Re:Why are we always on the defensive?
on
CPRM Smokescreen
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· Score: 1
One action might be assassination of key figures, such as Valent, Rosen etc.
It might be better to throw pies, like the entarteurs (sp?) who pied Gates. If they had shot Gates, I think most of us would feel only horror at their actions. But by covering his face in pie they achieved widespread publicity without physically harming Gates.
None of the anti-copy protection sentiment (except from the commies) is intended to remove anyone's right to sue pirates for copyright violations.
I'm not a communist; I believe in free markets and private ownership of property. But I do not believe in intellectual property. My view is an increasingly prevalent one on the internet. You seem to disagree with it, but please don't claim that my view doesn't exist.
Copying is usually not a copyright violation, though.
Correct under the current copyright laws. Since copyright is a completely artificial construct, why not extend those laws to prohibit all copying of a copyrighted work? That is clearly what the intellectual property cartel wants, whether they achieve it by legal or technical means. If such a law were passed, would your anti-copy protection sentiment extend to anti-copyright sentiment?
Your post was intelligent and well-reasoned. Because of that, and because it contradicted the 'received wisdom' on Slashdot, I'm reluctant to contradict it. But I'm going to anyway.
If there really were a conspiracy here, the changes you're anticipating would be in the BIOS...
The people driving these changes are not naive, and they are not going to promote a 'secure architecture' which can be defeated by flashing the BIOS. From the TCPA FAQ:
What types of capabilities are being highlighted in the TCPA 1.0 Specification?... new capabilities such as platform integrity metrics (self-inspection of the BIOS, master boot record, and OS loader in the PC)... Can you give an example of why one of these platforms is desirable?... Access to data and secrets in a platform could be denied if the software environment in the platform is changed (by a virus, for example).
The FAQ is pretty mealy-mouthed about what they're really up to. The least useless document I found on the site was TCPS05 - Integrity Metrics & Authenticated Boot (pdf) - a bloated, powerpoint-derived pdf that could be summed up in 4k of text. Anyhow, you ask for evidence that the 'Generic' ATA proposal is CPRM in sheep's clothing. I think that the big piece of circumstantial evidence is the fact that the proposal surfaced so recently after CPRM was killed. Maybe T13 is a dynamic, fast-moving group that fields a major technical proposal every day, but I somehow got the impression that they're a slow-moving tortoise which cranked out CPRM over an extended period. If that impression is correct, then the timing is suspicious.
Why are we always on the defensive?
on
CPRM Smokescreen
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· Score: 5
In recent months, Slashdot has been flooded with stories of anti-freedom initiatives like CPRM. Various people leap into action and try to beat these monstrosities back. Sometimes they win; sometimes they lose. Increasingly, when the battlefield is a court, the good guys lose. The obvious pattern is that these aggressors are never at risk while they attack us. They don't risk their freedom or property or prosperity while they fight to censor and ultimately to jail the free citizens. Therefore they become bolder with each attempt. At this rate, it doesn't matter if they win or lose a particular battle, because even when they lose they don't really lose anything. How can we fight back in a way that really hurts them? How can we hit them so hard that they become reluctant to pursue this war? Boycotting is useless. Even if we caused a 10% dip in sales, which would be phenomenally hard, I don't think we'd weaken their fanatical commitment to protect their privileged state. Complaining to the aggressors is also useless. We are not going to open their eyes to anything - they understand the nature of this war quite clearly. So don't bother sending that carefully crafted email to the RIAA. So what can we do? One thing that occurs to me is to bring this war home to the aggressors who are fighting it. We are being attacked by individual human beings, like Jack Valenti, Hilary Rosen, Leonard Chariglione, and an anonymous band of mercenaries who help them. And this might be the key. What if we strip away that anonymity, study the individuals behind these attacks, and do everything legally allowed to place unpleasant pressure on them? An engineer who helps develop CPRM ought to be as much of an internet celebrity as Cantor and Siegel. I think that the IP cartel relies on the services of many intelligent individuals who do not want to be famous on the internet for their participation in such a scheme. This just scratches the surface. If we want to win this war, we must do something more than wait for the next assault.
