Well, as long as your OS still relies on the ancient "executable installer" model for software distribution, you're going to be stuck making design decisions to accomodate that model. Things like APT have other nightmare scenarios (what if someone compromises the repository?), but not having to run shitty little EXEs to install applications isn't something I miss from Windows.
A copyright "enforced by DMCA" is, unfortunately, the only way of phrasing this in modern English, after our loss of the instrumental case, back before Chaucer's time. One of the few formations we have left for expressing this sort of action is "x by means of y", or in a shorter form, "x by y". This is the same formation we use when we say "I traveled by plane".
...Or are you implying that the DMCA is not a tool by means of which copyrights may be enforced?
"PS/2" was an IBM line of personal computers. Today it is used more to refer to the mini-din mouse connector, which found its way into being the standard mouse and keyboard connectors before it was challenged by USB. I've never seen it used to refer to the second Sony console.
I, for one, welcome our new lobster-eating overlords. We've been long overdue for a state legislature to stand up to the security-crazed national congress and tell them to shove their citizen surveillance programs back through the orifice that produced them. It's great to see the federalist division of power in action.
We got Flash 7 just in time to be left behind by Flash 8 and 9, and now it seems we've got an x86 build of Flash 9 just in time to be left behind by amd64.
If it couldn't be so plausibly explained by managerial incompetence, I'd think they were actively trying to exclude Linux users from viewing Flash applications.
It is all monstrously short-sighted, isn't it, though? I mean, how will we copy these films when they leave copyright? Or if a public-domain film is distributed in a DRM'd format?
Hell, we'll be lucky to get the ciphertext off the disk 100 years from now. The historians are going to think we were all insane with paranoia. And they'd be right!
A stopgap solution might be to require an unencrypted version be deposited with the Library of Congress of any commercially distributed work with total sales over $100 or something like that... but any copyright wonkery at this point is simply wishful thinking.
No offense, but that plan didn't work so well at Alexandria, and I doubt it will work at the Library of Congress. Lots of copies keep stuff safe, and we need lots and lots of plaintext (not encrypted) copies if anyone is going to remember this artistic medium a few centuries from now. Depositing one copy at one library is too much of a crapshoot.
Yes, and that's exactly why a lot of those one-copy originals are gone forever -- and no one will ever read them again. For example, an unfortunate number of them existed only in the Alexandria library.
It would be easy enough to design DRM so that the DRM no longer applies after a certain date.
This is an assertion made frequently by those who don't object to DRM en toto, and it is founded on an assumption that the content that has been restricted can eventually be liberated using the software tools that were initially published to control access to it.
From a preservation standpoint, the encryption of content for mass distribution is always an unsavory outcome. What we should have learned from the silent film era is that lots of copies keep stuff safe, and when you only have a few durable copies around, parts of our cultural heritage tend to disappear rapidly from the historical and archaeological record.
If there is to be any hope for the cultural output of our generation to be available to the historians, students, or anyone else, we need to ensure that the copies we are making are not worthless blobs of random noise. It's going to be hard enough to read the digitally stored works of our time using the hardware tools of the future. We should not erect a series of worthless software roadblocks which will only make preserving those works even more difficult.
The prospect of some media conglomerate making a few million more dollars today is not a compelling reason to discard the cultural artifacts of our generation from the historical record. We need as many plaintext copies around as possible, and we need to hope that enough of them survive.
I'm not going to spend $450 on a phone that doesn't come with an API, regardless of whether it can be hacked. I'd much rather be running ARM binaries on a Unix-like OS than dealing with stuff like MIDP 1.0 (which doesn't even offer float math), but I'll reward the company that provides me with the interface I need. If I have to void the warranty to run the software I feel like running, I don't have any intention of paying for the experience.
I'm sure this thing will be useful to someone, somewhere, with only the bundled functionality, but for me, Steve's just announced a really expensive brick.
Better (and more convenient) than dd'ing from/dev/urandom is wipe(1). It will, at your option, overwrite the disk using 34 different byte patterns, 8 of which are random.
Its man page is also the only one I know of that uses the phrases "rising totalitarianism", "Department of Homeland Security", and "THIS IS AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS THING TO DO".
A web server that's handing out 200 OK to anyone who requests a file is not like a house without an ablative thermal shield. It's more like a house that automatically unlocks itself for whoever knocks.
If you only want to show your restricted content to people who have viewed your ads, you have lots of options:
set a cookie when you serve your ads and check for it when you serve the restricted content
require an HTTP referer from your own domain
require authentication
None of these is the beginning of a technological "arms race". These measures are no more absurd than asking people who they are before you let them into your house.
Being too lazy to set your web site up to reflect your wishes isn't really a persuasive position. Don't want some people to see your restricted content? Duh, don't transmit it to them.
