I mean, what do they expect? They make the proper functioning of the government and the military dependant on the products of one single software giant who won't even let them look at the intrinsic workings of their software (the source) and without planning ahead what to do if it breaks.
Now they need a security breach at MS to recognize this is a bad idea after hundreds of previous security holes didn't open their eyes? And what will all this lead up to? A few papers how this security breach isn't all that important for national security (and in fact it isn't, reagarding all the other gaping security holes in MS products) and that's it.
The alternatives i see are:
- look out for alternatives to work with and put them into use at least in some places, so if the security breaches in one OS forbid it's further use the alternative is ready for use in an overseeable time (anything less than a year is unrealistic here)
- engage in the development of the software they use (open source is a good starting point here if you don't want to do it from scratch) so at least they have a little control over the security and when holes will be patched.
All this is of no use if the people handling critical data aren't minimally trained (it is a bad idea to download software from the net and run it, regardless of the OS you use. If the OS faciliates this (like running applications from mailprograms at a mouseclick) it only makes things worse).
I mean popping up additional windows is built into javascript, whatever their content. In the same way cookies were meant to store information on the clientside to faciliate informationgathering later (one click patent).
I mean this is like patenting doing 'xy' in a do loop in fortan because 'we did it first in a do loop'. Or like patenting the display of ads in graphical form (as gif) on a web-browser. The functionality to do just that (not specifically with ads but with anything) was provided by the developpers of javascript/html. The functionality of popping up additional windows was probably even developped with ads in mind.
If they get that patent someone should go and patent the idea of using gifs/etc. for advertising altogether, to show just how ridiculous it all is. As an afterthought: i hope they get this patent, i hate that popping up advertisement windows anyway (so much, i almost always switch off javascript)
Is it really like that in USA? newspapers, teachers and politicians condemning gaming? Because i don't see any of this in Europe. Maybe the occasional newsheadline "Quake made child run amok" but there's not that many childs running amok and there's not that much of a public echo to this, so maybe that newspaper sells a bit better for a day.
So either the whole thing was blown out of proportion on slashdot or the americans are less tolerant than they'd like all the rest of the world to be.
Yeah, for applications compiled with those, but how many applications will be?
Look at all those nice Proccessor extensions and how long it took for everyday applications to benefit from them.
No, i don't say those extensions are useless, but it takes time until you can get that performance boost and if SSE2 catches on you can be sure that AMD either licenses it or offers something similar.
Well, let's look at it face on: The P4 with about 1.5 GHz easily beats the PIII with 1.0GHz (and probably even 1.13). A big part of it is probably due to better memory performance. But as the PIII seems to be at the end of the lane MHz wise (as the 1.13 GHz "launch" showed) the P4 is just at the start of it. The P4 was desinged to run at a higher speed, it makes no sense to compare it to a PIII clock by clock because the PIII can never reach those clockrates. We'll probably see 2GHz P4s in the stores within the next year (intel announced them for Q3) competing with Athlons (Palomino) clocked at about 1.6 GHz.
If you look at it this way the 1.2 GHz Athlon and the 1.5 P4 are just the top of the line processors so it's just right to compare their performance. But to be fair one should allow for some increased performance for the P4 with some firmware updates (a few percent), and, more importantly, consider that the P4 design will probably go a longer way. So the P4 will set high standards for the next major overhaul of the Athlon core (Thoroughbred) and AMD moving to 64-bit with the ClawHammer.
This means we'll see some serious competition between intel and AMD next year, and that's just what benefits the consumers most.
... and normally it's the way they first learned. So once they learned to progam in a MS environment they will stay with it. Think vi and emacs, most use one or the other but not both and normally they stay with what they happened to use first.
So this is a smart move by MS marketing, the Students at Universities will ask for an MS environment, like the one they got used to instead of learning the UNIX way of doing things. The problem i see here is not MS ensuring that there will be people using their programming environment in the future, but that people in the MS-environment don't see the line between original C and the standard libraries available in each environment on the one hand and MS "inventions" on the other. And we all know how much MS likes to screw widely accepted standards.
I don't know who signed the Berne Convention (i don't have word), but Andorra and Angola appear on the WIPO members list (which contains 175 states) at least. So they at least grant the WIPO to "promote the protection of intellectual property" there (however vague that objective is). I can't puzzle out the legalese but i guess that WIPO members are either part of the Berne Convention or part of the Paris Convention.
But what if you have all the licenses you need and ignore them or even better tell them, that if they want the licenses checked they better pay for the time and work that costs?
Well, it would be a bad idea for Microsoft to raid all that people and generally prevent them from using an unauthorized copy of windows. It surely would be easy for them to scan the net for duplicate registration keys (we all know that they could coax that kind of information out of any IE visiting one of their websites) and thus gather enough evidence.
