> Specifically: Why do movie studios allow Netflix to send out DVDs to their subscribers by mail, but not to allow the same option in the form of "virtual DVDs" that you could "check out" through their website, and stream them while they're checked out to you?
They don't "let" Netflix do it. It's netflix's right to do so and the movie studios tried to stop them, just like they tried to stop VHS and Beta rentals when VHS gained traction in the late 70s/early 80s.
Probably worth noting that somebody like Netflix cuts deals with studios anyway even though they could end-run. That gives them the ability to have dependable supplies (they don't have to join the mad rush on release date at Walmart - they just their own crate, maybe even just on spools without all the shrink-wrap), and they might get better pricing.
However, the fact that Netflix COULD just go to Walmart and buy a ton of DVDs gives them a lot more leverage. They're not completely dependent on the studios, so it is in the interest of the studios to offer them a deal that is a compromise.
Because no one wants to pay the $19.95 for the rental that the movie studios would want to charge for it.
Well, plus it would involve a $10/month fee for Warner Brothers online - just to have access to it. Oh, and for the first six months after anything new comes out they'll only let you stream it on Comcast if you subscribe to the Oprah channel.
If you want to watch all your favorite shows you'll need 7 more studio-level subscriptions, and you'll need cable service from Comcast, Verizon, and DirecTV, and you'll have to live in the USA. Oh, and half of your shows will only play on IE, a few will play on a Kindle but not any other Android tablet, some will be iPad-only, and so on. Your library will be scattered across 47 different UIs.
This is the sort of nonsense that keeps people from paying for streaming-only content. They don't want to set up their set-top box with 12 different accounts, and when they want to watch a movie they don't want to have to do a google search to try to figure out where they bought it from so that they can navigate to the right application. If they just download it from TBP it all goes in their Movie folder and works on everything.
Any term in the fine print that says you can't rent it isn't legally binding. You can put anything you want in a piece of paper, but that doesn't make it enforceable. The first sale doctrine basically says that if you walk into walmart and hand them cash and get a box you keep forever, then it is a sale regardless of what anything else says. You're not allowed to copy it, but you can do almost anything else with it, including reselling it, lending it out, or renting it out.
Copyright governs COPYING and exhibition of works. Rental involves neither (though streaming does). Copyright holders generally cannot impose restrictions on how their works are used after they are first sold. They often try to do so anyway, but no court would uphold their right to take action against you.
You're either a fucking idiot or a corporate stooge. The right of first sale (part of copyright law), says it is perfectly legal to rent your DVDs, CDs, books, etc.
Not quite. You can't rent or lend CDs, or records, or other "phonorecordings" without a license. It's a special case.
Citation? And I mean to a supreme court case or law, not to some blog or industry white paper.
The first sale principle was established by the supreme court and it says that when you pay money for something and are allowed to keep it forever without further compensation, you bought it regardless of anything written in the fine print. You can therefore do whatever you want with it, other than copy it or publicly broadcast it. You can certainly lend it out, for free or for a fee.
The MPAA has opposed this for eons, but they had their days in court and lost. A notice on a recording that says that it is not for resale or rental has no power whatsoever.
Along the lines of the focus on maximizing per-view revenue and not per-month revenue is the love-affair the entertainment industry has with exclusive contracts. You can buy this show on this service, or that show on that service, or you can stream this show only if you have a cable subscription to this channel, but only for one season, and so on. Often things are hard to buy at any price, and sometimes you can only get much of what you want if you subscribe to 3 different services (thus paying for most of the content multiple times). The whole entertainment industry is rife with this sort of mentality from channel bundling to streaming to only putting channels on a single cable provider.
This is extremely frustrating for consumers, who just want to pay a REASONABLE price to get everything they want. Reasonable isn't $200/month. Honestly, just typical extended cable is probably already pushing it for many. So, people end up pirating instead, because TPB works on any ISP, computer, etc.
Hollywood needs to make it easy to be a loyal customer if they want to have many of them. They need to make their customers feel happy about what they're getting for their money, and not make them feel like they're constantly at odds or being taken advantage of.
Flight sims are an extremely niche product. It was likely adopt this business model or never make another MS Flight game again.
Sure, but many fans considered it a bit of a slap in the face - which was the original point. I can certainly see why they did it, but they definitely didn't do it for their fans.
