Ugh, and here we run into yet another Slashdot fallacy. The old "if it can be done, then it can be done for free*" fallacy. My entire point is that it's not convenient to change CDs. That inconvenience would make stripping all of the DRM from my library about a day-long project.
And your response is to hack my CD-burner to burn.iso's to my hard drive? And then what, get another program to emulate reading the.iso's so that iTunes will import them? And then what, write a script to automate that? Instead of telling me it can be done, why don't you go do it and release it? Then you'll have a DRM-stripping tool that will be, as far as I know, more convenient than anything else available.
I think because actually designing this script robustly (so that it works on a variety of hardware/software configurations) turns this into a rather involved software development project (for one hobbyist in their spare time anyway). So the solution? Either wait for someone to write a moderately difficult script, or have everyone learn how to string together the script on their own computer. This is your idea of convenience? Do you also rebuild your linux kernel for fun? Because, you know, not everyone actually enjoys that.
I got to tell you that this is definitely going to take me a lot longer than just spending one day manually burning the CDs. Or manually burning to.iso's. So... what I'm getting at, is how exactly does this actually make stripping DRM incredibly convenient? Because that was the whole point: to make DRM-stripping fast, easy, and painless for everyone. It's just obnoxious to be that voice in the peanut gallery asserting "you can just do this, man". Yeah? Then go do it. But I maintain your solution isn't really that convenient after all (except possible for a tiny subset of people that could actually do all the scripting already), and that's the whole point. It's a lot more convenient to say something can be done, than to actually go out and do it.
-stormin
* free = no cost, including (and especially) time cost
Try this parallel. You've just been handed a voice-recognition program. You speak English text, it spits out plain text. You're skeptical that it works. So, to demonstrate how bad it is, you start up the program and immediately start spouting Hungarian into the microphone. The result? Not lines and lines of phoneticly correct syllables, but lines and lines of English gobbledygook. The conclusion? If it can't even properly handle [words] that can't possibly be correct matches, then what makes you think it'll do better with realistic [words]? The system was designed to operate in an English-only environment, why should throwing Hungarian at it prove anything about the system at all? You have no more idea now than you did before the test how well the program would actually convert English to text.
The parallel isn't exact. In this case, every word you speak in English is supposed to have an equivalent. Whereas the visual-recognition program is supposed to be determining just that: does this front-end input (from a video camera) match any of the back-end input (the stock of images). Those two activities are not analogous, but that's not where the visual recognition program breaks down.
You see the system is designed so that it will derive characteristics from data input on the back-end (e.g. the images loaded into the database of suspects) regardless of whether that's good data or bad data. You've completely circumvented the filter you're trying to test! When you put in a picture of a cartoon, it applies algorithms designed for photographs of people to a picture of a cartoon, and this part of the process is pretty much exactly the same as feeding an English dictation program Hungarian text.
In essence, you're specifically testing the one part of the system and making judgments about another. Why not just do penetration testing from root? That's another good analog. And that's why this is an utterly invalid method of testing. It tells us nothing about how accurate the system would be if we gave it good input on the back end, and then realistic input through the front end. That's the kind of test that would give us something to talk about.
So the story is that people want their music to play on iTunes. They could just use vanilla MP3, but then they have no DRM. They can't use their own DRM, because that's not compatible. So DVD Jon reverse engineered the Apple DRM, and now 3rd parties can use the Apple DRM to get their stuff into iTunes without sacrificing copy-protection?
Man, that's like a completely different story than what was in the articles I've read so far. Thanks for the input - do you have a source to this info? Also - does this mean DVD Jon has officially gone over to the dark side?
That's just not true, and you're staring at the example right now. Want to get DRM off your iTunes tracks? Burn an audio CD, and re-import. This can be done by any iTunes user - not just hackers. So the security is obviously not "shut". But at the same time if you have a library of 8,000 songs (as I do) and a couple hundred are DRMd, and you don't even know for sure which, then the step above becomes onerous. So clearly the security is not "open" either - at least not fully open.
I don't know why you have a motivation to see this issue as just on/off, open/shut but it just doesn't match reality. Your fundamental flaw is in assuming that all security breaches can be automated. Since the current iTunes breach requires physical movement (e.g. burning the new CDs) you can't automate it with just a script or something. Anyone that thinks security is just about the software and only about the software doesn't really understand security.
Especially when they start the interrogation with: "So we've finally caught up with you at last, Yosemite Sam."
If the system is designed to match faces against a database of photographs of real humans and you plug cartoons in there - what do you expect? False positives generated in this manner prove nothing about how the system would actually work. If there are a large number of false positives even when the match database is realistic, then we have a problem.
Isn't that part of the reason we have a statue of limitations? It does seem to change the moral dimensions if you are happy to watch someone profit off of your idea, then sue them once they are a nice plump target. How to you distinguish between a patent troll that's happy to watch other people do all the work and take all the risks of going to market and a company that, for whatever reason, is incapable of suing in a timely manner?
The rewards of using an idea aren't just from the IP, they're also from the marketing, from the manufacturing, and from the risk-taking. Since the patent-holder invested none of that, why should they profit from it? If the patent stealing prevented the company from doing that (e.g. if a poor inventor can't keep up with a rich manufacturing firm) that's one thing, but if a company simply sits on a patent while another company works with it - why should we reward the lack of investment?
OK, you're the second person to say this, but I'm not sure what I'm missing here. I *did* read both the AP article and the review before posting. Here's a quote from the article:
Today, songs purchased from Apple's online iTunes Music Store can't be played on portable devices made by other companies. Songs purchased from many other online music stores also won't work on iPods because they similarly use a form of copy-protection that Apple doesn't support.
So you've got songs purchased from iTunes and you can't move them to another players. But you can always move vanilla MP3 songs pretty much wherever you want. So if you strip the DRM, you can then move your purchased music to another player, to another machine, etc. without restriction. That seems to be what the reviewer was referring to as well when he said: "It's already possible to convert Music Store songs to MP3 without even using any functionality outside of iTunes"
I'm not claiming that you're wrong and I'm right. If this [this = stripping DRM from iTunes-purchased tracks] is not, in fact, what the new crack will do, then I'd like to know what it will do. However, I got my interpretation straight out of both the AP article and the review, so the problem is not me failing to read or comprehend what's written, it's a problem with the crack not being accurately and clearly characterized in the article/review.
