Posted by timothy (46% noise) View Skip
alek writes “A day after Slashdot reports about a self-inflicted vulnerability in Firefox 3.5, Mozilla releases 3.5.1. It addresses that security issue, but also fixes the annoying slow-startup on Windows. Bummer the UNIX wars have subsided, because apparently they also had to fix a problem where Firefox on a Sparc platform would crash when visiting www.hp.com!”

Good. - by xlotlu (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread
Now I can re-enable TraceMonkey and slashdot will be fast again… sorta.

slow start for _some_ - by asa (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Your post says “but also fixes the annoying slow-startup on Windows.” which suggests that all Windows users were experiencing slow starts. That’s not the case at all. It was only a small fraction of users affected by the now fixed issue. And for the record, the security flaw was already fixed, even before it was lifted from our bug database and turned into a public exploit. It just takes a few days to get everything in order for a release to users.

Re:FROSTY PISS - by basementman (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
So what your saying is Microsoft could fix all of their problems by changing the color of the screen?

Re:Blue screen - by EsbenMoseHansen (Score: 3, Informative) Thread

Actually, the linux blue screen of death is blinking of 2 (or is it three?) of the keyboard leds. Though support for blue screen of death is coming, by the name of kernel mode-settting. It is pretty rare, though.

Lockups I have seen, too, in both linux and windows. Lots of cases is hardware problems, but your problem sounds like a driver issue. Using proprietary drivers, perhaps?

Re:I’d fix bugs and contribute quality code - by koreaman (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

You should try fixing some bugs in Sunbird, if Mozilla interests you but the hugeness of Firefox is intimidating. I was able to contribute code (granted, only two lines) to Sunbird that fixed a real live bug, and I was in high school at the time.

Posted by timothy (50% noise) View Skip
Nazlfrag writes “Earlier this month the blog and discussion forum ZGeek was sued for $42 million AUD over a user’s comment. The plaintiffs are aspiring movie producers who claim to have lost a movie deal due to a 9/11 conspiracy discussion thread. Even though the initial lawsuit has been thrown out, and the company complied with lawyers’ demands by taking down the offending posts, it is believed the plaintiffs will file suit again. In addition to suing the forum, in an Australian first they have been granted an injunction to force the ISPs to disclose the IP addresses of the two posters involved. Due to the risk of incurring even greater legal costs the company is closing its doors in Australia, and will ban their fellow countrymen from posting there again.”

Some snippets of the thread from caches. - by Doug52392 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Here it is, ladies and gentlemen, The Thread That Cost Someone $42.5 Million Dollars: 
 
Page 1.  
Page 2 (John posts as “Doghead” on this page).  
Page 4. 
Greg Smith’s threat/post. 
 
Mirror - Page 1  
Mirror - Page 2  
Mirror - Page 4  
Mirror - Greg’s Threat  
 
If there are any other pages I missed that got picked up in the cache, post them here.

Banned? Not so much. - by Fex303 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Due to the risk of incurring even greater legal costs the company is closing its doors in Australia, and will ban their fellow countrymen from posting there again.

Wait what?

As a longtime user (~10 years) of Zgeek, and an Aussie, I’m pretty sure we haven’t been banned. It’s just that the site, which is hosted in the US already is going to legally set up shop outside of Australia to avoid these kinds of legal hassles.

For the record, the whole lawsuit thing is a joke, and everyone’s aware that it’s doomed to failure. The problem is that since Zgeek is essentially run by one guy in his spare time, he doesn’t have the resources to fight it effectively, so it’s better to run away rather than set yourself up for future problems.

For the record, the site really isn’t too much more than a place were people post random news, and a forum which is dominated by in-fighting, trolling, and a bizarre ‘shit-in-his-shoes’ meme (it was started after Google started rating us highly as place to get life advice). And yes, it’s as much fun as it sounds.

Australia is a little jumpy right now - by circletimessquare (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

what with Sasha Baron Cohen making a contentious movie about a flamboyant gay Australian

and their favorite Australian son, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is having major troubles in Caleefornya

but Australians will always have the Sound of Music, Mozart, the Tyrolean Alps, and Hitler

So Where is the Forbidden Thread? - by JumperCable (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
So a 9/11 Australian conspiracy theorist, Greg Smith, gets his butt whooped in an on-line thread that he participated in (big surprise). And now he wants to sue over his damaged character? I suspect his damaged reputation has much more to do with what he said and how he handled it. 
 
So where is the cache of the thread?

Local solution - by DoofusOfDeath (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Throw anotha lawya’ on the barbie, mate?

Posted by timothy (52% noise) View Skip
An anonymous reader writes “Twelve years ago OpenBSD developers started engineering a release process that has resulted in quality software being delivered on a consistent 6 month schedule — 25 times in a row, exactly on the date promised, and with no critical bugs. This on-time delivery process is very different from how corporations manage their product releases and much more in tune with how volunteer driven communities are supposed to function. Theo de Raadt explains in this presentation how the OpenBSD release process is managed (video) and why it has been such a success.”

The primary reason they release so fast - by guacamole (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I could be wrong, but I think the primary reason they release so fast is because the OpenBSD team does not attempt to bundle all of existing open source software with their OS like say Debian is trying to do. In *BSD distros, there is the core OS that includes essentially only the operating system and some utilities, and then there is the ports collection. I believe a serious bug in some port package will not halt the release process of a BSD distribution, at least for non-essential ports.

Re:It works? - by man_of_mr_e (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I disagree. The “forks” from original BSD weren’t really forks. They were Berkeley giving up on it and letting others take over.

Most of the various BSD’s are “forks” because they have different purposes. OpenBSD is security oriented, NetBSD is intended to run on vritually everything that has a CPU, FreeBSD was intended for more mainstram use.

The only real “schism” I can think of is when Matt Dillon broke off and formed DragonFly BSD. Everything else was pretty much some guys saying “I’m gonna go off and do this instead”.

There may not be any real Linux “forks”, but that’s because Linus has tried very hard to make Linux “one size fits all”, and that has resulted in its own set of problems (see the various scheduler wars, for instance.. they were bloody). There are also any number of “branches” in which different patches are applied to the mainline kernel for different purposes.

