As I read the opening statements of these two briefs a feeling of sadness came over me. The MPAA brief argues rigidly from the form and intent of the DMCA, while the defendants resort to disputing the DMCA's power to render mechanisms of fair use illegal. It was interesting to note that the term "fair use" wasn't present even once in the DMCA's brief.
But sadly, this is all largely irrelevant to our freedoms. It may be that the defendants will win this round, and the Court will permit them and others to engineer and distribute "devices" that subvert copyright protections. But nothing in this case will mitigate the central issue: if CSS hadn't been so weak, we would all still be constrained to the MPAA's anemic idea of consumer rights.
In other words, what good will a victory here do us if IP owners like the MPAA simply protect their materials with strong encryption that isn't likely to be broken by sloppy redistributors? Remember that Jon Johansen only managed to crack CSS because a private key was accidentally left in the clear!
This is an important case as it sets precedent and could determine the viewpoint of future courts, but if this issue never returns to the courtroom because the MPAA does it right in CSS2.0, then what will it have really bought us?
I'd agree that games that no longer make money for a company might as well be released into the public domain, but why GPL?
Don't misunderstand me - I spent nearly an hour yesterday trying to find a copy of the Zork Trilogy in z-machine format. (I believe Activision released them as freeware some time ago, but then, that might just be what the pirate websites *claim*:-)
But I think you might be a little too enamoured of the GPL to think clearly in this case. Releasing the ROM is one thing - it permits groundswell fanclubs for old titles and truly is "sharing" in the best sense of the word. But releasing code and allowing modifications could conceivably leak too much proprietary information onto the internet for the comfort of the parent companies.
My guess is that Sony sees this as a simple screen-time equation. Every minute you spend playing a free ROM is a minute less you'll spend playing a purchased Sony CD on a purchased Sony Playstation. I happen to disagree with that assessment, but then look at how the government managed to shred the "Napster makes me buy more CD's" argument in court - real surveys impress suits far more than vague theories. In the absence of hard numbers, Sony will follow it's gut. And that means no ROM's for you.
Sometimes I feel that certain people in security view the products and the admins using those products as the enemy, and not the crackers at all!
Who was cracking Novell's LANManager password scheme - included in Win9x - before l0phtcrack was released? How many DDoS attacks had you heard of before the release of trinoo, etc? What about fragmented IP packets before teardrop?
The real problem with full disclosure is not that holes aren't patched - publicly announced bugs usually do get fixed sooner rather than later. The problem is that users don't always deploy the patches. In the meanwhile, well-meaning (or otherwise) "grey hats" who have coded exploits to holes they discovered - usually in order to enhance their media shebang and sell more of their own security "solutions" - have handed a tool to skript kidz who simply hunt the net until they find a box whose harassed admin hasn't installed the latest patch. Alone, many of these "crackers" couldn't crack a paper bag. With the utilities in their arsenal, it's trivial.
I'm all for disclosure of security holes - it keeps vendors honest, and it allows for creative security community solutions. It may not be in the best interests of the world (and info security does have a global impact these days) to code actual *demos* in order to pressure vendors into implementing fixes. Just explain the hole, explain the danger, heck even explain a step-by-step exploit. Just dont code the bitch. Your neighborhood harassed admin will thank you.
An insightful poster recently remarked that the only way to ensure true independence from the companies you review is to:
1) purchase your own, off-the-shelf copy of the product - to ensure you experience what customers experience 2) politely return all unsolicited "gifts"
Consumer Reports does it, and their reputation is unimpugnable. Regrettably, in the hardware and software business, prices for off-the-shelf products often exceed the budget of enthusiasts. We're talking $100's to $1000's of dollars in most cases, especially for hardware.
The solution I would suggest is this. Establish a "blind" company that federates reviewers. This company accepts contributions from its members, pools them, purchases a sample product at the lowest price it can find, then allows the reviewers to share the sample product for their reviews. When all reviews are complete, the product can be auctioned off or resold in some other fashion. The companies bacing the reviewed products will never have contact directly with the reviewers, and the monetary issue is alleviated.
I don't know why the Times article repeats so often that DeCSS is about copying DVDs. It isn't, it's about access control and the movie studios trying to control what you can you with a DVD *after* you have bought and paid for it. We know this all ready, but the general public doesn't and it is a shame to see the Times drop the ball.
Ah, but that's only what it means to us, to the consumers who purchase and have to make use of these DVD products.
To the MPAA however, which has far more potent propaganda organs than Slashdot can boast, this really is about copying and piracy.
When you rip a DVD directly without decryption, the resulting DVD remains playable only on MPAA-controlled hardware. The number of "rogue" copies is limited to your financial potential for output of physical DVDs - in other words, not much. This means the MPAA can largely restrict number and presentation of their movies, ultimately squeezing scarce-product revenue out of zero-scarcity information.
But with DeCSS, users can extract a clear copy of teh content, and present it via any channel they like, including the Internet. Unlike some geeks on slashdot, who for some reason only envision a future of broadband when piracy isn't on trial, the MPAA fully expects movies to be downloadable in a short period of time by ordinary viewers in just a matter of a few years.
They are trying to head off the perceived obsolesence of their marketing and distribution channels. It's not piracy now they're fighting but piracy five years from now.
