Dead Blog

Please go here: http://gschueler.tumblr.com/

Tumbling and feeding

I've come to use Tumblr to post things most of the time now.

All of my tumblr'ing is mixed in to my main feed. If you care enough to bother, please subscribe to that feed. Or you can just view my tumblr blog at http://gschueler.tumblr.com.

If you're new to RSS feeds and feed reading, I would suggest you check out this video: RSS in Plain English.

And you can begin by signing up for a Google.com account at the Google Reader page.

eReading on iPhone

I'm interested in the capabilities of the iPhone as a form of eBook reading device. I'd love to be able to have an easy way to read the thousands of public domain books available from places like Project Gutenberg.

Here is a brief look at how the iPhone works as an eReader for three different formats: website, online book, and pdf.

I created a perl script a while back that would take a .txt from the Gutenberg project, parse it into chapters, and generate a set of Markdown formatted files (1 per chapter) with embedded links, as well as a Table of Contents page. Using my old Markdown cgi script to view this in a web browser made it somewhat easier to read the text, but I think if I adapted this especially for the iPhone it might turn out great.

Things I'd like my eReader to do:

• Remember how far you've read so you don't have to make a new bookmark each time you return to the book.
• look good
• make it easy to navigate the entire book, and within a chapter (if it is broken up into pages.)
• have an easy way to find new books

Limitations of the iPhone that complicate matters:

1. no user SDK for iPhone native apps: only web-based apps can be created right now
2. apparently iPhone doesn't trigger javascript "scroll" events, or doesn't allow you to get the scroll position
3. not sure how well/if javascript-created cookies work

Solutions to these problems:

1. web-based actually makes a lot of sense for an eBook that is not in PDF format.
2. each chapter of the book will have to be broken up into smaller sections ("pages") to be able to remember where you left off. the granularity of this is TBD
3. will have to wait and see, unless someone can answer this for me

I don't have an iPhone (yet), but that hasn't stopped me from doing some research. The iPhoneDevCamp has provided some answers to my questions, and Joe Hewitt has also created iUI, which seems like a perfect way to fit iPhone-like navigation and interface over this kind of app.

I'm going to hack away at this some more during my non-existent free time, but I expect I will make more time to work on this idea after I actually get an iPhone.

Bragging 2.0 .com.net

A couple sites have drifted past my web browser recently that I thought were amusing. They have brought the age-old past-time of braggadocio into the web 2.0 world of social-networking.

• The Best Stuff In the World
• State your preference on things. What things? Anything. Best Shoe. Best CD. Best Yogurt. Best Planet. (Crap, I'm the only person who thinks Dune is the best planet.)

• Meosphere
• This site lets you check off anything you have done. Use it to keep a list of achievements, or compare yourself to your friends. You can do it by list, or by a map for places. Which major US Cities have you visited? How many US States? What Academy Award winning Movies have you seen? (30 of 79 for me, not too shabby.)
  

If you think of something they don't have, you can easily add a new category (for Best Stuff) or create a new list of things (for Meosphere).

If you are pedantic about collecting things, or getting only the best product, or demonstrating your supreme good taste, you just may enjoy spending a lot of time on these sites.

Vote for Brazil (Film)

The MPAA's 16-Byte Headache

If you don't get 99.9% of your news from the web and don't read a lot of tech news sites, you might not be aware of an interesting story involving copyright, hollywood, and tech-news sites that has become something of an internet-wide revolt.

Around February 10th, 2007, a hacker on the web forum doom9.com posted that he had discovered the "Processing Key" used to encrypt HD-DVD video discs. This key is used by all current HD-DVD discs to encrypt the content, and with it, a nimble hacker could decrypt the content of a HD-DVD and be able to extract the video from the disc, much like the DeCSS code released for decrypting DVD discs. This key is a 32-digit number when listed in base-16 (or "hex"), equivalent to 16 bytes of data.

To movie pirates online this is a boon because it means they could now easily pirate the higher-quality HD-DVD movies for transfer across the internet. To users of the Linux operating system, (much like in the case of DeCSS and DVD discs) this key can be used to let them watch movies they have purchased legally on their Linux computers, which do not have any officially licensed software to allow them to do so. To the MPAA this is a violation of the DMCA, which prohibits people from telling someone how to bypass a security mechanism designed to protect a copyrighted work.

