(don't even bother modding me up for this. It took all of thirty seconds to find it.)
Soundbyte from the article: watermarking relies on security through obscurity. Any obsessive slashdotter will tell you that relying exclusivally on such security is a Very Bad Thing (tm).
It doesn't actually sound terribly bad. You have the option of buying the "full", untimed version, for $5, or paying $1 for the ten-hour version. (What would be useful is the ability to upgrade from the timed version to the full version for $4, if you decided you liked the book and wanted to buy it for real.)
Since this was a press release, instead of a real article, no discussion was made into the protection scheme, how and where the books may be read, or anything along those lines. (Odds are this paragraph is in violation of the DMCA.) I can envision that the system could either get cumbersome fast, or be unprotectable. If the reader requires an Internet connection so that it can contact the server and deduct time from your account, it seems to defeat the entire purpose of an ebook: portability in a handheld. I'm not really into reading long documents on my CRT, especially since it's absurdly unportable, but my Visor is a pretty decent platform for reading in class or in bed or on the couch or wherever. If the timing mechanism were built into the file itself, what's to keep me from backing it up before I started reading and restoring from backup when the time expires?
While this seems worth furthur examination, I don't think this really fits into "Your Rights Online".
I hate to break it to you, but the tech economy slide started to take place spring 2000, about the time that dubya announced his canidacy for president. This was when the NASDAQ "corrected" (which, of course, is a euphamistic term for "crashed") and the dot-coms started dying. It took about a year for the dot-com crash to make its way around to the rest of the market. Now that they aren't demanding Cisco routers and Sun servers quite as much as they used to, and everyone's got a great big inventory that they don't know what to do with, the big companies are tightening their belts. Unfortunatly for dubya-bashers, it has absolutly nothing to do with our current president, and instead the economy he inherited from the last one.
Ah. That would explain why his books tend to take place at least partially in Texas. (I just finished reading Islands in the Net, and off the top of my head Heavy Weather and Distraction also do.)
Last time I renewed my licence over here in Colorado (when I turned eighteen just under three years ago), they wouldn't put my SSN on my licence because I didn't have the card with me. The number on the licence seems to be a unique, state-assigned identifier; it has been the same ever since I got my non-driving ID many years ago.
NAND gates! Children these days. We had to draw the layers by hand on the silicon wafer. None of those high-level gates for us. (Not even any new-fangled lithography.)
I did that for a while when I worked as a lab assistant. I typed my password in Dvorak into the QWERTY keyboard and everything worked great, until I wanted to mount my share from my room or something. It took thirty second to recreate the password as I figured out which key I would have typed, figuring out what its QWERTY equivilant was, and typing the key (in Dvorak), which proved to be rather obnoxious.
Fortunatly, my typing managed to avoid becomming jibberish, and I still use Dvorak, but passwords that aren't quite that obscure.
It (or something like that) was on Slashdot last week, claiming that authentication (specifically Hailstorm/Passport) was the real issue. here is the/. article, and here is the actual article.
It's syndicated, which means it doesn't have a network. In practice, it's picked up by the same "independent" tv stations that are generally also WB affiliates. This also has the annoying side effect that air times will vary from station to station. Your mileage will vary. (Check local listings. TV Guide has a great listings search feature, for those of you lucky enough to be within the United States.)
Think long and hard about your audience. Remember, everyone will not start using encryption until it ships on the AOL 15.0 cd. Until then, we're stuck using what we've got. There's about a 98% chance that you can't convince your mother to encrypt her e-mails to you, no matter what you do. But if you hunt down a decent plugin to whatever mail client she happens to be using (various others have been mentioned around here, including for Outlook; I won't cut-and-paste here) that transparently encrypts/decrypts e-mail, that 2% chance suddenly gets a whole lot bigger. Get yourself a decent mail client too; I personally use Mutt with its superb, nearly-transparent PGP/GPG integration. (I have to type my passphrase occassionally. Mutt remembers it for several minutes, then forgets it.) PGP/GPG isn't used by everyone, but my casual pseudo-survey seems to indicate that it's the most widely-used encryption system. Besides, it has clients for basically every operating system known to man.
