Copy protection is just stupid. These companies spend all this money to prevent it from getting cracked, but it always does in the end.
More to the point they have failed to learn the lessons of 20 or so years ago. Where all sorts of exotic copy protection techniques were tried with software. The real irony is that it is quite possible that some of the users of cracked software have actually bought licences for it.
I'm a little surprised--why did it take so long for someone to do this? It seems that lately every freakin' copy protection scheme that comes out is cracked within minutes.
In this context "comes out" means that the format is being bought by a significent amount of people.
Maybe Jon Johansen was asleep for this one?
Maybe they don't sell these kind of DVDs in Norway.
Now the copyright cartel will probably just kill the format, and try again with stronger encryption.
The problem isn't so much the strength of the encryption. It's more that they are trying to use encryption to do something encryption isn't very good at doing.
This, of course, is not meant by me to imply that any form of mass-consumer DRM is at all uncrackable. They're all doomed in my view.
Hence they are often combined with legislation to attempt to outlaw cryptoanalysis.
I wonder how the case would have gone had the guy just been selling modded console sans illegal software.
It looks like the court did not actually think the games were worth much anyway. Certainly nothing like retail price. Note that the £750 isn't a fine it's his court costs. 38 hard disks containing 80 games equates to 3,040 games. He has 140 hours of community service, thus a game equates to under 3 minutes worth of of work. 140 hours @ £4.20/hour equates to £588. Dividing this by 3,040 gives £0.19. (Which equates to 0.33 USD or 0.28 EUR.)
In Canada downloading *absolutely is* legal. There have been rulings on this point from the high courts, and the CPCC is steamed about it.
Or possibly they are upset that there isn't an easy way to lobby the Canadian Judiciary.
The comment from the minister in charge of these things was something like "It is very disappointing to discover that this is the case in Canadian law. We'll have to fix that."
Do Canadians, who's interests said minister should be looking after, think things are "broken" in the first place.
Even if it were a criminal offense, it would be a stupid thing to try to prosecute. The burden of proof in criminal court is "beyond reasonable doubt." Hard for downloads, only really worth trying for distribution.
Even though in theory many pieces of P2P software perform both upload and download it is perfectly possible for a specific file only to be downloaded...
Don't forget about these people. Skyramps were Werner von Braun's original idea for putting things into orbit. Arrayed against him were the USAF, who favored vertically-launched rockets because they could quickly be fired off in annihillating volleys at the Soviets,
You can just as easily use "skyramps" to launch missiles, as demonstrated by the Luftwaffe. The problem is that they can be more easily damaged by enemy attack than harderned silos.
Tell me if you like the fit of my tinfoil hat- but here goes:
Does anyone really belive that the US doesnt have a shuttle like craft? I am sure the military has some type of way to get up and work on sattelites without the shuttle.
It would be rather hard to hide launching such a vehicle. Trying to hide a launch from a miltary base would be rather stupid, since the obvious "wrong conclusion" would be that an ICBM was being launched. Returning a shuttle type vehicle to Earth is, if anything, even less stealthy than launching one.
NASA should take a leaf from the bidding manual of the United States Air Force (USAF) and open up bidding for the next shuttle to both American and Japanese companies.
Why Japanese companies? Wouldn't it be better to approach Russian companies, assuming that the idea is to build a manned spacecraft which dosn't kill it's crew.
These are the most ridiculus set of rules for computer use I have ever seen. Not allowed to install software on the laptop?
They are being loaned computers which belong to someone else. This isn't that different from the sort of policies employers might apply to laptops issued to employees. Though an employer might well simply fire an employee who violated such rules and call the cops....
Are they afraid some student might install Java, Perl, or Python and actually learn how to program? Are they afraid the students would install photoshop/gimp and be artistic?
How do you know that this software isn't amongst that already installed?
The school could have had just as good an effect by suspending those involved briefly and billing their parents for the board tech's time required to re-image the ibooks.
Assuming they could be persuaded to pay.
Instead, they decide to jump on the "Cybercrime is teh evil!" bandwagon and go apeshit.
Without inside information it's hard to know if this is the first or last approach taken. Maybe something like this did happen to the majority of the offenders, but the minority said "no way, do your worst"...
Hell, a kid in my district got 12 days out of school suspension for getting around the BESS Proxy wheres a kid who ripped a hunk of flesh off of another one's chest got 2 days in school suspension.
Is there any reason why the injuried student (or their parents) did not go to the police?
But what if teacher-a asks a student to bring his walkman to help with an AV project, and teacher-b blindly following the rules and confiscates it, and teacher-a fails the student for not being able to complete their project. Sounds silly... I've seen this happen.
