Actually, producing or distributing "circumvention devices" is a criminal offence in all countries that have implemented WIPO legislation (such as the US DMCA or the EU Copyright Directive).
Telstra used to be the national government-run telephone monopoly. It's now semi-privatised, though maintains a lot of its monopoly over the network (in particular, the last mile). As a profit-making entity answerable to its shareholders, it has, of course, been squeezing that for all it's worth, at the Australian consumer's expense. It's about time Telstra got smacked down.
Knowing the New Labour government, chances are a bill requiring data-loggers in all PCs will be drafted before the end of the year. And the data loggers will not only be accessible to the police, but to the Inland Revenue, the TV Licensing department, the British Phonographic Industry and local council officials.
that the US has a bill of rights and constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association. Australia, a former penal colony and military outpost of the British Empire, has no constitutional guarantees of any rights other than there not being a religious test for public office. That, and the apathy of the citizens of the "Lucky Country", allows the government of the day to get away with things such as passing draconian sedition laws, banning online advocacy of suicide or euthanasia, banning video games unsuitable for children and controversial art-house films (never mass-market entertainment; if the films banned are French and highbrow, it wins them anti-elitist culture-war points), and now the national firewall.
There is no way that the US government could push something like this through.
There is an online petition which will mail the government. So far, it has received around 80,000 signatures within a few days.
If you're Australian, you probably should sign it and tell your friends about it. Unless this meets with overwhelming opposition, the government will force it through.
Sites such as Piratpartiet (or their local equivalents) would probably be mandatorily blocked in Australia. The mandatory part of the blacklist will include anything illegal, which under Australian law includes copyright violation, advocacy of suicide/euthanasia, hardcore porn and various extremist points of view (which, given Australia's sedition laws, covers a lot).
What constitutes being "black" or "white" beyond skin colour? Does a black character have to dress in a certain way, walk in a certain way, or speak in a certain way to be truly "black"? Also, how do you make a protagonist in an action game "feminine"? Do women jump over ravines in a different way from men?
If President-elect Obama was a fictional character, would people be accusing him of being essentially a white character hastily written into being tokenistically black because he doesn't dress funky or say "fo'sheezy"?
Aren't they just asset-stripping Yahoo!'s search business and throwing the rest back to die like a finless shark?
(Though does anyone use Yahoo! Search? Come to think of it, does anyone use any Yahoo! properties other than Flickr and del.icio.us these days?)
Still, at least then, Flickr won't be "upgraded" to an all-Silverlight/Windows Media service that integrates tightly with the Windows 7 desktop or something.
Over and above this, it'll need a new name. I know it doesn't make one iota technical difference, but people are fussy about such things; change the name, and people don't care if it was developed by fiends. Keep it and people will find excuses to edge away and it'll wither on the vine.
The Volkswagen was a runaway success despite its Nazi origins, but had it been named the "Hitlerwagen", things would have probably turned out a lot differently.
If you have to choose either Windows or MacOS X for a platform (let's say, you need to run things not available on Linux; it happens), OSX is the lesser evil. It doesn't have the BluRay-mandated DRM infrastructure in the kernel making the system slow and fragile, and it is based on UNIX with some very elegant technologies on top. Apple's APIs are also considerably less horrendous than Microsoft's, at least since the move to Cocoa.
As far as audio players go, Apple are evil, though they seem to be the only people making decent-sized hard-disk-based players with a passable interface for going through large music collections (i.e., the iPod scroll wheel is a lot better than stabbing at the down button with your finger for 30 seconds as you make your way down the alphabet). Having said that, if someone made a player that did something similar but was mountable from Linux/UNIX, I'd be interested.
if the Russian Mafiya decides to devote a few hours on a 500,000+-machine botnet to cracking your WAP password, you're screwed.
Which is not really news. If you're sufficiently important a target to merit such attention, you should probably be taking a lot more precautions than WAP encryption in the first place, though it doesn't scale to drive-by attacks on random low-value targets (i.e., the average user). If the payoff is merely probing your network, sending spam from your ISP account and/or pwning your unpatched Windows PCs, your WAP network is safe for now.
Wouldn't DVD codecs, if they include decryption keys, require a special DRM-enabled kernel which enforces restrictions on decrypted media? Last time I looked, the DVDCCA licensing terms specifically required the license holders to prevent persistent copies of content from being made. I can't see how anyone could legally (in the US and/or WIPO signatories) offer a DVD decrypting codec which interoperated with any software the user might throw at it. Is Ubuntu silently replacing its Linux with a locked-down version if you buy the DVD-enabled version?
Re:Isn't that bad for electronics?
on
The Google Navy
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· Score: 1
Besides which, huge data centres like Google's swap out and junk dead components all the time. If conditions cause component lifespans to be halved, I'm sure Google's cost/benefit analysis will have factored this in.
