Posts by Ray Simard

The mind boggles

Someone, somewhere (in fact, here at El Reg, I think) speculated, tongue-in-cheek, that Apple was patenting the wheel, Beethoven, air, etc., to shine light on the absurdity of the U. S. patent system. I'm about half-willing to consider moving the tongue in this case to its normal position.

And if they aren't, this case and the many others like it should have that effect anyway, if some sufficiently prominent and respected voices can pipe up and cite them collectively in a suitably loud and blistering attack on the system.

(The film Patent Absurdity is a nice start, but I fear its audience is not getting very far beyond those who already understand the problem and don't need convincing.)

Thanks to @Greemble, and...

...I was just about to deliver a very swift kick to Mr. Jobs and all others guilty of this insanity, but my foot is sore and I cannot find a foot doctor since the Apple lawsuit forced them to change the name of their specialty.

(Thanks to Greemble for reminding me of that brilliant Groucho Marx letter to WB.)

All browsers? Really?

"'You don't want to differentiate on HTML5 - [as a coder] I want to be able to write this mark up once and it runs across all browsers,' Gavin said."

Uh...

Presumably the famous <VIDEO> tag is not an exception to this lofty goal. With that in mind, said browser independence can't very well achieved without a codec acceptable to all the browser makers.

Are this fellow and his employer assuming that Mozilla and Google will cave in get behind it (and Apple's) obstinate insistence upon supporting only the patent-encumbered (and to its advantage) H.264 codec and the desecration of the history and philosophy of Internet vendor-independent standards that entails?

This way lies madness

The DNS does not need, nor even benefit from, a TLD for every niche, interest and societal sector. Technically, the system would work fine with no TLDs at all. They were conceived to help organize the DNS around the purpose and function of the domains under them, but aside from .GOV and .EDU, for which you still have to provably qualify (and setting aside the country-code domains for the moment), the rest have been stripped of their meaning entirely.

Remember when .com, .net and .org meant something? To get a domain you had to include a short written justification (and $100 USD) wth the application, and that had to match up with the TLD you requested. Strictly, you got .NET if you were a part of the Internet itself, .ORG if you were a non-profit or .COM otherwise (granted, the was a lot of play in the system, but that was the goal). If .com, .org and .net were merged into a single TLD there would be no harm in that at all; they mean nothing any more. Even USENET's top-level groups are more meaningful.

TLDs are not directories; they are not browseable; being part of .autopartsdealers* isn't going to get anyone to your store's site any faster than if it's www.south-booswah-autoparts.com--in fact, less so. I see no reason to waste time and trouble over this; it's headed in the wrong direction. These new "niche" TLDs will soon be full of inappropriate domains just as .COM .NET and .ORG are now, if we imagine for a moment that those old standards still existed. It's just complicating the DNS and creating illusory significance to the domains under them.

(I was going to say .hamster-duct-tape, but that would be lost on most people.)

Raise your glasses (and thumbs) high!

If, as it is, VP8 is covered by the BSD license, then it's a done deal: it's open and royalty-free.

As for patent encumbrances: It's pretty well known by now that the wind blows where the money goes. MS and Apple can't play the intimidation game with Google that patent-holders have learned to use to threaten smaller firms into unwarranted settlements and cross-licensing agreements.

Theoretically, Google could change their minds and strap YouTube with H.264 or something, but now, why should they? They'd have one hell of a firestorm to deal with and no justification to claim. Adobe's newly-announced support for VP8 is one more reason.

It will be interesting to see how VP8 performs against H.264. I doubt there will be a problem with that. Theora may have lagged somewhat behind H.264 in that department, but not by all that much, and Theora is practically VP8's ancestor. It being so, one could realistically, if a bit loosely, refer to VP8 as the improved Theora many hoped for.

This isn't just a victory for web video: it's a victory for the Internet itself. MS and Apple can still refuse to support anything but H.264, but now it will be a whole lot harder to get away with it. They'll be on the defensive without a defense.

Chalk up a big one for the good guys!

Movie: "Patent Absurdity"

http://patentabsurdity.com/

Downloadable directly or with Bit Torrent. The HD version is a pretty good demonstration of the performance of Ogg/Theora/Vorbis.

The MPAA and kindred won't like you getting this by P2P either...but for reasons quite different from the usual.

Treat people like criminals...

...and they'll behave like criminals.

The industry alarmists' attitudes annoy and insult the many who ride the fence between the temptation to pirate and the willingness to pay the bucks out of a sense of integrity. It's pretty hard to quantify the extent of piracy triggered by such irritation, but I'll bet it amounts to a pretty fair chunk of change.

