"But, because such a format wouldn't offer the studios total control over your living room, it's never going to happen as long as the movie studios have any say in the matter."
There's no law against some minor player in the hardware market adding dual layer + XviD decoding + component output @ 720p or 1080i to their DVD players, is there? If so, there's always imports, and I'd bet someone could come up with a firmware hack that accomplished something like this with an existing unit anyway.
At any rate, if I had a small manufacturing setup & was a relatively unknown brand, I would be working *feverishly* to develop something like this. I'd also be working just as hard or harder to get at least 720p if not 1080i recording capability into it via component inputs. That wouldn't be a cheap unit, but I'll bet it'd sell like wildfire with very little advertising cost at any price under about $1500.00.;-)
"The main problem is that you would need to get everyone to get on board with it all at once."
I think the opposite is true. If people have the option of trying the New, Improved, Secure Email without abandoning their current routine, a gradual transition might have a fighting chance. Lots of people with traditional phones also have SIP and VoIP and such. Heck, with a bit of finesse, new protocol plugins could be integrated into existing mail clients.
Digital signatures could come in dual-varieties: Authority-issued and self-issued. Clients would only download headers & sigs, then decide what bodies to download via sig policy. By default, a client would accept mail signed with an authority-issued sig automatically, but would accept self-issued ones only if the recipient whitelists the sender. Outbound message bodies from unknown sources (self-issued & not whitelisted) would have to sit on the originating outbound server and wait, pending certificate acceptance. Unknown sources would have low connection quotas; upon a flood of sig packets or a large distribution from an unknown source, intermediate servers would refuse connections from that source pending a positive sig disposition.
People complained about Windows '95 being essentially just a shell for an underlying command-line OS, DOS. So along come NT, 2000, and XP with their "real" kernels. Then we get a.NET layer on top of that as the new, de-facto programming API instead of Win32. Now, along comes PowerShell -- a command-line interpreter -- on top of.NET, and to top it off, Exchange GUI administration will essentially be a shell for the PowerShell CLI.
All this isn't necessarily "bad" per se, it's just interesting how there really is nothing new under the sun.
After about 8 years of hosting an annual group of 12 - 16 randomly collected folks, I have to say that I haven't met a real asshole in the bunch. A bore or drone here and there, to be sure, but no real assholes to speak of. (Just noticing that Firefox 2.0 apparently has "asshole" in its spellchecker dictionary right out of the box... good deal.)
I think the mitigating factor here is that, although these are people from the internets, they're not from a general "find a place to stay" sort of site. These are folks who are willing to spend 24 hours straight watching B-movies (http://www.b-fest.com/), and who have interacted with other groupies long enough to achieve at least a virtual sense of familiarity. So, couch surfers? Sure. But strangers? Only in the physical sense.
Besides... IMO, if someone is willing to watch 24 hours of fare like Tiny Town, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Let my Puppets Come, Kingdom of the Spiders, Robot Monster and Orgy of the Dead just to rape and murder me afterwards, well dammit, they deserve it, and God bless `em. The moral of the story is that I can't vouch for people who're only known by their desire to couch surf at your house. I also can't vouch for people who share whatever quirky interests you happen to be into. But I can vouch for B-Movie fanatics... they tend to bring unexpected housewarming gifts & to leave your place cleaner than they found it. In crowds, they also tend to round up dramatically when a collective restaurant tab goes `round the table. They got my vote.
No one makes unauthorized copies of DRM-laden files?
Hmm... I happen to know people who, wanting to make a point, *only* file-share stuff from rootkited / MediaMaxed audio CDs and CGMS-protected DVR_MS recordings -- after stripping the DRM, of course.
Just because most copies in the wild lack evidence of DRM does not mean that DRM was effective.
Your post was modded funny, but this is exactly what I'm doing with my home PCs -- my wife's included. (Yes, I read/. *and* have a wife. Bow before me.)
I'll need to interact with Vista and all the.NET 3 crap at work, but damn if it isn't the slowest thing I've ever run in a VM. FC6 is finally close enough to "idiot proof Linux" that I feel confident running it at home, which means bye-bye to all the authoritarian DRM BS that Vista promulgates.
