> Once you've used a DSL line or cable modem there is simply no going back
Au contraire, as a matter of objective fact you are wrong. I've used modems of various speeds, ISDN (back in '95-'96) and DSL more recently. Because of the absurdly high prices and the availability of free net access at 56K, I've opted to just use the free service. There are only three salient advantages to the "high bandwidth" options. Connectivity is always there without going through the sign on dance. You still have access to your phone line. You can download large files in reasonable times. For other activity the differences are marginal. Web surfing has many bottlenecks that have nothing to do with you connection speed. Neither email or news reading are significantly improved (except huge enclosures).
For gaming the most important characteristic (usually) is latency and there are many factors which affect it. Depending on how high capacity is achieved there is a definite possibility that latency and capacity are inversely related.
In any case all the current so-called high bandwidth options are just kludges by the copper monopolies used to diminish the possibility of new competition for true high bandwidth opportunities.
At the risk of being a bit boisterous this is basically a horseshit argument. If your network is predominantly users connected with 33K modems it has some validity. But you need a high speed connection to conveniently be downloading these sort of files anyway. And downloads are NOT across the gnutella network. They are directly client to client. Search responsivity can be sluggish but the bandwidth needed by the protocol is not onerous if you have the high speed connection needed anyway for a reasonable download time.
To go one step further it isn't the bandwidth and it isn't lack of scalability, it is vulnerability to DoS attacks while the network remains small. The reason I say scalability is not an issue is because if the packet TTL is properly handled then a network of 10 billion nodes is no more congested than a network of 10 thousand nodes. That is because under reasonable assumptions (ttl = 7, 3 or 4 connections per node) a packet won't see more than 10 thousand nodes no matter how large the entire network is.
Given fixed resources for malicious behavior, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the potential for disruption is diminished as the network gets larger. Conversely, if pinhead journalists can discourage enough people from trying things like gnutella, that helps to limit the size of the network, make it more vulnerable to attack, and serve as a self fulfilling prophecy.
Every bit that is downloaded must be uploaded by somebody. I suppose you meant that the number of people downloading is larger than the number of people uploading? That was the claim of the Xerox PARC report.
Jeez, have you even bothered to look at the packet stream before making your pronouncement? It is being crushed under a stream of meaningless pings, not search queries. And the ominous thing is that those pings are generating so few pongs and queries are producing so few responses. I think the reason is that there are currently so many malicious clients that are not routing any responses and generating a constant babble of meaningless pings. What gnutella needs are clients that are designed to be resistant to denial of service attacks, not napsterization (centralizing).
Why is it that people who have never even looked at a gnutella packet stream or contributed a line of code to a client are so damn willing to offer their worthless, uninformed opinions (I'm reacting more to the lame-ass article on ZDNet but the article I'm replying to qualifies also)? Anyone who has taken a close look at the traffic is aware that gnutella has been subject to a denial of service attack ever since the first injunction against Napster was almost enforced. The goal of this attack is to convince the deep thinkers on the net that gnutella "will not scale" and hence to give up on true peer to peer networking in favor of whatever the RIAA does with Napster once they manage to steal the technology with the aid of their judicial accomplices.
For those who have not bothered to read, every gnutella packet has a TTL (time to live which really translates to hops to live) so that it only gets seen by at most 'TTL' nodes which is supposed to be 7 by default. For those keeping track that means there is really nothing that needs to be 'scaled' regardless of how many total nodes there are. Packets on a "well behaved" network will die a natural death before causing a melt down. We were handling large networks (thousands of distinct nodes) just fine before the attacks began. What we have to do now is release clients that defend against the DOS attack and get enough such nodes out there to restore the previous performance.
Again for those who have not looked at the issue, the way you can mount an attack on gnutella is to set up as many clients as you can that don't route back any responses and at the same time spew out an unending stream of pings and possibly nonsense search queries (meant to load other clients but not produce query response packets). One way to fight back is to drop all pings on connections that have an inordinate proportion of pings and drop connections that appear to be generating too many queries that don't result in any responses. The first strategy is easy to impement and is in the current version of Mactella. The second is harder and is under development now.
Those who are loudly proclaiming that gnutella is failing because it does not 'scale' are little more than unwitting dupes of the sinister forces that are trying to generate precisely that impression. It may be true that it can't adapt to overcome malicious attacks but that is far from proven at this point.
