Open DRM?
So I recently spied a story about "
My First Experience with a DRM Protected CD" at Digital Media Thoughts. The gist of the story is, a guy's girlfriend buys a Back Street Boyz CD. The guy pops it in his PC and gets the MediaMax EULA. He declines the EULA, the CD pops out. He holds down the shift key and inserts the CD to avoid the autorun feature. When he rips the CD, he discovers it to be all bubukles, and whelks, and knobs, and flames o' fire.
What happened?
Turns out the CD automatically installed the anti-ripping software without telling him.
In proper internet fashion, he gets on Google and googles the living snot out of "MediaMax." He then discovers that the solution is simply to disable the MediaMax driver with the commands:
net stop sbcphid
del %systemroot%\system32\drivers\sbcphid.sys
(I got this from the
Hydrogen Audio Forums page, btw.)
This has started me thinking about the fundamental problem with DRM (aside from the fact that technological mechanisms can't figure out if your use of the media is infringing or if it's fair-use.) DRM systems have to protect media from ALL copying devices. But the ever-nefarious pirates only need to be successful once.
The fact that you can go online and find a description of how to disable the MediaMax protection system in less than 5 minutes of googling sort of demonstrates the "uphill battle" nature of the record label's anti-copying efforts.
In other parts of the crypto community, we have
Kerckhoffs' principle which tells us that a system should be secure even if every part of it (save the key) is known to an attacker. Why can't we have this with DRM systems? Why do I have to sign an NDA to simply be on a conference call with _______ to talk about DRM? What is so fundamentally broken about that system that they can't show it to people without legal structures in place to ensure you don't tell people what's inside it? If the bad guys want to break your DRM, they will. Why not make it resistant to protocol attacks by people without secret or private keys? Why not publish your DRM code?
Skype Voicemail via POTS?
Hmm... well... I don't know what to say. My inane ramblings about Skype not working are not completely accurate. Perhaps I just found a bug or something. I have successfully turned off multiple clients, left others on, left many Skype VoiceMails. Hmm.. So ignore most of the recent entry on Skype.
However... it would still be wikked-cool to be able to phone my SkypeIn phone number, press a secret code and listen to my voice mail over the phone.
Skype Weirdness
Okay... I just signed up for
SkypeIn and Skype voicemail. But I just noticed a major problem. I use Skype on multiple computers, frequently logging in at home and at work at the same time. If I'm logged in at home (as I frequently am) but not logged in at work (which is less frequent) and I get a voice mail message, it will show up in the Skype calls list at home, but not at work. So, the moral of the story here is ALWAYS log out of Skype if you're not going to be around.
This is sort of a deal killer for me. I started using Skype not so much because I was interested in being MORE reliably reachable. I bought the SkypeIn account to see if I couldn't forward my notoriously unreliable mobile phone to my SkypeIn account so I would be able to pickup voicemail messages on my computer or via the phone. There are only two problems with this: 1) Skype VoiceMail doesn't have a phone interface, and 2) Skype VoiceMail seems to be delivered to clients that are logged in at the moment, but not ones that aren't.
I can understand this model; it's the simplest mode of working. But it's not the model that really works for me. I have multiple computers, I want the clients to act as views into a "model" that's maintained on a server somewhere (or at least can be updated in a P2P manner.) That way if all the clients are turned off, and I get a voice mail, the first client to connect will see the voice mail. If that client hangs up and I go to a different client, I still want to see that same voice mail.
Maybe it's just a bug. Maybe they'll fix it before my SkypeIn account expires. I find I'm a fan of most of its other features...
Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign
So a lot of what I do now is review design artifacts: architecture diagrams, requirements documents, project plans, security objectives, marketing requirements, etc. One of the things I've noticed is that within a given organization, a "language" evolves to describe software features. By "language" I mean a set of conventions where an abbreviated form takes the place of a more complex concept. This is definitely a "sign" in the Pierce or de Saussure meaning of the term. This shouldn't be a great surprise to anyone... using abstraction to eliminate from examination unimportant features of an object is a great analytical and design tool. Until it fails.
I've started wondering a lot about how people and organizations develop "signs" to represent complex aspects of software development, and how they can be used to make the process and the end result more reliable.
