Tsutomo Matsumoto did some work on breaking fingerprint scanners. It was embarassingly easy. Half of the machines he worked with would get tripped up by blowing on the reader (which would cause condensate to form everywhere but where the oil of the last print was at, causing it to re-read the last print... whoops, the last print was an authorized user, feel free to p0wn the box). He also described and demonstrated a way to make fake-fingers out of household materials at the cost of less than a buck which is 80% effective at fooling every scanner on the market.
Summary here or check Slashdot, its probably been covered here before.
>>
An intellectual was seen as an idle person and often was a person who defied the Will of God by questioning dogma.
>>
Yeah, good thing the Church never caught Thomas Aquinas while he was writing that whole Summa Theologica thing, or St. Augustine with City of God, or the Jesuits wasting time with that useless triviality of organizing the entire Chinese writing system such that Westerners could actually begin to study it. You can see the continued intellectual poverty Christianity inflicted on America through the so-called "writings" of such featherweights as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Bah, Christianity, whens the last time a theologian ever contributed anything useful to mankind. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to gin up a Pascal program to measure Cartesian distances.
I don't rememeber him ever hurting people. He did eat the moon once, though. I guess that hurts the man in the moon, what with him probably not liking being eaten and whatnot.
If you accept this argument (and I don't), then piracy still costs the customer money because it drives other developers out of the market -- nobody can afford to make a "Photoshop for the Rest of Us" because they have to compete against regular Photoshop priced at, uh, free. Take a look at pirated productivity applications and how little customer choice there is in those sectors -- how is anybody supposed to convince you to pay $40 for "just the word processor features you actually need without all the bloat of Office" when you can get office for nada? Its like giving Microsoft/Adobe a special-ops abusive business practices team which can't be trust-busted because it isn't legal to begin with.
Is that just./ code for "We appreciate the service you have provided, Grammar Nazi, but not enough to award you karma" or is it "Hah, look at this guy, he thinks people on./ might have a fourth-grade comprehension of the English language. l0l n00b"?
There is a large difference between someone who provides a game which can be manipulated into producing something which can be interpreted as porn, and someone who orders porn produced for the video game. We know what the budgets are like for video games nowadays -- this wasn't a rogue programmer, this was in the design document, it was on the white board, somebody actually sat down and animated while somebody else (likely) did the vocal work and a third person the "game logic". Mini-games don't just happen. Say what you will about how bad it is, but you can't pretend this is in the same league as accidentally allowing Super Smash Brothers to look as if Yoshi is fellating everything in sight just because it has a positionable camera and he's a walking tongue-machine who is practically the textbook definition of asexual.
Great, they disabled it before it shipped. What kind of morons do we have in the industry that someone thought "Hey, I know a great way to push the envelope a bit"?
"More Questions then Answers" needs a comma in the middle, and indicates narration of events in time (first more questions, then answers).
"More Questions than Answers" means the number of questions was greater than the number of answers. Always use than for comparisons, kids.
Incidentally, you probably meant "preliminary injunction" rather than "protective injection".
The inventory control system, for one. Most of the large chain stores have fairly sophisticated inventory systems designed in large part to prevent "shrinkage" (which happens through both theft and also silly things like "Customer spilled a cup of coffee on the book" and "Evening manager left a packing container outside of the premises while assisting unloading from the truck, it was discovered in the morning sopping wet from the rain"). You also need fairly accurate records to deal with the vagaries of the publishing business -- for example, if a big book turns out to be a total flop the publisher only receives money for the books which were actually sold and the excess are frequently destroyed at the retail and/or wholesale levels. (Thats why they have the "if you received this book without the cover" warning in the front page of a lot of trade paperbacks, among others).
I think it probably happened because an eighteen year old employee who makes $7 or so an hour missed the special instruction on line 32 of the packing list for the one particular book in the shipping carton he was unloading, resulting in the book getting shelved somewhere in the store, where it was brought to the front and scanned by another eighteen year old employee who probably didn't even glance at the title. Complete accident on a low scale, in other words.