But they would loose more than win, many people would abandon windows and use alternative OSes, and once they use them at home they could use them at work too... and that's where MS gets the real money for their OS: selling licenses and training to all those employers equipping tens to tenthousands of computers with it.
For games it's a little different, by now the Softwareindustry has learned the fact, that any software selling millions of copies (games and popular tools) will have it's copyprotection cracked sooner or later, so they calculate to make their revenue in the first two or three months after it appears on the market (that's why they have to hype the product so enough people will rush to the store and buy it the day it comes out).
For the music industry neither of these arguments work: they loose more than gain from anyone grabbing their music for free, and once SDMI is cracked free copies of music may hit the net instantaneously after release. So for the music industry with their current business model (make the main income from selling copies of music) it's a simple equation: each 'pirated' copy is one copy sold less (a more realistic calculation would be more like 10:1) and so they will drag everyone they deem worthy of sueing to court (probably down to the student who shares his music files with the whole university) to frighten people from 'pirating'.
What good that will do them remains to be seen, maybe it only helps to create a free music scene, like commercial software bothered enough people to spark initiatives for free software, and as there can be money made from free software (with good documentation, training and support for example) there could be money made from free music as well (with fan articles, advertising, and concerts for example). It would be less money altogether, but OTOH there would be less overhead (mainly distribution and marketing) too, in the end the artists share might even be bigger (and that's what the music industry most cares about, the rights of the artists, let's not forget that).
The really dedicated audiophiles (no, not the type who measures the quality of his speakers by their price and then puts them in opposing corners of a room) probably doesn't listen to the music that is most prevalent on napster (like 'top of the hitlist'). After they spent like $10000 on their audio equipment they'll happily pay another $50 for some japan-import-CD.
For most of todays 'top hits' it doesn't matter anyway if audioquality is slightly degraded and most people listen to that music as background to something else, like driving, working, chatting, partying etc. Under these circumstances audioquality doesn't matter too much, especially since with the audioequipment it is played on the difference is probably inaudible anyway.
But if the RIAA needs the illusion that noone will copy their music because it's slightly altered to pull through their SDMI scheme I'm just happy to let them proceed with it and fail.
I'm sorry, but no court could even consider to give MS that big of a lever because of some potentially leaked code:
I think the old "in dubio pro reo" applies here, so MS would have to prove:
1) the code(fragment) was really developped by MS before the break in.
2) the code was stolen from their website during the break in (according to latter MS statements it took them only a few minutes to discover the intruder)
3) the code has been read by a developper
4) the code could not have been created independly of MS code and is worthy of protection as a trade secret.
If any court choose to make it to easy for MS anyone could cite this case as a reference and sue MS because some of their developpers surely looked at open-source code and choose not to honour the GPL when adapting some functionality to their OS.
Also this would set an ideal precedent where any software-firm could sue the whole competition by claiming that some of their source code leaked. I think any decent judge would consider these facts before coming to a hasty decision. And even MS lawyers should hesitate to give the competition that big of a weapon if the case is used as a precedence against MS.
Imagine, just set up a little software business, claim to be hacked and that part of your ingeneous solutions crept up in MS programs. If it even permits to temporarily halt MS shipping out products (imagine delaying Windows ME by half a year with such a scheme) the damage would be more than anything MS could gain using this scheme against others.
I guess that Germany has a big enough market to produce enough learning material to be a proficient worker with just a little English.
While there is a big market and also lots of documentation available, and also a lot of software is translated (There are german versions of most MS Products, Linux... you name it), most germans learn english as their first foreign language anyway. And while much is translated there's always some tools that come only with an english manual or with a german manual that is translated so badly, that you have to go looking for the english version (when i get the choice of reading the english or german part of the manual i usually go for english).
Also a few years ago the situation was quite different, german 'man' pages in UNIX where unheard of, so if you wanted to use UNIX for more than reading email you had to deal with english texts.
Then there is the fact that the translated versions (of books and software) often lag behind the english versions, while some books/software arent translated at all, so if you want to keep up with the edge of technology you can only do so by reading english texts.
Also with the english language you simply reach a bigger part of the "internet community", be it usenets, information searches, discussion groups, chats, whatever. So when i enter a chat where i can't assume all participants to speak german i go with english.
Well, being a student i surely don't qualify as representative of all, or even most, germans, but i assume, that many of them made the experience that something they wanted to know or take part in is only available in english, or is simply better/more informative in english and so they started digging up their school english.
Also since many are now confronted with the internet already as kids, the effect on the next generation will probably be even stronger.
