While I agree that adding large amounts of resistance to a controller is a dumb idea, a controller can be used for more than simple control. Look at force feedback for example. While it's not implemented very well in a lot of systems, it provides good information that can help with gameplay.
In a driving game, to pick the simplest example, the looseness of the wheel could be correlated to the slipperiness of the road surface, much as it is in the Real Life (tm) system.
Controllers with no resistance at all (a lot of early joysticks) don't provide the correct feel for a game. It should be hard to pull back on the stick, to some extent, in a flight sim game. That sort of thing.
What would be really nice is a controller with variable resistance that could be controlled by the game itself, to provide feedback on whatever makes the most sense. This has been done, but in only the most rudimentary fashion, really.
Did some searching. Apparently, Sun's JRE plugin wants to see Mozilla 5.0 or higher in the useragent string or it complains. So change the Mozilla/4.0 to a Mozilla/5.0 and that solves that problem. Most servers are checking for the "MSIE" part anyway, so it won't break that part of the change.
This doesn't "fake" anything. It changes the actual value within mozilla which is obviously used for other things. Who knows what all will break when you do this. I know for a fact that plugins will break and the "help->about" page breaks. You don't want to change this value just to trick a site because you will end up having to reinstall. And no, removing the file does not make things go back to like they were before. There is no feature to "fake" the user-agent request header within mozilla.
Why would it be used for other things? It's the USER-AGENT string. All it does is get sent out on every HTTP request as part of the header. It has no other real function.
And it works perfectly fine for me. Several Mozilla based browsers even expose "general.useragent.override" in their preferences dialog, allowing you to change it to whatever you please without having to edit a text file directly. It's a widely known and used modification for Mozilla.
And yes, removing it makes things go exactly back where they were before. I've done it on mine, I've removed it, it simply works. You really haven't the faintest clue what you're talking about, do you? If you broke your installation, then you did it some other way, that's for sure.
This is a marketing stategy that would make any MBA proud.
Bah. I hope you can see the difference between thinking that using the GPL/LGPL is a good idea and blindly agreeing with anything Richard Stallman has to say.
I consider Stallman to be an extremist, personally. He's had a lot of good ideas, but he's had a lot of bad ones too.
I define free (as do millions of others) as being a state in which each individual has maximum choice.
As do I. However, I think that maximum choice is more easily obtained by keeping the code freely available and up to date instead of allowing everyone to take the code and make it theirs without sharing. If the code is required to be free, then that allows more choice for others wanting to use code that is out there. By disallowing people to take the code and make it theirs, as the BSD license does, the GPL ensures the maximum amount of choice for everybody, IMO.
But you're essentially right. I'm not concerned with your choice to take someone else's code without contributing back to that code. I'm concerned with everybody's choices in code that is actually available for them to choose from. The GPL is the best way to go about that. The BSD license is about choice for someone to do what they want, regardless of what's best for others.
No you don't. The GPL requires them to give the source code of their changes only to people to whom they distribute the code either directly or indirectly (i.e. if one of their customers distributes the code). If they choose to distribute the code for a fee, you can get access to the source by either buying a copy or persuading one of their customers to distribute it to you.
Agreed, but irrelevant. If they're distributing their software, then the code (or access to it) must go along with it. If they're not distributing their software and using it in-house only, then who cares, really?
Just add this to your user.js file (create the file in the same dir as prefs.js if it doesn't exist yet):
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)");
That'll fake it so the site thinks you're using IE 6 on an XP box. Usually, unless the site has something really extraordinary on it, it'll work reasonably okay anyway.
You don't have access to the other persons changes, but you never had that access to begin with. Certainly I have access to their changes. That's one of the requirements of the GPL. That's the whole *point*.
Look, if I'm going to give away my code, I might just want to ensure that I'm able to get access to any improvements to that code. That's what the GPL is for. It ensures that the code not only remains free to everybody, but that changes to that code also remain free to everybody.
If someone doesn't want to share and share alike, then they can use someone else's code or just roll their own instead. Basically, if I'm going to be generous enough to stick my code out there for anyone to use, then I'm going to stick a requirement on it to make whoever uses it do the same. This is what keeps that code "free", the requirement that changes to it must stay freely available as well.
Under the BSD license, someone can take this free code, change it, and sell it without keeping it freely available. After they've taken it, they are under no obligation to keep the modified code free. Like I said, this makes sense sometimes. If I don't care about some piece of code anymore, then BSD it is. But if I want to ensure that the code remains freely available and improvements are also available, then GPL makes sense.
In fact they use many of the same techniques that ruthless companies use. The official FSF policy on LGPL is really interesting: if there is significant competition in an area, they recommend first lowering the price of the code by issuing it under LGPL so companies don't have to give up any writes to use. Once competition is driven out, the license can be changed to GPL and they can reap the benefits. Now you're just trolling. While I think that the the LGPL has problems, I fail to see how it has any of the implications that you seem to think it does. One of the main problems in the LGPL is the confusion regarding "linking", but other than that, I'd say it serves a valid purpose. It allows people to release a library of functionality and ensure that the changes to the library remain free while allowing non-free projects to use the functionality as well.
Or in the first place did you intend to demand that changes be rolled back into your project?
Well, duh. If I gave something away for free and then someone uses it to make a profit and doesn't even bother to help you out in the way you've helped them, I'd be pretty pissed off too.
