They can't catch all speeders, either. And it's a damn sight unlikely that they'll catch all murderers, child molestors, rapists, thieves, or copyright infringers.
TPM has a distinctly separate use, even within open source computing.
Bruce Potter pointed this out at DefCon 14 this past year. He noted that, with TPM, you can basically be assured of a protected path from bootup until your OS takes control through signing the bootloader. In theory, this makes it possible for computers to effectively be tamper-proof. Trojaning the bootloader would be immediately noticed (in the case of signing) or impossible (in the case of encrypting--though the machine's BIOS would have to support something like that.
I encourage you to try to find his talk online. It definitely opened my eyes. Before, much like you, I felt that TPM was only useful for restricting ones rights. Now that I realize that there is another potential use, my opinion is certainly different.
The service would have to be defined as the receiver. Whoever provides e-mail service, even if it's my own machine. Yes, that means that if your machine is an e-mail server, you'd have to keep the logs.
Whoever your e-mail provider is is also an ISP. They provide an Internet service. Therefore, they are required to maintain whatever logs are mandated by the government. If that includes storing backups of e-mails, so be it. The company that provides you access to the Internet doesn't have to maintain that information--they're just a conduit.
Of course, the government might try to claim this, and then they will simply shut down any ISP for which they go after this information. It's pretty well impossible to capture and maintain all of the traffic that crosses the ISP's gateway for any useful length of time.
I think it's reasonable to assume that format-shifting sets a new copyright timestamp, but only for that specific representation. If I were to grab your photos and scan them in myself, I would have a set of photos (copyright: me, 2007).
There may be difficulties in proving copyright infringement in a case like this, and that's largely ok with me. I mean, if, instead, I simply copied your digital scans rather than making my own, can you prove that I did so? Probably not, unless you watermarked them.
Put another way, I think that, given two separate releases of a movie on DVD, one of them should expire before the other. The burden of proving copyright infringement SHOULD be on the copyright holder (yeah, yeah, preponderance of the evidence, blahblah).
There would be no outcry, no migration. The inertia is too high, and Microsoft has trained people that computers just break sometimes.
I've had Microsoft updates tear my system apart. Complete loss of internet connectivity (makes diagnosing the problem fairly hard) in one case, and sometimes inability to boot. I don't run really odd software--mostly putty for connecting to systems where I do the real work. Nothing whatsoever that messes with booting.
Then you have all the WGA incidents where Windows Update decided that, for example, OEM copies of Windows straight from the manufacturer were invalid.
I've also seen/experienced problems where, mysteriously, my VPN connections will simply stop working, requiring deleting and removing (in some cases) or a reinstall to fix.
There are certainly issues with Linux on the desktop, and they are often hard to solve. Perhaps that means that I should amend my statement: Linux is just as ready for the desktop as Windows is.
Absolutely, however GooTube is pretty good about removing material when asked to do so by copyright holders. The problem is that it keeps getting re-uploaded, and the DMCA doesn't (as far as I know) allow for blanket removal. That is, each instance of infringement must be included in the DMCA takedown request. So Viacom has to constantly monitor the site and send out the requests, and someone at Youtube has to take them down, one by one. Viacom can't say, "Please remove all Daily Show content," or, "Please remove all of our content." It just doesn't work that way.
This is one reason that negotiating a deal would be beneficial to both parties. There are many more users willing to upload content than Viacom employees working to search it out, or Youtube employees capable of removing it. The money lost in fighting the infringement is probably significant.
That said, as long as it continues to be (financially) worth it, Youtube will continue to host videos and will simply have to deal with the takedown notices. And Viacom (and other copyright holders) will have to continue to monitor these sites for infringing content.
That poster said that the card was purchased "months ago". It was advertised as being Vista-ready at that time. Allegedly, it is not Vista-ready.
Most stores have fairly limited return policies. Without a receipt, the best you can get is store credit. With a receipt, you typically have something like 30 days to return a purchase. After that, you have to go through the manufacturer.
