Ignoring the issues of it being a button versus a software feature, and more importantly the problem of whether or not the average user is informed enough (or if the software titles are descriptive enough) to decide if a particular program is desired:
The problem is that no current permissions system is nearly sophisticated enough to handle that kind of thing.
For instance, on multitasking and multiuser systems, users are relatively "safe" from one another. A non-privileged user is limited to write in one home directory, with quotas on resource usage. Acquisition of resources is mediated by the operating system. Likewise, processes cannot directly mangle the memory of other processes, even if they're controlled by the same user. This all works because the operating system and hardware impose limitations on the environment that the software runs in - i.e., there's a kernel mode and user mode, and the only code that runs in kernel mode is the kernel, and if it's all configured properly and there are no flaws, you have a somewhat secure system where everyone plays nicely.
So one malevolent user can't ruin another person's day, and the same is true to some extent for processes. (It's not true for threads, however. One thread can go berserk and wreck the whole process, and this is acceptable because we trust that since all the threads came from the same source code and work towards the same end, they should get along together.)
But what you're talking about would demand a much finer-grained level of access control. We would now be assuming that individual applications want to mess with each other, and we want to protect the good ones from the bad by giving each one exclusive control over their own files. Interactions between different programs would again need to be mediated by something.
In other words, you have Gaim installed under your user directory in/home/me/gaim, and you also have CrapApp3000 in/home/me/malware, and you want to be guaranteed that you can get rid of the crappy software with a few administrative operations, regardless of the nature of that program, and without damaging the rest of your installation. But for all you know, CrapApp could infect any number of other programs, or read your data and send it away to someone online, if permitted to. We'd need a system that actually limits CrapApp to as few operations as necessary for it to perform its task. This of course would require a redesign of all sorts of desktop software (and of course introduce a great deal of additional layers and complexity).
Right now, you can select a particular software item and say "Be gone" and have it uninstalled in a minute - but ONLY IF it obeys conventions and is not malicious. As long as applications are lumped together into the same pool of permissions, you just can't protect them from each other.
Unless what you were talking about was not in fact just saving information about a system configuration, but rather the actual programs itself. I.e., automated backups. Then yeah, I guess that would work better, but the obvious drawbacks of efficiency in time and disk space would apply.;)
I'll refer you to Chapter Two of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture (http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf). The gist of it is that during the late 1800s, there were a series of court cases that were to determine whether or not you needed permission to take photographs of anything that did not belong to you. This would include personal likenesses, landscapes of other people's property, etc. Thankfully the courts' answer was No, with a few minor exceptions for commercial paparazzi, but if it had gone the other way it could have actually killed off all of amateur photography.
But unfortunately, in this day and age we seem to have this notion that everything of incidental value, that is even tangentially related to intellectual property, is exclusively controlled by the owner of that property. And let's not forget that the facts of IP infringement cases are irrelevant if the target is a single, poorly-funded entity that can be buried in legal threats. We've learned this from the ??AA suits and various Cease and Desists for Fair Use.
Well, I presume that the speed benefits would be comparable among all the other QT/KDE programs, but if you're implying that the memory benefits will stack, keep in mind that a ton of the memory used by those apps is shared, so I think the 15% only applies once.
> I find myself offended, and can't say why, that if I start developing a program with the GPL version of Qt, I am forbidden to later switch it over to the commercial version.
Then are you also offended by the GPL itself? You can start developing a fork for your favorite GNU project, but you are forbidden from switching over to a commercial license. It is no different for QT - like it or not, linking with its libraries makes your code a derivitive work.
> 1) I can't imagine being in circumstances when I would want to make that switch, and
Uh, I don't understand why you draw a distinction between "switching" to a commercial license and using one to begin with; you're in the same legal trouble either way.
> 2) With Gnome there ISN'T a commercial version to switch to.
That in itself is useless to you. If there weren't a commercial version of KDE to switch to, you would have no way to produce a commercial KDE application, so you are no worse off with the existence of a commercial version. What you may have meant to say was that you are *able* to use the same license of Gnome for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, because Gnome uses the LGPL instead of the GPL.
Gnome was originally developed as a free alternative to QT/KDE, because QT was not under the GPL at the time. Now that it is, it still apparently isn't good enough for a lot of free software lovers.
