Even though I am a UK BBC license fee payer, I won't be able to use this service I have paid for, because I don't use Windows and in and case I'm mot prepared to accept DRM.
I'll continue downloading DRM free BBC shows via bittorrent just as I have for a while now. I have no moral objection to doing this since I've paid for the content anyway.
How long are we going to continue in a situation where the unofficial channels of content delivery are superior to the official ones? Surely it can't be forever and DRM will soon have to die?
Agreed. My henry manages brick dust, rubble, plaster and everything else a house renovation project brings with it.
The same stuff totally clogged my dc02 up to the point it was unusable. I ended up giving it away to someone who might have the time to strip it down and clean it out.
I would recommend a henry to anyone. They are cheap and almost indestructable.
They sell more cyclone vacuums now because that what the public have been brainwashed into demanding. If you want a real opinion, ask someone who spends most of their days vacuuming. For example, try finding an office cleaning company that uses dysons. You can't. They don't. Dyson's are not robust and not good value and not the best at what they do.
They are however very good cleaners for your typical household, but still not the best value and arguably not the best cleaner overall.
Dyson hoovers are one of the most succesful marketing efforts in recent times. Everyone has fallen for it. All they had to do was make a machine that was above average and then convince the world it was unique and they did it brilliantly.
Well done to them, not on producing a brilliant cleaner, but on excelling at business and marketing.
Where copyright is concerned you need a license to duplicate or distribute works. As far as the copy you paid for is concerned you OWN it. You don't have a copyright license for it. If you did, you would be allowed to copy it.
Maybe you are making a comparison with EULAs and the like that are often used in software?
If so, then I can tell you that (despite the name) a EULA is not a license, but a contract.
That sounds like pretty good description of Ubuntu to me!
Which of those characteristics you describe are Fedora, (Open)SUSE or Debian better than Ubuntu at?
Just to be clear, I'm not saying I think think Ubuntu is better than the others. In fact Fedora is probably my favourite disto. I just don't see how it is more "enterprise-ish" than Ubuntu is.
We had an RHEL3 box which had a truly ancient version of Python installed
Do you realise how long ago RHEL3 came out?
You couldn't force an upgrade
I don't think your criticisms should be aimed at RHEL. If you wanted new packages over stability or wanted to be able to force upgrade then you picked the wrong distro. You are not their target audience.
If the stability of fedora is enough for your needs maybe you should look there instead?
If you read the text a bit more carefully you will notice they were not specifically talking about you in particular. There exists a set of people who either use or intend to use RHEL. I imagine a subset of these are the ones likely to be waiting.
Okay, so the copy of windows belongs to person A. Person B finds a way to "steal" it by fooling the validation system. Person A loses out.
Now consider a bank account.
Person A has money in their account. Person B finds a way to steal it by fooling the bank. Who loses out?
It's generally not person A because the bank is responsible for their own security and so should cover it themselves.
Microsoft is the gatekeeper of their license key system and has a responsibility to make sure person A _never_ loses _anything_ If person B cheats the system then Microsoft should cover it themselves and go after person B.
What makes this worse is that the whole license key scheme is only needed to prop up Microsofts outdated business model and doesn't benefit customers at all. It's entirely self serving. In the bank scenario clearly the customer cares if someone else takes their cash. The security there is because customers demand and require it.
Vista is great! (in a way)
on
Is Vista a Trap?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Okay, it's bad for the poor people who have to buy new hardware because they can't get vista drivers for their existing stuff.
But it means a good load of ebay bargains for those of us running open source operating systems with support for just about everything built in.
I haven't actually noticed the bargains happening much yet, but they will come. Just like last time shortly after Windows XP came out. Second hand USB stuff was going for next to nothing on ebay.
We don't need you to patrinise us by attempting to explain why we are wrong My Blair. What many of us are trying to say to you is that we fully understand your viewpoint so you can stop explaining it to us. What we are saying to you is that you are wrong. Wrong because you don't have a very good understanding of security. Wrong because you have no ability to clearly judge the value this scheme will give us. Wrong because you have the terror threat out of proportion. Wrong because you are wasting our money on something we don't want or need.
Your job is to represent our views, not to decide what is best for your self and explain to us why you think it is right.
Honestly, I don't think you have the understanding of security issues to grasp why biometriecs are a very bad choice for personal security, nor do I think you have the imagination to forsee the abuses that could come of this. Combine these two things with your governments record on large scale IT projects and anyone can see that we are heading for disaster.
Asymmetric ciphers are not security through obscurity as long as the key is not in the hands of the attacker. When used properly, the whole process is totally transparent and the attacker can see the encrypted data all day long and knows exactly how the system works but still can't get at the unencrypted data. It is not obscured at all.
Security through obscurity is where the attacker has everything they need to get at the data but they just have a few hoops to jump through. Proper security is where the attacker has no chance because they are missing something (like a secret key)
DRM gives the attacker the key (because the attacker is the owner of the media and they need the key to play it) but makes some attempt to hide it. All these attacks on DRM do not break the cipher or find a weakness in the crypto algorythm. All they do is find the key (it's in there somewhere) and use it to decrypt the content.
