[rescue] my NPR interview is up!

Greg A. Woods rescue at sunhelp.org
Tue Jul 31 12:26:54 CDT 2001


[ On Tuesday, July 31, 2001 at 06:02:29 (-0600), james at foonly.com wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] my NPR interview is up!
>
> Sure it does.  The client must be free in order for the content to become
> pervasive.  Hiding the code for the client lowers (but certainly does not
> eliminate) the risk of reverse engineering both the client and server,
> which would lead to a loss of control.  Real derives their money from
> licensing the encoders and server side code, as well as advertising which
> is enforced by the client.

Except in the end it's going to kill them.  Someone might make some
money, but nobody wins in the end.

In the end you don't have to completely reverse engineer their silly
client and/or codec either, at least not if all you want to do is to
convert their proprietary format into something you can use -- you just
run the whole mess in a black box like xnest, or on some headless
machine in a closet (i.e. so that you don't even see their stupid
attempt at foisting advertising at you), and write a device driver hook
that looks enough like the real /dev/audio and/or display frame buffer
to capture the data.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>     <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>



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