Actually, there is one point that you did not mention when describing your proposal. Your system could be used to link the various clone Napster servers. They would only pass on requests which they could not fill with their own users. This way people could still use the various Napster clients, but get more files offered. Nice
No one said that distributed P2P needs to be a Napster clone. Free software authors frequently make the mistake of just coping some retarded existing commercial software (witness the influence of Windows on Gnome and KDE). We need to try a lot of totally diffrent ideas too. Here is one example:
Your system plays the role of file server by offering a list of available file and plays the role of search server for you by collecting the lists of available files from diffrent people. The key here is that only you search your own system's database, so only you get taged for the cost of collecting the databases of too many diffrent systems. Clearly, your system needs to figure out automatically which nodes it should track by remembering where you actually find stuff, but this should not present any real problem. You would also introduce a little randomization by tranking random nodes for a limited period of time.
This might work just as well as Napster for people who always DL the same type of music (like Tech for me). Clearly, you would not be able to show off to your friends by DLing any song they request, but that is not really that importent.
I do consider ssh2 to be broken crypto. The protocol specifies the base and modulus for its public-key-exchange algorithm. This means that anybody can sit down and "study" that base and modulus for weaknesses and attack spots. Heck, the NSA -- or Tatu -- could have pre-computed the information necessary to break the encryption on an ssh2 stream.
Why did he do this? Dose he want to try to kill competition by making a protocoll which no one can use without being insecure or is there some reason why he did not feal that this was a threat?
There are lots of CLI users who want to be able to influence GUIs with their CLI and KDE 2 may allow them to do this, but it is still not much really a GUI revolution.
Specifically, there is little "transfer" from the tricks the users has learned unde the GUI to the tricks they will learn under the CLI, i.e. using the GUI dose not teach you to use the dcop CLI. The relevent quote from your own thread would be "Wow! I had no idea you could do this." If it is possible for a users who knows about CLIs to not understand that they could use the CLI then something is wrong.
We could have a much more tightly integrated CLI and GUI if the widget set automatically provided a CLI for every window and all menus had direct interpretations via the CLI, i.e. much like the old autocad interface where all menu commands caused CLI commands. This allows you to build commands with the menus and edit/reuse them from the history.
Actually, you could take this one step further by eliminating widget based menus in favor of an improved cut and paste. The idea here is that cut and paste is critically importent to the usability of any computer interface so it must be optimized for speed (this crtl-C ctrl-V shit dose not cut it). The way to make shure that your cut and paste is good enough is to force the simulation of menus via cut and paste commands to the window's CLI. I think that Plan 9 dose with their editor.
Actually, it's likely that they are doing us a favor by preventing us from using unsigned drivers. I'm pretty shure that it's easy to get ring zero in ALL microsoft products (Bo2K can do it to 98 and NT right?), so you cna just write a patch for the running code to totally disable to DRM software. This is a superior solution to just capturing the output stream since it will enable to you copy files instantly instead of taking 3 min to play.
I would bet that the visualization/EQ plug-in authors will have stripped the necissary code from Bo2K to get ring zero and writen hacks to disable DRM long before we ever see much music distributed under Microsoft's DRM.
Actually, there might be software hacks which do not require faking a signed driver. Specifically, Windows has never been very good about keeping ring zero to it's self. BO2K (open source) can get ring zero in 98 and NT right? Anyway, it's highly unlikely that they will monitor the checksum of running code, so you can just disable all the rights managment stuff in the OS on a running system.
You could also just use protected mode to redirect the sound card IO ports, but I'd consider this and hardware hacks to be inferior solutions compaired with just "fixing" the running DRM code since you could only transfer music from secure to insecure at playback speeds. If you just fix the DRM then you can copy anything that you want to copy.
BTW> I will laugh my ass off if they try to add runtime monitoring of code. That would be so much work for such a bandaid fix for the fact that they can not improve their protected mode handling.
No, the Napster deal will totally kill all hope for subscription based services (unless Napster now fails). This is the sweatist deal t he music industry could possibly have brokered for themselves. They _need_not_sign_any_new_artists_
to make money. Specifically, if I'm an independent musician whosells my own CDs then the music industry (not me) recieves all the money from Napster when people use Napster to transfer my songs.
Actually, it's just as bad for artists who are signed by the music industry. The industry will never need to pay the artists for Napster based revinue. Why would the music industry ever make subscription based services where they might be forced to pay the artists for downloads. hell, they do not even need to pay for servers now since Napster is P2P.
