The Clicker: Microsoft's OPM for the masses - Engadget - www.engadget.com

More here. The Clicker: HDCP's Shiny Red Button

Oh. My. God.

DRM control built into monitors and dumb TV screens to stop you watching content controlled HDTV goodness.

And now we've got people talking about adding DRM to hard disks to stop you storing it as well.

I can see (for miles and miles and) a (Microsoft) Vista up ahead and it ain't pretty.

This modern life, eh? Just Say No To DRM. You know it makes sense.

Techdirt Corporate Intelligence: Techdirt Wireless How Dare You Want To Use That Internet Connection! UK Police charge and get a conviction for using somebody's wifi without permission "dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service and possessing equipment for fraudulent use of a communications service." 500 quids and 12 months' conditional discharge.

Oh good grief... I guess we're all criminals now. I mean I've ripped CDs that say no copying. I've downloaded music I couldn't find anywhere else. I've bought (shock horror) music from Russian music sites. I've used BitTorrent to get the full series 4 of Alias because I kept missing it on TV. And yes, I've sat in the Marriott Park Lane and used a Wifi connection from across the street rather than pay the ridiculous prices for the Hotel's hotspot. I've even been reduced to wandering around Smithfields with the laptop open trying to find an open AP so I could find out the mobile phone number of the person I was supposed to be meeting. My own AP at home is deliberately wide open with an SSID of "1trinityrd.public" which contravenes NTL's internet access T&Cs.

And now the UK Police have nothing better to do but to hassle somebody with an open laptop on the streets. I guess I'll just have to hide in a cafe from now on.

This modern life, eh?

A Discordian Coloring Book - Frame
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The Principia Discordia
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TRIZ 40 Principles
oblique strategies for mechanical engineering creativity and innovation [from: del.icio.us]

We are all terrorists now
[from: del.icio.us]

There's a discussion going on here about issues with using Skype when yours is the sole computer behind a cheap firewall/router on broadband. It seems relatively common that you copy of Skype ends up being a supernode helping to switch traffic for people who are behind NAT. In some circumstances the sheer volume of TCP connections can then overwhelm the router. So even though the bandwidth needed is quite small, the effect is that internet access grinds to a halt with DNS and web timeouts. There's a further problem here that people with bandwidth capped broadband are likely to have exactly this sort of connection and may not have any router at all. In which case, first they are very likely to become a supernode, and secondly, even the small bandwidth taken is eating into their cap.

Skype really need to do something to rate limit this or even allow people to reject being a supernode. The problem is that if they do that their whole switching mechanism and NAT busting approach fails if not enough people are supernodes. But in the past couple of days I've had two people say they've had to reject Skype for exactly this reason, so if they don't do something they will be shooting themselves in the foot. In my case, I've now had three instance of this happening in the last 2 days. Fixing it involves killing Skype for 3-4 minutes and then restarting it.

One suggestion has been to go into tools | options | connections and uncheck "Use port 80 and 443 for incoming connections" as this is supposed to bar being a supernode. But it's had no effect for me.

On another note, my son is going to Brunel Uni in Sept. I was scanning the computer network terms of use. In the middle is a statement that goes "P2P file sharing pograms (such as kazaa, grokster, bittorrent, Skype) are expressly forbidden". I'm not exactly surprised, and the issue is likely to be bandwidth as much as copyright issues. Still irritating though to see Skype lumped in with these.

I've been taking a look at OpenID and searching for PHP implementations. Along the way I've come across several programs that are typically only 5-10k long. And I'm seeing a wide variety of copyright statements at the top which basically say "do what you like but leave my name on this because I want attribution". Sometimes there's even a no commercial restriction. I have to ask myself, what are you trying to achieve and what are you afraid of? This all gets particularly annoying in an area where the code is very likely to get absorbed into a bigger system, as is the case with Identity.

So here's a request. If you're contributing code to the world, either use an established copyright scheme like GPL, or effectively make it public domain. Which is why when I do this stuff I typically put a disclaimer in the top of the file that says "do whatever you like with this, I don't care". It would be nice to hav a more formal way of saying this but I've never found a formal way of saying "I renounce copyright over this file".

