I don't think that I'd feel entirely comfortable turning my back on somebody who would cheat even without a reward...
People who cheat for rewards are abhuman scum best recycled for their valuable phosphorus; but at least they exhibit a certain value-rational predictability. Somebody who would cheat purely for its own sake...
So you meant to tell me a device with a microphone, speaker, and wi-fi connection can be used to make VOIP calls!! Wow--what will folks figure out next? When you guys get around to discovering stuff like Skype, Google Voice, etc--let me keep sleeping...
Unfortunately, the 'news' in this story is more along the lines of "Wow, consumer electronics device with microphne, speaker, and wi-fi connection not cryptographically crippled so hard that you can't do obviously useful things with it!"...
In our delightsome world of carrier locked handsets, mandatory app stores, and rampant consoleitis, the fact that a device shows signs of matching its technical capabilities, not its profit maximizing capabilities, is beginning to count as news...
Closer parallels might be seen in the 1980 Iranian embassy siege(which I think is the last time the UK sent forces into an embassy over its owner's objections six days after it had been taken over by gunmen, and only after they had started to kill hostages) or the 1984 Libyan embassy siege, where somebody inside the Libyan embassy in London fired an automatic weapon into a crowd wounding several and killing a police officer and the UK didn't storm the embassy. They did declare the whole lot personae non gratae and tell them to GTFO; but all were allowed to leave and the matter largely languished thereafter.
For good or ill, storming embassies is seen as very serious business(in our case, of course, just remember how big a deal it was when the Iranians stormed our embassy. We were pissed...
I would say that there are two issues that don't get consciously acknowledged enough; but that are assumed when a 'what, when, and where' style privacy expectation is formed...
The first is ubiquity(which is almost identical to cost, over a modest time horizon). Being shadowed by a cop, say, costs nontrivial money. I don't have an absolute protection against being shadowed; but I do have a reasonable expectation that I would only be followed if there were some reason to go to the trouble(an analogous case might be the assorted awkwardness that facebook photo-tagging has spawned: Obviously, I can't claim to have any privacy right to the visible fact that I showed up at a party; but, historically, my presence there would likely only be remembered by my friends, or if I were a celebrity, or if I did a naked kegstand. Now, even the most tedious attendees are recorded in trivially searchable form).
The second is inference: With more advanced technology, you can gain new insights from old data. The hunting-grow-ops-with-FLIRcams cases are a good example: Do you have a privacy right to the outside of your house? Umm, it's outside and visible from the street... How about the inside? Now, with new imaging technology, I can draw strong inferences about the inside of your house just by looking at the outside. Once the fancy terahertz stuff gets cheaper and more compact, this should get even more dramatic. In these cases, new technology means that information in which I don't have a privacy interest can now be, with some clever math, turned into information that I do have a privacy interest in. This presents a bit of a problem.
Your license plate is always showing. I don't understand how anyone can claim it's private.
I don't know why we need to go through this every damn time; but here goes:
Tracking and correlation. Yes, obviously, a license plate is visible, and passers-by have always been able to see them. However, without a network of passers-by observing license plates on every corner, and chattering amongst themselves about which ones are seen where, when, that means almost nothing. Only the most overtly memorable and/or suspicious license plate would merit accurate memory of time/place, much less multiple time/place recordings allowing for inferences about travel.
With automation and machine vision, highly accurate recording and correlation across fairly broad areas, in space and time, becomes relatively easy and cheap.
This isn't specific to Skydrive, it's a defect of other 'cloud storage' things as well; but why the hell would I want an "app" on my desktop for something that is supposed to be a filesystem?
Why would I use an application-specific re-implementation of things like 'search' and 'metadata display'? That's just perverse. I can understand that, if you need a UI that works in just about any browser, with download links and a little xmlhttprequest upload box, for basic just-need-to-grab-that-file-to-print-it-out type needs; but a desktop "app"?
Is it too hard for Microsoft to expose their own service as a filesystem?
Verizon has built a system where it is cost-effective to track every single $.10 text message and minute of call time; but it costs $5/month, forever, to keep a database field set to 'no' rather than 'yes'... Surely this is entirely plausible, no?
'if a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal.'
So, anything made of reasonably ordinary matter at a temperature greater than zero Kelvins doesn't enjoy fourth amendment protection? Am I going to have to start using neutrinos as drug mules?
