I bet that sentence for terrorism or dissemination of child pornography is much higher that two to five years behind the bars. If what is on terrorist's disk can land him in prison for life (or make him disapear from UK via CIA and land him in some Middle East prison with tortures and all) is he going to be scared of 2-5 for not handing encryption keys?
So is this really an Act to fight terrorism and paedophilia, or is it a tool to intimidate and criminalise law abiding citizens suspected of e.g. tax evasion[1]?
Robert
[1] you can always write in a search warrant that you want to check someone's financial information in order to check if he isn't financing terrorist cell, or buying child pornography, right?
A government representative commented that they 'hope that this video will put to rest the conspiracy theories.'
Now, that's really stupid and pointless task. Every conspiracy theory is not falsifiable, so there's no point in disproving it.
In short, there's no proof that you can give to conspiracy theorist, that will convince him he is wrong. Just ask any of them, if there is anything in the world that would make him change his mind.
...I'd suggest JuK and amaroK, they work just fine. Better yet in tandem;) I don't know why, but for me JuK is much better for tagging and physical organizastion of collection, while amaroK is better for selecting music and it's playback from well organized collection.
No, usually they are not. We (the Poles) frown upon movies dubbed into Polish since almost always the quality of dubbing is MUCH lower than the original. The only movies that are dubbed to Polish are children movies, and still usually you have the choice of original and dubbed soundtrack. There are usually only Polish subtitles.
But that's besides the point. These movies are to be bought legally for a decent price and people are buying them, even if they could buy pirated copies from Russians on every flea market.
And at the same time music CDs cost many times more, they are not selling and RIAA counterparts are demanding from national legislatures the powers of secret police of totalitarian state, because those bloody pirates are taking away the food from the mouth of their children.
There are people that can grab oportunity, when they see it, and than there are people, that are used to take money by force, "for protection".
That's funny... They claim, that they will start doing this in China, but in Poland, for years now, you can buy legal DVDs with papers and magazines for $2-$3, and normal commercial releases of not-so-fresh movies for $5-$6. When you factor in costs and risks associated, many people see no incentive in pirating dvds.
Meanwhile CDs with latest crappy pop music start far beyond the $20 point and -- SURPRISE!!! -- no one is buying them;)
They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.
Which just shows shortsightedness of Bush's and other administrations, when they deem some research as "inapropriate" and cut the funds. After sth like this (and a large those of Connections) one can clearly see, that you never know what one research program will lead to or whether it will be (ethically) good or bad.
As with all situations when someone goes crying to parents or authorities, that someone said something mean to him, there are different povs and situations "edited" to fit the agenda of the reporting party.
Usually, there are three steps to the "Newbie Story":
1. Linux learning curve is very steep. I have years of Linux experience and I still stumble over some problems that I cannot solve immediatelly. More often than not, newbie has problems making something work with/on Linux.
2. Many people have problems groking and go to power users or authors of the software for help. They usually help. And since they do have other things in life to do than answer the same question over and over again, their answers are terse, with more or less detailed pointers to relevant sections of documentation, sometimes spiced with some examples, not necessarily relevant to the problem at hand at first glance.
3. Some people just can't be bothered to use the pointers to documentation, post more detailed bug reports etc. They demand to fix their problem, telepatically, pronto! They usually get the answer along the lines of "you have the right to refund in the full amount you paid me, go bother someone else."
But when the newbie in question starts whining about the painful experience in some public forum, he/she usually skips step 2.
At that point it will be time to just say goodnight to these companies and find something else to do for entertainment. Sadly there are no viable options right now. Reading a book is nice, but it doesn't satisfy the urge for junk entertainment... And that is how the world becomes less pleasnt.
Obviously, you never read any of the lengthy military sci-fi sagas;) I think that trashy, light reading novels are as old as the print itself.
And when I've got to spend my hard earned disposable income on some entertainment, books give me much better bang for the buck. I'm hopelessly addicted to Stargate franchise, and I bought all the boxed sets so far on avarage for $2 per episode. But it's just 45mins of entertainment for $2. The ebooks on Baen on the other hand are $4-$6 and give me couple of days of entertainment[1]. And no frigging DRM on Baen ebooks.
Robert
[1] You could probably tell, that I am not native English speaker, so that's just how much it takes me to read avarage length book in English.
Not when your 800lbs-gorilla-customer tells you that their corporate standard on encryption is PGP (they even have keys signed by corporate cert authority;)
Anyway, I don't complain, since pgp/gpg exists on every platform and has excelent support in Mutt.