What really chaps my hide, though, is the industries' attempts to effectively grab regulatory power over the design and functionality of consumer electronics, demanding limitations aimed ostensibly at frustrating the transfer of material by users to their own systems and media, but with no regard for legitimate kinds of copying and the cost imposed on consumers whose equipment would no longer work because of them. The idea of an industry with no accountability to the public acquiring de facto regulatory control of another industry's designs and innovations is pretty scary, the more so when they're choking off useful features because they might--MIGHT--be used for piracy--sometimes.

I have a goodly number of purchased items which were purchased because I first grabbed a pirated copy for a preview. I can't be the only one. The numbers might not be all that impressive, but has anyone considered that--that some purchases came about because of interest triggered by a pirated copy of something they might otherwise not have considered interesting enough to buy? Yes, there's a temptation to just keep the illegitimate copy and pass on the purchase, but when there's the willingness to buy what can be pirated, there's at least some willingness to buy what has been pirated.

I also see a bit of irony in one case of my own, an Italian movie I "stole" via Bit Torrent. I had first combed the net in search of a copy, and found only one for sale--from Italy. Region 2. Useless.

No surprise

What do you expect when you excite atoms?

Mary Shelley's story...

...made into a movie with Boris Karloff, mike in hand, shouting "I feel good!"

Take heed

When mice are outlawed, only outlaws will have mice.

Wicket adhesion factors

They're called fences here in in the US too.

I suppose it wouldn't be the ultimate tragedy (though it might be expensive) if the likes of Google and Bing are routinely hit with DMCA takedowns, but it does look like things might get dicey when you throw in the elements of jurisdiction, legitimate distribution, fair use (can a copyright holder use a DMCA takedown to prevent linking to a parody it doesn't like, leaving the search engine only the options to comply automatically or to review the content manually?), hit-and-run takedowns by parties who don't hold copyrights, or perhaps use of the search engine to locate such content for reasons other than piracy?

This looks like the system is batting on an increasingly sticky wicket.

(We don't use that phrase in the US.)

Back to normal?

At this moment a Google search for "torrent tracker" brings up the TPB top-level page third, after the Wikipedia article describing trackers and torrentking.org. The DMCA notice isn't there.

As far as the original censorship goes, I frankly don't care if TPB is naughty or nice; it's not Google's place, on its own or under pressure, to play moral guardian to the world or any part of it. They might well nix clearly criminal enterprises (malware, kiddie porn, terrorism how-to, Crack Cocaine 'R' Us...), but despite its woes TPB is not in that class. I've got a problem with one industry telling another industry which is in no way violating any law what to do. Yes, Google runs its own shop as it sees fit and has the right to do this if it wants to, but it's a very bad idea, and a worse precedent.

Good reasons for...what?

It's not often that an issue comes up that pits two personal passions of mine against each other. Here's one.

On the one side is a reverence for the freedom of those who own and operate an enterprise to run their own house as they choose, within the bounds of basic business ethics. In the case of connectivity providers, one example of this I'd hate to see lost is the right to use, at their discretion, such things as DNSBLs to fight spam, or block outbound port 25 from users of things like DHCP pools to frustrate direct-to-MX bots. These things inherently chip somethinng away from a neutral net, though in these particular cases, nobody worth listening to is likely to object.

On the other is exactly this matter, preserving to the greatest extent possible the old concept of the end-to-end model, or the spirit anyway, and, in general, keeping an eye to the ideal of making the net blind to the nature of traffic, where any two endpoints of a connection anywhere on the net behave exactly the same as any two others.

Paris, who has lots of conflicting passions.

Ports...?

>In the meantime, admins should prevent attacks targeting SMB2 by disabling

> the service. If that's not possible, the two TCP ports used by the service,

>139 and 445, should be blocked at the firewall.

When should any of the SMB-related ports ever be accessible to anything but the specific machines/networks (presumably local) that need them?

@Anon ... Just FEI

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/28/djbdns_cache_poisoning_vulns/

Tux, just because...

A double standard, methinks

From: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/23/google_and_typosquatting/

"According to a recent study from McAfee and Harvard prof/cyber watchdog Ben Edelman - which relies on web data from May 2008 - at least 80,000 domains are typo-squatting on America's 2,000 most popular web sites, just waiting for innocent web users to misspell or mistype their next url...

