That's a good point. Unfortunately, memorability and low syllable counts are mortal enemies of accuracy.
Here's an unofficial contest entry form. Try your hand at injecting colorful, catchy words into the popular culture to differentiate the following cases from "pirates":
Someone who downloads copyrighted files: improve on "downloader" or "p2p user" Someone who shares copyrighted files: improve on "filesharer" or "uploader" Someone who violates the DMCA for legitimate, otherwise legal purposes,
e.g. to play a DVD on Windows Media Center* or Linux, or to move PlaysForSure
or FairPlay protected items onto incompatible devices: improve on __________? (And I suppose I should add the obligatory "....Profit!")
-- * Windows Media Center does not support commercial DVD playback, even with a licensed CSS decoder installed, except in the rare case when (a) there is no TV Out device enabled on the system and (b) the monitor resolution is at 640 x 480 or less. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894323/en-us
Fascinating idea there, distributed RBLs. Thanks for the link. I think of RBLs as simply another case of what should be an unfettered exchange of information & opinion between mutually consenting parties. It's unfortunate that so many obstacles to this sort of thing are accumulating, but if it means the start of hardened protocols to fend off interference, then I suppose it's a Good Thing in the long run.
I've had similar thoughts about using a distributed protocol for nym servers, and building a pseudonymous repute system thereupon that's (hopefully) hard-to-spoof, trace or interrupt.
iPod is the Coca-Cola of portable digital music players. There's a lot of value in being first (or in being perceived as the original of something).
Hopefully some new player can muster some real market penetration. If one comes about that does something new, does it easily, and it's something that iTMS's DRM prevents, maybe we'll see a swing in the other direction. Seemed most people I knew used Alta Vista before Google came around, but web search was a pretty nascent market at that point & brand recognition was confined to a pretty small demographic.
Has the music player market reached critical mass, i.e. does it have too much cultural penetration for the top brand to be toppled in a quick coup? I'd like to think not, but my inner cynic seems to have the upper hand right now.
I heavily favor egalitarian ideals, but I'm sorry: Racism is a manner of thinking, an attitude. Tyrrany has its seeds in the idea that citizens' attitudes qualify as "problems" that the state needs to solve via criminilazition. The ideal of tolerance can be elevated in ways that are less threatening to a free society. China can call anything that glorifies democracy "incitement to violence" if you allow enough indirection in the definition of the crime.
Incitement to violence is a legitimate thing to criminalize, but the ideal of a free society isn't compatible with loose construals thereof as was done here. A necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) test for guilt on this charge should be that violence was actually incited.
All manner of horrors are committed by states in the name of "protecting the public," so we can't just say "well this instance may be a bit extreme, but we can all agree that the public needs to be protected," and by extension agree that the basic concept of outlawing hate speech is valid and only the implementation is left to quibble about. The concept is not valid, and the justifcation for it is more insidious than that which it purports to protect society from.
Good point; security and privacy schemes in general need to start thinking in terms of local storage as an organizing principle. I wouldn't mind having my search results stored by A9, Google, etc. if they couldn't be used except in the context of providing me the data-dependent service.
Right now this sort of thing could be accomplished with a browser extension or toolbar, but eventually it's probably going to take a whole protocol; something will need to encapsulate secure data exchange with client-side crypto and query/aggregation ability. It's a pretty tall order technically, but privacy and data intelligence are a couple of *huge* market needs. The player who can best remove the tension between them will have something big.
A well-designed OS may well come up short of being airtight against malware, but there's still cavernous room for improvement given where we are today.
Execution of anything new should be in a pretty small sandbox by default -- e.g. no network access, limited API priveliges in the OS, and disk access limited to per-executable private directories. Warning dialogs could certainly be a hell of a lot more informative too; if users didn't see them often enough for them to be a nuisance, they'd probably take them a bit more seriously. Apps' signatures could embed descriptions of reasons for each escalated privelige requirement. "Write to non-system folders" isn't as serious a need as "write to system folders" or "create a new startup item." "Access any wan resource" is more serious than "access specific domain ________," and "listen for and accept incoming wan connections" is more severe yet.
Basically, a decent security designer just needs some common sense in sorting out types of actions & assigning severity levels to them. When an unsigned app requires potentially disastrous priveliges, an OS *should* send users down a more complicated path to granting the escalation. Make `em edit a configuration file or something. If that's what it took to allow the escalation, I bet white-hat developers would learn to sign their code & economize on their security privilege requirements in a jiffy.
I'm usually way out on the "pro privacy" side of these issues -- you know, YRO trumps all other considerations, etc. In the parent / kid context though, good communication is fantastic, but alone it's insufficient in a significant percent of cases.
