I remember being in a kind of holiday camp in Belgium (with parents), and we also had swipe cards, mostly for getting drinks at meals. You had to put money on them and could then walk to the machines and get drinks, and then push the eject button to get the card back. What we discovered was that the card stuck out of the back of the reader by a bit. If you pulled it out on that side, the machine would still dispense drinks. I'm not sure, the account might still have been charged with the money - it would be too stupid a way to get free drinks. But it might have been that way, it's been about eight years.
Yeah, but there's always theory and practice. Legal practice is going to be:
- You're not allowed to circumvent the copy protection if it's reasonably effective. - Since it hasn't been circumvented yet, we can conclude that it is reasonably effective, therefore - you're not allowed to... etc.
Did that for my 15" (modest, I know) LG Flatron - and I knew an hour after I'd unpacked that I wouldn't let go of it again. Fair price, too, at 350 Euros - I paid that much for my 17" CRT in... 1998 or 99, I think.
This makes me think of the Otherland series by Tad Williams - the old Mr Sellars' 'garden' - in Otherland, everyone uses varying degrees of VR, from 3D animation on screens to neural implants. Sellars has an implant, and he keeps track of all his information activities in a kind of garden, where various tasks and issues are represented by plants and how they grow, wither, sprout new leaves etc. Fairly vague, and it would also require some pretty strong AI to actually know what to make of the information, but the idea is interesting.
Re:Open Source and DRM are fundamentally incompati
on
Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 1
All quite valid, but ultimately, I don't really see the point anymore - if you're going to trust people a bit, you might as well trust them fully.
As for 'no extracts for 3 months' - what about reviews? Special licenses for reviewers? Nice, the RIAA gets to decide who's allowed to review an album...
'No more than one CD sold' - I don't mean that everyone will get a pirated copy if one's available, but that everyone who wants to pirate can and will once a plaintext copy is out on P2P. Large-scale violators? Ordinary P2P, once it's out, it's hard to see where it originated; if the RIAA gets tougher in tracking down these people, move to Freenet.
As I said - I don't really see the point. Why not trust people for a change... (I know, because the RIAA wants to expand their profits and control, and fair use is not compatible with that)
Re:We have to stop perpetuating this myth
on
Open Source DRM
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· Score: 1
Nothing to add, really, just a small anecdote about this. I read in a magazine (not a computing mag, though) that about 30% of people who were planning to get XP *legitimately* said they were still going to crack the activation because it pissed them off, and this was before XP was released. Dunno where they pulled the statistic from, but it's interesting.
Posting from Windows 98 *gasp*, and even a semi-legitimate copy: Installed from an original CD - but an OEM copy that came with a different computer than mine but wasn't installed on that one...
Re:Open Source and DRM are fundamentally incompati
on
Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 1
once limited plain text extracts can exist
Apart from all the other points that have been made, this one seems quite plain to me: Once they can exist, you can make extracts of each bit of the content and reassemble them into a full plaintext copy. Tough luck.
OK. Say the DRM system prevents me making more than, say, 10 extracts of 100 words each of an E-Book, 5 extracts of 10 seconds of a song, or something like that - and some kind of authority keeps track of this across different computers, of course. Now, I go to IRC and find 50, 100, 500 people who have the same piece of media, each makes appropriate extracts, someone collects them and reassembles them. A lot of work? Yes, but look at the lengths some warez dudes will go to just to get a cracked copy of something out - and once it's out on P2P, you lose. (Which is of course the problem with all of this - once one copy is out, perhaps even an analogue recording from line-out, all is lost.)
What I'm increasingly thinking might make sense is a kind of 'voluntary' DRM (or simple copy-protection) - leave the code completely open so that people *can* circumvent it quite easily, but tell them that it's a) probably illegal and b) possibly immoral.
I've seen at least one CD that didn't have the audio player software (which, to add insult to injury, often has something like 47kbit-encoded tracks!), but still multisession - there was simply an *empty* data session, so the disc showed up in Windows as 'Data (E:)' containing no files. How that is supposed to stop anyone, I don't know. I've never tried CDex, but EAC showed the disc normally, with all the audio tracks plus one data.
From a strictly technical standpoint there isn't much difference.
