Re:When's the new Badfinger album coming out?
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On Apple vs Apple
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If that was actually the agreement they entered into, yes, they would be in violation. However, I truly doubt that's what was written on the piece of paper they signed. And unless you've seen it, you don't really know. Neither do I. And to the best of my knowledge, nobody outside of the Apple Corps. or their attorneys do either.
However, another story is that by the agreement "Apple Computer agreed that it would not package, sell or distribute physical music materials" (from the Wikipedia article). Since Apple's music distribution is totally electronic, this would seemingly not violate the agreement.
It seems to me, based on the fact that the two companies are again taking the issue to court, that the real agreement -- which again, has yet to be publicly and officially revealed -- lies somewhere between these two extremes, such that Apple's conduct appears to be defensible to Apple Computer but leaves open the possibility of a win to Apple Corps.
If their agreement actually was as you describe, preventing them from entering the music business altogether, then it seems likely that Apple Computer probably could have just purchased Apple Corps., or at least bought the Apple name from them outright: AAPL is sitting on a $8.7 Billion USD war chest, and that's just in cash. Obviously they think that the 1991 settlement protects them, so I doubt very much that the issue is as clear-cut as you and others are making it out to be.
This is totally untrue. An out-of-court settlement is in no way necessarily a license. The only thing that happened is that Apple Computer paid Apple Records a bunch of money, and they dropped their suit. Nobody here knows anything else. The terms of that deal were confidential, as was the amount paid, and pretty much anyone quoting it is repeating hearsay. It may or may not be correct hearsay, but it's not definitive. The Wikipedia article on the topic claims that Apple Computer's field of use specifically disallowed music distributed on physical media; if this is true then they are probably in the clear today. But of course, nobody can claim to know this unless they have inside access to the documents (or until they become part of the public record in the new suit).
Apple Computer never licensed the Apple trademark from anyone. I think you're the one who's misusing the word here.
I think the premier audio codec for nerds -- audio nerds anyway -- is FLAC. There seem to be a lot of people who trade concert bootlegs and stuff encoded with FLAC, and a lot of discussion of it on various audio forums.
But there we're talking about a subculture of a subculture, it's so far from mainstream it's not even funny. I think if you went to most readers of Slashdot's homes (parents' basements, whatever) and scanned their hard drives, you'd find that the most common formats were probably straight MP3, followed perhaps by AAC, Windows Media, and then maybe OGG or Apple Lossless as a distant fourth.
I'm not necessarily sure that without the iTMS that the iTunes/iPod combo would fly, without any protection against downloading the songs back to a PC that they didn't come from.
It would be pretty easy to make an argument that Apple was negligent in creating a product that could so easily be used to pirate massive quantities of copyrighted content -- that in effect, they had created a system perfectly tailored to the unlicensed copying and distribution of copyrighted content: iTunes rips tracks from CDs, compresses, stores, and organizes them, they are transparently synced to the iPod, and then the iPod can be taken to another computer and its contents downloaded. I think it would be trivial to argue that by not including some safeguard against downloading imported tracks, that Apple was failing to act in a "reasonable and prudent" manner with regards to others' property, and that's the basis for negligence.
Now I find these sort of secondary-liability suits rather distasteful, and I'm not even sure if one would succeed, but it wouldn't really have to -- it would only have to hurt Apple either financially or in terms of its reputation, something that wouldn't have been hard to do, right when the iPod first came out. A lot of product liability torts are really used just as a way to bludgeon companies with huge expenses, and although Apple has a big war chest, it's not infinite. It just doesn't make any sense to create that sort of trouble for yourself. Apple is a big, fat target with deep pockets: they're a lawsuit magnet.
And in the long run, even if Apple survived the lawsuits, it wouldn't be hard to convince a few Senators (after administering the correct amount of cash) that the iPod was merely a "piracy machine." I'm sure the music labels would be able to create all sorts of sales figures showing how much money they'd lost due to iPod piracy, and how it was just going to be one downward spiral into dope-smoking Communism if immediate action wasn't taken. Remember this all would have happened before iPods became the cultural phenomenon they are today, so it wouldn't have been difficult for the labels to get legislation passed and kill hard-drive based MP3 players the same way they killed DAT: with an overabundance of restrictions or some form of mandated copy protection.
When I think of the ways that a showdown between Apple circa 2001 and the RIAA and the record labels might have played out, there are a lot more end-states that look worse than the situation today than there are ones that look better.
If Apple did this, they wouldn't be able to offer the tight hardware/software integration that they do. Part of the reason I shell out for a new Mac every few years is because I don't have to worry about hardware compatibility. If I want a wireless card, I just fire up Apple's web site or go to the Apple store and buy one. Done. Same thing if I want a videoconferencing camera. Or practically anything else. That whole "it just works" thing is made possible by the fact that there are only at any given time about 12 supported hardware configurations. (Okay I made that number up, but it's much, much smaller than the number of possible PC hardware configurations.)
You may see this as a limitation, I see it as a feature. You don't need to worry about whether or not something will work with your Mac. There's rarely much fine print to read. Sure, there's less selection and the gear is more expensive, but if you value your time and don't enjoy spending it messing around with drivers or configurations, the lack of options actually becomes a feature. Using my example of a wireless card, there is ONE wireless card for Macs. (At one time there was two, but I don't think they're making the regular 'non Extreme' one anymore.) You buy the card, stick in into your machine, done. No drivers, no guessing as to whether or not it's going to work.
I've argued that not having something like this, hardware that's just guaranteed to work without a hassle, is one of the things that's most frustrating with Linux. With Windows it's less so, because most hardware you find at Worst Buy works at least marginally under Windows, but it doesn't guarantee you that the drivers won't be bloated or flakey, or that it won't interact with some other part of your white-box system in some bizarre way.
