Three things: 1) it's not what something costs but what it is worth to someone else 2) Speaking as someone who has tried publishing my novel on an ebook, why shouldn't I be able to charge what I see as a fit price for my years of work? No-one else has to buy it if they don't think it is worth it.If I sell 0 because it is too expensive then that is my choice. 3) this investigation is about price fixing not about the actual cost
Agreed, but that requires you to browse at -1 which most(/many/some?) experienced members of/. will do for just this reason, but it is not the public face of the system (i.e. an un-logged in user)and as browse at -1 you might as well have no moderation system at all; except that trying to get highly moderated encourages some good behaviour. TBH I think/. has it at a good level particularly with the meta-moderation system which seems a good safety net, but i was just trying to disagree with the idea that the majority opinion is the correct one, nothing worthwhile is either easy or popular.
The problem with the tyranny of the majority in this case is that descenting views are able to be suppressed by the moderation system. That is an unpopular view cannot be heard. This would be like a suffragette being boo'd into silence, or the leading political party rounding up supporters of the minority opposition and locking them up. Not good, really not good.
"There are 7 billion people on the planet." By what definition? Yes I agree there are too many people for them all to live at a western standard of liviing with current technology. No 7 Billion can clearly be supported by the planet because they are! Sure some are starving but in those environments people are breeding fast enough to replace those that die from it. Is this pleasant? No but it is what is happening. Currently farming is not exploiting all the square footage it could - how many towns/cities are built on good farmland that could be producing crops? People are eating too much meat, if they ate vegetables instead we could support more people still. Do I think any of this is good, no, do I think the population will continue to increase for the moment? Yes because how am I going to stop other people from breeding and more importantly do I have the right to tell them that? Ethically can I choose to prevent people from breeding for the greater good? That way leads to dangerous thinking. True the current situation will destroy the environment if it carries on the way it does but we could do that with 1 billion people if we carried on chopping down rain forests and strip mining for coal. If everyone demands that we have economic growth at positive percentages and that is what makes us unsustainable not the number of people. I'm convinced we could support 10 billion if we were either prepared to screw the enviroment completely for our advantage or is we would live at much lower energy usage per capita; We just can't have both.
You say that, it's a thought experiment of mine, if copyright went tomorrow what would happen? Would teenagers stop taking their dates to a movie? I think not. Would I stop going to the cinema for the experience? Nope their sound system and screen is still far better than my home one, so why would I? Would I stop going to concerts? Would I continue to buy CDs for the music I like? Probably, because I want that band to make more music and I don't trust DRM'd music. Would I still buy books? Watch adverts? Would I still need a Sky subscription because standard TV didn't show all I wanted to watch and tormenting has its own issues. Yes to all. Now new artists would likely have a harder time - unless they used DRM (in a sensible way otherwise it would work against their interests). DVDs would have to be sold much closer to cost and steaming services would have to offer good service better than the freeloaders. I actually suspect under that model more money would end up going to artists because the media companies would not be able to charge for their services. Big movies are mostly paid for by cinema takings (Which I don't think would go down drastically, let's not forget cinemas could still eject people for trying to record the film.) The rest of the money tends to come from DVD sales which may get bitten into but if things like netflix haven't killed that then I don't know what will. People do pay for good content well delivered because then you pay for the service not the content. People have always wanted to "be on the stage" countless people still want to direct films, not because they want to make money but because they want to climb that mountain and I think that by removing the studios from the equation you'd lose things like Avatar but gain a million fan re-tellings of Star Wars some of which would undoubtedly be bloody brilliant. I honestly think as a society we'd gain.
Okay this post is getting way too long so let's simplify it to three main points. 1) Availability of an unencrypted sensor. If you're right and sensors in the future continue to be in a form that the hobbyist can interface to them then I agree, no problem. If however they all start to use protocols like CSI2 that the hobbyist cannot realistically interface to then there will be problems. If they use any high speed interface that scrambles the data for noise spreading or just simply as a way to embed sync codes i.e. something like 8b10b encoding then without the datasheet (that will not be forthcoming) then again hobbyists have a problem.
2) The availability of components. I think on this one you and I will just have to differ because I see so many components that we use on a day to day basis that are not available from a Farnell catalogue. I see friends who work in the industry who cannot make the systems they want to because they cannot source the parts they want. I see the number of devices out there growing and getting ever more integrated and technical, but the technology in the RS catalogue staying pretty much the same. But your mileage clearly varies.
3) Watermarking use cases I saw your earlier post, that does not render it totally invalid. It renders it invalid if used poorly. All that is needed is that there is a competantly applied watermark. Paramount for example could make sure that all content it gives out to anyone whatsoever has its watermark embedded. Then anytime that watermark is seen somewhere it shouldn't it can be set up to automatically report the issue. because all content contains this watermark there is no differencing possible. Now you could then add region and network specific watermarks to narrow the source of the infringement down further, and these could be overcome by the methods you suggest, but if you have a standard watermark consistently applied - and let's face it that's the easiest and laziest solution - then there's nothing we can do to remove it. (Except detect the frames it is on, remove those and interpolate but again that could be tricky if the job is done competently by the producer).
