The law seems to be different in Australia. It's not the radio station who prosecutes; most radio stations would love to be played in public places. It's that much more exposure their advertising and their station gets. But the stations' licenses are for private use only, and if it's played in a public place without special arrangements, the record labels get huffy.
That's why companies like Muzak have sprung up, with public performance licensing. Even MP3.com has gotten into the act, with audio streams meant for business use -- and the service is NOT free.
To follow up on the replies -- if the company owns the equipment a song is being played on, and other employees are listening in, it's considered a public performance. It's also technically illegal for a company to have a radio playing for the employees or the customers to listen. When those listening with you are your friends in a social atmosphere it's different; but a workplace or commercial establishment is considered a public venue.
If you brought your original CDs into your workplace and played them on your company's equipment, that'd count as a public performance, and would also be technically illegal. Sad but true.
I agree with the principals of capitalism. (Not mercantilism, which is something very different.) So I think Time Warner should have the right to change their fee structure. Their service agreement says they can change their service if they want, and we all agreed to it.
Capitalism also means the consumer is part of the market, though, so I hope Time Warner understands that if they overdo their rate hike, I'd have to cancel my Roadrunner service, and I'd also drop my cable account and switch to satellite. They'd lose three times as much revenue they're receiving from me for Roadrunner.
This idea has serious flaws which may undermine the security of the encryption.
If an attacker has some idea of where the location is the GPS data will unlock, he can test the data agaist a range around that location. Given a GPS resolution of about 10 meters, there are 10,000 possible values per square kilometer. Testing a block of data against an area 10 kilometers on a side gives only a million possible permutations; child's play for modern computers. 100 kilometers on a side is 100 million permutations.
How do they measure "online sessions"? Is this for dial-up connections? Those people who stay on for hours at a time will be the most likely to have upgraded to an always-on DSL or cable line, and would've skewed the measurements.
When the IDE spec first came out, exactly how the master/slave drive negotiation worked wasn't specified. As a result, drive manufacturers had to guess at how to go about implementation, and drives from different manufacturers wouldn't always work together.
Two drives from the same manufacturer, especially ones built less than a decade ago, should work just fine.:-P
Verisign routinely sends renewal requests for domains that have been transferred from them to another registrar. At best, it's terrible business practice. At worst, it's highly deceptive.
I think this belongs, despite the fact that Bill Gates was actually speaking the truth when he said, a few days before the roll-out of Windows 95, that people needing tech support from Microsoft would never be kept on hold for longer than an hour.
Yup, it was the literal truth. Anyone who called Microsoft waited on hold, and then, after 59 minutes, they were cut off.
This technique is actually very old, though it wasn't used bit by bit. You're inserting null terms into the cypher stream. Prior to modern cryptological methods nulls were fairly popular, but the technique has fallen into disuse because of its increasing the message size, and because 1:1 stream cyphers are SO much more convenient. Besides, the new cryptosystems are unbreakable, right? Right?
Even having a small multiple of nulls to significant elements increases the complexity of calculation exponentially. For example, a 1:1 proportion of null bits in 512-bit blocks. The result is a 1024-bit blocked key stream. You can't do any sort of intelligent analysis of the stream unless you can figure out which bits are significant, and there are 2^512 possible permutations of significant and garbage bits for each block.
There was a quick link to a secure site that took my credit card number. This was more convenient for me than it might be for some people, admittedly. On the other hand, I've turned down registering a few pieces of software that used PayPal to process the purchases (I have a strong dislike for PayPal).
It also made my price point; at $20 I register some shareware programs, while at $40 it'd have to be a truly amazing piece of software. (I've actually registered software at that price level; Conseal Firewall, back before McAfee bought them out.)
You want to make money on shareware? Charge less. Make it very convenient to pay. And don't annoy the end user.
Headlight Software has made lots of money from Getright registrations, despite some people having pirated it. I've registered it myself. (I think it was $20, not $25, when I did, though.)
If a software company wants too much money for a piece of shareware, users will get a patch or key generator rather than pay. If the software nags the hell out of the user when he installs it, he'll get mad. I know I do.
