Slashdot Mirror
Hacker Stockholders Unite!
MeanGene writes, "Hacker News Network published an article that calls upon the hackers (broadly speaking) to exercise their views through a shareholder proxy to influence big business - for the DVD cause in particular. I like the conclusion: Hack life!"
Depends on the company but my common stock gives me rights to vote or rather proxy-vote for both SUNW and LU
Shareholder activists indeed did not sway IBM. If I recall correctly, there were some large state pension funds (like California's state employee retirement fund) weighing in with millions of shares and not getting their agendas met.
But I think a tactic like this might be good for education, if not change. The world of intellectual property is in upheaval right now and this may be a way to get our position (Open Standards) on the public agenda.
Besides we'd probably get eaten alive by capital gains tax.
Oh, brother. Look: suppose I make $100,000 in the market tomorrow. I'll pay $28,000 in short term capital gains tax, leaving me with $72,000. I pay capital gains tax only when I make money. Think about it. It's like saying: "I better not take that $10,000 per month consulting job because the income tax will be too much."
I suggest a libertarian technology activism group. Maybe something like Geeks Requiring IT Self-Regulation... I guess that would be GRITS for shorts^H. Heh.
;^p
Sorry, couldn't resist.
To play an audio CD, I put the CD in, start the CD player program, sound comes out of the speakers.
The player program does not read the raw data off the CD and dump it in a file, which I then have to run through another program to play it - that is what a CD ripper does.
I really can't think of a simpler way to play a DVD on Linux than 'insert DVD, run player program'.
Saxo Grammaticus
i understand the goal but do you all think that there are there enough rich people willing to do it?
Why not lobby some of these linux IPO's to pony up some money for the cause. They have made a boatload of money off GPL'd code and have a interest in this. I'm sure sure they could set up a war chest to defend the linux cause and wack some of these greedy bullys with a big multimillion dollar stick. Someone should setup a web based petition that we could all sign. I would love to see the response of some of these newly rich linux IPO's to such a suggestion.
Natalie Nortman
Patalie Portman
Patalie Nortman
Natalie Portman
Thank You.
TrollKing
Yeah it's called an investment club. Together with many others you can buy large quantities of shares in companies.
how'd he find your 411? WHOIS and an altavista search. wow. what a hacker... sheesh. idiots.
RMS wrote a parable about students who couldn't afford to do their homework because they couldn't afford the licenses to read their textbooks. Every day the future looks more like RMS's vision.
Some lawyers already do make a good living doing exactly this and have been for many years. Look up Milberg Weiss.
As far as the "buy some stock, ask a question, sell the stock the next day", that's going to affect the price of the stock ... ummm ... about as much as a random /. comment will affect the release date of linux kernel 2.4.
this is the type of stuff that Microsoft® & minions Really excel at, however much their actual code stinks; they gots the best legal and marketing that money can buy, and makes a lot of mulah to buy even more legal, financial and marketing - quality code is almost irrelevant in appealing to the masses. I still think people buy msft for the strangest reasons, they just likes billionairs, wishes they was one, and tinks dey's on "So you wants to be a Billionaire?" and reboot when the man says to. Is that your final answer?
In a nutshell: (1) save up some money, $1000 or more. (If you can't save money then get a decent job when you get out of school and spend less money than you earn). (2) Take a few hours down at your local bookstore with books by Peter Lynch, the Gardner brothers, whatever you can understand. (3) Read web sites like The Motley Fool.
For certain investments, like buying an IPO stock at the sweetheart IPO price, or buying into limited partnerships, then you need special qualification. But if you want to buy common stock in the market, there is no income or asset requirement. It's like buying a computer, a stereo, or a car: if you can pay for it, you can buy it.
Well you do have to be 18 years old, if you aren't 18 yet, do some research and be ready on your 18th birthday. You don't have to be a US Resident either: lots of US brokers will open accounts for foreign nationals.
I'm more than willing to chip in some cash if enough people are doing this. I don't consider myself a hacker or anything, I mean, I can't code at all, I barely know any Linux. I do however recognize that the MPAA needs to be stopped. Putting in $20 to help stop them, especially since I get some stock out of the deal, that's perfectly ok with me.
If you had read the article, you would have known that it said to pool your stocks with other hackers.
I wish there were a Linux hardware manufacturing company. Just imagine all the things we could do if someone out there had a couple good engineers, a business-savvy CEO (not a programmer or engineer who founded the company), and a license to use, say, one of IBM's fabs.
There are companies like that (what VA Linux is, btw? Or Cobalt)...
Even a friend of mine has one: ttp://www.linuxmedialabs.com
Paul Bunyk
I think it's time to stop thinking about the CPU as the center of hardware. We have lots of CPU suppliers, fairly open access to instruction sets, and so on.
How about an FHF modem? There's a hardware category that needs more Open Source intellectual property!
The problem, though, is that where software has a trivial manufacturing cost, hardware costs a lot of $$$ to manufacture. Someone has to put up that $$$ and that someone usually wants their costs back and then some. IMHO that's why no FHF has ever gotten off the ground.
As an successful investor in the area of arbitrage, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that this kind of tactic has been tried before and has failed miserably. For example, back when South Africa was under apartheid, there were many groups that bought stock in companies such as IBM in an attempt to pursuade the company to cease operations in a country actively engaged in oppression. IBM took the position that it's sole obligation was to make money, not to engage in politics or moral issues. They contended that it was the responsibilty of the U.S. to make policy. IBM further contended that it would cease South African operations if instructed to by the government.
Here's the point. Unless you can convince the stock holders that an open DVD policy will make more money for the stock holders, any attempt to change corporate policy will fail.
If you really want to hack the system, you must prove that the current proprietary policy does not maximize profits.
AOL!
...as in, I would also be very willing to donate/invest the tiny fraction of my income that'd be needed to a trust fund such as this. If their credentials are good. Perhaps an offshoot of the EFF would be of more use than trying to get the EFF proper to engage in this kind of thing?
Er, why not simply short against the box?
For the investing-impaired, "shorting against the box" involves simultaneously owning a stock, and borrowing the same amount of stock and selling it.
Why would one want to do this. Lets say it's near the end of the year, and your stock has had a big run up. You want to sell, and take a profit, but then you'd be taxed THIS year, instead of waiting a few days, and selling NEXT year. If you short the same amount of stock, you are now market-neutral: any further gain on one side is offset by an equal loss on the other side. You can now unroll both positions NEXT year, deferring taxes for one year.
Now, this used to work, in Canada, several years ago. Tax laws may have changed there to render this tactic inneffective, and I'm pretty sure that profits have to be declared when risk is eliminated in the U.S. (though I'm NOT a tax expert), so the technique may not be effective from a tax perspective any more. It would be an effective means of turning short-term capital gains, into long-term ones, otherwise.
But, in this case, since we are not concerned about tax issues (we aren't interested in profit, but are interested in stemming losses), it may be a useful strategy.
A few points though:
1) Market risk is eliminated only so long as one holds both the long and short positions - there may be SOME time lag in buying the stock and immediately shorting against the box. Simultaneously on the selling side.
2) One may be required to return the "borrowed" stock, thus necessitating a sale of the stock one has long earlier than desireable. This occurs in the unlikely scenario of the person from whom the stock is borrowed wishing to sell. Usually brokerages can replace the borrowed stock without involving the short seller, but in extreme cases, they may not have enough in their inventory and short sellers will be asked to return what they have borrowed (such sellers are picked at random by the brokerage). This ALMOST NEVER happens.
(It tends to happen if the stock has a big run-up: owners want to sell at the WORST possible time for short sellers, who now have to buy back the stock (if they haven't shorted against the box) for much more than they sold it, locking in their losses.)
3) I don't know if shareholders that are simultaneously long and short the same amount can participate in shareholder meetings. Anyone?
4) There are brokerage costs involved on the buying and selling side. They've just doubled since you do both simultaneously, twice.
- RSH (posting anon.)
P.S. I'd support and contribute to such a non-profit club, provided the directors were known open-source advocates.
I moderate you up to a 5; First Post.
Congratulations on getting First Post. I cannot express my full expression of happiness towards you. Keep up the good work!
Thanks,
TrollKing
IPOs are a whole different aspect of investing. You can be locked out of buying shares of the IPO if you aren't experienced or you don't have enough money to invest. This doesn't mean you can't buy shares after the stock's IPO and get voting rights then.
I moderate you down to a -2; Losah.
You sir, are a losah. You did not get first post, yet you claimed you had done so. I am extremely disappointed in you.
Regards,
TrollKing
I admit "hacking" is cool but when it becomes malicious or starts breaking the laws its time to pull the plug.
This isn't about the kid breaking any laws, it's about him going against a megacorp's wishes and getting beaten down for it.
The megacorp had no intention of servicing Linux (or other unixen) with products, so 'we' wrote our own. Now they claim that it is a threat to their income.
If everyone had your view, then Linus Torvalds would be working as some little known programmer on a nice little unknown project somewhere, and we'd all be using either Windows, or outdated Unixes (on PCs anyways). Society can kiss my hiney, as long as people do what they like and don't hurt others doing it.
--
AC
Well, your credit card charge proves they ARE listening. And, the EFF FAQ specifically mentions that they do not send out glossy membership material to keep costs down. Personally, I think an email thanks WOULD be nice, but it really isn't necessary, and they did warn you about what you get, and don't get. - RSH (posting anon.) Disclaimer: I am a recent (post DeCSS fiasco) EFF supporter to the tune of $100/year.
that's not a bad idea. just take out an ad (not classifieds - a real ad) and just publish the source. i've thought about doing that. wonder how much it costs?
Generally, to short stock "naked". you need to either (a) own the stock you are shorting, or (b) put up about 150-200% of the value in cash in case the stock rises. Usually, (a) means that the same brokerage has to be involved. However, sometimes, of you have the actually stock certificates, you can use them as colateral. - RSH
there are some stories posted that are nearly meaningless and furthermore have roughly 450 comments most of which are equally meaningless, repetetive, and boring. what is the point of trolling slashdot if it is already a cruel parody of itself, a troll on the internet as it were?
I moderate down to a -1; Smeghead.
Crackers and Hackers are not at all the same. I put crackers in my soup, yet I would not dare of thinking to place a hacker in my soup. Think twice before posting such garb.
Regards,
TrollKing
All these hackers are losers living in their parent's basement and working at taco bell. They can't have enough money to buy stock! They don't have enough money to take a girl on a date, if they could get one to go out with them.
I moderate you down to -1
Why not stick hot grits down all the shareholder's pants?
Troll King
If I understand this article right, we're supposed to hurt the MPAA by INVESTING in its member companies?
/. boycott would never work, but I don't see how raising their stock options is supposed to work better. I'm hunting for an analogy here, but can't think of one.
Uh.. ok.
Now I agree a
gel ym no saw taht tiz eguh a deppop tsuj I
I HAVE NEVER BEEN DONE BY ROYALTY.
I moderate you down to a -13; Fucker.
You took my fucking nickname, bitch.
Regards,
TrollKing
I moderate you down to a -pi; Requiem.
Gah.. I will sick Natalie Portman after you.
Fear me,
TrollKing
Learn English, fool. It's "You're" not "Your",
...friggin tard.
big business has nuclear weapons. people have little slingshots with pebbles in them. sometimes big business gets an eye poked out, but frankly i dont give a shit. your rant on 'intent' is silly. you have no proof of the intent of the defendant. id like to see your sorry ass in court trying to prove his mental state in this case. furthermore, mr "read the letter of the law", you might notice that the law has provided for no distinction between 'intent to circumvent for illegal use' and 'intent to circumvent for legal use', which probably makes the law itself illegal, and open to appeal.
Nathan.... did your phone just ring??
That was me..
TrollKing
There is minimal risk to anyone's life savings with this scheme. With appropriate hedging, the risk of loss due to a movement in stock price can be reduced to near zero.
The only real costs are the commission fees and the group's operating expenses. The cost per member drops to near zero if enough people join the group.
I paged you too..
Thank you for using AirTouch
TrollKing
You've got to love it!.
Cheap advertising signature that's bigger than the actual comment posted.
Slapdash.org seems to be turning into a very self centered little clique - watch it boys - before you know it you'll be talking simply to yourselves.
Saxo Grammiticus
I also not that you changed the Subject line here.
