GPL protects the expression of an idea which is protectable under copyright law. I could look at some GPL'd code, write a function spec, throw it over a wall & have someone else recode it & be in compliance.
Reverse engineering something like the Xing DVD player is extracting the idea (which is not protected) to create a new expression. On one hand it's harder because you have to disassemble object code, but on the other it's easier to keep your clean room clean because all source code is almost guaranteed original.
Stripping crap out of an expression of an idea & re-publishing that expression is infringement. It's a derivative work.
I agree with you that GPL violators vs. Kaaza copyright infringers is hypocritical, but you're trying to lump all reverse-engineering in with Kaaza lite. My non-infringing case of r.e. might violate a EULA, but EULAs have a much more tenuous legality than the old copyright law GPL is based on.
Did the guy who r.e.'d your code really reverse engineer it or take portions out verbatim? "hack it up, release again" sounds like the latter, which is NOT what happened in the case of DeCSS or bnetd.
The DVDCCA would point out that the unlicensed player almost certainly violates a long list of patents
...and trade secrets. IIRC, they're claiming that even though the cat's out of the bag (qprff tshirt et al.), it was a misappropriated trade secret, so cannot be used, presumably even for legit decoding.
A Linux "home theater PC" would be really neat because it would give you total control of playback, processing and UI. The Windows-based HTPCs have 2 serious problems:
#1 the UI is Windows. Arguably fine if you want a Quake-playing, web surfing, mp3 jukebox, DVD playing machine connected to your video projector, but if you just want to pop in a DVD & go you have problems. You can replace the shell (Windows Explorer) with something like Talisman but you're still faced with unintegrated apps: at least the DVD player and PowerStrip for tweaking video card timing, maybe also YXY for aspect ratio control and the video card's control panel for RG&B gamma curves.
With Linux, you can build a UI as simple as a standalone player's OSD. The problem isn't so much that HTPC's UI is Windows- the problem is that they aren't open source.
#2 you don't have control of the whole signal processing chain. The whole point is to use dead-stupid data projectors that might have crappy scalers and simple color correction settings. Having control from bits off the DVD all the way to the VGA output would be the ultimate realization of what HTPCs are about.
The key thing would be to finally get progressive scan working correctly. DVD player software on Windows uses flags to do reverse 3-2 pulldown. Badly encoded discs (frequent!) can look like crap. Video sourced disks either comb (weave) or look soft (bob). The new Radeon's have hardware motion-adaptive deinterlacing which solves the video sourced problem, but not the wrong flags one.
You'd need a lot of processing power to do good deinterlacing and 3-2-3-2 cadence detection in software, but I bet a Pentium 4 @ 2GHz could do an OK job (P4 Northwood for easier/quieter cooling than Athlon). If the software is doing the deinterlacing, you can go back to a cheap video card.
dScaler does (motion adaptive IIRC) software deinterlacing, but from analog capture cards. Being able to integrate dScaler and the flag reading from LiViD plus a would be cool (you get the best results if you consider the flags but are willing to throw them out if they're nonsense. If they are mostly right (maybe broken by video-domain edits of telecined film), they'll give you faster recovery than cadence reading only.
Oh #3: hard disk noise. With Linux, you can build your own teeny version that fits on a (small/cheap 64MB) Compact Flash card & boot off that.
Ashcroft claimed purposedoes matter in the Felten case. The Justice Dept. brief said the purpose was research, so circumvention was A-OK.
Elcomsoft has argued that the ebook processor's purpose is to allow things like fair use backup or using a text-to-speech program, but it doesn't seem to be working....
Of course the hippest way to play DVDs with new edits would be with a frame-accurate playlist interpreted in realtime by the DVD player instead of having to build a whole new file.
I'm on Windows, though, so can't hack my DVD player source.
It's called an edit decision list and despite jmu1's wierd response, should be perfectly legal.
The studio's support or even permission should not be needed because the distributed file as CaseyB suggests would contain none of the original movie.
You would need to use DeCSS to make an unencrypted mpeg-2 file, but people who make EDLs and the tools to parse them need not be involved in that.
Video editing tools that parse standard format EDLs (Discreet's "edit" supports CMX, GVG & Sony formats) already exist, but tend to be the expensive ones. The cheap ones (I use Cinestream (EditDV) from discreet (used to be Radius, Digital Origin, Media 100)) only use proprietary formats.
The EDL parser would be fairly simple because it doesn't need to be a full-blown editor and deal with a bunch of files; it would only have one very long "daily" to work from. It might have to create new I frames if cuts occur on B or P frames. Much simpler than a full-blown editor like edit.
A tool to convert human-readable EDLs to CMX ones would enable people to watch a movie on a regular-ol' DVD player, make notes of the in & out point times & just type 'em into an email message to someone who knows how to run the re-processor.
Shameless self-promotion, I know, but we've got to get the message out in ways other than forum postings, websites, peitions and email to congresspeople.
Thanks for correcting me. I'm just learning about this process. I guess it does make sense to go to the main body to get a unique identifier for the bill even if it's going to dwell in a sub-body for a while.
This reminds me that trying to follow the various versions of the PATRIOT act was a nightmare. How are you supposed to write to a Member of Congress if you don't know what to call the legislation? Some twist on CBDTPA will be introduced into the House soon, then each body will amend them willy-nilly & it might go to conference committee. What is someone to think if you write complaining about a particular section that's been amended to the point (in the version of the bill they believe will come to a vote) that your argument is nonsensical?
S2048 is not in committee. It got introduced directly into the Senate. Go here for the table of contents for March 21, 2002 of the Senate Congressional Record article57 is statements on introduced legislation & pages S2269, S2270, S2271, and S2272 contain the statements. (dunno if those last 5 links will work - Thomas says they're "temp")
It seems pretty weird to have a hearing about an issue, but no legislation officially introduced (though we can gather Eisner & co had seen the draft), then have the leg. go directly to the main body. Allows speakers to say whatever they want without needing to stick to the intent/result of the pending leg., but the leg. can be tweaked at the last minute to suit public perception. Maybe it's a common occurance, though?
The senate reconvenes April 8th, but the only thing on the agenda is the energy bill. Who knows when this will come up for debate???
The documents linked from the page mentioned are not Congressional Hearing transcripts but submitted statements.
Sometimes these statements are read at the hearing, but sometimes they are just entered in the record and the congressperson or expert witness says little or expounds on the points in the statement.