One of the reasons we have a concept of "minors" (for whom parents are responsible) is that judgement takes time to acquire. Much as people would like, it's just not possible to *reliably* create kids with good judgement via good parenting. Kids are more susceptible to peer pressure, and they tend to go through phases where they're prone to concealing their activities from their parents. Some lessons need to be learned the hard way, but the "hard way" can carry an unacceptably high price in the online arena.
Different kids need different amounts of supervision and oversight in the physical world, and I don't see much difference between that & the online world. Most parents would't let their kid padlock their closet, nor would they agree never to search the child's bedroom under any circumstances. In the spirit of good communication, I would suggest telling the kid that you're monitoring & logging his/her conversations. That admittedly introduces some technical hurdles; ideally it should be done at the router or proxy level, which means disallowing encrypted protocols that can't be logged by an intermediate node.
If you log a child's surfing habits, you always have the option of not reading the logs unless/until you have reason to. But down the road if you have reason to suspect something (or heaven forbid something awful happens), you'll probably be glad you have the logs.
I hope I'm wrong, but I have less faith that "eventually, people will figure out that there is no benefit to upgrading all this stuff." I can't help but think that MS wouldn't have the market share it does in the OS and Browser segments if people were prone to figuring these sorts of things out. When it's time for a new system, consumers by and large seem to run with the default setup, and buy the best complete bundle value (as they perceive it) when Best Buy has a sale. It isn't until later that they realize they've lost capability, and then they probably won't even remember the times their eyes glazed over as their/.er friend tried to warn them about this crap.
I'd be pleased if your view of humanity proved the more accurate 5 years from now.
("The important thing is to realize why you have loyalty to a certain brand, and be willing to re-evaluate your position when the quality of the brand you favour starts dropping.")
Amen. In contrast to the article's take on things, I was formerly loyal to Intel & ATI, and switched to AMD/nVidia to use an Athlon X2 -- socket AM2. The experience has been good enough that I'm likely to stay with AMD for a while.
My habit of buying only used CDs earned me a rootkit; after the defective-by-design units had been pulled from store shelves, some of them ended up in the used bin, and like a doofus I wasn't paying attention when I popped it in my laptop drive with AutoPlay enabled. Whoops! No great inconvenience there since I'm in the habit of making regular disk-image backups of my system drive, but I did have a laugh at my own expense after realizing what had happened.
I honestly wonder how many people changed their CD buying habits over the Sony/BMG malware deal. It'd be great if it was a massive segment of the buying public, but I suspect that in reality it's an even smaller group than those who are boycotting RIAA goods out of opposition to their tactics.
I haven't bought a single new CD since the RIAA started these shenanigans. I used to buy 1 - 2 a month, probably about 18 a year on average.
I still buy CDs mind you, I just confine my purchases to used ones; I have some minor moral quibbles with funding racketeering & extortion organizations.
If there even is a bona fide decrease in CD sales (I'm unconvinced), I wonder how much of the decrease is accounted for by those intentionally refraining from CD purchases as part of an anti-RIAA attitude? It has to be a pretty small slice of the pie chart, I know, but hell... I'd be thrilled to know I was part of a group responsible for a 0.5% drop in CD sales.
I'm just glad mankind has finally succeeded in returning the earth to temperature it was at before he arrived. The primordial beasts were getting pretty freaking ticked off at how unusually cool the last few millennia were around here, and justified or not, they were blaming it on us.
You're probably right on the antitrust matter; good insights there. Perhaps the best hope is LimeWire's claim (towards the end of TFA) of having offered to filter copyrighted material using hash codes, and the RIAA's refusal to submit hash codes for filtering. iMesh looks like the equivalent of a Death Star, so it will be important for LimeWire to establish the precedent that copyright cartels cannot dictate what anti-piracy provider or technical implementation a P2P software maker has to use.
Ideally, writers of P2P software should be under no compulsion to serve as unpaid stop-loss agents for the cartel anyway. Failing that though, a bona fide offer to implement workable filtering technology should serve to indemnify them, *especially* if their offer was at no charge to the rights-holder. In fact, seeing as how filtering is a service requiring considerable expense for LimeWire to implement, I would think they would be within their rights if they *did* charge a fee of some sort for the service. Otherwise, the cartel wouold probably simply flood the system with bogus hashes in an attempt to make the network unusable.
At any rate, I'm glad LimeWire is open source; if it goes down, its own successor will probably be some fork of the original project. This case may have implications for OSS too, though. I fear that OSS projects will eventually need to resort to pseudonymous contributors with cryptographic signatures but no "identity" per se. I mean, if the RIAA prevails here, I don't know what other defense there will be when cartels try to achieve the digital equivalent of a book burning. The act of being associated with an OSS project could expose contributors to an unacceptable level of intimidation via legal liability. That should not be allowed to happen.
