What's so great about paying a monthly fee to have a device phone home and upload marketting data based on my viewing habits?
I don't know. I have a Tivo. I pay no monthly fee, but I do let it phone home and upload my viewing. In fact, I signed up to have it upload my detailed and specific viewing (opt-in) because I want my opinion to count. If they can pass along what shows suck to somebody, and back it up with data, then I'm all for it. Improve my selection.
I say, if other people can make a cheaper device, one that just records and plays back TV, that doesn't phone home, and doesn't have any service fees to just use it - they deserve my business.
I agree.
I just want to record and watch TV. I dont want to rate shows, or have a device pretend to tell me what I want to watch. I know what I want to watch, and I know what time it's on.
I know what I want to watch, and I don't give a shit what time it's on. If all you want is a digital VCR with a clock in it, then good for you. I happen to want something a little more intuitive. I like my Tivo: I like the way it works, I like the interface, I like the suggestions feature, I sometimes like the occassional advertising it throws onto the main menu (but not always).
Sometimes, the fact that the majority of people like a device is all that's needed to get an outpouring of people saying "I like the device." It's not necessary to attribute it to some kind of meme propogation or some such silly thing.
It has the potential to be a huge blunder for Real with very little risk for Apple should they decide to counter
Look guys... the worst case scenario is that Real has to update their iPod Harmony Plugin to fix the problem Apple creates.
There's no possible case where Apple can disable Real's Harmony system that Real cannot work around through a pretty simple update to their software. If you have the iPod Plugin already, it'd notify you to download the new one when it called home to check for updates.
I mean, it's not like the music you bought from Real will suddenly become useless. That music is in Real's own DRM format. The plugin is what converts it and makes the music compatible with the iPod.
b) have to go back to Real for a new version of their music
No, because the music Real sells isn't in this format. It's similar, but not exactly the same. The way the Harmony thing works is that they have a plugin for RealPlayer that converts from their format to the "pretend to be FairPlay" format at the time that you transfer the music to the iPod.
So you'll never have to redownload all the music. At most, you'll need an updated plugin for RealPlayer.
Look, I know all about reversing file formats and such.. I did this with the iTunesDB on the iPod and developed some libraries to deal with it (which foo_pod, a plugin for the foobar 2000 player, is using, in fact). And yes, there's a lot of unknowns in there.
But the M4P format is basically an MPEG 4 Container with a couple of special atoms in it. That's it. MPEG 4 is an open and well defined standard, and the special atoms are not extremely complicated. One of them holds the account information for the key lookup function, the other holds the AES encrypted data. And that's basically that. Everything else in the file is actually *documented* in the MPEG 4 specs.
So it's not like a lot of reverse engineering had to occur here. If Apple breaks it, it'll be fairly obvious by a quick analysis whether they did so intentionally or not. And the likelihood is that yes, they'll have intentionally broken it, because they don't really have anything in the file format that's "unknown".
Like I said, Apple's FairPlay DRM has been wholly cracked apart and analysed. There's nothing new or tricky there. If they break it, they'll have to break it in a way that doesn't involve mere changing of a couple of special values that nobody else uses.
One way they could break it is easy though.. Apple sells 128kbit music, Real's is 192kbit. A quick patch to the iPod firmware and it now will only play protected files if they are 128kbit. But that might be too blatent even for Apple, I think.
Want to (temporarily) save TiVo? Add a feature that will take a certain segment of the recorded video to an on-board dual-layer DVD recorder. Let the viewer have the option of cutting out the commercials, starting the recording at a certain spot and ending at a certain spot, pick up recording when the actual program restarts, etc. Once you are all done, you have a DVD for your collection.
What, you mean like the Pioneer DVR-320-S and Pioneer DVR-520H-S?
Okay, they don't have editing out commercials capability yet, and I doubt they are dual layer. So it's not totally there. But they do have Tivo+DVD Recorder.
I thought 'Harmony' was just Real's reverse engineering of FairPlay, no? They advertise RealPlayer with 'Harmony Technology.' So won't their FairPlay songs play just fine in RealPlayer no matter what Apple does? But if you put it into iTunes or on an iPod it won't work. Hence, Apple's problem.
"Harmony" is Real's term for their ability to munge from their own DRM format into something that looks like FairPlay. Looks like FairPlay enough to work on an iPod or something.