In which case the person at fault is teacher-a. They have set a very bad example to the student and wasted teacher-b's time. If teacher-a wants the rules to be varied then it is entirely their responsibility to follow the relevent procedures for doing so and informing anyone who needs to know. In this kind of situation the teachers are in the position of enforceing the rules. Whilst inconsitant enforcment of rules tends to lead to poor school discipline even worst is where people who are ment to be enforcing rules encourage breaking them.
Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that criminals should not be allowed to vote, which makes a pretty convenient way for legislators to disenfranchise the segments of society who might not agree with what they're doing.
It might be a better idea, in practice, to disbar criminals from holding office...
There is no reason why imaging should require anything more than booting off a floppy and grabbing an image from a network server. That takes all of 10 seconds (not 10 minutes).
Many floppy disks are rather less than reliable. Floppy disk drives and teenages do not mix at all. A drive containing the broken off shield from a disk will take longer than 10 seconds to read anything. Ditto for one which has been stuffed with paper, blutack, chocolate, etc.
The only problem with this idea is not the labor overhead but what you do if, say, something does go wrong (say hardware failure) just before a final paper is due. And you image the computer thinking it was the student's fault, thereby erasing the important paper and then find out it is hardware?
In the case of a laptop you have a three stage process. 1) backup user data. 2) re-image. 3) restore user data. Which is far more time consuming than a network workstation. Where everthing can be saved on a server. N.B. In both cases if said student has saved something anywhere other than where they should have then it's their own fault if they lose their work.
What the heck is "violence policy" and how it is different in the US schools from "the laws of the land"?
More to the point these "policies" don't supercede the "law of the land". Which has lead to interesting situations of students being convicted by what amount to "kangaroo courts" then later aquitted by a real criminal court. Especially embarassing for the school concerned if it's the alleged defendant insisting on the involvement of the criminal justice system.
Altering the OS of your school provided laptop is probably not illegal, depending on what exactly you do.
The relevent factor here is who owns the laptop. If it actually belongs to the student they can do what they like to it. Several sections of the FAQ, such as requiring to pay for insurance as a pre-condition of taking the computer off site, requring a protective bag and enforced collection at certain times of the year imply that these are not the property of the students. Instead they are school property being loaned to students. No different from text books, if you want a textbook you can deface you can buy your own. Ditto with laptops.
Are you kidding? Telco's idea of a "redundant circuit" is two wires in the same conduit.
Or two conduits in the same trench. Even a conduit either side of the same (low) bridge. Too often what gets overlooked is that a system is only as redundent as its least redundent part.
It's not quite everyone, but there a good portion of websites will give non-working output or refuse to give full functionality if you give them the opera user agent string. If you give them IE or even usually Mozilla, they give complete working output.
There's even a few which accept Netscape, but not Firefox. There's also the situation where the user agent checking is only done on one specific page, so if you bypass the initial page just about any browser will work without problems.
And what about MS' "corporate responsibility" to stop copyright infringement? Since Microsoft has a (long) history of infringing on other people's IP why should they care unless their IP is involved?
Well, the point of a birthday is to celebrate the anniversary of the instant at which you were born. So the most correct thing to do would be store that event as a time rather than a date, and then if you are in a different time zone at the time, it doesn't matter, because it's stored as an event in UTC, and will show up on the correct day which corresponds to the correct time at that other point on Earth where you were actually born.
You'd need to add some logic to handle leap years. Not just for people born on the 29th of Febuary. You might even get situation where someone being born on the 31st December, in a leap year, i.e. day 366 would confuse some software.
Yes, I have exactly the same timezone handling requirement and surprisingly, the evolution calendar does it right.
Getting a 21st century machine to understand a 19th century concept should be a "no brainer". That people can be suprised when software does the right thing shows how low popular expectations are.
You can set separate timezones for the beginning and end of an event, which I particularly like for entering flights with the "local times" listed on the airline itinerary.
A fairly common way for airlines to give the timings of flights to passengers. Wonder how well the Microsoft stuff coped when Concorde was still flying:)
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I think the odds are in favour of "Al-Qaeda" affiliated groups.
"Al-Qaeda" might as well equate to "unknown".
As others have pointed out there is no monolithic AQ organisation; any random wannabe-martyr can blow people up and claim it for A.Q.
The more or less have to now, otherwise the press won't take them seriously.
Copy protection is just stupid. These companies spend all this money to prevent it from getting cracked, but it always does in the end.
