hard to break encrption plus the DMCA is a tough one-two punch that will knock us out.
Only encryption, even in hardware: Break once, spread everywhere. Breaking it could be a public effort in the open. Only DMCA: illegal, but not much effort needed to break - crack can be one by amateurs (DVD Jon is an amateur compared to many - at least 1 of 1000 geeks could do what he did - there are people that can do far more - including physical hardware hacks, true encryption breaking, as opposed to getting one hands on a key, etc).
Both: Breaking it would need to be in secret, and also very complex. This is a hard combination. You'd need one or a few people would could pull it off themselves.
And we have a right to decide how exactly we are going to use that product that WE PAID FOR within the limits of (legitimate, i.e. constitutional and fair, of which much copyright and the DMCA certainly ISN'T).
We have as much right (outside of what illegitimate laws such as the DMCA try to enforce) to crack DRM as they have to make it. Fair use is part and parcel of copyright, it is PART OF THE BARGAIN they have with society they give us in exchange for the limited monopoly we give them. They circumvent that with DRM (perhaps that should be illegal or cause for them to lose copyright rights) and we aren't allowed to circumvent their circumvention of their obligations to us?
Is that balanced?
Or do you believe in an economy where the seller has all the rights and the buyer none? Economic systems only work because of a balance of power between the 2.
We turn up our noses at every reasonable compromise along the way?
Such as a 14 year + possible 14 year extension term of copyright, fair use, no DRM and no DMCA?
Oh wait, WE were fine with that, it was the content industries and their lackeys which turned up THEIR noses at that "reasonable" (*) compromise between private rights and the public good.
(*) Now that the marginal cost of copying is almost nil, and people can produce and distribute content very cheaply (or in the case of P2P, one's content can spread at NO cost to one's self), copyright has outlived much of its usefulness. Back in the day where production and distribution cost huge amounts, not providing the content owners and distributors with monopoly rights means others could undercut them, and perhaps people would stop investing what it takes to produce and distribute content. Open source books and art didn't make much sense than. Open source software succeeds wildly now.
Today's economy could run quite well without copyright. People would still produce content, because it is cheap enough to do as a hobby, or because it is needed for practical reasons (much software is made by someone because they or their company needs it - much, much, much more that that made by Independent Software Vendors).
And why is it wrong to not play by Apple's rules? The car companies don't set their own speed limits you have to obey or make you pay an extra fee to travel over 55 bmp, or sue you for modding your car to make it faster, more powerful, etc.
Why is the computer industry allowed to place restrictions on products after you buy, unlike other industries, and yet is allowed to produce crap (buggy, defective, etc) ithout liability, unlike other industries?
God help you if you fail to have an alibi, if you were sitting at home alone watching TV.
Chances are good your cable box and/or cable company knows you were watching (unless you never changed the volume or channel during the time) because of all the data they collect. Could be used to prove your alibi.
Then companies shouldn't whine and scream "DMCA violation" when someone reverse engineers their hardware.
Do you think the company has the right to refuse to release specs, but we don't have the right to complain or to reverse engineer them, and that they have the right to whine to the gov't if we do so.
Packet based technology is INTRINSICALLY less reliable than circuit switched.
Running it over their own network will help somewhat, I admit, but the fundamental shortcomings of the technology remain.
Plus the temptation to push the existing infrastructre beyond its maximum reasonable capacity is too hard to resist in many cases.
With circuit switched, you just CAN'T have more circuits available than there is infratructure to support it. With packet switched, you kinda sorta can, but get degradation in service which worsens as load increases. If the September 11 attacks occurred with packet based phone networks being the norm, the impact on phone service would have been much much worse. You'd get a call "through", but you'd hear silence 95% of the time, and gibberish the other 5%. With circuit switched, either an error message or a good connection. And with the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service at least critical NS/EP (National Security/Emergency Preparedness) calls would get through.
Homeland Security depends on circuit switched public telephone networks.
A lot of people think subliminals do not work. A lot of people think they do work. I don't think it has been decided either way. Regular ads seem to work well enough - most people believe everything on TV.
Plus the subconscious is literal.
"Bush is God" wouldn't make your subconscious think of George W. Bush, but rather might have you worshipping a shrub in your front yard. Also, "bush" has a naughty (explicit) meaning (in the USA at least) as well, which could have interesting effects on your subconscious. Perhaps a lot of geeks would get out more then...