Don't get me wrong, the BSD license has it's place, but if the main point is to keep the code free, what would you choose something that lets anyone take the code and make it non-free?
Not everybody misunderstands the thrust of the GPL. When I release code under the GPL, I do so for a very specific reason: I want to keep that code free. If I were to release something under the BSD license, it would likely only be because I don't much give a damn about that code anymore.
The DND line may get cut out or blurred over in a piracy situation. As for the director's vision, only the director really cares about that. The studio likely couldn't care less. And these are only supposed to be going to academy people anyway, not to movie houses or what have you.
Simply change the color of some or multiple background items in the movie. Or something simpler. The specific color combination identifies the copy of the movie. The purple vase in this scene, the red shoes in that scene, the green hat in the other scene.. Look it up on the big chart, and voila, you have a name.
No need to make it complicated by relying on frame by frame specificness. Color of the background items will most likely survive a transfer to any given format. And it's not immediately obvious which items you need to look at, unless multiple copies get leaked and someone watches both of them and pays very close attention to them.
And it doesn't have to be color, that's just a simple example to give you an idea of how easy this is. Recolorizing something is pretty trivial to do in post processing anyway, but so are a lot of other things.
... that in this particular case, I don't think KISS has been given enough time to investigate and so actually suing them is probably premature. They likely will comply if the code is found in there.
However, I was trying to point out that there are legal remedies if some company flat out refused to comply with the terms of the license. The original article seemed to not understand that.
How come companies like Kiss cant'be punished by Law?
Well, see, they can. You yourself stated that you thought up the MPSub format and that this other guy, laaz, implemented it. Well, that means that laaz has *copyright* over that implementation and possibly you have copyright over the format itself (that's a bit more iffy though).
In any case, laaz has obviously released his changes to the mplayer codebase under the GPL. If KISS used that part of the code, but didn't release their derivative work, then they have violated the licensing agreement that gave them access to that MPSub source in the first place. And that means laaz can sue them for copyright violation.
If the RIAA can sue people for it, then developers can too. My advice to anyone who finds this sort of attitude when they get their code stolen: call a lawyer. I know it's not nice, and I know you released the software so that anybody could use it. But if a company steals your work and won't play ball with everybody else, then sue them. You have the right. Your work has been *stolen* here. What the hell are you waiting for?
Despite what idiots say, the GPL has never been tested in court because it's rock-fucking-solid. It cannot be defeated, not really. This is the opinion of some very, very smart people who know law in great detail. And you'll have the support of every developer on the planet if the other side tries to attack the GPL directly.
So do it. If they won't abide by the terms of the license, no matter what you try, then sue the holy shit out of the fuckers. At least you'll be able to force them to stop using your code that way.
Many propose "oh just configure portforwarding on your NAT box", but that does not scale. Imagine a bunch of workstations configured via dhcp behind NAT (typical setup in mid-range companies). How do you set up that?
Give every machine a name, configure the NAT box to forward whatever port you want to that name instead of to a specific IP address. If you're using anything better than a home-type cable/dsl NAT box, then it most likely has support for this, for exactly this type of reason. More likely, you're using a NAT/firewall machine which has a lot more configurability than the home boxes.
What are you doing as netadmin if everyday another P2P protocol pops up?
If you're doing your job right, you're probably doing your best to make sure it is blocked at the firewall. It's a workplace, not the users personal playground. Not every application should be allowed to run inside your network. It's the companies' network, not the user's.
If there's a legitmate reason to allow an application access to the network, then you can configure the network to allow it. Otherwise, the network's firewall should be blocking it by default. That's what a good netadmin does. Duh.
Hey, go fuck yourself. You assume I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about when I damn well do. I know about atmospheric science, I know about the theories and the data and the measurements. The fact of the matter is that atmospheric science isn't at the point where everybody, or even the majority, agree on the predictions. For every real atmospheric scientist you'll find who says GW exists, you'll find another who says it doesn't. It's simply not at the stage where there's enough evidence to prove anything at all.
You misread the fucking evidence, and took some people's word too seriously. Why don't *you* go read the fucking papers again, huh?
The issue is the *rate* of change
I don't deny that the rate has increased. I do deny that there's any solid evidence that a) it's caused by mankind, or b) there's anything we can do about it in any case.
Ever heard of El Nino?
Yes. So? Weather is a very complex system. And they can't prove El Nino is the cause of any particular thing any more than they can prove GW. Yet that doesn't stop idiot weathermen saying that this or that storm is due to El Nino.
We know it's a complex system. In fact, it's so complex, that we can only understand it so far in a very, very, very general way. We do not possess the capability to make medium term predictions about the climate with anything even approaching any kind of accuracy, and yet that doesn't stop people from spouting off statements like "Everybody will be dead in 50 years because of Global Warming!", now does it?
However, we have acceptably accurate proxy records from all over the world going WAY back from a variety of sources, and we have well enough to establish a solid baseline from.
Agreed, but that doesn't help in making a medium range prediction, now does it? We can see that the rate of change has increased in the last 50 years, but we can also see from these proxy records that the rate of change over long periods of time is slow and steady. Now, doesn't that suggest that medium term spikes don't really mean a damn thing? It should. Because those proxy records don't show year by year data, they show huge chunks of time all at once.
