Our nation's creative enterprises have been hesitant to offer their products over the Internet out of fear of piracy -- intellectual theft.
So what? No really, why do you feel a burning desire to legislate a "fix" for this "problem?" If they don't want to offer their product in that format they don't have to. If they don't want their product copied, at all, ever, they are perfectly within their rights to not release it in easily copyable formats.
Please note, though, that this is not the same as prohibiting the existance of easily copyable formats.
For instance, they are free to only release their movies in theaters. They are free to only allow their artists to perform live concerts.
Let's use music as the example. It used to be released on vinyl. No one copied it. It would have been too expensive. This was a good business model. Then there was tape. Although they were copyable they were so much cheaper to produce, and the copies so mush less desirable than the originals, that they still improved their bottom line. Still a good business model.
Then came CD. Perfecly copyable, and now cheap to copy. They can produce CDs for a fraction of what cassettes cost, but charge more for them. Apparently the market will bear a higher price for the improved quality and convenience. IOW we are already paying more for those factors.
If they really think they will lose money by releasing easily copyable product, then they have just determined that it is simply not a good business model. They are free to go back to cassette-only release.
"Initially it was about cost savings but it has been a benefit to the business because we're profiting from being more flexible," says Steve Yatko, chief technology officer of securities IT at CSFB. "Our trading volume has increased [twenty-fold], and our customers are seeing better pricing. And things that used to take days [like installing applications and doing management tasks] now take minutes."
That's a great quote to take to the PHB's. What's even better about it is that it isn't limited to Linux's benefits vs. any particular platform, but against the whole universe of closed source.
But then there's this:
Also, contrary to popular belief, Linux is not really "free." How are large-scale licensing agreements to be worked out?
Umm, how about like this. Buy or download a copy, modify however you like, and install it everywhere you want. As long as you aren't releasing it outside the organization (and there's no way they would) they don't need to worry about licensing or IP.
There's enough stupid people in the world who fall for things like this to make it economically worthwhile.
How about the ones that look like junk mail, but say, "Your account will be billed shortly if we don't hear from you." I signed up for a free trial of something, and the original terms clearly stated that I would not be automatically billed; I would have to accept the terms of a future communication. That "future communication" was a typical junk mail that said failure to respond would constitute acceptance.
Sure, I can sue to get the money back (I called immediately to cancel) but the legal costs would have been more than I was arguing over. Plus time off work to go make my case to begin with.
Short of a class action, these cases just aren't worth pursuing, and the people who do it know this. That's why I never give out a credit card number any more unless I want to buy something immediately.
Guess it's finally time to answer the question
on
Science Grid Genesis
·
· Score: 2
According to this paper, the entire human life takes roughly a petabyte of storage.
Looks like interesting times for AI researchers. Does AI require as many transistors as the brain has neurons? Does it require the same amount of storage and information? Is there something else needed? Looks like we're soon to answer at least one of these.
Now think of the same situation, but someone is following you around with a microphone recording everything you say.
Or let's stick with out doorman checking your ID. Suppose when he did, he took out a book and started writing down everything on it. How many people would demand their ID back and complain to managment that it was none of the doorman's damn business?
But due to chicken-and-egg problems, running Windows apps is probably nonnegotiable for most people, so WINE is going to have to get a lot better before Linux is a threat to the desktop. I sort of expected with all the effort Corel put into it, it should be there by now, but they seem to be as far as ever from seamlessly running Win apps. (By the way, a lot of people think that the Windows API is too much of a moving target for WINE to catch up. As a Windows developer, let me say, this is rubbish. Almost every Windows app out there is tested on Win 95 to make sure it runs decently on the entire 32 bit Windows product line. If WINE could ever catch up to Win 95, they would be almost completely done. The target hasn't moved anywhere since August, 1995.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when I install, say, Office 2000 on my Win95 machine, doesn't it update many dll's that were part of the original OS installation? That being the case, is it really true to say that new software runs on Win95, or is it more accurate to say that each new app provides an incremental OS upgrade?
If my ISP had a service that would simply drop all mail except that from a white list I provide, that would be worth an extra buck or two a month to me. This would take some database lookups to see whether to forward or drop, but push those lists out as far to the edge as possible and nothing else inside has to deal with it.
I've never configured a mail system, so I'll admit I don't know how much processing power this would save them, but the storage would drop dramatically.
