>>sending spam would be just as illegal, no matter where the server is
>So, what are you gonna do? Send the bill to many goverments? Say they are parts of "the evil axe" and apply sacntions to them?
Here is my theory about how the same article appears on slashdot multiple times.
First, the article appears on slashdot. It is very interesting.
Because the article appears on slashdot, it then appears elsewhere like CNet, CNN, etc. (Please no flames for beginning a sentence with a conjunction.)
Now that the news item, especially one like this, appears everywhere, now even the BBC, it gets noticed by editors, submitted, and accpeted in an expidited manner, because an editor submits it the second (third, fourth) time.
It is the user agent string. If your browser sends a certian user-agent string when you click the parent post's link you will get a goatse link instead of link to the new york times article.
Type the following....
netcat images.org.lu 80 GET http://images.org.lu/net-ass.html HTTP/1.0 User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
The server will return some javascript to load this url
http://198.247.175.96/goat/hello.jpg
which is the goatse link, and will also try to prevent you from closing the browser window.
But if your browser doesn't send any user agent string, (or if it sends the Mozilla user agent string), then you instead get back an http 302 redirecting you to the NYT article.
I remember back in the 70's, the Popular Electronics magazine giving details of how to listen in on various space shots. (I think various Skylab related activities.) They specifically noted that in the US you could listen in, but couldn't necessarily disclose to anyone else what you heard.
You do not require a license to recieve or "interpret" any radio energy, at least in the US.
That was true for many years, but no more. Some few years ago it became illegal to sell scanners or any type of equipment that could listen to analog cell phones. Remember that? There are all sorts of illegal mods on usenet for various RatShack scanners so you could go ahead and listen to an artificially blocked range of frequencies.
Congresscritter: Oh my God! This affects ME! We must pass a law to prevent them from listening to our unencrypted simple analog broadcasts! There. Now we can feel safe about our scandalous activities not being discovered due to our cell phone usage.
The Saturn V was designed for super-orbital travel (i.e., going to the moon). It would be somewhat wasteful to use it in the Shuttle's role of placing payload into low earth orbit.
It wouldn't be wasteful if it is cheaper to launch, and could put signifantly heavier payloads into LEO.
But that still leaves all the spammers who are selling legitimate products (such as all that refinancing crap, I suppose that could be real)
It is real. But it is not called "refinancing crap", it is called "foreclosure crap".
Don't you see the multi-million dollar commercials on TV offering incredible mortgages? They'll give you a loan for 125 % of the value of your property! But only if you have bad credit history. No big stack of paperwork. Just a few papers to sign with some microscopic print. (Dynamite comes in small packages!) You can get pre-approved over the phone. etc., etc.
The business model might be something like this...
Offer easy to get loans to people with bad credit history. People don't read the fine print.
???
People default on the loan. Maybe just problems with one payment.
Profit !!! (Or I mean: Foreclose!!!)
Foreclose and get the equity in their house, or some portion thereof. Now they have less money, and worse credit history. So they go to another easy to get refinancing scheeme.
while True { Lather(), Rinse() };
At least, this is my theory on how these work. A big enough percentage must result in foreclosures to make it very profitable. You know the old saying about something that sounds too good to be true.
There is probably a reason that there are few mosdest hoops to jump through to get a mortgage at a real bank. (Although it is really not that difficult.)
This business model is just speculation on my part. But I am somewhat suspicious of refinancing my home based on an offer I received through a spamvertisement. Of cousre, perhaps this says something about the brain power of those who respond to spam?
Wouldn't a better solution be to forbid Windows from shipping Java at all? That why we can be sure that it CANNOT be b0rked by Billy Boy.
The judge was trying to be fair. He didn't want to allow Microsoft to profit from their illegal behavior.
Your solution (require MS to NOT ship Java ever, at all) might be reasonable if in addition the judge required Microsoft to NEVER EVER ship a.Net/C#/CLR virtual machine either. That way Microsoft still doesn't have an unfair advantage. If you have to download a Java VM, you might also find yourself needing to download a CLR VM. If third party developers have to go to the trouble to include a JRE because they cannot assume it is in the OS, then they should likewise not be able to assume that Microsoft's CLR virtual machine is there either.
Knowing Microsoft, that could mean it is in one of those 'extras' folders buried somewhere on the disc. Never installed unless the user digs around to find it!
