I see, you believed what they told you. That's why you're wrong.
If you buy something over a counter, as you would a pack of gum, then you own it.
No two ways about it. EULAs are post-sale contracts and thus unenforceable.
Moreover, they don't even have the right to tell you not to "crack" the software. It's yours, you can give it the number they gave to you, or any other number you like.
If you didn't agree, in writing, that you don't own Windows, then you do. You'd have to agree otherwise for a sale to be turned into something else. If you have a volume liensing plan, you did agree to a license. If you merely bought your computer or OS in the store, it's yours. Totally and absolutely.
Nope. To the claim. Can't speak to the rest, but the voices *say* I'm fine.
I'm saying that copyright is all you don't have, but it's not part of ownership as the common person sees it.
If your name is McDonald, you probably feel you own your name (and you do) even if you don't own the exclusive rights to it, or even if someone else's exclusive rights mean you can't exercise yours in certain ways, like fast-food restaurants.
So, you own the hypothetical CD. In the sense that a sale always results in a contractually unencumbered product (if you buy it, no extra contracts apply and no post-sale restrictions are valid), you can also be said to own perpetual usage rights. Anything else wouldn't be a sale, and it is a sale.
There's no reason to think of your copy as limited. If you aren't the type to photocopy books, there's pretty much no way that you don't enjoy total usage of it, including marking it up, outright re-editing, and resale.
People often argue that the prevention of derivative works prevents edited copies, but it's trivial to see how edited copies are legal. If I buy a book and cross out the naughty words, it's still legal and I can give it to someone else that way. I can rip out pages, etc. Editing and destroying are hard to distinguish.
You can't take your book and legally bludgeon someone to death with it, but we don't say that this lack of bludgeon-rights means we don't own the book.
Sure, I own the encrypted data on the disc. But that's just a mechanical translation of the movie, and the same copyright covers both. Thus, if I own one, I own the other.
Even if you don't like the word "own", the same thing applies with "have perpetual usage and resale rights".
You're right that a compromise is needed, but that doesn't imply that the DMCA and DRM are in any way needed.
How about we see what percentage of our economy is media based, tax everyone that much and give the money to copyright holders based on how many people have their works? Then just public-domain everything.
Or, how about regular copyright lasts for 20 years, then goes to mandatory licensing at 100-x% of past revenues. x% then increases with time until the work is fully free at 40 years.
Or, how about regular copyright, as written now, and government prosecution of serious pirating (rings in Asia, etc) *or* DRM, but not both?
Or, we could have 5-year copyrights and the government would strictly enforce no-pirating laws (shutting down, if not charging everyone).
Or, we could let the industry die and be replaced by one with a viable economic model. (Unreasonable? No, the industries tied to holding content would die - the creators however do produce a product which is in-demand. We'd likely jump to a product-placement model, and who knows where from there.)
Personally, if something requires constitution-violation laws or enforcement, it's not something we want at *any* cost.
WW2 was fought for liberty, not a Britney Spears album.
You do own the content. You merely lack the copying rights to make a duplicate of it legitimately. Seriously, space/media-shifting and backup allowances clearly show that you own the content, not just the plastic disc or paper book.
Doesn't really matter though, you can't sell someone something without implicitly giving them permission to use the thing.
If that means they need to decrypt it to view it, and you knew that, that must mean that you intend to let them use the product, or it wouldn't be a sale. (And the courts have ruled solid that, if it looks like a duck, it is. If you think you bought something, you did.) If you've given people the rights to decrypt it, that means it's not a DMCA violation ("... without permission"), and thus legal.
Further, as the MPAA would *have* to know this. Contract/Sale law is pretty well understood here. So for them to send a DMCA takedown they *must* be lying.
Clearly, the law intends to stop unintended decryption - trying to put the files on P2P. Sure. But it's insanity to just assume that this applies to legitimate use of media you purchased legally.
The MPAA have no leg to stand on, but they aren't above cold-blooded and calculated direct misstatements of fact, lies, of outright fraud as an reading of Hollywood history will show. What's a little intentional perjury? So like the RIAA they continue to send takedown notices against legit files, having sworn to be the rights-holder, etc, and continue to do so merely because nobody has enough money to punish them in court. Thieves.
Actually, the argument is just as good that the morality and how realistic a law is are exactly what should determine if you break it.
You may not want to let a police officer watch you, but society doesn't gain, overall, if people follow laws they believe to be unjust. I feel the DMCA is a trainwreck and I'd refuse to follow it. I'm Canadian so this one doesn't apply yet, but when it does, I'm still going to keep watching DVDs where I want to.
I don't know why US citizens admit to doing this stuff though, or anyone going through the USA. (Skylarov. And that's why Alan Cox is staying out.) Find a Canadian, New Zealander, etc to host it.
You may be able to get your own Palladium keys, but as you point out, you won't be allowed to play DRMed media. Likely many apps will refuse to run if you aren't on a machine whose ID they can verify.
And as for backwards compatibility, there's no reason they couldn't make a PC-compatible console, that only ran MS-certified and signed apps. Businesses could afford to get their software signed, especially if they only needed internal distribution, which many would like for copyright/trade-secret reasons.
A business console wouldn't look like an XBox, it'd have a keyboard and run any apps you needed, but it wouldn't come with any system-level dev tools.
More importantly, it'd be sold as an integrated unit and under a DRM-enforced EULA.
What does the business lose? The chance that you'll click on a virus they don't catch. The chance of someone sneaking data out using something like SSH/SCP? Higher admin costs because of differing hardware? I can't see their issue?