I am so sick of people referencing Stevens as if he was fundamentally wrong when describing the problem in a non-technical way.
He said the Internet was [like] a bunch of tubes. If the word "like" wasn't there, then it was implied. It's called a simile. It's making a comparison between two different things. Did Stevens think that his email traveled through his home plumbing? No. He just wanted to illustrate that if you have a congested network, things will not travel as quickly through it. Do you disagree?
Yes, Stevens was horrendously misestimated network latency by several orders of magnitude. Yes, he probably shouldn't have the power to regulate the Internet if he uses the word "Internet" in its plural form, or in place of the word "email". And I would certainly look for a better analogy to explain his point than contrasting dump trucks and tubes. But the point was still valid, and mind-numbingly simple. The fact is that it shouldn't even take a university professor to defend him for making that point.
Whether or not you want to ridicule him for a few (admittedly glaring) technical inaccuracies is a totally separate matter.
> (BTW, swizzling the low-order pixels as the grandparent suggested is an obvious clue that the image has been altered, and is a possible steganographic image.)
True, modifying the bits might lead to an easily detectable pattern. And any modification at all is noticeable when there are "normal" copies of the same image floating around. So let's assume that there aren't, and that you have a shared one-time pad available beforehand. Then you should be able to make the low order bits carry a message yet remain indistinguishable from random data. Which raises a question - what patterns are normally present in the low order bits of picture files? If the files you normally exchange have random lest significant bits, then you're in the clear. But I'm guessing it's not that easy for photographs and especially simple gifs with few colors.
Well whatever method you use, unless you're making use of some hiding room in the format that's discarded as garbage data (like the space after a gzip file), then you won't directly increase the file size by using steganography. However, you would want to work with a larger image to begin with so you could fit more covert data in it, and that alone may be suspicious to anyone watching.
DeCSS did not crack CSS. It decrypted it using a CSS key. Decryption is not supposed to take a long time, cracking is. The last time I tried cracking a CSS title key with libdvdcss, it took a couple minutes.
You... *don't* like to agree with Lessig? What kind of slashdotter are you? I'm hearby making a slashdot citizen's arrest and stripping you of your license to practice IP debate.
"Gentlemen, I propose we send a message to tobacco companies everywhere by fining the El Dorado Cigarette Company infinity billion dollars!" "That's the spirit, Frank! But I think a real number might be more effective."
I cannot be the only one who thought of that.
Seriously, I know that statutory damages are supposed to be ridiculously high as a deterrent, but at some point you just have to laugh them out of court. Can anyone name any other case, fictional or real, where the amount claimed was in the trillions? What's the largest real amount of money actually won in court?
I remember one time when I was going through hell with D because the libraries I needed were apparently not available in the format recognized by the D linker. After a lengthy explanation of my limited understanding of the problem, the only reply I got was Walter informing me that for $25 I could get the library from his CD. Not quite the same problem as yours, but annoying nonetheless.
I only know of Feynman's antics through Surely You're Joking, but that book contains such a complete image of his personality that I feel like you could shove it in a test tube and grow a Feynman clone. The number one thing that strikes me about him is that he always questioned the system and the way people think about the system. His pranks demonstrated points that were valid but idealistic. He understood many aspects of this world better than anyone else around him, but he was at the same time powerless to change them.
Security is only one example. Everything else described in Surely You're Joking, from his experience with the South American education system, to the time he served on the California textbook commission, shows that he had an uncanny ability to identify the shortcomings - indeed absurdity - in the way we mortal humans think and pass on our habits to the next generation. And he was free from this trap, free to explore life despite the influences around him.
He was truely the greatest hacker that ever lived.
Either you were only trying to make a point, or you have a lot more faith in the public than I ever will have. I am optimistic about technological breakthroughs and perfect mathematical systems, but not people.
What am I optimistic about? The very first thing that comes to my mind is the promise of the truly integrated and efficient digital world. The place where everything everywhere is interconnected, where communication, data-sharing, queries, and analysis are all relatively easy problems. Where systems are routinely made - to a mathematical certainty - perfectly secure and reliable, and any examples to the contrary are the rare exception and handled with excellent competency.
