Aboriginal Archive Uses New DRM 182
ianare writes "An application that gives fresh new meaning to 'digital rights management' has been pioneered by Aboriginal Australians. It relies on a user's profile to control access to a multimedia archive. The need to create profiles based on a user's name, age, sex and standing within their community comes from traditions over what can and cannot be viewed. For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families. These requirements threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a traditional sense, but also about how people would access it depending on their gender, their relationship to other people, and where they were situated."
Err, DRM? (Score:2, Insightful)
If TFA (which went 'splat' on me when I tried to reach it) is implying that the files need DRM to solve what is essentially an administration problem (user & group permissions), then something's fscked. Otherwise, methinks the summary is more than just a little misleading, no?
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How is this DRM? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this DRM? (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends on how they assembled it. If it's some sort of self-contained website-on-a-box, then yeah, it's probably a local DB (MySQL?) and local PHP with perms based on the profile info.
OTOH, if they rigged it as one big fat binary, then the access controls locked into the binary is similar in concept (though nowhere near as complete as true DRM which looks for a key, IMHO).
Users *want* the rules enforced (Score:3, Informative)
That was my reaction, but they call it a "website that's not online". However, from the sounds of it, the users probably don't own the computers, so I would still call it access control.
If it is DRM, itt appears to have a major advantage of most systems: the users want it to enforce its rules.
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Quite right.
What the article describes is the reaction of an individual to tabu, and has almost nothing to do with DRM as we know it (i.e., as a way to prevent individuals from distributing material in breach of legally established copyright).
Tabu is when a person, for reasons of cultural norms, if forbidden from doing something, such as viewing a picturee of a deceased relative, or watching a ritual, and the penalty for breaking tabu is either self-loathing or is a punishment imposed by peers.
In othe
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Access control - Sensible way to keep data secure and allow straightforward heirarchies of access (read only, write/modify/delete, execute).
DRM - Batshit insane coked up record company exec spin on access control containing nutbag crazy ideas (read it sometimes, don't copy it even though you can read it, self destruct in five minutes, install rootkit to spy on you, etc etc). Defective by design.
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This system clearly bricks the content not intended for the current user, so it's DRM.
not your ordinary DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
So this is simply a website with user management. Not everybody is allowed to see everything. This is different from DRM as Microsoft advocates it, where people would not be able to save these pages and images unencrypted onto their machines. Because, you know, they might mail them to somebody of the opposite sex!
It's highly unlikely that this website really relies on complicated DRM schemes (which would require Vista).
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Exactly. I think that if there is an off-line aspect to it then either a custom application that only allows those verified to access/download images OR gpg and a ring of trust as a solution more an
Re:not your ordinary DRM (Score:5, Informative)
I know some Koori's, that's how first Australian's (the politically correct term in Australia for Aboriginals) refer to themselves.
Actually the Aboriginal people of the area known as New South Wales call themselves Koori, the people of Queensland call themselves Murri, the South Australian's are Nunga, WA far west (around Perth) are Nunya, whilst in the Top End (Darwin Region) there are Larrakia, Tiwi, Mirar and Yolgnu, People of Central Australia call themselves Arrente, Marla etc. Whereas I am a Balanda (in the local language).
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It also turns out that calling someone a 'black cunt' is considered offensive in most languages around here. So only use 'Koori' if you know you can.
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I know about it because I work in an IT arena that supports Aboriginal organisations.
I guess the average Australian woulnt know about this stuff as most Australian Aboriginal communities are loathe to share their culture because of the 'secret men's/women's business' aspect.
Not DRM at all. (Score:2)
Think about every non-DRM'd song you've ever bought...
Yep. Case in point. People who have bought that song have access to it. People who haven't, don't. Access control -- but it's un-DRM'd.
However, complicated DRM schemes do not require Vista.
Easily hacked? (Score:2)
Re:Easily hacked? (Score:5, Funny)
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From the BBC News article [bbc.co.uk]: It asks every person who logs in for their name, age, sex and standing within their community.. Sounds like it's voluntary from that description, like those "Enter your date of birth" dropdowns that 'prove' your age.
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Re:Easily hacked? (Score:5, Informative)
-nB
Images of deceased persons (Score:4, Interesting)
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That's very interesting. Do they do this for images of actors pretending to be deceased, or for images of actors who are deceased? Or both?
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Re:Easily hacked? (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider it like the 127.0.0.1 goatse.ch line in your /etc/hosts file.
Re:Easily hacked? (Score:4, Funny)
Why, I do believe you have come across the simplest explanation of the system's motivation that a slashdotter would understand.
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Get the parent to 5 - Insightful asap please.