"unless you prevent private individuals from obtaining electronic parts, there is nothing stopping you from building your own digitization device, other then the know-how. It will not be pretty, it will not be portable, it will not be compact, but it will do the job of circumventing DRM"
Okay, look at the raspberry pie project. one of the drivers for that project and what makes it so cool is exactly that these parts are stopping becoming available to the general public. You cannot buy a BCM2835, fine that's broadcom, but can you as a consumer buy a Qualcomm chip, or a CSR bluetooth chip, even if you could (but I believe you can't) they will not release all the software needed to drive the hardware and reverse engineering it is something no-one has managed yet. The large corporations won't sell less than multiple thousands simply because it's not worth supporting the small producer. Some large corporations like TI might still sell their beagle boards which will help, but can you rely on that? It's getting harder with every generation. Please try and buy a raw camera module. Try and build your own PCB using parts with a ball pitch so fine that you need professional level reflow ovens to plonk the parts down(by the way modern parts are already at this stage and it's getting worse all the time too). So it's not about preventing people from doing it, it's just not worth the man hours of their engineers to put the mechanisms in place to do the purchase. We're not there yet thanks to PCs still being prevalent in the home but give it time. Now at the moment you always have the hole of a generic PC to do most of this, but as I was worried about in another post if the tablet market basically shuts down the home built PC at home then what? If that doesn't happen then what about "trusted computing" what if that is successful and makes amateur PC building impossible?
"somehow prevent display devices from showing user generated contents" That's not needed. All content is watermarked. In my scenario user generated content has a watermark embedded in it by the camcorder. Now a sophisticated watermark would include details about the license and your access rights would be monitored too, it may be possible to turn that watermark off for your content but I'm talking about the default setting that 99% of people will use being one that "protects them"
"all be accomplished with ready-made, shiny, consumer items bought at BestBuy." Show me someone who has built a home made camcorder without using items that you would find at best buy. The projects I have seen all have a reliance on commodity hardware or use vendor supplied test hardware (such as the beagle board) which do have parts of the system that you cannot touch and those are the parts that handle media codecs. Now people do write their own, but as i was trying to communicate in my last post even assuming you do that then surely you end up with a situation like happened to ogg that the only people to use it were the techie elite and therefore it never gained traction. Fine then that's what you use to exchange pirated information with your friends. It soon becomes that the only people exchange in that file format are those pirating at which point it is trivial for law enforcement to find you because you suddenly stand out above the noise of other file transfers. Yes there are ways to hide this but then you're even further underground. and you end up like truecrypt where even possessing the software to hide your activities becomes grounds for search and seizure and by law having to reveal your keys. This is a long way from the current situation where everything is in mpeg format and enforcing infringement is difficult because at the moment it's hard to see the forest for the trees, but once Joe sixpack has moved on to a place that doesn't allow DRM free content to exist then the game changes. Now there is still one hope I have left Xilinx and their test boards could be the last back door, so here's hoping but I think old age is making me cynical.
"Streaming won't solve a thing either[...]" I really hope you are right, but a lot depends on if the trusted computing thing ever comes to anything. It would be fairly easy for microsoft to say that you can only use its screen grabbing API which forbids the grabbing of secure content. If it became impossible to play content on an open source platform or the architecture/DRM shifted so that media decode was always done in some sort of CPU offload then "You need software to decode the stream, so it's hackable in no time." is no longer true.
"The concept of copyright itself is dissolving since it is based on the assumption that the information flow can be controlled." Yes and no. I think people are getting more used to sharing themselves but less used to corporate social responsibility - and copyright is all about corporate social responsibility. But then people also seem to forget that public libraries exist so I'm fairly sure the general public is becoming used to a subscription model and not an ownership model. For me a lot depends on what happens in tablets. I see them as the immediate future of home computing and if that is correct then it depends on what happens with android. If windows or apple wins/dominates then forget it. Apple has already sewn up content control and microsoft can't be far behind. Freedom of information doesn't help you if content is locked down. If android wins/dominates then there is at least a chance of openness but again in the mobile world CPU offload for intensive tasks like media handling is very attractive so again I'm not sure how you could hack that if the device manufacturer was competent.
Let's stick to the analogue hole argument at the moment as existing schemes can be improved and we could find ourself in the situation where any new device you can buy will be DRM enabled plugging the hole - can we at least agree on that? (e.g. the HDCP strippers I'm aware of rely on a hole in the original HDMI standard that has since been plugged but backwards compatibility keeps the hole open for legacy devices - this can then be used by the strippers. However a new HDCP standard could easily chose to plug this hole. As a further example we now have the HDCP root key but that was due to a security breach which is hardly likely to happen again).
