The challenge was to remove a watermark of the same watermarking technology from a 3rd piece of music. And believe me, it's NOT trivial.
I believe you. However, that is not the "nightmare scenario" that was originally posited.
The original scenario was that each player
would place a different watermark on the same piece of music to aid tracking down just who
took an SDMI song and ripped to MP3.
This means
the encoding algorithm would have to be stored
in each consumer player, and presumably would
have a different identifying seed
for each one. That won't happen.
An interesting scenario, but one unlikely to
actually work.
By doing a bitwise comparison of two different "SDMI-approved" players, anyone of even moderate
programming talent could identify the "new"
watermark the players were adding and either eliminate it, or make it untracable by filling it with random data.
Insofar as SDMI players playing only "clean"
originals, that would make SDMI players far to
costly to build. Consumer-level hardware just
isn't reliable enough to "refuse to play" because
you have some tiny skip in the CD-ROM readback.
It simply happens too frequently.
You don't need to "educate" anybody.
If SDMI comes out like this, people won't
buy players for it. Period.
The Green Party did make or break the U.S. government. Green Party voters did.
That's a huge difference.
Nader is not right now in a position to
tell Gore and Bush "the first person who makes
me head of the EPA gets to be president". He's
out on his ass where all minority candidates should be.
Similarly, the horribly misnamed Constitution party isn't in a position to demand the reimposition of "blue laws" (no stores open on
Sunday cause the Bible says that's a day of rest).
Again, extremists like voting systems that
allow their candidates to leverage their wedge votes to gain disproportionate influence over the
body politic. However that is a very poor way
to elect a government. Most countries (including the U.S.) need less extremism, not more.
What you incorrectly call "lying", most people
call setting priorities.
Voters in the U.S. here have
more power because they can decide they
dislike a candidate so much that they'll vote for a stronger candidate who would otherwise be
their second or third choice just to be able to
knock the guy they dislke off.
This leads to candidates who not only worry
about energizing their base, but also worry about
being considerate enough of their opposition to
not unduly piss them off.
On the other hand in most EU democracies, you vote knowing that
you have absolutely no voice in the makeup of
the actual government. That coalition building is done in proverbial smoke filled rooms by the various parties. This leads to extremist parties
(willing to switch votes on national concerns)
in a position to make or break governments, and
gives them a disproportionate amount of power because of that.
I'll take the American system any day of the week.
You are obvously a member of one of those completely utterly clueless rightwing groups.
It's rather off-topic to the original article,
but in the general interest of Slashdot's "News
for Nerds, Stuff that Matters", allow me to
grant you some small fraction of a clue you
so desperately desperately need.
To wit: Al Gore once said he was the model
for the main characters in Erich Segal's 1970
romance novel Love Story. The truth:
Al Gore based his account on an article in the
Nashville Tennessean. Segal says the
newspaper "exaggerated" the connection to the
Gores. He says the protagonist was a combination
of Gore and his college roommate, actor Tommy
Lee Jones.
The song Gore actually heard as a bedroom
lullaby: "Don't Forget the Union Label".
He got the titles confused.
Clinton being one of our greatest president?
That's a judgement call. But he didn't get
us in any wars, and wasn't suffering early
Alzheimers in office either.
We now return to our regularly scheduled clueless whining.
IANAL.
Nonetheless, I've dealt with legal conflict of interest. I've been personally affected by it. This qualifies, without question. For
Rehnquist to claim otherwise is an invitation for an appeal of the appeal, though he's likely counting on that not happening.
No kidding.
Renquist is on the Supreme Court.
Precisely who do you think someone could appeal Renquist's apparent conflict of interest to?
BZZT! Wrong answer. Nothing "supercedes" the
constitution. Not in the U.S. nor anywhere
else I'm aware of. Rather, treaties are *sanctioned* by the Constitution, and *if ratified* (e.g. signed into law by Congress/President) have the same
force as any other law - subject to
the same constitutional limits that any other law
has.
The original poster should go back and take a
remedial course in civics. Either that or
go join some random right-wing kook group with their typical habit of making bald assertions that they have no clue about.
