Possible reasons to replace tcpip.sys - Make their sofware be able to go around your personal firewall to "phone home" - Make their sofware, outside the control of your personal firewall, be available as a server so that it can be updated/controlled remotelly - Wrapping, at the TCP stack level, all traffic to and from their software in an encryption layer so that you can't figure out what information is being send over the wire by snooping. - Increase the (thread/process level) priority of TCP/UDP traffic to and from their software so that your machine is a beter P2P drone. - Make your machine a drone in their P2P network all the time as long as Windows is running, even if you kill all user space processes and threads. - Making it harder to read any key material from memory when their software checks with the server to see if you're still allowed to listen to your music.
I'm not sure but I would wager that the "Premium" tier service for Qtrax operates in much the same way as iTunes
From the article itself: "The premium subscription service tier uses Microsoft's Janus DRM technology, which allows consumers to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to music in the Qtrax network. Subscribers will also have the ability to transfer content to Windows Media enabled portable devices for as long as the subscription stays active."
In other words: only supported by Windows Media portable players or Window itself, only plays as long as you pay your monthly fee, non-transferable to different formats.
As in, worse than iTunes.
Nothing to see here folks - just another showpiece online music store from the music industry so that they can show how "pirates are hurting even sales of music in digital format" while they lobby for wider copyright protection, mandatory DRM on everything and tougher penalties for non-commercial copyrigh infringement.
Re:All fun and no work...
on
Just Let Me Play!
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not the work, it's the challenge.
Rephrasing what you said: A payoff with no challenge is not as compelling as a payoff that you've beaten a challenge for it.
What the author of the article is pointing is the tendency in many modern games to force the player to do work to get access to a great deal of the game's content.
The thing for casual gamers is, they have enough work already in real life and they don't have the available free time to go out farm kabots (or whatever) for several hours to get to the next level to finally be able to go into the next area of the game.
To give an example in the context of RPGs (online or not): it's a lot more fun to get that neat elite sword by besting a boss (maybe in battle, maybe outwitting the boss, maybe sneaking by the boss and stealing it, maybe by finding out via a side-quest a spell that paralizes that boss, maybe by getting to be friends with his faction) than it is to get the same sword by farming dragons for 3 days.
The importance given to terrorism and the weight of that fear are unreal (even surreal).
Nobody denies that terrorism exists or that it has affected the lives of several people. Then again, lightning bolts are real too and they have affected the lives of several people.
Still, governments are hardly curtailing people's liberty to go out on a storm or forcing then to wear a chain-mail suit when doing so.
Yet some people are willing to accept and even agree that, to protect themselfs from terrorism, more and more power should be delivered in the hands of some while at the same time making those that get that power less and less accountable.
How did we, as members of "democratic" societies, managed to get even the twisted caricature of democracy that we have instead of police states if beyond me.
Here in Holland i signed up for a 1Mbps cable connection a couple of years ago.
Nowadays, i have 4Mbps and i'm still paying the same - the provider has, on their own initiative and free of charge doubled the speed... twice.
And yes, i can can get about 80% of the theoretical maximum when downloading Linux ISOs from a local university.
The thing is, in Holland and due to the way the law is made (the ex-public, now private telco was forced to allow any ISP to provide ADSL access via their lines) the competition in the area of broadband internet is fierce.
The issue with EULAs is not that much that it can form a valid contract, it's that users are presented with the EULA after they have completed the transaction in which they aquired the product.
In other words, after both the buyer and the seller have accepted and fullfilled the conditions in the implicitly purchase contract, the buyer is presented with what can be described as an unilateral contract change (in the form of the EULA) which the buyer has to accept in order to be able to exercise the rights he/she already aquired by fullfiling the conditions of the original transaction (ie paying for the product).
An equivalent would be buying a house (as in signing the contract and paying for the house) and afterwards when you try to enter your new house, your way is blocked and you are presented with a new contract which you have to sign in order to be allowed in.
This is why in most of Europe EULAs are not valid at all.
In the US on the other hand, being the land of ju$tice and hone$t politician$, some states have already explicitly made EULAs valid, and at the federal level it is still unclear if they are valid or not (and it would cost tons of $$$ to find that out for sure)
Consider that: - Console gaming has been going in the direction of PC gaming (online playing, internal hard-disks, downloadable patches and content). - The gamer population is becoming older, more mature and with less free time on their hard (thus less hardcore gamers, more casual gamers). - The new focus of Nintendo with the Wii on casual gamers. - DirectX 10 being Vista-only and Vista requiring (for most people) a multiple parts hardware upgrade.
