Interview with a content management heretic : most available content management systems leave you with a lot of work to do At last, an analyst who says the emperor's got no clothes on.

Phoebos and Deimos Have Vanished Update #5 - Has NASA Betrayed Us? Uh-huh... And what exactly is "Your Own World USA"?

What is CRAYON ? And how did they get over 280,000 people to use it when it doesn't work? "Create your own newspaper" from all those boringly mainstream news sources? RSS should be able to replicate this and in a much more function rich way.

DMCA (Syklarov), SSSCA, (only US government approved hardware, software, OS ), Win XP (three installs and you're out). What's next?

There's a lot of arguments in there about a lot of topics. But what of software copy protection?

You may remember when Lotus 123 was copy protected and as users we all bought protection crackers so we could install twice, support our users and take backups? How I saw it was that we, the people, complained and voted with our money to such an extent that software copy protection disappeared or became manageable. In the current legal climate, most of the activity that led to a big win for consumers then would be illegal now.

We did this one. Why are we going through all this again?

Why is the playing field so biased towards BigCos this time around?

The USA exports all these laws by implication of it's economic position. And we're not drawing very pleasant conclusions about the land of the free (sic!) imposing the results of a democracy from which the rest of the world is excluded.

The EU is building a reputation for passing similar legislation on the nod. Why is there so little debate here, compared with the USA?

Did the proposers of the SSSCA think through any of the implications? Or were they happy to just take Hollywood's shilling?

Is the SSSCA so extreme that it will polarise the debate, allowing them to slip through a lesser but no less stupid bill?

As Frank Zappa might have said, "What happens when music is illegal?"

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I wonder if there is a logical proof that shows that successful copy protection of computer mediated media is impossible based on cryptography? One requirement of any scheme is that at some stage, the underlying information must exist in clear for the local user to make use of it. In Audio this means that it is turned into an analog signal that is fed to the amp and speakers. Once the signal is in clear there is a window of opportunity to turn it into a non-copy protected digital stream. At this point, the stream can be copied indefinitely. In cryptography, we are always concerned with protecting the information passed from Alice to Bob so that Carol cannot access it. But in copy protection we are trying to prevent Bob from accessing the information while at the same time providing access to Bob. A logical impossibility.

IMHO, we can only make this hard, not impossible. This means that we may only be able to push up the economic cost to Bob (in time, effort or money) to the point where it's not worth the effort, not enforce it. In audio and still pictures the stream is sufficiently simple that we stepped over that line long ago. The existence of MP3 encoders, mini disks, cassettes and so on, mean that it is now trivial to re-code de-crypted source. But in video, the technology has not yet made it easy. We accept that decrypting Sat or Cable TV is too hard. So while possible we cannot do anything useful with the clear signal reaching our display device. A similar situation happens with software. It's virtually always possible to obtain cracks or cracked versions of software. But copying and distributing 500Mb of MS Office is just too much effort. Compared with the price.

So arguably, it's the protection cracking technology that sets the retail price of commodity digital forms. If cracking is easy, then official sources have to be cheap.

Forget DMCA, the new nemesis 'SSSCA' - From a Wired article: Music and record industry lobbyists are quietly readying an all-out assault on Congress this fall in hopes of dramatically rewriting copyright laws. The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), scheduled to be introduced by Hollings, backs up this requirement with teeth: It would be a civil offense to create or sell any kind of computer equipment that "does not include and utilize certified security technologies" approved by the federal government. [kuro5hin.org]

Apart from going What the F***, I'm not sure how to respond to this at all, at all. most of the commentators seem to see this as the hardware equivalent of the DMCA but I can't see anything in the proposed law specifically aimed at digital rights management. It seems to me to be another attempt to mandate Clipper with an NSA approved back door.

