Does anybody really not think wireless will soon be a mandatory feature for all portable media players?
wireless on a portable media player would only be useful if it allowed users to freely share whatever non-DRMed media they have with each other. This would be a great feature for ipod marketing because it would further lock in users to the currently dominant platform. the reason we haven't seen that on the ipod is the same one we haven't seen a simple copy-from-ipod feature in iTunes. It has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with Big Music Bucks.
Beyond that, the vast majority of users in China do not own their own computers - they spend their time in internet cafes... which means they're even less likely to have the proxy program.
She contacts John and asks if there is anyway he can help. A few days later she receives an email which contains a link and 2 pieces of information, a username, and a password.
Mary clicks the link and is asked for her username and password, she enters in the requested information and is taken to a default Psiphon web page. She notices that the top part of the web page has an address bar nearly identical to the address bar in her Internet Explorer. Mary types in "www.google.com", and notices that she is taken to Google's main page, and that the address bar is still at the top of Google's page.
It is a web application. You just go to a url, log in, and start browsing. Of course at an internet caffee they could have a key logger but that's another matter entirely.
And I don't see Torvalds (Linux) coming together with Trudge (Samba), Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), Pat (Slackware), GNOME foundation, and/or others against MS.
Are you proving your geek pedigree by calling them all by name like they're your best pals??
I like the "manage music through metadata" concept, I think it's so much better than browsing through folders. I don't know who invented it, but I first used it in iTunes and for that I give them credit. The iTunes interface for playing back songs and editing metadata is also well designed.
But iTunes also has done enough to piss me off that I am now moving away from it. The music store popping up whenever you misclick. Ripping to friggin' m4a/AAC as default, which isn't half as widely supported as MP3. And most of all, not allowing you to cut and paste tracks from your iPod.
I now use rhythmbox for browsing/playback + easytag for tag editing (under ubuntu) and I don't regret itunes at all.
Can you name even one person who has been "shipped off sans due process to an offshore prison camp" who wasn't captured in a war zone under arms while not wearing a uniform?
Abu Omar. This guy was kidnapped by CIA agents in Milan (with the assent of the italian government), and shipped to airforce base in aviano and from there to egypt to be tortured. None of this is conjecture, it's all over the news (at least here in italy).
One. If you think everyone in Guantanamo was an armed irregular in afghanistan or Iraq you are a fool. People have been shipped there from lot's of other places, like pakistan, bosnia, etc.
Two. When you capture an enemy soldier it hardly matters if he has a uniform, there are international conventions on how you should treat prisoners, and none of them consider torture acceptable.
Three. One of the things distinguishing a democracy from a dictatorship is the fact that when someone is arrested, his family is allowed to know that he is being detained and on what accusation. It is only dictatorships that make people just disappear.
Despite advancements in streaming technology, video delivered on the Web can still be choppy, with frequent interruptions as data packets buffer and reload on the screen.
We all thought that multicast streaming would be the television of the future, but guess what, it won't. Except perhaps for sports or other "live" happenings.
It turns out internet tv is download lot's of content, watch it when I want. The TiVo proved this type of viewing appeals to users. And protocols such as bittorrent make it possible. Like democracy player. That does mean it is hard for the content industry to control distribution, cause distribution is p2p. So they will oppose it.
If when Apple wants to send me a file, they're able to pay Earthlink such that the data they send isn't part of the 1.5Mbps, but counts as additional bandwidth, then that works to both of our advantages.
Naive. That's not how it works. Your internet connection is not getting any faster because of Apple (or whoever) paying.
But that's not the problem either. If I were requesting a service from Apple and knew that they would be getting my provider to prioritize that traffic over the rest it would still be sort of fair. The point is that my internet connection is going to be slower because OTHER PEOPLE are using video services provided by a company who pays the extortion fee (or more likely, is another branch of the telco giving me access): the free sites which I try to access will be slower because of that.
