It was illegal for NSA to gather and to keep that information from the people. Contracts that require illegal acts are invalid. After NSA decided to work beyond the law Snowden was no longer bound by that contract.
I don't even know for sure if that's literally true but it damn well is worth reminding people: a contract has terms for both parties. We know Snowden violated his terms, but do we know he went first?
Was his consideration purely his paychecks? I know a lot of people go into various branches of government service (everywhere from the mundane office work, to the "glory" of being a warrior) merely as a job, but if you ask people why they work where they work, that's not what all (or even most) of them say. I've never talked (knowingly;-) to NSA people, but I've talked to 19 year-old-army recruits, 40 year old unemployment insurance workers, a few cops (though it's been a long time), etc and damned if I haven't heard some idealism and oldschool civics from time to time. Do you think those people are lying about why joined the organization? Some, maybe, but not most of them.
There's an expectation that the service has a purpose, and that it's a good purpose. I don't give a flying fuck whether or not "the government shall act in good faith to promote the interest of its citizens" is explicitly written in ink on the workers' contracts or not, because if you get that anal about it, then the very idea of any contracts every having any validity itself becomes nebulous.
Whose place is it to decide whether or not the government has violated its contracts? Everyone's. If you don't believe that, then ask anyone their opinion about Nazi war criminals, to get a better explanation within the context of an easy black/white example. Sure, today's examples are harder and blurrier, but the responsibility hasn't moved.
Finally. People have been asking for years for software to become even harder to maintain and debug. For too long, we have tolerated too-high quality and reliability, too-low prices, and projects completing absurdly ahead of deadline. I'm glad to see that someone is finally doing something about it.
Interesting that "installing or updating apps" has become a CPU-bound thing, so that more CPUs or cores makes it significantly faster. I normally think of those kinds of activities as being something where your Amiga's single-core 7 MHz 68000 is mostly idle, just waiting for the disk or network I/O.
It's great that my next phone will be quad-core, but I damn well expect it to be using those cores to work on complicated pipelines. If I see more than 10% CPU use on "updating apps" then I'm going to be a bit disappointed.
The Senate Appropriations Committee supposedly did this unanimously so not a single one of these people can claim it's not their fault:
BARBARA A. MIKULSKI - Maryland CHRIS COONS - Delaware DAN COATS - Indiana DIANNE FEINSTEIN - California JACK REED - Rhode Island JEANNE SHAHEEN - New Hampshire JEFF MERKLEY - Oregon JERRY MORAN - Jerry Moran JOHN BOOZMAN - Arkansas JOHN HOEVEN - North Dakota JON TESTER - Montana LAMAR ALEXANDER - Tennessee LINDSEY GRAHAM - South Carolina LISA MURKOWSKI - Alaska MARK BEGICH - Alaska MARK KIRK - Illinois MARK PRYOR - Arkansas MARY L. LANDRIEU - Louisiana MIKE JOHANNS - Nebraska MITCH MCCONNELL - Kentucky PATRICK J. LEAHY - Vermont PATTY MURRAY - Washington RICHARD C. SHELBY - Alabama RICHARD J. DURBIN - Illinois ROY BLUNT - Missouri SUSAN COLLINS - Maine THAD COCHRAN - Mississippi TIM JOHNSON - South Dakota TOM HARKIN - Iowa TOM UDALL - New Mexico
But maybe this was one of those "voice votes" where it wasn't really unanimous. It's being reported as unanimous, though, so the disgraced need to issue press releases disclaiming responsibility immediately, if they want to squirm out of this. I live in NM so I blame you, Tom Udall. Explain yourself.
You'd have to avoid anything with obvious wireless access, which means no lock/unlock/panic/remote start systems, and likely not even a car radio since many are on the bus as well.
Ok, you've sold me. I wouldn't miss a single one of those things. Would you?
It is, if you then disconnect half of it and move it offsite! I'm not sure that's the best way to do backups, though.
If I were this guy, I'd look into why it takes rsync so long to read the dir tree. This is one of those situations where no matter how much people say "Linux filesystems don't suffer from fragmentation," I nevertheless suspect you're suffering from highly fragmented directories. Let me guess: do you repeatedly come close to filling the disk? Maybe it's time to do this: after the next rsync, destroy your original with a new mkfs.whatever (I hope you have at least two backups) and then cp the data back to it.
Reigning in rogue agencies isn't the answer to the security problem. By all means reign them in, but merely out of civics and saving tax money (our government should be working for us, not against us; all this money being spent on NSA computers could be spent on crack instead, for a net economic gain).
