If you're so partial to MP3s of crappy conglomorate controlled music use a site that doesn't DRM their music and also distributes it cheap (allofmp3.com).
If you're interested in ending the stranglehold on your music that the conglomorates have on you I suggest finding alternative ways to get your music legally and for free. Support the bands that support the free distribution of their music (bt.etree.org, easytree.org, FurthurNET, etc).
Stop worrying about how you are going to be able to listen to your crappy quality music forever and switch to allofmp3's non-DRM, high quality downloads, or switch to free music that's encoded typically in FLAC.
The fact is that you cannot command a person to work for eight (if they're lucky) solid hours. Or as Scott Kirwin put it in the article, "Managers [have] lost sight that workers are real people, not robots."
You have never worked in a call center have you? They have supervised slave labor down to a science. Outside of taking advantage of 3 minute leeway for phone logins and clock punches there was very little time available for screwing off.
They had all the computers locked down, no applications installed other than those you needed for your job, remote screenshot ability, and apparently an alert when you were surfing on a page other than the ones that were permitted.
You were scored on your performance and adherence to the time schedule.
This is another step toward an accepted and democratized dictatorship, think of it, soon the US will be the only place on earth where people will elect their dictator... isn't democracy great!
There are plenty of other places where people "elect" their dictator. Here we were happy to elect someone who has put people in positions of power that errode our freedoms.
People don't consider the President and his cabinet to be doing anything wrong. They want to be told what to do and how to do it. Freedom is them being able to change the channel on conglomorate controlled cable and go to a restaurant that serves an identical menu to the one next door but has different names for the entres.
Democracy *IS* great. Fascism, facilitated and welcomed by the willing public, is not so great.
Can you imagine the huge amount of processing that would be required to apply DRM server-side instead, which I should imagine is the only way to prevent the use of this method?
Would it be any different than allofmp3 encoding media into FLAC, OGG, WMA before piping it down to you?
I can't imagine that they keep 100% of their music library encoded in all the formats they have available (and I know for a fact that they don't) so how would it be any different?
It's not exactly as if iTMS songs are all that large anyway. We aren't talking about high quality sound files like FLAC. FLAC takes a LONG time to encode (well I don't have the fastest machine ever but still).
If they really wanted to stop this crap that's what they would do but the only people that really care about the DRM is the RIAA. Apple just wants to sell iPods.
Oh you can boot Linux but you won't be using it in any useful way. IIS will dominate the webservers in the world because their's will run on the "secure global information network".
Linux will fall into worthless obscurity because it will run on one of the various unsecure networks that the majority of computer users will never "want" to see. After all the only people that use unsecure computing are terrorists and those that are against the RIAA/MPAA/MSFT/GOV metroplex.
You are just as confused as everyone else. Microsoft dominates the computing world. They will dictate (via proxy through the masses of users that utilize their OS/software) which global network will prevail under "secure computing".
Don't want to interoperate with the rest of the secure users out there? Don't use hardware that is tied to THE secure OS.
At the time, digital-rights advocates raised concerns that the technology could be used by software makers and media companies to control people's PCs, putting Microsoft on the defensive. The dispute even led the software giant to change the name of its technology from Palladium to the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, or NGSCB.
And yes, we all know that now that the name of their security technology is different Microsoft can't "team up" with the hardware makers to lock down PCs to a single OS. It wouldn't be in the best interests of either side to do that right? Oh wait, MSFT already has contractual agreements that basically force this to happen why not take it a step further and make people not only pay extra for the OS pre-installed/distributed w/the PC but also make them have no choice but to run it once they get it.
I love the wording in the article... Oooh it's the hardware vendors taking the initiative and not Microsoft (like Microsoft is always at the forefront of technology or something). Is that supposed to make me feel better that the entire computing platform will be locked down leading to the end of free distribution of anything, the Internet as we know it, etc?
Didn't Ben Franklin say something about this? Yeah.
To add to this... If this became the future of "TV" then people could keep high quality shows with the "nitty gritty work" behind the show driving it rather than moronic ratings from l4m3rz that want drama instead of real action.
