is that this technology appears to make a whole generation of older video devices (TV's, VCR's, etc.) that are still working fine obsolete.
I have a 20-year old RCA 19-inch console TV that is still working fine. I don't want to buy another just because of some damn 'broadcast flag' not letting watch my shows.
The problem with most "trusted computing" proposals so far is that "trusted" is an accurate description of them. It's just an imcomplete description. They aren't about insuring that you, the owner of the computer, can trust the computer or the software on it. They're about insuring that third parties (such as Microsoft, HP, etc.) can trust your computer to do what they tell it to do. The proponents omit that part because they know all too well that if they did say all of what they meant that the average consumer would scream bloody murder and refuse to have anything to do with it.
Actually it's places like China and Indonesia that Indian companies are outsourcing their jobs to because they can pay those programmers even lower wages.
Will my 5-year old VCR still allow me to record shows? I don't think it knows about the the broadcast flag. If so, I see a possible upswing in the VCR repair and upkeep business......
and so are personal stereos, where I work. Something about 'not being conductive to the work environment'. The problem is that there is so much racket from people around me talking on the phone, chatting, etc. that you NEED headphones (or something to block out the noise) sometimes to concentrate on the task at hand.
Wow, it looks like I now have some kind of perverted 'fan' following me around.
While I am somewhat flattered by your account name, it is rather disturbing that you are stalking my comments. You must have a rather large hair up your ass (plus a lot of spare time) to be doing this.....
First off, no i haven't read the article yet, just felt the need to say something on the whole privacy on the net thing. There will always be a balance between safety and freedom. In this case that freedom being our privacy. With absolute privacy any number of bad things can arise that we didn't intend. For example truly anonymous file servers could distribute kiddy porn or credit card and social security numbers at will, after all with perfect privacy there would be no way to trace them. And also having no privacy is also a very bad idea for reasons to obvious to state. So the balance is somewhere in the middle and, as I understand it from the article summary, it is simplu shifting in the direction of less privacy. what we really have to ask is if we want this greater safty at the cost of some of our privacy? Which is most definately not a cut and dry problem in and of itself. So sorry about not having a factoid about some part of the article but I just wanted a balanced counterpoint to the inevitable bashing of the loss of privacy on the net.
The most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs.
Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution.
These findings are important to sociologists who are interested in learning how ideas grow from isolated topics into full-blown epidemics that "infect" large populations. Such an understanding is also important to marketers, who hope to be able to pitch products and ideas directly to the most influential people in a given group.
"There is a lot of speculation that really important people are highly connected, but really, we wonder if the highly connected people just listen to the important people," said Lada Adamic, one of the four researchers working on the project.
To satisfy their curiosity, the researchers began analyzing data from Intelliseek's BlogPulse Web crawler, which regularly mines thousands of blogs for references to people, places and events.
When they plotted the links and topics shared by various sites, they discovered that topics would often appear on a few relatively unknown blogs days before they appeared on more popular sites.
"What we're finding is that the important people on the Web are not necessarily the people with the most explicit links (back to their sites), but the people who cause epidemics in blog networks," said researcher Eytan Adar.
These infectious people can be hard to find because they do not always receive attribution for being the first to point to an interesting idea or news item.
Indeed, the team at HP Labs found that when an idea infected at least 10 blogs, 70 percent of the blogs did not provide links back to another blog that had previously mentioned the idea.
To get past this obstacle, the researchers developed techniques to infer where information might have come from, based on the similarities in text, links and infection rates.
For instance, if Blog A used the words "furry germs" to link to an infectious topic like Giantmicrobes just days after Blog B in the same social circle used the exact same words and link, that would be a good sign that Blog A copied Blog B.
The researchers have incorporated their techniques into a search algorithm they call iRank. Unlike Google's PageRank algorithm, which ranks websites based on overall popularity, the iRank algorithm ranks sites based on how good they are at injecting ideas into the mainstream.
"A lot of sites that get listed by search engines as most relevant are not always the most relevant," said Adar. "For instance, Slashdot often gets listed at the top, but it's just an aggregator. I may want to go to the source."
Adar and Adamic say it's too soon to tell if iRank will be incorporated into popular search engines.
