It's a bad idea for many reasons to have a recognizeable net presence when you go to get a job.
Not true.
It's a bad idea to have a bad net presence when you go get a job. However, a good presence will count towards you (e.g. being helpful, and knowledgeable on technical forums such as the LKML and other FOSS mailing lists is all good when your prospective employer does some googling, assuming your prospective employer doesn't have a fundamental problem with ideas like FOSS).
I needed it for software to communicate with Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC's). The software didn't seem to work on my WinXP box and it states in the help files it won't work under emulation
But in this case simple and common SSL certificate verification would work to stop such a man-in-the-middle attack.
SSL (and other such certification systems) present a trust problem:
When I connect to Alice, she presents a certificate which is signed by Bob. This tells me that Bob has verified that Alice is who she says she is. All very good you might think... except why the hell should I trust Bob? Maybe "Alice" is really Charlie pretending to be Alice and Bob signed the certificate because Charlie paid him a whole heap of cash. Or maybe Bob just didn't actually bother to check before signing the certificate. Either way, I don't know Bob and so he hasn't earnt my trust.
In this case, Bob is someone like Verisign - a large corporation who has been paid a reasonably large amount of money by Alice. If there's one thing I've learnt it's that most large corporations are fundamentally untrustworthy, especially when they're receiving bundles of cash from someone.
This kind of trust problem is not easilly solvable (if it's actually solvable at all). One potential way to do things is have a social network - each person signs the certificates of each of their friends and assigns a "trust score" showing how strong their trust relationship is. When I want to see how trustworthy Alice is, I traverse the network if signatures between me and Alice and can calculate the end "trustworthyness" from the scores of all the interconnections in the network. The problem here is that there usually aren't that many hops between any 2 people in the network - I might trust Bob and Bob might trust Alice, even though *I* don't trust Alice.
you also need to generate lasers of the proper wavelengths.
Why do you need to use the correct wavelengths?
Blueray discs use blue lasers because the pits are smaller than the wavelength of the infrared laser used for CDs. But why would that stop you reading a CD with the blue laser? The wavelength is still smaller than the pits so all you'd be doing is seeing the pits in a higher resolution, right? (or am I missing something?)
If you do anything fairly dramatic and it doesn't come out so well, or even if you fail to have documented proof you followed the prescribed maintenance schedules, they can be right buggers when it comes to satisfying a warranty issue. They've outright said that a number of mods, such as chipping, will invalidate warranty.
But you're not going to be thrown in jail for doing this. I think this is a bad analogy anyway - in breaking a DRM system you're (probably) not modifying the original media, you're just manipulating the data you read from it. Personally I couldn't care less if they told me I would void the warranty on a DVD by cracking the DRM - I have plenty of other products that I voided the warranty on as soon as I got them (to name a few: I flashed my wireless access point with WhiteRussian and I chipped my old PlayStation)
Best that we don't store literary classics strictly digitally. Unless of course, the underlying medium is some sort of diamond platter or something.
Storing stuff digitally is fine, even on a medium that degrades over time. You just have to make sure you copy it onto a new medium before the old one starts (unrecoverably) losing data. Infact this is better than analogue in this respect because: - Analogue media still degrade, but you have no error correction data (so *any* degredation shows up in the playback) - It's quite difficult to quantify the degredation of analogue media *because* you have no error detection system. Digital media usually contain checksums which will allow you to quantify how much degredation has occurred - You lose quality every time you copy analogue media.
delay my purchase until the next must-have technology arrives (next-gen DRM'd digital inputs/outputs
IMHO you can pretty much ignore DRM'd inputs - so many people have recently bought shiny new, expensive TVs which have no support for DRM I don't think the movie/tv industry will have a hope in hell of enforcing DRM until those TVs have reached the end of their natural life (10 - 15 years at the earliest).
Screw 'em. I'm building my own PVR/media center PC.
I run MythTV, which is great (the feature set is way better than Sky+). Sadly I can't receive any of Sky's encrypted channels directly from the sat dish - they have to come through the Sky decoder and get captured and reencoded from the S-video signal, all because noone has the balls to force Sky into selling a CAM. (Yes, I'm aware there are some illegal CAMs which can decode VideoGuard signals - they cost a fortune). Oh, Sky also won't give me access to the AC3 audio unless I pay them for a Sky+ PVR so I'm stuck with normal stereo.
