At my school, many students make money selling
the notes they take in class so that the
deaf students don't have to worry about writing
all the time and can pay attention to the
interpreter. Granted, this is a service the collage provides, but isn't it the same thing? The sale of the reproduction of a classroom lecture?
Where it can affect people, where it is about money, is for the band that sells 600 copies of their CD, ok? If they all of a sudden go from selling 600 copies of their CD down to 50 copies, because the other 550 copies get downloaded for free, that's where it starts affecting real people with real money.
I have a big disagreement with this one. If you're a struggling musician who puts all his effort into selling 600 CD's, and find that 550 of them have been pirated, I can understand how you'd be pissed off. Except that doesn't happen. What happens is that the musician still sells the 600 CD's, but because of forums like Napster that allow free trading of music, an additional 600 people have now listened to the music, and those who like it will probably buy the album if they can, and will be a million percent more likely to go see the band play at a local concert or something. Those who didn't like the music might keep the pirated MP3's, but they wouldn't have bought the album anyway.
The bottom line is free music distribution, pirated or legal, always helps the small musician. When you haven't hit the big time, exposure is the name of the game, not money.
When we started this project, we consciously made the decision to write the player the Right Way. There were already efforts underway to make a fully open player, along with a fully open spec, and these efforts are very respectable. However, we chose to try and to what's best for us and what's best for the community by working with people instead of against them. People will listen to you a lot better if you're not yelling "Hack the Planet" all the time.
There was a point in this project where we realized that we were going to have to make a choice: open source and lawsuits, or closed source and better player. At the time, I personally was almost ready to jump ship and send my efforts to a more rebellious cause ('cause I'm so 31337), but I chose to stick with it and try and play the game. We all want open software, but the Real World doesn't really understand that. For example, there are countries where there is no distinction between free speech and free beer (i.e: if any part of the source code is available, you cannot charge for the product). Also, there are countless licensing issues with trying to open source something with so many copyrights involved. It sucks, but it's life. We're working to change it, but it isn't going to happen instantly.
Also keep in mind that a lot of people are screaming bloody murder because the player will not be free as in speech, when they actually mean free as in beer. This attitude is expected, but not respectable. When you are a software company, and you give away your software for free, where do you make the buck? Companies like Red Hat can distribute free software because they make their money in support. That model doesn't work in the application environment. You have to pay the bills somehow.
The player will be done and it will be good. And the first step toward our goal is to distribute it, closed source and not free, to the masses through one medium or another. Then we can start playing our cards, like taking out CSS and trying to open source the thing. We are trying to convince the powers that be to open source the media framework so that Linux has a replacement for what DirectShow does in windoze. We are working toward open sourcing the various codecs and try and get around licensing issues. We are hoping to work with the people working on the open DVD spec, and to support that. Things will change, but they won't change overnight.
This is an excellent response with some good questions, but The Point of this matter is not being addressed in the letter. That is, if copyrighted material has been posted to a news story in slashdot by a user, someone or something is then in violation of the DMCA and other copyright laws (IANAL).
There are many ways to beat Microsoft in this case, but the more important question is what about the general case? If I take some copyrighted and closed spec that I stole from some company, and post or link to it from slashdot, does slashdot then have the legal responsibility of censoring the comments I post?
Most lawyers and corporations would probably jump to say that the host of the site is at fault, but I say that this is a medium to which the rules of newspapers and magazines cannot be applied. In other words, the people who run slashdot do not filter and choose each word that is electronically published on its pages. Those wanting to pursue a copyright violation should be able to go after the individual who posted the comment, but not the host. And if the post was anonymous, they lose. I'm sure certain slashdot logs could be obtained by subpoena, but beyond that, not much can be done.
This is the way it should be. Whether it is this way remains to be seen. Also, keep in mind that the purpose of copyright laws and the DMCA were to help the little guy, not Big Corporations.
This article made one very good point and one very incorrect point.
CORRECT: CSS breaks the law, by not allowing people who purchased media content to use it how they wish (which includes the copying of small portions, etc). The only way the MPAA will be defeated is if CSS is shown to be illegal. You're OK if you break a law and then prove that law to be bogus.
INCORRECT: DeCSS was the result of reverse engineering. We all know this is not true. The code is the result of hacking the Xing player, both to get the keys and the algorithm. A pure reversal of CSS would have been to just look at the bits on a disk and figure out how to get them to unscramble.
My question is, if CSS is wrong, how would they have done it right? That's what I've been trying to mull over in my mind for a while.
