have seen God would be put to death. In the year 2000, someone attempting to replicate the experience would face years in prison if caught.
Atheists and blacks, by contrast, are protected by a host of federal and state laws.
You said: As I am sure you know, a number of major corporations are vitally interested in effective protection of copyrights.
Your use of the phrase "protection of copyrights" illustrates a basic misconception that is being deliberately put forth by the entertainment industry. Copyright and copy protection are two completely different concepts. Copyright provides legal protection against unauthorized copying, while copy protection/access control provides physical protection against unauthorized copying or access. They are NOT one and the same. Copyright allows for fair use. Copy protection and access control do not allow for fair use. Fair use is what allows you to quote passages from a copyrighted book in your term paper. Fair use allows you to videotape a copyrighted television program so you can watch it later. By making the act of bypassing a copy protection or access control scheme illegal, the DCMA effectively outlaws fair use.
By using the term "protection of copyright", you lend credibility to the deliberate lie that copyright and copy protection are one and the same, and that if a copy protection scheme is bypassed, then somehow the copyright is lost, and therefore that copy protection must be enforced by law.
The importance of retaining fair use provisions cannot be understated. Most of our preserved culture prior to the computer age exists as printed words on paper. In the future, the historical record of our culture will be preserved on computer media. It is vitally important to the freedom of our culture that our cultural record be dispersed throughout our society.
Why?
Because when one person or company has the power to retain physical control over all copies of their work, they also have the power to alter or destroy all copies of the work. Our cultural record is filled with examples of important books, films, and recordings that various people -- including the original publisher have attempted to censor or alter. The reason that censorship of published works is largely unsuccessful is that once copies of a work are sold, the buyer obtains complete physical control over that copy, and there is nothing that the copyright owner can do to recall the work.
Persons who are interested in the preservation of a controversial book may obtain an original copy, and protect it, secure in the knowledge that the words will not change on the page, and that their book will not suddenly burst into flames on the command of the publisher. Contrast this with the "access control." In a world where our historical record is dissemenated in electronic form, under the "access control" of the copyright owner, the copyright owner will have the ability to "reach out" and destroy or alter EVERY SINGLE copy in existance of a work. A court could find a work obscene, and issue an order that the copyright owner permanently disable access to the work, and perhaps issue a "revised" edition in it's place. In such a situation, the original work would effectively disappear forever from the world. Not only would our history be subject to continual "revision", but such revision would be enforced by law. Under the DMCA, it is effectively illegal to retain a permanent record of public discourse, including discourse in the mass media, without the permission of the content provider. Ray Bradbury had the right idea, but the wrong method of action when he wrote Fahrenheit 451. In the world we are now passing into law, there will be no need to go house to house to destroy the books that our censors do not want us to read. Instead, our censors will simply be able to order that the access codes be disabled by the publisher. The act of preserving the truth is on the verge of actually becoming illegal. And we're the generation that's doing it to ourselves.
A point came out of the article that I haven't come across before. The article implied that you cannot master a DVD without access to the encryption keys. The article said: Want to produce content - well, you need a license to produce the encrypted bitstream that will go on a disk, or you'll have to deal with someone who does.
I was under the impression, possibly mistaken, that it was possible to master a DVD with no encryption, i.e. a key of "zero", and that a DVD player has the ability to recognize and play back such a DVD.
Is this true, or is encryption mandatory?
If encryption is mandatory, DeCSS is of NO use in creating "pirated" copies of DVDs, and it should be argued that way in court.
After all, what good is having the decrypted data, if you can't make a playable disk with it?
I wonder if IBM knows about this. The VM operating system has been doing this EXACTLY for over 30 years.
VM consists of two parts -- CP (Control Program) is a virtual machine emulator that runs on the bare iron (or can run under another copy of VM).
Other general purpose operating systems, such as MVS or CMS, run as "virtual machines" under the real-time CP.
Among other things, CP intercepts the hardware interrupts, and emulates them to the guest operating system, EXACTLY as described in the patent.
CP also allows the guest operating systems to use the regular hardware instructions to enter a "virtual interrupt-disabled" state so that the guest operating systems can safely proceed as if interrupts were actually disabled, while the actual hardware leaves the interrupts enabled, to allow continual real-time interrupts/data collection.
Apparently the patent examiners had no awareness of this VERY long-standing prior art.
I've said all along that MP3 is interim technology... it's opening up new markets, but it isn't the end-all, and lossy compression is NOT the future of audiophile music.
While the MPAA and MP3.com battle it out to determine the future of music files degraded by lossy compression, those on the cutting edge have moved on.
Check out: www.softsound.com for instance. They have a LOSSLESS compression scheme called "shorten" that can reduce a sound file 2:1.