As much as I wish someone other than a file sharing software maker was running the ball on this play, it's still a big deal for someone to be bringing up antitrust issues as a plaintiff against the RIAA - even if it's only as a "counter plaintiff".
For the time being, I say forget who LimeWire is and what the majority of their users do; get behind them in this. Whether LimeWire prevails in their defense pales in significance compared to the importance of these counterclaims.
Wealth creation is a legitimate enough term in and of itself; it's just prone to misuse, probably because of its seeming ability to justify any action of the speaker's choosing, so long as it remotely relates to commerce in some way. But if there were no such thing wealth creation, there could be no such thing as oil sultans or software magnates.
The problem with the 100,000 support employees argument is that wealth creation is *not* equivalent to "job creation." Wealth creation is more likely to go hand in hand with job *destruction* than job creation -- at least in the short term.
The invention of the nail gun displaced workers yet created wealth; whereas it previously took, e.g. $1500 worth of labor to frame & shingle a large house, it now took, say, $700. Initially this may only have meant that $800 was added to unemployment, and the builder may have absorbed all of the extra profit. In time though, the nail gun drove the cost of a large house down by ~$600. The increased affordability of housing created new wants among homebuyers, like having a small boat. Increased spending on new wants eventually creates employment to offset the displaced workers, and an economy that previously produced homes now produced homes & boats.
I have a mountain of grass clippings in my back yard that I have to pay to dispose of. If Ted invents a clean automobile engine that runs on grass clippings, then I and everyone else with lots of grass clippings suddenly have an asset where we previously had a liability, and Ted has a fantastic profit source he didn't have before. When the effect of uber-cheap transit propogates through the economy, things will inevitably spring up on which to use the increased discretionary income, like X-Box 640s, or PS8s.
If the support personnel argument were valid, then it wouldn't it make economic sense to make the OS as buggy as possible? In reality though, an OS that was so easy and stable that it put 100,000 former support techs out of work would be a more legitimate example of wealth creation.
Well yeah... wouldn't most people, if they noticed before they left the shop? I mean, I woulnd't walk 5 miles through driving snow to return a penny, but like I'm sure a lot of other/.ers have, I have given back extra quarters & singles a couple times. (Never hit the jackpot with anything bigger.)
As far as keeping the isos goes though, I suppose it's just as much a matter of economics as it is of principle. I have a 1TB RAID-5 comprised of three 500GB SATA drives which were purchased for ~$289 each. I don't like the visual quality of "shrunk" DVD video, so I'm not going to burn them to 4.7GB DVRs; I store them at full quality. So each iso takes up 9+GB, meaning a DVD has to be worth ~$8.00 of RAID space for me to keep its iso around. If it's worth that much to me, I can pick it up on eBay & save the RAID space for HD recording.;-)
Thanks for chiming in; I feel less crazy knowing someone else thought the same thing. They certainly are making sure that Microsoft media products are becoming the least usable on the market.
Yes, okay, sure... the Real Problem is that software is patentable in the first place. But does Stallman think that we're going to change that fact quickly just by being absolutist about it?
If not, how many ideas do we want to see slip into proprietary hands while we maintain our moral purism about software patents? This is a political issue, and political agendas live, eat, sleep & breathe half-measures. According to Stallman, "If we are not careful, this can sap the pressure for a real solution." Erm, what pressure? Where is the well-funded, politically connected lobby that's creating more pressure for a Real Solution than beneficiaries of software patents can create in the opposite direction? `Cause short of that, we all know that we're not going to see a Real Solution anytime soon.
IMO, the idea of "Open Source as Prior Art" is basically a good one that needs some tweaking. If Stallman is correct (and I have no way of knowing whether he is) that "when prior art is considered by the Patent Office during the patent-granting process, it usually loses any weight it might have had in a court case," then that might be a problem. However, I can't understand how patent holders of a variation on an OSDL-tagged thingamabob could (a) claim their idea is patentable because of some variation, and still (b) go after the FOSS-derived works. Wouldn't the very granting of the patent in spite of the OSDL art be the basis for establishing non-infringement?
Stallman wants the very idea of ideas to be irrevocably tied to freedom. That's a beautiful vision, and God bless him if he can ever pull it off; I'm (sadly) not optimistic. Meanwhile, I'll settle for having as many of them as possible stay clean from proprietary claims. Failing both, anonymous/pseudonymous coding & releasing might be our only refuge.
