By misspelling "grief" you defied the adaptive Huffman table's expected distribution, thereby wasting memory. You're lucky this is a C64 story where memory is abundant, because if you had posted this in a VIC-20 story (where every single byte truly counts) I would have called you Not Worthy.
For that kind of situation, perhaps what you need is a non-lawyer attorney. ("Aren't attorney and lawyer synonyms?" No.) Not everyone who represents you, need be a professional. I remember that from No Laughing Matter and if the guy who wrote Catch-22 (and his friend) ain't qualified to offer legal advice, I don't know who is!;-)
If I am as impaired at 0.1 as you are are at 0.05 why can I not drive at 0.1?
It looks like there are (at least) two different ways of looking at the word "impaired," relating to exactly what you're benchmarking the driver's state relative to. Are we comparing it to average (or worst) drivers or are we comparing it to the same driver?
Maybe you are as good a driver at 0.99% as I am at 0.049%. It's possible. There's a school of thought out there, though, which says this is irrelevant unless (!) you're also as good as driver at 0.99% as you are at 0%. Are you? [Sloppy's finger tembles, hovering over the "call bullshit" button.]
Are we trying to punish people for being bad drivers, or are we trying to punish them for not being the best drivers they can be? Half of the population consists of below-average drivers, but we don't appear to have any policies where these people are continually tested and ticketed for being bad drivers. Why not? Because the fuckwits (*) are either trying but suck and we give them a break so they don't rebel, or we haven't figured out an objective way to demonstrate the fact that they aren't really trying as hard as they could.
There's probably a lot of truth in that first possibility: we accept that half the population drives bad, because pointing cars at us accidentally is probably safer than getting them mad where half the population they point guns at us the other half and says "let me drive or else." But I prefer to idly ponder the second possibility.
The "neat" thing about blood alcohol testing is that whether it's a perfect indicator or not, at some point you have an objective number that represents [handwave] something, and we all know how to work with numbers. If we could arrest people for driving while impaired, in cases where they were impaired because they were yelling at the kids in the backseat at 4.4 syllables per second which is over the unsafe threshold of 2.5 syllables per second, we probably would do it! But we don't have the measurements to point to, just like we don't yet have the brainwave measurements that show a driver was daydreaming (i.e. impaired) (**) instead of consciously paying attention.
(*) Wait, did I just call half the population fuckwits? Geez, I'm such an asshole.
(**) In my personal experiences of my own collisions or speeding tickets, daydreaming is impairment #1, the most common cause of me being unaware of what was about to happen. But you can't measure it (yet), so you can't prove it, so, so nyaah nyaah!!
why should I not be allowed to support the candidate I believe in?
Nobody's suggesting you shouldn't be allowed to do that. The proposal is that you shouldn't be able to do commercial business with them, within the narrow context of the re-election business specifically. Support them in all politically-imaginable ways, and even form a corporation with them to sell cars, if you wish. We just want to point a gun at your face and say "stop giving them money." We want elections to become political instead of commercial.
Consider some so-called politician that you happen to hate. (Please don't tell me you're the one person in this country who doesn't hate anyone.) (Obama? GWB? Reed? Boener?) Now admit it: you don't really think of that person as truly political, do you? You could respect a true sincere adversary, but this guy, he's not quite that. He didn't win over his supporters by showing he knows how to make wise decisions; he used expensive media advertisements to trick a bunch of fools into supporting him, right?
If only Obama were the actual socialist that a certain media company says he is, you might actually hate him less. But he's not: the bastard is corruptly selling his DoJ to the highest bidder in a way that would horrify Marx and Engels. If only GWB were the conservative he ran as, you would hate him less, but at least your cold uncaring government would be cheap. But he wasn't: somehow the dimwit managed to commit to more spending of public funds than LBJ and FDR combined, funnelling it into contractors' pockets at everyone's expense.
Where's the political philosophy?
