Nope. If all they wanted was to watch pirated movies, they'd download the VCD versions. Much smaller, and almost as good.
And bigtime DVD pirates don't care about this. They just presses duplicates of the disc with encryption intact.
The only people this helps are people who want to watch DVDs they already own on alternate platforms. (Or people who'd rather download a 9GB movie instead of a 650MB movie, then burn it onto 12 CDs and flip discs all the time... yeah, like that's a big group of people.)
Cracking the encryption doesn't mean as far as piracy goes until a 9GB download and 9GBs of drive space are so cheap as to not matter. Until then, it just lets us watch the movies we own the right to view. (That bit about the region coded has no legal force, so fuckem.)
But, they feared making it open because their bugs would be obvious. So they hid it hoping that nobody would look.
Even if it was open, they wouldn't have gotten any serious help. As Bruce Schneier says, nobody will waste their time helping test a proprietary scheme.
And if any hackers found bugs, they'd simply have waited until the system was finalized before pointing them out.
Even doing this in hardware would only have bought them a little time. Smart cards, designed to be uncrackable even with determined hardware hackers with millions of dollars at stake are proving to be fairly 'easy' to crack. And because the codes pretty well had to be static, you'd only need to crack one...
As was said in a previous message, no matter how strong it was, or how well protected, it would eventually be cracked because we can just watch it be done. Crypto relies on the premise that you can en/decrypt the message in a 'safe' place. PGP assumes that your PC is trojan free, or your super-safe messages could simply be screen-dumped. The same with DVD hardware... we could take it apart piece by piece, melting open the chips until we could apply hardware probes on critical gates and watch the execution.
If you make it harder, you only attract smarter hackers.
But, that would be overkill. Someone would get fired from a hardware company and would have given away the key. Nothing like this is ever secure for long.
The law is in place to punish people who break it, and award damages to those hurt by their actions.
If you pirate a movie, and get caught, then tough. You had it coming.
But, if you buy a DVD you should be able to use the information on that disc in any way that you see fit except for violating copyright by making and distributing copies.
There is no legal punishment for watching a movie outside of its coded region. Nor is there a law against watching movies in Linux. Or in writing software that will read bits off of a DVD and do something arbitrary (probably display them as a movie.)
Those things are not illegal. But the movie companies are trying to take away our ability to do those. Fuck em.
Nothing illegal was done on either side, but we don't have any obligation to do things their way.
They used trade secrets to make the product harder to use, all in the name of stopping piracy. Bullshit. They're primarily concerned with restricting viewing to certain regions so they can jack up prices with artificial scarcity.
They have the legal right to encrypt data. But we also have the legal right to decrypt that data. They're saying the law doesn't offer enough protection (whine, whine) and taking matters into their own hands, and they get upset when we take matters into our own hands.
This isn't a matter of copyright violation. If it was, they wouldn't harrass the author of the program, they'd simply stand back and let the FBI, or whatever regional authority step in and apply the appropriate legal penalty.
This *is* a matter of pissy overly-protected corporations who throw tantrums when the world doesn't work their way and start sending in the high-priced lawyers to blackmail people into submission.
I hope they get figuratively assraped by the whole thing. I was fairly neutral to the studios until this, but now they're up there with MS and Amazon, just another good-for-nothing company with too many lawyers and a monopoly based only on suing everyone who does it better.
But don't let yourself feel sorry for the jerks for a minute. They have all the legal protection they need against real criminals. This whole mess is about them blackmailing law-abiding folks.
Have a background, or a light overlay, of the kernel source (or, a small hunk of it.) Showing whatever graphics, maybe a busy X desktop with the GIMP and other 'neat' apps open, over a background of the source.
After all, the apps and stuff are all there because it's open source. Everything neat about GNU/Linux is because it's open source. So make the source a prominent part of the picture.
If it was done well, it would show up fairly well on the solid colors, and be lost in the details. Enough to let people see it and recognize it (oh, source code... good idea) without dominating the picture and annoying the PHBs.
IANAL, but if you change the registry keys you are modifying the software, which might not be allowed under copyright law (even if you don't copy or distribute the resulting derived work).
I can't see how they could prevent you from modifying your copy of their software. You're pretty free to do what you wish with the works that you own. I mean, you can buy a painting and paint over it, or cut out the parts you don't like. You can write in the margins of a book. But, I think they'd have trouble keeping you from modifying the registry, seeing as the registry is a configuration file. I'm sure the whole file is copyrighted, and to copy it would be a violation, but I don't see how they could keep you from changingit, as long as you didn't try to distribute that modified work. If you posted the whole modified registry, to crack Win2k, it would be a problem. But, if you published a.reg which when imported would 'fix' it, I can't see a problem. I'd say that registry keys can't be copyrighted, they're like page numbers. The information stored in them, or a collection of keys as an individual work (like a bible concordance) could be copyright, but the specific keys, or the keys not as presented in the work, shouldn't be copyrightable. And, publishing a.reg with fixes is just like a web page that says, open key x/x/x/x/x and change the value to y. etc. So unless microsoft starts shipping different binaries (which would be copyrighted) I'm still going to crack it. NT Workstation -> NT Server, Win2k lite -> Win2k Server Unlimited, etc.
