This Week In Techdirt History: October 1st – 7th
from the stuff-that-happened dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2012, as copyright trolls continued their war on open wi-fi, rightsholders in the EU sought new storage media levies for the cloud and US ISPs were gearing up to enact their “six strikes” plan, we were trying to kill the myth that the constitution guarantees copyright. Some people at least seemed to get it, with a high-profile EU Parliament Committee proposing the ability to create non-copyrighted content, a DOJ lawyer exploring the fact that copyright needs to change in the internet age, and Psy mega-amplifying his Gangnam Style fame by allowing anyone to use the song and video for anything.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2007, it was expected and then confirmed that the RIAA would win its lawsuit against Jammie Thomas — even as we speculated that investors would soon force the RIAA to abandon its aggressive lawsuit strategy. In that trial, a Sony-BMG exec made some pretty absurd statements, around the same time that Viacom’s CEO gave a speech demonstrating that the company is wrong about almost everything related to the internet and modern media, and the president of the ESA was calling for lots more DRM. But at least one group of creators was experimenting: Radiohead announced the pay-what-you-want plans for their album In Rainbows.
Fifteen Years Ago
Even back in 2001 this week, Hollywood already had its hooks in the government (and was working hard on getting them into colleges too). The music industry was heavily on the offensive and sending misguided musicians to complain to the government about downloading. As Napster creator Shawn Fanning was giving interviews about the service’s demise (and even selling life story rights to MTV), the next generation of file sharing tools was starting to wonder if the “Betamax doctrine” would ever prove effective as a defense. Meanwhile, Congress was still considering an onerous and extreme DRM bill (which as we’ll see in a few weeks was eventually killed, surprisingly, by…. Senator Patrick Leahy, who is more recently known for introducing a terrible copyright bill).
Comments on “This Week In Techdirt History: October 1st – 7th”
Twenty years ago
After last week, smoothly heating it up… It was twenty years ago, today…
Up-To-Date September 28 – October 4, 1997
Re: Twenty years ago
Also 20 years ago:
Gordon Moore tells us Moore’s Law runs out of steam in 2017.
…So 2017’s almost over, what have we got?
Re: Re:
Clock speeds have stopped rising and we are now resorting to
more cores, memory and storage capacities to maintain progress.
Todays PCs and devices will be good enough for awhile. so watch
for prices to start dropping instead.
Re: Re: Re: Moore's law
Prices have been dropping. The Desktop PC has been adequate (and going obsolete, as it moves onto my laptop and my phone) for multiple years. Everyone is wondering what the fuss is all about with the latest iPhone.
Now we also have the internet of insecure THINGS! lol
Seriously, we need to turn to the fundamentals of computing: How do you secure a computation when the hardware and software is unreliable? What does security mean in the face of the total inability to keep secrets, where anyone can trivially copy anything?
Re: Re: Re:2 Moore's law
There’s some evidence of this starting to happen among newer IoT chipmakers – indeed it may prove to be a key way that some fresh silicon startups can shake up the industry a little bit. We can only hope.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3227044/internet-of-things/why-chipmakers-are-taking-iot-security-into-their-own-hands.html
Re: Re: Re: Clock speeds have stopped rising ...
Not that Moore’s Law ever said anything about clock speeds …
Re: Re: Re:2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Consequences_and_limitations
The number of transistors on a chip are directly affected by
scaling and that scaling is the main factor in clock speeds.
Shrinking of features is slowing their advances and clock
speed advances are inevitably slowing in lock-step.
Thus, clock speeds can’t be separated from Moore’s Law and
have been following it all along from the ’60s.
Re: Re: Twenty years ago
Synchronized chickens.
Multiple cores and multi-threaded software are now the norm. We’ve gotten really good at making those chickens work together.
OFF TOPIC IMPORTANT
Evacuate SEOUL NOW.