...mirror it for free directly to the NSA's data warehouse -- you know, to assist in constructing the Citizen Advertising Preference Habituanalysis Profile® that is the key to defeating terror in the twenty-first century.
Maybe "SPAM Per Capita with Broadband Connectivity" would be a more meaningful statistic.
It would take some legal craftwork to do make this workable, but credit card issuers could help tackle the SPAM problem by creating special-purpose honeypot card numbers that could not be collected on. The up front documentation requirements would be severe on a "defraud the fraudsters" approach like this, lest the system become a social malady of its own. In fact, the sting would probably have to be executed by law enforcement personnel. Still, much currently sent SPAM is in violation of existing laws, so all tactics that law enforcement has at its disposal should be on the table in the crimesolving process... including deception and baiting.
The SPAM problem isn't intractable at the technology level though; it's ultimately social factors that are holding up a technological solution anyway. A reputation protocol for domains & IP addresses would do the trick, were a next-gen mail protocol to ride on top of it. At the request of any receiving server, outbound servers would be responsible for validating their sending of a message. A permanent send log for every server would be maintained through distributed storage. Servers would need to *earn* unrestricted inbound access to other servers. Users would have direct whitelist control for inbound messages to their own boxes, and by default, messages requiring priveleges beyond the sending server's current authorization would generate permission requests to a dynamically-configurable destination, e.g. the final recipient or the sysadmin, depending on conditions like number of requests the server is generating, the nature of available reputation data for the server, etc.
Someone please organize a pro-bono heist of Russiniovich's soul from Seattle & give it back to him.
Honestly though, I can see why this would happen & I'm actually suprised it didn't sooner. If you were a large, publicly traded software interest, how would you deal with a third party appearing (being?) more knowlegeable than you about your own system's intrinsics? Yes, he made Windows more usable for many of us, but when it comes down to it, it's what the overall PR impact looks like to the marketing dep't that matters...
I can only hope that this simply means little more than MSDN hosting for the current offering of tools. If they start retiring Mark's apps, I'm going Black Friday.
I'm assuming you're referring to TOR, not TOR (though he's pretty cool too).
I also think Freenet and Darknet type networks will play increasingly important roles in the inexorable globalization of free speech. What's needed is a way to create secure, historied pseudonyms that are peer validated, verifiable by signature, but incapable of being route-traced. If done right, such a system could potentially put freedom of speech and trade beyond the reach of government suppression.
I agree that this is an interesting idea; perhaps specific projects will organize around anonymity / pseudonymity. De5C, or LinuxHDCP for example?
As I said previously above, civic rights will tend to erode, and the DMCA is a prime example of this erosion. This raises a bevy of ethical issues, but if attempts to keep speech free fail at the civic & political levels, the OSS community could conceivably be the one to lead a charge towards securing them at the technological level in spite of laws to the contrary. I think Pseudonymity is more useful than Anonymity, but the technical requirements of truly secure pseudonymity are formidable (e.g. untraceable yet unforgeable, etc.).
Pseudonymity is no fad, and IMO the practice hasn't seen even a fraction of the popularity it will eventually garner.
This is a no-brainer; governments rarely become less restrictive with the passage of time, since governments are expected to, you know, "do things" and "solve problems." Regardless what political philosophy they adhere to, governments just aren't prone to seeing their duty as one of removing interference from citizens' lives. So all else being equal, a nation's code of justice will tend to become more complex and intrusive with time, increasing its citizens' need to ensure their own privacy.
Pure Anonymity doesn't fulfill many of the criteria that people seek in online interaction & transactions, and Pseudonymity is hard to distinguish from anonymity if it isn't secure and historied. Facilitating private, secure transactions between unique, historied pseudonymous personnae is the task in front of us; after all, technology is fundamentally capable of securing those human rights that governments wrongly cease to recognize.
* -- (resisting the urge to post as AC just for the hell of it)
Errr, didn't you get the memo? The 10th amendment is moot in light of the commerce clause.
Seriously though, while I think much of the reaction to this is a tad melodramatic, the potential for legislation like this to be enacted is exactly why it's important to help privacy-enhancing technologies reach critical mass -- e.g. Freenet, darknets, and Onion Routers.
Eventually, one's right to anonymity will only be secured by technological means, since governments will increasingly come together to counter it, regardless of their political philosophy. We should be teaching "ordinary folks" how to use these tools in much the same manner as we'd teach them to avoid phishing scams; their privacy is threatened in both cases.
