If you think that by running Linux you are somehow going to escape this you're wrong. The possibilities that computer HARDWARE will only work with DRM enabled BIOS's is coming. Nevermind the fact that if you want to be connected to the rest of the world you will have to have a DRM'd computer with a DRM'd BIOS in order to do so.
Maybe the latest and greatest ATI or nVidia card might require DRM-BIOS to work, but somebody somewhere will keep making non-DRM hardware... and somebody somewhere will keep supplying the content for that. By making content that can only be played on DRMed systems, companies are going to be betting their whole empire on the publuc accepting it... I doubt they'll be that dumb.
"Unbreakable" DRM will always be for niche applications. I don't even consider the present music services DRM as unbreakable because they all let you make at least one analog CD through the front door. Once you do that, the music is yours to fold, spindle, and mutliate with no further restrictions.
The Analog Hole will never die. If content is to be displayed to humans, it's going to have to go get to light waves and sound waves somehow, and content can always be captured by kinescopes and acustic couplers. Sure, there's going to be some quality loss by resorting to those technologies, but there's no way to defeat them from making a copy, and those copies can then be encoded into digital format.
There's always going to be a point of demarcation where the digitally encrypted stream must become a plaintext analog signal in order for the monitor or speakers to function, and anything that copies the signals at that point will have a pretty good looking copy as well.
Unless the digital demarc point is installed after our eyes and ears on the way to the brain, I just don't see how this is going to work...
HDTV tuners and sets are already in the market, and they know nothing about this Janus technology. If a broadcaster were to use this technology to "protect" its content, these older devices won't know how to make heads or tails of the restrictions, and therefore are going to have to be considered "untrusted" and not allowed to have the content.
That's just not going to fly in the marketplace. HDTV early adopters will just ignore the content that their units can't play back, and broadcasters aren't going to want to limit their potential audience by ruling out everybody but those who have bought certain models of HDTV hardware.
This platform will need a killer app, and I doubt Hollywood can come up with one...
Funny, I my house I go straight for the interesting-to-me circulars, because I want to know what Best Buy and Circuit City are promoting this week. I don't particularly need to see the news content because I've seen enough news on TV and the Web during the week, but the ad content is something that doesn't come out until Sunday Morning, and is best presented in that way than on the web...
It reminds me of a 1990s-era site called FreeRide which awarded "points" that were redeemable for prizes for visiting sponsor sites. It was even to the point that you could earn points for searching Google and other search engines, as they were even willing to pay per click back then.
Somehow, I don't think this is going to last very long. Anybody who's working on a Pay-Per-Click basis without a way to shut this kind of "unqualified lead" down is going to get wiped out very quickly...
Actually, The BBC doesn't own BBC America. Discovery Communications actually runs the network, and licenses the name and logo.
Discovery has to license BBC shows on a one-by-one basis. However, their network actually isn't bound to only show BBC programs, as for example they air So Graham Norton which airs on the 4 Network over there. So, if the cherry picked content on BBC America seems to resemble shows seen on sister network TLC, know you know why.
And let's face it, just because a show hasn't yes been sold to the USA doesn't mean that it won't be sold in the future after the ratings are known. So, they can't exactly give anything away without risking other lines of business.
The BBC will likely do something to limit the International use of this service, as having the shows freely availalbe over the Web might negatively impact their ability to sell their programs in other places, and some of the shows aired by the BBC belong to other companies and they want the exclusive rights to the show in their home territory.
The article refers to this being a challenge, but one they plan on getting over...
Re:OT:Slashdot = News.com + 2 days... or more
on
Gmail Addresses For Sale
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Well, yeah... but somebody else pointed out to me that another post on that topic got posted same day. We now have future knowledge of a dupe!:)
Re:OT:Slashdot = News.com + 2 days... or more
on
Gmail Addresses For Sale
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
True, but dupes belong in the "rejected" bin... but I guess putting one into "pending" isn't that bad, considering they've been known to be found in the "accepted" bin far too often.:)
Re:OT:Slashdot = News.com + 2 days... or more
on
Gmail Addresses For Sale
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I've been accepted once on only 11 attempts so far. Slashdot must get more "acceptable" stories than they can actually accept, so I take it some degree of semi-randomness (who gets the editors' attention in the sea of noise first) will always be a final factor...
But that's interesting that they're giving existing testers account-opening passwords (kinda like now Google-owned Blogger in its early days...) and those users are free to determine whatever scheme they want to hand out their codes. No wonder some are desiding to auction to the highest bidder...
I submitted a story called "802.11b goes out to the ballgame in San Fran" more than a month ago, and it still is in the "pending" column. I wonder if they're saving it for a rainy day or something...
Well as much as I hate 419 scammers I still can't bring myself to think of them as scum quite on the same level as mass spammers.
Wait a second... aren't most of the 419ers finding their marks by sending spam? The response rate is a trace, but the payout is enough to make the crime profitable.
