i agree with your points in relation to where we are now in the world. unfortunately your final statement "I think that this should be about the final chapter in the history of the proprietary Internet appliance." i cannot agree with for this reason:
i remember when mobile phones first hit south africa. you had to fork out about R 1500 ($ 300 at the time).
before i left for the bright lights of london, the last phone i got was worth about R 3000 ($ 400 - way to go South African economy!). how much did i pay for the phone. um. nothing.
an extension of "software as a service" is quickly becoming content as a service. in x years time (yes a subtle reference to the box) you will be given an internet appliance when you register with the "metapshere" and every time you listen to a music track, watch a video, download a book, whatever, you will be charged for it. gibson and stephenson wrote about this kind of stuff years ago.
hehe
i actually avoided the solution in my post didn't i! your view point is 100% correct - and very unfortunate, isn't it.
the only option really is for microsoft to license the real and apple api and to support it in their media player. problem is, why would they want to do that? if they can get their format all over the show, they needn't fork out the extra $ so that they can be "compatible" (i use "" because, as you said, there is no standard streaming format other than mpeg that is considerable).
this sparks off a number of debates really...
the first, and most significant boils down to point of the original post. ignoring the other factors about real's spyware and their business model, microsoft have effectively wiped out the competition by bundling media player with their operating system. they took somebody else's idea, made it better (debate, yes!) and offered it along with their operating system. so, effectively, their end-to-end operating system principle is anti-competitive. i know that's a very broad and subjective statement, but i'm not a lawyer and i don't REALLY know who's software is better. all i know is that i've had my new windows box for 2 months now, and i haven't bothered to install real whereas it used to be on my good old installs cd.
it also proves another point - the cost of innovation (when last did microsoft innovate anything other than "user-friendly" software)
the second debate is actually back to your point about a standard media format. we used to have this, its actually in most satellite tv receivers all over the world - mpeg2. 4/5 years ago, when real was a great piece of software, a 56k modem was THE DEAL. you couldn't really watch mpeg on it, so real just compressed the data even more and gave us a viable streaming solution. now a 512k dsl/cable/whatever connection is THE DEAL. surely with that kind of bandwidth on hand players could revert back to a slightly more bandwidth intensive standard, yet a standard nontheless?
anyway. drone drone, waffle, waffle.
another little side point. in response to shiva600's comment about the open source and FREE darwin streamer. great, cool, i love it. but still. the fact remains - you still have to download and know about the goddamn player. we here at/. know about this kind of stuff, we have our fingers on the pulse of what's happening. unfortunately, we constitute a small minority. we are not a target market...
your understanding that with the inclusion of media player windows are NOT keeping real player off the desk top i believe to be mistaken.
when corporates do roll outs of XP - do you think they are going to bother rolling out real as well? why should they?
when my mother buys her new machine and gets XP OEM, do you think she knows what real player is? of course not! she clicks on things to play movies and they work. (yes its a nice integrated approach as someone else pointed out and you have to congratulate microsoft for catering for my mother!)
anyway...
do you think real really cares about real player? how many people actually have the real player plus - the one you BUY? they only care about their SERVERS and SERVICES. the software that compresses the movies, the software that streams the casts.
now if i'm a web media streaming company and i have to decide to go MS or REAL - who do you think i'm going to go with? the server that has a player on just about EVERY desktop, or the server that my listeners have to download the player? that's not a difficult decision!
i have little knowledge about pirating cable signals, but surely the difference is this:
if i buy a song from an MSP, on their servers they have an unencrypted version of the song that they encrypt with my public key and then i download it.
in the case of cable pirating, that's a multicast signal that requires some sort of key to access. surely the signal that you are receiving is not encrypted uniquely to your device and the SIM card is not directly involved in PKI decryption of the signal.
er i may be wrong, like i said, i know nothing about cable pirating...
in my *gasp* physical copy (so no, i don't know the URL) of Wired from july 2001 there was banner on the cover : THE RIAA DOESN'T WANT YOU TO SEE WHAT'S ON PAGE 61. naturally page 61 talks about a group of people accepting SDMI's challenge to crack their encryption algorthyms, which were based on watermarking.