It's like this.. If I was a non-computer-geek using Real Player to transfer songs to my iPod, and it gave me an error, I'd go try to use iTunes (the offical, supported thing which actually came with the iPod), which presumably would not give me an error. Thus, I'd blame Real. Correctly, in this case.
In order for somebody to be using the Real Player software to talk to their iPod, they had to have downloaded and installed it, and then installed the iPod Plugin within the software itself.
Whereas iTunes came with the iPod.
I just disagree that Apple will be getting any calls on this one. And furthermore, I doubt they'd care, since they charge customers $50 to talk to Apple on the phone *anyway*. They don't have any free support system.
I am using my Apple Mac to transfer songs to my Apple iPod just like I did with my Apple iTunes.
Using Real's Harmony software with an error message popping up in a message box with Real's skinned theme on it saying that the Real software was unable to perform whatever operation it was attempting to perform. Contrariwise, iTunes will work just fine.
If Real's format survives, every update Apple does will have to be evaluated against the possibility of breaking Real's version weighed with the PR flack this would cause.
First, understand that Real's music "format" is really irrelevant. What they're doing is converting it into something very similar to Apple's format.
So if Apple breaks Real by accident, they're likely breaking backward compatibility with old iTunes purchased songs as well.
Contrarywise, if Apple breaks Real on purpose, it'll be fairly obvious to those people capable of seeing how they broke it (and there's quite a lot of them... their DRM format has been totally blown open here, remember). They'll look into it, and give the detailed word. Hell, you and me are probably both capable of figuring out how they did it,if they were to do it. It's simply not all that complicated to do.
Finally, it's quite likely that the next release of the iPod software will try to break Real's compatibility. They did this in the last release of iTunes to try to stop Hymn decrypted songs from working. This was absolutely 100% intentional and not a side effect from some other change. Hymn was quickly fixed, but the point is that Apple isn't much concerned about PR flack when they decide to get bitchy about their DRM.
So, short version: 1) It's possible for Real to work around anything Apple can throw out there, or make the conversion so similar that they can't break it without doing damage to their own legit customers. 2) Expect Apple to try it once or twice anyway, followed by quick patches to the Harmony iPod plugin.
I'm not defending their use of DRM. Myself, I always crack the DRM after purchasing a tune, and convert it to some other format that's not restricted. Harmony, in combination with my iPod and Hymn, lets me create unprotected AAC files with no loss, which is cool. It might not be entirely legal, but I'm not sharing the music so I really don't give a flip.
But it's not totally silly for them to give compatibility a try, is what I'm saying.
How much mojo will I have to go through to accomplish this? Will I have to re-download every Real tune I own to make it compatible again?
Worst case scenario: You have to update the Harmony software.
Realize that it's not the *music* that's doing the iPod compatibility here. Real has their own DRM. What they do is to convert the music to be similar to Apple's DRM at the time that you transfer it to the iPod.
So you don't ever need to redownload the music, but it's possible that you'd need to get a software update to make it compatible again.
Oh, and remember the best case scenario: Apple finds that is it, in fact, *unable* to break Harmony/iPod compatibility without also breaking iPod/iTunes compatibility. Now, I know for a fact that this is not currently the case, but some minor effort by Real on the Harmony software could make it such.
Actually, I have done end user support. And I've had to fend off calls the other way around, mostly, where the hardware was at fault and the customer is complaining about the error being with the software because the error is on the screen.
People tend to blame the program running when it throws out an error message, in my experience.
Real sells 192kbit MPEG 4 AAC encoded music now. The new encoder/player/thingy defaults to that format. Looks like they're dumping the crappy ra format, finally.
It's like this.. Apple can break the iPod's compatibility with Real's Harmony software, certainly. Real then simply adjusts their software to make their songs more like Apple's songs are. At some point, Apple can't break compatibility without breaking compatibility with all their own songs as well.
Remember, Real is just converting from their format into the format the iTunes Music Store uses. If they get close enough to that format, there's nothing Apple can do to prevent them without shooting themselves in the foot too.
Considering that in order to use Real's music you must transfer it using Real's Harmony software and any errors you get will be in that software... I think people would generally be more likely to blame Real rather than Apple.
