When the scenario is one person in ten thousand then it's likely they had poor judgement. When it's nine thousand out of ten thousand the system was flawed.
Especially when you consider that people were merely following both the conventional wisdom and expert advice.When the scenario is one person in ten thousand then it's likely they had poor judgement. When it's nine thousand out of ten thousand the system was flawed. My bank was offering me loans larger than I thought I could afford.
In 2009, many of these people were blaming home owners for their purchases, for being too greedy. I didn't buy a home, but I don't think it'd be right to blame me if I had.
Well really I guess the question is not how old your first computer is, but how old you were when you got your first computer. By my view of "digital native", if you had a computer before the age of 10, you are one. But then there's also the Internet-Facebook-iPhone natives coming up, which might be something to think about. How will these technologies shape these kids' world?
You're saying that if there was a DRM video standard implemented in Firefox on Linux, the video could be passed by the decoding hardware to the screen in such a way that it would be impossible for Linux/Firefox to intercept the feed, while still displaying the video in Firefox with Firfox-rendered controls (for pause/play/etc).
You're saying that's how these hardware solutions currently work? I'm surprised by this. What products work this way?
I'm not sure about buying Foxconn. It might be a good idea, but then again it may be to their advantage to be able to jump ship and go with another supplier if they can get a better deal.
Personally, I'd be looking to invest in wider product development. For various reasons, Apple has abandoned the server/enterprise side of their business, and they haven't been releasing updates for iWork. IMHO apple should be working on providing a robust, secure, viable option to the stack of products respresented by Microsoft Server, Exchange, and Office, including making it easier to run a large Mac network than a Windows domain.
I would also be investing heavily in R&D for new standards for things like FTP, rsync, mail transmission (replacing IMAP/SMTP/ActiveSync), DNS, IM/chat/SMS, etc. I would set as my goal to design a total next-generation model for networking and communications that would be more effective and efficient than current technologies, but which includes open standards and interoperability with the old model (if possible). Unfortunately, Apple is currently in the best position to pull off this kind of overhaul, given how much vertical integration they already have.
Beyond that, Apple would do well to invest in either creating a game console or courting more game developers. Steam on Mac is a good start, but games are still something that keeps people on Windows.
Yeah, but you're talking about closed systems there. I'm saying that if I buy a normal computer running Linux/Firefox, then it doesn't matter what "hardware DRM" there is, because the decrypted video has to be passed back to Firefox, which is open source. Firefox can be reprogrammed to capture the video stream.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't having the copy protection in hardware *not* help with an open source player? Once it's decrypted and funneled back to the player for playback, someone could rewrite the open source player to capture that output in its unencrypted form. Am I wrong?
You're right, they keep pushing it back, and I'm guessing it's for 2 reasons:
1) The concept of "digital" keeps changing. People who are 35 now may have grown up with computers already, but they didn't grow up with smartphones and facebook.
2) Journalists keep predicting that the world will change once the "digital natives" start taking over, and they're not willing to give up the idea. As the "digital natives" enter the workforce and no one is observing the magical effects everyone predicted, they say, "Well these aren't true digital natives! Wait until the real digital natives arrive!"
The fact is, most people under 20 don't understand computers very well. They've comfortable using them, but they have even less understanding of what's going on than earlier generations who had to do a lot more manual configuration.
That is simply because a large portion of the population does not truly think about what they are saying and are simply regurgitating what they have heard.
That's because humans learn language by "regurgitating what they have heard". It's all imitation of convention-- using a set of noises which tones which indicate some intention. Most of the time, you yourself are not truly thinking about what you are saying.
The purpose of modern universities is not to teach students. They are businesses which make money by providing a resort town to 20-somethings, runing minor-league professional sports teams, and doing scientific research. The whole "education" thing is just a method of attracting 20-somethings to their resort, and publishing attracts more students than good classes do.
Oh, and a third problem with the "forced registration" concept that you *must* consider: if you require your users to check with a server before installing, then you *must* make sure that the server remains available *forever*. It's terrible to spend $10k on software and find it doesn't work after 3 years because the company turned off their activation server. Yes, that has happened to me.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I'd think "moving forward" would involve building a new product, not just hacking out chunks of one that's shared with one's competitors and spinning them off.
