A few years of digital prohibition, where the more skilled among us can make truckloads of money building grey/black-market hardware, workarounds, etc.
A highly sensible and valid point. What the hell are you doing on/.?
There is another method to get round the HDCP trap, which is to buy one of the Spatz boxes http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/15/spatz-techs-dvi magic-killing-on-hdcp/ - there's no way that it could be embargoed - the point of the device is to enable legacy devices to receive HDCP output. That is not illegal, or unethical.
Now, HDCP also allows a revocation method - but it is not at all clear how the revoked keys would be transported. It could be that a new HD-DVD/BD disk carries them and disallows display for that disk, or burns this data into the player's NVRAM. I cannot believe that the latter would be legal ("I put this disk into my player and it broke it entirely". "Oh, yes, sorry, 20th Century Fox has revoked your television rights for using a non-approved display device". "Mother of pearl - call my lawyers!"), so we have a situation where some DVD makers could choose not to allow display on HDCP-stripping devices.
I think the way around this one would be to ensure that they lose as much money as possible on that. Every time someone discovers a non-stripper compliant disk, they post the name of the disk on a central web site (LiveJournal or some such), and we all go out and buy the disk. The next day, we all go back and return the disk and demand our money back - "Hey! This disk doesn't play on my projector. My other ones do!". Doesn't matter if you have a projector, HDTV or a HD-DVD player - we just all go out and do a consumer return. And clearly tell them why the disk is going back. This causes the studios and shops to lose more money than a simple boycott of the goods.
After a while, they're going to notice that the HDCP-stripper friendly disks sell more than the hostile ones (which they've lost a boatload on). Companies, in the end, are amoral creations designed to make profit. They are, in the round, economically rational. They will shift.
And once the device-discrimination stops, we can start the frame grabbing parties to P2P the contents of their disks. Hell, did I just say that out loud?
Since November 2005, the broad principle is E45.73 per 100h of music and E125.77 per 100h of movie. This apparently (I did not check the math) translates into E.32 per 650Mo CD-R, E1.27 per 4.7Go DVD-R, E1.05 per 100Mo of flash drive or mp3 player (1 euro = 1.20 USD)
Brilliant. So, let's see if I understand. Under the Single Market agreement, I can purchase goods and services from any EU member state, under the taxation rules of that member state, and the customs officials cannot stop me importing the materials. (Hence, UK customs officials can whine and whinge about bringing back 200 bottles of wine and 10,000 cigarettes, but they can't actually stop you).
Now, it's not worth it for CD-Rs, but I would have thought that a box of 100 DVD-Rs are about 60 in the UK, which, under French tax rules would cost about 180. Which means that if you can travel to the UK and back for 120, you could buy a years worth of DVD-Rs and then P2P the shit out of them. Hell, you wouldn't even have to leave the airport, and I'll bet you could get a flight from any provincial airport in France to Heathrow or Gatwick, buy the DVD-Rs in the terminal, and then bugger off home. I even seem to remember that airport shopping is UK tax discounted too!
OK - so I in the UK will open up a Unix shell account in France and fill my boots with P2P stuff (which I can import for private and domestic use without prosection because of the Secondary Infringement laws in the Copyright Act), and the French can hop over to Britain and buy the DVD blanks. Everyone wins! Well, except the record and film companies, but we hate them anyway.
BTW, mes amis - eat in France before you leave. British food has got a zillion times better in the last 10 years, but the airport food still sucks donkey balls.
It's true that we have a state religion. It's also true that it receives no government funding and is followed by a minority of people.
Very minor nitpick: The United Kingdom does not have a state religion. England has a state religion; Scotland does not (the Kirk is not formally part of the state). However, since the Monarch of the United Kingdom is also the Monarch of England; and the Monarch of England must also be head of the Church of England (by definition); it is true to say that the Queen/King must be CoE. Most crucially, the monarch may not be Roman Catholic. Which is just dreadful, and I'm an atheist (but people should be able to follow whatever faith they like, if any).
All of this malarkey stems from the terms of the Act of Union - the Scots would never have accepted the English Church as their official religion, so the Articles of Union make it explicit that the Union does not have an official religion (if my history lessons from a Scots education serve me correctly).
Being the head of state (i.e. being the queen) means nothing for the day to day governance of the UK. The position is ceremonial. Prime ministers are required to brief her but she has absolutely no power of veto over the policies her government chooses to implement.
Actually, the monarch could veto legislation - it's called the Royal Prerogative. The chances of that every happening are about zero. Because the next Act of Parliament would be to declare itself completely sovereign (as it was just before the Restoration), and to relegate the monarchy to a totally symbolic role, if not to completely abolish it.
Abolition of the monarchy is (technically) a little problematic, since the armed forces swear allegiance to the Queen; but I think a rapid change of oath to "Her Majesty's Government" should do it.
PMPs finally make it possible for me to come in the next day and say, "hey, you've got to watch this clip from last night's Office." I would certainly get more people to start watching the show by actually showing them part of the show than by possibly injuring someone with my horrible Dwight impersonation.
That's the man, officer! Plain as day admitted to a public, non-domestic performance intention. Lock the bastard up, and throw away the key...
What do you mean "fair use" rights? Don't you know they were abolished under the "Digital Millenium Copyright and Hollywood-gets-whatever-it-wants Act"?
I'll explain why this is not the case: Spatz-Tech, maker of the DVIMAGIC device, is the third party.
I think that Spatz-Tech itself is the HDCP licensee. However, I don't know that. In the end, we'll find out if they can arbitratily have their license revoked, or their supplies withdrawn. At the moment, both of us are speculating.
