The reasoning is simple and not related to any of these open door analogies. If it's not yours, don't take it. That's the reasoning a court will use.
That is why it's a dumb law. The web consists approximately 100% of things that aren't yours. If you use simple reasoning and avoid analogies (which is probably a bad idea!) then you just directed your browser to steal this comment from Slashdot's server.
Can't you see how insane that is? You didn't just now steal anything from Slashdot! You didn't behave dishonorable or disrepectfully. Yet you did just now access someone else's computer to take someone else's information, without authorization. Now stop flouting the law, or else I will tell on you.
Authorization may seem like a reasonable criterion at first, if you're trying to set a policy for dealing with crimes which are committed using computers. But when you think about the actual transactions that people perform in the real world, it falls apart. I think this is because lawmakers forget about the crime they wanted to deter, and got all distracted by regulating the computer itself. It's the credit card fraud and theft of $20 bills they ought to be concerned about, not the computer access and all the subtle details for whether or not someone should have been talking to that computer.
The DVD/BD-logo on the player tells me that this device is licenced to descramble those disks. It's neither secret nor uncommunicated.
It's licensed by DVDCCA (and the Blu-Ray equiv, whoever that is) to implement their trade secret. It is not licensed by the movie's copyright owner to descramble the work.
It couldn't possibly do the latter.
If you publish a movie right now, there is no way some trade secret licensing or certification company, who has never communicated with you, several years ago (when they authorized the use of that logo by that player manufacturer) can have possibly known whom you are about to decide to authorize to descramble your movie.
The logo tells you the device complies with technical specifications, not laws such as DMCA. If you think it does, then you have never read DMCA. DMCA talks about authorization by copyright owners, not authorization by specification creators.
That sounds though like just the type of thing Microsoft may use as an excuse to refuse to sign
They won't. A $99 service cannot possibly audit the code they're signing, and much less, they can't even begin to fathom the myriad subtle consequences of that code.
If a system administrator can't be sure that his Windows machines won't boot other OSes, then what's the point of SecureBoot?
Ultimately, SecureBoot is marketed as giving application programs (e.g. a proprietary competitor to mplayer) a way of knowing whether or not the computer is currently running an OS (and other code) other than Microsoft-approved ones; it's theoretically not intended to prevent you from running non-MS code at other times. The idea is that a piece of the system should have a reliable way of knowing whether the Microsoft xor someone else (e.g. the user) is in control.
Microsoft wants to be able to tell, say GE or Sony, that it's ok to publish files or media which work with Windows Media Player, because Windows Media Player will always know for sure, whether it's outputting decoded video to a real video card with a real HDCP connection to a real monitor, vs when it's outputting to a virtual card or to a monitor-emulator. And they want to be able to persuade them that it will become harder than it has been in the past, for anyone to reverse-engineer players which would be compatible with that media.
That's what I like about it. They're not even paying lip service to that bullshit official purpose. Red Hat made it sound like they have drank some of the Koolaide, with all their worrying about how the person who owns the computer might abuse an unsigned module to take control of their computer.
Once you're running your bootloader, then the issue is over. There is no need to further check for any other signatures or try to guarantee that the owner can't run their own code. You have satisfied the requirement and thereby gotten the computer to work.
Federal Law says that if you access their servers and you were not authorized to do so, then you have committed a computer crime, no matter what analogy you come up with.
Right, but I think the point is that it's a stupid law. (And therefore nobody respects it or obeys it, and therefore nobody expects anyone else to obey it, and therefore that law is useless to (and probably even contrary to) the cause of justice.) In a thread titled "strange sense of morals" that's not irrelevant.
Are you authorized to read the data at http://amazon.com/? How do you know? Who authorized you? When? What evidence do you have that you were authorized to request that page? What evidence do you have that you were authorized to receive the reply after you request that page?
I know those are all stupid questions, but only because you have not been authorized to read Amazon's page, or if you have, it was done secretly inside Amazon and was never communicated to you. That is why it is a stupid law.
It reminds me of how nobody has ever actually been prosecuted for playing a CSS-protected DVD on a DVDCCA-approved DVD player. Every time you descramble the CSS on a DVD, that's "circumvention" and illegal per DMCA, unless you have authorization by the movie's copyright holder, to do that. But of course, nobody has ever gotten authorization to do that. (Disagree? Prove it, or at least show some modest indirect evidence. This is harder than you think. Hint: purchasing the DVD does not imply permission to descramble the CSS, or else 2600 would have won their DeCSS case.) Every time anyone played a commercial DVD or BluRay, they were breaking the law, and the player manufacturer and the retail store who sold the player, broke the law too. That is, unless there's some sort of secret and uncommunicated authorization.
So how do you know if you're authorized? You don't. You never know, until you moment you die without ever having been called to court.
Same for public web servers. Everyone just assumes that information left in public, and without any notices it shouldnt' be accessed, nor with any even half-hearted ineffective attempts to limit access, is.. well.. publically accessible. But then fuckwits come along with a law saying you need authorization -- something that no one ever has, or at least can never show or demonstrate they have. The only authorization is hidden within the mind of whoever owns the server. It is never revealed, and it's lack is also never revealed, until the moment you get a letter from a lawyer or are confronted by a cop.
