(Before you mod this as troll or flamebait, please do me and the community the courtesy of reading to the end to see the point that I'm making)
Comcast Corp. has taken an unprecedented step in Michigan to stop customers from stealing premium cable television
Replace with "obtaining access to a shared resource without paying the agreed price"
rigging illegal access to premium channels and pay-per-view movies
Replace with "access in excess of their contracted level"
The customers themselves turned over illegally modified cable boxes
Replace with "cable boxes modified in breach of their contract".
Theft of cable TV costs the industry an estimated $6 billion a year
Replace with "Unauthorized access to the shared resource" and "lowers the maximum possible hypothetical gross earnings of the industry by"
"The chosen route is really to try to educate people that stealing cable is a crime,"
Replace with "obtaining access to a shared analog resource in excess of your contract is a breach of that contract, and a possible breach of copyright, both of which are actionable in civil lawsuits, but neither of which can be prosecuted as criminal acts."
Gosh, what a change that makes. And yet my interpretation is closer to the one that a court will use to determine the type and degree of offence here, because it will actually deal with what the law says, and not what Comcast wishes that it says.
Some context: I neither perform nor endorse obtaining access to cable content in excess of your contract. I thoroughly welcome individual lawsuits against individuals who do this (rather than against those providing the tools, or legislating against technology), and indeed any suit that makes individuals responsible for their actions. I understand that these suits are civil only because the devices in question are analog, and that under the DMCA, modifying a digital device to obtain access to copyighted content would be a criminal offence.
But what I will not let slip by is the manipulation of language and law to create a crime where none exists, nor will I accept the use of hate speech to brand end consumers as criminals when breach of contract in the business world is spun as oversight, regrettable necessity or overzealous compliance with the fiduciary duty to maximise profit. When a business breaches contract law by (e.g.) trying to enforce an unreasonable contract clause, do we call them criminals and jail them as a menace to society? No, we say that they are behaving unreasonably, that they are in breach of contract law, we (perhaps) levy a small fine, and we instruct them to comply with both the letter and spirit of the contract. That is all.
These people obtaining premium cable are in breach of contract. That, and only that. They are not criminals, and I rather hope that some of them invest in a libel suit to demonstrate that.
Spend the money on creating better and cheaper products.
GOTO 1.
In practice:
Follow the theory, burning venture capital money, until you have a significant number of customers tied in to long term relationships.
Decide how much profit you deserve, and set your prices accordingly. Every time a customer leaves (if you've been kind enough to allow them contracts that let them leave) crank up the costs to the remaining customers. The beauty of this method is that while it seems like only idiots would tolerate it, you just rebrand yourself as a "prestige service", and as long as you have one idiot left willing to pay your price, it works.
Offer a great package to new customers, and then as soon as they sign on the dotted line, begin a campaign of abuse in tandem with FUD until they become so beaten and cynical that they believe it's pointless even changing to another supplier.
Constantly cut back on staff while giving multi-million dollar rewards to your executives for their bold cost saving initiatives. Refer to this funelling of money from many purchasers to a few major stock holders as "stimulating the economy". And remember guys, get that money offshore as soon as possible, so that the evil IRS can't steal it and spend it on schools and hospitals!
Spend the money you save on telling your customers what great value for money they're getting. Anything left goes into a college fund - for sending the children of friendly Congressmen and Senators through college, of course.
GOTO 2, until your last customer leaves, or you spread your campaign contributions too thin and the DOJ, SEC or FTC finally point out that the emperor has no clothes on.
Overly cynical, or an honest assessment of how a system composed of a few huge imcumbents actually works in practice? Make your own mind up.
Re:DRM helmets are outdated.
on
DRM Helmet
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· Score: 2
Great, I write a piece of speculative fiction about this, and it's already outdated and not nearly extreme enough...
More than once Slashdot has published stories from questionable sources which turned out to be completely false
Yeah, but this is completely different! The Beijing evening news is a for-profit publication with a staff of paid professional editors, whereas Slashdot is... no, wait... what was I saying again?
I've read everything that's come out of BLP for the last four years.
Great! And you've independently replicated all of their experiments, right? Right?
come up with a better explanation for the results of BLP's experiments - all of them
I can think of a pretty good reason for the reported results of their experiments. Mortgages, dental plans, kids to put through college... Remind me, their experiments have been independently verified, right?
And it's the one that the designers of the open source multiplayer action game Netrek figured out from day 1. You accept that the clients will be compromised, and you design your server and your network model appropriately.
It's only very recently that commercial games developers are even beginning to understand this, and they're still not getting it right. For example, Counterstrike now attempts to check that your opengl.dll is correct. Fine, but that still relies on the client being uncompromised and reporting the correct number. That's a small barrier for a crackers with a hex editor.
They really need to get it through their heads: you can't trust the client. Every packet that comes in has to be assumed to come from a borg or robot client, and dealt with accordingly. What this means in practice is:
The server has the final word on the world state. It accepts only requests for actions from the client, not state data, and it verifies that the client is in a state that it should be requesting this action. If that means that it rejects valid actions from a human player experiencing lag, tough, that's the cost of trust.