Information will be easy to digest, and even easier to share. New and dynamic interactions between totally separate realms will occur regularly. Licensing and intellectual property law will become simplified to the point that they do not encroach upon our ability to use content in new and creative ways. Likewise, combinatorial patents will no longer exist.
The law will understand technology the way it should be understood, and mere technicalities will be eliminated. The potential of the system, and indeed society, will not be impeded by arbitrary restrictions.
In short, I believe in easy access to and consumption of almost all useful information that society documents or creates, and the rapid addition of new information to this wealth of knowledge.
Unfortunately, I do not necessarily believe that our generation will live to see this.
I'm not sure, information on wikipedia (and hence, everything that rips content from wikipedia like TFA) is a bit sparse. It does seem strange that the data on every disc would be different, encrypted with a different key. But if that were not the case, wouldn't it be trivial to make an image and distribute this rather than the unencrypted movie data, since people can just burn the image illegally and play it in a liscensed player to accomplish the same goal? At least if the title key and cypherdata are different between all discs, this isn't feasable, because a legitimate player will notice the discrepency between the title key and volume id (serial number) and will refuse to play.
Version race nothing, I've been watching this language with mild interest for years now. I thought that it reaching version One Point Zero would be as unlikely as DNF getting released. This is the single most surprising headline I've read in a few weeks.
This point has been mentioned a lot in this article's comments and the last one on this topic, but I'll karma whore and reiterate it:
There's a difference between the title key and the player key. The title keys are used to directly decrypt the contents of the dvd (or hddvd or blu-ray), and differ between discs. They are not revoked because they are never reused to begin with. The player key is what's licensed to the companies and stored in players. This is the key that allows access to the title key, and if compromised, this key can be revoked by simply not allowing it to decode any more title keys on future discs. So if this guy has obtained a player key, he can continue to decrypt future title keys up until the powers that be catch on, which may never happen if he doesn't publish it.
But he may not even have a player key. He might have just read the title keys, after they were decrypted by powerdvd, out of memory. I think that's what the GP meant.
I heard a suggestion in another thread that the title keys alone might be useful enough - the idea was that they could be exchanged freely across a p2p network, but the player keys that yielded them would remain in private hands to ensure their usefulness. I think the people discussing that missed one important point (although I could be wrong): the title keys should be unique not just to each movie, but to each disc containing that movie, as they are derived from the serial number in the disc. So your title key is useless to anyone else. It's a shame if that's true.
Guess the only thing to do is go back to trading gigabytes of movie data over bittorrent illegally, instead of a couple kilobytes of key data so you can view a legal copy.;)
Actually that's true of most dvd drives these days. The industry made a major push a few years ago to make sure newer drives enforce region codes in hardware, so it's not just that one brand that's defective by design. I don't know if it violates the CSS specs or not.
"DVD Video discs are the most infamous and visible example of regional lockout. Computer DVD drives come from the factory with RPC (Regional Playback Control), either RPC-1 (older drives) or RPC-2 (newer drives). The difference between the two is that RPC-1 means the player software has the responsibility of enforcing the region control, while in RPC-2, it is enforced by the drive's firmware.
It means that RPC-1 drives can play DVDs from any region (0-7) while RPC-2 drives play only from a particular region (although the region code can be changed 5 times after which it is locked)"
Sucks, doesn't it. After those five times are up, you're screwed unless you can reflash the firmware. That's your money at work.
I always smile any time I hear about another piece of anti-smoking legislation getting passed. It's one of those rare instances where democracy fails spectacularly in your favor, and you get to laugh a deep, sadistic laugh, as the rights of the few are stripped away by the whims of the many. Soon smokers won't dare to light up in public, in private, in the wilderness, or underwater. An entire right will have been permanently extinguished from this country, and I will take satisfaction in seeing my will imposed so effectively on that formerly nicotine-inflicted population. I don't smoke, and I've decided that neither should you.
Right, it's not even "breaking" or "cracking" the encryption if you *have* the key. DeCSS didn't crack CSS; it simply applied a key that they obtained elsewhere to decrypt the dvd normally. In contrast, something like libdvdcss will make use of the fact that CSS keyspace is extremely small, and brute-force it (if the library was not compiled with a player key).
