Indeed: neither the constitution, nor the copyright laws require copyright owners to make access to copyrighted works "easy." However, from a technical standpoint it only takes one person to slog through the hard work of figuring out how to access a protected work and then write document describing the method to everyone else.
The constitutional issue present is whether the government can impose prior restraint on that speech (which is exactly what the DMCA does), and whether computer software is, for the purposes of the 1st ammendment, protected speech. The US Supreme Court has yet to rule, however at least on the 2nd half of the argument, the 9th circuit had ruled that computer software was speech in the first ammendment sense. The 9th circuit was set to re-hear the question en banc when that case (this one was about export regulations on encryption software) was made moot.
In short, no, you do not have the right to insist that copyrighted works be made "easy" for you to use. But I believe that the copyright holders do not have the right to prevent anyone from documenting the steps necessary to access their works. And if I am right, then any copy restriction regime is nothing more than a waste of everyone's time.
You're laboring under a misaprehension that when you release your code under a GPL license that the GPL somehow affects your rights. It does not. The owner of the copyright retains all rights under copyright law. The GPL only affects people other than the copyright holder. That's how come, for example, TrollTech can dual-license their code. Nobody else has that right (with respect to their code), but they certainly do.
Once you release code under any open-source license, the version that you release cannot be "unreleased," of course. Perhaps that's the source of your confusion. But that fact applies to the BSDL as much as the GPL.
Me? I use both. I decide based on the circumstances.
I have just started down this road, and believe I've found a great workaround...
Before I sent in the paper work for the LNP Transfer, I turned on call forwarding on the old voice line, and forwarded it to the Vonage temporary "virtual" number. Then I disconnected the wiring for the SBC line and wired the vonage box into place.
Now the only issue is the money - I will still have to pay SBC until they get around to it, but at least the Vonage line is now fully functional and I need do nothing more about the changeover. The extra $$ I was spending on long distance calls will still be money I'm saving in the meantime. The savings will be even greater at some point down the road.
I'll tell another story... This one is 2nd hand, and dates from the 50s. I believe the casinos have gotten a lot smarter since then, so I doubt this would work any more.
The story goes that a friend of my father invites him and his wife (my mom) to Vegas for the weekend. They get there and start living it up. The friend says not to worry, he'll pay for it all. They see a couple shows, have fabulous meals.... All the while, the friend is periodically going to the cashier's window and cashing checks.
Comes Monday morning and it's time to check out. Dad listens in and hears the conversation between the friend and the hotel cashier, "Thanks for staying with us. We're sorry you had such bad luck at the tables. To make it up to you, we've comp'ed your party's stay."
The punch line is that the friend took one of his suitcases straight to the bank the minute they got off the plane. He was cashing the checks, and his wife would cash out the chips and take the money up to the room. Whether he was actually kiting the checks (and thus really did need to get the money back to the bank in a hurry on Monday), I don't know (but probably not - they were pretty well off).
1. You don't need a friend. In roulette, you bet against the house - each player plays independently.
2. It's not a free weekend, but it is cheap.
3. You take your $500. Bet $13 each on 0 and 00. Bet $237 each on red and black (or odd and even, or any other 2:1 action). If 0 or 00 comes up, you get $468. If either red or black comes up, you get $474. Thus, your weekend costs you either $26 or $32. Of course, if you feel lucky, you can omit the 0 and 00 bets and simply bet $250 on red and black. The house then has a 5% chance of busting you completely, but you have a 94% chance of having a free weekend. Either way, you get paid in live chips, and can cash them in immediately.
4. In addition to the straight monetary costs, the hotel gets to make whatever interest it can having had hold of your money (usually) for a (sometimes lengthy) period of time in advance. And, of course, you run the relatively small risk of getting mugged with your $500 (or less) between the casino and your bank.
5. I haven't been to Nevada (I play poker, so I don't have to leave California) in a long time, but I recall hearing about such offers at least as late as the '80s, so it's possible it still goes on.
This point needs further amplification... The free dev tools you can get from OS X are equivalent to Visual Studio. XCode is, in fact, bundled with the OS (as an optional package, yes, but it's on the CD), along with the CHUD tools (an amazing suite of debuggers). Maybe you can download some CLI compilers for free from Microsoft, but they hardly compare to what Apple ships for free with OS X.
