] The Federal Communications Commission took a historic
] step this week toward limiting piracy of digital
] television signals, enacting regulations that will affect
] not only consumer-electronics manufacturers, but Silicon
] Valley companies as well.

Declan McCullagh's News.Com article on the broadcast flag.

] Three computer hardware makers contacted by CNET
] News.com on Wednesday said that the FCC's order
] would require them to redesign or stop selling their
] current products.

] "This was designed to absolutely kill the computer," said
] Cliff Watson, a senior engineer at Digital Connection, a
] small business in Huntington Beach, Calif., that sells an
] HDTV PCI card. "It will kill the computer because the
] actual implementation of the ruling is so bloody restrictive."

Are PCs next in Hollywood piracy battle? | CNET News.com

Top 10 reasons why British people think poorly of American visitors:

...

8. They don't know who Guy Fawkes is. ("Who? Guy Fox? Nah, don't know him... Is he from New Jersey?")

The Gunpowder Plot: Guy Fawkes

flynn23 wrote:
] The EFF's ultra radical stance is not a bad thing. Sometimes
] you have to stand a little further off balance than you would
] normally do just so you can make your point crystal clear. I'd
] rather they endorse file sharing rather than some cockamamee
] scheme that the RIAA buys into. If anything, maybe people will
] see this stance and realize that the entire argument of owning
] intellectual property in perpetuity is bullshit. Maybe owning
] ANY intellectual property is bullshit.

This just looks like the right place to hop in this EFF stance thread.. I'll just start my babble here.

Owning IP in perpetuity is bullshit.. However, we must be careful about dismissing the idea of IP ownership as a whole because we think the way it's being used right now sucks. The same framework that makes the RIAA's use of copyright go is also the basis of open licensing al la GPL and Creative Commons. I think thats the key place where you can walk over a line and become ultra radical.. Simply dismissing IP as a whole is like burning down a forrest because you are pissed at a tree house.. Our society is strongly based in law, that's good. Thats not the part of things we want to break down. The concept of IP isn't going anywhere, and we need it.

If I can't take a work and apply some enforceable rule structure that allows me to control its use, not only does it break these closed and restrictive systems we dislike, but it also makes it impossible to enforce open IP systems. Instead of the end-consumers stealing information it's just going to be the big companies stealing innovation. Think SCO. We can be bent over in both directions..

We don't need to completely pull back from the system.. We need to fix the damn system. And the only real way of doing that - if we are to actually buy into our own line of ethics babble - is to setup a system that works better right along side of it. Unfortunately, that's really hard. And all us open framework people work by group think.. "They" can watch "us", and we don't necessarly move faster. Maybe we are just more redundant? shrug.. Its always going to seem like the man is one step ahead. They'll just read the damn blogs.. :) Hopefully we will just be right, and not have our rights gutted before we can prove it.

And then, the one place where I am an extremist comes into play.. I don't give a flying fuck about the law wherever it does something to break my rights to tinker, exercise speech, or any of my other real hot button "I'm-an-American-and-these-are-my-rights" issues. I enjoy breaking law under such circumstances. Its necessary, fun, and patriotic duty! Its really the only time you can do it without being an ethical slob.

That being said, I also think it would be a really bad thing if all intellectual property law as we know it just "went away".. Then we would be getting into Gibson novel territory with s... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

RE: [Politech] Reply to EFF over its position on RIAA, file swapping [ip]

] The second way the FCC's claims are deceptive is the more
] troubling of the two, and that is the compatibility
] problem I spoke of above. Arguably right now a TiVO or a
] DVD recorder with no tuner might not be covered, but
] after 2005, that same TiVO or DVD probably won't be
] compatible with the new FCC-governed DTV television set.
] ***THIS is the REAL problem. Whiles the FCC says the
] device is not covered, after 2005, in many cases it just
] won't work. ***

[Politech] Analysis of FCC's broadcast flag rules, from Ethan Ackerman

This is a weblog written by a friend of mine who is has much infosec clue. I expect good things out of Randy's blog.

Insights into Information Security by Randy Bias

Decius wrote:
] Oh, its ok, the BBC will put all their television online, and
] everyone will watch it instead. :)

Exactly. On several fronts we are going to be seeing a shootout between these very rigid IP rules for distribution of content vs. very liberal rules.. I think the liberal approach will win in the long run, but we are going to be dealing with the rigid approach for the foreseeable future.

Rant.