Gosh, it sure would be great if all the people who respond so arrogantly actually were familiar with a few details. For instance, there is an escape clause for the broadcasters if there is a substantial proportion of the market that is not equipped for digital TV by the cutoff date. It is not a slamdunk that analog TV disappears in 2006.
This is really getting pathetic. Strong opinions based on almost zero knowledge. Who cares about some grab ass opinion is, if you've never programmed an app for the Mac? I think it is an interesting question why open source has not been a more important factor on the Mac yet. But most of the people offering opinions here don't even have rudimentary knowledge of the subject.
My own candidate for part of the answer is lack of good source control tools. I managed to get CVS running on a Mac running OS X but we found it easier to move the CVS server to a PPC Linux box for cross development purposes. It also took some searching to find a good CVS client. We are using one from Hong Kong which does a great job, especially over a slow communications link (it's called MacCVSClient). Without tools with this functionality you can't hope to coordinate the efforts of widely dispersed developers who may not even know each other.
We are running an open source Mac project (Mactella) at cxc, but it has only really been noticed by people who want to download the binary. There is a real learning curve since the project is built as a PowerPlant project in CodeWarrior. That means you need to be familiar with Mac toolbox and the even more complex framework, PowerPlant.
There has always been a hacker subculture in the Mac world (eg the MacHack conventions every summer in Michigan, MacTech magazine). As the tools for collaborative development spread I hope and expect open source to become a more important factor.
Maybe you didn't really mean to use a car for your example? If the car is stolen it seems rather likely that title to the car will be somewhat irregular. In that case I bet you would be considered guilty of purchasing stolen merchandise and face a decent chance of prosecution and conviction.
VMS has no security at all; zero, zilch. It requires that I depend on the kindness of strangers. What sort of dumbshit deal is that? So I'm just supposed to trust you when you say there is no back door coded into it (or a typographical error that makes the PRNG subtely less random)? Why should anyone trust you (you being anyone promising security software with closed source) when there are companies with enough balls to say here's the source code, have it checked yourself. And incidentally, by no stretch of the imagination was PGP developed as an open source project. They publish source code for shipping products to prove the security they offer. If someone finds a bonehead bug that is just an added bonus. Not something as likely to occur with closed source products.
Speaking of sad commentary can you imagine that some people thought it was necessary to intervene militarily and stop Adolf Hitler? Gosh I'm glad we're all so advanced today that we can see past such folly today. We're so much smarter now than those fools and knaves who waged the Cold War.
If they've managed to spread the idea that making an archive copy of media you've purchased is in any way illegal, they really do need to be stopped. They damn well know it is not illegal so they've tried to make it technically infeasible. They bought enough legislators to pass their DMCA but I don't think they can buy enough judges to make it stick.
No, they are not "loosing" money, they are "losing" money. If English is not your first language, I apologize for any perceived harshness. However, it should be mentioned that their IPO got a real boost from the news about all the hacker attention. That is almost certainly a significant boost to their company which they may have dissipated with their new policies. Just how many gung ho hardware hackers do they think there are? They do pay for marketing. Wouldn't the attention they get this way not provide a significant amount of "free" marketing? Oh well, adios Netpliance.
Are you speaking metaphorically or are you utterly clueless (yes, this is a trick question)? What computer system did he break into? What software did he download? What computer time did he steal?
If it were the case that Jon is the person who reverse engineered CSS (for more than one reason I don't think that is the case but for simplicity assume he did), then he is being charged for entering his own computer. The software is in his own computer, the computer time is time on his own machine.
Also allow me to summarize what appears to be the two types of relationships. Xing has a contract with CSS CCA which they negotiated and for which consideration was obtained by both parties. Xing does NOT have a contract with people who buy products from them. If you choose not to sell something to me because I am unwilling to sign a contract or because I demand an alteration to the contract, that is fine with me. But the corporate drones want it both ways: they want to sell a retail product and pretend to have a contractual relationship.
For the learning disabled among us (yes, I am tired of attempting to be entirely civil) here is a very brief quote from the document "Licensing Requirements for the CSS DVD Copy Protection Method" written by a senior counsel at Intel:
"However, motion picture owners have been reluctant to embrace this exciting new medium until reasonable steps to deter casual home copying are in place."