It seems pretty unlikely that this bill will make it into law in this form, there's just too many holes and too much stupidity in it. But as ever it's the process that is damaging. It's all part of a continuing effort to soften us up and accept something. And what is worse is that even though it is aimed at USA law, it inherently affects the rest of the world due to the USA's position of economic leadership. Can we really expect the manufacturers that build for the USA making non compliant hardware for the rest of the world? And how long before the EU sneaks though a provision that is as strong or stronger in order to retain "competitiveness".

NEWS DISSECTOR : When Is A Journalist A Journalist? Why, when they're a blogalist of course.

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There's been way too much instant reporting of the non decision about MS. This one had me chuckling and seems much more apropos than the regurgitation of the press release which is all we seem to get from the mainstream agencies. It comes to you care of blackholebrain :

Dubya: "I didn't want to see Microsoft become a bigamist --well, isn't that what it is, you know, like that guy married to his own children out in Utah? [chuckle/smirk] -- so I've decided to use my Presidential powers to make sure nobody breaks them up. Out in Texas, where my ranch is, I spent a lot of time thinking about how a monopoly sometimes can be a good thing. Like, cows have a monopoly on beef, right? So how in the world could you make cows change into chickens and pigs, and still get beef?"

The Times : The economy's up even if computers are down Anatole Kaletsky is consistently aggressively optimistic. He's been saying "Recession, what recession" for a year now. His tenet is that there is no fundamental problem with western economies, in fact they are strong and growing stronger, but there is an irrational and emotional belief that the IT boom bust will drag everything else down. One interesting comment in all this. "Once the Microsoft monopoly is broken and PCs are sold for £100 or less, as they already are in China, families (and businesses) will be able to have all the computers they want, and still have plenty of extra money to spend on other goods." Which does raise the question exactly why computer equipment is so expensive.

Things are looking up. It looks like I'm going to the O'Reilly P2P conference. I've got a pass to the conference and the flight is booked using air miles. All I have to do now is find a really cheap hotel...

from David Brake, UK-based Internet journalist,consultant and virtual community builder : The FT argues that the Telecomms bubble is a bigger deal than the dotcom bubbleIt doesn't surprise me in the least and is pretty scary. There's a real possibility that the various government 3G auctions will have the effect of destroying the telecoms industry.

PHP: Mirror Sites The PHP manual, notes and comments are now mirrored worldwide.

"Censored by the DMCA" Replace your site's front page with a banner that points to an Anti-DMCA site. Uh-Huh. For how long?

Today's CD - Back to mine - Danny Tenaglia

What is \ The Cyborg Manifesto \ ?

The End of Innovation? - The idea of the Internet is that innovation happens at the end points, an idea seen most clearly in P2P. It's an idea that is quickly being eroded by technology, the DMCA, and recent court decisions, says Lawrence Lessig.

Good level headed analysis of the effects of DMCA. Favourite quotes. "Well, certainly peer-to-peer systems will make it harder for there to be centralized control of all sorts of things -- centralized control of criminal law, centralized control of morality, centralized control of culture." ... "It essentially means that any software written around the world that happens to be inconsistent with American law is now subject to criminal prosecution in the United States" ... "they are essentially asserting that the right of people to tinker with and describe weaknesses in encryption systems depends upon who you work for".

Astro-mice to get orbiting love-pad Who cares what it's about. What a great headline! Presumably there's a tie in here with yesterday's story about pregnancy testing kits for female astronauts.

Beware That Company Box You Took Oh, good grief! Your company goes out of business. They give you the laptop instead of severance pay. And then... you use it... Gasp! Hook it up to your cable modem and suddenly Win2000 has caught Code Red! "But the sysadmin always used to fix my problems and configure everything for me, gibber, gibber".

The best quote in the article was from Marquis Grove of Security News Portal. "Most of them are totally unaware that computers can't just be turned on and left to their own devices," Well I certainly wouldn't recommend turning on a PC and walking away from it. Who knows what might happen. And then we get the usual helpful advice from the experts. "Run a personal firewall, anti-virus software and re-install everything from scratch". Could be tricky when the accountants have locked up the company assets and have all the original CDs.