Now, in reply to this point, we ordinarily get people saying that the BBC is excellent. Ie they like it. They can receive its content. They want to subscribe. Its just irrelevant to the human rights issue. Not quite. There is a need for certain types of content that simply isn't, and probably can't ever be, met by commercial broadcasters unless they're forced into it by the government (which some might consider a worse alternative). Just compare the news coverage on BBC or PBS with, say, Fox News, or the local news of any station in the US. Commercial broadcasters provide infotainment, not journalism, and that isn't enough for a healthy democracy.
So here are your options:
force commercial broadcasters to provide certain types of content, and hope that they'll do a decent job, instead of meeting the letter of the law while spitting on the spirit of it, or
charge a fee to everyone who owns a TV and use that money to pay for certain types of content, or
fund that content out of general tax revenue, making everyone pay for it whether they own a TV or not, or
watch your country fall apart as everyone receives bread and circuses with no easy way to get the information they need to be informed participants in a democracy.
The EFF has since admitted that the other unknown blocks were just more metadata used by iTunes. Can you provide a link to that announcement? The one I posted is the most current one I could find on eff.org, posted just 4 days ago, and it says in part:
It's best to assume that either the sign or chtb field could be used by Apple to identify the user who purchased a track (that would be true if Apple logs what it writes in these fields, or if sign is, as it seems, a cryptographic signature). It's also safe to assume that they can be used to tell the difference between real and forged names / Apple IDs in tracks.
And as the tags are not encrypted, they are obviously not intended for tracking files on peer to peer filesharing as I could change them to reference anyone. They're not encrypted, but they are probably signed. The iTunes Plus files have blocks called "sign" and "chtb" which were not present in the old DRM'd files, and whose contents are unique for each combination of user + track. If you're going to remove your name, make sure you remove those blocks too - otherwise, the file could still be traced back to you by someone who knows what the original personal info might have been (i.e. Apple).
Besides, didn't everyone cheer when some stores introduced audio watermarking which would actually prevent you from putting the original file on peer to peer networks, unlike this? No, I don't remember anyone cheering because of that. Most people here don't want their files being tracked at all, whether it's by watermark or name.
3 Mbps is pretty weak these days, and fractional T1 would be almost intolerable if you actually use any high-bandwidth applications. I have DSL advertised at 7 Mbps (5 Mbps in real life), and when I had Comcast I had a reliable 6 Mbps for about the same price.
The music labels' business is threatened by the very nature of the thing they're trying to sell. It's foolish to try to make money from selling numbers, and they were lucky to have gotten as far as they did during the "bubble" period when it was practical for big companies, but not individuals, to make copies.
Now the bubble has burst, and if they don't adapt to the world as it exists today--where copyright is easy to violate on a large scale and impossible to enforce 99% of the time--they'll face the same fate as a dot-com millionaire-for-a-day who didn't know when to quit the game.
No. It would, if musicians were all as stubborn and unimaginative as record execs, but they're not. There are other business models for music besides "write song now, sell copies later", and as long as musicians adapt, there will still be music.
Buggy whip makers relied on the horse drawn carriage to protect their livelihood, and look where they ended up. Sorry, but capitalism means no one owes you a living, and if you refuse to adapt by providing something people can't get on their own, then you're toast.
"Other than starting up, it's responsive"... and other than that one unfortunate mishap, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
Trillian takes longer to load than just about anything I've used (except Borland Developer Studio), and it slows the whole machine down while it does so. It's ridiculous because there doesn't seem to be any good reason - it's an IM client, not a game that has to cache hundreds of MB worth of textures.
Many non-material items are legally real property. Drug formulae, music, video game software, and others are ideas. Those are not "legally real property". Copyrights and patents themselves can, in some cases, be considered property, but the formulas, music, software, etc. that are covered by copyright or patents are not a form of property. You cannot own an idea or a number, but you can patent or copyright it.
People deserve to own their ideas and make money with them. No, not necessarily. They deserve to be compensated for the work they do, but that doesn't have to mean legal monopolies on ideas or information: I get compensated for the work I do, and like most people, my job doesn't have any special legal protection. All I need is an agreement between my boss and myself that if I do X amount of work, I'll receive Y dollars. If I don't think that's enough, I have the option to stop working for him and find someone else who's willing to pay my asking price, or to enter another line of work, or to lower my expectations and settle for Y dollars.
