Home Server Projects
The best servers are those that don't appear to be servers at all.
Saturday 29 November 2008, 4:34 PM
Piracy in the Clouds
Reading a blog here by Rupert Goodwins inspired an interesting issue. What's to prevent anyone from putting copyrighted material up in the cloud somewhere? Nothing. In some respects that's what fueled YouTube's expansion.
Now if an IP pirate "owns" or pays for memory space somewhere or in a lot of somewhere(s), what's to keep him/her from hiding illegally duplicated copies of some crappy movie on those cloud servers and storage? The only way for the industry to know its there is to have the collusion of the cloud vendor and/or the ISP to reveal the content of what's there. From there he can make copies on demand if desired or point mass DVD duplicators through an IP connection to the cloud source of the pirated master copy.
If he/she (the pirate) was clever, using a cloud service, chop up the movie or audio recording data files into pieces and re-digitize the material. (Maybe 10 minutes long.) Then encrypt or obfuscate the data. The watermark would likely be disrupted. Duplicate the pieces. Mix in junk pieces. Spread the pieces all over the web or cloud using an anonymous connection so they couldn't necessarily track the broadcaster during the "broadcast". Write a program that relocates all the pieces and puts it back together and run it at the DVD duplicator location. Now he has a way to keep most of the incriminating evidence of copyright piracy someplace else other than his own facility. This guy is the one to go after with criminal charges.
Is all of that worth it to watch a movie that costs typically $5US to rent? No. Especially a lot of the crap that comes out of Hollywood.
So lets look at a supposed stupid or inexperienced iPirate(copyright 2008--me!), the ones that the movie industry seems to really enjoy beating up on in the courts. All of the above goes bye-bye. Suzy (age 14) copies a DVD she has up to the cloud vendor's storage space. She goes over to her friend's house and they decide to watch the movie from the cloud on her friend's computer (without a DVD player) because Daddy's downstairs watching football on the big screen.
The cloud vendor now has had 2 opportunities to be a cop. One on the way up, one on the way down. What if Suzy had bought the movie? Ignore the legal fine print here. Everybody that “buys” the DVD thinks they own the disk. Surely watching the teenage romance or horror film ought not to break the law. Its not like they're selling copies of it at the flea market. No she's a thief and a pirate. Time to call in the cops.
The big difference in the two scenarios is that we'll assume Suzy is not the pirate and she has the typical skill set of a digitally aware teenager. But she copies the file from the DVD straight to the cloud no encryption or hashing at all. So the watermark and whatever other encoded identification the movie distributor has embedded in the film is still readable. The Pirate has done enough to hide the watermarks etc to escape detection, he's not going to get caught.
So unless the cloud vendor or the ISP colludes with the movie industry, nobody is going to know a damn thing about Suzy being a 14 year-old pirate. Are they going to catch Suzy, yeah maybe. Are they going after the pirate making hundreds of copies? No because they can't find him. They'll go after the low-hanging fruit like they always have. Sharing a scary or mushy movie with a friend shouldn't have become a federal crime.
Lesson- Don't copy ANYTHING you don't own up to the cloud. That would include backup copies of software along with movies and sound files. Its only a matter of time before the a------- in Hollywood start going after Suzy by attaching themselves like remoras to the ISPs and the cloud venders.
Now if an IP pirate "owns" or pays for memory space somewhere or in a lot of somewhere(s), what's to keep him/her from hiding illegally duplicated copies of some crappy movie on those cloud servers and storage? The only way for the industry to know its there is to have the collusion of the cloud vendor and/or the ISP to reveal the content of what's there. From there he can make copies on demand if desired or point mass DVD duplicators through an IP connection to the cloud source of the pirated master copy.
If he/she (the pirate) was clever, using a cloud service, chop up the movie or audio recording data files into pieces and re-digitize the material. (Maybe 10 minutes long.) Then encrypt or obfuscate the data. The watermark would likely be disrupted. Duplicate the pieces. Mix in junk pieces. Spread the pieces all over the web or cloud using an anonymous connection so they couldn't necessarily track the broadcaster during the "broadcast". Write a program that relocates all the pieces and puts it back together and run it at the DVD duplicator location. Now he has a way to keep most of the incriminating evidence of copyright piracy someplace else other than his own facility. This guy is the one to go after with criminal charges.
