It's a classic case of "I know you told me it's impossible, but we'll show you by just going ahead and doing it!"
Yes, the crypto's all going to be broken. And fast. But we've never had a DMCA before, and that makes things a little bit different. The music industry now has unprecedented rights to control the medium of distribution, which makes it easier for them to invoke "piracy" in order to maximize their revenues. First sale and fair use are going to become pay-per priveleges if they get their way.
CSS is not clever encryption, but it gives the MPAA the right to do things they've never been able to do (region-coding, etc.) Yes, it's been broken, but if the anti-circumvention provisions are upheld, we won't be seeing commercial unrestricted DVD players anytime soon. And that's what this whole war is about.
OK, exactly *which* part of www.fuckgeneralmotors.com is a *Ford* trademark?
None of it. The article focuses on tarnishment. If I put up a big sign that says "we kill baby seals", then draw a big arrow to an Exxon billboard... Theoretically, I'm tarnishing their trademark. Even though I've never actually used the word Exxon in my treatise.
I'm not agreeing with Ford in this case, just trying to explain the legal issue behind the suit.
If Ford wanted to avoid the redirected hits, they could simply check out the HTTP headers. A few browsers won't include them, but that would take care of the vast majority of the hits.
In any case, it's a silly argument. The 2600 server makes no connection to the Ford server. It simply directs the client to make a connection. This is the same as your average Hyperlink, and while some people would have you believe that we should control what links people put on their sites, when a company chooses to put their server out there, they agree to accept traffic. I've never heard of a case of a Hyperlink being disallowed because it might put a burden on another server (and god help Slashdot if that ever happens.)
He's picking a few too many fights, I agree. But somebody's gonna do it anyway. Better it be a guy who doesn't mind being sued, and isn't going to cave after a couple of cease-and-desist letters.
You have to wonder though, is ford looking for a solution or just trying to set legal prescident?
Probably the latter. Trademarks need to be vigorously defended. If they don't sue here, they weaken future tarnishment cases along the same lines. Additionally (and this is much more doubtful), they might open themselves up to some liability if a company like GM sued for slander-- not that GM would have a case, but at least Ford can prove that they don't approve of the prank.
And yes, I think that they're overreacting and that they shouldn't have the right to tell me what I can do with my HTTP/DNS server as long as it doesn't actually touch them. Unfortunately the trademark system actively encourages litigation.
what would happen if all those lamers could compile stuff into their clients to give them infinite armour, infinite ammo, infinite health, extra speed, automatic aiming and a really small bounding box.
This seems like a problem you're going to encounter eventually in any system requiring so much trust of the client. The solution you're inevitably going to have to arrive at (with Open Source or hacked Closed Source code) is not to trust. Networked gaming systems should put more verification in the server, or in a distributed case, require other clients to verify.
Well, I'll guess it's because his company makes software that some of these people want to use, and it's not very realistic to expect them to give away the software when they had to pay programmers to write it. Nice try at the straw man, though.
I'm thoroughly confused. Microsoft is being forced to give away software that they wrote? Has the GPL become compulsory? Of course it isn't. Nobody's forcing Microsoft to give away the software "they had to pay programmers to write." If they choose to use code that somebody else wrote, then maybe they shouldn't bitch if that person imposes some sort of restrictions on it. That is, after all, the name of their own game. GPLed code does not sneak up on you in the dead of night. You know what you're getting into before you use it.
Well, the GPL is a software license, and the GPL is a bad business decision for most commercial software developers, so the point of relevance is that the GPL is most likely a bad business model for the sector of the industry that needs it in the first place.
That's crazy talk. Do you know how much software companies save-- in terms of money and effort-- by using the GNU development suite? How about Linux? There are lots of free tools that simply would not exist in the state that they do if the GPL didn't exist. And it's a pretty good bargain for a lot of companies. Take the code as is for free, or give back as much work as you want or can afford. This guarantees that there're always better tools out there.
