The only thing not cracked yet...
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Frivolous lawsuits. Until the RIAA finally realizes that its lawsuit tactic isn't working it's the only attempt at DRM that hasn't been made completely useless yet. Unfortunately I don't see that happening unless/until they lose bigtime in multiple court cases.
Was Tiger (10.4) certified? I don't see it listed on the Open Group website. Did Apple even try to certify Tiger? Why (not)? If not then why start now with Leopard?
Does this mean I won't be able to buy a car running Microsoft Windows (tm) for Internal Combustion Engines (Win-ICE)? I was so looking forward to having to reboot my car every 1000 miles...
If they had made a multi-band phone and sold it SIM-less, they could well have cracked the carrier market wide open.
From what I understand the carrier (AT&T) had to do a lot of work on their end to support the phone. The visual voicemail system alone required AT&T to update how their voicemail system works. By picking an exclusive partner Apple ensured that all these changes would work properly with the iPhone. If they simply dumped an unlocked phone on the market then a lot of the fancy gimmicks they've been touting wouldn't work for the vast majority of people, and you'd end up with a lot of people griping about how the phone doesn't work the way it was advertised.
Tying the iPhone to a single carrier is only to be expected considering Apple's history. They've always held tight control over their hardware and peripherals, and they're basically doing the same thing here.
The Microsoft (a big company) open standard is setup to be backwards compatible with all the weird crap imposed by their prior formats (which makes sense, since documents tend to be stored in these formats)
But their so-called standard really isn't a standard. Within the definition of OOXML are statements that are basically "implement this like Office 95 did", without any additional detail. The only company in the world that can implement these sorts of things is Microsoft themselves since Office 95 isn't open source. The only companies they're likely to share this information with, if any, are partners who sign NDA's with them, which means anything that has the possibility of ever implementing this is likely to be available for Windows only. That certainly does NOT qualify as an "open standard". To be an open standard it needs to be defined in such a manner that the standard can be implemented on any existing platform without any dependencies on Windows or Microsoft.
It seems to me that with the constant growth & change of the high-tech marketplace the stuffed shirts responsible for levying taxes are going to have to significantly overhaul how taxes are levied in the not-too-distant future. The way this tax appears to be defined it could apply to devices that are not primarily cameras. Mobile phones are close to fitting into this definition. You can also buy binoculars capable of recording to digital media. A similar problem thats already rearing its ugly head is the recent decision by Canada to levy an "ipod tax" on mp3 players. They're already collecting taxes on the sale of music, so this in effect is taxing the end user twice. I'd be willing to bet that somebody in Canada will sue over that soon. Imagine if Canada implemented this digital camera tax and then in a few years ipods started showing up with built-in cameras... You'll end up with devices that are heavily taxed under a slew of "digital rights" taxes.
Those parts that are connected are using it to fight corruption. Why just yesterday I got my third e-mail from the widow of a former government employee who needed my help to move some funds out of Nigeria so that the corrupt government couldn't get its hands on it. All they needed was my bank account number.
A number of reasons. One is to be able to run different linux distros on the same machine for testing purposes. Another is to set up two completely different environments that run tasks at different times.
I used to work for a search engine company (not Google) that has thousands of linux servers. After doing a bit of research they discovered that the vast majority of these machines are idle for a good amount of time. Rather than buy new servers they simply installed Xen and intellegently divided up the physical hardware to perform their different tasks. Now instead of separate physical servers to do web spidering, data analysis, log processing, etc. they've combined these tasks onto the same physical hardware but kept them as individual virtual servers.
True, but at least a half dozen of them were successfully recovered by the Allies during the war. The movie U-571 is a dramatization of one of these successes, and the credits at the end of the movie list a number of other incidents where Enigmas were captured. No idea what happened to all of these though. My bet would be that either they ended up in museums or were destroyed after the war.
The only thing this did was to piss off a lot of legitimate users, including the FAA and the Military when the available supply of Military GPS units dried up.