As for MS and the legions of Developers, Developers, Developers? There'd of course be a way to run simple shareware type apps - ActiveX through IE, in a sandbox? Limited-run keys... (why not get a cut of every app sold, plus every OS?)
Handled properly (slowly) I can't see much resistance to consolification.
As for the XBox 360 hack, there's one mentioned on/. now. Apparently the patch is forced when you log onto Live, and you can't roll it back. This isn't an HD/DVD hack or anything, but an example of how hard it will be to maintain it if managed.
It would encourage there to be less laws... But we'd have to trust out politicians to always be writing new laws - the potential abuse there is huge. Especially when they find a must-go bill (renewing the murder laws) and attach some crap to it as a rider.
'For the purposes of this law, the suspect^Wguilty shall be assumed to have murdered a person if they have imbibed more than one "joint" or "marijuana cigarette"' or something else.
We'd need a system where laws weren't enacted for a year anyways. We should never need legislation before that. And let it be cancelled with only a 33% vote during that time. If a large portion of the nation isn't behind a law we shouldn't all live under it.
I agree. We almost passed a trial program here in BC. It was for Instant-Runoff Voting and I prefer Approval voting, but either are far ahead of what we currently have.
No, but you won't get rid of either of them unless you realize that the PATRIOT Act is just a "and the anti-drug stuff, you can use over there too". Fight the real source of the unconstitutional crap, not a mere me-too bill.
Okay, an undetectable xbox mod-chip that can be installed as a commodity is all I ask. I simply can't require a geek to use it. I do still think that the point of this exercise is the difficulty of developing this would be to do on an xbox.
You don't think general purpose computers will go away, and thus we're fine. I think most businesses will love the idea of consoles (locked down productivity machines). As such, there won't be much of a market for anything not locked down to the manufacturer - because anything else would encourage piracy, or course.
So sure, while I also agree that technically, Palladium-type technologies aren't a bad thing. I would like to use some of them in my own security even. However, I don't believe that these would be systems I actually would get to control. It's always going to be in someone's best interest to keep control (ie, have written the binary 'BIOS' that we have to trust as the basis for our 'admin' access.)
It's like having a computer to secure but not trusting the lock company to not have a master key, or cut a key for your lock for a crook. You couldn't secure the computer with a lock, even an unbreakable one, because it might be trojaned. This is Palladium and all the rest. A system I can't trust because someone else owns the keys and I'm not allowed to play with.
So the solution to the problem above is, 1) buy many locks from many people, wrap one layer on another. 2) assume the hardware is tamperable and never keep decrypted data there - use zero-knowledge protocols so that the machine can be stolen without compromising the data.
As Palladium, XBox-ification, PS3-ism, etc, is merely a defective lock, I don't feel the need to sell my general purpose computer to get it, which currently is the price. Until then, I'd rather have an unencrypted computer and no false sense of security.
But, I don't think the majority agree. That's why I predict the consolification, and the need for us to develop the next untraceable hacking tools with these consoles. Otherwise we're going to be in a bad place when stuff does go wrong and the next Richard Nixon can abuse even more total power.
As for security, sure. I believe it. *All* of the great hacks I've ever witnessed were social engineering.
What part do you do, coding, testing, paranoid guy watching everyone else?
But, this xbox bet... No. My point is that there needs to be a non-physical mod. Grandma may run a program, she won't take her xbox in for illegal soldering. Anyways, even if she did, afaik, Microsoft would detect it (now, or at the next patch) if you connected to their network and brick the unit.
This is why the hack needs to be non-physical, undetectable, and developed with people using only an xbox as a general purpose computer (chat with fellow hackers only via the xbox, code only via its tools, etc).
If not, what does it get you? HDDVD. Yeah. But what about the next encrypted media format? The one we won't have PCs to compile the code and burn the boot discs on.
As for the likelihood of the country actually getting to where a general purpose computer is illegal ala 1984... Slim. But rare enough to be strange, to require a business license to buy (it's wholesale), etc. If the xbox was 95% of what a PC was, leaving out just the 5% that let you tweak it (regedit, a compiler, etc) the majority wouldn't understand that it was stripped down. To them it would be TV-enhanced. Only the geeks would mind.
This is what the RIAA/etc want. A world where DRM makes content safe. We'd all be using an approved platform so whitelisting content with a known-valid watermark would be easy. Even if we warez the files we couldn't do anything because, like cell-phones, only approved programs would be able to run. (There'd be Java and Javascript, but those can't utilize DirectX, or anything - crippled.)
They'd never ban the computer world-wide. Even if they were fantastically successful and got rid of all others, China wouldn't follow suit, so the situation would be self correcting eventually. Someone who doesn't try to DRM their citizens onto consoles will eat our lunch.
It's not a conspiracy theory. I don't think anyone wants this, just that the people who are trying to legislate it have a convenient blind-spot over the consequences of their actions. I'd rather live in a country with an economy, so I dislike this legislation of unreality.
The issue was discussed in that thread, but no, not the trivial crash assumed to cause the airplane to fall like a y2k brick.
But still, that's my point. All the systems were properly isolated and yet a failure (overload and overheating is a failure) in one destroyed the others.
Not effectively, because of the mess of unrealistic patents. But, yes. You could look at your competition, think of the clever things they do (for which you could assume a patent would be upheld), and look to see if they're patented.
However, if you infringe on a patent after this, you'll likely be assumed to have known through your patent research and be liable for triple damages.
Realistically the thing to do is pretend they don't exist. Don't go looking at any. Ignore people talking about them (Microsoft).