If you use Gmail with POP3/SMTP access, then yes. I do it myself Mozilla Mail and the enigmail extension. I guess technically it is GPG, but what's the difference?
I can use my gpg/mutt/exim/fetchmail with any ISP I want, which I do. But the article is about Gmail mail client vs Pine mail client, not GMail ISP vs any other ISP.
If it does, is my key safe from subpoena from US government, however long it would take, including bought SCOTUS verdict, that Google has to hand it? I mean, when I use local MUA, my key never leaves my laptop. In case of gmail, unless Google implements RSA, AES etc in Javascript, my secret key would have to reside on Google servers...
Robert
PS No, I'm not long-haired, bearded, smelly privacy advocate; my company works with national telecom and data retention laws as well as our contract require us to use PGP whenever we pass personal information of their consumers. There are lots of sane (as in non-nerdy) and legitimate reasons to use crypto.
which makes me hit "other amount", then I hit 3-0-0-0-0-ENTER
Well, how about those morrons remove the need to type the smaller currency?
I mean, when was the last time that ATM allowed you to withdraw $0.53? It doesn't let you do this in Europe either. Hell, most ATMs in Euro zone or outside of it won't let you withdraw less than about 10-20 euro, some of them have no bills smaller than 100. And yet you have to type 1-0-0-0-0-enter to withdraw a hundred...
That's funny... Revolutions started for less opressive laws.
I mean, these are the laws to support some lesser businesspeople from across the Atlantic, that give nothing to the economy of EU.
Remind me, why were those pesky laws on Copyright enacted? I distinctly remember the United States of America ignoring them for the better part of the century, until it had the positive balance on the so called Intelectual Property.
I had a dream, that India, China, Russia and EU could return to the original shape of IP, like the copyright extending to 14yrs since the day of publishing. I mean, wouldn't it be a poetic justice, to strike The West with their original weapon?
Yes, all non-opening phones have button locks, but that is only good if you remember to lock them every time.
Almost all the non-flip phones also have auto-key-lock. My cute, bricky SE T630 locks automagically after 30 secs or so. It works just as well when I just stuff it after use into the back pocket of my jeans. And I've never had a problem with a screen, all good "bricks" (like this SE T630) have extremelly hard and scratch resistant "glass" over the screen.
So basically, because MS used rather defective DVD-ROM drives[...]
You see, the "defectiveness" of DVD drives is just a product of MS's DRM. They deliberately decided, that Xbox DVD can't play DVD-R/+R etc. Not just DVD media ID, but really DVD recorded discs. So they ordered drives that would have their laser IC calibrated in such a way, that it would not be able to properly play home recorder DVDs. But the side effect of this is that such DVD drive quite rapidly stops reading even "legitimate" xbox dvd discs.
Surprised? Go, sue MS in US. In Europe I don't really care.
Yeah, but booting non-MS code is much more difficult than booting copied discs. All you need to boot copies of retail games is DVD-ROM telling xbox, that it's xbox360dvd in the drive.
In order to run unsigned binaries you have to crack several levels of protection, some of them embedded into the processor itself. And these are not your garden variety propriety measures hackable in an hour by sophomore CS student.
So, you still can't run XBMC (NG) on Xbox360, but you can play all the pirated games you want. Weird, isn't it?
I own original Xbox modified with DuoX modchip. Of course I have several pirated games installed on my (upgraded) HD. I would have bought some games I love (like burnout 3, 4), if it weren't for extremely stupid, suicidal policy of MS to ship Xbox with defective DVD drives that don't read DVD-R etc disks[1].
So, for me it's funny... MS is doing anything it can to make Xbox 360 unatractive to me and to prevent me from ever buying legal copies of games for either its old or new system...;)
Robert
PS If you want to condemn me as unwashed pirate, bugger off. I have a DVD collection bought legally, exceeding 300 DVD-s. Give me fair deal and I'll make your toilet solid gold. But if you want me to bend over for marginal gain, you must have been smoking something very strong all of your life.
[1] You see, me and my wife are compulsive sci-fi/crime series watchers. Unlike me, my wife can't really comprehend them in English, so whenever I buy dvd set I process it to add Polish translation. But -- in order to play those remastered DVDs -- I had to change the Xbox DVD drive to PC DVD drive, to read DVD-R. And PC DVD drive won't read original xboxdvd discs...
A killer sentenced for 25yrs in prison is suing for libel the parents of his victim. He raped and killed their daughter and when they publicly told (after he was convicted) that he is "animal" he sued them for libel.
