And in the UK this was codified by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in 1984
which was a reaction to some pretty extreme cases of police abuse and malpractice in the 1970s.
Like, police knowingly covering up evidence which proved that people in prison with life sentences were innocent.
So it's a good thing that now interviews and taped (audio & video) and available to both sides but it only came
about through a rare moment of political clarity.
Let's put it this way for you then. I own a piece of land and the house on top. If somebody were to make a copy of it so they could live in it, seriously what kind of arse hole would I be to complain. I still have my land and my house and my use of it is not affected in anyway.
But if my "house" was Disneyland and I made a living by showing people around and you took a copy
of the house and starting eating into my revenue by showing people around that one, then I'd have a point.
I think this analogy is being stretched too far....
As ridiculous as it may sound, it's theoretically possible for a Windows driver to be licensed under the GPL.
It's theoretically possible, but in practice such a driver would have to avoid
any use of the Windows DDK (including any header files). The Windows DDK is licensed
in such a way to actively prevent GPL'd drivers, though other licenses that MS can steal from like BSD
are OK.
I looked at a movie download service yesterday $4.99 per movie I'm happy to pay that for the convenience But the movie was 1.6GB I can get the same thing off thepiratebay (Which I did) and its only 700MB same quality plus no 24hour viewing time/DRM.
Given the price of second hand DVDs these days you could almost have bought it and had it shipped to your door for that price too.
Certainly I could have rented it from the local shop for less ($2.50/day) and ripped it.
There are stories like this all the time, but tech people still have trouble convincing most users that end-to-end encryption is important.
I think -- and I have no scientific basis for this, but it'd an
interesting area of study -- that the answer could be that humans
simply haven't evolved to understand the threat.
If you live in a small pre-technological tribe then it's easy
for your brain to figure out when you're being watched, when you
might be being watched, and when you're definitely not being watched.
If you're in an enclosed room, your brain says no one is watching or listening
to you. And that was true for the first few million years of human brain
development. It has only changed in the last 100 years, and seriously
changed only in the past 50.
Hey, in the UK a bunch of ticket sellers managed to FUD the government about "ticket touts", so that now resales
of tickets are effectively illegal. It's incredibly stupid and annoying, although given the track record of the current government it's not very surprising nor the worst thing.
Smaller groups such as certain terrorist organisations possibly do not have the organisation or patience to find out this information themselves, but they do have the ability to look up web pages.
And then what? "Look up web pages" on how to shoot them down?
I'm guessing you mean the "terrorists" can hide from them, but there are too many
satellites to do that, and the amateur satellite trackers don't know accurately which ones
are spy sats (the ones you have to hide from) versus other types of sats like military
communications. Plus the US military mostly uses UAVs to track terrorists, and those
aren't being tracked, nor fly in predictable orbits.
The point, though, is this: The owner of the shop whose windows are
being trashed isn't in a position to change society. He installs the
device to move the problem on.
Politicians, parents and teachers are the ones who can solve this, but our
politics (and parenting and schools) are totally disfunctional at the moment. No one wants to
talk about what the problems are and what solutions might actually
work, be tested and proven. Instead it's essentially a one party
system with everyone trying to be "tough on this" and "longer prison
sentences for that".
It states several times "customers suspected of making illegal downloads."
I'll add some facts here...
The way this works is like this: IFPI (or more likely some contracted-out company) will
connect to "Teeney_Spears_best_of.torrent" bittorrent, and will note down the
time and IP address of all the other machines in the swarm. Any which belong to a UK
ISP will result in a notification being sent to the ISP who will forward it
along to the customer. Three srikes etc.
The ISPs won't be monitoring connections, because (surprisingly) that is illegal
interception and can only be done under carefully controlled conditions as specified
in the RIP Act. Oh actually, it can be done by everyone and their dog in local government,
but that is a separate issue.
Encryption and suspicion don't really come into this. Plausible deniability,
neighbours and visitors using your wifi connection, challenges over the chain
of evidence, compromised machine, etc. are all possible, assuming any of these cases ever makes it
to court. The whole point of the voluntary agreement is to avoid cases coming
to court and needing solid evidence.
* Make it OBVIOUS when there's an option/command click 'advanced' operation, instead of making us guess. And that goes for the rest of the software on the Mac.
How, exactly, do you propose doing this?
Some small visual clue - eg. a small triangle pointing down and right, which is what was
used on KDE (may still be -- I haven't used KDE for a while).
