Can someone explain why copyrights and patents should expire? I'm being serious. Because the whole point of copyright is to make more works available for public use. That means being able to view, share, and build upon them, without begging for permission from anyone first. That's what "progress of the arts" means - the arts aren't exactly being advanced by a particular work if you can only see it by paying and you aren't allowed to use its settings or characters in your own work.
Copyright is a temporary stop along the line from "twinkle in the artist's eye" to "useful work in the public domain", during which the work is a little bit useful: you know that the work exists, and you can view it if you beg (bribe) the copyright holder for permission, but you can't do anything else with it. That temporary stop was added in order to provide another incentive for artists to publish, because the previous incentive (getting paid for the time they spent working) wasn't enough for some powerful people. The ultimate resting point of the work, however, is still in the public domain, where people can actually use it how they want.
Many Slashdoters don't want such protection because they (mistakenly) assume their percieved (I.E. self assumed and created out of thin air) rights trump everyone elses rights. I don't want such "protection" because I don't believe anyone deserves veto power over another person's free speech. You have no right to stop me from saying a sequence of words just because you said the same sequence of words earlier. It's not about my rights being more important than yours, it's about your alleged "right" to prevent copying of numbers being ridiculous, unnecessary, and stifling innovation.
Whatever technology is in this patent is almost certainly already in the Series 2 TiVos, as this patent was actually filed ages ago. Nope. I've upgraded both of my TiVos' hard drives, which involved reading all the data off the original drives. There were no passwords preventing me from reading it, and the replacement drives certainly do not implement this challenge-response system, but neither DVR has complained.
Also, if you honestly think that data belongs to you simply because you own the physical medium, you're in for a serious shock when you use any other electronic device. Content distributors, software companies, and even Richard Stallman would beg to differ. If I own the physical medium, I am entitled to read the data stored on it. See the Lexmark case.
Yup, which is exactly what would happen if someone tampered with the stored lease on a TPM system. The only difference is it might be stored in encrypted form on the hard drive, but that wouldn't make it any harder for an attacker to corrupt the stored lease.
where do you then keep the clear text lease info on the client without being tampered by an unauthorized party? Anywhere you want. No one can tamper with it because it's signed by the lease server, and if it's modified, then the signature won't match. This is cryptography 101. The code that checks the signature can't be tampered with either if it's stored in ROM.
RTFA. This isn't an encryption system, it's an access control: you can't read or write to the drive without passing the password challenge. The data may or may not be encrypted, but that doesn't matter if the drive won't even let you read it.
Also, RTF subject line. I'm talking with my wallet, and using my mouth (well, fingers) to tell others to talk with their wallets too.
You see, either the Series 3 TiVo cannot receive high-def cable at all using CableCARDs, (in which case, well, you might as well stick with a tried and true series 2), or you have to agree to the rather onerous terms of the CableLabs license to use CableCARD. Indeed. Yet another reason not to get anything "HD". Every last bit of it is anti-consumer, from CableCARD to HDCP to AACS, all loaded with DRM and designed to screw you. You pay twice as much for a screen half the size, and you still can't watch TV the way you want.
You clearly don't understand what TiVo are doing. They're doing this for the consumer. If they can't demonstrate to the FCC and the broadcasters that they're trying to protect their content, *poof* goes your TiVo. Bullshit. My TiVo works just fine without any secret hard drive handshakes. So does everyone else's MythTV.
If TiVo sells you a hard disk that they don't want you to do what you want with, then it's stated in the license you accepted when you bought the product. You don't "license" hard drives. You buy them, and then you own them and become entitled to read or write whatever you want on them.
BIOS can not protect itself unless there is a one time programmable code that does the integrity check upon the very start of every system boot. That's called a boot ROM.
Again, TPM is totally unnecessary for this and provides no extra security. All it's good for is performing cryptography with a private key that isn't revealed to the person who owns the hardware. For this phone-home feature, the only key that needs to be kept secret is the lease server's private key, not anything on the client.
since OLPC stores the priviliged process in a hard drive which can be totally erased thus cause the system lose the security protection. in contrast CMPC stores the security informaiton in TPM which can not be maniputated by SW. TPM does not store "processes". It performs encryption.