The movie was enjoyable in it's own way. It was intentionally made in a certain style, and basically focused on the propaganda type of thing. And for that, it is quite well made. It's cheesy, but it's supposed to be.
When you compare it to the book though, it just pales by comparison. I would have enjoyed Starship Troopers the movie a hell of a lot more if I'd never heard of Starship Troopers the book. It's one of Heinlein's great stories, and the movie simply doesn't come close.
But the 13th Warrior was quite good after I worked out that it was a retelling of Beowulf. Then it made one hell of a lot more sense.
I know, I should have figured it out, but I'd not read Eaters of the Dead at that point, and it wasn't until I was reading that story that it hit me. After that, I went back, rewatched it, and was able to enjoy it because I knew WTF was going on.
So it was a poor movie by the metric of telling a story in and of itself, I grant you, but it was fairly well made and stuck to the plotline pretty good.
What if his actions cause the music industry to loss confidence in that DRM?
LOL!
Understand this... The "music industry" is royally screwed seven ways from Sunday. They know it too, don't kid yourself otherwise.
See, they need *customers*.
In order to exist, the music industry has to convince people to buy what they are pushing. They're between a rock and a hard place here, because if they make that DRM too obnoxious, if they go beyond the line too much, then their own customers will flip them the bird and jump right back onto P2P networks. It's already happened once, in their eyes. Does the P2P scare back around 1998 ring a bell? Napster? Back when it didn't quite suck, I mean.
See, Napster opened a new world for the music industry, because it showed them that the world had changed and now they had to compete with "free". How in the hell does one compete with free products?
DRM is a reaction to this, by trying to make it difficult for people to convert their products into a format than can easily become "free". Unfortunately, this is an impossible task. It's *proven* to be impossible, no less. So they now have to not only compete with "free", but to do it, they have to do something that's absolutely and totally impossible to do. What a bind that puts them in, huh?:-)
The music industry is scared shitless, and with reason. This new medium takes their products and puts it into a form that: a) damn near eliminates distribution costs, b) makes low cost viral marketing into one of the most powerful forms of marketing there is through the rapid dissemination of the meme in question, and c) eliminates all ability to control distribution of their product and thus be able to charge for it.
A and B they love, but C is included in the bargin and they cannot escape it. Furthermore, they're starting to figure out that the combination of A and B on a large enough scale eliminates the need for the middlemen in their business. Artist and customer can directly interact just as easily as middlemen and customers can. Since most of them are middlemen, this naturally makes them nervous. Right now, they're engaging in heavy media spending to combat this knowledge, leading to the current meme of "taking music without paying is stealing" and so on. They're engaging it on both the artist side and the customer side, and if both sides would just wake the hell up, the middlemen would be out of jobs.
So what I'm saying is that the idea that they can NOT offer their product on the internet is an unrealistic notion. They don't have that choice, not really.
If they don't offer something out there, in a light enough restriction no less, then what will happen is that they eventually die off. People will go back to passing around music for free, legislation and lawsuits be damned, they will find a way to do it safely if it comes down to it. Many very bright people are already looking for that way.
And if the artists see that the music companies aren't actively trying to make them some cash by selling their music online, the artists might start waking up en masse and seeing that the old system is unnecessary with the new technological capabilities to directly reach the customers.
So the music industry *will* sell online. They don't have a real choice not to do so anymore. They can no longer pack up their toys and go home, because that would be a losing move.
In order for such an update to work, it'd have to be an update to the AE devices themselves. And they'd have to update iTunes at the same time. And then it'd be probably just as easy to break open iTunes to get the public key again, and there you go.
What they really are worried about is somebody hacking apart the AE device and finding the private key. With that, I could write an AE emulator that would receive transmissions from iTunes... And totally bypass their DRM as well. Not that their DRM is effective anyway, but it's just one more way to do it, you know?
The real threat is that somebody will take this and figure out how to fake being an AE, then you essentially have iTunes doing the work of defeating its own DRM for you.
I investigated this justeport program yesterday, to see what it would take to do exactly that. My goal was not actually to defeat DRM, but to possibly create an emulator for being an AE, so that I could use iTunes to play songs on other computer's speakers. The thought of piping the music to a file did cross my mind, but that was not the goal.
