R* has been making a big deal out of how "uncrackable" their DRM is.
This is the geek equivalent of "kick me". I love the pure hubris of it. As soon as you say this, hordes of teenagers in the Netherlands begin salivating and firing up their decompilers.
I'll say it again with the hopes that someone at R* who has a clue reads this:
"If at any time you are holding both the encrypted content and the decryption keys, no matter how cleverly you hide that fact - a crack is always possible."
PJ, the arch-censor of Groklaw, desperately needs you to believe this
To believe that it's possible, or to believe that it's probable?
It seems like if she was looking for job security she would be arguing that it's probable. Instead she's arguing that it's possible. And we all know what possible means. I have a lottery ticket in my pocket. It's possible I've won. Sure as hell wouldn't call it probable though.
And FWIW, Groklaw does far more than merely keep an eye on SCO. Just the other day there was a good article about the Bilski ruling over on Groklaw. The Groklaw front page also has items about the cyberbullying case, and Harvard having a youtube channel.
If there's one thing PJ has probably learned from following the SCO story from the beginning is that you don't put all your eggs in a single basket.
I'm sure that the supervisor appreciated some random asshole telling him how to do his job and manage his staff.
That 'random asshole' has another name. CUSTOMER.
If you're providing shitty service to your customers then yeah, he probably does want to know about it. Review the tape with the level 1 drone, see if he was on his script or not. That's his job. Managing people who are supposed to help. No help = no reason to keep someone on the payroll.
Big things are often times a collection of lots of little things. Anyone remember AOL's famous customer support? And how are they doing these days?
It's not yours. You may have written it but you did it on the company dime. You don't own it, so don't go messing it up with your graffiti.
Besides, why would you want to in the first place? When it crashes (and it will eventually - most workplace projects are committee clusterfucks) do you really want your name on it?
It's an interesting idea. But I'll bet that if some law got passed mandating this, some kid from the netherlands would hack a way around it next weekend.
There is no knot so difficult to tie that it cannot be untied. Granted, I don't know off the top of my head how to untie the one you propose. But I do know that every time someone steps up and says "this protection scheme is unbeatable!" some frustrated 16 year old gives them a whole plate of crow to eat. Within the week, usually.
My first thought is builds. I have to do Windows CE 5.0 builds all the time and they're almost entirely I/O bound. I've also compiled Xfree86 before at another job. It seems like the really large compiles are mostly I/O bound. The CPU doesn't peg, but the hard drive light stays lit.
Something like this would be fantastic for development. I really want one.
I think it's a fine line. Most lawsuits are settled, and they're settled precisely because both sides hedge their bets and realize that they have a lot to lose by going into an all-out court battle. It's hard for me to accept that offering a settlement up front is inherently wrong to do.
Yeah, you make a good point there. True. Settlements do not imply an unwillingness to sue. I hadn't really thought of it in that way, and you're right.
But there is also a counter point hidden in your argument:
Furthermore, the sheer impossibility of going through with a full lawsuit for every person that the RIAA finds to be sharing files is a problem.
By your own argument, it would be impossible for the RIAA to follow through with every threat they send out. Therefore they must be filing at least a percentage of these fraudulently.
For instance, if you have ten lawyers, and a lawsuit takes about a month, then you could reasonably file 120 cases a year. If you file 200, you are possibly committing fraud. If you file 400, you are probably committing fraud.
Now, I'm not sure of their exact numbers - but I'll bet they don't have the resources to follow through with every single complaint they file.
I'm pretty certain they've moved into the fraud category.
Good lord. I hadn't read that before - thanks for the link.
The only thing that story is missing is a guy in a cheap pinstripe suit and brass knuckles saying "It would be a shame if somethin' bad should happen to your routers. Yeah. A real shame."
Wow. I just keep continuing to be amazed by the sheer criminal audacity of those people. It's just stunning.
Oh sure, I agree completely. But there is an assumption in your post that sort of makes my point:
Compare to the $3k settlements. That's sustainable. They can keep doing that as long as they want, because the settlements pay for the settlement center operation, and most people can work out a payment plan for that kind of money.
