Intellectual Property and the digital world.

So in the news you will see stoires of people getting arested for piracy.

The MPAA and the RIAA are at the lead of this fight aganst piracy and they have friends in most parts of the world, in New Zealand we have NZFACT.

in the last few years we have seen an explosion in legal cases over piracy often aiming at home users who download a film or song.

the problem is that in my opinion they are aiming at the wrong people, we are seeing takedown notices for all sorts of things that are “fair use”.
just a few days ago youtube where asked to take down a video of a little kid with the song “lets go crazy” in the background and the quality of the song is so bad you may not recognise it…..

why did Universal Music ask for it to be taken down?
because its piracy!

why don’t they arrest the people who are making many thousands of copies of a movie and selling them?
I dont know, maybe thay are and we just don’t hear about it.
maybe its just easer to go for the home users.

What is the alternative?

cheep or even free content, videos, music, books all for cheep or free.

is this a dream?
not at all, its happening now.

www.twit.tv
Leo laport is putting many hours a week of content on to the internet, it can be free or you can make a donation.
Leo can a living out of it, if you have 1 million viewers and only 1% donate $5 a month, you still get $50,000 a month.

and it’s not only the geeks, radiohead have tried to make the same system work for music.

even books are becomming free: www.gutenberg.org

and in the last few weeks we have seen Joss Whedon bring out a short video, made for the web and your’s for only a few dollers.

Is piracy a lost sale?

most prople who download simply don’t want to pay, even if its only a few dollers thay will still take the free download regardless of the law.
other people download or copy a movie because its easy, I know some who download a moive and then buy it because they like it so much.
I know some who download a movie because they can’t find it in any shop.
many people download TV shows to get them before the DVD set comes out.

is priacy a lost sale?
yes often, but not always.

Do we still need copyright?

Isaac Newton once said “If I have seen further then it is by standing on the sholders of Giants.”

many good works have been made by building on the works of others, this can’t happen with moden works due to copyright.

copyright was a good thing many years ago…..
the problem was when the length of copyright got longer and longer, 25 years became 50 years which then became life, then life +25.

the moden movie “10 things I hate about you” is based on tameing of the shrew, this could not happen if the works of Shakespeare where not in the public domain.

Where to from here?

I feel that the studios are trying to protect on old busness model.
they have done it before and they will do it again…

60 years ago they said that the LP would be the end of live music performance.
20 years ago they where saying that VHS would be the end of the cinima.
6 years ago the MP3 would be then end of all music.

today we find that Itunes are selling more songs than anyone else.

they need to embrace the new world and move on.

Data destruction the secure way.

Why do we want to securily remove data?

A good number of second hand computers still have data on them, credit card number, passwords and even medical records and e-mail.

if you are selling a computer or even giveing it away it pays to clean the drive of all your data first.

Technical information

The disks of a hard drive are divided into lots of little parts called sectors, each sector holding 512 bytes of data. So that the computer knows which sectors are being used to hold data, there is a reserved and protected part of the disk called the FAT (file allocation table).

When a file is written to the disk, the OS marks off in the FAT each sector used by the file. It also makes a note of the file name and the first sector of that file. When the file is read back, the OS looks up the first sector of the file and then reads-in the 512 bytes from the sector along with the address of the next sector for the file, and so on to the end of the file.

When you permanently delete a file (by emptying the recycle bin, allowing the bin to get full so that it overwrites the oldest files, or using a utility that bypasses the recycle bin) the OS does not delete data from every sector because this takes time. Instead it simply marks as free in the FAT every sector used by that file, and then removes the file name from the directory listing. It also makes the file name invisible to normal disk search methods, usually by replacing the first letter. This means that the space is now free to be used by other files, but the actual data is still present on the drive and can be recovered using undelete utilities provided it has not been overwritten by newer files.

Formatting the drive will empty the FAT and directory listing but again, it will not remove the data, and at this point your data can be recovered by reading directly from the sectors and putting the files back together like a puzzle.

How to stop people getting the data back

This depends on how much you care and how much cash you have.

The first and easiest way is just to reformat the drive. This will be OK if you just want to keep the drive and reuse it for other data. Your original data could still be recovered if a person wanted to, but it will get rid of data that you don’t want, clearing the disk for you to reuse.

The next level of security is provided by wiping the free space using a program like pgp or drive-crypt. This writes random data to all unused parts of the drive and is a good plan if you are selling the drive. If you do this and then change your mind, then nobody can (economically) help you recover your data.

