It has nothing to do with "win"modems or reverse engineering ability. The difference between a good old hardware modem and a "win"modem is that one follows a standard and the other doesn't.
An external hardware modem is a serial device (standard) that obeys the AT command set (standard). An internal hardware modem behaves like a serial port card (standard) with an attached device that obeys the AT command set (standard).
The only problem with "win"modems is that there's no baseline standard for talking to an ADC/DAC for a phone line, but there's no reason it has to be that way! Remember seeing "NE2000 compatible" in the advertisements for NICs? Instead of making 100s of different NICs that all behaved differently and required their own software drivers, NIC makers all constructed their hardware so that it would behave like a NE2000 ethernet card. Then one driver can work with all the devices. VGA for video? USB mass storage for thumbdrives and external HDDs? All examples of hardware being designed around a standard so that the OS only has to have a single driver to interface with the same class of hardware from any manufacturer.
From TFA: [AMD's] original statements about the issue gave the impression it only affected Phenoms clocked at 2.4GHz or higher.
In any case, I think the word despite is used in the quoted sentence because AMD is releasing flawed Phenoms with clock speeds lower than 2.4GHz. This would mean AMD is lying about the reason why they delayed the 2.4GHz Phenoms, since AMD's actions would establish that this erratum alone is not sufficient reason for them not to ship a particular CPU. So AMD is making a claim despite the fact that there is evidence that their claim is false.
You really need to be more careful. The entire rest of the page was rendered in a warm and fatherly voice thanks to you. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but I kept thinking, "Get back to the music already!"
Yes, that could inflate the numbers of non-paying customers.
I downloaded it for $0 too, and it didn't appeal to me at all. I wish I could "un-download" it, i.e. delete it from my hard disk and decrement their "$0 downloader" count.
there is a positive correlation between peer-to-peer downloading and CD purchasing.
Well of course. This study makes it perfectly clear that P2P downloading leads to CD purchasing, so P2P is obviously helping the music industry.
Wait a minute. Before P2P some people liked to buy a lot of CDs and some people didn't like to buy CDs at all. Those people who liked to buy a lot of CDs are now buying fewer CDs and downloading music illegally instead. Those people who didn't care much about music before are not downloading musically illegally because they don't want it very much. So P2P is obviously hurting the music industry.
Oh wait. I can come to two different opinions based on the same evidence depending on what mood I'm in and the people I listen to. Maybe I should recognize that it's totally possible to make a convincing argument for a statement that isn't true. Maybe I should re-evaluate some of the things I'm dead certain about.
As I recall, this whole mess got started because someone got the bright idea to "redefine" 1MB as 1,000,000B to sell less product for the same amount of money. This conferred a financial advantage over other manufacturers (who then followed suit). I doubt manufacturers would be willing to go back, and I don't especially want them to either.
An easy interface for installing QEMU and Windows like QEMU Launcher and QEMU Control polished and fully supported by Canonical.
I have never used QEMU in Windows, but virtualbox-ose is in "universe". Having played with FOSS virtualization software in the past, I can say that virtualbox-ose is an order of magnitude easier to work with and is almost as user-friendly as VMWare. In some ways, I actually like it better than VMWare.
In actuality, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes -- a difference of approximately 7% from Seagate's figures. Seagate is saying it will offer a cash refund or free backup and recovery software."
cash or software, cash claim only if bought before 2006 & you have proof-of-purchase. 5% of what you paid
Shouldn't that be 7% of what I paid? They're fudging the numbers again!
Ok, seriously, the best solution to this problem is for software authors to start using powers of 10 for sizes when giving information to the user. In the mean time, just print on the side of the box how many bytes there are. You can't screw that up.
"750,000,000,000 byte hard drive for sale" - is that so terribly hard? I thought the computer industry liked to print big numbers on the outside of boxes anyway.
In higher education web sites, this kind of error is endemic. On both occasions I needed a higher resolution picture of one of my professors, I right clicked on the tiny thumbnails on their web sites and clicked "View Image." It nearly always works.