This conforms to my understanding of US law as practiced in states I am familiar with (civil torts are a very state-specific thing in America, for those of you unfamiliar with the system). For starters, depending on the specific state after the purchase takes place that book is yours, whether the store meant to sell it or not (not the buyer's fault that the store sold it to them in error -- they made the transaction in good faith from someone who had apparent authority to make the sale, which means if the judge decides someone is owed relief its going to be the store paying, not the end buyer). And if that buyer were to get on TV and say "I don't see what the whole fuss is about. I mean, sure, Dumbledore dies but it didn't answer the greater question of whether Harry will get back together with that Chinese witch", you could certainly threaten them with legal action but no judge would muzzle them in advance of the trial for the tort (you'd also have to have a darn spiffy legal theory to make that conduct tortious, because you've got no contractual obligation with the end-user of the book preventing premature blabbing and if you tried to assert some sort of "Hey, its our exclusive IP until Saturday, when all those fair use rights you have start to kick in" you'd be laughed out of court -- for that matter, the factual statement "This book contains the death of Dumbledore" isn't even a fair use because it isn't a "use" at all as it doesn't substantially replicate the expressive form of the content).
But its not really a Constitutional issue. The vast majority of the law isn't, really. Constitutional issues just engage law review writers and producers of Law and Order because they're a lot sexier than the law of torts and state definitions of what exactly constitutes a sale (sample controversy: Bob makes an oral agreement to Sue that he will give her his copy of Harry Potter after it comes out if she goes on a date with him on Thursday. On Friday, after the date, Bob takes delivery of Harry Potter from UPS a day earlier than it should have arrived, reads it, and is disgusted to find that he ordered the English edition and has extraneous u's all over his book. Forgetting his earlier agreement with Sue, he burns the book in disgust. Does Sue sue for breach of contract, non-delivery of goods, or damage to her property? Answer: go to law school.)
Yeah. I got a scholarship to go to college with an eye towards being a high-school teacher. I eventually returned the money because its just not feasible. The highest paying public school in the state starts teachers at 60% of the average salary for graduates in my engineering department, with the promise that I'll be making a decent salary in a mere 10-15 years. From that already low number, a not-insignificant amount will be jacked by the union, which will spend my money to defeat the political candidates I support and work to ensure that the school district is unable to give me a merit-based base raise (thanks guys, keep up the great work representing my interests).
Whats the point of suing him as a multinational corporation? You'll never collect from him and will end up being portrayed in the media as a bully persecuting a teenager for a youthful indiscretion. He'll say he's very, very sorry and why are you tryring to ruin his life for just one little mistake, etc. And people will buy it because people are, on average, dumb.
He immediately thought "Dang, the least the bastards who put me in this bathtub of ice could have done is compensated me for the hypothermia by leaving me a nice, warm kidney to play with".
Remember Earthbound? With the completely random prayer effects? The first two times I had Paula Pray, my entire party died instantly to the effect. This was in the bad old days of SNES RPGing where that meant backing up hours and hours through the dungeon to the last save point in town. I concluded that God hated me and that I would never use the Pray ability again, so for the rest of the game I just used her regular, predictable heals and frying pan. I lived in fear of accidentally hitting the pray button in battle -- it happened maybe twice (once in the fight with Poo) and those were my most gut-wrenchingly scary moments in gaming ("My party! Nooooooooo! Oh, wait, heal for 8 damage. Phew, dodged a bullet there."). I wiped three times on the end boss because even though my little brother was telling me "You have to pray to beat him!" I was saying "No way you're going to trick me into praying! I've seen what happens!"
Again, you don't have to crack the encryption, you just have to compromise the weakest step in the chain, which is the output device. I don't care you had four-hundred NSA cryptographers in a little itty-bitty box handling all of your encryption/decryption needs, with instructions to commit suicide if anyone attempted to pry the encryption algorithm from them, because the output of the little NSA-box is cleartext and must be displayed through output devices controlled by the adversary.
Cracking has to be done all over again for each new movie -- no, each new movie has to be displayed once, somewhere on the Internet, then you just transmit the cleartext. Organized large scale piracy (e.g. the Red Army factories in China) can certainly afford to pay one technology geek twenty bucks to set them up a system to rip the content straight from the output device, and then it will get distributed in a DRM-free format. And as bandwidth continues to increase exponentially while size of content does not, thats a recipe for ever-easier piracy.
