Businesses other than the big 4 are capable of loaning money to a startup small business, which is effectively what a self-producing artist is. There are also smaller truly indie labels that perform the same function.
Artists see such tiny percentages of the gross from a big 4 album, they can even end up owing the label money.
The main reason to go with a big label is the marketing effects from the big 4 being embedded so deep in other media channels such as TV and radio, thus giving you exposure that it's very hard to get even now on an indie. This is changing though, and were the big 4 to go away, it would open up the door to lots of artists having moderate success, instead of a tiny handful getting mega success and everybody else going nowhere.
Nothing the big 4 does now can't be replicated by a host of other smaller, more artist and listener focused businesses, instead of the profit-at-any-cost current ones that try to control the market and the artists rather than supply what they want and need. For example, people wanted easy to download non-DRM music on-demand. It's taken 15 YEARS for the music industry to finally deliver. I remember my mate introducing me to MP3/BIT files downloaded off the internet in 1994. Here we are in 2009, and amazon has finally just launched its non-DRM MP3 download service in the UK, with major label backing. Speedy response to the market there guys.
Just because he's a hacker doesn't mean they can't bruteforce dictionary search his password. You'd be amazed how many otherwise intelligent people pick a weakish password (word+number) even when shown why not to.
You wouldn't be amazed how many pick a really really weak password given the opportunity (6-letter or less word), it's as common as you think.
Still, with the NSA backdoor scare in windows, and the UK government deciding the police can attempt remote access of british PCs at will without warrants, it's no bad idea to be a little paranoid of commercial WDE products, especially if they're american or british.
Indeed it is. Though we don't have 'probable cause' in the UK, here's the wording of the act (section 49). I'm slightly incorrect though; I should have said 'reasonable belief'
If any person with the appropriate permission under Schedule 2 believes, on reasonable grounds
(a) that a key to the protected information is in the possession of any person, (b) that the imposition of a disclosure requirement in respect of the protected information is - (i) necessary on grounds falling within subsection (3), or (ii) necessary for the purpose of securing the effective exercise or proper performance by any public authority of any statutory power or statutory duty, (c) that the imposition of such a requirement is proportionate to what is sought to be achieved by its imposition, and (d) that it is not reasonably practicable for the person with the appropriate permission to obtain possession of the protected information in an intelligible form without the giving of a notice under this section, the person with that permission may, by notice to the person whom he believes to have possession of the key, impose a disclosure requirement in respect of the protected information.
(3) A disclosure requirement in respect of any protected information is necessary on grounds falling within this subsection if it is necessary -
(a) in the interests of national security; (b) for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime; or (c) in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom.
---
Failing to comply with the notice mentioned above is what carries up a two year jail sentence, or 5 years when related to terrorism or pedophile related offences. Basically, if a suspected pedo has files in an encrypted store, they want to be able to lock him up for failing to cough it up for inspection, even if there's no other concrete evidence to convict him directly.
Onbiously an *honest* citizen will always hand over their keys on demand to the police, and what honest citizen would forget his password? And of course, no innocent man would ever receive an encrypted file by email he couldn't also decrypt on demand.
Identity theft has risen sharply in the UK in recent years, as it has globally. A specific example include people cloning or stealing car number plates so they can drive in the London congestion charge zone without paying, and somebody else gets the fines.
Government advice? Spend a significant sum replacing our number plates with ones that break if they're removed, or pay credit-insurance in case our financial details are stolen.
I'm sure it's occured to the government that people are starting to use identity theft more to avoid detection. They just use that as an excuse to pass ever-more draconian laws allowing them to dig into your private-life ever deeper without warrants; in case, you know, you're a terrorist.
Bear in mind, when the RIP act first came into force, only the police and security services had rights under it to perform such things as covert suveillance, and retrieve your email and phone records without a warrant. Now those powers have been devolved to all sorts of bodies, including local councils - which has led to a council covertly following a 4 year old to see if she actually lived in the cachement area of a local school (and so was eligable to attend), and another getting email and phone records to investigate a case of illegal rubbish dumping - all without warrants.