The manufacturer, in this case, is allegedly refusing to acknowledge the problem. This means that any warranty that came with the card will be useless. It seems like a pretty bad situation, all around.
That said, acknowledging the problem just means that whoever does decide to sue them will have evidence against them.
Businesses (and anyone else with lots of money) are fairly big targets in America. Lots of people think they can get rich quick by abusing the court system. This has lead to people and companies refusing to admit problems in a lot of cases (having to cowtow to shareholders doesn't help matters, either.)
[1] Inevitably, when someone puts a footnote tag (what is the actual term for that, anyway?) in a post, they will forget to include the actual footnote.
The expression "so easy a child could do it" is really misleading. Children are typically better capable of learning and figuring things out than most adults I know. Perhaps the expression should be, "So easy a retiree could do it." But that would probably be considered degrading.
Too early? That excuse is only going to hold water for a little while longer. Distributions like Ubuntu already make installation and most use so absurdly simple that children[1] literally can do it. The next version of Ubuntu is expected to include things like accelerated graphics drivers (not open source) and other little spiffies that are currently 'hard' to get working. The last great barrier is wifi (both configuration and support), but that's coming along, too.
The problem is inertia. It doesn't matter much that Linux is ready for the desktop. What matters is that Windows has owned the desktop for over a decade. People are familiar with it, and no matter how irrational, when confronted with something/different/ but no/harder/, people cry that they can't do it.
I don't know what about Kubuntu was too hard for the gentleman in the Asker's story, but I'd be willing to bet that the problem was that it was unfamiliar. He probably didn't immediately know how to do the tasks that he normally does. Maybe his e-mail client wasn't already set up and his ISP couldn't help him, or maybe he couldn't find Internet Explorer and didn't know that Firefox was the alternative. But the fact is that he wasn't willing to try, and it's likely that he wasn't willing to try because he had his comfortable Windows desktop waiting for him back in his comfort zone. I'm not trying to say that there's something wrong with this man, but this (admittedly speculative) case is representative of the problem.
No, Linux is ready for the desktop. It's about as ready as it's going to get. It is no harder to use than Windows. It's the inertia issue advocates need to overcome, now, and that will be a harder battle.
Most of their 'lockouts' are temporary, anyway. Call them, explain the problem, and it goes away. I guess they might not force the issue of the money, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if they don't make it slightly harder on people who use this trick. After all, it effectively cuts the price of Vista for people who are willing to install it twice in a row.
I'll have to be honest--all of my installations (for both OSs) have been in VMWare. It's possible that the unusual environment is the cause for my observations.
Nonetheless, the up-front questions make it worth it, to me, even if it turned out to be a little slower in the real world. Multitasking an XP install is pretty hard because of the context switch ("Ok, now I have to type in the key, ok, now they're asking me for the time zone--oh, it's reading from the disc some more, I can go back to something more important before it asks if I want the firewall enabled.")
I've seen many blogs that proclaim that XP keys are invalidated after upgrading with Vista. They always link to a discussion of the EULA, which claims that the license is invalidated.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that Microsoft will invalidate XP keys for their WGA check (because they'll certainly still work to install the media) if you upgrade that installation of XP to Vista? Has anyone actually tried it?
Certainly, Microsoft could probably link the two installations, if you do an actual upgrade. If they can do that, what do you think they'll do to 'upgrade' copies that were installed using the Vista->Vista trick? Maybe they'll wait awhile, then decide that these copies are 'pirate' installations, and lock you out of upgrades (possibly drop you down to degraded mode) until you pay a fee to convert your installation to a Full install.
I don't know where you get the notion that
an XP->Vista install would take significantly less time . I've installed both numerous times, and the Vista install is faster on the wall clock, but it's also less intrusive. It asks most of the questions up front, meaning I can go about other tasks until the install is complete.
