Yeah. It'll be like a driving license, or a credit card. It won't be compulsory, just eventually you'll cave into having one because you'll get so much less hassle that way.
I don't think this technology is much use for "location-locking" entertainment media.
If I bought a CD I couldn't listen to in my car, first thing I'd do is copy it onto MiniDisc. Bye bye location protection.
But the problem is deeper than that. The record companies can't possibly know where you live, so they couldn't sell CDs in shops that could only be played at one particular GPS location. The nearest they could get would be to sell you a new CD player that supports location-locking, and have it send them your GPS location; then either mail you a CD encoded with those co-ordinates, or email you the image to burn yourself. This doesn't sound like a very saleable proposition - and if it were, it'd be far simpler and more secure for them to just have your player identify itself uniquely, use that as the encryption key and to hell with GPS.
If this technology is ever to be used by anyone (whether or not this particular story is true), it will be by corporations and governments for sensitive data that they want only to be readable (eg) inside their head office/the Pentagon/wherever. In which case it could work, especially if they use an earlier poster's idea of requiring a particular path rather than just a present location. Go on, build your Faraday Cage - if you don't know this document was supposed to be couriered via Hooper Street and in through the side door, good luck decrypting it!
The users would have no way of knowing before hand if they had the right chuncks of the operating system to install supposedly windows software.
I think IE is the only "chunk" that's needed by any significant number of programs: users of an unbundled Windows could simply install it, or just use programs that didn't require it. It's not an immediately elegant solution, but it's a lot better than where we are now; and it would encourage future programmers not to rely on IE, weakening further the case for bundling it in the future.
The states are proposing to make it a marketplace where no one can be sure they can use the software other people are selling, and no one can be sure they are making software all the people can, and want, to use.
Well, MS is certainly not above encouraging this perception so people are scared of an unbundled Windows in case some application or other doesn't work on it.
But if the courts can prevent MS from exploiting this kind of FUD (eg, by making the unbundled version the only one available, so MS has to support it or lose the whole market), I'm sure MS would make full use of its logo-certification programme to make sure Windows didn't get the reputation of being a lottery.
This is a bit by the way anyway. The relative merits of the idea aren't really the question here: the point is that MS is claiming that an unbundled Windows is impossible, which is clearly just a lie. Perhaps it's not immediately clear exactly where the line lies between OS and application, but I'm sure a judge would be willing to draw one; and I find it impossible to believe that Microsoft doesn't have the know-how and the resources to make it happen extremely quickly if it were in its interests to do so.
Surely the people whom Verisign needs to have trust in the certificate side of its business are senior managers? And I wouldn't have thought they'd even hear about this ploy. Even if they did, I doubt it would make a great difference to them one way or the other. If they need certificate technology, they're not going to spend too much time worrying about how a company under consideration markets its registration service.
But I agree it's a dangerous path for Verisign to set off down.
A smaller encoding scheme gives us exactly one benefit: faster downloads and uploads for the users. It is not going to make Usenet smaller. It is not going to allow servers to increase retention. Do you really think people aren't going to post more, if they can do it faster? Of course they are. They're always going to post more, with or without yEnc [...] big deal.
So effectively, what he's saying is, in effect: "this system changes nothing, and is of no benefit, except that it makes more data available on the Usenet and gives users faster uploads and downloads. So it's worthless."
This guy obviously hasn't had to use a metered dial-up account for a while. A 33% saving on transfer times is an enormous benefit. I feel quite insulted by the way he seems to think it's of no importance, as if my time and money aren't worth anything. "What's the rush" indeed! I'd happily tear up MIME and MD5 tomorrow if it would speed up my transfers by a third.
If yEnc is so widespread, it can only be because there's a demand for it. And if there's a demand for it, why the hell shouldn't programmers support it? Last time I checked, RFC's weren't enforced by law. The Net has seen a million non-standard hacks, and has, for the most part, assimilated the good ones and outlived the bad. yEnc is by no means the worst, and it brings real benefits to tens of thousands of people every day. I say leave it alone - or if you have to oppose it, at least oppose it constructively, for Christ's sake!
