Let me be clear here. They can code up operating systems that contain date-based expiration code all they want. So can anyone else. But when they try to prevent developers from modifying the OS so that it doesn't expire or from installing a homebrew OS, that's unethical.
And when have they done either of those things? Have there been assassinations? Does the iPhone give hackers electric shocks? I think we would have heard by now if that were true.
Phones will only run apps signed by Apple. It also applies FairPlay to the package.
Twitter message from Deric Horn on March 6, 2008
Let me repeat that: if Apple doesn't sign your iPhone app, it does not run.
If you (I speak hypothetically, since your confusion makes it unlikely that you actually do any iPhone coding) want to reverse engineer and hack the firmware, go right ahead, just don't expect Apple to welcome you with candy, flowers and toppled statues of Jobs. If you brick it, you're on your own.
Unless I get a digital signature from Apple, that's going to be a little bit of a problem.
The beta firmware expired (and was replaced by Apple even before your remarks).
The beta firmware did not expire; it is not a banana that got left out on the counter too long. It was programmed to do what it did, by Apple, on purpose. That is up to Apple. If they want, they can release beta firmware that not only refuses to run after a certain date but contains goatse or crashes every time a developer tries to run an application, or whatever. That's fine.
The problem is that their hardware checks digital signatures on the OS before loading it. That's a close cousin of Tivoization, and it's wrong.
I will agree that Apple has excellent and not entirely evil reasons to want to force people to do things the Apple way.
However, it's wrong for Apple to manufacture and sell hardware that disobeys its owner.
Let me be clear here. They can code up operating systems that contain date-based expiration code all they want. So can anyone else. But when they try to prevent developers from modifying the OS so that it doesn't expire or from installing a homebrew OS, that's unethical.
You're closer to the truth than you know. They use 64 bit (i.e. 8 byte) WEP by default, which is really 40 bit (i.e. 5 byte) WEP since three of those bytes are the IV and broadcast in the clear. However, 2WIRE has an awful policy of printing the WEP key on the side of the modem in hex format and not using the digits A through F.
So the default key, written in hex, is a "decimal" number somewhere between 0,000,000,000 and 9,999,999,999. That's only 10 billion possibilities, or about 33.2 bits of entropy. Your computer can crack through that in a day or two with only three or four captured packets.
When I discovered this (and, of course, got stonewalled by 2WIRE), I wrote a patch for aircrack (now aircrack-ng) that programs it to search only the binary coded decimal keyspace. I named this option -t in honor of "Two Wire" for their terrible security.
Now I feel so stupid. I should have thought to give each developer another few hundred dollars so they could buy extra handsets to develop their apps. After all, it's not as if it's reasonable to expect a machine to do everyday tasks AND be used as software development platform at the same time. That's why there are so few people who are able to write software these days: most people can't afford a second computer that only runs development code.
And anyway, it would be out of the question to expect to be able to recover a device from a software error by reinitializing it. Once upon a time I mastered a DVD badly and when I stuck it in my DVD player, the thing crashed and never came back. The player was scrap, but that's not surprising since it's the way all consumer electronics devices work.
Oh, wait. The problems these people are facing don't even have anything to do with any of the ordinary embedded software development issues. They didn't make programming errors that left their devices in a bad state and they weren't unable to reinitialize their devices with the original firmware.
The problem is that Apple thinks it owns an iPhone even after the handset has been traded to a customer for cash, resulting in features that hurt users (like mandatory SDK expiration dates) and the hubris of code signing. Apple broke every single one of those iPhones. The developers did nothing but buy hardware from an unethical company.
I see a remarkable parallel between them and the *AAs, actually. Both are large monolithic companies who make a rather large amount of money with archaic business practices and are reliant on their customers being ignorant.
I agree. Casinos and the *AAs would work much better if they were made up of distinct processes that communicated via message passing rather than function calls.
Yes, it sucks that backup copies are collateral damage in this battle. But you tell me a better method for us to guarantee that no wholesale bootlegging will occur, and I'll take it to my superiors.
