"If you could replicate a star ship, you wouldn't need to."
There are lots of ways to move the earth... get a long rope; get a really long lever; put every nuke we (planet-wide) have in Topeka and detonate them...
Of course, scientists still debate how far out the sun's corrona will extend in it's red giant phase. Will the earth be inside, on the surface, or outside the sun? The discussion is, of course, moot since the planet will have been long incinerated before then (during the expansion.) So, how many astroids will it take to pull us out to about Jupiter's orbit? And what will a shift in our orbit do to the rest of the planets?
(Sometimes you have to wonder why we pay these people to think up these sorts of things.)
It doesn't matter how many times you rewrite the same shit, you'll still have bugs. The only way to "fix" BIND is to write the whole damned thing with security in mind and then stop grafting diseases onto it (read: buggy feature after buggy feature.)
All complex software has bugs. All software that interacts with untrusted agents most likely has at least one "buffer overflow" problem. Even perl has enough sense to force you to deal with tainted input.
What goes on inside my network and what goes on between my network and some other network are totally different things.
Listening to what goes on within the wired confines of my apartment is much more difficult than listening to the RF from a group of wireless LAN cards. I can protect the wired network both in terms of physical access and "internet" access [firewalls, unroutable protocols, etc.] Doing the same thing for a RADIO network is much more difficult... I cannot stop everyone from coming with 1000ft of my apartment nor can I turn every machine in the radio lan into a fortified castle complete with shark infested mote.
Think of it just as you would implementing a regular LAN.
Good greif. How many "regular LANs" do you allow any idiot off the street to plug into? Most cards don't have 128bit encryption -- some have very little at all. And I'd bet most wireless LANs are running with the default security settings. With a radio signal, unlike an ethernet wire, there's no wall behind which you can hide.
If your unwired laptop can do something, someone else's can too. Even if you make the access point itself a secured point in your network, you still have to get through it.
Allow me to clarify... "run red lights" means not stopping at most yellow lights. It turns red before I've cleared the light. By definition, that's running the red light. Some areas have cameras to catch people doing that.
However, I don't drive through solid red lights. Even when noone is around -- you never know if there really is nothing coming.
Well, technically, it's not public airwaves. Hughes/DirecTV/et.al. own a chunk of of the US RF spectrum (in the 30GHz range as I recall.) Add to that, the signal is encrypted. Thus, one can conclude they do have a reasonable right to expect privacy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Hughes/DirecTV own the smartcard? They certainly own the software inside it -- esp. the magic bits in the write only section.
While one can technically listen to cordless phones and cell phones, it's strictly illegal in the US -- it's deemed a wire-tap. Even internet traffic can fall into this range of legal fly-paper.
That's the nature of sat. transmissions. They aren't aimed for point-to-point. Go look through legal breifs about some trouble Playboy had with a town in Texas(?). There was some serious problems with the town's pornography laws and the fact that Playboy could not prevent residents from receiving the signal. This was with standard C-Band "big dish" stuff.
...
illegal to read billboards...
Billboards (at least in NC) are beyond the state-owned right of way. There is a fence along the edge of the right of way on interstates; the billboard is beyond that fence. At any rate, this is bad example as billboards are explicitly placed for public view. If you put one in your backyard behind a line of "privacy trees", then you certainly could invoke a number of laws.
This is the same thing as a drive-in theater. If you've taken no steps to prevent someone from seeing something that otherwise would be easily seen without moderate to elaborate steps, then you really cannot argue about someone seeing it "without permission". There were some heated words between a theater owner and an adjacent home owner in my home town years ago... The theater owner had taken no steps to block the view of the screen beyond from the road and the audio was broadcast on an FM radio frequency with enough power to reach several homes in the area.
If a communication is privileged...
Like a cell phone conversation, per haps? Why doesn't DirectTV or DISH fall in this group? They have a reasonable expectation of "privacy". They scamble/encrypt their signal to protect their product(s). I don't see this as any different than stealing cable -- the nature of the technology is different, but that's all.
I don't see how it's Hughes' business what's done with it.
Hughes owns the frequency spectrum so they certainly do have a number of rights.
The second best way is to heavily encrypt it...
Which is exactly what they are doing. Why do people get so pissed off when they take steps to protect their encryption?
And furthermore, in Canada...
As many like to point out, US laws only apply in the US. Likewise, Canadian laws only apply in Canada. What people do in Canada is their own business. If they get hit by US targeted coutermeasures, then too bad for them. Hughes cannot legally stop Canadians from watching DSS without paying and the Canadians cannot stop Hughes from trying to prevent them from "stealing" their signal.
