Blackmoor Vituperative

eWeek reports that the Digital Rights Mafia is still bitching and moaning about how digital music is slowly replacing CDs, even though people still buy 10 times as many CDs as they download. The media robber barons blame so-called “pirates” — which is to say, their customers. They ought to look closer to home.

As long as the Big Four music labels and the Digital Rights Mafia insist on infecting their products with DRM, people aren’t going to buy it. Even Steve Jobs has finally realized what many of us knew back when he was pushing DRM in 2003 — that DRM is a colossal waste of time and money.

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

(from Apple.com, Thoughts On Music)

When the Digital Rights Mafia gives up on their jihad against their customers, maybe they’ll realize it, too. Then we’ll all win.

Don’t hold your breath.

Microsoft zero-day vulnerabilities are increasingly so commonplace, the risk is lost with the message. On Feb. 2, Microsoft issued another security alert, this one for Excel, that largely went unnoticed.

In its security bulletin, Microsoft warned that “other Office applications are potentially vulnerable” to the zero-day flaw.

Zero-day refers to a flaw for which there is an exploit but no available fix. The Excel vulnerability is Microsoft’s fifth zero-day exploit since December, and part of an increasingly troubling trend.

(from eWeek, New Zero-Day Threat Excels)

Does a house have to fall on you? Anyone still using MS Office after all this time and all these security vulnerabilities probably shouldn’t be permitted to use a computer. Switch to OpenOffice, you blockheads.

An anonymous reader dropped us a link to this New York Times article about a ‘vast expansion’ of DNA sampling here in the US. A little-noticed rider to the January 2006 renewal of the ‘Violence Against Women Act’ allows government agencies to collect DNA samples from any individual arrested by federal authorities, and from every illegal immigrant held for any length of time by US agents. The goal is to make DNA collection as routine a part of detainment as fingerprinting and photography. Privacy experts and immigrant rights groups are decrying this initiative already. Many are also skeptical of lab throughput, as FBI analysts indicate this may increase intake by as much as a million samples per year. There is already a backlog of 150,000 samples waiting to be entered into the agency’s database.

(from Slashdot, US Set on Expansion of Security DNA Collection)

You need to see this movie. Buy it from Amazon or rent it from NetFlix. Don’t bother looking for it at Blockbuster or Wal-Mart — I do not care for seeing art bowdlerized by sniveling moral busybodies, whether its by some blue-vested crone at Wal-Mart or by some middle-aged former soccer-mom in a secret tribunal at MPAA headquarters.

By all means, label things accurately. If it has full frontal nudity, say so. If it has graphic decapitations, say so. But do not have the unmitigated arrogance to tell me what I as an adult may see or buy, or what I as a parent may allow my children to see.

Some will say that what the MPAA, Blockbuster, and Wal-Mart do is not censorship. To that, I say “bullshit”.

See this movie, and watch all of the special features. The deleted scenes are worth watching.

Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, Connecticut, was sentenced to up to 40 years in prison for the crime of using a classroom computer which had been infected by malware.

Oct. 19, 2004, while substituting for a seventh-grade language class at Kelly Middle School, Amero claimed she could not control the graphic images appearing in an endless cycle on her computer.

“The pop-ups never went away,” Amero testified. “They were continuous.”

The Web sites, which police proved were accessed while Amero was in the classroom, were seen by as many as 10 minor students. Several of the students testified during the three-day trial in Norwich Superior Court to seeing images of naked men and women.

Computer expert W. Herbert Horner, testifying in Amero’s defense, said he found spyware on the computer and an innocent hair styling Web site “that led to this pornographic loop that was out of control.”

“If you try to get out of it, you’re trapped,” Horner said.

[…]

The six-person jury […] convicted Amero, 40, of Windham of four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child. It took them less than two hours to decide the verdict. She faces a sentence of up to 40 years in prison.

(from Norwich Bulletin, Teacher guilty in Norwich porn case)

I have said before that most people are too stupid to be allowed near computers. This is not one of those cases: Ms. Amero didn’t own the computer, and it wasn’t her responsibility to maintain it. The fault here lies with the administration of Kelly Middle School. The computer in question should never have been connected to the Internet. Its operating system was out of date, its antivirus software had expired, and the machine itself was infected by numerous pieces of spyware. When she walked into that classroom, there was a ticking bomb on her desk, and it’s the Kelly Middle School administration that is to blame for it.

As for the jury, you can bet your retirement that any potential juror who had any knowledge of computers whatsoever was eliminated during voir dire by the prosecution. Jury ignorance has become the weapon of choice of judges and prosecutors who want to control the outcome of trials. But since the jury pool (prior to voir dire) is selected randomly, there were probably very few such individuals in the first place.

This is a grotesque miscarriage of justice. However, it would be a mistake to think that Ms. Amero’s case is unusual. Miscarriages of justice happen every day: you simply do not hear about most of them.

I’ve been working with Vista since its beta days, and I started using Linux in the mid-’90s. There may be other people who have worked with both more than I have, but there can’t be many of them. Along the way, I’ve formed a strong opinion: Linux is the better of the two.

(from eWeek, Leveling the Playing Field)

Interesting. Academic, since I have no intention of buying Vista at any price, but still, it’s interesting.

A story over at InformationWeek raised our hackles a bit with the headline “Copyright Protection A Boom Business” followed by the summary saying, “Cracking down on piracy contributed to 6.6% of the U.S. gross domestic product in 2006, according to an industry lobbying group.” Just sounds like more typically inflated and ridiculous claims about piracy that regularly stream out from the content industry, which then get presented to legislators as reasons why we need more laws to bolster their aging business models. Just one problem, though: the facts of the story don’t support the headline at all.

(from Techdirt, Copy Protection A ‘Boom Business’, Except When It Isn’t)

Just more lies from the Digital Rights Mafia.

A California court made it clear to Apple that if the company wanted to find out who leaked details of an in-development product to bloggers, they’d actually have to do it legally. That lesson cost the company almost $700,000 in legal fee reimbursement.

(from WebProNews, Apple Ordered To Pay Legal Fees For Bloggers)

While Sony BMG already settled the class action lawsuit against it for their rootkit malware that opened up security holes on computers that were difficult to fix and hidden in a way that made them difficult to find, there was also an investigation to see if the rootkits violated federal law — and as I have been saying since Day 1, they did. The company has reached an agreement with the FTC, and unlike the typical agreement where a company “doesn’t admit guilt,” in this case Sony BMG clearly states that they violated federal law with the rootkits, and will reimburse people up to $150 if their computers were damaged by the software.

Why the hell aren’t these people in jail, barred from using computers for years, and so on, like any other hacker? Because most hackers don’t have millions to spend on their defense, that’s why. If you think the law is applied equally to everyone, this is your wake-up call. (Although if you really needed that wake-up call, you have other problems.)

The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.

Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.

Such a technique is broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI’s Carnivore surveillance system, later renamed DCS1000. It raises concerns similar to those stirred by widespread Internet monitoring that the National Security Agency is said to have done, according to documents that have surfaced in one federal lawsuit, and may stretch the bounds of what’s legally permissible.

(from ZDNet, FBI turns to broad new wiretap method)