What the hell are you talking about?

DTV is completely and entirely free of DRM. We defeated the broadcast flag, remember?

The analog switch-off is a change from unencrypted free-to-air analog programming to unencrypted free-to-air digital programming. There may be some problems with the transition, but they don't have a damn thing to do with DRM.

I expected better of BoingBoing than to try to tie the issue of DRM to the analog switch-off. The world has gone digital, it's about time television did too.

People who enjoy this would also probably like Applindia by The Beatgeek (a mixing of hip hop, Appalachian folk music, and traditional Indian music) and Porch by Buck 65 (purely acoustic versions of his songs, including a mash-up of his song Wicked and Weird with Coo-coo Bird). Unfortunately, both of these are pretty tough to find, but I thought that I'd plug them anyway, since they're both done by talented struggling underground hip hoppers, and both excellent.

From the pictures, it's clear that there are two wire loops which serve as quad antennas. You could likely make the card not usable by breaking the antenna wires. You should be sure not to do it in the middle (which would be the opposite corner from the chip), since that could just make it into a double dipole antenna of appropriate size. However, if you chose a random spot along the rim of the card and snipped it, then you'd likely make the antennas nearly useless.

@10

Even that wouldn't be enough. Knowing how things work is not enough alone. You need the actual keys. Knowing how the local software works (having it open sourced) would allow you to extract the keys from it, but having the server source would only allow you to get the keys if it allowed you to figure out a way to hack it.

According to the article, they didn't just ignore the son-in-law when he said that the drugs and gun were his, they threatened him with perjury charges if he kept saying that they were his. Even when the gun was shown to belong to his mother, they still didn't believe him. They also never charged him with anything. So you can't even really call it a legit bust when the person who was dealing was never charged and the people who weren't dealing were prosecuted.

There's a book store in Raleigh, NC called Reader's Corner whose whole outside front wall is covered with book shelves filled with books for sale on the honor system. They tend to mostly keep the cheaper ones with little or no resale value there and the more expensive ones inside, but still, it's pretty nice. You can see it on Google street view if you want.

Even more impressive to me is the Peanuts and Corn record label's honor system mp3 store. Rather than set up a complicated system with limited access to downloads or some such, they simply put the download link up and then you're on your honor to pay for them. I admire it for several reasons:

Anyway, I'd urge people who like quality hip-hop to support them. The record label is basically just Mcenroe's means of making albums he produces available. Thus far only some of them are also available as mp3s, but hopefully that will increase over time.

Funny, just before I read this, I finished watching some episodes of Sam & Max: Freelance Police, including one in which they fight a giant robot baby.

I'm pretty sure that the security camera is real. If you look at the flicker photos, you'll see that the camera's shadow is different (different time of day) and that the bird isn't there in the other photo. So either it's a real camera or someone is retouching their photos in odd ways.

I assume that "crowdripping" is meant to be parsed as "crowd-ripping", but first read I thought you were saying "crow-dripping" and I had no idea what you meant. I figured it out, but it can be sort of tough to get the reading part of my brain to retokenize a word. I think that it's sometimes good to keep in mind that English is not an agglutinating language.

As previous posters have pointed out, this is not about transitivity. Transitivity is when A (rel) B and B (rel) C implies A (rel) C. In this case, (rel) would be trust. So when we're talking about transitive trust, that would be: Alice trusts Bob, Bob trusts Carol, does that mean that Alice trusts Carol?

On the other hand, there is no way to substitute "Us" "Pilots" "trust to fly planes" and "trust to carry guns" into the above. We trust pilots to fly planes. This would suggest A=We, B=Pilots, and (rel)=trust to fly planes. But then there's no way to do the B (rel) C part, since that would be "Pilots trust ?? to fly planes". Obviously we can't put "trust to carry guns" into that sentence sensibly ("Pilots trust guns to fly planes","Pilots trust their trust in guns to fly planes"?).

