I consider it more like the constitution of the US which restricts the actions of government in order to keep people from voting themselves censorship or other such stupidities. It too restricts freedom in the strict sense. But in the broader sense it does more to guarantee freedom than to restrict it.
I find it really interesting that the most vocal proponents of the BSD license seem to be people who want to sell my own work back to me at an exorbitant markup because they've made a few secret special changes to it. The BSD license seems to me to be a great detriment to the continued freedom of my work.
Ahh, so PostgresSQL's license is more free because it allows random commercial entities to take my hard work and start using it to create little monopolies and gouge their customers. Well, let me sign right up for that.
I do use sqlite though. *sigh* It's too darned useful and there's no GPL alternative. But at least I can redistribute any changes I make to it under a license that preserves freedom.
MySQL, while it has come a long way, still has a ways to go to rival PostgresSQL, legally speaking. PostgreSQL is BSD. MySQL is anything but. Sure, the community edition is free, but it cannot be used with commercial software. In fact, there's a special "open source exception" to the license. That's not really open source. Open Source would never make you pay server licensing fees for use in commercial software, it would only make you distribute your source at worst.
This is a blatant distortion bordering on an outright lie.
MySQL community edition is licensed under the GNU GPL (version 2 even) and may be used inside any random commercial entity without having to distribute anything. And if you want to use MySQL in commercial software you may use it as long as you distribute source code for MySQL and any changes you have made to it.
It is true that the interface libraries are also covered by the GPL. But this can be gotten around easily enough by writing your own interface libraries, or having a GPLed thunk which speaks a proprietary protocol to your proprietary application and then uses the MySQL GPLed interface layer to talk to MySQL.
Personally, I consider PostgresSQL's license to be less free, and I'm disappointed in IBM for supporting it in any way. Ultimately IBM is throwing away their money by doing this. The article even tells you why PostgresSQL's license is less free. The company distributes proprietary extensions to PostgresSQL. They've essentially forked the code. If their proprietary extensions even become widely accepted and relied upon they have essentially rendered PostgresSQL no longer Free Software.
I'm surprised that IBM would be throwing away money on such a thing. They are essentially encouraging the development of another little monopolistic company making secret software that could ultimately hurt them very badly.
I agree very strongly with this. You are correct, this amounts to users volunteering to throttle their own bandwidth, and it will never work.
Another proposal would be for backbones and network interconnects to apply some sort of fairness discipline to traffic coming from the various networks. This would give ISPs incentive to throttle and prioritize appropriately. ISPs also need to modify their TOS to make it explicit that you have a burst bandwidth and a continuous bandwidth and that you cannot constantly expect to get the burst bandwidth.
Comcast and other cable company's sending fake RST packets is unconscionable and should be punished severely. But traffic shaping in order to ensure your network resources are fairly allocated to your customers is an excellent practice and should be encouraged.
Many P2P apps assign quality values to various peers they communicate with based on whether a peer as fed them bad data and how much bandwidth the other peer seems to have. Also, there are heuristics you can use to determine the 'nearness' of a peer in terms of network topology. These practices combined with traffic shaping should result in P2P apps largely pulling stuff from peers that are near them on the network and thereby using the available bandwidth much more efficiently.
I completely agree with you. Many times people say "If Microsoft did this... blah blah" and most of the time the comparison is completely silly. But this time it's spot on. And Apple is just as wrong to do it as Microsoft was (and is).
Most companies try to identify a market segment, work out what people in that segment want to buy, and then produce a product for that market. Apple tries to produce products for Steve Jobs.
*nod* Most good software I've ever seen was designed to solve the specific needs of a very few people, often needs the software author h(im/er)self had. I think the focus group method is practically guaranteed to lead to mediocre or poor designs. There is nothing specific it's really trying to do, and it's hard to get enthusiastic over something and do a really good job on it when no individual seems all that excited over it.
I was worried that we might face more competition from Japan that we have. But now it's clear that they are taking steps to ensure that the vast majority of their citizens will never have net access. This is a great relief.
I'm largely OK with people using my ideas. For programming, most of the work I do for myself I distribute under the GPL. I encourage places I work for to distribute code that's not core to their business under the GPL, or if their business already includes a really significant service component, their core code. For my words, I would get annoyed if they were sold and/or plagiarized without my permission.