Besides, the more "secure" the document gets in the sense of positively linking it to the person carrying it, the less frightful the consequences of losing it.
Yeah, because a few years ago the world was "frightful". Oh hang on, no it
wasn't. Travel was far more civilized, governments focused on freedom and happiness, and
technology boomed (we travelled to the moon!).
Yet another good example of why you shouldn't hire the sysadmins who blindly use what the vendors ship, but security and performance minded sysadmins who reduce installations to what's actually needed.
I hope that was a joke. If you hired a sysadmin who started compiling their own kernels on your enterprise Red Hat
systems, you'd lose support.
That's pretty much it. They're talking about 'high-quality piracy', not casual piracy as in downloading from the Pirate Bay or burning your friend a copy. High quality piracy in this context means that CDs are pressed, covers forged, everything in order for the product to look like it is authentic. It is then sold as if it were in fact authentic (as opposed to casual piracy, where no money trades hands).
In fact it's more like trademark fraud (or fraud in general) than piracy.
If there is such a thing as "bad" piracy then this is it. Let's suppose there was no
copyright at all, as some people wish, and you could go into a market and choose which
copy of MS Windows (say) you wanted to buy. They'd all be cheap, but a purchaser might
still want to buy the trademark Microsoft(R) Windows(R) from Microsoft because for instance
it would be a kind of guarantee that it didn't have malicious viruses or spyware added
[hah!]. Or they might want to buy Rich's EZ-Install(R) Windows(R) where I have added
a way to make it really easy to reinstall Windows when it goes wrong.
But they wouldn't want to buy something fraudulently claiming
to be either of these which is in fact a rip containing viruses and spyware.
By claiming to be the genuine Microsoft(R) Windows that's exactly what this group
was doing, having misleading packaging, and probably logos and holograms and the rest.
As an aside, this is exactly how the "cola beverage" market works. There's no
trade secret about how to make a cola drink, so everyone can make one as cheaply
as they like. But
you're still not allowed to call it Coca Cola(R).
This system shows that the ruling class is paranoid to the bone, I think it stems from the amount of poor people they see as potential threat to their pitiful life.
No it doesn't... It just shows that the Labour party is dangerously enamoured with technology
promises sold to it by IT consultants, and at the same time are ignorant and incompetent about
technology (and science and, apparently, civil rights and the rule of law). In fact they're proud of their incompetence - our previous prime minister
actually considered it a good point that he never used a computer.
The companies are just trying to maximize their quarterly numbers by selling more and more
stuff. Whether it works or not doesn't matter.
And here is an idea, make the drivers modular. Drivers cause more BSODs and crashes than anything else. Don't let a single driver bring down a system. This is just basic common sense.
It is common sense, but PC hardware currently makes this hard to achieve. Give a
device driver access to I/O memory and it can hang the PC in numerous ways - eg.
writing to another device, accidentally performing DMA to a random bit of memory,
putting the device into some state where it grabs the PCI bus and never releases it (effectively
causing the PC to hang).
Intel's VT-d which effectively virtualizes the hardware, DMA and PCI bus may one day
fix this, or at least allow you to write safe device drivers. But VT-d is experimental
and hardware which supports it is very rare at the moment.
Conversely you can not give device drivers full access to the hardware. Exokernels
work like this -- all hardware requests go through a small, trusted hypervisor.
But performance tends to suck and some things just don't virtualize well, 3D graphics cards in particular.
Clarification: I didn't mean that one person could make a great game in a few hours - I meant that many people with many * their spare hours could make a great game. I think
Katamari Damacy could have been made this way. Katamari has basically simple levels and the main attraction are the many and varied objects which would parallelise easily,
just like Wikipedia pages.
As for the rest of it -- yes, as Bob Young said (something along the lines of) he wanted to take a billion dollar industry [operating systems] and turn it into a multimillion dollar industry.
There will be less revenue, but more creativity, and far more content for everyone.
I think they just need to have a business model which works, and not be expecting either handouts
from government or for people to voluntarily restrict themselves from sharing and copying.
Because
realistically, we've seen that this doesn't work, and the only way to make it work is to
institute draconian censorship and monitoring of all citizens
which will make mainland China look like a paragon of
freedom.
So some realistic business models for you (not in any particular order):
Sell your game only for really locked-down consoles. Works well if you have a
cartridge system which includes peculiar hardware. (The "N64 model").