It isn't 10:1 like MP3, but considering that most people have written off audio data as uncompressable, a 2:1 ratio isn't too shabby.
Audiophiles have quietly switched over to this format for internet music trading. As the internet bandwidth grows, the file size advantage of MP3 will become less important, and lossless compression such as shorten will replace lossy compression schemes, such as MP3, and the current crop of SDMI compression schemes that the recording industry is "betting the farm" on.
Plus, a CDR loaded with.shn files can hold up to about 110 minutes of music on a data CDR! Doing so gives you the more reliable error correction of CDR data vs CD audio, which makes ripping errors a thing of the past.
If the recording industry was SMART, they would position MP3 as a "preview", or streaming format, like FM radio and advertise it as a lower quality, more convenient format at a lower price, or even give it away for free. Then they would be in a position to sell their uncompressed tracks at full price as a "premier" product, and interest in MP3s would diminish.
However, the recording industry isn't smart.
Instead, they are positioning their own flavors of inferior lossy compression as their "premier" product. In a year or so, people will realize that there are non-SDMI products that offer SUPERIOR sound quality to the industry "premier" product, and the recording industry will have once again painted themselves into a corner.
Interestingly, the EVL also made the 3D wire-frame projection of the Death Star trench that was used in the rebel briefing scene in Star Wars. This is a project with deep roots and has been around for quite a while...
First, there is a lot of confusion here between the notions of COPY protection, and COPYRIGHT protection. This is no accident. One of the tactics of the MPAA is to attempt to equate the two in people's minds. To say, in effect, "We must have copy protection, otherwise our copyrights are unprotected." This is COMPLETELY untrue. Their copyrights are every bit as protected now as they were before DeCSS was written. If you make an unauthorized copy of a DVD, their legal standing to sue you is unchanged by the existance of DeCSS.
COPYRIGHT protection is a monopoly, granted by the government, giving you the exclusive legal right to duplicate a work.
COPY protection is a technological measure used to prevent third parties from duplicating a work.
You can have copy protection on something that is not copyrighted, and vice versa. This does NOT equate the two concepts, as the MPAA would like you to believe. Please do not play into their hands by accepting their distortion and melding of the two, completely independant concepts of copyright and copy protection.
Second, the DVD consortium had two options in the design of CSS. They could have either based their copy protection system on a patent, and disclosed the patent. This would have prevented third parties from legally creating their own DVD players. Instead they chose to rely on keeping their copy protection a trade secret. Unfortunately, they were not successful in maintaining their trade secret. Now they are arguing that they should receive patent-like protection for their broken trade secret.
They should not receive this protection because they did not disclose their invention. This is the entire purpose of a patent. You have a choice whether to publish, and receive a government monopoly, or maintain the secret, and take your chances that someone will reverse-engineer your trade secrets. The fact that the DVD consortium has based their entire copy protection on a poorly-kept trade secret should not change the legal status of that trade secret. It was broken, and the reverse-engineered DVD specification has entered the public domain.
If this interpretation of the DMCA is allowed to stand, it will in fact eliminate the entire concept of fair use. Given that traditional media will be eventually replaced by digital media, all of which will be presumably copy-protection enabled, under this interpretation it will become ILLEGAL to attempt to save a web page, capture a video or audio stream, or even videotape a broadcast, so long as the content provider has made even the most basic, ineffective effort to hinder you from doing so.
The DCMA has a lot of bad language. One of the worst bits is the notion of a device "effectively" controlling access to a copyrighted work. What does it mean to "effectively" control access? CSS "effectively" controlled access until DeCSS was invented. Now CSS is an ineffective protection scheme. The mere fact that a television broadcast was transmitted and received in real time "effectively" prevented duplication of television programs, until the VCR was invented. Should the VCR have been made illegal because it overrode an "effective" copy-protection method? Should the photocopier have been outlawed because it overrode the "effective" copy-protection method of a book being printed on paper? How much poorer our culture would have been.
This is the real threat posed by this court case. It is VERY important. It is the most important case I have seen in years. The rulings on this case will determine the very meaning of fair use in the digital age. It will determine whether or not the DCMA has eliminated the concept of fair use, as the MPAA is claiming, or not.
Does anyone remember when you'd buy a tape and have to buy a new one in 6-8 months because it degraded or just plain wore out? That doesn't happen anymore.
I heard a story, which may or may not have been true, that the album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd stayed in the top 200 best selling vinyl albums from the time it was released until the time it was put out on CD.
The explanation offered was that many audiophiles use that album to showcase their stereos, and would replace it over and over again every time the vinyl wore out.
It's interesting how some of the oldest technologies for "data" storage are proving to be the longest lasting.
Here's an example:
Wire recorders and wire recordings. These date back to the 1940s and 1950s. Instead of using a magnetic tape as we know it today, you record on a stainless steel wire.