For one thing, they plan to refine the algorithm after seeing how it works on more data. They would also like to modify the algorithm to resist manipulation from Google-bomb-type attacks, where collaborators link to each other's sites to boost themselves in Google's ranking mechanism.
In the meantime, the team has made some of its research available online in the form of the Blog Epidemic Analyzer, a Java program that reveals the implicit and inferred links between blogs in an interactive, visual form.
"Blogs are helping us get a better understanding of how things happen on the Internet," said Adar. "We're hopeful that in being able to do this research, we can apply the technology to other information, like e-mail, to improve productivity."
Agreed. I recently switched to a Linux box running sendmail. Sendmail took a while for me to configure but now that it's up an running smoothly I don't have to worry about MS-directed worms.
I'm longer caught in the crossfire and that suits me just fine.....
Civil liberties and consumer rights groups are calling on MEPs to reject the EU Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive.
Today (3 March) is the last day that amendments can be tabled before the final debate and vote, from 8-11 March.
IP Justice, an international coalition of civil liberties groups and consumer rights activists, is organising a protest in Strasbourg to "uphold traditional civil liberties against the over-zealous enforcement of intellectual property rights". The meeting will be held outside the EU Parliament on 8 March between 4.30pm and 6.30pm.
The bill was introduced to make it easier to tackle large scale pirating operations, and to create a consistent, pan-European approach to intellectual property law. But many groups, including Campaign for an Open Digital Environment (CODE) and the EFF, are concerned about the way the bill has been rushed through the European Parliament.
The directive's Rapporteur, French MEP Janelly Fourtou, (who, incidentally, is wife of the head of Vivendi Universal) has placed it on a "First Reading". This is usually reserved for directives on which there is already unanimous agreement, and does not allow for public debate. This meant the directive could be drafted behind closed doors.
Civil rights groups want the proposal sent into a second reading, where its provisions can be publicly considered.
According to the BSA, 25 per cent of software in use in the UK is illegal. It claims that reducing this to 15 per cent would generate an extra 2.5bn in tax revenues and 40,000 jobs in the IT sector. It points out that organised crime gangs have moved into software piracy on a large scale, and argues that tough legislation is needed to stop this.
Few people would seriously oppose a law that would tackle these problems, and make it easier for industry to go after real criminals: the organised crime gangs, the people selling sub-standard software, or pirating thousands of videos.
However, this directive fails to distinguish between commercial counterfeiting, and inadvertent individual copyright infringement. This means a 12-year old P2P file sharer, or someone photocopying pages from a library text book at university, is seen as identical to a large scale piracy operation filtering money into organised crime.
The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure UK (FFII-UK) proposed a set of amendments that it says would reduce the directive's harm to consumers, including limiting its scope to commercial cases.
As it stands, this directive grants some very scary powers to rights holders. Consider the Anton Piller orders: these enable rights holders to hire private police to raid a suspect's home.
This was previously restricted to very rare, large commercial infringers. The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) points out that now, anyone who infringes copyright - even unwittingly - may have his or her "assets seized, bank account frozen and home invaded".
The bill creates a new "Right of Information" that allows rights holders to obtain personal information on P2P file sharers. An ISP's servers can be seized and destroyed with no hearing if one of their customers is alleged to have infringed a copyright.
It fails to define the term 'intellectual property rights', so interpretation will vary hugely from country to country when/if the directive becomes law, undermining one of the main objectives of the legislation: harmonising EU law.
Neither the Business Software Alliance, nor the British Phonographic Industry was able to provide any comment on the implications of this directive for consumers before we went to press.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a space-themed MMOG?
is that this technology appears to make a whole generation of older video devices (TV's, VCR's, etc.) that are still working fine obsolete.
I have a 20-year old RCA 19-inch console TV that is still working fine. I don't want to buy another just because of some damn 'broadcast flag' not letting watch my shows.
Wouldn't reverse engineering something like a device driver, assorted hardware, etc. be considered by some a violation for fair-use?
lol. Based on your moderation, who's the troll I wonder?
The problem with most "trusted computing" proposals so far is that "trusted" is an accurate description of them. It's just an imcomplete description. They aren't about insuring that you, the owner of the computer, can trust the computer or the software on it. They're about insuring that third parties (such as Microsoft, HP, etc.) can trust your computer to do what they tell it to do. The proponents omit that part because they know all too well that if they did say all of what they meant that the average consumer would scream bloody murder and refuse to have anything to do with it.
