No, he's absolutely right. The guy visiting the bank wants to download it, sure, but he doesn't know he wants to download it, and he shouldn't install it until he knows that he wants to install it. There's no way around that. People who don't know what they're doing shouldn't be installing things that they don't know what they're installing. Period.
Ok, so when it doesn't work, he can contact his bank, and they can either help him get it working. Or, if they have a lot of trouble calls regarding this, they can change their site so it doesn't require a java applet.
Frankly, I think some web developers are too quick to require some stupid installation for their site to work. Banks shouldn't need java applets. Frankly, I think Flash is for the weak. You shouldn't need plug-ins to make a web page.
I Would also like to make something clear, this is not a victory for Free Software like many people understand. This is not a victory against propietary software. Most of the people that installs Firefox doens't undestand or care about the fact that firefox is Free Software. Most firefox installs are under windows.
Well, it is a sort of victory for free software, in that it's a fairly common misconception that free software developed by a scattered group of volunteers won't ever be as high-quality as software developed by "professionals" being paid by a company.
Yes, it's true that most people don't care whether the software is free (libre), and I doubt most people ever will. They care whether the software does what they need it to do, and the fact that it's free (gratis) will help, but really the issue of whether the software is good and useful is key. People will probably always want software that's useful and proprietary more than software that's useless and libre.
So what I'm saying is, Firefox can now be pointed to as an example of free software that's also good. When people who don't care about whether software is libre can be sold on open source software as a source of good free (gratis, or at least cheap) software we can increase the market share sufficiently that proprietary software developers will need to support interoperability, or else using their proprietary software will amount to shutting yourself off from a large portion of the outside world.
mmmm...relatively cheap, but still not free. However, besides the CPU time, I'm sure part of the reason they don't do it this way is the extra delay that it would add between when you click "Buy song" to when it's on your computer, ready to play. If that buying process doesn't feel fast, Apple loses a lot of their iTMS customers.
So how much processing power do you need to instantly (or should I say, close enough to instantly that the buyer doesn't notice) encrypt a 5MB file with strong encryption? Multiply that by the number of downloads performed over the life of the music store. Is that much processing power worth it to add the security of doing server-side encryption when the users have free access to the decryption keys anyway, and projects like Hymn are floating around?
I'm still not sure what you're on about. The part of my sentence you quoted is completely uninteresting. Sure, Jefferson changed it to "happiness" because for some reason he thought it was a more appropriate word to use (which was all the quoted text really means).
As for being condescended to, and all these idealogs astroturfing.... It seems there's a misunderstanding somewhere, because this whole discussion began when you seemed to argue that the phrase, "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness," was in no way referencing Locke, and suggesting that Jefferson was referencing Locke is tantamount to calling Jefferson "illiterate"-- which I just don't understand.
And now you seem to be arguing that I'm one of these "astroturfing idealogs"? Sorry, I really....really don't understand what's got you wound up. Does I saying that Dante wrote about religious and political issues make me a racist? If I say Voltaire references Leibnitz, am I accusing Voltaire of being a midget? Really, I don't see the pattern.
hmmmmm... interest question. I guess I'm smart enough to know that baseless insults don't make you right. I'm also mature enough that I don't resort to insults merely because I've been proven wrong. I'm kinda hansome, too, if you want to know, and I have a pretty good sense of humor most of the time. Why so much interest in me all of the sudden, anyway? I thought we were talking about thalami.
So pain is "the release of glutamate and the simulation of the thalamus"? If I pour a big jug of glutamate on a table and stimulate a thalamus by poking it with a stick, is that pain? OK, you'll say we need the specific form and causation, right? So lets say that immediately following death, I remove some nerves and the thalamus, activate the nerves, let all the "biological responses" happen, but there's no brain attached, no consciousness of any kind, and no sensation is produced because there's nothing to sense these "biological responses". Is that pain?
