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Comment Re:Mac Mini with EyeTV (Score 1) 232

There is. It's called Windows Media Center. Or TiVo. Or your cable/satellite box.

Point is there's not a lot of room for innovation in the DVR market. If Apple's TV is somehow different from the Apple TV we have now, it will be via something like Google TV... it will interact with whatever content is coming from your TV provider.

Comment Re:Why so small? (Score 1) 232

I disagree about the 60"+ market. If Apple is making a TV, they are smart to focus on the mid-sized sets.

People who buy big screens care a lot about picture quality and stuff like 120Hz, 3D, etc... more than they do about apps and such. They probably have home theater components and don't really care about an iOS device built into a TV set. To them that kind of functionality belongs in a box, not in the display.

Not to mention large displays have the whole plasma vs. CCFL LCD vs LED LCD debate ... each has distinct pluses and minuses and Apple isn't going to go there. Apple would pick one type of display, probably LED LCD as it is the most green, and lose at least half the potential market in doing so.

Apple has the potential to do something really different with TV if they stick to sizes where the consumers aren't going to be too picky about the display part of it.

Comment Re:And the thing that surprises the Chinese (Score 2) 173

Do not confuse lack of interest with censorship. Was your search language English? Google may have simply been excluding results that were in Chinese.

It could also be China is preventing non-Chinese search engines from indexing Chinese sites with so-called "bad news". Interesting form of censorship, but not something you can blame the search engines for.

Comment Re:Comment Censored (Score 1) 173

This. Mod parent up.

Corporations can and do abuse the legal system to censor free speech, but it is not strictly censorship as it is not the policy of the government, and if it is a found to be a SLAPP there are severe penalties in a lot of courts.

Comment Re:Set-top boxes (Score 1) 839

Apple TV already has no reason to support CableCARD - They are already on the a la carte model. You can buy/rent episodes and season passes for current shows from iTunes.

Try this:
add up the cost of even just renting every episode of every show you watch now from iTunes.
Now compare that to your current cable TV package.
Now imagine your cable company went straight a la carte and allowed you to drop all but the "lifeline" channels (OTA feeds and probably some public-access type stuff), bringing your bill down to $20/mo or so, then you watch everything not on the OTA networks by either paying extra per channel or for on-demand.

Which of the three is really cheaper? If you follow a handful of shows religiously, you might be better off with OTA or lifeline + iTunes. If you only watch a handful of cable channels, you might save with the a la carte option a lot of people seem to want. But if you record a lot of different stuff so you have a variety of stuff to watch, you're probably better off with a cable package.

Where I am, the basic HD service doesn't have a whole lot of junk. I hear FIOS is even better. Getting a 4-tuner Ceton greatly increased the value of basic cable, and Comcast doesn't charge me for the CableCARD. Adding an extra TV means buying a used Xbox 360. That's it.

I personally would like to do package+a la carte. To get a few more channels I want (Science Channel, Nat Geo, BBC America) I need the "preferred" tier, which means I would also be paying for a lot of Encore/Flix-type movie channels that are made worthless by Netflix.

Hear that Comcast? I don't mind paying for cable, and I WANT to give you more money, but I want to only pay for the "preferred" channels I'll watch.

Comment Re:It's good, and I'd like it for Linux (Score 1) 584

The only quibble I see is that you have to do it as root.

If this kind of disclosure was enforced for Linux, it would be safe to let users install apps that didn't need anything privileged (like write to /usr/share/Music)

Where the app would live is another question... I'd say under ~/bin and ~/lib

and why can't we have per-user package management? apt-get should not have to run sudo or setuid to read the system's package DB and read/write the user DB.

User DB overlays system DB, so if a user tried to install a package that was already system-wide, they couldn't.

If a user went to install an app that needs to be system-wide, apt-get could sudo launch a helper provided the user is in sudoers.

User installed apps exist solely in the user's profile and are sandboxed from writing outside of it via something like chroot with a read-only mount of the root filesystem somewhere inside it.

Comment More proof opt-in is the ONLY way to do it right. (Score 3, Insightful) 134

If you RTFA, you'll quickly realize what Carbonite did was provide a 'do-not-spam' list to, well, a spammer... and then, surprise, surprise, the spammer misues or abuses it.

The list was Carbonite customers AND people who previously clicked the opt-out link in past Carbonite spam... So strictly speaking, this wasn't a straight list of Carbonite customers. Spam might be annoying, but there is a bigger issue here: If you wanted to phish Carbonite logins, you'd have a pretty good start.

Scrubbing the list in-house won't happen... Carbonite doesn't have huge lists, the spammers do. And the spammers are not going to give Carbonite their whole list to scrub, those things are money. So Carbonite has to give an opt-out list to the spammers and trust them not to spam it. Sure...

The article's suggestion of address hashes is kinda bogus, and especially dangerous if the hashed addresses are known to be customers. Assuming a spammer/phisher already has eleventy billion addresses, this is a hash collision attack. All the spammer has to do is hash their list and look for matches. Instant customer list.

Comment And with Siri... (Score 1) 692

...a bold new direction in robotics was born - the Genuine People Personality. Without a personality, people would become frustrated with their inability to relate to robots. With a personality, robots could be more than just machines. The could be friends and companions or, as the Marketing Department of the Corporation preferred to describe them in early advertising slogans, ‘your plastic pals that are fun to be with’.

- DNA

Comment Re:Premium? (Score 1) 397

Those premium options are for the people who put stuff on download.com. In other words, pay CNet more so they don't stick their crap on your product.

But most "content providers" will probably be happy to let CNet wrap their installer, because it gives them reports on who actually installed the download, what else they have installed from download.com, and who knows what else. I'm surprised CNet isn't charging FOR the wrapper, given the amount of 'demographics' it could weasel out of end users' systems.

Comment Re:DRM systems (Score 1) 34

Not reliable ones. The only DRM/anti-tamper that can't be short-circuited in code is an encryption key. Put the key in a secure chip and make it really, really hard to get to the key from outside the secure hardware. And if you are willing to accept the karma of bricking devices, zeroize the key when tampering is detected.

Using physical characteristics of flash to generate a key is a bad idea. First, you can't quickly destroy the key to prevent tampering. If the key can be extracted from the hardware, it can be emulated. Second, flash cells wear out and their characteristics are going to change, meaning your key is going to change. Third, you might find supposedly random characteristics are rather deterministic by manufacturer, chip type, and production run, reducing your key space significantly.

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