Microsoft had better be careful here or they could find themselves on the wrong side of a contempt of court finding. The judge would be able to compell Microsoft to carry out his orders. It would be interesting to dream of the means by which the judge could do this. Huge daily fines. And I mean huge enough to bankrupt Microsoft if they didn't comply within a short time.
I seem to recall a finding against a pilots union a few years back, it was a national headline news item. The pilots union was found to be illegal in its striking behavior in order to bankrupt the airline, shut it down, and cause untold problems for travelers. It wasn't really a strike, but was something like all of the pilots calling in sick. The judge said that he would begin fining the pilots union $10 million per day until the pilots returned to work. He said that the assets of the pilots union would soon fit into a small bag in the overhead compartment of a Cessna.
SO if you don't use java at all, you will still be required to download and in stall it if you want the latest security patches in the newest SP.
If you don't like this, then you should thank Microsoft for bringing this on themselves through their own illegal behavior. Don't blame the court for trying to fix it.
What would happen if Microsoft simply didn't ship it? If it's something as trivial as a fine then they could easily not bother.
Judge: I find Microsoft in contempt of court and order them to pay $500 million dollars per day until Java is shipped in Windows as previously ordered.
And just in case you're wondering, this sanction would get collected by the court.
MS-bashers are quick to point out shortcomings in the OS, but never seem to notice the Good Things (tm) that make it popular.
Popular?
By what measure is it popular? Because so many people choose it?
Windows has many good things in it. These are typically the good things that competitors had years before Microsoft, back when there was anything resembling any kind competition. Now Microsoft has tons of money to pour into development to make a great product. But there is no competition. So how do we know that Microsoft is so great compared to where the competition would be if there were any? Microsoft's product is so great compared to what? New competitors that are trying to play catchup? (But doing a darned good job of it.)
A list of numbers with any creativity is copyrightable. Seeing one of those numbers somewhere else does not copyright infringement make. Some criteria that a Judge uses to decide if copyright infringement has occured are: (1) how much of the work was copied, and perhaps more importantly, (2) how significantly would the copying affect the marketability or economic value of the original copyrighted work. There are a couple other criteria as well. But focusing on criteria 2, I could copy only a tiny portion of a large article, but it could be copyright infringement if that were the "heart" of the work, or significantly affected the marketability of the work. I suspect your list of numbers (especially credit card numbers) has very little marketable value.
Second point, just because you have an original work of authorship, in which you have a copyright interest, doesn't mean you have other problems. Copyright is not an absolute right to say anything. Your hypothetical list of credit card numbers might, for instance, fall afoul of some law. A copyrighted compilation of classified state secrets might land you in trouble. A copyrighted threat on the president's life would certianly get one into some trouble.
Here is how I understand the garage door opener case. Chamberlain makes a garage door opener that uses a rolling code system. (The code changes each time.) What happens if I am at McDonalds and push the button on my remote? The remote and the opener are now out of synch. The system implements some huge back-door resynch mechanism to fix this. This mechanism is how the third party was able to make a compatible remote. If the third party had indeed made use of a copyrighted list, there could possibly be a copyright infringement. Apparently there was no copyright infringement. So how can this be a DMCA case? That is the big question? Similarly, how can other insane cases be genuine DMCA cases? You don't have a DMCA case unless an actual copyright infrinigement has first occured. (Other things, like circumvention are also necessary to become a DMCA case.) Did the clone printer ink refill company actually infringe any copyright? Did FatWallet actually infringe any copyright in publishing sale prices? (Sale prices are facts.)
The fact that ANY digitally represented work can ALSO be represented as a natural number is what has made many of us wonder about the concept of assigning 'ownership' to them at all.
A very interesting take indeed. I was talking about lists of numbers. But any digital work can be represented as a single long bitstring, which is a (very large) integer.
The real trick is knowing which integers are useful. If you look at integers within a certian (large) size range, there are probably very few such integers that are directly viewable in, say, a DVD player, or integers that are bootable on a modern PC. And I thought Carmichael numbers were rare! Let's have a new class of numbers for mathematicians and call them "DVD" numbers.
3.1415926535 897............ad nauseam....
That might look like Pi, but it's not. It is a creative, unique list of numbers.
(C) 2003 LineNoiz. All Rights Reserved.
Don't use the numbers in this list, or I'll DMCA your ass!
The DMCA would only apply if you used a copy protection device to prevent access, and someone circumvented that protection. Merely using the numbers in the list, is an old-fashioned, pre-DMCA copyright infringement.
