So what will happen is that they'll sell one song at $1 to someone, and he'll share it, the manual way (but losslessly), with all of his friends (or as many as the legal system has indicated is "non-commmercial").
I wonder if we'll get to the point where putting up a semi-public list of all the content you own will be considered illegal.
Sony, for example, has been noted to be rather schizophrenic, also; its content producing divisions dreams of ever more secure/draconian DRM, while its consumer electronics division would prefer no DRM whatsoever (or at least, no new DRM systems which only make consumer devices more costly and complicated to produce and less user-friendly).
And even if the librarian of congress never decides to legalize, carte blanche archival, as he is required to consider every 3 years under 17.1201.1, the DMCA only applies to the US not the rest of the world where almost all other countries are free to bypass DRM as they wish, nor is cracking at the digital level required for historical purposes, echo, echo.
QuantumG stated that copyright law is a major problem to cultural preservation. (Actually he said "records and history" but copyright cannot be claimed on facts in most jurisdictions, so I'm reinterpreting his argument in what I thought was the same way you did when you claimed that the "right of first sale" refuted his point).
After I replied with "DRM + DMCA" to your "right of first sale", I conceded that point to you, and presented the following argument which you haven't considered at all.
Copyright term can be long compared to the life of bought media.
Even in the juridictions which allow space-shifting, it is not clear that space-shifted copies can be legally distributed even to the heirs of the copier.
The combination of these two points means that copyright law can be (and probably is already) a significant stumbling block to the long-term preservation of culture.
Your point (A) is perfectly correct, yet totally unconnected to the efficacy (or lack thereof) of DRM. There also do not exist unbreakable cryptosystems, yet this does not prevent cryptography from being useful. Why? Because risk/security is not a binary concept in the real world, it is a relative, economic one. If breaking a particular DRM system would cost more than the economic benefit to the breaker, it is unlikely to happen, assuming it has significant costs to do so, as some hardware-based DRM systems have.
Your point (B) is perfectly correct also. The DMCA only makes breaking DRM schemes more expensive (see above) because of higher risks.
My observation was that distribution of a space-shifted copy, even to one's heirs, is not necessarily supported by the wording "Such copying is a paradigmatic noncommercial personal use." (emphasis mine) used in Recording Indus. Ass'n of Am. v. Diamond Multimedia Sys., Inc. AFAIK, the courts have not decided this issue, as it has not come to trial, and a simple reading of the decision, I claim, would not seem to support such distribution.
I admit you have a point about the majority of DRM being broken up to now, but the signs are that eventually it could become prohibitively expensive to break at the digital level. But even if you are right, and all DRM will be broken, AFAIK the fair use provision for copying only applies to the owner of the original media. Once the original media succumbs to bit-rot, the non-DRM copy can only legally be used by the copier herself, and upon her death would "vanish". The minute copyright terms are extended to longer than the sum of an average human lifetime (actually less, since babies don't go around breaking DRM) and the average media lifetime, it becomes very difficult for your average Joe to preserve the bits of culture he likes in order that they enter the public domain.
This assumes that we, the public, care about following copyright law to the letter. However, if no one would care about copyright law, QuantumG has no point in the first place and your mention of the right of first sale is redundant.
Considering the evidence that climate has been cyclic with a cycle of approximately 100k years for the last million-odd years, leads me to think that there must also be negative feedback loops involved here. You seem to have missed that. Badly.
Yes, I realize this doesn't mean that there couldn't be a magic global temperature or CO2 concentration at which suddenly this behavior breaks down. But somehow, I don't think we know all that much about all the processes involved.
The right of first sale loses badly to the combination of DRM and the DMCA.
We can only hope that eventually most other media will follow the anti-DRM trend music is currently setting. But I doubt that it will ever happen to software. Music and video are different in that the consumer expects to be able to transfer them between umpteen zillions of different kinds of player hardware. Less so for video now, because of the price of video players relative to music players, and the size of video content relative to current storage technology.
I've always supported a law such that terminating a DRM activation server or discontinuing selling or licensing specific DRM technology requires releasing technology for consumers to unlock their bought media. Ditto with server-based multiuser games, the game marketer should be force to release server binaries, at the very minimum, if not server source code. And protocol documentation. And all this should be put in escrow at some kind of government agency before any sales can occur. And updated periodically if any of the software is patched over time.
Yes, I understood that it would be a dead project from the start, but it would enable people, X years from now, to run your MUD in a VM and understand a bit about the playing experience.