So fine any future TV could be filmed with your existing camcorder and you will always have content of that quality available. This may in the future be the equivalent of filming a 3d blue ray on a VHS tape recorder but if you're happy with that level of quality then fine. Until your camcorder breaks. Or the battery wears out. How will you replace it then when spares are no longer made? How will these people rip the content is my question, without access to the right keys and using even current encoding schemes then how will you guess the 128bit key required to break them? All the exploits I'm aware of that exist exist by manufacturers poorly implementing the standard or by secrets being spilled. If people carry on doing this and they learn from the mistakes then great however I can easily see the day where a product recall occurs when the device has its DRM broken. All media devices would also in this time period need internet access or at least need to be plugged into a device with internet access and it would be trivial to carry a list of forbidden devices on such internet connection device. Let me paint a picture: So 30 years from now Panasonic screw up the DRM on their latest camcorder and suddenly you can film movies with it. Every hacker on the planet tries to buy one. The devices are recalled to have their software updated and anyway the first time they get net access they download the new "fixed software". So the hackers ban it from doing that by wrapping it in tin foil and not connecting it to their phone or tablet. So how do you get the content off it? Connect it to your internet enabled TV? Clearly not, so you copy the data to an SD-Card and then import that to your TV. Except the media is watermarked with the ID of the device that produced it and it now dials home to say that that device is now in use. Tell me this wouldn't be possible to implement with current technology if the will was there? Why not have the next standard for internet TV require this level of secuiry - "ahh you want to use windows 9 you must have DirectDRM3! for all attached devices and media." Okay perhaps you try and write some software to read the now insecure file the camcorder wrote and re-encode it. Great but by this point you've really got an underground community. If the people exchanging for example h264 encoded files are 99% copyright infringers and 1% none infringement then simply by exchanging these none protected files you've painted a target on your own head; and you can't distribute one of the formats that would look like amateur produced content because that will all be signed content that you can't produce without the end to end security of the DRM you just broke. I'd love to say otherwise; I'm a great believer in the importance of the public domain and believe hackers breaking DRM and copyright are the only way to stand against the ever encroaching private stranglehold, but I don't see a long term future and it sickens me.
You mean like every manufacturer of DVDs and HDMI compliant TV or media source now has to implement DRM. Then yes, easy. It's already happened every new device you buy does implement it. That mobile phone with HDMI output has to be compliant. That laptop has to be compliant. That Blue Ray disk and player has to be compliant. It's already happened and expect all new standards to implement it.
What if you had a DRM compliant camera that looked for watermarks and refused to take photos if it saw the watermark? Okay I'll hang onto my current camcorder. But what happens when it breaks? What happens when a new 3D, Ultra-HD standard comes out - well maybe I'll get a new camera for that and still keep my old one around. Then I forget I have the old one because I never use it. Well I use it occasionally. My nephew however has no concept that a camcorder could exist that doesn't respect the watermarks and considers my old one faulty because "the picture looks fuzzy" - he has said that about my old none HD camcorder. It would be very easy to plug the analogue gap given time and the right industry standards.
But it's not about that. If you can get the public to accept that any format they buy or obtain for free is DRM'd then you have won 99% of the battle. because then you can control how content moves from there. Yes people will always be trying to break the schemes and will probably continue to succeed, but imagine if the next generation of people accepts that DRM is not only expected but buys into the fact that is required. Kind of like most people buy that intellectual property should be bought and sold like any other property. (Actually i do buy some of that argument, just not all of it but that's another story). If you can change the way people think then your battle for more favourable laws to protect your content are easier to pass.
"As soon as the DVD is out, the cat is out of the bag and hours later you find rips on BitTorrent." Right so you try and move people over to BlueRay which has stronger DRM. Even better persuade them that online streaming is the way forwards and you can then change the DRM algorithm any time it is cracked. Just make sure that the latest format has the best content and voting with your wallet won't help here because they will take a loss on a format to begin with to allow them to discontinue the now none secure one that will eventually make them no money. Then later ratchet up the prices. Or only offer the extras on the latest format (notice how the HP DVDs don't have all the same extras on it that the blue ray ones do).
Depends if the regime that replaces him is worse than him. Not for us, but for the people who follow and have to live under it. I await to be convinced, he was a bad 'un no arguments there, but we have seen so called democracies be very evil too.
Not really, there are legitimate uses of a military, even for a peaceful none jingo-istic nation. A nation could maintain a military purely for self defence and never post them oversea or threaten anyone else. In that case having a large military to call upon would be no bad thing. Possibly a waste of resources - until at least someone tries to invade, at which point you'll be glad for having them around. Switzerland is probably a good model here.
