Now that't it's been declared impossible, someone is bound to go and do it...
Also, a future killer application will be computer services accessed via cellphones. 3G and decent visuals are going to be a long time coming but voice based services will work now.
Without access to the sources, who knows what code makes up a typical Windows release. With s/w it's rare to find functionallity that cannot be implemented in a number of ways so it's very difficult to determine when code is stolen just by observing the external behaviour.
Book plagiarism is easy to detect because the "code" is the functionallity; software plagiarism is impossible to detect without open access to sources.
It's been years since I watched an ad and acted positively on it's content (ie bought something)
I often promise myself to avoid products whose ads treat me as an idiot.
As ads have become less effective and less relevant to viewers the broadcasters have responded by making adverts more intrusive, more common and generally making watching TV a difficult experience. Surprise! People watch less TV.
All programs have to be "interpreted" by something when run. Usually it's a hardware CPU but it could just be a good software emulator. If a program is running on a s/w interpreter emulating a CPU it's trivial (though lengthy) to determine the algorithms and data used by the program. It doesn't matter how hidden the code and data are, when they hit the CPU they must make sense.
No packaging is perfect so these DVDs must have a limited shelf life. Each will need a "best before" label and the stock will need rotating just like as supermarket.
When did the medja companies start to hate their customers?
The number of false positives and the resulting legal cases (where one group of people are repeatably suspected following a false positive) will ensure this never works as intended.
First, bolting on security to existing products will fail. It's impossible to close up badly designed software.
Secondly, MS relies on open (as in open door flapping in the wind) systems to rapidly deploy new innovations. As people have pointed out defaults rule and if the default is a closed system many innovations would get nowhere as few users would switch them on.
a/ 700,000 cards is NOT a targetted mailing. It's plain spam and you have to wonder if they have a licensed mailing list or just copied the stuff out of a trade directory (most have copyright clauses preventing such use these days):-)
b/ any company receiving such a card should get the company lawyer to write back pointing out the legal consequences of libel.
c/ I wonder if Microsoft or Adobe could satisfy the BSA audit?
There are a number of companies that make good money selling virus checkers for WinXX products and apps. Yet M$ isn't one of them. Why doesn't M$ have a virus checker product?
There will be a temporary delay while the protection is broken before binary data copies are available. Excellent analogue copies will be available immediately. Bit image copies and off-the-books pressings are not prevented so the bulk pirates are unaffected.
Nobody seems to pointed out that so long as the program running on the xbox has been developed to the xbox code standards it can be ANYTHING.
Including a hacked version of the user level linux kernel.....
Most games avoid OS services anyway to gain speed (and lets face it directx is just a way to do this in a controlled manner.) so games and operating system kernels have much in common:-)
MS admits it's neither capable nor willing to tackle it's builtin security problems. Instead of acting responsibly as a mature member of the computer business, it's gone crying to the government, "Wah, please make them stop!"
Sadly, this beings the possibility of a balkanized internet one step closer; one half full of unprotected systems constantly attacked by "terrorist" virii, the other a calm and peaceful place consisting of systems created and run by responsible persons using secure protocols and operating systems and protected from the wild place by powerful filters and blocks.
Then finally, MS will have it's dearest wish, control of an internet. However, the rest of us will have moved on to bigger and better Internets where men are REAL men, women are REAL women and Mel is a REAL programmer:-)
Pause Technologies - created in 2000 based on a 10 year old dubious patent. No products. Just a shell holding a patent that they hope people will be stupid enough to licence rather than challenge in court.
As for the "technology" it's just another kind of flow buffer. These exist everywhere where incoming data/water/etc and outgoing data/water/etc flow rates may differ in the short term.
By 2005 hard disks will cost about one cent a gigabyte if current trends continue -- and there is no reason to doubt they will. The first terabyte single drives are almost certainly in the prototype stage right now.
That means the storage space required to hold a movie will cost about 20 cents...
Won't be long after that before you will be able to buy a disk holding "The Best 100 Movies"
and DVD as a format will be dead.
So they would be happy for me to create a token with the string "TomCruise@Actor" would they?
No matter how you try and gloss over it, as soon as you start providing an authentication method that people rely on you must also start to perform real, and expensive checks.
And if you think that there is a fuss about domain names just wait this is in use!
as barney is a common name and cannot be trademarked i suggest that if a large number of web pages were suddenly created in honour of Congressman Barney Frank (www.house.gov/frank) suggesting he wasn't a political dinosaur and wasn't subject to writing "purple" prose the evil one's web presence would be significantly diluted...
After all Barney does support reclassifying marijuana as a Schedule II drug with important medicinal uses:-)
it's fairly obvious that the true intent of the new license is to scare companies into not allowing their developers to create GPL'ed code. The obvious target is driver development. M$ will claim that GPL'ed driver code which is substantially similar to the Win/NT driver code (which it must be because of the hardware needs)
potentially infects their IP (what it does do of course is make it very difficult to "buy the company" to gain access to IP - Stac would have never been a target if their code was GPL'ed)
also, much talk about testing GNU licenses in court -- has a M$ license ever been tested in court?
I guess that this curious policy will end as soon as some customer sues them for giving her/him a car that can exceed the speed limit - thus encouraging him/her to break the law...