IMHO, fixing that would go a long way towards fixing the patent situation. If the patent holder had to pay back all licensing and attorney fees for a patent ruled invalid, the patent holders themselves would be far more careful in asserting rights for "inventions" that are not likely to stand up to scrutiny.
I agree. In fact, I would go so far as to say that patent holders would be terrified of asserting their rights to collect licensing fees period. Think about it: would you take a job if your contract said at the end of five years of employment there would be a 1 in 100 chance you would have to pay back every cent of your salary earned so far? No, you would not. This would be the end of the patent system.
Personally, I think that would be wonderful, but it's always a good idea to really consider the consequences of new regulations before advocating them.
Everyone knows that it's much more acceptable to show graphic, detailed video of torture and murder than it is to show video of two people going through the motions of making love without taking off their underwear.
Thanks for backing up your products with 5 year warranties while all the other major HDD manufacturers that I know of have reduced their consumer warranties to 1 year. That tells me all I need to know about the quality of Seagate's products compared to its competitors.
So call it a (nearly) guaranteed 40MB/sec, and an average of 60MB/sec.
Come on now. Those figures only make sense for sequential reading and writing, which is almost never the situation while swapping.
Cox Communications (now Suddenlink in my area) did this. Long story short I threatened to expose them if they didn't stop and they said they would not take any action. Two days later the forged RST packets disappeared.
I have packet logs. If I can help anyone bust them for this, please email me.
Which makes me wonder, can you sell games direct for a game console and avoid the licencing fees?
Legally or technically? I have no idea about the legal aspect.
As for the technical aspect, the original NES used a special manufactured-by-Nintendo chip in the cartridge to verify that the game was licensed. Various non-approved game publishers would cannibalize those chips from unpopular games and stick them in their own. Presto! Instant authorized cartridge! I remember hearing about one game manufacturer where they would include an adapter with their cartridge: you plug the adapter into the console, and then you plug their game in addition to an "official" game into the adapter. The adapter would send requests for the authorization chip to the official game and requests for the actual game to the manufacturer's cart.
For disc-based systems like the Playstation and Playstation 2, I believe they prevent unauthorized games from running by checking for the presence of extra subchannel data or odd eight-to-fourteen modulation patterns respectively. In theory, a manufacturer could get around this by reverse-engineering the copy protection signatures and using special, expensive hardware to press them into their own discs. Action Replay 2 is an example of this actually happening on the Playstation 2, but I don't know of any game makers who used this trick to get around going through Sony to get their game published.
For the original xbox (I know nothing about copy prevention on the latest generation of consoles), in addition to special disc features to prevent copying, the hardware checks for the presence of a Microsoft-supplied digital signature on the executable before it starts executing. So, Take Two could have the best disc replication hardware possible and still not be able to publish on the xbox without MS's go-ahead (or MS's private signing key). In other words, the xbox is "tivoized."
500GB is a LOT of data. Great for backups, perhaps for storing raw video footage and so on, but hard to justify for distributing data or for sneakernet uses.
When my friend first got a DVD burner, he felt guilty about storing less than 4GB on a DVD-R because it was a waste that was hard to justify.
...because most people who think they understand the nature of Trusted Computing are dead wrong.
In theory you are perfectly correct. There's no sense in trusting data coming from the client. Any hardware or software added to the client's machine to make it disobey its owner can be circumvented.
In practice, the bad guys have come up with a way to make this circumvention difficult and expensive. Here's the basic outline for trusted computing:
* A small chip called a TPM is added to your motherboard. This chip may (in later incarnations) be integrated into the CPU or other system components.
* The chip **DOES NOT** restrict the activities that your system can perform. You can still run arbitrary code at arbitrarily high privilege levels.
* What the chip **DOES** do is keep a detailed log of the code that has run or is running with elevated privileges. Just to reiterate: you can run any code you want, but the chip is watching.
* The chip contains its own public/private key pair that it can use to sign reports on your computer's activity. If you choose to run software on your computer that passes these reports on to other computers on the Internet, other computers on the Internet can know with certainty what software is in control of your computer. You could choose to run software on your computer that would modify these reports before passing them on. However, owing to the nature of public key cryptography, other computers on the Internet would be able to detect your forgery.