Re:It works? - by Just Some Guy (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I’ve never heard that referring to anyone in the BSDs but Theo himself. When was the last time you heard complaints about NetBSD or the FreeBSD core team?

…is even more fragmented. How many Debian derivatives are there? RedHat? What about Gentoo, LFS, etc.? There’s probably more similarity (and shared code) between FreeBSD and OpenBSD than between Ubuntu and Slackware.

Cut the BSDs some love. They deserve it, and there’s plenty to go around.

Re:It works? - by Piranhaa (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

They have different philosophies. I really don’t know where you’re going with that post because isn’t very accurate. You can’t compare the “Linux Kernel” with OpenBSD’s whole. A kernel is pretty much useless without a “userland.” OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD are all operating systems. Linux, sorry to say, is not.

If you want to compare BSD versions to Linux versions, then you’d have to compare with (in no particular order): 
-Gentoo 
-Debian - Ubuntu - Xubuntu - Xandros - (how many more are there?) 
-Slackware 
-RedHat 
-Ubuntu … because I can’t even keep track

So, you have a million confusion projects going on based on the code all, called “Linux”. How many versions of “OpenBSD” are there out there? Umm, ONE. Sure, someone could go and make their own userland and such, but it cannot be called OpenBSD. So, before you go on a rant about how many times BSD has been forked, please get your facts straight.

Thanks,

Re:Slashdotted??? - by Amazing Quantum Man (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

That was a William Shatner video.

Posted by timothy (41% noise) View Skip
CNETNate writes “The world’s first 3D webcam not only takes anaglyphic images, but will let you have a stereoscopic 3D video chat over the Internet. It’s the work of a unique camera called ‘Minoru,’ which has been tested and documented in a feature today. Be warned though: anaglyphic photography was clearly not invented to create comfortably-viewable videos.”

Really? This is the world’s first? - by xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Am I missing something, or is this just two ordinary webcams that superimpose their images onto one another? Why did it take so long for someone to duct tape 2 cameras together?

I used to be a big fan of 3-D… - by FlyingSquidStudios (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Then they started putting out all these animated films in 3-D- Robots, Beowulf, Up, etc. And I kept paying the extra to see the 3-D versions. Something kept bothering me though. Then, in the middle of Up, I realized what it was: after about 10 minutes, I stopped noticing that it was 3-D at all. I mean, if you get really absorbed in a movie, you don’t need it to be 3-D anyway… and frankly, 3-D images never look three dimensional like they do in the real world. They have an otherworldly quality that seems, at least to me, in some ways less natural than 2-D images. Maybe it’s that they don’t define the subtleties of the true three dimensional world well enough, I don’t know. Half the time it almost seems like I’m looking at one of those paper cut-out toy theatres where there’s several levels of depth, but everything on each level is flat and it’s only the levels themselves that are spaced apart. Am I the only one who feels this way?

Don’t worry - you’re not alone - by Animaether (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

There’s several reasons why you may not find them all that ‘3D’…

starting with the obvious: it’s not 3D, it’s stereographic. We still call that ‘3D’ because you get depth cues from it and depth would be the third dimension.

also obvious: when you move your head, the perspective doesn’t change. For 2D, your brain doesn’t care so much* as it’s been trained in seeing 2D images since you were born. Stereographic images however do fool your brain into getting a depth cue, and it assumes that because it gets depth cues, you should be able to get a different perspective by moving your head. This confusion fades after a short while (depends on the person), but it’ll always be there. The worst thing is.. your eyes jitter, even if you keep your head perfectly still, your eyes will still be bouncing all over the place - with minute movements, but your brain still expects the minute differences in perspective it’s used to from actual 3D environments.

less obvious: you get depth cues of, say, an object being up close… something silly like the sword in Beowulf… right at you through the screen. You look at it, essentially crossing your eyes a little like you would any object that gets closer to you.. but now something funny happens. Your eyes, when they cross, by virtue of the brain will try to focus at a depth of the intersection point of your two eyes*. However, the film is not -actually- 3D.. so you’re at the mercy of whatever focus the film’s producer decided upon. So if that tip of the sword is squarely out of focus, your brain sits there wondering what the $&#* is going on. This effect is not so pronounced for surfaces further away (much like a focal distance on your camera of 15m will happily cover 14m and 16m as well, and far beyond those; while a macro shot at 2cm distance requires very careful positioning of your camera’s distance to the subject to get the correct part in focus… e.g. photographing an insect and trying to get its head, rather than some leg in focus) - but at the same time, depth cues get much less pronounced as surfaces get further away - simply as they converge with perspective.

There’s a few other reasons, including keystoning of the projection (when seeing a stereographic 3D feature, try to sit as close to the center of the screen when projected out to the seating as possible), but the above are the main three.

It bugs me as well, but for some movies it’s absolutely worth seeing the ‘3D’ version.

* This is also the main reason why some people have issues trying to see side-by-side type stereographic images. Getting your eyes to see a surface at one distance (depending on how much you have to cross your eyes to make the two images overlap), while the lenses of each eye focus on another distance (the display surface) can be unnatural and some people simply never get it happening for them.

For kicks.. close your left eye, now with your right eye, try to focus on a nearer distance (without cheating using another surface). Do the same with the right eye closed and left eye open. If you can do this, you can probably watch side-by-side stereographic images (of the cross-eye method) easily. 
Now for your brain kicking in.. open both eyes, and try again. You’ll find this difficult at best and impossible at worst - without, in fact, going cross-eyed.

Human visual system is fun - and that’s without going into any optical illusion stuff :)

Profit - by matchlight (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Step 1: build something 
Step 2: Figure out how to use it to make porn 
Step 3: make porn 
Step 4: Profit!

3D Webcam - by Reason58 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Finally! My old, 2D webcam kept falling through the cracks in the floorboards.