GoingOn Screenshot
The future of YASNs? [from: del.icio.us]

I've just received this email about the Pledge to refuse to register for the UK ID Card and to give £10 to a legal fund to support those who do the same. They've now got 10,000 signatures. I think the email needs wider distribution.

Thank you all - what a success!

When I started this pledge, I hoped we could show the government the depth and strength of feeling against their draconian ID system, and begin to build a fund to fight a series of legal battles against it. YOU have now done this - and more quickly than I ever dared hope.

Some of you have already asked exactly how the pledge is going to work, and now that we have reached the 10,000 mark I hope you'll bear with me while I explain in a little more detail what we (NO2ID) intend to do:

1) We shan't be asking you for your £10 until or unless the government manages to pass the Identity Cards Bill. It is by no means certain that they will be able to do this - and you can help us NOW to stop them*. Once you send your money in, it would be administratively prohibitive for us to refund it so we only want to ask for it once we are absolutely sure that we are going to need it.

2) All funds that you send will be held in trust, in a seperate bank account administered by an independent third party (a couple of law firms have already offered their services). NO2ID will not mix your pledges with campaign funds, i.e. every penny you give will go towards fighting the Act in the courts, and supporting those who are fighting the necessary legal battles.

3) It is just possible that even if the government do pass this Bill, they may drop the current ID scheme - leaving the legislation on the statute books. In this case, we shall still need to get the Act repealed (it contains some very dangerous powers, even if they remain dormant for a time) and so the fund will be used to pursue that end.

4) Once we have won utterly (no Bill, no ID scheme, no law sitting on the statute books) then any monies remaining in the fund will be dispersed - depending on how much is left - by either donating it to an appropriate charity (we'll hold a vote on which one, should this ever become necessary) or drafting a Bill, the aim of which is to inhibit any future government from imposing compulsory registration and ID cards on the people of the UK.

HOWEVER, this pledge does not end just because we have reached 10,000. We know that many tens of thousands more will refuse to register, and we still want to reach them and have them sign up before the closing date of October 9th, the day before Parliament sits again in the Autumn. The more of us that there are by then, the harder we make it for them to proceed.

We shall also shortly be launching another pledge - one that you may be highly motivated to promote.

Raising £100,000 in a little over a month from people who will refuse to register for an ID card is astounding, but now we want to raise £1,000,000 from people who - for whatever reason - feel they CAN'T refuse to register, but who will wholeheartedly support those of us who do. I know from the comments and direct mails [*please* don't write expecting an answer, I simply can't handle the volume of mail] that there are many people like this out there already.

I'll be notifying you of the URL for the new pledge shortly - DON'T SIGN IT YOURSELF, but see if your friends, family and colleagues will now back YOU up in your fight for our freedom and privacy.

*Finally, I said that there is something that you can do to help us now. Don't forget that we are fighting hard to defeat the Bill so that your pledge may not even be called in. Many of you have said that you'd happily give more than £10, some have already seperately donated and joined NO2ID. If you haven't done so already, please:

1) Sign our petition at http://www.no2id-petition.net and get others to, too.

2) Donate to NO2ID - via Paypal from the front page of our website http://www.no2id.net or by post (cheques payable to 'NO2ID') sent to NO2ID, Box 412, 78 Marylebone High St, London W1U 5AP.

3) If you're able to give £15 or more or set up a regular payment, please do become a member - we hope it will be the shortest subscription that you ever make! Forms and bank details are available online at http://www.no2id.net/getInvolved/join.php or by post from the above address. If you send an SAE it will save campaign funds for our ongoing essential work in Parliament, the media and across the country.

Thank you for your patience with this long e-mail, and my heartfelt thanks for your commitment to fight this thing. Together, I am sure we shall win.

In solidarity,

Phil Booth
National Coordinator, NO2ID

[from: JB Ecademy]

Intel to cut Linux out of the content market
Wonderful rant about Intel, East Fork, MS and DRM [from: del.icio.us]

Rent A Coder:How Software Gets Done
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Bypassing DVD Copy Protections
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Bloggerheads (UK) - Prepare your angry-pants

Security Services generally despise politicians and they especially despise politicians when they are particularly stupid. There was a famous case not so long ago when an MP stood up in the UK parliament and bragged that the Argentinians couldn't do anything pre-emptive because we'd broken their encryption codes. Shortly after, they changed their codes. Doh!