Robert
PS Since he is currently in prison, w/o any source of income, the state will provide him an attorney for free, while his victims will have to pay for an attorney. Hope that MS won't get free legal advice.
Unless they'll be using it outside of DMCA/EUCD reach, they'll have to deal with customs.
Are you kidding? Customs officers in almost all countries wouldn't recognize such "copyright infringing" device even if it bit them in the ass.
Just go to any mom&pop video games shop in US or EU and ask for modded xbox/ps2. Modchips may be perhaps made in US, UK, but I'd bet a lot, that they were imported to Poland and went legally through customs.
While we're at it, I haven't heard about a single case of prosecution against any seller of modchips alone. All the cases I've read about were really about "harddisk full of games" gratis with modded console.
No, I don't see any problem with buying such a device. It's just not needed yet and won't be for a long time -- there's really no HD programming in Poland and there won't be for another ~10yrs. And I won't touch any HD media with a long stick as long as it will be possible to lock me out of my legally bought media and hardware (key revocation); my ~300 dvds collection looks just OK on 32" TV, thank you very much.
No, the serious pirates can for example buy "magic box" from countries outside of DMCA/EUCD reach, that will decrypt HDMI signal using the weaknesses found in the HDCP before it even was implemented in a single device.
It will be just like someone at Ars Technica wrote: your HD player sometimes won't play your legal HD content on your computer or HDTV. But it will always play illegaly downloaded HD content from the Internet -- talk about shooting yourself in a foot.
Is it still true, if the data is actually encrypted in stream mode in packs of 512 bytes (i.e. sector), and every sector gets different initialization vector (IV)?
Slashdot Mirror
There's one thing that sticks out.
I bet that sentence for terrorism or dissemination of child pornography is much higher that two to five years behind the bars. If what is on terrorist's disk can land him in prison for life (or make him disapear from UK via CIA and land him in some Middle East prison with tortures and all) is he going to be scared of 2-5 for not handing encryption keys?
So is this really an Act to fight terrorism and paedophilia, or is it a tool to intimidate and criminalise law abiding citizens suspected of e.g. tax evasion[1]?
Robert
[1] you can always write in a search warrant that you want to check someone's financial information in order to check if he isn't financing terrorist cell, or buying child pornography, right?
A government representative commented that they 'hope that this video will put to rest the conspiracy theories.'
Now, that's really stupid and pointless task. Every conspiracy theory is not falsifiable, so there's no point in disproving it.
In short, there's no proof that you can give to conspiracy theorist, that will convince him he is wrong. Just ask any of them, if there is anything in the world that would make him change his mind.
Robert
...I'd suggest JuK and amaroK, they work just fine. Better yet in tandem ;) I don't know why, but for me JuK is much better for tagging and physical organizastion of collection, while amaroK is better for selecting music and it's playback from well organized collection.
Robert
I'd bet that they're dubbed into Polish...
No, usually they are not. We (the Poles) frown upon movies dubbed into Polish since almost always the quality of dubbing is MUCH lower than the original. The only movies that are dubbed to Polish are children movies, and still usually you have the choice of original and dubbed soundtrack. There are usually only Polish subtitles.
But that's besides the point. These movies are to be bought legally for a decent price and people are buying them, even if they could buy pirated copies from Russians on every flea market.
And at the same time music CDs cost many times more, they are not selling and RIAA counterparts are demanding from national legislatures the powers of secret police of totalitarian state, because those bloody pirates are taking away the food from the mouth of their children.
There are people that can grab oportunity, when they see it, and than there are people, that are used to take money by force, "for protection".
Robert
That's funny... They claim, that they will start doing this in China, but in Poland, for years now, you can buy legal DVDs with papers and magazines for $2-$3, and normal commercial releases of not-so-fresh movies for $5-$6. When you factor in costs and risks associated, many people see no incentive in pirating dvds.
;)
Meanwhile CDs with latest crappy pop music start far beyond the $20 point and -- SURPRISE!!! -- no one is buying them
Robert
They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.
Which just shows shortsightedness of Bush's and other administrations, when they deem some research as "inapropriate" and cut the funds. After sth like this (and a large those of Connections) one can clearly see, that you never know what one research program will lead to or whether it will be (ethically) good or bad.
Robert
As with all situations when someone goes crying to parents or authorities, that someone said something mean to him, there are different povs and situations "edited" to fit the agenda of the reporting party.