Finally, if some independent label did set up a subscription based service why would any consumers buy their shit when they can just pay the Napster tax and DL all the same stuff + the main stream stuff. The only way to fix this is for everyone to switch to IRC for file trading.
Yep, Metallica and the rest will never see a cent of this money. It goes to the people who have always been exploiting the artists.
Actually, this is a really sweet deal for the music industry if they can keep the majority of users on Napster instead of IRC or free services. Specifically, if I'm a popular independent artist then the music industry will now be making money off of the distribution of my music on Napster. Essentually, the music industry now has a tax on most distribution of online music. The only real question here is "will Napster retain it's monopoly of online music distribution."
Yes, the Geological and meterological history of Mars is intereting and importent to studdy, but it's just plain moronic to suggest that Mars' geology and weather is an ecosystem.. there is no life on Mars (yet). Specifically, you are claiming that Mars' geology and weather are more intereting then Earth's geology, weather, life, and Human history *combined*. This is total bullshit.
Also, teraforming is unlikely to really transform the Geology beyond recognishion, i.e. we will still have many human lifetimes to studdy it. the only thing we will really damage is the weather, but I think it's safe to say that the "preperations" for teraforming will do considerable studdy of the weather and the changes will be quite intersting themselves.
Regardless, adding life to a lifeless enviroment can only be a good thing.
First, do you think that a union would really fix the H1 Visa problem? I'd assume that a union would just try to decrease the number of H1 Visas. I suppose it might force companies to pay H1 Visa recipiants more since this would make them less attractive, but this just means that only the companies without unionized labor would have lots of H1 Visa holders. I think federal legislation to force fair treatment of H1 Visa holders wopuld be much more effective.
Second, do you think that unions would really do anything to fix the problems with unfair co compeat contracts and NDAs? These issues are much to subtile for your average union and they only effect a minority of emploies (the more intelegent ones). Now, I suppose that a tech union might be a bit smarter then other unions, but I still think that it would ignore it's smarter most importent members in favor of the mass of dues paing html typing idiots.
I think the tech industry would be much better served by having a "tech workers loby" which did not deal with companies, but dealt with congress and the courts instead, i.e. it would try to help show that bad contracts and H1 Visa abuse should be illegal.
Alternativly, one could make an argument that unions would be ineffective since there are many many tech companies, i.e. unions are designed to deal with companies which have "monopolies on work." Now, the solution to this problem would be a more "distributed union" where the workers just discussed the problems they were having at work. It would be possible to look up people's opinions on companies to get a realistic view before joining a company and it would be possible to get help organizing "one time strikes." Actually, maybe we are closer to having such a place then we realize.. maybe a weblog like slashdot or kuro5hin could do this job.
Actually, the electric only cars cost a lot less to run then gas powered cars and the power plants are MUCH cleaner then any gas car. Plus, the electric only cars are simple machines realitive to gas powered cars, so they will not have the same reliability problems. Finally, the new pulse charging technology means that you can recharge one in a short period of time.
The ONLY two problems with electric cars are: (a) the high cost of the bateries and (b) the short range of travel between charges. Still, if you want a commuter car (200 miles per day) there is no better way to travel (besides public transit).
No, it just means that people will be forced to buy SCSI drives instead of ATA. Hell, ATA drives may not support this feature when used as a RAID, so you could just buy a motherboard with an ATA RAID controller instead of a normal ATA controller and use any drives you wanted.
Yes, we need to "stop this now," but that may mean switching to SCSI next summer. No one said that freedom would be cheap.
Unfortunatlyu, this will not help matters since the "copy protection" will still be implemented in software. These drives are identical to old execpt when you want to use newer software which exploits their features. We need to sell the idea that people should pay more for drives which will not work with some software packages to keep more software packages from requiring those drives. I think we are just going to need to play on people's paranoia, i.e. these drives will not let you back up. It is not the whole truth, but it's the only thing that they will hear.
It's a real shame that the TLDs were not originally treated as seperate orginisations:.edu would have been required by law to prevent non-universities from obtaining domain names,.org would have been a non-profit orginisation who's charter prevented them from allowing corperations to own.org domains,.net would have been some orginisation which gave priority to "network" related orginisations (i.e. joe.net could belong to any one until some network protocol called joe gained a signifcant following), and.com would have been a free-for-all. All the TLDs would have diffrent root servers and all the TLDs would have diffrent arbitration rules. Anyone could create a new TLD by putting up a root server, but they would then need to convince people to use their server too.
Hopefully, only the TLD with reasonable arbitration rules would have a following. Ok, this last bit is a stupid libertarian pipe dream, but you would be able to create a rouge.com which did not cheat the common people like the real.com inevitibly would.