Please, let me know what's really going on and where you got your info.
So I guess next time a teletubby or Shrek wanders through a mall, they're totally going to throw off the face-recognition software.
Is it just me, or does that seem like a stupid way to test the software? If you want to show that rudimentary disguise is an easy way to get around it, that's valid, but just messing with the sample of potential matches by throwing in cartoon characters destroys the validity of the "study".
Do you have any facts to back up this claim? I know that some legislators are lawyers, but in the past whenever I've contacted my own representatives (which I've done many times) I've been struck by how utterly clueless their staff seemed to be. (And, by the way, Senator Allen R-VA is a lawyer who, judging by his staff and subsequent form letter, has no idea what net neutrality even means.) Furthermore, law is a specialized profession. You don't just have to be a lawyer to really understand this, you have to be a lawyer with at least a rudimentary understanding of technology who also specializes in IP law (as opposed to tax law, criminal law, family law, constitutional law, etc.) How many legislators fit that bill? I think you're drastically over-simplifying this case. I find that annoying because every time some wide-eyed fanatic claims "all the legistlators are lawyers and teh lawyers are all out to get us!" he or she takes away from serious analysis of a serious problem. No one is going to take you seriously if you sling around unfounded assumptions, and that gets in the way of people like me who actually want to change things instead of just be melodramatic about them.
In any case, I visited this site: Congress Merge to do a search of how many members of congress were lawyers. I first did a search for "lawyer" in the profession field. I got 6 hits (3R, 3D, if you're curious). Then I did a search for "attorney" and got 193 hits. Assuming no overlap, we've got 199 lawyers in congress (102D to 90R, if you're curious, and I'm assuming 1I). Congress has 635 members (435 in the House, 200 in the Senate).
So out of 635 members, 199 were lawyers or attorneys at any point in the career. That's 31%. Hardly enough to say, in my opinion, that "Legislators are by and large lawyers". 31% of those are lawyers, how many do you think are IP lawyers? Sorry to rain on your simplistic world, but it's more complex than just "teh lawyers are everywhere!"
One common misconception I've come across on Slashdot a lot is that security is either open or shut. An algorithm is either secure or broken. This is not how security works, and a couple real-life examples demonstrate this. You lock the doors on your car, but someone can still just break the window to gain access. But this doesn't mean locking the doors is meaningless, it makes it harder (or more risky) for a thief to gain access to the contents of your vehicle.
The same thing applies with iTunes. The question isn't "is it possible to strip DRM", but "how easy is it to strip the DRM". I don't think, for example, that being able to burn to a CD or capture audio output is practical for most people. I have over 40 GB of music. A lot of it is burned from my CD collection, a lot of it is from my wife's collection, and some of it is downloaded from iTunes. So I've got well over 8,000 files and of those a couple hundred are DRM-protected. I honestly don't know which at this point. For me to DRM-strip them using either of those methods is going to be like a day-long project that, frankly, I don't have time for. In addition to that, I'm not sure about the sound-quality degradation in converting from MP3 to audio CD and back to MP3. Or about going from digital to analog back to digital. In any case, it would be pain in the butt to go through my entire library, and I may not be able to practically avoid some quality degradation. Yeah - DRM is already "broken", but at what cost?
If the result of DVD Jon's crack is a program what will go through my iTunes library and batch process the files to strip any DRM automatically, then we have something on our hands that matters. In addition, there are a lot of additional potential applications for DRM-stripping to make music automatically portable across various music players. If my library was nothing but vanilla MP3s with no DRM, then it wouldn't realy matter if I accessed it with iTunes (for an iPod) or Windows Media Player (for various wannabe iPods).
The effect of DRM is not to make it impossible to move your music around, it's to make it inconvenient. Convenience is not a side-issue for digital music. It's the issue. Otherwise we'd all just carry around CD players and 500-disc CD wallets. The digital music industry exists because of convenience, so any approach that not only circumvents DRM but does it painlessly is a significant improvement over DRM-skirting strategies that require additional effort from the consumer.
If you're going to talk about the cost of piracy, shouldn't you talk about the benefit as well? Singers like Weird Al claim that the internet (including so-called "illicit" trafficking of songs) has boosted his overall sales. I know that there are several bands I now support (CDs and other paraphernalia) purely because I heard their songs "illegally".
In fact, I would be buying *more* music if it weren't for how much I hate the RIAA. The main obstacle I have to overcome in parting with my hard-earned cash to support a band is the knowledge that most of that money goes to a member of the RIAA. If the RIAA wasn't such an evil empire, they'd be seeing a net profit from illegal music trafficking, in my opinion. It's great exposure for a ton of new artists.
Of course the real problem here, if you ask me, isn't about net sales. If you can download any song for free, you are going to try a lot of music you'd never listen to before. As a result the "hits"-based industry suffers. If you can only hear music played on the radio, then they can pretty much determine what groups are going to be their money-makers (just as publishing companies can largely determine what the best-sellers will be with their marketing muscle). So even if they make as much, or slightly more, money using the new model, the fact is that the money will be more evenly distributed among the artists. Not good, for an industry that depends on superstars. In addition to the possible redistribution of the income is the central fact that the RIAA members can not control the spread of music through P2P networks the way they can through top-40, etc. radio channels. More than the money, I think it's that control over what we listen to that they don't want to give up.
Of course, if that was the reason given for their lawsuits, people would revolt. So they make up this excuse about losing money to piracy even though it's pretty clear that anyone who adapts to piracy gains from it and real reason for declining music revenue is the behavior of the RIAA and it's members, not the behavior of so-called pirates.
