I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then.
With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?
It's not DJ'ing in the strictest sense of the word, but I switched the sound system at the improv comedy club I'm a part of over from tapes and CDs to an MP3/OGG based system about a year ago to good results.
Under the tape and CD system, it took a significant amount of time to find the music selection that you needed. Even if the tapes and CDs were well-organized, it could take 20-30 seconds to find the right audio clip, where you'd need to be able to get it in 3-4 seconds to hit "the moment." Plus, especially with the tapes, you'd always have to worry if the person in front of you had rewound it to the right spot.
So I converted most of the common clips to MP3, wrote a Perl/Tk frontend running with XMMS, MySQL, and Linux to allow for quick searches, and put it into production. The results have been great - the people running the audio can get to their samples incredibly fast, and it really impresses the audience.
So a digital audio solution worked wonders for us, even though we're not the traditional "DJ".
Oh, I'm doing that too. It just seems like it'd be good to take the message to The People.
The People have been hearing for years about how computer hackers are evil, evil scum. If we can associate the *AA with hackers, it'd be a good PR win.
I sent off this Letter to the Editor to newspapers in Coble's 6th District in North Carolina (Greensboro, High Point, Burlington, Asheboro, Lexington) this morning, before the bill was officially introduced. Hopefully it'll get published in at least one of the papers:
###### To The Editor,
For years, Congress and law enforcement has been telling us about the dangers posed by computer hackers. They have warned computer users about how you should be on guard for the damage that hackers can do to your computer systems.
However, Rep. Howard Coble is preparing to submit a bill in Congress that would grant almost complete immunity to large music and movie companies to hack into your computers, if they have the suspicion that you might be sharing copyrighted files. No proof or involvement by law enforcement will be needed. And what's more, if they damage your computers in this vigilante action, you'll need to prove real damages of over $250 and get the permission of the US Attorney General to file suit against them.
What Rep. Coble is saying is that computer hacking is bad, unless you're a rich corporation with lots of money to provide in campaign donations. The hypocracy of such a bill is stunning. The voters of Congressional District 6 need to decide whether Rep. Coble is looking out for their interests, or Big Hollywood's.
Re:Is it time for the Geek community to target...
on
MPAA vs. Television
·
· Score: 2
While I'd tend to agree with you, I still think it's important to get the message out to people in South Carolina that Sen. Hollings is selling their VCRs out to Big Hollywood, a sellout that will bring no benefit to South Carolina. In this day of Enron, Worldcom, etc., Hollings is trying to legislate profits for multibilliondollar companies in California. At the very least, Hollings' opponent in '04 might be able to use that as ammunition against him.
The big thing with the NRA is that they're generally recognized as THE lobby on gun control issues. From what I can tell, the tech community (being those of us involved in it, not technology corporations) has no organized presence in DC, aside from several fledling groups that haven't really gotten off the ground yet.
I think that part of that might be the newness of the issues (the NRA is over 100 years old, so they've had plenty of time to build clout), but a lot of it seems to relate to the tech community as a whole's propensity toward splitting into lots of ultra-pure, ultra-focused camps due to disagreements (vi vs. emacs, Debian vs. Red Hat vs. Mandrake, Gnome vs. KDE, Free Software vs. Open Source). As long as we concentrate more on infighting than on the big picture, our opinions will be disregarded in favor of big-money corporate lobbies.
We certainly have no need to join up with the NRA in any sort of organizational sense, but we could learn a ton from the way they've been able to push and protect their issues from legislators who are out to get them.
Re:Is it time for the Geek community to target...
on
MPAA vs. Television
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What the tech community needs is a united front on the issues. Sure, there's the EFF, DigitalConsumer.org, anti-dmca.org, digitalspeech.org, publicknowledge.org, etc. etc. etc - all with varying degrees of influence, completeness, and scope. It really seems like a big duplication of effort.
Whether you like them or not, we could learn a lot from the National Rifle Association. The NRA has their "protecting our freedoms" issues, and they've managed to unite a group of fairly individualist people for a common goal. Legislators do not defy the NRA lightly in Congress, while they routinely screw over the tech industry. We need a solid lobby like the NRA to watch over our interests in Washington.