It's not about MY 1.5MBps on the cable that runs to my home, it's about the unknown amount of bandwidth I am sharing with an unknown number of other subscribers, on a bigger cable somewhere downstream.
There's at least one good game for the XBox360. Elder scrolls oblivion.
of course it's not going to make me buy the box cause I play it on my PC. For the kind of complex RPG or strategy games that I like, I think the PC is a better platform because the keyboard provides more flexible controls.
Although in the case of Oblivion they've kind of nerfed the keyboard I think, probably to make it more similar to the Xbox version. As an example you use the tab key to go in all the character menus, maps and inventory, and do not have keyboard shortcuts such as M for map or I for inventory. And you can only set numbers 1 through 8 as hotkeys: why not 9 and 0??? just to make it similar to the xbox version which (i'm guessing here) uses 4 buttons for this, times 2 by using some modifier button.
I almost never turn my ipod up over halfway when I'm listening to the headphones.
Are the new iPods louder than the old ones? I have a 4g and I disagree.
Listening at half volume may be okay if you're in the silence of your own room.. but if you're traveling around, on a train, a bus, walking on a street with traffic going by (which is where I use it mostly) at half volume it will be completely inaudible.
I mean, kids just aren't interested in porn. If they happen on an iffy site that has porn ads they'll just go EWW! and move on to something more interesting.
If on the other hand they're old enough to actually be looking for porn I don't see how making porn harder to access for them is going to make them Better People (TM) when they grow up.
And if you wanted to censor violence you would first have to shutdown all tv channels basically, and bomb hollywood.
It seems that both AAC and MPC are faster cpu-wise than mp3 decoding. Vorbis is apparently slightly slower. Charts don't mention WMA. Why do you people assume newer standards use more CPU?? a newer, better algorithm will usually be faster, not slower, besides having better compression/quality results.
I disagree that testing should be DRMed WMA vs non-DRMed WMA. Why should we use WMA, unless the DRM locks us into it? It should be DRMed WMA/AAC vs the best non-DRMed format available for comparable quality, since when we are not locked into a technology by DRM we can choose best-of-breed technology.
Intel's stance surrounding Digital Rights Management (DRM) is that consumers should be able to do whatever they like with legally purchased content
(...)
Intel is encouraging Viiv content providers to allow users to pass their media to other devices
So whatever they say about their intentions it will be up to the content providers to decide what you can or cannot do with legally purchased content.. Guess how nice they're going to be about this. and this is from version 1, not some distant imagined future..
You don't solve the problem of 3rd world technology and computing by dumbing it down and providing a tool that does a few things.
It doesn't "do a few things". It is a full fledged computer. The only thing it doesn't have is a hard disk, it has flash based storage cause it's much cheaper.
And I wish my laptop had that cheesy-looking wind-up thing to use on the long train-rides (of course it wouldn't work cause my laptop uses way too much power)
Also, once the project is started and the engineering is done, the goal is that the 100 bucks will cover the costs of producing it so it won't even be a charity anymore, you can make as many as needed and sell them cheap to 3rd world educational institutions (of course donations to help them buy them would still be wellcome)
i could go to toys r us and buy toys more powerful and less costly than these wind up devices.
Bullshit. More powerful perhaps in terms of Mhz or some other silly measure of computational power, but there are no real, general-purpose computers this cheap on the market, because it is not a very profitable buisness and doesn't have a lot of demand here anyhow (because most of us can afford better).
"The thing about regulation of all kinds is that although it makes business difficult and slows growth, the established corporations love it; it makes breaking into the market almost impossible for new competitors."
Regulation stops companies from externalizing their costs on the rest of us. Corporations HATE regulation of any kind, although they can happily live with regulation that is not enforced strongly enough so they can:
1. break the law, earning 100 extra profit 2. get caught, and pay a fine of 10 3. repeat 4. Profit!
