There are some things that I prefer renting over buying, and movies are one of those things. With the exception of a few "classics", movies don't have enough replay value for me to justify paying more to buy them. Heck, if DVD's were as cheap as rental I wouldn't buy them because they would just be one more thing cluttering up the house.
However, the concept of rental clashes with the nature of the online and digital world. Everything that exists can be copied in exact form. You can't return data - you have a copy, not the original. The way I see it there are two options, the concept of rental can be preserved artificially with the introduction of DRM, or it can be abandoned in favor of purchases.
As a consumer I don't have a problem with the general idea of DRM on a rental - my fair use rights aren't being violated, because I don't have the right to backup, timeshift, or format shift rentals to begin with (unlike media I own, for which any DRM is intolerable). Where the problem occurs is the proprietary nature of DRM. At best, the rental DRM would be an "Open Standard" meaning anyone who pays RAND* patent fees and signs an NDA will be allowed to implement a device, and be given keys (specific to them) to decode the data. Then I could buy online rental devices or software from any number of manufactures, and it would be guaranteed to work with any number of online rental stores. This is similar to the legal workings of DVDs, Blueray, WMV. At the worst you have proprietary technologies, where each company has it's own format and player, like with Apple or DVIX (the first one). In both cases there will never be an open source player - the best we could hope for is something like the new Real Player that has an open source core with proprietary plug-ins. Even that is unlikely, as the movie industry is demanding end-to-end security (HDMI, Trusted Computing) which an open source operating system would not provide.
In the other option, the internet utopia dream was that the price of media would drop to the point of making rental unnecessary and removing the allure of piracy from the general public. The media industries are strongly opposed to this model of the future, and the only way it will ever happen is if independent media producers embrace it with success, and eventually put the current media companies out of business. This is also unlikely given the weight that the media companies have in government. Therfore, media purchases will also be hindered with DRM for the conceivable future, and will continue to be priced at traditional rates.
So given DRM on rental verses DRM on purchase, I definitely prefer the previous, but there is another potential risk with DRM rental and it is a biggy. The media companies have shown themselves very fond of the idea of DRM rental, as seen with Napster. They like the model where people don't own copies of media, but instead just subscribe to services that provide them. If too many people embrace these services, we could end up in a situation where everything is locked up. We continue to hear stories about how the original archive copies of important cultural media is being lost due to the extreme length of copyright, and the mismanagement of the copyright holders (Dr Who, classic films). But in most of those cases, at least lower quality copies exist in the form of consumer media. However, if we can no longer record broadcast media, and there are no purchased copies of media, the copyright holders will be the only ones capable of preserving the records of our popular culture. Time and time again they show themselves inept at doing so.
Anyway, I plan on sticking to buying CD's and renting locally for as long as those options exist, and continue to support those independent producers who treat their customers with respect. I'll keep trying to inform my representatives about the issues. But I'm not optimistic. We'll see what happens.
* For the uninitiated: RAND = Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory NDA = Non-Disclosure Agreement
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) An enormous amount of spam will initially go undetected before your idea is effective ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (x) Your idea proposes a solution that only large corporations could deploy ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (x) The large amount of resources needed for implementation of your idea that small companies don't have ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored (x) Your solution is nothing more than a conceptual remanifestation of a solution that already exists ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) I think it is a creative concept, but there is no need to reinvent the wheel. ( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I was actually giving this some thought the other day and perhaps firefox should use one of the C++ garbage collecting libraries. A webbrowser really just needs to be usable and low on memory, no crtical speed requirements as long as the UI is responsive, websites render quickly, and javascript interprets at decent speeds (none of which a garbage collector would slow down). Firefox developers could still focus on keeping the memory footprint down, but applying a garbage collector is a good solution because its unlikely they'll ever remove every memory leak. This would remove most of them, help detect others, and keep the remaining problems minimal.
Firefox is yet another OSS victory!
on
World Firefox Day
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
Netscape was good, or at lest the best of the day. It ran on every obscure platform under the sun. It was like java before even java. Runs and is able to be debugged and crashed everywhere.
I've heard from Netscape developers that the highlight was when they realized they were _the_ browser for the web, and they were seeing web addresses (complete with the http:/// part on them) on the side of trucks and all that. I also heard that the secretary is quite wealthy now due to stock options, the whole nine yards.
Well, they stagnated. And IE came and IMNSHO, ruined the web experience in the late 90s to early 00s. And during that time Netscape released their code into the Mozilla project. It then got worse. AOL bought Netscape, and Netscape is just a memory.
But then, guess what happened?
Because of the open code and open standards, we got the web back! My browser of choice is Safari. I really like it. It does almost 100% of what I think a browser should do. And it too is based on open standards and OSS (KHTML), and Apple has given patches back to the KHTML people.
