an image of an eye glowing green...

0wn yourself

2005-07-29

drm is choking the life out of creativity, convenience, and fair use...

seth schoen, of the eff, recently published four short articles (number one, two, three and four) about his experiences at windows hardware engineering con and some of the new techniques and strategies they're going to be employing in the near future.

digital wRongs management is going to be marbled throughout every layer of the new version of windows.

these restrictive subroutines will be able to tell your computer what it's allowed to play, record, copy, store and even what hardware it's allowed to talk to (not to mention what programs it's not allowed to run).

think about it--telling _YOUR_ computer what it can _DO_!!

noncompliant software and hardware will be blacklisted (by microsoft, at the behest of any corporate entities it's in bed with) and new media will be able to require a certain version of the blacklist to be in place or else it just won't play.

lemme let that sink in for a second. this means that you can buy a new dvd or cd or something, bring it home and put it in your player, and the _dvd_ can tell you that you've gotta hook up to the global interweb and go get the new list or else it's not gonna do what you paid it to do. your dvd.

same with software.

if you load a player (or other piece of software) that windows doesn't like, it can simply stop working until you agree to play by it's rules.

nonsense.

and if the industry really thinks this is the magic bullet for stamping out piracy, they are in for a rude awakening. granted, a lot of lazy, apathetic and (plain) ignorant consumers will go right along with this (whether for agreeing with them, not realizing/caring/being inconvenienced, or just because they don't know what else to do) that unless we (the body of consumers) can unite and stand up to this, drm's not going anywhere anytime soon--in fact, it's prolly gonna progress to the hardware level (which raises it's own set of security/privacy concerns) in a further attempt to tell consumers what they can and can't do with equipment they legally purchased.

it just gives me a headache.

longhorn (or vista, or whatever you're calling it now), au'revoir! hello *nix (and other more enlightened, user-friendly platforms)!

speak _your_ mind....

--cidViscous

0wn yourself

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