When I read about stuff like this, it makes me annoyed. Not because any sense of fairness or ethics (companies don't have morals), but because of the wasted resources. Litigation is money spent without any production at the end. You pay a bunch of bloodsuckers to fight another bunch of bloodsuckers and either you take money from the other guy or the other guy takes money from you, but the only people guaranteed to get paid are the bloodsuckers.
Imagine if the money spent on spurious litigation went into actual R&D, capital investment for fabrication centers, engineer salaries, hell even advertising. Anything but litigation!
But as long as there's an avenue to make money this way, you can't really expect companies like SGI to behave any differently. You're providing a way for companies that are no long profitable (either because they have no product, e.g. SGI, or because they have an antiquate business model e.g. **AA) to leech off of the market instead of exiting it. Of course they're going to try to survive and not just go quietly into that good night. So, while I'm annoyed at this behavior, you have to realize that it's intellectual property laws that are the problem. We need fewer and simpler IP laws. Of course, trying to get lawmakers to pass fewer laws is like asking a competitive eater to "take it slow", and that's not even mentioning that the bloodsuckers aren't going to be happy to see yet another cash cow disappear anytime soon.
How long will it take for public outrage to really grow until real reform is made?
I'm not sure where you disagree with me on this. I agree that we're witnessing the switchover from "how things used to be" to "how all things are now", but this switchover was not instantaneous. It has taken about a generation. And thus the generation that watched it happen is, in some ways, very unique.
People born in the 50s and 60s, heck all the way into the 70s were too old for the most part to catch on in the digital age. Meanwhile, anyone born in the 90s was too young. By the time they were old enough to start messing with computers, they were everywhere.
So it's those born from, say, the late 70s to the early 90s that grew up without computers, but then embraced them early enough to really get it. I'm just remarking on how quickly that transformation took place, and how few people were around to really be a part of it.
My wife and I are about to have our first child so I'm in no mood to start saying older people aren't young! I'm 25 now, but I'll be 35 soon enough, and 45 after that. So I'm rather heavily biased not to consider those ages "old".
I can remember being 15. Sometimes it seems like forever ago, but other times I feel very little time has passed at all.
Hahahaha... I like the idea of puzzle time. My wife wants to home school, so I imagine she'll be doing something similar. She really likes math more than computers, however, so I imagine puzzle time is going to be algebra starting when they're about 5. She's still really angry about not being allowed into advanced math classes when she was younger because she was a girl (I guess some teachers are still stupid) so if our kids are anything like her, they really will be doing algebra at that point.
I guess that means that it's my duty to make sure they also know how to install RAM, identify the components of a computer, etc. I'll do my best to make sure the first computer they get to mess with is also the first computer they build.
This is completely wrong. There are international treaties, which scopes are negotiated, and some of them apply even to non signing parties, under the UN authority.
There's a difference between a law and an agreement. If you and your neighborhood all agree to paint your houses red and never blue, but then someone rebels and paints his house blue - is that action illegal? As long as you and your neighbors are all acting as autonomous individuals then it can not be illegal. Law presupposes a gov't. Without the gov't there is no law. Even if you and your neighbors get your pitchforks and torches and compel him to paint his house back to red - there's no law. There is only organized coercion. The two are not identical.
Similarly international treaties are treaties between autonomous (if not equal) nation-states. As such, they are contractual agreements but do not rise to the level of law because there is no superior entity to serve as the repository for that law.
The UN is not such an organization. No nations have given up their autonomy to the UN in the way that a US state gives autonomy to the federal gov't. Furthermore, the UN lacks the resolve, the capacity, or both to actually enforce any of its resolutions. The idea that the UN constitutes an international gov't to which member states are subject is ludicrous. The UN is a club, not a government. It has neither authority nor power to have any real influence. Darfur? Rwanda? Iraq's failure to comply with resolutions? Iran's? N. Korea's? You've got to be joking.
And as regards the matter of funding, why on earth should the US pay so much more than other nations to support an organization that doesn't represent US interests? Did you miss the recent Chavez speech? *This* is what we pay for? I'm surprised we tolerate them to meet on US soil with such ridiculous antics. And yet this is what payments look like to the UN: Under the scale of assessments adopted in 2000, other major contributors to the regular UN budget for 2001 are Japan (19.63%), Germany (9.82%), France (6.50%), the UK (5.57%), Italy (5.09%), Canada (2.57%), Spain (2.53%), and Brazil (2.39%). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nation#Financ ing)
You can understand Japan paying 20% considering they have no significant military, and thus have a vested interest in such an organization, but why are we being charged 10 times what Canada and Spain pay for an organization that is so manifestly opposed to US interests, utterly rife with corruption (oil-for-"food", and the large numbers of sexual predators wearing blue helmets while the commit rape around the world) and all-around incompetent and impotent? The UN benefits the US the least, and charges us the most - and you're surprised we're in arrears? I'm surprised we pay at all.
Excellent point. I suppose when I have kiddies (first one arrives in about 8 weeks!) I'll take that route. Not right away, of course. First things first, and pooping is more important than gaming (not to mention walking and speaking).
The trouble is that I think there probably won't be enough techies out there teaching the kiddies the ancient and revered art of actually knowing what happens inside your computer. That's not how people in my generation learned computers. We learned because we wanted to play games and DOS required at least a little fiddling. And once you started fiddling, you started wanting to know more.
But every since WinXP gamers don't really need to know much at all to game. They just point and click and the game runs (or they buy a new computer if it doesn't). So there's no hook from gaming to learning. The result? A whole generation of WoW addicts who couldn't go 1 day without touching a keyboard, but who haven't the faintest idea what's happening inside those magic boxes.
I'm glad your boyfriend is mentoring his sister. I'm actually trying to teach my little brother what's up (my sisters are actually pretty competent, if not hackers) but it's not that easy when I don't see him that often.
And it's safe to say my kids will pick it up. Their father is a decent math major and their mother is an excellent math/comp sci dual major - but what about all those people out there who aren't hard core, but who know how to do basic trouble shooting and then go into other fields? Tons of people my age learned the basics of computing, then went into non-computing fields. Will they really be interested enough to teach their kids? I doubt it.