Yet the NSA is merely one (possibly the biggest and most powerful, but still just one) potential adversary out there. Everything they do, someone else could do. And not all adversaries are parts of your government or in any way accountable to you. We have to secure our communications, or else all of your NSA fears (whether currently grounded in reality or not) will eventually come true, but with some other name filled into the bogeyman blank. Please, after we deal with the NSA, let's not go through all this again and again. Can't we learn?
Geez, you could even argue that if we secured our comms, then foreign governments would be less of a threat to us, and the NSA's non-secret agenda would become less necessary. You don't need (quite as badly) the NSA reading the Chinese government's mail, if you start denying the Chinese government the ability to read your mail. In a way, by going to all this extra trouble to make ourselves vulnerable to snoopers, we (at least to some extent) justify the NSA! That's stupid. Even if you think the NSA is necessary (and it probably is!) the goal of all government should be to obsolete itself.
So, NSA guys, I'll at least say this: thanks for the great ciphers. Was this your plan, all along, for persuading us to use 'em? Am I going to read some day, that Clapper ordered Snowden to do what he did?;-) I don't think it's working, but thanks for trying.
CALEA also requires that encrypted communications be decrypted.
True, within limited context. CALEA requires that the communication providers and equipment decrypt. If you can communicate with general-purpose equipment and networks (e.g. PCs and the Internet) where your software handles things, there currently isn't any law in the US which require it be decrypted. That is why the government wants a "CALEA II," to make it illegal for people to write or use secure software, such as ssh or gpg.
The reason Skype isn't legally allowed to be secure, is that Skype software completely relies on the Skype service, and the dedicated service both falls under CALEA and and has a single point of pressure (currently: Microsoft). If the service were something generic (e.g. use any XMPP server) and replaceable, and if the client software handled the security, then CALEA wouldn't apply. Beyond CALEA itself, governments and other powerful entities can use force against software makers, so just make sure: 1) your software is not single-source; effectively this means it needs to be Free Software 2) it uses generic networks, and the software secures things at the endpoints rather than relying on the service to magically apply security (which is hilarious when you think about it).
Skype's security problems reminds me a lot of some basic strategies for computer freedom in general. While Free Software and standardized services are usually preferred because they're most likely to not work against the user' interests (and if they do, it's almost never deliberate), there actually do exist situations where a proprietary service or application may be fairly safe. The trick is to never, ever use a proprietary application with a proprietary service, combined. As long as one or the other can be replaced, you have a means of keeping the overall system "honest" and responsible to the user.
So while, for example, the iTunes application may be a rather shittier-than-average media player, it's actually fairly safe to use it as a player. Just don't use it with the iTunes store or you're risking getting into a single-source trap. Or if the iTunes store were to opens its protocols so that other applications could transact with it, it would be just fine -- just don't use the iTunes application with it. Similarly, nearly all websites are effectively proprietary (e.g. they're not running GPL3 code) but that's totally not a problem, because your Firefox or Chromium or Konqueror lack special code to screw you over, by for example, locking you into any of these websites (or, say, by leaking session keys to third parties).
The problem with Skype is that you can't use it without the Skype network. And you can't use the network without their app. Together, it adds up to an application and network which are nearly useless, because you'll never be able to trust them. CALEA is almost the very embodiment of the general problem, written into law (!) and limited to the domain of communications. You can see echos (but they're not quite as clear) of the same user-screwing idea written into other laws applying to other domains. e.g. DMCA, which is used to tie proprietary content to proprietary players, keeping users from being able to legally do things the right way (i.e. retain the capacity to "fire" their player or provider).
They can't put any conditions upon when they'll accept a notice; refusing a notice merely means they lose their liability protection.
But yeah, they could indirectly do it, with other punative measures against recurring abusers. If, say, notices regarding "Boardwalk Empire" were to exceed 50% bogus threshold (i.e. they are wasting Google's time, costing Google money) then Google could just remove HBO's own pages from searches too. Then they could charge in proportion to HBO's abuse, to restore the HBO links. What's really cute about this idea, is that censorship mechanisms already exist at Google, thanks to the same damn industry.
I love the bonding idea too (if anyone should be posting bonds with DMCA notices, it's HBO!), but that's something Congress would have to do.
Regardless of whether you think what Snowden did (and continues to do) is good or bad, he is a traitor to the country.
