FolkWolf.Net

David Wong doesn't think that games like Command and Conquer and Starcraft are realistic enough.

This seems to be my week for putting geeks up on pedestals. My last entry was JWZ, this one talks about Cory Doctorow

Cory gives the most concise definition of why DRM doesn't work I've ever heard, and if you know anything about cryptography, you'll see why DRM falls down.

But there's the rub. Alice wants Bob to buy Pirates of the Caribbean from her. Bob will only buy Pirates of the Caribbean if he can descramble the CSS-encrypted VOB -- video object -- on his DVD player. Otherwise, the disc is only useful to Bob as a drinks-coaster. So Alice has to provide Bob -- the attacker -- with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext.

There's a lot of good stuff in there about why DRM doesn't work, as well as a lot of information about why DRM ultimately won't work.Go read it

JWZ is one of the few people in the world who know a lot about computers and the internet, and "Content" He missed out on Linux, but that's OK, we love him anyway. He runs a nightclub now in the SOMA neighbourhood of SF. It's a v. cool place, and he REALLY tries to hype local musicians, and music he likes. It's not much of the music I like (More like the music Gorester likes) but anyone who's willing to go out on a limb like he did deserves many kudos.

The preceding paragraph is entirely beside the point, which is about the music industry, a subject I'm very interested in for many reasons, two of the biggest are my girlfriend and my room-mate. The record industry is in a fucked up state right now, and nothing displays that more humourously than this quote that JWZ heard Sister Machine Gun say on his stage

UNIX Geeks and pizza, together at last

Only UNIX geeks would take a perfectly good web-enabled pizza ordering system, and make a complicated, arcane command line utility out of it...

I'm so proud!