In business there is no good or evil, there is only money. Don't let yourself fall into the ideology trap that pirates are evil - that's a question for a philosophy class in college or a million arguments on the internet - but all that should matter to you as a businessman is the money.
The best possible case of DRM is to convert potential pirates into customers. There are lots of not-so-great cases, they generally involve pissing off your paying customers, something that should be avoided at all costs because paying customers who are unhappy will tell the world how unhappy your product has made them and that will discourage any new paying customers.
So, I am going to suggest that instead of DRM to punish pirates you should look for ways to identify pirates and upsell to them. Give them the carrot instead of the stick, that way you never have to worry about accidentally hitting a paying customer with the stick - worse case is just more carrots.
One option is to let the software run just fine without a serial number, but after some number of launches without a serial number, like maybe 20, start putting up a click-through start-up screen. On that screen you can nicely point out that they've used the software 20 times now and it is only fair that since they are getting so much value out of it, they should pay for it - remember you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Then give the user three choices:
1) Enter their serial number 2) Go to a web page where they can buy a serial number 3) Click through and use the software anyway
If someone is inclined to pay this helps them to remember, if they are already a paying customer and they lost their serial number or whatever, this won't stop them from getting their work done and so won't piss them off and if they are a hardcore pirate who will never pay, you still haven't lost anything anyway.
I mean after 30+ years of connected networks there is no such thing as an offensive strike in cyber terrorism?
Because it is a terrible, terrible idea. If automated counter-attacks were to become the norm, then all it would take to start a "war" between two groups is for someone to compromise just one system at the first group and set it to attacking the second group. Think mutual assured destruction except Anonymous has their finger on the button and it's labeled "lulz."
Yes, pretty much every 'legit' method of viewing a show on the internet has the ability to be way more accurate than the current method of nielsen ratings because they can count every single viewing by their entire customer base rather than sampling and/or relying on the honesty (and mental accuity) of nielsen families.
But piracy? They don't care. Frankly, I see that as a benefit of being a pirate, less surveilllence. On the other hand, it isn't scalable given the current model of commercial-funding. If it switches from ad-time buys to product-placement, then piracy stats will become meaningful (and shows will become very bland, no big money client is going to want to be associated with a show that might piss even a sliver of their customer base). If we go to something better, a la the ransom model, then it won't really matter all that much.
Nielsen has one and only purpose - to help price ad-time buys. Shows on bittorrent have had the ads stripped out. The people watching those versions might as well not exist for all that Nielsen's customers care.
I was mostly joking - although if someone did self-immolate like that I wouldn't say one bad thing about them for doing it, I'm too much of a coward to go that far.
But, I just don't think there are enough cases that actually make it to court to get someone who feels that strongly about it. The power of these draconian laws are in their chilling effects, not their actual prosecution.
You can't tell me that the latest boy band single that comes out is your birthright.
Yes, all culture is our birthright. It isn't a question of quality because that is subjective. Who are you to say that Symphony No. 9 is better for me than the Macarena?
I have the strange suspicion that the same thing will be happening on a much larger scale soon. Maybe it'll be file-sharing issues like this, or smart phone lockdown, DMCA, DRM or some other thing that just really should not matter on a big scale, and let the fireworks commence.
I believe you've nailed it. The last resort of a failing dictatorship is to divert public interest into a convenient war. That works for governments of all sizes.
While that statement is mostly true (I would say "A last resort, not THE last resort"), I don't think it applies in the same way here. NK has been this way for decades, basically ever since the end of the korean war - entire nations have come and gone in the meantime. You might say their dictatorship is failing in slow motion, through 3 generations of dictators, but I don't think that really captures the situation.
This looks a lot more like a case of "We have always been at war with Eurasia" - rule by unending war rather than a last gasp war.
I also don't think revolution is much of a threat to the NK government because the general population isn't even at subsistence level -- they can't fight. An internal coupe seems much more probable to me but might not result in any significant change for the country as a whole.