Posted by timothy (76% noise) View Skip
kpoole55 writes “I’ve been googling for an answer to a question and I’m not making much progress. The problem is image collections, and finding the better of near-duplicate images. There are many programs, free and costly, CLI or GUI oriented, for finding visually similar images — but I’m looking for a next step in the process. It’s known that saving the same source image in JPEG format at different quality levels produces different images, the one at the lower quality having more JPEG artifacts. I’ve been trying to find a method to compare two visually similar JPEG images and select the one with the fewest JPEG artifacts (or the one with the most JPEG artifacts, either will serve.) I also suspect that this is going to be one of those ‘Well, of course, how else would you do it? It’s so simple.’ moments.”

Filters - by mypalmike (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

First, make a bumpmap of each image. Then, render them onto quads with a light at a 45 degree angle to the surface normal. Run a gaussian blur on each resulting image. Then run a quantize filter, followed by lens flare, solarize, and edge-detect. At this point, the answer will be clear: both images look horrible.

image quality measures - by trb (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
google (or scholar-google) for Hosaka plots, or image quality measures. Ref:

HOSAKA K., A new picture quality evaluation method. 
Proc. International Picture Coding Symposium, Tokyo, Japan, 1986, 17-18.

DCT - by tomz16 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Just look at the manner in which JPEGs are encoded for your answer!

Take the DCT (discrete cosine transform) of blocks of pixels throughout the image. Examine the frequency content of the each of these blocks and determine the amount of spatial frequency suppression. This will correlate with the quality factor used during compression!

Translation: Please help me with my porn… - by Chyeld (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Dear Slashdot,

Recently I checked my porn drive and realized that I have over 50 gigibytes of jpg quality porn collected. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that a good portion of these are all the same picture of Natlie Portman eating hot grits. Could you please point me to a free program that will allow me to find the highest resolution, best quality version of this picture from my collection and delete the rest?

Many Thanks!

Found it a while ago - by sco08y (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I mean, you don’t want second rate pictures in your pr0n stash?

I had problems building it back then, let alone writing the scripts for it and the hassle of figuring out which images were duplicates, but this utility seems to fit the bill.

Posted by timothy (47% noise) View Skip
Moon Workstation writes “In an special meeting held at Santa Clara, CA, 62% of Sun’s stockholders voted for the acquisition by Oracle. As a result of this Sun’s stock will be taken from the stock market as of Friday. The acquisition is still waiting for approval by the US Department of Justice and anti-trust offices in other countries. The planned acquisition is source for rumors and speculation about the future of different Sun products, like OpenSolaris, CPUs and others.” (MySQL among them.)

Release ZFS as GPL - by LWATCDR (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

You all know you want it.

GO MONTY! - by Foofoobar (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Monty is the man who will keep MySQL alive regardless of Oracle. Oracle can funble and bumble it all they want. In fact, you can expect MySQL development to slow to a crawl over the next 3 years as Oracles tries to figure out what to do and to integrate it. In the meantime, Monty AB is going to become the new defacto standard for MySQL replacing Oracles version in the open source community. Distros will start picking up Monty AB and as a result, more installs of Monty AB will be used than that Oracles MySQL in 5 years do to licensing issues or lack of development.

Re:*OR*… - by turbidostato (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

“and dump MySQL altogether.”

How can this been modded up as “insightful”??? Everybody knows it’s not “dump mysql” but “mysqldump”!!!

(/me ducks away)

Pedantry - by maxume (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

It is likely that shareholders owning 62% of Sun stock voted for the Oracle deal. This is slightly different than 62% of shareholders (for instance, if 1 person owned 50% of the company, another owned 12%, and 15,000 people owned the rest, 0.013% of the shareholders would have 62% of the vote).

Re:wait a minute - by tnk1 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

The buying was de facto, but not official yet. To buy a public company, what you are really doing is buying out the shareholders, but the Board of Directors does most of the work in deciding if it is a good idea for the company. The board also usually also has representatives from major shareholders on it, so usually their determination also has some built in voting power, if not all of it.

So, if the Board says they are bought, they pretty much *are* bought.

However, sometimes there is a significant shareholder rebellion, and hostile takeovers are possible, where the buyer has obtained enough shares to impose their will on the board either through direct vote or through shareholder suits. You can usually see that coming a mile away, though, because its unlikely that individual shareholders of tiny numbers of share will care about anything more than making the straight money on their stock that they will be getting. That means a corporate raider or some similar organization would have to appear who buys into the company for it to be a real threat.

And of course, the government needs to approve for anti-trust reasons.

In this case, the shareholders’ meeting is required, but is likely just a formality. The government inquiry is actually a bigger threat by far. The Board’s determination in this case is sort of like Election night in the US. You aren’t elected until the Electoral College has met, but it would be fair to say that you’re pretty much President-elect as soon as the popular vote totals are tallied and the margin is wide enough.

Posted by timothy (53% noise) View Skip
leetrout writes “I attended a media briefing held by NASA at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. this morning where they released restored video of the Apollo 11 mission. The clips released are about 40% of the total footage to be restored by September by Lowry Digital in Burbank, CA. Wired has all the clips. A couple remarkable comments made during the briefing included the opinion from the original footage search committee that the original slow scan footage (stored as a single track on telemetry tapes) has been lost forever as the tapes were likely recycled by the mid ‘80s (apparently common NASA practice). Also, that someone from the applied physics laboratory was in Australia converting the slow scan directly to video. This differs from NASA’s goal of merely broadcasting the event, at which it was successful. Unfortunately, no one knows where those tapes of approximately two hours of footage are located.”

Re:Pink Floyd - by escay (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
on second thought, let me just google and post a link to the article. http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/one-small-step/2006/08/19/1155408073519.html

ah, times when i wish /. had an Edit Comment option. or something like google’s goggles.

Re:Incredible - by jbarr (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

While it does seem incredible today, those were very, very different times.

People were far more concerned and enamored with “seeing” an event than how they might see it again. Heck, most people didn’t even have colored TVs at that time, and because so much was live broadcast, if you wanted to see something like the moon landing, you planned for it.

Gone are the days of just savoring the moment and keeping the memory alive.

Re:Incredible - by 140Mandak262Jamuna (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Remember everything that was meticulously preserved from those days were on non-erasable, non-rewritable medium. Magnetic tapes that could be erased and reused were pretty new, and practices for backing important data for posterity, for ever etc were not well thought out. I am sure NASA has meticulously archived and stored the blueprints of Saturn V rockets and wiring diagrams of command modules and such things printed on paper.