This is what most of us know as fair use, such as transferring from one medium to another (as encouraged by Sony in their ads for MiniDisc). This is not intended, nor is it presented as such, as a means to curtail piracy. The pirates will blithely produce copies with no need or use for DeCSS. DeCSS defeats playback protection.
I have read this claim repeatedly but in every case I can recall it has always been stated as a "well known fact". My question is has anyone actually done it? Would it be possible to confirm that this claim is more than just hot air? There must be some geeks out there who have access to a DVD-ROM burner. It does not count to claim that a properly modified burner could do the deed. Has anyone actually confirmed this "well known fact"???
Yes, at this point I think your response is correct. I am very much looking forward to the deployment of ZKS (Zero Knowledge Systems of Montreal) which should tend to render deep pockets litigation terrorism impotent. I was planning a Mac virtual driver for DVD-ROM that would allow for automatic on-the-fly decryption so the virtual drive would be just like the original disc but with all vestiges of CSS 'repaired'. There is not yet a standard MPEG2 codec for QuickTime but when that is remedied (perhaps using AltiVec on G4's) this would allow unlicensed players to be easily created that had features that existing CSS licensed players don't or won't provide (like useful bookmarks).
My main problem with your description is the implication that click through "licenses" are worth more than a warm bucket of spit. Also the comment about reverse engineering ignores the language in the DMCA, viz:
REVERSE ENGINEERING.--(1) Notwithstanding the provi-sions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs,
It doesn't appear to me that one would have to travel to Norway or any other country in order to create something like deCSS which affects playback but does not affect the ability to make illegal copies.
Wake up and smell the coffee. Yes, the DVD CCA did a crappy job on the encryption schemes. It has not only been alleged, it has been analyzed and published on the web. Of the 40 bits of entropy they allowed themnselves they only used about 16 or 25 depending on which attack is available. Both results are pathetic. Take a look at http://www.derfrosch.de/decss/ for details.
If you're going to re-compress in VideoCD format (I assume that is what you mean when you speak of using "mpeg, and burn on two cds". What would DeCSS have to do with this scenerio? Unless you have a direct MPEG2 to MPEG1 transcoder (an expensive proposition in either software or hardware) you are only using the decoded MPEG2 which doesn't have anything to do with DeCSS. This is an important point. At this point DeCSS has almost nothing to do with real piracy (which doesn't need it) and everything to do with fair use which is what the corporate oligarchies are clumsily trying to extinguish. They will fail.
I have a quote from a highly relevent document written by Michael Moradzdeh who is identified as senior counsel at Intel Corporation. The document is "Licensing Requirements for the CSS DVD Copy Protection Method". This is from the first page of the document in the Background topic:
DVD, with its dramatically increased storage capacity, is expected to drive a revolution in multimedia software applications and movies. However, motion picture owners have been reluctant to embrace this exciting new medium until reasonable steps to deter casual home copying are in place. The studios have been concerned that the quality and reproducibility of the DVD may result in innumerable illegal copies being made by casual home users, leading to a loss of revenue. The motion picture and consumer electronics industries, later joined by the computer industry, have developed and negotiated a plan for limiting home copying. It includes a scrambling algorithm known as the "Contents Scramble System" or "CSS." It relies on a combination of content scrambling, key encryption, conditional access, and licensing terms to enforce a set of design rules. In order to receive the keys and algorithms needed to access the content, manufacturers must commit that systems which incorporate these keys and algorithms will meet these design rules.
Without having to read too carefully I think it is clear that what CSS is designed to prohibit technologically is what has previously been known as fair use. It has NO impact on professional pirating. Their shell game is to point at and loudly complain about pirating but the technology is designed to reverse the perceived losses they sufferred in Sony vs Universal Pictures in the Betamax decision.
You need to understand that CSS is not intended to stop "professional" pirating at all. It has essentially no effect on this challenge to the industry. Here is a quote:
"DVD, with its dramatically increased storage capacity, is expected to drive a revolution in multimedia software applications and movies. However, motion picture owners have been reluctant to embrace this exciting new medium until reasonable steps to deter casual home copying are in place. The studios have been concerned that the quality and reproducibility of the DVD may result in innumerable illegal copies being made by casual home users, leading to a loss of revenue."
