There is an excellent article on the DMCA in the June issue of IEEE Spectrum. Go read it – it’s an excellent overview of just how ridiculously bad a law the DMCA is.
IEEE Spectrum on the DMCA
Posted in Copyright, patents, and trademarks, DRM
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an inconvenient truth
Went to see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient truth last night. Highly recommended. I think the planet is in for major trouble – the bit about the ocean level rising is particularly disturbing…
Check out the website, too, particularly the advice on how to reduce your CO2 ‘footprint’.
Posted in Environment
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an example of DRM
A few days ago, I mentioned that most (current) HP and IBM laptops come with DRM in the BIOS.
If you were wondering how DRM will affect you and why it’s bad, here’s a prime example of DRM and how it is bad for everyone, today.
HP has some nice deals on laptops. If you don’t want to support Intel and their proprietary, DRM-ridden EFI scheme, an AMD64 laptop is the way to go. HP sells a nice one, the nx6150, which can be had for under $1000 if you look around a bit.
It’s a good deal: high-resolution screen, AMD64 Turion CPU, not too heavy, big hard drive, etc. Baughj got one and is very happy with it. All but for one important detail.
The BIOS has DRM.
The machine has a mini-pci slot. It can come with a mini-pci wifi card, or you can get one separately. Kind of. HP charges $70 for an HP-branded Intel 2200BG card. This card is identical to the original Intel 2200BG card but for the pci id. The firmware is identical. The non-HP branded Intel card is about $40. But; you can also buy a Ralink card made by MSI at newegg, for $20. Ralink supplies GPL’d GNU/Linux drivers. They work. The hardware is cheap.
Now get this: the HP bios checks the pci id of the mini-pci card, and *REFUSES TO BOOT* if you don’t have an HP-branded card in there. It says ‘illegal mini-pci card detected’ or something along those lines.
HP is not the only company to do this. IBM does it too. Dell, notably, does NOT. Nonsense about FCC requirements is just that – the third-party cards that are sold (e.g. the MSI one) are FCC approved. And if Dell can get away with not DRM’ing their machines, why on earth can HP and IBM not do this?
It’s greed. Lock-in. They want you to pay a $50 premium to get a card that works properly (i.e. no ndiswrapper/windows driver acrobatics) under GNU/Linux.
I don’t think this is acceptable. What’s next – only HP branded RAM to be used in HP laptops? At a small premium of, say, 250% of the going rate?
Maybe someone will sue HP/IBM over this. They deserve it.
Posted in DRM, Free Software/Open Source
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time to fight back
I’ve had it. I’m sick of region encoding on DVDs and video games. I’m sick of crippled (‘copy-protected’) audio CDs. I’m sick of DRM’d music. I’m sick of the fact that I can’t legally use the DVDs I purchased on the computer I purchased because it runs GNU/Linux. I’m sick of the fact that I can’t exercise my fair-use rights with DVDs, copy-protected audio CDs and digital music I purchase online. I’m sick of the fact that the perfectly good DVI video interface is being replaced with HDMI, which is nothing but a DRM’d version of DVI – not compatible of course.
I’ve been boycotting for quite a while. I refuse to buy DVDs. I refuse to buy DRM’d music. I refuse to buy new audio CDs – just bought five second hand the other day…
But it’s time to fight back more actively. I’ve joined the Action Alert Network at Defective By Design. If you value your freedom please join us!
Go Pearl Jam!
Pearl Jam have just released their new video under an attribution, non commercial, no derivatives Creative Commons license. You can download it from Google Video. It plays fine with Mplayer. According to this Google blog post, the free download is only available until Wednesday. That’s a bit silly. Hopefully you’ll be able to find a bittorrent tracker here after that date.
Posted in Free Culture
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why broadcom sucks
I’ve upgraded a few key parts of my laptop. I have a somewhat ageing Dell Inspiron 5150, which has some nice features (1400×900 screen resolution, 3GHz P4 CPU) and some not-so-nice ones: it weighs a ton, it gets really hot because of bad thermal design, and its fans are way too loud.