But the short answer is that there's not enough in here to do it.
The way is works is that you generate an AES key. You encrypt that key using the RSA Public Key. You send that to the AE, which decrypts it with its private key. Then you use the AES key to stream the music over.
To pretend to be an AE, you need to know the private key inside the AE. Without it, you can't decrypt the AES key iTunes sends you, and you can't decrypt the stream of music.
Faking the protocol is pretty easy, since it's mainly RTSP with some extra headers. Faking iTunes into seeing you as an AE device is also pretty easy. Just use various Rendezvous utilities to broadcast yourself as an available RAOP service. But you can't decrypt the stream without that private key.
In theory, you could modify a copy of iTunes by changing the public key in there. Then you could make it work with your AE emulator program, but it wouldn't work with real AE devices anymore. Still, could be useful if you want a wacky way to bypass the DRM.;)
The MD5 hash of the real file is 59a98f181fe383907e520a391d75b5a7. If you download it, then you can check it with any tool to generate the MD5 hash, and if they match, you can be certain it hasn't been messed with.
That's the whole point of telling people what the hash of the file is.
And even when it doesn't make sense, it remains the sole prerogative of the publisher to conclude that their barriers don't make sense, or are alienating customers, or whatever, and make changes.
Entirely true. And the way to make them realize it doesn't make sense is to feed in bogus data and use sites like bugmenot.com to feed them bad statistics and so forth.
When the statistics they get from the data are heavily skewed and they realize that, then they might realize that the whole thing is worthless.
I find films where who's the "good guy" and who's the "bad guy" is unclear to generally be far better. Real life doesn't have good or bad guys, just guys doing whatever it is that they feel the need to do.
A film that makes it plainly obvious who is good and who is bad is, very generally speaking, less interesting to me. I can't identify with the character, because his actions and motivations are usually very cartoon-like in their simplicity. He's the good guy, so *obviously* he has to run back into the burning building to save the kid instead of chasing the bad guy down the street. That sort of thing... I find it annoying because there's no surprises.. The characters have no depth, they're basically one dimensional, have to "do the right thing" type of characters. They're also uninteresting.
For the same reasons, many actors want to play the bad guy. The bad guy has more motivational range, more depth, more interest. I generally like the bad guys better in such films, because at least they are doing something different than the norm.
Films where the protagonists are themselves "bad guys" are usually quite good as well. Any thief movie sort of falls into this category.. The Italian Job, to pick an example, didn't have any "good guys" in it at all. And it was just excellent, I thought. Would have been better without Mark Wahlberg, but still a damn fine flick.
All Carmack had to do was to add "Sorry, Doom 3 is cancelled because Creative Labs won't let us use their patented algorithims" to his.plan file.
Of course, this would have constituted conspiracy to commit murder in some jurisdiction or other, because if he had done so he'd know damn well that every CL executive would have been found dead in their beds the next morning.
It was called Code Red Vigilante or Code Blue or one of several varients. But essentially, they hung around and when they saw a code red attack come in, they'd either use the same hole to get in and alert the virus laden machine, or they'd actually go in and patch the thing automatically. A number of corporations deployed these inside their firewall, to take care of the rapid infection problems they had.
Essentially, it waited for an attack and then fixed the attacker by getting in, patching the hole and removing the virus. It worked pretty well, eventually.
The concept of fixing the problems on people's machines, whether they want it or not, is a nice one but still probably not legal.
Still, it's quite possible to write a crafty virus capable of spreading efficently without overloading the network, patching and removing itself as it goes.
One idea is to have every machine it "infects" split the remaining search space with it. Every copy of the virus that you spawn can talk back to its parent, split the search space with it, and then they both self-destruct when they are done with their spaces. You could cover the whole, or at least most, of the internet this way pretty rapidly. As long as your self-destruct worked, it'd be a self limiting infection, and the search space halving would prevent killing the bandwidth by only checking every IP once. Of course, you'd miss a lot of machines, but you'd get most of them. Enough to make a dent, I'm sure.
I mean, it reads like an almost textbook description of rain fade. First it fades down to crappy quality, stays that way for a bit, then cuts out entirely. The rain pours for a while, and then slacks off, and your signal comes back nice and strong.
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What's so great about paying a monthly fee to have a device phone home and upload marketting data based on my viewing habits?
