That's got to be the perfect plan to wake America up to the idiocy of Diebold voting machines, a la Brewster's Millions. Campaign slogan: "We're all assholes!"
Has America interfered with Mexico in some monstrous way that I'm not aware of?
Don't know if you've heard, and this doesn't have much to do with the GP poster per se, but Greg Palast has had some interesting things to say about ChoicePoint (which you may recall is widely implicated in shady dealings in Florida in 2000) being found stealing Mexican voter rosters and similar illegal activities in the run-up to the recent Mexican presidential election, with the FBI implicated (see here). That might count as having "interfered with Mexico in some monstrous way".
DRM does not change the sound of music. It does not sound any different.
No, but I cannot purchase from the iTMS songs that are encoded at higher rates. That was my point.
But dude, DRM really really *does* change the sound of music! Seriously! It turns them all into some strange cover of that old Simon and Garfunkel tune. I mean, how else would you be able to explain the simple fact that I can't hear anything when I play my wife's iTunes tracks on my Linux box?
Given that no DRM I've yet heard of has been able to stand up against a bunch of people willing to crack it, does anyone think the Zune might gain a cult following if someone should manage to disable the 3-day/3-play limit on the songs? Or even the DRM wrapper that adds DRM to the songs that don't have it? Because a DRM-less Zune actually sounds like a good idea. Hackers, get to it!
I'm not privy to Zune internals, but from what I've gleaned about it, it sounds like the forehead-slappingly easiest way for MS to implement this would be to have a fancified cache directory into which all audio files received via sharing are placed. This cache directory will delete any item older than X, or any file that's been played more than Y times (perhaps flagged by means of audio file metadata written by the player, that counts how many times any file is played).
Reading about MS' claims of "seamlessly adding DRM" to shared audio files, I suspect what they are doing is not actually adding any DRM to files at all -- this would be tricky to pull off, especially given the requirements that the process must be seamless, quick, and invisible to the user. Meanwhile, watching directory contents is brain-dead simple, and would require exactly zero fancy coding to add DRM to audio files. YMMV, but I find it's generally a safe bet to put your money on the simple solutions, at least where MS is concerned.:)
If this is in fact the case, "cracking" such DRM measures would require some means at the very least of manipulating file metadata, perhaps to make sure every audio file is only one day old and has only been played once. Or, if MS is clever and has added a metadata bit flagging a file as "shared", instead of using a cache directory, simply set that bit to "0" and you're good to go. (Note that this is all conjecture; you must do your own reverse engineering to figure out what MS has done to implement their DRM.)
At any rate, happy hunting to all you puzzle-loving hackers out there! And be sure to let us all know once you've broken it!
My interpretation of MS's press release is that Creative Commons music will not be shared at all unless they are selling them through MS's online store and authorize it by opting in. Songs you rip yourself will not be sharable.
Looks like there's been an update to TFA since you looked at it last (giving you the benefit of the doubt). Medialoper's post added this addendum, which "actually came from Microsoft's own Zune Insider, Cesar Menendez":
"I made a song. I own it. How come, when I wirelessly send it to a girl I want to impress, the song has 3 days/3 plays?" Good question. There currently isn't a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM. We can't tell if you are sending a song from a known band or your own home recording so we default to the safety of encoding. And besides, she'll come see you three days later. ..
You can read Menendez' full blog posting here, if you're interested.
So, the long and the short of it is that the Zune will share Creative Commons music, and indeed anything else you stick on it, without necesarily going through MS' online store, and without "opting in" to Microsoft's draconian DRM. You seemed to think that:
It will only work for songs bought from MS's store and whose publishers specified it to be sharable/advertising enabled.
Unless things change between now and release, that isn't actually that case -- the publishers / file creators don't have one single iota of input in this process; the Zune will add DRM to every shared audio file, regardless of license. So I must agree with the idea of "contributory and vicarious infringement", only in this case, it's not an offense against the RIAA caused by sharing, it's an offense against every single copyright license that disallows such DRM shenanigans. Sure, some will argue that there simply isn't that much content covered by Creative Commons and similar licenses, but such content is on the increase, and for the Zune to add this kind of draconian DRM automatically to *everything* is simply Not Cool(TM).