It's like an audio file.. You zoom in and the thing becomes chaotic, going up and down and such. You zoom out and you can clearly see larger trends and patterns at work. 50 years is nothing on the scale that these proxy measurements indicate.
Current global warming theory is not based on "temperature is rising so it will continue rising"; it's based on actually looking at the physics of what is happening in the atmosphere and working out models of how those physics change as we change the chemical makeup of the atmosphere by pumping junk into it.
Bullshit. If what you say was in fact true, then the theory is even more worthless than I suspected. First off, we don't *know* the composition of the atmosphere in great enough detail to be able to make any reasonable conclusions based on it. Secondly, physics is a rough approximation, a model, of reality and almost never works correctly when you try to model a complex system. A complex system being one which behaves chaotically and has the "butterfly effect" inherent in it, as the atmosphere certainly does.
Global warming theory is based on superstition for the most part, and bad science at best. It's not something any reasonable person would look at and think was true. The data doesn't support the conclusions given. More data may support it, but at best, it's a theory, not a fact.
As for the 0.8 degrees, consider this: A global change of roughly +4 degrees is enough move the California coastline back by several kilometres. It doesn't take much of a change.
Why would the coastline move? Antartica is built on a land mass, I grant you, but the melting of the north polar caps shouldn't cause more than a few inches of height variation, as they're floating.
Global warming, for whatever reason, is undeniably real.
Prove it. PROVE IT! (shouting from the rooftops) PROVE IT!
That's all I'm asking here.
Look, I don't dispute that the average temperature on the planet in the last 100 years has gone up 0.8 degrees. Oh, didn't you know that? POINT EIGHT DEGREES. That's it. That's your "global warming". This is an undisputed FACT. We have records going back that far.
Global warming is a political agenda, it is not scientific fact. The science behind global warming has be shown to be bad in nearly all cases. People trying to prove something and then coming up with data to support what they're trying to prove while ignoring data that contradicts it.
20 years ago the big watch word was "global cooling". Hell, man, don't you remember the 80's? I may not be 44 years old yet, but hell, even I remember Leonard Nimoy on an educational TV special warning the world about the effects of global cooling.
Look, the fact of the matter is that study of the climate is relatively *new* and anything you see in any study of the climate must be taken with a grain of salt. You simply can't take 50 to 100 years of data and predict what will happen in the next 50 or 100 years. You can't take a couple of the unusual weather phenomena that happen every year somewhere and realistically blame it on the climatic scare tactic of the decade.
We don't have the baseline to make any predictions with any kind of accuracy. We don't have the understanding necessary to predict with any kind of accuracy.
There may be global warming, but there's absolutely no reason to think that there is.
Yes, we read these posts. Yes, we have had to build a business model on Windows that doesn't assume we can extract un fair rents from the OS. On Linux we have a new open source strategy and the codecs announced today are available to Linux users. When Linux wins Real wins since we are building the best open source linux player and selling added value services users really recommend, like Rhapsody.
Okay, first off, Rhapsody blows. If I wanted DRM in my music, I'd buy from Apple instead. I'm no Apple fan, far from it, but at least their DRM isn't half as nasty. I don't want a streaming media service, and I don't want a subscription free. I want to purchase music/songs online and then own the songs and be able to do as I damn well please with them. Much like I do at the music store. I buy a CD, I own the CD, I have the music in hand, I can put that music most anywhere and play it. I do not want music that I pay $10 a month to listen to (using my computer only no less) and then have to pay extra to put it on a CD. That sucks.
Secondly, what does "business model on Windows that doesn't assume we can extract un fair rents from the OS" even mean? If you mean to build a player program that doesn't suck, then you certainly don't have a very good track record of that up until now.
Finally, you can mouth off about "open source" all you like, but it's not helping you here. I'm a big fan of OSS, and it's good that you're wanting to move into the OSS area. But OSS isn't the holy grail here. You want techno-philes on your side? Then you have to offer them something *really* cool. Saying that you're now open source is a good sign that you may not suck as badly anymore, but you need to give me a reason to *want* to use your stuff. Right now, I can see no reason to consider using your stuff, and, considering your track record, see no reason to give Real any chance at all.
You need to make me want to use your stuff. Otherwise I, and many others, won't be using it. Because there is better stuff already out there and it is already open source as well. So you're not special here.
I have not tried Real's new player yet, and I may not try it at all.
Most people have given up on Real and won't be going back. And with good reason. Real not only got passed in the streaming media format wars, they got lapped like four times.
I gave up on Real years and years ago. Nowadays, if a site requires me to have Real-anything to view their content, I go to another site instead. RealOne was the last straw. Hell, Real 7 was bad enough not to use it, Real 8 made it worse, and RealOne clenched it.
You had your three chances. You lost. You'll simply have to go one *hell* of a long way to make me, as a technically minded person, even consider trying your brand of bloated ad-ridden spyware nonsense one more time. And having Linux support won't cut the mustard. Just saying "we're not as shitty as we used to be" doesn't work. You need to offer me something to consider installing your particular brand of shit again.
Because I removed it *years* ago and have not missed it.
And Real employees, nobody would blame you for cashing out now. You should have cashed out years ago. You're just riding a dead horse, as far as I can tell.
There's something I quite simply don't understand: although SCO is attacking the GPL in public, why would the GPL be mentioned in court at all?
