Good call. This bullshit about "DRM is there to prevent the normal user from pirating" is the most moronic thing I've ever heard. It's a rationalization that content companies come up with to convince their shareholders that they haven't just wasted billions of dollars.
The normal user doesn't pirate. It's the clever user that breaks copy protection and learns to properly transcode. DRM just slows this guy down. Not much either.
KFG, I know you know how DRM works, but some people here don't, so here's a quick primer: DRM is encryption. Encryption is a simple concept; A wants to send something to B, but doesn't want C (the attacker) to read it. B gives A a key with which to encrypt, having a personal decryption key. The attacker can't decode it because he doesn't have B's decryption key.
In DRM, B and C are the same guy - the attacker has the key. Sure DRM technologies try to obfuscate this key, but ultimately, the key must exist somewhere that is accessible to B - and as such, C.
As a result, there only needs to be one clever guy in the 6.5 Billion people in the world. Everyone else just downloads the program they wrote to do the magic. Result: piracy isn't even slowed by these technologies; they end up being an inconvenience to normal users and a tremendous waste of money in the anti-piracy game.
A better solution: Steganography. Embed the purchaser's customer ID in his purchase. There are some good algorithms that can do this reliably even through a transcode (especially if it's only 16 bytes of ID; the larger the difference between message text and embedded text bandwidths, the more resistant the embedded text can be to lossy compression).
Even for DVDs purchased at a store, add a unique ID to each DVD sold. The buyer's and DVD's info is taken at point of purchase and associated with one another.
Casual piracy would end quickly - the purchaser would be held accountable for leaking stuff into the wild. Professional piracy would move into the realm of credit fraud investigation (as that would be the only way to shift accountability away from oneself), and would thus carry a heavy penalty.
Of course, there'd still be the 'mom-and-pop' hole, but it would quickly get filled; a couple hundred thousand to give mom and pops a cheap little reader is a hell of a lot cheaper than this DRM arms race.
Damned right. Duplication and piracy are the price the **AA pays for the various end-runs around the better half of copyright law.
What am I on about? Fair use and release into the public domain are key concepts in copyright. The **AA have been fucking with these for a while now. Copyright ends in 95 years? A fucking joke. I may be breaking the law when I store my movies as AVI files, but Disney broke (as in damaged irreparably) copyright law when they pushed the length of copyright past its original 14 years.
Yeah. Read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and pay close attention to the political views of Bernardo De La Paz. Then you'll know what happens to laws that become too onerous to follow.
Still, they're not 'artists'. They're entertainers.
Artists do it for the love. The second they start doing it for the money, it's a job. Once it's a job, they're no longer artists; they're entertainers (ie: they get paid to entertain you).
No, there's nothing wrong with that.
However, there's something wrong with the [RM][IP]AA's use of their employees as a sort of moral shield against the underhanded shit they do. I see it kinda like the woman who says "I have kids in the car" when she is called on cutting in line. It's despicable to use other people - especially your charge (kids) or the hand that feeds you (entertainers) - as an excuse to do amoral things.
The CSS key for a DVD is available on the DVD. Jon just figured out where it was and what the scramble was by comparing a few encrypted video frame headers with correct MPEG-2 frame headers hunting around the disc for something that would produce a valid header.
Of course, it helps that CSS is a very weak cipher. Given that and knowlegde of what an MPEG-2 header looks like, it's relatively easy to infer the key (which is what libdvdread does if your drive is designed not to report the key sector).
Well, the reason the hack works is because of a kind of cheapness in common DVD players: they read the ISO9660 filesystem and ignore the UDF system (as all the player needs is the DVD filenames). As a result, the iso9660 stuff likely reports the correct data, while the UDF does not. Simple hack: mount as ISO9660 in Linux and play via filesystem (rather than via/dev/dvd). As a result, Linux users are actually better off then Windows for once when it comes to DVDs.
At its essence, then, any company who uses this new copy protection are alienating their bleeding-edge customers. You know, the guys who would be buying HD-DVDs and Blu-Rays, if they ever decided on which to use.
"which results in the IFO file on the DVD (this is the file responsible for storing information on chapters, subtitles and audio tracks) appearing to the PC as being zero bytes long"
Easy peasy. UDF is an extension of ISO9660; just use isoinfo to get the hex offset, and read the file raw right up until you're no longer getting valid IFO data.
I'll bet libdvdread will have this hack within a week.
Agreed. Something that happens a lot in Pennsylvania is organic farmers' markets. They're littered around mid-pennsy and some of the states to the south. The grub is cheap, delicious, and 'organic', according to US laws.