This is a business model.
A business model based on litigation threats and fear. That's why RICO applies, IMHO. This is a racket. Someone does you wrong? Fine. Take them to court. Sue them.
But if you're re-tooling that process to turn it into a sustainable revenue stream, clearly something is wrong. The fact that they offer you a settlement amount up front demonstrates that. They're not interested in actually suing anybody. They do it just often enough to provide an example of "what could happen to you". Just like how the mob doesn't break the kneecaps of every single person who owes them money. Just anyone with enough balls to complain, which keeps the rest in line.
Granted, in the RIAA's case it's not a baseball bat and your kneecaps. It's a bunch of high-priced lawyers that you're never ever going to have enough money and resources to beat in court. That versus your entire financial future. In a way the mob is the better deal - your kneecaps will heal eventually.
This is without a doubt a protection racket. The exact sort of thing RICO was meant to protect people from. I can't wait to see how this pans out.
SCO gets a final judgement and loses $3.5m. Someone (Missouri) finally files a RICO suit against the RIAA. Our do-nothing Congress actually gets the balls enough to stand up to the automotive industry.
At this point I'm halfway expecting to see a copy of Duke Nukem Forever in my stocking.
The RIAA can claim that they have a reasonable belief that they've sued are the right people.
Most of their legal paperwork is of the John Doe variety. By its very nature they are saying "we know something bad happened, but we're not sure who did it." I don't think that argument would hold much water.
They can argue a reasonable belief that they will prevail in court.
The vast majority of their legal actions are dropped in their extortion racket. "Pay us $3k and we'll go away."
If they really believed they could win in court, why offer these settlement notices up front? Especially when they claim damages far in excess of $3k? Who throws money away like that?
RICO was made for just such a circumstance (IMHO, IANAL, and so on).
Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance, stop. Move in, stop. Pull out, track right, stop. Center in, pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Give me a hard copy right there.
Fortunately, they are not critical components of our economy, and as such, do not deserve bailouts.
Oh, I agree completely. Absolutely. I'd even argue that the auto industry doesn't deserve bailouts.
So I'm definitely not saying they deserve it, I'm saying they're probably deluded enough to ask. They have a massively inflated opinion of themselves. They lobby to change laws for crying out loud. All for the sake of making money off of other people's music. They sue their own customers. Money is their God, and the consequences be damned. And Uncle Sam has looked like he's in a spending mood lately.
They may not ever get around to asking publicly, but I'd bet that there has at least been a discussion around some RIAA office somewhere with the topic being "should we ask for some of this bailout money as well".
Their business model collapses, hopefully chapter 11 ensues, new management enters, abolishes overpaid execs.
Not in today's United States. Federal bailout. It's the new model for capitalism these days.
Incompetent execs? Outdated business model? Are you selling something that was great in the 80's but sucks today?
Federal bailout. After all, we can't have these overpriced incompetent execs making the unemployment numbers worse, can we?
I'm only halfway kidding. I would not be surprised if these sleazebags tried to dip into the new broken economy safety net of federal bailouts.
"OMG the pirates have taken our money! Help help help! NONE of this is our fault at all! Just because we've redefined music to be this thumping easily mass produced crap a trained seal and a drum machine could make and force DRM down our consumers throats (that is, when we're not suing them) doesn't mean a thing!"
I give about 60/40 odds that some RIAA goon will try this sometime before the current administration is replaced. You watch.
Before long if your RMIM (Rectal Music Industry Microphone) detects Happy Birthday being sung within 100 yards of you, it'll automatically show up as a charge on your credit card.
I'll bet if Weird Al were to sell his digital downloads directly on his own webpage without RIAA support he'd have a different opinion on the profitability of digital music sales. Especially if Steve Albini's numbers are correct.
Al is probably earning about 2% of each sale. I'd be pissed too.
Maybe I'm suffering from a case of advancing years, but I couldn't help but be amazed by this metric. These days it is indeed small, but another part of me remembers being a fifteen year old kid amazed at how absolutely great his C64 was.