They can retroactively say you didn't have authorization, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Any arguments they make which happen to get applied to clearly valuable or sensitive information (situations where common sense tells you the owner wouldn't want the information to be public -- situations the law was ostensibly intended to cover) apply just as logically to Amazon's home page. It's just that if Amazon prosecuted you for shopping at their store, the judge wouth laugh them out of court despite the technical wording of the law, simply because it's so absurd. Common sense would prevail if Amazon sued you for being a customer -- in defiance of what Congress wrote.
But in between these two extreme examples, is a shitload of gray area. (Nearly everything you did on the web today was technically illegal.) The written law doesn't distinguish between any two points along this spectrum, just as DMCA doesn't distinguish between pirates and people merely playing their DRMed movies on Sony players. It must necessarily comes down to a judge needing to pull an arbitrary decision out of their ass, every single time.
Not that I have any sympathy for the bad guys in this case. The extortion is illegal in itself, and shows some clearly malicious intent. If
This isn't the usual opt-in vs opt-out issue. DNT is explicitly trinary: yes/no/didn't_say. DNT is itself just a form of communication, not a policy imposed upon advertisers (yet).
If you default people to DNT:1 without asking them, you are actually undermining DNT for people who did actually want to answer Yes.
For Christmas, would you like
A large lump of coal
A smaller lump of coal and some x-ray specs (this is the default, and what you'll get if you don't answer)
A hovercraft
? You're saying everyone should get a hovercraft unless they opt into a large lump of coal. Not only does that rule out anyone getting x-ray specs, but the increased hovercraft demand means the hovercrafts are going to be more expensive, so we're either not going to really get them (shit, I should have chosen the coal!), or they're going to be lamer than they would have been, if only the kids who wanted them got them.
Please don't screw over the kids who really want a hovercraft, so much that they're actually willing to take 3 seconds of mouse clicking to tell Santa.
Did we put Wifi and 3G in all these things to fuck around with sneakernet? You, sir, must be living in the past.
Exactly.
Have you ever heard of, oh, say, Dropbox? Owncloud? (and probably tons of others.)
Oops. You were talking sense right before then. What happened?
Suggesting service providers which require specialized client applications, just make the device look like a total loser. The question is whether or not it's able to mount an NFS or CIFS/SMB share. (And yes, I'd expect a Microsoft tablet to at least be able to mount CIFS shares.) If it can, then the device is potentially going to be able to do all the things you have been taking for granted for the last 20 years. If it can't, then the tablet computer is also "living in the past" and will be a constant disappointment due to its atrocious performance.
If someone wants all their files to have to upload over their ADSL and then download again over the same link, just to be able to access them from across the room (and give some otherwise-unnecessary third party the perk of scanning the data (or at least filename) for keywords to sell to advertisers or law enforcement or whatever), sure, they should be allowed. But if that's "normal" then it's got fail written all over it, because that's usually a stupid, slow, insecure, and generally unpleasant way to do things.
However you want to explain the psychology of it, it was pleasing to see your collection on a shelf.
Unless you have spent a lot of time with computers, in which case it's a lot more pleasing to see your collection on your screen. And unlike the thousand CD collection on sagging shelves, it magically stays sorted (computers are so awesome!) so you can always find what you want to listen to, without having to carefully reinsert things when you're finished playing them, and without new additions sometimes (even planned free space distributed throughout the collection's shelves, eventually fills) resulting in "expensive" insertions with cascades of shelf-fulls of CDs moving. Keeping things findable was the biggest problem I had with my CDs.
Physical media is a management nightmare. I don't know how librarians can stand it. I guess when it's your job rather than part of relaxation, I can see how your attitude would change about things consuming your time.
And then the whole thing went digital, and the idea of collecting has lost some of its luster.
Except for the people who spend a lot of time with computers, or people who have large collections for which computers are the solution. For them, the idea of collecting finally became practical and the collection gained utility value. What used to be a complete pain in the ass, became painless.
Secondly and perhaps just as importantly, the collection has lost its uniqueness. Sure, you may have every Rolling Stones album ever, but you can just copy it and give it to your friend, and now he has all of their albums too. So there's no status in it, and no accomplishment.
As for status, who cares. But no accomplishment?! The Rolling Stones are a rather bad example (they're deservedly one of the best-known and ubiquitously played rock bands, ever), but I suppose they have their rarities too. The accomplishment is that you used to not ever hear song x and now you hear song x whenever you please. Collections give you that, and broadcast services never can. Singlecast services, if you don't mind the inefficiency and unreliability, and assuming they overcome the selection problem (which is possible but the last time I looked (2010) they were awful), might some day.
Good answer; I'm glad someone remembered and stepped in there.
How ironic that I've forgotten. I happen to be going through some Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 migration drama, and the loss of aufs and trying to make the seeming-inferior overlayfs do the same job, ought to have put the value of additive assigns in the forefront of my mind. I wouldn't have tolerated this crap 15 years ago, because on the Amiga it all Just Worked. Meanwhile, some very smart people are still struggling with just what is the right way to do a union filesystem on Linux.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I recall from the Amiga back then (a friend had one), and what I have seen here so far, this "Amiga Experience" is all about the GUI, not so much about the underlying tech.