After statements, there's a question & answer period. That's when the good stuff usually happens & it's only reflected in the transcripts.
The latest Sentate Judiciary and Commerce Committee hearings on the CBDTPA (sih-bid-tihp-ah?) & related issues have not been posted to GPO Access yet.
Judiciary (Leahy): "Competition, Innovation, and Public Policy in the Digital Age: Is the Marketplace Working to Protect Digital Creative Works?" held 3/14/2002, Commerce (Hollings): "Protecting Content in a Digital Age--Promoting Broadband and the Digital Television Transition" held 2/28/2002.
Earlier hearings do have transcripts posted, though. Compare "Online Entertainment: Coming Soon to a Digital Device Near You" submitted statements vs. transcript
The q&a in the transcript looks like it's either written communication from before the hearing or a heavily edited version of what was said. I have the audio from Hollings hearing, so when the transcript comes out, I'll check its accuracy.
the link to the statements for that particular hearing from the Judiciary page is wrong, but mine is right. I've let them know
How far could this bill get by then? Congress seems awfully busy right now, so my guess is that it gets introduced & the amendments start flying, but even if it does pass in the Senate, it'll be a looong fight (giving us a chance to get more involved) in the House.
Because the money is used to buy advertising (speech).
While the proponents of this particular brand of finance reform always refer to mega-corporate donors, the legislation is not so discriminating: if the Sierra Club wants to run ads right before a primary in Vermont talking about Leahy's record on the environment (and not saying "Leahy for Senate"- that would be hard), they can't.
There is no Macrovision for component analog HDTV.
The broadcast flag is for over-the-air (OTA) HDTV broadcasts. It's a proposal by the BPDG (broadcast protection discussion group) subgroup of the CPTWG (content protection technical working group, pronounced see-pee-twig).
The analog hole is the component video connection between an HDTV "receiver" (8VSB for OTA, satellite (?mod) or QAM64 for cable demods + MPEG-2 decoder) and an HDTV "monitor." The concern is that "premium content" (monopolized by Eisner's minions) can be recorded by products like the Cinewave HD, DivX;-)'d and uploaded to Morpheus.
The "consumer" HDTV cards for PCs from Hauppage have the 8VSB receiver/demod built-in & no component inputs, but sub-$200 HD analog-component-in cards are probable given time.
The "analog hole" problem is that even with (relatively) closed networks (cable & satellite) where the net controls the box, the box needs to connect to the TV (monitor). DVI + HDCP or IEEE 1394 + DTCP protection is the answer for new sets, but they don't want to obsolete existing HDTV monitors, so the compromise is that selected content will only be converted to unprotected analog at 1/4 resolution (960x540 instead of 1920x1080). The AV Science Forum people are NOT happy about this.
The EFF has a nice section on DRM for HDTV. There's a presentation of a proposal there that seems to say that broadcast protection would entail a flag or watermark that "compliant equipment" would obey if present.
OTA doesn't have the option of replacing everyone's tuners or simply blocking them out of premium content, so I guess we'd all better buy non-compliant receivers now! There might be law passed in the vein of SSSCA to require compliant receivers in the future, but the CE mfgs aren't fighting this the way the IT mfgs are fighting SSSCA, so it might go down as a voluntary program.
(OTA is a.k.a. "digital terrestrial" to separate it from direct digital broadcast satellite)
- copyright isn't ownership: it's monopoly control of distribution
Why should you care about your privacy? Targeted advertising is only irritating. Modern day cointelpro-like operations become easier & that's pretty scary.
What bothers me the most, though, is the amount of data the police can gather about you without a warrant, then use that to get a warrant. The Law & Order file (someone please chime in if any of these are wrong) in my head shows cops getting credit purchase history, credit reports, banking records, phone usage and toll bridge crossings without warrants.
The problem is that police do need tools to fight crime and it's probable that the majority of people convicted through an evidence chain that begins with information gained w/o warrant are actually guilty. This means there will be little support for prohibiting executive branch acesss without judicial approval until there's a case where the circumstantial evidence leads to a conviction and incarceration an an innocent so egregious that people have to sit up and take notice.
I'd guess that most conviction of innocents will be of "low lifes" with prior drug-related convictions popped for petty theft or trafficking using time & place data from grocery saver cards, license checks, credit cards and phone records (E911 anyone?) as well as a history of banking and purchases that are out of line with the perp's legit. job. No one will care.
Oh, don't forget "security" cameras.
Bottom line? Private interests can gather information that would be seen as invasive if the government did it directly, then hand it over on demand. The only thing left might be Lawyer/Client, but Dr./Patient is compromised by the release of information to insurance companies (which is then pooled).
Don't get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong physical description.
In Santa Cruz, California, some bars & liquor stores no longer accept passports.
They claim the reason is that there's no physical description, so you could borrow the pp of an older friend who looks similar in a pp photo, but is a different height or weight.
I think they're just smacking down smartass UCSC students, but there's a good chance that's due to ABC pressure rather than store's own policy.
BrianJepson who's merited his very own Slashdot story worked with Josh (the creator of the bizzaro music referenced earlier) to help create the original AS220 web presence.
Josh, Brian & I went to South Kingstown High School together where we made horrible git-fiddle noises until I moved away & they found an outlet @ AS220. My Dad still lives on the East Coast & he's read poetry there at the invitation of Buddy C. in some wierd kinda "Yeah! Providence" thing.
There's more of Josh's stuff at AS220.org including a nice rant against NT, in favor of open source stuff.
If Josh was still with us, I think he'd be making serious contributions to the OSS movement. He's still the smartest guy I've ever met. I've met Marvin Minsky and Zack Settel, but didn't get to know 'em enough to compare.
You ever read the comic strip Steven? The old ones were Providence-centric. My favorite was when Brock & Steven went to jail, escaped by climbing into the toilet & through the sewer & came out at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel. We used to by acid there from Bruce Springsteen on a skateboard.
"Providence. Where it rains Where Friendship is a one-way street. Rich folks live on Power St. but most of us live off Hope.Providence. Where it snows four months out of the year, and the rest of the time rains like a bitch. Where Friendship is a one-way street. Where the rich folks live off of Power, and the rest of us live off of Hope."
Reminiscing....
