I Hate DRM

I just can't understand how anyone, ANYONE with any brains or any success in life whatsoever could vote for Obama.  Well America, you did it.  You were begging for it and now you are going to get it.

The number one issue that both sides would agree upon was the economy.  How can there be this many stupid people in this country?  How can you not see how Obama's financial plan is going to hurt EVERYONE.  EVERYONE.  Not just those evil, horrible, rich people.
Let me try to explain this in as simple of terms as I can.  What happens when the costs for ANY company rises?  These companies RAISE FUCKING PRICES assholes.  They STOP GIVING RAISES assholes.  They STOP PAYING BONUSES assholes.  They STOP HIRING assholes.  They START FIRING people assholes!  These are the same fucking companies that you and I all work for ASSHOLES.  You just fucked yourself.  How can you be that fucking stupid?

So for all you people that are getting $500 or $1000 back in taxes, have fun paying twice as much for half the amount.  Don't believe me?  Let's look at how increased costs affect everyday things already.

Let's take a look at ice cream.  The containers used to be 1.75 Gallons.  They are now 1.25 Gallons and the price has increased.  Look at Coke or Pepsi.  No longer are we going to see cases that are 24 cans or 1/2 cases that are 12 packs.  We are going to see 18 packs and 8 packs.  Like paying $3 for a 1/2 gallon of milk?  How about $3 for 1/3 gallon?  Get ready for it you fucking stupid ass entitlement loving mother fuckers.  I hope prices rise so much that you can't afford to feed your family.  I hope gas rises to $6 a gallon.  I hope your grocery bill rises from $100 to $200 a week and you get 1/2 the amount of food.  I hope you lose your fucking jobs to cover for all the new taxes.

You know why?  Because it will sting a little for me but I'll survive it because I still believe busting your ass is the way to get ahead in this country.  Apparently more than 50% of this country doesn't think this way so maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe I should just give up and let the state take care of me and my family.  But I can't.  I want better for myself and my family.  I want my kids to have a better life.  YOU SIMPLY CANNOT DO THIS WITH THE GOVERNMENT TAKING CARE OFYOU.

So please, any one of you with the balls enough to explain how you think this liberal, wealth distributing, company destroying new president is better than McCain, fire away.  I beg you because every single liberal *** I have tangled with doesn't have a fucking leg to stand on on any issue.  Great job *** heads.

How many times have you had to buy a brand new phone because you switched carriers?  How many times has this fact prevented you from switching carriers?  How many times have you bought a new phone and then for whatever reason you have to switch carriers and buy another new phone?

Well, cellular carriers have locked their phones for years and this is the reason why it always seems like we are buying new phones.  Cellular carriers like this and do this on purpose.  It serves to keep you locked into their service.  The hope is that you will be less likely to switch if you have to buy a new phone.

Traditionally users had 2 choices if they wanted to use their existing phone on another network; 1.) hack the firmware to unlock the phone whereby violating the DMCA or 2.) buy a new phone.  Neither of these options is consumer friendly.

In November of 2006 an exemption was made to the current DMCA law that said users are allowed to unlock their phones legally.  This is pro-consumer legislation and generally thought of as such.

Fast forward to a few months ago.  iPhones are released and they are locked to AT&Ts network.  The ability to use a software patch to unlock the phone is now available.  As you can imagine, many users have been using this patch because they either are unhappy with AT&Ts horrible data network or they are unhappy with their service or they just want to continue using their existing GSM carrier.  Whatever the case they are legally entitled to do this now under the DMCA.

That brings us to today.  Apple announced that some phones with the unlock "may" become inoperable.  That they were going to disable them on "purpose" but that it may happen.  Whatever.  This is Apple's way of circumventing the law that allows people to do just that.