The server sends only the information that each client needs to know. The Netrek server sends position, heading and speed information to clients, but only if there's a friendly unit close enough to scan them, less frequently for distant units, and when it sends information about cloaked units it lies, so that even if you hack the client to display cloaked units, you end up displaying an infrequently updating image of where they might be, which can sometimes be more of a hinderance than a help. All this requires extra processing on the server. Tough. Hardware gets cheaper by the day. Sometimes it means that clients miss out on information, and see things appearing and disappearing. Again, you have to accept that as a necessary price to pay.
You design your game so that perfect execution doesn't guarantee you perfect results. Unlike the rail gun in quake, for example, in Netrek if you fire perfect vector torpedoes aimed precisely where your target is going, a decent human player will dodge them nearly every time. Instead, you have to use your (human) skill and judgement to decide where your (human) target will dodge once you fire, and fire where he's going to go, not where he was going. Or you fire where you don't want him to go, for strategic purposes. A netrek client firing perfect vector torpedoes is actually a liability against clued players!
This isn't theoretical. I wrote a 'borg client for Netrek (bypassing the pretty darn good RSA binary check that still surpasses that in many commercial games), and found that it gave me at most a marginal advantage. It hardly effected my combat ability at all, and it made only a slight improvement to my strategic ability (by recording the limited information it received and making best guesses about what was actually going on in the game state). It certainly didn't spoil play balance like many FPS hacks do, and it didn't require any server fixes, because I simply could not exploit it very far to start with.
The reason why the Netrek developers understood all this was that it was open source (so it was trivial to hack up a client), and also that servers developers were somewhat separate from the client developers. The server developers could dictate the architecture and packets and the client developers had to work with what they were given. Contrast that with the way that commercial games development tends to get done, with the same people writing both server and client, with a mandate to get it working as quickly and easily as possible.
If I was back in commercial games development, this is the first change I'd make: separate the server developers and client developers, and only let them communicate through the code - and with the server guys calling all the shots. That sounds inefficient, but if you don't make the effort early on, you'll damn well have to do it later, once the problems are out there in the field. We need to fix the attitude endemic in commercial games development that there's never time to do it right, but always time to do it twice.
Yet another "substance abuse" program that deals with only one substance. Is it such a weird idea to deal with the actual problem and set up general programs to help people with addictive personalities? Is it too hard to attract funding if we admit that it's people that are the problem and not whatever buzzword compliant substance is currently being screamed about in the news?
...for unfiltered IP access. As the article so insightfully points out, the issue isn't cost or even availability, it's that pretty soon the companies that rent you a cable modem or DSL connection will be the same companies that own (or have an interest in) a whole stack of content. These are the people who bought the DMCA, the people who want to buy DRM legislation like the SSSCA in its various incarnations. Now they will control the creation, the ownership, the distribution and the delivery of content. So much for the original intent of copyright law.
Ask yourself this: when your choice of access is a subsidiary or partner of either Disney or AOL-Time Warner, why would they even need to buy legislation? For your safety and convenience, they can just block everything except port 80, map that to their caching proxies, and firewall off any part of the 'net that challenges their profit models.
You think they won't or can't do it? Why not?. The FCC's position is that competition should be across technologies, not within technologies, and they seem to be lumping cable and DSL in as one technology. The cable/DSL providers could offer (e.g.) filtered 2048/64 cable modem or DSL for a giveaway price of $10 a month; if the competition is $100 a month 512/128 satellite service, or a range limited and contended 2.4Ghz wireless service, then that will just about kill off the idea of unrestricted residential (not consumer, dammit) broadband. That's quite apart from rate/bandwidth capping and billing depending on whether you're downloading content that you've bought from your provider, or if you're daring to go out onto the big wide internet.
Yes, I know that we've no right to demand cheap unrestricted content, and that we should vote with our wallets and so on. But here's something to think about. If you truly believe that an unregulated free market will take care of this, then you wouldn't object to a shell corporation representing the Chinese government buying AOL-Time Warner or AT&T-Comcast and owning 40% or more of the cable networks in the USA, right?
I use that example because the free market, in its purest sense, means that anyone who can afford to buy or do something should be able to do it. The assumption is that purchasing power is obtained through persuading people to give you money of their own free will, and that your actions will continue to be along those popular lines. There are holes big enough to sail an oil tanker through in that theory, the biggest being that once you get in a position to demand money, or you sell a service that has no effective competition, or (my example) you are spending the taxes you collectd from taxing a billion people, then you can continue to leverage that hold indefinitely, especially if there's a large capital investment cost to entering the market.
Capitalism suffers from exactly the same problem as communism: it works great in theory, because it assumes that people are basically good and honest and will cooperate with the spirit as well as the letter of the system. In practice, any system of human governance or interaction requires constant vigilance to prevent tyranny, even if that tyranny comes wearing a pair of big friendly round Mouse ears. I think we need to be asking our government if they understand that the whole point of the Constitution and of the American State is to prevent situations where We, the People can be oppressed and (de facto) taxed without representation. I'd say we're well past that point already; the only question is how far we'll push it before we either see mass civil disobedience, or we tear up the Constitution and start over with a political version of an End User License Agreement, complete with all the usual disclaimers of warranty.
