What they are worried about, however, are the factories in Asia that now have the ability to produce millions of identical copies of big-budget DVDs.
CSS has no effect whatsoever on these guys -- they just copy the disk, CSS key block and all, using the same sort of mass-pressing equipment as the legitimate publishers. At most, they might need to change the region coding. /.
If linux dvd had been available, would the dvd hackers have been someone like MoRE, a small group of brilliant hackers doing it for glory and freedom of information who come out looking like heroes? More likely it would have been a group of people in the pay of a DVD piracy syndicate in a third world country.
The pirate outfits large enough to be economically significant never needed to crack CSS. They simply copy the DVD, CSS keys and all, using essentially the same equipment as the legitimate publishers (as opposed to ordinary recordable DVD units for computers, which don't write a CSS key track and would thus produce an unreadable disk if used to copy an encrypted DVD).
I suppose that if the DVD owners hadn't left Linux users shut out, somebody might have eventually cracked CSS, but the only motivation would have been the classic one for climbing Mount Everest: because it's there. /.
But DVDs take 9GB or more, and its already compressed! Illegal videos ripped from DVDs are not going to start flying across the "internet" like this journalist implies.
Normally, I wouldn't be picky about typos, but you put the sneer quotes around the wrong word. They should be around "journalist".... /.
First of all, trying to remove 'consumer' ability to record 'standard' audio CDs and work with them on the computer is already way out of line.
Indeed. The simple fact of the matter is that a consumer has the legal right (under US law) to create a backup copy of a recording that he has legitimately purchased. Interfering with this process through mandated "antipiracy" features is a cheat and a fraud.
The bottom line is the same as it is for crypto, guns, or photocopiers: prosecutions of illegal acts committed using the tools are legitimate; blanket restrictions on the tools are not.
Aren't pirates a really useful excuse to make sure that people in general don't end up getting the technology they need to produce their own art, music and FILMS without depending entirely on the entertainment industries for anything of that nature?
The simple facts are: 1)Only a few idiots and 3133+ hacquer d00dz (but I repeat myself...) would spend hours copying a $19.95 DVD movie onto a $29.95 DVD blank with home equipment, 2)The real piracy problem is from knockoff factories in see-no-evil jurisdictions, which use the same mass-production equipment as the legitimate publishers, and 3)The people charged with protecting the legitimate IP interests of the studios know facts (1) and (2).
So, yes, you may be on to something with your theory about Hollywood's hidden agenda.
One of the masters pegged it -- in the very first story he sold, no less:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all."
-- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
Er, have you ever heard of an arcane concept known as "data compression"? Motion picture data is very highly compressible because of its high redundancy (i.e. almost every frame is very similar to the one before). /.
Got news for you: Lots of killings happen in Europe, too, they just don't get the press that this one did.
Actually, they do. The last two times European governments got out of control, they racked up body counts of about six million and about ten million. The former got more press, but they're both fairly well-known. /.
I think the simple solution is to just up the encryption level on the CSS to 128 bits.
Can this be done in a manner backward-compatible with existing CSS, using the existing 40-bit key as part of the 128-bit key (similar to one of the weak-crypto arrangements the NSA attempted to foist on the industry, in which 128-bit algorithms would be used, but only 40 bits of key space would really vary, the rest being added in a way that made them accessible to the NSA)? /.
The economics of the situation (legitimate DVD copies of major movies selling for $20-$30) just don't make piracy profitable enough to have a major effect on the bottom line. The only way for pirates to make money in that environment is to organize on a scale that makes them big fat targets for any government that gives a flip about the matter (which is the underlying problem in East Asia). /.
2)Copying DVD movies for personal use, trading with friends, etc.: a Little Immoral
2.1)Copying DVD movies for personal use (e.g. backup, format conversion): Not Immoral. (Also Not Illegal, FUD to the contrary notwithstanding.)
2.1.1)Interposing technological barriers to (2.1) above: Immoral. (Not Illegal, but current practice of mandating it without consumer consent should be illegal.)
Anyone who installed the Real Jukebox had a choice not to.
What part of the term "informed consent" is unclear?
By your 'reasoning', if you pick up a word processing program and it secretly sends everything you type to the FBI, you have no complaint coming -- you had a choice not to install a word processor.
Again, this is why fraud and misrepresentation are illegal in civilized countries. /.
Wherever you go in North America today, you will hear something about homesexuality [sic], drugs, weird sexual tandancies [sic]... Sure all these are for people IF and only IF they choose to be part of them. Why do these have to be forced on everybody else?