Overrating your (note correct useage) own importance a bit aren't we? I suggest you change to something a little more suitable for a small time business owner who's addicted to slashdot.
Maybe 'Little squabble about to begin'.
Saxo Grammaticus
You tell me.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
690 East 500 South Apt. #2
Springville, UT 84663
(801) 491-2803
(801) 491-2837 (fax)
(801) 370-7547 (pager)
BIG BUSINESS! Rather than spend all that money supporting MPAA companies, start your own production company that sells unrestricted DVDs.
Scene: Computer room in Commandante Taco's flat on Red-Hat Street. The sound of Tribes is heard in the adjoining room.
(John Katz is arranging tea on the table. Tribes sounds stop and Commandante Taco enters.)
CmdrTaco. Did you see what I was playing, John?
Katz. I didn't think it polite to watch, sir.
CmdrTaco. I'm sorry for that, for your sake. I don't snipe accurately--anyone can snipe accurately--but I play with wonderful expressions. As far as chat menus are concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for "R/L".
Katz. Yes, sir.
CmdrTaco. And speaking of the science of R/L, have you got the new Slashdot article for Roblimo?
Katz. Yes, sir. (Hands him a ream of paper.)
CmdrTaco. (Inspects the stack, takes two pages, and sits down on the sofa.) Oh! ... by the way, Katz, I see from your book that on Thursday night, when Lord RMS and Mr. Torvalds were dining with me, eight bowls of hot grits are entered as having been poured down your pants.
Katz. Yes, sir; eight bowls and a pot.
CmdrTaco. Why is it that at a linux using establishment the servants invariably pour hot grits down their pants? I ask merely for information.
Katz. I attribute it to the superior quality of the grits, sir. I have often observed that in Windows households the grits are rarely very hot.
CmdrTaco. Good Heavens! Is Windows so unstable as that?
Katz. I believe it is a very unpleasant OS, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have used a computer only once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person with a gun.
CmdrTaco. (Languidly.) I don't know that I am much interested in your ramblings, Katz.
Katz. No sir; I am not a very interesting person. I never of think of how boring I am when I spew crap.
CmdrTaco. Very boring, I assure you. That will do, Katz, thank you.
Katz. Thank you, sir. ( Katz goes out.)
CmdrTaco. Katz's views on Windows seem somewhat lax. Really, if the dumber orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of open-source responsibility.
(Enter Katz )
Katz. Mr. ESR
Granted there will always be "bad" hackers so we need to train "good" hackers to fight off the bad.
Kinda like in Dreamscape where the bad guy gets in the president's dream and the good guy has to kill him before he kills the president?
That movie was cool.
I think civil disobedience is the only way to honestly protest this. I think a coordinated effort of DDoS attacks, repeatedly striking the same corporations' sites by people who do it and then fess up afterwards (only to have the site attacked by the next person in line the next day), might have a far more profound effect.
What are you on? If that happened, their case would be made. Malicious hackers, pirates, script kids -- it's all the same. If a DDoS attack is launched against them, then they can easily use it as evidence that the only ones interested in DeCSS are criminals.
Either you're part of the MPAA or you haven't thought things out well.
I think the point of this article isn't how much we help or harm the company but how much say we can have in what the company does. What's wrong with making a company's stock go up if we can then have a say in what directions we want it to go? The only questions are: who would direct it, how many people can we get to participate and how much power would we really be able to have?
Eric > stupid rich capitalistic bastard who sold out.
Fuck off you zealots,
TrollKing
SHUT YOUR FUCKING FACE UNCLE FUCKER!!!
Beep! It's "you're" not "your" - ten points away.
Saxo Grammaticus
95% of people don't actually read anything but the headlines, and then proceed to discuss the issue as if they are experts on it. Look at any other article on Slashdot, it's always the same.
Do you not read anything? I thought
it was explained in pretty clear
lay-hackers english.
Oh, Wait. This must be one of the
dopes who only posts his novice
legal opinions in online talk magazines.
Maybe you should look at your keyboard instead then.....
He has a point. You must live such dull lives to care just how your comment gets moderated. Go outside, have a pint, chill the fuck out. Your all sad CUNTS.
Well said.
... well, up in arms if the government ever tried to ban guns.
While it may have illegal uses, it also has legal uses.
The primary purpose of guns is to kill. End of story. Do most people use them for murder? Guess what - they don't, because its wrong. Only a very tiny, and I mean tiny percentage of gun owners ever shoot at anybody, much less kill them. Even police. And people would be
The same is true for DeCSS. It can be used for good purposes or bad. Just because you have DeCSS doesn't mean you will use it to pirate. I would guess most people wouldn't. Frankly I didn't care about it until the MPAA tried to make it illegal. To me, this is about free speech and is only about free speech. Just because the MPAA or a judge or a clerk at the copyright office can't read C++ doesn't mean I can't, and just because I can't read machine code doesn't mean some guru can't. If anybody can read it and understand it, it's speech and it should be protected by the First Amendment.
In fact, by this point, DeCSS has become so much about free speech (what with T-shirts and everything), it has moved beyond the realm of computer code and into the realm of art and statement. I think once those shirts were made, any technical purpose of that has becomes less important than what that code symbolizes and that this is 100% a free speech issue at this point. Saying computer code isn't speech because computers read it is like saying its okay to ban a Hebrew translation of the Anarchist's Cookbook because the judge can't read it. It would never fly.
I vote dozens of proxies a year. And I don't need to do anything special when I buy the stock. What the hell companies are you buying stock in, because damn near everything for sale on the NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ is votable common stock. (Yeah there are a few nonvoting preferred issues but they are rare).
Moron. Do you know what a put is? Do you know how to use one? Do you know under what circumstances they pay out?
As far as Long Term Capital Management goes, they weren't hedged very well. They made a giant convergence bet by shorting US Treasuries and buying high interest European bonds. That yield pair did *not* converge and they got wiped out.
Buying a bunch of stock, some puts, and shorting clueless companies, can be done with little leverage. It's a lot different than giant leveraged bond trades.
You may be a lover but you ain't no fscking dancer! -Charlie Troll
Thanks, AC
Read the article,you lame moron. Your post has nothing to with what they talked about. If you can't figure that out, then you need more help than I or anyone else could ever provide. "bad hackers" train "good hackers. Jeeze, re-read your post...it's an embarrassment to have something like that on /.
7
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
10
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
12
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
100
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
And I can do anything.
Thank You,
Troll King
Thank You,
Troll King
Subscribe
you know, that whole 'voting' thing whereby the governed supposedly are provided with a means to give consent to those who govern them.... the very fact that this article makes sense points out that democracy is becoming irrelevant. big businesses run the world and rule our lives, government does not. perhaps that is why voting turnout is so low in many places like the United States of America. this new 'shareholder democracy' is fine except for two things: 1. only people with money get to vote. 2. the more money you got, the more important your vote is. oh well i guess the world wasnt that great of a place anyways. cyber-feudalism ho!
The general public will think precisely that a bunch of freakish computer outlaws came up with a way to Pirate DVD's and they'd be right because that's exactly what DeCSS will be used for.
DeCSS is a basic DVD ripper. If a DVD viewer is required for Linux, then write one that reads/decodes/displays the content only, not something that simply extracts the content and dumps it to a file.
Stop pretending that DeCSS is anything else than a way of getting more Free Stuff.
Saxo Grammaticus
Me too.
This dvd thing has really got me curious. The problem is that my coding skills are poor at best (no hacking kernel modules or dvd players for me) and I'm no lawyer (tho I can argue w/ the best of them). I've been looking for a way to fight the good fight if you will. I have sent some emails out to various companies (w/ minimal success of course), but this is the kind of thing that I'd like to get behind.
So what I'm wondering is if anyone is already heading in this direction. Are there people to contact yet? who do I talk to??
mmmmm, soft underbelly.
-Peter
I see the banners now: "Linux! Good enough to make 'Titanic', but not good enough to see it"
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Now, EFF, are you listening?
I seriously doubt it.
In fact, I'm a little disillusioned with them - I joined up on 6th January, and I haven't heard a peep from them. No acknowledgement, no book, no nothing. My credit card was charged, though.
And, the EFF FAQ specifically mentions that they do not send out glossy membership material to keep costs down.
They were supposed to send me a book.
Disclaimer: I am a recent (post DeCSS fiasco) EFF supporter to the tune of $100/year.
Did you get your book?
I didn't read the article, but the problem is that in probably most cases hackers don't have enough shares for their vote to matter. The only way it would make a difference is if they went to the board meeting and were very vocal.
And for god's sake people, stop posting "1st post" comments and get a life!
admit "hacking" is cool but when it becomes malicious or starts breaking the laws its time to pull the plug. Granted there will always be "bad" hackers so we need to train "good" hackers to fight off the bad.
Um, huh? Did you read the article? If you did, you'd know that the term "hacking" was not used in the sense of "system cracker" but in the sense of "creative solution to a problem." In that context, your comment makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
For those who know what "hacker" really means it's a very convenient word, but as far as the general public is concerned I'm afraid it's forever tainted and some new bit of slang is needed to replace it as a shortcut way of saying "knowledgeable and resourceful computer enthusiast". I'd suggest "computer ham", since hackers are to computers somewhat as amateur radio operators are to radio, but radio hams, having not so long ago endured being confused by the general public with those idiots with illegal Citizens Band rigs that screwed up everybody's television reception, would probably not be too receptive to that particular compliment, so I am open to sincere and well-intentioned suggestions.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
... lines of code maybe. Dollars? heh! not even in my dreams! But who's going to take the initiative? How about the smart ass^H^H^H^H guy who wrote the article and/or CmdrTaco? I'm willing to donate my food money for a month if someone is willing to take the lead and get this thing started.
:)
I'd love to do it! Yeah! Make checks payable to... er, I'll stop now, but we've gotta make sure this person knows what he/she is talking about and has the necessary investing/hacking experience!
but I'm not going to risk my life savings on an activist stunt like that. Especially with media corporations, whose value depends on a fickle market.
Sorry boys.
Heh, I thought a cracker was a white guy...
And what if we aren't rich enough to have any stock??
This is probably the best thinking we've seen so far in this case. It's not motivated by immaturity or rage... It's a new approach. SOmething I think is really needed. I don't necessarily say that his approach is *best*, but people who want to fight the the DVD corporations must do it in a more constructive way. Furthermore, you probably have to play by their rules. They make the rules and they control the people who enforce the rules. If you don't play by them, you're sure to get crushed.
Actually it has been made to work. Ever hear or read the text of the speech (from the floor, as a stockholder) that Charleton Heston made at a Time-Warner (I think) shareholders' meeting?
He was objecting to the content of some rap music that they were publishing (and promoting). Most of his speech simply consisted of reading the lyrics -- making audience and board members alike quite uncomfortable. I seem to recall that Warner very soon thereafter dropped their contracts with that rap group.
Now, I'm not sure what we could come up with that's quite that dramatic and to the point, but the point is that it can work.
-- Alastair
Replacing these schemes would be great, but they are unfortunately plans already in motion. The focus would have to be on the next generation of DVD device, such as a DVD3 player or something along those lines.
The main problem is the ownership of the previous specs. If the CSS software is as closely held as it currently is in court, then you wouldn't be able to code by region without re-inventing the wheel there. MPEG and MJPEG are owned by expert groups, but specific decoding principals are covered by patent. You'd need to engineer that out. We all remember the problems with QT4 and Sorenson. Apple would love to spread the QuickTime love, but the primary codec is proprietary. And since OpenSource users like the code, they may not use something proprietary. This is a moral or political stand rather than a logical one.
If we promote hardware-based decoding instead of software based decoding, anybody can use the DVD drive, companies will feel safe in publishing, and compatiblity is assured to a common standard. However, companies will add to the standard, breaking things. There is always this risk, except in cases where a standard is dictated down. XML is completely extensible if you follow its rules. That is a definite standard.
The philosophy that a modem is a modem is what sets the Linux world apart from the Windows world. Our modems accept AT commands universally. Winmodems won't accept anything until you throw another layer in-between to translate the information. Even then they only work within windows, and not even through DOS.
To sum, companies want to put out a differentiated product, make it out of as few cheap parts as possible and maximize profit. If you want DVD under Linux, you have to get a more expensive hardware board. The companies are not beholden to a bunch of Linux activists.
