From: Fergal Daly (fergal at domain esatclear.ie)
Date: Thu 09 Aug 2001 - 09:25:33 IST
On Wed, Aug 08, 2001 at 06:31:21PM -0400, Wesley Darlington wrote:
> I *like* Cringely's stuff. This article is one of his better ones. I don't
> find it implausible.
I've read a few of his articles too and they've been pretty good but this
was an exception. What is he on about with raw socket access? I there's
nothing you can do with XP in terms of forging packets etc that you couldn't
do with win9X, NT or root on a unix box.
As for taking over the internet, they tried it already with MSN and admitted
defeat, plus if they just adapt IPv4 by twiddling a few reserved bits,
they'll run into all the same problems IPv4 is running into now.
It might be just a flash upgrade to allow routers to route this new protocol
but if they're depending on all the bandwidth providers to apply it then
they could be out of luck, firmware upgrades are not done lightly, if it
ain't broke don't fix it.
> The article is certainly less scary and outlandish
> than RMS' short story on copyright...
>
> http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
What, the one that's already starting to come true? The one that's a wet
dream for the enormously rich and powerful lobbying group that just happens
to control most of what you see and hear on TV, radio and print?
Companies are touting smart cards that will allow publishers to encrypt
content and have it readable only if that particular card is present. In the
states the DMCA (a law bought by the intellectual property industry) already
makes it illegal to even try to circumvent anything like this, no matter
what your intention is, even if you just want to print it out so you can
read it in the loo.
There was an attempt recently to add special command to the IDE command set
that would mark certain blocks as unreadable without an access code. Content
would be downloaded to these blocks and only "approved" applications (only
available on "approved" operating systems of course) would be able to read
them and tough luck if your hard drive starts making that dreaded clunking
noise, there's no way for you to back those sectors up and restore them to a
new drive. Luckily this didn't go through.
Dmitry Sklyarov is in prison for cracking Adobe's absurdly weak copy
protection on their EBooks. Prof Edward Feltzen had to pull out of
presenting his research on digital watermarking due to legal threats. And of
course there's the whole DeCSS thing.
It's already started to happen,
Fergal
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