You might get sued, but it's likely going to happen for business reasons (too similar a product, etc) and the particular patent just an excuse.
If your design is modular and you could swap the FAT32 filesystem and patch existing products, while a lawsuit for damages for past infringement could still be brought, it's a totally different thing and not half as profitable as they need to prove damages - it's not possible to get an injunction and halt your business as a threat.
Slashdot is global, your particular brand of fascism may vary.
By "us", I mean, users of general purpose computers. Windows with Perl is just as dangerous (to the user:) as Linux.
As for how, yes, I agree. They'll develop a locked down platform with tons of DRM (ie a console) and people won't mind because they didn't expect it to be a general purpose computer. Eventually they'll just stop making software HDDVD players and to legally watch your movie you "just" need an XBOX. At that point, like with IE, general purpose computers will start to go away and then legislation plugging the analog hole will ban all non-DRMed (ie, user controlled) computers and only a few nerds will care. I think analog hole is the right term, as once a non-locked down system (mine) renders the output to analog, it's not protected. It's a digital method, but the analog results are the goal.
As for the XBOX/HDDVD bet, I'll take it... if you agree to three conditions. It must be software only, developed on an XBOX (what else would you have in an XBOX-only world), and keep working online even after Microsoft heard about the hack and released a patch.
rofl. Of course he thinks the military would crash a plane rather than let you see it, that's what they need the black helicopters to collect debris from.
Seriously though, of course the military uses civilian airports. But they prefer not to. Civilians drive like grandmothers. An entire flight of fighters will launch within thirty seconds, not two minutes between each like jumbo jets.
I do take issue to your automatic democrat reference, and how this somehow is implied to support the republicans. I really hate what the USA has become, how anything can be justified in search of kiddy-porn viewing terrorists. I hate how there's a war going on overseas on totally false pretenses. Sure. We may need to lay down some smack for various reasons - we have an army because we think it may be needed. But this fake Osama/Saddam link is just insulting. Had the USA gone into Afghanistan any time in the last ten years for the multitude of human rights violations it would be one thing. Instead they go chasing Osama. For what!? Alive, dead, he's just another guy. If he dies, another will take his place. Instead, work on securing our systems here, building better firefighting and escape systems, etc. But no, a war is needed and they can't just say that US imperialism demands it so they have to lie about the reason. So we've got the troops overseas enforcing one mission, just so that our imperialist goals are met coincidentally. How horribly wasteful! Doesn't this sound like Vietnam?
If you need a label for my views, call it quasi-libertarian. We have a government and it taxes us to protect us - not ideal maybe, but it's better than it could be. I on board until they start lying about the reasons for their actions. At this point, what representation do we have. I see taxation. Just asking the important question...
btw, lay off the gays. They build valuable martian landing strips. Also, it's lame.
But having source lets you begin to replace components. If it's a black box you never can. If it's an open source system you can get around problems. Maybe the C compiler is hacked, maybe it'll even hack all future C compilers, but will it recognize a Ruby interpreter? Will it successfully hack Ruby such that a debugger written in Ruby will fail to display the vulnerability in C programs?
Look at Debian on BSD. They're swapping the Linux kernel while keeping the GNU tools and Debian packaging. You could swap in another kernel, or emulate three or four kernels in a VM and make sure they all agree. You could skip the GNU tools and use others, etc.
How do you avoid the potentially bugged parts of Windows. Let's say the MMU and the encryption routines. Swap in other components and see if it works identically.
I'd have to say that the legal climate looks otherwise. If you claim that Bill Clinton has himself directly ordered the political murder of many people, and post "facts" that supposedly support this, absolutely nothing will happen. I've seen many websites that say this, and much "worse".
They don't present this as an opinion at all. Straight "fact". And they're still there. On US webservers, un-obfuscated URLs, etc. Surely if it were so easy to remove this, it would have been.
It's hard to pursue slander or libel charges (in the USA - in much of Europe truth is no defense). If the person honestly believes something crazy, that's a defense. If they were mistaken, it's a defense. If they present a hypothetical and don't appear to be grind an axe, that's a defense. Not an ultimate one, but good enough usually.
It's not proven, but the assumption is that while the entertainment computers weren't on the same networks, etc, as the flight computers, their components traveled through the same conduits so an unexpected electrical fire took them all out.
My point isn't that this did happen, but that while the "rules" are good practice, they are no real guarantee of safety. They keep evolving after crashes.
The in-flight entertainment system was totally disconnected from all airplane systems, but when it shorted out and burned everything in the same conduits, the logical separation wasn't enough. I'm sure the F22 pilots aren't playing Pokemon on their consoles though, but I trust that the example illustrates the flaw in assuming that the pieces aren't going to interfere.
Further, you've got some crazy ideas about how missiles are held onto planes by the pilots good intentions and leprechauns. Any glitch capable of causing unintended behavior could cause any unintended behavior in the system. If the system can arm, aim, and launch a missile, it could do it by accident. A different accident, six smaller accidents, one "shouldn't have been an accident but he was in the wrong place", or whatever. You're so sure that a target could never be taken from the ones the jet is currently tracking, the armed missile (the are war planes) could never be given the wrong target, etc.
Yes, these are systems to catch these things. That's good, or planes would be launching fully armed missiles while being fueled. I know. But you've got the idea that the systems could never fail.
I'm a little surprised that they've never simulated this, or their simulator isn't. Either way it's laughable.
You never finished your second thought. I'm surprised they didn't test something like this either. I have a feeling CNN is wrong about this.
I did. Or their simulator isn't [a simulator].
