It would be nice if any image format could have not only metadata, but digitally signed metadata.
Anyone viewing the image would then be able to verify, with the same level of trustworthiness as SSL certificates have, that the metadata within the image is really from who it claims to be from.
An example: When a US Senator posts pictures of his microsoft and digitally signs the bragging rights, we could all be pretty sure it was actually him doing the bragging.
Now imagine that Certificate Authorities could issue digital signing certificates to individual cameras and the cameras do the signing. Have some cryptographically secure way to distribute the certificate into the camera without any human ever seeing or having access to it. The key would be kept in a smart chip running Java like the sim card on your phone. The processor, memory and signing key are in a secure chip that is tamper resistant.
The result of this is that you could be sure that a SPECIFIC CAMERA took the picture. That way, a journalist could have each of his 500 cameras have a different uniquely identifiable certificate so that each picture can be identified with the camera that took the image and signed it.
The potential security issues are: * someone steals the camera and takes photos -- but the journalist can also record when the camera was stolen or missing. Certs can be revoked. * for a dedicated attacker it might be possible to recover the secret key material from the sim card so that it now is available to humans in a form that can be used to sign anything
CDs were developed because they had superior audio quality. I remember the first time I listened to one in a high end stereo store in the mid 1980s. At first, I thought, it sounds good. Then in a moment, it dawned on me. There was a total silence in the background. No background hiss. This was unlike phonograph records or cassette tape.
I don't think piracy had anything to do with the development of DVDs, or iTunes. In particular, iTunes was a music store that sold music through purchases from the get to. I believe the evolution of some kind of digital stores for software, music or other digital wares was inevitable. By the late 1990's some commercial software was already delivered by internet download.
I would also point out another counter example. Bittorrent. It was developed for perfectly legitimate and lawful purposes.
Pirates simply used Bittorrent as a tool. Just as they might use other tools.
Any tools that enable and facilitate storage or transmission of information can be used for piracy. That always has been and always will be true. If it is delivered to your senses in a way that your natural sense organs (eyes, ears, nose) can perceive what Hollywood is delivering, then there will always be piracy.
One problem is that Hollywood has always overreached. They considered home cassette taping of records to be piracy. Just so you would have to re-purchase in order to listen in your car. They considered making a mix tape of your favorite songs to be piracy. Idiots.
What they SHOULD be considering piracy is a high volume operation that is making thousands of knockoff CDs or DVDs that look genuine. That's what those gigantic statutory infringement fines are for. Not for a mom at home to get sued out of her lifetime earnings over two dozen songs.
The lesson is simple. We need to eliminate all forms of storage and transmission of information in order to eliminate piracy. Printing presses, audio and video recordings and transmission. Computers. The Internet. The importance of all these pale in comparison with the trillions of dollars per hour that piracy drains from the global economy.
lmost every last person in the entertainment industry, with very few exceptions, is a complete and utter idiot, lacking even the most basic pattern recognition skills, and incapable of learning even the most obvious lesson from their past actions.
They're not stupid. It's just the drugs. It's Hollywood.
But we need something like this for the rest of the country.
People other than Californians need some kind of a binding law that protects the citizens from unreasonable search and seizure. A law that requires a warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.
But this should be taken further. In addition to protection from arbitrary search and seizure, it should protect citizens from arbitrary arrest.
If only the United States could ever get such a law. It could be modeled after other ideas that have been thrown around.
. . . was to go after everyone except the actual pirates.
* Go after ISPs. (Ignore internet backbones.)
* Go after Google. (Ignore other search engines. Ignore the actual websites that host pirated content.)
* Go after domain names. (Ignore the collateral damage to the remaining 99.999% of the site caused by one pirate user unknown to the site's owner.)
* Go after online storage lockers. (Better yet, just go after any new technology that facilitates storage or communication between people, like printing presses, cassette tapes, and blank CDs and DVDs.)
* Go after manufacturers of hardware mp3 players that fit in your pocket. (Diamond Rio was the first big lawsuit that the RIAA wisely initiated which was amazingly successful at stopping all forms music piracy.)
This is not an exhaustive list. But THIS is how you stop piracy folks!
Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc are not riding your pipes for free.
