I'm a pure-7-bit-ASCII vandal, myself. I just embed escape [2;9y into my posts, to make your VT100 do a constantly-repeating self-test.
Another fun fact: I just upgraded to MaraDNS about a week ago. Believe it or not, I had been using Twisted Names, and got away with it for several years. It mostly worked. Mostly.
These companies don't get subsidies for being oil companies.
Suppose Iraq were to invade Kuwait, and as a result, market experts predicted that oil prices would go up, long-term. One example of a subsidy for being an oil company, would be to use public funds (collected as income taxes or through currency inflation) to send military forces out to kick Iraq's ass our of Kuwait.
Suppose people typically used oil in a manner that tore its molecules apart to release energy, and then they dumped the resulting lower-energy molecules into the public atmosphere where they don't just magically go away, and where most physics-based (as opposed to faith-based) models predict the waste products cause various undesired side-effects at public expense. An example of a subsidy, would be to knowingly allow this pollution to happen, without making the oil users do something to clean up the CO2, or if they can't do that, charging them a fee for inefficient government programs to clean up the CO2.
The two examples of subsidies that I gave, both turn out to be real, rather than merely hypothetical. You might even call these subsidies good ideas if you insist, but let's not pretend they're not subsidies. These are examples of government using its power to artificially distort the energy market toward oil being more relatively affordable than competing energy sources, and these political decisions have the effect of reducing the natural free market incentives for developing clean[er] energy. ("Picking winners and losers" in Republicanese, if that helps anyone understand it.)
Like I said, some people may be able to make a good case for this manipulation of the market. I just want everyone to admit we're doing it, that's it's not something a tech-neutral, or a free-market-uber-alles, government would do. And somehow, I have a hunch that once we start acknowledging that, the case for how it's a good idea, may be challenged. It'll be a good debate.
Don't understate the importance of this. I heard the new pope uses emacs instead of vim (because "my fingers learned that one on the dvorak keyboards in the seminary"). And yet, he prefers python3 over scheme. Runs it all on Mac OS 10.4 and won't upgrade to 10.8, because
he can't get his Zune to sync with later-than-10.4 anyway
Driver issues with his Piledriver-APU-based Hackintosh
10.4 reminds him slightly more of his old Atari ST (and I quote: "fuck you Amigoids, yuor all going to hell 4ever!!!11")
invisible scrollbars and a wrong default scroll wheel direction, are an abomination before The Lord
I don't care if you don't see any geeky controversy here; the python3 thing is important. The new pope is saying fallible things on the Internet!
That would be awesome to do just for the fun of adding a false positive, but then I realized I have no damn use for the propane. I grill with charcoal (tastes better; sorry, Hank Hill). I hate the police state as much as anyone, but you're talking about wasting money! Let's not get carried away.
There's no reason the TPP treaty can't be amended to require signatories have no anti-circumvention laws. The president has the power to get on this right now. He could do it today. It would be a totally legitimate political decision, too. "The people are saying this sucks. Let's try to not suck."
If such a change makes the agreement unacceptable to the other parties, then I guess "free trade" isn't very important, so I don't want to hear any more excuses about how these treaties are a vital priority.
If such an agreement is accepted and conflicts with earlier agreements, then you go resolve the earlier agreements which would then have become out-of-date. The fact that it's incompatible with old treaties or a not-yet ratified treaty is irrelevant. If someone had said the people didn't have the right to pass the 21st Amendment based on the argument that it conflicted with the 18th Amendment, they would have been called out as absurd.
If the president uses the free trade agreements as an excuse for not pressuring Congress to repeal DMCA, he'll get away with the inaction, but nobody should let him get away with this sort of rationalization for it. It'll be a lie, and everyone will know it, and we'll call him on it. Mr. President, don't do it unless your goal is to discredit yourself.
We hear cases where the owner of a car gets mailed a ticket, regardless of who was driving.
That would be ALL of the cases, wouldn't it? Since the state only knows who owns the car, not who is driving it.
No. Most of the time, the state is able to successfully determine exactly who committed the infraction, without even caring whose vehicle it is. (And they're able to put points on peoples' license, too, now that you mention it.) This may be anecdotal evidence, but for what it's worth...