Then, if XP keys are/really/ invalidated, there's the possibility of a user deciding to revert. They shouldn't be stuck with Vista if they decide that it sucks so much that they can't stand it. They should be able to reinstall XP with their previous key. That said, I've seen no evidence that XP keys are invalidated, just a bunch of people making that wild claim on blogs and then linking to a story which only talks about what the EULA says.
Windows will have a place in the business world for some time, and certainly on the desktop in commodity PCs. Microsoft is in no danger of losing what is arguably their flagship product (though some would argue that Office is their bread-and-butter).
Now they want market dominance in consoles. With PCs as gaming systems, they are competing with themselves for dominance (Xbox vs PC), and they flat out don't get any royalties for games sold on the PC. They know that they have dominance on the PC even without gaming, so the easiest way to gain console dominance is to try to move people off of the PC and onto the Xbox.
Now I don't think they'd blatantly sabotage gaming on Windows--certainly, they're using gaming as leverage for Vista upgrades via DirectX 10. But they probably won't work to maintain it as a viable platform for that much longer. DirectX 10 represents the start of a merger between the SDKs for Xbox and PC. I suspect that soon, we'll see the SDK for the Xbox start to become more advanced than the PC version. Eventually, the main optimizations and improvements will go to the XBox.
Sneaky people, if this is their strategy, but effective. The PS3 is looking more and more like it's going to flop, and the Wii targets a completely different market (though it's catching up to the 360 in sales, regardless, and despite being released a year later). They've got a virtually clear path to hardcore console gaming dominance.
Hell, buy them BEFORE you buy the system. Our local Circuit City got 30 Wiis yesterday, and one Wiimote. If you are planning on getting (and hunting for) a Wii, and you see the controllers, get them.
I got lucky. I ordered my Wii on Amazon and didn't get extra controllers. I've been hunting for awhile and had seen controllers, but never thought to get them because I had no Wii (nevermind the fact that you can play with them on your computer before you get the console). Once I managed to order the Wii, I started hunting for controllers, onlhy to find that they were sold out all over town.
I finally found 3 sets today at Wal Mart (they had an extra 'chuk and also four classic controllers) on the day that my Wii ships.
Sure, but the original poster was talking about the PS3/Xbox360 killing the Wii by copying the Wiimote. The fact is, companies want to develop for the base system. They don't want to rely on a peripheral being available because that cuts into their potential audience (and customerbase) significantly. You'll notice that most games which use a peripheral come with that peripheral bundled, or are in the same series. There have been no games utilizing the guitar for PS2/except/ for Guitar Hero. The PS2 dance pad has had a few DDR knockoffs, but not that many. Most other peripherals have one, maybe two games, as well.
Note the 'so far not set' part of your parent's post. The bit to degrade if HDCP is not present exists in the specification and on every disc, but right now it is set to 0. Once they start producing discs with that bit set to 1 (after the format is more standardized and more people have committed to it) they will start setting the bit and you will see the degraded signal.
There is no 'making the keys stealthier and starting over'. The problem with this sort of DRM, as has been noted many, many times, is that the decryption key and the cyphertext are distributed to the end-user. It doesn't matter how obfuscated they make it--if it can be read by the PC, it can be extracted by the PC.
Trusted computing may make this harder--I'm not sure whether it will make it impossible, however.
I think the reason Hymm failed is because DVD-Jon stopped working on breaking iTunes DRM in that direction. The same techniques should still be possible to replicate, however there are really only a handful of people in the world with the knowledge and ability to do that, and there are apparently NO people with the knowledge, ability, and drive. Otherwise, Hymm would work.
In 64-bit Vista, you have to enable this functionality at boot. You cannot permanently enable it (i.e. every time you reboot, you have to re-select that option) and I'm sure that the 'protected' software won't run in this mode.
The truth is, watermarking is probably the way to go. Tie the content to the specific user, then go after them in court if they make illegal copies. Legal copies shouldn't even show up on the radar, as they will almost always be personal copies of the content.
Suing might not even be necessary. Force users to maintain accounts, and go after them with a collection agency or hit their credit cards/credit if they fail to abide by the agreement.