Give me a good interface to manage my white list, give me a daily/weekly/monthly list of all return addresses that have tried to send to me (so I can add new ones to my list) and I'm a happy camper.
I must admit, in linux as it is today, this extension requires more paranoia than I can muster today.
I think that's the bottom line. Currently installation requires that you delegate to the program writers (or packagers) the same level of system access that you have yourself. This doesn't even count the packages that must be installed as root.
As more commercial software is released, the only viable options I see are to become paranoid about what rights you grant to an installation, or to simply refuse to install anything except from source.
Yeah, I guess I could create a new user in Linux with just the permissions I want to give it for every program on my computer, then run the program with the appropriate user.
Or, you could write an installer application that you run to manage all other installations. Have this app create a new user for each program as it's installed, with these users members of the "installer" group. That way nothing you install later could overwrite anything else you installed.
If there's an insoluble technical reason why this wouldn't work, I'm sure someone will tell me. Problems I see:
Several apps dynamically link to the same library. You try to update one of the apps, and it includes an update to that library. Only the one that initially installed it can do this. (This could actually be a good thing.)
Massive proliferation of users. Would this require rethinking what a "user" is? Or is it really even a problem?
Would the installer have to run as root for this to work?
I'm sure there are other problems, but at first glance I like the idea.
Merchanitability is not liability. As far as I can see, this already covers software, correct?
Most modern EULA's specifically disclaim merchantability to any purpose whatsoever. The poster you're replying to is simply saying that if your software doesn't do what the seller said it would, then they owe you your money back.
You downloaded it for free? Then they don't owe you anything. You paid $50,000 for multiple installations and several hundred user seat licenses? They owe you a refund.
I write an anti-spam filter that and post it into the public domain (Open Sourced). Microsoft uses it in their next whiz-bang mail server.
Who sold it, you or Microsoft? The one selling it bears the liability. Same as when a component of a physical good is defective. The end user sues the seller, and maybe the original componenet manufacturer. The seller may also sue the manufacturer to recover their own legal costs.
But end users always sue the guy with the deepest pockets. In your example, I don't think many people would waste their time suing you.
Mind you, I'm not excusing bad software, but I don't see how this proposal will do anything, because a new license will come out that people will simply have to accept something like:
"I accept that if I use this software it is completely insecure and will allow bad people to do bad things to me and my computer. I completely waive all rights to bring legal action again the makers of this software, even if they knew there is or was a problem. "
"We've been working hard on the next file system for years [since the early 1990's], and -- not that we've made the progress that we've wanted to -- we're at it again," Ballmer said.
While the Cairo project eventually resulted in Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, the file system work was abandoned because of complexity, market forces and internal bickering. "It never went away. We just had other things that needed to be done," Jim Allchin, the group vice president in charge of Windows development, told News.com.
Those other things most likely included battling "Netscape and Java and the challenge of the Internet and the Department of Justice," Gartner Group analyst David Smith said--issues that continue to persist today.
<snip>
The more important reasons for the renewed development effort, however, are strategic. If the plan succeeds, it will give Microsoft a huge technological advantage over the competition by making its products more attractive to buyers and giving large companies another reason to install Windows-based servers.
So if they hadn't been trying so hard to kill off Netscape, they would have had the time to spend on creating this. Something that seems to offer actual advantages to the user, and that would be "a huge technological advantage over the competition by making its products more attractive to buyers."
I wonder how many other genuine advances have been put on hold in the name of detroying someone else first.
You would have go through the process again for another card. BTW, extracting the keys from a single card is estimate to cost $300,000 or more. It is not something that can be mass-produced.
That's in current figures, right? How much will that amount of processing time/power cost in say 20 years? I see statements like that, "It's too hard/costs too much, so it can't happen," and I only have to look back to here and here. Whenever someone coomes up with an encryption scheme that "can't" be cracked in a "reasonable" amount of time, the definition of "reasonable" inevitably slides downward.
In a properly designed smart card system the bad guys can get ahold of all the cards (initialized or uninitialized) they want and they will not be able to "compromise the whole system".
Just to point out, I said when someone gets their hands on the card readers. Granted, the reader is just an interface and the real work is done by the computer behind it. But for smart cards to be practical, there has to be a portable appliance-type device that does all the work. Something you can mount in a police car. If the cards were read-only, I would be less concerned, but I don't imagine it would be long before someone realized how much more "efficient" it would be to allow the judge to digitally revoke a driver's license on the spot. Basically, if we don't want them to be writable, then we don't really need smart cards, just write-once memory chips.