It would be ironic if this spelled the beginning of the end for mainstream gaming on the PC and the Wii turned out to be the dawn of a new era.
More ironic than that would be if game developers adopted OpenGL massively and slowly but surelly Linux became the OS of choice for gaming on the PC.
I guess the gamers amongst us are in for some "interesting times".
I've been using a Windows 2000 machine for gaming on the PC for years now and only recently (about 2 months ago) did i came across a game that required Windows XP to run properly.
Thus, i would hardly be surprised if Windows Vista only games would take at least 3 or 4 years to appear (except games published by MS which i'm 100% sure will put out Vista-only games as soon as Vista is out - they did the same thing way back when Win98 came out)
Still, as an avid PC Gamer, i find myself seriously considering buying a Wii.
Let's hope Quake Wars can keep me entertained for a couple of years;)
The Struts framework (Struts, not Structs) used in the Java/J2EE world already does some JavaScript generation for client-side validation of form input for a couple of years now.
The truth is, the solution that Morfik came up with is actually one of the two most obvious (to any software designer level IT professional that has done any significat amount of web-interface software design and programming) solutions for the "JavaScript libraries are not 100% standard and the language (the official name is ECMAScript) is bug-prone" problem. The solutions being:
Code generation (either based in another language - best candidate being Java - or in configuration files)
Good JavaScript libraries and frameworks, possibly including some level of type checking of parameters
Given the state of the USPTO i wouldn't be surprised in somebody already patented both "inovations"...
Here's a couple more possibilities: - Passport number - Passport nationality - Number of bagage items - Bagage weight - Travelling with other persons (wife/kids/others) - Married/Single - Special meal wishes - Date of reservation - Date of payment - Ammount payed - Payment currency - Invoice address - Check-in time - Boarding time
Possibly even a digitized copy of the passport.
Also notice that the passenger might not be the paying entity, thus the data of the paying entity is also needed (name, address).
PS: SSN is not used as identification means outside the US - non-US residents do not have SSNs (they might have equivalent numbers but they aren't used in the same way). Maybe you're refering to the passport number?
"What percentage of people actually use their consoles as a primary movie player?"
People who don't want to buy two? Students? No idea, I just know that we coped for several years with a PS2 as the DVD player.
So the market segment which actually used the PS2 as a DVD player (students) because they didn't had enough available income before to aquire a PS2 and a (50 bucks) DVD player will either: a) Spend $600 for the PS3 (plus an extra $800 to get an HD TV with HDMI to actually used it a an HD player) b) Get a Wii or an X-Box 360 I know where i'll be placing my bet...
It isn't the same, and it isn't right to say that consumers always get fucked by these standards wars, often they lead to decent competition that drives...
I think you're missing the problem here. The standard war is not important - none of the competing would be standards offers any real advantage with relation with the current standard, the DVD.
Sure, you get to to see more distinct pixels in you TV (keep in mind that a properly upscaled conventional size movie on an HD TV also has more pixels though not distinct), so long as you have the right sort of HD TV (with HDMI) and your player has an HDMI connector. Still: a) Does one really notices any significant difference under normal use (if one is not explicitly looking for difference in a side by side comparisson nor seing TV 5 inches from the screen)? b) Is it worth the premium price for both a new player and a new TV? c) Is it worth the extra limitations imposed by the new and improved DRM?
It's as if Gillete and Wilkinson had a "standard war" for a new razor standard: one would be a 7 blades razor the other an 8 blades razor, users would need a special mirror in the bathroom to properly use any of them, both shaved an extra 2 microns of each hair (and you'de only noticed it because of the special mirror) compared to traditional razors, both were 5 times more expensive than current blades and if you damaged the handle of your razor, spare razor heads could not be used anymore.
In other words, why should anybody care about this "standard war" if both sides are trying to push products that are very expensive, impose more limitations on consumers and require consumers to once again buy their movie collection in a new format, all the while giving a very small improvement to the user experience and that only when the user has new and specially designed periferals?
Personally, the only reason i care about any of these "standards" is to make sure that my non-techie aquaintaces are aware that this is just the industry trying (once again) to use the consumer as their bitch only this time it's two trying to give us all a taste of their "big boy" instead of one.
An external, 320 Gb (industry Gb though, not 2^20 bytes), USB 2.0, 3.5'', 7200 RPM harddisk costs around $220 and capacity is going up (for the same price) at least as fast as Moore's Law.
With a 7200RPM HD, the limit to how fast you can access data on it is in the actuall speed of the USB 2.0 connection and is already much faster than DVD access (where media access speed is the limiting factor). For a little extra you can get an eSATA (External SATA) interface instead, which is comparable in speed to SATA (which is the current standard interface for internal harddisk drives).