Usually, there are three steps to the "Newbie Story":
1. Linux learning curve is very steep. I have years of Linux experience and I still stumble over some problems that I cannot solve immediatelly. More often than not, newbie has problems making something work with/on Linux.
2. Many people have problems groking and go to power users or authors of the software for help. They usually help. And since they do have other things in life to do than answer the same question over and over again, their answers are terse, with more or less detailed pointers to relevant sections of documentation, sometimes spiced with some examples, not necessarily relevant to the problem at hand at first glance.
3. Some people just can't be bothered to use the pointers to documentation, post more detailed bug reports etc. They demand to fix their problem, telepatically, pronto! They usually get the answer along the lines of "you have the right to refund in the full amount you paid me, go bother someone else."
But when the newbie in question starts whining about the painful experience in some public forum, he/she usually skips step 2.
Robert
No, thanks, I'll wait for Blu-Ray. After all, Sony has such a great track record with media formats: Beta, MD, MemoryStick, SACD, UMD.
;)
I just can't wait to lay my hands on this blu-ray goodness, there's just no chance that HD-DVD might win!
Robert
PS
PPS For me, both formats look like crap from the consumer's point of view... I'll just stick to PAL upconverted to 720p, thankyouverymuch.
We've been over this dozen times over. 8080, 6502, 68000 might be faster, normalized for clock, but...
Go, buy 8080 with 2GHz clock and 64-bit-wide addressbus.
Robert
At that point it will be time to just say goodnight to these companies and find something else to do for entertainment. Sadly there are no viable options right now. Reading a book is nice, but it doesn't satisfy the urge for junk entertainment... And that is how the world becomes less pleasnt.
;) I think that trashy, light reading novels are as old as the print itself.
Obviously, you never read any of the lengthy military sci-fi sagas
And when I've got to spend my hard earned disposable income on some entertainment, books give me much better bang for the buck. I'm hopelessly addicted to Stargate franchise, and I bought all the boxed sets so far on avarage for $2 per episode. But it's just 45mins of entertainment for $2. The ebooks on Baen on the other hand are $4-$6 and give me couple of days of entertainment[1]. And no frigging DRM on Baen ebooks.
Robert
[1] You could probably tell, that I am not native English speaker, so that's just how much it takes me to read avarage length book in English.
S/MIME is the answer my friend...
;)
Not when your 800lbs-gorilla-customer tells you that their corporate standard on encryption is PGP (they even have keys signed by corporate cert authority
Anyway, I don't complain, since pgp/gpg exists on every platform and has excelent support in Mutt.
Robert
See #15072581
Robert
If you use Gmail with POP3/SMTP access, then yes. I do it myself Mozilla Mail and the enigmail extension. I guess technically it is GPG, but what's the difference?
I can use my gpg/mutt/exim/fetchmail with any ISP I want, which I do. But the article is about Gmail mail client vs Pine mail client, not GMail ISP vs any other ISP.
Robert
OK, can gmail do PGP?
If it does, is my key safe from subpoena from US government, however long it would take, including bought SCOTUS verdict, that Google has to hand it? I mean, when I use local MUA, my key never leaves my laptop. In case of gmail, unless Google implements RSA, AES etc in Javascript, my secret key would have to reside on Google servers...
Robert
PS No, I'm not long-haired, bearded, smelly privacy advocate; my company works with national telecom and data retention laws as well as our contract require us to use PGP whenever we pass personal information of their consumers. There are lots of sane (as in non-nerdy) and legitimate reasons to use crypto.
which makes me hit "other amount", then I hit 3-0-0-0-0-ENTER
Well, how about those morrons remove the need to type the smaller currency?
I mean, when was the last time that ATM allowed you to withdraw $0.53? It doesn't let you do this in Europe either. Hell, most ATMs in Euro zone or outside of it won't let you withdraw less than about 10-20 euro, some of them have no bills smaller than 100. And yet you have to type 1-0-0-0-0-enter to withdraw a hundred...
Robert
That's funny... Revolutions started for less opressive laws.
I mean, these are the laws to support some lesser businesspeople from across the Atlantic, that give nothing to the economy of EU.
Remind me, why were those pesky laws on Copyright enacted? I distinctly remember the United States of America ignoring them for the better part of the century, until it had the positive balance on the so called Intelectual Property.
I had a dream, that India, China, Russia and EU could return to the original shape of IP, like the copyright extending to 14yrs since the day of publishing. I mean, wouldn't it be a poetic justice, to strike The West with their original weapon?
Robert
Yes, all non-opening phones have button locks, but that is only good if you remember to lock them every time.