Porn has been around forever. It is the alpha and the omega. I thanked god for the internet when I was 12, because all the naked goodness I wanted was just a click away. Is this morally right? Who knows. The point is that there is no way to get rid of this ability short of government censorship. You can put little clickthrough warnings and other worthless crap like that on there, but it isn't going to stop anyone.
So what is the answer? The key is, as it usually is, education. The parents must tell their kids about these things. And the parents must educate themselves in how to FRIGGIN USE A COMPUTER if they don't want their little ones to see dirty pictures on the intra. Use web logs, set up a proxy, keep the computer out of the kids room, or if you're really worried, don't give the kid net access.
This socialist atitute of "the government should raise our kids for is" just makes me sick.
By that argument, a telivision manufacturer can be held liable for the content of the TV signal, or a newspaper printer for the content of the "opinions" column. What it comes down to is the fact that you are paying the ISP for a certain section of disk space and bandwidth. That space is essentially yours, and you should be able to do whatever you want with it. Of course, this "right" could be changed in the ISP's contract, but it should have to be explicitly stated if this right is not there.
When you pay for something, it is yours. It's the same basic argument that is used against DeCSS and a whole slew of free speach arguments. And it is correct.
This is just another example of rules that were created in good faith are being used by the Big Guys to squash the Little Guys. Coke has a website, do they need a friggin website in every country? I didn't like this automatic domain trademark thing from the beginning, and it still looks to me like it will cause more harm than good.
Besides, the answer to this one is simple: Coca-cola is wrong even according to the law. No one else can have coca-cola.* or cocacola.*, but like it's said at the top, "coke" is a slang, and I doubt the corp has the (tm) or (r) on that suckah.
I have just one question: why don't they take the designs of the probes that have been lost, and rebuild them? Isn't most of the cost of these million dollar probes the research and testing that goes into their design? Didn't somebody write that stuff down? Both missions were failures because of us humans, the hardware seems to work just fine.
I think that the statement "We're almost there" is a very accurate one. There are many groups, commertial and open, who see the lack of good multimedia applications in Linux. The desktop void is being filled, audio support is getting better, but AV tools for the OS just aren't there.
This is actually one of the long term goals of the LSDVD group: to produce video authoring software for linux. It's a long term goal, one which would take a lot of time and money, and might have to be slightly closed source in order to get by licensing issues with The Man.
We all love music. Most of us probably play and write music as well. Just be patient, the tools are coming...
-davek ps: big things are happening with LSDVD, stay tuned.
Was there one paragraph in that article that didn't happen to mention that mycio.whatever site? And the statement "Windows is not vunerable to these attacks" stated without any supporting evidence is a bit disturbing. But, what cha gonna do? Sometimes the news is just slanted.
Has anyone taken into consideration another reason that *nix seems to be less secure than Windows boxen? How many 31337 h4x0rz do you know that run windows? Most of the time they're running linux, hacking the kernel, trying cracks out on their own boxes first, etc etc. Which system do you think they'd be more likely to attack? The one they know or the one they don't? Duh.
Oh and all you guys who like to flame/.ers for speaking out against M$ and claiming they're stupid for dreaming up conspiricy theories and such, sometimes it is nice to root for the underdog. So stop raining on our parade, OK?
Score one for our team, I guess. Being involved in the whole DeCSS thing, it's nice to see someone win in a reverse engineering case. We all have to keep in mind that any company who is limiting the methods for their media to be played (such as playstation games) is in violation of the Fair Use Act. I hope this is at the center of the Cali DeCSS case, instead of taking the "f*ck the man" approach.
My question is: where is the line drawn? What protection should companies (or individual software vendors) have with their intellectual property? Should every media format be forced to be public, or just allow it to be "figured out" by whomever wants to?
I don't know if a computer will _ever_ be able to replace the ability to actually comprehend a language. I mean, I use bablefish at least once a day, but I would still have no idea what the languages are saying if I knew nothing about the language's idioms and sayings.
What I don't understand is: why is it so difficult to learn another language? I mean, isn't there a stat like only 10% of a language is used 90% of the time? And in all indo-european languages, like 9 out of that 10 percent is all the same. So why can't I learn French in 1 day? I'm trying to cram as many languages into my brain as I can (working on French, Hungarian, and Latvian, wish me luck), and doing it without any formal instruction.
I came to France 6 months ago savoir _aucune_ de francais, and now I can almost speak it. I don't know if that's slow or fast, but why did it take me 6 months to learn the few hundred main words of this language?