There is no how-to other than the instructions that come with the EyeTV.
Except... Throw away the CD they give you and download the latest software from their website. More recent versions have included important performance gains in playback. But apart from that, it's just good to go.
Alas, it's not up to the standard of a TiVo. It does recurring recordings, not season passes. But until they come out with an HD TiVo (yes, there is an HD DirecTiVo, but it has a questionable future and yesteryear's software and feature set) it will have to do.
It does skip a frame here and there, and it uses perhaps an average of 85% of the CPU. Before I bought the mini, our 500 used to be connected to a single 1.6GHz G5 Powermac. It looks just as good on the "maxi" mini as it did on that machine, IMHO.
I've got an El Gato EyeTV 500 attached to our mini, and it works perfectly. It's the "maxi" (1.42GHz) mini, so I'm not sure if the cheaper one has enough CPU, but the maxi is routinely displaying 720p on our TV, and in my experiments (our TV won't anti-overscan the picture at 1080i, and the native resolution is 720p anyway) it appears to be able to do 1080i without using all of the CPU as well.
The combination of the mini and the EyeTV 500 makes for a great HTPC, at least for digital over-the-air TV (and unencrypted QAM digital TV over cable).
But that sort of thing is not what the article was talking about - Microsoft or not. Nowhere does the article talk about DRM. Instead, the article is all about the system I've described - where "trusting" a binary is based on a keychain that is controlled by the owner of the computer, not the author of the OS or some other third party.
When cryptography is used for the evil DRM purposes you folks are talking about, then yes, it is evil and yes, there are GPL issues. But that's NOT what is under discussion here.
Sure, you can sign binaries. But if you give that binary to someone, and he later demands the source code from you, you'd better include the private key along with it.
No. My private key is not required to create a trusted executable. Presumably the owner of the machine, if he chooses to compile the program from source, will be able to sign the resulting binary with his own private key. After all, surely the owner of the machine will be able to trust the output of his own (trusted) compiler. If he chooses to distribute his work, then the community can make their own decisions on whether he is or is not a trustworthy source of binaries, and can trust, or not, his signed binaries (which he will, of course, distribute with the source, per the GPL).
We're not talking about the Xbox mentality here - where there is only one key for signing apps and it is owned by a platform monopolist. We're talking about being assured as to who was responsible for creating a binary, and the user being in control of vesting trust in those sources, or not, as he sees fit.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (X) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business ( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked ( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook ( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck (X) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Sending email should be free (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough ( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Another one is the SBC-Yahoo video news player. They're playing Windows media videos, but using a stupid active-X control to do it. I can think of a dozen sites that are capable of playing windows media shite on my mac without using farking Active-X to achieve it. Morons.
Interestingly enough, they supplied it for Sparc Solaris only. They could have built it for x86 Solaris easily enough, but that would have validated running a non-Microsoft operating system on x86 hardware. They're absolutely unwilling to ceede that ground.
I haven't read the full spec, but from what I see, it sounds like SIP's main purpose is to be a workaround for NAT. Well, instead of that, how about adding support for IPv6? No NAT traversal required.
But at the same time Apple is fully within their rights to subpoena information regarding who violated their NDA.
Except for the fact that in California, there are shield laws to protect journalists and that since Nick dePlume is not a Californian, California courts have no jurisdiction over his conduct.
What is pornography? It's a very similar question. So there's a pretty large grey line. Was the mac mini newsworthy? Hell yes. I don't think there can be any reasonable doubt (not that that is the standard in any event) that it was. So in this instance, we need not split hairs.
Woodward et al were uncovering political corruption and outright crimes.
The content doesn't matter. If it's newsworthy, then by definition, reporting it is journalism. If it's journalism, then journalistic sheild laws apply.
Once we create an environment where people with access to private data can steal it without consequence it will inevitably lead to gross violations of individual privacy.