Now what the US does and projects power and tries to get the rest of the world to sing to its tune is another story but that is a question of how you use the tool not a problem with the tool itself. In fact i would argue that if you're going to do something do it right, and a military too small for the job is to me a good definition of useless. So fine, object to using a large military for immoral purposes, but that's separate from the recruitment and justice and discrimination within that service.
fwiw it's a UK charity not a US company. Doesn't make much difference to your points, but it changes what the company is and the legal recourse and the attitude if the people involved quite a bit.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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The F-35 Story
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It's the difference between the semiconductor industry 's: "Here's this really cool thing we've built - will someone please buy it from us? No? It doesn't do everything you want, you want it gold plated? Sure, we can do that in 9 months if you'll promise to buy some. Cool, oh, you didn't sell as may as you thought, oh never mind; here's the next cool thing we've been working on" and "We want someone to design this for us, we want it beyond anything you've done before we don't know how difficult it will be, but here's a big pot of cash that might just do it. Oh, you mean you can't, you promise if we give you more money you'll be able to do it, cool, here's more money" Let the design companies set the specification and you can screw them, set it yourself and prepare for problems.
What's the alternative though? The government could swap to the model of letting the defence companies lead the development rather than them (I believe this is how it used to work, WWII period UK had dozens of military plane companies with this model, but then a plane was some wood & canvas, some levers and a big engine*). Now I'm sure this is great for innovation, but perhaps not for end to end systems that you need on a modern battlefield where everything has to integrate and last for decades. Also who would loan these companies the billions needed to get a program off the ground? How would you get startups?
That's just downright evil. If only they had done that and fired you over facebook you'd then have grounds for wrongful dismissal! Hang on, so If i told my beloved over dinner how much i hated my job would that be disparaging the workplace? If I at home came up with a new CV and asked a friend to pass it on to his boss at his work would that be insubordination? Do people really think like that?
Good point, I kind of assumed I'd have enough time to recover from reformats. Also i guess myself and partner have a comparatively high probability of dying in the same accident, again a big weak spot. This then leads to a very tangled treasure hunt... I guess you can either have redundancy or security/trust but the combination of the two is difficult. Good challenge though; just means I'll have to come up with a more complex scheme;-)
3 stage affair. I have a friend let's call him Andrew whose machine I have a log in to. On that machine is a list of instructions of what to do on my death. Andrew does not know this file is on his machine but knows I use his machine for various random things. Another friend called Brian who knows about this file but does not have access to it. To access the file he'd have to contact Andrew who would login as root and therefore be able to read the file and pass it onto Brian.. As part of these instructions most passwords are on another encrypted file on my local machine which my partner has a login to. The really secure ones are actually hidden at a relative's house - I'm not saying which one though or how but again that information is in the file on Andrew's machine. Andrew however does not have access to that relative's house without asking that relative. Similarly that relative is not going to let a virtual stranger go digging around in their house without good reason.
Now if Brian or Andrew wanted to they would have a fair chance of getting access to some stuff but they would have to both violate the trust I have in them and co-operate in doing so. They would also know where all the other stuff is stored and how to get it. My partner could go digging on my computer and accidentally find the file with my facebook, slashdot etc password in it, however that password file does not have the passwords to the email or banking or anything else. My relatives could discover what i hid at their house but without the information from Brian & Andrew it would mean nothing to them. The chances of all my friends and relatives having to simultaneously turn against me make me think this is a fairly secure method. No one link in the chain makes it insecure. Much better than any online single password service that I know... Besides I like the idea that my last act is to get all my friends and relatives together in a cross country treasure hunt!
4) Large gravity wells are a pain in the neck, why go there when there is plenty of matter about. 5) The tyranny of convenience - Look at the Roman empire, once they had done a couple of waves of expansion they settled back because it was hartd to maintain an empire because of the communication and material transfer delay. Also why would a senator in Rome spend resources to expand when spending them locally means you have a higher quality of life (in the short term). Why spend men's lives and resources on the wilderness? If you have controlled the birth rate then no need to expand. If you haven't controlled the birth rate then I'd like to know how an economy that size functions. 6) I imagine the tribes of south America thought that they were alone in the world because they had never been contacted by outsiders. That is until the first explorers turned up. if in five thousand years of human history they had never been contacted by outsiders did that mean they were alone on the earth? 7) Empires rise in fall. In heaven as it is on Earth;-) In a couple of million years the galaxy will be full again.
"Every public company is required by law to become the next Microsoft if the business opportunity presents itself in order to provide maximum return to shareholders." Show me the law. I know there are laws that say they are required to follow the votes of your shareholders and hold AGMs and suchlike but show me where it says companies must maximise profits/share price at the expense of everything else.
Not in polite society no. I trust my friends to not give my phone number to that crazy person at the end of the street. I trust my friends not to use the information about my address and DOB to perform ID theft and get credit cards in my name. I trust my friends not to burgle my house when they know I'll be on holiday.
If I get a friend's phone number or they tell me in the pub that they are about to go on holiday i do not then share that information with anybody because that would be inviting trouble for my friend. In fact in polite society you don't pass on information you've been given to just anybody otherwise we'd all have crazy ex-girlfriends after us. If you would share your friends information with anyone and everyone i worry for your friends.
Slashdot Mirror
Three things:
1) it's not what something costs but what it is worth to someone else
2) Speaking as someone who has tried publishing my novel on an ebook, why shouldn't I be able to charge what I see as a fit price for my years of work? No-one else has to buy it if they don't think it is worth it.If I sell 0 because it is too expensive then that is my choice.
