What the

This one was a bit too long to post on Twitter. A quote from a link I tweeted:

In addition, the appeals court took aim at several filtering schemes. Blocking all files of a certain type (such as RAR files) was deemed inappropriate, since a file type has no bearing on the legality of an upload. Scanning by IP address was also tossed, because numerous people can use a single IP address. File name filtering tells you nothing about the contents of a file, so that was tossed. Even content scanning was problematic, as the court noted that this would just lead to encrypted files. Besides, even if you could know that a file was copyrighted, it could still be a legal "private backup" not distributed to anyone else.

Courts making rulings based on actual technical knowledge? What's this world coming to? I note that they even listened to me (okay, probably just other people with similar technical knowledge) and realized that content scanning would be ineffective as it would just lead to ubiquitous encryption with no actual reduction in infringement.

& Solid State Stuff

Pretty soon I'm going to be looking to upgrade some things on my computer, starting with the hard drive. In addition to getting a large disk to begin using for archived anime (as opposed to the large stack of DVDs I've burned), I was going to get a solid-state disk to put my Windows 7 that I won in a raffle a couple weeks ago on.

For anyone not familiar with them, SSDs have the benefit that they have 0 seek time (as opposed to about 9 ms for HDs), combined with linear read speeds several times that of HDs. For very large and contiguous files, which involve only linear access, an SSD could be 3 or 4x as fast as an HD. But for accessing large numbers of small, non-contiguous files, which involve many seeks, the difference is much, much larger. Thus SSDs can be anywhere from substantially faster to massively faster than HDs, depending on the type of access.

But what exactly do I do with the SSD when I get it? Prior to Wednesday, the answer was obvious: use it as my boot drive. That is, put Windows and frequently used programs on it, and use a separate HD to put large and infrequently used stuff on.

Today, however, there's another option, thanks to the announcement of this evil little thing: a disk controller which combines an HD and an SSD, using the SSD as a massive cache for the much larger HD. That is, instead of having the SSD serve as a dedicated boot drive, it's used to cache frequently used files from all over the HD (when talking about an 80 gig cache, "frequently" probably amounts to once every week or two).

One obvious advantage is that the superior performance of the SSD is applied not just to system files (e.g. Windows), but also to anything on the disk that gets used frequently. Similarly, you don't need to let part of the SSD go to waste if you don't have enough files to fill it up (I'm told using an SSD as your boot drive takes 30-40 gigs of SSD, while higher end SSDs go up to 256 gigs). Another big benefit is that you don't have to manually split files that are normally on the boot drive (e.g. Program Files and the Users documents folder) between the SSD and HD depending on whether you want them fast or slow; for example, I wouldn't want to put downloaded anime on my (dedicated) SSD, nor would I want my SSD bloated with the various bulky compiler intermediates.

Now, the big question is how exactly this is going to work. According to the manufacturer, it requires a driver for Windows in order to work. This suggests that caching may all be done in software, rather than hardware. This brings up the obvious question: in what cases the cache will be used? If the cache is only used within the current Windows boot (essentially serving as a gigantic system cache), this won't be very useful, at least for me (perhaps for a database server, with multiple terabytes of database, a 100+ gig cache would be substantially beneficial). I already have 8 gigs of RAM, about 4 of which (at a minimum) is available to be used by the system cache, which is a pretty decent cache for one session (and RAM is much faster than an SSD, anyway).

From the write-up, however, it sounds like the cache at least persists between Windows boots, which would mean it wouldn't quite be that bad. However, if the caching is all software-based via a Windows driver, this obviously means that it won't be of any benefit prior to loading that driver - that is, during boot up/shut down and going into/out of hibernate, which are things I was hoping to gain out of getting an SSD.

I guess we'll find out when the thing ships, in 3 weeks or so.

What the Goat

The National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning for the South Los Angeles, Long Beach and Whittier [right about here] areas as a powerful new storm moves ashore.

Tornado Warning Issued for South Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Whittier

A tornado watch. In Los Angeles county. Has that ever happened before?

Random Fact of the Day

Watching CSI: Miami I learned something new: that receiving a liver transplant* can change your blood type to that of the donor. I'd never heard anything about that before, so I had to do a Google search before believing it. Apparently it's actually happened; once. It seems that stem cells in the liver managed to detach and land in the bone marrow of the recipient, and take over the marrow.

This makes me wonder. If I understand the biology involved correctly, this would only be possible if the blood type changed in a particular direction. In any other direction you'd get the same effect you'd get from getting an incompatible blood transfusion. Thus my question: might this have happened before, but been misclassified as simple organ rejection?

