The problem with placing all your information in one place is that it provides a very lucrative target for script kiddies and the like. How much effort is someone going to put into cracking JRV's user DB as opposed to MS Passport? The presence of such a high profile single point of failure is going to attract crackers like moths to a lamp.
bzzt, bad analogy. If you want to write something realy fast and you're on a x86, you're pretty much stuck with x86 ASM. With DirectX vs OpenGL there is no such tie to the hardware standard, a dev can pick either one and it will work on the same platform.
Re:But it's not OK when it's Microsoft!
on
$1200 Cheap!
·
· Score: 1
Monopolies are subject to different rules than companies not in a monopoly position.
Except
Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the console market and can't realy influence it with thier OS monopoly. So in this case MS isn't any different from the other console makers.
"distributed.net does not condone the unauthorized use of its software on any computer system. You may not run any distributed.net software on a system unless you own the system or have received permission from the owner to run distributed.net software. Running the client on a machine without authorization will result in your removal from the project and will disqualify you from winning. "
As well as from the FAQ
Q: What shouldn't I use to participate?
A: You shouldn't run the client on any machine that you do not own or administer.
Maybe he should have asked before putting it on, ya think?.
Actualy you're wrong, there's no such thing as an uncrackable code, only ones which take so much time to crack that by the time they're compromised the data's useless.
I'm in the same situation, I've been an earthlink DSL customer for well over a year and getting them to lower my rate to 39.95 proved surprisingly painless. I havn't seen them raise my rate yet, we'll just have to wait and see.
I mean, do they just live in their own little world compleatly obliviouse to the reality that they are fighting a war they can't win? There are just so many reasons they can't stop the copying of digital information.
Copy protection can never totaly prevent someone from copying something, only make it so difficult most people can't do it. The problem with DVDs, CDs, and any other digital medium is that all it takes is one person to make a copy of the data free of the copy protection scheme. Then that copy can be spread to an infinite number of other people.
Encyrption is useless until we get implanted chips directly into our brain (and not even then realy) since at some point the data must exist in it's unencrypted form somewhere in the users hardware. And as long as that unencypted stream exists it can be taped and duplicated, be it via some software crack or by grabing the stream going to the output hardware. There may be some quality loss, but if anything the MP3 craze proved that people don't care.
You realy have to wonder what the engineers who designed this stuff and claimed they could make it an effective copy protection scheme were thinking. You'd think people involved in things like encyption and whatermarking would be aware of how they can be broken/bypassed and realize that this is one area where they can not be effectivly applied. Of course it may be that the managment and business drones are the one's pushing for it, but if that's the case then shouldn't the engineer's be the ones to step in and give them the truth of the matter? I think that fact that businesses and organizations can so blindly embark on a such project without giving any thought to what the people who actualy know what they're talking about are saying is a much greater indication of the breakdown of our society than the mass copying of data contained on overpriced plastic discs.
It seems whenever a story regarding Napster is posted everyone starts talking about how it'd be so much better if everyone moved to gnutella. Hello? gnutella will never become anywhere as popular as napster becuase it just too damn inefficient and slow. It is absolutly ridiculous that each and every client serving files also has to route searches, and searches would have to be sent (directly or indirectly) to every freaking client on the network in order to be sure you've gotten every possible hit. No non-nerd types are going to put up with searches that can take several minutes and still not turn up what your looking for even if it's availiable on the network.
A much better system would be to have a gnutella like cluster of "servers". Clients could connect to one of the servers by getting a list of servers from a known source (just like connecting to gnutella) and then upload a list of all the files they're sharing to it. The servers in the cluster maintain a list of the files all the clients connected to them are sharing as well as ips and sharelists of other clients which they periodicaly download from other servers, the server could also set some limit as to how big their client/shares DB gets. Ther server would also periodicaly ping the clients they have sharelists for so when the client exits it can remove their sharelist from it's DB. Searches would be handled in a similar method as gnutella except that because the servers are dedicated to routing searches and because each server contains the sharelist for multiple clients, searching would be much faster and produce better results. With this system clients serving files no longer have to route searches and the system is no more vunerable than gnutella to legal attacks.