If you are worried that they won't be interested because it's already dead, you can try to convince them that publishing it on SF is useful to prevent someone from trying to patent your innovative features.
> and frankly I'd rather not support using SourceForge in the first place > (their bug tracker is atrociously terrible.)
OK, I can't force you to overcome your distaste for SF; however, I don't see how you're "supporting" it since interest in your MUD will probably be small compared to the cost of maintaining your information there, and secondly, since you won't be actively developing it, I fail to see why you care about the bug tracker. Merely post news a few months after it is up that you have put the project on "hold" and people interested in contacting you about it should write to email xxxxx@yyyyy.zzz (or your SF email).
Another possibility, now that I think of it, is to publish the article to your Slashdot journal, and post links to it whenever appropriate Slashdot threads pop up.
If that MUD is already dead, maybe you can contact the developers and convince them to release it as open source on SourceForge? You could also try to convince them to add your explanatory article into the documentation section.
My apologies that you had to take a karma hit just because I was too lazy to link to an explanatory source. My bad, should have known, will try to remember in the future.
OK, based on your posting history I get the impression that you use Windows but don't like it, and are constantly experimenting with Linux, which you also never like.
> Bullshit. My time is not free.
So, just don't experiment as much with Linux; wait several years between your experiments. Anyway, my impression is that the probability you're going to like it, no matter what it is, is really, really small.
Did some research to try to quantify that "many"...
Based on a search at secunia.com there were a total of 10 Linux privilege escalation bugs reported for 2008.
Of those, 5 were in proprietary software packages for Linux: Acrobat Reader, MaxDB, Avaya, SSH Tectia Client, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not interesting for ordinary desktop users.
Of the other 5, 1 was in KDE, so that wouldn't affect 100% of Linux users, let's be generous (the most popular free distros use Gnome) and say that's 50% of users.
Of the other 4, 1 seems to work on general Linux systems (sys_remap_file_pages() bug).
Of the other 3, 1 requires the USBLCD driver to be used or only gives group privilege escalation, 1 requires Intel G33 series or newer chipset, and 1 requires that the kernel is running as VMI guest on a x86 system. How many boxes does that cover? Not many, except perhaps for the Intel chipsets --- let's say another 50% (because I have no idea what market share Intel has).
So that's something like 2, maybe 2.5 bugs in all of 2008. Is that "many"? Matter of opinion.
The information in flash memory is stored as electric charge which slowly dissipates. Last time I checked, it was recommended to refresh it periodically, or the information could be lost in as little as 10 years.
User rts008: the automatic Slashdot meme enforcement AI bot indicates that your post should have looked like
"The problem here IMHO is they are looking to drop the hammer on this guy NOT for what he did, but for the fact that he made all their security look like the POS that it is."
And that's the crux of the matter, put very succinctly.
"Where the hell did they get their security guys from, Redmond College?"
There, fixed that for you.
There, fixed that for you.
Note: repeated offenses against the "Forum Meme Purity Act" may make you open to extradition to other forums, like Digg!
On another note, this is the same Toxage that has said they are in the working world and it takes them like 40 minutes to get to work... Interesting that we are now back in high school. oO
Even funnier that the forum ID which posted that is "I pwnd U"....
I think you're spot-on that one of the most useful skills nowadays is the ability to sniff out all of the "impurities" which pollute the ever-increasing quantities of incoming information: trolling, vandalism, astroturfing, conflicts of interests (both commercial and other), crackpots, etc. Not to mention the age-old stuff like blatant fraud wearing new, modern clothes (e.g., phishing).
My oldest child is just getting to an age where trying to teach him about it is possible.
You ignore an important assumption of the post you reply to, that the blackhats are aware that their target population, "those types", have migrated to Linux, and have started to target them there.
Currently there is no point to doing that, because of the very limited use of Linux by such users.
When "those types" are all using Linux, you'll need to install Plan9 or something equally exotic in order to attain the same level of security you have on your 4 Linux desktops now. Even that might not work, because in all probability (because of the way open-source works), your Plan9 installation will share applications like browsers and mail clients with the current mainstream Linux desktops.
OTOH, I still think the 4 Linux desktops will be more secure than WinXP is now, even after becoming mainstream, because more people will actually care about making them secure. You see, Microsoft currently doesn't care that much about how secure Windows is, because any security vulnerability in it is mostly an externality to them economically, they only lose a bit of reputation. So I'm fairly sure that the large group of volunteers trying to secure Linux is actually more motivated, and hopefully at a time when Linux is mainstream there would (hopefully) be even more effort being invested in securing it (of course, with the "too many cooks" effect and all, you cannot be sure this will help).