*In theory this is probably possible with most transplants, given that it involves stem cells being transported with the organ.

Moving On Up

I'd heard all of this from him directly, but I just ran across this post on the ZDNet Security blog - Microsoft adds 'Skywing' to Windows defense team.

Incidentally, Miller is the arch-nemesis I mentioned earlier.

Curve Ball

Some surprising last-minute good news from France:

After the parliament voted in favor of the law, no one doubted that it would be approved by the senate and National Assembly as well. As expected the law was indeed ratified by the senate this morning, but to everyone’s surprise it didn’t make it through the National Assembly.
...
Unfortunately the law is not completely off the table. It is likely to be voted on again on April 27 according to members of UMP, one of the supporting parties. However, failing to get it passed through the National Assembly the first time is clearly a huge mistake that is almost amateurish, and public opinion is not likely to change anytime soon.

Which I suppose makes for a (tentative) good-triumphs-over-evil-in-the-end Hollywood ending, after what the proponents of the law pulled in parliament.

Name That Movie

See if you can recognize this one.

A bill written by big business interests is proposed in French parliament. Hugely controversial, the bill is opposed by most apart from the business interests that wrote it, and it is difficult to see how it could pass (although you can never underestimate the corruption of government officials). As the deadline for the vote draws near, an intense debate lasting 42 hours straight breaks out among parliament members.

Eventually, late Thursday evening, it is decided that the debate should cease and parliament members should go home for the night, and the bill would be voted on the next week. So, parliament members do exactly that. After about 98% of parliament members have left the building, the vote is called early, at nearly 11 PM on Thursday night. With 16 members remaining, the bill passes, 12 to 4.

Can you name that movie?

Actually you can't, because it actually happened - yesterday. This is the French Three-Strikes law, which promises to disconnect people from the internet on allegation of copyright infringement, without ever having to present evidence in court or even tell the accused what copyright they are thought to have infringed. It will also require running spyware on all computers that constantly talks to government systems and monitors activity and the state of your network.

Welcome to French democracy, proving that America really isn't that bad afterall.

& More Piracy

I haven't written about it as much on this blog as other places (instant messages, IRC, various forums, etc.), but I'm a huge opponent of both Digital Rights Management (also known as Content Restriction, Annulment and Protection) and draconian anti-piracy efforts like the RIAA's law suit campaign. This was based on the belief that regardless of the raw numbers (e.g. total P2P downloads of something vs. actual sales), the total number of lost sales due to piracy was low enough that it was better to just eat the losses as part of the cost of doing business than to expend the effort, cost, and public good will to try and fight piracy (which wouldn't work anyway). Specifically, I was guessing that the actual losses were in the 5-15% range - that is, if there were 0 piracy, producers could sell 5-15% more of whatever they make.

However, just now I came across some rather shocking statistics, complements of the makers of World of Goo (a game that shipped without DRM). According to their data collection, 82% of copies of the game played were pirated. That's higher than I expected, but that wasn't the shocking part: that the ratio of pirated copies to lost sales is about 1000:1. Crunching the numbers and rounding up a bit to err on the side of caution, this means that the actual losses of piracy are less than 0.6% of the revenue they make from legitimate sales. This is between 8 and 25 times lower than I thought it would be.

These numbers absolutely demolish the claims that

1. Internet piracy seriously hurts publishers (the actual damage is negligibly small)
   
2. That DRM does more help than harm by reducing piracy (with levels of losses that low, there isn't any room for DRM to help, yet it's clear that it does a substantial amount of harm)
   

Switching Gears

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.
...
Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers making music available online for others to take.

Wall Street Journal

I definitely did not expect this so soon, as progress in the courts of stopping the RIAA's legal campaign is proceeding at a crawl, and the RIAA could probably have continued for a while longer before getting hit with serious legal penalties.

& Other Things

I managed to forget something important in my last post, despite the fact that it's closely related to one of the things I did mention; that is, Echoes of War is out. At least, it got shipped to me last week; few others seem to have gotten it already, and as far as I know it hasn't even hit peer-to-peer networks yet.

Echoes of War is an orchestral remix/arrangement of music from all three of Blizzard's universes - Warcraft (III, World of Warcraft), Starcraft (I & II), and Diablo (I-III) - by Eminence. It's about one and a half hours of music, with several tracks from each game and each track being a medley of game pieces.

