The "CD hole," besides being annoying, is absolute proof that you've been lied to, repeatedly, by the RIAA.
They claim DRM is about stopping piracy. This is a blatent lie - obviously, pirates can just burn, rip, and redistribute. Or buy the CD, or check it out from their library. That the system allows burning to CD is clear evidence that pirates are not the target.
The target is your fair use rights. Many companies had tried to sell DRM music with draconian restrictions, but they were a step backwards from the freedom of a CD, so they failed. The RIAA realized they needed to start slowly, offering a DRM system with very few restrictions. The restrictions will slowly be made more draconian, and nobody will notice. With a complete lack of competion in the industry, nothing will stand in the way.
Enter iTunes. People vehemently defend Apple now, and they will continue to do so when Apple and the MPAA remove ripping rights. "You can still play the music on your iPod," they'll say. "We would love to let you rip, but piracy was too much of a problem," the RIAA will lie. But they will have won: there will be a point where the DRM infrastructure will be mature enogh to support whatever restrictions the RIAA wants. Consumers will have nowhere else to turn, they will have given up their freedom, not even for their safety, but for their convenience.
What about DVDs? They were cracked, and DVD sales are just the same as before. When CDs were created, nobody expected equipment to rip and burn them would be accessable to consumers, and yet CDs are still around. Audiocasette recorders caused legislation reinforcing a consumer's right to make personal copies. There was legal controversy about the Xerox machine, and about player piano tapes.
Ever since there's been 'content,' there's been demand to copy it, and human ingenuity has 'cracked' whatever protection there was. But this doesn't harm the medium, in fact, it makes it more valuable to honest people. There will still be a demand for iTunes and friends, so the MPAA won't stop. There isn't a consumer demand for draconian hardware DRM, so I don't think it'll happen. This is driven by greed, but in the end, consumers want cheap, legal downloads with minimal (hopefully nonexistant) DRM, so that's what'll happen.
This 'crack' won't affect Apple's relation with the RIAA, nor the service, nor even the software, in any way. Why? iTunes lets you burn CDs, and CDs can be ripped. This crack only gives people slightly better quality and saves them a CD-RW. It also makes it a bit easier to get the files off a Bochs or VMWare system. Even if it did allow something that wasn't trivial before, it wouldn't impact iTunes sales or piracy significantly.
The owner of that webspace is stupid - in the time it took him to set up a redirect and copy a 1x1 gif, he could have just typed the article.
Today Nils Ahlswede and Alexander Peter Kampl of Lik Sang International Limited (Lik Sang) announced that they have resolved their dispute with Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) regarding Lik Sang's distribution and pre-modified Xbox game consoles, which had been made available through the website www.lik-sang.com.
The resolution included, in addition to the payment of an undisclosed sum, an acknowledgement by Messrs. Ahlswede and Kampl as well as Lik Sang that these devices infringe Microsoft's intellectual property rights and circumvent the copy protection system incorporated by Microsoft in its Xbox video game system to prevent the playing of counterfeit games.
Hong Kong, November 17, 2003
This press statement is made on behalf of Alex Kampl.
Yes, Red Hat could clamp down, but that language doesn't in any way imply they will. The language is there so that you can still offer downloads or sell CDs under the Fedora name, but Microsoft can't take Fedora, implement drive letters and 8.3 filenames, and market it as Fedora, throwing more marketing power at it and killing Red Hat. The language is there so they retain some control against misuse of their trademark. I don't think it's a problem - don't confuse Red Hat and SCO.
I'm not sure how to generate energy by smashing Jupiter into the sun (it would be cool, though.) But if you want to use kinetic energy, you want tidal generators, which slightly slow down the earth.
[When I came aboard at SCO I looked at this issue of code and asked:] 'Why don't you guys do this?' They said, 'Because the Linux community will get mad at us.'
I tell you what, I'll give you the Linux community getting mad at us vs. shareholder value. That was the trade off. They were absolutely right, the Linux community got mad and we were right, shareholder value went up. The last time I checked the CEO was in charge of shareholder value, not standing around the campfire singing Kumbaya with the Linux world. So far, I'm pleased with where we're going..
