"We can make scientific breakthroughs in energy production that can make all your lives easier, but I'll be damned if we can make a copy protection schema that doesn't suck."
Glad to know that soon I'll be able to use methanol biofuel to power my buggy, insecutre, DRM laden Sony products.
(Note: This article does not reflect how I, the author, percieve environmental activists as a whole in any way, shape, or form. If any of this offends you, that's not my problem.)
A young gentleman whom we shall refer to as Generic Hippie Treehugger wishes to utilize a clean, efficient, environmentally friendly biodeisel fuel in his automobile. That's great. Biodeisel's an excellent idea, and it'd seem our good friend G.H.T. is on the right track, protecting his planet and supporting the further development of biodeisel fuels by purchasing them and advocating them to his peers.
But wait! G.H.T. is also a vegetarian, which means he refuses to consume any meat or meat byproducts. He also just discovered after the fact that a good portion of his biodeisel fuel is being produced from unused animal parts! Now he has to choose. Should he continue to use petroleum based fuels, further damaging an already withered global ecosystem, or should he utilize this new, clean fuel, at the cost of hundreds of animal lives?
The solution?
RIDE A BICYCLE, YOU CLOD.
I can see some of the more overzealous PETA folks standing on top of biodeisel powered SUV's shrieking at the top of their lungs, "IT'S PEOPLE! ETHANOL BASED BIODEISEL FUEL IS PEOPLE!!!" You know, like that'd make the animals that filled their gas tanks any less dead. That, or I can see a lot of them suddenly realizing where their revolutionary new environmentally friendly fuel comes from, having a brief personal crisis, and then driving straight to McDonalds in their new eco-friendly cars and ordering ten triple cheeseburgers at the drive-through. It's madness, I tell you, madness. Think of all the mental and emotional distress this will cause all of the oversensitive animal-rights zealots! THINK OF THE CARNAGE! Getting attacked for even wearing faux fur that looks real is bad enough, I don't need these people throwing blood on my car.
In all seriousness, though, if the animal parts weren't being consumed anyway, then that's turning waste into gold, or at least gas. The same thing goes for plants, and solid waste, too. This is an excellent idea, turning stuff that would just wind up in a landfill or, worse yet, in the food at MCL into a usable fuel product. If effective, highly efficient methods of turning waste byproducts from agriculture and food production into fuel are developed, and this information is made widely available - and entrepreneurs willing to take advantage of it seize the opportunity - this could make a huge difference not only in our environment, but also in our economy, granted this stuff is actually cheaper than gasoline. I'm behind this 100%, and hopefully, I'll live to see it in a gas station here at home one of these days.
The only thing that concerns me is that the methane emissions of facilities producing biodeisel may get out of hand if left unchecked. Methane is a pretty nasty greenhouse gas, too. Sure, getting rid of a lot of our carbon dioxide would be dandy, but what's the point if it's just being replaced with methane? I'm sure that's already been taken into consideration, though, considering that any methane that escapes is wasted fuel. (And thus, wasted money.) So... really, I can't see anything wrong with this. You make food and fuel all at once. All it needs to do now is clean my water. Who wants to try extracting this stuff from sewage?
It's been strongly implied that both Macromedia and Adobe are both very worried about Microsoft burying them, likely beneath a pile of impending bundles, as you said. Combining their assets - and their software - may be mutually beneficial for both companies, and allow them to stay afloat in a post-Sparkle world, wherein both companies alone may simply have been post-mortem. Additionally, if Adobe doesn't sweep Macromedia's work under the rug - an earth-shatteringly stupid idea - and actually works to combine the beneficial features of both software suites into one truly kickass package, the result may actually turn out to be a vastly superior product. (Regardless of who they're competing with, better software is better software.)
However, I strongly doubt Adobe is gearing up for an anti-trust lawsuit. It won't work, at least not quick enough to save them. They're probably already trying to get a product on store shelves before or at the same time that Vista rolls out - a product that will likely work on modern machines (2.5 GHz average, 512 RAM, etc.) and better still on the penis-envy inducing monster computers that will be necessary to run Vista. (1GB RAM recommended, 4.0+ GHz processor, a mid-range GPU... All to type up office papers? What?) The catch with Sparkle is that - according to what I've read so far, anyway - it won't be able to work on anything but Vista, which people are going to be very slow to adopt due to the cost of upgrading. If Adobe rolls out a product that's efficient enough to run on a 'Vista-Obsolete' computer, but powerful enough to match or outperform Sparkle, they won't need a lawsuit to save them. That'd just be a bonus later on down the road.
... They'll combine the Adobe and Macromedia software suites one way or another, creating an extremely useful but even more impossibly bloated graphic design and animation program package or packages. Why throw out perfectly good software when you can use the code - which you now own - to make your own products better? That doesn't make sense.
Freehand and Fireworks probably aren't going anywhere, but they won't be known by that name. They'll become components of other pieces of Adobe software, granted that they have definite advantages over Adobe's existing products or are designed to perform tasks that Adobe's products simply can't. (Or should I say, 'Macrodobe'. Damn, that name is stupid.)
However, even if the software suites are combined to make a really dandy graphics and animation package, this will also likely translate into an increase in cost, as though the average Joe could afford it anyway. Huzzah.