You'll want to make it clear that the default profession is farmer, and that these people make up the vast bulk of the population. Indeed, they are so vital to everything else that "farmer" is too broad a term. I know it seems dull, but it might be useful to know if a region produces a lot of arable crops, pigs, sheep, cattle, fish or fruit.
I'm a little sceptical of a chart that is apparently based on 12th-14th centuries, but has doctors separate from barbers (barber-surgeons were around right up to the 19th century), and misses out midwives altogether.
Guardsmen/watchmen and lawyer/advocates are more of a 15th century than a 12th century phenomenon. For that matter, tailors are practically unknown in pre-14th century Europe except in the very largest cities. This seems to represent the very largest mediaeval Europe, cities, and seem (to me) more like 15th or 16th, which is admittedly the favourite period of most fantasy worlds (whether they realise it or not).
You missed undertakers, bone and antler workers, potters, glassblowers, boatmakers, shipwrights, reed cutters, market traders (as opposed to specialist mercers, wholesale importers and travelling merchants), miners of various sorts, and minters (where do you think all those gold pieces come from?). You also forgot the seedy and distasteful side of mediaeval city life: dung collectors, trash scavengers, whores, pimps, burglars, cutpurses, muggers and bandits.
The ages need to come down a lot. The age of majority for men crept up from the 9th to 14th centuries, but we really need to stop thinking of it as 18 or 21 and more like 13 or 14. "Men" as young as 11 were called up to serve in the Æthelredian fyrd, and like it or not, that's still common in some third world countries today.
Mediaeval population centres tended to specialise, so instead of having a representative selection of trades, you'd have a town (or region) that specialises in making (e.g.) pottery, glass, or even a particular colour of cloth (with all the necessary supporting trades), and that exports its wares over a large area. Besides being realistic, this avoids an identikit feel to towns, and gives convenient plot hooks: how would adventurers respond to the blockade of the town that produces most high quality sword blades?
It would be useful to have degrees of specialisation. Bear in mind that the trades on this list represent those found in the very largest mediaeval towns and cities. In smaller towns, you wouldn't necessarily have a separate glovemaker and a pursemaker, but you might have a general "small leather goods" maker.
The idea of trades breaks down altogether in smaller communities, where most necessary skills for day-to-day life can be found replicated inside each household. So in any given household, you'd find someone who can make shoes, clothes and hats, but perhaps not particularly well, and you'd also find a competent butcher, weaver and woodworker. It's important to note that the vast bulk of the population live on the land, and so any group doing a lot of travelling are going to spend most of their time interacting with farmers or local thegns or knights rather than city types, so don't just skim over the small communities. Perhaps you could have degrees of competency, so that a large town might have a good tailor, while a small village might have a single individual who is both an adequate tailor and a poor cobbler?
Other enhancements that I can think of would be a "retail price index" based on the supply and demand of goods. For example, a town with a lot of armourers would pay well for iron, and swords would be (relatively) cheap. Wool will be cheap in an area with a lot of sheep farmers, and meat would be expensive in an industrial centre. Prices also vary sharply depending on the season: the value of a cart is more or less constant, but the value of a horse to pull it is much lower just before winter (when you have to feed it) than in spring (when you can make use of it).
Keep at it; this has the potential to become an extremely useful tool. Incidentally, how about trying it in Java?
here's what it said: This server is running from a Compaq iPaq 3765 [...]
Aww, bless. It's like the real (the real) old days of the web, when you would actually hear by word of mouth that there was a new picture of a shiny rock or a dinosaur over at http://160.111.252.106, and you'd rush to view it! (And for those who weren't there, no I am not being sardonic).
Here, just for fun, is a link to my iPaq running thttpd over a wireless link [18.24.6.206]. It's really nothing spectacular.
Ah, you're just griping because the story submitter is getting a thorough slashdotting, and your server (as I write) is still up. Tell you what, I'll keep hitting refresh until it dies.;-)
What did we expect, that the Mongolian Hordes technique actually works, or that Brooke's Law is purely theoretical? Lean really is mean, especially for the RAD category that a lot of open source falls into.
Anyway, these figures are spurious: I occasionally submit bug reports, fixes and enhancements to dev team on sourceforge projects, but I don't join the teams, because I can't commit the effort. But I did review the code, there's just no metrics that capture it. In fact, everyone who downloads, compiles and runs the source is testing the code to some extent.
In any case, I think you'll find tacit agreement that on most software projects (especially once the sales guys panic and start telling you what the customers actually want, halfway through development) that creationism is indeed a false ideal, and that it's a few dedicated (obsesses/fanatical/insomniac) individuals that do the vast bulk of the actual code development, while unseen teams break the ground in terms of hardware, requirement capturing and high level design, and clean up squads follow on to fix and maintain the stable versions. There's a lot of scope to be an unsung hero in development; I recently caught a bunch of minor memory leaks in a piece of software that had already been written, reviewed, fixed, and reviewed twice more (i.e. we're still catching bugs on the sixth iteration). And yet, because it's a single file controlled by one developer, it looks like only one person really ever worked on it.
