Yes, people are that honest. If they weren't they would just pirate the book, video, game, instead of purchasing. None of this DRM deters anyone willing to pirate.
But any campaign funds can only be used for the campaign. So save those peanuts from coach class if you go hungry. You will still need to borrow against your mortgage if you quit your day job to go campaigning.
Oh, add a proviso to the bill that politicians only get paid when they're at work, with only 10 vacation days a year for campaigning purposes or travel, anything beyond that comes out of their pockets. Any political party meetings will have to happen after hours.
Same with video games. The digital copies of the game maintain their original price for a long time, even for a few years the price will be at least 75% of the original cost. Meanwhile physical copies of the same game rapidly drop in price because there is pressure on the store owners to clear out space to make room for newer games. Both editions originally sold for the same price. Even for Steam it is cheaper to buy a physical copy of a Steam game from an online retailer than to buy it from Steam. This is despite the fact that the digital copy costs nothing to make an additional copy for sale, whereas the physical copy had a significant production cost.
All those savings from eliminating production costs are NOT passed on to the customers.
How is it unfair to publishers? Publishers don't like resold books but it is still fair. Just because a publisher is greedy has nothing to do with what's right or wrong or fair. We've had used book markets for centuries. We've been allowed to give away books forever. Now with DRM the publishers have a means to stop their arch enemies, the book resellers, and nullify any legal rights to reselling. The thing that is unfair here is in restricting the market.
Not that most physical books last longer than their copyright terms. They don't deteriate as fast as you imply. Meanwhile e-books deteriorate; in 5 years that format might be obsolete, or our book reader has broken and the manufacturer no longer makes it or is out of business? Even Microsoft Word has difficulty reading older Word formats. If you want to keep a book for 50 years then e-books are not a good way to do so, e-books are meant for new gadget loving people who'll probably read their books only once.
The way it's worked for centuries - the honor system. The police don't follow people home from the used book sellers to be sure they aren't keeping an extra copy. If someone is printing up a lot of copies for sale then the police are interested. So why not the same with e-books? Why treat all customers are criminals, when the real criminals are pirating the books already?
If you make a copy then you are breaking the law. It's pretty simple. It used to work on the honor system, you could sell a book without worrying having to prove beyond doubt that you did not make a copy. You used to do this with some software as well. Now they have created an inferior format of book designed to prevent resale.
Also remember that DRM does not exist in order to prevent copying! It exists in order to prevent resale. Calling it copy protection is naive, because all these formats are easily broken by the pirates (especially with games). What the publishers want is for every law abiding person to buy their own copy at full price. DRM is about extra revenue by preventing legal used book markets and not lost revenue due to piracy.
Why should you have to prove it? Why treat the citizen as a criminal until proven innocent? Meanwhile the actual criminals just rip off the books and do what they want because the DRM does not slow them down. Only the law abiding purchaser is being punished.
This would be true if they were up front and clear about this. They hide the license in a bunch of legalese, meanwhile their marketing implies that you are buying the book. Streaming movies make it more confusing as they have a "rent" versus "buy" option even though they treat both options as rentals.
There are DRM free e-books, that should be the preferred format for content creators rather than partnering with publishers that use DRM.
No. Why is this so hard? Were you not around in the 90s when software copyrights were under debate, and Borland had its common sense license? (install anywhere you want but make sure only one copy is running at a time, on the honor system) Nothing new is going on here, except "e-book" versus sofware on floppy disks, and the added DRM that only hinders legal owners from exercising their legal rights.
You assume a copy was kept. Stop assuming that. Not everyone is a pirate. If I give a physical book to someone I am not keeping a photocopy of it. When I give a game away I delete the copy that I have. Sure, pirates might not do this but pirates are not slowed down by DRM. And the content creator may not even mind, it's the content publishers who have gone off the deep end here and restricting legal rights to customers who have fully purchased items from them (not rented).
How old are you? Are you too young to remember public libraries? Have you never been to a used book store, a used record store, a used game store, a used movie store? Now when the same good is sold digitally, at the *same* price as the physical copy, the same rules should apply as long as you don't keep a copy. This used to be the copyright rules in the US. Technically it still is except that there are criminal laws against figuring out how to remove the DRM in order to give the original item to someone else. Pirates however have no hurdles whatsoever, this DRM exists only to prevent legal owners from legally reselling or giving away products that they own.
