Libya last year. Serbia before, Kuwait, Korea,

You gotta be kidding. This is why I asked for anyone who is not a self-serving jackal asking you for "help". And so you list prime examples of the very thing I pointed out!

Libya: a bunch of radical islamists trying to overthrow a secular thug in order to establish Sharia law and persecute everyone who is not them. You and NATO helped in hopes of gaining preferential access to Libyan oil fields. Next.

Serbia: a bunch of power-hungry "separatists" who would exploit any possible division to split their country into a buch of city-states if they could get away with it as long as it put them in charge. Not to mention that some of them used a clever strategy of breeding like rabbits to gain control of territory of their neighbours, which you and NATO whole-heartedly endorsed. So you stepped in and gave them "freedom" to be dependent on you and your allies! And oppress the Serbs. Then there is a whole litany of fabricated "war crimes" that you try to pin on the Serbs to bring them to heel (never you mind that NATO killed far more civilians in far more criminal fashion, like bombing passenger trains, etc). An exercise in disgusting, self-serving "righteousness" for profit. Next.

Kuwait: an absolute monarchy invaded by a next door thug over them syphoning his oil using lateral oil wells running under Iraq's border built by US corporations (you knew the reason for the invasion, didn't you?) and so you went and ... restored absolute, oppressive monarchy back into its "rightful" place, the great purveyors of "freedom" and "democracy" that you are! Oh and the lies and propaganda that went along with it! The tear inducing (and totally fake) "eye witness" testimony by an incognito daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador before the Senate about babies murdered in their incubators... just priceless. Next.

Korea: you propped up a dictator so bloody and corrupt that half of his country preferred Soviet-style thuggery to his exploits! Or did you think that all these North Koreans who fought against you did it just for kicks? It was not until the 1990s when the last South Korean dictator was ousted, all the previous ones having been untouchable due to your whole-hearted support, the great lovers of "freedom" and "democracy" that you are. Next.

WW2: you ignored all the pleas for help while trying to profit from the war by strategically supplying both sides until you were outright attacked by the Axis, Japan having bombed Pearl Harbour and 4 days later Nazi Germany having declared war on you. You did not join out of any good will. Next.

WW1: a bunch of blood-thirsty empires fighting over which royal dick is going to be sucked by whom. There were no "good guys" in this war and so you cannot count it as "helping" anyone (other then yourself). Next.

the list goes on.

Indeed, the Spanish American war, the subjugation of Philippines, etc etc. A long list of selfish, self-centered exploits of a greedy empire.

Some US military actions are deplorable and indefensible, but some of them are legitimate attempts to help defend freedom and democracy

Actually the distinction is quite different. All of the military actions of the US are (with the possible exception of WW2) self-centered profit and expansion of power seeking excercises but because of the chosen "national narrative" and "national mythos" of the USA, i.e. "brave defenders of freedom and democracy" that your power elites use to hold the thing together, they are forced to pretend that the actions are to give liberties of the oppressed etc and so on to keep the populace appropriately opiated. Sometimes the mirage thus formed is more successful then other times. This is what is confusing you.

US = Imperialist and Everyone Else = Innocent Victims is a naive way of viewing the problem.

That is not the view. The view is far more straightforward: empires = imperialist, be they Roman, British, French, Russian or American.

What makes the difference however is all the hypocrisy of the US empire trying to paint itself as a peddler of "freedom" which makes it a particularly odious specimen.

So you agree. Most of the 100,000 deserved to die. They were already our enemies. Deluded too.

I will quote you to anyone who has ever expressed any sympathy for the US after 9/11. That will cure them of any misconceptions rather quick.

Come to think of it, your logic of "the uppity foreigners actually want to hold us to all the bullshit we've been spewing and then refuse to lick our boots worshipfully and to cower in fear before us - kill these ingrates all!" expresses a world-view straight out of Mein Kampf. You know, that book so revered by your other supremacist ideological brothers of yesteryear. Same ideas, different übermenschen. They sported more bloody results of their insane lust for global domination, but the hour is young yet. Then, on the other hand, they did not have Internet and so they all had to go and be belligerent jackasses in the real world, instead of being online "tough guys" - like you - who cower in their basements while cheering on the mercenaries in foreign lands.