On the road to this goal, I wanted to review Semiotics, or the study of signs. There are a couple good resources I found. The first is
Daniel Chandler's Semiotics for Beginners and the second is the
entry on Salience from the Wikipedia. Both are excellent references.
Crank and Partitions
Mi amigo Steve just sent me an email pointing to a page over at Science News indicating that a University of Wisconsin at Madison PhD candidate "hit a home run" by showing the relationship between Dyson's Crank and congruences in partition numbers. Now... I know that a lot of readers are going to think this is a difficult and obtuse mathematical concept. Quite frankly, however, if you can count to 100 and understand how to add and multiply numbers, you can conceptualize number-theoretic partitions, and the concept of "rank" and what famed physicist Freeman Dyson termed "Crank".
Start off by reading the Wikipedia entry on "
Integer Partitions"; you just have to read the first paragraph to get an idea for what mathematicians mean when they say "partition." Once you've done that, bop on over to
Science News and read about how Karl Mahlburg discovered a previously hidden relationship between "Crank" and partition congruences.
Cool stuff.
Digital Camera plus BlueTooth plus Mobile Phone
David Pescovitz of
BoingBoing fame recently interviewed John Poisson of the Fours Initiative for "
The Feature" website. The article,
The Big Picture, is a good read. I think that because it's sprinkled with insightful truths like: 'Gluing a camera on the side of a mobile phone to get a "camera-phone" isn't much of a communication innovation.' At last, I've found someone who agrees with me on this point.
The whole affair motivated me to start a moblog over at
http://mhamrick.textamerica.com/. There's nothing over there that's especially interesting unless you have a fetish for styrofoam cups. I think the whole moblog concept is a step in the right direction, but the whole ecosystem is cocked up a bit by the fact that the crappy digital cameras you find in mobile phones are about the only ones that are easy to use with Text America's moblog engine.
What I was thinking would be good would be a small cellular data radio you could plug into a typical "high quality" digital camera like an EOS RebelM or a PENTAX istDL or what-have-you. When pictures are snapped, they're automagically uploaded to something like Flickr or Ophoto or Text America's moblog service. If you added this with one of those digital frames (like the Pacific PV1 or the photoVu 17" wireless digital picture frame) and you could have an interesting system where you could go out and have a live window into the photographer's world.
Mouth Sounds, Hackers, Revenge of the Sith
People who know me know that I like to make bizarre sounds. For many years I thought I was brain damaged, but then I realized I was just in training for the job of radio show sound effects man. Fred Newman, sound effects guru of Prairie Home Companion, has a book out called
Mouth Sounds, and it's on my Amazon.Com wish list should anyone wish to buy it for me *hint*.
Old school Hackers... people who were hackers before they were called HaX0rz... might be interested in
What The Hack, the hacking festival that occurs once every four years in the Netherlands. And... if you are upset that the authorities allow hackers to meet in public, please see the
MIT Hacks page for a description of the original sense of the term "Hacker".
Also... I just discovered from the "
Which Revenge of the Sith Character are you?" online quiz, that I'm General Grievous . Sweet. Four light sabers of droidy goodness. Certainly I can take on one stupid Jedi... Do'h!
Page Rank Algorithm Patent
Stories at Slashdot and other sites on the web are saying that US patent application 20050071741, filed on the 31st of March, 2005 is the Google page rank algorithm. A quick analysis of the application can be found at
Buzzle.com. Or, you can goto the US Patent and Trademark website at
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html and search by number.
Good Music from Austin
Hey! There is good music on the web.
LinkFilter just pointed me towards the website for
TOrcH, a jazz outfit from down Texas way. Good to know there's good music going on in my old home. Now if they could keep the Crystal Meth off the streets, I might move my family back. But the music is good.
Biblio : New Business Ventures and the Entrepreneur
BTW... I just put
New Business Ventures and the Entrepreneur on my Amazon.Com wish-list. It's given a glowing review at Amazon.Com and quoted in my
New Venture Creation text by Timmons and Spinneli. The bit that got my attention was a quote from Greg Gianforte.. "A lot of Entrepreneurs think they need money ... when actually they haven't figured out the business equation." Gianforte was a principal in Brightwork Development Inc.; a software development company sold to McAfee Associates for over $10M. Gianforte goes on to describe the lack of money as being a "good thing" in a certain sense; it forces the business bootstrapper to concentrate on selling to bring money into the business.
