The W3C initiative started out as a concern that geeky sites were fine for, well, geeks but there are a lot of people out there from blind and sight-limited users to more people who just can't stand or get their heads around the shoddy interfaces of poorly designed sites...
Thee is nothing on this thread so far about how you address this. Yes many badly designed sites are popular but that doesn't make it right that a substantial proportion of users, or potential users, are effectively locked out because good, accessible design was never thought about at the beginning or, at best, was just a few tweaks bolted on at runtime.
The big advantage for Microsoft over OSS is precisely that they can act as a single interlocutor with blind and disabled associations, something the OSS community cannot provide: to paraphrase Kissinger: I'll work with the OSS community if you can give me their phone number... Microsoft does actually test much of its software with such groups but I've yet to see anyone promoting OSS solutions to take that trouble. Call it a market grab if you will, but it seems to make good business sense as well as being "politically correct".
Hmmm....If someone walks up to me and kicks me in the gonads, does everyone get on my back for not wearing adequate protection while walking in the street? Or do we assume the liability to prosecution weighs heavier on the asshole who kicks me?
Why in the sole area of Internet security is the onus on the user having to protect him/herself rather than going after the assholes who pollute the space with such dangerous crap?
Legislation? Yeah: making sure anyone holding rights to an operational domain is legally identifiable and liable for what they do, would be a great start...
They've correctly identified a niche market: people who just can't wait ( =/. readers?) for the film to arrive by post or in the cinema, so will download and watch it once on their PC or portable device, and settle down to the "hard copy" version for all re-views once it's arrived.
I wouldn't count on the download version for your long-term collection, as it's likely to be tied to a specific device:
http://www.xmlbystealth.net/blog/2006/03/bbc-news- entertainment-film-fans-get.html
It's all about making the client pick up the cost. There was a time in a newspaper shop that I used to be able to drop the exact money for a newspaper on the counter with a wave of the bought item and a nod to the shop owner, nimbly avoiding the queue of people waiting to stock up on cigarettes, sweets and lotto tickets.
Now I have to queue with everyone else, wasting my friggin' time doing SFA, just because the barcode scan manages the till, invenstory, re-ordering and pricing.
The retailers don't give a rat's ass about the client, as long as it saves/makes them money.
RFID is in the same vein but takes it all the more further. Now you don't even know if the goods have a RFID chip or not, or what it might be used for, or how long it stays. Here's some ideas:
- customer profiling in store: which items attract attention (detect when goods removed from shelf and how often before being purchased)?
- customer loyalty: how often does a customer - who's bought an item of clothing here before - return wearing said item (the chip's still in there: did you think otherwise?);
- turnaround time: mean time from being shelved to being checked-out;
- spending patterns: cooperation between different stores to identify "their" customers by noting "friendly" RFIDed products coming into their stores;
If you think any of this is fantasy, get along to an RFID conference soon....
You throw out the TCO argument a little too light-handedly.
Getting support administrators, help desk and training staff for Microsoft systems is relatively cheap, because there are so many of them and so much documentations and support material.
Linux and OSS support on the other hand is scarce, and more expensive to hire, and much is still very much undocumented in the way that big enterpreises and organisations like (big training manuals and serious looking books and papers from big consultancies - which is not to ignore the massive level of material available, only that CxO's of companies don't tend to hang around SourceForge, BBS and/.
The devil you know is still much more popular than the devil you can't get a handle on...
then I want it dual booting with Linux and nothing more... ever.
IF Linux is as stable as you make out, and you want "nothing more...ever", then why not make it - or Windows for that matter - available as a chipset, like the good ol' BBC Microcompuetr of yesteryear...? Whatever the OS, why should I waste my time waiting for the system to boot up or shut down, when so many other devices have their OS's on EPROM....I just want to switch on and go.
Perhaps these new DRM actions overstep the bounds of consumer rights so far that it ensures copyrights will always be in place? What I mean is that the focus and question seems to not be, "What are the artist's musician's rights?" so much as "What rights do we even have as consumers?
