> how to block installing Lockjaw/Gnometris/KSirtet "just for me".
The first thing I'd do is make sure everyone's home directory is mounted "noexec", but that's not a full solution to this, because you have to make sure other places like/tmp or/var/tmp are similarly locked down, and any automatically mounted media is also mounted "noexec". And check that this doesn't break something you need, like "Joe X's special shell script from 1994" (but I don't think he has a lot of those kinds of stuff on his locked-down boxes).
> how do we prevent people from bringing in USB printers
Hmm, don't know that one right off... Wait 2 minutes for Google searches... "sudo apt-get remove usbmount" (for Ubuntu, or the "yum" equivalent for yum-based distros)?
I'm sure that eventually he could find a solution for everything he wants to do just using a lot of relatively simple things. It seems to me that the big advantage of Microsoft here is that they've already done all the work of organizing these solutions for you. OTOH, I've never used "puppet" or any of the other recommended solutions, they might be even better than MS's stuff (which I also don't use).
> Someday (hopefully) people will accept that the Abrahamic God was every bit as real > as Ra and Zeus -- not real at all.
You're probably right, but as I said, why do you think that'll prevent people of that era from believing in something else which seems equally ridiculous to you?
Possibly in the far future mankind will understand that this "love" thing is only a manifestation of various neurotransmitters in various concentrations at various sites in the brain. What a relief that'll be, eh? We won't have to believe in such an unclear, subjective, non-quantifiable concept, then.
Somehow I don't envy them (at least, in that --- they'll probably have real flying cars, too).
Recording the output is trivial, as you say. However, audiobooks can be 30 hours long and are broken up into 3, 4, even 5 pieces. The "analog-hole" approach is not practical under these circumstances.
I assume that they're broken up so that the maximum length of each piece isn't cumbersome; your reply indicates that the pieces are usually less than 6 hours long; most people sleep at least 5 hours/night which would only mean 1 hour of computer deprivation assuming only one computer in the house to do this.
But to get to the real point: your reply shows why DRM actually does work, even if it is breakable. It just has to make breaking it enough work that enough people are willing to pay for the luxury of not having to break it (i.e., buy multiple copies of the same content). Of course, the downside is that it will sometimes scare away other customers, like me. But as long as people like me are in the minority, companies will continue to try to use DRM to pad revenues.
Well, I agree that the example I gave, of a postage-stamp-sized package, is a bit of a strawman; on the other hand, I can understand shippers wanting the rigidity of a 3-D box in the case of shipping a fragile item; for example, a thin glass rod. An envelope doesn't provide much rigidity.
My first thought when reading your comment was that adding the third dimension wouldn't increase the "volume" of the packaging material, just the "area" (multiplied by wall thickness to get actual packaging volume). But then I realized that this (hollow box) would be a terrible way to ship a fragile item. It still might be effective and environmentally friendlier, however, if you could suspend the item in the center of the box stuck to elastic threads connected with 5 out of 6 of the box's faces (compared with filling the box with a soft filler).
Although its effect has often been compared to that of a nuclear weapon, it is only about one thousandth the power of the atomic bomb used against Hiroshima: it is equivalent to around 11 tons of TNT, whereas the Hiroshima blast was equivalent to 13,000 tons of TNT and modern nuclear missiles are far more powerful than the atomic bomb used against Hiroshima. However, the MOAB bomb's yield is comparable to the smallest of nuclear devices, such as the M-388 Davy Crockett.
> Ok the title might be a little ridiculous, but the ridiculous packaging > used to ship a few tiny objects by some shippers is pretty shameful.
In my experience, the smaller an item is that I carry around, the more likely it is for me to lose it. I think the same thing goes for the USPS. I don't think I'd feel all that great if Amazon tried to ship my new microSD card to me in a package the size of a postage stamp.
I would think that it would be trivial to just record the output of your speakers/mp3 player/etc., no? You could even record multiple times and develop sophisticated algorithms to remove the analog noise and improve resolution.
And while we're at it, I'm fairly sure that someone could write software which would OCR the output of a camcorder recording the screen of Adobe's ebook reader application while the down arrow key was held down with a small weight or clamp. Doesn't matter how many updates they make to their software in this case.
DRM is silly and insulting to the customer, especially in low-bandwidth cases like this.
Using the DMCA to censor him just inconveniences him a bit while he finds a way to post it from a country without such a law (or effective enforcement thereof). Isn't this less despicable than using the DCMA to charge him with the criminal act of providing tools to break access controls?