* You are free to turn off or remove the chip at any time.
Many people criticize "Trusted Computing" technology by saying that it "controls" what software you can run on your computer. This is true, but not in the way most people think. You are still free to run any software you like on your Trusted Computer, but you cannot program your computer to lie convincingly about your choice of software to other computers on the Internet.
In this way, other people on the Internet can hold you responsible for choosing to run software that they don't approve of. Want to install AutoAim v3.5 on your PC? Go ahead. But the next time you try to play a multiplayer game, the game server will refuse to let you connect until it receives a report from your Trusted Platform Module indicating that you aren't enhancing your aim with software. Don't like the idea of installing GovernmentSpySoftware v2.02 on your home PC? Then don't! But be aware that the next time you try to connect to the Internet, a government-mandated piece of software in your ISP's Radius server will require a signed certificate from your TPM that the spy software is running and unaltered before it instructs the routers to handle your traffic.
These are just hypothetical examples, but they show how trusted computing will be used to control your computer without ever making your computer less capable or more restricted. If anything, a "trusted computer" is more capable than a PC of today: it has the extra capability of spying on you and reporting your actions to other people!
So you can't "wrap the chip in software" like you suggested. Your software won't have the necessary private keys to produce authentic-looking reports from the TPM. You could definitely physically break open the chip and try to extract the private key. You might even be successful if you've got a lot of equipment and education. But that would have to be done on a PC-by-PC basis since each PC will have its own TPM and each TPM will have its own private key.
Laptop: Toshiba Tecra S2 Graphics Card: GeForce Go 6600 Operating System: Dual booting Windows XP and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04.
Battery life in Windows XP: 3-4 hours (can't be more exact since I rarely use it) Battery life in Ubuntu 7.04 without compiz: about 3h 30m Battery life in Ubuntu 7.04 with compiz: about 3h 30m
So, compiz doesn't noticeably affect battery life, at least on my hardware.
But it seems to me that this could indicate that as part of the Media Key Block update on new disks, a new HRL will be distributed to invalidate the old WinDVD host key, in addition to the changes for the new WinDVD device key. That would be more consistent with what all these parties are describing.
You're 100% right.
There's already enough misinformation layered on top of AACS, which is built on the fundamentally impossible idea of DRM. Thank you for helping to keep me from adding to it. Hopefully anyone who reads my post will also read your reply.
once you put in a disc which says "Hey, you're supposed to be revoked" that player will stop working until you get an upgrade.
This myth appears to have originated...
It's not a myth at all. Try reading section 4.8 of the AACS Introduction and Common Cryptographic Elements spec
It isn't a myth, but Host Revocation and Drive Revocation are trivial to bypass and are not what is being described in this article.
HRLs and DRLs only serve to stop Hosts (PCs) and drives (HD-DVD or Blu-Ray) from communicating with eachother. For example, if a host's certificate is revoked and the drive knows this, the drive will not read certain bits off of the data medium and pass them along the ATA bus back to the PC. The bits are still on the medium and they are not encrypted or anything like that. The drive will just refuse to read them. This has already been fixed in at least one instance by flashing the drive's firmware. In any case, all one would need to do to get around this for good would be to make an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive that just reads the bits off of the medium and passes them back to the host PC just like a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive does.
What's being described in this article is that the software player's "device keys" are being revoked. Here is how that works (basically):
Each disc contains video that is encrypted with a master key. Each player contains a set of "device keys". The subset difference tree algorithm (part of the AACS spec) is used to encrypt the master key so that it can only be decrypted by a certain set of device keys. Before WinDVD 8 was revoked, the subset difference tree algorithm was used to encrypt the master key for each disc so that it could be decrypted by any set of device keys. Now, according to the article (or at least the summary), new discs are being produced for which any set of device keys can be used to recover the master key except WinDVD 8's device keys.