One analysis that I thought was interesting was that this was the new guy's way to kickstart peace negotiations. He's got a lot more experience outside of NK than the last two guys, he's european educated and lived there for about a decade. Although he is reported to have had poor grades and more of a interest in basketball than politics. Be that as it may, he's still got to have a much better awareness of the global situation than most north koreans.
However, his dictatorship is not absolute, he's got to contend with multiple power factions in the government, particularly the military. Simply stating that he wants to negotiate a formal end to the war would not go over well with those guys - loss of face, plus it threatens their little fiefdoms in the apparatus. By going all out with the rhetoric he saves face and reassures those guys that their jobs might get even more important while prompting other countries to offer to negotiate (the carrot) while the stick of increased sanctions isn't so bad since NK has been sanctioned out the wazoo for decades anyways.
Who knows what will happen, but the one thing I am sure of, it isn't a situation that can be boiled down into simplistic sound-bites like timesquare wants to.
So you are saying that the system needs to be revised - this ain't any different from upgrading software. Which was my original point, hacks are hacks - social engineering or software engineering, its basically the same thing.
We just had our first democratically (for a certain value of democracy) elected govt to actually complete their term. So much for democracy...
I have friends in Pakistan (Lahore). The problems you guys have got are going to take way more than one term of government. Look at the US, it took us nearly a century of democracy to officially end slavery, and well over a century later we still suffer plenty oif after-effects. Change comes slow. Simply making it to a second consecutive term of democracy is a pretty big acheivement, there are lots of countries that let their first democraticly elected government turn into just another despot. (Crossing fingers that doesn't happen in Egypt right now.)
It is difficult to imagine an funding model for the internet with worse social costs.
Which is what I was replying too, the model I described would have far worse social cost
OK, congrats, you came up with something WORSE. Good for you! Thanks for contributing, it is always nice when people put their imagination to use figuring out why something can't possibly work rather than thinking about ways around the obstacles in life.
I'm afraid this is simply incorrect, connection to the internet requires bandwidth
Marginal bandwidth costs are minimal. You've made the error of assuming that fixed costs like servers, adminstration, etc are part of the marginal cost of deliverying a new copy. Even so, who says something more distributed can't fill the gap? When the content is public domain, much of the business case for centralization goes away.
I am well aware of this, however in a micro-transaction based internet the small number of companies with the resources to process payments would still be able to do that for all internet users;
You confuse ability with desire. Advertising is a behemoth, orders of magnitude larger than everything else combined. Your example of "demographic research" wouldn't even provide one ten thousandth of the incentive that advertising budgetse do.
A fear you suffer from the affliction of believing that your personal lack of creativity represents the best the rest of the world can do.
You start off by assuming that any significant content will be permanently locked up behind a paywall. That's just false. It is thinking stuck in the economic model of scarcity. The web is neither rivalrous nor particularly excludable. In other words the marginal cost of each additional viewer approaches zero. Once your fixed costs are paid for, it isn't necessary to continue to charge money.
Consider the ransom model, similar to how kickstarter works, once enough money has been collected production begins and the end result is released to the public domain. It is entirely possible to build a healthy profit margin into such a model - the producers are unlikely to win the lottery but even something as small as a 25% guaranteed profit on a production funded with other people's money would make any investor swoon. And that's just one of thousands of potential business models that don't need advertising and don't build paywalls to keep the poor out.
PS - you also seem to be completely uneducated regarding the nature of the current internet surveillance state. Tracking purchases is only a tiny piece of the puzzle. There are literally hundreds of companies that exist only to build profiles of people as they go from one web page to another in order to better target advertisements. That massive infrastructure goes away when the advertising model goes away.
not really familiar with word choice in diplomacy and international relations, are you?
I said academic credentials, in fact I explicitly excluded those who are playing politics. Come on man, you are laboring so hard to define them as insane, but you can't even cite one unbiased expert that shares your opinion?