I hope we don't have another replay of the Skylarov fiasco.
Disclaimer: Don't take this comment as indicating that I think the DMCA is a good law.
This is vapor reporting from the Anti-Piracy Bureau. It seems that one server out of a ring of many, which might have had a total capacity of 65TB, is claimed to have been seized.
The only thing we've learned which "contradicts" this is that it is simpler to consider the motions of the planets from the Sun's frame of reference. It is possible to use the Earth as a frame of reference, it's just not intuitive (isn't part of the basis of the theory of relativity that all frames of reference are created equal?). And no, I don't think we should be teaching Earth-centric scientific theories in our schools, or rather, only in history classes.
> And hopefully someday people will realize they are Just Plain Wrong about the existence > of God, but unfortunately that's not as easily proven beyond a reasonable doubt as > evolution.
How on Earth do you think it could be possible to prove the non-existence of an omnipotent entity? And why do you think there is some connection between "proof" and "belief"? I.e., even if you could prove such a thing, why do you think it would cause people to stop believing?
Hulu and Netflix, AFAIK, are US-only, and I believe there are still countries where iTunes is unavailable. I would also guess (not using any of them) that they are all Windows-only.
> forcing the hand of the RIAA/MPAA
Good. Maybe this will eventually lead to a more sane situation in international copyright law.
IE is the only browser I know of which interfaces with ActiveX. It might be interesting in a multiuser browsing situation to remove IE in order to close off that avenue of infection.
Not using IE would protect you from other IE-only attacks, not just ActiveX.
As always, it's a tradeoff between functionality and security. Everyone has to make their own decision if it is worthwhile.
OTOH, if you booby trap your home in anticipation of or in response to ssuspected warrantless or sneak-and-peek operations, then, again, THEY ASKED FOR IT if they get hurt. You don't have to be a criminal to want to punish sneak-and-peek activity. After all, ANYONE in your abode who is not invited is a trespasser, even a paramedic if they insist on remaining present after realizing there is no emergency, no body, no blood, no validity in being present at the address because the address is WRONG due to admittedly a faulty dispatch order...
I don't know how Australian law approaches this, but in the US, you'd be guilty of reckless endangerment, and anyone, even a criminal who breaks into your house, who is injured by your traps can sue you for damages in civil court. He would, of course, have to show intention on your part (i.e., if you make the trap look unintentional enough, you might be OK, as long as no one who knows you testifies that you kept the situation dangerous for long periods of time).
A quick search leads me to "the law in England and Wales,.... There 'Offences Against The Person Act 1861 s 31' makes it an offense to set up a mechanical contrivance calculated to destroy human life or cause grievous bodily harm."
I think a better "trap" would be to have your computers automatically erase all the encryption keys in memory and shut down, the minute any intrusion is detected. Unfortunately, this won't help you against the police planting hardware keyloggers and other unpleasant stuff.
Sorry I was a bit harsh, probably deserved the Troll moderation.
But next time you probably should put the words back into the third party's mouth, like "my doc said that....".
I inherited a mistrust of doctors from my father, but I approach it as an opportunity to learn about something which is both interesting and useful to me personally, yet not directly connected with my profession. I understand that approach isn't for everyone.
Most of your post makes good sense (although simplistic, I'd guess) until
Cortisone shots don't fix anything, they just relieves the pain and lubricates the joints while your body heals itself.
Try to check if you actually know something before opening mouth. Or did you think that the Slashdot crowd wouldn't understand the word "inflammation" and went for the car analogy: "lubrication"?
You are correct that corticosteroids do not directly aid the healing of the damage, but they are not helping because of their lubricating effect. They modulate the immune response, which is how they relieve the pain and inflammation. The "truth" here is probably more complicated than what we know about it. (Yes, I realize the linked research deals with muscles and not bone or connective tissue, it's just illustrative.)
If you had several such pre-built probes waiting in orbit, you would have a much better chance, no? The probes would have the advantage that they're already out of the deepest part of Earth's gravity well, and that you could choose the one whose orbit is best. I would think that with only two or three you would be able to do what he wanted.
OTOH, I'm not convinced it would be cost-effective. Depends on how often do asteroids pass by close enough to make it worth our while (and how often they're worth piggy-backing upon), versus the cost saved for getting where you want to go.
But you could still press the button yourself! (Or pay your kids to do it.) Interesting how this simple idea has been overlooked by all the people replying to my post.
In other words, if book publishers are hoping that moving away from paper will enable them to implement DRM, they're just as stupid as the music and movie industry.