So, if you managed to get a copy of WinDVD 8's device keys before today, you were set. You could decrypt, play, and copy any Blu-Ray or HDDVD disc. Now, you can't decrypt, play, or copy new Blu-Ray or HDDVD discs, at least until you get your hands on a new set of device keys...
Note: I have deliberately dumbed down my explanation of the spec for two reasons. First, there are several intermediate keys that are involved in the process. Explaining the function of each and every intermediate key between the device keys and the title key would take a long time and not contribute any real information about the "spirit" of how AACS works. Second, the AACS spec is not fully implemented. According to what I have read, the AACS spec includes the concept of sequence keys that can be used for "forensic" purposes. However, the Sequence Key Blocks required to get any benefit from that part of the spec are not present on current Blu-Ray and HDDVD media.
You don't need to achieve a pure monopoly to dictate to retailers or charge near monopoly rents. Look at the example I cited, ie. the PC OS market Sure you can point to MacOS, and Linux, but these don't seriously dent Microsoft's power, especially in regard to small business computer retailers (maybe someone as big as Dell can get away with shiping PCs without that OS installed...). Note the barrier to entry here isn't capital expenditure, as it is in chip manufacturing for instance, but primarily network effects.
Hear hear! Anti-trust laws are great. Still, there's nothing like starting your own business to give you perspective. I grew up in a community of lefties so I've always felt that regulating businesses to limit the harm they can do is a good idea. Then I started a business in New Mexico (a low-regulation state) and in California (a high-regulation state), and the difference is eye-opening. I still believe in regulations that limit the actions of businesses, especially corporations where the owners are shielded from a lot of the legal liability resulting from their choices, but I'm gentler with my judgments now.
While I'm against the overweening IP regime we are currently subjected to, we should not loose sight of the necessity of IP regulation. IP addresses another market failure, namely the 'free rider effect,'
This is not a good line of reasoning. It goes like this:
We have a problem.
Doing A solves this problem.
Therefore, we should do A.
This is a logical fallacy. It ignores the potentially serious consequences of doing A (i.e. having copyright and patent laws). It also ignores the possibility that there may be another way to solve the problem.
Ian Clarke, the founder of freenet, has a great argument that says freedom of speech and copyright are incompatible. I, for one, think freedom of speech is more important that copyright. And for the curious, there are several ideas floating around about how to encourage innovation without resorting to copyrights and patents. Try searching for the "patronage system" or "ransom licensing". They're not perfect, but they are proof that alternatives to copyrights and patents exist.
P.S.
There is at least one logical fallacy and at least one grammar error in my post. See if you can find them!
Slashdot Mirror
It has nothing to do with "win"modems or reverse engineering ability. The difference between a good old hardware modem and a "win"modem is that one follows a standard and the other doesn't.
An external hardware modem is a serial device (standard) that obeys the AT command set (standard). An internal hardware modem behaves like a serial port card (standard) with an attached device that obeys the AT command set (standard).
The only problem with "win"modems is that there's no baseline standard for talking to an ADC/DAC for a phone line, but there's no reason it has to be that way! Remember seeing "NE2000 compatible" in the advertisements for NICs? Instead of making 100s of different NICs that all behaved differently and required their own software drivers, NIC makers all constructed their hardware so that it would behave like a NE2000 ethernet card. Then one driver can work with all the devices. VGA for video? USB mass storage for thumbdrives and external HDDs? All examples of hardware being designed around a standard so that the OS only has to have a single driver to interface with the same class of hardware from any manufacturer.
From TFA: [AMD's] original statements about the issue gave the impression it only affected Phenoms clocked at 2.4GHz or higher.
In any case, I think the word despite is used in the quoted sentence because AMD is releasing flawed Phenoms with clock speeds lower than 2.4GHz. This would mean AMD is lying about the reason why they delayed the 2.4GHz Phenoms, since AMD's actions would establish that this erratum alone is not sufficient reason for them not to ship a particular CPU. So AMD is making a claim despite the fact that there is evidence that their claim is false.
You really need to be more careful. The entire rest of the page was rendered in a warm and fatherly voice thanks to you. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but I kept thinking, "Get back to the music already!"