Unfortunatly, P2P is not really the same as radio. Lissining to radio means that you *want* a DJ to chose the songs for you. The truth is that there are fundamentally three parties involved in the music lissening process: the data provider, the DJ, and the lissener. These parties may be devided up in many diffrent ways. Examples:
1) "Data provider == DJ == Lissener" is the traditional mp3 and CD system.
2) "Data provider == DJ != Lissener" is the trditional radio system.
3) "Data provider != DJ == Lissener" is the fast download system you are describing.
4) "Data provider == Lissener != DJ" is the system used by my artificial intelegence based mp3 player Smartplay. It only playes songs from your drive, but it uses a simple AI to guess your mood and it had a more efficent user interface to help keep you from waisting a lot of time skipping songs.
Anyway, there is really nothing keeping us from a "Data provider != DJ != Lissener" system. This would mean that the DJs would broadcast URLs and mixing instructions, but not necissarily the mp3 data it's self, and the download sites would wait for a significant portion of the lisseners to login before starting the multicast download of the song. The point is that you would not need to have a lot of bandwidth to be a DJ and the lisseners computer can hack together the playlists from multiple DJs to allow for even greater variety.
I tend to think that a hybrid of the "Data provider != Lissener != DJ" and the artivifial intelegence selection of DJs (ala smartplay's selection of songs, but for whole DJs instead---based on what they were plaing right now and your mood) would be the very best solution.
Seriously, how can anyone consider anything diffrent from LaTeX for serious writing (unless they have a publisher with trained monkies to rewrite it in TeX)? Hyperlinks are the ONLY feature missing from LaTeX, but LaTeX is about the only system with a good clean way to handle the old fassion hyperlinks (i.e. index, figure numbering, etc.).
The point is that you must use LaTeX if you want your work to ever appear respectable in print, so the question is: dose your publisher want to TeX it themselves from your draft or do they want you to TeX it, i.e. it's a question of money. If your an autonomous institution which dose it's own publishing and dose not have ass loads of money then you really need to make people TeX it.
Now, there are SGML systems which produce TeX and HTML, but they may not handle pictures propperly, so you should be very careful. Actually, there are ways to include hyperlinks in LaTeX. The resulting dvi file can be compiled to an HTML file. This is almost shurly the very best way to typeset your documents since you can write a TeX macro to treat images propperly for conversion to postscript OR HTML. It would work something like this: your images would be compiled to both.eps and.jpg, the TeX macro would embed the.eps and the URL for the.jpg into the dvi, the dvi could be converted into both.ps and.html without loosing the pictures. There are some issues regardling the placment of the images when convered to HTML, but nothing a LaTeX hacker could not fix.
Actually, the TiVo runs Linux, so the Cracker could just implement a man-in-the-middle attack with a kernel modification. Now, the MPAA may modify the TiVo kernel with proprietary code, but there are GPL protections here AND there are lots of people who know the Linux kernel enough to understand changes (and thus the protocol for the challenges). Regardless, the end result is a man-in-the-middle attack which NO ONE can stop. This means it will be *easy* to make Linux copy your copy protected data. I would expect a hack for the new TiVo to be out before all the old TiVo's are sold out. Actually, getting the keys out may be a little more work, but it can still be done.
You are absolutly correct, but I would like to clerify a few points you made, i.e. there are very few intelegent post in this discussion, so I'm gona take a min. to improve on one of the few intelegent ones I've found.
Clearly, the second drive attack can be defeated by encrypting the connection between the software and the drive, so that even the OS can not read the data. The above poster is discussing a man in the middle attack, i.e. the OS or hardware pretends to be the drive to the software and the software to the drive, the OS can answer all the challenges correctly since it can just make the identical chalenge to guy with the correct responce. The only difficult part is telling the OS how to find the challenges. This is why the protocoll/algorithm would need to be secret. Now, the Samba guys can tell you that protocoll are *significantly* easier to crack then encryption keys, so we should have no trouble breaking this.
Actually, an encrypted channel between the drive and the software could really be a boon for privacy advocates, so I doubt the NSA/FBI would ever allow the RIAA/MPAA to include it in hard drives. Specifically, it could mean that the NSA/FBI would need to replace your operating system to get the same man-in-the-middle attack, i.e. no lissening to random EM radiation emmited by the drive wires.
Jeff
Re:All sites with Linux source code will be illega
on
Copy Protection Galore
·
· Score: 1
Yes, judges should not make new laws, but they need to be able to strike down laws based on contradictions with existing laws which were not explicitly removed when the new law was passed. This is significantly more power then just striking down laws based on constitutional grounds.
