An alternative to direct key escrow is the system used by Lotus Notes for their export versions a while back. Known as a "Work Factor Reduction Field", it's some fractional part of the key (Lotus used 24 of the 64 bits in their keys), encrypted with a system-wide key (usually half of an asymmetric key pair) and included in the transmission. Taken to an extreme, this could be the full session key, encrypted (ala Clipper). The main drawback is that you lose the requirement for several agencies to cooperate before an escrowed key can be recovered. Any agency with access to the systemwide private key could recover any crypted transmission. A policy to split-escrow the systemwide private key obviously fails after the first legitimate recovery order, since there's no way to prevent the recovery agency from retaining a copy of the master key. (this assumes the master key wasn't clandestinely retained before being split for escrow in the first place)
Really, a going.com can't afford not to have.biz, as it weakens their brand and signals that the.com might be snatchable..biz is a tax, a doubled renewal free, pure and simple.
This reminds me of the brouhaha over extending toll-free area codes. When 888 and 877 were introduced, marketing companies scrambled to sell existing 800 customers the 888 and 877 versions of their numbers "to prevent consumer confusion". In reality, this little land rush reduced the value of 888/877, because it occupied namespace that was supposed to be available for expansion.
In a similar vein, when a company registers theirname.biz alongside theirname.com, theirname.net, theirname.org, theirname.tv, etc. ad infinitum (or perhaps ad nauseum), they have essentially reduced the number of TLDs to one. What was intended to be a larger namespace becomes a simple alternate spelling of the.com-space. Nothing is gained, other than lining the pockets of the registrars.
<aside> Marketers don't get it right very often, either. NetSol recently spammed me with a pitch to buy the.net and.org versions of my.com domain name, even though both were already taken and both were registered by NetSol! </aside>
We should make sure that content creators are paid what THEY expect to be paid for their work, or NOT enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Since you put it that way...
We should offer what we think the content is worth. If the offer is turned down, we should not be tasting of the fruits of their labor.
I don't know about you, but I think CDs and videos are overpriced. And we all know that the majority of the revenues go not to the content creators, but to the intermediaries. What we need is a way to directly compensate content creators, bypassing (and making obsolete) the intermediaries. It won't make the thieves disappear, but it will benefit the real artists a lot more.
By inserting the tag, you are interfering with my fair use rights.
Bah! By inserting that tag, I'm suggesting to your browser that I don't want extra cruft overlaid on my pages. You're free to ignore it, unlike encrypted content that seeks to abridge fair use.
If I were more cynical, I might suggest that your desire to control my content is less than ethical. Good thing I'm not.
I can deface your site all day long, as long as it's for my own personal use.
It's unethical to block ads. Don't like them? Don't visit sites that use them. Else, you are stealing.
Blocking ads is exactly the same as inserting ads, from a conceptual viewpoint. I, too, can change anything, so long as I don't redistribute it.
My VCR automatically marks commercials when I record off-air programs, and skips them on playback. Am I stealing? I throw away snail-mail advertisements unopened, too.
If you want SmartTags, use a browser that ignores the metatag and inserts them anyway. But don't attempt to coerce me into changing the content of my site.
To paraphrase: What I do within my own web server is absolutely, positively none of your business.
1. In response to the PFY's "melpyoo", I say I need a CMOS backup battery... the jumper-cable style. He replies, "CMOS battery? Er, we got lithium batteries..."
2. As I'm looking for a battery for my calculator, the salesdroid asks if he can "help". I ask to see the battery cross-reference book. He cops an attitude and insists that there is no such thing as a battery cross-reference book. I insist that there is. He demands to know if I've ever actually seen one, and if so, where. I tell him I saw one at the last RatShack I visited... "the one to which I'm returning now!"
Y'know, I've just finished installing Win98 on about a dozen machines at work. And on every one of them, I had to go through that stoopid Internet Connection Wizard, which forces me to install a modem before I can even get to the screen that allows me to choose LAN as a connection option. (never mind that none of these machines even have modems)
Of course, for me it's second nature by now (just as I know to install at least a loopback device under NT4, so the machine will be able to network in the future). But I still have to deal with the less clued folks who get confused. Gh0d help me if/when we have to roll out XP. (then again, my boss was ranting about the licensing jihad the other day, and said something like "Tell them to bugger off... we're installing Linux on all our machines.")
Oh, yeah, the PCjr... I had a job in 1990 where a Jr was in use running a calibration bench for encoding altimiters. I upgraded the bench to do automated RS-232 port switching for the 8 bays, and wrote a front end for the Jr to handle collecting the calibration tables.