Melissa - Dating Brian Sandro requires patience, but even Melissa's substantial reserves are tapped by her boyfriend's secrecy and late nights in front of the computer.
I wouldn't exactly use the word "tapped" here. Maybe if she would put out more he would be tapping her;)
Why do we always have to start out w/cool shows that get into the nitty gritty of work and then branch out into situational drama soaps?
It happens with all the shows (ER, Baywatch, CSI, Without a Trace). They start out showing the real work behind the topic the show covers and after two seasons they show the work behind the work where everyone is a backstabbing bitch that fucks everyone else.
In Two-factor authentication, the authorization is based at two levels.
1. An authorized user would carry a physical token (swipe card or similar). 2. The user will have to further authenticate his identity by punching in the correct password associated with the physical token.
In addition to two layers of protection, if the token is lost it can be immediately invalidated and the risk of security is less than with a single password authentication scheme.
For a general OS I don't think this is a necessity. An option? Sure.
a special rubber for good click feel, and the distinctive peanut shape.
Besides the obvious juvenile jokes about that sentence taken out of context I really don't see the remote as being all that great when using it with a system that is rather slow.
Great, so the remote has a "click" feel. Does that help me to know that I actually did engage the button when the Guide takes 5+ seconds to refresh (yes, it is much better now that they 7.0+ series update came out but it still sucks)? Or when I click the TiVo button at the top is it supposed to let me know that I can wait up to 10 seconds for the main menu to show up from live TV?
Yeah, the remove is nice and easy to use. It even looks good but it is certainly not making up for the lack of speedy internal hardware.
What losers! Comcast's millions of customers could save so much money if they just built their own MythTV boxes from the spare computer parts they all have lying around their houses. I mean, it's the way I decided to do it, so it must therefore be the best possible solution for everyone on the planet!
While MythTV is great for those people that are Linux/computer savvy it's not so great for people that just want shit to work...
When I say "work" I mean when the powersupply goes someone comes out to the house in a truck, gives you a new box, and turns it back on to make sure it is recording again for you. It also means that there was no setup involved for the end user. Nothing needed to be done other than plugging it into their RCA/s-video jacks and hitting power. It means that if for whatever reason a serious issue comes about it will either be automagically updated (like my TiVo is) or it will be replaced by that same nice truck driving tech that replaced the one w/the burned powersupply.
Yes, MythTV is a great thing for the power users (and it may even be good for people that aren't "power"users but still are somewhat savvy). What TiVo is great for is people that just don't want to fuck around with that crap.
Just so you know I wouldn't have a single problem setting up MythTV. I don't use it because it's too much work and TiVo just works.
He doesn't even come close to implying that in your quote. He says that bittorrent might be just the thing that enables the studios to utilize the web.
I never said he did but I'll try to clarify because apparently I wasn't clear.
I'm putting words into the mouth of the MPAA when I say that. They are, afterall, the ones that attempt to shame us out of downloading movies because it hurts everyone involved.
If the MPAA allows people to download movies that would end the need for the big screen! People would lose their jobs and there wouldn't be a place that you could blow $25/night to see something that will be out in 6 weeks or less on DVD.
What better way to save bandwidth - the single killer cost when each film might sum a gigabyte - than by having the box download the film using a restricted version of bittorrent, and use a proportion of the available upstream bandwidth on the local connection to supply other people renting the same film? As the file's encrypted piracy wouldn't be a concern as the key to play it would only be issued by the central server, over an encrypted channel.
What better way to waste my money than to require me to pay for an Internet connection to download a movie that I paid for! Not only that but I don't get it instantaneously and I have to slow down the rest of my home network while maxing my upstream helping the content distributer not spend so much on bandwith costs.
This would have the effect - exactly opposite to a DVD-rental shop - that popular videos would be available more quickly than rarely demanded ones. The system has the same priorities as the company behind it.
More quickly? You haven't been to a large video chain recenty have you? I have never had a problem getting a "new" movie. In fact, I have a harder problem getting something that isn't "new". They have racks and racks of their latest releases and only one or two copies of the older stuff.
If I can't get it at Blockbuster I can walk across the street to Hollywood and get it there.
