Actually there is a way that Apple could end up pissing on everyone else. One supposes that, whilst Apple may move to Intel processors, there is absolutely no reason to retain the addressing schema of the original, MS-DOS based IBM PC. This will instantly place a barrier to running Apple OS XI on "commodity" hardware.
By the time this barrier is breached, which will take a small but finite amount of time, Apple could announce that the next release of OS XI would be made Open Source.
Apple will still make money selling slick, pre-installed, working-from-the-box systems and providing telephone support {unlimited calls for paid-up users who bought the OS from Apple; premium-rate pay-as-you-go for freeloaders}. Only Microsoft have anything to lose from this.
Well, it worked on my laptop! I did have a working X server beforehand, and I did stop KDM before doing the apt-get upgrade and restart it afterward. Seems to run faster as well.
Debian stuck with the devil they knew {a pre-licence-change XFree86, with patches backported -- this was legal, as a patch is small enough for fair use exemption to apply} while getting Sarge ready for release on a dozen architectures. Now Sarge is out of the way, we can expect a flurry of activity in unstable and testing..... which will mean stable will once again get left behind.
If you want Debian on a desktop or laptop, you probably want testing.
It's perfectly safe to run as a non-root user on a box without internet connectivity! Since we are on VOIP here, and we have these nifty little phones with a switch built into each one, I can disconnect my workstation from the Intranet at anytime by pulling one plug.
What effect do you think cutting off the Internet link to Nigeria would have? These people are based all over the world nowadays, including many in Europe. Many of the spam emails seem to originate from trojanned Windows PCs.
You might try to strike back by bringing down the spam zombie PCs. This will at least make people notice they have a problem. Closing down the botnets will be good for everyone.
Someone, somewhere will find a way to hack it. They always do. Proof that it is mathematically impossible to achieve copy-prevention for movies would be a device with a connector exactly the same as the back end of a cathode ray tube. Now you can get the red, green and blue video components directly from the three grid drive signals, and the timing information from the scan coil signals. And that's all you need to recreate the picture. The sound is easy.
If you really want to stop people copying what you're selling, you have to make the original cheap enough not to be worth the effort to copy. The free CDs and DVDs they give away with newspapers, for instance -- copying a CD or DVD takes time, ties up my computer, I'd rather just buy another copy of the paper already. Come to think of it, there's the paper itself. Even if I could be bothered to walk the extra couple of kilometres to find a newsagent with a photocopier in-store, it isn't worth it to photocopy even just the stories I want. My phone has a 2MPx camera and more memory than I know what to do with, but it's still highly inconvenient for photographing newspapers. You can achieve the same effect by providing some real added value collectable items with the CD / DVD -- tilt-it-and-watch-it-change pictures, brass Rizla holders, maps, posters, or the like.
Unfortunately, I don't see a good way to apply either of these models to this system. Sending video over broadband internet will take the same amount of time for an "original" as for a copy, and you can't send collectable items down the wires!
Analogue quality loss is really a non-issue -- at least, not so much of an issue as it ever was in the days of walkman cassettes. If you take the best digital copy you can from an analogue output, it isn't going to get any worse because all future copies will be made digitally, and hence every bit as good as the "original". The only critical stage is making that first, digital copy.
For the record, my own experiments show that EP mode {4 hours on a single-layer DVD+RW} is barely distinguible from digital broadcast on a 51cm. TV and EP+ {6 hours} is still tolerable. Even an analogue copy -- made from a cheap portable player with no RGB output, just composite video via a 3.5mm jack plug and a metre of cable of a grade I wouldn't use for speech -- is fine in EP.
OK, I'll give you those. OpenOffice.org, too. But it seems to me that generally, more OSS is ported to Windows from Unix/Linux/BSD/MacOSX, than from Windows to Unix/Linux/BSD/MacOSX. It also seems to me that most Windows software is closed-source, even if it is given away gratis; and the practice of disabling features in order to extort money from users for "enhanced versions" is common.
The problem with China is NOT that it is a communist regime, but that it is a totalitarian regime. The issue is not "Will the Government seek to redistribute the wealth" {yes = communism, no = capitalism} but "are the People free to choose their leader?" {yes = democracy, no = dictatorship}. This may be incredible to someone raised in a country where free elections are the norm, but: in China, the People do not get to elect their own representatives. At all. That is beyond bad, but it is in no way the same thing as communism. Most countries have a Communist Party, but they seek power through the means of fair elections. There can be authoritarian/capitalist governments just as there can be freely-elected communist governments.