Frankly, I think that for every developer who leaves his fingerprints on the code, there's room for at least three unseen backup guys and gals who do nothing but pave the way, clean up afterwards, and interdict management before they can distract the one productive guy. You just can't let management know that's actually the way it works, because it looks - on paper - like an inefficient process. That's quite apart from the testers, the technical writers, the people who do small parts of any GUI, the IT guys who keep the machines and servers running, the sales, marketing and customer support people who tell you varying shades of truth, and even the receptionist fielding calls for you. Even commercial enterprises don't tend to count these people; my current team has nine developers, but there at least another two dozen non-technical people who we absolutely rely on who aren't counted as part of our team. Open source seems to be similar, only with fewer people, and with even some technical people (like testers and casual bug fixers) not being captured in the team size statistics.
sto is more efficient, no doubt, less bugs found, less bugs to fix;-)
Sorry, you're right, "efficient" is far too fuzzy a criteria. If we're being specific, I actually meant "patriotic", which is now synonymous for "good".;-)
The only way that I can see this working is with a new standard for gateway digital devices that will pass content only to other devices of the same class, and (I suspect) over a proprietary, non-IP network. Then (whatever actual encoding is used) there's going to be an identifying watermark that the receiving device must look for. It will either be a simple identifier (so that you can copy from one PVR to another if you plug them together) or a "copy never" bit so that you can stream it to another PVR, but this second PVR will not make a copy, it will only stream on to a display. Technically, there might be a "copy once" bit, but only on the original broadcast, so once it hits your PVR, it's "copy never".
If it's the former case, and you can make copies by plugging two PVR's together, I think that's fair enough, because I can take my PVR round to my brother's house and make a copy of Buffy for him. That's raising the bar far enough, as it effectively restores the situation that case law has decided is fair use: making a few copies explicitely for known friends and family.
However, that theory is replete with flaws. For one, it doesn't match the way the industry has been going. It's far more likely (I suggest) that it will be a "copy never" bit, and only local streaming will be allowed. For another, there's still that bloody great gaping hole at the tail in either case: sending to a display. Because unless the display also has to be one of these new devices, you just stream to a video capture card, then it's straight onto the internet with the content, and people will download it and stream it to their own non-compliant display devices.
That's the sting. It has to cover display devices (TV's, monitors) and it has to be mandatory. Don't think this will stop with PVR's. For it to have even a hope in hell of making a difference, every display device sold will have to be compliant, and it will have to refuse to show content without the watermark. That means that PC video cards will also have to watermark their content. You see where this is going? It snowballs pretty rapidly. But unless they get everything, there's little point in them pushing ahead with it.
To support this rather alarmist attitude, ask yourself this: if this is truly an industry consensus, why does it need to be legislated?. I suggest that the answer is that for it to work, it has to be mandatory, and it has to be across the board: every channel, every cable decoder, every PVR, every TV, every monitor, every video card, every DVD player, every VCR. Everything.
Wake up, the coffee is brewing. This is Son of SSSCA, yet again. They're just hoping nobody notices this time until it's too late. Please, please, get out that pen and paper, and ask your elected representatives to have a good, long, hard look at this, because it has the potential to be as bad as you can possibly imagine, and then a whole lot worse.
I don't think that this article says or even implies that there's a "copy once" bit.
What it implies is a new standard for gateway digital devices that will pass content only to other devices of the same class, and (I suspect) over a proprietary, non-IP network. Then (whatever actual encoding is used) there's going to be an identifying watermark that the receiving device must look for. It will either be a simple identifier (so that you can copy from one PVR to another if you plug them together) or a "copy never" bit so that you can stream it to another PVR, but this second PVR will not make a copy, it will only stream on to a display. Technically, there might be a "copy once" bit, but only on the original broadcast, so once it hits your PVR, it's "copy never".
If it's the former case, and you can make copies by plugging two PVR's together, I think that's fair enough, because I can take my PVR round to my brother's house and make a copy of Buffy for him. That's raising the bar far enough, as it effectively restores the situation that case law has decided is fair use: making a few copies explicitely for known friends and family.
However, that theory is replete with flaws. For one, it doesn't match the way the industry has been going. It's far more likely (I suggest) that it will be a "copy never" bit, and only local streaming will be allowed. For another, there's still that bloody great gaping hole at the tail in either case: sending to a display. Because unless the display also has to be one of these new devices, you just stream to a video capture card, then it's straight onto the internet with the content, and people will download it and stream it to their own non-compliant display devices.
That's the sting. It has to cover display devices (TV's, monitors) and it has to be mandatory. Don't think this will stop with PVR's. For it to have even a hope in hell of making a difference, every display device sold will have to be compliant, and it will have to refuse to show content without the watermark. That means that PC video cards will also have to watermark their content. You see where this is going? It snowballs pretty rapidly. But unless they get everything, there's little point in them pushing ahead with it.
