Month: January 2001

Copy Protection — Does Size Matter?

JVC is marketing its digital VCR in part by claiming that it contains so much data — roughly 75 gigabytes per 30 minutes of video — that it would be too large to copy. It does have other copy protection schemes as well with the digital VCR. Its designed to work with HDTV sets and so requires and HDCP decoder as well (and JVC claims the HDCP system can’t be broken).

Ignore the central problem, which is that not only is nobody buying HDTV sets due to the huge expense and lack of HDTV broadcasts (and HDTV standards for that matter), and ignoring the fact that HDCP will be broken at some point if HDTV ever catches on, copy protection through enormous file size seems like a silly thing to claim.

I remember people making the same claim for compact discs back in the late 1980s — audio CDs were pirate-free since it was simply too difficult for the average home user to duplicate a CD (remember when a 1X CD-R and a hard drive large enough to make it useful cost upwards of $10 grand?) That mark fell pretty quickly. Pirating a CD is trivially easy today.

But this is precisely where the JVC guy is wrong — almost nobody I knows goes to the trouble of pirating CDs. Most of us don’t need the high definition 650mb version of the music, but instead are just happy with the compressed MP3 version.

This is the fallacy in JVC’s thinking. It isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but within 10 years consumers will almost certainly be able to buy hard drives capable of dealing with the 300 gigabytes or so of data on a digital VCR tape. But nobody’s going to want to trade that on the Internet, just as nobody cares very much to trade the huge files found on DVDs. Instead, people are more than willing to sacrifice quality for file size and trade MPEG-4 versions of DVD movies.

Blocking Malaria

Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine are investigating a possible treatment for Malaria which acts by trapping the parasite in its protective sac. Trap the parasite long enough, and it simply dies before it can wreak havoc on the body.

Dr. Daniel Goldberg and his colleagues managed to successfully block malaria parasites in blood samples.

When malaria enters the human body, the parasites infect red blood cells and then surround themselves with part of the blood cell membrane to create a protective sac for the parasite to reproduce. The parasite replicates itself until it bursts the protective sac and then scatter to infect the bloodstream.

In blood cultures, Goldberg and other researchers treated the malaria with a drug that prevented the parasite from bursting from the protective sac. Eventually the parasite would deteriorate and no longer poses an infectious threat.

Much more research will be required to identify the specific mechanism that prevents the parasites from escaping the sac, and any possible treatment for human beings based on the finding is years away.

Source:

Scientists ‘block malaria’. The BBC, December 31, 2000.

Women Join German Combat Units

After losing its case in the European Court of Justice, Germany allows women to serve in combat position.

In January 2000, a female electronics specialist sued in the European Court of Justice claiming that the German armed forces’ policy of not allowing women to join combat units violated the European Union’s principle of sexual equality. She won and in July Germany changed its constitution to allow women in combat positions.

According to the BBC, 1,900 women have applied to join the German armed forces since the constitutional change. The first 244 women were accepted on January 2, 2001, most of whom joined the German army and air force.

Source:

Women join German fighting forces. The BBC, January 2, 2001.

Zimbabwe Heading Toward Food Crisis

Political unrest in Zimbabwe is severely harming that nation’s agriculture leading some to predict food shortages in the coming year.

As President Robert Mugabe’s political fortunes have declined, Mugabe has attempted to improve his standing by fomenting discord between white farmers and black veterans of Zimbabwe’s civil war. Supports of the government have seized white-owned farms over the past several months, and Mugabe has simply ignored rulings by Zimbabwe courts that such actions are illegal.

Many of the former soldiers seizing farms have little expertise in large scale agriculture. Other large farmers, fearful their land will be seized, have dramatically cut back on plantings. Zimbabwe can’t turn to small producers either, unfortunately, because the government buys their produce directly but waited 6 months after taking possession of their farm produce to actually pay the small scale farmers. As a result they haven’t had the financial wherewithal nor incentives to keep their production even at last year’s levels.

The BBC reports that some crops could decline by as much as one-third from the previous year’s level. Already prices for some food staples such as bread have climbed so high that they are already almost out of the reach of many people, and the situation is likely to get worse before it gets any better.

Source:

Zimbabwe faces food crisis. Grant Ferrett, The BBC, January 2, 2000.

Caleb Carr’s Dystopian Argument

Caleb Carr’s pro-censorship argument in Salon.Com is so poorly constructed it is almost not worth replying to, except to point out that most pro-censorship arguments rely on much the same premise which its advocates always assume but rarely even attempt to prove. According to Carr,

It is my belief, for which I offer no apology, that most of that technology [the Internet] is making people dumber: It is teaching them how to assemble massive amounts of information, of arcane minuitia, without simultaneously teaching them how to assemble those bits of information into integrated bodies of knowledge — such integration being the only function that distinguishes the human brain from a mechanical computer.

He might not want to offer an apology for this view, but it might be nice if he’d bother to offer even a shred of evidence for such an extreme claim. Carr’s call for enlightened government masters to filter out all of the bad information seems nothing more than a rehashing of Plato’s elitist argument in The Republic.

At the beginning of his essay, Carr says he doesn’t understand what the word “dystopian” means as applied to his latest novel, “Killing Time.” According to my handy dictionary, dystopia means “an imaginary place which is depressingly wretched and whose people lead a fearful existence.” Or the sort of future that humanity is in store for if it ever starts listening to people like Carr.

ALF/ELF Target McDonald's Corporate Headquarters

In a press release, the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front took responsibility for the December 7, 2000 vandalization of McDonald’s corporate office in Long Island, New York. According to the release,

At roughly 1:30am Friday, December 7th, members of the ALF and ELF descended upon McDonald’s corporate offices in Haupauge. Here we smashed over 10 windows and spraypainted anti meat slogans against environmental destruction. We will not be stopped.

For good measure, ALF press officer/activist added that, “McDonald’s represents the core idea of American capitalism which places profit, power, and greed ahead of life.” Whereas vandalism is life affirming.

Source:

Earth Liberation Front Claim Joint Credit for Economic Sabotage at McDonald’s Corporate Offices on Long Island, NY. Front Line Information Service, press release, December 9, 2000.