The law recognizes that there is a difference between trade secrets and personal detailed financial and medical information. In the latter case, there is a universal duty to protect its confidentiality. In the former, unless you are a party to a confidentiality agreement, there is no such duty.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed: neither the constitution, nor the copyright laws require copyright owners to make access to copyrighted works "easy." However, from a technical standpoint it only takes one person to slog through the hard work of figuring out how to access a protected work and then write document describing the method to everyone else.
The constitutional issue present is whether the government can impose prior restraint on that speech (which is exactly what the DMCA does), and whether computer software is, for the purposes of the 1st ammendment, protected speech. The US Supreme Court has yet to rule, however at least on the 2nd half of the argument, the 9th circuit had ruled that computer software was speech in the first ammendment sense. The 9th circuit was set to re-hear the question en banc when that case (this one was about export regulations on encryption software) was made moot.
In short, no, you do not have the right to insist that copyrighted works be made "easy" for you to use. But I believe that the copyright holders do not have the right to prevent anyone from documenting the steps necessary to access their works. And if I am right, then any copy restriction regime is nothing more than a waste of everyone's time.
(IANAL, of course, but I play one in my mind)
Once you release code under any open-source license, the version that you release cannot be "unreleased," of course. Perhaps that's the source of your confusion. But that fact applies to the BSDL as much as the GPL.
Me? I use both. I decide based on the circumstances.
I have just started down this road, and believe I've found a great workaround...
Before I sent in the paper work for the LNP Transfer, I turned on call forwarding on the old voice line, and forwarded it to the Vonage temporary "virtual" number. Then I disconnected the wiring for the SBC line and wired the vonage box into place.
Now the only issue is the money - I will still have to pay SBC until they get around to it, but at least the Vonage line is now fully functional and I need do nothing more about the changeover. The extra $$ I was spending on long distance calls will still be money I'm saving in the meantime. The savings will be even greater at some point down the road.
I was about to suggest that everyone who marries a human marries a quadraped, but then I realized that the word I was thinking of was tetrapod.
And thus, this entire comment is pointless. Happy Friday!
The story goes that a friend of my father invites him and his wife (my mom) to Vegas for the weekend. They get there and start living it up. The friend says not to worry, he'll pay for it all. They see a couple shows, have fabulous meals.... All the while, the friend is periodically going to the cashier's window and cashing checks.
Comes Monday morning and it's time to check out. Dad listens in and hears the conversation between the friend and the hotel cashier, "Thanks for staying with us. We're sorry you had such bad luck at the tables. To make it up to you, we've comp'ed your party's stay."
The punch line is that the friend took one of his suitcases straight to the bank the minute they got off the plane. He was cashing the checks, and his wife would cash out the chips and take the money up to the room. Whether he was actually kiting the checks (and thus really did need to get the money back to the bank in a hurry on Monday), I don't know (but probably not - they were pretty well off).
1. You don't need a friend. In roulette, you bet against the house - each player plays independently.
2. It's not a free weekend, but it is cheap.
3. You take your $500. Bet $13 each on 0 and 00. Bet $237 each on red and black (or odd and even, or any other 2:1 action). If 0 or 00 comes up, you get $468. If either red or black comes up, you get $474. Thus, your weekend costs you either $26 or $32. Of course, if you feel lucky, you can omit the 0 and 00 bets and simply bet $250 on red and black. The house then has a 5% chance of busting you completely, but you have a 94% chance of having a free weekend. Either way, you get paid in live chips, and can cash them in immediately.
4. In addition to the straight monetary costs, the hotel gets to make whatever interest it can having had hold of your money (usually) for a (sometimes lengthy) period of time in advance. And, of course, you run the relatively small risk of getting mugged with your $500 (or less) between the casino and your bank.
5. I haven't been to Nevada (I play poker, so I don't have to leave California) in a long time, but I recall hearing about such offers at least as late as the '80s, so it's possible it still goes on.
This point needs further amplification... The free dev tools you can get from OS X are equivalent to Visual Studio. XCode is, in fact, bundled with the OS (as an optional package, yes, but it's on the CD), along with the CHUD tools (an amazing suite of debuggers). Maybe you can download some CLI compilers for free from Microsoft, but they hardly compare to what Apple ships for free with OS X.
MacOS X - Free for Friends & Family.
