Replying to myself, I just checked Wikipedia. Best Western has 4,000 hotels world-wide, 2,000 of which in North America. This means that the 1,312 hotels affected are probably all in continental Europe.
Checking with Wikipedia, Best Western seems to have 4,000 hotels world-wide, 2,000 of which in North America. So it appears that yes, it's only the european continental hotels.
The Sunday Herald article is amazingly unclear about the scope of this
breach. Which hotels are affected? The article says all "continental
hotels". Does that, from a British Newspaper, mean european
continental hotels only?
I stayed at Best Western in the US late last year. Luckily, I have since
then changed to a different credit card than the one I used at the
time.
The last time when a company I did business with lost my credit
card details, I decided I wouldn't do anything about it until I really
saw an unauthorized withdrawal from my account. Because in the past,
when there was an unauthorized withdrawal (only happened to me once),
a single phone call to the credit card company had been enough to get
my money back (some 300 Euro). They said they would start to
investigate it, but because it could take a long time, "here's your
money back as a first measure."
With the recently stolen card info, I
got a notice from my bank a few months later that they had to disable
my card because there was an attempt to commit fraud with it.
I got a new card with no further action required on my part.
Either way, this could turn out to be a big hassle for Best
Western. If only they could let me know if my personal data
was affected.
There used to be an ad here in Germany that showed a long row of cars, tightly packed after one another. Caption: "In principle, that's the right approach. Now everybody please go 240 km/h (150mph) at the same time."
This article gives me a hunch why my no-name laptop battery dies so quickly even when Ubuntu still thinks it has 10% charge and several minutes left. Didn't happen with the manufacturer's battery...
Ubuntu usually does an excellent job analysing how good your battery really is (not sure if it's the kernel ACPI or HAL or GNOME that's actually doing it). But when the battery lies so blatantly, it seems even Ubuntu can't keep my laptop from sudden death without a proper warning or shutdown.
Fossil fuels come from plants who got their energy from the sun. Wind and water power are also powered by the Sun.
Right on the spot. We need to understand that solar energy is not some kind of exotic energy for funny cars. It is pretty much the only energy we have, compared to which all other forms of energy (nuclear, geothermal) pale into insignificance.
Using fossil fuels is actually a fairly inefficient form of using solar energy. It took millions of years to collect that energy and transform it into the fossil fuels as which it is now stored. Compare that to a few hours for recharging a battery from PV cells:-)
My favourite number in this context: The energy stored in all the fossil fuel in the earth's crust equals about 20 days of sunshine. Can't find the quote for that right now, but the numbers in the first few paragraphs here are pretty much in that ballpark.
German law is not based on precedent as much as US law is. The judges try to interpret the law and give their rationale why they came to a particular conclusion. Other judges can then follow that interpretation in subsequent cases. If they don't, they have to explain why they think the previous interpretation was wrong, or does not apply to the new case.
In the rationale for this particular case, they say that a WLAN owner would only be required to take action if he had concrete evidence of something unlawful happening on his connection. So it's really not restricted to copyright infringement.
I think only a Slashdot Poll could answer this definitely.
Further anecdotal evidence, though: I've had a Lenovo T61 now for about two months, after having had a Pre-Lenovo T40 for more than four years, which had been my sturdiest Thinkpad up to that time. So far, I see no difference in the build quality of both machines, but only time will really tell.
The game publishing business seems very conservative. Many of the
games that became classics over the last few decades were initially
rejected by all of the major publishers: Mastermind, Monopoly, you
name it. Even Sudoku took more than twenty years until it finally hit
home.
A friend of mine developed the board game Friedrich, a strategy
game about the Seven Years' War. It took him fifteen years to
arrive at the final version, building very elaborate prototypes, and
playing hundreds of games with friends who were acting as beta
testers. The game was rejected by all major publishers he showed it
to, mostly on the grounds that "it takes too long to play" (3-5
hours at least). After he'd mentioned that, every discussion was immediately over.
My friend finally decided to publish the game
himself, founding his own game publishing company. The game quickly
achieved almost a cult following, both in Germany, where it was
initially published, and in the US. I think some 4000 copies have
been sold so far. It won the prize for the Best Historical
Simulation by the American Games magazine in 2006.
So I'd say: Be prepared to go a long way, but it may well be worth
it.