The last time I got a speeding ticket (2007), I handed my driver's license to the cop who pulled me over, so he knew whom to cite. The time before that (1999) the same attempt to identify me happened, and interestingly, in the 1999 incident I was driving a company car. The company didn't have to pay anything, though: the responsibility still fell on me, the driver.
Indeed, going all the way back to the 1980s, I've found the process to be shockingly accurate: every time I got pulled over for speeding, they cited me instead of some innocent third party. And every time I got cited for speeding, I had just minutes before been pulled over by a cop. Coincidence?;-)
That's the standard by which all others should be judged. It might not be perfect, and maybe it can even be improved upon, but any new-fangled ideas for traffic law enforcement, are going to get compared to that. The government can't just expect everyone to forget decades of experience, forget seeing TV shows where a hunky cop pulls over a hot babe for speeding and she says she'll do anything to avoid the tic-- wait, maybe that wasn't TV. Err.. but anyway, when I compare speed cameras to such a basic and long-established level of competency and accuracy, speed cameras appear to fail.
Sheesh,.. fining the wrong people, and systematically(!), is just such a dumb regression from the status quo, that yeah.. I think whoever suggested it was stupid, whoever voted for it and signed it was stupid, and together they made us all a little stupider just by saying it. (Seriously, a time traveller from the year 1913 would be amazed that we're talking about it, trying to decide whether punishing innocent people is a good idea or not.) There's just no excuse for that.
I suppose if I'm going to quote things, I ought to spell correctly. I'd fix it now, but Slashdot's DRM failed to anticipate the need.;-) Or rather, from Slashdot's PoV, the system is intended to not let people correct trivial errors. And so, everyone loses (you and I live with the glaring spelling error), because we're working within a third party's intents.
I fail to see the issue with a DRM-lock on content designed and intended to only be streamed.
The key words are "intented to." It always raises the question of "intended by whom?"
Broadcast and analog cable television wasn't intended to be recorded on VCRs, when you look at intent from the PoV of the television stations. When you look from the PoV of the viewers, thought, that intent is completely irrelevant, and in fact the stream is intended to be recordable. That's why someone would subscribe to a service which is compatible with industry-standard "cable ready" tuners, for example. The conditions are set by the buyer.
I haven't used Netflix yet, so I can't comment on whatever shortcomings it may or may not have. Perhaps they thought of everything any person may ever want to do with the streams, and made sure that it is all possible. If that's true, though, they would be the first in history.
In the past, every single party who attempted to do this, failed. Use a cable company's DVR, or a pre-DeCSS DVD player, to see how spectacularly bad the efforts of vertical integrators have been, before. I hear that all licensed Blu-Ray players still do the make-people-watch-ads thing, though I've never actually watched a Blu-Ray movie to verify what everyone's saying about them.
how could you have a documented, published DRM standard that actually works?
You wouldn't have asked that, unless you already knew the answer.:-)
But the serious answer to that, is to define "works" as being interoperable with all devices/software made by anyone who desires to be interoperable. Don't cave in on basic necessities, and let the DRM guys worry about whatever the hell it is, that they worry about. Their problems are not our problems.
Everybody wins. Except consumers, who can't record it, can't excerpt it for fair use,
Wrong, because if you read what I wrote, then you'll know they certainly will be able to record, back up, etc. My quite modest conditions for adopting DRM would make it not be DRM.
The amazing thing is that anyone would use a system which doesn't conform to those modest conditions.
I'm totally ok with DRM, provided that it's very clear how to implement it, and I don't need to sign any contracts or otherwise agree to keep any trade secrets. Just write up the RFC, send it to IETF, and we'll all get to work on our your-DRM-compatible players. Everybody wins.
what's wrong with making these asshole drivers pay?
Nothing! The issue with speed cameras is that we don't know that's what's happening, and there's reason to suspect that it's not.
We hear cases where the owner of a car gets mailed a ticket, regardless of who was driving. Or we hear of cases where one side alleges speeding didn't happen, but weren't given a chance to oppose it in court.
Sometimes we even hear that speeding was accurately detected, but the cops failed to confront the speeder, so they were allowed them to continue speeding.