I would have thought that if the consortium revoke the keys because someone has improperly used the device, they'd be opening themselves to massive lawsuits for illegal restraint of trade.
Unless the conditions for revocation were clearly covered in the HDCP license agreement. Or do you claim that the contract would be ruled unconscionable?
I think it might be ruled unconscionable. If you have a contract term which states that your business may be cancelled if a third party, over whom you can exercise no control, finds a way to abuse your device such that it harms another consortium member, and that the device has a legitimate purpose which was approved by the same HDCP consortium; then no-one in their right mind would sign such a contract. It leaves you with open ended liability for actions which you are powerless to prevent.
The HDCP license agreement states that all devices are subject to technical review to ensure that their keys are sufficiently robustly protected (to prevent device cloning), as well as ensuring interoperability [and do revocation checking]. If the keys were issued after such a review, one can hardly claim that the possible abuse of the devices was unforeseeable by an expert well versed in the field.
I realise that the analogy does not apply well, but the Betamax defence must have some applicability here - the device has an extant (perhaps even dominant), legitimate use. *Any* device could be abused (imagine getting hit over the head by one of these ugly Toshiba HD-DVD boxes!), but that would not provide sufficient cause to invalidate the manufacturers line of business.
OK, we have a device that strips HDCP from a DVI signal. Watch its HDCP key get revoked after the first round of HD DVD or Blu-ray videos gets ripped, and watch it not be able to decode new titles.
Such a thing is, of course, possible (Just as the revocation of DVD player keys is possible - don't know how many have actually been revoked, though).
But these are legitimate devices - not piracy tools. Think monitors which can do HDTV resolution, but aren't HDCP compatible, or the original set of HDTVs in the USA (ie, most of the current set). The keys are issued by the HDCP consortium in the full knowledge of what the device does, and I would have thought that if the consortium revoke the keys because someone has improperly used the device, they'd be opening themselves to massive lawsuits for illegal restraint of trade.
Similarly, if a HD-DVD player ends up with a design flaw which allows it to be hacked, and the manufacturer gets its keys revoked, then they better be prepared to pony up free upgrades to the innocent consumers who bought their kit. Or face class action lawsuits.
Fundamentally, I think that the key revocation method is more of a bluff than an genuine threat. The costs of revocation and distribution are non-trivial, and legally dangerous. It's the nuclear option that the industry are holding "just in case".
It is an encrypted signal. Assuming the system is not flawed like the similar system for encrypting DVDs...
It is an encrypted signal - HDCP. But I think you might be confusing the the AACS media content protection systems with the transmission content protection system. Once the HDCP protection is stripped (and there are many papers indicating the flaws in HDCP which would enable such a stripping process), all you've got is a raw DVI signal. The television doesn't know that it's a HD-DVD, or HDTV broadcast, or an HDTV camera feeding the picture - so the AACS stuff is pretty much irrelevant by the time it reaches the display.
Scrambled content is never intended to enrich the public domain, ever. So why is it provided with copyright protection?
Valid point - it seems that the studios, in effect, are saying that they wish to write their own copyright enforcement mechanisms (by virtue of getting anti-circumvention laws passed). Thus, to all intents and purposes, they are "opting out" of the standard copyright framework. It's an off topic issue, but it's still a good thought. That said, you can never really claim that all creative work is original (film makers/script writers/composers have got to come from some sort of cultural background - and that culture is fed by expiry of copyrighted works into the public domain). So the idea of "opting out" is fraught with problems.
On a practical note it I should mention that the signal on HDMI is not only encrypted, it is also the uncompressed HD signal. So even if you could decrypt it you would not have the storage capacity or processing bandwidth to handle it (eg re-compress). Whatever your datarate is for the disc, the datarate for the signal on HDMI will be about 100x higher. Eventually we will have that sort of storage capacity and corresponding processing capability, but not very soon.
Well, I don't think you'd stream the uncompressed content straight to a hard disk - the capacity is not the problem (around 5-6TB), but the bandwidth would kill most off the shelf disk arrays (~500 MB/s). You could, however, stream it to something like a HDTVxpress board, which would then spit out an MPEG-2 stream with an bandwidth of about 10 MB/s - which is easy. And these devices will be much cheaper by the time HD-DVD/Blu-Ray becomes prevalent (if that ever happens).
Re:Let's just have one Linux desktop
on
KDE 3.5 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
The problem is that Qt is proprietary and this upsets some people. Also, we should have some sort of Open Source widget toolkit that we can fall back to when trolltech goes by the wayside, though they will probably just release Qt as Open Source
Qt was released under the GPL a long while ago. You can license it for non-GPL applications, but then you have to pay TrollTech money. The "Qt is not free" myth is covered in the KDE Myths section: here
if you take some naughty images of you and your consenting partner that would fall under these new laws, then you'll be a criminal even if you have no intent of distributing these publically.
Actually, there was already a case brought against a group of gay S&M fetishists, who took videos of themselves in various sub/dom situations, and hammering nails into... well, you can guess the rest. They were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, and, IIRC found guilty - even though there was never any intention of distributing the material. What is being proposed here - and let me be clear, if I wasn't earlier - I think the proposal is not a sensible approach - is the enclosure with the definition of Obscene Publications of violent sexual imagery.
IMHO, there is a world of difference between child pornography and simulated rape and mutilation scenes between consenting adults [NB: if the photos are the result of actual rapes or mutilations, then they are already considered obscene by virtue (or vice) of the non-consensual element]
The evidence that I have checked out in this area indicates that consumers of child pornography tend (note that word) to be more likely to act as child abusers. I am certainly willing to be convinced otherwise, but in this case, I agree with the ban on such materials being in the public domain, in order to safeguard the likely violations of rights to children which might otherwise occur. But that's where it stops. I don't support the extension of such bans to violent sexual imagery. Libertarians might well disagree with me, but that's surely their right.