As far as I can see, all it would be likely to cost you is a second class stamp -- to send back any solicitor's letter with "ha ha" scrawled across it in red marker pen, while you got on with your business. The biggest expense you might incur would be in actually turning up to court and politely but firmly asking the judge to dismiss the case as it is without merit. That would take a morning at most. You also can't be sued for money you haven't got, so being a skint open source developer could well stand in your favour.
We would certainly not tolerate in Britain a fume-filled factory set in a surrounding of rubbish heaps, where children as young as ten had to operate an unguarded hydraulic press, and faced having their paltry wages docked for visiting the stinking pit latrine too often.
Yet we seem quite happy to allow the import of goods manufactured in just such conditions elsewhere, out of sight and out of mind, just so we can all have our mobile phones and DVD players and Tony Blair can pretend we are not working class any more.
We should have banned long ago the import of any goods produced out of accordance with the prevailing standards in the destination country with respect to employees' hygiene, safety, right to choose whether or not to belong to a trade union, waste minimisation, recycling and energy saving measures. Otherwise we're just exporting bad practice.
We should stop buying goods from China right now and only start again after the second multi-party election in a row {just to prove they are serious}. And this is not something that can be achieved by a consumer boycott, because not everything that comes out of China is destined directly for consumers: for instance, a lot of electronic components are made in China, and if one company stopped using Chinese parts they would lose out to less-scrupulous competitors who continued to do so. Government action is required to force companies not to buy from China.
On what the hell grounds can you possibly be sued, for writing a program which helps other people exercise their right to control what software is installed on their computers?
Where is the Open Source anti-adware, anti-spyware stuff? I don't see a spyware removal tool for Linux. Oh..... there wouldn't need to be one, would there? We could just comment out the spyware-ish bits before compiling, and distribute the resulting patchfile. On Gentoo, that would probably be part of the ebuild scripts. OK then, what about Open Source spyware removal for Windows?
But the point is that all the Open Source software available for Windows is there by accident. It wasn't written for Windows, it just was ported to Windows from some unix variant. Nobody writes GPL software with Windows in mind -- it's just that some Windows user manages, with more or less effort, to persuade it to compile, and is obliged by the licence to make the source available. {If anybody persuaded BSD-licenced code to compile under Windows, they probably would keep it closed-source -- and maybe even disable some options in an effort to extort money out of users}.
My computer is my property, and I have the right to determine what software runs on it. Installing software without my explicit consent is at least trespass {which is a civil offence and grounds to sue} and may constitute criminal damage {which is a crime, so dial 999 and let the police deal with it}. These things were already offences long before computer-specific legislation was passed. The use of confusing language to persuade someone to install software may additionally constitute Burglary Artifice. If it's a Crown Court, then the odds are in your favour -- out of a jury of 12 people, how likely do you think it is that none or only one have experienced PC trouble due to spyware?
You know, I often wonder what would life have been like if, way back in early 1976, some members of the Homebrew Computer Club had dragged Bill Gates {the author of that letter} into the gents' and given him a bloody good hiding. That has to be my second choice for an "if I could alter the course of history" fantasy.
Yes, it's dead easy and can be done using readily-available and household materials. You just need some graphite dust and sellotape {from your desk}, photoresist PCB board and processing chemicals {from Maplin or similar; unless electronics is considered bomb-making nowadays}, and plant gelatin {from a health food store}. Dust laptop for {presubably the rightful user's} fingerprints with graphite and lift with sellotape. {Option: enhance image electronically}. Make a printed circuit board using the fingerprint pattern. Ideally use negative working photoresist or take a negative as part of enhancing the image, though in practice negative images are acceptable to fingerprint scanners {which seem to respond to edges in blissful ignorance of actual direction}. Use PCB to cast a gelatin mould of the rightful user's fingerprint. Use artificial gelatin fingerprint {possibly on the end of your own finger} to operate scanner. In the event of a bust, it can be disposed of safely by eating {you did use plant gelatin, didn't you?}
Debian was my first distribution, and to tell the truth I found it a bit awkward. A friend helped me with the really hard stuff -- all the Unix I remembered from university was ls and rogue. I was using it at first as a simple "modem sharer", to split a dialup connection between a Windows 95 and a Windows 98 box; but also it was set up with an Apache server and cgi-bin directory, so I could try out stuff before uploading it to my web site.
