[geeks] Vista is a job creator...

[Frank Van Damme]

On 9/22/06, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> Tue, 19 Sep 2006 @ 09:19 -0500, Lionel Peterson said:
>
> > My guess - a cable with a secret combination of pre-wired pins that
> > are considered part of the media protection scheme, making
> > reverse-engineering a legal problem (since to do so would require
> > "breaking" a protection scheme, which, as we all know, is a crime!)...
>
> That is a large part of the scheme: criminalization of normal behavior.
>
> Of course, that's not as scary as someone finally discovering a system
> that really can't be broken.
>
> That's the danger of things like Palladium and similar ideas: total
> control over your hardware goes away.  Breaking the encryption in
> that case would actually cause your hardware to stop functioning.
>
> That's one big reason so much software now requires network access, and
> chats with remote servers all the time.  It's softening people up to the
> idea of giving up control over their machines and communications.
>
> Besides the fact that is damned stupid and unreliable, it's a control
> freak's wet dream.

I call it a control freaks worst nightmare, depending on who is the
control freak.

In a few years time, the only content and hardware will be from a
company that takes control over the functioning of every detail of
your and mine household appliances.

What is there to do? As a citizen, as a sysadmin? Is raising awareness
enough? Should we boycott where we can? Can we live without the next
generations optical storage media like blu ray?


-- 
Frank Van Damme

"All  PCs are compatible. But some of them are more compatible than
others." [Onbekend]