Mostly, I think for profit distribution should still be regulated via the legal system. People who distribute for money will end up advertising, there will be a money flow to trace, you won't have to violate the 4th amendment in order to find violators.
I think we should encourage people to avoid really excessive personal sharing of media via social norms, but not with the legal system. Things like Pirate Bay make me uncomfortable. Especially because they make a bunch of money from advertising.
I don't exactly think copyright needs to go away. But I think it should be leaky and the balance should be shifted a lot farther away from iron fisted control by the original creator. It should be possible to make a documentary about college students without tracking down the copyright holders for all the posters in the student's bedrooms.
I don't think I'll ever produce video. I think if I did I'd feel the same way about it as I would about my writing.
I refuse to debate anything with someone who persistently uses the word 'steal'. Especially when they previously popped out with a whole bunch of examples of real stealing and then equate it with this activity that is not stealing.
There is no common ground that can be found when you begin with language that is so fragrantly prejuidicial as end any discussion before it begins.
I would be happy to see no movies being produced and copyright for movies in its current form ended. Most movies produced are pieces of derivative garbage that are made by studios who are so interested in the profits they can extract from their monopoly rents that they care not for whether a movie has any artistic merit whatsoever.
I, in fact, want it to end. I want it utterly destroyed so that people who have your opinions and biases and refusal to even think about the problem from a different perspective are proven wrong. Because after it goes away, it will come back. People want movies. Some means of paying for their production will happen. Government protection of monopoly rents is not required for this to happen.
It might be that some sort of government protection or encouragement might prove helpful in some instances. But I do not think it is necessary, and all the caterwauling about this is basically a whole bunch of parasites who produce nothing useful and drag the quality down with their greed complaining that their method of parasitism is being rendered obsolete and the host is developing an immunity to their predation.
I am not a communist, and I think the concept of physical property has proven to be an excellent method of encouraging the creation of vast quantities of wealth. I think that same system for ideas is stifling and routinely destroys vast quantities of wealth.
All of your ideas sound great, but you conveniently forget the cost of the first copy. When someone goes to a theatre and buys a ticket, they are paying for the cost of making the original. Yes, they are watching a copy, which cost only a few dollars to make, but they are paying for the original work, as well as the marketing, distribution and the minimum wage earned by the people at their theatres.
It's not the government's job to prop up a broken business model. If the first copy is too expensive, then don't make it.
All of your other examples are strawmen that have nothing to do with anything. I'm not advocating mugging. When someone loses their ticket, they've lost their ticket. There are a limited number of seats in the theater. Taking them by force is not acceptable. And the same goes for all the other examples.
I've been working with it in NS2. The way it works there is pretty ugly in some respects because it's kind of iffy which thing is implemented in TCL and which in C++. You have to do these really hairy code searches all the time.
I like Python as an extension language. Things like Boost::Python make it really easy to tie C/C++ and Python together. And it's a lot faster and prettier than TCL. But Python is a more complex language than TCL.
I tend to feel that in general the market will follow demand. It can be painful in some ways to be a leader, but I don't think that it's worth switching away.
I guess my general recommendation on that would be if the userbase is small and shrinking, consider moving away. If it's really tiny, but growing, maybe you're a little too much on the edge and would be more comfortable switching away, and that's an individual call to make. If it's smallish but not tiny, and growing, you probably shouldn't switch away.
And, of course, the values for tiny and small are rather fuzzy.
I don't think it's theft. I merely believe that it results in sub-optimal results for the community as a whole. I don't really want to put effort into supporting something that's specifically designed to be contrary to my interests and to make it illegal for me to make it work in a manner that isn't.
It isn't theft.
And downloading a movie isn't theft either.
It's arguably doing damage to the community for the movie to not be freely available. The cost of the movie is likely too high for many people who might otherwise enjoy it. So the community as a whole is hurt by the value these people are not deriving from the movie because the monopoly right granted on its distribution makes the cost too high.
The idea is to trade off the damage to the community as a whole as opposed to the good for the community as a whole to grant a temporary monopoly right in an attempt to encourage the production of the movie. Treating copyright as a property right is to totally short-circuit this attempt at balance.
The existence of electronic distribution means this balance needs to be re-thought. The tradeoff is different. The ability to make a copy so cheaply means that the amount of damage to society being done by the granted monopoly right is correspondingly greater. Even more people than previously might be able to enjoy the movie if only the monopoly right didn't exist.