They don't fail on intelligence (but that's not normally where people I interview fail anyway), they fail on people skills - being able to recognise that someone else may know more about X than you do, and coping with that knowledge well.
Or failing to recognize that allowing yourself to be sponsored by a huge viciously competitive monopoly could compromise your integrity, freedom, and eventually your very existence.
Being "book smart" and yet gullible enough to trust those who can't be trusted isn't going to save them.
With Sprint moving away from circuit switching and to a packet switched network for public conventional voice services, VoIP likely won't have the disadvantage of less reliability compared to the public telephone network.
Call attempts that fail with errors due to network issues and congestions, silence and distortion due to dropped packets, dropped calls, etc will likely become more common.
Phones are critical. They are counted on to help save lives. Packet switching just isn't up to the task. The gov't should intervene and say the public telephone network must stay circuit switched. It even risks Homeland Security issues. The Government Emergency Telephone System (home of the legendary and formerly secret 710 area code) http://gets.ncs.gov/ might be needed to save many lives, and be unable to due to the unreliability of packet based networks,
Plus contract breech is only civil, DMCA can be (very expensive) civil or (felony) criminal (prison for up to 5 years PER violation - easy to get multi-thousand year sentences if you break protection on only a few hundred songs - also with risk of being sexually assaulted - which is very high for many geeks, loss of voting and other civil rights, illegal to work in certain fields, employers won't hire felons anyway unless they are too poor to run background checks, etc.)
It's not nesting tables (that's not really bad in my book, it just slowed down old Netscapes) that is the big problem.
It is the fact the Slashdot pages are invalid HTML.
And rather than fix it, or at least address the criticism, Slashdot gives a 403 Forbidden error when trying to use validator.w3.org.
As if that will make us have confidence in the HTML being valid, making it so we can't even see the errors. It would be like buying a car with a sheet over it, and not being allowed to look under the sheet before purchase.
Think about it, if you had spent thousands of dollars on copy protection and DRM that got immediately broken time and time again why would you continue to throw money down that hole? It's not a very sound business practice, once it's obvious (and it's been so for a looooong time) that DRM and copy protection aren't going to stop piracy you need to look for another solution.
The DMCA makes any technical restriction have the force of law. DRM isn't only useful for making it hard to either pirate or exercise fair use (it is breakable - your argument is true), but it is useful for making it ILLEGAL.
XOR (some 8 bit byte) was used as an encryption method for a bar code reader. (I am being vague, don't want to break any laws). Such a scheme is trivally breakable, true, but it still allowed the DMCA to be used.
They could make the chip so that a copyrighted work is located right in with the key.
Heck the key could be stored as a big copyrighted work (a 128 bit key might not qualify under copyright, but a 1 MB file would). The chip would generate a key by making a hash of the copyrighted work.
Getting at the copyrighted work or helping anyone do so would be a DMCA violation.
Well, but you say copyright needs to be creative? How about some big novel stored in ASCII with random pertubations of bit 7. The derived work is copyrightable since the original work (in ASCII, with bit 7 always 0) is. The derived work would be different in each machine and create different hashes and hence different private keys.
It took me less that 5 minutes to come up with this scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
hard to break encrption plus the DMCA is a tough one-two punch that will knock us out.
Only encryption, even in hardware: Break once, spread everywhere. Breaking it could be a public effort in the open.
Only DMCA: illegal, but not much effort needed to break - crack can be one by amateurs (DVD Jon is an amateur compared to many - at least 1 of 1000 geeks could do what he did - there are people that can do far more - including physical hardware hacks, true encryption breaking, as opposed to getting one hands on a key, etc).
Both: Breaking it would need to be in secret, and also very complex. This is a hard combination. You'd need one or a few people would could pull it off themselves.
XOR is all that is needed to gain DMCA protection.
There was a product which used that, but I won't name the product or the byte it used - that might be illegal.
And we have a right to decide how exactly we are going to use that product that WE PAID FOR within the limits of (legitimate, i.e. constitutional and fair, of which much copyright and the DMCA certainly ISN'T).
