Media DRM on Vista is optional. If you don't like it, don't use it. No, your mp3s won't degrade. And you can copy them as often as you wish.
True, to the best of our knowledge, because it is only common sense isn't it?
Do you know about Microsoft's Zune?
It has wireless music sharing - you can send a song to another Zune player wirelessly. Sounds great, right?
Well, contrary to common sense - Zune infects ALL wirelessly transmitted music with DRM. It doesn't matter if the source was originally infected or totally clean - if you Zune it, it gets DRM.
And, that's not the only precedent - if you use XP's media-player to rip your CD's, you should check the configuration because it defaults to infecting your rips with DRM. At least it did for the original release and many service packs, I think they eventually did change the default to non-DRM, years later and all.
If Microsoft is willing to pull stunts like that, then obviously somewhere within MS, someone with a lot of clout believes in a 100% DRM world. How long until the next service pack for Vista tries to do something that actually makes the current FUD into truth?
I just tested one stream out and it works fine. I had to dig out the URL form the "Page Info" in order to test it, but that's just user-interface issues, not codec ones.
As I replied to your sibbling post also, a 4GB flash drive should, according to your calculations, last for at least 8 months when used for storing a pagefile.
It's all about the actual specs of the parts in use. If you don't buy the right product for the job, you can't expect it to do the job. Maybe you've been buying cheap knock-offs -- stuff without wear-leveling, or with only 10K rewrites or some other deficiency. No way I can diagnose your problems without the actual specs of the actual parts and the actual usage they've been subjected to.
Try samsung and maybe PQI. My clients use M-systems which sounds like it is beyond your budget.
Either way, if you are constantly paging, you should just buy more real RAM. Nowadays, swap should only ever be used as a last resort.
So tell me, why does in a real world test, a 4GB flash drive that claims to support over 100k writes die within 2 months of usage as storage for a pagefile?
Why do you ask an unanswerable question? You tell me all the relevant specs on the specific model and the actual usage, and I'll tell you your answer. Chances are that in telling me the specs on that model, you'll find the answer yourself. You should also include what your definition of "consstantly" is - consistently, constantly? - either way, what exactly does it mean.
Not to mention that a 140G flash drive costs quite a bit more then a high-end 140G scsi disk, so it is an extremely expensive route to go even if it would do what you claim.
You are the first person to bring up cost. Good for you.
which isn't anywhere near the approx 5 years a decent 'enterprice' disk lasts under very heavy load.
Make that 8GB into the same size as the 'enterprice' disk and you will find that it is better. Currently 146GB FC drives are very common, which is more than 18x 8GB, so 1.3 years * 18 is 23 years. Just to be fair, lets up the sustained write rate to 40MB/s which gets you to 11.5 years. Still way more than 5 years. Now, lets step up to the flash that gets 1M writes instead of 100K writes, now we are at 115 years. Is that good enough for yah?
Not to mention that changing a few bytes in a sector still results in rewriting the entire sector (in both cases), so with the given bandwidth, you can end up with a lot more writes then you assume.
That's wrong multiple in ways:
1) Your example was a page file - that means entire PAGES, not individual bytes. 2) Even if you are talking about regular file i/o - flash cell sizes are measured in BITS, so random byte-sized writes need only affect a handful of cells, not an entire sector's worth of data.
The only situation where your claim would apply to a flash disk is if it were in some sort of raid-5 type parity stripe. But, in that situation single byte writes require that the entire block be read first, in order to recalculate the parity. If you have to read 1000x more data than you write, you aren't going to come near anywhere near a 40MB/s sustained write bandwidth.
Flash is good for at least 100K writes per cell - the nice stuff is good for at least 1M writes per cell, and with write-leveling, which apparently all modern flash devices implement, writes are effectively round-robin distributed across the entire device. So you can do the math to figure out how long you've got. In a lot of cases, flash memory will last longer than an equivalent spinning disk would under the same conditions.
Because that was the first one at the top of the google search, and because cross-checking with the wikipedia entry for Dolly did not show claims that the effect was conclusively understood. If you have knowledge to the contrary, please update the the wiki entry for Dolly with it.
We get it in HD from the start, and for other shows (for example SG-1, where we start the second half of this season on 9th Jan) we even get them before the US.
