"isn't the concept of "Freedom Of Expression" a US law only?"
Yeah, here in the UK, they've banned truth, justice, and apple pie for years. Hell, we're not even allowed to build white picket fences unless we're in america!
Outside the US, everyone's bearded terrorists living in caves and sacrificing goats (no, really). Freedom of expression was invented by Abraham Lincoln, nobody had ever thought of it before, nor since. Outside the US, we're all ruled by royalty, shahs, sheiks, and dictators, depending on how far you are from america.
The european union is an urban legend, we all trade in pebbles when we can't get dollars, and every country is at war with every other country. If only those american politicians would show us how to implement freedom of expression...
(admittedly this police officer isn't doing the best job of representing UK values though)
"DRM is not an issue unless you want to use a non-supported player or pirate music"
Nice troll.
DRM is the difference between knowing you'll be able to listen to music, and not knowing that you'll be able to listen to music.
Know what hi-fi you'll have in 3 years time? Are you sure it'll be supported by your chosen DRM scheme? Howabout if you have the choice of one hi-fi that supports the scheme, and a better hi-fi that doesn't?
Going to be on Windows/MacOS all your life? Howabout at work? Good luck listening to crippled music when you start using XMMS.
Ever plan to get an in-car CD player?
A decent jukebox? (Nomad Zen plays just MP3)
Howabout your friends' systems? Can they still borrow your music?
Want to put your music on a set-top box and play it in the living room? Did you check which formats MythTV supports?
DRM means that in a few years, you'll be fiddling with an audio loopback cable and a copy of Audacity trying to retrieve a copy of your music, while anyone who's insisted on a readable format for their music will be happily converting to whatever portable or hi-fi device they buy next.
p.s. go and read about piracy before you continue comparing murderers with people who share music
"Combine that with RFIDs scanned as they leave the store, returning to the car, and I think we will have an incredible insight into the nature of those people's purchases."
You think that's bad? Imagine a bomb which explodes when it detects the RFID tag in an American passport nearby.
"You have 15 seconds. Tell me the non-911 way to report an emergency to the fire department where you are presently located."
112
(works internationally, so you don't get caught out dialling 999 in the US, or 911 in the UK, although they both might be mapped to something useful too)
"No, the Fire Dept. would be a subscription or pay-by-use system (with known rates, not an "auction" process as you suggest) that you would have or not have, like insurance."
Why not the best capitalist fire system, the Roman one? The chief fireman negotiating a buying price for your [rapidly devaluing] property so that he can put the fire out once he's bought it?
"My guess is that many applications use self-modifying code as part of their anti-piracy/anti-reverse-engineering protection."
Yeah, like we're not going to be able to make that do exciting things when it misfunctions... And you thought finding buffer overflows was hard when the code stayed where you put it!
"Shareware developers need not apply, which happen to make the Windows platform what it is today."
A big mess of losers who want you to pay $30 for their crappy half-day hack that's available free in any other OS, and where they've spent more effort on "antipiracy" measures than on the program itself?
Traceroute? yep, that'll be $30 please. Text editor? yep, that'll be $30 please. Hex editor? yep, that'll be $30 please. Icon editor? yep, that'll be $30 please. Graphics converter? yep, that'll be $30 please. and so on and so on...
"I can only hope and pray that wireless USB will be very very secure."
WUSB is intriniscally insecure, just like TCP/IP. If you want a secure connection, you'll need to run a secure protocol over the WUSB connection, such as SSH, SFTP, etc.
Alternatively, you can use symmetric encryption if a paired set of devices happen to share a key. Imagine touching two devices together and pressing "generate key" on one, and "receive key" on the other. Instant high security.
It's probably good that it's not being included in the lowest-level transport protocol, because that'll mean that you can build a device without spending 6 years trying to understand the encryption provisions in the speicifcation. Look at WiFi for example -- it claims to have encryption, but you need to run SSL anyway because it's so weak. May as well make the transport protocol dumb, because anything that needs SSL will have to implement it anyway.
Well that should help on my Nomad Jukebox Zen, which will quite happily display a low-battery warning and then die from lack of power whilst plugged into a USB cable with a 5V supply!