I mean, the guys who cracked this where probably some folks who thought $10K was a lot of money and didn't mind about giving their work away for that really cheap price, hey, the record industry doesn't even acknowledge their work and downplays it all.
Now after the RIAA chose to ignore all advice by the developpers they paid (in total) some million US$ and who must have told them that it wouldn't work, will they finally listen to some hackers who did it for cheap (hell if they hired some decent experts the RIAA 'd have spent $10.000 just to draw up a contract) and dump SDMI?
Obviously not, they will come up with some new watermarks (probably worse than the first batch because it's really urgent now before MP3 is so widely accepted even they can't stop it) and when it's cracked we'll see the DeCSS case all over again. Meanwhile players will hog the shelves because customers don't want to be screwed (we saw it all with DAT tapes) until it leaks out that with one player copy protection can be turned off, at which point "without copyprotection" will become a salesargument for players.
If the RIAA just wants to ignore the fact that digital information can be copied, they should buy earprotectors and blindfolds for their members, but maybe that costs more than $10K...
Now the main theme of the technology industries is, that the hackers should help them to prove the evil record industry that watermarking doesn't work, so they (the good ones) may avoid sinking millios of dollars in a scheme that won't work anyway. The only part i can agree to is the part about the boneheaded record industry. My advice to the technology industry: if you don't want to sink millions then simply don't. Period. Create your own forum, not headed by the record industry, come up with some sensible alternative, implement it, market it, and let the record industry try to sell records without players to play them on.
And yes, the watermarks will be broken, all of them. And you know this anyway. So why bet money it won't? And i still prefer it to be broken after it was thrown on the market, so everyone participating in this silly scheme loses as much money as possible. It can't hurt enough. I mean, basically what the record industry is trying is to screw over consumers every which way they can, and to screw the artists too while they're at it. If they're boneheaded enough to go on with it, ignoring the advice they specifically asked and payed for, they should pay.
I'm sure there will be programs out for copying watermarked records within half a year of the implementation, and players for playing music stripped of watermarks or for copying music with watermarks intact will be found on the shelves probably earlier (maybe you'll have to open the player and connect two pins or somesuch, thereby voiding the guarantee, but hey, that's even better ).
So if the technology industry wants those watermarks to be hacked they should do it themselves. they've got the experts for it, they know all the weaknesses, so they surely have a headstart. They could do this pretty fast. They could even ask real money for it.
And then SDMI players will be found on the shelves where miracouously you can turn this 'feature' off, "oops engineering left in some test menues, well, we trust our customers to simply not do this, and no, we don't know why our player sells better than any of the others out there despite it's slightly higher price". We've seen it all with DVD's and region encoding.
The industry should pay close attention to Patents RAMBUS is currently applying for, to avoid the same hassles for future memory/bus technologies. Since the Patent Offices appear to be incompetent the industry should fight those Patents before they are granted. Had the memory-industry kept an eye on patents relating to memory technology and fought them when there still was time, the whole thing might have cost them much less. I see no reason to let RAMBUS lay claim to technologies crucial to future technologies if it can be avoided.
While i believe you, that they probably have some fine engineers over at MS the problem is, that it's not them that make the truely important design decisions , but marketing. This can be seen at the example of bundling IE with Windows: while at first this didn't have anything to do with the design of either product (hey they just gave it away for free, you pay the price with MS Windows anyway) later IE was intertwined with the OS so much that it's now really not easy to rip it out without destrying something (for the big userbase). It's obviously bad design to give up modularity and every engineer will tell you that, It's also obviously good design to have clear, well documented interfaces (maybe there are, but the documentation is well hidden) so you can exchange one thing for another.
It's also very obvious that applications should be compatible with their preceding versions if possible (try to edit a Word document with an older version than Word than what last touched it... so most businesses who have a lot of correspondence with customers via Word documents use two versions: an old one for creating documents goin out to customers (who might not have updated to the latest version) and the latest version to be able to read their customers documents). Now all these are design decisions no sane engineer would burden a sensible piece of software with, it's just microsoft marketing screwing over the customers.
and here is a link to a german article at heise. According to the article the CeBit at least allowed to present MP3 players (well this is a consumeroriented product and i really don't see its place on a business fair). Why creative choose to cancel the CeBit home (the consumers part) presentation as well is beyond me too, i think it's either a slight overreaction on creatives part here, but the 'home' part really isn't that big OTOH, maybe they just needed an argument.
In fact the splitting of CeBit didn't go exactly according to plan, most see the business part as the real thing and don't see sense in visiting what's mostly a big advertisement for the newest games/gadgets. So most people still go for CeBit (not "CeBit home") as can be seen from the fact, that there's really a lot of people there at Weekends while real business is done mostly in the week.