Following an abortive attempt to build a dual-boot Debian/Windows 98 box {mainly aborted because I had lost the post-it note with the W98 serial number on it, it was the small hours of the morning, none of my mates were awake and I wanted it working NOW!} I ended up building a single-boot box with Mandrake 8.2.
Mandrake taught me about Linux, but I hit its limitations quickly. And I really did not like the RPM system. I think most of the packages on that box were compiled from source. I tried a newer Mandrake, which was very slick but now even more limiting; and Slackware, which was sort of good {no barriers} but left me crossing my fingers a lot; and I ended up coming back to Debian. Only this time, I went with Testing rather than Stable. I also did a Gentoo stage one install, just for the experience. I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone who may have to deal with a poorly server. The Gentoo fans are right on the mark about the Portage system, it is the dog's bollocks -- but so is APT. It's as much about the size of your package repository as anything. {Also, Gentoo's source-based distribution sidesteps neatly around the PINE licence issues.} Whichever you get used to first, is worth sticking with.
As for the Debian vs. Ubuntu bitching, what are you smoking? To all intents and purposes, Ubuntu is Debian. Perhaps a case of "too like me for me to like" ?
The whole DRM thing does not work, at all, full stop.
Suppose we are using asymmetric encryption, with encrypting key P(x) and decrypting key S(x) such that S(P(x)) = x for all reasonable x. {In this application, we don't care whether or not P(S(x)) = x. It might do, it might not. It doesn't matter.} Now the player is fed P(x) and evaluates S(P(x)) to recover x. The point is, that the function S(y) has to be stated somewhere -- either in the player or on the medium. Even if the function S(y) is hard-coded into the player, a determined hacker might well be able to determine S(y) from a sufficiently thorough inspection of the player. But since the player already evaluates S(y) by design, as long as we have P(x) then we can recover x. We don't care about determining the function P(x) {we might, if we wanted to make recordings which would play on the player; but P(x) might well be published anyway, if it is sufficiently difficult to deduce S(x) from inspection of P(x)}, only its inverse S(x) -- which we actually already know, because we have a player.
What you really need is to be able to write something on the recording medium which can be read by a legitimate player, but not by pirates. That is the ultimate solution to the problem of unauthorised copying -- but unfortunately it also happens to be impossible. Not just supremely difficult, impossible. As impossible as having two things, each of which measured the same as a third thing, but which did not measure the same as each other. And the limitation is not with present-day technology, but with the universe itself.
That's like having a mortgage on my house, and now the Bank gets my paycheck and they take their cut then hand me the rest.
And they might just as well do exactly that, to all intents and purposes. If you don't keep up the repayments on your mortgage, you'll be homeless. Usually the bank will expect your regular repayments by means of a standing order, and will even give you a current account to make sure of this.
So how about..... the Taxman gets your pay cheque, takes his cut and hands you the rest? That's exactly how it works in Britain if you work for an employer -- your income tax is deducted out of your wages before they are paid to you. It was designed to keep the Working Classes from committing tax fraud. {Obviously any money you earn not through an employer's books will be missed unless you are honest enough to declare it; but the odds are good that this is not enough to be worth chasing up.}
Of course there will be new markets, new challenges and new responses -- this potentially has as big an impact as the invention of the gramophone. The main thing is, people who love making music will keep on making it. People who make money just by transporting it about and keeping a little for themselves, on the other hand, are going to lose out.
As mentioned before, it would emulate an existing, well-documented soundcard such as the venerable SoundBlaster 16 or an onboard AC97 chip {we all know the output from onboard sound cards can vary from mediocre to dire; but the data being fed to it will be sound, no pun intended}.
Then, if they really wanted to get around it, they would have to declare every existing soundcard of the appropriate make and model obsolete -- and probably they would have to pay for everyone who has one to receive a replacement {it wouldn't be the owner's fault it suddenly stopped working}, and to have all the old ones collected for recycling {since they would be generating a lot of waste in one go and therefore automatically under obligation to have it recycled properly}.
Alternatively, there are ways to crack the software lockdown. Once you know what it's looking for and where it is looking, you can either pretend to be that, or tell it to look for what you really are. It might be easier to go for the analogue signal, though..... as I have already stated, there will be some initial quality loss from the D-A and A-D stages; but there are steps that can be taken to minimise this, and the newly-digitised copy can be copied indefinitely without loss of quality.