Actually, our criminal justice system is totally fucked because judges do not take more power from the executive branch. The courts should have struck down mandatory minimum sentences for violating seperation of powers (note: that is a big leap, but it's the only thing which would have saved us from having laws with mandatory minimum sentences). Anyway, th point of the Judicial branch is to provide a more "academic" side to the government. Yes, academics screw up frequently, especially when their decission have political impact like judges, but I trust (almost) any judge more then I trust (almost) any FBI/DEA officer. It's the executive branch who are the real problems since it is the executive branches power which really gets magnified by all the government agencies which have been created.
What is wrong with using a Turing-complete markup langauge? Yes, you have security issues, but those would be easy to handle with TeX. Yes, you can enter an infinite loop, but that means your reader gets borred and closes the window.
No, I can not think of any reason why the "original" purpose of the web would not be better served by a high quality typsetting system like TeX as opposed to HTML. (Note: I said the original purpose of the web, i.e. academics sharing documents online, not ecommerce, porn, or flash games)
Actually, I can think of one reason a Turing-complete langauge would really kick the shit out of HTML: forms are one of the dumbest user interfaces ever invented, so Sun created Java, but Java sucks because Sun created on their buisness based timeline. Honestly, we would all be much better off if the browsers had a working programming langague prior to the web becomming a buisness.
I do not think LaTeX would be a really smart choice for a web markup langauge, but compiling a modified version of LaTeX into Display PostScript (with hyperlinks added) would kick the shit out of HTML (even today with all of HTML's extra features).
..dose this device allow software control of the audio stream, so that we can add good encryption. You can not trust the cell phone makers to add encryption which the NSA has not tampered with, so replacable software encryption is really the most importent feature (by far).
I totally agree, but I was sorta saing that there should be no MS Word. I was mreally tring to imply that there should be no applications / basic interfaces execpt for really disguised programming / scripting langauges. MS Word would just be editor, spell checker, pretty printer, etc. libraries.
I'm not really shure that it matters if we make computers easy to use for the masses since the masses will never have more then a blender even when they own a computer. Fundamentally, we should care about how much the computer entices people to learn more about programming it since this controls how many people we have to maintain the blenders for the masses.
Current trends in GUI design are very damaging from this POV since they further seperate the user from the program, i.e. a smaller percentage of expert computer users have any idea what is going on.
I'm literally talking about using a shellish langauge to write the interace, but have a shell prompt at the bottom of EVERY programs main window. Pull down menues would just be cut and paste short cuts to shell commands (ala Plan9). No one would know that you could just do things directly unless they knew what was happening, but they could start plaing arround and learn quite a lot without forests of confusing menus and icons. Most importently, every program would be very flexible.
This is a very interesting point, but I don't think it will help with the problems the article describes. The article is partially complaining about how software is not easy to use, but any powerful set of tools will necissarily be more abstract. You may remove the feature bloat and allow all technical people to be competent in a wide range of tasks, but stupid or unskilled people will still be stupid or unskilled.
I think there is a kind of Church Turing Thesis which applies to this: You can choose between using a blender or using a computer. A blender only dose a few things, but a cmputer's interface must be a programming langauge (or else it's a blender).
A central database would not necissarily have the same problems as our current DNS system if OIDs were not human readable. Unfortunatly, three would still be two serious problems:
(1) Who would do the human readable -> OID translation.
(2) Using a centralized database to find things would make censorship really easy. I've seen a lot of people here asking "who would own the centralized database." This question is totally irrelevent as any government would strongly regulate the database owners. the real question is "what country would be able to pass laws about it?" i.e. who's version of censorship are we going to force on the world.
First, there maybe be a solution to (1), but it's not totally clear how to implement it. Specifically, you need a "philosophical" cross between search engines and alternative DNS servers. I do not see how to d this, but it seems like you want to have the "athoritative" qualities of DNS, but allow eople to switch as easily as going to a diffrent search engine.
Second, the only real solution to (2) is to eliminate the centralized database. Actually, you really should just junk all this guys ideas an use freenet. Now, information on freennet is not perminant, but there are soltions to that too. Specifically, get people to permenently rehost thngs they think are importent.