What's wrong with having cops pull people over, check ids, the courts getting guilty pleas from most of them, having the borderline cases adjudicated, having the falsely-accused get acquitted, etc? This approach worked for a century, and then we threw it away.
If it's within 10% of the speed limit, then yeah it's probably a scam. Yet my experience is that speeders tend to go over 20% faster than the posted speed limit.
10%, 20%,.. where did you get these constants? Might 4% and 8%, or 25% and 50%, be logically-superior constants? Just kidding, they can't be superior, because all three sets of numbers are totally made up.
One of the main features of all the speed camera programs (at least the ones I have heard of, anyone who knows of an exception please speak up!) is they're designed to circumvent the usual judicial process where the state has to supply proof against the accused.
These use civil citations, whereas most of us grew up in a world where cops would use criminal citations that you could either plead guilty to, or go to court for, where the whole issue of "evidence" would come up. Naturally this radical new approach will be seen by many, as a scam.
OTOH, if the states can keep pushing these and not cave in, people could eventually be reconditioned. Maybe in 20 years people will think of these as less scammy, and then they'll be prepared to move additional parts of the justice system to civil punishment rather than criminal. "You're suspected of rape. $100 fine." Neat idea for a fun Idiocracy-type movie.:-)
I've already dropped my cable tier to the lowest possible for some basic digital channels that people in my household still watch and aren't available over torrents.
The "obvious" thing (which is so obvious, that I wonder if I'm wrong!) is that an OTA antenna plugged into your HDHR will pick up what you're talking about, because the only thing you can't easily pirate, also just happens to be the only thing that is legally available+playable: local TV stations. No?
If that's not what you're talking about, then just what content are you talking about? Please give an example. A show name, anything.
Is the issue that your local geography makes OTA unviable? If so, then maybe your city needs its own "scene.";-) I wonder if municipalities ought to start actively suporting such a thing, as an alternative to cable franchises. If Cox is setting the turn-away-customers bit, it may be that no one cares about your market area anyway, so why not?
And what's with the "no transcoding" constraint? You didn't explain why that's important. If you're cursed with having to stream over wifi (no copper LAN in the house), transcoding is damn useful for reducing the OTA MPEG2 bitrates.
If you really want to get technical about things, the Korean War never ended.
If I wanted to get technical about things, I would suggest that technical people take back the word "technical" from the lawyers. Then we could tell things like they really are: that the war ended decades ago when people (mostly) stopped shooting at each other (and no, an isolated axe murder doesn't count), regardless of whatever some lawyer says after looking for signatures on a page.
Saying we've remained at war with NK is pretty much the same as saying we weren't at war with Iraq. Papers, signatures and legislative resolutions -- or their lack thereof -- don't serve as strong evidence of war; bullets, bombs, and their associated death tolls do.
That's why America needs to playfully toggle the president's party more often: to make Congress look at schizoid as possible, for our amusement. "I'm a constitutionalist! It's a living document! Small government! Big government! Flip! Flop! The president must kill the terrorists without wasting courts' resources on an unnecessary trial! The president must not harm the innocent without due process! Rabbit season! Duck season! I demand you shoot me now!"
Text email is vulnerable too! I'm in the habit of: after reading every email, I save it to malware.sh, then I go to a shell, type "chmod +x malware.sh" and then either "./malware.sh" or "sudo./malware.sh" depending on the flip of a coin. And in spite of my weird habit of doing this, I never check to see who sent me the email and whether or not it's PGP signed and if their signature checks out.
See? Spearphishing is a really hard problem to solve! Reading email is dangerous! DAAANGEROUSSS!!!!11
One of the ugly facts of life, is that somebody is always going to have that power. Don't phrase that as a yes/no question, please. The question is whether the decision should be made in your state capitol, Washington DC, though some high-barrier amendment process, anarchic armed mobs, xor the hammer of Thor.
The interesting thing here is that the story Didn't push his agenda yet his story was still rejected. Does that not simply lend credence to his claim of "the end of democracy in America"?
This reminds me of what happened to Bill Maher in 2001. Some of his advertisers got their panties in a bunch over something he said, so they stopped paying him, and since then, he's referred to the incident as when he was "silenced."