Don't forget the US Coast Guard, who developed the Differential GPS system for boaters. It consists of a series of ground-based stations throughout the US that receive GPS signals then re-broadcast a "fixed" signal that DGPS receivers can then use for a more accurate fix. I always thought it was pretty ironic (and laughable) that one branch of the military would degrade GPS and then another branch of the military would remove that error specifically for civilian use.
It's a nice thought but I wouldn't expect to see any significant changes in a long time. Companies like Microsoft that have huge investments in proprietary software are going to use the threats of patents to try to combat the growth of linux and open source software in general. I'm sure they'll continue to do that for as long as they possibly can. Even companies like Amazon, with their dubious one-click patent, use them as weapons in going after the competition. Unless/until something significant happens that puts an end to the abuse of dubious software patents I have a feeling they'll be around for quite some time.
Especially in the world of computers it seems that so many of the patents are of questionable validity. A lot of software-related patents end up getting invalidated due to prior art when the patent holder tries to enforce it. Why do you think Microsoft isn't publicizing the list of patents that it claims linux infringes on? Tons of people will try to dig up prior art as soon as they know what patents MS claims are being infringed upon.
But this is just another layer of security through obscurity. I've seen some anti-DRM tools that simply intercept the connection attempts to DRM servers and return back seemingly valid responses. They can revoke all the keys they want on their servers but if the connection to the server is intercepted and a bogus ACK is sent back instead then the DRM is defeated yet again.
As far as key revocation goes, I think the guys over at Doom9 have shown that the AACS attempts at this are lacking as well. They've been able to publish new keys within 24 hours of them being released by the AACS license authority. It takes a lot more effort for the AACSLA to revoke old keys and publish new ones than it does the hackers to uncover the new keys.
DRM cracking is a very different thing than cracking servers, viruses, trojans, etc. DRM is inherently flawed because you have to provide the keys to the encryption so that the end user can read the data. Even if the NSA developed a DRM system it'd be fairly easy to crack since they'd have to give you the keys as well.
Windows is so damned insecure and targeted by viruses, trojans, etc. because of it's poor design. The argument that Windows is attacked the most because of market share is absurd. Windows was, and still is, designed mainly on an architecture that wasn't designed for network use. Microsoft has also refused to rebuild Windows from the ground up in a more secure model because it would adversely impact the vast majority of Windows applications that rely on the inherent insecurity of the OS. If you take a well designed OS like Open BSD or OS X (which is based on BSD) and install applications that have been shown to be highly secure (like Apache) then it's extremely difficult to crack.
If Windows wasn't the dominant operating system in the world then problems with viruses, trojans, and even spam, wouldn't be anywhere near as prevalent as they are. I've seen Windows computers become fully compromised simply by visiting a compromised website in Internet Explorer despite the fact that virus scanners, firewalls, etc. were all installed on the Windows computer. That's virtually impossible to do on OS's like BSD, OS X, linux, etc. as long as basic security practices are used (basically logging in as an unprivileged user and not root). I've NEVER seen a linux, BSD, or OS X computer infected with malware the way Windows computers are, and I've worked with literally thousands of these computers. True, you might occasionally see a *nix box that has some level of compromise, but it's almost never as bad as what can happen to a Windows computer by simply connecting it to the internet.
The problem with DRM, in a nutshell, is that you ultimately have to provide the keys for accessing the content to the end user. All DRM, no matter how it's designed, is at the most basic level just security through obscurity. Since decryption keys have to be provided to the end user it's just a matter of time before one of the (potentially) millions of users worldwide manages to find those keys and figure out how to make use of them. Companies spend more and more on trying to restrict access to those keys, and now to revoke compromised keys (think AACS), but even that's a losing battle. Companies spend tons of money and some teenaged hacker in Russia still manages to crack the encryption fairly quickly. It's a no-win battle for the companies. They just haven't admitted defeat yet.