While the GPL certainly imposes some limitations on the use of free code in closed-source applications, it's likely only something like the GPL could produce so much useful code. You really have to weight the benefits against the drawbacks. In this case, the only drawback is that in a hypothetical no-GPL universe, coders might have produced tons of free, unrestricted code, which is not around in our world. This is a pretty strange argument to make. Is GPLed code sucking up all the world's coding resources? If there would have been so much GPL-free code in such a world, why isn't it here?
Okay, I'll bite. Which software company that currently charges for software can give it all away for free and expect to stay in business?
Well, I wasn't aware that the existence of OSS forced every company to give their software away free. In fact, I wasn't even aware that the use of some OSS requires you to give all of your software away free. Tivo uses Linux, and they give the source away on their site. But they also package closed-source software with their boxes and somehow manage to survive.
That said, as the guy above pointed out, only a fraction of the computer market revolves around pure software sales. Many companies provide services, or make money using tools they have to buy from other companies. And closed source software will still make money, it'll just be harder to dominate an important area with one or two pieces of proprietary software.
Saying that Microsoft should embrace the GPL because it's better for anyone other than Microsoft will just make us look like fools.
I don't think anyone was saying that MS should embrace the GPL, any more than they should embrace their competition. The two entities may be mortal enemies forever. I think the argument was that the industry as a whole should embrace it, rather than listen to Microsoft's silliness. And that's an important message to get out. Free software has a lot of nice aspects that even for-profit industries can benefit from. The more people that realize that, the better off we'll all be.
PS Don't knock OSS's business potential based on the events of the past few years. This has been an unusual time; it's not necessarily a good idea to take a lot of bad management and decision making and offer that as proof that OSS will never make anyone money.
So, even if some broadcasters encrypted, the monitor would have to accept unencrypted data, or you wouldn't be able to watch anything that wasn't encrypte.
Hmm. But that only means that the receiver would have to accept unencrypted content. That makes a difference-- are HDTVs required to ship with over-the-air receivers, or could they ship with DSS/Cable receivers and some sort of (encrypted-only) digital in to the monitor?
Don't look at the past couple of years as an example of anything right or wrong about the way people have been trying to market OSS. A lot of perfectly nice closed-source companies are now selling off their office furniture, while some OSS companies are hanging in there.
OSS provides a great set of absolutely free tools that any software company or service provider can use, even if they eventually choose to produce closed-source software (have you priced the Sun C++ compiler recently?) It's often a whole lot cheaper to use free tools and contribute any changes back to the community, then to do everything with closed-source software.
Look at Tivo for an example-- they used Linux instead of an expensive set-top-box operating system, and were able to get their product out the door a whole lot cheaper. They gave the work they did back to the Open Source community, but can you really argue that it's hurting them?
software produced by government or university researchers
is increasingly being licensed until the GPL
(e.g. the NSA's selinux) which prevents them
using it even through it was produced with tax
payers' money.
Anyone can use GPLed software. You don't have to give away all of your trade secrets. You can even include a GLPed program with your closed source software (as long as you provide the code.) What you can't do is include the code into your products and release them as closed-source.
That is something of a shame, and perhaps government agencies should be required to release their code under a different license. Unfortunately the gist of Mundie's statements don't seem to revolve around taxpayer-funded code. It seems to be more a platform to make some misleading statements about choice and legality.
but you're also right about the proprietary software, and that's the problem. For this to work, we need something as open as possible so that programmers couldn't be excluded because they're using the wrong kind of stream.
Sure, but what the heck. We've already got Linux for Palm-- Linux for Scientific Atlanta isn't impossible. Linux for Tivo already exists, of course-- in fact, the kernel's available from Tivo itself. I think the goal would be to develop a good Linux distro for a few major cable boxes, and forget about building anything.
I certainly hope you're wrong, but I'll admit that anything's possible these days. I still believe that you have a huge lawsuit if the electronics makers and media companies got together and developed a closed standard.