If only those people actually had to sink or swim on their actual political merits or lack thereof, then maybe your guys would finally crush that party, once and for all, and the country could get back on track. Or at least you'd finally get that fair fight you've always wanted but the country never really has, and then if you lost, well, that opposing philosophy isn't all bad. Even Marx's|Rand's society would have a few nice things about it, as stupid as it would be.
But instead those people buy slick ads, and the sheep in That Other Party keep falling for it, believing the ads and voting for the slickness instead of the politics. And the reason those other people aren't merely polically wrong (if only that were their failing!) is that the ads they use to buy the foolish voters are expensive, so they owe favors. Thus, their misguided conservative|liberal foolishness, goes beyond wrong, into corrupt.
Regulating the election business is one proposed solution to that, for allowing things to get back to politics and allowing democracy, instead of media ad budgets, decide our fate.
Skype used to have a reputation of using encrypted peer-to-peer transmissions.
That's funny. I remember their reputation always being "no one knows how the key exchange works and therefore nobody can trust it."
"Encrypted" means jack shit. Skype never had a reputation for being secure because they never showed anyone that they are. With any serious VoIP protocol (e.g. zfone) they tell you how it works. If the design is a trade secret, then it's a scam. You've known that for decades.
Then what's going on with the backlog; why isn't Apple just telling LE that they can't crack the phones? Does that setting come with the wrong default?
First of all, remove the four digit constraint; that's ludicrous. Change prompt to "passphrase" and use whatever they enter, no matter how long. If some users desire to stick to only using numeric characters, and only want to enter up to four of them, that's their business. It shouldn't be required or forced upon the user, though. There's just no reason for that, and nobody who has thought about it for more than a few seconds would do that. Even Apple's own Mac OS X doesn't force you to use 4-decimal-digit passwords, though I think Mac OS X may just be a relic of the company's earlier sane/competent/user-friendly era. (If Jobs had lived, I wonder if he would have killed off the Mac by now.)
Second, as a hardware maker, Apple has tons of options above and beyond mere software interfaces, for providing keys. (I'll let your imagination run wild as to what you can do for authentication using a usb port, though this approach might not be so great for the kind of people who primarily need to defend against LE seizing their possessions.)
Four-digit decimal passwords are a 1970s thing, maybe which people are still used to, due to ATM legacy. Anyone who does that in a new product in 1980s or later, at a minimum ought to be called on the bullshit. If MS Windows had forced a 4-decimal-digit constraint on user passwords or their encrypted filesystems forced that upon the keys, you know this would have been in huge print in some full-page Mac OS ad in the New York Times. And every damn one of us (me included) would be high-fiving Apple while joining in the laughter. It would have been better than even their FAT filename constraints ad.
It's gotta be broken on purpose; that's the only thing that makes sense. And if Apple made a conscious decision to make it easily crackable, you could make an argument that they're accepting the expense. I think it's a weak and dubious argument, but it's not totally out of thin air. They've created an expense which ought to not exist at all, due to the brute-force cracking normally being completely beyond reach.
If you design the product correctly, then it only takes a few seconds to tell law enforcement, "We lack the ability. Even the NSA lacks the ability. Give us a hundred billion dollars and we might be able to do one phone every hundred billion years." The fact that there's a backlog, shows that Apple screwed up big time, to the point of shocking negligence. Having them bear the expensive of the mistake might be the best incentive for them to fix the next version of the iPhone.
Not that that would really be fair -- it's not Law Enforcement's place to be providing incentive for Apple to do crypto competently. OTOH, if there were laws mandating people use best practices for mainstream consumer PCs... *laugh* Sorry, it's just one of those crazy ideas people sometimes get.
You purchased a license to play the encrypted DVD when you bought your DVD player. If you didn't pay the license fee, then you have no right to play the encrypted content.
Has anyone ever actually seen one of these licenses? (I haven't, but I've never bought a DVD drive that was marketed as a player, so if the above is true, then I wouldn't have seen one!) Could you (or anyone) post one, somewhere?