Reading Jamie's comments, it gives me the impression that he thinks serialized novels are a new mode of distribution.
Sure, it's on the internet, but it's not new. Dickens famously wrote his novels in serial form, publishing them in story magazines, and crowds formed on publishing day for a chance to plunk down their tuppence or whatever for the next issue.
One famous anecdote relates that when Dickens was completing the last installment of "The Olde Curiousity Shoppe" a mob formed on the pier waiting for the next shipment of magazines to call into port, yelling "Does Little Nell die?" to the approaching sailors.
This will work, although it might take some tweaking.
King is just the prominent, safe, establishment figure that was needed to validate the Street Performer's Protocol in the public eye. I'm sure he's not the only pulp-fiction author who chafes under the heavy percentage levied by his publishers from the sale of each book. Sure, practically speaking he doesn't need the money, but then neither do Ellison or Gates, and they don't show signs of slowing up in their rapacity soon either.
But if this fails, damn... we're in trouble. And the repercussions could extend well beyond media like books, even perhaps to the extent that OSS software advocates will have to argue against the "King Incident" when proselytizing and open source solution.
Consider Netscape Mozilla. Inside the community, people mostly understand that the project is doing well (with some misgivings perhaps) but int he corporate world, Mozilla is tarred as a top-flight example of "the failure of open source" as a business model. It's unfair, but it's also the popular impression.
Similarly, King can afford to screw himself once or twice while playing with new means of distribution. So could, perhaps, Daniel Steel or Dean Koontz, or the other pot-boilers. But the less well-heeled authors out there, who are scraping by on their publishing income and probably a shit job on the side, can't afford to take risks. They'll view this move by King as a litmus test of the viability of online publishing, and they'll act accordingly.
I want very much for this experiment to succeed. It's the first step towards a more open, better-connected world. But if it doesn't, expect massive damage control on the side of IP freedoms.
I've already sworn to build my first and only house based entirely upon solar power, possibly with a wind backup. While it is possible to connect a solar home to the grid - and even push out your excess energy in return for monthly payments - dependency is something I'm determined to avoid.
However, solar is not only vastly expensive - the typical home can run you as much as $20,000 at building time, enough to pay for about 80 years of coal power - it is also unreliable. A solar panel captures 28% of sunlight's energy at theoretical maximum. In reality, your home's position on the globe and the variability of weather mean that you will probably need a backup system of some kind, such as wind.
Try fitting a system that requires vast, immobile panels onto a car. The Sunrayce Competition promotes the idea of solar powered vehicles, but so far the machines lag behind in reliability and power - and even are deficient in such exotic concepts as "passenger seats".
Solar power is the way to go. It's free, it's unlimited from a practical standpoint, and it's clean. But we aren't there yet. -konstant Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Would-be censors often use a "voluntary ratings system" as a beachhead. They know full well, from experience, that voluntary ratings swiftly become mandatory. No amount of sermonizing about "parental choice" can deflect the fact that parental responsibility goes deeper than glancing at a ratings label slapped on an entertainment product by a board of self-appointed busybodies.
When a ratings system is first imposed, either by a government oversight committee or by industry consent (think the MPAA), the public is soothed with the statement that compliance to the ratings is a voluntary decision on the part of the consumer. At first this is true.
But after many years, as new "responsible adults" cycle into the pool of consumers and the old, more watchful ones cycle out, the public impression of the ratings begins to shift. People forget, or never learn, what the original justification for those R, PG, and NC-17 ratings might have been. They become receptive to the idea that the content itself somehow intrinsically merits the rating.
Then the lawmakers step in.
Protest ratings systems wherever you find them. If you have concerns about the content your children, or you yourself consume, then you assume a concomitant responsibility to learn about the issues. You cannot, one the one hand, harp about a lack of informed choices, and on the other hand abdicate your responsibility to go out and make sure your choices are well informed!
You've said before on slashdot that TUX supports a number of usability features, although not the full complement. Could TUX have been made faster at the job of serving static pages if you had ripped out every single extraneous bit? What if TUX had been small to the point of being basically unusable in the real world, but served pages faster even than it does now?
The question is, would that have been a fair benchmark?
If your answer is No, then the followup question is, how is that materially different from what you *did* do?
Couldn't this protocol be used to assist in cellphone spoofing? It's already well understood that most cellphones are vulnerable to eaves-dropping in the absence of encryption. What about the following scenario:
1) set up a transmitter to broadcast the "silence" command to my victim's area 2) intercept incoming calls 3) since the victim is not notified of the call, I open up on the channel and pretend to be him/her.
This was one of the reasons our old friend the Denial of Service attack was invented oh so long ago.
The two major distinctions between these benchmarks and the unjustly-maligned Mindcraft benchmark that were later confirmed by PC Labs: 1) these tests compare Win2k to Linux. By contrast, the Mindcraft study compared WinNT4.0 to Linux.
2) in the "Operating System" column of the Linux boxes, we see a revealing note: Operating System: Red Hat Linux 6.2 Threaded Web Server Add-On
It seems as though RHAT has taken the trouble to render its TCP/IP stack into a multi-threaded model, rather than the forked model I understand it used to be. This was identified as the primary deficiency in the previous benchmarks.