I don't know. I have a Tivo. I pay no monthly fee, but I do let it phone home and upload my viewing. In fact, I signed up to have it upload my detailed and specific viewing (opt-in) because I want my opinion to count. If they can pass along what shows suck to somebody, and back it up with data, then I'm all for it. Improve my selection.
I say, if other people can make a cheaper device, one that just records and plays back TV, that doesn't phone home, and doesn't have any service fees to just use it - they deserve my business.
I agree.
I just want to record and watch TV. I dont want to rate shows, or have a device pretend to tell me what I want to watch. I know what I want to watch, and I know what time it's on.
I know what I want to watch, and I don't give a shit what time it's on. If all you want is a digital VCR with a clock in it, then good for you. I happen to want something a little more intuitive. I like my Tivo: I like the way it works, I like the interface, I like the suggestions feature, I sometimes like the occassional advertising it throws onto the main menu (but not always).
Sometimes, the fact that the majority of people like a device is all that's needed to get an outpouring of people saying "I like the device." It's not necessary to attribute it to some kind of meme propogation or some such silly thing.
It has the potential to be a huge blunder for Real with very little risk for Apple should they decide to counter
Look guys... the worst case scenario is that Real has to update their iPod Harmony Plugin to fix the problem Apple creates.
There's no possible case where Apple can disable Real's Harmony system that Real cannot work around through a pretty simple update to their software. If you have the iPod Plugin already, it'd notify you to download the new one when it called home to check for updates.
I mean, it's not like the music you bought from Real will suddenly become useless. That music is in Real's own DRM format. The plugin is what converts it and makes the music compatible with the iPod.
b) have to go back to Real for a new version of their music
No, because the music Real sells isn't in this format. It's similar, but not exactly the same. The way the Harmony thing works is that they have a plugin for RealPlayer that converts from their format to the "pretend to be FairPlay" format at the time that you transfer the music to the iPod.
So you'll never have to redownload all the music. At most, you'll need an updated plugin for RealPlayer.
Look, I know all about reversing file formats and such.. I did this with the iTunesDB on the iPod and developed some libraries to deal with it (which foo_pod, a plugin for the foobar 2000 player, is using, in fact). And yes, there's a lot of unknowns in there.
But the M4P format is basically an MPEG 4 Container with a couple of special atoms in it. That's it. MPEG 4 is an open and well defined standard, and the special atoms are not extremely complicated. One of them holds the account information for the key lookup function, the other holds the AES encrypted data. And that's basically that. Everything else in the file is actually *documented* in the MPEG 4 specs.
So it's not like a lot of reverse engineering had to occur here. If Apple breaks it, it'll be fairly obvious by a quick analysis whether they did so intentionally or not. And the likelihood is that yes, they'll have intentionally broken it, because they don't really have anything in the file format that's "unknown".
Like I said, Apple's FairPlay DRM has been wholly cracked apart and analysed. There's nothing new or tricky there. If they break it, they'll have to break it in a way that doesn't involve mere changing of a couple of special values that nobody else uses.
One way they could break it is easy though.. Apple sells 128kbit music, Real's is 192kbit. A quick patch to the iPod firmware and it now will only play protected files if they are 128kbit. But that might be too blatent even for Apple, I think.
Want to (temporarily) save TiVo? Add a feature that will take a certain segment of the recorded video to an on-board dual-layer DVD recorder. Let the viewer have the option of cutting out the commercials, starting the recording at a certain spot and ending at a certain spot, pick up recording when the actual program restarts, etc. Once you are all done, you have a DVD for your collection.
What, you mean like the Pioneer DVR-320-S and Pioneer DVR-520H-S?
Okay, they don't have editing out commercials capability yet, and I doubt they are dual layer. So it's not totally there. But they do have Tivo+DVD Recorder.
I thought 'Harmony' was just Real's reverse engineering of FairPlay, no? They advertise RealPlayer with 'Harmony Technology.' So won't their FairPlay songs play just fine in RealPlayer no matter what Apple does? But if you put it into iTunes or on an iPod it won't work. Hence, Apple's problem.
"Harmony" is Real's term for their ability to munge from their own DRM format into something that looks like FairPlay. Looks like FairPlay enough to work on an iPod or something.