Everyone had a different idea of what the "Amiga Experience" was, because the machine was so striking in so many different ways.
I don't remember talking to many people who thought Intuition and Workbench (the GUI) were all that special (right-button fixed-position menus, and "screens" being the only "cool" Amiga-exclusive GUI features that I can think of off the top of my head), but OTOH in the mid-1980s there weren't that many GUI competitors, so I guess it's not far-fetched that at least some people thought that was special.
To some people, it was just the games. The Amiga had its day in the sun where it was, for a brief period, the game machine. When that day ended, those people moved on.
To me, it was all about the tech. And even within the tech, there were at least two camps and lots of people with a mix of membership in both. The custom chips were excellent -- by mid/late 1980s standards (by 1996 I had installed a graphics card and by 2000 the case was truly stuffed to the gills with replacements for nearly everything on the mobo, every Z3 slot filled and some cards with other weirdo connectors which connected to other sub-cards!).
Exec was excellent (if you ignored the issue of memory protection) and simple, and I still sometimes wish on Linux I could "nice" processes with absolute priorities. (But it doesn't matter as much, these days.)
Even AmigaDOS (!) (when's the last time you heard that part of the system praised?) had some very nice things about it, or easily added onto it. Linux finally got equivalent ramdisk tech with 2.4 but I still don't see a pipe device as awesome and convenient as APIPE.;-) Linux finally got diverse filesystems (on of my favorite things about it) and has pulled ahead by a huge margin (I'll admit that; Linux is now the world leader in this regard) but Amiga people were plugging in, and playing with, and benchmarking different ones, years before anyone ever heard of Hans Reiser. When x86 people were working around fdisk partitioning, Amiga people had RDB -- equivalent tech is just now hitting becoming widely deployed with GPT. Some of its features seem very dubious by today's standards (I can't explain to anyone in 2012 why they would want "assigns" and not sound like a moron) but compared to AmigaDOS' comtemporaries.. oh, those people knew why someone would want a feature like that, and envied the Amiga even if they had to do it in secret.
The Amiga was plenty loved for its tech. Maybe by different people for different reasons, but the techlove was there, and I think critical to Amiga lingering after Commodore's death, for as long as it did.
One thing, though. For all the Amiga tech we don't have today, we still get by. Some of it got improved on (FFS seems so quaint now), some of it got the need for it bypassed by either new paradigms or brute force (you don't need copper lists, or to tell APIPE how much memory to use for its queue, or decent partitioning system when you have LVM), some of it is now seen as a bad idea (e.g. reading the the code which implements a filesystem, from the inserted media), and whatever we all still lack today, is mitigated by the other advantages of being the mainstream (e.g. Core i5 for $200 instead of a Cyberstorm 060 for $1000). The tech was damn fine, but it's still 1980s tech that we're talking about. It still impressed in the 1990s, but mainly because the 1990s were a semi-dark age.
That all comes down to some judge's arbitrary decision for what the tool is "primarily intended" for. If you do this, choose your marketing terms carefully.
BTW, everyone: you don't necessarily have to wait eighty years for this. When a work transitions from copyrighted to PD, that is just one of the ways DMCA can cease to apply in spite of DRM still being present.
Another way is to get the copyright holder's authorization. You own a video camera, don't you? Good, then you can make movies. Now you've just got to somehow get your movie published with CSS or BD+ applied to it. Then grant authorization to yourself, customers, the world, whatever, to crack your movie's DRM. The more people who do this, the murkier things get. When someone makes a movie player, who is to say it's not intended for playing movies that are allowed to be played? Is it completely bullshit when there is 1 movie? 10 movies? 100? 1000? At some point, you cross a line into it being plausible enough.
Without you doing anything or signing anything or making any special deals, your movie may even be getting DRMed already, with HDCP every time you play it. For all I know, you might even be reading this very comment, right now, using an HDCP connection to your monitor. As this comment's copyright holder, I hereby grant you authorization to defeat the HDCP or any other techological measures which effectively limit access to my Slashdot comments.
Then there's the flip side of DMCA's "authority of the copyright holder." You might want to think about the legality of Sony's electronics business, if they make equipment which can play your DRMed movies but if you have not granted them authorization to do so.
The writers wanted a new villain. Seriously, would you have so anxiously tuned into the Season 4 premiere, had the Season 3 cliffhanger had just been, "Oh no, the Romulans kidnapped Picard and now we're about to fight the Super-Warbird?"
The reason it is Apple's problem, is that they sell devices which will only install software from Apple's servers. (Personally, I can't view this as anything other than malicious. It's the kind of bullshit you would expect from that hellhole known as video game consoles, and was the act which put Apple into the loathed and reviled company of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. All four of you are the same to me, now.) Apple can fix this bug by releasing an iOS update which allows installation of software no matter where it comes from or by whom it is signed. Give control to the users and open up the market.
The reason it's not Apple's problem, is that everyone knows iOS devices have this flaw, and for whatever reason, iOS device owners bought the device anyway. They opted in to limited software availability and a broken market. Common sense said "don't do it" and some other force said "do it" and they blew off common sense. So be it.