No. Pain requires a context: it requires that it be "sensed" in order for it to be "pain" and not "the release of neurotransmitters which stimulate a gland". In short, there is no pain where nothing exists to feel it.
Brilliant. Now why did they "decide to change it"? Just to mix things up? Laughs on future generations? Needed a break from all the solemnity? In-joke with their main man Locke?
The word "property" is indiscernable from the word "happiness" only to King Midas and Randists such as you.
I really don't understand what you're on about. If I said, "Life in modern society today is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," it would be obvious that I was referencing Hobbs, right? Now, Hobbs never said anything about "life in modern society today," but if I wrote a paper with that sentence, it would be clear where my word choice was coming from.
It's not as though anyone is claiming that Jefferson was doing a book report, chose to quote Locke, and misquoted out of stupidity. He was writing a political and philosophic statement and chose to incorporate ideas from a political philosopher.
Locke argued that men had, by nature, 3 rights which could never be taken or given away, even by contract: life, liberty, property. And you think it's a coincidence that in early draft's of the constitution, Jefferson wrote that people had "inalienable rights" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property"?
And no, "happiness" and "property" are not the same, which I suppose was part of the reason he changed it. Like I said, I can't remember why he changed it, but I believe there was documentation of the discussion, somehow. I think I remember something about believing that the pursuit of happiness being a more central issue, since property is only important as a means to happiness, but like I said, I can't remember off-hand, and I can't find mention of it online.
However, I'm not sure why you're so upset by all this.
I agree, but that doesn't seem to be what Apple has done. If they are really sending you completely unprotected files, then "breaking" the DRM isn't even remotely a PITA.
Yeah, 'cept some people still can't figure out how to get songs off of their iPods. Really, Apple could put a link in iTunes that says "Remove DRM from songs" and most people still would never figure it out.
More to the point, your brain is a physical, bio-chemical part of your body. The idea that changing the operating state of the brain would result in physical, biochemical changes in your body shouldn't be surprising. It should be considered true by definition.
Well, it depends on how you think of it. Is pain the nerve impulse, or is it the brain's interpretation of the nerve impulse? Like, if I cut off your arm, but hooked it up and fed it blood so that it stayed "alive", and then poked it with a pin, would you say the arm "feels pain", or would it have to be attached to a person who could recognize the pain in order to properly be called "pain"?
I guess it's a little bit of a "tree falls in the forest" type question...
Another example of an idealogue (who again just happens to be Libertarian) assuming the Founders were drooling illiterates.
Huh? It seems to me he's assuming that the founding fathers were particularly literate, since he's claiming they were familiar with Locke (which isn't so much as assumption as it is a fact). Locke claimed that every man had inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, and it's quite obvious that the writers of the Declaration of Independance were referencing Locke, but decided to change it to "the pursuit of happiness". I believe there are even documents (letters) which spell this out and explain why they changed it, but I can't remember off-hand.
And ironically, part of the reason people think the Milgram experiments were unethical seems to be related to the results. I wonder what the view of these experiments would have been if everyone involved had refused to administer the shocks. I think we'd probably be talking about what a lovely experiment it was if it weren't for the fact that it exposes an ugly truth we don't like to believe about ourselves.
Besides, it is rumoured that Apple supposedly watermarks the songs they distibute through iTMS and these watermarks may (or may not) contain data ont the user who purchassed that song.
I believe these "watermarks" are applied at the same time as the encryption. So programs that break the encryption can strip them out, and bypassing the DRM application process entirely will probably result in a normal AAC file. (I'm guessing)
Well, what did you think, they encrypted all their music files once, and every user has a single unique key that will magically encrypt only the songs they've purchased? Or that they kept a separate encrypted copy of every song for every user? Or when the music starts downloading immediately (and quickly) did you think they were encrypting the 5 MB song on the fly for every download?
