How does it protect user privacy if something as trivial as the attack described above totally defeats it?
It expresses desire/intent to good-faith actors, just like do-not-track. It's useless for "protecting" things, but otherwise a pretty decent idea in optimistic settings, and vastly better-than-nothing when interacting with good-faith actors. It's not stupid, just not a good general-purpose approach for the Internet.
Sorry dude, but anyone who thinks of a "personal computer" and a "telephone" (or a "game console" or a "PVR" or an "e-book reader" or a $HACKER_INFIDEL_DU_JOUR) as distinctly different things -- and that one class should serve its owner and another class should serve someone else -- has sipped of the Nintendo/Sony/Apple/Microsoft(Xbox) koolaide.
If you like the taste, fine, drink more. If you don't, spit/vomit it out. It sounds like up to now, now you've had half a glassful, but I think you've got a fateful decision coming up. If you simply stop right now, the effect will be the same as if you chugged the whole thing, except slower and more agonizing.
This isn't really all that bad. Imagine if Linux required you to sudo in order to chmod u+x something. The only people who would be pissed off by that, would be programmers (but Apple has thought of that too -- you can sign when you create the file, to make it be executable).
Pretty much the only thing they've gotten wrong (and it's a big one, but I think expected by users of this particular platform) is that the ultimate authority on what signatures are trusted, appears to be Apple rather than the owner of the machine.
You might be right that a lockdown is coming, though. Obviously, getting a share of all software sales for the platform, is something Apple would want, and their mobile customers have all already voted that they highly approve of the idea. Why wouldn't it end up going that way? To serve the interests of "classic" Mac users as opposed to iThing users? How many people is that? Not many of those are left, is my bet.
I would have thought it's obvious: No Apple Music, no Beatles. No Beatles, no Sgt Pepper, diminished role for Abbey Road Studios, it kinda snowballs from there.
You could say they're recognizing the wrong guy, and that they should have instead recognized Wozniak. But after his murder by John Hinckley, any such recognition would be posthum-- hey waitaminute, you're right!! WTF?!
I expect the terms also include no talk show appearances, public opinion campaigns, or other mechanisms where he could directly influence a potential juror outside the court. Even a simple blog post could cause irreparable harm to a jury's ability to be impartial.
I think this is the best answer I've read so far, and it seems reasonable on the surface. Best of all, there's a way to test whether or not it's correct: we just need to find other people the same court has allowed bail for. If it imposes the Internet restriction on everyone, then you're very likely right. If it only imposes the internet restrictions on some people, then you're very likely wrong.
After all, the nature of crime someone is charged with, has no bearing on whether or not a defendant using the Internet might influence a juror.
No this incident is does not prove anything like this, just that software needs decent quality testing.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It's merely the 17 billionth confirmation of the overall fundamental failure of the basic idea behind malware signature blacklisting, not proof.
Moving your email address is a hassle. Let's just assume you don't want any hassle at all, at the cost of the new guy not quite getting everything he wants (yet still be dealt with very reasonably).
Sell the site, not the domain. Keep the domain either for the rest of your life, or until you're so bored out of your mind that you have the time to deal with moving your email (i.e. hopefully the rest of your life).
On the still-yours domain, have a web server reply with 301 redirects to the equivalent page at the new domain. Then after a while (a year?), have it reply with 410. Then after a while, uninstall the web server. There may always be some stale links, but there's nothin' to do about that.
My home server's disks are dm-crypted for just this reason. The passphrase is stored as plaintext right on the boot/root SSD, so if someone steals/seizes my server the data isn't protected at all. But that's not the common threat. The common -- as in downright routine -- threat is that two or three times per year I RMA a drive. And while I usually would have an opportunity to wipe such a drive (I react as soon as SMART says things are going bad), that's just extra hassle and it's not always possible (had one completely croak very suddenly).
So I send ciphertext off to total strangers with no idea where it'll next turn up, and don't worry or think about about whether or not that drive, say, contained/home and Firefox's saved passwords, or whatever.
