Losing between $3-4B a year???
on
A Tour of Pixar
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· Score: 5, Interesting
"It's estimated we lose between $3bn (£1.8bn) and $4bn (£2.4bn) a year to this problem despite strong anti-piracy actions by the movie industry," said Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
I love these estimates. Where do they pull these numbers out of? Realistically, 95% of this figure is revenue they'd never have earned anyhow. People who are willing to pay to see a movie will not settle for a low res DivX viewing on their PC. I think the $3-4B figure is based on pirated DVDs, not camcorder captures available on the net. Even then, these figures would be based on selling a DVD at $20 a pop for each pirated one in countries where $20 is half a month's wages. You have to admit that $3 billion loss is far more impressive a figure than a more factual $150M loss since that's about what they swallow on a big budget movie flop. I'm not saying piracy does not exist but the scale of the problem is being way overstated.
They do use Gecko for their Compuserve service. It's important to remember that MS and AOL are competitors in the ISP market. I think (hope) the AOL chiefs are smart enough no to give give all control to MSIE since it often links back to MSN, like it or not. I imagine that the 7-year IE thing was pushed by MS and not AOL. It's in AOL's best interests to NOT tie themselves technologically to a competitor that would like nothing more than to see them out of business tomorrow. It's also in AOL's best interest to take a 3/4B$ payoff to pad their balance sheet. It's important to note that MS is not longer providing an IE port for the Mac, and as such AOL cannot commit solely to IE since they'd face a real risk of alienating their paying Mac customers. I doubt Mozilla/Netscape is going anywhere and I wouldn't be overly surprised to see Gecko in AOL 9.0.
Re:Submit Feedback! Get ogg support on iPods too!
on
Neuros Review
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· Score: 1
.. they'll complain that our software isn't "free,"...
Absolutely true. Everybody knows that Windows users ALWAYS pay for software. It's a well known fact that there hasn't been a pirated copy of Windows, Office, or any other Windows Warez since 1992 at the latest, around the time Linux came about. Coincidence? I don't think so. In fact, all those Linux Warez sites are proof positive that those thieving Linux users will never pay for software. The same goes for P2P software. Look at all those Kazaa for Linux users out there. I mean if a version of Kazaa for Windows existed not a single Windows user would use it because they ALWAY pay for everything be it software or music. In fact, there will never be a Windows version of Kazaa for this very reason.
The problem I see is that in order to get to the central "TheftGuard" server they're going to have to send a proper routable packet. If that packet is routable, a router/firewall will have a chance to capture and handle it.
BTW, you make a good point about the BIOS that means that the loopback trick wouldn't work since the BIOS comm layer almost certainly wouldn't rely on the OS IP stack. It would be interesting to get an ethereal trace of one of these making a call "home" to see exactly what they do.
An interesting twist would be to REQUIRE that the computer hit the server every 30 days for an "update" of some kind. If it's doesn't check in within 30 days, the machine would be disabled. Actually, days isn't such a good idea, make that per X number of hours of uptime.
Good encryption is king, if you have sensitive data, store in in an encrypted partition or file. Of course, backups are king too and how many Joe Users have ever even done one of those.
You're thinking of the Intel Pentium fiasco, they stopped that a while back. This particular one is at the BIOS level so I'm thinking it's either flashed into the BIOS ROM or they get it from something that already has a unique ID, in this case the MAC addr. I doubt it would be done as a separate chip (although it could) since that would take board real estate and increase manufacturing costs. Beyond that, I think you're right (sadly) that processor IDs will come back, I *think* that's a requirement of the whole "trusted computing" thing.
Without debugging info it's ~17M with the latest snapshot, still over 16M without including the Linux subsystem. We have to remember that Wine is still alpha so the code as it stands (and there's a lot of it) probably wasn't written with maintaining a small footprint in mind. The question is whether the fact that you don't need a license for W98 makes it cheaper to use a 32 or even 64M flash card with the savings.