Regulation is also used against monopolistic or oligopolistic practices, to stop incumbents in a market from creating entry barriers to competitors or exit barriers for customers moving out, so your statement that it hinders competition is absolutely wild.
Of course excess of regulation is also possible (as in useless burocratic rules) but that's certainly not the problem in the US right now.
The beauty of modern warfare is very few people die relative to former wars. We've only lost around 2,000 men and women in Iraq so far and although it is a trajedy (not the war, but the loss) it is far less than wars of the same scale in years prior. Technology makes the difference.
Perhaps you see only 2000ish dead US marines. The rest of the world sees more than 30 thousand people dead, the majority of them civilians. In fact there were times in history where wars mostly killed soldiers on both sides, instead of mostly slaughtering civilians. Yes, technology does make the difference.
There's also the not insignificant fact that encryption is complex to use and administer. Adding in robust encryption is not free from a user-friendliness perspective. Much thought has to be put into reducing the user-visible complexity as much as possible so that the user base will actually use the encryption, and use it in such a way that security is preserved. Not trivial.
Depends. If I want privacty but do not care about authentication, I can do a Diffie-Hellman key exchange which adds zero complexity to the user experience: no key management hassles at all. I am then only vulnerable to man in the middle attacks. Zfone does that. This kind of encryption has plenty of advantages and zero disadvantages (except for the computational cost of encryption which is nowadays mostly irrelevant). There is zero reason not to do this for any data transfer.
And I can mitigate MITM risk, ssh style by having each host generate an asymmetric key pair, storing remote host's public key the first time I talk to it, and warning the user when the key changes. This does add a little bit of user complexity, of course.
Zfone does something slightly different:
we still get fairly decent authentication against a MiTM attack, based on a form of key continuity. It does this by caching some key material to use in the next call, to be mixed in with the next call's DH shared secret, giving it key continuity properties analogous to SSH.
The reason is that Zfone does not store any keys:
It has perfect forward secrecy, meaning the keys are destroyed at the end of the call, which precludes retroactively compromising the call by future disclosures of key material.
Simple Diffie Hellman exchenge is what is being done by some bittorrent clients for instance (Azureus, among others). In that case authentication is irrelevant, since we are talking to unknown peers anyhow. But I think it's also quite good for telephony. My assumption about the privacy of my phone call is that it is private unless wiretapping occurs (which requires a warrant and a certain amount of telco work), and a MiTM attack should be the digital equivalent.
From TFA it is not very clear whether it just removes proposed DMCA-style restrictions (which automatically make it illegal to break DRM for any reason) or if it actually requires the guy selling you the content to provide you the conversion. These two statements from TFA are quite differtent:
It would no longer be illegal to crack digital rights management -- the codes that protect music, films and other content -- if it is to enable to the conversion from one format to another
It will force some proprietary systems to be opened up... You have to be able to download content and play it on any device
If it just makes it legal to break DRM under these conditions (which by the way, it already is except in US under the DMCA) it just means that french legislation will not get quite as draconian against consumers as US legislation. Still it is relevant, cause it probably means I could legally sell an HDVD ripping player.
My iTMS songs will degrade in quality over time? Oh my!
First, CDs may have been "hyped" that way, but any intelligent person soon realized that you had to handle them with care as not to scratch them, not leave them in the car in direct sunlight, and so on.
That's why I rip my CDs dude. If I have them on my pc(s) and on my mp3 player and on the physical disk i'm not going to lose them even if my house burns down (although if it does, music will be the least of my problems).
Your iTMS songs may "degrade" in the sense that your next update to iTunes might disallow burning them to CDs (not because apple is bad, but because they do buisness and if theyhave enough pressure from the **AA's, who knows..). And anyhow you can't play them on any portable player except an iPod. This should be punished by antitrust law IMHO.
I don't care if they trust me. I'm the one buying the computer and I trust myself to use it however I see fit (and if I break any laws with it I can be tried for it, same as with my kitchen knife if I use it to stab someone).
