I wonder how your boss would react if you told him his personnel management system needed improving, or his accounting methods were wrong. One can assume that his reaction would be that he has X years training in management and that he's more qualified to do it than you are.
True. However, my guess would be that the boss who insists that you use the same solutions that "everybody else" is using in the technical sphere is also basically just parroting what "everybody else" is doing in the management/business sphere.
You knew that you would be letting loose a tidal wave of flames against them.
What tidal wave of flames? I've seen a few here and there, but most responses have been reasonable. I've seen far more bile directed at Bruce than at Be, here.
My question is this: are there any non-MIT people who will rave on and on about how great LISP is?
<raises hand> I went to Georgia Tech. The class where LISP was introduced fundamentally changed the way I think about programming. Although I rarely ever write any 'real' code in LISP, the things I learned in that class and from dealing with the language have had a tremendous influence on the way I design and write software. I consider the experience to have been a key step in my making the transition from a hack who fools around with code to a skilled software developer.
Fast forward to the 21 century, we see history replaying itself -- now commoners are considered too stupid to program instead of too stupid to read.
A nice analogy, but it falls down in a crucial way: reading is a, well, "read-only" task. Programming, on the other hand, involves "writing" and creating. Unless you get into Burroughs-esque cutups and automatically generated texts, the skill required to write a piece of text is generally much greater than that required to read and comprehend it.
Finally, note that while most anyone who wants to can read the Bible today, the vast majority of the devout still depend on some spiritual leader to interpret the scripture for them.
... then why did they put CodeWarrior 5 for Linux on hold? Motorola is a business. They do what they do in order to make money, not because they want to support your cute little "Linux Everywhere" utopian ideal. They developed this system because they thought it would make money for them. Presumably, CW5 for Linux is on hold because they don't think it will make money for them. There's a good chance they're right. Linux is a system developed by programmers for programmers, so there's a profusion of free development tools available. How many people do you think will actually buy CW5 for Linux? Not me - I somehow doubt it offers significant advantages over emacs+gcc+gdb.
Wait.. better idea.. I think there should be a vote on every article Katz wants to post.. he gives us the title, and we get to vote on whether it gets posted, and how many words he gets to post it with. That should keep him in check.
Such a voting system already exists: It's the number of comments posted in response to a Jon Katz article. More comments means more eyeballs. And more eyeballs means more ad revenues.
If you don't like Katz, don't read the articles he posts (maybe even filter him out entirely), and don't post comments on such articles. And most of all, don't waste your time complaining. The Slashdot staff doesn't much care that you're posting complaints, so long as you're posting something.
I'm a little suspicious that none of the screenshots are showing any scheduling programs or other PDA-mainstays.
My guess would be that they're trying to emphasize the various abilities that this device has that differentiate it from the Palms. The personal-organizer type software should be relatively trivial - I can't imagine them shipping the thing without it.
Re:If you want ease-of-use over choice, get an iMa
on
Making Linux Beautiful
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· Score: 1
If uniformity is what you want, you'll be far happier with a G4 running OSX - the standardization runs straight down to hardware (plug and play) - you'll be very happy.
Why the hell wouldn't any sane person prefer ease-of-use over choice? I suppose the average Slashdotter will never understand this, but computers are tools. What do we do with tools? Mainly, we use them. Thus, the most important attribute of a tool is its utility, not its appearance. Beyond a certain point, putting time into customizing your GUI is like going out into the garage and making your toolbox look 'unique' with spray-paint and decals, instead of using the tools inside to fix your car. My Craftsman toolbox looks just like thousands of other Craftsman toolboxes owned by thousands of other people. And you know what? I don't mind a bit. It's what I can do with the tools inside that counts to me.
John, How about a verification program a la "Beam-it" that runs alongside Quake, as a type of server. (Note that the report on Beam-It did state that the methods of verification used do not require closed-source software to remain secure. However, a closed-source program like quakelives, improperly made from the Quake source code without proper licensing is probably inappropriate.) If queried, it could check signatures against that of a known-okay binary.
An open-source Beam-It might work, but an open-source loader/verifier for Quake wouldn't. Here's why: We don't know which sectors of the CD that the Beam-It server will request during the verification process. Which means that for every single CD we want to Beam, we have to have the CD's entire data stream available. This makes it unreasonable to fake ownership of CDs: you end up having to download several hundred megabytes of data for each one. This sheer quantity of data is what makes Beam-It pretty secure.