On a related note people restoring and cleaning and analyzing old masters and paintings by students of old masters find they were recycling the canvases. Many layers of paintings, some by great old masters, are washed over and painted again.

philosophical rant

Strange, when an object is too close to you in space, it appears bigger than same size object at a distance. But when it is very close to you in time, we don’t think it is any big deal. Only later we realize how big whatever that thing was.

/philosophical rant

Re:Incredible - by sjfoland (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
I would have liked the restored versions so much better if they hadn’t replaced Neil Armstrong with Hayden Christiansen.

NASA or the BBC? - by davidwr (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

The BBC “recycled” tapes in the ‘70s and ‘80s, losing many episodes of well-known programs forever *coughdrwhoandmanyothers*.

Posted by timothy (75% noise) View Skip
jtcm writes “Three men have been charged with conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after federal investigators found that they allegedly offered a cracker more than $250,000 to assist with breaking Dish Network’s satellite TV encryption scheme: ’[Jung] Kwak had two co-conspirators secure the services of a cracker and allegedly reimbursed the unidentified person about $8,500 to buy a specialized and expensive microscope used for reverse engineering smart cards. He also allegedly offered the cracker more than $250,000 if he successfully secured a Nagra card’s EPROM (eraseable programmable read-only memory), the guts of the chip that is needed to reverse-engineer Dish Network’s encryption.’ Kwak owns a company known as Viewtech, which imports and sells Viewsat satellite receiver boxes. Dish Network’s latest encryption scheme, dubbed Nagra 3, has not yet been cracked by satellite TV pirates.”

Crime depends on who you are… - by gillbates (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I’m thinking that if a security researcher had done the same thing, he would not be in jail. Nor would a large corporation.

But a set top box importer does it, and suddenly it’s a federal crime.

The most troublesome part about this is that engineers routinely reverse engineer the work of others for the sake of creating compatible products - an exemption the DMCA explicitly allows. Perhaps the company wanted to offer a cheaper STB to Dish, and undercut the competition. Or perhaps they planned to sell directly to the black market, engaging in fraud. The act of reverse engineering a component tells us nothing about the company’s intentions.

I mention this because this very thing was done to Lexmark printers a few years ago. Instead of getting arrested, the manufacturer of competing cartridges was sued under the DMCA; the case went all the way to the SCOTUS, and Lexmark lost. It would appear this would set precedent regarding the legality of reverse engineering for the sake of creating interoperable products, but strangely, the FBI seems not to follow precedent. I find it odd that an activity which was legal and sanctioned by the DMCA - and even supported by the Supreme Court, is now interpreted as being illegal according to the very same law.

If anything, this shows the illegality of an action depends more upon who you are than what you do. Best not to offend our corporate overlords, lest they have the FBI arrest you.

Group keying and revocation… - by nweaver (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

These days, the model is very much based on some really funky group keying and key revocation, which allows the sattelite provider to revoke individual keys because each receiver has a unique key rather than a group sharing a common key.

Among other things, this makes piracy MUCH harder, because the sattelite providers can buy pirated receivers, take them to the lab, find out the key used, and revoke it, disabling that entire batch of pirated receivers without affecting normal customers.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot… - by girlintraining (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Although it was eliminated by dubious judicial means shortly after becoming law, the DMCA allows for reverse-engineering for the purposes of interoperability. The entire market for these devices is based on non-interoperability. Because if the CAM became truly portable and emulated fully in software, it’s a tiny step to a digital video recorder that is completely under user control receiving HDTV. Which is actually the main selling point here. They took our VCRs away, and now we’re attacking people who want to get them back the only way possible; At this point it doesn’t matter whether his intent was to sell descrambler boxes or not, or anyone’s, because that’s the only way you’re getting that functionality. An irony, really, that you could be paying the same fees as someone with an “approved” box, accessing the same content, and yet wind up in jail because your equipment wasn’t up to the provider’s specifications… Namely, that you wanted to “time shift” the content.

Damn criminals, flaunting their freedoms in front of us… They get what they deserve, eh?

Re:Whiskey Tango Foxtrot… - by DaveV1.0 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

This is not for interoperability. The goal of this operation was to create smart cards that allowed people to view channels they did not pay for and to allow people who do not have an account to view the channels. The goal was to facilitate theft of service, not interoperability.

Re:Whiskey Tango Foxtrot… - by tlhIngan (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Component and composite outputs on the back of every descrambler out there will spit it out in standard definition. You can’t record HD signals out of them — many won’t even downgrade the signal, it’ll just be dead. Getting high definition on any of those requires an HDMI hookup, which is encrypted, and therefore “tunerless” VCRs and DVD burners can’t be used. Even getting signals OTA (not scrambled) doesn’t do you much good because the tuners are usually integrated into the television. I haven’t tuners being sold separately with HD outputs that can be sent to any COTS recording equipment. This is intentional, purposeful, and frankly conspiratorial on the part of the manufacturers.

Piracy is the only way the market for HD video recordings will survive.

Funny thing is, you can record high-def quite easily, you just need to purchase two legal products.

First, you buy a Hauppage HD-PVR, about the only consumer-level high-def recording box that handles up to 1080i via component inputs. Hey look, Myth supports it!

Now, for pesky HDMI… you buy a HD Fury 2, which takes HDMI (including HDCP!) and converts it to either RGB or Component outputs, and while it handles 1080p, the HD-PVR only has 1080i.

Now you have a high-def PVR solution, MythTV compatible.

Alternate methods is if your cablebox supports Firewire, and can output the high-def content over it (I’ve seen ‘em where the SD content is output over Firewire, but the HD content isn’t), but most satellite boxes don’t have this, unfortunately.