On that topic, would anyone happen to know why libdvdcss successfully brute-forces some titles, but halts and fails on others? I ran into that problem and was forced to set my dvd drive's region code so it could decrypt using the normal method instead.
"The specification was publicly released in April 2005 and the standard has been adopted as the access restriction scheme for HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc."
Blu-ray IIRC had room for additional DRM methods as well.
Yeah, it really takes a special kind of brilliance (where the meaning of "special" is not a benevolent one) to come up with the idea of shoving auto-reboot down people's throats as a method to encourage them to apply patches. A utility that would make it easy and convenient for me to update my system, and that would remind me to do so at the proper time, would be great. But Microsoft's idea of "convenient" is... Well, think Clippy. Instead of allowing me to check for updates just before the system shuts down, they want to do so when it starts up. So rather than allow me to click a button to let the update take care of itself as I walk away from my computer with my business done for the day, I would have to add an additional reboot cycle to the time I have to wait to use my computer. The result is that I often go days without applying security patches (Yes, my own damn fault, I know, but that does not excuse the tool.)
It really sucks to be consistently interrupted from a full screen fast-action game by a dialog threatening to bring down my system if I do not actively opt out. And the same people go out of their way to bring us popup spam integrated into the OS API. I do not want to see "Help make office better!" spring up over my powerpoint presentation at random intervals, nor do I appreciate the fact that I have to click the tiny X to get rid of this window, and if they miss I incur the wrath of more dialogs.
And to think that they almost made the Vista sound effect mandatory is even more disgusting.
The fact that Microsoft promotes such "features" is evidence of one of the following: A) That these people lack even the slightest respect for the user experience (sometimes I wonder if this is actually intentional, and if they're mocking me for kicks); or B) That they are so caught up in an intra-company bureaucracy that they are incapable in general of making intelligent design decisions.
I wonder if KDE 4's port to Windows will include kwin.
Slashdot Mirror
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
/home/me/gaim, and you also have CrapApp3000 in /home/me/malware, and you want to be guaranteed that you can get rid of the crappy software with a few administrative operations, regardless of the nature of that program, and without damaging the rest of your installation. But for all you know, CrapApp could infect any number of other programs, or read your data and send it away to someone online, if permitted to. We'd need a system that actually limits CrapApp to as few operations as necessary for it to perform its task. This of course would require a redesign of all sorts of desktop software (and of course introduce a great deal of additional layers and complexity).
;)
Ignoring the issues of it being a button versus a software feature, and more importantly the problem of whether or not the average user is informed enough (or if the software titles are descriptive enough) to decide if a particular program is desired:
The problem is that no current permissions system is nearly sophisticated enough to handle that kind of thing.
For instance, on multitasking and multiuser systems, users are relatively "safe" from one another. A non-privileged user is limited to write in one home directory, with quotas on resource usage. Acquisition of resources is mediated by the operating system. Likewise, processes cannot directly mangle the memory of other processes, even if they're controlled by the same user. This all works because the operating system and hardware impose limitations on the environment that the software runs in - i.e., there's a kernel mode and user mode, and the only code that runs in kernel mode is the kernel, and if it's all configured properly and there are no flaws, you have a somewhat secure system where everyone plays nicely.
So one malevolent user can't ruin another person's day, and the same is true to some extent for processes. (It's not true for threads, however. One thread can go berserk and wreck the whole process, and this is acceptable because we trust that since all the threads came from the same source code and work towards the same end, they should get along together.)
But what you're talking about would demand a much finer-grained level of access control. We would now be assuming that individual applications want to mess with each other, and we want to protect the good ones from the bad by giving each one exclusive control over their own files. Interactions between different programs would again need to be mediated by something.
In other words, you have Gaim installed under your user directory in
Right now, you can select a particular software item and say "Be gone" and have it uninstalled in a minute - but ONLY IF it obeys conventions and is not malicious. As long as applications are lumped together into the same pool of permissions, you just can't protect them from each other.
Unless what you were talking about was not in fact just saving information about a system configuration, but rather the actual programs itself. I.e., automated backups. Then yeah, I guess that would work better, but the obvious drawbacks of efficiency in time and disk space would apply.