In 18 months you should be able to get 640 Gb for the same $220.
At the same time, reliability of (cheap) CD-R and DVD+/-R media is really bad - i've recently moved a lot of data from my CD/DVD collection to an external harddisk and the rate of failure for (just) 4 years old CDs was about 1 in 10, plus some (about 2 years old or less) DVDs were already causing significant read speed slowdows with my DVD writer (which is a Plextor, a premium, well known, quality brand).
So what exactly is the point of getting an expensive new Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drive, possibly filled with all kinds of DRM mandated limitations to use, plus very expensive media (look at the price of DVD+R DL media at launch time and for the first one or two years for an example) with 40Gb or less capacity and significantly slower than the most widespread external HD interface (USB 2.0)?
For same (expected) price (i reckon about $350) one can get 600Gb + of external HD storage now, or about 900Gb - 1Tb (possibly standard with an eSATA interface) in one years time.
... and i would go even further: - ODF is so slow, so slow that when saving finishes you find the storage media has decomposed due to atomic decay - OpenXML is so fast, so fast that saving finishes before is actually starts. Furthermore, this technology puts us half-way to showing how an infinite number of monkeys with in an infinite amount of time could create all possible literary works, since time is not a problem anymore.
In my opinion, the only way one could ever say that saving of an ODF document goes fast is if you throw the PC from the top of a tall building after you start the save.
But, it also has a few things that Silicon Valley lacks. Namely, it has a better cultural scene for folks. I don't mean the high-class snobby rich folks that fit in well in California. I mean young folks, the kind that like to live someplace that is the live-music capital of the world, with two world-class music festivals, a world-class movie festival, site of the flagship whole foods, the state's only public nude beach, and plenty more to keep you busy every week.
Actually what you're describing right there about Austin, Texas matchs the perception i have (as a foreigner, non-US resident though) of the whole of California.
So by, in terms of personal freedom, being more like California than Texas, Austin has managed to create a mini-Silicon Valley.
Maybe that freedom to be yourself (ie, the real freedom, not the one US politicians are selling nowadays) might very well be a factor in making Silicon Valley what it is!!?
BTW: We have loads of nude beaches here in Europe (and further - topless is not frowned upon on the vast majority of beaches around here) but no comparable Silicon Valley-like place... guess the nude beaches per-se ain't it:(
Are you joking? Did you really think that when you download something from there that Russian electrons are sent to your computer?
Nobody would believe that - it goes against all logic.
What they do is send these really, really small russians to your computer along with really, really small instruments. They live in you hard-disk and come out at night when nobody is around and feed on any breadcrumbs you might have left in your desk.
When you ask your conmputer to play the music it's actually those little russians that play it.
Doesn't anybody watch Discovery around here anymore???
Anti-DRM people are not per-se Anti-cryptography - most often anti-DRM people are pro-cryptography.
DRM is all about control. Cryptography is all about keeping private what one wishes to be private.
DRM uses cryptography but goes further and adds a remote control agent to it. Basically: - With pure cryptography you either have access to the encrypted data (thus being part of that private conversation) or you don't. The only rules applied were the ones by which a participant on that private conversation choose to share the key with you (assuming of course that the cryptographic system worked as intended). - With DRM, you never get the key. Instead a (hardware/software) agent from a third party decides, each time you want to access the information, if you will or not be able to access it, which parts of it will you be able to access and how. The rules that said agent enforces are unknown to you - you might have been told about them but you have no way to verify that they are indeed what you have been told. Furthermore, in some situations, and without your knowledge, the agent can receive new rules from the above mentioned third party.
Remote software agents in general, especially when mixed with laws designed to mandate use of such agents suffers from at least two big problems: 1) If an updateable agent is already installed to control your access to information, it can be "upgraded" to a surveilance agent that not only controls but also logs and reports your access to information. 2) If by law those agents are required to "protect" all information (or maybe all of a specific class) and the law does not allow everybody to have their onw agents, then the situation will occur where someone which produces information cannot access their own information and the de facto owners of said information are those which own the agent controlling access to it. For example, imagine a video camera where all you film is immediatly wrapped in a "protection" and access to it is controlled by an agent from Sony - do you really trust that Sony will be there and will be willing to allow you and your descendants access to the movie you made of your first-born's first steps?