How long before local government and other civic bodies have the right to send me a trojan via email, or break into my wireless to investigate an accusation of some petty civil offence without a warrant?
Sorry, I messed up. Yes, it's illegal to lock them out. Under the RIP act, it's 2 years in jail for refusing to hand your encryption keys over upon demand, as long as the police have a reasonable suspicion that you have them. If you're accused of child-porn or terrorism offences, it goes up to 5 years for refusing to hand over your keys.
Under the RIP act, no. 2 years in jail for refusing to hand your encryption keys over upon demand, as long as the police have a reasonable suspicion that you have them. If you're accused of child-porn or terrorism offences, it goes up to 5 years for refusing to hand over your keys.
Methods mentioned in the article include: quietly breaking in physically and installing a keylogger, parking up nearby and breaking in via the wireless, or sending a trojan via email. This gives them email, browsing history, local documents, and presumably other information going forward. They also have the capability under the RIP act to intercept emails, web-traffic and other 'net use via a tap at the ISP itself.
All of this without any court oversight or warrants. But they'll only do it if a senior police officer believes it's necessary to gather evidence of a crime carrying a sentence greater than 3 years.
Well, that's alright then! as long as a policeman is suspicious of me, that's a perfectly good enough reason to remove all court oversight of police intrusion into my private life!
IE7 isn't even available for windows 2000, it's XP and vista only, so you're right they're stuck with IE6.
That said - Windows 2000 is in extended support now, and IE6 has unpatched security holes that likely never will be fixed.
Or perhaps they should use an "external browser" and one "internal" one. That's pretty much what they should be doing, from a security point of view. Keep the buggy and vulnerable modified IE for their internal apps, and switch to something else which actually gets security fixes for external browsing.
Man, you've nailed it precisely. I picked up Mirror's Edge the other day on sale. I just quit in frustration after finally completing one particular bit.
At the autosave point, you're under fire from a helicopter gunship, while you then have to do a wall-jump up to a platform, another running jump, turn 180, then do a running walljump across to another platform. About a 1/3 of the time, she jumps *through* the wall surface and falls to her death. If you make it past the random walljump of death, you run round a corner, drop kick a cop off the edge, fall down a hole, then do another really long jump across a gap. Normally, this is about where you'd get another autosave point, but no. You now need to clamber up the building, defeat two more cops with shotguns - at which point I failed repeatedly. So every time I failed to get the 2nd cop before being killed (which you only get 1 go at before they kill you) I had to do the 'dodge the helicopter fire while trying to make the random walljump of death' for a minute or two before I got to fight the two guards, the bit I was actually stuck at. After that, there was another couple of massive leaps, which if mistimed would have sent me back to the helicopter section again. I think it took me about 25 attempts to complete this section.
It really, really, made me pine for the new Prince of Persia method. If you screw up, you only go back slightly to tackle the bit you're stuck on, instead of having to do the same stuff over and over again you've already mastered. And if you're going to rely on edge detection, you shouldn't force the player to repeatedly redo something because your code is broken and you can't reliably tell whether to bounce them off a wall, walljump, or just jump through the wall entirely then insta-kill them for it, then force them to go back a long way to try again.
I play games to enjoy them, not as some exercise to improve my rage-control.
Real-life GTA is definitely missing the autosave and restart options though. A 20 year wait at Her Majesty's Pleasure before you can try the flying car jump again where you hit a bunch of hoes like skittles is taking immersion a bit too far really.
You're not the only one. I'd already assumed DECT encryption had been broken some time ago and that it was already considered insecure, so other strong tunnel encryption should be required for anything sensitive. I'm rather surprised it's taken this long to MitM it.
As the Internet Watch Foundation demonstrated vividly the other day with wikipedia, silent and secret censorship is unfortunately already alive and well in the UK today. Since participating ISPs block the list without question, and in fact are required to, and the list is not vetted by any other organisation, we have no idea what pages are being 404'd for the majority of british internet users already.
Add this to the european-wide expansion of state monitoring of email, web-traffic, phonecalls and text messages, and the capability - and willingness - for a great firewall of the UK like the chinese or coming australian firewall is rising greatly.