It's always a little strange to see the 'New York to London' figure given for something that is fairly clearly intended for blunt-force diplomacy, not passenger travel.
We ditched the Concorde years ago because there weren't enough customers to make flying that fast economic.
Cheap petrochemicals are one of the most vital foundations of modern technological civilization, making possible(and helping to set the price and availability of) virtually anything everyone who isn't a subsistence mud farmer interacts with day to day.
Brand A fast food chicken products are, roughly as comestible as Brand B fast food chicken products.
Nope, no significant difference there, must be ironic.
Discrete video cards are a tiny slice of the market(albeit a tiny slice that tends to spend more money; but still tiny.)
On the integrated side, Intel chipsets don't have full hardware decode(substantially earlier ones had support for certain video-related math; but you still need a patent-licenced h.264 software decoder on top to actually decode) until the G45+(GMAX4500HD) which hit as a comparatively high price part in latish 2008.
Nvidia and ATI integrated graphics start supporting it a bit earlier; but aren't as common. There are just A Lot of XP boxes with seriously bland intel GMAs out there...
XP doesn't, not sure about Vista(and there may be some ghastly mess with 'business' and 'home basic' vs. 'home premium' or some nonsense).
Generally, though, the bet among pragmatists seems to be that, sooner or later, Mozilla will go down the 'just expose platform's preferred media decode system' road(though that would increase the amount of platform specific code, and would actually gimp support for things like webM and ogg vorbis/FLAC, since those tend not to show up by default in quicktime or directshow). Mobile is an unsurprising starting point, since the delta(in performance and battery life) between hardware decoded and software decoded-on-some-horrid-little-ARM is so dramatic; but the bet seems to be that the desktop version will probably go that way at some point.
True enough.(though, given that the treaty is probably not intended to grant all broadcast rights to Akamai and their ilk, or to petty regional affiliates of broadcasters, I wouldn't be too surprised to see some hilarious/alarming overbroad definition of what 'broadcasting' actually is, specifically intended to ensure that the exciting new rights accrue directly to the top, without any accidentally being lodged in the middlemen who just do boring things like 'making the broadcast work'. Since it is also likely being written by people who either don't understand bittorrent or who consider it to be on par with leprosy and chemical weapons, it may or may not have that use case very clearly laid out...)
I have no reason to doubt the power of Adobe's marketing department; but server-side transcoding seems unlikely to be a very lucrative niche. Flash has supported h.264 video for a while now(since somewhere in the 8.x or 9.x window, I think) and much of the 'flash video' on the web, even if it still has a.swf or.flv extension, often turns out to be h.264. In that case, the only change they'll need to make is to the site code: instead of the "detect flash, if flash detected, play, else, tell them to go download flash", they'll need "detect flash, if flash detected, play, else, HTML5 play".
What will be interesting is if, for those customers who actually use the fancy 'flash video' features(RTMPe, anything DRM related, whatever 'adaptive streaming' sauce Adobe may have offered) will now have the exciting opportunity to purchase the Adobe Video Client SDK for Android in order to build apps to replace their now nonfunctional websites...
"Mozilla decided that, where available, Firefox should take advantage of the media decoding capabilities supplied by the underlying hardware and operating system. This approach means that Mozilla won’t have to license patent-encumbered codecs or include built-in decoders in the browser—it can just use the decoding capabilities that are already present in relevant environments."
Given that the vast majority of smartphones seem to be based on SoCs with hardware h.264 decoding as an option, usually turned on, I suspect that it is largely a dead issue on the mobile side. Nobody can really afford to not support it at all, full stop, that capability stubbed out in the little crypto blob that controls the hardware decoder; and once you've enabled it, there is minimal additional complexity(and no legal entanglement) for Mozilla or anybody else who wishes to ask the decoder to do some decoding.
On the desktop, where hardware decoding cannot be as reliably depended upon, or in relatively closed embedded systems where cost is a major factor, there might still be room.
(Alternately, it could be that Google doesn't really give a damn about formats, they just care about licensing fees, and only need WebM to be plausible enough to keep the MPEG-LA running a little bit scared, not enough to run them into the ground, which is likely too expensive to be cost effective.)
