Slashdot Mirror

Okay is it me or did the slashdot article not tell us who the defendants were?
Before we get all knee jerk-y and pissed, how do we know they are not genuine bootleggers being sued and instead of hackers like the DeCSS folk?
According to this C|NET article, they were advertising the software on their website as DVD cracking software...This Wired article names sites like krackdown.com and dvd-copy.com which sound like piracy sites to me. It seem they advertised the DeCSS software as DVD copying software. I expect this to be fodder for the DVD-CCA's lawyers next week.

I think that keeping your eyes on what is happening at colleges is the best way of keeping your eyes on trends that will soon be mainstream. One case of this was mp3s. The rampant use of them on college intranets was widespread 3 years ago. It seems just now this is being reported (Wired) .

Now we hear about other benefits of the big pipe. Those kids just keep moving the target further and further away for the private corps who are trying to satisfy the public - it is really great. If any large corporation really wanted to see what is going to be cool in a couple years (or months?!!?) they should employ (and listen to) a panel of college tech student. If they don't the students may just have to do it themselves.

Yeah.

Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative

by Christian de Duve, Nobel Laureate for biology/medicine 1974

An excellent starting point into the origins of life on Earth (considers possible seeding from extra-terrestrial sources as one of many other possible theories) for interested parties who did not major in science in school (or even for those who did). Easy to read with full explanations and lots of interesting bits.

I have more of an engineering background but am interested in science as a hobby. I thought I was pretty well versed in the origins of life issue. This book filled in a lot of gaps I did not even know were there.

I am not going to make an excerpt from the book because to start I would not be able to finish until I had reproduced the book here in its entirety. I picked up a hardback copy from Barnes and Noble for six bucks. You can get it through an inter-library loan if your local library does not have a copy.

I highly recommend tracking this book down and reading it. It will provide a framework of knowledge that will allow you to glance at the headline of the article at Wired and not give it a second thought i.e. you will recognize it as merely another example of bad science reporting.

I think, therefore ken_i_m

Guess what? Looks like at least one of the "virtual billboards" CBS put up over Times Square covered up the "astro-vision" which was showing ads for NBC -- and now NBC is "shocked and outraged" (i.e. pissed because somebody else did it first)! Suddenly Dan Rather is contrite. Oh brother.

Personally I think common sense should come in to play here: an individual is usually nither the press nor a corporation, and should not have the same protections/restrictions. And the internet shouldn't be allowed to become some political advertising free-for-all, lest we all be spammed with banner ads proclaiming "Vote Gore!" or pop-up windows advising us, "Get tough on Internet Porn with CyberCop and George W. Bush!". Oh, the humanity!

The problem is to determine whether any of these bodies did in fact carry life, and then to find out where life began if it did not originate on Earth.

There's only one thing that could give a solid (though not irrefutable) indication that Earth life originated on Mars: we go to Mars and we find a number of varieties of life, only one or two of which biochemically match the major categories found on Earth. Articles like the Wired piece are a waste of bits.
--

Well, try this:

Xerox tries new plan:
"sue instead of making new stuff"
But real artists ship.

Wired has an excellent article on this subject. It is a little old (Feb 1997) at this point, but as far as I know, still valid. Everyone should read this: The Great HDTV Swindle.

Here is a quick summary:

Conventional NTSC signals are analog. Frames are broadcast more or less as they are, and the timing signal is embedded in the carrier. DTV is Digital Television. By digitizing the signal, you can do things like compress it to save bandwidth, include program information, add additional data services, etc. HDTV is High Definition Television. It roughly doubles the number of vertical scan lines being broadcast, yielded a significantly better picture. It also allows different aspect ratios, so you don't have to clip or letterbox a movie to broadcast it.

Sounds real neat, right?

Not exactly. DTV compression allows HDTV to be broadcast in the roughly the same bandwidth as current TV channels. It also allows compression of NTSC signals. Rather then broadcasting HDTV in a full channel, a broadcaster can compress the NTSC signal, broadcast that using only one sixth of the channel, and lease the remaining bandwidth to wireless communications providers.