VMWare DOES freak out Microsoft. MS has gone to long lengths to keep people from selling machines with multiple operating systems installed. Thing is, a machine with loosely-coupled processors (non-SMP) might get around that restriction. Microsoft is also stuck with the antitrust albatross hanging around its neck, and can't act too monopolistic. VMWare is an expensive commercial product with (I think) reasons why a freeware version cannot be made, while VNC is free. Also, VMWare can be ungainly, while if you've got a separate processor to run XP as the base OS, you've got no potential for conflict and no overhead.
I think the REAL reason MS is trying to block this sort of use is because of the new prevalence of multiprocessor machines in the marketplace. I think Microsoft is worried about people running their OS on a single processor, while a less expensive and more advanced OS (not necessarily Linux) handles the entire machine. People would be able to run their favorite Windows applications under this new OS while getting used to it; then, once the software companies get an idea where the wind is blowing and port their apps to the new system, Windows can be dispensed with.
All *nix distributions can handle multiple uplinks, once you've tweaked them properly. Load balancing can be an issue, but if you want pure redundancy, that's not a huge problem. Servers on redundant connections is a whole different ball of wax, though.
So the RIAA comes up with this foolproof DRM scheme and plugs it into every single computer and they successfully discourage the distribution of circumvention hardware, and their intellectual property (they stole it, fair and square) is safe, right?
Well, for a little while, perhaps.
See, there's a little property general purpose computing devices have, one a lot of you Mac users are already familiar with. Any state engine can emulate any other state engine, given enough resources and time. So your Macintosh can emulate a PC, albeit a bit more slowly than you might prefer.
So what does this mean?
It means that you can code your display and decryption algorithms in pseudocode, rather than have it run natively on the processor. Having a DRM system that's able to tell what the CPU is working on directly is difficult enough; a DRM system able to parse metalevels and see what an emulator is doing would require so much in the way of resources that it'd cripple the machine.
And remember, computers speed up by an order of magnitude every seven years, so you'd be able to emulate a 600 MHz P-III on your desktop PC in five. So much for the SSSCA.
Who's going to be hurt by these annoying new copy protections?
The people who rip the songs just to upload them? No... They're typically on the cutting edge, and will have the means to bypass whatever form of copy protection is in place.
The people who download songs off the net? No... If 99% of the user base is unable to rip a song, but 1% can, ripped copies will become available, and passing from machine to machine they will multiply.
The person who only listens, or only copies for himself? Yup! He's going to be greatly inconvenienced by these restrictive technologies.
The RIAA doesn't care, though. They only care about being able to ramp up the prices on music CDs. The MPAA doesn't care either.
Fibre Channel is an advanced form of SCSI, and can actually be used for communications. I know it can be done, I just don't know whether it's been done before, with drivers available, and I don't know how expensive it'd get.
6 bits per color; I suspect you'd just truncate the two least significant bits from each color for 24-bit color. There'd be a little banding in your images.
Can one make replacement battery covers or back covers that would serve as the antenna? My tiny little Nokia with the internal antenna could sure use some help.
Mr. Greene doesn't want anyone sharing music with their friends either. Or putting them on their hard drives, or uploading them to their MP3 players, or burning them onto blank CDs... All of these actions kill potential revenue, and no matter how it inconveniences the average listener, he'll push for anything that'll protect the bottom line.
First off, given an idea of which GPL'd code such a project is based on, one could re-substitute function and variable names, and then determine what changes had been made and why, so your code isn't secure from reverse-engineering.
Secondly, one of the reasons for the GPL is for people to be able to fix bugs and share those patches. By making it difficult for coders to parse the program, you're removing that capability.
So basically, you're losing the GPL's advantages, and keeping its disadvantages.
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The law seems to be different in Australia. It's not the radio station who prosecutes; most radio stations would love to be played in public places. It's that much more exposure their advertising and their station gets. But the stations' licenses are for private use only, and if it's played in a public place without special arrangements, the record labels get huffy.