Since they have an annoying form you have to fill out to get the download location I figured I'd save everybody the time and effort. Here's the page to all the downloads:
As long as they don't redistribute any GPLv3 software, they're correct.
There are two arguments being brought up with regards to this:
1 - The GPLv2 license has an option to specify that code is licensed by "GPL version 2 or later". If this is the case then the argument goes that many of those who wrote code under GPLv2 could simply say "well now my code is licensed under GPLv3".
2 - People who have those vouchers from MS For copies of SUSE may hold on to them until parts of the linux kernel and other related software is actually released under GPLv3. Once that happens then they'll redeem those vouchers for the version of SUSE that has the GPLv3 code in it.
I'm extremely happy with this, mainly because it puts a HUGE stake through the heart of the SCO v. IBM case. Novell has provided testimony from the lawyer who drew up the SVRX contract with SCO that blows holes in all the SCO claims. The lawyer also provided draft copies of the contract, including notes & comments regarding changes, reasons for the wording, etc. This should once and for all provide the legal decision that SCO does NOT have any claims to own unix, which basically guts the remainder of their lawsuits.
Part of what makes OCR work is that it assumes that the text was written to communicate meaning.
As computing power continues to grow that kind of assumption is less and less important. Ten years ago I worked for a speech recognition company that developed tools similar to what Google is now using for their 800-GOOG-411 search line. Back then the state of the art was to carefully guide what a caller was likely to say, and to rely on massive dictionaries to help with the recognition. Now, 10 years later, with more research and more powerful computers, it's much easier to develop more free-formed speech recognition systems that can accurately recognize arbitrary strings of numbers/letters. (account numbers, phone numbers, etc) Given that the capabilities of speech regonition systems have grown so much I'd be willing to bet that OCR capabilities have grown in similar ways.
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Frivolous lawsuits. Until the RIAA finally realizes that its lawsuit tactic isn't working it's the only attempt at DRM that hasn't been made completely useless yet. Unfortunately I don't see that happening unless/until they lose bigtime in multiple court cases.
You might as well use your soon-to-be-launched version instead of the soon-to-be-stale release.
So why didn't they get 10.4 certified back when they were about to release it?
Was Tiger (10.4) certified? I don't see it listed on the Open Group website. Did Apple even try to certify Tiger? Why (not)? If not then why start now with Leopard?
Does this mean I won't be able to buy a car running Microsoft Windows (tm) for Internal Combustion Engines (Win-ICE)? I was so looking forward to having to reboot my car every 1000 miles...
If they had made a multi-band phone and sold it SIM-less, they could well have cracked the carrier market wide open.
From what I understand the carrier (AT&T) had to do a lot of work on their end to support the phone. The visual voicemail system alone required AT&T to update how their voicemail system works. By picking an exclusive partner Apple ensured that all these changes would work properly with the iPhone. If they simply dumped an unlocked phone on the market then a lot of the fancy gimmicks they've been touting wouldn't work for the vast majority of people, and you'd end up with a lot of people griping about how the phone doesn't work the way it was advertised.
Tying the iPhone to a single carrier is only to be expected considering Apple's history. They've always held tight control over their hardware and peripherals, and they're basically doing the same thing here.
I wonder how long until SSL and other encryption technologies become the standard due to things like this.
The Microsoft (a big company) open standard is setup to be backwards compatible with all the weird crap imposed by their prior formats (which makes sense, since documents tend to be stored in these formats)
But their so-called standard really isn't a standard. Within the definition of OOXML are statements that are basically "implement this like Office 95 did", without any additional detail. The only company in the world that can implement these sorts of things is Microsoft themselves since Office 95 isn't open source. The only companies they're likely to share this information with, if any, are partners who sign NDA's with them, which means anything that has the possibility of ever implementing this is likely to be available for Windows only. That certainly does NOT qualify as an "open standard". To be an open standard it needs to be defined in such a manner that the standard can be implemented on any existing platform without any dependencies on Windows or Microsoft.