I would not want Apple to be the only -- or probably even the dominant -- computer company in existence. Their way of building systems, making one integrated machine rather than parts that are assembled together by the customer, is definitely limiting in a way. I'm glad that it's possible to build an open system, and I think it can be a great way of learning about how a computer works (or at least what's inside), to build one yourself. But not all people want that, or even care about that possibility. Lots of people (apparently about 3%, from the numbers I've seen) are willing to sacrifice that flexibility AND pay a significant premium, in order to have LESS options and thus less complexity.
I think you're missing the point. If the iPod didn't provide some semblance of copy protection, if it didn't create the appearance of protecting copyrighted music, and if Apple as a company didn't pretend to give a shit about the RIAA, then the iPod could not exist as a consumer product in the way it does today.
Nobody likes the RIAA, except for the record labels. I doubt even the people who work at Apple like them, or like having to basically cripple their hardware and software because of them. But it just doesn't make any sense, if you wanted to produce a useful product -- and useful requires that you not get sued and get an injunction placed against distributing the product, or get run out of business by billion-dollar DMCA lawsuits, groundless as they may be -- you don't go taking a baseball bat to the hornet's nest that is the RIAA.
Instead, you blow some smoke at them. Appease them, if you will. You throw some trivial copy protection on there, enough so you can say "hey, we told them not to steal music," but which makes it easy for anybody with half a brain to download Senuti (or any of the other dozen utilities that are out there) and share their music with anyone else.
It's a good compromise, and I much prefer it to the alternative, which is that they wait for the RIAA to either sue them into the ground, or use their pet politicians to pass some bullshit law requiring really onerous DRM. Because that's the alternative.
The scenario you're talking about doesn't make sense. You wouldn't keep all those clips that you made with Garageband stored on the iPod using iTunes (which puts them in an invisible folder), that would be just silly. It would make the clips hard to work with in any other program.
What any reasonable person would do it just copy them to the iPod as it's sitting on the desktop, thus using it like a portable hard drive, and making it trivially easy to get off on the other end.
I know a lot of musicians, many of whom have iPods, and many of them use them to move work around. But I don't know anyone who keeps their works-in-progress saved in iTunes, that's just not it's function. After you've finished making a song, then sure load it in. But something you want to share with other people, you don't put in there.
That would work. Actually what I was describing would (obviously) need some extra equipment to make work, I think the easiest way is to have the pulses from the PMT cause the system to read the value of a free-running, fast counter, and the random digit is pulled from the least significant bit of the counter. Eventually though this might be prone to errors, if the counter spent more of its time in one state than the other.
But you're right, using two sources would make sure that there wasn't anything non-random involved in the bit generation. I wonder if it would be more or less robust if you used two types of random noise: say used resistor thermal noise to flip the bits and decay noise to cause the count.
Basically what the judge said, was that Microsoft couldn't ask for the right of discovery in a U.S. court and subpoena other people/corporations for information, all because they were involved in a dispute in a U.K. court. Basically, he said "we're not going to get involved."
I think the flip side of his use of 'comity,' though, is that if Microsoft went to court in the U.K., and got whatever their equivalent of discovery powers are (power to have subpoenas issued), then the U.S. courts would honor them and might allow Microsoft to use them to get subpoenas valid in the U.S. (maybe). At least that would be my take on what would be fair, once you start saying that you're going to respect the judgment of the other jurisdiction's courts.
I don't know this, but I suspect that Microsoft may have already attempted to get discovery/subpoenas in the U.K. already and failed (which would make sense, since logically you'd try there first), and the judge is also telling Microsoft that he's not going to contradict a U.K. court's ruling on something that's going on in their jurisdiction. If this is the case, it's as if a child asked their mother for something, got told no, and then went to their father and asked the same question, hoping for a different answer. The father, not wanting to really piss off his wife, tells his kid that he already got his answer.
So depending on the situation, the ruling could be a bit of a slapdown (the latter case, where MS has already tried in the U.K.), or it could just be telling them to go ask permission first (the former, second paragraph) and then they might have a chance.
It's not about recognizing any other country's laws as being valid here, which would of course be rather ridiculous (despite this we do it quite often through international treaties, and I stand behind my judgement), but not attempting to extend U.S. law onto another nation in a way that would diminish their sovereignty. This is the international case, but it works between U.S. States as well. It's basically one court's way of respecting another jurisdiction's right to make their own laws, which apply to themselves.
Now, where your question really gets interesting is if the 'other jurisdiction' is obviously undemocratic and unjust. IMO, the notion of "comity" is based on an essential respect for the right to self-determination of others; when the laws in the other jurisdiction are obviously borne not out of self-determination but out of tyranny and oppression, it raises a valid question as to whether such courtesy and respect should be given. My feeling is that no, it should not; but this is a bit of a moot point when you're talking about relations between the U.S. and U.K. legal systems, which typically do not characterize each other as tyrannical. In fact it is possible, although not typically seen anymore, to use very old English rulings as precedent in U.S. courts. (You see this sometimes if you read old USSC or appellate court cases on particularly fundamental issues; somebody will have dragged out their Blackstone's Commentaries and found some particularly interesting Common Law case to mention.)
I would pay for this also. A ways back I wrote about how Amtrak has introduced "Quiet Cars" on some of its trains, where they are pretty aggressive (at least in my experience) in enforcing a no-cellphones and no-loud-talking rule, and it has just totally changed my experience of rail travel. I now take them for almost all of my Northeast Corridor trips.