I'd be interested to see which copyright holders have signed that license.
DMCA requires that authorization comes from the works' copyright holder, not some specs group or patent licensor. And the DVD player manufacturer has no way of knowing who that could ever be. If I ever manage to produce a CSS-protected DVD, there's just no possible way Panaphonics or Sorny could possibly be handing out licenses granted by me.
Sorry, AC, I'm not calling you a liar or anything like that, but I think you're very likely mistaken. Having the license come with the player just doesn't make any sense at all, especially from the industry that bought DMCA. That whole "without the authority of the copyright owner" phrasing that they made everything conditional upon, is just a totally different approach and strategy than what you're suggesting.
You know what? That would be unfortunate and really stupid of the MAFIAA to do that, and yet, if it happened... ok. The scope of DMCA's bullshit is so much wider than the MAFIAA's tiny little suicidal industries. If they want to stay out of the market for a few more years by buying some exemption to common sense, fine. Fuck 'em. But it's not like people who want to legally play their videos, are the only people who have lived under the constant threat of DMCA.
I just don't want to see the bugfix narrowed so much that it only applies to phones. It seems like phones are what is giving the cause the publicity to get mainstream support (Slashdot's headline for this is just crazy!), but it better not just be phones that get saved, or I'll be mad. I'll be a mad guy on the Internet! I might even post an angry comment on Slashdot!;-)
No. Violating DMCA and infringing copyright are two different, distinct things. Unlocking phones doesn't, and never has, involve infringing copyright. DMCA prohibited a bunch of non-infringing activities; it did not redefine what was infringing. It's part of the same "title" of US Code as copyright, but it's not the same thing as copyright. HTH.
So if you rip a DVD that you legally own (e.g. purchased at a store)
Hey guys, just wanna step in on a tiny little issue here. The word is "play" not "rip." DMCA doesn't contain a single word that relates, in any way, to what happens to the data after it has been descrambled, or why you were doing that. Indeed, that was the whole problem in the first place. Whether you immediately send the plaintext to a video decoder and show it on the screen, or write the plaintext to a file for more convenient playback later, are legally identical right now: that is, they're illegal unless you have secured authorization from the copyright holder.
I don't know about you, but back in the day I bought a lot of DVDs, and not a single one of them says anywhere on the packaging or label, that I'm authorized to play it. This bill would make that irrelevant.
So what? Congress should pass it anyway. If he vetos, he vetos. And then Congress will get to call him an obstructionist for a change, and all his cred will be gone. And if it ever got that far anyway (it probably won't) the critters who prevent an override will be hounded until they lose their re-elections.
You don't simply not try, based on the idea that someone of dubious motive (and dubious level of power) might oppose you. Fight.
Seriously, read it. It starts out by truly fixing some of the most egregious brain damage and expansiveness of DMCA, making it into a legitimate copyright law. The cellphone unlocking technicality is just one a thousand bugs this fixes; the bill would also legalize making/selling/using ink cartridges, legalize the playing the DVDs that you have bought, etc. If DMCA had passed originally in this form, it would be much less destructive and hated.
After the first part, then it looks like it does something benevolent related to phones specifically, but to some code I'm unfamiliar with. Then it takes a shot at WIPO.
Overall, this is a no-brainer, and anyone who opposes it, will be outed. That means they'll kill it in some committee, but just in case they don't, remember names and who votes for/against. Reward and punish, based on this one, right here.
This is a zip gun not some wonder weapon. How the hell is this a defense article?
Because zipping (compressing) the ciphertext prior to encrypting it, makes plaintext attacks harder. Remember what we did to PRZ a couple decades ago?
This time, I want the T-shirt with the barcode machine readable plans on it. Who's making it? I'll buy two; one for me and one to be given to the first non-American who replies saying they want one. I'll need your postal address. But hold it, first things first: who's making the T-shirt?
