The article summary asks, "How much are proprietary format licensing fees pushing up the cost of consumer goods?".
Proprietary format licensing fees are not "pushing up" the cost of consumer goods. Consumer goods will use proprietary formats when the value to the consumer (and thus ultimately to the manufacturer) justifies paying the license fee. Without MP3 support would SanDisk be able to target such a large market? Probably not. They would save $0.75 in licensing and lose millions of dollars in sales overall.
At the end of the day it is not a "proprietary format" raising the price, it is market demand.
.. think that trying to sell you exactly what you're looking for is a dispicable business practice and ought to be outlawed immediately!
But seriously, maybe when you enabled cookies Amazon recognized you from a previous visit and through the magic of their recommendation engine, perhaps based on a previous purchase where other customers who bought the same item also bought a bluetooth adapter, guessed that you might in fact be looking for a bluetooth adapter.
Instate a law that says "In any advertisement of their service, ISPs can quote a maximum bandwidth no greater than the lowest mean data rate permitted by any throttling technique or other restriction imposed on the communications of the consumer, both for upstream or downstream."
This way an ISP couldn't advertise a 5Mbsp down / 1Mbps up service if they restricted your torrents to 2Mbps down (on average) through throttling.
That's fine, except where the interpreted data can be created from more than one set of actual data. An example might be when creating a hash of a zip archive. If I take the original zip archive, and recompress it using a more efficient algorithm I can reduce the actual data size. I could even go so far as to manipulate the compression algorithm for every byte encoded until I found an encoding that enabled me to produce a hash collision and still match the original file size.
For other document types, I could, for example, take a marked-up UTF-16 document and change the character encoding to UTF-8, saving roughly half the space for a document whose characters were mostly English glyphs, then execute the same attack. For rich documents, space could be saved by minimally degrading image quality. For binaries, by running packers on them.
Adding the filesize to the hash string doesn't offer as much protection as you might first think when at the end of the day you can still find ways to create a collision.
Your statement seems to directly contradict the article summary which says that not only has spring been comming earlier but also autumn later. In the case of your opinion vs. the scientific study I'm going to have to go with the good folks in lab coats.
Sorry to go against the flow, but what makes you think that just because I might develop a product in software rather than creating a physical device my invention should not be protected? As long as I have created a non-obvious invention I should be able to patent it. The solution is not to abolish software patents. There should be a way to discourage submission of obvious ideas, be it financial penalties or otherwise. How do you prove something was an obvious idea at the time? Most obvious ideas probably come from a simple enhancement of a wide-spread existing technology. If you can look at the existing technologies of the time, and have the patent author submit R&D notes on deriving their idea, then you have some good evidence to work with.
"Personally I think a router should have a read only OS in solid state media and no way to execute from read write media that is attached to it. Flashing new versions of the OS and applications should be only possible with explicit user intervention and from the internal interface."
Yes, but what happens when a remote exploit allows the code to be modified in memory? How often do you reboot your router?;)
This is a great idea, _but_ imagine the possibilities for rooting these devices. With a harddrive so large, and a processor at least powerful enough to handle BitTorrent, imagine the possibilities for a remote user to install malware on it. Mail relays, fake websites, even packet sniffers to capture your login as you use online banking.
Worse still, you can run various anti-malware and anti-virus tools on your desktop, but how do you plan to even detect your router being rooted, let alone repair it? (and no, that is not an invitation for the top 1% brainiac population to suggest ripping out the drive, re-installing the firmware, or running Linux on it - we're talking about the general public).
I think it's a great idea, but if it becomes popular and these are always-on devices with a lot of services running on them, that could be a problem.
.. to stop posting articles about liquid explosives, or any other terrorist scare story the Government creates. We already know that some of these 'terrorists' didn't even have air tickets, or even passports, and some have already been released. The Government is either creating news, or blowing what little legitimate news there is completely out of proportion as a reason to impose more and more draconian 'security measures' upon us.
