I'm quite curious just exactly what they mean by flaws to deter counterfeiting. If I send an image to the printer that I want printed, I don't want my printer altering that image in any way-- regardless of what the image may be. If the printer doesn't do its job, then it's going in the trash. Period.
Why so many companies are choosing to focus on anti-counterfeiting measures anymore also confuses me. Unless things have really changed in recent years, counterfeiting isn't exactly a big problem. You might see a news story or two about it on occasion, but it's really just not that common, and there are good reasons why.
For one thing, standard printers are simply not very good at making even sub-standard counterfeit bills. The texture isn't right, the colors aren't quite right, there's no authenticity strip embedded in the paper (in $5's and above), and even the aroma of the paper and ink isn't quite right-- money has its own smell. Because of this, anybody who knows anything about money and has had their hands on cash at least a few times during their life can easily tell the difference between a real and a fake if they bother to pay the least bit of attention to these properties.
Second of all, the time and effort required to produce anything of acceptable quality that won't be checked for authenticity (ie, less than $100) using a commercial printer far outweighs the value of money counterfitted. Yeah, you may be able to get away with faking a handful of 20's, but you'll have spent a good couple thousand dollars on a printer that's good enough, the proper equipment to cut everything, the paper, etc. Anybody willing to invest this much time and effort into counterfitting is going to expect more return from it, and so they are going to find some other method.
What it comes down to is that these companies probably invested a lot more money into creating these anti-counterfeiting technologies than will be saved from bad money. So in essence, they've crippled my photoshop software and my printer for nothing.
I won't argue about whether it's too early to tell or not; the simple fact of the matter is that the climate is changing and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it. Will it cause some species of animals to go extinct? Quite possibly. Is it going to force us to change food production and abandon areas that are no longer inhabitable? Almost certainly.
But what has been stated over and over and everyone seems to ignore is that the Earth is BOUND TO CHANGE. There is nobody who can question that. The climate goes through cycles which are not necessarily related at all to any pollutants we have introduced during the period of human civilization. Even if this does turn out to be the case, then guess what? We just make equipment run as efficiently as we can and when the time comes that the climate has shifted usable land, then we start shifting food production and residental areas accordingly.
Yes, it is a shame that certain species will die off and may never see the face of the Earth again, but people have to keep in mind that it's all part of nature. Climactic changes are one of many factors that contribute to the evolution of our planet. If the world hadn't gone through such changes in the past to force older species to extinction, the human race may have never become the dominant species it is now. The major difference that sets us apart from other species is that we are intelligent and can adapt to our environment. Short of the sun burning out (which will also happen eventually), the human race will always find ways of surviving on this planet-- even if that means living in man-made greenhouses to isolate us from the outside environment.
If someone steals a $1.00 piece of candy from a store (which is more than one track off a cd is worth), are they charged this outrageous $250,000 fine? No! You might get some short jail time, but nothing near the scale of what they talk about for copyright infringement. All of a sudden it's so much worse to steal digital information than physical property.
I'm not saying that you should steal songs in the first place, but to deter infringement by practically ruining some of these people's lives is just wrong. If you walk up to some artist and ask them if it was worth their pathetic 50 cents to see some poor college student be fined several thousand dollars and face jailtime, I'm sure they would hold back from commenting.
And once again, record labels should not be allowed to take legal ownership of the songs these artists create. If an individual artist really has a problem with people downloading their music, let them speak for themselves. I'm sure that the vast majority of them don't mind the publicity, but because of their stupid contracts they can't voice their real opinion.
Their answers to many of the interview questions angered me, to be quite honest. They said many things that only went to verify that our legal system is off balance:
1) Considering IP infringement to be the same thing as theft. This is simply not true, no matter how you look at it. Is it criminal? Yes. Should it be treated the same way as theft? Most definitely NOT. The punishments assigned to most IP cases, even the smaller fines, are ridiculous. Do they think we're all millionaires who can afford to throw around $250k for every single frickin' song we've ever downloaded? They're making examples of the first few they've caught by charging them extravagent amounts of money when the RIAA wouldn't have brought in that much money from the original sale in the first place. Wouldn't something like this fall under cruel and unusual punishment?