Posted by timothy (63% noise) View Skip
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “The RIAA’s motion to keep secret the record companies’ 1999-to-date revenues for the copyrighted song files at the heart of the case has been denied, in the Boston case scheduled for trial July 27th, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. The Judge had previously ordered the plaintiff record companies to produce a summary of the 1999-to-date revenues for the recordings, broken down into physical and digital sales. On the day the summary was due to be produced, instead of producing it, they produced a ‘protective order motion’ asking the Judge to rule that the information would have to be kept secret. The Judge rejected that motion: ‘the Court does not comprehend how disclosure would impair the Plaintiffs’ competitive business prospects when three of the four biggest record labels in the world — Warner Bros. Records, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and UMG Recording, Inc. — are participating jointly in this lawsuit and, presumably, would have joint access to this information.’”

Forcing them to show their hands - by erroneus (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

This could be the beginnings of an interesting new strategy against the RIAA. Forcing the RIAA to produce the verifiable truth about various things and to pull their skeletons from their closets and put them on display can likely act as quite a deterrent against RIAA actions.

Still. How is the judge taking their failure to produce the data? Does making a motion instead of producing the data result in an automatic extension somehow? Is this an unwritten part of due process now?

There, RIAA shit. - by unity100 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

the judge has corrected a MAJOR malfunction in your logic circuits. next time when you accuse someone of damaging your profits, you will remember to actually prove EVIDENCE to back up your case. that is, unless your leashholders are afraid of being proven wrong about all the shit you have been perpetrating. enjoy.

What are these other documents? - by yuna49 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Gertner’s ruling states that ”[the Court] will, however, order the second set of documents, which implicate the business interests of third-party artist-owned companies, shielded from disclosure.”

What are these documents, and who are these “third-party artist-owned companies?”

Is this Legit, or Contempt? - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Ray—if I was ordered by a judge to produce a detailed breakdown of my accounting (say a trial for tax evasion) practices over the past years by 7/31, and on the 31st I came to court with just a “protective order motion” asking that my accounting practices be kept secret…

Wouldn’t I be held in contempt?

I mean…I can see producing the motion *with* the information…or…before it…but… tell me why it is these guys appear to have rights in the legal system that everyone else doesn’t… More importantly, what piece of paperwork do I have to file so I can ignore court orders like they do and get off scott free?

Re:Is this Legit, or Contempt? - by RIAAShill (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Moreover, the summary is again biased and sensationalized, part of a pattern that shows increasingly unprofessional conduct on the part of the submitter. The RIAA offered a proposed order that was greater in scope than what they had argued for. Had the judge and her clerks read only the moving papers and then just signed the order, the RIAA would have had that order amended upon discovery of the inconsistency. The RIAA actually got the protective order it had argued for—it just didn’t get the overbroad proposal they submitted.

Be nice. NYCL has a viewpoint and he likes to express it loud and clear, but accusations regarding professionality are uncalled for. He’s not representing anyone in the case or publishing information that one couldn’t get through PACER.

It isn’t any use arguing what the RIAA would have done had the judge signed off on their prosed protective order. They should have vetted it before submitting it to avoid any appearance of deceptive behavior. Since they didn’t, then they deserve a little nose tweaking.

And no, they did not get everything they wanted. The judge refused to protect the revenue information of the plaintiffs. They did seem to get what they wanted with regards to the non-revenue information.

Posted by Soulskill (89% noise) View Skip
Ssquared22 writes “It may feel like a rip-off to some, but you’ve got to admit that paying $30 for Gears of War 2 sure beats paying $60! Game publishers and developers may not like it, but people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There’s nothing game developers can do to stop them, and companies like Gamestop continue to laugh all the way to the bank. In an article at Crispy Gamer, David Thomas dissects one of the most critical issues in gaming today: used games and merchants (online and brick-and-mortar) who specialize in this ‘sleight of hand.’”

Steam - by danieltdp (Score: 2) Thread
That’s why I hate steam. Try yourself to sell a used game that is curently registered in your steam account (like Half Life 2)…

digital “property” - by Ephemeriis (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I like computers… I make my living fixing them… I thoroughly enjoy video games… But I really hate what digital media has done to the concepts of property and ownership.

Used to be that I’d buy a book, or a record, or a board game, or a deck of cards - and nobody would question for a moment that I owned those things. They were my property. I could do with them whatever I wanted. After I finished reading the book I could donate it to the local library, or hand it off to a friend, or sell it to a used bookstore. If the original author of that book showed up at my garage sale and complained that I was selling his book he would have been laughed at.

These days, however, we don’t actually own anything. We’ve just been given a temporary license to use the thing. And when I’m done playing my video game, or done reading my ebook, or done listening to my MP3, I’m not really able to do much with it. Sure, I can sell a video game to someone else… But the DRM involved is making it hard just to re-install the game on your own computer, much less transfer ownership to someone else.

The worst part isn’t that this is happening… Of course a company is going to do everything they can to make money - that’s what businesses do. So I don’t blame EA or Microsoft or whoever for trying to prevent the selling of used video games. The worst part is that it is being allowed to happen. Nobody is laughing at these guys. Their arguments aren’t being rebuffed. They aren’t being thrown out of court. These folks are claiming that the $60 I paid for a video game didn’t actually buy me a video game, and everyone just kind of shrugs and nods and goes along with it.

Used games put more money in the studios hands. - by harl (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Alice has $90. 
Bob has $30.

No used: 
Alice buys Gears of War. 
Money given to studios - $60

With used: 
Alice buys Gears of War. 
Alice sells GoW to Bob. 
Alice buys GoW2 
Money given to studios - $120

Used stores allow people who don’t have enough to buy games new or don’t want to buy games new to funnel their money to those who do.

Additionally it exposes more people to games sowing the seeds for future full price purchases when their spending habits and/or income changes.

Gamestop blows - by furby076 (Score: 3, Informative) Thread
I can’t stand places like gamestop. $60 game (brand new). They buy it back for $10 to $15. They resell it at $55. No wonder they are laughing all the way to the bank - they are ripping off their consumers. 
 
Craigslist/Ebay and other similar sites is the way to buy used games.

Re:Gamestop blows - by Sethb (Score: 3, Informative) Thread
You might also want to check out Goozex. You trade your games to other gamers for points there. If a game is 500 points, you get all 500 points, and Goozex.com gets a buck on each transaction. It’s not perfect, as you’ll sometimes have to wait a few days/weeks to get the game you want, or for someone to want your game, but there’s not a middleman making $30 off each used game transaction. 
 
