Glad to see a magazine article quoting a real security expert (Dan Wallach) rather than some random VP of marketing for a "content management" company. Spectrum doesn't even commit the common media sin of giving equal time to some crazy guy in the name of artificial fairness.
In any case, I am less worried about the crypto, which doesn't affect video quality. Fingerprinting of video and audio with watermarks can affect quality; in copy protection circles, you'll see iffy technologies proposed simply because they "can't hurt" to throw them in---but then some of them are detectable by golden eyes/ears. IMHO even that much quality loss is not worth whatever security a watermark offers.
Why do you condemn producers that cast black artists as pricipal actors in their films? Is that somehow morally wrong to you? Don't these producers have the artistic license and more improtantly the right to cast whoever they want without feeling repercussions from people like yourself that believe that skin color should be the major consideration in the casting process?
My question is: why is this considered "artistic license," when nothing in the book indicates Ford's race in the first place? If you cast an actor who had green eyes to play Ford, would that be artistic license? The term "artistic license" implies diverging from the book. Here there is no divergence.
Am I missing some kind of #include at the beginning of every novel that says, "if otherwise unspecified, everyone is a white male"? Does HHGG start on an alternate Earth where England doesn't have any black people?
I am reminded of Douglas Hofstadter's GEB:EGB. He made the Tortoise character male, explaining that GEB extended Lewis Carroll's version of the Achilles and the Tortoise tale. Then he discovered that the Tortoise's sex was completely unspecified in the original dialogue. He had just assumed the animal characters were male, and furthermore assumed that it was specified that way by the author.
You're assuming that the data on the driver's license will be correct---i.e., that it will list the bearer's current visa status.
Will they get a free replacement whenever their status changes? Will we ever see someone mistakenly arrested because his/her license is out of date?
If you're here unlawfully, sure you're breaking the law. If you're here lawfully but your driver's license disagrees, is that breaking the law? Does the law require you to properly maintain every thing upon which some bureaucrat decides to plaster your visa status?
This is the same problem we have with databases of sex offenders. It may sound like a great idea, if you assume the database is accurate. But entries get stale, and suddenly people start tossing bricks through your window and beating up your kids at school.
When people tell me that the private sector is so much more efficient than a government program, I ask them how long it took the private sector to put a man in orbit.
The sun is behind the camera, and the light flash is very close to being inline with the sun. Plus, it occurs at a point where a (decently reflective) man-made object happens to be.
This leads me to suspect that the sun reflected intermittently in the glass of the lamp. The tiny "smoke" trail you see around the light looks very much like the light trails that are generated by a point source, such as a candle flame, when a camera vibrates a bit during an exposure.
How could a reflection be intermittent? I suppose if the top of the light pole was moving around a bit, say from wind or waves, you could have this happen.
This does not explain the diagonal streak, but a plausible explanation is that the streak is a lens flare from the point flash.
Do a Google search on "obfuscated v" to see the entries of the obfuscated voting contest. The contest was judged a while ago, and there are some clever submissions there. One of them still baffles me.
I submitted this as a story when the winners were announced, but it was rejected.
Apple has shown that DRM (like it or otherwise) CAN work.
85m DRM'd songs sold.
70% marketshare when (some) non-DRM alternatives are available.
By that logic, Chinese restaurants have shown that fortune cookies work. They must work, if over 70% of takeout meals come with them.
No, the presence of DRM does not prove that the technologies are technologically effective. It proves that the technologies don't tick people off too much---although I see the inability to play DRM as a chief complaint when people buy portables.
The problem with inconveniencing the user is that media companies want DRM technologies that really will stop people. They talk about speedbumps, but they don't really want speedbumps: they design giant complex systems that are going to be a major pain to the consumer, because they really think they'll stop people. Maybe after a DRM system is broken someone will defensively say, "oh, sure it doesn't work, but that was just supposed to be a speedbump. A million-dollar, gold-plated speedbump with motion detectors and attack dogs."
If I designed a DRM system for audio or video, I would actually take the unconventional step of writing an official removal tool that people can download. If it's just supposed to be a speedbump, why not? Then people can't complain about not being able to make fair use copies---and remember, media execs keep believing in this "common case" user who doesn't access the Internet anyway.