We have as much right (outside of what illegitimate laws such as the DMCA try to enforce) to crack DRM as they have to make it. Fair use is part and parcel of copyright, it is PART OF THE BARGAIN they have with society they give us in exchange for the limited monopoly we give them. They circumvent that with DRM (perhaps that should be illegal or cause for them to lose copyright rights) and we aren't allowed to circumvent their circumvention of their obligations to us?
Is that balanced?
Or do you believe in an economy where the seller has all the rights and the buyer none? Economic systems only work because of a balance of power between the 2.
We turn up our noses at every reasonable compromise along the way?
Such as a 14 year + possible 14 year extension term of copyright, fair use, no DRM and no DMCA?
Oh wait, WE were fine with that, it was the content industries and their lackeys which turned up THEIR noses at that "reasonable" (*) compromise between private rights and the public good.
(*) Now that the marginal cost of copying is almost nil, and people can produce and distribute content very cheaply (or in the case of P2P, one's content can spread at NO cost to one's self), copyright has outlived much of its usefulness. Back in the day where production and distribution cost huge amounts, not providing the content owners and distributors with monopoly rights means others could undercut them, and perhaps people would stop investing what it takes to produce and distribute content. Open source books and art didn't make much sense than. Open source software succeeds wildly now.
Today's economy could run quite well without copyright. People would still produce content, because it is cheap enough to do as a hobby, or because it is needed for practical reasons (much software is made by someone because they or their company needs it - much, much, much more that that made by Independent Software Vendors).
And why is it wrong to not play by Apple's rules? The car companies don't set their own speed limits you have to obey or make you pay an extra fee to travel over 55 bmp, or sue you for modding your car to make it faster, more powerful, etc.
Why is the computer industry allowed to place restrictions on products after you buy, unlike other industries, and yet is allowed to produce crap (buggy, defective, etc) ithout liability, unlike other industries?
An album has perhaps 15 songs and is about $15 (unless you are trying to get ripped off).
That's about $1/song and you (usually) don't have any issues ripping it and using it on every device you own without any DRM issues.
Or you can pay $1/song and be in shackles.
Hard choice, eh?
I would prefer that a few bad DVD John-like people not ruin it for me
DVD John and other people who write software that allows people fair use are bad people? Are you nuts or just a fascist?
Are you the guy that wrote the SCSI drivers for Linux? :)
God help you if you fail to have an alibi, if you were sitting at home alone watching TV.
Chances are good your cable box and/or cable company knows you were watching (unless you never changed the volume or channel during the time) because of all the data they collect. Could be used to prove your alibi.
What if the worker is a programmer?
Sometimes she or she will be waiting for a compile to finish or for the Java Virtual Machine to start up.
Are you from outside the USA?
Here in the US, you don't need any official policy.
The law allows employers to fire someone for any non-illegal reason or for no reason at all. It is called "at will".
Only illegal reasons are discrimination against people in legally recognized "protected classes", or "whistle blowing" for gov't employees.
Even illegal reasons won't cause a boss to get in trouble unless one can prove the illegal reason was why one was fired.
But does anyone want to play them?
Then companies shouldn't whine and scream "DMCA violation" when someone reverse engineers their hardware.
Do you think the company has the right to refuse to release specs, but we don't have the right to complain or to reverse engineer them, and that they have the right to whine to the gov't if we do so.
Just use the RAM in PCs destined to run Windows. No one would notice - the unreliability would be expected.
Packet based technology is INTRINSICALLY less reliable than circuit switched.
Running it over their own network will help somewhat, I admit, but the fundamental shortcomings of the technology remain.
Plus the temptation to push the existing infrastructre beyond its maximum reasonable capacity is too hard to resist in many cases.
With circuit switched, you just CAN'T have more circuits available than there is infratructure to support it. With packet switched, you kinda sorta can, but get degradation in service which worsens as load increases. If the September 11 attacks occurred with packet based phone networks being the norm, the impact on phone service would have been much much worse. You'd get a call "through", but you'd hear silence 95% of the time, and gibberish the other 5%. With circuit switched, either an error message or a good connection. And with the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service at least critical NS/EP (National Security/Emergency Preparedness) calls would get through.
Homeland Security depends on circuit switched public telephone networks.
The Linux kernel (and much other open source code) has some "interesting" comments as well.