I suspect that that would be a no-go. They clearly don't much care about whatever pile of hacks and shims and eldrich blasphemy got Flash running on something that wasn't Win32; but I would strongly suspect that cross-platform stuff like, say, their precious little DRM system, that they hope will save them from HTML5 video by ensuring that 'premium content' providers remain loyal, is worth far more to them closed than open.
What surprises me, really, is that Adobe never got Flash to work properly even as the capabilities of handhelds have shot through the roof. Ok, Flash sucks on a 528MHz ARM11 with 192 MB of RAM and a painfully-underpolished Android 1.6 OS. Why does it still suck on systems with 2-4x as many cores(each clocked 2-3x faster and generally based on a more sophisticated ARM flavor), and a GB of RAM?
If we all get to live in a banner-ad-riddled panopticon, it seems only fair that some of the same vulnerabilities should afflict the great and small alike.
It seems particularly curious to kill it when they already have(and are ostensibly releasing security updates for, to the degree Adobe ever manages that) Flash 'working' on Android versions up to 4.0
Do they gain something by killing their marketshare faster than they otherwise would through people gradually upgrading? Naively, I would think that they would try to milk the fuck out of that marketshare while they still can, and do some zealous hunting for alternatives.
Even in that event, though, the UN would largely be acting in the role of a rubber-stamp for various member states that want color of law for assorted bullshit involving censorship or ghastly telco monopolies...
Don't get me wrong: as a 'respectable', but rather pliable, venue for 'legislation shopping'(about as respectable as doctor shopping for oxycontin; but far more dangerous) the UN is a supremely dangerous instrument. If you can't get your terrible idea adopted at a national level, or your terrible idea requires some sort of transnational suicide pact, you go and shop it to the UN, or the WTO, or the EU, or any other obscure alphabet soup institution, and then you come back and 'harmonize' the law you were gunning for in the first place.
That's the distinction. These assorted treaty bodies and multinational whatnots are not powers unto themselves, as any of the less pathetic nation states are; but can be(and usually are) useful instruments for applying credibility to things that either require a veneer of international consensus or are simply too slimy to easily do domestically.
(Even organizations like the IMF and World Bank, that are traditionally given broad latitude to fuck with little countries that nobody likes, get substantially more tenuous if they step on the toes of countries even a few rungs up the ladder.)
"Broadcast" everything we can get our hands on, ourselves.
Then WE own a 'perpetual copyright' and YOU can't use it....nenner neener
It would be entertaining for the pirate bay to acquire unprecedented intellectual property rights over the vast majority of the western world's commercial cultural output...
To describe the UN as 'tyrannical' is arguably inaccurate. It's pretty hard to be a 'tyranny' when your available power extends just far enough to write nasty notes until the office supplies budget runs out, and where getting any real shit done requires unanimity from the somewhat-togetherness-challenged security council...
The really pernicious thing about the UN is that it provides an excellent alternate venue for the more tyrannically minded members of state governments, and favored industry representatives, to put the stamp of 'law' on things that are either too crazy to ram through more local legislatures, or where support is overwhelmingly strong in certain countries but weak or nonexistent elsewhere.
The UN would be up shit creek without a paddle within about one budget cycle if it displeased its member states too seriously; which is why its assorted baroque treaty bodies can be so... customer service oriented... when it comes to agreeing to crazy stuff.
The idea that 'broadcasters' need some sort of newly created right seems unsupportable to the point of insanity(obviously, they want as much as they can get; but that's a different matter). "Broadcasting" has historically been something that people are quite enthusiastic about doing. So much so that the FCC and its equivalents have spent a lot of time busting unlicenced RF sources, and copyright holders have done considerable wailing and gnashing about all their precious content getting shoved out over the airwaves.
Take the robust history of broadcasting, clearly not an endangered activity, and add the fact that newer technology is making it ever cheaper and easier, and it just seems completely insane to award a bigger slice of power to people engaged in it.
History demonstrates that, even without broadcast rights, even in downright wild-west environments, broadcasting gets done. Technological advances are making broadcasting and broadcast-like activity even cheaper and easier, so what possible reason could we have to need to award it any further incentives?
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I don't think that I'd feel entirely comfortable turning my back on somebody who would cheat even without a reward...