That's a software solution, the Windows equivalent of an rm/dev/dsp; touch/dev/dsp -type hack {Untested; but should remove the DSP device created by the sound card driver, and create a regular file in its stead}. Software solutions can be defeated if the programmer is sufficiently determined. I am talking of a hardware solution; an actual printed circuit board which plugs into a PCI slot. That would be a lot harder to detect in software, particularly if a real sound card was also fitted and generating plausible responses to anything the computer might ask it.
No - I don't want to develop a proprietary programme using Qt or MySQL. Or anything. I have enough trouble sleeping at night thanks to a certain four-legged bed invader, without that thought on my conscience.
Bypassing DRM of any description is trivial. At some stage, the digital signal must be converted to a reasonably high quality, analogue signal. This can be redigitised and now contains no DRM metadata -- just a list of numbers saying how far to move the loudspeaker cones, which can then be copied indefinitely without introducing any additional loss of quality. No DRM scheme is able to know the difference between a loudspeaker and an analogue-to-digital converter; and even if someone did find out a way, they still could not be sure that there was no microphone trained on that loudspeaker.
However, there is usually a place to get in upstream of the DAC. Since the specifications of many PC sound cards are published, it would not be difficult to make a device which sits on the computer's bus and pretends to be a sound card -- but in reality is storing the raw zeros and ones fed to it. These again are just numbers saying how far to move the speaker ones. A device like this could only be defeated by declaring entire makes and models of sound card obsolete, which would not be a popular move and might well be illegal under the WEEE directive.
As I foresee it, artists who did not belong to a collective with its own studio and producers would have to borrow money to pay for the studio and production facilities, on the strength of future album sales. {If you're going the full-on indie route, this is what you already do anyway}. This does mean bank managers will have to find someone who knows about music to determine whether or not a loan is economically viable. There might be a need for an arrangement where a lender can hold some sort of lien over the licencing fees; but that sounds too much like a centralised, bureaucratic way of working.
Anyway, record labels can well afford to swallow the investment in studio and production. People will still buy their products.
Fine, except there is no such thing as "listen once".
I invented a form of listen-once music myself, when I was eight years old, by mounting a small ceramic magnet inside the shell of a Philips Compact Cassette, downstream of the sound head.
The very same day, using two cassette recorders and a commonly-available 5-pin DIN to DIN cable, I demonstrated exactly what was wrong with such a scheme.
Everyone who makes music available for listening to, should have to publish the name and address of the copyright holder and the amount of money that you need to send to that person in order to be allowed to make a single, permanent copy of that music {i.e. on a medium which cannot be prepared for re-use using generally available equipment -- to re-use a CD, you would have to melt it down} plus an indefinite number of temporary copies. The licencing fee would be the same for any party. If any money changes hands at the time the music changes hands, and the licencing fee is to be stopped out of the transaction charge, then this must also be clearly stated.
Example: I buy a CD of Lester Norton's greatest hits for £12.50. It says in the booklet that Norton owns the copyright on all his music and the licence fee is £1.50 for the album. My friend wants a copy of the album. I make a copy of the CD, and send a postal order for £1.50 to Lester Norton. He gets his money, and my friend saves the best part of £11. Everyone is happy.
If you later try to makes proprietary verions of that GPL program, you have to strip out anything that's not your. Your back to square one.
Only if you signed over the copyright to someone else. If you are the copyright holder yourself, then you can make proprietary versions. Only nobody will buy them, because they can get a free version elswhere.
With BSD, you can makes proprietary verions of that program at any time without the need to remove anything.
Other people, meanwhile, will still be free to make free versions. Your proprietary software will still be ripped off right, left and centre. And you'll still burn in hell for selling out.
The USA blew up the World trade Centre by pissing off one person too many.
If you insult someone, and they retaliate, it's your fault. If you insult someone, they retaliate and an innocent third party suffers, it's {at least partly} your fault that that third party suffered -- because they would not have, if you had not made the original insult in the first place.
It's all about oil, or money. There isn't a lot of difference. The Arabs have oil and want money for it. The USA begrudges the amount it is paying for oil, and adds insult to injury by insisting to pay for it in US dollars -- so the Arabs have to change US dollars for local currency, at whatever exchange rate the USA chooses. The USA and UK also sell weapons to anybody who wants them.