I admit I'm not fully up on the details of the case, but it's my understanding that SCO actually released the code in question themselves, under the GPL. Which is the only logical reason I can think of for them to attack the GPL.
Ah. This explains two aspects of ipods that I've found odd up til now: the fact that only itunes can be used to move files to them, and the fact that files can't easily be moved from ipods back to main computers.
Actually, you can use several programs to stick songs on an iPod. EphPod, AnaPod, XPlay, there's lots of them. iTunes is just the only one that can stick *protected* songs on the iPod at present, for that reason.
And moving a song back off the iPod is trivial, really. It's just a concious design decision by Apple not to include that feature in iTunes. many of these other programs do it. Here's a little utility I wrote that does nothing else by copy songs off an iPod: http://otto.homedns.org:8888/itunes/iPodCopy.zip
Yup. I think DRM is fundamentally harder than encryption between two peers because DRM is trying to prevent the recipient of data from using that data in ways other than intended, whereas two-peer encryption is focused on trying to prevent outsiders from gaining access to the data at all. DRM forces the vendor to include the decryption keys SOMEWHERE.
Right. DRM is fundamentally *impossible* to make uncrackable with current technology, for the simple reason that the goal is to provide access to the material in one way while restricting access to it in another. Like you can listen to it, but you can't convert it. For current hardware, there's no real distinction between levels of access. It's a stream of bits. If you can access the bits to hear them, then you can copy them as well. There's no way for the bits to know if they are being listened to or copied. Software solutions must rely on encryption schemes and use proprietary decryptor programs so that there is some way to control when it's decrypted. But since you have to have access to the key to do that, it can be bypassed. The only way to make DRM work is to radically alter the actual hardware, and then you simply open up the door to hardware hackers who can rewire the thing to bypass your scheme. But that would effectively close the door on a lot of the hacking, since there's fewer hardware hackers than software ones, and a hardware hack isn't as easy to distribute over the internet as is the resulting decryption program of a software hack.
Well, I hadn't really thought about it in those terms. It's just that the use of big tables of random seeming numbers and the odd coding style sorta lends itself to thinking that. I suppose it's possible it was a straight hack, but damn, I wouldn't want to have to come up with that code without using a debugger on the existing binary code.
After examining the code, here's basically how the iTunes encryption works:
Every user account for iTunes gets a "user key". This gets sent to the computer at the the time of "Authorization" and gets written to a file on the hard drive. But it's not written out plainly, oh no. Instead, it creates a "system key" using several bits of data from Windows and the hardware and such. This system key is what's stored in the file.
To playback a song, the system key is derived from the machine and used to decrypt the file on the drive. This gives the list of user keys that machine is authorized to play, and these will decrypt songs using the same account (yes, each song is encrypted at the time of download, with the user key for that account).
This crack essentially works out how the system key is derived. Using that, it gets the user key, writes it off to a file, and can then decrypt any of that users songs.
Note that when you transfer a song from iTunes to the iPod, it does the same basic thing. Decrypts the file using the system key and reencrypts it using iPod specific information, then sticks it on the iPod. The iPod then does the same process as iTunes to play the file, more or less, it's just using a different system key.
This crack could be patched by changing the method to derive the system key from the machine, but not once the user key has been derived and written to a file somewhere. Once you have the user key, that can be used to decrypt the songs, and you're essentially done. Since you have the song files, and the key to decrypt them, no patch in the world could possibly fix it. They could fix it for newly purchased songs, but to do that they'd have to change every users key and reauthorize them. And that potentially breaks the authorization for songs that have already been purchased. They could start a new key without removing the old ones, in order to maintain backward compatibility and not piss off everyone who has used iTMS up until now, and then release new songs using only the new encryption, but it's essentially a dead end. The whole concept behind iTunes encryption is that once a machine is authorized, it can play songs without any outside intervention. Meaning that it has everything it needs to decrypt the songs right there on that machine. Meaning that as long as this is true, it can be cracked again.
I knew it was only a matter of time. I give it another 2 weeks before someone takes the code out of the drms.c, drms.h, and drmtables.h files and produces an M4P->M4A converter. Everything really needed to do it is in there. You read in the file, call this code to get the system key, call the code to get the user key, call the code to decrypt the DRMS section, then rewrite the file with a normal AAC data section instead. Not too difficult, although interpreting Jon's code is a PITA to say the least. The guy writes C code that reads more like ASM. Frankly, looking at the code, I think he simply found the relevant part of iTunes/Quicktime with a debugger and converted the relevant machine language straight into C with no major adjustments.
There is a good explination of the "Aftermarket Radio Problem" here...
I think rather than it being a technological issue...
While you have a point about dealers and manufacturers being weasels, it's still a pretty big design glitch. Most auto manufacturers, when they change the wiring schema in any way, generally use an entirely different type of connector or harness to avoid that sort of problem. I can't think of a case in which the radio changed significantly between model years and the wiring connector didn't change dramatically. Not in domestics, anyway.
Actually, yeah, you probably could. Reading the hack, it seems that when you switch the GPS into NMEA mode, OnStar can't talk to it anymore and the light changes from green to red. Stick it back into Motorola Binary mode and OnStar is fine with it. So assuming you could talk to it in Motorola Binary mode, no problem.