It does make sense to me for there to be a connection between underground tech and underground culture. JWZ's DNA club sounds cool (I'm only 2 hours away, but a new father, so no time). I'm working with a guy at Grape Stake Studios on an anti DMCA/SSSCA musical work. There is common ground rich for exploitation here. Getting the message out about the threat of things like "trusted" operating systems using forms other than the written word and protests has merit.
There's a picture of the ProComp and some elctrodes on one of Mann's myriad sites (wearcam.org, wearcomp.com which seems to be down, eyetap.org, U. Toronto EECS, CBC)
Biosensors used in the author's "smart clothing" apparatus include ProComp ECG, EEG, respiration, and sweat sensor built into a Jantzen bathing suit. Upon arriving home, late at night, one is generally too hot from just climbing the stairs, etc., so when first going to sleep, the underwear tells the heater to turn off, but after a couple of hours sleeping, when one's metabolism slows down, the underwear senses the resulting changes in one's body temperature/conductivity, and turns up the heat. Our clothing of the future may some day be interoperable and interconnected, so that it keeps track of our physical condition and allows us to decrypt this information for evaluation by a doctor or other professional of our choosing. Further description of the "smart underwear" prototype, and anecdotes on the author's experience designing, building, and using it is appears in [Mann96b].
It's curious that this page puts an emphasis on personal safety, suggesting that heartrate vs. footsteps could indicate a subject was in distress and that a network of cyborgs could protect each other.
Another of Mann's interests is surveillance. His investigation into the horror that the watchers feel when watched back is interesting, but it always seems to involve a certain amount of confrontation (see his videos if you don't believe me). Did the security personnel know he had cameras in his sunglasses & how did they react when they found out?
I use ogg. When the only player I could find was Sonique and the only material was my dead friend's it seemed redundant.
Now there's a plug-in for WinAmp and I have a CD-ROM drive that doesn't fuck up rips, so I'm building a library. Ogg Vorbis sounds better and it's openness is attractive for future-proofing and Hollings/Eisner/Valenti/Rosen-proofing my collection.
I believe there's a problem that OGG requires floating-point operations
The current implementation might require FP, but I haven't run across an audio processing algorithm that couldn't be done in fixed-point (and don't forget Turing after all). Sure it won't be easy, but with a reasonably fast processor and good fp emulation library, only a select few inner loops would have to be hand coded (to take the floating-point values, convert them to 32-bit fixed point values, do the processing using the uP's multiplier to best effect and putting the result back in floating point at the end).
I am not as pessimistic as you that a good quality portable decoder cannot be built. I agree that it probably won't be, but headphones should encourage better fidelity, not worse.
I can hear the Rio One decoding errors even with the cheap earbuds because they're mid-high-frequency errors which the earbuds reproduce especially well. If they were over 16kHz or under 200Hz it would be a different story. The warbling of too low a bitrate or a poor encoder is also easy to hear.
The earbuds don't provide as much isolation as over-the-ear headphones, so listening in an airplane or subway might hide the errors, but I listen on a couch or in bed in a quiet room after my son has gone to sleep. I can't use speakers at the volume I like & don't have whole house audio from my changer (though I'm thinking of changing that). I'd rather rip the discs to an archive on my PC & grab a few to an mp3 player that I can jack into my car, carry around the house & take to work.
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When we say 24 bit audio, let's clarify what we're discussing. Junk like the Rio One use 16-bit *fixed point* DSPs. I'd assume that most PC decoders use single-precision (32 bit?) floating point. I don't know what the "24 bit" decoder plug-in for WinAmp is all about, but it is supposed to sound better than the built-in one.
A better approach might be to use a heftier DSP. I know the Motorola 56k series & this would seem to be a good candidate: 24 bit datapath with a 56 bit accumulator for 24x24=48 results accumulated without rounding until the end (so a 256-tap FIR is possible).
Sure it's more power hungry than a C54, but hell, skip the hard drive (use flash) but keep the lithium-ion battery and you're all set.
It'll be a lot of work to write the code, I'll grant you that, but fixed-point mp3 decoders have been written (by xaudio for example). Ogg Vorbis will be a chore too.
Actually, there already is a portable player that uses the 56k series, the PJB 100
If you're willing to deal with even worse power requirements, a CPU with FPU is possible. We can trade off things like a nice big backlight for a nice big color LCD and use a Pentium or PowerPC. I'm not going jogging with the thing, so if it weighs a pound or 2, I'm OK with that.
My old 120Mhz Pentium laptop can run WinAmp. An embedded Pentium 166MHz draws 2.35A at 1.8V or 4.23 Watts. Modern NiMH AA cells give 1800mAH each, so four might give you 3/4 to 1 hour of use. That's not enough, but it's within an order of (10) magnitude.
The "portable supercomputer" PPC 440GP also draws around 4Watts, but it runs up to 400MHz.
The TMS320C32 32-bit floating point DSPs draw nominally.675 and max 1.4 Watts @ 60MHz.
You're right of course. If they were electrostatic, they'd probably need an external power supply like the Stax cans.
The people with the Grados had bought them themselves & were from places like CNMAT & IRCAM (they weren't rich), so yeah, electrostatics are improbable (Stax start at just under US$1k).
The audio fidelity on the whole is as good as can be expected. We all know what MP3 encoding does to your tunes if you have a reasonable speakers
All mp3 decoders are not created equal and I sure wish reviewers would dig a little deeper. If they go beyond navigation and I/O features and cover audio quality, it's typically only to mention background hum or hiss or a wimpy headphone amplifier.
mp3 at high bitrates created with a competent encoder (LAME is one) can sound pretty good. Decoding with cheap 16 bit DSPs such as the TMS320C54x used in the Rio One is hard to do-- you have to watch out for error accumulation (e.g. please round to zero instead of simply truncating).
If you don't believe me that decoders differ, consider these tests of PC decoders. Unfortunately, no one seems to do such detailed testing on embedded decoders.
I'm giving my Rio One to my nephew who will be so thrilled to have it that if he hears the high-frequency errors on playback of middlin' bitrates (192kbps), he probably won't mind.
I don't know what I'm going to replace it with, though. I know I shouldn't expect much out of a $80 player powered from on AA cell, but there's no guarantee that a $400 Rio Riot or iPod will be glitch-free: they might have spent the whole power and cost budget on LCDs, hard drives and amortizing development.