Really, it's not that Apple's stupid. It's more likely that they never intended to make an utterly unbreakable system. As you mentioned yourself, the only reason Apple really cares about the DRM is that the music industry happy. In pretty much all of this copy protection for software/entertainment, there are three groups:
the distributor, who wants the copy protection to be as restrictive and unbreakable as possible
the user, who wants the copy protection to be as loose as possible, but will require at least that the copy protection is loose enough that it won't inhibit their fair use
the hacker, who's going to break the copy protection no matter what.
...and this situation is no different. The distributor isn't going to get their unbreakable encryption. What the RIAA should really want the DRM to do is:
be loose enough that normal users won't feel an immense desire to break it
make sure that breaking it is enough of a PITA (or seemingly dangerous) so that the normal user won't bother.
I come here for Interesting and Funny posts, and always sigh when I see post about how some Star Trek/comic book/etc. development that I know something about isn't interesting enough to be "News".
Am I too much of a "nerd" or something?
(Sorry for flambait, but I can't help it. Seeing so many of these recently, i.e. "Why is the on the front page?!" et al, and don't see why people bother).
Now why would MS decide to spend money on extra development effort on a project that earns no revenue in order to increase interoperability, thereby incouraging web developers to fix their web sites so that competing browsers can render them correctly? This loses them both dollars and marketshare.
There's only one reason why Microsoft would do that: If a large percentage of users in general get fed up with the vendor lock-in and refuse to develop web pages for IE's de facto standards. One way to accomplish that is for us to all agree that the W3C standards are the standards, even if not necessarily a reflection of real-world web pages.
For example, I have a certain habit. Whenever I'm talking to a anyone about Internet browsers, and it comes up that pages render differently in Firefox/Safari vs. IE, I say, "Well that's because IE renders pages incorrectly, and so web developers make pages incorrectly so that they'll work in IE." When I hear someone talk about how there are IE only web pages, I say, "That's because the web developers did a bad job."
I know it sounds pretentious and heavy handed, but I don't saying merely because I think it's the truth. I say it in the hopes that it will effect these people's perceptions of what's going on. If nothing else, a lot of people have picked up on this as a sort of trivia that can make them look smart and computer savvy, so it gets repeated a lot. The more people that view this as "Microsoft and some web developers are doing a bad job" (vs. "No one but Microsoft can make a good web browser"), the more people are likely to insist that Microsoft start doing things the "right way".
And I know that people here on/. tend to think Microsoft won't listen to what people want, but if enough people start moving to alternative products, Microsoft will be forced to play fair.
I dislike CSS because it makes the most common layout formatting (columns) hard to implement.
I'd agree to that. In fact, I find a lot of the positioning control a little hard to deal with, but I wonder if some of that might be the browser implementations rather than the standard itself. You know, sometimes I try to place something, and I'm pretty sure I've done it the right way, but it takes a hell of a lot of tweaking to get it to show up where I want it. That might be browser issues, but it might also be that I'm somehow confused by the standard and missing some detail of what I'm doing.
Just as an arbitrary illustration, I get sick of writing:
Personally, I think I'd end up getting *more* confused by your layout. Too many brackets, too much nesting. Maybe you're right that there's a better way, but I'm not sure what.
But I think you're right to refer to these issues as 'things you dislike' rather than flaws. I don't believe I'm arguing with you if I say that these are areas where CSS has room for improvement, but they aren't "flaws".
I hope companies start designing webpages for Firefox only and it will display a message when you try to access the site in IE saying please use firefox to access this website.
I hear what you're saying, but I'd rather wish that deveopers could code to the standards, and include a message that says, "If this page doesn't render properly, it's your web browser, not the page." In other words, what you said except without any browser bias (because coding for a specific browser is where the mess begins in the first place). However, that's still very impractical.
Sometimes it's the browser's fault and sometimes it's the standard's fault. I guess I'll also allow that maybe the designer is trying to hack together something funny. Still, it'd be nice if all the browsers were at least *trying* to adhere to standards.