They pay their bandwidth bill, handsomely, at their end of the connection.
It is YOUR OWN CUSTOMERS who are using your bandwidth. YOUR CUSTOMERS are choosing to go to Google, or to whatever sites that use whatever bandwidth that customer uses. (Note: your customer might not even use Google at all, but still uses your bandwidth.)
If you need to build and develop your network, then it is YOUR CUSTOMERS who pay for that. Not the rest of the world.
(Pay attention Comcast, since you should hear this too.)
Here are a few other things to consider.
What if Google encrypts all communication between YOUR CUSTOMER and Google's servers? You would have no idea what packets are ads, email, video, instant messages, or anything else. You could only block all or nothing.
I suppose you could just block all of Google. Facebook. Netflix. And every other important major internet property.
I'm sure that will make your customers very happy.
But one reason Amazon has been one of the first places I go to is because they carry just about anything and everything under the sun.
Now I suddenly have to do a double take and have second thoughts about anything I might buy on Amazon. Is Amazon trying to lure me into something and not show me all of the options.
I used to trust Amazon. Now I don't. Wow that was quick.
That "smart" part of the TV will be obsolete in three years. While the TV part of it will be good for ten years.
Within three years the terms of service on that "smart" part of the TV will change without consulting you.
I like to get my set top box from where I choose, independently of the TV. I can easily replace the cheap set top box if it becomes hostile to use.
Finally, relevant to this topic, the way the "smart" players are playing does not give me confidence yet that I'm willing to commit to a long term set top box -- especially one built in to the TV -- that might be spying on me, if not today, then in a few years from now.
What if the maker of my Smart TV decides not to let me watch programs on internet service X or Y?
I'll just take a "dumb" TV with a large order of HDMI inputs please.
The real problem is you want to blame someone else
You don't want to get the real pirate. That would take actual work. So you're happy to get the ISP. The Web site. Anyone, really.
So you want a gigantic internet OFF switch.
You want a magic shutdown anything we want at any time with no legal recourse and no due process.
But the core problem is this: pirates exist. And any past, present or yet to be invented means of communications can be used to enable and facilitate piracy -- without any knowledge of an innocent provider of the communications mechanism.
If you propose that censors monitor all communications going through their systems, then who will bear the cost of that? Should Facebook monitor every post? Should Google monitor every email, every file attachment? What if Joe send a password protected ZIP file of a pirated mp3 by Gmail? Google cannot possibly know what is in that file attachment because they cannot open it. Do you propose to do away with file attachments?
Or maybe you propose to do away with any form of private communication?
If you were watching what Hollywood has put out over the last decade it would be clear to you that robots have already completely replaced writers and artists. Sometimes even actors.
Slater can offer multiple alternative arguments defending against the copyright infringement claim by PETA.
One such argument is that Slater did not infringe the monkey's copyright because . . . ta da . . . just as TechDirt and others have pointed out, the picture is in the public domain.
I would find this counter argument amusing, ironic simply because it is the opposite of what Slater argued when he wanted to own the copyright in order to profit from it. Now it is more expedient to argue the image is in the public domain, hence no infringement.
On the post: Law Enforcement And The Ongoing Inconvenience Of The Fourth Amendment
Re:
On the post: Law Enforcement And The Ongoing Inconvenience Of The Fourth Amendment
Re:
It makes sense in an Orwellian society using Newspeak.
On the post: Making The Case Against Adding DRM To JPEG Images
DRM bad, but digitally signed metadata is good
Anyone viewing the image would then be able to verify, with the same level of trustworthiness as SSL certificates have, that the metadata within the image is really from who it claims to be from.
An example: When a US Senator posts pictures of his microsoft and digitally signs the bragging rights, we could all be pretty sure it was actually him doing the bragging.
Now imagine that Certificate Authorities could issue digital signing certificates to individual cameras and the cameras do the signing. Have some cryptographically secure way to distribute the certificate into the camera without any human ever seeing or having access to it. The key would be kept in a smart chip running Java like the sim card on your phone. The processor, memory and signing key are in a secure chip that is tamper resistant.
The result of this is that you could be sure that a SPECIFIC CAMERA took the picture. That way, a journalist could have each of his 500 cameras have a different uniquely identifiable certificate so that each picture can be identified with the camera that took the image and signed it.