The USA has been throwing its weight around, and the UK has been its pathetic little lap-dog, for too long. We should get our arses in gear and move ahead right now with trying to go oil-free. We're going to have to do that eventually anyway, one day -- and things are only going to get bloodier and messier for countries that insist to use oil right up to the end. So why not save ourselves the bother right now? Stop using oil, leave the Arabs alone, stay out of their messy business. And while we're at it, let's take the radical step of outlawing theism. I don't imagine for a minute that it will stop terrorists altogether, but at least they will have to be honest about their motives.
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Actually there is a way that Apple could end up pissing on everyone else. One supposes that, whilst Apple may move to Intel processors, there is absolutely no reason to retain the addressing schema of the original, MS-DOS based IBM PC. This will instantly place a barrier to running Apple OS XI on "commodity" hardware.
By the time this barrier is breached, which will take a small but finite amount of time, Apple could announce that the next release of OS XI would be made Open Source.
Apple will still make money selling slick, pre-installed, working-from-the-box systems and providing telephone support {unlimited calls for paid-up users who bought the OS from Apple; premium-rate pay-as-you-go for freeloaders}. Only Microsoft have anything to lose from this.
Well, it worked on my laptop! I did have a working X server beforehand, and I did stop KDM before doing the apt-get upgrade and restart it afterward. Seems to run faster as well.
..... which will mean stable will once again get left behind.
Debian stuck with the devil they knew {a pre-licence-change XFree86, with patches backported -- this was legal, as a patch is small enough for fair use exemption to apply} while getting Sarge ready for release on a dozen architectures. Now Sarge is out of the way, we can expect a flurry of activity in unstable and testing
If you want Debian on a desktop or laptop, you probably want testing.
It's perfectly safe to run as a non-root user on a box without internet connectivity! Since we are on VOIP here, and we have these nifty little phones with a switch built into each one, I can disconnect my workstation from the Intranet at anytime by pulling one plug.
What effect do you think cutting off the Internet link to Nigeria would have? These people are based all over the world nowadays, including many in Europe. Many of the spam emails seem to originate from trojanned Windows PCs.
You might try to strike back by bringing down the spam zombie PCs. This will at least make people notice they have a problem. Closing down the botnets will be good for everyone.
Someone, somewhere will find a way to hack it. They always do. Proof that it is mathematically impossible to achieve copy-prevention for movies would be a device with a connector exactly the same as the back end of a cathode ray tube. Now you can get the red, green and blue video components directly from the three grid drive signals, and the timing information from the scan coil signals. And that's all you need to recreate the picture. The sound is easy.
If you really want to stop people copying what you're selling, you have to make the original cheap enough not to be worth the effort to copy. The free CDs and DVDs they give away with newspapers, for instance -- copying a CD or DVD takes time, ties up my computer, I'd rather just buy another copy of the paper already. Come to think of it, there's the paper itself. Even if I could be bothered to walk the extra couple of kilometres to find a newsagent with a photocopier in-store, it isn't worth it to photocopy even just the stories I want. My phone has a 2MPx camera and more memory than I know what to do with, but it's still highly inconvenient for photographing newspapers. You can achieve the same effect by providing some real added value collectable items with the CD / DVD -- tilt-it-and-watch-it-change pictures, brass Rizla holders, maps, posters, or the like.
Unfortunately, I don't see a good way to apply either of these models to this system. Sending video over broadband internet will take the same amount of time for an "original" as for a copy, and you can't send collectable items down the wires!
Analogue quality loss is really a non-issue -- at least, not so much of an issue as it ever was in the days of walkman cassettes. If you take the best digital copy you can from an analogue output, it isn't going to get any worse because all future copies will be made digitally, and hence every bit as good as the "original". The only critical stage is making that first, digital copy.
For the record, my own experiments show that EP mode {4 hours on a single-layer DVD+RW} is barely distinguible from digital broadcast on a 51cm. TV and EP+ {6 hours} is still tolerable. Even an analogue copy -- made from a cheap portable player with no RGB output, just composite video via a 3.5mm jack plug and a metre of cable of a grade I wouldn't use for speech -- is fine in EP.
OK, I'll give you those. OpenOffice.org, too. But it seems to me that generally, more OSS is ported to Windows from Unix/Linux/BSD/MacOSX, than from Windows to Unix/Linux/BSD/MacOSX. It also seems to me that most Windows software is closed-source, even if it is given away gratis; and the practice of disabling features in order to extort money from users for "enhanced versions" is common.