Anyway, issue (1) is central to freenet too, so there is really no point in even considering this guys proposals. Freenet is beats these proposals in every way.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there is one point that you did not mention when describing your proposal. Your system could be used to link the various clone Napster servers. They would only pass on requests which they could not fill with their own users. This way people could still use the various Napster clients, but get more files offered. Nice
No one said that distributed P2P needs to be a Napster clone. Free software authors frequently make the mistake of just coping some retarded existing commercial software (witness the influence of Windows on Gnome and KDE). We need to try a lot of totally diffrent ideas too. Here is one example:
Your system plays the role of file server by offering a list of available file and plays the role of search server for you by collecting the lists of available files from diffrent people. The key here is that only you search your own system's database, so only you get taged for the cost of collecting the databases of too many diffrent systems. Clearly, your system needs to figure out automatically which nodes it should track by remembering where you actually find stuff, but this should not present any real problem. You would also introduce a little randomization by tranking random nodes for a limited period of time.
This might work just as well as Napster for people who always DL the same type of music (like Tech for me). Clearly, you would not be able to show off to your friends by DLing any song they request, but that is not really that importent.
I do consider ssh2 to be broken crypto. The protocol specifies the base and modulus for its public-key-exchange algorithm. This means that anybody can sit down and "study" that base and modulus for weaknesses and attack spots. Heck, the NSA -- or Tatu -- could have pre-computed the information necessary to break the encryption on an ssh2 stream.
Why did he do this? Dose he want to try to kill competition by making a protocoll which no one can use without being insecure or is there some reason why he did not feal that this was a threat?
There are lots of CLI users who want to be able to influence GUIs with their CLI and KDE 2 may allow them to do this, but it is still not much really a GUI revolution.
Specifically, there is little "transfer" from the tricks the users has learned unde the GUI to the tricks they will learn under the CLI, i.e. using the GUI dose not teach you to use the dcop CLI. The relevent quote from your own thread would be "Wow! I had no idea you could do this." If it is possible for a users who knows about CLIs to not understand that they could use the CLI then something is wrong.
We could have a much more tightly integrated CLI and GUI if the widget set automatically provided a CLI for every window and all menus had direct interpretations via the CLI, i.e. much like the old autocad interface where all menu commands caused CLI commands. This allows you to build commands with the menus and edit/reuse them from the history.
Actually, you could take this one step further by eliminating widget based menus in favor of an improved cut and paste. The idea here is that cut and paste is critically importent to the usability of any computer interface so it must be optimized for speed (this crtl-C ctrl-V shit dose not cut it). The way to make shure that your cut and paste is good enough is to force the simulation of menus via cut and paste commands to the window's CLI. I think that Plan 9 dose with their editor.
Actually, it's likely that they are doing us a favor by preventing us from using unsigned drivers. I'm pretty shure that it's easy to get ring zero in ALL microsoft products (Bo2K can do it to 98 and NT right?), so you cna just write a patch for the running code to totally disable to DRM software. This is a superior solution to just capturing the output stream since it will enable to you copy files instantly instead of taking 3 min to play.
I would bet that the visualization/EQ plug-in authors will have stripped the necissary code from Bo2K to get ring zero and writen hacks to disable DRM long before we ever see much music distributed under Microsoft's DRM.
Actually, there might be software hacks which do not require faking a signed driver. Specifically, Windows has never been very good about keeping ring zero to it's self. BO2K (open source) can get ring zero in 98 and NT right? Anyway, it's highly unlikely that they will monitor the checksum of running code, so you can just disable all the rights managment stuff in the OS on a running system.
You could also just use protected mode to redirect the sound card IO ports, but I'd consider this and hardware hacks to be inferior solutions compaired with just "fixing" the running DRM code since you could only transfer music from secure to insecure at playback speeds. If you just fix the DRM then you can copy anything that you want to copy.
BTW> I will laugh my ass off if they try to add runtime monitoring of code. That would be so much work for such a bandaid fix for the fact that they can not improve their protected mode handling.
No, the Napster deal will totally kill all hope for subscription based services (unless Napster now fails). This is the sweatist deal t he music industry could possibly have brokered for themselves. They _need_not_sign_any_new_artists_
to make money. Specifically, if I'm an independent musician whosells my own CDs then the music industry (not me) recieves all the money from Napster when people use Napster to transfer my songs.
Actually, it's just as bad for artists who are signed by the music industry. The industry will never need to pay the artists for Napster based revinue. Why would the music industry ever make subscription based services where they might be forced to pay the artists for downloads. hell, they do not even need to pay for servers now since Napster is P2P.
Finally, if some independent label did set up a subscription based service why would any consumers buy their shit when they can just pay the Napster tax and DL all the same stuff + the main stream stuff. The only way to fix this is for everyone to switch to IRC for file trading.