This is the key question. Whilst market muscle seems to be able to dictate certain aspects of our behaviour - whether regarding DRM, what authentication methods are used to access certain services, or whatever - the balance of power invariably lies with the provider dictating and requiring use of the terms that best suit their business and to hell with what the consumer might want. Public policy and public standards propose and enforce sane, safe and workable solutions to all aspects of our lives (imagine no rules of the road - yeah, I guess some/.ers would be happy with that until they are the ones that get smashed up), so why on Earth not get their hands dirty on this one? Who do these guys think they are telling us how to behave? If anyone has such a right, it is the state not the market.
Yeah, planes are big and complex as was the Apollo XI launcher, but nobody would accept that sort of feeble argument as a defence. Buggy is bad, period. Microsoft are starting to realise that, but open-source heads still reckon it's kinda cool to be imperfect...Cut the crap and get professional
where the identification and authentication framework is mandated by law but anyone is free to provide a conformant infrastructure. To use the so-called "Bürgerkarte" (or citizen card) you can actually use anything from a bank card with on-board chip, an eHealth card or even your mobile phone (where you authenticate via your supplier who sends a single-transaction pin as a challenge-response mechanism) and you can use any of the mechanisms for any of a range of services, including, soon, onlne banking. As all implementations all use the same authentication mechanism, you will be able to use your phone to authenticate for eHealth services, and even your card from one bank to authenticate with your account in another...and you can have as many "instances" of the "card" as you want, provided by a range of public and private sector suppliers. Many handware summpliers are getting in on the act and supplying card-readers as standard with new PCs, for those who want...What's more, as there is no personal data on-card and a hashing mechanism before any id token is passed to a eService supplier there is also the strongest personal data protection possible: no one service can scrape any personal data from a transaction
http://www.cio.gv.at/identity/ and http://europa.eu.int/idabc/en/document/885/331
Surely this is what Douglas Hofstadter argued already 25 years ago in his Pulitzer winning "Gödel, Escher, Bach", when exploring the possibilities and limits of artificial intelligence?
Fair point. So ultimately, it is about how much the lender or orginal seller trusts the buyer/renter to respect the original intellectual property. Copy for private use is indeed OK under most rental and selling schemes. What you seem to be saying is that this approach trusts the end user so little/not at all and thus shifts the balance of power back disproportionately to the issuer?
Sure, you could photocopy the whole thing too, but it's still an ingringement of the copyright terms.
Why shouldn't a library protect itself against selfish users who can't return something on time so that others can use it?
And no, the fact that this is a digital copy doesn't change anything, as the library still has a license to distirbute a finite number of copies at a time.
Just because it is Microsoft's DRM in question, shouldn't distract from the fact that this is a very intelligent use of the concept.
There are those who'll never accept any limitations on their pirating (see "Fuck that" below) or copying but surely the key issue is policy not technology? Where it's used and how, not who's produced it?
Yeah, I receievd the threatening package too, because of my web site. I ignored him but forwarded the dossier to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse http://www.chillingeffects.org/> who are compiling dossiers on these sorts of guys. As a private individual, I'd be interested to see how the hell he thinks a character string in a DNS domain that can be parsed to extract the substring stealth infringes his right to....make money from the word Stealth: like that's a major contribution to society. I should have published my book by it's working title "XML by Stealth" - might have given this guy indigestion as you can't copyright book titles!
What's different is that much of the packaged technology is sold and promoted as easy to use. You need experience and a license to drive a car.
I agree there should be some basic awareness raising but there are two issues:
- language: "increase the fuel line supply to the carburetor" or "push the gas pedal" - you get my drift;
- scams: How many even relatively alert users spot the distinction between a phishing pop up that is a hypertexted gif image saying "Security Alert, click OK, etc..." (and just for more deception, the inidcation of the hypertext target being javascripted to display a legit site while actually pointing to a fraudster - smart that, and evil) and a real dialogue box?
It's called crimial deception and I don't buy the "caveat emptor" argument: I didn't ask for the fucking stuff to pop up on my PC so I don't see why I should be on my guard 24/7
Slashdot Mirror
ought to be at least credited with inspiring your post, if not 90% of the actual words in the same order...