(Yes, that’s my referral code in the Goozex link) :)

Posted by timothy (65% noise) View Skip
bheer writes “Today Google’s Open-Source Chromium project announced a new compression technique called Courgette geared towards distributing really small updates. Courgette achieves smaller diffs (about 9x in one example) than standard binary-diffing algorithms like bsdiff by disassembling the code and sending the assembler diffs over the wire. This, the Chromium devs say, will allow them to send smaller, more frequent updates, making users more secure. Since this will be released as open source, it should make distributing updates a lot easier for the open-source community.”

Re:Can a layman get an explanation in English? - by six (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Binary executable files contain a lot of addresses (variables, jump locations, …) that are generated by the assembler at compile time.

Now consider you just add one 1-byte instruction somewhere in the middle of your program (let’s say “nop”). When you compile it again, all the code that reference addresses beyond the insert point will have changed because the address has been incremented. So these 4 bytes added to your source code could mean addresses that get incremented in the compiled file in thousands of places.

What they do basically is take the binary file, disassemble it back to pseudo source code (not real asm I guess), and diff that against old version. The patch engine on the client end does the same disassembling, applies the patch, and reassembles the patched source code to an executable file.

This means diffs gets much smaller (4 bytes vs. 1000s in my extreme example), but also makes the diff/patch process much more complex, slower, and not portable.

Re:Can a layman get an explanation in English? - by PCM2 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

It’s a good theory and you’re a smart person, but:

1. The compilers probably wouldn’t be similar enough. Even developers who use GCC to compile something for Linux usually use Visual Studio to compile the same code for Windows. (The source code for Chrome, for example, shipped as a Visual Studio project.) Mac OS X likes to have everything written in Objective C, so that output would probably be very different.
2. Different operating systems rely on different shared libraries to do the same things. So a function call that opens a file in Linux might not look like a function call to do the same thing on Windows — it might take a different number of arguments, for example, which means it would look rather different in machine language.

Portability doesn’t appear to be Google’s primary concern, though. They seem to be keen on the idea of delivering binaries over the wire (real binaries, not bytecode) — see Google Native Client.

Like many brilliant ideas… - by istartedi (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

…it makes you smack yourself on the head and go “why hasn’t everybody been doing this for years?”.

The idea is simple, and reminds me of something I learned in school regarding signals. Some operations are easy to perform in the frequency domain, so you do the Fourier transform, perform the operation, and then transform back.

This is really just the same idea applied to the problem of patches. They’re small in source; but big in binary. It seems so obvious that you could apply a transform,patch,reverse process… but only when pointed out and demonstrated.

It’s almost like my favorite invention: the phonograph.

The instructions for making an Edison phonograph could have been understood and executed by any craftsman going back thousands of years. Yet, it wasn’t done until the late 19th century.

Are the inventors that brilliant, or are we just that stupid.

Bad explanation - by DoofusOfDeath (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Courgette achieves smaller diffs (about 9x in one example)

That’s potentially very misleading. I can compress any document, down to a single but, if my compression algorithm is sufficiently tailored to that document. For example: 
 
if (compressed_data[0] == 0): 
      return = get_Magna_Carta_text() 
else: 
      return unzip(compressed_data[1:]) 
 
What we need to know is the overall distribution of compression ratios, or at least the average compression ratio, over a large population of documents.

Re:wait a minute - by flowsnake (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Not really a problem. Every n releases you push a complete patch - a bit like key frames in MPEG. People who keep their stuff reasonably up-to-date benefit from the smaller patches, those who don’t just have to go back to the ‘key frame’ equivalent. And on the client - the latest version on the host is effectively the sum of all the diffs up to that point. OK so there is not enough information there to revert to an arbitrary earlier version, but usually we don’t revert to older versions of executables. If we absolutely have to revert, maybe to undo a bad update, we can always just download a complete version of the required version.

Posted by CmdrTaco (76% noise) View Skip
proslack writes “The die had been cast years before Apollo 11 had even reached the moon. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam war was straining US finances. A fatal fire on the Apollo launch pad in January 1967 had blotted NASA’s copybook. The Soviet moon effort seemed to be going nowhere. In the budget debates during the summer of 1967, Congress refused NASA’s request to fund an extended moon programme. What if things had been different that summer? Suppose Congress had granted NASA’s wish, then fast-forward 40-odd years…” A nice little what-if sort of story that makes sorta nostalgic for a non-existent present.

Iterations - by steveha (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

While we are daydreaming about what might have been, I’d like to imagine an alternate history where NASA didn’t stop iterating.

NASA got the Saturn V through an iterative development cycle. Get Werner von Braun, have him build rockets very similar to ones he had built before; fly them, collect data, improve the design. Fly the new ones, collect data, improve the design. Over and over.

And then, for the Space Shuttle, NASA essentially said “We don’t need to do that test and improve cycle anymore; we are just going to design the Space Shuttle on paper, build it, and be done.” NASA’s unsung heroes of rocket surgery managed to make it work, but that’s a triumph of hard work and overtime against management stupidity.

It would have been cheaper to keep the test/improve cycle going than to spend ten years building the shuttle and flying nothing. According to Wikipedia, the Shuttle program will have cost $174 billion by its conclusion in 2010; the Saturn V program cost $32 to $45 billion in today’s dollars ($6.5 billion in 1960’s dollars; the inflation is depressing, isn’t it?). But at the time the Shuttle project was started, the Saturn V had already been paid for; just keeping it flying would have cost even less than those numbers suggest. And besides, you wouldn’t need a Saturn V for every flight; just for ones where you need that kind of crazy lift capacity.

It would actually have been far cheaper to keep flying expendables, but keep developing them, and hopefully iterate into something reusable. Take the rockets from the 1960’s, and spend 20 years flying and improving them, and what would you have in the 1980’s? A lot more stuff flying, more safely, and a lot cheaper.