Settled.

Agreed! Your medication has indeed settled at the bottom of your stomach ... where it unfortunately failed to dissolve and thus has no effect. Probably too much alcohol in the surrounding contents.

You might try stopping chewing on the furniture for a bit and try lying down instead - at least until this episode of yours passes. To put you to sleep you can count bloody corpses of all the "enemies" you are going to kill! Since there are at least a good 5 billion of them, you are not likely to run out before midnight...

For everyone 1 person that hates the US there's 5 that wish we'd come in and fix whatever crap is going on in their community.

This is a perfect example of the root cause of everything that is wrong with the USA: supremely arrogant, utterly self-deluded, smugly imbecillic and profoundly ignorant feeling of the Universe revolving around your ass.

From what I've seen traveling around the world (something that I am sure you did not deem necessary to form your opinion) is that if anything, your numbers are actually reversed: for every naive goofus who sees USA as a potential saviour, 5 see it for what it is: a self-important empire whose distinguishing feature is hypocritical pontification about "freedom" and "democracy" while depriving anyone who has something it wants of freedom, property and frequently life all the while propping up convenient dictators and absolute monarchs (see also: Saudi Arabia) all over the world.

And your general attitude just illustrates the point gloriously.

America isn't perfect but we're the best hope for the World and everyone knows it, that's why they loan us money until they're starving because they know if there's ever a problem we're the ones they can call.

Comedy gold. What was the last time anyone other than thieves and would-be robber barons hoping to profit from misery of their fellows actually asked you to show up and blow their country to smithereens in the name of "saving" it?

Or were you trying to be sarcastic by pointing out how USA rigged the world financial markets for its own benefit? Or more precisely for the benefit of its top 1%, who - amusingly enough - are these days busy abandoning what they sense is soon to be a rotting corpse of a has-been empire for some greener pastures...

Lawyers in modern society fulfill the same role as the various priests and shamans fulfilled in the societies of old: control of access to the "deity" in fashion (in this case the fabled, never seen, mythical "Justice"). Overtly it is to "help" the sheep to access the deity in question, but in reality it is of course merely to satisfy avarice of the priests and their hunger to wield power over others. That is also the reason why priests are always attempting to control politics - in the old days by manipulating pharaohs, kings, emperors and the like or even becoming kings themselves (also see under "The Pope") - but in the modern times they dispensed with intermediaries and half measures and simply took the power directly, in the so called "republics" and "democracies" in which invariably at least two thirds of the power structure consists of the pries ... err ... lawyers.

And no lawyer has any real stake in simplifying or reducing the input of lawyers.

Which is of course the golden rule of all parasitic priesthoods.

Also note that, just like lawyers, all the priests and shamans in history always claimed to only want to "help" their victims and thus always argue themselves "indispensable" to whatever society they happen to prey on.

Why do you think priests always insist on making the rules of the interaction with the "deity" as arcane as possible? As an example: most of history the Christian priests insisted on having their Bible in a language that common people could not read and which had to be "interpreted" for them, just as modern lawyers insist on "legalese" for the same very reasons. Unlike the Catholic priests however, modern lawyers resort to the methods of other, older, priesthoods by ever expanding and complicating (never simplifying, as you noticed) their arcane manuscripts and rituals. This is because the Judeo-Christians have essentially hobbled themselves with the idea of a "Holy Book", which offers limited room for expansion (although several of the "one, only and 100% true" improvements and revisions have been produced). Fortunately for the Christian priests, the original writers made the thing ambiguous, self-contradictory and - most importantly - voluminous enough to satisfy the purpose it was intended for.

As to "justice", the very first test to see if a society has any is to see if making offerings to and groveling before a priest, i.e. a "lawyer", is a pre-requisite for its supposed dispensation.

Note also how promise of "justice" is a key element in most religions and how much emphasis is placed on it by the religion's priests.