Lowmag.net
No amount of hedging is going to help when the market crashes
And why not, pray tell me? Have you heard of things called "market-neutral portfolios" by any chance?
and it will inevitably crash
Do you have a direct line to God, or, perhaps, the planets' alignment told you this?
if it is day trading, go to Vegas and be honest about what you want!
There's day-trading and day-trading. Firms like Madoff or D.E.Shaw have been day-trading for a long time and making good (and stable) money off it.
Because a hedging strategy only works as long as the system remains stable: no major government collapses, no large-scale wars, and no general stock corrections
This is utter bullshit. There are many, many possible hedging strategies (even assuming you are long stocks to keep things simple). Some will fail in some conditions, some will not.
To give you a very simple example, let's say I am long Viacom stock class A shares (VIA/A). I am afraid that the market will go down, so I short Viacom class B shares (VIA/B) which generally track VIA/A pretty well. I am now hedged and do not really care about government collapses and market crashes.
Next time get a clue as to what you are talking about.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Why all the negative comments people? Shares are
a good investment. If you don't invest in shares,
what are you going to do with your money? All the suggestion is saying is to assign the voting right proxies (which lets face it you wouldn't have used anyway) over to some organisation which will go and use the votes for a good cause. Hey if every slashdot reader who was able invested $10,000 that would probably be a lot of votes. The worst that is likely to happen to you is you make some money on the stockmarket.
That's right. There are two basic points I would like to touch on here.
1) There's a lot of talk here. Evidently there are those who are willing to put forth money, but who do not have the expertise or understanding (or whatever) to get this STARTED.
2) I don't think any purchase is required. How many of us own stock through an investment firm, like Fidelity? How many of us make 401K contributions through these people? That means that we own some stock and have a voice.
Investment companies would be stupid to invest in businesses that do not make serious money. I remember asking at a 401K presentation whether we could decide NOT to invest in people like Microsoft. They said, "No." That choice was not given to me. I give them money, tell them what kinds of investment I want and how high of a risk I am willing to take, and they deal with the details.
That means that they almost certainly invest in media companies. I would have to take a closer look at my list, but I would be really very surprised if people like Disney are not on it.
Also, tech stocks are the darlings of the market right now, so I have almost certainly invested in companies that can affect this particular case. Again, I will have to check my list, and I intend to do so.
So, back to my two points: most of us that have a retirement plan and that actually work for a living (and I bet it's many more of us than those who would brand us "hackers" without knowing what that means would give us credit for) own some stock and have some voice. It's a matter of clicking around for a few minutes on 401k.com or wherever you go for that sort of thing in order to find out where your stock is.
One final note. I have seen over and over again the power of many, many people submitting a petition to get what they want. It is amazing to me how the Internet has made this even more powerful, giving us the ability to unite voices that previously knew nothing of each other.
With that in mind, it is also amazing to me how NOTHING HAPPENS until one person with the right knowledge gets stuff together. Once that single entity is in place (even a website: "Go here and submit your signature!") then people tend to flock to it.
Slashdot is a great place. It is even greater because there are enough people here that we can probably find that one person who is able to begin the process spoken of in the article. I can't say that I understood the whole thing. Financial stuff is not my forte, but of all of us here, there is surely someone who is both willing and able to start what could be an avalanche, and I hope he/she will surface soon.
I see a lot of people here willing to give money and time to the effort. I would be willing to bet that most of them (us) are just waiting for some place to send their regards, their stock, and their vote. I know that's the ONLY thing holding me back right now. I just need someone to start driving the truck, and I'll hop in and give my support in whatever way I can.
-- Chris Monson
But tools for MS-Windows which grabbed the decoded DVD video after decoding by a licensed player existed before DeCSS. And any real DVD pirate would simply be using the same industrial equipment which is already making pirate DVDs. I'm still waiting for a Linux DVD viewer before I buy any DVDs..
this guys story is amazing, he changed a government with a website http://www.jeffed.com/
quoth:
Jeffed.com AGM Agitating Becomes Shareowner.com.au
Crikey's sister site shareowner.com.au is set to become a new force in corporate Australia and, to a lesser extent, in the UK. Australia has about 6 million small shareholders or about 40 per cent of the adult population which is second only to the US in terms of market penetration. We also have close to the highest number of houses on line. Given the rising tide of shareholder activism globally, surely there is a niche for a web-based shareholder activist site in Australia. The Australian Shareholders Association has about 5000 members paying $60 a year. However, being an association largely run by volunteers and retirees, they are naturally fairly cautious.
We already have a list of more than 20 corporate situations or practices that we will focus on involving some of the biggest companies and most powerful businessmen in Australia.
Basically, he gets proxies from ppl and also donated money to buy shares, and then turns up at the AGM and asks scary questions.
As a journo, he was disgusted at the lack of ethics, government collusion with business and media, and lack of real journalism that he took matters into his own hands, and told it like it was.
Jeffed.com got more hits that the Labor party site during the Victorian election, changed the coverage of the election and basically helped turn the tide against the sitting Liberal govt (read 'Republican' for our US cousins, Labor is liberal, Liberal is conservative).
The thing that everyone seems to be missing, is that this is run similar to a mutual fund. You don't have to buy a full share. If you get a bunch of people to contribute a dollar, say, 10000, and the stock is $50/share, you can buy 200 shares. You can then vote with these 200 shares. The more people put in, the larger the block. It doesn't need to be a large chunk, but the chunk can grow as more and more people are in.
I'm definetly intrested. It's just that I live in Finland, which adds some complexity. But I'm definetly intrested.
a sig with any other name would be as witty
yes there is a way to use credit cards for interpersonal transactions. Check out paypal.com. That should fit the bill.
" but really, you can't abjure responsibility by attributing personalities to the opposing sides"
First of all you should never use the "Personal Responsibility" argument when defending corporations. Corporations were designed and created to abdicate Personal Responsibility". To put it another way people use corporations to shield themselves and to shirk personal responsibility.
Having said all that. Here is the reality of the situation. Corporations bribe politicians to make otherwise innocent conduct illegal. Then when said conduct occures the corporation calls on their bought governments to jail the people who break the brand spanking new law. Remember this what jonathan did was not illegal a couple of years ago. It became illegal when the DMCA was passed. As long as corporations are able to foist draconian laws upon an unsuspecting public and jail those who would dare to disobey them they remain evil.
Jack Valenti needs to take some Personal Responsibility for jailing a 16 year old so he can make a few extra dollars.
War is necrophilia.
I'm boycotting seeing any movies. My roomate and my best friend are as well. I told my sister about it, and she told one of her friends about it, and now both of them are boycotting seeing any movies by these companies.
So my big question is: has anyone organized a boycott?I would love a website or some other organization where I can register as boycotting with them. As an added bonus, this organization could keep me up to date on things I might like to boycott or fight, and organize for those things as well.
How about it? Anyone up to it?
P.S. My sister thinks that with the way movies work, if you go to a dollar theater, all of the money goes to the theater, and none of it to the movie companies. That way, you can boycott the companies without giving up movies. Is this true? Does anyone know?
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
I wish there were a Linux hardware manufacturing company. Just imagine all the things we could do if someone out there had a couple good engineers, a business-savvy CEO (not a programmer or engineer who founded the company), and a license to use, say, one of IBM's fabs.
We could design our own Linux BIOS or chipset. License a BIOS from AMI and/or a chipset from VIA, then customize it from there. If it ends up requiring an NDA, so be it. But it would be monsterously useful to have Linux-friendly chipsets and BIOSes. I know there's an open source BIOS project, but it seems dead, and they probably have no idea how to manufacture a BIOS chip (nor the money to have someone else manufacture it).
We could design our own SCSI host adapter. License the chips from LSI Logic (formerly Symbios Logic, formerly NCR), and make it the best supported SCSI host adapter in Linux, which shouldn't be too hard, considering that you've got access to the microcode.
Why not manufacture cheap modems or printers that use software drivers under Linux? They'd be insanely cheap to manufacture, and I'm sure someone out there would buy them. You can get a 400 MHz CPU for less than $75 today, so it wouldn't really be such a drain.
And DVD decoder cards surely wouldn't be a problem. Just pay the license fee for the specs, write a binary driver, and manufacture a few thousand of the decoder cards. Instant DVD under Linux. Of course, it wouldn't be integrated into the kernel, but it's no different than those binary video card drivers for XF86.
I'm really starting to get sick of these millionaires and billionaires doing absolutely nothing for the Linux community. We could be accomplishing stuff here.
Like I alluded to before, I'm not even so interested in bleeding-edge 1.5 GHz processors and designing our own SCSI chipset... what we should be doing is making generic cards that will run under Linux, with a "Designed for Linux" seal. Imagine if everything possible was open, with a minimum of NDAs. I bet it could happen.
There will be a site set up at www.BuyTheMPAA.org very soon in an attempt to organize an effort towards Dr.Z's solution. We are waiting for the zone update to go through, but the site currently has content and will include a mailing list. The mailing list is also in the process of being set up but the database will be ready before the site goes live. As soon as you can get to the site, you can sign up for the list. For more info, contact BuyTheMPAA@nolab.org
what's wrong with murder? :-D
void recursion (void)
{
recursion();
}
while(1) printf ("infinite loop");
if (true) printf ("Stupid sig quote");
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
The article has a valid point about baing able to attend stockholders meetings and having your say. Doing that may even persuade others to vote the same as you. But aside from the problem mentioned already in some other post, mainly that most stock doesn't allow you to vote, one has to appreciate the Largeness of some of these companies. I did the math on our favourite orge Micro$oft around the time when there where speculations about what the court could do if they are found guilty of abusing their monoopoly. One of the coices was splitting and selling off some parts of M$ and i thought it would be extremely nifty if the community of free code, linux etc users got together and rounded up enough money to buy the M$-spinoff. The problem is that every person on this planet would have to cough up $1000 to buy micro$oft... let that sink in. Now admittedly most of the companies we are talking about are not as big as M$ and instead of buying the whole our aim would only be a significant vote, say 1%-5%. However we are also very few compared to the entire population of the earth so that it's up to several thousands of dollars per capita again. The idea of the community influencing BB by becoming stockholders is super nifty but even if we all pulled together and got millions of dollars (perhaps even tens of millions) that would only byu us 0.1% of any given Big Corp. That we'd like to influence. The reasonable alternative would be to start an investment fund with long term objectives. Maybe in 20 years time we'd have enough money to fullfill our dreams.
I like the plan, and am willing to put $$ where
my keyboard is.
I would be willing to contribute $100 up front
and $10/month for an "investment club". THat club would pursue the ends described in this article.
(1) Collect proxies for use at board meetings
(2) Raise Open Source/Free Trade/Customer rights
And we'd probably make some money while we're at it. IIRC, this has been (somewhat) successful with Tobacco companies.
Unfortunately, I'm not willing to organize such an effort. However, if enough people put $$ pledges up, perhaps someone will be motivated to make the next step happen.
Yes, $100 & 10/mo are pitifully small amounts - I think however that many people can afford a small amount, and are more effective than a few big players.
...On the main page, there were nine stories dealing with internet crime, and two about the MPAA lawsuit against the CSS crack, and none covering what I would expect from a "true" Hacker (tm) site; namely, programming tips, new compilers, clever tricks and solutions, Linux news...
...no-one would ever believe that such a site is about harmless "hacking".
No. They'd probably believe that, like Slashdot, this site concerns itself with issues important to prgrammers, like privacy and software patents. How many such stories have been posted here? It's a NEWS site, not a tips/howto site.
If you're going to criticize the site, try to provide some valid criticism. They have a "Defaced Pages Archive". I think its a far better indicator of the mentality of those behind HNN than the stories they post.
In general I'd have to agree with the author's assessment of /. user posts. I read many of them expecting to broaden my view of the DeCSS situation. Instead I found less than 1% quality posts.
Gur svggrfg funyy fheivir lrg gur hasvg znl yvir. Jr zhfg ercrng.
Everyone works at different rates and peoiple come around to things at different times. One sudden buy may get noticed. A handful may slip in under the RADAR. This increases transaction cost but may be worth it. What about folks who come in "late" to the thing?
The hack is do it all legally and without any more warning than absolutely necessary. And if they still do the wrong thing? Well, they can get get all their stock dumped at once -- that makes the value go DOWN (though hackerdom would lose $ in that). But remember as a public company they don't care about the Right Thing or Wrong Thing so much as 'Keep the investors happy.' If the investors are only happy with The Right Thing, what are they gonna do? Yep. Sure, it's pandering. Why not make 'em pander to *us*?
