I didn’t visit Cyberport before. I like the idea of CyberPort but I dislike its current transportation linkage.
This morning I attended OpenDRM seminar with OAKA-mates at Cyberport, personally I am not quite interested to digital right, but I think DRM will enter mainstream in Hong Kong in the future with current discussion on copyright amendment bill. And I am interested to hear more on their development process on open-source project – ChillOut as their OpenDRM implementation.
Speakers presented their works from making DRM specification to implementing a set of open-source DRM java libraries. Speakers expressed importance of open-source software development to make successful adoption of DRM, which I found in the success of Linux movement.
And I found a number of common OSS development tools are used to help their development process, including Subversion, Eclipse and MediaWiki. I could not find others to show me these tools in the seminar, it is still a way for us to advocate others to use these tools.
In the Q&A session, one of audience asked a question – “will the software easier be easier hacked by hackers ?”, oh no, “hacker” again, although I understood he was asking about “will the software be easier cracked by crackers ?”.
IMHO, 1st of all, hacker should be a positive term, which means a computer programmer blah-blah-blah, and I think people should study the first paragraph for its definition from wikipedia. (But I would like to clarify that I am not worshiper of Richard Stallman, and my belief might be near Linus Torvald‘s, Eric Raymond‘s, etc… but I am serious in the difference between hacker and cracker after I learnt it)
And the 2nd is that this guy still doesn’t believe “open the source code” is no relationship with software security, it won’t let your software easier be cracked, and the truth is open-source software is easier to getting bug fixed from a larger number of software maintainers.
After the seminar, I had a lunch with Ben and Abel, and the lunch is seems to be Linux Cafe, oh, it should be Linux Lunch. Ha!
haha , it is also my first time to CyberPort. 😛
Just like what Richard Stallman said: “I expect that someone will find a way to produce unencrypted versions, and to upload and share them, so DRM will not entirely succeed, but that is no excuse for the system.)”
It is impossible to forbid people to create unencrypted copy. In fact, it doesn’t really need any “cracking” of system. Windows Platform allows people to burn a copy of music into an audio CD. People could convert them back into MP3 easily.
Unless the media is restricted to sell to who use a “trusted computing”. All secrets move into the hardware. But it is still breakable. It is similar to the case of PS2. The protection is cracked by solder a modchip on the circuit board. Yes, it is still be more secure. The draw back is more restriction on our “own” computer. It raises even more problems than DRM.
DRM is just a technology to increase the difficulty to share but can not 100% protect the content provider. However, media providers believe it is the way to go. It is very difficult to prohibit them. Personally, I also wish the legal download market can go into a correct way. But the current situation refused me to join; it is simply because I don’t have windows desktop. It is ridiculous that the purchased music can be played on a single platform only.
Therefore, in order to get Linux users be involved. Not be isolated from the legal download market controlled by DRM. The OpenDRM is the only way we could go. As Hong Kong has a number of MP3 manufacturers, how to encourage them to implement OpenDRM is what we could contribute. It is pity that no marketing material in the seminar could be used. And it needs 9 months more to wait for it to be an ISO standard.