That's why companies like Muzak have sprung up, with public performance licensing. Even MP3.com has gotten into the act, with audio streams meant for business use -- and the service is NOT free.
To follow up on the replies -- if the company owns the equipment a song is being played on, and other employees are listening in, it's considered a public performance. It's also technically illegal for a company to have a radio playing for the employees or the customers to listen. When those listening with you are your friends in a social atmosphere it's different; but a workplace or commercial establishment is considered a public venue.
:-P
The hills are alive, with the sound of MUZAK.
If you brought your original CDs into your workplace and played them on your company's equipment, that'd count as a public performance, and would also be technically illegal. Sad but true.
I agree with the principals of capitalism. (Not mercantilism, which is something very different.) So I think Time Warner should have the right to change their fee structure. Their service agreement says they can change their service if they want, and we all agreed to it.
Capitalism also means the consumer is part of the market, though, so I hope Time Warner understands that if they overdo their rate hike, I'd have to cancel my Roadrunner service, and I'd also drop my cable account and switch to satellite. They'd lose three times as much revenue they're receiving from me for Roadrunner.
This idea has serious flaws which may undermine the security of the encryption.
If an attacker has some idea of where the location is the GPS data will unlock, he can test the data agaist a range around that location. Given a GPS resolution of about 10 meters, there are 10,000 possible values per square kilometer. Testing a block of data against an area 10 kilometers on a side gives only a million possible permutations; child's play for modern computers. 100 kilometers on a side is 100 million permutations.
How do they measure "online sessions"? Is this for dial-up connections? Those people who stay on for hours at a time will be the most likely to have upgraded to an always-on DSL or cable line, and would've skewed the measurements.
When the IDE spec first came out, exactly how the master/slave drive negotiation worked wasn't specified. As a result, drive manufacturers had to guess at how to go about implementation, and drives from different manufacturers wouldn't always work together.
:-P
Two drives from the same manufacturer, especially ones built less than a decade ago, should work just fine.
Verisign routinely sends renewal requests for domains that have been transferred from them to another registrar. At best, it's terrible business practice. At worst, it's highly deceptive.
I think this belongs, despite the fact that Bill Gates was actually speaking the truth when he said, a few days before the roll-out of Windows 95, that people needing tech support from Microsoft would never be kept on hold for longer than an hour.
Yup, it was the literal truth. Anyone who called Microsoft waited on hold, and then, after 59 minutes, they were cut off.
> The result is a 1024-bit blocked key stream.
Key stream? Duhhhhh... data stream.
This technique is actually very old, though it wasn't used bit by bit. You're inserting null terms into the cypher stream. Prior to modern cryptological methods nulls were fairly popular, but the technique has fallen into disuse because of its increasing the message size, and because 1:1 stream cyphers are SO much more convenient. Besides, the new cryptosystems are unbreakable, right? Right?
Even having a small multiple of nulls to significant elements increases the complexity of calculation exponentially. For example, a 1:1 proportion of null bits in 512-bit blocks. The result is a 1024-bit blocked key stream. You can't do any sort of intelligent analysis of the stream unless you can figure out which bits are significant, and there are 2^512 possible permutations of significant and garbage bits for each block.
There was a quick link to a secure site that took my credit card number. This was more convenient for me than it might be for some people, admittedly. On the other hand, I've turned down registering a few pieces of software that used PayPal to process the purchases (I have a strong dislike for PayPal).
It also made my price point; at $20 I register some shareware programs, while at $40 it'd have to be a truly amazing piece of software. (I've actually registered software at that price level; Conseal Firewall, back before McAfee bought them out.)
You want to make money on shareware? Charge less. Make it very convenient to pay. And don't annoy the end user.
Headlight Software has made lots of money from Getright registrations, despite some people having pirated it. I've registered it myself. (I think it was $20, not $25, when I did, though.)
If a software company wants too much money for a piece of shareware, users will get a patch or key generator rather than pay. If the software nags the hell out of the user when he installs it, he'll get mad. I know I do.