Well, here's an interesting thought. What if you used a special plug-in or side program that would find blocked terms in your library, encrypt their titles into a seemingly random and unreadable form, and then look for similarly encrypted titles on the network? Sure, it'd be obvious what titles are on there that shouldn't be - just look for the jibberish - but that would require human analysis. Just as well, if it replaces the terms with codewords - 'Eminem' becomes 'Waffle' - then the encryption is even more difficult to detect by humans. There are a lot of ways of going about doing this.
Hell, here's a good example. Just scramble the title. 'Eminem - Without Me'? How about something like, 'EemMi nteumo h-t iW'. How hard could a title scrambler script be to make? (A hundred points to anyone who figures out the pattern I used to scramble that, it's incredibly simple.) Now, to make things even sillier, let's remove all spaces and any characters that aren't letters or numbers, and convert all letters to lower-case. Now it's, 'eemminteumohtiw'. Finally, throw in some leet by changing certain letters to numbers and vice versa. '33mm1n73um0h71w'.
To better demonstrate the letter-number conversion, a term such as '3 6 Mafia - I Gotta Stay Fly' would become a scrambled, spaceless, dashless, all lower-case form of 'E G M4f!4 - ! 60774 574y F1y'. Have fun with that.
Sure, they could update Kazaa's filters with similar software, but still. That'd be pretty neat to try. A program to scramble the terms for you and look for the same... Hmm. Any takers?
I concur. I've long theorized that their agenda was just that; Google will use its advertising dollars and vast amount of freely available resources to offer free and satisfactory services to undercut their competition. From many standpoints, this is fair play. However, the question of motive inevitably rears its head. Once the competition is gone, what will they do with the markets they've dominated?
This is why Google is, in my honest opinion, extremely dangerous. It's not just because they have the theoretical ability to erode entire industries into nothing within less than a decade. Any large company can pull a stunt like that if the upper management knows how to do it. It's the fact that they are willing and apparently wanting to do it that bothers me, and that's why companies like the ones listed in the article - robust, multi-billion dollar corporations - are starting to worry. One could speculate that this is a step in the right direction, but replacing a heaping handful of ugly monopolies with one corpulent, slightly less ugly monopoly isn't the way to go, if you asked me.
This actually surprises people? Hell, a friend of mine has gone through two Xboxes. Both of them made a horrible grinding noise, came up with an error, and scratched the living hell out of whatever disc was in 'em. Both then became unusable. Meanwhile, while the damn things did work, they locked up from time to time or displayed error messages of some sort while games were being played.
Now that the Suckbox 360 has been released, I expected a product that wasn't a 20 pound pile of garbage. It looks like they've yet to fix that 'garbage' part, that's for freakin' sure. You know, I almost hope this trend of crashing continues. It'll go to show the ineptitude of Microsoft's programmers and engineers, and hopefully teach them a hard lesson about rushing a product to market.
This is a Microsoft product. It WILL crash. End of story. I'll be waiting for the Nintendo Revolution, thanks.
Bad idea: Implimenting a copy protection scheme without analyzing it first.
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Good idea: Monitoring your customers' reactions in order to quickly and intuitively react to any problems they encounter with your product.
Bad idea: Monitoring your customers' reactions in order to quickly and intuitively react to any problems they encounter with your product, and then sweeping the problems under the rug.
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Good idea: Asking for help from third parties to save time and money in developing your product.
Bad idea: Asking for help from total idiots to save time and money in developing your product.
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Good idea: Informing your customers that your product could modify the content of their PCs - their personal property - and how.
Bad idea: Not informing your customers that your product could modify the content of their PCs - their personal property - and how, and then denying it in spite of conclusive proof that says otherwise.
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Good idea: Dealing with rogue business affiliates strictly, or severing ties in response to a mess like this.
Bad idea: Praising rogue business affiliates for creating a mess like this.
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It looks like the RIAA is just full of good ideas. Honestly, these aren't the kind of people who I wish to do business with. This just goes to show how slackassedly the RIAA deals with business partners when they cause a massive breach of ethics and customer trust by failing to properly analyze a poorly constructed third-party copy protection scheme they implimented, and then sluggishly respond to the fiasco by posting ineffective third-party patches without actually attempting to reach customers or willingly going public about the issue.
Folks, Sony obviously doesn't care whether or not their products damage your property, and neither does First 4 Internet. F4I is guilty for making this bastard of a CPS, and Sony is just as guilty for distributing it without even looking at it, and then barely even trying to help fix the problems it causes. It doesn't matter what this talking head from the RIAA says. This isn't just a programming error, this is a royal fuckup of unimaginable magnitude - a prime example of an absolute lack of good business sense and business ethics. One would hope that F4I and Sony will get what they have coming for this, but something tells me Sony will likely load off the blame onto F4I and get out of this unscathed... Business as usual.
However, I can safely say that this turn of events will not curb my habit of buying music second hand, and I certainly know whose products to avoid now. I'd hate to see if there was a safety recall involving one of Sony's products. That'd probably go something like this.
"Upon analyzing this product, we have determined that it poses a great danger to the consumer - an obvious and highly dangerous flaw in its design-"
"Sony has done nothing wrong here! It's just a design error. Mistakes happen, sir."
"... I don't know where you come from, but here in America, we don't like it when portable CD players explode unintentionally-"
This just keeps getting better and better. Not only that, but Sony isn't the only company who's going to take it in the ass over this rootkit bit.