It seems to me that while watermarking could be fairly resistant to unintentional audio manipulation, or uninformed attempts to destroy it, it should fall quite easily to a compotent attack.
It seems that watermarking should be a security-by-obscurity method, where if you knew the protocol by which the original was modified, you should be able to find where that code is stored in the source media, and remove, or scramble it.
By knowing where the data is stored, smaller changes should suffice to mask it then if you had to add whtie noise to the whole file in order to hope to kill the watermark.
Also, helping this, is that for any watermarking scheme to be effective, there has to be an easily available way to tell if a file is watermarked. For instance, in photoshop, loading a marked file produces a (c) symbol after the filename, and will display creator info. If you had to mail this file to the company to get an answer back, it would be so cumbersome that nobody would use it. This means that the watermark readers have to be visible, if only in binary form, to watch them work.
All systems that are watermarked and checked on client computers are as good as broken whenever someone compotent wants to try. Being that watermarking is the hiding of a secret key in a document, and that secret key can't be too secret, because you can watch it be generated (it is your computer, and you can use a debugger) you can also remove it, by applying the inverse of that secret key to the watermarked file.
This is complicated a bit by the fact that digital music watermarking could be done in secret, and with a key that we wouldn't know. As long as Sony music could send a copy of the MP3 to the marking company and have the key checked, it would satisfy their needs. And we're also prevented from using known-plaintext attacks unless someone gets an unmarked version of the song from pre-production, just before the watermarking.
But even this should be vulnerable. Even if we can't remove the watermark by applying the inverse, we could, if we knew how it was done, mask out just the relevant bits, and scramble the key beyond reading in a much more subtle way than by applying a strong white noise to the whole file.
The very fact that watermarks have to be robust also means that they can be found, if their format can be discovered, which makes them security by obscurity.
If watermarking was done in such a way that you could check if Company A owned the file by constructing a watermark for Company A, for that file, and then looking for it, it would be easier to hide. But, watermarking needs to be read without knowing the result, to see which company's mark is used, not simply to state if a known mark is there or not.
If the mark could not be read without knowing it, then more subtle ways of hiding the mark could be used that depended on the specific mark. (ie, if the first bit is 0, do this, else, if this, do that...) But, the mark must always be readable in a standard way. This means it has to be fairly easy to find. Sort of like using SYNC bytes on storage media to let you know where the data begins.
Once you know the format of the sync data, and can use that to find the specific areas that the watermark would change, even if you can't determine what the data was before being changed, you could write over it with random data, along with the sync data you used to find it, the hopefully rendering the watermark unreadable.
"Contracts arise when a duty does or may come into existence, because of a promise made by one of the parties. To be legally binding as a contract a promise must be exchanged for adequate consideration. Adequate consideration is a benefit or detriment which a party receives which reasonably and fairly induces them to make the promise/contract."
The EULA can't offer you anything because you've already got the software. To make the EULA valid, they'd have to do two things.
1) Offer you something (free support, discounts, etc) and
2) make it voluntary, so that you could use the software even if you disagreed.
I don't feel like searching for all the references, but some contracts can be implied. That is, you go into a store, walk around, pick up an item, take it to a cashier, hold out money, get change back, and leave the store. Even if no words are spoken, you have entered into a contract. The idea is that it's plainly obvious what you are doing, you're paying for ownership of that product. They make an implied offer by leaving something lying on a shelf with a price on it. You make the implied acceptance when you offer money for it.
If the store was going to impose any conditions on your use of that product, they'd have to tell you beforehand. This is similar to how you can't just add clauses to a contract after it's been signed and expect them to be binding.
I've never been in a store where I've been told about the EULA, let alone as anything I'm going to be bound by. And they don't open the box to let you see the shrinkwrap license, or run the software to read the EULA, so you can't be said to have consented to the contract because you didn't know it existed. You can't be bound to a contract you don't know about. In some circumstances, you can be bound by ones you didn't sign, such as for purchase of an item, but you can't be bound by one you didn't know about.
The whole practice of having EULAs in software is borderline illegal. It would be fraud to try to convince gullible people that they've entered into a contract without knowing it and thus owe you money, it's borderline to offer someone a non-binding contract and try to make them think it is binding.
Using EULAs like this is just as underhanded and dirty as patenting y2k fixes that have been in the books for years, then suing companies that can't afford to protect themselves.
I know you can't buy a standard computer from Comp USA and have it come with NT Server. I said "If you buy Win2k server in the store..." which means, if you buy Win2k, like walk down the isle, see the box, and pick is up...
The fact that you can return the product if you don't like the license doesn't matter. You've already entered into the only contract involved when you give the story money in exchange for the right (implied by the sale of said box of software without explicit notice otherwise) to use that software.
They *offer* you another contract later, but you aren't bound by it because 1) they can't legally restrict your right to use the product unless you've agreed to let them, and 2) they don't offer you anything as incentive for you to agree.