When someone asks "Why won't my XBox boot Ubuntu?" you can have sympathy for them and slap them for being a moron. They're right and wrong. I tend to lean toward pointing out what's wrong, but threats like UEFI make me wonder how easy things it will remain, to keep saying No to such obvious malice and hostility on the part of manufacturers.
This is a case of Apple abusing its walled garden authority to assume the role of the judicial and make a summary judgement in favour of the plaintiff.
That's one way of looking at it, but a better way is this: Apple misdesigned the system, to make it so that they would always be a potential party in lawsuits concerning any applications that run on the platform, since they're all hosted by Apple. A cynic might even say they designed it that way, so that they would often have legitimate excuses to interfere with the software market. Regardless of why, though, a flaw is a flaw.
Even calling it a "walled garden" could be taken as a form of spin. Call it a "single point of failure" if you want to be mean to Apple, or "single point of failure and marketing" if you want to be charitable and also acknowledge the one reason a developer might not be completely abhorrent of the app store. (The idea being, "Sure you could make more profit per transaction if you ran your own store, but would customer find you?" And for that one thing, a bunch of tech people forgot everything else they had ever learned, and said "ok" when they saw Apple do something everyone knew was harmful to the platform's users.)
That's my point: the platform has a dependency upon a central authority which may (and in this case, does) sometimes comply with "behests." It reminds me of people who rely upon youtube for video distribution, who then bitch about "censorship" when Google (perhaps even moreso than Apple in this case) immediately folds when presented with the slightest "behest." Those peoples' problem is that they have a single host. iOS problem is that it has a single repository.
A user relying on an iOS device (or an XBox or a PS3) for something important, is like a video business relying on youtube (not streaming video in general, but one specific host).
If the internet-at-large or PCs-in-general worked like that, people would have bitchslapped the stupid out of it, decades ago. And vulnerable exceptions to this (e.g. ICANN's control of DNS) are grave worldwide concerns, so that whenever mechanisms emerge to make them more subject to arbitrary denial of service (e.g. SOPA bill), they are fought. The App Store isn't an exception -- it's the same kind of stupid. Let's stop irrationally thinking of it as a magical exception to what has otherwise always been simple common sense.
I think it's weird that so many people are bringing up Android. If people had reacted intelligently to this known and widely foreseen problem when iOS was introduced (Android wasn't even on the market yet!) by crushing the stupid idea of hardware-manufacturer-controlled "app stores" then either
1) Android wouldn't have the problem because they would have learned from Apple's mistake and wouldn't want to recreate Apple's 1% marketshare of smartphones and tablets. (And even now in real life, Android has this problem to a lesser degree than iOS.) But people were stupid so product tying to central app stores wasn't punished.
2) Android (the current "compromise choice" with probably be best balance between mainstreaminess and nonsuckiness) would be in Apple's loathed position right now, and we'd be bitching about Google and people would be explaining that the other mainstream platform (Maego/Meego/whatever) doesn't have this glaring flaw. But people were stupid so there is no other mainstream platform than Android.
Don't use iOS, and you get one step closer to things working right. If you want to step over Android to something good that's fine. But don't worry too much about that if you can't handle the break from the bigger world. First: don't use iOS.
Because friendly computers are immune to patent disputes?
Friendly computers are immune to a patent dispute causing previously-installed software to stop working, yes. Poster tried to tug at heart strings by implying this happened (RTFAing tells me this is not actually the case; they won't have a problem unless they need to replace hardware, migrate, etc).
Furthermore, friendly computers are immune to patent disputes allowing someone other than publisher to interfere with the market, prior to a court order. Apple should not have any say in whether or not this product is on the market. Even a stolid authoritarian would agree this is a matter for the courts, not Apple (or the marketplace, since we're using an authoritarian PoV). But the platform's unreasonable reliance on Apple-only repository makes it an Apple problem.
That is a design flaw. A known and very high-profile (and staggering) design flaw since day 1, which is one of the reasons I never bought any of these products.
And really, if you think about it, a truly friendly computer cannot even have its software interfered with by an injunction, even if we think that's a bad idea. Unless government forces have knowledge of a specific computer, that computer ought to be answering to its owner rather than another party.
We have seen this principle at work in the past, where people used patented codecs, cryptographic software, and DMCA-prohibited software despite its illegality. This is the essence of a friendly computer: serving its owner over all other considerations. That's true even if you think it's a bad idea -- that there's such thing as "too friendly," and that society has a legitimate interest in having the capacity to forcefully deny users the ability to use their computers in certain ways.
Don't use iOS devices for anything important. This kind of risk is the exactly one of the reasons the App Store and iOS' close ties to that store, is such a dumb idea to become dependent upon.
It's not your computer. Get that into your head.
And if people would stop buying them because of that, then developers would target some other, much more friendly, computer. Then you wouldn't be screwed right now.
"Digital citizen" sounds stupid and isn't any different than any other sort of citizen, unless you're trying to discriminate against people who have had bandsaw accidents. "Person" will do fine.