This is from a document by MICHAEL MORADZADEH who is senior counsel for Intel in a document called "LICENSING REQUIREMENTS FOR THE CSS DVD COPY PROTECTION METHOD". Reading more of the document it becomes clear this was meant as a technical fait accompli to overcome the court's propensity to allow the consumer "fair use" which apparently drives the studios crazy. Looked at from a position closer to theirs it might be stated they are prepared to deal with piracy that is economically motivated but not with casual copying.
I would agree about the Twin Cities having a great livability index with the price of living, schools, and items of interest. The real shortfall is a lack of critical mass. When you visit a place like Silicon Valley you get the feeling that everything interesting is somewhere close. I stayed with a friend along the Pacific in SF, drove down to Apple and some other places to interview. Stopped in at Stanford for a lecture by Andrew Wiles on FLT. Experienced the unending expanse of new hitech ventures. I got an offer at Apple that interested me but I couldn't justify the changes for my family based on the slight increase in income (the stock options were another matter).
I think part of what might be missing are the multiple institutions like Stanford and Cal, LBL, PARC, as well as all the older, larger technology companies (Varian, HP), not to mention all the biotech companies. There just aren't that many places ever where all those things come together. Great place to be if you're rich. The nice thing about the Twin Cities is it is great here even if you are not rich.
Tom, I get the feeling I may have already made this point before and if so I apologize for repeating myself. The specific WIPO law being cited by the CSS lawyers has a provision that clearly says that reverse engineering for the purpose of compatibility is NOT to be considered illegal. It's their damn law but it still says they can't use it in this case (of course everything is more complicated than four sentence paragraphs). So even if it is not an essential freedom it is something the framers of this nasty law recognize.
Damn, I just can't sit back and use those moderator points with important points being muddled. Freedom is precisely the point. Big, dumb corporations want to make reverse engineering illegal with their vapid shrink wrap and click through "so-called licenses". It isn't that far from trying to surpress intellectual curiosity. I can understand a person possibly being unhappy with the idea of his hard work being misappropriated. But if that is the case then try to regulate the economic act, not the intellectual act of tinkering.
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> Once you've used a DSL line or cable modem there is simply no going back
Au contraire, as a matter of objective fact you are wrong. I've used modems of various speeds, ISDN (back in '95-'96) and DSL more recently. Because of the absurdly high prices and the availability of free net access at 56K, I've opted to just use the free service. There are only three salient advantages to the "high bandwidth" options. Connectivity is always there without going through the sign on dance. You still have access to your phone line. You can download large files in reasonable times. For other activity the differences are marginal. Web surfing has many bottlenecks that have nothing to do with you connection speed. Neither email or news reading are significantly improved (except huge enclosures).
For gaming the most important characteristic (usually) is latency and there are many factors which affect it. Depending on how high capacity is achieved there is a definite possibility that latency and capacity are inversely related.
In any case all the current so-called high bandwidth options are just kludges by the copper monopolies used to diminish the possibility of new competition for true high bandwidth opportunities.
At the risk of being a bit boisterous this is basically a horseshit argument. If your network is predominantly users connected with 33K modems it has some validity. But you need a high speed connection to conveniently be downloading these sort of files anyway. And downloads are NOT across the gnutella network. They are directly client to client. Search responsivity can be sluggish but the bandwidth needed by the protocol is not onerous if you have the high speed connection needed anyway for a reasonable download time.
To go one step further it isn't the bandwidth and it isn't lack of scalability, it is vulnerability to DoS attacks while the network remains small. The reason I say scalability is not an issue is because if the packet TTL is properly handled then a network of 10 billion nodes is no more congested than a network of 10 thousand nodes. That is because under reasonable assumptions (ttl = 7, 3 or 4 connections per node) a packet won't see more than 10 thousand nodes no matter how large the entire network is.
Given fixed resources for malicious behavior, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the potential for disruption is diminished as the network gets larger. Conversely, if pinhead journalists can discourage enough people from trying things like gnutella, that helps to limit the size of the network, make it more vulnerable to attack, and serve as a self fulfilling prophecy.
Every bit that is downloaded must be uploaded by somebody. I suppose you meant that the number of people downloading is larger than the number of people uploading? That was the claim of the Xerox PARC report.
