Category: Life

The forums are offline pending an investigation into one of our users. I was issued a supeona by federal agents to turn over the entire forum database. I had been issuing warnings over the past few months that the boards were being monitored and not to do anything stupid, but someone did anyway.

I do not know if, or when, the forums will be back up. If there is any news, you can see it on www.stankdawg.com or at www.oldskoolphreak.com if I am incarcerated. Wish me luck in fighting this and keep your eyes peeled for your own safety.

This is why I don’t like April 1st. Now I’m going to be hyper-stressed until tomorrow, when I find it was all a joke. Or not.

New York senator and former first lady Hillary Clinton has launched an attack on violent videogames, singling out Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto titles as a “major threat” to morality.

“Children are playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them,” she said in a statement on the issue. “This is a silent epidemic of media desensitisation that teaches kids it’s OK to diss people because they are a woman, they’re a different colour or they’re from a different place.”

You know, I find the “Think of the Children! Think of the CHILDREN!!” stance particularily annoying. Why? Because its being applied to adult contexts. Grand Theft Auto has an M rating from the ESRB. That means that you have to be an adult in order to purchase the game. So why keep applying these games to the context of children? Only in videogames is the system so absurd!

Think of it like movies. The movie “Hostage” just came out featuring Bruce Willis and much violence and gore. Yet you don’t see senators wishing to restrict/ban the movie, because it isn’t applying itself to a context of children. It’s an R rated movie: not for kids.

So are the senators thus saying that in this world in which the elder videogame players are now in their 20s-30s, that they aren’t allowed to have any adult-oriented games? Are they saying that every game should be published “thinking of the children”? It’s a pretty scary thought.

Such are the injustices of the digital world. See, if Mrs. Clinton were to say that about an adult book, or R-Rated movie, there would be an outcry. But because she’s saying it about an M-Rated game, everyone automatically removes any layer of common sense they once had and filters their views.

But that’s just one of the things that bothers me about the comments. The other thing that bothers me is that they explicitly focus on what’s the worst one can do with a game. The beauty of GTA is that you can do whatever you want. You want to drive there? Fine. You want to play golf? Fine. You want to race? Fine. You want to go to the beach and watch the sunset? Fine. Want to protect an old lady crossing the street? Fine. You can do all these non-violent activities in GTA! But because it is such a freeform game, it means that people can do whatever they want, including the immoral activities. And the media, exclusively focuses on the worst they can pull off. You can run over people with a car. What else is a realistic game supposed to do when you go through a red with a speeding car? People do carry money. Again, realistic. Its all up to the player.

Now if the media producer making a piece on GTA wants to run over prostitutes, that’s his choice. It only reflects how sick that dude is, not the rest of the players. The other players just play the game like normal people. But it does bother me that people who have never even played the game pick up on the ignorance of the media producers out there and say threats.

Think of it this way: how legitimate is someone if they say “this movie is HORRIBLE!” if they haven’t even seen the movie?! So why do people think that Clinton’s statements are legit?

The beauty of the digital world, eh?

It’s interesting how two newspieces can present such utterly different articles on the same event. Take the two following examples covering the re- discovery of how to bypass iTunes’ DRM:

Hard to lower pirate flag while legal alternatives still lacking

There’s a fun little back and forth going on between Apple and a group of programmers. Apple runs the iTunes music service, where you can download any of a gazillion songs for a buck or so.

But those songs come with restrictions on where you can play them. So Jon Johansen, Cody Brocious, and crew (Johansen is the Norwegian who cracked the encryption on DVDs several years ago) created PyMusique — software that lets you access iTunes, pay for music, and download it without the built-in digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.

Apple responded by closing the “hole” PyMusique exploited, and requiring all iTunes users to upgrade to the latest version of the software.

Johansen and the PyMusique folks responded by “reopening the door” with a new version. (I am writing this on Wednesday. By the time you read this things may have changed.)

To be fair, the PyMusique group said they weren’t interested in stripping the DRM, only in making iTunes available for Linux users. But the restrictions aren’t in the songs — they are added by Apple’s software. Johansen and crew simply decided not to add that feature.

Who can blame them? By adding restrictions to music, Apple is going against decades of an understanding between music makers and music buyers.