The disadvantages are:
o Mono. It's a single wire. You can't put multiple tracks on it.
o Frequency response. Not so good, but acceptable for voice recording and radio recording.
The advantages are:
o Little to no hiss! Tape hiss is mostly due to the fact that magnetic tape is covered with small, irregularly shaped magnets. A stainless steel wire is continuous, with no individual magnetic particles. Wire recordings sound surprisingly clean.
o In theory, they can last forever! Tape formulations tend to break down over time. The plastic backing dries out and the oxide flakes. A wire recording is just a spool of stainless steel wire. It doesn't deteriorate. I have recordings from the late 40s that still sound pristine, and may well last forever.
A couple more examples of "obsolete" technologies that are incredibly archival:
o Black and white photography: Daguerreotypes. These were made by plating silver on copper, sensitizing with iodine, developing with mercury fumes, fixing with salt, and toning with gold chloride. The image is basically gold on silver, and the images do not fade.
o Color photography: Technicolor. Technicolor pictures were originally made on a special camera that performed color seperation in the camera, and produced three black and white negatives, each representing one of the primary colors red, green, or blue. These negatives were then used to create "matrices", which are essentially printing plates. Finally, the three matrices were used to print the release films -- using highly stable, acid based cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes.
The Technicolor process was replaced in the 70s by monopack film, which has three color layers in the film base. Monopack film is much cheaper to produce and easier to use, but the dyes used are dictated by the chemistry requirements of the process, and the dyes are not stable. This is why original prints of such films as "The Wizard of Oz" retain their color unfaded, while most films from the late 70s and early 80s have faded to shades of pink and red.
Another example is punched cards. As someone pointed out, they can rot, but in a hundred years, if you found a stack of punched cards in the bottom of a desk drawer, next to a magnetic tape, I'll lay odds that you can recover the data off the cards, but not the tape.
Going this route is an unbelievably stupid move on the part of the labels.
They can't stop people from using the MP3 format, but they are in their last and best position to influence the basic ethics of CD ripping and MP3 use. Products like the RIO and other standalone MP3 players are not going to go away. If anything, they are going to gain wider and wider acceptance.
Take for example a law-abiding, honest person. Let's make this person the "music listener of the future." He buys CDs, but he has a large collection, and he can't really lug it around, because he's on the go too much, and wants his music in walkman format. When he wants new music, he goes to the store, purchases a CD at retail price, rips it on his computer, and downloads it to his walkman-sized MP3 player, so he can carry it around with him.
Life is good.
He would never think of going to the web to "steal" MP3s from pirate sites. His conscience is clean. He has broken no laws, and hasn't even skirted any laws. He's paid for his music, and is engaging in perfectly legal use of the software.
Now, the music industry begins distributing CDs with copy protection that can't be ripped. This person, following his usual routine, goes to the store, and unknowingly purchases a copy protected CD. Now, he takes it home, tries to rip it as usual, but can't. Now he's mad, because he just paid $15.00 for a CD that appears to be defective. He goes online to find out what is going on. He discovers that he can't rip the CD because it's copy protected.
Someone suggests that he look for an MP3 of the disc online.
After all, this scheme doesn't prevent EVERYONE from making MP3 copies. It just raises the bar -- now in order to make MP3s you need special equipment.
At first, this person hesitates... he's heard a lot about "MP3 pirating" and how it's so wrong to deprive the artists of their money... but then he realizes, what's the difference between ripping the CD himself, and downloading an MP3 of the CD? He's already paid for the music. If he had the proper equipment to rip the CD, he would wind up with a bit-for-bit duplicate of the online MP3 file anyway.
So he downloads the MP3. In the process, he notices that the same site has lots of other interesting stuff that he doesn't have. Maybe he doesn't download them, but eventually, as more and more new releases are copy protected, and he finds himself going to the web again and again to obtain MP3s of his own CDs, he realizes that there is no point in buying the CDs anymore, because he is just going to have to go to the web to download the MP3 so he can listen to it.
Now this person either keeps buying the unusable CDs, and starts to feel like a sucker -- used and abused by the record labels, or simply stops buying the useless CDs, downloads the MP3s instead, and suddenly has a lot more free cash to spend on other things.
The RIAA says that copy protection "keeps honest people honest." Instead, it's primary effect is, has always been, and will always be, to turn honest people into criminals.
Re:This is sad, but I think we all saw it coming
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RIAA Sues MP3.com
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· Score: 2
The RIAA was caught with their pants down. They got big and fat off CD profits, and just assumed that the world would wait until they were good and ready to wake up and exploit this "internet" thing.
As a result, they had no product in the pipeline, and were blindsided by the grass-roots MP3 phenomenon.