VMWare DOES freak out Microsoft. MS has gone to long lengths to keep people from selling machines with multiple operating systems installed. Thing is, a machine with loosely-coupled processors (non-SMP) might get around that restriction. Microsoft is also stuck with the antitrust albatross hanging around its neck, and can't act too monopolistic. VMWare is an expensive commercial product with (I think) reasons why a freeware version cannot be made, while VNC is free. Also, VMWare can be ungainly, while if you've got a separate processor to run XP as the base OS, you've got no potential for conflict and no overhead.
I think the REAL reason MS is trying to block this sort of use is because of the new prevalence of multiprocessor machines in the marketplace. I think Microsoft is worried about people running their OS on a single processor, while a less expensive and more advanced OS (not necessarily Linux) handles the entire machine. People would be able to run their favorite Windows applications under this new OS while getting used to it; then, once the software companies get an idea where the wind is blowing and port their apps to the new system, Windows can be dispensed with.
All *nix distributions can handle multiple uplinks, once you've tweaked them properly. Load balancing can be an issue, but if you want pure redundancy, that's not a huge problem. Servers on redundant connections is a whole different ball of wax, though.
So the RIAA comes up with this foolproof DRM scheme and plugs it into every single computer and they successfully discourage the distribution of circumvention hardware, and their intellectual property (they stole it, fair and square) is safe, right?
Well, for a little while, perhaps.
See, there's a little property general purpose computing devices have, one a lot of you Mac users are already familiar with. Any state engine can emulate any other state engine, given enough resources and time. So your Macintosh can emulate a PC, albeit a bit more slowly than you might prefer.
So what does this mean?
It means that you can code your display and decryption algorithms in pseudocode, rather than have it run natively on the processor. Having a DRM system that's able to tell what the CPU is working on directly is difficult enough; a DRM system able to parse metalevels and see what an emulator is doing would require so much in the way of resources that it'd cripple the machine.
And remember, computers speed up by an order of magnitude every seven years, so you'd be able to emulate a 600 MHz P-III on your desktop PC in five. So much for the SSSCA.
Who's going to be hurt by these annoying new copy protections?
The people who rip the songs just to upload them? No... They're typically on the cutting edge, and will have the means to bypass whatever form of copy protection is in place.
The people who download songs off the net? No... If 99% of the user base is unable to rip a song, but 1% can, ripped copies will become available, and passing from machine to machine they will multiply.
The person who only listens, or only copies for himself? Yup! He's going to be greatly inconvenienced by these restrictive technologies.
The RIAA doesn't care, though. They only care about being able to ramp up the prices on music CDs. The MPAA doesn't care either.
Fibre Channel is an advanced form of SCSI, and can actually be used for communications. I know it can be done, I just don't know whether it's been done before, with drivers available, and I don't know how expensive it'd get.
Thanks for the info on Firewire, though.
6 bits per color; I suspect you'd just truncate the two least significant bits from each color for 24-bit color. There'd be a little banding in your images.
How well would Firewire, Fibre Channel, or SCA work as NUMA interconnects? How would these guys compare, pricewise and in effectiveness, to 1000baseT?
Can one make replacement battery covers or back covers that would serve as the antenna? My tiny little Nokia with the internal antenna could sure use some help.
Mr. Greene doesn't want anyone sharing music with their friends either. Or putting them on their hard drives, or uploading them to their MP3 players, or burning them onto blank CDs... All of these actions kill potential revenue, and no matter how it inconveniences the average listener, he'll push for anything that'll protect the bottom line.
What are the IPs in the worm's database? It'd be a good idea to ban the whole list.
Why would someone want to do such a thing?
First off, given an idea of which GPL'd code such a project is based on, one could re-substitute function and variable names, and then determine what changes had been made and why, so your code isn't secure from reverse-engineering.
Secondly, one of the reasons for the GPL is for people to be able to fix bugs and share those patches. By making it difficult for coders to parse the program, you're removing that capability.
So basically, you're losing the GPL's advantages, and keeping its disadvantages.