The problem with China is NOT that it is a communist regime, but that it is a totalitarian regime. The issue is not "Will the Government seek to redistribute the wealth" {yes = communism, no = capitalism} but "are the People free to choose their leader?" {yes = democracy, no = dictatorship}. This may be incredible to someone raised in a country where free elections are the norm, but: in China, the People do not get to elect their own representatives. At all. That is beyond bad, but it is in no way the same thing as communism. Most countries have a Communist Party, but they seek power through the means of fair elections. There can be authoritarian/capitalist governments just as there can be freely-elected communist governments.
As far as I can see, all it would be likely to cost you is a second class stamp -- to send back any solicitor's letter with "ha ha" scrawled across it in red marker pen, while you got on with your business. The biggest expense you might incur would be in actually turning up to court and politely but firmly asking the judge to dismiss the case as it is without merit. That would take a morning at most. You also can't be sued for money you haven't got, so being a skint open source developer could well stand in your favour.
We would certainly not tolerate in Britain a fume-filled factory set in a surrounding of rubbish heaps, where children as young as ten had to operate an unguarded hydraulic press, and faced having their paltry wages docked for visiting the stinking pit latrine too often.
Yet we seem quite happy to allow the import of goods manufactured in just such conditions elsewhere, out of sight and out of mind, just so we can all have our mobile phones and DVD players and Tony Blair can pretend we are not working class any more.
We should have banned long ago the import of any goods produced out of accordance with the prevailing standards in the destination country with respect to employees' hygiene, safety, right to choose whether or not to belong to a trade union, waste minimisation, recycling and energy saving measures. Otherwise we're just exporting bad practice.
We should stop buying goods from China right now and only start again after the second multi-party election in a row {just to prove they are serious}. And this is not something that can be achieved by a consumer boycott, because not everything that comes out of China is destined directly for consumers: for instance, a lot of electronic components are made in China, and if one company stopped using Chinese parts they would lose out to less-scrupulous competitors who continued to do so. Government action is required to force companies not to buy from China.
On what the hell grounds can you possibly be sued, for writing a program which helps other people exercise their right to control what software is installed on their computers?
Amen to that.
..... there wouldn't need to be one, would there? We could just comment out the spyware-ish bits before compiling, and distribute the resulting patchfile. On Gentoo, that would probably be part of the ebuild scripts. OK then, what about Open Source spyware removal for Windows?
Where is the Open Source anti-adware, anti-spyware stuff? I don't see a spyware removal tool for Linux. Oh
But the point is that all the Open Source software available for Windows is there by accident. It wasn't written for Windows, it just was ported to Windows from some unix variant. Nobody writes GPL software with Windows in mind -- it's just that some Windows user manages, with more or less effort, to persuade it to compile, and is obliged by the licence to make the source available. {If anybody persuaded BSD-licenced code to compile under Windows, they probably would keep it closed-source -- and maybe even disable some options in an effort to extort money out of users}.
My computer is my property, and I have the right to determine what software runs on it. Installing software without my explicit consent is at least trespass {which is a civil offence and grounds to sue} and may constitute criminal damage {which is a crime, so dial 999 and let the police deal with it}. These things were already offences long before computer-specific legislation was passed. The use of confusing language to persuade someone to install software may additionally constitute Burglary Artifice. If it's a Crown Court, then the odds are in your favour -- out of a jury of 12 people, how likely do you think it is that none or only one have experienced PC trouble due to spyware?
You know, I often wonder what would life have been like if, way back in early 1976, some members of the Homebrew Computer Club had dragged Bill Gates {the author of that letter} into the gents' and given him a bloody good hiding. That has to be my second choice for an "if I could alter the course of history" fantasy.
Yes, it's dead easy and can be done using readily-available and household materials. You just need some graphite dust and sellotape {from your desk}, photoresist PCB board and processing chemicals {from Maplin or similar; unless electronics is considered bomb-making nowadays}, and plant gelatin {from a health food store}. Dust laptop for {presubably the rightful user's} fingerprints with graphite and lift with sellotape. {Option: enhance image electronically}. Make a printed circuit board using the fingerprint pattern. Ideally use negative working photoresist or take a negative as part of enhancing the image, though in practice negative images are acceptable to fingerprint scanners {which seem to respond to edges in blissful ignorance of actual direction}. Use PCB to cast a gelatin mould of the rightful user's fingerprint. Use artificial gelatin fingerprint {possibly on the end of your own finger} to operate scanner. In the event of a bust, it can be disposed of safely by eating {you did use plant gelatin, didn't you?}
References here and here.