I find it hard to imagine that the whole, and until now vastly successfull (we have to give em that), record industry (or at least a major part of it) is really to boneheaded to see that the future lies in the internet and that a big part of trading music will be via internet services, be it with or without them.
The whole lawsuit is far easier to understand if they're only playing for time, time to get their marketing concepts updated, time to get the whole infrastructure in place, time to get the 'right' legislation (favourable for them) 'installed', in short, time to move their whole huge marketing apparatus on the right tracks.
I think it's sad though, that american judges so willingly play their game (terming something a 'monstrosity' what will clearly be part of future business), maybe feeling a need that that huge industry with so much income (paying so much taxes) has to be protected.
It's not truely helping american industry as a whole, because obviously the internet music market would grow much faster if smaller businesses had a chance to play the game too, at least forcing the existing music industry to act faster, generating a more diverse market (the pricing of CD's shows that there really is a necessity for that) and generally would wake that huge music industry up to DO something with all their money (instead of suing).
We have seen this happen with the internet, it started as a small thing, only a few geeks at universities had a part in, as long as it was left alone it was growing quite fast, now all that hassle about encrytion, copyrights and stupid patents starts slowing things down.
Now i'm not proposing the internet should be a place without laws, but i think judges should at least consult some unbiased experts to get to an understanding what effect their rulings will have on a market with a really huge potential, especially in the case of the internet, because this market can move to another country (with different legislation) in a matter of weeks!
Well, maybe the american judges/politicans just feel a need to help european economy a little, and if our politicians are stupid enough to give the chance away too, why not give chinese economy a hand (i think they view copyrights/patents/etc. that have the sole function of giving a mainly US industry advantages quite different, at least they're buying a hell of a lot industrial CD and DVD burners over there).
As mentioned in this german article from Heise there are already some names (Siemens/Fujistu, Compaq and IBM) announcing sub DM 2000 (probably translates to sub $1000) PC's with this part. Since MHz still sell in the OEM business this might make some dent in Intels OEM sales and that will probably hurt more (in terms of $$, not of faceloss) than the whole 1.13 GHz story.
Another more detailed article can be found at Anandtech.
I think the OSS implementation should be ported to Windows (just to embarass them further), after the legal hassles are sorted out (I think they really don't have a case).
After the DeCSS case (part 1) it seems obvious that encryption (however weak) may not be broken if only you can pay the lawyers (maybe 'legal encryption' will become more secure than 'quantum encryption' soon, stop all that science at once, maybe we can soon make planes fly by simply forbidding them to land... oops got sidetracked there) now since the output of their device is 'encrypted' noone may decrypt it without properly licensed decoders.
While this at first looks like a simple definition of terms it's more then that. The fourth 'definition' is a good example:
4. Online piracy is the unauthorized uploading of a copyrighted sound recording and making it available to the public, or downloading a sound recording from an Internet site, even if the recording isn't resold. Online piracy may now also include certain uses of 'streaming' technologies from the Internet."
Here the term 'license violation' or 'unauthorised uploading' is replaced with a much stronger term 'Online piracy' including all the prejudices that come with the term 'piracy'. Note the comparatively harmless sound (since we are already used to it) of 'Bootleg'.
I really wonder who cooked up these terms, internet piracy is not common language yet and so i wouldn't accept that term were i the defense. The RIAA members surely wouldn't like to be called 'social parasites' throughout the process, 'just for 'convenience sake', and no, 'social parasite' wouldn't be an abuse, merely a definition.
Interestingly while pretending to provide 'clear terms and definitions' they then proceed to make it vague by including "certain uses of `streaming' technologies" as if 'uploading' wasn't already very inprecise to start with.
Why didn't they use a definition like "providing unauthorized public access to copyrighted music via the internet". That would be a much clearer definition. But i think they want to get an exemplary case which they then can further extend and apply to other forms of music exchange via the net (is it also forbidden to send a music-file to a friend, maybe even one i got of one of his own CD's?).
As long as they don't redefine 'uploading' or 'streaming' their term 'internet piracy' doesn't apply at all to napster. The music files aren't 'uploaded' to some central server, they are copied peer to peer (the only thing that is 'uploaded' is a list of names), and the copying process is a simple file transmission via the internet and wouldn't be termed 'streaming'. The only 'uploading' of music files that takes place is the copying of music on a personal PC which may well be 'authorized use' if a person chooses to use his PC as a CD player (in about ten years time you probably can't clearly distinguish between PC and CD-player anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, what do they expect? They make the proper functioning of the government and the military dependant on the products of one single software giant who won't even let them look at the intrinsic workings of their software (the source) and without planning ahead what to do if it breaks.