It's been pointed out that First 4 Internet is to blame for this, too. This is because they made the DRM package, including the rootkit, and if they took code from an LGPL project and sold it as part of a piece of commercial software without permission from the original author, they infringed upon a copyright. They're every bit as responsible for this mess as Sony. Sony, meanwhile, should have inspected the software they were baking into their CDs - and they may actually have done so and let this slide - before going ahead with it. They may also be held liable for replicating a piece of software which infringes upon an existing copyright, in addition to being grossly irresponsible about the whole thing. Either way, the mess just keeps getting bigger.
None the less, I still can't get WISH TV 8 to feature this whole story on the news. Crap.
If information searched for and found on the internet can be directly tied to criminal activities, and is therefore evident of a person's involvement in a crime, then I feel that this isn't anything to be worried about, and nothing new. In past cases library records have been used to help prove the guilt of a suspected criminal. (For example, if any of you watch The New Detectives or any other forensic science shows on television, you may remember a case in which a person had murdered a family member - I think it was a woman who murdered her husband - by using hemlock to fatally poison them. During the investigation, the police acquired the suspect's library record in order to confirm that they had done research into poisons and, more specifically, the hemlock plant itself. If anyone remembers that particular case, I'd appreciate it if you'd fill us all in on that.)
However, if search and library records are used in mere speculation, and don't actually prove anything, but are instead used to paint an unnecessarily ugly picture of a defendant in a trial and damage their character, that's a bit much. It all comes down to how the information is actually used, and whether or not it's being handled in a responsible manner. Furthermore, if search records are used to pin a defendant with lesser crimes, then it has gone beyond the scope of the initial investigation and could be used to unfairly leverage legal power against a suspect in a crime, guilty or not, or even blackmail them into confessing to crimes regardless of whether or not they committed them. ("I won't tell the jury you were looking up hentai if you just fess up." "... Will they even know what that is?" "They will when I'm through with 'em." "OH GOD.") Additionally, if search records are used to preemptively press charges against a person, then it has gone entirely too far. For example, let's say I look up information about radioactive elements and rocketry. Someone could say that I'm planning to construct a rocket-propelled 'dirty bomb', or worse yet, an atomic device, and could then charge me with terrorism. All I'm really doing is gathering information for a research paper on the periodic table while looking up information on rocketry on the side in order to build a model rocket, but nowadays, who's going to believe that?
So, in other words, this isn't anything new. As always, we just need to ensure that the courts are using the information they gather responsibly and in a fair and just manner.
Re:They needed space to test a vacuum?
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Space Lichens
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· Score: 1
Very interesting. So this wasn't an average lifespan of the lichen in space... I wonder if further tests will determine just how long the lichens can actually last out there.
Re:They needed space to test a vacuum?
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Space Lichens
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Substances like water, carbon, and oxygen are neat because they seem to be the most condusive to forming complex substances that make up the organic components of the bodies of living things. It's silly to think that there aren't living things that can exist without water, though. Or carbon. Or oxygen.
Theories about the possible environments wherein living things could exist are endless. Looking at the extremophilic algae and tube worms - That was the name you were looking for, I believe - here on Earth, we could see similar creatures living in the hot, highly acidic, CO2 rich environments of Venus. Lichens and other organisms tailored to exist only on the essentials, on the other hand, could thrive - and may actually exist - on Mars. (And if Mars was once like Earth, that theory certainly takes off, doesn't it?) Of course, those schools of thought only support organisms akin to the ones that exist here on Earth.
Meanwhile, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn provide a plethora of environments known to support life on Earth in some cases, but there are also theories that organisms could exist in the extreme cold of some of these celestial bodies by catalyzing acetylene and other volatile substances at extremely slow rates. If that theory were to pan out, then the idea of 'ice creatures from outer space' might not be too far off - and possibly a springboard for dozens of cheesy new sci-fi movies. (It'd certainly beat Spielburg's take on 'War of the Worlds'.)
While we're discussing theoretical models for living things unlike those that exist here on Earth, let's take a look at what we're made of - that all-important element carbon, I'm no chemistry expert, but doesn't boron nitride behave in a remarkably similar fashion to carbon? What about the possibility of a boron-based group of organisms? Or maybe plants and animals composed of different substances entirely? When one begins to consider the possibilities, it becomes immediately evident that they are indeed virtually endless.
The void of space may indeed host living things. Other worlds thought to be uninhabitable may also support life as well. I agree that it'd be pretty silly to disregard that possibility until we can conclusively prove that life simply can't thrive in these environments. Heck, maybe there's some kind of lichen out in some nebula somewhere, feeding off of plasma... Who knows.
Re:They needed space to test a vacuum?
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Space Lichens
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· Score: 5, Insightful
They likely brought it into space in order to determine whether or not it could survive not just in a vaccuum, but also under these conditions, all at the same time:
* Vaccuum. (Of course.) * Assorted forms of radiation. * Zero gravity. * Extremes of temperature.
Those conditions tend not to support life from Earth, and so to see that lichen can indeed survive in space, if only for a short time, is astounding. Not only does this add weight to the panspermia theory, but it also could stand to change our take on the 'qualifications' for a habitable environment completely, raising questions such as, "Could it be possible for more complex organisms to actually thrive in space?"
Don't usually make a right. This is just too funny to be wrong, though.
Invasive anti-cheat software + Invasive and secretive copy-protection software = OMGH4X
This is going to be good. Good as in hilarious. I just know it.
As someone else stated in another reply, the 'cookies' in question will consist of anything of or related to Broadcast Flag. As I warned in my own reply to said statement, it's important to refrain from putting anything past these guys; they did, after all, get the AHRA passed back in... oh, '92, I think? Whenever it was. I say it's a 50-50 chance it'll go either way.