FreeBSD - buy me lunch.
Linux & Solaris - barter at about $20/hr.
Windows - $150/hr, 2 hour minimum.
It also doesn't work on a mac.
There is no how-to other than the instructions that come with the EyeTV.
Except... Throw away the CD they give you and download the latest software from their website. More recent versions have included important performance gains in playback. But apart from that, it's just good to go.
Alas, it's not up to the standard of a TiVo. It does recurring recordings, not season passes. But until they come out with an HD TiVo (yes, there is an HD DirecTiVo, but it has a questionable future and yesteryear's software and feature set) it will have to do.
It does skip a frame here and there, and it uses perhaps an average of 85% of the CPU. Before I bought the mini, our 500 used to be connected to a single 1.6GHz G5 Powermac. It looks just as good on the "maxi" mini as it did on that machine, IMHO.
I don't see why not, but I don't have any 5.1 sort of equipment, so I don't know for sure.
The combination of the mini and the EyeTV 500 makes for a great HTPC, at least for digital over-the-air TV (and unencrypted QAM digital TV over cable).
But that sort of thing is not what the article was talking about - Microsoft or not. Nowhere does the article talk about DRM. Instead, the article is all about the system I've described - where "trusting" a binary is based on a keychain that is controlled by the owner of the computer, not the author of the OS or some other third party.
When cryptography is used for the evil DRM purposes you folks are talking about, then yes, it is evil and yes, there are GPL issues. But that's NOT what is under discussion here.
Read TFA and try again.
If you're right, then everything you said in the grandparent is correct.
However, I do not believe that what you're talking about has anything to do with what the article is about at all.
Note further that the article has nothing at all to do with Microsoft.
In this instance, I believe you're the FUD spreader.
No. My private key is not required to create a trusted executable. Presumably the owner of the machine, if he chooses to compile the program from source, will be able to sign the resulting binary with his own private key. After all, surely the owner of the machine will be able to trust the output of his own (trusted) compiler. If he chooses to distribute his work, then the community can make their own decisions on whether he is or is not a trustworthy source of binaries, and can trust, or not, his signed binaries (which he will, of course, distribute with the source, per the GPL).
We're not talking about the Xbox mentality here - where there is only one key for signing apps and it is owned by a platform monopolist. We're talking about being assured as to who was responsible for creating a binary, and the user being in control of vesting trust in those sources, or not, as he sees fit.
Another one is the SBC-Yahoo video news player. They're playing Windows media videos, but using a stupid active-X control to do it. I can think of a dozen sites that are capable of playing windows media shite on my mac without using farking Active-X to achieve it. Morons.
Interestingly enough, they supplied it for Sparc Solaris only. They could have built it for x86 Solaris easily enough, but that would have validated running a non-Microsoft operating system on x86 hardware. They're absolutely unwilling to ceede that ground.
Enough to know that that is probably how his lawyer will make this whole thing dry up and blow away.
I haven't read the full spec, but from what I see, it sounds like SIP's main purpose is to be a workaround for NAT. Well, instead of that, how about adding support for IPv6? No NAT traversal required.
Unless TS is offering briefcases with unmarked bills inside, I don't think this rises to the level of a civil tort.
I can't think of any other news organization so willing to cater to potential informants.
Then you're not thinking very hard.
Except for the fact that in California, there are shield laws to protect journalists and that since Nick dePlume is not a Californian, California courts have no jurisdiction over his conduct.
What is pornography? It's a very similar question. So there's a pretty large grey line. Was the mac mini newsworthy? Hell yes. I don't think there can be any reasonable doubt (not that that is the standard in any event) that it was. So in this instance, we need not split hairs.
Woodward et al were uncovering political corruption and outright crimes.
The content doesn't matter. If it's newsworthy, then by definition, reporting it is journalism. If it's journalism, then journalistic sheild laws apply.
Once we create an environment where people with access to private data can steal it without consequence it will inevitably lead to gross violations of individual privacy.
The law recognizes that there is a difference between trade secrets and personal detailed financial and medical information. In the latter case, there is a universal duty to protect its confidentiality. In the former, unless you are a party to a confidentiality agreement, there is no such duty.