You can find a nice collection some of his works online here and his own website here.
There’s an interesting article on arstechnica about why pirate downloads of videos are outpacing legal ones. I particularly liked their term for Digital Rights Management:
Another obvious factor is Content Restriction Annulment and Protection (CRAP) technologies, more commonly known as DRM. Consumers who pay for digital video downloads want to be able to play those videos with the software of their choice, without a lot of trouble or the imposition of additional limitations. Consumers also want to be able to convert legitimately downloaded content to other formats so that it can be played on mobile devices.The rest of the article is worth reading too.
Peter Gutmann in New Zealand has looked at the problems that Windows Vista’s digital rights management (DRM) can cause. Not only Windows users will be affected, it will also cause problems for other operating systems such as Linux and OS X and can potentially threaten your life:
For example the field of medical imaging either bans outright or strongly frowns on any form of lossy compression because artifacts introduced by the compression process can cause mis-diagnoses and in extreme cases even become life-threatening. Consider a medical IT worker who’s using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer (the CD-ROM drives installed in workplace PCs inevitably spend most of their working lives playing music or MP3 CDs to drown out workplace noise). If there’s any premium content present in there, the image will be subtly altered by Vista’s content protection, potentially creating exactly the life-threatening situation that the medical industry has worked so hard to avoid. The scary thing is that there’s no easy way around this – Vista will silently modify displayed content under certain (almost impossible-to-predict in advance) situations discernable only to Vista’s built-in content-protection subsystem.
Actually, the Vista DRM is probably going to cause Microsoft quite a lot of pain in the long term, when you realise how many features are crippled by it, and given that as Peter says, one important point that must be kept in mind when reading the Vista Content Protection specification is that in order to work, Vista’s content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics. As his “Executive Executive Summary” says:
The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.
(Via vowe dot net, to get an explanation about what DRM is, you can click here)
The weather permitting, we should be in the UK for the next few days. (We should by flying to and from Heathrow, at the moment the flight has not been cancelled). Normal posting will resume when we return, in the mean time we wish you a happy Christmas!
Update (2006.12.23): We got to the airport at about 08:15 to find the 10:05 flight we were booked on had been cancelled, but Lufthansa rebooked us at no charge onto the considerably more expensive 8:25 flight, aimed at business travellers, which still hadn’t left.
It took us about 2 hours to change our tickets, check our luggage in and get through the double security controls (Hand-luggage X-ray and patting down, passport control, hand-luggage X-ray and patting down, and final ticket/passport control before being allowed into the gate area – we asked what the point of it was, and were told by the security staff that Germany has aligned itself to the American standards. I can’t say I view that as progress…).
Anyone hoping to check in the usual !#7_0_UG3” onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview (‘/outbound/www.lufthansa.com’);”>40 minutes prior to the flight would have missed it yesterday for sure. After that, we sat in the plane until 11:00 before finally taking off. We felt sorry for the poor business passengers who had booked on to a flight which should have taken off at breakfast time, and finally got away just before it was time for lunch.
Up until now, my experiments with Linux have been of limited success and use – at irregular intervals I’ve loaded the latest and greatest Suse Linux version onto our “cellar-PC” (its only reason for existence is as an emergency PC, in case if we ever have an application that will only run under a real windows installation – the rest of the PCs in our household are various Apple Macs), but despite trying two or three different WLAN cards in the PC, I’ve never succeeded in getting the WLAN configured and hooked up to the Internet. These days a PC without Internet access is a rather expensive door-stop.
I have been pleasantly surprised. I booted the PC using the “Edgy Eft” version DVD that C’t distributed a couple of weeks ago, and was amazed that even running directly from the DVD, Ubuntu found my WLAN card, configured it, and was able access the Internet! I immediately decided to overwrite the Suse 10.1 installation I already had on the PC with Ubuntu. There were no problems at all, and I’ve even installed the Skype RPM for Mandriva 10.1 and higher, which involved first installing Alien to convert it from an RPM package to a DEB package before Skype could be installed – again no problems, it just worked. That’s something I’m used to on our Apple Macs, but not in Windows or Linux. I am someone who knows almost nothing about Linux, so a “just works” behavior is exactly what I need.
If you want to try Linux, let me recommend the book I mentioned above and the Ubuntu version of Linux – I don’t think you can go wrong.
(Posted directly from Ubuntu, of course!)
Ford is using a total of 14 Mac minis on their assembly lines in their two northern Indiana factories to sequence the delivery of parts, reports Macworld. Interestingly, the company that did the evaluation for Ford that lead to the decision has almost completely switched to Macs as a result of their findings in the Ford study.
We are certainly pleased with our Mac minis – we have two at the moment (one we bought used on E-Bay as a remote mp3 music-server for our Roku Soundbridge in the lounge and my main desktop “PC”). We’re probably going to add one more in the lounge in January to replace the Roku and add the possibilty of recording / playing back digital terrestrial TV using an Elgato EyeTV USB stick, which we are testing at the moment on my Mac mini.
One thing I like to do when I have time is to follow links from one web site to the next exploring new connections.
Today, starting from Transblawg, I found myself after several clicks reading a longish paper on The Translation and Dubbing of ‘Fuck’ into Catalan: The Case of From Dusk till Dawn by Dídac Pujol of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. From Dusk till Dawn / Obert fins a la matinada, by the way, is a film made in 1996 directed by Robert Rodriguez. Amazing what some people find to publish papers about – and in this case, even quoting 18 references to back up their arguments!
This week’s Economist has a report about the new Nikon D40 – a 6 megapixel digital SLR camera which undercuts its rivals by several hundred dollars. Their main point in the article subtitled Nikon’s new camera favours quality over quantity is that they think Nikon has recognised that chasing an ever-increasing number of pixels on the image sensor is not the way to go. Thank goodness – I have recently bought a Canon Ixus 60 (which you can deduce has 6 megapixels) and noticed it is becoming quite difficult to find a decent compact camera which doesn’t offer 8-10 megapixels and correspondingly low sensitivity / high noise CCD image sensors.
I’ve just read When smoke ran like water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution by Devra Davis. Its a real eye-opener about how industry distorts and manipulates evidence about the effects of pollution in an effort to keep their liabilities as low as possible and profits as high as possible.
Of course, an obvious example in Germany is the recent lobbying by the tabacco industry to avoid having a blanket ban on smoking in public places imposed by the government. Here, as in other countries and in other industries, the tabacco industry funds apparently independent research groups to produce reports which either play down the destructive effects of their products or emphasise the negative aspects that a ban may result in. Another common practice is to fund “independent” scientists who criticize and discredit research and those individuals working on that research, something which has actually ruined careers of scientists whose work conflicts with the marketing goals of industry.
What I did find interesting is that this sort of manipulative behaviour goes back a long way.
For example, as far back as the 1930’s, the American automotive industry (including GM, Goodyear, Firestone, Mack Truck and several other companies) started buying up and shutting down railway networks and replacing them with bus services. By the 1950’s they had shut down and motorized more than 900 of the 1200 electric railway transit systems in the USA. In 1947 GM and 9 further corporate co-defendants were convicted on a charge of monopolizing the sale of motor buses… and fined the princely sum of $5000, or the price of two small cars! No wonder cities like Los Angeles are today completely dependent on motor vehicles for transportation.
If you are interested in how industry manipulates politics and the markets to get its way, this book is well worth reading.