If you think what he did was bad, then he's a traitor to his country. If you think what he did was good, then he's a traitor to his government and a hero to his country. I think a lot of peoples' opinions on the good/bad question are going to correspond with their opinion about whether or not the country and the government are on the same side.
I've seen a dog watch TV, though she had a pretty short attention span. The best part is what she was watching and what was happening; it was perfect. It was a nature show about wolves, and there was a pack and an "outsider" wolf. I shit you not: my dog started growling at the outsider! Something about its posture, I guess.
Honestly, I have answered "Yes, this is helpful" to joke reviews in a few cases, just because I thought they were hilarious. Amazon reviewing is Just Another place to go Fuck Around On The Internet, and so some people use it for that. Creative outlet. And no, I don't do it, but I should. And I already admitted I've upvoted some, so.. fine, blame me.
I am so disappointed that people are now talking about religion-blind bribes as though they're evil.
Let's say you're in a third world country, and a "your papers please" official hassles you over something that doesn't make sense, but then explains that your problem can be taken care of for a small fee.
Do you ask him what crazy religious beliefs he has, as a condition for paying the bribe? "Sure, this $20 might find itself into your pocket... if you can tell me a little about, oh, I don't know, say.. THETANS!" (As you blurt out the last word, transfix him with your gaze and watch to see if he winces.)
Of course not. And what if Google did that? You'd accuse them of religious discrimination.
Google: "Do you believe that evidence reveals properties of nature to us?"
Politician: "Of course. Are you telling me there are people who thi--"
Google: "Evidencist!! No money for you, Mister Science!"
And before you say we shouldn't have bribes at all, I should remind you than nearly 100% of voters always vote for one of the top two best-funded candidates in any race. I take that as meaning we've agreed that it's very important to us, that we only allow people in government if they have proven themselves adept at shakedowns. So, c'mon dudes, you're not telling me that 100% of The People are evil are you? Google's just doing what all Americans want them to have to do.
Re:iTunes protocol as DRM
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How DRM Won
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· Score: 1
It's impossible for any media to play on any platform. Even if something were supplied with no decryption key necessary, I can still point to some box it doesn't play on
It depends on why it doesn't play on that box.
If it could have easily played on that box, and would have worked except that someone went to extra trouble to make it not work, then people have cause to gripe. That's a situation where have people expending resources in order to achieve a lower total gross value, which is course, going to result in an even lower net value. If they simply hadn't spent the extra money to make it not work, they could have charged even more for the product. Purposeful economic destruction triggers a lot of peoples' bullshit alarms.
If it doesn't work, not because someone tried to make it not work, but because of a real limitation or practical concern, then that's a whole other situation. It's true that you can't play a movie on VHS player if you don't have physical access to the VHS tape, but why can't you? It's not because some evil or insane bastard wanted to make the media worth less. It works like that because it's easiest to make a media player which requires media, and harder to make a media player that is able to magically work without media. It's natural. It's like everything else in the world that we encounter (e.g. you can't take a trip in your car without physical access to the car) outside of the DRM sphere.
As long as someone isn't trying to keep it from working right, then I think most people will cut them a lot of slack. We're all quite familiar with, and more accepting of, mere technical limitations. It's when someone is dealing in bad faith and acting two-faced (anti-business in the market but claiming to be pro-business in other forums, such as their DC lobbying or their meetings with stockholders, etc) -- that we 1) get pissed off, and 2) give up and just do what happens to be both easiest and works best.
With rented media I'd expect DRM, it's the only way that system can work.
We have hard evidence that it works fine without DRM. From the late 1970s to the mid/late-1980s (I'm not sure exactly when Macrovision happened) we had a VHS rental industry without DRM. There was explosive growth in that period.
And the fact that Macrovision eventually showed up, isn't very good evidence that DRM was needed; we have no reason to believe the mid/late-1980s to late 1990s market would have gone much differently without it. And Macrovision was so trivially circumvented (a lot of people even did it unwittingly with literally zero effort) that it almost doesn't count as DRM (uhr.. "ARM?") so I could possibly even cite the entire history of VHS as proof that rentals don't require DRM to work. I suppose I could make a similar argument with the CSS on DVDs and the DVD rental market, but it's not quite the same (since people at least knew they were breaking the law when they played DVDs on "unauthorized" equipment, and from 1996-1999 AFAIK nobody had stuff like DeCSS yet, so the DVD rental market started with a situation much like the DRM situations that we have today).