At the time, Linux afficianados claimed that the superiority would be short lived. Assuming these stats are otherwise legit, it seems as though they were right, and in such a brief period of time as well. I'm impressed! Keep pumping out impressive turn-arounds like this one, and very soon commercial entities will have to give open source its just props as a development model.
I am slightly curious whether this "web server add-on" is available to consumers, and also whether it is a fully-featured web server. If not, and this is just a hack, that might cast a pall of illegitimacy. Anyone have the inside scoop?
Wonderful article. I'm so glad/. still posts stuff like this occasionally.
The author mentions, enticingly, that the potential of the technology is to store 10 gigs or more in an area roughly the size of a "single gambling die". This, clearly, is a fantastic dream.
Regrettably, the real problem that the article doesn't really touch is the space and more importantly, the precision and energy, required by the laser that is needed to read and write to the medium. Just glancing at the interior of my relatively rudimentary CD-ROM drive, I can see that its mechanism consumes considerably more area than a die. And it doesn't even rely upon the sophisticated network of lenses described in the PRISM research project.
You all know how inconvenient it was/is to transport a CD player through rough terrain and expect it to work continuously. Imagine trying to get any kind of ruggedness out of this badass!
However, 10 gigs smaller than the last joint in my thumb.... yum. -konstant Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
For the life of me I don't understand the enthusiasm of analysts for the future of Sun. On the lower end, they have Linux bursting onto the scene, readily gaining acceptance in *nix shops where developers hold considerable sway. Above them on the performance scale they have Win2k, which on its debut release demonstrated dramatically higher price/performance and raw performance benchmarks on database serving than Sun has ever been able to achieve.
Atop this there is the consideration that Sun believes the future will look like the past, with millions of time-sharing clients begging for resources from massive servers. Contrast this to the view MS propounded yesterday (the.NET hoopla) in which they envision millions of powerful offline devices, including PCs, handhelds, etc, that can poll services at any time from a broad selection of vendors, with no gatekeeper other than adherance to SOAP XML standards.
What does Sun have going for it in the long run? I see nothing apart from the fact that they have positioned themselves as the "anti-Microsoft", which sounds awfully promising when the DOJ is hovering over MS like a vulture. But really, is that the kind of world you want to live in? And is it really any kind of foundation for a company? Personally I don't think so.
Don't be an asshole. I own a low-powered pickup truck, and I don't even drive it myself. I walk to work while my girlfriend drives the truck to her $10/hr job in West Seattle.
Our little family is precisely what the initiative was intended to target: small, not economically well-to-do, and unable to handle a $400/year fee for the privilege to sit in traffic.
Don't assume you know what you're talking about, or to whom you're talking.
In Washington, the state vehicle registration tax was recently reduced to a flat $30 fee. This cut millions of dollars from bus and road funding, forcing Seattle Metro to scale back some bus routes. Various other agencies are also wondering where they are going to come up with the missing cash, all because people are too greedy
This is a gross oversimplification. I live in Washington, and I voted for the citizen's initiative that reformed vehicle tabs to $30 per annum. You neglect three essential points.
1) the real motivation of the bill was to constrain future state tax increases without a majority vote from the state populace
2) the initiative was overturned in the state supreme court, and the subsequent reduction in car tabs was performed by the legislature instead
3) most of us continue to pay substantially more than $30 yearly, due to "other fees assessed". My car tab fee was $130 in bellevue.
America doesn't realize taxes are good for it.
Absolutely people understand that taxes can benefit them. However, we desire discretion over when and to what extent they are assessed. The distinction between taxation without representation and taxation by unresponsive beauracracy seems mighty small sometimes.
More importantly, Judge Jackson also issued a stay for the "immediate" behavioral remedies that were to be imposed within 90 days of his ruling.
This means that Microsoft, even if ultimately the appeals process does not support it, will remain unmodified and unrestricted until all appeals are exhausted. This process may take upwards of two years.
Personally I wish the SC *would* take it, so that we could get this behind us. I'm sure I'm not the only person tired of hearing about it. However, the signs are that the Appellate Court will be assigned the task of reading through the evidentiary record rather than the SC, simply as a matter of expediency.
Even if you, like me, don't listen to much music. Even if you, like me, don't bother to pirate and have qualms about using a work against the wishes of its creator. Even if you, like me, think that sometimes people seem to enjoy the persecution and the notoriety more than the actual freedoms they claim to defend; even then you should love Napster.
The reason is that Napster has hit the public, and these lawsuits have hit the news. It has tapped at the door of consciousness for probably hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who generally wouldn't give a second thought to issues like intellectual property and who have never before really felt themselves to be on the wrong side of massively sucessful corporations. It's created conflict, and it's made people start to think about the way things are and possibly about the way they ought to be.
Napster expands the horizons of the debate! All right!
I for one welcome this shifty, greedy maneuver. If RAMBUS does manage to corner the market on volatile RAM technologies, then the computer industry will thrash around violently looking for a way out. And it will be about time.
We've become sloppy and trained to the notion that memory should be divided into segments varying by speed, size, volatility, and cost. We all spend months in college or in the field learning about the subtle differences between L1 caching, L2 caching, main memory, hard drive memory, ROM, and the trillion variations of RAM. We don't see the forest for the trees: this model of data management is the single most crucial hindrance to the advancement of computer science in our entire industry.