Given the way government works, more and more information would start going on the cards, they would become "required" for most transactions, and dishonest people would figure out how to crack the system.
If the card is stolen, officials say the data on the chip can't be easily retrieved.
Officials estimate the seven-year plan to distribute the mandatory cards to all Hong Kong residents, aged 11 and up, will cost $400 million.
The expense includes computer database, networks, card readers, technical support and additional staff. (My emphasis)
Once the first card reader is compromised, or even if someone just reverse-engineers the chip, the whole system is compromised. Once bank information is on them -- and I have no doubt that that bit of the proposal is only on hold, not really dropped -- how long will it be before someone builds a remote reader that can pull info just by walking within a few feet of one?
Computer security in no way affects human life directly.
"Reboot the air traffic control system."
"How long has the reactor control system been down?"
"Try to get the GPS working again before we enter the harbor in this fog."
Any of these sound like non-life threatening situations? And you did notice the questioner is specifically concerned with the third type of situation I mentioned, didn't you?
He referred to an especially embarrassing part of Microsoft's case, in which the company showed a videotape to make the argument that Windows would be damaged if a user attempted to remove the Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser. Microsoft later admitted the demonstration computer was rigged.
The timeline in question is that Microsoft, after the original presentation, admitted that it had been rigged. Allchin did not admit it in this deposition.
But [Mac columnist Dave] Horrigan didn't think the iPod presents a serious piracy threat to Microsoft, and doubted the company would take special measures to prevent in-store copying.
"If Microsoft puts in protection it almost always screws up and causes problems for them or their legit users," he said.
Since when has that ever stopped them?
Dennis Lloyd, publisher of iPod fan site iPodlounge, also said this is the first time he'd heard of an iPod put to such use.
"I can see how easy it would be to do," he said. "It's a shame someone has stooped this low to bring bad press to the insanely great iPod."
How is this bringing bad press to the iPod? It can be used to copy things. That's what it's designed to do. This is like saying that someone intentionally driving their car into a busy cross walk is bad press for the car. And even if we accept the premise that it's bad press for the iPod, I really don't think that's why the kid did it.
Someone's cooking the numbers
on
ULTra Robo-Taxi
·
· Score: 2
Slashdot Mirror
Our nation's creative enterprises have been hesitant to offer their products over the Internet out of fear of piracy -- intellectual theft.
So what? No really, why do you feel a burning desire to legislate a "fix" for this "problem?" If they don't want to offer their product in that format they don't have to. If they don't want their product copied, at all, ever, they are perfectly within their rights to not release it in easily copyable formats.
Please note, though, that this is not the same as prohibiting the existance of easily copyable formats.
For instance, they are free to only release their movies in theaters. They are free to only allow their artists to perform live concerts.
Let's use music as the example. It used to be released on vinyl. No one copied it. It would have been too expensive. This was a good business model. Then there was tape. Although they were copyable they were so much cheaper to produce, and the copies so mush less desirable than the originals, that they still improved their bottom line. Still a good business model.
Then came CD. Perfecly copyable, and now cheap to copy. They can produce CDs for a fraction of what cassettes cost, but charge more for them. Apparently the market will bear a higher price for the improved quality and convenience. IOW we are already paying more for those factors.
If they really think they will lose money by releasing easily copyable product, then they have just determined that it is simply not a good business model. They are free to go back to cassette-only release.
"Initially it was about cost savings but it has been a benefit to the business because we're profiting from being more flexible," says Steve Yatko, chief technology officer of securities IT at CSFB. "Our trading volume has increased [twenty-fold], and our customers are seeing better pricing. And things that used to take days [like installing applications and doing management tasks] now take minutes."
That's a great quote to take to the PHB's. What's even better about it is that it isn't limited to Linux's benefits vs. any particular platform, but against the whole universe of closed source.
But then there's this:
Also, contrary to popular belief, Linux is not really "free." How are large-scale licensing agreements to be worked out?
Umm, how about like this. Buy or download a copy, modify however you like, and install it everywhere you want. As long as you aren't releasing it outside the organization (and there's no way they would) they don't need to worry about licensing or IP.
There's enough stupid people in the world who fall for things like this to make it economically worthwhile.