"For instance, the study (PDF) says, 742 domains sit just a few misplaced characters from freecreditreport.com, and 327 are shadowing cartoonnetwork.com. "Cartoon Network with three Os. Cartoon Network with two Ts. Cartoon Network that starts with a k. More ways to misspell Cartoon Network than you ever imagined," Edelman tells The Reg. "And almost all of them serve Google ads."

"In the US, typo-squatting is against the law. The 1999 Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) prohibits anyone from "registering or using" domains misleadingly similar to a trademark or famous name."

[end excerpt]

So (in the U.S. anyway), it's a crime to register a domain in the hope typo-typers will happen to land on it, but it's fine to diddle (and defile) the DNS to accomplish the same thing--provided you're an ISP in control of the nameservers that nearly all your clients, save those savvy and motivated enough to point their resolvers elsewhere, use.

Someone's not paying attention...

Hmm...

As if the coerced Three Strikes policy weren't enough...

That a major provider should be compelled to become copyright cops under pressure, not from a governmental regulatory agency which is, at least in theory, answerable to the people, but rather a cabal of private interests, is outrageous enough.

But what's even more so is wangling a promise to censor their customers' browsing according to their whims.

I didn't know that the green of Green Dam meant the Emerald Isle.

It's not technology; it's attitude.

FAT came about when Billy designed the DIsk Extended BASIC for the Altair 8800 (on 8-inch, single-sided, single-density floppies, capacity 256kb). It was simple and compact enough for such small volumes, not to mention drivers simple and small enough to share elbow room with the rest of the system in a box with 16Kb of RAM. (Yes, hard to believe it. The 8080A and Z-80 had 16-bit memory addressing, hence a maximum of 64Kb of RAM accessible directly, but memory was expensive and lots of systems ran with 16K.)

I'm not sure what kind of filesystem CP/M-80 had, but when Microsoft edged out Digital Research for the contract to provide operating systems for the new IBM PC (sad story about Gary Kildall there), FAT came along with it. Quarters were still cramped. The 8086/8088 could address more RAM but still not a lot (640K I believe, hence Billy's embarrassing quote that nothing would ever need more than that), and double-sided double-density 5-1/4" floppies held somewhat less than a standard floppy does now.

So, FAT made sense then, but it's a living fossil now.

So, why not, as said here by many, scrap it for something better?

Look at Linux and NTFS. M$ has stubbornly refused to disclose even the minumum information about that filesystem needed to design a third-party driver for it. Why? It's not the kind of technology that others would seize upon and exploit competitively. It seems to me that they want to frustrate any attempt to access their media with anything not their own.

Sure, drivers for other OSes can be had, but that's only useful for user-created volume (granted, the most common case). Microsoft is not likely to start supporting any non-M$ filesystems and wherever they control the design of things, if history repeats, they will go out of their way to avoid using anything they can't control.

There are people who are pathological control freaks. The same can be true of corporations.

Not patenting the wheel, but getting close...

Hmm... It's New Year's, not April Fool's day. Did ElReg get the date wrong or is this a serious proposal?

Unless I read this wrong, this patent has nothing to do with what software is on the computer, much less anything to do with online access. It's right at the hardware level, right? You have to pay a fee just to turn the damn thing on... LInux won't make any difference if the thing won't start marching in the first place.

"'Beyond simple activation, the user may be able to select a level of performance related to processor, memory, graphics power, etc. that is driven not by a lifetime maximum requirement, but rather by the need of the moment,' Microsoft's shameless patent application continues."

Buy the machine, then buy the right to use it?

Again, is this serious, am I reading it all wrong, or...what?

Am I missing something here, or are THEY missing something?

From the article:

" 'We will ask Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court's order.'

"And it looks like Viacom will give the OK. 'The Court's recent decision has triggered concern about what information will be disclosed and how it will be used,' according to a canned statement from the company. 'Viacom has not asked for and will not be obtaining any personally identifiable information of any user.

" 'Any information that we or our outside advisors obtain - which will not include personally identifiable information - will be used exclusively for the purpose of proving our case against YouTube and Google, will be handled subject to a court protective order and in a highly confidential manner.'"

Well, then...

If all that is to be believed, then what POSSIBLE use would anyone have for IP addresses and logins? Logins would be used for...what? To identify users, what else?

IP addresses have no intrinsic relevance to content, therefore no relevance to piracy unless and until they are used to...what? To identify offenders, what else?

But then, is it that are they intending to identify only those actually guilty of illegal uploading? There's no exception for that case mentioned in the article or any of the newspaper articles I've seen. But let's suppose that is what they intend to do. Well, then...