If the RIAA had come out with a music distribution mechanism for the internet even 5 years ago, MP3 may well have never come to be. Instead, the labels and RIAA ignored the format, no actually, they ignored the ENTIRE MARKET for on-line music.
Not surprisingly, the world stopped waiting for them.
Now all they have LEFT to do is pretend that MP3s are all about illegal pirating. They've missed their chance. They blew it. It's going to cost them their industry monopoly.
It isn't the first time a major industry has been destroyed this way. The railroad industry was nearly wiped out when the interstate highway system was built, because they thought that they were in the railroad industry, and forgot that they were actually in the TRANSPORTATION industry.
People who wanted to ship their products but didn't want to deal with unresponsive and expensive railroad service simply bought trucks and hired fleets of truckers.
The music labels thought that they were in the CD and cassette business, and forgot that they were in the music DISTRIBUTION business.
Just as highways and semis broke the railroad monopoly, the internet is breaking the music distribution monopoly.
They're fighting because they're big, and rich, and dying. And it's their own fault.
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IBM came out with a rushed product called AIX/370. We ordered a copy to demo it, and it sucked. It was a dog.
This Linux port is actually the first credible Unix implementation for the 390. (i.e. something that systems programmers are excited about, as opposed to disgusted by.)
Haha. Obviously you've never seen a mainframe power cord.
... the motor-generator. The electricity from the power plant is not used to directly power the mainframe. Instead, the power is used to drive a motor, which turns a flywheel, which drives a power generator, which provides power to the mainframe.
... theoretically without killing the mainframe. Theory is very nice ...
It's about the thickness of your wrist, and uses a locking connector. I believe that it requires a wrench to detach the power cord from the motor-generator.
Yes
If there is a power spike on the lines, the power spike is absorbed by the momentum of the physically rotating flywheel, thus protecting the mainframe. Beats the hell out of a "surge suppressor" any day.
This is standard equipment on a 3090.
Oh yes, and we have direct connections to two Commonwealth Edison power substations. If there is a blackout on our primary substation, a HUGE, frightening looking switch is automatically thrown, and the mainframe power is switched over to the other substation
Sniff ... you're making me cry :0)
... or traded it for a PC, or something. In those 11 years, I think it crashed maybe twice due to a CPU hardware failure.
...)
We just rolled out our 3090 last week. Cut it up and sold it for scrap. $5,000,000 brand new in 1989. I think we got $3000 for it
I don't miss the 3380s though. They were a different story. Those disk drives were NOT sealed, and we have a crappy, dusty machine room. We used to have a 3380 failure about once a week. Finally, we replaced our 3380 strings with 3390s, then Hitachis, which don't seem to crash (knock on beige colored steel
Not true. If you have a mainframe running two linux images, and one of those linux images is compromised, there is no way for the person to break out of his virtual machine and get into other virtual machines.
... it's actually running in user mode, the control program actually emulates all of the privileged instructions on behalf of the virtual machine guest.
Why?
The concept of a "virtual machine" extends not only to the user-mode instructions, but to the system-mode instructions as well.
The standard end user operating system, CMS, runs entirely in system mode with memory protection turned off! Or at least it thinks it is
So, even if you found a way to inject executable code into the kernel, and get the kernel to run your code in system mode, the only damage you can do is to your running kernel. You are still kept inside of a black box, and can't interfere with any other virtual machines.
Yes, and there are companies that you can contract with that maintain entire machine rooms full of unused mainframe equipment. If your mainframe is put out of service -- say destroyed in a fire, you drive your backup tapes to the facility, and they configure their mainframe to do your work while IBM rushes in a team to install your new mainframe.
These are expensive contracts for big time players.
The main difference between the two formats is that Omnimax uses a dome screen, and IMAX uses a flat screen. An IMAX movie projected on an Omnimax screen will look distorted.
- John
No kidding! We had an IBM RS6000 that took 36 minutes from power-on to login-prompt.
Needless to say, fixing boot problems on this machine was a nightmare. You would come in at midnight, bring the machine down, and have time for less then a dozen boot attempts in an 8 hour window before you had to have it working the next morning. That damn machine took years off our lives.
Some of you will, no doubt, remember the issue of whether or not Heisenberg was building an atomic bomb for the Nazis, and if so, was he actively interfering with the project because he disagreed with the Nazi's goals. It turned out that after the war, Heisenberg and some other scientists were being held in Britain. The British tape secretly recorded all of their conversations. The medium? Spools of wire. (Think of a spool of wire being used just like a magnetic tape.)
A few years back some scholars wanted to listen to these recordings and had a terrible time finding a player. Eventually they found a collector who had one in working order. Wire recorders have not been made since the fifties. But they eventually found a player and carefully transcribed them. (And it seems that Heisenberg was actively trying to build a bomb, but lacked the resources to do so.)
