I've seen a dog watch TV, though she had a pretty short attention span. The best part is what she was watching and what was happening; it was perfect. It was a nature show about wolves, and there was a pack and an "outsider" wolf. I shit you not: my dog started growling at the outsider! Something about its posture, I guess.

Honestly, I have answered "Yes, this is helpful" to joke reviews in a few cases, just because I thought they were hilarious. Amazon reviewing is Just Another place to go Fuck Around On The Internet, and so some people use it for that. Creative outlet. And no, I don't do it, but I should. And I already admitted I've upvoted some, so .. fine, blame me.

I am so disappointed that people are now talking about religion-blind bribes as though they're evil.

Let's say you're in a third world country, and a "your papers please" official hassles you over something that doesn't make sense, but then explains that your problem can be taken care of for a small fee.

Do you ask him what crazy religious beliefs he has, as a condition for paying the bribe? "Sure, this $20 might find itself into your pocket ... if you can tell me a little about, oh, I don't know, say .. THETANS!" (As you blurt out the last word, transfix him with your gaze and watch to see if he winces.)

Of course not. And what if Google did that? You'd accuse them of religious discrimination.

Google: "Do you believe that evidence reveals properties of nature to us?"

Politician: "Of course. Are you telling me there are people who thi--"

Google: "Evidencist!! No money for you, Mister Science!"

And before you say we shouldn't have bribes at all, I should remind you than nearly 100% of voters always vote for one of the top two best-funded candidates in any race. I take that as meaning we've agreed that it's very important to us, that we only allow people in government if they have proven themselves adept at shakedowns. So, c'mon dudes, you're not telling me that 100% of The People are evil are you? Google's just doing what all Americans want them to have to do.

It's impossible for any media to play on any platform. Even if something were supplied with no decryption key necessary, I can still point to some box it doesn't play on

It depends on why it doesn't play on that box.

If it could have easily played on that box, and would have worked except that someone went to extra trouble to make it not work, then people have cause to gripe. That's a situation where have people expending resources in order to achieve a lower total gross value, which is course, going to result in an even lower net value. If they simply hadn't spent the extra money to make it not work, they could have charged even more for the product. Purposeful economic destruction triggers a lot of peoples' bullshit alarms.

If it doesn't work, not because someone tried to make it not work, but because of a real limitation or practical concern, then that's a whole other situation. It's true that you can't play a movie on VHS player if you don't have physical access to the VHS tape, but why can't you? It's not because some evil or insane bastard wanted to make the media worth less. It works like that because it's easiest to make a media player which requires media, and harder to make a media player that is able to magically work without media. It's natural. It's like everything else in the world that we encounter (e.g. you can't take a trip in your car without physical access to the car) outside of the DRM sphere.

As long as someone isn't trying to keep it from working right, then I think most people will cut them a lot of slack. We're all quite familiar with, and more accepting of, mere technical limitations. It's when someone is dealing in bad faith and acting two-faced (anti-business in the market but claiming to be pro-business in other forums, such as their DC lobbying or their meetings with stockholders, etc) -- that we 1) get pissed off, and 2) give up and just do what happens to be both easiest and works best.

With rented media I'd expect DRM, it's the only way that system can work.

We have hard evidence that it works fine without DRM. From the late 1970s to the mid/late-1980s (I'm not sure exactly when Macrovision happened) we had a VHS rental industry without DRM. There was explosive growth in that period.

And the fact that Macrovision eventually showed up, isn't very good evidence that DRM was needed; we have no reason to believe the mid/late-1980s to late 1990s market would have gone much differently without it. And Macrovision was so trivially circumvented (a lot of people even did it unwittingly with literally zero effort) that it almost doesn't count as DRM (uhr.. "ARM?") so I could possibly even cite the entire history of VHS as proof that rentals don't require DRM to work. I suppose I could make a similar argument with the CSS on DVDs and the DVD rental market, but it's not quite the same (since people at least knew they were breaking the law when they played DVDs on "unauthorized" equipment, and from 1996-1999 AFAIK nobody had stuff like DeCSS yet, so the DVD rental market started with a situation much like the DRM situations that we have today).

With rented media, I don't understand the expectation that it should be downloaded locally and not copy protected.