I wonder exactly how many years a C64 would have to run to make up a single seconds worth of that difference. How long would a C64 have to run to perform 600 Gflop? How long would every single C64 ever made have to run? I wonder.
You'd have to run some integer-only 6502 IEEE floating point library or something like that to figure out how long a single floating point operation would take on the C64. Then multiply by 600G.
Would it be a few years? A few millenia? Blue-green algae?
But hey, with Kevin Smith saying they did a good job I'm willing to put my doubts on hold. And the trailer they've been showing is pretty fantastic looking, I'll admit.
It's just that I've been let down so many times already with book to movie conversions. It's safest to not go into the theater with high hopes.
I realize they're doing it to make the masses happy. And the masses like explosions every five minutes. And very few people are as OCD with their entertainment as I am. I know that too. It's just a bummer that they can't just tell the story in the way the original author intended.
You know what would be great? If movies didn't cost $100 million to make. Reign in the budgets. Hire some unknowns. If Hollywood would occasionally bang out a movie for $5 million. Then they could afford to make the occasional lemon. They could get away from the whole "Bruckheimer extreme movie" mindset and get back to making the occasional classic. I'd really like that.
Want to see how it's done (IMHO of course) correctly? Check out this. It's a low budget adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu. Nobody actors, zero budget. And it's just about dead-on target. Tells the story pretty much exactly. It's beautiful.
If Hollywood would ever get it into it's head that sometimes this is the best way to make a movie...with their resources, they could make absolute classics.
You don't like ignorant marketing people messing with your IT so don't mess with their marketing when you don't know what you're doing.
You're trolling, but I'll bite anyways.
I do know what I'm doing. Why? Because I can read. When I read a story, I understand it. When the movie comes out and it's different, I notice. And when the changes subtract from the original story and were only made to "spice" up the story to hold on to the public's diminishing attention span, I have every right to stop and say, "Hey, you know what? That sucks."
He talks about meeting the producer for Batman, and Superman Begins. John Peters. Right around 13:00 or so he talks about presenting his script summary and how it was received.
And it was liked, but John said Kevin was missing some "action beats". He says that you need an action beat every ten pages. Something big needs to happen. This is how Hollywood thinks. Every ten pages of script, you need a fight scene. And listen to the absolutely stupid ideas that get thrown around.
This is why the Watchmen will suck.
Hollywood likes comic book movies because every ten minutes you are guaranteed to have an action scene. That's what superheroes do. It automatically meets the "action beats" criteria by default. That's why so many comics are being made into film. Every ten minutes someone gets in a big fight, or something explodes. Hollywood likes that.
But that's not what happens in The Watchmen. The Watchmen is a story about people. There isn't a lot of action. Hardly any, actually. This is a story about people. It has more in common with Clerks than it does with X-Men. Most of the story is people standing around talking. Character development.
Which is why Hollywood is going to fuck it up.
They're going to insist on their action beats. And that's not at all what the story is about.
Don't get me wrong. It will look pretty. It will have most of the story parallel the book. But mark my words - the heart and soul of the story will be ripped out. Most of the character development will be missing. And it will be replaced with a ten minute CGI battle of Dr. Manhattan pacifying Vietnam, or something similar.
Sorry to sound so pessimistic, but that's what's going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
R* has been making a big deal out of how "uncrackable" their DRM is.
This is the geek equivalent of "kick me". I love the pure hubris of it. As soon as you say this, hordes of teenagers in the Netherlands begin salivating and firing up their decompilers.
I'll say it again with the hopes that someone at R* who has a clue reads this:
"If at any time you are holding both the encrypted content and the decryption keys, no matter how cleverly you hide that fact - a crack is always possible."
PJ, the arch-censor of Groklaw, desperately needs you to believe this
To believe that it's possible, or to believe that it's probable?
It seems like if she was looking for job security she would be arguing that it's probable. Instead she's arguing that it's possible. And we all know what possible means. I have a lottery ticket in my pocket. It's possible I've won. Sure as hell wouldn't call it probable though.
