technology

Plugging the Analog hole and the threat to democracy!

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Ed Felten is a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. Prof. Felten has done a lot analysis of copy protection schemes (and I use the word schemes in the negative sense, as in schemes to sell snake oil). Over the years he has been sued several times by companies trying to prevent him publishing the results of his studies. Prof. Felten is not an advocate of piracy or a thief. He is not trying to sell anything to anyone. All he is trying to do is inform the public about technology that affects them. Unfortunately this sort of public discussion, about “content protection technologies” is explicitly prohibited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which I personally think is unconstitutional, and is definitely one of the worst pieces of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress. Because of the ridiculous provisions in this law, companies have tried to stymie public discussion of flaws in their products.

As we move to a point in time when the current analog tv signals are permanently turned off (currently scheduled for the end of 2008) people who still have current non-digital tv sets will need new digital to analog converter boxes. This point where the digital signal is converter so that it can be viewed is known as the analog hole. This conversion point can be used to copy this digital content. The big media companies desperately want to keep people from copying this content and bypassing their revenue stream. As part of this effort they have enlisted two of their congressional lackeys, James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin and John Conyers of Michigan to sponsor their Digital Transition Content Security Act. It is interesting that congressmen from WI and MI get such a disproportionate amount of their campaign financing from big entertainment companies, you would think that they would get most of their money from cheese and car companies. The MPAA and RIAA and their friends are the top contributor to Sensenbrenner and no 2 contributor to Conyers.

Prof. Felten has a very interesting post here about a big hole in the anti-analog hole legislation. Basically they want to make an exemption to the protection schemes for “Professional Equipment”. They need this so that the creators of the content can actually copy and create the content. A potential side-effect of this exemption and the way it is worded is that it would close off access to content creation technologies to amateur creators. Besides causing trouble for people who just want to edit their home videos in iMovie, it also potentially closes off access for citizen media to compete with the “mainstream media”(MSM). Given the sorry state of MSM today and the desperate need we have for alternative sources of news, this is a very major problem. Without blogs and podcasts and videocasts, we would be left with the likes of Fox News, and Judith Miller and Bob Woodward. The sources of information would be controlled by a few huge companies and their lackeys in government.

The most essential element to a truly functional democracy, is an informed populace. Without accurate information, people can’t make wise decisions. Forget about piracy. That is just a bogus argument about money and who gets to collect it. Currently that is the distributors of the content, not the creators. The technology we have today is finally allowing the content creators to start profiting from their work, rather than some middleman.

The reason why DRM must be eliminated is because it a grave threat to democracy. Information must be free to flow! People need access to information of all kinds in order for democracy to thrive. We must not let swine like Conyers and Sensenbrenner contribute to the smothering of democracy. Contact these fools and give them a piece of your mind!

It sucks when you have to change the batteries in your faucet

This entry was posted in technology on by (updated 6881 days ago)

About a year and a half ago, my company replaced the faucets, toilet flushers, and paper towel dispensers with units equipped with motion sensors. While this may have seemed like a good idea to someone, particularly the toilet flushers, the reality is that half the time they don’t work and you have to use the manual flush button anyway. With the faucets, you have to position your hands just right in order to get them to turn on and if you move your hands out of position the water flow stops. You also have no control of the temperature. I just went to the rest room and saw one of the faucets apart so the battery could be replaced. Having done some shopping for assorted bathroom components over the years it is obvious that these electronic fixtures must be substantially more expensive than conventional units. And since a technician must be called every time one of these things stops working (which is pretty frequently) it sure doesn’t seem like they could be saving any money in reduced water costs. but what do I know I’m just an engineer not a facilities manager.faucet and battery

Top images of 2006

This entry was posted in drm patents politics technology this and that Unintelligent Design on by (updated 6893 days ago)

At the end of every year you always see the lists of top images and stories of the past year.  Here are a few of the images I am looking forward to seeing at the end of 2006:

-George W Bush being convicted at his impeachment trial

-Karl Rove’s perp walk and subsequent conviction in the Valerie Plame leak case

-Republicans loosing control of both houses of congress in November

-Tom Delay convicted on all charges in his corruption trial

-the final US troops returning from Iraq

-the RIAA announcing all file sharing lawsuits are dropped and previous settlements are refunded

-Record companies announcing they will never use DRM again and repudiating the DMCA

-prices of online music downloads being reduced to the point ($.20-$.25 per song) where file sharing of music becomes pointless except for old out of print recordings.