I for one would love to see a technology like the magram become viable through hard research and buckets of funding. Can you imagine the virtues of a system that could boast cheap, fast, large, and non-volatile memory in one consolidated chunk?
Imagine how intelligent an OS design such as the orthogonally persistent EROS operating system would become if the distinction between disk and memory were eliminated at low cost.
So, while I fear the short term repercussions of what it would mean for a company as shoddy as RAMBUS to gain broad control over the hardware market, in the long term such a development might just shake us out of our doldrums. Which can only be a good thing.
As much as it pains me to say it, Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree with this software-based "intellectual property" protection mechanism. As others in the thread correctly point out, you can always intercept a transmission in the clear at some point on your machine. The packaged music or video may be owned or obfuscated by somebody else, but the output of its decryption is 100% within my control. It has to be translated, and immediately afterwards I can snag a copy. This form of protection will always fail in the long run. Its only hope is to render the cost of buying a legitimate copy less than the inconvenience of ripping the output stream. Before IP can be protected commercially (if indeed it should be) the hardware makers must collude with the owners of intellectual property. This is precisely what the MPAA is attempting to accomplish. If they own the players, then they can ensure that at no point is the clear stream electronically accessible. At best I can place a microphone in front of my speakers or try to do a video capture and re-record the output of a movie. But in either case, I will have at best a lossy copy. Personally I wish they would all just give up and go home, and stop treating a non-scarce resource like a precious, scarce one. -konstant Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I am not qualified to assess whether Corel is a creeping black cancre on open source, BUT... being a profssional tester I am regrettably over-qualified to address the tone of hostility the author assumes towards testing. He writes in part:
"Changing file types is an advanced feature, and it should not be so easily accessible from a right-click menu," said one, on June 9. "A new user could easily handicap his or her system by accidentally playing around with settings without a clear understanding of their purpose." A bug? What here isn't working as designed? Or a dumbing down of KDE? Is there a single case of any KDE user ever "handicapping his or her system" by slapdash changing of file types?
It may be that the bug database for Debian is structured in such a way as to distinguish "bugs" from "design change requests". However, the supercilious attitude this developer assumes towards a voluntary bug submission is way too common in computing. Open source projects trawling for contributors often proclaim 'if you can't code, file bugs!' but if this is the attitude a bug filed in goodwill can expect to generate, don't be suprised to see your userbase ossify out to 99% hard-core developers and only 1% or 2% OSS newbies.
It's an unfortunate fact that development often looks down upon test, not the least because QA is staffed by typically less-educated or -skilled individuals. Keep in mind, however, that without this buffer of moderately knowledgeable testers between consumers and devs with their fingers stuffed in the code, many key issues of usability and quality will be pooh-poohed right out the door. The dialogs aren't consistent? Well who gives a fuck! They work, don't they? Ship it!
When you're getting QA input for free, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
In Canadian law, at least, you have to have a reason to appeal. I don't know American law very well, but it seems (inferring from the Wired article) that that's also the case in the US. So what grounds are they using for the appeal?
Fortunately, once the appeal is filed it will become a matter of public record and all of slashdot can descend upon it like a swarm of crows on a roadkill.
If public statements of Microsoft's lawyers are any indication, the appeal will be based upon four lrge grounds:
1) the prior law established by this appeals court
2) the factual record (appealing instances of the FoF in which Microsoft claims Judge Jackson made irrational judgements and ignored evidence)
3) the legal precedent of this case in context with other antitrust rulings
4) the severity of the punishment in relation to the accusations
It will certainly be interesting. I'm waiting on tenterhooks.
Since LCD monitors were not exactly prevalent at the time of the Apple II, and since MS Cleartype depends strictly upon the existence of a tri-bar distribution of colors that is found only in LCD's...
Let's just say that having a bright idea and actually implementing that idea are two very different things. How many people in the/. audience have clever pet inventions that they just don't have the time, or the skill, to make a reality? Some day someone else will have the same idea, except that they will do the grunt work of actually producing a workable copy. Guess who will deserve the credit for bringing an innovative idea into the world?
Here is the software of the guy who claims Apple figure all this out years ago. He has a demo written (idiosyncratically enough) in pure i386 assembly:
However, his discussion doesn't seem nearly as complex as the one we have linked in this article. My feeling is that the idea of sub-pixel manipulation is one of those "floating revelations" that recur to more than one clever mind, but that MS Cleartype is the first practical application.
Oh, and here's the cleartype site at MS. Be sure to view it with an LCD screen - otherwise you won't get the benefit due to the triangular distribution of color spots on a CRT: MS Reader
I'm sorry, but I shall have to disagree with you: a file manager is NOT a HTML browser! HTML only allows 1 action per click, file browsers require many actions (open/activate, show properties, rename, etc.)
Now, integrating an FTP client into the file manager is a GOOD idea, since the operations of the two are very similar. But the differences between a browser and a file manager are too large to make them one and the same
What you don't remember is that at its roots a browser is not a means to display HTML files. It's a means to navigate remote directories, which happen to contain HTML files most of the time. Remember that the original web browsers displayed nothing more than text, and HTML was only sparsely used for decorative formatting.
A file manager is a generalized browser - when positioned as a superset of the web and FTP, it makes a great deal of sense.