When I looked at the replies to my post, I suddenly understood that talking about a robotic finger just threw everyone off. How many pages does the average ebook have, anyway? How much work could it be to press the button yourself? Even if you're reading the 870 page "Order of the Phoenix", you wouldn't need to break the DRM all in one sitting, anyway. And even at 2 seconds per page (based on a very slow refresh for the epaper, even current electrophoretic technology is supposed to be able to attain 4x that) that would only be a total of 29 minutes of pressing the button, spread over as many sittings as you wish.
I agree that you are correct that DRM isn't about absolute security (I know well that there's no such beast). However, if the person is willing to press the button himself (or pay his children to do it, perhaps?), then my scheme merely requires software to drive the camera and perhaps do OCR, and that can be distributed over the internet.
Well, I'm glad to have made your day a bit brighter.
Could someone who actually owns a Kindle (I don't) let me know if it is possible to just constantly press a key on it and get the whole ebook's text to scroll continuously from beginning to end? In that case, you wouldn't need a robotic/zombie/whatever-else-you-find-amusing finger but rather just a simple clamp + some kind of video capture device with a high enough framerate + postprocessing software.
Even if the encryption algorithm and hardware were "unhackable", how hard could it be to set up a robot finger to press "Next Page" + a digital camera to photograph each page + OCR if desired????
Have a Kindle title which you want TTS (and it was forbidden)? Just convert it to regular text, as above, and poof, TTS.
Unless Amazon is going to start checking the files you TTS/read on your Kindle for copyright violations, I suppose.
> Meanwhile, the cynic in me says "It doesn't matter, we'll only see the news they > want us to see", the paranoid in me says "We'll only see the news THEY want us to > see", and the dadaist in me says "News? Art.".
That's golden. Thanks, I've stored it in my personal cache.
Although I might have rephrased it as:
Meanwhile, the cynic in me says "It doesn't matter, we'll only see the news Big Money wants us to see", the paranoid in me says "We'll only see the news Big Brother wants us to see", and the dadaist in me says "News? Art.".
We should dream about the EU being concerned that Canonical is leveraging Ubuntu's overpowering monopoly on the desktop to stifle competition among browsers.
You have big dreams. Me, I only dream about the "Year of the Linux Desktop".
(Oh, and this also answers your question about Apple. The EU would (presumably) only be concerned if suddenly Apple found itself in a monopolistic position on the Desktop.)
Slashdot Mirror
> how to block installing Lockjaw/Gnometris/KSirtet "just for me".
The first thing I'd do is make sure everyone's home directory is mounted "noexec", but that's not a full solution to this, because you have to make sure other places like /tmp or /var/tmp are similarly locked down, and any automatically mounted media is also mounted "noexec". And check that this doesn't break something you need, like "Joe X's special shell script from 1994" (but I don't think he has a lot of those kinds of stuff on his locked-down boxes).
> how do we prevent people from bringing in USB printers
Hmm, don't know that one right off... Wait 2 minutes for Google searches... "sudo apt-get remove usbmount" (for Ubuntu, or the "yum" equivalent for yum-based distros)?
I'm sure that eventually he could find a solution for everything he wants to do just using a lot of relatively simple things. It seems to me that the big advantage of Microsoft here is that they've already done all the work of organizing these solutions for you. OTOH, I've never used "puppet" or any of the other recommended solutions, they might be even better than MS's stuff (which I also don't use).
> Someday (hopefully) people will accept that the Abrahamic God was every bit as real
> as Ra and Zeus -- not real at all.
You're probably right, but as I said, why do you think that'll prevent people of that era from believing in something else which seems equally ridiculous to you?
Possibly in the far future mankind will understand that this "love" thing is only a manifestation of various neurotransmitters in various concentrations at various sites in the brain. What a relief that'll be, eh? We won't have to believe in such an unclear, subjective, non-quantifiable concept, then.
Somehow I don't envy them (at least, in that --- they'll probably have real flying cars, too).
Recording the output is trivial, as you say. However, audiobooks can be 30 hours long and are broken up into 3, 4, even 5 pieces. The "analog-hole" approach is not practical under these circumstances.
I assume that they're broken up so that the maximum length of each piece isn't cumbersome; your reply indicates that the pieces are usually less than 6 hours long; most people sleep at least 5 hours/night which would only mean 1 hour of computer deprivation assuming only one computer in the house to do this.