How interesting that they had problems finding a working wire recorder. At any time, there are between a half dozen and a dozen wire recorders for sale on eBay. The circuitry of a wire recorder is so simple that any good old-school tube radio repairman could get one working in an afternoon.
Wire recordings are an example of an early technology that turned out, unintentionally, to be a fantastic archival medium. Sure, the recording is monophonic, and the frequency response is limited, but for voice recording, those are acceptable compromises, considering that a spool of stainless steel wire can last for centuries. Short of physically destroying the spool, or deliberately erasing it, it will not decay. There's no plastic backing to decay. There's no oxide particles to flake off. Just corrosion-proof steel wire. Fantastic!
I have dozens and dozens of original wire recordings from the late 1940s and early 1950s, and they all sound as good today as a freshly recorded wire.
RTFM = Read The Manual
This is definitely an amusing idea, yet unnecessary. The internet has already interpreted the censorship as damage, and worked around it.
Did anyone else notice that this announcement was timed for release the day after the deadline for comments on excemptions to the DMCA provisions had passed?
Thus, no one will have commented on this important development.
They want to encrypt it to prevent you from recording it.
The real purpose of the DMCA is to eliminate the fair use provisions of copyright law by technological means.
Fair use doctrine says that you can record a video broadcast, so you can watch it later, or skip the commercials.
The purpose of this technology is to ensure that there is no place in the video chain where the video signal is available in an unencrypted code, so there is no place where you can insert a VCR.
The DMCA will make it illegal to bypass the video encryption, so no one will be able to legally manufacture an HDTV video recorder without the permission of the encryption cartel, and you can be sure that all "authorized" recorders include content management codes, so that you can only record when the broadcaster turns on the record-enable bits.
- John
Oh rats. I thought your troll had a point.
:-)
Repression never stops. The Spanish Inquisition comes back every few years. Right now it's the atheists and OSS zealots. In a few years it'll be the Blacks again.
Actually, right now it's drug users. As of a few days ago, the U.S. passed the two-million prisoner mark. According to the Department of Justice's own figures, one quarter of those, or one half million U.S. citizens are imprisoned for non-violent drug offences alone.
Mandatory minimum prison sentences were applied in 64 percent of drug cases in 1998. The average length of imprisonment for drug offenses was 76 months; for firearms violations it was 63 months; and for manslaughter, it was 45 months. -- The Washington Post
Even if you find yourself with incurable cancer, like Steve Kubby, and all that is keeping you alive is regular use of medical marijuana, you are subject to imprisonment and likely death in prison from deprivation of your medicine if you are caught using an illegal medicine, i.e. one that is not patented by a campaign-contributing pharmaceutical company. Many medical marijuana patients, once discovered, find themselves under a court order not to use the only medicine that will keep them alive, and are subject to drug tests, and risk imprisonment and death in prison if they dare to continue using their medicine.
Drug users in general are subject to abuse and murder by the police. Their property is subject to seizure without trial, thus bankrupting them and preventing them from defending themselves. They are sent to special "drug courts" where they find that their constitutional rights don't apply. They are subject to "mandatory minimum" sentencing rules that forbid the judge from using any discretion in sentencing, hence the 76 month average drug sentence.
Back to the original point, if you go back far enough, the origins of most religions are based on the teachings of individuals who have had mystical -- i.e. hallucinatory, drug-like experiences. During the inquisition, someone who accidently ate the wrong mushroom, had a "mystical" experience, and claimed to have seen God would be put to death. In the year 2000, someone attempting to replicate the experience would face years in prison if caught.
Atheists and blacks, by contrast, are protected by a host of federal and state laws.
You said:
As I am sure you know, a number of major corporations are vitally interested in effective protection of copyrights.
Your use of the phrase "protection of copyrights" illustrates a basic misconception that is being deliberately put forth by the entertainment industry. Copyright and copy protection are two completely different concepts. Copyright provides legal protection against unauthorized copying, while copy protection/access control provides physical protection against unauthorized copying or access. They are NOT one and the same. Copyright allows for fair use. Copy protection and access control do not allow for fair use. Fair use is what allows you to quote passages from a copyrighted book in your term paper. Fair use allows you to videotape a copyrighted television program so you can watch it later. By making the act of bypassing a copy protection or access control scheme illegal, the DCMA effectively outlaws fair use.
By using the term "protection of copyright", you lend credibility to the deliberate lie that copyright and copy protection are one and the same, and that if a copy protection scheme is bypassed, then somehow the copyright is lost, and therefore that copy protection must be enforced by law.