The W3C initiative started out as a concern that geeky sites were fine for, well, geeks but there are a lot of people out there from blind and sight-limited users to more people who just can't stand or get their heads around the shoddy interfaces of poorly designed sites... Thee is nothing on this thread so far about how you address this. Yes many badly designed sites are popular but that doesn't make it right that a substantial proportion of users, or potential users, are effectively locked out because good, accessible design was never thought about at the beginning or, at best, was just a few tweaks bolted on at runtime. The big advantage for Microsoft over OSS is precisely that they can act as a single interlocutor with blind and disabled associations, something the OSS community cannot provide: to paraphrase Kissinger: I'll work with the OSS community if you can give me their phone number... Microsoft does actually test much of its software with such groups but I've yet to see anyone promoting OSS solutions to take that trouble. Call it a market grab if you will, but it seems to make good business sense as well as being "politically correct".
Hmmm....If someone walks up to me and kicks me in the gonads, does everyone get on my back for not wearing adequate protection while walking in the street? Or do we assume the liability to prosecution weighs heavier on the asshole who kicks me?
Why in the sole area of Internet security is the onus on the user having to protect him/herself rather than going after the assholes who pollute the space with such dangerous crap?
Legislation? Yeah: making sure anyone holding rights to an operational domain is legally identifiable and liable for what they do, would be a great start...
They've correctly identified a niche market: people who just can't wait ( = /. readers?) for the film to arrive by post or in the cinema, so will download and watch it once on their PC or portable device, and settle down to the "hard copy" version for all re-views once it's arrived.
I wouldn't count on the download version for your long-term collection, as it's likely to be tied to a specific device:
http://www.xmlbystealth.net/blog/2006/03/bbc-news- entertainment-film-fans-get.html
It's all about making the client pick up the cost. There was a time in a newspaper shop that I used to be able to drop the exact money for a newspaper on the counter with a wave of the bought item and a nod to the shop owner, nimbly avoiding the queue of people waiting to stock up on cigarettes, sweets and lotto tickets. Now I have to queue with everyone else, wasting my friggin' time doing SFA, just because the barcode scan manages the till, invenstory, re-ordering and pricing. The retailers don't give a rat's ass about the client, as long as it saves/makes them money. RFID is in the same vein but takes it all the more further. Now you don't even know if the goods have a RFID chip or not, or what it might be used for, or how long it stays. Here's some ideas: - customer profiling in store: which items attract attention (detect when goods removed from shelf and how often before being purchased)? - customer loyalty: how often does a customer - who's bought an item of clothing here before - return wearing said item (the chip's still in there: did you think otherwise?); - turnaround time: mean time from being shelved to being checked-out; - spending patterns: cooperation between different stores to identify "their" customers by noting "friendly" RFIDed products coming into their stores; If you think any of this is fantasy, get along to an RFID conference soon....
You throw out the TCO argument a little too light-handedly. Getting support administrators, help desk and training staff for Microsoft systems is relatively cheap, because there are so many of them and so much documentations and support material. Linux and OSS support on the other hand is scarce, and more expensive to hire, and much is still very much undocumented in the way that big enterpreises and organisations like (big training manuals and serious looking books and papers from big consultancies - which is not to ignore the massive level of material available, only that CxO's of companies don't tend to hang around SourceForge, BBS and /.
The devil you know is still much more popular than the devil you can't get a handle on...
then I want it dual booting with Linux and nothing more ... ever.
IF Linux is as stable as you make out, and you want "nothing more...ever", then why not make it - or Windows for that matter - available as a chipset, like the good ol' BBC Microcompuetr of yesteryear...? Whatever the OS, why should I waste my time waiting for the system to boot up or shut down, when so many other devices have their OS's on EPROM....I just want to switch on and go.
Perhaps these new DRM actions overstep the bounds of consumer rights so far that it ensures copyrights will always be in place? What I mean is that the focus and question seems to not be, "What are the artist's musician's rights?" so much as "What rights do we even have as consumers? /.ers would be happy with that until they are the ones that get smashed up), so why on Earth not get their hands dirty on this one? Who do these guys think they are telling us how to behave? If anyone has such a right, it is the state not the market.