I think the movie theaters would do well to take a look at how a small change can influence the perceived user experience, and how that translates into purchasing decisions down the road. Some enforcement of the rules they already have would probably draw me back into the theater, but they'd have to be vigilant about it. It only takes one bad experience for a person to feel like they've wasted $9 on a movie because some asshole talked through it, and that person probably won't come back.
I would definitely pay an extra buck to get a bouncer that patrolled the theater and threw out people for talking or using cellphones; I'd probably pay half that just to go to a theater that was a complete RF-blocking Faraday cage, so that cellphones didn't function at all.
Oh, and I'd pay an extra $5 if the bouncers were retired librarians-turned-pro-wrestlers, and they viciously beat people who talked to death in the aisle. Quietly, of course.
Thanks for doing the math. I suspected that the keyspace here wasn't as big as what most people are already getting today with current technologies, you confirmed it.
Although somebody mentioned that TFA may have been a bad summary of the intended application, and what they really plan on using this for is as a source for salt, which would then get included into the key of a symmetric cipher, thus increasing the keyspace, but why you'd want to go to all this work when you could just increase the key by 60 bits and not have to worry about using a radio-telescope is beyond me. (It's still a shared key, regardless of whether you're sharing the location and time of a quasar or web-stream of a quasar and the time, or a regular password. One way you have to get them the key information, from a security standpoint it doesn't matter what it is.)
I actually thought that they were talking about using the data from quasars to generate one-time pads, which would then be distributed by conventional means. I didn't think they were actually proposing having two separate people observe the same quasar, to produce the "one-time" pad simultaneously. Unless you had a quasar that you knew nobody else knew about, and definitely wasn't monitoring, it seems like a pretty bad idea. Especially if the people you're trying to conceal information from have more resources than you do.
In short, I think it's actually a pretty dumb idea; its forward security depends entirely on the assumption that somebody, someplace, wasn't out there, recording the same quasar that you used to generate your pad. And given the rather finite (to my knowledge) number of visible/recievable quasars, it seems like a poor assumption to make. Certainly I wouldn't want to bet my life on it.
You pretty much described the key weakness of one-time pads. If you ever re-use one, then (depending on the message length and content, plus many other factors) your security is weakened significantly, because then you become vulnerable to frequency analysis and other conventional crypt-analytic attacks.
If I was going to use a OTP to secure a line of communication, I think the best way to use it would be to transmit a key for some other symmetric cipher, of fixed and arbitrary (and very long!) length. It's not "perfectly secure," in the same way that using a OTP for everything would, but it eliminates some of the problems. Also, it minimizes key distribution, which is always the Achilles' heel of OTP systems -- they depend entirely on having a secure method to distribute the pads to the recipients. By sending only a per-message key using them, and then following with the actual message, a book of pads could last significantly longer than if you used them for message encryption itself. (This of course demands that you have a good symmetric key cipher to use, and use keys that are long enough to prevent decryption for whatever length of time you need to protect the content, say 10,000 years.)
I have some real doubts about whether using a quasar is really more secure or desirable than using other forms of random entropy, for example, radioactive decay patterns or various aspects of quantum tunneling. Those sources are pretty much accepted as being "totally random" -- or at least, if anyone were to be able to predict a pattern in them, they'd certainly be up for a Nobel Prize or two. I can't figure out why using quasars is better than using a true RNG that doesn't rely on an external antenna that could be fed a false signal.
It's not as though quasars are unique in having random properties; you can also get randomness from quantum phenomena, and Wikipedia suggests thermal noise from resistors and avalanche noise from reverse-biased Zener diodes can also be used. Either one of those methods would cost a lot less than using a radio-telescope and pointing it at a quasar. I don't know how many thousand of those you could build for the cost of one good radio-telescope, but I bet it's a lot. And there's always the option of using a chunk of something radioactive and pointing a phosphor-coated PMT at it, if you want something quick and dirty that you can probably make in most university labs. And if you're not quite so relentlessly paranoid as to completely abhor psuedo-RNG algorithms, you can use such a source to provide a seed, and from there generate (within reason) probably more random numbers than you'll ever want to use.
Unless the cost is minimal, like 2 dollars or so, then I won't mind if I wasted the money.
When I was in college, we had a student group called the "Film Board" that used to show movies. Obviously they didn't have the overhead of a 'real' theater (we had lecture halls that were basically designed to show films in, with fairly decent sound systems), but they managed to pay for the cost of the films. They generally got them after the big theaters but before they hit home videos (so about on par with the second-run theaters, if they even exist anymore). It was all legitimate, they got the rights to show everything along with the film itself, which was mostly 16mm.
They only ever showed one title a weekend, four shows -- two on Friday and two on Saturday -- and the price was a buck a head, bring your own popcorn. I went pretty much every weekend, and we never paid attention to what was on. If it was bad, you could just sneak out after the first reel and no big loss.
Although it's obviously not going to keep Hoyts in business, I wonder if they were to go under, whether small community organizations couldn't replicate what we had going on in college. I think there is still a demand for going and watching movies someplace, just as a "thing to do" in the evenings, and if the corporate theaters failed to deliver it, I wonder whether others could pick it up. There are lots of places around with "media rooms", and I've seen some lecture halls that are better equipped than some small movie theaters anyway. The venues definitely exist, I think it would just require someone to want to make it happen in their town.
This is true. In another comment of mine I suggested that theaters need to get smaller, down to the size where an average person could rent one for an evening with a group of friends. However I think the alternative, or perhaps complementary option, is to go large.
