As it should, or rather, must. At least one of the failures which I listed appears to have been caused by bad planning and not having a reasonable goal --- in the case of Munich, the goal isn't hitting a given finish date, or immediate savings of money, but rather, independence from lock-in. Whoever got that to be understood to be the goal of the project was a genius, because it's one of the only goals for such a project that I can think of which Microsoft couldn't possibly undercut.
> It's been thwarted
You keep using that word. It's a bad choice for such a discussion, because a search of meanings using Google gives a list which varies from "blocked, obstructed" to "defeated, disappointingly unsuccessful". I can agree that Microsoft blocked the transition for at least a year with FUD about Linux infringing its software patents, so the first definition would be OK. But for sure the transition isn't "disappointingly unsuccessful".
> The other failures are a problem that shows that the FOSS community
Actually, I think a very good case can be made about the other failures not involving the FOSS community whatsoever, but rather being the result of bad management on the part of the organizations thinking about transitioning. In fact, I think if your transition plan depends on the FOSS community doing anything specific for you, it's obvious you're doing it wrong. Very wrong.
After Munich actually finishes its transition, we will get to see whether the long-term TCO is smaller. It will be very interesting, assuming that Microsoft won't manage to somehow corrupt the flow of objective information about it. Unfortunately, it won't necessarily prove anything about the profitability of future migrations, since Munich hadn't even bought XP licenses (they were running NT!) at the time it decided to go for Linux, yet even like that they had a horrific amount of lock-in via Office macros. They also used the transition as an opportunity to "clean house" and prevent every department independently writing its own Office macros for shared tasks, which will also save them maintenance costs in the long run.
themoviedb.org, at least, hasn't yet publicized its license terms, nor how people will be able to download its content in bulk form in order to "keep them honest". The history of trying to make money by closing what was open is quite long, now.
Cinavia is audio watermarking. Considering that they aren't quite as braindead as the SDMI developers so that they haven't posted a public oracle for their watermark, I would guess that Cinavia has a chance of surviving for quite a bit longer. But I wouldn't bet on it surviving a very long time if it becomes a nuisance.
There are few details about this watermark on the net, currently, and the information which there is gives one the impression that it is currently designed to prevent movies which have been taped in a movie theater from being played at home. I don't find anywhere that it would prevent copying/backup of media designed for home use.
Frankly, I'd be totally OK with that. That's not the kind of abusive DRM which inconveniences the paying consumer. It's also a use case which is a lot easier for protecting a watermark, because one only gets one instance of the watermark for every film which is released. My bet is that it will be cracked by someone analyzing the detection algorithm rather than by comparison of watermarked/non-watermarked audio streams. That is, assuming that someone doesn't just come up with some kind of processing paradigm which manages to remove the watermark without even figuring out how it works exactly.
How long before someone makes an HDCP compliant (w/ random valid HDCP sink key) virtual video card driver you install in windows that appears to other software as a valid HDCP compliant video device. The driver could be written to decrypt and write the stream to a disk.
I have to admit that I didn't think about this use case for HDCP, and you may be correct. OTOH, isn't Microsoft into only letting vendor-signed drivers run under modern versions of Windows? In that case, the Bluray player might also be able to check that the video card in question had a signed driver from a whitelist of allowed vendors.
> You're left with trust - not exactly the most comfortable form of security.
It's actually the most ubiquitous form of security there is, in the field of software. Even in the case of open source applications, very very few people only use an application after doing a thorough security audit.
So I ask again, more bluntly: is this FUD, or is it actually more dangerous than other things I do in the course of a typical day, like commuting?
> The app can access a lot and can call home over the internet, so you are afraid for a good reason.
My impression was that the app can do exactly what you authorize it to do when you install it, and nothing more. Am I wrong? Could you be a bit more specific what we should all be afraid of? For example, is it more dangerous than getting into my car and driving for an hour?
Intel's statement had to do with the security of the use case of HDCP: digital video encrypted with HDCP being transported over HDMI cables. In other words, the hardware Intel claims is required, is specialized hardware which interfaces with HDMI ports. This software implementation is not interesting for cracking encrypted video if it cannot communicate with the Blu-Ray or other media player in question in a way which tricks the media player into thinking that the computer running the software is a certified display device.