There's always hope, I guess.:-) The best solution is, of course, to stop the law before it starts. After that, we can just hope that most people ignore it.
It seems to me that palladium would face a similar challenge. How do they differentiate between a rogue board that pretends to be palladium compliant and a real one? Especially in a world with flashable BIOS?
What's to stop people from buying boards that will be palladium switchable? If you want to run Windows, you can set the BIOS one way, if you want to run Linux, you can set the BIOS to disregard it?
Technologically, there's no way to enforce it (and they know this). It would all depend on how many people Big Hollywood wanted to see arrested as to how many people would try to get around their DRM stuff. Throw enough people in jail for "hacking" and "pirating", and everyone else will be too scared to try to fight.
If MS wants to put the interests of the large media companies ahead of the interests of its own customers, the people who actually buy the computers and the software, why not let them take it to the market? Let's let the market decide what it thinks of that. Let's give them enough rope to hang themselves.
The thing that we have to worry about is some sort of legal framework that requires all computers to respect some DRM system.
Bingo. That's the danger with "letting the market decide" on DRM. If it was that simple, we wouldn't have anything to worry about, because DRM-restricted technology would die a firey death so horrible it'd make Circuit City's Divx look pretty. Big Hollywood knows this, so in addition to pushing DRM to the major technology players, they're going to Congress to make any technology that doesn't do DRM illegal.
So we'll get a situation where Microsoft/AOL/Sony/etc. all get the license to provide the legal DRM systems, and anyone who wants to develop any innovative new technology will have to get the blessing from the DRM priests before they can bring that technology to market. If you thought corporate technology monopolies were bad before, wait 5-10 years.
That being said: If every slashdot reader were to write a simple letter to their senators & congressmen about fair use, there'd be no stopping us. So go... right now... and write your letter, I plan to. If you don't, don't bitch about losing your fair use rights when it does happen.
I'll second that. At the VERY least, place a phone call to your US Senators and US Representative. This is a 30-second (literally) process, and is the bare minimum that anyone concerned by this issue should do. It at least gets another tick-mark in the "no" column for DRM issues.
By all means, if you're more motivated, write, fax , email, or even set up a meeting with your rep's local staffer. I did that - it's not bad, and you can usually get a meeting with them within a day or so.
If you need to brush up on talking points, Digital Consumer has a lot of great references, FAQs, etc. Make your points in a calm, logical manner, pointing out that DRM A) won't stop piracy, B) will retard the technological innovation that has pushed our economy in the past 50 years, and C) only serves the interests of a few fat-cat media cartels.
But, please, do something to help stop this. We as a community dropped the ball on the DMCA, and look where it's gotten us. We can't afford to do the same on DRM.
I would imagine that, unless Apple comes out with another promotion for current 10.1.x users, or you can sweet-talk one of their sales reps, that you're "screwed".:-/
Actually, your iTools account doesn't work for those forums. You need an "Apple Account", which you can use for stuff like downloading developer tools, etc.
At least that's what happened when I tried my iTools username/password.
I think you might be - what I took from the keynote was that the $20 upgrade pricing is ONLY for people who buy new Mac hardware between today and 8/24. Anyone else will have to pay the $129.
Jobs talks about the death of free internet services (email/storage/etc), and confirms that iTools will go away as of September 30. So it looks like the FAQ posted is correct.
I realize that you are trolling, but that's a good question. It comes down to what you consider "sharing" to mean. If it means playing the CD in your car with your friends or lending a CD to your friend, then that is totally within your rights. If you mean making it freely available to everyone who may cross your path, that is quite illegal, as Napster (and soon Gnutella and Kazaa) learned.
The point you seem to be missing is that there is no way for the technology to know whether someone is going to use a burned/ripped copy for legal/moral uses (portable MP3 player, emailing a song to your mother) or illegal/immoral uses (offering an entire album for download). None. When DRM technology will not let you rip a CD to your brand-new $400 MP3 player, do you think that complaning to the RIAA with "But this is within my rights!" will do anything?
Don't fool yourself into thinking the issue is about copyright law. The copyright cartels have tons of tools at their disposal to prosecute copyright violators - standard copyright law being the main one - tools that they have shown no inclination to use to actually, oh, stop copyright infringement. Their current push for legally-mandated DRM technology is about control, and only control. They want to be the ones to dictate how you can use the CDs and DVDs that you buy, the music that you download, the TV shows that you watch. Your rights to perform the "legal" copyright violations that you mention will be subject to the whims of Hollywood lawyers and profit margins.