Forget about instantenously communicating securly with the entire rest of the world. Focus on what you can. Sign every message that you send. Put your key fingerprint in your signature, especially if you post to Usenet or mailing lists. (If someone decides to forge your key, they're going to have a hard time doing it if your original fingerprint is archived in hundreds of posts all across the net.) Post your key on your webpage and your Slashdot user identity. When you get a signed e-mail from someone, hunt down his or her key and add it to your ring. From then on, encrypt the e-mails you send to that person. You can't change the world today, but you can work to make it a better place tomorrow, one encrypted e-mail at a time..
Oh, c'mon. As if anyone on Slashdot actually reads the stories...:)
I tried. I clicked one of the links in the article to read the original and it was Slashdotted. So there are *some* of us who try to read the articles. (Most of us are thwarted by the others who do, too.)
There's one really good reason to concentrate emissions by generating power at one point and distributing it, via electricity, to the surroundings: it has the great potential to reduce total emissions by making it more cost-effective to install scrubbers at one site (the power plant) rather than thousands (vehicles). It's not difficult to imagine that it's easier to scrub one power plant than to install super-duper catalytic converters and scrubbers on a hundred thousand cars.
Which is why you need to take a look at Perl and maybe save yourself some time next time you feel the need to parse some resonabally-sized text file. Perl is good for many things, that's why whe call it the Swiss Army chainsaw. Sure, you can do almost anything it does with Python or a suitable collection of awk, sed, and grep, but putting it into one comprehensive package makes it probably more elegant than duct-taping any of the shell commands together with pipes.
I used to write text-processing code in basic long long ago and fell immediatly in love with Perl when I picked up the second edition of the Camel Book. It was a while before I got around to using Perl for any serverside stuff.
I'm not saying everyone will find Perl useful for everything, but it can be useful for very many things, not just server-side Slashcode.
The yuppie children demographic -- the ones with cel phones and without bills to pay -- is getting larger every minute. Seems like a good one to target to me. Teenagers these days spend a disporportante ammount of their incomes, making them a significant consumer class. Odds are they're the major target audience for this scheme.
Why would you want WINE to emulate Blue Screens of Death if jwz's xscreensaver modules do the same thing far more elegantly anyway? I love that screensaver... the first time I walked past a real NT bluescreen of Death this summer I first dismissed it as another xscreensaver hack but then realized that, no, it really was a real, live BSOD.
procmail works wonders for filtering spam for me. Just read the manpage (yeah, it's hard; I can't remember anything I did since it was a long time ago) and throw together a few recipies. Better yet, bounce mail your filters reject. Odds are they'll remove it from their distribution list real fast.
Very carefully. What works for me (usually, but be prepared to buy a new one -- cheep at your local computer superstore, unless you want a nice one (I love my Logitech wireless keyboard -- shameless plug -- and it's a little more expensive than the average cheep ones)) is unplugging it, taking the case off, then (optionally) popping the keys off, washing them seperatly in the sink, then get the body of the keyboard good and wet in a really big sink (or bathtub, if that's what you have handy). Let it dry for like fourty-eight hours, then make sure it's good and dry, then put it back together, and pray it doesn't break. Unless you really want to keep the keyboard, though, it might be better to buy a new one. And one of those cans of presurized air might be a nice touch, too.
Your mileage may vary, although it's worked nicely for me, even on my notebook. (Those keys, having never been cleaned or replaced, were *really* dirty.) here are photos from one of those bathing sessions. Short of a full bath, you might just want to unplug it, blow it out, and scrub the keys with a damp cloth.
Having read the GPL in its entirity last week mostly for fun, I understand exactly where RMS is coming from, and it seems that many Slashdot readers and KDE counter-flame posters haven't, and their ignorance shows.
Terms and Conditions for Copying, Distributing and Modifying, 2.a:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
Derivitive works must be licensed under the GPL. Ok, check for the KDE code, but GPL code can't then be linked with non-free libraries (ie Qt, until now). Then comes the next problem, 4:
You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.