Given the limited initial demand for HDTV, what do you think the broadcasters are going to do? Waste all that bandwidth on a signal most are not going to use, or give us what we currently have and lots of extra money leasing their bandwidth? I know which one I would bet on.

So, if you think you are going to be seeing a better TV picture any time soon, think again. Except to spend lots of money to upgrade your equipment, but with zero reward.

Here's an excerpt from Wired 5.02, "The Great HDTV swindle":

The long wait for HDTV did create one positive benefit: technology matured, enabling television to go digital. An HDTV picture contains far more visual data than an old-style NTSC picture, because the screen is wider and the image is more detailed. At first no one could see a way of transmitting all this data through a traditional TV channel, which has a bandwidth of just 6 MHz. It was like trying to force four times as much water through an old, small pipe.

But if a picture can be digitized, it can be compressed. For instance, instead of transmitting all the pixels of a plain blue sky, you can send a code saying, "Paint the next 5,000 pixels blue." And if the sky doesn't change during a series of video frames, you can send a code saying, "Keep the sky the same as before." You can also use clever algorithms to average out color variations in ways that are almost imperceptible to the human eye. At the receiving end, a suitable new, improved, digital TV set can be smart enough to understand these coded instructions, decompress the signal, and turn it back into the original picture.

Meanwhile, digitized TV had some mind-boggling implications. If the huge amount of data in an HDTV transmission can be squeezed into one old-fashioned 6-MHz channel, consider what can be done to a low-quality NTSC picture if it, too, is digitized and compressed. It can be reduced to as little as 1 MHz, leaving 5 MHz of a traditional channel "spare."

It's not looking too good for people with trailing dash domains, but I feel if ICANN follows through on requiring the mass revocation of those domains, they should fix the "races.com" domain registration while they're at it.

Quote from ICANN webpage regarding the trailing hyphans:
http://www.icann.org/nsi/trailing-hyp hens.htm

"... They also provide that those registering domain names must agree to cancellation of the registration in the event of a registry or registrar mistake, and in the case of every one of the trailing-hyphen names the registering party did in fact have such an agreement."

So why hasn't "races.com" been revoked yet and the registration corrected either back to the original owner or the the correct owner John McLanahan???

In the case of "races.com", there was certainly a registrar mistake and the various parties (NSI Registry, NSI Registrar, Register.com) agree this to be true so when will it be corrected???

Or am I misreading the sentence from ICANN's website that states:
"They [the agreements] also provide that those registering domain names [Registrars] must agree to cancellation of the registration in the event of a registry or registrar mistake, ..."

Note the important word REGISTRAR!!!! So while some like NSI have claimed John McLanahan is SOL, it appears that ICANN is either not aware of the "races.com" situation or doesn't follow it's own rules of correcting such mistakes.

For a backgrounder on how "races.com" was lost, see this link:
http://www.wired.com/news/prin t/0,1294,32974,00.html

I can only hope ICANN, NSI, and/or Register.com do the right thing and restore the "races.com" domain back to the proper owner; and restore people's confidence in the domain name system. Imagine if "business.com" had been lost during a domain transfer...that's exactly what happened with "races.com"!!

It is worth reflecting on the fact that an Internet military power can be gained for extremely small amounts of money by countries that would otherwise not be able to attack/disrupt the more conventional military powers.

So now we have:

• The US military talking about it in a warfare sense [http://www.wired.com/news/p olitics/0,1283,33443,00.html]
• The US President talking about it a civil corps sense.
• And the NSA continuing to hoard its mindshare, feeds, and databases, in the spy sense.

My feeling is that all of this is good. It is better than just the news itself. It is very good that the US government has the foresight (gasp) in addressing these current and future problems.

In announcing the new suite Wednesday, Jobs said the company had looked at the fact that it owned proprietary software on both ends of a Web visit to the site. "We realized we could take unfair advantage of the fact," Jobs said.
The panel generally said the approach just made it more compelling to buy a Mac for consumers seeking Internet access, and that Apple was smart to leverage it.

I would have liked to have asked Woz what his take on this would be. We all know how much we love pages that need AOL or internet explorer or some other non-universal technology.