Jeez, have you even bothered to look at the packet stream before making your pronouncement? It is being crushed under a stream of meaningless pings, not search queries. And the ominous thing is that those pings are generating so few pongs and queries are producing so few responses. I think the reason is that there are currently so many malicious clients that are not routing any responses and generating a constant babble of meaningless pings. What gnutella needs are clients that are designed to be resistant to denial of service attacks, not napsterization (centralizing).
Why is it that people who have never even looked at a gnutella packet stream or contributed a line of code to a client are so damn willing to offer their worthless, uninformed opinions (I'm reacting more to the lame-ass article on ZDNet but the article I'm replying to qualifies also)? Anyone who has taken a close look at the traffic is aware that gnutella has been subject to a denial of service attack ever since the first injunction against Napster was almost enforced. The goal of this attack is to convince the deep thinkers on the net that gnutella "will not scale" and hence to give up on true peer to peer networking in favor of whatever the RIAA does with Napster once they manage to steal the technology with the aid of their judicial accomplices.
For those who have not bothered to read, every gnutella packet has a TTL (time to live which really translates to hops to live) so that it only gets seen by at most 'TTL' nodes which is supposed to be 7 by default. For those keeping track that means there is really nothing that needs to be 'scaled' regardless of how many total nodes there are. Packets on a "well behaved" network will die a natural death before causing a melt down. We were handling large networks (thousands of distinct nodes) just fine before the attacks began. What we have to do now is release clients that defend against the DOS attack and get enough such nodes out there to restore the previous performance.
Again for those who have not looked at the issue, the way you can mount an attack on gnutella is to set up as many clients as you can that don't route back any responses and at the same time spew out an unending stream of pings and possibly nonsense search queries (meant to load other clients but not produce query response packets). One way to fight back is to drop all pings on connections that have an inordinate proportion of pings and drop connections that appear to be generating too many queries that don't result in any responses. The first strategy is easy to impement and is in the current version of Mactella. The second is harder and is under development now.
Those who are loudly proclaiming that gnutella is failing because it does not 'scale' are little more than unwitting dupes of the sinister forces that are trying to generate precisely that impression. It may be true that it can't adapt to overcome malicious attacks but that is far from proven at this point.
Gosh, it sure would be great if all the people who respond so arrogantly actually were familiar with a few details. For instance, there is an escape clause for the broadcasters if there is a substantial proportion of the market that is not equipped for digital TV by the cutoff date. It is not a slamdunk that analog TV disappears in 2006.
This is really getting pathetic. Strong opinions based on almost zero knowledge. Who cares about some grab ass opinion is, if you've never programmed an app for the Mac? I think it is an interesting question why open source has not been a more important factor on the Mac yet. But most of the people offering opinions here don't even have rudimentary knowledge of the subject.
My own candidate for part of the answer is lack of good source control tools. I managed to get CVS running on a Mac running OS X but we found it easier to move the CVS server to a PPC Linux box for cross development purposes. It also took some searching to find a good CVS client. We are using one from Hong Kong which does a great job, especially over a slow communications link (it's called MacCVSClient). Without tools with this functionality you can't hope to coordinate the efforts of widely dispersed developers who may not even know each other.
We are running an open source Mac project (Mactella) at cxc, but it has only really been noticed by people who want to download the binary. There is a real learning curve since the project is built as a PowerPlant project in CodeWarrior. That means you need to be familiar with Mac toolbox and the even more complex framework, PowerPlant.
There has always been a hacker subculture in the Mac world (eg the MacHack conventions every summer in Michigan, MacTech magazine). As the tools for collaborative development spread I hope and expect open source to become a more important factor.
Maybe you didn't really mean to use a car for your example? If the car is stolen it seems rather likely that title to the car will be somewhat irregular. In that case I bet you would be considered guilty of purchasing stolen merchandise and face a decent chance of prosecution and conviction.
No, it was von Neumann. This is quoted in Vol 3 of Knuth. In the quote I don't think he mentions digital devices since his point was more general.
VMS has no security at all; zero, zilch. It requires that I depend on the kindness of strangers. What sort of dumbshit deal is that? So I'm just supposed to trust you when you say there is no back door coded into it (or a typographical error that makes the PRNG subtely less random)? Why should anyone trust you (you being anyone promising security software with closed source) when there are companies with enough balls to say here's the source code, have it checked yourself. And incidentally, by no stretch of the imagination was PGP developed as an open source project. They publish source code for shipping products to prove the security they offer. If someone finds a bonehead bug that is just an added bonus. Not something as likely to occur with closed source products.