I don't know why you'd think that. It seems to me that with all the FOSS available, you'd have to be crazy to start from scratch on a product like this. Even if you start from a fresh design, it makes complete sense to find a FOSS project that does similar functions and reuse any good code that does what you want it to do.
I agree, however I will concede the fact that at least in theory it is possible to have perfect virtual security. It is theoretically possible to have a system with no bugs, no vulnerabilities. Plenty of people on Slashdot seem to think they have such a system on account of running Linux and I'm not inclined to argue.
I am inclined to argue. Linux has bugs. There are security vulnerabilities. They're not terribly easy to exploit, but they exist.
Aside from that, it's just a basic rule of any kind of security (digital or physical): enabling access to authorized users also creates the risk of allowing access by unauthorized users. If you can log into your desktop computer through SSH, then it means it's also theoretically possible for me to log in through SSH. It's just a question of whether I can get ahold of (or guess) your credentials, and that's assuming that there are absolutely no security vulnerabilities in the SSH scheme.
As an IT person who has supported software like what you're using, I always insist on paying for software because, for professionals, it's not worth the legal (and technical) liabilities that come with pirated software. Yes, your software will be pirated; that cannot be helped. If your software is worthwhile, you will not prevent copyright infringement.
However, many companies try to fight piracy by requiring product activation or hardware dongles. When I run across software with their of these kinds of protections, I always recommend looking for another solution. In other words, if you make me use a dongle, I will be looking to replace your product with something that does not require a dongle, or to rearrange our workflow so we simply don't need your product.
I know, people *think* that dongles and activation and other copy protection shouldn't cause problems, but I've been supporting software that uses them for well over a decade now, and they *always* end up being a headache. It's true that in some cases, I was not able to replace software that required dongles or activation, but do you really want to rely on me being "stuck" using your product? Do you want to run your business by relying on your customers to be locked-in and forced to use your product, or would you rather have your users be happy with their purchases?
In short, if you have some very minimal DRM, that's not a huge problem. One option might be to have forced registration-- i.e. when you install, it checks a serial number online and won't install without verifying that the serial number is legitimate. But the main problems with this sort of scheme (i.e. activation) is that it tends to block imaging solutions in businesses, and it tends to break down when an admin needs to move licenses between computers. Make sure you consider both of these needs before implementing DRM.
In the physical world, there's no such thing as perfect security... Real security has a lot of different considerations than digital security, a big one being "How much is the target worth?"
Your post is very insightful, but I just want to comment to point out that this is true of digital security as well. There is no such thing as perfect digital security, and one of the considerations of any kind of security is "how much is the target worth?"
For example, even the most guarded computers, whether they're CIA or NSA or whatever, are not perfectly secure. By the nature of providing even a single person with access, you've opened up avenues of attack, even if the attack is a manipulation of that single person. However, their security is much more strict than the security on my home PC, and with good reason. I only have to protect my home PC from a very casual scatter-shot attack; I may need to install an antivirus or firewall or be careful about which sites I browse, but nobody is targeting my computer. No one is going to break into my apartment to steal my computer. No one is going to spend months probing my computer for vulnerabilities. Even if I have something extremely important on my home computer, nobody would have any way of knowing that ahead of time.
So the reason the NSA demands stricter security for their computers than I do for mine is not merely an issue of resources, it's because my computer is not a valuable target. Ask a security expert to define "security", and if they're thinking about it, they won't tell you it's "the task of making unauthorized access impossible." Their definition will be (or at least should be) something more like, "the task of making unauthorized access difficult in proportion to the value of the thing being protected, such that most people won't bother trying, and those who try are likely to give up or get caught before they succeed."
Yes, I use the iPhone for work. I type emails on it. It's fine. In fact, I prefer typing (and type faster) on my iPhone to typing on my Blackberry, but I recognize that it's a personal preference thing.
I have both an iPhone and a Blackberry, and the Blackberry gets no use.
As for what I mean? There are already two browsers FF and Opera, that can't legally play your videos, so any users of those browsers won't be able to use your site.
Generally speaking, this is no worse or more fragmented than before. On the contrary, you have basically eliminated WMV, Real Media, and you're on your way to being without Flash.
But since those users CAN use flash, why the fuck should I switch? you're either gonna end up with H.264 for the iShiny and flash for everybody else, or they'll stick with flash and leave the iShiny to GTFO.