But they could also just have never tested flying the plane along that route. Seeing as the plane is still under development they should have simulators running that they pre-test all missions in, and one that they play the plane's black-box into later and test for exactly the same output results.
Frankly, if six planes lockup at the same time and place, this error is obvious enough to have been caught during testing, especially as this is the place that nav systems tend to fail.
This is worse than a programmer who makes an array with ten elements and doesn't test trying to put eleven in.
As for the failure itself, of course we never know if a news article is accurate, but it did claim that the systems did not come back and that the pilots were required to follow their tankers back to base. I assume this is an exaggerated, as an armed-forces pilot should be able to navigate with manual means, which they should have had - but it definitely would have scrubbed the mission, as you say.
I am a developer. I know how bugs happen and that I'll never get rid of anywhere near all the potential bugs in my code. But I try to have test suites that simulate full usage of the program for all cases (impossible) but I do make sure that I have a specific case testing anything I claim the program could do. If it could "fly around the world" I'd have a test run that flew both ways, at least once.
I'm actually really unimpressed with the government on safety. The space shuttle was developed with the same sort of procedures as the F22 and Richard Feynman had a few choice words to say about its horrible safety and design. (Criminal - if it were a civilian matter people would have been in jail.) Too many people said things like you, "a missile launching on it's own is 1/10,000, arming on its own if 1/10,000, etc, for a total of 1/1[lots of 0s]." But these failures aren't unrelated, so the 1/10,000 chance of something happening is more likely to at least put untested load on the rest of the systems, etc.
There's a lot of profit in shackling you, people won't stop just because we bankrupted ourselves on a media campaign.
And here I also have to disagree. There are very, very few companies that are in a position to profit from shackling Linux.
I think game consoles say otherwise. And DRM, etc. If we're left free, we're the analog hole. "They" have to stop general purpose computers which means we're up against Sony, the RIAA, the MPAA, Microsoft, etc. Everyone who benefits from us being on a restricted platform.
You can't break HDDVD protection on an XBOX and never will be able to. You can't bypass Lexmark printers ink "protection" system without a real computer. You can't install browser plugins on a console, or chat outside of the manufacturers approved forums...
Yeah, because a glitch capable of dropping a missile could never arm it, aim it, and drop it.
Sure, nav systems are separate from flight systems. Except that they're not really because as the in-flight-entertainment crash showed, even systems that aren't connected are.
This is exactly what you get if you hire a bunch of hacks who live in their parents' basements - critical software that obviously doesn't have a test plan.
I'm a little surprised that they've never simulated this, or their simulator isn't. Either way it's laughable.
You're placing a lot of trust in design principles that, if they really were followed, would have presented the failure just witnessed. Surprisingly, this doesn't seem to shake your faith.
So, we'd spend millions fighting this injustice. And when we were done, we'd merely have saved our industry or hobby from one potential threat. Another will try and eventually one will succeed. There's a lot of profit in shackling you, people won't stop just because we bankrupted ourselves on a media campaign.
Won't someone rid us of this troublesome law and those who abuse it?
No, but it's not like anyone real will respond to Balmer's threats either. Trying to use patents this way (submarine patents, etc) doesn't seem to get a lot of court respect either, especially wrapped in FUD obviously designed to help their stock price.
This site is simply so that the author can, on May 2nd, prove that MS is full of shit. It doesn't need to be well worded to do that, it need merely survive.
At that, the futility of software patents will be exposed in on of the following ways
1) MS shows patents - public realizes that 90% of software in the field is covered by these same patents, and laughs. One independent discovery doesn't mean anything, but if everyone discovered it themselves maybe it was obvious.
2) MS shows patents - judge awards ownership of the site, the owner, his cat, etc, to MS. All software companies immediately open a subsidiary in the Bahamas and leave the USA.
3) MS doesn't say anything. Showing what?
3.1) That they can't usefully sue this guy, which they could if they had a real case.
3.2) That they don't consider it worth their time.
We both know MS won't reply, so it's a question of why, 3.1 or 3.2?
Either way he's pretty indemnified against future cases, either they can't, or he can show their extremely uncooperative nature to a judge and likely get the case pitched as he'd specifically tried to cooperate, the lawsuit would have to allege some damages, which they would obviously have been concealing from him now, despite his direct questions...
Which says that they can't.
They either respond now, and fail or destroy the economy (which I find unlikely), and have played their hand. Or, they fail to respond, thus taking away much of their ability to do so later. So even if it was that they didn't care to reply, it becomes that they couldn't if they wanted to.
If MS succeeds, the USA enters a patent nightmare that its big-business controllers don't want. Those big corps that "donate" to politicians are no more eager to have a patent fight with MS than anyone else. If MS wins it will be over the dead body of the rest of the industry, and they'll last three seconds before another patent troll knifes their now-fattened back and destroys them too.
I think it's a good bet that the supreme court judges have already considered this, but I'm not heavily invested in the US economy just in case.
It's not worth looking. Software patents are everywhere and for everything. Even if they could have ever made sense with the right system, we've now accepted the computer equivalent of patenting the wheel. XOR for drawing, scrollbars, icon grouping by function, pen-script that doesn't have many strokes, etc... Every trivial thing you do is covered by patents.
It's so bad that
#!/usr/bin/ruby pet_species = {:Rover =>:Dog}
violates at least three software patents I can think of, for looking up handlers based on data in a file, for algorithms used in almost every hash algorithm, and for automatically assigning values to human-readable identifiers.
Now what's covered that I didn't think of? What would that be like in any non-trivial program?
"So?" you say. "It's still a patent violation even if everyone does it."