So here we are again people.  When you buy products and services from a company that purposely tries control what you do with YOUR legally purchased hardware/software, this is what you get.  We will continue to see this sort of thing until people wizen up and learn that they only thing these people understand is money and that you must show your disapproval by NOT buying their products.  If you like this sort of control and malicious attempts to break your hardware, continue....please

AACS is one of the copy protection algorithms used to keep HD DVD and Blu-Ray DVD out of the hands of those dirty, nasty pirates everywhere.  One of the ways it accomplishes it is by using an encrypted key to make sure your content is "original".  These keys can be revoked which would render all "copied" material unreadable (or something like that).

A few months ago, a number of hackers found how to hack the keys to copy the material.  Now, new keys have been released to thwart those nasty pirates and once again, they have been able to hack them.  This time though, a week before DVDs bearing these new keys were released to the public.

The creators of these copy protection scams truly don't understand how these people work.  The people responsible for "hacking" the keys most likely have no interest in making money or selling pirated goods.  They do it for the challenge.  Remember when you were a kid and your parents told you that you couldn't do something....exactly.  You wanted to do it 100 times more.  It's human nature.  These "hackers" (or should we call them content liberators), are just following human nature.  And as long as we have these stupid "restriction controls" in place like AACS, there will be those who will find a way around it.

Is it any wonder why all this stuff cost as much as it does?  Have you looked at the retail price of a HD DVD?  $30 in most cases.  That's almost twice the cost of a regular DVD.  My advice to all these companies that buy so heavily into copy protection is this; stop using it.  Save that money and figure out how to COMPETE with pirates, not beat them.  Beating them will never happen.  Maybe then you will be able to offer value to your customers.  Have fun fighting a losing battle and meanwhile, count me out as a customer.

I was reading this article over at ARS and it gave me a good laugh.  DMCA takedown notices are more and more common.  I read at least one story a day where a company tries to use the DMCA to silence something they don't like or don't agree with.  Most of the time, it is just easier for people and/or sites to just comply and take down the suspect content.  This is what they are hoping for and this is what the NFL was hoping for.  Too bad they ran up against a lawyer exercising her fair use rights.

Wendy Seltzer who is a law professor and also works for the EFF has a blog about the NFL's escapades.  Basically, she taped a certain segment of the broadcast that said something to the effect that the NFL owns everything in the broadcast and it cannot be used in any situation without their consent.  Wendy was teaching her students about how content owers are overstepping their rights.  The statement in the broadcast made no concession for an individual's fair use rights.  So she posted a video clip of this statement on YouTube and within 5 days a takedown notice from the NFL was sent to which se sent a counter-notification saying that the material was being used as a teaching tool and that she was well within her fair use rights to use it.  YouTube reposted the clip.  12 days later the NFL again sent YouTube a takedown notice citing the DMCA.  YouTube complied.  Here comes the real funny part.

Apparently, there are some provisions in the DMCA that require the person using it to actually know something about it.  Basically, when YouTube sent the NFL Wendy's fair use claim, they decided to ignore it.  And because of that, they may now be in violation of the law.  Wendy describes that it "...instead puts the NFL into the 512(f)(1) category of 'knowingly materially misrepresenting ... that material or activity is infringing'".  A big no-no for the NFL and it's lawyers.

This just goes to show you how disconnected these people are from the law and how easy it is to use the DMCA to silence people.  Content providers throw it around all willy-nilly and now it may come back to bite one of them.  Good for Wendy.  Good for the EFF.  The NFL deserves everything they get out of this one.  Hopefully, more and more of these cases will get content providers something to think about.  This could be a big win for fair use advocates.

I recently bought a new laptop at Best Buy that came preloaded with Vista Home Premium.

Here are my initial observations while using it:
•Best Buy has an entire "Vista Personalization Worksheet" that must be completed on the sale of any machine that has Vista. What this really means is they try to sell you a bunch of crap that you don't need. They also want all your personal information. Not sure if this is a Microsoft thing or a Best Buy thing but I told the sales guy that if they tried to sell me a bunch of stuff I didn’t want or need that I would just leave. All I want is the laptop and that is it. His response was “I hope you aren’t planning on getting on the internet then.” Meaning that I would need to buy all the stuff they sell to keep me safe.