Maybe geeks will take over the world, one stock at a time.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
What would really kick ass in the open hardware department would be open hardware laptop components. I simply can't think of anything cooler than going to your local Fry's and getting the stuff to build your own laptop.
"The player program does not read the raw data off the CD and dump it in a file"
/dev/dsp.
Yes it does, on Linux at least. Remember that devices are treated as files; the cd player just dumps it to
-----
"But really, I think life is just a game of Mao Nomic." -Purplebob
I've thought about things like that before- replacing the current DVD standards with open-source standards.
However, the problem is: Why would companies want to change over? To them, the current DVD system is fine; ours would only provide advantages to us, not to them.
On the other hand, if we were to add in several features lacking in current DVDs, it may be possible... eventually. But replacing standards takes a long time.
-----
"But really, I think life is just a game of Mao Nomic." -Purplebob
I am me.
Lets just be carefull if talking to outsiders, sometimes 'gushing' out a statement causes the mis-understandings. Think on how it could be taken badly and explain in clear terms.
Now the best way to get that clear idea across is to Get Involved so that some shareholder meetings get livend up
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
Actually just a couple, means we would need to trust them a bit, but we are good at asking questions and putting people under the microscope so I don't see that as un-workable.
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
The biggest hassle I see is that people will want to dynamicly change their investment level or 'not participate' in an action they don't agree with.
Can you see a way that people can pony up some money, take some action, then pull the money out again?
There is also the legal side, we need to have each person as a shareholder yet some may be in different countries. What structure supports this?
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
I would be more than glad to put some (modest) money forward for this.
Qusetions
I would like to see this implemented and a special slashdot area for its running.
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
It is now 23:00 for me in Oz so am off to bed. If anyone else has collected details of those wishing to participate, please let me know.
Also there have been several saying they can organise. Could those that have not contacted me yet please do so and we can pool the names into a list and get going.
I will contact those involved before passing the info on so don't worry about getting spammed
see you all in about 10 hours...
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
Please read through and if willing let me know of your commitmant.
I am also seeking out what the FAQ's are and will put a page of them up.
As has been stressed elsewhere a fast action is important by a lot of people before things really change for the worse.
you dont need to commit a lot of money, the idea is a lot of shareholders
DO NOT LET THIS DIE
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
The courts have frequently upheld the right to reverse engineering.
If the courts determine that the later is ok? Then by what reason do we have to put up with the MPAA?
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
It is legal, not breaking any laws
It is ultimately for the good of each target company.
It does not require a very large amount of money from any one person.
It will help the comunity by opening up standards.
Open standards means more jobs for community coders.
If you read the articles and find fault then point *that* out.
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
If yes then all it takes is one person to start, we pool some money in and vote on where and how to use it. Call me niave but I think we can get enough like minded people that we CAN make a difference.
It would not be that hard to think of secure ways of handling this and if you violently object to a direction taken you can always pull (whats left + what you gained) back out. Since its not a huge amount of money to risk we could just direct deposit it to a somewhat public relavent persons bank account.
This is an opourtunity to do something. Lets not let apathy kill us this time and seal the fate against us little guys.
The Time Has Come, let Our Voice Be Heard
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
If this was about circumventing copy protection for cable TV broadcast* I'd agree completely.
BUT this is a purchased disk!! Now I am not saying that distributing copies is right. I am saying that Fair Use is the issue and the way the MPAA is using the law is WRONG.
Piracy is a seperate issue and piracy is wrong.
Lets force some Ethics back into business and adjust our response to those who do pirate instead of just ignoring them. Tell your pirate friends it is wrong to pirate and tell the MPAA to give us fair use.
cya, Andrew...
*- I think the distinction between physical and broadcast needs to be identified more as the probable intent of the DMCA was to stop intercepting copyright material. IANAL
This is my sig, exciting huh!
Be it democracy, corporatisim even comunisim.
It comes down to those who care enough to decide to do something. I don't believe the are any limits to what can be done if it is decided on by people that care.
Yes more money has an effect. You have to care to put the money on the line. Suits make money because they care about money.
It is a little sad that greedy people tend to care more about their money than those who care about what is right
If you care then Email me, already one Linux consultancy has and is offering to start this off.
It is not enough just to think. YOU have to DO ; after all this is about Your Future.
Make it work, Andrew....
This is my sig, exciting huh!
The best thing is that even if it fails the money wont have been completely wasted. Might even return a profit.
Does anyone know if returning a profit could cause problems? Or could that money just go towards porpaganda.
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
cya, Andrew...
PS:for those that can't figure mine out its andrewm@engineer.com
This is my sig, exciting huh!
Perhaps a few will help us out?? Time to stop lurking and speak up!
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
Oh, wow. Now not only could they do us for incitement but also for insider trading. :)
threadeds blog
So my argument goes: if BB doesn't know who you are, how can they stop you?
threadeds blog
To stop BB building roads no one wants, it was thought a wheez to buy some of the land in the line and then resell off in one square foot sections. The idea being that the paperwork to each individual would be so huge as to be prohibative. All BB did was lean on the government to get the law changed so these holdings were too small to require notification.
threadeds blog
For those with a long enough memory, (and my comment is a hand-me-down from my Grandad), some people tried to stop companies going over to using Asbestos because they knew it was dangerous. They bought stock, wrote the Execs. etc. At that time, as you can imagine, these people who could buy the stock were seriously rich. They were generally ignored and the health problems only became common knowledge later.
Later those companies went bust paying out claims because they knew what they had done was wrong. By then of course, the execs who had made the decisions had retired.
What I think is needed would be some international court to deal with these execs who flout common rules of decency and even follow them to their graves. What some do is no different to some War crimes to my mind.
threadeds blog
So, how do you think these people got into the positions they hold? And yes, they did thoroughly enjoy it.
threadeds blog
You have a really good point there. But DeCSS does not only run under Windows. The original does, because at the time Linux didn't have UDF filesystem support. But DeCSS has since been ported over as "css-auth" which works basically the same. And there is an MPEG2 player called Xmovie (Sorry, I don't have a link readily available. You could probably find it on Freshmeat) that incorporates css-auth into it and can play DVDs (although it's all software, and is fricking slow unless you have a beast of a computer).
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
The point, though, is that you cannot lose more than you put in. You contribute $5 to the fund and the company gets convicted of atrocious crimes, the board of directors gets the death penalty and the fallout causes the stock market to crash to 1/10th of its current value... you lose your five bucks. That's it; no retirement plans lost, no kids denied access to college, nada but that measly five bucks.
:)
This fund would not be an investment, it would be a means of making our case heard in a legitimate forum, the company's shareholders' meeting, as well as a means to generating some real press coverage, since the media simply could not resist such a juicy story. Is it possible that the shares purchased could rise or drop in value? Sure, but who cares? That isn't the point of the exercise, so it doesn't matter whether the stock's price changes, although it would be a delicious irony to own stock and pray that it goes down.
Deosyne
I've not looked at the tools involved in playing DVDs on Linux, but it sounds like you're arguing for making things more complex. Linux tools are normally based on one tool for each job: in this case, I guess, one tool to decode and one to play.
-- Andrem
There has been a major scientific break-in
On a whim, I decided to dial out with an old modem laying around (bypassing the proxy) and check out the site for myself. On the main page, there were nine stories dealing with internet crime, and two about the MPAA lawsuit against the CSS crack, and none covering what I would expect from a "true" Hacker (tm) site; namely, programming tips, new compilers, clever tricks and solutions, Linux news... At that point, I gave up my attempt to get the block on hackernews.com removed; no-one would ever believe that such a site is about harmless "hacking".
Perhaps the hacker community is too fragmented, there are multiple leaders here.
Secondly, hackers are not like 'hippies' or 'rockers' or 'ravers', everybody has his own motive.
To be a malicious hackers or not to be a malicious hacker, that's a choice.
Bizar technology?
I wonder how many shares of stock /.ers already have stashed away. I've got about $150k worth of communications stock in a 401K program. Every year I get some stupid proxy form that I ignore.
/. to present issues and discuss upcoming votes.
I'd gladly sign the voting rights over to someone who wanted to gather a large "Block" and vote for "Hackers" (Or technologically aware, or...)
Maybe my stock isn't really going to help this problem, but I bet it could come in handy eventually.
Perhaps we could even us a forum like
This way you eliminate any chance of "Losing" additional money--you don't lose anything. You don't have to Trust anyone either--Random voting can't be MUCH worse than my usual abstaining.
What do you suppose is the combined value of all the stock "We" have just "Sitting Around". $100m? And what if we add those co-workers that we know well?
Rather than a direct attack on one issue, it would be a slow, steady push in the right direction--something that would do much more good in the long run.
The problem is, Who wants to set it up? I hate paperwork.
As it became clear that this Big Business had deliberately circumvented their protection system, in order to use these DVDs on their internal platform of choice, as opposed to the platforms for which it was available, they took steps to prevent the circulation of the code which allowed this circumvention.
I'm sorry, you lost me right there. It doesn't matter if it's a big guy picking on a small, or a small guy picking on a big. Hacking is hacking, and if I wish to accomplish an end but the only "legitimate" (read: legal) means to do so are not within my capabilities, then I must resort to non-legitimate means.
Now, if the ends I wish to reach are contrary to society's desires (say, if I wish my enemies dead just for being my enemies), well, that's what the law's for. But it is not society as a whole who says that Linux users must suffer by not being allowed to watch movies like Windows users can. Indeed, society as a whole says that businesses should seek to do business without discrimination on irrelevant attributes: being black or white has nothing to do with whether you can own a home (though being radioactive green might cause problems for the neighbors); what operating system you use has nothing to do with whether you can view movies (so long as your operating system supports sufficient graphics and sound capabilities, which both Windows and Linux - at least, the versions of Linux which would play movies - do).
Therefore, if the MPAA has failed to license CSS to any Linux-compatible player, then someone else is free to pick up the ball on that, so long as those who view movies on Linux pay for them just like those who view movies on Windows.
-------------------------------------------------- ------------------------
- ---------------------
Don't call me "Generation X," call me a child of the eighties
by Bryant Adkins
published in The Reflector
January 20, 1995
-----------------------------------------------
I am a child of the eighties. That is what I prefer to be called. The nineties can do without me. Grunge isn't here to stay, fashion is fickle and "Generation X" is a myth created by some over-40 writer trying to figure out why people wear flannel in the summer.
When I got home from school, I played with my Atari 2600. I spent hours playing Pitfall or Combat or Breakout or Dodge'em Cars or Frogger.
I never did beat Asteroids. Then I watched "Scooby Doo." Daphne was a Goddess, and I thought Shaggy was smoking something synthetic in the back of their psychedelic van. I hated Scrappy.
I would sleep over at friends' houses on the weekends. We played army with G.I. Joe figures, and I set up galactic wars between Autobots and Decepticons. We stayed up half the night throwing marshmallows and Velveeta at one another. We never beat the Rubik's Cube.
I got up on Saturday mornings at 6 a.m. to watch bad Hanna-Barbera cartoons like "The Snorks," "Jabberjaw," "Captain Caveman," and "Space Ghost." In between I would watch "School House Rock."
"Conjunction junction, what's your function?"
On weeknights Daisy Duke was my future wife. I was going to own the General Lee and shoot dynamite arrows out the back. Why did they weld the doors shut?
At the movies the Nerds got Revenge on the Alpha Betas by teaming up with the Omega Mus. I watched Indiana Jones save the Ark of the Covenant, and wondered what Yoda meant when he said, "No, there is another."
Ronald Reagan was cool. Gorbachev was the guy who built a McDonalds in Moscow. My family took summer vacations to the Gulf of Mexico and collected "Muppet Movie" glasses along the way. (We had the whole set.)
My brother and I fought in the back seat. At the hotel we found creative uses for Connect Four pieces like throwing them in that big air conditioning unit.
I listened to John COUGAR Mellencamp sing about Little Pink Houses for Jack and Diane. I was bewildered by Boy George and the colors of his dreams, red, gold, and green.
MTV played videos. Nickelodeon played "You Can't Do That on Television" and Dangermouse."