It seems to me that with the constant growth & change of the high-tech marketplace the stuffed shirts responsible for levying taxes are going to have to significantly overhaul how taxes are levied in the not-too-distant future. The way this tax appears to be defined it could apply to devices that are not primarily cameras. Mobile phones are close to fitting into this definition. You can also buy binoculars capable of recording to digital media. A similar problem thats already rearing its ugly head is the recent decision by Canada to levy an "ipod tax" on mp3 players. They're already collecting taxes on the sale of music, so this in effect is taxing the end user twice. I'd be willing to bet that somebody in Canada will sue over that soon. Imagine if Canada implemented this digital camera tax and then in a few years ipods started showing up with built-in cameras... You'll end up with devices that are heavily taxed under a slew of "digital rights" taxes.
... the Iranian intelligence community have lost their collective nuts.
Those parts that are connected are using it to fight corruption. Why just yesterday I got my third e-mail from the widow of a former government employee who needed my help to move some funds out of Nigeria so that the corrupt government couldn't get its hands on it. All they needed was my bank account number.
A number of reasons. One is to be able to run different linux distros on the same machine for testing purposes. Another is to set up two completely different environments that run tasks at different times.
I used to work for a search engine company (not Google) that has thousands of linux servers. After doing a bit of research they discovered that the vast majority of these machines are idle for a good amount of time. Rather than buy new servers they simply installed Xen and intellegently divided up the physical hardware to perform their different tasks. Now instead of separate physical servers to do web spidering, data analysis, log processing, etc. they've combined these tasks onto the same physical hardware but kept them as individual virtual servers.
True, but at least a half dozen of them were successfully recovered by the Allies during the war. The movie U-571 is a dramatization of one of these successes, and the credits at the end of the movie list a number of other incidents where Enigmas were captured. No idea what happened to all of these though. My bet would be that either they ended up in museums or were destroyed after the war.
The only thing this did was to piss off a lot of legitimate users, including the FAA and the Military when the available supply of Military GPS units dried up.
Don't forget the US Coast Guard, who developed the Differential GPS system for boaters. It consists of a series of ground-based stations throughout the US that receive GPS signals then re-broadcast a "fixed" signal that DGPS receivers can then use for a more accurate fix. I always thought it was pretty ironic (and laughable) that one branch of the military would degrade GPS and then another branch of the military would remove that error specifically for civilian use.
It's a nice thought but I wouldn't expect to see any significant changes in a long time. Companies like Microsoft that have huge investments in proprietary software are going to use the threats of patents to try to combat the growth of linux and open source software in general. I'm sure they'll continue to do that for as long as they possibly can. Even companies like Amazon, with their dubious one-click patent, use them as weapons in going after the competition. Unless/until something significant happens that puts an end to the abuse of dubious software patents I have a feeling they'll be around for quite some time.
Especially in the world of computers it seems that so many of the patents are of questionable validity. A lot of software-related patents end up getting invalidated due to prior art when the patent holder tries to enforce it. Why do you think Microsoft isn't publicizing the list of patents that it claims linux infringes on? Tons of people will try to dig up prior art as soon as they know what patents MS claims are being infringed upon.
Mainly because I refuse to install/use Vista.
But this is just another layer of security through obscurity. I've seen some anti-DRM tools that simply intercept the connection attempts to DRM servers and return back seemingly valid responses. They can revoke all the keys they want on their servers but if the connection to the server is intercepted and a bogus ACK is sent back instead then the DRM is defeated yet again.
As far as key revocation goes, I think the guys over at Doom9 have shown that the AACS attempts at this are lacking as well. They've been able to publish new keys within 24 hours of them being released by the AACS license authority. It takes a lot more effort for the AACSLA to revoke old keys and publish new ones than it does the hackers to uncover the new keys.
DRM cracking is a very different thing than cracking servers, viruses, trojans, etc. DRM is inherently flawed because you have to provide the keys to the encryption so that the end user can read the data. Even if the NSA developed a DRM system it'd be fairly easy to crack since they'd have to give you the keys as well.