Too bad Sky does such a piss-poor job of HD encoding. They really need to take a lesson or two from the BBC -- or maybe an engineer or two -- because the BBC's HD quality is head and shoulders above Sky's. I never would have thought that brand-spanking new h.264 could look worse than old mpeg-2, but Sky proves it on a daily basis.
I stopped watching BSG this season after the first episode. Not because the story sucks - in fact I really liked that first episode, it was brilliant - but because the picture sucks.
I learned last year that UniversalHD runs the BSG reruns after 6 months or so, in high def. So, now I am just going to wait it out until the show is available in HD.
I think Universal is just frackin stupid to run the premier episodes in crap-def on the sci-fi channel. If there is a single demographic most likely to own HDTVs and actively seek out HD shows, it is the one that watches BSG. They need to get their shit together and simulcast the show in HD, not make us wait 6+ months for it.
Isn't that how censorship is supposed to work in a free society?
If a single company has enough clout, all by itself, to force authors to self-censor, then it isn't a free market.
If on the other hand, you've got 20 (to pick an arbitrary number) businesses that all independently decide to boycott games with extreme ratings and collectively that forces self-censorship, then you've got a reasonable chance that the boycott represents the will of a free society and not just the arbitrary decision of a company trying to pander to the lowest common denominator.
Remember back when there were no ratings for video games? The pro-ratings argument said that going to a voluntary system would prevent mandatory censorship by the government, that it would just make it easier for the customer to choose appropriate titles, nothing more.
Well, it hasn't worked out quite like they said it would, has it? Illinois did pass a law anyway, fortunately it was shot down by the courts - but guys like Jack Thompson are still out there just looking to befriend any politician that needs a little censor-happy rabble-rousing to get himself re-elected.
Meanwhile Wal-mart now refuses to carry any games with too extreme of a rating, effectively brow-beating the game authors into self-censorship if they want to have any hope of enough sales to recoup their investment.
It isn't too hard to see something like this proposed standard turning into the online equivalent of that sort of thing -- unless your website is certified by an ESRB-like agency as 'properly' using this NSFW flag, you'll be black-listed by all the big net-nanny commercial filters - thus putting yet another unnecessary burden on a website's author to comply or be left out of the corporately accessible world.
Under such a regime, most discussion sites would end up filtered because it would be impossible to enforce an NSFW tagging requirement. If you value being able to read slashdot at work, you don't want to support this proposal.
including a promise to observe 'network neutrality' principles,
That's not a concession - that's an attempt to head off binding legislation with a 'promise' that is easily broken once the merger is past the point of no return. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
And if the bank accidentally transfers money into your account you can keep it. If they ask for it back, it's entrapment. What's more, if a cop gives you a speeding ticket and he's not wearing his hat, you don't have to pay.
Yes, the Vista workshop was so valuable that I decided to cut all ties with Google. They may be supplying millions of dollars and free promotions across the globe, but... man, it was such a great workshop!
Yah haven't seen the Manchurian Candidate have you? Have you asked your mom about Microsoft recently?
so, what Blake is complaining about is that when comparing vaporware products to actual products that do what the user wants, google should ignore the actual product and promote the vaporware product nobody else has heard about, because He is the supposed author of said vaporware product.
Got it.
Somewhere deep inside, my view of Firefox just diminished.
Wow, pretty strong reaction for someone who hasn't even bothered to read the actual article. Blake doesn't even mention Parakey. Good job jumping to conclusions slashdroid.
It sounds like he didn't "crack" AACS, he just extracted the disc keys for certain titles.
A quick and dirty and probably somewhat inaccurate description of the way AACS works is that each disc is encrypted with a single 'disc key' and then that key is encrypted once with every known 'player key,' and each of those is stored on the disc. So, if you have an authorized player, it will find the version of the disc key that it knows how to decrypt and then use that to decrypt the disc for playback.
My guess is that he used one of the software players like WinDVD or PowerDVD that now sort of support HD-DVD and BLU-RAY. But instead of extracting their player key and publishing that, he played a disc in a debug environment and extracted the 'disc key' for that specific title.