HBO showed Mike Tyson pummel everybody except Robin Givens, the bad actress from "Head of the Class" who took all Mike's cashflow.
I drank Dr. Pepper. "I'm a Pepper, you're a Pepper, wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?" Shasta was for losers. TAB was a laboratory accident, Capri Sun was a social statement. Orange juice wasn't just for breakfast anymore, and bacon had to move over for something meatier.
My mom put a thousand Little Debbie Snack Cakes in my Charlie Brown lunch box, and filled my Snoopy Thermos with grape Kool-Aid. I would never eat the snack cakes, though. Did anyone? I got two thousand cheese and cracker snack packs, and I ate those.
I went to school and had recess. I went to the same classes everyday. Some weird guy from the eighth grade always won the science fair with the working hydro-electric plant that leaked on my project about music and plants. They just loved Beethoven.
Field day was bigger than Christmas, but it always managed to rain just enough to make everybody miserable before they fell over in the three-legged race. Where did all those panty hose come from?
Deck the Halls with Gasoline, fa la la la la la la la la," was just a song. Burping was cool. Rubber band fights were cooler. A substitute teacher was a baby sitter/marked woman. Nobody deserved that.
I went to Cub Scouts. I got my arrow-of-light, but never managed to win the Pinewood Derby. I got almost every skill award but don't remember ever doing anything.
The world stopped when the Challenger exploded.It is to us what Kennedy's assasination was to the children of the 60's.
Did a teacher come in and tell your class? Half of your friends' parents got divorced. People did not just say no to drugs.
AIDS started, but you knew more people who had a grandparent die from cancer.
Somebody in your school died before they graduated.
When you put all this stuff together, you have my childhood. If this stuff sounds familiar, then I bet you are one, too. We are children of the eighties. That is what I prefer "they" call it.
Do you ever feel like there are people watching you? You're not alone.
After reading your post I have decided to put up a list of movies that used Linux for their computer animation. I'm not really much of a movie buff though. If people will email me titles of films that used Linux in special effects I will post them on my webpage.
"Reality is less than television."-Brian Oblivion
Now, EFF, are you listening? I'd be happy to participate, even though I guess it will be a lot harder since I'm a Swede .. Don't have a broker in the US .. yet.
it's in my head
You only need ONE stock to make your voice heard. ONE. That's not much ...
Get it? We're NOT buying a majority stake in these companies - we just want to make our voice heard and to get some media attention (oh yes, we will).
Now, back to the article - read through it again - please.
it's in my head
On the subject of mindshare..
Regardless of what these companies think, they can't maintain their control over the distribution of media. Its the nature of the internet. Rather then beeing foolish like the RIAA and fight the internet in a battle they will lose, the MPAA needs to realize they are approaching this from the entirely wrong angle. The single cause that they are fighting ie internet based distribution, is something they should embrace. Im not saying they should allow anyone to sell it, but if films were freely available for download, piracy would be minimal.
Newspapers figured this one out right away, and hopped right to it, but music and film industries shunned the idea of free internet distribution of films. Rather then embrace the new technology, they pushed it away and are now attacking the innovaters that picked up where these companies made an unwise decision.
Back to mindshare.. We need to engrain the realization that they cant effectivly fight the internet. And rather waste money on a bulk of large rabid lawyers, they should cut their losses and start distributing films via the internet. If they dont do it, someone else will..
Vidster anyone?
We also need to convince other stockholders that they are ultimatly going to lose money through these foolish lawsuits.
Seems to me that these guys are still afraid of the new technology. Fear breeds stupidity.
no
I'd be much more interested in giving the EFF proxy to shares which I own in said companies, if they wanted to become one.
:)
I would be able to invest a lot more in my own shares which I could recoup my investment on, than I would in donating (total loss) to the EFF.
All they (or whoever set the proxy company up) really need to is co-ordinate the buying and selling of the shares, and collecting share information for bargaining purposes. Possibly via a mailing list.
For example :
Dear EFF-share-proxy-member.
In a months time, EvilMegaCorp Ltd, who we believe are threatening your rights becuase they are pushing a bill that removes your right to remain silent under police questioning, are having an AGM.
Now is the time we want you to act. Please buy as many of their shares as you can afford in the next 7 days, and e-mail us your share numbers and digitally signed letter giving us proxy over them within 14 days.
We will use this power to speak up at the meeting and attempt to get them to change their minds on this piece of corporate policy on your behalf. After the date of the meeting, you are free to do with the shares as you please (such as sell them again - we hope the price won't have dropped too much
You can buy shares in this company from www.somerandombroker.com who we have had good dealings in the past if you do not currently have a broker for such deals.
Sincerely,
EFF
Are the EFF, or anyone else, willing to set up something like this??
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Sounds like a 'Why should I change from MSFT/NOVL/SUNW to Linux question?'
Because of mindshare. Because of benefits to us.
Linux has seen great popularity recently. It is because it has attracted a great deal of attention, debate, experimentation and usage.
In this example case, the companies would potentially want to change over because they could see that they may be left holding a dead dog, unless they embrace the future. But they won't even look at it until we present a reasoned arguement.
Remember that Linux wasn't viable for business until there was enough mindshare in the industry that 'Hey, Linux is OK', and commercial service and support was provided.
It is all about attracting the companies attention. But sometimes it may take informing other stakeholders about threats to their investments to really get the business's attention.
Of course they may decide that they want to stick with their beloved DVD player revenue stream. Insightful competitors may recognise oppourtunities in other players, or even, try to focus on selling the media themselves. But if you get other stakeholders thinking about what was put forward in the well-reasoned discussion, you may get other, larger stakeholders asking 'Whats up with this OSSD thing?'
The infrastructure must be commoditised, and that will only happen with a cheap and freely available solution.
But the DVD was only an example. Lets get back to the bigger picture.
When one learns to hack, one must first learn the rules and the tools. In code hacking, this amounts to learning the programming languages. Now, for hacking businesses we also have to learn the rules and tools. Because it is outside of our domain we may have to look differently. But they are there. As we learn the rules, we learn better what we can and can't do, and how to bend the Matrix to our making.
The DeCSS fiasco really overstepped the mark, broke the rules, and people are now paying for it. If we keep fighting DeCSS we will lose the war. Why? Because we are reacting to them. If we want to achieve something you have to be in control.
And how do we achieve some form of control? Playing within the rules. As soon as you break the rules, you forfeit all rights - that is what the DeCSS hackers are finding out.
Cheers
RedIguana
Cheers
1. Obviously we know that being restrictd from viewing dvd movies on Linux because a large organization chooses so for thier own twisted reasons is unfair practice and should be frowned upon.
2. On the other hand, reverse enginnering a product and ther distributing some elses work regardless of the type of work/art it is should also be frowned upon.
The only provision that the court should make is that the MPAA cannot deny the rights of linux developers to license the code to develop linux based dvd movie players.
Proponent companies for linux should see this as an opportunity to gain alot ofmarket share by licensing this algorithm the same as thier windows counterparts and for the same monetary sum. im doing this, they can provide this functionality for thier customers and at the same time protect the technology holders who despite being misguided, have brought us this exciting new technology and with the proper motivation, will contnue to do so.
sorry for the run-ons.
if windows video card manufacturers can package dvd players with thier cards, then linux developers should be able to do the same.. and by the same token windows developers dont arbitrarily give out the source code for software that they license.. so should it be under linux.
my rant for the day.
LW
The answer to your question is this. The MPAA is a essentially a marketing company for the movie industry. By dissasembling the software protection, you are limiting thier ability to effectively market thier product.
thier customers are not the general public, but the movie industry who relies upon the MPAA to keep the original works protected from copyright infringment.
As far as reverse engineering is concerned, I am just as adamant that it should be legal as anyone else. Being an engineer like most many of us at /., I like to look at the guts of it.
I draw the line when someone is undercutting my business by preventing me from making a profit with my product. either by scaring off my investors or my giving away my work to allow others to break the copyright.
LW
This is perhaps one of the best articles I have read on /. in a long time. It brings up some very good points. I agree. Lets hack life. Anyone out there sets up such a investment group, let me know and I will buy in.
I think you've got the idea wrong though. What the article is suggesting is that shareholders nominate a representative to vote in their place at a shareholder meeting (the term proxy). To start up a group to do this, all you'd need is an efficient way of filing the paperwork for each shareholder to be represented by the entity we're trying to create.
What it seems you're trying to do, along with half of slashdot, is to get people to pool their money and buy a big chunk of shares. The article only mentions this because it saves on commissions. This is a good idea, but to get this entity off the ground faster, wouldn't it be easier to just sign over proxy votes?
Since I have absolutely NO experience in investing, I'd be cautious about sending an organization money to buy stock for me. However I'd be glad to sign over a vote that I have no other way of getting voiced.
i've always considered the eff a particularly successful activist stunt...
The idea of a central "pooled fund" as put forward by some posters is interesting, but faces the problems of regulation, setting up a holding firm, etc. Instead, if individuals were to purchase single shares (or more), and sign over proxy voting rights to a central voice on a particular issue (be it the an organization like the EFF, or a single person) the same result could be had. The proxy has the benefit of people being able to chose on each issue where they wish to be heard, and opt out of issues they don't agree with. At the same time, the onus is no longer on one central organization to represent views at all meetings, instead a different voice for each issue/meeting/company could be heard simply by giving them voting rights. As someone else mentioned, it is highly unlikely that the proxy size alone will be large enough to make major changes. The goal should be to get the message heard at shareholder meetings and sway shareholder opinion and draw media attention to the issues. There are obviously a variety of technical legal rules on how a hack like this would work, and can't be done overnight. It is something to consider, and is a interesting new view on how an unorganized community can organize itself to deal with certain issues. When facing business, or goverment, or an other organization, being organized in an approach is the only way to go.
I see very easily how this could work out to be very profitable. (of course, this means it probably won't.)
In theory, if we bought a bunch of shares of something, say, just for the sake of example, Pioneer. So we've got like $100,000 in it. We go to a shareholders meeting and ask, something like, "I just bought a DVD Drive of yours after investing in your company. I go to my local video store and rent the latest HK action flick, but I can't watch it because something the clerk calls "region lock"? Does this mean I can't watch any foreign movies on my DVD Rom at home? Why did you guys think that was a good idea? Why won't you let consumers use your products to view their own movies?" (Sit back and watch panic ensue.)
Then sell your $100,000 worth of shares, and reinvest in Pioneer...but open a short position.
(For those in the comp industry who don't know what a short position is, you sell stock that you don't own, essentially borrowing it from your broker. When you wish to get out of the position, you BUY it back, optimally at a lower price. You keep the difference.)
Even if the rest of the shareholders aren't as impressed by yor bashing of the company, opening the market the next day by trying to sell a bunch of shares will create the image of public distrust, and that in itself will drive the stock down short term, at least. And the pool will make money...money you can invest to strike another company...and if anyone's seting this up, here's some logistical diagrams for it all.
You will need, I figure at least 3 "leader" types:
1 Schmoozing, Public Speaker Type Guy for the sharehlders meetings. Ideally, someone who can argue, but isn't argumentative. This guy is going to have to like to travel a lot, and not have any other job besides this. (It may help to have more than one of these guys for time reasons, as well as limited recognition by the board members of the companies.)
1 Professional Trader
I don't mean someone who's got a f*cking E*Trade or Ameritrade account. I'm talking about someone who has real-time access to the market. A direct access trader. (The brokers in NY have been trading for 40+ years with better tools...now that the tools are open to you, why shackle yourself with old equipment? Start REALLY trading online.) Someone who's done it for a while, so we can best manipulate the market in the event that Public Speaker Guy cannot, for whatever reason, accomplish his mission.
A crack research staff.
I imagine this will be a grup of 10+ people who read through sites like slashdot and others who will find approporiate causes, do the research on them, and give public speaker guy his ammunition. They will be "Public Speaker Guy" apprentices.