Your suggestions above for citizen-friendly uses of DRM seem reasonable on the surface but do not take in account a couple of important factors in our society: - Governments and companies have a lot more resources (in the form of money, lawyers, manpower and influence) to control, enforce and if necessary punish in relation to make individuals access the information via their chosen DRM. Individuals on the other hand rarelly have such means when it is corporations and government that want to access information about those individuals. - Laws and law enforcement are non-simmetrical between individuals and governments/corporations. The existing laws often allow corporations/governments to get away with doing things that individuals cannot. Furthermore, punishment for breaking a law does not inflict the same level of retribution on an individual than on a company - people often go to jail in situations where companies will just get a fine, also in situations where both an individual and a company will get a fine, the fines for individuals represent a much higher percentage of the individual's wealth and income (thus being harder) than they do of a company's assets and revenue. Even worse, it is much more easy for a company to get law enforcement to act of a suspicion that individuals are breaking a law to the detriment of the company than the other way around (if you don't believe me on the last one, just try to get the german police to investigate a company for selling a single individual's private information to others without permission - which European law says they can't). Last but not least, companies can often field an army of the best laywers money can pay - how many individuals can do that?
This is why many people here are against DRM - companies that in practice already have a lot of power to control
This little trick can be used to great effect in simulating the compromising of someone's account in an Unix system: Just send that someone an e-mail as if coming from that person's account - they'll go nuts trying to figure out who has their password.
By the way, the little trick from the parent poster can be done on any e-mail server that supports the SMTP (standard internet e-mail) protocol. Thus you can telnet to port 25 of that e-mail server instead of port 25 of mail.example.com
I vaguelly remember some investigatory documentary on Discovery or some other such channel where they were investigating how information on a bid by an European company for the rights to explore an oilfield somewhere in Asia had been intercepted by NSA and provided to the competing US companies.
The interesting (not to mention relevant) detail here is that they (the Europeans) where using a supposedly safe mobile phone (made by a Swiss company i believe) which turned out to have a backdoor that allowed NSA to decrypt the calls.
Why should we expect these guys to be any more honest than those other ones where (assuming they're actually not the same ones)?
As i see it, the best way to make sure you have a backdoor free safe phone is to have a generic open-mobile solution, a bit like a mini-PC but for a mobile phone, with an open communications API that allows development and deployment on such a mobile of software which provides the safe communications.
As long as the encryption layer is implemented by the provider and cannot be checked by any independent 3rd party, there is no guarantee whatsoever that it ain't filled with backdoors/weaknesses put there on purpose to allow the sig-int agencies (of one or more countries) to be able to spy on calls made via those mobile phones.
The main objectives for movie companies with the new digital distribution formats and HDMI are: 1) Get consumers to re-buy their whole movie collection again in a new format 2) Move all or at least the vast majority of their movie sales for home use to a beter protected format so as to defend themselfs from what they currently percieve as their main competition - sharing of movies via the Internet. 3) Monitize or increase their profits in existing markets (for example: video/DVD rentals) and open new markets (internet distribution) while maintaining or extending their ability to control prices. 4) Increase their share of movie publishing.
DRM is the chosen mechanism by which movie publishers aim to remotelly control, enforce and even change (if an internet connection is available) any rules of their choice on the allowed uses of the movies contained on the media that consumers aquire.
Businesses being businesses, they will naturally use those remote control abilities (pun not intended) to maximize their profits - given their behaviour up to now, this will most likelly include maximizing the amount that consumers pay, up to and including pay-per-single-view.
At the same time, the bigguest part of the movie industry (as measured by sales and also, quite likelly, by lobbying power) consists of old-style, long existing, entrenched businesses - they are aiming to remain dominant beyond the next 5 years and certainly have long term strategies in place to ensure that it will be so.
It is clear to all that, before they can achieve their objectives, massive user adoption of DRM supporting hardware is necessary. Assuming that the main players in the movie industry are indeed engaged in a plan which is only expected to give fruit in a medium to long (5+ years) term, it's hardly surprising that they will start by visibly refraining from exercising the remote control that the newest DRM hardware allows them, if they believe that this will accelerate the transition from the current generation of hardware to the new (strong DRM enabled) generation of hardware.
It should also be pretty obvious, that since they haven't actually signed any contract with any consumers by which they [movie publishers] are obliged to not enable their DRM, this announcement of theirs still leaves open to them the possibility to, at any time and with no penalty to them, change their minds if they believe that the market penetration of the newest DRM enable hardware has passed the point beyond which said hardware has become the de facto standard.
In other words, their promises are as worthless as the paper they are written in.
Slashdot Mirror
Possible reasons to replace tcpip.sys
- Make their sofware be able to go around your personal firewall to "phone home"
- Make their sofware, outside the control of your personal firewall, be available as a server so that it can be updated/controlled remotelly
- Wrapping, at the TCP stack level, all traffic to and from their software in an encryption layer so that you can't figure out what information is being send over the wire by snooping.