If that's the future you want, so be it. I personally find it extremely distasteful that a small band of "special" corporations (MPAA, RIAA) are going to be allowed to have the blessed stamp of "producer," and as such determine what technology can be developed, and who is allowed to distribute "authorized" content. The issues are as old as copyright itself, only the distribution method has changed, which is allowing Hollywood to paint a doomsday picture of "You must allow us to control the technology in every digital device, or else the great Republic will fall due to a lack of HIGH VALUE DIGITAL CONTENT."
Spare me. If you work at an embedded systems company, and look forward to the day you have to license DRM technolgy from Hollywood for all of your systems, bully for you. A large number of us, however, see that "copyright" is merely the smokescreen for the larger issue.
The Technology Administration of the US Dept. of Commerce will be holding a public workshop on DRM on Wednesday, July 17, 2002. There are no details as to time, location, etc. on their site, but there is a public comment form.
So even if you can't do anything on the 17th, feel free to send the government your thoughts on DRM and its place in technology.
It's closed-source, commerical software, but I've been a big fan of NetTracker from Sane Solutions for a few years now.
I use it in an ISP environment, running with Apache logs on FreeBSD, and haven't had a problem with it yet. Plus, their support is outstanding.
It's one of the few pieces of closed-source software I have recommended. They have a demo version, so you can try it out on your logfiles and see if it works for you. But I highly recommend it.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with Sane aside from being a happy customer
The day I can send the music companies an album on vinyl or tape, or send them a broken CD, and get a replacement back on the media of my choosing for the cost of shipping, is the day I'll buy the "You're buying content, not the delivery device" argument.
Slashdot Mirror
Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina is at 1-202-224-3154, and the bill is S.2395. Call now!
(Not that it'll help - he's blatantly whored himself out to Big Hollywood, but we've got to do our part).
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then.
With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?
It's not DJ'ing in the strictest sense of the word, but I switched the sound system at the improv comedy club I'm a part of over from tapes and CDs to an MP3/OGG based system about a year ago to good results.
Under the tape and CD system, it took a significant amount of time to find the music selection that you needed. Even if the tapes and CDs were well-organized, it could take 20-30 seconds to find the right audio clip, where you'd need to be able to get it in 3-4 seconds to hit "the moment." Plus, especially with the tapes, you'd always have to worry if the person in front of you had rewound it to the right spot.
So I converted most of the common clips to MP3, wrote a Perl/Tk frontend running with XMMS, MySQL, and Linux to allow for quick searches, and put it into production. The results have been great - the people running the audio can get to their samples incredibly fast, and it really impresses the audience.
So a digital audio solution worked wonders for us, even though we're not the traditional "DJ".
Shows me what I get for not running "ispell" on it before I sent it. Consider me and my English teacher mother properly shamed. :-)
Oh, I'm doing that too. It just seems like it'd be good to take the message to The People.
The People have been hearing for years about how computer hackers are evil, evil scum. If we can associate the *AA with hackers, it'd be a good PR win.
I sent off this Letter to the Editor to newspapers in Coble's 6th District in North Carolina (Greensboro, High Point, Burlington, Asheboro, Lexington) this morning, before the bill was officially introduced. Hopefully it'll get published in at least one of the papers:
######
To The Editor,
For years, Congress and law enforcement has been telling us about the dangers posed by computer hackers. They have warned computer users about how you should be on guard for the damage that hackers can do to your computer systems.
However, Rep. Howard Coble is preparing to submit a bill in Congress that would grant almost complete immunity to large music and movie companies to hack into your computers, if they have the suspicion that you might be sharing copyrighted files. No proof or involvement by law enforcement will be needed. And what's more, if they damage your computers in this vigilante action, you'll need to prove real damages of over $250 and get the permission of the US Attorney General to file suit against them.
What Rep. Coble is saying is that computer hacking is bad, unless you're a rich corporation with lots of money to provide in campaign donations. The hypocracy of such a bill is stunning. The voters of Congressional District 6 need to decide whether Rep. Coble is looking out for their interests, or Big Hollywood's.