Hmm, "poorer families who didn't have computers at home" attending "a local private high school"? I don't know where you're from, but around here (NC, USA) private schools are far from cheap (and certainly not free.) If a family has the money to send their child(ren) to a private school, then I would hope they have the budget to purchase a home computer.
As for the computer being the modern equiv to a phone or "passing notes"... I don't see why that's so surprizing. Computing technology is ubiquitous so people tend to take it for granted. Much like power and telephone services... very few people care how power gets to the plug on the wall or how their phone call is connected to someone on the other side of the planet. They don't care how it works; they only care that it works.
Cost of a 3-year-old computer: damn near zero.
Cost of using one of several ad-driven ISP's: absolutely zero.
Poor kids can't afford to play Everquest on a P4 with a 20" monitor and a broadband connection, but any kid that has power and a phone line can scrape together the cash to get on the net with a cheap Linux box and an old modem.
It's a matter of priority. If you're raising a family on 20k/yr, then there are far more valuable things demanding one's money than "[scraping] together the cash" for a shit computer someone threw in the trash a year ago. It's also a matter of image; which is worse on the kid, the stigma of no computer or the stigma of a "worthless" (by modern standards) computer. Keep in mind, kids can be very cruel.
I think the point Katz failed to point out is one of computer literacy. In the modern world, computer literacy is a core skill required to be a productive part of society. If you don't know how to use a computer, there's not much you can do.
Also, there was no mention of gaming consoles. It would be interesting to see the distribution of video game consoles along with these numbers. I suspect even the dirt-poorest households have a game console (and a number of expensive games.)
Read their findings again. The watermark is "identical" for each copy. If it were different, they would need a huge table (a list of serial numbers?) and try everyone of them to detect a watermark. There could be some subtleties wired into the depths of the algorithm, but no where near what would be required to uniquely identify millions of copies.
However, the existance of the DMCA does suggest that they have at least thought of this in some ways, by getting these circumvention devices declared illegal.
As the entire software industry will confirm, copy protection is almost worthless. They've been searching for this "holy grail" for decades. Even laser etched holes in floppies didn't work. Hollywood, having a much greater hold on Washington, simply makes it illegal to break their "copy protection". However, their system is flawed from the get-go; their system does not hinder the people they are most afraid of -- those being the bootleg CD pressing factories (de-compositing a DVD is harder, but I'm certain it's only a matter of time.)
For the record, Valenti is not an idiot. We may all classify him as an ass, but he does know what he's doing.
Anyway, as I've said repeatedly, this whole "digital thing" scares the hell out of Hollywood. Video tapes take time to duplicate and lose quality in the process. Digital is always the same series of ones and zeros. DVD's are fast and cheap to make (both content and fabrication) which screws up their economics -- 1000 VHS tapes takes a few hours to make, 1000 DVD disks can be pressed in a few minutes.
Face it, people are greedy little bastards. Technology allows them to screw you repeatedly so they do. And then they push through laws to make it illegal to try to prevent them from doing so. All they care about is their bank accounts. They have no evidence that DVD piracy is any worse than VHS tape piracy. They tout things like "billions of dollars" but fail to prove any of it -- and shouldn't they be enforcing the existing copyright laws these people are breaking?
[Personally, I think society is collapsing. There are just too many petty bullshit laws to ever enforce them all or even know your breaking many of them. I break a multitude of laws everyday -- I drive faster than the posted speed limit; I run red lights; I change lanes within 50ft of an intersection; I pass people on the right...]
Most DVD players that don't support CD-R's do so for simple cost and complexity reasons.
The reason the 630nm red laser cannot read a CD-R is simply because the dye is invisible to that spectrum -- CD-R's were designed for 780nm CD drives. However, all DVD players can read CD-RW's -- most do a better job at it than CD-ROM drives.
Video cards with TV out are only required to support macrovision if you are playing back a DVD. My (ok, ancient) Matrox RR-Studio doesn't spit out macrovision -- of course, it also won't play DVDs because of it. This is merely a protection of the rights the studios have bought -- they paid for macrovision on that disk so they do have the right to enforce what they paid for.
I love seeing that lie about VCRs. I have two VCRs that don't give a rat's ass about macrovision. Macrovision was designed to confuse the AGC on VCRs. Only the more expensive VCRs have AGC's that can deal with this noise. Just about all video decoders will capture macrovisioned signals without distortion -- and set a bit somewhere to tell you macrovision is there. [For the record, there are even DVD+VCR combo devices available now too. I don't know how the hell they get away with it, but there it is.]