People who cheat for rewards are abhuman scum best recycled for their valuable phosphorus; but at least they exhibit a certain value-rational predictability. Somebody who would cheat purely for its own sake...
So you meant to tell me a device with a microphone, speaker, and wi-fi connection can be used to make VOIP calls!! Wow--what will folks figure out next? When you guys get around to discovering stuff like Skype, Google Voice, etc--let me keep sleeping...
Unfortunately, the 'news' in this story is more along the lines of "Wow, consumer electronics device with microphne, speaker, and wi-fi connection not cryptographically crippled so hard that you can't do obviously useful things with it!"...
In our delightsome world of carrier locked handsets, mandatory app stores, and rampant consoleitis, the fact that a device shows signs of matching its technical capabilities, not its profit maximizing capabilities, is beginning to count as news...
Closer parallels might be seen in the 1980 Iranian embassy siege(which I think is the last time the UK sent forces into an embassy over its owner's objections six days after it had been taken over by gunmen, and only after they had started to kill hostages) or the 1984 Libyan embassy siege, where somebody inside the Libyan embassy in London fired an automatic weapon into a crowd wounding several and killing a police officer and the UK didn't storm the embassy. They did declare the whole lot personae non gratae and tell them to GTFO; but all were allowed to leave and the matter largely languished thereafter.
For good or ill, storming embassies is seen as very serious business(in our case, of course, just remember how big a deal it was when the Iranians stormed our embassy. We were pissed...
Does a genetically engineered selectively crippling genetic disease count?
I would say that there are two issues that don't get consciously acknowledged enough; but that are assumed when a 'what, when, and where' style privacy expectation is formed...
The first is ubiquity(which is almost identical to cost, over a modest time horizon). Being shadowed by a cop, say, costs nontrivial money. I don't have an absolute protection against being shadowed; but I do have a reasonable expectation that I would only be followed if there were some reason to go to the trouble(an analogous case might be the assorted awkwardness that facebook photo-tagging has spawned: Obviously, I can't claim to have any privacy right to the visible fact that I showed up at a party; but, historically, my presence there would likely only be remembered by my friends, or if I were a celebrity, or if I did a naked kegstand. Now, even the most tedious attendees are recorded in trivially searchable form).
The second is inference: With more advanced technology, you can gain new insights from old data. The hunting-grow-ops-with-FLIRcams cases are a good example: Do you have a privacy right to the outside of your house? Umm, it's outside and visible from the street... How about the inside? Now, with new imaging technology, I can draw strong inferences about the inside of your house just by looking at the outside. Once the fancy terahertz stuff gets cheaper and more compact, this should get even more dramatic. In these cases, new technology means that information in which I don't have a privacy interest can now be, with some clever math, turned into information that I do have a privacy interest in. This presents a bit of a problem.
Your license plate is always showing. I don't understand how anyone can claim it's private.
I don't know why we need to go through this every damn time; but here goes:
Tracking and correlation. Yes, obviously, a license plate is visible, and passers-by have always been able to see them. However, without a network of passers-by observing license plates on every corner, and chattering amongst themselves about which ones are seen where, when, that means almost nothing. Only the most overtly memorable and/or suspicious license plate would merit accurate memory of time/place, much less multiple time/place recordings allowing for inferences about travel.
With automation and machine vision, highly accurate recording and correlation across fairly broad areas, in space and time, becomes relatively easy and cheap.
Surely this difference is obvious?
I get the impression that the Vienna Convention is one of those things that diplomat types take fairly seriously.
I'd certainly be hiring some extra rentacops if I were a british diplomat posted overseas right about now...
This isn't specific to Skydrive, it's a defect of other 'cloud storage' things as well; but why the hell would I want an "app" on my desktop for something that is supposed to be a filesystem?
Why would I use an application-specific re-implementation of things like 'search' and 'metadata display'? That's just perverse. I can understand that, if you need a UI that works in just about any browser, with download links and a little xmlhttprequest upload box, for basic just-need-to-grab-that-file-to-print-it-out type needs; but a desktop "app"?
Is it too hard for Microsoft to expose their own service as a filesystem?
Verizon has built a system where it is cost-effective to track every single $.10 text message and minute of call time; but it costs $5/month, forever, to keep a database field set to 'no' rather than 'yes'... Surely this is entirely plausible, no?
Strictly speaking, that conflict was Americans vs. Southerners...