If you're not RMAing the occasional drive, then you're either lucky, or you're not using spinning drives anymore, or you've decided to not encrypt and therefore have to occasionally destroy a drive instead of a getting free warranty replacement, so you're paying more money.
Remember, if The computer company, who happens to hire a great many programmers, were not granted a monopoly on this technique for hiring programmers, then they would have no incentive to develop the technique.
If you don't grant this patent, why should IBM innovate ways to figure who to hire? What's in it for them?
It is only by forcefully preventing the other companies in the tech industry from doing things like this, for two decades, that technology as a whole can move forward.
The reason for allowing potentially-hostile entities to communicate securely with one another in certain forms, is that they already have the means to communicating securely in other forms, and there's no conceivable way this capability will ever be denied to them.
Let's take a bad scenario, where cops are talking on their encrypted radios, arranging plans to do something contrary to the public interest and for which the public who funds them and otherwise invests them with power, and a right and need to know. It sure sounds bad, doesn't it? But they can do the same exact thing by meeting in person! It's impossible to prevent conspiracies.
This is one of the same arguments that privacy advocates use against government intrusion. The motivation that privacy advocates have can vary, and one of them is that We The People are more important than law enforcement, and I agree with that point of view, but it's not the only reason. The other reason, nothing social-contracty, is that aggressive surveillance by law enforcement is futile. If I intend to commit a crime, then I can very easily secure communications with my co-conspirators to a degree that is far beyond LE's capabilities to intercept. Thus, aggressive surveillance will tend to only catch people who don't think they're committing crimes, or small-time stuff where the bad guys made the wrong convenience/security gamble, etc. You might find some good in those scenarios, but overall it doesn't help you with exactly the kind of stuff that government uses to justify their expensive invasiveness.
Similarly, if we rely on intercepting cop communication to find out about cop misconduct, we're going to be looking at the least important misconduct. We have bigger fish to fry, than exposing some guy who comes back 10 minutes late, at public expense, from his donut break. The cops will still be able to meet at the station and make plans to go beat the shit out of protesters, and they'll be able to maintain radio silence (or at least not give anything away) on the way there. We get nothing.
In addition, once you move to modern encryption and its hardware, we're generally talking about much more generally capable equipment than old style analog radios. There's no reason it can't be recording everything anyway, to be automatically time-shifted (as a lot of people here are suggesting) or later subpoenaed or FOIAed (to support rather than initially expose, evidence of a wrongdoing).
So let them have their secure communications, and let them become Yet Another example/leader/precedent for all of society moving toward decent comm tech. Saying they don't need decent comm is like saying their cars don't need round wheels. Encrypt-everything is beyond even a right; it's a minimal best practice for which exceptions should only be made when there are compelling reasons. That goes even for cops.
What compelling reason anyone has to use Ubuntu over Debian anymore?
Network effects. People use it because it's popular, and popular distros get targeted by various projects' package builders. Users know that recent versions of various apps will either be in the main repository or in PPAs, quickly/easily/dumbly installable with minimal effort for that PC that you don't want to have to mess with much.
That free game you wanna check out? It has a Ubuntu 11.10 package waiting for you, so you can be playing the most recent release of it 5 minutes from now, without any effort on your part.
And if that's not your situation, then that's not your situation and maybe Ubuntu isn't what you, or some particular box, needs.
The computer maker gets paid to install all sorts of adware and other crap on the computer; does that cover the cost of the Windows license?
Maybe it "covers" any cost that you want it to, such an extra Terabyte of disk space, or an extra 400 MHz of clockspeed, or some extra shaders, or an extra core, or...
It's a shame you didn't trawl through the article either, because if you had, you would have seen that it was about the applications crashing, not iOS or Android. In this particular article, I'm not seeing any evidence of OS unreliability for these platforms.
What's shocking is the trend over time, where lately (the figures are broken up by calendar quarters) applications are crashing about 3% of the time?!? That's hard to believe. If I had any desktop app that crashed that often, it wouldn't be installed for very long.