Low water use is mandated by the Clean Water Act. If you bothered to keep up with what us humans are doing to ruin the planet, maybe you'd understand why this matters. [FWIW, the Colorodo river no longer reaches the ocean. etc. etc. etc.]
Those things aren't magic either. I setup my sister's machine to use the one I carried home over christmas -- over an hour later, the damn thing was passing traffic.
Practically nothing. And this assumes you can conclusively prove they are the one(s) responsible. Very few people/organizations ever take legal action -- it costs far more to track the son-of-bitch down and haul their ass into court than they could ever recover.
Generally, they are too young to be crimally prosecuted anyway. PLUS, once you cross a country border (or several), it becomes even harder to bring legal action.
While ingress/egress filters are a good thing on paper (and I support their use to a large extent), they aren't a magic bullet.
Small ISPs with one or even a half dozen netblocks shouldn't have any trouble with adding these kinds of filters. They do increase processing and delay for every packet coming and going, but for such a small list, it's not going to be measurable. However, for larger ISPs, that list can grow very large and become very measurable.
But processing is not the only constraint. Those filters introduce an additional constraint when adding clients: those that bring their own address space will require the list(s) to be altered. And thus enters "human error" -- I've seen too many people lock themselves out of routers by doing things wrong (both improperly and in the wrong order.)
Additionally, this roadblock can only stop packets that reach it. The traffic still has to travel across your link or traverse part of the ISP network to be blocked by the filters on the borders.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah...
"If you could replicate a star ship, you wouldn't need to."
There are lots of ways to move the earth... get a long rope; get a really long lever; put every nuke we (planet-wide) have in Topeka and detonate them...
Of course, scientists still debate how far out the sun's corrona will extend in it's red giant phase. Will the earth be inside, on the surface, or outside the sun? The discussion is, of course, moot since the planet will have been long incinerated before then (during the expansion.) So, how many astroids will it take to pull us out to about Jupiter's orbit? And what will a shift in our orbit do to the rest of the planets?
(Sometimes you have to wonder why we pay these people to think up these sorts of things.)
It doesn't matter how many times you rewrite the same shit, you'll still have bugs. The only way to "fix" BIND is to write the whole damned thing with security in mind and then stop grafting diseases onto it (read: buggy feature after buggy feature.)
All complex software has bugs. All software that interacts with untrusted agents most likely has at least one "buffer overflow" problem. Even perl has enough sense to force you to deal with tainted input.
What goes on inside my network and what goes on between my network and some other network are totally different things.
Listening to what goes on within the wired confines of my apartment is much more difficult than listening to the RF from a group of wireless LAN cards. I can protect the wired network both in terms of physical access and "internet" access [firewalls, unroutable protocols, etc.] Doing the same thing for a RADIO network is much more difficult... I cannot stop everyone from coming with 1000ft of my apartment nor can I turn every machine in the radio lan into a fortified castle complete with shark infested mote.
- Think of it just as you would implementing a regular LAN.
Good greif. How many "regular LANs" do you allow any idiot off the street to plug into? Most cards don't have 128bit encryption -- some have very little at all. And I'd bet most wireless LANs are running with the default security settings. With a radio signal, unlike an ethernet wire, there's no wall behind which you can hide.If your unwired laptop can do something, someone else's can too. Even if you make the access point itself a secured point in your network, you still have to get through it.
Allow me to clarify... "run red lights" means not stopping at most yellow lights. It turns red before I've cleared the light. By definition, that's running the red light. Some areas have cameras to catch people doing that.
However, I don't drive through solid red lights. Even when noone is around -- you never know if there really is nothing coming.
- broadcast something on public airwaves
Well, technically, it's not public airwaves. Hughes/DirecTV/et.al. own a chunk of of the US RF spectrum (in the 30GHz range as I recall.) Add to that, the signal is encrypted. Thus, one can conclude they do have a reasonable right to expect privacy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Hughes/DirecTV own the smartcard? They certainly own the software inside it -- esp. the magic bits in the write only section.While one can technically listen to cordless phones and cell phones, it's strictly illegal in the US -- it's deemed a wire-tap. Even internet traffic can fall into this range of legal fly-paper.
- Hughes is sending the signal to [everyone]
That's the nature of sat. transmissions. They aren't aimed for point-to-point. Go look through legal breifs about some trouble Playboy had with a town in Texas(?). There was some serious problems with the town's pornography laws and the fact that Playboy could not prevent residents from receiving the signal. This was with standard C-Band "big dish" stuff.- ...
