I'm sorry. Movie Industry and Logic aren't allowed in the same sentence.

Well spoken.

That was my point!

Movie Industry/MPAA:

1. Offer DVDs for salwe
2. Encrypt DVDs and lobby to outlaw playing on all OSes not Windows
3.
4. PROFIT (or blame piracy if you don't profit)!!!

The RIAA is even worse. They want to make the SHIFT key illegal on keyboards. They are using the DMCA law in the US toward that end.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/8/201119/758

Is Jack Valenti serious with this? What's the point with making the shift key illegal on keyboards?

The DMCA has allowed them to run a protection racket backed by the FBI. Imagine you are a parent, and a couple of their lawyers threaten you with a $100,000 fine and 10 years in prison because your kid downloaded an MP3 file, unless you fork over $20,000.
bVal
Back in the 80's, Valenti was involved in a "white horse" scam along with Sen. Cranston. He threatened to sue retirement home residents if the congress didn't fork over millions of dollars a year. They actually went for it.

Pressing the shift key when loading in a CDROM will prevent autorun code from starting. The code that is installed in a Windows computer is actually a rootkit, which hides any code or processes which begins with a certain pattern. Not only is the Sony code hidden, but also any viruses taking advantages of this fact.

Here is a link to the Computer Security internet program which explains it. The second link is a transcript of the program.
http://media.grc.com/sn/SN-012.mp3

http://www.grc.com/sn/SN-012.pdf


Note to Moderator:
Sorry, for double-posting. I was answering a response at the end of page 1 and didn't notice that there was a second page.

Gosh, I guess I won't be buying any more Sony CDs any longer. Or any copy protected stuff, since I will be a criminal if I load my Ogg player with music from it. They can take their outdated business model and incinerate it, as well as their CDs.

This kind of rootkit isn't much of a risk for Linux/Unix. Linux doesn't autoexec anything when a CD is mounted. Sometimes my wife wishes we had Windows back, but after hearing something like that podcast, she is quite happy to use Debian and Ubuntu instead. Her difficulties are from using a mid 90's laptop which happens to be running Linux, when my previous 2.4 GHz high end work laptop was running Windows and was a lot easier to use because of the newness, not the OS.

Ekkume

Not entirely true - some distributions DO support autorun.sh

I don't mind if a distro supports it. I do mind if a distro is configured by default to execute it. Who knows, someone might want to make a CD that launches itself for their own use...

Open Source is great. The animosity Open Source people show to those who try to push closed source stuff into Linux is great too. Let's keep Linux clean of this Sony garbage and similar stuff, which can only exist in the CLO$ED $OURCE world.

Ekkume

Sadly, this is the direction every country is, or will soon be, taking towards individual rights. Linux may be going the way of the do-do or, more than likely, the underground, because big business are lobbying on behalf of their proprietary brands.

Yet, even worse, it is the society in which these laws are enacted that is to blame, ultimately. Here, in the US, we are clamoring for more security and giving up our freedoms in order to "feel" safer; however, as can be seen throughout history, that feeling of security is in all actuality the chains of slavery not-so-quietly slipping around their shoulders:

Pierre-Joseph ProudhonUnfortunately, as it has been stated by Noam Chomsky (with whom I disagree with on many points), "Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune." And, this is now the case, where "telling the truth is a revolutionary act" (George Orwell). People don't want to hear rational discussion on the facts, they would rather put their trust, either explicitly or implicitly by their silence, into the hands of those politicians who mean to rule them.

EDIT: Fixed a couple of spelling errors

So the encryption must be closed-source to work eh? In File Processing, we learn that a strong encryption algorithm DOES NOT depend upon secrecy, but upon mathematical and computational difficulty. I would expect such a lousy secrecy-based encryption to be something invented by a 12 year old not paid professionals.

Ridiculous....

So you pay money for a DVD but still you cant view it cos you are using an OSS (probably a lot better than commercially available closed source softwares) ???

Man!!! do we have to pay for every dump thing??????

This is a sad precedent especially when you consider which country Linux began in. Let's hope and lobby that other nations don't follow and enact similar laws.