Why not put a sign by your doorbell saying "by pressing this bell, you agree to pay to a consultation fee of $1,000. If you do not agree with this, do not press this bell."
Seems a bit harsh. To be able to market complex technologies to even very stupid people is surely more a gift than a failing. Your market is, after all, generally limited to people capable of understanding why they might want your product.
It's hard to recall any industry which has so abused, neglected and exploited its customers and survived.
How about the tobacco industry?
Re:MozillaQuest is a troll. It's misinformation
on
Mozilla 0.9.9 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, intrigued by that, I went to look at the site. I was amused to see that the very first sentence of the first article on the front page states that:
The Mozilla Organization has not yet released the Milestone 0.9.9 edition of its Mozilla browser suite.
From 1 April 2002, the monthly subscription cost for PIPEX Xtreme Solo [i.e. 512kbps ADSL] will be reduced to £19.95 ex VAT (£23.44 inc. VAT). This will apply to new and existing customers alike - meaning that you can sign up now and still benefit from the reduced subscription fee from April.
A friend who has this service says he "absolutely loves" it: very fast and generally transparent. Mine's due for installation on Wednesday.
Who is the GPL bad for?... Those that would like to steal code repackage it and sell it without giving either credit or code back to whence it came.
What about people who DO want to give credit? If my company were writing an application based on components written by someone else, we'd be happy to give fair payment to the developers in return for our use of those components. But if the components were GPL'd this wouldn't be enough (or even relevant); our new software would have to be available for free! There's no way my company could do this and stay in business.
So we'd have to rewrite the components from scratch, and the application would take longer and cost more to produce - or not get built at all. The marketplace would be poorer, and our business would be in a less competitive position. I'd say in this case the GPL is bad for everyone - except the people who simply aren't willing to pay for code in the first place!
Ctrl-H is ANSI for backspace; its use implies (normally ironically) that you almost typed one thing, then realised you meant to type something else. e.g. "We'll have to wait and see if the new proposals are approved by Micros^H^H^H^H^H^HCongress."
I don't believe I have ever heard of somebody going into a music store and picking a random album and buying it because they thought it looked interesting.
I did that once. I bought this CD. It wasn't great.
Why ever would we want to save Be after they refused to GPL their product? Companies have to learn that if they won't give us their products for free, we won't buy them.
Okay, so maybe I'm being stupid but...
on
802.11b on your Tivo
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Err, why is this such a great thing? I mean, obviously it is - there are people on the forum mentioned above saying that the guy who did this is a "deity" and so forth. But none of them actually seems to have said what they intend to do with wireless, and I have to say it's not obvious to me what a Tivo and a PC could usefully have to say to each other.
Can anyone who knows a bit more about the Tivo enlighten me?
I would imagine it will be charged like GPRS, on a per-packet basis, since it looks like it will work exactly the same way. Obviously, though, you wouldn't be stuck having to run WAP micro-browsers on tiny screens: you'd be running a "real" computer, so you could run the real IE6 or whatever. Or, better still, Opera or Mozilla - cos if you think unrequested pop-ups are annoying now, wait until you're being charged per byte you receive!
As for the actual rates, there's obviously no way of predicting, but I imagine they'll be very high at first, because businesses will be willing to pay serious money for this. Just imagine - the whole sales force out on the road being constantly connected (via VPN I imagine) to the company network. No more waiting until a sales rep can come into the office to pick up the latest 40Mb chunk of sales data; his computer could just suck it up in real time as he drives up the M6.
The tester does in fact own the copyright on his bug reports (unless he has specifically signed it away). Those are his intellectual property.
But still, the developers aren't proposing to publish them or anything. They just want to act on the information contained therein. That's very different to exploiting them as works; and if there's no specific contract between the tester and the developers governing this use, he hasn't, by default, got a leg to stand on.
I have to say I can't see how it could be any other way. Imagine what would happen if passing on information automatically entitled you to a share in any profits arising from subsequent use of that information!? Teachers could sue their old pupils. Financial papers could sue their readers. Society simply couldn't function at all.