You know, that's actually a decently believable theory. However, I wouldn't put this past them just yet. This Halloween monster just might be a wimp in a rubber suit after all, but what if it's the real deal?
You know, I'm agitated much too easily nowadays. This bit is really getting my blood pressure up, so, you know what? I'm going to be brief, before I suffer that long awaited anneurism I've been anticipating and die.
This law, in a nutshell, applies to any device that can convert analog video into digital video. This is the video version of the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), with some added goodies. Any analog to digital conversion device - or vice versa, apparently - produced after the law goes into effect will have to be approved under Hollywood's standards by the USPTO. Among these standards are mandated DRM, as well as a nifty little requirement stating that the device must be proprietary and completely closed, thereby making it substantially more difficult to modify. Content converted from an analog format to a digital format will be encased in DRM, and any unprotected output, digital or otherwise, will be constricted heavily. (In other words, ugly as sin.) It mandates highly invasive and restrictive DRM, plain and simple, and everything therein that applies will become law.
This is about more than piracy, people. This is about killing technology, just like how the AHRA killed DAT. If you're a content producer or marketer, and you control this kind of technology, you control who can compete with you. They're on a technological tirade, and any device which could possibly be used to erode away at their market share will be eliminated. Only approved commercial institutions will have access to unrestricted 'professional' devices. (A device, under this law, becomes 'professional' once it's widely available.) Just as the AHRA stopped DAT dead in its tracks, this is a new control mechanism for DV. While it seems to only apply to devices that could theoretically pirate analog content in a digital format or vice versa, will this affect those who wish to record and publish their own videos? Almost certainly. They wouldn't field a bill like this unless there wasn't an anticompetitive kicker in there for them.
If these rapaciously greedy, bottom feeding, subhumanly mentally deficient piles of animated scum manage to get this law passed, it'll mean big trouble, not only for consumers, but producers as well. There is absolutely no sense in it whatsoever. None. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. As an aspiring innovator, this is the kind of garbage that causes my hair to stand on end. This is the kind of law that, upon reading it, causes me to enter a state of mind wherein my number one priority is to beat the living shit out of the nearest handy inanimate object of similar size and composition to a human body, so I don't track down these sneering assholes and wail on them instead. Cheesy as it is, The Rock said it best: "Know your role, and shut your mouth." The AA's need to take that statement to heart, sit down, and shut the fuck up.
What's next? Outlawing any 'improfessional' application of P2P protocols while forcing anyone who owns a streaming radio or video site on the internet to file comprehensive broadcasting reports with the FCC to ensure they're not playing copyrighted content? Or maybe a law that makes it illegal to distribute multimedia via a wireless connection, along with mandated DRM baked into every WiFi card! The possibilities are just endless with these people. Given their track record, I'd highly advise putting anything past them.
Okay. Now, what the Warden seems to be doing according to the article and other sources is invasive by nature, but the information doesn't appear to be moving anywhere it shouldn't. The only Call-Home ability it posesses is the 'ban flag', which it sends to Blizzard if it discovers a process that it doesn't approve of. Not such a big deal, unless it's actually sending this information to Blizzard as it updates. (Then it most definitely could be considered spyware.)
The real issue here is the fact that, given WOW's track record, there's no doubt in my mind that there's at least one way to exploit the Warden in order to glean information off of players while they play WOW. (Which is likely when they're most vulnerable - they won't notice a thing!) Just as an example, let's imagine that somebody wrote a virus and attached it to, let's say, an image or something on a popular WOW site or through a WOW mailing list. (Any highly accessable medium will do.) This virus is designed to attach itself to the Warden and send the information the Warden gathers to a third party. Whenever WOW starts and the Warden goes to work, the virus activates.
The information gathered isn't exactly benign. If a third party gathered player E-mail address books, for example, it could be sold to spammers. If any personal information is gathered, it could be used to perpetrate an act of identity theft or fraud. However, I feel that this isn't bad enough, so I'll play the devil's advocate. Let's say this virus in question here modifies the operating parameters of the Warden to gather more and more detailed information in the same manner it harvests data from running programs. The problem just got bigger. Now we can start throwing browsing habits, passwords, credit card numbers, and other lovely stuff into the mix. (Maybe even an opportunistic strain of the virus that can snag your credit card info from Blizzard's site if you access their services while playing WOW!) Fun, huh? That's gotta suck.
I'm not aware of any security attached to the Warden, so the probability of this being immediately possible can not be determined. This is, after all, only a theoretical situation. I would like to see someone investigate the Warden with greater detail, however, and see if there aren't any security holes in the Warden or WOW that someone could exploit. The issue here shouldn't be the invasive nature of the Warden; it should be what someone else could do with that information to royally fuck your day up. A data mining scheme involving 4.5 million individual people could be very profitable for an interested party or parties, so now that this is out in the open, we should be on the lookout for any instruments that could take advantage of what the Warden already does.
Slashdot Mirror
"We can make scientific breakthroughs in energy production that can make all your lives easier, but I'll be damned if we can make a copy protection schema that doesn't suck."
Glad to know that soon I'll be able to use methanol biofuel to power my buggy, insecutre, DRM laden Sony products.
Biodeisel Fuel - A Moral Crisis
(Note: This article does not reflect how I, the author, percieve environmental activists as a whole in any way, shape, or form. If any of this offends you, that's not my problem.)