'if a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal.'
So, anything made of reasonably ordinary matter at a temperature greater than zero Kelvins doesn't enjoy fourth amendment protection? Am I going to have to start using neutrinos as drug mules?
It's always a little strange to see the 'New York to London' figure given for something that is fairly clearly intended for blunt-force diplomacy, not passenger travel.
We ditched the Concorde years ago because there weren't enough customers to make flying that fast economic.
Well, let's see here...
Cheap petrochemicals are one of the most vital foundations of modern technological civilization, making possible(and helping to set the price and availability of) virtually anything everyone who isn't a subsistence mud farmer interacts with day to day.
Brand A fast food chicken products are, roughly as comestible as Brand B fast food chicken products.
Nope, no significant difference there, must be ironic.
Discrete video cards are a tiny slice of the market(albeit a tiny slice that tends to spend more money; but still tiny.)
On the integrated side, Intel chipsets don't have full hardware decode(substantially earlier ones had support for certain video-related math; but you still need a patent-licenced h.264 software decoder on top to actually decode) until the G45+(GMAX4500HD) which hit as a comparatively high price part in latish 2008.
Nvidia and ATI integrated graphics start supporting it a bit earlier; but aren't as common. There are just A Lot of XP boxes with seriously bland intel GMAs out there...
XP doesn't, not sure about Vista(and there may be some ghastly mess with 'business' and 'home basic' vs. 'home premium' or some nonsense).
Generally, though, the bet among pragmatists seems to be that, sooner or later, Mozilla will go down the 'just expose platform's preferred media decode system' road(though that would increase the amount of platform specific code, and would actually gimp support for things like webM and ogg vorbis/FLAC, since those tend not to show up by default in quicktime or directshow). Mobile is an unsurprising starting point, since the delta(in performance and battery life) between hardware decoded and software decoded-on-some-horrid-little-ARM is so dramatic; but the bet seems to be that the desktop version will probably go that way at some point.
True enough.(though, given that the treaty is probably not intended to grant all broadcast rights to Akamai and their ilk, or to petty regional affiliates of broadcasters, I wouldn't be too surprised to see some hilarious/alarming overbroad definition of what 'broadcasting' actually is, specifically intended to ensure that the exciting new rights accrue directly to the top, without any accidentally being lodged in the middlemen who just do boring things like 'making the broadcast work'. Since it is also likely being written by people who either don't understand bittorrent or who consider it to be on par with leprosy and chemical weapons, it may or may not have that use case very clearly laid out...)
I have no reason to doubt the power of Adobe's marketing department; but server-side transcoding seems unlikely to be a very lucrative niche. Flash has supported h.264 video for a while now(since somewhere in the 8.x or 9.x window, I think) and much of the 'flash video' on the web, even if it still has a .swf or .flv extension, often turns out to be h.264. In that case, the only change they'll need to make is to the site code: instead of the "detect flash, if flash detected, play, else, tell them to go download flash", they'll need "detect flash, if flash detected, play, else, HTML5 play".
What will be interesting is if, for those customers who actually use the fancy 'flash video' features(RTMPe, anything DRM related, whatever 'adaptive streaming' sauce Adobe may have offered) will now have the exciting opportunity to purchase the Adobe Video Client SDK for Android in order to build apps to replace their now nonfunctional websites...
"Mozilla decided that, where available, Firefox should take advantage of the media decoding capabilities supplied by the underlying hardware and operating system. This approach means that Mozilla won’t have to license patent-encumbered codecs or include built-in decoders in the browser—it can just use the decoding capabilities that are already present in relevant environments."
Given that the vast majority of smartphones seem to be based on SoCs with hardware h.264 decoding as an option, usually turned on, I suspect that it is largely a dead issue on the mobile side. Nobody can really afford to not support it at all, full stop, that capability stubbed out in the little crypto blob that controls the hardware decoder; and once you've enabled it, there is minimal additional complexity(and no legal entanglement) for Mozilla or anybody else who wishes to ask the decoder to do some decoding.
On the desktop, where hardware decoding cannot be as reliably depended upon, or in relatively closed embedded systems where cost is a major factor, there might still be room.