Yep, Metallica and the rest will never see a cent of this money. It goes to the people who have always been exploiting the artists.
Actually, this is a really sweet deal for the music industry if they can keep the majority of users on Napster instead of IRC or free services. Specifically, if I'm a popular independent artist then the music industry will now be making money off of the distribution of my music on Napster. Essentually, the music industry now has a tax on most distribution of online music. The only real question here is "will Napster retain it's monopoly of online music distribution."
Yes, the Geological and meterological history of Mars is intereting and importent to studdy, but it's just plain moronic to suggest that Mars' geology and weather is an ecosystem.. there is no life on Mars (yet). Specifically, you are claiming that Mars' geology and weather are more intereting then Earth's geology, weather, life, and Human history *combined*. This is total bullshit.
Also, teraforming is unlikely to really transform the Geology beyond recognishion, i.e. we will still have many human lifetimes to studdy it. the only thing we will really damage is the weather, but I think it's safe to say that the "preperations" for teraforming will do considerable studdy of the weather and the changes will be quite intersting themselves.
Regardless, adding life to a lifeless enviroment can only be a good thing.
First, do you think that a union would really fix the H1 Visa problem? I'd assume that a union would just try to decrease the number of H1 Visas. I suppose it might force companies to pay H1 Visa recipiants more since this would make them less attractive, but this just means that only the companies without unionized labor would have lots of H1 Visa holders. I think federal legislation to force fair treatment of H1 Visa holders wopuld be much more effective.
Second, do you think that unions would really do anything to fix the problems with unfair co compeat contracts and NDAs? These issues are much to subtile for your average union and they only effect a minority of emploies (the more intelegent ones). Now, I suppose that a tech union might be a bit smarter then other unions, but I still think that it would ignore it's smarter most importent members in favor of the mass of dues paing html typing idiots.
I think the tech industry would be much better served by having a "tech workers loby" which did not deal with companies, but dealt with congress and the courts instead, i.e. it would try to help show that bad contracts and H1 Visa abuse should be illegal.
Alternativly, one could make an argument that unions would be ineffective since there are many many tech companies, i.e. unions are designed to deal with companies which have "monopolies on work." Now, the solution to this problem would be a more "distributed union" where the workers just discussed the problems they were having at work. It would be possible to look up people's opinions on companies to get a realistic view before joining a company and it would be possible to get help organizing "one time strikes." Actually, maybe we are closer to having such a place then we realize.. maybe a weblog like slashdot or kuro5hin could do this job.
Actually, the electric only cars cost a lot less to run then gas powered cars and the power plants are MUCH cleaner then any gas car. Plus, the electric only cars are simple machines realitive to gas powered cars, so they will not have the same reliability problems. Finally, the new pulse charging technology means that you can recharge one in a short period of time.
The ONLY two problems with electric cars are: (a) the high cost of the bateries and (b) the short range of travel between charges. Still, if you want a commuter car (200 miles per day) there is no better way to travel (besides public transit).
No, it just means that people will be forced to buy SCSI drives instead of ATA. Hell, ATA drives may not support this feature when used as a RAID, so you could just buy a motherboard with an ATA RAID controller instead of a normal ATA controller and use any drives you wanted.
Yes, we need to "stop this now," but that may mean switching to SCSI next summer. No one said that freedom would be cheap.
Unfortunatlyu, this will not help matters since the "copy protection" will still be implemented in software. These drives are identical to old execpt when you want to use newer software which exploits their features. We need to sell the idea that people should pay more for drives which will not work with some software packages to keep more software packages from requiring those drives. I think we are just going to need to play on people's paranoia, i.e. these drives will not let you back up. It is not the whole truth, but it's the only thing that they will hear.
It's a real shame that the TLDs were not originally treated as seperate orginisations: .edu would have been required by law to prevent non-universities from obtaining domain names, .org would have been a non-profit orginisation who's charter prevented them from allowing corperations to own .org domains, .net would have been some orginisation which gave priority to "network" related orginisations (i.e. joe.net could belong to any one until some network protocol called joe gained a signifcant following), and .com would have been a free-for-all. All the TLDs would have diffrent root servers and all the TLDs would have diffrent arbitration rules. Anyone could create a new TLD by putting up a root server, but they would then need to convince people to use their server too.
.com which did not cheat the common people like the real .com inevitibly would.