The app that really made this possible (besides FC6)? GnuCash, of all things. My wife balances the checkbook in our household (sucker), and she's used to MS Money. She's 100% non-technical, so I think it's a red letter day when a user like her can use Linux for everything she used to do on a Windows PC.
Seriously - scoff at this law at your own peril. A world where 'net anonymity is unlawful is probably also a world where Tor and TrueCrypt are unlawful... where by law, your communications, writings and journals must be open to whatever official set of prying eyes feels the need to review them.
In spite of how ridiculous or unenforceable the law might seem, if Brazil gets away with this in principle, other governments 'round the world will be salivating at the prospect of doing the same. It's the nature of governments to inexorably accumulate control over their populace, after all. When multiple governments start cooperating to thwart anonymous speech, the groundwork for the World Wide Firewall has been laid.
It is no Small Deal if this gets enacted. Speech is not long free in the absence of a right to anonymous speech. </tinfoil_hat>
Ironically, I installed Fedora Core 6 in a VM during a single (under 1 hour) phone call between my wife & her mother. When she hung up the phone, I showed her how cool FC was, and how the net connection, Firefox, the package manager & Calc all worked right out of the box.
This was a big accomplishment for me, since I'm green at *nix & have historically had less than stellar luck getting TCP/IP & package managers working smoothly without extra research.
Her reaction? She thought it'd be cool to be the only chick in her office who could quip that she used Linux at home.
Good point. I'd love to see some kind of foundation create a framework for describing comprehensive agendas with priority-balanced interests and strategies for change. Ideally it wouldn't be restricted to a single political camp or philosophy, but could accommodate multiple self-selected groups (or "parties," for lack of a better term).
The salient measure of these things is "where do people rank this issue's importance and urgency within the context their total list of socio-political concerns," not "how many people are buzzing about this issue right this minute?".
What people think should be *done* about the issue is just another dimension on things.
In a general sense, boycotts are probably about half as effective as positive alternatives, In this case, it's even less. I mean, how on earth could someone effectively focus a "made in China" boycott so as to impact any specific company's bottom line in a significant way?
It's hard to make a sound byte out of "avoid contributing to companies that support repressive regimes who commit nasty human rights abuses." On the other hand, fair trade coffee is a *great* example of the positive alternative strategy. It's easy to say, easy to remember, easy to label, and people feel good about buying it. Even more important, though, is that you don't need to saturate consumers with pamphlets and TV spots for them to learn about the issue. They can discover it *and* start contributing to its solution right at the supermarket or coffeehouse checkout counter.
Unfortunately, there are a slew of strategic and ethical conundrums involved with applying this tactic to China. Ignoring those for a moment though, the marketing analogue for "free trade coffee" in this case might be something like a "freely produced goods" certification, signifying that a product originates entirely from the labor of free peoples. Now, let the haggling over the definition of "free peoples" begin!
***"The rest of the bit about license backup, specifically where it tells you how to back up your licenses, is valuable context."***
The context informs you that what you used to be able to do on a disconnected system ("back up licenses") now requires an internet connection so their daemon can phone home for permission to "restore your media usage rights". This is not even close to the same thing.
***"if you care about the MCE thing... seems like there's a fix available."***
I missed the news of the October 24 Rollup's release, so thanks. After taking a backup image of my system disk, I'll see what it does. Let's be clear, though: I mentioned that the 3-day MCE/TV issue was mentioned in the WMP11 *beta* release notes & didn't appear to be present in WMP11 final. The DRM-ing of recorded TV by MCE, though, is not a bug, it's a "feature," as is the DVD playback restriction. (On any consumer DVD recorder / player I've seen, personal recordings are not DRMd, and one can play commercial DVDs through component video to any HDTV.) And I stand by the reasonableness of my speculation about the 3-day bug: Its presence in the WMP11 beta and the explanation of its remedy in the October Rollup release notes both suggest that work is going on to make WMP a vehicle for modifying DRM components that control expiration features on recorded TV in Media Center. I think it's quite reasonable that some people would postpone or forgo a WMP11 install without some assurances to the contrary.
***"Regardless of your pro/anti-Microsoft sentiment,"***
Hold on a minute: Microsoft's existence and ubiquity enables me to make a living, so I am not anti-Microsoft. As a consumer of at-home operating systems, though, I am viewing MS with an increasingly jaundiced eye, and with good reason. Windows is fast becoming the most restrictive media playback platform on the market, and its media lockdowns go far beyond what's required by copyright law & device licensing regulations, e.g. http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003807.php. On any other software PVR I've tried, there are no playback restrictions on video DVD-Rs recorded from S-Video in.