If there are any linguist/. readers, please email me. This subject facinates me and I have no education on it.
Well, its nice to be in the group and not be told that there's an interview. O well, I wouldn't have had much to say anyway, and I'm in France. Bummer.
Anyway, I gotta say something that was sort of left out of the interview. From reading what Paul said, it sounds pretty much like the LSDVD project is all about taking all the pieces related to a DVD player and glueing them togeather. This might be an initial goal, but let me assure you that the groups final goal is to produce a complete, stable, open sourced (as much as possible) DVD player for linux. This would include support for various MPEG decoder cards as well as a software decoding module (which is what I am working on now). The AC-3 audio encoding might have to be written by us as well, I'm not sure about the licensing issues with that.
One question that wasn't really asked was: What have we written so far? Well, we're attacking it from two different sides. 1) we have code to parse all the nasty VOB blocks and headers, but we can't get to the straight MPEG stream because of the encryption, so 2) we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.
And what about the time frame? Well, the three of us are all in different places right now, and development is lagging because of it. But next month we all return back to the old skool and that's when the project will begin to bear fruit. We hope to have a usable (or at least demonstratable) program by April 2000 (after we've all dropped out of school or died because of sleep deprivation).
Problem is, there are no real "rights" when it comes to discrimination in the internet. If I want to put up a site that is viewable only by Netscrape users, I can and should be able to do that. If this well-publicized chess match, sponsored by M$N, was accessable only if you were a paying customer of the MSNetwork, then all you can really do is bitch and complain. It sucks, but its not illegal or "wrong" (I guess), its marketing.
I can just hear the salespeople now, "Well, in order to destroy the message you have to install this program called cron(8)..."
Actually, wouldn't it be possible to have a time span somehow put into the encryption key? So that after a certain click of system clock the key would no longer decrypt the message. How to regular PGP keys "expire" anyway?
The whole network computer thing is an old relic of large mainframe computing archetecture that was more or less defeated with the advent of PC's. Currently, aren't most LAN's a combination of both stand-alone computers and main servers? Most have a main file server where everyone's homedir is, but everyone's desktop machine has the ability to live apart from the network.
The whole network computer thing is old, and it is a dead end. It might look good in theory, but in reality, it just isn't practical.
point. but the biggest problem is what if someone was looking for you? What if the FBI had caught wind that you were planning to bomb the white house and they saw that you were reading alt.explosives 20 times a day?
Even though subjects like this spill over into such issues as mercy killings and doctor assisted suicide, lets stay on the topic at hand. That is: parents deciding to terminate the life of their child because of a handicap that would make the child's life miserable.
My main problem with this sort of thing (and there are many problems with it) is the question of who decides the fate of the handicapped child? In the issue of doctor assisted suicide, the patient decides whether to let him/her self die. When you're dealing with a child (I'm assuming an infant), it is not them who decides to live or die; it is the parents. As soon as you make it legal to terminate someone's life without their concent, you've started down a slippery slope that leads to No Place Good.
In addition to that, allowing infant genocide (correct term?) would lead to immense corruption with unwanted pregnancies. For example, if an 18 year old got pregnant, chose to have the child, and then 4 months into motherhood realized that it was a lot harder than she thought, she could go to the doctor, bribe him into saying that the child was handicapped in some way, and have the kid, well, basically "put to sleep."
That's the great thing about capitalism: if you are getting screwed, don't buy the product. If companies like MCI, Sprint, Mobil, Exxon, and the like want to conglamorate togeather and create these grand entities that the public hates, I say go for it! You'll hang yourself with your own bankroll. But if these mergers lower prices and increace service quality, then its the consumer who wins in the end anyway.
This isn't a new idea. In responce to a Christian poster at my school, we were going to write JesOS. It would take 3 days to boot and wouldn't boot on sunday, you wouldn't kill a process, you'd crucify it. There would be no reboot, only a resurrect. It could have been a good idea, but jokes that take a month or so to make sort of stop being funny.
I wondered how long it was going to be before someone started using satellite imaging for personal purposes. I mean, international spying is one thing, but getting the "big picture" about domestic events such as car wrecks and the like is something that (some) people will pay good money for.
I just want to know how long before I can use the thing to find out if my girlfriend is cheating on me.
D'accord. Totally, when I start my country, its going to be complete lassiez-faire capitalism, free from all government regulations. The number of evils introduced by that are far less than those introduced by the suffocating restrictions of the US gov.