I think theater owners are getting this, because I've seen several new IMAXes open around me, in regular multiplex-type locations (as opposed to being in science museums, which used to be the only place you'd find them), and a lot of movies being shown in them as special features. Harry Potter, for instance, was shown in an IMAX theater around here.
I think theaters can go one way or the other: small digital cinemas that people can rent out, bring their own refreshments to, and see any DVD movie they want in, or they can get bigger to the point where there's no way to replicate it at home. Just watching the film itself is the experience, and it doesn't matter if the refreshments are god-awful expensive, and you blast the sound so loud that nobody can talk over it anyway.
I'm not sure how sustainable this second path is though. The consumer is fickle, and right now IMAX movies have a certain novelty aspect to them. I wonder whether people would continue to go, if every corner had an IMAX cinema, and every movie came out in that format.
There are obviously a lot of technical gimmicks that could be added to the big-screen features that are hard to replicate at home (3-D effects seem to be an old standby), but I'm not sure if they're enough to save theaters as an industry.
Yep, I think you pretty much summed it up. Theaters are claiming they offer a better experience, but at the same time they're desperately begging for a temporary 'monopoly' on showing films, before they go out on DVD.
Personally, I want to like going to a movie theater. I really do. I like the experience; there's something sort of uselessly traditional about it. And not owning a home theater with a projector and a few kilowatts of sound amplification, it is a big step above watching a movie at home.
However, as much as I like going, it's as if the theaters have been doing everything they can to cheapen that experience, to the point where I barely go anymore. And I ought to be their target market -- I have the disposable income and I don't have a home theater, or even a regular TV (their only competition is my 19" computer monitor). But the increased ticket costs, coupled with the outrageous price of refreshments, advertising -- I'm not talking about previews here, but actual bald-faced ads run before them, and the chance of getting stuck in a theater with some asshole who won't shut up; these things all make the value proposition a lot worse than it might otherwise be.
I think the thing that might save theaters is if they made themselves even smaller. Although I like watching actual film movies, it doesn't seem like this is going to keep them in business. I'm thinking of basically 'extreme home theaters' that could be rented out for an evening for under $100. Get 8 friends together, and grab a theater for a night. Big comfy seats, and you pick a movie out of a catalog and they play it for you. Particularly if they allowed you to bring your own food/drink, I think there could really be a market for such a thing. You pick the start time, and you don't have to worry about being stuck with some obnoxious people (other than the ones you choose to bring, of course). All the equipment would be pretty much standard, off-the-shelf stuff. Maybe they could even get HD versions of movies and show them, since it's going to be a while before most people have that kind of gear at home. And rather than picking from just a few movies, as a viewer you'd have a large catalog. Maybe equivalent to the 'new releases' section of Blockbuster, if you wanted to get the theater the same night, but if you wanted to book in advance, I see no reason why a Netflix-like variety of stuff ought not be available. After all, for the theater it's just a different disc they have to plug in. A well-engineered system might even deliver them by wire, from some giant datacenter somewhere.
The theaters are clinging to a business model that worked well before people had other choices. Now people have those choices, and they're going elsewhere. If movie theaters want to be around for another generation, they need to put some hard and creative thought into what it is that they offer, and what consumers want and are willing to pay for. Getting a six-week monopoly on a new film is a shoddy way to stay in business, and I think in the long run, consumers will find other ways to spend their time while they're waiting for the DVD to come out.
Great, this is exactly the answer I was looking for. So you really need local console access in order to set it up for headless operation.
For some reason I thought that the sshd daemon was running by default, I realize now that the person who said that just meant that sshd was installed, but not running, by default.
Unfortunately not, what people are mostly talking about when they discuss "universal healthcare" is a sort of UK-type 'socialized medicine,' or an expansion of Medicare and Medicaid out to everyone, and those programs are pretty much all-you-can-eat. And I don't think you'll find many private health-insurance companies in the UK, either, which further justifies my point. (I'm not saying they don't exist there, but there aren't very many and they're small in size relative to the NHS.)
So yes, I agree that it "would be insane," however that's just what many people are proposing.
A very limited type of universal healthcare would be less insane, for example one that covered nothing but catastrophic events and only kicked in at $5 or $10 thousand dollars, but this isn't want most people who are pining for government health insurance want. They want something that's going to pay for everything, from their regular GP visits to prescription drugs, and that's exactly the domain of the private insurance companies right now.
I'm aware of this; the question was really not of SSH but of Trustix's default policies. If root login via SSH is disabled, the ability for a normal user to sudo and become root-like could also have been disabled (by not adding them to sudoers by default); the advantage being that there would be no way to remote-root the system, all nontrivial changes would need to be made locally by default. However from a remote-administration standpoint this would really suck, and it would make setting up a totally headless system impractical because you'd need a local console (with root access) in order to at least add your normal user to sudoers.
The question wasn't really about SSH as a protocol or anything, it was about Trustix and how far along the security vs. convenience path they've placed themselves.
When you say that sshd by default disallows root login, I just wanted to ask a clarifying question. Does it still allow you to log in as a regular user and then sudo (or sudo -s, if such things are kosher according to your rules) in order to do necessary maintenance activities? I'm just thinking in terms of installing it on a totally headless machine for which there wasn't a local console at all, and all admin tasks were done over SSH. As long as you could sudo, this would be fine, but if you couldn't, or had to use a local console in order to reenable root privs, then it would be a real pain.
I'm assuming that you can sudo, else the setup would be pretty braindead for a server, but I just thought I'd ask to be sure.
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If that was actually the agreement they entered into, yes, they would be in violation. However, I truly doubt that's what was written on the piece of paper they signed. And unless you've seen it, you don't really know. Neither do I. And to the best of my knowledge, nobody outside of the Apple Corps. or their attorneys do either.