Sell advertising or product-placement in the game. Lots of games do this already. It's the
"radio/TV model" if you like.
Have the game connect to a central server in order to get frequent new content and bugfixes.
(I'm not talking about an MMORPG). Access to the central server requires a monthly subscription. This is
the "subscription and service" model. Of course
you have to actually work for your money with this model, sorry:-)
Massive collaboration (the "Wikipedia model"): you write some tools to write games, and your tools
are so good that massive numbers of people spending only a few hours in their spare
time can come up with great games. You probably won't make a living by this method,
but you'll be famous and you'll get to play great games.
Ransomware: tell your users that the next version won't be released until
donations reach $X in the bank account. Blender was released for free this way.
Get a rich patron/benefactor (this is how it worked before copyright, but had some obvious
downsides).
.. so basically, you think that no one should ever again make a single-player computer game.
whereas I said:
The real problem is your business model is out of date. What worked for Doom back in 1994 when 56k modems were state of the art no longer works when everyone has DSL and fibre.
I don't think there's any part there where I say that people can't write
single player games.
What I said was that the business model is out
dated. You may think it's really sad that horse and cart companies
are having a hard time these days, or that there's just not the demand
for hand-made wooden spinning wheels that there used to be. Or if you want
a copyright comparison, that no one is buying the six volume book I wrote about my
navel fluff that took me 10 years to research.
Just because someone makes something does not mean that there is a
commercial market out there for it or that people "should" or "must"
buy it.
Copyright is a particularly dumb way to allocate money to authors anyway. It
hugely benefits people like J.K. Rowling and the Beatles, giving them wealth far
beyond what anyone could spend in a lifetime. On the other hand, it prevents people
from authoring worthy, well researched works if those works would only have a very small
potential audience. In between these extremes, most money goes to publishers and other
intermediaries, leaving
the creators impoverished. It also gets in the way of collaboration. The internet is particularly
well-suited to having large groups of people spend only a minimum of their spare time
collectively authoring great works (see: the entire canon of free software, Wikipedia, etc.).
Copyright is all about preventing collaboration, derivative works and so on, and it is only by
"hacking" copyright law that people have made limited steps to overcome this.
The real problem is your business model is out of date. What worked
for Doom back in 1994 when 56k modems were state of the art no longer
works when everyone has DSL and fibre.
There are loads of proven business models which could work for you: eg.
monthly subscriptions, multiplayer networked games with a central server, or
even just soliciting donations. Change
your business model to something which works.
TFA mentions problems with loans where the end date falls after rollover day. I think it's pretty unlikely that financial software uses a time_t variable for its calculations.
Slashdot Mirror
This cartoon explains one reason. Another is our dear leader pandering to commercial interests that want to sell this despicable technology.
Rich.
And in the UK this was codified by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in 1984 which was a reaction to some pretty extreme cases of police abuse and malpractice in the 1970s. Like, police knowingly covering up evidence which proved that people in prison with life sentences were innocent. So it's a good thing that now interviews and taped (audio & video) and available to both sides but it only came about through a rare moment of political clarity.
Rich.
Let's put it this way for you then. I own a piece of land and the house on top. If somebody were to make a copy of it so they could live in it, seriously what kind of arse hole would I be to complain. I still have my land and my house and my use of it is not affected in anyway.
But if my "house" was Disneyland and I made a living by showing people around and you took a copy of the house and starting eating into my revenue by showing people around that one, then I'd have a point.
I think this analogy is being stretched too far ....
Rich.
As ridiculous as it may sound, it's theoretically possible for a Windows driver to be licensed under the GPL.
It's theoretically possible, but in practice such a driver would have to avoid any use of the Windows DDK (including any header files). The Windows DDK is licensed in such a way to actively prevent GPL'd drivers, though other licenses that MS can steal from like BSD are OK.
Rich.
Unfortunately, those religious zealots are also the ones that squawk the loudest.
So shout back. We can't let the middle ages win..
Rich.
I looked at a movie download service yesterday $4.99 per movie I'm happy to pay that for the convenience But the movie was 1.6GB I can get the same thing off thepiratebay (Which I did) and its only 700MB same quality plus no 24hour viewing time/DRM.
Given the price of second hand DVDs these days you could almost have bought it and had it shipped to your door for that price too. Certainly I could have rented it from the local shop for less ($2.50/day) and ripped it.
Rich.