I am surprised that no one has commented on the fact that this is another case of a backdoor that was intended for the use of whitehats being commandeered by blackhats. When you build backdoors into systems you weaken security.
Another, really amazing story along those lines is the cell-phone wire-tapping of greece during the months before the last olympics games in athens. The system was designed with a wire-tapping backdoor, greece didn't even purchase that feature when they bought the switches, but the blackhats were able to turn it on and listen in to the phone calls of the mayor of athens and the prime minister of greece.
If you were correct you'd think there would be at least ONE expert on the topic saying the same thing as you. But nope, all those people who have spent their lives studying the situation, those people are moronic fuckwits. You know better.
And Request Policy is the technical user's upgrade. It is kind of like a noscript for trackers, but also for ads and scripts and basically any remotely linked inline content.
Removing that rare occurrence completely ruins the revenue model.
GOOD! That revenue model is the single largest driver of the internet surveillance state. It is difficult to imagine an funding model for the internet with worse social costs. The sooner it dies, opening the door to replacement systems that are less invasive the better off we all are.
Tell me... did you believe, regurgitate, cite as authority etc the White House web site when it was Bush and the subject was "Iraq" or "Waterboarding"?????
Yeah, because an accounting audit of a congressional program is so totally nebulous that anyone can make up anything they want about it and nobody would be the wiser.
If you want to compare apples to apples, then compare it to the statements that Obama and company have made about drone strikes. They are being at least as secretive as Bush was about WMDs in Iraq and torture, and are at least as untrustworthy on the unverifiable details.
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In business there is no good or evil, there is only money. Don't let yourself fall into the ideology trap that pirates are evil - that's a question for a philosophy class in college or a million arguments on the internet - but all that should matter to you as a businessman is the money.
The best possible case of DRM is to convert potential pirates into customers. There are lots of not-so-great cases, they generally involve pissing off your paying customers, something that should be avoided at all costs because paying customers who are unhappy will tell the world how unhappy your product has made them and that will discourage any new paying customers.
So, I am going to suggest that instead of DRM to punish pirates you should look for ways to identify pirates and upsell to them. Give them the carrot instead of the stick, that way you never have to worry about accidentally hitting a paying customer with the stick - worse case is just more carrots.
One option is to let the software run just fine without a serial number, but after some number of launches without a serial number, like maybe 20, start putting up a click-through start-up screen. On that screen you can nicely point out that they've used the software 20 times now and it is only fair that since they are getting so much value out of it, they should pay for it - remember you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Then give the user three choices:
1) Enter their serial number
2) Go to a web page where they can buy a serial number
3) Click through and use the software anyway
If someone is inclined to pay this helps them to remember, if they are already a paying customer and they lost their serial number or whatever, this won't stop them from getting their work done and so won't piss them off and if they are a hardcore pirate who will never pay, you still haven't lost anything anyway.
I mean after 30+ years of connected networks there is no such thing as an offensive strike in cyber terrorism?
Because it is a terrible, terrible idea. If automated counter-attacks were to become the norm, then all it would take to start a "war" between two groups is for someone to compromise just one system at the first group and set it to attacking the second group. Think mutual assured destruction except Anonymous has their finger on the button and it's labeled "lulz."
Yes, pretty much every 'legit' method of viewing a show on the internet has the ability to be way more accurate than the current method of nielsen ratings because they can count every single viewing by their entire customer base rather than sampling and/or relying on the honesty (and mental accuity) of nielsen families.
But piracy? They don't care. Frankly, I see that as a benefit of being a pirate, less surveilllence. On the other hand, it isn't scalable given the current model of commercial-funding. If it switches from ad-time buys to product-placement, then piracy stats will become meaningful (and shows will become very bland, no big money client is going to want to be associated with a show that might piss even a sliver of their customer base). If we go to something better, a la the ransom model, then it won't really matter all that much.