- Increase the (thread/process level) priority of TCP/UDP traffic to and from their software so that your machine is a beter P2P drone.
- Make your machine a drone in their P2P network all the time as long as Windows is running, even if you kill all user space processes and threads.
- Making it harder to read any key material from memory when their software checks with the server to see if you're still allowed to listen to your music.
I'm not sure but I would wager that the "Premium" tier service for Qtrax operates in much the same way as iTunes
From the article itself:
"The premium subscription service tier uses Microsoft's Janus DRM technology, which allows consumers to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to music in the Qtrax network. Subscribers will also have the ability to transfer content to Windows Media enabled portable devices for as long as the subscription stays active."
In other words: only supported by Windows Media portable players or Window itself, only plays as long as you pay your monthly fee, non-transferable to different formats.
As in, worse than iTunes.
Nothing to see here folks - just another showpiece online music store from the music industry so that they can show how "pirates are hurting even sales of music in digital format" while they lobby for wider copyright protection, mandatory DRM on everything and tougher penalties for non-commercial copyrigh infringement.
It's not the work, it's the challenge.
Rephrasing what you said:
A payoff with no challenge is not as compelling as a payoff that you've beaten a challenge for it.
What the author of the article is pointing is the tendency in many modern games to force the player to do work to get access to a great deal of the game's content.
The thing for casual gamers is, they have enough work already in real life and they don't have the available free time to go out farm kabots (or whatever) for several hours to get to the next level to finally be able to go into the next area of the game.
To give an example in the context of RPGs (online or not): it's a lot more fun to get that neat elite sword by besting a boss (maybe in battle, maybe outwitting the boss, maybe sneaking by the boss and stealing it, maybe by finding out via a side-quest a spell that paralizes that boss, maybe by getting to be friends with his faction) than it is to get the same sword by farming dragons for 3 days.
Terrorism is real!
The fear of terrorism is real!
The importance given to terrorism and the weight of that fear are unreal (even surreal).
Nobody denies that terrorism exists or that it has affected the lives of several people.
Then again, lightning bolts are real too and they have affected the lives of several people.
Still, governments are hardly curtailing people's liberty to go out on a storm or forcing then to wear a chain-mail suit when doing so.
Yet some people are willing to accept and even agree that, to protect themselfs from terrorism, more and more power should be delivered in the hands of some while at the same time making those that get that power less and less accountable.
How did we, as members of "democratic" societies, managed to get even the twisted caricature of democracy that we have instead of police states if beyond me.
Here in Holland i signed up for a 1Mbps cable connection a couple of years ago.
... twice.
Nowadays, i have 4Mbps and i'm still paying the same - the provider has, on their own initiative and free of charge doubled the speed
And yes, i can can get about 80% of the theoretical maximum when downloading Linux ISOs from a local university.
The thing is, in Holland and due to the way the law is made (the ex-public, now private telco was forced to allow any ISP to provide ADSL access via their lines) the competition in the area of broadband internet is fierce.
The issue with EULAs is not that much that it can form a valid contract, it's that users are presented with the EULA after they have completed the transaction in which they aquired the product.
In other words, after both the buyer and the seller have accepted and fullfilled the conditions in the implicitly purchase contract, the buyer is presented with what can be described as an unilateral contract change (in the form of the EULA) which the buyer has to accept in order to be able to exercise the rights he/she already aquired by fullfiling the conditions of the original transaction (ie paying for the product).
An equivalent would be buying a house (as in signing the contract and paying for the house) and afterwards when you try to enter your new house, your way is blocked and you are presented with a new contract which you have to sign in order to be allowed in.
This is why in most of Europe EULAs are not valid at all.
In the US on the other hand, being the land of ju$tice and hone$t politician$, some states have already explicitly made EULAs valid, and at the federal level it is still unclear if they are valid or not (and it would cost tons of $$$ to find that out for sure)
By the way IANAL and all that
Please get the Pirate Bay back up, 'cause less pirates means higher global temperatures
Consider that:
- Console gaming has been going in the direction of PC gaming (online playing, internal hard-disks, downloadable patches and content).
- The gamer population is becoming older, more mature and with less free time on their hard (thus less hardcore gamers, more casual gamers).
- The new focus of Nintendo with the Wii on casual gamers.
- DirectX 10 being Vista-only and Vista requiring (for most people) a multiple parts hardware upgrade.