How about the ones that look like junk mail, but say, "Your account will be billed shortly if we don't hear from you." I signed up for a free trial of something, and the original terms clearly stated that I would not be automatically billed; I would have to accept the terms of a future communication. That "future communication" was a typical junk mail that said failure to respond would constitute acceptance.
Sure, I can sue to get the money back (I called immediately to cancel) but the legal costs would have been more than I was arguing over. Plus time off work to go make my case to begin with.
Short of a class action, these cases just aren't worth pursuing, and the people who do it know this. That's why I never give out a credit card number any more unless I want to buy something immediately.
According to this paper, the entire human life takes roughly a petabyte of storage.
Looks like interesting times for AI researchers. Does AI require as many transistors as the brain has neurons? Does it require the same amount of storage and information? Is there something else needed? Looks like we're soon to answer at least one of these.
Linux is not a graphical shell like Windows 1.0 so you have to compare Linux to QDOS (the OS Microsoft used to make DOS from).
Man, I thought I was being tough going back to Windows 1.0 (even though it wasn't usable), but you're just being mean
Now think of the same situation, but someone is following you around with a microphone recording everything you say.
Or let's stick with out doorman checking your ID. Suppose when he did, he took out a book and started writing down everything on it. How many people would demand their ID back and complain to managment that it was none of the doorman's damn business?
Imagine if every single program took as long to get good and usable as Linux did.
When did Windows 1.0 come out? And when did NT3.51 come out? Next question.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when I install, say, Office 2000 on my Win95 machine, doesn't it update many dll's that were part of the original OS installation? That being the case, is it really true to say that new software runs on Win95, or is it more accurate to say that each new app provides an incremental OS upgrade?
If my ISP had a service that would simply drop all mail except that from a white list I provide, that would be worth an extra buck or two a month to me. This would take some database lookups to see whether to forward or drop, but push those lists out as far to the edge as possible and nothing else inside has to deal with it.
I've never configured a mail system, so I'll admit I don't know how much processing power this would save them, but the storage would drop dramatically.
Give me a good interface to manage my white list, give me a daily/weekly/monthly list of all return addresses that have tried to send to me (so I can add new ones to my list) and I'm a happy camper.
I must admit, in linux as it is today, this extension requires more paranoia than I can muster today.
I think that's the bottom line. Currently installation requires that you delegate to the program writers (or packagers) the same level of system access that you have yourself. This doesn't even count the packages that must be installed as root.
As more commercial software is released, the only viable options I see are to become paranoid about what rights you grant to an installation, or to simply refuse to install anything except from source.
Yeah, I guess I could create a new user in Linux with just the permissions I want to give it for every program on my computer, then run the program with the appropriate user.
Or, you could write an installer application that you run to manage all other installations. Have this app create a new user for each program as it's installed, with these users members of the "installer" group. That way nothing you install later could overwrite anything else you installed.
If there's an insoluble technical reason why this wouldn't work, I'm sure someone will tell me. Problems I see:
I'm sure there are other problems, but at first glance I like the idea.
Go here.
Merchanitability is not liability. As far as I can see, this already covers software, correct?
Most modern EULA's specifically disclaim merchantability to any purpose whatsoever. The poster you're replying to is simply saying that if your software doesn't do what the seller said it would, then they owe you your money back.
You downloaded it for free? Then they don't owe you anything. You paid $50,000 for multiple installations and several hundred user seat licenses? They owe you a refund.
I write an anti-spam filter that and post it into the public domain (Open Sourced). Microsoft uses it in their next whiz-bang mail server.
Who sold it, you or Microsoft? The one selling it bears the liability. Same as when a component of a physical good is defective. The end user sues the seller, and maybe the original componenet manufacturer. The seller may also sue the manufacturer to recover their own legal costs.
But end users always sue the guy with the deepest pockets. In your example, I don't think many people would waste their time suing you.
Mind you, I'm not excusing bad software, but I don't see how this proposal will do anything, because a new license will come out that people will simply have to accept something like:
"I accept that if I use this software it is completely insecure and will allow bad people to do bad things to me and my computer. I completely waive all rights to bring legal action again the makers of this software, even if they knew there is or was a problem. "
Okay, whose EULA were you quoting there?
"We've been working hard on the next file system for years [since the early 1990's], and -- not that we've made the progress that we've wanted to -- we're at it again," Ballmer said.
While the Cairo project eventually resulted in Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, the file system work was abandoned because of complexity, market forces and internal bickering. "It never went away. We just had other things that needed to be done," Jim Allchin, the group vice president in charge of Windows development, told News.com.