Supernatural
And in keeping with the Skeptical theme of the day, I just read on
LinkFilter that James Randi's
Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural is now online.
Text to Speech Demo
Just a quick note... I happened to recently find the demo page for
AT&T's Text to Speech Interactive Multi-Lingual Demo. It's probably the best text to speech I've heard in a while. As a test, I setup my email client to use the demo interface to produce a .WAV file with the sender and subject line of messages that come in from a couple public mailing lists. The .WAV files are then forwarded to my mobile phone as MMS messages. But for a few problems with T-Mobile's email-to-MMS gateway, it worked like a charm. Sadly, the SDK is available only for WinTel, AIX, Solaris, HP/UX, and Linux. No MacOS X.
Skeptics, Spiritualists and Forteans
So I happened to find SETIRadio's Podcast archive. I love the guys over at SETI, though they do come across sometimes as partisan skeptics. Personally, I like to keep an open mind; I like to read both
The Watchtower and
Skeptical Inquirer. In it's hey-day,
Fortean Times magazine was a font of high quality "phenomenal" information. The problem with the Skeptics is they seem to reject anything not based on direct observation of objective reality. Problems with religious activists is they can put forward policies based on religious tradition when something based more on objective criteria better suits the public interest. Evolution is a case in point. I don't know of too many scientists who claim to have been present for the billions of years it took for life to evolve on Earth (obviously using the Scientific view of objective reality here...) Some of the better scientists I know still call the Evolution of Life on Earth a theory. Why? Because they say they have no direct evidence. I.e. - They weren't there to witness it. However... they're pretty clear on how the preponderance of evidence seems to support the theory. And they're testing the various hypotheses about how to date and interpret the fossil record with the same science that supports modern engineering and technology.
And what of the religious theories regarding the creation of the Earth? If you ask me, they're a lot more beautiful than evolution. I like most of them and I think they reveal fundamental truths about the way we interact with the universe, what we think is important, and our social fabric. The thought of a hardcore skeptic / evolutionary biologist in charge of a religious prayer service frightens the living daylights out of me. Almost as much as a structural engineer with nothing but a religious education.
Call me a luke-warm middle of the road freak if you will, but I've just got to think that the way you frame a problem is at least as important as the way you solve it. Frame the study of development MRSA ( Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus ) as anything other than an evolutionary biology or epidemiological problems and you've got problems. Start relying on objective reality for proof of "God" and you've got similar problems. One of the best things we can know sometimes is that we don't know. And that's why I still pick up the odd copy of Fortean Times now and again. 'Cause you never know, maybe there really is a Loch Ness Monster.
But there are a bunch of good skeptical programs about science at
SETIRadio. Or if you don't want to commit to a world-view, you might want to look up a few books by Charles Fort:
The Book of the Damned, New Lands,
Lo!, and Wild Talents. Also, it looks like someone's put together a compendium hardcover:
The Complete Books of Charles Fort.
radioSHARK Disappoints
Discovered that you can only have something like eight scheduled programs with a radioSHARK, or maybe it's just that it doesn't like recording the last program in the list. Griffin Tech's software has been extremely underwhelming, and the AM radio reception is well... pretty non-existant. Most people don't care much for AM radio, but I was on a talk radio spot a couple weeks ago and sort of wanted to record it. This isn't the first time I've had problems with the thing. When I first bought the thing, it would stop recording when the screen blanked. It's not that it would stop recording when the host computer went to sleep, mind you, but when the screen blanked. When I called tech support their answer was, "oh, just set your mac so the screen never blanks." Thanks guys. My Mac is in the bedroom right next to my bed. I guess I have a choice between sleeping and using the radioSHARK.
However... most of the problems with the underlying drivers seem to have gone away, and I just noticed that the radioSHARK shows up in the list of Microphones in the Sound Input pane of the control panel under MacOS X 10.4. A quick test with Squeak's sound recording morph shows that you can import sound from the current station, even if the radioSHARK app is not running. Hmm... there may be hope yet for this device. The most recent version of
Squeak has facilities for recording and playing back PCM audio files as well as MP3's. I don't think I've seen native support for AAC, FLAC, or Ogg Vorbis, but in a pinch, you could use Squeak's equivalent of native methods to link to shared libraries that support these file formats. w00t!