Do you habitually just jump on the end of a post and pretend to make a counterpoint to a figment of your imagination, or you are just making an exception in my case? Contrary to the impression you leave with your quotation marks (watch where you sling those things!) I never argued that FPS/space shooters were either necessary or sufficient for being "'good' or 'comfortable' with computers" (note that what I put in quotes can actually be found in your post*)
My point was simply that generations prior to ours have a hard time grasping computer concepts. I picked, purely for fun, two gaming-related examples. There are plenty others. If you've ever done any support work in your life, you've met the older men and women who want you to explain how to burn a CD and take line-by-line notes. The result? They can now burn a CD, as long as it's only the same type (e.g. data vs. music) using the exact same software on the same computer. Swap up Nero for Roxio or move the shortcuts to the burning software - and they are lost.
The generation following ours, as far as I can tell, has taken to computers like a duck to water, as it were. Not *all* kids, of course, but by and large they figure stuff out. They blog, surf, rip, burn, etc. with some degree of competence. However this competence is only superficial. Ask a lot of these kids anything about how the technology works and you'll get a blank stare. It just works.
So, generationally speaking, it seems as though the generations that were exposed to computers late enough in life to not take them for granted, but early enough in life to adapt may be a unique generation.
But don't let my questions get in the way of you sounding clever by any means.
-stormin
* I don't always use quotation marks to quote people, but the only other use I think is valid is as a literary device when describing someone speaking, and when there's little chance of the quote being misunderstood (as in my reference to "golly gee willikers!" in my first post on this topic).
There are other issues as well. For the most part the concept of friendship is pretty unambiguous in meatspace. But a lot of behavior that would be considered sociopathic (e.g. theft of property) is not necessarily sociopathic on the net.
I suppose this may end up being a non-issue as courts have started to recognize digital property as real property with real wealth, but as the EVE scams demonstrate, there are a plenty of people who engage in behavior online without shame or fear of recrimination who would, at the very least, expect much harsher social consequences in real life.
Consider all the trolls, griefers, and flamers out there. What does this sort of behavior mean for people who grow up seeing this as not something new and different, but as much a part of life as people who flick you off in traffic? And, perhaps more interesting, not what are the cross-generational divides that may result, but the cross-cultural divides? As S. Korea, the US and first-world nations barrel into the digital age, how will citizens of these nations interact with people from countries where internet access is still too sporadic and rare to support this kind of social transformation?
I have to admit that standing on what I consider to be the precipice of people who grew up without PCs (my family's first internet-connected PC didn't arrive until I was 16), I'm a little apprehensive of how I will fit in with younger generations. My father (older generation) is pretty much incapable of learning FPS controls, or manipulating a space ship in 3d (ala Descent). I was able to get a grip on the controls, but it was hard for me. My younger brother (11 years younger) was literally flying spaceships through 3d space about as well as I could when he was 3 years old. The creepy thing is that no matter how adept he is at playing video games and taking them for granted he still (at 14) can't really tell the difference between a computer and a monitor. What's life going to look like when these guys are running the show? Is our generation the only one that will really understand computer internals en masse?
Ive had this question in my mind since a loong time, but is it possible legally for any one country to claim things in space as part of their country?
This is kind of a silly question, but a revealing one. Citizens of a nation are subject to the laws of that nation pretty unambiguously. No matter what you want to do, your actions can be held against a codified standard of conduct and found to be legal or illegal. But this is precisely because an individual citizen is without question subject to the rules of his gov't (by philosophy if you like, by force if you reject that). They can't even really just leave the country and abandon their citizen ship (try killing someone in the U.S., fleeing to Canada, and trying to switch citizenships to avoid prosecution.)
Nations, however, are not analogous to citizens. There is no international gov't that all nations are subject to. There's no universal, international authority. The U.N. lacks both the philosophical, legal, and military credibility to serve that role and there are no other close competitors. So, without a meta-national institution to make laws to govern nations, there's really no such thing as international law that all nations are subject to.
The international law that does exist is a very different beast. Take the E.U. is an example. It does provide international law to member nations, but as such it is just a contract between nations, and doesn't rise to the level of having power over other nations. So the E.U. could make it illegal for E.U. nations to claim part of space, but not for the US (or Canada, etc.) There's really no such thing as international law other than ad hoc treaties between nations.
So it seems pretty obvious that, at this point, there's no government to deem seizing part of space as national territory. It's neither illegal nor legal at this point. The fact that neither the US nor any other nation has attempted to claim territory out there (as far as I know) reflects the simple fact that no one has the resources to waste attempting to defend such a claim. And, as with practically all extra-legal disputes - any such dispute over territorial claims would likely eventually come down to might-makes-right.
It's not as though extra-terrestial disputes are uniquely a-legal, however. It's pretty hard to say that any international action on the part of one nation or another is illegal. It may violate treaties, but that's not the same thing as breaking a law. Wars, invasions, annexations... none of these things are illegal in the same sense that theft, murder and tax evasion are.
Summary: international law not only doesn't exist, it's an oxymoron. In order to have nations subject to binding laws would require the creation of - at the minimum - a federation of those nations that would effectively create a new nation.
FTA: There is a misconception that social networking is the exclusive domain of teenagers, but this analysis confirms that the appeal of social networking sites is far broader.
Of course it's not just teens. It's also all the creepy older people that need to hang out with teens. And I'm not really talking about the sexual predators, I'm just talking about the 35 year olds with tattoos and piercings clinging desperately to what's left of their diminishing youth.
So in a way, this misconception that social networking is for teens is precisely why you get so many creepy older people there - they want to be with the teens. Ironically, now that we have stories coming out like this, the social respectability of these sites will increase and we might to see some normal adults. So the creepy adults are paving the way for broad general acceptance. Not to mention the kids who get started with social sites early and then just grow up with them.
Does anyone else want to pull their hair out whenever the news media reports on tech with such a "golly gee willickers!" tone?