Not that I don't recognize that BitTorrent is currently used for many legitimate applications (whereas that was extremely difficult to argue with a straight face with P2P), but I think this statement is a little overboard. I'd say that, currently, "legitimate" use of BitTorrent is a "token minority" of its use. The vast, vast majority is pirated software, pirated movies, and pirated TV shows (and, to a lesser extent, music, just because of the nature of BitTorrent being more conveniently applicable to small amounts of large files, rather than large amounts of small files).
Anyone not admitting that at this particular point in time is lying to themselves.
Maybe that was true when SuperNova and LokiTorrent were around. We are sorta heading back into the "time before torrents" when stuff wasn't easily available on a huge online database available on the web.
Have you take a split second to look at the legitimate uses of torrents recently? easytree, Etree, etc? HUGE repositories of legal music for download?
But the Washington-based lobby hasn't sued BitTorrent's developer, Bram Cohen of Bellevue, Wash., nor has it gone after individual BitTorrent users.
How could they go after him? The software is open-source and its intentions are nothing less than noble. If Cohen was looking to *directly* make money on BitTorrent he wouldn't have released the source to it.
As far as going after individual users... They rarely did anyway. BitTorrent isn't as easy as Kazaa for finding "mass sharers". Most people are maxing their upstream on a single torrent instead of offering up their entire personal library in one place. That is why they are going after the sites linking to the trackers.
Independent musicians can also use BitTorrent to provide free samples. The Web site of the South by Southwest music festival (2005.sxsw.com/ geekout/sxsw4pod/) uses BitTorrent to offer a 2.6-gigabyte compilation of songs by artists playing at this Austin event. (In an unplanned demonstration of how BitTorrent doesn't always function at top speed, that torrent was more of a glacier Tuesday night, with too few users to serve up bits of the file.)
And the author of this article just proved how posting links to torrents on a highly trafficked site will get him his music faster.;-)
The MPAA may be able to drive BitTorrent movie downloads into what Green called "the dark corners of the Internet," but this program isn't going to go away. It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web.
And what? Put all those popcorn salesmen and ticket rippers out of their after-school jobs? Nope, at least not for now.
And with VoIP it would be quite easy to enable an easy to update whitelist for inbound calls. People could use something like the various spam blocking sites (i.e. Spamhaus) that would put and end to that crap.
There are so many possibilities for controlling this crap that I don't even want to go into it. Personally? I would use my addressbook (LDAP?) as the whitelist. Anyone else would get a message to find another way to contact me to be added to the whitelist, to enter the passcode to get through, or they be routed to/dev/null.
Anyone showing up as "UNKNOWN", "UNAVAILABLE", or originating numbers coming from outside the country would automatically be re-routed to/dev/null. I would sort of expect these options to be built into the software and easily enabled by end users as that would make the most sense.
Yeah, it could cause you to lose some callers. How many times do people call you that you don't know and that you actually want to hear from? I'll take the 1 caller a year that doesn't know the passcode and can't find another way to contact me.
Yes but that setup allows for corruption when the government appoints individuals to the court. it may not have any bearing on us for years to come and the Act itself might fall into a forgotten existence until a completely conservative government choose to (or has the complete ability to) take advantage of it.
I will state again... This act should not have been passed especially under the stress it was.
Personally? I don't care if there was a single abuse of the Patriot Act or not. It should not have been passed in the first place. The simple fact of the matter is that the government should not have passed an act that allows for civil rights violations.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Ben Franklin [An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania, 1759]
Should be noted that this was only posted to give Slashdot reader their daily dose of paid advertisement to the front page. We read about Macs being booted from iPods two days ago and we have known for years that you could do recovery from USB devices, bootable CDs, and even floppies!
Thanks editors I'm glad you are giving us all this news that matters.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're so partial to MP3s of crappy conglomorate controlled music use a site that doesn't DRM their music and also distributes it cheap (allofmp3.com).
If you're interested in ending the stranglehold on your music that the conglomorates have on you I suggest finding alternative ways to get your music legally and for free. Support the bands that support the free distribution of their music (bt.etree.org, easytree.org, FurthurNET, etc).