There is currently a petition being driven by my local MP to try and ban 'violent pornographic websites'
To be fair, this one is only about attempting to extend the laws which cover possession of child pornography to violent porn (rape, mutilation, etc). She's not trying to ban porn websites, just the (currently legal) possession of their materials within the United Kingdom. Yes, I think it's unworkable, but it's not an entirely incoherent approach. Yarro's proposal is just plain crazy. He could even make it less crazy by saying "Right, all web sites in the United States should have to be registered with the (Local/State/Federal government) Department of Naughty Pictures which will then determine whether the site can offer service on port 80, or should be on port 6969." And failure to register a website constitutes an offence.
Yes, it's still stupid; yes, it can be trivially circumvented; and yes, it doesn't address non-HTTP protocols. But at least it's a coherent argument. The tiny, tiny flaw is that it would be struck down by the courts before you could mention the words "prior restraint". I'm fairly sure that the US Congress is prohibited from restricting freedom of spech - something about the first amendment to their contraception, or convolution - some word like that, anyway.
Do the EU and the UN run an awful lot of nameservers for use by others? I'm thinking no. This isn't a government issue.
Well of course the EU commission won't be running the servers, merely doing what the US DoC does, and delegating to someone like the ITU to run them. You say it's not a government issue - I agree. But it is a governance issue. The US government has decided that, for it's own reasons, it cannot have the root domain under anyone's sovereignty but it's own. The EU has decided that the member states cannot accept the risk that the USA might not behave as properly as it has done to date. No-one is going to force anyone in Europe to use any such EU/UN sponsored root zone, any more than EU citizens will be forced to use the Galileo GPS system. But it will be there, and the EU and member states' government resolvers will be configured to use it (I guess).
And, as we're both in violent agreement here - no big deal either way. The chances that the US is going to turn into a police state is pretty small, and the chances that the EU would want to force a namespace conflict with the ICANN roots is equally slim. But from the amount of bandwidth consumed and venom spouted you'd think that World War 3 was in preparation.
If you want to get DNS delegated from someone other than ICANN, set up your own DNS server and point it at one of the alternative roots, or talk to your ISP.
And, for the record, I use ORSN as my root DNS provider.
it's laughable watching all the anti-American slashbots get worked into a lather over it.
Actually, an equal amount of the silly shit seems to be coming from the jingoist community, who are just as well represented here.
If you don't like the US DoC controlling your root (and remember it's just the file, not the servers themselves), you already have alternatives.
Of course - and that's exactly what the EU and UN might end up doing if they can't get agreement from the US. It's their right to get their root service from anywhere [although I suspect many of their citizens would continue to use the ICANN root anyway], and the US can't stop them (and couldn't give two shits about even trying). But I think they're trying to see if consensus can't win over here.
However, I don't actually disagree with the gist of what you're saying. For the greater part of the Internet community, control over the root zone will mean... absolutely bugger all.
ICANN controls it. The US just gave them its blessing.
No, I think you're wrong there. The US DoC has control. ICANN is simply their agent for exercising that control. ICANN cannot do anything to "." without permission of the DoC. See here for a better explanation than I could ever give.
The UN is a forum for international diplomacy. It is NOT a world government. If countries want to control the flow of information, they can setup their own DNS servers. They won't ofcourse, because noone will use something that's controlled -- that is why they're trying to subvert the system everyone is already using.
So how come the ITU arranges the international telephone standards under the UN's aegis? No-one is talking about transferring day to day control to the General Council - it would just be given to a technical working group like the ITU. (In fact the ITU offered to take over if asked).
The body which controls the root zone doesn't "control the Internet". There are lots of non-US based root zones. I use ORSN. Does that give political control of my Internet traffic to Paul Vixie?
And China, Syria et al can suck my balls. They can demand all sorts of changes, but unless they can get the rest of the world to agree, they won't get them.
I mean, I suppose that the DoC could yank ICANN's charter unless they do what, say, Tom DeLay says. (Pretty unlikely, IMHO). Does that mean that Tom DeLay controls the Internet?
The US won't mess with the root because it is not in their best interest, will never be in their best interest, and is and will always be very much directly against their best interest.
Of course it could be in their best interest. If you were at war with a country which depended heavily on Internet commerce, wouldn't it make sense to nuke the TLD for that country? Much cheaper than nuking them for real (and more politically acceptable). In truth, the EU is big enough to host an alternative root (like ORSN), so it's not much of a threat to them, but a country like Vanuatu? And "give us the records of all US IP addresses using Kazaa or we nuke your TLD" could be a serious threat in the future, even if it violates trade agreements and sovereignty.
Because if the US did something like that the resulting backlash would hurt it very severely as the rest of the world would immediately form their own internet, not interoperate with ours, sanction in in the UN, WTO, etc, other countries wouldn't want to trade with it, etc.
In the case of warfare, having the enemy break off trade ties is hardly a solid reason for not doing something. As for sanction in the UN, from what I see on this discussion 50% of Americans would support complete withdrawal from the UN, thus its sanctions have little to no effect. And since the only significant players in the WTO today are the USA and EU, that's only one bloc that has to be placated. I can see no circumstances in which the EU and the USA would be at daggers drawn (ie, a military stand off)
I'm in the US, and I think almost no one here would ever want or tolerate such a thing.
