Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Six Strikes and Copyright Law

Today I logged a search for: will peerblock stop the six strike law?

The answer to this is "No" - as Peerblock will not protect you against anything! (see my other posts on the subject). In fact I was not aware that there was a "Six Strikes" law, I thought it was just a proposal by the media industries in an attempt to contain piracy. I will not try to enter into this argument, you can read this for yourself on the links below. I am just taking issue with some of the technological issues that are raised by this discussion.

Following some of the links that I have found on the pages linked below, I take issue with some of the statements that I find.

The discussion here was prompted by some of the comments on the articles I found when making a search for "Six Strikes" - i.e. the article by Ian Paul, PCWorld,    Jul 8, 2011 and others.

Like most forums the nature of the comments is more from the nature of appearing smarter than the other participants and insulting each other.


RIAA MPAA and CopyrightInformation.org (The Center for Copyright Information)
Hardly an independent organization:
  • Executive Vice President & General Counsel - Executive Vice President & General Counsel Steven M. Marks, Executive Vice President & General Counsel, Recording Industry Association of America    (RIAA)
  • Member - Marianne Grant, Senior Vice President, Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.  (MPAA)
  • Chairman - Thomas Dailey, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Verizon Communications, Inc.
Plus representatives from Verizon, Viacom, Comcast, iKeepSafe.org, Future of Privacy Forum, 
Jerry Berman, Chairman, Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee 
Gigi Sohn, President and CEO, Public Knowledge

Some quotes from the Center for Copyright Information:

I don't really see what the following means:
"..... helping consumers take action to protect themselves, their internet accounts and home networks."
The only ones that are possibly being "protected" are the music and movie industry themselves. I think that it is very much "wishful thinking" on the part of the "industry" here. The threats that they are proposing are not likely to be so, the "six" that is, and they are unlikely to be passed into law.

Also, the information is hardly "educational" as it is purely FUD being spread by the "industry"
"........ the educational information provided in an alert will lead to very few subscribers who persist (or allow others to persist) in illegal file sharing."

It is not likely that those that are persisting in file-sharing  are not likely to be frightened off by idle threats and are more likely to step up their efforts to avoid detection in the first place.

Those allowing others to persist are likely to be the ISPs themselves - I would say in general that the ISPs are more interested in staying clear of the "industry" and are probably just paying lip service to them as they do not want to appear as being um-cooperative or not obeying local laws.

Links:

Outlook Web Access

OWA

I came across this when troubleshooting Outlook email, etc, on a corporate network that had done "sour".

A 3rd party IT company were using it temporarily to access an Exchange server while the main accounts, served by PC based Office installations, were rebuilt.

What was not known at the time was if the local Word and Excel files (not to mention the local calendar and contact list) were accessible from OWA.

Monday, July 23, 2012

Why I think Outlook is seriously flawed

Don't get me wrong, I think that Outlook is probably the best that there is in integration of an Office suite on a Personal Computer. The ability to tie all elements of document creation with your messaging and scheduling is almost perfect.

However, I have observed many what I would term "legacy" problems over the time that I have had experience with using the MS Office suite. I won't go on to detail the versions that I have had dealings with as I think that my observations go beyond the differences between them. In addition, I think that the flaws transcend these versions and as such maybe be beyond redemption.

The fact that the user base is spread across multiple versions and platforms makes a fix" neigh on impossible. My initial suspicions were based on the notion that I either didn't know what I was doing, quite possible, or it was just that the version that I was using was fundamentally different than the versions and data files that are used in the enterprise. What I was seeing was inconsistencies in .pst files when I was migrating users from old computers to replacement ones.

What I was seeing was multiple folders, inboxes - outboxes etc - with data that seemed to have broken links between them. I was kind of expecting to see more than one set of personal folders, one from the old install and a new one. However, what I was seeing was that the linkages that seemed to have worked before were now broken in the migrated data. Contacts that were in the original contact folder were either not there or could not be found when emails were initiated to recipients that had been mailed frequently in the past. Often these contacts had to be added back to the personal folder that contained the in-box that was wanting to be used.

As I was saying, I thought that this behavior was due to something that I was not "getting" or doing wrong. I have now seen almost the exact same thing happening to an organization that I thankfully have no commitment to their IT well-being.  In this case a failure in the organizations email seemed to have resulted in the corruption of their users Exchange servers accounts. Whether this is just I coincidence with the firing of their complete IT department I just don't know!

A final note about Windows 8 (RT) and Office:

I am of the opinion that there are likely to be a lot of "pissed" Microsoft customers that are waiting for the Surface and other "Windows" based tablets. As far as I can see Outlook, the email, calendar and contacts, are not going to be available for RT based machines.

If the tablet format is to be viable in the workplace an Outlook solution (or something like it) is essential.

Asus products that I have owned

Having seen multiple visits from Nei-Hu, Taiwan I thought that I would make a mini index of the posts that I have made relating to Asus products on this blog.

More to come.

Links:

Friday, July 20, 2012

Cinavia watermarking

This method of DRM (Copy Protection) has started turning up on BD and other theatrical digital recordings and is currently (starting in 2012) detected by Sony PS3 and maybe some other Blu-Ray players.

It is an additional protection method to AACS and is also designed to protect media that is captured by video cameras, CAM or TS recordings. The detection of the "watermark" in the recording by the playback device will suspend the playback of the media after a period of time. It is supposed to be able to determine whether the copy was made from a camera or a direct copy of the BD, i.e. a "rip".