There are a number of TV shows that I would _never_ watch if I did not have the ability to record/time-shift them.. This crap is going to cause problems with that technology by virtue of the fact that the same technology can also enable copying with very little modification. Its pretty much proven that you can't keep people from tinkering with consumer hardware to make it do what they want.. Tivo, XBox, etc.. There will be more examples. There will be "Hack your TV" t-shirts..

We already know people who are hacking together software HDTV decoders.. Who is this rule going to stop? Not people with skills.. Not people who want to "steal" the data. Its going to stop end consumers from getting products that do what they want, and thats all. Its going to oppress my Mom, and piss me off. Thats it.

I think the term "digital divide" is going to be re-defined if all these communication technologies keep turning restrictive one after another. Its not going to have anything to do with wealth, its going to be about the technical skills that determines who is a have and a have-not. Its about punk rock ethics coming of age because of the PC and the Internet. Viva the self-taught engineer who hates the man and cherishes freedom.

RE: FCC Approves Internet Anti-Piracy Tool

"Can you imagine the nightmare our roads would be if everybody had one?"

Device Lets Drivers Control Traffic Lights

] According to a KPTV newscast, a Simpsons fan with too
] much time on his hands grafted a tobacco plant and a
] tomato plant and, ta-da: tomacco!

Where was this when I was quitting smoking? Shesh.

Slashdot | Simpsons Fan Creates Real Tomacco Plant

Decius wrote:
] You blog, but don't oped....

Sure, call me out. That does work after all.

What can I say, I'm usually busy doing stuff, I always intend to revise later, I never do. I'm sitting on the floor, laptop propped up on a cardboard box. Phbttt.

] Monotone vs. Subversion vs. CVS???

There is a clearly perceived problem among the Digirati. Managing source code with multiple people working on it is a royal fucking pain in the ass. There are many people working on this problem for that reason.. It really picked up when there was a big stir about the Linux Kernel not being developed with an open tool chain when Linus switched his repository to BitKeeper. Everyone knows its time for CVS to die, but there are many ideas of which direction to go.

The key engineering design point in play here is the good old centralized authority vs. decentralized structure.. And well, I don't necessarily know what to make of this Monotone yet. All I did was read the FAQ. Let just say its interesting:

] Monotone does not have a specific networking protocol. Each
] type of change or certificate has a serialization format called
] a packet, which is a pleasantly-formatted stream of ASCII
] text. The state of a monotone database is captured by a set
] of packets. Packets can be sent to mail or news servers, or
] posted to web CGI programs, and retrieved by other users.
] Packets can also be emailed, printed out, backed up,
] or whatever.

] An important fact about packets is that they are informative,
] and do not represent a conversation or any commitments by
] the sender or receiver. A packet is simply a representation
] of some fact. For most functions, monotone decides what to
] do by interpreting the facts it has on hand, rather than
] having specific conversations with other programs. Only the
] fetch and post commands exchange data -- in the form of
] packets -- with anyone else on the network. The rest of the
] time, monotone is "offline".

] Monotone ships with simple client implementations of the
] NNTP, SMTP and HTTP protocols, so that you can exchange
] packets with existing servers 'out of the box'. If you want
] to transmit packets through some other means, monotone
] can produce and consume them on the command line, as
] ordinary data.

So basically, it determines if there are changes by comparing SHA1 hashes.. Files don't have version numbers, they have hashes. Changes go out in packets, and any given repository gets to decide what it wants to do.

I have not really done all my homework here, but there are a few things about this I find intriguing. If I read this right, everything this RC system does, it can do blind. Or at least doesn't require any kind of state to be kept between clients. If it was necessary to distribute changes to an app in a way where it was not possible to maintain any kind of centralized resource - even a place to send changes to - this would be very useful. It would be possible to "broadcast" changes in situations where proper level of anonminity could be maintained, and as long as the proper people were looking they could merge any changes. Newsgroups, message boards, stego sequences in frames of Bin Laden video, whatever.

So anyway, there is some op-ed.. I'm going to Home Depot to buy a door and two cheap sawstands to use as a desk.

RE: monotone: distributed version control

] monotone is a free, distributed version control system.
] it provides fully disconnected operation, manages
] complete tree versions, keeps its state in a local
] transactional database, supports overlapping branches and
] extensible metadata, exchanges work over plain network
] protocols, performs history-sensitive merging, and
] delegates trust functions to client-side RSA
] certificates.

monotone: distributed version control