Of course, if we ever get to a future where Linux is as (or more) mainstream than Windows, what I said about Microsoft seeing security as an externality will no longer be true. So predicting the future here is about as easy as predicting the stock market.
I wasn't totally agreeing with your post (IMO curtarro seems to be right on) but still appreciated that your argument was valid and you had a point until (shoot-self-in-foot-time):
> 'Bricked' means you can't fix it, you send it in for service, and all they can > do is throw it in the trash and give you a new one.
Anyone who has had a HD drive die and then come back to life after swapping out its driver board understands that you are talking out of your ass here and that we probably have very little idea what actually happens at HD service centers. Except, of course, that even if they fixed our drive and we could have gotten it back with the data intact, we won't (because they can't be bothered with the logistics and even more importantly, the responsibility for making sure they don't send Customer A's data by mistake to Customer B).
A pity because your error really doesn't have much to do with your defining "bricked" as "not recoverable by flashing again by exactly the same process". BTW, if "pressing a hidden reset button and then flashing again by exactly the same process" would work, would it be still be "bricked" in your opinion?
The set of strings which look like meaningful data is a lot larger than even, let's say, the number of deterministic guesses you could possibly make in a reasonable amount of time. While at the same time it's also a lot smaller than the set of random data of the same length.
Assuming, of course, that we're discussing a reasonably large amount of data, e.g., more than 100 bytes (to be really generous, assuming ~2 bits of entropy per byte, a conservative estimate for English text, IIRC).
Or did I whoosh and you were going for Funny? EMIIW ("Excuse me if I whooshed")...
There, fixed that for you. It's going to take a LONG time to generate enough true entropy to fill a modern drive (using/dev/random). On *BSD systems and most other UNIX-like ones, there's no real difference between/dev/random and/dev/urandom, assuming both the latter even exists. See Wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
So what will happen is that they'll sell one song at $1 to someone, and he'll share it, the manual way (but losslessly), with all of his friends (or as many as the legal system has indicated is "non-commmercial").
I wonder if we'll get to the point where putting up a semi-public list of all the content you own will be considered illegal.
Sony, for example, has been noted to be rather schizophrenic, also; its content producing divisions dreams of ever more secure/draconian DRM, while its consumer electronics division would prefer no DRM whatsoever (or at least, no new DRM systems which only make consumer devices more costly and complicated to produce and less user-friendly).
...Unfortunately you missed the first half where all DRM of any significance has and will continue to be circumvented.
No, I largely ceded the point to you, and presented an argument which is based on the gray area of the legal uses of space-shifted content. You're just not listening.
And even if the librarian of congress never decides to legalize, carte blanche archival, as he is required to consider every 3 years under 17.1201.1, the DMCA only applies to the US not the rest of the world where almost all other countries are free to bypass DRM as they wish, nor is cracking at the digital level required for historical purposes, echo, echo.
And now even ignore yourself, as you correctly stated (and also I totally agreed with you) that the DMCA has nothing to do with fair use copying and space-shifting.
Let me summarize the argument up to now.
After I replied with "DRM + DMCA" to your "right of first sale", I conceded that point to you, and presented the following argument which you haven't considered at all.
Interesting. Why don't you do your own 10 minutes of research before replying, next time?
"compilations of portions"
I fail to see how this is going to help to preserve full-length works, eh? LOL
Your point (A) is perfectly correct, yet totally unconnected to the efficacy (or lack thereof) of DRM. There also do not exist unbreakable cryptosystems, yet this does not prevent cryptography from being useful. Why? Because risk/security is not a binary concept in the real world, it is a relative, economic one. If breaking a particular DRM system would cost more than the economic benefit to the breaker, it is unlikely to happen, assuming it has significant costs to do so, as some hardware-based DRM systems have.
Your point (B) is perfectly correct also. The DMCA only makes breaking DRM schemes more expensive (see above) because of higher risks.
If you reread my post, I do not connect the DMCA with fair use full-work copying as initially put out in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., supported in Recording Indus. Ass'n of Am. v. Diamond Multimedia Sys., Inc., and echoed in part (for literary works) in the explicit exceptions to the DMCA.