"You don't like the Goths?"
"No! Not with the persecution we have to put up with!" "Persecution?" Padway raised his eyebrows. "Religious persecution. We won't stand for it forever." "But I thought the Goths let everybody worship as they pleased." "That's just it! We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their business unmolested, as if they owned the country! If that isn't persecution, I'd like to know what is!" -- L. Sprague deCamp (Lest Darkness Fall)
This almost certainly has nothing to do with spam, and a lot to do with the $10m of investors money that disappeared.
The two differ only in trivial details. The bottom line is that these two engaged in theft as a way of life, and finally made the mistake of robbing the wrong person. The Universe punishes stupidity by death, with no appeal. /.
What the hell is the Bureau of ALCOHOL TOBACCO AND FIREARMS doing getting involved in this?
Given that agency's history, they have an obvious interest in developing a program to identify dangerous violent people, in order to target their recruitment efforts. /.
Perhaps they've actually done something GOOD with this program. Perhaps they've found more of the real issues that can influence violent and troubled kids. How do we know this tool isn't a good thing, finding people in danger before something happens?
Your generosity is perhaps commendable in an abstract sense, but misplaced here. The government and its school system have perpetrated so many abuses and idiocies that the default has shifted: any prudent person assumes that they are in the wrong unless and until they prove otherwise. Extending a presumption of good faith and competence is as foolish as hiring somebody who just got out of prison for embezzlement as your accountant. /.
If every ten hours you need to charge up the batteries then you might as well download a different chunk of music while you're at it.
The main problem with MP3 portables is that loading in a new selection of music is awkward (connect to a computer and wait for the files to transfer) compared to a CD/tape player (remove one, insert another). What I'd like to see is a player that could read MP3s from a CD with enough buffer memory that it could store a good chunk of the contents and only occasionally have to spin the disk.
As for the battery life, 10 hours is plenty if the batteries are a standard off-the-shelf type, but not if they're sticking the purchaser with a proprietary design. /.
House Commerce Committee Chairman Thomas Bliley, R-Va., last week said that it would be 'unfortunate' if the United States were underrepresented on the ICANN board. Because the United States still has the majority of Internet users and businesses and because of the nation's leadership role in inventing and promoting the Internet, the US should be well represented on the ICANN board, he said."
The ICANN board should represent the people who have a legitimate interest in its doings. While the heavier Internet presence in the US does tend to weight this criterion in favor of Americans, there is no reason why Americans per se need to be particularly "well represented" -- the relevant community is defined in terms of Net involvement, not nationality. /.
A variety of concerns beyond alarming talk or behavior will be included, from the availability of guns to a youngster's abuse of dogs and cats
That's enough right there to convince me that the whole thing is balderdash. Only a nitwit, or someone with a political agenda, would equate availability of guns (the standard situation in rural America) with abuse of dogs and cats (a clear symptom of dangerous psychopathy). /.
But wasn't easy access to guns the bottom line which made the Colorado incident as tragic as it was?
Not at all. In fact, they were damn lucky that the main bomb set by the perps failed to go off -- if it had, it would have drowned gun casualties in the noise (and deprived politivultures of a sound bite, so I suppose it was lucky for them as well). /.
When I was in the Air Force, we had a gentleman who would become violently angry at the slightest upset, and would frequently swear that he would make the Air Force "pay" (and we are not talking in the monetary sense) for his imagined grievances.
Er, you do know that threatening people is against the law? This provides cause to arrest the perpetrator, after which an assessment of how likely he is to carry out the threat may legitimately be used in sentencing.
Of course, most cases of derangemant are not that obvious. But many are more obvious than it is popular to think ("I never would have suspected" is a more likely headline than "Yeah, we knew they were psycho shit-for-brains, but what could we do?" says High School Superintendant.), and any tools that help identify the not-so-obvious cases should be welcomed.
Absolutely not. A bright line must be drawn at acts of violence or specific threats of same. Step beyond that, and you give the authorities the latitude to define any sort of anti-authority attitude as "dangerous" -- which is precisely what they have done in every state where they obtained the power to do so. /.
When we involve Jodie Foster/Clarice Starling and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (in Quantico, Virginia) everyone says "cool" (or "kewl"). Psychological profiling is okay if we can say "Hannibal Lecter" in the same breath. However, when someone tries to apply this technology to denizens of the geek world (read: the heavily stereotyped Quake fanatics/Linux zealots/potential-actual/.'ers), the specter of Big Brother is seen galloping across the Plains of Civil Liberty.