Don't know about you, but I'm not about to put up $134K of my own money for a chance to make it rich from the iOS marketplace. (Yes, they sold ~6.5 million copies --- in this case.)
My impression was that there's also very little money, on the average, in iOS apps also --- perhaps a bit more than 0, but nothing you'd want to bet feeding your family on.
> Hint: You can't, you're now violating your licensing agreement.
It wouldn't surprise me if the countdown has started to amend that licensing agreement with language similar to "device whitelisting is allowed solely for the prevention of circumvention of protections to intellectual property rights blah blah blah", so that cases like this are given the green light.
Don't forget that the Bluetooth consortium is just a bunch of megacorps --- hey, guess what? How surprising! Sony is a member!
From reading the article, it seems that they are suing for breach of the AdWords contract. This seems unlikely to me to shut down the illegal pharmacies, unless Google is paying investigators to actually do business with the pharmacies and track them down "in real life" --- in which case, why not just give the evidence they obtain to the applicable LEOs?
I suppose one doesn't prevent the other, but the article doesn't at all address this possibility, in fact, it spins the story like Google might be doing this for CYA in case law enforcement catches these guys all by themselves.
> NASA scientists called the rock 'Oileán Ruaidh,' which is the Gaelic name for an island off the coast of northwestern Ireland
Can't NASA scientists think ahead a little bit to make the future a safer place? GPS manufacturers of the year 2437 are gonna be pissed when their customers end up on Mars while trying to fly to Ireland...
> in the Middle East for ordinary citizens to own automatic military assault rifles
Hmm, which Middle East country are we talking about, exactly? You kind of sound like someone pulling factoids from thin air, but here on Slashdot you never know. Color me curious. Care to cough up some examples?
> If you could convince 100 million U.S. citizens that making this > change was a reason to vote for someone
Last time I checked, the only way to do that was to buy an awful lot of time on television. So much time, actually, that paying for lobbyists would be small change in comparison.
Writing a novel takes a long time and is a lot of work. Producing a movie, even a cheap one, takes much more money than most individuals have to spare. Leaving aside why should anyone put all that effort or money in to bring a concept to fruition, you can't even solve the how if people aren't willing to commit to paying for viewing / listening to / reading the final work.
Frankly, I'm sure that if Paulo Coelho publicized that because copyright no longer exists he needs his fans to finance the writing of his next book, he'd manage to raise enough money to get by. And some people would still pay him for his works. I'm not sure how much more of less money he'd raise this way, than he raises now, however. Independent movie developers would probably be releasing short clips of the beginning of their movie on places like YouTube and gathering contributions to finance the rest of project.
Yes, as the GP already stated, things would be different. Very different. For example, the minute CreativeGuyNo1 releases the first chapter of his book, there would be nothing preventing CreativeGuyNo2 from publishing a competing second chapter, trying to steal away the audience from CreativeGuyNo1. People would probably coin new words for concepts like "creator who released a good teaser but never actually paid back anything for the flood of money he got to continue" and "someone who is great at polishing the great ideas of others but has few original ideas of his own".
Personally, I think it would be ideal if there would be some kind of compromise --- say about 20 years of protection, with little punishment for not-for-profit infringement (the definition of profit not including receiving other copyrighted works). Unfortunately, I don't have billions of dollars of income out of which to allocate funding for lobbyists. So the chance I'll see it in my lifetime is minuscule.
> You can't republish that recipe as your own in another cookbook, though.
I find it amazing, in this day and age, that anyone who isn't a lawyer specializing in IP law in their particular jurisdiction can still feel confident that "they know" what are the exact boundaries of legality. What I am confident, about, however, is that what you have just claimed is (universally? vis-a-vis US law?) true, is true in some jurisdictions, and untrue in others, and almost certainly depends if you copied the recipe verbatim or paraphrased it (even without changing it in any material fashion with respect to its meaning).
Perhaps this is why I relate to copyright law in the following fashion: I think if what I am doing is morally right, and take steps to minimize the damage to myself if I should be accused of breaking the law, such steps being in accord with the probability of that happening.
They game governments to get laws passed which enrich themselves at the cost of depriving society of: the use of the public domain, due process, and other privileges like anonymity on the net.