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While I agree that adding large amounts of resistance to a controller is a dumb idea, a controller can be used for more than simple control. Look at force feedback for example. While it's not implemented very well in a lot of systems, it provides good information that can help with gameplay.
In a driving game, to pick the simplest example, the looseness of the wheel could be correlated to the slipperiness of the road surface, much as it is in the Real Life (tm) system.
Controllers with no resistance at all (a lot of early joysticks) don't provide the correct feel for a game. It should be hard to pull back on the stick, to some extent, in a flight sim game. That sort of thing.
What would be really nice is a controller with variable resistance that could be controlled by the game itself, to provide feedback on whatever makes the most sense. This has been done, but in only the most rudimentary fashion, really.
Did some searching. Apparently, Sun's JRE plugin wants to see Mozilla 5.0 or higher in the useragent string or it complains. So change the Mozilla/4.0 to a Mozilla/5.0 and that solves that problem. Most servers are checking for the "MSIE" part anyway, so it won't break that part of the change.
This doesn't "fake" anything. It changes the actual value within mozilla which is obviously used for other things. Who knows what all will break when you do this. I know for a fact that plugins will break and the "help->about" page breaks. You don't want to change this value just to trick a site because you will end up having to reinstall. And no, removing the file does not make things go back to like they were before. There is no feature to "fake" the user-agent request header within mozilla.
Why would it be used for other things? It's the USER-AGENT string. All it does is get sent out on every HTTP request as part of the header. It has no other real function.
And it works perfectly fine for me. Several Mozilla based browsers even expose "general.useragent.override" in their preferences dialog, allowing you to change it to whatever you please without having to edit a text file directly. It's a widely known and used modification for Mozilla.
And yes, removing it makes things go exactly back where they were before. I've done it on mine, I've removed it, it simply works. You really haven't the faintest clue what you're talking about, do you? If you broke your installation, then you did it some other way, that's for sure.
This is a marketing stategy that would make any MBA proud.
Bah. I hope you can see the difference between thinking that using the GPL/LGPL is a good idea and blindly agreeing with anything Richard Stallman has to say.
I consider Stallman to be an extremist, personally. He's had a lot of good ideas, but he's had a lot of bad ones too.
I define free (as do millions of others) as being a state in which each individual has maximum choice.
As do I. However, I think that maximum choice is more easily obtained by keeping the code freely available and up to date instead of allowing everyone to take the code and make it theirs without sharing. If the code is required to be free, then that allows more choice for others wanting to use code that is out there. By disallowing people to take the code and make it theirs, as the BSD license does, the GPL ensures the maximum amount of choice for everybody, IMO.
But you're essentially right. I'm not concerned with your choice to take someone else's code without contributing back to that code. I'm concerned with everybody's choices in code that is actually available for them to choose from. The GPL is the best way to go about that. The BSD license is about choice for someone to do what they want, regardless of what's best for others.
No you don't. The GPL requires them to give the source code of their changes only to people to whom they distribute the code either directly or indirectly (i.e. if one of their customers distributes the code). If they choose to distribute the code for a fee, you can get access to the source by either buying a copy or persuading one of their customers to distribute it to you.
Agreed, but irrelevant. If they're distributing their software, then the code (or access to it) must go along with it. If they're not distributing their software and using it in-house only, then who cares, really?
Or at least which browser you claim to use.
Just add this to your user.js file (create the file in the same dir as prefs.js if it doesn't exist yet):
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)");
That'll fake it so the site thinks you're using IE 6 on an XP box. Usually, unless the site has something really extraordinary on it, it'll work reasonably okay anyway.
You don't have access to the other persons changes, but you never had that access to begin with.
Certainly I have access to their changes. That's one of the requirements of the GPL. That's the whole *point*.
Look, if I'm going to give away my code, I might just want to ensure that I'm able to get access to any improvements to that code. That's what the GPL is for. It ensures that the code not only remains free to everybody, but that changes to that code also remain free to everybody.
If someone doesn't want to share and share alike, then they can use someone else's code or just roll their own instead. Basically, if I'm going to be generous enough to stick my code out there for anyone to use, then I'm going to stick a requirement on it to make whoever uses it do the same. This is what keeps that code "free", the requirement that changes to it must stay freely available as well.
Under the BSD license, someone can take this free code, change it, and sell it without keeping it freely available. After they've taken it, they are under no obligation to keep the modified code free. Like I said, this makes sense sometimes. If I don't care about some piece of code anymore, then BSD it is. But if I want to ensure that the code remains freely available and improvements are also available, then GPL makes sense.
In fact they use many of the same techniques that ruthless companies use. The official FSF policy on LGPL is really interesting: if there is significant competition in an area, they recommend first lowering the price of the code by issuing it under LGPL so companies don't have to give up any writes to use. Once competition is driven out, the license can be changed to GPL and they can reap the benefits.
Now you're just trolling. While I think that the the LGPL has problems, I fail to see how it has any of the implications that you seem to think it does. One of the main problems in the LGPL is the confusion regarding "linking", but other than that, I'd say it serves a valid purpose. It allows people to release a library of functionality and ensure that the changes to the library remain free while allowing non-free projects to use the functionality as well.
Or in the first place did you intend to demand that changes be rolled back into your project?
Well, duh. If I gave something away for free and then someone uses it to make a profit and doesn't even bother to help you out in the way you've helped them, I'd be pretty pissed off too.