Before complaining consider _why_ this was done (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yawn.
So how long do you suppose it would take them to make separate profiles as each gender, as a member of every major "community"?
the restrictions also allows you the visitor to better understand the culture
Concealing information never leads to better information. It leads to tunnel-vision.
The sooner we get over our societally-imposed hangups, whether that mean sex or drugs or na
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Suffice it to say that all cultures have information access restrictions. Some are different from yours.
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old world traditions and new world tech (Score:2)
Now instead of getting random users to see goatse, users will be trying to get specific people to view a pic of their now-dead grandma hosted on flickr.
Most of the traditions we have in a non-network-connected world were created and exist because of barriers that now have much less meaning. While I commend them for holding their traditions, it seems a bit misplaced.
First off, people online are going to make friends and connections based on personalities and interests, not physical proximity to their tribal
SURPRISE!!!! (Score:2)
Not user/admin access rights (Score:3, Insightful)
DRM will only let the person whose profile is signed in view the image, whether it's emailed or whatever. It's a very different thing.
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Not an uncommon issue for archivists (Score:5, Interesting)
I still think my favorite example was a living history project - the researchers involved had been recording traditional stories. One of them was an explanatory myth about why it snows. The problem was that there was a strong tradition requiring that the story be told only when there is snow on the ground. There's a doozy of an access control problem, unless you take the cheap way out and declare that there is always snow on the ground somewhere.
Talk about behind the times (Score:2)
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Australian Aboriginese are (Score:2, Interesting)
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Yes, a life of marginalization, backwards social mores, lack of medicine and wealth, and no religious tolerance sounds like a grand time.
I find the whole idealization and worship of tribal peoples to be a western fetish. Idealizing them in some fantasy might be a nice psychological crutch but in reality its not
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Quite right (Score:2)
When he came back for a visit, many years later, he revealed that he had never taken out Australian citizenship. When we asked why he explained something on the lines of "Australians are wonderful people, but the country is run by a load of white complete bastards who treat them like shit, and I refuse to vote for them."
The other replies to the parent have many misconceptions. First, it wasn't t
licensing, on DRM (Score:2)
Regarding the term DRM, it does not really apply to this in the sense of embedding permissions within a file, and only allowing 'approved' devices for opening (i.e. music DRM like aacs/wma). It is an access permissions system using PHP/MySQL, similar to many others in use on the web or internally. However I felt the application was novel and interesting enough to warrant discussion, an
Putting this in a pornography context... (Score:2)
already done (Score:2, Informative)
Misdirected Energy (Score:2)
In that case, of course, no one ever claimed that Jews in New York were a poor sub-stratum. Given the problems confronted by the [insert PC
Re:once again (Score:5, Insightful)
Given your comment, I'm wondering... (Score:3, Interesting)
Can't they respect their own traditions without imposing technologically enforced access controls? What do they do when someone uses hard-copy information, or, to take an example from the article, a man viewing woman's rituals?
What is the point of building an access control system like this?
-- Terry
Re:Given your comment, I'm wondering... (Score:5, Insightful)
You look at an example of why someone wants an access control system like this and you still have to ask?
Re:Given your comment, I'm wondering... (Score:4, Insightful)
to prevent accidents? (Score:5, Informative)
It seems odd to you, but it's also how they want to live. They're free to leave where they live (and many do), and those that stay want to live the traditional way.
technology isn't culture (Score:2)
Apparently you're an idiot, though.
Re:technology isn't culture (Score:5, Insightful)
For an interesting story with a similar theme, I suggest this Wired article [wired.com] from '99.
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I know I shouldn't be, but I'm still mildly surprised by the sheer number of slashdotters with no class, and no ability to envision a view of the world or way of living other than their own.
Re:to prevent accidents? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:to prevent accidents? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I think that Larry Craig learned a lot in that airport restroom!
Fallacious is what that is. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yeah, not like in our culture - where we don't need such stuff to enforce our tradition of , e.g.,keeping our kids away from pornography, horror etc.:
"CIPA requires schools and libraries using e-rate discounts to operate 'a technology protection measure with respect to any of its computers with Internet access that protects against access through such computers to visual depictions that are obscene, child p
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Can't they respect their own traditions without imposing technologically enforced access controls? What do they do when someone uses hard-copy information, or, to take an example from the article, a man viewing woman's rituals?
What is the point of building an access control system like this?
As I understood it, its not about keeping members of their culture from viewing what they shouldn't. It's about allowing you the random slashdotter from viewing their sacred rituals.