Slashdot Mirror
As I read the opening statements of these two briefs a feeling of sadness came over me. The MPAA brief argues rigidly from the form and intent of the DMCA, while the defendants resort to disputing the DMCA's power to render mechanisms of fair use illegal. It was interesting to note that the term "fair use" wasn't present even once in the DMCA's brief.
But sadly, this is all largely irrelevant to our freedoms. It may be that the defendants will win this round, and the Court will permit them and others to engineer and distribute "devices" that subvert copyright protections. But nothing in this case will mitigate the central issue: if CSS hadn't been so weak, we would all still be constrained to the MPAA's anemic idea of consumer rights.
In other words, what good will a victory here do us if IP owners like the MPAA simply protect their materials with strong encryption that isn't likely to be broken by sloppy redistributors? Remember that Jon Johansen only managed to crack CSS because a private key was accidentally left in the clear!
This is an important case as it sets precedent and could determine the viewpoint of future courts, but if this issue never returns to the courtroom because the MPAA does it right in CSS2.0, then what will it have really bought us?
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I'd agree that games that no longer make money for a company might as well be released into the public domain, but why GPL?
:-)
Don't misunderstand me - I spent nearly an hour yesterday trying to find a copy of the Zork Trilogy in z-machine format. (I believe Activision released them as freeware some time ago, but then, that might just be what the pirate websites *claim*
But I think you might be a little too enamoured of the GPL to think clearly in this case. Releasing the ROM is one thing - it permits groundswell fanclubs for old titles and truly is "sharing" in the best sense of the word. But releasing code and allowing modifications could conceivably leak too much proprietary information onto the internet for the comfort of the parent companies.
My guess is that Sony sees this as a simple screen-time equation. Every minute you spend playing a free ROM is a minute less you'll spend playing a purchased Sony CD on a purchased Sony Playstation. I happen to disagree with that assessment, but then look at how the government managed to shred the "Napster makes me buy more CD's" argument in court - real surveys impress suits far more than vague theories. In the absence of hard numbers, Sony will follow it's gut. And that means no ROM's for you.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Sometimes I feel that certain people in security view the products and the admins using those products as the enemy, and not the crackers at all!
Who was cracking Novell's LANManager password scheme - included in Win9x - before l0phtcrack was released? How many DDoS attacks had you heard of before the release of trinoo, etc? What about fragmented IP packets before teardrop?
The real problem with full disclosure is not that holes aren't patched - publicly announced bugs usually do get fixed sooner rather than later. The problem is that users don't always deploy the patches. In the meanwhile, well-meaning (or otherwise) "grey hats" who have coded exploits to holes they discovered - usually in order to enhance their media shebang and sell more of their own security "solutions" - have handed a tool to skript kidz who simply hunt the net until they find a box whose harassed admin hasn't installed the latest patch. Alone, many of these "crackers" couldn't crack a paper bag. With the utilities in their arsenal, it's trivial.
See this related article written by the l0pht:
http://www.l0pht.com/~oblivion/so apbox/index.html
I'm all for disclosure of security holes - it keeps vendors honest, and it allows for creative security community solutions. It may not be in the best interests of the world (and info security does have a global impact these days) to code actual *demos* in order to pressure vendors into implementing fixes. Just explain the hole, explain the danger, heck even explain a step-by-step exploit. Just dont code the bitch. Your neighborhood harassed admin will thank you.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
An insightful poster recently remarked that the only way to ensure true independence from the companies you review is to:
1) purchase your own, off-the-shelf copy of the product - to ensure you experience what customers experience
2) politely return all unsolicited "gifts"
Consumer Reports does it, and their reputation is unimpugnable. Regrettably, in the hardware and software business, prices for off-the-shelf products often exceed the budget of enthusiasts. We're talking $100's to $1000's of dollars in most cases, especially for hardware.
The solution I would suggest is this. Establish a "blind" company that federates reviewers. This company accepts contributions from its members, pools them, purchases a sample product at the lowest price it can find, then allows the reviewers to share the sample product for their reviews. When all reviews are complete, the product can be auctioned off or resold in some other fashion. The companies bacing the reviewed products will never have contact directly with the reviewers, and the monetary issue is alleviated.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I don't know why the Times article repeats so often that DeCSS is about copying DVDs. It isn't, it's about access control and the movie studios trying to control what you can you with a DVD *after* you have bought and paid for it. We know this all ready, but the general public doesn't and it is a shame to see the Times drop the ball.
Ah, but that's only what it means to us, to the consumers who purchase and have to make use of these DVD products.
To the MPAA however, which has far more potent propaganda organs than Slashdot can boast, this really is about copying and piracy.
When you rip a DVD directly without decryption, the resulting DVD remains playable only on MPAA-controlled hardware. The number of "rogue" copies is limited to your financial potential for output of physical DVDs - in other words, not much. This means the MPAA can largely restrict number and presentation of their movies, ultimately squeezing scarce-product revenue out of zero-scarcity information.
But with DeCSS, users can extract a clear copy of teh content, and present it via any channel they like, including the Internet. Unlike some geeks on slashdot, who for some reason only envision a future of broadband when piracy isn't on trial, the MPAA fully expects movies to be downloadable in a short period of time by ordinary viewers in just a matter of a few years.
They are trying to head off the perceived obsolesence of their marketing and distribution channels. It's not piracy now they're fighting but piracy five years from now.