The focus on the Internet isn't too bad, but why bother? No reason to exclude LANs or (shared?) single node systems. Just lose the "on the internet" part of each one and you've got something just as good.
Maybe the whole "conflict" is to not take seriously, and is a conspiratorial hoax between oatmeal and funnyjunk. Or rather, those are the puppets and this is really a conspiracy between the puppetmasters: National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. What if this is all just an attempt to wipe out cancer in bears, thereby removing this important check on their population, so that they are finally able to overrun North America? I, for one, welcome our new ursine overlords.
Slashdot Mirror
That is why it's a dumb law. The web consists approximately 100% of things that aren't yours. If you use simple reasoning and avoid analogies (which is probably a bad idea!) then you just directed your browser to steal this comment from Slashdot's server.
Can't you see how insane that is? You didn't just now steal anything from Slashdot! You didn't behave dishonorable or disrepectfully. Yet you did just now access someone else's computer to take someone else's information, without authorization. Now stop flouting the law, or else I will tell on you.
Authorization may seem like a reasonable criterion at first, if you're trying to set a policy for dealing with crimes which are committed using computers. But when you think about the actual transactions that people perform in the real world, it falls apart. I think this is because lawmakers forget about the crime they wanted to deter, and got all distracted by regulating the computer itself. It's the credit card fraud and theft of $20 bills they ought to be concerned about, not the computer access and all the subtle details for whether or not someone should have been talking to that computer.
It's licensed by DVDCCA (and the Blu-Ray equiv, whoever that is) to implement their trade secret. It is not licensed by the movie's copyright owner to descramble the work.
It couldn't possibly do the latter.
If you publish a movie right now, there is no way some trade secret licensing or certification company, who has never communicated with you, several years ago (when they authorized the use of that logo by that player manufacturer) can have possibly known whom you are about to decide to authorize to descramble your movie.
The logo tells you the device complies with technical specifications, not laws such as DMCA. If you think it does, then you have never read DMCA. DMCA talks about authorization by copyright owners, not authorization by specification creators.
Read it again. DMCA is quite explicit about this.
They won't. A $99 service cannot possibly audit the code they're signing, and much less, they can't even begin to fathom the myriad subtle consequences of that code.
It will be signed without a thought.
Ultimately, SecureBoot is marketed as giving application programs (e.g. a proprietary competitor to mplayer) a way of knowing whether or not the computer is currently running an OS (and other code) other than Microsoft-approved ones; it's theoretically not intended to prevent you from running non-MS code at other times. The idea is that a piece of the system should have a reliable way of knowing whether the Microsoft xor someone else (e.g. the user) is in control.
Microsoft wants to be able to tell, say GE or Sony, that it's ok to publish files or media which work with Windows Media Player, because Windows Media Player will always know for sure, whether it's outputting decoded video to a real video card with a real HDCP connection to a real monitor, vs when it's outputting to a virtual card or to a monitor-emulator. And they want to be able to persuade them that it will become harder than it has been in the past, for anyone to reverse-engineer players which would be compatible with that media.
That's what I like about it. They're not even paying lip service to that bullshit official purpose. Red Hat made it sound like they have drank some of the Koolaide, with all their worrying about how the person who owns the computer might abuse an unsigned module to take control of their computer.
Once you're running your bootloader, then the issue is over. There is no need to further check for any other signatures or try to guarantee that the owner can't run their own code. You have satisfied the requirement and thereby gotten the computer to work.
Right, but I think the point is that it's a stupid law. (And therefore nobody respects it or obeys it, and therefore nobody expects anyone else to obey it, and therefore that law is useless to (and probably even contrary to) the cause of justice.) In a thread titled "strange sense of morals" that's not irrelevant.
Are you authorized to read the data at http://amazon.com/? How do you know? Who authorized you? When? What evidence do you have that you were authorized to request that page? What evidence do you have that you were authorized to receive the reply after you request that page?
I know those are all stupid questions, but only because you have not been authorized to read Amazon's page, or if you have, it was done secretly inside Amazon and was never communicated to you. That is why it is a stupid law.
It reminds me of how nobody has ever actually been prosecuted for playing a CSS-protected DVD on a DVDCCA-approved DVD player. Every time you descramble the CSS on a DVD, that's "circumvention" and illegal per DMCA, unless you have authorization by the movie's copyright holder, to do that. But of course, nobody has ever gotten authorization to do that. (Disagree? Prove it, or at least show some modest indirect evidence. This is harder than you think. Hint: purchasing the DVD does not imply permission to descramble the CSS, or else 2600 would have won their DeCSS case.) Every time anyone played a commercial DVD or BluRay, they were breaking the law, and the player manufacturer and the retail store who sold the player, broke the law too. That is, unless there's some sort of secret and uncommunicated authorization.
So how do you know if you're authorized? You don't. You never know, until you moment you die without ever having been called to court.
Same for public web servers. Everyone just assumes that information left in public, and without any notices it shouldnt' be accessed, nor with any even half-hearted ineffective attempts to limit access, is .. well .. publically accessible. But then fuckwits come along with a law saying you need authorization -- something that no one ever has, or at least can never show or demonstrate they have. The only authorization is hidden within the mind of whoever owns the server. It is never revealed, and it's lack is also never revealed, until the moment you get a letter from a lawyer or are confronted by a cop.