After: France sells surplus to importer for $2. He sells it on local market for $3. Farmer has to quit farming. Local people buy food for $3.
Net result: the importers, of which there are far fewer than there used to be farmers, earn a lot of money. French farmers earn a lot of money at the expense of their fellow subsidizing taxpayers. The majority of local people, who used to be farmers, lose their livelyhood, can't find new work in their country's stunted economy, and become wholly dependent on foreign aid.
And this, folks, is why international economics is an important subject. Ever heard of the law of unintended consequences? This sure looks like a textbook case -- international "aid" is actually screwing Africa. Look around, even Africans are saying it.
No, but as virtual money begins to have real-world value to the point that there is an effective exchange rate, then the lines between such a virtual economy and any real economy are much blurrier. WoW might not be a bank or wire service, but if WoW money is being exchanged with real money in significant volumes, it may as well be.
Is it that these people aren't paying taxes on their sales, and that makes it easier to launder money or defraud people?
I think this is the crux of the issue -- that goldfarming sales can be pretty substantial, and that they go largely unreported for taxation purposes. Given the informal and unreported nature of such transactions, it's also conceivable that goldfarming could indeed make it easier to launder money or defraud people.
Mind you, I'm not saying that this is definitively the case, not by any means. I don't know enough about the situation to say one way or the other. Nor do I think the Japanese government is saying this either, at least as far as I've read. But I *do* think the potential is there, which warrants an investigation to look more deeply into the facts -- which is what the Japanese government is doing.
My point is simply that there is significant potential for shenanigans of the sort that governments are usually interested in controlling -- to wit, tax evasion and money laundering -- and that, as such, this investigation is reasonable, and the GGP poster is a bit out of line in suggesting that opening an investigation must necessarily mean that Japan has solved all other problems.
I would like to congratulate the Japanese government for solving all of its countries other problems. I mean, they must have solved everthing else if this is somehow now a priority to them, right?
I'll assume you're just relatively ignorant and haven't spent much time living in Japan. As it is, they keep a very tight grip on the economic reins in a number of areas, and money laundering and taxation are two of the big ones. These are serious issues for anyone doing business in / with Japan, as banking and wiring service websites will show anti-laundering / anti-fraud messages from time to time, and the government's efforts to prevent money laundering and tax dodging are partly why it's so difficult now to get a bank account in Japan. If dodgy types have found out that gold farming is a quick and dirty way to skirt the laws, it makes perfect sense to me that the government would be interested in finding out about it -- hence the investigation.
Right just think what would happen if bill gates got rid of a **** of his cash in vertual gold before filling out taxes, then was able to sell it off and spend it slowly.
For crime, as with anything, follow the money. That's what Japanese law enforcement does, they follow the money as one of their many tools in trying to run a tight ship. And as virtual money starts to look more and more like the real thing, you can expect all sorts of government attention in other countries as well.
I disabled one of my neighbours router for a few days just to see if they could figure out what the problem was...
after 4-5 days I decided to let them off the hook and re-opened their router to the world.
They never did get it secured...
Heck, simply shutting it off isn't going to prompt them to secure it -- for all they can tell, it might just be a flaky product; there's nothing they can see that would indicate someone outside shut it off. Do something with more obvious symptoms than "it don't work", like renaming to something ridiculous that they'll actually see when next they log on, or tweak the settings to redirect to something silly (but not legally dangerous), like the kittenwar site mentioned in TFA.
Yes, but one thing a lot of futurists seem to forget is that the mass majority of humanity doesn't seem to be all that smart. As such, any the amplification of human intelligence as noted in the summary would more likely simply amplify our own tendencies toward mediocrity. Much like that rephrasing, "to err is human, but to really screw things up requires a computer."