With rented media, I don't understand the expectation that it should be downloaded locally and not copy protected.
Copy protection is easy to address: it's always a bad idea (no matter what kind of basic media tech we're talking about) because it limits implementations. When you tell mplayer users "no, our content doesn't work with your player, and we'll probably sue people if we ever find out that it does, so go look elsewhere" that simply can't be as good as "yes, we'll take your money." Anyone renting media should have an expectation that the business wants to do business and isn't going out of their way to look for reasons to say no and p
iTunes protocol as DRM
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How DRM Won
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· Score: 3, Interesting
One way to look at these issues might be to phrase the question in legalese, particularly DMCAese: Is the inability to interact with iTunes cloud storage, using software other than iTunes, due to a "technical measure which limits access?" If someone were to reverse-engineer the protocol that the iTunes application uses to communicate with the backend, so that you could use the service without Apple's shockingly crappy software, and then if Apple sued 'em under 1201, would a fair judge (please, bear with me and pretend) strictly ruling by the letter of the law, say Apple is right or wrong?
If so, then at least it's DRM according to many governments.
I think Apple would do that (i.e. they would say it's DRM) if someone wrote an iTunes cloud client. And I suspect Apple would win, but I guess that depends on the details of the protocol. But history shows that the fact that nothing works with iTunes is on purpose, part of Apple's wishes, not merely due to laziness, lack of market demand, etc.
I do think that the "DRM" label gets overused and applied to things where it should not (e.g. watermarking to detect who leaked something -- that is not DRM!). But trade secret proprietary protocols cut much closer to the line, and when we're talking about a megacorp's proprietary trade secret for transferring media files.. c'mon. Of course you're going to find a "technical measure which limits access" there. Don't you think?
As for your codec example, if the codec were a trade secret (and there have been a few), then yes, it would probably count as DRM. When you get to non-secret things like a supposedly "industry standard H.whatever" where it's documented, I think calling it DRM might be a stretch. We would at least have to depart from the legalese way of looking at it. If the lack of a h.266 decoder were due to patent holders' prohibition, then in DMCA-speak that'd be a "dishonorable-lawyer-trick measure to limit access" rather than a "technical measure to limit access.";-) At that point, when people refuse to take your money, you don't need to split hairs and argue about whether or not its strictly DRM. They've already gone to a lot of trouble to refuse the revenue, so leave it at that, and just go download the pirate copy which is encoded with the codec that you're allowed to decode. Then everyone wins.
all the NSA needs is metadata. With metadata they can know a lot about you.
NSA is merely the excuse/cover for people securing the things that have always needed securing. Don't look at things from the PoV of the NSA or the kinds of people they're supposedly supposed to (?) be peeking at. Look at it from your own PoV.
When a burglar sees you send a mundane message to your friend, it matters to you whether or not he is able to tell the difference between
Come check out my new pump shotgun. I can't wait for someone to break in and give me an excuse to use it. God damn I have wanted to kill someone, anyone, for so so long. Blood! I MUST HAVE BLOOD!
or
I'll be right over in a few minutes and we can begin our long night of drinking, as part of the wake for my recently-deceased guard dog. I can crash at your place, right? No, I don't want to carry over my solid gold food bowl; that'll just remind me of him. OMG, he'll never eat out of that bowl again. I'm going to have a cry now... you have tissues?
These are the kind of messages which are important to 99.999% of people, the kind of info that we're constantly leaking to fuck-knows-who, which needs to be transmitted securely.
Interesting how they say their measurements start with a full battery charge but don't say they end with a full battery charge. It's almost as though the so-called MPG number is totally made up out of thin air.
You people are making things too complicated. People who want phones which act like mirrors and resist makeup smudges, really just need their phones to offer stylesheet files to all viewers who gaze upon the user.
The normal rule of gunnery is to shoot, and then whatever you happen to hit: call that the target.;-) With terrorism, whoever you missed is the target. And whoever you hit, is your weapon against that target. But in order to work, it requires the cooperation of the target. If the target does not choose to react fearfully, then the terrorism does not accomplish its objective.
Does the same thing apply to carjacking? Armed robbery?
No. The goal of carjacking is to get a ride; the goal of robbery is to obtain value. Deciding to not fear it, does not deny your adversary his goal.