Now they need a security breach at MS to recognize this is a bad idea after hundreds of previous security holes didn't open their eyes? And what will all this lead up to? A few papers how this security breach isn't all that important for national security (and in fact it isn't, reagarding all the other gaping security holes in MS products) and that's it.
The alternatives i see are:
- look out for alternatives to work with and put them into use at least in some places, so if the security breaches in one OS forbid it's further use the alternative is ready for use in an overseeable time (anything less than a year is unrealistic here)
- engage in the development of the software they use (open source is a good starting point here if you don't want to do it from scratch) so at least they have a little control over the security and when holes will be patched.
All this is of no use if the people handling critical data aren't minimally trained (it is a bad idea to download software from the net and run it, regardless of the OS you use. If the OS faciliates this (like running applications from mailprograms at a mouseclick) it only makes things worse).
I mean popping up additional windows is built into javascript, whatever their content. In the same way cookies were meant to store information on the clientside to faciliate informationgathering later (one click patent).
I mean this is like patenting doing 'xy' in a do loop in fortan because 'we did it first in a do loop'. Or like patenting the display of ads in graphical form (as gif) on a web-browser. The functionality to do just that (not specifically with ads but with anything) was provided by the developpers of javascript/html. The functionality of popping up additional windows was probably even developped with ads in mind.
If they get that patent someone should go and patent the idea of using gifs/etc. for advertising altogether, to show just how ridiculous it all is. As an afterthought: i hope they get this patent, i hate that popping up advertisement windows anyway (so much, i almost always switch off javascript)
Is it really like that in USA? newspapers, teachers and politicians condemning gaming? Because i don't see any of this in Europe. Maybe the occasional newsheadline "Quake made child run amok" but there's not that many childs running amok and there's not that much of a public echo to this, so maybe that newspaper sells a bit better for a day.
So either the whole thing was blown out of proportion on slashdot or the americans are less tolerant than they'd like all the rest of the world to be.
But then at least we have a good excuse :-)
You could make signs only a tetrachromat can read ... Hows that for paranoia and the age old conspiracy theme?
Yeah, for applications compiled with those, but how many applications will be?
Look at all those nice Proccessor extensions and how long it took for everyday applications to benefit from them.
No, i don't say those extensions are useless, but it takes time until you can get that performance boost and if SSE2 catches on you can be sure that AMD either licenses it or offers something similar.
Well, let's look at it face on: The P4 with about 1.5 GHz easily beats the PIII with 1.0GHz (and probably even 1.13). A big part of it is probably due to better memory performance. But as the PIII seems to be at the end of the lane MHz wise (as the 1.13 GHz "launch" showed) the P4 is just at the start of it. The P4 was desinged to run at a higher speed, it makes no sense to compare it to a PIII clock by clock because the PIII can never reach those clockrates. We'll probably see 2GHz P4s in the stores within the next year (intel announced them for Q3) competing with Athlons (Palomino) clocked at about 1.6 GHz.
If you look at it this way the 1.2 GHz Athlon and the 1.5 P4 are just the top of the line processors so it's just right to compare their performance. But to be fair one should allow for some increased performance for the P4 with some firmware updates (a few percent), and, more importantly, consider that the P4 design will probably go a longer way. So the P4 will set high standards for the next major overhaul of the Athlon core (Thoroughbred) and AMD moving to 64-bit with the ClawHammer.
This means we'll see some serious competition between intel and AMD next year, and that's just what benefits the consumers most.
... and normally it's the way they first learned. So once they learned to progam in a MS environment they will stay with it. Think vi and emacs, most use one or the other but not both and normally they stay with what they happened to use first.
So this is a smart move by MS marketing, the Students at Universities will ask for an MS environment, like the one they got used to instead of learning the UNIX way of doing things. The problem i see here is not MS ensuring that there will be people using their programming environment in the future, but that people in the MS-environment don't see the line between original C and the standard libraries available in each environment on the one hand and MS "inventions" on the other. And we all know how much MS likes to screw widely accepted standards.
I don't know who signed the Berne Convention (i don't have word), but Andorra and Angola appear on the WIPO members list (which contains 175 states) at least. So they at least grant the WIPO to "promote the protection of intellectual property" there (however vague that objective is). I can't puzzle out the legalese but i guess that WIPO members are either part of the Berne Convention or part of the Paris Convention.
But what if you have all the licenses you need and ignore them or even better tell them, that if they want the licenses checked they better pay for the time and work that costs?