Imagine buying a music CD at the mall, bringing it home, and playing it on your stereo. Then you play it on your car’s CD player driving to work. But when you get there and pop it into the little player on your desk, you hear a voice say, “We’re sorry, but you are only authorized to play this disk on up to two CD players. You have now exceeded that. Thank you.”

That’s exactly how iTunes and most of the other legal online music service work. When you pay for and download a song, it comes with various built-in restrictions. Maybe you can only pay it while you’re subscribed to the service. Maybe you’re limited to playing it on certain machines. Maybe you can’t copy it to other media (say, a CD to play in your car).

And people wonder why music piracy is so rampant.
[…]

This article is from USA Today, and can be found here.

Now lets look at another article on the subject:

Crack hacker stunts iTunes growth

LONDON, England – Apple’s plans for a subscription music service from iTunes could be blighted by a hacking attack that took the American electronics giant by storm on Friday.

The attack was alleged to have been led by legendary hacker Jon Johansen, who is credited with illegally cracking the encryption code for software protection of DVDs.

The hackers cracked the code for Apple’s digital rights management software, allowing downloaded songs from iTunes to be passed on. Digital rights software normally allows only the purchaser to play downloaded songs on their computer and personal digital music player. This could mean somebody swapping songs with a friend or offering the songs for free to millions through filesharing sites.

Although Apple is reported to be moving quickly to try to solve the problem, there may be no quick fix. Ken Chow, a spokesman for US information security company SafeNet, said: “Hacking communities are now so widespread via the internet that once the genie is out of the bottle, it is hard to to undo what has been done. A suitable replacement for much of the DVD encryption hacked into years ago has not yet been widely adopted.”

Apple is reported to be planning a subscription service for iTunes to enable users to expand their music collections more rapidly. Instead of buying individual songs, consumers would pay a set fee each month and rent as many as they wanted to. This service would enable them to download thousands at a time.

Any such product is likely to be put on hold until Apple has solved its hacking problem.

The company may be hit by competition, however, in the interim. Online music rivals are introducing subscription services to rival iTunes.

Napster To Go, the most prominent competition for Apple, highlights iTunes’ flaws, particularly the fact that building a music collection from scratch would cost hundreds of pounds.

While less money is paid for subscription services, it does have to be paid indefinitely. The songs are rented. If the monthly subscription is not paid, all the downloaded music disappears -unless the files have already been copied with the aid of the illicit hacking software.

This article is from the Billings Gazette, and can be found here.

Needless to say, I obviously disagree with the latter view on the subject. But I find it so very interesting how different the perspectives from the same event are.

The new Canadian Copyright Reforms Plan have been released. It has complied with some international treaties, and in doing so ammended this article:

It would not be legal to circumvent, without authorization, a TPM applied to a sound recording, notwithstanding the exception for private copying.

TPM being DRM. In other words, it would be illegal for you to use the music files you purchased from iTunes or whatever to make a CD out of it. Because that would involve “circumventing” copyright protection, even though you payed for the music files, and now own them.

I hate any law that says you cannot do with your property as you wish. I bought it, I own it, so why is it illegal to use it in anyway I see fit?

In conformity with the WPPT, performers would be provided with moral rights in their fixed and live performances, consistent with the moral rights already provided to authors in relation to their works.

I really don’t like the concept of “Moral Rights”. In essence it means that if the people who own the music (which isn’t the actual artist in 99% of the cases) can sue you if you use the music in a way that they don’t see fit. For example, even if I payed $5,000 to liscence an Operatic song for a movie, the company owning the music could still sue me if they didn’t like the movie.

Copyright would also be infringed by persons who … facilitate circumvention…

In other words, you can be sued if you make and distribute a tool that lets you modify your property (even legitimately).

ISPs would be exempt from copyright liability in relation to their activities as intermediaries, namely, their activities as mere conduits for information, their caching activities, their hosting activities, and their information location activities.

The only thing this act does right: internet providers are no longer liable for the acts of their users.

United States Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has been appointed chairman of the new Intellectual Property Subcommittee.

This is the man that has been bribed by the RIAA and MPAA:

The music and movie industries, who contributed $179,928 to Hatch in 2004, are most likely very enthused about his new position.

So in other words, a man in charge of a judicial committee has been payed approx. $180,000USD from the organizations representing a specific side to the issue he is overseeing. To me, that’s like the individual in charge of reforms in gun laws being payed $180,000 by a gun maker. Can anyone say “biased”?

Moral: Justice is only as strong as one’s wallet.