Forgive me, but I'm sure that every well meaning democrat has said those words, a rephrasing of "It can't happen here". I'm sure that no-one wanted out of control witch hunts in the name of anti-communism in the 1950s, but it happened. I'm sure no American citizen wanted mines in Managua harbour to blow up a British ship, but it happened.
People are the same everywhere - make them scared enough and they'll surrender all sorts of powers to people who promise to take away their fears.
Nor does anyone else in it. Any more than the UK would wish to be swallowed up by the USA.
The problem from watching this somewhat pointless anti-EU/anti-US bashing is that the point is getting missed. The USA is asking the worlds citizenry to trust ICANN, because we (the US government) will never do anything bad, like instigate economic warfare by dicking with the DNS root servers and TLDs.
And the rest of the world has the opinion that no, we can't trust them - not that we don't want to, or that they've done something bad, but that we must not trust them. In effect, the "trust us, we're American" argument is asking the world to surrender ultimate control of a now-vital part of their economies to the USA. Something which no responsible politician (democratically elected or otherwise) would wish to do. It was different when the Internet was just the preserve of academics and geeks. But it's not that now, any more than Stock Exchanges are just the private banking facilities of a few gentlemen of commerce.
The UK and the USA are very close allies - and let's hope that alliance will survive for many years to come. But we (the UK) wouldn't give the USA the launch codes for our Trident missiles any more than the USA would give us unfettered access to Fort Meade, or distribution rights over the Federal Gold Reserve. It's not that either country has done something to forgo the trust - just that it would be a fundamental breach of sovereignty to allow such strategic control to a foreign power - however benign.
Hence, the desire to move root DNS control to a non-national body. Perhaps the ITU isn't the right place, but then who?
Having RTFA, I read the bit about stronger anti-piracy than HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, and got to thinking "Bollocks". I do understand the statement made, but funnily enough my faith in genocidal gerontocratic tyrannies falters from time to time. Like now.
I really don't think China wants strong anti-piracy measures - they want rapid economic growth. Thus, anything which impedes that is a Bad Thing, and must be stopped. Patent licensing, anti-copying measures will stop people in Shanghai and other relatively wealthy cities taking up HD, which ain't good for the low-profit margin DVD-bound producers.
So, in this case, I don't think it's about Total Control. They don't achieve that by technical means - they do that by their normal anti-piracy measures. The ones which get measured in 9mm quantities.
They'll use current (imperfect) IP geolocation stuff like everyone else.
No, they wont.
I rather think that they will. I know because my wife works for the BBC and showed me a preview of the technology roadmap - which is now public, and so I can talk about it here.
They're using GeoIP to do IP location, Kontiki to handle the P2P aspect and (at the moment) Windows WMV DRM to handle the encryption and license to view.
I suspect that this is only the initial technology - there is no way that MPlayer/VLC/etc will implement DRM (and even if they did, they're open source, so people could just dike it out anyway).
The DRM aspect is for due diligence - so that the Beeb can represent to the content producers (often non-BBC companies) that their content is being safeguarded against the legions of pirates, who, err.. download the stuff via DVB-{S,T,C} and then upload to Bittorrent. In other words - the guys at Kingswood Warren [BBC Tech HQ] know fine that the DRM protection is ultimately bullshit, but that they have to make some good faith effort to raise the piracy bar.
Back to GeoIP: I tried going out to my (German-based) Web proxy, then back via a UK HTTP proxy to test whether it would work. And it did - proving nothing, BTW, except that non UK people will get access to this content anyway.
Sony chose not to allow porn, a multibillion dollar industry even before the internet, on the Betamax.
Bullshit! I watched loads of p... Erm, I mean, I was aware of production of adult material on Betamax when I was far too young to allow my fragile little mind access to such filth.
I wonder if the parent's observation was limited to the USA only.
Speed to market: "Blu-ray is very robust, but it's also not here," said Richard Doherty, research director for the Envisioneering Group. "The PC industry has clearly backed the system that is weeks away from commercialization."
For a company with about 100 employees, hosting an entire AD/Exchange infrastructure sounds very wasteful. The cost per mailbox tends to be much higher than seeking messaging as an external commodity service.
It might make sense to run an internal directory server for accounts and IT asset tracking, but it's not at all clear that you need to run the messaging internally. Companies like Outblaze will do this sort of thing for you, or folks like IBM and HP (ObDisc: I work for HP) offer these sorts of managed services.
Actually, there's so little information in your original requirements list that it's very hard to recommend anything. It has to be said that phrases like "cobbled together" rather than "tailored integration" make it sound like you want justification for your already-made decision; if I'm wrong on this one, I do apologize.
What will you be managing in the directory? Are you likely to be buying off-the-shelf LDAP aware products. Is LDAP 2000 branding important to your organisation? Are your applications Kerberised? What's the expected expansion/contraction of the company. What sort of R&D budget have you got? What is the target cost per user per mailbox? How important are shared calendars versus personal time trackers?
Sorry to be negative - but without that sort of information, anything you see here is likely to be "I use X, and like it, so I say use X".
That's probably not the case. Windows ACL is much better than the "standard" unixy permissions, and much grainier. SELinux is trying to come close to what Windows already offers.
Don't think so. SELinux is a MAC (mandatory access control) framework. ACLs - by their nature are a DAC (discretionary access control) mechanism. MAC and DAC work together - if DAC access succeeds, then MAC can still override it. The graininess of the access control has got nothing to do with it.
The point about MAC based systems is that they enforce system security policy between system subject, objects and actions. In other words, an SELinux policy can say "allow this program to perform only the following actions to this file, and no other". So that, even if a cracker compromises the app on the Linux box, he can't get the cracked app to execute other actions on that file, or even the permitted actions on another file.