With Microsoft slowly going the route of open source (also this) (it's only disclosed source but it's a start), I wonder if this is a wise move or a fatal mistake. I only wish I had known about this in time.

From the wired article
BEIJING -- Software giant Microsoft Corp
has run into more bad publicity in China
with a newspaper reporting that its latest
Windows 2000 operating system will be
barred throughout the government.

Microsoft and Chinese officials on
Thursday denied the report, which
appeared in Wednesday's edition of the
Yangcheng Evening News.

What's more interesting is that MS is developing for OS X. How big a step is it from bsd-based operating system to linux? Not that much...

I'll nominate for Domain Name Bully WhatsHappenin.com for their silly lawsuit against QuePasa.com. The internet is NOT english only.

The Cluestick award should go to 2600 Magazine. When will they take down the "Free Kevin" crap? Not only did Mitnick ask for a bunch of the delays in his case, HE PLEAD GUILTY. Biggest media punt of the year.(puts on asbestos underwear)

I nominated for everything but Best Dressed... hmm... maybe Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee?
"This is the nineties. You don't just go around punching people. You have to say something cool first."

Doesn't Slashdot have the clout?

I did the same... but I didn't get blocked!
Surprise! I know I've tried once or twice with some of the more dubious links from Wired News and got blocked.
Maybe the filters really only block when they see naughty words...

Shortly after I had installed my SLS Linux ("Soft Landing
System"), I found a place where someone was
counting people running Linux.

Those numbers I found at this place called Linux Counter
gave me confidence and showed me, that I was not
alone.

From time to time I came back to look at the
numbers and the charts and the rising curves made
me laugh and fuled my wildest dreams about an
operating system that (n)ever was....

Harald T. Alvestrand is my unsung hero.
His Linux Counter provides an silent yet important
service for Linuxers since 1992 over all these years now.

He stands IMHO for all those other unsung heros,
who love the idea behind "free" software and have
contributed their share to its success.

Im therefore nominating this guy behind
the Linux Counter for /.s Unsung Hero Award.

Wired did a pretty good story about the current state of cold fusion not long ago. Interesting stuff here:
What if Cold Fusion is Real?

Windows 2000 will be known as "Classic Windows." Microsoft's newest OS will be "New Windows."

When people realize they liked Classic Windows better than New Windows, Microsoft will discontinue New Windows, keep Classic Windows for the diehards, and furnish a new OS based on Linux, shipping under a made-up name: BGsani.

Apparently they're enjoying the situation and getting ready to launch an online game. There's a lot of really enjoyable things in this article. It brought a smile to my face to see the chaos that they have planned. A new web site, games, a music CD. I'm liking it!

A friend of mine asked me if I was a bit obsessive about the etoys vs etoy issue.

No.

Try not to take the following quote out of context, I am not advocating anybodys demise, I am making a point about your business practices.

Robert Heinlein wrote in the "Notebooks of Lazurus Long": "Don't ever scare a small man, he will kill you! "

You are scaring me. I build websites for a living.

I am betting my life and that of my family, on my ability to make a living communicating my clients needs and desires to the web.

To that end, over and above what I must know to build and promote my customers sites effectively, to keep fresh as new technologies arrive, as my skills improve, devoting more time to litigation than to creation is not an option.

Your 'offer of settlement' is at best a delaying tactic, giving etoys time to recap some shareholder value by getting you off the radar screen.

Well it's not going to work.

You are not the first company to try to use checkbook litigation to have it your way, but I am devoting my time and energy to make you the last. Unlike a lot people that fill your email box with their thoughts, I am spreading word of your actions across the web in every venue I can find and can get access.

A number of people are calling for the resignation of Toby Lenk. That is a call for the board of directors to make.

The internet is unlike snug little publications, old boy networks, or the evening news. The internet offers immediacy and community. The majority of links below[1] all were created in less than thirty days since the TRO was issued.

If the internet is going to develop, having a place for all, including lawyers and toy companies, allowing everyone the ability to grow and prosper, we must not be hostage to anyones checkbook.