This is the key question. Whilst market muscle seems to be able to dictate certain aspects of our behaviour - whether regarding DRM, what authentication methods are used to access certain services, or whatever - the balance of power invariably lies with the provider dictating and requiring use of the terms that best suit their business and to hell with what the consumer might want. Public policy and public standards propose and enforce sane, safe and workable solutions to all aspects of our lives (imagine no rules of the road - yeah, I guess some
Shucks, the server's down...do we get a "get out of jail free" card?
Yeah, planes are big and complex as was the Apollo XI launcher, but nobody would accept that sort of feeble argument as a defence. Buggy is bad, period. Microsoft are starting to realise that, but open-source heads still reckon it's kinda cool to be imperfect...Cut the crap and get professional
where the identification and authentication framework is mandated by law but anyone is free to provide a conformant infrastructure. To use the so-called "Bürgerkarte" (or citizen card) you can actually use anything from a bank card with on-board chip, an eHealth card or even your mobile phone (where you authenticate via your supplier who sends a single-transaction pin as a challenge-response mechanism) and you can use any of the mechanisms for any of a range of services, including, soon, onlne banking. As all implementations all use the same authentication mechanism, you will be able to use your phone to authenticate for eHealth services, and even your card from one bank to authenticate with your account in another...and you can have as many "instances" of the "card" as you want, provided by a range of public and private sector suppliers. Many handware summpliers are getting in on the act and supplying card-readers as standard with new PCs, for those who want...What's more, as there is no personal data on-card and a hashing mechanism before any id token is passed to a eService supplier there is also the strongest personal data protection possible: no one service can scrape any personal data from a transaction http://www.cio.gv.at/identity/ and http://europa.eu.int/idabc/en/document/885/331
Surely this is what Douglas Hofstadter argued already 25 years ago in his Pulitzer winning "Gödel, Escher, Bach", when exploring the possibilities and limits of artificial intelligence?
"Hi honey, I...er...crashed the system"
Fair point. So ultimately, it is about how much the lender or orginal seller trusts the buyer/renter to respect the original intellectual property. Copy for private use is indeed OK under most rental and selling schemes. What you seem to be saying is that this approach trusts the end user so little/not at all and thus shifts the balance of power back disproportionately to the issuer?
Sure, you could photocopy the whole thing too, but it's still an ingringement of the copyright terms. Why shouldn't a library protect itself against selfish users who can't return something on time so that others can use it? And no, the fact that this is a digital copy doesn't change anything, as the library still has a license to distirbute a finite number of copies at a time. Just because it is Microsoft's DRM in question, shouldn't distract from the fact that this is a very intelligent use of the concept. There are those who'll never accept any limitations on their pirating (see "Fuck that" below) or copying but surely the key issue is policy not technology? Where it's used and how, not who's produced it?
Yeah, I receievd the threatening package too, because of my web site .
I ignored him but forwarded the dossier to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse http://www.chillingeffects.org/> who are compiling dossiers on these sorts of guys.
As a private individual, I'd be interested to see how the hell he thinks a character string in a DNS domain that can be parsed to extract the substring stealth infringes his right to....make money from the word Stealth: like that's a major contribution to society.
I should have published my book by it's working title "XML by Stealth" - might have given this guy indigestion as you can't copyright book titles!
What's different is that much of the packaged technology is sold and promoted as easy to use. You need experience and a license to drive a car. I agree there should be some basic awareness raising but there are two issues: - language: "increase the fuel line supply to the carburetor" or "push the gas pedal" - you get my drift; - scams: How many even relatively alert users spot the distinction between a phishing pop up that is a hypertexted gif image saying "Security Alert, click OK, etc..." (and just for more deception, the inidcation of the hypertext target being javascripted to display a legit site while actually pointing to a fraudster - smart that, and evil) and a real dialogue box? It's called crimial deception and I don't buy the "caveat emptor" argument: I didn't ask for the fucking stuff to pop up on my PC so I don't see why I should be on my guard 24/7