Debian was my first distribution, and to tell the truth I found it a bit awkward. A friend helped me with the really hard stuff -- all the Unix I remembered from university was ls and rogue. I was using it at first as a simple "modem sharer", to split a dialup connection between a Windows 95 and a Windows 98 box; but also it was set up with an Apache server and cgi-bin directory, so I could try out stuff before uploading it to my web site.
Following an abortive attempt to build a dual-boot Debian/Windows 98 box {mainly aborted because I had lost the post-it note with the W98 serial number on it, it was the small hours of the morning, none of my mates were awake and I wanted it working NOW!} I ended up building a single-boot box with Mandrake 8.2.
Mandrake taught me about Linux, but I hit its limitations quickly. And I really did not like the RPM system. I think most of the packages on that box were compiled from source. I tried a newer Mandrake, which was very slick but now even more limiting; and Slackware, which was sort of good {no barriers} but left me crossing my fingers a lot; and I ended up coming back to Debian. Only this time, I went with Testing rather than Stable. I also did a Gentoo stage one install, just for the experience. I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone who may have to deal with a poorly server. The Gentoo fans are right on the mark about the Portage system, it is the dog's bollocks -- but so is APT. It's as much about the size of your package repository as anything. {Also, Gentoo's source-based distribution sidesteps neatly around the PINE licence issues.} Whichever you get used to first, is worth sticking with.
As for the Debian vs. Ubuntu bitching, what are you smoking? To all intents and purposes, Ubuntu is Debian. Perhaps a case of "too like me for me to like" ?
The whole DRM thing does not work, at all, full stop.
Suppose we are using asymmetric encryption, with encrypting key P(x) and decrypting key S(x) such that S(P(x)) = x for all reasonable x. {In this application, we don't care whether or not P(S(x)) = x. It might do, it might not. It doesn't matter.} Now the player is fed P(x) and evaluates S(P(x)) to recover x. The point is, that the function S(y) has to be stated somewhere -- either in the player or on the medium. Even if the function S(y) is hard-coded into the player, a determined hacker might well be able to determine S(y) from a sufficiently thorough inspection of the player. But since the player already evaluates S(y) by design, as long as we have P(x) then we can recover x. We don't care about determining the function P(x) {we might, if we wanted to make recordings which would play on the player; but P(x) might well be published anyway, if it is sufficiently difficult to deduce S(x) from inspection of P(x)}, only its inverse S(x) -- which we actually already know, because we have a player.
What you really need is to be able to write something on the recording medium which can be read by a legitimate player, but not by pirates. That is the ultimate solution to the problem of unauthorised copying -- but unfortunately it also happens to be impossible. Not just supremely difficult, impossible. As impossible as having two things, each of which measured the same as a third thing, but which did not measure the same as each other. And the limitation is not with present-day technology, but with the universe itself.
So how about
Of course there will be new markets, new challenges and new responses -- this potentially has as big an impact as the invention of the gramophone. The main thing is, people who love making music will keep on making it. People who make money just by transporting it about and keeping a little for themselves, on the other hand, are going to lose out.
As mentioned before, it would emulate an existing, well-documented soundcard such as the venerable SoundBlaster 16 or an onboard AC97 chip {we all know the output from onboard sound cards can vary from mediocre to dire; but the data being fed to it will be sound, no pun intended}.
..... as I have already stated, there will be some initial quality loss from the D-A and A-D stages; but there are steps that can be taken to minimise this, and the newly-digitised copy can be copied indefinitely without loss of quality.
Then, if they really wanted to get around it, they would have to declare every existing soundcard of the appropriate make and model obsolete -- and probably they would have to pay for everyone who has one to receive a replacement {it wouldn't be the owner's fault it suddenly stopped working}, and to have all the old ones collected for recycling {since they would be generating a lot of waste in one go and therefore automatically under obligation to have it recycled properly}.