2) The references to fair use in the different responses seemed contradictory. They claim there is fair use and that people do have certain rights for private use of their own property. Shouldn't this mean that I have a right to use whatever means possible to copy my own CD for backup purposes? If the RIAA insists on making it more difficult to do this, then I'm more than willing to take the extra time required to do so, only now thanks to our friend the DMCA, I'm not allowed to crack the algorithms used to protect the content. Doesn't this seem the least bit contradictory? If somehow the content falls in my lap, it is perfectly legal to keep a copy of it for my own purposes as a backup, and yet it's illegal for me to obtain that content?
I don't know about the rest of you, but it seems like it's time for a change. The RIAA and various other organizations have corrupted the government bodies that were created to protect the citizens of this country. No longer is it the individual artists who create the content, the actual people doing the work, who are being protected-- only the corporate shell that drains money out of their success.
It seems that if there is indeed fair use for personal copying, then I should be able to copy the CD my any means necessary--including cracking any protection algorithms... If the record labels should be able to attempt to circumvent my rights with a system of their invention then I should have the same freedom to circumvent that system without litigation, regardless of what the DMCA says.
I think people would be much more inclined to respect the laws if it were the artists themselves pressing the charges against people and stepping up to remand piracy stops instead of the RIAA which doesn't serve any purpose other than to litigate. If I hear the artists themselves screaming about losing money then I might care. When I hear a big corporation telling me to stop copying stuff when they themselves aren't the ones creating the music, then it does nothing more than piss me off. And by artists screaming, I don't mean ones being sponsored by the RIAA-- I mean they themselves must go and speak out against it. I don't hear the indie artists complaining about piracy, and there are plenty of big indie artists out there that I'm sure have their music pirated too.
This is indeed progress, in my opinion. I think students should be able to discuss lectures as they are occuring and better understand what is being covered. But what it means is that the instructor isn't doing a good enough job discussing it himself, or isn't keeping the environment open enough to encourage open discussion in the class.
Certainly, there are some people who will just abuse the ability for the purpose of joking around and waste time, but I know that I would personally use the same idea in some of my classes where the professors aren't very good at teaching.
I can see the application of having more intelligent autopilot systems on aircraft, but I would have to agree with you that I would never allow a machine to take over the role as the primary pilot of an aircraft I'm riding.
This is especially true in the aspect of terrorism... If they take control of the flight computer, then even if passengers overpower them, what are they supposed to do after that? Nobody will know how to fly, even if the controls are still there to do so.
The problem with most of these predictions is that there are claims of robots taking over service jobs, which I find highly doubtful. People don't like interacting with robots-- that's why automated call answering systems piss people off so much when they call their favorite stores or businesses. I can see robotic technology taking over some other hard labor jobs once the intelligence is there, and perhaps assisting in some of the engineering areas, but not in the numbers he's talking about, and not as soon.
This requires equipment to be shipped back to the manufacturers, however. If given the choice between throwing away my old parts or digging up documents to find out where to ship my stuff to, my parts will be in the trash without a second thought.
I think it's rather unlikely for this to happen in the US anytime soon. The time it takes to disassemble electronics properly to separate them out into the varying material types would make the process very expensive, and seeing as how companies are already cutting corners in every way they can, I find it hard to believe they would bother pouring money into device disposal.
I find that I like to get up and walk around anytime that I'm not actually typing at my computer. I can do any thinking and other mental work while I'm standing up and when it comes time to make a change to code, I sit down and type
There are always items you can bring in to help maintain strength in your arms-- small weights. The stress relief ball things are good for both stress relief and can work the muscles in your hands to keep them from getting stiff from typing all day.
I'll do occasional stretching exercises briefly while I'm at the office, but unfortuntely nothing that can really be considered a real workout. I do stay in decent shape, however, even after working as a programmer for five years.
The size of memory they specify for storying the biometric information in the passport seems extremely limiting. Even assuming that image is compressed, will they really be able to get enough information out of the low resolution/lossy image to run a proper face recognition?
1) If the router is intelligent enough to impliment this over DHCP, all the better-- I did not say DHCP couldn't be used, in fact my point was exactly that existing technology can do this.