To support this rather alarmist attitude, ask yourself this: if this is truly an industry consensus, why does it need to be legislated?. I suggest that the answer is that for it to work, it has to be mandatory, and it has to be across the board: every channel, every cable decoder, every PVR, every TV, every monitor, every video card, every DVD player, every VCR. Everything.
Wake up, the coffee is brewing. This is Son of SSSCA, yet again. They're just hoping nobody notices this time until it's too late. Please, please, get out that pen and paper, and ask your elected representatives to have a good, long, hard look at this, because it has the potential to be as bad as you can possibly imagine, and then a whole lot worse.
... this is why I'm still using Lynx. I'll maybe give one of these new fangled "GUI port 80 telnet clients" a whiz once they're robust enough to deal with ten year old technology.
Didn't they learn anything from the Sony's mistake [slashdot.org]? You can spend millions, but someone will always be able to defeat the technology
That's taking a short term view. In the mid term, they can claim that because a few guys are savvy enough to crack it and put the latest Buffy out on gnutella, that they need to set the flags so that no content can be recorded. They'll do it with a big sigh, and they'll use phrases like "regrettable", "a few hard core pirates spoiling it for everyone" and "protecting the national economy", but they will do it.
Of course, this won't stop the same few guys from recording and distributing the shows anyway through good old video capture, but that's not the point. The point is to stop most of us making any recordings.
I know this is speculative, but it fits the pattern, and frankly I'll be happy to forgoe the pleasure of saying "told you so" in favour of nipping this in the bud right now. We need to remind our elected representatives that the explicit purpose of copyright law is to protect the individual creators (and implicitely, consumers) of content from big publishers, and not to give publishers carte blanche to control creation, distribution and consumption. That's a travesty of the intent of copyright law.
Good point, but isn't the picture on their contact page one of the installation splash screens from WinME? Just throw in a silver haired grandmother surfing the web with her smiling golden haired grandchild, and you're there.
Seriously though, that's a very good point. We cry wolf so often that we're beginning to see conspiracy theories everywhere. Or perhaps that's just the chemicals the government puts in the drinking water making me say that.
Because they have the source for their Security Enhanced Linux available for download. We'd better tell them that security through obscurity is much more efficient, eh?;-)
IE isn't a browser made for users. It is a browser made for web designers and businesses
According to MS, it's not a "browser" at all. It's a "platform" for "delivering content". That's why they pushed it to the top of their "crap stuff to leverage" pile and flushed Netscape down the pan.
In practice, it requires a hell of a lot of finessing and regulation; anti-trust laws to name but one.
Specifically regarding this situation:
You can sell any kind of shit if you like, but you can't call it Shinola. ReplayTV can sell any product they like, but if the post-purchase substance and small print doesn't match the pre-purchase claims on which it's sold, they'll get bitchslapped, and rightly so.
You're allowed to screw customers (as long as you tell them about it) and competitors until you have 70% of the market, at which point you're an abusive monopoly. If all of the suppliers in a market are colluding to fix prices and screw customers, that's a cartel. It's debatable whether PVR's are a subset of VCR's, or whether they form their own market. If the latter, then there's already clear evidence of a cartel. If the former, it's only a matter of time before there's one, and it'd be nice to see the FTC getting its act together before the fact for once, instead of shutting the stable door after the horse is over the horizon.
Slashdot Mirror
(Before you mod this as troll or flamebait, please do me and the community the courtesy of reading to the end to see the point that I'm making)
Replace with "obtaining access to a shared resource without paying the agreed price"
Replace with "access in excess of their contracted level"
Replace with "cable boxes modified in breach of their contract".
Replace with "Unauthorized access to the shared resource" and "lowers the maximum possible hypothetical gross earnings of the industry by"
Replace with "obtaining access to a shared analog resource in excess of your contract is a breach of that contract, and a possible breach of copyright, both of which are actionable in civil lawsuits, but neither of which can be prosecuted as criminal acts."
Gosh, what a change that makes. And yet my interpretation is closer to the one that a court will use to determine the type and degree of offence here, because it will actually deal with what the law says, and not what Comcast wishes that it says.
Some context: I neither perform nor endorse obtaining access to cable content in excess of your contract. I thoroughly welcome individual lawsuits against individuals who do this (rather than against those providing the tools, or legislating against technology), and indeed any suit that makes individuals responsible for their actions. I understand that these suits are civil only because the devices in question are analog, and that under the DMCA, modifying a digital device to obtain access to copyighted content would be a criminal offence.
But what I will not let slip by is the manipulation of language and law to create a crime where none exists, nor will I accept the use of hate speech to brand end consumers as criminals when breach of contract in the business world is spun as oversight, regrettable necessity or overzealous compliance with the fiduciary duty to maximise profit. When a business breaches contract law by (e.g.) trying to enforce an unreasonable contract clause, do we call them criminals and jail them as a menace to society? No, we say that they are behaving unreasonably, that they are in breach of contract law, we (perhaps) levy a small fine, and we instruct them to comply with both the letter and spirit of the contract. That is all.
These people obtaining premium cable are in breach of contract. That, and only that. They are not criminals, and I rather hope that some of them invest in a libel suit to demonstrate that.
- Offer a better product at a lower price.