My observation was that distribution of a space-shifted copy, even to one's heirs, is not necessarily supported by the wording "Such copying is a paradigmatic noncommercial personal use." (emphasis mine) used in Recording Indus. Ass'n of Am. v. Diamond Multimedia Sys., Inc. AFAIK, the courts have not decided this issue, as it has not come to trial, and a simple reading of the decision, I claim, would not seem to support such distribution.
I admit you have a point about the majority of DRM being broken up to now, but the signs are that eventually it could become prohibitively expensive to break at the digital level. But even if you are right, and all DRM will be broken, AFAIK the fair use provision for copying only applies to the owner of the original media. Once the original media succumbs to bit-rot, the non-DRM copy can only legally be used by the copier herself, and upon her death would "vanish". The minute copyright terms are extended to longer than the sum of an average human lifetime (actually less, since babies don't go around breaking DRM) and the average media lifetime, it becomes very difficult for your average Joe to preserve the bits of culture he likes in order that they enter the public domain.
This assumes that we, the public, care about following copyright law to the letter. However, if no one would care about copyright law, QuantumG has no point in the first place and your mention of the right of first sale is redundant.
Considering the evidence that climate has been cyclic with a cycle of approximately 100k years for the last million-odd years, leads me to think that there must also be negative feedback loops involved here. You seem to have missed that. Badly.
Yes, I realize this doesn't mean that there couldn't be a magic global temperature or CO2 concentration at which suddenly this behavior breaks down. But somehow, I don't think we know all that much about all the processes involved.
The right of first sale loses badly to the combination of DRM and the DMCA.
We can only hope that eventually most other media will follow the anti-DRM trend music is currently setting. But I doubt that it will ever happen to software. Music and video are different in that the consumer expects to be able to transfer them between umpteen zillions of different kinds of player hardware. Less so for video now, because of the price of video players relative to music players, and the size of video content relative to current storage technology.
I've always supported a law such that terminating a DRM activation server or discontinuing selling or licensing specific DRM technology requires releasing technology for consumers to unlock their bought media. Ditto with server-based multiuser games, the game marketer should be force to release server binaries, at the very minimum, if not server source code. And protocol documentation. And all this should be put in escrow at some kind of government agency before any sales can occur. And updated periodically if any of the software is patched over time.
> It would just be another abandoned project,
Yes, I understood that it would be a dead project from the start, but it would enable people, X years from now, to run your MUD in a VM and understand a bit about the playing experience.
If you are worried that they won't be interested because it's already dead, you can try to convince them that publishing it on SF is useful to prevent someone from trying to patent your innovative features.
> and frankly I'd rather not support using SourceForge in the first place
> (their bug tracker is atrociously terrible.)
OK, I can't force you to overcome your distaste for SF; however, I don't see how you're "supporting" it since interest in your MUD will probably be small compared to the cost of maintaining your information there, and secondly, since you won't be actively developing it, I fail to see why you care about the bug tracker. Merely post news a few months after it is up that you have put the project on "hold" and people interested in contacting you about it should write to email xxxxx@yyyyy.zzz (or your SF email).
Another possibility, now that I think of it, is to publish the article to your Slashdot journal, and post links to it whenever appropriate Slashdot threads pop up.
If that MUD is already dead, maybe you can contact the developers and convince them to release it as open source on SourceForge? You could also try to convince them to add your explanatory article into the documentation section.
My apologies that you had to take a karma hit just because I was too lazy to link to an explanatory source. My bad, should have known, will try to remember in the future.
OK, based on your posting history I get the impression that you use Windows but don't like it, and are constantly experimenting with Linux, which you also never like.
> Bullshit. My time is not free.
So, just don't experiment as much with Linux; wait several years between your experiments. Anyway, my impression is that the probability you're going to like it, no matter what it is, is really, really small.
Simple, it's like in Linux, the Shadow Minister is the secret minister with the real power behind the publicly-readable Prime Minister.
Did some research to try to quantify that "many"...
Based on a search at secunia.com there were a total of 10 Linux privilege escalation bugs reported for 2008.
Of those, 5 were in proprietary software packages for Linux: Acrobat Reader, MaxDB, Avaya, SSH Tectia Client, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not interesting for ordinary desktop users.
Of the other 5, 1 was in KDE, so that wouldn't affect 100% of Linux users, let's be generous (the most popular free distros use Gnome) and say that's 50% of users.
Of the other 4, 1 seems to work on general Linux systems (sys_remap_file_pages() bug).
Of the other 3, 1 requires the USBLCD driver to be used or only gives group privilege escalation, 1 requires Intel G33 series or newer chipset, and 1 requires that the kernel is running as VMI guest on a x86 system. How many boxes does that cover? Not many, except perhaps for the Intel chipsets --- let's say another 50% (because I have no idea what market share Intel has).
