Thursday, May 26, 2005
President Bush signed a new law last month setting tough penalties of up to 10 years in prison for anyone caught distributing a movie or song prior to its commercial release.
"Today's crackdown sends a clear and unmistakable message to anyone involved in the online theft of copyrighted works that they cannot hide behind new technology," said John C. Richter, acting assistant attorney general.
via: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050526/ap_en_bu/movie_downloading
My take… this sends a strong and clear message to all the Star Wars fans that are buyng the merchandise, going to the theatre 3+ times to see the movie, spending the time and effort to download the movie for a post theatre fix, and will eventually buy all the variations of Lucas’s DVD collections, that they are not valued. 10 years for a kid downloading Star Wars… what if this was was a ‘Yu-Gi-Oh’ movie? Let’s put those 8 yr. olds in prison!
Saturday, May 14, 2005
An interesting turn of events… I wonder how fast Apple would sue a company releasing “AppleOS”?
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1076
It seems to me that I recall everyone getting excited about Microsoft losing its ‘Windows’ trademark as it was too generic. I would think both ‘Apple’ and ‘Tiger’ would qualify as well, then.
Friday, May 13, 2005
I was reading
a commentary on the recent smackdown by the courts of the FCC's proposed broadcast flag. The article generally descibes the craptacular nature of the broadcast flag, but worries about what replacement the MPAA and broadcasters will ram through Congress (with the help of their shills) instead. The idea that the broadcast flag just dies and nothing replaces it is not too likely. Assuming that might actually happen, there was a witty little passage:
Now lets assume that nothing else happens: Congress backs off and nothing replaces the Broadcast Flag. At that point we get to play a game of chicken with the broadcasters. While most believe that broadcasters are actually too smart to follow through with such threats, they have threatened to cease broadcasting in HD if something akin to the Broadcast Flag isnt implemented. They argue that without a Broadcast Flag there is insufficient protection of their high-quality programming.
Perhaps thats why theyve replaced all their high-quality programming with Reality TV. Their thought? Nobody will want to send copies of a B-list actors brother giving roses to desperate, attention-craved women.My sentiments exactly...
Good news for all the folks that really pushed hard on Microsoft to make some form of this software available for Universal subscribers.
http://blogs.msdn.com/rickla/archive/2005/05/12/416994.aspx
Saturday, May 07, 2005
Now, why doesn’t someone create a program for smartphones that allows us to type in Morse Code then?
http://www.160characters.org/news.php?action=view&nid=1541
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
In mixed news, the House passed a bill authorizing technology makers to permit skipping of objectionable material on DVDs. For instance, a built-in filter on your DVD player would allow you to selectively edit nudity, swearing, violence, or other objectionable content. While I personally won’t use this technology, I firmly believe that users have the right to view DVDs on their own terms. I absolutely hate the fact that warnings, trailers, and outright commercials are shown on DVD now and I cannot skip them without breaking the copy protection.
The bad news to this bill is that now people that camcorder a movie in a theatre are eligible for up to 3 years in prison. Call me crazy, but if I was to actually physically steal a DVD from a store, I probably would not get that kinda time. Is this punishment commensurate with the crime? Have you actually seen what a camcordered theatre release looks like? That should be punishment enough. We already have laws for copyright protection, we don’t need more special case laws.
Friday, April 15, 2005
Congratulations to the FBI for nabbing those horrible, nasty game pirates that were offering vintage and no longer available games. The worldwide market for "Duck Hunt" and "Mario Bros" has exploded in the last few months, so I am sure they were robbing Nintendo of valuable revenue.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--piratednintendo0413apr13,0,6709023.story
In other news, federal agents actually worked on something worthwhile to the community and nabbed 10,000 suspects.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/washpost/20050415/ts_washpost/a53043_2005apr14
Hmm... so maybe the FBI's resources would have been better spent investigating, say, the rapists, murderers, and child molestors at large than busting 4 poor chumps dumb enough to try selling "Donkey Kong". That is just my opinion though.
Friday, April 01, 2005
I have seen a number of techniques for enumerating a user's group in Active Directory and .NET. Here is one that seems to crop up every now and then (note, I cleaned this up so at least we were calling Dispose() on our DirectoryEntrys):
ArrayList al = new ArrayList();
using (DirectoryEntry user = new DirectoryEntry(_adsPath, _username, _password, AuthenticationTypes.Secure))
{ object adsGroups = user.Invoke("Groups");
foreach (object adsGroup in (IEnumerable)adsGroups)
{ using (DirectoryEntry group = new DirectoryEntry(adsGroup))
{ al.Add(group.Name);
}
}
}
As we can see, this one uses Reflection to grab the native IADsMembers interface. We then enumerate the groups by placing each native object into a DirectoryEntry and consuming it as we wish.
What's wrong with this method? At first glance, nothing really. Sure, it seems a little more complex than just retrieving the 'memberOf' property from the user to begin with. We also know that this will not expose the nested group relationships like enumerating the 'tokenGroup' attribute will.
No, the real issue with this is that we are at risk for a memory leak. What would happen if an error occurred right after we .Invoke() and before the foreach loop finishes? We would have left a bunch of native IADs objects in limbo. Only the DirectoryEntry has the .Dispose() pattern that will calls the appropriate Marshal.ReleaseComObject() on the native IADs object.
Developers make mistakes and this one is fraught with peril. Don't use it. Instead, enumerate the 'memberOf' attribute or 'tokenGroups' and avoid the issue.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Fantastic article from the National Journal regarding the HDTV, public safety, and all those airwaves that are vastly underutilized.
http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/0218njsp.htm
My only comment, Cable HDTV (and other compressed HDTV) looks like crap. It's galling when you are supposed to view this gorgeous image and the compression artifacts are so high that you see green blocks with any motion.
via
Boing Boing
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Let me first say this: this is not a comment on the quality of Paul DiLascia's code. I have not personally evaluated it, and likely won't (it sounds too dirty). But, you too can play with
*ahem*... 'ManWrap', here on MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/04/C/default.aspx
What's next... the STD/IUD library (STanDard Interface User Design)?