The size of a legitimate Quake executable is miniscule in comparison to a CD, and you only need to download it *once*. If the loader/verifier for Quake is open source and works like Beam-It, all that a would-be cheater has to do is hack up a version of the loader/verifier that gets data for the verification process from a legal binary, but actually loads a modified one. If the loader/verifier is open source, this is pretty trivial.
I think perhaps a rating system would help out/. tremendously. You could "moderate" the articles you like up and those you thought irrevelant down.
A defacto article rating already exists: The count of comments in response to an article. Of course, it's not perfectly accurate, thanks to trolls and offtopic stuff (like this comment and the one I'm responding to). But it's as good as any explicit "rating system" would be.
Funny thing, but people would like to look at software creation as a building/engennering, but few as i do prefer to look at it, more from writing standpoint. Few good lessons in writing as some of smart people I know say, would do better to a programmer, than whole year of engeneering and physics courses.
Absolutely. While there are clearly big differences between writing an essay and writing a program, there are big similarities, as well - at least, if your goal in your coding is to produce something halfway maintainable. Remember, program code doesn't just get read by compilers - it gets read by other people, as well. And in the long term, readability by other humans is of paramount importance. Someone who can't produce a clearly-written, convincing, well-organized essay will probably also be unable to produce clean, readable, well-organized, and relatively defect-free source code.
That said, I do think that all the hard math and engineering skills are important for good programming, as well - which is probably why truly great programmers are so rare: it takes a rarely-seen combination of 'hard' and 'soft' skills.
You didn't purchase or license the software component that decrypts the MPEG stream.
If software to do that decryption is available under a 'free' license (i.e. DeCSS, I believe), you do not need to purchase such a license. And since the CSS algorithm is not patented, there is no need for authors of software like DeCSS to purchase a license to use that decryption algorithm in their software.
I appload the Salon reporter that made Valenti spit what he actaully is afraid of. And what he actually wants.
Round of applause to Salon for this one.
I disagree. I think it was mostly a softball interview, especially where DeCSS was concerned. Valenti was asked what he thought constituted fair use of DVDs, and replied "Any use by which you buy it at a price." At this point, the interviewer could have pointed out that CSS made many such fair uses of DVDs difficult or impossible, and that DeCSS re-enabled consumers to make those fair uses. (The example of the person who wants to copy a movie to his laptop hard drive so that he can watch it on an airplane without having to spin the DVD drive would be good.)
It would have been great to force Valenti to admit that yes, the MPAA is happy to prevent consumers from doing various perfectly legal and legitimate things with movies they've bought and paid for.
Come on folks! You can't have it both ways! Either copyright does not matter and people can do whatever they want with open source software, including making it closed, or copyright does matter and the big companies (and little companies, and everyone else) gets to enforce their copyrights.
Absolutely. But would you say that it was okay for the police to run down dozens of innocent bystanders in pursuit of a murderer? Of course not. What the MPAA is doing goes far above and beyond what is reasonable for enforcement of copyright.
The GPL doesn't attempt to restrict fair use - you can take a piece of GPL'd software and do whatever you want with it, "in the privacy of your own home", so to speak. It's only when you want to distribute something based on GPL'd software that its restrictions come into play. The MPAA, on the other hand, would gladly restrict plenty of uses of their copyrighted material that have nothing to do with distribution.
Yes, copyright matters. But so does fair use. It's incredibly disingenuous of you to pretend that anyone who supports the availability of tools that can help to violate copyright (but that also have legitimate fair-use applications) is an opponent of copyright.
So I think we have to educate our lawmakers here. Acknowledge copy protection technology as a legitimate means to legitimate ends, but emphasise that these schemes give content produces an unprecedented degree of control over the end use of their products. This degree of control was probably not forseen by the lawmakers who voted for DMCA (I don't comment on those who actually wrote the clauses, or the companies who lobbied for it). Hence technological copy control should only be supported by the law where it permits fair use. We can emphasise this by demonstrating copy protection schemes which permit fair use. We are good at technology: that bit should be easy.
I agree that the law needs to take copy control measures into account, with an eye towards defending fair use, rather than the intellectual 'property' of copyright holders. But I think you're mistaken to think that technological measures that really protect against illegal copying while permitting fair use are 'easy'. If you can view it, you can copy it - and this is especially true when you physically control the hardware used to view it.