This suggests that either the top two mobile platforms are experiencing a crisis in unusually shitty software having recently and suddenly appeared, or there's something funny within that data (e.g. are a small handful of recently-popular apps crashing 100% of the time, messing up the numbers for the whole? Is there some very popular beta test going on out there?).
If you're going to release something and don't care whether or not derived works come with source, then why use GPL in the first place? If you don't care, you don't care. If you care, you care. Is it that hard to "know yourself?";-)
It makes me wonder if some people are using GPL as a bluff, to trick derivers into releasing their source, even though there would be no consequences for failing to do so.
And that's a clever idea (who really has time for dealing with lawyers?) but if that's your position, then all the more reason you should be loudly rattling your saber, angrily screaming that your Crack Legal Team WILL enforce GPL to the maximum, salt the farmland of violators after raping their daughters and poisoning their wells, bringing violators' heads to you so that their skulls may decorate the pikes which ring your lair. The last thing you want anyone hearing, is that you won't really enforce it, even if it's true.
I'm not sure that's necessary in this case. If it's just an executive agreement and doesn't need to be ratified, then it's just an executive agreement and doesn't need to be ratified. It's not binding, has no legal power, and thus isn't threatening to constitutional limits.
All we have to do is keep reminding the executive that it really is merely his handshake deal, and legislated policy need not change to comply with it. If he goes to Congress and says he needs some crazy new laws to comply with the 'treaty', the response is "What treaty?"
Consequences can only be "unintended" for so long. We've known for decades, arguably centuries, that creating a large/popular black market will divert economic strength away from the general populace toward criminals. When you see it as it's happening, and maintain (rather than repeal) the laws that make that market remain black, it's no longer an unintended consequence. At the very best, it's a regretfully accepted/planned consequence.
You can't say "you have to break some eggs to make an omelet" and then call the breaking of eggs unintended. Oh you intended it, you just weren't completely happy about it.
Similarly, we shouldn't allow politicians a free pass on the known and anticipated consequences of the drug war. They can still support the drug war with honor, but only if they own those consequences. The authoritarian parties need to come out and say
We know better than doctors and your local governments, believe there is a limit to the dignity humans should be allowed to have, and also we believe that it is better that Americans send their drug money to Mexico than spend it on domestic farms. Drug production is that unwanted in our country that we're willing to make these sacrifices, and here is why...
and then finish that sentence with whatever amazing fact or political theory it is, that has been so preciously held from the public for so long. But don't fucking say, "We didn't intend to usurp your local government, overrule your doctor, disrepect people, and send money to Mexico.. we had no idea prohibition would necesitate all that," because that is just insultingly unbelievable.
I'm pretty sure Hilary was more electable than an unknown 2 year Senator with a foriegn name.
You are definitely wrong. Hillary would have been a bad choice, because she would always have been associated with a previous president, and many people hate all previous and current presidents. An "unknown" was, without a doubt, the smart choice. Hillary-vs-McCain would have been a fair fight, and only drooling fuckwit morons pick fair fights.
To see an example of fuckwit drooling morons, observe the Republican nomination campaign, which is coming down to not-unknowns -- i.e. candidates with guaranteed exploitable weaknesses.
On the one hand, Samsung is getting nailed because they are using pretty standard tablet/smartphone user interfaces that Apple claims ownership of.
No, the court has taken the opinion that they're not using a "pretty standard UI" but rather, an unusually Apple-like one. It's the trashcan-icon case from 20 years ago, all over again.
And then OTOH, all 3G compatible devices must infringe the Samsung patent.
You might disagree with it, but it's not unambiguously crazy.
so, for folks that have 'popcorn hour' boxes and WD media players, asus players, etc - are we all supposed to throw these in the trash, now?
No, because those devices don't have DVD CCA license agreements. This court case wasn't about copyright, it was about the hoops people agree to jump through in order to play DVDs.
If you want to build a CSS-compatible DVD player "by the book" then you have to sign an agreement that your player will be guaranteed to suck. If your player doesn't totally suck, then you're in breach of contract.