Quoting small excerpts of the list, for certian purposes, such as this, is fair use, specifically spelled out in the copyright act itself. If the list really were PI, then it is not copyrightable, because it would be a mere fact, like someone's telephone number.
Not to the parent poster, but in general: Has anyone on/. ever actually read the copyright act? Way back in the late 80's, at my employer of the day, several of the senior engineers decided that we should read the copyright act in order to understand it. It is pretty plan english.
Okay, maybe not the same, but a list of numbers is copyrightable.
A list of numbers is a work of authorship if it has any creativity at all. As one counterexample, a phone book is not a work of authorship because the mere facts it represents (not how they might be layed out in a particular book) are devoid of any creativity at all. If I make up a list of numbers, I could copyright it. That is, I could register the copyright. Actual copyright exists at the moment of creation. Not that the copyright might have much value to anyone.
Back to the original point. A list of numbers in a garage door opener system is certianly a work of authorship. The portion of the post I responded to said "...too bad lists of numbers can't be copyrighted...". My response is that in fact they can. Lists of numbers are a work of authorship unless they are devoid of any creativity whatsoever, such as 1, 2, 3, 4.... Some lists of numbers might be more valuable than others. I'll stay away from encoding as a list of numbers some other work of authorship.
I probably could devise a Pop Quiz question involving a list of numbers. The entire question, and the list of numbers are a work of authorship.
A list of numbers (unless devoid of creativity) is certianly a work of authorship and has copyright protection. Even the creativity of a moron counts. By this standard, the hypothetical list of numbers in a system are certianly entitled to copyright protection.
(Aside: I'm not suggesting that any actual copyright infringement occured however, based on how I understand the "infringing" door opener to work.)
I'd like to see IDE hard drives that encrypt every sector -- but done in the drive's electronics.
Before the drive can be used, the mainboard (bios?) must first issue an ide command to set the key that the drive used for reading/writing each sector.
WIth a properly configured bios, the bios could ask you for the key during power on self test.
You run your computer off a UPS. If the bad guys are going to serve a warrant, raid you and steal your gear, they might first cut the power to prevent you from inserting a linux "reformt-the-drive" floppy and punching reset. The UPS helps against this.
But even if you can't get the drive reformatted, and the bad guys attach your drive to one of those drive copying gizmos to collect evidence, all they get is encrypted blocks. Or better, if the drive electronics detects an attempt to do this, massive sequential copying of blocks, but without first having issued the decryption key command, then the drive electronics could simultaneously return random bytes to through the ide interface to the copying gizmo while actually overwriting the corresponding sector on the drive with different random data.
Another way to look at this from the point of view of the drive electronics is that if the drive is powered up, and very much access is attempted without the decryption key command, then the drive can assume that it is NOT physically in the good guy's computer where it belongs.
While the technique described here is also good to prevent data mining of your hard drive, it is most useful in preventing data mining by the bad guys who might steal your drive for evidence.
Trolls, got too much time on your hands? Here is an idea to get your rocks off. Build a small Linux distribution CD that "erases" a hard drive by filling it with...
Pr0n
Convincing evidence of some popular conspiracy theory
Fake contrived evidence of some crime (say, a murder)
...anything else you can think of to yank someone's chain
Funny, I thought the DMCA was only for circumventing security measures for "copyrighted works". Can anyone clarify this?
Let me see if I can make this more clear. Company A does not like competition from company B. What company B did makes company A look bad. Big money can be had. So let's use our new toy, the wonderful universal do-anything tool... The DMCA. It slices, it dices, it is so versatile.
Summary: big money is involved. Therefore the DMCA can be used to do anything. What the original motivation for the law was, or the letter of the law is, is irrelevant. Is that any more clear?
Slashdot Mirror
Such legislation would indeed be very popular. It would also be unconstitutional, as per the first amendment.
Bzzzzt. Wrong. Spammers enjoy all the free speech rights of everyone else. Go ahead. Exercise your right to free speech -- somewhere outside my inbox.
>>sending spam would be just as illegal, no matter where the server is
>So, what are you gonna do? Send the bill to many goverments? Say they are parts of "the evil axe" and apply sacntions to them?
Get real. We live in the real world.
A much more realistic solution is to drop bombs.
Or let them sign up for the Windows source code.
and we all know that everything on the Internet is true
Especially when it is a spam!
Insightful: +1
If you can get there on a segway, you could ride a bicycle or you could WALK
Or you could drive an SUV.