DRM is fundamentally broken by design. Ciphers of this kind rely on the attacker not getting hold of the key. At the same time, the recipient needs the key to get the data. I can never work because the attacker is the same person as the recipient.
In effect, DRM is security through obscurity.
How much longer will we have to put up with this crap before the media companies realise this and stop inconveniencing their customers and wasting our money and time as well as their own?
Some people say that proxying all tracker requests via the tor network is a good idea. This news seems to support that suggestion.
If everyone routed all bittorrent traffic (the peer-to-peer part) via tor would clearly destroy the network, but it should easily be able to handle a few people using it for the tracker traffic.
What on earth is "stop free speech". Does it mean never-ending talk? Personally I don't mind if only the Friday police have a right to it. Normal police can't spend all their time talking they need to get on with their jobs.
I would probably agree with you there. In fact one command could easily handle all of this doing what you suggest by defailt, and having additional arguments for selecting different CPU and I/O nice values.
I suspect nice(1) was not changed for backwards compatibility reasons. There would perhaps be corner cases where a process expected their fair share of I/O time but didn't need much CPU (e.g., tar zcf scripts for backups?) that would suffer too much or not complete if they were suddenly I/O starved.
Maybe there is a case for a userland tool that sets both at once combining the nice and ionice commands into one, but they certainly should not be tied together in the kernel. The kernel is there to provide mechanisms for setting these things, not for deciding what should be linked to what.
Life can be good or bad in either scenario and with the exception of people in absolute poverty, there is no credible established link between wealth and (un)happiness.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though I am a UK BBC license fee payer, I won't be able to use this service I have paid for, because I don't use Windows and in and case I'm mot prepared to accept DRM.
I'll continue downloading DRM free BBC shows via bittorrent just as I have for a while now. I have no moral objection to doing this since I've paid for the content anyway.
How long are we going to continue in a situation where the unofficial channels of content delivery are superior to the official ones? Surely it can't be forever and DRM will soon have to die?
Agreed. My henry manages brick dust, rubble, plaster and everything else a house renovation project brings with it.
The same stuff totally clogged my dc02 up to the point it was unusable. I ended up giving it away to someone who might have the time to strip it down and clean it out.
I would recommend a henry to anyone. They are cheap and almost indestructable.
They sell more cyclone vacuums now because that what the public have been brainwashed into demanding. If you want a real opinion, ask someone who spends most of their days vacuuming. For example, try finding an office cleaning company that uses dysons. You can't. They don't. Dyson's are not robust and not good value and not the best at what they do.
They are however very good cleaners for your typical household, but still not the best value and arguably not the best cleaner overall.
Dyson hoovers are one of the most succesful marketing efforts in recent times. Everyone has fallen for it. All they had to do was make a machine that was above average and then convince the world it was unique and they did it brilliantly.
Well done to them, not on producing a brilliant cleaner, but on excelling at business and marketing.
But if you own a license to the song
What does "a license to the song" mean?
Where copyright is concerned you need a license to duplicate or distribute works. As far as the copy you paid for is concerned you OWN it. You don't have a copyright license for it. If you did, you would be allowed to copy it.
Maybe you are making a comparison with EULAs and the like that are often used in software?
If so, then I can tell you that (despite the name) a EULA is not a license, but a contract.
(IANAL)
That sounds like pretty good description of Ubuntu to me!
Which of those characteristics you describe are Fedora, (Open)SUSE or Debian better than Ubuntu at?
Just to be clear, I'm not saying I think think Ubuntu is better than the others. In fact Fedora is probably my favourite disto. I just don't see how it is more "enterprise-ish" than Ubuntu is.
enterprise-ish
Would you care to define enterprise-ish for us non-bullshit speaking types?
People who eventually become mechanics started out just by putting oil in their cars.
We had an RHEL3 box which had a truly ancient version of Python installed
Do you realise how long ago RHEL3 came out?
You couldn't force an upgrade
I don't think your criticisms should be aimed at RHEL. If you wanted new packages over stability or wanted to be able to force upgrade then you picked the wrong distro. You are not their target audience.
If the stability of fedora is enough for your needs maybe you should look there instead?
If you read the text a bit more carefully you will notice they were not specifically talking about you in particular. There exists a set of people who either use or intend to use RHEL. I imagine a subset of these are the ones likely to be waiting.
Okay, so the copy of windows belongs to person A.
Person B finds a way to "steal" it by fooling the validation system.
Person A loses out.
Now consider a bank account.
Person A has money in their account.
Person B finds a way to steal it by fooling the bank.
Who loses out?
It's generally not person A because the bank is responsible for their own security and so should cover it themselves.
Microsoft is the gatekeeper of their license key system and has a responsibility to make sure person A _never_ loses _anything_
If person B cheats the system then Microsoft should cover it themselves and go after person B.
