The fabathome wiki indicates Hod Lipson is at Cornell, and CMU's directory has no record of either researcher (which would usually be present for a year or so after leaving the university).
And I was beginning to think this would be something that would make me *proud* of my alma mater for once...
Memo to freshman Democrats in Congress: Please please tie research funding to doing useful research, and running an institution well for its students (that means a clean, consistent financial aid system and reasonable tuition), not defense and homeland stupidity pork. Your constituents will thank you.
I always hate it when academics use their position to further crap like this rather than fight the bullshit. My alma mater had plenty of these jerks too, particularly the people running the career programs in "e-commerce" and computer security. One telltale sign is that they've testified before Congress. Apparently Mr. Jacobson doesn't like p2p because there's porn on it. The money shot is this bit:
There are several issues that make pornography on peer-to-peer networks more problematic than web or FTP-hosted pornography. You don't have to look for pornography on peer-to-peer networks; it will find you.
I'm not so sure that this is a good thing at this stage. It's less of "another hole in the dike"; if people use this and spend their time on it, that is less time spent on cracking the DRM where it really hurts. It almost seems like a flag of surrender on the DRM issue, and it would be better to create tons of uncertainty and doubt that DRM works at all (in the digital, compressed original) by repeatedly cracking it wide open than to make media companies think that we're resorting to this because we can't manage or are too lazy to crack the original. This could cause them to redouble their efforts to plug the analog hole or make using it circuitous and obnoxious.
What are they using for a cooling liquid, ethylene glycol perhaps?
Oh, I get it, it's hyperbole. So now if I buy a product that says "toxic" on the box, there's no way of knowing whether it is or isn't, and whether I can leave it around young kids without them getting too curious and going to the hospital. Ingenious! What will they think of next?
This is a repost of a comment I have made previously, but I think the connection is important. Jack Abramoff took money to lobby on behalf of a company, eLottery, whose business model basically depends on software and business method patents in order to raise the cash they need to spend on lobbyists. Without the patents, there would at best be a trade association for such companies in a competitive market, probably more open in its dealings with government as well.
An article several months ago in the Washington Post
described more about how Jack Abramoff took money
to influence congressional proceedings. In this case, it was to scuttle
a bill that would have prohibited state lotteries from going online. As
with his work with Indian
casinos, Abramoff pulled strings to get otherwise anti-gambling members
of Congress to vote against a law prohibiting companies like eLottery
from conducting lotteries over the Internet.
Oh, did I say "companies like"? Oops, no, just eLottery. They seem to have some patents
"broadly covering Internet retailing of state lottery
tickets". In other words, software patents, or actually business model
patents (legalized monopolies) disguised as them. Of course, those
patents let them raise capital from investors eager to profit from that
legalized monopoly. Where did that capital go? Right into lobbyists'
pockets.
I guess you haven't watched much sports on TV lately. The people doing the HUDs for some networks (actually, cough cough NBC is a big culprit) seem to also have forgotten that most of their audience doesn't have HD. The winter olympics were particularly bad this way -- the flag icons (already at a horrible aspect ratio) and much of the text was unreadable in standard definition, probably having been designed for European DTV, which is not as high resolution as HDTV but has a much higher adoption rate. Apparently the HUD was done centrally for many countries' broadcasts, but NBC could have at least raised a stink about it if they weren't so busy trying to promote their own HD cable networks. The occasional ESPN experiments with 8 mini screens are also near useless without HD, and there are probably a couple of other examples that have escaped me.
The clocking inaccuracies can actually be deliberate, to reduce the number of pops and clicks on the line when things do go to shit. I have used faxes successfully between Asterisk servers running older (1.0.x) versions of Asterisk (and over a VERY clean, heavily QoS'ed network link), but with the newer jitter buffer in 1.2 which is much more stable for voice it's damn near impossible to run faxes with the stock code. Even a 2ms change in latency (smaller than the time needed to transmit a single 1500 byte packet over a T1, which is 8 ms) with a modern voice-oriented jitter buffer will cause compensation algorithms to run which stretch or compress the audio, and no fax machine or modem will stay connected for long over that.
