Well there is CDON. An oasis of wonderful mainstream music just out of reach in Norway. For want of a Norwegian credit card, I'm unable to purchase it. But look at that catalogue! And DRM free!
Stephen Baxter proposed this in his novel "Space." I don't know if it was original then. It was an interesting idea, but it seems to fall down because it is built on an assumption that an intelligent species could slow down its resource consumption to below its rate of expansion. Baxter got around this flaw by proposing a reset. In the novel it was a periodic catastrophic implosion of space due to start getting too close to each other and colliding en masse. Thus species were caught in a finite period of time in which to develop and had a cap (light speed) on how fast they could escape the localised catastrophes.
Personally, I think one escape from the Fermi paradox is that we might not be able to recognize the aliens. Would anyone two-hundred years ago thought of radio waves as a sign of extra-terrestrial intelligence? Maybe there's something else out there we haven't discovered yet but is obvious to most advanced societies. We could find it any year now and see the sky light up with conversation.
Agreed, there is potential good use to be had of TPM. But really physical ownership of it is not the issue. That's clearly the case as when you buy a computer with TPM you will legally own it, no questions. What you're really talking about is who gets to decide what use is made of it. And that comes down to the balance of power between the seller and the buyer. What TPM does is open a new option for the one with power to abuse the one without. In this case, and for now, that appears to be the seller.
I'm starting to think that it's time to quit Ubuntu and move on. I was drawn to Linux originally because I liked the Open Source idea (and because I was a C programmer it seemed required somehow). But Ubuntu is turning into quite a haven for proprietary and binary only software and I wonder if I'm undermining the open source movement by not sticking with something a bit more free.
The wider implication of the original post however, was that while he may have said privately that Macs were better, publicly he was undoubtedly saying something different. Therefore why believe his latest public statement?
The main message that I'm getting from these ads, is that Apple are saying Macs are shite for doing anything serious or useful. And that's pretty much it.
Happily, the metaphor breaks down at this point. If the willing purchasers of DRM are the idiot few, then the market is not going to pander to them. So tell everyone just how bad DRM is and spread the word. You don't have to convince everyone. You just have to get a large enough proportion of people vocally not buying DRM and then the profitable approach for companies is to sell non-DRM to everyone. Because those who are happy with DRM will still purchase something without DRM, but not vice versa.
Get him charged with this and found guilty. Perhaps it's a small but positive step towards getting him charged with war crimes. By keeping such a tight grip on power for so long and to such a total extent, he's put himself in a dangerous position. If he starts to look weak, you watch the rest of the dogs turn on him. It'll happen so fast you'll wonder where he went.
What you're proposing may work, but it depends how sophisticated the watermark is. If it were very compact, say it contained the purchaser's id in a single frame, then for the swapping to work it would have to be swapping within a single frame which whilst theoretically possible, I think is far from plausible.
I'm not hammering on your idea and I'm not saying that this definitely is the case with this particular watermark. There are a lot of people in this thread saying that watermarks are easily circumvented but they can also be quite strong. If you read the article, you find that the company's attitude is not one of placing ultimate faith in the watermarks, but that comparing the time and effort it takes to strip the watermark out, it's easier to just buy a copy. And you've got to ask yourself who has the motivation for stripping it out? Not presumably the person that just bought it as they already have it. And for the dedicated pirate, better to just rip it off a DVD than go through all that hassle. Especially with the risk that they might miss part of a watermark and start spreading their data trail all over P2P.;)
Personally, I wish this company the very best of luck and I hope to see their catalogue expand rapidly. Watermarking purchased movies is a model of copy-protection I would be entirely happy with as I already use it happily with books. Watermarking means that the property is yours and specific to you. And I think that would have a more significant effect on piracy than locking the product up with CSS and making it harder to play on my Linux box.
Are you sure it would be easy to do this? Funky statistical analysis aside (you'd have to be good without knowing the algorithm), wouldn't you need access to the original to do a comparison? And if you have access to the original then what is the point in trying to restore your watermarked version to the original?
I think you have confused me with another poster perhaps when you call me mistaken? I haven't said that the ends ever do justify the means. But we are in agreement it seems, so all is good.
No. It turns you into your opponent, which is my point. If you define your opponent by his behaviour, or as a behaviour, then adopting his behaviour in an attempt to defeat him is null and void. Witness any cycle of violence endlessly perpetuating itself, both seeing only the atrocities committed by the enemy. If in your example a group with massively more resources eliminates an enemy entirely, then there is no limiter in the victors behaviour that prevents it fragmenting and turning those acquired methods on itself. After all, when such small differences between two human factions provide enough of an excuse to fight over a resource, there are surely plenty of other available differences to serve within the winning faction as a cause for further resource fighting.