There is no analogue in the world of physical property. Sure someone who doesn't have a pound of sugar might be able to derive a lot of value from having that pound. But in order for them to have it, it has to be taken from someone else who is also deriving value from having it.
Calling copyright 'intellectual property' totally casts the debate in terms that lead people to make poor decisions.
The idea of capitalism is to derive the overall greatest value to society as a whole from the distribution of various resources. It turns out that to do that it is best to let each individual actor assign their own values to various resources and each bargain with the others to gain the things they most value. This has various interesting problems in practice, but that's the basic idea.
Casting copyright and patents as 'property' totally skews how people think of them and prevents this calculation from being done appropriately.
I happen to know of a shop that was doing that in C++ 5 years ago. They were processing stock market transactions and managing something like 20% the full volume of the NYSE.
You can do that with J2EE and its frameworks. But I think those frameworks tend to make people settle into solutions that are sub-optimal because they discourage people from actually thinking about the problems they're trying to solve.
I've been thinking of a general architecture for a fully RESTful 2-phase commit mechanism that doesn't mandate any sort of framework at all behind it. Mostly seeing what horrible things are being done with SNMP these days made me think about how to do it. SNMP needs replacement (or at the very least a major overhaul and upgrade), and the biggest thing it needs is a way to set up complex changes to a switch or router as a single transaction.
I will have to look more at that. I find the Java language itself to be merely mildly irritating and overly verbose. And I really dislike the current JVMs that are out there. I'll be happy when there's a JVM that starts in less than a millisecond and takes less than 50M of memory to run decently.
But, my biggest vexation is the ponderous stupidity of most Java frameworks and how they simply refuse to even acknowledge that the world outside Java and its JVM even exists.
I would highly recommend either Python or Ruby, though my general preference is for Python. TCL is an awful tar pit put there to make it easy to spot academic things that aren't actually useful in reality. They all seem to get trapped in TCL. It's eerie.
My hatred of Java has nothing to do with speed. The platform has become a giant morass of 'enterprisey' 'solutions' that create more need for more 'solutions'. And all Java 'solutions' must somehow involve XML, because it's standard, and enterprisey.
Well, if that bothers you complain to the hardware manufacturers. Personally I've used Linux for years with boxes I've built without much attention to whether or not the hardware worked with the OS. I've only been bitten once, and even then a driver came out within a few months.
I'm guessing that most of the hardware involved is the sort of bottom-of-the-barrel hardware you get when you get something from a place like Dell or you go the extra-extra cheap route when buying stuff for a hand-built box.
If you want people in the Open Source community to make all kinds of compromises of this nature then what you really want is Windows. One of the reasons that OS is as horrible as it is is that every hardware manufacturer under the sun thinks they can hide horrible quality under proprietary drivers. It's a ghastly state of affairs, and I wouldn't buy hardware from a manufacturer who was too embarrassed by their awful design to release decent specs.
The nVidia driver is also not considered GPLONLY. Your kernel is considered 'tainted' if you use it. You will get no help or support from the kernel people if you have a kernel problem when your kernel is tainted.
Linus wants ndiswrapper to be in the same class. And he's right to. Maybe it's GPL, but it's whole purpose is to load stuff that isn't right into the kernel.
The review article doesn't make that really clear. Hmmm... I'll have to check it out. I'm actually in the market for storage like that that's much, much tinier than IronKey is, but I'll take bigger if that's all I can get.:-)
What I want to use it for is to store hard-drive encryption keys. I can just plug the IronKey into the system and configure LUKS to go look there for the password on bootup.
I apologize if I unfairly painted your product with a broad brush that I felt applied to all of them. The reviewer clearly didn't know how to separate good from bad or at least explain how to his audience.
One of them won't even tell you the full details of the algorithm they use, saying it's 'proprietary' which is another word for "It's secret and it doesn't actually work." in the security industry.
Not only that, but each and every single one of them uses software on my computer to do the encryption. I can get the same thing by using decent drive encryption software like dm-crypt and LUKS. And those are publicly viewable and peer reviewed so they're much more likely to be secure than some stupid random algorithm slapped together by a few techs they paid to do it out of the spare change jar. So that's just totally silly.
I was hoping for something where the encryption was really done in the drive itself and it required me to enter something on a little keypad attached to it in some way in order to decrypt anything. I bet the one that sounds like it might do that just causes the USB device to refuse to talk to the world unless you enter the right thing on the keypad. You could pull that thing apart, attach a few leads and I bet you could read every bit off there (including the PIN) in the clear.
