Build Date: Sun Feb 15 00:30:09 2026 UTC
I live in a tiny, mysterious third-world country that is very far away and filled with meat golems. It is called 'Colorado'.
-- Tjames Madison
Better Go Buy Yourself Some Super-Big Hard Drives
2000-12-22 14:18:52
Y'know, some days it just hurts to be a freedom fighter, man. You wake up thinking that you're just about to turn the corner on FREEDOM, and then some asswipe industry cartel puts a WWF leg-lock on your neck. Fuck, it's depressing.
Case in fucking point: the fabulous Register online magazine reports that a group of unmitigatedly evil bastardos known by the cryptic secret-tong-society name of the 4C Entity have proposed extending the copy protection found in DVDs to hard drives. NOT ONLY would they put this technology into their own stupid hard drives, but it would become part of the ATA standard, so that ALL NEW HARD DRIVES will have copy protection installed!
This means that you would be UNABLE to copy or store files that have been marked as protected -- like music, text, etc. EVEN where such file copying is legal and in your rights as "fair use," such as for making backup archival copies. You'd still be fucking screwed! I mean, the whole thing is such an invasive violation of your rights as a user that it makes my head spin.
Doesn't it just seem kind of strange that companies like this come up with asshole proposals to protect CORPORATE BASTARDOS "intellectual property rights" against YOU, but not to protect YOUR rights against corporate bastardos? Don't forget that Sony-Columbia and NBC are -not- paying for your hard drive. YOU are paying for your hard drive. WHY should you have to plunk down your HARD-EARNED SMASH to get treated like a criminal by your own stupid hardware? FUCK THAT.
I say that HE WHO PAYS THE PIPER should get to CALL THE TUNE. And it's pretty goddamned obvious that the people of the the world are not calling for an encore revival round of "Fuck You and Your Rights, Dipshit Consumer."
My recommendations to everyone who cares about LIBERTY: go buy yourself a goodly amount of hard drives with lots and lots of gigadoodles of space on them, right now! The 4C Entity (I shiver as I write that) says that this copy protection shit will be in new ATA drives by NEXT SUMMER. So you need to bank up on FREE HARDWARE right away. Get a few pre-ban hard drives, put them in your closet, and stretch them out for a few years. It should go without saying that you should avoid any drives from the 4C Entity themselves (IBM, Toshiba, Intel and Matsushita), who are quite obviously running-dog enemies of freedom that don't deserve one teeny-weeny speck of your money. FuX0rs!
Hey, while you're at it: put some Freenet on your machine, too. Now, more than before, we need some goddamned freedom. I dunno how well this copy protection is going to work against Freenet. Maybe not that well.
Oh, and also: go read this article on The Register, and click through on some of their ads. They have done a YEOMAN'S JOB on this excellent exclusive and have proved themselves to be true Professional Journalists. Beaujolais to them! They deserve some click-through cash.
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