Artists Against 419 A "419 Scam" is the attempt to defraud people of their money by claiming that they need to send money and/or account details in order to recieve a large ammount of funds. If any victim actually cooperates, they're told that they need to send more. Spam is commonly used because of the relatively low cost of sending massive e-mails, and the fact that the scammers net thousands of dollars from each fool that bites. The name comes from the chapter of Nigerian number in law that says this is illegal there, yet a majority of these scams come from there.
flash mobs This is a concept that comes from people who send text messages to a mailing list of bunch of friends that says something cool is going on, so anybody free should come join them. In cities, this can cause 100s of people to show up on the "if you contact 10 friends, and they contact 10 friends..." principle. Singer Avril Lavigne is currently doing a tour of unadvertised events at shopping malls, which have attracted up to 6000 people that more or less depends on the first people to see the sign announcing the event telling their friends, and having those friends tell others. This group is encuraging a simple Slashdotting against 419ers, which is basically the same principle. More people showing up than expected causes problems...
News Corp. was definitely part of the sides pushing for the ownership increases, as they were very ready to buy up stations as soon as that was allowed.
News Corp.'s position on the PTAR rule was a funny one... they were fine with it continuing to exist because Fox at the time was not programming enough primetime hours for it to have any impact on them. They just never wanted to see it modified so that it applied to their network, and as it played out it never was.
DRM in Slashdot's definiton includes any system that applies encryption or security to data that we think should have been stored in plaintext all along. Sure, that's not the proper definition of the term, but it's how it's used around here...
In the Futurama Universe, the Simpsons was still on Fox in new episodes in the year 3000. The original cast was most likely still able to do the voices from their jars.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if he got into some kind of trouble for doing this.
Microsoft licenses its patches to allow redistribution, so long as they in the end get run on duly authorized installations of Windows. This package just wraps a bundle of patches up to each run in sequence... which is exactly what a Service Pack does, or a network admin does when he's pushing bunches of patches on his network...
Assuming this "service pack" is what it claims to be, then all this guy did was take each of Microsoft's official releases, and create a batch operation that installs them all in sequence while surpressing the user interface of each and providing one UI to get all of the needed parameters once.
All of Microsoft's fixes allow command line options to supply the answer to any questions that a user would be asked so that a network admiinstrator can write a simple batch file to do the install on his network.
This really isn't much different than what commerical vendors such as BigFix do...
Yep... he'd have to make a seperate version of his unofficial service pack for each language out there, since whenever he included a package with different editions for each language he went with English, his result is an English-edition Service Pack and nothing else.
Slashdot Mirror
The outage affected area customers of Sprint Corp., including Ziff Davis Media Inc., the publisher of eWEEK.com.
No wonder eWeek was the first on the story, even though it took them a while to publish it.
If you think that by running Linux you are somehow going to escape this you're wrong. The possibilities that computer HARDWARE will only work with DRM enabled BIOS's is coming. Nevermind the fact that if you want to be connected to the rest of the world you will have to have a DRM'd computer with a DRM'd BIOS in order to do so.
Maybe the latest and greatest ATI or nVidia card might require DRM-BIOS to work, but somebody somewhere will keep making non-DRM hardware... and somebody somewhere will keep supplying the content for that. By making content that can only be played on DRMed systems, companies are going to be betting their whole empire on the publuc accepting it... I doubt they'll be that dumb.
"Unbreakable" DRM will always be for niche applications. I don't even consider the present music services DRM as unbreakable because they all let you make at least one analog CD through the front door. Once you do that, the music is yours to fold, spindle, and mutliate with no further restrictions.
The Analog Hole will never die. If content is to be displayed to humans, it's going to have to go get to light waves and sound waves somehow, and content can always be captured by kinescopes and acustic couplers. Sure, there's going to be some quality loss by resorting to those technologies, but there's no way to defeat them from making a copy, and those copies can then be encoded into digital format. There's always going to be a point of demarcation where the digitally encrypted stream must become a plaintext analog signal in order for the monitor or speakers to function, and anything that copies the signals at that point will have a pretty good looking copy as well. Unless the digital demarc point is installed after our eyes and ears on the way to the brain, I just don't see how this is going to work...
HDTV tuners and sets are already in the market, and they know nothing about this Janus technology. If a broadcaster were to use this technology to "protect" its content, these older devices won't know how to make heads or tails of the restrictions, and therefore are going to have to be considered "untrusted" and not allowed to have the content.
That's just not going to fly in the marketplace. HDTV early adopters will just ignore the content that their units can't play back, and broadcasters aren't going to want to limit their potential audience by ruling out everybody but those who have bought certain models of HDTV hardware.
This platform will need a killer app, and I doubt Hollywood can come up with one...
The late 90s. Anybody remember all of the "Get paid to surf!" offers that were floating around back then?
Funny, I my house I go straight for the interesting-to-me circulars, because I want to know what Best Buy and Circuit City are promoting this week. I don't particularly need to see the news content because I've seen enough news on TV and the Web during the week, but the ad content is something that doesn't come out until Sunday Morning, and is best presented in that way than on the web...