2) Indeed, this isn't an ideal solution necessarily, and the number I gave was only an example-- I did not intend for ports to actually start at 1, because I am well aware that the lower range is pretty well cluttered. However, if you work with easy to remember numbers starting at, say, 64000, then programs for calling someone's phone can easily take advantage of that with port 64005, for example. If pagers are standardized to offset 6, then they send messages to port 64006.
3) No, it is not the same inconvenience, because your router address (either on the local or the global side) is a KNOWN address. Once you know that, and assuming the persons network is configured according to the standard, then you KNOW (are guaranteed) that you can access their phone by contacting , port 64005 or whatever the standard dictates.
4) Finally, I never said they would be contiguous, only that they would be *known* addresses/ports, based upon your base address. I don't care whether there are any gaps in my allocated address/port set, only that they are known. The way things are currently, there would be no guarantee that my phone could be accessed in my own address space, and even if that's the case, that it would be a predetermined offset from my address base, which makes it basically useless to give my phone a global address in the first place.
The device id would be more of a theoretical, accepted "standard" for organization of IP addresses. By default, your cell phone should have your IPv6 base address with an offset of, say, 5. In the case of adding it on to IPv4, you have your router running on your WAN ("base") address right now. Access port 5, for example, of the router with the equivalent of port forwarding or a proxy enabled to get access to your phone on the internal network-- which can have whatever the hell internal address it wants since nobody cares.
Again, let me emphasize, this is more of a standard for organization than changing anything on the technical side. So, no, there would be no changes other than for routers to be intelligent enough to configure the appropriate port forwarding and/or proxy.
there's a book out there now that the Linux newbies can use to setup their box properly without leaving the gaping security holes that some distros have by default
You obviously did not understand the point of my device ID thought. Having such an ID (whether this is accomplished by NAT and router ports or making something new) would allow for global access to my devices--phone, pager, home computer, work computer-- while still giving each person in the world only one IP address. Certainly, a home network could still be setup such that, to the devices, they see an internal net address like 192.168.x.x, but if most people's only reason for getting IPv6 pushed is for global device access, then a formal device-id assignment would do just that without consuming a separate IP for each device.
Something that most people fail to recognize is that, even if each device is given its own IP address, do you honestly believe it will be in any kind of consecutive order? That your phone will magically have the address right after your home computer? Not likely. If things work in the future anything like they do now, with each provider company taking posession of blocks of IPs, then your phone will have something completely different from your computer, which makes it essentially useless for grouping your devices together and/or convenient global access.
The best we can hope for with IPv6, assuming this pipe dream of "an ip for every device" comes true, is that governments would truely assign every registered citizen with their own small block of IPs to do with whatever they please and that provider companies would allow you to actually use them on your home computer, phone, pager, etc. At least then there can be some logical organization to things; I can have my base (home) IP as 1.0.65.24.148.50, my phone as 1.0.65.24.148.51, etc. It would be something a person could memorize like their SSN.
The problem is an IPv4-based internet. If it had been designed to allow for future expansion of addresses, there would be no problem, but since every backbone and every router built prior to IPv6 standards being implimented has 4-byte addresses, then the entire world has to be transitioned before IPv6 addresses can go into commercial use.
Does it need to be done? Eventually, yes. Is it an emergency? Not at all. Not every single device out there has its own global IP address and they never will, people. There's no reason for them to work that way, and doing so would only clutter the already messy network we call the internet.
Or perhaps there should be just one IP address assigned to every person and then you can have a device ID for everything they own. Why does each device need a globally recognizable unique ID? It would seem to make much more sense to go the device ID route, since then if you know a person's individual IP, you can say that I want to send a message to "so and so's pager" or "so and so's home computer".
Making an allocation of 35 trillion addresses is all great and good, but the underlying question is... why?
I wonder when individual music artists will be able to take advantage of better systems like these for distributing their music rather than the major record labels-- at least those who really want to make any profit from anything other than their concerts and merchandise...
I suppose you think any of the other big canditates would have done any better? I can only imagine what kind of mess we would be in today if Gore was in office. We'd be the world's bitch, and we'd be paying these damn little terrorist hotspots to leave us alone.
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I'm quite curious just exactly what they mean by flaws to deter counterfeiting. If I send an image to the printer that I want printed, I don't want my printer altering that image in any way-- regardless of what the image may be. If the printer doesn't do its job, then it's going in the trash. Period.