The goal of HDCP is to prevent unauthorized taping of copyrighted shows. This requires that most video recorders implement a system to recognize and reject these signals. Of course the owners of the standard can't force hardware manufacturers to include the system-- but they can make it a condition if the hardware manufacturer wants their product to be compatible with HDCP-encoded media. At some point these restrictions will move from recorder to monitor (I believe they already are, but I can't find a link.) It may be illegal, I don't know. Are set manufacturers required by any known law to accept unencrypted streams?
Besides, I'm not talking about streaming HDTV content--there isn't enough available bandwidth to do that into the home yet.
It's a great idea, but as you say-- there's not really enough bandwidth to do any of this on a broad scale right now. Cable modems only offer 27-32Mbps total per channel/neighborhood, while most DSL connections are just barely above the acceptable bandwidth limits for decent, NTSC quality streaming video. It would probably work fine as long as less than 10% of subscribers were using it. More users than that gets hairy, and most ISPs don't implement any multicast, which could certainly improve things. I've actually dealt with a project that's trying to do something similar (commercially), and their experience with broadband providers wasn't very hopeful. So it looks like (for at least the next 2-3 years) video streaming is going to have to give way to video caching for later playback.
Another problem, of course, is the distribution. Your average small producer can't just throw together enough bandwidth to distribute (by unicast) to a large number of people. What you need is an infrastructure, something that can essentially provide Open Source Akamai-style caching and application-level multicast. Put that in place and your box becomes a whole lot more useful.
By the way, why build a box from scratch? A lot of existing set-top boxes, and certainly things like Tivo, would provide a good platform to begin with. By 2002 sometime, cable companies are going to have to relinquish control of the box-- in other words, you'll be able to march into Best Buy and take your pick of a handful of different boxen; to adapt them to this purpose, you might have to more or less obliterate the proprietary software, but it might be worth it (new Scientific Atlanta boxes even include cable modems.)
Besides, it wouldn't make sense [for hardware manufacturers] to [prevent playback of unauthorized signals] from a technical standpoint because people are going to have things like camcorders that they'll want to hook up to watch their videos, and these are already using digital interfaces in some cases
This seems to be exactly where they're heading (albeit only with the high-res inputs). Presumably, video cameras that want to use the bus will include a licensed version of the technology that clearly marks the signal as "legal".
I wonder if the reaction here to his supposed "hate crimes" and "threats" would be any different.
Yes. It would. People would say lots of nasty things about his particular set of beliefs. But in the end, the majority of the on-topic posts would say essentially "this is ridiculous-- the guy was clearly joking". Just like they do now.
Come on, say what you will about Slashdot posters, but very few of them will condone the flagrant violation of an individual's rights just because they don't like his politics. For the most part, we all know that what goes around comes around. Look at the articles on the Yahoo/French Government Nazi-memoriabilia debacle or similar stories having to do with "hate music" on Napster if you want examples.
. The recording and movie industries lose hundreds of millions to professional pirates while possibly only millions to Joe Sixpack sharing with his brother-in-law.
Honestly, Hollywood is its own worst enemy.
I think Hollywood has a pretty good idea of how much they're losing to pirates vs. average consumers. The motivations for their current actions seem to be twofold:
The "honest" motivation is that many content producers-- artists, publishers, engineers etc.-- are just plain scared. They see an entire way of life, which is predicated on copyright protection, disappearing when Joe Consumer starts using Gnutella on a day-to-day basis. If such a thing were to happen someday, the monetary loss to the industry would greatly exceed the cost of professional "piracy". Napster gave the audio industry a taste of wide-scale consumer piracy, and the industry didn't much care for it.
The "insidious" motivation stems from the fact that modern companies need to show significant, constant revenue growth to their shareholders. Unfortunately, CDs are currently priced at the edge of consumer affordability-- there might be some room for price increases, but not much (a $30 CD?) Corporations are looking for new ways to maximize revenues-- cross marketing is a one such technique (movie soundtracks, Britney Spears/Pepsi ads). But some execs look at the average American income and think they can get a bigger slice, if only they change the way they price their goods. Some of the "rights" that we take for granted-- making mix tapes of our CDs, or even being allowed to listen to a CD multiple times-- would make excellent sources of revenue if the content providers could convince consumers and the government to go along.