They use their legal muscle to try to prevent independently created content from becoming competitive with their product (e.g.: Veoh).
> When you realize that, you will realize YOU made up god. Therefore, god doesn't exist.
And when I paint this great (to me) painting, it should matter to me that (perhaps) only I think it's a masterpiece?
> is not whether or not an invisible man exists
My belief in strong agnosticism hinges on the following thought experiment: "What observation could give me evidence that my model of God exists?" I simply could not imagine any such observation which could give evidence for God's existence or for his non-existence. This is probably because I identify God as being a Platonic ideal, not as "a being with enough power to cause things to happen which I cannot understand".
After understanding that I believed in strong agnosticism, I was freed of worrying about whether God actually exists, and understood I merely had to make a decision, based on what I think might make me feel better, survive longer, or whatever my goals in life are. OTOH, I'd be surprised if there are many strong agnostics who follow religious beliefs which are onerous, since strong agnostics like me obviously don't believe that God, even if he actually exists, punishes people for doing X, Y, or Z, or rewards them for doing A, B, or C --- or at least, punishes/rewards them in any observable fashion.
Refusal (and therefore, I suppose, inability) to surrender your encryption keys in the UK is a crime. I suppose trying to use some system with deniability might be of use, but given the spirit of that law, I don't see it as an impossibility that the court would merely presume (based on other "evidence") that you have used the deniability features of whatever encryption system is installed, and jail you for not surrendering the (presumed) keys (even if you haven't used those features).
Slashdot Mirror
> The Munich transition is taking ages.
As it should, or rather, must. At least one of the failures which I listed appears to have been caused by bad planning and not having a reasonable goal --- in the case of Munich, the goal isn't hitting a given finish date, or immediate savings of money, but rather, independence from lock-in. Whoever got that to be understood to be the goal of the project was a genius, because it's one of the only goals for such a project that I can think of which Microsoft couldn't possibly undercut.
> It's been thwarted
You keep using that word. It's a bad choice for such a discussion, because a search of meanings using Google gives a list which varies from "blocked, obstructed" to "defeated, disappointingly unsuccessful". I can agree that Microsoft blocked the transition for at least a year with FUD about Linux infringing its software patents, so the first definition would be OK. But for sure the transition isn't "disappointingly unsuccessful".
> The other failures are a problem that shows that the FOSS community
Actually, I think a very good case can be made about the other failures not involving the FOSS community whatsoever, but rather being the result of bad management on the part of the organizations thinking about transitioning. In fact, I think if your transition plan depends on the FOSS community doing anything specific for you, it's obvious you're doing it wrong. Very wrong.
> Project Limux that was thwarted in Munich
Er, you got that backwards. The Munich transition is going more or less OK if not on time, however, there have been quite a few other failures: an internationally obscure Swiss canton failed, and also the city of Vienna.
After Munich actually finishes its transition, we will get to see whether the long-term TCO is smaller. It will be very interesting, assuming that Microsoft won't manage to somehow corrupt the flow of objective information about it. Unfortunately, it won't necessarily prove anything about the profitability of future migrations, since Munich hadn't even bought XP licenses (they were running NT!) at the time it decided to go for Linux, yet even like that they had a horrific amount of lock-in via Office macros. They also used the transition as an opportunity to "clean house" and prevent every department independently writing its own Office macros for shared tasks, which will also save them maintenance costs in the long run.
themoviedb.org, at least, hasn't yet publicized its license terms, nor how people will be able to download its content in bulk form in order to "keep them honest". The history of trying to make money by closing what was open is quite long, now.
I do see that there is an open ticket concerning posting the licensing terms on the website. So I'm encouraged, at least for now.
Cinavia is audio watermarking. Considering that they aren't quite as braindead as the SDMI developers so that they haven't posted a public oracle for their watermark, I would guess that Cinavia has a chance of surviving for quite a bit longer. But I wouldn't bet on it surviving a very long time if it becomes a nuisance.
There are few details about this watermark on the net, currently, and the information which there is gives one the impression that it is currently designed to prevent movies which have been taped in a movie theater from being played at home. I don't find anywhere that it would prevent copying/backup of media designed for home use.