Ham radio operators talk on the radio all the time and dont have accidents at that rate,
Two things.
First an anecdote - I know a ham who did HF CW in his car while driving.
Second, I really wonder how they defined a cell phone as being involved in an accident. Did they just record any accident where a phone was someplace visible to the driver? Did they record any accident where a call was in progress? Did they try to determine if the call itself contributed to the accident? Did fault come into it? If you're parked talking on the phone and somebody rear-ends you, does that count as a phone-involved accident?
These stats might be really telling us that lots of cars have cell phones in them.
Btrfs is fairly comparable to ZFS in terms of capabilities/architecture. Personally I tend to prefer the design (devices go directly into pools - you don't have to designate groupings of devices into RAID/etc). Each has some feature the other lacks, but ZFS is more mature.
Ultimately btrfs seems likely to replace ext4 some day, though that day could be quite a ways off. ZFS is unlikely to do so unless the license issue is overcome - sure, you can use it, but there will always be a drive to have the #1 general-purpose filesystem be one that is actually in the mainline kernel.
Well, since ZFS is available for Linux I had to wonder why there would be people making a fuss about btrfs. You bring up licensing which is an issue, and I'm guessing Oracle did not help the license issues, or possibly made the license issues worse.
Well, for starters btrfs plans to have features I need, like reshaping RAID, while ZFS has no plans (that I'm aware of) to add this feature. No, I'm not talking about adding/removing raid from a zpool - I'm talking about adding/removing drives from a RAID while maintaining redundancy while the filesystem is online. mdadm supports this, and so does btrfs (though doing anything with raid5/6 on btrfs is risky right now).
The main strength of ZFS is its maturity/stability. Feature-wise, I'm sure it does somethings btrfs lacks, but when you look at the planned feature lists btrfs seems likely to surpass it at some point.
And of course there is the license - ZFS will never be in the mainstream kernel unless Oracle re-licenses it or somebody re-writes it (and in so doing ditches the maturity which is its main advantage).
IMHO, this is a very good thing. btrfs doesn't have as many capabilities that ZFS or Storage Spaces/ReFS possesses.
Beyond maturity, what is actually missing? When I look at the feature lists for both if anything it seems like btrfs has more features, like being able to reshape a raid. The last time I checked ZFS supported adding or removing a raid from a zpool, but not adding or removing individual drives from a raid (without degrading it). That is, you can't turn a 4-drive raid5 into a 5-drive raid5 without adding 5 drives and then removing 4.
I'm certainly willing to believe btrfs is missing something, but it has a number of features already (though some aren't as ready for production use - for example I'd probably avoid raid 5/6 for the time being).
When it looks like a Major Player moves in and starts dominating the generation of your pet virtual currency, why wouldn't you just jump ship to the next one, where you can stand a chance to make money in the early days of generation?
Well, generation of US Dollars has been monopolized by the US Government for over 200 years, and I don't see anybody in a rush to jump ship to the South Sudanese Pound.
Bitcoin was designed to be a currency - not a way to make money. The hype factor has caused value to surge, which largely limits its actual value as a currency. At some point value will stabilize and mining/etc will become economically efficient, and at that point nobody will make significant money off of mining or trading Bitcoin, but it will be far more useful as a currency.
Attempting freemium/f2p business models for a game is not tantamount to lack of respect for ones customers.
However, this wasn't done in parallel with the original software - it was a replacement, and a MUCH less functional one. It is also a much more expensive model - you could pay as much to just fly 2-3 planes in Hawaii and Alaska as you could pay to fly 15 planes globally in the previous versions. Flying globally isn't even an option in the new version.
Unsurprisingly, they basically abandoned the new product. The intent was to bring in casual gamers, but about all they did was drove away their long-established userbase. Somebody who spends $200 on commercial airliner add-ons with virtually every system simulated flying long hauls isn't going to want to just fly around Hawaii in a small plane that is highly simplified.
At this point they've abandoned the field entirely, and their previous customers are slowly migrating to other platforms.
Copying an IMEI is... well, more or less worthless unless you're on some shitty network like verizon which still doesn't use GSM and SIM cards. It has nothing to do with security.
It wouldn't be illegal to spoof in many countries if it didn't matter.