On the other hand, if anyone knows where I can download a soft CAM that'll work under Linux and decrypt VideoGuard streams, I'm all ears...
DRM wars (they're all just added to each other, not which one's the best)
Multiple DRM systems is certainly a problem though - for example, if you want to watch several satellite channels which use different encryption, you need a CAM for each type of encryption. Either you have a sat receiver that accepts multiple CAMs or you have to fiddle around swapping them when you change channels. Not to mention the trouble caused by things like VideoGuard because the owners (Sky) refuse to actually sell a CAM, resulting in the need for a whole separate *receiver* for every type of encryption - absolute crazyness.
HD wars (each has its own pros and cons)
This isn't really a format war - it's simply a choice of compatable equipment. With a given TV stream you can use a CRT, DLP projector, plasma screen, TFT, etc - they're all compatable with the TV stream so this isn't a problem, people get to choose whichever they want. It's not as if you're locked into a particular service because of your choice of display technology.
DVR wars (market competition)
IMHO this is actually starting to become a bit of a problem because of bundling - with every service provider bundling their own hardware as part of the service, the businesses that create independent PVRs are left out in the cold. Exclude bundling and you open up a whole market to competition and that's good for the consumer - competition breeds both innovation and lower prices.
DVDs have macrovision
A slight correction - DVD *players* often do Macrovision, not DVDs themselves.
Still, if our intelligence services are worth anything anymore I'll be we can turn off Galileo if we want, if it's really that big a deal.
At the end of the day, you just have to destroy the sats (this applies to GPS too). However, if the US decided to shutdown a system like Gallileo by force I suspect it would be considered an act of war. I doubt the US really wants to get into a shooting match with europe, not least because it would almost certainly lose (the US has pissed off so many people recently, if it started a war with europe, people like China would probably join the fight).
I would venture to say that disabling GPS, at this point, would cause more economic damage in the short term than a medium-sized war.
I dare say that turning off or seriously degrading GPS would cause a few deaths too. That said, it wouldn't be the first stupid thing governments and millitaries have done. I would much prefer to get my positining data from a variety of sources, not just a single millitary system, that way no one organisation could decide to pull the plug. Also, ESA aren't millitary, so using Gallileo would make me feel much happier.
you don't really "jam" global satellite transmissions.
What you do is remotely disable or degrade them at the source, which is what all this is about: who has the authority and ability to do just that.
Despite NAVSTAR's ability to do selective availability, this has been turned off since 2000 (although only a fool would trust it could never be turned back on). Selective availability affects the whole GPS system, not just a localised area so the millitaries now favour localised jamming. Besides, it had got to the point where selective availability is next to useless over a large chunk of the planet because anyone who cares has access to DGPS or SBAS data which easilly corrects the artificial errors.
The EU may have granted the United States the power to turn off Galileo
That's not what I said - I said the EU had given into US demands and modified the system so it is easilly jammable. As far as I know (I damned well hope!) the US doesn't have the ability to actually control the service itself, just interfere with it in a localised area.
It is not the geographically data itself that they get copyright on (or no one else could maka map of an area were you have copyright on your map).
Of course someone could make a map of the same area - they just have to collect their own data instead of ripping off someone else's data (or licence the existing data).
Anyone is free to make their own map (or whatever) based on the information on someone else map.
Certainly not the case here in the UK - if you want to use the Ordinance Survey's data then you have to pay them for it, you can't just rip it off and use it for your own maps. I'm surprised if this isn't the same in the US - someone has gone to a lot of effort to collect the data, why should you automatically get it for free?
No, the US doesn't like the Euro Gallileo, because as far as we know, they lack the ability to block, or change the signal.
This is not true (anymore). ISTR the sequence of events went something like:
EU announced Gallileo
US started complaining that they didn't see why the EU wanted to do this since there was an already perfectly good GPS system in operation.