Instead, what we have here are two relations. So really what we're saying is that A (rel1) B does not imply A (rel2) B. In this case, We trust pilots to fly planes does not imply we trust pilots to carry guns. A=us, B=pilots, (rel1)=trust to fly planes, (rel2)=trust to carry guns. So really, the point which is being made is that (rel1) != (rel2), i.e. trust is domain-specific, and the existence of one type of trust relationship does not imply the existence of another type of trust relationship. This is a good point and less obvious than it seems in this framework, since people do often expect trust to be domain-specific, however, it is not transitivity.

Trust should definitely be considered domain-specific. Trusting your friend to keep your secret should not imply trusting you friend to do heart surgery.

A minister who spoke to our congregation recently described trust as having three components: caring, commitment, and competency. Caring is how much the other person cares about you. Commitment is how committed they are to your well being. And competency is how able you believe they are. Caring and commitment are not necessarily domain-specific, but competency clearly is.

HDCP's stated purpose is not to prevent playback on certain TV's. Rather, its purpose is to prevent videos from being sent digitally to devices which could record the digital signal. It's intended to guarantee that only televisions can receive the unencrypted signal.

Of course, it doesn't serve this purpose because all that needs to occur is that the pirates need to get their hands on one HDCP chip and record its output. As a lot of TVs, including some very cheap ones these days, have HDCP chips in them, they aren't hard to get a hold of. So all it does in practice is prevent legitimate consumers from playing HD movies out through DVI connections to monitors whose manufacturers didn't or couldn't buy HDCP chips. That is to say, what it is achieving in practice is the purpose that Songe suggested it has.

Theoretically, the HDCP standards group could revoke the keys from the compromised HDCP chips, however, there is no mechanism for them to know which chips have been compromised.

At some point, someone will probably take the time to read up on the existing research and use this to actually completely break the encryption scheme of HDCP. It's a master key system whose master key can be extracted, allowing anyone who wants to to build chips which can decrypt HDCP. However, there's a bunch of work which would need to be done to break it in practice. Thus far, no one has actually done that. I got an inquiry from a mod-chip company who was looking at the possibility once, but they don't appear to have actually pursued this.

By the way, the example about rentals is spurious. This is an encryption of an uncompressed HD signal between the video source and the display. Recording 720p DVI, if you had a device which could record it, would require about 10Gigs per minute. So that 90 minute movie would take up most of a terabyte. That's some pretty serious storage. You could possibly throw out some information on the assumption that it's an 720p MPEG source and only store half of that, but that's still quite a bit. And that's only if you had some way to record it.

What a nice gift to the airlines.

Suspended is too light given the available evidence. This cop should be arrested and charged with assault and theft (unless he gave the skateboard back or gave the kid a receipt after the video ended).

The idea behind the phrase "a nation of laws" was that this nation would be a place where the law ruled over all people, where no one person was immune to it. This is the opposite of that. The cop is not enforcing the laws, he is bullying a 14-year-old kid and observing no laws in the process. The kids may have been committing a very low level misdemeanor by skating where it is prohibited, but assault and theft are much more serious crimes and should be treated as such whether or not they are perpetrated by cops or civilians. The cop clearly assaulted the kid. He should be arrested for it.

If a 200 pound kid had done that to a 100 pound cop, the kid would be in prison by now and likely to stay there for a long time.

As for people saying that the kids should have been more respectful of the cop: bullshit. The police are paid to serve the public, and it's their job to be respectful and polite to the public even in the worst circumstances. The cop was rude to the kids from the beginning and for no discernible reason. The kids were not rude at all. Talking to someone when they're screaming at you is not a form of rudeness. Several times the cop would scream something at the kid and then pause. Then the kid would politely respond, and then the cop would yell at him for "back talk". This is bullying behavior. The cop didn't want respect, he wanted the kid to kowtow to him. That's not respect, that's submission. They aren't the same thing at all.

Facts:
It is not illegal to talk back to cops.
It is not illegal to videotape cops.
In most states, orders from a police officer do not have to be obeyed unless you are being placed under arrest, the cops have a warrant, someone is in immediate danger, or the cops are ordering an unruly mob to disperse.
So, it is not illegal for the kid to not sit when the cop told him to or to talk when the cop told him to shut up.
It is illegal to assault someone.
It is illegal to threaten someone.
It is illegal for cops to detain you outside of certain specific circumstances.