While some of them fairly closely follow the original sound, some of them are arranged in very novel and surprising ways. Two of the best examples of this are the big band jazz arrangement of the Starcraft I Terran music, and the crazy symphonic/operatic/Middle Eastern/The Rock arrangement of the Starcraft I Zerg music. (other samples can be played from the Echoes of War media section)

How much I like the tracks varies by the track. Several of them I really like, although I'm noticably less fond of the Diablo tracks than the Warcraft and Starcraft ones. But in any case, the album is awesome. If you like the music of Warcraft, Starcraft, and/or Diablo, buy it. I just wish the stupid thing was sold by stores that didn't charge you $14 for shipping...

Various Thingies

First of all, I should mention that my house is fine; the fire didn't get near it. The probability of it getting here was fairly low, but we did a bit of better-safe-than-sorry packing. Though last night while driving home from school I did drive past a (unrelated) fire that filled the entire intersection with smoke in about a 50 feet radius; I still don't know what was on fire (I couldn't see it), but the smoke was very obvious, and I heard fire trucks going by.

In other news, it's been relatively difficult to collect data on Firefox after reenabling the Feed Sidebar addon. Firefox crashed after three days of logging memory usage, and then a couple days later I needed to restart it because I needed the memory for WoW (Firefox was using about a gig). But the addon defintiely seems like the cause of the memory leak. From the days I gathered data, it looks like it leaks about 40 megs/hour (although that's only over a couple days; it might decrease over time).

Finally, I just noticed something that happened last year: the Starcraft soundtrack, not previously available (the compressed audio shipped with the games is 22 khz ADPCM, which is pretty poor quality), is on iTunes for $10; the other Blizzard OSTs that were included in the collectors' editions of Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, and World of Warcraft are also available there (though unfortunately all of them are single CDs, which means they are incomplete). The music is DRM-free (although I hear they encode personally identifying information in the audio files), 256 kbps AAC (good quality), though you will have to install the Apple iTunes crapware to buy it. I'm told the M4A files should play on all PC audio players that support AAC (I know they work on WinAmp), though they are not MP3s, and will not work on MP3 audio players. That's your public service announcement for today.

Beyond Godly

On Recording Industry vs. the People, in response to this story, somebody suggested:

It would be interesting to set up a 'honey-pot' node (using maybe a printer or a network monitoring box), wait for a takedown notice, and say "see you in court". It would be even more interesting to see the discovery request for the hard disk of a printer.

That idea is beyond godly - set up a honeypot network that isn't actually sharing copyrighted material, and file DMCA abuse suits for every DMCA takedown notice they receive. I suspect that would very rapidly lead to more thorough investigations before companies fire off bogus DMCA takedown notices.

Empirical Data and the RIAA

A bit ago I wrote up a rather lengthy list of factors which could, in theory, produce false-positives in identifying users sharing copyrighted files via peer-to-peer programs. Most of these risks could be mitigated by thorough investigation, though I noted that as the RIAA clearly cuts every corner they can, it's likely that few if any of these mitigating measures are taken in actual investigations.

Now the University of Washington has demonstrated some of these risks in actual occurrence in their project Tracking the Trackers: Investigating P2P Copyright Enforcement. While they've only looked at a couple of the risks I suggested, the results show quite a few false positives, indicating that my prediction that measures to minimize these risks are not being applied was accurate.

The research paper is here, if you don't want to go through the project's web site itself. The New York Times blog has also picked up this story. They also have a cute logo/illustration:


This was actually a study I've been wanting to see done for some time. The other study that I think is very important but has not yet been done is to determine empirically how, on a system like eDonkey, where users search all peers for a certain file, the number of requests a single computer gets for a single file varies with the popularity of the file. The basis of this investigation is the claim by RIAA and others that users could be sharing thousands or millions of copies of each copyrighted work, therefore constitutional limitations on civil damage awards do not apply.

Clearly files that are popular (e.g. the latest hit song) will be downloaded more (in total) than files which are unpopular. But does this mean any single computer will upload popular files significantly more often than unpopular files? I believe the answer is no, for the reason that because the files are more popular, not only are they downloaded more, but they are also available from more computers. In theory, the increase in demand is accompanied by a proportionate increase in supply, keeping the ratio invariant regardless of demand. According to this belief, I have argued on forums (one example here) that most of the people the RIAA has sued have, according to simple probability, not uploaded more than a single copy of each file, on average (so about $0.70 of damage per file, if you assume 1 download = 1 lost sale, which itself is highly suspect).