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E3 ended today. ::sniff::
But now for some more Major Media Company fun!
First up is a plan to
outlaw analog-to-digital converters. Hollywood wants this because you can
copyprotect a CD all you want, but then you can just set up a digital tape
recorder right next to the speaker and, boom, you have a free digital copy. The
side effects of something like this are enourmous though. It would turn digital
scanners, samplers, thermometers, seismographs, camcorders, cameras,
microscopes, telescopes, modems, radios, televisions, cellular phones,
walkie-talkies, light-meters, etc etc etc into highly regulated devices since
they all turn something analog into something digital (here's an explanation of
analog and
digital). If they really wanted to be technical about it, you may end up
with a "cellphone that switches itself off when you get within range of the
copyrighted music on your stereo".
Next is how several media companies
have broke the law (and just like I'm about to) in their stories about how copy-protected CD's can be defeated with a marker. Thanks to the
DMCA, it's illegal to tell how to defeat copy-right protection. Hence every news organization that wrote about the marker method broke the law.
And as the 2600 case proved, even linking to news stories that talk about the
marker method is illegal. So much for free speech.
You know, I wonder if
this makes me a "bad boy" now. Girls dig stuff like that right? I mean I can say
"Yeah...... I linked to the marker story" and girls will be all over me......
right? Right?!?!
In happier news, Mozilla
1.0 Release Canidate 3 was released today. Tabbed browsing and a built in
pop-up killer are reason enough to download it.
And finally, October 2000 is now ready
for consumption. I also finally got those Cornell pictures scanned in today
(yeah, the ones I took back in October 2000 hehe) so here's the gorgeous Cornell campus.
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