This is BS, and I for one would rather fly on a plane with a 0.0005% chance of being blown up than to have to go through all the security at airports today. I probably have more chance of being hit by a bus, and if you think about what happened here _intelligence information_ stopped this supposed attack, _not_ the screening procedures in place at the airports. Terrorism happened before 9/11, it will happen after 9/11. But it doesn't happen so frequently that it should cause any one of us particular concern. I request of the/. editors that next time they think about headlining a terrorism related article they consider the effect that the media over-reaction and pushing of Government spin has on the lives of each and every one of us, and also on future generations who may never know the meaning of freedom if things keep going the way they are. Don't be a tool for the Bush/Blair administration to leverage.
Why ask how to detect liquid explosives anyway? Sure, it's nice if we can spot them, but real terrorists will find another way. What terrorist today would pack explosives in their shoes, for example?
Enough is enough. I would rather see some articles here summarizing the evidence behind and outcome of this and past terrorism news alerts by the Government, then maybe people would realize that we don't need to soil our pants each time this happens, and we can get some level of sanity back around airport security.
As someone living in the US with family in the UK, I currently don't want to fly home. It isn't because I'm scared of terrorists. It's because I'm scared of our Governments.
What happens when the robot tilts forward and so needs to move forward to correct its balance, but runs into something before it has moved far enough to correct itself? Does it simply fall over?
I do not believe 90% will pay when they can pirate. I did not say I believed that. What I said was that providing a simple registration system instead of a complex activation scheme will not reduce your sales.
If only 5% will pay with activation, still around 5% will pay with simple registration. Why? Because the people who pirate will pirate regardless of which system you use.
"I've used products that had good licensing tools. Keys that you enabled online, and enabled a number of users etc."
I _hate_ crap like that. I use DriveCrypt for encryption (from securstar.de), and it has the most horrific license system I've ever had the displeasure to use. You have to activate your software and lock it to a computer, then if you want to use it on an alternative computer you have to uninstall it on the first, then enter a "deactivation" code on the website, then finally you can reactivate on the new PC. God forbid you should format one of your computers forgetting to deactive your license first. I even had a problem where a new version of the software wouldn't accept the current activation on the system. I had to uninstall the newer version, re-install the older version, uninstall it and de-activate, then install the new one again and activate it. At that point I was like "JFK!", and no, that's not a reference to Kennedy.
Lets face it: People hate activation, and for a good reason. It doesn't stop piracy. It doesn't really reduce piracy either. All it does it cause perpetual headaches to your legally licensed customers. I work on software products and was partly responsible for redesigning our software registration system, which used to also use online activation. We stripped out the 'activation' element and sales didn't drop at all, however the volume of support traffic that we had to handle due to activation issues (the largest type of support incident by far) dropped to almost nothing. Our customers were much happier people.
Secrets to succesful system: 1) Make a good product, 2) Don't extort your customers, 3) Make the registration process simple.
An example of a good registration system: I recently bought Sonar 5 from Cakewalk. It came with a serial code in the DVD sleave, which you punch into Cakewalks' website in exchange for a registration code that can be used perpetually. That's it. Simple. Cakewalk get their registration info, you get to use the software you just paid hundreds of dollars for as you want. Sure, there is an element of trust involved in that, but hey, you just paid a few hundred bucks. Maybe they ought to trust you after that. By comaprison, other similar software I have licenses for is heinous. Cakewalk earned a lot of respect from me because of this.
Pirates will pirate. People with morals who wish to support your work will pay where they can. Respect your customers.
Take a look at the patches Apple releases from time to time, usually numbering in the 20s, which is just as many if not more than Microsoft does for Windows. That fact that nobody cares enough to exploit them is a different story. If you're a malware author and you're looking to get some publicity, set up a botnet or mail relay for spamming, given market share statistics which platform are you going to invest time in exploiting for largest ROI? Certainly not the Mac.