- illegal to read billboards...
Billboards (at least in NC) are beyond the state-owned right of way. There is a fence along the edge of the right of way on interstates; the billboard is beyond that fence. At any rate, this is bad example as billboards are explicitly placed for public view. If you put one in your backyard behind a line of "privacy trees", then you certainly could invoke a number of laws.This is the same thing as a drive-in theater. If you've taken no steps to prevent someone from seeing something that otherwise would be easily seen without moderate to elaborate steps, then you really cannot argue about someone seeing it "without permission". There were some heated words between a theater owner and an adjacent home owner in my home town years ago... The theater owner had taken no steps to block the view of the screen beyond from the road and the audio was broadcast on an FM radio frequency with enough power to reach several homes in the area.
- If a communication is privileged...
Like a cell phone conversation, per haps? Why doesn't DirectTV or DISH fall in this group? They have a reasonable expectation of "privacy". They scamble/encrypt their signal to protect their product(s). I don't see this as any different than stealing cable -- the nature of the technology is different, but that's all.- I don't see how it's Hughes' business what's done with it.
Hughes owns the frequency spectrum so they certainly do have a number of rights.- The second best way is to heavily encrypt it...
Which is exactly what they are doing. Why do people get so pissed off when they take steps to protect their encryption?- And furthermore, in Canada...
As many like to point out, US laws only apply in the US. Likewise, Canadian laws only apply in Canada. What people do in Canada is their own business. If they get hit by US targeted coutermeasures, then too bad for them. Hughes cannot legally stop Canadians from watching DSS without paying and the Canadians cannot stop Hughes from trying to prevent them from "stealing" their signal.Hmm, "poorer families who didn't have computers at home" attending "a local private high school"? I don't know where you're from, but around here (NC, USA) private schools are far from cheap (and certainly not free.) If a family has the money to send their child(ren) to a private school, then I would hope they have the budget to purchase a home computer.
As for the computer being the modern equiv to a phone or "passing notes"... I don't see why that's so surprizing. Computing technology is ubiquitous so people tend to take it for granted. Much like power and telephone services... very few people care how power gets to the plug on the wall or how their phone call is connected to someone on the other side of the planet. They don't care how it works; they only care that it works.
- Cost of a 3-year-old computer: damn near zero.
It's a matter of priority. If you're raising a family on 20k/yr, then there are far more valuable things demanding one's money than "[scraping] together the cash" for a shit computer someone threw in the trash a year ago. It's also a matter of image; which is worse on the kid, the stigma of no computer or the stigma of a "worthless" (by modern standards) computer. Keep in mind, kids can be very cruel.Cost of using one of several ad-driven ISP's: absolutely zero.
Poor kids can't afford to play Everquest on a P4 with a 20" monitor and a broadband connection, but any kid that has power and a phone line can scrape together the cash to get on the net with a cheap Linux box and an old modem.
I think the point Katz failed to point out is one of computer literacy. In the modern world, computer literacy is a core skill required to be a productive part of society. If you don't know how to use a computer, there's not much you can do.
Also, there was no mention of gaming consoles. It would be interesting to see the distribution of video game consoles along with these numbers. I suspect even the dirt-poorest households have a game console (and a number of expensive games.)
Read their findings again. The watermark is "identical" for each copy. If it were different, they would need a huge table (a list of serial numbers?) and try everyone of them to detect a watermark. There could be some subtleties wired into the depths of the algorithm, but no where near what would be required to uniquely identify millions of copies.
- However, the existance of the DMCA does suggest that they have at least thought of this in some ways, by getting these circumvention devices declared illegal.
As the entire software industry will confirm, copy protection is almost worthless. They've been searching for this "holy grail" for decades. Even laser etched holes in floppies didn't work. Hollywood, having a much greater hold on Washington, simply makes it illegal to break their "copy protection". However, their system is flawed from the get-go; their system does not hinder the people they are most afraid of -- those being the bootleg CD pressing factories (de-compositing a DVD is harder, but I'm certain it's only a matter of time.)For the record, Valenti is not an idiot. We may all classify him as an ass, but he does know what he's doing.
Anyway, as I've said repeatedly, this whole "digital thing" scares the hell out of Hollywood. Video tapes take time to duplicate and lose quality in the process. Digital is always the same series of ones and zeros. DVD's are fast and cheap to make (both content and fabrication) which screws up their economics -- 1000 VHS tapes takes a few hours to make, 1000 DVD disks can be pressed in a few minutes.