Why so many companies are choosing to focus on anti-counterfeiting measures anymore also confuses me. Unless things have really changed in recent years, counterfeiting isn't exactly a big problem. You might see a news story or two about it on occasion, but it's really just not that common, and there are good reasons why.
For one thing, standard printers are simply not very good at making even sub-standard counterfeit bills. The texture isn't right, the colors aren't quite right, there's no authenticity strip embedded in the paper (in $5's and above), and even the aroma of the paper and ink isn't quite right-- money has its own smell. Because of this, anybody who knows anything about money and has had their hands on cash at least a few times during their life can easily tell the difference between a real and a fake if they bother to pay the least bit of attention to these properties.
Second of all, the time and effort required to produce anything of acceptable quality that won't be checked for authenticity (ie, less than $100) using a commercial printer far outweighs the value of money counterfitted. Yeah, you may be able to get away with faking a handful of 20's, but you'll have spent a good couple thousand dollars on a printer that's good enough, the proper equipment to cut everything, the paper, etc. Anybody willing to invest this much time and effort into counterfitting is going to expect more return from it, and so they are going to find some other method.
What it comes down to is that these companies probably invested a lot more money into creating these anti-counterfeiting technologies than will be saved from bad money. So in essence, they've crippled my photoshop software and my printer for nothing.
I won't argue about whether it's too early to tell or not; the simple fact of the matter is that the climate is changing and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it. Will it cause some species of animals to go extinct? Quite possibly. Is it going to force us to change food production and abandon areas that are no longer inhabitable? Almost certainly.
But what has been stated over and over and everyone seems to ignore is that the Earth is BOUND TO CHANGE. There is nobody who can question that. The climate goes through cycles which are not necessarily related at all to any pollutants we have introduced during the period of human civilization. Even if this does turn out to be the case, then guess what? We just make equipment run as efficiently as we can and when the time comes that the climate has shifted usable land, then we start shifting food production and residental areas accordingly.
Yes, it is a shame that certain species will die off and may never see the face of the Earth again, but people have to keep in mind that it's all part of nature. Climactic changes are one of many factors that contribute to the evolution of our planet. If the world hadn't gone through such changes in the past to force older species to extinction, the human race may have never become the dominant species it is now. The major difference that sets us apart from other species is that we are intelligent and can adapt to our environment. Short of the sun burning out (which will also happen eventually), the human race will always find ways of surviving on this planet-- even if that means living in man-made greenhouses to isolate us from the outside environment.
Let me pose this question:
If someone steals a $1.00 piece of candy from a store (which is more than one track off a cd is worth), are they charged this outrageous $250,000 fine? No! You might get some short jail time, but nothing near the scale of what they talk about for copyright infringement. All of a sudden it's so much worse to steal digital information than physical property.
I'm not saying that you should steal songs in the first place, but to deter infringement by practically ruining some of these people's lives is just wrong. If you walk up to some artist and ask them if it was worth their pathetic 50 cents to see some poor college student be fined several thousand dollars and face jailtime, I'm sure they would hold back from commenting.
And once again, record labels should not be allowed to take legal ownership of the songs these artists create. If an individual artist really has a problem with people downloading their music, let them speak for themselves. I'm sure that the vast majority of them don't mind the publicity, but because of their stupid contracts they can't voice their real opinion.
Their answers to many of the interview questions angered me, to be quite honest. They said many things that only went to verify that our legal system is off balance:
1) Considering IP infringement to be the same thing as theft. This is simply not true, no matter how you look at it. Is it criminal? Yes. Should it be treated the same way as theft? Most definitely NOT. The punishments assigned to most IP cases, even the smaller fines, are ridiculous. Do they think we're all millionaires who can afford to throw around $250k for every single frickin' song we've ever downloaded? They're making examples of the first few they've caught by charging them extravagent amounts of money when the RIAA wouldn't have brought in that much money from the original sale in the first place. Wouldn't something like this fall under cruel and unusual punishment?