The Shuttle was a mistake, of management more than anything else.

steveha

We’d have another antarctica - by petes_PoV (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
… but on the Moon (and without the penguins)

What benefits would we have got? Hard to say, probably nothing tangible - just a group of half-a-dozen scientists and technicians spending a few months at a time far out of the public gaze. There might be the occasional documentary, but there’s only so much footage of rocks and dust - and one patch of dirt looks a lot like any other. So I doubt there’d be much about it in the news (again, just like antarctica). Just about the only time it would make the headlines is when there’s a debate about cutting funding (again), or when something goes wrong - or when there’s an expose about the billions being spent on it, for not-much in the way of returns.

Is that what we thought we’d get?

What if Apollo had continued… - by theendlessnow (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
If the Apollo program had continued:

1. Children would still be drinking Tang.
2. Saddam could have hid his WMDs on the moon instead of a suburb of New Jersey (shhh! it’s a secret).
3. Even more things could have been made from “space age materials”.
4. Apple would prohibit the Palm Pre from using iTunes (arguably, this happens no matter what).
5. Michael Jackson’s funeral would have been in space. Saving LA the hassle.
6. Mythbusters would get to see if a large scale nuclear explosion really would push the moon out of earth’s orbit.

Rosy bullshit - by ShooterNeo (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

All the discussions about the space program overlook a critical fact. It costs about $10,000 a kilogram or more to lift anything into low earth orbit. That means that the entire manned space program is virtually useless : there’s no point in learning how to put people into space and have them survive if no affordable way for a lot of people and supplies to go into space exists. If every kilo costs 10 grand, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to send robots and equipment into space than to send people. Even repairing Hubble never made any sense : it would have been a lot cheaper to build a brand new telescope every time than to pay for each repair mission.

The only way a moon base or a space station or a space hotel or anything else will ever be practical is if that launch cost is reduced through new technology. Personally, out of all the proposals I’ve ever seen, only one new technology makes the slightest bit of sense : laser launch.

What does the moon have, that Earth does not? - by goffster (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Even the Earth has a whole lot of undeveloped acreage in the ocean.

Posted by CmdrTaco (85% noise) View Skip
eyrieowl writes “J.R.R.‘s heirs are suing for royalties on the LoTR films. Apparently they haven’t gotten any money due to some creative accounting. Peter Jackson ought to understand…he had to sue the studio for much the same reason. As for The Hobbit? FTFA: ‘Tolkien’s family and a British charity they head, the Tolkien Trust, seek more than $220 million in compensation…[and]…the option to terminate further rights to the author’s work.’”

Obligatory - by hobbit (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

This is common in Hollywood - by Spy Handler (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
According to the studios, Spider-Man, Return of the Jedi and Forrest Gump all lost money and therefore no royalty on net income needs to be paid. 
 
These people are simply criminals, and deserve to be locked up as such. However Hollywood is famous for making large political contributions, and their boys are in power at the moment. (not that the “other” party did anything about it either)

Re:Then explain this - by jnaujok (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

The contract was signed by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1969. Copyright doesn’t even enter into the argument. New Line, Time Warner, and MGM are all bound by the original contract, signed by J.R.R. Tolkien. As the Inheritor of his estate, Chris Tokien has the right, along with the Tolkien Trust, to enforce the terms of the contract through civil action.

I hate to make this sound angry, but it has nothing to do with Chris Tolkien, other than he’s the one who inherited the money. J.R.R. Tolkien sold a product for a specific fee, partly up front, and partly to be paid later. The studio is now using fraudulent accounting techniques to avoid paying the “later” part. If J.R.R. Tolkien were still alive, he would be the one suing. Hes not, but the contract is still binding, so his estate is suing.

Copyright doesn’t even show up in this equation. Nor does whether his heirs added anything to the mythos (which he has through his clean up and publishing of all the remaining Tolkien works and notes.)

This is just simple, every day, contract law.

Disclaimer: IANAL, and this is my opinions, based on reading TFA.

Re:Then explain this - by Tr3vin (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Uh, The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin. There are tons of notes and papers the Tolkien kept while writing his stories. Many of these offer insight into the world of Middle Earth, and would not have been easily accessible if it wasn’t for the work of his son. Christopher Tolkien has spent a great deal of time going through his father’s work, assembling notes from various sources to try to provide a more detailed history of Middle Earth. While the heirs aren’t responsible for the original tale, they have done there share of work to get the story behind the story out and available to the public. Without the background, creating a movie like LotR would be much more difficult. The entire mythos was not well documented within the confines of the books. There were a lot of details that don’t fit nicely within story form that were important to the movie. One of the biggest examples is the Elvish language. Much of the language has been put together from his original notes, which have been assembled by Christopher over the years.  
 
This is definitely not a case were the children are sitting around trying to bum money off of their parent’s work. I am very thankful for their contributions. Without their work, my knowledge of Tolkien would probably be limited to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

but but the MPAA is for the artists? - by Dan667 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
The MPAA is fighting to make sure the artists and copyright holders get what they are owed? Did they forget or is it just a bunch of BS and you should not feel bad about piracy and ignore them?

Posted by samzenpus (88% noise) View Skip
Z80xxc! writes “The Anchorage Daily News reports that a 15 mile-long blob of unknown, ‘gooey,’ probably organic material is floating past communities on Alaska’s North Slope. The US Coast Guard sent pollution experts to investigate, who determined that it was not an oil spill or other type of pollution, but were unable to determine what it is. A sample is currently being analyzed by experts in Anchorage, while the blob is following the current northwards.”

Organic … - by Cinderbunny (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Is it certified?

The Raft - by lymond01 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Short story/short film in Stephen King’s Creepshow 2. These campers swim out to a fixed raft in the middle of a lake and some goop, not unlike the goop in the article, follows them. One person touches it, and it leeches up her arm and pulls her in. This sort of continues for the next 10 minutes or so until there hero and heroine make out. It’s Stephen King so it doesn’t end well.

My point? Don’t touch it. And don’t let it touch you.

Re:Looks like whale blood to me - by Farmer Tim (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Then again, I’m in Philadelphia and have no idea what whale blood looks like

Now you know.

Power vacuum - by gksmith (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
The power vacuum left by Palin is attracting all kinds of scum.