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They can't catch all speeders, either. And it's a damn sight unlikely that they'll catch all murderers, child molestors, rapists, thieves, or copyright infringers.
TPM has a distinctly separate use, even within open source computing.
Bruce Potter pointed this out at DefCon 14 this past year. He noted that, with TPM, you can basically be assured of a protected path from bootup until your OS takes control through signing the bootloader. In theory, this makes it possible for computers to effectively be tamper-proof. Trojaning the bootloader would be immediately noticed (in the case of signing) or impossible (in the case of encrypting--though the machine's BIOS would have to support something like that.
I encourage you to try to find his talk online. It definitely opened my eyes. Before, much like you, I felt that TPM was only useful for restricting ones rights. Now that I realize that there is another potential use, my opinion is certainly different.
As Bruce says, TPM is not evil, it is a tool.
The service would have to be defined as the receiver. Whoever provides e-mail service, even if it's my own machine. Yes, that means that if your machine is an e-mail server, you'd have to keep the logs.
Sucks, huh?
You're thinking of "ISP" in the wrong light.
Whoever your e-mail provider is is also an ISP. They provide an Internet service. Therefore, they are required to maintain whatever logs are mandated by the government. If that includes storing backups of e-mails, so be it. The company that provides you access to the Internet doesn't have to maintain that information--they're just a conduit.
Of course, the government might try to claim this, and then they will simply shut down any ISP for which they go after this information. It's pretty well impossible to capture and maintain all of the traffic that crosses the ISP's gateway for any useful length of time.
I think it's reasonable to assume that format-shifting sets a new copyright timestamp, but only for that specific representation. If I were to grab your photos and scan them in myself, I would have a set of photos (copyright: me, 2007).
There may be difficulties in proving copyright infringement in a case like this, and that's largely ok with me. I mean, if, instead, I simply copied your digital scans rather than making my own, can you prove that I did so? Probably not, unless you watermarked them.
Put another way, I think that, given two separate releases of a movie on DVD, one of them should expire before the other. The burden of proving copyright infringement SHOULD be on the copyright holder (yeah, yeah, preponderance of the evidence, blahblah).
There would be no outcry, no migration. The inertia is too high, and Microsoft has trained people that computers just break sometimes.
I've had Microsoft updates tear my system apart. Complete loss of internet connectivity (makes diagnosing the problem fairly hard) in one case, and sometimes inability to boot. I don't run really odd software--mostly putty for connecting to systems where I do the real work. Nothing whatsoever that messes with booting.
Then you have all the WGA incidents where Windows Update decided that, for example, OEM copies of Windows straight from the manufacturer were invalid.
I've also seen/experienced problems where, mysteriously, my VPN connections will simply stop working, requiring deleting and removing (in some cases) or a reinstall to fix.
There are certainly issues with Linux on the desktop, and they are often hard to solve. Perhaps that means that I should amend my statement: Linux is just as ready for the desktop as Windows is.
I expect that we'll see easier-to-install packages and better integration now that Java is GPL.
Flash is another problem...
Absolutely, however GooTube is pretty good about removing material when asked to do so by copyright holders. The problem is that it keeps getting re-uploaded, and the DMCA doesn't (as far as I know) allow for blanket removal. That is, each instance of infringement must be included in the DMCA takedown request. So Viacom has to constantly monitor the site and send out the requests, and someone at Youtube has to take them down, one by one. Viacom can't say, "Please remove all Daily Show content," or, "Please remove all of our content." It just doesn't work that way.
This is one reason that negotiating a deal would be beneficial to both parties. There are many more users willing to upload content than Viacom employees working to search it out, or Youtube employees capable of removing it. The money lost in fighting the infringement is probably significant.
That said, as long as it continues to be (financially) worth it, Youtube will continue to host videos and will simply have to deal with the takedown notices. And Viacom (and other copyright holders) will have to continue to monitor these sites for infringing content.