EU pointed out that NAVSTAR is under the control of the US millitary and they didn't trust the US not to turn it off or "adjust" it
US said that this would never happen and the EU should just use GPS
Some time later it was obvious the EU had ignored the US "recommendation" and continued working on Gallileo so the US then made a lot of fuss about how it would be bad because the US wouldn't have control of it and thus couldn't block it (strange - isn't that what they said they would never do?). Lots of words like "terrorism" were thrown around.
EU caved and modified Gallileo so that the US (and anyone else for that matter) could easilly block it.
Now personally, I think this is a very Bad Thing - if I'm using a global positioning system for safety critical purposes I want it to be as damned bulletproof as possible, I don't want it purposefully designed to be easilly jammable just to please a paranoid foreign government.
It's not really intended to be security anyway - everyone knows the normal NAVSTAR, WAAS and EGNOS PRNs (you have to in order to use the services) - the PRNs are used to differentiate between individual satellites, which all transmit on the same frequencies. I guess they just decided not to publish the Galileo PRNs until they'd got further into the project.
You draw a big distinction between 'good for business' and 'morale'. If morale is not based on business success then what is it based on?
You can be in the most successful business in the world, but if your job sucks and is a constant battle against upper management then your morale is going to be in the toilet. Money don't buy happyness.
Law enforcement and consumer groups said over and over not to give out sensitive information unless you placed the call yourself
Unfortunately many companies assume that people will ignore this advice anyway - I have been phoned before now by my cellphone provider who ask me to authenticate myself by giving them my passphrase and date of birth when I pick up the call. Of course I refuse since there's no way for me to authenticate them first - and that leaves them a bit stumped.
Perhaps losing customers might encourage companies to start signing official emails.
AFAIK PayPal say they will never send you an email, so I'm not sure how signing the non-existant emails is going to help. Do you really think the average victim of a phishing scam is going to check the signature?
Digital networks use physically separated medium for call control and signalling, and you won't get access to that medium without crowbar and selected location to crack at. And those locations are usually monitored 24/7.
The SS7 network is certainly not built with security in mind - once you've gained access to a system connected to the SS7 net you've got a pretty free reign. Pretty much any large VoIP gateway will have an SS7 connection on one side and an internet connection on the other so crack one of them and you're sorted. Not to mention all the SIGTRAN enabled equipment that some moron has decided to plug into an unfirewalled internet connection.
That said, I suspect the worst you'd be able to do is spoof a few calls, send a few SMS messages and add a few records to the billing systems.
Besides, there are much easier ways of getting an anonymous DDI - just use one of the many PSTN-%gt;SIP gateways.
there is usually an abundance of low paying jobs..
And if you're encouraging a group of people to work are you going to tell them "hey, if you work you can have excellent job satisfaction cleaning the toilets for 2 peanuts a month"? No - they're going to want to take the highly paid jobs. The reason there is an abundance of crumby low paid jobs is because noone wants them. Really we should be putting criminals to work doing the jobs noone wants instead of using tax payer's money to keep them fed and housed in jail.
Here again, somebody has to decide which packets are worthy of immediate delivery and which ones are not. It is very difficult to distinguish between your first and second cases. I might be in desperate need of a piece of software for my business that is accessible via bittorrent, but have to wait for it because of gamers, who are using the network for recreation.
Well for starters, I'd suggest that for business purposes you should have a business account and your ISP could (hopefully) shape the traffic more toward business needs, whereas "home user" accounts could be shaped more towards games.
But remember - your bittorrent will still work, albeit possibly at a slightly reduced speed - without the shaping things like VoIP could be rendered *completely* useless.
Under your "bad" scenario I would at least have the option of paying for less latency.
Probably not - much of the anti-neutrality stuff is basically ISPs wanting to charge content providers. So you might complain that you can't access google fast enough, but there's nothing you can do because Google has refused to pay the money the ISP is trying to extort from them.
Similarly, lets say your ISP runs their own VoIP service, so they downgrade the connection to all 3rd party VoIP services - there's probably nothing you can do about this other than change to a different ISP (who's probably doing exactly the same thing to promote their own services). This is very much akin to Microsoft killing competition by bundling software with Windows - in a way it's worse because at least MS don't actually stop you using the alternatives.