-More people listening to podcasts than Clear Channel radio stations

-The Thomas Moore Law center is disbanded and all intelligent design efforts are abandoned.

-Software and business model patents are ruled invalid and are permanently rejected

Clearly some of these items fall into the realm of fantasy (like the RIAA giving up on drm),  but some are definitely things that could happen this year.  What are some images or stories you would like to look back on come December 31 2006?

Holiday gadget help

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This time of year lots of people buy new gadgets. If you need any help setting up new computers, networking gear, ipods or other gadgets, just drop me an e-mail sam DOT abuelsamid AT gmail DOT com and I can fill you in on rates. I’m very reasonable and I have time available this week and next. If you would like to get something configured in advance, it can be ready to go on Christmas morning.

Ypsilanti Library offers eAudiobooks 1

This entry was posted in drm Ypsilanti on by (updated 6918 days ago)

ypsilanti libraryAs of last week the Ypsilanti District Library began offering a downloadable audiobook service. They are offering a service that is provided by a company called netlibrary.com. As I wrote in this post if you have an ipod or an Apple computer or one that runs on Linux, don’t bother signing up because the service provides books that are encoded Microsoft windows media audio DRM. You can only listen to the books on a computer with windows 2000 or XP and a recent version of windows media player. If you have an audio player that supports microsofts “plays for sure” drm you can transfer the book to that device too. Of course most of the inexpensive players don’t support plays for sure so you are out of luck just like the 35 million ipod owners out there. You can’t burn the books to cd either. All in all when you combine all the restrictions with the decidely limited selection that netlibrary offers, the whole deal seems like a waste of our tax dollars. Of course no one has yet come up with a copy protection scheme that actually prevents copying digital media. Any media that can be copied can be converted to another unprotected format, usually with any of several free software tools. Of course any further discussion of this would probably be a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and I certainly wouldn’t want to distract the FBI from hunting terrorists by having to come after me.

Minor catastrophe averted! 2

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I had a brain fart this morning and accidently deleted the sql database that has all the contents of this blog. Unfortunately the last backup I did was three weeks ago. Fortunately Scott W at my hosting provider websitesource.com was able to find the last backup from last week and get the database restored for me within about an hour. I was missing the last 5 posts but fortunately my bloglines subscription still had those cached, so I just did some cutting and pasting and I’m back. I’ll definitely be doing more regular backups from now on especially before I start messing with anything on my site.

Gadget Stuff

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I like to read the gadget sites like Engadget and Gizmodo. Being an engineer and a geek (and proud of it!), I am always fascinated by the stuff that people can come up with. For all of the faults of humanity, and there is definitely no shortage of those, people can be so incredibly creative and resourceful. Of course I often wish that they would direct some of those efforts, toward making the world a better place to live. But I am still amazed by the ingenuity of people. I like gadgets and I have my fair share of them, although there are plenty, that although they are fascinating, I still think are dumb and useless. Over on Engadget they have an item about a treadmill bike. treadmill bike Someone attached a treadmill to a bicycle frame to create a bike that you walk on to move instead of pedalling. Engadget’s caption says it all, “You know, you could also just walk.”

Meanwhile on Gizmodo they have been having a running joke about people’s ipod shrines. Now I love my ipod and take it almost everywhere with me. But I wouldn’t build a shrine to it. It is a device that I use all the time. I love the design and the user interface. I don’t worship it. I have also love legos since I was a kid and my son max loves them too. Having said all that, I still this particular ipod shrine is very funny. leog ipod shrine

Diebold still trying to corrupt the election process! 2

This entry was posted in politics technology on by (updated 6934 days ago)

After the fiasco of a major digital voting failure in Carteret County, North Carolina during the 2004 elections, the NC legislature passed a particularly restrictive new law governing electronic voting systems.