If Intel's laptop has code stored in hardware that performs the phone-home verification, that's nice, but it has nothing to do with TPM. That's just BIOS. Phoning home doesn't require the client to encrypt anything; the client only has to verify the server's signature.
An Xbox (unless you get one with the DVD kit) doesn't have IR remote control, so I'd have to add hardware to that, too. I've already done more hardware hacking in the past six weeks than in the five years previous. While it's fun to a point, I'd really like most of the rooms to be as turnkey as possible---either by being clones of my current front end or by being an off-the-shelf product like the AppleTV. The DVD remote is just an accessory to plug in, not a hardware hack. XBMC supports it natively.
The XBox processor can't realistically handle a MythTV front end with video of any quality. My Celeron M 1.4 GHz is just barely able to cut it unless I do the most lightweight deinterlacing. The Xbox is a P3 at half that clock speed. The AppleTV is a Pentium M that's 1GHz, but it has a much better GPU for offloading a lot of that work, and Apple has done the performance tuning for me to make sure it actually works.... I don't know what all is involved in a MythTV front end, so I can't say how well it runs on an Xbox. However, XBMC can play DVD-quality video just fine, and it supports DAAP, as well as SMB shares if your MythTV box runs Samba.
It will take all of an hour or two to get MythTV to transcode content for the AppleTV. It would take a lot longer than that to figure out how to set up a MythTV front end on yet another piece of hardware with different IR hardware, different OS installation, You wouldn't have to do any transcoding, because XBMC plays just about every format under the sun, except the DRM-encrusted ones.
The AppleTV gives me a lot more room to grow than an Xbox. That means that I'll be able to keep using an AppleTV long after I'd need to replace the Xbox with something else. That long-term viability is worth an extra hundred dollars to me. Fair enough, but I think you're underselling the Xbox. Most of the features you might want are already available for XBMC, or could be added with a Python script, as long as they don't need the AppleTV's extra processing power.
After all that MythTV hacking and griping about subscription fees, why would you turn around and buy an AppleTV? Let alone one for each room?
An old Xbox costs under $100, and to mod it and install XBMC costs nothing and takes no longer than an hour. Even if you have to buy a wifi/ethernet bridge for each one, it still costs half as much as AppleTV.
[TPM] provides you with secuirty means and root of trust for a computing platform! It is the application that determines its usage models Yeah, but the possible usage models are fairly limited. TPM could be changed to become more useful for the hardware owner, but currently it's easier to use the TPM against the hardware owner.
FAIK, CMPC uses TPM for the anti-theft purposes but nothing else. Well, perhaps you could explain what these "anti-theft purposes" are. How exactly does a chip inside your laptop, storing a private key that you aren't even allowed to know, keep anyone from stealing your laptop?
I would have to say: if there won't be any non-smoking bars without a special govt incentive, doesn't that indicate that there is no demand for no smoking bars? Not necessarily. That's why I used the term "market failure".
I never let smoking policy keep me from going to a bar, nor did my non-smoking friends. I'd go and be mildly annoyed at the smoke, and then come home, change all my clothes, and take a shower. Because it wasn't a choice between a smoking bar and a non-smoking bar, it was a choice between the smoking bar and nothing.
If there are REALLY so many non-smokers who absolutely hate smoke in pubs/bars, then all it takes is ONE pub/bar to voluntarily go non-smoking and WHOOSH! their custom goes through the roof Right, but you're ignoring the people in the middle: people who dislike smoke in bars, but don't absolutely hate it enough to insist on going somewhere else... especially when there might not be a somewhere else. I sure never saw a non-smoking bar before the ban.
It's quite possible that the majority of bar patrons were non-smokers who only tolerated the smoke because their smoking friends dragged them along with cries of "dude, it's not that bad, you won't even notice it after a few minutes". Maybe the market would solve this problem if nonsmokers would just refuse to go along, but human nature is what it is, and boycotting a whole industry is always easier said than done.
I have two Series2 units and I love them. But there's no way in hell I'd spend PS3-level prices on a Series3 recorder, especially with the lack of TivoToGo and now this bullshit.