- Gain market share.
- Spend the money on creating better and cheaper products.
- GOTO 1.
In practice:Overly cynical, or an honest assessment of how a system composed of a few huge imcumbents actually works in practice? Make your own mind up.
Great, I write a piece of speculative fiction about this, and it's already outdated and not nearly extreme enough...
Well, if we're looking for the original inspiration, it was probably Harriet Beecher Stowe, but she's been dead for a while now.
Yeah, but this is completely different! The Beijing evening news is a for-profit publication with a staff of paid professional editors, whereas Slashdot is... no, wait... what was I saying again?
Bob Justman's original handwritten notes creating the "Wesley Crusher" character for TNG.
Anyone want to organise a fund so that we can buy them for Wil?. ;-)
Great! And you've independently replicated all of their experiments, right? Right?
I can think of a pretty good reason for the reported results of their experiments. Mortgages, dental plans, kids to put through college... Remind me, their experiments have been independently verified, right?
And it's the one that the designers of the open source multiplayer action game Netrek figured out from day 1. You accept that the clients will be compromised, and you design your server and your network model appropriately.
It's only very recently that commercial games developers are even beginning to understand this, and they're still not getting it right. For example, Counterstrike now attempts to check that your opengl.dll is correct. Fine, but that still relies on the client being uncompromised and reporting the correct number. That's a small barrier for a crackers with a hex editor.
They really need to get it through their heads: you can't trust the client. Every packet that comes in has to be assumed to come from a borg or robot client, and dealt with accordingly. What this means in practice is:
This isn't theoretical. I wrote a 'borg client for Netrek (bypassing the pretty darn good RSA binary check that still surpasses that in many commercial games), and found that it gave me at most a marginal advantage. It hardly effected my combat ability at all, and it made only a slight improvement to my strategic ability (by recording the limited information it received and making best guesses about what was actually going on in the game state). It certainly didn't spoil play balance like many FPS hacks do, and it didn't require any server fixes, because I simply could not exploit it very far to start with.
The reason why the Netrek developers understood all this was that it was open source (so it was trivial to hack up a client), and also that servers developers were somewhat separate from the client developers. The server developers could dictate the architecture and packets and the client developers had to work with what they were given. Contrast that with the way that commercial games development tends to get done, with the same people writing both server and client, with a mandate to get it working as quickly and easily as possible.
If I was back in commercial games development, this is the first change I'd make: separate the server developers and client developers, and only let them communicate through the code - and with the server guys calling all the shots. That sounds inefficient, but if you don't make the effort early on, you'll damn well have to do it later, once the problems are out there in the field. We need to fix the attitude endemic in commercial games development that there's never time to do it right, but always time to do it twice.
Yet another "substance abuse" program that deals with only one substance. Is it such a weird idea to deal with the actual problem and set up general programs to help people with addictive personalities? Is it too hard to attract funding if we admit that it's people that are the problem and not whatever buzzword compliant substance is currently being screamed about in the news?
...for unfiltered IP access. As the article so insightfully points out, the issue isn't cost or even availability, it's that pretty soon the companies that rent you a cable modem or DSL connection will be the same companies that own (or have an interest in) a whole stack of content. These are the people who bought the DMCA, the people who want to buy DRM legislation like the SSSCA in its various incarnations. Now they will control the creation, the ownership, the distribution and the delivery of content. So much for the original intent of copyright law.
Ask yourself this: when your choice of access is a subsidiary or partner of either Disney or AOL-Time Warner, why would they even need to buy legislation? For your safety and convenience, they can just block everything except port 80, map that to their caching proxies, and firewall off any part of the 'net that challenges their profit models.
You think they won't or can't do it? Why not?. The FCC's position is that competition should be across technologies, not within technologies, and they seem to be lumping cable and DSL in as one technology. The cable/DSL providers could offer (e.g.) filtered 2048/64 cable modem or DSL for a giveaway price of $10 a month; if the competition is $100 a month 512/128 satellite service, or a range limited and contended 2.4Ghz wireless service, then that will just about kill off the idea of unrestricted residential (not consumer, dammit) broadband. That's quite apart from rate/bandwidth capping and billing depending on whether you're downloading content that you've bought from your provider, or if you're daring to go out onto the big wide internet.
Yes, I know that we've no right to demand cheap unrestricted content, and that we should vote with our wallets and so on. But here's something to think about. If you truly believe that an unregulated free market will take care of this, then you wouldn't object to a shell corporation representing the Chinese government buying AOL-Time Warner or AT&T-Comcast and owning 40% or more of the cable networks in the USA, right?
I use that example because the free market, in its purest sense, means that anyone who can afford to buy or do something should be able to do it. The assumption is that purchasing power is obtained through persuading people to give you money of their own free will, and that your actions will continue to be along those popular lines. There are holes big enough to sail an oil tanker through in that theory, the biggest being that once you get in a position to demand money, or you sell a service that has no effective competition, or (my example) you are spending the taxes you collectd from taxing a billion people, then you can continue to leverage that hold indefinitely, especially if there's a large capital investment cost to entering the market.