DRM isn't really about copy protections, it's more about preventing exactly this situation. They know pirates have broken in and anyone who wants a pirated copy can get them, but they want to prevent legal owners from creating a used book market, or a used game market, a used movie market, etc. Not to mention re-gifting (for those people who think resellers are evil). The biggest threat that publishers see is the reseller, not the pirate.
The problem is that you're calling people who are being conned by Microsoft idiots. They usually don't have sysadmins looking over their shoulder at home. The computer "experts" they know say to always accept recommended updates, even the sysadmins at work require that. Now they get a notification that looks very similar to all the other junk advertisements that Microsoft has been shoving out and they click the "x" to dismiss it - without reading every word on it. That's a normal response and not something that only idiots do. Their mistake is in not being paranoid enough.
Or just don't teach "coding". We designed software for Apollo and the space shuttle without people learning to "code" in grade school. Personally I think high school is even a bit too early for this. Instead teach mathematics and science. Too many "coders" today don't understand basic concepts, like precision of floating point numbers, why their triply nested loop is running slowly, or even simple graph theory, which are built on top of concepts that should have been learned in high school. We also have a glut of kids assuming that they can be self taught and that college is a waste of time, and they set their highest goals to that of an entry level IT slave.
But you don't need to put 20 locks on your backyard tree house. If I ever had a twitter account, I would not care if it as compromised, it is literally of zero importance to me. As long as my password isn't related to those I use on something important. Ok, so they hack into twitter, follow that to break into instagram, use that to defame people under my pseudonym on reddit, and so forth, and after all of that nothing of any value was lost!
Put high security on stuff that needs high security: your online banking (better to do that in person though), anything that has your credit card number (if you're dumb enough to click the "remember my card details" button). Put medium to high security on stuff that has personal information you don't want to get out: social security numbers, home address, your real name, your children's name. Put low security on stuff that's irrelevant in the long run: your comments on stackexchange, your Morris dancing blog, the account you created before a hardware company let you download datasheets (though using bugmenot for that works too).
But if you treat everything online as requiring high security then you start losing security overall. Like you said, too many hard passwords and you ask your browser to remember them, or get some password management software. And yet so many utterly irrelevant web sites have the tougher password restrictions than online banking.
You can honestly not think of any reason why a strong password is not always required? I can think of reasons why jumping into a pool while wearing full platemail might be necessary (it's scene 23 in my movie script). I don't even have a password on my home computer, but then again no one breaking in remotely is going to be blocked by a Windows login screen either. They can break in locally of course but if that happens I have more serious matters to deal with than that they'll be able to look at some photos before wiping the drive and reselling it.
Not every account needs a strong password. Sure, if it's your primary windows account then lock it down somewhat. Otherwise you imagine the worst thing that can happen and if it's not too bad you don't stress over it. Sure there's panic that any windows account can cause the end of the world if they're able to send random email, but that can happen from the attacker's computer or a million other anonymous mail sites, big deal. Who needs a super strong password for their guest account?
But it's the way it is because there's no budget to fix it. In corporations they upgrade PCs every one or two year, polish up the foosball tables, then tell the investors that they need more funding. In the government they often are stuck with aging outdated equipment, buildings, etc. Of course, given the price tag charged by contractors treating the government as an ATM it's no wonder they can't upgrade.
No, if you look closely there is no apology or backtracking. They are offering a second chance notification that will probably do exactly the same thing.
"If the customer wishes to continue with their upgrade at the designated time, they can click 'OK' or close the notifications with no further action needed."
In other words, if you close the notification then you'll be upgraded to Windows 10. No where have they said that they'll make it easier to opt out, and the statement above means that they will not go to an opt-in process and are still relying on the strategy of fooling the users.
The close button does indeed close the notification. But the rest of the notification is designed to fool people. Most of the dialogue is in older Windows GUI style. The "Upgrade now" choice is a classic button. But the opt out method is not a button but is a metro style web like "link" to click on, with only a change in color and thus easily overlooked (especially by people on Windows 7 not used to the metro UI).
You get to see the same tricky dialogue the second time. Microsoft is NOT backtracking. They are saying that if you click that "X" button then Windows will be upgraded, they've not said that they will make the second dialogue easier to understand. But the journalists are naively buying into this and thinking there is an apology. Just like many customers they don't expect Microsoft to be evil and so are easily fooled.