Well, this is a pretty grungy thing to argue about, but...:)
That red circle just shows you where the postcode's centred. It's the same size at all zoom levels. As it happens, that postcode really does only refer to one property, because it's such a big one (NTL's Nottingham office as it happens). Most postcodes are far less precise. My old house was in the same postcode as fourteen different properties. My grandmother shares a postcode with fifteen other houses. Right now I'm living in a house which shares a postcode with thirty two other addresses. You can try it out with any postcode you like at Postcodes On-line.
And US zip codes are even larger. Just to pluck a (fairly vague) page at random, this map of the town of Salem, Oregon shows the zip codes for various areas. Each code covers several streets, and potentially thousands of residences.
Tivo explicitly promises not to use anything more specific than a zip code to identify your viewing details (see point 1.3 of their privacy policy); and that's nothing like as specific as you seem to think - unless everyone in Beverley Hills 90210 lives in the same house. Even UK postcodes aren't that precise: it's simply not true to say that "if i give my postcode to some companies they can tell exactly which house iam living in," unless your house is the size of a football pitch.
And if you don't want Tivo to collect your data at all, you can simply tell them not to. This is clearly stated in their terms and conditions - and indeed in the PrivacyWatch report you quote. Okay, you have to phone them, rather than pushing a button, but it's an offer they're under no obligation to make at all. And they even give you a toll-free number to call!
So I don't see any grounds for complaint. I mean, the users get a service they clearly love (see Slashdot stories passim) for a price they're happy to pay; the advertisers get invaluable data, freely given and broadly anonymous, again for a price they're happy to pay; and Tivo gets the revenue from both sides. Personally, I think that's wonderful. Tivo have managed to broker a stunning win-win business model, and best of luck to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Should have written it on your arm or something!
Yeah. It'll be like a driving license, or a credit card. It won't be compulsory, just eventually you'll cave into having one because you'll get so much less hassle that way.
Blaming everything on Sun again. :)
Under the CBDTPA, use of such circumvention measures will mean that you spend ten years with your address as "federal penitentiary."
:)
Doubt it - the CBDTPA has no force in the UK!
My sympathy is with those of you whom it does affect though. That's one very very bad law you've got there.
I don't think this technology is much use for "location-locking" entertainment media.
If I bought a CD I couldn't listen to in my car, first thing I'd do is copy it onto MiniDisc. Bye bye location protection.
But the problem is deeper than that. The record companies can't possibly know where you live, so they couldn't sell CDs in shops that could only be played at one particular GPS location. The nearest they could get would be to sell you a new CD player that supports location-locking, and have it send them your GPS location; then either mail you a CD encoded with those co-ordinates, or email you the image to burn yourself. This doesn't sound like a very saleable proposition - and if it were, it'd be far simpler and more secure for them to just have your player identify itself uniquely, use that as the encryption key and to hell with GPS.
If this technology is ever to be used by anyone (whether or not this particular story is true), it will be by corporations and governments for sensitive data that they want only to be readable (eg) inside their head office/the Pentagon/wherever. In which case it could work, especially if they use an earlier poster's idea of requiring a particular path rather than just a present location. Go on, build your Faraday Cage - if you don't know this document was supposed to be couriered via Hooper Street and in through the side door, good luck decrypting it!
The users would have no way of knowing before hand if they had the right chuncks of the operating system to install supposedly windows software.
I think IE is the only "chunk" that's needed by any significant number of programs: users of an unbundled Windows could simply install it, or just use programs that didn't require it. It's not an immediately elegant solution, but it's a lot better than where we are now; and it would encourage future programmers not to rely on IE, weakening further the case for bundling it in the future.
The states are proposing to make it a marketplace where no one can be sure they can use the software other people are selling, and no one can be sure they are making software all the people can, and want, to use.
Well, MS is certainly not above encouraging this perception so people are scared of an unbundled Windows in case some application or other doesn't work on it.
But if the courts can prevent MS from exploiting this kind of FUD (eg, by making the unbundled version the only one available, so MS has to support it or lose the whole market), I'm sure MS would make full use of its logo-certification programme to make sure Windows didn't get the reputation of being a lottery.