People who take the cop's side will claim to be in favor of law and order, but really, they're against it because what they're arguing for is that the law shouldn't be enforced against cops, only civilians. They're not for law and order, they're simply for submission to authority. That's a nation of people, not a nation of laws.

Now, I dislike DRM as much as the next fellow, but this article is a little sensationalistic. If you read the FAQ, it does actually describe how to move your music from your current computer to a new one using their backup and restore functionality. It does still mean that users will likely lose access to their music, but probably not until such time as incompatibilities between the operating system and their software show up, likely due to newer operating systems.

Over the holidays in our flying we were asked to remove laptops and "video cameras" from our bags and place them in bins separate from the bag. Of course, these days, almost every digital camera and most telephones are technically video cameras, so maybe it was a case of someone dealing with uncertainty by covering their ass.

Why is his race relevant? Is "white rap" and new sub-genre or something? This also doesn't really seem like rap to me. Rap requires creating a rhythm with your voice. This is just a guy talking with some people singing.

Youtube may well be within their rights, but being within their rights is not sufficient make them right.

To begin with, they are owned by Google, who has famously claimed that they have not being evil as a goal. Since that is their stated goal, it is fair for us to discuss whether or not they are meeting it. Is hampering someone who is exposing police brutality evil? I am not certain, but it is pretty clearly not doing good.

I think that the real underlying problem here is the fallacy that suppressing media or discussion of some bad act will help it go away. The initial intention of policies which prevent videos with violence in them is to prevent the glamorization of violence. But once the idea is accepted that it is not just violence itself, but depictions of violence which are the problem, this leads to situations where the removal of depictions of violence can actually cause more violence to occur.

News organizations successfully apply logic to the problem and use their own judgment in an appropriate way. For instance, no one suggested that showing the beating of Rodney King would lead to more police brutality or that showing pictures from Abu Graib would lead to more torture. However, every website which accepts user-created video (even ones which accept adult content) explicitly bans videos depicting torture and many of them also ban violence. YouTube's community policy, for instance, says "If your video shows someone getting hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don't post it." This would, for instance, ban the several videos of cops tasering people which have sparked national discussion about the appropriate use of electronic weapons.

Web sites want to be able to draw a bright line about what is and is not acceptable because they are afraid that if they allow users to display videos which glamorize or sexualize torture or brutality that they could be blamed for encouraging torture or violence. But in their attempts to do so it is inevitable that they will sweep in videos whose attempt is to condemn torture or violence, and as such they wind up potentially contributing to the problem.

If all these policies were fully enforced then any torturer could know that no video taken of them would be likely to be able to be distributed. If all torturers and brutalizers knew that any video made of their actions would never be allowed to see the light of public scrutiny, it would certainly only serve to encourage them. Or, more accurately, it would fail to discourage them the way the threat of public scrutiny often can.

Keith

Joshua Schachter (father of del.icio.us and one of the people behind FOAF) has blogged about this sort of stuff some in the past year or so.

Specifically, his posts here and here seem pertinent.

Keith

I wonder if he means my uncle. My uncle is a liberal who lives in Escondito, CA and has had to evacuate his house. So maybe he's one of those "America haters" that Glenn Beck is talking about. Except, of course, that my uncle flew a helicopter in the Vietnam war and has a purple heart to show for it. So maybe Glenn Beck needs to keep his thoughts to himself. Does anyone have a good link to send complaints to CNN?

The "rule" of avoiding passive voice is not a general rule of writing. It is a rule of writing news. When writing news, it is usually a good idea to avoid using the passive voice because its use often indicates that you have failed to include information that would be relevant. A sentence like "The mayor's office fired five city workers today" is more informative than the sentence "Five city workers were fired today." Writing in the passive voice often serves as a crutch for writers who don't want to take the time to figure out who is doing what.

Part of what makes this story interesting is that the person is talking about writing news. However, in particular they're arguing that passive voice is a good idea in headlines, even if its use should be discouraged elsewhere in the news article.

