Hmm, well, I hope they make the CDs outta titanium, otherwise I'll be able to slice them up good with my dagger!
Anyway, that aside, when the hell are people going to realize that the nature of audio is to be interpreted by human ears, and as such can't be "protected" ? Best of luck if you guys succeed though, I understand the Christian Coalition has been trying the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil bit for awhile, without success.
Maybe technology will answer their prayers (pun intended).
Free beer is the driving force behind adoption of Open Source by "mainstream" users. You can thump on your copy of Linux Kernel Hacking all you want, or quote the second edition, but it won't get you very far.
The world we live in is one which is driven by the distribution of money. That's all modern government is - a huge bureacracy dedicated to distributing money. Collect money here, drop off money there. That's all most of them do. Our legal system is modelled around this. Infact one might argue that money is more important than people - steal someone's car, you go to jail. Beat them up and you probably won't. Even then, beating someone up isn't generally a felony, but stealing their car is! Or how about this one - copyrights - after the author dies, the copyright doesn't expire.. it sticks around for another 50-100 years. More examples of protecting money, not people.
My point is this - in the world outside the room that you're reading this in does not concern itself with ideals or morality. It deals in money. If you make a good product for free, and give it away, it can be insanely popular.. but people don't care why you did it... they just see $0.00. RMS, for all his boasting about the GPL, seems to miss this basic point. Everyone points at ideals.. it ain't that at all. It's money. Sorry guys..
On the flipside, if you try hard enough, you might be able to crash the whole damned system by replacing every piece of moneyware (new buzzword - take note!) with freeware. Imagine that.. high quality free software. Bastard anti-american communists. Now you see why people fight the adoption of open source so hard - not all of them are so nearsighted. Fortunately, after all these years of being blind consumers.. one does not need to explain to the majority. Just say "FREE BEER!" and they come running.:)
Take money out of the equation. Make it unprofitable for people to lie and you'll have solved the central problem of capitalism in general... that is, money makes people dishonest.
Same goes for the 'net, either you take capitalism out of it, or you solve it. But you can't work around it.
You realize this is a violation of the DMCA, don't you? By removing those chips and reconfiguring them, you are bypassing a copy protection mechanism - namely, by desoldering!
Atari's gonna come after you and poke you many times with a soldering iron, da?
A SMDI player can refuse to play because your Audio channel isn't "secure" from end-to-end.
Barring some radical new advance in speakers, I can just put a resistor in series with a tap, and hardwire it into the voice coil of the speaker, and run that back into the audio input of my soundcard. No worries.
"He glanced around at the motley collection of thugs,
pimps, and record company executives that skulked on
the edges of the dim pools of light with which the
dark shadows of the bar's inner recesses were pitted.
They were all very diliberately looking in any
direction but his, carefully picking up the threads of
their former conversations about murders, drug rings,
and music publishing deals. They knew what would happen
now and didn't want to watch in case it put them off
their drinks."
-- Douglas Adams, So Long, And Thanks for All The Fish
Top 10 Ways to Hack SDMI
------------------------
10. Write a device driver that emulates a soundcard.
Dump output to disk. Optional - sending to the
real soundcard. Bonus points if you use DirectSound.
9. Attach leads to the DAC of the soundcard,
design daughterboard to resequence for raw wave
output. Optional: 64MB stick of RAM and a memory
overlay for copying back out to the system.
Estimated cost to hire an EE to do this: $25k
8. SoftICE, a pack of mountain dew, and an SDMI decoder.
7. 15 minutes alone with developers of SDMI and a backpack
full of bricks.
6. 45 minutes alone with legislators who signed DMCA into
law, backpack full of bricks (note: bricks may be damaged
by contact with thick heads of legislators - Aim lower)
5. Audio cable connected between INPUT and OUTPUT of soundcard.
4. Hold press conference. Compare SDMI to DivX. Drop plenty of
rumors so retail outlets won't carry it without large cash
advances.
3. Hold shareholder conference. Compare SDMI to DivX. Using
the rumors created in #4, draw on their fears that SDMI will
collapse into a dense black hole, taking their profits with
them.
2. Use genetic algorithms (GA) to predict prime numbers without
using brute force. Optional - for speed, do it using an
analog computer. Send result to spook@nsa.gov, move to
antarctica, dig hole in ground, call up UUNet, ask for
net feed under an alias.