A young gentleman whom we shall refer to as Generic Hippie Treehugger wishes to utilize a clean, efficient, environmentally friendly biodeisel fuel in his automobile. That's great. Biodeisel's an excellent idea, and it'd seem our good friend G.H.T. is on the right track, protecting his planet and supporting the further development of biodeisel fuels by purchasing them and advocating them to his peers.
But wait! G.H.T. is also a vegetarian, which means he refuses to consume any meat or meat byproducts. He also just discovered after the fact that a good portion of his biodeisel fuel is being produced from unused animal parts! Now he has to choose. Should he continue to use petroleum based fuels, further damaging an already withered global ecosystem, or should he utilize this new, clean fuel, at the cost of hundreds of animal lives?
The solution?
RIDE A BICYCLE, YOU CLOD.
I can see some of the more overzealous PETA folks standing on top of biodeisel powered SUV's shrieking at the top of their lungs, "IT'S PEOPLE! ETHANOL BASED BIODEISEL FUEL IS PEOPLE!!!" You know, like that'd make the animals that filled their gas tanks any less dead. That, or I can see a lot of them suddenly realizing where their revolutionary new environmentally friendly fuel comes from, having a brief personal crisis, and then driving straight to McDonalds in their new eco-friendly cars and ordering ten triple cheeseburgers at the drive-through. It's madness, I tell you, madness. Think of all the mental and emotional distress this will cause all of the oversensitive animal-rights zealots! THINK OF THE CARNAGE! Getting attacked for even wearing faux fur that looks real is bad enough, I don't need these people throwing blood on my car.
In all seriousness, though, if the animal parts weren't being consumed anyway, then that's turning waste into gold, or at least gas. The same thing goes for plants, and solid waste, too. This is an excellent idea, turning stuff that would just wind up in a landfill or, worse yet, in the food at MCL into a usable fuel product. If effective, highly efficient methods of turning waste byproducts from agriculture and food production into fuel are developed, and this information is made widely available - and entrepreneurs willing to take advantage of it seize the opportunity - this could make a huge difference not only in our environment, but also in our economy, granted this stuff is actually cheaper than gasoline. I'm behind this 100%, and hopefully, I'll live to see it in a gas station here at home one of these days.
The only thing that concerns me is that the methane emissions of facilities producing biodeisel may get out of hand if left unchecked. Methane is a pretty nasty greenhouse gas, too. Sure, getting rid of a lot of our carbon dioxide would be dandy, but what's the point if it's just being replaced with methane? I'm sure that's already been taken into consideration, though, considering that any methane that escapes is wasted fuel. (And thus, wasted money.) So... really, I can't see anything wrong with this. You make food and fuel all at once. All it needs to do now is clean my water. Who wants to try extracting this stuff from sewage?
It's been strongly implied that both Macromedia and Adobe are both very worried about Microsoft burying them, likely beneath a pile of impending bundles, as you said. Combining their assets - and their software - may be mutually beneficial for both companies, and allow them to stay afloat in a post-Sparkle world, wherein both companies alone may simply have been post-mortem. Additionally, if Adobe doesn't sweep Macromedia's work under the rug - an earth-shatteringly stupid idea - and actually works to combine the beneficial features of both software suites into one truly kickass package, the result may actually turn out to be a vastly superior product. (Regardless of who they're competing with, better software is better software.)
However, I strongly doubt Adobe is gearing up for an anti-trust lawsuit. It won't work, at least not quick enough to save them. They're probably already trying to get a product on store shelves before or at the same time that Vista rolls out - a product that will likely work on modern machines (2.5 GHz average, 512 RAM, etc.) and better still on the penis-envy inducing monster computers that will be necessary to run Vista. (1GB RAM recommended, 4.0+ GHz processor, a mid-range GPU... All to type up office papers? What?) The catch with Sparkle is that - according to what I've read so far, anyway - it won't be able to work on anything but Vista, which people are going to be very slow to adopt due to the cost of upgrading. If Adobe rolls out a product that's efficient enough to run on a 'Vista-Obsolete' computer, but powerful enough to match or outperform Sparkle, they won't need a lawsuit to save them. That'd just be a bonus later on down the road.
... They'll combine the Adobe and Macromedia software suites one way or another, creating an extremely useful but even more impossibly bloated graphic design and animation program package or packages. Why throw out perfectly good software when you can use the code - which you now own - to make your own products better? That doesn't make sense.
Freehand and Fireworks probably aren't going anywhere, but they won't be known by that name. They'll become components of other pieces of Adobe software, granted that they have definite advantages over Adobe's existing products or are designed to perform tasks that Adobe's products simply can't. (Or should I say, 'Macrodobe'. Damn, that name is stupid.)
However, even if the software suites are combined to make a really dandy graphics and animation package, this will also likely translate into an increase in cost, as though the average Joe could afford it anyway. Huzzah.
Well, here's an interesting thought. What if you used a special plug-in or side program that would find blocked terms in your library, encrypt their titles into a seemingly random and unreadable form, and then look for similarly encrypted titles on the network? Sure, it'd be obvious what titles are on there that shouldn't be - just look for the jibberish - but that would require human analysis. Just as well, if it replaces the terms with codewords - 'Eminem' becomes 'Waffle' - then the encryption is even more difficult to detect by humans. There are a lot of ways of going about doing this.