A copyright holder can decide who and how their material is distributed (as it should be). What is this rules does is reverse the rule of thumb of "if you put it on the internet, you are publishing it for anyone to see, unless you protect access to it". Now, instead of having to protect the content through technical measures, they can use lawyers instead.
The problem with this line of thinking is that content isn't "up" on the web for anyone to "see". The server is actively responding to requests for that content by serving it up. Sending a 403 when you don't want to distribute your content isn't actively blocking access -- it's merely not distributing it.
If you configure a server to your distribute content to anyone in the world who asks for it, that's exactly what you're going to get. You don't solve this problem with lawsuits. You solve with with a fucking text editor and a couple of brain cells.
The guy who sued and won had to take an action for this to be stopped by a court, just like any copyright holder would have to in the future...
If you don't want to distribute content to someone, you configure your web server to deny them access to the resource. If you're running a server that's handing out 200 OK in response to requests for content, your server is doing exactly what it's configured to do. If you don't want to? Well, you'd better start handing out some damned 403 Forbiddens instead.
Basically, this judge has given webmasters grounds to sue people in lieu of learning how to do their damned jobs properly.
I'm not even sure who's clamoring for Etch to release. Anyone who needs the latest toys can run it already, and anyone who really needs the stability of Debian Stable knows that it will be released when it's ready.
It's the other distros that seem to be in a huge hurry. To each his own; that's why we have more than one distro.
There are two different sizes, by the way. The larger one is for diesel.
Re:CSS turns 10, typographers still crying
on
CSS Turns 10 Years Old
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The great thing about a personal computer is that I can customize the settings to my personal preferences. If, god help us all, you ever do find a way to embed typefaces in web pages, I'll be painlessly overriding your designs with black Bitstream Vera on a pale gray background.
If you took the raw materials for the F/A-22 Raptor, and added a subsistence wage for everyone involved in its construction, do you reach the 1.5 *BILLION* that Lockheed Martin takes in return for it?
Do you really expect to find engineers capable of designing a machine like that who will work for a subsistence wage?
It takes less and less money each year to create content.
Refinement of manufacturing techniques continues to push down the cost of musical instruments, cameras, and so forth. Advances in software, electronics, and computing have made home audio and video studios possible at a fraction of the cost of equipment from the 1960's -- and in many ways, today's home-grade equipment allows artists to be productive on a smaller investment of money and time.
When you have to buy miles of film stock or thousands of dollars in studio time and quarter-inch tape, sure, producing movies and music is exorbitantly expensive. While many artists will still opt for more expensive production (for a variety of reasons), the financial power of the recording industry is no longer a necessary catalyst for the creation of content.
And I don't even think I need to spell out how incredibly cheap the manufacture and distribution of copies of finished content is today.
There was a time when creation and distribution of content was so prohibitively expensive that we needed an industry just to finance and manage these business activities in order for artists to be productive and for others to enjoy their work. Those days are all but over. The MPAA and RIAA are having a difficult time adjusting. The don't seem to be getting the message, so unfortunately, we're just going to have to bleed them until they dry up and go away.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, as long as your OS still relies on the ancient "executable installer" model for software distribution, you're going to be stuck making design decisions to accomodate that model. Things like APT have other nightmare scenarios (what if someone compromises the repository?), but not having to run shitty little EXEs to install applications isn't something I miss from Windows.
A copyright "enforced by DMCA" is, unfortunately, the only way of phrasing this in modern English, after our loss of the instrumental case, back before Chaucer's time. One of the few formations we have left for expressing this sort of action is "x by means of y", or in a shorter form, "x by y". This is the same formation we use when we say "I traveled by plane".
...Or are you implying that the DMCA is not a tool by means of which copyrights may be enforced?
"PS/2" was an IBM line of personal computers. Today it is used more to refer to the mini-din mouse connector, which found its way into being the standard mouse and keyboard connectors before it was challenged by USB. I've never seen it used to refer to the second Sony console.
I, for one, welcome our new lobster-eating overlords. We've been long overdue for a state legislature to stand up to the security-crazed national congress and tell them to shove their citizen surveillance programs back through the orifice that produced them. It's great to see the federalist division of power in action.
We got Flash 7 just in time to be left behind by Flash 8 and 9, and now it seems we've got an x86 build of Flash 9 just in time to be left behind by amd64.
If it couldn't be so plausibly explained by managerial incompetence, I'd think they were actively trying to exclude Linux users from viewing Flash applications.
Hell, we'll be lucky to get the ciphertext off the disk 100 years from now. The historians are going to think we were all insane with paranoia. And they'd be right!
No offense, but that plan didn't work so well at Alexandria, and I doubt it will work at the Library of Congress. Lots of copies keep stuff safe, and we need lots and lots of plaintext (not encrypted) copies if anyone is going to remember this artistic medium a few centuries from now. Depositing one copy at one library is too much of a crapshoot.
Yes, and that's exactly why a lot of those one-copy originals are gone forever -- and no one will ever read them again. For example, an unfortunate number of them existed only in the Alexandria library.