I'm totally against copyright/DRM/preventing private copying, and it seems like most people on slashdot feel the same way, but you might actually get some constructive responses to a reasonable question like this. I'm totally willing to think about the problem, and if I come up with the winning solution I won't try to charge you a dime. I'll be happy if you just use it. Please, consider submitting this question as an "Ask Slashdot" for a variety of responses.
Just to be sure I understand you, you have two goals:
1. You want to ensure that people who are willing to pay for the game will send their money to the people who actually authored it. 2. You want to ensure that people who buy discs are receiving quality goods.
Here are my thoughts:
1a. Ransom licensing (i.e. only take preorders). Not only does it totally eliminate the freeloader problem, but it ensures that there won't be any profit in making knockoff discs. Ransom licensing would work best for a big company with a solid reputation for making good games. However, this is a big departure from the way games are traditionally financed, and big game developers seem to be quite risk averse/conservative. 1b. Holograms, maybe? I don't know how good people are at duplicating those. 1c. Program the game to ask for the retailer's name during registration, and explain why you want to know. Normally I feel that it's my own business how old I am and how many TVs I own, but if you explain your plight to a gamer who honestly wants to send money to the developers, I'm sure he or she would be willing to register and help you check if the disc came from your company.
2a. Digital distribution. Either a digital download is bit for bit identical to the original or it isn't. There's no such thing as a file that is pretty much OK today but rotten next week because it was fabricated poorly. If my hard disk or CD-R holding the download fails, that's my fault as a consumer, not your fault as a game developer. For extra brownie points, let me use my serial number to download additional copies of the game installer in case I lose my original. 2b. As a last resort, publish CDs but don't use any physical-medium-based DRM. If your game discs can be copied using standard, cheap CD-Rs and don't require sophisticated mastering machinery, commercial pirates will be more likely to gravitate to more readily available, more mature duplication techniques that are more likely to produce quality goods. It's not an ideal situation, but it won't reflect as badly on your company because Takamura's Shady CD House is the only company in town who can duplicate Madden 2010 DVDs and all of the discs coming out suffer bit rot after a month.
See posix_fadvise. Using that API, a process can have as much control over a file as it needs; too bad the kernel does basically nothing with that information.
Is it really true that the kernel does basically nothing with posix_fadvise? I was about to rewrite an app to use posix_fadvise instead of O_DIRECT to manage caching based on this post by Linus:
Yes, this is a FUD post. You should Fear that this will become accepted practice. You should be Uncertain about whether or not the gatekeepers at Apple will let you run the apps you want to on your own hardware. You should Doubt the iPhone's ability to provide a truly open computing environment.
What is the difference between the gaming cards and the workstation cards from Nvidia and ATI?
I don't know anything about ATI cards.
Other people have mentioned some features that Quadros have and GeForces don't. I'll add hardware antialiased lines to that list. However, the real difference between a GeForce Card and a Quadro card is about $1000 and a missing or extra capacitor. Really.
I suspect (and it's only a suspicion) that there are some transistors in the GPU that serve no purpose other than to implement Quadro-only features. In GeForce CPUs, those transistors may be broken or may never have been tested.
Nowadays, the difference between a high-end nvidia graphics card and a midrange nvidia graphics card from the same generation is often which pixel and vertex shader units have been disabled. The high-end card may have 32 out of 32 pixel shader units enabled, whereas the midrange graphics card may have only 24 or 16 of them enabled. Those units may be broken or they may be just fine. If you're using Windows and don't mind potentially damaging your card and voiding your warranty, there's a program called Rivatuner that can enable the masked shader units.
So it's the same deal. If you're willing to risk what you've got, you may be able to turn what you have into a whole lot more.
Is anybody really satisfied with ~3 hours of battery life on a laptop?
Agreed. The ideal laptop stays up at full performance on battery power alone for as long as I can stay awake. It recharges in less time than it takes me to sleep. I would gladly deal with a double-thickness, double-weight laptop if meant significantly more battery life. Or even triple thickness, triple weight.