Some companies seem to think that they could somehow manage to construct a cartel with an absolute monopoly on both software and hardware playback and thereby make sure no one circumvented the DRM restrictions. That strikes me as rather unlikely, if for no other reason than technology which exists right now suffices for pirating most of the value of reasonable extrapolations of current forms of digital content. After MP3 is out of the bag, its impossible to technologically stop music piracy because if your customers can play music so can the pirates and if pirates can play music then pirates can encode music in MP3 at whatever bitrate they want and put that on the darknet.
Getting the secret key is trivial, because they give it to you. How else would anyone be able to watch the movie? After they revoke a secret key thats been used once ("Aww, shoot, Star Wars 17 Serial #234253242364 was pirated, quick, shut it down") its meaningless because the cleartext has already entered the darknet.
Even worse to catch algorithmically are the ones just farming using manpower. Lets say the logs tell you that someone spent 16 hours online in a spot known to be very efficient for getting gold. Quick, AI: is that a farmer or is that any of the hundreds of thousands of hardcore players playing the game as it is designed? You might think that tracking outgoing gold transfers would help you, but honestly, the hard core aren't hording the gold either, and you can easily design a money-laundering protocol because the AH makes skewed trades possible. And Blizzard isn't willing to invest the man hours to manually investigate the tens of thousands of borderline accounts and find which are the ones that have 15 epics because they're farmers and which of the ones have 15 epics because they're the designated vendor for a hardcore guild.
Evaluating this purely from an econ standpoint, not meaning to endorse it. His labor is a very minor contribution to the value added. The setup (capital) and the business model (entrepeneurship) are much more important inputs into the process -- take the macros and the guy who speaks enough English to negotiate with IGE and you can make a new farm farm with any "lumpen proletariat" you choose, but take the labor and lose the macros and contacts and they're just a bunch of poorly educated people trying to play a game that they have no experience in and trying to sell to people they can't speak to.
Somebody didn't read the darknet paper... All it takes is ONE person in the entire world who wants to see (or sell!) a movie enough to go through the trouble of setting up a system to do so, something which might be technically infeasible for Joe User but which would be trivial for someone with a modicrum of skill and equipment (and, incidentally, if you're going to make a hobby or career out of it the marginal cost in both dollars and time is close to zero -- set the system up once and it will be good forever). Then that one person puts it on $FILESHARINGNETWORK, and for the rest of the world the process is:
1. Type movie name into search box, click enter.
2. Download movie.
3. Watch.
P.S. Video capture card + Winamp plugin to capture output to DirectSound and write to disk + editing/compression software of choice = digital quality piracy.
P.P.S. You never need to "crack" the encryption when someone gives you the cyphertext, the cypher specification, and the secret key.
... Man Arrested For Loitering. And buried within the text, "But the District Attourney explained that, while loitering is a difficult offense to prove, since it comes down to the defendant saying he was not there all day versus the homeowner saying he was, the DA opted to indict on a charge for which there exists indisputable evidence of guilt".
Seriously, though, wake up folks. DAs are creative with charging people all the time -- had this guy not been a creepazoid he would be home right now (well, had he not been a creepazoid he would have been at home, rather than parked outside someone's house for hours), but being a creepazoid isn't per-se illegal and loitering, which is per-se illegal, is a devil of a charge to make stick. So the DA went for the low-hanging fruit. Its the same basic principle that got Al Capone for tax evasion and that DAs in Virginia get check-bouncers for "uttering" with. (If you want to know what "uttering" is in this context and why its a very DA friendly crime in Virginia, I recommend the excellent http://crimlaw.blogspot.com/.)
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, with your signature the rating is accurate with respect to you.
Summary here or check Slashdot, its probably been covered here before.
>> An intellectual was seen as an idle person and often was a person who defied the Will of God by questioning dogma. >> Yeah, good thing the Church never caught Thomas Aquinas while he was writing that whole Summa Theologica thing, or St. Augustine with City of God, or the Jesuits wasting time with that useless triviality of organizing the entire Chinese writing system such that Westerners could actually begin to study it. You can see the continued intellectual poverty Christianity inflicted on America through the so-called "writings" of such featherweights as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Bah, Christianity, whens the last time a theologian ever contributed anything useful to mankind. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to gin up a Pascal program to measure Cartesian distances.