The importance of retaining fair use provisions cannot be understated. Most of our preserved culture prior to the computer age exists as printed words on paper. In the future, the historical record of our culture will be preserved on computer media. It is vitally important to the freedom of our culture that our cultural record be dispersed throughout our society.
Why?
Because when one person or company has the power to retain physical control over all copies of their work, they also have the power to alter or destroy all copies of the work. Our cultural record is filled with examples of important books, films, and recordings that various people -- including the original publisher have attempted to censor or alter. The reason that censorship of published works is largely unsuccessful is that once copies of a work are sold, the buyer obtains complete physical control over that copy, and there is nothing that the copyright owner can do to recall the work.
Persons who are interested in the preservation of a controversial book may obtain an original copy, and protect it, secure in the knowledge that the words will not change on the page, and that their book will not suddenly burst into flames on the command of the publisher. Contrast this with the "access control." In a world where our historical record is dissemenated in electronic form, under the "access control" of the copyright owner, the copyright owner will have the ability to "reach out" and destroy or alter EVERY SINGLE copy in existance of a work. A court could find a work obscene, and issue an order that the copyright owner permanently disable access to the work, and perhaps issue a "revised" edition in it's place. In such a situation, the original work would effectively disappear forever from the world. Not only would our history be subject to continual "revision", but such revision would be enforced by law. Under the DMCA, it is effectively illegal to retain a permanent record of public discourse, including discourse in the mass media, without the permission of the content provider.
Ray Bradbury had the right idea, but the wrong method of action when he wrote Fahrenheit 451. In the world we are now passing into law, there will be no need to go house to house to destroy the books that our censors do not want us to read. Instead, our censors will simply be able to order that the access codes be disabled by the publisher. The act of preserving the truth is on the verge of actually becoming illegal. And we're the generation that's doing it to ourselves.
- John
A point came out of the article that I haven't come across before. The article implied that you cannot master a DVD without access to the encryption keys.
The article said:
Want to produce content - well, you need a license to produce the encrypted bitstream that will go on a disk, or you'll have to deal with someone who does.
I was under the impression, possibly mistaken, that it was possible to master a DVD with no encryption, i.e. a key of "zero", and that a DVD player has the ability to recognize and play back such a DVD.
Is this true, or is encryption mandatory?
If encryption is mandatory, DeCSS is of NO use in creating "pirated" copies of DVDs, and it should be argued that way in court.
After all, what good is having the decrypted data, if you can't make a playable disk with it?
Or did the opinion piece author get it wrong?
- John
I wonder if IBM knows about this. The VM operating system has been doing this EXACTLY for over 30 years.
VM consists of two parts -- CP (Control Program) is a virtual machine emulator that runs on the bare iron (or can run under another copy of VM).
Other general purpose operating systems, such as MVS or CMS, run as "virtual machines" under the real-time CP.
Among other things, CP intercepts the hardware interrupts, and emulates them to the guest operating system, EXACTLY as described in the patent.
CP also allows the guest operating systems to use the regular hardware instructions to enter a "virtual interrupt-disabled" state so that the guest operating systems can safely proceed as if interrupts were actually disabled, while the actual hardware leaves the interrupts enabled, to allow continual real-time interrupts/data collection.
Apparently the patent examiners had no awareness of this VERY long-standing prior art.
- John
I've said all along that MP3 is interim technology ... it's opening up new markets, but it isn't the end-all, and lossy compression is NOT the future of audiophile music.
.shn files can hold up to about 110 minutes of music on a data CDR! Doing so gives you the more reliable error correction of CDR data vs CD audio, which makes ripping errors a thing of the past.
While the MPAA and MP3.com battle it out to determine the future of music files degraded by lossy compression, those on the cutting edge have moved on.
Check out: www.softsound.com for instance. They have a LOSSLESS compression scheme called "shorten" that can reduce a sound file 2:1.
It isn't 10:1 like MP3, but considering that most people have written off audio data as uncompressable, a 2:1 ratio isn't too shabby.
Audiophiles have quietly switched over to this format for internet music trading. As the internet bandwidth grows, the file size advantage of MP3 will become less important, and lossless compression such as shorten will replace lossy compression schemes, such as MP3, and the current crop of SDMI compression schemes that the recording industry is "betting the farm" on.
Plus, a CDR loaded with
If the recording industry was SMART, they would position MP3 as a "preview", or streaming format, like FM radio and advertise it as a lower quality, more convenient format at a lower price, or even give it away for free. Then they would be in a position to sell their uncompressed tracks at full price as a "premier" product, and interest in MP3s would diminish.
However, the recording industry isn't smart.
Instead, they are positioning their own flavors of inferior lossy compression as their "premier" product. In a year or so, people will realize that there are non-SDMI products that offer SUPERIOR sound quality to the industry "premier" product, and the recording industry will have once again painted themselves into a corner.