However, another story is that by the agreement "Apple Computer agreed that it would not package, sell or distribute physical music materials" (from the Wikipedia article). Since Apple's music distribution is totally electronic, this would seemingly not violate the agreement.
It seems to me, based on the fact that the two companies are again taking the issue to court, that the real agreement -- which again, has yet to be publicly and officially revealed -- lies somewhere between these two extremes, such that Apple's conduct appears to be defensible to Apple Computer but leaves open the possibility of a win to Apple Corps.
If their agreement actually was as you describe, preventing them from entering the music business altogether, then it seems likely that Apple Computer probably could have just purchased Apple Corps., or at least bought the Apple name from them outright: AAPL is sitting on a $8.7 Billion USD war chest, and that's just in cash. Obviously they think that the 1991 settlement protects them, so I doubt very much that the issue is as clear-cut as you and others are making it out to be.
so now the correct term is "we're all exactly the same".
We're all morons, now?
This is totally untrue. An out-of-court settlement is in no way necessarily a license. The only thing that happened is that Apple Computer paid Apple Records a bunch of money, and they dropped their suit. Nobody here knows anything else. The terms of that deal were confidential, as was the amount paid, and pretty much anyone quoting it is repeating hearsay. It may or may not be correct hearsay, but it's not definitive. The Wikipedia article on the topic claims that Apple Computer's field of use specifically disallowed music distributed on physical media; if this is true then they are probably in the clear today. But of course, nobody can claim to know this unless they have inside access to the documents (or until they become part of the public record in the new suit).
Apple Computer never licensed the Apple trademark from anyone. I think you're the one who's misusing the word here.
I think the premier audio codec for nerds -- audio nerds anyway -- is FLAC. There seem to be a lot of people who trade concert bootlegs and stuff encoded with FLAC, and a lot of discussion of it on various audio forums.
But there we're talking about a subculture of a subculture, it's so far from mainstream it's not even funny. I think if you went to most readers of Slashdot's homes (parents' basements, whatever) and scanned their hard drives, you'd find that the most common formats were probably straight MP3, followed perhaps by AAC, Windows Media, and then maybe OGG or Apple Lossless as a distant fourth.
I've long found that the best tool for backporting shiny stickers is 3M Pearl Finish MultiTask tape.
You can also run un-shiny stuff in emulation using Gloss Finish, but it's not recommended.
You're right, but blame the article submitter:
Following Microsoft's attempt to subpoena documents through US courts, relating to their ongoing anti-trust case in the UK... (emphasis mine)
I'm not necessarily sure that without the iTMS that the iTunes/iPod combo would fly, without any protection against downloading the songs back to a PC that they didn't come from.
It would be pretty easy to make an argument that Apple was negligent in creating a product that could so easily be used to pirate massive quantities of copyrighted content -- that in effect, they had created a system perfectly tailored to the unlicensed copying and distribution of copyrighted content: iTunes rips tracks from CDs, compresses, stores, and organizes them, they are transparently synced to the iPod, and then the iPod can be taken to another computer and its contents downloaded. I think it would be trivial to argue that by not including some safeguard against downloading imported tracks, that Apple was failing to act in a "reasonable and prudent" manner with regards to others' property, and that's the basis for negligence.
Now I find these sort of secondary-liability suits rather distasteful, and I'm not even sure if one would succeed, but it wouldn't really have to -- it would only have to hurt Apple either financially or in terms of its reputation, something that wouldn't have been hard to do, right when the iPod first came out. A lot of product liability torts are really used just as a way to bludgeon companies with huge expenses, and although Apple has a big war chest, it's not infinite. It just doesn't make any sense to create that sort of trouble for yourself. Apple is a big, fat target with deep pockets: they're a lawsuit magnet.
And in the long run, even if Apple survived the lawsuits, it wouldn't be hard to convince a few Senators (after administering the correct amount of cash) that the iPod was merely a "piracy machine." I'm sure the music labels would be able to create all sorts of sales figures showing how much money they'd lost due to iPod piracy, and how it was just going to be one downward spiral into dope-smoking Communism if immediate action wasn't taken. Remember this all would have happened before iPods became the cultural phenomenon they are today, so it wouldn't have been difficult for the labels to get legislation passed and kill hard-drive based MP3 players the same way they killed DAT: with an overabundance of restrictions or some form of mandated copy protection.
When I think of the ways that a showdown between Apple circa 2001 and the RIAA and the record labels might have played out, there are a lot more end-states that look worse than the situation today than there are ones that look better.
If Apple did this, they wouldn't be able to offer the tight hardware/software integration that they do. Part of the reason I shell out for a new Mac every few years is because I don't have to worry about hardware compatibility. If I want a wireless card, I just fire up Apple's web site or go to the Apple store and buy one. Done. Same thing if I want a videoconferencing camera. Or practically anything else. That whole "it just works" thing is made possible by the fact that there are only at any given time about 12 supported hardware configurations. (Okay I made that number up, but it's much, much smaller than the number of possible PC hardware configurations.)
You may see this as a limitation, I see it as a feature. You don't need to worry about whether or not something will work with your Mac. There's rarely much fine print to read. Sure, there's less selection and the gear is more expensive, but if you value your time and don't enjoy spending it messing around with drivers or configurations, the lack of options actually becomes a feature. Using my example of a wireless card, there is ONE wireless card for Macs. (At one time there was two, but I don't think they're making the regular 'non Extreme' one anymore.) You buy the card, stick in into your machine, done. No drivers, no guessing as to whether or not it's going to work.