***"Hopefully people aren't confused by your +5 mod'd post."***
Not only should you not get WMP11 intentionally, the fact that there's a RTM for it should make you think about turning off Windows Update (if you haven't already). At least make sure you have a disk-image backup before installing it, or you'll probably be kicking yourself down the road.
From http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/play er/11/readme.aspx: "Windows Media Player 11 does not permit you to back up your media usage rights (previously known as licenses)." "Digital media files must be in stored in monitored folders for media sharing to work properly in Windows Media Player 11." "Content that is protected with media usage rights cannot be played in Windows Media Player 10 if a computer already has the Windows Media Format 11 Runtime installed."
The following issue from the Beta release isn't mentioned in the official release notes, but the fact that it appeared in the beta indicates that MS was preparing their DRM platform for a new time-limit "feature" that can be applied to recorded TV on their Media Center products (at the request of broadcasters, of course): "Recorded TV shows that are protected with media usage rights, such as some TV content recorded on premium channels, will not play back after 3 days when Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2 for Windows XP is installed on Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. No known workaround to resolve this issue exists at this time."
I'm not pulling that speculation out of my butt, either. They already add more restrictions to DVD playback than any other software or consumer DVD player does. DVD playback is prohibitied in Media Center Edition when your display device is set to > 640 x 480 resolution (as is the case for HDTV use): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894323
I would be extremely surprised if down the road a bit we don't discover that WMP11 is a trojan horse for a slew of previously unheard of content restrictions.
By day I'm a developer on the Microsoft platform. By night I'm an XP Media Center Edition user who's scared & angry enough to invest research time I don't have into MythTV & [Ubuntu || Mandriva || Fedora]. As far as home usage goes, I'm sorry, but this former Redmond fanboy / apologist is done with MS.
That'd be a start anyway; it would at least let you sandbox the forensic trail to some extent.
I'm trying to think of this from the angle of the forensic expert. If I were in that position & were being paid to uncover evidence of certain files/filetypes, I definitely wouldn't stop after a file search of a single PC that belonged to the defendant. In fact, the first thing I would do is ask the plaintiff's attorney to submit a discovery motion asking the defendant, under penalty of perjury, to enumerate all the computers, drives, routers, access points and storage devices in his/her possession.
Next I would probably search for several telltale things. These would include (among other things) the registry and all the configuration or ini files of all media-related software (p2p, playback, transcoding, tagging, library manager, etc.). Same for any terminal servers, terminal clients, or virtual machine managers I found. Then I'd look for any evidence of network share usage and drive mappings. Lastly, I'd look for encryption & wipe utilities.
All those bits of information would guide further investigation. What was accessed on those network shares? Where are the virtual machine images? What do I find when I try to mount & scan them? It's possible that all of this won't turn up the media files themselves, but if you lied to the court in response to the aforementioned discovery motion, these things are likely to expose that lie.
I'm not saying it's impossible to shield all evidence of what media files you possess; it's just a *lot* harder than it first appears.
There are probably references galore to those files' existence on your sys drive. Do you run a media player from your sys drive? Do you run a p2p app from your sys drive? If on MS Windows, do you browse to your media files using Windows Explorer? All of these activities will leave a history trail as evidence of a media file's existence.
It would actually be pretty difficult to run a system that used media files but accumulated no traces of them. Every app that touches media in any way would need to be run in portable mode, and those apps themselves would need to be launched in a way that didn't generate any MRU entries.
Dear governments of the world: We're concerned & we want to help you make the most out of your law enforcement dollar. We think we can help. Out of a list of 29 items, we the sane people of the planet will permit you to ignore the vast majority of these for the next few years -- 22 of them, in fact.
Furthermore, even though we're eliminating over 75% of the crimes on your action-item list, we are a generous bunch, so we'll only eliminate 50% of your budget. Given your newfound surplus (once you adjust, of course), we'd like you to apply the best possible strategy -- along with all of your remaining resources -- to making noteworthy progress against 7 high-priority items that actually impact citizens' lives on a day-to-day basis, in the order that they're listed below.