Is all of that worth it to watch a movie that costs typically $5US to rent? No. Especially a lot of the crap that comes out of Hollywood.
So lets look at a supposed stupid or inexperienced iPirate(copyright 2008--me!), the ones that the movie industry seems to really enjoy beating up on in the courts. All of the above goes bye-bye. Suzy (age 14) copies a DVD she has up to the cloud vendor's storage space. She goes over to her friend's house and they decide to watch the movie from the cloud on her friend's computer (without a DVD player) because Daddy's downstairs watching football on the big screen.
The cloud vendor now has had 2 opportunities to be a cop. One on the way up, one on the way down. What if Suzy had bought the movie? Ignore the legal fine print here. Everybody that “buys” the DVD thinks they own the disk. Surely watching the teenage romance or horror film ought not to break the law. Its not like they're selling copies of it at the flea market. No she's a thief and a pirate. Time to call in the cops.
The big difference in the two scenarios is that we'll assume Suzy is not the pirate and she has the typical skill set of a digitally aware teenager. But she copies the file from the DVD straight to the cloud no encryption or hashing at all. So the watermark and whatever other encoded identification the movie distributor has embedded in the film is still readable. The Pirate has done enough to hide the watermarks etc to escape detection, he's not going to get caught.
So unless the cloud vendor or the ISP colludes with the movie industry, nobody is going to know a damn thing about Suzy being a 14 year-old pirate. Are they going to catch Suzy, yeah maybe. Are they going after the pirate making hundreds of copies? No because they can't find him. They'll go after the low-hanging fruit like they always have. Sharing a scary or mushy movie with a friend shouldn't have become a federal crime.
Lesson- Don't copy ANYTHING you don't own up to the cloud. That would include backup copies of software along with movies and sound files. Its only a matter of time before the a------- in Hollywood start going after Suzy by attaching themselves like remoras to the ISPs and the cloud venders.
Saturday 15 November 2008, 4:10 PM
Submission to Virtual Mania
I've been using VMWare on Windows XP Pro at work and discovered that maybe there is a purpose for virtualization but it may not be the reasons the programmers were envisioning. BTW virtualization still doesn't make coffee or buttered toast!
Turns out that VMWare for workstations (not the VMPlayer, that's another product) has a feature that allows screen capturing and it takes the capture and puts it into the clipbook on the host. Another option is one that allows “making movies” of desktop actions. These two features makes writing user manuals a breeze. I've been writing what I call a “cartoon book” otherwise known as a user manual. I use tons of screen captures with arrows and boxes etc. hence the “cartoon book” handle. For that reason alone, using VMWare was worth the price of the product. I can run our new application software in a virtual machine and grab screen captures of every step of the process being written about without dealing with the user interface of the system I'm actually doing the writing on.
An embedded user manual should be considered an extension of the user interface on the product. You shouldn't kill a tree to make your software easier to use by your customer.
Of all the virtual tools I've used previously, VMWare Workstation is probably the easiest and most stable software yet. I loaded Fedora 9, Debian 4.0, Ubuntu 8.1, OpenSolaris 10, Windows XP Pro and Windows XP Embedded all into virtual machines using VMWare. All of them work just fine and the system does not bog down and come to momentary halts like it does with VirtualPC 2007 from Microsoft. The development system I use at work has a Pentium Duo in it with 4GB of RAM @ 2.8 Gigahertz so its not an impoverished machine. With VirtualPC running, the virtual machine and the host its running on run much slower than they should. Running VMWare there is a slight apparent performance hit but nothing like VPC.
The behavior of the application program running in a Windows XP Pro VM has same behavior appearance of the application running on standard hardware with Windows XP Pro without a virtual machine. Since the application is the equivalent of a Human-Machine Interface device, operation while running in the VM opens many training possibilities with a training program running perhaps in one VM and the application running in another.
The other products tried were not acceptable at all and I'd rather not give them any Google hits.
The only trick to learn for setting up the VMs is to pre-allocate the entire suggested virtual drive space for each of the Linux distributions. Fedora 9 and Windows XP didn't seem to care but Debian and Ubuntu required pre-allocated space for the drive in the virtual file set up by VMWare. OpenSolaris I installed with a pre-allocated drive space since it seemed as if it was going to only use minimal configuration unless I gave it more space. OpenSolaris seems to need quite a bit of space to operate properly. Obviously with all of the virtual machines using anywhere from 256MB to 512 MB of real RAM space, 4GB of RAM goes fast if you try to run more than one or two at a time.