Frankly, I'd be totally OK with that. That's not the kind of abusive DRM which inconveniences the paying consumer. It's also a use case which is a lot easier for protecting a watermark, because one only gets one instance of the watermark for every film which is released. My bet is that it will be cracked by someone analyzing the detection algorithm rather than by comparison of watermarked/non-watermarked audio streams. That is, assuming that someone doesn't just come up with some kind of processing paradigm which manages to remove the watermark without even figuring out how it works exactly.
How long before someone makes an HDCP compliant (w/ random valid HDCP sink key) virtual video card driver you install in windows that appears to other software as a valid HDCP compliant video device. The driver could be written to decrypt and write the stream to a disk.
I have to admit that I didn't think about this use case for HDCP, and you may be correct. OTOH, isn't Microsoft into only letting vendor-signed drivers run under modern versions of Windows? In that case, the Bluray player might also be able to check that the video card in question had a signed driver from a whitelist of allowed vendors.
> You're left with trust - not exactly the most comfortable form of security.
It's actually the most ubiquitous form of security there is, in the field of software. Even in the case of open source applications, very very few people only use an application after doing a thorough security audit.
So I ask again, more bluntly: is this FUD, or is it actually more dangerous than other things I do in the course of a typical day, like commuting?
> The app can access a lot and can call home over the internet, so you are afraid for a good reason.
My impression was that the app can do exactly what you authorize it to do when you install it, and nothing more. Am I wrong? Could you be a bit more specific what we should all be afraid of? For example, is it more dangerous than getting into my car and driving for an hour?
Intel's statement had to do with the security of the use case of HDCP: digital video encrypted with HDCP being transported over HDMI cables. In other words, the hardware Intel claims is required, is specialized hardware which interfaces with HDMI ports. This software implementation is not interesting for cracking encrypted video if it cannot communicate with the Blu-Ray or other media player in question in a way which tricks the media player into thinking that the computer running the software is a certified display device.
Insightful? I rather doubt that "Angry Birds" is the average development model, especially for someone who looks to Slashdot for free advice:
The initial cost to develop Angry Birds was estimated to exceed €100,000, not including money spent on the subsequent updates.
Don't know about you, but I'm not about to put up $134K of my own money for a chance to make it rich from the iOS marketplace. (Yes, they sold ~6.5 million copies --- in this case.)
My impression was that there's also very little money, on the average, in iOS apps also --- perhaps a bit more than 0, but nothing you'd want to bet feeding your family on.
> Hint: You can't, you're now violating your licensing agreement.
It wouldn't surprise me if the countdown has started to amend that licensing agreement with language similar to "device whitelisting is allowed solely for the prevention of circumvention of protections to intellectual property rights blah blah blah", so that cases like this are given the green light.
Don't forget that the Bluetooth consortium is just a bunch of megacorps --- hey, guess what? How surprising! Sony is a member!
From reading the article, it seems that they are suing for breach of the AdWords contract. This seems unlikely to me to shut down the illegal pharmacies, unless Google is paying investigators to actually do business with the pharmacies and track them down "in real life" --- in which case, why not just give the evidence they obtain to the applicable LEOs?
I suppose one doesn't prevent the other, but the article doesn't at all address this possibility, in fact, it spins the story like Google might be doing this for CYA in case law enforcement catches these guys all by themselves.
Don't they read xkcd or use git? They should start calling the rocks by SHA1 checksums of Earth names prefixed by "Mars: ".
Actually, Charles Schultz thought of this first, more or less.
> NASA scientists called the rock 'Oileán Ruaidh,' which is the Gaelic name for an island off the coast of northwestern Ireland
Can't NASA scientists think ahead a little bit to make the future a safer place? GPS manufacturers of the year 2437 are gonna be pissed when their customers end up on Mars while trying to fly to Ireland...
Nah, actually I'm so long here I have tons of karma to burn while playing "cyber-dutch-boy with finger in levee".
Wait a second --- you mean that someone hacked into their computers and brought everything back on line against their will?
Hey mods! Just because you don't agree with the post, it doesn't make it a troll.
> in the Middle East for ordinary citizens to own automatic military assault rifles
Hmm, which Middle East country are we talking about, exactly? You kind of sound like someone pulling factoids from thin air, but here on Slashdot you never know. Color me curious. Care to cough up some examples?