But terrorism is about persuading the survivors, the technically-not-victims. Nobody ever carjacks in order to get the next car to lock their doors. Nobody commits armed robbery in order to manipulate a third party (movie script counter-example: Die Hard, but the FBI was manipulated as part of a "Briar Patch" strategy, rather than terrorism(*)).
e.g. Not Terrorism: "Your tank factory and its workers are gone. This gains me a numeric advantage in next month's tank battle." Terrorism: "Your tank factory and its workers are gone. Surrender or else I'll wreck more of your expensive factories and kill more of your workers."
(*) Does this happen in real life? What believed acts of terrorism were actually not?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't even know for sure if that's literally true but it damn well is worth reminding people: a contract has terms for both parties. We know Snowden violated his terms, but do we know he went first?
Was his consideration purely his paychecks? I know a lot of people go into various branches of government service (everywhere from the mundane office work, to the "glory" of being a warrior) merely as a job, but if you ask people why they work where they work, that's not what all (or even most) of them say. I've never talked (knowingly ;-) to NSA people, but I've talked to 19 year-old-army recruits, 40 year old unemployment insurance workers, a few cops (though it's been a long time), etc and damned if I haven't heard some idealism and oldschool civics from time to time. Do you think those people are lying about why joined the organization? Some, maybe, but not most of them.
There's an expectation that the service has a purpose, and that it's a good purpose. I don't give a flying fuck whether or not "the government shall act in good faith to promote the interest of its citizens" is explicitly written in ink on the workers' contracts or not, because if you get that anal about it, then the very idea of any contracts every having any validity itself becomes nebulous.
Whose place is it to decide whether or not the government has violated its contracts? Everyone's. If you don't believe that, then ask anyone their opinion about Nazi war criminals, to get a better explanation within the context of an easy black/white example. Sure, today's examples are harder and blurrier, but the responsibility hasn't moved.
Finally. People have been asking for years for software to become even harder to maintain and debug. For too long, we have tolerated too-high quality and reliability, too-low prices, and projects completing absurdly ahead of deadline. I'm glad to see that someone is finally doing something about it.
Interesting that "installing or updating apps" has become a CPU-bound thing, so that more CPUs or cores makes it significantly faster. I normally think of those kinds of activities as being something where your Amiga's single-core 7 MHz 68000 is mostly idle, just waiting for the disk or network I/O.
It's great that my next phone will be quad-core, but I damn well expect it to be using those cores to work on complicated pipelines. If I see more than 10% CPU use on "updating apps" then I'm going to be a bit disappointed.
Is the "panel" some subset of the committee? (I'm not exactly looking for desperate ways to excuse anyone, just wanna make sure...)
The Senate Appropriations Committee supposedly did this unanimously so not a single one of these people can claim it's not their fault:
BARBARA A. MIKULSKI - Maryland
CHRIS COONS - Delaware
DAN COATS - Indiana
DIANNE FEINSTEIN - California
JACK REED - Rhode Island
JEANNE SHAHEEN - New Hampshire
JEFF MERKLEY - Oregon
JERRY MORAN - Jerry Moran
JOHN BOOZMAN - Arkansas
JOHN HOEVEN - North Dakota
JON TESTER - Montana
LAMAR ALEXANDER - Tennessee
LINDSEY GRAHAM - South Carolina
LISA MURKOWSKI - Alaska
MARK BEGICH - Alaska
MARK KIRK - Illinois
MARK PRYOR - Arkansas
MARY L. LANDRIEU - Louisiana
MIKE JOHANNS - Nebraska
MITCH MCCONNELL - Kentucky
PATRICK J. LEAHY - Vermont
PATTY MURRAY - Washington
RICHARD C. SHELBY - Alabama
RICHARD J. DURBIN - Illinois
ROY BLUNT - Missouri
SUSAN COLLINS - Maine
THAD COCHRAN - Mississippi
TIM JOHNSON - South Dakota
TOM HARKIN - Iowa
TOM UDALL - New Mexico
But maybe this was one of those "voice votes" where it wasn't really unanimous. It's being reported as unanimous, though, so the disgraced need to issue press releases disclaiming responsibility immediately, if they want to squirm out of this. I live in NM so I blame you, Tom Udall. Explain yourself.
Ok, you've sold me. I wouldn't miss a single one of those things. Would you?
It is, if you then disconnect half of it and move it offsite! I'm not sure that's the best way to do backups, though.
If I were this guy, I'd look into why it takes rsync so long to read the dir tree. This is one of those situations where no matter how much people say "Linux filesystems don't suffer from fragmentation," I nevertheless suspect you're suffering from highly fragmented directories. Let me guess: do you repeatedly come close to filling the disk? Maybe it's time to do this: after the next rsync, destroy your original with a new mkfs.whatever (I hope you have at least two backups) and then cp the data back to it.