And this is the problem, and IMO a reason *not* to differentiate between the two - how can you make sure that no copy is being saved if you can't 'trust' the client that is downloading the content? To really make a difference, you need a working DRM-type system (which doesn't neccessarily mean it has to be protected by law); if you don't want DRM, it's *always* possible to reverse-engineer the protocol and record the content (case in point: ASFrecorder, a tool available to record Windows Media streams - which I do not actually use to 'pirate' streamed content, whatever that would mean, but to watch high-quality content on a low-bandwidth link).
Now, I've had about 10 different 'protected' CDs (don't ask me what 'technology' precisely...), and ripped all of them to MP3 without even using the infamous black pen. Just varying combinations of 3 CD drives and two rippers - so far, they've all worked with one or the other. 'Beat' the copy protection? For some CDs, I'd never have known there was one if they hadn't had a warning label!
Apart from the fact that I think Norah Jones *does* deserve your money (as does Aimee Mann though!), and it probably really isn't her fault (AFAIK, some artists have even complained about this 'protection' being used without their consent, others probably just don't know)...
this is interesting - here in Europe, 'copy-protected' CDs are already pretty widespread - mostly chart crap, of course (which I get to see when my sister asks me to burn them for her...), but my copy of the Norah Jones album wasn't protected at all. No label and no problems when copying. Wait... actually, my MP3s were ripped from a borrowed copy of the CD, and I bought it later - and haven't tried ripping the copy I bought... still, doesn't seem to be a problem.
Anyway, weird inconsistency in this. Seems to be common though, looking through the heise database someone mentioned earlier.
Actually, sorry to nit-pick here, but 'Enhanced CD' is the label put on ordinary (non-corrupted) CDs that have *extra* multimedia content (usually Macromedia shows with a Quicktime video or something like that, but I've seen ones with just a plain MPEG of a song). I have a couple of these and seen several more, none of them were 'protected'. This is an official label given by the RIAA, I believe.
I just posted this on Userfriendly.org, and I feel it's appropriate to add to this thread as well. I'm not going to talk at length about my own opinions, I'm German and that should answer some questions. Anyway: "Only the radical abolition of war and the risk of war can help. For that, one should work and resolve not to be forced into a course of action that counteracts this aim. This is a tough thing to demand from the individual who is conscious of his social dependence. But it is not impossible." Albert Einstein (translation mine and probably not very good)
Just think about that. It really moved me when I first read it, and that was a while before this strike began.
I must admit, I like my 'closed' phone. I know it won't crash. It doesn't have any security issues. It won't take a photo in the wrong place. It just works!
Depends on your model of course, but AFAIK some current (last 2 years or so) Nokias do have some issues where a malicious SMS can seriously lock up your phone, and I've known of a Nokia that, after a year or two, started spontaneously locking up far too frequently. Not my own experience, since I don't own a mobile at all, but seen on friends' phones.
And as for games - you haven't been to school in the last couple of years then, I assume.
But a 386 should quite easily run Linux, shouldn't it? Depends on the memory of course, but my NAT router that I'm posting through is a 386DX, 40 Mhz though. Then again, it's got 20 MB of RAM (and no hard drive).
I know this topic is almost a week old, but I'll say this anyway.
The boards they ran the Pentiums in were Super7 ones with VIA chipsets - the kind you'd use for a K6-2 (as an aside on old hardware - this here, my main machine, is a K6-2 350. Power...), but which will still run ordinary Pentiums. I was surprised though - an old P100 I got recently had a similar board. A machine built in early '96, and it had AGP, SDRAM banks (took it up to 384 MB), etc. I didn't know AGP existed in '96, and the machine definitely hadn't been upgraded. It had a 1 MB Trio32 PCI video card installed, by the way.
It was interesting to run a P133 chip at 150 MHz (100 FSB!) - it was noticeably faster for desktop use. It now has a P200 MMX @ 2.5x100 which works well enough.
Since the watermark is encoded into the actual track, you can't remove it by converting to Ogg.
And that was what the SDMI was about - testing how crackable such a watermarking scheme is. This is the kind of thing Ed Felten cracked. If you're a small business, perhaps no one will have bothered to crack it (or didn't think it was right) - but if the RIAA tries it, see how long it takes for a de-watermarker to show up...
imagine what would happen to the black market if paper money was eliminated....
People would conduct business in anything else that's a) physical and b) scarce - go back to gold, or certain drugs would *be* the currency.