Of course, we all know that it won't stop knowledgable people from circumventing the blocks, especially those who are supposed to be blocked in the first place. So the only end result will inevitably be more secret government censorship of the UK web of legitimate sites for ordinary people, while not affecting the already illegal activity they're supposedly trying to stop. For all we know, the IWF already filter political websites they disagree with. It's a slippery slope, and the British government has not not only jumped right onto it, it's running downwards as fast as humanly possible.
ESX. Bare-metal hypervisors beat the absolute pants off linux or windows hosted hypervisors by any metric you can think of. Plus the management interface that lets you treat an entire bank of servers as a resource pool, start guest VMs on any of the pool, migrate them between hardware without powering off, and bringing VMs up automatically on another box in the pool if a server has a hardware fault - these are all areas that xen and virtualbox can't compete.
For localised single-server hossting, or workstation hosting? Sure, vmware may be in trouble. But enterprise-grade hosting with proper SANs and load-balancing physical servers hosting dozens or hundreds of guest VMs, where VMWare makes most of their money? I'm not aware of anything that competes right now.
Oh bugger. I've just checked, and they have turned the beta off. Now I can only buy in sterling and the prices are higher than normal retail! Screw that valve, you just lost a loyal customer.
I'm in the UK. I have the choice of buying in dollars, or enabling the european prices and paying in sterling. You're right that the exchange rate is pretty poor, so it still works out cheaper to buy in dollars and let my bank handle the exchange, even including UK VAT (sales tax) which is still charged on the online download. I can see how it might be cheaper to buy in sterling if your bank's exchange-rate costs are higher.
So far, they haven't taken away the option of buying in dollars yet. If they do, then it'll be time to kick up a big stink. So far, you can buy in either currency.
Unlike retail games, where anyone with the physical disc can play it - rather my point, in fact. I pay the same price for steam games as retail, but I can do less with the games.
The HFEA is the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the UK government regulator of treatments than involve well, embryos.
They approve treatments that are reasonably safe and ethical; and deny approval for treatments that are unsafe or unethical.
The US has the FDA to do the exact same thing for other treatments. I honestly don't see how legal regulation to prevent free-for-all medical treatment where the layman has no idea whether a given treatment is safe* or not is a bad thing.
*For reasonable definitions of safe, there's no such thing as zero risk when dealing with medical treatments.
Nor can more than one person play from your steam game list at a time. What if I want to play TF2 while another of my household plays another online game from my list? You can't. You can hack about with offline mode for single player games, but for multiplayer, only one person can play from your list at a time. This has become more of a problem as time goes on. Short of creating a new steam account for every single different game, they've very effectively tied your entire list of software to single-user only - it's even more restrictive than secuROM in it's way.
Now, steam makes up for it with the plus points in some ways, but we should be wary of cheering on putting more and more of our games at a single point of failure.
You're dead right of course. I'm so used to Sony music being one of the worst offenders by crippling their own electronics division, I completely forgot they were the defendants in the sony betamax case brought by the music studios.
Equally, the corporations didn't put in restrictions to stop us making copies. Oh, wait, they did. Sony tried to stop betamax players having record buttons. They lost, and making your own tapes of TV shows (timeshifting) became a new fair use right.
Well, it's 1984 all over again, and the media companies are trying their damndest to stop us using our own property in our own houses as we wish. They lost using copyright law. It's perfectly legal to transcode your films to hard-disk under copyright law, so they went and got a new law, the DMCA, to make it illegal to even talk about breaking the crappy locks on the products they sold us.
He's not complaining about the convenience, or the digital nature of it. He's complaining that the media companies are deliberately putting new technical and legal restrictions to take away the rights we've had for 20 years, and make him use his own discs in the limited time and method of THEIR choosing. And we shouldn't let the tight-fisted bastards get away with it.
Slashdot Mirror
He was probably used to relying on autoaim...
I'd be pretty surprised if there wasn't a public RC build out before august, as there was with Vista, though there may not be an upgrade path.