I would think the answer is pretty obvious: because they did not invent it, and because it's standard. Standards are to Microsoft what garlic is to vampires.
It's not pathetic - it's true. OS's have a philosophy deeply ingrained, and that affects the OS users. I'm not saying you can't be clueful on Windows or clueluess on Unix, but I will say that on usenet there is at least a mild correlation between luserish behavior and Windows. Every time you interact with an OS, it is silently teaching the values of the people who created it. Take an innocuous example from Windows is the tendency to refer to 'your computer'. As in, 'this will install FOO on your computer.' Obviously, if you are logged into (excuse me, onto) the computer, you must 'own' it, right? The idea that more than one person is affected by a system administration issue simply doesn't fit into this mindset. Windows is deeply, in it's bones, a PeeCee OS. It is completely built around the pre-network world. The windows user learns that it's normal to be a client. The windows world is permeated with the idea that servers are somehow special, expensive, rare. Windows NT charges extra for a 'server license'. Compaq and Dell make a lot of money selling huge beefy PC servers to NT-using customers. Although many people claim that NT is a resource hog, I also suspect a psychological motivation - NT admins have a need to visually differentiate their servers from PeeCees. I've notices that NT admins had a hard time accepting the fact that an old, cast-off PC became a linux 'server' that was suddenly 'important'. Not because they're against Linux, but because the natural order of things was reversed.
Interesting point, but I think the real cost of bandwidth is the cost of stringing copper/fiber from point a to point b. And within this cost, I'd guess that there's the relatively small (although actually huge) cost of telecom-style construction (poles, manholes, repeaters, etc) and the relatively large cost of dealing with political barriers. For example, how much do you think you'd have to pay to be allowed to install your own cable on all the telephone poles in a town? I'm guessing more than the entire value of the existing physical plant, because the ILEC and cable TV co. would lobby so hard against you. So I tend to think that the cost of routers on each end of the line is a trivial cost. Maybe some RF solution will save us.
It's really just a question of where they point the bytes, to a web server, or to a desktop in a barn in Iowa.
Not really. The web surfer downloads maybe 100k of html+image junk and sits there, not consuming bandwidth, for seconds or even minutes while reading. The napster-user keeps his link constantly saturated with the mix of upload and download. (For reasonably consumerish values of link.) So, time spent online is not the main issue; amount of bits moved to/from the internet is the issue.
The biggest barrier to consumer broadband has been the myth that you can get high-bandwidth, uncapped service for $40/month. Obviously, the people selling that myth were hoping that consumers would hardly use the bandwidth at all. When that turned out not to be true, profitability was threatened. Universities respond to this by trying to restrict the rights of their captive consumers. The crop of quotes in this article suggests that commercial ISP's, on the contrary, are seeing this as a legitimate usage that should be charged for. Ideally, I'd like to see them charge for transfer, rather than adopting a tiered scheme. But even the tiered scheme is a huge step in the right direction, away from the idea that "people who move lots of bits are troublemakers" towards the idea that "people who move lots of bits are our best customers". This could have two wonderful effects. First, mega-corporations might find that it's more profitable to sell consumers transport, and remain content-agnostic than it is to build proprietary lock-in schemes and badly admin'ed caching proxies. Second, of course, the US government tends to see only profit-making activities as legitimate. When the ISP's are profiting from p2p, they might serve as a counterbalance to the IP cartel that is currently 'educating' Congress on the evils of p2p. Anyhow, charging per GB transferred is by far the healthiest business model because it gives ISPs incentives to upgrade their bandwidth, since pipes now show up as revenue producers to the bean counters. Anyone who sells 'bandwidth', on the other hand, is incentivized to minimize the customer's use of that bandwidth, whether by outages, restrictive AUP's, or other hassles.
When I need or want your product, I'll research it. Until then, leave me alone.