Almost all the non-flip phones also have auto-key-lock. My cute, bricky SE T630 locks automagically after 30 secs or so. It works just as well when I just stuff it after use into the back pocket of my jeans. And I've never had a problem with a screen, all good "bricks" (like this SE T630) have extremelly hard and scratch resistant "glass" over the screen.
Robert
So basically, because MS used rather defective DVD-ROM drives[...]
You see, the "defectiveness" of DVD drives is just a product of MS's DRM. They deliberately decided, that Xbox DVD can't play DVD-R/+R etc. Not just DVD media ID, but really DVD recorded discs. So they ordered drives that would have their laser IC calibrated in such a way, that it would not be able to properly play home recorder DVDs. But the side effect of this is that such DVD drive quite rapidly stops reading even "legitimate" xbox dvd discs.
Surprised? Go, sue MS in US. In Europe I don't really care.
Robert
Yeah, but booting non-MS code is much more difficult than booting copied discs. All you need to boot copies of retail games is DVD-ROM telling xbox, that it's xbox360dvd in the drive.
;)
In order to run unsigned binaries you have to crack several levels of protection, some of them embedded into the processor itself. And these are not your garden variety propriety measures hackable in an hour by sophomore CS student.
So, you still can't run XBMC (NG) on Xbox360, but you can play all the pirated games you want. Weird, isn't it?
I own original Xbox modified with DuoX modchip. Of course I have several pirated games installed on my (upgraded) HD. I would have bought some games I love (like burnout 3, 4), if it weren't for extremely stupid, suicidal policy of MS to ship Xbox with defective DVD drives that don't read DVD-R etc disks[1].
So, for me it's funny... MS is doing anything it can to make Xbox 360 unatractive to me and to prevent me from ever buying legal copies of games for either its old or new system...
Robert
PS If you want to condemn me as unwashed pirate, bugger off. I have a DVD collection bought legally, exceeding 300 DVD-s. Give me fair deal and I'll make your toilet solid gold. But if you want me to bend over for marginal gain, you must have been smoking something very strong all of your life.
[1] You see, me and my wife are compulsive sci-fi/crime series watchers. Unlike me, my wife can't really comprehend them in English, so whenever I buy dvd set I process it to add Polish translation. But -- in order to play those remastered DVDs -- I had to change the Xbox DVD drive to PC DVD drive, to read DVD-R. And PC DVD drive won't read original xboxdvd discs...
Capsaicin is the "active agent" (AA) in chilli pepper, not just pepper. Black pepper (known where I live as just "pepper") has different AA.
Robert
There is an over-the-air, unprotected digital radio broadcast system in the UK operating for years now. And you know what? The sky didn't fall.
Robert
We have similar case in Poland right now:
A killer sentenced for 25yrs in prison is suing for libel the parents of his victim. He raped and killed their daughter and when they publicly told (after he was convicted) that he is "animal" he sued them for libel.
Robert
PS Since he is currently in prison, w/o any source of income, the state will provide him an attorney for free, while his victims will have to pay for an attorney. Hope that MS won't get free legal advice.
Unless they'll be using it outside of DMCA/EUCD reach, they'll have to deal with customs.
Are you kidding? Customs officers in almost all countries wouldn't recognize such "copyright infringing" device even if it bit them in the ass.
Just go to any mom&pop video games shop in US or EU and ask for modded xbox/ps2. Modchips may be perhaps made in US, UK, but I'd bet a lot, that they were imported to Poland and went legally through customs.
While we're at it, I haven't heard about a single case of prosecution against any seller of modchips alone. All the cases I've read about were really about "harddisk full of games" gratis with modded console.
No, I don't see any problem with buying such a device. It's just not needed yet and won't be for a long time -- there's really no HD programming in Poland and there won't be for another ~10yrs. And I won't touch any HD media with a long stick as long as it will be possible to lock me out of my legally bought media and hardware (key revocation); my ~300 dvds collection looks just OK on 32" TV, thank you very much.
Robert
No, the serious pirates can for example buy "magic box" from countries outside of DMCA/EUCD reach, that will decrypt HDMI signal using the weaknesses found in the HDCP before it even was implemented in a single device.
It will be just like someone at Ars Technica wrote: your HD player sometimes won't play your legal HD content on your computer or HDTV. But it will always play illegaly downloaded HD content from the Internet -- talk about shooting yourself in a foot.
Robert
Is it still true, if the data is actually encrypted in stream mode in packs of 512 bytes (i.e. sector), and every sector gets different initialization vector (IV)?
Robert