This is a bit by the way anyway. The relative merits of the idea aren't really the question here: the point is that MS is claiming that an unbundled Windows is impossible, which is clearly just a lie. Perhaps it's not immediately clear exactly where the line lies between OS and application, but I'm sure a judge would be willing to draw one; and I find it impossible to believe that Microsoft doesn't have the know-how and the resources to make it happen extremely quickly if it were in its interests to do so.
Surely the people whom Verisign needs to have trust in the certificate side of its business are senior managers? And I wouldn't have thought they'd even hear about this ploy. Even if they did, I doubt it would make a great difference to them one way or the other. If they need certificate technology, they're not going to spend too much time worrying about how a company under consideration markets its registration service.
But I agree it's a dangerous path for Verisign to set off down.
I lost sympathy about here:
A smaller encoding scheme gives us exactly one benefit: faster downloads and uploads for the users. It is not going to make Usenet smaller. It is not going to allow servers to increase retention. Do you really think people aren't going to post more, if they can do it faster? Of course they are. They're always going to post more, with or without yEnc [...] big deal.
So effectively, what he's saying is, in effect: "this system changes nothing, and is of no benefit, except that it makes more data available on the Usenet and gives users faster uploads and downloads. So it's worthless."
This guy obviously hasn't had to use a metered dial-up account for a while. A 33% saving on transfer times is an enormous benefit. I feel quite insulted by the way he seems to think it's of no importance, as if my time and money aren't worth anything. "What's the rush" indeed! I'd happily tear up MIME and MD5 tomorrow if it would speed up my transfers by a third.
If yEnc is so widespread, it can only be because there's a demand for it. And if there's a demand for it, why the hell shouldn't programmers support it? Last time I checked, RFC's weren't enforced by law. The Net has seen a million non-standard hacks, and has, for the most part, assimilated the good ones and outlived the bad. yEnc is by no means the worst, and it brings real benefits to tens of thousands of people every day. I say leave it alone - or if you have to oppose it, at least oppose it constructively, for Christ's sake!
Why not put a sign by your doorbell saying "by pressing this bell, you agree to pay to a consultation fee of $1,000. If you do not agree with this, do not press this bell."
Well, if it's good enough for Microsoft...
Anyone else notice the article was co-written by Adam Horowitz? I guess after Hello Nasty there was only one place to go - business journalism!
Seems a bit harsh. To be able to market complex technologies to even very stupid people is surely more a gift than a failing. Your market is, after all, generally limited to people capable of understanding why they might want your product.
It's hard to recall any industry which has so abused, neglected and exploited its customers and survived.
How about the tobacco industry?
Well, intrigued by that, I went to look at the site. I was amused to see that the very first sentence of the first article on the front page states that:
The Mozilla Organization has not yet released the Milestone 0.9.9 edition of its Mozilla browser suite.
Excellent reportage.
Wish I could afford broadband!
i ndex.shtml:
From http://www.dsl.pipex.net/adsl/sales/pricing/solo-
From 1 April 2002, the monthly subscription cost for PIPEX Xtreme Solo [i.e. 512kbps ADSL] will be reduced to £19.95 ex VAT (£23.44 inc. VAT). This will apply to new and existing customers alike - meaning that you can sign up now and still benefit from the reduced subscription fee from April.
A friend who has this service says he "absolutely loves" it: very fast and generally transparent. Mine's due for installation on Wednesday.
Who is the GPL bad for? ... Those that would like to steal code repackage it and sell it without giving either credit or code back to whence it came.
What about people who DO want to give credit? If my company were writing an application based on components written by someone else, we'd be happy to give fair payment to the developers in return for our use of those components. But if the components were GPL'd this wouldn't be enough (or even relevant); our new software would have to be available for free! There's no way my company could do this and stay in business.
So we'd have to rewrite the components from scratch, and the application would take longer and cost more to produce - or not get built at all. The marketplace would be poorer, and our business would be in a less competitive position. I'd say in this case the GPL is bad for everyone - except the people who simply aren't willing to pay for code in the first place!