I was talking generally to illustrate the principle that the ends justifying the means doesn't not seem to work when you take a broad enough view that you can see the ends as merely waypoints. In this case, the relevance of the principle is that atempting to silence criticism because you regard it as bad science, is itself bad science. Hence "becoming monsters."
Key to silencing political opposition. Find (or foster) a nice divisive issue (abortion, homosexuality, gun ownership). Get opposition arguing vehemently over this and quietly agree on all major issues (corporate taxation, media control, privacy rights). Whenever major issue comes up, mention minor divisive issue. Watch political opposition fall apart.
Absolutely right! This scientist should bear in mind the old Nietzche quote: "He who fights monsters must be careful, lest he himself become one." Or something very much along those lines. What distinguishes the "good guys" from the bad is how they behave, nothing else. Adopting your opponents methods to defeat them, doesn't work in the larger picture.
If Something A is better than Something B, and the only barrier to Something A's adoption is its minority status, then when it reaches a level of adoption that this no longer matters as much, you're going to see one HELL of a tipping point!
It is your belief that slavery is a voluntary arrangement on both sides?
So to bring the analogy full circle, is it anyone's belief that DRM is a voluntary arrangement on both sides? Given that it is worse for the customer, then we can expect that it is not. We would expect the customer to go elsewhere in a free market. Except in this case, there is a monopoly on the product.
I think that's more likely a problem with Firefox itself. At least Firefox 2 crashes fairly frequently if I'm making a long post to a forum. Sounds similar. I've now switched to Opera which is great in all regards except for its annoying cookie management interface. When I have access to Linux, I use Konqueror (even on Gnome) as this has actually never let me down. I think it even runs faster.
So if I want to download one of these fake torrents and because of the confusion of names I accidentally download a Britney Spears album, then am I legally liable? I mean it's not my fault they gave it the same name as something else and caused confusion.
So with millions of dollars contributed to lobby groups, how much in comparison would it cost to pay a few people to post appropriate comments to online forums? And how much difference could a handful of people make, if they did that sort of posting as their day job? Not much and quite a lot, is my guess.
So the next question is what are the useful ways of identifying such posters?
Slashdot Mirror
Wonderful. So now we've established that the system has both false positives and false negatives.
(I'm not on there, either)
My jaw drops. That was brilliant...
Well there is CDON. An oasis of wonderful mainstream music just out of reach in Norway. For want of a Norwegian credit card, I'm unable to purchase it. But look at that catalogue! And DRM free!
Stephen Baxter proposed this in his novel "Space." I don't know if it was original then. It was an interesting idea, but it seems to fall down because it is built on an assumption that an intelligent species could slow down its resource consumption to below its rate of expansion. Baxter got around this flaw by proposing a reset. In the novel it was a periodic catastrophic implosion of space due to start getting too close to each other and colliding en masse. Thus species were caught in a finite period of time in which to develop and had a cap (light speed) on how fast they could escape the localised catastrophes.
Personally, I think one escape from the Fermi paradox is that we might not be able to recognize the aliens. Would anyone two-hundred years ago thought of radio waves as a sign of extra-terrestrial intelligence? Maybe there's something else out there we haven't discovered yet but is obvious to most advanced societies. We could find it any year now and see the sky light up with conversation.
Agreed, there is potential good use to be had of TPM. But really physical ownership of it is not the issue. That's clearly the case as when you buy a computer with TPM you will legally own it, no questions. What you're really talking about is who gets to decide what use is made of it. And that comes down to the balance of power between the seller and the buyer. What TPM does is open a new option for the one with power to abuse the one without. In this case, and for now, that appears to be the seller.
Wow! Thank you. I'd never seen that series before. I love it! It's mathematical and yet so sweet!
I'm starting to think that it's time to quit Ubuntu and move on. I was drawn to Linux originally because I liked the Open Source idea (and because I was a C programmer it seemed required somehow). But Ubuntu is turning into quite a haven for proprietary and binary only software and I wonder if I'm undermining the open source movement by not sticking with something a bit more free.
The wider implication of the original post however, was that while he may have said privately that Macs were better, publicly he was undoubtedly saying something different. Therefore why believe his latest public statement?
The main message that I'm getting from these ads, is that Apple are saying Macs are shite for doing anything serious or useful. And that's pretty much it.
I fully support the top-down approach. The customer is the top. The person trying to sell me something depends on my favour.
Happily, the metaphor breaks down at this point. If the willing purchasers of DRM are the idiot few, then the market is not going to pander to them. So tell everyone just how bad DRM is and spread the word. You don't have to convince everyone. You just have to get a large enough proportion of people vocally not buying DRM and then the profitable approach for companies is to sell non-DRM to everyone. Because those who are happy with DRM will still purchase something without DRM, but not vice versa.