Hell, here's a good example. Just scramble the title. 'Eminem - Without Me'? How about something like, 'EemMi nteumo h-t iW'. How hard could a title scrambler script be to make? (A hundred points to anyone who figures out the pattern I used to scramble that, it's incredibly simple.) Now, to make things even sillier, let's remove all spaces and any characters that aren't letters or numbers, and convert all letters to lower-case. Now it's, 'eemminteumohtiw'. Finally, throw in some leet by changing certain letters to numbers and vice versa. '33mm1n73um0h71w'.
To better demonstrate the letter-number conversion, a term such as '3 6 Mafia - I Gotta Stay Fly' would become a scrambled, spaceless, dashless, all lower-case form of 'E G M4f!4 - ! 60774 574y F1y'. Have fun with that.
Sure, they could update Kazaa's filters with similar software, but still. That'd be pretty neat to try. A program to scramble the terms for you and look for the same... Hmm. Any takers?
Problem: "I can't search for Eminem or any of his titles."
Solution: Rename all of your Eminem files.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I concur. I've long theorized that their agenda was just that; Google will use its advertising dollars and vast amount of freely available resources to offer free and satisfactory services to undercut their competition. From many standpoints, this is fair play. However, the question of motive inevitably rears its head. Once the competition is gone, what will they do with the markets they've dominated?
This is why Google is, in my honest opinion, extremely dangerous. It's not just because they have the theoretical ability to erode entire industries into nothing within less than a decade. Any large company can pull a stunt like that if the upper management knows how to do it. It's the fact that they are willing and apparently wanting to do it that bothers me, and that's why companies like the ones listed in the article - robust, multi-billion dollar corporations - are starting to worry. One could speculate that this is a step in the right direction, but replacing a heaping handful of ugly monopolies with one corpulent, slightly less ugly monopoly isn't the way to go, if you asked me.
This actually surprises people? Hell, a friend of mine has gone through two Xboxes. Both of them made a horrible grinding noise, came up with an error, and scratched the living hell out of whatever disc was in 'em. Both then became unusable. Meanwhile, while the damn things did work, they locked up from time to time or displayed error messages of some sort while games were being played.
Now that the Suckbox 360 has been released, I expected a product that wasn't a 20 pound pile of garbage. It looks like they've yet to fix that 'garbage' part, that's for freakin' sure. You know, I almost hope this trend of crashing continues. It'll go to show the ineptitude of Microsoft's programmers and engineers, and hopefully teach them a hard lesson about rushing a product to market.
This is a Microsoft product. It WILL crash. End of story. I'll be waiting for the Nintendo Revolution, thanks.
I think I know where the RIAA will be turning their attention next in regard to copy protection.
DRM for office supplies.
Let's play a game of 'Good Idea, Bad Idea'.
---
Good idea: Implimenting a copy protection scheme.
Bad idea: Implimenting a copy protection scheme without analyzing it first.
---
Good idea: Monitoring your customers' reactions in order to quickly and intuitively react to any problems they encounter with your product.
Bad idea: Monitoring your customers' reactions in order to quickly and intuitively react to any problems they encounter with your product, and then sweeping the problems under the rug.
---
Good idea: Asking for help from third parties to save time and money in developing your product.
Bad idea: Asking for help from total idiots to save time and money in developing your product.
---
Good idea: Informing your customers that your product could modify the content of their PCs - their personal property - and how.
Bad idea: Not informing your customers that your product could modify the content of their PCs - their personal property - and how, and then denying it in spite of conclusive proof that says otherwise.
---
Good idea: Dealing with rogue business affiliates strictly, or severing ties in response to a mess like this.
Bad idea: Praising rogue business affiliates for creating a mess like this.
---
It looks like the RIAA is just full of good ideas. Honestly, these aren't the kind of people who I wish to do business with. This just goes to show how slackassedly the RIAA deals with business partners when they cause a massive breach of ethics and customer trust by failing to properly analyze a poorly constructed third-party copy protection scheme they implimented, and then sluggishly respond to the fiasco by posting ineffective third-party patches without actually attempting to reach customers or willingly going public about the issue.
Folks, Sony obviously doesn't care whether or not their products damage your property, and neither does First 4 Internet. F4I is guilty for making this bastard of a CPS, and Sony is just as guilty for distributing it without even looking at it, and then barely even trying to help fix the problems it causes. It doesn't matter what this talking head from the RIAA says. This isn't just a programming error, this is a royal fuckup of unimaginable magnitude - a prime example of an absolute lack of good business sense and business ethics. One would hope that F4I and Sony will get what they have coming for this, but something tells me Sony will likely load off the blame onto F4I and get out of this unscathed... Business as usual.
However, I can safely say that this turn of events will not curb my habit of buying music second hand, and I certainly know whose products to avoid now. I'd hate to see if there was a safety recall involving one of Sony's products. That'd probably go something like this.
"Upon analyzing this product, we have determined that it poses a great danger to the consumer - an obvious and highly dangerous flaw in its design-"
"Sony has done nothing wrong here! It's just a design error. Mistakes happen, sir."
"... I don't know where you come from, but here in America, we don't like it when portable CD players explode unintentionally-"
*obnoxious snoring*
"ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME, YOU JERK-OFF?!"
"Huh?"
"OH MY GOD! I FINALLY FIGURED IT OUT!"
"What?"
"The earth... it's... it's..."
"Yes?"
"... IT'S MOVING."
"HOLY SHIT!"
This just keeps getting better and better. Not only that, but Sony isn't the only company who's going to take it in the ass over this rootkit bit.