Isn't the challenge not to make windows games run under linux, aka wine, but to get game publishers to release linux versions of their games?
Now a standard linux distro aimed solely at game developers to make their life easier might be a better way to go......
They also ensure higher prices and greater profits for the car dealerships.......
Actually it's places like China and Indonesia that Indian companies are outsourcing their jobs to because they can pay those programmers even lower wages.
Will my 5-year old VCR still allow me to record shows? I don't think it knows about the the broadcast flag. If so, I see a possible upswing in the VCR repair and upkeep business......
As if one bit is going to stop anyone from doing anything.
Because NASA says that it costs too much to maintain, and it's getting close to its estimated end of life date.
Sounds like you are on cable? I recently got DSL and have seen no slowdown in the evening hours.
and so are personal stereos, where I work. Something about 'not being conductive to the work environment'. The problem is that there is so much racket from people around me talking on the phone, chatting, etc. that you NEED headphones (or something to block out the noise) sometimes to concentrate on the task at hand.
Wow, it looks like I now have some kind of perverted 'fan' following me around.
While I am somewhat flattered by your account name, it is rather disturbing that you are stalking my comments. You must have a rather large hair up your ass (plus a lot of spare time) to be doing this.....
First off, no i haven't read the article yet, just felt the need to say something on the whole privacy on the net thing.
There will always be a balance between safety and freedom. In this case that freedom being our privacy. With absolute privacy any number of bad things can arise that we didn't intend. For example truly anonymous file servers could distribute kiddy porn or credit card and social security numbers at will, after all with perfect privacy there would be no way to trace them.
And also having no privacy is also a very bad idea for reasons to obvious to state. So the balance is somewhere in the middle and, as I understand it from the article summary, it is simplu shifting in the direction of less privacy. what we really have to ask is if we want this greater safty at the cost of some of our privacy? Which is most definately not a cut and dry problem in and of itself. So sorry about not having a factoid about some part of the article but I just wanted a balanced counterpoint to the inevitable bashing of the loss of privacy on the net.
The most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs.
Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution.
These findings are important to sociologists who are interested in learning how ideas grow from isolated topics into full-blown epidemics that "infect" large populations. Such an understanding is also important to marketers, who hope to be able to pitch products and ideas directly to the most influential people in a given group.
"There is a lot of speculation that really important people are highly connected, but really, we wonder if the highly connected people just listen to the important people," said Lada Adamic, one of the four researchers working on the project.
To satisfy their curiosity, the researchers began analyzing data from Intelliseek's BlogPulse Web crawler, which regularly mines thousands of blogs for references to people, places and events.
When they plotted the links and topics shared by various sites, they discovered that topics would often appear on a few relatively unknown blogs days before they appeared on more popular sites.
"What we're finding is that the important people on the Web are not necessarily the people with the most explicit links (back to their sites), but the people who cause epidemics in blog networks," said researcher Eytan Adar.
These infectious people can be hard to find because they do not always receive attribution for being the first to point to an interesting idea or news item.
Indeed, the team at HP Labs found that when an idea infected at least 10 blogs, 70 percent of the blogs did not provide links back to another blog that had previously mentioned the idea.
To get past this obstacle, the researchers developed techniques to infer where information might have come from, based on the similarities in text, links and infection rates.
For instance, if Blog A used the words "furry germs" to link to an infectious topic like Giantmicrobes just days after Blog B in the same social circle used the exact same words and link, that would be a good sign that Blog A copied Blog B.
The researchers have incorporated their techniques into a search algorithm they call iRank. Unlike Google's PageRank algorithm, which ranks websites based on overall popularity, the iRank algorithm ranks sites based on how good they are at injecting ideas into the mainstream.
"A lot of sites that get listed by search engines as most relevant are not always the most relevant," said Adar. "For instance, Slashdot often gets listed at the top, but it's just an aggregator. I may want to go to the source."
Adar and Adamic say it's too soon to tell if iRank will be incorporated into popular search engines.
For one thing, they plan to refine the algorithm after seeing how it works on more data. They would also like to modify the algorithm to resist manipulation from Google-bomb-type attacks, where collaborators link to each other's sites to boost themselves in Google's ranking mechanism.