This shows a complete lack of any moral value whatsoever. Completely gone. Guess what - if that many people get mad, you're not doing the right thing! It doesn't matter how much money you can make, you still shouldn't do it. (To put it another way, "Last I checked, it wasn't my job to sit around the table carving the roast beef for the Whos down in Whoville.")
And my favorite, hopefully prophetic, quote which McBride attributes to IBM's lawyers:
The skies over Utah will be blackened with attorneys before this is all done.
That's true, but unrelated. Outside the nucleus, neutrons are unstable and have a half-life of about 15 minutes, decaying by emitting an electron and antineutrino to become a proton.
This begs the question: Is it better for security researchers to avoid publicly criticizing e-voting flaws? Is public faith in the system more important than overall system security?
Obviously, for e-voting to function, there can't be any suggestion of fallibility. After all, what good is a voting system that instills doubt? It may be reasonable, but it's still doubt.
Actually, it makes quite a lot of sense. Throughout American history, there's been debate over state's rights - first they were colonies, then they seperated, then there was the Articles of Confederation. At this point, the states were essentially independent, and the federal government couldn't even scrape together a military. So then we got the Constitution, with a much stronger federal government.
Grandparent is drawing parallels between the federal government's ability to restrain bickering states and the UN's ability to restrain bickering nations. I wouldn't be surprised if the UN becomes stronger in the future, but I wish they'd keep their noses out of technology and IP law.
Also, you can listen to it as it comes in - in XMMS, Preferences, Audio I/O Plugins tab, Input Plugins pane, Configure MPEG (or Vorbis), in the Streaming tab, check "save streams." I would assume there's something similar for Winamp.
As I understand it, this makes possessing or offering a file which cannot be legally copied illegal, even if you never actually uploaded it. How do they intend to prove what the file was? Based on the filename? Remember the DMCA C&D of an OpenOffice mirror? My point is, without them downloading the file (or confiscating your computer), they can't prove you have it.
It's completely unnecessary - the laws are strong enough as they are. This law, like the DMCA, at best serves only to lower the burden of proof, and make it more economical to sue. My guess is that there is something more sinister hidden in the wording.
Obviously, the cracker is responsible for his crimes, regardless of whose computer he uses. Yes, accused people might say "someone else used my computer," just as one might say "someone else used my gun." Obviously, the court would need to decide whether or not that is true. The grey area, of course, is when someone agrees to let a cracker use their computer for attacks. But again, unless such collusion can be proven, only the hacker is responsible. So if you know your system's been cracked, you're responsible to turn it off. But I don't think people should be liable simply for running insecure systems - all systems are insecure to some degree.
Yes, there are proxies to block popups. But this is a perfect example of being forced into a bad design. You have a browser which unconditionally displays popups when requested, and to fix this, you make a proxy that heuristically blocks such requests? The blindingly obvious solution is to have the browser display popups conditionally. Why is IE the only browser that doesn't?
I have three theories. The tinfoil hat theory is what you describe - they benefit from popups, either directly or by receiving bribes from advertisers or proxy authors. Personally, I think they're going to use it as a carrot-on-a-stick to lead people to DRM. There won't be an IE specific patch, there'll be a service pack, and to force people to apply it, they'll finally implement popup blocking. The third theory is that they're lazy and stupid, which is of course why everybody does everything.
Meanwhile, it doesn't matter how inferior IE is, because users don't know of alternatives and web designers are to lazy to care about them. Everybody uses IE and nobody can fix it. The result is that Microsoft gets even more control, others are forced to write ugly hacks like popup-blocking proxies, and the general public gets becomes even more frustrated with computers.
Very true, though it's easy to understand why they do it. Capitalism works great in the long term, but it makes things difficult for individual companies in the short term. So you get groups fighting dirty, dissing their competitors, legislating against their competitors, etc. Now, the people with marketing power grew up when communism was the biggest evil, and the worst insult. In a few years, Microsoft and friends will start calling open source terrorism (after all, OSS has geographically distributed "projects", or rather, "cells"), because that will be the worst insult.
