Category: Politics

Everyone knows that America’s involment in most of the Middle East conflicts is all about one thing – oil. Back in Desert Storm, we weren’t protecting the people of Kuwait, we were protecting their oil. The same thing is still going on today. Whenever war with Iraq is mentioned on the news, someone always brings up how it’s going to affect gas prices.

This is why I think it’s so strange that most Americans are infatuated with giant SUVs. It seems like if you aren’t driving a suburban, or something even bigger like a hummer, then you just aren’t cool anymore. People brag about the fact that their new SUV gets less than 10 miles to the gallon like it’s something to be proud of.

Now someone has set up a website to try to convince people that this might not be the best way. The site is called Americans for Fuel Efficient Cars. There you can read news articles and watch their commercials. I think they have a pretty good point.

Paige and I both drive Hondas, which are some of the most fuel efficient cars in the world…

Here’s another good article at News.com about the DMCA.

I guess the thing that bothers me the most about how the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is being used is the fact that companies can deny me the use of things that I’ve purchased. For example, it is illegal for me to write a program that lets me watch a DVD that I’ve bought. When you buy a DVD, you aren’t really buying anything other than the right to watch that movie on an approved player.

There was a story just the other day about how you can buy DVDs in China for about $1 each. There, the disks are mass-produced by companies with disk duplicating machines just like the ones used by the movie studios. But Hollywood doesn’t seem to mind that very much. Instead of going after the big-time thieves, they chose to attack a teen-aged kid.

Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager, is on trial right now for writing a program to let him to watch DVD movies on Linux. This program, called DeCSS, breaks the encryption or Content Scrambling System on DVD disks. He wrote this program when he was only 15 years old. Here’s an article about that trial. The verdict has not been given yet.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), filed a complaint against Jon Johansen saying that his program allowed illegal duplication of DVD movies. But the funny thing is, DVD players only play encrypted movies. If you’re going to make a copy of a DVD, you don’t want to decrypt it. Otherwise it won’t play.

Some of the regular visitors to our site may be wondering why I’m posting all of this stuff instead of pictures of our pets. The reason is I feel like big corporations are walking away with all of our personal freedoms. The only way I know of to change this is to educate people about what’s going on in the world. Hopefully if enough people read about the DMCA, and how it’s being abused, we can make a difference.

All my life I’ve been curious about how things work. One of my favorite activities is tearing things apart and putting them back together. That’s how I learned everything I know about computers. The process of tearing things apart to figure out how they work is usually called reverse engineering.

Recently, Hollywood passed a law called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act or DMCA. This law supposedly provides copyright protection for digital media. What it actually does is make it illegal to reverse engineer most software. The DMCA has been very controversial from the beginning and has never been used in a court case until now.

A Russian software company called ElcomSoft had written a program to open and read eBook files. Normally this would be no big deal. For example, Microsoft Word can open WordPerfect files without violating the law. The catch is, these eBook files were encrypted in order to protect the copyright of the original document.

Instead of being praised as a clever guy, the programmer who wrote the software, Dmitry Sklyarov, was arrested and jailed as a criminal. Luckily common sense prevailed in the trial and ElcomSoft was acquitted. There’s a pretty good article at News.com about the verdict.