So this is where RMS' "forgiveness" thing comes in. He is explicitly regranting KDE the license to use anything copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation. If he hadn't done that, then the integrity of the GPL would have been questioned. Granted, he could have used a different word, but that's still no excuse for the KDE people to get up in arms over word choice.
What both KDE and GNOME want to do is write code, unincumbered by any legal issues. The problem is these pesky legal issues can become very important at times. RMS, while maybe being a little extreme, understands this better than any of us. The most important thing is that now, KDE and GNOME are on equal footing, with their underlying widget libraries equal. Now it truly is about who has the best code, not who has the best licence.
What portion of their Windows-based app does this circumvent? Registration. So you don't have to type in your vital marketing data so they can sell you out to all their valued marketing partners. Maybe this is their most important revenue stream, so obviously they want to protect it. Does anyone else find it ironic that the previous story is Amazon appending their privacy policy?
Is this device covered by some sort of EULA (not the software, but rather the device) that prevents reverse engineering? If not, than they have nothing to sue over, besides standard legal manipulations that we're all familiar with. This needs to be delt with quickly and appropiatly, by retaining legal council and verifying that they have no legal leg to stand on.
Is this a forbringer of a day where reverse engineering is illegal? Where everything is sealed and consumers own nothing but rent them from major corporations? Maybe not, but it's enough to make one wonder.
Slashdot Mirror
How much damage is done to J. Crew because some cybersquatter has crew.com?
(don't even bother modding me up for this. It took all of thirty seconds to find it.)
Soundbyte from the article: watermarking relies on security through obscurity. Any obsessive slashdotter will tell you that relying exclusivally on such security is a Very Bad Thing (tm).
Since this was a press release, instead of a real article, no discussion was made into the protection scheme, how and where the books may be read, or anything along those lines. (Odds are this paragraph is in violation of the DMCA.) I can envision that the system could either get cumbersome fast, or be unprotectable. If the reader requires an Internet connection so that it can contact the server and deduct time from your account, it seems to defeat the entire purpose of an ebook: portability in a handheld. I'm not really into reading long documents on my CRT, especially since it's absurdly unportable, but my Visor is a pretty decent platform for reading in class or in bed or on the couch or wherever. If the timing mechanism were built into the file itself, what's to keep me from backing it up before I started reading and restoring from backup when the time expires?
While this seems worth furthur examination, I don't think this really fits into "Your Rights Online".
If you have Perl on your system, this snippet will tell you exactly what time (localtime) the billionth second, according to Unix, will pass:
perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1000000000), "\n"'
I'm a little disapointed that the billionth second occurs the day after my 21st birthday. One day earlier would have been way cool...
Has Slashdot ever Slashdotted itself? I feel privlaged to be a piece of history.
I hate to break it to you, but the tech economy slide started to take place spring 2000, about the time that dubya announced his canidacy for president. This was when the NASDAQ "corrected" (which, of course, is a euphamistic term for "crashed") and the dot-coms started dying. It took about a year for the dot-com crash to make its way around to the rest of the market. Now that they aren't demanding Cisco routers and Sun servers quite as much as they used to, and everyone's got a great big inventory that they don't know what to do with, the big companies are tightening their belts. Unfortunatly for dubya-bashers, it has absolutly nothing to do with our current president, and instead the economy he inherited from the last one.
Ah. That would explain why his books tend to take place at least partially in Texas. (I just finished reading Islands in the Net, and off the top of my head Heavy Weather and Distraction also do.)
Last time I renewed my licence over here in Colorado (when I turned eighteen just under three years ago), they wouldn't put my SSN on my licence because I didn't have the card with me. The number on the licence seems to be a unique, state-assigned identifier; it has been the same ever since I got my non-driving ID many years ago.
NAND gates! Children these days. We had to draw the layers by hand on the silicon wafer. None of those high-level gates for us. (Not even any new-fangled lithography.)
Fortunatly, my typing managed to avoid becomming jibberish, and I still use Dvorak, but passwords that aren't quite that obscure.
It (or something like that) was on Slashdot last week, claiming that authentication (specifically Hailstorm/Passport) was the real issue. here is the /. article, and here is the actual article.