And then Mozilla grew into Firefox, and things are getting better on the web again. I recently ran into two websites that required IE. One was for my taxes, and I told them that sure this time I can use IE on the Mac, but IE on the Mac is dead and if they want my business, they need to support standards. At work, there is one system that requires IE _on windows_, and we had to get a new computer, with windows just to view one website, and I had a word or two with them. And guess what? They told me that they are now targeting Firefox as the target browser, and for that to be cross platform.
Hey, as sucky as IE was, it did help the scene a little bit. It focused the other guys to care about security and for standards compliance, and today I have a number of good choices for browsing the web on a number of platforms, and its getting better every day.
So what happens to the RFID when it goes through a dozen X-Ray scans? How about just sitting in my pocket at 35k ft? Have these chips been tested to show that they will continue to work after normal wear of a passport? My passport certainly takes a beating everytime I travel: x-rays, increased radiation due to high elevation, bending, humidity, etc. I doubt all these things have been tested for.
I really don't want to have to wait and hour and miss my flight as the prove that I am who my passport says I am just because some stupid chip failed.
In case anyone doesn't know. The ReactOS project works closely with WINE. They are implementing the API from WINE on a replica of the Windows 2000 kernel.
This means that both Windows drivers and applications will work natively without any changes. They seem to have come on leaps and bounds in the past year with many applications working straight away (OpenOffice, Abiword, mIRC, Unreal Tournament, InfranView, PuTTY as some). Once they start implementing some of the security features then there will be another viable alternative.
In the future I can imagine ReactOS coming on a CD with OpenOffice, Apache etc, much like Linux distributions do, which creates an easy migration path:
Windows + Apps -> Windows + OSS Apps -> ReactOS + OSS Apps then then off to a Linux or *BSD varient if you want.
And as a result of all it's cost cutting and cut-throat business tactics, Dell may eventually implode under itself. I'm not saying it will happen overnight, but like many here on Slashdot, I work "in the industry." I work for a small computer sales/service retailer, and over the past 2-3 years I've experienced a sharp increase in the number of Dell computers coming in for service, relative to the number of other brands. Granted, many were for virus/spyware infections, and the large number may be more because of larger market share. Beyond viruses though, I have seen more than enough Dell components fail, particularly the lower end/bargain models, both Desktops and Laptops. Ordinarily that wouldn't bother me, but I've heard from customers how bad Dell support is now, with the call centers moved offshore. I've had to fix Dell computers still covered under warranty because the owners got so fed up with trying to get help from the support lines.
A number of years ago, Dell built it's business up on quality parts and service- winning numerous awards for customer service, and were recommended all around. The beige box Dells in particular, which went for over $1500, were pretty solid machines. Back when profit margins were high enough to cover the costs of quality support. Now the conditions of the market have changed, and Dell has to trim the fat off what's already become an anorexic business model to stay competative. People who once came in to my shop swearing by Dell now swear AT Dell, and promise to never buy anything Dell again, after their 6 month old Inspiron 1150's LCD inverter burnt out, and Dell refused to replace it, even though it had a year warranty. Despite numerous calls, all the call center would say is insert the recovery CD and reinstall the operating system.
Bottom line- Dell became the bohemoth it is now based on reputation of quality machines. Take the quality out, and they are just another retailer. They still enjoy brand recognition, and the higher end systems aren't too bad. But they grow marketshare by offering $299 PCs, and $699 laptops to anyone who thinks any Dell is a good Dell, even if on the cheap (without understanding that You Get What You Pay For). As a result, it's userbase will slowly erode away.
I must say that there should be a clean, concise list of security flaws that should never appear within a web browser, and each browser should be forced to undergo testing against that list before being released.
To have such fundamental flaws appear, whether by accident or negligence, is unacceptable.
Furthermore, the browser "industry" and the commercial sector NEED to come up with some guidelines as to how to promote and ensure online security for financial transactions and personal data.
For example, it's almost impossible for the casual or sophisticated user to easily determine whether a frame that appears within a website actually belongs to that website, or another. For example, if you have an online account with MBNA credit card, and make an online purchase, some vendors will display an MBNA authentication page which asks you to login to your online account to verify the purchase.
The problem is that this authentication page appears as a frame within the online vendor. How can you tell whether that frame is a legitimate MBNA page, or just a clever phishing attack? The browser gives no indication as to whether the frame belongs to MBNA or the vendor.
PayPal suffers from the same thing. I hate clicking on the "Make a Donation" button of some sites, and then seeing the PayPal login appear within a frame of the original site. That prevents me from making a donation - with today's complicated scripting invocations and what not, I don't feel trusting enough to type my account info and password into some frame which happens to appear in the middle of some other organization's website.