Those other things most likely included battling "Netscape and Java and the challenge of the Internet and the Department of Justice," Gartner Group analyst David Smith said--issues that continue to persist today.
<snip>
The more important reasons for the renewed development effort, however, are strategic. If the plan succeeds, it will give Microsoft a huge technological advantage over the competition by making its products more attractive to buyers and giving large companies another reason to install Windows-based servers.
So if they hadn't been trying so hard to kill off Netscape, they would have had the time to spend on creating this. Something that seems to offer actual advantages to the user, and that would be "a huge technological advantage over the competition by making its products more attractive to buyers."
I wonder how many other genuine advances have been put on hold in the name of detroying someone else first.
You would have go through the process again for another card. BTW, extracting the keys from a single card is estimate to cost $300,000 or more. It is not something that can be mass-produced.
That's in current figures, right? How much will that amount of processing time/power cost in say 20 years? I see statements like that, "It's too hard/costs too much, so it can't happen," and I only have to look back to here and here. Whenever someone coomes up with an encryption scheme that "can't" be cracked in a "reasonable" amount of time, the definition of "reasonable" inevitably slides downward.
In a properly designed smart card system the bad guys can get ahold of all the cards (initialized or uninitialized) they want and they will not be able to "compromise the whole system".
Just to point out, I said when someone gets their hands on the card readers. Granted, the reader is just an interface and the real work is done by the computer behind it. But for smart cards to be practical, there has to be a portable appliance-type device that does all the work. Something you can mount in a police car. If the cards were read-only, I would be less concerned, but I don't imagine it would be long before someone realized how much more "efficient" it would be to allow the judge to digitally revoke a driver's license on the spot. Basically, if we don't want them to be writable, then we don't really need smart cards, just write-once memory chips.
Given the way government works, more and more information would start going on the cards, they would become "required" for most transactions, and dishonest people would figure out how to crack the system.
If the card is stolen, officials say the data on the chip can't be easily retrieved.
Officials estimate the seven-year plan to distribute the mandatory cards to all Hong Kong residents, aged 11 and up, will cost $400 million.
The expense includes computer database, networks, card readers, technical support and additional staff. (My emphasis)
Once the first card reader is compromised, or even if someone just reverse-engineers the chip, the whole system is compromised. Once bank information is on them -- and I have no doubt that that bit of the proposal is only on hold, not really dropped -- how long will it be before someone builds a remote reader that can pull info just by walking within a few feet of one?
Computer security in no way affects human life directly.
"Reboot the air traffic control system."
"How long has the reactor control system been down?"
"Try to get the GPS working again before we enter the harbor in this fog."
Any of these sound like non-life threatening situations? And you did notice the questioner is specifically concerned with the third type of situation I mentioned, didn't you?
He referred to an especially embarrassing part of Microsoft's case, in which the company showed a videotape to make the argument that Windows would be damaged if a user attempted to remove the Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser. Microsoft later admitted the demonstration computer was rigged.
The timeline in question is that Microsoft, after the original presentation, admitted that it had been rigged. Allchin did not admit it in this deposition.
Just you're average nitpicker.
... not ... flame ... grammar ...
Must
But [Mac columnist Dave] Horrigan didn't think the iPod presents a serious piracy threat to Microsoft, and doubted the company would take special measures to prevent in-store copying.
"If Microsoft puts in protection it almost always screws up and causes problems for them or their legit users," he said.
Since when has that ever stopped them?
Dennis Lloyd, publisher of iPod fan site iPodlounge, also said this is the first time he'd heard of an iPod put to such use.
"I can see how easy it would be to do," he said. "It's a shame someone has stooped this low to bring bad press to the insanely great iPod."
How is this bringing bad press to the iPod? It can be used to copy things. That's what it's designed to do. This is like saying that someone intentionally driving their car into a busy cross walk is bad press for the car. And even if we accept the premise that it's bad press for the iPod, I really don't think that's why the kid did it.
From the What is ULTra page:
maximum speed 25mph (40kph)
But from the Fact File:
ULTra average speed is about 40 kph
So which is it, maximum speed or average?
My, this IS cheaper and easier than driving!
So what? That's not what it's for. From the article:
Advanced Transport Systems estimate that building an ULTra network would cost about one-third to one-half of the amount needed for a light railway.
It's not positioned as an alternative to cars, but to light rail.