If someone can show me that they've got this kind of a set-up going, count me in, too. If we can get it to work this way...maybe us hackers will have a big ol' retirement fund soon. =)
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
- Andy "I'm in London so it's $0.02+$15.00 currency fees for me, dammit" R.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
You want an English version? Here you go, provided by an anonymous coward a while back, not sure what artical. I just happened to save it.q .nu/ Even if the *can* get all the copies of the sourcecode (not bloody likely) off the net... below is the general crypto system used... Vengence. 0 General disclaimer. This information is provided as is, with no warranties on its accuracy or usability. It is based on a piece of source code claiming to be the css algorithms, and which have since been confirmed to interoperate with the CSS system. The author has not read any official CSS documentation, and any errors in the terminology is a result of this. This information has not to the knowledge of the author been made available through breaches of the DVD consortium Non Disclosure Agreement. 1 System overview. Every DVD player is equipped with a small set of player keys. When presented with a new disc, the player will attempt to decrypt the contents with the set of keys it possesses. Every disk has a disk key data block that is organized as follows: 5 bytes hash of decrypted disk key ( hash ) disk key encrypted with player key 1 (dk1 ) disk key encrypted with player key 2 (dk2 ) ... disk key encrypted with player key 409 (dk409) Suppose the player has a valid key for slot 213, it will calculate (1) Kd = DA( dk213 , Kp213 ) To verify that Kd is correct, the following check is done, if the check fails, it will try the next player key. (2) Kd = DA( hash , Kd ) An obvious weakness stems from this check, by trying all 240 possible Kd, disk key can be deduced without knowing any valid player key. As will be shown later, this attack can be carried out with a complexity of 225, making such an attack feasible in runtime applications. Another obvious attack is that by having 1 working player key, other player keys can be derived through a similar search. This can be done offline, also keys obtained from the former attack can be used as a starting point. To decrypt the contents an additional key tk - the title key is decrypted with the now decrypted and verified disk key. (3) Kt = DB( tk, Kd) Each sector of the data files is the optionally encrypted by a key that is derived from Kt by exclusive or of specified bytes from the unencrypted first 128 bytes of the 2048 bytes sector. The decryption is done with the CSS stream cipher primitive described in section II. 2 CSS streamcipher primitive: The CSS streamcipher is a very simplistic one, based on 2 LFSRs being added together to produce output bytes. There is no truncation, both LFSR are clocked 8 times for every byte output, and there are 4 ways of combining the output of the LFSRs to an output byte. These four modes are just settings on 2 inverter switches, and the modes operation are used for the following purposes. 1.Authentication to DVD drive ( not discussed ) 2.Decryption of Disk key (DA) 3.Decryption of Title key (DB) 4.Decryption of data blocks. LFSR1: 17 bits ? taps, and is initialized by the 2 first bytes of key, and setting the most significant bit to 1 to prevent null cycling. LFSR2: 25 bits 4 taps, is initialized with byte 3,4,5 of the key shifting all but the 3 least significant bits up 1 position, and setting bit 4 to prevent null cycling. As new bits are clocked into the LFSRs, the same bits are clocked in with reversed order to the two LFSRs output bytes. ( With optional inversion of bits. ) The output of LFSR1 is O1(1), O1(2), O1(3) ... Likewise LFSR2 produces O2(1), O2(2), O2(3) ... These two streams are combined through 8 bits addition with carry carried over to the next output. The carry bit is zero at start of stream. (4) O(i) = O1(i) + O2(i) + c where c is carry bit from O(i-1) This streamcipher is very weak, a trivial 216 attack is possible with output bytes known for i = {1,2,3,4,5,6}. Guess the initial state of LFSR1, and clock out 4 bytes. O2(1), O2(2), O2(3), O2(4) can then be uniquely determined, and from them the state at i=4 is fully known. The guess on LFSR1 can then be verified by clocking out 2 or more bytes of the cipher and comparing the result. Another important attack is the case when only O(i) for i = {1,2,3,4,5} is known. Guess the initial state of LFSR1, and clock out 3 bytes. Now O2(1), O2(2) and O2(3) can be found as in the above attack. This will reveal all but the most significant bit of LFSR2s state at i=3. If both possible settings for MSB is tried, and LFSR2 is clocked backwards 24 steps, a state where bit 4 is set at i=1 can always be found. ( This is stated without proof ). Select the setting of the most significant bit for LFSR2 such that LFSR2 is in a legal state at i=1, and clock out two more bytes to verify the guess of LFSR1. For some values of O( i = {1,2,3,4,5} ) multiple start states can be found, and for others none. Selecting the correct start state is not a problem, as this attack is used in situations where only the first five output bytes are of significance ( encryption of keys ). 3 CSS mangling step: When the CSS streamcipher is used to encrypt keys such as in DA(data,key) and DB(data,key), an additional mangling step is performed on the data. This cipher is best illustrated with the following block diagram: A(1,2,3,4,5) are the input bytes (data) C(1,2,3,4,5) are the output bytes (data) ki = O(i) where O(i={1,2,3,4,5}) is streamcipher output from key B(1,2,3,4,5) are temporary stages The cipher is evaluated top down, with exceptions indicated by an arrow.
Re:So where can we get the code *tonight* ? (Score:5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Mon Dec 27, '99 09:22 PM EDT (#258) This is from: http://www.2600.com/news/1999/1112-files/crypto.g
---- Sig? What sig? Who needs one, anyway?
Personally I found the article interesting and highly insightful, but what has struck me about this whole DVD battle is that very few of us are actually doing anything about it. What we need is a.) a concrete plan (or plans) of action based on a clear and straightforward understanding and interpretation of the legal and ethical issues at hand, whether this take the form buying up stocks and using some community oomph to get things done, or some other ingenious plan, it doesn't matter as long as it works. b.) we need people or organizations that are willing to get this shit organized, collect funds, work out the details, and put plans into ACTION. Maybe the folks at openDVD.org are the ones to be doing this, or maybe the EFF. Maybe, as someone mentioned, VALinux and RedHat (and any other company involved with Linux and open source) should be taking a more active stance, hey maybe ALL of these groups should be standing up and getting organized TOGETHER; this is a community isn't it?
My point is that if this weak, fragmentary defence front against 'BB' (and no i dont agree with lumping corporate America into one faceless evil) continues, we WILL lose. Things like DeCSS will become ILLEGAL, and we begin to lose some of our most cherished freedoms in the face of corporatism and profit. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy takes an interesting look at what today's social and economic standards could turn into down the line, and frankly, visions like his make this case even more important; who knows, this thing could become pivotal, a landmark decision for or against corporate power. We have to make this thing count.
If we are going to get serious about this, we must all ackowledge that most of the people in this discussion are COMPUTER hackers. This means our area of expertise is COMPUTERS. It would be arrogant to the most extreme to assume that just because computers a complicated we can just waltz into a whole new system of solving problems ie. politically and legally. We have to acknowledge that there are other people out there who are hackers in other fields LIKE law and politics.
As a community we have to look up and see whats happening around us instead of aplying the same logic that we use in our work. Test our ideas before we put all of our faith in them. The best way to do this, IMHO, would be to introduce new people into our community who are just not computer hackers but hackers in other fields. We need to see them as the same sort of people as us, just with a different speciality.
Computer hackers pose absolutely no threat at all by themselve. Even if every computer hacker in the world were to get together and try to sort things out their way it would fail because we will only end up scaring the general public and prompting legislation against similar behaviour in the future. We need people that know what they are doing and that ISN'T US!!!
This one will die on the vine even before it gets started.
No one is going to give their "good" money for some silly activist stunt like this. (Actually maybe some will, but you'd have to be an idiot.)
I admit "hacking" is cool but when it becomes malicious or starts breaking the laws its time to pull the plug. Granted there will always be "bad" hackers so we need to train "good" hackers to fight off the bad.
What we really need to do is to employ these talented hackers in respectable jobs that actually utilize their skills. That would be a real boon to society.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
After all the recent attacks on sites like Yahoo etc... I think your going to find it hard drumming up support for "hackers". People associate that name with "malicious computer attacks" and "cyber-terrorism" even though it might not be the case.
The only people who are going to support hackers are probably other hackers. But who knows anything is possible, just not probable.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
Your a "TrollPawn"... not a TrollKing. Better luck next time.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
why don't you ask that of Network Solutions... there hauling in enough money (at $70 per registration) to feed half of the population of the 3rd world countries.
We buy wholesale for $20 and then sell for $30 by the time we pay our credit card and merchant account their cut and also our tech support to process the registrations there is actually very little profit left at all. Right around $3 actually. I don't mind donating to a worthy cause, but define exactly an organization that is supposed to make the "net a better place".
Besides I think we are making the net a better place by offering such a low rate for domain names. Now everyone has no excuse for not having a domain name for them or their familys. Just my two cents.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
Once, but after a little media spin, it wouldn't work again and they might even get it outlawed. What this amounts to is buying stock for the sole purpose of gaining influnce in company policy and then selling out. The first time this might work, but the second time, a smart CEO would ask the Representive of the "Club" why he should take him seriously when he will be sell the stock tomorrow and further has no vested intrest in the long term viability of the company. I can also see Companies who become victums of this, going to congress and having this sort of thing outlawed. I beleive we will get away with this once and only once, maybe not even that. Our only real chance is to get another BB with world class lawyers to support us, otherwise we are lost. Besides we'd probably get eaten alive by capital gains tax.
---------------------------------------------
Jesus died for somebodies sins, but not mine
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
I must state that I am like most of you and agree that information should be freely availible, especially with regards to technology. However, as much of a good idea as this seems, I doubt it will work.
Firstly, there are many more shareholders out there who are investing in a company to make a profit than there probably are "hackers" on a revolution for free information.
Secondly, even if their ["hackers"] voice is heard, it does not necessarily mean that the other investors will listen. After all, they are trying to protect their investments, and a company is not likely to be worth as much if their stocks drop because they were forced by a "hacker" majority vote to give out their trade secrets with no royalties or licensing.
Its a good article, and sounds like a well thought out plan, but the sad reality is that there are more people in the world that are more interested in their own worth than people interested in freely availible information.
"Did you know that each time big business's stock drops and you find that a big business Officer sold his stock just before the drop, you can sue him? Yes, you can, and it happens a LOT - you just don't hear about it. Big business almost always settles out of court before a trial (think they want to go to court when they can get rid of the annoyance by paying off the complainer - it's almost legal extortion - but the complainer has to lose money in the first place for the suit to have teeth.)"
These illicit 'trades' have to be publicly documented over computer networks, I believe.
"Remember, the Security and Exchange Commission, which allowed the company to raise a lot of money by going public, makes BB play by SEC rules. If you understand computers you can understand the SEC rules."
Would systematically sniffing SEC releases for certain executive/company names and launching law suits when their found to fit the profile of an questionable trade not be a 'delicious' source of funding to facilitate the 'Investment Club'. If you need a source of reference regarding the impact/hassle of one of these suits just ask Dr. Michael Coupland or review the Corel archives. Long live social hacktivism!
Ok, I think that it's a nice idea, really...
But who's going to do this? I would really like to see it happen, yet, I don't see it happenning, not to an extent that would make a single bit of difference anyway.
People will think what they want to think. I know people who will not be swayed by logic, reason, or a definition in the dictionary to change their mind about anything. What makes anybody think that this will be any different?
Eh...
So it would be perfectly allowable to have an English description of the CSS algorithm, (or even a Hebrew translation). Does anyone have a detailed description of this?
Although I did hear that there was a precedent of a magazine being banned from publishing diagrams of an H bomb. Any truth in this?
Seems very odd considering that the only really difficult part of building one is getting the parts.
The idea isn't to buy controlling interest in the company, it's just to buy enough to
- not go broke on commissions
- have a chance to speak at general meetings
We're talking about BIG companies here, not thinly traded Mom'n'Pop startups. For most of them, you can buy thousands or even hundreds of thousands of shares without the market noticing the action (millions might start to show...). Check the financial section tomorrow to see the daily volumes involved.In fact, this entire post is not my opinion at all.
Nicely done. If only you could put it in small print with an asterisk which requires the reader to look at the other side of the page...
- - - -
"Domains at $15/year"
How about donating 50 cents from every registration towards making the 'net a better place? There's no shortage of companies that embrace the open source philosophy. Some of them would surely contribute.
And how about $1 per Slashdot reader? There are enough people here to cripple high-powered web servers whenever a new cool article is posted (e.g The Lego Machine Gun). Surely this must translate into a few thousand dollars (<RANT>after you discount the 31337 haxx0r doodz whose sole contribution to the 'net is allowing us to be in the presence of f1r5t p05t'ers</RANT>).
- - - -
How about selling options on the stock for the same price at which it was bought? Ever looked at options?
