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Asia not taking net security seriously, say experts. [The New Zealand Herald Mar 16 2001 6:36PM ET][Asia-Pacific latest] DJ sez: When you live so close to so many of your fellow man for so many thousands of years, you develop a lot of ways to make it easy on everyone that to most Westerners seem quaintly amusing at best. One quality all the books I've read seem to agree on is a sense of space and privacy that's always present no matter how big a crowd you're in. Richard Stallman's preference for a world of null passwords to me expresses a lot of problems accepting the fundamental truth of human separation and our desire for privacy. Pre-populist Internet was the rural town, a sense of community and voluntary respect for boundaries; current Internet is the big city and all that implies, hence more 'gated communities', virtual private networks and the like.
BTW, 'software piracy' as applied to most foreign countries is a complete scam by Microsoft and the BSA, and I say this as a staunch defender of property rights. The Software Piracy Association has egregiously abused the justice system of this country. For years all these other countries (who can afford inflated software prices even less than comparatively wealthy Americans) have practically been their entire economies on unlicensed copies of Microsoft Windows and other mainstream software. These companies have gotten accustomed to a sweet profit while providing increasingly less value, and they're getting desperate to maintain it.
The hardware manufacturers won't help you either. But what about those quirky rebels at Apple? Child, I don't quite know how to break it to you, but history is a little more complex than legend, and if you still believe in fairies here's a clue stick on those fantabulous new DVD recorders:
"What is wrong is when companies who make copy-protecting products don't disclose the restrictions to the consumers. Like Apple's
recent happy-happy web pages on their new DVD-writing drive,
announced this month (http://www.apple.com/idvd/). It's full of
glowing info about how you can write DVDs based on your own DV movie
recordings, etc. What it quietly neglects to say is that you can't
use it to copy or time-shift or record any audio or video copyrighted by major companies. Even if you have the legal right to
do so, the technology will prevent you. They don't say that
you can't use it to mix and match video tracks from various artists, the way your CD burner will. It doesn't say that you can't copy-protect your OWN disks that it burns; that's a right the big manufacturers have reserved to themselves. They're not selling you a DVD-Authoring drive, which is for "professional use only". They're selling you a DVD-General drive, which cannot record the key-blocks needed to copy-protect your OWN recordings, nor can a DVD-General disc be used as a master to press your own DVDs in quantity. These distinctions are not even glossed over; they are simply ignored, not mentioned, invisible until after you buy the product."
What the entertainment industry refers to as copy protection on content usually refers to some form of access control, since those (wink wink, nudge nudge) "professional" grade duplication machines can blithely stamp out exact bit-for-bit copies without ever having to access the content. As with the majority of software copy protection historically, it does little to nothing to deter the criminals and places an undue burden on the purchaser -- which is increasingly becoming more alarming as the industry attempts to have the gun of the law do their dirty work and invents thoughtcrimes faster than you can think.
Eliminating mala prohibita legislation is the right thing to do, but those who profit from the status quo have
too much at stake, and not just their thirty pieces of silver. They'd rather die than admit they're wrong, and that their ideas have bad consequences. 8:11:32 PM
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