There seems to be an increasing tendency to view copyright as having restrictions on uses which aren't enumerated in the copyright statute (i.e. things other than copying, sale, lease, creation of derivative work, and public performance). It unfortunately goes beyond this one crappy law firm. For instance, the assertions of the big sports leagues that you're not allowed to create accounts of the game or share statistics about it without their permission.

Keith

Faulting the map for not including every religion in the world is not fair. A map of four religions you can follow. One of 30 religions, you cannot. There are, however, certain inaccuracies, like the fact that they have Christianity coming to Ethiopia in roughly 1800 CE rather than 300-400 CE. That said, it's still an interesting illustration of the history.

Keith

There's actually still another couple of problems lurking behind the ones you mention. Let's assume that we can adequately automatically "fingerprint" works to recognize similarity and have a massive database of everything that we're worried about. Let's further assume that there is some form of global cryptographic authentication which people can use to prove their identities and that the database is sophisticated enough to keep track of who is allowed to do what with which works. There's still three more things that we can't easily do:

1) Differentiate what is fair use from what is not.

There's not a legal bright line in the law. Fair use is murky and decided by the courts. The inspectors you mention in the editorial would not only have to be knowledgeable about language, they would have to be lawyers, and even then it's iffy that they could identify what is and isn't fair use in a consistent and reliable manner.

2) Authenticate ownership of works.

Let's say that we have a huge database where all copyrighted works can be registered. Someone adds a work to the database of copyrighted works. How do we know that it's really their work? It could be someone else's work which they just uploaded. It could be a public domain work. It could be a work which isn't eligible for copyright. Only a thorough investigation of each submitted work could yield this information.

The most troubling implication of this are its potential for censorship. If Michael Moore were working on a new film about the evils of the sprocket industry and an industry spy got his hands on a rough cut, he could upload it to the database and claim it as his own. As a result, when Moore finishes his film and tries to distribute it via the internet, the database would recognize it as being a work which was already submitted (or at least as infringing one). Michael Moore would be effectively enjoined from distributing his film via the internet until he successfully appeals the decision.

3) Identify ownership of portions of a copyrighted work.

Owning the copyright on a film, for example, does not imply owning the copyright on all clips used in that film, on pictures which appear, or on songs which appear in the film. Likewise, owning the copyright on a rap song does not imply owning the copyright of any samples it uses.

Consider the following example which illustrates this case:
A talented comedian videotapes a short sketch and submits it to a sketch comedy program. The sketch comedy program likes it so much that they want to air it as is. So, they sign a contract which allows them rights to broadcast it, include it in DVDs, etc., but isn't exclusive. The creator is still allowed to broadcast it or distribute it himself. The sketch comedy show then broadcasts the sketch as part of an episode.

The network registers the comedy program as being their copyrighted work (as it indeed is).

Someone attempts to upload the sketch to YouTube. Should YouTube allow it?

Our magical automated engine would recognize it as being a part of a copyrighted work, and presumedly turn it down. But the correct response depends on what the creator has done in the mean time. For one, he could be the one trying to upload it, in which case it should definitely be allowed. He also could have release it under a CC license or elsewise given the uploader the right to upload it.

In truth, the example above could perhaps be solved through holding more complicated data in the database, specifying what parts of a show are copyrighted by different people. In that example, you could have a time code breakdown of the copyright ownership of different things. But things aren't always going to be that straightforward. For instance, in a scene in a video documentary, there could be a picture beside a collage accompanied by background music with narration over it. Keeping track of what belongs to who is not just difficult, its nigh impossible.

Keith

I wouldn't be too worried about beta particles being in your laptop. After all, a beta particle is just an electron (or in some case, but not in this case, a positron). Generally, it's an electron moving at high speed, so you'd want to make sure it gets appropriately captured so that it doesn't run amok, but still it's pretty safe.

Now, if you had alpha particles, that would be something to be worried about.

Keith

No one has actually ever killed for Fortran. This is how it should be.

Keith

DD-B@6:

With my first point, I was actually talking about the ability to find the good stuff in a mountain of bad. What is the web itself but one huge slushpile? And yet, there's no difficulty finding quality on the web.