I'll refer you to Chapter Two of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture (http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf). The gist of it is that during the late 1800s, there were a series of court cases that were to determine whether or not you needed permission to take photographs of anything that did not belong to you. This would include personal likenesses, landscapes of other people's property, etc. Thankfully the courts' answer was No, with a few minor exceptions for commercial paparazzi, but if it had gone the other way it could have actually killed off all of amateur photography.
But unfortunately, in this day and age we seem to have this notion that everything of incidental value, that is even tangentially related to intellectual property, is exclusively controlled by the owner of that property. And let's not forget that the facts of IP infringement cases are irrelevant if the target is a single, poorly-funded entity that can be buried in legal threats. We've learned this from the ??AA suits and various Cease and Desists for Fair Use.
Well, I presume that the speed benefits would be comparable among all the other QT/KDE programs, but if you're implying that the memory benefits will stack, keep in mind that a ton of the memory used by those apps is shared, so I think the 15% only applies once.
> I find myself offended, and can't say why, that if I start developing a program with the GPL version of Qt, I am forbidden to later switch it over to the commercial version.
Then are you also offended by the GPL itself? You can start developing a fork for your favorite GNU project, but you are forbidden from switching over to a commercial license. It is no different for QT - like it or not, linking with its libraries makes your code a derivitive work.
> 1) I can't imagine being in circumstances when I would want to make that switch, and
Uh, I don't understand why you draw a distinction between "switching" to a commercial license and using one to begin with; you're in the same legal trouble either way.
> 2) With Gnome there ISN'T a commercial version to switch to.
That in itself is useless to you. If there weren't a commercial version of KDE to switch to, you would have no way to produce a commercial KDE application, so you are no worse off with the existence of a commercial version. What you may have meant to say was that you are *able* to use the same license of Gnome for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, because Gnome uses the LGPL instead of the GPL.
Gnome was originally developed as a free alternative to QT/KDE, because QT was not under the GPL at the time. Now that it is, it still apparently isn't good enough for a lot of free software lovers.
I am so sick of people referencing Stevens as if he was fundamentally wrong when describing the problem in a non-technical way.
He said the Internet was [like] a bunch of tubes. If the word "like" wasn't there, then it was implied. It's called a simile. It's making a comparison between two different things. Did Stevens think that his email traveled through his home plumbing? No. He just wanted to illustrate that if you have a congested network, things will not travel as quickly through it. Do you disagree?
Yes, Stevens was horrendously misestimated network latency by several orders of magnitude. Yes, he probably shouldn't have the power to regulate the Internet if he uses the word "Internet" in its plural form, or in place of the word "email". And I would certainly look for a better analogy to explain his point than contrasting dump trucks and tubes. But the point was still valid, and mind-numbingly simple. The fact is that it shouldn't even take a university professor to defend him for making that point.
Whether or not you want to ridicule him for a few (admittedly glaring) technical inaccuracies is a totally separate matter.
> (BTW, swizzling the low-order pixels as the grandparent suggested is an obvious clue that the image has been altered, and is a possible steganographic image.)
True, modifying the bits might lead to an easily detectable pattern. And any modification at all is noticeable when there are "normal" copies of the same image floating around. So let's assume that there aren't, and that you have a shared one-time pad available beforehand. Then you should be able to make the low order bits carry a message yet remain indistinguishable from random data. Which raises a question - what patterns are normally present in the low order bits of picture files? If the files you normally exchange have random lest significant bits, then you're in the clear. But I'm guessing it's not that easy for photographs and especially simple gifs with few colors.
Well whatever method you use, unless you're making use of some hiding room in the format that's discarded as garbage data (like the space after a gzip file), then you won't directly increase the file size by using steganography. However, you would want to work with a larger image to begin with so you could fit more covert data in it, and that alone may be suspicious to anyone watching.
DeCSS did not crack CSS. It decrypted it using a CSS key. Decryption is not supposed to take a long time, cracking is. The last time I tried cracking a CSS title key with libdvdcss, it took a couple minutes.
You... *don't* like to agree with Lessig? What kind of slashdotter are you? I'm hearby making a slashdot citizen's arrest and stripping you of your license to practice IP debate.
