Technophile Monkey

Disclaimer: This information is presented to help you do two things: Pull a backup of your purchased ebooks and get Adobe’s crippled ePub files to interoperate. These files are incapable of interoperating with anything in their crippled form, they only work on a very small set of ePub reader applications and devices, therefore it’s a good idea to uncripple them so you can use any ePub reader you like to view them. With the programs offered here, you can turn the smelly evil zombie death ePubs you bought (i.e. the DRM-crippled ones) into glorious rainbow-farting free ePubs. They’ll still end in .epub, but they will have their shackles removed.

The programs offered here are a result of reverse engineering. Reverse-engineering in order to maintain interoperability is perfectly fine in most jurisdictions, but I’m not a lawyer, so don’t take my advice.

But back to topic. These steps are only valid for Windows, I don’t have the OS X equivalents of the tools, but some googling can reveal them.

• Install an interpreter for the Python programming language. Use the 32-bit version regardless of your operating system!
• Install PyCrypto.
• Install Adobe Digital Editions. Heck, if you’ve bought an ePub, you should already have Digital Editions. Just make sure your purchased books show up in there. Start Adobe Digital Editions. Open a page in one of your purchased books (this may be important so that the decrypter can get to the session key).
• Download ineptkey_v43.pyw. Run it by double-clicking. This will generate an adeptkey.der file. This is your decryption key.
• Download ineptepub and run it by double-clicking on it. This should let you choose a .der file and the crippled .epub file you want to decrypt. On the third line, choose a location and filename to save the decrypted .epub file to.
• Done. You have given your ebook a little freedom. The file is finally more useful than the output of cat /dev/urandom > foo.epub.

Decrypting your ebookis useful in many cases: To make extra backup copies of your library that are sure to work even after Adobe goes out of business, to read your purchased books on an ebook reader that can’t display the crippled version of ePub, or in case Adobe ever tries anything funny and locks you out of the library you’ve paid cash for.

Disclaimer 2: I am not the author of these scripts. I don’t know who is, they’re scattered all over the net and coming from various people who have done all kinds of modifications to them. I thank all of them for helping us fight an idea that is defective by design.

Here’s a very insightful comment on a recent Slashdot article asking for the best eBook reader:

dpbsmith writes: I’ve been taught a lesson. I am now the proud owner of over $300 worth of useless bits. They are encrypted and keyed to a serial-numbered hardware device which bit the dust last year. In theory, this is no problem, as the books and Gemstar’s record of my ownership remains on the servers. All I need to do is buy a new device, call Gemstar customer service, have them reencode my books with the new device serial number, and download them again. Except that Gemstar doesn’t exist, Gemstar customer service doesn’t exist, and the servers were shut down long ago.

Because of another limitation of DRM–I couldn’t share my books with my wife even if she had her own Rocket eBook reader, which she didn’t, she didn’t know that I had purchased an e-copy for $15, and bought her own paper copy for $15. She can still read her copy. She will still be able to read it twenty years from now. She can lend it to a friend. She can sell it on eBay. Scarcely five years after purchase, I cannot read mine and will never be able to read it again.

The same is true today with the Kindle. The Kindle only supports a handful of formats, and none of them are open. Perversely, the Sony readers mostly support open formats like ePub today. Sony used to be the king of crippled, proprietary products and formats, but with their eBook readers (Sony PRS-505, etc.) they seem to have opened up. Who knows why, but it’s a good thing to have happened. A good thing for Mr. and Mrs. Customer, at least.

So before you buy a Kindle, ask yourself the question: Do I want my reader to natively support non-DRM-crippled books? Do I want my reader to still be able to display the books I’ve bought five years down the line? Then maybe the Kindle is not the right choice. Right now, there are ways to get the Kindle to do this as well, but Amazon can issue an update at any time that removes your ability to do so. Other manufacturers are instead adding more and more open formats to their readers. You may think the ~ $100-$200 lower price on the Kindle may justify the loss of freedom, but I think you won’t be happy with that decision.