Here's how I'd like to see the law handle copyright, copy protection, and fair use: If a copyright holder publishes a work in a 'shrinkwrap' form that includes technological measures that deliberately make some fair uses difficult or impossible (i.e. most copy protection schemes), the copyright is rendered null-and-void. So copyright holders can attempt to 'protect' works themselves, or they can ask the government to help them enforce copyright, but they can't do both. Make them face a tradeoff not unlike the trade secret/patent tradeoff. Copyright should not be permitted when the copyright holder attempts to limit the (effective) rights of the buyer further than the law already does, just as patents should not be granted to inventors who are unwilling to disclose how their invention works.
Intel is currently shipping 800MHz chips. So by Moore's law, they should have 3.2 GHz in about 36 months. If IBM had a 3.3 GHz CPU shipping in exactly 36 months (3 years), Intel would only be 3% slower.
<sigh> Look, Moore's law is an observed phenomenon, not a fundamental rule, and it is observed in the industry as a whole, not necessarily within individual companies. If Intel doesn't come up with technologies allowing them ot go to 3.2 GHz within 3 years, then no, they won't have a 3.2 GHz then. It's by no means inevitable that they will come up with such technologies.
Here's a thought on this 'multi-clock' CPU of IBM's: What clock will they advertise it at? Presumably the clock of the fastest part. Still - maybe, just maybe, we'll start seeing marketing move away from clock speed as a meaningful measurement of chip performance. We can always hope.
An interesting idea occurred to me recently when I went out to find the DeCSS source...I flipped to altavista, and found plenty of sites with it. Now, the DVD-CCA can do the same. What I was thinking of doing was creating a same-sized, same-named file with a whatever miscellaneous.c and such files one might want to include.
This idea occured to me at one point, but I rejected it. Remember, the point of mirroring the source everywhere isn't just to piss off the MPAA and give them more defendants to deal with: It's also to make sure that the source stays available for people who want to learn from it or use it. Lots of bogus copies will be just as much an impairment to those people as to the MPAA.
Isn't it possible that they just created a database with random sectors sampled from each cd, and then check the client for these specific sectors?
Sure it is. But there's another possibility that lets them ask for arbitrary sectors while keeping their database size managable: A one-way hash, like MD5. They divide the CD into chunks of, say, 8192 bits (1KB), and compute and store the MD5 key (which is 128 bits) of each chunk. Then, they request an arbitrary chunk from the client, and check that the returned value has the same MD5 key as the one stored in the database for that chunk. Under this scheme, the verification data for each CD only consumes 1/64th of the data required for the CD itself. This is in fact considerably smaller than the MP3s of the music that they're keeping around in order to stream it to listeners.
The GPL'ed piece of software is NOT the player, its the bit that authenticates your ownership of the CD to the webserver. The webserver sends the tracks of those CDs you're authenticated for in plain old MP3 streams, for which you can use anything you'd like.
Actually, this is a little disturbing. I don't say this as an OS fanatic, but as someone who thinks that mp3.com is doing neat stuff, and would like to see them beat the RIAA.
If their security depends on a closed-source library, maybe it's not so strong. Several people here have described an authentication scheme they believe is being used: The server requests random blocks of data from the CD, and compares the data returned by the client to its entries in some database. This is pretty robust, and open-sourcing it won't significantly weaken it: any would-be cracker still has to be able to send back the correct blocks to the server. And if the server can request any arbitrary block, then passing around a crack for the system is no easier than passing around raw WAV files of the CDs that the crack is supposed to let you aquire. Which is sorta stupid.
So if they're unwilling to open the authentication library, then I'm wondering if it isn't because they are using some less-robust scheme, such as only storing a relatively small and predefined set of blocks for each CD.
Of course, another possibility is that they kept the library closed source because it will provide a greater appearance of security in the eyes of the court - security through obscurity makes a lot of sense to the technologically unsophisticated. If they open-sourced it, no doubt the RIAA would attempt to portray this act as helpful to crackers.
Actually, IIRC, anything you can do in C++ can be done in C. (At least this used to be the case way back when I was writing C++ code) Remember that the first few generations of C++ compilers were actually just preprocessors which translated C++ source code into pure C source, which was then fed to the C compiler.
