What's the big stink nowadays in digital music distribution? DRM - especially backups. If BestBuy did this right, they could sell a "warranty" for their songs - for $49.99, you can protect say 1000 songs. That way, if they are deleted or lost or whatever, you can simply use that warranty to recover them!
While the readership here at/. might see through this obvious scam, Joe Sixpack sees it as a good deal. Consumers are already used to warranties on their physical goods, and with a little bit of clever marketing I can see consumers getting taken advantage of with a "warranty" ploy.
But here's the rub: we have been raging against lock-in and recoverability for quite some time now - enough to alert the less technical consumer. BestBuy comes out with a warranty on music, and markets it right, the consumer sees the problem as fixed and buys stuff from BestBuy.
I know you were joking, but really a music warranty could be a viable business model. Let's hope it doesn't happen...
This is entirely true, and I can see the rationality behind it all. I guess I just needed to vent, as other schools in that district have firefox pre-installed on their computers, and the ones I was using did not (ant then I got a detention for using it).
The CIPA issue, at least for the firefox debate, is actually a non-issue - from the little poking around that I have done, they seem to have set up one master "gateway" server running blocking software that is accessed through a proxy. It doesn't matter what browser I use - I get the same filtered content. But telling me I HAVE to use IE? Talk about breaking someone's spirit...
Yes, incredible as it may seem, this has happened to me.
Let me repeat that:
this HAS happened to me.
Schools (K-12 at least) seem to be under the impression that students should be locked down hard from the Internet - a policy I may not agree with, but see good reason for. However, this attitude has gotten me into trouble a number of times.
For instance, one day we had some assignment to look something or another up on the Internet. Since I had my laptop there, I decided that I would use it instead (it has a Dvorak keyboard, which I like better than QWERTY). I pulled out my laptop, hooked it up to an unused RJ45 jack with a cat5e cable that I had brought from home, and did the assignment. At the end of the hour, as we were all packing up, our "sysadmin" (I use the term loosely, as I could do a better job than him while in a coma) walked in and saw my laptop. He walked over, asked my name, and then asked me to try to access a blocked webpage (myspace, if I remember correctly). I typed in the URL, and lo and behold the site came up. The sysadmin looked puzzled, thanked me, and walked away, polite as can be. The next day I found my computer account suspended and a fresh new detention slip waiting for me for circumventing school security, even though I had never done so until he asked me to visit the blocked website.
The first detention was something that I could see a faint glimmer of rationality in, but the second one I got took the cake. This one occurred a few days later, while my computer account was still suspended. I was in the lab again, using the teacher's account (we needed the internet again, and my laptop had suddenly and mysteriously been banned from connecting to the internet at school) when the sysadmin walked into the room and saw me on the computer. He talked to me teacher for a while, and I could see her trying to explain why I needed her account and his insistence that I was breaking every school rule known. Eventually, he walked over to me and asked whose account I was on, etc. and told me to get off immediately. I complied, but before he walked away I asked why my laptop could no longer connect to the network. I asked as polite as you please, no anger in my voice, no threatening actions, etc. He simply looked at me with an odd expression on his face for a few seconds and then walked off. Next day I get a slip with not one, not two, not three, but FOUR detentions for "using another person's account" and for "insubordination."
All this hyperbole brings me back to my initial point: at a different point in time, I got a detention for using a version of portable firefox from my thumbdrive.
Actually, I was thinking almost the exact same thing, only with a more ZOMG MS is EVIL!!! slant.
Depending on how they have this set up it could be a VERY effective deterrent to setting up an undergorund "pirate" internet radio station. The way I've seen these set up is you have a media player outputting to a streamer. Most of the time that media player is also using the sound systems to play the music locally as well. So I can see the "thinking" behind this being "since people are *obviously* going to try and get around DRM by streaming it to other people (who will presumably be streamripping) let's throttle bandwidth so there's not enough bandwidth to transfer an MP3!"