Kaspersky AV updates itself several times per day and has for the last 12 years (as long as I've been using the Internet) been regarded as one of the very best, if not the best, scanning engines. Although I see several posts here regarding reactivity due to virus definitions, one should not forget that a good antivirus product must also include a powerful heuristic engine to warn against software that has viral behaviours. The latest software from KAV also now inherits a handful of specialist feature I've noticed cropping up in other types of security software over the past year, such as monitoring (and controlling) certain application behaviours while a piece of software executes. KAV is also handy because it can not only warn for viruses and trojans, but also malware, and these days it's even intercepting network traffic (not simply as a proxy) such that, for example, malicious code and binaries are blocked even before your browser can access them.
It's not regarded as the fastest scanner in the world, but if you're looking for genuine protection I would recommend it to anyone.
Wear not one, but an array of bullet proof iPods to form a bullet proof iPod vest
Ensure that, for your own safety, your government is monitoring your phone calls. In a post-911 world we must all take additional steps to ensure the iTerrorist threat is neutralized
If, after following all of the above guidelines, your iPod should happen to be stolen, contact the RIAA as quickly as possible and inform them of all the illegal music you have stored on it, then wait for them to subpeona your assailiant and recover your costs in an out of court settlement.
There is probably an expectation that downloads will innevitably replace physical DVD purchases at some point in the future. To sell downloads at price points lower than physical media means decreasing the value of your product over time.
Because you are using FreeDB to look up information on a CD, it should be reasonable to assume that along with the CD one of the RIAA's members has already granted you access to the disc information, it's on the CD sleeve that came with your disk.
Further, the RIAA could hardly argue that information should not be publically accessible in any case: All I have to do is walk into a store and browse the CDs in order to see it.
Slashdot Mirror
The article summary asks, "How much are proprietary format licensing fees pushing up the cost of consumer goods?".
Proprietary format licensing fees are not "pushing up" the cost of consumer goods. Consumer goods will use proprietary formats when the value to the consumer (and thus ultimately to the manufacturer) justifies paying the license fee. Without MP3 support would SanDisk be able to target such a large market? Probably not. They would save $0.75 in licensing and lose millions of dollars in sales overall.
At the end of the day it is not a "proprietary format" raising the price, it is market demand.
.. think that trying to sell you exactly what you're looking for is a dispicable business practice and ought to be outlawed immediately!
But seriously, maybe when you enabled cookies Amazon recognized you from a previous visit and through the magic of their recommendation engine, perhaps based on a previous purchase where other customers who bought the same item also bought a bluetooth adapter, guessed that you might in fact be looking for a bluetooth adapter.
Instate a law that says "In any advertisement of their service, ISPs can quote a maximum bandwidth no greater than the lowest mean data rate permitted by any throttling technique or other restriction imposed on the communications of the consumer, both for upstream or downstream."
This way an ISP couldn't advertise a 5Mbsp down / 1Mbps up service if they restricted your torrents to 2Mbps down (on average) through throttling.
Now all they need is a camera on each side of the outfit and to display the pictures captured on the opposite side, and you have invisibility-wear!
That's fine, except where the interpreted data can be created from more than one set of actual data. An example might be when creating a hash of a zip archive. If I take the original zip archive, and recompress it using a more efficient algorithm I can reduce the actual data size. I could even go so far as to manipulate the compression algorithm for every byte encoded until I found an encoding that enabled me to produce a hash collision and still match the original file size.
For other document types, I could, for example, take a marked-up UTF-16 document and change the character encoding to UTF-8, saving roughly half the space for a document whose characters were mostly English glyphs, then execute the same attack. For rich documents, space could be saved by minimally degrading image quality. For binaries, by running packers on them.
Adding the filesize to the hash string doesn't offer as much protection as you might first think when at the end of the day you can still find ways to create a collision.
Your statement seems to directly contradict the article summary which says that not only has spring been comming earlier but also autumn later. In the case of your opinion vs. the scientific study I'm going to have to go with the good folks in lab coats.
