"PCFriendly" doublespeak

[miriam_e]

I just spent hours yesterday and this morning trying to work out why I couldn't get some of my DVDs to play. They are Region-encoded for this region. (Actually, Australian law has ruled that region-encoding is not applicable in Australia -- it is not illegal to defeat it here, but the spineless worms stopped short of making it illegal to force encoding on the Australians.) I simply couldn't get Linux to recognise the DVD. I know I used to play it on MSWindows, so I booted one of my older machines into MSWIndows. It refused to play the DVD too, though it at least recognised that it was a DVD. This had me puzzled till I noticed a program in the root directory of the DVD, called "PCFriendly". It seems that, in truly Orwellian style, this program lets the movie studio make the disk PC unfriendly. After installing the program, which requires you fill out your details (I always fill out such forms with gibberish), suddenly I was able to access and play the DVD... on my MSWindows machine, but still not on my Linux machine.

I decided to do a little web research on this "PCFriendly" program to find out more about it... and was horrified. It tracks the user, keeping details of all DVD titles played from then on, passing on details through the internet, giving all the user's details away (or more likely selling them) to advertisers and other shadowy organisations so that the user's habits are reported on and they can be targetted with advertisements.

So what this has forced me to do is rip the DVD so that I can watch the content on my main, fast computer which is Linux-only. I almost never use Windows nowadays and I only have it dual boot on an old, slow machine.

This makes me wonder what will happen after Windows goes bankrupt and nobody has copies of the OS anymore? These DVDs will become unwatchable, just as so many of my old documents made with "protected" programs are now unusable.

These people in the film industry are truly disgusting. One wonders how long they will continue to get away with pulling such con-tricks and inconveniencing their customers.

If you want to read more about PCFriendly:
http://www.interhack.net/pubs/pcfriendly/

And now I should get back to writing the last couple of chapters of my story. Slackness, thy name is Miriam.

Comments

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I am one of the few people I know who has often read through the "agreements" that everybody simply clicks through. Many of them basically say "You agree to be bound by these conditions, but we aren't bound by anything, moreover we can change the conditions anytime we want without telling you, and you'll still be bound by them."

I have no problem with sharing my info if I can guarantee it won't be used to hurt me or others, but too many groups in society have great irrational fear and hatred of other perfectly innocuous groups. Just by being gay, or having a different skin color, or having a disability, or having particular parents, or even for no reason at all (e.g. the witch burnings -- there are no real witches) is enough to inflict pain and death upon you or, at the very least, to severely limit your opportunities.

I've heard people pooh-pooh the desire for privacy, saying that they have nothing to hide. But it turns out that privacy is more important to our wellbeing than most people realise. Many animals live short, stressed lives if they don't get some privacy, and many simply curl up and die without it.

Yes. I've been having some very depressing thoughts on compatible technologies lately. I'm trying to design a small, energy efficient, desktop computer that fits into your pocket, but compatibility issues are a real nightmare.