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh, and here we run into yet another Slashdot fallacy. The old "if it can be done, then it can be done for free*" fallacy. My entire point is that it's not convenient to change CDs. That inconvenience would make stripping all of the DRM from my library about a day-long project.
.iso's to my hard drive? And then what, get another program to emulate reading the .iso's so that iTunes will import them? And then what, write a script to automate that? Instead of telling me it can be done, why don't you go do it and release it? Then you'll have a DRM-stripping tool that will be, as far as I know, more convenient than anything else available.
.iso's. So... what I'm getting at, is how exactly does this actually make stripping DRM incredibly convenient? Because that was the whole point: to make DRM-stripping fast, easy, and painless for everyone. It's just obnoxious to be that voice in the peanut gallery asserting "you can just do this, man". Yeah? Then go do it. But I maintain your solution isn't really that convenient after all (except possible for a tiny subset of people that could actually do all the scripting already), and that's the whole point. It's a lot more convenient to say something can be done, than to actually go out and do it.
And your response is to hack my CD-burner to burn
I think because actually designing this script robustly (so that it works on a variety of hardware/software configurations) turns this into a rather involved software development project (for one hobbyist in their spare time anyway). So the solution? Either wait for someone to write a moderately difficult script, or have everyone learn how to string together the script on their own computer. This is your idea of convenience? Do you also rebuild your linux kernel for fun? Because, you know, not everyone actually enjoys that.
I got to tell you that this is definitely going to take me a lot longer than just spending one day manually burning the CDs. Or manually burning to
-stormin
* free = no cost, including (and especially) time cost
Try this parallel. You've just been handed a voice-recognition program. You speak English text, it spits out plain text. You're skeptical that it works. So, to demonstrate how bad it is, you start up the program and immediately start spouting Hungarian into the microphone. The result? Not lines and lines of phoneticly correct syllables, but lines and lines of English gobbledygook. The conclusion? If it can't even properly handle [words] that can't possibly be correct matches, then what makes you think it'll do better with realistic [words]? The system was designed to operate in an English-only environment, why should throwing Hungarian at it prove anything about the system at all? You have no more idea now than you did before the test how well the program would actually convert English to text.
The parallel isn't exact. In this case, every word you speak in English is supposed to have an equivalent. Whereas the visual-recognition program is supposed to be determining just that: does this front-end input (from a video camera) match any of the back-end input (the stock of images). Those two activities are not analogous, but that's not where the visual recognition program breaks down.
You see the system is designed so that it will derive characteristics from data input on the back-end (e.g. the images loaded into the database of suspects) regardless of whether that's good data or bad data. You've completely circumvented the filter you're trying to test! When you put in a picture of a cartoon, it applies algorithms designed for photographs of people to a picture of a cartoon, and this part of the process is pretty much exactly the same as feeding an English dictation program Hungarian text.
In essence, you're specifically testing the one part of the system and making judgments about another. Why not just do penetration testing from root? That's another good analog. And that's why this is an utterly invalid method of testing. It tells us nothing about how accurate the system would be if we gave it good input on the back end, and then realistic input through the front end. That's the kind of test that would give us something to talk about.
-stormin
So the story is that people want their music to play on iTunes. They could just use vanilla MP3, but then they have no DRM. They can't use their own DRM, because that's not compatible. So DVD Jon reverse engineered the Apple DRM, and now 3rd parties can use the Apple DRM to get their stuff into iTunes without sacrificing copy-protection?
Man, that's like a completely different story than what was in the articles I've read so far. Thanks for the input - do you have a source to this info? Also - does this mean DVD Jon has officially gone over to the dark side?
-stormin
That's just not true, and you're staring at the example right now. Want to get DRM off your iTunes tracks? Burn an audio CD, and re-import. This can be done by any iTunes user - not just hackers. So the security is obviously not "shut". But at the same time if you have a library of 8,000 songs (as I do) and a couple hundred are DRMd, and you don't even know for sure which, then the step above becomes onerous. So clearly the security is not "open" either - at least not fully open.
I don't know why you have a motivation to see this issue as just on/off, open/shut but it just doesn't match reality. Your fundamental flaw is in assuming that all security breaches can be automated. Since the current iTunes breach requires physical movement (e.g. burning the new CDs) you can't automate it with just a script or something. Anyone that thinks security is just about the software and only about the software doesn't really understand security.
-stormin
If the system is designed to match faces against a database of photographs of real humans and you plug cartoons in there - what do you expect? False positives generated in this manner prove nothing about how the system would actually work. If there are a large number of false positives even when the match database is realistic, then we have a problem.
-stormin
Isn't that part of the reason we have a statue of limitations? It does seem to change the moral dimensions if you are happy to watch someone profit off of your idea, then sue them once they are a nice plump target. How to you distinguish between a patent troll that's happy to watch other people do all the work and take all the risks of going to market and a company that, for whatever reason, is incapable of suing in a timely manner?
The rewards of using an idea aren't just from the IP, they're also from the marketing, from the manufacturing, and from the risk-taking. Since the patent-holder invested none of that, why should they profit from it? If the patent stealing prevented the company from doing that (e.g. if a poor inventor can't keep up with a rich manufacturing firm) that's one thing, but if a company simply sits on a patent while another company works with it - why should we reward the lack of investment?
-stormin
So you've got songs purchased from iTunes and you can't move them to another players. But you can always move vanilla MP3 songs pretty much wherever you want. So if you strip the DRM, you can then move your purchased music to another player, to another machine, etc. without restriction. That seems to be what the reviewer was referring to as well when he said: "It's already possible to convert Music Store songs to MP3 without even using any functionality outside of iTunes"
I'm not claiming that you're wrong and I'm right. If this [this = stripping DRM from iTunes-purchased tracks] is not, in fact, what the new crack will do, then I'd like to know what it will do. However, I got my interpretation straight out of both the AP article and the review, so the problem is not me failing to read or comprehend what's written, it's a problem with the crack not being accurately and clearly characterized in the article/review.
Please, let me know what's really going on and where you got your info.
-stormin
So I guess next time a teletubby or Shrek wanders through a mall, they're totally going to throw off the face-recognition software.