I'm not trying to dismiss your question (I'd like to hear more answers), but even if we assume that it's flawed, I still really want to say, so what? It's still the standard.
Is Microsoft seriously arguing that they've never thrown their weight behind an imperfect work-in-progress technology/standard before? Is the imperfectness of CSS2 made better by making IE render it improperly?
Now, I'm not trying to keep people from discussing the finer points of possible improvements to web-standards, but can't we all agree that it's better to have all browsers interpreting the same standards the same way?
Social Engineering has always been the biggest problem. There is no such thing as perfect security when too many people are in the know, or have some sort of access.
No matter how good an encryption system is, its obviously going to fail if the person breaking in has the right information.
In the more general case, no matter what security measures you put in place, you can't stop someone from misusing authorized access. Therefore, I would go as far as to say that there's no perfect security and the only way for something to be completely secure is to disallow any access whatsoever.
The strangest part of this whole affair is that spamming ultimately originates as a form of advertising. Here's someone who is patently not interested in the company's product, and has made a legal request under state law for them to stop sending him ads. Instead of complying, the company is now going to try to sue his pants off to show him who's boss. Supposing in some bizarro world they win, and are granted permission to keep sending him ads? I bet he's going to be really eager to buy things from them now...
I believe at least part of the problem (though I may be wrong in this case) is that the spammers who send the advertising and the people who are selling the product are two different companies. In a sense, the spammers have no financial interest in you actually buying the product, other than in that it maintains the image of spam as an effective advertising medium.
Or even when they are the same company, it seems that companies who advertise through spam aren't relying on the inherent good-quality of their product for sales.
So when it comes to legal action, the spammers aren't so worried about making the product look bad, or even making spam look bad (after all, it already looks about as bad as it's going to). What they're more worried about is their right to continue spamming.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people don't know that something can "hurt" your computer unless it's a "virus".
Ok, so when it doesn't work, he can contact his bank, and they can either help him get it working. Or, if they have a lot of trouble calls regarding this, they can change their site so it doesn't require a java applet.
Frankly, I think some web developers are too quick to require some stupid installation for their site to work. Banks shouldn't need java applets. Frankly, I think Flash is for the weak. You shouldn't need plug-ins to make a web page.
Well, it is a sort of victory for free software, in that it's a fairly common misconception that free software developed by a scattered group of volunteers won't ever be as high-quality as software developed by "professionals" being paid by a company.
Yes, it's true that most people don't care whether the software is free (libre), and I doubt most people ever will. They care whether the software does what they need it to do, and the fact that it's free (gratis) will help, but really the issue of whether the software is good and useful is key. People will probably always want software that's useful and proprietary more than software that's useless and libre.
So what I'm saying is, Firefox can now be pointed to as an example of free software that's also good. When people who don't care about whether software is libre can be sold on open source software as a source of good free (gratis, or at least cheap) software we can increase the market share sufficiently that proprietary software developers will need to support interoperability, or else using their proprietary software will amount to shutting yourself off from a large portion of the outside world.
One might argue that the economist who is credited with first saying it trumps Heinlein.
So how much processing power do you need to instantly (or should I say, close enough to instantly that the buyer doesn't notice) encrypt a 5MB file with strong encryption? Multiply that by the number of downloads performed over the life of the music store. Is that much processing power worth it to add the security of doing server-side encryption when the users have free access to the decryption keys anyway, and projects like Hymn are floating around?
I'm still not sure what you're on about. The part of my sentence you quoted is completely uninteresting. Sure, Jefferson changed it to "happiness" because for some reason he thought it was a more appropriate word to use (which was all the quoted text really means).
As for being condescended to, and all these idealogs astroturfing.... It seems there's a misunderstanding somewhere, because this whole discussion began when you seemed to argue that the phrase, "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness," was in no way referencing Locke, and suggesting that Jefferson was referencing Locke is tantamount to calling Jefferson "illiterate"-- which I just don't understand.