They can retroactively say you didn't have authorization, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Any arguments they make which happen to get applied to clearly valuable or sensitive information (situations where common sense tells you the owner wouldn't want the information to be public -- situations the law was ostensibly intended to cover) apply just as logically to Amazon's home page. It's just that if Amazon prosecuted you for shopping at their store, the judge wouth laugh them out of court despite the technical wording of the law, simply because it's so absurd. Common sense would prevail if Amazon sued you for being a customer -- in defiance of what Congress wrote.
But in between these two extreme examples, is a shitload of gray area. (Nearly everything you did on the web today was technically illegal.) The written law doesn't distinguish between any two points along this spectrum, just as DMCA doesn't distinguish between pirates and people merely playing their DRMed movies on Sony players. It must necessarily comes down to a judge needing to pull an arbitrary decision out of their ass, every single time.
Not that I have any sympathy for the bad guys in this case. The extortion is illegal in itself, and shows some clearly malicious intent. If
Pardon me. That looks pretty decent. I just assumed it was another dropbox/gdrive/idisk. It's not. I was wrong.
This isn't the usual opt-in vs opt-out issue. DNT is explicitly trinary: yes/no/didn't_say. DNT is itself just a form of communication, not a policy imposed upon advertisers (yet).
If you default people to DNT:1 without asking them, you are actually undermining DNT for people who did actually want to answer Yes.
For Christmas, would you like
?
You're saying everyone should get a hovercraft unless they opt into a large lump of coal. Not only does that rule out anyone getting x-ray specs, but the increased hovercraft demand means the hovercrafts are going to be more expensive, so we're either not going to really get them (shit, I should have chosen the coal!), or they're going to be lamer than they would have been, if only the kids who wanted them got them.
Please don't screw over the kids who really want a hovercraft, so much that they're actually willing to take 3 seconds of mouse clicking to tell Santa.
Exactly.
Oops. You were talking sense right before then. What happened?
Suggesting service providers which require specialized client applications, just make the device look like a total loser. The question is whether or not it's able to mount an NFS or CIFS/SMB share. (And yes, I'd expect a Microsoft tablet to at least be able to mount CIFS shares.) If it can, then the device is potentially going to be able to do all the things you have been taking for granted for the last 20 years. If it can't, then the tablet computer is also "living in the past" and will be a constant disappointment due to its atrocious performance.
If someone wants all their files to have to upload over their ADSL and then download again over the same link, just to be able to access them from across the room (and give some otherwise-unnecessary third party the perk of scanning the data (or at least filename) for keywords to sell to advertisers or law enforcement or whatever), sure, they should be allowed. But if that's "normal" then it's got fail written all over it, because that's usually a stupid, slow, insecure, and generally unpleasant way to do things.
Unless you have spent a lot of time with computers, in which case it's a lot more pleasing to see your collection on your screen. And unlike the thousand CD collection on sagging shelves, it magically stays sorted (computers are so awesome!) so you can always find what you want to listen to, without having to carefully reinsert things when you're finished playing them, and without new additions sometimes (even planned free space distributed throughout the collection's shelves, eventually fills) resulting in "expensive" insertions with cascades of shelf-fulls of CDs moving. Keeping things findable was the biggest problem I had with my CDs.
Physical media is a management nightmare. I don't know how librarians can stand it. I guess when it's your job rather than part of relaxation, I can see how your attitude would change about things consuming your time.
Except for the people who spend a lot of time with computers, or people who have large collections for which computers are the solution. For them, the idea of collecting finally became practical and the collection gained utility value. What used to be a complete pain in the ass, became painless.
As for status, who cares. But no accomplishment?! The Rolling Stones are a rather bad example (they're deservedly one of the best-known and ubiquitously played rock bands, ever), but I suppose they have their rarities too. The accomplishment is that you used to not ever hear song x and now you hear song x whenever you please. Collections give you that, and broadcast services never can. Singlecast services, if you don't mind the inefficiency and unreliability, and assuming they overcome the selection problem (which is possible but the last time I looked (2010) they were awful), might some day.
Good answer; I'm glad someone remembered and stepped in there.
How ironic that I've forgotten. I happen to be going through some Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 migration drama, and the loss of aufs and trying to make the seeming-inferior overlayfs do the same job, ought to have put the value of additive assigns in the forefront of my mind. I wouldn't have tolerated this crap 15 years ago, because on the Amiga it all Just Worked. Meanwhile, some very smart people are still struggling with just what is the right way to do a union filesystem on Linux.
Yeah, this guy got confused. He thought his problem was remote server vs local media, but his real problem was dependent vs independent.
Everyone had a different idea of what the "Amiga Experience" was, because the machine was so striking in so many different ways.
I don't remember talking to many people who thought Intuition and Workbench (the GUI) were all that special (right-button fixed-position menus, and "screens" being the only "cool" Amiga-exclusive GUI features that I can think of off the top of my head), but OTOH in the mid-1980s there weren't that many GUI competitors, so I guess it's not far-fetched that at least some people thought that was special.