...I live in the 9th largest city in the US, but I still only get one choice... You either live with the fact that you're being tracked, or life without access.
Yep... Free Market...
Um, no, only one choice is much more commonly understood to be a monopoly. And as another poster elsewhere stated: A "Free Market" argument presupposes that there is competition for the consumer to take advantage of. What the GP poster here describes is decidedly not a "free market".
First off, I'm no tech drone, but I'm no noob either. And when I left my last job at a major international finance house, just one year ago, they were only then finally phasing out the last of their NT4 machines. Most of these were indeed servers, but there were also a few unfortunate workstations (shunned, mind you).
Now I fully agree with you that this could be seen as evidence that that company is stuck in the past, but be that as it may, this was one huge-ass organization, with more than a handful of NT4 machines lying around. Note too that the GP poster here never states that all these NT4 machines he had to deal with were workstations -- he merely describes them as "PCs", which in Windowsland sometimes just means "computers that aren't Macs". So between that and what I've seen with my own eyes, I'm willing to give the GP poster the benefit of the doubt here -- and a good bit of sympathy.
For example, I think it was in this story (I can't listen to it now to be sure) that the interviewer very politely tore apart a GM executive's argument for why many families "need" an SUV. Now, I'll agree that sometimes interviewees aren't challanged as strongly as I might like, but misleading or false statements do get challanged.
I'm sorry I missed that segment. I used to listen to NPR a lot more (drove to work in a town with good reception of an NPR station), but slowly went off them in favor of the BBC (which was also syndicated at the same time as my commute). Perhaps it was just the luck of the draw in terms of program segments, or maybe the program at the time I was driving wasn't one of the more journalistically strict (my memory's fuzzy by now), but I do recall hearing a number of interviews on NPR that were woefully weak. Granted, NPR does a stellar job compared to Fox, CNN, and the like that seem to consistently dive for the lowest common denominator (perhaps a sad truism of news-for-profit?), but in comparison to the BBC, I found NPR just didn't stand muster. I'd be thrilled if this has changed. Once I can start working from home again (hopefully in about a half a year or so), I'll be able to listen with more regularlity.
I could almost swear some author somewhere has already described this, but the first thing that popped into my head was an image of a rotund alien race that speaks by farting. Maybe that's just an unconscious recall of some of my elder male relatives, I dunno. Interestingly, "communicating by farts" shows no hits on Google, so there might be a niche here for content development and provision...
This kind of weak NPR-enabled nonsense frosts me. Try listening to the BBC -- if a speaker is bullshitting, the interviewer calls them on it. If the interviewer asks a question and the speaker evades by spouting, the interviewer calls them on it. It's called doing your homework, and actually mediating, things NPR (or, really, just about any US media outlet) can't be bothered to do. <sigh.>
Yes, but I can step off a plane in Paris without fearing for my essential liberty. I'm not going to get dragged to the Bastille for having contributed (via testimony) to the state-sanctioned murder of a mentally handicapped person in Texas. What you're suggesting is much the same--that Yahoo's executives ought to be brought to justice here for things which we consider unjust, but which aren't necessarily considered unjust in the jurisdiction where they occurred.
IANAL, but just to play devil's advocate, one could take the stance that what happened in the US, what Yahoo's US execs themselves did, is the aiding and abetting of, possibly including conspiracy to ________ (have a lawyer fill in the blank). This much can be shown to have occurred on US soil, and as such would (at least theoretically) be prosecutable in US courts.
But it is very worth emphasizing the parent's point -- Person A should not be legally liable in Country B for actions performed in Country C. If you want to go after Yahoo's execs this way, find something they've done in the US. The censoring itself is happening in China, carried out by order of the Chinese government (AFIACT); any political imprisonment and / or execution is happening in China, carried out by the Chinese government. Inasmuch as sovereignty means anything in international law (another subject entirely for exploration elsewhere), the US courts can't do diddly about these things. They might be able to take on contributory actions carried out by people in the US -- but this is something that a lawyer would have to look into.