Stop worrying about how you are going to be able to listen to your crappy quality music forever and switch to allofmp3's non-DRM, high quality downloads, or switch to free music that's encoded typically in FLAC.
The fact is that you cannot command a person to work for eight (if they're lucky) solid hours. Or as Scott Kirwin put it in the article, "Managers [have] lost sight that workers are real people, not robots."
You have never worked in a call center have you? They have supervised slave labor down to a science. Outside of taking advantage of 3 minute leeway for phone logins and clock punches there was very little time available for screwing off.
They had all the computers locked down, no applications installed other than those you needed for your job, remote screenshot ability, and apparently an alert when you were surfing on a page other than the ones that were permitted.
You were scored on your performance and adherence to the time schedule.
This is another step toward an accepted and democratized dictatorship, think of it, soon the US will be the only place on earth where people will elect their dictator... isn't democracy great!
There are plenty of other places where people "elect" their dictator. Here we were happy to elect someone who has put people in positions of power that errode our freedoms.
People don't consider the President and his cabinet to be doing anything wrong. They want to be told what to do and how to do it. Freedom is them being able to change the channel on conglomorate controlled cable and go to a restaurant that serves an identical menu to the one next door but has different names for the entres.
Democracy *IS* great. Fascism, facilitated and welcomed by the willing public, is not so great.
Can you imagine the huge amount of processing that would be required to apply DRM server-side instead, which I should imagine is the only way to prevent the use of this method?
Would it be any different than allofmp3 encoding media into FLAC, OGG, WMA before piping it down to you?
I can't imagine that they keep 100% of their music library encoded in all the formats they have available (and I know for a fact that they don't) so how would it be any different?
It's not exactly as if iTMS songs are all that large anyway. We aren't talking about high quality sound files like FLAC. FLAC takes a LONG time to encode (well I don't have the fastest machine ever but still).
If they really wanted to stop this crap that's what they would do but the only people that really care about the DRM is the RIAA. Apple just wants to sell iPods.
Oh you can boot Linux but you won't be using it in any useful way. IIS will dominate the webservers in the world because their's will run on the "secure global information network".
Linux will fall into worthless obscurity because it will run on one of the various unsecure networks that the majority of computer users will never "want" to see. After all the only people that use unsecure computing are terrorists and those that are against the RIAA/MPAA/MSFT/GOV metroplex.
You are just as confused as everyone else. Microsoft dominates the computing world. They will dictate (via proxy through the masses of users that utilize their OS/software) which global network will prevail under "secure computing".
Don't want to interoperate with the rest of the secure users out there? Don't use hardware that is tied to THE secure OS.
See, DRM won't work otherwise.
At the time, digital-rights advocates raised concerns that the technology could be used by software makers and media companies to control people's PCs, putting Microsoft on the defensive. The dispute even led the software giant to change the name of its technology from Palladium to the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, or NGSCB.
And yes, we all know that now that the name of their security technology is different Microsoft can't "team up" with the hardware makers to lock down PCs to a single OS. It wouldn't be in the best interests of either side to do that right? Oh wait, MSFT already has contractual agreements that basically force this to happen why not take it a step further and make people not only pay extra for the OS pre-installed/distributed w/the PC but also make them have no choice but to run it once they get it.
I love the wording in the article... Oooh it's the hardware vendors taking the initiative and not Microsoft (like Microsoft is always at the forefront of technology or something). Is that supposed to make me feel better that the entire computing platform will be locked down leading to the end of free distribution of anything, the Internet as we know it, etc?
Didn't Ben Franklin say something about this? Yeah.
To add to this... If this became the future of "TV" then people could keep high quality shows with the "nitty gritty work" behind the show driving it rather than moronic ratings from l4m3rz that want drama instead of real action.
Man, not to be tied down by the networks? Woot.
Melissa - Dating Brian Sandro requires patience, but even Melissa's substantial reserves are tapped by her boyfriend's secrecy and late nights in front of the computer.
;)
I wouldn't exactly use the word "tapped" here. Maybe if she would put out more he would be tapping her
Why do we always have to start out w/cool shows that get into the nitty gritty of work and then branch out into situational drama soaps?