Yeah. And anything you can do in either C or C++ you can also do in assembler. Or hey, you could just build a turing machine.
Question is, would you want to?
Stuff like polymorphism is a lot cleaner syntactically in C++ than in C.
It's still designed to keep out those the DVD CCA doesn't approve of. The encryption does nothing to prevent piracy, only to maintain DVD CCA's complete and total control over the technology. Just the way they like it.
The encryption and licensing scheme does help to prevent piracy: it allows them to prevent anyone from selling a $200 bit-for-bit writer. Piracy will almost certainly be more common when such a piece of hardware is available. Not that this justifies the MPAA's tactics in responding to the crack.
The encryption doesn't give them complete and total control over the technology. Only a judge's decision to punish someone who has reverse engineered the encryption scheme will do that.
To make sure that no one beside their chosen few can make players to play DVDs (read: those that pay the toll) they encrypt them, and only give the keys to those who pony up the dough.
The part about "those who pony up the dough" is false. From the DVD FAQ:
Makers of equipment used to display DVD-Video (drives, chips, display boards, etc.) must license CSS. There is no charge for a CSS license, but it's currently a lengthy process, so it's recommended that interested parties apply as soon as possible.
The point of CSS licensing isn't to make money for the DVD CCA. It's to allow them to prevent anyone from selling a cheap writer that can do bit-for-bit copies.
Suppose everyone boycotts DVDs and it DOES work. Sales plummet. What will MPAA announce? "Sales are down x% since the eeeevil pirating program DeCSS was released. Obviously everyone's pirating now, and for the good of the world we must put Johansen on death row!".
I don't think this is likely. The only way a boycott will make DVD sales plummet is if a fair number of people participate. And if enough people participate to make a difference, then awareness of the boycott will be widespread enough that the MPAA's "See what DeCSS is doing to us!" spin won't fly.
You are right that comparing MHz-for Mhz doesn't make sense, but what the original poster said was that the 700 MHz chip attains the performance of a 500 MHz Pentium. That sucks, right? Who wants to buy a chip with that level of relative performance?
You seem to have missed my point entirely. No, a 700MHz chip that performs like a 500MHz Pentium does not suck, if its price is similar to or less than that of a 500 MHz Pentium. Why should I care that a chip with P/500 performance actually has a 700MHz clock, as long as that chip costs no more than a P/500?
Or are you simply trying to say that P/500 performance sucks?
Where can you buy this T-shirt? at Copyleft, of course
He asked for a t-shirt with the DeCSS source code. If you look closely at the t-shirt in the link, you can see that it is a source file named "css_descramble.c". This is in fact a part of the "css_auth" source code package. When I view my copy of that file, the header reads rather clearly "Copyright 1999 Derek Fawcus". Because, you see, this source was not written by Jon Johansen, and is not a part of DeCSS. My understanding is that this code was in fact developed by disassembling the DeCSS binary and analyzing the assembler, because it was never released except in binary form. So until you can show me the DeCSS source code (i.e. the stuff that Johansen wrote), I'm going to conclude that a desire to play DVDs under Linux was not his motive.
I'm not saying this because I'm out to trash Johansen or DeCSS, or to support the MPAA - I'm not. But I think that by claiming that Johansen's goal was to watch DVDs under Linux, and not to duplicate DVDs, we're implicitly agreeing with the MPAA's (false) assertion that any duplication is illegal, immoral, and fattening. Further, DeCSS quite obviously is useful for duplicating DVDs, and continuing to shout otherwise only makes it look like we're evading the issue and weakens our case. Instead, we need to confront the issue head on: Yes, DeCSS is useful for duplicating DVDs. What of it? Duplication of copyrighted material is not intrinsically illegal - under fair use rules, making backups and such is clearly a legal activity. To talk about Linux compatability or otherwise avoid acknowledging DeCSS' utility for duplication is to implicitly capitulate on the issue of fair use rights. These are far more important to me than the ability to watch DVDs under Linux.
Here's a clue: The MPAA isn't doing this because they're a bunch of big corporate meanies who want to keep you from playing DVDs on your free anti-corporate OS. They're doing this because it's a way for them to get a rope around the neck of fair use. By going on about Linux compatibility, you're ultimately playing into their hands - you might succeed in beating them this time, but next time they go after fair use, we won't have Linux compatability or some other red herring to use as a shield, and we'll discover that most people don't comprehend our advocacy of fair use rights because we failed to defend them this time around.