Actually that "X" is legitimate. It does exactly what any "X" does and closes the notification. The snag is that Windows 10 upgrade is already scheduled to happen even if you do nothing and click on nothing! The way to stop it is to click on the "here" in the sentence "Click here to change upgrade schedule or cancel scheduled upgrade." In other words you have to click on something that is not a button.
The "X" button is probably the only innocent thing in that notification.
The notification will install Windows whether or not you have administrative privilege. That notification basically says that you WILL be upgraded unless you take active steps to stop it, administrator or not. Windows is scheduled to be installed and it will install even if you do nothing at all! This will happen even with a guest user account! Though I suspect you do need administrative privilege to cancel the upgrade...
You're still stuck in the mode of thinking that Microsoft is doing everything properly, or that only idiots can misunderstand a notification designed to fool people, or naively assuming that Windows would never upgrade itself without opt-in permission.
Nonsense. Why technically clicking cancel did not cause the install (which was pre-scheduled), the effect ws intended to be the same. By having a big button that lets up upgrade immediately they trick people into thinking that anything else stops the upgrade. Once you see the notification, the upgrade is *already* scheduled and *will* happen unless you take action to prevent it. This makes even very smart people able to make mistakes. It is easy to mistake this for yet another Windows 10 advertisement and unless you read and understand every word in the notification you can easily be misled.
Let's make this clear: You will automatically be upgraded to Windows 10 if you do nothing, you will automatically be upgraded if you ignore that notification, you will automatically be upgraded if you reboot your computer. The only way to stop the upgrade is to OPT OUT.
There are three buttons on that notifier, but you only see two. Two buttons are in standard Windows notifier style, the third is in Metro style and is a single word in a small font colored blue, and that third easily overlooked "button" is what must be pressed to cancel the scheduled upgrade.
This current turn around is false. They say "If the customer wishes to continue with their upgrade at the designated time, they can click 'OK' or close the notifications with no further action needed." This is the same behavior as the notification people are complaining about! If you close this second-chance notification by clicking on "x" then it will still install Windows 10 according to the schedule! Theyve given no hints that they will make the second-chance notification be clearer and less ambiguous than the first notification! And they've got the journalists duped as they're reporting a Microsoft "backtrack" when they're still going full speed ahead into the iceberg.
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Yes, people are that honest. If they weren't they would just pirate the book, video, game, instead of purchasing. None of this DRM deters anyone willing to pirate.
But any campaign funds can only be used for the campaign. So save those peanuts from coach class if you go hungry. You will still need to borrow against your mortgage if you quit your day job to go campaigning.
Oh, add a proviso to the bill that politicians only get paid when they're at work, with only 10 vacation days a year for campaigning purposes or travel, anything beyond that comes out of their pockets. Any political party meetings will have to happen after hours.
Same with video games. The digital copies of the game maintain their original price for a long time, even for a few years the price will be at least 75% of the original cost. Meanwhile physical copies of the same game rapidly drop in price because there is pressure on the store owners to clear out space to make room for newer games. Both editions originally sold for the same price. Even for Steam it is cheaper to buy a physical copy of a Steam game from an online retailer than to buy it from Steam. This is despite the fact that the digital copy costs nothing to make an additional copy for sale, whereas the physical copy had a significant production cost.
All those savings from eliminating production costs are NOT passed on to the customers.
How is it unfair to publishers? Publishers don't like resold books but it is still fair. Just because a publisher is greedy has nothing to do with what's right or wrong or fair. We've had used book markets for centuries. We've been allowed to give away books forever. Now with DRM the publishers have a means to stop their arch enemies, the book resellers, and nullify any legal rights to reselling. The thing that is unfair here is in restricting the market.
Not that most physical books last longer than their copyright terms. They don't deteriate as fast as you imply. Meanwhile e-books deteriorate; in 5 years that format might be obsolete, or our book reader has broken and the manufacturer no longer makes it or is out of business? Even Microsoft Word has difficulty reading older Word formats. If you want to keep a book for 50 years then e-books are not a good way to do so, e-books are meant for new gadget loving people who'll probably read their books only once.
The way it's worked for centuries - the honor system. The police don't follow people home from the used book sellers to be sure they aren't keeping an extra copy. If someone is printing up a lot of copies for sale then the police are interested. So why not the same with e-books? Why treat all customers are criminals, when the real criminals are pirating the books already?
If you make a copy then you are breaking the law. It's pretty simple. It used to work on the honor system, you could sell a book without worrying having to prove beyond doubt that you did not make a copy. You used to do this with some software as well. Now they have created an inferior format of book designed to prevent resale.