Ok, so if you "acquire" such a laptop/desktop, just flash the BIOS before connecting to the net. Don't feel like scrounging around for a floppy? Ok, block the laptop MAC at your firewall, plug in the ethernet cable, log where it attempts to go, and redirect that hostname to 127.0.0.1, again problem solved. This is weak stuff that only the absolute dumbest of criminals would fall for.
That said, the interesting part would be to find out what the BIOS uses to identify the PC to the TheftGuard server. My guess is the (yawn) MAC address since it needs to be connected to the 'net to be effective. So change the MAC if it's programmable on the NIC in question, or (if it's not a laptop) just toss the NIC in the trash and spend $10 on a new one.
They'll probably sell a lot of these to CIOs who think they can outwit industrial spies. Yeah, it's better than nothing but the level of security they're making it out to be is way beyond it's piss poor practical value.
"doing students a dis-service if it sends them out of the institution without an MS-centric, Linux-centric"
You mean with not without right?
Back in the day they taught methodology and standard languages, namely Assembly, C, Cobol, and Pascal... C++ was not yet taken seriously although it's now my personal fav. It would be interesting to go back and see what they're teaching these days. Reality is that the "old" way taught you how to devise solutions. It would be sad to think that the "new" way is to focus on implementing solutions. You'd imagine it's in software companies interests (one in particular comes to mind) to push universities to focus on teaching implementations since it essentially creates virtual sales reps for their products on graduation.
The part that really gets me is the "copyright notice" defense that they infer too. It would be interesting to get somebody with some legal background to interpret that clause. It's very vaguely defined in the GPL and I wonder how much water it holds legally for SCO.
Enough already... I've patented the concept of protecting menial IP through government assigned monopolies. All patent holders must pay me royalties for reading/disclosing/enforcing their patents or risk my legal wrath. I've got $27 bucks in my wallet and I'm NOT afraid to use it. Think about it, do you really want Lionel Hutz knocking at YOUR door? Well then pay up!!!
I'm sure the MPAA and RIAA will learn from this, NOT! Intuit has competition from Quicken, neither the MPAA or RIAA have competition in the sense of a true replacement product. Scooby Doo is not an acceptable replacement for The Matrix, just like Eminem is not an acceptable replacement for Christina Aguilera. The MPAA and RIAA will stop the fight when their coffers are bare and they're leveraged to the hilt. Is this "the smart thing" to do? No, but then again these guys are too stubborn to see a good thing when it keeps hitting them upside the head repeatedly. The idocy of their fight against un-DRM'd MP3s simply blows me away. They could have 98% of all the file sharers in their back pocket happily charging credit cards if they'd just stop being so friggen obtuse.
The W3C is a standards body. The patent-free policy is to allow OSS/free software to even EXIST. Even the slightest patent royalty immediately kills the possibility of (legal) free software. In a patent free ecosystem, for-profit and not-for-profit software compete on equal footing. Allow even one patent with royalty fees, even as low as $0.01 a unit, and that ecosystem is gone, free software cannot exist by definition, much less compete. As for your monopoly argument, you are blurring patents with software. A patent (in this case) is a concept or methodology. There is no grant of monopoly to OSS. A monopoly grant would be that all software that abides by W3C standards MUST be open sourced. There is no such implication here, in fact OSS is not even mentioned anywhere in the clause. Please tell me that this is a troll?
Have an EPIA 800MHz, works great for MP3s but bought it for a media center. Not enough "nuts" for decoding MP2 video in real time. The fullspeed FPU on the 10000 would certainly help in that department. Bogos show up as 1200 but that's only for 1+1 stuff, not 1+1.1. The best part of these little boards is they're dead quiet and generate miniscule amounts of heat. For that reason alone, I'm looking into the 10000 as a replacement for my current EPIA.