Radio waves can cause thermal heating in human tissue
There's been some hard (but inconclusive) science to possibly confirm this, too. An experiment was performed where a control subject stayed in the house, and a test subject went outside without a hat, in the daytime. The test subject reported a warm feeling, somehow coming down from above. Each subject's body temperature was measured with a thermometer, but they were the same. I don't know what it all means, but I think there ought to be a label on "outside" until we understand this radiation phenomenon better.
Even if it's not harmful, what reason could you have to be against letting me choose whether or not my GMO food was farmed by Jews? All I'm asking, is that GMO food made on farms where Jewish workers are employed be labeled, and that cell phones manufactured in a facility which employs coloreds be labeled. I just think we should have an informed free marketplace. That's good for everybody, and even chinks have shown a preference for an informed free marketplace.
It's not like I'm trying to outlaw those peoples' products or infringe on your right to do business with Jews, colored, towel-heads, or Catholics. If you're ok with doing business with those people, I don't have any problem with that. It's a free country and I hope your daughter brings one of them home with her. All I'm asking for, is a harmless label and the right to choose. Why's everyone acting like I'm some kind of unreasonable asshole?!? I don't get it!
Ugh. I hate that idea. It's based on presumption that people have HTML email reading turned on. I wouldn't trigger your canary while snooping through your emails, not because I'm clever or anything, but just because I wouldn't think to turn HTML on. Worse, if I did think to turn on HTML email, I would also have to enable external images, yet another non-default in most IMAP clients.
denyhosts (a program very similar to fail2ban) has explicit built-in support for that sort of thing. You can trivially configure it so that if anyone tries to log in as any of a certain list of users, that triggers the ban.
Wanna brute force my mysql user's password? Ok. I don't have a mysql user anyway, but your first attempt to be him, is also your last attempt.. to be anyone.
Someone has the database, but it's not enough: they want people to send them passwords associated with the records. That leads me to one conclusion, to the old Demonoid's credit.
Throw your band's promo torrent up on any of the popular torrent indexing sites (The Pirate Bay, Isohunt, RuTorrents, etc) and now those files are centrally available under a single website.
You can do the equivalent with 1990s tech except that it's even more convenient. Either have Google be the equivalent of "popular torrent site" or even a music review site where people have written opinions. Except instead of linking to a torrent file or magnet link, you link to the mp3 on the band's site. The web is great at handling these kinds of problems.
Just imagine in all your rosy bittorrent scenarios, in any situation where you'd see a magnet link or link to a torrent file, you instead had a link to an mp3 file. When you click the link, instead of it downloading a torrent file and then starting your bittorrent client, it's instead already downloading the file without the extra step. Or you right-click the link and instead of taking the default action, you have many options, so maybe it's going to download and then play (or not play, if playing is the usual). How's removing a step, a "pain?"
BitTorrent as a distribution method can be used legitimately
Not really disputing that, just saying it's less convenient or flexible than linking to a file. (You just can't beat directly linking to a file, except maybe.. remote-mounting whole filesystems.) BitTorrent is for situations where convenience is secondary to some other concerns, and I don't think those other concerns are always necessarily dumb. In this case, though, the primary concern is that the product's company name is BitTorrent so they have to "eat their own dog food" by relying on this not-quite-the-perfect-tool-for-the-job protocol. I wish them good luck, but they should expect to see plenty of eyerolling by "computer people" because what they're doing is a little bit silly from both a technical and user interface perspective. OTOH, if marketing says using bittorrent protocol makes it more exciting/interesting to customers, then who am I to argue with that? It might even be right!
It's still not as good as simply having a website with a downloadable mp3 file or two, plus a "buy the album" button (1990s tech). But I guess I can't fault the BitTorrent company for wanting to build on bittorrent instead of HTTP, and maybe it causes the hosting server to be slightly cheaper. (No, wait, music files are so tiny compared to what people do on the 'Net these days, that I really doubt it makes a difference in cost, either.) But at least bittorrent is "hip." This is a cutting-edge 2003 business model. Next up: band pages which serve NZBs pointing to to the msgids of their posted MP3s.;-) Is Twitter still 140 characters, or can you tweet a 4 MB file yet?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
By misspelling "grief" you defied the adaptive Huffman table's expected distribution, thereby wasting memory. You're lucky this is a C64 story where memory is abundant, because if you had posted this in a VIC-20 story (where every single byte truly counts) I would have called you Not Worthy.