This seems to be the majority attitude on the web, and yet sellers have mostly refused to hear it. If they did hear it, they'd create informative web sites that look good to search engines. Instead, they create hollow, shiny brochure-ware and then pay to advertise it. It's amazing how far they are from understanding customers. For example, if I walk into a store, the product is typically displayed all around me. The merchant assumed that people walking into the store were likely to be customers, not potential investors or employees or reporters. But go to a typical commercial web page and 'products' is only one tiny link off the front page, which is mostly devoted to press releases. Why do merchants make the assumption that they are the hunters and customers are prey, when real-world merchants understand that customers are the hunters and merchants are prey? I don't get it.
They're not stupid. They'll make it so the fridge is essentially useless without a functioning display. For example, 'Windows Refrigerator (SM) has detected that your temperature setting is too cold. Resetting temperature to 58 degrees F. [OK] [Cancel]" Meanwhile the compressor doesn't work until you click one of those two buttons.
Can you image a book that had a paragraph on each page automatically morph into an advertisement?
I can. Have you patented this idea yet? The 'e-book movement' is all about the IP cartel assuming this level of control over reading. Let's go one step further: Can you imagine someone being locked in prison for helping you shut off the paragraph-morphing feature of your e-book? I can.
I agree. Flashier ads won't help. Text ads are the way to go. The only ads I've clicked on in over two years were some 'adwords' on google. However, I will probably not click on those things again. Why? Because although the ads were inoffensive, properly targeted, and logical, the pages they linked to were bloated, content-free crap that took so long to download I gave up in each case. So I think the successful strategy would be google adwords + google-hosted, google-designed pages that actually make a coherent offer. Ads continue to suck because they are marketing fluff that would only appeal to an idiot. What would an effective ad be? An offer to sell a well-known product cheaper than it's available anywhere else. An offer of a niche product or service that meets my needs and that I didn't know existed. In case that's not crystal clear, an offer is a sequence of words that essentially says, "If you give me X, I'll give you Y." Images might be useful as illustrations, but they don't go to the core of the offer. This is why web ads continue to suck. Imagine a salesman who wants to sell mainframe computers to Acme corporation. He finally gets a 15 appointment with Acme's CIO. He shows up in a clown suit, does a little dance, looses his pet monkey who smashes everything in the office, and ends by throwing a cream pie in the CIO's face. Has he made a big impression? Yes. Will he sell anything? No. This is exactly what web ads do - they throw away a golden opportunity to tell potential customers why they should buy a product, choosing instead to entertain or irritate with distracting gimmicks.
the police presence is rather overwhelming (I live in San Jose).
Yeah, its absolutely insane how many cops are out on Fri/Sat nights. Especially in front of the-club-formerly-known-as-FX. Is this level of police presence really justified by anything, or does the city just have too much money? Also, why does SJ have so few night clubs that they all have insane lines?
So if the software vendor now gets to turn the consumer into a zombie who must do his bidding, why not take advantage of this in a new GNU license? "By using this software, you agree that any software you have previously written is released under the GPL or the GNUcita license."
That would be true if UCITA were a proposed federal law. But it's not. It's model legislation for state legislatures to adopt (or not adopt) thereby exercising their valued states' rights.
First of all, Nigam is probably a fictitious name invented by the MPAA's attorney's. If he's real, he's probably a hapless intern or paralegal whose name they stuck in their Perl script that auto-generates these letters. That way the 'under penalty of perjury' bits won't hurt a real lawyer. Did I say Perl? Visual Basic for these lamers. Second, MPAA23@pacbell.net is obviously a throwaway account. The MPAA sees the people hosting DeCSS as dangerous, unscrupulous characters and wants to keep them at arm's length. If you want real emails, they're probably at mpaa.org and at proskauer.com. Now, if you were a real jerk, you'd exploit an open relay to start sending forged takedown letters from Mr. Nigam to lots of ISP's regarding lots of web sites. I don't recommend this. Anyhow, if you really want to put sand in these people's gearboxes, start by realizing that they are not like you! They don't live on the internet. Email is not important to them. They live in the world of cell phones and fax machines. Now if everyone could fax them a bannerized version of DeCSS - oh never mind.