While I'd tend to agree with you, I still think it's important to get the message out to people in South Carolina that Sen. Hollings is selling their VCRs out to Big Hollywood, a sellout that will bring no benefit to South Carolina. In this day of Enron, Worldcom, etc., Hollings is trying to legislate profits for multibilliondollar companies in California. At the very least, Hollings' opponent in '04 might be able to use that as ammunition against him.
The big thing with the NRA is that they're generally recognized as THE lobby on gun control issues. From what I can tell, the tech community (being those of us involved in it, not technology corporations) has no organized presence in DC, aside from several fledling groups that haven't really gotten off the ground yet.
I think that part of that might be the newness of the issues (the NRA is over 100 years old, so they've had plenty of time to build clout), but a lot of it seems to relate to the tech community as a whole's propensity toward splitting into lots of ultra-pure, ultra-focused camps due to disagreements (vi vs. emacs, Debian vs. Red Hat vs. Mandrake, Gnome vs. KDE, Free Software vs. Open Source). As long as we concentrate more on infighting than on the big picture, our opinions will be disregarded in favor of big-money corporate lobbies.
We certainly have no need to join up with the NRA in any sort of organizational sense, but we could learn a ton from the way they've been able to push and protect their issues from legislators who are out to get them.
What the tech community needs is a united front on the issues. Sure, there's the EFF, DigitalConsumer.org, anti-dmca.org, digitalspeech.org, publicknowledge.org, etc. etc. etc - all with varying degrees of influence, completeness, and scope. It really seems like a big duplication of effort.
Whether you like them or not, we could learn a lot from the National Rifle Association. The NRA has their "protecting our freedoms" issues, and they've managed to unite a group of fairly individualist people for a common goal. Legislators do not defy the NRA lightly in Congress, while they routinely screw over the tech industry. We need a solid lobby like the NRA to watch over our interests in Washington.
There's always hope, I guess. :-) The best solution is, of course, to stop the law before it starts. After that, we can just hope that most people ignore it.
It seems to me that palladium would face a similar challenge. How do they differentiate between a rogue board that pretends to be palladium compliant and a real one? Especially in a world with flashable BIOS?
What's to stop people from buying boards that will be palladium switchable? If you want to run Windows, you can set the BIOS one way, if you want to run Linux, you can set the BIOS to disregard it?
Technologically, there's no way to enforce it (and they know this). It would all depend on how many people Big Hollywood wanted to see arrested as to how many people would try to get around their DRM stuff. Throw enough people in jail for "hacking" and "pirating", and everyone else will be too scared to try to fight.
The thing that we have to worry about is some sort of legal framework that requires all computers to respect some DRM system.
Bingo. That's the danger with "letting the market decide" on DRM. If it was that simple, we wouldn't have anything to worry about, because DRM-restricted technology would die a firey death so horrible it'd make Circuit City's Divx look pretty. Big Hollywood knows this, so in addition to pushing DRM to the major technology players, they're going to Congress to make any technology that doesn't do DRM illegal.
So we'll get a situation where Microsoft/AOL/Sony/etc. all get the license to provide the legal DRM systems, and anyone who wants to develop any innovative new technology will have to get the blessing from the DRM priests before they can bring that technology to market. If you thought corporate technology monopolies were bad before, wait 5-10 years.
Cool. Hopefully they'll also update their PPM repository, where many modules are a year and a half old. Perl/Tk, for example, is two revisions behind.
Pretty cool. I'm just waiting until Perl/Tk gets ported over to OS X natively, instead of needing an X server. That'll be nice. :-)
And when AOL/TW buys the Broadcast Flag from Congress, you may still be able to use their set-top box to record one or two shows a year! Groovy! ;-)
That being said: If every slashdot reader were to write a simple letter to their senators & congressmen about fair use, there'd be no stopping us. So go... right now... and write your letter, I plan to. If you don't, don't bitch about losing your fair use rights when it does happen.
I'll second that. At the VERY least, place a phone call to your US Senators and US Representative. This is a 30-second (literally) process, and is the bare minimum that anyone concerned by this issue should do. It at least gets another tick-mark in the "no" column for DRM issues.