Security isn't that hard to do right. But nobody seems to want to bother. They just want to slap the word on their product, make the user jump through a few hoops and call it good.
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Yes. Would you rather live in a country with laws or without them? In which do you have more freedom?
I consider it more like the constitution of the US which restricts the actions of government in order to keep people from voting themselves censorship or other such stupidities. It too restricts freedom in the strict sense. But in the broader sense it does more to guarantee freedom than to restrict it.
I find it really interesting that the most vocal proponents of the BSD license seem to be people who want to sell my own work back to me at an exorbitant markup because they've made a few secret special changes to it. The BSD license seems to me to be a great detriment to the continued freedom of my work.
The GPL is more free because it preserves freedom. The BSD license is less free because it allows that freedom to be taken away.
Ahh, so PostgresSQL's license is more free because it allows random commercial entities to take my hard work and start using it to create little monopolies and gouge their customers. Well, let me sign right up for that.
I do use sqlite though. *sigh* It's too darned useful and there's no GPL alternative. But at least I can redistribute any changes I make to it under a license that preserves freedom.
I refuse to use PostresSQL because its license is less free. If someone made a GPL fork of PostgresSQL I would then consider it.
This is a blatant distortion bordering on an outright lie.
MySQL community edition is licensed under the GNU GPL (version 2 even) and may be used inside any random commercial entity without having to distribute anything. And if you want to use MySQL in commercial software you may use it as long as you distribute source code for MySQL and any changes you have made to it.
It is true that the interface libraries are also covered by the GPL. But this can be gotten around easily enough by writing your own interface libraries, or having a GPLed thunk which speaks a proprietary protocol to your proprietary application and then uses the MySQL GPLed interface layer to talk to MySQL.
Personally, I consider PostgresSQL's license to be less free, and I'm disappointed in IBM for supporting it in any way. Ultimately IBM is throwing away their money by doing this. The article even tells you why PostgresSQL's license is less free. The company distributes proprietary extensions to PostgresSQL. They've essentially forked the code. If their proprietary extensions even become widely accepted and relied upon they have essentially rendered PostgresSQL no longer Free Software.
I'm surprised that IBM would be throwing away money on such a thing. They are essentially encouraging the development of another little monopolistic company making secret software that could ultimately hurt them very badly.
I agree very strongly with this. You are correct, this amounts to users volunteering to throttle their own bandwidth, and it will never work.
Another proposal would be for backbones and network interconnects to apply some sort of fairness discipline to traffic coming from the various networks. This would give ISPs incentive to throttle and prioritize appropriately. ISPs also need to modify their TOS to make it explicit that you have a burst bandwidth and a continuous bandwidth and that you cannot constantly expect to get the burst bandwidth.
Comcast and other cable company's sending fake RST packets is unconscionable and should be punished severely. But traffic shaping in order to ensure your network resources are fairly allocated to your customers is an excellent practice and should be encouraged.
Many P2P apps assign quality values to various peers they communicate with based on whether a peer as fed them bad data and how much bandwidth the other peer seems to have. Also, there are heuristics you can use to determine the 'nearness' of a peer in terms of network topology. These practices combined with traffic shaping should result in P2P apps largely pulling stuff from peers that are near them on the network and thereby using the available bandwidth much more efficiently.
I completely agree with you. Many times people say "If Microsoft did this... blah blah" and most of the time the comparison is completely silly. But this time it's spot on. And Apple is just as wrong to do it as Microsoft was (and is).
*nod* Most good software I've ever seen was designed to solve the specific needs of a very few people, often needs the software author h(im/er)self had. I think the focus group method is practically guaranteed to lead to mediocre or poor designs. There is nothing specific it's really trying to do, and it's hard to get enthusiastic over something and do a really good job on it when no individual seems all that excited over it.
I was worried that we might face more competition from Japan that we have. But now it's clear that they are taking steps to ensure that the vast majority of their citizens will never have net access. This is a great relief.
I'm largely OK with people using my ideas. For programming, most of the work I do for myself I distribute under the GPL. I encourage places I work for to distribute code that's not core to their business under the GPL, or if their business already includes a really significant service component, their core code. For my words, I would get annoyed if they were sold and/or plagiarized without my permission.