I don't think "executives at SCO want to make money by damaging the reputation of Linux". In fact, beyond looking to be bought out, I can't imagine WTF those execs would be thinking. Reality is that they've mortally wounded themselves and they'll be spewing some significantly more venomous words as their end draws closer. As for the MS thing, the only reasons I can see MS "suddenly" licensing IP for Services for Unix (which has been around over 8 years now), is either to simple grab cheap headline space (most likely) or because SCO's lawyers threatened them and MS decided it was cheaper to pay a bit now rather than take it to court since SCO will eventually be hung out to dry sooner rather than later.
Come on, you don't mean that. If somebody sneaks into your house while you're not looking, "borrows" your gun, goes out an kills somebody, you're responsible? You could be accused of negligence but you're not really responsible for the killing.
This whole email spam crap is based on assumptions that people will "do the right thing" and we all know there's a subset of people that will take advantage of this. Long story short, we need a backwards compatible SMTP protocol based on private keys. No private key? You get your message bounced back like when you email a non-existing account. The "old" way of SMTPing could then be slowly fazed out. The key to getting this working is no f***ing patents, IP bullshit, or non-standard implementations (you listening MS?). IEEE or some other non-corporate owned body needs to publish a standard and everybody else needs to just do it. Otherwise, the "open" email system we see today will be replaced by completely "closed" email systems. The solution isn't complicated, it's getting it implemented that is.
That's fine but you'd better not be infringing on my patent #6,555,123 for a fibrous CO2 / O exchange membrane. I do license this IP at the RAND rate of $0.01 per breath which is a bargain given the benefits that include avoiding asphyxiation and living in general.
Re:Code was relased before SCO was bought
on
SCO To Show Copied Code
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Doesn't matter if somebody sneaked the code in behind their back, they distributed that code under the GPL and ignorance is not a defense when it comes to law, it's called "due diligence" and it's pre-law 101 stuff. It's the same reason I couldn't accept a package from a stranger, bring it into the country, and claim I didn't know about it when it turns out to be 10 kilos of heroin.
Yep, and to take your argument even further into the realm of the ludicrous. You can't call the a use of paint and brush strokes to create a painting IP. However, the use of a keyboard and finger strokes to create a program is suddenly IP. Different medium, same principle.
Did it some copying happen, perhaps. However, the fact that they use the "obfuscation" argument over and over is a good sign that they have nothing concrete. Hell, I bet I could find code that in the kernel that behaves in a similar fashion to code I wrote in college but that still doesn't make it IP theft. They're going to have a very hard time proving any of this. Anyhow, as many people have stated, the fact they themselves distributed this code under a GPL license means they've relinquished the rights to prevent 3rd party redistribution anyhow.
This letter is a death rattle, plain and simple, not pretty, very frightening, but it's just a precursor to the inevitable for SCO.
The sad part is that this is happening over and over. I mean what kinda of R&D did Amazon sink into researching auto-completion? Zaroo dollars! More likely some summer intern added it because they learned it in comp sci 101 and now it's Amazon's to enforce. They may throw the "it's a defensive patent" line at the public but the distinction between a defensive patent and enforcing a patent is based solely on goodwill unless they publish a legally binding statement that they won't pursue infringers. It still wouldn't you from being dragged into court if they so chose.
The question on my mind is WHEN, not if, patent reform is going to happen. Like the internet bubble of the 90's, this patent bubble can't keep going in perpetuity. At this rate, maybe 3 or 4 more years? Simply put, process patents are eventually going to have to be abolished or the US economy will end up stagnating in a sea of litigation. Tech companies are going to be clobbering each other in the courts instead of in the labs. It won't be bad for everybody though, it'll be a boon for lawyers. Maybe it's time to shed this IT gig and head to law school where the real money is going to be!