While I agree that it's not generally a good money-making venture, that's not the goal here. The goal is hedging. Since it's a "charitable cause," the fund is expecting to lose money. The hedge is just to limit the loss.
- - - -
You're right. What the hell was I thinking?
--Rimbo, promising himself (yet again) to get a good night's sleep tonight
...as in, I would also be very willing to donate/invest the tiny fraction of my income that'd be needed to a trust fund such as this. If their credentials are good. Perhaps an offshoot of the EFF would be of more use than trying to get the EFF proper to engage in this kind of thing?
(sorry for the double-post... had some trouble with the login... AC wasn't deliberate)
--
Sod morality, Lets make money! With the combined knowledge of /. on tech stocks. We could make serious money. Currently the trend is that most Internet floatations go very well. The key is to spot which companies have real value and which are pure media hype. One major problem we would hit would be insider information. Most of us work for some tech company or other (Except the kids and the students) and that leaves you ineligable to deal in stocks you know 'non-public' info on.
i bet that some smarty-pants can even figure out how to use various stock tricks such as hedging so that we dont even risk any money, other than the cost of buying/selling the shares. ($12/per, in my case)
i know a certain percent of you folks out there are highly paid web-folks. how about it? are you willing to lend some money to a good cause temporarily? (and you know that the press we got over this would do at least as much as the combined voting power we gained!)
Let's be honest here, the MPAA (and RIAA, for that matter) know EXACTLY who they are going to piss off by doing what they are doing. And they are also well aware of what we, as 'hackers' are capable of. They also know, that unfortunately for us, the bogus, broad-based technology crime laws are written against people like us, who at any given time, just by doing what we know is right (reverse engineering, taking things apart, figuring them out) could be sent to prison, indefinitely. The article is correct, 100%. The world may be run by computers, but money still makes that world go 'round. They wanna say that we are stealing their money, then get some stock and show that they arent representing your needs and wants, as a shareholder. Now there are enough of us in the world to put the kebosh on any one of their websites, but then they go to court and say "We were just trying to protect our investment! And looks what these bullys did to our website!" Dont think it can happen? Read the news, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, et al. have already decided that the recent dDoS attacks and the RSA website hacking are not only related, but were caused by the guy WHO WROTE THE SOFTWARE. Sound familiar? The guy who writes DeCSS gets arrested because the MPAA doesnt like what it can do. The guy who writes Trinoo gets looked into (so far....) because the FBI doesnt like what that can do. Face it, the only way to fight big business is by taking control of their business, by whatever legal means possible. Not to quote an off color reference, but remember how the 'Nerds' won in Revenge Of The Nerds? they didnt resort to violence or anything like that, They took control of the governing body. Thats the way to win. Ignore the sig below
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
The problem is that we do not have very much time to wait until the next stockholders meeting. We do not have an large amount of time allocated on this issue. There will be a trial that will modify our laws on copyrights. This is the case. We can waste plenty of time ranting about how the stock market works, if it would work and why it wouldnt. We need to contribute to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org) who will get lawyers. We need to be here as a resource for the lawyers to review. They will need to know much technical information as possible to win this case. We should contribute as much information to as many RELIABLE sources as possible. A credable media source whom actually has some weight needs to distribute the information. A court will not consider a post in a slashdot thread a very reliable source of information. If we could at least do that much, things should look up. We just have to realize that the courts will most likely schedule a trial before a stockholders meeting or at least before we can organize a group. This trial is about how the copyright laws are interpreted and could physically change the laws for the worse. I say again we need to focus our attention on the case at hand.
How about if some of the Linux nouveau-riche could spend their IPO dollars on this idea. How about it Linus, Eric?
Overall, I like the idea of setting up a fund through which many investors from the "Hacker" community could proxy their votes and enter motions or comments into shareholder meetings. Or in fact, even result in sweeping changes to the board membership if representation is strong enough...
One thing that may be easier though with the DVD case in mind. If you look at the DVDForum web site. The site contains information on how to become a member. All it takes is about $1000 per year. DVD technical information is shared with all members. Seems to me, membership would give a concerned group of developers the ability to develop a DVD player for any architechture they wanted. Even those which other companies would avoid or ignore.
Perhaps you don't agree with this. I don't care. I just raise it as another alternative. If the REAL reason for breaking CSS and the distribution of DeCSS is just to be able to play DVD's on a platform that has been ignored by other software vendors and manufacturers, then wouldn't the above result in the desired end? Or do you want everything in life for free?
Anyway, back to the original topic....
For starters: How about some suggestions of what companies would be suitable targets for a shareholder revolt? Any discussion should (and perhaps already is) take place somewhere not so public I guess.
Once this is done, some investigation using the multitude of on-line investing resources can be done to determine how much stock would be needed to actually have a chance to be heard. What I mean is... Microsoft has ~5 billion shares outstanding, and a market capitalization of about $500 billion. Buying 50000 shares is not going to give anyone a strong voice. And right now, even 50000 shares would cost $5 million, but only give (dare I say) us a 0.00001% of the vote. Assuming all shares were spoken for.
NOW BEFORE YOU SAY ANYTHING... I only used Microsoft as an example; a pretty extreme one. Like, who would want to change them anyway. And let's face it, the investment involved would be... (I can't even think of a word)
/uni0/milw/sol01/pl03 7340032 6774917 529948 93%
F U NE X N M? Son: "Dad... How do you spell 'hourly'?" Dad: "0 * * * *"
...they want us to hack the CFO's computer and increase our shares, too.
My email is real.
1
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
2
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
3
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
4
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
5
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
6
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
8
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
9
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
19038
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
69
This sig will bend over for a dollar!
Since a normal program in the Unix world uses files as input, output, status, as well as storage (/dev/lp0, /proc/sound, even /dev/null and in-memory kernel structures...), the fact that DeCSS dumps things to files doesn't matter. Any normal program does that.
Additionally, if the source were available under GPL, it could be modified for any use...good or bad...and make no mistake making *personal* backups is a good use.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
OpenBIOS including link to 'Linux BIOS'
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Thanks,
Thank You,
Troll King
Thank You,
Troll King
Subscribe
Thank You,
Thank You,
Troll King
Thank You,
Troll King
Subscribe
corporations already do terrible things and their shares skyrocket. The fact is, if they don't do things like have children working in their sweatshops in 3rd world countries, the stockholders wouldn't make as much money becuase the profit margin would be lower, and so the stock would be worth less. IN capitalism, corporate crime does pay.
Thank You,
Troll King
Thank You,
Troll King
Subscribe
Hello. I am a private investor who currently makes nearly all of his income from investing and has been involved in the market for a while. I really consider myself a part of both of these worlds, as I am both a computer enthusiast and an investor. If there was considerable interest, I would be happy to use my expertise to start a partnership that would invest in the companies suggested and would also attempt to actually make a profit for its members. If anyone would actually be interested in investing in such a partnership, please email me at live4sw@aol.com, or mmoin@optonline.net, or just reply to this message.
It seems, perhaps, that this partnership could "kill two birds with one stone", by pooling interested slashdotters' money in order to influence corporate change (I would certainly have a website that would make all of the investment info public, and have discussions among the investors about ways to use our holdings to contact companies). If there is considerable interest, I would certainly consider starting a partnership (a mutual fund would be prohibitively expensive to start). -Andrew Moin
Since I'm a shareholder, I'd already written a letter to Sony Corp. expressing my deep concern for the issues at stake, the mistreatment of Norwegian youth, boycott of Columbia-Tristar pictures, etc. etc., and asking what the official Sony position is. I'm still waiting for a reply, but hopefully this wakes someone up in the company. Two hints: 1) If you're serious about doing this sort of thing, you should open an account with Firstrade. To buy a share in a company costs $7, and to get the stock certificate in your name costs $7 there, so your invitation to the shareholder's meeting only comes out to $14 in commissions, plus the actual cost of the shares. This is the cheapest way to become a registered shareholder that I've seen. 2) You can always lie to the company and claim your shares are held "in street name" with your broker. AFAIK, there's no way they can reasonably check if you actually do own shares this way. You won't get invited to the meetings, but you can write more effective nastygrams to the companies' investor relations departments.
Who could run this in such a manner as to make it possible for me to participate?
The Electronic Frontiers Foundation?
"SCREW YOU Big Business! I'm going to copy and distribute as many DVDs as I like now, hahahahaha!"
You're another one who just doesn't fucking get it do you?
DeCSS isn't needed to copy DVDs. I never was needed for that. If you can read the data, you can copy the data.
If I have written on a note in my desk "XXDX11212220222002341" You may have no idea what that means, but you can still copy it as many times as you like. DeCSS is useless for piracy. Having a 4 foot long fork doesn't help you eat the world's largest bowl of soup.
Remember those old 3.5" floppies that had holes punched in the media that would cause failures if you tried to sequentially copy them?
People wrote programs that copied around those missing sectors, problem solved.
The DeCSS genie is out of the bottle. I even have a copy of the source. It's too late. That fight is over.
The author has a good point, next month I'm going to begin the stock investment phase of my retirement planning. I just may throw a share or two into one of these companies just so that I can show up at a stockholder meeting.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Which is why I think we should burn a DVD (with CSS protection) and use CSS in other areas, so we can sue all the DVD manufacturers for making devices that are primarily designed for the the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls the access to our work. If all DVD players, including the DVD CCA licensed ones, become violators, then I'm sure DVD CCA will be willing to make a deal.
Hack law by realizing that DVD CCA has no exclusive claim to CSS. It's not patented.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Ah, terrorism. The last refuge of the truly desperate. It might pay off with a little short-term satisfaction, but it doesn't really help. It just gets people to unify against the terrorists. Aren't the Evil Corporations enough of an enemy without giving them a bunch of powerful allies (e.g. the general public, the FBI, etc.)?
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
As soon as you break the rules, you forfeit all rights
I do? I think that this is exactly what the authoritarian law-and-order types want you to believe. Break any rule and you become less than human, not worthy of any rights.
As in: "This guy portscanned a machine on the network! He should go to prison for five years and be forbidden to work with computers for the rest of his life. What do you mean it's too harsh? He's a hacker, vermin that must be eliminated. Be thankful we don't shoot him on the spot!"
I think you are wrong in a very basic way.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
1) How many people are on the net?
2) How many people read slashdot?
3) How many people could donate $100?
Multiply either 1*3*100 or 2*3*100 and see what sort of numbers you come up with. If Folks use what they would have spent on their next few DVDs (price varrying) then we can actually pick up quite a few shares.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
no it doesn't.
All CD players do is tell the CDplayer to start playing the CD. So long as the CD player is connected to the soundcard, it will play without linux even know that a soundcard exists.
This is why the CDplayer/DVDplayer analogy falls down however...the DVDplayer needs to decode the data whereas the CDplayer only needs a computer to start it.
Could mr AC be a MPAA troll?
"All CD players do is tell the CDplayer to start playing the CD. So long as the CD player is connected to the soundcard, it will play without linux even know that a soundcard exists"
All CD player programs do is tell the CD player machine....
Perhaps I phrased it poorly. My point was not about whether some individual hedging strategy will result in financial security for a few individuals, but whether any hedging strategy can provide safety for anyone who wants it.
Of course some people will always make money. That doesn't mean that their strategy was foolproof, it means that their strategy coincided with chance market fluctuations. They made a gamble and won; it happens at the horse races all the time.
So many people in the financial world talk about hedging to "remove risk" or "reduce risk" when they're really talking about shifting risk to someone else. When you save your own ass by shorting before a crash, it's at the expense of making the crash doubly worse for someone else.
The truth is that the risk has been moved from betting on individual stocks to betting on hedging strategies. Everyone is doing it, leaving the exact same situation as before sophisticated mathematical hedging strategies came out.
The market will eventually go down. A major downward correction is overdue. Do I have a crystal ball? Of course not, it is a well known fact that stocks in general are overvalued, that their prices are inflated by an excess of capital in the system. I suppose it is possible that instead of stock prices crashing the whole thing will be solved by inflation, but the net result is the same: people don't have the money they think they have, and people who buy in now to stay will lose.
Of course, you could always weasel out of it by calling "getting out" "investing in currency" or some such thing. The best way to short a whole market you know is going down is to get out and stay out until it starts making sense again. If people do this in a considered, rational way instead of waiting for the first frightening downward hickup as an excuse to dump everything and run, we might have a true correction and avoid a drastic crash. The damage has already been done, some people are going to lose, it can be done thoughtfully and the system as a whole will survive, or it can be done thoughtlessly, and goverments will be destabilized, banks will be broken, and chaos will result.