I think you miss the point. That "Flash video" is still H264. The switch has happened. It's just than when you use Flash, you are locking yourself out of a very popular mobile platform while also committing yourself to a proprietary inefficient video player.
Finally how is Adobe forcing shit? not only can you include their player absolutely free which you can NOT do withH.264
Again, you're missing something very important. The Flash player is just another example of a H264 player being included "for free", similarly to the way Quicktime and Chrome are "free". By sticking with Flash, you aren't somehow refusing to move along to H264, you're just committing to a specific player instead of allowing people to use whichever player they like.
So the question is, what are you really after? At first, I thought you were simply anti-patent and didn't understand how complicated the situation is. In this latest post, however, you seem to merely be anti-Apple and are eager to lock everyone into a specific proprietary H264 video player (i.e. Adobe Flash) in order to hurt Apple. Seems petty to me.
with Apple being able to slam through H.264 which while it is very obviously the most technologically superior codec, its holding group might a well have as a motto "Pay your $699 license fee, you cocksmoking teabaggers!" so you can give up anybody other than the big three (Apple,Google,MSFT) using it.
Well but here's the problem: First, h264 is (at least arguably) the technologically superior codec. Second, you're paying a licensing fee on h264 for patents, and AFAIK there's still no guarantee that Vorbis or WebM don't infringe on any patents.
Nobody is claiming patent infringement because they aren't in wide use, and the money isn't really there. If one of them becomes the standard across all kinds of devices, someone might come along and start suing. Now maybe that's just FUD, but it's good enough FUD that it's going to keep people from jumping ship. Switching to a technologically inferior solution requires a huge investment and an uncertain benefit. People aren't going to do it.
Basically it looks like we are headed right back to the bad old days of "you must use X browser"
Not sure what you mean. So far, things are as "free" as they've ever been. H264 is *the* standard, like it or not. You can pitch a hissy fit, but the situation isn't much different from distributing music as MP3, which has also been patent-encumbered. GIF images, too.
At least Adobe doesn't sue your ass if you include flash support in your OS or device whereas MPEG-LA made it clear if Moz or anybody wants to support H.264 they better pay their license fee.
Adobe isn't going to sue you, but they will try to railroad you into using their products whether you like it or not. Incidentally, Adobe Flash is only increasing adoption of H264, since that's pretty much become the standard encoding for Flash video. The only difference is, instead of Microsoft or Google or Apple paying your licensing fee, Adobe does.
Well in fairness, sometimes this sort of thing just needs to happen. It's frustrating when there's a clear technological winner that isn't being implemented because of some political reason, but often enough there are legitimate reasons why the different browsers aren't happy with a given standard. Over time, improvements get made, problems get settled, new standards come out. Eventually, hopefully, there's a good standard that people can agree with. It takes time, but it's just what needs to happen.
What's really a problem is when good standards get roadblocked because they threaten someone's revenue stream because it breaks vendor lock-in.
Not really. First, there are problems that a filesystem check can repair without damaging the integrity of your data.
More importantly, some filesystem/disk problems are transparent until you check for errors. Linux is usually set to do a fsck at regular intervals in order to detect errors that might otherwise go undetected. So, in short, you might not know that you need to restore from backups until you do a filesystem check.
The best manager I ever had once told me that, when he saw "MCSE" in the top half of a resume, he stopped looking at it and put it in the "ignore" stack. The problem wasn't having an MCSE per se, but he said that putting it in the top half your your resume showed that your priorities were out of whack.
Good generalists are hard to find, perhaps because so many choose to specialise.
It's also a hard thing for most people to do. You have to be able to think big and small at the same time. Specialist deal in details and rarely see the big picture. The "big picture" guys usually have no idea of the details and are often envision a big picture that isn't possible-- because the devil is in the details. Good generalists are people who can have enough of a view of both to inform the specialists what their goals are and advise the "big picture" people about what's possible.
Slashdot Mirror
When the scenario is one person in ten thousand then it's likely they had poor judgement. When it's nine thousand out of ten thousand the system was flawed.
Especially when you consider that people were merely following both the conventional wisdom and expert advice.When the scenario is one person in ten thousand then it's likely they had poor judgement. When it's nine thousand out of ten thousand the system was flawed. My bank was offering me loans larger than I thought I could afford.