First, many Linux distros already support most common audio formats, either through reverse engineered codecs (developed outside of the Land of the Free[tm], natch) or binary wrappers around Windows codecs. While they may not be easy for a distro vendor to legally distribute, it is certainly not difficult for users to obtain them. It's unclear if ESR really understands what he is talking about here, or the state of Linux media support, which is really quite good. But he likes making up buzzwords for concepts which have already been hashed and rehashed outside his reality distortion field, then pretending he's saying something brand new. Damn am I glad he doesn't run OSI anymore. (The comment about sci-fi convention geeks is also deeply ironic given ESR's own personal history.)
One path is clear -- while evangelism for open codecs like Ogg, and support for them in hardware, should continue, Linux users should also cease recommending distributions like Fedora that don't come with basic mp3 playback support out of the box. Redhat's lawyers really screwed the pooch on that one, and it takes a very mangled reading of the situation regarding mp3 to assume you need a license to decode mp3's.
Note that he has not actually mentioned DRM. Of course that's the big sticking point, and even if you assume the RIAA would be satisfied with application-level control (because you will NEVER get driver-level control on Linux to match Windows), you've got to convince one of the big legal music distribution sites to play along. Surprise -- both iTunes and Urge are owned by or partnerships with a major OS vendor that competes directly with Linux. Does he think there's a chance in hell Apple would jeopardize their hardware market to port iTMS to what they consider an insignificant platform? Windows Media DRM on Linux? Don't make me laugh! Steve Jobs will embrace Linux if it has good "industrial design"? Maybe if it's designed by his industrial designers!
And remember, the iPod generation is only slightly younger than the Napster mini-generation...
First, many Linux distros already support most common audio formats, either through reverse engineered codecs (developed outside of the Land of the Free[tm], natch) or binary wrappers around Windows codecs. While they may not be easy for a distro vendor to legally distribute, it is certainly not difficult for users to obtain them. It's unclear if ESR really understands what he is talking about here, or the state of Linux media support, which is really quite good. But he likes making up buzzwords for concepts which have already been hashed and rehashed outside his reality distortion field, then pretending he's saying something brand new. Damn am I glad he doesn't run OSI anymore. (The comment about sci-fi convention geeks is also deeply ironic given ESR's own personal history.)
One path is clear -- while evangelism for open codecs like Ogg, and support for them in hardware, should continue, Linux users should also cease recommending distributions like Fedora that don't come with basic mp3 playback support out of the box. Redhat's lawyers really screwed the pooch on that one, and it takes a very mangled reading of the situation regarding mp3 to assume you need a license to decode mp3's.
Note that he has not actually mentioned DRM. Of course that's the big sticking point, and even if you assume the RIAA would be satisfied with application-level control (because you will NEVER get driver-level control on Linux to match Windows), you've got to convince one of the big legal music distribution sites to play along. Surprise -- both iTunes and Urge are owned by or partnerships with a major OS vendor that competes directly with Linux. Does he think there's a chance in hell Apple would jeopardize their hardware market to port iTMS to what they consider an insignificant platform? Windows Media DRM on Linux? Don't make me laugh! Steve Jobs will embrace Linux if it has good "industrial design"? Maybe if it's designed by his industrial designers!
And remember, the iPod generation is only slightly younger than the Napster mini-generation...
How do you know this? Do you work at Apple?
Code for previous releases was never withheld without notice like this, and Apple released only the code they had to (GPL) before people complained.
I am aware of a fairly large suburban school district that was taken to the cleaners by their IT manager without them knowing it at the time. Few people outside IT in such a place really understand the cost of the IT equipment they're buying. So the manager decided to order a whole bunch of "spares" to fill a closet. Somehow this closet was bottomless as stuff kept officially going in it but it never filled up.