Neuromancer anyone? Don't remember exactly, but I think cash has been made illegal, yet everyone keeps using one currency of which there is still plenty around in a kind of totally separate underground economy. Rather realistic, that bit, if you ask me.
I have to disagree on some of this. You're right, stuff bought on the net should be taxed the same way anything bought the usual way is.
But I think that the internet as such - not to be confused specifically with e-commerce - will become more and more (and to some extent, is already) of a 'staple of life', like the phone system already is.
Just one example - I'm in the process of applying to and entering UK university. Right now I'm organizing a trip there to visit some of them before I make the choice. I'm arranging the visits by e-mail - sure, it would be possible by phone, but I wouldn't say this is a luxury, it is a real practical improvement.
I think the net will become much more important, and certainly is not a luxury for many people even now. "The internet isn't free" - well, a lot of stuff is. In cases where money does change hands, taxes should be paid as in regular offline business.
That's a different point of course. But what I'm saying is that wireless (or rather, wireless networks interconnected with directional wireless links, ordinary cables, or anything else anyone can come up with) might *become* the internet. Lofty goal, as you say, but thinkable (though probably close to impossible...)
during the War On Drugs they didn't focus enough on the source of the drugs, and too much on the "end-user"
So what do you propose they should do to fight drugs? More to the point, *why*? Have another look at Europe, the Netherlands to be precise. The haven't legalised weed, they're officially tolerating it, but that's almost the same. So? Less drug crime, generally less trouble. Sure drugs cause problems, but I don't see how repression can solve them. In fact, recently the Dutch government has been trying to clamp down on weed again - and illegal trading goes back up with all the negative consequences. Interestingly, Germany, which is still much more strict on the issue, has a *higher* per-capita consumption of cannabis than the Netherlands.
As for the copyright stuff - sounds good, we'll have to see what comes of it...
Might also need some sort of (eep!) central authority to verify pages were who they claimed to be (so I couldn't take over CNN, for example). Maybe just signed keys for each content provider would be good enough?
'course. Browser queries CNN.com, server replies with 'the SHA1 hash/MD5 of our current front page is X', browser downloads page from p2p network, verifies hash, done. If the hash is wrong, it either tries again or just gets the page directly from CNN. Oversimplified, but that's the way it would work, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
I remember being in a kind of holiday camp in Belgium (with parents), and we also had swipe cards, mostly for getting drinks at meals. You had to put money on them and could then walk to the machines and get drinks, and then push the eject button to get the card back. What we discovered was that the card stuck out of the back of the reader by a bit. If you pulled it out on that side, the machine would still dispense drinks. I'm not sure, the account might still have been charged with the money - it would be too stupid a way to get free drinks. But it might have been that way, it's been about eight years.
Yeah, but there's always theory and practice. Legal practice is going to be:
- You're not allowed to circumvent the copy protection if it's reasonably effective.
- Since it hasn't been circumvented yet, we can conclude that it is reasonably effective, therefore
- you're not allowed to... etc.
Did that for my 15" (modest, I know) LG Flatron - and I knew an hour after I'd unpacked that I wouldn't let go of it again. Fair price, too, at 350 Euros - I paid that much for my 17" CRT in... 1998 or 99, I think.
This makes me think of the Otherland series by Tad Williams - the old Mr Sellars' 'garden' - in Otherland, everyone uses varying degrees of VR, from 3D animation on screens to neural implants. Sellars has an implant, and he keeps track of all his information activities in a kind of garden, where various tasks and issues are represented by plants and how they grow, wither, sprout new leaves etc. Fairly vague, and it would also require some pretty strong AI to actually know what to make of the information, but the idea is interesting.
Yes. Absolutely. You know you want it.
Buy? You mean you haven't got any?
OTOH, good excuse to.. er... upgrade.
It's labelled Strg. Same place as Ctrl.
All quite valid, but ultimately, I don't really see the point anymore - if you're going to trust people a bit, you might as well trust them fully.
As for 'no extracts for 3 months' - what about reviews? Special licenses for reviewers? Nice, the RIAA gets to decide who's allowed to review an album...
'No more than one CD sold' - I don't mean that everyone will get a pirated copy if one's available, but that everyone who wants to pirate can and will once a plaintext copy is out on P2P. Large-scale violators? Ordinary P2P, once it's out, it's hard to see where it originated; if the RIAA gets tougher in tracking down these people, move to Freenet.
As I said - I don't really see the point. Why not trust people for a change...