And now you seem to be arguing that I'm one of these "astroturfing idealogs"? Sorry, I really....really don't understand what's got you wound up. Does I saying that Dante wrote about religious and political issues make me a racist? If I say Voltaire references Leibnitz, am I accusing Voltaire of being a midget? Really, I don't see the pattern.
hmmmmm... interest question. I guess I'm smart enough to know that baseless insults don't make you right. I'm also mature enough that I don't resort to insults merely because I've been proven wrong. I'm kinda hansome, too, if you want to know, and I have a pretty good sense of humor most of the time. Why so much interest in me all of the sudden, anyway? I thought we were talking about thalami.
No. Pain requires a context: it requires that it be "sensed" in order for it to be "pain" and not "the release of neurotransmitters which stimulate a gland". In short, there is no pain where nothing exists to feel it.
The word "property" is indiscernable from the word "happiness" only to King Midas and Randists such as you.
I really don't understand what you're on about. If I said, "Life in modern society today is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," it would be obvious that I was referencing Hobbs, right? Now, Hobbs never said anything about "life in modern society today," but if I wrote a paper with that sentence, it would be clear where my word choice was coming from.
It's not as though anyone is claiming that Jefferson was doing a book report, chose to quote Locke, and misquoted out of stupidity. He was writing a political and philosophic statement and chose to incorporate ideas from a political philosopher.
Locke argued that men had, by nature, 3 rights which could never be taken or given away, even by contract: life, liberty, property. And you think it's a coincidence that in early draft's of the constitution, Jefferson wrote that people had "inalienable rights" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property"?
And no, "happiness" and "property" are not the same, which I suppose was part of the reason he changed it. Like I said, I can't remember why he changed it, but I believe there was documentation of the discussion, somehow. I think I remember something about believing that the pursuit of happiness being a more central issue, since property is only important as a means to happiness, but like I said, I can't remember off-hand, and I can't find mention of it online.
However, I'm not sure why you're so upset by all this.
Yeah, 'cept some people still can't figure out how to get songs off of their iPods. Really, Apple could put a link in iTunes that says "Remove DRM from songs" and most people still would never figure it out.
More to the point, your brain is a physical, bio-chemical part of your body. The idea that changing the operating state of the brain would result in physical, biochemical changes in your body shouldn't be surprising. It should be considered true by definition.
Yeah... In college we threw a party with keg of non-alcoholic beer, just to laugh at the people getting "drunk". Good times.
I guess it's a little bit of a "tree falls in the forest" type question...
Huh? It seems to me he's assuming that the founding fathers were particularly literate, since he's claiming they were familiar with Locke (which isn't so much as assumption as it is a fact). Locke claimed that every man had inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, and it's quite obvious that the writers of the Declaration of Independance were referencing Locke, but decided to change it to "the pursuit of happiness". I believe there are even documents (letters) which spell this out and explain why they changed it, but I can't remember off-hand.
And ironically, part of the reason people think the Milgram experiments were unethical seems to be related to the results. I wonder what the view of these experiments would have been if everyone involved had refused to administer the shocks. I think we'd probably be talking about what a lovely experiment it was if it weren't for the fact that it exposes an ugly truth we don't like to believe about ourselves.
I believe these "watermarks" are applied at the same time as the encryption. So programs that break the encryption can strip them out, and bypassing the DRM application process entirely will probably result in a normal AAC file. (I'm guessing)
Really, it's not that Apple's stupid. It's more likely that they never intended to make an utterly unbreakable system. As you mentioned yourself, the only reason Apple really cares about the DRM is that the music industry happy. In pretty much all of this copy protection for software/entertainment, there are three groups:
...and this situation is no different. The distributor isn't going to get their unbreakable encryption. What the RIAA should really want the DRM to do is:
Ooooooooooo.... I like the idea of spin-offs. Then spin-off the spin-off until even "cool guy number 3" has his own movie.