Sure. But the government will simply discover what happens when they mandate the value of a resource. Any legitimate use flees across the border and all they're left with is the criminals they've made of their people. If the USA declares software patents to be valid and actually tries to enforce them, all useful development will simply move out of the USA.
The United States of Argentina they'll call it. Driven into bankruptcy by government fiat.
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I see, you believed what they told you. That's why you're wrong.
If you buy something over a counter, as you would a pack of gum, then you own it.
No two ways about it. EULAs are post-sale contracts and thus unenforceable.
Moreover, they don't even have the right to tell you not to "crack" the software. It's yours, you can give it the number they gave to you, or any other number you like.
If you didn't agree, in writing, that you don't own Windows, then you do. You'd have to agree otherwise for a sale to be turned into something else. If you have a volume liensing plan, you did agree to a license. If you merely bought your computer or OS in the store, it's yours. Totally and absolutely.
Nope. To the claim. Can't speak to the rest, but the voices *say* I'm fine.
I'm saying that copyright is all you don't have, but it's not part of ownership as the common person sees it.
If your name is McDonald, you probably feel you own your name (and you do) even if you don't own the exclusive rights to it, or even if someone else's exclusive rights mean you can't exercise yours in certain ways, like fast-food restaurants.
So, you own the hypothetical CD. In the sense that a sale always results in a contractually unencumbered product (if you buy it, no extra contracts apply and no post-sale restrictions are valid), you can also be said to own perpetual usage rights. Anything else wouldn't be a sale, and it is a sale.
There's no reason to think of your copy as limited. If you aren't the type to photocopy books, there's pretty much no way that you don't enjoy total usage of it, including marking it up, outright re-editing, and resale.
People often argue that the prevention of derivative works prevents edited copies, but it's trivial to see how edited copies are legal. If I buy a book and cross out the naughty words, it's still legal and I can give it to someone else that way. I can rip out pages, etc. Editing and destroying are hard to distinguish.
You can't take your book and legally bludgeon someone to death with it, but we don't say that this lack of bludgeon-rights means we don't own the book.
Sure, I own the encrypted data on the disc. But that's just a mechanical translation of the movie, and the same copyright covers both. Thus, if I own one, I own the other.
Even if you don't like the word "own", the same thing applies with "have perpetual usage and resale rights".
You're right that a compromise is needed, but that doesn't imply that the DMCA and DRM are in any way needed.
How about we see what percentage of our economy is media based, tax everyone that much and give the money to copyright holders based on how many people have their works? Then just public-domain everything.
Or, how about regular copyright lasts for 20 years, then goes to mandatory licensing at 100-x% of past revenues. x% then increases with time until the work is fully free at 40 years.
Or, how about regular copyright, as written now, and government prosecution of serious pirating (rings in Asia, etc) *or* DRM, but not both?
Or, we could have 5-year copyrights and the government would strictly enforce no-pirating laws (shutting down, if not charging everyone).
Or, we could let the industry die and be replaced by one with a viable economic model. (Unreasonable? No, the industries tied to holding content would die - the creators however do produce a product which is in-demand. We'd likely jump to a product-placement model, and who knows where from there.)
Personally, if something requires constitution-violation laws or enforcement, it's not something we want at *any* cost.
WW2 was fought for liberty, not a Britney Spears album.
You do own the content. You merely lack the copying rights to make a duplicate of it legitimately. Seriously, space/media-shifting and backup allowances clearly show that you own the content, not just the plastic disc or paper book.
... without permission"), and thus legal.
Doesn't really matter though, you can't sell someone something without implicitly giving them permission to use the thing.
If that means they need to decrypt it to view it, and you knew that, that must mean that you intend to let them use the product, or it wouldn't be a sale. (And the courts have ruled solid that, if it looks like a duck, it is. If you think you bought something, you did.) If you've given people the rights to decrypt it, that means it's not a DMCA violation ("
Further, as the MPAA would *have* to know this. Contract/Sale law is pretty well understood here. So for them to send a DMCA takedown they *must* be lying.
Clearly, the law intends to stop unintended decryption - trying to put the files on P2P. Sure. But it's insanity to just assume that this applies to legitimate use of media you purchased legally.
The MPAA have no leg to stand on, but they aren't above cold-blooded and calculated direct misstatements of fact, lies, of outright fraud as an reading of Hollywood history will show. What's a little intentional perjury? So like the RIAA they continue to send takedown notices against legit files, having sworn to be the rights-holder, etc, and continue to do so merely because nobody has enough money to punish them in court. Thieves.
Actually, the argument is just as good that the morality and how realistic a law is are exactly what should determine if you break it.
You may not want to let a police officer watch you, but society doesn't gain, overall, if people follow laws they believe to be unjust. I feel the DMCA is a trainwreck and I'd refuse to follow it. I'm Canadian so this one doesn't apply yet, but when it does, I'm still going to keep watching DVDs where I want to.
I don't know why US citizens admit to doing this stuff though, or anyone going through the USA. (Skylarov. And that's why Alan Cox is staying out.) Find a Canadian, New Zealander, etc to host it.
You may be able to get your own Palladium keys, but as you point out, you won't be allowed to play DRMed media. Likely many apps will refuse to run if you aren't on a machine whose ID they can verify.
/. now. Apparently the patch is forced when you log onto Live, and you can't roll it back. This isn't an HD/DVD hack or anything, but an example of how hard it will be to maintain it if managed.
And as for backwards compatibility, there's no reason they couldn't make a PC-compatible console, that only ran MS-certified and signed apps. Businesses could afford to get their software signed, especially if they only needed internal distribution, which many would like for copyright/trade-secret reasons.
