...it's being forced to fight them. It's not every OSS developer that has the resources to fight things like this, even if they're in the right. In the US (civil, and possibly criminal as well) legal system, being right doesn't insure your victory; it only acts as a force-multiplier. The thing that's multiplied, of course, is how much money you have to sink into lawyers.
IANAL, but how easy is it for a victorious defendant to recover legal defense costs from a plaintiff? Probably not very, or the ACLU/EFF's money would go further...
The problem is that in this age, that oath has little to do with what the military is actually ordered to do. Iraq is just the largest and most recent example; we also have all the invasions in the Reagan years (Grenada, etc.) and the invasion of Panama. The treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo is directly counter to the spirit of the Constitution.
Earlier, we have Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs operation as examples of non-defensive military excursions.
Hell, in the 1800's we picked a war with Mexico for no other reason than to take land we wanted for the railroad.
While it is indeed the politicians' fault, the US leadership has a history of such things--Iraq is not a shot in the dark, but the worst and most recent example of misuse of the military. I will never join the military simply because I can not trust the leadership of this country not to order me to do something unethical/unconstitutional.
What ever happened to the Department of _Defense_?
I live in a moderate-sized (350k) geek-oriented (everyone and his dog works on the space program or for army R&D, except for the few inevitable alabamian rednecks) city: Huntsville, Alabama. While the big chains are more visible, after living here for a while I've learned where all the high-quality small shops are. They're around, just not advertising their presence with glowing 10-foot signs.
It is fairly easy, with maybe one week(end) of HTML training, to write a simple informational webpage suitable for a small business. This is who we are, this is what we sell, here are pictures of what we sell, etc.
These simple webpages represent the full utility of the WWW.
However, most customers don't expect a simple and useful webpage in these marketing-department-infested times. Flash animations, morphing buttons, using graphical titles when <h1> will do, javascript abominations that are glorified links, and the like are now commonplace, and a business who puts up a fully-functional but non-glamourous website will be looked down upon by most potential customers.
The Web has always been democratic, really. Anyone can go download Apache and put some information online in a matter of minutes. However, like American democracy, a complacent, easily impressed (politicians in this era suffer from overmarketing as much as businesses) populace doesn't really benefit from a democratic system.
...just plug your line-out into your line-in, or into the line-in of another computer if the Secure Audio Path finds some way to mess up your ability to record while it's playing. The quality loss from running through the DAC is probably much less than the quality loss from the mp3 compression in the first place, so it's not a problem...
...and thus resistance to attack. There are two kinds of centralization here: legal centralization and network centralization. Napster has a single point of "legal failure"--you only have to sue one entity to bring it down. It also has relatively few network points of failure. The opposite is Gnutella, which is as unusable as it is unsueable.
We've already demonstrated that a network as centralized as Napster won't work for legal reasons. However, there are existing networks out there that have enough decentralization to be highly resistant against lawyers, but are centralized enough to take the bandwidth burden away from the ordinary user.
There are already two systems in place that would work. The first is the oldest form of P2P on the net: IRC. IRC fileswapping channels have been around for a while; the problem is that they don't have the "critical mass" of users to make them really useful. Someone, however, should write a script that reflects searches from one channel to the other. For instance, if someone sends out a search on channel 1, the bot will send the same search to channel 2. If it is sent any results, it will echo them to the original searcher. This doesn't put any bandwidth burden on the original searcher, but extends his search radius considerably, especially if the reflectors are configured to examine multiple servers (for instance, #mp3 on DALnet reflecting to #mp3 on EFnet. I don't know how you'd write it as a mIRC script, but it could be done in C...). The bots would probably be configured to keep a record of all the fileswapping channels that they have heard of. (Reflector bots should mention all the channels that they are reflecting to/for every 10 minutes or so). When the bot logs on, it should join each of its list of channels, and then determine which channel links are already being maintained. This is easy to do: send a query and see if someone reflects that query to the other channels. If any channels do not already have a reflector linking them, the bot starts bouncing queries between them. It then leaves all channels that it's not serving a function in, to cut down on its bandwidth use. Anytime a reflector hears another reflector give its periodic status report, including a line like "I am a member of channels #foo, #bar, #fnord, etc...", it should add any new channels to its list.