If you want to find out what DRM is all about, check out Defective By Design.

In the world of software, we sometimes find geeky wordplay such as recurive acronyms. The best-known recursive acronym is surely found in the GNU project, because GNU stands for “GNU’s not UNIX”.

leihs, one of the projects I lead, used to be a pure equipment booking system without any inventory-related functions. There are numerous linguistic problems in translating German booking-related terms to English, because English distinguishes between borrowing and lending whereas German only knows the concept of “Ausleihe”, which is used both for borrowing and for lending. So in German, it made sense to call leihs leihs — it was an Ausleihsystem.

Now you English-speaking people can’t really follow the beauty (ahem) of that, and thus when leihs became international, we had to think up a better definition of the name. The result is perhaps the world’s first ever bilingual recursive acronym:

• leihs is an easy inventory handling system
• leihs ist ein einfaches Inventarhandhabungssystem

Amazing, huh?

Roman Haefeli and band recorded a short Ubuntu song yesterday.

They lyrics are simple, so sing along: “Ubuntu – no Windows” Well, you gotta get the timing right as well, which might be harder.

Hugo Roy wrote an excellent post over at the FSFE fellowship blogs. While he says that there’s nothing new in what he’s writing, I’ll put another spin on it and say that some things can’t be repeated often enough. Such as software freedom, an issue that most people don’t care about and/or don’t understand yet. But once they run into enough of the problems that non-free software causes, they will care.

Hugo uses a nice comparison to democracy — while not everyone would run for an election, most people would probably still agree that the fact that they could and that democracy exists is a pretty comfortable thing.

Here’s an excerpt:

Anyone can run for an election, but it does not mean that everyone will. Because not everyone has the capacity or the will to become a politician. This being said, would you say that Democracy does not matter because you do not want to be in politics? I guess most people would not say that.

It’s the same thing with Free Software. Anyone can use, share, study and improve the program. But the fact that you will not do that, does not mean that it’s not important to you. It’s important for the whole system. And the more important the system becomes, the more valuable is that freedom.

Read the rest at Hugo’s blog.

Another huge disappointment from the US Patent and Trademark Office: They let Microsoft patent a feature that has been part of UNIX systems since almost 30 years (Original source: Groklaw). sudo allows you to execute a program with the privileges of the superuser (root, admin etc.). Also, remember that su (e.g. via su -c) has this functionality built in as well, just without the beautiful configuration options.

This should once again demonstrate why software patents are a dangerous, stupid thing.

In the very near future, your typical way of consuming entertainment could be so much improved, but only if Big Content stops barking up the wrong tree and works with us instead of against us.

It’s Saturday night and you have a two hour blank spot in your evening schedule. There’s a good film in theaters right now, but you don’t feel like going out and would much rather cuddle on the sofa and watch the same film with your significant other. What do you do today? You grab the thing off RapidShare or some BitTorrent tracker. The quality isn’t all that (it’s a telesync or a cam release, ewww), but you got it nearly for free and you didn’t need to move your butt anywhere.

How could the entertainment industry improve this situation and turn this into cash? By offering the same film to you at home, in Full HD, to be streamed to your TV for 10% more than the movie ticket would cost. Hey, you’d save that much by not having to buy drinks, popcorn and parking. Also, as opposed to the RapidShare solution, you could start watching right away and, let’s be generous and realistic, finish anytime in the following 7 days. Huge profit for the industry, and they can make even more if they use e.g. BitTorrent to spread content distribution onto all connected cable boxes of all subscribers of the service. That way they put some of the cost of scaling onto the customer instead of having to buy their own bandwidth. So their profits improve from two sides: Not having to maintain the cinema distribution chain for that particular view and not having to pay for all their own bandwidth as customers pay a significant amount.

This isn’t bullshit: Look at any decent HD torrent today and you can usually find a solid amount of seeders. My line at home isn’t particularly fat (10 Mbit/s), but BitTorrent can saturate it, and that means I get a good 8 GB HD rip in a bunch of hours.