Copy protection is easy to address: it's always a bad idea (no matter what kind of basic media tech we're talking about) because it limits implementations. When you tell mplayer users "no, our content doesn't work with your player, and we'll probably sue people if we ever find out that it does, so go look elsewhere" that simply can't be as good as "yes, we'll take your money." Anyone renting media should have an expectation that the business wants to do business and isn't going out of their way to look for reasons to say no and prevent the transaction.

As for the expectation of downloading (or otherwise making a copy of the rented media) you may be right or wrong, depending on the media tech. VHS and optical discs are great examples where I can really only think of one good reason where someone might want to copy the rented content to faster or more reliable media (if it's slightly scratched so it takes lots of retries but will eventually succeed) but that situation is avoidable by the business having their shit together.

With Internet streaming, I think it's pretty easy to see why it should be downloadable, because that's just dumb tech right now (in some markets, at least) so unlike scratched discs, the seller can't merely fix the problem by exercising more care.

One common case is that people's Internet connection is relatively slow, so it's hard (even in a best case scenario when the connection is dedicated to the stream) to transmit video in real time. My DSL is only 7Mbps, for example, so (very roughly) downloading 8GB of data takes around 3 hours. If we're talking about a 2 hour movie, then it simply isn't going to work; the bitrate is going to have to be reduced to even have a chance of working.

And maybe reducing the bitrate is a somewhat adequate solution, but an even better (and easier) solution is that I just go ahead and take 3 hours (or 5 hours or whatever is necessarily) to download the 2 hours of video. This approach is proven to work great but of course no streaming service offers that, since that's not "streaming." No legal Netflix clients have 10 GB buffers. (BTW, if Netflix didnt't have DRM, or if the DRM were easily and legally defeated, you damn well know someone would make a 10 GB-buffer Netflix client, which would give a business advantage to Netflix. This is what I meant above about copy protection limiting implementations. If the customer requires large buffers and the copy protection disallows the market from inventing that, then Netflix is essentially telling those customers "fuck you, don't pay me.")

Another common case for some people but not others, is that Internet connections aren't dedicated to streaming, or something [wave hands] out there is slow or bursty. I have a lot going on, on my network. I might actually have 7Mbps for watching a movie one moment, but it's going to be 2Mbps the next. Transmission and playback have just got to become decoupled. So there's your download example; in 2013 I'm really at least one order of magnitude of performance away from streaming being a good idea, and with DRM even the bad idea becomes unworkable.

Time will probably erase or mitigate the download requirement (but not the no-copy-protection requirement) . I know in some parts of the world, you have gigabit fiber to your home and even if your stream only gets 10% of your connection, it's good enough. Good for you. Maybe in 2023 or 2033 I'll have that my city. Until then, though, streaming is bad tech and saving the data for SATA playback is its only hope.

As for copy protection, time won't erase that uselessness. Both parties in the rental transaction have (and will always have) strong incentive for that to not exist. And if you don't have copy protection, then the whole download issue is kind of irrelevant anyway. Without the DRM, the industry will come up with players that do whatever is needed, and whether or not it solves the problem by downloading and saving, won't matter except to the consumers who are looking for the best tools for their jobs.

One way to look at these issues might be to phrase the question in legalese, particularly DMCAese: Is the inability to interact with iTunes cloud storage, using software other than iTunes, due to a "technical measure which limits access?" If someone were to reverse-engineer the protocol that the iTunes application uses to communicate with the backend, so that you could use the service without Apple's shockingly crappy software, and then if Apple sued 'em under 1201, would a fair judge (please, bear with me and pretend) strictly ruling by the letter of the law, say Apple is right or wrong?

If so, then at least it's DRM according to many governments.

I think Apple would do that (i.e. they would say it's DRM) if someone wrote an iTunes cloud client. And I suspect Apple would win, but I guess that depends on the details of the protocol. But history shows that the fact that nothing works with iTunes is on purpose, part of Apple's wishes, not merely due to laziness, lack of market demand, etc.

I do think that the "DRM" label gets overused and applied to things where it should not (e.g. watermarking to detect who leaked something -- that is not DRM!). But trade secret proprietary protocols cut much closer to the line, and when we're talking about a megacorp's proprietary trade secret for transferring media files .. c'mon. Of course you're going to find a "technical measure which limits access" there. Don't you think?