Aside from this, it's true that having a hardware safe for cryptographic private keys (the fritz chip) is sound from a security perspective (while takign control of what the chip will or will not sign away from the user is bad).
The reason I was comparing this TUD OS with TC is that the intel and AMD TC platforms both implement memory curtaining to isolate programs from one another, which this project seems to do quite nicely with a software-only solution.
And let me rebuke this OT but blatantly false line:
DRM is irrelevent to those who don't possess or have any intention of possessing illegal copyrighted content.
It is relevant to anyone who has any interest to legally buying content which is sold with DRM restrictions. Even in the best of worlds, where the content sellers play nice, DRM stops me from playing something I bought from company X on anything but the players approved by company X. (iTunes audio files on anything but an iPod?). And if company X goes out of buisness or just decides not to support that format anymore you may be unable to play those files ever again.
And in the real world, companies which can effectively write a different copyright law for each piece of content will use this to their advantage and to the user's disadvantage: to milk more money by selling the same stuff multiple times, and to hinder interoperability in anti-competitive ways.
People may be inclined to use whichever browser or media player comes preinstalled (because in the end any browser does the job, alghough us techies may be picky) but this is different. People who buy Photoshop (which costs several hundred bucks) are mostly doing professional-level work with graphics or photography, and they use photoshop because it is the best product around. Even if MS can come out with a half-decent basic graphics app you can use to remove red-eye fron your pics they're not going to take much of a chunk of photoshop's profits. I think it's a big waste of MS money.
This kind of thing goes to show that an OS designed for security can provide it without the need for the so called "trusted computing": the user can still have the machine entirely under your own control.. programs can be isolated from each other so that keylogging and other spyware techniques do not work, but the user can still do what the hell he wants with his machine (including tampering with the "secure" applications he is using if he wants to).
still don't understand how someone can patent a genetic defect in blood. Isn't my wife prior art?
LOL...
..except it isn't funny cause it's true.. I don't know about blood defects but I know the genetic engineering for agriculture companies have been accused of patenting natural varieties of seed that have been used for perhaps thousands of years in some region of India...
It is true that downloading copyrighted material using bittorrent is illegal.
It is illegal to download copyrighted material to which the copyright holder did not grant you a license. When you download a linux distro, or a movie released under a permissive creative commons license, you are legally downloading copyrighted material.
Furthermore, the journalist did not just say it was illegal. He said it was theft, and that is just plain false. Theft, under any juridic definition, involves the act of taking away something from someone, which downloading does not do. So while downloading the latest tv series episode off bittorrent is illegal under current US copyright law, it is NOT a theft, by this or any other legal system.
the article doesn't say if a specific thinkpad model was chosen, nor could I find the info on the indiana state website. As mentioned here http://www.tonymcfadden.net/tpmvendors.html, lot's of thinkpad models already come shipped with an "atmel", which is a TPM 1.2 chip... a fritz chip... buyers beware!
Slashdot Mirror
I like the "manage music through metadata" concept, I think it's so much better than browsing through folders. I don't know who invented it, but I first used it in iTunes and for that I give them credit. The iTunes interface for playing back songs and editing metadata is also well designed.
But iTunes also has done enough to piss me off that I am now moving away from it. The music store popping up whenever you misclick. Ripping to friggin' m4a/AAC as default, which isn't half as widely supported as MP3. And most of all, not allowing you to cut and paste tracks from your iPod.
I now use rhythmbox for browsing/playback + easytag for tag editing (under ubuntu) and I don't regret itunes at all.
Take a look at this page too: http://web.amnesty.org/pages/stoptorture-050406-f
And let me say 3 more things.
One. If you think everyone in Guantanamo was an armed irregular in afghanistan or Iraq you are a fool. People have been shipped there from lot's of other places, like pakistan, bosnia, etc.