Nielsen has one and only purpose - to help price ad-time buys. Shows on bittorrent have had the ads stripped out. The people watching those versions might as well not exist for all that Nielsen's customers care.
Self-immolation has never changed anything
I'm pretty sure the people of Tunisia disagree with you.
I didn't say ALL draconian laws, I said these draconian laws. Given the context, it should be pretty clear I was talking about copyright enforcement.
I was mostly joking - although if someone did self-immolate like that I wouldn't say one bad thing about them for doing it, I'm too much of a coward to go that far.
But, I just don't think there are enough cases that actually make it to court to get someone who feels that strongly about it. The power of these draconian laws are in their chilling effects, not their actual prosecution.
You can't tell me that the latest boy band single that comes out is your birthright.
Yes, all culture is our birthright. It isn't a question of quality because that is subjective.
Who are you to say that Symphony No. 9 is better for me than the Macarena?
I have the strange suspicion that the same thing will be happening on a much larger scale soon. Maybe it'll be file-sharing issues like this, or smart phone lockdown, DMCA, DRM or some other thing that just really should not matter on a big scale, and let the fireworks commence.
So, you are saying Jammie Thomas should pull a Moahmed Bouazizi?
I believe you've nailed it. The last resort of a failing dictatorship is to divert public interest into a convenient war. That works for governments of all sizes.
While that statement is mostly true (I would say "A last resort, not THE last resort"), I don't think it applies in the same way here. NK has been this way for decades, basically ever since the end of the korean war - entire nations have come and gone in the meantime. You might say their dictatorship is failing in slow motion, through 3 generations of dictators, but I don't think that really captures the situation.
This looks a lot more like a case of "We have always been at war with Eurasia" - rule by unending war rather than a last gasp war.
I also don't think revolution is much of a threat to the NK government because the general population isn't even at subsistence level -- they can't fight. An internal coupe seems much more probable to me but might not result in any significant change for the country as a whole.
One analysis that I thought was interesting was that this was the new guy's way to kickstart peace negotiations. He's got a lot more experience outside of NK than the last two guys, he's european educated and lived there for about a decade. Although he is reported to have had poor grades and more of a interest in basketball than politics. Be that as it may, he's still got to have a much better awareness of the global situation than most north koreans.
However, his dictatorship is not absolute, he's got to contend with multiple power factions in the government, particularly the military. Simply stating that he wants to negotiate a formal end to the war would not go over well with those guys - loss of face, plus it threatens their little fiefdoms in the apparatus. By going all out with the rhetoric he saves face and reassures those guys that their jobs might get even more important while prompting other countries to offer to negotiate (the carrot) while the stick of increased sanctions isn't so bad since NK has been sanctioned out the wazoo for decades anyways.
Who knows what will happen, but the one thing I am sure of, it isn't a situation that can be boiled down into simplistic sound-bites like timesquare wants to.
You're overgeneralizing considerably.
It is a difference in degree, not kind.
So you are saying that the system needs to be revised - this ain't any different from upgrading software. Which was my original point, hacks are hacks - social engineering or software engineering, its basically the same thing.
We just had our first democratically (for a certain value of democracy) elected govt to actually complete their term. So much for democracy...
I have friends in Pakistan (Lahore). The problems you guys have got are going to take way more than one term of government. Look at the US, it took us nearly a century of democracy to officially end slavery, and well over a century later we still suffer plenty oif after-effects. Change comes slow. Simply making it to a second consecutive term of democracy is a pretty big acheivement, there are lots of countries that let their first democraticly elected government turn into just another despot. (Crossing fingers that doesn't happen in Egypt right now.)
Replacing an employee that allows unintended access is less costly than replacing an electronic system that readily allows unintended access.
Parts swaps don't improve security when the risk is in the system design. How do you know that another employee ain't just as vulnerable?
It is difficult to imagine an funding model for the internet with worse social costs.
Which is what I was replying too, the model I described would have far worse social cost
OK, congrats, you came up with something WORSE. Good for you! Thanks for contributing, it is always nice when people put their imagination to use figuring out why something can't possibly work rather than thinking about ways around the obstacles in life.