3) this investigation is about price fixing not about the actual cost
Agreed, but that requires you to browse at -1 which most(/many/some?) experienced members of /. will do for just this reason, but it is not the public face of the system (i.e. an un-logged in user)and as browse at -1 you might as well have no moderation system at all; except that trying to get highly moderated encourages some good behaviour. /. has it at a good level particularly with the meta-moderation system which seems a good safety net, but i was just trying to disagree with the idea that the majority opinion is the correct one, nothing worthwhile is either easy or popular.
TBH I think
The problem with the tyranny of the majority in this case is that descenting views are able to be suppressed by the moderation system. That is an unpopular view cannot be heard.
This would be like a suffragette being boo'd into silence, or the leading political party rounding up supporters of the minority opposition and locking them up.
Not good, really not good.
"There are 7 billion people on the planet."
By what definition?
Yes I agree there are too many people for them all to live at a western standard of liviing with current technology.
No 7 Billion can clearly be supported by the planet because they are! Sure some are starving but in those environments people are breeding fast enough to replace those that die from it. Is this pleasant? No but it is what is happening.
Currently farming is not exploiting all the square footage it could - how many towns/cities are built on good farmland that could be producing crops? People are eating too much meat, if they ate vegetables instead we could support more people still.
Do I think any of this is good, no, do I think the population will continue to increase for the moment? Yes because how am I going to stop other people from breeding and more importantly do I have the right to tell them that? Ethically can I choose to prevent people from breeding for the greater good? That way leads to dangerous thinking.
True the current situation will destroy the environment if it carries on the way it does but we could do that with 1 billion people if we carried on chopping down rain forests and strip mining for coal. If everyone demands that we have economic growth at positive percentages and that is what makes us unsustainable not the number of people. I'm convinced we could support 10 billion if we were either prepared to screw the enviroment completely for our advantage or is we would live at much lower energy usage per capita; We just can't have both.
Announcement "Please turn off all electronic devices."
Me "Erm my watch doesn't have an off button"
Okay I've never done this but my inner idiot makes me want to.
You say that, it's a thought experiment of mine, if copyright went tomorrow what would happen?
Would teenagers stop taking their dates to a movie? I think not.
Would I stop going to the cinema for the experience? Nope their sound system and screen is still far better than my home one, so why would I?
Would I stop going to concerts?
Would I continue to buy CDs for the music I like? Probably, because I want that band to make more music and I don't trust DRM'd music.
Would I still buy books? Watch adverts? Would I still need a Sky subscription because standard TV didn't show all I wanted to watch and tormenting has its own issues. Yes to all.
Now new artists would likely have a harder time - unless they used DRM (in a sensible way otherwise it would work against their interests). DVDs would have to be sold much closer to cost and steaming services would have to offer good service better than the freeloaders.
I actually suspect under that model more money would end up going to artists because the media companies would not be able to charge for their services.
Big movies are mostly paid for by cinema takings (Which I don't think would go down drastically, let's not forget cinemas could still eject people for trying to record the film.) The rest of the money tends to come from DVD sales which may get bitten into but if things like netflix haven't killed that then I don't know what will. People do pay for good content well delivered because then you pay for the service not the content.
People have always wanted to "be on the stage" countless people still want to direct films, not because they want to make money but because they want to climb that mountain and I think that by removing the studios from the equation you'd lose things like Avatar but gain a million fan re-tellings of Star Wars some of which would undoubtedly be bloody brilliant. I honestly think as a society we'd gain.
Okay this post is getting way too long so let's simplify it to three main points.
1) Availability of an unencrypted sensor.
If you're right and sensors in the future continue to be in a form that the hobbyist can interface to them then I agree, no problem.
If however they all start to use protocols like CSI2 that the hobbyist cannot realistically interface to then there will be problems. If they use any high speed interface that scrambles the data for noise spreading or just simply as a way to embed sync codes i.e. something like 8b10b encoding then without the datasheet (that will not be forthcoming) then again hobbyists have a problem.
2) The availability of components.
I think on this one you and I will just have to differ because I see so many components that we use on a day to day basis that are not available from a Farnell catalogue. I see friends who work in the industry who cannot make the systems they want to because they cannot source the parts they want. I see the number of devices out there growing and getting ever more integrated and technical, but the technology in the RS catalogue staying pretty much the same. But your mileage clearly varies.
3) Watermarking use cases
I saw your earlier post, that does not render it totally invalid. It renders it invalid if used poorly.
All that is needed is that there is a competantly applied watermark. Paramount for example could make sure that all content it gives out to anyone whatsoever has its watermark embedded. Then anytime that watermark is seen somewhere it shouldn't it can be set up to automatically report the issue. because all content contains this watermark there is no differencing possible. Now you could then add region and network specific watermarks to narrow the source of the infringement down further, and these could be overcome by the methods you suggest, but if you have a standard watermark consistently applied - and let's face it that's the easiest and laziest solution - then there's nothing we can do to remove it. (Except detect the frames it is on, remove those and interpolate but again that could be tricky if the job is done competently by the producer).