Ctrl-H is ANSI for backspace; its use implies (normally ironically) that you almost typed one thing, then realised you meant to type something else. e.g. "We'll have to wait and see if the new proposals are approved by Micros^H^H^H^H^H^HCongress."
I don't believe I have ever heard of somebody going into a music store and picking a random album and buying it because they thought it looked interesting.
I did that once. I bought this CD. It wasn't great.
Why ever would we want to save Be after they refused to GPL their product? Companies have to learn that if they won't give us their products for free, we won't buy them.
Err, why is this such a great thing? I mean, obviously it is - there are people on the forum mentioned above saying that the guy who did this is a "deity" and so forth. But none of them actually seems to have said what they intend to do with wireless, and I have to say it's not obvious to me what a Tivo and a PC could usefully have to say to each other.
Can anyone who knows a bit more about the Tivo enlighten me?
God I envy you.
I would imagine it will be charged like GPRS, on a per-packet basis, since it looks like it will work exactly the same way. Obviously, though, you wouldn't be stuck having to run WAP micro-browsers on tiny screens: you'd be running a "real" computer, so you could run the real IE6 or whatever. Or, better still, Opera or Mozilla - cos if you think unrequested pop-ups are annoying now, wait until you're being charged per byte you receive!
As for the actual rates, there's obviously no way of predicting, but I imagine they'll be very high at first, because businesses will be willing to pay serious money for this. Just imagine - the whole sales force out on the road being constantly connected (via VPN I imagine) to the company network. No more waiting until a sales rep can come into the office to pick up the latest 40Mb chunk of sales data; his computer could just suck it up in real time as he drives up the M6.
My tax dollars shouldn't fund some guy's political agenda.
:)
Tell it to GWB!
The tester does in fact own the copyright on his bug reports (unless he has specifically signed it away). Those are his intellectual property.
But still, the developers aren't proposing to publish them or anything. They just want to act on the information contained therein. That's very different to exploiting them as works; and if there's no specific contract between the tester and the developers governing this use, he hasn't, by default, got a leg to stand on.
I have to say I can't see how it could be any other way. Imagine what would happen if passing on information automatically entitled you to a share in any profits arising from subsequent use of that information!? Teachers could sue their old pupils. Financial papers could sue their readers. Society simply couldn't function at all.
Well, this is a pretty grungy thing to argue about, but... :)
:)
That red circle just shows you where the postcode's centred. It's the same size at all zoom levels. As it happens, that postcode really does only refer to one property, because it's such a big one (NTL's Nottingham office as it happens). Most postcodes are far less precise. My old house was in the same postcode as fourteen different properties. My grandmother shares a postcode with fifteen other houses. Right now I'm living in a house which shares a postcode with thirty two other addresses. You can try it out with any postcode you like at Postcodes On-line.
And US zip codes are even larger. Just to pluck a (fairly vague) page at random, this map of the town of Salem, Oregon shows the zip codes for various areas. Each code covers several streets, and potentially thousands of residences.
So there.
Tivo explicitly promises not to use anything more specific than a zip code to identify your viewing details (see point 1.3 of their privacy policy); and that's nothing like as specific as you seem to think - unless everyone in Beverley Hills 90210 lives in the same house. Even UK postcodes aren't that precise: it's simply not true to say that "if i give my postcode to some companies they can tell exactly which house iam living in," unless your house is the size of a football pitch.
And if you don't want Tivo to collect your data at all, you can simply tell them not to. This is clearly stated in their terms and conditions - and indeed in the PrivacyWatch report you quote. Okay, you have to phone them, rather than pushing a button, but it's an offer they're under no obligation to make at all. And they even give you a toll-free number to call!
So I don't see any grounds for complaint. I mean, the users get a service they clearly love (see Slashdot stories passim) for a price they're happy to pay; the advertisers get invaluable data, freely given and broadly anonymous, again for a price they're happy to pay; and Tivo gets the revenue from both sides. Personally, I think that's wonderful. Tivo have managed to broker a stunning win-win business model, and best of luck to them.
In IE6 you can also shift-click on a link to open it in a new window. Not quite as neat as a middle-button click, but could be worse.