Oh, puh-leeze. There is an obvious and fundamental difference between studying a narrowly defined group of people under legitimate criminal suspicion on the one hand and Big Brother sticking his nose into the thoughts of the entire population on the other. /.
Time for a close encounter with the Platinum Baseball Bat of Truth.
Indeed it is, and you will find that it far outmatches the Plastic Wiffle Ball Bat of Error which you wield.
In the United States, the only rights you have are the ones guaranteed by the Constitution. Everything else is a privilege. Indeed, the 10th Amendment reserves powers not expressly granted the Federal Govt. to the States
***BZZZZTTT*** Thank you for playing. The correct answers (with the sections indicating the errors in the above statement in bold) are:
Amendment IX:The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
I would recommend that you not forget that in other countries around the world, a person's "rights" end at the barrel of a soldier's gun.
And here, at the risk of starting Yet Another Second Amendment Flame War[tm], the government's "prerogatives" end at the barrel of a citizen's gun. /.
Slashdot Mirror
Get me a big bowl of popcorn and a ringside seat for the subsequent meeting between their tax lawyers and the IRS.... ;-)
/.
CSS has no effect whatsoever on these guys -- they just copy the disk, CSS key block and all, using the same sort of mass-pressing equipment as the legitimate publishers. At most, they might need to change the region coding.
/.
The pirate outfits large enough to be economically significant never needed to crack CSS. They simply copy the DVD, CSS keys and all, using essentially the same equipment as the legitimate publishers (as opposed to ordinary recordable DVD units for computers, which don't write a CSS key track and would thus produce an unreadable disk if used to copy an encrypted DVD).
I suppose that if the DVD owners hadn't left Linux users shut out, somebody might have eventually cracked CSS, but the only motivation would have been the classic one for climbing Mount Everest: because it's there.
/.
Normally, I wouldn't be picky about typos, but you put the sneer quotes around the wrong word. They should be around "journalist"....
/.
Indeed. The simple fact of the matter is that a consumer has the legal right (under US law) to create a backup copy of a recording that he has legitimately purchased. Interfering with this process through mandated "antipiracy" features is a cheat and a fraud.
The bottom line is the same as it is for crypto, guns, or photocopiers: prosecutions of illegal acts committed using the tools are legitimate; blanket restrictions on the tools are not.
Aren't pirates a really useful excuse to make sure that people in general don't end up getting the technology they need to produce their own art, music and FILMS without depending entirely on the entertainment industries for anything of that nature?
The simple facts are: 1)Only a few idiots and 3133+ hacquer d00dz (but I repeat myself...) would spend hours copying a $19.95 DVD movie onto a $29.95 DVD blank with home equipment, 2)The real piracy problem is from knockoff factories in see-no-evil jurisdictions, which use the same mass-production equipment as the legitimate publishers, and 3)The people charged with protecting the legitimate IP interests of the studios know facts (1) and (2).
So, yes, you may be on to something with your theory about Hollywood's hidden agenda.
One of the masters pegged it -- in the very first story he sold, no less:
/.
Er, have you ever heard of an arcane concept known as "data compression"? Motion picture data is very highly compressible because of its high redundancy (i.e. almost every frame is very similar to the one before).
/.
Actually, they do. The last two times European governments got out of control, they racked up body counts of about six million and about ten million. The former got more press, but they're both fairly well-known.
/.
Can this be done in a manner backward-compatible with existing CSS, using the existing 40-bit key as part of the 128-bit key (similar to one of the weak-crypto arrangements the NSA attempted to foist on the industry, in which 128-bit algorithms would be used, but only 40 bits of key space would really vary, the rest being added in a way that made them accessible to the NSA)?
/.
The economics of the situation (legitimate DVD copies of major movies selling for $20-$30) just don't make piracy profitable enough to have a major effect on the bottom line. The only way for pirates to make money in that environment is to organize on a scale that makes them big fat targets for any government that gives a flip about the matter (which is the underlying problem in East Asia).
/.
2.1)Copying DVD movies for personal use (e.g. backup, format conversion): Not Immoral. (Also Not Illegal, FUD to the contrary notwithstanding.)
2.1.1)Interposing technological barriers to (2.1) above: Immoral. (Not Illegal, but current practice of mandating it without consumer consent should be illegal.)
2.2)Copying DVD movied to trade: Immoral.