And FWIW, Groklaw does far more than merely keep an eye on SCO. Just the other day there was a good article about the Bilski ruling over on Groklaw. The Groklaw front page also has items about the cyberbullying case, and Harvard having a youtube channel.
If there's one thing PJ has probably learned from following the SCO story from the beginning is that you don't put all your eggs in a single basket.
I'm sure that the supervisor appreciated some random asshole telling him how to do his job and manage his staff.
That 'random asshole' has another name. CUSTOMER.
If you're providing shitty service to your customers then yeah, he probably does want to know about it. Review the tape with the level 1 drone, see if he was on his script or not. That's his job. Managing people who are supposed to help. No help = no reason to keep someone on the payroll.
Big things are often times a collection of lots of little things. Anyone remember AOL's famous customer support? And how are they doing these days?
No way I'd sign my work at work.
It's not yours. You may have written it but you did it on the company dime. You don't own it, so don't go messing it up with your graffiti.
Besides, why would you want to in the first place? When it crashes (and it will eventually - most workplace projects are committee clusterfucks) do you really want your name on it?
It's an interesting idea. But I'll bet that if some law got passed mandating this, some kid from the netherlands would hack a way around it next weekend.
There is no knot so difficult to tie that it cannot be untied. Granted, I don't know off the top of my head how to untie the one you propose. But I do know that every time someone steps up and says "this protection scheme is unbeatable!" some frustrated 16 year old gives them a whole plate of crow to eat. Within the week, usually.
My first thought is builds. I have to do Windows CE 5.0 builds all the time and they're almost entirely I/O bound. I've also compiled Xfree86 before at another job. It seems like the really large compiles are mostly I/O bound. The CPU doesn't peg, but the hard drive light stays lit.
Something like this would be fantastic for development. I really want one.
I think it's a fine line. Most lawsuits are settled, and they're settled precisely because both sides hedge their bets and realize that they have a lot to lose by going into an all-out court battle. It's hard for me to accept that offering a settlement up front is inherently wrong to do.
Yeah, you make a good point there. True. Settlements do not imply an unwillingness to sue. I hadn't really thought of it in that way, and you're right.
But there is also a counter point hidden in your argument:
Furthermore, the sheer impossibility of going through with a full lawsuit for every person that the RIAA finds to be sharing files is a problem.
By your own argument, it would be impossible for the RIAA to follow through with every threat they send out. Therefore they must be filing at least a percentage of these fraudulently.
For instance, if you have ten lawyers, and a lawsuit takes about a month, then you could reasonably file 120 cases a year. If you file 200, you are possibly committing fraud. If you file 400, you are probably committing fraud.
Now, I'm not sure of their exact numbers - but I'll bet they don't have the resources to follow through with every single complaint they file.
I'm pretty certain they've moved into the fraud category.
Good lord. I hadn't read that before - thanks for the link.
The only thing that story is missing is a guy in a cheap pinstripe suit and brass knuckles saying "It would be a shame if somethin' bad should happen to your routers. Yeah. A real shame."
Wow. I just keep continuing to be amazed by the sheer criminal audacity of those people. It's just stunning.
Oh sure, I agree completely. But there is an assumption in your post that sort of makes my point:
Compare to the $3k settlements. That's sustainable. They can keep doing that as long as they want, because the settlements pay for the settlement center operation, and most people can work out a payment plan for that kind of money.
This is a business model.
A business model based on litigation threats and fear. That's why RICO applies, IMHO. This is a racket. Someone does you wrong? Fine. Take them to court. Sue them.
But if you're re-tooling that process to turn it into a sustainable revenue stream, clearly something is wrong. The fact that they offer you a settlement amount up front demonstrates that. They're not interested in actually suing anybody. They do it just often enough to provide an example of "what could happen to you". Just like how the mob doesn't break the kneecaps of every single person who owes them money. Just anyone with enough balls to complain, which keeps the rest in line.
Granted, in the RIAA's case it's not a baseball bat and your kneecaps. It's a bunch of high-priced lawyers that you're never ever going to have enough money and resources to beat in court. That versus your entire financial future. In a way the mob is the better deal - your kneecaps will heal eventually.