If you ask me the ideal P2P filesharing system is something truly distrubuted like Freenet or Mojo Nation. But niether of thoes are ready for prime time and this kind of system has to reach a critical mass befor they can provide reliable/fast downloads.
The thing is, what's stoping me from just cracking open the speakers and connecting to the decryped output going directly into the speaker itself? The rule of "if you can hear it, it can be recorded" still holds.
True, but that's only for internal precision. As far as the external precision (i.e. the precision of the finished, fully rendered image) going any higher than 8 bits per channel realy doesn't get you anything.
I think my highschool still teaches pascal, and up until last year they were teaching it using turbo pascal 6 on a lab full of 286s, 386s and a few 486s. Now I think they teach it on P133s or something. Right now I'm taking AP Computer Science AB on a lab with everything from 386s to a few P90s. Why the dumb beginers get the better comps I will never understand. All the good comps at our school go to the media production (photoshop) and CAD classes, it's so unfair, but I digress.
Actualy, Quake 3 does use hardware T&L for world geometry but UT does not. All the player models in Q3 still use software T&L though so while changing the camera angle at the driver level might be possible it still woun't do any good to cheaters. The thing is that the Q3 netcode does a fairly good job of only sending position, state, ect. information on players which are visible, so being able to see through walls would be useless because the client doesn't even know the position of players who are behind solid brushes, let alone pass that information to the graphics drivers.
Atempting to use any sort of music crypto to prevent pirating is just like what the MPAA did with DVDs. In fact trying to encypt music cds would be even less efective because unlike DVDs anyone with a CD-R drive can make an exact bit-for-bit copy. And as with DVDs the encyption could be bypassed by capturing the unencypted output, except that to do so with music CDs would be even more trivial since all you have to do is connect the line out on your sound card or CD player to the line in. When are they going to figure out that encyption was not meant to nor is at all effective at stoping people from copying CDs and DVDs. The only thing encyption is good for is preventing unauthorized viewing of material, and not preventing copying of that material.
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The problem with placing all your information in one place is that it provides a very lucrative target for script kiddies and the like. How much effort is someone going to put into cracking JRV's user DB as opposed to MS Passport? The presence of such a high profile single point of failure is going to attract crackers like moths to a lamp.
A law which can be used in a bad way is a bad law.
bzzt, bad analogy. If you want to write something realy fast and you're on a x86, you're pretty much stuck with x86 ASM. With DirectX vs OpenGL there is no such tie to the hardware standard, a dev can pick either one and it will work on the same platform.
Monopolies are subject to different rules than companies not in a monopoly position.
Except
Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the console market and can't realy influence it with thier OS monopoly. So in this case MS isn't any different from the other console makers.
Short answer: Yes.
the kind of RC5 rate one of these would get!
"distributed.net does not condone the unauthorized use of its software on any computer system. You may not run any distributed.net software on a system unless you own the system or have received permission from the owner to run distributed.net software. Running the client on a machine without authorization will result in your removal from the project and will disqualify you from winning. "
As well as from the FAQ
Q: What shouldn't I use to participate?
A: You shouldn't run the client on any machine that you do not own or administer.
Maybe he should have asked before putting it on, ya think?.
How could they possibly worry about China getting DVD encyption keys? That cat is already out of the bag.
There is a copy of it (2 CD DiVX) on eDonkey2000 (http://www.edonkey2000.com).
Actualy you're wrong, there's no such thing as an uncrackable code, only ones which take so much time to crack that by the time they're compromised the data's useless.
I'm in the same situation, I've been an earthlink DSL customer for well over a year and getting them to lower my rate to 39.95 proved surprisingly painless. I havn't seen them raise my rate yet, we'll just have to wait and see.