Dude, it's right there in your ROM.
But doesn't Punter protocol upload in 256 byte blocks anyway?
On no: the horror. I don't remember for sure! When did that happen? In 1985 I so would have schooled you. Look at me now; how sad.
For that kind of situation, perhaps what you need is a non-lawyer attorney. ("Aren't attorney and lawyer synonyms?" No.) Not everyone who represents you, need be a professional. I remember that from No Laughing Matter and if the guy who wrote Catch-22 (and his friend) ain't qualified to offer legal advice, I don't know who is! ;-)
It looks like there are (at least) two different ways of looking at the word "impaired," relating to exactly what you're benchmarking the driver's state relative to. Are we comparing it to average (or worst) drivers or are we comparing it to the same driver?
Maybe you are as good a driver at 0.99% as I am at 0.049%. It's possible. There's a school of thought out there, though, which says this is irrelevant unless (!) you're also as good as driver at 0.99% as you are at 0%. Are you? [Sloppy's finger tembles, hovering over the "call bullshit" button.]
Are we trying to punish people for being bad drivers, or are we trying to punish them for not being the best drivers they can be? Half of the population consists of below-average drivers, but we don't appear to have any policies where these people are continually tested and ticketed for being bad drivers. Why not? Because the fuckwits (*) are either trying but suck and we give them a break so they don't rebel, or we haven't figured out an objective way to demonstrate the fact that they aren't really trying as hard as they could.
There's probably a lot of truth in that first possibility: we accept that half the population drives bad, because pointing cars at us accidentally is probably safer than getting them mad where half the population they point guns at us the other half and says "let me drive or else." But I prefer to idly ponder the second possibility.
The "neat" thing about blood alcohol testing is that whether it's a perfect indicator or not, at some point you have an objective number that represents [handwave] something, and we all know how to work with numbers. If we could arrest people for driving while impaired, in cases where they were impaired because they were yelling at the kids in the backseat at 4.4 syllables per second which is over the unsafe threshold of 2.5 syllables per second, we probably would do it! But we don't have the measurements to point to, just like we don't yet have the brainwave measurements that show a driver was daydreaming (i.e. impaired) (**) instead of consciously paying attention.
(*) Wait, did I just call half the population fuckwits? Geez, I'm such an asshole.
(**) In my personal experiences of my own collisions or speeding tickets, daydreaming is impairment #1, the most common cause of me being unaware of what was about to happen. But you can't measure it (yet), so you can't prove it, so, so nyaah nyaah!!
Nobody's suggesting you shouldn't be allowed to do that. The proposal is that you shouldn't be able to do commercial business with them, within the narrow context of the re-election business specifically. Support them in all politically-imaginable ways, and even form a corporation with them to sell cars, if you wish. We just want to point a gun at your face and say "stop giving them money." We want elections to become political instead of commercial.
Consider some so-called politician that you happen to hate. (Please don't tell me you're the one person in this country who doesn't hate anyone.) (Obama? GWB? Reed? Boener?) Now admit it: you don't really think of that person as truly political, do you? You could respect a true sincere adversary, but this guy, he's not quite that. He didn't win over his supporters by showing he knows how to make wise decisions; he used expensive media advertisements to trick a bunch of fools into supporting him, right?
If only Obama were the actual socialist that a certain media company says he is, you might actually hate him less. But he's not: the bastard is corruptly selling his DoJ to the highest bidder in a way that would horrify Marx and Engels. If only GWB were the conservative he ran as, you would hate him less, but at least your cold uncaring government would be cheap. But he wasn't: somehow the dimwit managed to commit to more spending of public funds than LBJ and FDR combined, funnelling it into contractors' pockets at everyone's expense.