i'm sure there's some MS exclusive distribution kickback scheme in place to prevent that. These anti-competitive (I know, I know, it's hard to believe) schemes are the main reason why you can't walk into BestBuy and get a PC loaded with RedHat/Lindows whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's estimated we lose between $3bn (£1.8bn) and $4bn (£2.4bn) a year to this problem despite strong anti-piracy actions by the movie industry," said Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
I love these estimates. Where do they pull these numbers out of? Realistically, 95% of this figure is revenue they'd never have earned anyhow. People who are willing to pay to see a movie will not settle for a low res DivX viewing on their PC. I think the $3-4B figure is based on pirated DVDs, not camcorder captures available on the net. Even then, these figures would be based on selling a DVD at $20 a pop for each pirated one in countries where $20 is half a month's wages. You have to admit that $3 billion loss is far more impressive a figure than a more factual $150M loss since that's about what they swallow on a big budget movie flop. I'm not saying piracy does not exist but the scale of the problem is being way overstated.
They do use Gecko for their Compuserve service. It's important to remember that MS and AOL are competitors in the ISP market. I think (hope) the AOL chiefs are smart enough no to give give all control to MSIE since it often links back to MSN, like it or not. I imagine that the 7-year IE thing was pushed by MS and not AOL. It's in AOL's best interests to NOT tie themselves technologically to a competitor that would like nothing more than to see them out of business tomorrow. It's also in AOL's best interest to take a 3/4B$ payoff to pad their balance sheet. It's important to note that MS is not longer providing an IE port for the Mac, and as such AOL cannot commit solely to IE since they'd face a real risk of alienating their paying Mac customers. I doubt Mozilla/Netscape is going anywhere and I wouldn't be overly surprised to see Gecko in AOL 9.0.
.. they'll complain that our software isn't "free,"...
Absolutely true. Everybody knows that Windows users ALWAYS pay for software. It's a well known fact that there hasn't been a pirated copy of Windows, Office, or any other Windows Warez since 1992 at the latest, around the time Linux came about. Coincidence? I don't think so. In fact, all those Linux Warez sites are proof positive that those thieving Linux users will never pay for software. The same goes for P2P software. Look at all those Kazaa for Linux users out there. I mean if a version of Kazaa for Windows existed not a single Windows user would use it because they ALWAY pay for everything be it software or music. In fact, there will never be a Windows version of Kazaa for this very reason.
Hey somebody with mod privs today mod the parent on Real using WMA format up. What the heck is Real thinking???
The problem I see is that in order to get to the central "TheftGuard" server they're going to have to send a proper routable packet. If that packet is routable, a router/firewall will have a chance to capture and handle it.
BTW, you make a good point about the BIOS that means that the loopback trick wouldn't work since the BIOS comm layer almost certainly wouldn't rely on the OS IP stack. It would be interesting to get an ethereal trace of one of these making a call "home" to see exactly what they do.
An interesting twist would be to REQUIRE that the computer hit the server every 30 days for an "update" of some kind. If it's doesn't check in within 30 days, the machine would be disabled. Actually, days isn't such a good idea, make that per X number of hours of uptime.
Good encryption is king, if you have sensitive data, store in in an encrypted partition or file. Of course, backups are king too and how many Joe Users have ever even done one of those.
You're thinking of the Intel Pentium fiasco, they stopped that a while back. This particular one is at the BIOS level so I'm thinking it's either flashed into the BIOS ROM or they get it from something that already has a unique ID, in this case the MAC addr. I doubt it would be done as a separate chip (although it could) since that would take board real estate and increase manufacturing costs. Beyond that, I think you're right (sadly) that processor IDs will come back, I *think* that's a requirement of the whole "trusted computing" thing.
Without debugging info it's ~17M with the latest snapshot, still over 16M without including the Linux subsystem. We have to remember that Wine is still alpha so the code as it stands (and there's a lot of it) probably wasn't written with maintaining a small footprint in mind. The question is whether the fact that you don't need a license for W98 makes it cheaper to use a 32 or even 64M flash card with the savings.
Had to seize this chance:
1. Steal laptop
2. Flash BIOS and/or Reprog MAC (TBD)
3. Sell corporate secrets for $$$
4. Sell laptop for $$$
5. Profit!
Ok, so if you "acquire" such a laptop/desktop, just flash the BIOS before connecting to the net. Don't feel like scrounging around for a floppy? Ok, block the laptop MAC at your firewall, plug in the ethernet cable, log where it attempts to go, and redirect that hostname to 127.0.0.1, again problem solved. This is weak stuff that only the absolute dumbest of criminals would fall for.