Don't get me wrong, the BSD license has it's place, but if the main point is to keep the code free, what would you choose something that lets anyone take the code and make it non-free?
Not everybody misunderstands the thrust of the GPL. When I release code under the GPL, I do so for a very specific reason: I want to keep that code free. If I were to release something under the BSD license, it would likely only be because I don't much give a damn about that code anymore.
The DND line may get cut out or blurred over in a piracy situation. As for the director's vision, only the director really cares about that. The studio likely couldn't care less. And these are only supposed to be going to academy people anyway, not to movie houses or what have you.
Simply change the color of some or multiple background items in the movie. Or something simpler. The specific color combination identifies the copy of the movie. The purple vase in this scene, the red shoes in that scene, the green hat in the other scene.. Look it up on the big chart, and voila, you have a name.
No need to make it complicated by relying on frame by frame specificness. Color of the background items will most likely survive a transfer to any given format. And it's not immediately obvious which items you need to look at, unless multiple copies get leaked and someone watches both of them and pays very close attention to them.
And it doesn't have to be color, that's just a simple example to give you an idea of how easy this is. Recolorizing something is pretty trivial to do in post processing anyway, but so are a lot of other things.
... that in this particular case, I don't think KISS has been given enough time to investigate and so actually suing them is probably premature. They likely will comply if the code is found in there.
However, I was trying to point out that there are legal remedies if some company flat out refused to comply with the terms of the license. The original article seemed to not understand that.
How come companies like Kiss cant'be punished by Law?
Well, see, they can. You yourself stated that you thought up the MPSub format and that this other guy, laaz, implemented it. Well, that means that laaz has *copyright* over that implementation and possibly you have copyright over the format itself (that's a bit more iffy though).
In any case, laaz has obviously released his changes to the mplayer codebase under the GPL. If KISS used that part of the code, but didn't release their derivative work, then they have violated the licensing agreement that gave them access to that MPSub source in the first place. And that means laaz can sue them for copyright violation.
If the RIAA can sue people for it, then developers can too. My advice to anyone who finds this sort of attitude when they get their code stolen: call a lawyer. I know it's not nice, and I know you released the software so that anybody could use it. But if a company steals your work and won't play ball with everybody else, then sue them. You have the right. Your work has been *stolen* here. What the hell are you waiting for?
Despite what idiots say, the GPL has never been tested in court because it's rock-fucking-solid. It cannot be defeated, not really. This is the opinion of some very, very smart people who know law in great detail. And you'll have the support of every developer on the planet if the other side tries to attack the GPL directly.
So do it. If they won't abide by the terms of the license, no matter what you try, then sue the holy shit out of the fuckers. At least you'll be able to force them to stop using your code that way.
Many propose "oh just configure portforwarding on your NAT box", but that does not scale. Imagine a bunch of workstations configured via dhcp behind NAT (typical setup in mid-range companies). How do you set up that?
Give every machine a name, configure the NAT box to forward whatever port you want to that name instead of to a specific IP address. If you're using anything better than a home-type cable/dsl NAT box, then it most likely has support for this, for exactly this type of reason. More likely, you're using a NAT/firewall machine which has a lot more configurability than the home boxes.
What are you doing as netadmin if everyday another P2P protocol pops up?
If you're doing your job right, you're probably doing your best to make sure it is blocked at the firewall. It's a workplace, not the users personal playground. Not every application should be allowed to run inside your network. It's the companies' network, not the user's.
If there's a legitmate reason to allow an application access to the network, then you can configure the network to allow it. Otherwise, the network's firewall should be blocking it by default. That's what a good netadmin does. Duh.
Take a fucking science class.
Hey, go fuck yourself. You assume I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about when I damn well do. I know about atmospheric science, I know about the theories and the data and the measurements. The fact of the matter is that atmospheric science isn't at the point where everybody, or even the majority, agree on the predictions. For every real atmospheric scientist you'll find who says GW exists, you'll find another who says it doesn't. It's simply not at the stage where there's enough evidence to prove anything at all.
You misread the fucking evidence, and took some people's word too seriously. Why don't *you* go read the fucking papers again, huh?
The issue is the *rate* of change
I don't deny that the rate has increased. I do deny that there's any solid evidence that a) it's caused by mankind, or b) there's anything we can do about it in any case.
Ever heard of El Nino?
Yes. So? Weather is a very complex system. And they can't prove El Nino is the cause of any particular thing any more than they can prove GW. Yet that doesn't stop idiot weathermen saying that this or that storm is due to El Nino.
We know it's a complex system. In fact, it's so complex, that we can only understand it so far in a very, very, very general way. We do not possess the capability to make medium term predictions about the climate with anything even approaching any kind of accuracy, and yet that doesn't stop people from spouting off statements like "Everybody will be dead in 50 years because of Global Warming!", now does it?
However, we have acceptably accurate proxy records from all over the world going WAY back from a variety of sources, and we have well enough to establish a solid baseline from.
Agreed, but that doesn't help in making a medium range prediction, now does it? We can see that the rate of change has increased in the last 50 years, but we can also see from these proxy records that the rate of change over long periods of time is slow and steady. Now, doesn't that suggest that medium term spikes don't really mean a damn thing? It should. Because those proxy records don't show year by year data, they show huge chunks of time all at once.