It's been pointed out that First 4 Internet is to blame for this, too. This is because they made the DRM package, including the rootkit, and if they took code from an LGPL project and sold it as part of a piece of commercial software without permission from the original author, they infringed upon a copyright. They're every bit as responsible for this mess as Sony. Sony, meanwhile, should have inspected the software they were baking into their CDs - and they may actually have done so and let this slide - before going ahead with it. They may also be held liable for replicating a piece of software which infringes upon an existing copyright, in addition to being grossly irresponsible about the whole thing. Either way, the mess just keeps getting bigger.
None the less, I still can't get WISH TV 8 to feature this whole story on the news. Crap.
So in other words... either First 4 Internet is full of geniuses or idiots. I'm putting my money on the latter. As for Sony, well...
I don't think the possibility actually exists that they aren't being commanded by a troupe of retards.
If information searched for and found on the internet can be directly tied to criminal activities, and is therefore evident of a person's involvement in a crime, then I feel that this isn't anything to be worried about, and nothing new. In past cases library records have been used to help prove the guilt of a suspected criminal. (For example, if any of you watch The New Detectives or any other forensic science shows on television, you may remember a case in which a person had murdered a family member - I think it was a woman who murdered her husband - by using hemlock to fatally poison them. During the investigation, the police acquired the suspect's library record in order to confirm that they had done research into poisons and, more specifically, the hemlock plant itself. If anyone remembers that particular case, I'd appreciate it if you'd fill us all in on that.)
However, if search and library records are used in mere speculation, and don't actually prove anything, but are instead used to paint an unnecessarily ugly picture of a defendant in a trial and damage their character, that's a bit much. It all comes down to how the information is actually used, and whether or not it's being handled in a responsible manner. Furthermore, if search records are used to pin a defendant with lesser crimes, then it has gone beyond the scope of the initial investigation and could be used to unfairly leverage legal power against a suspect in a crime, guilty or not, or even blackmail them into confessing to crimes regardless of whether or not they committed them. ("I won't tell the jury you were looking up hentai if you just fess up." "... Will they even know what that is?" "They will when I'm through with 'em." "OH GOD.") Additionally, if search records are used to preemptively press charges against a person, then it has gone entirely too far. For example, let's say I look up information about radioactive elements and rocketry. Someone could say that I'm planning to construct a rocket-propelled 'dirty bomb', or worse yet, an atomic device, and could then charge me with terrorism. All I'm really doing is gathering information for a research paper on the periodic table while looking up information on rocketry on the side in order to build a model rocket, but nowadays, who's going to believe that?
So, in other words, this isn't anything new. As always, we just need to ensure that the courts are using the information they gather responsibly and in a fair and just manner.
Very interesting. So this wasn't an average lifespan of the lichen in space... I wonder if further tests will determine just how long the lichens can actually last out there.
Substances like water, carbon, and oxygen are neat because they seem to be the most condusive to forming complex substances that make up the organic components of the bodies of living things. It's silly to think that there aren't living things that can exist without water, though. Or carbon. Or oxygen.
Theories about the possible environments wherein living things could exist are endless. Looking at the extremophilic algae and tube worms - That was the name you were looking for, I believe - here on Earth, we could see similar creatures living in the hot, highly acidic, CO2 rich environments of Venus. Lichens and other organisms tailored to exist only on the essentials, on the other hand, could thrive - and may actually exist - on Mars. (And if Mars was once like Earth, that theory certainly takes off, doesn't it?) Of course, those schools of thought only support organisms akin to the ones that exist here on Earth.
Meanwhile, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn provide a plethora of environments known to support life on Earth in some cases, but there are also theories that organisms could exist in the extreme cold of some of these celestial bodies by catalyzing acetylene and other volatile substances at extremely slow rates. If that theory were to pan out, then the idea of 'ice creatures from outer space' might not be too far off - and possibly a springboard for dozens of cheesy new sci-fi movies. (It'd certainly beat Spielburg's take on 'War of the Worlds'.)
While we're discussing theoretical models for living things unlike those that exist here on Earth, let's take a look at what we're made of - that all-important element carbon, I'm no chemistry expert, but doesn't boron nitride behave in a remarkably similar fashion to carbon? What about the possibility of a boron-based group of organisms? Or maybe plants and animals composed of different substances entirely? When one begins to consider the possibilities, it becomes immediately evident that they are indeed virtually endless.
The void of space may indeed host living things. Other worlds thought to be uninhabitable may also support life as well. I agree that it'd be pretty silly to disregard that possibility until we can conclusively prove that life simply can't thrive in these environments. Heck, maybe there's some kind of lichen out in some nebula somewhere, feeding off of plasma... Who knows.
They likely brought it into space in order to determine whether or not it could survive not just in a vaccuum, but also under these conditions, all at the same time:
* Vaccuum. (Of course.)
* Assorted forms of radiation.
* Zero gravity.
* Extremes of temperature.
Those conditions tend not to support life from Earth, and so to see that lichen can indeed survive in space, if only for a short time, is astounding. Not only does this add weight to the panspermia theory, but it also could stand to change our take on the 'qualifications' for a habitable environment completely, raising questions such as, "Could it be possible for more complex organisms to actually thrive in space?"
I for one welcome our moldy overlords.
Don't usually make a right. This is just too funny to be wrong, though. Invasive anti-cheat software + Invasive and secretive copy-protection software = OMGH4X This is going to be good. Good as in hilarious. I just know it.