Yes, that could inflate the numbers of non-paying customers.
I downloaded it for $0 too, and it didn't appeal to me at all. I wish I could "un-download" it, i.e. delete it from my hard disk and decrement their "$0 downloader" count.
there is a positive correlation between peer-to-peer downloading and CD purchasing.
Well of course. This study makes it perfectly clear that P2P downloading leads to CD purchasing, so P2P is obviously helping the music industry.
Wait a minute. Before P2P some people liked to buy a lot of CDs and some people didn't like to buy CDs at all. Those people who liked to buy a lot of CDs are now buying fewer CDs and downloading music illegally instead. Those people who didn't care much about music before are not downloading musically illegally because they don't want it very much. So P2P is obviously hurting the music industry.
Oh wait. I can come to two different opinions based on the same evidence depending on what mood I'm in and the people I listen to. Maybe I should recognize that it's totally possible to make a convincing argument for a statement that isn't true. Maybe I should re-evaluate some of the things I'm dead certain about.
As I recall, this whole mess got started because someone got the bright idea to "redefine" 1MB as 1,000,000B to sell less product for the same amount of money. This conferred a financial advantage over other manufacturers (who then followed suit). I doubt manufacturers would be willing to go back, and I don't especially want them to either.
An easy interface for installing QEMU and Windows like QEMU Launcher and QEMU Control polished and fully supported by Canonical.
I have never used QEMU in Windows, but virtualbox-ose is in "universe". Having played with FOSS virtualization software in the past, I can say that virtualbox-ose is an order of magnitude easier to work with and is almost as user-friendly as VMWare. In some ways, I actually like it better than VMWare.
Shouldn't that be 7% of what I paid? They're fudging the numbers again!
Ok, seriously, the best solution to this problem is for software authors to start using powers of 10 for sizes when giving information to the user. In the mean time, just print on the side of the box how many bytes there are. You can't screw that up.
"750,000,000,000 byte hard drive for sale" - is that so terribly hard? I thought the computer industry liked to print big numbers on the outside of boxes anyway.
In higher education web sites, this kind of error is endemic. On both occasions I needed a higher resolution picture of one of my professors, I right clicked on the tiny thumbnails on their web sites and clicked "View Image." It nearly always works.
I agree. In fact, I would go so far as to say that patent holders would be terrified of asserting their rights to collect licensing fees period. Think about it: would you take a job if your contract said at the end of five years of employment there would be a 1 in 100 chance you would have to pay back every cent of your salary earned so far? No, you would not. This would be the end of the patent system.
Personally, I think that would be wonderful, but it's always a good idea to really consider the consequences of new regulations before advocating them.
Everyone knows that it's much more acceptable to show graphic, detailed video of torture and murder than it is to show video of two people going through the motions of making love without taking off their underwear.
...and then release a patch on the Internet that restores everything. "Game experience may change with online play," right?
(ObDisclaimer: I work for Seagate.)
Thanks for backing up your products with 5 year warranties while all the other major HDD manufacturers that I know of have reduced their consumer warranties to 1 year. That tells me all I need to know about the quality of Seagate's products compared to its competitors.
So call it a (nearly) guaranteed 40MB/sec, and an average of 60MB/sec.
Come on now. Those figures only make sense for sequential reading and writing, which is almost never the situation while swapping.
I'm fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing. What do you mean "bad"?
Cox Communications (now Suddenlink in my area) did this. Long story short I threatened to expose them if they didn't stop and they said they would not take any action. Two days later the forged RST packets disappeared.
I have packet logs. If I can help anyone bust them for this, please email me.
Which makes me wonder, can you sell games direct for a game console and avoid the licencing fees?
Legally or technically? I have no idea about the legal aspect.
As for the technical aspect, the original NES used a special manufactured-by-Nintendo chip in the cartridge to verify that the game was licensed. Various non-approved game publishers would cannibalize those chips from unpopular games and stick them in their own. Presto! Instant authorized cartridge! I remember hearing about one game manufacturer where they would include an adapter with their cartridge: you plug the adapter into the console, and then you plug their game in addition to an "official" game into the adapter. The adapter would send requests for the authorization chip to the official game and requests for the actual game to the manufacturer's cart.