Look, if I buy a device that has a hard drive in it, that hard drive is mine. The data on it is mine. If you don't want me to access it from the "wrong" host, maybe you shouldn't have sold it in the first place. You can have all the control you want over that hard drive while it's gathering dust in your warehouse.
And before someone dings me for using the adjective "passive-aggresive" to describe Seattle... remember that this is the city that has systematically balked at mass-transit for several decades, usually for no good reason at all. Oh? Try spending a couple weeks in Spokane with no car, and then see what you think of Seattle's transit system with its free-ride zone, free transfers, and buses that don't stop running at 9:00 PM.
I like the first two ideas (the third one would simply fill the same purpose as the outright ban, in my opinion). Well, the problem is that without some incentive, there won't be any non-smoking bars. Maybe there were a couple in Seattle, but there were none in Spokane before the ban. Do you have a better way to address that market failure?
If you, the bartender, think the extra profit you get from allowing smoking is more than the discount you'd receive from forbidding it, then the choice to keep your smoking policy is obvious. But an incentive might convince some bars at the margins to switch.
If the overall exposure is no higher than what a smoker voluntarily exposes himself to anyway, and it produces a measurable benefit (e.g. attracting more customers, like a smoking area does), then I say go for it.
That's exactly what we had in Spokane before the statewide ban. Unfortunately, it did nothing to promote non-smoking bars. I'd never even seen a bar that wasn't smoky until after the ban.
I would've preferred something like this:
Keep the door signs (green for no smoking, yellow for smoking areas, red for smoking everywhere).
Come up with a measurable definition of "smoke-free air", and require that non-smoking areas must meet that standard, whether by ventilation systems, barriers, or other means. The health inspectors already have to go out regularly to check the soup for rats; this would just be one more thing on their checklist.
Provide an incentive for non-smoking businesses, like cheaper liquor licenses or a tax break, with a bonus for the first bar in each neighborhood to become non-smoking.
The problem with that analogy is smoking is a legal activity performed voluntarily by millions of people, including many business owners and employees, and exposure to second-hand smoke is far less dangerous than, say, climbing too high on a ladder.
Agreed. I'm a non-smoker, but I voted against the ban.
Here in Spokane, we had a county-wide system of colored signs on the door of every restaurant and bar, so you could see the smoking policy before you went in. Green for "no smoking", yellow for "smoking in designated areas", red for "smoking everywhere". Before the ban, green signs outnumbered yellow and red put together, two to one, according to the county's statistics.
On the other hand, those stats included every business in the county that sold edible food or drink, from convenience stores to movie theaters. I don't recall ever actually seeing a non-smoking bar before the ban.
To my knowledge TPM is not used for DRM sorts of thing but for anti-theft purpose since a kid carrying a mobile laptop is so vulnerable to thieves and robbers in the street. Then I'm afraid you don't understand what TPM is or what it does. TPM does nothing at all to discourage or prevent laptop theft.
Your remark about CPU speed also misses the point. OLPC is about cheap hardware with low power consumption and no moving parts to break. 366 MHz is enough for plenty of tasks if you don't have a bloated OS with a bunch of eye candy, virus scanners, etc.
When did desire ever imply a right? No kidding. Some people even seem to think that just because they desire to sell me a disc containing a certain number, they have the right to prevent everyone else in the world from telling me what the number is. Isn't that crazy?
I know there are no physical costs to downloading a new ISO for your lost cd rom, but-- Just stop right there. Of course there are no physical costs; that's the whole damn point. If you lose a CD and want another copy of the content you paid for, it doesn't cost the manufacturer anything when you download one. Your analogy ignores the single most important fact about the situation.
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Copyright is a temporary stop along the line from "twinkle in the artist's eye" to "useful work in the public domain", during which the work is a little bit useful: you know that the work exists, and you can view it if you beg (bribe) the copyright holder for permission, but you can't do anything else with it. That temporary stop was added in order to provide another incentive for artists to publish, because the previous incentive (getting paid for the time they spent working) wasn't enough for some powerful people. The ultimate resting point of the work, however, is still in the public domain, where people can actually use it how they want.