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It's not the point, yet. Here's a bet: Within a few years, members of this community will find reasons for accessing the information that is "forbidden" to them, and the efforts to remove the DRM will begin. There will be some aboriginal scholar, or teacher, or 14 year old aboriginal hacker who decides enough is enough and it's time for the information to be free. Soon, no more DRM.
Digital data has a tendenc
Re:Given your comment, I'm wondering... (Score:4, Insightful)
If they make the decision to do that, it will be because they have also made the decision to leave the community.
The mores make the community, not the other way around.
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Cultures that don't allow individual choices are slave cultures. Just because they've got tradition and superstition wrapped around it, that doesn't mean it's right in any way.
Re:Given your comment, I'm wondering... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:once again (Score:5, Insightful)
So, assuming you have an S/O, you wouldn't mind if there were YouTube videos of you doing the linen fandango with him/her? For that matter, why do you even bother to wear clothing outdoors when the temperature is warm?
Sounds unrelated, but it isn't once you dig deeper...
See, there are, at base, some things which any given existing culture likes to keep secret. Sometimes it's simple stuff like sex, sometimes it's complex stuff like not viewing your deceased relatives for fear that their ghost will come in the night and tear up your house.
Just because someone holds the beliefs that they shouldn't view the rituals of the opposite gender, or that they shouldn't eyeball videos of "hot cheating amateur couples!" on a website, doesn't mean they're supposed to go all Aboriginal or Amish in their lifestyle. And just because you think it's silly doesn't mean that they cannot and/or shouldn't self-censor as individuals or as a community. Odds are very good that this Aboriginal resource DB was rigged by request from the community itself, so why the hullabaloo?
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Jingoism and bigotry posing as rational smug superiority. Nothing more.
Re:once again (Score:5, Informative)
I'd say ignorance even.
The reason why this is important, is due to the critical need for anthropologists to win the trust of many of these ancient tribes to study the practices so we can learn a bit more about how hunter gatherer societies organise. Back in the earlier days of Anthropologists studying Aboriginal tribes, the Aboriginals, knowing "whitefulla" had no real ability to use the dances and rituals in the "magical" way Aboriginal religions see them, they freely cooperated and would show the rituals etc. However a series of incidents, where the rituals where shown on TV and then seen by neighboring tribes, thus unleashing "curses" or whatever, led to most of these tribes stopping from trusting anthropologists to respect the conditions of the cooperation. This particularly occurs with gender specific rituals. "womens business" rituals are not to be seen by men (white men included), and unless the anthropologist can guarantee this, she won't be shown the ritual. But oftentimes she cant, and so anthropology never gets to study it.
Systems like this, where the community gets to decide the 'rules' of accessing the multimedia (a bit like creative commons even) means that the Anthropologist can finally win the trust of the tribe to do the studies needed to piece together the mysteries of traditional Aboriginal life.
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You don't go to your neighbor's house and ask to observe or join in their supper so you can learn about their cooking and dining techniques to compare to your own. You invite your neighbors over for dinner. And they might invite you over as well, but a polite host doesn't expect it.
Who cares if this stuff is lost to the ages. If THEY want to document it, they're free to. Nobody
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The question is not whether or not the information would be useful. Undoubtedly, it would be. The question is whether we have the right to demand its recording. And I would say, no, and especially not under false pretenses. The proper way to go about it is to invite our neighbors to review our research into our own culture, and try to impress upon them the benefits of a permanent record. Then, if they decide to record themselves or invit
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There's one important distinction here.
There is a huge difference between "secret" and "private". What you do when you're sitting on the toilet or between the sheets with your SO is no secret, but it is private.
But the other important distinction here is that the Aboriginal database is consensual, much like flagging "inappropriate content". It's to protect you from accidentally seeing something that you don't wan
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There is a huge difference between "secret" and "private". What you do when you're sitting on the toilet or between the sheets with your SO is no secret, but it is private.
On the surface, that sounds correct... but it's a subtlety at best, IMHO. Someone wanting to keep their sex life away from the public at large is really no different than someone wanting to keep their religious (or other) rituals from being viewed by folks who probably don't want to see or know about it (like parents keeping their nocturnal activities away from the kids, or not really wanting to know that grandma and grandpa still get jiggy on occasion). The motivations are the same - be it a naked coupl
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It's something that comes up a lot in computer science. Stuff that's "private" in a module/class/whatever is not for clients to access. But it's usually no "secret"; you wouldn't cryptographically protect it, for example.
Absolutely. Just like I'm pretty eager not to see most of my friends have se
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"For that matter, why do you even bother to wear clothing outdoors when the temperature is warm?"
Becasue I'll get arrested. I should be able to walk out of my house naked, but people stuck with beliefs that should have been left behind with the middle ages have made it taboo.
