It seems inevitable that this will lead to a technology arms race.
The advertisers get more obnoxious. Browsers and proxies get better at screening out ads. More features will appear to help the end user. And those features will become more sophisticated.
Here is a hypothetical example. [Disclaimer: this example is purely hypothetical. I have not done this myself, and am not trying to induce browser authors to commit a crime. Remember, a web site has to make money, and not watching ads is stealing!] Anyway, that said, suppose a browser (or proxy?) went through all the motions of running the ad. Executed the ad code, scripts, flash animations, etc. Dutifully simulated the popup windows, and executed their code. Dutifully requested all of the graphics, flash animations, and other inline content for the popup windows. This way the server really thinks that you see the ad. After all, your browser requested a flash that is only embedded in the popup. So you must not be a thief, because you are seeing the ad. The problem is, the authors of this browser or proxy have induced their users into stealing because the browser or proxy doesn't actually display the ads or popup windows. It still consumes the bandwidth, but these evil crooks (i.e. users) don't care.
This technique will prevent the advertisers from knowing that you've seen the ad. From their perspective, your browser has executed all the right code and requested all the right content from the server that should be associated with viewing this page.
Seen from the perspective I've described it here (advertiser friendly, and users as thieves) could the above hypothetical example be construed as a circumvention device? "Our content is protected by Anti-Leech, and these evil hackers have circumvented it. That's as bad as spray painting ad billboards!"
In the end, we'll have heads up displays in cars, with ad billboards constantly popping up in our face while driving. This will be seen as enormously beneficial in eliminating the visual clutter of billboards on buildings and roadways.
Get one of those USB 2.0 external drive enclosures with an open front, into which you can insert an IDE drive. (This is basically an external USB 2.0 drive using an IDE drive, but WITHOUT the drive.) Use those removable drive cages that let you remove an IDE drive through the front panel.
Cost of external USB 2.0 case: <$100.
Cost per backup media...
Drive: $80
Removable Cage: $20
Spending $100 per removable backup media might seem a lot, until you compare with high end tape. Plus you don't need a $1000 or more tape drive.
Advantages? Backup is fast. Restore is great -- just mount the drive read only, and interactively hunt for the file you want and drag it back to your drive.
Each backup consists of a bare drive with those removable rails attached to its side.
Xerox needs to invite engineers from IBM and AMD over to show them the new technology. The higher up's should direct Xerox engineers to answer any and all questions that the visiting engineers might have about the technology.
This question is really interesting to me because I am wanting to get into patent law. Anybody want to comment on what recourse a company would have for protecting the perfect UI? Legal precedent would not appear to be on your side.
One possible perfect UI would be that of a slave who must carry out your every whim. Sort of like a personal secretary. They live and breathe to make you happy. They learn your personal habits and adapt. They learn what news you like, what entertainment, keep track of all of the mundane details of life and remind you of important things that you needn't concern yourself with remembering. They buy the birthday present you were supposed to get for your friend if you ignore the reminders for too long. They tirelessly do research for you.
What kind of UI do they have? Conversational. You give orders, they carry them out. They give you information and reminders and responses to queries. You scribble notes, they obey the sticky notes.
If such a perfect UI were created, should Microsoft be able to charge a recurring cost for it, just as you would have to pay a human slave? But such a UI would bring slave ownership from the wealthy down closer to the masses. At least for those whose hardware is recent enough to run the software.
Wouldn't there be plenty of prior art preventing a patent? After all the slave/secretary has been around forever.
What's needed is something that will announce all kinds of real-time content. Video streams, audio streams/ radio/TV satellite / time sensitive media files etc. etc...
How about a massive p2p announcement like...
Right now, a commercial just started/ended on channel 37.
The announcement should be in a well-specified short low-latency binary format, of course.
One acronym: DRM.
It's coming, and in hardware form.
I don't worry so much about DRM / TCPA / Palladium as I used to.
Why? Governments all over the world (outside the US) are jumping on the open source bandwagon. Other countries outside the US will make hardware and have local software development efforts. The only way that hardware DRM can really be truly effective is to get all hardware to use it. Since this appears like it will never happen, then DRM hardware efforts will be defeated or ignored. In either case, you won't have to be tormented with DRM hardware.