Shame that *nix desktops are still such a long way from being suitable for the average nongeek user. The social part of the problem frustrates me, much like when libertarians get nowhere in US elections. I don't expect this to change until some distro really hits a grand slam in terms of UI simplicity, makes PnP driver installs "foolproof," and gains the requisite mindshare to make documentation & help ubiquitous. Then it's up to the community to realize that Win users don't comprehend how to RTFFAQ first, and so take turns swallowing our pride when answering a newbie question for the umpteenth time.
ReactOS [http://www.reactos.org] might be a way to leverage Windows' high UI recognition against Windows itself. Then you've at least got a fighting chance at having full control over the system.
Unless the DRM situation with these things changes drastically (for the better, that is), I wish them both death by a thousand stalemates.
Even if that comes to pass, don't bet on the big players seeing DRM as a major factor in the formats' demise. However, if they watch a boatload of R&D capital go down the drain while outlets of unencumbered content (e.g. mp3tunes.com and emusic.com) gain market share, who knows - perhaps a light could go on somewhere, or perhaps a foundation or open consortium could spawn an *open* storage format & device / communication spec that DRM-bent interests don't control.
The funding obstacle to this is monumental to be sure, but the most likely way to put a stake in DRM would probably be for an open standard for HDTV devices (storage, communication, playback) to gain traction in consumer devices. Sure, they wouldn't work with HDCP / 5C content, but that's the point. A third of the commercial devices won't interoperate either, given the bugginess of so many implementations. Utopia would be to see something like an EFF branded HD PVR, with open licensed blueprints allowing free manufacture thereupon on the condition that no DRM of any kind be enabled.
Exactly - it's a win for nobody, and is most notably a loss for law enforcement. That's why I think the exclusionary rule is enough disincentive for law enforcement to trample on our privacy rights; their natural impulse is to attempt to maximize convictions, and staying between fourth amendment lines serves that goal better than straying does.
On the flip side, I've often wondered how things would pan out if we *removed* the exclusionary rule, and put criminal liability for fourth amendment violations in its place... on the face of it, it appears that this would satisfy the points you raise above...
I dunno the real stats on this, but in my personal experience, I see DVDs become coasters with much greater frequency than I see hard drives becoming paperweights. Besides, I'll still bet I could set up a local mirrored soft RAID *and* a barebones versioned offsite backup apparatus (write only remote interface, no mod, no del) that also used mirroring, and do it for < $/GB than conventional, dual-layer or Blu-ray DVD storage would amount to.
Does someone implement a cheap version-controlled storage driver that allows for periodic removal / archiving, whereby current files are all still present on the live system, but the point-in-time retrieval window is reduced to e.g. the last 90 days? With a glut of cheap 40 & 60GB drives out there, one could stack up a lot of them in geographically dispersed pairs of small, EMP-shielded safes.;-) With the ever increasing size of drive that $300 will buy, it's likely that an entire archive could be delivered on a single disk if needed.
You have a good point, but if McDonalds ran the "FFIA" and its oversight came to encopass 98% of all restaurants, if it co-opted congress into enshrining its profitibility in the US Code, and if it lobbied successfully for laws requiring consumer microwaves to have chips that ensure home reheating isn't prohibited by the seller of the item to be heated, you might see good ol' McDs as more of a threat and less of a lousy but benign establishment.
I hear you there, and in all honesty I have a hard time answering that one. I know this makes me a tool of the man and all that, but I want criminals brought to justice, and I'm not without sympathy for law enforcement. In an ideal world, there would be no tension between our fourth amendment rights and law enforcement's capacity to convict criminals, but there'd be no intentional fouls in basketball either.
I guess I expect the police to be interested in gathering evidence that criminals would like to keep from them, and I assume that motive will inspire a certain amount of infringement. I feel secure enough in my rights without the police making a priority of them, though; in domestic criminal cases, our privacy rights are secured at the prosecution stage more than at the evidence gathering stage - the penalty for violations by law enforcement being the exclusion of the evidence in question.
Now I have a hard time seeing the value of a suspect's library records in the prosecution of a crime, but hey, if the police want to chase that line, fine with me. I don't expect them to get subpoenas and warrants in advance for every bit of evidence they want to gather; I expect them to do this only when they encounter obstacles or are on territory where the evidence would spoil without a warrant.
This story interested me because I'm more worried about trustees of our private data being loose with it. Police have always sought to uncover data with exceptional eagerness. The library director's actions show exactly the respect for privacy that I want to see, so I'm happy.