Convincing the government takes nothing more than a few campaign finance contributions-- the DMCA was passed by a voice vote. Convincing the consumer is easy as well, provided you give them absolutely no alternative. Get all of the content producers on board, blackmail the hardware manufacturers into submission (join and make money or stay out and produce worthless equipment), and make sure the government will prevent "circumvention" no matter what the constitutional cost. Given a choice between pay-per-use Jennifer Lopez and nothing, consumers will pay the extra fees, many not even realizing that their entertainment budget has doubled.
What could stand in the way? Circumvention devices, illegal pirates, countries with "weaker" copyright protections. But the content providers know that they only need to marginalize these threats and they won't be significant. For all we say about "consumers never accepting this technology", the industry now has the clout to push it down our throats if they want to. And I believe it would take something truly significant to change their course at this point.
Anyone with a fat enough pipe could launch their own channel, and if you can build a box to let the average Joe watch it on his TV
Perhaps, but it would seem that the hardware manufacturer/content provider alliance is moving towards a set of proprietary interface standards that will make it difficult for your box to even talk to the average TV.
If the TV accepts only an encrypted digital input for high-definition, even the playback of your own homemade content is at the mercy of the owner of the technology. To circumvent is, as we know, a high crime even if the use is legitimate. As an example, look at Napster-- lots of non-RIAA music was floating around, but the RIAA had no problem seeking to shut the whole thing down before the court required specific-song filtering.
Dun and Bradstreet operates a commercial collection service, for collecting from deadbeat companies.
As an aside, D&B also collects for dead companies. The best part of collecting for a dead company is that you never really have any accountability to your collectees-- they can question the (often fictional) charges but D&B will basically inform them that the people who would know are now gone. So please pay up.
I'm sure it's not terribly legal, but most people will pay rather than write letters or put their credit at risk.
except in the case where an employee would be accessing AOL via TCP over someone else's system... like their home dialup.
That's exactly the concern. If anyone can get to the email server from the public net (ie, it's not behind a firewall), it's vulnerable to hacking. These PIN-calculators make hacking tougher, but they aren't a substitute for a good firewall.
Now, if you tell me that TW mail is not stored on the external net, and is instead available only to those inside the firewall (or those with VPN connections), then there's much less to worry about.
It's not just that your ability to access your company's e-mail is being placed in the hands of people you do not know and will never meet.
Ok, but slow down there a second. I'd agree with you completely here, but we're talking about AOL/TW's own corporate email. If they want to store their mail on a silly external system (that they own), it's not hurting anyone but them-- unless you count employees' using their corporate account for personal mail, in which case it's hard to argue that personal mail deserves corporate security.
Outsourcing of corporate email is nothing new, and nobody's forcing companies to do it. I'm just surprised that a major corporation like AOL/TW would be crazy enough to put something as important as corporate email on an external network, no matter how great the password protection. And for all the talk about PIN calcs, the server will still never be as secure as one on a private network.
While they mentioned one of the security measures being used with the new system (something like a PIN-calculator), they didn't mention the security risks of putting corporate email out on the public Internet. Unless they're using some sort of private, enterprise version of the AOL server software, running behind a firewall, it sounds very risky to put all that information on the external net with nothing more than (even very good) password protection. I couldn't quite tell if this was the case from the article.
Well, if I saw a comment that said "if we get here we're really...", I'd be more concerned about what was going on with the code than with the language.
A better example is "// oops, this is totally fucked up, gotta remember to fix it".
You misunderstand Ken Thompson. In fact, he's proving the point about Microsoft's closed software. He is pointing out that you cannot trust one source for all of your software.