I've argued that not having something like this, hardware that's just guaranteed to work without a hassle, is one of the things that's most frustrating with Linux. With Windows it's less so, because most hardware you find at Worst Buy works at least marginally under Windows, but it doesn't guarantee you that the drivers won't be bloated or flakey, or that it won't interact with some other part of your white-box system in some bizarre way.
I would not want Apple to be the only -- or probably even the dominant -- computer company in existence. Their way of building systems, making one integrated machine rather than parts that are assembled together by the customer, is definitely limiting in a way. I'm glad that it's possible to build an open system, and I think it can be a great way of learning about how a computer works (or at least what's inside), to build one yourself. But not all people want that, or even care about that possibility. Lots of people (apparently about 3%, from the numbers I've seen) are willing to sacrifice that flexibility AND pay a significant premium, in order to have LESS options and thus less complexity.
I think you're missing the point. If the iPod didn't provide some semblance of copy protection, if it didn't create the appearance of protecting copyrighted music, and if Apple as a company didn't pretend to give a shit about the RIAA, then the iPod could not exist as a consumer product in the way it does today.
Nobody likes the RIAA, except for the record labels. I doubt even the people who work at Apple like them, or like having to basically cripple their hardware and software because of them. But it just doesn't make any sense, if you wanted to produce a useful product -- and useful requires that you not get sued and get an injunction placed against distributing the product, or get run out of business by billion-dollar DMCA lawsuits, groundless as they may be -- you don't go taking a baseball bat to the hornet's nest that is the RIAA.
Instead, you blow some smoke at them. Appease them, if you will. You throw some trivial copy protection on there, enough so you can say "hey, we told them not to steal music," but which makes it easy for anybody with half a brain to download Senuti (or any of the other dozen utilities that are out there) and share their music with anyone else.
It's a good compromise, and I much prefer it to the alternative, which is that they wait for the RIAA to either sue them into the ground, or use their pet politicians to pass some bullshit law requiring really onerous DRM. Because that's the alternative.
The scenario you're talking about doesn't make sense. You wouldn't keep all those clips that you made with Garageband stored on the iPod using iTunes (which puts them in an invisible folder), that would be just silly. It would make the clips hard to work with in any other program.
What any reasonable person would do it just copy them to the iPod as it's sitting on the desktop, thus using it like a portable hard drive, and making it trivially easy to get off on the other end.
I know a lot of musicians, many of whom have iPods, and many of them use them to move work around. But I don't know anyone who keeps their works-in-progress saved in iTunes, that's just not it's function. After you've finished making a song, then sure load it in. But something you want to share with other people, you don't put in there.
That would work. Actually what I was describing would (obviously) need some extra equipment to make work, I think the easiest way is to have the pulses from the PMT cause the system to read the value of a free-running, fast counter, and the random digit is pulled from the least significant bit of the counter. Eventually though this might be prone to errors, if the counter spent more of its time in one state than the other.
But you're right, using two sources would make sure that there wasn't anything non-random involved in the bit generation. I wonder if it would be more or less robust if you used two types of random noise: say used resistor thermal noise to flip the bits and decay noise to cause the count.
Basically what the judge said, was that Microsoft couldn't ask for the right of discovery in a U.S. court and subpoena other people/corporations for information, all because they were involved in a dispute in a U.K. court. Basically, he said "we're not going to get involved."
I think the flip side of his use of 'comity,' though, is that if Microsoft went to court in the U.K., and got whatever their equivalent of discovery powers are (power to have subpoenas issued), then the U.S. courts would honor them and might allow Microsoft to use them to get subpoenas valid in the U.S. (maybe). At least that would be my take on what would be fair, once you start saying that you're going to respect the judgment of the other jurisdiction's courts.
I don't know this, but I suspect that Microsoft may have already attempted to get discovery/subpoenas in the U.K. already and failed (which would make sense, since logically you'd try there first), and the judge is also telling Microsoft that he's not going to contradict a U.K. court's ruling on something that's going on in their jurisdiction. If this is the case, it's as if a child asked their mother for something, got told no, and then went to their father and asked the same question, hoping for a different answer. The father, not wanting to really piss off his wife, tells his kid that he already got his answer.
So depending on the situation, the ruling could be a bit of a slapdown (the latter case, where MS has already tried in the U.K.), or it could just be telling them to go ask permission first (the former, second paragraph) and then they might have a chance.
It's not about recognizing any other country's laws as being valid here, which would of course be rather ridiculous (despite this we do it quite often through international treaties, and I stand behind my judgement), but not attempting to extend U.S. law onto another nation in a way that would diminish their sovereignty. This is the international case, but it works between U.S. States as well. It's basically one court's way of respecting another jurisdiction's right to make their own laws, which apply to themselves.
Now, where your question really gets interesting is if the 'other jurisdiction' is obviously undemocratic and unjust. IMO, the notion of "comity" is based on an essential respect for the right to self-determination of others; when the laws in the other jurisdiction are obviously borne not out of self-determination but out of tyranny and oppression, it raises a valid question as to whether such courtesy and respect should be given. My feeling is that no, it should not; but this is a bit of a moot point when you're talking about relations between the U.S. and U.K. legal systems, which typically do not characterize each other as tyrannical. In fact it is possible, although not typically seen anymore, to use very old English rulings as precedent in U.S. courts. (You see this sometimes if you read old USSC or appellate court cases on particularly fundamental issues; somebody will have dragged out their Blackstone's Commentaries and found some particularly interesting Common Law case to mention.)