Two. When you capture an enemy soldier it hardly matters if he has a uniform, there are international conventions on how you should treat prisoners, and none of them consider torture acceptable.
Three. One of the things distinguishing a democracy from a dictatorship is the fact that when someone is arrested, his family is allowed to know that he is being detained and on what accusation. It is only dictatorships that make people just disappear.
It turns out internet tv is download lot's of content, watch it when I want. The TiVo proved this type of viewing appeals to users. And protocols such as bittorrent make it possible. Like democracy player. That does mean it is hard for the content industry to control distribution, cause distribution is p2p. So they will oppose it.
But that's not the problem either. If I were requesting a service from Apple and knew that they would be getting my provider to prioritize that traffic over the rest it would still be sort of fair. The point is that my internet connection is going to be slower because OTHER PEOPLE are using video services provided by a company who pays the extortion fee (or more likely, is another branch of the telco giving me access): the free sites which I try to access will be slower because of that.
It's not about MY 1.5MBps on the cable that runs to my home, it's about the unknown amount of bandwidth I am sharing with an unknown number of other subscribers, on a bigger cable somewhere downstream.
There's at least one good game for the XBox360. Elder scrolls oblivion.
of course it's not going to make me buy the box cause I play it on my PC. For the kind of complex RPG or strategy games that I like, I think the PC is a better platform because the keyboard provides more flexible controls.
Although in the case of Oblivion they've kind of nerfed the keyboard I think, probably to make it more similar to the Xbox version.
As an example you use the tab key to go in all the character menus, maps and inventory, and do not have keyboard shortcuts such as M for map or I for inventory. And you can only set numbers 1 through 8 as hotkeys: why not 9 and 0??? just to make it similar to the xbox version which (i'm guessing here) uses 4 buttons for this, times 2 by using some modifier button.
I mean, kids just aren't interested in porn. If they happen on an iffy site that has porn ads they'll just go EWW! and move on to something more interesting.
If on the other hand they're old enough to actually be looking for porn I don't see how making porn harder to access for them is going to make them Better People (TM) when they grow up.
And if you wanted to censor violence you would first have to shutdown all tv channels basically, and bomb hollywood.
It seems that both AAC and MPC are faster cpu-wise than mp3 decoding. Vorbis is apparently slightly slower. Charts don't mention WMA. Why do you people assume newer standards use more CPU?? a newer, better algorithm will usually be faster, not slower, besides having better compression/quality results.
I disagree that testing should be DRMed WMA vs non-DRMed WMA. Why should we use WMA, unless the DRM locks us into it? It should be DRMed WMA/AAC vs the best non-DRMed format available for comparable quality, since when we are not locked into a technology by DRM we can choose best-of-breed technology.
And I wish my laptop had that cheesy-looking wind-up thing to use on the long train-rides (of course it wouldn't work cause my laptop uses way too much power)
Also, once the project is started and the engineering is done, the goal is that the 100 bucks will cover the costs of producing it so it won't even be a charity anymore, you can make as many as needed and sell them cheap to 3rd world educational institutions (of course donations to help them buy them would still be wellcome) Bullshit. More powerful perhaps in terms of Mhz or some other silly measure of computational power, but there are no real, general-purpose computers this cheap on the market, because it is not a very profitable buisness and doesn't have a lot of demand here anyhow (because most of us can afford better).
"The thing about regulation of all kinds is that although it makes business difficult and slows growth, the established corporations love it; it makes breaking into the market almost impossible for new competitors."
Regulation stops companies from externalizing their costs on the rest of us. Corporations HATE regulation of any kind, although they can happily live with regulation that is not enforced strongly enough so they can:
1. break the law, earning 100 extra profit
2. get caught, and pay a fine of 10
3. repeat
4. Profit!
Regulation is also used against monopolistic or oligopolistic practices, to stop incumbents in a market from creating entry barriers to competitors or exit barriers for customers moving out, so your statement that it hinders competition is absolutely wild.