There are stories like this all the time, but tech people still have trouble convincing most users that end-to-end encryption is important.
I think -- and I have no scientific basis for this, but it'd an interesting area of study -- that the answer could be that humans simply haven't evolved to understand the threat. If you live in a small pre-technological tribe then it's easy for your brain to figure out when you're being watched, when you might be being watched, and when you're definitely not being watched. If you're in an enclosed room, your brain says no one is watching or listening to you. And that was true for the first few million years of human brain development. It has only changed in the last 100 years, and seriously changed only in the past 50.
Rich.
Sorry to reply to my own post, here's a better link.
Hey, in the UK a bunch of ticket sellers managed to FUD the government about "ticket touts", so that now resales of tickets are effectively illegal. It's incredibly stupid and annoying, although given the track record of the current government it's not very surprising nor the worst thing.
Rich.
Smaller groups such as certain terrorist organisations possibly do not have the organisation or patience to find out this information themselves, but they do have the ability to look up web pages.
And then what? "Look up web pages" on how to shoot them down?
I'm guessing you mean the "terrorists" can hide from them, but there are too many satellites to do that, and the amateur satellite trackers don't know accurately which ones are spy sats (the ones you have to hide from) versus other types of sats like military communications. Plus the US military mostly uses UAVs to track terrorists, and those aren't being tracked, nor fly in predictable orbits.
Rich.
The point, though, is this: The owner of the shop whose windows are being trashed isn't in a position to change society. He installs the device to move the problem on.
Politicians, parents and teachers are the ones who can solve this, but our politics (and parenting and schools) are totally disfunctional at the moment. No one wants to talk about what the problems are and what solutions might actually work, be tested and proven. Instead it's essentially a one party system with everyone trying to be "tough on this" and "longer prison sentences for that".
Rich.
It states several times "customers suspected of making illegal downloads."
I'll add some facts here ...
The way this works is like this: IFPI (or more likely some contracted-out company) will connect to "Teeney_Spears_best_of.torrent" bittorrent, and will note down the time and IP address of all the other machines in the swarm. Any which belong to a UK ISP will result in a notification being sent to the ISP who will forward it along to the customer. Three srikes etc.
The ISPs won't be monitoring connections, because (surprisingly) that is illegal interception and can only be done under carefully controlled conditions as specified in the RIP Act. Oh actually, it can be done by everyone and their dog in local government, but that is a separate issue.
Encryption and suspicion don't really come into this. Plausible deniability, neighbours and visitors using your wifi connection, challenges over the chain of evidence, compromised machine, etc. are all possible, assuming any of these cases ever makes it to court. The whole point of the voluntary agreement is to avoid cases coming to court and needing solid evidence.
Rich.
How, exactly, do you propose doing this?
Some small visual clue - eg. a small triangle pointing down and right, which is what was used on KDE (may still be -- I haven't used KDE for a while).
Rich.
Besides, the more "secure" the document gets in the sense of positively linking it to the person carrying it, the less frightful the consequences of losing it.
Yeah, because a few years ago the world was "frightful". Oh hang on, no it wasn't. Travel was far more civilized, governments focused on freedom and happiness, and technology boomed (we travelled to the moon!).
Rich.
Rich.
Yet another good example of why you shouldn't hire the sysadmins who blindly use what the vendors ship, but security and performance minded sysadmins who reduce installations to what's actually needed.
I hope that was a joke. If you hired a sysadmin who started compiling their own kernels on your enterprise Red Hat systems, you'd lose support.
Rich.
That's pretty much it. They're talking about 'high-quality piracy', not casual piracy as in downloading from the Pirate Bay or burning your friend a copy. High quality piracy in this context means that CDs are pressed, covers forged, everything in order for the product to look like it is authentic. It is then sold as if it were in fact authentic (as opposed to casual piracy, where no money trades hands).
In fact it's more like trademark fraud (or fraud in general) than piracy.
If there is such a thing as "bad" piracy then this is it. Let's suppose there was no copyright at all, as some people wish, and you could go into a market and choose which copy of MS Windows (say) you wanted to buy. They'd all be cheap, but a purchaser might still want to buy the trademark Microsoft(R) Windows(R) from Microsoft because for instance it would be a kind of guarantee that it didn't have malicious viruses or spyware added [hah!]. Or they might want to buy Rich's EZ-Install(R) Windows(R) where I have added a way to make it really easy to reinstall Windows when it goes wrong. But they wouldn't want to buy something fraudulently claiming to be either of these which is in fact a rip containing viruses and spyware.