"Gentlemen, I propose we send a message to tobacco companies everywhere by fining the El Dorado Cigarette Company infinity billion dollars!"
"That's the spirit, Frank! But I think a real number might be more effective."
I cannot be the only one who thought of that.
Seriously, I know that statutory damages are supposed to be ridiculously high as a deterrent, but at some point you just have to laugh them out of court. Can anyone name any other case, fictional or real, where the amount claimed was in the trillions? What's the largest real amount of money actually won in court?
Haven't you heard? Both Microsoft and the RIAA are centered here.
I remember one time when I was going through hell with D because the libraries I needed were apparently not available in the format recognized by the D linker. After a lengthy explanation of my limited understanding of the problem, the only reply I got was Walter informing me that for $25 I could get the library from his CD. Not quite the same problem as yours, but annoying nonetheless.
I only know of Feynman's antics through Surely You're Joking, but that book contains such a complete image of his personality that I feel like you could shove it in a test tube and grow a Feynman clone. The number one thing that strikes me about him is that he always questioned the system and the way people think about the system. His pranks demonstrated points that were valid but idealistic. He understood many aspects of this world better than anyone else around him, but he was at the same time powerless to change them.
Security is only one example. Everything else described in Surely You're Joking, from his experience with the South American education system, to the time he served on the California textbook commission, shows that he had an uncanny ability to identify the shortcomings - indeed absurdity - in the way we mortal humans think and pass on our habits to the next generation. And he was free from this trap, free to explore life despite the influences around him.
He was truely the greatest hacker that ever lived.
Either you were only trying to make a point, or you have a lot more faith in the public than I ever will have. I am optimistic about technological breakthroughs and perfect mathematical systems, but not people.
What am I optimistic about? The very first thing that comes to my mind is the promise of the truly integrated and efficient digital world. The place where everything everywhere is interconnected, where communication, data-sharing, queries, and analysis are all relatively easy problems. Where systems are routinely made - to a mathematical certainty - perfectly secure and reliable, and any examples to the contrary are the rare exception and handled with excellent competency.
Information will be easy to digest, and even easier to share. New and dynamic interactions between totally separate realms will occur regularly. Licensing and intellectual property law will become simplified to the point that they do not encroach upon our ability to use content in new and creative ways. Likewise, combinatorial patents will no longer exist.
The law will understand technology the way it should be understood, and mere technicalities will be eliminated. The potential of the system, and indeed society, will not be impeded by arbitrary restrictions.
In short, I believe in easy access to and consumption of almost all useful information that society documents or creates, and the rapid addition of new information to this wealth of knowledge.
Unfortunately, I do not necessarily believe that our generation will live to see this.
I'm not sure, information on wikipedia (and hence, everything that rips content from wikipedia like TFA) is a bit sparse. It does seem strange that the data on every disc would be different, encrypted with a different key. But if that were not the case, wouldn't it be trivial to make an image and distribute this rather than the unencrypted movie data, since people can just burn the image illegally and play it in a liscensed player to accomplish the same goal? At least if the title key and cypherdata are different between all discs, this isn't feasable, because a legitimate player will notice the discrepency between the title key and volume id (serial number) and will refuse to play.
Not sure what the manufacturing process would be.
Version race nothing, I've been watching this language with mild interest for years now. I thought that it reaching version One Point Zero would be as unlikely as DNF getting released. This is the single most surprising headline I've read in a few weeks.
This point has been mentioned a lot in this article's comments and the last one on this topic, but I'll karma whore and reiterate it:
;)
There's a difference between the title key and the player key. The title keys are used to directly decrypt the contents of the dvd (or hddvd or blu-ray), and differ between discs. They are not revoked because they are never reused to begin with. The player key is what's licensed to the companies and stored in players. This is the key that allows access to the title key, and if compromised, this key can be revoked by simply not allowing it to decode any more title keys on future discs. So if this guy has obtained a player key, he can continue to decrypt future title keys up until the powers that be catch on, which may never happen if he doesn't publish it.
But he may not even have a player key. He might have just read the title keys, after they were decrypted by powerdvd, out of memory. I think that's what the GP meant.