The ultimate point of his lecture is where he rants about how nobody's calling up manufacturers and begging them for features that restrict rights, therefore there is no market demand for DRM. But he overlooks the obvious fact there are whole markets that would not exist if not for DRM. Like iTunes and DVDs, for example. If the manufacturers won't release the products without DRM, and customers want the product, they'll buy it with DRM, therefore, there IS market demand for DRM.
Sure these markets would exist without DRM. In fact, they already do: CDs, for example, have no DRM, and look, they keep stamping them out.
If it turns out that no effective DRM exists, do you think these manufacturers will just go out of business, or stay behind as the rest of the world goes digital?
Yes, the content industry wants some kind of protection before they move forward. But it's false to say these markets wouldn't exist without protection.
It is also a tenuous argument that consumers want XYZ because manufacturers want it, and consumers need manufacturers. By that argument, consumers want to look at banner ads.
Now, instead of four billion years, they've got to explain in it 250 million years. Given that they've already posited that mankind's ancestors appeared about 50 million years ago, they're down to a mere 200 million years to go from single-celled to upright and walking.
How on Earth you arrive at that conclusion? The big extinction didn't kill everything or wind speciation back to step 1. The meteor didn't kill off 80% of species and then magically devolve the remaining 20%.
Ultimately, I think, it comes down to faith.
No, no it does not. These scientific theories really do work, as you witness every day when you use a computer or a TV set or a DVD player. Whether scientists are right about, say, the speed of light or radioactivity does not need to be taken on faith.
Remember, creationists aren't just disputing some evolutionary biologists somewhere. They have to dispute physics, geology, cosmology, basically anything that gives you a dating method or shows what the place was like billions of years ago.
Just about every branch of science eventually matures to the point that it burps out evidence the Earth or universe is old.
I don't understand why Lilypond aims to go back to having a proprietary textual format for typesetting music. Most people, I'd imagine, would want to typeset music graphically, as it's just more intuitive that way
Intuitive maybe, but painfully slow. Imagine having to type a paper using your mouse.
I use ABC notation to notate tunes, and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet. When I get a tune in my head, I can just type it in quickly, and convert it to sheet music or MIDI on the command line. I don't need any special software to write the music, beyond vi.
Another nice property of ABC notation: you don't have to pass it through software before you can read it. Because it mimics a staff line using ASCII characters, ABC is readable enough that some musicians can sight-read an ABC as well as sheet music. People commonly use the notation in trad music mailing lists or Usenet posts, which is another good reason to have a good plain-text notation for notating melodies.
ABC versus Lilypond: ABC notation is intended for notating melodies (e.g., folk melodies) rather than arbitrary polyphonic music, It is a file format designed to do one specific thing very well, without being extended into something cumbersome but general-purpose.
My standard response to people who want DRM on computers:
Fine, go ahead and put together a DRM system, as long as we let the scientific community verify that it actually works
before forcing companies to implement it, and people to put up with it.
No fair waving around white papers or assuring us that someone says this-or-that technology really works, and then demanding an act of congress. Let's see a working system first, and let's let the cryptographic community inspect the system's inner workings (if you can't even reveal how it works, it's not a secure system,) and let them decide if it can be trivially circumvented by any teenager.
I have a feeling that developers of many DRM schemes dread, and would rather avoid, such independent review of their systems.
That's a pretty good likeness. I'm always amused when some crazy pundit accuses an army of faceless, imaginary foes of "being out of touch with reality."
And of course, we all know all about these ivory tower eggheads and how they think, even tho we never seen one, or can name one, or have no idea where the nearest ivory tower is.
One thing this guy doesn't understand is that the RIAA isn't a mere publisher. They actually involve themselve's quite a bit in how an album sounds and is marketed.
But then, on the flip side of the coin, the downloaders are involved quite a bit in manufacturing and distribution, which are supposedly a large portion of the cost of a CD.
I mean, if you download an MP3 and put it on a disc, you are paying for the shipping, the CD blank material, the equipment to do the burning, the electricity, etc and so forth. You're covering all the costs except for royalties to the copyright holders, and NRE costs for the album's production, and I suppose marketing.