Whats that... you don't realize that everyone is already ON GSM except Verizon?
Considering that I have a GSM phone in my pocket, I'd say your statement is rather arrogant.
Its trivial to make an IMEI unchangeable. You make it controlled by fuses.
Security by obscurity. If you want to clone the IMEI you just make your own phone and you can make the IMEI whatever you want it to be. Or you can hack the baseband on the phone you already have. Or you replace the fuses.
Yes, none of those is easy to do, which is why it is security by obscurity. It wouldn't be "obscurity" if it were easy to do. The point is that there is no algorithmic/cryptographic protection. In some sense even smartcards suffer this problem, but at least those do use an embedded secret that never leaves the card which forces you to actually attack the hardware, and not merely replicate it.
The features of Microsoft Flight. That would be the freemium'ed dumb-downed version of Microsoft Flight Simulator, which has otherwise been abandoned after ~30 years.
Sorry - I was talking about the VC backers. The kickstarter backers won't get anything - kickstarter is basically a donation, and I'm sure Zuckerberg appreciates it.
I can see Facebook thinking that maybe they can make money from the Oculus, and maybe they can, but it's not going to be in a way that I assume most of the original backers thought they were buying into.
The original backers bought into a $2B buyout. If the product is successful now, they won't make another cent, as they no longer own it. If the product flops they won't lose a cent for the same reason. They just have to make do with their $2B - somehow I think they'll manage.
4.Regulations (FCC and other regulators have strict rules about how cellphones are allowed to operate and I doubt they would allow a phone with an open source baseband to get approval because such a phone could be modified to violate the rules)
This might make sense if non-open-source firmware couldn't be modified to violate the rules. There really isn't any information in the source code that isn't also in the binary if you're determined enough. Likewise, if you have physical possession of the phone, it is impossible to prevent you from modifying it in arbitrary ways.
The irony is that if somebody really wanted to cause trouble they'd just buy or make a jammer. I can see why the FCC wants to have commercially sold devices certified, but they shouldn't need to be locked down to this degree. If people want to experiment with them, how is that worse than them experimenting with home-built hardware? You can legally buy hardware capable of broadcasting arbitrary signals on arbitrary frequencies already.
And as far as changing IMEI/etc goes - an authentication system which is based on a number which is not unique to the account is a poor system. IMEI is just security by obscurity. Anybody who has physical possession of a phone can find its IMEI, including whoever sold it to you. Changing an IMEI is always possible, no matter how hard the phone vendors try to make it. The phone should just authenticate with a shared secret which is actually secret, or should use a smartcard built into the SIM/etc. And yes, I realize this would probably require changing GSM.
Remind me again why "black box" style cellular data transmitters aren't required to be transmitting cockpit voice data and full telemetry from every major airliner at all times yet?
Well, full telemetry is just being cheap. Voice would not only cost money, but would anger the pilots union. That is why cockpit voice recorders just have a short loop of memory - nobody wants the boss going back and listening to their water-cooler talk for the whole flight.
Seems to me that a better solution would be to just make it illegal to access except in a disaster, or even encrypt it with the NTSB (or other 3rd party) holding the keys.
So, I'm not convinced that US Intel knew anything on day 1, but if they did it certainly would be an interesting revelation.
Being able to see wreckage with a satellite isn't fancy. However, having it on day 1 suggests that they can routinely scan large areas of the Earth and spot things in near-realtime. That isn't something anybody can do as far as anybody knows.
If the US did track the flight it would be more likely to be using electronic means. Visual imagery of the ocean isn't easy. Spotting the pings is much easier, and it is also possible that there is some kind of radar-like technology involved. There is no reason you couldn't track an aircraft with radar from a satellite, though it would be challenging due to surface reflections (the plane is a lot closer to the earth than the earth is to the satellite, and has near-zero velocity in the direction of the radar beam). Also, a conventional radar on a satellite would be obvious to everybody since it requires emissions.
However, there is another way to obtain aircraft locations - passively look for signals reflecting off of the aircraft from other sources - military or civilian. That would include radar returns, but it could include any other RF source. Depending on sensitivity that might allow for coverage in areas that don't have traditional radar coverage. This sort of technology would be especially useful for tracking stealth aircraft, so it would make sense that the US would research it.