With unemployment on the rise, is it really a good idea to be encouraging more people to try and get jobs? There aren't enough jobs as it is...
I'm not "anti-women-working", I'm just being practical - having 1 bread-winner per family is better than having some families where both partners work whilest other families have both partners out of work.
The unemployment problem can be reduced by reducing the number of hours each person works and increasing the number of employees, but I imagine that would screw with the economy rather a lot:)
In which case you could still use a virtualization tool to virtualize the video-playback OS, and then grab the screenshots from that.
Isn't this the point of having DRM hardware? My understanding is:
1. Read encrypted content off bluray disc 2. The media player software decrypts the content and shoves it at the display driver with a "DRM flag" set 3. The display driver encrypts it and sends it to the graphics card 4. The graphics card decrypts it, re-encrypts it with HDCP and shoves it at the monitor 5. The monitor decrypts it and displays it.
So the weak points are the media player, the display driver and the monitor.
If you ran it inside a VM then you would either have to emulate the graphics card (almost impossible because you'd need the graphics card's encryption keys to convince the driver to talk to you) or let it talk to a real graphics card and intercept the stream (which would be encrypted, so completely useless).
The assumptions the industry is making are basically: 1. The media player is trusted since only trusted players can licence the bluray decryption keys (we saw how well that worked with DVDs - I play them regularly on Xine) 2. The display driver is trusted - this might be the case if you only trust signed drivers. 3. The monitor is trusted to not have a "decrypted output"
In any case, the easy way to grab bluray content at the moment is to decrypt the HDCP stream, since HDCP has already been cracked. I don't hold out much hope for the media players remaining trusted for too long - putting any kind of DRM system in the hands of a large number of suitably motivated techies is going to result in it being cracked reasonably quickly.
Until bluray/hddvd has been cracked there's no way I'll be buying movies in those formats anyway - DRM is fundamentally incompatable with FOSS media players, and if the MPAA thinks I'll be putting any closed source software from them on my system they're very mistaken - after things like the Sony incident I really wouldn't trust software from that industry unless it could be audited by the public. (Not to mention that I have no HDCP capable hardware and have no intention of buying any any time soon).
Slashdot Mirror
It's a bad idea for many reasons to have a recognizeable net presence when you go to get a job.
Not true.
It's a bad idea to have a bad net presence when you go get a job. However, a good presence will count towards you (e.g. being helpful, and knowledgeable on technical forums such as the LKML and other FOSS mailing lists is all good when your prospective employer does some googling, assuming your prospective employer doesn't have a fundamental problem with ideas like FOSS).
I needed it for software to communicate with Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC's). The software didn't seem to work on my WinXP box and it states in the help files it won't work under emulation
Did you try WINE?
But in this case simple and common SSL certificate verification would work to stop such a man-in-the-middle attack.
SSL (and other such certification systems) present a trust problem:
When I connect to Alice, she presents a certificate which is signed by Bob. This tells me that Bob has verified that Alice is who she says she is. All very good you might think... except why the hell should I trust Bob? Maybe "Alice" is really Charlie pretending to be Alice and Bob signed the certificate because Charlie paid him a whole heap of cash. Or maybe Bob just didn't actually bother to check before signing the certificate. Either way, I don't know Bob and so he hasn't earnt my trust.
In this case, Bob is someone like Verisign - a large corporation who has been paid a reasonably large amount of money by Alice. If there's one thing I've learnt it's that most large corporations are fundamentally untrustworthy, especially when they're receiving bundles of cash from someone.
This kind of trust problem is not easilly solvable (if it's actually solvable at all). One potential way to do things is have a social network - each person signs the certificates of each of their friends and assigns a "trust score" showing how strong their trust relationship is. When I want to see how trustworthy Alice is, I traverse the network if signatures between me and Alice and can calculate the end "trustworthyness" from the scores of all the interconnections in the network. The problem here is that there usually aren't that many hops between any 2 people in the network - I might trust Bob and Bob might trust Alice, even though *I* don't trust Alice.
'Needing my internet fix' however, I believe doesn't fall under any protected class at this time.
:)
You could probably start a religion requiring Internet access though
you also need to generate lasers of the proper wavelengths.