Also remember that DRM does not exist in order to prevent copying! It exists in order to prevent resale. Calling it copy protection is naive, because all these formats are easily broken by the pirates (especially with games). What the publishers want is for every law abiding person to buy their own copy at full price. DRM is about extra revenue by preventing legal used book markets and not lost revenue due to piracy.
Why should you have to prove it? Why treat the citizen as a criminal until proven innocent? Meanwhile the actual criminals just rip off the books and do what they want because the DRM does not slow them down. Only the law abiding purchaser is being punished.
This would be true if they were up front and clear about this. They hide the license in a bunch of legalese, meanwhile their marketing implies that you are buying the book. Streaming movies make it more confusing as they have a "rent" versus "buy" option even though they treat both options as rentals.
There are DRM free e-books, that should be the preferred format for content creators rather than partnering with publishers that use DRM.
No. Why is this so hard? Were you not around in the 90s when software copyrights were under debate, and Borland had its common sense license? (install anywhere you want but make sure only one copy is running at a time, on the honor system) Nothing new is going on here, except "e-book" versus sofware on floppy disks, and the added DRM that only hinders legal owners from exercising their legal rights.
You assume a copy was kept. Stop assuming that. Not everyone is a pirate. If I give a physical book to someone I am not keeping a photocopy of it. When I give a game away I delete the copy that I have. Sure, pirates might not do this but pirates are not slowed down by DRM. And the content creator may not even mind, it's the content publishers who have gone off the deep end here and restricting legal rights to customers who have fully purchased items from them (not rented).
How old are you? Are you too young to remember public libraries? Have you never been to a used book store, a used record store, a used game store, a used movie store? Now when the same good is sold digitally, at the *same* price as the physical copy, the same rules should apply as long as you don't keep a copy. This used to be the copyright rules in the US. Technically it still is except that there are criminal laws against figuring out how to remove the DRM in order to give the original item to someone else. Pirates however have no hurdles whatsoever, this DRM exists only to prevent legal owners from legally reselling or giving away products that they own.
DRM isn't really about copy protections, it's more about preventing exactly this situation. They know pirates have broken in and anyone who wants a pirated copy can get them, but they want to prevent legal owners from creating a used book market, or a used game market, a used movie market, etc. Not to mention re-gifting (for those people who think resellers are evil). The biggest threat that publishers see is the reseller, not the pirate.
The problem is that you're calling people who are being conned by Microsoft idiots. They usually don't have sysadmins looking over their shoulder at home. The computer "experts" they know say to always accept recommended updates, even the sysadmins at work require that. Now they get a notification that looks very similar to all the other junk advertisements that Microsoft has been shoving out and they click the "x" to dismiss it - without reading every word on it. That's a normal response and not something that only idiots do. Their mistake is in not being paranoid enough.
Or just don't teach "coding". We designed software for Apollo and the space shuttle without people learning to "code" in grade school. Personally I think high school is even a bit too early for this. Instead teach mathematics and science. Too many "coders" today don't understand basic concepts, like precision of floating point numbers, why their triply nested loop is running slowly, or even simple graph theory, which are built on top of concepts that should have been learned in high school. We also have a glut of kids assuming that they can be self taught and that college is a waste of time, and they set their highest goals to that of an entry level IT slave.
But you don't need to put 20 locks on your backyard tree house. If I ever had a twitter account, I would not care if it as compromised, it is literally of zero importance to me. As long as my password isn't related to those I use on something important. Ok, so they hack into twitter, follow that to break into instagram, use that to defame people under my pseudonym on reddit, and so forth, and after all of that nothing of any value was lost!
Put high security on stuff that needs high security: your online banking (better to do that in person though), anything that has your credit card number (if you're dumb enough to click the "remember my card details" button).
Put medium to high security on stuff that has personal information you don't want to get out: social security numbers, home address, your real name, your children's name.
Put low security on stuff that's irrelevant in the long run: your comments on stackexchange, your Morris dancing blog, the account you created before a hardware company let you download datasheets (though using bugmenot for that works too).
But if you treat everything online as requiring high security then you start losing security overall. Like you said, too many hard passwords and you ask your browser to remember them, or get some password management software. And yet so many utterly irrelevant web sites have the tougher password restrictions than online banking.