Is that not how humans traditionally hunted bears? I keep seeing people deride all this hunting business as using too much technology or insight to trick the animals... but that is precisely what got us to the top of the food chain in the first place.
I think the point is that this isn't about food/etc.
If bears were a menace to society or there was a need to eat them, then it only makes sense to kill them in the most efficient manner possible. To the degree that it is safe the method should be humane.
If a lion were loose in the vicinity of a playground, the goal wouldn't be to make capturing/killing/etc it a challenge.
However, we don't need to eat bears, and in general they're not dangerous to people. If this is about "sport" then efficiency isn't really important, though safety should be. I'm not into hunting, so I won't comment on the morality of treating it as a sport, but if that really is your purpose, it doesn't make sense to shoot fish in a barrel.
Of course we have a choice in the matter. Long ago we decided that the Post Office could not look in your mail, and we have held them to that for over a century.
The USPS is a centralized organization that can be controlled as such. The actions of everybody is not.
We have laws that make it illegal to distribute copyrighted music. How is that working for the RIAA?
A complete history of everywhere you've been in the last month probably would consume far less space than an mp3 file, so how are you going to keep people from sharing it? All you need is a distributed algorithm - like record your own footage with geotagging, process it to generate GUIDs for all the faces in each frame, compress to cut down on redundancy, and upload to some random website where it gets combined with everybody else's data. Distribution could be distributed as with freenet/etc as well.
That was why I say you "can't" stop the destruction of privacy. It isn't a matter of rules/laws/etc - it is a matter of technology, and you just can't stop technological progress.
I was referring to the linking argument, not the compiling argument.
The fact that code originating in GCC ends up in the binary has nothing to do with whether it is legal or not to write a non-GPL Linux kernel module that uses arbitrary kernel symbols.
I wasn't really debating anything you said with regard to compilers. Your argument makes sense, though I haven't really given it as much thought. The process of compilation is not creative, but the design of the compiler itself certainly is. I'd have to give some thought to counter-arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but you'll miss out on the opportunity to buy rust protection, gap insurance, and extended warranties at 20x the market rate.
> Specifically: Why do movie studios allow Netflix to send out DVDs to their subscribers by mail, but not to allow the same option in the form of "virtual DVDs" that you could "check out" through their website, and stream them while they're checked out to you?
They don't "let" Netflix do it. It's netflix's right to do so and the movie studios tried to stop them, just like they tried to stop VHS and Beta rentals when VHS gained traction in the late 70s/early 80s.
Probably worth noting that somebody like Netflix cuts deals with studios anyway even though they could end-run. That gives them the ability to have dependable supplies (they don't have to join the mad rush on release date at Walmart - they just their own crate, maybe even just on spools without all the shrink-wrap), and they might get better pricing.
However, the fact that Netflix COULD just go to Walmart and buy a ton of DVDs gives them a lot more leverage. They're not completely dependent on the studios, so it is in the interest of the studios to offer them a deal that is a compromise.
Because no one wants to pay the $19.95 for the rental that the movie studios would want to charge for it.
Well, plus it would involve a $10/month fee for Warner Brothers online - just to have access to it. Oh, and for the first six months after anything new comes out they'll only let you stream it on Comcast if you subscribe to the Oprah channel.
If you want to watch all your favorite shows you'll need 7 more studio-level subscriptions, and you'll need cable service from Comcast, Verizon, and DirecTV, and you'll have to live in the USA. Oh, and half of your shows will only play on IE, a few will play on a Kindle but not any other Android tablet, some will be iPad-only, and so on. Your library will be scattered across 47 different UIs.
This is the sort of nonsense that keeps people from paying for streaming-only content. They don't want to set up their set-top box with 12 different accounts, and when they want to watch a movie they don't want to have to do a google search to try to figure out where they bought it from so that they can navigate to the right application. If they just download it from TBP it all goes in their Movie folder and works on everything.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070824072530AA0GeNF in slashdot a link it worth more than a pile of 'didn't read the license agreement that you made by opening a disc'
Any term in the fine print that says you can't rent it isn't legally binding. You can put anything you want in a piece of paper, but that doesn't make it enforceable. The first sale doctrine basically says that if you walk into walmart and hand them cash and get a box you keep forever, then it is a sale regardless of what anything else says. You're not allowed to copy it, but you can do almost anything else with it, including reselling it, lending it out, or renting it out.