More to the point they have failed to learn the lessons of 20 or so years ago. Where all sorts of exotic copy protection techniques were tried with software.
The real irony is that it is quite possible that some of the users of cracked software have actually bought licences for it.
The only "secure" media format is a CD laminated between two plates of steel.
No doubt you could still extract the data from such a CD. AFAIK steel is not completly opaque to X-rays.
I'm a little surprised--why did it take so long for someone to do this? It seems that lately every freakin' copy protection scheme that comes out is cracked within minutes.
In this context "comes out" means that the format is being bought by a significent amount of people.
Maybe Jon Johansen was asleep for this one?
Maybe they don't sell these kind of DVDs in Norway.
Now the copyright cartel will probably just kill the format, and try again with stronger encryption.
The problem isn't so much the strength of the encryption. It's more that they are trying to use encryption to do something encryption isn't very good at doing.
This, of course, is not meant by me to imply that any form of mass-consumer DRM is at all uncrackable. They're all doomed in my view.
Hence they are often combined with legislation to attempt to outlaw cryptoanalysis.
I wonder how the case would have gone had the guy just been selling modded console sans illegal software.
It looks like the court did not actually think the games were worth much anyway. Certainly nothing like retail price. Note that the £750 isn't a fine it's his court costs. 38 hard disks containing 80 games equates to 3,040 games. He has 140 hours of community service, thus a game equates to under 3 minutes worth of of work. 140 hours @ £4.20/hour equates to £588. Dividing this by 3,040 gives £0.19. (Which equates to 0.33 USD or 0.28 EUR.)
In Canada downloading *absolutely is* legal. There have been rulings on this point from the high courts, and the CPCC is steamed about it.
Or possibly they are upset that there isn't an easy way to lobby the Canadian Judiciary.
The comment from the minister in charge of these things was something like "It is very disappointing to discover that this is the case in Canadian law. We'll have to fix that."
Do Canadians, who's interests said minister should be looking after, think things are "broken" in the first place.
Even if it were a criminal offense, it would be a stupid thing to try to prosecute. The burden of proof in criminal court is "beyond reasonable doubt." Hard for downloads, only really worth trying for distribution.
Even though in theory many pieces of P2P software perform both upload and download it is perfectly possible for a specific file only to be downloaded...
Don't forget about these people. Skyramps were Werner von Braun's original idea for putting things into orbit. Arrayed against him were the USAF, who favored vertically-launched rockets because they could quickly be fired off in annihillating volleys at the Soviets,
You can just as easily use "skyramps" to launch missiles, as demonstrated by the Luftwaffe. The problem is that they can be more easily damaged by enemy attack than harderned silos.
Tell me if you like the fit of my tinfoil hat- but here goes:
Does anyone really belive that the US doesnt have a shuttle like craft? I am sure the military has some type of way to get up and work on sattelites without the shuttle.
It would be rather hard to hide launching such a vehicle. Trying to hide a launch from a miltary base would be rather stupid, since the obvious "wrong conclusion" would be that an ICBM was being launched.
Returning a shuttle type vehicle to Earth is, if anything, even less stealthy than launching one.
NASA should take a leaf from the bidding manual of the United States Air Force (USAF) and open up bidding for the next shuttle to both American and Japanese companies.
Why Japanese companies? Wouldn't it be better to approach Russian companies, assuming that the idea is to build a manned spacecraft which dosn't kill it's crew.
These are the most ridiculus set of rules for computer use I have ever seen. Not allowed to install software on the laptop?
They are being loaned computers which belong to someone else. This isn't that different from the sort of policies employers might apply to laptops issued to employees.
Though an employer might well simply fire an employee who violated such rules and call the cops....
Are they afraid some student might install Java, Perl, or Python and actually learn how to program? Are they afraid the students would install photoshop/gimp and be artistic?
How do you know that this software isn't amongst that already installed?
The school could have had just as good an effect by suspending those involved briefly and billing their parents for the board tech's time required to re-image the ibooks.
Assuming they could be persuaded to pay.
Instead, they decide to jump on the "Cybercrime is teh evil!" bandwagon and go apeshit.
Without inside information it's hard to know if this is the first or last approach taken. Maybe something like this did happen to the majority of the offenders, but the minority said "no way, do your worst"...
Hell, a kid in my district got 12 days out of school suspension for getting around the BESS Proxy wheres a kid who ripped a hunk of flesh off of another one's chest got 2 days in school suspension.
Is there any reason why the injuried student (or their parents) did not go to the police?