Capitalism suffers from exactly the same problem as communism: it works great in theory, because it assumes that people are basically good and honest and will cooperate with the spirit as well as the letter of the system. In practice, any system of human governance or interaction requires constant vigilance to prevent tyranny, even if that tyranny comes wearing a pair of big friendly round Mouse ears. I think we need to be asking our government if they understand that the whole point of the Constitution and of the American State is to prevent situations where We, the People can be oppressed and (de facto) taxed without representation. I'd say we're well past that point already; the only question is how far we'll push it before we either see mass civil disobedience, or we tear up the Constitution and start over with a political version of an End User License Agreement, complete with all the usual disclaimers of warranty.
This is a superb start, many congratulations.
Some positive criticism:
Other enhancements that I can think of would be a "retail price index" based on the supply and demand of goods. For example, a town with a lot of armourers would pay well for iron, and swords would be (relatively) cheap. Wool will be cheap in an area with a lot of sheep farmers, and meat would be expensive in an industrial centre. Prices also vary sharply depending on the season: the value of a cart is more or less constant, but the value of a horse to pull it is much lower just before winter (when you have to feed it) than in spring (when you can make use of it).
Keep at it; this has the potential to become an extremely useful tool. Incidentally, how about trying it in Java?
Aww, bless. It's like the real (the real) old days of the web, when you would actually hear by word of mouth that there was a new picture of a shiny rock or a dinosaur over at http://160.111.252.106, and you'd rush to view it! (And for those who weren't there, no I am not being sardonic).
Ah, you're just griping because the story submitter is getting a thorough slashdotting, and your server (as I write) is still up. Tell you what, I'll keep hitting refresh until it dies. ;-)
What did we expect, that the Mongolian Hordes technique actually works, or that Brooke's Law is purely theoretical? Lean really is mean, especially for the RAD category that a lot of open source falls into.
Anyway, these figures are spurious: I occasionally submit bug reports, fixes and enhancements to dev team on sourceforge projects, but I don't join the teams, because I can't commit the effort. But I did review the code, there's just no metrics that capture it. In fact, everyone who downloads, compiles and runs the source is testing the code to some extent.
In any case, I think you'll find tacit agreement that on most software projects (especially once the sales guys panic and start telling you what the customers actually want, halfway through development) that creationism is indeed a false ideal, and that it's a few dedicated (obsesses/fanatical/insomniac) individuals that do the vast bulk of the actual code development, while unseen teams break the ground in terms of hardware, requirement capturing and high level design, and clean up squads follow on to fix and maintain the stable versions. There's a lot of scope to be an unsung hero in development; I recently caught a bunch of minor memory leaks in a piece of software that had already been written, reviewed, fixed, and reviewed twice more (i.e. we're still catching bugs on the sixth iteration). And yet, because it's a single file controlled by one developer, it looks like only one person really ever worked on it.
Frankly, I think that for every developer who leaves his fingerprints on the code, there's room for at least three unseen backup guys and gals who do nothing but pave the way, clean up afterwards, and interdict management before they can distract the one productive guy. You just can't let management know that's actually the way it works, because it looks - on paper - like an inefficient process. That's quite apart from the testers, the technical writers, the people who do small parts of any GUI, the IT guys who keep the machines and servers running, the sales, marketing and customer support people who tell you varying shades of truth, and even the receptionist fielding calls for you. Even commercial enterprises don't tend to count these people; my current team has nine developers, but there at least another two dozen non-technical people who we absolutely rely on who aren't counted as part of our team. Open source seems to be similar, only with fewer people, and with even some technical people (like testers and casual bug fixers) not being captured in the team size statistics.
Sorry, you're right, "efficient" is far too fuzzy a criteria. If we're being specific, I actually meant "patriotic", which is now synonymous for "good". ;-)
The only way that I can see this working is with a new standard for gateway digital devices that will pass content only to other devices of the same class, and (I suspect) over a proprietary, non-IP network. Then (whatever actual encoding is used) there's going to be an identifying watermark that the receiving device must look for. It will either be a simple identifier (so that you can copy from one PVR to another if you plug them together) or a "copy never" bit so that you can stream it to another PVR, but this second PVR will not make a copy, it will only stream on to a display. Technically, there might be a "copy once" bit, but only on the original broadcast, so once it hits your PVR, it's "copy never". If it's the former case, and you can make copies by plugging two PVR's together, I think that's fair enough, because I can take my PVR round to my brother's house and make a copy of Buffy for him. That's raising the bar far enough, as it effectively restores the situation that case law has decided is fair use: making a few copies explicitely for known friends and family. However, that theory is replete with flaws. For one, it doesn't match the way the industry has been going. It's far more likely (I suggest) that it will be a "copy never" bit, and only local streaming will be allowed. For another, there's still that bloody great gaping hole at the tail in either case: sending to a display. Because unless the display also has to be one of these new devices, you just stream to a video capture card, then it's straight onto the internet with the content, and people will download it and stream it to their own non-compliant display devices. That's the sting. It has to cover display devices (TV's, monitors) and it has to be mandatory. Don't think this will stop with PVR's. For it to have even a hope in hell of making a difference, every display device sold will have to be compliant, and it will have to refuse to show content without the watermark. That means that PC video cards will also have to watermark their content. You see where this is going? It snowballs pretty rapidly. But unless they get everything, there's little point in them pushing ahead with it. To support this rather alarmist attitude, ask yourself this: if this is truly an industry consensus, why does it need to be legislated?. I suggest that the answer is that for it to work, it has to be mandatory, and it has to be across the board: every channel, every cable decoder, every PVR, every TV, every monitor, every video card, every DVD player, every VCR. Everything. Wake up, the coffee is brewing. This is Son of SSSCA, yet again. They're just hoping nobody notices this time until it's too late. Please, please, get out that pen and paper, and ask your elected representatives to have a good, long, hard look at this, because it has the potential to be as bad as you can possibly imagine, and then a whole lot worse.