er, so anyway, the point is (and i think this was on/. at some point) you can check this url - scroll down a bit to get to the meat of the crack - for more information on audio watermarking and its effectivity:
http://cryptome.org/sdmi-attack.htm
anyway, selling media online has always been something churning around in the back of my mind and every time i come up with some sort of idea that may or may not work i, i can pretty much figure out a way to crack it.
my conclusion is that there is no way you can encrypt this data in an uncrackable way due to the fact that at some point you have to send audio data to the sound card - and if anyone intercepts that stream or |'s it to another dev then all your effort is wasted.
surely a viable solution would be to use hardware-based decryption using PKI. like lets say my sound card had a mobile (cell phone) like SIM card slot in it. so i buy this sound card, register with some MSP (music service provider) who supple me with a SIM card that i slot into my sound card. then i can download encrypted media (like NOT destiny's child, please!) and, tada, a workable solution.
the first thought that has always come into my mind here is *ping* HARDWARE DONGELS. nooooo. what a success that was! but i feel this is slightly different. its not like you are having software that probes for the existance of something which can be decompiled and cracked.
i've got a number of other great ideas on this that i've been formulating for over 3 years now, if anyone out there is interested in getting together to maybe push something like this forward (i have a lot of ideas with regards to ownership of content and so on as well - basically giving you the same "freedom" of ownership that you have with physical media), give me a shout on michael_jw_bartlett at hotmail dot com.
of course you can always buy gold audio jacks, plug it into you sound card's output and plug the input into your cd writer...;)
i think you are taking the point out of context. yes, we all fucked around when we were 15 and pulled girls hair or whatever. the ramifications of our actions were quite small, yeah?
now 15 year old kids are taking down corporate web servers, writing virii, writing software that negates copyrighting etc...
so, what i'm saying is that yes, we were all rebellious but the extend of our then-rebellion was nowhere near as far reaching and dangerous as "digital rebellion".
i can't really agree with this.
i'm a very well rounded person. client-facing consultant, athlete, geek, ex-stage actor blah blah
i've done a lot of lan gaming where i meet geek kids who "interact" with people online. and i cannot say that their online interaction have done anything for their real world personalities.
i agree with the original post. i think that kids need fresh air, to play ball, to go out on dates and eat pizza off a plate rather than out of a box. balance is important, otherwise the incredible ability that they have to naturally communicate with computers is lost if they can't communicate with humans.
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i agree with your points in relation to where we are now in the world. unfortunately your final statement "I think that this should be about the final chapter in the history of the proprietary Internet appliance." i cannot agree with for this reason:
i remember when mobile phones first hit south africa. you had to fork out about R 1500 ($ 300 at the time).
before i left for the bright lights of london, the last phone i got was worth about R 3000 ($ 400 - way to go South African economy!). how much did i pay for the phone. um. nothing.
an extension of "software as a service" is quickly becoming content as a service. in x years time (yes a subtle reference to the box) you will be given an internet appliance when you register with the "metapshere" and every time you listen to a music track, watch a video, download a book, whatever, you will be charged for it. gibson and stephenson wrote about this kind of stuff years ago.
and THAT is the future of internet appliances!
hehe
/. know about this kind of stuff, we have our fingers on the pulse of what's happening. unfortunately, we constitute a small minority. we are not a target market...
i actually avoided the solution in my post didn't i! your view point is 100% correct - and very unfortunate, isn't it.
the only option really is for microsoft to license the real and apple api and to support it in their media player. problem is, why would they want to do that? if they can get their format all over the show, they needn't fork out the extra $ so that they can be "compatible" (i use "" because, as you said, there is no standard streaming format other than mpeg that is considerable).
this sparks off a number of debates really...
the first, and most significant boils down to point of the original post. ignoring the other factors about real's spyware and their business model, microsoft have effectively wiped out the competition by bundling media player with their operating system. they took somebody else's idea, made it better (debate, yes!) and offered it along with their operating system. so, effectively, their end-to-end operating system principle is anti-competitive. i know that's a very broad and subjective statement, but i'm not a lawyer and i don't REALLY know who's software is better. all i know is that i've had my new windows box for 2 months now, and i haven't bothered to install real whereas it used to be on my good old installs cd.
