Boing Boing: In the age of ebooks, you don’t own your library. It is an argument that ought to be hardwired into the mind of every copyfighter. Simply because the idea of property rights is one of the driving notions behind new and increasingly out-of-control IP legislation. But as it turns out, IP in practical use actually undermines property rights for the masses.
It’s funny that in the name of protecting “intellectual property,” big media companies are willing to do such violence to the idea of real property — arguing that since everything we own, from our t-shirts to our cars to our ebooks, embody someone’s copyright, patent and trademark, that we’re basically just tenant farmers, living on the land of our gracious masters who’ve seen fit to give us a lease on our homes.
And perhaps that is the whole idea. A brilliantly evil way of restoring the proper order of the world to what it has been for the vast majority of recorded history. Just updated for a world where farmland has become deprecated.
Filed under Copywrong by Björn Hallberg 1 month, 2 weeks ago
An interesting observation as the BLU-RAY format ascends as the next optical storage technology.
Blu-ray Disc players from Samsung, Sony and Sharp are now the most expensive they have been all year, presumably because HD DVD’s exit from the high-def disc arena has removed some of Blu-ray’s pricing pressure.
Sure, there could be a relation to the rising costs of raw materials but it just doesn’t add up. The manipulation and the conspiracy against consumers is quite staggering as I see it. Now, blu-ray is not something I will adopt anytime soon, but I predict that it will be useful as a stepping stone before we can all enjoy the next generation hard drives and solid state units. Or on-demand downloading and completely cyberized storage for that matter. Maybe it will even keep us floating until the advent of personal holographic storage. That is if the prices for writers / readers and blank media ever drop to a reasonable level. Right now it is looking more and more like the next “dual layer” flop.
Filed under Gadgets by Björn Hallberg 1 month, 3 weeks ago
Yes folks, that is how the dollar has been saved time again from a complete and utter collapse. Allied nations have risked their own financial well-being to prop up the end-result of America’s wars and financial negligence. And now the pleas start again. I say stop fighting the inevitable. The US will collapse and it is only a matter of time. The sooner the better so that we can move on and create something better.
Take the hint from progressive states like Venezuela and kick the dollar. If a few more states could be convinced to do the same, we could maneuver the U.S. to a critical point where it would collapse under its own weight and no sane capitalist would rush to its defense. And that would be the end. As for repercussions, it would be something we would all have to bear and I for one would be willing to pay the price. As opposed to American tyrants (this quote comes to mind) who would have others pay the price for their criminal ideals.
But the American regime will have none of this. They will call in every last favor and use every last instrument of manipulation to increase the chances of intervention. At the very least, they are going to bring us all down with them. And many around the world, caught in the notion of the infallible America, are only too happy to comply.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to rid the world of the United States once and for all. We might never get a better chance, at least not without the use of military force down the line. Lets call it a preventive measure.
Filed under Americas by Björn Hallberg 1 month, 3 weeks ago
1 in 300 US residents are on the terrorist list. Does that make sense?
“At the current rate of growth, the U.S. watch lists will contain a million records by July. If there were a million terrorists in this country, our cities would be in ruins” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program. “The absurd bloating of the terrorist watch lists is yet another example of how incompetence by our security apparatus threatens our rights without offering any real security.”
As some clever person over at digg pointed out, in a perfect world, this million or so names ought to be those working for the military industrial complex in some capacity. Dangerous times indeed, especially with the seemingly inevitable plunge of the US economy that most of us have been predicting for years.
Filed under Americas by Björn Hallberg 1 month, 3 weeks ago
America is number one again. Leading the world by its dismal example.
For the first time in U.S. history, more than one of every 100 adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report documenting America’s rank as the world’s No. 1 incarcerator. It urges states to curtail corrections spending by placing fewer low-risk offenders behind bars.
The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect an increase in the nation’s overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as “three-strikes” laws, that result in longer prison stays.
“For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling,” the report said. “While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine.”
The racial disparity for women also is stark. One of every 355 white women aged 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one of every 100 black women in that age group.
The report said the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which round out the Top 10.
The U.S. also is among the world leaders in capital punishment. According to Amnesty International, its 53 executions in 2006 were exceeded only by China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan.
Filed under Americas by Björn Hallberg 2 months ago
People ought to think about where they host their domains these days.
Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.
It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.
You never know how this sort of nonsense will affect you in the end. Now that the US seems hell bent on exercising this absurd, but still according to their own twisted laws, perfectly logical measure. It is hard to imagine a world where American entities did not figure into the equation. In this case, the registrar was a US company, but even if you think you are clever and place your domain name and servers outside US territory you might still find that DNS root servers are still open to manipulation. As are the only options for making electronic money transfers (Paypal, VISA etc). Or for that matter the search engines that presumably generate a good portion of your revenue.
To be fair, certain issues, like “holocaust denial” are more or less censored in certain European countries. Picking a host nation as a cyber dissident has become an infinitely complex task of issues and limitations. It is a far cry from the free and borderless wired world that we have come to believe in.