A business console wouldn't look like an XBox, it'd have a keyboard and run any apps you needed, but it wouldn't come with any system-level dev tools.
More importantly, it'd be sold as an integrated unit and under a DRM-enforced EULA.
What does the business lose? The chance that you'll click on a virus they don't catch. The chance of someone sneaking data out using something like SSH/SCP? Higher admin costs because of differing hardware? I can't see their issue?
As for MS and the legions of Developers, Developers, Developers? There'd of course be a way to run simple shareware type apps - ActiveX through IE, in a sandbox? Limited-run keys... (why not get a cut of every app sold, plus every OS?)
Handled properly (slowly) I can't see much resistance to consolification.
As for the XBox 360 hack, there's one mentioned on
It would encourage there to be less laws... But we'd have to trust out politicians to always be writing new laws - the potential abuse there is huge. Especially when they find a must-go bill (renewing the murder laws) and attach some crap to it as a rider.
'For the purposes of this law, the suspect^Wguilty shall be assumed to have murdered a person if they have imbibed more than one "joint" or "marijuana cigarette"' or something else.
We'd need a system where laws weren't enacted for a year anyways. We should never need legislation before that. And let it be cancelled with only a 33% vote during that time. If a large portion of the nation isn't behind a law we shouldn't all live under it.
I agree. We almost passed a trial program here in BC. It was for Instant-Runoff Voting and I prefer Approval voting, but either are far ahead of what we currently have.
No, but you won't get rid of either of them unless you realize that the PATRIOT Act is just a "and the anti-drug stuff, you can use over there too". Fight the real source of the unconstitutional crap, not a mere me-too bill.
Okay, an undetectable xbox mod-chip that can be installed as a commodity is all I ask. I simply can't require a geek to use it. I do still think that the point of this exercise is the difficulty of developing this would be to do on an xbox.
You don't think general purpose computers will go away, and thus we're fine. I think most businesses will love the idea of consoles (locked down productivity machines). As such, there won't be much of a market for anything not locked down to the manufacturer - because anything else would encourage piracy, or course.
So sure, while I also agree that technically, Palladium-type technologies aren't a bad thing. I would like to use some of them in my own security even. However, I don't believe that these would be systems I actually would get to control. It's always going to be in someone's best interest to keep control (ie, have written the binary 'BIOS' that we have to trust as the basis for our 'admin' access.)
It's like having a computer to secure but not trusting the lock company to not have a master key, or cut a key for your lock for a crook. You couldn't secure the computer with a lock, even an unbreakable one, because it might be trojaned. This is Palladium and all the rest. A system I can't trust because someone else owns the keys and I'm not allowed to play with.
So the solution to the problem above is, 1) buy many locks from many people, wrap one layer on another. 2) assume the hardware is tamperable and never keep decrypted data there - use zero-knowledge protocols so that the machine can be stolen without compromising the data.
As Palladium, XBox-ification, PS3-ism, etc, is merely a defective lock, I don't feel the need to sell my general purpose computer to get it, which currently is the price. Until then, I'd rather have an unencrypted computer and no false sense of security.
But, I don't think the majority agree. That's why I predict the consolification, and the need for us to develop the next untraceable hacking tools with these consoles. Otherwise we're going to be in a bad place when stuff does go wrong and the next Richard Nixon can abuse even more total power.
As for security, sure. I believe it. *All* of the great hacks I've ever witnessed were social engineering.
What part do you do, coding, testing, paranoid guy watching everyone else?
But, this xbox bet... No. My point is that there needs to be a non-physical mod. Grandma may run a program, she won't take her xbox in for illegal soldering. Anyways, even if she did, afaik, Microsoft would detect it (now, or at the next patch) if you connected to their network and brick the unit.
This is why the hack needs to be non-physical, undetectable, and developed with people using only an xbox as a general purpose computer (chat with fellow hackers only via the xbox, code only via its tools, etc).
If not, what does it get you? HDDVD. Yeah. But what about the next encrypted media format? The one we won't have PCs to compile the code and burn the boot discs on.
As for the likelihood of the country actually getting to where a general purpose computer is illegal ala 1984... Slim. But rare enough to be strange, to require a business license to buy (it's wholesale), etc. If the xbox was 95% of what a PC was, leaving out just the 5% that let you tweak it (regedit, a compiler, etc) the majority wouldn't understand that it was stripped down. To them it would be TV-enhanced. Only the geeks would mind.
This is what the RIAA/etc want. A world where DRM makes content safe. We'd all be using an approved platform so whitelisting content with a known-valid watermark would be easy. Even if we warez the files we couldn't do anything because, like cell-phones, only approved programs would be able to run. (There'd be Java and Javascript, but those can't utilize DirectX, or anything - crippled.)
They'd never ban the computer world-wide. Even if they were fantastically successful and got rid of all others, China wouldn't follow suit, so the situation would be self correcting eventually. Someone who doesn't try to DRM their citizens onto consoles will eat our lunch.
It's not a conspiracy theory. I don't think anyone wants this, just that the people who are trying to legislate it have a convenient blind-spot over the consequences of their actions. I'd rather live in a country with an economy, so I dislike this legislation of unreality.
The issue was discussed in that thread, but no, not the trivial crash assumed to cause the airplane to fall like a y2k brick.
But still, that's my point. All the systems were properly isolated and yet a failure (overload and overheating is a failure) in one destroyed the others.
Not effectively, because of the mess of unrealistic patents. But, yes. You could look at your competition, think of the clever things they do (for which you could assume a patent would be upheld), and look to see if they're patented.