It happens with all the shows (ER, Baywatch, CSI, Without a Trace). They start out showing the real work behind the topic the show covers and after two seasons they show the work behind the work where everyone is a backstabbing bitch that fucks everyone else.
Boo.
In Two-factor authentication, the authorization is based at two levels.
1. An authorized user would carry a physical token (swipe card or similar).
2. The user will have to further authenticate his identity by punching in the correct password associated with the physical token.
In addition to two layers of protection, if the token is lost it can be immediately invalidated and the risk of security is less than with a single password authentication scheme.
For a general OS I don't think this is a necessity. An option? Sure.
Perhaps you're close, but it's not fair to call that instant. I'm assuming that the Internet doesn't close for holidays, unlike video stores.
Well, I don't know what video stores you frequent but the ones I do (Hollywood and Blockbuster) are open 365 days a year.
Hollywood Video (source)
Hours of Operation:
We're open 365 days a year
Sun-Sat 10a.m. to Midnight
** Most Locations
The three Blockbuster Video stores closest to me are open 365 days a year as well but their store locator is down at the moment for proof.
a special rubber for good click feel, and the distinctive peanut shape.
Besides the obvious juvenile jokes about that sentence taken out of context I really don't see the remote as being all that great when using it with a system that is rather slow.
Great, so the remote has a "click" feel. Does that help me to know that I actually did engage the button when the Guide takes 5+ seconds to refresh (yes, it is much better now that they 7.0+ series update came out but it still sucks)? Or when I click the TiVo button at the top is it supposed to let me know that I can wait up to 10 seconds for the main menu to show up from live TV?
Yeah, the remove is nice and easy to use. It even looks good but it is certainly not making up for the lack of speedy internal hardware.
What losers! Comcast's millions of customers could save so much money if they just built their own MythTV boxes from the spare computer parts they all have lying around their houses. I mean, it's the way I decided to do it, so it must therefore be the best possible solution for everyone on the planet!
While MythTV is great for those people that are Linux/computer savvy it's not so great for people that just want shit to work...
When I say "work" I mean when the powersupply goes someone comes out to the house in a truck, gives you a new box, and turns it back on to make sure it is recording again for you. It also means that there was no setup involved for the end user. Nothing needed to be done other than plugging it into their RCA/s-video jacks and hitting power. It means that if for whatever reason a serious issue comes about it will either be automagically updated (like my TiVo is) or it will be replaced by that same nice truck driving tech that replaced the one w/the burned powersupply.
Yes, MythTV is a great thing for the power users (and it may even be good for people that aren't "power"users but still are somewhat savvy). What TiVo is great for is people that just don't want to fuck around with that crap.
Just so you know I wouldn't have a single problem setting up MythTV. I don't use it because it's too much work and TiVo just works.
He doesn't even come close to implying that in your quote. He says that bittorrent might be just the thing that enables the studios to utilize the web.
I never said he did but I'll try to clarify because apparently I wasn't clear.
I'm putting words into the mouth of the MPAA when I say that. They are, afterall, the ones that attempt to shame us out of downloading movies because it hurts everyone involved.
If the MPAA allows people to download movies that would end the need for the big screen! People would lose their jobs and there wouldn't be a place that you could blow $25/night to see something that will be out in 6 weeks or less on DVD.
What better way to save bandwidth - the single killer cost when each film might sum a gigabyte - than by having the box download the film using a restricted version of bittorrent, and use a proportion of the available upstream bandwidth on the local connection to supply other people renting the same film? As the file's encrypted piracy wouldn't be a concern as the key to play it would only be issued by the central server, over an encrypted channel.
;)
What better way to waste my money than to require me to pay for an Internet connection to download a movie that I paid for! Not only that but I don't get it instantaneously and I have to slow down the rest of my home network while maxing my upstream helping the content distributer not spend so much on bandwith costs.
This would have the effect - exactly opposite to a DVD-rental shop - that popular videos would be available more quickly than rarely demanded ones. The system has the same priorities as the company behind it.
More quickly? You haven't been to a large video chain recenty have you? I have never had a problem getting a "new" movie. In fact, I have a harder problem getting something that isn't "new". They have racks and racks of their latest releases and only one or two copies of the older stuff.