Call it paranoia or what you will, but that would be a very good (and baseless, unfounded, and stupid) reason to cap the network like that. Now, I'm not sure of this, but I thought I heard a story about some big fuss about digital radio and computers - apparently, radio stations thought users would "streamrip" the digital radio, using the convenient tags sent along with the songs to ID the music. So as out-there as my crazy paranoid idea may be, there IS a little bit of precedent about at least some parts of it.
Very true. Technology, as it stands now, is very open to phishing, etc. You're entirely right - the technology needs to change.
However, such failings of technology is only a part of the problem. It seems like every time I visit/. there's a new article about how some company or another just lost the SSN, bank account numbers, passwords, identification numbers, DNA signatures and biometric iris scans of another 40 million people. It seems like these companies are actually at fault for this lost data, so where do we draw the line? If you get phished you're not liable but if you lose the laptop the personal information of everyone in the state is on you are? What about a weak implementation of security?
I have the same issue: this demo does not seem to work.
I tried FireFox 1.0.6, Opera 9, and IE 6. None of them show ANYTHING aside from the "Pure Java Full Screen Demo" page. Neither the pure-Java way nor the JavaScript way work. However, in Firefox at least, I get a status bar message that reads "Applet FullScreen notinited"
Test system is Windows 2000 with FireFox 1.0.6, Opera 9, IE 6. Java IS enabled, as I can see the US clock applet. Java identifies as the "Java 2 Runtime Environment, SE v1.4.1" along with Java Web Start.
Guess that means I'm off the hook for this exploit!
yeah, you're probably right, unless text like that scrolls (at least the title) like in iPod does... then again, i dont have a cell phone, so i wouldn't know. Of course, my logic breaks down at the point where you actually try to READ the damn thing. I was just suggesting an alternitive... the world is a sad place when people can't live for five seconds without total sensory bombardment.
Plus, from what i've done with developing for cell phones (flash mostly) it seems that there is no industry standard for screen sizes... it will be a pain getting existing phones to play it right or making a set of NEW phones just for TV. it's a no-win situation.
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Here's the thing - that may be what they do.
What's the big stink nowadays in digital music distribution? DRM - especially backups. If BestBuy did this right, they could sell a "warranty" for their songs - for $49.99, you can protect say 1000 songs. That way, if they are deleted or lost or whatever, you can simply use that warranty to recover them!
While the readership here at /. might see through this obvious scam, Joe Sixpack sees it as a good deal. Consumers are already used to warranties on their physical goods, and with a little bit of clever marketing I can see consumers getting taken advantage of with a "warranty" ploy.
But here's the rub: we have been raging against lock-in and recoverability for quite some time now - enough to alert the less technical consumer. BestBuy comes out with a warranty on music, and markets it right, the consumer sees the problem as fixed and buys stuff from BestBuy.
I know you were joking, but really a music warranty could be a viable business model. Let's hope it doesn't happen...
This is entirely true, and I can see the rationality behind it all. I guess I just needed to vent, as other schools in that district have firefox pre-installed on their computers, and the ones I was using did not (ant then I got a detention for using it).
The CIPA issue, at least for the firefox debate, is actually a non-issue - from the little poking around that I have done, they seem to have set up one master "gateway" server running blocking software that is accessed through a proxy. It doesn't matter what browser I use - I get the same filtered content. But telling me I HAVE to use IE? Talk about breaking someone's spirit...
Yes, incredible as it may seem, this has happened to me.
Let me repeat that:
this HAS happened to me.
Schools (K-12 at least) seem to be under the impression that students should be locked down hard from the Internet - a policy I may not agree with, but see good reason for. However, this attitude has gotten me into trouble a number of times.
For instance, one day we had some assignment to look something or another up on the Internet. Since I had my laptop there, I decided that I would use it instead (it has a Dvorak keyboard, which I like better than QWERTY). I pulled out my laptop, hooked it up to an unused RJ45 jack with a cat5e cable that I had brought from home, and did the assignment. At the end of the hour, as we were all packing up, our "sysadmin" (I use the term loosely, as I could do a better job than him while in a coma) walked in and saw my laptop. He walked over, asked my name, and then asked me to try to access a blocked webpage (myspace, if I remember correctly). I typed in the URL, and lo and behold the site came up. The sysadmin looked puzzled, thanked me, and walked away, polite as can be. The next day I found my computer account suspended and a fresh new detention slip waiting for me for circumventing school security, even though I had never done so until he asked me to visit the blocked website.