Yup, which is exactly what would happen if someone tampered with the stored lease on a TPM system. The only difference is it might be stored in encrypted form on the hard drive, but that wouldn't make it any harder for an attacker to corrupt the stored lease.
RTFA. This isn't an encryption system, it's an access control: you can't read or write to the drive without passing the password challenge. The data may or may not be encrypted, but that doesn't matter if the drive won't even let you read it.
Also, RTF subject line. I'm talking with my wallet, and using my mouth (well, fingers) to tell others to talk with their wallets too.
Again, TPM is totally unnecessary for this and provides no extra security. All it's good for is performing cryptography with a private key that isn't revealed to the person who owns the hardware. For this phone-home feature, the only key that needs to be kept secret is the lease server's private key, not anything on the client.
If Intel's laptop has code stored in hardware that performs the phone-home verification, that's nice, but it has nothing to do with TPM. That's just BIOS. Phoning home doesn't require the client to encrypt anything; the client only has to verify the server's signature.
After all that MythTV hacking and griping about subscription fees, why would you turn around and buy an AppleTV? Let alone one for each room?
An old Xbox costs under $100, and to mod it and install XBMC costs nothing and takes no longer than an hour. Even if you have to buy a wifi/ethernet bridge for each one, it still costs half as much as AppleTV.
I never let smoking policy keep me from going to a bar, nor did my non-smoking friends. I'd go and be mildly annoyed at the smoke, and then come home, change all my clothes, and take a shower. Because it wasn't a choice between a smoking bar and a non-smoking bar, it was a choice between the smoking bar and nothing. If there are REALLY so many non-smokers who absolutely hate smoke in pubs/bars, then all it takes is ONE pub/bar to voluntarily go non-smoking and WHOOSH! their custom goes through the roof Right, but you're ignoring the people in the middle: people who dislike smoke in bars, but don't absolutely hate it enough to insist on going somewhere else... especially when there might not be a somewhere else. I sure never saw a non-smoking bar before the ban.
It's quite possible that the majority of bar patrons were non-smokers who only tolerated the smoke because their smoking friends dragged them along with cries of "dude, it's not that bad, you won't even notice it after a few minutes". Maybe the market would solve this problem if nonsmokers would just refuse to go along, but human nature is what it is, and boycotting a whole industry is always easier said than done.
I have two Series2 units and I love them. But there's no way in hell I'd spend PS3-level prices on a Series3 recorder, especially with the lack of TivoToGo and now this bullshit.
Look, if I buy a device that has a hard drive in it, that hard drive is mine. The data on it is mine. If you don't want me to access it from the "wrong" host, maybe you shouldn't have sold it in the first place. You can have all the control you want over that hard drive while it's gathering dust in your warehouse.
If you, the bartender, think the extra profit you get from allowing smoking is more than the discount you'd receive from forbidding it, then the choice to keep your smoking policy is obvious. But an incentive might convince some bars at the margins to switch.
If the overall exposure is no higher than what a smoker voluntarily exposes himself to anyway, and it produces a measurable benefit (e.g. attracting more customers, like a smoking area does), then I say go for it.
I would've preferred something like this:
The problem with that analogy is smoking is a legal activity performed voluntarily by millions of people, including many business owners and employees, and exposure to second-hand smoke is far less dangerous than, say, climbing too high on a ladder.
Agreed. I'm a non-smoker, but I voted against the ban.
Here in Spokane, we had a county-wide system of colored signs on the door of every restaurant and bar, so you could see the smoking policy before you went in. Green for "no smoking", yellow for "smoking in designated areas", red for "smoking everywhere". Before the ban, green signs outnumbered yellow and red put together, two to one, according to the county's statistics.
On the other hand, those stats included every business in the county that sold edible food or drink, from convenience stores to movie theaters. I don't recall ever actually seeing a non-smoking bar before the ban.
Your remark about CPU speed also misses the point. OLPC is about cheap hardware with low power consumption and no moving parts to break. 366 MHz is enough for plenty of tasks if you don't have a bloated OS with a bunch of eye candy, virus scanners, etc.
I've got a number in the 105xxx range for the right bidder, if you don't mind fielding the occasional obscure question about an IRC client. ;)