Where's the political philosophy?
If only those people actually had to sink or swim on their actual political merits or lack thereof, then maybe your guys would finally crush that party, once and for all, and the country could get back on track. Or at least you'd finally get that fair fight you've always wanted but the country never really has, and then if you lost, well, that opposing philosophy isn't all bad. Even Marx's|Rand's society would have a few nice things about it, as stupid as it would be.
But instead those people buy slick ads, and the sheep in That Other Party keep falling for it, believing the ads and voting for the slickness instead of the politics. And the reason those other people aren't merely polically wrong (if only that were their failing!) is that the ads they use to buy the foolish voters are expensive, so they owe favors. Thus, their misguided conservative|liberal foolishness, goes beyond wrong, into corrupt.
Regulating the election business is one proposed solution to that, for allowing things to get back to politics and allowing democracy, instead of media ad budgets, decide our fate.
That's funny. I remember their reputation always being "no one knows how the key exchange works and therefore nobody can trust it."
"Encrypted" means jack shit. Skype never had a reputation for being secure because they never showed anyone that they are. With any serious VoIP protocol (e.g. zfone) they tell you how it works. If the design is a trade secret, then it's a scam. You've known that for decades.
Then what's going on with the backlog; why isn't Apple just telling LE that they can't crack the phones? Does that setting come with the wrong default?
First of all, remove the four digit constraint; that's ludicrous. Change prompt to "passphrase" and use whatever they enter, no matter how long. If some users desire to stick to only using numeric characters, and only want to enter up to four of them, that's their business. It shouldn't be required or forced upon the user, though. There's just no reason for that, and nobody who has thought about it for more than a few seconds would do that. Even Apple's own Mac OS X doesn't force you to use 4-decimal-digit passwords, though I think Mac OS X may just be a relic of the company's earlier sane/competent/user-friendly era. (If Jobs had lived, I wonder if he would have killed off the Mac by now.)
Second, as a hardware maker, Apple has tons of options above and beyond mere software interfaces, for providing keys. (I'll let your imagination run wild as to what you can do for authentication using a usb port, though this approach might not be so great for the kind of people who primarily need to defend against LE seizing their possessions.)
Four-digit decimal passwords are a 1970s thing, maybe which people are still used to, due to ATM legacy. Anyone who does that in a new product in 1980s or later, at a minimum ought to be called on the bullshit. If MS Windows had forced a 4-decimal-digit constraint on user passwords or their encrypted filesystems forced that upon the keys, you know this would have been in huge print in some full-page Mac OS ad in the New York Times. And every damn one of us (me included) would be high-fiving Apple while joining in the laughter. It would have been better than even their FAT filename constraints ad.
It's gotta be broken on purpose; that's the only thing that makes sense. And if Apple made a conscious decision to make it easily crackable, you could make an argument that they're accepting the expense. I think it's a weak and dubious argument, but it's not totally out of thin air. They've created an expense which ought to not exist at all, due to the brute-force cracking normally being completely beyond reach.
If you design the product correctly, then it only takes a few seconds to tell law enforcement, "We lack the ability. Even the NSA lacks the ability. Give us a hundred billion dollars and we might be able to do one phone every hundred billion years." The fact that there's a backlog, shows that Apple screwed up big time, to the point of shocking negligence. Having them bear the expensive of the mistake might be the best incentive for them to fix the next version of the iPhone.
Not that that would really be fair -- it's not Law Enforcement's place to be providing incentive for Apple to do crypto competently. OTOH, if there were laws mandating people use best practices for mainstream consumer PCs... *laugh* Sorry, it's just one of those crazy ideas people sometimes get.
Has anyone ever actually seen one of these licenses? (I haven't, but I've never bought a DVD drive that was marketed as a player, so if the above is true, then I wouldn't have seen one!) Could you (or anyone) post one, somewhere?