You can honestly not think of any reason why a strong password is not always required? I can think of reasons why jumping into a pool while wearing full platemail might be necessary (it's scene 23 in my movie script). I don't even have a password on my home computer, but then again no one breaking in remotely is going to be blocked by a Windows login screen either. They can break in locally of course but if that happens I have more serious matters to deal with than that they'll be able to look at some photos before wiping the drive and reselling it.
Not every account needs a strong password. Sure, if it's your primary windows account then lock it down somewhat. Otherwise you imagine the worst thing that can happen and if it's not too bad you don't stress over it. Sure there's panic that any windows account can cause the end of the world if they're able to send random email, but that can happen from the attacker's computer or a million other anonymous mail sites, big deal. Who needs a super strong password for their guest account?
But it's the way it is because there's no budget to fix it. In corporations they upgrade PCs every one or two year, polish up the foosball tables, then tell the investors that they need more funding. In the government they often are stuck with aging outdated equipment, buildings, etc. Of course, given the price tag charged by contractors treating the government as an ATM it's no wonder they can't upgrade.
No, if you look closely there is no apology or backtracking. They are offering a second chance notification that will probably do exactly the same thing.
"If the customer wishes to continue with their upgrade at the designated time, they can click 'OK' or close the notifications with no further action needed."
In other words, if you close the notification then you'll be upgraded to Windows 10. No where have they said that they'll make it easier to opt out, and the statement above means that they will not go to an opt-in process and are still relying on the strategy of fooling the users.
The close button does indeed close the notification. But the rest of the notification is designed to fool people. Most of the dialogue is in older Windows GUI style. The "Upgrade now" choice is a classic button. But the opt out method is not a button but is a metro style web like "link" to click on, with only a change in color and thus easily overlooked (especially by people on Windows 7 not used to the metro UI).
You get to see the same tricky dialogue the second time. Microsoft is NOT backtracking. They are saying that if you click that "X" button then Windows will be upgraded, they've not said that they will make the second dialogue easier to understand. But the journalists are naively buying into this and thinking there is an apology. Just like many customers they don't expect Microsoft to be evil and so are easily fooled.
Actually that "X" is legitimate. It does exactly what any "X" does and closes the notification. The snag is that Windows 10 upgrade is already scheduled to happen even if you do nothing and click on nothing! The way to stop it is to click on the "here" in the sentence "Click here to change upgrade schedule or cancel scheduled upgrade." In other words you have to click on something that is not a button.
The "X" button is probably the only innocent thing in that notification.
The notification will install Windows whether or not you have administrative privilege. That notification basically says that you WILL be upgraded unless you take active steps to stop it, administrator or not. Windows is scheduled to be installed and it will install even if you do nothing at all! This will happen even with a guest user account! Though I suspect you do need administrative privilege to cancel the upgrade...
You're still stuck in the mode of thinking that Microsoft is doing everything properly, or that only idiots can misunderstand a notification designed to fool people, or naively assuming that Windows would never upgrade itself without opt-in permission.
Some people have ended up broken when trying to revert and had to reinstall W7 from scratch.
Nonsense. Why technically clicking cancel did not cause the install (which was pre-scheduled), the effect ws intended to be the same. By having a big button that lets up upgrade immediately they trick people into thinking that anything else stops the upgrade. Once you see the notification, the upgrade is *already* scheduled and *will* happen unless you take action to prevent it. This makes even very smart people able to make mistakes. It is easy to mistake this for yet another Windows 10 advertisement and unless you read and understand every word in the notification you can easily be misled.
Let's make this clear: You will automatically be upgraded to Windows 10 if you do nothing, you will automatically be upgraded if you ignore that notification, you will automatically be upgraded if you reboot your computer. The only way to stop the upgrade is to OPT OUT.
There are three buttons on that notifier, but you only see two. Two buttons are in standard Windows notifier style, the third is in Metro style and is a single word in a small font colored blue, and that third easily overlooked "button" is what must be pressed to cancel the scheduled upgrade.
This current turn around is false. They say "If the customer wishes to continue with their upgrade at the designated time, they can click 'OK' or close the notifications with no further action needed." This is the same behavior as the notification people are complaining about! If you close this second-chance notification by clicking on "x" then it will still install Windows 10 according to the schedule! Theyve given no hints that they will make the second-chance notification be clearer and less ambiguous than the first notification! And they've got the journalists duped as they're reporting a Microsoft "backtrack" when they're still going full speed ahead into the iceberg.