- John
Interestingly, the EVL also made the 3D wire-frame projection of the Death Star trench that was used in the rebel briefing scene in Star Wars. This is a project with deep roots and has been around for quite a while ...
Sonny Bono was DEAD. It was his wife who used his name to put a "sunny" face on a very bad piece of leglislation.
- John
Two issues.
First, there is a lot of confusion here between the notions of COPY protection, and COPYRIGHT protection. This is no accident. One of the tactics of the MPAA is to attempt to equate the two in people's minds. To say, in effect, "We must have copy protection, otherwise our copyrights are unprotected." This is COMPLETELY untrue. Their copyrights are every bit as protected now as they were before DeCSS was written. If you make an unauthorized copy of a DVD, their legal standing to sue you is unchanged by the existance of DeCSS.
COPYRIGHT protection is a monopoly, granted by the government, giving you the exclusive legal right to duplicate a work.
COPY protection is a technological measure used to prevent third parties from duplicating a work.
You can have copy protection on something that is not copyrighted, and vice versa. This does NOT equate the two concepts, as the MPAA would like you to believe. Please do not play into their hands by accepting their distortion and melding of the two, completely independant concepts of copyright and copy protection.
Second, the DVD consortium had two options in the design of CSS. They could have either based their copy protection system on a patent, and disclosed the patent. This would have prevented third parties from legally creating their own DVD players. Instead they chose to rely on keeping their copy protection a trade secret. Unfortunately, they were not successful in maintaining their trade secret. Now they are arguing that they should receive patent-like protection for their broken trade secret.
They should not receive this protection because they did not disclose their invention. This is the entire purpose of a patent. You have a choice whether to publish, and receive a government monopoly, or maintain the secret, and take your chances that someone will reverse-engineer your trade secrets. The fact that the DVD consortium has based their entire copy protection on a poorly-kept trade secret should not change the legal status of that trade secret. It was broken, and the reverse-engineered DVD specification has entered the public domain.
If this interpretation of the DMCA is allowed to stand, it will in fact eliminate the entire concept of fair use. Given that traditional media will be eventually replaced by digital media, all of which will be presumably copy-protection enabled, under this interpretation it will become ILLEGAL to attempt to save a web page, capture a video or audio stream, or even videotape a broadcast, so long as the content provider has made even the most basic, ineffective effort to hinder you from doing so.
The DCMA has a lot of bad language. One of the worst bits is the notion of a device "effectively" controlling access to a copyrighted work. What does it mean to "effectively" control access? CSS "effectively" controlled access until DeCSS was invented. Now CSS is an ineffective protection scheme. The mere fact that a television broadcast was transmitted and received in real time "effectively" prevented duplication of television programs, until the VCR was invented. Should the VCR have been made illegal because it overrode an "effective" copy-protection method? Should the photocopier have been outlawed because it overrode the "effective" copy-protection method of a book being printed on paper? How much poorer our culture would have been.
This is the real threat posed by this court case. It is VERY important. It is the most important case I have seen in years. The rulings on this case will determine the very meaning of fair use in the digital age. It will determine whether or not the DCMA has eliminated the concept of fair use, as the MPAA is claiming, or not.
Does anyone remember when you'd buy a tape and have to buy a new one in 6-8 months because it degraded or just plain wore out? That doesn't happen anymore.
I heard a story, which may or may not have been true, that the album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd stayed in the top 200 best selling vinyl albums from the time it was released until the time it was put out on CD.
The explanation offered was that many audiophiles use that album to showcase their stereos, and would replace it over and over again every time the vinyl wore out.
It's interesting how some of the oldest technologies for "data" storage are proving to be the longest lasting.
Here's an example:
Wire recorders and wire recordings. These date back to the 1940s and 1950s. Instead of using a magnetic tape as we know it today, you record on a stainless steel wire.
The disadvantages are:
o Mono. It's a single wire. You can't put multiple tracks on it.
o Frequency response. Not so good, but acceptable for voice recording and radio recording.
The advantages are:
o Little to no hiss! Tape hiss is mostly due to the fact that magnetic tape is covered with small, irregularly shaped magnets. A stainless steel wire is continuous, with no individual magnetic particles. Wire recordings sound surprisingly clean.
o In theory, they can last forever! Tape formulations tend to break down over time. The plastic backing dries out and the oxide flakes. A wire recording is just a spool of stainless steel wire. It doesn't deteriorate. I have recordings from the late 40s that still sound pristine, and may well last forever.