(I know, because the RIAA wants to expand their profits and control, and fair use is not compatible with that)
Nothing to add, really, just a small anecdote about this. I read in a magazine (not a computing mag, though) that about 30% of people who were planning to get XP *legitimately* said they were still going to crack the activation because it pissed them off, and this was before XP was released. Dunno where they pulled the statistic from, but it's interesting.
Posting from Windows 98 *gasp*, and even a semi-legitimate copy: Installed from an original CD - but an OEM copy that came with a different computer than mine but wasn't installed on that one...
once limited plain text extracts can exist
Apart from all the other points that have been made, this one seems quite plain to me: Once they can exist, you can make extracts of each bit of the content and reassemble them into a full plaintext copy. Tough luck.
OK. Say the DRM system prevents me making more than, say, 10 extracts of 100 words each of an E-Book, 5 extracts of 10 seconds of a song, or something like that - and some kind of authority keeps track of this across different computers, of course. Now, I go to IRC and find 50, 100, 500 people who have the same piece of media, each makes appropriate extracts, someone collects them and reassembles them. A lot of work? Yes, but look at the lengths some warez dudes will go to just to get a cracked copy of something out - and once it's out on P2P, you lose. (Which is of course the problem with all of this - once one copy is out, perhaps even an analogue recording from line-out, all is lost.)
What I'm increasingly thinking might make sense is a kind of 'voluntary' DRM (or simple copy-protection) - leave the code completely open so that people *can* circumvent it quite easily, but tell them that it's a) probably illegal and b) possibly immoral.
I've seen at least one CD that didn't have the audio player software (which, to add insult to injury, often has something like 47kbit-encoded tracks!), but still multisession - there was simply an *empty* data session, so the disc showed up in Windows as 'Data (E:)' containing no files. How that is supposed to stop anyone, I don't know. I've never tried CDex, but EAC showed the disc normally, with all the audio tracks plus one data.
From a strictly technical standpoint there isn't much difference.
And this is the problem, and IMO a reason *not* to differentiate between the two - how can you make sure that no copy is being saved if you can't 'trust' the client that is downloading the content? To really make a difference, you need a working DRM-type system (which doesn't neccessarily mean it has to be protected by law); if you don't want DRM, it's *always* possible to reverse-engineer the protocol and record the content (case in point: ASFrecorder, a tool available to record Windows Media streams - which I do not actually use to 'pirate' streamed content, whatever that would mean, but to watch high-quality content on a low-bandwidth link).
Now, I've had about 10 different 'protected' CDs (don't ask me what 'technology' precisely...), and ripped all of them to MP3 without even using the infamous black pen. Just varying combinations of 3 CD drives and two rippers - so far, they've all worked with one or the other. 'Beat' the copy protection? For some CDs, I'd never have known there was one if they hadn't had a warning label!
Apart from the fact that I think Norah Jones *does* deserve your money (as does Aimee Mann though!), and it probably really isn't her fault (AFAIK, some artists have even complained about this 'protection' being used without their consent, others probably just don't know)...
this is interesting - here in Europe, 'copy-protected' CDs are already pretty widespread - mostly chart crap, of course (which I get to see when my sister asks me to burn them for her...), but my copy of the Norah Jones album wasn't protected at all. No label and no problems when copying. Wait... actually, my MP3s were ripped from a borrowed copy of the CD, and I bought it later - and haven't tried ripping the copy I bought... still, doesn't seem to be a problem.
Anyway, weird inconsistency in this. Seems to be common though, looking through the heise database someone mentioned earlier.
Actually, sorry to nit-pick here, but 'Enhanced CD' is the label put on ordinary (non-corrupted) CDs that have *extra* multimedia content (usually Macromedia shows with a Quicktime video or something like that, but I've seen ones with just a plain MPEG of a song). I have a couple of these and seen several more, none of them were 'protected'. This is an official label given by the RIAA, I believe.
I just posted this on Userfriendly.org, and I feel it's appropriate to add to this thread as well. I'm not going to talk at length about my own opinions, I'm German and that should answer some questions.
Anyway:
"Only the radical abolition of war and the risk of war can help.
For that, one should work and resolve not to be forced into a course of action that counteracts this aim.
This is a tough thing to demand from the individual who is conscious of his social dependence. But it is not impossible."