Slashdot Mirror
True. However, my guess would be that the boss who insists that you use the same solutions that "everybody else" is using in the technical sphere is also basically just parroting what "everybody else" is doing in the management/business sphere.
What tidal wave of flames? I've seen a few here and there, but most responses have been reasonable. I've seen far more bile directed at Bruce than at Be, here.
<raises hand> I went to Georgia Tech. The class where LISP was introduced fundamentally changed the way I think about programming. Although I rarely ever write any 'real' code in LISP, the things I learned in that class and from dealing with the language have had a tremendous influence on the way I design and write software. I consider the experience to have been a key step in my making the transition from a hack who fools around with code to a skilled software developer.
A nice analogy, but it falls down in a crucial way: reading is a, well, "read-only" task. Programming, on the other hand, involves "writing" and creating. Unless you get into Burroughs-esque cutups and automatically generated texts, the skill required to write a piece of text is generally much greater than that required to read and comprehend it.
Finally, note that while most anyone who wants to can read the Bible today, the vast majority of the devout still depend on some spiritual leader to interpret the scripture for them.
... then why did they put CodeWarrior 5 for Linux on hold? Motorola is a business. They do what they do in order to make money, not because they want to support your cute little "Linux Everywhere" utopian ideal. They developed this system because they thought it would make money for them. Presumably, CW5 for Linux is on hold because they don't think it will make money for them. There's a good chance they're right. Linux is a system developed by programmers for programmers, so there's a profusion of free development tools available. How many people do you think will actually buy CW5 for Linux? Not me - I somehow doubt it offers significant advantages over emacs+gcc+gdb.
Such a voting system already exists: It's the number of comments posted in response to a Jon Katz article. More comments means more eyeballs. And more eyeballs means more ad revenues.
If you don't like Katz, don't read the articles he posts (maybe even filter him out entirely), and don't post comments on such articles. And most of all, don't waste your time complaining. The Slashdot staff doesn't much care that you're posting complaints, so long as you're posting something.
My guess would be that they're trying to emphasize the various abilities that this device has that differentiate it from the Palms. The personal-organizer type software should be relatively trivial - I can't imagine them shipping the thing without it.
Why the hell wouldn't any sane person prefer ease-of-use over choice? I suppose the average Slashdotter will never understand this, but computers are tools. What do we do with tools? Mainly, we use them. Thus, the most important attribute of a tool is its utility, not its appearance. Beyond a certain point, putting time into customizing your GUI is like going out into the garage and making your toolbox look 'unique' with spray-paint and decals, instead of using the tools inside to fix your car. My Craftsman toolbox looks just like thousands of other Craftsman toolboxes owned by thousands of other people. And you know what? I don't mind a bit. It's what I can do with the tools inside that counts to me.
An open-source Beam-It might work, but an open-source loader/verifier for Quake wouldn't. Here's why: We don't know which sectors of the CD that the Beam-It server will request during the verification process. Which means that for every single CD we want to Beam, we have to have the CD's entire data stream available. This makes it unreasonable to fake ownership of CDs: you end up having to download several hundred megabytes of data for each one. This sheer quantity of data is what makes Beam-It pretty secure.
The size of a legitimate Quake executable is miniscule in comparison to a CD, and you only need to download it *once*. If the loader/verifier for Quake is open source and works like Beam-It, all that a would-be cheater has to do is hack up a version of the loader/verifier that gets data for the verification process from a legal binary, but actually loads a modified one. If the loader/verifier is open source, this is pretty trivial.
A defacto article rating already exists: The count of comments in response to an article. Of course, it's not perfectly accurate, thanks to trolls and offtopic stuff (like this comment and the one I'm responding to). But it's as good as any explicit "rating system" would be.
Absolutely. While there are clearly big differences between writing an essay and writing a program, there are big similarities, as well - at least, if your goal in your coding is to produce something halfway maintainable. Remember, program code doesn't just get read by compilers - it gets read by other people, as well. And in the long term, readability by other humans is of paramount importance. Someone who can't produce a clearly-written, convincing, well-organized essay will probably also be unable to produce clean, readable, well-organized, and relatively defect-free source code.