Re:Don't get me wrong, I love this stuff, BUT...
on
The DeCSS Haiku
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· Score: 2
However, you're missing an important point. Many people are willing to accept suppression of source code because they do not see it as speech. The average reporter is techno-illiterate and sees DeCSS as a bunch of greasy machine parts used by vandals. However, the average reporter would be outraged if the MPAA were silencing speech critical of itself. Touretsky's various translations of DeCSS help bring source code into the realm of speech. The US establishment (media/congress/judges) is very supportive of people's fundamental rights. When they fail to protect those rights, it's frequently because they don't understand the situation. If the MPAA manages to suppress all of Touretsky's expression, this will help make the case interesting to the establishment.
There's also the possibility that the stresses of the job shape the person. And as for the 'homicidal' rant of this one officer, have you ever heard a sysadmin say he wants to throw the Sexchange server out the window or something? A Catholic police officer once told me that he wished the Crusades would come back, and that he'd like to give his life fighting for Christianity. Now, this statement could raise a few eyebrows in today's culture, but I think what he was really expressing was a wish for a straightforward battle where the enemy is well defined. This would be quite a relief from the reality of police work.
Well if Sealand were really working, that threat would be pretty remote. Sealand was intended to have multiple feeds from different providers. In addition, Sealand claims to be a sovereign country, a claim which has been accepted and rejected at different times by the British courts. They at least have a leg to stand on in defending their bandwidth. Unfortunately, I haven't heard much about Sealand in the past year.
It really bothers me that the judge pretends to see a difference between Sony and Napster, when really he just disagrees with the Sony decision. "...actual, specific knowledge of direct infringement..." - what junk! You think Sony didn't know that VCR's were being used for 'infringement'?
I agree. Unfortunately, that opinion seems to be a controversial one. I guess nobody likes to hear criticism of something he values. UF has its heart in the right place, and the jokes can be quite accurate. And yet, for some reason I just don't find it funny. Dilbert is good. Maybe it's as if different people are tuned to different frequencies, and each comic is a transmitter.
I think it's a great idea. It would help bridge the cognitive gap between the complex world of content-control and the simple perceptions of consumers. However, I think it will be very hard to persuade the first few manufacturers.
I think that everyone would agree that the content creator should have the last word over how his content should be used.
OK, kosipov, as the content creator of this post I hereby instruct you on how my content should be used: Print this post on 8.5x11 or A4 sized paper, crumple it up and swallow it. No water allowed.
I was really offended by that quote. Why should there be any compromise at all? Why shouldn't the customer, who's paying for the equipment, get what he wants? How did these so-called content providers become worthy of consideration in a transaction which does not involve them?
Slashdot Mirror
It might be better to throw pies, like the entarteurs (sp?) who pied Gates. If they had shot Gates, I think most of us would feel only horror at their actions. But by covering his face in pie they achieved widespread publicity without physically harming Gates.
I'm not a communist; I believe in free markets and private ownership of property. But I do not believe in intellectual property. My view is an increasingly prevalent one on the internet. You seem to disagree with it, but please don't claim that my view doesn't exist.
Correct under the current copyright laws. Since copyright is a completely artificial construct, why not extend those laws to prohibit all copying of a copyrighted work? That is clearly what the intellectual property cartel wants, whether they achieve it by legal or technical means. If such a law were passed, would your anti-copy protection sentiment extend to anti-copyright sentiment?
The people driving these changes are not naive, and they are not going to promote a 'secure architecture' which can be defeated by flashing the BIOS. From the TCPA FAQ:
The FAQ is pretty mealy-mouthed about what they're really up to. The least useless document I found on the site was TCPS05 - Integrity Metrics & Authenticated Boot (pdf) - a bloated, powerpoint-derived pdf that could be summed up in 4k of text.
Anyhow, you ask for evidence that the 'Generic' ATA proposal is CPRM in sheep's clothing. I think that the big piece of circumstantial evidence is the fact that the proposal surfaced so recently after CPRM was killed. Maybe T13 is a dynamic, fast-moving group that fields a major technical proposal every day, but I somehow got the impression that they're a slow-moving tortoise which cranked out CPRM over an extended period.