And I do understand they are related.
"some things which any given existing culture likes to keep secret."
Yes, but as long as you have the means for that i
We're respecting religion here now? (Score:2)
Sure, it's not completely fair to judge the validity of beliefs if we're not Aboriginal or have much knowledge of them, mind you, that doesn't stop most Slashdotters from bagging out Christianity despite not knowing shit about it beyond some rhetoric about spaghetti monsters and abortion clinics being blown up. Hell, I've even read someone on slashdot [slashdot.org] being modded to +5 for blaming the holocaust on Christianity even though the Nazis killed Dietrich Bonhoeffer, chased out Karl Barth and kept the young John P
You're kidding, right? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're kidding, right? The material concerned was created by the Aboriginal people, is chiefly of concern to them, and in no way impacts on anyone who doesn't use the service. WhoTF do you think you are to tell them that what they hold sacred is "superstition mumbo-jumba", or that "the days of secret ceremonies are coming to and end"!?
This is news on
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I always laugh when some geek tries to present themselves as being a completely rational person.
Sorry, but they're human, and humans are emotional mammals first and foremost; rationality is just a useful trick we've learned, but our brains are still fundamentally as emotional -- and thus irrational -- as ever. A person truly striving to be rational would accept this fact. However someone who wants to present themselves as being superior must del
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These aren't all secret ceremonies either. There are cultural issues around seeing images of the dead, or speaking about them. It may seem quaint to you, but it's a very real thing to them. An equivalent mi
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One just needs to look around and see the secret ceremonies of all types are coming to an end. 25 years from now they will be quaint.
I sincerely doubt that. A group of women performing an aboriginal ritual is no different than a group of Freemasons performing theirs, or Mormons getting married in a Temple ritual for that matter.
Sure, outsiders (like myself in all three cases) may have a somewhat good idea of what goes on during these rituals, and even see televised re-enactments of one of them courtesy of the History/Discovery/NatGeo Channels. That said, I don't know that what I've heard or seen regarding them is the actual deal or
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really, the days of secret ceremonies are coming to and end.
On whose say so? The geek's?
There are times when I think that the geek is the last of the imperialists. Believing that every cultural barrier must fall to his "white man's" notion of perfection.
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really, the days of secret ceremonies are coming to and end.
Evidently not! Seems like some cultures just don't want to be assimilated.
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There are cultures wherein if someone dies then you arn't allowed to use their name anymore.
Not only that, but you arn't allowed to use words that *sound* like their name.
Such cultures have languages in which the lexicon changes very rapidly as people introduce new words all the time to replace sound-alikes.
Sometimes its not hard to see why languages and traditions become extinct as people realise that they don't really *have* to maintain this kind of rubbish (yes call me insensitive. But real
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No, you're a fucking moron.
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Note to the primitives: y'all lost. Suck it. Suck. It. Hard.
This isn't flamebait, merely an expression of one man's frustration from having to deal with the pathetic primitives that can't accept the fact that the world has evolved past the sillier forms of supernaturalism.
I'd use the term "holier than thou" to describe your attitude, but I fear that the phrase alludes to what you likely term as superstition. On the other hand, "STFU you intolerant, elitist, arrogant asshead", while certainly applicable, just seems a bit too harsh.
A bit of a quandary, really...
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The world?
Outside of the USA which is rife with that form of silly supernaturalism called 'christianity', of course.
You were referring mainly to Europe?
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For one thing, I'm not in Europe but it was hard to imagine where on earth was being suggested by the OP. Not east asia, certainly not middle east nor south america...
For another, I've known a lot of christians and I doubt strongly that sharia would necessarily be any worse than what 'christian crazies' could dream u
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Note to the primitives: y'all lost. Suck it. Suck. It. Hard.
How civilized, how enlightened you are! Please explain to us why we should follow your wittily expressed contempt.
This isn't flamebait, merely an expression of one man's frustration from having to deal with the pathetic primitives that can't accept the fact that the world has evolved past the sillier forms of supernaturalism.
That which to us seems perfectly obvious will some day be revealed as silly superstition.
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Like what? Please, great prophet, what truth will be revealed to be false? Have your god(s) spoken to you?
*Sigh* yer a fricken' troll. You don't have to be a prophet to see that, just over 14 years old. By definition, we don't know what things we're idiots about yet, though life is being debunked daily. The process hasn't stopped, for some of us, anyway. You write like the arrogant juvie who has it all figured out.
Many things labelled "morals" will change, things like the 'traditional' family (a recent invention) for instance. Here's a guess at a few things that we'll think are silly in the future: the descr