It's syndicated, which means it doesn't have a network. In practice, it's picked up by the same "independent" tv stations that are generally also WB affiliates. This also has the annoying side effect that air times will vary from station to station. Your mileage will vary. (Check local listings. TV Guide has a great listings search feature, for those of you lucky enough to be within the United States.)
It's Leonard Nimoy, not Nemoy.
Forget about instantenously communicating securly with the entire rest of the world. Focus on what you can. Sign every message that you send. Put your key fingerprint in your signature, especially if you post to Usenet or mailing lists. (If someone decides to forge your key, they're going to have a hard time doing it if your original fingerprint is archived in hundreds of posts all across the net.) Post your key on your webpage and your Slashdot user identity. When you get a signed e-mail from someone, hunt down his or her key and add it to your ring. From then on, encrypt the e-mails you send to that person. You can't change the world today, but you can work to make it a better place tomorrow, one encrypted e-mail at a time..
There's one really good reason to concentrate emissions by generating power at one point and distributing it, via electricity, to the surroundings: it has the great potential to reduce total emissions by making it more cost-effective to install scrubbers at one site (the power plant) rather than thousands (vehicles). It's not difficult to imagine that it's easier to scrub one power plant than to install super-duper catalytic converters and scrubbers on a hundred thousand cars.
I dunno. This one looks pretty scrambled to me...
I used to write text-processing code in basic long long ago and fell immediatly in love with Perl when I picked up the second edition of the Camel Book. It was a while before I got around to using Perl for any serverside stuff.
I'm not saying everyone will find Perl useful for everything, but it can be useful for very many things, not just server-side Slashcode.
There was an article in Time Digital (of all places) several months ago about that sort of thing. I have no idea if I could hunt it down now, though.
The yuppie children demographic -- the ones with cel phones and without bills to pay -- is getting larger every minute. Seems like a good one to target to me. Teenagers these days spend a disporportante ammount of their incomes, making them a significant consumer class. Odds are they're the major target audience for this scheme.
Why would you want WINE to emulate Blue Screens of Death if jwz's xscreensaver modules do the same thing far more elegantly anyway? I love that screensaver... the first time I walked past a real NT bluescreen of Death this summer I first dismissed it as another xscreensaver hack but then realized that, no, it really was a real, live BSOD.
procmail works wonders for filtering spam for me. Just read the manpage (yeah, it's hard; I can't remember anything I did since it was a long time ago) and throw together a few recipies. Better yet, bounce mail your filters reject. Odds are they'll remove it from their distribution list real fast.
Your mileage may vary, although it's worked nicely for me, even on my notebook. (Those keys, having never been cleaned or replaced, were *really* dirty.) here are photos from one of those bathing sessions. Short of a full bath, you might just want to unplug it, blow it out, and scrub the keys with a damp cloth.
Terms and Conditions for Copying, Distributing and Modifying, 2.a:
Derivitive works must be licensed under the GPL. Ok, check for the KDE code, but GPL code can't then be linked with non-free libraries (ie Qt, until now). Then comes the next problem, 4: So this is where RMS' "forgiveness" thing comes in. He is explicitly regranting KDE the license to use anything copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation. If he hadn't done that, then the integrity of the GPL would have been questioned. Granted, he could have used a different word, but that's still no excuse for the KDE people to get up in arms over word choice.What both KDE and GNOME want to do is write code, unincumbered by any legal issues. The problem is these pesky legal issues can become very important at times. RMS, while maybe being a little extreme, understands this better than any of us. The most important thing is that now, KDE and GNOME are on equal footing, with their underlying widget libraries equal. Now it truly is about who has the best code, not who has the best licence.
Is this device covered by some sort of EULA (not the software, but rather the device) that prevents reverse engineering? If not, than they have nothing to sue over, besides standard legal manipulations that we're all familiar with. This needs to be delt with quickly and appropiatly, by retaining legal council and verifying that they have no legal leg to stand on.
Is this a forbringer of a day where reverse engineering is illegal? Where everything is sealed and consumers own nothing but rent them from major corporations? Maybe not, but it's enough to make one wonder.