'Course, this all goes into my feelings about family versus industrial farming, and the rediculous addiction the US has to corn farming. I'll leave all that out, as it's not really as relevant here.
I know IP is a recent concept, but Copyright, Patents, Trademarks and Trade Secrets have been lumped together, in terms of how they're thought about, for years.
A black hole is not a geometric point. It's an object with none of its matter outside of its schwartzchild radius (for a given mass, the schwartzchild radius is the distance at which escape velocity is c). It's never been a geometric point; the term singluarity is used because the volume of a black hole is quite small.
This 'infinite density' and 'zero volume' bullshit has been popularized by TV Sci fi.
"When water and sun are plentiful, they grow HUGE, but have virtually no taste. "
I've found that increasing their available CO2 helps a lot with the lack of taste. I built a little solar/house-powered monoethanolamine reactor to boost the CO2 in my greenhouse to about 1800 PPM. The result is more photosynthesis, and so more sugar. Good sweet 'matoes.
Don't ask me why, but tomatoes don't seem to like it at higher than about 2000 ppm. Or at least, that's what I read.
I realize that WiFi *drivers* exist and work well for Linux (not to mention the lovely ndiswrapper for unsupported cards). What I'm saying is that a very few distros handle WiFi in a nice, easy, card-agnostic plug-and-play GUI-spanking manner - which is what I mean by 'support'.
IE: Power users don't need support, they just need to know that it Can Be Done and access to Google. Normal users need the base system to handle it for them, and if it doesn't, they spread rumors about the immaturity of the OS.
It's unfortunate that more of us aren't power users, but that's the way it crumbles.
Actually, I got the term from someone whos computer I fix repeatedly. She calls herself 'Typhoid Tiffany', because of the damage she does to her computer.
Re:Is it really an infection if...
on
IE7 Toolbar Mayhem
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Quick question, though. What was bizarre or seething about dismissing a nit-picker?
The guy was an AC who, apparently, didn't have anything to say other than "You spelled 'definitely' wrong" - very much the definition of a spelling troll.
Re:Is it really an infection if...
on
IE7 Toolbar Mayhem
·
· Score: -1, Troll
You're funny.
Microsoft fan. *snort*
*pats his monitor* Hey, Punquin! Say 'Hi' to the nice man.
[Slax-based system]: 'Hello, OCG. Nice to meet you!'
"Yes, [DRM] is necessary, or else everything would be pirated to hell and back"
*snort* Yeah, 'cos DRM is fool proof and everything. Good one. Had me rolling.
Seriously, what makes DRM a better system than, say, a system which would steganographically embed the buyer's customer ID into every song, movie and program they download? If the file shows up in the wild, the customer could be held responsible (as he should be). Meanwhile, users don't get restricted to how they can use the stuff they pay for.
"Besides, the GPL is essentially a form of DRM"
Expanding the concept of DRM into the world of legal documents opens a can of worms you don't want to taste.
Still, using a purpose-based definition (DRM is a method of preventing the duplication of digital media by unauthorized persons), I fail to see how the GPL would count as DRM. That's like saying that Creative Commons is a form of DRM. The fact is that Copyright, legally, makes copying an infringement. In order to alleviate this for a products consumers, GPL and CC explicitly allow copying.
You already knew that, of course; you're just being smarmy. I get that, but a misdirection like that can't go uncommented.
Heh. I'm not an MS fan (read some of my posts; I'm a linux geek and a member of the pirate party - no establishmentism here ^_^), but I'm also not a zealot.
Sure, it's humor, but the summary still gives slashdotters (who are of a generally 'MS Sucks' mind) the impression that IE7 will just allow this to happen. That's why I said the post was fud, but the article wasn't.
Meanwhile, Hey OCG! It's been a while since I've seen you posting around! 'Course, that's probably 'cos I've been too busy to go posting myself. Anyways, yeah, good to see you; I've always thought of you as the Devil's Advocate Himself ^_^.
Re:Is it really an infection if...
on
IE7 Toolbar Mayhem
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"I don't like how protected mode stays disabled after you install one toolbar."
That only occurs if the toolbar in question disables it. The problem with installing any toolbar is that it is actually executing a binary on your system - meaning that it has full access to your computer, and even interface override control.
I wonder if there's any of those stupid toolbars that automatically clicks 'yeah, fine, do it' on any ActiveX warnings that pop up.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose, but the point of a thesis is to avoid bias.
Dude's gonna fail to grageeeate.
Ah, correct me if I'm wrong, but IceWeasel is just Firefox with different branding, ne?
Good call. This bullshit about "DRM is there to prevent the normal user from pirating" is the most moronic thing I've ever heard. It's a rationalization that content companies come up with to convince their shareholders that they haven't just wasted billions of dollars.
