07-May-1999 [Artur Marques]
Today [23:59]: #1) Technology is desirable; #2) RIO crypt
Technology is desirable - always!
While visiting South Korea [a monarchy], some days ago, the British royal family, expressed good and bad ideas about the Internet. Prince Philip told people about how concerned he was with pornographic webs... bla bla bla everyone has heard it before... but then he said something much more polemic: "not all technological developments are necessarily desirable".
That is WRONG. That is the attitude that caused so many witch hunting, since the dawn of Science. IMHO, every technological development IS desirable. Some uses of it, may not be. Take a car, for example. You can use it to drive yourself to work, but you can also use to it to kill people... The car itself is a wonderful thing; the things some people do with it, are not. This such a trivial matter, that many tech' british are feeling out of sync with Philip boy.
I bet you've already heard about the DIAMOND RIO MP3 player. It is a walkman sized hardware kit, that allows you to listen to MP3 without the need of a PC, of course. Many musical [$$$] interests got afraid of the RIO and tried *hard* to stop DIAMOND of selling it, without succeeding. RIO still sells, although there are better equipments for the job, right now, months after its launch.
Unfortunately, DIAMOND will use some crypto techniques that will prevent the copying of certain MP3 files. That is bad news. Many people insist on confusing copyright enforcement with freedom restrictions to the use of software programs and software data. These shortcuts will never solve the piracy problem - they will only increase the revenue of "big" pirates, the ones which will earn from finding the "way around"... The regular users, with no profit or harm in their mind, will be restricted on their use of technology. That sucks.