•Do you use OWA (Outlook Web Access)? Chances are that it won't work on Vista. Not sure whether it is a problem with IE7 or Vista or both but I cannot use my OWA for work. The support stuff I have seen says you need to upgrade the Exchange server. Sure…no problem. Because upgrading an Exchange server within a huge organization is a no brainer.

•The laptop shipped with about 7,000 systray applications. Everyone needs their marketing software to show up in the systray. This is no different than any other OEM. The difference is that this time, the crappy software is installed on a new platform which they are unfamiliar with. Perfect example; when you launch Vista you get the "Welcome Screen". This screen shows you all the stuff that you would want to do on a regular basis. Some of the OEMs even have their own marketing software stubs in here. Well, when you uninstall their application, it doesn't remove it from the Welcome Screen. So you are left with a bunch of the giant generic icons that aren't shortcuts to anything since the application was removed. Nice.

•I was copying about 4 GB of pictures to the vista machine and it wanted to "insert" them into the file structure. When I did that it reported that it was going to take 12 hours. I stopped it and copied the files to the end of the list of existing files and it copied in minutes. Something funny with the way Vista organizes and indexes files going on here. For the common user, this is just going to frustrate the heck out of them and make Vista appear to be very slow.

•Nothing appeared faster. In fact, it seemed common tasks too much longer than they did in XP.

•The nifty window cycling thing that Mac OS does takes forever to work in Vista. So much so, that it makes that feature useless in my opinion. It’s neat-o but that is it. I can’t imagine using it in any real world situation.

•I was surprised that it actually shipped with the OS install disk. I was able to install Vista from scratch without any crappy OEM software. A big bonus for me and probably the single best thing I can say about the laptop.

Never has an OS been created that had so little thought about what the end users of the product actuall need and want. Microsoft spent tons of time and energy developing a platform that will be able to deliver Hollywood's content to your machine. This OS was created to sell you more product. They didn't create an OS for the users that happened to enable these features. These features were the point. The fact that is does some stuff for the end user is secondary.

Microsoft has been saying that these "protections" only apply to "premium" content. Well this simply isn't true. All drivers that involve the display and audio subsystems need to updated. Just look at the problems that nVidia and Creative are having. This is costing them tons of research and development time. Guess who is ultimately going to pay for that? You guessed it...we are! Additionally, when the code for your drivers is now doubled to handle all of the "protected" content, you now have twice as many places for problems as before. How is this more stable? And these drivers are used whether you are playing "premium" content or not.

My conclusion is that I wouldn't buy Vista as a stand alone OS. I would even have hesitations to buy it preinstalled on a new PC. My guess is that there are going to be a ton of issues with games and other apps…from driver support to performance. My advice would be to stay away from it for as long as possible. As a side note, OEM versions of XP are about $80 and Linux is still free.

For years now, Hollywood has been saying that DRM is about piracy and that we need it to "protect" their content. But no more. A recent Business Week article has a very subtle quote from an unnamed movie exec where he says "His (Apple's) user rules just scare the heck out of us".

What does this mean? It means that Hollywood is more concerned that you can put the 1 movie you download on more than one device per Apple's FairPlay DRM policy and they don't like it. This supports the notion that DRM is about charging you over and over again for the same content; something Hollywood loves to do. This logic is so backwards because you can go out and buy the same DVD for the same or cheaper then lend it to everyone you know which is perfectly legal. Well, DRM is Hollywood's answer to this "problem" of sharing movies. They would love nothing better than to be able to prevent people from doing such actions. They would love nothing better than to be able to charge you every time you gave that movie to a friend.

Again, DRM is not about piracy. It's about charging you over and over for the same content....do I sound like a broken record?

I've had this dilemma for months now. I am right at the point where I was planning on upgrading my hardware and TV to create the "Ultimate Movie Room". These plans started a year ago before the specs were fleshed out for HD DVD and BluRay.