The first detention was something that I could see a faint glimmer of rationality in, but the second one I got took the cake. This one occurred a few days later, while my computer account was still suspended. I was in the lab again, using the teacher's account (we needed the internet again, and my laptop had suddenly and mysteriously been banned from connecting to the internet at school) when the sysadmin walked into the room and saw me on the computer. He talked to me teacher for a while, and I could see her trying to explain why I needed her account and his insistence that I was breaking every school rule known. Eventually, he walked over to me and asked whose account I was on, etc. and told me to get off immediately. I complied, but before he walked away I asked why my laptop could no longer connect to the network. I asked as polite as you please, no anger in my voice, no threatening actions, etc. He simply looked at me with an odd expression on his face for a few seconds and then walked off. Next day I get a slip with not one, not two, not three, but FOUR detentions for "using another person's account" and for "insubordination."
All this hyperbole brings me back to my initial point: at a different point in time, I got a detention for using a version of portable firefox from my thumbdrive.
Scary.
Actually, I was thinking almost the exact same thing, only with a more ZOMG MS is EVIL!!! slant.
Depending on how they have this set up it could be a VERY effective deterrent to setting up an undergorund "pirate" internet radio station. The way I've seen these set up is you have a media player outputting to a streamer. Most of the time that media player is also using the sound systems to play the music locally as well. So I can see the "thinking" behind this being "since people are *obviously* going to try and get around DRM by streaming it to other people (who will presumably be streamripping) let's throttle bandwidth so there's not enough bandwidth to transfer an MP3!"
Call it paranoia or what you will, but that would be a very good (and baseless, unfounded, and stupid) reason to cap the network like that. Now, I'm not sure of this, but I thought I heard a story about some big fuss about digital radio and computers - apparently, radio stations thought users would "streamrip" the digital radio, using the convenient tags sent along with the songs to ID the music. So as out-there as my crazy paranoid idea may be, there IS a little bit of precedent about at least some parts of it.
Very true. Technology, as it stands now, is very open to phishing, etc. You're entirely right - the technology needs to change.
However, such failings of technology is only a part of the problem. It seems like every time I visit /. there's a new article about how some company or another just lost the SSN, bank account numbers, passwords, identification numbers, DNA signatures and biometric iris scans of another 40 million people. It seems like these companies are actually at fault for this lost data, so where do we draw the line? If you get phished you're not liable but if you lose the laptop the personal information of everyone in the state is on you are? What about a weak implementation of security?
I have the same issue: this demo does not seem to work.
I tried FireFox 1.0.6, Opera 9, and IE 6. None of them show ANYTHING aside from the "Pure Java Full Screen Demo" page. Neither the pure-Java way nor the JavaScript way work. However, in Firefox at least, I get a status bar message that reads "Applet FullScreen notinited"
Test system is Windows 2000 with FireFox 1.0.6, Opera 9, IE 6. Java IS enabled, as I can see the US clock applet. Java identifies as the "Java 2 Runtime Environment, SE v1.4.1" along with Java Web Start.
Guess that means I'm off the hook for this exploit!
yeah, you're probably right, unless text like that scrolls (at least the title) like in iPod does... then again, i dont have a cell phone, so i wouldn't know. Of course, my logic breaks down at the point where you actually try to READ the damn thing. I was just suggesting an alternitive... the world is a sad place when people can't live for five seconds without total sensory bombardment. Plus, from what i've done with developing for cell phones (flash mostly) it seems that there is no industry standard for screen sizes... it will be a pain getting existing phones to play it right or making a set of NEW phones just for TV. it's a no-win situation.
oooh, tv on a inch square screen! leave the TV to the TVs. an RSS feed would be much better.