The normal user doesn't pirate. It's the clever user that breaks copy protection and learns to properly transcode. DRM just slows this guy down. Not much either.
KFG, I know you know how DRM works, but some people here don't, so here's a quick primer:
DRM is encryption. Encryption is a simple concept; A wants to send something to B, but doesn't want C (the attacker) to read it. B gives A a key with which to encrypt, having a personal decryption key. The attacker can't decode it because he doesn't have B's decryption key.
In DRM, B and C are the same guy - the attacker has the key. Sure DRM technologies try to obfuscate this key, but ultimately, the key must exist somewhere that is accessible to B - and as such, C.
As a result, there only needs to be one clever guy in the 6.5 Billion people in the world. Everyone else just downloads the program they wrote to do the magic. Result: piracy isn't even slowed by these technologies; they end up being an inconvenience to normal users and a tremendous waste of money in the anti-piracy game.
A better solution: Steganography. Embed the purchaser's customer ID in his purchase. There are some good algorithms that can do this reliably even through a transcode (especially if it's only 16 bytes of ID; the larger the difference between message text and embedded text bandwidths, the more resistant the embedded text can be to lossy compression).
Even for DVDs purchased at a store, add a unique ID to each DVD sold. The buyer's and DVD's info is taken at point of purchase and associated with one another.
Casual piracy would end quickly - the purchaser would be held accountable for leaking stuff into the wild. Professional piracy would move into the realm of credit fraud investigation (as that would be the only way to shift accountability away from oneself), and would thus carry a heavy penalty.
Of course, there'd still be the 'mom-and-pop' hole, but it would quickly get filled; a couple hundred thousand to give mom and pops a cheap little reader is a hell of a lot cheaper than this DRM arms race.
Damned right. Duplication and piracy are the price the **AA pays for the various end-runs around the better half of copyright law.
What am I on about? Fair use and release into the public domain are key concepts in copyright. The **AA have been fucking with these for a while now. Copyright ends in 95 years? A fucking joke. I may be breaking the law when I store my movies as AVI files, but Disney broke (as in damaged irreparably) copyright law when they pushed the length of copyright past its original 14 years.
Yeah. Read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and pay close attention to the political views of Bernardo De La Paz. Then you'll know what happens to laws that become too onerous to follow.
Still, they're not 'artists'. They're entertainers.
Artists do it for the love. The second they start doing it for the money, it's a job. Once it's a job, they're no longer artists; they're entertainers (ie: they get paid to entertain you).
No, there's nothing wrong with that.
However, there's something wrong with the [RM][IP]AA's use of their employees as a sort of moral shield against the underhanded shit they do. I see it kinda like the woman who says "I have kids in the car" when she is called on cutting in line. It's despicable to use other people - especially your charge (kids) or the hand that feeds you (entertainers) - as an excuse to do amoral things.
Slashdot has ads?
When did this happen?
*looks around*
Where are they?
You're incorrect.
The CSS key for a DVD is available on the DVD. Jon just figured out where it was and what the scramble was by comparing a few encrypted video frame headers with correct MPEG-2 frame headers hunting around the disc for something that would produce a valid header.
Of course, it helps that CSS is a very weak cipher. Given that and knowlegde of what an MPEG-2 header looks like, it's relatively easy to infer the key (which is what libdvdread does if your drive is designed not to report the key sector).
Any DVD drive with bit/book settings would be able to circumvent that; data is not written to a DVD/CD in a spiral.
As such, you can just set the drive to read raw data, read the data, reverse the bits, and decode according to the appropriate book.
Well, the reason the hack works is because of a kind of cheapness in common DVD players: they read the ISO9660 filesystem and ignore the UDF system (as all the player needs is the DVD filenames). As a result, the iso9660 stuff likely reports the correct data, while the UDF does not. Simple hack: mount as ISO9660 in Linux and play via filesystem (rather than via /dev/dvd). As a result, Linux users are actually better off then Windows for once when it comes to DVDs.
Funny stuff. No, really.
At its essence, then, any company who uses this new copy protection are alienating their bleeding-edge customers. You know, the guys who would be buying HD-DVDs and Blu-Rays, if they ever decided on which to use.
"which results in the IFO file on the DVD (this is the file responsible for storing information on chapters, subtitles and audio tracks) appearing to the PC as being zero bytes long"
Easy peasy. UDF is an extension of ISO9660; just use isoinfo to get the hex offset, and read the file raw right up until you're no longer getting valid IFO data.
I'll bet libdvdread will have this hack within a week.