This is because we've invented tools to help us out. Things like Digg or Google or del.icio.us which directly or indirectly reflect the popularity of web pages. Of course, there's a second part to the process which is needed to make this work. We have to also look at how good things gain popularity on the web. What makes that work is a certain transitivity of interest. I tend to be interested in the same things which web sites I'm interested in are interested in. As a result, I'll follow their links. This means that they can elevate the popularity of other things, allowing a certain process of well-liked things propagating to other places and gaining popularity.

For instance, I really like Greece's Low-Bap hip-hop collective, so I was listening to their radio station, Blasphemy.gr and I heard them play an American rapper that I'd never heard before. So I went looking and found out that his name was Virtuoso and found more information about him and bought one of his albums. Now, I didn't go to Blasphemy.gr in order to find this rapper, I went so that I could listen to rappers I already knew about like Sadahzinia and Active Member and other Low Bap artists. But the sort of music that they like is the same sort of music which I like, so I discovered something new. Likewise, I go to Boingboing because I know that I want to see some of the things that they're interested in, but there are also other things which I didn't expect to be interested in that I have been anyway.

This transitivity of interest causes liked things to be able to grow in popularity. And as they grow in popularity, we have tools which make them easier to find. And the nice thing about the way this process works on the web is that it can be applied to other objects beyond the web itself. For instance, Boingboing frequently recommends books (even ones which aren't podcast or can't be downloaded) or gadgets (even ones which aren't open source). This process can work to separate good from bad even with things other than web pages.

In fact, I would argue that this process works significantly more efficiently than the process currently commonplace in retail. I don't go into book stores and just browse books. The problem is that the average standard of quality is not so high that I can just grab a random book off the shelf and be assured a good read. So I still must separate good from bad. My best chance of doing this is to judge a book by its cover, which as we all know, often does not work so well. Instead, I use the internet to research and then know ahead of time what book I want, and I just go to a book store to buy it. If I were to just go to a book store without doing research first, I would go to one with a knowledgeable sales staff which I could ask for some guidance, and they could recommend to me what book I should buy.

In neither of these cases does having more books on the shelf of a bookstore make my task significantly harder. Assuming that the books are well organized, it just means that I'll have to walk farther on average. The only thing that it makes harder is browsing, which is not a great way to find books as is, assuming that our goal is to find a book which we will enjoy. We're much better off using the internet to find books. If you follow sites which talk about the sorts of books you like, they will introduce you to other books that you will be likely to like due to the transitivity of interest.

And more to the point, as books themselves become a part of the web, this process is automatically engaged. The only problem with fiction books is that they are a little different from hypertext. They are less likely to be explicitly cross-referential, so we cannot apply a google-like algorithm to find the fiction best loved by other fiction. There are influences and cross-references, but they are rarely explicit enough to apply a popularity algorithm to them. However, we can do this with most non-fiction, and it is already being done with scientific papers. (That was actually the first thing that the Google guys did before they applied it to the web.)

Anyway, my main point is that the tools and processes of the web are all about slush-pile sorting, and they work. They work for web pages, and they work for books too.

Keith

It seems to me that the basic argument being made is very similar to that made by Andrew Keen. If we get rid of the gatekeepers to the public then people will be overwhelmed by bad art and this overwhelming amount of art will drive down the price that people are willing to pay for art.

Now, the real problems with this sort of argument are that:

1) It assumes that consumers cannot separate the good from the bad without the aid of the gatekeepers. This itself contains an assumption that the gatekeepers are doing their job well. But the more questionable idea is that things like blogs or digg or other user-based ratings although they work fine for web pages will not work for novels.

2) It assumes that the presence of large amounts of bad art can drive down the price of good art. There's not really much evidence that this happens.

3) It assumes that giving away electronic art leads to people not wanting physical copies. This is the one assumption which although it doesn't hold now, might hold in the long enough term. However, there are ways to get around this problem, such as making money from advertising or simply giving some things away for free while holding others back for pay.

Keith

Barbie having sex with Ken isn't slash. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_fiction for a definition of slash.

Keith