That poster said that the card was purchased "months ago". It was advertised as being Vista-ready at that time. Allegedly, it is not Vista-ready.
Most stores have fairly limited return policies. Without a receipt, the best you can get is store credit. With a receipt, you typically have something like 30 days to return a purchase. After that, you have to go through the manufacturer.
The manufacturer, in this case, is allegedly refusing to acknowledge the problem. This means that any warranty that came with the card will be useless. It seems like a pretty bad situation, all around.
That said, acknowledging the problem just means that whoever does decide to sue them will have evidence against them.
Businesses (and anyone else with lots of money) are fairly big targets in America. Lots of people think they can get rich quick by abusing the court system. This has lead to people and companies refusing to admit problems in a lot of cases (having to cowtow to shareholders doesn't help matters, either.)
[1] Inevitably, when someone puts a footnote tag (what is the actual term for that, anyway?) in a post, they will forget to include the actual footnote.
The expression "so easy a child could do it" is really misleading. Children are typically better capable of learning and figuring things out than most adults I know. Perhaps the expression should be, "So easy a retiree could do it." But that would probably be considered degrading.
Too early? That excuse is only going to hold water for a little while longer. Distributions like Ubuntu already make installation and most use so absurdly simple that children[1] literally can do it. The next version of Ubuntu is expected to include things like accelerated graphics drivers (not open source) and other little spiffies that are currently 'hard' to get working. The last great barrier is wifi (both configuration and support), but that's coming along, too.
/different/ but no /harder/, people cry that they can't do it.
The problem is inertia. It doesn't matter much that Linux is ready for the desktop. What matters is that Windows has owned the desktop for over a decade. People are familiar with it, and no matter how irrational, when confronted with something
I don't know what about Kubuntu was too hard for the gentleman in the Asker's story, but I'd be willing to bet that the problem was that it was unfamiliar. He probably didn't immediately know how to do the tasks that he normally does. Maybe his e-mail client wasn't already set up and his ISP couldn't help him, or maybe he couldn't find Internet Explorer and didn't know that Firefox was the alternative. But the fact is that he wasn't willing to try, and it's likely that he wasn't willing to try because he had his comfortable Windows desktop waiting for him back in his comfort zone. I'm not trying to say that there's something wrong with this man, but this (admittedly speculative) case is representative of the problem.
No, Linux is ready for the desktop. It's about as ready as it's going to get. It is no harder to use than Windows. It's the inertia issue advocates need to overcome, now, and that will be a harder battle.
Most of their 'lockouts' are temporary, anyway. Call them, explain the problem, and it goes away. I guess they might not force the issue of the money, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if they don't make it slightly harder on people who use this trick. After all, it effectively cuts the price of Vista for people who are willing to install it twice in a row.
I'll have to be honest--all of my installations (for both OSs) have been in VMWare. It's possible that the unusual environment is the cause for my observations.
Nonetheless, the up-front questions make it worth it, to me, even if it turned out to be a little slower in the real world. Multitasking an XP install is pretty hard because of the context switch ("Ok, now I have to type in the key, ok, now they're asking me for the time zone--oh, it's reading from the disc some more, I can go back to something more important before it asks if I want the firewall enabled.")
I've seen many blogs that proclaim that XP keys are invalidated after upgrading with Vista. They always link to a discussion of the EULA, which claims that the license is invalidated.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that Microsoft will invalidate XP keys for their WGA check (because they'll certainly still work to install the media) if you upgrade that installation of XP to Vista? Has anyone actually tried it?
Certainly, Microsoft could probably link the two installations, if you do an actual upgrade. If they can do that, what do you think they'll do to 'upgrade' copies that were installed using the Vista->Vista trick? Maybe they'll wait awhile, then decide that these copies are 'pirate' installations, and lock you out of upgrades (possibly drop you down to degraded mode) until you pay a fee to convert your installation to a Full install.
Then, if XP keys are
Exactly.