Is it just me, or does that seem like a stupid way to test the software? If you want to show that rudimentary disguise is an easy way to get around it, that's valid, but just messing with the sample of potential matches by throwing in cartoon characters destroys the validity of the "study".
-stormin
Do you have any facts to back up this claim? I know that some legislators are lawyers, but in the past whenever I've contacted my own representatives (which I've done many times) I've been struck by how utterly clueless their staff seemed to be. (And, by the way, Senator Allen R-VA is a lawyer who, judging by his staff and subsequent form letter, has no idea what net neutrality even means.) Furthermore, law is a specialized profession. You don't just have to be a lawyer to really understand this, you have to be a lawyer with at least a rudimentary understanding of technology who also specializes in IP law (as opposed to tax law, criminal law, family law, constitutional law, etc.) How many legislators fit that bill? I think you're drastically over-simplifying this case. I find that annoying because every time some wide-eyed fanatic claims "all the legistlators are lawyers and teh lawyers are all out to get us!" he or she takes away from serious analysis of a serious problem. No one is going to take you seriously if you sling around unfounded assumptions, and that gets in the way of people like me who actually want to change things instead of just be melodramatic about them.
In any case, I visited this site: Congress Merge to do a search of how many members of congress were lawyers. I first did a search for "lawyer" in the profession field. I got 6 hits (3R, 3D, if you're curious). Then I did a search for "attorney" and got 193 hits. Assuming no overlap, we've got 199 lawyers in congress (102D to 90R, if you're curious, and I'm assuming 1I). Congress has 635 members (435 in the House, 200 in the Senate).
So out of 635 members, 199 were lawyers or attorneys at any point in the career. That's 31%. Hardly enough to say, in my opinion, that "Legislators are by and large lawyers". 31% of those are lawyers, how many do you think are IP lawyers? Sorry to rain on your simplistic world, but it's more complex than just "teh lawyers are everywhere!"
-stormin
One common misconception I've come across on Slashdot a lot is that security is either open or shut. An algorithm is either secure or broken. This is not how security works, and a couple real-life examples demonstrate this. You lock the doors on your car, but someone can still just break the window to gain access. But this doesn't mean locking the doors is meaningless, it makes it harder (or more risky) for a thief to gain access to the contents of your vehicle.
The same thing applies with iTunes. The question isn't "is it possible to strip DRM", but "how easy is it to strip the DRM". I don't think, for example, that being able to burn to a CD or capture audio output is practical for most people. I have over 40 GB of music. A lot of it is burned from my CD collection, a lot of it is from my wife's collection, and some of it is downloaded from iTunes. So I've got well over 8,000 files and of those a couple hundred are DRM-protected. I honestly don't know which at this point. For me to DRM-strip them using either of those methods is going to be like a day-long project that, frankly, I don't have time for. In addition to that, I'm not sure about the sound-quality degradation in converting from MP3 to audio CD and back to MP3. Or about going from digital to analog back to digital. In any case, it would be pain in the butt to go through my entire library, and I may not be able to practically avoid some quality degradation. Yeah - DRM is already "broken", but at what cost?
If the result of DVD Jon's crack is a program what will go through my iTunes library and batch process the files to strip any DRM automatically, then we have something on our hands that matters. In addition, there are a lot of additional potential applications for DRM-stripping to make music automatically portable across various music players. If my library was nothing but vanilla MP3s with no DRM, then it wouldn't realy matter if I accessed it with iTunes (for an iPod) or Windows Media Player (for various wannabe iPods).
The effect of DRM is not to make it impossible to move your music around, it's to make it inconvenient. Convenience is not a side-issue for digital music. It's the issue. Otherwise we'd all just carry around CD players and 500-disc CD wallets. The digital music industry exists because of convenience, so any approach that not only circumvents DRM but does it painlessly is a significant improvement over DRM-skirting strategies that require additional effort from the consumer.
-stormin
If you're going to talk about the cost of piracy, shouldn't you talk about the benefit as well? Singers like Weird Al claim that the internet (including so-called "illicit" trafficking of songs) has boosted his overall sales. I know that there are several bands I now support (CDs and other paraphernalia) purely because I heard their songs "illegally".
In fact, I would be buying *more* music if it weren't for how much I hate the RIAA. The main obstacle I have to overcome in parting with my hard-earned cash to support a band is the knowledge that most of that money goes to a member of the RIAA. If the RIAA wasn't such an evil empire, they'd be seeing a net profit from illegal music trafficking, in my opinion. It's great exposure for a ton of new artists.
Of course the real problem here, if you ask me, isn't about net sales. If you can download any song for free, you are going to try a lot of music you'd never listen to before. As a result the "hits"-based industry suffers. If you can only hear music played on the radio, then they can pretty much determine what groups are going to be their money-makers (just as publishing companies can largely determine what the best-sellers will be with their marketing muscle). So even if they make as much, or slightly more, money using the new model, the fact is that the money will be more evenly distributed among the artists. Not good, for an industry that depends on superstars. In addition to the possible redistribution of the income is the central fact that the RIAA members can not control the spread of music through P2P networks the way they can through top-40, etc. radio channels. More than the money, I think it's that control over what we listen to that they don't want to give up.
Of course, if that was the reason given for their lawsuits, people would revolt. So they make up this excuse about losing money to piracy even though it's pretty clear that anyone who adapts to piracy gains from it and real reason for declining music revenue is the behavior of the RIAA and it's members, not the behavior of so-called pirates.
-stormin
When I read about stuff like this, it makes me annoyed. Not because any sense of fairness or ethics (companies don't have morals), but because of the wasted resources. Litigation is money spent without any production at the end. You pay a bunch of bloodsuckers to fight another bunch of bloodsuckers and either you take money from the other guy or the other guy takes money from you, but the only people guaranteed to get paid are the bloodsuckers.
Imagine if the money spent on spurious litigation went into actual R&D, capital investment for fabrication centers, engineer salaries, hell even advertising. Anything but litigation!