By all means, if you're more motivated, write, fax , email, or even set up a meeting with your rep's local staffer. I did that - it's not bad, and you can usually get a meeting with them within a day or so.
If you need to brush up on talking points, Digital Consumer has a lot of great references, FAQs, etc. Make your points in a calm, logical manner, pointing out that DRM A) won't stop piracy, B) will retard the technological innovation that has pushed our economy in the past 50 years, and C) only serves the interests of a few fat-cat media cartels.
But, please, do something to help stop this. We as a community dropped the ball on the DMCA, and look where it's gotten us. We can't afford to do the same on DRM.
I would imagine that, unless Apple comes out with another promotion for current 10.1.x users, or you can sweet-talk one of their sales reps, that you're "screwed". :-/
Actually, your iTools account doesn't work for those forums. You need an "Apple Account", which you can use for stuff like downloading developer tools, etc.
At least that's what happened when I tried my iTools username/password.
The sentiment's the same, though.
Looks like Apple is actively moderating that forum - I saw the number of topics go from 8 to 2 in a few minutes while I was reading them.
I think you might be - what I took from the keynote was that the $20 upgrade pricing is ONLY for people who buy new Mac hardware between today and 8/24. Anyone else will have to pay the $129.
Jobs talks about the death of free internet services (email/storage/etc), and confirms that iTools will go away as of September 30. So it looks like the FAQ posted is correct.
$99 a year.
I realize that you are trolling, but that's a good question. It comes down to what you consider "sharing" to mean. If it means playing the CD in your car with your friends or lending a CD to your friend, then that is totally within your rights. If you mean making it freely available to everyone who may cross your path, that is quite illegal, as Napster (and soon Gnutella and Kazaa) learned.
The point you seem to be missing is that there is no way for the technology to know whether someone is going to use a burned/ripped copy for legal/moral uses (portable MP3 player, emailing a song to your mother) or illegal/immoral uses (offering an entire album for download). None. When DRM technology will not let you rip a CD to your brand-new $400 MP3 player, do you think that complaning to the RIAA with "But this is within my rights!" will do anything?
Don't fool yourself into thinking the issue is about copyright law. The copyright cartels have tons of tools at their disposal to prosecute copyright violators - standard copyright law being the main one - tools that they have shown no inclination to use to actually, oh, stop copyright infringement. Their current push for legally-mandated DRM technology is about control, and only control. They want to be the ones to dictate how you can use the CDs and DVDs that you buy, the music that you download, the TV shows that you watch. Your rights to perform the "legal" copyright violations that you mention will be subject to the whims of Hollywood lawyers and profit margins.
If that's the future you want, so be it. I personally find it extremely distasteful that a small band of "special" corporations (MPAA, RIAA) are going to be allowed to have the blessed stamp of "producer," and as such determine what technology can be developed, and who is allowed to distribute "authorized" content. The issues are as old as copyright itself, only the distribution method has changed, which is allowing Hollywood to paint a doomsday picture of "You must allow us to control the technology in every digital device, or else the great Republic will fall due to a lack of HIGH VALUE DIGITAL CONTENT."
Spare me. If you work at an embedded systems company, and look forward to the day you have to license DRM technolgy from Hollywood for all of your systems, bully for you. A large number of us, however, see that "copyright" is merely the smokescreen for the larger issue.
The Technology Administration of the US Dept. of Commerce will be holding a public workshop on DRM on Wednesday, July 17, 2002. There are no details as to time, location, etc. on their site, but there is a public comment form.
So even if you can't do anything on the 17th, feel free to send the government your thoughts on DRM and its place in technology.
It's closed-source, commerical software, but I've been a big fan of NetTracker from Sane Solutions for a few years now.
I use it in an ISP environment, running with Apache logs on FreeBSD, and haven't had a problem with it yet. Plus, their support is outstanding.
It's one of the few pieces of closed-source software I have recommended. They have a demo version, so you can try it out on your logfiles and see if it works for you. But I highly recommend it.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with Sane aside from being a happy customer
The day I can send the music companies an album on vinyl or tape, or send them a broken CD, and get a replacement back on the media of my choosing for the cost of shipping, is the day I'll buy the "You're buying content, not the delivery device" argument.