Once I heard how crippled all of the HD movie hardware/software was going to be, I knew that I couldn't support it. Not to mention the BetaMax vs. VHS style war going on with the two different formats. So I started looking towards alternatives that would yield comparable results and this is what I came up with.

First I needed to decide where I was going to put this stuff. Instead of creating the ultimate movie room, I scaled back a bit and decided to upgrade the system in my family room. Once I knew where I was going to upgrade, now I needed to decide what to upgrade.

First the TV. I love the small form-factors of plasmas and LCDs. I know that I could get the best bang for the buck with a DLP but I loose some of the "sleek factor" there. So I started my search for a Plasma or LCD. I ended up on the Philips 42" Plasma with Ambilight. 42" is about the biggest TV that will fit in my space but you could easily replace this size with something more fitting for yourself. The thing that is important is the inputs/outputs on the back and the overall resolution. In my opinion, 1080p (or 1920 × 1080 resolution) is overkill right now and since I know I am not going to buy a BluRay or HD DVD player any time soon, I decided with a TV that is 720p/1080i or 1366x768 resolution. The Philips has 2 HDMI inputs and an audio output (somewhat uncommon for these TVs for some reason). The HDMI cables allow me to get 1080i signal. I spent about $1300 for the TV.

Next is the audio and DVD solution. Since this is going in the family room and having rear surround speakers wasn't an option, I wanted an all in one solution that output some good sound. It was also important that the system up-convert DVD from that standard 480p to 1080i. This usually means it has to have an HDMI output. The final requirement is that it had the Faroudja video processor. My understanding from most of the AV nerds out there is that this chip does the best video up-conversion on the market. So I settled for the Denon S301 system. It has great sound, HDMI connection, up-converts to 1080i, uses the Faroudja chip, and even has a USB and iPod port on the front! I got this open box from Best Buy for around $1000.

Now that I have the TV and Stereo/DVD, I needed the cables to hook everything up. Seeing as I was at Best Buy, I decided to pick up the cheapest HDMI cables they had. 2 x 6 feet cables cost me $140. WOW! What a rip right? Exactly. So I went online to find cheaper/better cables. I found a site that sold HDMI cables for $17 each and were 2 to 3 times the thickness of the "cheapie" Best Buy cables. A quick search on google.com and you're set. So 2 HDMI cables cost me about $40. The thing to note here is that it is a digital signal and unless you are trying to pass that signal great lengths, it doesn't make a difference who makes them. The $200 Monster cables work just as well as my $17 generic cables...especially over such a short distance. Do yourself a favor and don't waste your time on the "better" digital cables, they are all the same.

The final thing you want to do is get a new cable box or DVR. Chances are that you box has been sitting in the same room for a few years. Well, all of the chips and technology in those boxes has been gradually upgraded. I got a new box days after I had everything setup and it made a dramatic difference. Make up any lie you want as to why you need a new box but don't tell them you want it because you just got a new HD TV. They probably won't respond very well to that.

So I now have a system that displays HD cable in 1080i and a DVD player that up-converts to 1080i getting me very close to an actual HD DVD or BluRay picture at a fraction of the cost. I can continue buying the regular DVDs at $10-15 each vs. the HD content at $23-30 each. In total I spent about $2400 on a near-HD DVD quality system which is thousands less than I would have spent on a 1080p TV, HD DVD or BluRay player, Separate Stereo and Speakers, and cables to hook it all up. On top of that, the thousands of dollars I have already spent on regular DVDs doesn't go to waste and I can continue to purchase those DVDs at 1/2 the price.

All in all not a bad alternative to the high priced, drm crippled, user unfriendly HD DVD or BluRay solutions of today.

I have been wondering why this is taking so long. The RIAA has been sue happy for years now with no end in sight. I really want to see someone crush these idiots and put them in their place. Maybe Lime Wire is the one to do it. You can read more about it here.