By claiming to be the genuine Microsoft(R) Windows that's exactly what this group was doing, having misleading packaging, and probably logos and holograms and the rest.
As an aside, this is exactly how the "cola beverage" market works. There's no trade secret about how to make a cola drink, so everyone can make one as cheaply as they like. But you're still not allowed to call it Coca Cola(R).
Rich.
This system shows that the ruling class is paranoid to the bone, I think it stems from the amount of poor people they see as potential threat to their pitiful life.
No it doesn't ... It just shows that the Labour party is dangerously enamoured with technology
promises sold to it by IT consultants, and at the same time are ignorant and incompetent about
technology (and science and, apparently, civil rights and the rule of law). In fact they're proud of their incompetence - our previous prime minister
actually considered it a good point that he never used a computer.
The companies are just trying to maximize their quarterly numbers by selling more and more stuff. Whether it works or not doesn't matter.
Rich.
And here is an idea, make the drivers modular. Drivers cause more BSODs and crashes than anything else. Don't let a single driver bring down a system. This is just basic common sense.
It is common sense, but PC hardware currently makes this hard to achieve. Give a device driver access to I/O memory and it can hang the PC in numerous ways - eg. writing to another device, accidentally performing DMA to a random bit of memory, putting the device into some state where it grabs the PCI bus and never releases it (effectively causing the PC to hang).
Intel's VT-d which effectively virtualizes the hardware, DMA and PCI bus may one day fix this, or at least allow you to write safe device drivers. But VT-d is experimental and hardware which supports it is very rare at the moment.
Conversely you can not give device drivers full access to the hardware. Exokernels work like this -- all hardware requests go through a small, trusted hypervisor. But performance tends to suck and some things just don't virtualize well, 3D graphics cards in particular.
Rich.
Clarification: I didn't mean that one person could make a great game in a few hours - I meant that many people with many * their spare hours could make a great game. I think Katamari Damacy could have been made this way. Katamari has basically simple levels and the main attraction are the many and varied objects which would parallelise easily, just like Wikipedia pages.
As for the rest of it -- yes, as Bob Young said (something along the lines of) he wanted to take a billion dollar industry [operating systems] and turn it into a multimillion dollar industry. There will be less revenue, but more creativity, and far more content for everyone.
Rich.
I think they just need to have a business model which works, and not be expecting either handouts from government or for people to voluntarily restrict themselves from sharing and copying. Because realistically, we've seen that this doesn't work, and the only way to make it work is to institute draconian censorship and monitoring of all citizens which will make mainland China look like a paragon of freedom.
So some realistic business models for you (not in any particular order):
Rich.
You said:
whereas I said:
I don't think there's any part there where I say that people can't write single player games.
What I said was that the business model is out dated. You may think it's really sad that horse and cart companies are having a hard time these days, or that there's just not the demand for hand-made wooden spinning wheels that there used to be. Or if you want a copyright comparison, that no one is buying the six volume book I wrote about my navel fluff that took me 10 years to research.
Just because someone makes something does not mean that there is a commercial market out there for it or that people "should" or "must" buy it.
Copyright is a particularly dumb way to allocate money to authors anyway. It hugely benefits people like J.K. Rowling and the Beatles, giving them wealth far beyond what anyone could spend in a lifetime. On the other hand, it prevents people from authoring worthy, well researched works if those works would only have a very small potential audience. In between these extremes, most money goes to publishers and other intermediaries, leaving the creators impoverished. It also gets in the way of collaboration. The internet is particularly well-suited to having large groups of people spend only a minimum of their spare time collectively authoring great works (see: the entire canon of free software, Wikipedia, etc.). Copyright is all about preventing collaboration, derivative works and so on, and it is only by "hacking" copyright law that people have made limited steps to overcome this.
Rich.
Right, sane people :-)
The real problem is your business model is out of date. What worked for Doom back in 1994 when 56k modems were state of the art no longer works when everyone has DSL and fibre.
There are loads of proven business models which could work for you: eg. monthly subscriptions, multiplayer networked games with a central server, or even just soliciting donations. Change your business model to something which works.
Rich.
TFA mentions problems with loans where the end date falls after rollover day. I think it's pretty unlikely that financial software uses a time_t variable for its calculations.
Heh, you'd be surprised ...
Rich.