If I can't get it at Blockbuster I can walk across the street to Hollywood and get it there.
YMMV
Not that I don't recognize that BitTorrent is currently used for many legitimate applications (whereas that was extremely difficult to argue with a straight face with P2P), but I think this statement is a little overboard. I'd say that, currently, "legitimate" use of BitTorrent is a "token minority" of its use. The vast, vast majority is pirated software, pirated movies, and pirated TV shows (and, to a lesser extent, music, just because of the nature of BitTorrent being more conveniently applicable to small amounts of large files, rather than large amounts of small files).
Anyone not admitting that at this particular point in time is lying to themselves.
Maybe that was true when SuperNova and LokiTorrent were around. We are sorta heading back into the "time before torrents" when stuff wasn't easily available on a huge online database available on the web.
Have you take a split second to look at the legitimate uses of torrents recently? easytree, Etree, etc? HUGE repositories of legal music for download?
It's obvious to me that you haven't.
But the Washington-based lobby hasn't sued BitTorrent's developer, Bram Cohen of Bellevue, Wash., nor has it gone after individual BitTorrent users.
;-)
How could they go after him? The software is open-source and its intentions are nothing less than noble. If Cohen was looking to *directly* make money on BitTorrent he wouldn't have released the source to it.
As far as going after individual users... They rarely did anyway. BitTorrent isn't as easy as Kazaa for finding "mass sharers". Most people are maxing their upstream on a single torrent instead of offering up their entire personal library in one place. That is why they are going after the sites linking to the trackers.
Independent musicians can also use BitTorrent to provide free samples. The Web site of the South by Southwest music festival (2005.sxsw.com/
geekout/sxsw4pod/) uses BitTorrent to offer a 2.6-gigabyte compilation of songs by artists playing at this Austin event. (In an unplanned demonstration of how BitTorrent doesn't always function at top speed, that torrent was more of a glacier Tuesday night, with too few users to serve up bits of the file.)
And the author of this article just proved how posting links to torrents on a highly trafficked site will get him his music faster.
The MPAA may be able to drive BitTorrent movie downloads into what Green called "the dark corners of the Internet," but this program isn't going to go away. It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web.
And what? Put all those popcorn salesmen and ticket rippers out of their after-school jobs? Nope, at least not for now.
And with VoIP it would be quite easy to enable an easy to update whitelist for inbound calls. People could use something like the various spam blocking sites (i.e. Spamhaus) that would put and end to that crap.
/dev/null.
/dev/null. I would sort of expect these options to be built into the software and easily enabled by end users as that would make the most sense.
There are so many possibilities for controlling this crap that I don't even want to go into it. Personally? I would use my addressbook (LDAP?) as the whitelist. Anyone else would get a message to find another way to contact me to be added to the whitelist, to enter the passcode to get through, or they be routed to
Anyone showing up as "UNKNOWN", "UNAVAILABLE", or originating numbers coming from outside the country would automatically be re-routed to
Yeah, it could cause you to lose some callers. How many times do people call you that you don't know and that you actually want to hear from? I'll take the 1 caller a year that doesn't know the passcode and can't find another way to contact me.
YMMV.
Yes but that setup allows for corruption when the government appoints individuals to the court. it may not have any bearing on us for years to come and the Act itself might fall into a forgotten existence until a completely conservative government choose to (or has the complete ability to) take advantage of it.
I will state again... This act should not have been passed especially under the stress it was.
Personally? I don't care if there was a single abuse of the Patriot Act or not. It should not have been passed in the first place. The simple fact of the matter is that the government should not have passed an act that allows for civil rights violations.
Historical perspective is something you apparently fail to understand.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Ben Franklin [An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania, 1759]
those that drafted those never thought that our fellow citizens would have the apathy for tyrrany that we currently do.
Sorry but USB keyboards are too expensive compared to the $4.99 PS/2 I just picked up.
Should be noted that this was only posted to give Slashdot reader their daily dose of paid advertisement to the front page. We read about Macs being booted from iPods two days ago and we have known for years that you could do recovery from USB devices, bootable CDs, and even floppies!
Thanks editors I'm glad you are giving us all this news that matters.