Mostly, I think for profit distribution should still be regulated via the legal system. People who distribute for money will end up advertising, there will be a money flow to trace, you won't have to violate the 4th amendment in order to find violators.
I think we should encourage people to avoid really excessive personal sharing of media via social norms, but not with the legal system. Things like Pirate Bay make me uncomfortable. Especially because they make a bunch of money from advertising.
I don't exactly think copyright needs to go away. But I think it should be leaky and the balance should be shifted a lot farther away from iron fisted control by the original creator. It should be possible to make a documentary about college students without tracking down the copyright holders for all the posters in the student's bedrooms.
I don't think I'll ever produce video. I think if I did I'd feel the same way about it as I would about my writing.
I refuse to debate anything with someone who persistently uses the word 'steal'. Especially when they previously popped out with a whole bunch of examples of real stealing and then equate it with this activity that is not stealing.
There is no common ground that can be found when you begin with language that is so fragrantly prejuidicial as end any discussion before it begins.
I would be happy to see no movies being produced and copyright for movies in its current form ended. Most movies produced are pieces of derivative garbage that are made by studios who are so interested in the profits they can extract from their monopoly rents that they care not for whether a movie has any artistic merit whatsoever.
I, in fact, want it to end. I want it utterly destroyed so that people who have your opinions and biases and refusal to even think about the problem from a different perspective are proven wrong. Because after it goes away, it will come back. People want movies. Some means of paying for their production will happen. Government protection of monopoly rents is not required for this to happen.
It might be that some sort of government protection or encouragement might prove helpful in some instances. But I do not think it is necessary, and all the caterwauling about this is basically a whole bunch of parasites who produce nothing useful and drag the quality down with their greed complaining that their method of parasitism is being rendered obsolete and the host is developing an immunity to their predation.
I am not a communist, and I think the concept of physical property has proven to be an excellent method of encouraging the creation of vast quantities of wealth. I think that same system for ideas is stifling and routinely destroys vast quantities of wealth.
It's not the government's job to prop up a broken business model. If the first copy is too expensive, then don't make it.
All of your other examples are strawmen that have nothing to do with anything. I'm not advocating mugging. When someone loses their ticket, they've lost their ticket. There are a limited number of seats in the theater. Taking them by force is not acceptable. And the same goes for all the other examples.
I've been working with it in NS2. The way it works there is pretty ugly in some respects because it's kind of iffy which thing is implemented in TCL and which in C++. You have to do these really hairy code searches all the time.
I like Python as an extension language. Things like Boost::Python make it really easy to tie C/C++ and Python together. And it's a lot faster and prettier than TCL. But Python is a more complex language than TCL.
I tend to feel that in general the market will follow demand. It can be painful in some ways to be a leader, but I don't think that it's worth switching away.
I guess my general recommendation on that would be if the userbase is small and shrinking, consider moving away. If it's really tiny, but growing, maybe you're a little too much on the edge and would be more comfortable switching away, and that's an individual call to make. If it's smallish but not tiny, and growing, you probably shouldn't switch away.
And, of course, the values for tiny and small are rather fuzzy.
I don't think it's theft. I merely believe that it results in sub-optimal results for the community as a whole. I don't really want to put effort into supporting something that's specifically designed to be contrary to my interests and to make it illegal for me to make it work in a manner that isn't.
It isn't theft.
And downloading a movie isn't theft either.
It's arguably doing damage to the community for the movie to not be freely available. The cost of the movie is likely too high for many people who might otherwise enjoy it. So the community as a whole is hurt by the value these people are not deriving from the movie because the monopoly right granted on its distribution makes the cost too high.
The idea is to trade off the damage to the community as a whole as opposed to the good for the community as a whole to grant a temporary monopoly right in an attempt to encourage the production of the movie. Treating copyright as a property right is to totally short-circuit this attempt at balance.
The existence of electronic distribution means this balance needs to be re-thought. The tradeoff is different. The ability to make a copy so cheaply means that the amount of damage to society being done by the granted monopoly right is correspondingly greater. Even more people than previously might be able to enjoy the movie if only the monopoly right didn't exist.
There is no analogue in the world of physical property. Sure someone who doesn't have a pound of sugar might be able to derive a lot of value from having that pound. But in order for them to have it, it has to be taken from someone else who is also deriving value from having it.
Calling copyright 'intellectual property' totally casts the debate in terms that lead people to make poor decisions.