• An Immediate withdrawal of your lawsuit
• A Public Apology to EToy on Your Website Front Page to run for 60 days and a link to it thereafter as long as you remain on the internet.
• Monetary Compensation to Etoy in the amount of at least $300,000.00 ($10,000 a day for each day the etoy site is down.
• In Cash or Certified FundsNo Checks or Stock!!
• A contribution equal to 200% of the Above figure for a Fund to the National Arbitration Forum for resolving Domain Name Disputes, for those name holders without deep pockets.

This is MY Opinion. This does not constitute an offer to settle, nor does it in any way represent the views of any other than myself. This may help however.

They have enough control to "hold" the domain name so that none of the other registrars can issue it. From one of the previous Wired articles:

Network Solutions spokeswoman Sheryl Regan said the domain name registrar routinely shuts down contested domain names when court orders are issued.

"We put a domain name on hold so no one has access to it," Regan said.

And NSI is the incumbent registrar, which brings with it many advantages...

Heh heh. I brought the floppies. I made 60 copies using the many aol, ms office, and macintosh disks I've accumulated over the years. I was mentioned in the Wired article (yippee). I'll show up on the 14th with even more disks. Email me interesting articles that you want included. My address is stickman AT altavista DOT net. The courtroom is small, only about 50 seats. Let's fill it on the 14th! And the rest of the floor, and the lobby, and the street below. :)

Ryan Salsbury

Here's the other, from somewhat earlier today. Pretty flattering. :)

Here is the Wired article anouncing the denial.

--GnrcMan--

Check for a 'view for printing' or similarly-named link. In this case, it leads to:
http://www.wired.com/news/prin t/0,1294,32916,00.html
which is all on one page so you don't need to keep flipping.

Hi all. I just got back from the hearing in San Jose. There were about 35 of us in a courtroom with 56 seats. The dvd lawyers seemed quite suprised by the turnout. I brought a bag of 60 floppies which included decss, the source, the letter, and pointers to various online news articles (including /.). Everyone got a floppy (or three), including the dvd guys. The dvd lawyers got a few laughs when they requested that one of the floppies be entered in to evidence, SEALED. Apparently they didn't want copies of the floppy available from the county clerk, as that would surely bring about the ruination of the movie industry. Paper printouts were also circulated and were entered as evidence, again sealed.

The judge said almost nothing during the hearing once the procedural bits were taken care of. He'll send his ruling to the lawyers on both sides sometime this afternoon.

There were a couple reporters at the hearing. Chris Oakes from Wired showed up early and sat through the hearing. His story is here. He misspelled my name though, it's Salsbury. I also chatted for some length with Deborah Kong from the San Jose Mercury. I explained the difference between bit-for-bit copying and decryption and why decryption is not necessary for piracy. Her article will probably be in tomorrow's paper.
There was also a reporter from kcbs 740, I don't remember his name.

After dinner we had lunch at the Habana Cuba. Mmmm, bananas and sheep.

##############################
BTW: I forgot my bag of floppies and a blue jacket in the back of someone's car when we went to Habana. If you find it, please email me at stickman AT altavista DOT net. We can arrange a mutually convienent place to meet, like the hearing on the 14th.
##############################

Ryan

It looks like eToys.com is giving up their pointless fight

EToys Relents, Won't Press Suit

Rather than flaming you, I will merely suggest that you continue reading to page 2 of the article.

The reason for all of that it is a lawyer-repellant. Any company that gets caught with a Y2K bug that causes a loss of service is going to have a liability problem. And even if they don't, there is going to be an issue of comparison with similar products. Think of Y2K-compliance as a bullet item on glossy ads for a product. By a couple of months from now, all that is going to matter is that you avoided not having it. The companies that blew it are going to get beaten up pretty badly. Microsoft is taking a bit of a ribbing on Wired for getting the dates wrong on some documents. Arguably, those dates don't matter much. But it looks bad.

I think it's time to set the record straight on this Al Gore thing. Mr Gore does not, nor has he ever, claimed to invent the internet. What Al Gore claims (and rightly so) is that while he was in the senate he was influenced heavily by a report (see this for details)that made him believe in and become a major proponent of the internet. While in the senate he helped to pass a number of bills in support of ARPANET.