Now wanna know what *really* scares me? How about the *first amendment* rights we're losing for the sake of something as frivolous as the entertainment industry's right not to innovate?
Even the Blu-Ray readers presumably fund the DRM queen via licensing fees. To me, that makes them nearly as culpable for the infestation as the commercial releases are.
But even if I put all my DRM vigilantism aside, the capacity increase over reg'lar DVDs just doesn't cut it in my pocketbook. In fact, why even write to removable media when a RAID can store oddles more gigs per $?
I guess I just don't see the point in these things, with TV & stereo -out available for most PCs on the cheap, and with HTDV -out not being too pricey either.
I would damn well hope she's more interested in protecting her library... she's a *Library Director*.
If she were a *Detective*, maybe I'd expect her to be more interested in helping the police.
Well, since congress has been co-opted into being acting agents of the MPAA, it should be no surprise that some enforcement folks expect to be able to commandeer the investigative efforts of any & all public personnel, on a whim.
Sure - give me a John Galt to vote for in the Presidential race and I'm all over it.
Until then, our political system should be able to operate to the benefit of the citizenry in the absence of an Executive Branch that's extraordinarily ballsy & possessed of an unwavering resolution to dismantle the pork-barrel system.
I also thought of that comparison -- or, ever see that alternative desktop that Packard Bell used to ship on early Windows 95 computers?
If my cluttered, disorganized & overstuffed virtual folders can now be visually represented like my cluttered, disorganized & overstuffed physical work area, I suppose it's about a break even. The thing I dislike about physical stacks though is that you have to thumb through them.
The ideal desktop for me would be a very context-aware autocompleting cursor that combinined something like the Windows "Run" prompt feature with Google desktop search and a smattering of command line extensions.
But I'll concede that the eye candy is definitely OMG!!! PONIES!!!!!
A line item veto doesn't give the President any more direct control over the contents of bills than a total veto does. Congress retains the power to legislate that line item in another bill. When invoked, the line item veto simply forces a majority in congress to explicitly validate what some legislator wanted to have quietly enacted on the merits of another issue.
By the same note, the way riders are currently used in practice essentially gives congress an end run around the Presidential veto, by holding important or popular legislation hostage to distasteful items that are completely unrelated to the main issue a bill addresses.
A fair compromise would be to limit the line item veto's power with a test of how integral the item is to the purpose of the bill. A President shouldn't use such power to redesign the main provisions of a bill, but given today's congress, I would take that defect over the current situation.
Good point, though I don't think it's a music merchant's responsibility to provide me with one. It's plenty straightforward for me to exercise my own fair-use right to backup most CDs, without needing physical media as an intermediary, and without needing to circumvent any DRM and risk deportation to Turkey & life imprisonment in the process.
Newer CDs that implement some type of copy-prevention mechanism are dicey. They don't bind one to terms & conditions as restrictive as iTunes', but exercising one's fair-use rights with this (currently small) subset of discs could still qualify as criminal, I suppose. Yet some approaches to CD ripping & backup are quite accidentally immune to certain copy-protection methods used thereupon. Do fair-use rights apply to such discs or not? Does one need to check whether a disc carries copy-protection technology before exercising them? I'm open to advice on that.
"The lossless copying of media has scared the media cartels for years. That is why we have DRM and other fun stuff like SCMS."
I hope at least a handful of home theater reviewers will take a principled stance on DRM & use a legacy monitor or set, so they can just curtly review these things as "could not play" when they refuse to work on such devices.
TFA describes scanners that obviously need direct line-of-sight to a camera's CCD. It'd take a boatload of well-placed scanners for this system to be effective. Sounds like they can really only secure a very specific area of interest by covering opportune viewing angles for it.
Here's my 39-cent cloaking device: add a simple telescoping blinder tube or hood around the camera's lens, and drastically reduce the CCD's angle-of-attack surface. In conjunction with using the blinder, photograph the area of interest from an odd angle &/or distance, and if the blinder needs to be significantly extended, shoot multiple narrow-angle segments of the subject & stitch them together after the fact.
Slashdot Mirror
I only know differently because the PCs I build are mainly for my wife to timeshift Toolbelt Diva.
(We have very different ideas about what constitutes a "hardware store.")
...mirror it for free directly to the NSA's data warehouse -- you know, to assist in constructing the Citizen Advertising Preference Habituanalysis Profile® that is the key to defeating terror in the twenty-first century.