And yet (even if you ignore Maher's great comeback on HBO) let's look at how the withdraw of commercial support for Maher's and Card's speech is impacted: worse case scenario, the ceasing of their commercial support reduces them to having a voice of the same magnitude as all us "little people."
Boo hoo! Poor OSC no longer has his voice artificially amplified, and that DC no longer delivers many thousand of CardMeme impressions! It's the end of democracy, because too many people voted with their wallets! It's chilling speech, because those listeners/customers decided to opt out of actively funding someone's speech.
Now poor OSC has to post to Slashdot to be heard, or stand on a soap box in the public square, or be the person who pays, rather than gets paid, for his speech. You know, just like nearly every single one of us. And not because anyone brought him down, but because people decided to abstain from elevating him. The poor bastard, having to compete in the same marketplace of ideas as the rest of us!! Nobody should have to endure that -- where's Voltaire to fight to the death for OSC's RIGHT to a privileged position?
This is a first amendment issue!! What part of "Congress shall make no law, allowing customer whims to abridge the business viability of media in a competitive marketplace" don't you understand?!
Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have finally found an example of the "culture of dependency" that Republicans have been warning us all about. Everyone, please welcome our newest member, Orson, to "the 47%."
You're right of course, but people (at least in America) tend to be wildly optimistic and idealistic.
It's easy to say "don't talk to cops" but sometimes you want to say "the red truck ran the light and wrecked that poor lady's little car. Is she ok? Yes, I saw it, the light was red. Shit, I walk through that intersection all the time. If I had been there, the fuckwit might have killed me!" when you see that a real crime has happened and there are real victims and you want justice.
You'll probably get away with talking to cops in a situation like that. Sadly, you might not, but the risk is remote enough...
On the other end of the spectrum, RTFA. And in between, most of life. That's where it's hard to decide things correctly.
If there are prosecutors or cops seeing this, what I hope they'd come away with, is that when horror stories like this come to light, you're just training every one of us, to not tell you who hit the lady's car. It's probably better to let people run lights, is it? Of course not, but that's what you're teaching us: don't talk. And if enough of us get trained by you to think "fuck justice" then I guess we don't need to employ you anymore, huh?
Requiring a global CA to sign a ssh key would in no way make it less secure
Of course it would. You don't know the global CAs or whose interests they're serving or what (if anything) they do to keep safe. OTOH you almost always know your own practices and allegiances. Making the trust path depend on a third party, can only increase the viability of a MitM. The only way their certification could help, would be if it's checked in parallel with other certifications (such as your own), to either bolster it as a corroborating assertion that the identity is correct, or to cast doubt on it if it doesn't match. Alas, without support for multiple signers, neither of these scenarios end up occuring.
You'd be right if ssh used a more modern signing approach, such as PGP. But that's almost never the case, at least in 2013. (I must admit, I still haven't tried building ssh with GNU/TLS.)
The CA is only 'intentionally less secure' if you're a paranoid nutjob that doesn't realize a CA exists based on its reputation
Aha. I see the problem. You're in 1995. You're right. In 1995, if you perceive the risk, then you're either a visonary/cipherpunk or you're a paranoid. In either case, the mainstream press and industry can get away with ignoring your concerns. (In 1995 the only evidence we had that the CA system would fail, was in things like the recent (1994) passage of CALEA, which showed the US government had the intent to systematically weaken communications security. But we didn't yet know what would come of it, and CAs didn't yet admit on their own web pages (!) that they are "CALEA compliant" as Verisign amazingly has.)
In 2013 we know that it has failed (sometimes due to governemnts, sometimes due to other attackers, and sometimes due to mistakes) and continues to fail, routinely. There's a news story every month where some signer, who is fully trusted, turned out to have been undeserving of the trust.
That isn't to say it's useless (no matter how much you increase the MitM vulnerability of a crypto system, it remains more secure than plaintext), just that future PK systems will necessarily allow for multiple trust paths working in parallel, as PGP does and encourages.