It reminds me of a 1990s-era site called FreeRide which awarded "points" that were redeemable for prizes for visiting sponsor sites. It was even to the point that you could earn points for searching Google and other search engines, as they were even willing to pay per click back then.
Somehow, I don't think this is going to last very long. Anybody who's working on a Pay-Per-Click basis without a way to shut this kind of "unqualified lead" down is going to get wiped out very quickly...
Actually, The BBC doesn't own BBC America. Discovery Communications actually runs the network, and licenses the name and logo.
Discovery has to license BBC shows on a one-by-one basis. However, their network actually isn't bound to only show BBC programs, as for example they air So Graham Norton which airs on the 4 Network over there. So, if the cherry picked content on BBC America seems to resemble shows seen on sister network TLC, know you know why.
And let's face it, just because a show hasn't yes been sold to the USA doesn't mean that it won't be sold in the future after the ratings are known. So, they can't exactly give anything away without risking other lines of business.
The BBC will likely do something to limit the International use of this service, as having the shows freely availalbe over the Web might negatively impact their ability to sell their programs in other places, and some of the shows aired by the BBC belong to other companies and they want the exclusive rights to the show in their home territory.
The article refers to this being a challenge, but one they plan on getting over...
Well, yeah... but somebody else pointed out to me that another post on that topic got posted same day. We now have future knowledge of a dupe! :)
True, but dupes belong in the "rejected" bin... but I guess putting one into "pending" isn't that bad, considering they've been known to be found in the "accepted" bin far too often. :)
I've been accepted once on only 11 attempts so far. Slashdot must get more "acceptable" stories than they can actually accept, so I take it some degree of semi-randomness (who gets the editors' attention in the sea of noise first) will always be a final factor...
But that's interesting that they're giving existing testers account-opening passwords (kinda like now Google-owned Blogger in its early days...) and those users are free to determine whatever scheme they want to hand out their codes. No wonder some are desiding to auction to the highest bidder...
I submitted a story called "802.11b goes out to the ballgame in San Fran" more than a month ago, and it still is in the "pending" column. I wonder if they're saving it for a rainy day or something...
Not to mention... Google could very easily just kill any auctioned-off account.
Unsettling yes. Sound to anyone like groupthink?
No. It's not. At least, most of us don't think so...
Well as much as I hate 419 scammers I still can't bring myself to think of them as scum quite on the same level as mass spammers.
Wait a second... aren't most of the 419ers finding their marks by sending spam? The response rate is a trace, but the payout is enough to make the crime profitable.
Artists Against 419
A "419 Scam" is the attempt to defraud people of their money by claiming that they need to send money and/or account details in order to recieve a large ammount of funds. If any victim actually cooperates, they're told that they need to send more. Spam is commonly used because of the relatively low cost of sending massive e-mails, and the fact that the scammers net thousands of dollars from each fool that bites. The name comes from the chapter of Nigerian number in law that says this is illegal there, yet a majority of these scams come from there.
flash mobs
This is a concept that comes from people who send text messages to a mailing list of bunch of friends that says something cool is going on, so anybody free should come join them. In cities, this can cause 100s of people to show up on the "if you contact 10 friends, and they contact 10 friends..." principle. Singer Avril Lavigne is currently doing a tour of unadvertised events at shopping malls, which have attracted up to 6000 people that more or less depends on the first people to see the sign announcing the event telling their friends, and having those friends tell others. This group is encuraging a simple Slashdotting against 419ers, which is basically the same principle. More people showing up than expected causes problems...
This is going to be a major Slashdotting with a useful purpose!
News Corp. was definitely part of the sides pushing for the ownership increases, as they were very ready to buy up stations as soon as that was allowed.
News Corp.'s position on the PTAR rule was a funny one... they were fine with it continuing to exist because Fox at the time was not programming enough primetime hours for it to have any impact on them. They just never wanted to see it modified so that it applied to their network, and as it played out it never was.
DRM in Slashdot's definiton includes any system that applies encryption or security to data that we think should have been stored in plaintext all along. Sure, that's not the proper definition of the term, but it's how it's used around here...
In the Futurama Universe, the Simpsons was still on Fox in new episodes in the year 3000. The original cast was most likely still able to do the voices from their jars.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if he got into some kind of trouble for doing this.
Microsoft licenses its patches to allow redistribution, so long as they in the end get run on duly authorized installations of Windows. This package just wraps a bundle of patches up to each run in sequence... which is exactly what a Service Pack does, or a network admin does when he's pushing bunches of patches on his network...
Assuming this "service pack" is what it claims to be, then all this guy did was take each of Microsoft's official releases, and create a batch operation that installs them all in sequence while surpressing the user interface of each and providing one UI to get all of the needed parameters once.
All of Microsoft's fixes allow command line options to supply the answer to any questions that a user would be asked so that a network admiinstrator can write a simple batch file to do the install on his network.
This really isn't much different than what commerical vendors such as BigFix do...
Yep... he'd have to make a seperate version of his unofficial service pack for each language out there, since whenever he included a package with different editions for each language he went with English, his result is an English-edition Service Pack and nothing else.