I think the best use of the word piracy is to describe what real pirates ("arr, matey") do. Calling copyright infringement counterfeiting implies that the people receiving the copies of the software/music/whatever else are unaware that the copies aren't authorized or would prefer authorized copies, which is almost never true in my experience. I have friends who buy retail games and then download ripped versions just so they don't have to deal with CD keys and having the disc in the drive.
Given the rapid rate of technological change, is there a more practical way to interface emergent technology with our legal system while retaining civil rights over corporate rights?
Yes. Make sure the troublemakers get Focused. Oh wait, civil rights?
I give it a 90% chance that this slashdot story's body was not carefully thought out. However, the story itself does not say that the route announcement was malicious. It says that there were malicious routes, and they were announced to the world. It's the routes (that is, routing table entries) that were malicious since they were deliberately incorrect. Censorship is always malicious.
And I agree, US companies should have better sense than to contribute toward things like the great firewall of China. They may not be able to stop their hardware from being re-sold in the Chinese market, but they surely shouldn't accept contracts for purpose-built censorship software.
Your analogy is flawed. A better analogy would be walking into a store and buying a coke. When the coke is bought you find out that it is, in fact, chained to the store and you have to drink it inside. Hymn is the glass you pour the coke into in order to be able to chill outside where you want to be.
Your analogy is also flawed. Because the fact the Coke was chained to the store was no secret. It's not something you didn't find out after you bought it. It's more like you bought the Coke knowing full well it was chained to the store but also knew that if you bought this special Hymn glass you could take the Coke outside, and you assumed you'd always be able to do that. But suddenly Apple came along and sent a C&D to the company making Hymn glasses.
Your analogy is also flawed. The fact that chain is mentioned in little tiny letters on the bottom of the can (right after dextromethylpyroxyencryptorific acid and Red #2) does not mean that people know about it. Also, trying to stop people from unchaining cokes from stores is wrong, regardless of whether the store can get away with it or whether people know about it in advance.
Also, computers are like cars--let's keep the flawed analogy chain going.
If you strive for the perfect setup, you'll be miserable. Just try to find a combination that's good enough.
Someday, we'll all be wearing digital clothes and contacts like in Rainbows End and it will meet all your needs. Until then, you're going to have to choose between carrying a few different gadgets and giving up capabilities.
P.S. Does the "the government can revoke your certificate and kick you off the net" idea freak anyone else out? It sounds like Vernor Vinge understands trusted computing.
So in other words, Microsoft wants students to have free as in beer access to Microsoft software development tools. Students have always had free as in beer access to Microsoft software development tools through piracy.
Nothing has changed except Microsoft has decided that permitting a previously prohibited activity is a good idea. Quibble all you want about the differences between "downloading from Microsoft's server" versus "downloading from a friend's server."
The important thing is that this is a good example of copyright hurting business and the public instead of helping. A lot of people in my girlfriend's art classes at college were convinced that pirating Photoshop was stealing, was wrong, and was hurting Adobe. Maybe I'll have better luck explaining the truth to this kind of person now that I have an example like this backed by a big corporation.
General Grievous isn't such a bad name. I always liked to imagine that he had a whole chain of command underneath him. You know, Private Painful reports to Sergeant Shocking, who receives orders from Lieutenant Lamentable (or Colonel Catastrophic), both of which fear and obey Brigadier General Baleful. Maybe Admiral Atrocious comes to visit sometimes.
For me, this is one of the major delights of the Star Wars franchise.
This may be one of the reasons why Microsoft is launching the education campaign: to counter falsehoods like the one you've relayed.
Microsoft doesn't care about the truth. Microsoft cares about perpetuating the idea that distributing bytes under non-Free licenses is moral and good for society, an idea Bill Gates has been pushing from the beginning.
I object to this initiative because illegal == wrong in a lot of young minds, which is demonstrably not the case.
If Microsoft is going around telling people that there are criminal penalties for copyright infringement, young children might get the idea that copyright infringement is wrong, which would have much more serious consequences. We already have more than one generation of people who have never seen a copyright expire. People are already beginning to forget why the constitution says that copyright should be for a limited time only.