Businesses other than the big 4 are capable of loaning money to a startup small business, which is effectively what a self-producing artist is. There are also smaller truly indie labels that perform the same function.
Artists see such tiny percentages of the gross from a big 4 album, they can even end up owing the label money.
The main reason to go with a big label is the marketing effects from the big 4 being embedded so deep in other media channels such as TV and radio, thus giving you exposure that it's very hard to get even now on an indie. This is changing though, and were the big 4 to go away, it would open up the door to lots of artists having moderate success, instead of a tiny handful getting mega success and everybody else going nowhere.
Nothing the big 4 does now can't be replicated by a host of other smaller, more artist and listener focused businesses, instead of the profit-at-any-cost current ones that try to control the market and the artists rather than supply what they want and need. For example, people wanted easy to download non-DRM music on-demand. It's taken 15 YEARS for the music industry to finally deliver. I remember my mate introducing me to MP3/BIT files downloaded off the internet in 1994. Here we are in 2009, and amazon has finally just launched its non-DRM MP3 download service in the UK, with major label backing. Speedy response to the market there guys.
Just because he's a hacker doesn't mean they can't bruteforce dictionary search his password. You'd be amazed how many otherwise intelligent people pick a weakish password (word+number) even when shown why not to.
You wouldn't be amazed how many pick a really really weak password given the opportunity (6-letter or less word), it's as common as you think.
Still, with the NSA backdoor scare in windows, and the UK government deciding the police can attempt remote access of british PCs at will without warrants, it's no bad idea to be a little
paranoid of commercial WDE products, especially if they're american or british.
Nah, that's far too much work. Just sit behind them on the train, they're bound to leave all sorts of information for you to pick up.
Indeed it is. Though we don't have 'probable cause' in the UK, here's the wording of the act (section 49). I'm slightly incorrect though; I should have said 'reasonable belief'
If any person with the appropriate permission under Schedule 2 believes, on reasonable grounds
(a) that a key to the protected information is in the possession of any person,
(b) that the imposition of a disclosure requirement in respect of the protected information is -
(i) necessary on grounds falling within subsection (3), or
(ii) necessary for the purpose of securing the effective exercise or proper performance by any public authority of any statutory power or statutory duty,
(c) that the imposition of such a requirement is proportionate to what is sought to be achieved by its imposition, and
(d) that it is not reasonably practicable for the person with the appropriate permission to obtain possession of the protected information in an intelligible form without the giving of a notice under this section,
the person with that permission may, by notice to the person whom he believes to have possession of the key, impose a disclosure requirement in respect of the protected information.
(3) A disclosure requirement in respect of any protected information is necessary on grounds falling within this subsection if it is necessary -
(a) in the interests of national security;
(b) for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime; or
(c) in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom.
---
Failing to comply with the notice mentioned above is what carries up a two year jail sentence, or 5 years when related to terrorism or pedophile related offences. Basically, if a suspected pedo has files in an encrypted store, they want to be able to lock him up for failing to cough it up for inspection, even if there's no other concrete evidence to convict him directly.
Onbiously an *honest* citizen will always hand over their keys on demand to the police, and what honest citizen would forget his password? And of course, no innocent man would ever receive an encrypted file by email he couldn't also decrypt on demand.
Identity theft has risen sharply in the UK in recent years, as it has globally. A specific example include people cloning or stealing car number plates so they can drive in the London congestion charge zone without paying, and somebody else gets the fines.
Government advice? Spend a significant sum replacing our number plates with ones that break if they're removed, or pay credit-insurance in case our financial details are stolen.
I'm sure it's occured to the government that people are starting to use identity theft more to avoid detection. They just use that as an excuse to pass ever-more draconian laws allowing them to dig into your private-life ever deeper without warrants; in case, you know, you're a terrorist.
Bear in mind, when the RIP act first came into force, only the police and security services had rights under it to perform such things as covert suveillance, and retrieve your email and phone records without a warrant. Now those powers have been devolved to all sorts of bodies, including local councils - which has led to a council covertly following a 4 year old to see if she actually lived in the cachement area of a local school (and so was eligable to attend), and another getting email and phone records to investigate a case of illegal rubbish dumping - all without warrants.