He got caught as soon as he did only because he was a complete dumbass about it -- students knew there was a "forbidden room" and were suspicious of its contents, and he listed some Cisco kit and some printers on eBay with an address that obviously traced back to the school. When someone brought in a printout of the eBay auctions it was all over.
This is the issue, right here. Apple used the open source community for attention and went ahead and dumped on them with nary a word from any of the people that covered how innovative Darwin was when it was released as open source in the first place.
A fair number of people choose to work for Apple rather than some other Silly Valley company because they're a "cool company" who did things like open source the guts of their OS. What should someone in their position think after this kind of stunt?
More alarming to me than the kernel being closed is that they didn't release any of the core source until people started complaining. Even the parts of the OS that are most useful for tinkering were an afterthought for Apple.
I would think disbarment is quite possible here. The fact that their lawyers started asking him unrelated personal questions in a deposition, blatantly fishing for dirt, is quite possibly a criminal offense (harassment and abuse of process).
Too bad that the Mac community is so full of mindless toadies that they joined in the harassment from their own side. I don't think *they* deserve an apology from this guy, who did nothing wrong.
"I began getting hate mail from people upset about the iPod Nano suit. I had to take my website down and remove legitimate references to my name on numerous web services. My fiancee and I were afraid to go outside in our own home town for fear of recognition and reprisal."
I mean, seriously folks, you love a defective product *that* much? It sounds like great advertising for Apple...except for the whole "well, we sell so many of these because people are mindlessly attached to our brand and don't want to hear anything bad about them" bit.
"that was a delay resulting from the fact there's basically one person at Apple packaging and setting up the sources for distribution."
Which is something anyone who has ever worked professionally with open source components of OS X is aware of -- that Apple's marketing of their commitment to open source is exactly that, marketing, and goes only skin deep. None of this is to fault those who are working on it, but the fact that all of the open source releases were after the fact, repackaged, as well as Apple's bug tracking (radar) being strictly internal, never inspired a lot of confidence. For a long time, different parts of the OS were being released in different ways which helped a lot adding to the confusion.
"in the enterprise community, one we found out that the rest of the sources would continue to be released on x86 as normal, the kernel being gone was barely a blip on our radar."
So what else could Apple do at this point that would barely show up on your radar? Let's say they start going nuts with itunes drm, and start locking down everything itunes depends on. Oh well, you never needed to recompile the C library anyway, right?
Aside: I actually *did* need to recompile Apple's C library back in the OS X 10.0 days as their loginwindow had no extension API and I was working at a site that used Kerberos for logins, so I patched crypt(2) and used magic values in the passwd db. This never made it into production as 10.1 was released shortly thereafter but we were using a patched, hacked-together loginwindow plugin after that for about a year before the API was opened up in 10.2. Now I hear loginwindow itself is encrypted or obfuscated in some way to depend on the TPM as a deterrent to pirates, as it is considered a "core component" of the OS. It's only a hop skip and a jump from there to the chaos currently going on in the Windows world where Microsoft is making everyone rewrite their GINAs to a new API for Vista.
This is old news if you subscribe to a ton of mailing lists, but it never hit the trade press much. A lot of journalists assumed the lack of a class of users who would be concerned with this issue. I'm happy to see that at least one journalist is doing their job and airing a potentially controversial issue, sensational or otherwise.
Actually, if you'll remember, the early 90's had a lot of defense industry consolidation. For example Lockheed Martin bought out most of Martin Marietta. Consolidation is often a sign of underregulation (or ending of overregulation) and thus potential for profits, but it can also point to an industry actually in decline, forced to consolidate to keep its economies of scale going. This was around the time Clinton got elected and there were (scuttled) plans being floated to "right-size" the Pentagon. Lockheed either had layoffs at some point or was planning them (don't remember the details).