Speaking of sad commentary can you imagine that some people thought it was necessary to intervene militarily and stop Adolf Hitler? Gosh I'm glad we're all so advanced today that we can see past such folly today. We're so much smarter now than those fools and knaves who waged the Cold War.
If they've managed to spread the idea that making an archive copy of media you've purchased is in any way illegal, they really do need to be stopped. They damn well know it is not illegal so they've tried to make it technically infeasible. They bought enough legislators to pass their DMCA but I don't think they can buy enough judges to make it stick.
No, they are not "loosing" money, they are "losing" money. If English is not your first language, I apologize for any perceived harshness. However, it should be mentioned that their IPO got a real boost from the news about all the hacker attention. That is almost certainly a significant boost to their company which they may have dissipated with their new policies. Just how many gung ho hardware hackers do they think there are? They do pay for marketing. Wouldn't the attention they get this way not provide a significant amount of "free" marketing? Oh well, adios Netpliance.
Are you speaking metaphorically or are you utterly clueless (yes, this is a trick question)? What computer system did he break into? What software did he download? What computer time did he steal?
If it were the case that Jon is the person who reverse engineered CSS (for more than one reason I don't think that is the case but for simplicity assume he did), then he is being charged for entering his own computer. The software is in his own computer, the computer time is time on his own machine.
Also allow me to summarize what appears to be the two types of relationships. Xing has a contract with CSS CCA which they negotiated and for which consideration was obtained by both parties. Xing does NOT have a contract with people who buy products from them. If you choose not to sell something to me because I am unwilling to sign a contract or because I demand an alteration to the contract, that is fine with me. But the corporate drones want it both ways: they want to sell a retail product and pretend to have a contractual relationship.
For the learning disabled among us (yes, I am tired of attempting to be entirely civil) here is a very brief quote from the document "Licensing Requirements for the CSS DVD Copy Protection Method" written by a senior counsel at Intel:
"However, motion picture owners have been
reluctant to embrace this exciting new medium until reasonable steps to deter casual home
copying are in place."
This is what most of us know as fair use, such as transferring from one medium to another (as encouraged by Sony in their ads for MiniDisc). This is not intended, nor is it presented as such, as a means to curtail piracy. The pirates will blithely produce copies with no need or use for DeCSS. DeCSS defeats playback protection.
I have read this claim repeatedly but in every case I can recall it has always been stated as a "well known fact". My question is has anyone actually done it? Would it be possible to confirm that this claim is more than just hot air? There must be some geeks out there who have access to a DVD-ROM burner. It does not count to claim that a properly modified burner could do the deed. Has anyone actually confirmed this "well known fact"???
Yes, at this point I think your response is correct. I am very much looking forward to the deployment of ZKS (Zero Knowledge Systems of Montreal) which should tend to render deep pockets litigation terrorism impotent. I was planning a Mac virtual driver for DVD-ROM that would allow for automatic on-the-fly decryption so the virtual drive would be just like the original disc but with all vestiges of CSS 'repaired'. There is not yet a standard MPEG2 codec for QuickTime but when that is remedied (perhaps using AltiVec on G4's) this would allow unlicensed players to be easily created that had features that existing CSS licensed players don't or won't provide (like useful bookmarks).
My main problem with your description is the implication that click through "licenses" are worth more than a warm bucket of spit. Also the comment about reverse engineering ignores the language in the DMCA, viz:
REVERSE ENGINEERING.--(1) Notwithstanding the provi-sions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs,
It doesn't appear to me that one would have to travel to Norway or any other country in order to create something like deCSS which affects playback but does not affect the ability to make illegal copies.
Wake up and smell the coffee. Yes, the DVD CCA did a crappy job on the encryption schemes. It has not only been alleged, it has been analyzed and published on the web. Of the 40 bits of entropy they allowed themnselves they only used about 16 or 25 depending on which attack is available. Both results are pathetic. Take a look at http://www.derfrosch.de/decss/ for details.