Which is funny, as I remember a story about Ken Thompson (it may actually have been one of his colleagues) building a backdoor into the password program. It was so cleverly embedded into the system that even if you rebuilt from clean code it would still be there-- because the hack was embedded in the compiler itself. This is an old story, sorry to rehash...
This is a much more interesting idea, the device-independent sound of it intrigues me...
Isn't this one of the inevitable uses for Display Postscript? You can render the PS description at any point in the image-- you can either do it immediately or you can pipe it over the net to some other display device.
This is a very confusing thing to see in a Slashdot story. It's not particularly informative, and we've heard (and made) many of these arguments before.
It also seems to be a little bit conflicted. "Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to charge for multiple installs" but "Microsoft should implement restrictive technological measures to potentially allow for this" seems conflicted. I guess this guy really doesn't want the government telling him whether it's ok to use multiple copies, but he's ok if Microsoft does it the same?
And by the way, there's nothing wrong with jumping the gun expressing your concern with a new feature that a company is putting into their product. That's the best way to send them a message that they are likely to encounter customer resistance, and maybe they might want to reconsider before committing themselves-- staying silent and waiting until it's a done deal does nobody any good.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the crypto's all going to be broken. And fast. But we've never had a DMCA before, and that makes things a little bit different. The music industry now has unprecedented rights to control the medium of distribution, which makes it easier for them to invoke "piracy" in order to maximize their revenues. First sale and fair use are going to become pay-per priveleges if they get their way.
CSS is not clever encryption, but it gives the MPAA the right to do things they've never been able to do (region-coding, etc.) Yes, it's been broken, but if the anti-circumvention provisions are upheld, we won't be seeing commercial unrestricted DVD players anytime soon. And that's what this whole war is about.
None of it. The article focuses on tarnishment. If I put up a big sign that says "we kill baby seals", then draw a big arrow to an Exxon billboard... Theoretically, I'm tarnishing their trademark. Even though I've never actually used the word Exxon in my treatise.
I'm not agreeing with Ford in this case, just trying to explain the legal issue behind the suit.
In any case, it's a silly argument. The 2600 server makes no connection to the Ford server. It simply directs the client to make a connection. This is the same as your average Hyperlink, and while some people would have you believe that we should control what links people put on their sites, when a company chooses to put their server out there, they agree to accept traffic. I've never heard of a case of a Hyperlink being disallowed because it might put a burden on another server (and god help Slashdot if that ever happens.)
He's picking a few too many fights, I agree. But somebody's gonna do it anyway. Better it be a guy who doesn't mind being sued, and isn't going to cave after a couple of cease-and-desist letters.
Probably the latter. Trademarks need to be vigorously defended. If they don't sue here, they weaken future tarnishment cases along the same lines. Additionally (and this is much more doubtful), they might open themselves up to some liability if a company like GM sued for slander-- not that GM would have a case, but at least Ford can prove that they don't approve of the prank.
And yes, I think that they're overreacting and that they shouldn't have the right to tell me what I can do with my HTTP/DNS server as long as it doesn't actually touch them. Unfortunately the trademark system actively encourages litigation.
This seems like a problem you're going to encounter eventually in any system requiring so much trust of the client. The solution you're inevitably going to have to arrive at (with Open Source or hacked Closed Source code) is not to trust. Networked gaming systems should put more verification in the server, or in a distributed case, require other clients to verify.
As for the hacked servers... Well, avoid them?
The patent office generally "cannot afford" to do searches outside of their own database of prior art. This certainly helps them push patents out.
I'm thoroughly confused. Microsoft is being forced to give away software that they wrote? Has the GPL become compulsory? Of course it isn't. Nobody's forcing Microsoft to give away the software "they had to pay programmers to write." If they choose to use code that somebody else wrote, then maybe they shouldn't bitch if that person imposes some sort of restrictions on it. That is, after all, the name of their own game. GPLed code does not sneak up on you in the dead of night. You know what you're getting into before you use it.