I'll write more about my experiences with VMWare periodically. It seems to be an excellent product. My next test is to see how well it works when hosted on Linux.
Turns out that VMWare for workstations (not the VMPlayer, that's another product) has a feature that allows screen capturing and it takes the capture and puts it into the clipbook on the host. Another option is one that allows “making movies” of desktop actions. These two features makes writing user manuals a breeze. I've been writing what I call a “cartoon book” otherwise known as a user manual. I use tons of screen captures with arrows and boxes etc. hence the “cartoon book” handle. For that reason alone, using VMWare was worth the price of the product. I can run our new application software in a virtual machine and grab screen captures of every step of the process being written about without dealing with the user interface of the system I'm actually doing the writing on.
An embedded user manual should be considered an extension of the user interface on the product. You shouldn't kill a tree to make your software easier to use by your customer.
Of all the virtual tools I've used previously, VMWare Workstation is probably the easiest and most stable software yet. I loaded Fedora 9, Debian 4.0, Ubuntu 8.1, OpenSolaris 10, Windows XP Pro and Windows XP Embedded all into virtual machines using VMWare. All of them work just fine and the system does not bog down and come to momentary halts like it does with VirtualPC 2007 from Microsoft. The development system I use at work has a Pentium Duo in it with 4GB of RAM @ 2.8 Gigahertz so its not an impoverished machine. With VirtualPC running, the virtual machine and the host its running on run much slower than they should. Running VMWare there is a slight apparent performance hit but nothing like VPC.
The behavior of the application program running in a Windows XP Pro VM has same behavior appearance of the application running on standard hardware with Windows XP Pro without a virtual machine. Since the application is the equivalent of a Human-Machine Interface device, operation while running in the VM opens many training possibilities with a training program running perhaps in one VM and the application running in another.
The other products tried were not acceptable at all and I'd rather not give them any Google hits.
The only trick to learn for setting up the VMs is to pre-allocate the entire suggested virtual drive space for each of the Linux distributions. Fedora 9 and Windows XP didn't seem to care but Debian and Ubuntu required pre-allocated space for the drive in the virtual file set up by VMWare. OpenSolaris I installed with a pre-allocated drive space since it seemed as if it was going to only use minimal configuration unless I gave it more space. OpenSolaris seems to need quite a bit of space to operate properly. Obviously with all of the virtual machines using anywhere from 256MB to 512 MB of real RAM space, 4GB of RAM goes fast if you try to run more than one or two at a time.
I'll write more about my experiences with VMWare periodically. It seems to be an excellent product. My next test is to see how well it works when hosted on Linux.
Monday 3 November 2008, 6:29 PM
Software Jihad part 2
I guess the point of my previous post (read rant if you want) was that Microsoft makes a lot of noise of "protecting" their IP but in reality they are only paying lip-service to it and the situation in China makes it extremely obvious. I guess they want to "look" like they are protecting their IP without really doing what they can to make it pirate-proof.
They don't dare PO the marketplace because the linchpin is the OS. If you don't put the OS on the box you aren't going to buy anything else with the Microsoft name on it. No sales – no profit.
It was a lesson MS learned yet again with the XBOX. If you can't afford the box to play it on, you won't buy the games from the company that is now selling XBOX 360's at a loss just to get customers to buy HALO 3 or 4 or whatever.
My guess is that if they really did put teeth into the WGA and kill OS desktops running illegal copies, they would really piss-off a lot of their potential world-wide market and make a lot of people think twice about putting Microsoft anything on their computers. (Actually I hope Microsoft does do something stupid like enforce their copyright!)
All in all, its an exercise in hypocrisy. They use their copyright to hammer on who they perceive as competing people and companies that offer something that just “looks like” their product and then they ignore rampant OS piracy in emerging markets.
The problem of marketing shrink-wrap operating system software has been exposed by the "black-screen of annoyance", (The BSOA, you read it here first!). Assuming the software can be made “pirate-proof”, customers who can't afford the software in the first place, really can't afford the hardware to run it. XP Pro requires stout enough hardware to effectively run, so that when the cost of the hardware is a significant amount of a person's annual income, you end up with nothing left for software. You can't pirate hardware, you can physically steal it but it still takes software to run it. So obviously the answer is to steal the software.