If that impression is correct, then the timing is suspicious.
In recent months, Slashdot has been flooded with stories of anti-freedom initiatives like CPRM. Various people leap into action and try to beat these monstrosities back. Sometimes they win; sometimes they lose. Increasingly, when the battlefield is a court, the good guys lose.
The obvious pattern is that these aggressors are never at risk while they attack us. They don't risk their freedom or property or prosperity while they fight to censor and ultimately to jail the free citizens. Therefore they become bolder with each attempt. At this rate, it doesn't matter if they win or lose a particular battle, because even when they lose they don't really lose anything.
How can we fight back in a way that really hurts them? How can we hit them so hard that they become reluctant to pursue this war?
Boycotting is useless. Even if we caused a 10% dip in sales, which would be phenomenally hard, I don't think we'd weaken their fanatical commitment to protect their privileged state.
Complaining to the aggressors is also useless. We are not going to open their eyes to anything - they understand the nature of this war quite clearly. So don't bother sending that carefully crafted email to the RIAA.
So what can we do? One thing that occurs to me is to bring this war home to the aggressors who are fighting it. We are being attacked by individual human beings, like Jack Valenti, Hilary Rosen, Leonard Chariglione, and an anonymous band of mercenaries who help them. And this might be the key. What if we strip away that anonymity, study the individuals behind these attacks, and do everything legally allowed to place unpleasant pressure on them?
An engineer who helps develop CPRM ought to be as much of an internet celebrity as Cantor and Siegel.
I think that the IP cartel relies on the services of many intelligent individuals who do not want to be famous on the internet for their participation in such a scheme.
This just scratches the surface. If we want to win this war, we must do something more than wait for the next assault.
I would think the answer is pretty obvious: because they did not invent it, and because it's standard. Standards are to Microsoft what garlic is to vampires.
It's not pathetic - it's true. OS's have a philosophy deeply ingrained, and that affects the OS users. I'm not saying you can't be clueful on Windows or clueluess on Unix, but I will say that on usenet there is at least a mild correlation between luserish behavior and Windows.
Every time you interact with an OS, it is silently teaching the values of the people who created it. Take an innocuous example from Windows is the tendency to refer to 'your computer'. As in, 'this will install FOO on your computer.' Obviously, if you are logged into (excuse me, onto) the computer, you must 'own' it, right? The idea that more than one person is affected by a system administration issue simply doesn't fit into this mindset.
Windows is deeply, in it's bones, a PeeCee OS. It is completely built around the pre-network world. The windows user learns that it's normal to be a client. The windows world is permeated with the idea that servers are somehow special, expensive, rare. Windows NT charges extra for a 'server license'. Compaq and Dell make a lot of money selling huge beefy PC servers to NT-using customers. Although many people claim that NT is a resource hog, I also suspect a psychological motivation - NT admins have a need to visually differentiate their servers from PeeCees. I've notices that NT admins had a hard time accepting the fact that an old, cast-off PC became a linux 'server' that was suddenly 'important'. Not because they're against Linux, but because the natural order of things was reversed.
Interesting point, but I think the real cost of bandwidth is the cost of stringing copper/fiber from point a to point b. And within this cost, I'd guess that there's the relatively small (although actually huge) cost of telecom-style construction (poles, manholes, repeaters, etc) and the relatively large cost of dealing with political barriers. For example, how much do you think you'd have to pay to be allowed to install your own cable on all the telephone poles in a town? I'm guessing more than the entire value of the existing physical plant, because the ILEC and cable TV co. would lobby so hard against you.
So I tend to think that the cost of routers on each end of the line is a trivial cost. Maybe some RF solution will save us.
Not really. The web surfer downloads maybe 100k of html+image junk and sits there, not consuming bandwidth, for seconds or even minutes while reading. The napster-user keeps his link constantly saturated with the mix of upload and download. (For reasonably consumerish values of link.)
