Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's this simple, (right?) -- you would need a key of a size equal to the total storage of the hard drive itself for a true "one time pad" encryption of the HD. I suppose you could have a duplicate, removable HD containing your 'key' (basically 40 GB of random bits), but at that point why not just remove the data HD itself and carry it around?
As someone pointed out, e-book publishers are already offering locked-down versions of novels from the 1800's. So such a thing would have a use right now.
Bad publicity? Bah. You forget, we are in The Age of Brazen Evil. They will do it, if nothing else works to maintain their stranglehold. They're extorting money from college students
already, and are bullying Verizon for the IP's of individual filesharers for the express purpose of suing them. Also, while it's not the RIAA, we saw an article earlier today about DirecTV suing thousands and thousands of people.
It may be self-destructive in the long run to sue your customers, but these type of organizations appear not to agree. They seem to have little reluctance to sue anyone they perceive as a 'criminal', why would they draw the line at (the parents of) teenagers?
"Law enforcement officials?" I guess that would include violence against the Gestapo (hell, it's in their name: the 'stapo' part stands for state police).
You're probably correct, but laws against being recklessly stupid with your own property DO exist. A (stupid) acquaintance of mine left his car running while he went into the post office for ten minutes. Someone swiped the car. The car thief was arrested, but also my acquaintance got a citation for creating what the law terms "an attractive nuisance".
In regard to the phone numbers--they're not e-mail addresses. It's not as if a list of valid, mainly listed phone numbers is particularly valuable in and of itself. The phone company provides such lists to anyone who asks. I'd imagine that a list of phone numbers of people who have gone out of their way to say that they don't want to receive unsolicited calls is even less valuable.
The author doesn't 'give up' anything other than (potential) profits. Copyright compels people to do something, so does 'copyleft'...or to put it another way it's just a particular type of copyright. No difference as far as the weight of 'protections' provided by copyright law and conventions. The term 'copyleft' is kind of silly for just that reason.
The format became popular long before the 'enforcement'. It was popular because it worked, and was free (aib). Once it became a de facto standard because of those reasons, someone realized 'whoah, we can like charge everyone for using this, and they'll have to pay because it's the de facto standard'. And it kind-of worked. But the enforcement had less than nothing to do with its popularity.
As an aside, it's the compression process that's patented, not the gif structure itself. Will we now see LZW compression used elsewhere?
If Microsoft is serious about wanting people to install their patches, they should institute a policy against making 'retroactive' changes to product EULAs in the patches. If they want me to patch this stuff on a weekly basis, having to parse through a few pages of EULA-ese in order to do so is a substantial 'barrier to entry'.
In the US, it is not possible to copyright a 'font' itself--that is to say, the actual images of the letters. What is copyrighted and licensed is the software to display/hint the font. So all the usual tests for 'is this the same software' apply.
As for outside of the US, where the fonts themselves are copyrightable...well, I'm sure there are legal standards, and I'd imagine they're rather arbitrary. How could they not be? You're right, so many fonts look so similar. Quick--is it Univers or Albertus Medium??? I'm sure some people can tell, but I'd be hard-pressed to do so.
Hey it's not like their entire customer base is hot-headed, demanding nerds with Napoleon fantasies...
Actually it isn't. GW's target audience is no longer who it once was. GW sells a huge amount of product to the 12-and-under crowd, especially in the UK. They really don't like catering to demanding nerds, and prefer a more malleable audience with deep-pockets parents.
Is MS stepping up their 'you must use auto-update' program? In their security bulletin it states that except for Windows 2000, the patch can only (their emphasis) be downloaded through windows update, not through a direct link. There then follows some hemming and hawing about how "A version of the patch that can be downloaded and deployed throughout a network is available. Information on obtaining it is available in the FAQ." Cool, that sounds like a way to get the '98 patch without having to enable the auto-backdoor nonsense. Ah, but the somewhat convoluted procedure in the FAQ entails visiting the Windows Update website, which, note, only works with the latest version of IE. Am I missing something here or are they making it a LOT harder than it should be to get this patch manually?
If the laser is shined through at a different angle, however slight, how can you get an accurate reading?
Think of it as a key with a square barrel. You put the square barrel into a square receptor. This lines it up properly.
Would wear and tear change the shape of the token, rendering it useless?
Eventually, I'm sure it would. It doesn't have to last forever, just like the stripe on the back of a credit card doesn't last forever.
If this stores a terrabit of info, how can we get it to store the info we want?
We can't. Not that it matters for the proposed use.
How will the government be able to demand a backdoor to this tech?
How will they make such a demand? Whinily and petulantly, as always. But I'm not sure they will be able to get one no matter how much they pout. Of course the main point of this (so far) is not using it to encrypt data, but only as a replacement for credit cards, so for the moment the gov't would only need a 'back door' if they wanted to buy stuff and charge it to you. They have another way of doing that already, called 'taxation'.
As for the duty of any government to spend money thoughtfully, spending money in a market already well-developed is NOT very thoughtful.
So, rather than pay someone to develop software that they can use in perpetuity, it would be more responsible for them to throw money down a licensing black hole forever?
Not to mention, I think it is of considerable value to the government to know what the source code is that's behind the software they're running. I suppose they could pay people to develop it and then keep it a big secret so Bill doesn't lose any sales. And, um, this would benefit Germany and German citizens how?
Why is the media so on about this millionaire and his 'adventures'? I think the real record he's going for is the highest newspaper column inches to importance ratio.