I don't know what all the fuss is about Cisco routers. For my money, Black and Decker wins every time.
Maybe "SPAM Per Capita with Broadband Connectivity" would be a more meaningful statistic.
It would take some legal craftwork to do make this workable, but credit card issuers could help tackle the SPAM problem by creating special-purpose honeypot card numbers that could not be collected on. The up front documentation requirements would be severe on a "defraud the fraudsters" approach like this, lest the system become a social malady of its own. In fact, the sting would probably have to be executed by law enforcement personnel. Still, much currently sent SPAM is in violation of existing laws, so all tactics that law enforcement has at its disposal should be on the table in the crimesolving process... including deception and baiting.
The SPAM problem isn't intractable at the technology level though; it's ultimately social factors that are holding up a technological solution anyway. A reputation protocol for domains & IP addresses would do the trick, were a next-gen mail protocol to ride on top of it. At the request of any receiving server, outbound servers would be responsible for validating their sending of a message. A permanent send log for every server would be maintained through distributed storage. Servers would need to *earn* unrestricted inbound access to other servers. Users would have direct whitelist control for inbound messages to their own boxes, and by default, messages requiring priveleges beyond the sending server's current authorization would generate permission requests to a dynamically-configurable destination, e.g. the final recipient or the sysadmin, depending on conditions like number of requests the server is generating, the nature of available reputation data for the server, etc.
Someone please organize a pro-bono heist of Russiniovich's soul from Seattle & give it back to him.
Honestly though, I can see why this would happen & I'm actually suprised it didn't sooner. If you were a large, publicly traded software interest, how would you deal with a third party appearing (being?) more knowlegeable than you about your own system's intrinsics? Yes, he made Windows more usable for many of us, but when it comes down to it, it's what the overall PR impact looks like to the marketing dep't that matters...
I can only hope that this simply means little more than MSDN hosting for the current offering of tools. If they start retiring Mark's apps, I'm going Black Friday.
I'm assuming you're referring to TOR, not TOR (though he's pretty cool too).
I also think Freenet and Darknet type networks will play increasingly important roles in the inexorable globalization of free speech. What's needed is a way to create secure, historied pseudonyms that are peer validated, verifiable by signature, but incapable of being route-traced. If done right, such a system could potentially put freedom of speech and trade beyond the reach of government suppression.
I agree that this is an interesting idea; perhaps specific projects will organize around anonymity / pseudonymity. De5C, or LinuxHDCP for example?
As I said previously above, civic rights will tend to erode, and the DMCA is a prime example of this erosion. This raises a bevy of ethical issues, but if attempts to keep speech free fail at the civic & political levels, the OSS community could conceivably be the one to lead a charge towards securing them at the technological level in spite of laws to the contrary. I think Pseudonymity is more useful than Anonymity, but the technical requirements of truly secure pseudonymity are formidable (e.g. untraceable yet unforgeable, etc.).
Sure, they're all just harmless cracks in the sidewalk to you, aren't they?
Pseudonymity is no fad, and IMO the practice hasn't seen even a fraction of the popularity it will eventually garner.
This is a no-brainer; governments rarely become less restrictive with the passage of time, since governments are expected to, you know, "do things" and "solve problems." Regardless what political philosophy they adhere to, governments just aren't prone to seeing their duty as one of removing interference from citizens' lives. So all else being equal, a nation's code of justice will tend to become more complex and intrusive with time, increasing its citizens' need to ensure their own privacy.
Pure Anonymity doesn't fulfill many of the criteria that people seek in online interaction & transactions, and Pseudonymity is hard to distinguish from anonymity if it isn't secure and historied. Facilitating private, secure transactions between unique, historied pseudonymous personnae is the task in front of us; after all, technology is fundamentally capable of securing those human rights that governments wrongly cease to recognize.
* -- (resisting the urge to post as AC just for the hell of it)
Errr, didn't you get the memo? The 10th amendment is moot in light of the commerce clause.
Seriously though, while I think much of the reaction to this is a tad melodramatic, the potential for legislation like this to be enacted is exactly why it's important to help privacy-enhancing technologies reach critical mass -- e.g. Freenet, darknets, and Onion Routers.
Eventually, one's right to anonymity will only be secured by technological means, since governments will increasingly come together to counter it, regardless of their political philosophy. We should be teaching "ordinary folks" how to use these tools in much the same manner as we'd teach them to avoid phishing scams; their privacy is threatened in both cases.