So, time spent online is not the main issue; amount of bits moved to/from the internet is the issue.
The biggest barrier to consumer broadband has been the myth that you can get high-bandwidth, uncapped service for $40/month. Obviously, the people selling that myth were hoping that consumers would hardly use the bandwidth at all. When that turned out not to be true, profitability was threatened. Universities respond to this by trying to restrict the rights of their captive consumers. The crop of quotes in this article suggests that commercial ISP's, on the contrary, are seeing this as a legitimate usage that should be charged for. Ideally, I'd like to see them charge for transfer, rather than adopting a tiered scheme. But even the tiered scheme is a huge step in the right direction, away from the idea that "people who move lots of bits are troublemakers" towards the idea that "people who move lots of bits are our best customers".
This could have two wonderful effects. First, mega-corporations might find that it's more profitable to sell consumers transport, and remain content-agnostic than it is to build proprietary lock-in schemes and badly admin'ed caching proxies.
Second, of course, the US government tends to see only profit-making activities as legitimate. When the ISP's are profiting from p2p, they might serve as a counterbalance to the IP cartel that is currently 'educating' Congress on the evils of p2p.
Anyhow, charging per GB transferred is by far the healthiest business model because it gives ISPs incentives to upgrade their bandwidth, since pipes now show up as revenue producers to the bean counters. Anyone who sells 'bandwidth', on the other hand, is incentivized to minimize the customer's use of that bandwidth, whether by outages, restrictive AUP's, or other hassles.
This seems to be the majority attitude on the web, and yet sellers have mostly refused to hear it. If they did hear it, they'd create informative web sites that look good to search engines. Instead, they create hollow, shiny brochure-ware and then pay to advertise it. It's amazing how far they are from understanding customers.
For example, if I walk into a store, the product is typically displayed all around me. The merchant assumed that people walking into the store were likely to be customers, not potential investors or employees or reporters. But go to a typical commercial web page and 'products' is only one tiny link off the front page, which is mostly devoted to press releases.
Why do merchants make the assumption that they are the hunters and customers are prey, when real-world merchants understand that customers are the hunters and merchants are prey? I don't get it.
They're not stupid. They'll make it so the fridge is essentially useless without a functioning display. For example, 'Windows Refrigerator (SM) has detected that your temperature setting is too cold. Resetting temperature to 58 degrees F. [OK] [Cancel]" Meanwhile the compressor doesn't work until you click one of those two buttons.
I can. Have you patented this idea yet? The 'e-book movement' is all about the IP cartel assuming this level of control over reading. Let's go one step further: Can you imagine someone being locked in prison for helping you shut off the paragraph-morphing feature of your e-book? I can.
I agree. Flashier ads won't help. Text ads are the way to go. The only ads I've clicked on in over two years were some 'adwords' on google. However, I will probably not click on those things again. Why? Because although the ads were inoffensive, properly targeted, and logical, the pages they linked to were bloated, content-free crap that took so long to download I gave up in each case. So I think the successful strategy would be google adwords + google-hosted, google-designed pages that actually make a coherent offer.
Ads continue to suck because they are marketing fluff that would only appeal to an idiot. What would an effective ad be? An offer to sell a well-known product cheaper than it's available anywhere else. An offer of a niche product or service that meets my needs and that I didn't know existed.
In case that's not crystal clear, an offer is a sequence of words that essentially says, "If you give me X, I'll give you Y." Images might be useful as illustrations, but they don't go to the core of the offer. This is why web ads continue to suck.
Imagine a salesman who wants to sell mainframe computers to Acme corporation. He finally gets a 15 appointment with Acme's CIO. He shows up in a clown suit, does a little dance, looses his pet monkey who smashes everything in the office, and ends by throwing a cream pie in the CIO's face.
Has he made a big impression? Yes. Will he sell anything? No.
This is exactly what web ads do - they throw away a golden opportunity to tell potential customers why they should buy a product, choosing instead to entertain or irritate with distracting gimmicks.