So, you can buy the cheap one, take it home, click 'I Agree', read about whatever registry hack is required, apply it, and have a fully legal copy of Win2k - Unlimited. MS may be able to deny you support because you've modified it outside of spec, but that's no great loss...
Sure, lawyers may disagree with what I've said. But, they get paid when they sue people. Not just when they win, but for every minute they spend on it. This gives them tremendous incentive to sue anyone they can.
And sure. They could financially break most companies if they wanted to. But then, they could sue you over anything, and as long as they kept going until you were broke, it wouldn't matter who the law actually supported.
But, that's a problem with our legal system. If you cave in to MS on this one, be sure to send your check to Amazon.com and all the other companies suing everyone for their fraudulently obtained patents, and every other company that resorts to legal-fee blackmail of one form or another.
Re:Which direction will nanotech go?
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Nanosystems
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· Score: 1
Perhaps. Some jobs seem to be perfect for autonomous large machines, just as some seem perfect for millions of tiny ones.
If you have to haul huge quantities of raw materials from one site to another, a long way away, a 'truck' would seem to make more sense than a conveyor belt. Especially since the truck would be immediately useful on a different route, where the belt would have to be moved. Also, a belt has to cover the whole distance, even if it's only in use 0.02% of the time. If you're using seperate machines, you just put less of them on the job and use them as their full, and most efficient, capacity.
Maybe there will be improvements to trucks, and not just in the engine/fuel, but in the general structure, but wheels are a pretty basic idea and seem pretty hard to improve on.
I can see a use for both. Why give each nanite the ability to travel hundreds of kilometers between jobsites when hundreds of millions can be carried at once, in one shipment. Large machines would probably also carry repair nanites, and larger scale bots, to fix any problems they encountered along the way.
It's as legal as using a highlighter in a book you bought.
If they're stupid enough to sell exactly the same product for five different roles, they shouldn't be suprised if people buy the cheap package.
They're just blackmailing jerks, hoping companies will decide it's not worth the risk of a frivolous lawsuit from MS costing them millions.
Can you imagine if a book company sold two versions of some required textbook, one hideously expensive one for students, and a cheaper one that everyone, except students was allowed to use...
If you buy Win2k server in the store, and don't have to sign a license agreement to do so, you can do whatever you want with it.
You can specifically twiddle with registry setting to remove annoying and arbitrary limits.
The EULA that is supposed to prevent this has *no* force because it's not a legal contract. You can answer 'I agree' without commiting to anything.
Why? Because if you say 'No', the software you own a license to use won't work. So you have to say 'I Agree'. But they don't offer you anything beyond the right to use the software you already paid, so you're not agreeing to a contract.
They're coercing you into accepting, and not offering any consideration.
It's not valid.
They're just doing what all the lame little companies using illegitimate patents to blackmail people are doing... Hoping you don't care to fight it in court.
Re:Which direction will nanotech go?
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Nanosystems
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· Score: 1
Well, that's what I meant when I posted that. You'd drop a few general purpose replicators which would make the rest of the machines. But the machines wouldn't all be small, because there are economies of scale, and not all the machines would be capable of self-duplication and other 'complex' tasks.
They were collecting the data for financial reasons. Perhaps not ones that could be used now, but they saw a market and tried to enter it. That market still exists. Companies *do* want to know what music you listen to, and how often.
They should have 1) offered a complete opt-out (like the patch) and 2) offered to pay those who opted in.
Most of the people in these threads were upset about the monitoring being secret, not that some company thought the information was worth something.
They should have two levels. 1) opt out 2) opt in anonymously - get some free CDs or coupons 3) opt in completely - get a lot more stuff.
The data is valuable to the music companies two ways. First, just knowing how much various CDs are played is valuable marketing data. Second, knowing WHO plays them, which demographic they're in, what else they bought, etc, is worth a LOT more.
I bet they'd get a lot of kids opting in if at the end of the year they could get $50 worth of CDs or computer games from an online store...
That would be the best of both worlds. Out-out for the paranoid, or just plain annoyed, and opt-in for the greedy.
Oh yeah, Quicktime, the proprietary player is just so cool. I mean, who cares about the fact that it's ugly, sucks CPU like a cheap whore, and is no better than mpeg for movies.
Or, maybe Radio Shack just decided to demand personal information, knowing that only a few people wouldn't choose to avoid the confrontation by just buckling in and giving their information.
Then they not only sell the information for mailing lists, but spam it with their own junk.
I personally assume (because they did send junk mail to the fake name I gave them at my address) that they use it for junk mail. No idea though, how all those other companies decided to send that same fake person junk mail. They must have been telepathic.
No, your other choice is to click 'I Agree' and then do whatever the hell you want.
The EULAs are *not* valid.
For a contract to be valid, both parties have to get something out of it (however minor, hence the cliche of $1...)
If you buy a software package, you have all rights except for those which violate the copyright. You don't have to accept a contract offering you those rights because you already paid for them at the store.
The only way the EULAs could be valid would be if they offered you something truly optional (ie, not affecting your ability to use the program if you decline) such as a free service contract, or something.