(Contract -- a real contract which you signed and also handed over thousands of dollars as part of, not a secret one that you didn't know you had time-traveled and retroactively become bound to, like opening a box containing software a week after buying it. This isn't some secret surprise that sprung on Kaleidescape.)
Alternatively, since the CSS trade secret is long-ago out, you can avoid the agreement but take your chances with DMCA and probably some patents. Do this and you won't have a legal document that you signed with ink, where you promised to make sure that nobody will want your player.
Or just don't make DVD players. Tell user to get their media files.. um.. however. With no DRM or trade secrets, there are no contractual or DMCA issues. The worst you have to worry about are codec patents.
Popcorn Hours and WDTVs are perfectly safe. This is the future of media players: never be compatible with DRM if you don't want contract lawsuits. Just suggest to users that they get non-proprietary files which don't require any special permissions to be compatible with. And if non-proprietary files aren't for sale, well, people manage to get them anyway, somehow. If the copyright holders refuse to be paid, that's their problem. The rest of the economy is waiting for them.. or not.
Even saying they're "uncomfortable with the Internet" is to drink the Koolaide. The long-term and repeated historical trend has been that they're uncomfortable with sales, and this time the threat that people will shove more money down their gullets than the Hollywood companies can handle, is just as grave, and they are fighting it just as tenaciously.
Part of me wants to say there's one difference, which is that this time they are winning and achieving the goal of lowering their revenue -- driving people toward piracy because they refuse to offer the files themselves. But that's only a personal perspective and when you look at the actual numbers, it's not true: revenues are continuing to increase.
So once again, even the MPAA can't fuck this up, and they're gagging on the money that we force them to consume against their will.
The issue everyone needs to face, is whether you will disregard their choking noises like a coward at an accident scene, or if you'll be compassionate and help them achieve their long sought-after goal? Are you going to callously defy the MPAA and keep sending money for broken DRMed shit to be earmarked for the purchase of more absurd laws, or are you going to join their leaders in the effort to drive MPAA companies out of business?
I know that their suicide sounds like an insurmountable mountain, a futile effort which has stood the test of many, over decades of repeated attempts. Even the mighty Valenti couldn't prevent the movie rental market; if he, a figure of legend in modern times, couldn't bankrupt the studios, what hope do we the people have now, led by our pathetic Dodd? All I can say is take heart: if we all pull together, We Can Do This!
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It expresses desire/intent to good-faith actors, just like do-not-track. It's useless for "protecting" things, but otherwise a pretty decent idea in optimistic settings, and vastly better-than-nothing when interacting with good-faith actors. It's not stupid, just not a good general-purpose approach for the Internet.
That might make a really cool mount option, sort of a "noexec-lite." I bet it would be easy to add, too.
Sorry dude, but anyone who thinks of a "personal computer" and a "telephone" (or a "game console" or a "PVR" or an "e-book reader" or a $HACKER_INFIDEL_DU_JOUR) as distinctly different things -- and that one class should serve its owner and another class should serve someone else -- has sipped of the Nintendo/Sony/Apple/Microsoft(Xbox) koolaide.
If you like the taste, fine, drink more. If you don't, spit/vomit it out. It sounds like up to now, now you've had half a glassful, but I think you've got a fateful decision coming up. If you simply stop right now, the effect will be the same as if you chugged the whole thing, except slower and more agonizing.
This isn't really all that bad. Imagine if Linux required you to sudo in order to chmod u+x something. The only people who would be pissed off by that, would be programmers (but Apple has thought of that too -- you can sign when you create the file, to make it be executable).
Pretty much the only thing they've gotten wrong (and it's a big one, but I think expected by users of this particular platform) is that the ultimate authority on what signatures are trusted, appears to be Apple rather than the owner of the machine.
You might be right that a lockdown is coming, though. Obviously, getting a share of all software sales for the platform, is something Apple would want, and their mobile customers have all already voted that they highly approve of the idea. Why wouldn't it end up going that way? To serve the interests of "classic" Mac users as opposed to iThing users? How many people is that? Not many of those are left, is my bet.