When Apple does something with an arrogance similar to them (they didn't) on desktop UI, when you ask them "Who the hell are you?", they can reply "We basically invented consumer desktop environment" and you shut up. Microsoft does have some credits too, they came up with their own way of desktop paradigm.

What are the credentials and references of Gnome 3 designers? Adding some note taking trojan to Debian to trigger Mono install? I may have broken how Debian stable is intended to run since I went nuts when I saw that trojan and completely uninstalled Gnome&depsIt felt like seeing Ballmer's face on my wallpaper when I saw that badly written Mono junk inside Debian. So, sorry if I am flaming a bit.

Okay, look at the raspberry pie project. one of the drivers for that project and what makes it so cool is exactly that these parts are stopping becoming available to the general public.

Completely untrue. The entire electronics industry depends on availability of large quantities of parts and there are literally millions of small companies using them. Again, you seem to live in a world where all electronics is somehow restricted to 10 manufacturers. Its a fantasy land.

You cannot buy a BCM2835, fine that's broadcom, but can you as a consumer buy a Qualcomm chip, or a CSR bluetooth chip, even if you could (but I believe you can't) they will not release all the software needed to drive the hardware and reverse engineering it is something no-one has managed yet.

More nonsense. The fancy chips are needed only if you are doing something that requires both small size and complexity. All of their functions are merely a condensed version of what can be achieved with less integrated generic components.

Also, one does not need to implement any of the digital consumer protocols to exploit the analog hole. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and any other future wireless protocol has no bearing on the matter, whatsoever.

The large corporations won't sell less than multiple thousands simply because it's not worth supporting the small producer.

Yes, that is why all of the electronic mail-order suppliers are long out of business ... oh wait! Its not like any of them buy large orders of parts and then divide them into small chunks to be sold to individuals for a premium, right?

Some large corporations like TI might still sell their beagle boards which will help, but can you rely on that? It's getting harder with every generation.

No it is not getting harder. And yes, you can rely on it. Development boards are sold to all and sundry because there are millions of electronics engineers out there experimenting with components and all manufacturers are eager to give them toys in hopes that some of them devise some new consumer products which will result in the companies they work for ordering large volumes of the said parts. This is the fundamental method by which all sales of parts are conducted and it is not going away in any foreseeable future.

Please try and buy a raw camera module.

You buy a cheap camera and remove the CCD sensor from it. Bonus, you get optics to go along with it. Unless they start making explosive, tamper-proof cameras, you have a very large supply of sensors all around you. And that assumes that you are not using other methods such as an electro-mechanical scan or some such. Again, you forgot that your digitization device does not need to be pretty, small, portable or even 21st century technology. 1930s methods updated for modern components will do just fine, thank you.

Try and build your own PCB using parts with a ball pitch so fine that you need professional level reflow ovens to plonk the parts down(by the way modern parts are already at this stage and it's getting worse all the time too).

Err, you use pre-made PCBs that allow for mounting of SMT components on them and which have old-fashioned DIP pin layout at the bottom. And again, this only applies to specialized SMT chips. DIP packaged chips are and will remain widely available for a variety of reasons. So will discrete components.

So it's not about preventing people from doing it, it's just not worth the man hours of their engineers to put the mechanisms in place to do the purchase.

Huh? Even a few thousand of clients out of the 7 billion people on Earth is enough to get someone in China going, as amply evidenced on Alibaba.com.

We're not there yet thanks to PCs still being prevalent in the home but give it time. Now at the moment you always have the hole of a generic PC to do most of this, but as I was worried about in another post if the tablet market basically shuts down the home built PC at home then what?

There will always be a huge generic PC market. Otherwise you might as well shut down all scientific and manufacturing sectors, not to mention other business endeavours which depend on generic PCs. All that will happen is that "consumer" products will get dumber, to match their audience, but that was always inevitable anyways.

Again, your desperate attachment to "PC at home". WTF? Isn't there a whole world of applications and industries outside of "home", "consumer" crap? What's with this tunnel vision of yours?

If that doesn't happen then what about "trusted computing" what if that is successful and makes amateur PC building impossible?