I know that people have produced MAC enhancements for Windows in the past, but didn't think that type enforcement et al were present in standard Windows releases. However, I am willing to be informed otherwise
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A highly sensible and valid point. What the hell are you doing on
There is another method to get round the HDCP trap, which is to buy one of the Spatz boxes http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/15/spatz-techs-dv
Now, HDCP also allows a revocation method - but it is not at all clear how the revoked keys would be transported. It could be that a new HD-DVD/BD disk carries them and disallows display for that disk, or burns this data into the player's NVRAM. I cannot believe that the latter would be legal ("I put this disk into my player and it broke it entirely". "Oh, yes, sorry, 20th Century Fox has revoked your television rights for using a non-approved display device". "Mother of pearl - call my lawyers!"), so we have a situation where some DVD makers could choose not to allow display on HDCP-stripping devices.
I think the way around this one would be to ensure that they lose as much money as possible on that. Every time someone discovers a non-stripper compliant disk, they post the name of the disk on a central web site (LiveJournal or some such), and we all go out and buy the disk. The next day, we all go back and return the disk and demand our money back - "Hey! This disk doesn't play on my projector. My other ones do!". Doesn't matter if you have a projector, HDTV or a HD-DVD player - we just all go out and do a consumer return. And clearly tell them why the disk is going back. This causes the studios and shops to lose more money than a simple boycott of the goods.
After a while, they're going to notice that the HDCP-stripper friendly disks sell more than the hostile ones (which they've lost a boatload on). Companies, in the end, are amoral creations designed to make profit. They are, in the round, economically rational. They will shift.
And once the device-discrimination stops, we can start the frame grabbing parties to P2P the contents of their disks. Hell, did I just say that out loud?
--Ng
Brilliant. So, let's see if I understand. Under the Single Market agreement, I can purchase goods and services from any EU member state, under the taxation rules of that member state, and the customs officials cannot stop me importing the materials. (Hence, UK customs officials can whine and whinge about bringing back 200 bottles of wine and 10,000 cigarettes, but they can't actually stop you).
Now, it's not worth it for CD-Rs, but I would have thought that a box of 100 DVD-Rs are about 60 in the UK, which, under French tax rules would cost about 180. Which means that if you can travel to the UK and back for 120, you could buy a years worth of DVD-Rs and then P2P the shit out of them. Hell, you wouldn't even have to leave the airport, and I'll bet you could get a flight from any provincial airport in France to Heathrow or Gatwick, buy the DVD-Rs in the terminal, and then bugger off home. I even seem to remember that airport shopping is UK tax discounted too!
OK - so I in the UK will open up a Unix shell account in France and fill my boots with P2P stuff (which I can import for private and domestic use without prosection because of the Secondary Infringement laws in the Copyright Act), and the French can hop over to Britain and buy the DVD blanks. Everyone wins! Well, except the record and film companies, but we hate them anyway.
BTW, mes amis - eat in France before you leave. British food has got a zillion times better in the last 10 years, but the airport food still sucks donkey balls.
--Ng
Very minor nitpick: The United Kingdom does not have a state religion. England has a state religion; Scotland does not (the Kirk is not formally part of the state). However, since the Monarch of the United Kingdom is also the Monarch of England; and the Monarch of England must also be head of the Church of England (by definition); it is true to say that the Queen/King must be CoE. Most crucially, the monarch may not be Roman Catholic. Which is just dreadful, and I'm an atheist (but people should be able to follow whatever faith they like, if any).
All of this malarkey stems from the terms of the Act of Union - the Scots would never have accepted the English Church as their official religion, so the Articles of Union make it explicit that the Union does not have an official religion (if my history lessons from a Scots education serve me correctly).
--Ng
Actually, the monarch could veto legislation - it's called the Royal Prerogative. The chances of that every happening are about zero. Because the next Act of Parliament would be to declare itself completely sovereign (as it was just before the Restoration), and to relegate the monarchy to a totally symbolic role, if not to completely abolish it.
Abolition of the monarchy is (technically) a little problematic, since the armed forces swear allegiance to the Queen; but I think a rapid change of oath to "Her Majesty's Government" should do it.
--Ng
That's the man, officer! Plain as day admitted to a public, non-domestic performance intention. Lock the bastard up, and throw away the key...
What do you mean "fair use" rights? Don't you know they were abolished under the "Digital Millenium Copyright and Hollywood-gets-whatever-it-wants Act"?
--Ng
I'll explain why this is not the case: Spatz-Tech, maker of the DVIMAGIC device, is the third party.
I think that Spatz-Tech itself is the HDCP licensee. However, I don't know that. In the end, we'll find out if they can arbitratily have their license revoked, or their supplies withdrawn. At the moment, both of us are speculating.
--Ng
I would have thought that if the consortium revoke the keys because someone has improperly used the device, they'd be opening themselves to massive lawsuits for illegal restraint of trade.
Unless the conditions for revocation were clearly covered in the HDCP license agreement. Or do you claim that the contract would be ruled unconscionable?
I think it might be ruled unconscionable. If you have a contract term which states that your business may be cancelled if a third party, over whom you can exercise no control, finds a way to abuse your device such that it harms another consortium member, and that the device has a legitimate purpose which was approved by the same HDCP consortium; then no-one in their right mind would sign such a contract. It leaves you with open ended liability for actions which you are powerless to prevent.
The HDCP license agreement states that all devices are subject to technical review to ensure that their keys are sufficiently robustly protected (to prevent device cloning), as well as ensuring interoperability [and do revocation checking]. If the keys were issued after such a review, one can hardly claim that the possible abuse of the devices was unforeseeable by an expert well versed in the field.