Imagine that in 1930, somebody said that the controls presented to drivers don't map well enough to the function of cars, and that in the future people would have to know how every drivetrain component works in order to drive or face losing the ability to use public roads.
Like all others, this car analogy is flawed - the controls presented to drivers map perfectly to the function of cars, and only moderately well to humans. Cars have throttles, humans have feet, so there was a gas pedal which directly controlled the throttle. Cars have rack and pinion steering, humans have hands, so there's a steering column connecting your hands to the steering system.
Contrast this with a computer - computers have programs, humans have hands, so you either type the name of the program or move the mouse to the icon and click on it. Yes, it's more complex, but there's a reason - instead of a few linear or discrete controls, computers have many abstract concepts. To drive, you must understand the controls (turning the right while moving foreward makes the car go right, while the car is moving backwards, it goes in reverse, it does nothing while the car is stopped). To use a computer, you must understand the abstract concepts - this is a program, it runs, it interacts with files, files are stored in directories, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, didn't catch that. Two commas make a good song. It's a MathNet reference. An old PBS show, a spoof of Dragnet.
As everybody knows, in the current payola scheme, songs with three commas in their name get automatic airtime.
They claim DRM is about stopping piracy. This is a blatent lie - obviously, pirates can just burn, rip, and redistribute. Or buy the CD, or check it out from their library. That the system allows burning to CD is clear evidence that pirates are not the target.
The target is your fair use rights. Many companies had tried to sell DRM music with draconian restrictions, but they were a step backwards from the freedom of a CD, so they failed. The RIAA realized they needed to start slowly, offering a DRM system with very few restrictions. The restrictions will slowly be made more draconian, and nobody will notice. With a complete lack of competion in the industry, nothing will stand in the way.
Enter iTunes. People vehemently defend Apple now, and they will continue to do so when Apple and the MPAA remove ripping rights. "You can still play the music on your iPod," they'll say. "We would love to let you rip, but piracy was too much of a problem," the RIAA will lie. But they will have won: there will be a point where the DRM infrastructure will be mature enogh to support whatever restrictions the RIAA wants. Consumers will have nowhere else to turn, they will have given up their freedom, not even for their safety, but for their convenience.
Ever since there's been 'content,' there's been demand to copy it, and human ingenuity has 'cracked' whatever protection there was. But this doesn't harm the medium, in fact, it makes it more valuable to honest people. There will still be a demand for iTunes and friends, so the MPAA won't stop. There isn't a consumer demand for draconian hardware DRM, so I don't think it'll happen. This is driven by greed, but in the end, consumers want cheap, legal downloads with minimal (hopefully nonexistant) DRM, so that's what'll happen.
This 'crack' won't affect Apple's relation with the RIAA, nor the service, nor even the software, in any way. Why? iTunes lets you burn CDs, and CDs can be ripped. This crack only gives people slightly better quality and saves them a CD-RW. It also makes it a bit easier to get the files off a Bochs or VMWare system. Even if it did allow something that wasn't trivial before, it wouldn't impact iTunes sales or piracy significantly.
As I understand that, not only is it not analog, it's also not re-encoding, which is even better. Similar to mplayer -dvd 1 -dumpstream.
Yes, Red Hat could clamp down, but that language doesn't in any way imply they will. The language is there so that you can still offer downloads or sell CDs under the Fedora name, but Microsoft can't take Fedora, implement drive letters and 8.3 filenames, and market it as Fedora, throwing more marketing power at it and killing Red Hat. The language is there so they retain some control against misuse of their trademark. I don't think it's a problem - don't confuse Red Hat and SCO.
Like cars?
I'm not sure how to generate energy by smashing Jupiter into the sun (it would be cool, though.) But if you want to use kinetic energy, you want tidal generators, which slightly slow down the earth.
This shows a complete lack of any moral value whatsoever. Completely gone. Guess what - if that many people get mad, you're not doing the right thing! It doesn't matter how much money you can make, you still shouldn't do it. (To put it another way, "Last I checked, it wasn't my job to sit around the table carving the roast beef for the Whos down in Whoville.")