The potential security issues are:
* someone steals the camera and takes photos -- but the journalist can also record when the camera was stolen or missing. Certs can be revoked.
* for a dedicated attacker it might be possible to recover the secret key material from the sim card so that it now is available to humans in a form that can be used to sign anything
On the post: Important California Privacy Bill Signed Into Law: Police Need A Warrant To Look At Your Data
Re: "But we need something like this for the rest of the country."
I totally agree that we need to prosecute the "enemies domestic" who are undermining the constitution.
On the post: The Right Way To Stop Piracy
Re: piracy *as* the innovator
CDs were developed because they had superior audio quality. I remember the first time I listened to one in a high end stereo store in the mid 1980s. At first, I thought, it sounds good. Then in a moment, it dawned on me. There was a total silence in the background. No background hiss. This was unlike phonograph records or cassette tape.
I don't think piracy had anything to do with the development of DVDs, or iTunes. In particular, iTunes was a music store that sold music through purchases from the get to. I believe the evolution of some kind of digital stores for software, music or other digital wares was inevitable. By the late 1990's some commercial software was already delivered by internet download.
I would also point out another counter example. Bittorrent. It was developed for perfectly legitimate and lawful purposes.
Pirates simply used Bittorrent as a tool. Just as they might use other tools.
Any tools that enable and facilitate storage or transmission of information can be used for piracy. That always has been and always will be true. If it is delivered to your senses in a way that your natural sense organs (eyes, ears, nose) can perceive what Hollywood is delivering, then there will always be piracy.
One problem is that Hollywood has always overreached. They considered home cassette taping of records to be piracy. Just so you would have to re-purchase in order to listen in your car. They considered making a mix tape of your favorite songs to be piracy. Idiots.
What they SHOULD be considering piracy is a high volume operation that is making thousands of knockoff CDs or DVDs that look genuine. That's what those gigantic statutory infringement fines are for. Not for a mom at home to get sued out of her lifetime earnings over two dozen songs.
The lesson is simple. We need to eliminate all forms of storage and transmission of information in order to eliminate piracy. Printing presses, audio and video recordings and transmission. Computers. The Internet. The importance of all these pale in comparison with the trillions of dollars per hour that piracy drains from the global economy.
On the post: The Right Way To Stop Piracy
Re: Simple
On the post: Important California Privacy Bill Signed Into Law: Police Need A Warrant To Look At Your Data
This is a great step forward
People other than Californians need some kind of a binding law that protects the citizens from unreasonable search and seizure. A law that requires a warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.
But this should be taken further. In addition to protection from arbitrary search and seizure, it should protect citizens from arbitrary arrest.
If only the United States could ever get such a law. It could be modeled after other ideas that have been thrown around.
But alas, it will probably never happen.
On the post: The Right Way To Stop Piracy
I thought the best way to stop piracy . . .
* Go after ISPs. (Ignore internet backbones.)
* Go after Google. (Ignore other search engines. Ignore the actual websites that host pirated content.)
* Go after domain names. (Ignore the collateral damage to the remaining 99.999% of the site caused by one pirate user unknown to the site's owner.)
* Go after online storage lockers. (Better yet, just go after any new technology that facilitates storage or communication between people, like printing presses, cassette tapes, and blank CDs and DVDs.)
* Go after manufacturers of hardware mp3 players that fit in your pocket. (Diamond Rio was the first big lawsuit that the RIAA wisely initiated which was amazingly successful at stopping all forms music piracy.)
This is not an exhaustive list. But THIS is how you stop piracy folks!
On the post: ISP Announces It's Blocking All Facebook And Google Ads Until Companies Pay A Troll Toll
Re: Re:
On the post: ISP Announces It's Blocking All Facebook And Google Ads Until Companies Pay A Troll Toll
Dear ISP
Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc are not riding your pipes for free.
They pay their bandwidth bill, handsomely, at their end of the connection.
It is YOUR OWN CUSTOMERS who are using your bandwidth. YOUR CUSTOMERS are choosing to go to Google, or to whatever sites that use whatever bandwidth that customer uses. (Note: your customer might not even use Google at all, but still uses your bandwidth.)