It's like this.. If I was a non-computer-geek using Real Player to transfer songs to my iPod, and it gave me an error, I'd go try to use iTunes (the offical, supported thing which actually came with the iPod), which presumably would not give me an error. Thus, I'd blame Real. Correctly, in this case.
In order for somebody to be using the Real Player software to talk to their iPod, they had to have downloaded and installed it, and then installed the iPod Plugin within the software itself.
Whereas iTunes came with the iPod.
I just disagree that Apple will be getting any calls on this one. And furthermore, I doubt they'd care, since they charge customers $50 to talk to Apple on the phone *anyway*. They don't have any free support system.
I am using my Apple Mac to transfer songs to my Apple iPod just like I did with my Apple iTunes.
Using Real's Harmony software with an error message popping up in a message box with Real's skinned theme on it saying that the Real software was unable to perform whatever operation it was attempting to perform. Contrariwise, iTunes will work just fine.
Who you gonna call?
If Real's format survives, every update Apple does will have to be evaluated against the possibility of breaking Real's version weighed with the PR flack this would cause.
First, understand that Real's music "format" is really irrelevant. What they're doing is converting it into something very similar to Apple's format.
So if Apple breaks Real by accident, they're likely breaking backward compatibility with old iTunes purchased songs as well.
Contrarywise, if Apple breaks Real on purpose, it'll be fairly obvious to those people capable of seeing how they broke it (and there's quite a lot of them... their DRM format has been totally blown open here, remember). They'll look into it, and give the detailed word. Hell, you and me are probably both capable of figuring out how they did it,if they were to do it. It's simply not all that complicated to do.
Finally, it's quite likely that the next release of the iPod software will try to break Real's compatibility. They did this in the last release of iTunes to try to stop Hymn decrypted songs from working. This was absolutely 100% intentional and not a side effect from some other change. Hymn was quickly fixed, but the point is that Apple isn't much concerned about PR flack when they decide to get bitchy about their DRM.
So, short version:
1) It's possible for Real to work around anything Apple can throw out there, or make the conversion so similar that they can't break it without doing damage to their own legit customers.
2) Expect Apple to try it once or twice anyway, followed by quick patches to the Harmony iPod plugin.
I'm not defending their use of DRM. Myself, I always crack the DRM after purchasing a tune, and convert it to some other format that's not restricted. Harmony, in combination with my iPod and Hymn, lets me create unprotected AAC files with no loss, which is cool. It might not be entirely legal, but I'm not sharing the music so I really don't give a flip.
But it's not totally silly for them to give compatibility a try, is what I'm saying.
How much mojo will I have to go through to accomplish this? Will I have to re-download every Real tune I own to make it compatible again?
Worst case scenario: You have to update the Harmony software.
Realize that it's not the *music* that's doing the iPod compatibility here. Real has their own DRM. What they do is to convert the music to be similar to Apple's DRM at the time that you transfer it to the iPod.
So you don't ever need to redownload the music, but it's possible that you'd need to get a software update to make it compatible again.
Oh, and remember the best case scenario: Apple finds that is it, in fact, *unable* to break Harmony/iPod compatibility without also breaking iPod/iTunes compatibility. Now, I know for a fact that this is not currently the case, but some minor effort by Real on the Harmony software could make it such.
Actually, I have done end user support. And I've had to fend off calls the other way around, mostly, where the hardware was at fault and the customer is complaining about the error being with the software because the error is on the screen.
People tend to blame the program running when it throws out an error message, in my experience.
Real sells 192kbit MPEG 4 AAC encoded music now. The new encoder/player/thingy defaults to that format. Looks like they're dumping the crappy ra format, finally.
It's like this.. Apple can break the iPod's compatibility with Real's Harmony software, certainly. Real then simply adjusts their software to make their songs more like Apple's songs are. At some point, Apple can't break compatibility without breaking compatibility with all their own songs as well.
Remember, Real is just converting from their format into the format the iTunes Music Store uses. If they get close enough to that format, there's nothing Apple can do to prevent them without shooting themselves in the foot too.
Considering that in order to use Real's music you must transfer it using Real's Harmony software and any errors you get will be in that software... I think people would generally be more likely to blame Real rather than Apple.