If China / India / Japan, etc. make their own PC's, and support Linux, then there is no way all (any?) of these PC's will have hardware drm. In fact crap like this could perhaps accellerate Microsoft's downfall.
Re:.. and in the darkness bind them
on
More on Longhorn
·
· Score: 2
Sure, the tobacco companies are blatantly lying to everyone, but then again, nobody believes them, either. On the other hand, Microsoft insists that it's not a monopoly, and insists that its products are secure/reliable/inexpensive to own, and 90% of people believe them.
If you go back in time far enough, people used to believe the cigarette companies.
I think we have crossed a point where many people distrust Microsoft. In time, I think most will.
If they had to choose a bacteria to do unpredictable and possible dangerous experimentation with, why did they choose one that is known to cause crotch-burn in humans?!
Probably because it was the simplest form, or the easiest to work with that they could obtain over the counter.
(an alternate theory might have something to do with culling the herd.)
They're taking an already extant organism, "hollowing it out" as it were, and seeing if it can live and reproduce normally with a series of increasingly customized (and minimal) genetic material. Not creating something from nothing.
That is simply because we cannot yet manipulate things at the molecular level in sufficient quantity or resolution. Once we can, then someone might not even start with an existing organism's shell script wrapper.
Of course, I suppose, even then, they would not be starting from "nothing".
Write to them to complain instead of writing on Shashdot.
Are you unhappy about this misuse of an already existing law?
Sale prices are facts, not copyrighted material.
Courts have already ruled that facts devoid of any creativity (such as telephone books) can be copied.
Wal-Mart
From main web site, click Help (at top). Click Company Information (bottom). Click Contact Stores and Home Office Customer Service (bottom left).
From main web site, click Help (way bottom). Click either Contact Us About Online Services (left middle), or Contact Us About Target (left further down).
But seriously, see section 3 of GPL. You must either (A) include source with binary. [Parphrased], or (B) include with binary a written offer for source for a charge of no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution...
Now, I suppose that your cost of performing source distribution could be high if you run your server on, say, big proprietary overpriced OS. Say, your friend licenses you an expensive proprietary server that you only have to make payments on per download from the server. This becomes your cost of performing the download, which you pass on to those who want to download source.
Let's hope that they rebuild with something better and newer.
There is a problem with this. Longhorn is not out yet. We know it will at least be newer than XP. As for better, well, Microsoft has promised that it will be.
The media companies would argue that part of the value of their product is "missing."
The media companies would argue that part of their huge profits are missing, and that the few extra cents they would have paid the artists are also missing.
Not only does the fsf gpl faq address this, but section 3 of the GPL makes it clear.
You must either
Include source code
Accompany with written offer to ANY third party
Accompany with written offer received from someone else -- but this option available only if YOU are a NON-commercial distributor, and yourself received the second option above.
It's the ANY third party that I was hung up over. So yes, Lindows, must either include source on the CD's or include downloadable source to anyone, not just their customers.
Of course, they don't have to make it easy to find.
This written offer good for anyone who visits our web site between 2:00 and 3:00 AM CST on the 2nd Tuesday of the month.
Ruined your day? Think about the sweet potato. Not so sweet any more...
That all depends on whom you ask. You must not have ever met any jumping, cheering fans (shills?) who give applause on command. They would say that, on the contrary, this makes it even sweeter.
This would MAKE their day. Such a potato would be rare indeed, and valued due to limited supply.
The GPL requires that everyone who DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY gets a copy of your GPL'ed binaries should be able to download [fsf.org] the sources from you.
Not true.
Everyone who directly gets binaries from you must be able to get sources from you. (B gets binaries from A, therefore, A must provide sources to B, but not necessarily to C or D.)
As soon as the someone redistributes binaries, then it is THEIR responsibility to provide sources. (B provides binaries to C and D. It is B's responsibility to provide sources to C and D. A has no such responsibility.)
This is the WHOLE POINT of the GPL. You know the wording, in order to protect your rights, we must forbid anyone from taking away your rights. Threrfore, you cannot take away rights when you redistribute.
If Lindows provides sources to all GPL'ed works on their disk, then they have met their GPL obligations in full. Ideally, just compress sources and include on CD, then there can be no argument about it.
So does this mean that I can download any distribution from their FTP server, burn it on a CD, and then sell it for $15 (or any other price)?