You'll notice we're taking a middle ground on the drug enforcement thing, putting some on the list & leaving others off. Well, that's what you get when you realize that the sane people of the world include liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Our views may differ a bit on recreational chemical policy, so in this case we agreed to leave you to enforce the ones currently wreaking measurable societal damage, and let idiots do as they will on the rest. That list may change over the course of time.
# 8 - Human Trafficking # 14 - Human Smuggling # 25 - Small Arms Trafficking # 9 - Amphetamines/Meth (we're really just sick of looking at ugly teeth) # 6 - Counterfeit Pharmaceutical (I want my V!grr8 to do its job, dammit) # 11 - Ecstasy # 4 - Opium/Heroin
When these 7 are no longer a problem, please see us about permission to prosecute any of the others. We imagine that there will still be other, more pressing issues once you've solved the biggies above.
Diversity of Censorship is a *great* phrase to define this ideal. In the interest of pushing back against censoring systems simply insulating people in their existing worldviews, I'd suggest a feedback loop inferred *from* one's filterset *to* a dimension on a repute score. (If the current threats to privacy and speech freedoms continue to bear down on us, pseudonymous repute systems will become increasingly necessary and ubiquitous.) Within most contexts (be they conversational or transactional), I only need to know one or two things about someone to figure out if I want to interact with them. On eBay it might be their feedback score; on/., it might be their karma. In political discussions, I'd love to know -- in addition to their philosophical leanings -- how narrow the set of ideas is that they're willing to expose themselves to. If they're willing to disclose that sort of thing about themselves, I'd probably be more likely to take them seriously & consider their opinions carefully.
In a connected world, there's always tension between privacy and robustness of interaction. Pseudonymity plus a secure, historied, addressable repute system that allows for granular disclosure preferences would be helpful on a lot of fronts. Secure pseudonymity can, e.g., reduce some of the tensions between Wikipedia and Tor (if the former would wake up to that fact, anyway). It permits people to engage in anonymous political speech without sacrificing authority (provided they've invested the time in building up some karma for one of their personnae). And assuming repute systems become more robust right along with recommendation engines, why not have the option of disclosing your openness to others' ideas along with your payment speed, shipping speed, insightfulness, etc.?
A dozen amens on your post, and a quick suggestion: Filtering has got to move towards decentralization. Providers of filtering software should not the ones with the ultimate "yea" or "nay" on a site or article.
What would make more sense (and provide some legal shelter for blackhole list servers & the like) would be to serve multidimensional karma ratings compiled from a diverse set of viewpoints, and let the clients be the ones to decide what level to browse at on any given indicator.
It would feel a lot less like censorship to me if browsing policy was determined at a very fine level of granularity, was made in close proximity to the browsers, and was fully disclosed. The further removed the censor is from the reader, the sooner that power will be abused.
Excuse me, but I have a patent pending on the idea of a superior human sub-species. You and Huxley may both remit the appropriate licensing fees as enumerated in my forthcoming invoice.
But the whole world is *going* insane... they just haven't all gotten there yet. As long as countries are less draconian than China they can probably justify their restrictions to the populous. As long as one country remains where anonymous speech is legal and internet infrastructure is of a decent quality though, free thought has at least a fighting chance.
Meanwhile, I think Ima set up a hosting company in Somalia...
It's about time a document format stayed "fixed." Give me a format with good payload per kilobyte, precise platform-independent presentation control and NO interactivity whatsoever, and I might just become a fanboy.
In fact, as anti-MS as my sentiments are wont to be these days, I'm growing kind of fond of the MDI format. I don't like much else that they're doing, but I might just have to tip my hat to the XPS effort if it remains a static document.
TFA was referring more to virtual assets that get converted into physical currency, but your point raised a question for me: If you got a tax bill due to the IRS considering virtual gold as a real asset, then could you pay that tax bill in virtual gold?
Slashdot Mirror
"But, because such a format wouldn't offer the studios total control over your living room, it's never going to happen as long as the movie studios have any say in the matter."
;-)
There's no law against some minor player in the hardware market adding dual layer + XviD decoding + component output @ 720p or 1080i to their DVD players, is there? If so, there's always imports, and I'd bet someone could come up with a firmware hack that accomplished something like this with an existing unit anyway.
