EXE Info 0.1 is now available from the EXE Info web page. EXE Info is a tool that displays information about executable files, including their MD5 checksums and the MD5 checksums of each section of the executable. If you have any questions, comments, bug reports, or feature requests, please add a comment to this post or contact me directly. For more about EXE Info, see the EXE Info web page.
Bill C-61 is the Canadian government’s latest attempt to change the Copyright Act of Canada. The bill affects all Canadians which is why it’s very important that Canadians know about it and understand the parts that affect them. Here are some resources that I strongly encourage you to view:
- Bill C-61 summary with references to relevant parts of the bill
- Michael Geist’s “A Week in the Life of the Canadian DMCA” – Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 – shows how the bill makes ordinary activities illegal
- Jim Prentice interview with on-screen commentary debunking some of Prentice’s statements about what will be legal under the bill and what won’t (original MP3 from CBC)
In a nutshell, Bill C-61 will make many common and legitimate consumer activities, such as transferring a DVD to a video iPod or transferring a copy-protected CD to an MP3 player, illegal. For these reasons, you should contact your local Member of Parliament to express your concern. The best way to do this is in person, although mailing a letter (no postage required) is also an option. For some ideas, you may wish to read the Bill C-61 petition I wrote. You can also contact me for suggestions. The government will probably try to pass Bill C-61 soon after Parliament resumes on September 15 so it is imperative that you speak with your MP now.
An even greater threat to society than the negative impact on consumer rights, I believe, is the control that Bill C-61 gives to the big media companies, which will ultimately stifle innovation and competition. The rights granted by C-61 to big media companies are equivalent to granting Ford the right to say who is allowed to sell seat covers to be used in Ford vehicles and how much they have to pay Ford for Ford’s permission. I will make a post about this consequence of C-61 soon. In the meantime, you can read these articles which explain the problem to some degree: Red Hat founder concerned over Bill C-61, Why Are TPMs Still Popular?, and DVD-CCA Sues to Suppress Kaleidescape Product.
To learn more about Bill C-61 or to get involved in informing people of its consequences, I suggest you refer to these:
- Michael Geist’s blog
- Russell McOrmond’s blog
- Fair Copyright for Canada (participating)
- Bill C-61 full text with internal links for easy referencing (also available from the Government of Canada web site without links but in both French and English)
I purchased a pair of Netgear WGT634U wireless routers a couple years ago with the intent of installing a custom operating system and seeing what they could do. Recently I attempted to configure one of them to monitor bandwidth usage for our house. I ran into several issues, which I will outline along with their solutions in hopes that it will save others some time in the future.
Continue reading ‘OpenWRT and serial on the Netgear WGT634U’
The European Commission’s adoption of a copyright term extension proposal yesterday (covered by Ars Technica, Slashdot, and Digital Copyright Canada) provides an eerie reminder that, despite a plethora of evidence that such extensions are a bad idea, governing bodies continue to actively extend copyright terms. To determine why they are a bad idea, it is important to separate the two ways that copyright terms can be extended: by extending the terms of existing works (retroactive term extension) and by extending the terms of works that have yet to be made. Note that the EC’s copyright term extension includes both.
The purpose of copyright is to promote the creation of literary and artistic works. Because a retroactive term extension applies to works that have already been created, it cannot possibly promote the creation of new works. Furthermore, it reduces the number of works in the public domain, impeding the ability of new authors to build on the past. Not only is a retroactive term extension not helpful, it in fact hurts society.
Extending the copyright term for future works may provide some additional incentive to create new works. However, because copyright terms are already quite long (life of the author plus 50+ years in most jurisdictions), the net present value of the copyright term extension (the additional years for which the author holds exclusive rights) is very low. This is clearly laid out by a group of economists in their argument against copyright term extensions to the Supreme Court of the United States. Appendix B (page 23) shows that the net present value of copyright term extension is less than 2% of the existing net present value without term extensions, even assuming a low interest rate. And as with a retroactive term extension, extending the term for future works would impede creators’ ability to build on past works by reducing the number of works in the public domain. This detriment to the public domain far outweighs the negligible increase in creators’ revenue from a copyright term extension on future works.