How long before local government and other civic bodies have the right to send me a trojan via email, or break into my wireless to investigate an accusation of some petty civil offence without a warrant?
Sorry, I messed up. Yes, it's illegal to lock them out. Under the RIP act, it's 2 years in jail for refusing to hand your encryption keys over upon demand, as long as the police have a reasonable suspicion that you have them. If you're accused of child-porn or terrorism offences, it goes up to 5 years for refusing to hand over your keys.
Under the RIP act, no. 2 years in jail for refusing to hand your encryption keys over upon demand, as long as the police have a reasonable suspicion that you have them. If you're accused of child-porn or terrorism offences, it goes up to 5 years for refusing to hand over your keys.
Methods mentioned in the article include:
quietly breaking in physically and installing a keylogger, parking up nearby and breaking in via the wireless, or sending a trojan via email.
This gives them email, browsing history, local documents, and presumably other information going forward.
They also have the capability under the RIP act to intercept emails, web-traffic and other 'net use via a tap at the ISP itself.
All of this without any court oversight or warrants. But they'll only do it if a senior police officer believes it's necessary to gather evidence of a crime carrying a sentence greater than 3 years.
Well, that's alright then! as long as a policeman is suspicious of me, that's a perfectly good enough reason to remove all court oversight of police intrusion into my private life!
Jesus.
IE7 isn't even available for windows 2000, it's XP and vista only, so you're right they're stuck with IE6.
That said - Windows 2000 is in extended support now, and IE6 has unpatched security holes that likely never will be fixed.
Or perhaps they should use an "external browser" and one "internal" one.
That's pretty much what they should be doing, from a security point of view. Keep the buggy and vulnerable modified IE for their internal apps, and switch to something else which actually gets security fixes for external browsing.
Others have reported that the hard-reset only works until you try to charge or sync it. Zunicide 2008!
Man, you've nailed it precisely. I picked up Mirror's Edge the other day on sale. I just quit in frustration after finally completing one particular bit.
At the autosave point, you're under fire from a helicopter gunship, while you then have to do a wall-jump up to a platform, another running jump, turn 180, then do a running walljump across to another platform. About a 1/3 of the time, she jumps *through* the wall surface and falls to her death. If you make it past the random walljump of death, you run round a corner, drop kick a cop off the edge, fall down a hole, then do another really long jump across a gap. Normally, this is about where you'd get another autosave point, but no. You now need to clamber up the building, defeat two more cops with shotguns - at which point I failed repeatedly. So every time I failed to get the 2nd cop before being killed (which you only get 1 go at before they kill you) I had to do the 'dodge the helicopter fire while trying to make the random walljump of death' for a minute or two before I got to fight the two guards, the bit I was actually stuck at. After that, there was another couple of massive leaps, which if mistimed would have sent me back to the helicopter section again. I think it took me about 25 attempts to complete this section.
It really, really, made me pine for the new Prince of Persia method. If you screw up, you only go back slightly to tackle the bit you're stuck on, instead of having to do the same stuff over and over again you've already mastered. And if you're going to rely on edge detection, you shouldn't force the player to repeatedly redo something because your code is broken and you can't reliably tell whether to bounce them off a wall, walljump, or just jump through the wall entirely then insta-kill them for it, then force them to go back a long way to try again.
I play games to enjoy them, not as some exercise to improve my rage-control.
Real-life GTA is definitely missing the autosave and restart options though. A 20 year wait at Her Majesty's Pleasure before you can try the flying car jump again where you hit a bunch of hoes like skittles is taking immersion a bit too far really.
You're not the only one. I'd already assumed DECT encryption had been broken some time ago and that it was already considered insecure, so other strong tunnel encryption should be required for anything sensitive. I'm rather surprised it's taken this long to MitM it.
As the Internet Watch Foundation demonstrated vividly the other day with wikipedia, silent and secret censorship is unfortunately already alive and well in the UK today. Since participating ISPs block the list without question, and in fact are required to, and the list is not vetted by any other organisation, we have no idea what pages are being 404'd for the majority of british internet users already.