The difference is that, if you are a US resident, the Russian mob does not use any force against you.
And for that matter, I strongly suspect that even residents of Russia don't have allofmp3.com knocking on their doors saying, "Youse hasn't been downloadin' that much lately. Muggsy here don't like that." Yet here in the States, we do have the RIAA/MPAA attempting to bully the whole public into buying absolute crapola.
I wish some day that the irs would go have a chat with them... "Losing $250Billion a year huh? That's pretty interesting... considering you only reported half a billion in profits for the last few years..."
With bullshit numbers like these, I think that's exactly what someone should do -- get a big-ass tax audit rolling all over their sorry butts. I mean hell, if nebulous things like goodwill can show up on a balance sheet and be part of financial accounting and tax basis, shouldn't these garbage RIAA/MPAA "lost sales" also be taken into consideration by the IRS? I'm sure we could shoehorn that in somehow. Anyone up on corporate accounting care to take a stab at it?
How is a "war on piracy" going to actually accomplish anything? All it will do is provide an arena for posturing and bribery^h^h^h^hlobbying.
That's exactly what this will accomplish, which is exactly what the proponents want. That and the option to label a whole demographic as "outlaws", thus giving those in power more leverage if/when they ever decide they want to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's got to be the perfect plan to wake America up to the idiocy of Diebold voting machines, a la Brewster's Millions. Campaign slogan: "We're all assholes!"
(Hint.)
Don't know if you've heard, and this doesn't have much to do with the GP poster per se, but Greg Palast has had some interesting things to say about ChoicePoint (which you may recall is widely implicated in shady dealings in Florida in 2000) being found stealing Mexican voter rosters and similar illegal activities in the run-up to the recent Mexican presidential election, with the FBI implicated (see here). That might count as having "interfered with Mexico in some monstrous way".
But dude, DRM really really *does* change the sound of music! Seriously! It turns them all into some strange cover of that old Simon and Garfunkel tune. I mean, how else would you be able to explain the simple fact that I can't hear anything when I play my wife's iTunes tracks on my Linux box?
...but only for three days or three plays, whichever comes first! :-P
I'm not privy to Zune internals, but from what I've gleaned about it, it sounds like the forehead-slappingly easiest way for MS to implement this would be to have a fancified cache directory into which all audio files received via sharing are placed. This cache directory will delete any item older than X, or any file that's been played more than Y times (perhaps flagged by means of audio file metadata written by the player, that counts how many times any file is played).
Reading about MS' claims of "seamlessly adding DRM" to shared audio files, I suspect what they are doing is not actually adding any DRM to files at all -- this would be tricky to pull off, especially given the requirements that the process must be seamless, quick, and invisible to the user. Meanwhile, watching directory contents is brain-dead simple, and would require exactly zero fancy coding to add DRM to audio files. YMMV, but I find it's generally a safe bet to put your money on the simple solutions, at least where MS is concerned. :)
If this is in fact the case, "cracking" such DRM measures would require some means at the very least of manipulating file metadata, perhaps to make sure every audio file is only one day old and has only been played once. Or, if MS is clever and has added a metadata bit flagging a file as "shared", instead of using a cache directory, simply set that bit to "0" and you're good to go. (Note that this is all conjecture; you must do your own reverse engineering to figure out what MS has done to implement their DRM.)
At any rate, happy hunting to all you puzzle-loving hackers out there! And be sure to let us all know once you've broken it!
Cheers,
Looks like there's been an update to TFA since you looked at it last (giving you the benefit of the doubt). Medialoper's post added this addendum, which "actually came from Microsoft's own Zune Insider, Cesar Menendez":
You can read Menendez' full blog posting here, if you're interested.