I realise that the analogy does not apply well, but the Betamax defence must have some applicability here - the device has an extant (perhaps even dominant), legitimate use. *Any* device could be abused (imagine getting hit over the head by one of these ugly Toshiba HD-DVD boxes!), but that would not provide sufficient cause to invalidate the manufacturers line of business.
--NgOK, we have a device that strips HDCP from a DVI signal. Watch its HDCP key get revoked after the first round of HD DVD or Blu-ray videos gets ripped, and watch it not be able to decode new titles.
Such a thing is, of course, possible (Just as the revocation of DVD player keys is possible - don't know how many have actually been revoked, though).
But these are legitimate devices - not piracy tools. Think monitors which can do HDTV resolution, but aren't HDCP compatible, or the original set of HDTVs in the USA (ie, most of the current set). The keys are issued by the HDCP consortium in the full knowledge of what the device does, and I would have thought that if the consortium revoke the keys because someone has improperly used the device, they'd be opening themselves to massive lawsuits for illegal restraint of trade.
Similarly, if a HD-DVD player ends up with a design flaw which allows it to be hacked, and the manufacturer gets its keys revoked, then they better be prepared to pony up free upgrades to the innocent consumers who bought their kit. Or face class action lawsuits.
Fundamentally, I think that the key revocation method is more of a bluff than an genuine threat. The costs of revocation and distribution are non-trivial, and legally dangerous. It's the nuclear option that the industry are holding "just in case".
--NgIt is an encrypted signal. Assuming the system is not flawed like the similar system for encrypting DVDs...
It is an encrypted signal - HDCP. But I think you might be confusing the the AACS media content protection systems with the transmission content protection system. Once the HDCP protection is stripped (and there are many papers indicating the flaws in HDCP which would enable such a stripping process), all you've got is a raw DVI signal. The television doesn't know that it's a HD-DVD, or HDTV broadcast, or an HDTV camera feeding the picture - so the AACS stuff is pretty much irrelevant by the time it reaches the display.
Scrambled content is never intended to enrich the public domain, ever. So why is it provided with copyright protection?
Valid point - it seems that the studios, in effect, are saying that they wish to write their own copyright enforcement mechanisms (by virtue of getting anti-circumvention laws passed). Thus, to all intents and purposes, they are "opting out" of the standard copyright framework. It's an off topic issue, but it's still a good thought. That said, you can never really claim that all creative work is original (film makers/script writers/composers have got to come from some sort of cultural background - and that culture is fed by expiry of copyrighted works into the public domain). So the idea of "opting out" is fraught with problems.
On a practical note it I should mention that the signal on HDMI is not only encrypted, it is also the uncompressed HD signal. So even if you could decrypt it you would not have the storage capacity or processing bandwidth to handle it (eg re-compress). Whatever your datarate is for the disc, the datarate for the signal on HDMI will be about 100x higher. Eventually we will have that sort of storage capacity and corresponding processing capability, but not very soon.
Well, I don't think you'd stream the uncompressed content straight to a hard disk - the capacity is not the problem (around 5-6TB), but the bandwidth would kill most off the shelf disk arrays (~500 MB/s). You could, however, stream it to something like a HDTVxpress board, which would then spit out an MPEG-2 stream with an bandwidth of about 10 MB/s - which is easy. And these devices will be much cheaper by the time HD-DVD/Blu-Ray becomes prevalent (if that ever happens).
--NgAll I'm waiting for is someone to produce a device that intercepts the HDMI signal and strips it of any copy protection bits.
You mean like this?
--NgThe problem is that Qt is proprietary and this upsets some people. Also, we should have some sort of Open Source widget toolkit that we can fall back to when trolltech goes by the wayside, though they will probably just release Qt as Open Source
Qt was released under the GPL a long while ago. You can license it for non-GPL applications, but then you have to pay TrollTech money. The "Qt is not free" myth is covered in the KDE Myths section: here
--Ngif you take some naughty images of you and your consenting partner that would fall under these new laws, then you'll be a criminal even if you have no intent of distributing these publically.
Actually, there was already a case brought against a group of gay S&M fetishists, who took videos of themselves in various sub/dom situations, and hammering nails into ... well, you can guess the rest. They were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, and, IIRC found guilty - even though there was never any intention of distributing the material. What is being proposed here - and let me be clear, if I wasn't earlier - I think the proposal is not a sensible approach - is the enclosure with the definition of Obscene Publications of violent sexual imagery.
IMHO, there is a world of difference between child pornography and simulated rape and mutilation scenes between consenting adults [NB: if the photos are the result of actual rapes or mutilations, then they are already considered obscene by virtue (or vice) of the non-consensual element]
The evidence that I have checked out in this area indicates that consumers of child pornography tend (note that word) to be more likely to act as child abusers. I am certainly willing to be convinced otherwise, but in this case, I agree with the ban on such materials being in the public domain, in order to safeguard the likely violations of rights to children which might otherwise occur. But that's where it stops. I don't support the extension of such bans to violent sexual imagery. Libertarians might well disagree with me, but that's surely their right.
--NgThere is currently a petition being driven by my local MP to try and ban 'violent pornographic websites'
To be fair, this one is only about attempting to extend the laws which cover possession of child pornography to violent porn (rape, mutilation, etc). She's not trying to ban porn websites, just the (currently legal) possession of their materials within the United Kingdom. Yes, I think it's unworkable, but it's not an entirely incoherent approach. Yarro's proposal is just plain crazy. He could even make it less crazy by saying "Right, all web sites in the United States should have to be registered with the (Local/State/Federal government) Department of Naughty Pictures which will then determine whether the site can offer service on port 80, or should be on port 6969." And failure to register a website constitutes an offence.