In 2009, many of these people were blaming home owners for their purchases, for being too greedy. I didn't buy a home, but I don't think it'd be right to blame me if I had.
Well really I guess the question is not how old your first computer is, but how old you were when you got your first computer. By my view of "digital native", if you had a computer before the age of 10, you are one. But then there's also the Internet-Facebook-iPhone natives coming up, which might be something to think about. How will these technologies shape these kids' world?
You're saying that if there was a DRM video standard implemented in Firefox on Linux, the video could be passed by the decoding hardware to the screen in such a way that it would be impossible for Linux/Firefox to intercept the feed, while still displaying the video in Firefox with Firfox-rendered controls (for pause/play/etc).
You're saying that's how these hardware solutions currently work? I'm surprised by this. What products work this way?
I'm not sure about buying Foxconn. It might be a good idea, but then again it may be to their advantage to be able to jump ship and go with another supplier if they can get a better deal.
Personally, I'd be looking to invest in wider product development. For various reasons, Apple has abandoned the server/enterprise side of their business, and they haven't been releasing updates for iWork. IMHO apple should be working on providing a robust, secure, viable option to the stack of products respresented by Microsoft Server, Exchange, and Office, including making it easier to run a large Mac network than a Windows domain.
I would also be investing heavily in R&D for new standards for things like FTP, rsync, mail transmission (replacing IMAP/SMTP/ActiveSync), DNS, IM/chat/SMS, etc. I would set as my goal to design a total next-generation model for networking and communications that would be more effective and efficient than current technologies, but which includes open standards and interoperability with the old model (if possible). Unfortunately, Apple is currently in the best position to pull off this kind of overhaul, given how much vertical integration they already have.
Beyond that, Apple would do well to invest in either creating a game console or courting more game developers. Steam on Mac is a good start, but games are still something that keeps people on Windows.
It's not necessarily bad management. Making good products is not as simple as throwing money at "good ideas".
Yeah, but you're talking about closed systems there. I'm saying that if I buy a normal computer running Linux/Firefox, then it doesn't matter what "hardware DRM" there is, because the decrypted video has to be passed back to Firefox, which is open source. Firefox can be reprogrammed to capture the video stream.
My first computer was a 12MHz 286 with a 125MB hard drive and like 2 MB of ram - and it was super badass at the time, with DOS 4.
I'm not sure we want to start this game on Slashdot, but I got you beat. My first (IIRC) was a 4Mhz 8088 with 512k of RAM.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't having the copy protection in hardware *not* help with an open source player? Once it's decrypted and funneled back to the player for playback, someone could rewrite the open source player to capture that output in its unencrypted form. Am I wrong?
You're right, they keep pushing it back, and I'm guessing it's for 2 reasons:
1) The concept of "digital" keeps changing. People who are 35 now may have grown up with computers already, but they didn't grow up with smartphones and facebook.
2) Journalists keep predicting that the world will change once the "digital natives" start taking over, and they're not willing to give up the idea. As the "digital natives" enter the workforce and no one is observing the magical effects everyone predicted, they say, "Well these aren't true digital natives! Wait until the real digital natives arrive!"
The fact is, most people under 20 don't understand computers very well. They've comfortable using them, but they have even less understanding of what's going on than earlier generations who had to do a lot more manual configuration.
That is simply because a large portion of the population does not truly think about what they are saying and are simply regurgitating what they have heard.
That's because humans learn language by "regurgitating what they have heard". It's all imitation of convention-- using a set of noises which tones which indicate some intention. Most of the time, you yourself are not truly thinking about what you are saying.
The purpose of modern universities is not to teach students. They are businesses which make money by providing a resort town to 20-somethings, runing minor-league professional sports teams, and doing scientific research. The whole "education" thing is just a method of attracting 20-somethings to their resort, and publishing attracts more students than good classes do.
Oh, and a third problem with the "forced registration" concept that you *must* consider: if you require your users to check with a server before installing, then you *must* make sure that the server remains available *forever*. It's terrible to spend $10k on software and find it doesn't work after 3 years because the company turned off their activation server. Yes, that has happened to me.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I'd think "moving forward" would involve building a new product, not just hacking out chunks of one that's shared with one's competitors and spinning them off.