The movie was enjoyable in it's own way. It was intentionally made in a certain style, and basically focused on the propaganda type of thing. And for that, it is quite well made. It's cheesy, but it's supposed to be.
When you compare it to the book though, it just pales by comparison. I would have enjoyed Starship Troopers the movie a hell of a lot more if I'd never heard of Starship Troopers the book. It's one of Heinlein's great stories, and the movie simply doesn't come close.
I agree that Ghosts of Mars was total crap.
But the 13th Warrior was quite good after I worked out that it was a retelling of Beowulf. Then it made one hell of a lot more sense.
I know, I should have figured it out, but I'd not read Eaters of the Dead at that point, and it wasn't until I was reading that story that it hit me. After that, I went back, rewatched it, and was able to enjoy it because I knew WTF was going on.
So it was a poor movie by the metric of telling a story in and of itself, I grant you, but it was fairly well made and stuck to the plotline pretty good.
What if his actions cause the music industry to loss confidence in that DRM?
:-)
LOL!
Understand this... The "music industry" is royally screwed seven ways from Sunday. They know it too, don't kid yourself otherwise.
See, they need *customers*.
In order to exist, the music industry has to convince people to buy what they are pushing. They're between a rock and a hard place here, because if they make that DRM too obnoxious, if they go beyond the line too much, then their own customers will flip them the bird and jump right back onto P2P networks. It's already happened once, in their eyes. Does the P2P scare back around 1998 ring a bell? Napster? Back when it didn't quite suck, I mean.
See, Napster opened a new world for the music industry, because it showed them that the world had changed and now they had to compete with "free". How in the hell does one compete with free products?
DRM is a reaction to this, by trying to make it difficult for people to convert their products into a format than can easily become "free". Unfortunately, this is an impossible task. It's *proven* to be impossible, no less. So they now have to not only compete with "free", but to do it, they have to do something that's absolutely and totally impossible to do. What a bind that puts them in, huh?
The music industry is scared shitless, and with reason. This new medium takes their products and puts it into a form that:
a) damn near eliminates distribution costs,
b) makes low cost viral marketing into one of the most powerful forms of marketing there is through the rapid dissemination of the meme in question,
and c) eliminates all ability to control distribution of their product and thus be able to charge for it.
A and B they love, but C is included in the bargin and they cannot escape it. Furthermore, they're starting to figure out that the combination of A and B on a large enough scale eliminates the need for the middlemen in their business. Artist and customer can directly interact just as easily as middlemen and customers can. Since most of them are middlemen, this naturally makes them nervous. Right now, they're engaging in heavy media spending to combat this knowledge, leading to the current meme of "taking music without paying is stealing" and so on. They're engaging it on both the artist side and the customer side, and if both sides would just wake the hell up, the middlemen would be out of jobs.
So what I'm saying is that the idea that they can NOT offer their product on the internet is an unrealistic notion. They don't have that choice, not really.
If they don't offer something out there, in a light enough restriction no less, then what will happen is that they eventually die off. People will go back to passing around music for free, legislation and lawsuits be damned, they will find a way to do it safely if it comes down to it. Many very bright people are already looking for that way.
And if the artists see that the music companies aren't actively trying to make them some cash by selling their music online, the artists might start waking up en masse and seeing that the old system is unnecessary with the new technological capabilities to directly reach the customers.
So the music industry *will* sell online. They don't have a real choice not to do so anymore. They can no longer pack up their toys and go home, because that would be a losing move.
In order for such an update to work, it'd have to be an update to the AE devices themselves. And they'd have to update iTunes at the same time. And then it'd be probably just as easy to break open iTunes to get the public key again, and there you go.
What they really are worried about is somebody hacking apart the AE device and finding the private key. With that, I could write an AE emulator that would receive transmissions from iTunes... And totally bypass their DRM as well. Not that their DRM is effective anyway, but it's just one more way to do it, you know?
The real threat is that somebody will take this and figure out how to fake being an AE, then you essentially have iTunes doing the work of defeating its own DRM for you.
;)
I investigated this justeport program yesterday, to see what it would take to do exactly that. My goal was not actually to defeat DRM, but to possibly create an emulator for being an AE, so that I could use iTunes to play songs on other computer's speakers. The thought of piping the music to a file did cross my mind, but that was not the goal.