1. Go to local high school, offer the kid with thick glasses
in the computer lab $20 to crack SDMI. Return after lunch
to pick up detailed documentation of program, and the
program itself which was ported to 8 platforms and has
bilingual support. Thank kid.
| Permission is granted to distribute this document |
| in any medium, provided this notice is attached. |
| Copyleft, 2000 Signal 11 |
Here is a group of people who gets as much respect from the Macheads as id software does from PC enthusiasts.
Well, ever since they made Quake we've been losing respect for them. Quake and Quake2 sucked hardcore, Q3A is good but is so far down the "fast twitch, fast connection, fast card" that I actually went back and played Half Life instead. So, ID isn't a very good comparison. Actually, most of us don't worship the company, we just worship the games. And sometimes we'll elevate some coder geek to god-hood when they release some OS called "leenux"?:)
But I agree, it is sad indeed.. the Halo project will probably die under the threat of being forced to use DirectX and NT exclusively... that's the problem with Microsoft... they claim they know innovation, but the whole Microsoft Way is to anti-innovate. They crush other competitors, or absorb them.. they rob the industry of creativity by foisting The One True OS onto everyone, forcing them to do things only one way. Sad indeed, I hope Bungie sticks it out long enough to release Halo.
Hey, Microsoft.. if it bugs you that much, why not just integrate the game into the OS? I can think of more than a few geeks who'd love an anti-aliased 3D start menu and be able to pick up ammo in the system tray and go chase down and shoot badly-written applications (and developers!) that eat the last hour's worth of work in their finance spreadsheet.
I mean, that's what you guys do, right? I mean, go in, muck around with the definition of an "OS" and an "Application" and then get sued by the government, right?
Hey, personally, I love it. Corporations have taken over this country's government, it's nice to see they can't yet attack a *coalition* of governments.
It's sad, but I have been finding myself more and more often rooting for people who want to take this country's economy and flush it down the shitter. Why? If the economy collapses then a depression will ensue. A depression is the only thing that'll get americans out of their own little private stupors and remove the people from power who have quietly stolen all their rights and given them the crumbs of capitalism - the big screen TVs and SUVs.. when the things that are important like health insurance and retirement (social security / welfare) get axed.
Yeah, horray for the EU.. go kick some yankee ass. Maybe I'll move there and pretend I love the prince and replace my swearing with bloody this and bloody that.
*sigh* Where are the patriots of this country when one really needs them? Busy preparing for armageddon in mountana, instead of here, online, fighting the real revolution.
Look, the 'net was designed from the ground up to serve as a knowledge repository, a method for researchers to share information between each other. Linking goes right to the core of this - when you publish something on the 'net without http authentication or logging in, you are implicitly saying that it is OK to link your content.
It is ideas like the one presented here that threaten the nature of the 'net. Some people would like to modify the HTML standard so that each link as a Copyright field in it so you can't go there unless your browser is authorized to. Or how about compiling HTML so other people can't view your code? Let's make the net read-only and royalty based, and lock out the information have-nots and poor and create a digital divide, setting up different classes of citizens!
It quickly snowballs, you see, and not for the better. Slashdot needs no such permission, if they want to make sure people don't like, do like the NY Times and register before you can view. It's called fair use - slashdot doesn't profit directly from linking, or not linking, to that article. And btw - I thought the goal of a magazine was to GET READ... putting up barriers to linking only encourages people NOT TO READ your 'zine. Or make dynamic links that break every 15 minutes or so. Go ahead, destroy your website and make people want to go elsewhere if that's your game plan, but keep your laws off my content.
Considering what our esteemed Slashdot did with a certain Jon Katz book, I think your concerns are misplaced. Just call it "fair use". You can even charge a nominal amount of money to view comments submitted by others (for free). Submit, like 1% to charity and the other 99% for, uhh, "administrative purposes" (namely, your bank account needs feeding).
Get rich, retire to a beach in, uhh, Michigan, and live happily ever after. That's the Slashdot Way.
I hope they catch him, 'cuz then we can press charges against him for using his fingers to circumvent a copy protection device and throw him in jail. Stealing software.. what next.. candy from babies?
No, they'll invade the source of 50% of the world's oil and directly threaten our economies. Oh, wait, they tried that.
I welcome that move. I can't wait until our economy is laid to waste by high oil prices. It would serve the fat pigs in this country well to finally shuffle off a 150 year old technology and modernize. Yeah, so it'd be painful, yeah, it'd trigger a massive global depression, but hey.. that's the price you pay, literally, eh?
How about exploding US embassies in foreign countries.
Hey now, we have the ability to blow up embassies too - just ask the chinese!
This is not 1940 - this 2000. Warfare has changed.