Are there methods they can employ to insure that data that's supposed to stay in the network, isn't encouraged to take a nightly stroll somewhere it isn't supposed to without excessively violating the privacy of the users?
As the case of Dr. Wen Ho Lee showed, this is impossible - even for (supposedly) ultra high security installations like the U.S. nuclear
research labs.
All you have to do is download to a tape or floppy and walk out with the info. If the person doing this is actually
a criminal or spy (as opposed to Dr. Lee - who called tech support to help him figure out how to do this), it is pretty trivial for
them to prevent this from being detected.
Yes, there are dozens of basic security procedures
that can catch the idiots, but you will never
catch anybody who knows anything about computers.
This is most likely some form
of boilerplate contract language that
COMPAQ's lawyers told their
web-publishing department to release
all "to be distributed free"-type software
under.
The programmer who released the GPL code probably
just put it up on a server controlled by a
dept. that does this as part of their release
process.
It's quite unlikely that this is an intentional
challenge to the GPL or other freeware licenses.
Point it out to them, and I'm sure they'll clean
it up.
..we now return you to Slashdot's regularly scheduled hyperbole.
I'm probably way too late for anybody to be
reading this, but I feel that I need to point
out this simple little fact:
Flesh IS a machine
To put it in techno-hype terms, "flesh" is self-organizing carbon based nanotechnology
that uses starlight, thermal plumes, or other
"flesh" as it's enery source, and water in its liquid form as it's chief organizational
transport mechanism.
Even our most sophisticated machinery is at a bare minimum - four orders of magnitude - less complicated than "flesh" (or "wood", or "algae"). Despite the fantasy predictions of popular
science-fiction authors, such structures are
probably at least several centuries away. And
in fact, we may never develop a technology
that is as robust over the long haul as life
has been this last 4.5 Billion years.
I was about to start a rant on how so many top level
stories have become, well, 'Off Topic'. ( Come on now, how the hell is a single party in the San Jose area "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters?" )
But then I got to thinking: this kind of post does have topicality to it, just only for the people in the greater Bay Area. So is it time to start thinking about regionalizing Slashdot the way that many of the larger DotComs have been?
Just add a "region preference" to people's user info that would flag stories about local events.
Guys from Sweeden wouldn't have to read about
non-global events happening in San Jose, and vice versa. You could have a "no-regions" flag for people who don't want to be bothered, and an "all-regions" for people who like reading about
parties even if they can't be there.
The idea is cool obviously, but frought with ethical dilemmas.
Does the company owe the person whose computer discovered the drug anything? If so, someone is eventually going to win a computational lottery. If not (at least in U.S. versions of this) you could easily get some eldery person unable to afford the very drug their computer researched.
I can easily see the day when picking your screen saver will be almost as challenging as picking the charities you choose to support.
Advantages: Even more portable. Doesn't require the biscuts.
Disadvantages: Not quite as sensitive as "Dog", but still able to detect significant quantities of Alcohol, Pot, and other illicit substances.
When this amazing new technology gets installed, I predict that the entire basis of our free society will go down the toilet, and we'll spend our lives in neo-Nazi slave camps!
In fact, the only thing I can think of that MS really innovated on was PayWare with the Tiny Basic brouhaha... unless I'm missing
something really big and obvious.
If you notice, the "Bill of Rights" message was moderated to 0. Probably exactly where it should be; of extremely marginal interest, but not a true -1 worthy troll.
Moderators in aggragate are a lot smarter than you think.
Syllabus: 1] Write code that does nothing - but has buzzwords like "B2B" or "Sharing" in it. 2] Be written up in Slashdot. 3] Get VC funding. 4] Be written up in Slashdot again, with nearly identical commentary to the first. 5] Make the cover of a half dozen clueless magazines. 6] Be ignored by Slashdot. 7] Count stock options worth several billion dollars. 8] Get sued by some equally clueless industry group afraid their fat cash cow is going away. 9] Be written up in Slashdot, with more redundant commentary. 10] Pursue the lawsuit in front of some absurdly clueless judge who slaps a restraining order on the idea of "programming" because it could violate some businesses ability somewhere to make money. 11] Did I mention being written up in Slashdot? 12] Go out of business, because after all, the code did nothing.