Not only that, but changing a program from a 5 user, to a 50 user license by using a binary patch or modifying registry settings, like for a web server or NAT/Firewall, doesn't violate any laws either. If you didn't sign a license agreement saying otherwise in the store before they let you buy it, then you have the right to modify it. Just like you could buy a piece of art and then take an exacto(tm) knife and make make any desired alterations.
This whole thing is a scam. It really should be illegal to use these legal scare tactics.
My answer to this is that it takes a certain level of proof for us to believe in something. If we would believe anything because it's possible, we'd be wandering around thinking we're brains in jars hooked up to some interesting VR equipment, etc.
I'm familiar with the arguments, like that you can't prove something doesn't exist just by looking in 99.99% of the places it could be...
But, this means that there's as much chance that Elvis WAS taken by Aliens, as that there is a Xian God, as that there is a... God, and so on.
There isn't any proof for these. And these are all things that seem fairly unlikely. It would be a safe bet to say that in a large forest, a tree probably fell over in the last week, because that's the nature of dead trees and forest contain trees. That's something you can, without direct evidence for this time, form an opinion about based on other evidence.
To apply this standard to the existence of the Xian god, it is very unlikely that a god exists. It's not like there was ever a time that gods roamed the Earth performing miracles for humans to document properly. So this isn't just the extension of a known trait, like some trees fall, therefor another tree could fall. This is something completely without precedent or support.
The only 'evidence' of a god are the words of people who have a vested interest in believing, and want to validate their beliefs. The bible contains very few instances of actual manifestations of god, and these aren't written by the people who saw them. And if they were, they still weren't witnessed by independent third parties who collaborated their testimony.
That falls far short of establishing enough (any) proof for me to believe in something that contradicts my experiences.
There is some ammount of 'faith' involved in disbelieving something. But I count myself more as an agnostic/athiest than a complete disbeliever. I just thing it's silly to believe without proof, and that's what my argument on/. has been. "If you believe in something unlikely, with no proof, then it displays a certain lack of judgement."
If I asked you if you thought that bananas were intelligent, and the secret rules of earth, would you say that they might be, and you could form no opinion, or would you say that it was very unlikely? Ditto on the god thing. We can't know for sure, because nobody has defined what a god is. If we found 'the Q', would they count? And we also can't prove something doesn't exist just by not finding (Maybe it's shy.) All we can do it point out flaws in the arguments and 'proof' that it does exist and state that it's fairly unlikely.
I think the burden of proof is on the side of those trying to get you to believe in their omnipotent diety that created and controls the world, yet deliberately created evidence that contradicts the proof of it's existence, yet allows people to carry out holy wars in its name, and have contradictory religions all based on supposedly accurate logs of its actions, but at the same time requires their prayers, etc.
Then there's the whole problem of all the religions. If one religion is right, then the rest are wrong. So even if there was a god, it could be one of twenty or so different gods or pantheons, which are mutually exclusive (Our god is omnipotent, and he exists, therefore yours doesn't...) So, even if there is a god, it's a losing bet that it's the Xian god.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that ALL evidence points to there not being a god, and NO evidence points to there being a god.
I thought the whole idea of the BSDL was that you could do ANYTHING with the code, including using it in your closed-source commercial product, etc.
How do they reconcile this with making it non-GPLable? And what clause do you use to do that?
Flavours of BSD, Why so many?
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Which BSD?
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· Score: 1
I was on the OpenBSD page, and I found it won't support dual CPU machines. I'm sure FreeBSD and/or NetBSD will... Why are the versions forked?
Especially OpenBSD, it seems like they should be handing their bugfixes back to be folded into regular BSD, and simply releasing a distro with less services and more encryption.
FreeBSD seems like it should just be #ifdef i386 code in the main release. I mean, why have a seperate fork for (mainly) intel machines?
Seems weird. Like it was decided for political instead of convenience reasons.
Well, if it's so much better, why doesn't Linux use it? Or is it dependant on kernel features Linux doesn't have or something?
Re:Q3Test2 map, and smallishness
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No Next Q3Test
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· Score: 1
Yeah. Q3test2 is bad for that.
I've played against someone so good with the rail that if they get it, I can't get more than a few steps from the spawnspot before the first rail, and then if I show my head, being finished off. The only way to beat them is to kill them before they manage to get it.
I love the tricks you can do in the air on that map. I've gone twenty or so bounces without touching down, it's great.
My one change to the map would be to remove the rail platform, or at least the part you can stand on. Replace it with a bounce pad, and float the railgun in the air, like the yellow armor, so you get it as you fly out, but then are thrown back onto the level, so you can't sit way out there, where someone who respawns can't hurt you.
At least when you're on the quad platform, railing down, there are a lot of spots you can't see. The rail platform is perfect for camping, and contains the perfect weapon, and enough health to replenish the odd machinegun bullet your hapless victim tosses your way. It's too good.
Mostly, yes. The organized part of it, and the pushing of that, are quite nasty in general.
Religious beliefs in general make me question someone's judgement. I don't discount everything they think or say, but it does count into that first impression I get of them.