I noticed that too, and what's *really* sleazy about this (other than "No known workaround to resolve this issue exists at this time") is that "protected with media usage rights" is a completely fictional construct invented by MS. There is NO DRM on those shows to begin with, as almost any other timeshifting / TV-recording software will show. MCE makes analog recordings of cable shows through S-Video. If you record them with a VCR, DVD recorder, or any other software package, they're yours to use as you please. Only if you record them with MCE are they "protected with media usage rights."
I'm starting to wonder if MS is embarking on a long term surreptitious anti-DRM campaign. Their marketplace saturation is not invincible, and this tightening of the DRM noose is exactly the sort of thing that's liable to spark a larger user exodus than they're used to seeing. Maybe they're growing weary of all the hoops they have to jump through to court the favor of the rights holders, and think that if they make their DRM draconian and brutal enough they can prove a point & force the Hollywood goons to at least partially capitulation to open formats.
Nah, I'm dreaming. Sorry.
At any rate, I run Windows Media Center 2005 (for now), so thank heavens I have Winders Update turned off & do frequent disk image backups.
I use EAC (Exact Audio Copy) for all my audio ripping & burning needs. As far as free players with strong privacy, a small footprint, and really good library / playlist management, I'm still waiting. Meanwhile, I use MMJB (which I bought long, long ago) as my main music player & library manager.
For video conversions, I tend to use Nero tools. Having a Media Center PC with ~ 2TB of RAID storage, I really don't burn DVDs much anymore; I just store MP4s. VirtualDub is *almost* where I need it to be, but I don't have time to get a PhD in codec internals. I've had trouble finding a simple tool for XVid encoding, while Nero overcomes my lack of knowlege admirably.
The other non-free tools I use often are VideoReDo and ConvertXToDVD. VLC is a best-of-breed player with an improving set of transcoding features, and I use that for playback of the MP4 files I make with Nero Recode (MCE chokes on `em). Between all those, I have no unmet video needs. Well ok, Shrink and Decrypter might *occasionally* be required; despite having a completely legit CSS-compliant DVD codec on my system (nVidia), I still get occasional CSS errors when trying to play commercial DVDs in MCE. Decrypter's iso capability is the simplest way I've found to play the disc when that bug rears its ugly head. (As a matter of principle, I treat the iso as inseparable from the physical disc, and if it was a rental, I delete the iso when the disc goes back to Netflix).
In the "free transcoding tools" category, one probably should mention Gordian Knot (especially AutoGK), MediaCoder and MeGUI, all of which are on my system but rarely used anymore given the above.
This actually works in our favor, IMO. (Erm, "our" refers to opponents of ubiquitous DRM.) Casual users don't switch tools until properly motivated to do so, and at this point why should they? They have a tool they didn't have to pay extra for or research or install, it's easy to use, and for the time being it does what they want it to. However, losing the ability to do what they could in the past can provide the motivation to switch, and that's where "we" come in (if you're willing to put some effort into this issue, that is).
I see this as a three step process. Right now, just go ahead and be a MS shill. Make people aware of how easy it is to rip, burn, and transfer music in MP3 format using WMP; promote the habit of using and relying on those features. Show them how to make mix CDs for their car. Regarding ripping, make sure they know that MP3 can be used on multiple brands and types of devices, and point out good values in non-WMA portable players. Step 2... ______________. Just kidding; step 2 is to create awareness of other free, easy tools that are more powerful & do more than WMP. This isn't about getting them to switch, this is about name recognition. These folks need to have a vague concept in their heads that geeks and enthusiasts use "EAC" where novices use WMP, and that it is free, safe, and can do things which WMP cannot.
Step 3 takes care of itself when MS cripples WMP. When the patch goes out to all those auto-updating fools, they'll be mentally prepared for your advice to switch. Without preparation, telling them to switch to "EAC" will sound like alien speak. With preparation, this action will follow naturally when they discover that their PC (arguably) isn't broken or infected, but that MS intentionally crippled one of their favorite programs.
Grokster & eMule & LimeWire thrived in the wake of Napster's demise, right? When a frequently-used tool stops working, people find alternatives. If they already have a positive opinion of a certain alternative, then the switch will be all the faster when WMP "breaks." EAC is more complicated for a novice to configure than is WMP, but I'd lay odds that having prior "warm fuzzies" about it would motivate them to figure it out when the time came, and all the more so if you're willing to help them.
Yeah, I'm just itching to buy into a new technology that can have its capabilities reduced after I've bought it. Remind me to sign the EULA with disappearing ink, seeing as how that's what they're using to write the feature list...
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good point. Unfortunately, memorability and low syllable counts are mortal enemies of accuracy.