Here is my theory about how the same article appears on slashdot multiple times.
First, the article appears on slashdot. It is very interesting.
Because the article appears on slashdot, it then appears elsewhere like CNet, CNN, etc. (Please no flames for beginning a sentence with a conjunction.)
Now that the news item, especially one like this, appears everywhere, now even the BBC, it gets noticed by editors, submitted, and accpeted in an expidited manner, because an editor submits it the second (third, fourth) time.
However, this is purely speculative on my part.
Type the following....
The server will return some javascript to load this url
http://198.247.175.96/goat/hello.jpg
which is the goatse link, and will also try to prevent you from closing the browser window.
But if your browser doesn't send any user agent string, (or if it sends the Mozilla user agent string), then you instead get back an http 302 redirecting you to the NYT article.
I can't yet figure out under exactly what conditions, but sometimes the parent post's link gives you a Goatse link.
. html?ex=1043557200&en=feead5560491c953&ei=5062&par tner=GOOGLE
I'm beginning to think it is if you use IE on Windows. But it may be just some random percentage of the time.
If I use netcat from a close by Linux to retrieve...
http://www.shorl.com/gabrihafaseme
then get a nice legit link to the new york times article...
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/18/business/18SOFT
If I click it from Mozilla (on Win XP), then I also directly get the NYT article.
The parent post is a goatse link disguised as an msnbc link.
o rl.com/gabrihafaseme
. html?ex=1043557200&en=feead5560491c953&ei=5062&par tner=GOOGLE
The link is as follows...
http://g.msnbc.com/0ADP%0A/sfdgsf.1?http://www.sh
Apparently, if you make a link of the form....
http://g.msnbc.com?http://www.cnn.com
Then you will get an HTTP 302 Object Moved, redirecting you to the second url, in this example http://www.cnn.com.
In the above, the http://www.shorl.com/gabrihafaseme link, gives another 302, which then redirects your browser to...
http://images.org.lu/net-ass.html
Which returns yet another 302, sending you to...
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/18/business/18SOFT
But wait, this can't be right. So somewhere, I've gotten off the track, and don't see how this leads to the goatse link.
Worse, the goatse link makes an effort to prevent you from closing the browser window.
The parent post is a Goatse link.
One more thing. (Replying to my own reply :-)
I remember back in the 70's, the Popular Electronics magazine giving details of how to listen in on various space shots. (I think various Skylab related activities.) They specifically noted that in the US you could listen in, but couldn't necessarily disclose to anyone else what you heard.
You do not require a license to recieve or "interpret" any radio energy, at least in the US.
That was true for many years, but no more. Some few years ago it became illegal to sell scanners or any type of equipment that could listen to analog cell phones. Remember that? There are all sorts of illegal mods on usenet for various RatShack scanners so you could go ahead and listen to an artificially blocked range of frequencies.
Congresscritter: Oh my God! This affects ME! We must pass a law to prevent them from listening to our unencrypted simple analog broadcasts! There. Now we can feel safe about our scandalous activities not being discovered due to our cell phone usage.
The Saturn V was designed for super-orbital travel (i.e., going to the moon). It would be somewhat wasteful to use it in the Shuttle's role of placing payload into low earth orbit.
It wouldn't be wasteful if it is cheaper to launch, and could put signifantly heavier payloads into LEO.
It is real. But it is not called "refinancing crap", it is called "foreclosure crap".
Don't you see the multi-million dollar commercials on TV offering incredible mortgages? They'll give you a loan for 125 % of the value of your property! But only if you have bad credit history. No big stack of paperwork. Just a few papers to sign with some microscopic print. (Dynamite comes in small packages!) You can get pre-approved over the phone. etc., etc.
The business model might be something like this...
- Offer easy to get loans to people with bad credit history. People don't read the fine print.
- ???
- People default on the loan. Maybe just problems with one payment.
- Profit !!! (Or I mean: Foreclose!!!)
Foreclose and get the equity in their house, or some portion thereof. Now they have less money, and worse credit history. So they go to another easy to get refinancing scheeme.while True { Lather(), Rinse() };
At least, this is my theory on how these work. A big enough percentage must result in foreclosures to make it very profitable. You know the old saying about something that sounds too good to be true.
There is probably a reason that there are few mosdest hoops to jump through to get a mortgage at a real bank. (Although it is really not that difficult.)