Palin’s Blog - by Sylvak (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

She was advised to create a Blog, but heard blob

Posted by CmdrTaco (56% noise) View Skip
CWmike writes “Mozilla has confirmed the first security vulnerability in Firefox 3.5, saying that the bug could be used to hijack a machine running the company’s newest browser. A noted Firefox contributor called the situation ’self-inflicted’ and said it was likely that the hacker who posted public exploit code Monday became aware of the flaw by rooting through Bugzilla, Mozilla’s bug- and change-tracking database. The vulnerability is in the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that debuted with Firefox 3.5, said Mozilla. ’[It] can be exploited by an attacker who tricks a victim into viewing a malicious Web page containing the exploit code,’ Mozilla’s security blog reported Tuesday.”

Temporary fix - by AdmiralXyz (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

According to TFA, the temporary fix is to disable TraceMonkey (JavaScript will still work). Set ‘javascript.options.jit.content’ in about:config to false until the patch is released.

MOD PARENT UP - by argent (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Mod Parent Up “this should have been in the summary, Taco”.

Re:MOD PARENT UP - by the way%2C what're you (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I’ve got at least a dozen non-default settings I’ve set in about:config. What’s one more?

at least a baker’s dozen?

Re:WTF - by maxume (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

So when they know about and are actively working on fixing a bug that is an exploit vulnerability, you think they should do it in public?

I get the argument that telling your users about it means that they can protect themselves (say, by running noscript), but for a consumer facing organization like Mozilla, the majority of users aren’t going to notice or do anything.

Re:WTF - by bunratty (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
You mean that you actually want example exploit code to be available to everyone? Why?

Posted by CmdrTaco (82% noise) View
bstender writes “Most major browsers — including the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera — recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face. What that means, in brief, is that Web developers can now easily embed downloadable fonts in their pages. To see an example, load up Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4 and learn more. You’ll see three new typefaces — Liza, Auto, and Dolly — used in the body text and headlines.” No doubt the licensing issues are just as complex as the font nerd potential.

quality is quality, however… - by Ralph Spoilsport (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
a high quality typeface is hard to make.

I should know - I used to do it for a living. However, they are easily stolen, and fonts that once cost serious bucks are now (essentially) free. Which is why I don’t do it for a living anymore. But I’m not discussing that - what I am pointing at is if you can embed fonts in a page, it is a trivial exercise to open a font, “clean” the points (creating a new drawing of the font), and then export the thing with a new name. So, you could take Arial, fry it up, and come out with Ariel. Now someone might notice something fishy about Ariel, noting it similarity to Arial. In the USA, the DESIGN of a font is something you cannot copyright. Only the software that is the font file itself. This is what torpedoed the type industry back in the mid 1990s, in Adobe vs SSI (?) case in Florida.

Sure, SSI got sued by Adobe for this, but that was pre-www - back in the day of centralised font distribution systems on floppies or CDs. MS or Adobe would have to chase down thousands of people with take-down notices. The FROEI (financial return on energy invested) would be microscopic and an endless battle due to variations in international laws.

Another strategy would be DRM. This would work on new DRM fonts, but there are literally tens of thousands of older fonts (from ancient PostScript to TrueType to newer OpenType) that are not DRM’d and they would be all over the place, effectively smothering any DRM font system.

Flash was developed initially as an animation system, but quickly it became obvious that it opened up font use, even if the test is not animated. Flash has its own and deeply obvious problems, and I look forward to its death. That said, at the time it served a useful purpose. With AJAX and now font-face, I don’t see much future for Flash at all, outside of its original use as an animation engine.

I’m of mixed feelings on this - as I noted, a good font is hard to make. However, the basic digital fonts were developed way back in the 1980s and early 1990s and have only been updated for new technology (unicode, opentype, etc.) and one would think that there is little point to grinding more and more out of them, except in terms of petty greed. If Adobe had their way, we never would have seen TrueType and you would have to pay $100 for every typeface and each would have to be installed on only your machine. Of course, it would look very good. If MS had their way, everything would be TrueType and you could only use the fonts that come installed with the OS, and any extra would be excluded at the OS level… and they would all suck. So, the piracy of the 1990s (fueled by the ancient Titan and venerable program, Fontographer) led to an explosion of fonts. Most of them craptastic, but a true example of digital creativity. Some/Many were obvious rip-offs, but their hinting was often crap - delta hints were almost always missing, their letterspacing worse, and the kerning either atrocious or non-existent.

Tools, including Fontographer (resurrected by FontLab, bless their hearts) have improved since 1993, and so have “amateur” fonts. However, the market for fonts is still very poor as the saturation level increases daily.

Net result? If MS adopts @font-face for IE, game over (in a good way), and we will see a flowering of online type design. If MS drags its heels on this, @font-face could die on the vine, and we’ll be stuck with Arial, for a VERY long time.

So, here’s hoping @font-face spreads like crazy, and we can finally get some decent looking pages going…

RS

Licensing nightmare? - by Karellen (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

Why?

Why is font licensing any different from image licensing? The page directs you to (optionally) download font information. Your computer either does or does not. If it does, it uses the font information to render something on the page. As the server gave you this information when your computer asked for it, you legitimately have a copy. However, you are not allowed to redistribute this copy to a third party unless you have a license to do so, else you are in breach of copyright.

It’s just a bunch more bits that you’ve downloaded off of a server. How are these bits any different from any other bits?

(Is there a missing href in the story?)

typekit - by macshit (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

So what’s the deal with “typekit”?

Their blog grandly announces (or at least strongly implies) that they’ve solved the licensing/theft/etc problems with downloadable fonts, without using DRM, but while there’s a lot of handwaving, they don’t actually seem to go into any detail about how they’ve “solved” it.

Does anybody know?

Re:typekit - by Excors (Score: 3, Informative) Thread
Subsetting is not EOT functionality - EOT is basically just a wrapper around a TTF file, and subsetting just involves modifying the TTF, so you can do exactly the same in browsers that read raw TTF files. I’ve written a font optimizer tool (open source) that does that. (Windows has an API to generate embedded fonts with subsetting, which the WEFT tool uses; I’m not currently aware of any other subsetting implementations.)

To disable @font-face in Firefox 3.5 - by GeekDork (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

In about:config, set gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled to false and restart the browser.