Similarly, if an artist or musician wants to get paid for painting or recording, he can find someone who'll agree to pay him for it. If he wants $10,000 to make a painting, and someone is willing to pay him $8000, he has the same options: accept the lower offer, look for another customer, or enter another line of work where customers are willing to pay more. What he doesn't need or deserve, however, is the option to make his painting for free, plaster copies of it all over walls and galleries, and then force anyone who looks at it or makes their own copy to pay him $10,000. That's just a way to avoid honest negotiations.
Maybe Bush isn't quite as bad as I thought. Or if he is shooting people down at Gitmo, at least it's being kept a lot quieter. I guess you didn't hear about Abu Ghraib. Getting shot would be a luxury compared to getting sodomized with glow sticks and beaten to death.
You're right, I can't download a legal copy of the movie online and transfer it to my phone (for which I blame the DRM, not the phone).
I can, however, drive to Best Buy and buy the PotC: Dead Man's Chest DVD for $14.99, exactly the same price that Apple charges for the downloadable version. I'll get slightly better video quality, as well as special features, and I could be there and back in half an hour... which is just about as long as it'd take to download the movie at 4-5 Mbps.
I'm not denying that the iPhone is slick and polished, but it's not revolutionary, and most of its features can be found elsewhere for a lower price. What sets it apart are a big screen, visual voice mail, a full-featured browser, and support for Apple's DRM instead of Microsoft's. Those are nice, but I don't think they're worth an extra $500, especially when you consider the features it doesn't have that cheaper phones do.
Your comparison is misleading because you linked to the two-disc special edition. The regular edition DVD is only $14.99 -- it's marked down quite a bit from an inflated "list price", but Best Buy always does that.
That's the same price as on the iTunes store, but you still get extra features (outtakes, commentary, other languages) as well as the ability to play it on any DVD player, rip it to your favorite compressed format, etc.
Here you go. I paid $50 for it, but now that I think about it, that price included an extra discount you can't get as a new customer - but $129 is still a lot cheaper than the iPhone.
It's a Samsung SCH-U740. I did have to sign up for a 2-year contract to get that price... but as I understand it, the iPhone price we've all seen also requires a 2-year contract.
Of course, the iPhone will be able to play non-DRMed movies, so if you wanted you could go to Best Buy, spend $25 on Pirates of the Caribbean, use Handbrake to rip it as mp4, and put that on your iPhone. I can do that right now. I can go to Best Buy and buy a DVD--which, in case you haven't checked lately, only costs a couple bucks more than the iTunes version and includes bonus features Apple won't give you--and then use DVDFab to put it on my phone.
But here's the kicker: my phone is smaller and thinner than the iPhone, it has 3G data connectivity, it has a QWERTY keyboard with buttons I can actually feel, it has voice dictation in case I don't feel like typing, it has GPS for navigation, it can download purchased songs over the air instead of syncing with a PC, and it still only cost me about one-tenth of the iPhone's price tag.
Yeah, the only new part of that is being able to watch a DRM'd copy of Pirates of Caribbean that you paid $10 to download. Lots of phones have been able to play 3GP movies for a while now, as well as accessing the web for local searches and phone call links (albeit without Google Maps's ajaxy goodness).
Such an argument would be destroyed by simply reading the text of the DMCA. 1201(k) requires specific kinds of copy protection to be implemented for a "VHS format analog video cassette recorder", "8mm format analog video cassette camcorder", "Beta format analog video cassette recorder", "8mm format analog video cassette recorder", or an "analog video cassette recorder that records using an NTSC format video input and that is not otherwise covered under clauses (i) through (iv)". Notice the word "cassette" in all those terms, and the calling out of specific analog recording formats.
Furthermore, those terms are defined; the meaning of "analog" is not just left up in the air where any old hyperchicken can redefine it to suit his case. For example, 1201(k)(4)(A):
An "analog video cassette recorder" means a device that records, or a device that includes a function that records, on electromagnetic tape in an analog format the electronic impulses produced by the video and audio portions of a television program, motion picture, or other form of audiovisual work.
Those lawsuits would be baseless anyway. TiVo is understandably afraid of having to pay the enormous cost of a legal battle with Big Content, but make no mistake: they'd win in the end. There's nothing legally requiring them to implement DRM or other annoying features (except maybe the CableCard license, which only applies to the pricey Series3 units).