I'd be interested to see which copyright holders have signed that license.
DMCA requires that authorization comes from the works' copyright holder, not some specs group or patent licensor. And the DVD player manufacturer has no way of knowing who that could ever be. If I ever manage to produce a CSS-protected DVD, there's just no possible way Panaphonics or Sorny could possibly be handing out licenses granted by me.
Sorry, AC, I'm not calling you a liar or anything like that, but I think you're very likely mistaken. Having the license come with the player just doesn't make any sense at all, especially from the industry that bought DMCA. That whole "without the authority of the copyright owner" phrasing that they made everything conditional upon, is just a totally different approach and strategy than what you're suggesting.
You know what? That would be unfortunate and really stupid of the MAFIAA to do that, and yet, if it happened... ok. The scope of DMCA's bullshit is so much wider than the MAFIAA's tiny little suicidal industries. If they want to stay out of the market for a few more years by buying some exemption to common sense, fine. Fuck 'em. But it's not like people who want to legally play their videos, are the only people who have lived under the constant threat of DMCA.
I just don't want to see the bugfix narrowed so much that it only applies to phones. It seems like phones are what is giving the cause the publicity to get mainstream support (Slashdot's headline for this is just crazy!), but it better not just be phones that get saved, or I'll be mad. I'll be a mad guy on the Internet! I might even post an angry comment on Slashdot! ;-)
No. Violating DMCA and infringing copyright are two different, distinct things. Unlocking phones doesn't, and never has, involve infringing copyright. DMCA prohibited a bunch of non-infringing activities; it did not redefine what was infringing. It's part of the same "title" of US Code as copyright, but it's not the same thing as copyright. HTH.
Hey guys, just wanna step in on a tiny little issue here. The word is "play" not "rip." DMCA doesn't contain a single word that relates, in any way, to what happens to the data after it has been descrambled, or why you were doing that. Indeed, that was the whole problem in the first place. Whether you immediately send the plaintext to a video decoder and show it on the screen, or write the plaintext to a file for more convenient playback later, are legally identical right now: that is, they're illegal unless you have secured authorization from the copyright holder.
I don't know about you, but back in the day I bought a lot of DVDs, and not a single one of them says anywhere on the packaging or label, that I'm authorized to play it. This bill would make that irrelevant.
So what? Congress should pass it anyway. If he vetos, he vetos. And then Congress will get to call him an obstructionist for a change, and all his cred will be gone. And if it ever got that far anyway (it probably won't) the critters who prevent an override will be hounded until they lose their re-elections.
You don't simply not try, based on the idea that someone of dubious motive (and dubious level of power) might oppose you. Fight.
Seriously, read it. It starts out by truly fixing some of the most egregious brain damage and expansiveness of DMCA, making it into a legitimate copyright law. The cellphone unlocking technicality is just one a thousand bugs this fixes; the bill would also legalize making/selling/using ink cartridges, legalize the playing the DVDs that you have bought, etc. If DMCA had passed originally in this form, it would be much less destructive and hated.
After the first part, then it looks like it does something benevolent related to phones specifically, but to some code I'm unfamiliar with. Then it takes a shot at WIPO.
Overall, this is a no-brainer, and anyone who opposes it, will be outed. That means they'll kill it in some committee, but just in case they don't, remember names and who votes for/against. Reward and punish, based on this one, right here.
Because zipping (compressing) the ciphertext prior to encrypting it, makes plaintext attacks harder. Remember what we did to PRZ a couple decades ago?
This time, I want the T-shirt with the barcode machine readable plans on it. Who's making it? I'll buy two; one for me and one to be given to the first non-American who replies saying they want one. I'll need your postal address. But hold it, first things first: who's making the T-shirt?
There's been some hard (but inconclusive) science to possibly confirm this, too. An experiment was performed where a control subject stayed in the house, and a test subject went outside without a hat, in the daytime. The test subject reported a warm feeling, somehow coming down from above. Each subject's body temperature was measured with a thermometer, but they were the same. I don't know what it all means, but I think there ought to be a label on "outside" until we understand this radiation phenomenon better.