(Back to the topic at hand) A code signing system that operated on multiple signatures would be particular valued now, thanks to the recent story of the bit9 failure. Imagine a system that required three "moderately trusted" certs, where no one but a user who does their own builds, would trust any CA more than moderately. All of the failures that the antiquated single-signer systems allow, would be trivially prevented. And yet here we are, going with a single-signer system (which we already know is dumb) and worse, that signer is Microsoft. Three cheers for Linus, telling everyone the rather obvious thing, that if we're going to use such a broken system, at least decentralize the signers.
Bummer, I was wrong. 1201(a)(3)(2). If DRM is applied without the authority of the copyright holder, then it is not circumvention to defeat it.
Everybody, please send along a statement whenever you share your home movies: "I grant authorization to all parties, to apply technological measures which limit access to this work. I do not grant authorization to any party, to bypass or descramble any such measures."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a pure-7-bit-ASCII vandal, myself. I just embed escape [2;9y into my posts, to make your VT100 do a constantly-repeating self-test.
Another fun fact: I just upgraded to MaraDNS about a week ago. Believe it or not, I had been using Twisted Names, and got away with it for several years. It mostly worked. Mostly.
They got you when you loaded the iframe, not when you clicked Like.
Suppose Iraq were to invade Kuwait, and as a result, market experts predicted that oil prices would go up, long-term. One example of a subsidy for being an oil company, would be to use public funds (collected as income taxes or through currency inflation) to send military forces out to kick Iraq's ass our of Kuwait.
Suppose people typically used oil in a manner that tore its molecules apart to release energy, and then they dumped the resulting lower-energy molecules into the public atmosphere where they don't just magically go away, and where most physics-based (as opposed to faith-based) models predict the waste products cause various undesired side-effects at public expense. An example of a subsidy, would be to knowingly allow this pollution to happen, without making the oil users do something to clean up the CO2, or if they can't do that, charging them a fee for inefficient government programs to clean up the CO2.
The two examples of subsidies that I gave, both turn out to be real, rather than merely hypothetical. You might even call these subsidies good ideas if you insist, but let's not pretend they're not subsidies. These are examples of government using its power to artificially distort the energy market toward oil being more relatively affordable than competing energy sources, and these political decisions have the effect of reducing the natural free market incentives for developing clean[er] energy. ("Picking winners and losers" in Republicanese, if that helps anyone understand it.)
Like I said, some people may be able to make a good case for this manipulation of the market. I just want everyone to admit we're doing it, that's it's not something a tech-neutral, or a free-market-uber-alles, government would do. And somehow, I have a hunch that once we start acknowledging that, the case for how it's a good idea, may be challenged. It'll be a good debate.
Don't understate the importance of this. I heard the new pope uses emacs instead of vim (because "my fingers learned that one on the dvorak keyboards in the seminary"). And yet, he prefers python3 over scheme. Runs it all on Mac OS 10.4 and won't upgrade to 10.8, because
I don't care if you don't see any geeky controversy here; the python3 thing is important. The new pope is saying fallible things on the Internet!
That would be awesome to do just for the fun of adding a false positive, but then I realized I have no damn use for the propane. I grill with charcoal (tastes better; sorry, Hank Hill). I hate the police state as much as anyone, but you're talking about wasting money! Let's not get carried away.
There's no reason the TPP treaty can't be amended to require signatories have no anti-circumvention laws. The president has the power to get on this right now. He could do it today. It would be a totally legitimate political decision, too. "The people are saying this sucks. Let's try to not suck."
If such a change makes the agreement unacceptable to the other parties, then I guess "free trade" isn't very important, so I don't want to hear any more excuses about how these treaties are a vital priority.
If such an agreement is accepted and conflicts with earlier agreements, then you go resolve the earlier agreements which would then have become out-of-date. The fact that it's incompatible with old treaties or a not-yet ratified treaty is irrelevant. If someone had said the people didn't have the right to pass the 21st Amendment based on the argument that it conflicted with the 18th Amendment, they would have been called out as absurd.
If the president uses the free trade agreements as an excuse for not pressuring Congress to repeal DMCA, he'll get away with the inaction, but nobody should let him get away with this sort of rationalization for it. It'll be a lie, and everyone will know it, and we'll call him on it. Mr. President, don't do it unless your goal is to discredit yourself.