Am I too much of a "nerd" or something?
(Sorry for flambait, but I can't help it. Seeing so many of these recently, i.e. "Why is the on the front page?!" et al, and don't see why people bother).
There's only one reason why Microsoft would do that: If a large percentage of users in general get fed up with the vendor lock-in and refuse to develop web pages for IE's de facto standards. One way to accomplish that is for us to all agree that the W3C standards are the standards, even if not necessarily a reflection of real-world web pages.
For example, I have a certain habit. Whenever I'm talking to a anyone about Internet browsers, and it comes up that pages render differently in Firefox/Safari vs. IE, I say, "Well that's because IE renders pages incorrectly, and so web developers make pages incorrectly so that they'll work in IE." When I hear someone talk about how there are IE only web pages, I say, "That's because the web developers did a bad job."
I know it sounds pretentious and heavy handed, but I don't saying merely because I think it's the truth. I say it in the hopes that it will effect these people's perceptions of what's going on. If nothing else, a lot of people have picked up on this as a sort of trivia that can make them look smart and computer savvy, so it gets repeated a lot. The more people that view this as "Microsoft and some web developers are doing a bad job" (vs. "No one but Microsoft can make a good web browser"), the more people are likely to insist that Microsoft start doing things the "right way".
And I know that people here on /. tend to think Microsoft won't listen to what people want, but if enough people start moving to alternative products, Microsoft will be forced to play fair.
I'd agree to that. In fact, I find a lot of the positioning control a little hard to deal with, but I wonder if some of that might be the browser implementations rather than the standard itself. You know, sometimes I try to place something, and I'm pretty sure I've done it the right way, but it takes a hell of a lot of tweaking to get it to show up where I want it. That might be browser issues, but it might also be that I'm somehow confused by the standard and missing some detail of what I'm doing.
Just as an arbitrary illustration, I get sick of writing:
Personally, I think I'd end up getting *more* confused by your layout. Too many brackets, too much nesting. Maybe you're right that there's a better way, but I'm not sure what.
But I think you're right to refer to these issues as 'things you dislike' rather than flaws. I don't believe I'm arguing with you if I say that these are areas where CSS has room for improvement, but they aren't "flaws".
I hear what you're saying, but I'd rather wish that deveopers could code to the standards, and include a message that says, "If this page doesn't render properly, it's your web browser, not the page." In other words, what you said except without any browser bias (because coding for a specific browser is where the mess begins in the first place). However, that's still very impractical.
Sometimes it's the browser's fault and sometimes it's the standard's fault. I guess I'll also allow that maybe the designer is trying to hack together something funny. Still, it'd be nice if all the browsers were at least *trying* to adhere to standards.
Is Microsoft seriously arguing that they've never thrown their weight behind an imperfect work-in-progress technology/standard before? Is the imperfectness of CSS2 made better by making IE render it improperly?
Now, I'm not trying to keep people from discussing the finer points of possible improvements to web-standards, but can't we all agree that it's better to have all browsers interpreting the same standards the same way?
No matter how good an encryption system is, its obviously going to fail if the person breaking in has the right information.
In the more general case, no matter what security measures you put in place, you can't stop someone from misusing authorized access. Therefore, I would go as far as to say that there's no perfect security and the only way for something to be completely secure is to disallow any access whatsoever.
I believe at least part of the problem (though I may be wrong in this case) is that the spammers who send the advertising and the people who are selling the product are two different companies. In a sense, the spammers have no financial interest in you actually buying the product, other than in that it maintains the image of spam as an effective advertising medium.
Or even when they are the same company, it seems that companies who advertise through spam aren't relying on the inherent good-quality of their product for sales.
So when it comes to legal action, the spammers aren't so worried about making the product look bad, or even making spam look bad (after all, it already looks about as bad as it's going to). What they're more worried about is their right to continue spamming.