Right now the RIAA is suing people for just linking to sites that have DeCSS (or something just called DeCSS)
Exactly who is legally responcible when the browser directs someone to some legally questionable site? The first person the lawyers will call is the author of the web page not Microsoft
for a start, every anti-copy mechanism ever invented has been beaten because people will accept poor quality copies. Next, there's no point using encryption because the signal has to be decrypted by the player so it can be seen/heard (which makes CSS such a joke.) and people just make analog copies. As we are mostly talking about a digital signal anyway, the professional pirates just duplicate bit images and don't have any problems at all:-)
I regularly report problems with corporate web sites, but recently less and less of them seem to care. Many high profile sites no longer have "webmaster" email aliases and no other online mantainence contact information.
Currently I know of problems with three UK media companies web sites but there's no useful contact info on any of them so I've started sending the info to The Register and similar sites in the hope that being publically humiliated may have some effect:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Now that't it's been declared impossible, someone is bound to go and do it...
Also, a future killer application will be computer services accessed via cellphones. 3G and decent visuals are going to be a long time coming but voice based services will work now.
Without access to the sources, who knows what code makes up a typical Windows release. With s/w it's rare to find functionallity that cannot be implemented in a number of ways so it's very difficult to determine when code is stolen just by observing the external behaviour.
Book plagiarism is easy to detect because the "code" is the functionallity; software plagiarism is impossible to detect without open access to sources.
It's been years since I watched an ad and acted positively on it's content (ie bought something)
I often promise myself to avoid products whose ads treat me as an idiot.
As ads have become less effective and less relevant to viewers the broadcasters have responded by making adverts more intrusive, more common and generally making watching TV a difficult experience. Surprise! People watch less TV.
encryption does NOT prevent copying.
A GPS encryption scheme just means you have to be in a particular area before you can pirate a copy.
Hasn't anyone learnt anything from the DeCSS farce?
Who's going to wear a _Timex_ just to buy stuff?
All programs have to be "interpreted" by something when run. Usually it's a hardware CPU but it could just be a good software emulator. If a program is running on a s/w interpreter emulating a CPU it's trivial (though lengthy) to determine the algorithms and data used by the program. It doesn't matter how hidden the code and data are, when they hit the CPU they must make sense.
No packaging is perfect so these DVDs must have a limited shelf life. Each will need a "best before" label and the stock will need rotating just like as supermarket.
When did the medja companies start to hate their customers?
The number of false positives and the resulting legal cases (where one group of people are repeatably suspected following a false positive) will ensure this never works as intended.
First, bolting on security to existing products will fail. It's impossible to close up badly designed software.
Secondly, MS relies on open (as in open door flapping in the wind) systems to rapidly deploy new innovations. As people have pointed out defaults rule and if the default is a closed system many innovations would get nowhere as few users would switch them on.
a/ 700,000 cards is NOT a targetted mailing. It's plain spam and you have to wonder if they have a licensed mailing list or just copied the stuff out of a trade directory (most have copyright clauses preventing such use these days) :-)
b/ any company receiving such a card should get the company lawyer to write back pointing out the legal consequences of libel.
c/ I wonder if Microsoft or Adobe could satisfy the BSA audit?
There are a number of companies that make good money selling virus checkers for WinXX products and apps. Yet M$ isn't one of them. Why doesn't M$ have a virus checker product?
WinBlows (like to see that in the court transcripts.)
OTOH, does Windows become Ventanas in Spanish speaking countries?
There will be a temporary delay while the protection is broken before binary data copies are available. Excellent analogue copies will be available immediately. Bit image copies and off-the-books pressings are not prevented so the bulk pirates are unaffected.
Including a hacked version of the user level linux kernel.....
Most games avoid OS services anyway to gain speed (and lets face it directx is just a way to do this in a controlled manner.) so games and operating system kernels have much in common :-)
Sadly, this beings the possibility of a balkanized internet one step closer; one half full of unprotected systems constantly attacked by "terrorist" virii, the other a calm and peaceful place consisting of systems created and run by responsible persons using secure protocols and operating systems and protected from the wild place by powerful filters and blocks.
Then finally, MS will have it's dearest wish, control of an internet. However, the rest of us will have moved on to bigger and better Internets where men are REAL men, women are REAL women and Mel is a REAL programmer :-)
As for the "technology" it's just another kind of flow buffer. These exist everywhere where incoming data/water/etc and outgoing data/water/etc flow rates may differ in the short term.
``The photos of the hijackers were on file.''
So the rules is if you look a bit like someone that is suspected of being a criminal, you don't get to fly?
I see many, huge lawsuits.
That means the storage space required to hold a movie will cost about 20 cents...
Won't be long after that before you will be able to buy a disk holding "The Best 100 Movies"
and DVD as a format will be dead.
No matter how you try and gloss over it, as soon as you start providing an authentication method that people rely on you must also start to perform real, and expensive checks.
And if you think that there is a fuss about domain names just wait this is in use!
After all Barney does support reclassifying marijuana as a Schedule II drug with important medicinal uses :-)
also, much talk about testing GNU licenses in court -- has a M$ license ever been tested in court?
I guess that this curious policy will end as soon as some customer sues them for giving her/him a car that can exceed the speed limit - thus encouraging him/her to break the law...
Exactly who is legally responcible when the browser directs someone to some legally questionable site? The first person the lawyers will call is the author of the web page not Microsoft
for a start, every anti-copy mechanism ever invented has been beaten because people will accept poor quality copies. Next, there's no point using encryption because the signal has to be decrypted by the player so it can be seen/heard (which makes CSS such a joke.) and people just make analog copies. As we are mostly talking about a digital signal anyway, the professional pirates just duplicate bit images and don't have any problems at all :-)
Currently I know of problems with three UK media companies web sites but there's no useful contact info on any of them so I've started sending the info to The Register and similar sites in the hope that being publically humiliated may have some effect :-)