Copyright governs COPYING and exhibition of works. Rental involves neither (though streaming does). Copyright holders generally cannot impose restrictions on how their works are used after they are first sold. They often try to do so anyway, but no court would uphold their right to take action against you.
You're either a fucking idiot or a corporate stooge. The right of first sale (part of copyright law), says it is perfectly legal to rent your DVDs, CDs, books, etc.
Not quite. You can't rent or lend CDs, or records, or other "phonorecordings" without a license. It's a special case.
Citation? And I mean to a supreme court case or law, not to some blog or industry white paper.
The first sale principle was established by the supreme court and it says that when you pay money for something and are allowed to keep it forever without further compensation, you bought it regardless of anything written in the fine print. You can therefore do whatever you want with it, other than copy it or publicly broadcast it. You can certainly lend it out, for free or for a fee.
The MPAA has opposed this for eons, but they had their days in court and lost. A notice on a recording that says that it is not for resale or rental has no power whatsoever.
Agreed on all.
Along the lines of the focus on maximizing per-view revenue and not per-month revenue is the love-affair the entertainment industry has with exclusive contracts. You can buy this show on this service, or that show on that service, or you can stream this show only if you have a cable subscription to this channel, but only for one season, and so on. Often things are hard to buy at any price, and sometimes you can only get much of what you want if you subscribe to 3 different services (thus paying for most of the content multiple times). The whole entertainment industry is rife with this sort of mentality from channel bundling to streaming to only putting channels on a single cable provider.
This is extremely frustrating for consumers, who just want to pay a REASONABLE price to get everything they want. Reasonable isn't $200/month. Honestly, just typical extended cable is probably already pushing it for many. So, people end up pirating instead, because TPB works on any ISP, computer, etc.
Hollywood needs to make it easy to be a loyal customer if they want to have many of them. They need to make their customers feel happy about what they're getting for their money, and not make them feel like they're constantly at odds or being taken advantage of.
Flight sims are an extremely niche product. It was likely adopt this business model or never make another MS Flight game again.
Sure, but many fans considered it a bit of a slap in the face - which was the original point. I can certainly see why they did it, but they definitely didn't do it for their fans.
Ham radio operators talk on the radio all the time and dont have accidents at that rate,
Two things.
First an anecdote - I know a ham who did HF CW in his car while driving.
Second, I really wonder how they defined a cell phone as being involved in an accident. Did they just record any accident where a phone was someplace visible to the driver? Did they record any accident where a call was in progress? Did they try to determine if the call itself contributed to the accident? Did fault come into it? If you're parked talking on the phone and somebody rear-ends you, does that count as a phone-involved accident?
These stats might be really telling us that lots of cars have cell phones in them.
Btrfs is fairly comparable to ZFS in terms of capabilities/architecture. Personally I tend to prefer the design (devices go directly into pools - you don't have to designate groupings of devices into RAID/etc). Each has some feature the other lacks, but ZFS is more mature.
Ultimately btrfs seems likely to replace ext4 some day, though that day could be quite a ways off. ZFS is unlikely to do so unless the license issue is overcome - sure, you can use it, but there will always be a drive to have the #1 general-purpose filesystem be one that is actually in the mainline kernel.
Well, since ZFS is available for Linux I had to wonder why there would be people making a fuss about btrfs. You bring up licensing which is an issue, and I'm guessing Oracle did not help the license issues, or possibly made the license issues worse.
Well, for starters btrfs plans to have features I need, like reshaping RAID, while ZFS has no plans (that I'm aware of) to add this feature. No, I'm not talking about adding/removing raid from a zpool - I'm talking about adding/removing drives from a RAID while maintaining redundancy while the filesystem is online. mdadm supports this, and so does btrfs (though doing anything with raid5/6 on btrfs is risky right now).
The main strength of ZFS is its maturity/stability. Feature-wise, I'm sure it does somethings btrfs lacks, but when you look at the planned feature lists btrfs seems likely to surpass it at some point.
And of course there is the license - ZFS will never be in the mainstream kernel unless Oracle re-licenses it or somebody re-writes it (and in so doing ditches the maturity which is its main advantage).
IMHO, this is a very good thing. btrfs doesn't have as many capabilities that ZFS or Storage Spaces/ReFS possesses.