The Macrovision requirement is in section 1201(k) of the DMCA, which specifically refers to "analog video cassette recorders". TiVo doesn't make analog recordings or use cassettes, so the Macrovision requirement doesn't apply.
If you're dealing with such an evil captor, then you're screwed anyway, whether or not you even use encryption. They're aware that steganography exists, so they might just assume that you're hiding data in every.iso,.avi, and.jpg file on your disk, and torture you forever until you reveal it to them.
You'd have a fairly strong defense against that accusation if your hard drive contains no steganography tools. That's sort of the the issue with truecrypt - it doesn't prove you have child porn, or even a hidden volume, but its not unreasonable to suppose you might, if you have truecrypt, there is other circumstantial evidence, and a 'snitch' whose just reliable enough of a witness to sway a jury. Luckily, in a criminal case, the standard is "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt", not "one could reasonably suppose you might be guilty".
As has already been stated, if the authorities are so corrupt that they'll jail you without proving the case against you, then you're screwed no matter what you do.
The "flaw" pointed out by the GP is only a flaw if you're being tried in a kangaroo court. I don't think our court system has gotten that bad.
I mean, if you're dealing with a corrupt court where you're guilty until proven innocent, you don't even have to be using encryption to get screwed this way. The DA might just as well accuse you of using steganography to hide illegal photos in random files spread all across your hard drive, which is equally impossible to disprove.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "structured nature of the hidden volume", though. TrueCrypt hidden volumes have no plaintext header, just like main volumes, and as long as the crypto methods in use are good ones, the encrypted data will be indistinguishable from random bytes, no matter how well-structured the plaintext is.
There are attacks against hidden volumes, but they basically involve taking snapshots of the whole volume at separate points in time, then obtaining the main volume's key and checking whether any changes have been made to "unused" areas of the filesystem.
That is, I could sneak into your house and copy the disk today (version A), then come back next month, seize the disk (version B), and force you to give up the main volume key. I can then mount both versions of the partition and look for differences between them. If there are any areas that contained random data in version A, and different-but-still-random data in version B, I can be pretty sure it means you were writing to a hidden partition located there.
I think the best defense against that attack would be for TrueCrypt to randomly write chunks of new random data to the free space of mounted volumes, which would disguise the writes made to hidden volumes. (Of course you'd need to use both keys when mounting the main volume so it knew not to clobber your hidden data.)
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So here are your options:
3 Mbps is pretty weak these days, and fractional T1 would be almost intolerable if you actually use any high-bandwidth applications. I have DSL advertised at 7 Mbps (5 Mbps in real life), and when I had Comcast I had a reliable 6 Mbps for about the same price.
Your analogy is weaker. Stealing != copying.
The music labels' business is threatened by the very nature of the thing they're trying to sell. It's foolish to try to make money from selling numbers, and they were lucky to have gotten as far as they did during the "bubble" period when it was practical for big companies, but not individuals, to make copies.
Now the bubble has burst, and if they don't adapt to the world as it exists today--where copyright is easy to violate on a large scale and impossible to enforce 99% of the time--they'll face the same fate as a dot-com millionaire-for-a-day who didn't know when to quit the game.
No. It would, if musicians were all as stubborn and unimaginative as record execs, but they're not. There are other business models for music besides "write song now, sell copies later", and as long as musicians adapt, there will still be music.
Buggy whip makers relied on the horse drawn carriage to protect their livelihood, and look where they ended up. Sorry, but capitalism means no one owes you a living, and if you refuse to adapt by providing something people can't get on their own, then you're toast.
"Other than starting up, it's responsive"... and other than that one unfortunate mishap, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
Trillian takes longer to load than just about anything I've used (except Borland Developer Studio), and it slows the whole machine down while it does so. It's ridiculous because there doesn't seem to be any good reason - it's an IM client, not a game that has to cache hundreds of MB worth of textures.
Similarly, if an artist or musician wants to get paid for painting or recording, he can find someone who'll agree to pay him for it. If he wants $10,000 to make a painting, and someone is willing to pay him $8000, he has the same options: accept the lower offer, look for another customer, or enter another line of work where customers are willing to pay more. What he doesn't need or deserve, however, is the option to make his painting for free, plaster copies of it all over walls and galleries, and then force anyone who looks at it or makes their own copy to pay him $10,000. That's just a way to avoid honest negotiations.
In Canada, you have a parliamentary system where third parties actually matter once in a while. Down here, we obey Duverger's law.