2) The references to fair use in the different responses seemed contradictory. They claim there is fair use and that people do have certain rights for private use of their own property. Shouldn't this mean that I have a right to use whatever means possible to copy my own CD for backup purposes? If the RIAA insists on making it more difficult to do this, then I'm more than willing to take the extra time required to do so, only now thanks to our friend the DMCA, I'm not allowed to crack the algorithms used to protect the content. Doesn't this seem the least bit contradictory? If somehow the content falls in my lap, it is perfectly legal to keep a copy of it for my own purposes as a backup, and yet it's illegal for me to obtain that content?
I don't know about the rest of you, but it seems like it's time for a change. The RIAA and various other organizations have corrupted the government bodies that were created to protect the citizens of this country. No longer is it the individual artists who create the content, the actual people doing the work, who are being protected-- only the corporate shell that drains money out of their success.
It seems that if there is indeed fair use for personal copying, then I should be able to copy the CD my any means necessary--including cracking any protection algorithms... If the record labels should be able to attempt to circumvent my rights with a system of their invention then I should have the same freedom to circumvent that system without litigation, regardless of what the DMCA says.
I think people would be much more inclined to respect the laws if it were the artists themselves pressing the charges against people and stepping up to remand piracy stops instead of the RIAA which doesn't serve any purpose other than to litigate. If I hear the artists themselves screaming about losing money then I might care. When I hear a big corporation telling me to stop copying stuff when they themselves aren't the ones creating the music, then it does nothing more than piss me off. And by artists screaming, I don't mean ones being sponsored by the RIAA-- I mean they themselves must go and speak out against it. I don't hear the indie artists complaining about piracy, and there are plenty of big indie artists out there that I'm sure have their music pirated too.
This is indeed progress, in my opinion. I think students should be able to discuss lectures as they are occuring and better understand what is being covered. But what it means is that the instructor isn't doing a good enough job discussing it himself, or isn't keeping the environment open enough to encourage open discussion in the class.
Certainly, there are some people who will just abuse the ability for the purpose of joking around and waste time, but I know that I would personally use the same idea in some of my classes where the professors aren't very good at teaching.
I can see the application of having more intelligent autopilot systems on aircraft, but I would have to agree with you that I would never allow a machine to take over the role as the primary pilot of an aircraft I'm riding.
This is especially true in the aspect of terrorism... If they take control of the flight computer, then even if passengers overpower them, what are they supposed to do after that? Nobody will know how to fly, even if the controls are still there to do so.
The problem with most of these predictions is that there are claims of robots taking over service jobs, which I find highly doubtful. People don't like interacting with robots-- that's why automated call answering systems piss people off so much when they call their favorite stores or businesses. I can see robotic technology taking over some other hard labor jobs once the intelligence is there, and perhaps assisting in some of the engineering areas, but not in the numbers he's talking about, and not as soon.
This requires equipment to be shipped back to the manufacturers, however. If given the choice between throwing away my old parts or digging up documents to find out where to ship my stuff to, my parts will be in the trash without a second thought.
Nah, they haven't made any premium unleaded displays since the regulations on radiation output... Damn safety standards!
I think it's rather unlikely for this to happen in the US anytime soon. The time it takes to disassemble electronics properly to separate them out into the varying material types would make the process very expensive, and seeing as how companies are already cutting corners in every way they can, I find it hard to believe they would bother pouring money into device disposal.
I find that I like to get up and walk around anytime that I'm not actually typing at my computer. I can do any thinking and other mental work while I'm standing up and when it comes time to make a change to code, I sit down and type
There are always items you can bring in to help maintain strength in your arms-- small weights. The stress relief ball things are good for both stress relief and can work the muscles in your hands to keep them from getting stiff from typing all day.
I'll do occasional stretching exercises briefly while I'm at the office, but unfortuntely nothing that can really be considered a real workout. I do stay in decent shape, however, even after working as a programmer for five years.
The size of memory they specify for storying the biometric information in the passport seems extremely limiting. Even assuming that image is compressed, will they really be able to get enough information out of the low resolution/lossy image to run a proper face recognition?