A couple more examples of "obsolete" technologies that are incredibly archival:
o Black and white photography: Daguerreotypes. These were made by plating silver on copper, sensitizing with iodine, developing with mercury fumes, fixing with salt, and toning with gold chloride. The image is basically gold on silver, and the images do not fade.
o Color photography: Technicolor. Technicolor pictures were originally made on a special camera that performed color seperation in the camera, and produced three black and white negatives, each representing one of the primary colors red, green, or blue. These negatives were then used to create "matrices", which are essentially printing plates. Finally, the three matrices were used to print the release films -- using highly stable, acid based cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes.
The Technicolor process was replaced in the 70s by monopack film, which has three color layers in the film base. Monopack film is much cheaper to produce and easier to use, but the dyes used are dictated by the chemistry requirements of the process, and the dyes are not stable. This is why original prints of such films as "The Wizard of Oz" retain their color unfaded, while most films from the late 70s and early 80s have faded to shades of pink and red.
Another example is punched cards. As someone pointed out, they can rot, but in a hundred years, if you found a stack of punched cards in the bottom of a desk drawer, next to a magnetic tape, I'll lay odds that you can recover the data off the cards, but not the tape.
Going this route is an unbelievably stupid move on the part of the labels.
... he's heard a lot about "MP3 pirating" and how it's so wrong to deprive the artists of their money ... but then he realizes, what's the difference between ripping the CD himself, and downloading an MP3 of the CD? He's already paid for the music. If he had the proper equipment to rip the CD, he would wind up with a bit-for-bit duplicate of the online MP3 file anyway.
They can't stop people from using the MP3 format, but they are in their last and best position to influence the basic ethics of CD ripping and MP3 use. Products like the RIO and other standalone MP3 players are not going to go away. If anything, they are going to gain wider and wider acceptance.
Take for example a law-abiding, honest person. Let's make this person the "music listener of the future." He buys CDs, but he has a large collection, and he can't really lug it around, because he's on the go too much, and wants his music in walkman format. When he wants new music, he goes to the store, purchases a CD at retail price, rips it on his computer, and downloads it to his walkman-sized MP3 player, so he can carry it around with him.
Life is good.
He would never think of going to the web to "steal" MP3s from pirate sites. His conscience is clean. He has broken no laws, and hasn't even skirted any laws. He's paid for his music, and is engaging in perfectly legal use of the software.
Now, the music industry begins distributing CDs with copy protection that can't be ripped. This person, following his usual routine, goes to the store, and unknowingly purchases a copy protected CD. Now, he takes it home, tries to rip it as usual, but can't. Now he's mad, because he just paid $15.00 for a CD that appears to be defective. He goes online to find out what is going on. He discovers that he can't rip the CD because it's copy protected.
Someone suggests that he look for an MP3 of the disc online.
After all, this scheme doesn't prevent EVERYONE from making MP3 copies. It just raises the bar -- now in order to make MP3s you need special equipment.
At first, this person hesitates
So he downloads the MP3. In the process, he notices that the same site has lots of other interesting stuff that he doesn't have. Maybe he doesn't download them, but eventually, as more and more new releases are copy protected, and he finds himself going to the web again and again to obtain MP3s of his own CDs, he realizes that there is no point in buying the CDs anymore, because he is just going to have to go to the web to download the MP3 so he can listen to it.
Now this person either keeps buying the unusable CDs, and starts to feel like a sucker -- used and abused by the record labels, or simply stops buying the useless CDs, downloads the MP3s instead, and suddenly has a lot more free cash to spend on other things.
The RIAA says that copy protection "keeps honest people honest." Instead, it's primary effect is, has always been, and will always be, to turn honest people into criminals.
The RIAA was caught with their pants down. They got big and fat off CD profits, and just assumed that the world would wait until they were good and ready to wake up and exploit this "internet" thing.
As a result, they had no product in the pipeline, and were blindsided by the grass-roots MP3 phenomenon.
If the RIAA had come out with a music distribution mechanism for the internet even 5 years ago, MP3 may well have never come to be. Instead, the labels and RIAA ignored the format, no actually, they ignored the ENTIRE MARKET for on-line music.
Not surprisingly, the world stopped waiting for them.
Now all they have LEFT to do is pretend that MP3s are all about illegal pirating. They've missed their chance. They blew it. It's going to cost them their industry monopoly.
It isn't the first time a major industry has been destroyed this way. The railroad industry was nearly wiped out when the interstate highway system was built, because they thought that they were in the railroad industry, and forgot that they were actually in the TRANSPORTATION industry.
People who wanted to ship their products but didn't want to deal with unresponsive and expensive railroad service simply bought trucks and hired fleets of truckers.
The music labels thought that they were in the CD and cassette business, and forgot that they were in the music DISTRIBUTION business.
Just as highways and semis broke the railroad monopoly, the internet is breaking the music distribution monopoly.
They're fighting because they're big, and rich, and dying. And it's their own fault.
Corporate evolution in action. The dinosours die.
- John