MidKnight Gallery

DWBlog, from the maker of NewsFire (the first RSS reader to hook me before I outgrew its feature set at the time) has an entry on a subject that I’ve often felt conflicted about: product activation. In many ways, I agree with his points, even this one:

What activation allows is for reasonable limits to be placed on licenses. One has to realize that people will try to pirate software, and that in cases of rampant abuse it must be possible to stop the bleeding. The use of activation means that while honest users are given very liberal boundaries, rampant and excessive abuse can and will be stopped. 99.99% of users will never have an issue. In the few cases where the liberal boundaries are broken, there’s probably something suspicious happening.

First of all – I absolutely loathe “copy protection.” In software this is the practice of deliberately manufacturing a CD or other disk so that it violates the spec but is still readable – on the majority of readers – but the “bad” sectors can’t be copied. Time after time this has resulted in disks that are bought and paid for that don’t work on some fairly small subset of perfectly functional CD-ROM drives. Given software return policies at most stores this is usually money down the drain. In the music industry this has resulted in everything from CD’s that won’t play in the fancy DVD/CD player you now use for your home system or in your car stereo, to CD’s that run software to prevent your computer from reading the audio tracks. Some of the latter, such as the Sony rootkit, have gone as far as completely hijacking your computer.

To add insult to injury, if anything happens to the original media – it gets scratched or your 4-year old decides it makes a shiney frisbee – you are stuck, with no recourse, because you cannot back it up.

That said, I think every software distributor deserves to be paid for his work if you use his product. That leaves us with the question of what is fair value and how to best enforce the programmers/distributors end of the bargain.

He’s right. programmers need a way to tie “you paid for this” to “you can use this,” and serial numbers are so easily distributed and cracked that it’s practically worthless. My point of disagreement with his article is the following – many people pushing activation and digital rights management are very restrictive in their activation licenses, and the boundaries are not liberal and are very easy to slam into. There are also other issues relating to activation vs. serial numbers that can make it a pain to use and need to be addressed.

Let me get one triviality out of the way. There are a few other methods of piracy prevention. One that is common with higher-end and specialty software (Lightwave, Nobeltec) is to use a “dongle.” The huge disadvantage with this methodology is the same as copy protected media – if the key is lost or damaged then poof, no software. That said, it allows you to install a copy on several machines that you may sit at use the software at whichever one simply by bringing the key along.

Another method is to not even bother. Apple takes this approach with a good percentage of their software, though not Aperture and their “pro” apps. The sci-fi publisher Baen Books, one of the few to make significant money off of ebooks not only doesn’t lock theirs down at all, but gives away an entire “free library,” the better to hook you with. All of the books are available in numerous, standard, easy-to-transfer formats. If you want to know why they did this:

If I can’t make a living as a writer by the quality of my writing outweighing any losses I might suffer from theft — without trampling all over blind and crippled people in order to stop the theft — I’ve got no damn business being a writer in the first place. I’ve still got my tool box, and I haven’t forgotten how to be a machinist.

Eric Flint

Entire pages of this material on copyright and why they did the ebooks the way they did are available at the old Library still available at: http://www.baen.com/library/ under “Prime Palaver.”

Back to our topic. Our remaining issues are these: What constitutes fair use and what problems does “activation” bring to the table for users?

With serial numbers/etc. if you lose the number, well, you’re toast. That said, it’s easy if you’re reasonably careful to keep duplicate copies of your serial numbers and disks so that if anything happens, you can still install and use the program.

What happens if the company providing the software or service goes away or is bankrupted, and the computer you originally installed the program on had to be replaced or reinstalled? Suddenly, even though you have a product bought and paid for that you can reinstall off of your backup discs, you can no longer use the program because there is no activation/authentication database to activate it against.

This to me is the biggest achilles heel of any centralized activation system, and one reason why despite the weaknesses of serial numbers, etc., I avoid “activation”-based schemes where possible.