Sorry to go against the flow, but what makes you think that just because I might develop a product in software rather than creating a physical device my invention should not be protected? As long as I have created a non-obvious invention I should be able to patent it. The solution is not to abolish software patents. There should be a way to discourage submission of obvious ideas, be it financial penalties or otherwise. How do you prove something was an obvious idea at the time? Most obvious ideas probably come from a simple enhancement of a wide-spread existing technology. If you can look at the existing technologies of the time, and have the patent author submit R&D notes on deriving their idea, then you have some good evidence to work with.
If this concerns you, don't use WMV/VC-1, use DivX.
"Personally I think a router should have a read only OS in solid state media and no way to execute from read write media that is attached to it. Flashing new versions of the OS and applications should be only possible with explicit user intervention and from the internal interface."
;)
Yes, but what happens when a remote exploit allows the code to be modified in memory? How often do you reboot your router?
Yes, it will download torrents while your *nix box is turned off.
;)
Did you miss the headline?
This is a great idea, _but_ imagine the possibilities for rooting these devices. With a harddrive so large, and a processor at least powerful enough to handle BitTorrent, imagine the possibilities for a remote user to install malware on it. Mail relays, fake websites, even packet sniffers to capture your login as you use online banking.
Worse still, you can run various anti-malware and anti-virus tools on your desktop, but how do you plan to even detect your router being rooted, let alone repair it? (and no, that is not an invitation for the top 1% brainiac population to suggest ripping out the drive, re-installing the firmware, or running Linux on it - we're talking about the general public).
I think it's a great idea, but if it becomes popular and these are always-on devices with a lot of services running on them, that could be a problem.
.. to stop posting articles about liquid explosives, or any other terrorist scare story the Government creates. We already know that some of these 'terrorists' didn't even have air tickets, or even passports, and some have already been released. The Government is either creating news, or blowing what little legitimate news there is completely out of proportion as a reason to impose more and more draconian 'security measures' upon us.
/. editors that next time they think about headlining a terrorism related article they consider the effect that the media over-reaction and pushing of Government spin has on the lives of each and every one of us, and also on future generations who may never know the meaning of freedom if things keep going the way they are. Don't be a tool for the Bush/Blair administration to leverage.
This is BS, and I for one would rather fly on a plane with a 0.0005% chance of being blown up than to have to go through all the security at airports today. I probably have more chance of being hit by a bus, and if you think about what happened here _intelligence information_ stopped this supposed attack, _not_ the screening procedures in place at the airports. Terrorism happened before 9/11, it will happen after 9/11. But it doesn't happen so frequently that it should cause any one of us particular concern. I request of the
Why ask how to detect liquid explosives anyway? Sure, it's nice if we can spot them, but real terrorists will find another way. What terrorist today would pack explosives in their shoes, for example?
Enough is enough. I would rather see some articles here summarizing the evidence behind and outcome of this and past terrorism news alerts by the Government, then maybe people would realize that we don't need to soil our pants each time this happens, and we can get some level of sanity back around airport security.
As someone living in the US with family in the UK, I currently don't want to fly home. It isn't because I'm scared of terrorists. It's because I'm scared of our Governments.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 642
What happens when the robot tilts forward and so needs to move forward to correct its balance, but runs into something before it has moved far enough to correct itself? Does it simply fall over?
I do not believe 90% will pay when they can pirate. I did not say I believed that. What I said was that providing a simple registration system instead of a complex activation scheme will not reduce your sales.
If only 5% will pay with activation, still around 5% will pay with simple registration. Why? Because the people who pirate will pirate regardless of which system you use.
Uh.. ok 'JFK' should be 'JFC'. I was so mad about the whole thing it made me incoherent.
"I've used products that had good licensing tools. Keys that you enabled online, and enabled a number of users etc."