Beyond maturity, what is actually missing? When I look at the feature lists for both if anything it seems like btrfs has more features, like being able to reshape a raid. The last time I checked ZFS supported adding or removing a raid from a zpool, but not adding or removing individual drives from a raid (without degrading it). That is, you can't turn a 4-drive raid5 into a 5-drive raid5 without adding 5 drives and then removing 4.
I'm certainly willing to believe btrfs is missing something, but it has a number of features already (though some aren't as ready for production use - for example I'd probably avoid raid 5/6 for the time being).
When it looks like a Major Player moves in and starts dominating the generation of your pet virtual currency, why wouldn't you just jump ship to the next one, where you can stand a chance to make money in the early days of generation?
Well, generation of US Dollars has been monopolized by the US Government for over 200 years, and I don't see anybody in a rush to jump ship to the South Sudanese Pound.
Bitcoin was designed to be a currency - not a way to make money. The hype factor has caused value to surge, which largely limits its actual value as a currency. At some point value will stabilize and mining/etc will become economically efficient, and at that point nobody will make significant money off of mining or trading Bitcoin, but it will be far more useful as a currency.
Attempting freemium/f2p business models for a game is not tantamount to lack of respect for ones customers.
However, this wasn't done in parallel with the original software - it was a replacement, and a MUCH less functional one. It is also a much more expensive model - you could pay as much to just fly 2-3 planes in Hawaii and Alaska as you could pay to fly 15 planes globally in the previous versions. Flying globally isn't even an option in the new version.
Unsurprisingly, they basically abandoned the new product. The intent was to bring in casual gamers, but about all they did was drove away their long-established userbase. Somebody who spends $200 on commercial airliner add-ons with virtually every system simulated flying long hauls isn't going to want to just fly around Hawaii in a small plane that is highly simplified.
At this point they've abandoned the field entirely, and their previous customers are slowly migrating to other platforms.
Copying an IMEI is ... well, more or less worthless unless you're on some shitty network like verizon which still doesn't use GSM and SIM cards. It has nothing to do with security.
It wouldn't be illegal to spoof in many countries if it didn't matter.
Whats that ... you don't realize that everyone is already ON GSM except Verizon?
Considering that I have a GSM phone in my pocket, I'd say your statement is rather arrogant.
Its trivial to make an IMEI unchangeable. You make it controlled by fuses.
Security by obscurity. If you want to clone the IMEI you just make your own phone and you can make the IMEI whatever you want it to be. Or you can hack the baseband on the phone you already have. Or you replace the fuses.
Yes, none of those is easy to do, which is why it is security by obscurity. It wouldn't be "obscurity" if it were easy to do. The point is that there is no algorithmic/cryptographic protection. In some sense even smartcards suffer this problem, but at least those do use an embedded secret that never leaves the card which forces you to actually attack the hardware, and not merely replicate it.
The features of Microsoft Flight. That would be the freemium'ed dumb-downed version of Microsoft Flight Simulator, which has otherwise been abandoned after ~30 years.
While Microsoft has difficulty in executing things, they still maintain a basic respect for their customers.
https://microsoftflight.com/en...
Sorry - I was talking about the VC backers. The kickstarter backers won't get anything - kickstarter is basically a donation, and I'm sure Zuckerberg appreciates it.
I can see Facebook thinking that maybe they can make money from the Oculus, and maybe they can, but it's not going to be in a way that I assume most of the original backers thought they were buying into.
The original backers bought into a $2B buyout. If the product is successful now, they won't make another cent, as they no longer own it. If the product flops they won't lose a cent for the same reason. They just have to make do with their $2B - somehow I think they'll manage.
4.Regulations (FCC and other regulators have strict rules about how cellphones are allowed to operate and I doubt they would allow a phone with an open source baseband to get approval because such a phone could be modified to violate the rules)
This might make sense if non-open-source firmware couldn't be modified to violate the rules. There really isn't any information in the source code that isn't also in the binary if you're determined enough. Likewise, if you have physical possession of the phone, it is impossible to prevent you from modifying it in arbitrary ways.
But, the FCC doesn't have to make sense...