Shame that *nix desktops are still such a long way from being suitable for the average nongeek user. The social part of the problem frustrates me, much like when libertarians get nowhere in US elections. I don't expect this to change until some distro really hits a grand slam in terms of UI simplicity, makes PnP driver installs "foolproof," and gains the requisite mindshare to make documentation & help ubiquitous. Then it's up to the community to realize that Win users don't comprehend how to RTFFAQ first, and so take turns swallowing our pride when answering a newbie question for the umpteenth time.
ReactOS [http://www.reactos.org] might be a way to leverage Windows' high UI recognition against Windows itself. Then you've at least got a fighting chance at having full control over the system.
Unless the DRM situation with these things changes drastically (for the better, that is), I wish them both death by a thousand stalemates.
Even if that comes to pass, don't bet on the big players seeing DRM as a major factor in the formats' demise. However, if they watch a boatload of R&D capital go down the drain while outlets of unencumbered content (e.g. mp3tunes.com and emusic.com) gain market share, who knows - perhaps a light could go on somewhere, or perhaps a foundation or open consortium could spawn an *open* storage format & device / communication spec that DRM-bent interests don't control.
The funding obstacle to this is monumental to be sure, but the most likely way to put a stake in DRM would probably be for an open standard for HDTV devices (storage, communication, playback) to gain traction in consumer devices. Sure, they wouldn't work with HDCP / 5C content, but that's the point. A third of the commercial devices won't interoperate either, given the bugginess of so many implementations. Utopia would be to see something like an EFF branded HD PVR, with open licensed blueprints allowing free manufacture thereupon on the condition that no DRM of any kind be enabled.
Exactly - it's a win for nobody, and is most notably a loss for law enforcement. That's why I think the exclusionary rule is enough disincentive for law enforcement to trample on our privacy rights; their natural impulse is to attempt to maximize convictions, and staying between fourth amendment lines serves that goal better than straying does.
On the flip side, I've often wondered how things would pan out if we *removed* the exclusionary rule, and put criminal liability for fourth amendment violations in its place... on the face of it, it appears that this would satisfy the points you raise above...
I dunno the real stats on this, but in my personal experience, I see DVDs become coasters with much greater frequency than I see hard drives becoming paperweights. Besides, I'll still bet I could set up a local mirrored soft RAID *and* a barebones versioned offsite backup apparatus (write only remote interface, no mod, no del) that also used mirroring, and do it for < $/GB than conventional, dual-layer or Blu-ray DVD storage would amount to.
;-) With the ever increasing size of drive that $300 will buy, it's likely that an entire archive could be delivered on a single disk if needed.
Does someone implement a cheap version-controlled storage driver that allows for periodic removal / archiving, whereby current files are all still present on the live system, but the point-in-time retrieval window is reduced to e.g. the last 90 days? With a glut of cheap 40 & 60GB drives out there, one could stack up a lot of them in geographically dispersed pairs of small, EMP-shielded safes.
I'm still waiting for the 1.6TB SD card though...
You have a good point, but if McDonalds ran the "FFIA" and its oversight came to encopass 98% of all restaurants, if it co-opted congress into enshrining its profitibility in the US Code, and if it lobbied successfully for laws requiring consumer microwaves to have chips that ensure home reheating isn't prohibited by the seller of the item to be heated, you might see good ol' McDs as more of a threat and less of a lousy but benign establishment.
I hear you there, and in all honesty I have a hard time answering that one. I know this makes me a tool of the man and all that, but I want criminals brought to justice, and I'm not without sympathy for law enforcement. In an ideal world, there would be no tension between our fourth amendment rights and law enforcement's capacity to convict criminals, but there'd be no intentional fouls in basketball either.
I guess I expect the police to be interested in gathering evidence that criminals would like to keep from them, and I assume that motive will inspire a certain amount of infringement. I feel secure enough in my rights without the police making a priority of them, though; in domestic criminal cases, our privacy rights are secured at the prosecution stage more than at the evidence gathering stage - the penalty for violations by law enforcement being the exclusion of the evidence in question.
Now I have a hard time seeing the value of a suspect's library records in the prosecution of a crime, but hey, if the police want to chase that line, fine with me. I don't expect them to get subpoenas and warrants in advance for every bit of evidence they want to gather; I expect them to do this only when they encounter obstacles or are on territory where the evidence would spoil without a warrant.