Here's an unofficial contest entry form. Try your hand at injecting colorful, catchy words into the popular culture to differentiate the following cases from "pirates":
Someone who downloads copyrighted files: improve on "downloader" or "p2p user"
Someone who shares copyrighted files: improve on "filesharer" or "uploader"
Someone who violates the DMCA for legitimate, otherwise legal purposes,
e.g. to play a DVD on Windows Media Center* or Linux, or to move PlaysForSure
or FairPlay protected items onto incompatible devices: improve on __________?
(And I suppose I should add the obligatory "....Profit!")
--
* Windows Media Center does not support commercial DVD playback, even with a licensed CSS decoder installed, except in the rare case when (a) there is no TV Out device enabled on the system and (b) the monitor resolution is at 640 x 480 or less.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894323/en-us
Rhetorical and snarky question perhaps, but I'd actually love to hear some analysis of it from a lawyer's perspective.
Fascinating idea there, distributed RBLs. Thanks for the link. I think of RBLs as simply another case of what should be an unfettered exchange of information & opinion between mutually consenting parties. It's unfortunate that so many obstacles to this sort of thing are accumulating, but if it means the start of hardened protocols to fend off interference, then I suppose it's a Good Thing in the long run.
// ;-)
I've had similar thoughts about using a distributed protocol for nym servers, and building a pseudonymous repute system thereupon that's (hopefully) hard-to-spoof, trace or interrupt.
Anyway...
void parent()
{
score += int.MaxValue(informative);
}
iPod is the Coca-Cola of portable digital music players. There's a lot of value in being first (or in being perceived as the original of something).
Hopefully some new player can muster some real market penetration. If one comes about that does something new, does it easily, and it's something that iTMS's DRM prevents, maybe we'll see a swing in the other direction. Seemed most people I knew used Alta Vista before Google came around, but web search was a pretty nascent market at that point & brand recognition was confined to a pretty small demographic.
Has the music player market reached critical mass, i.e. does it have too much cultural penetration for the top brand to be toppled in a quick coup? I'd like to think not, but my inner cynic seems to have the upper hand right now.
I heavily favor egalitarian ideals, but I'm sorry: Racism is a manner of thinking, an attitude. Tyrrany has its seeds in the idea that citizens' attitudes qualify as "problems" that the state needs to solve via criminilazition. The ideal of tolerance can be elevated in ways that are less threatening to a free society. China can call anything that glorifies democracy "incitement to violence" if you allow enough indirection in the definition of the crime.
Incitement to violence is a legitimate thing to criminalize, but the ideal of a free society isn't compatible with loose construals thereof as was done here. A necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) test for guilt on this charge should be that violence was actually incited.
All manner of horrors are committed by states in the name of "protecting the public," so we can't just say "well this instance may be a bit extreme, but we can all agree that the public needs to be protected," and by extension agree that the basic concept of outlawing hate speech is valid and only the implementation is left to quibble about. The concept is not valid, and the justifcation for it is more insidious than that which it purports to protect society from.
Think they'll rename it to, er... GooTube?
Good point; security and privacy schemes in general need to start thinking in terms of local storage as an organizing principle. I wouldn't mind having my search results stored by A9, Google, etc. if they couldn't be used except in the context of providing me the data-dependent service.
Right now this sort of thing could be accomplished with a browser extension or toolbar, but eventually it's probably going to take a whole protocol; something will need to encapsulate secure data exchange with client-side crypto and query/aggregation ability. It's a pretty tall order technically, but privacy and data intelligence are a couple of *huge* market needs. The player who can best remove the tension between them will have something big.
A well-designed OS may well come up short of being airtight against malware, but there's still cavernous room for improvement given where we are today.
Execution of anything new should be in a pretty small sandbox by default -- e.g. no network access, limited API priveliges in the OS, and disk access limited to per-executable private directories. Warning dialogs could certainly be a hell of a lot more informative too; if users didn't see them often enough for them to be a nuisance, they'd probably take them a bit more seriously. Apps' signatures could embed descriptions of reasons for each escalated privelige requirement. "Write to non-system folders" isn't as serious a need as "write to system folders" or "create a new startup item." "Access any wan resource" is more serious than "access specific domain ________," and "listen for and accept incoming wan connections" is more severe yet.
Basically, a decent security designer just needs some common sense in sorting out types of actions & assigning severity levels to them. When an unsigned app requires potentially disastrous priveliges, an OS *should* send users down a more complicated path to granting the escalation. Make `em edit a configuration file or something. If that's what it took to allow the escalation, I bet white-hat developers would learn to sign their code & economize on their security privilege requirements in a jiffy.
I'm usually way out on the "pro privacy" side of these issues -- you know, YRO trumps all other considerations, etc. In the parent / kid context though, good communication is fantastic, but alone it's insufficient in a significant percent of cases.