The studios thought that they would be able to 'revoke' disclosed player keys by just not using them on any discs pressed after the disclosure was made public. This guy's approach seems to be to distribute disc keys and then anyone with the same disc can decrypt that specific title, thus making it harder for the studios to guess which player keys need revoking.
I think that this guy's approach will be most useful to widescale pirating because all it takes is for one person to decrypt a movie and share it with a billion of his closest friends. But the 'regular joe' who just wants to copy his BD-HDs to his hard disk for ease of playback or maybe to cut clips from it for his own home movie won't benefit because chances are, the keys for his particular discs won't be widely known enough for him to find them.
So, I now look forward to various HD titles from disc (rather than from broadcast, which are already common if you know where to look) showing up on P2P and elsewhere, I'm still not purchasing any AACS playback system since the "crack" is not (yet) useful enough for me to exercise typical fair-use rights of format shifting and personal editing.
It's possible that 2D barcodes could have been adequate, barely. I'm skeptical, though, particularly since the data stored on the passports is not very compressible (most of it is a fairly high-quality copy of the photo, and much of the rest is the digital signature data). Can you provide a link to the sort of 2D barcode you think would work?
Sorry, I don't have one. A company came and demoed it for one my clients a year or two ago. The primary difference over the standardized codes is that they make use of color - looked kinda of like those tests for color-blindness. They claimed the potential for significantly higher data densities over time, easily more than 1MB/in^2. One downside was the cost of printing equipment, but that wouldn't be a significant issue in this case. The upside was that it was pure software and even sloppy shots from 1 megapixel cameras were capable of capturing enough information to handle data densities in 10KB/in^2 range. Very easy to put into whatever embedded hardware you wanted.
Another serious limitation of barcodes is that they're read-only. Smart cards can be configured to allow writing, and to do it securely. It is expected that additional authentication data will eventually be added to the passports. One of the goals is to eventually augment visual identification by an agent with automated biometric matching as well.
If you really need to write, just print a regular B&W barcode on a page of the passport, same as an entry/exit stamp and it since it isn't erasable you have a much stronger audit trail. Unlike chips, it requires no upgrade to the passport to support. When you have a 10 year minimum life-cycle to deal with, that means a long time before any changes to the hardware will make a difference, long enough for them to become obsolete before they are even fully deployed.
Such databases will simply push the issuers and relyers to move towards adding automated biometric matching.
Again, see my point about 10 year life-cycles - partial deployment means no net security benefit until it isn't partial anymore, and an "arms race" is not affordable - field upgrades are not cheap - consider the hundreds, if not thousands, of entry points to the USA, that's a LOT of hardware to replace each time the bad guys come up with a new way to short-circuit the current system. Moving to biometrics is not "free" either - there is a reason the US forces everyone but its own citizens to provide fingerprints on entry - citizens can vote, foreigners can't.
Adding additional authentication tools requires deploying new hardware to the passport control checkpoints, but it does not require restructuring the system as a whole.
That applies to any system they implement - any system that a hundred thousand people are able to do in a timely fashion every day will be interchangeable from a "deploy new hardware" perspective. Still doesn't really make it much cheaper.
What it does do, though, is to effectively eliminate post-issuance forgery, allowing security resources to be focused on addressing the up-front problems.
Well, I'll grant you that is true for the narrowest definition of forgery. I just don't see a cost benefit to the system as a whole, plus now they've upped the ante for the what the regular people have to worry about too. From the regular joe's perspective it is definitely a net loss.
Okay, if they didn't do it "right", how should it have been done?
As I wrote here, I question the basic assumption that making an 'unforgeable' document is of any net benefit. Just because some people WANT something doesn't mean that their desires are feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
Media DRM on Vista is optional. If you don't like it, don't use it. No, your mp3s won't degrade. And you can copy them as often as you wish.
True, to the best of our knowledge, because it is only common sense isn't it?
Do you know about Microsoft's Zune?
It has wireless music sharing - you can send a song to another Zune player wirelessly. Sounds great, right?
Well, contrary to common sense - Zune infects ALL wirelessly transmitted music with DRM. It doesn't matter if the source was originally infected or totally clean - if you Zune it, it gets DRM.