As someone else stated in another reply, the 'cookies' in question will consist of anything of or related to Broadcast Flag. As I warned in my own reply to said statement, it's important to refrain from putting anything past these guys; they did, after all, get the AHRA passed back in... oh, '92, I think? Whenever it was. I say it's a 50-50 chance it'll go either way.
You know, that's actually a decently believable theory. However, I wouldn't put this past them just yet. This Halloween monster just might be a wimp in a rubber suit after all, but what if it's the real deal?
You know, I'm agitated much too easily nowadays. This bit is really getting my blood pressure up, so, you know what? I'm going to be brief, before I suffer that long awaited anneurism I've been anticipating and die.
This law, in a nutshell, applies to any device that can convert analog video into digital video. This is the video version of the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), with some added goodies. Any analog to digital conversion device - or vice versa, apparently - produced after the law goes into effect will have to be approved under Hollywood's standards by the USPTO. Among these standards are mandated DRM, as well as a nifty little requirement stating that the device must be proprietary and completely closed, thereby making it substantially more difficult to modify. Content converted from an analog format to a digital format will be encased in DRM, and any unprotected output, digital or otherwise, will be constricted heavily. (In other words, ugly as sin.) It mandates highly invasive and restrictive DRM, plain and simple, and everything therein that applies will become law.
This is about more than piracy, people. This is about killing technology, just like how the AHRA killed DAT. If you're a content producer or marketer, and you control this kind of technology, you control who can compete with you. They're on a technological tirade, and any device which could possibly be used to erode away at their market share will be eliminated. Only approved commercial institutions will have access to unrestricted 'professional' devices. (A device, under this law, becomes 'professional' once it's widely available.) Just as the AHRA stopped DAT dead in its tracks, this is a new control mechanism for DV. While it seems to only apply to devices that could theoretically pirate analog content in a digital format or vice versa, will this affect those who wish to record and publish their own videos? Almost certainly. They wouldn't field a bill like this unless there wasn't an anticompetitive kicker in there for them.
If these rapaciously greedy, bottom feeding, subhumanly mentally deficient piles of animated scum manage to get this law passed, it'll mean big trouble, not only for consumers, but producers as well. There is absolutely no sense in it whatsoever. None. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. As an aspiring innovator, this is the kind of garbage that causes my hair to stand on end. This is the kind of law that, upon reading it, causes me to enter a state of mind wherein my number one priority is to beat the living shit out of the nearest handy inanimate object of similar size and composition to a human body, so I don't track down these sneering assholes and wail on them instead. Cheesy as it is, The Rock said it best: "Know your role, and shut your mouth." The AA's need to take that statement to heart, sit down, and shut the fuck up.
What's next? Outlawing any 'improfessional' application of P2P protocols while forcing anyone who owns a streaming radio or video site on the internet to file comprehensive broadcasting reports with the FCC to ensure they're not playing copyrighted content? Or maybe a law that makes it illegal to distribute multimedia via a wireless connection, along with mandated DRM baked into every WiFi card! The possibilities are just endless with these people. Given their track record, I'd highly advise putting anything past them.
Okay. Now, what the Warden seems to be doing according to the article and other sources is invasive by nature, but the information doesn't appear to be moving anywhere it shouldn't. The only Call-Home ability it posesses is the 'ban flag', which it sends to Blizzard if it discovers a process that it doesn't approve of. Not such a big deal, unless it's actually sending this information to Blizzard as it updates. (Then it most definitely could be considered spyware.)
The real issue here is the fact that, given WOW's track record, there's no doubt in my mind that there's at least one way to exploit the Warden in order to glean information off of players while they play WOW. (Which is likely when they're most vulnerable - they won't notice a thing!) Just as an example, let's imagine that somebody wrote a virus and attached it to, let's say, an image or something on a popular WOW site or through a WOW mailing list. (Any highly accessable medium will do.) This virus is designed to attach itself to the Warden and send the information the Warden gathers to a third party. Whenever WOW starts and the Warden goes to work, the virus activates.
The information gathered isn't exactly benign. If a third party gathered player E-mail address books, for example, it could be sold to spammers. If any personal information is gathered, it could be used to perpetrate an act of identity theft or fraud. However, I feel that this isn't bad enough, so I'll play the devil's advocate. Let's say this virus in question here modifies the operating parameters of the Warden to gather more and more detailed information in the same manner it harvests data from running programs. The problem just got bigger. Now we can start throwing browsing habits, passwords, credit card numbers, and other lovely stuff into the mix. (Maybe even an opportunistic strain of the virus that can snag your credit card info from Blizzard's site if you access their services while playing WOW!) Fun, huh? That's gotta suck.
I'm not aware of any security attached to the Warden, so the probability of this being immediately possible can not be determined. This is, after all, only a theoretical situation. I would like to see someone investigate the Warden with greater detail, however, and see if there aren't any security holes in the Warden or WOW that someone could exploit. The issue here shouldn't be the invasive nature of the Warden; it should be what someone else could do with that information to royally fuck your day up. A data mining scheme involving 4.5 million individual people could be very profitable for an interested party or parties, so now that this is out in the open, we should be on the lookout for any instruments that could take advantage of what the Warden already does.
LINUX LAWSUIT 2: RETURN OF THE SCO
Coming to a courthouse near you!
I so called that.
I'm suddenly reminded of Futurama.
"How deliciously ironic!"
"That's not ironic! That's just mean!"