Oddly, the RIAA does not subtract these costs when computing these amounts of money they claim is stolen from them.
| Unlike traditional radio it is easy to make copys [sic] of songs that have been webcasted
As others have pointed out, this is not at all unlike traditional radio. Capturing from an FM radio station probably gives you better quality.
| and then place them on peer to peer networks such as bittorrent and napster
Neither of these are presently peer-to-peer networks.
| What inevitably happens is that people will record internet radio stations all day
History tells us that this is not what inevitably happens. Nor do people spend all day scanning in library books and thus putting book publishers out of business.
| and then put all the CD quality songs up for download
...definitely not CD-quality songs...
| thereby harming the music industry.
Possibly, but I'd like to see more evidence that the distribution of crappy MP3s really cuts into record company sales.
The 5th Information Hiding Workshop took place just a short while ago, and similar attitudes were aired---not just in coffee breaks between sessions, either.
One very prominent researcher asked the entire audience to consider whether or not they really believe that DRM marking will ever be a possibility, and to consider the consequences of publishing Yet Another Copyright Marking Scheme. A similar frank comment appears in the preface to the 3rd IHW proceedings, 3 years earlier, which had a lot of watermarking papers.
What is new is a sense of the conference being part of the overall policy machine. When people publish YACMS, vulnerable to the same collection of attacks, they contribute to this mass of research which Jack Valenti et al perceive as proof that maybe it is possible after all, despite the insistence from the tech sector that it is not.
Remember the good old days, when web sites w/ images had a "text-only version"? Nowadays, web sites won't even provide an "images-only version."
What's really amazing is how much extra effort it takes to make a site that doesn't work on most browsers. You really have to go out of your way to make a glitzy flash thing that I can't see---and then you have to run out of energy/interest at just the right moment, before you can slap together the non-flash version for the rest of us.
I certainly wouldn't call NetPositive the "best" browser (or even the "best" bare bones browser I've seen,) but I think you're going a bit overboard. It renders most web sites I frequent (including Slashdot,) and I use it over Mozilla whenever I can.
NetPositive's big problem is that it lacks support for, well, damn near everything. Its advantage is that it launches and renders speedily and gracefully, while Mozilla lurches and grunts. RRRAAAR, MOZILLA SMASH!!!
It annoys me greatly when someone tells me the DMCA contains an exemption for scientists. This supposed exemption is an extremely thin, virtually nonexistent concession to the scientific community.
Aside from being limited to "encryption research" (only one component of security research, which did not cover the SDMI researchers,) the exemption contains a ridiculous requirement that scientists first ask permission from companies before collecting data or performing experiments---data which, coincidentally, might embarrass those companies. Is there
any good reason why third parties should have themselves written into the scientific method?
Another major problem with the exemption: it only permits one step in the scientific process, the actual collection of data, the act of circumventing a DRM system. The next step, publishing or sharing that data with the scientific community, doesn't seem to be exempted, and has been the target of legal disputes in the past.
What I'd like to see: an exemption for the entire scientific method, which doesn't require the scientific community to be restructured or centralized or authorized by an entertainment industry or any other arbitrary group who can write laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Xcott
In any case, I am less worried about the crypto, which doesn't affect video quality. Fingerprinting of video and audio with watermarks can affect quality; in copy protection circles, you'll see iffy technologies proposed simply because they "can't hurt" to throw them in---but then some of them are detectable by golden eyes/ears. IMHO even that much quality loss is not worth whatever security a watermark offers.
Caj
My question is: why is this considered "artistic license," when nothing in the book indicates Ford's race in the first place? If you cast an actor who had green eyes to play Ford, would that be artistic license? The term "artistic license" implies diverging from the book. Here there is no divergence.
Am I missing some kind of #include at the beginning of every novel that says, "if otherwise unspecified, everyone is a white male"? Does HHGG start on an alternate Earth where England doesn't have any black people?
I am reminded of Douglas Hofstadter's GEB:EGB. He made the Tortoise character male, explaining that GEB extended Lewis Carroll's version of the Achilles and the Tortoise tale. Then he discovered that the Tortoise's sex was completely unspecified in the original dialogue. He had just assumed the animal characters were male, and furthermore assumed that it was specified that way by the author.