Face it, people are greedy little bastards. Technology allows them to screw you repeatedly so they do. And then they push through laws to make it illegal to try to prevent them from doing so. All they care about is their bank accounts. They have no evidence that DVD piracy is any worse than VHS tape piracy. They tout things like "billions of dollars" but fail to prove any of it -- and shouldn't they be enforcing the existing copyright laws these people are breaking?
[Personally, I think society is collapsing. There are just too many petty bullshit laws to ever enforce them all or even know your breaking many of them. I break a multitude of laws everyday -- I drive faster than the posted speed limit; I run red lights; I change lanes within 50ft of an intersection; I pass people on the right...]
Most DVD players that don't support CD-R's do so for simple cost and complexity reasons.
The reason the 630nm red laser cannot read a CD-R is simply because the dye is invisible to that spectrum -- CD-R's were designed for 780nm CD drives. However, all DVD players can read CD-RW's -- most do a better job at it than CD-ROM drives.
Video cards with TV out are only required to support macrovision if you are playing back a DVD. My (ok, ancient) Matrox RR-Studio doesn't spit out macrovision -- of course, it also won't play DVDs because of it. This is merely a protection of the rights the studios have bought -- they paid for macrovision on that disk so they do have the right to enforce what they paid for.
I love seeing that lie about VCRs. I have two VCRs that don't give a rat's ass about macrovision. Macrovision was designed to confuse the AGC on VCRs. Only the more expensive VCRs have AGC's that can deal with this noise. Just about all video decoders will capture macrovisioned signals without distortion -- and set a bit somewhere to tell you macrovision is there. [For the record, there are even DVD+VCR combo devices available now too. I don't know how the hell they get away with it, but there it is.]
Low water use is mandated by the Clean Water Act. If you bothered to keep up with what us humans are doing to ruin the planet, maybe you'd understand why this matters. [FWIW, the Colorodo river no longer reaches the ocean. etc. etc. etc.]
Those things aren't magic either. I setup my sister's machine to use the one I carried home over christmas -- over an hour later, the damn thing was passing traffic.
"Dialup Networking" is much easier to deal with.
Unfortunately, you'll never be able to kill enough people to stop this shit for good.
- what [is] the legal recourse?
Practically nothing. And this assumes you can conclusively prove they are the one(s) responsible. Very few people/organizations ever take legal action -- it costs far more to track the son-of-bitch down and haul their ass into court than they could ever recover.Generally, they are too young to be crimally prosecuted anyway. PLUS, once you cross a country border (or several), it becomes even harder to bring legal action.
While ingress/egress filters are a good thing on paper (and I support their use to a large extent), they aren't a magic bullet.
Small ISPs with one or even a half dozen netblocks shouldn't have any trouble with adding these kinds of filters. They do increase processing and delay for every packet coming and going, but for such a small list, it's not going to be measurable. However, for larger ISPs, that list can grow very large and become very measurable.
But processing is not the only constraint. Those filters introduce an additional constraint when adding clients: those that bring their own address space will require the list(s) to be altered. And thus enters "human error" -- I've seen too many people lock themselves out of routers by doing things wrong (both improperly and in the wrong order.)
Additionally, this roadblock can only stop packets that reach it. The traffic still has to travel across your link or traverse part of the ISP network to be blocked by the filters on the borders.
There were only 54 posts when I started typing that.
Gee, and no one has made any reference to Brazil???
Personally, I think it would be cool to have pneumatic delivery tubes everywhere.
Gee, I'm gonna have to take some of this stuff to work (where my camera is) and put up pictures of 17 year old disks!
:-))
How much do you think I could make on eBay with all this stuff? Anyone want the source code (decades old of course) to OS-9 Level II? *grin*
(I wish I still had my MM/1 -- I gave to some guy at Fort Bragg (of course I made him drive to Raleigh to get it.
funny you should ask... I still have the cart for that one (and the ultra-patch disk) :-)
- That's [good] enough for your home user.
You expect "home users" to buy 3000$ tape drives and then shell out 100$ per tape? Why do you think QIC and TRAVAN hardware is so popular?(Yes, I own an HP DDS-3, Sony DDS-4, and a Sony AIT1 drive. BUT, I'm not a typical home user.)
I'll check my (cassette) tape archive and see what I still have.
You do know the COCO's recorded at about 1500 baud, right?
That's DOCTOR EVIL. I didn't spend three years in evil medical school to be called MISTER.
(I couldn't resist.)