One of the reasons we have a concept of "minors" (for whom parents are responsible) is that judgement takes time to acquire. Much as people would like, it's just not possible to *reliably* create kids with good judgement via good parenting. Kids are more susceptible to peer pressure, and they tend to go through phases where they're prone to concealing their activities from their parents. Some lessons need to be learned the hard way, but the "hard way" can carry an unacceptably high price in the online arena.
Different kids need different amounts of supervision and oversight in the physical world, and I don't see much difference between that & the online world. Most parents would't let their kid padlock their closet, nor would they agree never to search the child's bedroom under any circumstances. In the spirit of good communication, I would suggest telling the kid that you're monitoring & logging his/her conversations. That admittedly introduces some technical hurdles; ideally it should be done at the router or proxy level, which means disallowing encrypted protocols that can't be logged by an intermediate node.
If you log a child's surfing habits, you always have the option of not reading the logs unless/until you have reason to. But down the road if you have reason to suspect something (or heaven forbid something awful happens), you'll probably be glad you have the logs.
I hope I'm wrong, but I have less faith that "eventually, people will figure out that there is no benefit to upgrading all this stuff." I can't help but think that MS wouldn't have the market share it does in the OS and Browser segments if people were prone to figuring these sorts of things out. When it's time for a new system, consumers by and large seem to run with the default setup, and buy the best complete bundle value (as they perceive it) when Best Buy has a sale. It isn't until later that they realize they've lost capability, and then they probably won't even remember the times their eyes glazed over as their /.er friend tried to warn them about this crap.
I'd be pleased if your view of humanity proved the more accurate 5 years from now.
("The important thing is to realize why you have loyalty to a certain brand, and be willing to re-evaluate your position when the quality of the brand you favour starts dropping.")
Amen. In contrast to the article's take on things, I was formerly loyal to Intel & ATI, and switched to AMD/nVidia to use an Athlon X2 -- socket AM2. The experience has been good enough that I'm likely to stay with AMD for a while.
A bit of irony on that point...
My habit of buying only used CDs earned me a rootkit; after the defective-by-design units had been pulled from store shelves, some of them ended up in the used bin, and like a doofus I wasn't paying attention when I popped it in my laptop drive with AutoPlay enabled. Whoops! No great inconvenience there since I'm in the habit of making regular disk-image backups of my system drive, but I did have a laugh at my own expense after realizing what had happened.
I honestly wonder how many people changed their CD buying habits over the Sony/BMG malware deal. It'd be great if it was a massive segment of the buying public, but I suspect that in reality it's an even smaller group than those who are boycotting RIAA goods out of opposition to their tactics.
I haven't bought a single new CD since the RIAA started these shenanigans. I used to buy 1 - 2 a month, probably about 18 a year on average.
I still buy CDs mind you, I just confine my purchases to used ones; I have some minor moral quibbles with funding racketeering & extortion organizations.
If there even is a bona fide decrease in CD sales (I'm unconvinced), I wonder how much of the decrease is accounted for by those intentionally refraining from CD purchases as part of an anti-RIAA attitude? It has to be a pretty small slice of the pie chart, I know, but hell... I'd be thrilled to know I was part of a group responsible for a 0.5% drop in CD sales.
I'm just glad mankind has finally succeeded in returning the earth to temperature it was at before he arrived. The primordial beasts were getting pretty freaking ticked off at how unusually cool the last few millennia were around here, and justified or not, they were blaming it on us.
You're probably right on the antitrust matter; good insights there. Perhaps the best hope is LimeWire's claim (towards the end of TFA) of having offered to filter copyrighted material using hash codes, and the RIAA's refusal to submit hash codes for filtering. iMesh looks like the equivalent of a Death Star, so it will be important for LimeWire to establish the precedent that copyright cartels cannot dictate what anti-piracy provider or technical implementation a P2P software maker has to use.
Ideally, writers of P2P software should be under no compulsion to serve as unpaid stop-loss agents for the cartel anyway. Failing that though, a bona fide offer to implement workable filtering technology should serve to indemnify them, *especially* if their offer was at no charge to the rights-holder. In fact, seeing as how filtering is a service requiring considerable expense for LimeWire to implement, I would think they would be within their rights if they *did* charge a fee of some sort for the service. Otherwise, the cartel wouold probably simply flood the system with bogus hashes in an attempt to make the network unusable.
At any rate, I'm glad LimeWire is open source; if it goes down, its own successor will probably be some fork of the original project. This case may have implications for OSS too, though. I fear that OSS projects will eventually need to resort to pseudonymous contributors with cryptographic signatures but no "identity" per se. I mean, if the RIAA prevails here, I don't know what other defense there will be when cartels try to achieve the digital equivalent of a book burning. The act of being associated with an OSS project could expose contributors to an unacceptable level of intimidation via legal liability. That should not be allowed to happen.