A StrongARM-based PocketPC might be the answer- plenty of horsepower to run less compromised 16 bit decoder or even a 24 bit or floating point one. It should also be able to decode ogg vorbis....
By the way, instead of reasonable speakers, I'm using a good pair of headphones. Much more bang for the buck when it comes to revealing audio defects, though the Sonys tend to be a bit shrill (well the older V6s that I have) for long-term listening. These are the same model we used when I was at E-mu for all normal testing. The only thing more revealing was the elements from a good pair of Sennheisers in a set of noise protection muffs to cut background noise by 23dB. Also, some of the ATC guys have Grado electrostatics.
Would you purchace a car that could only be driven by people authorized by the dealership at the time of purchase?
More likely- only authorized by your insurance company or DMV/highway patrol.
When I was a kid (might be different in your state/time period), if I'd gotten my license while living at home, my parents would have had to pay male-teenager insurance whether I was allowed to drive the car or not.
If my parents had a thumbprint-activated car, maybe the insurance company would give them a break.
A GPS, governor and timer in the car might be another way to get a break on insurance- teenager can only drive towards home after 10pm. Can only drive in a 10 mile radius around home/school/work.
This sounds like a boon to the parent, but what about when the system breaks down or you just want junior to pop down to the store for a carton of milk @ 11pm?
Another party that might be interested in what you do with "your" car might be the lien-holder or leaser. No driving too fast or skipping service with "our" car sir.
-M
transcripts, recordings and submitted content
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SSSCA Hearing
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If you have the time and want to go beyond news reports read my previouscomments
I've put up.oggs of Eisner & Vadasz's comments as well as their answers to the 1st round of questions. If anyone has 34MB of server space, I have most of the 1st 3 hours of the hearing
DRM, watermarking & the cable-TV style interne
on
SSSCA Hearing
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Let's be clear here. We're talking about three different things:
1) Digital rights management where the content is encrypted & the keys are carefully managed. Only "authorized" players can get at the keys and the keys are somehow locked to a storage device or computer.
2) Watermarking where the content has tags hidden (steganography) with origin, copy and copyable information.
If every modem, router, PC, VCR, PVR and TV could recognize the watermarks and not play or pass on content with particular tags, you might have some control even if encryption is stripped off.
However, the quality of a camcorder pointed at a movie screen, divx'd & p2p distributed is so poor that the watermark could not be well hidden to still appear (artifacts would be easily visible in the theater).
That brings me to
3) The cable-TV style internet. I don't think Eisner cares that much about the genie getting out of the bottle. It's the genie replicating itself 1E6 times across the internet. The problem isn't a digital one, it's a physical vs. "ether" (Eisner's word) one. I can sell SVCDs on a street corner no easier than VHS tapes. I can only sell a few and the risk is high.
Suppose every ISP was required to prevent servers and p2p clients for "consumer" accounts . All servers must be licensed (like guns) and are subject to inspection without warrant.
That would achieve Eisner's goal.
A China-style firewall around the whole country would be required also.
I suggest Vadasz said "no" because he couldn't imagine Eisner would want something so far out.
I'm beginning to believe Eisner would be willing to do anything & give up any of our rights in order to achieve his goal.
Eisner's comments are posted A good portion of them is playback of a movie they got off a p2p network. Those Senators sure love to be entertained (you can almost hear Fritz's lips puckering when he fawns over Eisner).
I'll put up some of the question & answer stuff later.
Anyone want to host three hours worth of the hearing? It's 34MB. I could trim it to 30MB to fit in a Yahoo! Briefcase, but you can only upload 5MB at a time. It just isn't worth it (esp. since I didn't get the whole thing & Real crapped out on me a few times) to edit it into separate files.
By the way, Ogg Vorbis (ogenc v0.9, libvorbis RC3) did a nice job on speech at -q 0 (avg. bitrate 28.4 kb/s). I tried & failed with Streambox VCR, so had to grab the uncompressed audio out the back of Real & re-squish it. Too bad 'cause the original was only 16 kb/s.
Whoever's doing audio for Congress does a good job. The mics are close and well muted (none gets left on & no one gets cut off)- not much coughing or background noise.
The transcripts (what was actually said including questions & answers) will probably be available in a couple of weeks at the Government Printing Office {check out Orrin Hatch's Judiciary Committee Hearing on Copyrights while you're there}
The hearing was broadcast on CapitolHearings, but they don't seem to offer archives. I ripped the stream & will post an Ogg Vorbis version soon, but the everyone must have woken up today & decided to surf porn 'cause the 16kbps stream over a well-tuned DSL connection was interrupted several times, some of which failed auto-retries (do I hate RealPlayer now?).
If anyone else has a stream rip, please post it. My favorite part is Hollings saying "son of a bitch" a couple minutes before the hearing starts. Yes, that microphone is on sir.
Did anyone else listen? I thought Eisner went off the deep end during the question & answer period. He wants to protect camcorder-at-the-movie -> DivX;-) movies from distribution (not just stuff with DRM). The Intel V.P. (who was very calm despite the verbal LSD flying around) said that wasn't possible, but I don't think he was considering the full totalitarian push. Consider a law requiring ISPs to NAT and dynamic-IP all users so no one can run a server unless registered (like guns) & authorized. All P2P traffic is illegal. The entire US is firewalled off from "rouge" nations. Sure, it sounds unlikely, but that's why Eisner sounded so wacked out. He really sounded like he either wanted the net to become cable TV or just be shut down entirely (Disney isn't making any money from abc.com or disney.com or go.com- what do they need the damned pirate club for anyway?)
You might think Eisner was talking about watermarking, but he wanted 90% of "pirate" traffic catchable. He's MORE concerned about a teenage projectionist inviting over his buddy who's dad has a 3-chip DV camcorder than DRM cracks. A 400x300 divx compress from a camcorder aimed at a screen is not going to preserve watermarks unless they really fuck up the quality. I think he's heading towards the RIAA "we want the right to snoop & crack those pirate sonofabitches" idea.
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GPL protects the expression of an idea which is protectable under copyright law. I could look at some GPL'd code, write a function spec, throw it over a wall & have someone else recode it & be in compliance.
Reverse engineering something like the Xing DVD player is extracting the idea (which is not protected) to create a new expression. On one hand it's harder because you have to disassemble object code, but on the other it's easier to keep your clean room clean because all source code is almost guaranteed original.