Important Safety Tip: don't try floating-point math. The Borland FP emu code would crash the Jr.
The danger, as I see it, is that a company may start to see fines as a source of income, rather than as a tool to discourage undesirable actions.
In much the same way as some municipalities do? Or have you never happened across an inexplicably low speed limit as you passed through some small town's city limits on a rural highway?
The browser is a major development expenditure, for which there is no real revenue stream. A "loss leader", as it were. Looks like Netscape is trying to stanch the cash hemmorage.
I'll grant that, but for the more than casual music listener, radio's usability has dropped to essentially zero.
As previously ranted (sans link; how do you search the archived stuff, anyway?), I live in a city dominated by Clear Channel and Capital Cities radio properties. There's only one AAA station, and they're now aiming downmarket to catch the kiddies. The AAA genre, in general, has been the last bastion of progressive radio. But, as shown in this article on the Gavin site, AAA programmers are intentionally abandoning their progressive listeners to move their focus to the low end of their demographic. We're now referred to as "heritage listeners".
Of course, the net helps. But it complicates my life, as I need to record the Radio Paradise stream and burn it to CDR so I can have some decent music in my vehicle. (and, of course, I can't find a stream recorder that will just do 30-min chunks repeatedly)
I'm a realist, and I understand that radio has passed on. Doesn't mean I don't miss it.
Hundreds of the Payphone 2000 model, with a CRT and what was supposed to be text and videotext access to data
services, have been in airports and such for years now. As far as I know, AT+T never got around to activating any of the data
services involving the screen. It ended up just being an expensive way of presenting a menu for choosing payment method.
10 years ago (yes, 1991), I used one of these in LAX to check my email on my box in Minneapolis. I thought it was very cool. A few months later, the service was discontinued because it wasn't tarriffed. The FCC said companies providing transport could not provide content. My, how things have changed...
Radio stations are poor in general.
on
"Not a Mini-Spy"
·
· Score: 1
Most of the interest is not
from the sales department, but from the talent (meaning DJs) who need to make sure they still matter in the world.
Well, then, the stations can save their money. Talent doesn't matter. With few exceptions, today's air talent is 99.44% scripted, and playing a 100% predetermined playlist. (exceptions would include some "morning crew" shows and the 4 stations not yet owned by Clear Channel)
My unscientific survey of several bar buddies shows that 92% of the American public doesn't even know the noms de plume of the air talent they "listen" to, unless they're part of a "morning crew" format. Even then, they only know the name of the headliner personality. And all they remember from this morning's show are the penis jokes.
In the U.S., commercial radio has become a hideous parody of what it once was.
Typing over the songtitles and posting them on my website... Copyright infringement? You tell me.
Pretty sure not. While the lyrics of a song are copyrighted, the title is not. The memorable case (for me, a certified geezer) was ca. 1975. The Spinners released a song titled "Games People Play", which made a moderate hit. Lawyers for Joe South sued and lost, but The Spinners voluntarily changed the title to "They just can't stop it (the games people play)" to avoid hassle.
Later, in 1979, the Alan Parsons Project had a hit with another song entitled "Games People Play". No lawsuit that time.
Likewise, band names are not subject to copyright, though they may be trademarked, as done by the New Riders of the Purple Sage(tm).
But this is the Recording Industry Association of America, not the Recording Artist's
Association of America. RIAA exists to protect the recording studios primarily, and as a side effect, it sort of protects the
companies' artists - from everyone except the companies themselves, that is.
Spot on! It's important to remember that industries produce product. Mass-distributed music is a commodity, in much the same way DRAM is. But while DRAM has a wide distribution base, and has naturally sought a market-determined valuation (i.e. it's become pretty damn cheap), mass-music is controlled by a chokepoint of 5 companies in collusion. Thus the value stays artificially inflated through the artificial scarcity created by the distribution model.
We, the listeners and "consumers" of music, suffer. Where I live, the top 19 FM radio properties are owned by 3 companies. (Infinity owns one, the rest are split between Capital Cities and Clear Channel) The situation has degenerated to the point that I simply cannot listen to radio anymore. There are only 4 stations that aren't explicitly oldies or c&w. And of those 4, 3 are Urban Pop and the fourth plays 80% old material while screaming that it's committed to "new music, new names".
It's not a coincidence that the lead singer for Coldplay sound like Dave Matthews. It's not chance that the recent Train single sounds like Hootie and the Blowfish (albeit with a full string section... ish!).