It would be ironic if this spelled the beginning of the end for mainstream gaming on the PC and the Wii turned out to be the dawn of a new era.
More ironic than that would be if game developers adopted OpenGL massively and slowly but surelly Linux became the OS of choice for gaming on the PC.
I guess the gamers amongst us are in for some "interesting times".
I've been using a Windows 2000 machine for gaming on the PC for years now and only recently (about 2 months ago) did i came across a game that required Windows XP to run properly.
;)
Thus, i would hardly be surprised if Windows Vista only games would take at least 3 or 4 years to appear (except games published by MS which i'm 100% sure will put out Vista-only games as soon as Vista is out - they did the same thing way back when Win98 came out)
Still, as an avid PC Gamer, i find myself seriously considering buying a Wii.
Let's hope Quake Wars can keep me entertained for a couple of years
The truth is, the solution that Morfik came up with is actually one of the two most obvious (to any software designer level IT professional that has done any significat amount of web-interface software design and programming) solutions for the "JavaScript libraries are not 100% standard and the language (the official name is ECMAScript) is bug-prone" problem. The solutions being:
Given the state of the USPTO i wouldn't be surprised in somebody already patented both "inovations"...
How much do they hold in Library of Congress units?
Whoosh!!!???
Here's a couple more possibilities:
- Passport number
- Passport nationality
- Number of bagage items
- Bagage weight
- Travelling with other persons (wife/kids/others)
- Married/Single
- Special meal wishes
- Date of reservation
- Date of payment
- Ammount payed
- Payment currency
- Invoice address
- Check-in time
- Boarding time
Possibly even a digitized copy of the passport.
Also notice that the passenger might not be the paying entity, thus the data of the paying entity is also needed (name, address).
PS: SSN is not used as identification means outside the US - non-US residents do not have SSNs (they might have equivalent numbers but they aren't used in the same way). Maybe you're refering to the passport number?
Expensive hotels and high class hookers ...
Where do i sign up to be an IEEE member????
"What percentage of people actually use their consoles as a primary movie player?"
People who don't want to buy two? Students? No idea, I just know that we coped for several years with a PS2 as the DVD player.
So the market segment which actually used the PS2 as a DVD player (students) because they didn't had enough available income before to aquire a PS2 and a (50 bucks) DVD player will either:
a) Spend $600 for the PS3 (plus an extra $800 to get an HD TV with HDMI to actually used it a an HD player)
b) Get a Wii or an X-Box 360
I know where i'll be placing my bet...
It isn't the same, and it isn't right to say that consumers always get fucked by these standards wars, often they lead to decent competition that drives
I think you're missing the problem here. The standard war is not important - none of the competing would be standards offers any real advantage with relation with the current standard, the DVD.
Sure, you get to to see more distinct pixels in you TV (keep in mind that a properly upscaled conventional size movie on an HD TV also has more pixels though not distinct), so long as you have the right sort of HD TV (with HDMI) and your player has an HDMI connector. Still:
a) Does one really notices any significant difference under normal use (if one is not explicitly looking for difference in a side by side comparisson nor seing TV 5 inches from the screen)?
b) Is it worth the premium price for both a new player and a new TV?
c) Is it worth the extra limitations imposed by the new and improved DRM?
It's as if Gillete and Wilkinson had a "standard war" for a new razor standard: one would be a 7 blades razor the other an 8 blades razor, users would need a special mirror in the bathroom to properly use any of them, both shaved an extra 2 microns of each hair (and you'de only noticed it because of the special mirror) compared to traditional razors, both were 5 times more expensive than current blades and if you damaged the handle of your razor, spare razor heads could not be used anymore.
In other words, why should anybody care about this "standard war" if both sides are trying to push products that are very expensive, impose more limitations on consumers and require consumers to once again buy their movie collection in a new format, all the while giving a very small improvement to the user experience and that only when the user has new and specially designed periferals?
Personally, the only reason i care about any of these "standards" is to make sure that my non-techie aquaintaces are aware that this is just the industry trying (once again) to use the consumer as their bitch only this time it's two trying to give us all a taste of their "big boy" instead of one.
An external, 320 Gb (industry Gb though, not 2^20 bytes), USB 2.0, 3.5'', 7200 RPM harddisk costs around $220 and capacity is going up (for the same price) at least as fast as Moore's Law.
With a 7200RPM HD, the limit to how fast you can access data on it is in the actuall speed of the USB 2.0 connection and is already much faster than DVD access (where media access speed is the limiting factor). For a little extra you can get an eSATA (External SATA) interface instead, which is comparable in speed to SATA (which is the current standard interface for internal harddisk drives).