Slashdot Mirror
From Rogue Amoeba courtesy of TUAW ( http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2008/03/07/code-signing-and-you/ ):
However, the environment is different in one important way. Apple is the gatekeeper:
Phones will only run apps signed by Apple. It also applies FairPlay to the package.
Twitter message from Deric Horn on March 6, 2008
Let me repeat that: if Apple doesn't sign your iPhone app, it does not run.
Unless I get a digital signature from Apple, that's going to be a little bit of a problem.
The beta firmware did not expire; it is not a banana that got left out on the counter too long. It was programmed to do what it did, by Apple, on purpose. That is up to Apple. If they want, they can release beta firmware that not only refuses to run after a certain date but contains goatse or crashes every time a developer tries to run an application, or whatever. That's fine.
The problem is that their hardware checks digital signatures on the OS before loading it. That's a close cousin of Tivoization, and it's wrong.
I will agree that Apple has excellent and not entirely evil reasons to want to force people to do things the Apple way.
However, it's wrong for Apple to manufacture and sell hardware that disobeys its owner.
Let me be clear here. They can code up operating systems that contain date-based expiration code all they want. So can anyone else. But when they try to prevent developers from modifying the OS so that it doesn't expire or from installing a homebrew OS, that's unethical.
By default they come with 32 bit WEP
You're closer to the truth than you know. They use 64 bit (i.e. 8 byte) WEP by default, which is really 40 bit (i.e. 5 byte) WEP since three of those bytes are the IV and broadcast in the clear. However, 2WIRE has an awful policy of printing the WEP key on the side of the modem in hex format and not using the digits A through F.
So the default key, written in hex, is a "decimal" number somewhere between 0,000,000,000 and 9,999,999,999. That's only 10 billion possibilities, or about 33.2 bits of entropy. Your computer can crack through that in a day or two with only three or four captured packets.
When I discovered this (and, of course, got stonewalled by 2WIRE), I wrote a patch for aircrack (now aircrack-ng) that programs it to search only the binary coded decimal keyspace. I named this option -t in honor of "Two Wire" for their terrible security.
Now I feel so stupid. I should have thought to give each developer another few hundred dollars so they could buy extra handsets to develop their apps. After all, it's not as if it's reasonable to expect a machine to do everyday tasks AND be used as software development platform at the same time. That's why there are so few people who are able to write software these days: most people can't afford a second computer that only runs development code.
And anyway, it would be out of the question to expect to be able to recover a device from a software error by reinitializing it. Once upon a time I mastered a DVD badly and when I stuck it in my DVD player, the thing crashed and never came back. The player was scrap, but that's not surprising since it's the way all consumer electronics devices work.
Oh, wait. The problems these people are facing don't even have anything to do with any of the ordinary embedded software development issues. They didn't make programming errors that left their devices in a bad state and they weren't unable to reinitialize their devices with the original firmware.
The problem is that Apple thinks it owns an iPhone even after the handset has been traded to a customer for cash, resulting in features that hurt users (like mandatory SDK expiration dates) and the hubris of code signing. Apple broke every single one of those iPhones. The developers did nothing but buy hardware from an unethical company.
I see a remarkable parallel between them and the *AAs, actually. Both are large monolithic companies who make a rather large amount of money with archaic business practices and are reliant on their customers being ignorant.
I agree. Casinos and the *AAs would work much better if they were made up of distinct processes that communicated via message passing rather than function calls.
Would you be willing to preorder a ransom-licensed game if you liked the demo?
Yes, it sucks that backup copies are collateral damage in this battle. But you tell me a better method for us to guarantee that no wholesale bootlegging will occur, and I'll take it to my superiors.
I'm totally against copyright/DRM/preventing private copying, and it seems like most people on slashdot feel the same way, but you might actually get some constructive responses to a reasonable question like this. I'm totally willing to think about the problem, and if I come up with the winning solution I won't try to charge you a dime. I'll be happy if you just use it. Please, consider submitting this question as an "Ask Slashdot" for a variety of responses.