But what if teacher-a asks a student to bring his walkman to help with an AV project, and teacher-b blindly following the rules and confiscates it, and teacher-a fails the student for not being able to complete their project. Sounds silly... I've seen this happen.
In which case the person at fault is teacher-a. They have set a very bad example to the student and wasted teacher-b's time. If teacher-a wants the rules to be varied then it is entirely their responsibility to follow the relevent procedures for doing so and informing anyone who needs to know. In this kind of situation the teachers are in the position of enforceing the rules. Whilst inconsitant enforcment of rules tends to lead to poor school discipline even worst is where people who are ment to be enforcing rules encourage breaking them.
Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that criminals should not be allowed to vote, which makes a pretty convenient way for legislators to disenfranchise the segments of society who might not agree with what they're doing.
It might be a better idea, in practice, to disbar criminals from holding office...
There is no reason why imaging should require anything more than booting off a floppy and grabbing an image from a network server. That takes all of 10 seconds (not 10 minutes).
Many floppy disks are rather less than reliable. Floppy disk drives and teenages do not mix at all. A drive containing the broken off shield from a disk will take longer than 10 seconds to read anything. Ditto for one which has been stuffed with paper, blutack, chocolate, etc.
The only problem with this idea is not the labor overhead but what you do if, say, something does go wrong (say hardware failure) just before a final paper is due. And you image the computer thinking it was the student's fault, thereby erasing the important paper and then find out it is hardware?
In the case of a laptop you have a three stage process. 1) backup user data. 2) re-image. 3) restore user data.
Which is far more time consuming than a network workstation. Where everthing can be saved on a server.
N.B. In both cases if said student has saved something anywhere other than where they should have then it's their own fault if they lose their work.
What the heck is "violence policy" and how it is different in the US schools from "the laws of the land"?
More to the point these "policies" don't supercede the "law of the land". Which has lead to interesting situations of students being convicted by what amount to "kangaroo courts" then later aquitted by a real criminal court. Especially embarassing for the school concerned if it's the alleged defendant insisting on the involvement of the criminal justice system.
Altering the OS of your school provided laptop is probably not illegal, depending on what exactly you do.
The relevent factor here is who owns the laptop. If it actually belongs to the student they can do what they like to it. Several sections of the FAQ, such as requiring to pay for insurance as a pre-condition of taking the computer off site, requring a protective bag and enforced collection at certain times of the year imply that these are not the property of the students. Instead they are school property being loaned to students. No different from text books, if you want a textbook you can deface you can buy your own. Ditto with laptops.
I'm just glad terrorists didn't do this in the US. Who knows what would have happened.
The DHS would be wanting customer records from all pet shops as well as recruiting forensic veninary dentists.
Are you kidding? Telco's idea of a "redundant circuit" is two wires in the same conduit.
Or two conduits in the same trench. Even a conduit either side of the same (low) bridge.
Too often what gets overlooked is that a system is only as redundent as its least redundent part.
Reviewed by Sanjiv D. Shah...it looks like s/he knows what s/he is doing.
But when are Penn and Teller going to review the USPO? There's probably enough material there to keep them going for a whole series.
It's not quite everyone, but there a good portion of websites will give non-working output or refuse to give full functionality if you give them the opera user agent string. If you give them IE or even usually Mozilla, they give complete working output.
There's even a few which accept Netscape, but not Firefox. There's also the situation where the user agent checking is only done on one specific page, so if you bypass the initial page just about any browser will work without problems.
And what about MS' "corporate responsibility" to stop copyright infringement?
Since Microsoft has a (long) history of infringing on other people's IP why should they care unless their IP is involved?
Well, the point of a birthday is to celebrate the anniversary of the instant at which you were born. So the most correct thing to do would be store that event as a time rather than a date, and then if you are in a different time zone at the time, it doesn't matter, because it's stored as an event in UTC, and will show up on the correct day which corresponds to the correct time at that other point on Earth where you were actually born.
You'd need to add some logic to handle leap years. Not just for people born on the 29th of Febuary. You might even get situation where someone being born on the 31st December, in a leap year, i.e. day 366 would confuse some software.
Yes, I have exactly the same timezone handling requirement and surprisingly, the evolution calendar does it right.
:)
Getting a 21st century machine to understand a 19th century concept should be a "no brainer". That people can be suprised when software does the right thing shows how low popular expectations are.
You can set separate timezones for the beginning and end of an event, which I particularly like for entering flights with the "local times" listed on the airline itinerary.
A fairly common way for airlines to give the timings of flights to passengers. Wonder how well the Microsoft stuff coped when Concorde was still flying