Well, the GPL is a software license, and the GPL is a bad business decision for most commercial software developers, so the point of relevance is that the GPL is most likely a bad business model for the sector of the industry that needs it in the first place.
That's crazy talk. Do you know how much software companies save-- in terms of money and effort-- by using the GNU development suite? How about Linux? There are lots of free tools that simply would not exist in the state that they do if the GPL didn't exist. And it's a pretty good bargain for a lot of companies. Take the code as is for free, or give back as much work as you want or can afford. This guarantees that there're always better tools out there.
While the GPL certainly imposes some limitations on the use of free code in closed-source applications, it's likely only something like the GPL could produce so much useful code. You really have to weight the benefits against the drawbacks. In this case, the only drawback is that in a hypothetical no-GPL universe, coders might have produced tons of free, unrestricted code, which is not around in our world. This is a pretty strange argument to make. Is GPLed code sucking up all the world's coding resources? If there would have been so much GPL-free code in such a world, why isn't it here?
Okay, I'll bite. Which software company that currently charges for software can give it all away for free and expect to stay in business?
Well, I wasn't aware that the existence of OSS forced every company to give their software away free. In fact, I wasn't even aware that the use of some OSS requires you to give all of your software away free. Tivo uses Linux, and they give the source away on their site. But they also package closed-source software with their boxes and somehow manage to survive.
That said, as the guy above pointed out, only a fraction of the computer market revolves around pure software sales. Many companies provide services, or make money using tools they have to buy from other companies. And closed source software will still make money, it'll just be harder to dominate an important area with one or two pieces of proprietary software.
Saying that Microsoft should embrace the GPL because it's better for anyone other than Microsoft will just make us look like fools.
I don't think anyone was saying that MS should embrace the GPL, any more than they should embrace their competition. The two entities may be mortal enemies forever. I think the argument was that the industry as a whole should embrace it, rather than listen to Microsoft's silliness. And that's an important message to get out. Free software has a lot of nice aspects that even for-profit industries can benefit from. The more people that realize that, the better off we'll all be.
PS Don't knock OSS's business potential based on the events of the past few years. This has been an unusual time; it's not necessarily a good idea to take a lot of bad management and decision making and offer that as proof that OSS will never make anyone money.
Hmm. But that only means that the receiver would have to accept unencrypted content. That makes a difference-- are HDTVs required to ship with over-the-air receivers, or could they ship with DSS/Cable receivers and some sort of (encrypted-only) digital in to the monitor?
OSS provides a great set of absolutely free tools that any software company or service provider can use, even if they eventually choose to produce closed-source software (have you priced the Sun C++ compiler recently?) It's often a whole lot cheaper to use free tools and contribute any changes back to the community, then to do everything with closed-source software.
Look at Tivo for an example-- they used Linux instead of an expensive set-top-box operating system, and were able to get their product out the door a whole lot cheaper. They gave the work they did back to the Open Source community, but can you really argue that it's hurting them?
Anyone can use GPLed software. You don't have to give away all of your trade secrets. You can even include a GLPed program with your closed source software (as long as you provide the code.) What you can't do is include the code into your products and release them as closed-source.
That is something of a shame, and perhaps government agencies should be required to release their code under a different license. Unfortunately the gist of Mundie's statements don't seem to revolve around taxpayer-funded code. It seems to be more a platform to make some misleading statements about choice and legality.
Sure, but what the heck. We've already got Linux for Palm-- Linux for Scientific Atlanta isn't impossible. Linux for Tivo already exists, of course-- in fact, the kernel's available from Tivo itself. I think the goal would be to develop a good Linux distro for a few major cable boxes, and forget about building anything.
I certainly hope you're wrong, but I'll admit that anything's possible these days. I still believe that you have a huge lawsuit if the electronics makers and media companies got together and developed a closed standard.