A system like this is halfway between Gnutella and Napster in terms of bandwidth use. (The regular users in the channels who aren't running servers could safely squelch reflectors to cut down on bandwidth.) It has no single legal point of failure: the IRC network is protected as a common carrier with a significant non-infringing use, and there are too many people running servers and reflectors to sue them.
note: I'm merely talking about technology, not endorsing or condemning its use for any specific purpose.
-Entropius
(note: I'm not going to even go near the ethics of using a method like this to pirate media. I'm just commenting that it's possible)
"Secure Audio Path" will not work. All I have to do is play whatever godawful WMA+DRM "content" I want, connect the line-out of my sound card to my line-in, and hit record. Quality is not an issue here (at least not with a good sound card); I'd wager that the quality loss would be less than that sustained by the watermarking/compression process.
Even if they somehow manage to mess with this (disabling recording to a sound card while it's playing their shit), there are solutions... two sound cards... two computers... Sure, using two computers (or even connecting line out to line in) isn't something you're average Joe will do... but that doesn't matter. Once a few people defeat the DRM and make Ogg Vorbis / MP3's out of their WMAs, everyone else can get them via Napster or whatever peer-to-peer method they want. (Side note: The day they start charging for Napster, www.napigator.com is going to suffer an unintentional DoS. Opennap can't be sued out of existence so easily.)
That last hop from computer to speakers is an unencrypted analog one, and will likely remain analog for a long time. That means that it can be redirected and recorded. The *ONLY* way for the XXAA to stop people from copying their "content" (how I hate that word) is to make piracy not worth it. There are two ways of doing this: increase the (opportunity) cost of piracy and decrease the cost of music/videos. The opportunity cost of piracy keeps going down, and attempts like DRM won't stop it... there's only one solution left to them. If their "business model" can't stand up to the Internet, it should die an ungraceful death.
... is not the "change" part. They understand change. What they don't understand is decentralized change: evolution, if you want to call it that. See, up at MS, Mr. Chief Software Architect Gates directs the direction that the mutations will take: "hey, let's stick IE into windows and slow down everyone who for some reason does fileops from a GUI." In contrast, the decision-making process for open-source software is more distributed. MS just doesn't understand how decisions can be made when there's not one person holding the reins.
Taking this a step further, all corporations seem to be scared of decentralization. Decentralization, of course, is the thing that the Net is built on, and it's wonderful... but the corporations want to move things more and more to centralized models. I don't think they have some hidden agenda to control more and more facets of operation (well, other than MS and a few others); they just don't 'get' the concept of decentralization, partly because the corporate power structure is based on centralization. (even though the concept of stockholding is a decentralized one, someone with 10 shares of MS stock doesn't get even a tiny piece of power.)
-Entropius
What do you get when you multiply six by nine?
If you were a MS lawyer/policymaker and wanted to avoid being labelled an unfair monopoly, what would you do? By letting Linux or any other OS gain a significant niche market (by not FUD'ing it to death), without surrendering their stranglehold on the hard drives of the illiterate (the people who blindly upgrade their versions of Office), they can say, "Look, competition is rising against us" in court. Of course, MS knows that they're never going to let that competition get big enough to hurt them......or so they hope...
I haven't either. However, the *format* is not free. You can't get a free mp3 codec that will go over 56kbps... why? Fraunhofer license fees. There's a difference between the format and the files encoded in this format.
I've noticed that too. It's not a problem on my machine (Athlon 800) but it slows the rest of the system to a crawl on my mom's PPro-180. However, remember all the Vorbis stuff is still in beta; later versions will probably be much more optimized.
MP3's not free, though. MP3 was great as a proof of concept of digital audio; it was just a coincidence that the "free music" movement got started with a *format* that's not free.
Anyone who hasn't heard of Ogg Vorbis needs to go check it out here. The quality is better than mp3 for equivalent bitrates, and the format is free as in both speech and beer. There is of course a winamp plugin to play the files. Unfortunately, the encoder they have created doesn't work all that well, and there aren't many.ogg files out on the net... but the format has a lot of promise.
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...it's being forced to fight them. It's not every OSS developer that has the resources to fight things like this, even if they're in the right. In the US (civil, and possibly criminal as well) legal system, being right doesn't insure your victory; it only acts as a force-multiplier. The thing that's multiplied, of course, is how much money you have to sink into lawyers.