In the meantime, the team has made some of its research available online in the form of the Blog Epidemic Analyzer, a Java program that reveals the implicit and inferred links between blogs in an interactive, visual form.
"Blogs are helping us get a better understanding of how things happen on the Internet," said Adar. "We're hopeful that in being able to do this research, we can apply the technology to other information, like e-mail, to improve productivity."
I can see the TIVO 'flag' technology working ok, but surely there would be ways to circumvent that.
What's to stop me from using say, the video card card in my computer to record a cable broadcast, edit out commericals, and burning to a CD/DVD?
Agreed. I recently switched to a Linux box running sendmail. Sendmail took a while for me to configure but now that it's up an running smoothly I don't have to worry about MS-directed worms.
I'm longer caught in the crossfire and that suits me just fine.....
Kill the EU IP Rights Enforcement Bill!
Civil liberties and consumer rights groups are calling on MEPs to reject the EU Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive.
Today (3 March) is the last day that amendments can be tabled before the final debate and vote, from 8-11 March.
IP Justice, an international coalition of civil liberties groups and consumer rights activists, is organising a protest in Strasbourg to "uphold traditional civil liberties against the over-zealous enforcement of intellectual property rights". The meeting will be held outside the EU Parliament on 8 March between 4.30pm and 6.30pm.
The bill was introduced to make it easier to tackle large scale pirating operations, and to create a consistent, pan-European approach to intellectual property law. But many groups, including Campaign for an Open Digital Environment (CODE) and the EFF, are concerned about the way the bill has been rushed through the European Parliament.
The directive's Rapporteur, French MEP Janelly Fourtou, (who, incidentally, is wife of the head of Vivendi Universal) has placed it on a "First Reading". This is usually reserved for directives on which there is already unanimous agreement, and does not allow for public debate. This meant the directive could be drafted behind closed doors.
Civil rights groups want the proposal sent into a second reading, where its provisions can be publicly considered.
According to the BSA, 25 per cent of software in use in the UK is illegal. It claims that reducing this to 15 per cent would generate an extra 2.5bn in tax revenues and 40,000 jobs in the IT sector. It points out that organised crime gangs have moved into software piracy on a large scale, and argues that tough legislation is needed to stop this.
Few people would seriously oppose a law that would tackle these problems, and make it easier for industry to go after real criminals: the organised crime gangs, the people selling sub-standard software, or pirating thousands of videos.
However, this directive fails to distinguish between commercial counterfeiting, and inadvertent individual copyright infringement. This means a 12-year old P2P file sharer, or someone photocopying pages from a library text book at university, is seen as identical to a large scale piracy operation filtering money into organised crime.
The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure UK (FFII-UK) proposed a set of amendments that it says would reduce the directive's harm to consumers, including limiting its scope to commercial cases.
As it stands, this directive grants some very scary powers to rights holders. Consider the Anton Piller orders: these enable rights holders to hire private police to raid a suspect's home.
This was previously restricted to very rare, large commercial infringers. The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) points out that now, anyone who infringes copyright - even unwittingly - may have his or her "assets seized, bank account frozen and home invaded".
The bill creates a new "Right of Information" that allows rights holders to obtain personal information on P2P file sharers. An ISP's servers can be seized and destroyed with no hearing if one of their customers is alleged to have infringed a copyright.
It fails to define the term 'intellectual property rights', so interpretation will vary hugely from country to country when/if the directive becomes law, undermining one of the main objectives of the legislation: harmonising EU law.
Neither the Business Software Alliance, nor the British Phonographic Industry was able to provide any comment on the implications of this directive for consumers before we went to press.
It certaintly looks to me like someone's opinion of what is wrong with gaming today.
You can agree or disagree with said opinion, but calling the person who expressed it DISHONEST or a TROLL is crossing the line.
You need to lighten up a bit mekkab. We are talking about GAMES for goodness sakes!
Since when is expressing one's honest opinion a troll? You, sir are more of the troll in this conversation.
Actually we need to flip a coin to determine that. Wait........
No, the chief scientist 'went to see the doctor'; i.e. started taking Viagra.........
What about a Beowulf cluster of these?