All together now: YOU CORPORATE A$$HOLES!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Reading Jamie's comments, it gives me the impression that he thinks serialized novels are a new mode of distribution.
Sure, it's on the internet, but it's not new. Dickens famously wrote his novels in serial form, publishing them in story magazines, and crowds formed on publishing day for a chance to plunk down their tuppence or whatever for the next issue.
One famous anecdote relates that when Dickens was completing the last installment of "The Olde Curiousity Shoppe" a mob formed on the pier waiting for the next shipment of magazines to call into port, yelling "Does Little Nell die?" to the approaching sailors.
This will work, although it might take some tweaking.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
King is just the prominent, safe, establishment figure that was needed to validate the Street Performer's Protocol in the public eye. I'm sure he's not the only pulp-fiction author who chafes under the heavy percentage levied by his publishers from the sale of each book. Sure, practically speaking he doesn't need the money, but then neither do Ellison or Gates, and they don't show signs of slowing up in their rapacity soon either.
But if this fails, damn... we're in trouble. And the repercussions could extend well beyond media like books, even perhaps to the extent that OSS software advocates will have to argue against the "King Incident" when proselytizing and open source solution.
Consider Netscape Mozilla. Inside the community, people mostly understand that the project is doing well (with some misgivings perhaps) but int he corporate world, Mozilla is tarred as a top-flight example of "the failure of open source" as a business model. It's unfair, but it's also the popular impression.
Similarly, King can afford to screw himself once or twice while playing with new means of distribution. So could, perhaps, Daniel Steel or Dean Koontz, or the other pot-boilers. But the less well-heeled authors out there, who are scraping by on their publishing income and probably a shit job on the side, can't afford to take risks. They'll view this move by King as a litmus test of the viability of online publishing, and they'll act accordingly.
I want very much for this experiment to succeed. It's the first step towards a more open, better-connected world. But if it doesn't, expect massive damage control on the side of IP freedoms.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I've already sworn to build my first and only house based entirely upon solar power, possibly with a wind backup. While it is possible to connect a solar home to the grid - and even push out your excess energy in return for monthly payments - dependency is something I'm determined to avoid.
However, solar is not only vastly expensive - the typical home can run you as much as $20,000 at building time, enough to pay for about 80 years of coal power - it is also unreliable. A solar panel captures 28% of sunlight's energy at theoretical maximum. In reality, your home's position on the globe and the variability of weather mean that you will probably need a backup system of some kind, such as wind.
Try fitting a system that requires vast, immobile panels onto a car. The Sunrayce Competition promotes the idea of solar powered vehicles, but so far the machines lag behind in reliability and power - and even are deficient in such exotic concepts as "passenger seats".
Solar power is the way to go. It's free, it's unlimited from a practical standpoint, and it's clean. But we aren't there yet.
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Would-be censors often use a "voluntary ratings system" as a beachhead. They know full well, from experience, that voluntary ratings swiftly become mandatory. No amount of sermonizing about "parental choice" can deflect the fact that parental responsibility goes deeper than glancing at a ratings label slapped on an entertainment product by a board of self-appointed busybodies.
When a ratings system is first imposed, either by a government oversight committee or by industry consent (think the MPAA), the public is soothed with the statement that compliance to the ratings is a voluntary decision on the part of the consumer. At first this is true.
But after many years, as new "responsible adults" cycle into the pool of consumers and the old, more watchful ones cycle out, the public impression of the ratings begins to shift. People forget, or never learn, what the original justification for those R, PG, and NC-17 ratings might have been. They become receptive to the idea that the content itself somehow intrinsically merits the rating.
Then the lawmakers step in.
Protest ratings systems wherever you find them. If you have concerns about the content your children, or you yourself consume, then you assume a concomitant responsibility to learn about the issues. You cannot, one the one hand, harp about a lack of informed choices, and on the other hand abdicate your responsibility to go out and make sure your choices are well informed!
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
You've said before on slashdot that TUX supports a number of usability features, although not the full complement. Could TUX have been made faster at the job of serving static pages if you had ripped out every single extraneous bit? What if TUX had been small to the point of being basically unusable in the real world, but served pages faster even than it does now?
The question is, would that have been a fair benchmark?
If your answer is No, then the followup question is, how is that materially different from what you *did* do?
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Couldn't this protocol be used to assist in cellphone spoofing? It's already well understood that most cellphones are vulnerable to eaves-dropping in the absence of encryption. What about the following scenario:
1) set up a transmitter to broadcast the "silence" command to my victim's area
2) intercept incoming calls
3) since the victim is not notified of the call, I open up on the channel and pretend to be him/her.
This was one of the reasons our old friend the Denial of Service attack was invented oh so long ago.
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
The two major distinctions between these benchmarks and the unjustly-maligned Mindcraft benchmark that were later confirmed by PC Labs:
1) these tests compare Win2k to Linux. By contrast, the Mindcraft study compared WinNT4.0 to Linux.
2) in the "Operating System" column of the Linux boxes, we see a revealing note:
Operating System: Red Hat Linux 6.2 Threaded Web Server Add-On
It seems as though RHAT has taken the trouble to render its TCP/IP stack into a multi-threaded model, rather than the forked model I understand it used to be. This was identified as the primary deficiency in the previous benchmarks.