What about this: I copy a HD-DVD to my harddrive. Then I find the decryption key for it. I decrypt it and convert it to another format. Couldn't I then distribute it without them knowing what player was used?
That's exactly the scenario that has been characterized as the fundamental weakness of AACS, the encryption mechanism of both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Congratulations for finding this out in less time than the engineers who designed it.
I can't help it, but the way this question is asked, it sounds very
"official" to me. As if somebody in a big media corporation or record
label wanted to find out what the masses think, or some such... But
nevertheless, here's my two cents:
I don't think there can be any such thing as "illegal copying".
Copying is a fundamental operation of any computer, and the internet
means we can copy world-wide, instantly, at zero cost. Any mechanism
that tries to make this impossible is trying to set the clock back to
before the internet age. As many DRM-opponents have pointed out,
trying to control copying in such a world amounts to establishing a
police-state, no less.
The consequence is that artists, and distributors (in whichever form
we may still need them), need to be paid by other means, NOT by the
number of copies they distribute, NOT bound to the act of copying.
One idea is voluntary payment (think Magnatune). Another idea is that
musicians, in particular, can shift to other means of generating
income, e.g. concerts, public performances.
The economy is going to change. It has to, because copying can no
longer be controlled. Altogether, this is a good thing, but it can
turn into a very bad thing if people try very badly to keep this from
happening.
Does anyone know if current HD TVs are capable of playing HDCP DRMed content from Vista (or any other source)? I know that that HDREADY logo is supposed to mean that the answer is yes, but it's common for computer equipment (e.g. networking gear) to be incompatible even though all the kit is supposed to support the same standards.
Peter Gutmann has stated that your concerns hit the nail on the head. There are at least some monitors that are definitely not HDCP-enabled, even though the manufacturer claims otherwise. Plus, this is an issue that can't easly be rectified. You can't just buy an add-on device for HDCP, it has to be right inside the monitor, because the data stream must be encrypted right until it reaches the pixels.
To me this raises two questions. 1) what about HD-DVD? 2) is this so-called agreement on paper?
I can't comment on the first, but as to the second point: This is essentially a rumour that was "leaked" at a conference, and picked up by journalists. Read the arstechnica article linked above. It links to a German article that is the original source for this "rumour". Conveniently for Sony and Microsoft, now everybody seems to be assured that all of this won't be real for a while. I doubt you'd get anything on paper.
For anyone who's been following the recent debates about Vista, this
is already old news. But now the mainstream seems to be picking up on
it.
What the article doesn't mention is that, probably precisely for
this reason, there seems to be an agreement between Sony and Microsoft
that HDCP protection won't actually be required by Blu-Ray
discs until
at least 2010, maybe even 2012. Remember, it's the disc that
actually needs to require it, the operating system only provides
this as an option.
That doesn't make the system anymore pleasing though. I wonder how
far Microsoft will actually get with it. Customers do seem to get
upset with this, and it wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has had
to make "concessions" because of public criticism.
Peter Gutmann's paper on Vista's content protection is really
recommended reading, even if it's a bit polemic. And nothing beats
Microsoft's own document, written by the same guy that was
interviewed for Times Online.
I think this is a great project. But step back for a moment and
think what it means: If there was an earth-like civilization even very
close to us, say, at Alpha Centauri, we've had no chance of detecting
their stray radiation up until now. And with this new program, it's
only within 30 light years that we might be successful. That's really
our very, very close vicinity.
This, I think, puts the fact in perspective that SETI@home hasn't
found any signal yet, even after years of listening. They would only
be able to detect very powerful transmissions, much more powerful than
anything our own civilization could produce.
The fact that we haven't found any artificial signals from space yet
doesn't mean there's nobody out there.
What I find interesting about the history of "radio" is that the word itself wasn't coined until some ten or twenty years after the invention. People used to call it "the wireless" before that. The guy who made up the word "radio" was an advertising expert named Waldo Warren. The same guy was later given the task to create a brand name for some of the early inventions of R. Buckminster Fuller. He came up with the word "Dymaxion", simply by jotting together syllables of random words Fuller used all the time: Dynamic Maximum Tension.
I like it that the word "radio" comes from the same heritage.
The impetus to make a profit (and its associated compromises) isn't sitting well with true believers in free software.
... and then they go on to imply that only if you hide your code, you can make a profit. Thus, Torvalds is compatible with making a profit, while Stallman is not. I don't buy this. And what's more, I can't believe that a reputed magazine such as BusinessWeek still knows nothing better than to perpetuate that myth.