I can't BELIEVE that MBNA and PayPal would promote such idiotic practices, much less allow them to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some things that I prefer renting over buying, and movies are one of those things. With the exception of a few "classics", movies don't have enough replay value for me to justify paying more to buy them. Heck, if DVD's were as cheap as rental I wouldn't buy them because they would just be one more thing cluttering up the house.
However, the concept of rental clashes with the nature of the online and digital world. Everything that exists can be copied in exact form. You can't return data - you have a copy, not the original. The way I see it there are two options, the concept of rental can be preserved artificially with the introduction of DRM, or it can be abandoned in favor of purchases.
As a consumer I don't have a problem with the general idea of DRM on a rental - my fair use rights aren't being violated, because I don't have the right to backup, timeshift, or format shift rentals to begin with (unlike media I own, for which any DRM is intolerable). Where the problem occurs is the proprietary nature of DRM. At best, the rental DRM would be an "Open Standard" meaning anyone who pays RAND* patent fees and signs an NDA will be allowed to implement a device, and be given keys (specific to them) to decode the data. Then I could buy online rental devices or software from any number of manufactures, and it would be guaranteed to work with any number of online rental stores. This is similar to the legal workings of DVDs, Blueray, WMV. At the worst you have proprietary technologies, where each company has it's own format and player, like with Apple or DVIX (the first one). In both cases there will never be an open source player - the best we could hope for is something like the new Real Player that has an open source core with proprietary plug-ins. Even that is unlikely, as the movie industry is demanding end-to-end security (HDMI, Trusted Computing) which an open source operating system would not provide.
In the other option, the internet utopia dream was that the price of media would drop to the point of making rental unnecessary and removing the allure of piracy from the general public. The media industries are strongly opposed to this model of the future, and the only way it will ever happen is if independent media producers embrace it with success, and eventually put the current media companies out of business. This is also unlikely given the weight that the media companies have in government. Therfore, media purchases will also be hindered with DRM for the conceivable future, and will continue to be priced at traditional rates.
So given DRM on rental verses DRM on purchase, I definitely prefer the previous, but there is another potential risk with DRM rental and it is a biggy. The media companies have shown themselves very fond of the idea of DRM rental, as seen with Napster. They like the model where people don't own copies of media, but instead just subscribe to services that provide them. If too many people embrace these services, we could end up in a situation where everything is locked up. We continue to hear stories about how the original archive copies of important cultural media is being lost due to the extreme length of copyright, and the mismanagement of the copyright holders (Dr Who, classic films). But in most of those cases, at least lower quality copies exist in the form of consumer media. However, if we can no longer record broadcast media, and there are no purchased copies of media, the copyright holders will be the only ones capable of preserving the records of our popular culture. Time and time again they show themselves inept at doing so.
Anyway, I plan on sticking to buying CD's and renting locally for as long as those options exist, and continue to support those independent producers who treat their customers with respect. I'll keep trying to inform my representatives about the issues. But I'm not optimistic. We'll see what happens.
* For the uninitiated:
RAND = Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory
NDA = Non-Disclosure Agreement
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) An enormous amount of spam will initially go undetected before your idea is effective
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Your idea proposes a solution that only large corporations could deploy
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) The large amount of resources needed for implementation of your idea that small companies don't have
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(x) Your solution is nothing more than a conceptual remanifestation of a solution that already exists
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) I think it is a creative concept, but there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I was actually giving this some thought the other day and perhaps firefox should use one of the C++ garbage collecting libraries. A webbrowser really just needs to be usable and low on memory, no crtical speed requirements as long as the UI is responsive, websites render quickly, and javascript interprets at decent speeds (none of which a garbage collector would slow down). Firefox developers could still focus on keeping the memory footprint down, but applying a garbage collector is a good solution because its unlikely they'll ever remove every memory leak. This would remove most of them, help detect others, and keep the remaining problems minimal.
Netscape was good, or at lest the best of the day. It ran on every obscure platform under the sun. It was like java before even java. Runs and is able to be debugged and crashed everywhere.
I've heard from Netscape developers that the highlight was when they realized they were _the_ browser for the web, and they were seeing web addresses (complete with the http:/// part on them) on the side of trucks and all that. I also heard that the secretary is quite wealthy now due to stock options, the whole nine yards.
Well, they stagnated. And IE came and IMNSHO, ruined the web experience in the late 90s to early 00s. And during that time Netscape released their code into the Mozilla project. It then got worse. AOL bought Netscape, and Netscape is just a memory.
But then, guess what happened?
Because of the open code and open standards, we got the web back! My browser of choice is Safari. I really like it. It does almost 100% of what I think a browser should do. And it too is based on open standards and OSS (KHTML), and Apple has given patches back to the KHTML people.