Stripping crap out of an expression of an idea & re-publishing that expression is infringement. It's a derivative work.
I agree with you that GPL violators vs. Kaaza copyright infringers is hypocritical, but you're trying to lump all reverse-engineering in with Kaaza lite. My non-infringing case of r.e. might violate a EULA, but EULAs have a much more tenuous legality than the old copyright law GPL is based on.
Did the guy who r.e.'d your code really reverse engineer it or take portions out verbatim? "hack it up, release again" sounds like the latter, which is NOT what happened in the case of DeCSS or bnetd.
The DVDCCA would point out that the unlicensed player almost certainly violates a long list of patents
...and trade secrets. IIRC, they're claiming that even though the cat's out of the bag (qprff tshirt et al.), it was a misappropriated trade secret, so cannot be used, presumably even for legit decoding.
A Linux "home theater PC" would be really neat because it would give you total control of playback, processing and UI. The Windows-based HTPCs have 2 serious problems:
#1 the UI is Windows. Arguably fine if you want a Quake-playing, web surfing, mp3 jukebox, DVD playing machine connected to your video projector, but if you just want to pop in a DVD & go you have problems. You can replace the shell (Windows Explorer) with something like Talisman but you're still faced with unintegrated apps: at least the DVD player and PowerStrip for tweaking video card timing, maybe also YXY for aspect ratio control and the video card's control panel for RG&B gamma curves.
With Linux, you can build a UI as simple as a standalone player's OSD. The problem isn't so much that HTPC's UI is Windows- the problem is that they aren't open source.
#2 you don't have control of the whole signal processing chain. The whole point is to use dead-stupid data projectors that might have crappy scalers and simple color correction settings. Having control from bits off the DVD all the way to the VGA output would be the ultimate realization of what HTPCs are about.
The key thing would be to finally get progressive scan working correctly. DVD player software on Windows uses flags to do reverse 3-2 pulldown. Badly encoded discs (frequent!) can look like crap. Video sourced disks either comb (weave) or look soft (bob). The new Radeon's have hardware motion-adaptive deinterlacing which solves the video sourced problem, but not the wrong flags one.
You'd need a lot of processing power to do good deinterlacing and 3-2-3-2 cadence detection in software, but I bet a Pentium 4 @ 2GHz could do an OK job (P4 Northwood for easier/quieter cooling than Athlon). If the software is doing the deinterlacing, you can go back to a cheap video card.
dScaler does (motion adaptive IIRC) software deinterlacing, but from analog capture cards. Being able to integrate dScaler and the flag reading from LiViD plus a would be cool (you get the best results if you consider the flags but are willing to throw them out if they're nonsense. If they are mostly right (maybe broken by video-domain edits of telecined film), they'll give you faster recovery than cadence reading only.
Oh #3: hard disk noise. With Linux, you can build your own teeny version that fits on a (small/cheap 64MB) Compact Flash card & boot off that.
Ashcroft claimed purpose does matter in the Felten case. The Justice Dept. brief said the purpose was research, so circumvention was A-OK.
Elcomsoft has argued that the ebook processor's purpose is to allow things like fair use backup or using a text-to-speech program, but it doesn't seem to be working....
Of course the hippest way to play DVDs with new edits would be with a frame-accurate playlist interpreted in realtime by the DVD player instead of having to build a whole new file.
I'm on Windows, though, so can't hack my DVD player source.
Hmmmm... why is open source cool again?
It's called an edit decision list and despite jmu1's wierd response, should be perfectly legal.
The studio's support or even permission should not be needed because the distributed file as CaseyB suggests would contain none of the original movie.
You would need to use DeCSS to make an unencrypted mpeg-2 file, but people who make EDLs and the tools to parse them need not be involved in that.
Video editing tools that parse standard format EDLs (Discreet's "edit" supports CMX, GVG & Sony formats) already exist, but tend to be the expensive ones. The cheap ones (I use Cinestream (EditDV) from discreet (used to be Radius, Digital Origin, Media 100)) only use proprietary formats.
The EDL parser would be fairly simple because it doesn't need to be a full-blown editor and deal with a bunch of files; it would only have one very long "daily" to work from. It might have to create new I frames if cuts occur on B or P frames. Much simpler than a full-blown editor like edit.
A tool to convert human-readable EDLs to CMX ones would enable people to watch a movie on a regular-ol' DVD player, make notes of the in & out point times & just type 'em into an email message to someone who knows how to run the re-processor.
Damn, this sounds like a fun project.
-M
music.lockup.org
Copyright Wars featuring the Senate Commerce Committee on vocals
-and-
Rip-Mix-Scratch featuring Michael Eisner on turntables
Also search Google for
Eisner
Valenti
Hollings
DMCA
and watch for the "Sponsored Links"
Shameless self-promotion, I know, but we've got to get the message out in ways other than forum postings, websites, peitions and email to congresspeople.
Thanks for correcting me. I'm just learning about this process. I guess it does make sense to go to the main body to get a unique identifier for the bill even if it's going to dwell in a sub-body for a while.
This reminds me that trying to follow the various versions of the PATRIOT act was a nightmare. How are you supposed to write to a Member of Congress if you don't know what to call the legislation? Some twist on CBDTPA will be introduced into the House soon, then each body will amend them willy-nilly & it might go to conference committee. What is someone to think if you write complaining about a particular section that's been amended to the point (in the version of the bill they believe will come to a vote) that your argument is nonsensical?
S2048 is not in committee. It got introduced directly into the Senate. Go here for the table of contents for March 21, 2002 of the Senate Congressional Record article57 is statements on introduced legislation & pages S2269, S2270, S2271, and S2272 contain the statements. (dunno if those last 5 links will work - Thomas says they're "temp")
It seems pretty weird to have a hearing about an issue, but no legislation officially introduced (though we can gather Eisner & co had seen the draft), then have the leg. go directly to the main body. Allows speakers to say whatever they want without needing to stick to the intent/result of the pending leg., but the leg. can be tweaked at the last minute to suit public perception. Maybe it's a common occurance, though?
The senate reconvenes April 8th, but the only thing on the agenda is the energy bill. Who knows when this will come up for debate???
The documents linked from the page mentioned are not Congressional Hearing transcripts but submitted statements.
Sometimes these statements are read at the hearing, but sometimes they are just entered in the record and the congressperson or expert witness says little or expounds on the points in the statement.