Even if it's not harmful, what reason could you have to be against letting me choose whether or not my GMO food was farmed by Jews? All I'm asking, is that GMO food made on farms where Jewish workers are employed be labeled, and that cell phones manufactured in a facility which employs coloreds be labeled. I just think we should have an informed free marketplace. That's good for everybody, and even chinks have shown a preference for an informed free marketplace.
It's not like I'm trying to outlaw those peoples' products or infringe on your right to do business with Jews, colored, towel-heads, or Catholics. If you're ok with doing business with those people, I don't have any problem with that. It's a free country and I hope your daughter brings one of them home with her. All I'm asking for, is a harmless label and the right to choose. Why's everyone acting like I'm some kind of unreasonable asshole?!? I don't get it!
Ugh. I hate that idea. It's based on presumption that people have HTML email reading turned on. I wouldn't trigger your canary while snooping through your emails, not because I'm clever or anything, but just because I wouldn't think to turn HTML on. Worse, if I did think to turn on HTML email, I would also have to enable external images, yet another non-default in most IMAP clients.
denyhosts (a program very similar to fail2ban) has explicit built-in support for that sort of thing. You can trivially configure it so that if anyone tries to log in as any of a certain list of users, that triggers the ban.
Wanna brute force my mysql user's password? Ok. I don't have a mysql user anyway, but your first attempt to be him, is also your last attempt .. to be anyone.
Someone has the database, but it's not enough: they want people to send them passwords associated with the records. That leads me to one conclusion, to the old Demonoid's credit.
You can do the equivalent with 1990s tech except that it's even more convenient. Either have Google be the equivalent of "popular torrent site" or even a music review site where people have written opinions. Except instead of linking to a torrent file or magnet link, you link to the mp3 on the band's site. The web is great at handling these kinds of problems.
Just imagine in all your rosy bittorrent scenarios, in any situation where you'd see a magnet link or link to a torrent file, you instead had a link to an mp3 file. When you click the link, instead of it downloading a torrent file and then starting your bittorrent client, it's instead already downloading the file without the extra step. Or you right-click the link and instead of taking the default action, you have many options, so maybe it's going to download and then play (or not play, if playing is the usual). How's removing a step, a "pain?"
Not really disputing that, just saying it's less convenient or flexible than linking to a file. (You just can't beat directly linking to a file, except maybe .. remote-mounting whole filesystems.) BitTorrent is for situations where convenience is secondary to some other concerns, and I don't think those other concerns are always necessarily dumb. In this case, though, the primary concern is that the product's company name is BitTorrent so they have to "eat their own dog food" by relying on this not-quite-the-perfect-tool-for-the-job protocol. I wish them good luck, but they should expect to see plenty of eyerolling by "computer people" because what they're doing is a little bit silly from both a technical and user interface perspective. OTOH, if marketing says using bittorrent protocol makes it more exciting/interesting to customers, then who am I to argue with that? It might even be right!
It's still not as good as simply having a website with a downloadable mp3 file or two, plus a "buy the album" button (1990s tech). But I guess I can't fault the BitTorrent company for wanting to build on bittorrent instead of HTTP, and maybe it causes the hosting server to be slightly cheaper. (No, wait, music files are so tiny compared to what people do on the 'Net these days, that I really doubt it makes a difference in cost, either.) But at least bittorrent is "hip." This is a cutting-edge 2003 business model. Next up: band pages which serve NZBs pointing to to the msgids of their posted MP3s. ;-) Is Twitter still 140 characters, or can you tweet a 4 MB file yet? ;-)
There's a strange thing! I don't understand it. You don't understand it. Top Men don't fully understand it, or are divided on some fine point.
ERGO, [non sequiter crackpot hypothesis unsuggested by the data]! See? Finally, I have been proven right.