This business model is just speculation on my part. But I am somewhat suspicious of refinancing my home based on an offer I received through a spamvertisement. Of cousre, perhaps this says something about the brain power of those who respond to spam?
Wouldn't a better solution be to forbid Windows from shipping Java at all? That why we can be sure that it CANNOT be b0rked by Billy Boy.
.Net/C#/CLR virtual machine either. That way Microsoft still doesn't have an unfair advantage. If you have to download a Java VM, you might also find yourself needing to download a CLR VM. If third party developers have to go to the trouble to include a JRE because they cannot assume it is in the OS, then they should likewise not be able to assume that Microsoft's CLR virtual machine is there either.
The judge was trying to be fair. He didn't want to allow Microsoft to profit from their illegal behavior.
Your solution (require MS to NOT ship Java ever, at all) might be reasonable if in addition the judge required Microsoft to NEVER EVER ship a
Knowing Microsoft, that could mean it is in one of those 'extras' folders buried somewhere on the disc. Never installed unless the user digs around to find it!
Microsoft had better be careful here or they could find themselves on the wrong side of a contempt of court finding. The judge would be able to compell Microsoft to carry out his orders. It would be interesting to dream of the means by which the judge could do this. Huge daily fines. And I mean huge enough to bankrupt Microsoft if they didn't comply within a short time.
I seem to recall a finding against a pilots union a few years back, it was a national headline news item. The pilots union was found to be illegal in its striking behavior in order to bankrupt the airline, shut it down, and cause untold problems for travelers. It wasn't really a strike, but was something like all of the pilots calling in sick. The judge said that he would begin fining the pilots union $10 million per day until the pilots returned to work. He said that the assets of the pilots union would soon fit into a small bag in the overhead compartment of a Cessna.
SO if you don't use java at all, you will still be required to download and in stall it if you want the latest security patches in the newest SP.
If you don't like this, then you should thank Microsoft for bringing this on themselves through their own illegal behavior. Don't blame the court for trying to fix it.
What would happen if Microsoft simply didn't ship it? If it's something as trivial as a fine then they could easily not bother.
Judge: I find Microsoft in contempt of court and order them to pay $500 million dollars per day until Java is shipped in Windows as previously ordered.
And just in case you're wondering, this sanction would get collected by the court.
MS-bashers are quick to point out shortcomings in the OS, but never seem to notice the Good Things (tm) that make it popular.
Popular?
By what measure is it popular? Because so many people choose it?
Windows has many good things in it. These are typically the good things that competitors had years before Microsoft, back when there was anything resembling any kind competition. Now Microsoft has tons of money to pour into development to make a great product. But there is no competition. So how do we know that Microsoft is so great compared to where the competition would be if there were any? Microsoft's product is so great compared to what? New competitors that are trying to play catchup? (But doing a darned good job of it.)
A couple points.
A list of numbers with any creativity is copyrightable. Seeing one of those numbers somewhere else does not copyright infringement make. Some criteria that a Judge uses to decide if copyright infringement has occured are: (1) how much of the work was copied, and perhaps more importantly, (2) how significantly would the copying affect the marketability or economic value of the original copyrighted work. There are a couple other criteria as well. But focusing on criteria 2, I could copy only a tiny portion of a large article, but it could be copyright infringement if that were the "heart" of the work, or significantly affected the marketability of the work. I suspect your list of numbers (especially credit card numbers) has very little marketable value.
Second point, just because you have an original work of authorship, in which you have a copyright interest, doesn't mean you have other problems. Copyright is not an absolute right to say anything. Your hypothetical list of credit card numbers might, for instance, fall afoul of some law. A copyrighted compilation of classified state secrets might land you in trouble. A copyrighted threat on the president's life would certianly get one into some trouble.
Here is how I understand the garage door opener case. Chamberlain makes a garage door opener that uses a rolling code system. (The code changes each time.) What happens if I am at McDonalds and push the button on my remote? The remote and the opener are now out of synch. The system implements some huge back-door resynch mechanism to fix this. This mechanism is how the third party was able to make a compatible remote. If the third party had indeed made use of a copyrighted list, there could possibly be a copyright infringement. Apparently there was no copyright infringement. So how can this be a DMCA case? That is the big question? Similarly, how can other insane cases be genuine DMCA cases? You don't have a DMCA case unless an actual copyright infrinigement has first occured. (Other things, like circumvention are also necessary to become a DMCA case.) Did the clone printer ink refill company actually infringe any copyright? Did FatWallet actually infringe any copyright in publishing sale prices? (Sale prices are facts.)