That said, the interesting part would be to find out what the BIOS uses to identify the PC to the TheftGuard server. My guess is the (yawn) MAC address since it needs to be connected to the 'net to be effective. So change the MAC if it's programmable on the NIC in question, or (if it's not a laptop) just toss the NIC in the trash and spend $10 on a new one.
They'll probably sell a lot of these to CIOs who think they can outwit industrial spies. Yeah, it's better than nothing but the level of security they're making it out to be is way beyond it's piss poor practical value.
"doing students a dis-service if it sends them out of the institution without an MS-centric, Linux-centric"
... C++ was not yet taken seriously although it's now my personal fav. It would be interesting to go back and see what they're teaching these days. Reality is that the "old" way taught you how to devise solutions. It would be sad to think that the "new" way is to focus on implementing solutions. You'd imagine it's in software companies interests (one in particular comes to mind) to push universities to focus on teaching implementations since it essentially creates virtual sales reps for their products on graduation.
You mean with not without right?
Back in the day they taught methodology and standard languages, namely Assembly, C, Cobol, and Pascal
The part that really gets me is the "copyright notice" defense that they infer too. It would be interesting to get somebody with some legal background to interpret that clause. It's very vaguely defined in the GPL and I wonder how much water it holds legally for SCO.
Get to slam MS ***and*** SCO in one wipe!!!
Enough already ... I've patented the concept of protecting menial IP through government assigned monopolies. All patent holders must pay me royalties for reading/disclosing/enforcing their patents or risk my legal wrath. I've got $27 bucks in my wallet and I'm NOT afraid to use it. Think about it, do you really want Lionel Hutz knocking at YOUR door? Well then pay up!!!
Oops ... ummm ... ok ... bad example ... make that TaxCut and TaxACT then!
I'm sure the MPAA and RIAA will learn from this, NOT! Intuit has competition from Quicken, neither the MPAA or RIAA have competition in the sense of a true replacement product. Scooby Doo is not an acceptable replacement for The Matrix, just like Eminem is not an acceptable replacement for Christina Aguilera. The MPAA and RIAA will stop the fight when their coffers are bare and they're leveraged to the hilt. Is this "the smart thing" to do? No, but then again these guys are too stubborn to see a good thing when it keeps hitting them upside the head repeatedly. The idocy of their fight against un-DRM'd MP3s simply blows me away. They could have 98% of all the file sharers in their back pocket happily charging credit cards if they'd just stop being so friggen obtuse.
The W3C is a standards body. The patent-free policy is to allow OSS/free software to even EXIST. Even the slightest patent royalty immediately kills the possibility of (legal) free software. In a patent free ecosystem, for-profit and not-for-profit software compete on equal footing. Allow even one patent with royalty fees, even as low as $0.01 a unit, and that ecosystem is gone, free software cannot exist by definition, much less compete. As for your monopoly argument, you are blurring patents with software. A patent (in this case) is a concept or methodology. There is no grant of monopoly to OSS. A monopoly grant would be that all software that abides by W3C standards MUST be open sourced. There is no such implication here, in fact OSS is not even mentioned anywhere in the clause. Please tell me that this is a troll?
Yeah ... no MPEG2 decoder on my non-M series board though but hey, I only paid $95 for it so I can't complain too much.
Have an EPIA 800MHz, works great for MP3s but bought it for a media center. Not enough "nuts" for decoding MP2 video in real time. The fullspeed FPU on the 10000 would certainly help in that department. Bogos show up as 1200 but that's only for 1+1 stuff, not 1+1.1. The best part of these little boards is they're dead quiet and generate miniscule amounts of heat. For that reason alone, I'm looking into the 10000 as a replacement for my current EPIA.