This is an assertion made frequently by those who don't object to DRM en toto, and it is founded on an assumption that the content that has been restricted can eventually be liberated using the software tools that were initially published to control access to it.
From a preservation standpoint, the encryption of content for mass distribution is always an unsavory outcome. What we should have learned from the silent film era is that lots of copies keep stuff safe, and when you only have a few durable copies around, parts of our cultural heritage tend to disappear rapidly from the historical and archaeological record.
If there is to be any hope for the cultural output of our generation to be available to the historians, students, or anyone else, we need to ensure that the copies we are making are not worthless blobs of random noise. It's going to be hard enough to read the digitally stored works of our time using the hardware tools of the future. We should not erect a series of worthless software roadblocks which will only make preserving those works even more difficult.
The prospect of some media conglomerate making a few million more dollars today is not a compelling reason to discard the cultural artifacts of our generation from the historical record. We need as many plaintext copies around as possible, and we need to hope that enough of them survive.
I'm not going to spend $450 on a phone that doesn't come with an API, regardless of whether it can be hacked. I'd much rather be running ARM binaries on a Unix-like OS than dealing with stuff like MIDP 1.0 (which doesn't even offer float math), but I'll reward the company that provides me with the interface I need. If I have to void the warranty to run the software I feel like running, I don't have any intention of paying for the experience.
I'm sure this thing will be useful to someone, somewhere, with only the bundled functionality, but for me, Steve's just announced a really expensive brick.
Better (and more convenient) than dd'ing from /dev/urandom is wipe(1). It will, at your option, overwrite the disk using 34 different byte patterns, 8 of which are random.
Its man page is also the only one I know of that uses the phrases "rising totalitarianism", "Department of Homeland Security", and "THIS IS AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS THING TO DO".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
A web server that's handing out 200 OK to anyone who requests a file is not like a house without an ablative thermal shield. It's more like a house that automatically unlocks itself for whoever knocks.
If you only want to show your restricted content to people who have viewed your ads, you have lots of options:
None of these is the beginning of a technological "arms race". These measures are no more absurd than asking people who they are before you let them into your house.
Being too lazy to set your web site up to reflect your wishes isn't really a persuasive position. Don't want some people to see your restricted content? Duh, don't transmit it to them.
The problem with this line of thinking is that content isn't "up" on the web for anyone to "see". The server is actively responding to requests for that content by serving it up. Sending a 403 when you don't want to distribute your content isn't actively blocking access -- it's merely not distributing it.
If you configure a server to your distribute content to anyone in the world who asks for it, that's exactly what you're going to get. You don't solve this problem with lawsuits. You solve with with a fucking text editor and a couple of brain cells.
If you don't want to distribute content to someone, you configure your web server to deny them access to the resource. If you're running a server that's handing out 200 OK in response to requests for content, your server is doing exactly what it's configured to do. If you don't want to? Well, you'd better start handing out some damned 403 Forbiddens instead.
Basically, this judge has given webmasters grounds to sue people in lieu of learning how to do their damned jobs properly.
I'm not even sure who's clamoring for Etch to release. Anyone who needs the latest toys can run it already, and anyone who really needs the stability of Debian Stable knows that it will be released when it's ready.
It's the other distros that seem to be in a huge hurry. To each his own; that's why we have more than one distro.
There are two different sizes, by the way. The larger one is for diesel.
I can't wait either.
How are you, gentlemen?
If a victim or his family can only be satisfied by a state sponsored execution, then by all means, to hell with them all.
Perfect? It's still critically lacking in the license and published source code departments. Hopefully Cohen et al will resolve these issues.
You know you can eliminate every single one of those complaints by leaving New York, right?
It takes less and less money each year to create content.
Refinement of manufacturing techniques continues to push down the cost of musical instruments, cameras, and so forth. Advances in software, electronics, and computing have made home audio and video studios possible at a fraction of the cost of equipment from the 1960's -- and in many ways, today's home-grade equipment allows artists to be productive on a smaller investment of money and time.
When you have to buy miles of film stock or thousands of dollars in studio time and quarter-inch tape, sure, producing movies and music is exorbitantly expensive. While many artists will still opt for more expensive production (for a variety of reasons), the financial power of the recording industry is no longer a necessary catalyst for the creation of content.
And I don't even think I need to spell out how incredibly cheap the manufacture and distribution of copies of finished content is today.
There was a time when creation and distribution of content was so prohibitively expensive that we needed an industry just to finance and manage these business activities in order for artists to be productive and for others to enjoy their work. Those days are all but over. The MPAA and RIAA are having a difficult time adjusting. The don't seem to be getting the message, so unfortunately, we're just going to have to bleed them until they dry up and go away.
But does it come with GNU Iceweasel?
You have to encrypt everything; otherwise they know which data is sensitive. Make them work for it!