Thank god economics hasn't! Despite all the advances, if you have a postage stamp-sized country, you ain't gonna have more GNP than us, nor will you have more people than us. What are they gonna do? Organize all the little 3rd world countries and ship them over to us in wooden boats??
One must train for combat situations constantly, not occasionally, if you want to reduce the number of our casualties.
Dealing with the former soviet union is like dealing with sixteen armed, possible mental cases with no languages in common.
We're lucky then - only one of them can read the panel attached to the side of the nuke that says "This Side Up".
...only an idiot would deal with them without some way of escalating if they escalate.
Right now nobody's escalating anything. All that money is going to waste - we could be building out our infrastructure and securing our place in the global economy - enriching the lives of the citizens this government is dedicated to. But what are we doing? Building bombs! We need books not bombs! As demonstrated in WWII, we have ample industrial infrastructure to match and counter any buildup of any enemy globally. We don't need those troops standing by right now. Train them, send them to college, and then keep them on file incase some 3rd world country does something stupid and we need them.. but for god's sake, don't pay billions for maintaining alot more force than we need.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, that aside, when the hell are people going to realize that the nature of audio is to be interpreted by human ears, and as such can't be "protected" ? Best of luck if you guys succeed though, I understand the Christian Coalition has been trying the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil bit for awhile, without success. Maybe technology will answer their prayers (pun intended).
--
Content?
--
The world we live in is one which is driven by the distribution of money. That's all modern government is - a huge bureacracy dedicated to distributing money. Collect money here, drop off money there. That's all most of them do. Our legal system is modelled around this. Infact one might argue that money is more important than people - steal someone's car, you go to jail. Beat them up and you probably won't. Even then, beating someone up isn't generally a felony, but stealing their car is! Or how about this one - copyrights - after the author dies, the copyright doesn't expire.. it sticks around for another 50-100 years. More examples of protecting money, not people.
My point is this - in the world outside the room that you're reading this in does not concern itself with ideals or morality. It deals in money. If you make a good product for free, and give it away, it can be insanely popular.. but people don't care why you did it... they just see $0.00. RMS, for all his boasting about the GPL, seems to miss this basic point. Everyone points at ideals.. it ain't that at all. It's money. Sorry guys..
On the flipside, if you try hard enough, you might be able to crash the whole damned system by replacing every piece of moneyware (new buzzword - take note!) with freeware. Imagine that.. high quality free software. Bastard anti-american communists. Now you see why people fight the adoption of open source so hard - not all of them are so nearsighted. Fortunately, after all these years of being blind consumers.. one does not need to explain to the majority. Just say "FREE BEER!" and they come running. :)
Cheers,
~ Signal 11, jaded and cynical as ever.
--
--
Same goes for the 'net, either you take capitalism out of it, or you solve it. But you can't work around it.
--
Atari's gonna come after you and poke you many times with a soldering iron, da?
--
Barring some radical new advance in speakers, I can just put a resistor in series with a tap, and hardwire it into the voice coil of the speaker, and run that back into the audio input of my soundcard. No worries.
--
The alternative was worse?
--
--
-- Douglas Adams, So Long, And Thanks for All The Fish
Top 10 Ways to Hack SDMI
------------------------
10. Write a device driver that emulates a soundcard. Dump output to disk. Optional - sending to the real soundcard. Bonus points if you use DirectSound.
9. Attach leads to the DAC of the soundcard, design daughterboard to resequence for raw wave output. Optional: 64MB stick of RAM and a memory overlay for copying back out to the system. Estimated cost to hire an EE to do this: $25k
8. SoftICE, a pack of mountain dew, and an SDMI decoder.
7. 15 minutes alone with developers of SDMI and a backpack full of bricks.
6. 45 minutes alone with legislators who signed DMCA into law, backpack full of bricks (note: bricks may be damaged by contact with thick heads of legislators - Aim lower)
5. Audio cable connected between INPUT and OUTPUT of soundcard.
4. Hold press conference. Compare SDMI to DivX. Drop plenty of rumors so retail outlets won't carry it without large cash advances.
3. Hold shareholder conference. Compare SDMI to DivX. Using the rumors created in #4, draw on their fears that SDMI will collapse into a dense black hole, taking their profits with them.
2. Use genetic algorithms (GA) to predict prime numbers without using brute force. Optional - for speed, do it using an analog computer. Send result to spook@nsa.gov, move to antarctica, dig hole in ground, call up UUNet, ask for net feed under an alias.