I don't think "executives at SCO want to make money by damaging the reputation of Linux". In fact, beyond looking to be bought out, I can't imagine WTF those execs would be thinking. Reality is that they've mortally wounded themselves and they'll be spewing some significantly more venomous words as their end draws closer. As for the MS thing, the only reasons I can see MS "suddenly" licensing IP for Services for Unix (which has been around over 8 years now), is either to simple grab cheap headline space (most likely) or because SCO's lawyers threatened them and MS decided it was cheaper to pay a bit now rather than take it to court since SCO will eventually be hung out to dry sooner rather than later.
Come on, you don't mean that. If somebody sneaks into your house while you're not looking, "borrows" your gun, goes out an kills somebody, you're responsible? You could be accused of negligence but you're not really responsible for the killing.
This whole email spam crap is based on assumptions that people will "do the right thing" and we all know there's a subset of people that will take advantage of this. Long story short, we need a backwards compatible SMTP protocol based on private keys. No private key? You get your message bounced back like when you email a non-existing account. The "old" way of SMTPing could then be slowly fazed out. The key to getting this working is no f***ing patents, IP bullshit, or non-standard implementations (you listening MS?). IEEE or some other non-corporate owned body needs to publish a standard and everybody else needs to just do it. Otherwise, the "open" email system we see today will be replaced by completely "closed" email systems. The solution isn't complicated, it's getting it implemented that is.
That's fine but you'd better not be infringing on my patent #6,555,123 for a fibrous CO2 / O exchange membrane. I do license this IP at the RAND rate of $0.01 per breath which is a bargain given the benefits that include avoiding asphyxiation and living in general.
Doesn't matter if somebody sneaked the code in behind their back, they distributed that code under the GPL and ignorance is not a defense when it comes to law, it's called "due diligence" and it's pre-law 101 stuff. It's the same reason I couldn't accept a package from a stranger, bring it into the country, and claim I didn't know about it when it turns out to be 10 kilos of heroin.
Yep, and to take your argument even further into the realm of the ludicrous. You can't call the a use of paint and brush strokes to create a painting IP. However, the use of a keyboard and finger strokes to create a program is suddenly IP. Different medium, same principle.
Did it some copying happen, perhaps. However, the fact that they use the "obfuscation" argument over and over is a good sign that they have nothing concrete. Hell, I bet I could find code that in the kernel that behaves in a similar fashion to code I wrote in college but that still doesn't make it IP theft. They're going to have a very hard time proving any of this. Anyhow, as many people have stated, the fact they themselves distributed this code under a GPL license means they've relinquished the rights to prevent 3rd party redistribution anyhow.
This letter is a death rattle, plain and simple, not pretty, very frightening, but it's just a precursor to the inevitable for SCO.
The sad part is that this is happening over and over. I mean what kinda of R&D did Amazon sink into researching auto-completion? Zaroo dollars! More likely some summer intern added it because they learned it in comp sci 101 and now it's Amazon's to enforce. They may throw the "it's a defensive patent" line at the public but the distinction between a defensive patent and enforcing a patent is based solely on goodwill unless they publish a legally binding statement that they won't pursue infringers. It still wouldn't you from being dragged into court if they so chose.
The question on my mind is WHEN, not if, patent reform is going to happen. Like the internet bubble of the 90's, this patent bubble can't keep going in perpetuity. At this rate, maybe 3 or 4 more years? Simply put, process patents are eventually going to have to be abolished or the US economy will end up stagnating in a sea of litigation. Tech companies are going to be clobbering each other in the courts instead of in the labs. It won't be bad for everybody though, it'll be a boon for lawyers. Maybe it's time to shed this IT gig and head to law school where the real money is going to be!
i'm sure there's some MS exclusive distribution kickback scheme in place to prevent that. These anti-competitive (I know, I know, it's hard to believe) schemes are the main reason why you can't walk into BestBuy and get a PC loaded with RedHat/Lindows whatever.