But as long as there's an avenue to make money this way, you can't really expect companies like SGI to behave any differently. You're providing a way for companies that are no long profitable (either because they have no product, e.g. SGI, or because they have an antiquate business model e.g. **AA) to leech off of the market instead of exiting it. Of course they're going to try to survive and not just go quietly into that good night. So, while I'm annoyed at this behavior, you have to realize that it's intellectual property laws that are the problem. We need fewer and simpler IP laws. Of course, trying to get lawmakers to pass fewer laws is like asking a competitive eater to "take it slow", and that's not even mentioning that the bloodsuckers aren't going to be happy to see yet another cash cow disappear anytime soon.
How long will it take for public outrage to really grow until real reform is made?
-stormin
On the main page this article title is "Chines Bans Internet Rumors". Want to fix that?
A little polemical, a little over-the-top, but disturbingly insightful nonetheless.
-stormin
That's a brilliant metaphor and I think I will steal and use it myself.
;-)
I'll try to give you credit if I get famous with it!
-stormin
I'm not sure where you disagree with me on this. I agree that we're witnessing the switchover from "how things used to be" to "how all things are now", but this switchover was not instantaneous. It has taken about a generation. And thus the generation that watched it happen is, in some ways, very unique.
People born in the 50s and 60s, heck all the way into the 70s were too old for the most part to catch on in the digital age. Meanwhile, anyone born in the 90s was too young. By the time they were old enough to start messing with computers, they were everywhere.
So it's those born from, say, the late 70s to the early 90s that grew up without computers, but then embraced them early enough to really get it. I'm just remarking on how quickly that transformation took place, and how few people were around to really be a part of it.
-stormin
My wife and I are about to have our first child so I'm in no mood to start saying older people aren't young! I'm 25 now, but I'll be 35 soon enough, and 45 after that. So I'm rather heavily biased not to consider those ages "old".
I can remember being 15. Sometimes it seems like forever ago, but other times I feel very little time has passed at all.
-stormin
35 is only "older" when it's 35-trying-to-look-like-15.
-stormin
Hahahaha... I like the idea of puzzle time. My wife wants to home school, so I imagine she'll be doing something similar. She really likes math more than computers, however, so I imagine puzzle time is going to be algebra starting when they're about 5. She's still really angry about not being allowed into advanced math classes when she was younger because she was a girl (I guess some teachers are still stupid) so if our kids are anything like her, they really will be doing algebra at that point.
I guess that means that it's my duty to make sure they also know how to install RAM, identify the components of a computer, etc. I'll do my best to make sure the first computer they get to mess with is also the first computer they build.
-stormin
This is completely wrong. There are international treaties, which scopes are negotiated, and some of them apply even to non signing parties, under the UN authority.
c ing)
There's a difference between a law and an agreement. If you and your neighborhood all agree to paint your houses red and never blue, but then someone rebels and paints his house blue - is that action illegal? As long as you and your neighbors are all acting as autonomous individuals then it can not be illegal. Law presupposes a gov't. Without the gov't there is no law. Even if you and your neighbors get your pitchforks and torches and compel him to paint his house back to red - there's no law. There is only organized coercion. The two are not identical.
Similarly international treaties are treaties between autonomous (if not equal) nation-states. As such, they are contractual agreements but do not rise to the level of law because there is no superior entity to serve as the repository for that law.
The UN is not such an organization. No nations have given up their autonomy to the UN in the way that a US state gives autonomy to the federal gov't. Furthermore, the UN lacks the resolve, the capacity, or both to actually enforce any of its resolutions. The idea that the UN constitutes an international gov't to which member states are subject is ludicrous. The UN is a club, not a government. It has neither authority nor power to have any real influence. Darfur? Rwanda? Iraq's failure to comply with resolutions? Iran's? N. Korea's? You've got to be joking.
And as regards the matter of funding, why on earth should the US pay so much more than other nations to support an organization that doesn't represent US interests? Did you miss the recent Chavez speech? *This* is what we pay for? I'm surprised we tolerate them to meet on US soil with such ridiculous antics. And yet this is what payments look like to the UN: Under the scale of assessments adopted in 2000, other major contributors to the regular UN budget for 2001 are Japan (19.63%), Germany (9.82%), France (6.50%), the UK (5.57%), Italy (5.09%), Canada (2.57%), Spain (2.53%), and Brazil (2.39%). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nation#Finan
You can understand Japan paying 20% considering they have no significant military, and thus have a vested interest in such an organization, but why are we being charged 10 times what Canada and Spain pay for an organization that is so manifestly opposed to US interests, utterly rife with corruption (oil-for-"food", and the large numbers of sexual predators wearing blue helmets while the commit rape around the world) and all-around incompetent and impotent? The UN benefits the US the least, and charges us the most - and you're surprised we're in arrears? I'm surprised we pay at all.
-stormin
Yes, unless we start training the kiddies.
Excellent point. I suppose when I have kiddies (first one arrives in about 8 weeks!) I'll take that route. Not right away, of course. First things first, and pooping is more important than gaming (not to mention walking and speaking).
The trouble is that I think there probably won't be enough techies out there teaching the kiddies the ancient and revered art of actually knowing what happens inside your computer. That's not how people in my generation learned computers. We learned because we wanted to play games and DOS required at least a little fiddling. And once you started fiddling, you started wanting to know more.
But every since WinXP gamers don't really need to know much at all to game. They just point and click and the game runs (or they buy a new computer if it doesn't). So there's no hook from gaming to learning. The result? A whole generation of WoW addicts who couldn't go 1 day without touching a keyboard, but who haven't the faintest idea what's happening inside those magic boxes.
I'm glad your boyfriend is mentoring his sister. I'm actually trying to teach my little brother what's up (my sisters are actually pretty competent, if not hackers) but it's not that easy when I don't see him that often.
And it's safe to say my kids will pick it up. Their father is a decent math major and their mother is an excellent math/comp sci dual major - but what about all those people out there who aren't hard core, but who know how to do basic trouble shooting and then go into other fields? Tons of people my age learned the basics of computing, then went into non-computing fields. Will they really be interested enough to teach their kids? I doubt it.