For disc-based systems like the Playstation and Playstation 2, I believe they prevent unauthorized games from running by checking for the presence of extra subchannel data or odd eight-to-fourteen modulation patterns respectively. In theory, a manufacturer could get around this by reverse-engineering the copy protection signatures and using special, expensive hardware to press them into their own discs. Action Replay 2 is an example of this actually happening on the Playstation 2, but I don't know of any game makers who used this trick to get around going through Sony to get their game published.
For the original xbox (I know nothing about copy prevention on the latest generation of consoles), in addition to special disc features to prevent copying, the hardware checks for the presence of a Microsoft-supplied digital signature on the executable before it starts executing. So, Take Two could have the best disc replication hardware possible and still not be able to publish on the xbox without MS's go-ahead (or MS's private signing key). In other words, the xbox is "tivoized."
No, pension! They are rewarded for failing with plans for a financially secure retirement, which explains why it happens so frequently.
500GB is a LOT of data. Great for backups, perhaps for storing raw video footage and so on, but hard to justify for distributing data or for sneakernet uses.
When my friend first got a DVD burner, he felt guilty about storing less than 4GB on a DVD-R because it was a waste that was hard to justify.
Do they really need any other reason?
...because most people who think they understand the nature of Trusted Computing are dead wrong.
In theory you are perfectly correct. There's no sense in trusting data coming from the client. Any hardware or software added to the client's machine to make it disobey its owner can be circumvented.
In practice, the bad guys have come up with a way to make this circumvention difficult and expensive. Here's the basic outline for trusted computing:
* A small chip called a TPM is added to your motherboard. This chip may (in later incarnations) be integrated into the CPU or other system components.
* The chip **DOES NOT** restrict the activities that your system can perform. You can still run arbitrary code at arbitrarily high privilege levels.
* What the chip **DOES** do is keep a detailed log of the code that has run or is running with elevated privileges. Just to reiterate: you can run any code you want, but the chip is watching.
* The chip contains its own public/private key pair that it can use to sign reports on your computer's activity. If you choose to run software on your computer that passes these reports on to other computers on the Internet, other computers on the Internet can know with certainty what software is in control of your computer. You could choose to run software on your computer that would modify these reports before passing them on. However, owing to the nature of public key cryptography, other computers on the Internet would be able to detect your forgery.
* You are free to turn off or remove the chip at any time.
Many people criticize "Trusted Computing" technology by saying that it "controls" what software you can run on your computer. This is true, but not in the way most people think. You are still free to run any software you like on your Trusted Computer, but you cannot program your computer to lie convincingly about your choice of software to other computers on the Internet.
In this way, other people on the Internet can hold you responsible for choosing to run software that they don't approve of. Want to install AutoAim v3.5 on your PC? Go ahead. But the next time you try to play a multiplayer game, the game server will refuse to let you connect until it receives a report from your Trusted Platform Module indicating that you aren't enhancing your aim with software. Don't like the idea of installing GovernmentSpySoftware v2.02 on your home PC? Then don't! But be aware that the next time you try to connect to the Internet, a government-mandated piece of software in your ISP's Radius server will require a signed certificate from your TPM that the spy software is running and unaltered before it instructs the routers to handle your traffic.
These are just hypothetical examples, but they show how trusted computing will be used to control your computer without ever making your computer less capable or more restricted. If anything, a "trusted computer" is more capable than a PC of today: it has the extra capability of spying on you and reporting your actions to other people!
So you can't "wrap the chip in software" like you suggested. Your software won't have the necessary private keys to produce authentic-looking reports from the TPM. You could definitely physically break open the chip and try to extract the private key. You might even be successful if you've got a lot of equipment and education. But that would have to be done on a PC-by-PC basis since each PC will have its own TPM and each TPM will have its own private key.
Laptop: Toshiba Tecra S2
Graphics Card: GeForce Go 6600
Operating System: Dual booting Windows XP and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04.