You're right, I can't download a legal copy of the movie online and transfer it to my phone (for which I blame the DRM, not the phone).
I can, however, drive to Best Buy and buy the PotC: Dead Man's Chest DVD for $14.99, exactly the same price that Apple charges for the downloadable version. I'll get slightly better video quality, as well as special features, and I could be there and back in half an hour... which is just about as long as it'd take to download the movie at 4-5 Mbps.
I'm not denying that the iPhone is slick and polished, but it's not revolutionary, and most of its features can be found elsewhere for a lower price. What sets it apart are a big screen, visual voice mail, a full-featured browser, and support for Apple's DRM instead of Microsoft's. Those are nice, but I don't think they're worth an extra $500, especially when you consider the features it doesn't have that cheaper phones do.
Your comparison is misleading because you linked to the two-disc special edition. The regular edition DVD is only $14.99 -- it's marked down quite a bit from an inflated "list price", but Best Buy always does that.
That's the same price as on the iTunes store, but you still get extra features (outtakes, commentary, other languages) as well as the ability to play it on any DVD player, rip it to your favorite compressed format, etc.
Here you go. I paid $50 for it, but now that I think about it, that price included an extra discount you can't get as a new customer - but $129 is still a lot cheaper than the iPhone.
It's a Samsung SCH-U740. I did have to sign up for a 2-year contract to get that price... but as I understand it, the iPhone price we've all seen also requires a 2-year contract.
But here's the kicker: my phone is smaller and thinner than the iPhone, it has 3G data connectivity, it has a QWERTY keyboard with buttons I can actually feel, it has voice dictation in case I don't feel like typing, it has GPS for navigation, it can download purchased songs over the air instead of syncing with a PC, and it still only cost me about one-tenth of the iPhone's price tag.
Yeah, the only new part of that is being able to watch a DRM'd copy of Pirates of Caribbean that you paid $10 to download. Lots of phones have been able to play 3GP movies for a while now, as well as accessing the web for local searches and phone call links (albeit without Google Maps's ajaxy goodness).
Furthermore, those terms are defined; the meaning of "analog" is not just left up in the air where any old hyperchicken can redefine it to suit his case. For example, 1201(k)(4)(A):
Those lawsuits would be baseless anyway. TiVo is understandably afraid of having to pay the enormous cost of a legal battle with Big Content, but make no mistake: they'd win in the end. There's nothing legally requiring them to implement DRM or other annoying features (except maybe the CableCard license, which only applies to the pricey Series3 units).
The Macrovision requirement is in section 1201(k) of the DMCA, which specifically refers to "analog video cassette recorders". TiVo doesn't make analog recordings or use cassettes, so the Macrovision requirement doesn't apply.
If you're dealing with such an evil captor, then you're screwed anyway, whether or not you even use encryption. They're aware that steganography exists, so they might just assume that you're hiding data in every .iso, .avi, and .jpg file on your disk, and torture you forever until you reveal it to them.
As has already been stated, if the authorities are so corrupt that they'll jail you without proving the case against you, then you're screwed no matter what you do.
The "flaw" pointed out by the GP is only a flaw if you're being tried in a kangaroo court. I don't think our court system has gotten that bad.
I mean, if you're dealing with a corrupt court where you're guilty until proven innocent, you don't even have to be using encryption to get screwed this way. The DA might just as well accuse you of using steganography to hide illegal photos in random files spread all across your hard drive, which is equally impossible to disprove.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "structured nature of the hidden volume", though. TrueCrypt hidden volumes have no plaintext header, just like main volumes, and as long as the crypto methods in use are good ones, the encrypted data will be indistinguishable from random bytes, no matter how well-structured the plaintext is.
There are attacks against hidden volumes, but they basically involve taking snapshots of the whole volume at separate points in time, then obtaining the main volume's key and checking whether any changes have been made to "unused" areas of the filesystem.
That is, I could sneak into your house and copy the disk today (version A), then come back next month, seize the disk (version B), and force you to give up the main volume key. I can then mount both versions of the partition and look for differences between them. If there are any areas that contained random data in version A, and different-but-still-random data in version B, I can be pretty sure it means you were writing to a hidden partition located there.
I think the best defense against that attack would be for TrueCrypt to randomly write chunks of new random data to the free space of mounted volumes, which would disguise the writes made to hidden volumes. (Of course you'd need to use both keys when mounting the main volume so it knew not to clobber your hidden data.)