That said, let's remember something: how are many crime bosses caught? How was Al Capone caught? Tax evasion. Who cares what you actually did, but if you made money off of it and didn't give the fed their cut, then you lose. This is why the US is so scared of losing their hold over their citizen's income.
Great, they caught the bad guy. Lock him up and throw away the key.
My question is how did the fed know which chat rooms he was in? How did the agents know where he was on the internet at any given time? With all the/. stuff about big bro watching, it makes me think for a moment...
Slashdot Mirror
-davek
The bottom line is free music distribution, pirated or legal, always helps the small musician. When you haven't hit the big time, exposure is the name of the game, not money.
-davek
There was a point in this project where we realized that we were going to have to make a choice: open source and lawsuits, or closed source and better player. At the time, I personally was almost ready to jump ship and send my efforts to a more rebellious cause ('cause I'm so 31337), but I chose to stick with it and try and play the game. We all want open software, but the Real World doesn't really understand that. For example, there are countries where there is no distinction between free speech and free beer (i.e: if any part of the source code is available, you cannot charge for the product). Also, there are countless licensing issues with trying to open source something with so many copyrights involved. It sucks, but it's life. We're working to change it, but it isn't going to happen instantly.
Also keep in mind that a lot of people are screaming bloody murder because the player will not be free as in speech, when they actually mean free as in beer. This attitude is expected, but not respectable. When you are a software company, and you give away your software for free, where do you make the buck? Companies like Red Hat can distribute free software because they make their money in support. That model doesn't work in the application environment. You have to pay the bills somehow.
The player will be done and it will be good. And the first step toward our goal is to distribute it, closed source and not free, to the masses through one medium or another. Then we can start playing our cards, like taking out CSS and trying to open source the thing. We are trying to convince the powers that be to open source the media framework so that Linux has a replacement for what DirectShow does in windoze. We are working toward open sourcing the various codecs and try and get around licensing issues. We are hoping to work with the people working on the open DVD spec, and to support that. Things will change, but they won't change overnight.
-dave klint
There are many ways to beat Microsoft in this case, but the more important question is what about the general case? If I take some copyrighted and closed spec that I stole from some company, and post or link to it from slashdot, does slashdot then have the legal responsibility of censoring the comments I post?
Most lawyers and corporations would probably jump to say that the host of the site is at fault, but I say that this is a medium to which the rules of newspapers and magazines cannot be applied. In other words, the people who run slashdot do not filter and choose each word that is electronically published on its pages. Those wanting to pursue a copyright violation should be able to go after the individual who posted the comment, but not the host. And if the post was anonymous, they lose. I'm sure certain slashdot logs could be obtained by subpoena, but beyond that, not much can be done.
This is the way it should be. Whether it is this way remains to be seen. Also, keep in mind that the purpose of copyright laws and the DMCA were to help the little guy, not Big Corporations.
-davek
-davek
CORRECT: CSS breaks the law, by not allowing people who purchased media content to use it how they wish (which includes the copying of small portions, etc). The only way the MPAA will be defeated is if CSS is shown to be illegal. You're OK if you break a law and then prove that law to be bogus.
INCORRECT: DeCSS was the result of reverse engineering. We all know this is not true. The code is the result of hacking the Xing player, both to get the keys and the algorithm. A pure reversal of CSS would have been to just look at the bits on a disk and figure out how to get them to unscramble.
My question is, if CSS is wrong, how would they have done it right? That's what I've been trying to mull over in my mind for a while.
-davek
So what is the answer? The key is, as it usually is, education. The parents must tell their kids about these things. And the parents must educate themselves in how to FRIGGIN USE A COMPUTER if they don't want their little ones to see dirty pictures on the intra. Use web logs, set up a proxy, keep the computer out of the kids room, or if you're really worried, don't give the kid net access.
This socialist atitute of "the government should raise our kids for is" just makes me sick.
-davek
When you pay for something, it is yours. It's the same basic argument that is used against DeCSS and a whole slew of free speach arguments. And it is correct.
-davek
Besides, the answer to this one is simple: Coca-cola is wrong even according to the law. No one else can have coca-cola.* or cocacola.*, but like it's said at the top, "coke" is a slang, and I doubt the corp has the (tm) or (r) on that suckah.
h4ck 7h3 p14n3t!
-davek
I say GPL NASA. Can't hurt.
-davek
I think that the statement "We're almost there" is a very accurate one. There are many groups, commertial and open, who see the lack of good multimedia applications in Linux. The desktop void is being filled, audio support is getting better, but AV tools for the OS just aren't there.