I would pay for this also. A ways back I wrote about how Amtrak has introduced "Quiet Cars" on some of its trains, where they are pretty aggressive (at least in my experience) in enforcing a no-cellphones and no-loud-talking rule, and it has just totally changed my experience of rail travel. I now take them for almost all of my Northeast Corridor trips.
I think the movie theaters would do well to take a look at how a small change can influence the perceived user experience, and how that translates into purchasing decisions down the road. Some enforcement of the rules they already have would probably draw me back into the theater, but they'd have to be vigilant about it. It only takes one bad experience for a person to feel like they've wasted $9 on a movie because some asshole talked through it, and that person probably won't come back.
I would definitely pay an extra buck to get a bouncer that patrolled the theater and threw out people for talking or using cellphones; I'd probably pay half that just to go to a theater that was a complete RF-blocking Faraday cage, so that cellphones didn't function at all.
Oh, and I'd pay an extra $5 if the bouncers were retired librarians-turned-pro-wrestlers, and they viciously beat people who talked to death in the aisle. Quietly, of course.
Thanks for doing the math. I suspected that the keyspace here wasn't as big as what most people are already getting today with current technologies, you confirmed it.
Although somebody mentioned that TFA may have been a bad summary of the intended application, and what they really plan on using this for is as a source for salt, which would then get included into the key of a symmetric cipher, thus increasing the keyspace, but why you'd want to go to all this work when you could just increase the key by 60 bits and not have to worry about using a radio-telescope is beyond me. (It's still a shared key, regardless of whether you're sharing the location and time of a quasar or web-stream of a quasar and the time, or a regular password. One way you have to get them the key information, from a security standpoint it doesn't matter what it is.)
Yep, pretty much.
I actually thought that they were talking about using the data from quasars to generate one-time pads, which would then be distributed by conventional means. I didn't think they were actually proposing having two separate people observe the same quasar, to produce the "one-time" pad simultaneously. Unless you had a quasar that you knew nobody else knew about, and definitely wasn't monitoring, it seems like a pretty bad idea. Especially if the people you're trying to conceal information from have more resources than you do.
In short, I think it's actually a pretty dumb idea; its forward security depends entirely on the assumption that somebody, someplace, wasn't out there, recording the same quasar that you used to generate your pad. And given the rather finite (to my knowledge) number of visible/recievable quasars, it seems like a poor assumption to make. Certainly I wouldn't want to bet my life on it.
You pretty much described the key weakness of one-time pads. If you ever re-use one, then (depending on the message length and content, plus many other factors) your security is weakened significantly, because then you become vulnerable to frequency analysis and other conventional crypt-analytic attacks.
If I was going to use a OTP to secure a line of communication, I think the best way to use it would be to transmit a key for some other symmetric cipher, of fixed and arbitrary (and very long!) length. It's not "perfectly secure," in the same way that using a OTP for everything would, but it eliminates some of the problems. Also, it minimizes key distribution, which is always the Achilles' heel of OTP systems -- they depend entirely on having a secure method to distribute the pads to the recipients. By sending only a per-message key using them, and then following with the actual message, a book of pads could last significantly longer than if you used them for message encryption itself. (This of course demands that you have a good symmetric key cipher to use, and use keys that are long enough to prevent decryption for whatever length of time you need to protect the content, say 10,000 years.)
I have some real doubts about whether using a quasar is really more secure or desirable than using other forms of random entropy, for example, radioactive decay patterns or various aspects of quantum tunneling. Those sources are pretty much accepted as being "totally random" -- or at least, if anyone were to be able to predict a pattern in them, they'd certainly be up for a Nobel Prize or two. I can't figure out why using quasars is better than using a true RNG that doesn't rely on an external antenna that could be fed a false signal.
It's not as though quasars are unique in having random properties; you can also get randomness from quantum phenomena, and Wikipedia suggests thermal noise from resistors and avalanche noise from reverse-biased Zener diodes can also be used. Either one of those methods would cost a lot less than using a radio-telescope and pointing it at a quasar. I don't know how many thousand of those you could build for the cost of one good radio-telescope, but I bet it's a lot. And there's always the option of using a chunk of something radioactive and pointing a phosphor-coated PMT at it, if you want something quick and dirty that you can probably make in most university labs. And if you're not quite so relentlessly paranoid as to completely abhor psuedo-RNG algorithms, you can use such a source to provide a seed, and from there generate (within reason) probably more random numbers than you'll ever want to use.
Unless the cost is minimal, like 2 dollars or so, then I won't mind if I wasted the money.
When I was in college, we had a student group called the "Film Board" that used to show movies. Obviously they didn't have the overhead of a 'real' theater (we had lecture halls that were basically designed to show films in, with fairly decent sound systems), but they managed to pay for the cost of the films. They generally got them after the big theaters but before they hit home videos (so about on par with the second-run theaters, if they even exist anymore). It was all legitimate, they got the rights to show everything along with the film itself, which was mostly 16mm.
They only ever showed one title a weekend, four shows -- two on Friday and two on Saturday -- and the price was a buck a head, bring your own popcorn. I went pretty much every weekend, and we never paid attention to what was on. If it was bad, you could just sneak out after the first reel and no big loss.
Although it's obviously not going to keep Hoyts in business, I wonder if they were to go under, whether small community organizations couldn't replicate what we had going on in college. I think there is still a demand for going and watching movies someplace, just as a "thing to do" in the evenings, and if the corporate theaters failed to deliver it, I wonder whether others could pick it up. There are lots of places around with "media rooms", and I've seen some lecture halls that are better equipped than some small movie theaters anyway. The venues definitely exist, I think it would just require someone to want to make it happen in their town.
This is true. In another comment of mine I suggested that theaters need to get smaller, down to the size where an average person could rent one for an evening with a group of friends. However I think the alternative, or perhaps complementary option, is to go large.