This is the dumbest move the RIAA has pulled so far.
By suing over things printed on a t-shirt, the RIAA is just about forcing the judge to consider DeCSS as speech. No judge is going to say people can't wear clothing with statements on them.
What IP gives you over traditional media is interactivity. People will pay for interctive audio: that what phones are. They will pay for interactive "reading": web use (it's an amazing improvement over libraries). But there's precious few who will pay 10 times as much for interactive video as interactive audio. All the use cases are already covered by technologies that are as good or better than what can be done using TCP/IP networks.
The only thing unique about this concert, for instance, is that it is being done over TCP/IP. "International concerts" are done via TV every day, and nobody goes wow!. Broadcast TV also does it faster and cheaper than TCP/IP as well.
Some technical advances will change the industry, but IP Video is not going to replace TV - ever.
Even those who download a distribution spend money for the connection time, one way or another, which is pro-rated into the cost of getting Linux. Granted, for many the can mean a marginal cost approaching zero, but it is still not free. You also don't get "free" consultation either.
What Linux is - is "free" as in freedom. Unlike MS or Apple, you can modify to your hearts content. This gives you control.
That's what Linux is. If you thought otherwise, you haven't been listening very closely
Since Babelfish doesn't yet have a Hype-eeze to English converter up and running yet, I will translate it directly:
According to CBC, Researchers, musicians and engineers at McGill University in Montreal, have made Internet history.
Translation: We've done something not very remarkable on the Internet. Any company that tries to use this as a business model will be history.
They set up the first intercontinental netcast of a live concert in surround sound and full-screen video, Wednesday night. Thats a whole lotta buzzwords to basically say that we're one step closer to having actual good video over the internet.
Translation: We've managed to broadcast a concert in a screen that doesn't look crappy in a tiny 1 1/2" by 2 1/2" box on your PC; it looks crappy (with tons of compression artifacts) on screen the size of your TV!
The freaky part is the long term goal: mimicing environments down to floorboard vibrations to allow musicians to perform together from around the world.
Translation: The freaky part is that they are so clueless that they can't think of any application of Video over IP except for a physically impossible, economically impractible, and totally useless excercise of trying to get musicians on different contenents to overcome variable lag to play together.... badly.
I work in the real TV/video industry. Video Over Ip is a technology looking for a way to bilk investors and then die.
Slashdot Mirror
In the business section of all things, CNN has a good article on the making of Dune.
You will find a number of insights into their decisions, plus a good rundown from Alec Newman's point of view.
You can find it here
The challenge was to remove a watermark of the same watermarking technology from a 3rd piece of music. And believe me, it's NOT trivial.
I believe you. However, that is not the "nightmare scenario" that was originally posited.
The original scenario was that each player would place a different watermark on the same piece of music to aid tracking down just who took an SDMI song and ripped to MP3.
This means the encoding algorithm would have to be stored in each consumer player, and presumably would have a different identifying seed for each one. That won't happen.
An interesting scenario, but one unlikely to actually work.
By doing a bitwise comparison of two different "SDMI-approved" players, anyone of even moderate programming talent could identify the "new" watermark the players were adding and either eliminate it, or make it untracable by filling it with random data.
Insofar as SDMI players playing only "clean" originals, that would make SDMI players far to costly to build. Consumer-level hardware just isn't reliable enough to "refuse to play" because you have some tiny skip in the CD-ROM readback. It simply happens too frequently.
You don't need to "educate" anybody. If SDMI comes out like this, people won't buy players for it. Period.
The Green Party did make or break the U.S. government. Green Party voters did.
That's a huge difference.
Nader is not right now in a position to tell Gore and Bush "the first person who makes me head of the EPA gets to be president". He's out on his ass where all minority candidates should be.
Similarly, the horribly misnamed Constitution party isn't in a position to demand the reimposition of "blue laws" (no stores open on Sunday cause the Bible says that's a day of rest).
Again, extremists like voting systems that allow their candidates to leverage their wedge votes to gain disproportionate influence over the body politic. However that is a very poor way to elect a government. Most countries (including the U.S.) need less extremism, not more.
What you incorrectly call "lying", most people call setting priorities.