After statements, there's a question & answer period. That's when the good stuff usually happens & it's only reflected in the transcripts.
The latest Sentate Judiciary and Commerce Committee hearings on the CBDTPA (sih-bid-tihp-ah?) & related issues have not been posted to GPO Access yet.
Judiciary (Leahy): "Competition, Innovation, and Public Policy in the Digital Age: Is the Marketplace Working to Protect Digital Creative Works?" held 3/14/2002, Commerce (Hollings): "Protecting Content in a Digital Age--Promoting Broadband and the Digital Television Transition" held 2/28/2002.
Earlier hearings do have transcripts posted, though. Compare "Online Entertainment: Coming Soon to a Digital Device Near You" submitted statements vs. transcript
The q&a in the transcript looks like it's either written communication from before the hearing or a heavily edited version of what was said. I have the audio from Hollings hearing, so when the transcript comes out, I'll check its accuracy.
the link to the statements for that particular hearing from the Judiciary page is wrong, but mine is right. I've let them know
(yes, I saw John McCain on The Daily Show last night)
They go out of session after April 5 & return May 27.
How far could this bill get by then? Congress seems awfully busy right now, so my guess is that it gets introduced & the amendments start flying, but even if it does pass in the Senate, it'll be a looong fight (giving us a chance to get more involved) in the House.
What'cha doin' this (early) summer?
Because the money is used to buy advertising (speech).
While the proponents of this particular brand of finance reform always refer to mega-corporate donors, the legislation is not so discriminating: if the Sierra Club wants to run ads right before a primary in Vermont talking about Leahy's record on the environment (and not saying "Leahy for Senate"- that would be hard), they can't.
There is no Macrovision for component analog HDTV.
The broadcast flag is for over-the-air (OTA) HDTV broadcasts. It's a proposal by the BPDG (broadcast protection discussion group) subgroup of the CPTWG (content protection technical working group, pronounced see-pee-twig).
The analog hole is the component video connection between an HDTV "receiver" (8VSB for OTA, satellite (?mod) or QAM64 for cable demods + MPEG-2 decoder) and an HDTV "monitor." The concern is that "premium content" (monopolized by Eisner's minions) can be recorded by products like the Cinewave HD, DivX;-)'d and uploaded to Morpheus.
The "consumer" HDTV cards for PCs from Hauppage have the 8VSB receiver/demod built-in & no component inputs, but sub-$200 HD analog-component-in cards are probable given time.
The "analog hole" problem is that even with (relatively) closed networks (cable & satellite) where the net controls the box, the box needs to connect to the TV (monitor). DVI + HDCP or IEEE 1394 + DTCP protection is the answer for new sets, but they don't want to obsolete existing HDTV monitors, so the compromise is that selected content will only be converted to unprotected analog at 1/4 resolution (960x540 instead of 1920x1080). The AV Science Forum people are NOT happy about this.
The EFF has a nice section on DRM for HDTV. There's a presentation of a proposal there that seems to say that broadcast protection would entail a flag or watermark that "compliant equipment" would obey if present.
OTA doesn't have the option of replacing everyone's tuners or simply blocking them out of premium content, so I guess we'd all better buy non-compliant receivers now! There might be law passed in the vein of SSSCA to require compliant receivers in the future, but the CE mfgs aren't fighting this the way the IT mfgs are fighting SSSCA, so it might go down as a voluntary program.
(OTA is a.k.a. "digital terrestrial" to separate it from direct digital broadcast satellite)
-
copyright isn't ownership: it's monopoly control of distribution
Why should you care about your privacy? Targeted advertising is only irritating. Modern day cointelpro-like operations become easier & that's pretty scary.
What bothers me the most, though, is the amount of data the police can gather about you without a warrant, then use that to get a warrant. The Law & Order file (someone please chime in if any of these are wrong) in my head shows cops getting credit purchase history, credit reports, banking records, phone usage and toll bridge crossings without warrants.
The problem is that police do need tools to fight crime and it's probable that the majority of people convicted through an evidence chain that begins with information gained w/o warrant are actually guilty. This means there will be little support for prohibiting executive branch acesss without judicial approval until there's a case where the circumstantial evidence leads to a conviction and incarceration an an innocent so egregious that people have to sit up and take notice.
I'd guess that most conviction of innocents will be of "low lifes" with prior drug-related convictions popped for petty theft or trafficking using time & place data from grocery saver cards, license checks, credit cards and phone records (E911 anyone?) as well as a history of banking and purchases that are out of line with the perp's legit. job. No one will care.
Oh, don't forget "security" cameras.
Bottom line? Private interests can gather information that would be seen as invasive if the government did it directly, then hand it over on demand. The only thing left might be Lawyer/Client, but Dr./Patient is compromised by the release of information to insurance companies (which is then pooled).
Don't get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong physical description.
In Santa Cruz, California, some bars & liquor stores no longer accept passports.
They claim the reason is that there's no physical description, so you could borrow the pp of an older friend who looks similar in a pp photo, but is a different height or weight.
I think they're just smacking down smartass UCSC students, but there's a good chance that's due to ABC pressure rather than store's own policy.
Brian Jepson who's merited his very own Slashdot story worked with Josh (the creator of the bizzaro music referenced earlier) to help create the original AS220 web presence.
Josh, Brian & I went to South Kingstown High School together where we made horrible git-fiddle noises until I moved away & they found an outlet @ AS220. My Dad still lives on the East Coast & he's read poetry there at the invitation of Buddy C. in some wierd kinda "Yeah! Providence" thing.
There's more of Josh's stuff at AS220.org including a nice rant against NT, in favor of open source stuff.
If Josh was still with us, I think he'd be making serious contributions to the OSS movement. He's still the smartest guy I've ever met. I've met Marvin Minsky and Zack Settel, but didn't get to know 'em enough to compare.
You ever read the comic strip Steven? The old ones were Providence-centric. My favorite was when Brock & Steven went to jail, escaped by climbing into the toilet & through the sewer & came out at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel. We used to by acid there from Bruce Springsteen on a skateboard.
"Providence. Where it rains Where Friendship is a one-way street. Rich folks live on Power St. but most of us live off Hope.Providence. Where it snows four months out of the year, and the rest of the time rains like a bitch. Where Friendship is a one-way street. Where the rich folks live off of Power, and the rest of us live off of Hope."