The idea of capitalism is to derive the overall greatest value to society as a whole from the distribution of various resources. It turns out that to do that it is best to let each individual actor assign their own values to various resources and each bargain with the others to gain the things they most value. This has various interesting problems in practice, but that's the basic idea.
Casting copyright and patents as 'property' totally skews how people think of them and prevents this calculation from being done appropriately.
I happen to know of a shop that was doing that in C++ 5 years ago. They were processing stock market transactions and managing something like 20% the full volume of the NYSE.
You can do that with J2EE and its frameworks. But I think those frameworks tend to make people settle into solutions that are sub-optimal because they discourage people from actually thinking about the problems they're trying to solve.
I've been thinking of a general architecture for a fully RESTful 2-phase commit mechanism that doesn't mandate any sort of framework at all behind it. Mostly seeing what horrible things are being done with SNMP these days made me think about how to do it. SNMP needs replacement (or at the very least a major overhaul and upgrade), and the biggest thing it needs is a way to set up complex changes to a switch or router as a single transaction.
I will have to look more at that. I find the Java language itself to be merely mildly irritating and overly verbose. And I really dislike the current JVMs that are out there. I'll be happy when there's a JVM that starts in less than a millisecond and takes less than 50M of memory to run decently.
But, my biggest vexation is the ponderous stupidity of most Java frameworks and how they simply refuse to even acknowledge that the world outside Java and its JVM even exists.
I would highly recommend either Python or Ruby, though my general preference is for Python. TCL is an awful tar pit put there to make it easy to spot academic things that aren't actually useful in reality. They all seem to get trapped in TCL. It's eerie.
My hatred of Java has nothing to do with speed. The platform has become a giant morass of 'enterprisey' 'solutions' that create more need for more 'solutions'. And all Java 'solutions' must somehow involve XML, because it's standard, and enterprisey.
Well, if that bothers you complain to the hardware manufacturers. Personally I've used Linux for years with boxes I've built without much attention to whether or not the hardware worked with the OS. I've only been bitten once, and even then a driver came out within a few months.
I'm guessing that most of the hardware involved is the sort of bottom-of-the-barrel hardware you get when you get something from a place like Dell or you go the extra-extra cheap route when buying stuff for a hand-built box.
If you want people in the Open Source community to make all kinds of compromises of this nature then what you really want is Windows. One of the reasons that OS is as horrible as it is is that every hardware manufacturer under the sun thinks they can hide horrible quality under proprietary drivers. It's a ghastly state of affairs, and I wouldn't buy hardware from a manufacturer who was too embarrassed by their awful design to release decent specs.
The nVidia driver is also not considered GPLONLY. Your kernel is considered 'tainted' if you use it. You will get no help or support from the kernel people if you have a kernel problem when your kernel is tainted.
Linus wants ndiswrapper to be in the same class. And he's right to. Maybe it's GPL, but it's whole purpose is to load stuff that isn't right into the kernel.
Won't someone fix the title? It's just plain wrong. A non-commercial license is not Open Source.
The review article doesn't make that really clear. Hmmm... I'll have to check it out. I'm actually in the market for storage like that that's much, much tinier than IronKey is, but I'll take bigger if that's all I can get. :-)
What I want to use it for is to store hard-drive encryption keys. I can just plug the IronKey into the system and configure LUKS to go look there for the password on bootup.
I apologize if I unfairly painted your product with a broad brush that I felt applied to all of them. The reviewer clearly didn't know how to separate good from bad or at least explain how to his audience.
One of them won't even tell you the full details of the algorithm they use, saying it's 'proprietary' which is another word for "It's secret and it doesn't actually work." in the security industry.
Not only that, but each and every single one of them uses software on my computer to do the encryption. I can get the same thing by using decent drive encryption software like dm-crypt and LUKS. And those are publicly viewable and peer reviewed so they're much more likely to be secure than some stupid random algorithm slapped together by a few techs they paid to do it out of the spare change jar. So that's just totally silly.
I was hoping for something where the encryption was really done in the drive itself and it required me to enter something on a little keypad attached to it in some way in order to decrypt anything. I bet the one that sounds like it might do that just causes the USB device to refuse to talk to the world unless you enter the right thing on the keypad. You could pull that thing apart, attach a few leads and I bet you could read every bit off there (including the PIN) in the clear.
Security isn't that hard to do right. But nobody seems to want to bother. They just want to slap the word on their product, make the user jump through a few hoops and call it good.