X
Will they get a free replacement whenever their status changes? Will we ever see someone mistakenly arrested because his/her license is out of date?
If you're here unlawfully, sure you're breaking the law. If you're here lawfully but your driver's license disagrees, is that breaking the law? Does the law require you to properly maintain every thing upon which some bureaucrat decides to plaster your visa status?
This is the same problem we have with databases of sex offenders. It may sound like a great idea, if you assume the database is accurate. But entries get stale, and suddenly people start tossing bricks through your window and beating up your kids at school.
Xcott
Xcott
This leads me to suspect that the sun reflected intermittently in the glass of the lamp. The tiny "smoke" trail you see around the light looks very much like the light trails that are generated by a point source, such as a candle flame, when a camera vibrates a bit during an exposure.
How could a reflection be intermittent? I suppose if the top of the light pole was moving around a bit, say from wind or waves, you could have this happen.
This does not explain the diagonal streak, but a plausible explanation is that the streak is a lens flare from the point flash.
Xcott
I submitted this as a story when the winners were announced, but it was rejected.
By that logic, Chinese restaurants have shown that fortune cookies work. They must work, if over 70% of takeout meals come with them.
No, the presence of DRM does not prove that the technologies are technologically effective. It proves that the technologies don't tick people off too much---although I see the inability to play DRM as a chief complaint when people buy portables.
The problem with inconveniencing the user is that media companies want DRM technologies that really will stop people. They talk about speedbumps, but they don't really want speedbumps: they design giant complex systems that are going to be a major pain to the consumer, because they really think they'll stop people. Maybe after a DRM system is broken someone will defensively say, "oh, sure it doesn't work, but that was just supposed to be a speedbump. A million-dollar, gold-plated speedbump with motion detectors and attack dogs."
If I designed a DRM system for audio or video, I would actually take the unconventional step of writing an official removal tool that people can download. If it's just supposed to be a speedbump, why not? Then people can't complain about not being able to make fair use copies---and remember, media execs keep believing in this "common case" user who doesn't access the Internet anyway.
Caj
Sure these markets would exist without DRM. In fact, they already do: CDs, for example, have no DRM, and look, they keep stamping them out.
If it turns out that no effective DRM exists, do you think these manufacturers will just go out of business, or stay behind as the rest of the world goes digital? Yes, the content industry wants some kind of protection before they move forward. But it's false to say these markets wouldn't exist without protection.
It is also a tenuous argument that consumers want XYZ because manufacturers want it, and consumers need manufacturers. By that argument, consumers want to look at banner ads.
Xcott
How on Earth you arrive at that conclusion? The big extinction didn't kill everything or wind speciation back to step 1. The meteor didn't kill off 80% of species and then magically devolve the remaining 20%.
Ultimately, I think, it comes down to faith.
No, no it does not. These scientific theories really do work, as you witness every day when you use a computer or a TV set or a DVD player. Whether scientists are right about, say, the speed of light or radioactivity does not need to be taken on faith.
Remember, creationists aren't just disputing some evolutionary biologists somewhere. They have to dispute physics, geology, cosmology, basically anything that gives you a dating method or shows what the place was like billions of years ago. Just about every branch of science eventually matures to the point that it burps out evidence the Earth or universe is old.
X
Intuitive maybe, but painfully slow. Imagine having to type a paper using your mouse.
I use ABC notation to notate tunes, and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet. When I get a tune in my head, I can just type it in quickly, and convert it to sheet music or MIDI on the command line. I don't need any special software to write the music, beyond vi.
Another nice property of ABC notation: you don't have to pass it through software before you can read it. Because it mimics a staff line using ASCII characters, ABC is readable enough that some musicians can sight-read an ABC as well as sheet music. People commonly use the notation in trad music mailing lists or Usenet posts, which is another good reason to have a good plain-text notation for notating melodies.
ABC versus Lilypond: ABC notation is intended for notating melodies (e.g., folk melodies) rather than arbitrary polyphonic music, It is a file format designed to do one specific thing very well, without being extended into something cumbersome but general-purpose.