I've seen the claim that Bigfoot is sleeping with Nessie's sister.
Can we all just agree that there's something for everyone to hate here, without the my-hate-is-more-justified-than-yours competition?
I would have thought it's obvious: No Apple Music, no Beatles. No Beatles, no Sgt Pepper, diminished role for Abbey Road Studios, it kinda snowballs from there.
You could say they're recognizing the wrong guy, and that they should have instead recognized Wozniak. But after his murder by John Hinckley, any such recognition would be posthum-- hey waitaminute, you're right!! WTF?!
I think this is the best answer I've read so far, and it seems reasonable on the surface. Best of all, there's a way to test whether or not it's correct: we just need to find other people the same court has allowed bail for. If it imposes the Internet restriction on everyone, then you're very likely right. If it only imposes the internet restrictions on some people, then you're very likely wrong.
After all, the nature of crime someone is charged with, has no bearing on whether or not a defendant using the Internet might influence a juror.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It's merely the 17 billionth confirmation of the overall fundamental failure of the basic idea behind malware signature blacklisting, not proof.
Not surprising they allowed bail for this guy. Ortmann is a totally believable name for a website founder, unlike Dotcom.
Moving your email address is a hassle. Let's just assume you don't want any hassle at all, at the cost of the new guy not quite getting everything he wants (yet still be dealt with very reasonably).
Sell the site, not the domain. Keep the domain either for the rest of your life, or until you're so bored out of your mind that you have the time to deal with moving your email (i.e. hopefully the rest of your life).
On the still-yours domain, have a web server reply with 301 redirects to the equivalent page at the new domain. Then after a while (a year?), have it reply with 410. Then after a while, uninstall the web server. There may always be some stale links, but there's nothin' to do about that.
My home server's disks are dm-crypted for just this reason. The passphrase is stored as plaintext right on the boot/root SSD, so if someone steals/seizes my server the data isn't protected at all. But that's not the common threat. The common -- as in downright routine -- threat is that two or three times per year I RMA a drive. And while I usually would have an opportunity to wipe such a drive (I react as soon as SMART says things are going bad), that's just extra hassle and it's not always possible (had one completely croak very suddenly).
So I send ciphertext off to total strangers with no idea where it'll next turn up, and don't worry or think about about whether or not that drive, say, contained /home and Firefox's saved passwords, or whatever.
If you're not RMAing the occasional drive, then you're either lucky, or you're not using spinning drives anymore, or you've decided to not encrypt and therefore have to occasionally destroy a drive instead of a getting free warranty replacement, so you're paying more money.
Remember, if The computer company, who happens to hire a great many programmers, were not granted a monopoly on this technique for hiring programmers, then they would have no incentive to develop the technique.
If you don't grant this patent, why should IBM innovate ways to figure who to hire? What's in it for them?
It is only by forcefully preventing the other companies in the tech industry from doing things like this, for two decades, that technology as a whole can move forward.
The reason for allowing potentially-hostile entities to communicate securely with one another in certain forms, is that they already have the means to communicating securely in other forms, and there's no conceivable way this capability will ever be denied to them.
Let's take a bad scenario, where cops are talking on their encrypted radios, arranging plans to do something contrary to the public interest and for which the public who funds them and otherwise invests them with power, and a right and need to know. It sure sounds bad, doesn't it? But they can do the same exact thing by meeting in person! It's impossible to prevent conspiracies.
This is one of the same arguments that privacy advocates use against government intrusion. The motivation that privacy advocates have can vary, and one of them is that We The People are more important than law enforcement, and I agree with that point of view, but it's not the only reason. The other reason, nothing social-contracty, is that aggressive surveillance by law enforcement is futile. If I intend to commit a crime, then I can very easily secure communications with my co-conspirators to a degree that is far beyond LE's capabilities to intercept. Thus, aggressive surveillance will tend to only catch people who don't think they're committing crimes, or small-time stuff where the bad guys made the wrong convenience/security gamble, etc. You might find some good in those scenarios, but overall it doesn't help you with exactly the kind of stuff that government uses to justify their expensive invasiveness.