At any rate, if I had a small manufacturing setup & was a relatively unknown brand, I would be working *feverishly* to develop something like this. I'd also be working just as hard or harder to get at least 720p if not 1080i recording capability into it via component inputs. That wouldn't be a cheap unit, but I'll bet it'd sell like wildfire with very little advertising cost at any price under about $1500.00.
"The main problem is that you would need to get everyone to get on board with it all at once."
I think the opposite is true. If people have the option of trying the New, Improved, Secure Email without abandoning their current routine, a gradual transition might have a fighting chance. Lots of people with traditional phones also have SIP and VoIP and such. Heck, with a bit of finesse, new protocol plugins could be integrated into existing mail clients.
Digital signatures could come in dual-varieties: Authority-issued and self-issued. Clients would only download headers & sigs, then decide what bodies to download via sig policy. By default, a client would accept mail signed with an authority-issued sig automatically, but would accept self-issued ones only if the recipient whitelists the sender. Outbound message bodies from unknown sources (self-issued & not whitelisted) would have to sit on the originating outbound server and wait, pending certificate acceptance. Unknown sources would have low connection quotas; upon a flood of sig packets or a large distribution from an unknown source, intermediate servers would refuse connections from that source pending a positive sig disposition.
Since you brought up PowerShell...
.NET layer on top of that as the new, de-facto programming API instead of Win32. Now, along comes PowerShell -- a command-line interpreter -- on top of .NET, and to top it off, Exchange GUI administration will essentially be a shell for the PowerShell CLI.
People complained about Windows '95 being essentially just a shell for an underlying command-line OS, DOS. So along come NT, 2000, and XP with their "real" kernels. Then we get a
All this isn't necessarily "bad" per se, it's just interesting how there really is nothing new under the sun.
Didn't he do that "Little Suzie" song?
After about 8 years of hosting an annual group of 12 - 16 randomly collected folks, I have to say that I haven't met a real asshole in the bunch. A bore or drone here and there, to be sure, but no real assholes to speak of. (Just noticing that Firefox 2.0 apparently has "asshole" in its spellchecker dictionary right out of the box... good deal.)
I think the mitigating factor here is that, although these are people from the internets, they're not from a general "find a place to stay" sort of site. These are folks who are willing to spend 24 hours straight watching B-movies (http://www.b-fest.com/), and who have interacted with other groupies long enough to achieve at least a virtual sense of familiarity. So, couch surfers? Sure. But strangers? Only in the physical sense.
Besides... IMO, if someone is willing to watch 24 hours of fare like Tiny Town, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Let my Puppets Come, Kingdom of the Spiders, Robot Monster and Orgy of the Dead just to rape and murder me afterwards, well dammit, they deserve it, and God bless `em. The moral of the story is that I can't vouch for people who're only known by their desire to couch surf at your house. I also can't vouch for people who share whatever quirky interests you happen to be into. But I can vouch for B-Movie fanatics... they tend to bring unexpected housewarming gifts & to leave your place cleaner than they found it. In crowds, they also tend to round up dramatically when a collective restaurant tab goes `round the table. They got my vote.
No one makes unauthorized copies of DRM-laden files?
Hmm... I happen to know people who, wanting to make a point, *only* file-share stuff from rootkited / MediaMaxed audio CDs and CGMS-protected DVR_MS recordings -- after stripping the DRM, of course.
Just because most copies in the wild lack evidence of DRM does not mean that DRM was effective.
Your post was modded funny, but this is exactly what I'm doing with my home PCs -- my wife's included. (Yes, I read /. *and* have a wife. Bow before me.)
.NET 3 crap at work, but damn if it isn't the slowest thing I've ever run in a VM. FC6 is finally close enough to "idiot proof Linux" that I feel confident running it at home, which means bye-bye to all the authoritarian DRM BS that Vista promulgates.
I'll need to interact with Vista and all the
The app that really made this possible (besides FC6)? GnuCash, of all things. My wife balances the checkbook in our household (sucker), and she's used to MS Money. She's 100% non-technical, so I think it's a red letter day when a user like her can use Linux for everything she used to do on a Windows PC.
Probably more than that even, especially if they have any sense of templating & code re-use.
I hope we find out. It'd be nice to get some forensic details on their operation out into the open.