Battery life in Windows XP: 3-4 hours (can't be more exact since I rarely use it)
Battery life in Ubuntu 7.04 without compiz: about 3h 30m
Battery life in Ubuntu 7.04 with compiz: about 3h 30m
So, compiz doesn't noticeably affect battery life, at least on my hardware.
But it seems to me that this could indicate that as part of the Media Key Block update on new disks, a new HRL will be distributed to invalidate the old WinDVD host key, in addition to the changes for the new WinDVD device key. That would be more consistent with what all these parties are describing.
You're 100% right.
There's already enough misinformation layered on top of AACS, which is built on the fundamentally impossible idea of DRM. Thank you for helping to keep me from adding to it. Hopefully anyone who reads my post will also read your reply.
Mod parent up, please.
It isn't a myth, but Host Revocation and Drive Revocation are trivial to bypass and are not what is being described in this article.
HRLs and DRLs only serve to stop Hosts (PCs) and drives (HD-DVD or Blu-Ray) from communicating with eachother. For example, if a host's certificate is revoked and the drive knows this, the drive will not read certain bits off of the data medium and pass them along the ATA bus back to the PC. The bits are still on the medium and they are not encrypted or anything like that. The drive will just refuse to read them. This has already been fixed in at least one instance by flashing the drive's firmware. In any case, all one would need to do to get around this for good would be to make an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive that just reads the bits off of the medium and passes them back to the host PC just like a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive does.
What's being described in this article is that the software player's "device keys" are being revoked. Here is how that works (basically):
Each disc contains video that is encrypted with a master key. Each player contains a set of "device keys". The subset difference tree algorithm (part of the AACS spec) is used to encrypt the master key so that it can only be decrypted by a certain set of device keys. Before WinDVD 8 was revoked, the subset difference tree algorithm was used to encrypt the master key for each disc so that it could be decrypted by any set of device keys. Now, according to the article (or at least the summary), new discs are being produced for which any set of device keys can be used to recover the master key except WinDVD 8's device keys.
So, if you managed to get a copy of WinDVD 8's device keys before today, you were set. You could decrypt, play, and copy any Blu-Ray or HDDVD disc. Now, you can't decrypt, play, or copy new Blu-Ray or HDDVD discs, at least until you get your hands on a new set of device keys...
Note: I have deliberately dumbed down my explanation of the spec for two reasons. First, there are several intermediate keys that are involved in the process. Explaining the function of each and every intermediate key between the device keys and the title key would take a long time and not contribute any real information about the "spirit" of how AACS works. Second, the AACS spec is not fully implemented. According to what I have read, the AACS spec includes the concept of sequence keys that can be used for "forensic" purposes. However, the Sequence Key Blocks required to get any benefit from that part of the spec are not present on current Blu-Ray and HDDVD media.
Hear hear! Anti-trust laws are great. Still, there's nothing like starting your own business to give you perspective. I grew up in a community of lefties so I've always felt that regulating businesses to limit the harm they can do is a good idea. Then I started a business in New Mexico (a low-regulation state) and in California (a high-regulation state), and the difference is eye-opening. I still believe in regulations that limit the actions of businesses, especially corporations where the owners are shielded from a lot of the legal liability resulting from their choices, but I'm gentler with my judgments now.
While I'm against the overweening IP regime we are currently subjected to, we should not loose sight of the necessity of IP regulation. IP addresses another market failure, namely the 'free rider effect,'
This is not a good line of reasoning. It goes like this:
This is a logical fallacy. It ignores the potentially serious consequences of doing A (i.e. having copyright and patent laws). It also ignores the possibility that there may be another way to solve the problem.
Ian Clarke, the founder of freenet, has a great argument that says freedom of speech and copyright are incompatible. I, for one, think freedom of speech is more important that copyright. And for the curious, there are several ideas floating around about how to encourage innovation without resorting to copyrights and patents. Try searching for the "patronage system" or "ransom licensing". They're not perfect, but they are proof that alternatives to copyrights and patents exist.
P.S.
There is at least one logical fallacy and at least one grammar error in my post. See if you can find them!