Add this to the european-wide expansion of state monitoring of email, web-traffic, phonecalls and text messages, and the capability - and willingness - for a great firewall of the UK like the chinese or coming australian firewall is rising greatly.
Of course, we all know that it won't stop knowledgable people from circumventing the blocks, especially those who are supposed to be blocked in the first place. So the only end result will inevitably be more secret government censorship of the UK web of legitimate sites for ordinary people, while not affecting the already illegal activity they're supposedly trying to stop. For all we know, the IWF already filter political websites they disagree with. It's a slippery slope, and the British government has not not only jumped right onto it, it's running downwards as fast as humanly possible.
ESX. Bare-metal hypervisors beat the absolute pants off linux or windows hosted hypervisors by any metric you can think of. Plus the management interface that lets you treat an entire bank of servers as a resource pool, start guest VMs on any of the pool, migrate them between hardware without powering off, and bringing VMs up automatically on another box in the pool if a server has a hardware fault - these are all areas that xen and virtualbox can't compete.
For localised single-server hossting, or workstation hosting? Sure, vmware may be in trouble. But enterprise-grade hosting with proper SANs and load-balancing physical servers hosting dozens or hundreds of guest VMs, where VMWare makes most of their money? I'm not aware of anything that competes right now.
Oh bugger. I've just checked, and they have turned the beta off. Now I can only buy in sterling and the prices are higher than normal retail! Screw that valve, you just lost a loyal customer.
I'm in the UK. I have the choice of buying in dollars, or enabling the european prices and paying in sterling. You're right that the exchange rate is pretty poor, so it still works out cheaper to buy in dollars and let my bank handle the exchange, even including UK VAT (sales tax) which is still charged on the online download. I can see how it might be cheaper to buy in sterling if your bank's exchange-rate costs are higher.
So far, they haven't taken away the option of buying in dollars yet. If they do, then it'll be time to kick up a big stink. So far, you can buy in either currency.
Unlike retail games, where anyone with the physical disc can play it - rather my point, in fact. I pay the same price for steam games as retail, but I can do less with the games.
The HFEA is the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the UK government regulator of treatments than involve well, embryos.
They approve treatments that are reasonably safe and ethical; and deny approval for treatments that are unsafe or unethical.
The US has the FDA to do the exact same thing for other treatments. I honestly don't see how legal regulation to prevent free-for-all medical treatment where the layman has no idea whether a given treatment is safe* or not is a bad thing.
*For reasonable definitions of safe, there's no such thing as zero risk when dealing with medical treatments.
Nor can more than one person play from your steam game list at a time. What if I want to play TF2 while another of my household plays another online game from my list? You can't. You can hack about with offline mode for single player games, but for multiplayer, only one person can play from your list at a time. This has become more of a problem as time goes on. Short of creating a new steam account for every single different game, they've very effectively tied your entire list of software to single-user only - it's even more restrictive than secuROM in it's way.
Now, steam makes up for it with the plus points in some ways, but we should be wary of cheering on putting more and more of our games at a single point of failure.
You're dead right of course. I'm so used to Sony music being one of the worst offenders by crippling their own electronics division, I completely forgot they were the defendants in the sony betamax case brought by the music studios.
Equally, the corporations didn't put in restrictions to stop us making copies. Oh, wait, they did. Sony tried to stop betamax players having record buttons. They lost, and making your own tapes of TV shows (timeshifting) became a new fair use right.
Well, it's 1984 all over again, and the media companies are trying their damndest to stop us using our own property in our own houses as we wish. They lost using copyright law. It's perfectly legal to transcode your films to hard-disk under copyright law, so they went and got a new law, the DMCA, to make it illegal to even talk about breaking the crappy locks on the products they sold us.
He's not complaining about the convenience, or the digital nature of it. He's complaining that the media companies are deliberately putting new technical and legal restrictions to take away the rights we've had for 20 years, and make him use his own discs in the limited time and method of THEIR choosing. And we shouldn't let the tight-fisted bastards get away with it.