This is without a doubt a protection racket. The exact sort of thing RICO was meant to protect people from. I can't wait to see how this pans out.
SCO gets a final judgement and loses $3.5m. Someone (Missouri) finally files a RICO suit against the RIAA. Our do-nothing Congress actually gets the balls enough to stand up to the automotive industry.
At this point I'm halfway expecting to see a copy of Duke Nukem Forever in my stocking.
The RIAA can claim that they have a reasonable belief that they've sued are the right people.
Most of their legal paperwork is of the John Doe variety. By its very nature they are saying "we know something bad happened, but we're not sure who did it." I don't think that argument would hold much water.
They can argue a reasonable belief that they will prevail in court.
The vast majority of their legal actions are dropped in their extortion racket. "Pay us $3k and we'll go away."
If they really believed they could win in court, why offer these settlement notices up front? Especially when they claim damages far in excess of $3k? Who throws money away like that?
RICO was made for just such a circumstance (IMHO, IANAL, and so on).
Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance, stop. Move in, stop. Pull out, track right, stop. Center in, pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Give me a hard copy right there.
Fortunately, they are not critical components of our economy, and as such, do not deserve bailouts.
Oh, I agree completely. Absolutely. I'd even argue that the auto industry doesn't deserve bailouts.
So I'm definitely not saying they deserve it, I'm saying they're probably deluded enough to ask. They have a massively inflated opinion of themselves. They lobby to change laws for crying out loud. All for the sake of making money off of other people's music. They sue their own customers. Money is their God, and the consequences be damned. And Uncle Sam has looked like he's in a spending mood lately.
They may not ever get around to asking publicly, but I'd bet that there has at least been a discussion around some RIAA office somewhere with the topic being "should we ask for some of this bailout money as well".
Their business model collapses, hopefully chapter 11 ensues, new management enters, abolishes overpaid execs.
Not in today's United States. Federal bailout. It's the new model for capitalism these days.
Incompetent execs? Outdated business model? Are you selling something that was great in the 80's but sucks today?
Federal bailout. After all, we can't have these overpriced incompetent execs making the unemployment numbers worse, can we?
I'm only halfway kidding. I would not be surprised if these sleazebags tried to dip into the new broken economy safety net of federal bailouts.
"OMG the pirates have taken our money! Help help help! NONE of this is our fault at all! Just because we've redefined music to be this thumping easily mass produced crap a trained seal and a drum machine could make and force DRM down our consumers throats (that is, when we're not suing them) doesn't mean a thing!"
I give about 60/40 odds that some RIAA goon will try this sometime before the current administration is replaced. You watch.
How is it possible to hold a copyright on Happy Birthday? The lyrics change every time you sing it.
What does their copyright look like?
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear *
Happy birthday to you.
Or have they filed millions of copyrights?
Copyright 2234257612, Happy Birthday to You, Aaby version.
...
Copyright 2234257613, Happy Birthday to You, Aaron version.
Copyright 2234257614, Happy Birthday to You, Abe version.
Additional Additional Nit: Give them time.
Before long if your RMIM (Rectal Music Industry Microphone) detects Happy Birthday being sung within 100 yards of you, it'll automatically show up as a charge on your credit card.
He is not our ally in ensuring we can get whatever media we want whenever we want for no cost.
Short terms is what we actually do want. Copyright and patent.
Make your money off of something when it's new. Let a few years pass. Then it goes into the public domain.
How is this a bad scenario? Sounds like a little slice of heaven to me.
I'll bet if Weird Al were to sell his digital downloads directly on his own webpage without RIAA support he'd have a different opinion on the profitability of digital music sales. Especially if Steve Albini's numbers are correct.
Al is probably earning about 2% of each sale. I'd be pissed too.
Ok, just because I'm strange I had to go and figure it out.
A C64, according to this guy runs at about 320 flops.
So, it would take that C64 600*10^9 / 320 = 1,875,000,000 seconds. That's 59.46 years.