Similarly, if we rely on intercepting cop communication to find out about cop misconduct, we're going to be looking at the least important misconduct. We have bigger fish to fry, than exposing some guy who comes back 10 minutes late, at public expense, from his donut break. The cops will still be able to meet at the station and make plans to go beat the shit out of protesters, and they'll be able to maintain radio silence (or at least not give anything away) on the way there. We get nothing.
In addition, once you move to modern encryption and its hardware, we're generally talking about much more generally capable equipment than old style analog radios. There's no reason it can't be recording everything anyway, to be automatically time-shifted (as a lot of people here are suggesting) or later subpoenaed or FOIAed (to support rather than initially expose, evidence of a wrongdoing).
So let them have their secure communications, and let them become Yet Another example/leader/precedent for all of society moving toward decent comm tech. Saying they don't need decent comm is like saying their cars don't need round wheels. Encrypt-everything is beyond even a right; it's a minimal best practice for which exceptions should only be made when there are compelling reasons. That goes even for cops.
Network effects. People use it because it's popular, and popular distros get targeted by various projects' package builders. Users know that recent versions of various apps will either be in the main repository or in PPAs, quickly/easily/dumbly installable with minimal effort for that PC that you don't want to have to mess with much.
That free game you wanna check out? It has a Ubuntu 11.10 package waiting for you, so you can be playing the most recent release of it 5 minutes from now, without any effort on your part.
And if that's not your situation, then that's not your situation and maybe Ubuntu isn't what you, or some particular box, needs.
Maybe it "covers" any cost that you want it to, such an extra Terabyte of disk space, or an extra 400 MHz of clockspeed, or some extra shaders, or an extra core, or...
It's a shame you didn't trawl through the article either, because if you had, you would have seen that it was about the applications crashing, not iOS or Android. In this particular article, I'm not seeing any evidence of OS unreliability for these platforms.
What's shocking is the trend over time, where lately (the figures are broken up by calendar quarters) applications are crashing about 3% of the time?!? That's hard to believe. If I had any desktop app that crashed that often, it wouldn't be installed for very long.
This suggests that either the top two mobile platforms are experiencing a crisis in unusually shitty software having recently and suddenly appeared, or there's something funny within that data (e.g. are a small handful of recently-popular apps crashing 100% of the time, messing up the numbers for the whole? Is there some very popular beta test going on out there?).
If you're going to release something and don't care whether or not derived works come with source, then why use GPL in the first place? If you don't care, you don't care. If you care, you care. Is it that hard to "know yourself?" ;-)
It makes me wonder if some people are using GPL as a bluff, to trick derivers into releasing their source, even though there would be no consequences for failing to do so.
And that's a clever idea (who really has time for dealing with lawyers?) but if that's your position, then all the more reason you should be loudly rattling your saber, angrily screaming that your Crack Legal Team WILL enforce GPL to the maximum, salt the farmland of violators after raping their daughters and poisoning their wells, bringing violators' heads to you so that their skulls may decorate the pikes which ring your lair. The last thing you want anyone hearing, is that you won't really enforce it, even if it's true.
I'm not sure that's necessary in this case. If it's just an executive agreement and doesn't need to be ratified, then it's just an executive agreement and doesn't need to be ratified. It's not binding, has no legal power, and thus isn't threatening to constitutional limits.
All we have to do is keep reminding the executive that it really is merely his handshake deal, and legislated policy need not change to comply with it. If he goes to Congress and says he needs some crazy new laws to comply with the 'treaty', the response is "What treaty?"
Consequences can only be "unintended" for so long. We've known for decades, arguably centuries, that creating a large/popular black market will divert economic strength away from the general populace toward criminals. When you see it as it's happening, and maintain (rather than repeal) the laws that make that market remain black, it's no longer an unintended consequence. At the very best, it's a regretfully accepted/planned consequence.
You can't say "you have to break some eggs to make an omelet" and then call the breaking of eggs unintended. Oh you intended it, you just weren't completely happy about it.