Actually, the Thompsons weren't taken away, they were designated 'Class III firearms'. If you were willing register each one and pay a $200 tax stamp (quite a bit back then) on it and get a local law-enforcement official to sign off on your ownership, then sure, you could keep your Thompson.
Certain states went further, but that's basically the federal law on these weapons.
Maybe they'll do the same with iPods.
How soon we forget. As discussed a short while ago, IBM's new storage format could be a step toward more permanent storage, at least compared to the physical deterioration of magnetic and optical media:
IBM 's Hyperpunchcards
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's this simple, (right?) -- you would need a key of a size equal to the total storage of the hard drive itself for a true "one time pad" encryption of the HD. I suppose you could have a duplicate, removable HD containing your 'key' (basically 40 GB of random bits), but at that point why not just remove the data HD itself and carry it around?
As someone pointed out, e-book publishers are already offering locked-down versions of novels from the 1800's. So such a thing would have a use right now.
Bad publicity? Bah. You forget, we are in The Age of Brazen Evil. They will do it, if nothing else works to maintain their stranglehold. They're extorting money from college students already, and are bullying Verizon for the IP's of individual filesharers for the express purpose of suing them. Also, while it's not the RIAA, we saw an article earlier today about DirecTV suing thousands and thousands of people. It may be self-destructive in the long run to sue your customers, but these type of organizations appear not to agree. They seem to have little reluctance to sue anyone they perceive as a 'criminal', why would they draw the line at (the parents of) teenagers?
"Law enforcement officials?" I guess that would include violence against the Gestapo (hell, it's in their name: the 'stapo' part stands for state police).
At least, that's how it was explained to me.
No, but damned funny.
In regard to the phone numbers--they're not e-mail addresses. It's not as if a list of valid, mainly listed phone numbers is particularly valuable in and of itself. The phone company provides such lists to anyone who asks. I'd imagine that a list of phone numbers of people who have gone out of their way to say that they don't want to receive unsolicited calls is even less valuable.
The author doesn't 'give up' anything other than (potential) profits. Copyright compels people to do something, so does 'copyleft'...or to put it another way it's just a particular type of copyright. No difference as far as the weight of 'protections' provided by copyright law and conventions. The term 'copyleft' is kind of silly for just that reason.
As an aside, it's the compression process that's patented, not the gif structure itself. Will we now see LZW compression used elsewhere?
If Microsoft is serious about wanting people to install their patches, they should institute a policy against making 'retroactive' changes to product EULAs in the patches. If they want me to patch this stuff on a weekly basis, having to parse through a few pages of EULA-ese in order to do so is a substantial 'barrier to entry'.
As for outside of the US, where the fonts themselves are copyrightable...well, I'm sure there are legal standards, and I'd imagine they're rather arbitrary. How could they not be? You're right, so many fonts look so similar. Quick--is it Univers or Albertus Medium??? I'm sure some people can tell, but I'd be hard-pressed to do so.
Actually it isn't. GW's target audience is no longer who it once was. GW sells a huge amount of product to the 12-and-under crowd, especially in the UK. They really don't like catering to demanding nerds, and prefer a more malleable audience with deep-pockets parents.
Is MS stepping up their 'you must use auto-update' program? In their security bulletin it states that except for Windows 2000, the patch can only (their emphasis) be downloaded through windows update, not through a direct link. There then follows some hemming and hawing about how "A version of the patch that can be downloaded and deployed throughout a network is available. Information on obtaining it is available in the FAQ." Cool, that sounds like a way to get the '98 patch without having to enable the auto-backdoor nonsense. Ah, but the somewhat convoluted procedure in the FAQ entails visiting the Windows Update website, which, note, only works with the latest version of IE. Am I missing something here or are they making it a LOT harder than it should be to get this patch manually?
If the laser is shined through at a different angle, however slight, how can you get an accurate reading?
Think of it as a key with a square barrel. You put the square barrel into a square receptor. This lines it up properly. Would wear and tear change the shape of the token, rendering it useless?
Eventually, I'm sure it would. It doesn't have to last forever, just like the stripe on the back of a credit card doesn't last forever.
If this stores a terrabit of info, how can we get it to store the info we want?
We can't. Not that it matters for the proposed use.
How will the government be able to demand a backdoor to this tech?
How will they make such a demand? Whinily and petulantly, as always. But I'm not sure they will be able to get one no matter how much they pout. Of course the main point of this (so far) is not using it to encrypt data, but only as a replacement for credit cards, so for the moment the gov't would only need a 'back door' if they wanted to buy stuff and charge it to you. They have another way of doing that already, called 'taxation'.
As for the duty of any government to spend money thoughtfully, spending money in a market already well-developed is NOT very thoughtful.
So, rather than pay someone to develop software that they can use in perpetuity, it would be more responsible for them to throw money down a licensing black hole forever?
Not to mention, I think it is of considerable value to the government to know what the source code is that's behind the software they're running. I suppose they could pay people to develop it and then keep it a big secret so Bill doesn't lose any sales. And, um, this would benefit Germany and German citizens how?
Why is the media so on about this millionaire and his 'adventures'? I think the real record he's going for is the highest newspaper column inches to importance ratio.
Actually, the Thompsons weren't taken away, they were designated 'Class III firearms'. If you were willing register each one and pay a $200 tax stamp (quite a bit back then) on it and get a local law-enforcement official to sign off on your ownership, then sure, you could keep your Thompson. Certain states went further, but that's basically the federal law on these weapons. Maybe they'll do the same with iPods.
How soon we forget. As discussed a short while ago, IBM's new storage format could be a step toward more permanent storage, at least compared to the physical deterioration of magnetic and optical media: IBM 's Hyperpunchcards