The fact that ANY digitally represented work can ALSO be represented as a natural number is what has made many of us wonder about the concept of assigning 'ownership' to them at all.
A very interesting take indeed. I was talking about lists of numbers. But any digital work can be represented as a single long bitstring, which is a (very large) integer.
The real trick is knowing which integers are useful. If you look at integers within a certian (large) size range, there are probably very few such integers that are directly viewable in, say, a DVD player, or integers that are bootable on a modern PC. And I thought Carmichael numbers were rare! Let's have a new class of numbers for mathematicians and call them "DVD" numbers.
3.1415926535 897............ad nauseam....
/. ever actually read the copyright act? Way back in the late 80's, at my employer of the day, several of the senior engineers decided that we should read the copyright act in order to understand it. It is pretty plan english.
That might look like Pi, but it's not. It is a creative, unique list of numbers.
(C) 2003 LineNoiz. All Rights Reserved.
Don't use the numbers in this list, or I'll DMCA your ass!
The DMCA would only apply if you used a copy protection device to prevent access, and someone circumvented that protection. Merely using the numbers in the list, is an old-fashioned, pre-DMCA copyright infringement.
Quoting small excerpts of the list, for certian purposes, such as this, is fair use, specifically spelled out in the copyright act itself. If the list really were PI, then it is not copyrightable, because it would be a mere fact, like someone's telephone number.
Not to the parent poster, but in general: Has anyone on
Okay, maybe not the same, but a list of numbers is copyrightable.
A list of numbers is a work of authorship if it has any creativity at all. As one counterexample, a phone book is not a work of authorship because the mere facts it represents (not how they might be layed out in a particular book) are devoid of any creativity at all. If I make up a list of numbers, I could copyright it. That is, I could register the copyright. Actual copyright exists at the moment of creation. Not that the copyright might have much value to anyone.
Back to the original point. A list of numbers in a garage door opener system is certianly a work of authorship. The portion of the post I responded to said "...too bad lists of numbers can't be copyrighted...". My response is that in fact they can. Lists of numbers are a work of authorship unless they are devoid of any creativity whatsoever, such as 1, 2, 3, 4.... Some lists of numbers might be more valuable than others. I'll stay away from encoding as a list of numbers some other work of authorship.
I probably could devise a Pop Quiz question involving a list of numbers. The entire question, and the list of numbers are a work of authorship.
A list of numbers (unless devoid of creativity) is certianly a work of authorship and has copyright protection. Even the creativity of a moron counts. By this standard, the hypothetical list of numbers in a system are certianly entitled to copyright protection.
(Aside: I'm not suggesting that any actual copyright infringement occured however, based on how I understand the "infringing" door opener to work.)
I'd like to see IDE hard drives that encrypt every sector -- but done in the drive's electronics.
Before the drive can be used, the mainboard (bios?) must first issue an ide command to set the key that the drive used for reading/writing each sector.
WIth a properly configured bios, the bios could ask you for the key during power on self test.
You run your computer off a UPS. If the bad guys are going to serve a warrant, raid you and steal your gear, they might first cut the power to prevent you from inserting a linux "reformt-the-drive" floppy and punching reset. The UPS helps against this.
But even if you can't get the drive reformatted, and the bad guys attach your drive to one of those drive copying gizmos to collect evidence, all they get is encrypted blocks. Or better, if the drive electronics detects an attempt to do this, massive sequential copying of blocks, but without first having issued the decryption key command, then the drive electronics could simultaneously return random bytes to through the ide interface to the copying gizmo while actually overwriting the corresponding sector on the drive with different random data.
Another way to look at this from the point of view of the drive electronics is that if the drive is powered up, and very much access is attempted without the decryption key command, then the drive can assume that it is NOT physically in the good guy's computer where it belongs.
While the technique described here is also good to prevent data mining of your hard drive, it is most useful in preventing data mining by the bad guys who might steal your drive for evidence.
Funny, I thought the DMCA was only for circumventing security measures for "copyrighted works". Can anyone clarify this?
Let me see if I can make this more clear. Company A does not like competition from company B. What company B did makes company A look bad. Big money can be had. So let's use our new toy, the wonderful universal do-anything tool... The DMCA. It slices, it dices, it is so versatile.
Summary: big money is involved. Therefore the DMCA can be used to do anything. What the original motivation for the law was, or the letter of the law is, is irrelevant. Is that any more clear?