And it's right that it should. In the online world all we have to go by is what we say and do. We aren't judged by race, gender, age, looks, or anything else irrelevant, only our actions.
I would be a little more critical when reading a paper of yours, especially if it had something to do with a 'hot question', like the big bang, or evolution, but otherwise I don't really care.
It's not like I have no respect for anyone who is religious, it's that I don't respect particular opinion.
I can understand 'feeling' something is right. Often hunches are correct, they're good to listen to. And it's not like you can really go wrong, unless you join a church expecting tithes, or strange vows. If you keep it to yourself unless asked, it's no weirder than a nose ring or something... Odd, but just a quirk.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. If all they wanted was to watch pirated movies, they'd download the VCD versions. Much smaller, and almost as good.
And bigtime DVD pirates don't care about this. They just presses duplicates of the disc with encryption intact.
The only people this helps are people who want to watch DVDs they already own on alternate platforms. (Or people who'd rather download a 9GB movie instead of a 650MB movie, then burn it onto 12 CDs and flip discs all the time... yeah, like that's a big group of people.)
Cracking the encryption doesn't mean as far as piracy goes until a 9GB download and 9GBs of drive space are so cheap as to not matter. Until then, it just lets us watch the movies we own the right to view. (That bit about the region coded has no legal force, so fuckem.)
But, they feared making it open because their bugs would be obvious. So they hid it hoping that nobody would look.
Even if it was open, they wouldn't have gotten any serious help. As Bruce Schneier says, nobody will waste their time helping test a proprietary scheme.
And if any hackers found bugs, they'd simply have waited until the system was finalized before pointing them out.
Even doing this in hardware would only have bought them a little time. Smart cards, designed to be uncrackable even with determined hardware hackers with millions of dollars at stake are proving to be fairly 'easy' to crack. And because the codes pretty well had to be static, you'd only need to crack one...
As was said in a previous message, no matter how strong it was, or how well protected, it would eventually be cracked because we can just watch it be done. Crypto relies on the premise that you can en/decrypt the message in a 'safe' place. PGP assumes that your PC is trojan free, or your super-safe messages could simply be screen-dumped. The same with DVD hardware... we could take it apart piece by piece, melting open the chips until we could apply hardware probes on critical gates and watch the execution.
If you make it harder, you only attract smarter hackers.
But, that would be overkill. Someone would get fired from a hardware company and would have given away the key. Nothing like this is ever secure for long.
The law is in place to punish people who break it, and award damages to those hurt by their actions.
If you pirate a movie, and get caught, then tough. You had it coming.
But, if you buy a DVD you should be able to use the information on that disc in any way that you see fit except for violating copyright by making and distributing copies.
There is no legal punishment for watching a movie outside of its coded region. Nor is there a law against watching movies in Linux. Or in writing software that will read bits off of a DVD and do something arbitrary (probably display them as a movie.)
Those things are not illegal. But the movie companies are trying to take away our ability to do those. Fuck em.
Nothing illegal was done on either side, but we don't have any obligation to do things their way.
They used trade secrets to make the product harder to use, all in the name of stopping piracy. Bullshit. They're primarily concerned with restricting viewing to certain regions so they can jack up prices with artificial scarcity.
They have the legal right to encrypt data. But we also have the legal right to decrypt that data. They're saying the law doesn't offer enough protection (whine, whine) and taking matters into their own hands, and they get upset when we take matters into our own hands.
This isn't a matter of copyright violation. If it was, they wouldn't harrass the author of the program, they'd simply stand back and let the FBI, or whatever regional authority step in and apply the appropriate legal penalty.
This *is* a matter of pissy overly-protected corporations who throw tantrums when the world doesn't work their way and start sending in the high-priced lawyers to blackmail people into submission.
I hope they get figuratively assraped by the whole thing. I was fairly neutral to the studios until this, but now they're up there with MS and Amazon, just another good-for-nothing company with too many lawyers and a monopoly based only on suing everyone who does it better.
But don't let yourself feel sorry for the jerks for a minute. They have all the legal protection they need against real criminals. This whole mess is about them blackmailing law-abiding folks.
Have a background, or a light overlay, of the kernel source (or, a small hunk of it.) Showing whatever graphics, maybe a busy X desktop with the GIMP and other 'neat' apps open, over a background of the source.
After all, the apps and stuff are all there because it's open source. Everything neat about GNU/Linux is because it's open source. So make the source a prominent part of the picture.
If it was done well, it would show up fairly well on the solid colors, and be lost in the details. Enough to let people see it and recognize it (oh, source code... good idea) without dominating the picture and annoying the PHBs.
Argh, the HTML tags are filtered out even in plaintext mode.
:)
I give up. Send a SASE to my listed address and I'll give you a hardcopy.
s where needed. :)
It seems to me that while watermarking could be fairly resistant to unintentional audio manipulation, or uninformed attempts to destroy it, it should fall quite easily to a compotent attack.
It seems that watermarking should be a security-by-obscurity method, where if you knew the protocol by which the original was modified, you should be able to find where that code is stored in the source media, and remove, or scramble it.