Reigning in rogue agencies isn't the answer to the security problem. By all means reign them in, but merely out of civics and saving tax money (our government should be working for us, not against us; all this money being spent on NSA computers could be spent on crack instead, for a net economic gain).
Yet the NSA is merely one (possibly the biggest and most powerful, but still just one) potential adversary out there. Everything they do, someone else could do. And not all adversaries are parts of your government or in any way accountable to you. We have to secure our communications, or else all of your NSA fears (whether currently grounded in reality or not) will eventually come true, but with some other name filled into the bogeyman blank. Please, after we deal with the NSA, let's not go through all this again and again. Can't we learn?
Geez, you could even argue that if we secured our comms, then foreign governments would be less of a threat to us, and the NSA's non-secret agenda would become less necessary. You don't need (quite as badly) the NSA reading the Chinese government's mail, if you start denying the Chinese government the ability to read your mail. In a way, by going to all this extra trouble to make ourselves vulnerable to snoopers, we (at least to some extent) justify the NSA! That's stupid. Even if you think the NSA is necessary (and it probably is!) the goal of all government should be to obsolete itself.
So, NSA guys, I'll at least say this: thanks for the great ciphers. Was this your plan, all along, for persuading us to use 'em? Am I going to read some day, that Clapper ordered Snowden to do what he did? ;-) I don't think it's working, but thanks for trying.
True, within limited context. CALEA requires that the communication providers and equipment decrypt. If you can communicate with general-purpose equipment and networks (e.g. PCs and the Internet) where your software handles things, there currently isn't any law in the US which require it be decrypted. That is why the government wants a "CALEA II," to make it illegal for people to write or use secure software, such as ssh or gpg.
The reason Skype isn't legally allowed to be secure, is that Skype software completely relies on the Skype service, and the dedicated service both falls under CALEA and and has a single point of pressure (currently: Microsoft). If the service were something generic (e.g. use any XMPP server) and replaceable, and if the client software handled the security, then CALEA wouldn't apply. Beyond CALEA itself, governments and other powerful entities can use force against software makers, so just make sure: 1) your software is not single-source; effectively this means it needs to be Free Software 2) it uses generic networks, and the software secures things at the endpoints rather than relying on the service to magically apply security (which is hilarious when you think about it).
Skype's security problems reminds me a lot of some basic strategies for computer freedom in general. While Free Software and standardized services are usually preferred because they're most likely to not work against the user' interests (and if they do, it's almost never deliberate), there actually do exist situations where a proprietary service or application may be fairly safe. The trick is to never, ever use a proprietary application with a proprietary service, combined. As long as one or the other can be replaced, you have a means of keeping the overall system "honest" and responsible to the user.
So while, for example, the iTunes application may be a rather shittier-than-average media player, it's actually fairly safe to use it as a player. Just don't use it with the iTunes store or you're risking getting into a single-source trap. Or if the iTunes store were to opens its protocols so that other applications could transact with it, it would be just fine -- just don't use the iTunes application with it. Similarly, nearly all websites are effectively proprietary (e.g. they're not running GPL3 code) but that's totally not a problem, because your Firefox or Chromium or Konqueror lack special code to screw you over, by for example, locking you into any of these websites (or, say, by leaking session keys to third parties).
The problem with Skype is that you can't use it without the Skype network. And you can't use the network without their app. Together, it adds up to an application and network which are nearly useless, because you'll never be able to trust them. CALEA is almost the very embodiment of the general problem, written into law (!) and limited to the domain of communications. You can see echos (but they're not quite as clear) of the same user-screwing idea written into other laws applying to other domains. e.g. DMCA, which is used to tie proprietary content to proprietary players, keeping users from being able to legally do things the right way (i.e. retain the capacity to "fire" their player or provider).
And you can put a 68020 in your Amiga and leave all this "best 16-bit pc" talk behind.
It doesn't matter. Jack Tramiel's Mastercard limit is $230M.
Wife: What happened at work today, honey?
Scientist [excitedly]: I confirmed the hypothesis that pitch is perfectly solid!
They can't put any conditions upon when they'll accept a notice; refusing a notice merely means they lose their liability protection.