If Microsoft was really smart, they'd make a version of Windows XP Pro that could run from flash memory and reside in an XBOX chassis. Sell the XBOX with the OS ALREADY embedded in it. Then offer the rest of the software by subscription. Duh.
My guess is that Microsoft when they get the "cloud-computing" thing figured out will give away the OS just like Internet Exploder. Windows 7, 8, 9 whatever is installed and the first thing it will do is connect to the big Windows Live server in the sky and try to sell you 14 different sorts of software service plans like a satellite TV service. (Direct TV or DISH here in the US, I don't know what it is in the UK) That eliminates software piracy in a big way and makes the MS stockholders happy clams.
That's why Google is such a freaking nightmarish threat to MS. If Google gets there first, MS gets hind teat and will look a lot like Yahoo does now, in the game, but a poor second.
They don't dare PO the marketplace because the linchpin is the OS. If you don't put the OS on the box you aren't going to buy anything else with the Microsoft name on it. No sales – no profit.
It was a lesson MS learned yet again with the XBOX. If you can't afford the box to play it on, you won't buy the games from the company that is now selling XBOX 360's at a loss just to get customers to buy HALO 3 or 4 or whatever.
My guess is that if they really did put teeth into the WGA and kill OS desktops running illegal copies, they would really piss-off a lot of their potential world-wide market and make a lot of people think twice about putting Microsoft anything on their computers. (Actually I hope Microsoft does do something stupid like enforce their copyright!)
All in all, its an exercise in hypocrisy. They use their copyright to hammer on who they perceive as competing people and companies that offer something that just “looks like” their product and then they ignore rampant OS piracy in emerging markets.
The problem of marketing shrink-wrap operating system software has been exposed by the "black-screen of annoyance", (The BSOA, you read it here first!). Assuming the software can be made “pirate-proof”, customers who can't afford the software in the first place, really can't afford the hardware to run it. XP Pro requires stout enough hardware to effectively run, so that when the cost of the hardware is a significant amount of a person's annual income, you end up with nothing left for software. You can't pirate hardware, you can physically steal it but it still takes software to run it. So obviously the answer is to steal the software.
If Microsoft was really smart, they'd make a version of Windows XP Pro that could run from flash memory and reside in an XBOX chassis. Sell the XBOX with the OS ALREADY embedded in it. Then offer the rest of the software by subscription. Duh.
My guess is that Microsoft when they get the "cloud-computing" thing figured out will give away the OS just like Internet Exploder. Windows 7, 8, 9 whatever is installed and the first thing it will do is connect to the big Windows Live server in the sky and try to sell you 14 different sorts of software service plans like a satellite TV service. (Direct TV or DISH here in the US, I don't know what it is in the UK) That eliminates software piracy in a big way and makes the MS stockholders happy clams.
That's why Google is such a freaking nightmarish threat to MS. If Google gets there first, MS gets hind teat and will look a lot like Yahoo does now, in the game, but a poor second.
Sunday 2 November 2008, 3:04 PM
Software Jihad
I've been reading an article/blog over at CNN talking about the Chinese lawyer that has filed suit on Microsoft for putting black desktop backgrounds every hour on pirated copies of XP Pro. I like the fact that he's going for broke, he's asking for a billion dollars (1x10^9 US dollars) in damages. His claim is that typical Chinese people can't afford the local retail prices for legitimate Windows XP Pro. I agree with him. Maybe the typical Chinese shopkeeper or lawyer shouldn't be running Windows XP Pro. (Wait till they see the pricing model for Vista!) If the Department of Justice needed evidence of the effects of Microsoft's monopolistic effects on the world economy, there it is!
However, Microsoft should grow a couple of brass ones and actually defend their product's copyrights. An argument can be made that Microsoft by allowing their software to run basically unhindered even when the user is stupid enough to leave Windows Update turned on is pandering or implicitly encouraging software piracy. Its time for Microsoft to “put up or shut up”.
Microsoft needs to disable or kill every copy of Windows XP that connects to Windows Update that does not comply with their copyright. If they can turn the desktop color to black and stick a warning message on the screen, they can kill the software by dropping a logic bomb on the system. At the very least they will force the pirate to have to re-install the software at least once. More times if he's really stupid.