Now Bush got elected and the defense cos are super flush again, even more so than under Reagan. I wonder how that happened. Hey, I wonder at whom Big Defense directs its political donations. Couldn't be the GOP, could it... well, not just them, certainly the Scoop Jackson Democrats (read: neo-con liberals) share the blame. Sometimes the military-industrial complex doesn't win out, but they are a really squeaky wheel in the halls of congress and they are willing to pay a lot to get greased.
An article several months ago in the Washington Post described more about how Jack Abramoff took money to influence congressional proceedings. In this case, it was to scuttle a bill that would have prohibited state lotteries from going online. As with his work with Indian
casinos, Abramoff pulled strings to get otherwise anti-gambling members of Congress to vote against a law prohibiting companies like eLottery from conducting lotteries over the Internet.
Oh, did I say "companies like"? Oops, no, just eLottery. They seem to have some patents "broadly covering Internet retailing of state lottery tickets". In other words, software patents, or actually business model patents (legalized monopolies) disguised as them. Of course, those patents let them raise capital from investors eager to profit from that legalized monopoly. Where did that capital go? Right into lobbyists' pockets.
Except Apple and iTunes should be shot for having a separate interface to put podcasts into their store that has nothing to do with having them on the web, and isn't compatible with any other podcatcher. At least I haven't yet found a (free) podcast I cared about that was only on iTunes since everyone does the RSS first anyway (and I think iTunes uses the RSS internally). However, I would encourage people not to use iTunes and in particular the ITMS for podcatching for this very reason.
Come on, Apple. Open standards, not lock-in. At least for free content. It's not that hard. Apple deserves no credit for their closed-off pseudo-web bullshit.
Re:AOL hasn't always used totally closed video for
on
In2TV Goes Public
·
· Score: 1
Well, I just did. It's similar right up to a nice bit of javascript code buried in one of the files referenced by called isDRMAsset which looks for a magic letter next to the bitrate in the mms URL, and that letter is there. And my mplayer doesn't like connecting to the mms url that results. So this is apparently MS DRM. Sigh. (The letter is either S or G depending on the bitrate, if anyone cares.)
Slashdot Mirror
The fabathome wiki indicates Hod Lipson is at Cornell, and CMU's directory has no record of either researcher (which would usually be present for a year or so after leaving the university).
And I was beginning to think this would be something that would make me *proud* of my alma mater for once...
Memo to freshman Democrats in Congress: Please please tie research funding to doing useful research, and running an institution well for its students (that means a clean, consistent financial aid system and reasonable tuition), not defense and homeland stupidity pork. Your constituents will thank you.
On SOVIET LIMEWIRE, PORN FINDS YOU!
I'm not so sure that this is a good thing at this stage. It's less of "another hole in the dike"; if people use this and spend their time on it, that is less time spent on cracking the DRM where it really hurts. It almost seems like a flag of surrender on the DRM issue, and it would be better to create tons of uncertainty and doubt that DRM works at all (in the digital, compressed original) by repeatedly cracking it wide open than to make media companies think that we're resorting to this because we can't manage or are too lazy to crack the original. This could cause them to redouble their efforts to plug the analog hole or make using it circuitous and obnoxious.
What are they using for a cooling liquid, ethylene glycol perhaps?
Oh, I get it, it's hyperbole. So now if I buy a product that says "toxic" on the box, there's no way of knowing whether it is or isn't, and whether I can leave it around young kids without them getting too curious and going to the hospital. Ingenious! What will they think of next?
This is a repost of a comment I have made previously, but I think the connection is important. Jack Abramoff took money to lobby on behalf of a company, eLottery, whose business model basically depends on software and business method patents in order to raise the cash they need to spend on lobbyists. Without the patents, there would at best be a trade association for such companies in a competitive market, probably more open in its dealings with government as well.