Filed under Americas by Björn Hallberg 2 months ago
Being a fan of disk encryption, the report coming out of Princeton University is somewhat disconcerting. Granted the attacker must be relatively knowledgeable, have access to special software that afaik isn’t widely available yet and realize early on that the system is in fact encrypted (before letting the RAM circuits be wiped or overwritten). Imagine for instance the police confiscating your computer, pulling the plug and lugging it off to their secret computer lair or whatever. In that case, the memory is going to be wiped within a minute or so. But for around-the-clock protection even when you’re not around to pull the plug, the will be something to think about. Especially for those that always leave the computer casually in STR(S3) (suspend to RAM) or Laptop users.
The conclusion from their report:
Contrary to popular belief, DRAMs hold their values for surprisingly long intervals without power or refresh. Our experiments show that this fact enables a variety of security attacks that can extract sensitive information such as cryptographic keys from memory, despite the operating system’s best efforts to protect memory contents. The attacks we describe are practical—for example, we have used them to defeat several popular disk encryption systems.
Other types of software may be similarly vulnerable. DRM systems often rely on symmetric keys stored in memory, which may be recoverable using the techniques outlined in our paper. As we have shown, SSL-enabled web servers are vulnerable, since they often keep in memory private keys needed to establish SSL sessions. Furthermore, methods similar to our key-?nder would likely be effective for locating passwords, account numbers, or other sensitive data in memory.
There seems to be no easy remedy for these vulnerabilities. Simple software changes are likely to be ineffective; hardware changes are possible but will require time and expense; and today’s Trusted Computing technologies appear to be of little help because they cannot protect keys that are already in memory. The risk seems highest for laptops, which are often taken out in public in states that are vulnerable to our attacks. These risks imply that disk encryption on laptops may do less good than widely believed. Ultimately, it might become necessary to treat DRAM as untrusted, and to avoid storing sensitive con?dential data there, but this will not be feasible until architectures are changed to give software a safe place to keep its keys.
Filed under Software by Björn Hallberg 2 months, 2 weeks ago
Found on the net …
Original quote by Emma Goldman of course. Now where did I see those Fawkes masks just now … oh that’s right.
Filed under Misanthropy by Björn Hallberg 2 months, 2 weeks ago
Old news but nevertheless interesting. More and more artists are turning against the copyright regime. Here is a recent example of a modern record label, Alphabasic (via Rlslog) trying to go with the flow instead of fighting the current.
If you really like ‘The Flashbulb - Soundtrack To A Vacant Life’ […] show your support without it going to greedy retailers, distributors, and coked-up label reps […]
True, true. As everyone should know by now, the actual creative minds behind music in particular get only crumbs while the big labels rake in billions. Yet the chief argument among copyright protagonists remains the delusion of protecting creativity. Meanwhile, the RIAA and major music retailers join forces to cut artist royalties even further, from roughly 13% today to anything from 4 to 9%.
My personal favorite from last year: Eric Wilkinson, producer of a brilliant but unsung movie called The Man From Earth (via Rlslog) …
Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download. After that happened, people were watching it and started posting mostly all positive reviews…People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy.
Go see it today. Said movie makes it painfully clear that one of the most creative flicks (and a sci-fi at that) of 2007 did not come from any of the big movie studio conglomerates.
Filed under Copywrong by Björn Hallberg 2 months, 2 weeks ago
In a surprising turn of events, the tracker (though not the site itself) seems to be responding again.
The frontend of Demonoid is still hosted in the US, together with the popular Subdemon forums. Interestingly, the tracker - which has been offline for months - is now hosted in Malaysia, and has started to respond again, approximately 30 hours ago.
It is of course not clear what this all means, but without an official message from the Demonoid team, speculation has started. Could it be that the site has found a new host, and preparing a return? Many former Demonoid members are secretly hoping that this is indeed the case.
An all around important move if it proves to be true. Sure enough, there are many public trackers around, but Demonoid was bigger than most of them. And the content was broader and better kept compared to lets say the even larger Pirate Bay. Demonoid was simply the place for good, rare and non-scene releases.
Public trackers remain immensely important for a number of reasons. And it all boils down to democracy. Firstly, they give access regardless of social and economic standing. You don’t need to be well connected, wait in line, nor do you need to have the latest and greatest broadband connection with unlimited bandwidth to work your way up a ratio / upload system. In most parts of the world, bandwidth comes at a premium. Second, public trackers have a spectacular value when it comes to disseminating information freely and speedily. A bit like the recently attacked Wikileaks (now offline, IP = 88.80.13.160). One cannot disregard the possibility that a respectable portion of the p2p antagonists are in fact motivated by a fear and dislike of the idea of freedom of information. Sometimes, the need to protect dirty secrets and maintain social control through intellectual property converge, such as in the case with the Church of Scientology or for that matter Wikileaks.
On another note: Appropriately, Cryptome has posted a link to the entire Wikileaks archive, hosted at the Pirate Bay of course …
Filed under Copywrong by Björn Hallberg 2 months, 2 weeks ago
Contact
Lifestream