I don't rememeber him ever hurting people. He did eat the moon once, though. I guess that hurts the man in the moon, what with him probably not liking being eaten and whatnot.
If you accept this argument (and I don't), then piracy still costs the customer money because it drives other developers out of the market -- nobody can afford to make a "Photoshop for the Rest of Us" because they have to compete against regular Photoshop priced at, uh, free. Take a look at pirated productivity applications and how little customer choice there is in those sectors -- how is anybody supposed to convince you to pay $40 for "just the word processor features you actually need without all the bloat of Office" when you can get office for nada? Its like giving Microsoft/Adobe a special-ops abusive business practices team which can't be trust-busted because it isn't legal to begin with.
No. The big difference: Slashdotters aren't interested in stealing fine art.
Is that just ./ code for "We appreciate the service you have provided, Grammar Nazi, but not enough to award you karma" or is it "Hah, look at this guy, he thinks people on ./ might have a fourth-grade comprehension of the English language. l0l n00b"?
Great, they disabled it before it shipped. What kind of morons do we have in the industry that someone thought "Hey, I know a great way to push the envelope a bit"?
"More Questions then Answers" needs a comma in the middle, and indicates narration of events in time (first more questions, then answers). "More Questions than Answers" means the number of questions was greater than the number of answers. Always use than for comparisons, kids. Incidentally, you probably meant "preliminary injunction" rather than "protective injection".
The inventory control system, for one. Most of the large chain stores have fairly sophisticated inventory systems designed in large part to prevent "shrinkage" (which happens through both theft and also silly things like "Customer spilled a cup of coffee on the book" and "Evening manager left a packing container outside of the premises while assisting unloading from the truck, it was discovered in the morning sopping wet from the rain"). You also need fairly accurate records to deal with the vagaries of the publishing business -- for example, if a big book turns out to be a total flop the publisher only receives money for the books which were actually sold and the excess are frequently destroyed at the retail and/or wholesale levels. (Thats why they have the "if you received this book without the cover" warning in the front page of a lot of trade paperbacks, among others).
I think it probably happened because an eighteen year old employee who makes $7 or so an hour missed the special instruction on line 32 of the packing list for the one particular book in the shipping carton he was unloading, resulting in the book getting shelved somewhere in the store, where it was brought to the front and scanned by another eighteen year old employee who probably didn't even glance at the title. Complete accident on a low scale, in other words.
But its not really a Constitutional issue. The vast majority of the law isn't, really. Constitutional issues just engage law review writers and producers of Law and Order because they're a lot sexier than the law of torts and state definitions of what exactly constitutes a sale (sample controversy: Bob makes an oral agreement to Sue that he will give her his copy of Harry Potter after it comes out if she goes on a date with him on Thursday. On Friday, after the date, Bob takes delivery of Harry Potter from UPS a day earlier than it should have arrived, reads it, and is disgusted to find that he ordered the English edition and has extraneous u's all over his book. Forgetting his earlier agreement with Sue, he burns the book in disgust. Does Sue sue for breach of contract, non-delivery of goods, or damage to her property? Answer: go to law school.)
Yeah. I got a scholarship to go to college with an eye towards being a high-school teacher. I eventually returned the money because its just not feasible. The highest paying public school in the state starts teachers at 60% of the average salary for graduates in my engineering department, with the promise that I'll be making a decent salary in a mere 10-15 years. From that already low number, a not-insignificant amount will be jacked by the union, which will spend my money to defeat the political candidates I support and work to ensure that the school district is unable to give me a merit-based base raise (thanks guys, keep up the great work representing my interests).
Whats the point of suing him as a multinational corporation? You'll never collect from him and will end up being portrayed in the media as a bully persecuting a teenager for a youthful indiscretion. He'll say he's very, very sorry and why are you tryring to ruin his life for just one little mistake, etc. And people will buy it because people are, on average, dumb.
Yikes, were they that bad? I get better characters per line of text on my (Japanese) cell phone.
1) Software code. Sometimes.
2) There is no #2.
He immediately thought "Dang, the least the bastards who put me in this bathtub of ice could have done is compensated me for the hypothermia by leaving me a nice, warm kidney to play with".
