Just before the end of last year, a gaping hole has been closed in the struggle to turn the world in a lawyer’s playground: IBM has filed a patent that patents filing patents.
Whenever you apply for a new patent, you’ll have to pay royalties to IBM! It’s like the invention of the self-printing money! Well done! 🙂
References:
1 Comment | 
Fun, Philosophy | Tagged: IBM, Intellectual property, Law, Lawsuit, Patent, Patent troll, Patents | 
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Posted by digulla
Image via Wikipedia
Like so many people, I was upset that Sony discontinued support for Linux. I understand that it was a security risk (people were dabbling with the encrypted hypervisor and the encryption) but no one really cared enough to actually invest the huge amount of time necessary to really break it. I also understand that supporting Linux was a cost issue for Sony while it didn’t bring that many customers. At the same time, I knew I could run Linux on my PS3 but never did.
So it wasn’t an actual issue for me either, it just upset me. I bought the PS3 for many reasons and being able to run Linux had been one of them. Not the major point but I still got mad when they took that from me.
At the 27C3, they showed how it was hacked but I was intrigued by short appearance of a guy who had analyzed the time it took to break a console and why it was hacked. While piracy is a side effect of hacking a console, it’s probably not the driving force. The statistics say that it took at most 12 months to hack a console make Linux run. The PS3 was unscathed for three years – until Sony stopped support for Linux. After that, the hackers really dug into it and – what surprise – they pwn3d it.
Made me wonder why Sony dropped support? As we know from the history of Microsoft, piracy is actually a major driving force for software sales. The calculation goes a bit like this: If you don’t want to pay for something, it’s hard to force you. But once you’re used to something, and you like it, you stick with it. A good example was Office 97. It wasn’t that great but companies were forced to buy it quickly because all people working at those companies had got free, time limited copies along with their PCs. I’ll let you assume how many people bought the product after the time was up.
The thing was: People took work home (good for the companies), work on it and then bring it back to work. Then, something happened: The “old” Office 95 did display a warning, about 90% the size of the screen “I can’t open this! You may lose your work! Help!” So suddenly, there was a strong pressure on the company to upgrade 95 to 97 – because everyone had got a free copy of Office 97!
The key here is to be able to balance sales with piracy. Microsoft knows the Spiel best: Really smack down on people selling pirate copies but leave the home users alone. C= (and the Amiga) couldn’t play it. In the end, piracy overtook sales and the platform died. The lesson we learn here: Piracy is something that must be managed carefully. No piracy and sales will be much lower than they could be; too much and you go bankrupt.
So here is my heretic thought: Maybe Sony didn’t have enough piracy. ^_^
References: Video of the 27C3 talk “”. Go to the documentation site and search the download links for “console_hacking_2010”. The statistics part is at 05:33.
2 Comments | Philosophy, Software | Tagged: 27c3, Amiga, CCC, Linux, Microsoft, Piracy, PlayStation 3, PS3, Security, Sony | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Since a few days, I got pingbacks from codebix.com. Their site contains a lot of links to a lot of blogs but no real added value as far as I can tell … who are those guys? What’s their game?
2 Comments | Philosophy | Tagged: codebix.com | Permalink
Posted by digulla
You have a firewall, NoScript, disabled cookies and everything. Do you think you’re surfing anonymously?
Think again: http://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php
1 Comment | Philosophy | Tagged: Security, Surveillance, Web | Permalink
Posted by digulla
“Little Brother” got me thinking. When the DHS tries to make the city more safe and secure, they just make it worse. Why?
Because they ignore one of the most fundamental principles without which society cannot work: Trust and respect.
That doesn’t mean you need to trust someone completely or respect them in every way. It means: Know how much you can and should trust someone. Then treat them politely, without second thoughts. Surprise: Our brains have been trained for the millions of years before we had speech to read body language. And we’re really good at it.
You don’t have to be nice to a terrorist, bow your head to them or grovel. Not at all. But just imaging how kicking you around, killing your family, relatives, friends, would make you feel.
Now, I imagine that terrorists aren’t exactly lenient or forgiving. So if you would become mad at such a treatment, what will they do? Go on a killing spree? Gee, I think that’s exactly what they do. How surprising.
Which puts us into a delicate position. We can only be safe when we start treating everyone else on the planet with respect. Respect can mean to drive your car for another year, even if it sucks. Or to sell it to someone poor way under price because they deserve it — just as a human. It doesn’t mean we should all convert to the Islam or anything.
It just means that: Show some basic respect (as in polite).
It probably doesn’t mean to go to a poor country, “help” them fight against terrorism and then “suddenly” discover that there are billions of dollars buried in the ground. These people might not have spent a lot of time in school, but they spend an awful lot of time haggling at the bazaar. They see you lie.
Imagine if all the terrorists in the world believed that there were better ways to make them as happy as us. Wouldn’t that be better than strip searches at airports, constant fear of an attack, ever more complicated and even debasing security laws? What’s security without respect?
If we were 100% secure, no one could go anywhere (they might be infected), talk to anyone (they might spill secrets), do anything (they might make mistakes). In computer sciences, you learn early that a secure computer is one which is switched off, without any data or use. Secure but useless.