I don't know why you'd think that. It seems to me that with all the FOSS available, you'd have to be crazy to start from scratch on a product like this. Even if you start from a fresh design, it makes complete sense to find a FOSS project that does similar functions and reuse any good code that does what you want it to do.
I mean, why reinvent the wheel?
I agree, however I will concede the fact that at least in theory it is possible to have perfect virtual security. It is theoretically possible to have a system with no bugs, no vulnerabilities. Plenty of people on Slashdot seem to think they have such a system on account of running Linux and I'm not inclined to argue.
I am inclined to argue. Linux has bugs. There are security vulnerabilities. They're not terribly easy to exploit, but they exist.
Aside from that, it's just a basic rule of any kind of security (digital or physical): enabling access to authorized users also creates the risk of allowing access by unauthorized users. If you can log into your desktop computer through SSH, then it means it's also theoretically possible for me to log in through SSH. It's just a question of whether I can get ahold of (or guess) your credentials, and that's assuming that there are absolutely no security vulnerabilities in the SSH scheme.
As an IT person who has supported software like what you're using, I always insist on paying for software because, for professionals, it's not worth the legal (and technical) liabilities that come with pirated software. Yes, your software will be pirated; that cannot be helped. If your software is worthwhile, you will not prevent copyright infringement.
However, many companies try to fight piracy by requiring product activation or hardware dongles. When I run across software with their of these kinds of protections, I always recommend looking for another solution. In other words, if you make me use a dongle, I will be looking to replace your product with something that does not require a dongle, or to rearrange our workflow so we simply don't need your product.
I know, people *think* that dongles and activation and other copy protection shouldn't cause problems, but I've been supporting software that uses them for well over a decade now, and they *always* end up being a headache. It's true that in some cases, I was not able to replace software that required dongles or activation, but do you really want to rely on me being "stuck" using your product? Do you want to run your business by relying on your customers to be locked-in and forced to use your product, or would you rather have your users be happy with their purchases?
In short, if you have some very minimal DRM, that's not a huge problem. One option might be to have forced registration-- i.e. when you install, it checks a serial number online and won't install without verifying that the serial number is legitimate. But the main problems with this sort of scheme (i.e. activation) is that it tends to block imaging solutions in businesses, and it tends to break down when an admin needs to move licenses between computers. Make sure you consider both of these needs before implementing DRM.
In the physical world, there's no such thing as perfect security... Real security has a lot of different considerations than digital security, a big one being "How much is the target worth?"
Your post is very insightful, but I just want to comment to point out that this is true of digital security as well. There is no such thing as perfect digital security, and one of the considerations of any kind of security is "how much is the target worth?"
For example, even the most guarded computers, whether they're CIA or NSA or whatever, are not perfectly secure. By the nature of providing even a single person with access, you've opened up avenues of attack, even if the attack is a manipulation of that single person. However, their security is much more strict than the security on my home PC, and with good reason. I only have to protect my home PC from a very casual scatter-shot attack; I may need to install an antivirus or firewall or be careful about which sites I browse, but nobody is targeting my computer. No one is going to break into my apartment to steal my computer. No one is going to spend months probing my computer for vulnerabilities. Even if I have something extremely important on my home computer, nobody would have any way of knowing that ahead of time.
So the reason the NSA demands stricter security for their computers than I do for mine is not merely an issue of resources, it's because my computer is not a valuable target. Ask a security expert to define "security", and if they're thinking about it, they won't tell you it's "the task of making unauthorized access impossible." Their definition will be (or at least should be) something more like, "the task of making unauthorized access difficult in proportion to the value of the thing being protected, such that most people won't bother trying, and those who try are likely to give up or get caught before they succeed."
Yes, I use the iPhone for work. I type emails on it. It's fine. In fact, I prefer typing (and type faster) on my iPhone to typing on my Blackberry, but I recognize that it's a personal preference thing.
I have both an iPhone and a Blackberry, and the Blackberry gets no use.
As for what I mean? There are already two browsers FF and Opera, that can't legally play your videos, so any users of those browsers won't be able to use your site.
Generally speaking, this is no worse or more fragmented than before. On the contrary, you have basically eliminated WMV, Real Media, and you're on your way to being without Flash.