They have had over 3 years now to perfect the WGA crap and it should be “weaponized” and targeted on the software pirates world-wide. In fact a viral attack should be launched so that all those desktops that have Windows Update turned off can still be targeted by a spam email virus. If enough people get pissed off reading a message on their screen that they bought a pirated copy of Windows XP, they will shutdown the vendors that are selling pirated software, even in China. Microsoft has the perfect weapon to do it, ActiveX. Why won't they use it?
While they're at it, they need to kill every copy of Windows 9X, NT 4.0 and Win2K they can get their weapon package on. That way there will be no possibility of any wide-open and easy Windows zombies alive left anywhere in the world, at least on the Internet. The reality is that Microsoft doesn't have the guts to be seen actively pursuing software pirates except business users that are for the most part compliant. They don't want to be seen hassling little old ladies and children for the price of admission to their “club”.
The reason I think that Microsoft doesn't have the cajones to get really tough on the pirates is because they think pirated OS software is good for the rest of their product line. Especially if they manage to put it all under an Internet cloud-licensed business and delivery model. They probably think that nobody will buy their software if they get defensive.
Another possible reason is that the programming staff Microsoft has might not be up to the task of really launching a world-wide offensive against the software pirates out there. They don't have the chops to be really good hackers. We've already seen the kind of code that comes out of Microsoft and we're suffering system intrusions because of it. The OS software needs to have a built-in defensive shield setup to prevent un-authorized copying and it doesn't.
If I was a stockholder in Microsoft (and I'm not) I would hammer on Steve Ballmer to institute a world-wide campaign to extract every dollar possible from Windows XP before Windows 7 of 9 (or 7 of 10, whenever) comes out. Considering how well Vista is doing, Windows 7 might be the last opportunity Microsoft has to make a profit off an operating system.
However, Microsoft should grow a couple of brass ones and actually defend their product's copyrights. An argument can be made that Microsoft by allowing their software to run basically unhindered even when the user is stupid enough to leave Windows Update turned on is pandering or implicitly encouraging software piracy. Its time for Microsoft to “put up or shut up”.
Microsoft needs to disable or kill every copy of Windows XP that connects to Windows Update that does not comply with their copyright. If they can turn the desktop color to black and stick a warning message on the screen, they can kill the software by dropping a logic bomb on the system. At the very least they will force the pirate to have to re-install the software at least once. More times if he's really stupid.
They have had over 3 years now to perfect the WGA crap and it should be “weaponized” and targeted on the software pirates world-wide. In fact a viral attack should be launched so that all those desktops that have Windows Update turned off can still be targeted by a spam email virus. If enough people get pissed off reading a message on their screen that they bought a pirated copy of Windows XP, they will shutdown the vendors that are selling pirated software, even in China. Microsoft has the perfect weapon to do it, ActiveX. Why won't they use it?
While they're at it, they need to kill every copy of Windows 9X, NT 4.0 and Win2K they can get their weapon package on. That way there will be no possibility of any wide-open and easy Windows zombies alive left anywhere in the world, at least on the Internet. The reality is that Microsoft doesn't have the guts to be seen actively pursuing software pirates except business users that are for the most part compliant. They don't want to be seen hassling little old ladies and children for the price of admission to their “club”.
The reason I think that Microsoft doesn't have the cajones to get really tough on the pirates is because they think pirated OS software is good for the rest of their product line. Especially if they manage to put it all under an Internet cloud-licensed business and delivery model. They probably think that nobody will buy their software if they get defensive.
Another possible reason is that the programming staff Microsoft has might not be up to the task of really launching a world-wide offensive against the software pirates out there. They don't have the chops to be really good hackers. We've already seen the kind of code that comes out of Microsoft and we're suffering system intrusions because of it. The OS software needs to have a built-in defensive shield setup to prevent un-authorized copying and it doesn't.
If I was a stockholder in Microsoft (and I'm not) I would hammer on Steve Ballmer to institute a world-wide campaign to extract every dollar possible from Windows XP before Windows 7 of 9 (or 7 of 10, whenever) comes out. Considering how well Vista is doing, Windows 7 might be the last opportunity Microsoft has to make a profit off an operating system.