By knowing where the data is stored, smaller changes should suffice to mask it then if you had to add whtie noise to the whole file in order to hope to kill the watermark.
Also, helping this, is that for any watermarking scheme to be effective, there has to be an easily available way to tell if a file is watermarked. For instance, in photoshop, loading a marked file produces a (c) symbol after the filename, and will display creator info. If you had to mail this file to the company to get an answer back, it would be so cumbersome that nobody would use it. This means that the watermark readers have to be visible, if only in binary form, to watch them work.
All systems that are watermarked and checked on client computers are as good as broken whenever someone compotent wants to try. Being that watermarking is the hiding of a secret key in a document, and that secret key can't be too secret, because you can watch it be generated (it is your computer, and you can use a debugger) you can also remove it, by applying the inverse of that secret key to the watermarked file.
This is complicated a bit by the fact that digital music watermarking could be done in secret, and with a key that we wouldn't know. As long as Sony music could send a copy of the MP3 to the marking company and have the key checked, it would satisfy their needs. And we're also prevented from using known-plaintext attacks unless someone gets an unmarked version of the song from pre-production, just before the watermarking.
But even this should be vulnerable. Even if we can't remove the watermark by applying the inverse, we could, if we knew how it was done, mask out just the relevant bits, and scramble the key beyond reading in a much more subtle way than by applying a strong white noise to the whole file.
The very fact that watermarks have to be robust also means that they can be found, if their format can be discovered, which makes them security by obscurity.
If watermarking was done in such a way that you could check if Company A owned the file by constructing a watermark for Company A, for that file, and then looking for it, it would be easier to hide. But, watermarking needs to be read without knowing the result, to see which company's mark is used, not simply to state if a known mark is there or not.
If the mark could not be read without knowing it, then more subtle ways of hiding the mark could be used that depended on the specific mark. (ie, if the first bit is 0, do this, else, if this, do that...) But, the mark must always be readable in a standard way. This means it has to be fairly easy to find. Sort of like using SYNC bytes on storage media to let you know where the data begins.
Once you know the format of the sync data, and can use that to find the specific areas that the watermark would change, even if you can't determine what the data was before being changed, you could write over it with random data, along with the sync data you used to find it, the hopefully rendering the watermark unreadable.
Any problems with this theory?
I'm not too familiar with American law, so I went browsing and I found a few references. I'll post them here so people can see what I'm refering to.
Contract Law & Cornell U.
"Contracts arise when a duty does or may come into existence, because of a promise made by one of the parties. To be legally binding as a contract a promise must be exchanged for adequate consideration. Adequate consideration is a benefit or detriment which a party receives which reasonably and fairly induces them to make the promise/contract."
The EULA can't offer you anything because you've already got the software. To make the EULA valid, they'd have to do two things.
1) Offer you something (free support, discounts, etc) and
2) make it voluntary, so that you could use the software even if you disagreed.
I don't feel like searching for all the references, but some contracts can be implied. That is, you go into a store, walk around, pick up an item, take it to a cashier, hold out money, get change back, and leave the store. Even if no words are spoken, you have entered into a contract. The idea is that it's plainly obvious what you are doing, you're paying for ownership of that product. They make an implied offer by leaving something lying on a shelf with a price on it. You make the implied acceptance when you offer money for it.
If the store was going to impose any conditions on your use of that product, they'd have to tell you beforehand. This is similar to how you can't just add clauses to a contract after it's been signed and expect them to be binding.
I've never been in a store where I've been told about the EULA, let alone as anything I'm going to be bound by. And they don't open the box to let you see the shrinkwrap license, or run the software to read the EULA, so you can't be said to have consented to the contract because you didn't know it existed. You can't be bound to a contract you don't know about. In some circumstances, you can be bound by ones you didn't sign, such as for purchase of an item, but you can't be bound by one you didn't know about.
The whole practice of having EULAs in software is borderline illegal. It would be fraud to try to convince gullible people that they've entered into a contract without knowing it and thus owe you money, it's borderline to offer someone a non-binding contract and try to make them think it is binding.
Using EULAs like this is just as underhanded and dirty as patenting y2k fixes that have been in the books for years, then suing companies that can't afford to protect themselves.
I know you can't buy a standard computer from Comp USA and have it come with NT Server. I said "If you buy Win2k server in the store..." which means, if you buy Win2k, like walk down the isle, see the box, and pick is up...
The fact that you can return the product if you don't like the license doesn't matter. You've already entered into the only contract involved when you give the story money in exchange for the right (implied by the sale of said box of software without explicit notice otherwise) to use that software.
They *offer* you another contract later, but you aren't bound by it because 1) they can't legally restrict your right to use the product unless you've agreed to let them, and 2) they don't offer you anything as incentive for you to agree.
So, you can buy the cheap one, take it home, click 'I Agree', read about whatever registry hack is required, apply it, and have a fully legal copy of Win2k - Unlimited. MS may be able to deny you support because you've modified it outside of spec, but that's no great loss...