TPM has no place in many industrial and business applications and as long as there are millions of factories and businesses that have no use for it or where TPM is a hindrance, there will always be general purpose computing devices without it available. But not at BestBuy and not at every idiot's "home".

That's not needed. All content is watermarked. In my scenario user generated content has a watermark embedded in it by the camcorder. Now a sophisticated watermark would include details about the license and your access rights would be monitored too, it may be possible to turn that watermark off for your content but I'm talking about the default setting that 99% of people will use being one that "protects them"

I covered this in another post upstream. Go read it. Per-user watermarks are a pipe dream. All it takes is 2 or 3 streams from different users and they are gone. Just like DRM they are fundamentally flawed. All they are going to do is to catch rank amateurs, but then again so does every other "contents protection" scheme. So expect more grandmas and single mothers of a teenager to end up in court over filming something with a TV in a background and putting on YouTube. Release groups will just laugh at it.

Show me someone who has built a home made camcorder without using items that you would find at best buy. The projects I have seen all have a reliance on commodity hardware or use vendor supplied test hardware (such as the beagle board) which do have parts of the system that you cannot touch and those are the parts that handle media codecs.

You gotta be kidding. Hardware-based codecs are only there to provide low-power, small size consumer devices. They are not neeeded to digitize contents. Raw sensor (even electro mechanical one with plain-old color filter that you change by hand to scan the movie three times) is all that is needed. General purpose CPUs do all the encoding. Of course anyone who depends on specialty hardware is going to get all the specialty hardware headaches! More specialized and convoluted the hardware, bigger the headache! That is why only an idiot (or someone with masochistic tendencies) would be despearte to "reuse" it.

Now people do write their own, but as i was trying to communicate in my last post even assuming you do that then surely you end up with a situation like happened to ogg that the only people to use it were the techie elite and therefore it never gained traction.

You seem to expect some kind of dystopia where all codecs are secret and where only secret, tamper-proof devices are capable of displaying media contents! As long as even one general-purpose CPU remains available (and if it dit not, you might as well stop all manufacturing of all mass production of all products globally, not to mention all scientific and technological progress), software codecs will allow for media playback! More restrictive the "consumer" hardware more demand there will be for the general-purpose equipment!

And who cares for "traction"? Free people will do what free people do, even if a billion or two sheeple are very comfortable in chains and under boot heel.

It soon becomes that the only people exchange in that file format are those pirating at which point it is trivial for law enforcement to find you because you suddenly stand out above the noise of other file transfers. Yes there are ways to hide this but then you're even further underground. and you end up like truecrypt where even possessing the software to hide your activities becomes grounds for search and seizure and by law having to reveal your keys.

That is merely a side effect of all societies sliding towards fascist-like state. A cycle in human history. You are confusing the cause and effect here. I frequently point out that the only way to make the "intellectual property" and DRM "work" is a totalitarian state and that anyone who promotes these ideas is in effect promoting totalitarian ideologies. But this goes far beyond a discussion of DRM.

So fine any future TV could be filmed with your existing camcorder and you will always have content of that quality available.

NO. A consumer product, such as a camcorder, is only one possibility. I keep telling you that due to the nature of the way people see images, unless you prevent private individuals from obtaining electronic parts, there is nothing stopping you from building your own digitization device, other then the know-how. It will not be pretty, it will not be portable, it will not be compact, but it will do the job of circumventing DRM. And enterprising companies will gladly sell you kits for this even if they cannot sell you a finished product.

How will these people rip the content is my question, without access to the right keys and using even current encoding schemes then how will you guess the 128bit key required to break them?

By using the "analog hole". 1024 megabit key won't stop them because of that little hole existing. For example, should the corporations somehow manage to block all audio adapters in all computing devices, to digitize any analog audio stream at a quality exceeding the human hearing capacity one needs about $20 worth of electronic parts from DigiKey or any other online supplier. The only thing that will stop them is some kind of dystopian future where everyone's eyes and ears have been replaced with government interfaces, data communication has been banned and all knowledge of digitization of analog data is proscribed under the penalty of death.