At the time, Linux afficianados claimed that the superiority would be short lived. Assuming these stats are otherwise legit, it seems as though they were right, and in such a brief period of time as well. I'm impressed! Keep pumping out impressive turn-arounds like this one, and very soon commercial entities will have to give open source its just props as a development model.
I am slightly curious whether this "web server add-on" is available to consumers, and also whether it is a fully-featured web server. If not, and this is just a hack, that might cast a pall of illegitimacy. Anyone have the inside scoop?
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Wonderful article. I'm so glad /. still posts stuff like this occasionally.
The author mentions, enticingly, that the potential of the technology is to store 10 gigs or more in an area roughly the size of a "single gambling die". This, clearly, is a fantastic dream.
Regrettably, the real problem that the article doesn't really touch is the space and more importantly, the precision and energy, required by the laser that is needed to read and write to the medium. Just glancing at the interior of my relatively rudimentary CD-ROM drive, I can see that its mechanism consumes considerably more area than a die. And it doesn't even rely upon the sophisticated network of lenses described in the PRISM research project.
You all know how inconvenient it was/is to transport a CD player through rough terrain and expect it to work continuously. Imagine trying to get any kind of ruggedness out of this badass!
However, 10 gigs smaller than the last joint in my thumb.... yum.
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
For the life of me I don't understand the enthusiasm of analysts for the future of Sun. On the lower end, they have Linux bursting onto the scene, readily gaining acceptance in *nix shops where developers hold considerable sway. Above them on the performance scale they have Win2k, which on its debut release demonstrated dramatically higher price/performance and raw performance benchmarks on database serving than Sun has ever been able to achieve.
.NET hoopla) in which they envision millions of powerful offline devices, including PCs, handhelds, etc, that can poll services at any time from a broad selection of vendors, with no gatekeeper other than adherance to SOAP XML standards.
Atop this there is the consideration that Sun believes the future will look like the past, with millions of time-sharing clients begging for resources from massive servers. Contrast this to the view MS propounded yesterday (the
What does Sun have going for it in the long run? I see nothing apart from the fact that they have positioned themselves as the "anti-Microsoft", which sounds awfully promising when the DOJ is hovering over MS like a vulture. But really, is that the kind of world you want to live in? And is it really any kind of foundation for a company? Personally I don't think so.
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Don't be an asshole. I own a low-powered pickup truck, and I don't even drive it myself. I walk to work while my girlfriend drives the truck to her $10/hr job in West Seattle.
Our little family is precisely what the initiative was intended to target: small, not economically well-to-do, and unable to handle a $400/year fee for the privilege to sit in traffic.
Don't assume you know what you're talking about, or to whom you're talking.
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
In Washington, the state vehicle registration tax was recently reduced to a flat $30 fee. This cut millions of dollars from bus and road funding, forcing Seattle Metro to scale back some bus routes. Various other agencies are also wondering where they are going to come up with the missing cash, all because people are too greedy
This is a gross oversimplification. I live in Washington, and I voted for the citizen's initiative that reformed vehicle tabs to $30 per annum. You neglect three essential points.
1) the real motivation of the bill was to constrain future state tax increases without a majority vote from the state populace
2) the initiative was overturned in the state supreme court, and the subsequent reduction in car tabs was performed by the legislature instead
3) most of us continue to pay substantially more than $30 yearly, due to "other fees assessed". My car tab fee was $130 in bellevue.
America doesn't realize taxes are good for it.
Absolutely people understand that taxes can benefit them. However, we desire discretion over when and to what extent they are assessed. The distinction between taxation without representation and taxation by unresponsive beauracracy seems mighty small sometimes.
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
More importantly, Judge Jackson also issued a stay for the "immediate" behavioral remedies that were to be imposed within 90 days of his ruling.
This means that Microsoft, even if ultimately the appeals process does not support it, will remain unmodified and unrestricted until all appeals are exhausted. This process may take upwards of two years.
Personally I wish the SC *would* take it, so that we could get this behind us. I'm sure I'm not the only person tired of hearing about it. However, the signs are that the Appellate Court will be assigned the task of reading through the evidentiary record rather than the SC, simply as a matter of expediency.
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Even if you, like me, don't listen to much music. Even if you, like me, don't bother to pirate and have qualms about using a work against the wishes of its creator. Even if you, like me, think that sometimes people seem to enjoy the persecution and the notoriety more than the actual freedoms they claim to defend; even then you should love Napster.
The reason is that Napster has hit the public, and these lawsuits have hit the news. It has tapped at the door of consciousness for probably hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who generally wouldn't give a second thought to issues like intellectual property and who have never before really felt themselves to be on the wrong side of massively sucessful corporations. It's created conflict, and it's made people start to think about the way things are and possibly about the way they ought to be.
Napster expands the horizons of the debate! All right!
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I for one welcome this shifty, greedy maneuver. If RAMBUS does manage to corner the market on volatile RAM technologies, then the computer industry will thrash around violently looking for a way out. And it will be about time.
We've become sloppy and trained to the notion that memory should be divided into segments varying by speed, size, volatility, and cost. We all spend months in college or in the field learning about the subtle differences between L1 caching, L2 caching, main memory, hard drive memory, ROM, and the trillion variations of RAM. We don't see the forest for the trees: this model of data management is the single most crucial hindrance to the advancement of computer science in our entire industry.