Reminiscing....
It does make sense to me for there to be a connection between underground tech and underground culture. JWZ's DNA club sounds cool (I'm only 2 hours away, but a new father, so no time). I'm working with a guy at Grape Stake Studios on an anti DMCA/SSSCA musical work. There is common ground rich for exploitation here. Getting the message out about the threat of things like "trusted" operating systems using forms other than the written word and protests has merit.
There's a picture of the ProComp and some elctrodes on one of Mann's myriad sites (wearcam.org, wearcomp.com which seems to be down, eyetap.org, U. Toronto EECS, CBC)
Biosensors used in the author's "smart clothing" apparatus include ProComp ECG, EEG, respiration, and sweat sensor built into a Jantzen bathing suit. Upon arriving home, late at night, one is generally too hot from just climbing the stairs, etc., so when first going to sleep, the underwear tells the heater to turn off, but after a couple of hours sleeping, when one's metabolism slows down, the underwear senses the resulting changes in one's body temperature/conductivity, and turns up the heat. Our clothing of the future may some day be interoperable and interconnected, so that it keeps track of our physical condition and allows us to decrypt this information for evaluation by a doctor or other professional of our choosing. Further description of the "smart underwear" prototype, and anecdotes on the author's experience designing, building, and using it is appears in [Mann96b].
It's curious that this page puts an emphasis on personal safety, suggesting that heartrate vs. footsteps could indicate a subject was in distress and that a network of cyborgs could protect each other.
Another of Mann's interests is surveillance. His investigation into the horror that the watchers feel when watched back is interesting, but it always seems to involve a certain amount of confrontation (see his videos if you don't believe me). Did the security personnel know he had cameras in his sunglasses & how did they react when they found out?
Find someone who uses OGG and they'll make it.
I use ogg. When the only player I could find was Sonique and the only material was my dead friend's it seemed redundant.
Now there's a plug-in for WinAmp and I have a CD-ROM drive that doesn't fuck up rips, so I'm building a library. Ogg Vorbis sounds better and it's openness is attractive for future-proofing and Hollings/Eisner/Valenti/Rosen-proofing my collection.
I believe there's a problem that OGG requires floating-point operations
The current implementation might require FP, but I haven't run across an audio processing algorithm that couldn't be done in fixed-point (and don't forget Turing after all). Sure it won't be easy, but with a reasonably fast processor and good fp emulation library, only a select few inner loops would have to be hand coded (to take the floating-point values, convert them to 32-bit fixed point values, do the processing using the uP's multiplier to best effect and putting the result back in floating point at the end).
I am not as pessimistic as you that a good quality portable decoder cannot be built. I agree that it probably won't be, but headphones should encourage better fidelity, not worse.
.675 and max 1.4 Watts @ 60MHz.
I can hear the Rio One decoding errors even with the cheap earbuds because they're mid-high-frequency errors which the earbuds reproduce especially well. If they were over 16kHz or under 200Hz it would be a different story. The warbling of too low a bitrate or a poor encoder is also easy to hear.
The earbuds don't provide as much isolation as over-the-ear headphones, so listening in an airplane or subway might hide the errors, but I listen on a couch or in bed in a quiet room after my son has gone to sleep. I can't use speakers at the volume I like & don't have whole house audio from my changer (though I'm thinking of changing that). I'd rather rip the discs to an archive on my PC & grab a few to an mp3 player that I can jack into my car, carry around the house & take to work.
----
When we say 24 bit audio, let's clarify what we're discussing. Junk like the Rio One use 16-bit *fixed point* DSPs. I'd assume that most PC decoders use single-precision (32 bit?) floating point. I don't know what the "24 bit" decoder plug-in for WinAmp is all about, but it is supposed to sound better than the built-in one.
The StrongArm can retire 12 bits of [multiplier] result per cycle and the adder can retire 32 bits. This yields a total latency of two to four cycles for a 32-bit result and three to five cycles for a 64-bit result. Maybe softfloat can handle quality mp3 or ogg vorbis decoding, but it seems that if inner loops are coded in assembly it might be possible.
A better approach might be to use a heftier DSP. I know the Motorola 56k series & this would seem to be a good candidate: 24 bit datapath with a 56 bit accumulator for 24x24=48 results accumulated without rounding until the end (so a 256-tap FIR is possible).
Sure it's more power hungry than a C54, but hell, skip the hard drive (use flash) but keep the lithium-ion battery and you're all set.
It'll be a lot of work to write the code, I'll grant you that, but fixed-point mp3 decoders have been written (by xaudio for example). Ogg Vorbis will be a chore too.
Actually, there already is a portable player that uses the 56k series, the PJB 100
If you're willing to deal with even worse power requirements, a CPU with FPU is possible. We can trade off things like a nice big backlight for a nice big color LCD and use a Pentium or PowerPC. I'm not going jogging with the thing, so if it weighs a pound or 2, I'm OK with that.
My old 120Mhz Pentium laptop can run WinAmp. An embedded Pentium 166MHz draws 2.35A at 1.8V or 4.23 Watts. Modern NiMH AA cells give 1800mAH each, so four might give you 3/4 to 1 hour of use. That's not enough, but it's within an order of (10) magnitude.
The "portable supercomputer" PPC 440GP also draws around 4Watts, but it runs up to 400MHz.
The TMS320C32 32-bit floating point DSPs draw nominally
-M
You're right of course. If they were electrostatic, they'd probably need an external power supply like the Stax cans.
The people with the Grados had bought them themselves & were from places like CNMAT & IRCAM (they weren't rich), so yeah, electrostatics are improbable (Stax start at just under US$1k).
-M
The audio fidelity on the whole is as good as can be expected. We all know what MP3 encoding does to your tunes if you have a reasonable speakers
All mp3 decoders are not created equal and I sure wish reviewers would dig a little deeper. If they go beyond navigation and I/O features and cover audio quality, it's typically only to mention background hum or hiss or a wimpy headphone amplifier.
mp3 at high bitrates created with a competent encoder (LAME is one) can sound pretty good. Decoding with cheap 16 bit DSPs such as the TMS320C54x used in the Rio One is hard to do-- you have to watch out for error accumulation (e.g. please round to zero instead of simply truncating).
If you don't believe me that decoders differ, consider these tests of PC decoders. Unfortunately, no one seems to do such detailed testing on embedded decoders.