Hopefully, only the TLD with reasonable arbitration rules would have a following. Ok, this last bit is a stupid libertarian pipe dream, but you would be able to create a rouge
Jeff
Unfortunatly, P2P is not really the same as radio. Lissining to radio means that you *want* a DJ to chose the songs for you. The truth is that there are fundamentally three parties involved in the music lissening process: the data provider, the DJ, and the lissener. These parties may be devided up in many diffrent ways. Examples:
1) "Data provider == DJ == Lissener" is the traditional mp3 and CD system.
2) "Data provider == DJ != Lissener" is the trditional radio system.
3) "Data provider != DJ == Lissener" is the fast download system you are describing.
4) "Data provider == Lissener != DJ" is the system used by my artificial intelegence based mp3 player Smartplay. It only playes songs from your drive, but it uses a simple AI to guess your mood and it had a more efficent user interface to help keep you from waisting a lot of time skipping songs.
Anyway, there is really nothing keeping us from a "Data provider != DJ != Lissener" system. This would mean that the DJs would broadcast URLs and mixing instructions, but not necissarily the mp3 data it's self, and the download sites would wait for a significant portion of the lisseners to login before starting the multicast download of the song. The point is that you would not need to have a lot of bandwidth to be a DJ and the lisseners computer can hack together the playlists from multiple DJs to allow for even greater variety.
I tend to think that a hybrid of the "Data provider != Lissener != DJ" and the artivifial intelegence selection of DJs (ala smartplay's selection of songs, but for whole DJs instead---based on what they were plaing right now and your mood) would be the very best solution.
Jeff
Seriously, how can anyone consider anything diffrent from LaTeX for serious writing (unless they have a publisher with trained monkies to rewrite it in TeX)? Hyperlinks are the ONLY feature missing from LaTeX, but LaTeX is about the only system with a good clean way to handle the old fassion hyperlinks (i.e. index, figure numbering, etc.).
.eps and .jpg, the TeX macro would embed the .eps and the URL for the .jpg into the dvi, the dvi could be converted into both .ps and .html without loosing the pictures. There are some issues regardling the placment of the images when convered to HTML, but nothing a LaTeX hacker could not fix.
The point is that you must use LaTeX if you want your work to ever appear respectable in print, so the question is: dose your publisher want to TeX it themselves from your draft or do they want you to TeX it, i.e. it's a question of money. If your an autonomous institution which dose it's own publishing and dose not have ass loads of money then you really need to make people TeX it.
Now, there are SGML systems which produce TeX and HTML, but they may not handle pictures propperly, so you should be very careful. Actually, there are ways to include hyperlinks in LaTeX. The resulting dvi file can be compiled to an HTML file. This is almost shurly the very best way to typeset your documents since you can write a TeX macro to treat images propperly for conversion to postscript OR HTML. It would work something like this: your images would be compiled to both
Jeff
Actually, the TiVo runs Linux, so the Cracker could just implement a man-in-the-middle attack with a kernel modification. Now, the MPAA may modify the TiVo kernel with proprietary code, but there are GPL protections here AND there are lots of people who know the Linux kernel enough to understand changes (and thus the protocol for the challenges). Regardless, the end result is a man-in-the-middle attack which NO ONE can stop. This means it will be *easy* to make Linux copy your copy protected data. I would expect a hack for the new TiVo to be out before all the old TiVo's are sold out. Actually, getting the keys out may be a little more work, but it can still be done.
Jeff
BTW> There is always the free TiVo project too.
You are absolutly correct, but I would like to clerify a few points you made, i.e. there are very few intelegent post in this discussion, so I'm gona take a min. to improve on one of the few intelegent ones I've found.
Clearly, the second drive attack can be defeated by encrypting the connection between the software and the drive, so that even the OS can not read the data. The above poster is discussing a man in the middle attack, i.e. the OS or hardware pretends to be the drive to the software and the software to the drive, the OS can answer all the challenges correctly since it can just make the identical chalenge to guy with the correct responce. The only difficult part is telling the OS how to find the challenges. This is why the protocoll/algorithm would need to be secret. Now, the Samba guys can tell you that protocoll are *significantly* easier to crack then encryption keys, so we should have no trouble breaking this.
Actually, an encrypted channel between the drive and the software could really be a boon for privacy advocates, so I doubt the NSA/FBI would ever allow the RIAA/MPAA to include it in hard drives. Specifically, it could mean that the NSA/FBI would need to replace your operating system to get the same man-in-the-middle attack, i.e. no lissening to random EM radiation emmited by the drive wires.
Jeff
Yes, judges should not make new laws, but they need to be able to strike down laws based on contradictions with existing laws which were not explicitly removed when the new law was passed. This is significantly more power then just striking down laws based on constitutional grounds.