And my favorite, hopefully prophetic, quote which McBride attributes to IBM's lawyers:
Are these cat-atoms dead or alive?
That's true, but unrelated. Outside the nucleus, neutrons are unstable and have a half-life of about 15 minutes, decaying by emitting an electron and antineutrino to become a proton.
Obviously, for e-voting to function, there can't be any suggestion of fallibility. After all, what good is a voting system that instills doubt? It may be reasonable, but it's still doubt.
Grandparent is drawing parallels between the federal government's ability to restrain bickering states and the UN's ability to restrain bickering nations. I wouldn't be surprised if the UN becomes stronger in the future, but I wish they'd keep their noses out of technology and IP law.
Finding out you're unqualified.
I'm not worried - I've got my duct tape!
Also, you can listen to it as it comes in - in XMMS, Preferences, Audio I/O Plugins tab, Input Plugins pane, Configure MPEG (or Vorbis), in the Streaming tab, check "save streams." I would assume there's something similar for Winamp.
It's completely unnecessary - the laws are strong enough as they are. This law, like the DMCA, at best serves only to lower the burden of proof, and make it more economical to sue. My guess is that there is something more sinister hidden in the wording.
Obviously, the cracker is responsible for his crimes, regardless of whose computer he uses. Yes, accused people might say "someone else used my computer," just as one might say "someone else used my gun." Obviously, the court would need to decide whether or not that is true. The grey area, of course, is when someone agrees to let a cracker use their computer for attacks. But again, unless such collusion can be proven, only the hacker is responsible. So if you know your system's been cracked, you're responsible to turn it off. But I don't think people should be liable simply for running insecure systems - all systems are insecure to some degree.
Actually, they already do. One of Energizer's AA alkaline batteries weighs 23.0 grams, 23.0 grams = 4.94e14 calories, and 1 megaton energy = 10e15 calories, so one AA battery yeilds 494 kilotons of energy. By comparison, the Little Boy was 13 kilotons.
So there you have it - a AA battery is could destroy Hiroshima 38 times over.
I have three theories. The tinfoil hat theory is what you describe - they benefit from popups, either directly or by receiving bribes from advertisers or proxy authors. Personally, I think they're going to use it as a carrot-on-a-stick to lead people to DRM. There won't be an IE specific patch, there'll be a service pack, and to force people to apply it, they'll finally implement popup blocking. The third theory is that they're lazy and stupid, which is of course why everybody does everything.
Meanwhile, it doesn't matter how inferior IE is, because users don't know of alternatives and web designers are to lazy to care about them. Everybody uses IE and nobody can fix it. The result is that Microsoft gets even more control, others are forced to write ugly hacks like popup-blocking proxies, and the general public gets becomes even more frustrated with computers.
Very true, though it's easy to understand why they do it. Capitalism works great in the long term, but it makes things difficult for individual companies in the short term. So you get groups fighting dirty, dissing their competitors, legislating against their competitors, etc. Now, the people with marketing power grew up when communism was the biggest evil, and the worst insult. In a few years, Microsoft and friends will start calling open source terrorism (after all, OSS has geographically distributed "projects", or rather, "cells"), because that will be the worst insult.
Although it's sad that Mickey is gone, we will always have his copyright to remember him by.
Actually, power plants typically use proprietary Unixes that are sold with waranties. So it was a SCO box she hacked.
Like all others, this car analogy is flawed - the controls presented to drivers map perfectly to the function of cars, and only moderately well to humans. Cars have throttles, humans have feet, so there was a gas pedal which directly controlled the throttle. Cars have rack and pinion steering, humans have hands, so there's a steering column connecting your hands to the steering system.
Contrast this with a computer - computers have programs, humans have hands, so you either type the name of the program or move the mouse to the icon and click on it. Yes, it's more complex, but there's a reason - instead of a few linear or discrete controls, computers have many abstract concepts. To drive, you must understand the controls (turning the right while moving foreward makes the car go right, while the car is moving backwards, it goes in reverse, it does nothing while the car is stopped). To use a computer, you must understand the abstract concepts - this is a program, it runs, it interacts with files, files are stored in directories, etc.