And then Mozilla grew into Firefox, and things are getting better on the web again. I recently ran into two websites that required IE. One was for my taxes, and I told them that sure this time I can use IE on the Mac, but IE on the Mac is dead and if they want my business, they need to support standards. At work, there is one system that requires IE _on windows_, and we had to get a new computer, with windows just to view one website, and I had a word or two with them. And guess what? They told me that they are now targeting Firefox as the target browser, and for that to be cross platform.
Hey, as sucky as IE was, it did help the scene a little bit. It focused the other guys to care about security and for standards compliance, and today I have a number of good choices for browsing the web on a number of platforms, and its getting better every day.
Thank you Mozilla team, and thank you Microsoft.
So what happens to the RFID when it goes through a dozen X-Ray scans? How about just sitting in my pocket at 35k ft? Have these chips been tested to show that they will continue to work after normal wear of a passport? My passport certainly takes a beating everytime I travel: x-rays, increased radiation due to high elevation, bending, humidity, etc. I doubt all these things have been tested for.
I really don't want to have to wait and hour and miss my flight as the prove that I am who my passport says I am just because some stupid chip failed.
In case anyone doesn't know. The ReactOS project works closely with WINE. They are implementing the API from WINE on a replica of the Windows 2000 kernel.
This means that both Windows drivers and applications will work natively without any changes. They seem to have come on leaps and bounds in the past year with many applications working straight away (OpenOffice, Abiword, mIRC, Unreal Tournament, InfranView, PuTTY as some). Once they start implementing some of the security features then there will be another viable alternative.
In the future I can imagine ReactOS coming on a CD with OpenOffice, Apache etc, much like Linux distributions do, which creates an easy migration path:
Windows + Apps -> Windows + OSS Apps -> ReactOS + OSS Apps then then off to a Linux or *BSD varient if you want.
And as a result of all it's cost cutting and cut-throat business tactics, Dell may eventually implode under itself. I'm not saying it will happen overnight, but like many here on Slashdot, I work "in the industry." I work for a small computer sales/service retailer, and over the past 2-3 years I've experienced a sharp increase in the number of Dell computers coming in for service, relative to the number of other brands. Granted, many were for virus/spyware infections, and the large number may be more because of larger market share. Beyond viruses though, I have seen more than enough Dell components fail, particularly the lower end/bargain models, both Desktops and Laptops. Ordinarily that wouldn't bother me, but I've heard from customers how bad Dell support is now, with the call centers moved offshore. I've had to fix Dell computers still covered under warranty because the owners got so fed up with trying to get help from the support lines.
A number of years ago, Dell built it's business up on quality parts and service- winning numerous awards for customer service, and were recommended all around. The beige box Dells in particular, which went for over $1500, were pretty solid machines. Back when profit margins were high enough to cover the costs of quality support. Now the conditions of the market have changed, and Dell has to trim the fat off what's already become an anorexic business model to stay competative. People who once came in to my shop swearing by Dell now swear AT Dell, and promise to never buy anything Dell again, after their 6 month old Inspiron 1150's LCD inverter burnt out, and Dell refused to replace it, even though it had a year warranty. Despite numerous calls, all the call center would say is insert the recovery CD and reinstall the operating system.
Bottom line- Dell became the bohemoth it is now based on reputation of quality machines. Take the quality out, and they are just another retailer. They still enjoy brand recognition, and the higher end systems aren't too bad. But they grow marketshare by offering $299 PCs, and $699 laptops to anyone who thinks any Dell is a good Dell, even if on the cheap (without understanding that You Get What You Pay For). As a result, it's userbase will slowly erode away.
I must say that there should be a clean, concise list of security flaws that should never appear within a web browser, and each browser should be forced to undergo testing against that list before being released. To have such fundamental flaws appear, whether by accident or negligence, is unacceptable. Furthermore, the browser "industry" and the commercial sector NEED to come up with some guidelines as to how to promote and ensure online security for financial transactions and personal data. For example, it's almost impossible for the casual or sophisticated user to easily determine whether a frame that appears within a website actually belongs to that website, or another. For example, if you have an online account with MBNA credit card, and make an online purchase, some vendors will display an MBNA authentication page which asks you to login to your online account to verify the purchase. The problem is that this authentication page appears as a frame within the online vendor. How can you tell whether that frame is a legitimate MBNA page, or just a clever phishing attack? The browser gives no indication as to whether the frame belongs to MBNA or the vendor. PayPal suffers from the same thing. I hate clicking on the "Make a Donation" button of some sites, and then seeing the PayPal login appear within a frame of the original site. That prevents me from making a donation - with today's complicated scripting invocations and what not, I don't feel trusting enough to type my account info and password into some frame which happens to appear in the middle of some other organization's website. I can't BELIEVE that MBNA and PayPal would promote such idiotic practices, much less allow them to happen.