The new bill establishes stringent requirements for voting technology selection, requires election officials to use voter verified paper ballots for recounts and audits, mandates random hand-to-eye audits of paper ballots, and establishes the necessity of post-election voting system tests. North Carolina’s new voting machine requirements are unique, and unusually restrictive compared to similar laws found in other states. Under the new law, which received widespread public support, manufacturers must provide the state government with complete access to voting machine source code during the bidding process so that state officials can evaluate the reliability and integrity of the technology.

Diebold, the company that manufactures a particularly notorious voting system, is fighting these new requirements. They don’t want to provide the source code for their system and have gone to court to request a permanent exemption from these new rules. Diebold seems to prefer protecting their code in the courts than they do on their servers. In 2002 a copy of their source code was downloaded from one of their ftp servers that was left wide open. Subsequent analysis showed that it was running on microsoft windows, and used excel as part of the mechanism for tallying the votes. Now anyone who has used a windows based pc in recent years knows, it is a ridiculously insecure operating system and very easy to hack. As it turns out the diebold system was so poorly designed that someone could easily go into the system and change the vote tallies, without anyone being able to trace back or detect that it had even been modified. Internal memo’s and e-mails from diebold have also documented unauthorized changes they have made to software in voting machines. More information on Diebold voting system problems can be found at BlackboxVoting.com. Well now that someone is really trying to crack down on the abuses of Diebold, they are claiming that they can’t reveal the code because it based on windows.

Well this is bullshit! These rules were put in place for the public good. They are not unreasonable. In fact I don’t think they go quite far enough. I personally believe that any software used in voting machines should be open-source. If a company can’t or won’t play by these rules they should just take a hike. They should not be given any exemptions. This goes for not just Diebold but any other company. Governments should use these rules and only purchase systems that follow these rules. Fortunately the Electronic Frontier Foundation has gone to court to try and prevent this exemption and we should all hope they are successful. If they are not and Diebold is allowed to keep there code secret we will never be able to ensure fair and honest elections in this country again. Ars Technica is a really good site and they have a good write-up about this and it is worth reading.

I do buy music 10

This entry was posted in drm music on by (updated 6939 days ago)

For anyone who has been reading my recent rants on sony and drm, I just want to clarify something. I don’t have a problem with paying for music. I think musicians should be compensated for their work. I just don’t believe in supporting overpaid executives and lawyers for big media companies. In fact in recent months (coinciding with listening to podcasts) I have purchased more music than I have in a long time. It’s just that I now get it either directly from artists through their websites or from online stores like emusic.com that sell mp3 files with no drm and give a much bigger share of the proceeds back to the musicians. I have purchased music from Brother Love, Brad Sucks, the Arts and Sciences, the Black Furies, Jukebox Zeros and others. Demonstrate to the world that we don’t need drm. Buy non-drm music and boycott anything that is copy-protected.

Boycott Sony products!!

This entry was posted in drm technology on by (updated 6933 days ago)

On top of all the other bullshit and lies from Sony over the past 2 weeks regarding their DRM rootkit (see my previous posts here and a good timeline summary from BoingBoing), it now appears that Sony themselves have violated a copyright. It looks like some of the software sony used is ripped off from the Lame mp3 encoder. Lame is an open source software project published under the GPL, which allows anyone to use it for free, but you have to acknowledge it and return any modifications back to the community for further use under the same license. Well it appears that Sony or one its DRM suppliers used the open-source Lame code and neither acknowledged nor gave back the modifications. For a company that makes so much noise about protecting their intellectual property, they don’t seem to have any qualms about stealing others work.

Sony in general is very consumer unfriendly. Ever since they release the playstation portable last spring they have constantly been releasing firmware updates for the thing. While they have added a couple of new functions most of the updates have done nothing more than disable the hacks that people have done to allow them to create and play their own games on the device. There are people out there creating there own games or emulators to play older games. Sony doesn’t like this because they don’t get a cut like they do when people buy new games from the store. So they play cat and mouse, but each time they do this it is defeated again within a couple of weeks.

I will no longer purchase any Sony products of any kind, including hardware, software, music, anything! I urge anyone reading this to also boycott sony. Clearly this company does not deserve to be in business any more.

Update: Boing-boing is keeping a running log of events in the Sony rootkit drm debacle here