"it was free, but they wanted your personal info. I turned away and haven't gone back -- the value of their content was not sufficient to push me past the privacy barrier."
No need to label it as a privacy thing, some people came up with a calculator where you say what information is being requested, and it comes up with an approximate value for that information.
So if the request is anything like the length of the NYTimes' registration form, you can say that the cost of signing up is about $30, payable in personal information.
If you do that, then it becomes directly comparable to the sites which actually do request money (although they'll be taking lots of information too, so don't forget to add that to the bill)
People may tell you x is free because all you have to do is answer this big list of questions, but the real issue is that x costs just as much as its competitors if you take into account what that information would cost them if you didn't voluntarily supply it.
Fake information notwithstanding. But that'll probably become illegal anyway soon. <accent style="S.S.">Your papers?!</accent>
"If you weren't providing revenue for them, why should they care if you stop visiting?"
If their only intention is to make money from my visit, they shouldn't care. In fact, I would advise them to put the following line in their.htaccess file
deny from all
Of course, most writers invite people to visit their website because they like to have people listening to them. They like to make a difference to peoples' opinions. They have something to say. They might be involved in something more important than simply making money. And when it doesn't cost them anything to publish (it costs less to run my website per month than it does to buy lunch in London) then there's no good reason not to write-off the website as an expense, just like the sign in front of your office, or your letterhead paper, or anything else which gets you noticed.
"which could be useful to subsidise low cost environments such as open source content projects e.g. wikipedia."
Wikipedia sounds like the right sort of idea. The only internet content I've paid for in the last year (apart from the cost of maintaining my own website) is a donation to Wikimedia (and not using PayPal either)
You could buy a subscription to some other reference source instead, but the best bit about giving the money to an open site is that everyone can benefit from your donation. In fact for the cost of a bookshelf of encyclopediae, you could get one which never becomes out of date.
If you're looking for a dictionary, try updating the wiki once you find out what a new word means, and we should soon get a decent dictionary too.
Of course, school teachers and parents might prefer to spend their money on textbooks
"You stop there for lunch on your bike and will the alarm/immobliser disarm afterwards? Will it buggery. Apparently there's a US Airforce "listening station" nearby."
A listening station? In Yorkshire? More like a "talking constantly whilst prodding you in the chest" station...
"Would be more fun to have a strong emitter send out all possible code sequences so all the cars in Vegas would unlock..."
Okay, is it just me, or is this a no-brainer?
[counter]--->[car-key transmitter]-->aerial
You can buy transmitters (various radio frequencies or IR) in Maplin, and I'm pretty sure they work on the same frequencies as "real" car keys, because the unlicensed radio bands are so narrow, and it costs so much to develop a new transmitter. Each of the transmitters has an input of between 8 and 20 TTL lines with which you specify the "code" or identity so that you can match transmitters and receivers.
So attach a counter to them. Leave it running, and you can open every car in a car-park. Then pick the one you want to drive away in.
Statisticians will tell you that even code-hopping remote controls are vulnerable to transmitting lots of codes. The code only changes when you get a valid transmission, so all the time you're transmitting numbers, it's listening for the same code.
As to the "18-bit laser cut" keyfobs that come with a built-in identification code, need we remind anyone that 2^18 is tiny?
If you count slowly enough through the codes, you could sit there all day and write down when each car flashed its indicator lights to indicate that you'd found the code.
Slashdot Mirror
"The cliche'd example would be yelling "Fire" in a crowded movie theater."
Can you get that as a ringtone?
"isn't the concept of "Freedom Of Expression" a US law only?"
Yeah, here in the UK, they've banned truth, justice, and apple pie for years. Hell, we're not even allowed to build white picket fences unless we're in america!
Outside the US, everyone's bearded terrorists living in caves and sacrificing goats (no, really). Freedom of expression was invented by Abraham Lincoln, nobody had ever thought of it before, nor since. Outside the US, we're all ruled by royalty, shahs, sheiks, and dictators, depending on how far you are from america.
The european union is an urban legend, we all trade in pebbles when we can't get dollars, and every country is at war with every other country. If only those american politicians would show us how to implement freedom of expression...