But to get to the real point: your reply shows why DRM actually does work, even if it is breakable. It just has to make breaking it enough work that enough people are willing to pay for the luxury of not having to break it (i.e., buy multiple copies of the same content). Of course, the downside is that it will sometimes scare away other customers, like me. But as long as people like me are in the minority, companies will continue to try to use DRM to pad revenues.
Well, I agree that the example I gave, of a postage-stamp-sized package, is a bit of a strawman; on the other hand, I can understand shippers wanting the rigidity of a 3-D box in the case of shipping a fragile item; for example, a thin glass rod. An envelope doesn't provide much rigidity.
My first thought when reading your comment was that adding the third dimension wouldn't increase the "volume" of the packaging material, just the "area" (multiplied by wall thickness to get actual packaging volume). But then I realized that this (hollow box) would be a terrible way to ship a fragile item. It still might be effective and environmentally friendlier, however, if you could suspend the item in the center of the box stuck to elastic threads connected with 5 out of 6 of the box's faces (compared with filling the box with a soft filler).
> non-nuclear weapons with megaton yields
No such thing. The largest thermobaric weapons have yields in the tens or at most hundreds of tons.
From Wikipedia:
> Ok the title might be a little ridiculous, but the ridiculous packaging
> used to ship a few tiny objects by some shippers is pretty shameful.
In my experience, the smaller an item is that I carry around, the more likely it is for me to lose it. I think the same thing goes for the USPS. I don't think I'd feel all that great if Amazon tried to ship my new microSD card to me in a package the size of a postage stamp.
I would think that it would be trivial to just record the output of your speakers/mp3 player/etc., no? You could even record multiple times and develop sophisticated algorithms to remove the analog noise and improve resolution.
And while we're at it, I'm fairly sure that someone could write software which would OCR the output of a camcorder recording the screen of Adobe's ebook reader application while the down arrow key was held down with a small weight or clamp. Doesn't matter how many updates they make to their software in this case.
DRM is silly and insulting to the customer, especially in low-bandwidth cases like this.
Using the DMCA to censor him just inconveniences him a bit while he finds a way to post it from a country without such a law (or effective enforcement thereof). Isn't this less despicable than using the DCMA to charge him with the criminal act of providing tools to break access controls?
I hope we don't have another replay of the Skylarov fiasco.
Disclaimer: Don't take this comment as indicating that I think the DMCA is a good law.
This is vapor reporting from the Anti-Piracy Bureau. It seems that one server out of a ring of many, which might have had a total capacity of 65TB, is claimed to have been seized.
> the Sun revolved around the Earth
The only thing we've learned which "contradicts" this is that it is simpler to consider the motions of the planets from the Sun's frame of reference. It is possible to use the Earth as a frame of reference, it's just not intuitive (isn't part of the basis of the theory of relativity that all frames of reference are created equal?). And no, I don't think we should be teaching Earth-centric scientific theories in our schools, or rather, only in history classes.
> And hopefully someday people will realize they are Just Plain Wrong about the existence
> of God, but unfortunately that's not as easily proven beyond a reasonable doubt as
> evolution.
How on Earth do you think it could be possible to prove the non-existence of an omnipotent entity? And why do you think there is some connection between "proof" and "belief"? I.e., even if you could prove such a thing, why do you think it would cause people to stop believing?
Hulu and Netflix, AFAIK, are US-only, and I believe there are still countries where iTunes is unavailable. I would also guess (not using any of them) that they are all Windows-only.
> forcing the hand of the RIAA/MPAA
Good. Maybe this will eventually lead to a more sane situation in international copyright law.
IE is the only browser I know of which interfaces with ActiveX. It might be interesting in a multiuser browsing situation to remove IE in order to close off that avenue of infection.
Not using IE would protect you from other IE-only attacks, not just ActiveX.
As always, it's a tradeoff between functionality and security. Everyone has to make their own decision if it is worthwhile.
I don't know how Australian law approaches this, but in the US, you'd be guilty of reckless endangerment, and anyone, even a criminal who breaks into your house, who is injured by your traps can sue you for damages in civil court. He would, of course, have to show intention on your part (i.e., if you make the trap look unintentional enough, you might be OK, as long as no one who knows you testifies that you kept the situation dangerous for long periods of time).
A quick search leads me to "the law in England and Wales, .... There 'Offences Against The Person Act 1861 s 31' makes it an offense to set up a mechanical contrivance calculated to destroy human life or cause grievous bodily harm."