-stormin
Do you habitually just jump on the end of a post and pretend to make a counterpoint to a figment of your imagination, or you are just making an exception in my case? Contrary to the impression you leave with your quotation marks (watch where you sling those things!) I never argued that FPS/space shooters were either necessary or sufficient for being "'good' or 'comfortable' with computers" (note that what I put in quotes can actually be found in your post*)
My point was simply that generations prior to ours have a hard time grasping computer concepts. I picked, purely for fun, two gaming-related examples. There are plenty others. If you've ever done any support work in your life, you've met the older men and women who want you to explain how to burn a CD and take line-by-line notes. The result? They can now burn a CD, as long as it's only the same type (e.g. data vs. music) using the exact same software on the same computer. Swap up Nero for Roxio or move the shortcuts to the burning software - and they are lost.
The generation following ours, as far as I can tell, has taken to computers like a duck to water, as it were. Not *all* kids, of course, but by and large they figure stuff out. They blog, surf, rip, burn, etc. with some degree of competence. However this competence is only superficial. Ask a lot of these kids anything about how the technology works and you'll get a blank stare. It just works.
So, generationally speaking, it seems as though the generations that were exposed to computers late enough in life to not take them for granted, but early enough in life to adapt may be a unique generation.
But don't let my questions get in the way of you sounding clever by any means.
-stormin
* I don't always use quotation marks to quote people, but the only other use I think is valid is as a literary device when describing someone speaking, and when there's little chance of the quote being misunderstood (as in my reference to "golly gee willikers!" in my first post on this topic).
There are other issues as well. For the most part the concept of friendship is pretty unambiguous in meatspace. But a lot of behavior that would be considered sociopathic (e.g. theft of property) is not necessarily sociopathic on the net.
I suppose this may end up being a non-issue as courts have started to recognize digital property as real property with real wealth, but as the EVE scams demonstrate, there are a plenty of people who engage in behavior online without shame or fear of recrimination who would, at the very least, expect much harsher social consequences in real life.
Consider all the trolls, griefers, and flamers out there. What does this sort of behavior mean for people who grow up seeing this as not something new and different, but as much a part of life as people who flick you off in traffic? And, perhaps more interesting, not what are the cross-generational divides that may result, but the cross-cultural divides? As S. Korea, the US and first-world nations barrel into the digital age, how will citizens of these nations interact with people from countries where internet access is still too sporadic and rare to support this kind of social transformation?
I have to admit that standing on what I consider to be the precipice of people who grew up without PCs (my family's first internet-connected PC didn't arrive until I was 16), I'm a little apprehensive of how I will fit in with younger generations. My father (older generation) is pretty much incapable of learning FPS controls, or manipulating a space ship in 3d (ala Descent). I was able to get a grip on the controls, but it was hard for me. My younger brother (11 years younger) was literally flying spaceships through 3d space about as well as I could when he was 3 years old. The creepy thing is that no matter how adept he is at playing video games and taking them for granted he still (at 14) can't really tell the difference between a computer and a monitor. What's life going to look like when these guys are running the show? Is our generation the only one that will really understand computer internals en masse?
-stormin
Ive had this question in my mind since a loong time, but is it possible legally for any one country to claim things in space as part of their country?
This is kind of a silly question, but a revealing one. Citizens of a nation are subject to the laws of that nation pretty unambiguously. No matter what you want to do, your actions can be held against a codified standard of conduct and found to be legal or illegal. But this is precisely because an individual citizen is without question subject to the rules of his gov't (by philosophy if you like, by force if you reject that). They can't even really just leave the country and abandon their citizen ship (try killing someone in the U.S., fleeing to Canada, and trying to switch citizenships to avoid prosecution.)
Nations, however, are not analogous to citizens. There is no international gov't that all nations are subject to. There's no universal, international authority. The U.N. lacks both the philosophical, legal, and military credibility to serve that role and there are no other close competitors. So, without a meta-national institution to make laws to govern nations, there's really no such thing as international law that all nations are subject to.
The international law that does exist is a very different beast. Take the E.U. is an example. It does provide international law to member nations, but as such it is just a contract between nations, and doesn't rise to the level of having power over other nations. So the E.U. could make it illegal for E.U. nations to claim part of space, but not for the US (or Canada, etc.) There's really no such thing as international law other than ad hoc treaties between nations.
So it seems pretty obvious that, at this point, there's no government to deem seizing part of space as national territory. It's neither illegal nor legal at this point. The fact that neither the US nor any other nation has attempted to claim territory out there (as far as I know) reflects the simple fact that no one has the resources to waste attempting to defend such a claim. And, as with practically all extra-legal disputes - any such dispute over territorial claims would likely eventually come down to might-makes-right.
It's not as though extra-terrestial disputes are uniquely a-legal, however. It's pretty hard to say that any international action on the part of one nation or another is illegal. It may violate treaties, but that's not the same thing as breaking a law. Wars, invasions, annexations... none of these things are illegal in the same sense that theft, murder and tax evasion are.
Summary: international law not only doesn't exist, it's an oxymoron. In order to have nations subject to binding laws would require the creation of - at the minimum - a federation of those nations that would effectively create a new nation.
-stormin
FTA: There is a misconception that social networking is the exclusive domain of teenagers, but this analysis confirms that the appeal of social networking sites is far broader.
Of course it's not just teens. It's also all the creepy older people that need to hang out with teens. And I'm not really talking about the sexual predators, I'm just talking about the 35 year olds with tattoos and piercings clinging desperately to what's left of their diminishing youth.
So in a way, this misconception that social networking is for teens is precisely why you get so many creepy older people there - they want to be with the teens. Ironically, now that we have stories coming out like this, the social respectability of these sites will increase and we might to see some normal adults. So the creepy adults are paving the way for broad general acceptance. Not to mention the kids who get started with social sites early and then just grow up with them.
Does anyone else want to pull their hair out whenever the news media reports on tech with such a "golly gee willickers!" tone?
-stormin