Perhaps if they put the ships in the middle of the Pacific and have some kind of cargo docking facility, shipping replacements in from China will cost less.
It has been done before. In fact for many decades during and after the Cold War the United States offerred some of the best quality data services at the highest speeds for cheap prices (subsidized by your tax dollars) merely to ensure that the majority of the international telephone and non-satellite data traffic passed through the United States somewhere along the way from Point A to Point B.
On a tangent: weren't Google buying a lot of dark fibre a few years ago, and/or even laying their own submarine cables? Some speculated that that was to build a private backbone between geographically distributed containerised data centres, though what if it that wasn't the entire purpose?
Well, several British ISPs were planning to deploy a system named Phorm which would intercept everybody's HTTP connections and insert cookies/custom JavaScript for ad targetting purposes, so perhaps the DHS thing was an earlier, more limited version of this?
Would it really be that much cheaper to make 1980s-vintage computers? I mean, once the design work is done, are the price differences between fabbing a 6502-type CPU and an ARM or x86 that great? I thought that the price advantage of using mass-market components would outweigh any savings made by using primitive technologies.
I think MS's designs on Yahoo have to do not with search but with open technologies like YUI and popular sites like Flickr. With an acquisition of Yahoo, MS could kill YUI and various other open-source technologies, in a way that it has done before. (In the late 1990s they acquired Bay Area start-up DimensionX, who then made the Liquid Reality Java VRML toolkit. Liquid Reality was buried and the DimensionX developers were moved to MS's ActiveX division.)
Meanwhile, Flickr (the number 1 photo-sharing website by far) would fit into MS's standard-controlling strategy. Millions of users visit Flickr to share their content and see others' content. If all one's friends and photo-sharing communities are there, that's incentive to not jump ship to a rival site. If Flickr's AJAX/DHTML web site was replaced by a Silverlight application ("enhanced" with some Vista Aeroglass-style effects, of course), all these people would have to install Silverlight. Additionally, Microsoft could drive adoption of their Windows Media still-image standard as a replacement for JPEG, by recoding all the hosted images to WM format and serving it out only as such. All of a sudden, Silverlight is massively more popular, and WM is a major format for photographic still images.
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Actually, producing or distributing "circumvention devices" is a criminal offence in all countries that have implemented WIPO legislation (such as the US DMCA or the EU Copyright Directive).
Telstra used to be the national government-run telephone monopoly. It's now semi-privatised, though maintains a lot of its monopoly over the network (in particular, the last mile). As a profit-making entity answerable to its shareholders, it has, of course, been squeezing that for all it's worth, at the Australian consumer's expense. It's about time Telstra got smacked down.
Knowing the New Labour government, chances are a bill requiring data-loggers in all PCs will be drafted before the end of the year. And the data loggers will not only be accessible to the police, but to the Inland Revenue, the TV Licensing department, the British Phonographic Industry and local council officials.
This looks like a modern version of the Commocoffee 64.
that the US has a bill of rights and constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association. Australia, a former penal colony and military outpost of the British Empire, has no constitutional guarantees of any rights other than there not being a religious test for public office. That, and the apathy of the citizens of the "Lucky Country", allows the government of the day to get away with things such as passing draconian sedition laws, banning online advocacy of suicide or euthanasia, banning video games unsuitable for children and controversial art-house films (never mass-market entertainment; if the films banned are French and highbrow, it wins them anti-elitist culture-war points), and now the national firewall.
There is no way that the US government could push something like this through.
There is an online petition which will mail the government. So far, it has received around 80,000 signatures within a few days.
If you're Australian, you probably should sign it and tell your friends about it. Unless this meets with overwhelming opposition, the government will force it through.
Sites such as Piratpartiet (or their local equivalents) would probably be mandatorily blocked in Australia. The mandatory part of the blacklist will include anything illegal, which under Australian law includes copyright violation, advocacy of suicide/euthanasia, hardcore porn and various extremist points of view (which, given Australia's sedition laws, covers a lot).
What constitutes being "black" or "white" beyond skin colour? Does a black character have to dress in a certain way, walk in a certain way, or speak in a certain way to be truly "black"? Also, how do you make a protagonist in an action game "feminine"? Do women jump over ravines in a different way from men?
If President-elect Obama was a fictional character, would people be accusing him of being essentially a white character hastily written into being tokenistically black because he doesn't dress funky or say "fo'sheezy"?
Aren't they just asset-stripping Yahoo!'s search business and throwing the rest back to die like a finless shark?
(Though does anyone use Yahoo! Search? Come to think of it, does anyone use any Yahoo! properties other than Flickr and del.icio.us these days?)
Still, at least then, Flickr won't be "upgraded" to an all-Silverlight/Windows Media service that integrates tightly with the Windows 7 desktop or something.
Over and above this, it'll need a new name. I know it doesn't make one iota technical difference, but people are fussy about such things; change the name, and people don't care if it was developed by fiends. Keep it and people will find excuses to edge away and it'll wither on the vine.