What Stallman says is that free access to information is a fundamental value that is more important than business models that may be standing in its way. Thus, in order to achieve free access to information, new business models may need to be developed. And this is exactly what's happening. There are many successful companies that don't hide their source, take Novell for an example. Take IBM's growing engagement with open source, their gradual transformation into a service-oriented company. And it's much more widespread among small businesses than among the big players who take long to adapt to a paradigm shift.
Also you could make some damn fine music* by placing your transister radio next to your ZX81 while it executed different types of FOR/NEXT loop. The more statements inside the loop, the lower the note. Map different loops to different keys and you've got a synth baby.
Not bad. At some point I figured out how you could output 1's and 0's on the cassette port using machine language. So I started writing programs that made all sorts of tones on that port, going up, going down, changing the pulse-width. Man, that was my first synth! The only problem was that the audio output jack actually carried the same signal as the TV out jack (this was by construction, to save money). So as soon as you played sounds, the TV would show all sorts of psychedelic black and white patterns.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 which I got when I was twelve.
Much more deeply than the actual computer I remember the moment when I
had first switched it on and typed "print 2+2" on that piece of
membrane pretending to be a keyboard ("print" was actually a function
key, you couldn't type it letter by letter). I still remember my
astonishment when I pressed the "New Line" field and the number "4"
appeared in the top left corner of the screen. It was something
radically different from a pocket calculator. Or so I felt. Since
this moment the fascination of programming has never left me again.
It seems to me that it wouldn't be hard for some evil record company to promote a new song by simply sending bogus info to Last.fm; setup a few thousand accounts, let each account send info indicating playing that particular song and a few others (either targeted to a demographic or randomly, as to properly annoy everybody) all day long.
They have pretty good spam protection as far as I know (and this is a form of spam), though I don't know the details. It's not very different from every other blog on the net which also faces similar problems.
This review is one of the best technical articles I have read in a
while. Kudos to the author!
I've played with both services as well, and I have now been a happy (and
paying) last.fm user for several months. I don't quite share the
author's enthusiasm about Pandora; in my case (and for some of the
friends I tried it for), its recommendations were not quite that good.
The centralized music genome inventory that Pandora relies on reminds
me of a Cathedral, while Last.fm is more like a Bazaar of babbling
voices -- now I wonder where that metaphor comes from!
I think Last.fm has more potential because it is fundamentally a
social service -- it feels a lot more like other open online communities I
have come to know and love, whereas Pandora seems more like a black-box to
me (something the review author also mentioned).
Ummm... sure. Right after the rational/friendly discussion about the whol Linux GNU/Linux thing. (In other words: when pigs fly)
That discussion was very friendly between the main opponents, Linus and RMS, if I remember it correctly at all. There is a degradation in style and quality when Linus says he won't use a document that hasn't even been written.
Slashdot Mirror
Replying to myself, I just checked Wikipedia. Best Western has 4,000 hotels world-wide, 2,000 of which in North America. This means that the 1,312 hotels affected are probably all in continental Europe.
The article says 1,312, not 13,000.
Checking with Wikipedia, Best Western seems to have 4,000 hotels world-wide, 2,000 of which in North America. So it appears that yes, it's only the european continental hotels.
The Sunday Herald article is amazingly unclear about the scope of this breach. Which hotels are affected? The article says all "continental hotels". Does that, from a British Newspaper, mean european continental hotels only?
I stayed at Best Western in the US late last year. Luckily, I have since then changed to a different credit card than the one I used at the time.
The last time when a company I did business with lost my credit card details, I decided I wouldn't do anything about it until I really saw an unauthorized withdrawal from my account. Because in the past, when there was an unauthorized withdrawal (only happened to me once), a single phone call to the credit card company had been enough to get my money back (some 300 Euro). They said they would start to investigate it, but because it could take a long time, "here's your money back as a first measure."
With the recently stolen card info, I got a notice from my bank a few months later that they had to disable my card because there was an attempt to commit fraud with it. I got a new card with no further action required on my part.
Either way, this could turn out to be a big hassle for Best Western. If only they could let me know if my personal data was affected.
There used to be an ad here in Germany that showed a long row of cars, tightly packed after one another. Caption: "In principle, that's the right approach. Now everybody please go 240 km/h (150mph) at the same time."