(admittedly this police officer isn't doing the best job of representing UK values though)
"If you dont have enough intellect to figure out how to solder, hammer, research ON YOUR OWN, your just not a hacker."
Actually I remember one of the most famous articles on hacking emphasising the need to read as much as you possibly can to become a good hacker.
"DRM is not an issue unless you want to use a non-supported player or pirate music"
Nice troll.
DRM is the difference between knowing you'll be able to listen to music, and not knowing that you'll be able to listen to music.
Know what hi-fi you'll have in 3 years time? Are you sure it'll be supported by your chosen DRM scheme? Howabout if you have the choice of one hi-fi that supports the scheme, and a better hi-fi that doesn't?
Going to be on Windows/MacOS all your life? Howabout at work? Good luck listening to crippled music when you start using XMMS.
Ever plan to get an in-car CD player?
A decent jukebox? (Nomad Zen plays just MP3)
Howabout your friends' systems? Can they still borrow your music?
Want to put your music on a set-top box and play it in the living room? Did you check which formats MythTV supports?
DRM means that in a few years, you'll be fiddling with an audio loopback cable and a copy of Audacity trying to retrieve a copy of your music, while anyone who's insisted on a readable format for their music will be happily converting to whatever portable or hi-fi device they buy next.
p.s. go and read about piracy before you continue comparing murderers with people who share music
"Combine that with RFIDs scanned as they leave the store, returning to the car, and I think we will have an incredible insight into the nature of those people's purchases."
You think that's bad? Imagine a bomb which explodes when it detects the RFID tag in an American passport nearby.
"You have 15 seconds. Tell me the non-911 way to report an emergency to the fire department where you are presently located."
112
(works internationally, so you don't get caught out dialling 999 in the US, or 911 in the UK, although they both might be mapped to something useful too)
"Would you rather sign up for your new VoIP provider, then find out you're being robbed"
You signed up with NTL too?
"No, the Fire Dept. would be a subscription or pay-by-use system (with known rates, not an "auction" process as you suggest) that you would have or not have, like insurance."
Why not the best capitalist fire system, the Roman one? The chief fireman negotiating a buying price for your [rapidly devaluing] property so that he can put the fire out once he's bought it?
So what's the IP address of 911?
"My guess is that many applications use self-modifying code as part of their anti-piracy/anti-reverse-engineering protection."
Yeah, like we're not going to be able to make that do exciting things when it misfunctions... And you thought finding buffer overflows was hard when the code stayed where you put it!
of their message in the subject line
remind me of
tomshardware, and sites which think that too much information
in once place might spoil things
"Shareware developers need not apply, which happen to make the Windows platform what it is today."
A big mess of losers who want you to pay $30 for their crappy half-day hack that's available free in any other OS, and where they've spent more effort on "antipiracy" measures than on the program itself?
Traceroute? yep, that'll be $30 please.
Text editor? yep, that'll be $30 please.
Hex editor? yep, that'll be $30 please.
Icon editor? yep, that'll be $30 please.
Graphics converter? yep, that'll be $30 please.
and so on and so on...
"Time to buy my own UAV and find out what's really going on over there in Area 51." :)"
As if they won't shoot THAT down, too.
Give it airbags and let it bounce in... and try to get a Brit to help with the design...
"I for one, continue to welcome our curvaceous, female overlords..."
Where is the 3D porn?
"I can only hope and pray that wireless USB will be very very secure."
WUSB is intriniscally insecure, just like TCP/IP. If you want a secure connection, you'll need to run a secure protocol over the WUSB connection, such as SSH, SFTP, etc.
Alternatively, you can use symmetric encryption if a paired set of devices happen to share a key. Imagine touching two devices together and pressing "generate key" on one, and "receive key" on the other. Instant high security.
It's probably good that it's not being included in the lowest-level transport protocol, because that'll mean that you can build a device without spending 6 years trying to understand the encryption provisions in the speicifcation. Look at WiFi for example -- it claims to have encryption, but you need to run SSL anyway because it's so weak. May as well make the transport protocol dumb, because anything that needs SSL will have to implement it anyway.
"Like USB but without the power"
Well that should help on my Nomad Jukebox Zen, which will quite happily display a low-battery warning and then die from lack of power whilst plugged into a USB cable with a 5V supply!