Windows is so damned insecure and targeted by viruses, trojans, etc. because of it's poor design. The argument that Windows is attacked the most because of market share is absurd. Windows was, and still is, designed mainly on an architecture that wasn't designed for network use. Microsoft has also refused to rebuild Windows from the ground up in a more secure model because it would adversely impact the vast majority of Windows applications that rely on the inherent insecurity of the OS. If you take a well designed OS like Open BSD or OS X (which is based on BSD) and install applications that have been shown to be highly secure (like Apache) then it's extremely difficult to crack.
If Windows wasn't the dominant operating system in the world then problems with viruses, trojans, and even spam, wouldn't be anywhere near as prevalent as they are. I've seen Windows computers become fully compromised simply by visiting a compromised website in Internet Explorer despite the fact that virus scanners, firewalls, etc. were all installed on the Windows computer. That's virtually impossible to do on OS's like BSD, OS X, linux, etc. as long as basic security practices are used (basically logging in as an unprivileged user and not root). I've NEVER seen a linux, BSD, or OS X computer infected with malware the way Windows computers are, and I've worked with literally thousands of these computers. True, you might occasionally see a *nix box that has some level of compromise, but it's almost never as bad as what can happen to a Windows computer by simply connecting it to the internet.
In a word, No.
The problem with DRM, in a nutshell, is that you ultimately have to provide the keys for accessing the content to the end user. All DRM, no matter how it's designed, is at the most basic level just security through obscurity. Since decryption keys have to be provided to the end user it's just a matter of time before one of the (potentially) millions of users worldwide manages to find those keys and figure out how to make use of them. Companies spend more and more on trying to restrict access to those keys, and now to revoke compromised keys (think AACS), but even that's a losing battle. Companies spend tons of money and some teenaged hacker in Russia still manages to crack the encryption fairly quickly. It's a no-win battle for the companies. They just haven't admitted defeat yet.
Since they have an annoying form you have to fill out to get the download location I figured I'd save everybody the time and effort. Here's the page to all the downloads:
o w.php
http://www.openlogic.com/discovery/new_download_n
As long as they don't redistribute any GPLv3 software, they're correct.
There are two arguments being brought up with regards to this:
1 - The GPLv2 license has an option to specify that code is licensed by "GPL version 2 or later". If this is the case then the argument goes that many of those who wrote code under GPLv2 could simply say "well now my code is licensed under GPLv3".
2 - People who have those vouchers from MS For copies of SUSE may hold on to them until parts of the linux kernel and other related software is actually released under GPLv3. Once that happens then they'll redeem those vouchers for the version of SUSE that has the GPLv3 code in it.
... to the Fortress of Solitude?
I'm extremely happy with this, mainly because it puts a HUGE stake through the heart of the SCO v. IBM case. Novell has provided testimony from the lawyer who drew up the SVRX contract with SCO that blows holes in all the SCO claims. The lawyer also provided draft copies of the contract, including notes & comments regarding changes, reasons for the wording, etc. This should once and for all provide the legal decision that SCO does NOT have any claims to own unix, which basically guts the remainder of their lawsuits.
Part of what makes OCR work is that it assumes that the text was written to communicate meaning.
As computing power continues to grow that kind of assumption is less and less important. Ten years ago I worked for a speech recognition company that developed tools similar to what Google is now using for their 800-GOOG-411 search line. Back then the state of the art was to carefully guide what a caller was likely to say, and to rely on massive dictionaries to help with the recognition. Now, 10 years later, with more research and more powerful computers, it's much easier to develop more free-formed speech recognition systems that can accurately recognize arbitrary strings of numbers/letters. (account numbers, phone numbers, etc) Given that the capabilities of speech regonition systems have grown so much I'd be willing to bet that OCR capabilities have grown in similar ways.
... for Captchas? If Google is pushing OCR I could see it eventually becoming good enough to parse at least some types of captchas.