IANAL, but how easy is it for a victorious defendant to recover legal defense costs from a plaintiff? Probably not very, or the ACLU/EFF's money would go further...
The problem is that in this age, that oath has little to do with what the military is actually ordered to do. Iraq is just the largest and most recent example; we also have all the invasions in the Reagan years (Grenada, etc.) and the invasion of Panama. The treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo is directly counter to the spirit of the Constitution.
Earlier, we have Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs operation as examples of non-defensive military excursions.
Hell, in the 1800's we picked a war with Mexico for no other reason than to take land we wanted for the railroad.
While it is indeed the politicians' fault, the US leadership has a history of such things--Iraq is not a shot in the dark, but the worst and most recent example of misuse of the military. I will never join the military simply because I can not trust the leadership of this country not to order me to do something unethical/unconstitutional.
What ever happened to the Department of _Defense_?
It's only obvious to web geeks and frequent eBay'ers (who probably would have thought of such a feature had eBay not already included it).
It was obviously non-obvious to the patent examiners who looked over it.
This is why we need better patent examiners.
I live in a moderate-sized (350k) geek-oriented (everyone and his dog works on the space program or for army R&D, except for the few inevitable alabamian rednecks) city: Huntsville, Alabama. While the big chains are more visible, after living here for a while I've learned where all the high-quality small shops are. They're around, just not advertising their presence with glowing 10-foot signs.
It is fairly easy, with maybe one week(end) of HTML training, to write a simple informational webpage suitable for a small business. This is who we are, this is what we sell, here are pictures of what we sell, etc.
These simple webpages represent the full utility of the WWW.
However, most customers don't expect a simple and useful webpage in these marketing-department-infested times. Flash animations, morphing buttons, using graphical titles when <h1> will do, javascript abominations that are glorified links, and the like are now commonplace, and a business who puts up a fully-functional but non-glamourous website will be looked down upon by most potential customers.
The Web has always been democratic, really. Anyone can go download Apache and put some information online in a matter of minutes. However, like American democracy, a complacent, easily impressed (politicians in this era suffer from overmarketing as much as businesses) populace doesn't really benefit from a democratic system.
... if I buy you a drink? (SYJ has to be the funniest book I've read ...)
I want the convenience of downloadable music as much as anyone, but I am not willing to steal from artists just for my own convenience.
I don't like people stealing from the artists, either, which is why I don't like the RIAA.
...just plug your line-out into your line-in, or into the line-in of another computer if the Secure Audio Path finds some way to mess up your ability to record while it's playing. The quality loss from running through the DAC is probably much less than the quality loss from the mp3 compression in the first place, so it's not a problem...
...and thus resistance to attack. There are two kinds of centralization here: legal centralization and network centralization. Napster has a single point of "legal failure"--you only have to sue one entity to bring it down. It also has relatively few network points of failure. The opposite is Gnutella, which is as unusable as it is unsueable. We've already demonstrated that a network as centralized as Napster won't work for legal reasons. However, there are existing networks out there that have enough decentralization to be highly resistant against lawyers, but are centralized enough to take the bandwidth burden away from the ordinary user.
There are already two systems in place that would work. The first is the oldest form of P2P on the net: IRC. IRC fileswapping channels have been around for a while; the problem is that they don't have the "critical mass" of users to make them really useful. Someone, however, should write a script that reflects searches from one channel to the other. For instance, if someone sends out a search on channel 1, the bot will send the same search to channel 2. If it is sent any results, it will echo them to the original searcher. This doesn't put any bandwidth burden on the original searcher, but extends his search radius considerably, especially if the reflectors are configured to examine multiple servers (for instance, #mp3 on DALnet reflecting to #mp3 on EFnet. I don't know how you'd write it as a mIRC script, but it could be done in C...). The bots would probably be configured to keep a record of all the fileswapping channels that they have heard of. (Reflector bots should mention all the channels that they are reflecting to/for every 10 minutes or so). When the bot logs on, it should join each of its list of channels, and then determine which channel links are already being maintained. This is easy to do: send a query and see if someone reflects that query to the other channels. If any channels do not already have a reflector linking them, the bot starts bouncing queries between them. It then leaves all channels that it's not serving a function in, to cut down on its bandwidth use. Anytime a reflector hears another reflector give its periodic status report, including a line like "I am a member of channels #foo, #bar, #fnord, etc...", it should add any new channels to its list.