1. Go to local high school, offer the kid with thick glasses in the computer lab $20 to crack SDMI. Return after lunch to pick up detailed documentation of program, and the program itself which was ported to 8 platforms and has bilingual support. Thank kid.
| Permission is granted to distribute this document |
| in any medium, provided this notice is attached. |
| Copyleft, 2000 Signal 11 |
--
--
Well, ever since they made Quake we've been losing respect for them. Quake and Quake2 sucked hardcore, Q3A is good but is so far down the "fast twitch, fast connection, fast card" that I actually went back and played Half Life instead. So, ID isn't a very good comparison. Actually, most of us don't worship the company, we just worship the games. And sometimes we'll elevate some coder geek to god-hood when they release some OS called "leenux"? :)
But I agree, it is sad indeed.. the Halo project will probably die under the threat of being forced to use DirectX and NT exclusively... that's the problem with Microsoft... they claim they know innovation, but the whole Microsoft Way is to anti-innovate. They crush other competitors, or absorb them.. they rob the industry of creativity by foisting The One True OS onto everyone, forcing them to do things only one way. Sad indeed, I hope Bungie sticks it out long enough to release Halo.
--
I mean, that's what you guys do, right? I mean, go in, muck around with the definition of an "OS" and an "Application" and then get sued by the government, right?
--
It's sad, but I have been finding myself more and more often rooting for people who want to take this country's economy and flush it down the shitter. Why? If the economy collapses then a depression will ensue. A depression is the only thing that'll get americans out of their own little private stupors and remove the people from power who have quietly stolen all their rights and given them the crumbs of capitalism - the big screen TVs and SUVs.. when the things that are important like health insurance and retirement (social security / welfare) get axed.
Yeah, horray for the EU.. go kick some yankee ass. Maybe I'll move there and pretend I love the prince and replace my swearing with bloody this and bloody that.
*sigh* Where are the patriots of this country when one really needs them? Busy preparing for armageddon in mountana, instead of here, online, fighting the real revolution.
--
It is ideas like the one presented here that threaten the nature of the 'net. Some people would like to modify the HTML standard so that each link as a Copyright field in it so you can't go there unless your browser is authorized to. Or how about compiling HTML so other people can't view your code? Let's make the net read-only and royalty based, and lock out the information have-nots and poor and create a digital divide, setting up different classes of citizens!
It quickly snowballs, you see, and not for the better. Slashdot needs no such permission, if they want to make sure people don't like, do like the NY Times and register before you can view. It's called fair use - slashdot doesn't profit directly from linking, or not linking, to that article. And btw - I thought the goal of a magazine was to GET READ... putting up barriers to linking only encourages people NOT TO READ your 'zine. Or make dynamic links that break every 15 minutes or so. Go ahead, destroy your website and make people want to go elsewhere if that's your game plan, but keep your laws off my content.
--
Get rich, retire to a beach in, uhh, Michigan, and live happily ever after. That's the Slashdot Way.
--
It doesn't make a difference to me, other than the psychological impact of "I have the fastest card out there".
--
--
--
--
I welcome that move. I can't wait until our economy is laid to waste by high oil prices. It would serve the fat pigs in this country well to finally shuffle off a 150 year old technology and modernize. Yeah, so it'd be painful, yeah, it'd trigger a massive global depression, but hey.. that's the price you pay, literally, eh?
--
Hey now, we have the ability to blow up embassies too - just ask the chinese!
This is not 1940 - this 2000. Warfare has changed.
Thank god economics hasn't! Despite all the advances, if you have a postage stamp-sized country, you ain't gonna have more GNP than us, nor will you have more people than us. What are they gonna do? Organize all the little 3rd world countries and ship them over to us in wooden boats??
One must train for combat situations constantly, not occasionally, if you want to reduce the number of our casualties.
There is a point of diminishing returns...
--
--
We're lucky then - only one of them can read the panel attached to the side of the nuke that says "This Side Up".
...only an idiot would deal with them without some way of escalating if they escalate.
Right now nobody's escalating anything. All that money is going to waste - we could be building out our infrastructure and securing our place in the global economy - enriching the lives of the citizens this government is dedicated to. But what are we doing? Building bombs! We need books not bombs! As demonstrated in WWII, we have ample industrial infrastructure to match and counter any buildup of any enemy globally. We don't need those troops standing by right now. Train them, send them to college, and then keep them on file incase some 3rd world country does something stupid and we need them.. but for god's sake, don't pay billions for maintaining alot more force than we need.
--
Pay up.
--