Given all this, why would anyone implement a copyright term extension? Primarily it is a way for governing bodies to pacify creators by claiming that they will earn more money while economists have shown that such increases are negligible. It is my view that governing bodies that implement a copyright term extension have not adequately considered the negative impacts of such legislation.
You can now view the University of Waterloo’s Gazette feature article on copyright from May 16, 1979, on my web site. I became interested in this article when I first saw it on the Today in UW history web page. The page describes Canada’s copyright law as “antiquated”, which many would agree holds true today. Hopefully you will find this article useful for analyzing how copyright law was in the past and how it has adapted to meet new technologies. This article is especially relevant now with a new copyright bill likely to be tabled within the next 4 weeks (or maybe not). Those interested in doing something about Canadian copyright law should join a group like Waterloo Students for the Information Commons or Digital Copyright Canada.
(This post is for content owners, such as recording and publishing companies and independent artists, as well as for consumers. While it is aimed primarily at content owners because they are ultimately the people who decide how content is distributed, it is important that consumers also read it so they know how to facilitate the changes I propose.)
The Internet and its widespread availability to the general population (not yet true in many countries, but hopefully changing soon) have made distributing digital content to large numbers of people very easy. Books, academic journals, music, videos and many other creative works can be transferred from one computer to many others in a matter of minutes or often just seconds. However, most of that content is not allowed to be transmitted in that way. Why not? What can content owners and consumers do about it?
Continue reading ‘Content owners: Use web-based distribution now’
I am a copyright stickler. I try to discourage infringement of copyright laws whenever possible. As a result, my wishes often directly clash with the wishes of others that I socialize with. I suspect other copyright sticklers can relate. Though I wish more people cared about not infringing copyright, it’s difficult to change people’s minds on this issue so I won’t attempt to do that here. Rather, I will outline a situation where I felt uncomfortable discouraging copyright infringement in hopes that it will show you the social influences that make such a situation possible and how you can avoid encouraging such a situation.
Continue reading ‘A call for sensitivity to copyright sticklers’
When games run in Wine switch to full screen, Wine chooses the first available refresh rate for the requested resolution by default. This can be problematic because the first refresh rate is often the lowest. For example, Wine may choose 60 Hz when 85 Hz is available for the same resolution because 60 Hz appears first in the list of display modes. On CRTs, 60 Hz is quite flickery so it hurts the eyes after a while.
Why does Wine do this? Because Windows does it, or at least it used to. More recent versions of Windows default to 75 Hz if it’s available and then try other modes if 75 Hz is not available. In any case, a default resolution is selected that the user may want to change. Microsoft added a feature to dxdiag that lets the user specify an override refresh rate which is used instead of the default. This feature is documented in KB315614 (main article), KB230002, and KB217348. However, Wine did not include this feature…until now.
I wrote a patch to implement the above dxdiag functionality, which allows Wine users to specify an override refresh rate. The patch has been implemented in the most recent version of Wine (0.9.58), which is available in the Wine Ubuntu repositories, Debian unstable, and the other usual download locations. Instructions on how to use it are available on the UsefulRegistryKeys wiki page. The key to look for is “ForceRefreshRate” in HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftDirectDraw.
The commit information for the patch, including a diff, is available on the wine-cvs list.
I finally decided to do something about StarCraft’s CPU hogging, which, among other things, causes my battery to drain much faster than it should when I’m away from an outlet. The result is StarCraft Power Saver, a tool that patches StarCraft to use less CPU time. For full details, including download links and a summary of the problem, see the StarCraft Power Saver web page. Any public questions or concerns about the tool can be posted as a comment to this blog entry.
A number of people have posted to the OLPC Community Support mailing list asking which Secure Digital (SD) cards work with the OLPC XO laptop. I happened to have several SD cards around so I benchmarked these cards with the XO laptop and also with an ASUS Eee PC. For further comparison, I also tested all of the cards with a Transcend Multi-Card Reader M3 on my Dell Latitude D800.
Continue reading ‘OLPC XO and ASUS Eee PC SD card performance’