It's like an audio file.. You zoom in and the thing becomes chaotic, going up and down and such. You zoom out and you can clearly see larger trends and patterns at work. 50 years is nothing on the scale that these proxy measurements indicate.
Current global warming theory is not based on "temperature is rising so it will continue rising"; it's based on actually looking at the physics of what is happening in the atmosphere and working out models of how those physics change as we change the chemical makeup of the atmosphere by pumping junk into it.
Bullshit. If what you say was in fact true, then the theory is even more worthless than I suspected. First off, we don't *know* the composition of the atmosphere in great enough detail to be able to make any reasonable conclusions based on it. Secondly, physics is a rough approximation, a model, of reality and almost never works correctly when you try to model a complex system. A complex system being one which behaves chaotically and has the "butterfly effect" inherent in it, as the atmosphere certainly does.
Global warming theory is based on superstition for the most part, and bad science at best. It's not something any reasonable person would look at and think was true. The data doesn't support the conclusions given. More data may support it, but at best, it's a theory, not a fact.
As for the 0.8 degrees, consider this: A global change of roughly +4 degrees is enough move the California coastline back by several kilometres. It doesn't take much of a change.
Why would the coastline move? Antartica is built on a land mass, I grant you, but the melting of the north polar caps shouldn't cause more than a few inches of height variation, as they're floating.
Global warming, for whatever reason, is undeniably real.
Prove it. PROVE IT! (shouting from the rooftops) PROVE IT!
That's all I'm asking here.
Look, I don't dispute that the average temperature on the planet in the last 100 years has gone up 0.8 degrees. Oh, didn't you know that? POINT EIGHT DEGREES. That's it. That's your "global warming". This is an undisputed FACT. We have records going back that far.
Global warming is a political agenda, it is not scientific fact. The science behind global warming has be shown to be bad in nearly all cases. People trying to prove something and then coming up with data to support what they're trying to prove while ignoring data that contradicts it.
20 years ago the big watch word was "global cooling". Hell, man, don't you remember the 80's? I may not be 44 years old yet, but hell, even I remember Leonard Nimoy on an educational TV special warning the world about the effects of global cooling.
Look, the fact of the matter is that study of the climate is relatively *new* and anything you see in any study of the climate must be taken with a grain of salt. You simply can't take 50 to 100 years of data and predict what will happen in the next 50 or 100 years. You can't take a couple of the unusual weather phenomena that happen every year somewhere and realistically blame it on the climatic scare tactic of the decade.
We don't have the baseline to make any predictions with any kind of accuracy. We don't have the understanding necessary to predict with any kind of accuracy.
There may be global warming, but there's absolutely no reason to think that there is.
Yes, we read these posts. Yes, we have had to build a business model on Windows that doesn't assume we can extract un fair rents from the OS. On Linux we have a new open source strategy and the codecs announced today are available to Linux users. When Linux wins Real wins since we are building the best open source linux player and selling added value services users really recommend, like Rhapsody.
Okay, first off, Rhapsody blows. If I wanted DRM in my music, I'd buy from Apple instead. I'm no Apple fan, far from it, but at least their DRM isn't half as nasty. I don't want a streaming media service, and I don't want a subscription free. I want to purchase music/songs online and then own the songs and be able to do as I damn well please with them. Much like I do at the music store. I buy a CD, I own the CD, I have the music in hand, I can put that music most anywhere and play it. I do not want music that I pay $10 a month to listen to (using my computer only no less) and then have to pay extra to put it on a CD. That sucks.
Secondly, what does "business model on Windows that doesn't assume we can extract un fair rents from the OS" even mean? If you mean to build a player program that doesn't suck, then you certainly don't have a very good track record of that up until now.
Finally, you can mouth off about "open source" all you like, but it's not helping you here. I'm a big fan of OSS, and it's good that you're wanting to move into the OSS area. But OSS isn't the holy grail here. You want techno-philes on your side? Then you have to offer them something *really* cool. Saying that you're now open source is a good sign that you may not suck as badly anymore, but you need to give me a reason to *want* to use your stuff. Right now, I can see no reason to consider using your stuff, and, considering your track record, see no reason to give Real any chance at all.
You need to make me want to use your stuff. Otherwise I, and many others, won't be using it. Because there is better stuff already out there and it is already open source as well. So you're not special here.
I have not tried Real's new player yet, and I may not try it at all.
Most people have given up on Real and won't be going back. And with good reason. Real not only got passed in the streaming media format wars, they got lapped like four times.
I gave up on Real years and years ago. Nowadays, if a site requires me to have Real-anything to view their content, I go to another site instead. RealOne was the last straw. Hell, Real 7 was bad enough not to use it, Real 8 made it worse, and RealOne clenched it.
You had your three chances. You lost. You'll simply have to go one *hell* of a long way to make me, as a technically minded person, even consider trying your brand of bloated ad-ridden spyware nonsense one more time. And having Linux support won't cut the mustard. Just saying "we're not as shitty as we used to be" doesn't work. You need to offer me something to consider installing your particular brand of shit again.
Because I removed it *years* ago and have not missed it.
And Real employees, nobody would blame you for cashing out now. You should have cashed out years ago. You're just riding a dead horse, as far as I can tell.