As for your codec example, if the codec were a trade secret (and there have been a few), then yes, it would probably count as DRM. When you get to non-secret things like a supposedly "industry standard H.whatever" where it's documented, I think calling it DRM might be a stretch. We would at least have to depart from the legalese way of looking at it. If the lack of a h.266 decoder were due to patent holders' prohibition, then in DMCA-speak that'd be a "dishonorable-lawyer-trick measure to limit access" rather than a "technical measure to limit access." ;-) At that point, when people refuse to take your money, you don't need to split hairs and argue about whether or not its strictly DRM. They've already gone to a lot of trouble to refuse the revenue, so leave it at that, and just go download the pirate copy which is encoded with the codec that you're allowed to decode. Then everyone wins.

Sounds like a great number to stick into the headline, instead of the 262 lie that the incompetent /. editors used. And yes, of course, 168 is great.

all the NSA needs is metadata. With metadata they can know a lot about you.

NSA is merely the excuse/cover for people securing the things that have always needed securing. Don't look at things from the PoV of the NSA or the kinds of people they're supposedly supposed to (?) be peeking at. Look at it from your own PoV.

When a burglar sees you send a mundane message to your friend, it matters to you whether or not he is able to tell the difference between

Come check out my new pump shotgun. I can't wait for someone to break in and give me an excuse to use it. God damn I have wanted to kill someone, anyone, for so so long. Blood! I MUST HAVE BLOOD!

or

I'll be right over in a few minutes and we can begin our long night of drinking, as part of the wake for my recently-deceased guard dog. I can crash at your place, right? No, I don't want to carry over my solid gold food bowl; that'll just remind me of him. OMG, he'll never eat out of that bowl again. I'm going to have a cry now... you have tissues?

These are the kind of messages which are important to 99.999% of people, the kind of info that we're constantly leaking to fuck-knows-who, which needs to be transmitted securely.

I predict most of them will be broken, and not generate or exchange keys competently.

Interesting how they say their measurements start with a full battery charge but don't say they end with a full battery charge. It's almost as though the so-called MPG number is totally made up out of thin air.

You people are making things too complicated. People who want phones which act like mirrors and resist makeup smudges, really just need their phones to offer stylesheet files to all viewers who gaze upon the user.

The normal rule of gunnery is to shoot, and then whatever you happen to hit: call that the target. ;-) With terrorism, whoever you missed is the target. And whoever you hit, is your weapon against that target. But in order to work, it requires the cooperation of the target. If the target does not choose to react fearfully, then the terrorism does not accomplish its objective.

Does the same thing apply to carjacking? Armed robbery?

No. The goal of carjacking is to get a ride; the goal of robbery is to obtain value. Deciding to not fear it, does not deny your adversary his goal.

But terrorism is about persuading the survivors, the technically-not-victims. Nobody ever carjacks in order to get the next car to lock their doors. Nobody commits armed robbery in order to manipulate a third party (movie script counter-example: Die Hard, but the FBI was manipulated as part of a "Briar Patch" strategy, rather than terrorism(*)).

e.g. Not Terrorism: "Your tank factory and its workers are gone. This gains me a numeric advantage in next month's tank battle." Terrorism: "Your tank factory and its workers are gone. Surrender or else I'll wreck more of your expensive factories and kill more of your workers."

(*) Does this happen in real life? What believed acts of terrorism were actually not?

The president has constitutionally-granted authority over of the armed forces. We have a legal draft. Combine those two things, and ergo, it is within generally-accepted powers for the president to be able to label you a Designated Terroree, such that you're required to be afraid whenever told to, if people being afraid is believed to be militarily advantageous.

OTOH, the Third Amendment means that you don't have to be afraid whenever you're at home. So the president's legal powers over your emotions are limited, somewhat.

In 1771 right before your ancestors went to go confront Joseph Curwen, they did just that. They had a town meeting, exchanged bitcoins, and then went to go confront the sorcerer. Why isn't that good enough for you?

Where are the yellow ribbons reading "Support Our Whistle Blowers"?

I always thought yellow ribbons were very stupid, but then I read that. You may have just converted me to "ribbonism." I love the idea.

Yet any technology in the entertainment systems which existed back then simply would not work any more even using completely open standards.

Analog audio line-in.