Wiki says there were 30 million C64 units ever made.
So that would be 1,875,000,000 seconds / 30,000,000 = 62.5 seconds.
It would take every single C64 ever made about a minute to make up the difference.
Wow.
Crap I'm old. =)
edging out #11 by only 600 Gflops
Emphasis mine.
Maybe I'm suffering from a case of advancing years, but I couldn't help but be amazed by this metric. These days it is indeed small, but another part of me remembers being a fifteen year old kid amazed at how absolutely great his C64 was.
I wonder exactly how many years a C64 would have to run to make up a single seconds worth of that difference. How long would a C64 have to run to perform 600 Gflop? How long would every single C64 ever made have to run? I wonder.
You'd have to run some integer-only 6502 IEEE floating point library or something like that to figure out how long a single floating point operation would take on the C64. Then multiply by 600G.
Would it be a few years? A few millenia? Blue-green algae?
Yeah, I know. It's just disappointing is all.
But hey, with Kevin Smith saying they did a good job I'm willing to put my doubts on hold. And the trailer they've been showing is pretty fantastic looking, I'll admit.
It's just that I've been let down so many times already with book to movie conversions. It's safest to not go into the theater with high hopes.
I realize they're doing it to make the masses happy. And the masses like explosions every five minutes. And very few people are as OCD with their entertainment as I am. I know that too. It's just a bummer that they can't just tell the story in the way the original author intended.
You know what would be great? If movies didn't cost $100 million to make. Reign in the budgets. Hire some unknowns. If Hollywood would occasionally bang out a movie for $5 million. Then they could afford to make the occasional lemon. They could get away from the whole "Bruckheimer extreme movie" mindset and get back to making the occasional classic. I'd really like that.
Want to see how it's done (IMHO of course) correctly? Check out this. It's a low budget adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu. Nobody actors, zero budget. And it's just about dead-on target. Tells the story pretty much exactly. It's beautiful.
If Hollywood would ever get it into it's head that sometimes this is the best way to make a movie...with their resources, they could make absolute classics.
Ah well, I can dream can't I?
You don't like ignorant marketing people messing with your IT so don't mess with their marketing when you don't know what you're doing.
You're trolling, but I'll bite anyways.
I do know what I'm doing. Why? Because I can read. When I read a story, I understand it. When the movie comes out and it's different, I notice. And when the changes subtract from the original story and were only made to "spice" up the story to hold on to the public's diminishing attention span, I have every right to stop and say, "Hey, you know what? That sucks."
It's actually pretty simple shit, hombre.
Thanks for that link. I officially have hope now.
It will suck. Let me tell you why.
Listen to Kevin Smith talk about his work on the Superman Returns script.
He talks about meeting the producer for Batman, and Superman Begins. John Peters. Right around 13:00 or so he talks about presenting his script summary and how it was received.
And it was liked, but John said Kevin was missing some "action beats". He says that you need an action beat every ten pages. Something big needs to happen. This is how Hollywood thinks. Every ten pages of script, you need a fight scene. And listen to the absolutely stupid ideas that get thrown around.
This is why the Watchmen will suck.
Hollywood likes comic book movies because every ten minutes you are guaranteed to have an action scene. That's what superheroes do. It automatically meets the "action beats" criteria by default. That's why so many comics are being made into film. Every ten minutes someone gets in a big fight, or something explodes. Hollywood likes that.
But that's not what happens in The Watchmen. The Watchmen is a story about people. There isn't a lot of action. Hardly any, actually. This is a story about people. It has more in common with Clerks than it does with X-Men. Most of the story is people standing around talking. Character development.
Which is why Hollywood is going to fuck it up.
They're going to insist on their action beats. And that's not at all what the story is about.
Don't get me wrong. It will look pretty. It will have most of the story parallel the book. But mark my words - the heart and soul of the story will be ripped out. Most of the character development will be missing. And it will be replaced with a ten minute CGI battle of Dr. Manhattan pacifying Vietnam, or something similar.
Sorry to sound so pessimistic, but that's what's going to happen.