/.
What part of the term "informed consent" is unclear?
By your 'reasoning', if you pick up a word processing program and it secretly sends everything you type to the FBI, you have no complaint coming -- you had a choice not to install a word processor.
Again, this is why fraud and misrepresentation are illegal in civilized countries.
/.
/.
[Cue "Final Jeopardy" theme...]
"What is 'parental supervision'?"
Correct! Congratulations!
/.
Er, is it National Non Sequitur Day in your country?
It is completely hypocritical to complain about this one lapse of security when you let a much bigger and dangerous one slide by.
Never mind; the answer to my question is clearly "Yes"....
You have a choice whether or not to list your number, and you have a choice whether or not to use this product.
Choice requires informed consent. Fraudulent misreprentation of a product (e.g. wilful installation of hidden snoopware features) negates informed consent. That's why fraud is illegal in civilized countries.
bkennedy99@Home.com
You were saying somthing about being "completely hypocritical"...?
/.
The two differ only in trivial details. The bottom line is that these two engaged in theft as a way of life, and finally made the mistake of robbing the wrong person. The Universe punishes stupidity by death, with no appeal.
/.
I've heard horror stories about the postal service, but you're still getting eight-year-old news magazines??
/.
Given that agency's history, they have an obvious interest in developing a program to identify dangerous violent people, in order to target their recruitment efforts.
/.
Your generosity is perhaps commendable in an abstract sense, but misplaced here. The government and its school system have perpetrated so many abuses and idiocies that the default has shifted: any prudent person assumes that they are in the wrong unless and until they prove otherwise. Extending a presumption of good faith and competence is as foolish as hiring somebody who just got out of prison for embezzlement as your accountant.
/.
The main problem with MP3 portables is that loading in a new selection of music is awkward (connect to a computer and wait for the files to transfer) compared to a CD/tape player (remove one, insert another). What I'd like to see is a player that could read MP3s from a CD with enough buffer memory that it could store a good chunk of the contents and only occasionally have to spin the disk.
As for the battery life, 10 hours is plenty if the batteries are a standard off-the-shelf type, but not if they're sticking the purchaser with a proprietary design.
/.
The ICANN board should represent the people who have a legitimate interest in its doings. While the heavier Internet presence in the US does tend to weight this criterion in favor of Americans, there is no reason why Americans per se need to be particularly "well represented" -- the relevant community is defined in terms of Net involvement, not nationality.
/.
That's enough right there to convince me that the whole thing is balderdash. Only a nitwit, or someone with a political agenda, would equate availability of guns (the standard situation in rural America) with abuse of dogs and cats (a clear symptom of dangerous psychopathy).
/.
Not at all. In fact, they were damn lucky that the main bomb set by the perps failed to go off -- if it had, it would have drowned gun casualties in the noise (and deprived politivultures of a sound bite, so I suppose it was lucky for them as well).
/.
Er, you do know that threatening people is against the law? This provides cause to arrest the perpetrator, after which an assessment of how likely he is to carry out the threat may legitimately be used in sentencing.
Of course, most cases of derangemant are not that obvious. But many are more obvious than it is popular to think ("I never would have suspected" is a more likely headline than "Yeah, we knew they were psycho shit-for-brains, but what could we do?" says High School Superintendant.), and any tools that help identify the not-so-obvious cases should be welcomed.
Absolutely not. A bright line must be drawn at acts of violence or specific threats of same. Step beyond that, and you give the authorities the latitude to define any sort of anti-authority attitude as "dangerous" -- which is precisely what they have done in every state where they obtained the power to do so.
/.
Oh, puh-leeze. There is an obvious and fundamental difference between studying a narrowly defined group of people under legitimate criminal suspicion on the one hand and Big Brother sticking his nose into the thoughts of the entire population on the other.
/.
Indeed it is, and you will find that it far outmatches the Plastic Wiffle Ball Bat of Error which you wield.
In the United States, the only rights you have are the ones guaranteed by the Constitution. Everything else is a privilege. Indeed, the 10th Amendment reserves powers not expressly granted the Federal Govt. to the States
***BZZZZTTT*** Thank you for playing. The correct answers (with the sections indicating the errors in the above statement in bold) are:
I would recommend that you not forget that in other countries around the world, a person's "rights" end at the barrel of a soldier's gun.
And here, at the risk of starting Yet Another Second Amendment Flame War[tm], the government's "prerogatives" end at the barrel of a citizen's gun.
/.