Lest you think I’m merely fearmongering, even worse is already happening. Google just shut down their pay-for-download video service. Everyone who bought a movie through the service will no longer be able to play those videos because Google will not even continue to run the authentication servers for the rights management embedded in the movies. Since they can’t verify the copies are authentic and on the approved computer – they will not play. Google may decide to do something different, but right now they are only giving partial credits towards new purchases that expire after 60 days. At least with iTunes you can backup your music store purchases to a real CD that can get re-ripped, in the event the iTMS gets shut down – and your music will also still keep playing on any authorized computers.

So what is fair use? Obviously, that depends on what the software maker decides, to some extent. The blogger that inspired this article obviously “gets it.” Some of his products feature “family pack” pricing that allow several users in a household to use the program without buying entire separate copies. Apple does the same with OSX. For $200 you can buy a family pack for up to five users instead of the usual, one-user standalone copy that goes for $130. Contrast this with the price of Windows, which “mere mortals” like us can only get one very expensive copy at a time. While required to have some sort of DRM for the iTunes Music Store, Apple made the policies very liberal by any other retailers standards: You can burn a song to CD any number of times, just not the same playlist more than 7 times. A song you buy on iTMS can be copied to, authenticated, and used on up to 5 computers. Songs can be shared via streaming to however many computers are practical that are also running iTunes.

This concept is just perfect for a typical household. it is becoming more and more common to have multiple computers in a house. I personally have two: a workstation at home and the laptop I use on-site. Ponying up for two copies of everything just so I can use it as the sole user where and when I need it at the best computer for the job is ridiculous. So is having to pony up for separate full-price copies of an office suite just so the kids don’t have to take over my workstation to work on a school project – one more reason I’ll be getting the newest version of iWork. I’d gladly pay extra for Windows if it gave me the right to run several copies concurrently in virtualization or on several computers in my household. As it is – I don’t buy the extra copies (still running a w98 and a w2k machine) – and MS will get an even smaller cut via Dell or a similar vendor when I finally do replace my computer.

Piracy is an issue that needs to be addressed. The problem is that many of the cures are either only marginally effective, or worse, actively interfere with your ability to use a product you paid for. A lot of software vendors could look to Apple and Baen for ways to effectively deal with piracy without ruining their own image – by providing a better value for the reality of how people wish to use the software they paid for, and being very careful not to step on the toes of those self-same customers.

My family recently bought the Toy Story movies, as Disney had re-released them as the 10th anniversary and special edition, respectively. Yes, they’re wonderful Yes, it’s great to watch these masterpieces of cinema, and re-watch them to get all of the cute references and jokes. I sat for hours going through the movies, and delighted in the commentary on hows and whys.

That out of the way, there is something I missed. The credit gags. The first movie had some incredibly funny blooper reels added into the credits. The second had “Tour Guide Barbie” smiling and waving “bye now!” through the credits. finishing with her wiping her brow and asking if everyone was gone yet. The short animated films are gone as well, but I’m more upset by the fact they actually changed the content of the movie and not just the quality of the DVD transfer.

I’m still scouring the extras to see if the bloopers and shorts are elsewhere…

An article from the University of florida about an engineer who has developed an RC-model based drone with wings that change their actual shape in flight (as opposed to extending flaps, etc) from a F4U coarsair-like inverse gull to the opposite.

The intended usage is for highly maneuverable drones that can be operated even in a city.

An MPEG of the wing in action is available here.

It would take some work to scale this up to human-carrying aircraft. One of the reason plane wings are relatively stiff is that to build the wing strong enough to carry what we would call a decent load would make the wing unreasonably heavy if it had to have all the parts and supports required to make it bend like a bird’s wing. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how far this can be pushed, and more maneuverable, cheap drones are also a good thing, with any number of applications, many of them civilian.

In the Last week I managed, somewhere, to find the time to watch The Wedding Crashers, finally saw Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and managed to make an unusually slow go of reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

The Potter book is, as usual, better than the last. Rowling is steadily improving in her craftwork and technical prowess, despite the detractions of her literary critics. I’m not telling you who dies, and I’m not telling you the “prince” referred to in the title is either. If you don’t like her work, fine, but she’s doing something right, even if at first it was more in the storytelling department than the technical side. That it took me several days to finish was only because I had far too many other projects on my plate.