This is actually one of the long term goals of the LSDVD group: to produce video authoring software for linux. It's a long term goal, one which would take a lot of time and money, and might have to be slightly closed source in order to get by licensing issues with The Man.
We all love music. Most of us probably play and write music as well. Just be patient, the tools are coming...
-davek
ps: big things are happening with LSDVD, stay tuned.
Has anyone taken into consideration another reason that *nix seems to be less secure than Windows boxen? How many 31337 h4x0rz do you know that run windows? Most of the time they're running linux, hacking the kernel, trying cracks out on their own boxes first, etc etc. Which system do you think they'd be more likely to attack? The one they know or the one they don't? Duh.
Oh and all you guys who like to flame /.ers for speaking out against M$ and claiming they're stupid for dreaming up conspiricy theories and such, sometimes it is nice to root for the underdog. So stop raining on our parade, OK?
-davek
My question is: where is the line drawn? What protection should companies (or individual software vendors) have with their intellectual property? Should every media format be forced to be public, or just allow it to be "figured out" by whomever wants to?
-davek
LSDVD developer
What I don't understand is: why is it so difficult to learn another language? I mean, isn't there a stat like only 10% of a language is used 90% of the time? And in all indo-european languages, like 9 out of that 10 percent is all the same. So why can't I learn French in 1 day? I'm trying to cram as many languages into my brain as I can (working on French, Hungarian, and Latvian, wish me luck), and doing it without any formal instruction.
I came to France 6 months ago savoir _aucune_ de francais, and now I can almost speak it. I don't know if that's slow or fast, but why did it take me 6 months to learn the few hundred main words of this language?
If there are any linguist /. readers, please email me. This subject facinates me and I have no education on it.
-davek
Anyway, I gotta say something that was sort of left out of the interview. From reading what Paul said, it sounds pretty much like the LSDVD project is all about taking all the pieces related to a DVD player and glueing them togeather. This might be an initial goal, but let me assure you that the groups final goal is to produce a complete, stable, open sourced (as much as possible) DVD player for linux. This would include support for various MPEG decoder cards as well as a software decoding module (which is what I am working on now). The AC-3 audio encoding might have to be written by us as well, I'm not sure about the licensing issues with that.
One question that wasn't really asked was: What have we written so far? Well, we're attacking it from two different sides. 1) we have code to parse all the nasty VOB blocks and headers, but we can't get to the straight MPEG stream because of the encryption, so 2) we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.
And what about the time frame? Well, the three of us are all in different places right now, and development is lagging because of it. But next month we all return back to the old skool and that's when the project will begin to bear fruit. We hope to have a usable (or at least demonstratable) program by April 2000 (after we've all dropped out of school or died because of sleep deprivation).
Carpe Diem,
-Dave Klint
new Dream Theater Oct 26. Giddy!
-davek
Actually, wouldn't it be possible to have a time span somehow put into the encryption key? So that after a certain click of system clock the key would no longer decrypt the message. How to regular PGP keys "expire" anyway?
-davek
The whole network computer thing is old, and it is a dead end. It might look good in theory, but in reality, it just isn't practical.
foo,
-davek
-davek
My main problem with this sort of thing (and there are many problems with it) is the question of who decides the fate of the handicapped child? In the issue of doctor assisted suicide, the patient decides whether to let him/her self die. When you're dealing with a child (I'm assuming an infant), it is not them who decides to live or die; it is the parents. As soon as you make it legal to terminate someone's life without their concent, you've started down a slippery slope that leads to No Place Good.
In addition to that, allowing infant genocide (correct term?) would lead to immense corruption with unwanted pregnancies. For example, if an 18 year old got pregnant, chose to have the child, and then 4 months into motherhood realized that it was a lot harder than she thought, she could go to the doctor, bribe him into saying that the child was handicapped in some way, and have the kid, well, basically "put to sleep."
NOT GOOD.
-davek
government := Bad Thing (tm)
plain and simple.
-davek
-davek
I just want to know how long before I can use the thing to find out if my girlfriend is cheating on me.
-davek
That said, let's remember something: how are many crime bosses caught? How was Al Capone caught? Tax evasion. Who cares what you actually did, but if you made money off of it and didn't give the fed their cut, then you lose. This is why the US is so scared of losing their hold over their citizen's income.
-davek
My question is how did the fed know which chat rooms he was in? How did the agents know where he was on the internet at any given time? With all the /. stuff about big bro watching, it makes me think for a moment...
-davek