As much as I wish someone other than a file sharing software maker was running the ball on this play, it's still a big deal for someone to be bringing up antitrust issues as a plaintiff against the RIAA - even if it's only as a "counter plaintiff".
For the time being, I say forget who LimeWire is and what the majority of their users do; get behind them in this. Whether LimeWire prevails in their defense pales in significance compared to the importance of these counterclaims.
IANAL of course.
Wealth creation is a legitimate enough term in and of itself; it's just prone to misuse, probably because of its seeming ability to justify any action of the speaker's choosing, so long as it remotely relates to commerce in some way. But if there were no such thing wealth creation, there could be no such thing as oil sultans or software magnates.
The problem with the 100,000 support employees argument is that wealth creation is *not* equivalent to "job creation." Wealth creation is more likely to go hand in hand with job *destruction* than job creation -- at least in the short term.
The invention of the nail gun displaced workers yet created wealth; whereas it previously took, e.g. $1500 worth of labor to frame & shingle a large house, it now took, say, $700. Initially this may only have meant that $800 was added to unemployment, and the builder may have absorbed all of the extra profit. In time though, the nail gun drove the cost of a large house down by ~$600. The increased affordability of housing created new wants among homebuyers, like having a small boat. Increased spending on new wants eventually creates employment to offset the displaced workers, and an economy that previously produced homes now produced homes & boats.
I have a mountain of grass clippings in my back yard that I have to pay to dispose of. If Ted invents a clean automobile engine that runs on grass clippings, then I and everyone else with lots of grass clippings suddenly have an asset where we previously had a liability, and Ted has a fantastic profit source he didn't have before. When the effect of uber-cheap transit propogates through the economy, things will inevitably spring up on which to use the increased discretionary income, like X-Box 640s, or PS8s.
If the support personnel argument were valid, then it wouldn't it make economic sense to make the OS as buggy as possible? In reality though, an OS that was so easy and stable that it put 100,000 former support techs out of work would be a more legitimate example of wealth creation.
Well yeah... wouldn't most people, if they noticed before they left the shop? I mean, I woulnd't walk 5 miles through driving snow to return a penny, but like I'm sure a lot of other /.ers have, I have given back extra quarters & singles a couple times. (Never hit the jackpot with anything bigger.)
;-)
As far as keeping the isos goes though, I suppose it's just as much a matter of economics as it is of principle. I have a 1TB RAID-5 comprised of three 500GB SATA drives which were purchased for ~$289 each. I don't like the visual quality of "shrunk" DVD video, so I'm not going to burn them to 4.7GB DVRs; I store them at full quality. So each iso takes up 9+GB, meaning a DVD has to be worth ~$8.00 of RAID space for me to keep its iso around. If it's worth that much to me, I can pick it up on eBay & save the RAID space for HD recording.
Thanks for the offer... I will do that. You can reach me at paul + smith + 68; same domain as your own.
Thanks for chiming in; I feel less crazy knowing someone else thought the same thing. They certainly are making sure that Microsoft media products are becoming the least usable on the market.
Yes, okay, sure... the Real Problem is that software is patentable in the first place. But does Stallman think that we're going to change that fact quickly just by being absolutist about it?
If not, how many ideas do we want to see slip into proprietary hands while we maintain our moral purism about software patents? This is a political issue, and political agendas live, eat, sleep & breathe half-measures. According to Stallman, "If we are not careful, this can sap the pressure for a real solution." Erm, what pressure? Where is the well-funded, politically connected lobby that's creating more pressure for a Real Solution than beneficiaries of software patents can create in the opposite direction? `Cause short of that, we all know that we're not going to see a Real Solution anytime soon.
IMO, the idea of "Open Source as Prior Art" is basically a good one that needs some tweaking. If Stallman is correct (and I have no way of knowing whether he is) that "when prior art is considered by the Patent Office during the patent-granting process, it usually loses any weight it might have had in a court case," then that might be a problem. However, I can't understand how patent holders of a variation on an OSDL-tagged thingamabob could (a) claim their idea is patentable because of some variation, and still (b) go after the FOSS-derived works. Wouldn't the very granting of the patent in spite of the OSDL art be the basis for establishing non-infringement?
Stallman wants the very idea of ideas to be irrevocably tied to freedom. That's a beautiful vision, and God bless him if he can ever pull it off; I'm (sadly) not optimistic. Meanwhile, I'll settle for having as many of them as possible stay clean from proprietary claims. Failing both, anonymous/pseudonymous coding & releasing might be our only refuge.