Agreed. Something that happens a lot in Pennsylvania is organic farmers' markets. They're littered around mid-pennsy and some of the states to the south. The grub is cheap, delicious, and 'organic', according to US laws.
'Course, this all goes into my feelings about family versus industrial farming, and the rediculous addiction the US has to corn farming. I'll leave all that out, as it's not really as relevant here.
I know IP is a recent concept, but Copyright, Patents, Trademarks and Trade Secrets have been lumped together, in terms of how they're thought about, for years.
IceInu?
c'mon. It has the alliteration, and it's more the direct opposite, re GPP.
Do they sell a protein gel that *never* stops bleeding?
If so, I'll make a house out of it and sell it to Glen Danzig.
Yeah, spank that pseudoscience.
A black hole is not a geometric point. It's an object with none of its matter outside of its schwartzchild radius (for a given mass, the schwartzchild radius is the distance at which escape velocity is c). It's never been a geometric point; the term singluarity is used because the volume of a black hole is quite small.
This 'infinite density' and 'zero volume' bullshit has been popularized by TV Sci fi.
"When water and sun are plentiful, they grow HUGE, but have virtually no taste. "
I've found that increasing their available CO2 helps a lot with the lack of taste. I built a little solar/house-powered monoethanolamine reactor to boost the CO2 in my greenhouse to about 1800 PPM. The result is more photosynthesis, and so more sugar. Good sweet 'matoes.
Don't ask me why, but tomatoes don't seem to like it at higher than about 2000 ppm. Or at least, that's what I read.
I have something to fear from organic food.
The price.
Honestly. If you're going to try and push this shit on people, don't tell 'em it's good for em. Make it cheaper.
Your later post says that this is true in Gentoo.
I realize that WiFi *drivers* exist and work well for Linux (not to mention the lovely ndiswrapper for unsupported cards). What I'm saying is that a very few distros handle WiFi in a nice, easy, card-agnostic plug-and-play GUI-spanking manner - which is what I mean by 'support'.
IE: Power users don't need support, they just need to know that it Can Be Done and access to Google. Normal users need the base system to handle it for them, and if it doesn't, they spread rumors about the immaturity of the OS.
It's unfortunate that more of us aren't power users, but that's the way it crumbles.
Actually, I got the term from someone whos computer I fix repeatedly. She calls herself 'Typhoid Tiffany', because of the damage she does to her computer.
Quick question, though. What was bizarre or seething about dismissing a nit-picker?
The guy was an AC who, apparently, didn't have anything to say other than "You spelled 'definitely' wrong" - very much the definition of a spelling troll.
You're funny.
Microsoft fan. *snort*
*pats his monitor* Hey, Punquin! Say 'Hi' to the nice man.
[Slax-based system]: 'Hello, OCG. Nice to meet you!'
"Yes, [DRM] is necessary, or else everything would be pirated to hell and back"
*snort* Yeah, 'cos DRM is fool proof and everything. Good one. Had me rolling.
Seriously, what makes DRM a better system than, say, a system which would steganographically embed the buyer's customer ID into every song, movie and program they download? If the file shows up in the wild, the customer could be held responsible (as he should be). Meanwhile, users don't get restricted to how they can use the stuff they pay for.
"Besides, the GPL is essentially a form of DRM"
Expanding the concept of DRM into the world of legal documents opens a can of worms you don't want to taste.
Still, using a purpose-based definition (DRM is a method of preventing the duplication of digital media by unauthorized persons), I fail to see how the GPL would count as DRM. That's like saying that Creative Commons is a form of DRM. The fact is that Copyright, legally, makes copying an infringement. In order to alleviate this for a products consumers, GPL and CC explicitly allow copying.
You already knew that, of course; you're just being smarmy. I get that, but a misdirection like that can't go uncommented.
Heh. I'm not an MS fan (read some of my posts; I'm a linux geek and a member of the pirate party - no establishmentism here ^_^), but I'm also not a zealot.
Sure, it's humor, but the summary still gives slashdotters (who are of a generally 'MS Sucks' mind) the impression that IE7 will just allow this to happen. That's why I said the post was fud, but the article wasn't.
Meanwhile, Hey OCG! It's been a while since I've seen you posting around! 'Course, that's probably 'cos I've been too busy to go posting myself. Anyways, yeah, good to see you; I've always thought of you as the Devil's Advocate Himself ^_^.
"I don't like how protected mode stays disabled after you install one toolbar."
That only occurs if the toolbar in question disables it. The problem with installing any toolbar is that it is actually executing a binary on your system - meaning that it has full access to your computer, and even interface override control.
I wonder if there's any of those stupid toolbars that automatically clicks 'yeah, fine, do it' on any ActiveX warnings that pop up.