It's gotten so bad that I was actually going to write a (paper) letter to the PD of the last remaining listenable station. Only, in web-searching for her name, I turned up an interview on the Gavin site where she was discussing the consequences of aiming "downmarket" in the station's demographic. She shrugged off the upmarket attrition as a natural consequence. It left me seething.
Triple-A stations are all aiming for post-teeners. There are no more progressive stations. Listeners like me are completely disenfranchised and the industry simply doesn't care.
</rant>
Sorry... this has been pissing me off for a while, and I just had to get it out.
Even more scary: my boss (a reasonably tech-savvy guy) once had me update a page on our company website. When I pulled up the new page for his inspection, he asked me how I stopped the WWW to update it!
ie we'll have motherboards with PCI replacement
slots, PCI slots, and ISA slots, rather than just PCI and ISA slots as now;)
Mobos with ISA slots are getting harder to find. I'm seeing this in the industrial controls sector, where there a lot of ISA-based DATAC and control boards. There are also a lot of machine builders that bought into the soft-PC control hype of the past few years and designed around commodity PCs.
These guys are crying now... the commodity suppliers have all but dropped ISA. They have to move to industrial PCs or redesign for PCI-based DATAC and control (if they can find it; many controls components are just now becoming available in PCI). And of course, the industrial components are more bucks than the commodity stuff, which bites into their margin (which they had kept small to get a lowball price on the end product).
Personally, I never liked the idea of using commodity PCs for industrial applications in the first place, but those bean counters have a lot of influence in the engineering process. Note to the cognoscenti: I'm not talking about computer-related business here, but about stuff like big industrial machines. The people designing in this sector are surprisingly low-tech, in my experience.
Slashdot Mirror
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
So I guess they're giving credit... just not anywhere in the UI.
No doubt. But the escrow databases are also a sweet target. There is no non-problematic way to institute GAK.
An alternative to direct key escrow is the system used by Lotus Notes for their export versions a while back. Known as a "Work Factor Reduction Field", it's some fractional part of the key (Lotus used 24 of the 64 bits in their keys), encrypted with a system-wide key (usually half of an asymmetric key pair) and included in the transmission. Taken to an extreme, this could be the full session key, encrypted (ala Clipper). The main drawback is that you lose the requirement for several agencies to cooperate before an escrowed key can be recovered. Any agency with access to the systemwide private key could recover any crypted transmission. A policy to split-escrow the systemwide private key obviously fails after the first legitimate recovery order, since there's no way to prevent the recovery agency from retaining a copy of the master key. (this assumes the master key wasn't clandestinely retained before being split for escrow in the first place)
In a similar vein, when a company registers theirname.biz alongside theirname.com, theirname.net, theirname.org, theirname.tv, etc. ad infinitum (or perhaps ad nauseum), they have essentially reduced the number of TLDs to one. What was intended to be a larger namespace becomes a simple alternate spelling of the .com-space. Nothing is gained, other than lining the pockets of the registrars.
<aside> .net and .org versions of my .com domain name, even though both were already taken and both were registered by NetSol!
Marketers don't get it right very often, either. NetSol recently spammed me with a pitch to buy the
</aside>
Contribution policy:
Don't want money.
Got money.
Want admiration.
We should offer what we think the content is worth. If the offer is turned down, we should not be tasting of the fruits of their labor.
I don't know about you, but I think CDs and videos are overpriced. And we all know that the majority of the revenues go not to the content creators, but to the intermediaries. What we need is a way to directly compensate content creators, bypassing (and making obsolete) the intermediaries. It won't make the thieves disappear, but it will benefit the real artists a lot more.
Bah! By inserting that tag, I'm suggesting to your browser that I don't want extra cruft overlaid on my pages. You're free to ignore it, unlike encrypted content that seeks to abridge fair use.
If I were more cynical, I might suggest that your desire to control my content is less than ethical. Good thing I'm not.
- I can deface your site all day long, as long as it's for my own personal use.
- It's unethical to block ads. Don't like them? Don't visit sites that use them. Else, you are stealing.
Blocking ads is exactly the same as inserting ads, from a conceptual viewpoint. I, too, can change anything, so long as I don't redistribute it.My VCR automatically marks commercials when I record off-air programs, and skips them on playback. Am I stealing? I throw away snail-mail advertisements unopened, too.
If you want SmartTags, use a browser that ignores the metatag and inserts them anyway. But don't attempt to coerce me into changing the content of my site.