Back to the future vision. Later on, when the film is out on Blu-Ray, you could buy a downloadable copy for e.g. 30% less than what the BD version costs. There’s no DRM on it, but that’s fine because the industry saves money by having to pump less funds into maintaining the phyiscal disc supply chain. They piss off the channel partners, but hey, life is tough. If you want to hear complaints about changing markets making jobs obsolete, talk to a blacksmith.

The same works for series or games: The earlier you want them, the more you pay. The later you buy, the more restrictions (e.g. DRM) are removed. With games you may even get bonus packages such as downloadable content included free with your purchase if you choose to buy later, e.g. a year after release. And while we’re mentioning DRM, it could of course be removed completely once there is enough bandwidth to stream HD movies or game assets on demand. You’d never even receive a fully copy of the film, just the instant you’re viewing at the time. If there’s no file in the customer’s hands, there’s no pressure to have DRM.

Now you’ll call me naive, you’ll say that the studios will never have enough common sense for such a simplistic solution, and that they don’t have balls big enough to go without DRM or put some part of the distribution system onto customers’ devices. At the moment you’re right. But in 10 years, we’ll be getting our entertainment in a way like I described, and all these problems will have been miraculously solved.

These are ideas that are perfectly possible to implement right now, today. Just like MP3 was the ‘current’ thing, not the future thing, for us techies 10 years ago. This means the entertainment industry will have caught up with our ideas in a decade. The question is whether these ideas, or the big label entertainment industry itself, are still relevant then. It’s for them alone to decide, and they have to decide today.

The physical retail channel for entertainment will go away sometime soon, butts all over the world will be more and more reluctant to move out of their comfortable sofa grooves, so the entertainment industry better wake up to these facts, stop playing the victim and start planning now.

Photo CC-By Randy Son Of Robert

It seems that Microsoft wanted to use some Free Software in their Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool, which they have now removed from their website to investigate the license violation. Taking FOSS code would be fine, no one would stop Microsoft from doing this if they would abide by the terms of the GNU General Public License under which the original code was published. In fact, I’d welcome it if Microsoft would stop their own silly suite of “open source” software licenses and just develop under the GNU GPL like they do for their Hyper-V drivers, but MS seems to be on some sort of holy war against the GPL.

Anyhow. So Microsoft took GPL code and incorporated it in their own CD downloader/writing utility (what the heck did the tool do in the first place?). This is still fine. But then they refused to give out the source to their modifications and they changed the license to be a more restrictive one. You cannot do that with Free Software under the GPL! You must license the code you took under the same terms as it was licensed to you.

I’m looking forward to see how this will play out. We’d all welcome Microsoft to the Free Software field, but my guess is that they wouldn’t be able to compete anymore if their software were Free Software. Also, they ought to have enough lawyers to understand the GPL, so perhaps the team behind the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool should ask one next time they take some Free Software code.

Update: Microsoft have admitted their mistake and are now providing the source code to the tool, as the license demands. Congratulations for solving this the right way! And enjoy trying out the GPL. Maybe you’d like to shift some more projects to that license?

Matthias Ettrich, the founder of the KDE project was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (German Federal Cross of Merit) today for founding the project that created the Free Software K desktop environment. Specifically, the award was given “in recognition of his work spurring innovation and spreading knowledge for the common good”.

It’s good to see Free Software recognized on a national level — the Bundesverdienstkreuz is the only decoration given by Germany on a national level. KDE is a kickass desktop environment, certainly the most configurable and powerful one on any platform. Now let’s just fix a few more bugs and it’s ready to dominate the world.

Congratulations, Matthias

Some large Swiss publishers in the educational sector got together to put up this website:

http://fair-kopieren.ch/

(http://fair-kopieren.ch/

(http://blog.allmend.ch/2009/11/04/lehrer-muessen-keine-diebe-sein-offene-inhalte-fuer-die-schulen-anstatt-schutz-der-verlage/

(