Microsoft patents spying on you with your TV's camera
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
It's another absurd attempt of the publishers to control everything and everyone. Unfortunately, this is technically cheap now. But as I talked to a publisher recently, it's increasingly more difficult to regulate all the copyrights of anything anyone wants to publish. They dig make a trap only to end in it themselves. As publishing any content becomes too hard, publishers themselves will switch to alternatives. I think it's a good opportunity for CC and PD content to expand and become mainstream.
Fixed.
Richard Stallman is right, we should all oppose DRM, is unacceptable where all this DRM is headed for.
People camouflaging in their living rooms so that the whole family can watch a movie?
It is, incidentally, the opposite reason to why I ended up writing software for a living. My objective was to ease the physical toil of people by automating the work that can be done by machine, freeing them to do more important and rewarding things.
Unfortunately, the increase in leisure time that this creates opens a big hole for consumption which is where these vultures swoop in and enslave us again via pay-per-breath DRM.
Stallman is a prophet of human nature more than technolgy.
And sadly, it would seem to be the attitude of SV as well. From all the discussions and submissions here I get the impression that the concept of earning money by actually helping people and/or giving them real value is slowly getting forgotten, drowned by A/B tests, ad-revenue, eyeballs & stuff.
Real value and percieved value have diverged so much now that only percieved value matters.
The attitude that it would be okay to accept the license agreement with no intention of abiding by it's terms is just as bad IMO as the attitude that it's okay to market this technology in the first place.
And there is also another problem, if all the vendors adopt this technology then you can only choose to not have a TV at all.
I expect things I buy to adhere to common sense rules without reading license agreements before buying, I don't like having surprises like big brother watching me or things like movie stopped because grandma entered the room and she is looking at the TV.
So this thing could stop play if you leave the room, including during commercials.
"You! Winston Smith! Come out of the bathroom!"
But then I want those programs to stream in hd, and I want to stream them on demand.
"Black Mirror" is a rare type of near-future sci-fi with a strong societal criticism.
The third episode, "Entire History of You", is also great: what will happen a decade from now where technology like Google Glass is omnipresent?
This is not a patent. It is a patent application.
Microsoft, Please don't' license this patent:)
It's from 2001, shortly after the announcement of Windows Genuine Advantage.
Also, I'm pretty sure it would make me feel uneasy having machines reading me all the time and making decisions on what should I probably want it to behave like "Oh Breno is watching a QOTSA concert, he left to grab a beer, I should probably pause" that's sort of goofy, but the matter is: it doesn't know what I want.. it's a shitty feature
I'll call this type of gimmick "smartass technology"
I'm pretty sure there's a design/usability guide that supports what I'm saying...
If there's a penny to be made, it will happen.
(the Robert Downey Jr steampunk version, where he does just that in one scene)