To paraphrase: What I do within my own web server is absolutely, positively none of your business.
2. As I'm looking for a battery for my calculator, the salesdroid asks if he can "help". I ask to see the battery cross-reference book. He cops an attitude and insists that there is no such thing as a battery cross-reference book. I insist that there is. He demands to know if I've ever actually seen one, and if so, where. I tell him I saw one at the last RatShack I visited... "the one to which I'm returning now!"
I've given up on RatShack.
ROT-13 to send me email
Of course, for me it's second nature by now (just as I know to install at least a loopback device under NT4, so the machine will be able to network in the future). But I still have to deal with the less clued folks who get confused. Gh0d help me if/when we have to roll out XP. (then again, my boss was ranting about the licensing jihad the other day, and said something like "Tell them to bugger off... we're installing Linux on all our machines.")
Now, if he only carries through with that...
ROT-13 to send me email
Important Safety Tip: don't try floating-point math. The Borland FP emu code would crash the Jr.
ROT-13 to send me email
ROT-13 to send me email
ROT-13 to send me email
The Cerf Cube price has been cut to $299 until 7/13/01. That brings the cost/coolness ratio under my limit. Mine should be here Monday.
The browser is a major development expenditure, for which there is no real revenue stream. A "loss leader", as it were. Looks like Netscape is trying to stanch the cash hemmorage.
As previously ranted (sans link; how do you search the archived stuff, anyway?), I live in a city dominated by Clear Channel and Capital Cities radio properties. There's only one AAA station, and they're now aiming downmarket to catch the kiddies. The AAA genre, in general, has been the last bastion of progressive radio. But, as shown in this article on the Gavin site, AAA programmers are intentionally abandoning their progressive listeners to move their focus to the low end of their demographic. We're now referred to as "heritage listeners".
Of course, the net helps. But it complicates my life, as I need to record the Radio Paradise stream and burn it to CDR so I can have some decent music in my vehicle. (and, of course, I can't find a stream recorder that will just do 30-min chunks repeatedly)
I'm a realist, and I understand that radio has passed on. Doesn't mean I don't miss it.
My unscientific survey of several bar buddies shows that 92% of the American public doesn't even know the noms de plume of the air talent they "listen" to, unless they're part of a "morning crew" format. Even then, they only know the name of the headliner personality. And all they remember from this morning's show are the penis jokes.
In the U.S., commercial radio has become a hideous parody of what it once was.
Later, in 1979, the Alan Parsons Project had a hit with another song entitled "Games People Play". No lawsuit that time.
Likewise, band names are not subject to copyright, though they may be trademarked, as done by the New Riders of the Purple Sage(tm).
We, the listeners and "consumers" of music, suffer. Where I live, the top 19 FM radio properties are owned by 3 companies. (Infinity owns one, the rest are split between Capital Cities and Clear Channel) The situation has degenerated to the point that I simply cannot listen to radio anymore. There are only 4 stations that aren't explicitly oldies or c&w. And of those 4, 3 are Urban Pop and the fourth plays 80% old material while screaming that it's committed to "new music, new names".
It's not a coincidence that the lead singer for Coldplay sound like Dave Matthews. It's not chance that the recent Train single sounds like Hootie and the Blowfish (albeit with a full string section... ish!).
It's gotten so bad that I was actually going to write a (paper) letter to the PD of the last remaining listenable station. Only, in web-searching for her name, I turned up an interview on the Gavin site where she was discussing the consequences of aiming "downmarket" in the station's demographic. She shrugged off the upmarket attrition as a natural consequence. It left me seething.
Triple-A stations are all aiming for post-teeners. There are no more progressive stations. Listeners like me are completely disenfranchised and the industry simply doesn't care.
</rant>
Sorry... this has been pissing me off for a while, and I just had to get it out.
This is obviously a usage of the word "fun" with which I was not previously familiar.
"Last orders, please!"
"I am not making this up!"
These guys are crying now... the commodity suppliers have all but dropped ISA. They have to move to industrial PCs or redesign for PCI-based DATAC and control (if they can find it; many controls components are just now becoming available in PCI). And of course, the industrial components are more bucks than the commodity stuff, which bites into their margin (which they had kept small to get a lowball price on the end product).
Personally, I never liked the idea of using commodity PCs for industrial applications in the first place, but those bean counters have a lot of influence in the engineering process. Note to the cognoscenti: I'm not talking about computer-related business here, but about stuff like big industrial machines. The people designing in this sector are surprisingly low-tech, in my experience.