No. Most of the time, the state is able to successfully determine exactly who committed the infraction, without even caring whose vehicle it is. (And they're able to put points on peoples' license, too, now that you mention it.) This may be anecdotal evidence, but for what it's worth...
The last time I got a speeding ticket (2007), I handed my driver's license to the cop who pulled me over, so he knew whom to cite. The time before that (1999) the same attempt to identify me happened, and interestingly, in the 1999 incident I was driving a company car. The company didn't have to pay anything, though: the responsibility still fell on me, the driver.
Indeed, going all the way back to the 1980s, I've found the process to be shockingly accurate: every time I got pulled over for speeding, they cited me instead of some innocent third party. And every time I got cited for speeding, I had just minutes before been pulled over by a cop. Coincidence? ;-)
That's the standard by which all others should be judged. It might not be perfect, and maybe it can even be improved upon, but any new-fangled ideas for traffic law enforcement, are going to get compared to that. The government can't just expect everyone to forget decades of experience, forget seeing TV shows where a hunky cop pulls over a hot babe for speeding and she says she'll do anything to avoid the tic-- wait, maybe that wasn't TV. Err.. but anyway, when I compare speed cameras to such a basic and long-established level of competency and accuracy, speed cameras appear to fail.
Sheesh,.. fining the wrong people, and systematically(!), is just such a dumb regression from the status quo, that yeah.. I think whoever suggested it was stupid, whoever voted for it and signed it was stupid, and together they made us all a little stupider just by saying it. (Seriously, a time traveller from the year 1913 would be amazed that we're talking about it, trying to decide whether punishing innocent people is a good idea or not.) There's just no excuse for that.
I suppose if I'm going to quote things, I ought to spell correctly. I'd fix it now, but Slashdot's DRM failed to anticipate the need. ;-) Or rather, from Slashdot's PoV, the system is intended to not let people correct trivial errors. And so, everyone loses (you and I live with the glaring spelling error), because we're working within a third party's intents.
The key words are "intented to." It always raises the question of "intended by whom?"
Broadcast and analog cable television wasn't intended to be recorded on VCRs, when you look at intent from the PoV of the television stations. When you look from the PoV of the viewers, thought, that intent is completely irrelevant, and in fact the stream is intended to be recordable. That's why someone would subscribe to a service which is compatible with industry-standard "cable ready" tuners, for example. The conditions are set by the buyer.
I haven't used Netflix yet, so I can't comment on whatever shortcomings it may or may not have. Perhaps they thought of everything any person may ever want to do with the streams, and made sure that it is all possible. If that's true, though, they would be the first in history.
In the past, every single party who attempted to do this, failed. Use a cable company's DVR, or a pre-DeCSS DVD player, to see how spectacularly bad the efforts of vertical integrators have been, before. I hear that all licensed Blu-Ray players still do the make-people-watch-ads thing, though I've never actually watched a Blu-Ray movie to verify what everyone's saying about them.
Alas, keeping something secret is not compatible with the modest conditions which I enumerated.
Both, of course.
You wouldn't have asked that, unless you already knew the answer. :-)
But the serious answer to that, is to define "works" as being interoperable with all devices/software made by anyone who desires to be interoperable. Don't cave in on basic necessities, and let the DRM guys worry about whatever the hell it is, that they worry about. Their problems are not our problems.
Whoosh, dude.
Wrong, because if you read what I wrote, then you'll know they certainly will be able to record, back up, etc. My quite modest conditions for adopting DRM would make it not be DRM.
The amazing thing is that anyone would use a system which doesn't conform to those modest conditions.
I'm totally ok with DRM, provided that it's very clear how to implement it, and I don't need to sign any contracts or otherwise agree to keep any trade secrets. Just write up the RFC, send it to IETF, and we'll all get to work on our your-DRM-compatible players. Everybody wins.
Nothing! The issue with speed cameras is that we don't know that's what's happening, and there's reason to suspect that it's not.
We hear cases where the owner of a car gets mailed a ticket, regardless of who was driving. Or we hear of cases where one side alleges speeding didn't happen, but weren't given a chance to oppose it in court.
Sometimes we even hear that speeding was accurately detected, but the cops failed to confront the speeder, so they were allowed them to continue speeding.