Actually, our criminal justice system is totally fucked because judges do not take more power from the executive branch. The courts should have struck down mandatory minimum sentences for violating seperation of powers (note: that is a big leap, but it's the only thing which would have saved us from having laws with mandatory minimum sentences). Anyway, th point of the Judicial branch is to provide a more "academic" side to the government. Yes, academics screw up frequently, especially when their decission have political impact like judges, but I trust (almost) any judge more then I trust (almost) any FBI/DEA officer. It's the executive branch who are the real problems since it is the executive branches power which really gets magnified by all the government agencies which have been created.
Jeff
Dose this effect Linux users? If Alan Cox and Linus never allow this into the kernel then do we need to worry about it?
If they do allow this into the Kernel then we will not be able to recompile our kernels, so I see no way for Linus to allow this into the kernel.
What is wrong with using a Turing-complete markup langauge? Yes, you have security issues, but those would be easy to handle with TeX. Yes, you can enter an infinite loop, but that means your reader gets borred and closes the window.
No, I can not think of any reason why the "original" purpose of the web would not be better served by a high quality typsetting system like TeX as opposed to HTML. (Note: I said the original purpose of the web, i.e. academics sharing documents online, not ecommerce, porn, or flash games)
Actually, I can think of one reason a Turing-complete langauge would really kick the shit out of HTML: forms are one of the dumbest user interfaces ever invented, so Sun created Java, but Java sucks because Sun created on their buisness based timeline. Honestly, we would all be much better off if the browsers had a working programming langague prior to the web becomming a buisness.
I do not think LaTeX would be a really smart choice for a web markup langauge, but compiling a modified version of LaTeX into Display PostScript (with hyperlinks added) would kick the shit out of HTML (even today with all of HTML's extra features).
..dose this device allow software control of the audio stream, so that we can add good encryption. You can not trust the cell phone makers to add encryption which the NSA has not tampered with, so replacable software encryption is really the most importent feature (by far).
MS Word is a blender.
I totally agree, but I was sorta saing that there should be no MS Word. I was mreally tring to imply that there should be no applications / basic interfaces execpt for really disguised programming / scripting langauges. MS Word would just be editor, spell checker, pretty printer, etc. libraries.
I'm not really shure that it matters if we make computers easy to use for the masses since the masses will never have more then a blender even when they own a computer. Fundamentally, we should care about how much the computer entices people to learn more about programming it since this controls how many people we have to maintain the blenders for the masses.
Current trends in GUI design are very damaging from this POV since they further seperate the user from the program, i.e. a smaller percentage of expert computer users have any idea what is going on.
I'm literally talking about using a shellish langauge to write the interace, but have a shell prompt at the bottom of EVERY programs main window. Pull down menues would just be cut and paste short cuts to shell commands (ala Plan9). No one would know that you could just do things directly unless they knew what was happening, but they could start plaing arround and learn quite a lot without forests of confusing menus and icons. Most importently, every program would be very flexible.
This is a very interesting point, but I don't think it will help with the problems the article describes. The article is partially complaining about how software is not easy to use, but any powerful set of tools will necissarily be more abstract. You may remove the feature bloat and allow all technical people to be competent in a wide range of tasks, but stupid or unskilled people will still be stupid or unskilled.
I think there is a kind of Church Turing Thesis which applies to this: You can choose between using a blender or using a computer. A blender only dose a few things, but a cmputer's interface must be a programming langauge (or else it's a blender).
A central database would not necissarily have the same problems as our current DNS system if OIDs were not human readable. Unfortunatly, three would still be two serious problems:
(1) Who would do the human readable -> OID translation.
(2) Using a centralized database to find things would make censorship really easy. I've seen a lot of people here asking "who would own the centralized database." This question is totally irrelevent as any government would strongly regulate the database owners. the real question is "what country would be able to pass laws about it?" i.e. who's version of censorship are we going to force on the world.
First, there maybe be a solution to (1), but it's not totally clear how to implement it. Specifically, you need a "philosophical" cross between search engines and alternative DNS servers. I do not see how to d this, but it seems like you want to have the "athoritative" qualities of DNS, but allow eople to switch as easily as going to a diffrent search engine.
Second, the only real solution to (2) is to eliminate the centralized database. Actually, you really should just junk all this guys ideas an use freenet. Now, information on freennet is not perminant, but there are soltions to that too. Specifically, get people to permenently rehost thngs they think are importent.
Anyway, issue (1) is central to freenet too, so there is really no point in even considering this guys proposals. Freenet is beats these proposals in every way.