I think a better "trap" would be to have your computers automatically erase all the encryption keys in memory and shut down, the minute any intrusion is detected. Unfortunately, this won't help you against the police planting hardware keyloggers and other unpleasant stuff.
You'll need 50.1% approval to pass the motion.
Let's see, there are 1,500,000 Slashdot members...
1,500,000 members, of whom maybe 5% are active?
I don't think that's going to fly. Reminds me a bit of the post-Microsoft ISO SC 34 committee.
Sorry I was a bit harsh, probably deserved the Troll moderation.
But next time you probably should put the words back into the third party's mouth, like "my doc said that ....".
I inherited a mistrust of doctors from my father, but I approach it as an opportunity to learn about something which is both interesting and useful to me personally, yet not directly connected with my profession. I understand that approach isn't for everyone.
Most of your post makes good sense (although simplistic, I'd guess) until
Try to check if you actually know something before opening mouth. Or did you think that the Slashdot crowd wouldn't understand the word "inflammation" and went for the car analogy: "lubrication"?
You are correct that corticosteroids do not directly aid the healing of the damage, but they are not helping because of their lubricating effect. They modulate the immune response, which is how they relieve the pain and inflammation. The "truth" here is probably more complicated than what we know about it. (Yes, I realize the linked research deals with muscles and not bone or connective tissue, it's just illustrative.)
If you had several such pre-built probes waiting in orbit, you would have a much better chance, no? The probes would have the advantage that they're already out of the deepest part of Earth's gravity well, and that you could choose the one whose orbit is best. I would think that with only two or three you would be able to do what he wanted.
OTOH, I'm not convinced it would be cost-effective. Depends on how often do asteroids pass by close enough to make it worth our while (and how often they're worth piggy-backing upon), versus the cost saved for getting where you want to go.
But you could still press the button yourself! (Or pay your kids to do it.) Interesting how this simple idea has been overlooked by all the people replying to my post.
In other words, if book publishers are hoping that moving away from paper will enable them to implement DRM, they're just as stupid as the music and movie industry.
When I looked at the replies to my post, I suddenly understood that talking about a robotic finger just threw everyone off. How many pages does the average ebook have, anyway? How much work could it be to press the button yourself? Even if you're reading the 870 page "Order of the Phoenix", you wouldn't need to break the DRM all in one sitting, anyway. And even at 2 seconds per page (based on a very slow refresh for the epaper, even current electrophoretic technology is supposed to be able to attain 4x that) that would only be a total of 29 minutes of pressing the button, spread over as many sittings as you wish.
I agree that you are correct that DRM isn't about absolute security (I know well that there's no such beast). However, if the person is willing to press the button himself (or pay his children to do it, perhaps?), then my scheme merely requires software to drive the camera and perhaps do OCR, and that can be distributed over the internet.
Well, I'm glad to have made your day a bit brighter.
Could someone who actually owns a Kindle (I don't) let me know if it is possible to just constantly press a key on it and get the whole ebook's text to scroll continuously from beginning to end? In that case, you wouldn't need a robotic/zombie/whatever-else-you-find-amusing finger but rather just a simple clamp + some kind of video capture device with a high enough framerate + postprocessing software.
Even if the encryption algorithm and hardware were "unhackable", how hard could it be to set up a robot finger to press "Next Page" + a digital camera to photograph each page + OCR if desired????
Have a Kindle title which you want TTS (and it was forbidden)? Just convert it to regular text, as above, and poof, TTS.
Unless Amazon is going to start checking the files you TTS/read on your Kindle for copyright violations, I suppose.
Nowadays, it'd be more like
Rogue Astronomer selling details about Massive Asteroid Headed for Earth on Ebay
or maybe
Rogue Astronomer in Jail; only willing to give Asteroid Details directly to the President
> Meanwhile, the cynic in me says "It doesn't matter, we'll only see the news they
> want us to see", the paranoid in me says "We'll only see the news THEY want us to
> see", and the dadaist in me says "News? Art.".
That's golden. Thanks, I've stored it in my personal cache.
Although I might have rephrased it as:
> meanwhile, they did it in Italy, and nobody said a thing.
Duh! They've already started blocking outgoing content which protests it!
We should dream about the EU being concerned that Canonical is leveraging Ubuntu's overpowering monopoly on the desktop to stifle competition among browsers.
You have big dreams. Me, I only dream about the "Year of the Linux Desktop".
(Oh, and this also answers your question about Apple. The EU would (presumably) only be concerned if suddenly Apple found itself in a monopolistic position on the Desktop.)