What's wrong with having cops pull people over, check ids, the courts getting guilty pleas from most of them, having the borderline cases adjudicated, having the falsely-accused get acquitted, etc? This approach worked for a century, and then we threw it away.
10%, 20%, .. where did you get these constants? Might 4% and 8%, or 25% and 50%, be logically-superior constants? Just kidding, they can't be superior, because all three sets of numbers are totally made up.
How do you know that?
One of the main features of all the speed camera programs (at least the ones I have heard of, anyone who knows of an exception please speak up!) is they're designed to circumvent the usual judicial process where the state has to supply proof against the accused.
These use civil citations, whereas most of us grew up in a world where cops would use criminal citations that you could either plead guilty to, or go to court for, where the whole issue of "evidence" would come up. Naturally this radical new approach will be seen by many, as a scam.
OTOH, if the states can keep pushing these and not cave in, people could eventually be reconditioned. Maybe in 20 years people will think of these as less scammy, and then they'll be prepared to move additional parts of the justice system to civil punishment rather than criminal. "You're suspected of rape. $100 fine." Neat idea for a fun Idiocracy-type movie. :-)
The "obvious" thing (which is so obvious, that I wonder if I'm wrong!) is that an OTA antenna plugged into your HDHR will pick up what you're talking about, because the only thing you can't easily pirate, also just happens to be the only thing that is legally available+playable: local TV stations. No?
If that's not what you're talking about, then just what content are you talking about? Please give an example. A show name, anything.
Is the issue that your local geography makes OTA unviable? If so, then maybe your city needs its own "scene." ;-) I wonder if municipalities ought to start actively suporting such a thing, as an alternative to cable franchises. If Cox is setting the turn-away-customers bit, it may be that no one cares about your market area anyway, so why not?
And what's with the "no transcoding" constraint? You didn't explain why that's important. If you're cursed with having to stream over wifi (no copper LAN in the house), transcoding is damn useful for reducing the OTA MPEG2 bitrates.
If I wanted to get technical about things, I would suggest that technical people take back the word "technical" from the lawyers. Then we could tell things like they really are: that the war ended decades ago when people (mostly) stopped shooting at each other (and no, an isolated axe murder doesn't count), regardless of whatever some lawyer says after looking for signatures on a page.
Saying we've remained at war with NK is pretty much the same as saying we weren't at war with Iraq. Papers, signatures and legislative resolutions -- or their lack thereof -- don't serve as strong evidence of war; bullets, bombs, and their associated death tolls do.
That's why America needs to playfully toggle the president's party more often: to make Congress look at schizoid as possible, for our amusement. "I'm a constitutionalist! It's a living document! Small government! Big government! Flip! Flop! The president must kill the terrorists without wasting courts' resources on an unnecessary trial! The president must not harm the innocent without due process! Rabbit season! Duck season! I demand you shoot me now!"
Text email is vulnerable too! I'm in the habit of: after reading every email, I save it to malware.sh, then I go to a shell, type "chmod +x malware.sh" and then either "./malware.sh" or "sudo ./malware.sh" depending on the flip of a coin. And in spite of my weird habit of doing this, I never check to see who sent me the email and whether or not it's PGP signed and if their signature checks out.
See? Spearphishing is a really hard problem to solve! Reading email is dangerous! DAAANGEROUSSS!!!!11
One of the ugly facts of life, is that somebody is always going to have that power. Don't phrase that as a yes/no question, please. The question is whether the decision should be made in your state capitol, Washington DC, though some high-barrier amendment process, anarchic armed mobs, xor the hammer of Thor.
This reminds me of what happened to Bill Maher in 2001. Some of his advertisers got their panties in a bunch over something he said, so they stopped paying him, and since then, he's referred to the incident as when he was "silenced."
And yet (even if you ignore Maher's great comeback on HBO) let's look at how the withdraw of commercial support for Maher's and Card's speech is impacted: worse case scenario, the ceasing of their commercial support reduces them to having a voice of the same magnitude as all us "little people."
Boo hoo! Poor OSC no longer has his voice artificially amplified, and that DC no longer delivers many thousand of CardMeme impressions! It's the end of democracy, because too many people voted with their wallets! It's chilling speech, because those listeners/customers decided to opt out of actively funding someone's speech.