Maybe.
It depends on what is on that CD.
The GPL also allows you to put GPL software and non-free software onto the same CD. (Mere aggregation of GPL'ed works on a medium of distribution does not bring the other works on the medium under the scope of this license. Or some similar wording as I recall from reading the GPL in the previous century.)
Therefore, if Lindows puts some proprietary work on the CD they can keep you from copying that part of the CD. Now if the proprietary work is critical to functioning of the overall distribution, then you have a problem.
SuSE for instance has YaST. You get source, but under a restrictive license. YaST is absolutely critical to the distribution. If you didn't have YaST, then you might as well just settle for some other distribution. (Seriously.) Because of YaST, you can't sell SuSE's CD's. SuSE also does not offer downloads of their CD images. You can install SuSE for absolutely free by downloading a boot floppy, starting up YaST and installing from their FTP server. But you get no CD out of it. SuSE does allow you to make copies of CD's for a friend as long as no money at all changes hands. (Not even cost of materials.) While not perfect, this policy seems better than Lindows.
Actually, there are a few restrictions. Up until 1980-something, unless you put "Copyright 1993 Foobar" or "[copyright symbol] 1993 Foobar" on a work, it didn't get copyright protection.
The last time I checked, about 1989-90(?) you had five (5) years to make a good faith effort to correct a missing or improper copyright notice and still preserve your copyright protection.
but no reasonable person could argue that he was really hurting anyone by downloading a replacement for what he'd already bought.
The RIAA (also MPAA) and their shills are not reasonable people.
One could very much argue this. By downloading a file for a CD that you already bought, but broke, you are depriving the artists a few pennies and the record company executives of a new vacation home. So yes, downloading replacements does hurt people by this argument.
I can't imagine anyone knocking on your door, unless you use it to share their content.
You might need a better imagination.
The *AA views the mere act of listening to mp3's, the mere act of using p2p to be piracy.
(No I'm not crazy. The foregoing is a plausible conclusion from the facts. How they actually view things is perhaps unknowable.)
They can always knock on your door, send you a letter, etc. (not busting down your door, I would hope) telling you to stop using p2p. They could harrass you until you went to the trouble to get them to stop.
Remember that with things digital we are moving towards a guilty until proven innocent system. "Hey, Mr. ISP, shut down his account because he is running p2p, and we claim copyright infringement." No proof required.
My point is simply that just because you are innocent doesn't mean the *AA might not harrass you.
Big bad evil monopolistic companies don't need to go to anywhere near the same effort you are thinking of.
If they want to 0wn someone's precious VB code, then they can just program the trojan routines into the compiler without disguising them. It's not like you have the source to the compiler to examine.
But this entire point is moot. If they want to own large numbers of machines, they have a much simpler mechanism: Windows Update. Since millions of people agree to let their XP box automatically download and install updates from MS, they don't need to 0wn you today. They could at any artibrary time decide to 0wn you through Windows update. The advantage of this approach is that there is nothing today that looks suspicious. All code obtained via. Windows Update is legit, furthering your trust in Windows Update.
In the event, say, of a great national emergency, for instance, an unfavorable court ruling against Microsoft, they could overnight 0wn millions upon millions of boxes.
So why would they go to the trouble to do the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" thing to trojan their compilers? Even if they did trojan their compilers, the trojan might be known to only a small number of people. Hypotheteical example: one small group writes the back end code generation library of the compilers and gives that library in binary form to other compiler groups within the beast. In this scenerio, only a small number of people would know about the trojaned compilers, all compiliers would be affected, and there is no reason to disguise it in the source code.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems inevitable that this will lead to a technology arms race.
The advertisers get more obnoxious. Browsers and proxies get better at screening out ads. More features will appear to help the end user. And those features will become more sophisticated.
Here is a hypothetical example. [Disclaimer: this example is purely hypothetical. I have not done this myself, and am not trying to induce browser authors to commit a crime. Remember, a web site has to make money, and not watching ads is stealing!] Anyway, that said, suppose a browser (or proxy?) went through all the motions of running the ad. Executed the ad code, scripts, flash animations, etc. Dutifully simulated the popup windows, and executed their code. Dutifully requested all of the graphics, flash animations, and other inline content for the popup windows. This way the server really thinks that you see the ad. After all, your browser requested a flash that is only embedded in the popup. So you must not be a thief, because you are seeing the ad. The problem is, the authors of this browser or proxy have induced their users into stealing because the browser or proxy doesn't actually display the ads or popup windows. It still consumes the bandwidth, but these evil crooks (i.e. users) don't care.