Alternatively, there are ways to crack the software lockdown. Once you know what it's looking for and where it is looking, you can either pretend to be that, or tell it to look for what you really are. It might be easier to go for the analogue signal, though
That's a software solution, the Windows equivalent of an rm /dev/dsp; touch /dev/dsp -type hack {Untested; but should remove the DSP device created by the sound card driver, and create a regular file in its stead}. Software solutions can be defeated if the programmer is sufficiently determined. I am talking of a hardware solution; an actual printed circuit board which plugs into a PCI slot. That would be a lot harder to detect in software, particularly if a real sound card was also fitted and generating plausible responses to anything the computer might ask it.
No - I don't want to develop a proprietary programme using Qt or MySQL. Or anything. I have enough trouble sleeping at night thanks to a certain four-legged bed invader, without that thought on my conscience.
Bypassing DRM of any description is trivial. At some stage, the digital signal must be converted to a reasonably high quality, analogue signal. This can be redigitised and now contains no DRM metadata -- just a list of numbers saying how far to move the loudspeaker cones, which can then be copied indefinitely without introducing any additional loss of quality. No DRM scheme is able to know the difference between a loudspeaker and an analogue-to-digital converter; and even if someone did find out a way, they still could not be sure that there was no microphone trained on that loudspeaker.
However, there is usually a place to get in upstream of the DAC. Since the specifications of many PC sound cards are published, it would not be difficult to make a device which sits on the computer's bus and pretends to be a sound card -- but in reality is storing the raw zeros and ones fed to it. These again are just numbers saying how far to move the speaker ones. A device like this could only be defeated by declaring entire makes and models of sound card obsolete, which would not be a popular move and might well be illegal under the WEEE directive.
As I foresee it, artists who did not belong to a collective with its own studio and producers would have to borrow money to pay for the studio and production facilities, on the strength of future album sales. {If you're going the full-on indie route, this is what you already do anyway}. This does mean bank managers will have to find someone who knows about music to determine whether or not a loan is economically viable. There might be a need for an arrangement where a lender can hold some sort of lien over the licencing fees; but that sounds too much like a centralised, bureaucratic way of working.
Anyway, record labels can well afford to swallow the investment in studio and production. People will still buy their products.
Fine, except there is no such thing as "listen once".
I invented a form of listen-once music myself, when I was eight years old, by mounting a small ceramic magnet inside the shell of a Philips Compact Cassette, downstream of the sound head.
The very same day, using two cassette recorders and a commonly-available 5-pin DIN to DIN cable, I demonstrated exactly what was wrong with such a scheme.
Everyone who makes music available for listening to, should have to publish the name and address of the copyright holder and the amount of money that you need to send to that person in order to be allowed to make a single, permanent copy of that music {i.e. on a medium which cannot be prepared for re-use using generally available equipment -- to re-use a CD, you would have to melt it down} plus an indefinite number of temporary copies. The licencing fee would be the same for any party. If any money changes hands at the time the music changes hands, and the licencing fee is to be stopped out of the transaction charge, then this must also be clearly stated.
Example: I buy a CD of Lester Norton's greatest hits for £12.50. It says in the booklet that Norton owns the copyright on all his music and the licence fee is £1.50 for the album. My friend wants a copy of the album. I make a copy of the CD, and send a postal order for £1.50 to Lester Norton. He gets his money, and my friend saves the best part of £11. Everyone is happy.
Moral: Don't write proprietary software.
That is exactly the sort of attitude that makes people want to attack you.
The USA blew up the World trade Centre by pissing off one person too many.
If you insult someone, and they retaliate, it's your fault. If you insult someone, they retaliate and an innocent third party suffers, it's {at least partly} your fault that that third party suffered -- because they would not have, if you had not made the original insult in the first place.
It's all about oil, or money. There isn't a lot of difference. The Arabs have oil and want money for it. The USA begrudges the amount it is paying for oil, and adds insult to injury by insisting to pay for it in US dollars -- so the Arabs have to change US dollars for local currency, at whatever exchange rate the USA chooses. The USA and UK also sell weapons to anybody who wants them.
The USA has been throwing its weight around, and the UK has been its pathetic little lap-dog, for too long. We should get our arses in gear and move ahead right now with trying to go oil-free. We're going to have to do that eventually anyway, one day -- and things are only going to get bloodier and messier for countries that insist to use oil right up to the end. So why not save ourselves the bother right now? Stop using oil, leave the Arabs alone, stay out of their messy business. And while we're at it, let's take the radical step of outlawing theism. I don't imagine for a minute that it will stop terrorists altogether, but at least they will have to be honest about their motives.