Of course excess of regulation is also possible (as in useless burocratic rules) but that's certainly not the problem in the US right now.
And I can mitigate MITM risk, ssh style by having each host generate an asymmetric key pair, storing remote host's public key the first time I talk to it, and warning the user when the key changes. This does add a little bit of user complexity, of course.
Zfone does something slightly different: The reason is that Zfone does not store any keys: Simple Diffie Hellman exchenge is what is being done by some bittorrent clients for instance (Azureus, among others). In that case authentication is irrelevant, since we are talking to unknown peers anyhow. But I think it's also quite good for telephony. My assumption about the privacy of my phone call is that it is private unless wiretapping occurs (which requires a warrant and a certain amount of telco work), and a MiTM attack should be the digital equivalent.
Your iTMS songs may "degrade" in the sense that your next update to iTunes might disallow burning them to CDs (not because apple is bad, but because they do buisness and if theyhave enough pressure from the **AA's, who knows..). And anyhow you can't play them on any portable player except an iPod. This should be punished by antitrust law IMHO.
Aside from this, it's true that having a hardware safe for cryptographic private keys (the fritz chip) is sound from a security perspective (while takign control of what the chip will or will not sign away from the user is bad).
The reason I was comparing this TUD OS with TC is that the intel and AMD TC platforms both implement memory curtaining to isolate programs from one another, which this project seems to do quite nicely with a software-only solution.
And let me rebuke this OT but blatantly false line: It is relevant to anyone who has any interest to legally buying content which is sold with DRM restrictions. Even in the best of worlds, where the content sellers play nice, DRM stops me from playing something I bought from company X on anything but the players approved by company X. (iTunes audio files on anything but an iPod?). And if company X goes out of buisness or just decides not to support that format anymore you may be unable to play those files ever again.
And in the real world, companies which can effectively write a different copyright law for each piece of content will use this to their advantage and to the user's disadvantage: to milk more money by selling the same stuff multiple times, and to hinder interoperability in anti-competitive ways.
As mentioned in this previous story http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/27/ 0128236, photoshop is one of the most desired linux ports.
c s2ttL08/phscs2ttvpgrid.mov or many others on http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/newfeature s.html.
It's an awesome application. I'm no expert, but i've seen my sister who's into graphics play with the latest photoshop version, and I tell you MS isn't gonna beat that product just because they want to. Take a look at this tutorial video http://media.studio.adobe.com/linked_content/en/a
People may be inclined to use whichever browser or media player comes preinstalled (because in the end any browser does the job, alghough us techies may be picky) but this is different. People who buy Photoshop (which costs several hundred bucks) are mostly doing professional-level work with graphics or photography, and they use photoshop because it is the best product around. Even if MS can come out with a half-decent basic graphics app you can use to remove red-eye fron your pics they're not going to take much of a chunk of photoshop's profits. I think it's a big waste of MS money.
This kind of thing goes to show that an OS designed for security can provide it without the need for the so called "trusted computing": the user can still have the machine entirely under your own control.. programs can be isolated from each other so that keylogging and other spyware techniques do not work, but the user can still do what the hell he wants with his machine (including tampering with the "secure" applications he is using if he wants to).
smartest comment on this thread so far... please mod it funny...
Furthermore, the journalist did not just say it was illegal. He said it was theft, and that is just plain false. Theft, under any juridic definition, involves the act of taking away something from someone, which downloading does not do. So while downloading the latest tv series episode off bittorrent is illegal under current US copyright law, it is NOT a theft, by this or any other legal system.
the article doesn't say if a specific thinkpad model was chosen, nor could I find the info on the indiana state website. As mentioned here http://www.tonymcfadden.net/tpmvendors.html, lot's of thinkpad models already come shipped with an "atmel", which is a TPM 1.2 chip... a fritz chip... buyers beware!