To some people, it was just the games. The Amiga had its day in the sun where it was, for a brief period, the game machine. When that day ended, those people moved on.
To me, it was all about the tech. And even within the tech, there were at least two camps and lots of people with a mix of membership in both. The custom chips were excellent -- by mid/late 1980s standards (by 1996 I had installed a graphics card and by 2000 the case was truly stuffed to the gills with replacements for nearly everything on the mobo, every Z3 slot filled and some cards with other weirdo connectors which connected to other sub-cards!).
Exec was excellent (if you ignored the issue of memory protection) and simple, and I still sometimes wish on Linux I could "nice" processes with absolute priorities. (But it doesn't matter as much, these days.)
Even AmigaDOS (!) (when's the last time you heard that part of the system praised?) had some very nice things about it, or easily added onto it. Linux finally got equivalent ramdisk tech with 2.4 but I still don't see a pipe device as awesome and convenient as APIPE. ;-) Linux finally got diverse filesystems (on of my favorite things about it) and has pulled ahead by a huge margin (I'll admit that; Linux is now the world leader in this regard) but Amiga people were plugging in, and playing with, and benchmarking different ones, years before anyone ever heard of Hans Reiser. When x86 people were working around fdisk partitioning, Amiga people had RDB -- equivalent tech is just now hitting becoming widely deployed with GPT. Some of its features seem very dubious by today's standards (I can't explain to anyone in 2012 why they would want "assigns" and not sound like a moron) but compared to AmigaDOS' comtemporaries .. oh, those people knew why someone would want a feature like that, and envied the Amiga even if they had to do it in secret.
The Amiga was plenty loved for its tech. Maybe by different people for different reasons, but the techlove was there, and I think critical to Amiga lingering after Commodore's death, for as long as it did.
One thing, though. For all the Amiga tech we don't have today, we still get by. Some of it got improved on (FFS seems so quaint now), some of it got the need for it bypassed by either new paradigms or brute force (you don't need copper lists, or to tell APIPE how much memory to use for its queue, or decent partitioning system when you have LVM), some of it is now seen as a bad idea (e.g. reading the the code which implements a filesystem, from the inserted media), and whatever we all still lack today, is mitigated by the other advantages of being the mainstream (e.g. Core i5 for $200 instead of a Cyberstorm 060 for $1000). The tech was damn fine, but it's still 1980s tech that we're talking about. It still impressed in the 1990s, but mainly because the 1990s were a semi-dark age.
That all comes down to some judge's arbitrary decision for what the tool is "primarily intended" for. If you do this, choose your marketing terms carefully.
BTW, everyone: you don't necessarily have to wait eighty years for this. When a work transitions from copyrighted to PD, that is just one of the ways DMCA can cease to apply in spite of DRM still being present.
Another way is to get the copyright holder's authorization. You own a video camera, don't you? Good, then you can make movies. Now you've just got to somehow get your movie published with CSS or BD+ applied to it. Then grant authorization to yourself, customers, the world, whatever, to crack your movie's DRM. The more people who do this, the murkier things get. When someone makes a movie player, who is to say it's not intended for playing movies that are allowed to be played? Is it completely bullshit when there is 1 movie? 10 movies? 100? 1000? At some point, you cross a line into it being plausible enough.
Without you doing anything or signing anything or making any special deals, your movie may even be getting DRMed already, with HDCP every time you play it. For all I know, you might even be reading this very comment, right now, using an HDCP connection to your monitor. As this comment's copyright holder, I hereby grant you authorization to defeat the HDCP or any other techological measures which effectively limit access to my Slashdot comments.
Then there's the flip side of DMCA's "authority of the copyright holder." You might want to think about the legality of Sony's electronics business, if they make equipment which can play your DRMed movies but if you have not granted them authorization to do so.
The writers wanted a new villain. Seriously, would you have so anxiously tuned into the Season 4 premiere, had the Season 3 cliffhanger had just been, "Oh no, the Romulans kidnapped Picard and now we're about to fight the Super-Warbird?"
The reason it is Apple's problem, is that they sell devices which will only install software from Apple's servers. (Personally, I can't view this as anything other than malicious. It's the kind of bullshit you would expect from that hellhole known as video game consoles, and was the act which put Apple into the loathed and reviled company of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. All four of you are the same to me, now.) Apple can fix this bug by releasing an iOS update which allows installation of software no matter where it comes from or by whom it is signed. Give control to the users and open up the market.
The reason it's not Apple's problem, is that everyone knows iOS devices have this flaw, and for whatever reason, iOS device owners bought the device anyway. They opted in to limited software availability and a broken market. Common sense said "don't do it" and some other force said "do it" and they blew off common sense. So be it.
When someone asks "Why won't my XBox boot Ubuntu?" you can have sympathy for them and slap them for being a moron. They're right and wrong. I tend to lean toward pointing out what's wrong, but threats like UEFI make me wonder how easy things it will remain, to keep saying No to such obvious malice and hostility on the part of manufacturers.
That's one way of looking at it, but a better way is this: Apple misdesigned the system, to make it so that they would always be a potential party in lawsuits concerning any applications that run on the platform, since they're all hosted by Apple. A cynic might even say they designed it that way, so that they would often have legitimate excuses to interfere with the software market. Regardless of why, though, a flaw is a flaw.