A system like this is halfway between Gnutella and Napster in terms of bandwidth use. (The regular users in the channels who aren't running servers could safely squelch reflectors to cut down on bandwidth.) It has no single legal point of failure: the IRC network is protected as a common carrier with a significant non-infringing use, and there are too many people running servers and reflectors to sue them.
note: I'm merely talking about technology, not endorsing or condemning its use for any specific purpose. -Entropius
(note: I'm not going to even go near the ethics of using a method like this to pirate media. I'm just commenting that it's possible)
"Secure Audio Path" will not work. All I have to do is play whatever godawful WMA+DRM "content" I want, connect the line-out of my sound card to my line-in, and hit record. Quality is not an issue here (at least not with a good sound card); I'd wager that the quality loss would be less than that sustained by the watermarking/compression process.
Even if they somehow manage to mess with this (disabling recording to a sound card while it's playing their shit), there are solutions... two sound cards... two computers... Sure, using two computers (or even connecting line out to line in) isn't something you're average Joe will do... but that doesn't matter. Once a few people defeat the DRM and make Ogg Vorbis / MP3's out of their WMAs, everyone else can get them via Napster or whatever peer-to-peer method they want. (Side note: The day they start charging for Napster, www.napigator.com is going to suffer an unintentional DoS. Opennap can't be sued out of existence so easily.)
That last hop from computer to speakers is an unencrypted analog one, and will likely remain analog for a long time. That means that it can be redirected and recorded. The *ONLY* way for the XXAA to stop people from copying their "content" (how I hate that word) is to make piracy not worth it. There are two ways of doing this: increase the (opportunity) cost of piracy and decrease the cost of music/videos. The opportunity cost of piracy keeps going down, and attempts like DRM won't stop it... there's only one solution left to them. If their "business model" can't stand up to the Internet, it should die an ungraceful death.
...the Mission Statement Generator on the Dilbert webpage. I haven't seen that many buzzwords together in one place in I don't know how long.
... is not the "change" part. They understand change. What they don't understand is decentralized change: evolution, if you want to call it that. See, up at MS, Mr. Chief Software Architect Gates directs the direction that the mutations will take: "hey, let's stick IE into windows and slow down everyone who for some reason does fileops from a GUI." In contrast, the decision-making process for open-source software is more distributed. MS just doesn't understand how decisions can be made when there's not one person holding the reins.
Taking this a step further, all corporations seem to be scared of decentralization. Decentralization, of course, is the thing that the Net is built on, and it's wonderful... but the corporations want to move things more and more to centralized models. I don't think they have some hidden agenda to control more and more facets of operation (well, other than MS and a few others); they just don't 'get' the concept of decentralization, partly because the corporate power structure is based on centralization. (even though the concept of stockholding is a decentralized one, someone with 10 shares of MS stock doesn't get even a tiny piece of power.)
-Entropius
What do you get when you multiply six by nine?
If you were a MS lawyer/policymaker and wanted to avoid being labelled an unfair monopoly, what would you do? By letting Linux or any other OS gain a significant niche market (by not FUD'ing it to death), without surrendering their stranglehold on the hard drives of the illiterate (the people who blindly upgrade their versions of Office), they can say, "Look, competition is rising against us" in court. Of course, MS knows that they're never going to let that competition get big enough to hurt them... ...or so they hope...
I've noticed that too. It's not a problem on my machine (Athlon 800) but it slows the rest of the system to a crawl on my mom's PPro-180. However, remember all the Vorbis stuff is still in beta; later versions will probably be much more optimized.
MP3's not free, though. MP3 was great as a proof of concept of digital audio; it was just a coincidence that the "free music" movement got started with a *format* that's not free. Anyone who hasn't heard of Ogg Vorbis needs to go check it out here. The quality is better than mp3 for equivalent bitrates, and the format is free as in both speech and beer. There is of course a winamp plugin to play the files. Unfortunately, the encoder they have created doesn't work all that well, and there aren't many .ogg files out on the net... but the format has a lot of promise.
...between politics and karma whoring? The skills some slashdotters learn now could be of great use in a political career...