Why do you need to use the correct wavelengths?
Blueray discs use blue lasers because the pits are smaller than the wavelength of the infrared laser used for CDs. But why would that stop you reading a CD with the blue laser? The wavelength is still smaller than the pits so all you'd be doing is seeing the pits in a higher resolution, right? (or am I missing something?)
If you do anything fairly dramatic and it doesn't come out so well, or even if you fail to have documented proof you followed the prescribed maintenance schedules, they can be right buggers when it comes to satisfying a warranty issue. They've outright said that a number of mods, such as chipping, will invalidate warranty.
But you're not going to be thrown in jail for doing this. I think this is a bad analogy anyway - in breaking a DRM system you're (probably) not modifying the original media, you're just manipulating the data you read from it. Personally I couldn't care less if they told me I would void the warranty on a DVD by cracking the DRM - I have plenty of other products that I voided the warranty on as soon as I got them (to name a few: I flashed my wireless access point with WhiteRussian and I chipped my old PlayStation)
Best that we don't store literary classics strictly digitally. Unless of course, the underlying medium is some sort of diamond platter or something.
Storing stuff digitally is fine, even on a medium that degrades over time. You just have to make sure you copy it onto a new medium before the old one starts (unrecoverably) losing data. Infact this is better than analogue in this respect because:
- Analogue media still degrade, but you have no error correction data (so *any* degredation shows up in the playback)
- It's quite difficult to quantify the degredation of analogue media *because* you have no error detection system. Digital media usually contain checksums which will allow you to quantify how much degredation has occurred
- You lose quality every time you copy analogue media.
delay my purchase until the next must-have technology arrives (next-gen DRM'd digital inputs/outputs
IMHO you can pretty much ignore DRM'd inputs - so many people have recently bought shiny new, expensive TVs which have no support for DRM I don't think the movie/tv industry will have a hope in hell of enforcing DRM until those TVs have reached the end of their natural life (10 - 15 years at the earliest).
Screw 'em. I'm building my own PVR/media center PC.
I run MythTV, which is great (the feature set is way better than Sky+). Sadly I can't receive any of Sky's encrypted channels directly from the sat dish - they have to come through the Sky decoder and get captured and reencoded from the S-video signal, all because noone has the balls to force Sky into selling a CAM. (Yes, I'm aware there are some illegal CAMs which can decode VideoGuard signals - they cost a fortune). Oh, Sky also won't give me access to the AC3 audio unless I pay them for a Sky+ PVR so I'm stuck with normal stereo.
On the other hand, if anyone knows where I can download a soft CAM that'll work under Linux and decrypt VideoGuard streams, I'm all ears...
DRM wars (they're all just added to each other, not which one's the best)
Multiple DRM systems is certainly a problem though - for example, if you want to watch several satellite channels which use different encryption, you need a CAM for each type of encryption. Either you have a sat receiver that accepts multiple CAMs or you have to fiddle around swapping them when you change channels. Not to mention the trouble caused by things like VideoGuard because the owners (Sky) refuse to actually sell a CAM, resulting in the need for a whole separate *receiver* for every type of encryption - absolute crazyness.
HD wars (each has its own pros and cons)
This isn't really a format war - it's simply a choice of compatable equipment. With a given TV stream you can use a CRT, DLP projector, plasma screen, TFT, etc - they're all compatable with the TV stream so this isn't a problem, people get to choose whichever they want. It's not as if you're locked into a particular service because of your choice of display technology.
DVR wars (market competition)
IMHO this is actually starting to become a bit of a problem because of bundling - with every service provider bundling their own hardware as part of the service, the businesses that create independent PVRs are left out in the cold. Exclude bundling and you open up a whole market to competition and that's good for the consumer - competition breeds both innovation and lower prices.
DVDs have macrovision
A slight correction - DVD *players* often do Macrovision, not DVDs themselves.
Still, if our intelligence services are worth anything anymore I'll be we can turn off Galileo if we want, if it's really that big a deal.
At the end of the day, you just have to destroy the sats (this applies to GPS too). However, if the US decided to shutdown a system like Gallileo by force I suspect it would be considered an act of war. I doubt the US really wants to get into a shooting match with europe, not least because it would almost certainly lose (the US has pissed off so many people recently, if it started a war with europe, people like China would probably join the fight).