This technique will prevent the advertisers from knowing that you've seen the ad. From their perspective, your browser has executed all the right code and requested all the right content from the server that should be associated with viewing this page.
Seen from the perspective I've described it here (advertiser friendly, and users as thieves) could the above hypothetical example be construed as a circumvention device? "Our content is protected by Anti-Leech, and these evil hackers have circumvented it. That's as bad as spray painting ad billboards!"
In the end, we'll have heads up displays in cars, with ad billboards constantly popping up in our face while driving. This will be seen as enormously beneficial in eliminating the visual clutter of billboards on buildings and roadways.
Get one of those USB 2.0 external drive enclosures with an open front, into which you can insert an IDE drive. (This is basically an external USB 2.0 drive using an IDE drive, but WITHOUT the drive.) Use those removable drive cages that let you remove an IDE drive through the front panel.
Cost of external USB 2.0 case: <$100.
Cost per backup media...
Drive: $80
Removable Cage: $20
Spending $100 per removable backup media might seem a lot, until you compare with high end tape. Plus you don't need a $1000 or more tape drive.
Advantages? Backup is fast. Restore is great -- just mount the drive read only, and interactively hunt for the file you want and drag it back to your drive.
Each backup consists of a bare drive with those removable rails attached to its side.
Xerox needs to invite engineers from IBM and AMD over to show them the new technology. The higher up's should direct Xerox engineers to answer any and all questions that the visiting engineers might have about the technology.
This question is really interesting to me because I am wanting to get into patent law. Anybody want to comment on what recourse a company would have for protecting the perfect UI? Legal precedent would not appear to be on your side.
One possible perfect UI would be that of a slave who must carry out your every whim. Sort of like a personal secretary. They live and breathe to make you happy. They learn your personal habits and adapt. They learn what news you like, what entertainment, keep track of all of the mundane details of life and remind you of important things that you needn't concern yourself with remembering. They buy the birthday present you were supposed to get for your friend if you ignore the reminders for too long. They tirelessly do research for you.
What kind of UI do they have? Conversational. You give orders, they carry them out. They give you information and reminders and responses to queries. You scribble notes, they obey the sticky notes.
If such a perfect UI were created, should Microsoft be able to charge a recurring cost for it, just as you would have to pay a human slave? But such a UI would bring slave ownership from the wealthy down closer to the masses. At least for those whose hardware is recent enough to run the software.
Wouldn't there be plenty of prior art preventing a patent? After all the slave/secretary has been around forever.
What's needed is something that will announce all kinds of real-time content. Video streams, audio streams/ radio/TV satellite / time sensitive media files etc. etc...
How about a massive p2p announcement like...
Right now, a commercial just started/ended on channel 37.
The announcement should be in a well-specified short low-latency binary format, of course.
One acronym: DRM. It's coming, and in hardware form.
I don't worry so much about DRM / TCPA / Palladium as I used to.
Why? Governments all over the world (outside the US) are jumping on the open source bandwagon. Other countries outside the US will make hardware and have local software development efforts. The only way that hardware DRM can really be truly effective is to get all hardware to use it. Since this appears like it will never happen, then DRM hardware efforts will be defeated or ignored. In either case, you won't have to be tormented with DRM hardware.
If China / India / Japan, etc. make their own PC's, and support Linux, then there is no way all (any?) of these PC's will have hardware drm. In fact crap like this could perhaps accellerate Microsoft's downfall.
Sure, the tobacco companies are blatantly lying to everyone, but then again, nobody believes them, either. On the other hand, Microsoft insists that it's not a monopoly, and insists that its products are secure/reliable/inexpensive to own, and 90% of people believe them.
If you go back in time far enough, people used to believe the cigarette companies.
I think we have crossed a point where many people distrust Microsoft. In time, I think most will.
If they had to choose a bacteria to do unpredictable and possible dangerous experimentation with, why did they choose one that is known to cause crotch-burn in humans?!