So, the long and the short of it is that the Zune will share Creative Commons music, and indeed anything else you stick on it, without necesarily going through MS' online store, and without "opting in" to Microsoft's draconian DRM. You seemed to think that:
Unless things change between now and release, that isn't actually that case -- the publishers / file creators don't have one single iota of input in this process; the Zune will add DRM to every shared audio file, regardless of license. So I must agree with the idea of "contributory and vicarious infringement", only in this case, it's not an offense against the RIAA caused by sharing, it's an offense against every single copyright license that disallows such DRM shenanigans. Sure, some will argue that there simply isn't that much content covered by Creative Commons and similar licenses, but such content is on the increase, and for the Zune to add this kind of draconian DRM automatically to *everything* is simply Not Cool(TM).
Methinks "mediocrity" would be more accurate. As noted elsewhere,
This seems a very fitting description of how the US election process is being handled...
And this, folks, is why international economics is an important subject. Ever heard of the law of unintended consequences? This sure looks like a textbook case -- international "aid" is actually screwing Africa. Look around, even Africans are saying it.
Now back to your regularly scheduled ennui...
I know "Wind Waker" is not a typo, but sheesh, talk about iffy game titles -- all it brings to mind is summer camp games of fennis...
No, but as virtual money begins to have real-world value to the point that there is an effective exchange rate, then the lines between such a virtual economy and any real economy are much blurrier. WoW might not be a bank or wire service, but if WoW money is being exchanged with real money in significant volumes, it may as well be.
I think this is the crux of the issue -- that goldfarming sales can be pretty substantial, and that they go largely unreported for taxation purposes. Given the informal and unreported nature of such transactions, it's also conceivable that goldfarming could indeed make it easier to launder money or defraud people.
Mind you, I'm not saying that this is definitively the case, not by any means. I don't know enough about the situation to say one way or the other. Nor do I think the Japanese government is saying this either, at least as far as I've read. But I *do* think the potential is there, which warrants an investigation to look more deeply into the facts -- which is what the Japanese government is doing.
My point is simply that there is significant potential for shenanigans of the sort that governments are usually interested in controlling -- to wit, tax evasion and money laundering -- and that, as such, this investigation is reasonable, and the GGP poster is a bit out of line in suggesting that opening an investigation must necessarily mean that Japan has solved all other problems.
I'll assume you're just relatively ignorant and haven't spent much time living in Japan. As it is, they keep a very tight grip on the economic reins in a number of areas, and money laundering and taxation are two of the big ones. These are serious issues for anyone doing business in / with Japan, as banking and wiring service websites will show anti-laundering / anti-fraud messages from time to time, and the government's efforts to prevent money laundering and tax dodging are partly why it's so difficult now to get a bank account in Japan. If dodgy types have found out that gold farming is a quick and dirty way to skirt the laws, it makes perfect sense to me that the government would be interested in finding out about it -- hence the investigation.
As another poster noted on the linked GameSpot page,
For crime, as with anything, follow the money. That's what Japanese law enforcement does, they follow the money as one of their many tools in trying to run a tight ship. And as virtual money starts to look more and more like the real thing, you can expect all sorts of government attention in other countries as well.
What is this "lynx" you speak of? Have you got any screenshots you could link to?
Heck, simply shutting it off isn't going to prompt them to secure it -- for all they can tell, it might just be a flaky product; there's nothing they can see that would indicate someone outside shut it off. Do something with more obvious symptoms than "it don't work", like renaming to something ridiculous that they'll actually see when next they log on, or tweak the settings to redirect to something silly (but not legally dangerous), like the kittenwar site mentioned in TFA.
Don't forget that lovely anagram proverb:
Saru mochi kara okiru -- Monkeys arise from mochi. Mmm, chewy!
Yes, but one thing a lot of futurists seem to forget is that the mass majority of humanity doesn't seem to be all that smart. As such, any the amplification of human intelligence as noted in the summary would more likely simply amplify our own tendencies toward mediocrity. Much like that rephrasing, "to err is human, but to really screw things up requires a computer."
Um, no, only one choice is much more commonly understood to be a monopoly. And as another poster elsewhere stated: A "Free Market" argument presupposes that there is competition for the consumer to take advantage of. What the GP poster here describes is decidedly not a "free market".