In 18 months you should be able to get 640 Gb for the same $220.
At the same time, reliability of (cheap) CD-R and DVD+/-R media is really bad - i've recently moved a lot of data from my CD/DVD collection to an external harddisk and the rate of failure for (just) 4 years old CDs was about 1 in 10, plus some (about 2 years old or less) DVDs were already causing significant read speed slowdows with my DVD writer (which is a Plextor, a premium, well known, quality brand).
So what exactly is the point of getting an expensive new Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drive, possibly filled with all kinds of DRM mandated limitations to use, plus very expensive media (look at the price of DVD+R DL media at launch time and for the first one or two years for an example) with 40Gb or less capacity and significantly slower than the most widespread external HD interface (USB 2.0)?
For same (expected) price (i reckon about $350) one can get 600Gb + of external HD storage now, or about 900Gb - 1Tb (possibly standard with an eSATA interface) in one years time.
... and i would go even further:
- ODF is so slow, so slow that when saving finishes you find the storage media has decomposed due to atomic decay
- OpenXML is so fast, so fast that saving finishes before is actually starts. Furthermore, this technology puts us half-way to showing how an infinite number of monkeys with in an infinite amount of time could create all possible literary works, since time is not a problem anymore.
In my opinion, the only way one could ever say that saving of an ODF document goes fast is if you throw the PC from the top of a tall building after you start the save.
But, it also has a few things that Silicon Valley lacks. Namely, it has a better cultural scene for folks. I don't mean the high-class snobby rich folks that fit in well in California. I mean young folks, the kind that like to live someplace that is the live-music capital of the world, with two world-class music festivals, a world-class movie festival, site of the flagship whole foods, the state's only public nude beach, and plenty more to keep you busy every week.
... guess the nude beaches per-se ain't it :(
Actually what you're describing right there about Austin, Texas matchs the perception i have (as a foreigner, non-US resident though) of the whole of California.
So by, in terms of personal freedom, being more like California than Texas, Austin has managed to create a mini-Silicon Valley.
Maybe that freedom to be yourself (ie, the real freedom, not the one US politicians are selling nowadays) might very well be a factor in making Silicon Valley what it is!!?
BTW: We have loads of nude beaches here in Europe (and further - topless is not frowned upon on the vast majority of beaches around here) but no comparable Silicon Valley-like place
Are you joking? Did you really think that when you download something from there that Russian electrons are sent to your computer?
Nobody would believe that - it goes against all logic.
What they do is send these really, really small russians to your computer along with really, really small instruments. They live in you hard-disk and come out at night when nobody is around and feed on any breadcrumbs you might have left in your desk.
When you ask your conmputer to play the music it's actually those little russians that play it.
Doesn't anybody watch Discovery around here anymore???
Because the script kiddie was too stupid to form a corporation first. It worked for many other virus writers, like Kazaa and Gator.
This shouldn't be moderated Funny, it should be moderated Insightful
Anti-DRM people are not per-se Anti-cryptography - most often anti-DRM people are pro-cryptography.
DRM is all about control.
Cryptography is all about keeping private what one wishes to be private.
DRM uses cryptography but goes further and adds a remote control agent to it. Basically:
- With pure cryptography you either have access to the encrypted data (thus being part of that private conversation) or you don't. The only rules applied were the ones by which a participant on that private conversation choose to share the key with you (assuming of course that the cryptographic system worked as intended).
- With DRM, you never get the key. Instead a (hardware/software) agent from a third party decides, each time you want to access the information, if you will or not be able to access it, which parts of it will you be able to access and how. The rules that said agent enforces are unknown to you - you might have been told about them but you have no way to verify that they are indeed what you have been told. Furthermore, in some situations, and without your knowledge, the agent can receive new rules from the above mentioned third party.
Remote software agents in general, especially when mixed with laws designed to mandate use of such agents suffers from at least two big problems:
1) If an updateable agent is already installed to control your access to information, it can be "upgraded" to a surveilance agent that not only controls but also logs and reports your access to information.
2) If by law those agents are required to "protect" all information (or maybe all of a specific class) and the law does not allow everybody to have their onw agents, then the situation will occur where someone which produces information cannot access their own information and the de facto owners of said information are those which own the agent controlling access to it. For example, imagine a video camera where all you film is immediatly wrapped in a "protection" and access to it is controlled by an agent from Sony - do you really trust that Sony will be there and will be willing to allow you and your descendants access to the movie you made of your first-born's first steps?