I don't think that this article says or even implies that there's a "copy once" bit.
What it implies is a new standard for gateway digital devices that will pass content only to other devices of the same class, and (I suspect) over a proprietary, non-IP network. Then (whatever actual encoding is used) there's going to be an identifying watermark that the receiving device must look for. It will either be a simple identifier (so that you can copy from one PVR to another if you plug them together) or a "copy never" bit so that you can stream it to another PVR, but this second PVR will not make a copy, it will only stream on to a display. Technically, there might be a "copy once" bit, but only on the original broadcast, so once it hits your PVR, it's "copy never".
If it's the former case, and you can make copies by plugging two PVR's together, I think that's fair enough, because I can take my PVR round to my brother's house and make a copy of Buffy for him. That's raising the bar far enough, as it effectively restores the situation that case law has decided is fair use: making a few copies explicitely for known friends and family.
However, that theory is replete with flaws. For one, it doesn't match the way the industry has been going. It's far more likely (I suggest) that it will be a "copy never" bit, and only local streaming will be allowed. For another, there's still that bloody great gaping hole at the tail in either case: sending to a display. Because unless the display also has to be one of these new devices, you just stream to a video capture card, then it's straight onto the internet with the content, and people will download it and stream it to their own non-compliant display devices.
That's the sting. It has to cover display devices (TV's, monitors) and it has to be mandatory. Don't think this will stop with PVR's. For it to have even a hope in hell of making a difference, every display device sold will have to be compliant, and it will have to refuse to show content without the watermark. That means that PC video cards will also have to watermark their content. You see where this is going? It snowballs pretty rapidly. But unless they get everything, there's little point in them pushing ahead with it.
To support this rather alarmist attitude, ask yourself this: if this is truly an industry consensus, why does it need to be legislated?. I suggest that the answer is that for it to work, it has to be mandatory, and it has to be across the board: every channel, every cable decoder, every PVR, every TV, every monitor, every video card, every DVD player, every VCR. Everything.
Wake up, the coffee is brewing. This is Son of SSSCA, yet again. They're just hoping nobody notices this time until it's too late. Please, please, get out that pen and paper, and ask your elected representatives to have a good, long, hard look at this, because it has the potential to be as bad as you can possibly imagine, and then a whole lot worse.
... this is why I'm still using Lynx. I'll maybe give one of these new fangled "GUI port 80 telnet clients" a whiz once they're robust enough to deal with ten year old technology.
That's taking a short term view. In the mid term, they can claim that because a few guys are savvy enough to crack it and put the latest Buffy out on gnutella, that they need to set the flags so that no content can be recorded. They'll do it with a big sigh, and they'll use phrases like "regrettable", "a few hard core pirates spoiling it for everyone" and "protecting the national economy", but they will do it.
Of course, this won't stop the same few guys from recording and distributing the shows anyway through good old video capture, but that's not the point. The point is to stop most of us making any recordings.
I know this is speculative, but it fits the pattern, and frankly I'll be happy to forgoe the pleasure of saying "told you so" in favour of nipping this in the bud right now. We need to remind our elected representatives that the explicit purpose of copyright law is to protect the individual creators (and implicitely, consumers) of content from big publishers, and not to give publishers carte blanche to control creation, distribution and consumption. That's a travesty of the intent of copyright law.
Good point, but isn't the picture on their contact page one of the installation splash screens from WinME? Just throw in a silver haired grandmother surfing the web with her smiling golden haired grandchild, and you're there.
Seriously though, that's a very good point. We cry wolf so often that we're beginning to see conspiracy theories everywhere. Or perhaps that's just the chemicals the government puts in the drinking water making me say that.
For "companies like" substitute "dollars from" and I think we get a more accurate statement of their position.
Because they have the source for their Security Enhanced Linux available for download. We'd better tell them that security through obscurity is much more efficient, eh? ;-)
According to MS, it's not a "browser" at all. It's a "platform" for "delivering content". That's why they pushed it to the top of their "crap stuff to leverage" pile and flushed Netscape down the pan.
And it changes channels on your decoder box how exactly? Oh, silly me, it doesn't.
Like Communism, it works well... in theory.
In practice, it requires a hell of a lot of finessing and regulation; anti-trust laws to name but one.
Specifically regarding this situation: