I suspect that the reason for omitting region controls is actually a legal one. With current DVDs and games, it is often necessary to circumvent copy protection to circumvent region controls. Courts are more likely to call circumvention of region controls "fair use", and this provides legimitacy to programs and devices which circumvent their protections.
By removing region controls, they can say to the courts (and the lawmakers) - "look, if you circumvent our protection, you must be a pirate!". Right now, all it would take is a a rule from the Librarian of Congress to provide an exemption for cracking those protection schemes to make it legal. This is _far_ more likely to happen for regions than for backup copies.
> There are watermarks that survive microphone+cam recording in theaters.
Oh, you mean the annoying patterns of dots typically shown right after a bright flash, that can be effictly removed by temporal cleaners and smoothers, which can be detected and obscured fairly easily with software, and which are easily subjected to collusion attacks (record it in multiple theatres to find out which frames are used, and make a 3rd unreadable copy)?
If you're getting caught by those, you just aren't trying hard enough.
As for the unique disc identifiers, those will greatly increase the cost of production. It wouldn't be unreasonable to add a small recordable area to the disc to add a unique ID, but it would be up to the player to embed it in the video. Hack the player (either from a hardware standpoint, or modifying the memory in a Virtual Machine), no more watermark.
I can't see them burning every disc that comes out, especially when the cost would still not affect someone paying cash and using a wifi hotspot to upload it. If you don't let people cash, you lose a lot of the Wal-Mart crowd, and cutting out Wal-Mart really hurts economically.
> the feds only provide a penny per passenger for security on buses or trains... compared to seven or eight bucks for each plane passenger. > > Doesn't really make sense, does it?
Well, how much does a bus/train ticket cost? How about an airplane.
Spending $8/passenger when the fare is only $1.25 doesn't make much sense, does it?
The stock price doesn't have as much meaning as one might think. They could split it twice, and have a share price of $13.10, it would have gone up $0.12, and everything would be worth just as much as it was before.
Still, a gain is "better" than a loss, but the market will always fluctuate.
> That is why you are paid during work hours and not paid when you are at home, that is the difference between your time and company time.
Which is exactly why former employers have agreed to let me keep ownership in the past. I have written a large number of libraries, functions, and classes related to what I do. These were done on my own time, and I own the rights. I'm very familiar with them, and when writing code I can get my job done significantly faster than if I have to rewrite them from scratch.
As such, the deal I've made with former employers (I'm now my own employer, so I make the rules) was this: I will bring the work I've done before to the job, and use whatever code allows my job to get done faster. I retain copyright on Any updates I make to my libraries, and they get the use of them under a modified BSD license. Also, as I'm regularly working on this code for various projects, they get whatever bug fixes, updates, etc. I write in my off time, allowing them to get benefit from the work I do at home. The companies I made these deals with didn't want to sell my code; rather, they wanted a website with certain features. Why should I spend my time writing yet another user management/permissions/session system from scratch, when I have working ones already written. That is time I could be spending working on something more useful.
My employers had a choice: They can either have access to all of my personal code, and the development I do for myself outside of work, or they can have complete ownership of the work, have me spend more time (and as such cost them more money), and the work ends when I go home. Only one employer ever went for full ownership.
> That being said, I'm not sure how one would even go about making an ad IE-specific unless, once again, some funky jscript was used.
Well, since all you have to do to break it in IE is use standard HTML/CSS, I would imagine you could make it IE specific by just failing to provide a workaround for standards-compliant browsers once you got done kludging it to work in IE.
It's most certainly possible. It's called uploading the same chunk to 2 different people. Again, this is called seeding, and is usually considered a good thing.
> Try ubuntu. (tho im sure the same would work on debian) Tried it, and after spending hours and hours and hours trying to get a #(*&$#(ing LDAP+Kerberos5+SASL+AFS+SSH+SAMBA+PHP5+APACHE2+MTA +DNS+FTPD install working (a Windows Domain server, with an LDAP backend, integrated users for Windows/Linux servers, integrated emails, dynamic mass-configured virtualhosting, and networked homedirs).
I had so many issues trying to get various packages to run simultaneously and interoperate (typically because "official" packages wouldn't have the support I needed, or would be linked against the wrong version of kerberos, or the like). After hours and hours and hours of work, I finally just gave up and ran gentoo under ubuntu (Thanks to a little kernel patching, and some help from GRSecurity, I was able to run gentoo under ubuntu, in a chroot of it's own. It even had it's own copy of init running).
USE="+kerberos +sasl +apache2 +ldap" emerge -uDnv qmail samba =mod_php-5.X.X proftpd It was even kind enough to recompile the applications that would be changed by the new USE flags as well.
Change a couple config files, write a couple scripts, and it was working like a charm. I could move users between servers just by moving them in LDAP. Since _everything_ was compiled against the same libraries (automatically pulled in as dependencies), no more dependency errors, even when I have to run a newer version of something than is officially supported.
Binary packages will always have their problems and having a package-mysql, package-ldap, package-kerberos is just silly (not to mention harder to keep all running). If I feel like dealing with dependencies, version incompatibilities, and out-of-date software, I'll use windows (or perhaps RedHat if I'm feeling particularly machochistic).
> To install a service, apt-get install it. Thats it. No rc-updating, no etc updating.
Oh, so if a package potentially provides a service, it's automatically enabled? That's great. If I install CVS, I'm not going to want a PSERVER automatically running. Just because I installed telnet does not mean I want telnetd. If I install openldap or openssh, I may just want the libraries, not the whole client. Sure, you can seperate them into distinct RPMs, but that's a pain to maintain or extend. I'd rather have the program I want, compiled with only the options I want, optimized for my processor. You just can't get that with a binary distro.
It quickly becomes obvious that someone is cheating if the total amount of uploaded data is greater than the total amount of downloaded data. This makes it rather trivial for admins to track down and ban people who cheat in this manner. Um, it's called "seeding" after you finish downloading. Usually, that's considered a _good_ thing, because if nobody uploaded more than they download, the files couldn't be distributed.
Actually, if your computer is near a window, it might be easier to just use a laser on the window, and measure the reflection. They could get your password without ever entering the room at all.
As for B), it's illegal in the United States to send unsolicited commercial messages which the recipient must pay for. This is why junk faxes (paper/ink), and most junk cell calls (minutes) are illegal. If you have a free incoming/sender pays incoming, I suspect it would not be illegal if you weren't on the DNC.
As for getting paid for incoming, I'm currently doing that with my voipuser account. I get an outgoing minute for every incoming one. I've got my UK phone number on my websites, and I use it in contact phone #s on sites that said they wouldn't sell my information. It's hooked up to an asterisk box I've got running, which has messages like "Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold for the next representative..."
I mainly use the time for international outbound, as I have a cell, but it saves me a fair amount of money. Since I always check the "do not contact me/do not share checkboxes", nobody should call me in the first place.
> Of course, how many/.'ers actually leave BT enabled on their phones/PDAs?
Me, for one. I've even got it broadcasting my name, so if someone around me finds it, they know who it belongs to.
I don't mind people saying "hi", in a matter of speaking. So far, it's been coworkers etc. who decide to send me files. When I start getting ads/spam on it, I will shut it off.
For the most part, I agree with you. However, for some of the larger projects, it's hard to recoup 100 man-years worth of work in one sale. If it took your team of twenty people 5 years to write a software X, it makes more sense to try to make that money back (plus some profit, of course) by charging thousands of people who want to use it, rather than finding one sponsor willing to pay for it.
Personally, I don't believe the government should pass laws protecting such a system, any more than the government should pass laws prohibiting one. Let the authors do what they will, and succeed or fail on their own efforts, not some artifically mandated scarcity backed by the government. Copy protection schemes? Sure. Go for it. You aren't entitled to anything, but you are welcome to try.
People have been dealing with this for centuries without an organized form of government. You and your neighbors band together for the common defense. This is not done because you are required to do so; rather, it's done because someone who would murder your neighbor is probably a threat to you as well.
The law is the reason people cannot defend themselves, as government has an exclusive on "justice".
Actually, the surprising thing is that for a well maintained road (without a really low or high starting speed limit), the posted speed limit has very little effect on the 85th percentile of drivers. It does, however, greatly effect the lower 30 and upper 10.
The point is not that you can generate multiple messages with the same hash; the point is that you can take a photo, doctor it, and plaster a new hash over the old one.
"Why would a state voluntarily legislate to limit its power?"
Supposedly, the power comes from the people. It's not that the state would take it's power away, rather, it would be that the people have not yet conceeded that authority to it in the first place (by voting for, or electing people who vote for laws granting the state that power).
If the laws being enforced are themselves unreasonable, a warning is not out of order. Just because something is "the law" does not mean it's reasonable or prudent.
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I suspect that the reason for omitting region controls is actually a legal one. With current DVDs and games, it is often necessary to circumvent copy protection to circumvent region controls. Courts are more likely to call circumvention of region controls "fair use", and this provides legimitacy to programs and devices which circumvent their protections.
By removing region controls, they can say to the courts (and the lawmakers) - "look, if you circumvent our protection, you must be a pirate!". Right now, all it would take is a a rule from the Librarian of Congress to provide an exemption for cracking those protection schemes to make it legal. This is _far_ more likely to happen for regions than for backup copies.
> There are watermarks that survive microphone+cam recording in theaters.
Oh, you mean the annoying patterns of dots typically shown right after a bright flash, that can be effictly removed by temporal cleaners and smoothers, which can be detected and obscured fairly easily with software, and which are easily subjected to collusion attacks (record it in multiple theatres to find out which frames are used, and make a 3rd unreadable copy)?
If you're getting caught by those, you just aren't trying hard enough.
As for the unique disc identifiers, those will greatly increase the cost of production. It wouldn't be unreasonable to add a small recordable area to the disc to add a unique ID, but it would be up to the player to embed it in the video. Hack the player (either from a hardware standpoint, or modifying the memory in a Virtual Machine), no more watermark.
I can't see them burning every disc that comes out, especially when the cost would still not affect someone paying cash and using a wifi hotspot to upload it. If you don't let people cash, you lose a lot of the Wal-Mart crowd, and cutting out Wal-Mart really hurts economically.
I don't suppose your ISP does hosting?
> the feds only provide a penny per passenger for security on buses or trains... compared to seven or eight bucks for each plane passenger.
>
> Doesn't really make sense, does it?
Well, how much does a bus/train ticket cost? How about an airplane.
Spending $8/passenger when the fare is only $1.25 doesn't make much sense, does it?
The stock price doesn't have as much meaning as one might think. They could split it twice, and have a share price of $13.10, it would have gone up $0.12, and everything would be worth just as much as it was before.
Still, a gain is "better" than a loss, but the market will always fluctuate.
> That is why you are paid during work hours and not paid when you are at home, that is the difference between your time and company time.
Which is exactly why former employers have agreed to let me keep ownership in the past. I have written a large number of libraries, functions, and classes related to what I do. These were done on my own time, and I own the rights. I'm very familiar with them, and when writing code I can get my job done significantly faster than if I have to rewrite them from scratch.
As such, the deal I've made with former employers (I'm now my own employer, so I make the rules) was this: I will bring the work I've done before to the job, and use whatever code allows my job to get done faster. I retain copyright on Any updates I make to my libraries, and they get the use of them under a modified BSD license. Also, as I'm regularly working on this code for various projects, they get whatever bug fixes, updates, etc. I write in my off time, allowing them to get benefit from the work I do at home. The companies I made these deals with didn't want to sell my code; rather, they wanted a website with certain features. Why should I spend my time writing yet another user management/permissions/session system from scratch, when I have working ones already written. That is time I could be spending working on something more useful.
My employers had a choice: They can either have access to all of my personal code, and the development I do for myself outside of work, or they can have complete ownership of the work, have me spend more time (and as such cost them more money), and the work ends when I go home. Only one employer ever went for full ownership.
> That being said, I'm not sure how one would even go about making an ad IE-specific unless, once again, some funky jscript was used.
Well, since all you have to do to break it in IE is use standard HTML/CSS, I would imagine you could make it IE specific by just failing to provide a workaround for standards-compliant browsers once you got done kludging it to work in IE.
It's most certainly possible. It's called uploading the same chunk to 2 different people. Again, this is called seeding, and is usually considered a good thing.
> Try ubuntu. (tho im sure the same would work on debian)A +DNS+FTPD install working (a Windows Domain server, with an LDAP backend, integrated users for Windows/Linux servers, integrated emails, dynamic mass-configured virtualhosting, and networked homedirs).
Tried it, and after spending hours and hours and hours trying to get a #(*&$#(ing LDAP+Kerberos5+SASL+AFS+SSH+SAMBA+PHP5+APACHE2+MT
I had so many issues trying to get various packages to run simultaneously and interoperate (typically because "official" packages wouldn't have the support I needed, or would be linked against the wrong version of kerberos, or the like). After hours and hours and hours of work, I finally just gave up and ran gentoo under ubuntu (Thanks to a little kernel patching, and some help from GRSecurity, I was able to run gentoo under ubuntu, in a chroot of it's own. It even had it's own copy of init running).
USE="+kerberos +sasl +apache2 +ldap" emerge -uDnv qmail samba =mod_php-5.X.X proftpd
It was even kind enough to recompile the applications that would be changed by the new USE flags as well.
Change a couple config files, write a couple scripts, and it was working like a charm. I could move users between servers just by moving them in LDAP. Since _everything_ was compiled against the same libraries (automatically pulled in as dependencies), no more dependency errors, even when I have to run a newer version of something than is officially supported.
Binary packages will always have their problems and having a package-mysql, package-ldap, package-kerberos is just silly (not to mention harder to keep all running). If I feel like dealing with dependencies, version incompatibilities, and out-of-date software, I'll use windows (or perhaps RedHat if I'm feeling particularly machochistic).
> To install a service, apt-get install it. Thats it. No rc-updating, no etc updating.
Oh, so if a package potentially provides a service, it's automatically enabled? That's great. If I install CVS, I'm not going to want a PSERVER automatically running. Just because I installed telnet does not mean I want telnetd. If I install openldap or openssh, I may just want the libraries, not the whole client. Sure, you can seperate them into distinct RPMs, but that's a pain to maintain or extend. I'd rather have the program I want, compiled with only the options I want, optimized for my processor. You just can't get that with a binary distro.
It quickly becomes obvious that someone is cheating if the total amount of uploaded data is greater than the total amount of downloaded data. This makes it rather trivial for admins to track down and ban people who cheat in this manner.
Um, it's called "seeding" after you finish downloading. Usually, that's considered a _good_ thing, because if nobody uploaded more than they download, the files couldn't be distributed.
Actually, if your computer is near a window, it might be easier to just use a laser on the window, and measure the reflection. They could get your password without ever entering the room at all.
As for B), it's illegal in the United States to send unsolicited commercial messages which the recipient must pay for. This is why junk faxes (paper/ink), and most junk cell calls (minutes) are illegal. If you have a free incoming/sender pays incoming, I suspect it would not be illegal if you weren't on the DNC.
As for getting paid for incoming, I'm currently doing that with my voipuser account. I get an outgoing minute for every incoming one. I've got my UK phone number on my websites, and I use it in contact phone #s on sites that said they wouldn't sell my information. It's hooked up to an asterisk box I've got running, which has messages like "Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold for the next representative..."
I mainly use the time for international outbound, as I have a cell, but it saves me a fair amount of money. Since I always check the "do not contact me/do not share checkboxes", nobody should call me in the first place.
Depending on where you live, United Blood Services may be an option.
Ok, fine. Boot to CD, Modify the Kernel (log the first 5 minutes of keystrokes, perhaps?), and come back in a few days.
Depending on your state's laws, there is a very good chance that if you are married, the computer is just as much hers as yours.
User Identification Persistance? Something that allows you to track users (ala a cookie), but is persistant in some way?
> Of course, how many /.'ers actually leave BT enabled on their phones/PDAs?
Me, for one. I've even got it broadcasting my name, so if someone around me finds it, they know who it belongs to.
I don't mind people saying "hi", in a matter of speaking. So far, it's been coworkers etc. who decide to send me files. When I start getting ads/spam on it, I will shut it off.
> I wonder if it's possible to grep the likes of MySQL's storage files for MD5 hashes (thereby bypassing the databases authentication)?
Yes, but you need shell access to do it.
For the most part, I agree with you. However, for some of the larger projects, it's hard to recoup 100 man-years worth of work in one sale. If it took your team of twenty people 5 years to write a software X, it makes more sense to try to make that money back (plus some profit, of course) by charging thousands of people who want to use it, rather than finding one sponsor willing to pay for it.
Personally, I don't believe the government should pass laws protecting such a system, any more than the government should pass laws prohibiting one. Let the authors do what they will, and succeed or fail on their own efforts, not some artifically mandated scarcity backed by the government. Copy protection schemes? Sure. Go for it. You aren't entitled to anything, but you are welcome to try.
So, you live in New Mexico?
People have been dealing with this for centuries without an organized form of government. You and your neighbors band together for the common defense. This is not done because you are required to do so; rather, it's done because someone who would murder your neighbor is probably a threat to you as well.
The law is the reason people cannot defend themselves, as government has an exclusive on "justice".
Actually, the surprising thing is that for a well maintained road (without a really low or high starting speed limit), the posted speed limit has very little effect on the 85th percentile of drivers. It does, however, greatly effect the lower 30 and upper 10.
I'll trade ya. I work in the Phoenix Airport. $7.00/hour, in 130 degree heat (on the tarmac).
The point is not that you can generate multiple messages with the same hash; the point is that you can take a photo, doctor it, and plaster a new hash over the old one.
"Why would a state voluntarily legislate to limit its power?"
Supposedly, the power comes from the people. It's not that the state would take it's power away, rather, it would be that the people have not yet conceeded that authority to it in the first place (by voting for, or electing people who vote for laws granting the state that power).
If the laws being enforced are themselves unreasonable, a warning is not out of order. Just because something is "the law" does not mean it's reasonable or prudent.