An article several months ago in the Washington Post described more about how Jack Abramoff took money to influence congressional proceedings. In this case, it was to scuttle a bill that would have prohibited state lotteries from going online. As with his work with Indian casinos, Abramoff pulled strings to get otherwise anti-gambling members of Congress to vote against a law prohibiting companies like eLottery from conducting lotteries over the Internet.
Oh, did I say "companies like"? Oops, no, just eLottery. They seem to have some patents "broadly covering Internet retailing of state lottery tickets". In other words, software patents, or actually business model patents (legalized monopolies) disguised as them. Of course, those patents let them raise capital from investors eager to profit from that legalized monopoly. Where did that capital go? Right into lobbyists' pockets.
I guess you haven't watched much sports on TV lately. The people doing the HUDs for some networks (actually, cough cough NBC is a big culprit) seem to also have forgotten that most of their audience doesn't have HD. The winter olympics were particularly bad this way -- the flag icons (already at a horrible aspect ratio) and much of the text was unreadable in standard definition, probably having been designed for European DTV, which is not as high resolution as HDTV but has a much higher adoption rate. Apparently the HUD was done centrally for many countries' broadcasts, but NBC could have at least raised a stink about it if they weren't so busy trying to promote their own HD cable networks. The occasional ESPN experiments with 8 mini screens are also near useless without HD, and there are probably a couple of other examples that have escaped me.
Hacked by Chinese!
The clocking inaccuracies can actually be deliberate, to reduce the number of pops and clicks on the line when things do go to shit. I have used faxes successfully between Asterisk servers running older (1.0.x) versions of Asterisk (and over a VERY clean, heavily QoS'ed network link), but with the newer jitter buffer in 1.2 which is much more stable for voice it's damn near impossible to run faxes with the stock code. Even a 2ms change in latency (smaller than the time needed to transmit a single 1500 byte packet over a T1, which is 8 ms) with a modern voice-oriented jitter buffer will cause compensation algorithms to run which stretch or compress the audio, and no fax machine or modem will stay connected for long over that.
The problem is that DCI has been retained by telecom companies (specifically AT&T) in the past, and the opinions published on their Tech Central Station astroturf site closely tracked AT&T's. Why would Google hire a company with a track record of working hard for the other side?
>If you are capable of learning on your own, then why attend college in the first place?
Where the hell else would I get my source of pot? I need my weed, man.
First, many Linux distros already support most common audio formats, either through reverse engineered codecs (developed outside of the Land of the Free[tm], natch) or binary wrappers around Windows codecs. While they may not be easy for a distro vendor to legally distribute, it is certainly not difficult for users to obtain them. It's unclear if ESR really understands what he is talking about here, or the state of Linux media support, which is really quite good. But he likes making up buzzwords for concepts which have already been hashed and rehashed outside his reality distortion field, then pretending he's saying something brand new. Damn am I glad he doesn't run OSI anymore. (The comment about sci-fi convention geeks is also deeply ironic given ESR's own personal history.)
One path is clear -- while evangelism for open codecs like Ogg, and support for them in hardware, should continue, Linux users should also cease recommending distributions like Fedora that don't come with basic mp3 playback support out of the box. Redhat's lawyers really screwed the pooch on that one, and it takes a very mangled reading of the situation regarding mp3 to assume you need a license to decode mp3's.
Note that he has not actually mentioned DRM. Of course that's the big sticking point, and even if you assume the RIAA would be satisfied with application-level control (because you will NEVER get driver-level control on Linux to match Windows), you've got to convince one of the big legal music distribution sites to play along. Surprise -- both iTunes and Urge are owned by or partnerships with a major OS vendor that competes directly with Linux. Does he think there's a chance in hell Apple would jeopardize their hardware market to port iTMS to what they consider an insignificant platform? Windows Media DRM on Linux? Don't make me laugh! Steve Jobs will embrace Linux if it has good "industrial design"? Maybe if it's designed by his industrial designers!
And remember, the iPod generation is only slightly younger than the Napster mini-generation...