"unless you prevent private individuals from obtaining electronic parts, there is nothing stopping you from building your own digitization device, other then the know-how. It will not be pretty, it will not be portable, it will not be compact, but it will do the job of circumventing DRM"
Okay, look at the raspberry pie project. one of the drivers for that project and what makes it so cool is exactly that these parts are stopping becoming available to the general public. You cannot buy a BCM2835, fine that's broadcom, but can you as a consumer buy a Qualcomm chip, or a CSR bluetooth chip, even if you could (but I believe you can't) they will not release all the software needed to drive the hardware and reverse engineering it is something no-one has managed yet. The large corporations won't sell less than multiple thousands simply because it's not worth supporting the small producer. Some large corporations like TI might still sell their beagle boards which will help, but can you rely on that? It's getting harder with every generation.
Please try and buy a raw camera module. Try and build your own PCB using parts with a ball pitch so fine that you need professional level reflow ovens to plonk the parts down(by the way modern parts are already at this stage and it's getting worse all the time too). So it's not about preventing people from doing it, it's just not worth the man hours of their engineers to put the mechanisms in place to do the purchase. We're not there yet thanks to PCs still being prevalent in the home but give it time.
Now at the moment you always have the hole of a generic PC to do most of this, but as I was worried about in another post if the tablet market basically shuts down the home built PC at home then what? If that doesn't happen then what about "trusted computing" what if that is successful and makes amateur PC building impossible?
"somehow prevent display devices from showing user generated contents"
That's not needed. All content is watermarked. In my scenario user generated content has a watermark embedded in it by the camcorder. Now a sophisticated watermark would include details about the license and your access rights would be monitored too, it may be possible to turn that watermark off for your content but I'm talking about the default setting that 99% of people will use being one that "protects them"
"all be accomplished with ready-made, shiny, consumer items bought at BestBuy."
Show me someone who has built a home made camcorder without using items that you would find at best buy. The projects I have seen all have a reliance on commodity hardware or use vendor supplied test hardware (such as the beagle board) which do have parts of the system that you cannot touch and those are the parts that handle media codecs. Now people do write their own, but as i was trying to communicate in my last post even assuming you do that then surely you end up with a situation like happened to ogg that the only people to use it were the techie elite and therefore it never gained traction. Fine then that's what you use to exchange pirated information with your friends. It soon becomes that the only people exchange in that file format are those pirating at which point it is trivial for law enforcement to find you because you suddenly stand out above the noise of other file transfers. Yes there are ways to hide this but then you're even further underground. and you end up like truecrypt where even possessing the software to hide your activities becomes grounds for search and seizure and by law having to reveal your keys.
This is a long way from the current situation where everything is in mpeg format and enforcing infringement is difficult because at the moment it's hard to see the forest for the trees, but once Joe sixpack has moved on to a place that doesn't allow DRM free content to exist then the game changes.
Now there is still one hope I have left Xilinx and their test boards could be the last back door, so here's hoping but I think old age is making me cynical.
"Streaming won't solve a thing either[...]"
I really hope you are right, but a lot depends on if the trusted computing thing ever comes to anything. It would be fairly easy for microsoft to say that you can only use its screen grabbing API which forbids the grabbing of secure content. If it became impossible to play content on an open source platform or the architecture/DRM shifted so that media decode was always done in some sort of CPU offload then "You need software to decode the stream, so it's hackable in no time." is no longer true.
"The concept of copyright itself is dissolving since it is based on the assumption that the information flow can be controlled."
Yes and no. I think people are getting more used to sharing themselves but less used to corporate social responsibility - and copyright is all about corporate social responsibility. But then people also seem to forget that public libraries exist so I'm fairly sure the general public is becoming used to a subscription model and not an ownership model. For me a lot depends on what happens in tablets. I see them as the immediate future of home computing and if that is correct then it depends on what happens with android. If windows or apple wins/dominates then forget it. Apple has already sewn up content control and microsoft can't be far behind. Freedom of information doesn't help you if content is locked down.
If android wins/dominates then there is at least a chance of openness but again in the mobile world CPU offload for intensive tasks like media handling is very attractive so again I'm not sure how you could hack that if the device manufacturer was competent.
Let's stick to the analogue hole argument at the moment as existing schemes can be improved and we could find ourself in the situation where any new device you can buy will be DRM enabled plugging the hole - can we at least agree on that? (e.g. the HDCP strippers I'm aware of rely on a hole in the original HDMI standard that has since been plugged but backwards compatibility keeps the hole open for legacy devices - this can then be used by the strippers. However a new HDCP standard could easily chose to plug this hole. As a further example we now have the HDCP root key but that was due to a security breach which is hardly likely to happen again).
So fine any future TV could be filmed with your existing camcorder and you will always have content of that quality available. This may in the future be the equivalent of filming a 3d blue ray on a VHS tape recorder but if you're happy with that level of quality then fine. Until your camcorder breaks. Or the battery wears out. How will you replace it then when spares are no longer made?