I think theater owners are getting this, because I've seen several new IMAXes open around me, in regular multiplex-type locations (as opposed to being in science museums, which used to be the only place you'd find them), and a lot of movies being shown in them as special features. Harry Potter, for instance, was shown in an IMAX theater around here.
I think theaters can go one way or the other: small digital cinemas that people can rent out, bring their own refreshments to, and see any DVD movie they want in, or they can get bigger to the point where there's no way to replicate it at home. Just watching the film itself is the experience, and it doesn't matter if the refreshments are god-awful expensive, and you blast the sound so loud that nobody can talk over it anyway.
I'm not sure how sustainable this second path is though. The consumer is fickle, and right now IMAX movies have a certain novelty aspect to them. I wonder whether people would continue to go, if every corner had an IMAX cinema, and every movie came out in that format.
There are obviously a lot of technical gimmicks that could be added to the big-screen features that are hard to replicate at home (3-D effects seem to be an old standby), but I'm not sure if they're enough to save theaters as an industry.
Yep, I think you pretty much summed it up. Theaters are claiming they offer a better experience, but at the same time they're desperately begging for a temporary 'monopoly' on showing films, before they go out on DVD.
Personally, I want to like going to a movie theater. I really do. I like the experience; there's something sort of uselessly traditional about it. And not owning a home theater with a projector and a few kilowatts of sound amplification, it is a big step above watching a movie at home.
However, as much as I like going, it's as if the theaters have been doing everything they can to cheapen that experience, to the point where I barely go anymore. And I ought to be their target market -- I have the disposable income and I don't have a home theater, or even a regular TV (their only competition is my 19" computer monitor). But the increased ticket costs, coupled with the outrageous price of refreshments, advertising -- I'm not talking about previews here, but actual bald-faced ads run before them, and the chance of getting stuck in a theater with some asshole who won't shut up; these things all make the value proposition a lot worse than it might otherwise be.
I think the thing that might save theaters is if they made themselves even smaller. Although I like watching actual film movies, it doesn't seem like this is going to keep them in business. I'm thinking of basically 'extreme home theaters' that could be rented out for an evening for under $100. Get 8 friends together, and grab a theater for a night. Big comfy seats, and you pick a movie out of a catalog and they play it for you. Particularly if they allowed you to bring your own food/drink, I think there could really be a market for such a thing. You pick the start time, and you don't have to worry about being stuck with some obnoxious people (other than the ones you choose to bring, of course). All the equipment would be pretty much standard, off-the-shelf stuff. Maybe they could even get HD versions of movies and show them, since it's going to be a while before most people have that kind of gear at home. And rather than picking from just a few movies, as a viewer you'd have a large catalog. Maybe equivalent to the 'new releases' section of Blockbuster, if you wanted to get the theater the same night, but if you wanted to book in advance, I see no reason why a Netflix-like variety of stuff ought not be available. After all, for the theater it's just a different disc they have to plug in. A well-engineered system might even deliver them by wire, from some giant datacenter somewhere.
The theaters are clinging to a business model that worked well before people had other choices. Now people have those choices, and they're going elsewhere. If movie theaters want to be around for another generation, they need to put some hard and creative thought into what it is that they offer, and what consumers want and are willing to pay for. Getting a six-week monopoly on a new film is a shoddy way to stay in business, and I think in the long run, consumers will find other ways to spend their time while they're waiting for the DVD to come out.
Great, this is exactly the answer I was looking for. So you really need local console access in order to set it up for headless operation.
For some reason I thought that the sshd daemon was running by default, I realize now that the person who said that just meant that sshd was installed, but not running, by default.
Thanks.
Unfortunately not, what people are mostly talking about when they discuss "universal healthcare" is a sort of UK-type 'socialized medicine,' or an expansion of Medicare and Medicaid out to everyone, and those programs are pretty much all-you-can-eat. And I don't think you'll find many private health-insurance companies in the UK, either, which further justifies my point. (I'm not saying they don't exist there, but there aren't very many and they're small in size relative to the NHS.)
So yes, I agree that it "would be insane," however that's just what many people are proposing.
A very limited type of universal healthcare would be less insane, for example one that covered nothing but catastrophic events and only kicked in at $5 or $10 thousand dollars, but this isn't want most people who are pining for government health insurance want. They want something that's going to pay for everything, from their regular GP visits to prescription drugs, and that's exactly the domain of the private insurance companies right now.
I'm aware of this; the question was really not of SSH but of Trustix's default policies. If root login via SSH is disabled, the ability for a normal user to sudo and become root-like could also have been disabled (by not adding them to sudoers by default); the advantage being that there would be no way to remote-root the system, all nontrivial changes would need to be made locally by default. However from a remote-administration standpoint this would really suck, and it would make setting up a totally headless system impractical because you'd need a local console (with root access) in order to at least add your normal user to sudoers.
The question wasn't really about SSH as a protocol or anything, it was about Trustix and how far along the security vs. convenience path they've placed themselves.
When you say that sshd by default disallows root login, I just wanted to ask a clarifying question. Does it still allow you to log in as a regular user and then sudo (or sudo -s, if such things are kosher according to your rules) in order to do necessary maintenance activities? I'm just thinking in terms of installing it on a totally headless machine for which there wasn't a local console at all, and all admin tasks were done over SSH. As long as you could sudo, this would be fine, but if you couldn't, or had to use a local console in order to reenable root privs, then it would be a real pain.
I'm assuming that you can sudo, else the setup would be pretty braindead for a server, but I just thought I'd ask to be sure.