First, many Linux distros already support most common audio formats, either through reverse engineered codecs (developed outside of the Land of the Free[tm], natch) or binary wrappers around Windows codecs. While they may not be easy for a distro vendor to legally distribute, it is certainly not difficult for users to obtain them. It's unclear if ESR really understands what he is talking about here, or the state of Linux media support, which is really quite good. But he likes making up buzzwords for concepts which have already been hashed and rehashed outside his reality distortion field, then pretending he's saying something brand new. Damn am I glad he doesn't run OSI anymore. (The comment about sci-fi convention geeks is also deeply ironic given ESR's own personal history.) One path is clear -- while evangelism for open codecs like Ogg, and support for them in hardware, should continue, Linux users should also cease recommending distributions like Fedora that don't come with basic mp3 playback support out of the box. Redhat's lawyers really screwed the pooch on that one, and it takes a very mangled reading of the situation regarding mp3 to assume you need a license to decode mp3's. Note that he has not actually mentioned DRM. Of course that's the big sticking point, and even if you assume the RIAA would be satisfied with application-level control (because you will NEVER get driver-level control on Linux to match Windows), you've got to convince one of the big legal music distribution sites to play along. Surprise -- both iTunes and Urge are owned by or partnerships with a major OS vendor that competes directly with Linux. Does he think there's a chance in hell Apple would jeopardize their hardware market to port iTMS to what they consider an insignificant platform? Windows Media DRM on Linux? Don't make me laugh! Steve Jobs will embrace Linux if it has good "industrial design"? Maybe if it's designed by his industrial designers! And remember, the iPod generation is only slightly younger than the Napster mini-generation...
How do you know this? Do you work at Apple? Code for previous releases was never withheld without notice like this, and Apple released only the code they had to (GPL) before people complained.
I am aware of a fairly large suburban school district that was taken to the cleaners by their IT manager without them knowing it at the time. Few people outside IT in such a place really understand the cost of the IT equipment they're buying. So the manager decided to order a whole bunch of "spares" to fill a closet. Somehow this closet was bottomless as stuff kept officially going in it but it never filled up.
He got caught as soon as he did only because he was a complete dumbass about it -- students knew there was a "forbidden room" and were suspicious of its contents, and he listed some Cisco kit and some printers on eBay with an address that obviously traced back to the school. When someone brought in a printout of the eBay auctions it was all over.
This is the issue, right here. Apple used the open source community for attention and went ahead and dumped on them with nary a word from any of the people that covered how innovative Darwin was when it was released as open source in the first place.
A fair number of people choose to work for Apple rather than some other Silly Valley company because they're a "cool company" who did things like open source the guts of their OS. What should someone in their position think after this kind of stunt?
More alarming to me than the kernel being closed is that they didn't release any of the core source until people started complaining. Even the parts of the OS that are most useful for tinkering were an afterthought for Apple.
You mean Apple's digital downloads aren't also locked down, too expensive (and jeezus, $2 for a single music video or SNL skit?!), and a pain in the ass for everyone involved? That's news to me!
...it's a good idea to work somewhere other than Microsoft!
I would think disbarment is quite possible here. The fact that their lawyers started asking him unrelated personal questions in a deposition, blatantly fishing for dirt, is quite possibly a criminal offense (harassment and abuse of process).
Too bad that the Mac community is so full of mindless toadies that they joined in the harassment from their own side. I don't think *they* deserve an apology from this guy, who did nothing wrong.
"I began getting hate mail from people upset about the iPod Nano suit. I had to take my website down and remove legitimate references to my name on numerous web services. My fiancee and I were afraid to go outside in our own home town for fear of recognition and reprisal."
I mean, seriously folks, you love a defective product *that* much? It sounds like great advertising for Apple...except for the whole "well, we sell so many of these because people are mindlessly attached to our brand and don't want to hear anything bad about them" bit.
Would you mind repeating that, only in standard written English this time? A little clarification of cause and effect might help too, ya know.