Just to be sure I understand you, you have two goals:
1. You want to ensure that people who are willing to pay for the game will send their money to the people who actually authored it.
2. You want to ensure that people who buy discs are receiving quality goods.
Here are my thoughts:
1a. Ransom licensing (i.e. only take preorders). Not only does it totally eliminate the freeloader problem, but it ensures that there won't be any profit in making knockoff discs. Ransom licensing would work best for a big company with a solid reputation for making good games. However, this is a big departure from the way games are traditionally financed, and big game developers seem to be quite risk averse/conservative.
1b. Holograms, maybe? I don't know how good people are at duplicating those.
1c. Program the game to ask for the retailer's name during registration, and explain why you want to know. Normally I feel that it's my own business how old I am and how many TVs I own, but if you explain your plight to a gamer who honestly wants to send money to the developers, I'm sure he or she would be willing to register and help you check if the disc came from your company.
2a. Digital distribution. Either a digital download is bit for bit identical to the original or it isn't. There's no such thing as a file that is pretty much OK today but rotten next week because it was fabricated poorly. If my hard disk or CD-R holding the download fails, that's my fault as a consumer, not your fault as a game developer. For extra brownie points, let me use my serial number to download additional copies of the game installer in case I lose my original.
2b. As a last resort, publish CDs but don't use any physical-medium-based DRM. If your game discs can be copied using standard, cheap CD-Rs and don't require sophisticated mastering machinery, commercial pirates will be more likely to gravitate to more readily available, more mature duplication techniques that are more likely to produce quality goods. It's not an ideal situation, but it won't reflect as badly on your company because Takamura's Shady CD House is the only company in town who can duplicate Madden 2010 DVDs and all of the discs coming out suffer bit rot after a month.
See posix_fadvise. Using that API, a process can have as much control over a file as it needs; too bad the kernel does basically nothing with that information.
Is it really true that the kernel does basically nothing with posix_fadvise? I was about to rewrite an app to use posix_fadvise instead of O_DIRECT to manage caching based on this post by Linus:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/1/10/233
but if you're right then it would be a waste of time.
http://inventgeek.com/Projects/IonCooler/Overview.aspx
You beat me to it! I was going to write something like:
"Now, subscribers can begin paying overage fees and experiencing reduced speeds just six seconds after the beginning of the each new billing cycle."
Really? I thought the only audit trail available was to read the source code, which may be:
Seriously. Do you read the source code every time you download a program?
Get real. This is a Doom n' Gloom / FUD post.
Yes, this is a FUD post. You should Fear that this will become accepted practice. You should be Uncertain about whether or not the gatekeepers at Apple will let you run the apps you want to on your own hardware. You should Doubt the iPhone's ability to provide a truly open computing environment.
What is the difference between the gaming cards and the workstation cards from Nvidia and ATI?
I don't know anything about ATI cards.
Other people have mentioned some features that Quadros have and GeForces don't. I'll add hardware antialiased lines to that list. However, the real difference between a GeForce Card and a Quadro card is about $1000 and a missing or extra capacitor. Really.
I suspect (and it's only a suspicion) that there are some transistors in the GPU that serve no purpose other than to implement Quadro-only features. In GeForce CPUs, those transistors may be broken or may never have been tested.
Nowadays, the difference between a high-end nvidia graphics card and a midrange nvidia graphics card from the same generation is often which pixel and vertex shader units have been disabled. The high-end card may have 32 out of 32 pixel shader units enabled, whereas the midrange graphics card may have only 24 or 16 of them enabled. Those units may be broken or they may be just fine. If you're using Windows and don't mind potentially damaging your card and voiding your warranty, there's a program called Rivatuner that can enable the masked shader units.
So it's the same deal. If you're willing to risk what you've got, you may be able to turn what you have into a whole lot more.
Is anybody really satisfied with ~3 hours of battery life on a laptop?
Agreed. The ideal laptop stays up at full performance on battery power alone for as long as I can stay awake. It recharges in less time than it takes me to sleep. I would gladly deal with a double-thickness, double-weight laptop if meant significantly more battery life. Or even triple thickness, triple weight.