Seriously - scoff at this law at your own peril. A world where 'net anonymity is unlawful is probably also a world where Tor and TrueCrypt are unlawful... where by law, your communications, writings and journals must be open to whatever official set of prying eyes feels the need to review them.
In spite of how ridiculous or unenforceable the law might seem, if Brazil gets away with this in principle, other governments 'round the world will be salivating at the prospect of doing the same. It's the nature of governments to inexorably accumulate control over their populace, after all. When multiple governments start cooperating to thwart anonymous speech, the groundwork for the World Wide Firewall has been laid.
It is no Small Deal if this gets enacted. Speech is not long free in the absence of a right to anonymous speech.
</tinfoil_hat>
Hear hear!
Ironically, I installed Fedora Core 6 in a VM during a single (under 1 hour) phone call between my wife & her mother. When she hung up the phone, I showed her how cool FC was, and how the net connection, Firefox, the package manager & Calc all worked right out of the box.
This was a big accomplishment for me, since I'm green at *nix & have historically had less than stellar luck getting TCP/IP & package managers working smoothly without extra research.
Her reaction? She thought it'd be cool to be the only chick in her office who could quip that she used Linux at home.
Good point. I'd love to see some kind of foundation create a framework for describing comprehensive agendas with priority-balanced interests and strategies for change. Ideally it wouldn't be restricted to a single political camp or philosophy, but could accommodate multiple self-selected groups (or "parties," for lack of a better term).
The salient measure of these things is "where do people rank this issue's importance and urgency within the context their total list of socio-political concerns," not "how many people are buzzing about this issue right this minute?".
What people think should be *done* about the issue is just another dimension on things.
In a general sense, boycotts are probably about half as effective as positive alternatives, In this case, it's even less. I mean, how on earth could someone effectively focus a "made in China" boycott so as to impact any specific company's bottom line in a significant way?
It's hard to make a sound byte out of "avoid contributing to companies that support repressive regimes who commit nasty human rights abuses." On the other hand, fair trade coffee is a *great* example of the positive alternative strategy. It's easy to say, easy to remember, easy to label, and people feel good about buying it. Even more important, though, is that you don't need to saturate consumers with pamphlets and TV spots for them to learn about the issue. They can discover it *and* start contributing to its solution right at the supermarket or coffeehouse checkout counter.
Unfortunately, there are a slew of strategic and ethical conundrums involved with applying this tactic to China. Ignoring those for a moment though, the marketing analogue for "free trade coffee" in this case might be something like a "freely produced goods" certification, signifying that a product originates entirely from the labor of free peoples. Now, let the haggling over the definition of "free peoples" begin!
***"The rest of the bit about license backup, specifically where it tells you how to back up your licenses, is valuable context."***
The context informs you that what you used to be able to do on a disconnected system ("back up licenses") now requires an internet connection so their daemon can phone home for permission to "restore your media usage rights". This is not even close to the same thing.
***"if you care about the MCE thing... seems like there's a fix available."***
I missed the news of the October 24 Rollup's release, so thanks. After taking a backup image of my system disk, I'll see what it does. Let's be clear, though: I mentioned that the 3-day MCE/TV issue was mentioned in the WMP11 *beta* release notes & didn't appear to be present in WMP11 final. The DRM-ing of recorded TV by MCE, though, is not a bug, it's a "feature," as is the DVD playback restriction. (On any consumer DVD recorder / player I've seen, personal recordings are not DRMd, and one can play commercial DVDs through component video to any HDTV.) And I stand by the reasonableness of my speculation about the 3-day bug: Its presence in the WMP11 beta and the explanation of its remedy in the October Rollup release notes both suggest that work is going on to make WMP a vehicle for modifying DRM components that control expiration features on recorded TV in Media Center. I think it's quite reasonable that some people would postpone or forgo a WMP11 install without some assurances to the contrary.
***"Regardless of your pro/anti-Microsoft sentiment,"***
Hold on a minute: Microsoft's existence and ubiquity enables me to make a living, so I am not anti-Microsoft. As a consumer of at-home operating systems, though, I am viewing MS with an increasingly jaundiced eye, and with good reason. Windows is fast becoming the most restrictive media playback platform on the market, and its media lockdowns go far beyond what's required by copyright law & device licensing regulations, e.g. http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003807.php. On any other software PVR I've tried, there are no playback restrictions on video DVD-Rs recorded from S-Video in.