Your suggestions above for citizen-friendly uses of DRM seem reasonable on the surface but do not take in account a couple of important factors in our society:
- Governments and companies have a lot more resources (in the form of money, lawyers, manpower and influence) to control, enforce and if necessary punish in relation to make individuals access the information via their chosen DRM. Individuals on the other hand rarelly have such means when it is corporations and government that want to access information about those individuals.
- Laws and law enforcement are non-simmetrical between individuals and governments/corporations. The existing laws often allow corporations/governments to get away with doing things that individuals cannot. Furthermore, punishment for breaking a law does not inflict the same level of retribution on an individual than on a company - people often go to jail in situations where companies will just get a fine, also in situations where both an individual and a company will get a fine, the fines for individuals represent a much higher percentage of the individual's wealth and income (thus being harder) than they do of a company's assets and revenue. Even worse, it is much more easy for a company to get law enforcement to act of a suspicion that individuals are breaking a law to the detriment of the company than the other way around (if you don't believe me on the last one, just try to get the german police to investigate a company for selling a single individual's private information to others without permission - which European law says they can't). Last but not least, companies can often field an army of the best laywers money can pay - how many individuals can do that?
This is why many people here are against DRM - companies that in practice already have a lot of power to control
This little trick can be used to great effect in simulating the compromising of someone's account in an Unix system: Just send that someone an e-mail as if coming from that person's account - they'll go nuts trying to figure out who has their password.
By the way, the little trick from the parent poster can be done on any e-mail server that supports the SMTP (standard internet e-mail) protocol. Thus you can telnet to port 25 of that e-mail server instead of port 25 of mail.example.com
I vaguelly remember some investigatory documentary on Discovery or some other such channel where they were investigating how information on a bid by an European company for the rights to explore an oilfield somewhere in Asia had been intercepted by NSA and provided to the competing US companies.
The interesting (not to mention relevant) detail here is that they (the Europeans) where using a supposedly safe mobile phone (made by a Swiss company i believe) which turned out to have a backdoor that allowed NSA to decrypt the calls.
Why should we expect these guys to be any more honest than those other ones where (assuming they're actually not the same ones)?
As i see it, the best way to make sure you have a backdoor free safe phone is to have a generic open-mobile solution, a bit like a mini-PC but for a mobile phone, with an open communications API that allows development and deployment on such a mobile of software which provides the safe communications.
As long as the encryption layer is implemented by the provider and cannot be checked by any independent 3rd party, there is no guarantee whatsoever that it ain't filled with backdoors/weaknesses put there on purpose to allow the sig-int agencies (of one or more countries) to be able to spy on calls made via those mobile phones.
The main objectives for movie companies with the new digital distribution formats and HDMI are:
1) Get consumers to re-buy their whole movie collection again in a new format
2) Move all or at least the vast majority of their movie sales for home use to a beter protected format so as to defend themselfs from what they currently percieve as their main competition - sharing of movies via the Internet.
3) Monitize or increase their profits in existing markets (for example: video/DVD rentals) and open new markets (internet distribution) while maintaining or extending their ability to control prices.
4) Increase their share of movie publishing.
DRM is the chosen mechanism by which movie publishers aim to remotelly control, enforce and even change (if an internet connection is available) any rules of their choice on the allowed uses of the movies contained on the media that consumers aquire.
Businesses being businesses, they will naturally use those remote control abilities (pun not intended) to maximize their profits - given their behaviour up to now, this will most likelly include maximizing the amount that consumers pay, up to and including pay-per-single-view.
At the same time, the bigguest part of the movie industry (as measured by sales and also, quite likelly, by lobbying power) consists of old-style, long existing, entrenched businesses - they are aiming to remain dominant beyond the next 5 years and certainly have long term strategies in place to ensure that it will be so.
It is clear to all that, before they can achieve their objectives, massive user adoption of DRM supporting hardware is necessary. Assuming that the main players in the movie industry are indeed engaged in a plan which is only expected to give fruit in a medium to long (5+ years) term, it's hardly surprising that they will start by visibly refraining from exercising the remote control that the newest DRM hardware allows them, if they believe that this will accelerate the transition from the current generation of hardware to the new (strong DRM enabled) generation of hardware.
It should also be pretty obvious, that since they haven't actually signed any contract with any consumers by which they [movie publishers] are obliged to not enable their DRM, this announcement of theirs still leaves open to them the possibility to, at any time and with no penalty to them, change their minds if they believe that the market penetration of the newest DRM enable hardware has passed the point beyond which said hardware has become the de facto standard.
In other words, their promises are as worthless as the paper they are written in.
Unfortunatly for you, i am in the process of patenting the placing of one's finger (or any other appendixes) in the power button.
I will have absoluto control !!!