Monthly Archive for May, 2002

I really, really, really hope that a mainstream press source takes notice of a recent NewsForge story on how a recent Reuters article may violate the DMCA. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes it illegal to publish or disseminate any method to circument copy-protection, no matter how flimsy that protection may be, or how damaging it is to fair use.

While many in the computer science and education communities have seen great faults in the legislation, most mainstream people (and the press that represents them) simply sees the DMCA as a legitimate way to prevent illegal use of commercial products.

So where did Reuters go long? They published a story detailing exactly how to circumvent Sony’s CD protection technology. The circumvention device: a 99 cent magic marker. The distribution of this story: everywhere. At least a dozen mainstream sites, newspapers, and television networks, including CNN and Yahoo!, distributed this story — all of them are responsible for spreading information about circumvention Sony music CDs and allowing a customer to play them in his or her computer for less than a dollar.

I certainly wouldn’t want to post how to do it here, as I follow the law and wouldn’t want to violate the DMCA, a law with very stiff penalties (max $500,000 fine and 5 years in jail). So while Reuters may be a scoff-law, I certainly will not. I respect our recording industry, and the government that allows them to violate the fundamental rights of Americans for some short-term capital gain. No sir, not me. I say the record companies are using their FREEDOMS to create protectionist legislation to perpetrate their LEGAL monopolist practices and LEGITIMATELY destroy the notion of fair use, which hurts their business. I mean, who listens to music on their computer (or MP3 player, or portable, or car player, or cell-phone player) anyway? And why should they have the RIGHT to listen to music?

Seeing as at this point I am abusing sarcasm, I’ll stop.

In order to get a workstation for my job at MP3.com, I had to go down and build it myself. Basically they had a G4 lying around with no RAM and no hard drive, so I scavenged 256MB RAM and got a 20GB hard drive from the tech people, and got to install Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 and some software.

And here is the fun part – I’m currently downloading at 1.5 megabytes/second from Macromedia over the MP3.com internet connection. See, I can still be amazed by little things in life. 1.5 Megs, thats like five T-1 lines! Neat.

I just read an interesting article on News.com about MS’s new hiding features and other stuff to appear is Service Pack 1 to Windows XP. Basically MS is not doing any of the stuff talked about in the current remedy hearings, but they are basically renaming and centralizing the box that always pops up urging people to “make this my default.”

The new control panel lets you basically “hide” other installed programs and make certain programs default, overriding the annoying prompting. This is somewhat useful but not very. You aren’t allowed to delete Internet Explorer, only “hide” it, so it still takes up all the memory and is used in other apps, but it doesn’t appear on your desktop. Big woop. And you can hide other programs you’ve installed.

WHY???? If I installed the program, why would I want to hide it? Why not just uninstall it? I mean, if you don’t want to normally use it (say, only use RealPlayer for the occasional RealAudio stream) you can remove it from the Start Menu or the desktop already, just drag them to the Trash Recycle Bin. So what does this add? Not much.

But in one important respect Microsoft is being really nice, and I’m not really sure why. For people who are running stolen versions of XP using codes obtained from a big company, their systems will be frozen in that state, meaning no upgrades unless they pay, but will not be disabled:

“Basically we’re freezing their computer where it is,” Cullinan said. “We’re not preventing them from using it, but obviously one of the benefits of having a license is keeping your PC updated.”

If they’re ripping you off, MS, why not just completely disable their computer. Its their own darn fault for pirating your wares. Of course, I say this not being a user of XP, as I don’t buy ANY MS software, as I despise them, but I still understand that if they’re selling a product and someone is stealing it from them, they can do whatever they want to stop the people. Just as long as Adobe Photoshop doesn’t institute similar restrictions.

Oh yeah, Fox. Not the broadcasting company. Michael (J.) Fox was on Charlie Rose, and I caught a bit of it, and I found it very refreshing that he stated outright, without even being asked, that the reason he came forward with his disease was not because he cared about a cause, wanted to save the world, wanted to enlighten everyone to the evil of the disease, etc., but simply for himself, because it was becoming harder to keep lying to people, and to act, and whatever.

I really appreciate him telling the truth and not retroactively making his “coming out” about caring for the world. He cared for himself. He hid the disease for, like, seven years. Eventually it got bad, so he told people, because it was impacting his relations and his career. Makes sense to me. Really its not the public’s business except because he is a public figure, and of course he helped “shine the spotlight” on another disease, put a celebrity behind it, etc., which I guess actually is Good For the World ™. So it all worked out Mr. Fox. And by the way, I”m really sorry about your disease and am glad you’ve been so open about it. Maybe I’ll buy your new book.

For the past three days or so that I’ve had my computer, I’ve been happy to have it back online. Only, very quickly I realized that it was not on the internet. I could FTP, I could SSH, I could ping, but I could not get to web. So I thought, okay, try an alternate port…but port 8080 also did not work.

Finally I got an idea and typed “cox port blocking” into Google. Lo and behold, my wonderful ISP by default blocks port 80 and 8080. Why? Because of their stupid “no servers” rule, as if this web site is going to get more traffic than my rampant downloading if ISOs anyway! I mean, please!

So, long story longer, AgBlog is back, up, and actionable, at least until my next cable outage. I HEART Brandeis networking people, and the wonderful restriction-free network they maintain so well.