Windows will have a place in the business world for some time, and certainly on the desktop in commodity PCs. Microsoft is in no danger of losing what is arguably their flagship product (though some would argue that Office is their bread-and-butter).
Now they want market dominance in consoles. With PCs as gaming systems, they are competing with themselves for dominance (Xbox vs PC), and they flat out don't get any royalties for games sold on the PC. They know that they have dominance on the PC even without gaming, so the easiest way to gain console dominance is to try to move people off of the PC and onto the Xbox.
Now I don't think they'd blatantly sabotage gaming on Windows--certainly, they're using gaming as leverage for Vista upgrades via DirectX 10. But they probably won't work to maintain it as a viable platform for that much longer. DirectX 10 represents the start of a merger between the SDKs for Xbox and PC. I suspect that soon, we'll see the SDK for the Xbox start to become more advanced than the PC version. Eventually, the main optimizations and improvements will go to the XBox.
Sneaky people, if this is their strategy, but effective. The PS3 is looking more and more like it's going to flop, and the Wii targets a completely different market (though it's catching up to the 360 in sales, regardless, and despite being released a year later). They've got a virtually clear path to hardcore console gaming dominance.
There must be a reason why Google's floated to the top of the search engine love list
Being popular doesn't mean anything. Look at Windows.
Hell, buy them BEFORE you buy the system. Our local Circuit City got 30 Wiis yesterday, and one Wiimote. If you are planning on getting (and hunting for) a Wii, and you see the controllers, get them.
I got lucky. I ordered my Wii on Amazon and didn't get extra controllers. I've been hunting for awhile and had seen controllers, but never thought to get them because I had no Wii (nevermind the fact that you can play with them on your computer before you get the console). Once I managed to order the Wii, I started hunting for controllers, onlhy to find that they were sold out all over town.
I finally found 3 sets today at Wal Mart (they had an extra 'chuk and also four classic controllers) on the day that my Wii ships.
Sure, but the original poster was talking about the PS3/Xbox360 killing the Wii by copying the Wiimote. The fact is, companies want to develop for the base system. They don't want to rely on a peripheral being available because that cuts into their potential audience (and customerbase) significantly. You'll notice that most games which use a peripheral come with that peripheral bundled, or are in the same series. There have been no games utilizing the guitar for PS2 /except/ for Guitar Hero. The PS2 dance pad has had a few DDR knockoffs, but not that many. Most other peripherals have one, maybe two games, as well.
Note the 'so far not set' part of your parent's post. The bit to degrade if HDCP is not present exists in the specification and on every disc, but right now it is set to 0. Once they start producing discs with that bit set to 1 (after the format is more standardized and more people have committed to it) they will start setting the bit and you will see the degraded signal.
There is no 'making the keys stealthier and starting over'. The problem with this sort of DRM, as has been noted many, many times, is that the decryption key and the cyphertext are distributed to the end-user. It doesn't matter how obfuscated they make it--if it can be read by the PC, it can be extracted by the PC.
Trusted computing may make this harder--I'm not sure whether it will make it impossible, however.
I think the reason Hymm failed is because DVD-Jon stopped working on breaking iTunes DRM in that direction. The same techniques should still be possible to replicate, however there are really only a handful of people in the world with the knowledge and ability to do that, and there are apparently NO people with the knowledge, ability, and drive. Otherwise, Hymm would work.
In 64-bit Vista, you have to enable this functionality at boot. You cannot permanently enable it (i.e. every time you reboot, you have to re-select that option) and I'm sure that the 'protected' software won't run in this mode.
The truth is, watermarking is probably the way to go. Tie the content to the specific user, then go after them in court if they make illegal copies. Legal copies shouldn't even show up on the radar, as they will almost always be personal copies of the content.
Suing might not even be necessary. Force users to maintain accounts, and go after them with a collection agency or hit their credit cards/credit if they fail to abide by the agreement.
Like I said, I don't know if they're anywhere else or not. It's entirely possible that they are--I haven't particularly had the desire to find out.