Sure, lawyers may disagree with what I've said. But, they get paid when they sue people. Not just when they win, but for every minute they spend on it. This gives them tremendous incentive to sue anyone they can.
And sure. They could financially break most companies if they wanted to. But then, they could sue you over anything, and as long as they kept going until you were broke, it wouldn't matter who the law actually supported.
But, that's a problem with our legal system. If you cave in to MS on this one, be sure to send your check to Amazon.com and all the other companies suing everyone for their fraudulently obtained patents, and every other company that resorts to legal-fee blackmail of one form or another.
Perhaps. Some jobs seem to be perfect for autonomous large machines, just as some seem perfect for millions of tiny ones.
If you have to haul huge quantities of raw materials from one site to another, a long way away, a 'truck' would seem to make more sense than a conveyor belt. Especially since the truck would be immediately useful on a different route, where the belt would have to be moved. Also, a belt has to cover the whole distance, even if it's only in use 0.02% of the time. If you're using seperate machines, you just put less of them on the job and use them as their full, and most efficient, capacity.
Maybe there will be improvements to trucks, and not just in the engine/fuel, but in the general structure, but wheels are a pretty basic idea and seem pretty hard to improve on.
I can see a use for both. Why give each nanite the ability to travel hundreds of kilometers between jobsites when hundreds of millions can be carried at once, in one shipment. Large machines would probably also carry repair nanites, and larger scale bots, to fix any problems they encountered along the way.
So, you just fiddle with a few registry keys.
It's as legal as using a highlighter in a book you bought.
If they're stupid enough to sell exactly the same product for five different roles, they shouldn't be suprised if people buy the cheap package.
They're just blackmailing jerks, hoping companies will decide it's not worth the risk of a frivolous lawsuit from MS costing them millions.
Can you imagine if a book company sold two versions of some required textbook, one hideously expensive one for students, and a cheaper one that everyone, except students was allowed to use...
If you buy Win2k server in the store, and don't have to sign a license agreement to do so, you can do whatever you want with it.
You can specifically twiddle with registry setting to remove annoying and arbitrary limits.
The EULA that is supposed to prevent this has *no* force because it's not a legal contract. You can answer 'I agree' without commiting to anything.
Why? Because if you say 'No', the software you own a license to use won't work. So you have to say 'I Agree'. But they don't offer you anything beyond the right to use the software you already paid, so you're not agreeing to a contract.
They're coercing you into accepting, and not offering any consideration.
It's not valid.
They're just doing what all the lame little companies using illegitimate patents to blackmail people are doing... Hoping you don't care to fight it in court.
Well, that's what I meant when I posted that. You'd drop a few general purpose replicators which would make the rest of the machines. But the machines wouldn't all be small, because there are economies of scale, and not all the machines would be capable of self-duplication and other 'complex' tasks.
They were collecting the data for financial reasons. Perhaps not ones that could be used now, but they saw a market and tried to enter it. That market still exists. Companies *do* want to know what music you listen to, and how often.
They should have 1) offered a complete opt-out (like the patch) and 2) offered to pay those who opted in.
Most of the people in these threads were upset about the monitoring being secret, not that some company thought the information was worth something.
They should have two levels. 1) opt out 2) opt in anonymously - get some free CDs or coupons 3) opt in completely - get a lot more stuff.
The data is valuable to the music companies two ways. First, just knowing how much various CDs are played is valuable marketing data. Second, knowing WHO plays them, which demographic they're in, what else they bought, etc, is worth a LOT more.
I bet they'd get a lot of kids opting in if at the end of the year they could get $50 worth of CDs or computer games from an online store...
That would be the best of both worlds. Out-out for the paranoid, or just plain annoyed, and opt-in for the greedy.
Here's a good link about the great Quicktime user interface.
Or, maybe Radio Shack just decided to demand personal information, knowing that only a few people wouldn't choose to avoid the confrontation by just buckling in and giving their information.
Then they not only sell the information for mailing lists, but spam it with their own junk.
I personally assume (because they did send junk mail to the fake name I gave them at my address) that they use it for junk mail. No idea though, how all those other companies decided to send that same fake person junk mail. They must have been telepathic.
No, your other choice is to click 'I Agree' and then do whatever the hell you want.
The EULAs are *not* valid.
For a contract to be valid, both parties have to get something out of it (however minor, hence the cliche of $1...)
If you buy a software package, you have all rights except for those which violate the copyright. You don't have to accept a contract offering you those rights because you already paid for them at the store.
The only way the EULAs could be valid would be if they offered you something truly optional (ie, not affecting your ability to use the program if you decline) such as a free service contract, or something.
Not only that, but changing a program from a 5 user, to a 50 user license by using a binary patch or modifying registry settings, like for a web server or NAT/Firewall, doesn't violate any laws either. If you didn't sign a license agreement saying otherwise in the store before they let you buy it, then you have the right to modify it. Just like you could buy a piece of art and then take an exacto(tm) knife and make make any desired alterations.
This whole thing is a scam. It really should be illegal to use these legal scare tactics.
Good points.
... God, and so on.
/. has been. "If you believe in something unlikely, with no proof, then it displays a certain lack of judgement."