And, that's not the only precedent - if you use XP's media-player to rip your CD's, you should check the configuration because it defaults to infecting your rips with DRM. At least it did for the original release and many service packs, I think they eventually did change the default to non-DRM, years later and all.
If Microsoft is willing to pull stunts like that, then obviously somewhere within MS, someone with a lot of clout believes in a 100% DRM world. How long until the next service pack for Vista tries to do something that actually makes the current FUD into truth?
I just tested one stream out and it works fine.
N FERENCE/ceu_video1_or_20061221_573.wmv
I had to dig out the URL form the "Page Info" in order to test it, but that's just user-interface issues, not codec ones.
Try it yourself with the current release of VLC:
vlc mms://ceu.streampower.be/ceu/archive/CEU_PRESS_CO
The EU does not have software patents (yet, at least) so there should be no legal issues with using VLC to decode this stream.
As I replied to your sibbling post also, a 4GB flash drive should, according to your calculations, last for at least 8 months when used for storing a pagefile.
It's all about the actual specs of the parts in use. If you don't buy the right product for the job, you can't expect it to do the job. Maybe you've been buying cheap knock-offs -- stuff without wear-leveling, or with only 10K rewrites or some other deficiency. No way I can diagnose your problems without the actual specs of the actual parts and the actual usage they've been subjected to.
Try samsung and maybe PQI. My clients use M-systems which sounds like it is beyond your budget.
Either way, if you are constantly paging, you should just buy more real RAM. Nowadays, swap should only ever be used as a last resort.
So tell me, why does in a real world test, a 4GB flash drive that claims to support over 100k writes die within 2 months of usage as storage for a pagefile?
Why do you ask an unanswerable question? You tell me all the relevant specs on the specific model and the actual usage, and I'll tell you your answer. Chances are that in telling me the specs on that model, you'll find the answer yourself. You should also include what your definition of "consstantly" is - consistently, constantly? - either way, what exactly does it mean.
Not to mention that a 140G flash drive costs quite a bit more then a high-end 140G scsi disk, so it is an extremely expensive route to go even if it would do what you claim.
You are the first person to bring up cost. Good for you.
which isn't anywhere near the approx 5 years a decent 'enterprice' disk lasts under very heavy load.
Make that 8GB into the same size as the 'enterprice' disk and you will find that it is better. Currently 146GB FC drives are very common, which is more than 18x 8GB, so 1.3 years * 18 is 23 years. Just to be fair, lets up the sustained write rate to 40MB/s which gets you to 11.5 years. Still way more than 5 years. Now, lets step up to the flash that gets 1M writes instead of 100K writes, now we are at 115 years. Is that good enough for yah?
Not to mention that changing a few bytes in a sector still results in rewriting the entire sector (in both cases), so with the given bandwidth, you can end up with a lot more writes then you assume.
That's wrong multiple in ways:
1) Your example was a page file - that means entire PAGES, not individual bytes.
2) Even if you are talking about regular file i/o - flash cell sizes are measured in BITS, so random byte-sized writes need only affect a handful of cells, not an entire sector's worth of data.
The only situation where your claim would apply to a flash disk is if it were in some sort of raid-5 type parity stripe. But, in that situation single byte writes require that the entire block be read first, in order to recalculate the parity. If you have to read 1000x more data than you write, you aren't going to come near anywhere near a 40MB/s sustained write bandwidth.
Penis with red balls sucking its thumb and holding its blankie to something else.
Damn that's funny.
Flash is good for at least 100K writes per cell - the nice stuff is good for at least 1M writes per cell, and with write-leveling, which apparently all modern flash devices implement, writes are effectively round-robin distributed across the entire device. So you can do the math to figure out how long you've got. In a lot of cases, flash memory will last longer than an equivalent spinning disk would under the same conditions.
Lol: I think they should have more scenes where he was lifting up skirts and pulling off clothes, I only saw 2 in the movie and let's be honest,that's the kind of stuff you like to see in an invisible man movie.
Why the ancient (2002) article?
Because that was the first one at the top of the google search, and because cross-checking with the wikipedia entry for Dolly did not show claims that the effect was conclusively understood. If you have knowledge to the contrary, please update the the wiki entry for Dolly with it.