More info see:
Internet Pioneers
Wired News
The Slashdot story
This doesn't mean I'm voting for Gore btw, no political endorsements

Some general comments on this story: I don't think it's a well-done story, in that it only covers the last century; on the other hand it doesn't pretend to be the whole millenium but actually is just the century. I think they leave out lots of critical disasters, like the great depression, but put things that had almost no impact on societys (N-Rays??? Who cares?) They also leave out the invention of nuclear weapons, World War II and the Holocaust (How do you miss that?) and add things like wrong way corrigan, which are more humorous than they are true failures. All in all a halfhearted attempt, but not a bad read.

and

Case Hinges on Reverse Hack

and

Case Hinges on Reverse Hack

Here is an article that Wired just posted on this, that mentions this slashdot discussion.

And here's the letter I sent to John Hoy of the DVD CCA:

To: john.hoy@lmicp.com

I've recently heard that the DVD CCA has decided to attack people with lawsuits
who decide to post on their website the code used to decrypt DVDs.

I believe this is an extremely misguided action by the CCA that will not
acheive any intended purpose. DeCSS is typically used by users of operating
systems where DVD is not officially supported to be able to make use of DVD on
those systems. If anything, the added support for those systems will increase
the sales and popularity of DVD as a media.

This is not a piracy issue. DVD writeable disks are prohibitively expensive,
and the 5+GB size of a typical DVD movie makes PC-based storage impractical if
not impossible for most people.

Further, the use of a lawsuit to try to suppress the free exchange of
information and ideas between people is ludicrous in the context of the
Internet and will not work. For every site that is suppressed, many more will
be created with identical info. If you don't believe me on this point, I invite
you to view a discussion on this topic at slashdot.org:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/12/27/1942 16&mode=thread
Of the ~900 people that have posted comments on this topic, a substantial
portion, if not a majority, will be copying the "prohibited" code and/or
posting it on other websites. Others, like myself, who have not posted comments
but are following the discussion, will similarly feel compelled to oppose this
wrongful action.

It is my hope that the CCA realizes the futility of this type of harassment of
individuals working to provide DVD usability for alternative operating systems
and instead works with us to provide DVD support, which will only benefit DVD
as a whole.

Story at Wired
Story at Zdnet
Story at Cnet
I thought Wired and ZDNet were good. Cnet only seemed interested in the DVD CCA had to say. As usual ZDNet has a place to post responses. Go to it!

Wired posted a story on December 22nd.
Link: http://www.wired.com/ news/politics/0%2C1283%2C33225%2C00.html.

I have to admit that when I first heard about this, I strongly suspected a hoax. Unfortunately, it appears that I was wrong and that there are people in government who really don't know what the First Ammendment is.

As some people have speculated, this is from the recent January edition of WIRED. Some people thought that this was fictious invention, but this, along with the other items in this section of WIRED are to be released in the future. The article states that this device will be avaliable in 2005. The keyboard reciever will be avaliable for $50, and the fignernail set (of 10, obviously) will be sold for $20.

If you ask me though, this looks like one of those things back in the 50's... "we'll be living on the moon by the year 2000...."

Wired is running a story on this as well. See http://www.wired.com/news/p olitics/0,1283,33254,00.html. Nothing terribly new from the other online stories but it looks like they tried to reach the idiots at Leonardo Finance to no eval.

Wired Which someone mentioned. I did a search on altavista, google, hotbot, ask, webcrawler, excite and newsreal. Not one other mention of this story. I can't believe that only wired picked this up.
I also won't believe the web site for it's word.

Sigh, I don't know why I bother with this..

1. Sorry working from memory here. Maybe it was a ratio where they needed to get to 90% of the theoretical maximum possible. Anyway this is more or less antique technology in this area. See this page for a synopsis of important experiments.

2. See near bottom of this page .

3. Allegedly - until published and peer reviewed. However, the work was convincing enough to get conservative investors coughing up 25 million.

4. It is a theory with alleged (see above) experimental confirmation repeated by independent labs. A slightly different situation.