That said, I do think that all the hard math and engineering skills are important for good programming, as well - which is probably why truly great programmers are so rare: it takes a rarely-seen combination of 'hard' and 'soft' skills.
If software to do that decryption is available under a 'free' license (i.e. DeCSS, I believe), you do not need to purchase such a license. And since the CSS algorithm is not patented, there is no need for authors of software like DeCSS to purchase a license to use that decryption algorithm in their software.
Round of applause to Salon for this one.
I disagree. I think it was mostly a softball interview, especially where DeCSS was concerned. Valenti was asked what he thought constituted fair use of DVDs, and replied "Any use by which you buy it at a price." At this point, the interviewer could have pointed out that CSS made many such fair uses of DVDs difficult or impossible, and that DeCSS re-enabled consumers to make those fair uses. (The example of the person who wants to copy a movie to his laptop hard drive so that he can watch it on an airplane without having to spin the DVD drive would be good.)
It would have been great to force Valenti to admit that yes, the MPAA is happy to prevent consumers from doing various perfectly legal and legitimate things with movies they've bought and paid for.
Absolutely. But would you say that it was okay for the police to run down dozens of innocent bystanders in pursuit of a murderer? Of course not. What the MPAA is doing goes far above and beyond what is reasonable for enforcement of copyright.
The GPL doesn't attempt to restrict fair use - you can take a piece of GPL'd software and do whatever you want with it, "in the privacy of your own home", so to speak. It's only when you want to distribute something based on GPL'd software that its restrictions come into play. The MPAA, on the other hand, would gladly restrict plenty of uses of their copyrighted material that have nothing to do with distribution.
Yes, copyright matters. But so does fair use. It's incredibly disingenuous of you to pretend that anyone who supports the availability of tools that can help to violate copyright (but that also have legitimate fair-use applications) is an opponent of copyright.
I agree that the law needs to take copy control measures into account, with an eye towards defending fair use, rather than the intellectual 'property' of copyright holders. But I think you're mistaken to think that technological measures that really protect against illegal copying while permitting fair use are 'easy'. If you can view it, you can copy it - and this is especially true when you physically control the hardware used to view it.
Here's how I'd like to see the law handle copyright, copy protection, and fair use: If a copyright holder publishes a work in a 'shrinkwrap' form that includes technological measures that deliberately make some fair uses difficult or impossible (i.e. most copy protection schemes), the copyright is rendered null-and-void. So copyright holders can attempt to 'protect' works themselves, or they can ask the government to help them enforce copyright, but they can't do both. Make them face a tradeoff not unlike the trade secret/patent tradeoff. Copyright should not be permitted when the copyright holder attempts to limit the (effective) rights of the buyer further than the law already does, just as patents should not be granted to inventors who are unwilling to disclose how their invention works.
<sigh> Look, Moore's law is an observed phenomenon, not a fundamental rule, and it is observed in the industry as a whole, not necessarily within individual companies. If Intel doesn't come up with technologies allowing them ot go to 3.2 GHz within 3 years, then no, they won't have a 3.2 GHz then. It's by no means inevitable that they will come up with such technologies.
Here's a thought on this 'multi-clock' CPU of IBM's: What clock will they advertise it at? Presumably the clock of the fastest part. Still - maybe, just maybe, we'll start seeing marketing move away from clock speed as a meaningful measurement of chip performance. We can always hope.
This idea occured to me at one point, but I rejected it. Remember, the point of mirroring the source everywhere isn't just to piss off the MPAA and give them more defendants to deal with: It's also to make sure that the source stays available for people who want to learn from it or use it. Lots of bogus copies will be just as much an impairment to those people as to the MPAA.
Sure it is. But there's another possibility that lets them ask for arbitrary sectors while keeping their database size managable: A one-way hash, like MD5. They divide the CD into chunks of, say, 8192 bits (1KB), and compute and store the MD5 key (which is 128 bits) of each chunk. Then, they request an arbitrary chunk from the client, and check that the returned value has the same MD5 key as the one stored in the database for that chunk. Under this scheme, the verification data for each CD only consumes 1/64th of the data required for the CD itself. This is in fact considerably smaller than the MP3s of the music that they're keeping around in order to stream it to listeners.
Actually, this is a little disturbing. I don't say this as an OS fanatic, but as someone who thinks that mp3.com is doing neat stuff, and would like to see them beat the RIAA.