Voters in the U.S. here have more power because they can decide they dislike a candidate so much that they'll vote for a stronger candidate who would otherwise be their second or third choice just to be able to knock the guy they dislke off.
This leads to candidates who not only worry about energizing their base, but also worry about being considerate enough of their opposition to not unduly piss them off.
On the other hand in most EU democracies, you vote knowing that you have absolutely no voice in the makeup of the actual government. That coalition building is done in proverbial smoke filled rooms by the various parties. This leads to extremist parties (willing to switch votes on national concerns) in a position to make or break governments, and gives them a disproportionate amount of power because of that.
I'll take the American system any day of the week.
This is the first article that a link to goatse.cx would be on topic!
You are obvously a member of one of those completely utterly clueless rightwing groups.
It's rather off-topic to the original article, but in the general interest of Slashdot's "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters", allow me to grant you some small fraction of a clue you so desperately desperately need.
To wit: Al Gore once said he was the model for the main characters in Erich Segal's 1970 romance novel Love Story. The truth: Al Gore based his account on an article in the Nashville Tennessean. Segal says the newspaper "exaggerated" the connection to the Gores. He says the protagonist was a combination of Gore and his college roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones.
The song Gore actually heard as a bedroom lullaby: "Don't Forget the Union Label". He got the titles confused.
Clinton being one of our greatest president? That's a judgement call. But he didn't get us in any wars, and wasn't suffering early Alzheimers in office either.
We now return to our regularly scheduled clueless whining.
No kidding.
Renquist is on the Supreme Court. Precisely who do you think someone could appeal Renquist's apparent conflict of interest to?
BZZT! Wrong answer. Nothing "supercedes" the constitution. Not in the U.S. nor anywhere else I'm aware of. Rather, treaties are *sanctioned* by the Constitution, and *if ratified* (e.g. signed into law by Congress/President) have the same force as any other law - subject to the same constitutional limits that any other law has.
The original poster should go back and take a remedial course in civics. Either that or go join some random right-wing kook group with their typical habit of making bald assertions that they have no clue about.
As the case of Dr. Wen Ho Lee showed, this is impossible - even for (supposedly) ultra high security installations like the U.S. nuclear research labs.
All you have to do is download to a tape or floppy and walk out with the info. If the person doing this is actually a criminal or spy (as opposed to Dr. Lee - who called tech support to help him figure out how to do this), it is pretty trivial for them to prevent this from being detected.
Yes, there are dozens of basic security procedures that can catch the idiots, but you will never catch anybody who knows anything about computers.
This is most likely some form of boilerplate contract language that COMPAQ's lawyers told their web-publishing department to release all "to be distributed free"-type software under.
The programmer who released the GPL code probably just put it up on a server controlled by a dept. that does this as part of their release process.
It's quite unlikely that this is an intentional challenge to the GPL or other freeware licenses.
Point it out to them, and I'm sure they'll clean it up.
I'm probably way too late for anybody to be reading this, but I feel that I need to point out this simple little fact:
Flesh IS a machine
To put it in techno-hype terms, "flesh" is self-organizing carbon based nanotechnology that uses starlight, thermal plumes, or other "flesh" as it's enery source, and water in its liquid form as it's chief organizational transport mechanism.
Even our most sophisticated machinery is at a bare minimum - four orders of magnitude - less complicated than "flesh" (or "wood", or "algae"). Despite the fantasy predictions of popular science-fiction authors, such structures are probably at least several centuries away. And in fact, we may never develop a technology that is as robust over the long haul as life has been this last 4.5 Billion years.
I was about to start a rant on how so many top level stories have become, well, 'Off Topic'. ( Come on now, how the hell is a single party in the San Jose area "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters?" )
But then I got to thinking: this kind of post does have topicality to it, just only for the people in the greater Bay Area. So is it time to start thinking about regionalizing Slashdot the way that many of the larger DotComs have been?
Just add a "region preference" to people's user info that would flag stories about local events. Guys from Sweeden wouldn't have to read about non-global events happening in San Jose, and vice versa. You could have a "no-regions" flag for people who don't want to be bothered, and an "all-regions" for people who like reading about parties even if they can't be there.