But since those users CAN use flash, why the fuck should I switch? you're either gonna end up with H.264 for the iShiny and flash for everybody else, or they'll stick with flash and leave the iShiny to GTFO.
I think you miss the point. That "Flash video" is still H264. The switch has happened. It's just than when you use Flash, you are locking yourself out of a very popular mobile platform while also committing yourself to a proprietary inefficient video player.
Finally how is Adobe forcing shit? not only can you include their player absolutely free which you can NOT do withH.264
Again, you're missing something very important. The Flash player is just another example of a H264 player being included "for free", similarly to the way Quicktime and Chrome are "free". By sticking with Flash, you aren't somehow refusing to move along to H264, you're just committing to a specific player instead of allowing people to use whichever player they like.
So the question is, what are you really after? At first, I thought you were simply anti-patent and didn't understand how complicated the situation is. In this latest post, however, you seem to merely be anti-Apple and are eager to lock everyone into a specific proprietary H264 video player (i.e. Adobe Flash) in order to hurt Apple. Seems petty to me.
with Apple being able to slam through H.264 which while it is very obviously the most technologically superior codec, its holding group might a well have as a motto "Pay your $699 license fee, you cocksmoking teabaggers!" so you can give up anybody other than the big three (Apple,Google,MSFT) using it.
Well but here's the problem: First, h264 is (at least arguably) the technologically superior codec. Second, you're paying a licensing fee on h264 for patents, and AFAIK there's still no guarantee that Vorbis or WebM don't infringe on any patents.
Nobody is claiming patent infringement because they aren't in wide use, and the money isn't really there. If one of them becomes the standard across all kinds of devices, someone might come along and start suing. Now maybe that's just FUD, but it's good enough FUD that it's going to keep people from jumping ship. Switching to a technologically inferior solution requires a huge investment and an uncertain benefit. People aren't going to do it.
Basically it looks like we are headed right back to the bad old days of "you must use X browser"
Not sure what you mean. So far, things are as "free" as they've ever been. H264 is *the* standard, like it or not. You can pitch a hissy fit, but the situation isn't much different from distributing music as MP3, which has also been patent-encumbered. GIF images, too.
At least Adobe doesn't sue your ass if you include flash support in your OS or device whereas MPEG-LA made it clear if Moz or anybody wants to support H.264 they better pay their license fee.
Adobe isn't going to sue you, but they will try to railroad you into using their products whether you like it or not. Incidentally, Adobe Flash is only increasing adoption of H264, since that's pretty much become the standard encoding for Flash video. The only difference is, instead of Microsoft or Google or Apple paying your licensing fee, Adobe does.
Authors = the rest of their life + 70 years and counting.
FTFY. If things keep going as they are, copyrights will never expire again.
Well in fairness, sometimes this sort of thing just needs to happen. It's frustrating when there's a clear technological winner that isn't being implemented because of some political reason, but often enough there are legitimate reasons why the different browsers aren't happy with a given standard. Over time, improvements get made, problems get settled, new standards come out. Eventually, hopefully, there's a good standard that people can agree with. It takes time, but it's just what needs to happen.
What's really a problem is when good standards get roadblocked because they threaten someone's revenue stream because it breaks vendor lock-in.
Not really. First, there are problems that a filesystem check can repair without damaging the integrity of your data.
More importantly, some filesystem/disk problems are transparent until you check for errors. Linux is usually set to do a fsck at regular intervals in order to detect errors that might otherwise go undetected. So, in short, you might not know that you need to restore from backups until you do a filesystem check.
The best manager I ever had once told me that, when he saw "MCSE" in the top half of a resume, he stopped looking at it and put it in the "ignore" stack. The problem wasn't having an MCSE per se, but he said that putting it in the top half your your resume showed that your priorities were out of whack.
You're misunderstanding the point of certifications. The intention is to extract money from people who are desperate for work.
Good generalists are hard to find, perhaps because so many choose to specialise.
It's also a hard thing for most people to do. You have to be able to think big and small at the same time. Specialist deal in details and rarely see the big picture. The "big picture" guys usually have no idea of the details and are often envision a big picture that isn't possible-- because the devil is in the details. Good generalists are people who can have enough of a view of both to inform the specialists what their goals are and advise the "big picture" people about what's possible.