"Registration has other purposes, mainly to show advertisers that you have a large and diverse audience."
If that were true, then all of the NYTimes' online adverts would be pitched towards multimillionaire nurses in algeria...
"It would be neat if there could be a single authentication protocol where one could use the same user/password which worked anywhere"
Is that you, David Blunkett?
"it was free, but they wanted your personal info. I turned away and haven't gone back -- the value of their content was not sufficient to push me past the privacy barrier."
No need to label it as a privacy thing, some people came up with a calculator where you say what information is being requested, and it comes up with an approximate value for that information.
So if the request is anything like the length of the NYTimes' registration form, you can say that the cost of signing up is about $30, payable in personal information.
If you do that, then it becomes directly comparable to the sites which actually do request money (although they'll be taking lots of information too, so don't forget to add that to the bill)
People may tell you x is free because all you have to do is answer this big list of questions, but the real issue is that x costs just as much as its competitors if you take into account what that information would cost them if you didn't voluntarily supply it.
Fake information notwithstanding. But that'll probably become illegal anyway soon.
<accent style="S.S.">Your papers?!</accent>
"If you weren't providing revenue for them, why should they care if you stop visiting?"
.htaccess file
If their only intention is to make money from my visit, they shouldn't care. In fact, I would advise them to put the following line in their
deny from all
Of course, most writers invite people to visit their website because they like to have people listening to them. They like to make a difference to peoples' opinions. They have something to say. They might be involved in something more important than simply making money. And when it doesn't cost them anything to publish (it costs less to run my website per month than it does to buy lunch in London) then there's no good reason not to write-off the website as an expense, just like the sign in front of your office, or your letterhead paper, or anything else which gets you noticed.
"which could be useful to subsidise low cost environments such as open source content projects e.g. wikipedia."
Wikipedia sounds like the right sort of idea. The only internet content I've paid for in the last year (apart from the cost of maintaining my own website) is a donation to Wikimedia (and not using PayPal either)
You could buy a subscription to some other reference source instead, but the best bit about giving the money to an open site is that everyone can benefit from your donation. In fact for the cost of a bookshelf of encyclopediae, you could get one which never becomes out of date.
If you're looking for a dictionary, try updating the wiki once you find out what a new word means, and we should soon get a decent dictionary too.
Of course, school teachers and parents might prefer to spend their money on textbooks
"Well, yes, if you use lossy compression obviously you're going to lose information. How is that relevent?"
Because people use lossy compression all the time, yet still talk about digital formats as being "bit-for-bit perfect copies"
"You stop there for lunch on your bike and will the alarm/immobliser disarm afterwards? Will it buggery. Apparently there's a US Airforce "listening station" nearby."
A listening station? In Yorkshire? More like a "talking constantly whilst prodding you in the chest" station...
"Would be more fun to have a strong emitter send out all possible code sequences so all the cars in Vegas would unlock..."
Okay, is it just me, or is this a no-brainer?
[counter]--->[car-key transmitter]-->aerial
You can buy transmitters (various radio frequencies or IR) in Maplin, and I'm pretty sure they work on the same frequencies as "real" car keys, because the unlicensed radio bands are so narrow, and it costs so much to develop a new transmitter. Each of the transmitters has an input of between 8 and 20 TTL lines with which you specify the "code" or identity so that you can match transmitters and receivers.
So attach a counter to them. Leave it running, and you can open every car in a car-park. Then pick the one you want to drive away in.
Statisticians will tell you that even code-hopping remote controls are vulnerable to transmitting lots of codes. The code only changes when you get a valid transmission, so all the time you're transmitting numbers, it's listening for the same code.
As to the "18-bit laser cut" keyfobs that come with a built-in identification code, need we remind anyone that 2^18 is tiny?
If you count slowly enough through the codes, you could sit there all day and write down when each car flashed its indicator lights to indicate that you'd found the code.
"Not only is BSD (apparently) the "safest", but you mignt be suprised to notice that the 50 highest uptimes on the net belong to BSD"
You'd think with an open-source kernel, somebody would do a hack to let you specify the displayed uptime after you reboot it...