Probably because it was the simplest form, or the easiest to work with that they could obtain over the counter.
(an alternate theory might have something to do with culling the herd.)
They're taking an already extant organism, "hollowing it out" as it were, and seeing if it can live and reproduce normally with a series of increasingly customized (and minimal) genetic material. Not creating something from nothing.
That is simply because we cannot yet manipulate things at the molecular level in sufficient quantity or resolution. Once we can, then someone might not even start with an existing organism's shell script wrapper.
Of course, I suppose, even then, they would not be starting from "nothing".
Write to them to complain instead of writing on Shashdot. Are you unhappy about this misuse of an already existing law? Sale prices are facts, not copyrighted material. Courts have already ruled that facts devoid of any creativity (such as telephone books) can be copied.
Wal-Mart
From main web site, click Help (at top). Click Company Information (bottom). Click Contact Stores and Home Office Customer Service (bottom left).
Contact
Target
From main web site, click Help (way bottom). Click either Contact Us About Online Services (left middle), or Contact Us About Target (left further down).
Target
Target
Best Buy
From main web site, click Contact Us (left bar, bottom). Click General Questions about BestBuy.com.
Best Buy
Staples
From main web site, click Help (top right). Click Contact Us. Click Something Else.
Staples
These pages have a SUBMIT button for a reason. (because they want you to submit to them.)
If you don't write, then I'll assume you are perhaps happy about this.
Binaries, $1. Source, $1M.
Don't you mean: Binaries, $1. Source, priceless.
But seriously, see section 3 of GPL. You must either (A) include source with binary. [Parphrased], or (B) include with binary a written offer for source for a charge of no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution...
Now, I suppose that your cost of performing source distribution could be high if you run your server on, say, big proprietary overpriced OS. Say, your friend licenses you an expensive proprietary server that you only have to make payments on per download from the server. This becomes your cost of performing the download, which you pass on to those who want to download source.
Let's hope that they rebuild with something better and newer.
There is a problem with this. Longhorn is not out yet. We know it will at least be newer than XP. As for better, well, Microsoft has promised that it will be.
Yes, but did this server room have one of those fancy fire suppression systems?
Followup question: Was it a fire suppression system, or was it a Microsoft fire suppression system running Windows CE and Visual Basic?
>>Apparently UT was a major node for KazAA...
....but never be able to figure out which of the *AA's funded him.
And the firefighters will determine it was lit by a professionaly arsonist, but never be able to figure out what orginization funded him..
Peter Chernin, CEO of Fox and COO of News Corp., says media and tech companies should work together in the best interests of both industries.
Okay, then I'd like to offer a compromise proposal.
Instead of Tech putting in DRM for Media, how about Tech including little stickers that say "Don't steal the music."
(these stickers can be conveniently affixed to the inside of the device so that they are easily seen by anyone who takes the device apart.)
The media companies would argue that part of the value of their product is "missing."
The media companies would argue that part of their huge profits are missing, and that the few extra cents they would have paid the artists are also missing.
You are right and I am wrong.
Not only does the fsf gpl faq address this, but section 3 of the GPL makes it clear.
You must either
- Include source code
- Accompany with written offer to ANY third party
- Accompany with written offer received from someone else -- but this option available only if YOU are a NON-commercial distributor, and yourself received the second option above.
It's the ANY third party that I was hung up over. So yes, Lindows, must either include source on the CD's or include downloadable source to anyone, not just their customers.Of course, they don't have to make it easy to find.
This written offer good for anyone who visits our web site between 2:00 and 3:00 AM CST on the 2nd Tuesday of the month.
Ruined your day? Think about the sweet potato. Not so sweet any more ...
That all depends on whom you ask. You must not have ever met any jumping, cheering fans (shills?) who give applause on command. They would say that, on the contrary, this makes it even sweeter.
This would MAKE their day. Such a potato would be rare indeed, and valued due to limited supply.
The GPL requires that everyone who DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY gets a copy of your GPL'ed binaries should be able to download [fsf.org] the sources from you.
Not true.
Everyone who directly gets binaries from you must be able to get sources from you. (B gets binaries from A, therefore, A must provide sources to B, but not necessarily to C or D.)