I noticed that too, and what's *really* sleazy about this (other than "No known workaround to resolve this issue exists at this time") is that "protected with media usage rights" is a completely fictional construct invented by MS. There is NO DRM on those shows to begin with, as almost any other timeshifting / TV-recording software will show. MCE makes analog recordings of cable shows through S-Video. If you record them with a VCR, DVD recorder, or any other software package, they're yours to use as you please. Only if you record them with MCE are they "protected with media usage rights."
I'm starting to wonder if MS is embarking on a long term surreptitious anti-DRM campaign. Their marketplace saturation is not invincible, and this tightening of the DRM noose is exactly the sort of thing that's liable to spark a larger user exodus than they're used to seeing. Maybe they're growing weary of all the hoops they have to jump through to court the favor of the rights holders, and think that if they make their DRM draconian and brutal enough they can prove a point & force the Hollywood goons to at least partially capitulation to open formats.
Nah, I'm dreaming. Sorry.
At any rate, I run Windows Media Center 2005 (for now), so thank heavens I have Winders Update turned off & do frequent disk image backups.
I use EAC (Exact Audio Copy) for all my audio ripping & burning needs. As far as free players with strong privacy, a small footprint, and really good library / playlist management, I'm still waiting. Meanwhile, I use MMJB (which I bought long, long ago) as my main music player & library manager.
For video conversions, I tend to use Nero tools. Having a Media Center PC with ~ 2TB of RAID storage, I really don't burn DVDs much anymore; I just store MP4s. VirtualDub is *almost* where I need it to be, but I don't have time to get a PhD in codec internals. I've had trouble finding a simple tool for XVid encoding, while Nero overcomes my lack of knowlege admirably.
The other non-free tools I use often are VideoReDo and ConvertXToDVD. VLC is a best-of-breed player with an improving set of transcoding features, and I use that for playback of the MP4 files I make with Nero Recode (MCE chokes on `em). Between all those, I have no unmet video needs. Well ok, Shrink and Decrypter might *occasionally* be required; despite having a completely legit CSS-compliant DVD codec on my system (nVidia), I still get occasional CSS errors when trying to play commercial DVDs in MCE. Decrypter's iso capability is the simplest way I've found to play the disc when that bug rears its ugly head. (As a matter of principle, I treat the iso as inseparable from the physical disc, and if it was a rental, I delete the iso when the disc goes back to Netflix).
In the "free transcoding tools" category, one probably should mention Gordian Knot (especially AutoGK), MediaCoder and MeGUI, all of which are on my system but rarely used anymore given the above.
This actually works in our favor, IMO. (Erm, "our" refers to opponents of ubiquitous DRM.) Casual users don't switch tools until properly motivated to do so, and at this point why should they? They have a tool they didn't have to pay extra for or research or install, it's easy to use, and for the time being it does what they want it to. However, losing the ability to do what they could in the past can provide the motivation to switch, and that's where "we" come in (if you're willing to put some effort into this issue, that is).
I see this as a three step process. Right now, just go ahead and be a MS shill. Make people aware of how easy it is to rip, burn, and transfer music in MP3 format using WMP; promote the habit of using and relying on those features. Show them how to make mix CDs for their car. Regarding ripping, make sure they know that MP3 can be used on multiple brands and types of devices, and point out good values in non-WMA portable players. Step 2... ______________. Just kidding; step 2 is to create awareness of other free, easy tools that are more powerful & do more than WMP. This isn't about getting them to switch, this is about name recognition. These folks need to have a vague concept in their heads that geeks and enthusiasts use "EAC" where novices use WMP, and that it is free, safe, and can do things which WMP cannot.
Step 3 takes care of itself when MS cripples WMP. When the patch goes out to all those auto-updating fools, they'll be mentally prepared for your advice to switch. Without preparation, telling them to switch to "EAC" will sound like alien speak. With preparation, this action will follow naturally when they discover that their PC (arguably) isn't broken or infected, but that MS intentionally crippled one of their favorite programs.
Grokster & eMule & LimeWire thrived in the wake of Napster's demise, right? When a frequently-used tool stops working, people find alternatives. If they already have a positive opinion of a certain alternative, then the switch will be all the faster when WMP "breaks." EAC is more complicated for a novice to configure than is WMP, but I'd lay odds that having prior "warm fuzzies" about it would motivate them to figure it out when the time came, and all the more so if you're willing to help them.
Yeah, I'm just itching to buy into a new technology that can have its capabilities reduced after I've bought it. Remind me to sign the EULA with disappearing ink, seeing as how that's what they're using to write the feature list...