If you need to build and develop your network, then it is YOUR CUSTOMERS who pay for that. Not the rest of the world.
(Pay attention Comcast, since you should hear this too.)
Here are a few other things to consider.
What if Google encrypts all communication between YOUR CUSTOMER and Google's servers? You would have no idea what packets are ads, email, video, instant messages, or anything else. You could only block all or nothing.
I suppose you could just block all of Google. Facebook. Netflix. And every other important major internet property.
I'm sure that will make your customers very happy.
On the post: Amazon Bans Sale Of Competing Apple TV, Chromecast Devices To 'Avoid Customer Confusion'
Re: Re: really..
Trust is hard to build. Easy to lose.
See: Facebook
On the post: Amazon Bans Sale Of Competing Apple TV, Chromecast Devices To 'Avoid Customer Confusion'
Re: really..
But one reason Amazon has been one of the first places I go to is because they carry just about anything and everything under the sun.
Now I suddenly have to do a double take and have second thoughts about anything I might buy on Amazon. Is Amazon trying to lure me into something and not show me all of the options.
I used to trust Amazon. Now I don't. Wow that was quick.
On the post: Amazon Bans Sale Of Competing Apple TV, Chromecast Devices To 'Avoid Customer Confusion'
Re: What about smart tvs?
That "smart" part of the TV will be obsolete in three years. While the TV part of it will be good for ten years.
Within three years the terms of service on that "smart" part of the TV will change without consulting you.
I like to get my set top box from where I choose, independently of the TV. I can easily replace the cheap set top box if it becomes hostile to use.
Finally, relevant to this topic, the way the "smart" players are playing does not give me confidence yet that I'm willing to commit to a long term set top box -- especially one built in to the TV -- that might be spying on me, if not today, then in a few years from now.
What if the maker of my Smart TV decides not to let me watch programs on internet service X or Y?
I'll just take a "dumb" TV with a large order of HDMI inputs please.
On the post: The Increasing Attacks On The Most Important Law On The Internet
Re:
Should someone have to monitor all communications and postings? Who should pay for that? Why should the platform be liable for that?
Do you propose to do away with any kind of anonymous posting or commenting?
On the post: The Increasing Attacks On The Most Important Law On The Internet
The real problem is you want to blame someone else
So you want a gigantic internet OFF switch.
You want a magic shutdown anything we want at any time with no legal recourse and no due process.
But the core problem is this: pirates exist. And any past, present or yet to be invented means of communications can be used to enable and facilitate piracy -- without any knowledge of an innocent provider of the communications mechanism.
If you propose that censors monitor all communications going through their systems, then who will bear the cost of that? Should Facebook monitor every post? Should Google monitor every email, every file attachment? What if Joe send a password protected ZIP file of a pirated mp3 by Gmail? Google cannot possibly know what is in that file attachment because they cannot open it. Do you propose to do away with file attachments?
Or maybe you propose to do away with any form of private communication?
On the post: DailyDirt: Creative Robots Replacing Artists And Writers...
You're behind the times
On the post: The Trend Of Killing News Comment Sections Because You 'Just Really Value Conversation' Stupidly Continues
The meaning of Conversation
Conversation is when the news sites tell us sheeple what we are supposed to think.
Once you understand that, there is no problem.
On the post: Monkey Business: PETA Sues On Behalf Of The Monkey Selfie; Claims Copyright Belongs To The Monkey
An amusing argument Slater could use
One such argument is that Slater did not infringe the monkey's copyright because . . . ta da . . . just as TechDirt and others have pointed out, the picture is in the public domain.
I would find this counter argument amusing, ironic simply because it is the opposite of what Slater argued when he wanted to own the copyright in order to profit from it. Now it is more expedient to argue the image is in the public domain, hence no infringement.
On the post: Monkey Business: PETA Sues On Behalf Of The Monkey Selfie; Claims Copyright Belongs To The Monkey
Re: Next Up
On the post: Monkey Business: PETA Sues On Behalf Of The Monkey Selfie; Claims Copyright Belongs To The Monkey
Re: PETA's goal is animal rights, not copyright maximalism
Isn't PETA about People Eating Tasty Animals?
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