"that was a delay resulting from the fact there's basically one person at Apple packaging and setting up the sources for distribution."
Which is something anyone who has ever worked professionally with open source components of OS X is aware of -- that Apple's marketing of their commitment to open source is exactly that, marketing, and goes only skin deep. None of this is to fault those who are working on it, but the fact that all of the open source releases were after the fact, repackaged, as well as Apple's bug tracking (radar) being strictly internal, never inspired a lot of confidence. For a long time, different parts of the OS were being released in different ways which helped a lot adding to the confusion.
"in the enterprise community, one we found out that the rest of the sources would continue to be released on x86 as normal, the kernel being gone was barely a blip on our radar."
So what else could Apple do at this point that would barely show up on your radar? Let's say they start going nuts with itunes drm, and start locking down everything itunes depends on. Oh well, you never needed to recompile the C library anyway, right?
Aside: I actually *did* need to recompile Apple's C library back in the OS X 10.0 days as their loginwindow had no extension API and I was working at a site that used Kerberos for logins, so I patched crypt(2) and used magic values in the passwd db. This never made it into production as 10.1 was released shortly thereafter but we were using a patched, hacked-together loginwindow plugin after that for about a year before the API was opened up in 10.2. Now I hear loginwindow itself is encrypted or obfuscated in some way to depend on the TPM as a deterrent to pirates, as it is considered a "core component" of the OS. It's only a hop skip and a jump from there to the chaos currently going on in the Windows world where Microsoft is making everyone rewrite their GINAs to a new API for Vista.
This is old news if you subscribe to a ton of mailing lists, but it never hit the trade press much. A lot of journalists assumed the lack of a class of users who would be concerned with this issue. I'm happy to see that at least one journalist is doing their job and airing a potentially controversial issue, sensational or otherwise.
Actually, if you'll remember, the early 90's had a lot of defense industry consolidation. For example Lockheed Martin bought out most of Martin Marietta. Consolidation is often a sign of underregulation (or ending of overregulation) and thus potential for profits, but it can also point to an industry actually in decline, forced to consolidate to keep its economies of scale going. This was around the time Clinton got elected and there were (scuttled) plans being floated to "right-size" the Pentagon. Lockheed either had layoffs at some point or was planning them (don't remember the details). Now Bush got elected and the defense cos are super flush again, even more so than under Reagan. I wonder how that happened. Hey, I wonder at whom Big Defense directs its political donations. Couldn't be the GOP, could it... well, not just them, certainly the Scoop Jackson Democrats (read: neo-con liberals) share the blame. Sometimes the military-industrial complex doesn't win out, but they are a really squeaky wheel in the halls of congress and they are willing to pay a lot to get greased.
Oh, did I say "companies like"? Oops, no, just eLottery. They seem to have some patents "broadly covering Internet retailing of state lottery tickets". In other words, software patents, or actually business model patents (legalized monopolies) disguised as them. Of course, those patents let them raise capital from investors eager to profit from that legalized monopoly. Where did that capital go? Right into lobbyists' pockets.
Except Apple and iTunes should be shot for having a separate interface to put podcasts into their store that has nothing to do with having them on the web, and isn't compatible with any other podcatcher. At least I haven't yet found a (free) podcast I cared about that was only on iTunes since everyone does the RSS first anyway (and I think iTunes uses the RSS internally). However, I would encourage people not to use iTunes and in particular the ITMS for podcatching for this very reason.
Come on, Apple. Open standards, not lock-in. At least for free content. It's not that hard. Apple deserves no credit for their closed-off pseudo-web bullshit.
Well, I just did. It's similar right up to a nice bit of javascript code buried in one of the files referenced by called isDRMAsset which looks for a magic letter next to the bitrate in the mms URL, and that letter is there. And my mplayer doesn't like connecting to the mms url that results. So this is apparently MS DRM. Sigh. (The letter is either S or G depending on the bitrate, if anyone cares.)