As to the movies, they were both worthwhile. The creepiness delivered with a droll and wicked sense of humor in Lemony Snicket gave me delightful chills, whereas Crashers made me laugh my ass off. Between the two, Crashers is easily the funniest of the two, but it could have been better. Snicket did one thing absolutely right that it couldn’t afford to get wrong, whereas Crashers messed it up entirely: The bad guy.

The overarching creepy tone of Snicket could easily be overbearing, especially with children in danger (for an example of how to do infants in a movie wrong, try Baby’s Day Out, which I never could comfortably watch once I’d had kids). What saves it is that Count Olaf, as played by Jim Carrey, is so completely, comedically over the top, that he can be vicious, competent, and still keep the movie from being too dark.

The bad guy in Crashers is competent, vicious, and so intensely dead serious with no slapstick or anything that it jarringly breaks the mood of the jokes. I know that good comedies have their serious moments, but it was outright disturbing and threw off the mood at various, critical moments.

So I finally succumbed and rented the 2004 CGI-based remake of Appleseed.

The short version is – I like it. If you have the five bucks and a couple hours, go check it out.

The long version?

Appleseed is a story revolving around Deunan Knute, a female soldier with a fearsome reputation, and her boyfriend – cum – cyborg Briareos. She gets shanghaied/recruited to work for the ESWAT team for the self-proclaimed utopia of Olympus, the only shiny, active city left in the otherwise war-devastated earth. Over half of the city population is composed of bioroids, artificial humanoids that are basically biological, living robots. The bioroids run the city as well as much of its production, under the guidance of a council and a supercomputer called Gaia.

There are some who resent this, as all is not well in the utopia. As it turns out, there are decisions being made regarding the bioroids and humans that legitimately concern many of the humans who want to govern themselves, and this position, held largely by the military, also attracts bigots, and mean, spiteful men.

Of course, all hell breaks loose.

First, let me tell you what bugged me.

I haven’t followed the anime scene closely for a long, long time. I’ve seen Bebop courtesy of Cartoon Network, and I’d regularly collected and swapped movies post-Robotech including various Yamato movies, Crusher Joe, The Iczer series (blech), and so forth. Nevertheless, it looks now, as then, that the Japanese still have the knack for taking the worst of a marginally appropriate musical style and applying it in a gawdawful way. There are good places and bad places to apply techno and electronica music. This movie, like the chase scene in the Bourne identity, was not one of them. I say this both as a huge Oakenfold fan and a person who thinks the haunting piece that opens Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is just too beautiful for words.

The consistency of the cel-shaded animation was absolutely fantastic. Body movements were far less stiff than the ever-so-mediocre Final Fantasy (beautiful still shots, though). The consistency of the texturing prevented any number of jarring incongruities like those you can see if you watch Titan A.E. Nevertheless, there are places where the shiny metal surfaces are just a bit too shiny. The biggest irritant is the faces. The eyes were sometimes wonderfully expressive, and sometimes…. just stiff, like a mannequin. The jaws never seemed to move when the mouth opened and closed, which was a jarring contrast to the smoothness and lack of puppet-like feel of the rest of the movements.

Don’t let these complaints throw you off. The plot is tight, the action well-paced, and frenetic. I especially liked the interactions and politics involved between the various groups and factions. The bioroids had their own imperatives which could give pause to anyone who wasn’t fully convinced that they would never try to take over, and one didn’t have to be a paranoid bigot to be worried about it with some of what was going on. The military, played mostly as the heavies nevertheless had some very legitimate concerns that were not being addressed, and thus the brewing conflict.

Having seen the 1988 1-hour OAV version, I’ve got to say this does far better credit to the complexity of the original manga, and doesn’t feel stripped of life or character.

It would be a spoiler to discuss which of the groups were really the bad guys. I will say that it’s amazing to what lengths a person will go to to enforce their will when they think they know better than you do what you need or want.