Well, it would be a bad idea for Microsoft to raid all that people and generally prevent them from using an unauthorized copy of windows. It surely would be easy for them to scan the net for duplicate registration keys (we all know that they could coax that kind of information out of any IE visiting one of their websites) and thus gather enough evidence.
... and that's where MS gets the real money for their OS: selling licenses and training to all those employers equipping tens to tenthousands of computers with it.
But they would loose more than win, many people would abandon windows and use alternative OSes, and once they use them at home they could use them at work too
For games it's a little different, by now the Softwareindustry has learned the fact, that any software selling millions of copies (games and popular tools) will have it's copyprotection cracked sooner or later, so they calculate to make their revenue in the first two or three months after it appears on the market (that's why they have to hype the product so enough people will rush to the store and buy it the day it comes out).
For the music industry neither of these arguments work: they loose more than gain from anyone grabbing their music for free, and once SDMI is cracked free copies of music may hit the net instantaneously after release. So for the music industry with their current business model (make the main income from selling copies of music) it's a simple equation: each 'pirated' copy is one copy sold less (a more realistic calculation would be more like 10:1) and so they will drag everyone they deem worthy of sueing to court (probably down to the student who shares his music files with the whole university) to frighten people from 'pirating'.
What good that will do them remains to be seen, maybe it only helps to create a free music scene, like commercial software bothered enough people to spark initiatives for free software, and as there can be money made from free software (with good documentation, training and support for example) there could be money made from free music as well (with fan articles, advertising, and concerts for example). It would be less money altogether, but OTOH there would be less overhead (mainly distribution and marketing) too, in the end the artists share might even be bigger (and that's what the music industry most cares about, the rights of the artists, let's not forget that).
The really dedicated audiophiles (no, not the type who measures the quality of his speakers by their price and then puts them in opposing corners of a room) probably doesn't listen to the music that is most prevalent on napster (like 'top of the hitlist'). After they spent like $10000 on their audio equipment they'll happily pay another $50 for some japan-import-CD.
For most of todays 'top hits' it doesn't matter anyway if audioquality is slightly degraded and most people listen to that music as background to something else, like driving, working, chatting, partying etc. Under these circumstances audioquality doesn't matter too much, especially since with the audioequipment it is played on the difference is probably inaudible anyway.
But if the RIAA needs the illusion that noone will copy their music because it's slightly altered to pull through their SDMI scheme I'm just happy to let them proceed with it and fail.
I'm sorry, but no court could even consider to give MS that big of a lever because of some potentially leaked code:
I think the old "in dubio pro reo" applies here, so MS would have to prove:
1) the code(fragment) was really developped by MS before the break in.
2) the code was stolen from their website during the break in (according to latter MS statements it took them only a few minutes to discover the intruder)
3) the code has been read by a developper
4) the code could not have been created independly of MS code and is worthy of protection as a trade secret.
If any court choose to make it to easy for MS anyone could cite this case as a reference and sue MS because some of their developpers surely looked at open-source code and choose not to honour the GPL when adapting some functionality to their OS.
Also this would set an ideal precedent where any software-firm could sue the whole competition by claiming that some of their source code leaked. I think any decent judge would consider these facts before coming to a hasty decision. And even MS lawyers should hesitate to give the competition that big of a weapon if the case is used as a precedence against MS.
Imagine, just set up a little software business, claim to be hacked and that part of your ingeneous solutions crept up in MS programs. If it even permits to temporarily halt MS shipping out products (imagine delaying Windows ME by half a year with such a scheme) the damage would be more than anything MS could gain using this scheme against others.
I guess that Germany has a big enough market to produce enough learning material to be a proficient worker with just a little English.
... you name it), most germans learn english as their first foreign language anyway. And while much is translated there's always some tools that come only with an english manual or with a german manual that is translated so badly, that you have to go looking for the english version (when i get the choice of reading the english or german part of the manual i usually go for english).
While there is a big market and also lots of documentation available, and also a lot of software is translated (There are german versions of most MS Products, Linux
Also a few years ago the situation was quite different, german 'man' pages in UNIX where unheard of, so if you wanted to use UNIX for more than reading email you had to deal with english texts.
Then there is the fact that the translated versions (of books and software) often lag behind the english versions, while some books/software arent translated at all, so if you want to keep up with the edge of technology you can only do so by reading english texts.
Also with the english language you simply reach a bigger part of the "internet community", be it usenets, information searches, discussion groups, chats, whatever. So when i enter a chat where i can't assume all participants to speak german i go with english.
Well, being a student i surely don't qualify as representative of all, or even most, germans, but i assume, that many of them made the experience that something they wanted to know or take part in is only available in english, or is simply better/more informative in english and so they started digging up their school english.