Cheers,
First off, I'm no tech drone, but I'm no noob either. And when I left my last job at a major international finance house, just one year ago, they were only then finally phasing out the last of their NT4 machines. Most of these were indeed servers, but there were also a few unfortunate workstations (shunned, mind you).
Now I fully agree with you that this could be seen as evidence that that company is stuck in the past, but be that as it may, this was one huge-ass organization, with more than a handful of NT4 machines lying around. Note too that the GP poster here never states that all these NT4 machines he had to deal with were workstations -- he merely describes them as "PCs", which in Windowsland sometimes just means "computers that aren't Macs". So between that and what I've seen with my own eyes, I'm willing to give the GP poster the benefit of the doubt here -- and a good bit of sympathy.
Cheers,
I'm sorry I missed that segment. I used to listen to NPR a lot more (drove to work in a town with good reception of an NPR station), but slowly went off them in favor of the BBC (which was also syndicated at the same time as my commute). Perhaps it was just the luck of the draw in terms of program segments, or maybe the program at the time I was driving wasn't one of the more journalistically strict (my memory's fuzzy by now), but I do recall hearing a number of interviews on NPR that were woefully weak. Granted, NPR does a stellar job compared to Fox, CNN, and the like that seem to consistently dive for the lowest common denominator (perhaps a sad truism of news-for-profit?), but in comparison to the BBC, I found NPR just didn't stand muster. I'd be thrilled if this has changed. Once I can start working from home again (hopefully in about a half a year or so), I'll be able to listen with more regularlity.
Cheers,
I could almost swear some author somewhere has already described this, but the first thing that popped into my head was an image of a rotund alien race that speaks by farting. Maybe that's just an unconscious recall of some of my elder male relatives, I dunno. Interestingly, "communicating by farts" shows no hits on Google, so there might be a niche here for content development and provision...
This kind of weak NPR-enabled nonsense frosts me. Try listening to the BBC -- if a speaker is bullshitting, the interviewer calls them on it. If the interviewer asks a question and the speaker evades by spouting, the interviewer calls them on it. It's called doing your homework, and actually mediating, things NPR (or, really, just about any US media outlet) can't be bothered to do. <sigh.>
IANAL, but just to play devil's advocate, one could take the stance that what happened in the US, what Yahoo's US execs themselves did, is the aiding and abetting of, possibly including conspiracy to ________ (have a lawyer fill in the blank). This much can be shown to have occurred on US soil, and as such would (at least theoretically) be prosecutable in US courts.
But it is very worth emphasizing the parent's point -- Person A should not be legally liable in Country B for actions performed in Country C. If you want to go after Yahoo's execs this way, find something they've done in the US. The censoring itself is happening in China, carried out by order of the Chinese government (AFIACT); any political imprisonment and / or execution is happening in China, carried out by the Chinese government. Inasmuch as sovereignty means anything in international law (another subject entirely for exploration elsewhere), the US courts can't do diddly about these things. They might be able to take on contributory actions carried out by people in the US -- but this is something that a lawyer would have to look into.
And for that matter, I strongly suspect that even residents of Russia don't have allofmp3.com knocking on their doors saying, "Youse hasn't been downloadin' that much lately. Muggsy here don't like that." Yet here in the States, we do have the RIAA/MPAA attempting to bully the whole public into buying absolute crapola.
Meh.
With bullshit numbers like these, I think that's exactly what someone should do -- get a big-ass tax audit rolling all over their sorry butts. I mean hell, if nebulous things like goodwill can show up on a balance sheet and be part of financial accounting and tax basis, shouldn't these garbage RIAA/MPAA "lost sales" also be taken into consideration by the IRS? I'm sure we could shoehorn that in somehow. Anyone up on corporate accounting care to take a stab at it?
That's exactly what this will accomplish, which is exactly what the proponents want. That and the option to label a whole demographic as "outlaws", thus giving those in power more leverage if/when they ever decide they want to use it.