I purchased a new hard drive (7.2k rpm, 100GB Seagate Momentus), a stick of 1GB ram, and a new mini-pci wifi card (MSI MP54G4).
Obviously, the upgrade from a 4200 rpm drive and 512MB of RAM has made the machine a lot faster.
The most interesting part of the upgrade, though, is the $20 MSI card. It replaced a Broadcom BCM94306 card that came with the machine. Broadcom does not release GPL’d GNU/Linux drivers for its wifi cards. In fact it does not release GNU/Linux drivers for its cards, period. This means you have to use ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper kind of works but was never very reliable for me. What’s worse, it always made my machine run really hot and therefore loud – remember, crappy thermal design.
The MSI card is Ralink-based. It uses the GPL’d RT2500 driver, which is based on a GPL’d driver that Ralink released. A real company, releasing GPL’d drivers for it’s wireless hardware? Hey Broadcom, look here, maybe you can learn something from Ralink.
The card works wonderfully. It doesn’t drop its connection every 10 minutes (there are a lot of wifi networks fighting for spectrum around here). It does not make my machine get hot – presumably because ndiswrapper introduces quite a bit of overhead. And it works with Kismet.
I love it. Suddenly I have wireless I can actually depend on. If you have a crappy Broadcom wifi card, consider spending the $20 to replace it. But beware if you have an HP or IBM laptop – their machines will actually refuse to boot with a non HP or IBM-blessed wifi card. Dell does not do this. But that’s another issue, more about that in a later post, maybe.
Oh and Broadcom, get this – I’m recommending your competitors’ hardware because you don’t release GPL’d GNU/Linux drivers. I’m filing you and your hardware under ‘completely useless’.
Posted in Completely useless, Free Software/Open Source
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explorer destroyer
Yep, this blog is now equipped with “Level 1: Gentle Encouragement” of Explorer Destroyer. For all you Firefox users out there (a whopping 87% of visitors!), nothing will be different. IE users will see a nice banner at the top of the page, encouraging them switch to Firefox – here’s a demo of the banner on the Explorer Destroyer site.
In the same vein, the Kill Bill’s Browser site is hilarious 
Posted in Free Software/Open Source
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reflective screens
I’ve wondered for a while why so many laptops come with highly reflective screens. Today I found out why: I saw a guy on the subway actually using the screen of his laptop as a mirror to get his hair straightened out!
Posted in Personal
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canadian musicians get it
The Canadian Music Creators Coalition gets it. They believe that suing customers is not smart. That DRM is bad because customers don’t like it – because it causes nothing but trouble. And that cultural policy should support artists, not the major media companies.
Bravo, Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, and many others. Speak up and change the system!
LinuxBIOS: Tyan s2881 HOWTO
With a lot of help and several patches from the friendly folks over at the LinuxBIOS mailing list, I finally got LinuxBIOS working on the Tyan GX28 hardware.
I’ve put a Tyan s2881 LinuxBIOS build HOWTO on the LinuxBIOS wiki, describing all the steps required to get a stable LinuxBIOS on such a machine. It’s not hard now that it’s been documented
That hardware, by the way, is highly recommended. You can build a 1U dual-Opteron box based on a Tyan GX28 with 4xSATA disks (2x 74GB WD Raptor, and 2x250GB Seagate Barracuda), 2GB of RAM and an IPMI card for just under $2000. That’s with 2x a single-core Opteron 246 (at 1.8GHz). If you want 2 dual-core Opterons (the ‘low-end’ 265), add about $400.
Opterons rule. LinuxBIOS rules. The combination is fantastic.
At linuxworld a few weeks ago I talked to a guy from a company selling clusters who said that the clustering market totally changed from Intel to AMD practically overnight – and all because of the superiority of HyperTransport over Intel’s frontside bus design.
This thread on the Postgresql Performance agrees – the concensus is pretty much that nothing beats Opteron for running PostgreSQL, period.
Posted in coreboot
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