1) If the router is intelligent enough to impliment this over DHCP, all the better-- I did not say DHCP couldn't be used, in fact my point was exactly that existing technology can do this. 2) Indeed, this isn't an ideal solution necessarily, and the number I gave was only an example-- I did not intend for ports to actually start at 1, because I am well aware that the lower range is pretty well cluttered. However, if you work with easy to remember numbers starting at, say, 64000, then programs for calling someone's phone can easily take advantage of that with port 64005, for example. If pagers are standardized to offset 6, then they send messages to port 64006. 3) No, it is not the same inconvenience, because your router address (either on the local or the global side) is a KNOWN address. Once you know that, and assuming the persons network is configured according to the standard, then you KNOW (are guaranteed) that you can access their phone by contacting , port 64005 or whatever the standard dictates. 4) Finally, I never said they would be contiguous, only that they would be *known* addresses/ports, based upon your base address. I don't care whether there are any gaps in my allocated address/port set, only that they are known. The way things are currently, there would be no guarantee that my phone could be accessed in my own address space, and even if that's the case, that it would be a predetermined offset from my address base, which makes it basically useless to give my phone a global address in the first place.
The device id would be more of a theoretical, accepted "standard" for organization of IP addresses. By default, your cell phone should have your IPv6 base address with an offset of, say, 5. In the case of adding it on to IPv4, you have your router running on your WAN ("base") address right now. Access port 5, for example, of the router with the equivalent of port forwarding or a proxy enabled to get access to your phone on the internal network-- which can have whatever the hell internal address it wants since nobody cares.
Again, let me emphasize, this is more of a standard for organization than changing anything on the technical side. So, no, there would be no changes other than for routers to be intelligent enough to configure the appropriate port forwarding and/or proxy.
there's a book out there now that the Linux newbies can use to setup their box properly without leaving the gaping security holes that some distros have by default
You obviously did not understand the point of my device ID thought. Having such an ID (whether this is accomplished by NAT and router ports or making something new) would allow for global access to my devices--phone, pager, home computer, work computer-- while still giving each person in the world only one IP address. Certainly, a home network could still be setup such that, to the devices, they see an internal net address like 192.168.x.x, but if most people's only reason for getting IPv6 pushed is for global device access, then a formal device-id assignment would do just that without consuming a separate IP for each device.
Something that most people fail to recognize is that, even if each device is given its own IP address, do you honestly believe it will be in any kind of consecutive order? That your phone will magically have the address right after your home computer? Not likely. If things work in the future anything like they do now, with each provider company taking posession of blocks of IPs, then your phone will have something completely different from your computer, which makes it essentially useless for grouping your devices together and/or convenient global access.
The best we can hope for with IPv6, assuming this pipe dream of "an ip for every device" comes true, is that governments would truely assign every registered citizen with their own small block of IPs to do with whatever they please and that provider companies would allow you to actually use them on your home computer, phone, pager, etc. At least then there can be some logical organization to things; I can have my base (home) IP as 1.0.65.24.148.50, my phone as 1.0.65.24.148.51, etc. It would be something a person could memorize like their SSN.
The problem is an IPv4-based internet. If it had been designed to allow for future expansion of addresses, there would be no problem, but since every backbone and every router built prior to IPv6 standards being implimented has 4-byte addresses, then the entire world has to be transitioned before IPv6 addresses can go into commercial use.
Does it need to be done? Eventually, yes. Is it an emergency? Not at all. Not every single device out there has its own global IP address and they never will, people. There's no reason for them to work that way, and doing so would only clutter the already messy network we call the internet.
Personally, i wouldn't mind hackers flushing the toilet in my apartment in case one of my roomies doesn't think to... ;)
Or perhaps there should be just one IP address assigned to every person and then you can have a device ID for everything they own. Why does each device need a globally recognizable unique ID? It would seem to make much more sense to go the device ID route, since then if you know a person's individual IP, you can say that I want to send a message to "so and so's pager" or "so and so's home computer".
Making an allocation of 35 trillion addresses is all great and good, but the underlying question is... why?
to deposit all the spare change that builds up in my car, I'd be making my penny transactions like there's no tomorrow!
I wonder when individual music artists will be able to take advantage of better systems like these for distributing their music rather than the major record labels-- at least those who really want to make any profit from anything other than their concerts and merchandise...
I suppose you think any of the other big canditates would have done any better? I can only imagine what kind of mess we would be in today if Gore was in office. We'd be the world's bitch, and we'd be paying these damn little terrorist hotspots to leave us alone.
Thank you for putting it so well :)