I heard a suggestion in another thread that the title keys alone might be useful enough - the idea was that they could be exchanged freely across a p2p network, but the player keys that yielded them would remain in private hands to ensure their usefulness. I think the people discussing that missed one important point (although I could be wrong): the title keys should be unique not just to each movie, but to each disc containing that movie, as they are derived from the serial number in the disc. So your title key is useless to anyone else. It's a shame if that's true.
Guess the only thing to do is go back to trading gigabytes of movie data over bittorrent illegally, instead of a couple kilobytes of key data so you can view a legal copy.
Actually that's true of most dvd drives these days. The industry made a major push a few years ago to make sure newer drives enforce region codes in hardware, so it's not just that one brand that's defective by design. I don't know if it violates the CSS specs or not.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_lockout
"DVD Video discs are the most infamous and visible example of regional lockout. Computer DVD drives come from the factory with RPC (Regional Playback Control), either RPC-1 (older drives) or RPC-2 (newer drives). The difference between the two is that RPC-1 means the player software has the responsibility of enforcing the region control, while in RPC-2, it is enforced by the drive's firmware.
It means that RPC-1 drives can play DVDs from any region (0-7) while RPC-2 drives play only from a particular region (although the region code can be changed 5 times after which it is locked)"
Sucks, doesn't it. After those five times are up, you're screwed unless you can reflash the firmware. That's your money at work.
I always smile any time I hear about another piece of anti-smoking legislation getting passed. It's one of those rare instances where democracy fails spectacularly in your favor, and you get to laugh a deep, sadistic laugh, as the rights of the few are stripped away by the whims of the many. Soon smokers won't dare to light up in public, in private, in the wilderness, or underwater. An entire right will have been permanently extinguished from this country, and I will take satisfaction in seeing my will imposed so effectively on that formerly nicotine-inflicted population. I don't smoke, and I've decided that neither should you.
Now if only we could ban sex.
Right, it's not even "breaking" or "cracking" the encryption if you *have* the key. DeCSS didn't crack CSS; it simply applied a key that they obtained elsewhere to decrypt the dvd normally. In contrast, something like libdvdcss will make use of the fact that CSS keyspace is extremely small, and brute-force it (if the library was not compiled with a player key).
On that topic, would anyone happen to know why libdvdcss successfully brute-forces some titles, but halts and fails on others? I ran into that problem and was forced to set my dvd drive's region code so it could decrypt using the normal method instead.
Why?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS
"The specification was publicly released in April 2005 and the standard has been adopted as the access restriction scheme for HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc."
Blu-ray IIRC had room for additional DRM methods as well.
Yeah, it really takes a special kind of brilliance (where the meaning of "special" is not a benevolent one) to come up with the idea of shoving auto-reboot down people's throats as a method to encourage them to apply patches. A utility that would make it easy and convenient for me to update my system, and that would remind me to do so at the proper time, would be great. But Microsoft's idea of "convenient" is... Well, think Clippy. Instead of allowing me to check for updates just before the system shuts down, they want to do so when it starts up. So rather than allow me to click a button to let the update take care of itself as I walk away from my computer with my business done for the day, I would have to add an additional reboot cycle to the time I have to wait to use my computer. The result is that I often go days without applying security patches (Yes, my own damn fault, I know, but that does not excuse the tool.)
It really sucks to be consistently interrupted from a full screen fast-action game by a dialog threatening to bring down my system if I do not actively opt out. And the same people go out of their way to bring us popup spam integrated into the OS API. I do not want to see "Help make office better!" spring up over my powerpoint presentation at random intervals, nor do I appreciate the fact that I have to click the tiny X to get rid of this window, and if they miss I incur the wrath of more dialogs.
And to think that they almost made the Vista sound effect mandatory is even more disgusting.
The fact that Microsoft promotes such "features" is evidence of one of the following: A) That these people lack even the slightest respect for the user experience (sometimes I wonder if this is actually intentional, and if they're mocking me for kicks); or B) That they are so caught up in an intra-company bureaucracy that they are incapable in general of making intelligent design decisions.
I wonder if KDE 4's port to Windows will include kwin.
Wow, the guy who modded that post flamebait must REALLY hate Madlibs.
No I did not. As I said, I do not yet own the Wii. In that case this is even more baseless than I thought.