The goal of HDCP is to prevent unauthorized taping of copyrighted shows. This requires that most video recorders implement a system to recognize and reject these signals. Of course the owners of the standard can't force hardware manufacturers to include the system-- but they can make it a condition if the hardware manufacturer wants their product to be compatible with HDCP-encoded media. At some point these restrictions will move from recorder to monitor (I believe they already are, but I can't find a link.) It may be illegal, I don't know. Are set manufacturers required by any known law to accept unencrypted streams?
It's a great idea, but as you say-- there's not really enough bandwidth to do any of this on a broad scale right now. Cable modems only offer 27-32Mbps total per channel/neighborhood, while most DSL connections are just barely above the acceptable bandwidth limits for decent, NTSC quality streaming video. It would probably work fine as long as less than 10% of subscribers were using it. More users than that gets hairy, and most ISPs don't implement any multicast, which could certainly improve things. I've actually dealt with a project that's trying to do something similar (commercially), and their experience with broadband providers wasn't very hopeful. So it looks like (for at least the next 2-3 years) video streaming is going to have to give way to video caching for later playback.
Another problem, of course, is the distribution. Your average small producer can't just throw together enough bandwidth to distribute (by unicast) to a large number of people. What you need is an infrastructure, something that can essentially provide Open Source Akamai-style caching and application-level multicast. Put that in place and your box becomes a whole lot more useful.
By the way, why build a box from scratch? A lot of existing set-top boxes, and certainly things like Tivo, would provide a good platform to begin with. By 2002 sometime, cable companies are going to have to relinquish control of the box-- in other words, you'll be able to march into Best Buy and take your pick of a handful of different boxen; to adapt them to this purpose, you might have to more or less obliterate the proprietary software, but it might be worth it (new Scientific Atlanta boxes even include cable modems.)
Besides, it wouldn't make sense [for hardware manufacturers] to [prevent playback of unauthorized signals] from a technical standpoint because people are going to have things like camcorders that they'll want to hook up to watch their videos, and these are already using digital interfaces in some cases
This seems to be exactly where they're heading (albeit only with the high-res inputs). Presumably, video cameras that want to use the bus will include a licensed version of the technology that clearly marks the signal as "legal".
Yes. It would. People would say lots of nasty things about his particular set of beliefs. But in the end, the majority of the on-topic posts would say essentially "this is ridiculous-- the guy was clearly joking". Just like they do now.
Come on, say what you will about Slashdot posters, but very few of them will condone the flagrant violation of an individual's rights just because they don't like his politics. For the most part, we all know that what goes around comes around. Look at the articles on the Yahoo/French Government Nazi-memoriabilia debacle or similar stories having to do with "hate music" on Napster if you want examples.
I think Hollywood has a pretty good idea of how much they're losing to pirates vs. average consumers. The motivations for their current actions seem to be twofold:
The "honest" motivation is that many content producers-- artists, publishers, engineers etc.-- are just plain scared. They see an entire way of life, which is predicated on copyright protection, disappearing when Joe Consumer starts using Gnutella on a day-to-day basis. If such a thing were to happen someday, the monetary loss to the industry would greatly exceed the cost of professional "piracy". Napster gave the audio industry a taste of wide-scale consumer piracy, and the industry didn't much care for it.
The "insidious" motivation stems from the fact that modern companies need to show significant, constant revenue growth to their shareholders. Unfortunately, CDs are currently priced at the edge of consumer affordability-- there might be some room for price increases, but not much (a $30 CD?) Corporations are looking for new ways to maximize revenues-- cross marketing is a one such technique (movie soundtracks, Britney Spears/Pepsi ads). But some execs look at the average American income and think they can get a bigger slice, if only they change the way they price their goods. Some of the "rights" that we take for granted-- making mix tapes of our CDs, or even being allowed to listen to a CD multiple times-- would make excellent sources of revenue if the content providers could convince consumers and the government to go along.