Let me paint a picture:

Your picture is irrelevant. No matter what Panasonic or Sony or whatever-big-corp does, people will still need to use eyeballs to watch the TV and electonic components will still be available for sale and those amongst us who are little more knowledgeable than "Gee this here darn camcorder won't record mah movin' pictures! Oh well..." will still be able to circumvent any idiotic DRM conceivable because DRM is fundamentally, mathematically broken.

And if the corps somehow prevent display devices from showing user generated contents (which would incidentally mean an end to all personal computing, smart phones, office computers and the like) then it would only result in a bonanza of sales of "build your own display" kits.

As to transmitting video files being banned, the answers already exist: tor, i2p and freenet, amongst others. Bonus feature: more the "contents owners" disguised as governments crack down, more the peons realize the true nature of the world they live in, which is a good thing and would eventually result in an a bloody "Arab Spring" redux.

I'd love to say otherwise; I'm a great believer in the importance of the public domain and believe hackers breaking DRM and copyright are the only way to stand against the ever encroaching private stranglehold, but I don't see a long term future and it sickens me.

I think your problem is that you want the ability to circumvent DRM and at the same time you insist that this must all be accomplished with ready-made, shiny, consumer items bought at BestBuy. It is then no surprise that you find yourself despairing.

None of which plugged the "analog hole". As long as there remains one person out there with a non-compliant device and Internet access, the hole will remain wide open.

You said it would be "easy" to plug it. I pointed out that large manufacturers - most of whom are also invested in "contents producers" - complying with the scheme means nothing as long as others do not (and there are a lot of HDMI HDCP strippers available in Asia, and even here). The list of non-compliers has to be completely empty - which includes also any home-brew setups - enforcing which is anything but "easy".

You seem to hung up on the idea that merely denying access to unencumbered digitization technology to a lot of ignorant and easily baffled "Joe Sixpacks" out there is going to somehow deter people who actually re-encode and distribute contents, forgetting completely that people who are so easily controlled were not the ones doing any sort of contents ripping in the first place.

It would be very easy to plug the analogue gap given time and the right industry standards.

If by "easy" you mean total cooperation of every foreign and domestic manufacturer, electronics engineer, hobbyist and "pirate" out there, combined with total ban on access to electronic components enforced by a Gestapo-style police force, complete with burning of books on topics such as "digital image acquisition", then yes, "easy" indeed!

Otherwise it only takes one (2 or 3 if per-user watermarks are in effect) non-conformist with old/specially-built equipment amongst the billions of the "consumers" to break the contents once out of the idiotic DRM scheme and convert it to a non-encumbered format, following which anyone, anywhere with any sort of data connection can get it. The process is irreversible, i.e. once out, the cat can never be put back into the bag. Wholesale banning of the entire Internet is "easier" then getting the "analog hole" plugged, for in order for it to work one has to ensure that absolutely no one has access to any kind of digitization technology outside of the control of the corporato-government.

And it still does not change anything about the mathematically faulty nature of DRM, which is the point the original poster was making and which I was reinforcing.

What do you think about per-user watermarking? Then the analog hole doesn't have to be plugged, only anonymity has to be removed.

That still falls into non-technological enforcement measures, i.e. an attempt to terrorize the public into obedience by insinuating draconian consequences for heretical non-believers who could be identified by the police state.

It in no way addresses the fundamental fallacy of the DRM schemes from the point of view of cryptography. It is an equivalent of the authorities officially declaring the sky to be green and then threatening anyone who disagrees with a bullet to the head. Such a procedure will not alter the properties of the atmosphere, but it might frighten many into claiming that it did.

Also, per-user watermarking is a pipe dream, especially for audio. In order to be detectable, watermarking has to be sufficiently prominent to survive noise/data-loss due to digitization, encoding, decoding etc. If that is so, it is also easily detectable by simple comparison of two streams over certain noise threshold. So instead having to record once, you will need two or three copies from different users to detect and remove the watermarks. If the watermarking is subtle enough to be missed by this process, it is also useless as evidence (at least in any sane court) because it is below the noise level and cannot be detected with any degree of reliability.