I'm afraid this is simply incorrect, connection to the internet requires bandwidth
Marginal bandwidth costs are minimal. You've made the error of assuming that fixed costs like servers, adminstration, etc are part of the marginal cost of deliverying a new copy. Even so, who says something more distributed can't fill the gap? When the content is public domain, much of the business case for centralization goes away.
I am well aware of this, however in a micro-transaction based internet the small number of companies with the resources to process payments would still be able to do that for all internet users;
You confuse ability with desire. Advertising is a behemoth, orders of magnitude larger than everything else combined. Your example of "demographic research" wouldn't even provide one ten thousandth of the incentive that advertising budgetse do.
A fear you suffer from the affliction of believing that your personal lack of creativity represents the best the rest of the world can do.
You start off by assuming that any significant content will be permanently locked up behind a paywall. That's just false. It is thinking stuck in the economic model of scarcity. The web is neither rivalrous nor particularly excludable. In other words the marginal cost of each additional viewer approaches zero. Once your fixed costs are paid for, it isn't necessary to continue to charge money.
Consider the ransom model, similar to how kickstarter works, once enough money has been collected production begins and the end result is released to the public domain. It is entirely possible to build a healthy profit margin into such a model - the producers are unlikely to win the lottery but even something as small as a 25% guaranteed profit on a production funded with other people's money would make any investor swoon. And that's just one of thousands of potential business models that don't need advertising and don't build paywalls to keep the poor out.
PS - you also seem to be completely uneducated regarding the nature of the current internet surveillance state. Tracking purchases is only a tiny piece of the puzzle. There are literally hundreds of companies that exist only to build profiles of people as they go from one web page to another in order to better target advertisements. That massive infrastructure goes away when the advertising model goes away.
Was it a backdoor hack? Or just some employee with regular access to the system abusing his privileges?
Is there a meaningful difference?
I'll just leave this right here.
not really familiar with word choice in diplomacy and international relations, are you?
I said academic credentials, in fact I explicitly excluded those who are playing politics. Come on man, you are laboring so hard to define them as insane, but you can't even cite one unbiased expert that shares your opinion?
I am surprised that no one has commented on the fact that this is another case of a backdoor that was intended for the use of whitehats being commandeered by blackhats. When you build backdoors into systems you weaken security.
Another, really amazing story along those lines is the cell-phone wire-tapping of greece during the months before the last olympics games in athens. The system was designed with a wire-tapping backdoor, greece didn't even purchase that feature when they bought the switches, but the blackhats were able to turn it on and listen in to the phone calls of the mayor of athens and the prime minister of greece.
appeal to authority is the best you got?
If you were correct you'd think there would be at least ONE expert on the topic saying the same thing as you. But nope, all those people who have spent their lives studying the situation, those people are moronic fuckwits. You know better.
Ghostery is a good start.
And Request Policy is the technical user's upgrade. It is kind of like a noscript for trackers, but also for ads and scripts and basically any remotely linked inline content.
Removing that rare occurrence completely ruins the revenue model.
GOOD! That revenue model is the single largest driver of the internet surveillance state. It is difficult to imagine an funding model for the internet with worse social costs. The sooner it dies, opening the door to replacement systems that are less invasive the better off we all are.
With all the craaps out there, how can there not be an app that plays a phone-slamming sound over the connection and then disconnects the call?
Tell me... did you believe, regurgitate, cite as authority etc the White House web site when it was Bush and the subject was "Iraq" or "Waterboarding"?????
Yeah, because an accounting audit of a congressional program is so totally nebulous that anyone can make up anything they want about it and nobody would be the wiser.
If you want to compare apples to apples, then compare it to the statements that Obama and company have made about drone strikes. They are being at least as secretive as Bush was about WMDs in Iraq and torture, and are at least as untrustworthy on the unverifiable details.