I for one would love to see a technology like the magram become viable through hard research and buckets of funding. Can you imagine the virtues of a system that could boast cheap, fast, large, and non-volatile memory in one consolidated chunk?
Imagine how intelligent an OS design such as the orthogonally persistent EROS operating system would become if the distinction between disk and memory were eliminated at low cost.
So, while I fear the short term repercussions of what it would mean for a company as shoddy as RAMBUS to gain broad control over the hardware market, in the long term such a development might just shake us out of our doldrums. Which can only be a good thing.
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
As much as it pains me to say it, Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree with this software-based "intellectual property" protection mechanism. As others in the thread correctly point out, you can always intercept a transmission in the clear at some point on your machine. The packaged music or video may be owned or obfuscated by somebody else, but the output of its decryption is 100% within my control. It has to be translated, and immediately afterwards I can snag a copy. This form of protection will always fail in the long run. Its only hope is to render the cost of buying a legitimate copy less than the inconvenience of ripping the output stream. Before IP can be protected commercially (if indeed it should be) the hardware makers must collude with the owners of intellectual property. This is precisely what the MPAA is attempting to accomplish. If they own the players, then they can ensure that at no point is the clear stream electronically accessible. At best I can place a microphone in front of my speakers or try to do a video capture and re-record the output of a movie. But in either case, I will have at best a lossy copy. Personally I wish they would all just give up and go home, and stop treating a non-scarce resource like a precious, scarce one.
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I am not qualified to assess whether Corel is a creeping black cancre on open source, BUT... being a profssional tester I am regrettably over-qualified to address the tone of hostility the author assumes towards testing. He writes in part:
"Changing file types is an advanced feature, and it should not be so easily accessible from a right-click menu," said one, on June 9. "A new user could easily handicap his or her system by accidentally playing around with settings without a clear understanding of their purpose." A bug? What here isn't working as designed? Or a dumbing down of KDE? Is there a single case of any KDE user ever "handicapping his or her system" by slapdash changing of file types?
It may be that the bug database for Debian is structured in such a way as to distinguish "bugs" from "design change requests". However, the supercilious attitude this developer assumes towards a voluntary bug submission is way too common in computing. Open source projects trawling for contributors often proclaim 'if you can't code, file bugs!' but if this is the attitude a bug filed in goodwill can expect to generate, don't be suprised to see your userbase ossify out to 99% hard-core developers and only 1% or 2% OSS newbies.
It's an unfortunate fact that development often looks down upon test, not the least because QA is staffed by typically less-educated or -skilled individuals. Keep in mind, however, that without this buffer of moderately knowledgeable testers between consumers and devs with their fingers stuffed in the code, many key issues of usability and quality will be pooh-poohed right out the door. The dialogs aren't consistent? Well who gives a fuck! They work, don't they? Ship it!
When you're getting QA input for free, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
In Canadian law, at least, you have to have a reason to appeal. I don't know American law very well, but it seems (inferring from the Wired article) that that's also the case in the US. So what grounds are they using for the appeal?
Fortunately, once the appeal is filed it will become a matter of public record and all of slashdot can descend upon it like a swarm of crows on a roadkill.
If public statements of Microsoft's lawyers are any indication, the appeal will be based upon four lrge grounds:
1) the prior law established by this appeals court
2) the factual record (appealing instances of the FoF in which Microsoft claims Judge Jackson made irrational judgements and ignored evidence)
3) the legal precedent of this case in context with other antitrust rulings
4) the severity of the punishment in relation to the accusations
It will certainly be interesting. I'm waiting on tenterhooks.
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
The Apple II did the same thing
/. audience have clever pet inventions that they just don't have the time, or the skill, to make a reality? Some day someone else will have the same idea, except that they will do the grunt work of actually producing a workable copy. Guess who will deserve the credit for bringing an innovative idea into the world?
Since LCD monitors were not exactly prevalent at the time of the Apple II, and since MS Cleartype depends strictly upon the existence of a tri-bar distribution of colors that is found only in LCD's...
Let's just say that having a bright idea and actually implementing that idea are two very different things. How many people in the
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Here is the software of the guy who claims Apple figure all this out years ago. He has a demo written (idiosyncratically enough) in pure i386 assembly:
Free and Clear
However, his discussion doesn't seem nearly as complex as the one we have linked in this article. My feeling is that the idea of sub-pixel manipulation is one of those "floating revelations" that recur to more than one clever mind, but that MS Cleartype is the first practical application.
Oh, and here's the cleartype site at MS. Be sure to view it with an LCD screen - otherwise you won't get the benefit due to the triangular distribution of color spots on a CRT:
MS Reader
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I'm sorry, but I shall have to disagree with you: a file manager is NOT a HTML browser! HTML only allows 1 action per click, file browsers require many actions (open/activate, show properties, rename, etc.)
Now, integrating an FTP client into the file manager is a GOOD idea, since the operations of the two are very similar. But the differences between a browser and a file manager are too large to make them one and the same
What you don't remember is that at its roots a browser is not a means to display HTML files. It's a means to navigate remote directories, which happen to contain HTML files most of the time. Remember that the original web browsers displayed nothing more than text, and HTML was only sparsely used for decorative formatting.
A file manager is a generalized browser - when positioned as a superset of the web and FTP, it makes a great deal of sense.
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Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!