Yes, it's still stupid; yes, it can be trivially circumvented; and yes, it doesn't address non-HTTP protocols. But at least it's a coherent argument. The tiny, tiny flaw is that it would be struck down by the courts before you could mention the words "prior restraint". I'm fairly sure that the US Congress is prohibited from restricting freedom of spech - something about the first amendment to their contraception, or convolution - some word like that, anyway.
--NgDo the EU and the UN run an awful lot of nameservers for use by others? I'm thinking no. This isn't a government issue.
Well of course the EU commission won't be running the servers, merely doing what the US DoC does, and delegating to someone like the ITU to run them. You say it's not a government issue - I agree. But it is a governance issue. The US government has decided that, for it's own reasons, it cannot have the root domain under anyone's sovereignty but it's own. The EU has decided that the member states cannot accept the risk that the USA might not behave as properly as it has done to date. No-one is going to force anyone in Europe to use any such EU/UN sponsored root zone, any more than EU citizens will be forced to use the Galileo GPS system. But it will be there, and the EU and member states' government resolvers will be configured to use it (I guess).
And, as we're both in violent agreement here - no big deal either way. The chances that the US is going to turn into a police state is pretty small, and the chances that the EU would want to force a namespace conflict with the ICANN roots is equally slim. But from the amount of bandwidth consumed and venom spouted you'd think that World War 3 was in preparation.
If you want to get DNS delegated from someone other than ICANN, set up your own DNS server and point it at one of the alternative roots, or talk to your ISP.
And, for the record, I use ORSN as my root DNS provider.
--Ng
it's laughable watching all the anti-American slashbots get worked into a lather over it.
... absolutely bugger all.
Actually, an equal amount of the silly shit seems to be coming from the jingoist community, who are just as well represented here.
If you don't like the US DoC controlling your root (and remember it's just the file, not the servers themselves), you already have alternatives.
Of course - and that's exactly what the EU and UN might end up doing if they can't get agreement from the US. It's their right to get their root service from anywhere [although I suspect many of their citizens would continue to use the ICANN root anyway], and the US can't stop them (and couldn't give two shits about even trying). But I think they're trying to see if consensus can't win over here.
However, I don't actually disagree with the gist of what you're saying. For the greater part of the Internet community, control over the root zone will mean
--Ng
ICANN controls it. The US just gave them its blessing.
No, I think you're wrong there. The US DoC has control. ICANN is simply their agent for exercising that control. ICANN cannot do anything to "." without permission of the DoC. See here for a better explanation than I could ever give.
--Ng
The UN is a forum for international diplomacy. It is NOT a world government. If countries want to control the flow of information, they can setup their own DNS servers. They won't ofcourse, because noone will use something that's controlled -- that is why they're trying to subvert the system everyone is already using.
So how come the ITU arranges the international telephone standards under the UN's aegis? No-one is talking about transferring day to day control to the General Council - it would just be given to a technical working group like the ITU. (In fact the ITU offered to take over if asked).
The body which controls the root zone doesn't "control the Internet". There are lots of non-US based root zones. I use ORSN. Does that give political control of my Internet traffic to Paul Vixie?
And China, Syria et al can suck my balls. They can demand all sorts of changes, but unless they can get the rest of the world to agree, they won't get them.
I mean, I suppose that the DoC could yank ICANN's charter unless they do what, say, Tom DeLay says. (Pretty unlikely, IMHO). Does that mean that Tom DeLay controls the Internet?
--Ng
The US won't mess with the root because it is not in their best interest, will never be in their best interest, and is and will always be very much directly against their best interest.
Of course it could be in their best interest. If you were at war with a country which depended heavily on Internet commerce, wouldn't it make sense to nuke the TLD for that country? Much cheaper than nuking them for real (and more politically acceptable). In truth, the EU is big enough to host an alternative root (like ORSN), so it's not much of a threat to them, but a country like Vanuatu? And "give us the records of all US IP addresses using Kazaa or we nuke your TLD" could be a serious threat in the future, even if it violates trade agreements and sovereignty.
Because if the US did something like that the resulting backlash would hurt it very severely as the rest of the world would immediately form their own internet, not interoperate with ours, sanction in in the UN, WTO, etc, other countries wouldn't want to trade with it, etc.
In the case of warfare, having the enemy break off trade ties is hardly a solid reason for not doing something. As for sanction in the UN, from what I see on this discussion 50% of Americans would support complete withdrawal from the UN, thus its sanctions have little to no effect. And since the only significant players in the WTO today are the USA and EU, that's only one bloc that has to be placated. I can see no circumstances in which the EU and the USA would be at daggers drawn (ie, a military stand off)
I'm in the US, and I think almost no one here would ever want or tolerate such a thing.
Forgive me, but I'm sure that every well meaning democrat has said those words, a rephrasing of "It can't happen here". I'm sure that no-one wanted out of control witch hunts in the name of anti-communism in the 1950s, but it happened. I'm sure no American citizen wanted mines in Managua harbour to blow up a British ship, but it happened.
People are the same everywhere - make them scared enough and they'll surrender all sorts of powers to people who promise to take away their fears.
--Ng
The UK ain't part of the EU.
Err...Yes it is. Since 1973.
They don't want to be swallowed up by it.
Nor does anyone else in it. Any more than the UK would wish to be swallowed up by the USA.