Xcott
No fair waving around white papers or assuring us that someone says this-or-that technology really works, and then demanding an act of congress. Let's see a working system first, and let's let the cryptographic community inspect the system's inner workings (if you can't even reveal how it works, it's not a secure system,) and let them decide if it can be trivially circumvented by any teenager.
I have a feeling that developers of many DRM schemes dread, and would rather avoid, such independent review of their systems.
Xcott
And of course, we all know all about these ivory tower eggheads and how they think, even tho we never seen one, or can name one, or have no idea where the nearest ivory tower is.
But then, on the flip side of the coin, the downloaders are involved quite a bit in manufacturing and distribution, which are supposedly a large portion of the cost of a CD.
I mean, if you download an MP3 and put it on a disc, you are paying for the shipping, the CD blank material, the equipment to do the burning, the electricity, etc and so forth. You're covering all the costs except for royalties to the copyright holders, and NRE costs for the album's production, and I suppose marketing.
Oddly, the RIAA does not subtract these costs when computing these amounts of money they claim is stolen from them.
X
| Unlike traditional radio it is easy to make copys [sic] of songs that have been webcasted
As others have pointed out, this is not at all unlike traditional radio. Capturing from an FM radio station probably gives you better quality.
| and then place them on peer to peer networks such as bittorrent and napster
Neither of these are presently peer-to-peer networks.
| What inevitably happens is that people will record internet radio stations all day
History tells us that this is not what inevitably happens. Nor do people spend all day scanning in library books and thus putting book publishers out of business.
| and then put all the CD quality songs up for download
| thereby harming the music industry.
Possibly, but I'd like to see more evidence that the distribution of crappy MP3s really cuts into record company sales.
"I was visiting to show off some research I was doing at the University of Oregon using Tcl (related to wearable computers)."
"Here, try this, it's a wearable tickle machine. Hey, wait, come back...."
--X [Who can't wait to see one of these on ThinkGeek.]One very prominent researcher asked the entire audience to consider whether or not they really believe that DRM marking will ever be a possibility, and to consider the consequences of publishing Yet Another Copyright Marking Scheme. A similar frank comment appears in the preface to the 3rd IHW proceedings, 3 years earlier, which had a lot of watermarking papers.
What is new is a sense of the conference being part of the overall policy machine. When people publish YACMS, vulnerable to the same collection of attacks, they contribute to this mass of research which Jack Valenti et al perceive as proof that maybe it is possible after all, despite the insistence from the tech sector that it is not.
Xcottt
What's really amazing is how much extra effort it takes to make a site that doesn't work on most browsers. You really have to go out of your way to make a glitzy flash thing that I can't see---and then you have to run out of energy/interest at just the right moment, before you can slap together the non-flash version for the rest of us.
I certainly wouldn't call NetPositive the "best" browser (or even the "best" bare bones browser I've seen,) but I think you're going a bit overboard. It renders most web sites I frequent (including Slashdot,) and I use it over Mozilla whenever I can.
NetPositive's big problem is that it lacks support for, well, damn near everything. Its advantage is that it launches and renders speedily and gracefully, while Mozilla lurches and grunts. RRRAAAR, MOZILLA SMASH!!!
It annoys me greatly when someone tells me the DMCA contains an exemption for scientists. This supposed exemption is an extremely thin, virtually nonexistent concession to the scientific community.
Aside from being limited to "encryption research" (only one component of security research, which did not cover the SDMI researchers,) the exemption contains a ridiculous requirement that scientists first ask permission from companies before collecting data or performing experiments---data which, coincidentally, might embarrass those companies. Is there any good reason why third parties should have themselves written into the scientific method?
Another major problem with the exemption: it only permits one step in the scientific process, the actual collection of data, the act of circumventing a DRM system. The next step, publishing or sharing that data with the scientific community, doesn't seem to be exempted, and has been the target of legal disputes in the past.
What I'd like to see: an exemption for the entire scientific method, which doesn't require the scientific community to be restructured or centralized or authorized by an entertainment industry or any other arbitrary group who can write laws.