I hate to burst your bubble but I have this needle called the "analog hole" here...

Or do you propose that in the age of your "epoxy encased $25 PC" people will have their eyes and ear-drums removed at birth and replaced with appropriate corporato-government approved interfaces to your "epoxy PCs" to prevent these silly DRM schemes from being trivially circumvented?

Otherwise a digital camera or a digital audio recorder will put an end to this nonsense in minutes.

The GP is absolutely right. DRM is fundamentally broken because it violates the basic cryptography principle of having the recipient and the attacker being the same person. You just forgot (as most proponents of DRM do) that the attack vectors possible do not end at the computing device but extend far beyond it.

In order to make DRM technologically feasible (as opposed to enforcement by terrorizing the populace via random acts of spectacular and draconian punishments) one needs a totalitarian police state the likes of which Hitler and Stalin did not dream in their most fevered fantasies. A police state that requires surgery at birth, followed by genetic manipulation and eugenics, and ultimately complete mind control of every "consumer" by the "authorities" so that there could exist a separate "recipient" (a government/corporate controlled entity) and an "attacker" (the poor sod whose mind is being destroyed) in the same person's cranium. Should that come to be, DRM will be the least of our problems.

I thought it was the corporations that control the government? I guess we can switch narratives whenever it's convenient.

Well, look at the actual people of whom the "government" is composed: corporate lawyers, corporate executives, wannabe corporate executives etc.

It is not that the governments are controlled by mega-corporations or vice versa, its is that they have effectively merged into one extended entity, where it is near impossible to tell where the "government" ends and the "too big to fail" corporations start.

So basically what you're saying is they have to manipulate it into something other than what it is for people to care?

That is why I say Western "democracies" are doomed. A combination of carefully nurtured apathy and misdirection onto utter nonsense (sporting events, "reality" shows etc) and a coordinared effort by the oligarchy-controlled "free press" has pretty much irreversibly poisoned the whole thing to the point that only a major shock would snap the populace out of it. And the powers that be are doing everything possible to make sure that even by then it will be too late.

And if you do not believe me, just look at the blatant violations of the most basic clauses of the US Constitution (the ones that got the Founding Fathers incited to revolution in the first place) by the US government and the accompanying lack of any reaction whatsoever from the dazed public....

In Jefferson's time blood would be flowing in the streets if such a thing was tried. Today there is some twitching about to find the remote and change the channel ... ooh, the Bumville Asshats are playing the Barnburg Jackasses for the Stupid Cup! Who cares about all that concentration of money and power thing!

Better yet, not only there is near total apathy but a slew of apologists come out sneering dismissively to defend the indefensible as "necessary measures" or "its all not so bad compared to North Korea" etc.

provided that these sites don't run in chroots where 127.0.0.1 and *.onion addresses aren't the only ones allowed

Close. They are virtual machines which can only see the TOR router, i.e. no physical IP addresses of the underlying hardware host.

So having root on a virtual machine running apache/ngix/whatever gets you nothing, unless the admin was dumb enough to leave some self-identifying data laying around (which is what happened earlier in the year when FBI etc rooted some of the same Freedom Hosting hosts and found enough personal data to identify the admins of some of the websites - but not the location of the Freedom Hosting servers themselves).

To crack the whole system you would have to break out of the virtual environment to get to the physical host. Not impossible but clearly too difficult for FBI/ICE/Interpol and Anonymous both.

Um, if you have access server-side you'd just have it ping you over the regular 'net and log its IP address when the ping comes in.

You are thinking a regular machine sitting somewhere in a rack on the Internet.

Freedom Hosting hosts are virtual instances to which the only network connectivity available is the TOR router, i.e. virtual address space of the TOR network.

Having root on a virtual machine in such an environment does not enable you to identify the physical IP address of the hardware host, unless you manage to not only root the web-host but also to break out of the virtual machine and root the hardware host.

Naturally Anonymous did not manage anything of the sort, as the order of difficulty here far exceeded the script-kiddie level of Anonymous' "expertise".