This is exactly why the DMCA was pushed into law by the RIAA/MPAA, to protect their copyright and also to prevent people from breaking their encryption schemes. Unfortunately for them, apparently it only takes 16 bytes of data to do so.

(Note: I'm not certain about the exact wording of the DMCA, but I thought that it made it illegal to post any method of circumventing a protection mechanism. This 16 byte key is not a "method" in any sense: it certainly doesn't give me or anyone else the ability to decrypt HD-DVDs without further software. However, I Am Not A Rabid MPAA Lawyer, so don't take my word for it.)

It has apparently taken the MPAA and its copyright lawyers until just recently to start sending out takedown notices under the DMCA to websites that publish the key. Under the DMCA, if you are sent a request to remove something that a copyright-holder says violates the DMCA, you have to do so immediately, even if that content doesn't actually violate it.

The DMCA has been widely decried as limiting the free-speech rights of people. When DeCSS was released, allowing people to decrypt a DVD disc, the MPAA attempted to block its spread by issuing the same kind of DMCA takedown notices. However, spreading the DeCSS code was like telling someone how to make a lockpick set: it in itself did not violate copyright laws. Seeing this as an attempt to censor online communication, people took to very creative ways to publish the code, such as on t-shirts, in poetry form, in song, and as very long prime numbers, to point out the ridiculousness of the law.

The latest round of the MPAA's takedown notices under the DMCA are now even more offensive to people. The "offending" information in question is such a small amount of data, and users of slashdot.org, digg.com and other places have posted the 32-digits en-masse as a way of protest. They have also posted it in forms other than 32 hex digits which is the most common way to exchange it among computer programmers: as decimal numbers, in binary ones-and-zeros, "encoded" in simple encoding schemes, in english-words ("..., eight, eight, oh, cee"), etc, etc, ad naseum.

Many people, it seems, are posting it as a "Fuck you" to the MPAA, and others are getting angered that sites like digg.com are removing stories and comments that include the content. In reaction, many Digg users are posting the key as much as possible, and many say they are leaving the site forever.

Jay Adelson, the CEO of Digg.com recently posted that:

Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law.
- Jay Adelson, Digg the Blog

Digg.com users see this as flying in the face of Digg-founder Kevin Rose's former hacker ethos. (See The Broken.)

This bites right down to the bone on the question "can information be owned?" U.S. copyright law is designed to protect creators, and yet it seems ridiculous to claim to own a 32-digit number.

Slashdot user sabre86 wrote [sic]:

For what it's worth, this is utter crap, but it shows a severe weakness in copyright law. Anything that can be represented with data, anything at all, can be encoded/encrpyted on anything else, given an arbitrary coding mechanism. For instance, let us create "sabre86's stanard coding scheme": add 1 to any number. After encoding we have 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1. Look, it's a different number! I guess it isn't a circumvention. Or is it?

Later, user Mr_Icon wrote:

Everything digital is as a number (hence the name "digital").

Circumvention software? A long number. PDFs with classified military information? Long numbers. Child porn? Long numbers. Having those illegal numbers on your hard drive will get you convicted.

The information that the MPAA wishes to protect is now out there on the Internet, and virtually ineradicable. Not to mention that some people are reporting that the MPAA is including the key itself in the DMCA takedown notice, inadvertently publishing the information they wish to keep secure.

Whether or not the MPAA succeeds in taking down the offending 32-digits from some websites, the cat is apparently out of the bag.

Are they going to send a takedown notice to someone for posting a song on youtube?

See:

• Digg - DIGG: What's Happening with HD-DVD Stories?
• Slashdot: Censoring a Number
• Processing Key, Media Key, and Volume ID found!!!
• HD-DVD key fiasco is an example of 21st-century digital revolt
• Rudd-O: Spread This Number
  

Update:

digg.com has apparently been overwhelmed by stories linking to and including the key in question. And now (11pm pst) is offline:


Update 2 (12:30AMpst):

Digg.com is back up, and Kevin Rose has apparently reversed the digg.com stance on the MPAA's DMCA takedown notice:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

- Kevin Rose, Digg.com