Developers will get 70% of the proceeds from sales of their goods on the App store, with no further charges for hosting, credit-card processing, etc.
As I understand it, there won't be any goods in the App store. Just software.
I think the best use of the word piracy is to describe what real pirates ("arr, matey") do. Calling copyright infringement counterfeiting implies that the people receiving the copies of the software/music/whatever else are unaware that the copies aren't authorized or would prefer authorized copies, which is almost never true in my experience. I have friends who buy retail games and then download ripped versions just so they don't have to deal with CD keys and having the disc in the drive.
I wish I still had time for games...
Given the rapid rate of technological change, is there a more practical way to interface emergent technology with our legal system while retaining civil rights over corporate rights?
Yes. Make sure the troublemakers get Focused. Oh wait, civil rights?
Patent examiners are working hard to make sure there is very little difference between the two. cheek.insert(tongue);
I give it a 90% chance that this slashdot story's body was not carefully thought out. However, the story itself does not say that the route announcement was malicious. It says that there were malicious routes, and they were announced to the world. It's the routes (that is, routing table entries) that were malicious since they were deliberately incorrect. Censorship is always malicious.
And I agree, US companies should have better sense than to contribute toward things like the great firewall of China. They may not be able to stop their hardware from being re-sold in the Chinese market, but they surely shouldn't accept contracts for purpose-built censorship software.
Your analogy is also flawed. The fact that chain is mentioned in little tiny letters on the bottom of the can (right after dextromethylpyroxyencryptorific acid and Red #2) does not mean that people know about it. Also, trying to stop people from unchaining cokes from stores is wrong, regardless of whether the store can get away with it or whether people know about it in advance.
Also, computers are like cars--let's keep the flawed analogy chain going.
If you strive for the perfect setup, you'll be miserable. Just try to find a combination that's good enough.
Someday, we'll all be wearing digital clothes and contacts like in Rainbows End and it will meet all your needs. Until then, you're going to have to choose between carrying a few different gadgets and giving up capabilities.
P.S.
Does the "the government can revoke your certificate and kick you off the net" idea freak anyone else out? It sounds like Vernor Vinge understands trusted computing.
So in other words, Microsoft wants students to have free as in beer access to Microsoft software development tools. Students have always had free as in beer access to Microsoft software development tools through piracy.
Nothing has changed except Microsoft has decided that permitting a previously prohibited activity is a good idea. Quibble all you want about the differences between "downloading from Microsoft's server" versus "downloading from a friend's server."
The important thing is that this is a good example of copyright hurting business and the public instead of helping. A lot of people in my girlfriend's art classes at college were convinced that pirating Photoshop was stealing, was wrong, and was hurting Adobe. Maybe I'll have better luck explaining the truth to this kind of person now that I have an example like this backed by a big corporation.
General Grievous isn't such a bad name. I always liked to imagine that he had a whole chain of command underneath him. You know, Private Painful reports to Sergeant Shocking, who receives orders from Lieutenant Lamentable (or Colonel Catastrophic), both of which fear and obey Brigadier General Baleful. Maybe Admiral Atrocious comes to visit sometimes.
For me, this is one of the major delights of the Star Wars franchise.
This may be one of the reasons why Microsoft is launching the education campaign: to counter falsehoods like the one you've relayed.
Microsoft doesn't care about the truth. Microsoft cares about perpetuating the idea that distributing bytes under non-Free licenses is moral and good for society, an idea Bill Gates has been pushing from the beginning.
I object to this initiative because illegal == wrong in a lot of young minds, which is demonstrably not the case.
If Microsoft is going around telling people that there are criminal penalties for copyright infringement, young children might get the idea that copyright infringement is wrong, which would have much more serious consequences. We already have more than one generation of people who have never seen a copyright expire. People are already beginning to forget why the constitution says that copyright should be for a limited time only.
What if the one company controlling the one infrastructure decides that traffic shaping is a good thing?