The Volkswagen was a runaway success despite its Nazi origins, but had it been named the "Hitlerwagen", things would have probably turned out a lot differently.
If you have to choose either Windows or MacOS X for a platform (let's say, you need to run things not available on Linux; it happens), OSX is the lesser evil. It doesn't have the BluRay-mandated DRM infrastructure in the kernel making the system slow and fragile, and it is based on UNIX with some very elegant technologies on top. Apple's APIs are also considerably less horrendous than Microsoft's, at least since the move to Cocoa.
As far as audio players go, Apple are evil, though they seem to be the only people making decent-sized hard-disk-based players with a passable interface for going through large music collections (i.e., the iPod scroll wheel is a lot better than stabbing at the down button with your finger for 30 seconds as you make your way down the alphabet). Having said that, if someone made a player that did something similar but was mountable from Linux/UNIX, I'd be interested.
Didn't Intel kill the Alpha architecture after buying it out? And is anybody using MIPS other than Sony's PlayStation division?
Not to mention the lack of an integer type (all numbers are handled as floats internally, just like in VIC-20 BASIC).
Aren't the US's maritime borders more than 100 miles out to sea?
if the Russian Mafiya decides to devote a few hours on a 500,000+-machine botnet to cracking your WAP password, you're screwed.
Which is not really news. If you're sufficiently important a target to merit such attention, you should probably be taking a lot more precautions than WAP encryption in the first place, though it doesn't scale to drive-by attacks on random low-value targets (i.e., the average user). If the payoff is merely probing your network, sending spam from your ISP account and/or pwning your unpatched Windows PCs, your WAP network is safe for now.
Wouldn't DVD codecs, if they include decryption keys, require a special DRM-enabled kernel which enforces restrictions on decrypted media? Last time I looked, the DVDCCA licensing terms specifically required the license holders to prevent persistent copies of content from being made. I can't see how anyone could legally (in the US and/or WIPO signatories) offer a DVD decrypting codec which interoperated with any software the user might throw at it. Is Ubuntu silently replacing its Linux with a locked-down version if you buy the DVD-enabled version?
Besides which, huge data centres like Google's swap out and junk dead components all the time. If conditions cause component lifespans to be halved, I'm sure Google's cost/benefit analysis will have factored this in.
Perhaps if they put the ships in the middle of the Pacific and have some kind of cargo docking facility, shipping replacements in from China will cost less.
Aren't the V8 people also behind the Dalvik Java VM, which is used in Android?
It has been done before. In fact for many decades during and after the Cold War the United States offerred some of the best quality data services at the highest speeds for cheap prices (subsidized by your tax dollars) merely to ensure that the majority of the international telephone and non-satellite data traffic passed through the United States somewhere along the way from Point A to Point B.
On a tangent: weren't Google buying a lot of dark fibre a few years ago, and/or even laying their own submarine cables? Some speculated that that was to build a private backbone between geographically distributed containerised data centres, though what if it that wasn't the entire purpose?
Well, several British ISPs were planning to deploy a system named Phorm which would intercept everybody's HTTP connections and insert cookies/custom JavaScript for ad targetting purposes, so perhaps the DHS thing was an earlier, more limited version of this?
Perhaps next time they should try turning them into zombies instead? Zombies don't complain...
Would it really be that much cheaper to make 1980s-vintage computers? I mean, once the design work is done, are the price differences between fabbing a 6502-type CPU and an ARM or x86 that great? I thought that the price advantage of using mass-market components would outweigh any savings made by using primitive technologies.
Or the Daily Heil. (They were, infamously, quite fond of Hitler in the 1930s.)
I think MS's designs on Yahoo have to do not with search but with open technologies like YUI and popular sites like Flickr. With an acquisition of Yahoo, MS could kill YUI and various other open-source technologies, in a way that it has done before. (In the late 1990s they acquired Bay Area start-up DimensionX, who then made the Liquid Reality Java VRML toolkit. Liquid Reality was buried and the DimensionX developers were moved to MS's ActiveX division.)
Meanwhile, Flickr (the number 1 photo-sharing website by far) would fit into MS's standard-controlling strategy. Millions of users visit Flickr to share their content and see others' content. If all one's friends and photo-sharing communities are there, that's incentive to not jump ship to a rival site. If Flickr's AJAX/DHTML web site was replaced by a Silverlight application ("enhanced" with some Vista Aeroglass-style effects, of course), all these people would have to install Silverlight. Additionally, Microsoft could drive adoption of their Windows Media still-image standard as a replacement for JPEG, by recoding all the hosted images to WM format and serving it out only as such. All of a sudden, Silverlight is massively more popular, and WM is a major format for photographic still images.
Maybe I was thinking of the Canadian Rockies route with the glass-topped observation cars and prices to match.