As soon as the someone redistributes binaries, then it is THEIR responsibility to provide sources. (B provides binaries to C and D. It is B's responsibility to provide sources to C and D. A has no such responsibility.)
This is the WHOLE POINT of the GPL. You know the wording, in order to protect your rights, we must forbid anyone from taking away your rights. Threrfore, you cannot take away rights when you redistribute.
If Lindows provides sources to all GPL'ed works on their disk, then they have met their GPL obligations in full. Ideally, just compress sources and include on CD, then there can be no argument about it.
So does this mean that I can download any distribution from their FTP server, burn it on a CD, and then sell it for $15 (or any other price)?
Maybe.
It depends on what is on that CD.
The GPL also allows you to put GPL software and non-free software onto the same CD. (Mere aggregation of GPL'ed works on a medium of distribution does not bring the other works on the medium under the scope of this license. Or some similar wording as I recall from reading the GPL in the previous century.)
Therefore, if Lindows puts some proprietary work on the CD they can keep you from copying that part of the CD. Now if the proprietary work is critical to functioning of the overall distribution, then you have a problem.
SuSE for instance has YaST. You get source, but under a restrictive license. YaST is absolutely critical to the distribution. If you didn't have YaST, then you might as well just settle for some other distribution. (Seriously.) Because of YaST, you can't sell SuSE's CD's. SuSE also does not offer downloads of their CD images. You can install SuSE for absolutely free by downloading a boot floppy, starting up YaST and installing from their FTP server. But you get no CD out of it. SuSE does allow you to make copies of CD's for a friend as long as no money at all changes hands. (Not even cost of materials.) While not perfect, this policy seems better than Lindows.
Actually, there are a few restrictions. Up until 1980-something, unless you put "Copyright 1993 Foobar" or "[copyright symbol] 1993 Foobar" on a work, it didn't get copyright protection.
The last time I checked, about 1989-90(?) you had five (5) years to make a good faith effort to correct a missing or improper copyright notice and still preserve your copyright protection.
but no reasonable person could argue that he was really hurting anyone by downloading a replacement for what he'd already bought.
The RIAA (also MPAA) and their shills are not reasonable people.
One could very much argue this. By downloading a file for a CD that you already bought, but broke, you are depriving the artists a few pennies and the record company executives of a new vacation home. So yes, downloading replacements does hurt people by this argument.
I can't imagine anyone knocking on your door, unless you use it to share their content.
You might need a better imagination.
The *AA views the mere act of listening to mp3's, the mere act of using p2p to be piracy.
(No I'm not crazy. The foregoing is a plausible conclusion from the facts. How they actually view things is perhaps unknowable.)
They can always knock on your door, send you a letter, etc. (not busting down your door, I would hope) telling you to stop using p2p. They could harrass you until you went to the trouble to get them to stop.
Remember that with things digital we are moving towards a guilty until proven innocent system. "Hey, Mr. ISP, shut down his account because he is running p2p, and we claim copyright infringement." No proof required.
My point is simply that just because you are innocent doesn't mean the *AA might not harrass you.
If there are two keys with the same name and address, which one would you trust?
At least you should be suspicious.
Big bad evil monopolistic companies don't need to go to anywhere near the same effort you are thinking of.
If they want to 0wn someone's precious VB code, then they can just program the trojan routines into the compiler without disguising them. It's not like you have the source to the compiler to examine.
But this entire point is moot. If they want to own large numbers of machines, they have a much simpler mechanism: Windows Update. Since millions of people agree to let their XP box automatically download and install updates from MS, they don't need to 0wn you today. They could at any artibrary time decide to 0wn you through Windows update. The advantage of this approach is that there is nothing today that looks suspicious. All code obtained via. Windows Update is legit, furthering your trust in Windows Update.
In the event, say, of a great national emergency, for instance, an unfavorable court ruling against Microsoft, they could overnight 0wn millions upon millions of boxes.
So why would they go to the trouble to do the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" thing to trojan their compilers? Even if they did trojan their compilers, the trojan might be known to only a small number of people. Hypotheteical example: one small group writes the back end code generation library of the compilers and gives that library in binary form to other compiler groups within the beast. In this scenerio, only a small number of people would know about the trojaned compilers, all compiliers would be affected, and there is no reason to disguise it in the source code.