Copy protection can never totaly prevent someone from copying something, only make it so difficult most people can't do it. The problem with DVDs, CDs, and any other digital medium is that all it takes is one person to make a copy of the data free of the copy protection scheme. Then that copy can be spread to an infinite number of other people.
Encyrption is useless until we get implanted chips directly into our brain (and not even then realy) since at some point the data must exist in it's unencrypted form somewhere in the users hardware. And as long as that unencypted stream exists it can be taped and duplicated, be it via some software crack or by grabing the stream going to the output hardware. There may be some quality loss, but if anything the MP3 craze proved that people don't care.
You realy have to wonder what the engineers who designed this stuff and claimed they could make it an effective copy protection scheme were thinking. You'd think people involved in things like encyption and whatermarking would be aware of how they can be broken/bypassed and realize that this is one area where they can not be effectivly applied. Of course it may be that the managment and business drones are the one's pushing for it, but if that's the case then shouldn't the engineer's be the ones to step in and give them the truth of the matter? I think that fact that businesses and organizations can so blindly embark on a such project without giving any thought to what the people who actualy know what they're talking about are saying is a much greater indication of the breakdown of our society than the mass copying of data contained on overpriced plastic discs.
A much better system would be to have a gnutella like cluster of "servers". Clients could connect to one of the servers by getting a list of servers from a known source (just like connecting to gnutella) and then upload a list of all the files they're sharing to it. The servers in the cluster maintain a list of the files all the clients connected to them are sharing as well as ips and sharelists of other clients which they periodicaly download from other servers, the server could also set some limit as to how big their client/shares DB gets. Ther server would also periodicaly ping the clients they have sharelists for so when the client exits it can remove their sharelist from it's DB. Searches would be handled in a similar method as gnutella except that because the servers are dedicated to routing searches and because each server contains the sharelist for multiple clients, searching would be much faster and produce better results. With this system clients serving files no longer have to route searches and the system is no more vunerable than gnutella to legal attacks.
If you ask me the ideal P2P filesharing system is something truly distrubuted like Freenet or Mojo Nation. But niether of thoes are ready for prime time and this kind of system has to reach a critical mass befor they can provide reliable/fast downloads.
The thing is, what's stoping me from just cracking open the speakers and connecting to the decryped output going directly into the speaker itself? The rule of "if you can hear it, it can be recorded" still holds.
Isn't claiming to "own" a DiVX of something an oxymoron or something?
True, but that's only for internal precision. As far as the external precision (i.e. the precision of the finished, fully rendered image) going any higher than 8 bits per channel realy doesn't get you anything.
I think my highschool still teaches pascal, and up until last year they were teaching it using turbo pascal 6 on a lab full of 286s, 386s and a few 486s. Now I think they teach it on P133s or something. Right now I'm taking AP Computer Science AB on a lab with everything from 386s to a few P90s. Why the dumb beginers get the better comps I will never understand. All the good comps at our school go to the media production (photoshop) and CAD classes, it's so unfair, but I digress.
Actualy, Quake 3 does use hardware T&L for world geometry but UT does not. All the player models in Q3 still use software T&L though so while changing the camera angle at the driver level might be possible it still woun't do any good to cheaters. The thing is that the Q3 netcode does a fairly good job of only sending position, state, ect. information on players which are visible, so being able to see through walls would be useless because the client doesn't even know the position of players who are behind solid brushes, let alone pass that information to the graphics drivers.
Atempting to use any sort of music crypto to prevent pirating is just like what the MPAA did with DVDs. In fact trying to encypt music cds would be even less efective because unlike DVDs anyone with a CD-R drive can make an exact bit-for-bit copy. And as with DVDs the encyption could be bypassed by capturing the unencypted output, except that to do so with music CDs would be even more trivial since all you have to do is connect the line out on your sound card or CD player to the line in. When are they going to figure out that encyption was not meant to nor is at all effective at stoping people from copying CDs and DVDs. The only thing encyption is good for is preventing unauthorized viewing of material, and not preventing copying of that material.