it also proves another point - the cost of innovation (when last did microsoft innovate anything other than "user-friendly" software)
the second debate is actually back to your point about a standard media format. we used to have this, its actually in most satellite tv receivers all over the world - mpeg2. 4/5 years ago, when real was a great piece of software, a 56k modem was THE DEAL. you couldn't really watch mpeg on it, so real just compressed the data even more and gave us a viable streaming solution. now a 512k dsl/cable/whatever connection is THE DEAL. surely with that kind of bandwidth on hand players could revert back to a slightly more bandwidth intensive standard, yet a standard nontheless?
anyway. drone drone, waffle, waffle.
another little side point. in response to shiva600's comment about the open source and FREE darwin streamer. great, cool, i love it. but still. the fact remains - you still have to download and know about the goddamn player. we here at
if you are just a geek trying to change the world, then you may wish to care about M$ - because they, are you aren't!
your understanding that with the inclusion of media player windows are NOT keeping real player off the desk top i believe to be mistaken.
when corporates do roll outs of XP - do you think they are going to bother rolling out real as well? why should they?
when my mother buys her new machine and gets XP OEM, do you think she knows what real player is? of course not! she clicks on things to play movies and they work. (yes its a nice integrated approach as someone else pointed out and you have to congratulate microsoft for catering for my mother!)
anyway...
do you think real really cares about real player? how many people actually have the real player plus - the one you BUY? they only care about their SERVERS and SERVICES. the software that compresses the movies, the software that streams the casts.
now if i'm a web media streaming company and i have to decide to go MS or REAL - who do you think i'm going to go with? the server that has a player on just about EVERY desktop, or the server that my listeners have to download the player? that's not a difficult decision!
if i buy a song from an MSP, on their servers they have an unencrypted version of the song that they encrypt with my public key and then i download it.
in the case of cable pirating, that's a multicast signal that requires some sort of key to access. surely the signal that you are receiving is not encrypted uniquely to your device and the SIM card is not directly involved in PKI decryption of the signal.
er i may be wrong, like i said, i know nothing about cable pirating...
er, so anyway, the point is (and i think this was on /. at some point) you can check this url - scroll down a bit to get to the meat of the crack - for more information on audio watermarking and its effectivity:
http://cryptome.org/sdmi-attack.htm
anyway, selling media online has always been something churning around in the back of my mind and every time i come up with some sort of idea that may or may not work i, i can pretty much figure out a way to crack it.
my conclusion is that there is no way you can encrypt this data in an uncrackable way due to the fact that at some point you have to send audio data to the sound card - and if anyone intercepts that stream or |'s it to another dev then all your effort is wasted.
surely a viable solution would be to use hardware-based decryption using PKI. like lets say my sound card had a mobile (cell phone) like SIM card slot in it. so i buy this sound card, register with some MSP (music service provider) who supple me with a SIM card that i slot into my sound card. then i can download encrypted media (like NOT destiny's child, please!) and, tada, a workable solution.
the first thought that has always come into my mind here is *ping* HARDWARE DONGELS. nooooo. what a success that was! but i feel this is slightly different. its not like you are having software that probes for the existance of something which can be decompiled and cracked.
i've got a number of other great ideas on this that i've been formulating for over 3 years now, if anyone out there is interested in getting together to maybe push something like this forward (i have a lot of ideas with regards to ownership of content and so on as well - basically giving you the same "freedom" of ownership that you have with physical media), give me a shout on michael_jw_bartlett at hotmail dot com.
of course you can always buy gold audio jacks, plug it into you sound card's output and plug the input into your cd writer... ;)
i think you are taking the point out of context. yes, we all fucked around when we were 15 and pulled girls hair or whatever. the ramifications of our actions were quite small, yeah?
now 15 year old kids are taking down corporate web servers, writing virii, writing software that negates copyrighting etc...
so, what i'm saying is that yes, we were all rebellious but the extend of our then-rebellion was nowhere near as far reaching and dangerous as "digital rebellion".
um. well i assume you are about 15. well done for proving katz's point about being close-minded and obtuse...
:/
maybe next time you should "think" before you "shoot"
i can't really agree with this. i'm a very well rounded person. client-facing consultant, athlete, geek, ex-stage actor blah blah i've done a lot of lan gaming where i meet geek kids who "interact" with people online. and i cannot say that their online interaction have done anything for their real world personalities. i agree with the original post. i think that kids need fresh air, to play ball, to go out on dates and eat pizza off a plate rather than out of a box. balance is important, otherwise the incredible ability that they have to naturally communicate with computers is lost if they can't communicate with humans.