Analog thoughts

[Morlock Elloi]

It seems that time has come to do some serious interface rethinking.

The advent of WIPO/DMCA ideology and it's steady infiltration into actual
technology is starting to render traditional protection-busting schemes
ineffective. It is or will soon become illegal and also technically difficult
to meddle with hardware/software itself. The demise of general-purpose PC will
certainly not help.


The last frontier is human interface - eyes, ears and fingers (for the time
being and due to failure of www.fufme.com to attract capital these are the only
ones.) All content control breaks at this point - if there is a way to see or
hear, then analog capture cannot be foiled.

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about quality of analog capture of
picture and sound. That is to be expected when even dumb headphones are
marketed as "digital" to stupefied public. My experience is that digitizing
audio using standard mac h/w gives quality better than that of average .mp3
stream. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with going through analog stage
with high quality components. And as long as there are wires going into
speaker's amps, this will be doable. And after that hi-fi mic next to quality
speaker will also do the job.

Right now it all seems rather straightforward - even inferior peecee users
should be able to set up things so that audio is digitized while being played
and then converted to .mp3 or whatever.

What I am interested in is how could this be prevented ? What would be the most
effective way to disable analog audio recording and subsequent digitizing ?
What are the signs to look for ? Is there open-source software for digitizing ?

And on the legal side, how much spin would be required to make analog recording
illegal under DMCA ?

Thoughts ?



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