I would venture to say that disabling GPS, at this point, would cause more economic damage in the short term than a medium-sized war.
I dare say that turning off or seriously degrading GPS would cause a few deaths too. That said, it wouldn't be the first stupid thing governments and millitaries have done. I would much prefer to get my positining data from a variety of sources, not just a single millitary system, that way no one organisation could decide to pull the plug. Also, ESA aren't millitary, so using Gallileo would make me feel much happier.
you don't really "jam" global satellite transmissions.
Yes, you do
What you do is remotely disable or degrade them at the source, which is what all this is about: who has the authority and ability to do just that.
Despite NAVSTAR's ability to do selective availability, this has been turned off since 2000 (although only a fool would trust it could never be turned back on). Selective availability affects the whole GPS system, not just a localised area so the millitaries now favour localised jamming. Besides, it had got to the point where selective availability is next to useless over a large chunk of the planet because anyone who cares has access to DGPS or SBAS data which easilly corrects the artificial errors.
The EU may have granted the United States the power to turn off Galileo
That's not what I said - I said the EU had given into US demands and modified the system so it is easilly jammable. As far as I know (I damned well hope!) the US doesn't have the ability to actually control the service itself, just interfere with it in a localised area.
It is not the geographically data itself that they get copyright on (or no one else could maka map of an area were you have copyright on your map).
Of course someone could make a map of the same area - they just have to collect their own data instead of ripping off someone else's data (or licence the existing data).
Anyone is free to make their own map (or whatever) based on the information on someone else map.
Certainly not the case here in the UK - if you want to use the Ordinance Survey's data then you have to pay them for it, you can't just rip it off and use it for your own maps. I'm surprised if this isn't the same in the US - someone has gone to a lot of effort to collect the data, why should you automatically get it for free?
This is not true (anymore). ISTR the sequence of events went something like:
Now personally, I think this is a very Bad Thing - if I'm using a global positioning system for safety critical purposes I want it to be as damned bulletproof as possible, I don't want it purposefully designed to be easilly jammable just to please a paranoid foreign government.
navigation data is not, and cannot be, copyrighted.
I think the cartographers would beg to differ on this count.
It's really security by obscurity.
It's not really intended to be security anyway - everyone knows the normal NAVSTAR, WAAS and EGNOS PRNs (you have to in order to use the services) - the PRNs are used to differentiate between individual satellites, which all transmit on the same frequencies. I guess they just decided not to publish the Galileo PRNs until they'd got further into the project.
You draw a big distinction between 'good for business' and 'morale'. If morale is not based on business success then what is it based on?
You can be in the most successful business in the world, but if your job sucks and is a constant battle against upper management then your morale is going to be in the toilet. Money don't buy happyness.
Law enforcement and consumer groups said over and over not to give out sensitive information unless you placed the call yourself
Unfortunately many companies assume that people will ignore this advice anyway - I have been phoned before now by my cellphone provider who ask me to authenticate myself by giving them my passphrase and date of birth when I pick up the call. Of course I refuse since there's no way for me to authenticate them first - and that leaves them a bit stumped.
Perhaps losing customers might encourage companies to start signing official emails.
AFAIK PayPal say they will never send you an email, so I'm not sure how signing the non-existant emails is going to help. Do you really think the average victim of a phishing scam is going to check the signature?
Digital networks use physically separated medium for call control and signalling, and you won't get access to that medium without crowbar and selected location to crack at. And those locations are usually monitored 24/7.
The SS7 network is certainly not built with security in mind - once you've gained access to a system connected to the SS7 net you've got a pretty free reign. Pretty much any large VoIP gateway will have an SS7 connection on one side and an internet connection on the other so crack one of them and you're sorted. Not to mention all the SIGTRAN enabled equipment that some moron has decided to plug into an unfirewalled internet connection.
That said, I suspect the worst you'd be able to do is spoof a few calls, send a few SMS messages and add a few records to the billing systems.
Besides, there are much easier ways of getting an anonymous DDI - just use one of the many PSTN-%gt;SIP gateways.
there is usually an abundance of low paying jobs..
