Author: Tony

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More DMCA Madness

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.

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Digital Millenium Copyright Act

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.

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Star Trek – Attack of the Clone?

We finally got around to going to the movies Sunday afternoon. I like going when it’s only $2 per person, that way I don’t feel quite so bad about paying $6.25 for a medium coke and popcorn.

Anyway, we saw Star Trek – Nemesis. I can’t put my finger on it, but there was just something missing. Some reviewers have said that this was the worst Star Trek movie of the 10, but I didn’t think it was that bad. It was kind of neat to finally see Wil Wheaton on the big screen. That poor guy just can’t seem to catch a break.

I’m sure we’ll be going back to see The Two Towers sometime this week. That should be a lot of fun.

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Free advice

Here’s some information that might be useful to you if you’re trying to upgrade your motherboard or move a hard drive from one computer to another. I spent most of Sunday night doing this, so maybe by posting it here I can save someone out there some grief.

Back in the “good old days” of Windows 9x, all you had to do was pull the hard drive from one machine and plug it in to the other. Of course you then had to spend a few hours installing drivers for all the new hardware, but that’s another story.

Now with Windows 2000 and XP, this procedure is a little more complicated. If you pull a Windows 2000 hard drive out of one machine and plug it into another you’ll get a nasty blue screen of death that says something like “INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE”. To my knowledge, there’s no way around this message. Windows 2000’s repair process won’t fix it, and I couldn’t find a way to fix it at the recover console.

So here’s what you do. Before you remove the hard drive from the first computer or take out the old motherboard, change your IDE controller driver to Standard IDE. Here’s how to do that on Windows 2000:

Go to Start, Settings, Control Panel
Double-click System
Click the Hardware tab
Click Device Manager
Double-click IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
Double-click the IDE controller
Click the Driver tab
Click Update Driver
Click Next
Choose Display a list…
Click Next
Choose Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
Click Next
Click Next
Click Finish

Now instead of restarting your computer, shut down and move the hard drive to your new computer or swap out your motherboard. Your computer should now boot all the way to the desktop so you can start loading all the drivers for your new hardware.

I can’t wait to see how Microsoft improves their OS next…

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It’s finally over

Well, I made an 89 on my COBOL final. I thought I did better than that, but it’s hopefully still enough to get me an A in the course. I also finished up both program assignments tonight and turned them in. So I’m officially done with Fall 2002.

Now maybe we can go see some movies tomorrow and I’ll actually be able to pay attention instead of worrying about homework and tests. The big problem now is deciding what to see – Star Trek, James Bond, Analyze That?

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What the…

Quick, somebody call Satan and ask him how the weather is down there.

My boss just walked into my office and showed me a report about Linux. He then went on to suggest that I start looking at using Linux on some of the computers in the district.

Of course I’m already running Linux on my desktop machine and on one of the servers at the high school. So I showed it to him and he actually seemed interested. The plan right now is to look at the K-12 Linux Terminal Server as a way to beef up our old Pentium 75’s by using them as thin clients.

The cost savings of reusing old computers, improved stability, lack of virus worries, etc. seem obvious to me. Now it’s just a matter of convincing a commitee of people from each campus. This should be a lot of fun.

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The Two Towers on DVD

I meant to put this in the previous post, but I forgot so I’ll just add it here. I don’t think I’ve ever had more than one post in a single day.

There was an article on CNN the other day about how The Two Towers was available on DVD in Shanghai for about a dollar. The article says DVD, but I’m pretty sure they were actually VCDs. Anyway, Patra was in China a while back and one of her friends from the cruise ship bought a copy of it. When they got back to the room to watch it, they discovered it was actually Clash of the Titans. I guess sometimes you really do get what you pay for.

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Two down, one to go

I only have one more final exam to take this semester. Unfortunately it’s dealing with the COBOL programming language. I’ve been studying COBOL for a few months now and I’ve come to the conclusion that it was invented as some cruel punishment for programmers.

If anyone out there would like to see us and possibly win some free computer stuff, you should come to the [H]ard|OCP Hardware Workshop in Dallas on December 20. It starts at 6:00pm and will be followed by a presentation from AMD that will end around 11:00pm. It’s free to get in and there are lots of free prizes, so if you’re in the neighborhood, stop by. We’ll be there.

I came in to work this morning and checked my e-mail as usual. I had 10 new messages and PopFile correctly identified all of them as spam. It’s nice to find an intelligent, well-written program that actually does what it claims to do. It is Open Source and written in Perl, so I guess that’s to be expected.

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Still kicking

I really need to update this site more often… I think that would make a great New Years resolution. How often would you like to see things posted? I’m thinking I could probably post something everyday, and major updates about two or three times a week. I’m always coming across interesting web sites that I would like to share with people or things that I’d like to just remember for later. Oh well, I’ll see what I can do.

We took some pictures of the Thanksgiving festivities two weeks ago, I’ll try to get some of them posted as soon as possible. I have finals this week, so it may be a few days before they appear.

I’ve spent a little time this morning playing with PopFile. PopFile is a really nice e-mail filter for blocking spam. The interesting thing about it is that you “teach” it what is spam and what is not. Since I installed it this morning I received one legitimate message and three spam messages. I had to tell it that the first two spams were spam, but it caught the third one automatically. They say that the longer it runs, the better it gets.

I’m also still working on my software section. I even pulled out some of the old stuff that I worked on in high school. I’ll try to get that posted after finals. It should be interesting.

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Patra’s Back

Patra’s back in town for a few weeks.

She’s been pretty much all the way around the Pacific Ocean for the past 6 months and for some reason she still came back to Paris…