There's something I quite simply don't understand: although SCO is attacking the GPL in public, why would the GPL be mentioned in court at all?
I admit I'm not fully up on the details of the case, but it's my understanding that SCO actually released the code in question themselves, under the GPL. Which is the only logical reason I can think of for them to attack the GPL.
Ah. This explains two aspects of ipods that I've found odd up til now: the fact that only itunes can be used to move files to them, and the fact that files can't easily be moved from ipods back to main computers.
Actually, you can use several programs to stick songs on an iPod. EphPod, AnaPod, XPlay, there's lots of them. iTunes is just the only one that can stick *protected* songs on the iPod at present, for that reason.
And moving a song back off the iPod is trivial, really. It's just a concious design decision by Apple not to include that feature in iTunes. many of these other programs do it. Here's a little utility I wrote that does nothing else by copy songs off an iPod: http://otto.homedns.org:8888/itunes/iPodCopy.zip
Yup. I think DRM is fundamentally harder than encryption between two peers because DRM is trying to prevent the recipient of data from using that data in ways other than intended, whereas two-peer encryption is focused on trying to prevent outsiders from gaining access to the data at all. DRM forces the vendor to include the decryption keys SOMEWHERE.
Right. DRM is fundamentally *impossible* to make uncrackable with current technology, for the simple reason that the goal is to provide access to the material in one way while restricting access to it in another. Like you can listen to it, but you can't convert it. For current hardware, there's no real distinction between levels of access. It's a stream of bits. If you can access the bits to hear them, then you can copy them as well. There's no way for the bits to know if they are being listened to or copied. Software solutions must rely on encryption schemes and use proprietary decryptor programs so that there is some way to control when it's decrypted. But since you have to have access to the key to do that, it can be bypassed. The only way to make DRM work is to radically alter the actual hardware, and then you simply open up the door to hardware hackers who can rewire the thing to bypass your scheme. But that would effectively close the door on a lot of the hacking, since there's fewer hardware hackers than software ones, and a hardware hack isn't as easy to distribute over the internet as is the resulting decryption program of a software hack.
Well, I hadn't really thought about it in those terms. It's just that the use of big tables of random seeming numbers and the odd coding style sorta lends itself to thinking that. I suppose it's possible it was a straight hack, but damn, I wouldn't want to have to come up with that code without using a debugger on the existing binary code.
After examining the code, here's basically how the iTunes encryption works:
Every user account for iTunes gets a "user key". This gets sent to the computer at the the time of "Authorization" and gets written to a file on the hard drive. But it's not written out plainly, oh no. Instead, it creates a "system key" using several bits of data from Windows and the hardware and such. This system key is what's stored in the file.
To playback a song, the system key is derived from the machine and used to decrypt the file on the drive. This gives the list of user keys that machine is authorized to play, and these will decrypt songs using the same account (yes, each song is encrypted at the time of download, with the user key for that account).
This crack essentially works out how the system key is derived. Using that, it gets the user key, writes it off to a file, and can then decrypt any of that users songs.
Note that when you transfer a song from iTunes to the iPod, it does the same basic thing. Decrypts the file using the system key and reencrypts it using iPod specific information, then sticks it on the iPod. The iPod then does the same process as iTunes to play the file, more or less, it's just using a different system key.
This crack could be patched by changing the method to derive the system key from the machine, but not once the user key has been derived and written to a file somewhere. Once you have the user key, that can be used to decrypt the songs, and you're essentially done. Since you have the song files, and the key to decrypt them, no patch in the world could possibly fix it. They could fix it for newly purchased songs, but to do that they'd have to change every users key and reauthorize them. And that potentially breaks the authorization for songs that have already been purchased. They could start a new key without removing the old ones, in order to maintain backward compatibility and not piss off everyone who has used iTMS up until now, and then release new songs using only the new encryption, but it's essentially a dead end. The whole concept behind iTunes encryption is that once a machine is authorized, it can play songs without any outside intervention. Meaning that it has everything it needs to decrypt the songs right there on that machine. Meaning that as long as this is true, it can be cracked again.
I knew it was only a matter of time. I give it another 2 weeks before someone takes the code out of the drms.c, drms.h, and drmtables.h files and produces an M4P->M4A converter. Everything really needed to do it is in there. You read in the file, call this code to get the system key, call the code to get the user key, call the code to decrypt the DRMS section, then rewrite the file with a normal AAC data section instead. Not too difficult, although interpreting Jon's code is a PITA to say the least. The guy writes C code that reads more like ASM. Frankly, looking at the code, I think he simply found the relevant part of iTunes/Quicktime with a debugger and converted the relevant machine language straight into C with no major adjustments.
There is a good explination of the "Aftermarket Radio Problem" here...
I think rather than it being a technological issue...
While you have a point about dealers and manufacturers being weasels, it's still a pretty big design glitch. Most auto manufacturers, when they change the wiring schema in any way, generally use an entirely different type of connector or harness to avoid that sort of problem. I can't think of a case in which the radio changed significantly between model years and the wiring connector didn't change dramatically. Not in domestics, anyway.
Actually, yeah, you probably could. Reading the hack, it seems that when you switch the GPS into NMEA mode, OnStar can't talk to it anymore and the light changes from green to red. Stick it back into Motorola Binary mode and OnStar is fine with it. So assuming you could talk to it in Motorola Binary mode, no problem.