Let's assume my charisma is so effective that everyone I meet in those 40 years is convinced immediately.
I would still have to meet people at a rate of 6 people a minute continuously for those 40 years. With no breaks whatsoever. Not very likely, is it?
> If you could convince 100 million U.S. citizens that making this
> change was a reason to vote for someone
Last time I checked, the only way to do that was to buy an awful lot of time on television. So much time, actually, that paying for lobbyists would be small change in comparison.
Writing a novel takes a long time and is a lot of work. Producing a movie, even a cheap one, takes much more money than most individuals have to spare. Leaving aside why should anyone put all that effort or money in to bring a concept to fruition, you can't even solve the how if people aren't willing to commit to paying for viewing / listening to / reading the final work.
Frankly, I'm sure that if Paulo Coelho publicized that because copyright no longer exists he needs his fans to finance the writing of his next book, he'd manage to raise enough money to get by. And some people would still pay him for his works. I'm not sure how much more of less money he'd raise this way, than he raises now, however. Independent movie developers would probably be releasing short clips of the beginning of their movie on places like YouTube and gathering contributions to finance the rest of project.
Yes, as the GP already stated, things would be different. Very different. For example, the minute CreativeGuyNo1 releases the first chapter of his book, there would be nothing preventing CreativeGuyNo2 from publishing a competing second chapter, trying to steal away the audience from CreativeGuyNo1. People would probably coin new words for concepts like "creator who released a good teaser but never actually paid back anything for the flood of money he got to continue" and "someone who is great at polishing the great ideas of others but has few original ideas of his own".
Personally, I think it would be ideal if there would be some kind of compromise --- say about 20 years of protection, with little punishment for not-for-profit infringement (the definition of profit not including receiving other copyrighted works). Unfortunately, I don't have billions of dollars of income out of which to allocate funding for lobbyists. So the chance I'll see it in my lifetime is minuscule.
> You can't republish that recipe as your own in another cookbook, though.
I find it amazing, in this day and age, that anyone who isn't a lawyer specializing in IP law in their particular jurisdiction can still feel confident that "they know" what are the exact boundaries of legality. What I am confident, about, however, is that what you have just claimed is (universally? vis-a-vis US law?) true, is true in some jurisdictions, and untrue in others, and almost certainly depends if you copied the recipe verbatim or paraphrased it (even without changing it in any material fashion with respect to its meaning).
Perhaps this is why I relate to copyright law in the following fashion: I think if what I am doing is morally right, and take steps to minimize the damage to myself if I should be accused of breaking the law, such steps being in accord with the probability of that happening.
> The MAFIAA/RIAA ...
They game governments to get laws passed which enrich themselves at the cost of depriving society of: the use of the public domain, due process, and other privileges like anonymity on the net.
They use their legal muscle to try to prevent independently created content from becoming competitive with their product (e.g.: Veoh).
> When you realize that, you will realize YOU made up god. Therefore, god doesn't exist.
And when I paint this great (to me) painting, it should matter to me that (perhaps) only I think it's a masterpiece?
> is not whether or not an invisible man exists
My belief in strong agnosticism hinges on the following thought experiment: "What observation could give me evidence that my model of God exists?" I simply could not imagine any such observation which could give evidence for God's existence or for his non-existence. This is probably because I identify God as being a Platonic ideal, not as "a being with enough power to cause things to happen which I cannot understand".
After understanding that I believed in strong agnosticism, I was freed of worrying about whether God actually exists, and understood I merely had to make a decision, based on what I think might make me feel better, survive longer, or whatever my goals in life are. OTOH, I'd be surprised if there are many strong agnostics who follow religious beliefs which are onerous, since strong agnostics like me obviously don't believe that God, even if he actually exists, punishes people for doing X, Y, or Z, or rewards them for doing A, B, or C --- or at least, punishes/rewards them in any observable fashion.
> My money's on the $5 wrench. [xkcd.com]
Refusal (and therefore, I suppose, inability) to surrender your encryption keys in the UK is a crime. I suppose trying to use some system with deniability might be of use, but given the spirit of that law, I don't see it as an impossibility that the court would merely presume (based on other "evidence") that you have used the deniability features of whatever encryption system is installed, and jail you for not surrendering the (presumed) keys (even if you haven't used those features).