I'm giving my Rio One to my nephew who will be so thrilled to have it that if he hears the high-frequency errors on playback of middlin' bitrates (192kbps), he probably won't mind.
I don't know what I'm going to replace it with, though. I know I shouldn't expect much out of a $80 player powered from on AA cell, but there's no guarantee that a $400 Rio Riot or iPod will be glitch-free: they might have spent the whole power and cost budget on LCDs, hard drives and amortizing development.
A StrongARM-based PocketPC might be the answer- plenty of horsepower to run less compromised 16 bit decoder or even a 24 bit or floating point one. It should also be able to decode ogg vorbis....
By the way, instead of reasonable speakers, I'm using a good pair of headphones. Much more bang for the buck when it comes to revealing audio defects, though the Sonys tend to be a bit shrill (well the older V6s that I have) for long-term listening. These are the same model we used when I was at E-mu for all normal testing. The only thing more revealing was the elements from a good pair of Sennheisers in a set of noise protection muffs to cut background noise by 23dB. Also, some of the ATC guys have Grado electrostatics.
Would you purchace a car that could only be driven by people authorized by the dealership at the time of purchase?
More likely- only authorized by your insurance company or DMV/highway patrol.
When I was a kid (might be different in your state/time period), if I'd gotten my license while living at home, my parents would have had to pay male-teenager insurance whether I was allowed to drive the car or not.
If my parents had a thumbprint-activated car, maybe the insurance company would give them a break.
A GPS, governor and timer in the car might be another way to get a break on insurance- teenager can only drive towards home after 10pm. Can only drive in a 10 mile radius around home/school/work.
This sounds like a boon to the parent, but what about when the system breaks down or you just want junior to pop down to the store for a carton of milk @ 11pm?
Another party that might be interested in what you do with "your" car might be the lien-holder or leaser. No driving too fast or skipping service with "our" car sir.
-M
If you have the time and want to go beyond news reports read my previous comments
.oggs of Eisner & Vadasz's comments as well as their answers to the 1st round of questions. If anyone has 34MB of server space, I have most of the 1st 3 hours of the hearing
I've put up
Let's be clear here. We're talking about three different things:
1) Digital rights management where the content is encrypted & the keys are carefully managed. Only "authorized" players can get at the keys and the keys are somehow locked to a storage device or computer.
2) Watermarking where the content has tags hidden (steganography) with origin, copy and copyable information.
If every modem, router, PC, VCR, PVR and TV could recognize the watermarks and not play or pass on content with particular tags, you might have some control even if encryption is stripped off.
However, the quality of a camcorder pointed at a movie screen, divx'd & p2p distributed is so poor that the watermark could not be well hidden to still appear (artifacts would be easily visible in the theater).
That brings me to
3) The cable-TV style internet. I don't think Eisner cares that much about the genie getting out of the bottle. It's the genie replicating itself 1E6 times across the internet. The problem isn't a digital one, it's a physical vs. "ether" (Eisner's word) one. I can sell SVCDs on a street corner no easier than VHS tapes. I can only sell a few and the risk is high.
Suppose every ISP was required to prevent servers and p2p clients for "consumer" accounts . All servers must be licensed (like guns) and are subject to inspection without warrant.
That would achieve Eisner's goal.
A China-style firewall around the whole country would be required also.
I suggest Vadasz said "no" because he couldn't imagine Eisner would want something so far out.
I'm beginning to believe Eisner would be willing to do anything & give up any of our rights in order to achieve his goal.
Eisner's comments are posted A good portion of them is playback of a movie they got off a p2p network. Those Senators sure love to be entertained (you can almost hear Fritz's lips puckering when he fawns over Eisner).
I'll put up some of the question & answer stuff later.
Anyone want to host three hours worth of the hearing? It's 34MB. I could trim it to 30MB to fit in a Yahoo! Briefcase, but you can only upload 5MB at a time. It just isn't worth it (esp. since I didn't get the whole thing & Real crapped out on me a few times) to edit it into separate files.
By the way, Ogg Vorbis (ogenc v0.9, libvorbis RC3) did a nice job on speech at -q 0 (avg. bitrate 28.4 kb/s). I tried & failed with Streambox VCR, so had to grab the uncompressed audio out the back of Real & re-squish it. Too bad 'cause the original was only 16 kb/s.
Whoever's doing audio for Congress does a good job. The mics are close and well muted (none gets left on & no one gets cut off)- not much coughing or background noise.
The transcripts (what was actually said including questions & answers) will probably be available in a couple of weeks at the Government Printing Office {check out Orrin Hatch's Judiciary Committee Hearing on Copyrights while you're there}
The submitted statements are available on the Committee's own page.
The hearing was broadcast on CapitolHearings, but they don't seem to offer archives. I ripped the stream & will post an Ogg Vorbis version soon, but the everyone must have woken up today & decided to surf porn 'cause the 16kbps stream over a well-tuned DSL connection was interrupted several times, some of which failed auto-retries (do I hate RealPlayer now?).
If anyone else has a stream rip, please post it. My favorite part is Hollings saying "son of a bitch" a couple minutes before the hearing starts. Yes, that microphone is on sir.
Did anyone else listen? I thought Eisner went off the deep end during the question & answer period. He wants to protect camcorder-at-the-movie -> DivX;-) movies from distribution (not just stuff with DRM). The Intel V.P. (who was very calm despite the verbal LSD flying around) said that wasn't possible, but I don't think he was considering the full totalitarian push. Consider a law requiring ISPs to NAT and dynamic-IP all users so no one can run a server unless registered (like guns) & authorized. All P2P traffic is illegal. The entire US is firewalled off from "rouge" nations. Sure, it sounds unlikely, but that's why Eisner sounded so wacked out. He really sounded like he either wanted the net to become cable TV or just be shut down entirely (Disney isn't making any money from abc.com or disney.com or go.com- what do they need the damned pirate club for anyway?)
You might think Eisner was talking about watermarking, but he wanted 90% of "pirate" traffic catchable. He's MORE concerned about a teenage projectionist inviting over his buddy who's dad has a 3-chip DV camcorder than DRM cracks. A 400x300 divx compress from a camcorder aimed at a screen is not going to preserve watermarks unless they really fuck up the quality. I think he's heading towards the RIAA "we want the right to snoop & crack those pirate sonofabitches" idea.
-M