That’s why security measurements in companies work out so badly: If they were really enforced, the company couldn’t do business anymore. So you have to trust your workers. You have to treat them with respect or else you get the very problems that your dream of “security” pretended to solve.
Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: Little Brother, Respect, Security, Terrorism, Trust, War on Terrorism | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Little Brother (Cory Doctorow novel)
When I Write Like told me, I wrote like Cory Doctorow, I had to get one of his works: Little Brother.
Hm … no, I doubt that this was some clever marketing fad — there aren’t enough writers to make this worthwhile. Plus you can download the book.
Marcus is a teenager, going about his life, when he’s “caught up in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco.” What follows is funny, revolting, unsettling, witted, sometimes too realistic not to worry about. And it explains some of the more obscure and ever more relevant concepts of computer security. In a way even a non-geek can understand. And relate.
So if you want to read a few good arguments why it’s not safe to trust politicians and security experts with your security and safety, go get the book.
Recommendation: Buy.
1 Comment | Book, Philosophy | Tagged: Book, Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, Review, Security | Permalink
Posted by digulla
[Post in German because it’s a German issue]
Eine Gruppe von Leuten hat eine Webseite erstellt, wo man sich über das geforderte Leistungsschutzrecht informieren und nachlesen kann, warum es abzulehnen ist:
IGEL wurde in erster Linie aufgrund der Erkenntnis initiiert, dass es für ein Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverleger weder eine Notwendigkeit noch eine Rechtfertigung gibt.
Kurzversion: Verleger wollen mehr Geld für sich, alle anderen gehen leer aus — auch wenn die Verleger natürlich behaupten, diese neue Einnahmequelle nur für die armen Autoren und Journalisten zu fordern. Komischerweise sind es die gleichen Verleger, die seit Jahren durch Drücken der Löhne für die Armut der Autoren und Journalisten verantwortlich sind. Ein Weihnachtsmärchen?
Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: German, Law, Leistungsschutzrecht | Permalink
Posted by digulla
For years, states try to sell us their new security law “enhancements” with “nothing to hide, nothing to fear.” The argument is always the same: Since you’re a good guy, why should you care for a law that is meant to hurt only the bad guys?
Along came Wikileaks. Suddenly, all the same people suddenly cry out in anger.
Um … Do they have something to hide?
It shows once more that the world isn’t as simple as those politicians try to make us believe. The truth is that if the same politicians didn’t create an atmosphere of suppression and mistrust, we wouldn’t need those laws in the first place.
In a similar way, Wikileaks is just a symptom: It raises our attention to the sore spots of the “perfect” world we live in. Wikileaks didn’t kill people. It just shows without doubt that war is never a solution but rather another problem on top of all those we already had.
But didn’t the publication of the Wikileaks documents kill dissidents?
Did it? I’m not sure how well the Internet works where the Taliban live or whether they would use such a tool — surely they assume the Internet as the work of the devil. So unless you have hard fact that any dissidents were in fact killed, let’s use ‘endanger countless lives’ – as the US government did.
Next, choosing sides in a war is a pretty sure way to get you killed. And who started the war? On which grounds? Wasn’t the whole thing just one big lie? Can you prove to me that this was the sole option for the whole world to get rid of Saddam Hussein?
COSTOFWAR says that the US spent $745 billion so far in Iraq. No matter how corrupt the old Iraq government was, if that money had been spent in bribing them to stand down and enjoy the rest of their lives in some nice place or to treat their people better, I’m sure Wikileaks would have much less to spread.
Q: How do you know for sure a politician is lying to you? A: His lips are moving.
Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: Iraq, Julian Assange, Politician, Saddam Hussein, Security, United States, WAR, Wikileaks | Permalink
Posted by digulla
I’ve been playing around with Starmind for a while. Okay, I get money for answering questions (like, say, stackoverflow.com). But recently the editor was changed for something that really sucks. edlin didn’t freak me out as much because at that time, it was hard to be better. Today, it’s hard to be so bad. As I always say: “A lot of dedication and effort was necessary to create something so crappy.”
Anyway. That’s just the technical side.
The main problem with Starmind is money. It’s not that you have to pay for an answer or get money for one. Not really. It’s greed. If I post an answer, I sell it. It’s lost. I put a lot of effort into it and it’s gone. Poof. No one can see how brilliant I am but the guy who paid me for the answer. Mankind gets dumb.
On the stackexchange sites, the question and the answers stay open for comments forever. You can build upon them. Starmind puts the knowledge into a vault. “Hey, I paid for that, get lost!”
Things like Wikipedia work because more than two people win. Richard was right. Information wants to be free.
3 Comments | Philosophy | Tagged: Information, StackExchange, Starmind, Wikipedia | Permalink
Posted by digulla
In my youth, I was skiing almost every weekend. I fondly remember driving into the mountains, all the snow and the smell of the air, getting in gears and then racing downhill like there was no tomorrow (or so I thought at the time).
A lot has changed since that time. Snow became scarce. Last week, we had a decent amount and it does bring nice childhood memories back.
I love snow.
Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: Skiing, Snow, Switzerland | Permalink
Posted by digulla
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