How will these people rip the content is my question, without access to the right keys and using even current encoding schemes then how will you guess the 128bit key required to break them? All the exploits I'm aware of that exist exist by manufacturers poorly implementing the standard or by secrets being spilled. If people carry on doing this and they learn from the mistakes then great however I can easily see the day where a product recall occurs when the device has its DRM broken. All media devices would also in this time period need internet access or at least need to be plugged into a device with internet access and it would be trivial to carry a list of forbidden devices on such internet connection device.
Let me paint a picture: So 30 years from now Panasonic screw up the DRM on their latest camcorder and suddenly you can film movies with it. Every hacker on the planet tries to buy one. The devices are recalled to have their software updated and anyway the first time they get net access they download the new "fixed software". So the hackers ban it from doing that by wrapping it in tin foil and not connecting it to their phone or tablet. So how do you get the content off it? Connect it to your internet enabled TV? Clearly not, so you copy the data to an SD-Card and then import that to your TV. Except the media is watermarked with the ID of the device that produced it and it now dials home to say that that device is now in use. Tell me this wouldn't be possible to implement with current technology if the will was there? Why not have the next standard for internet TV require this level of secuiry - "ahh you want to use windows 9 you must have DirectDRM3! for all attached devices and media." Okay perhaps you try and write some software to read the now insecure file the camcorder wrote and re-encode it. Great but by this point you've really got an underground community. If the people exchanging for example h264 encoded files are 99% copyright infringers and 1% none infringement then simply by exchanging these none protected files you've painted a target on your own head; and you can't distribute one of the formats that would look like amateur produced content because that will all be signed content that you can't produce without the end to end security of the DRM you just broke.
I'd love to say otherwise; I'm a great believer in the importance of the public domain and believe hackers breaking DRM and copyright are the only way to stand against the ever encroaching private stranglehold, but I don't see a long term future and it sickens me.
You mean like every manufacturer of DVDs and HDMI compliant TV or media source now has to implement DRM. Then yes, easy. It's already happened every new device you buy does implement it.
That mobile phone with HDMI output has to be compliant.
That laptop has to be compliant.
That Blue Ray disk and player has to be compliant.
It's already happened and expect all new standards to implement it.
What if you had a DRM compliant camera that looked for watermarks and refused to take photos if it saw the watermark?
Okay I'll hang onto my current camcorder.
But what happens when it breaks?
What happens when a new 3D, Ultra-HD standard comes out - well maybe I'll get a new camera for that and still keep my old one around. Then I forget I have the old one because I never use it. Well I use it occasionally. My nephew however has no concept that a camcorder could exist that doesn't respect the watermarks and considers my old one faulty because "the picture looks fuzzy" - he has said that about my old none HD camcorder.
It would be very easy to plug the analogue gap given time and the right industry standards.
But it's not about that. If you can get the public to accept that any format they buy or obtain for free is DRM'd then you have won 99% of the battle. because then you can control how content moves from there.
Yes people will always be trying to break the schemes and will probably continue to succeed, but imagine if the next generation of people accepts that DRM is not only expected but buys into the fact that is required. Kind of like most people buy that intellectual property should be bought and sold like any other property. (Actually i do buy some of that argument, just not all of it but that's another story). If you can change the way people think then your battle for more favourable laws to protect your content are easier to pass.
"As soon as the DVD is out, the cat is out of the bag and hours later you find rips on BitTorrent."
Right so you try and move people over to BlueRay which has stronger DRM. Even better persuade them that online streaming is the way forwards and you can then change the DRM algorithm any time it is cracked. Just make sure that the latest format has the best content and voting with your wallet won't help here because they will take a loss on a format to begin with to allow them to discontinue the now none secure one that will eventually make them no money. Then later ratchet up the prices. Or only offer the extras on the latest format (notice how the HP DVDs don't have all the same extras on it that the blue ray ones do).
It's a brave new world.
Depends if the regime that replaces him is worse than him. Not for us, but for the people who follow and have to live under it.
I await to be convinced, he was a bad 'un no arguments there, but we have seen so called democracies be very evil too.
Not really, there are legitimate uses of a military, even for a peaceful none jingo-istic nation.
A nation could maintain a military purely for self defence and never post them oversea or threaten anyone else. In that case having a large military to call upon would be no bad thing. Possibly a waste of resources - until at least someone tries to invade, at which point you'll be glad for having them around.
Switzerland is probably a good model here.
Now what the US does and projects power and tries to get the rest of the world to sing to its tune is another story but that is a question of how you use the tool not a problem with the tool itself. In fact i would argue that if you're going to do something do it right, and a military too small for the job is to me a good definition of useless.
So fine, object to using a large military for immoral purposes, but that's separate from the recruitment and justice and discrimination within that service.
fwiw it's a UK charity not a US company.
Doesn't make much difference to your points, but it changes what the company is and the legal recourse and the attitude if the people involved quite a bit.