It was an ad by the German railroad.
This article gives me a hunch why my no-name laptop battery dies so quickly even when Ubuntu still thinks it has 10% charge and several minutes left. Didn't happen with the manufacturer's battery...
Ubuntu usually does an excellent job analysing how good your battery really is (not sure if it's the kernel ACPI or HAL or GNOME that's actually doing it). But when the battery lies so blatantly, it seems even Ubuntu can't keep my laptop from sudden death without a proper warning or shutdown.
Fossil fuels come from plants who got their energy from the sun. Wind and water power are also powered by the Sun.
Right on the spot. We need to understand that solar energy is not some kind of exotic energy for funny cars. It is pretty much the only energy we have, compared to which all other forms of energy (nuclear, geothermal) pale into insignificance.
Using fossil fuels is actually a fairly inefficient form of using solar energy. It took millions of years to collect that energy and transform it into the fossil fuels as which it is now stored. Compare that to a few hours for recharging a battery from PV cells :-)
My favourite number in this context: The energy stored in all the fossil fuel in the earth's crust equals about 20 days of sunshine. Can't find the quote for that right now, but the numbers in the first few paragraphs here are pretty much in that ballpark.
German law is not based on precedent as much as US law is. The judges try to interpret the law and give their rationale why they came to a particular conclusion. Other judges can then follow that interpretation in subsequent cases. If they don't, they have to explain why they think the previous interpretation was wrong, or does not apply to the new case.
In the rationale for this particular case, they say that a WLAN owner would only be required to take action if he had concrete evidence of something unlawful happening on his connection. So it's really not restricted to copyright infringement.
A rumour that sounds about as trustworthy as an e-mail from Nigeria.
I think only a Slashdot Poll could answer this definitely.
Further anecdotal evidence, though: I've had a Lenovo T61 now for about two months, after having had a Pre-Lenovo T40 for more than four years, which had been my sturdiest Thinkpad up to that time. So far, I see no difference in the build quality of both machines, but only time will really tell.
The game publishing business seems very conservative. Many of the games that became classics over the last few decades were initially rejected by all of the major publishers: Mastermind, Monopoly, you name it. Even Sudoku took more than twenty years until it finally hit home.
A friend of mine developed the board game Friedrich, a strategy game about the Seven Years' War. It took him fifteen years to arrive at the final version, building very elaborate prototypes, and playing hundreds of games with friends who were acting as beta testers. The game was rejected by all major publishers he showed it to, mostly on the grounds that "it takes too long to play" (3-5 hours at least). After he'd mentioned that, every discussion was immediately over. My friend finally decided to publish the game himself, founding his own game publishing company. The game quickly achieved almost a cult following, both in Germany, where it was initially published, and in the US. I think some 4000 copies have been sold so far. It won the prize for the Best Historical Simulation by the American Games magazine in 2006.
So I'd say: Be prepared to go a long way, but it may well be worth it.
That's exactly the scenario that has been characterized as the fundamental weakness of AACS, the encryption mechanism of both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Congratulations for finding this out in less time than the engineers who designed it.
I can't help it, but the way this question is asked, it sounds very "official" to me. As if somebody in a big media corporation or record label wanted to find out what the masses think, or some such... But nevertheless, here's my two cents:
I don't think there can be any such thing as "illegal copying". Copying is a fundamental operation of any computer, and the internet means we can copy world-wide, instantly, at zero cost. Any mechanism that tries to make this impossible is trying to set the clock back to before the internet age. As many DRM-opponents have pointed out, trying to control copying in such a world amounts to establishing a police-state, no less.
The consequence is that artists, and distributors (in whichever form we may still need them), need to be paid by other means, NOT by the number of copies they distribute, NOT bound to the act of copying.
One idea is voluntary payment (think Magnatune). Another idea is that musicians, in particular, can shift to other means of generating income, e.g. concerts, public performances.
The economy is going to change. It has to, because copying can no longer be controlled. Altogether, this is a good thing, but it can turn into a very bad thing if people try very badly to keep this from happening.
Peter Gutmann has stated that your concerns hit the nail on the head. There are at least some monitors that are definitely not HDCP-enabled, even though the manufacturer claims otherwise. Plus, this is an issue that can't easly be rectified. You can't just buy an add-on device for HDCP, it has to be right inside the monitor, because the data stream must be encrypted right until it reaches the pixels.