Yeah, its absolutely insane how many cops are out on Fri/Sat nights. Especially in front of the-club-formerly-known-as-FX. Is this level of police presence really justified by anything, or does the city just have too much money? Also, why does SJ have so few night clubs that they all have insane lines?
So if the software vendor now gets to turn the consumer into a zombie who must do his bidding, why not take advantage of this in a new GNU license?
"By using this software, you agree that any software you have previously written is released under the GPL or the GNUcita license."
That would be true if UCITA were a proposed federal law. But it's not. It's model legislation for state legislatures to adopt (or not adopt) thereby exercising their valued states' rights.
First of all, Nigam is probably a fictitious name invented by the MPAA's attorney's. If he's real, he's probably a hapless intern or paralegal whose name they stuck in their Perl script that auto-generates these letters. That way the 'under penalty of perjury' bits won't hurt a real lawyer. Did I say Perl? Visual Basic for these lamers.
Second, MPAA23@pacbell.net is obviously a throwaway account. The MPAA sees the people hosting DeCSS as dangerous, unscrupulous characters and wants to keep them at arm's length. If you want real emails, they're probably at mpaa.org and at proskauer.com. Now, if you were a real jerk, you'd exploit an open relay to start sending forged takedown letters from Mr. Nigam to lots of ISP's regarding lots of web sites. I don't recommend this.
Anyhow, if you really want to put sand in these people's gearboxes, start by realizing that they are not like you! They don't live on the internet. Email is not important to them. They live in the world of cell phones and fax machines. Now if everyone could fax them a bannerized version of DeCSS - oh never mind.
However, you're missing an important point. Many people are willing to accept suppression of source code because they do not see it as speech. The average reporter is techno-illiterate and sees DeCSS as a bunch of greasy machine parts used by vandals. However, the average reporter would be outraged if the MPAA were silencing speech critical of itself.
Touretsky's various translations of DeCSS help bring source code into the realm of speech.
The US establishment (media/congress/judges) is very supportive of people's fundamental rights. When they fail to protect those rights, it's frequently because they don't understand the situation. If the MPAA manages to suppress all of Touretsky's expression, this will help make the case interesting to the establishment.
There's also the possibility that the stresses of the job shape the person. And as for the 'homicidal' rant of this one officer, have you ever heard a sysadmin say he wants to throw the Sexchange server out the window or something?
A Catholic police officer once told me that he wished the Crusades would come back, and that he'd like to give his life fighting for Christianity. Now, this statement could raise a few eyebrows in today's culture, but I think what he was really expressing was a wish for a straightforward battle where the enemy is well defined. This would be quite a relief from the reality of police work.
Well if Sealand were really working, that threat would be pretty remote. Sealand was intended to have multiple feeds from different providers. In addition, Sealand claims to be a sovereign country, a claim which has been accepted and rejected at different times by the British courts. They at least have a leg to stand on in defending their bandwidth.
Unfortunately, I haven't heard much about Sealand in the past year.
It really bothers me that the judge pretends to see a difference between Sony and Napster, when really he just disagrees with the Sony decision. "...actual, specific knowledge of direct infringement..." - what junk! You think Sony didn't know that VCR's were being used for 'infringement'?
I agree. Unfortunately, that opinion seems to be a controversial one. I guess nobody likes to hear criticism of something he values. UF has its heart in the right place, and the jokes can be quite accurate. And yet, for some reason I just don't find it funny.
Dilbert is good. Maybe it's as if different people are tuned to different frequencies, and each comic is a transmitter.
I think it's a great idea. It would help bridge the cognitive gap between the complex world of content-control and the simple perceptions of consumers. However, I think it will be very hard to persuade the first few manufacturers.
OK, kosipov, as the content creator of this post I hereby instruct you on how my content should be used: Print this post on 8.5x11 or A4 sized paper, crumple it up and swallow it. No water allowed.
I was really offended by that quote. Why should there be any compromise at all? Why shouldn't the customer, who's paying for the equipment, get what he wants? How did these so-called content providers become worthy of consideration in a transaction which does not involve them?