It's the difference between the semiconductor industry 's:
"Here's this really cool thing we've built - will someone please buy it from us? No? It doesn't do everything you want, you want it gold plated? Sure, we can do that in 9 months if you'll promise to buy some. Cool, oh, you didn't sell as may as you thought, oh never mind; here's the next cool thing we've been working on"
and
"We want someone to design this for us, we want it beyond anything you've done before we don't know how difficult it will be, but here's a big pot of cash that might just do it. Oh, you mean you can't, you promise if we give you more money you'll be able to do it, cool, here's more money"
Let the design companies set the specification and you can screw them, set it yourself and prepare for problems.
What's the alternative though? The government could swap to the model of letting the defence companies lead the development rather than them (I believe this is how it used to work, WWII period UK had dozens of military plane companies with this model, but then a plane was some wood & canvas, some levers and a big engine*). Now I'm sure this is great for innovation, but perhaps not for end to end systems that you need on a modern battlefield where everything has to integrate and last for decades.
Also who would loan these companies the billions needed to get a program off the ground? How would you get startups?
* okay I exaggerate, but you get my point.
That's just downright evil.
If only they had done that and fired you over facebook you'd then have grounds for wrongful dismissal!
Hang on, so If i told my beloved over dinner how much i hated my job would that be disparaging the workplace?
If I at home came up with a new CV and asked a friend to pass it on to his boss at his work would that be insubordination?
Do people really think like that?
Good point, I kind of assumed I'd have enough time to recover from reformats. ;-)
Also i guess myself and partner have a comparatively high probability of dying in the same accident, again a big weak spot.
This then leads to a very tangled treasure hunt... I guess you can either have redundancy or security/trust but the combination of the two is difficult.
Good challenge though; just means I'll have to come up with a more complex scheme
3 stage affair.
I have a friend let's call him Andrew whose machine I have a log in to. On that machine is a list of instructions of what to do on my death. Andrew does not know this file is on his machine but knows I use his machine for various random things.
Another friend called Brian who knows about this file but does not have access to it. To access the file he'd have to contact Andrew who would login as root and therefore be able to read the file and pass it onto Brian..
As part of these instructions most passwords are on another encrypted file on my local machine which my partner has a login to. The really secure ones are actually hidden at a relative's house - I'm not saying which one though or how but again that information is in the file on Andrew's machine. Andrew however does not have access to that relative's house without asking that relative. Similarly that relative is not going to let a virtual stranger go digging around in their house without good reason.
Now if Brian or Andrew wanted to they would have a fair chance of getting access to some stuff but they would have to both violate the trust I have in them and co-operate in doing so. They would also know where all the other stuff is stored and how to get it. My partner could go digging on my computer and accidentally find the file with my facebook, slashdot etc password in it, however that password file does not have the passwords to the email or banking or anything else. My relatives could discover what i hid at their house but without the information from Brian & Andrew it would mean nothing to them.
The chances of all my friends and relatives having to simultaneously turn against me make me think this is a fairly secure method. No one link in the chain makes it insecure. Much better than any online single password service that I know...
Besides I like the idea that my last act is to get all my friends and relatives together in a cross country treasure hunt!
4) Large gravity wells are a pain in the neck, why go there when there is plenty of matter about. ;-) In a couple of million years the galaxy will be full again.
5) The tyranny of convenience - Look at the Roman empire, once they had done a couple of waves of expansion they settled back because it was hartd to maintain an empire because of the communication and material transfer delay. Also why would a senator in Rome spend resources to expand when spending them locally means you have a higher quality of life (in the short term). Why spend men's lives and resources on the wilderness? If you have controlled the birth rate then no need to expand. If you haven't controlled the birth rate then I'd like to know how an economy that size functions.
6) I imagine the tribes of south America thought that they were alone in the world because they had never been contacted by outsiders. That is until the first explorers turned up. if in five thousand years of human history they had never been contacted by outsiders did that mean they were alone on the earth?
7) Empires rise in fall. In heaven as it is on Earth
I'm sure I could come up with more if you like...
"Every public company is required by law to become the next Microsoft if the business opportunity presents itself in order to provide maximum return to shareholders."
Show me the law.
I know there are laws that say they are required to follow the votes of your shareholders and hold AGMs and suchlike but show me where it says companies must maximise profits/share price at the expense of everything else.
vi is easy (and fast) to use. However it is not easy (or fast) to learn.
Not in polite society no.
I trust my friends to not give my phone number to that crazy person at the end of the street.
I trust my friends not to use the information about my address and DOB to perform ID theft and get credit cards in my name.
I trust my friends not to burgle my house when they know I'll be on holiday.
If I get a friend's phone number or they tell me in the pub that they are about to go on holiday i do not then share that information with anybody because that would be inviting trouble for my friend. In fact in polite society you don't pass on information you've been given to just anybody otherwise we'd all have crazy ex-girlfriends after us.
If you would share your friends information with anyone and everyone i worry for your friends.