A lot of people think subliminals do not work. A lot of people think they do work. I don't think it has been decided either way. Regular ads seem to work well enough - most people believe everything on TV.
Plus the subconscious is literal.
"Bush is God" wouldn't make your subconscious think of George W. Bush, but rather might have you worshipping a shrub in your front yard. Also, "bush" has a naughty (explicit) meaning (in the USA at least) as well, which could have interesting effects on your subconscious. Perhaps a lot of geeks would get out more then...
They don't fail on intelligence (but that's not normally where people I interview fail anyway), they fail on people skills - being able to recognise that someone else may know more about X than you do, and coping with that knowledge well.
Or failing to recognize that allowing yourself to be sponsored by a huge viciously competitive monopoly could compromise your integrity, freedom, and eventually your very existence.
Being "book smart" and yet gullible enough to trust those who can't be trusted isn't going to save them.
That's why I want to stick with conventional reliable circuit switching. No retransmission delays OR dropped packets.
Too bad Sprint is switching away from circuit switched and to packet based infrastructure for their public telephone network.
so even conventional phone service will be Voice over IP (or some other packet protocol).
With Sprint moving away from circuit switching and to a packet switched network for public conventional voice services, VoIP likely won't have the disadvantage of less reliability compared to the public telephone network.
Call attempts that fail with errors due to network issues and congestions, silence and distortion due to dropped packets, dropped calls, etc will likely become more common.
Phones are critical. They are counted on to help save lives. Packet switching just isn't up to the task. The gov't should intervene and say the public telephone network must stay circuit switched. It even risks Homeland Security issues. The Government Emergency Telephone System (home of the legendary and formerly secret 710 area code) http://gets.ncs.gov/ might be needed to save many lives, and be unable to due to the unreliability of packet based networks,
Agreed.
Plus contract breech is only civil, DMCA can be (very expensive) civil or (felony) criminal (prison for up to 5 years PER violation - easy to get multi-thousand year sentences if you break protection on only a few hundred songs - also with risk of being sexually assaulted - which is very high for many geeks, loss of voting and other civil rights, illegal to work in certain fields, employers won't hire felons anyway unless they are too poor to run background checks, etc.)
Maybe 5 million dollars might be enough to get the Linux uptime rolls over at 497 days/tick overflow bug fixed! :)
Or would that take 5 billion?
It's not nesting tables (that's not really bad in my book, it just slowed down old Netscapes) that is the big problem.
a shdot.org%2F
It is the fact the Slashdot pages are invalid HTML.
And rather than fix it, or at least address the criticism, Slashdot gives a 403 Forbidden error when trying to use validator.w3.org.
As if that will make us have confidence in the HTML being valid, making it so we can't even see the errors. It would be like buying a car with a sheet over it, and not being allowed to look under the sheet before purchase.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsl
Yeah, way to go.
:)
Let's go back to Lynx.
Nah, let's go back to Gopher!
Or let's just ditch the Internet, and bring back the BBS!
Think about it, if you had spent thousands of dollars on copy protection and DRM that got immediately broken time and time again why would you continue to throw money down that hole? It's not a very sound business practice, once it's obvious (and it's been so for a looooong time) that DRM and copy protection aren't going to stop piracy you need to look for another solution.
The DMCA makes any technical restriction have the force of law. DRM isn't only useful for making it hard to either pirate or exercise fair use (it is breakable - your argument is true), but it is useful for making it ILLEGAL.
XOR (some 8 bit byte) was used as an encryption method for a bar code reader. (I am being vague, don't want to break any laws). Such a scheme is trivally breakable, true, but it still allowed the DMCA to be used.
They could make the chip so that a copyrighted work is located right in with the key.
Heck the key could be stored as a big copyrighted work (a 128 bit key might not qualify under copyright, but a 1 MB file would). The chip would generate a key by making a hash of the copyrighted work.
Getting at the copyrighted work or helping anyone do so would be a DMCA violation.
Well, but you say copyright needs to be creative? How about some big novel stored in ASCII with random pertubations of bit 7. The derived work is copyrightable since the original work (in ASCII, with bit 7 always 0) is. The derived work would be different in each machine and create different hashes and hence different private keys.
It took me less that 5 minutes to come up with this scheme.
Scary. Thank goodness I'm not on the dark side.