Albert Einstein (translation mine and probably not very good)
Just think about that. It really moved me when I first read it, and that was a while before this strike began.
I must admit, I like my 'closed' phone. I know it won't crash. It doesn't have any security issues. It won't take a photo in the wrong place. It just works!
Depends on your model of course, but AFAIK some current (last 2 years or so) Nokias do have some issues where a malicious SMS can seriously lock up your phone, and I've known of a Nokia that, after a year or two, started spontaneously locking up far too frequently. Not my own experience, since I don't own a mobile at all, but seen on friends' phones.
And as for games - you haven't been to school in the last couple of years then, I assume.
But a 386 should quite easily run Linux, shouldn't it? Depends on the memory of course, but my NAT router that I'm posting through is a 386DX, 40 Mhz though. Then again, it's got 20 MB of RAM (and no hard drive).
I know this topic is almost a week old, but I'll say this anyway.
The boards they ran the Pentiums in were Super7 ones with VIA chipsets - the kind you'd use for a K6-2 (as an aside on old hardware - this here, my main machine, is a K6-2 350. Power...), but which will still run ordinary Pentiums. I was surprised though - an old P100 I got recently had a similar board. A machine built in early '96, and it had AGP, SDRAM banks (took it up to 384 MB), etc. I didn't know AGP existed in '96, and the machine definitely hadn't been upgraded. It had a 1 MB Trio32 PCI video card installed, by the way.
It was interesting to run a P133 chip at 150 MHz (100 FSB!) - it was noticeably faster for desktop use. It now has a P200 MMX @ 2.5x100 which works well enough.
Since the watermark is encoded into the actual track, you can't remove it by converting to Ogg.
And that was what the SDMI was about - testing how crackable such a watermarking scheme is. This is the kind of thing Ed Felten cracked. If you're a small business, perhaps no one will have bothered to crack it (or didn't think it was right) - but if the RIAA tries it, see how long it takes for a de-watermarker to show up...
imagine what would happen to the black market if paper money was eliminated....
People would conduct business in anything else that's a) physical and b) scarce - go back to gold, or certain drugs would *be* the currency.
Neuromancer anyone? Don't remember exactly, but I think cash has been made illegal, yet everyone keeps using one currency of which there is still plenty around in a kind of totally separate underground economy. Rather realistic, that bit, if you ask me.
I have to disagree on some of this. You're right, stuff bought on the net should be taxed the same way anything bought the usual way is.
But I think that the internet as such - not to be confused specifically with e-commerce - will become more and more (and to some extent, is already) of a 'staple of life', like the phone system already is.
Just one example - I'm in the process of applying to and entering UK university. Right now I'm organizing a trip there to visit some of them before I make the choice. I'm arranging the visits by e-mail - sure, it would be possible by phone, but I wouldn't say this is a luxury, it is a real practical improvement.
I think the net will become much more important, and certainly is not a luxury for many people even now. "The internet isn't free" - well, a lot of stuff is. In cases where money does change hands, taxes should be paid as in regular offline business.
That's a different point of course. But what I'm saying is that wireless (or rather, wireless networks interconnected with directional wireless links, ordinary cables, or anything else anyone can come up with) might *become* the internet. Lofty goal, as you say, but thinkable (though probably close to impossible...)
during the War On Drugs they didn't focus enough on the source of the drugs, and too much on the "end-user"
So what do you propose they should do to fight drugs? More to the point, *why*? Have another look at Europe, the Netherlands to be precise. The haven't legalised weed, they're officially tolerating it, but that's almost the same. So? Less drug crime, generally less trouble. Sure drugs cause problems, but I don't see how repression can solve them. In fact, recently the Dutch government has been trying to clamp down on weed again - and illegal trading goes back up with all the negative consequences. Interestingly, Germany, which is still much more strict on the issue, has a *higher* per-capita consumption of cannabis than the Netherlands.
As for the copyright stuff - sounds good, we'll have to see what comes of it...
Might also need some sort of (eep!) central authority to verify pages were who they claimed to be (so I couldn't take over CNN, for example). Maybe just signed keys for each content provider would be good enough?
'course. Browser queries CNN.com, server replies with 'the SHA1 hash/MD5 of our current front page is X', browser downloads page from p2p network, verifies hash, done. If the hash is wrong, it either tries again or just gets the page directly from CNN. Oversimplified, but that's the way it would work, isn't it?