***"Hopefully people aren't confused by your +5 mod'd post."***
I still don't see what's confusing about it.
Thanks for the ALTools tip... if there software is 1/10 as good as their icons are cute, I'm sure it'll be killer.
Not only should you not get WMP11 intentionally, the fact that there's a RTM for it should make you think about turning off Windows Update (if you haven't already). At least make sure you have a disk-image backup before installing it, or you'll probably be kicking yourself down the road.
y er/11/readme.aspx:
w ww.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/11/re adme.aspx
= 49&PostID=144193
From http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/pla
"Windows Media Player 11 does not permit you to back up your media usage rights (previously known as licenses)."
"Digital media files must be in stored in monitored folders for media sharing to work properly in Windows Media Player 11."
"Content that is protected with media usage rights cannot be played in Windows Media Player 10 if a computer already has the Windows Media Format 11 Runtime installed."
The following issue from the Beta release isn't mentioned in the official release notes, but the fact that it appeared in the beta indicates that MS was preparing their DRM platform for a new time-limit "feature" that can be applied to recorded TV on their Media Center products (at the request of broadcasters, of course):
"Recorded TV shows that are protected with media usage rights, such as some TV content recorded on premium channels, will not play back after 3 days when Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2 for Windows XP is installed on Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. No known workaround to resolve this issue exists at this time."
At time of posting, this could still be found at:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:Eah4zybQy4sJ:
I'm not pulling that speculation out of my butt, either. They already add more restrictions to DVD playback than any other software or consumer DVD player does. DVD playback is prohibitied in Media Center Edition when your display device is set to > 640 x 480 resolution (as is the case for HDTV use):
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894323
Even today, as of Rollup 2, Media Center Edition renders recorded TV unplayable after two weeks when the broadcaster requests it:
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/rss.aspx?ForumID
I would be extremely surprised if down the road a bit we don't discover that WMP11 is a trojan horse for a slew of previously unheard of content restrictions.
By day I'm a developer on the Microsoft platform. By night I'm an XP Media Center Edition user who's scared & angry enough to invest research time I don't have into MythTV & [Ubuntu || Mandriva || Fedora]. As far as home usage goes, I'm sorry, but this former Redmond fanboy / apologist is done with MS.
It is if the margin on that other 20% of viewers' purchases > 1*$xxxx.
That'd be a start anyway; it would at least let you sandbox the forensic trail to some extent.
I'm trying to think of this from the angle of the forensic expert. If I were in that position & were being paid to uncover evidence of certain files/filetypes, I definitely wouldn't stop after a file search of a single PC that belonged to the defendant. In fact, the first thing I would do is ask the plaintiff's attorney to submit a discovery motion asking the defendant, under penalty of perjury, to enumerate all the computers, drives, routers, access points and storage devices in his/her possession.
Next I would probably search for several telltale things. These would include (among other things) the registry and all the configuration or ini files of all media-related software (p2p, playback, transcoding, tagging, library manager, etc.). Same for any terminal servers, terminal clients, or virtual machine managers I found. Then I'd look for any evidence of network share usage and drive mappings. Lastly, I'd look for encryption & wipe utilities.
All those bits of information would guide further investigation. What was accessed on those network shares? Where are the virtual machine images? What do I find when I try to mount & scan them? It's possible that all of this won't turn up the media files themselves, but if you lied to the court in response to the aforementioned discovery motion, these things are likely to expose that lie.
I'm not saying it's impossible to shield all evidence of what media files you possess; it's just a *lot* harder than it first appears.
There are probably references galore to those files' existence on your sys drive. Do you run a media player from your sys drive? Do you run a p2p app from your sys drive? If on MS Windows, do you browse to your media files using Windows Explorer? All of these activities will leave a history trail as evidence of a media file's existence.
It would actually be pretty difficult to run a system that used media files but accumulated no traces of them. Every app that touches media in any way would need to be run in portable mode, and those apps themselves would need to be launched in a way that didn't generate any MRU entries.
Dear governments of the world: We're concerned & we want to help you make the most out of your law enforcement dollar. We think we can help. Out of a list of 29 items, we the sane people of the planet will permit you to ignore the vast majority of these for the next few years -- 22 of them, in fact.