But yeah, they could indirectly do it, with other punative measures against recurring abusers. If, say, notices regarding "Boardwalk Empire" were to exceed 50% bogus threshold (i.e. they are wasting Google's time, costing Google money) then Google could just remove HBO's own pages from searches too. Then they could charge in proportion to HBO's abuse, to restore the HBO links. What's really cute about this idea, is that censorship mechanisms already exist at Google, thanks to the same damn industry.
I love the bonding idea too (if anyone should be posting bonds with DMCA notices, it's HBO!), but that's something Congress would have to do.
If you think what he did was bad, then he's a traitor to his country. If you think what he did was good, then he's a traitor to his government and a hero to his country. I think a lot of peoples' opinions on the good/bad question are going to correspond with their opinion about whether or not the country and the government are on the same side.
I've seen a dog watch TV, though she had a pretty short attention span. The best part is what she was watching and what was happening; it was perfect. It was a nature show about wolves, and there was a pack and an "outsider" wolf. I shit you not: my dog started growling at the outsider! Something about its posture, I guess.
Honestly, I have answered "Yes, this is helpful" to joke reviews in a few cases, just because I thought they were hilarious. Amazon reviewing is Just Another place to go Fuck Around On The Internet, and so some people use it for that. Creative outlet. And no, I don't do it, but I should. And I already admitted I've upvoted some, so .. fine, blame me.
I am so disappointed that people are now talking about religion-blind bribes as though they're evil.
Let's say you're in a third world country, and a "your papers please" official hassles you over something that doesn't make sense, but then explains that your problem can be taken care of for a small fee.
Do you ask him what crazy religious beliefs he has, as a condition for paying the bribe? "Sure, this $20 might find itself into your pocket ... if you can tell me a little about, oh, I don't know, say .. THETANS!" (As you blurt out the last word, transfix him with your gaze and watch to see if he winces.)
Of course not. And what if Google did that? You'd accuse them of religious discrimination.
Google: "Do you believe that evidence reveals properties of nature to us?"
Politician: "Of course. Are you telling me there are people who thi--"
Google: "Evidencist!! No money for you, Mister Science!"
And before you say we shouldn't have bribes at all, I should remind you than nearly 100% of voters always vote for one of the top two best-funded candidates in any race. I take that as meaning we've agreed that it's very important to us, that we only allow people in government if they have proven themselves adept at shakedowns. So, c'mon dudes, you're not telling me that 100% of The People are evil are you? Google's just doing what all Americans want them to have to do.
It depends on why it doesn't play on that box.
If it could have easily played on that box, and would have worked except that someone went to extra trouble to make it not work, then people have cause to gripe. That's a situation where have people expending resources in order to achieve a lower total gross value, which is course, going to result in an even lower net value. If they simply hadn't spent the extra money to make it not work, they could have charged even more for the product. Purposeful economic destruction triggers a lot of peoples' bullshit alarms.
If it doesn't work, not because someone tried to make it not work, but because of a real limitation or practical concern, then that's a whole other situation. It's true that you can't play a movie on VHS player if you don't have physical access to the VHS tape, but why can't you? It's not because some evil or insane bastard wanted to make the media worth less. It works like that because it's easiest to make a media player which requires media, and harder to make a media player that is able to magically work without media. It's natural. It's like everything else in the world that we encounter (e.g. you can't take a trip in your car without physical access to the car) outside of the DRM sphere.
As long as someone isn't trying to keep it from working right, then I think most people will cut them a lot of slack. We're all quite familiar with, and more accepting of, mere technical limitations. It's when someone is dealing in bad faith and acting two-faced (anti-business in the market but claiming to be pro-business in other forums, such as their DC lobbying or their meetings with stockholders, etc) -- that we 1) get pissed off, and 2) give up and just do what happens to be both easiest and works best.
We have hard evidence that it works fine without DRM. From the late 1970s to the mid/late-1980s (I'm not sure exactly when Macrovision happened) we had a VHS rental industry without DRM. There was explosive growth in that period.
And the fact that Macrovision eventually showed up, isn't very good evidence that DRM was needed; we have no reason to believe the mid/late-1980s to late 1990s market would have gone much differently without it. And Macrovision was so trivially circumvented (a lot of people even did it unwittingly with literally zero effort) that it almost doesn't count as DRM (uhr.. "ARM?") so I could possibly even cite the entire history of VHS as proof that rentals don't require DRM to work. I suppose I could make a similar argument with the CSS on DVDs and the DVD rental market, but it's not quite the same (since people at least knew they were breaking the law when they played DVDs on "unauthorized" equipment, and from 1996-1999 AFAIK nobody had stuff like DeCSS yet, so the DVD rental market started with a situation much like the DRM situations that we have today).
