The Worst Technology Laws

[rkr1958]

Given how much technology affects all parts of our lives these days, it's scary to think about how often Congress gets regulation of tech issues wrong. Sometimes it passes laws, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that make things worse. Other times it ignores vital issues such as online privacy, leaving us at the mercy of companies and whatever their privacy policies say this week.

full article at: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135131/article.html

[lordsmurf]

A great many of the old people in Congress these days are technophobes too!

[rkr1958]

An interesting and related news story.

Tech Group: Copyright Warnings Scare Consumers

WASHINGTON — A trade group that includes Google Inc. (GOOG), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and other high-tech companies has asked federal regulators to order changes in copyright warnings.

Copyright statements that appear at the start of most DVDs and pro sports broadcasts and movies go too far and discourage legal use of the content, the Computer and Communications Industry Association said in a statement Wednesday.

The complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission protests statements used by Major League Baseball, the National Football League and NBC Universal and Dreamworks Animation Inc., among others.
...

"We're getting into these fights because the law is lagging behind technology," said Schechter, a professor at the George Washington University Law School. "At the end of the day, people are going to use the Internet to clip and quote copyrighted material. And it may be that we need to start looking at very different legal solutions to the ones that are currently in use."

full story

[lordsmurf]

Fair use should extend to clips posted on Youtube and other locations, as far as I'm concerned, especially given how many times it is a commentary/opinion situation. Full movies and episodes? Of course not. Clips of a few seconds or minutes? Absolutely a fair use, without a doubt (at least to the majority of normal people). I find it ridiculous how MLB and others are able to make Youtube remove snippets of programs.

[rkr1958]

Vista Prevents Users Playing High-Def Content
Vista requires premium content like high-definition movies to be degraded in quality when sent to high-quality outputs.
Content protection features in Windows Vista are preventing customers from playing high-quality video and audio and harming system performance, even as Microsoft neglects security programs that could protect users, computer researcher Peter Gutmann argued at the USENIX Security Symposium in Boston Wednesday.

"If there was any threat modeling at all, it was really badly done," Gutmann, from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, said while giving a talk on Vista content protection. "Once the enemy is the user and not the attacker, standard security thinking falls apart."

Vista requires premium content like high-definition movies to be degraded in quality when sent to high-quality outputs, so users are seeing status codes that say "graphics OPM resolution too high." Gutmann calls this "probably the most bizarre status code ever."

While Microsoft's intent is to protect commercial content, home movies are increasingly being shot in high definition, Gutmann said. Many users are finding they can't play any content if it's considered "premium."

"This is not commercial HD content being blocked, this is the users' own content," Gutmann said. "The more premium content you have, the more output is disabled."

Gutmann, who wore a white T-shirt marked with a Windows Vista logo during his presentation, first issued his criticisms several months ago with a paper titled A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection.

Gutmann's paper called Vista's content protection rules "the longest suicide note in history."

Microsoft acknowledged that quality of premium content would be lowered if requested by copyright holders, the BBC reported. Microsoft defended its copyright protections after Gutmann's paper came out, saying they are common features of many playback devices, the BBC article says.

The protections allow copyright holders to prevent video from being played in high definition unless users have equipment that supports the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) digital rights management system developed by Intel. If PC users have graphics cards with video connections that don't support HDCP, they are out of luck.

High-definition audio is also blocked in many cases, Gutmann said Wednesday.

"It's taking this open architecture that IBM created 25 years ago and making it closed again," he said.

In a 132-slide PowerPoint presentation, Gutmann outlined numerous features of Vista that he says are frustrating customers and programmers. New functionality related to content protection makes it hard to develop new drivers, he said. When ATI was finally able to ship Vista drivers, they crashed Windows, and Dell and Gateway had to delay Vista upgrades because they couldn't get working drivers, he said.

Gutmann said hardware costs will increase because vendors can't provide Vista-approved security functionality unless Hollywood studios like MGM, 20th Century Fox and Disney grant written approval saying the content security meets their standards.

A Vista function known as "tilt bits" -- like the tilt sensor in pinball machines -- requires hardware and software drivers to report every minor glitch, even ones that cause no problems, Gutmann said.

"Every otherwise unnoticeable minor glitch is suddenly surfaced and turned into a showstopper," he said.

Separately, all the extra encryption required to meet Vista's content protection standards means some computer components can never enter power-saving mode, he said. Thus, when you play a movie your CPU keeps running at full steam, he said. The extra power demands make it hard to reduce electricity usage.

"It's a bit of an extreme claim, but you could say Windows Vista causes global warming, because it's burning so much power with all this nonsense," Gutmann said.

The encryption requirements render high-end graphics processing units less effective, he said, because the best of those products emphasize graphics performance over content protection. On Vista, US$100-video cards can thus outperform those that cost $1,000.

Gutmann argued that Microsoft placed content protection above all other priorities when building Vista, perhaps to gain favor and money from Hollywood. Microsoft should have instead focused this effort on security features that protect users, Gutmann said, such as encrypted paging to protect user secrets, protected content domains that keep out malware, and anti-debugging techniques to prevent rootkit hooking.

New Zealand's government, which has argued that digital rights management fails to address the rights of people and government, appears to be the only government worldwide to express public concern about Vista's content protection standards, Gutmann said.

Reference

[Supreme2k]

A great many of the old people in Congress these days are technophobes too!

Three words:

SERIES OF TUBES