Similarly, we shouldn't allow politicians a free pass on the known and anticipated consequences of the drug war. They can still support the drug war with honor, but only if they own those consequences. The authoritarian parties need to come out and say
and then finish that sentence with whatever amazing fact or political theory it is, that has been so preciously held from the public for so long. But don't fucking say, "We didn't intend to usurp your local government, overrule your doctor, disrepect people, and send money to Mexico.. we had no idea prohibition would necesitate all that," because that is just insultingly unbelievable.
You are definitely wrong. Hillary would have been a bad choice, because she would always have been associated with a previous president, and many people hate all previous and current presidents. An "unknown" was, without a doubt, the smart choice. Hillary-vs-McCain would have been a fair fight, and only drooling fuckwit morons pick fair fights.
To see an example of fuckwit drooling morons, observe the Republican nomination campaign, which is coming down to not-unknowns -- i.e. candidates with guaranteed exploitable weaknesses.
No, the court has taken the opinion that they're not using a "pretty standard UI" but rather, an unusually Apple-like one. It's the trashcan-icon case from 20 years ago, all over again.
And then OTOH, all 3G compatible devices must infringe the Samsung patent.
You might disagree with it, but it's not unambiguously crazy.
No, because those devices don't have DVD CCA license agreements. This court case wasn't about copyright, it was about the hoops people agree to jump through in order to play DVDs.
If you want to build a CSS-compatible DVD player "by the book" then you have to sign an agreement that your player will be guaranteed to suck. If your player doesn't totally suck, then you're in breach of contract.
(Contract -- a real contract which you signed and also handed over thousands of dollars as part of, not a secret one that you didn't know you had time-traveled and retroactively become bound to, like opening a box containing software a week after buying it. This isn't some secret surprise that sprung on Kaleidescape.)
Alternatively, since the CSS trade secret is long-ago out, you can avoid the agreement but take your chances with DMCA and probably some patents. Do this and you won't have a legal document that you signed with ink, where you promised to make sure that nobody will want your player.
Or just don't make DVD players. Tell user to get their media files .. um .. however. With no DRM or trade secrets, there are no contractual or DMCA issues. The worst you have to worry about are codec patents.
Popcorn Hours and WDTVs are perfectly safe. This is the future of media players: never be compatible with DRM if you don't want contract lawsuits. Just suggest to users that they get non-proprietary files which don't require any special permissions to be compatible with. And if non-proprietary files aren't for sale, well, people manage to get them anyway, somehow. If the copyright holders refuse to be paid, that's their problem. The rest of the economy is waiting for them .. or not.
..someone once crashed an expensive aircraft. It was very regrettable and the survivors who were responsible for it, felt bad.
Even saying they're "uncomfortable with the Internet" is to drink the Koolaide. The long-term and repeated historical trend has been that they're uncomfortable with sales, and this time the threat that people will shove more money down their gullets than the Hollywood companies can handle, is just as grave, and they are fighting it just as tenaciously.
Part of me wants to say there's one difference, which is that this time they are winning and achieving the goal of lowering their revenue -- driving people toward piracy because they refuse to offer the files themselves. But that's only a personal perspective and when you look at the actual numbers, it's not true: revenues are continuing to increase.
So once again, even the MPAA can't fuck this up, and they're gagging on the money that we force them to consume against their will.
The issue everyone needs to face, is whether you will disregard their choking noises like a coward at an accident scene, or if you'll be compassionate and help them achieve their long sought-after goal? Are you going to callously defy the MPAA and keep sending money for broken DRMed shit to be earmarked for the purchase of more absurd laws, or are you going to join their leaders in the effort to drive MPAA companies out of business?
I know that their suicide sounds like an insurmountable mountain, a futile effort which has stood the test of many, over decades of repeated attempts. Even the mighty Valenti couldn't prevent the movie rental market; if he, a figure of legend in modern times, couldn't bankrupt the studios, what hope do we the people have now, led by our pathetic Dodd? All I can say is take heart: if we all pull together, We Can Do This!