Well, our lovely friends at the RIAA are at it again. Fresh off their legislative ‘win’ that had them steal performance rights from artists by sneaking a bill inside a farm subsidy package, they tried this: http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0%2C2100%2C47552%2C00.html
Yes, that’s right - the RIAA wants the power to hack into private citizen’s computers and destroy their MP3 files, all in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’.
This is below scummy. This attempt to profiteer from a hastier-than-usual scrutiny of a bill aimed at saving lives is damned close to treasonous. The last thing we need right now is to have the public lose confidence in the government, and to destroy our newly-found bipartisanship by making it look like the government is using the War to line the pockets of special interests.
I’m firmly against music piracy, but these assholes don’t make it easy to defend them. They are the slimiest, sneakiest scuzzballs around, who claim to be defending the artists from piracy while ripping off their own copyrights. And now this.
I don’t know a remedy, but I do know I’d like to find the assholes responsible for this and tear them a new one.
Despite what the utterly clueless media thinks, that is cracking, not hacking. Cracking is malicious and usually not very skilled. Hacking is not malicious and is, by definition, skilled.
I have gotten to the point where I’m considering pirating all my music and then sending a check for $15 to the artist.
With another of the RIAA’s tactics - CDs that can’t be played on computers - they’re effectively determing where I can and can’t listen to music. I’m sorry, but this is not uranium we’re talking about here: you don’t need to monitor every movement of the object after the moment of sale.
I am really hoping that their tactics of treating their customer base like criminals and acting like assholes will help spur the inevitable revolution in music distribution. Thanks to computers and the internet, an artist can record, produce, package, advertise, sell, and deliver all their music without ever having to darken the door of a record company. The clock is ticking on the usefulness of the RIAA, and they know it. It surprises me how much in a hurry they are to bring about their own demise.
According to pretty much every reputable dictionary, the word “Hacker” can refer to a person who illicitly breaks into computer systems.
The word “Hacker” can also refer to someone who is bad at a particular skill (e.g. “He tries to play tennis, but he’s just a hacker”) someone or something that cuts notches, esp the device used to cut notches in pine trees to collect turpentine; someone who works hard at a boring task; a person who makes furniture with an axe; or an enthusiast of any pursuit. Words can have more than one meaning.
I think the current anti-piracy measures being employed (corrupting ECC bytes) don’t prevent you from playing cds in any form, even your computer. I think it prevents you from (easily) ripping them to mp3 files. I suspect there are already “solutions” to this “problem”.
In any event, let’s not overstate the issue. nobody is preventing you from playing cds on your computer.
Questions you might raise might include your right to back up music you legally buy on your computer in mp3, or wav format. In any event, if you don’t like the ecc byte corruption solution, don’t buy the cd.
But what the new anti-ripping code does do is degrade the sound quality. The RIAA claims that it’s ‘barely’ audible, but for audiophiles who have invested a good percentage of their disposable income in high-end audio gear, it’s a travesty.
Their counterparts in the MPAA are just as bad. There is now a proposal floating around to modify the HDTV standard so that the signal will remain digital right through the presentation device, to prevent copying movies. If that goes through, every HDTV that has been sold to date will be unable to play the new HDTV content. Given that these sets cost anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000, that’s a pretty big disaster for the ‘early adopters’ who trusted them when they said that content would be available soon if they just bought their displays now.
According to a story in The Globe and Mail the recording industry is drawing the attention of the anti-trust types at the DoJ. Sorry, but I tried to link to the story and it just would not work. Goto http://www.theglobeandmail.com , the story is by Mathew Ingram, and is linked on the front page of their site.
What else is interesting about the aforementioned scheme is that, allegedly, one CD in something like 100 (or 1000; somewhere there) will not be playable. I don’t have a cite on this, I’m sorry; it might be from a past Time, or from the Summer, 2001 issue of 2600. If someone could provide one, that’d be great.
The problem with this is huge. Not only does it waste materials and time; it will do so on a fairly large scale. Look at something like Staind’s latest album. What has it sold…something like five million? Let’s go with 4 million to be safe. If what I said above is true, that means that something between 4,000 and 40,000 defective CDs will be shipped.
I started hearing this a few years back, but back in the early days, hacker meant someone who broke into computers, cracker was someone who tried to break a code, or defeat copy protection. It was years later that people start to sanitize the term hacker. Someone who tries to do damage, was a crasher, not a cracker.
Just two days ago I encountered my first “non-playable on my PC” music CD - puchased by a co-worker at lunch.
See previous statement. The RIAA is. End of argument.
Me and the guy who brought it to my attention scanned the entire CD cover carefully. There is no warning whatsoever on the outside that the CD is defective or different in any way, shape, or form. Now…since most all stores prohibit return or exchange of opened CDs…what does he then do with it, if he bought it to play at work on his PC?
I’ve never heard that. Do you have a cite? **
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Just my personal experiance. I used to have a book that defined the terms that way. It was written by a hacker about computer security, but I loaned it to a friend of mines dad(he was head of computer security at a nuclear power plant, I was showing him why his new security system wouldnt work), and he never gave it back(that was in 1983, and I am not holding my breath on getting it back). Maybe I’m wrong, and it was just the people I was in contact with, but they guy I mentioned from the nuke plant, another friends dad who was with Sperry/Univac, and all the computer geeks/hackers I knew back then(around 1979/80 or so), always used this deffination hacker/cracker/crasher. It was always the assumption that hacker came from the phrase hacking into a system, which makes no sense if just means serious computer geek. I was kinda of a light weight hacker, as I didnt have the patience to required to really be a badass. All of the hackers I knew looked down on crackers. The idea was to get into somewhere you werent supposed to be, and not leave any evidence of you being there. If you went in and destroyed stuff, then whatever account you used to get in got shut down, and it just made things harder. Some BBS’s we crashed regularly, like the local white power board. We crashed that one hourly.
<sarcasm mode>
Yeah, I know how you feel. I used think I was a vandal, but really I was just a lightweight. You know, smashing windows and stuff like that. I never got into the really cool stuff like torching cars.
<Sarcasm off>
Since this is the pit, and since I was one of the guys who had to try and make a living from a BBS while little assholes got their jollies trying to crash it, let me send a nice sincere FUCK YOU to anyone who thinks that’s a cool way to spend their time.
You can call yourself a hacker, a cracker, or Mona Lisa for all I care, but if you spend your time trying to damage other people’s property, you’re nothing but a low-life vandal, no better than the punks who run around keying cars for yucks. So let’s not romanticise this, okay?