Also since many are now confronted with the internet already as kids, the effect on the next generation will probably be even stronger.
I mean, the guys who cracked this where probably some folks who thought $10K was a lot of money and didn't mind about giving their work away for that really cheap price, hey, the record industry doesn't even acknowledge their work and downplays it all.
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Now after the RIAA chose to ignore all advice by the developpers they paid (in total) some million US$ and who must have told them that it wouldn't work, will they finally listen to some hackers who did it for cheap (hell if they hired some decent experts the RIAA 'd have spent $10.000 just to draw up a contract) and dump SDMI?
Obviously not, they will come up with some new watermarks (probably worse than the first batch because it's really urgent now before MP3 is so widely accepted even they can't stop it) and when it's cracked we'll see the DeCSS case all over again. Meanwhile players will hog the shelves because customers don't want to be screwed (we saw it all with DAT tapes) until it leaks out that with one player copy protection can be turned off, at which point "without copyprotection" will become a salesargument for players.
If the RIAA just wants to ignore the fact that digital information can be copied, they should buy earprotectors and blindfolds for their members, but maybe that costs more than $10K
Now the main theme of the technology industries is, that the hackers should help them to prove the evil record industry that watermarking doesn't work, so they (the good ones) may avoid sinking millios of dollars in a scheme that won't work anyway. The only part i can agree to is the part about the boneheaded record industry. My advice to the technology industry: if you don't want to sink millions then simply don't. Period. Create your own forum, not headed by the record industry, come up with some sensible alternative, implement it, market it, and let the record industry try to sell records without players to play them on.
And yes, the watermarks will be broken, all of them. And you know this anyway. So why bet money it won't? And i still prefer it to be broken after it was thrown on the market, so everyone participating in this silly scheme loses as much money as possible. It can't hurt enough. I mean, basically what the record industry is trying is to screw over consumers every which way they can, and to screw the artists too while they're at it. If they're boneheaded enough to go on with it, ignoring the advice they specifically asked and payed for, they should pay.
I'm sure there will be programs out for copying watermarked records within half a year of the implementation, and players for playing music stripped of watermarks or for copying music with watermarks intact will be found on the shelves probably earlier (maybe you'll have to open the player and connect two pins or somesuch, thereby voiding the guarantee, but hey, that's even better ).
So if the technology industry wants those watermarks to be hacked they should do it themselves. they've got the experts for it, they know all the weaknesses, so they surely have a headstart. They could do this pretty fast. They could even ask real money for it.
And then SDMI players will be found on the shelves where miracouously you can turn this 'feature' off, "oops engineering left in some test menues, well, we trust our customers to simply not do this, and no, we don't know why our player sells better than any of the others out there despite it's slightly higher price". We've seen it all with DVD's and region encoding.
The industry should pay close attention to Patents RAMBUS is currently applying for, to avoid the same hassles for future memory/bus technologies. Since the Patent Offices appear to be incompetent the industry should fight those Patents before they are granted. Had the memory-industry kept an eye on patents relating to memory technology and fought them when there still was time, the whole thing might have cost them much less. I see no reason to let RAMBUS lay claim to technologies crucial to future technologies if it can be avoided.
While i believe you, that they probably have some fine engineers over at MS the problem is, that it's not them that make the truely important design decisions , but marketing. This can be seen at the example of bundling IE with Windows: while at first this didn't have anything to do with the design of either product (hey they just gave it away for free, you pay the price with MS Windows anyway) later IE was intertwined with the OS so much that it's now really not easy to rip it out without destrying something (for the big userbase). It's obviously bad design to give up modularity and every engineer will tell you that, It's also obviously good design to have clear, well documented interfaces (maybe there are, but the documentation is well hidden) so you can exchange one thing for another.
... so most businesses who have a lot of correspondence with customers via Word documents use two versions: an old one for creating documents goin out to customers (who might not have updated to the latest version) and the latest version to be able to read their customers documents). Now all these are design decisions no sane engineer would burden a sensible piece of software with, it's just microsoft marketing screwing over the customers.
It's also very obvious that applications should be compatible with their preceding versions if possible (try to edit a Word document with an older version than Word than what last touched it
and here is a link to a german article at heise. According to the article the CeBit at least allowed to present MP3 players (well this is a consumeroriented product and i really don't see its place on a business fair). Why creative choose to cancel the CeBit home (the consumers part) presentation as well is beyond me too, i think it's either a slight overreaction on creatives part here, but the 'home' part really isn't that big OTOH, maybe they just needed an argument.