I can't comment on the first, but as to the second point: This is essentially a rumour that was "leaked" at a conference, and picked up by journalists. Read the arstechnica article linked above. It links to a German article that is the original source for this "rumour". Conveniently for Sony and Microsoft, now everybody seems to be assured that all of this won't be real for a while. I doubt you'd get anything on paper.
For anyone who's been following the recent debates about Vista, this is already old news. But now the mainstream seems to be picking up on it.
What the article doesn't mention is that, probably precisely for this reason, there seems to be an agreement between Sony and Microsoft that HDCP protection won't actually be required by Blu-Ray discs until at least 2010, maybe even 2012. Remember, it's the disc that actually needs to require it, the operating system only provides this as an option.
That doesn't make the system anymore pleasing though. I wonder how far Microsoft will actually get with it. Customers do seem to get upset with this, and it wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has had to make "concessions" because of public criticism.
Peter Gutmann's paper on Vista's content protection is really recommended reading, even if it's a bit polemic. And nothing beats Microsoft's own document, written by the same guy that was interviewed for Times Online.
I think this is a great project. But step back for a moment and think what it means: If there was an earth-like civilization even very close to us, say, at Alpha Centauri, we've had no chance of detecting their stray radiation up until now. And with this new program, it's only within 30 light years that we might be successful. That's really our very, very close vicinity.
This, I think, puts the fact in perspective that SETI@home hasn't found any signal yet, even after years of listening. They would only be able to detect very powerful transmissions, much more powerful than anything our own civilization could produce.
The fact that we haven't found any artificial signals from space yet doesn't mean there's nobody out there.
Deserve it they do. This is the best service I have seen, well..., in quite a while. It will save me countless work. Thanks a lot for sharing this.
What I find interesting about the history of "radio" is that the word itself wasn't coined until some ten or twenty years after the invention. People used to call it "the wireless" before that. The guy who made up the word "radio" was an advertising expert named Waldo Warren. The same guy was later given the task to create a brand name for some of the early inventions of R. Buckminster Fuller. He came up with the word "Dymaxion", simply by jotting together syllables of random words Fuller used all the time: Dynamic Maximum Tension.
I like it that the word "radio" comes from the same heritage.
From the summary...
What Stallman says is that free access to information is a fundamental value that is more important than business models that may be standing in its way. Thus, in order to achieve free access to information, new business models may need to be developed. And this is exactly what's happening. There are many successful companies that don't hide their source, take Novell for an example. Take IBM's growing engagement with open source, their gradual transformation into a service-oriented company. And it's much more widespread among small businesses than among the big players who take long to adapt to a paradigm shift.
Amen to that, brother. Mod parent up.
Not bad. At some point I figured out how you could output 1's and 0's on the cassette port using machine language. So I started writing programs that made all sorts of tones on that port, going up, going down, changing the pulse-width. Man, that was my first synth! The only problem was that the audio output jack actually carried the same signal as the TV out jack (this was by construction, to save money). So as soon as you played sounds, the TV would show all sorts of psychedelic black and white patterns.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 which I got when I was twelve. Much more deeply than the actual computer I remember the moment when I had first switched it on and typed "print 2+2" on that piece of membrane pretending to be a keyboard ("print" was actually a function key, you couldn't type it letter by letter). I still remember my astonishment when I pressed the "New Line" field and the number "4" appeared in the top left corner of the screen. It was something radically different from a pocket calculator. Or so I felt. Since this moment the fascination of programming has never left me again.
They have pretty good spam protection as far as I know (and this is a form of spam), though I don't know the details. It's not very different from every other blog on the net which also faces similar problems.
I've played with both services as well, and I have now been a happy (and paying) last.fm user for several months. I don't quite share the author's enthusiasm about Pandora; in my case (and for some of the friends I tried it for), its recommendations were not quite that good.
The centralized music genome inventory that Pandora relies on reminds me of a Cathedral, while Last.fm is more like a Bazaar of babbling voices -- now I wonder where that metaphor comes from!
I think Last.fm has more potential because it is fundamentally a social service -- it feels a lot more like other open online communities I have come to know and love, whereas Pandora seems more like a black-box to me (something the review author also mentioned).
That discussion was very friendly between the main opponents, Linus and RMS, if I remember it correctly at all. There is a degradation in style and quality when Linus says he won't use a document that hasn't even been written.