So that's something like 2, maybe 2.5 bugs in all of 2008. Is that "many"? Matter of opinion.
The information in flash memory is stored as electric charge which slowly dissipates. Last time I checked, it was recommended to refresh it periodically, or the information could be lost in as little as 10 years.
User rts008: the automatic Slashdot meme enforcement AI bot indicates that your post should have looked like
There, fixed that for you.
Note: repeated offenses against the "Forum Meme Purity Act" may make you open to extradition to other forums, like Digg!
A reply in the original thread says:
Even funnier that the forum ID which posted that is "I pwnd U"....
You shouldn't blame him so much, my guess is that Britannica lacks an entry for Spell checker.
The Slashdot UI filters based on posts' scores and other modifiers.
Are you sure that it's not just that you're not seeing it because AC posts start at Score = 0 and your settings might be filtering posts like that?
I think you're spot-on that one of the most useful skills nowadays is the ability to sniff out all of the "impurities" which pollute the ever-increasing quantities of incoming information: trolling, vandalism, astroturfing, conflicts of interests (both commercial and other), crackpots, etc. Not to mention the age-old stuff like blatant fraud wearing new, modern clothes (e.g., phishing).
My oldest child is just getting to an age where trying to teach him about it is possible.
You ignore an important assumption of the post you reply to, that the blackhats are aware that their target population, "those types", have migrated to Linux, and have started to target them there.
Currently there is no point to doing that, because of the very limited use of Linux by such users.
When "those types" are all using Linux, you'll need to install Plan9 or something equally exotic in order to attain the same level of security you have on your 4 Linux desktops now. Even that might not work, because in all probability (because of the way open-source works), your Plan9 installation will share applications like browsers and mail clients with the current mainstream Linux desktops.
OTOH, I still think the 4 Linux desktops will be more secure than WinXP is now, even after becoming mainstream, because more people will actually care about making them secure. You see, Microsoft currently doesn't care that much about how secure Windows is, because any security vulnerability in it is mostly an externality to them economically, they only lose a bit of reputation. So I'm fairly sure that the large group of volunteers trying to secure Linux is actually more motivated, and hopefully at a time when Linux is mainstream there would (hopefully) be even more effort being invested in securing it (of course, with the "too many cooks" effect and all, you cannot be sure this will help).
Of course, if we ever get to a future where Linux is as (or more) mainstream than Windows, what I said about Microsoft seeing security as an externality will no longer be true. So predicting the future here is about as easy as predicting the stock market.
I wasn't totally agreeing with your post (IMO curtarro seems to be right on) but still appreciated that your argument was valid and you had a point until (shoot-self-in-foot-time):
> 'Bricked' means you can't fix it, you send it in for service, and all they can
> do is throw it in the trash and give you a new one.
Anyone who has had a HD drive die and then come back to life after swapping out its driver board understands that you are talking out of your ass here and that we probably have very little idea what actually happens at HD service centers. Except, of course, that even if they fixed our drive and we could have gotten it back with the data intact, we won't (because they can't be bothered with the logistics and even more importantly, the responsibility for making sure they don't send Customer A's data by mistake to Customer B).
A pity because your error really doesn't have much to do with your defining "bricked" as "not recoverable by flashing again by exactly the same process". BTW, if "pressing a hidden reset button and then flashing again by exactly the same process" would work, would it be still be "bricked" in your opinion?
You do know that you post this to a discussion of how the service is not longer open for new users to
> Try it
so it will be hard for him to
> quickly see.
??????
Take a deep breath, and think again.
The set of strings which look like meaningful data is a lot larger than even, let's say, the number of deterministic guesses you could possibly make in a reasonable amount of time. While at the same time it's also a lot smaller than the set of random data of the same length.
Assuming, of course, that we're discussing a reasonably large amount of data, e.g., more than 100 bytes (to be really generous, assuming ~2 bits of entropy per byte, a conservative estimate for English text, IIRC).
Or did I whoosh and you were going for Funny? EMIIW ("Excuse me if I whooshed")...
/dev/randon -> /dev/urandom
There, fixed that for you. It's going to take a LONG time to generate enough true entropy to fill a modern drive (using /dev/random). On *BSD systems and most other UNIX-like ones, there's no real difference between /dev/random and /dev/urandom, assuming both the latter even exists. See Wikipedia.