In fact the splitting of CeBit didn't go exactly according to plan, most see the business part as the real thing and don't see sense in visiting what's mostly a big advertisement for the newest games/gadgets. So most people still go for CeBit (not "CeBit home") as can be seen from the fact, that there's really a lot of people there at Weekends while real business is done mostly in the week.
I find it hard to imagine that the whole, and until now vastly successfull (we have to give em that), record industry (or at least a major part of it) is really to boneheaded to see that the future lies in the internet and that a big part of trading music will be via internet services, be it with or without them.
The whole lawsuit is far easier to understand if they're only playing for time, time to get their marketing concepts updated, time to get the whole infrastructure in place, time to get the 'right' legislation (favourable for them) 'installed', in short, time to move their whole huge marketing apparatus on the right tracks.
I think it's sad though, that american judges so willingly play their game (terming something a 'monstrosity' what will clearly be part of future business), maybe feeling a need that that huge industry with so much income (paying so much taxes) has to be protected.
It's not truely helping american industry as a whole, because obviously the internet music market would grow much faster if smaller businesses had a chance to play the game too, at least forcing the existing music industry to act faster, generating a more diverse market (the pricing of CD's shows that there really is a necessity for that) and generally would wake that huge music industry up to DO something with all their money (instead of suing).
We have seen this happen with the internet, it started as a small thing, only a few geeks at universities had a part in, as long as it was left alone it was growing quite fast, now all that hassle about encrytion, copyrights and stupid patents starts slowing things down.
Now i'm not proposing the internet should be a place without laws, but i think judges should at least consult some unbiased experts to get to an understanding what effect their rulings will have on a market with a really huge potential, especially in the case of the internet, because this market can move to another country (with different legislation) in a matter of weeks!
Well, maybe the american judges/politicans just feel a need to help european economy a little, and if our politicians are stupid enough to give the chance away too, why not give chinese economy a hand (i think they view copyrights/patents/etc. that have the sole function of giving a mainly US industry advantages quite different, at least they're buying a hell of a lot industrial CD and DVD burners over there).
As mentioned in this german article from Heise there are already some names (Siemens/Fujistu, Compaq and IBM) announcing sub DM 2000 (probably translates to sub $1000) PC's with this part. Since MHz still sell in the OEM business this might make some dent in Intels OEM sales and that will probably hurt more (in terms of $$, not of faceloss) than the whole 1.13 GHz story.
Another more detailed article can be found at Anandtech.
I think the OSS implementation should be ported to Windows (just to embarass them further), after the legal hassles are sorted out (I think they really don't have a case).
After the DeCSS case (part 1) it seems obvious that encryption (however weak) may not be broken if only you can pay the lawyers (maybe 'legal encryption' will become more secure than 'quantum encryption' soon, stop all that science at once, maybe we can soon make planes fly by simply forbidding them to land ... oops got sidetracked there) now since the output of their device is 'encrypted' noone may decrypt it without properly licensed decoders.
While this at first looks like a simple definition of terms it's more then that. The fourth 'definition' is a good example:
4. Online piracy is the unauthorized uploading of a copyrighted sound recording and making it available to the public, or downloading a sound recording from an Internet site, even if the recording isn't resold. Online piracy may now also include certain uses of 'streaming' technologies from the Internet."
Here the term 'license violation' or 'unauthorised uploading' is replaced with a much stronger term 'Online piracy' including all the prejudices that come with the term 'piracy'. Note the comparatively harmless sound (since we are already used to it) of 'Bootleg'.
I really wonder who cooked up these terms, internet piracy is not common language yet and so i wouldn't accept that term were i the defense. The RIAA members surely wouldn't like to be called 'social parasites' throughout the process, 'just for 'convenience sake', and no, 'social parasite' wouldn't be an abuse, merely a definition.
Interestingly while pretending to provide 'clear terms and definitions' they then proceed to make it vague by including "certain uses of `streaming' technologies" as if 'uploading' wasn't already very inprecise to start with.
Why didn't they use a definition like "providing unauthorized public access to copyrighted music via the internet". That would be a much clearer definition. But i think they want to get an exemplary case which they then can further extend and apply to other forms of music exchange via the net (is it also forbidden to send a music-file to a friend, maybe even one i got of one of his own CD's?).
As long as they don't redefine 'uploading' or 'streaming' their term 'internet piracy' doesn't apply at all to napster. The music files aren't 'uploaded' to some central server, they are copied peer to peer (the only thing that is 'uploaded' is a list of names), and the copying process is a simple file transmission via the internet and wouldn't be termed 'streaming'. The only 'uploading' of music files that takes place is the copying of music on a personal PC which may well be 'authorized use' if a person chooses to use his PC as a CD player (in about ten years time you probably can't clearly distinguish between PC and CD-player anyway).