Convincing the government takes nothing more than a few campaign finance contributions-- the DMCA was passed by a voice vote. Convincing the consumer is easy as well, provided you give them absolutely no alternative. Get all of the content producers on board, blackmail the hardware manufacturers into submission (join and make money or stay out and produce worthless equipment), and make sure the government will prevent "circumvention" no matter what the constitutional cost. Given a choice between pay-per-use Jennifer Lopez and nothing, consumers will pay the extra fees, many not even realizing that their entertainment budget has doubled.
What could stand in the way? Circumvention devices, illegal pirates, countries with "weaker" copyright protections. But the content providers know that they only need to marginalize these threats and they won't be significant. For all we say about "consumers never accepting this technology", the industry now has the clout to push it down our throats if they want to. And I believe it would take something truly significant to change their course at this point.
Perhaps, but it would seem that the hardware manufacturer/content provider alliance is moving towards a set of proprietary interface standards that will make it difficult for your box to even talk to the average TV.
If the TV accepts only an encrypted digital input for high-definition, even the playback of your own homemade content is at the mercy of the owner of the technology. To circumvent is, as we know, a high crime even if the use is legitimate. As an example, look at Napster-- lots of non-RIAA music was floating around, but the RIAA had no problem seeking to shut the whole thing down before the court required specific-song filtering.
As an aside, D&B also collects for dead companies. The best part of collecting for a dead company is that you never really have any accountability to your collectees-- they can question the (often fictional) charges but D&B will basically inform them that the people who would know are now gone. So please pay up.
I'm sure it's not terribly legal, but most people will pay rather than write letters or put their credit at risk.
That's exactly the concern. If anyone can get to the email server from the public net (ie, it's not behind a firewall), it's vulnerable to hacking. These PIN-calculators make hacking tougher, but they aren't a substitute for a good firewall.
Now, if you tell me that TW mail is not stored on the external net, and is instead available only to those inside the firewall (or those with VPN connections), then there's much less to worry about.
Ok, but slow down there a second. I'd agree with you completely here, but we're talking about AOL/TW's own corporate email. If they want to store their mail on a silly external system (that they own), it's not hurting anyone but them-- unless you count employees' using their corporate account for personal mail, in which case it's hard to argue that personal mail deserves corporate security.
Outsourcing of corporate email is nothing new, and nobody's forcing companies to do it. I'm just surprised that a major corporation like AOL/TW would be crazy enough to put something as important as corporate email on an external network, no matter how great the password protection. And for all the talk about PIN calcs, the server will still never be as secure as one on a private network.
While they mentioned one of the security measures being used with the new system (something like a PIN-calculator), they didn't mention the security risks of putting corporate email out on the public Internet. Unless they're using some sort of private, enterprise version of the AOL server software, running behind a firewall, it sounds very risky to put all that information on the external net with nothing more than (even very good) password protection. I couldn't quite tell if this was the case from the article.
A better example is "// oops, this is totally fucked up, gotta remember to fix it".
Which is funny, as I remember a story about Ken Thompson (it may actually have been one of his colleagues) building a backdoor into the password program. It was so cleverly embedded into the system that even if you rebuilt from clean code it would still be there-- because the hack was embedded in the compiler itself. This is an old story, sorry to rehash...
This is a much more interesting idea, the device-independent sound of it intrigues me...
Isn't this one of the inevitable uses for Display Postscript? You can render the PS description at any point in the image-- you can either do it immediately or you can pipe it over the net to some other display device.
But don't forget that they've already made two more movies after this one. If this first one sucks, they might be out a lot of money.
It also seems to be a little bit conflicted. "Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to charge for multiple installs" but "Microsoft should implement restrictive technological measures to potentially allow for this" seems conflicted. I guess this guy really doesn't want the government telling him whether it's ok to use multiple copies, but he's ok if Microsoft does it the same?
And by the way, there's nothing wrong with jumping the gun expressing your concern with a new feature that a company is putting into their product. That's the best way to send them a message that they are likely to encounter customer resistance, and maybe they might want to reconsider before committing themselves-- staying silent and waiting until it's a done deal does nobody any good.