If you're going to re-compress in VideoCD format (I assume that is what you mean when you speak of using "mpeg, and burn on two cds". What would DeCSS have to do with this scenerio? Unless you have a direct MPEG2 to MPEG1 transcoder (an expensive proposition in either software or hardware) you are only using the decoded MPEG2 which doesn't have anything to do with DeCSS. This is an important point. At this point DeCSS has almost nothing to do with real piracy (which doesn't need it) and everything to do with fair use which is what the corporate oligarchies are clumsily trying to extinguish. They will fail.
I have a quote from a highly relevent document written by Michael Moradzdeh who is identified as senior counsel at Intel Corporation. The document is "Licensing Requirements for the CSS DVD Copy Protection Method". This is from the first page of the document in the Background topic:
DVD, with its dramatically increased storage capacity, is expected to drive a revolution in multimedia software applications and movies. However, motion picture owners have been reluctant to embrace this exciting new medium until reasonable steps to deter casual home copying are in place. The studios have been concerned that the quality and reproducibility of the DVD may result in innumerable illegal copies being made by casual home users, leading to a loss
of revenue.
The motion picture and consumer electronics industries, later joined by the computer industry, have developed and negotiated a plan for limiting home copying. It includes a scrambling algorithm known as the "Contents Scramble System" or "CSS." It relies on a combination of content scrambling, key encryption, conditional access, and licensing terms to enforce a set of design rules. In order to receive the keys and algorithms needed to access the content, manufacturers must commit that systems which incorporate these keys and algorithms will meet these design rules.
Without having to read too carefully I think it is clear that what CSS is designed to prohibit technologically is what has previously been known as fair use. It has NO impact on professional pirating. Their shell game is to point at and loudly complain about pirating but the technology is designed to reverse the perceived losses they sufferred in Sony vs Universal Pictures in the Betamax decision.
You need to understand that CSS is not intended to stop "professional" pirating at all. It has essentially no effect on this challenge to the industry. Here is a quote:
"DVD, with its dramatically increased storage capacity, is expected to drive a revolution in multimedia software applications and movies. However, motion picture owners have been reluctant to embrace this exciting new medium until reasonable steps to deter casual home copying are in place. The studios have been concerned that the quality and reproducibility of the DVD may result in innumerable illegal copies being made by casual home users, leading to a loss of revenue."
This is from a document by MICHAEL MORADZADEH who is senior counsel for Intel in a document called "LICENSING REQUIREMENTS FOR THE CSS DVD COPY PROTECTION METHOD". Reading more of the document it becomes clear this was meant as a technical fait accompli to overcome the court's propensity to allow the consumer "fair use" which apparently drives the studios crazy. Looked at from a position closer to theirs it might be stated they are prepared to deal with piracy that is economically motivated but not with casual copying.
I would agree about the Twin Cities having a great livability index with the price of living, schools, and items of interest. The real shortfall is a lack of critical mass. When you visit a place like Silicon Valley you get the feeling that everything interesting is somewhere close. I stayed with a friend along the Pacific in SF, drove down to Apple and some other places to interview. Stopped in at Stanford for a lecture by Andrew Wiles on FLT. Experienced the unending expanse of new hitech ventures. I got an offer at Apple that interested me but I couldn't justify the changes for my family based on the slight increase in income (the stock options were another matter).
I think part of what might be missing are the multiple institutions like Stanford and Cal, LBL, PARC, as well as all the older, larger technology companies (Varian, HP), not to mention all the biotech companies. There just aren't that many places ever where all those things come together. Great place to be if you're rich. The nice thing about the Twin Cities is it is great here even if you are not rich.
Tom, I get the feeling I may have already made this point before and if so I apologize for repeating myself. The specific WIPO law being cited by the CSS lawyers has a provision that clearly says that reverse engineering for the purpose of compatibility is NOT to be considered illegal. It's their damn law but it still says they can't use it in this case (of course everything is more complicated than four sentence paragraphs). So even if it is not an essential freedom it is something the framers of this nasty law recognize.
Damn, I just can't sit back and use those moderator points with important points being muddled. Freedom is precisely the point. Big, dumb corporations want to make reverse engineering illegal with their vapid shrink wrap and click through "so-called licenses". It isn't that far from trying to surpress intellectual curiosity. I can understand a person possibly being unhappy with the idea of his hard work being misappropriated. But if that is the case then try to regulate the economic act, not the intellectual act of tinkering.