If their security depends on a closed-source library, maybe it's not so strong. Several people here have described an authentication scheme they believe is being used: The server requests random blocks of data from the CD, and compares the data returned by the client to its entries in some database. This is pretty robust, and open-sourcing it won't significantly weaken it: any would-be cracker still has to be able to send back the correct blocks to the server. And if the server can request any arbitrary block, then passing around a crack for the system is no easier than passing around raw WAV files of the CDs that the crack is supposed to let you aquire. Which is sorta stupid.
So if they're unwilling to open the authentication library, then I'm wondering if it isn't because they are using some less-robust scheme, such as only storing a relatively small and predefined set of blocks for each CD.
Of course, another possibility is that they kept the library closed source because it will provide a greater appearance of security in the eyes of the court - security through obscurity makes a lot of sense to the technologically unsophisticated. If they open-sourced it, no doubt the RIAA would attempt to portray this act as helpful to crackers.
Yeah. And anything you can do in either C or C++ you can also do in assembler. Or hey, you could just build a turing machine.
Question is, would you want to?
Stuff like polymorphism is a lot cleaner syntactically in C++ than in C.
The encryption and licensing scheme does help to prevent piracy: it allows them to prevent anyone from selling a $200 bit-for-bit writer. Piracy will almost certainly be more common when such a piece of hardware is available. Not that this justifies the MPAA's tactics in responding to the crack.
The encryption doesn't give them complete and total control over the technology. Only a judge's decision to punish someone who has reverse engineered the encryption scheme will do that.
The part about "those who pony up the dough" is false. From the DVD FAQ:
The point of CSS licensing isn't to make money for the DVD CCA. It's to allow them to prevent anyone from selling a cheap writer that can do bit-for-bit copies.
I don't think this is likely. The only way a boycott will make DVD sales plummet is if a fair number of people participate. And if enough people participate to make a difference, then awareness of the boycott will be widespread enough that the MPAA's "See what DeCSS is doing to us!" spin won't fly.
You seem to have missed my point entirely. No, a 700MHz chip that performs like a 500MHz Pentium does not suck, if its price is similar to or less than that of a 500 MHz Pentium. Why should I care that a chip with P/500 performance actually has a 700MHz clock, as long as that chip costs no more than a P/500?
Or are you simply trying to say that P/500 performance sucks?
at Copyleft, of course
He asked for a t-shirt with the DeCSS source code. If you look closely at the t-shirt in the link, you can see that it is a source file named "css_descramble.c". This is in fact a part of the "css_auth" source code package. When I view my copy of that file, the header reads rather clearly "Copyright 1999 Derek Fawcus". Because, you see, this source was not written by Jon Johansen, and is not a part of DeCSS. My understanding is that this code was in fact developed by disassembling the DeCSS binary and analyzing the assembler, because it was never released except in binary form. So until you can show me the DeCSS source code (i.e. the stuff that Johansen wrote), I'm going to conclude that a desire to play DVDs under Linux was not his motive.
I'm not saying this because I'm out to trash Johansen or DeCSS, or to support the MPAA - I'm not. But I think that by claiming that Johansen's goal was to watch DVDs under Linux, and not to duplicate DVDs, we're implicitly agreeing with the MPAA's (false) assertion that any duplication is illegal, immoral, and fattening. Further, DeCSS quite obviously is useful for duplicating DVDs, and continuing to shout otherwise only makes it look like we're evading the issue and weakens our case. Instead, we need to confront the issue head on: Yes, DeCSS is useful for duplicating DVDs. What of it? Duplication of copyrighted material is not intrinsically illegal - under fair use rules, making backups and such is clearly a legal activity. To talk about Linux compatability or otherwise avoid acknowledging DeCSS' utility for duplication is to implicitly capitulate on the issue of fair use rights. These are far more important to me than the ability to watch DVDs under Linux.
Here's a clue: The MPAA isn't doing this because they're a bunch of big corporate meanies who want to keep you from playing DVDs on your free anti-corporate OS. They're doing this because it's a way for them to get a rope around the neck of fair use. By going on about Linux compatibility, you're ultimately playing into their hands - you might succeed in beating them this time, but next time they go after fair use, we won't have Linux compatability or some other red herring to use as a shield, and we'll discover that most people don't comprehend our advocacy of fair use rights because we failed to defend them this time around.