5. I am too tired and irritated by your attitude to provide specific counter examples. However, there is one story I came across that summarizes what I see happening in this field. The Wright Brothers were ignored or denounced as frauds by 'authorities' for 5 years in America even though they could be seen to be flying regularly by Long Island commuters. They only got attention from institutions like the US DOD after they moved to Europe and became an instant press sensation. (sorry no links).

This is pretty standard for CNN, unfortunately. Most everything in their "Insurgency on the Internet" is fluff.

This looks very much as if they just sat down with eToys and wrote down everything that eToys said to write down. Further, RTMark doesn't really do much to make a case against eToys. (Though, to be fair, they may have tried, and CNN simply failed to insert that part.)

I guess this is symptomatic of the larger problem in media, in which nobody's willing to present a story with more than one side. The easiest side for CNN is to make eToys look like the good guys, and the evil hackers to be the bad guys.

I'm not sure that this can be turned around, at least not through CNN. Surely, though, we can get other news sources (Wired, of course) to do fair coverage of this. But CNN is part of a large group of media outlets that just aren't going to be representing the interests of a small political-arts-action group when their opponent is a large e-commerce business that advertises on their networks.

Well, here's the Wired story on the eToys thing... and they say supporters are calling for.. "virtual riots"...

The Cryptozilla project compiled SSLeay into Mozilla. The whole process took 15 hours. Their site seems to be down at the moment but here's a Wired article about it.

A relevant October 99 article from that bastion of net rapture, Wired. Refreshingly critical from a mag that is usually so swept up in the brave new future.

Covers a company making GPS tracking claims similar to the ADSX announcement.

Anatomy of a Spam

Having read both articles, I need more evidence that this ADSX technology is viable in the near term. otherwise this announcement is just more vaporware.

I find it telling how recently this post and the one on saving /. from Natalie Portman/Trolls have come up together--both are the result of Too Much Information needing to be distilled down. /. turned to moderators. About.com is all about that, too.

I first learned the term "reintermediation" from an article by Nicholas Negroponte in WIRED magazine. In another article by him (which I can't find right now) he says that while some people believe that librarians will be out of jobs, he predicts that there will be a new form of librarian. The old librarian could help you find what book you were looking for in the library. The new librarian will help you find the content you need from the 'net.

As a personal aside, I'm shocked and dismayed that search engines don't index database queries--I *just* finished rolling out my new personal web site which is totally database-driven, and thorhoughly meant to be indexed. Now you're telling me that because all my URLs look like this "content.asp?nodeid=dejavu" that search engines won't find all the delicious content I'm creating? Botheration!

I suppose *a* workaround here is to create an application which traverses the site and builds some mirrored heirarchy of it in static pages for the search engine to index, which uses JavaScript to bounce the user to the *right* page once they get there.

*sigh*

They've been around for a while. Ron Guilmette created wpoison a while back. There's even a Wired story about it.

Unfortunately, wpoison appears to have since disappeared, although Ron never mentioned this to me.


Interestingly, I found out all this information doing a simple Google search on "wpoison". ;-)

Grossmans discussion of sportsmanship also suffers from a very one-sided use of information. If hed been bothered to do any real research (and use it responsibly as academic practice would dictate) he would have found out that the first military group to use Doom for training were using it primarily for its team building capabilities - these Marines already knew how to shoot, Doom was brought in to teach group skills. Doom Goes to War Wired 5.04, 1997, 114+ http://www.wired.com/5.04/marinedoom/).-- Quote from Stomped's follow-up to Grossman interview

Barnett looks like he's explained this one before. "Marine Doom, as you saw, is not just a twitch game. The way you get through a Marine Doom scenario and survive is through teamwork and listening to your fire team leader and doing what you're supposed to...." "It's about repetitive decision making," Snyder swiftly interjects. Snyder's habitual deference - even off-duty, he calls his friends sir - doesn't always extend to allowing Barnett to finish his sentences. "We're trying to get these things ingrained by doing them over and over, with variations. A real firefight is not a good time to explore new ideas." -- quote from Wired article