(Alternately, it could be that Google doesn't really give a damn about formats, they just care about licensing fees, and only need WebM to be plausible enough to keep the MPEG-LA running a little bit scared, not enough to run them into the ground, which is likely too expensive to be cost effective.)
I suspect that that would be a no-go. They clearly don't much care about whatever pile of hacks and shims and eldrich blasphemy got Flash running on something that wasn't Win32; but I would strongly suspect that cross-platform stuff like, say, their precious little DRM system, that they hope will save them from HTML5 video by ensuring that 'premium content' providers remain loyal, is worth far more to them closed than open.
What surprises me, really, is that Adobe never got Flash to work properly even as the capabilities of handhelds have shot through the roof. Ok, Flash sucks on a 528MHz ARM11 with 192 MB of RAM and a painfully-underpolished Android 1.6 OS. Why does it still suck on systems with 2-4x as many cores(each clocked 2-3x faster and generally based on a more sophisticated ARM flavor), and a GB of RAM?
If we all get to live in a banner-ad-riddled panopticon, it seems only fair that some of the same vulnerabilities should afflict the great and small alike.
It seems particularly curious to kill it when they already have(and are ostensibly releasing security updates for, to the degree Adobe ever manages that) Flash 'working' on Android versions up to 4.0
Do they gain something by killing their marketshare faster than they otherwise would through people gradually upgrading? Naively, I would think that they would try to milk the fuck out of that marketshare while they still can, and do some zealous hunting for alternatives.
Even in that event, though, the UN would largely be acting in the role of a rubber-stamp for various member states that want color of law for assorted bullshit involving censorship or ghastly telco monopolies...
Don't get me wrong: as a 'respectable', but rather pliable, venue for 'legislation shopping'(about as respectable as doctor shopping for oxycontin; but far more dangerous) the UN is a supremely dangerous instrument. If you can't get your terrible idea adopted at a national level, or your terrible idea requires some sort of transnational suicide pact, you go and shop it to the UN, or the WTO, or the EU, or any other obscure alphabet soup institution, and then you come back and 'harmonize' the law you were gunning for in the first place.
That's the distinction. These assorted treaty bodies and multinational whatnots are not powers unto themselves, as any of the less pathetic nation states are; but can be(and usually are) useful instruments for applying credibility to things that either require a veneer of international consensus or are simply too slimy to easily do domestically.
(Even organizations like the IMF and World Bank, that are traditionally given broad latitude to fuck with little countries that nobody likes, get substantially more tenuous if they step on the toes of countries even a few rungs up the ladder.)
"Broadcast" everything we can get our hands on, ourselves.
Then WE own a 'perpetual copyright' and YOU can't use it....nenner neener
It would be entertaining for the pirate bay to acquire unprecedented intellectual property rights over the vast majority of the western world's commercial cultural output...
To describe the UN as 'tyrannical' is arguably inaccurate. It's pretty hard to be a 'tyranny' when your available power extends just far enough to write nasty notes until the office supplies budget runs out, and where getting any real shit done requires unanimity from the somewhat-togetherness-challenged security council...
The really pernicious thing about the UN is that it provides an excellent alternate venue for the more tyrannically minded members of state governments, and favored industry representatives, to put the stamp of 'law' on things that are either too crazy to ram through more local legislatures, or where support is overwhelmingly strong in certain countries but weak or nonexistent elsewhere.
The UN would be up shit creek without a paddle within about one budget cycle if it displeased its member states too seriously; which is why its assorted baroque treaty bodies can be so... customer service oriented... when it comes to agreeing to crazy stuff.
The idea that 'broadcasters' need some sort of newly created right seems unsupportable to the point of insanity(obviously, they want as much as they can get; but that's a different matter). "Broadcasting" has historically been something that people are quite enthusiastic about doing. So much so that the FCC and its equivalents have spent a lot of time busting unlicenced RF sources, and copyright holders have done considerable wailing and gnashing about all their precious content getting shoved out over the airwaves.
Take the robust history of broadcasting, clearly not an endangered activity, and add the fact that newer technology is making it ever cheaper and easier, and it just seems completely insane to award a bigger slice of power to people engaged in it.
History demonstrates that, even without broadcast rights, even in downright wild-west environments, broadcasting gets done. Technological advances are making broadcasting and broadcast-like activity even cheaper and easier, so what possible reason could we have to need to award it any further incentives?