The irony is that if somebody really wanted to cause trouble they'd just buy or make a jammer. I can see why the FCC wants to have commercially sold devices certified, but they shouldn't need to be locked down to this degree. If people want to experiment with them, how is that worse than them experimenting with home-built hardware? You can legally buy hardware capable of broadcasting arbitrary signals on arbitrary frequencies already.
And as far as changing IMEI/etc goes - an authentication system which is based on a number which is not unique to the account is a poor system. IMEI is just security by obscurity. Anybody who has physical possession of a phone can find its IMEI, including whoever sold it to you. Changing an IMEI is always possible, no matter how hard the phone vendors try to make it. The phone should just authenticate with a shared secret which is actually secret, or should use a smartcard built into the SIM/etc. And yes, I realize this would probably require changing GSM.
Remind me again why "black box" style cellular data transmitters aren't required to be transmitting cockpit voice data and full telemetry from every major airliner at all times yet?
Well, full telemetry is just being cheap. Voice would not only cost money, but would anger the pilots union. That is why cockpit voice recorders just have a short loop of memory - nobody wants the boss going back and listening to their water-cooler talk for the whole flight.
Seems to me that a better solution would be to just make it illegal to access except in a disaster, or even encrypt it with the NTSB (or other 3rd party) holding the keys.
So, I'm not convinced that US Intel knew anything on day 1, but if they did it certainly would be an interesting revelation.
Being able to see wreckage with a satellite isn't fancy. However, having it on day 1 suggests that they can routinely scan large areas of the Earth and spot things in near-realtime. That isn't something anybody can do as far as anybody knows.
If the US did track the flight it would be more likely to be using electronic means. Visual imagery of the ocean isn't easy. Spotting the pings is much easier, and it is also possible that there is some kind of radar-like technology involved. There is no reason you couldn't track an aircraft with radar from a satellite, though it would be challenging due to surface reflections (the plane is a lot closer to the earth than the earth is to the satellite, and has near-zero velocity in the direction of the radar beam). Also, a conventional radar on a satellite would be obvious to everybody since it requires emissions.
However, there is another way to obtain aircraft locations - passively look for signals reflecting off of the aircraft from other sources - military or civilian. That would include radar returns, but it could include any other RF source. Depending on sensitivity that might allow for coverage in areas that don't have traditional radar coverage. This sort of technology would be especially useful for tracking stealth aircraft, so it would make sense that the US would research it.
Is that not how humans traditionally hunted bears? I keep seeing people deride all this hunting business as using too much technology or insight to trick the animals... but that is precisely what got us to the top of the food chain in the first place.
I think the point is that this isn't about food/etc.
If bears were a menace to society or there was a need to eat them, then it only makes sense to kill them in the most efficient manner possible. To the degree that it is safe the method should be humane.
If a lion were loose in the vicinity of a playground, the goal wouldn't be to make capturing/killing/etc it a challenge.
However, we don't need to eat bears, and in general they're not dangerous to people. If this is about "sport" then efficiency isn't really important, though safety should be. I'm not into hunting, so I won't comment on the morality of treating it as a sport, but if that really is your purpose, it doesn't make sense to shoot fish in a barrel.
Of course we have a choice in the matter. Long ago we decided that the Post Office could not look in your mail, and we have held them to that for over a century.
The USPS is a centralized organization that can be controlled as such. The actions of everybody is not.
We have laws that make it illegal to distribute copyrighted music. How is that working for the RIAA?
A complete history of everywhere you've been in the last month probably would consume far less space than an mp3 file, so how are you going to keep people from sharing it? All you need is a distributed algorithm - like record your own footage with geotagging, process it to generate GUIDs for all the faces in each frame, compress to cut down on redundancy, and upload to some random website where it gets combined with everybody else's data. Distribution could be distributed as with freenet/etc as well.
That was why I say you "can't" stop the destruction of privacy. It isn't a matter of rules/laws/etc - it is a matter of technology, and you just can't stop technological progress.
I was referring to the linking argument, not the compiling argument.
The fact that code originating in GCC ends up in the binary has nothing to do with whether it is legal or not to write a non-GPL Linux kernel module that uses arbitrary kernel symbols.
I wasn't really debating anything you said with regard to compilers. Your argument makes sense, though I haven't really given it as much thought. The process of compilation is not creative, but the design of the compiler itself certainly is. I'd have to give some thought to counter-arguments.