However, if you infringe on a patent after this, you'll likely be assumed to have known through your patent research and be liable for triple damages.
Realistically the thing to do is pretend they don't exist. Don't go looking at any. Ignore people talking about them (Microsoft).
You might get sued, but it's likely going to happen for business reasons (too similar a product, etc) and the particular patent just an excuse.
If your design is modular and you could swap the FAT32 filesystem and patch existing products, while a lawsuit for damages for past infringement could still be brought, it's a totally different thing and not half as profitable as they need to prove damages - it's not possible to get an injunction and halt your business as a threat.
Slashdot is global, your particular brand of fascism may vary.
By "us", I mean, users of general purpose computers. Windows with Perl is just as dangerous (to the user :) as Linux.
As for how, yes, I agree. They'll develop a locked down platform with tons of DRM (ie a console) and people won't mind because they didn't expect it to be a general purpose computer. Eventually they'll just stop making software HDDVD players and to legally watch your movie you "just" need an XBOX. At that point, like with IE, general purpose computers will start to go away and then legislation plugging the analog hole will ban all non-DRMed (ie, user controlled) computers and only a few nerds will care. I think analog hole is the right term, as once a non-locked down system (mine) renders the output to analog, it's not protected. It's a digital method, but the analog results are the goal.
As for the XBOX/HDDVD bet, I'll take it... if you agree to three conditions. It must be software only, developed on an XBOX (what else would you have in an XBOX-only world), and keep working online even after Microsoft heard about the hack and released a patch.
rofl. Of course he thinks the military would crash a plane rather than let you see it, that's what they need the black helicopters to collect debris from.
Seriously though, of course the military uses civilian airports. But they prefer not to. Civilians drive like grandmothers. An entire flight of fighters will launch within thirty seconds, not two minutes between each like jumbo jets.
I do take issue to your automatic democrat reference, and how this somehow is implied to support the republicans. I really hate what the USA has become, how anything can be justified in search of kiddy-porn viewing terrorists. I hate how there's a war going on overseas on totally false pretenses. Sure. We may need to lay down some smack for various reasons - we have an army because we think it may be needed. But this fake Osama/Saddam link is just insulting. Had the USA gone into Afghanistan any time in the last ten years for the multitude of human rights violations it would be one thing. Instead they go chasing Osama. For what!? Alive, dead, he's just another guy. If he dies, another will take his place. Instead, work on securing our systems here, building better firefighting and escape systems, etc. But no, a war is needed and they can't just say that US imperialism demands it so they have to lie about the reason. So we've got the troops overseas enforcing one mission, just so that our imperialist goals are met coincidentally. How horribly wasteful! Doesn't this sound like Vietnam?
If you need a label for my views, call it quasi-libertarian. We have a government and it taxes us to protect us - not ideal maybe, but it's better than it could be. I on board until they start lying about the reasons for their actions. At this point, what representation do we have. I see taxation. Just asking the important question...
btw, lay off the gays. They build valuable martian landing strips. Also, it's lame.
But having source lets you begin to replace components. If it's a black box you never can. If it's an open source system you can get around problems. Maybe the C compiler is hacked, maybe it'll even hack all future C compilers, but will it recognize a Ruby interpreter? Will it successfully hack Ruby such that a debugger written in Ruby will fail to display the vulnerability in C programs?
Look at Debian on BSD. They're swapping the Linux kernel while keeping the GNU tools and Debian packaging. You could swap in another kernel, or emulate three or four kernels in a VM and make sure they all agree. You could skip the GNU tools and use others, etc.
How do you avoid the potentially bugged parts of Windows. Let's say the MMU and the encryption routines. Swap in other components and see if it works identically.
I'd have to say that the legal climate looks otherwise. If you claim that Bill Clinton has himself directly ordered the political murder of many people, and post "facts" that supposedly support this, absolutely nothing will happen. I've seen many websites that say this, and much "worse".
They don't present this as an opinion at all. Straight "fact". And they're still there. On US webservers, un-obfuscated URLs, etc. Surely if it were so easy to remove this, it would have been.
It's hard to pursue slander or libel charges (in the USA - in much of Europe truth is no defense). If the person honestly believes something crazy, that's a defense. If they were mistaken, it's a defense. If they present a hypothetical and don't appear to be grind an axe, that's a defense. Not an ultimate one, but good enough usually.
Here's the first relevant looking article I found.
1 4/ai_58946883
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0UBT/is_4_
It's not proven, but the assumption is that while the entertainment computers weren't on the same networks, etc, as the flight computers, their components traveled through the same conduits so an unexpected electrical fire took them all out.
My point isn't that this did happen, but that while the "rules" are good practice, they are no real guarantee of safety. They keep evolving after crashes.
Further, you've got some crazy ideas about how missiles are held onto planes by the pilots good intentions and leprechauns. Any glitch capable of causing unintended behavior could cause any unintended behavior in the system. If the system can arm, aim, and launch a missile, it could do it by accident. A different accident, six smaller accidents, one "shouldn't have been an accident but he was in the wrong place", or whatever. You're so sure that a target could never be taken from the ones the jet is currently tracking, the armed missile (the are war planes) could never be given the wrong target, etc.
Yes, these are systems to catch these things. That's good, or planes would be launching fully armed missiles while being fueled. I know. But you've got the idea that the systems could never fail.
I did. Or their simulator isn't [a simulator].
But they could also just have never tested flying the plane along that route. Seeing as the plane is still under development they should have simulators running that they pre-test all missions in, and one that they play the plane's black-box into later and test for exactly the same output results.