So now we have a case where for purely political reasons (getting elected mostly) the Republican party bragged to the media that the west had a mole in Al Qaida. And then they gave enough information to the media that they were able to name him. As a result the British MI5 had to move before they were ready on contacts in the UK and some slipped through the net.

So far so stupid. Except that some of the people allegedly involved in the bombings in London last week were allegedly linked with the groups being tracked via the mole.

At which point you could be forgiven for laying at least some of the blame for last week's 50 odd deaths at the US Republican party's door.

Me, I'm not so sure. There are some weird anomalies around the bombings just as there were around 9/11. Not really enough to fuel a full blown conspiracy theory but enough to make you go "hmmm?".

Is it a rather cute but horribly over priced robot dog from Sony? or is it an Anti Internet Banning Order?

Blunkett moots 'proof-lite' internet and banking banning orders | The Register

I can think of one or two people with blogs that ought to be given AIBOs but that's another story.

Guardian Unlimited | Online | Ben Hammersley: Swift and offshore
The rise of personal offshoring. Rentacoder, audio transcription, web hosting [from: del.icio.us]

Microsoft's OPM for the masses - Will Longhorn DRM force you to upgrade your monitor? : So what is OPM? The successor to Microsoft's rarely-mentioned COPP (Certified Output Protection Protocol), PVP-OPM (Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management) is the first play in Microsoft's game plan to ensure that protected content stays protected. PVP-OPM performs two main functions. First, it detects the capabilities of the display devices attached to the computer. For instance, does the DVI LCD monitor that you're using have HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection)? Second, it manages what, if anything, gets sent to those devices.

OMG. Is there no end to this madness? Here's the OS working in conjunction with the video card and drivers, not to mention the software video player, extending the reach of a "broadcast flag" embedded in the content all the way out to the video display device. I can hear the sound of suits signing contracts, cash registers ringing, Apple and Linux fans crying foul and in the background hackers sharpening their tools.

Yup, that'll work to keep unauthorised copies of Sith out of the customer's hands.

There's a problem here that I've struggled with, with FOAFnet and I will struggle with, with OpenID. Sites like Tribe.net and Ecademy depend for a lot of their function on having a rich user record. Even if I run an OpenID ID provider on Ecademy and Tribe trusts it, Tribe will want to create a local user account with lots of data attached. So checking against Ecademy when logging into Tribe serves no useful purpose when they could just as well authenticate the user against the local data.

Once the user has logged in, you don't want to make round trip requests for the data on every page refresh so you have to maintain a local session with locally cached data. Wich again points at a local user database.

This means that it is useful to help the user avoid typing all that data again into yet another account creation form. But single signon makes less sense.

Having said all that I think there are places where a temporary check against a trusted third party is useful. And it's exactly the scenario that led to OpenID at Livejournal. That is allowing users that have been authenticated by a trusted source to leave comments against an article. So think TypeKey, not YASN account record.

[Edited to add] I've already been accused of being insensitive for the first image (mine) as one of the suicide bombers worked in an Indian restaurant. But I think it nicely illustrates a point. Consider that apart from the pint (and that could be an Indian Pale Ale), Chicken Tikka Masala is the national dish, Tea is the National drink and both of them have strong ties with the the Indian sub-continent. Every small town in Britain has an "Indian" restaurant and the vast majority of them are run by Muslim Pakistanis and Bangla Deshis. So Asians are integrated into every corner of British society. So let's understand that the problem here is not racism. The problems are extremism, violence and a small minority of disaffected youth being preyed on by the followers of a death cult. Pretty much like N Ireland then.

And I still maintain that we should be finding ways of integrating that disaffected youth, no matter what skin colour or racial background, into mainstream society. They should be going out and they should be having fun. They should be the ones sticking two fingers up at authority and saying, hell no, I won't subscribe to your medieaval ideology. Hell no, I won't kill people and myself for your religion. And hell no, I won't spend my life in a closed inward looking community that wants to live in the past. I'm British, damn it and we don't do that sort of thing round here.

NINJAM - Novel Intervallic Network Jamming Architecture for Music - Main
a solution to latency when trying to jam across the net [from: del.icio.us]