Furthermore, even though we're eliminating over 75% of the crimes on your action-item list, we are a generous bunch, so we'll only eliminate 50% of your budget. Given your newfound surplus (once you adjust, of course), we'd like you to apply the best possible strategy -- along with all of your remaining resources -- to making noteworthy progress against 7 high-priority items that actually impact citizens' lives on a day-to-day basis, in the order that they're listed below.
You'll notice we're taking a middle ground on the drug enforcement thing, putting some on the list & leaving others off. Well, that's what you get when you realize that the sane people of the world include liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Our views may differ a bit on recreational chemical policy, so in this case we agreed to leave you to enforce the ones currently wreaking measurable societal damage, and let idiots do as they will on the rest. That list may change over the course of time.
# 8 - Human Trafficking
# 14 - Human Smuggling
# 25 - Small Arms Trafficking
# 9 - Amphetamines/Meth (we're really just sick of looking at ugly teeth)
# 6 - Counterfeit Pharmaceutical (I want my V!grr8 to do its job, dammit)
# 11 - Ecstasy
# 4 - Opium/Heroin
When these 7 are no longer a problem, please see us about permission to prosecute any of the others. We imagine that there will still be other, more pressing issues once you've solved the biggies above.
Diversity of Censorship is a *great* phrase to define this ideal. In the interest of pushing back against censoring systems simply insulating people in their existing worldviews, I'd suggest a feedback loop inferred *from* one's filterset *to* a dimension on a repute score. (If the current threats to privacy and speech freedoms continue to bear down on us, pseudonymous repute systems will become increasingly necessary and ubiquitous.) Within most contexts (be they conversational or transactional), I only need to know one or two things about someone to figure out if I want to interact with them. On eBay it might be their feedback score; on /., it might be their karma. In political discussions, I'd love to know -- in addition to their philosophical leanings -- how narrow the set of ideas is that they're willing to expose themselves to. If they're willing to disclose that sort of thing about themselves, I'd probably be more likely to take them seriously & consider their opinions carefully.
In a connected world, there's always tension between privacy and robustness of interaction. Pseudonymity plus a secure, historied, addressable repute system that allows for granular disclosure preferences would be helpful on a lot of fronts. Secure pseudonymity can, e.g., reduce some of the tensions between Wikipedia and Tor (if the former would wake up to that fact, anyway). It permits people to engage in anonymous political speech without sacrificing authority (provided they've invested the time in building up some karma for one of their personnae). And assuming repute systems become more robust right along with recommendation engines, why not have the option of disclosing your openness to others' ideas along with your payment speed, shipping speed, insightfulness, etc.?
A dozen amens on your post, and a quick suggestion: Filtering has got to move towards decentralization. Providers of filtering software should not the ones with the ultimate "yea" or "nay" on a site or article.
What would make more sense (and provide some legal shelter for blackhole list servers & the like) would be to serve multidimensional karma ratings compiled from a diverse set of viewpoints, and let the clients be the ones to decide what level to browse at on any given indicator.
It would feel a lot less like censorship to me if browsing policy was determined at a very fine level of granularity, was made in close proximity to the browsers, and was fully disclosed. The further removed the censor is from the reader, the sooner that power will be abused.
Excuse me, but I have a patent pending on the idea of a superior human sub-species. You and Huxley may both remit the appropriate licensing fees as enumerated in my forthcoming invoice.
But the whole world is *going* insane... they just haven't all gotten there yet. As long as countries are less draconian than China they can probably justify their restrictions to the populous. As long as one country remains where anonymous speech is legal and internet infrastructure is of a decent quality though, free thought has at least a fighting chance.
Meanwhile, I think Ima set up a hosting company in Somalia...
It's about time a document format stayed "fixed." Give me a format with good payload per kilobyte, precise platform-independent presentation control and NO interactivity whatsoever, and I might just become a fanboy.
In fact, as anti-MS as my sentiments are wont to be these days, I'm growing kind of fond of the MDI format. I don't like much else that they're doing, but I might just have to tip my hat to the XPS effort if it remains a static document.
TFA was referring more to virtual assets that get converted into physical currency, but your point raised a question for me: If you got a tax bill due to the IRS considering virtual gold as a real asset, then could you pay that tax bill in virtual gold?