Note that some programs don’t write random data but instead they only write lots of 0’s (zeros) to fill up the drive.

There are several programs that you can use to perform a random wipe:

pgp: http://www.pgp.com/
Partition Magic: http://www.powerquest.com
Window Washer: http://www.webroot.com/washer.htm
ERASER: http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/
Steganos: http://www.steganos.com/
KillDisk: http://www.killdisk.com/features.htm
Darik’s Boot And Nuke: http://dban.sourceforge.net/

I don’t know how well each of the above programs work, so do your own research. Read the info about them at their web pages and see if it is a random wipe or a 0’s fill, because a 0’s fill is not quite as good. Search for and read any user reviews to help you decide.

If you are a Linux user then a random wipe can be done as follows:

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda bs=1024k count=4096

The Linux “dd ..” method requires care. You need to calculate the “count=” value to match the size of the disk (or not include it… no “count=xxxx” will “probably” write the whole disk). The “hda” in the example means “the whole of the first disk on the first IDE interface”. That might be your system disk. There is no permission byte for “the whole disk”; it’s not part of a file system — it’s the whole disk. So use the correct “/dev/XXX” value, the idea is to unrecoverably erase a disk. For “complete” erasure, repeat the command a few times. Seven seems to be the US DoD number.

Keep in mind that any true random wipe program will take a lot of time to run:

don’t trust any program that says it can wipe a disk in under 10 minutes. Just stop for a moment and consider how long it should take to write 40Gb of data to the drive 7 times over!

A special note for the paranoid or those who have something to hide

Even after random data has been written to the drive it is still possible to recover data using special tools that security consultants, police and government agencies have access to.
If this is a problem for you and you really think that the government is out to get you, then you should simply destroy the drive and buy a new one. Exactly how you destroy it is up to you but I read that the US government has a system for destroying computer equipment by cross cut, crush, grind, burn and then spread on the roads as grit in winter.

For more info about data recovery and the art of data destruction, have a read here.

As for setting up a system that will destroy the drive at time of boot unless some special start-up procedure is followed, this might have worked in years gone by but in today’s world serious investigators won’t boot a system until the drive has been copied.

Use of any of the programs in this article will wipe ALL your DATA and it will no longer be recoverable by any ECONOMICALLY AVAILABLE means so be very very sure you want (or need) to do this before you start.

Iphone 3G review

I have been using the new Iphone for more than a day, very happy over all.
I did have an ipod touch so there was very little learing curve.

It took about 45 miuntes in the store to get setup as a new customer, new phone number and such.

the Vodafone people did the activation in-store, but this is something you can do at home with itunes.

I found it very easy to enter all my contacts in to the phone.
the onscreen keyboard is a lot better than using a T9 system, still not as good as a real keyboard like the blackberry.

I realy love the txt/sms system, it makes the interface much more like a IM client, for each contact you can see who said what and in what order.

the GPS is good, not very accurate indoors, very good outdoors.

3G coverage is not as good as Vodafone make it out to be…….
I live in lower hutt , less than 1KM from Queensgate and get very spotty 3G coverage at home.

I had a non-tech person (55 years old) who hates cellphones have a play with it and she was very happy, she commented how easy it was find find the right button and how easy it was to read the screen.

looks like the 2.0 firmware is mostly bug fixes and the itunes app store.

the only real issue I have found is that there is no hold switch for the volume controls. you put the phone in your pocket and start to listen to music, the volume can be changed but thing in your pocket pushing the volume controls.

the phone picks up finger prints as soon as you unbox it, on the bright side you are given a small black polishing cloth.

I have been looking at the app store today, there are about 100 free apps.
most are a bit random, but there are a few games for free.

as for a phone it not too bad, feels good in the hand, but you can’t really hold it with your sholder/neck.

is 16GB too small?  well I have 1600 song, 30 podcasts, 20 short videos and there is still a few GB free.

it looks like the camara show up to windows as a standard digital camara so getting photos off the device is easy.

over all I am very happy, looks like battery life will be two days or more depending on usage.

as for pricing:
I got the 16GB for $699 on $80 per month plan.

feel free to ask questions.

And so it begins…..

I hope this blog will be a place for me to give tech reviews, comments on whats going on in the tech world and also a place for me to post random thought about the world.

I don’t expect to be posting more than about once a week.