What makes this worse is that the whole license key scheme is only needed to prop up Microsofts outdated business model and doesn't benefit customers at all. It's entirely self serving. In the bank scenario clearly the customer cares if someone else takes their cash. The security there is because customers demand and require it.
Okay, it's bad for the poor people who have to buy new hardware because they can't get vista drivers for their existing stuff.
But it means a good load of ebay bargains for those of us running open source operating systems with support for just about everything built in.
I haven't actually noticed the bargains happening much yet, but they will come. Just like last time shortly after Windows XP came out. Second hand USB stuff was going for next to nothing on ebay.
No.
What is illegal is abusing monopoly power in one area to force your way into another.
So bundling MS office with Windows would be illegal because they own and control both and are a monopoly. Ubuntu is nowhere near a monopoly.
We don't need you to patrinise us by attempting to explain why we are wrong My Blair. What many of us are trying to say to you is that we fully understand your viewpoint so you can stop explaining it to us. What we are saying to you is that you are wrong. Wrong because you don't have a very good understanding of security. Wrong because you have no ability to clearly judge the value this scheme will give us. Wrong because you have the terror threat out of proportion. Wrong because you are wasting our money on something we don't want or need.
Your job is to represent our views, not to decide what is best for your self and explain to us why you think it is right.
Honestly, I don't think you have the understanding of security issues to grasp why biometriecs are a very bad choice for personal security, nor do I think you have the imagination to forsee the abuses that could come of this. Combine these two things with your governments record on large scale IT projects and anyone can see that we are heading for disaster.
Asymmetric ciphers are not security through obscurity as long as the key is not in the hands of the attacker. When used properly, the whole process is totally transparent and the attacker can see the encrypted data all day long and knows exactly how the system works but still can't get at the unencrypted data. It is not obscured at all.
Security through obscurity is where the attacker has everything they need to get at the data but they just have a few hoops to jump through. Proper security is where the attacker has no chance because they are missing something (like a secret key)
DRM gives the attacker the key (because the attacker is the owner of the media and they need the key to play it) but makes some attempt to hide it. All these attacks on DRM do not break the cipher or find a weakness in the crypto algorythm. All they do is find the key (it's in there somewhere) and use it to decrypt the content.
DRM is fundamentally broken by design. Ciphers of this kind rely on the attacker not getting hold of the key. At the same time, the recipient needs the key to get the data. I can never work because the attacker is the same person as the recipient.
In effect, DRM is security through obscurity.
How much longer will we have to put up with this crap before the media companies realise this and stop inconveniencing their customers and wasting our money and time as well as their own?
The people who base their opinions on available facts have suspected this for years.
Most people prefer supposition and believing what's "obvious" and they will continue to ignore the facts anyway.
Did you actually _read_ the article?
Some people say that proxying all tracker requests via the tor network is a good idea. This news seems to support that suggestion.
If everyone routed all bittorrent traffic (the peer-to-peer part) via tor would clearly destroy the network, but it should easily be able to handle a few people using it for the tracker traffic.
What on earth is "stop free speech". Does it mean never-ending talk? Personally I don't mind if only the Friday police have a right to it. Normal police can't spend all their time talking they need to get on with their jobs.
Hoping this gets into distros soon.
The latest ubuntu pre-release has the 2.6.20rc kernel. This will be 2.6.20 final (+patches) in the final "Feisty Fawn" release in a couple of months.
Also, I believe (but I'm not 100% sure) that fedora 7 will ship 2.6.20. Current pre-release (test1) and rawhide have 2.6.19.
I would probably agree with you there. In fact one command could easily handle all of this doing what you suggest by defailt, and having additional arguments for selecting different CPU and I/O nice values.
I suspect nice(1) was not changed for backwards compatibility reasons. There would perhaps be corner cases where a process expected their fair share of I/O time but didn't need much CPU (e.g., tar zcf scripts for backups?) that would suffer too much or not complete if they were suddenly I/O starved.
Maybe there is a case for a userland tool that sets both at once combining the nice and ionice commands into one, but they certainly should not be tied together in the kernel. The kernel is there to provide mechanisms for setting these things, not for deciding what should be linked to what.
I didn't say it was a violation of his or her own license.
b) binary blob kernel patch created by hardware munfacturuers
Widely believed to be a license violation.
c) binary blob in kernel tree created under NDA by the kernel team (who have private access to the source)
Almost certainly a license violation. (Can't be distributed with the portions of the kernel written by others who have released their code as GPL)
d) obfuscated code in the kernel tree (with original kept private to those kernel devs that have signed the NDA)
Probably a license violation (google for "gpl perferred form obfuscate")
e) uncommented code in the kernel tree (with commented code kept private to those kernel devs that have signed the NDA)
Dubious to keep commented version seperate for the same "preferred form" reason as above.
IANAL.
Life can be good or bad in either scenario and with the exception of people in absolute poverty, there is no credible established link between wealth and (un)happiness.