The problem from watching this somewhat pointless anti-EU/anti-US bashing is that the point is getting missed. The USA is asking the worlds citizenry to trust ICANN, because we (the US government) will never do anything bad, like instigate economic warfare by dicking with the DNS root servers and TLDs.
And the rest of the world has the opinion that no, we can't trust them - not that we don't want to, or that they've done something bad, but that we must not trust them. In effect, the "trust us, we're American" argument is asking the world to surrender ultimate control of a now-vital part of their economies to the USA. Something which no responsible politician (democratically elected or otherwise) would wish to do. It was different when the Internet was just the preserve of academics and geeks. But it's not that now, any more than Stock Exchanges are just the private banking facilities of a few gentlemen of commerce.
The UK and the USA are very close allies - and let's hope that alliance will survive for many years to come. But we (the UK) wouldn't give the USA the launch codes for our Trident missiles any more than the USA would give us unfettered access to Fort Meade, or distribution rights over the Federal Gold Reserve. It's not that either country has done something to forgo the trust - just that it would be a fundamental breach of sovereignty to allow such strategic control to a foreign power - however benign.
Hence, the desire to move root DNS control to a non-national body. Perhaps the ITU isn't the right place, but then who?
--Ng
Having RTFA, I read the bit about stronger anti-piracy than HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, and got to thinking "Bollocks". I do understand the statement made, but funnily enough my faith in genocidal gerontocratic tyrannies falters from time to time. Like now.
I really don't think China wants strong anti-piracy measures - they want rapid economic growth. Thus, anything which impedes that is a Bad Thing, and must be stopped. Patent licensing, anti-copying measures will stop people in Shanghai and other relatively wealthy cities taking up HD, which ain't good for the low-profit margin DVD-bound producers.
So, in this case, I don't think it's about Total Control. They don't achieve that by technical means - they do that by their normal anti-piracy measures. The ones which get measured in 9mm quantities.
--Ng
They'll use current (imperfect) IP geolocation stuff like everyone else.
No, they wont.
I rather think that they will. I know because my wife works for the BBC and showed me a preview of the technology roadmap - which is now public, and so I can talk about it here.
They're using GeoIP to do IP location, Kontiki to handle the P2P aspect and (at the moment) Windows WMV DRM to handle the encryption and license to view.
I suspect that this is only the initial technology - there is no way that MPlayer/VLC/etc will implement DRM (and even if they did, they're open source, so people could just dike it out anyway).
The DRM aspect is for due diligence - so that the Beeb can represent to the content producers (often non-BBC companies) that their content is being safeguarded against the legions of pirates, who, err.. download the stuff via DVB-{S,T,C} and then upload to Bittorrent. In other words - the guys at Kingswood Warren [BBC Tech HQ] know fine that the DRM protection is ultimately bullshit, but that they have to make some good faith effort to raise the piracy bar.
Back to GeoIP: I tried going out to my (German-based) Web proxy, then back via a UK HTTP proxy to test whether it would work. And it did - proving nothing, BTW, except that non UK people will get access to this content anyway.
--Ng
Sony chose not to allow porn, a multibillion dollar industry even before the internet, on the Betamax.
Bullshit! I watched loads of p... Erm, I mean, I was aware of production of adult material on Betamax when I was far too young to allow my fragile little mind access to such filth.
I wonder if the parent's observation was limited to the USA only.
--Ng
Speed to market: "Blu-ray is very robust, but it's also not here," said Richard Doherty, research director for the Envisioneering Group. "The PC industry has clearly backed the system that is weeks away from commercialization."
1 5c.html. So have Dell (http://news.com.com/HP%2C+Dell+back+Blu-ray+techn ology/2100-1041_3-5139694.html) I guess that they aren't part of the PC industry any more - just the two largest manufacturers of err... PCs.
Hmm. I know that HP has most definitely backed Blu-Ray. http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2004/0411
And "Envisioneering?". Dear God...
--Ng
For a company with about 100 employees, hosting an entire AD/Exchange infrastructure sounds very wasteful. The cost per mailbox tends to be much higher than seeking messaging as an external commodity service.
It might make sense to run an internal directory server for accounts and IT asset tracking, but it's not at all clear that you need to run the messaging internally. Companies like Outblaze will do this sort of thing for you, or folks like IBM and HP (ObDisc: I work for HP) offer these sorts of managed services.
Actually, there's so little information in your original requirements list that it's very hard to recommend anything. It has to be said that phrases like "cobbled together" rather than "tailored integration" make it sound like you want justification for your already-made decision; if I'm wrong on this one, I do apologize.
What will you be managing in the directory? Are you likely to be buying off-the-shelf LDAP aware products. Is LDAP 2000 branding important to your organisation? Are your applications Kerberised? What's the expected expansion/contraction of the company. What sort of R&D budget have you got? What is the target cost per user per mailbox? How important are shared calendars versus personal time trackers?
Sorry to be negative - but without that sort of information, anything you see here is likely to be "I use X, and like it, so I say use X".
--Ng
Don't think so. SELinux is a MAC (mandatory access control) framework. ACLs - by their nature are a DAC (discretionary access control) mechanism. MAC and DAC work together - if DAC access succeeds, then MAC can still override it. The graininess of the access control has got nothing to do with it.
The point about MAC based systems is that they enforce system security policy between system subject, objects and actions. In other words, an SELinux policy can say "allow this program to perform only the following actions to this file, and no other". So that, even if a cracker compromises the app on the Linux box, he can't get the cracked app to execute other actions on that file, or even the permitted actions on another file.
I know that people have produced MAC enhancements for Windows in the past, but didn't think that type enforcement et al were present in standard Windows releases. However, I am willing to be informed otherwise
--Ng