I _hate_ crap like that. I use DriveCrypt for encryption (from securstar.de), and it has the most horrific license system I've ever had the displeasure to use. You have to activate your software and lock it to a computer, then if you want to use it on an alternative computer you have to uninstall it on the first, then enter a "deactivation" code on the website, then finally you can reactivate on the new PC. God forbid you should format one of your computers forgetting to deactive your license first. I even had a problem where a new version of the software wouldn't accept the current activation on the system. I had to uninstall the newer version, re-install the older version, uninstall it and de-activate, then install the new one again and activate it. At that point I was like "JFK!", and no, that's not a reference to Kennedy.
Lets face it: People hate activation, and for a good reason. It doesn't stop piracy. It doesn't really reduce piracy either. All it does it cause perpetual headaches to your legally licensed customers. I work on software products and was partly responsible for redesigning our software registration system, which used to also use online activation. We stripped out the 'activation' element and sales didn't drop at all, however the volume of support traffic that we had to handle due to activation issues (the largest type of support incident by far) dropped to almost nothing. Our customers were much happier people.
Secrets to succesful system: 1) Make a good product, 2) Don't extort your customers, 3) Make the registration process simple.
An example of a good registration system: I recently bought Sonar 5 from Cakewalk. It came with a serial code in the DVD sleave, which you punch into Cakewalks' website in exchange for a registration code that can be used perpetually. That's it. Simple. Cakewalk get their registration info, you get to use the software you just paid hundreds of dollars for as you want. Sure, there is an element of trust involved in that, but hey, you just paid a few hundred bucks. Maybe they ought to trust you after that. By comaprison, other similar software I have licenses for is heinous. Cakewalk earned a lot of respect from me because of this.
Pirates will pirate. People with morals who wish to support your work will pay where they can. Respect your customers.
Take a look at the patches Apple releases from time to time, usually numbering in the 20s, which is just as many if not more than Microsoft does for Windows. That fact that nobody cares enough to exploit them is a different story. If you're a malware author and you're looking to get some publicity, set up a botnet or mail relay for spamming, given market share statistics which platform are you going to invest time in exploiting for largest ROI? Certainly not the Mac.
Right, because nobody would be able to hear you logging in.. :S
Also, 90% of the 'knockphrases' (you read it here first!) would be "knock knock kn-knock knock... knock knock".
"/." too.. Oh well. With "Digg" in the subject line somehow the typo seems fitting ;)
+Digg!
... not.
ROFLMAO LOLOL!
Kaspersky AV updates itself several times per day and has for the last 12 years (as long as I've been using the Internet) been regarded as one of the very best, if not the best, scanning engines. Although I see several posts here regarding reactivity due to virus definitions, one should not forget that a good antivirus product must also include a powerful heuristic engine to warn against software that has viral behaviours. The latest software from KAV also now inherits a handful of specialist feature I've noticed cropping up in other types of security software over the past year, such as monitoring (and controlling) certain application behaviours while a piece of software executes. KAV is also handy because it can not only warn for viruses and trojans, but also malware, and these days it's even intercepting network traffic (not simply as a proxy) such that, for example, malicious code and binaries are blocked even before your browser can access them.
It's not regarded as the fastest scanner in the world, but if you're looking for genuine protection I would recommend it to anyone.
Here are some of the recomendations from TFA:
If, after following all of the above guidelines, your iPod should happen to be stolen, contact the RIAA as quickly as possible and inform them of all the illegal music you have stored on it, then wait for them to subpeona your assailiant and recover your costs in an out of court settlement.
There is probably an expectation that downloads will innevitably replace physical DVD purchases at some point in the future. To sell downloads at price points lower than physical media means decreasing the value of your product over time.
Because you are using FreeDB to look up information on a CD, it should be reasonable to assume that along with the CD one of the RIAA's members has already granted you access to the disc information, it's on the CD sleeve that came with your disk.
Further, the RIAA could hardly argue that information should not be publically accessible in any case: All I have to do is walk into a store and browse the CDs in order to see it.