BBspot post

Looks like one of the bloopers on my personalized google page that I sent in made it to BBspot's blooper page. Linkage.

DRM Insanity

Cory Doctorow, an employee of the EFF as well as a Sci-Fi writer, recently gave a speech to Microsoft employees about DRM. The full speech can be found here. This is one of the best writings about the absurdity that DRM has become that I've read. It also explains how it works and why there are major difficulties getting it to work as they (the media companies) envision it will. Cory's blog can be found at craphound.com (very strange name btw...).

Go ahead... give it a read, it quite interesting. I even hear he is giving similar speeches around the country at different college campuses and such. I hope he comes around this part of the country, but seems unlikely.

Florida - Spring 2006

Well, Finally got some pictures from florida uploaded. Had a great time, but my alternator went out about 30 miles away from home. After being awake for over 24 hours and paddling 7 miles this made it a very, very long day. Finally ended up having it towed back to town after having my brother come down and try to help me get it back to town. One word to the wise... Never take Highway 41 through Kentucky. It is horribly marked and is one of the worst roads I've ever tried to follow. Anyways... on with the pics!









More can be seen by Clicking on one of the photos and following the links.

On another note, a cool little link I found was Retrievr, which allows you to draw something and it will try to find photos from Flickr which kinda match your drawing. Give it a shot!

Black Magic Voting

Black Box Voting is reporting that the internal logs of 40 or more electronic voting machines reveal several anomalies in the 2004 presedential election. Black Box sucessfully sued former Palm Beach County, FL supervisor of elections Theresa LePore to obtain these logs. One thing to note is that these were not the Diebold machines we have all heard of, but were produced by Sequoia Voting Systems. Some of the anomalies include votes being cast before and after polls were closed and one machine being powered off and on 128 times during the election.

Now, I won't jump to the conclusion that these log anomalies were done with malicious intent, but it is something that needs to be investigated. Blackbox.org has invested over $7,000 just to obtain these logs, which took 9 months to obtain. I encourage you to explore more of Blackboxvoting.org (not blackboxvoting.com) as they have several other interesting stories and appear to be very non-partisian.

ATI's Debacle

As an update to the previous article about HDCP, it looks like ATI themselves have taken notice that their graphics cards that they have been selling that claim to have HDCP support, while they don't. They are now removing the claims from their website. Hopefully this is just the first step they are taking and will issue a press release soon. A coverup with something like this would be foolish and almost impossible. There are several sites which archive other sites and a simple look at these archived sites would show what they had earlier.

Infact, if you would like to inform your represenative that you oppose these type of measures, it can be easily done right on the EFF's website. A written letter would also be great as opposed to a digital version.

Unsocial Networking

Here is a hilarious video clip from the daily show about social networking sites such as Facebook or Myspace.

In other not so funny news it looks like Myspace is going to attempt to make it's site safer to users. Who knew that putting your personal information on a public website would allow for unwanted people to contact you?

And well, I leave for Florida in the morning, so wish me luck! I just bought a 512 MB SD card for my roomates camera, so hopefully I'll be able to get some good pics and post a few.

Digital Rights Nightmare (DRN???)

With DVD's supposedly going the way of the VHS, the push for higher definition video is on. With the new and improved resolution, comes "new and improved" copy protection schemes. It seems that the new scheme for the next generation of media will be HDCP, or Hi-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection. This system will be necessary for hi-def playback of the new HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs. Basically this system allows for every piece of the system to protect the videostream, from the source, to the display itself. What this means is that without "DHCP Compliant" TV's/graphic cards/monitors and everything inbetween, nobody will be able to get the full benefit of this new media. Now, while this sounds like a technical limitation, it is not. There are many HDTV's and other hardware devices (such as computers) out there that can display the full resolution of the media but will not, because the video will be downscaled to 540p. 540p will be only 25% of the full resolution that these discs support. That's a pretty noticeable difference. It also means that all analog outputs will also be downscaled to the smaller resolution. But it is not guaranteed that you will even be able to output an analog signal at all in the future. You will need to use a digital output such as DVI or HDMI. Another article that describes a few of the personal computer problems in greater detail can be found here, and shows just how complicated it's going to get. The average consumer is not going to care about all of this stuff. They are just going to get angry because they are seeing no benefit with this "New Fangled DVD". How about the fact that just because your graphics chipset says that it is compliant, doesn't mean that your graphics card will be compliant. According to this article most(if not all) of the graphics cards produced in the last few years that have advertised themselves as HDCP compliant will not be.

Well, why don't companies just make their hardware/software HDCP compliant you ask? As with most of the major DRM attempts, this technology will need to be licensed. The controlling corporation for this particular technology will be Digital Content Protection, LLC. The current HDCP specifications can be found in this PDF. What will this mean for open source software? I doubt they will be able to include this software and still be open source. I fail to see how this system is making things better for the consumer at all.

Another great concern is with the DMCA, which currently trumps all fair use rights and copyright terms. Even if the copyright expires on an item of Intellectual Property, then it will eternally be legally protected by the copy protection mechanisms.

Another big problem for HDCP is that there a several known problems with the system. A paper was published in 2001 detailing the flaw, which as far as I can tell still exist. How long will it be before some hacker (yes, hacker... NOT cracker) bypasses this system just like CSS for DVD's?

I for one hope that the inherent problems and complexity of this system will show itself early in the game. This will hopefully cause a consumer backlash that will stop this system in it's tracks. I'm sure that when John Smith finds out that the HDTV he bought 6 months ago cannot play the new HD-DVD resolution, and that he will have to buy an entire new TV to see the benefits of the new HD-DVD player he just bought, he's going to be pretty angry. How long is it until we see a future so encumbered with digital rights management that it will resemble something like this? It seems that so much progress is being hindered by DRM and IP (intellectual property) legislation. Why would any consumer want a system so complex and resource intensive when we just want a better looking movie? If it were not for these roadblocks I think we would be watching HD-DVD's right now. Making more complex and expensive players is not good for the consumer in any way.

P.S.
I'm sorry for all the links in the article, as there is a plethora of reading there, but this is a complex issue. Anyway, I've already spent too much time on this issue. I am waiting to see how this one plays out.

The Broken Patent System.

Phillip Hallam-Baker has a very series of articles on his blog that detail several of the problems with the current patent system. As of today he has completed parts 1 through 3 of 4. A very interesting read indeed.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Link to his main site, dotfuturemanifesto which has many more interesting posts.

Word of the day!

Technorealism. I found this today while stumbling upon descriptions of other philosophical ideas.

Some others you might want to check out if you are unaware of the basics behind the names:
Pragmatism
Idealism
Materialism
Realism

Many others are linked to within the text, so I'll let you explore those on your own.

Sand

A very cool Java game that has had me entranced for quite a while recently is this sand game. I've seriously spent hours playing with different ideas in this. It's been linked by many, many other sites, but I figured I would put it here as well.

I will be leaving for Florida on the 18th and still don't have my camera back from the repair shop. I'll see if I will be able to borrow someone's for a week or so. I will be visiting Tampa again as well as many of the sites I visited before in the northern part of the state last year. Some warm weather will be welcome, and hopefully it will be much warmer than it was when I went last spring. If I ever obtain a camera I will be sure to post some of the highlights of the trip. My next big trip after this will hopefully be out west to Colorado and the Rocky Mountains. I've been there once and it was one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. I would like to be able to go with a few friends and take dualsport motorcycles on some of the mountain passes. Anyway, enough with the daydreaming, play with some sand!