Copy protection is easy to address: it's always a bad idea (no matter what kind of basic media tech we're talking about) because it limits implementations. When you tell mplayer users "no, our content doesn't work with your player, and we'll probably sue people if we ever find out that it does, so go look elsewhere" that simply can't be as good as "yes, we'll take your money." Anyone renting media should have an expectation that the business wants to do business and isn't going out of their way to look for reasons to say no and p
One way to look at these issues might be to phrase the question in legalese, particularly DMCAese: Is the inability to interact with iTunes cloud storage, using software other than iTunes, due to a "technical measure which limits access?" If someone were to reverse-engineer the protocol that the iTunes application uses to communicate with the backend, so that you could use the service without Apple's shockingly crappy software, and then if Apple sued 'em under 1201, would a fair judge (please, bear with me and pretend) strictly ruling by the letter of the law, say Apple is right or wrong?
If so, then at least it's DRM according to many governments.
I think Apple would do that (i.e. they would say it's DRM) if someone wrote an iTunes cloud client. And I suspect Apple would win, but I guess that depends on the details of the protocol. But history shows that the fact that nothing works with iTunes is on purpose, part of Apple's wishes, not merely due to laziness, lack of market demand, etc.
I do think that the "DRM" label gets overused and applied to things where it should not (e.g. watermarking to detect who leaked something -- that is not DRM!). But trade secret proprietary protocols cut much closer to the line, and when we're talking about a megacorp's proprietary trade secret for transferring media files .. c'mon. Of course you're going to find a "technical measure which limits access" there. Don't you think?
As for your codec example, if the codec were a trade secret (and there have been a few), then yes, it would probably count as DRM. When you get to non-secret things like a supposedly "industry standard H.whatever" where it's documented, I think calling it DRM might be a stretch. We would at least have to depart from the legalese way of looking at it. If the lack of a h.266 decoder were due to patent holders' prohibition, then in DMCA-speak that'd be a "dishonorable-lawyer-trick measure to limit access" rather than a "technical measure to limit access." ;-) At that point, when people refuse to take your money, you don't need to split hairs and argue about whether or not its strictly DRM. They've already gone to a lot of trouble to refuse the revenue, so leave it at that, and just go download the pirate copy which is encoded with the codec that you're allowed to decode. Then everyone wins.
Sounds like a great number to stick into the headline, instead of the 262 lie that the incompetent /. editors used. And yes, of course, 168 is great.
NSA is merely the excuse/cover for people securing the things that have always needed securing. Don't look at things from the PoV of the NSA or the kinds of people they're supposedly supposed to (?) be peeking at. Look at it from your own PoV.
When a burglar sees you send a mundane message to your friend, it matters to you whether or not he is able to tell the difference between
or
These are the kind of messages which are important to 99.999% of people, the kind of info that we're constantly leaking to fuck-knows-who, which needs to be transmitted securely.
I predict most of them will be broken, and not generate or exchange keys competently.
Interesting how they say their measurements start with a full battery charge but don't say they end with a full battery charge. It's almost as though the so-called MPG number is totally made up out of thin air.
You people are making things too complicated. People who want phones which act like mirrors and resist makeup smudges, really just need their phones to offer stylesheet files to all viewers who gaze upon the user.
The normal rule of gunnery is to shoot, and then whatever you happen to hit: call that the target. ;-) With terrorism, whoever you missed is the target. And whoever you hit, is your weapon against that target. But in order to work, it requires the cooperation of the target. If the target does not choose to react fearfully, then the terrorism does not accomplish its objective.
No. The goal of carjacking is to get a ride; the goal of robbery is to obtain value. Deciding to not fear it, does not deny your adversary his goal.
But terrorism is about persuading the survivors, the technically-not-victims. Nobody ever carjacks in order to get the next car to lock their doors. Nobody commits armed robbery in order to manipulate a third party (movie script counter-example: Die Hard, but the FBI was manipulated as part of a "Briar Patch" strategy, rather than terrorism(*)).
e.g. Not Terrorism: "Your tank factory and its workers are gone. This gains me a numeric advantage in next month's tank battle." Terrorism: "Your tank factory and its workers are gone. Surrender or else I'll wreck more of your expensive factories and kill more of your workers."
(*) Does this happen in real life? What believed acts of terrorism were actually not?