This story interested me because I'm more worried about trustees of our private data being loose with it. Police have always sought to uncover data with exceptional eagerness. The library director's actions show exactly the respect for privacy that I want to see, so I'm happy.
Now wanna know what *really* scares me? How about the *first amendment* rights we're losing for the sake of something as frivolous as the entertainment industry's right not to innovate?
Even the Blu-Ray readers presumably fund the DRM queen via licensing fees. To me, that makes them nearly as culpable for the infestation as the commercial releases are.
But even if I put all my DRM vigilantism aside, the capacity increase over reg'lar DVDs just doesn't cut it in my pocketbook. In fact, why even write to removable media when a RAID can store oddles more gigs per $?
I guess I just don't see the point in these things, with TV & stereo -out available for most PCs on the cheap, and with HTDV -out not being too pricey either.
I would damn well hope she's more interested in protecting her library... she's a *Library Director*.
If she were a *Detective*, maybe I'd expect her to be more interested in helping the police.
Well, since congress has been co-opted into being acting agents of the MPAA, it should be no surprise that some enforcement folks expect to be able to commandeer the investigative efforts of any & all public personnel, on a whim.
I'm glad this lady got it right.
Sure - give me a John Galt to vote for in the Presidential race and I'm all over it.
Until then, our political system should be able to operate to the benefit of the citizenry in the absence of an Executive Branch that's extraordinarily ballsy & possessed of an unwavering resolution to dismantle the pork-barrel system.
I also thought of that comparison -- or, ever see that alternative desktop that Packard Bell used to ship on early Windows 95 computers?
If my cluttered, disorganized & overstuffed virtual folders can now be visually represented like my cluttered, disorganized & overstuffed physical work area, I suppose it's about a break even. The thing I dislike about physical stacks though is that you have to thumb through them.
The ideal desktop for me would be a very context-aware autocompleting cursor that combinined something like the Windows "Run" prompt feature with Google desktop search and a smattering of command line extensions.
But I'll concede that the eye candy is definitely OMG!!! PONIES!!!!!
A line item veto doesn't give the President any more direct control over the contents of bills than a total veto does. Congress retains the power to legislate that line item in another bill. When invoked, the line item veto simply forces a majority in congress to explicitly validate what some legislator wanted to have quietly enacted on the merits of another issue.
By the same note, the way riders are currently used in practice essentially gives congress an end run around the Presidential veto, by holding important or popular legislation hostage to distasteful items that are completely unrelated to the main issue a bill addresses.
A fair compromise would be to limit the line item veto's power with a test of how integral the item is to the purpose of the bill. A President shouldn't use such power to redesign the main provisions of a bill, but given today's congress, I would take that defect over the current situation.
I'm not sure how they could do anything but; wouldn't the CPA ads require at least a few more members on the API in order to log the payable actions?
(Not to be confused with Actionable Payments...)
Good point, though I don't think it's a music merchant's responsibility to provide me with one. It's plenty straightforward for me to exercise my own fair-use right to backup most CDs, without needing physical media as an intermediary, and without needing to circumvent any DRM and risk deportation to Turkey & life imprisonment in the process.
Newer CDs that implement some type of copy-prevention mechanism are dicey. They don't bind one to terms & conditions as restrictive as iTunes', but exercising one's fair-use rights with this (currently small) subset of discs could still qualify as criminal, I suppose. Yet some approaches to CD ripping & backup are quite accidentally immune to certain copy-protection methods used thereupon. Do fair-use rights apply to such discs or not? Does one need to check whether a disc carries copy-protection technology before exercising them? I'm open to advice on that.
"The lossless copying of media has scared the media cartels for years. That is why we have DRM and other fun stuff like SCMS."
I hope at least a handful of home theater reviewers will take a principled stance on DRM & use a legacy monitor or set, so they can just curtly review these things as "could not play" when they refuse to work on such devices.
TFA describes scanners that obviously need direct line-of-sight to a camera's CCD. It'd take a boatload of well-placed scanners for this system to be effective. Sounds like they can really only secure a very specific area of interest by covering opportune viewing angles for it.
Here's my 39-cent cloaking device: add a simple telescoping blinder tube or hood around the camera's lens, and drastically reduce the CCD's angle-of-attack surface. In conjunction with using the blinder, photograph the area of interest from an odd angle &/or distance, and if the blinder needs to be significantly extended, shoot multiple narrow-angle segments of the subject & stitch them together after the fact.