Get him charged with this and found guilty. Perhaps it's a small but positive step towards getting him charged with war crimes. By keeping such a tight grip on power for so long and to such a total extent, he's put himself in a dangerous position. If he starts to look weak, you watch the rest of the dogs turn on him. It'll happen so fast you'll wonder where he went.
What you're proposing may work, but it depends how sophisticated the watermark is. If it were very compact, say it contained the purchaser's id in a single frame, then for the swapping to work it would have to be swapping within a single frame which whilst theoretically possible, I think is far from plausible.
I'm not hammering on your idea and I'm not saying that this definitely is the case with this particular watermark. There are a lot of people in this thread saying that watermarks are easily circumvented but they can also be quite strong. If you read the article, you find that the company's attitude is not one of placing ultimate faith in the watermarks, but that comparing the time and effort it takes to strip the watermark out, it's easier to just buy a copy. And you've got to ask yourself who has the motivation for stripping it out? Not presumably the person that just bought it as they already have it. And for the dedicated pirate, better to just rip it off a DVD than go through all that hassle. Especially with the risk that they might miss part of a watermark and start spreading their data trail all over P2P.
Personally, I wish this company the very best of luck and I hope to see their catalogue expand rapidly. Watermarking purchased movies is a model of copy-protection I would be entirely happy with as I already use it happily with books. Watermarking means that the property is yours and specific to you. And I think that would have a more significant effect on piracy than locking the product up with CSS and making it harder to play on my Linux box.
Are you sure it would be easy to do this? Funky statistical analysis aside (you'd have to be good without knowing the algorithm), wouldn't you need access to the original to do a comparison? And if you have access to the original then what is the point in trying to restore your watermarked version to the original?
I think you have confused me with another poster perhaps when you call me mistaken? I haven't said that the ends ever do justify the means. But we are in agreement it seems, so all is good.
Regards and thanks for clarifying.
-H.
No. It turns you into your opponent, which is my point. If you define your opponent by his behaviour, or as a behaviour, then adopting his behaviour in an attempt to defeat him is null and void. Witness any cycle of violence endlessly perpetuating itself, both seeing only the atrocities committed by the enemy. If in your example a group with massively more resources eliminates an enemy entirely, then there is no limiter in the victors behaviour that prevents it fragmenting and turning those acquired methods on itself. After all, when such small differences between two human factions provide enough of an excuse to fight over a resource, there are surely plenty of other available differences to serve within the winning faction as a cause for further resource fighting.
I was talking generally to illustrate the principle that the ends justifying the means doesn't not seem to work when you take a broad enough view that you can see the ends as merely waypoints. In this case, the relevance of the principle is that atempting to silence criticism because you regard it as bad science, is itself bad science. Hence "becoming monsters."
Key to silencing political opposition. Find (or foster) a nice divisive issue (abortion, homosexuality, gun ownership). Get opposition arguing vehemently over this and quietly agree on all major issues (corporate taxation, media control, privacy rights). Whenever major issue comes up, mention minor divisive issue. Watch political opposition fall apart.
Absolutely right! This scientist should bear in mind the old Nietzche quote: "He who fights monsters must be careful, lest he himself become one." Or something very much along those lines. What distinguishes the "good guys" from the bad is how they behave, nothing else. Adopting your opponents methods to defeat them, doesn't work in the larger picture.
If Something A is better than Something B, and the only barrier to Something A's adoption is its minority status, then when it reaches a level of adoption that this no longer matters as much, you're going to see one HELL of a tipping point!
So to bring the analogy full circle, is it anyone's belief that DRM is a voluntary arrangement on both sides? Given that it is worse for the customer, then we can expect that it is not. We would expect the customer to go elsewhere in a free market. Except in this case, there is a monopoly on the product.
I think that's more likely a problem with Firefox itself. At least Firefox 2 crashes fairly frequently if I'm making a long post to a forum. Sounds similar. I've now switched to Opera which is great in all regards except for its annoying cookie management interface. When I have access to Linux, I use Konqueror (even on Gnome) as this has actually never let me down. I think it even runs faster.
So if I want to download one of these fake torrents and because of the confusion of names I accidentally download a Britney Spears album, then am I legally liable? I mean it's not my fault they gave it the same name as something else and caused confusion.
So with millions of dollars contributed to lobby groups, how much in comparison would it cost to pay a few people to post appropriate comments to online forums? And how much difference could a handful of people make, if they did that sort of posting as their day job? Not much and quite a lot, is my guess.
So the next question is what are the useful ways of identifying such posters?
I read the back cover. Looked derivative. Put it back.