Even calling it a "walled garden" could be taken as a form of spin. Call it a "single point of failure" if you want to be mean to Apple, or "single point of failure and marketing" if you want to be charitable and also acknowledge the one reason a developer might not be completely abhorrent of the app store. (The idea being, "Sure you could make more profit per transaction if you ran your own store, but would customer find you?" And for that one thing, a bunch of tech people forgot everything else they had ever learned, and said "ok" when they saw Apple do something everyone knew was harmful to the platform's users.)
That's my point: the platform has a dependency upon a central authority which may (and in this case, does) sometimes comply with "behests." It reminds me of people who rely upon youtube for video distribution, who then bitch about "censorship" when Google (perhaps even moreso than Apple in this case) immediately folds when presented with the slightest "behest." Those peoples' problem is that they have a single host. iOS problem is that it has a single repository.
A user relying on an iOS device (or an XBox or a PS3) for something important, is like a video business relying on youtube (not streaming video in general, but one specific host).
If the internet-at-large or PCs-in-general worked like that, people would have bitchslapped the stupid out of it, decades ago. And vulnerable exceptions to this (e.g. ICANN's control of DNS) are grave worldwide concerns, so that whenever mechanisms emerge to make them more subject to arbitrary denial of service (e.g. SOPA bill), they are fought. The App Store isn't an exception -- it's the same kind of stupid. Let's stop irrationally thinking of it as a magical exception to what has otherwise always been simple common sense.
I think it's weird that so many people are bringing up Android. If people had reacted intelligently to this known and widely foreseen problem when iOS was introduced (Android wasn't even on the market yet!) by crushing the stupid idea of hardware-manufacturer-controlled "app stores" then either
1) Android wouldn't have the problem because they would have learned from Apple's mistake and wouldn't want to recreate Apple's 1% marketshare of smartphones and tablets. (And even now in real life, Android has this problem to a lesser degree than iOS.) But people were stupid so product tying to central app stores wasn't punished.
2) Android (the current "compromise choice" with probably be best balance between mainstreaminess and nonsuckiness) would be in Apple's loathed position right now, and we'd be bitching about Google and people would be explaining that the other mainstream platform (Maego/Meego/whatever) doesn't have this glaring flaw. But people were stupid so there is no other mainstream platform than Android.
Don't use iOS, and you get one step closer to things working right. If you want to step over Android to something good that's fine. But don't worry too much about that if you can't handle the break from the bigger world. First: don't use iOS.
Friendly computers are immune to a patent dispute causing previously-installed software to stop working, yes. Poster tried to tug at heart strings by implying this happened (RTFAing tells me this is not actually the case; they won't have a problem unless they need to replace hardware, migrate, etc).
Furthermore, friendly computers are immune to patent disputes allowing someone other than publisher to interfere with the market, prior to a court order. Apple should not have any say in whether or not this product is on the market. Even a stolid authoritarian would agree this is a matter for the courts, not Apple (or the marketplace, since we're using an authoritarian PoV). But the platform's unreasonable reliance on Apple-only repository makes it an Apple problem.
That is a design flaw. A known and very high-profile (and staggering) design flaw since day 1, which is one of the reasons I never bought any of these products.
And really, if you think about it, a truly friendly computer cannot even have its software interfered with by an injunction, even if we think that's a bad idea. Unless government forces have knowledge of a specific computer, that computer ought to be answering to its owner rather than another party.
We have seen this principle at work in the past, where people used patented codecs, cryptographic software, and DMCA-prohibited software despite its illegality. This is the essence of a friendly computer: serving its owner over all other considerations. That's true even if you think it's a bad idea -- that there's such thing as "too friendly," and that society has a legitimate interest in having the capacity to forcefully deny users the ability to use their computers in certain ways.
Don't use iOS devices for anything important. This kind of risk is the exactly one of the reasons the App Store and iOS' close ties to that store, is such a dumb idea to become dependent upon.
It's not your computer. Get that into your head.
And if people would stop buying them because of that, then developers would target some other, much more friendly, computer. Then you wouldn't be screwed right now.
"Digital citizen" sounds stupid and isn't any different than any other sort of citizen, unless you're trying to discriminate against people who have had bandsaw accidents. "Person" will do fine.
The focus on the Internet isn't too bad, but why bother? No reason to exclude LANs or (shared?) single node systems. Just lose the "on the internet" part of each one and you've got something just as good.
Maybe the whole "conflict" is to not take seriously, and is a conspiratorial hoax between oatmeal and funnyjunk. Or rather, those are the puppets and this is really a conspiracy between the puppetmasters: National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. What if this is all just an attempt to wipe out cancer in bears, thereby removing this important check on their population, so that they are finally able to overrun North America? I, for one, welcome our new ursine overlords.
Remember when the The Right to Read was paranoid ravings about stuff that could never happen, taken to a comically absurd extreme?
[When the phone rings]
Don't answer. Or don't even install the "ring when someone wants to talk to you" application.
What do you do when your desktop computer "rings?"