My answer to this is that it takes a certain level of proof for us to believe in something. If we would believe anything because it's possible, we'd be wandering around thinking we're brains in jars hooked up to some interesting VR equipment, etc.
I'm familiar with the arguments, like that you can't prove something doesn't exist just by looking in 99.99% of the places it could be...
But, this means that there's as much chance that Elvis WAS taken by Aliens, as that there is a Xian God, as that there is a
There isn't any proof for these. And these are all things that seem fairly unlikely. It would be a safe bet to say that in a large forest, a tree probably fell over in the last week, because that's the nature of dead trees and forest contain trees. That's something you can, without direct evidence for this time, form an opinion about based on other evidence.
To apply this standard to the existence of the Xian god, it is very unlikely that a god exists. It's not like there was ever a time that gods roamed the Earth performing miracles for humans to document properly. So this isn't just the extension of a known trait, like some trees fall, therefor another tree could fall. This is something completely without precedent or support.
The only 'evidence' of a god are the words of people who have a vested interest in believing, and want to validate their beliefs. The bible contains very few instances of actual manifestations of god, and these aren't written by the people who saw them. And if they were, they still weren't witnessed by independent third parties who collaborated their testimony.
That falls far short of establishing enough (any) proof for me to believe in something that contradicts my experiences.
There is some ammount of 'faith' involved in disbelieving something. But I count myself more as an agnostic/athiest than a complete disbeliever. I just thing it's silly to believe without proof, and that's what my argument on
If I asked you if you thought that bananas were intelligent, and the secret rules of earth, would you say that they might be, and you could form no opinion, or would you say that it was very unlikely? Ditto on the god thing. We can't know for sure, because nobody has defined what a god is. If we found 'the Q', would they count? And we also can't prove something doesn't exist just by not finding (Maybe it's shy.) All we can do it point out flaws in the arguments and 'proof' that it does exist and state that it's fairly unlikely.
I think the burden of proof is on the side of those trying to get you to believe in their omnipotent diety that created and controls the world, yet deliberately created evidence that contradicts the proof of it's existence, yet allows people to carry out holy wars in its name, and have contradictory religions all based on supposedly accurate logs of its actions, but at the same time requires their prayers, etc.
Then there's the whole problem of all the religions. If one religion is right, then the rest are wrong. So even if there was a god, it could be one of twenty or so different gods or pantheons, which are mutually exclusive (Our god is omnipotent, and he exists, therefore yours doesn't...) So, even if there is a god, it's a losing bet that it's the Xian god.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that ALL evidence points to there not being a god, and NO evidence points to there being a god.
I thought the whole idea of the BSDL was that you could do ANYTHING with the code, including using it in your closed-source commercial product, etc.
How do they reconcile this with making it non-GPLable? And what clause do you use to do that?
I was on the OpenBSD page, and I found it won't support dual CPU machines. I'm sure FreeBSD and/or NetBSD will... Why are the versions forked?
Especially OpenBSD, it seems like they should be handing their bugfixes back to be folded into regular BSD, and simply releasing a distro with less services and more encryption.
FreeBSD seems like it should just be #ifdef i386 code in the main release. I mean, why have a seperate fork for (mainly) intel machines?
Seems weird. Like it was decided for political instead of convenience reasons.
Well, if it's so much better, why doesn't Linux use it? Or is it dependant on kernel features Linux doesn't have or something?
Yeah. Q3test2 is bad for that.
I've played against someone so good with the rail that if they get it, I can't get more than a few steps from the spawnspot before the first rail, and then if I show my head, being finished off. The only way to beat them is to kill them before they manage to get it.
I love the tricks you can do in the air on that map. I've gone twenty or so bounces without touching down, it's great.
My one change to the map would be to remove the rail platform, or at least the part you can stand on. Replace it with a bounce pad, and float the railgun in the air, like the yellow armor, so you get it as you fly out, but then are thrown back onto the level, so you can't sit way out there, where someone who respawns can't hurt you.
At least when you're on the quad platform, railing down, there are a lot of spots you can't see. The rail platform is perfect for camping, and contains the perfect weapon, and enough health to replenish the odd machinegun bullet your hapless victim tosses your way. It's too good.
Mostly, yes. The organized part of it, and the pushing of that, are quite nasty in general.
Religious beliefs in general make me question someone's judgement. I don't discount everything they think or say, but it does count into that first impression I get of them.
And it's right that it should. In the online world all we have to go by is what we say and do. We aren't judged by race, gender, age, looks, or anything else irrelevant, only our actions.
Sure. And I can accept that.
I would be a little more critical when reading a paper of yours, especially if it had something to do with a 'hot question', like the big bang, or evolution, but otherwise I don't really care.
It's not like I have no respect for anyone who is religious, it's that I don't respect particular opinion.
I can understand 'feeling' something is right. Often hunches are correct, they're good to listen to. And it's not like you can really go wrong, unless you join a church expecting tithes, or strange vows. If you keep it to yourself unless asked, it's no weirder than a nose ring or something... Odd, but just a quirk.