We get it in HD from the start, and for other shows (for example SG-1, where we start the second half of this season on 9th Jan) we even get them before the US.
Too bad Sky does such a piss-poor job of HD encoding. They really need to take a lesson or two from the BBC -- or maybe an engineer or two -- because the BBC's HD quality is head and shoulders above Sky's. I never would have thought that brand-spanking new h.264 could look worse than old mpeg-2, but Sky proves it on a daily basis.
So while the rest of us watch the drama, you watch the image resolution do you? Way to go making audiophiles look sane; asshole!
Yep, I spend the entire 40 minutes of each episode just counting the pixels.
I stopped watching BSG this season after the first episode. Not because the story sucks - in fact I really liked that first episode, it was brilliant - but because the picture sucks.
I learned last year that UniversalHD runs the BSG reruns after 6 months or so, in high def. So, now I am just going to wait it out until the show is available in HD.
I think Universal is just frackin stupid to run the premier episodes in crap-def on the sci-fi channel. If there is a single demographic most likely to own HDTVs and actively seek out HD shows, it is the one that watches BSG. They need to get their shit together and simulcast the show in HD, not make us wait 6+ months for it.
A clone is an identical twin. The cow/sheep/dog/cat is still a cow/sheep/dog/cat, whether twinned or cloned.
It isn't anywhere near as simple as that.
Isn't that how censorship is supposed to work in a free society?
If a single company has enough clout, all by itself, to force authors to self-censor, then it isn't a free market.
If on the other hand, you've got 20 (to pick an arbitrary number) businesses that all independently decide to boycott games with extreme ratings and collectively that forces self-censorship, then you've got a reasonable chance that the boycott represents the will of a free society and not just the arbitrary decision of a company trying to pander to the lowest common denominator.
Classes:
Don't forget - hot korean chick who hangs out with hundreds of copies of herself, naked, on cylon flight decks.
If it passes, I can see a whole new range of "NSF" attributes. "Not safe for children.(NSFC)" "Not safe for (fill in the blank)".
NSFKFC - Not Safe for Kentucky Fried Chicken, useful for links to pictures of chicken not wearing any feathers.
Remember back when there were no ratings for video games? The pro-ratings argument said that going to a voluntary system would prevent mandatory censorship by the government, that it would just make it easier for the customer to choose appropriate titles, nothing more.
Well, it hasn't worked out quite like they said it would, has it? Illinois did pass a law anyway, fortunately it was shot down by the courts - but guys like Jack Thompson are still out there just looking to befriend any politician that needs a little censor-happy rabble-rousing to get himself re-elected.
Meanwhile Wal-mart now refuses to carry any games with too extreme of a rating, effectively brow-beating the game authors into self-censorship if they want to have any hope of enough sales to recoup their investment.
It isn't too hard to see something like this proposed standard turning into the online equivalent of that sort of thing -- unless your website is certified by an ESRB-like agency as 'properly' using this NSFW flag, you'll be black-listed by all the big net-nanny commercial filters - thus putting yet another unnecessary burden on a website's author to comply or be left out of the corporately accessible world.
Under such a regime, most discussion sites would end up filtered because it would be impossible to enforce an NSFW tagging requirement. If you value being able to read slashdot at work, you don't want to support this proposal.
including a promise to observe 'network neutrality' principles,
That's not a concession - that's an attempt to head off binding legislation with a 'promise' that is easily broken once the merger is past the point of no return. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
Smart-ass.
Yah haven't seen the Manchurian Candidate have you?
Have you asked your mom about Microsoft recently?
Dude, most of the flamers haven't even read your blog post - or if they did, they didn't comprehend it. You'll burn out trying to correct them.
so, what Blake is complaining about is that when comparing vaporware products to actual products that do what the user wants, google should ignore the actual product and promote the vaporware product nobody else has heard about, because He is the supposed author of said vaporware product.
Got it.
Somewhere deep inside, my view of Firefox just diminished.
Wow, pretty strong reaction for someone who hasn't even bothered to read the actual article. Blake doesn't even mention Parakey. Good job jumping to conclusions slashdroid.
It sounds like he didn't "crack" AACS, he just extracted the disc keys for certain titles.