Remember Earthbound? With the completely random prayer effects? The first two times I had Paula Pray, my entire party died instantly to the effect. This was in the bad old days of SNES RPGing where that meant backing up hours and hours through the dungeon to the last save point in town. I concluded that God hated me and that I would never use the Pray ability again, so for the rest of the game I just used her regular, predictable heals and frying pan. I lived in fear of accidentally hitting the pray button in battle -- it happened maybe twice (once in the fight with Poo) and those were my most gut-wrenchingly scary moments in gaming ("My party! Nooooooooo! Oh, wait, heal for 8 damage. Phew, dodged a bullet there."). I wiped three times on the end boss because even though my little brother was telling me "You have to pray to beat him!" I was saying "No way you're going to trick me into praying! I've seen what happens!"
Cracking has to be done all over again for each new movie -- no, each new movie has to be displayed once, somewhere on the Internet, then you just transmit the cleartext. Organized large scale piracy (e.g. the Red Army factories in China) can certainly afford to pay one technology geek twenty bucks to set them up a system to rip the content straight from the output device, and then it will get distributed in a DRM-free format. And as bandwidth continues to increase exponentially while size of content does not, thats a recipe for ever-easier piracy.
Some companies seem to think that they could somehow manage to construct a cartel with an absolute monopoly on both software and hardware playback and thereby make sure no one circumvented the DRM restrictions. That strikes me as rather unlikely, if for no other reason than technology which exists right now suffices for pirating most of the value of reasonable extrapolations of current forms of digital content. After MP3 is out of the bag, its impossible to technologically stop music piracy because if your customers can play music so can the pirates and if pirates can play music then pirates can encode music in MP3 at whatever bitrate they want and put that on the darknet.
Getting the secret key is trivial, because they give it to you. How else would anyone be able to watch the movie? After they revoke a secret key thats been used once ("Aww, shoot, Star Wars 17 Serial #234253242364 was pirated, quick, shut it down") its meaningless because the cleartext has already entered the darknet.
Even worse to catch algorithmically are the ones just farming using manpower. Lets say the logs tell you that someone spent 16 hours online in a spot known to be very efficient for getting gold. Quick, AI: is that a farmer or is that any of the hundreds of thousands of hardcore players playing the game as it is designed? You might think that tracking outgoing gold transfers would help you, but honestly, the hard core aren't hording the gold either, and you can easily design a money-laundering protocol because the AH makes skewed trades possible. And Blizzard isn't willing to invest the man hours to manually investigate the tens of thousands of borderline accounts and find which are the ones that have 15 epics because they're farmers and which of the ones have 15 epics because they're the designated vendor for a hardcore guild.
Evaluating this purely from an econ standpoint, not meaning to endorse it. His labor is a very minor contribution to the value added. The setup (capital) and the business model (entrepeneurship) are much more important inputs into the process -- take the macros and the guy who speaks enough English to negotiate with IGE and you can make a new farm farm with any "lumpen proletariat" you choose, but take the labor and lose the macros and contacts and they're just a bunch of poorly educated people trying to play a game that they have no experience in and trying to sell to people they can't speak to.
1. Type movie name into search box, click enter.
2. Download movie.
3. Watch.
P.S. Video capture card + Winamp plugin to capture output to DirectSound and write to disk + editing/compression software of choice = digital quality piracy.
P.P.S. You never need to "crack" the encryption when someone gives you the cyphertext, the cypher specification, and the secret key.
Seriously, though, wake up folks. DAs are creative with charging people all the time -- had this guy not been a creepazoid he would be home right now (well, had he not been a creepazoid he would have been at home, rather than parked outside someone's house for hours), but being a creepazoid isn't per-se illegal and loitering, which is per-se illegal, is a devil of a charge to make stick. So the DA went for the low-hanging fruit. Its the same basic principle that got Al Capone for tax evasion and that DAs in Virginia get check-bouncers for "uttering" with. (If you want to know what "uttering" is in this context and why its a very DA friendly crime in Virginia, I recommend the excellent http://crimlaw.blogspot.com/.)
If tea is more your fancy, there is a robot at the Aichi Expo that does exactly that. Its more for old people.