But the short answer is that there's not enough in here to do it.
The way is works is that you generate an AES key. You encrypt that key using the RSA Public Key. You send that to the AE, which decrypts it with its private key. Then you use the AES key to stream the music over.
To pretend to be an AE, you need to know the private key inside the AE. Without it, you can't decrypt the AES key iTunes sends you, and you can't decrypt the stream of music.
Faking the protocol is pretty easy, since it's mainly RTSP with some extra headers. Faking iTunes into seeing you as an AE device is also pretty easy. Just use various Rendezvous utilities to broadcast yourself as an available RAOP service. But you can't decrypt the stream without that private key.
In theory, you could modify a copy of iTunes by changing the public key in there. Then you could make it work with your AE emulator program, but it wouldn't work with real AE devices anymore. Still, could be useful if you want a wacky way to bypass the DRM.
The MD5 hash of the real file is 59a98f181fe383907e520a391d75b5a7. If you download it, then you can check it with any tool to generate the MD5 hash, and if they match, you can be certain it hasn't been messed with.
That's the whole point of telling people what the hash of the file is.
And even when it doesn't make sense, it remains the sole prerogative of the publisher to conclude that their barriers don't make sense, or are alienating customers, or whatever, and make changes.
Entirely true. And the way to make them realize it doesn't make sense is to feed in bogus data and use sites like bugmenot.com to feed them bad statistics and so forth.
When the statistics they get from the data are heavily skewed and they realize that, then they might realize that the whole thing is worthless.
I find films where who's the "good guy" and who's the "bad guy" is unclear to generally be far better. Real life doesn't have good or bad guys, just guys doing whatever it is that they feel the need to do.
A film that makes it plainly obvious who is good and who is bad is, very generally speaking, less interesting to me. I can't identify with the character, because his actions and motivations are usually very cartoon-like in their simplicity. He's the good guy, so *obviously* he has to run back into the burning building to save the kid instead of chasing the bad guy down the street. That sort of thing... I find it annoying because there's no surprises.. The characters have no depth, they're basically one dimensional, have to "do the right thing" type of characters. They're also uninteresting.
For the same reasons, many actors want to play the bad guy. The bad guy has more motivational range, more depth, more interest. I generally like the bad guys better in such films, because at least they are doing something different than the norm.
Films where the protagonists are themselves "bad guys" are usually quite good as well. Any thief movie sort of falls into this category.. The Italian Job, to pick an example, didn't have any "good guys" in it at all. And it was just excellent, I thought. Would have been better without Mark Wahlberg, but still a damn fine flick.
All Carmack had to do was to add "Sorry, Doom 3 is cancelled because Creative Labs won't let us use their patented algorithims" to his .plan file.
:D
Of course, this would have constituted conspiracy to commit murder in some jurisdiction or other, because if he had done so he'd know damn well that every CL executive would have been found dead in their beds the next morning.
Messily dead too.
It was called Code Red Vigilante or Code Blue or one of several varients. But essentially, they hung around and when they saw a code red attack come in, they'd either use the same hole to get in and alert the virus laden machine, or they'd actually go in and patch the thing automatically. A number of corporations deployed these inside their firewall, to take care of the rapid infection problems they had.
Essentially, it waited for an attack and then fixed the attacker by getting in, patching the hole and removing the virus. It worked pretty well, eventually.
The concept of fixing the problems on people's machines, whether they want it or not, is a nice one but still probably not legal.
Still, it's quite possible to write a crafty virus capable of spreading efficently without overloading the network, patching and removing itself as it goes.
One idea is to have every machine it "infects" split the remaining search space with it. Every copy of the virus that you spawn can talk back to its parent, split the search space with it, and then they both self-destruct when they are done with their spaces. You could cover the whole, or at least most, of the internet this way pretty rapidly. As long as your self-destruct worked, it'd be a self limiting infection, and the search space halving would prevent killing the bandwidth by only checking every IP once. Of course, you'd miss a lot of machines, but you'd get most of them. Enough to make a dent, I'm sure.
I mean, it reads like an almost textbook description of rain fade. First it fades down to crappy quality, stays that way for a bit, then cuts out entirely. The rain pours for a while, and then slacks off, and your signal comes back nice and strong.
Voila, problem reproduced.