So how about it?
The technology to block French users from the US based Yahoo is not just "immature".. it's flat out impossible.
The only good sign is that the French judge may, like his American counterparts, eventually "get it" and leave foreign sites alone.
The idea is cool obviously, but frought with ethical dilemmas.
Does the company owe the person whose computer discovered the drug anything? If so, someone is eventually going to win a computational lottery. If not (at least in U.S. versions of this) you could easily get some eldery person unable to afford the very drug their computer researched.
I can easily see the day when picking your screen saver will be almost as challenging as picking the charities you choose to support.
There's also "cop's nose"
Advantages: Even more portable. Doesn't require the biscuts.
Disadvantages: Not quite as sensitive as "Dog", but still able to detect significant quantities of Alcohol, Pot, and other illicit substances.
When this amazing new technology gets installed, I predict that the entire basis of our free society will go down the toilet, and we'll spend our lives in neo-Nazi slave camps!
Or maybe not...
Two words: Microsoft Bob
If you notice, the "Bill of Rights" message was moderated to 0. Probably exactly where it should be; of extremely marginal interest, but not a true -1 worthy troll.
Moderators in aggragate are a lot smarter than you think.
Start a company
Syllabus: 1] Write code that does nothing - but has buzzwords like "B2B" or "Sharing" in it. 2] Be written up in Slashdot. 3] Get VC funding. 4] Be written up in Slashdot again, with nearly identical commentary to the first. 5] Make the cover of a half dozen clueless magazines. 6] Be ignored by Slashdot. 7] Count stock options worth several billion dollars. 8] Get sued by some equally clueless industry group afraid their fat cash cow is going away. 9] Be written up in Slashdot, with more redundant commentary. 10] Pursue the lawsuit in front of some absurdly clueless judge who slaps a restraining order on the idea of "programming" because it could violate some businesses ability somewhere to make money. 11] Did I mention being written up in Slashdot? 12] Go out of business, because after all, the code did nothing.
This is the dumbest move the RIAA has pulled so far.
By suing over things printed on a t-shirt, the RIAA is just about forcing the judge to consider DeCSS as speech. No judge is going to say people can't wear clothing with statements on them.
Only if Apple's new mouse works well with one of the M$ operating systems, which of course, it doesn't.
Actually, no.
It all comes down to what people will pay for.
What IP gives you over traditional media is interactivity. People will pay for interctive audio: that what phones are. They will pay for interactive "reading": web use (it's an amazing improvement over libraries). But there's precious few who will pay 10 times as much for interactive video as interactive audio. All the use cases are already covered by technologies that are as good or better than what can be done using TCP/IP networks.
The only thing unique about this concert, for instance, is that it is being done over TCP/IP. "International concerts" are done via TV every day, and nobody goes wow!. Broadcast TV also does it faster and cheaper than TCP/IP as well.
Some technical advances will change the industry, but IP Video is not going to replace TV - ever.
Linux has never been "free" as in beer.
Even those who download a distribution spend money for the connection time, one way or another, which is pro-rated into the cost of getting Linux. Granted, for many the can mean a marginal cost approaching zero, but it is still not free. You also don't get "free" consultation either.
What Linux is - is "free" as in freedom. Unlike MS or Apple, you can modify to your hearts content. This gives you control.
That's what Linux is. If you thought otherwise, you haven't been listening very closely
Since Babelfish doesn't yet have a Hype-eeze to English converter up and running yet, I will translate it directly:
Translation: We've done something not very remarkable on the Internet. Any company that tries to use this as a business model will be history.
Translation: We've managed to broadcast a concert in a screen that doesn't look crappy in a tiny 1 1/2" by 2 1/2" box on your PC; it looks crappy (with tons of compression artifacts) on screen the size of your TV!
Translation: The freaky part is that they are so clueless that they can't think of any application of Video over IP except for a physically impossible, economically impractible, and totally useless excercise of trying to get musicians on different contenents to overcome variable lag to play together.... badly.
I work in the real TV/video industry. Video Over Ip is a technology looking for a way to bilk investors and then die.
Look at the second link: Hypothermia.
There's your direct evidence blow by blow.