And if you're encouraging a group of people to work are you going to tell them "hey, if you work you can have excellent job satisfaction cleaning the toilets for 2 peanuts a month"? No - they're going to want to take the highly paid jobs. The reason there is an abundance of crumby low paid jobs is because noone wants them. Really we should be putting criminals to work doing the jobs noone wants instead of using tax payer's money to keep them fed and housed in jail.
There are *WAY* more than enough jobs.
This very much depends on what field you're working in
Just because your country's leaders are flushing your economy down the toilet, don't assume that everybody else is in the same boat.
And what country are you in?
Here again, somebody has to decide which packets are worthy of immediate delivery and which ones are not. It is very difficult to distinguish between your first and second cases. I might be in desperate need of a piece of software for my business that is accessible via bittorrent, but have to wait for it because of gamers, who are using the network for recreation.
Well for starters, I'd suggest that for business purposes you should have a business account and your ISP could (hopefully) shape the traffic more toward business needs, whereas "home user" accounts could be shaped more towards games.
But remember - your bittorrent will still work, albeit possibly at a slightly reduced speed - without the shaping things like VoIP could be rendered *completely* useless.
Under your "bad" scenario I would at least have the option of paying for less latency.
Probably not - much of the anti-neutrality stuff is basically ISPs wanting to charge content providers. So you might complain that you can't access google fast enough, but there's nothing you can do because Google has refused to pay the money the ISP is trying to extort from them.
Similarly, lets say your ISP runs their own VoIP service, so they downgrade the connection to all 3rd party VoIP services - there's probably nothing you can do about this other than change to a different ISP (who's probably doing exactly the same thing to promote their own services). This is very much akin to Microsoft killing competition by bundling software with Windows - in a way it's worse because at least MS don't actually stop you using the alternatives.
we're not facing a global extinction event...
Yet...
Statistically an extinction level event *will* happen in the future. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in half a million years, noone knows.
allow women (or encourage women) to work.
:)
With unemployment on the rise, is it really a good idea to be encouraging more people to try and get jobs? There aren't enough jobs as it is...
I'm not "anti-women-working", I'm just being practical - having 1 bread-winner per family is better than having some families where both partners work whilest other families have both partners out of work.
The unemployment problem can be reduced by reducing the number of hours each person works and increasing the number of employees, but I imagine that would screw with the economy rather a lot
In which case you could still use a virtualization tool to virtualize the video-playback OS, and then grab the screenshots from that.
Isn't this the point of having DRM hardware? My understanding is:
1. Read encrypted content off bluray disc
2. The media player software decrypts the content and shoves it at the display driver with a "DRM flag" set
3. The display driver encrypts it and sends it to the graphics card
4. The graphics card decrypts it, re-encrypts it with HDCP and shoves it at the monitor
5. The monitor decrypts it and displays it.
So the weak points are the media player, the display driver and the monitor.
If you ran it inside a VM then you would either have to emulate the graphics card (almost impossible because you'd need the graphics card's encryption keys to convince the driver to talk to you) or let it talk to a real graphics card and intercept the stream (which would be encrypted, so completely useless).
The assumptions the industry is making are basically:
1. The media player is trusted since only trusted players can licence the bluray decryption keys (we saw how well that worked with DVDs - I play them regularly on Xine)
2. The display driver is trusted - this might be the case if you only trust signed drivers.
3. The monitor is trusted to not have a "decrypted output"
In any case, the easy way to grab bluray content at the moment is to decrypt the HDCP stream, since HDCP has already been cracked. I don't hold out much hope for the media players remaining trusted for too long - putting any kind of DRM system in the hands of a large number of suitably motivated techies is going to result in it being cracked reasonably quickly.
Until bluray/hddvd has been cracked there's no way I'll be buying movies in those formats anyway - DRM is fundamentally incompatable with FOSS media players, and if the MPAA thinks I'll be putting any closed source software from them on my system they're very mistaken - after things like the Sony incident I really wouldn't trust software from that industry unless it could be audited by the public. (Not to mention that I have no HDCP capable hardware and have no intention of buying any any time soon).