taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

This is pathetic. As noted in the link-blog a couple of days ago (as well as everywhere else), TiVo’s new DRM features have been spotted ‘in the wild’, protecting the valuable Intellectual Property that is Family Guy and Simpsons reruns.

The icing on the cake is that TiVo have come up with a hilarious hand-wavy explanation — apparently it was line noise. Marc Hedlund of O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow are having none of it, and rightly so; as a bonus, Cory asked a group of DRM experts, who ‘burst into positive howls of disbelief’ that line noise could corrupt the DRM bits and the corresponding checksums to match.

From my angle, though, there’s another noteworthy factor:

“During the test process, we came across people who had false positives because of noisy analog signals. We actually delayed development (of the new TiVo software) to address those false positives.” (– Jim Denney, director of product marketing for TiVo)

Interesting use of the term ‘false positive’ there. Sounds more like a good old-fashioned bug if you ask me ;)

Anyway, I’m glad I went for the home-built option. It was pretty obvious that TiVo are in the cross-hairs, and their product is only going to get worse as the DRM industry push harder…

Tags: cory, couple, drm, family, intellectual, line, noise, product, property, tivo

Copyright: Cory Doctorow’s DRM talk presented to MS research yesterday. This is a fantastic introduction to the issues regarding DRM; if you know someone who isn’t convinced that DRM is A Bad Thing, this is the argument they need to read.

OSes: /.: France Considers Open Source. The usual arguments are going on in the comments, but some people still insist that they get better support from MS than from Linux vendors.

What planet are they on? Because it would have been handy for me to live there, on the occasions in the past where I’ve had to develop code on MS platforms, and administer networks of Windows PCs. In my experience, you do not get support from Microsoft. Instead, you do what you do with Linux — go searching on Google, read MSDN, or post in the MSDN forums.

As far as I can see, there’s zero difference between doing that with Windows, and doing exactly the same thing with Red Hat — except in the latter case, you can turn up debug logging through a documented API or switch, use the source and fix it yourself, find the original developers and post a message to their core -dev list, or even ask them personally.

Where’s this amazing support? Maybe the companies I’ve worked for just weren’t paying enough, and therefore weren’t significant blue-chip customers. Or maybe it’s because we weren’t based in the US, and so got support from less-skilled, less high-priority staff in a regional office. But I’ve certainly never experienced the support these advocates claim MS offers, which makes me think it’s FUD as usual.

Tags: copyright, cory, doctorow, drm, linux, msdn, source, support, talk, thing, windows

BoingBoing forwards 2 links to hilarious Nigerian Scam parodies, one from Dick Cheney and one from Laura Bush. Cory quotes it already, but it’s too good to miss, so I will too:

I am the widow of the late President George W. Bush of the United States of America. I am writing you this letter in confidence regarding my current circumstances.

I escaped the United States ahead of death squads with my husband and two children Jenna and Frank, moving first to England and then, when my husband’s political enemies took power there, to Austria. All of our wealth, obtained legitimately through baseball, oil drilling and insider trading, was seized by the new government of the USA under the despotic regime of (Dr.) Noam Chomsky, except for the contents of a few Swiss bank accounts. These bank accounts, which contain social security lock-box funds and the bulk of the 2001 budget surplus, could not be accessed by me or my children, due to agreements made between the socialist government of the USA and Swiss bank regulators. They seized our ranch in Crawford, Texas and now use it to teach homosexualist propaganda to schoolchildren.

Tags: bank, boingboing, confidence, cory, government, husband, letter, nigerian, scam, widow

A good article about Prague’s CZFree.net, via Cory. Hopefully it’ll provide some good ideas for the Irish-WAN folks:

The most promising way (of getting onto the internet) seems to be connecting to the backbone on a wholesale basis, which is what CZFree.net does through its backbone provider — TransgasNet, the telecoms arm of gas company Transgas. “The connection is already built, and it’s real broadband, guaranteed connection, so the issue of Internet connection is solved,” Janda said.

CZFree.net also has a unique approach to providing Internet connectivity to its members. Janda said that the idea is to give each user at least 32 kbps Internet connectivity (around two-thirds of the dial-up access speed) free, while users who want additional bandwidth will pay a certain fee. The fee is still undecided because the initiative is still in the formative phase, but it should be Kc 200 to Kc 300. The connection to the wireless network is free by default, although every user has to invest in the hardware necessary for exchanging data over the Wi-Fi.

Tags: article, backbone, connection, connectivity, cory, czfree, fee, internet, janda, user

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing is on fire today. I was tempted to forward on an entry or two, but by the time I got to the end of today’s updates, I think the only thing a reader can do is just go there and read ‘em: Quake players on drugs, Dance Dance Resurrection, and EMI uploading their own music to Gnutella…

Tags: boing, cory, dance, doctorow, end, entry, fire, thing, time, today

Some vague web musing: while reading Cory Doctorow’s “Metacrap” essay on metadata, I noticed this:

Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page is.

He’s right, of course — that’s how Google works. But while reading this, it occurred to me that this implicitly rewards websites that consist of small numbers of large pages, instead of high numbers of short pages; if your site has a page for ever sub-heading (think of a Linux HOWTO document here), and a linker to your site links to the page that’s relevant to what they’re talking about, your Google ranking will be lower than if you keep the document all in one page and use named anchors.

Personally, despite what Jakob Neilsen thinks, I prefer the all-in-one page mode myself. It’s quicker to download (overall), easier to print or read offline, and I’m not afraid to use a scrollbar. Interesting to see Google (accidentally) recommends it too ;)

The rest of the essay is spot on, in my opinion.

BTW, Cory also writes for Boing Boing, one of the coolest mags I used to read back when, and now a top-quality weblog.

Tags: cory, document, essay, google, linker, metadata, number, page, site, web