A quick and dirty and probably somewhat inaccurate description of the way AACS works is that each disc is encrypted with a single 'disc key' and then that key is encrypted once with every known 'player key,' and each of those is stored on the disc. So, if you have an authorized player, it will find the version of the disc key that it knows how to decrypt and then use that to decrypt the disc for playback.
My guess is that he used one of the software players like WinDVD or PowerDVD that now sort of support HD-DVD and BLU-RAY. But instead of extracting their player key and publishing that, he played a disc in a debug environment and extracted the 'disc key' for that specific title.
The studios thought that they would be able to 'revoke' disclosed player keys by just not using them on any discs pressed after the disclosure was made public. This guy's approach seems to be to distribute disc keys and then anyone with the same disc can decrypt that specific title, thus making it harder for the studios to guess which player keys need revoking.
I think that this guy's approach will be most useful to widescale pirating because all it takes is for one person to decrypt a movie and share it with a billion of his closest friends. But the 'regular joe' who just wants to copy his BD-HDs to his hard disk for ease of playback or maybe to cut clips from it for his own home movie won't benefit because chances are, the keys for his particular discs won't be widely known enough for him to find them.
So, I now look forward to various HD titles from disc (rather than from broadcast, which are already common if you know where to look) showing up on P2P and elsewhere, I'm still not purchasing any AACS playback system since the "crack" is not (yet) useful enough for me to exercise typical fair-use rights of format shifting and personal editing.
It's possible that 2D barcodes could have been adequate, barely. I'm skeptical, though, particularly since the data stored on the passports is not very compressible (most of it is a fairly high-quality copy of the photo, and much of the rest is the digital signature data). Can you provide a link to the sort of 2D barcode you think would work?
Sorry, I don't have one. A company came and demoed it for one my clients a year or two ago. The primary difference over the standardized codes is that they make use of color - looked kinda of like those tests for color-blindness. They claimed the potential for significantly higher data densities over time, easily more than 1MB/in^2. One downside was the cost of printing equipment, but that wouldn't be a significant issue in this case. The upside was that it was pure software and even sloppy shots from 1 megapixel cameras were capable of capturing enough information to handle data densities in 10KB/in^2 range. Very easy to put into whatever embedded hardware you wanted.
Another serious limitation of barcodes is that they're read-only. Smart cards can be configured to allow writing, and to do it securely. It is expected that additional authentication data will eventually be added to the passports. One of the goals is to eventually augment visual identification by an agent with automated biometric matching as well.
If you really need to write, just print a regular B&W barcode on a page of the passport, same as an entry/exit stamp and it since it isn't erasable you have a much stronger audit trail. Unlike chips, it requires no upgrade to the passport to support. When you have a 10 year minimum life-cycle to deal with, that means a long time before any changes to the hardware will make a difference, long enough for them to become obsolete before they are even fully deployed.
Such databases will simply push the issuers and relyers to move towards adding automated biometric matching.
Again, see my point about 10 year life-cycles - partial deployment means no net security benefit until it isn't partial anymore, and an "arms race" is not affordable - field upgrades are not cheap - consider the hundreds, if not thousands, of entry points to the USA, that's a LOT of hardware to replace each time the bad guys come up with a new way to short-circuit the current system. Moving to biometrics is not "free" either - there is a reason the US forces everyone but its own citizens to provide fingerprints on entry - citizens can vote, foreigners can't.
Adding additional authentication tools requires deploying new hardware to the passport control checkpoints, but it does not require restructuring the system as a whole.
That applies to any system they implement - any system that a hundred thousand people are able to do in a timely fashion every day will be interchangeable from a "deploy new hardware" perspective. Still doesn't really make it much cheaper.
What it does do, though, is to effectively eliminate post-issuance forgery, allowing security resources to be focused on addressing the up-front problems.
Well, I'll grant you that is true for the narrowest definition of forgery. I just don't see a cost benefit to the system as a whole, plus now they've upped the ante for the what the regular people have to worry about too. From the regular joe's perspective it is definitely a net loss.
Okay, if they didn't do it "right", how should it have been done?
As I wrote here, I question the basic assumption that making an 'unforgeable' document is of any net benefit. Just because some people WANT something doesn't mean that their desires are feasible.