Within 12 Terabytes of logging data there are...hmm...how many logins? And what fraction of those are the miscreants Viacom is supposedly interested in finding? And of that staggering number, what fraction do they intend to actually try to chase down? Unauthorized uploads are hardly the work of a handful of evil syndicates; they are the work of multitudes of average Joes and Janes typically connecting via residential ADSL with dynamic IP addresses. How many court orders will have to be prepared and delivered to how many ISPs, who must then retrieve records of who was using what IP address at this or that time, which means...

...once again, user identities. What else?

Sure, piracy is a serious matter. But what is YouTube? Short, low-resolution, low-quality fragments of things. Is Viacom so utterly out of touch as to really believe people who would otherwise be paying for content are going to pass on the purchase when they can see a tiny bit of it on YouTube? If anything, YouTube-type excerpts probably create more interest in buying products than interfering with it.

What on earth does Viacom plan to do with 12 Terabytes of data that won't cost them hundreds of times over what they have lost due to YouTube uploads, according to the most outlandish estimates they could possibly get away with claiming?

This has all the signs of muscle-flexing and chest-pounding, hoping to mount a high-profile case, widely reported to the masses, to intimidate the net-using public. There's no doubt some ego-driven wish on Viacom's part to prove they're bigger and badder than something like Google which, good or bad, is big stuff to be bigger and badder than. (Screw the grammar.)

Shakespeare was right. (Henry IV, Act IV, Scene 2)

[ Another thought: If Viacom can get their mitts on all this, can the RIAA, the MPAA and other similar groups on other countries be far behind? How many more times will YouTube, and perhaps others, have to fork over these data? And once that avalanche is triggered, what's all of this going to cost?]

Let's get real, here

Anti-spammers:

1. "Force people off hosting providers?"

How? By providing evidence of abuse to the provider resulting in the provider (the responsible ones, anyway) terminating the account under the provider's TOS?

I have yet to see evidence that an anti-spammer was able to terminate anyone's account without the consent and cooperation of the account's provider, exercising its right to decide how their own services can and cannot be used.

2. DDoS and death threats?

Well, you'll find a handful of out-of-control renegades in any cause, whatever its merit.

3. From your site: " SpamHaus is a power-controlling website that has servers set up and blocks a large percentage of spam through out the internet."

Spamhaus does not block anything. As your words are suggesting, that is not physically possible; nothing can reach out onto the Internet beyond its own systems to disturb what others are doing. The only way anything is blocked by being listed on Spamhaus is when someone CHOOSES to use Spamhaus' data to block connections to his/her OWN systems, which is their prerogative, or use filtered BGP feed, again, by choice, applied to their own domains only.

4. "also i get spam all the time to my box, its not hard to delete it :)"

Looking at the mail log on my primary MX, I see that over the past three days, zen.spamhaus.org has recognized 12,975 connection attempts from known spam sources, which were blocked because I chose to do so. And that's just the primary MX. I have yet to encounter any evidence of a false positive in the time I've used it. And I'm just a guy hosting a half-dozen domains for friends, gratis, no mega-operation, and even my pipsqueak network still gets that many bogus connection attempts.

My personal spam load, AFTER that blocking, is on the order of 400-700 items PER DAY. It IS "hard to delete it." I have much better things to do with my time.

5. "let the authorities handle the spammers..."

I can understand such notions from net newbies and non-savvies, but you don't appear to be among that number. Do you really think anyone is going to buy that?

I'm afraid you're doing more here to advance the case against yourself than anything else.

(For the record, I have no association with Spamhaus other than that I'm a satisfied and grateful user.)

Self-fulfilling prophecies

With threats like this, DRM litigation feeding-frenzies, debacles like the Sony BMG rootkit, bizarre tricks ostensibly intended to restrict pirating of material and the like but actually limiting people's choices of what they can and cannot do with their own systems, people will increasingly consider themselves presumed criminals. Quite a few of those who would otherwise choose to purchase materials legitimately by their own sense of right and personal integrity will resent the label and live down to the expectations already laid upon them. Why choose to respect the monoliths that have already scorned you?

Absurdities like the $220,000-plus judgment against the woman who put some music up on file-sharing systems will polarize the public against the industries.

Treat someone like an adversary and you will make him one.

"...I"m half crazy..."

>>>> Yes, at least David Bowman knew where the key was to pull all those memory blocks. Someone, please find Microsoft's key. <<<<

Unlike Bowman, you cannot disconnect parts of the system selectively because it's all integrated with the OS. HAL has learned a new song:

"All, or nothing at all..."