Now poor OSC has to post to Slashdot to be heard, or stand on a soap box in the public square, or be the person who pays, rather than gets paid, for his speech. You know, just like nearly every single one of us. And not because anyone brought him down, but because people decided to abstain from elevating him. The poor bastard, having to compete in the same marketplace of ideas as the rest of us!! Nobody should have to endure that -- where's Voltaire to fight to the death for OSC's RIGHT to a privileged position?
This is a first amendment issue!! What part of "Congress shall make no law, allowing customer whims to abridge the business viability of media in a competitive marketplace" don't you understand?!
Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have finally found an example of the "culture of dependency" that Republicans have been warning us all about. Everyone, please welcome our newest member, Orson, to "the 47%."
You're right of course, but people (at least in America) tend to be wildly optimistic and idealistic.
It's easy to say "don't talk to cops" but sometimes you want to say "the red truck ran the light and wrecked that poor lady's little car. Is she ok? Yes, I saw it, the light was red. Shit, I walk through that intersection all the time. If I had been there, the fuckwit might have killed me!" when you see that a real crime has happened and there are real victims and you want justice.
You'll probably get away with talking to cops in a situation like that. Sadly, you might not, but the risk is remote enough ...
On the other end of the spectrum, RTFA. And in between, most of life. That's where it's hard to decide things correctly.
If there are prosecutors or cops seeing this, what I hope they'd come away with, is that when horror stories like this come to light, you're just training every one of us, to not tell you who hit the lady's car. It's probably better to let people run lights, is it? Of course not, but that's what you're teaching us: don't talk. And if enough of us get trained by you to think "fuck justice" then I guess we don't need to employ you anymore, huh?
Of course it would. You don't know the global CAs or whose interests they're serving or what (if anything) they do to keep safe. OTOH you almost always know your own practices and allegiances. Making the trust path depend on a third party, can only increase the viability of a MitM. The only way their certification could help, would be if it's checked in parallel with other certifications (such as your own), to either bolster it as a corroborating assertion that the identity is correct, or to cast doubt on it if it doesn't match. Alas, without support for multiple signers, neither of these scenarios end up occuring.
You'd be right if ssh used a more modern signing approach, such as PGP. But that's almost never the case, at least in 2013. (I must admit, I still haven't tried building ssh with GNU/TLS.)
Aha. I see the problem. You're in 1995. You're right. In 1995, if you perceive the risk, then you're either a visonary/cipherpunk or you're a paranoid. In either case, the mainstream press and industry can get away with ignoring your concerns. (In 1995 the only evidence we had that the CA system would fail, was in things like the recent (1994) passage of CALEA, which showed the US government had the intent to systematically weaken communications security. But we didn't yet know what would come of it, and CAs didn't yet admit on their own web pages (!) that they are "CALEA compliant" as Verisign amazingly has.)
In 2013 we know that it has failed (sometimes due to governemnts, sometimes due to other attackers, and sometimes due to mistakes) and continues to fail, routinely. There's a news story every month where some signer, who is fully trusted, turned out to have been undeserving of the trust.
That isn't to say it's useless (no matter how much you increase the MitM vulnerability of a crypto system, it remains more secure than plaintext), just that future PK systems will necessarily allow for multiple trust paths working in parallel, as PGP does and encourages.
(Back to the topic at hand) A code signing system that operated on multiple signatures would be particular valued now, thanks to the recent story of the bit9 failure. Imagine a system that required three "moderately trusted" certs, where no one but a user who does their own builds, would trust any CA more than moderately. All of the failures that the antiquated single-signer systems allow, would be trivially prevented. And yet here we are, going with a single-signer system (which we already know is dumb) and worse, that signer is Microsoft. Three cheers for Linus, telling everyone the rather obvious thing, that if we're going to use such a broken system, at least decentralize the signers.
Bummer, I was wrong. 1201(a)(3)(2). If DRM is applied without the authority of the copyright holder, then it is not circumvention to defeat it.
Everybody, please send along a statement whenever you share your home movies: "I grant authorization to all parties, to apply technological measures which limit access to this work. I do not grant authorization to any party, to bypass or descramble any such measures."