Frankly, if six planes lockup at the same time and place, this error is obvious enough to have been caught during testing, especially as this is the place that nav systems tend to fail.
This is worse than a programmer who makes an array with ten elements and doesn't test trying to put eleven in.
As for the failure itself, of course we never know if a news article is accurate, but it did claim that the systems did not come back and that the pilots were required to follow their tankers back to base. I assume this is an exaggerated, as an armed-forces pilot should be able to navigate with manual means, which they should have had - but it definitely would have scrubbed the mission, as you say.
I am a developer. I know how bugs happen and that I'll never get rid of anywhere near all the potential bugs in my code. But I try to have test suites that simulate full usage of the program for all cases (impossible) but I do make sure that I have a specific case testing anything I claim the program could do. If it could "fly around the world" I'd have a test run that flew both ways, at least once.
I'm actually really unimpressed with the government on safety. The space shuttle was developed with the same sort of procedures as the F22 and Richard Feynman had a few choice words to say about its horrible safety and design. (Criminal - if it were a civilian matter people would have been in jail.) Too many people said things like you, "a missile launching on it's own is 1/10,000, arming on its own if 1/10,000, etc, for a total of 1/1[lots of 0s]." But these failures aren't unrelated, so the 1/10,000 chance of something happening is more likely to at least put untested load on the rest of the systems, etc.
I think game consoles say otherwise. And DRM, etc. If we're left free, we're the analog hole. "They" have to stop general purpose computers which means we're up against Sony, the RIAA, the MPAA, Microsoft, etc. Everyone who benefits from us being on a restricted platform.
You can't break HDDVD protection on an XBOX and never will be able to. You can't bypass Lexmark printers ink "protection" system without a real computer. You can't install browser plugins on a console, or chat outside of the manufacturers approved forums...
Yeah, because a glitch capable of dropping a missile could never arm it, aim it, and drop it.
Sure, nav systems are separate from flight systems. Except that they're not really because as the in-flight-entertainment crash showed, even systems that aren't connected are.
This is exactly what you get if you hire a bunch of hacks who live in their parents' basements - critical software that obviously doesn't have a test plan.
I'm a little surprised that they've never simulated this, or their simulator isn't. Either way it's laughable.
You're placing a lot of trust in design principles that, if they really were followed, would have presented the failure just witnessed. Surprisingly, this doesn't seem to shake your faith.
So, we'd spend millions fighting this injustice. And when we were done, we'd merely have saved our industry or hobby from one potential threat. Another will try and eventually one will succeed. There's a lot of profit in shackling you, people won't stop just because we bankrupted ourselves on a media campaign.
Won't someone rid us of this troublesome law and those who abuse it?
No, but it's not like anyone real will respond to Balmer's threats either. Trying to use patents this way (submarine patents, etc) doesn't seem to get a lot of court respect either, especially wrapped in FUD obviously designed to help their stock price.
This site is simply so that the author can, on May 2nd, prove that MS is full of shit. It doesn't need to be well worded to do that, it need merely survive.
At that, the futility of software patents will be exposed in on of the following ways
1) MS shows patents - public realizes that 90% of software in the field is covered by these same patents, and laughs. One independent discovery doesn't mean anything, but if everyone discovered it themselves maybe it was obvious.
2) MS shows patents - judge awards ownership of the site, the owner, his cat, etc, to MS. All software companies immediately open a subsidiary in the Bahamas and leave the USA.
3) MS doesn't say anything. Showing what?
3.1) That they can't usefully sue this guy, which they could if they had a real case.
3.2) That they don't consider it worth their time.
We both know MS won't reply, so it's a question of why, 3.1 or 3.2?
Either way he's pretty indemnified against future cases, either they can't, or he can show their extremely uncooperative nature to a judge and likely get the case pitched as he'd specifically tried to cooperate, the lawsuit would have to allege some damages, which they would obviously have been concealing from him now, despite his direct questions...
Which says that they can't.
They either respond now, and fail or destroy the economy (which I find unlikely), and have played their hand. Or, they fail to respond, thus taking away much of their ability to do so later. So even if it was that they didn't care to reply, it becomes that they couldn't if they wanted to.
If MS succeeds, the USA enters a patent nightmare that its big-business controllers don't want. Those big corps that "donate" to politicians are no more eager to have a patent fight with MS than anyone else. If MS wins it will be over the dead body of the rest of the industry, and they'll last three seconds before another patent troll knifes their now-fattened back and destroys them too.
I think it's a good bet that the supreme court judges have already considered this, but I'm not heavily invested in the US economy just in case.
It's not worth looking. Software patents are everywhere and for everything. Even if they could have ever made sense with the right system, we've now accepted the computer equivalent of patenting the wheel. XOR for drawing, scrollbars, icon grouping by function, pen-script that doesn't have many strokes, etc... Every trivial thing you do is covered by patents.
:Dog}
It's so bad that
#!/usr/bin/ruby
pet_species = {:Rover =>
violates at least three software patents I can think of, for looking up handlers based on data in a file, for algorithms used in almost every hash algorithm, and for automatically assigning values to human-readable identifiers.
Now what's covered that I didn't think of? What would that be like in any non-trivial program?
"So?" you say. "It's still a patent violation even if everyone does it."
Sure. But the government will simply discover what happens when they mandate the value of a resource. Any legitimate use flees across the border and all they're left with is the criminals they've made of their people. If the USA declares software patents to be valid and actually tries to enforce them, all useful development will simply move out of the USA.
The United States of Argentina they'll call it. Driven into bankruptcy by government fiat.