No amount of hedging is going to help when the market crashes, and it will inevitably crash. Stocks are grossly overvalued, so they must come down across the board, and when they do, everyone invested in the stock market is going to lose money, and some will lose a lot. A lot of retirement plans are going to come up as around half of what people thought they had squirreled away. If your strategy isn't day-trade gambling, this is the worst possible time to invest (and if it is day trading, go to Vegas and be honest about what you want!).
Do you remember the LTCM fiasco? (LTCM = Long Term Crisis^H^H^H^H^H^HCapital Management) They were the perfect hedgers, leveraged to an insane degree and diversified beyond reproach: they nearly brought down the whole shebang (and probably would have, except for a multi-billion-dollar government bailout).
Why? Because a hedging strategy only works as long as the system remains stable: no major government collapses, no large-scale wars, and no general stock corrections. Since a general downward correction is due, no hedging strategy is valid even in the short term. Since the world in general is not stable, no hedging strategy is ever valid in the long term.
Ah, but they make money from the benefits of doing these things quietly, not from loudly announcing their future intention of doing so.
(besides, treating children badly will never arouse public uproar like killing cute little fuzzy baby seals; after all, the seals would otherwise expect a perfectly comfortable life through to adulthood whereas the children are as likely as not to fall victim to some predator)
If you're concerned about losing your savings over this, or worse, of endorsing the bad guys policy by driving their share price up, how about this simple trick:
At one of them, you buy the stock, and proxy it to the advocacy group. And at the other, you short it! Result: voting rights, but no risk exposition! If the stock tanks, you lose on the shares you bough, but you win it back on those that you shorted. And vice versa. Moreover, the transaction doesn't cause any extra demand (you buy and sell the same amount of shares), hence it should not favorably influence the price either...
For those that didn't read the article, the idea isn't that a group of hackers all crash the big party, but a large group of hackers pool their resources. You aren't giving away your life savings, each person wouldn't even individually have to spend that much. Also, you aren't investing in these various Big Business companies for the long term. The trust only needs to buy the stock a short while before the meeting to be able to vote. I'm sure we could find some trustworthy group of people, which includes someone with a good knowledge of the stock market, to run something like this. When the stock isn't in a particular BB it can be invested like a mutual fund, so that chances are you will actually make money off of this. If only 100 or so people committed themselves, with around 500 dollars each, that would give us 50,000 dollars, enough to buy a large enough block to be heard. And I don't think it's unrealistic to think if this is well organized we could get a good deal more than that
For this idea to work we would have to understand law and BB as well as we understand the computer, and most of us would think that really boring. Sure, we can hire lawyers, but then we'd have a grasp on "their world" just as good as the one they have on ours when they hire us - and that would be laughable.
What we need is someone who understands profoundly both worlds. Actually, we'd need a lot of these someones.
The problem with that is, I think we can assume Jon Johansen and company either don't know beans about writing an MPEG2 player, or they just didn't want to muss with it. They were working to get the file into standard MPEG2 format, so that somebody else could figure out how to play it; there's no practical way to DO that except to dump it to a disc (unless you have 10 gigs of RAM).
Now that the codebase is there, there IS work being done to make a "drop in the disc, hit play and go" player, check out XVideo on freshmeat. Sadly, it doesn't seem to work properly just yet, and more sadly it has to be binary only because of all this legal bullshit.
Nevertheless, I'm only going to say this once: DeCSS has NOTHING to do with piracy, it's USELESS to pirates, and the ONLY reason it exists is to play movies. Period. No other purpose. End of story. End of post.
^D
EOF
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Instead of concentrating funds to try and influence EXISTING companies, how about concentrating funds to build NEW companies or organizations (perhaps nonprofit?) which are specifically chartered to develop alternatives to the technologies which we dislike?
For instance, would it be possible to create a foundation which would design, manufacturer & sell at cost, players & disks using DVD-technology (or flourescence, whatever the latest stuff is) but unencrypted?
How much would it cost to set up something like this, esp. if they would also accept & organize the efforts of "free" labor from interested people all over the world?
Basically, my thought is that a lot of these big companies can dictate terms to the marketplace because they're the only ones which have the hardware/manufacturing facilities. We've got a lot of brainpower on the net, who have shown that they love tough problems, but there's no way to turn all that brainpower into real "products".
Might it be more cost effective to focus our donations (kind of like a voluntary "tax") into an organization which would organize the resources necessary to make our "desired" products a reality? If it was explicitly non-profit (only charged at-cost for its products), was seeded/subsidized by regular donations from activism, and took proper advantage of the brainpower of people willing to contribute, I'm sure that foundations like that could become a potent economic force!
However, I never met a man I trusted. Not on the 'net, anyhow. Nor has anyone else with a grain of sense. Who could run this in such a manner as to make it possible for me to participate?
By me? Nope, I'm Canadian, and nobody else will trust me by dint of my flapping head and beady eyes.
By some distinguished /.er who might be the hot grits troll in disguise?
By Andover itself? I don't know what their corporate mandate is, but probably not this.
By a trust organization or shell corporation formed by the charter Slashdot guys? We know where they live, so they're trustworthy. Probably.
Well, you tell me. Youse guys are the smart ones.
I think that the movie industries refusal to allow a Linux DVD player shows monopolistic tendencies or a cartel ... ?
threadeds blog
File this under the "better to light a candle than curse the darkness" category.
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Seriously...if someone can set this up, I'll gladly send in a dollar and if it is legal, they can keep $0.99 for themselves and use the $0.01 to but that fraction of a proxy of a share of stock.
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I do think the EFF would be fit for organizing this, especially things like finding out which BB company will be next to have their stockholders meeting and whether they could be influenced, then working out an agenda (possibly even with the help of /.) and, finally, actually sending someone over to bodily represent the cause.
I do not think this is something to be accomplished only with money donated to the EFF non-"special purpose".
The project needs A Lot Of Money (the more money it gets, the more influence and media attraction it will have) that stays there for some time, possibly generating good revenues or, more probably, as profit is not its main target, some losses (but remember: there is always risk in stock trading, and we are talking about large, established companies -> low risk stock).
Many of us each investing some in an "Investment Club" is what piles up to MUCH.
Risk would be shared, profit possible, and whoever wants to stop participating is free to do so.
Im looking forward to that kind of project.
Kiwaiti
Member of the Legion Of Microsoft Haters
Your post is living proof that it DOES work!
The 'hack' of the shareholder's meeting got enough coverage in the Media that you (and I) remember it, for next to no investment on the behalf of the protesters, which is EXACTLY what the article suggested! All the negative press coverage probably knocked a few million off thier share price too...
- Andy R.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Forget stock purchases. The only way it would work is if a large number of people bought one share each, attended the shareholders' meeting personally, and raised hell. If you buy a large block of the company's stock, you raise its price -- and that is almost tacit endorsement of their behavior.
I think civil disobedience is the only way to honestly protest this. I think a coordinated effort of DDoS attacks, repeatedly striking the same corporations' sites by people who do it and then fess up afterwards (only to have the site attacked by the next person in line the next day), might have a far more profound effect. The main reason doing it this way might be more effective (as opposed to a more conventional way such as through the legal system) is that if you want to protest, you should stick to the forum you know best. Secondly, censorship of this nature is information warfare, and information warfare should be fought by information.
I am in no way advocating such behavior. I do feel it would be effective, but that is far different from advocating it. In fact, this entire post is not my opinion at all.
Environmentalists have been doing this for some time now. They buy one share of a company whose environment policy needs adjusting and then get to say what they think in the shareholders meeting. I do not know whether they have had any success or not but at least they get the chance to speak.
And media usually is interested in what they have to say.
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
The EFF was set up to fight encroachments into our freedon on the net. This can be one of thier tools that they cn use. This has an advantage in that the EFF is established and trusted and works towards these goals anyway so action can be coordinated.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
C'mon. Keep your life savings. What Dr. Z is suggesting is that if each person invest a VERY SMALL amount (say, buy one share at market) and proxy it to the advocacy group, the combined shares will represent a very vocal interest in the company stridently expressing our views at each and every shareholder meeting. It's really quite brilliant! As Queen once suggested, "fight from the inside!"
Ask your doctor if getting up off your ass is right for you! -- Bill Maher
The DeCSS fiasco really overstepped the mark, broke the rules, and people are now paying for it.
First of all, nobody is paying for it (yet). Spending half a day being questioned by police is unpleasant, but hardly earth-shattering. And I know of no (non-moral) harm to anybody in the US.
Second, playing by the rules is fine as long as the opposition does not change them as the game goes along, and this is exactly what has happened. Allow me to recap.
Some time ago (late 60s?) the Congress adopted a copyright law that tried to set a balance between the copyright holders and the users. Specifically, users were given "fair use" rights, but these rights were offset by harsh penalties for "non-fair" use of copyrighted works. Fine. Everybody got used to this state of affairs and now considers it "natural".
Fast-forward to the end of the 90s. DMCA comes in and, basically, takes away fair use. Make no mistake, that is the real thrust of DMCA. If the copyright holder bothers to put in any device to control access to the copyrighted work, you fair-use rights go out of the window. Yes, you can still make copies for personal use, but, unfortunately, it so happens that it is illegal to access the material in order to make copies. Oops. Fair use? What fair use? That all theft and highway robbery!
Did you notice how the old balance of fair use versus harsh penalties just lost one whole side? Do you still want to be a good boy and say "well, if that's the rules, so that's the rules"?
Now, DMCA is (IMHO) a baaaad law. The way bad laws are overturned is by courts throwing them out. The courts throw them out by hearing cases that fall under this law. Clearly it's very important for the "right" sort of case to be the test case for the law. I think that the DeCSS case is not that bad for this purpose, given that there is actually a legitimate purpose for DeCSS.
I think our goal should be overturning of DMCA, because even if the DeCSS issue goes away (e.g. the case is dropped), DMCA is still there and is still hanging over any attempt to get "normal" access to copyrighted works.
By the way, it would help if somebody did produce a Linux DVD player based on DeCSS code. I think that the fact the code runs only under Windows does hurt the credibility of the defence a lot.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
First lets recap on who controls the MPAA, from their website http://www.mpaa.org/about/ it's controlled by:
.00006% of the company. How much influence would that have? Granted I'm looking at this from the standpoint of influencing the company rather then having a voice at a shareholders meeting. I suppose it would have no real effect other then a publicity stunt. If we could get 1 percent of the company that might have some major impact. But that would take 1,509,020 shares of stock, or contributions equaling 33,952,950.
Walt Disney Company;
Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc.;
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.;
Paramount Pictures Corporation;
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.;
Universal Studios, Inc.; and
Warner Bros.
After looking at a few of their stock prices and outstanding shares it seems the best effort would be applied by buying MGM stock. They're trading at 22.5 dollars a share with 150,902,000 shares outstanding. How many shares do we want and how much support can we get? Lets say we get 10,000 shares bought with this money. That's only
If it's a go, I'll contribute a few shares but I don't expect much more then a very loud voice at a shareholders meeting.
I see just one major problem with the idea, great as it is: the MPAA, which is the major force behind the lawsuit, is not a 'BB' - it has no stock to be voted, and a request from any SINGLE one of its members would most likely not have the clout to get them to stop. Hackers of the world would need to control a notable percentage of stock in THE MAJORITY of the several dozen major motion picture 'BB's that support the MPAA, and that, unfortunately, is very unlikely to happen.
One possible alternative is a media campaign, and to that effect, etoy might take an interest in helping, as they already have an established agent base in the thousands.
damnnewbe@hotmail.com
"I am not responsible for the opinions of my peers"
...I wonder if we might not see companies behaving unethically (or at least unpopularly) in the hopes of driving up their stock price.
Things might get a little wierd when you start buying stock in companies you're opposed to.
"Last week, Nil Ethicus Mercantile announced its new plan to club baby seals (using frozen dolphins and beluga whales to cut down on club costs) for the meat of their tongues, to be included in the recipe of an undisclosed school cafeteria supplier's luncheon meat. This week, the value of their shares shot up an amazing 400% as GreenPeace members bought up 60% of their stock. Recognizing the clear market support, several other companies have announced their intent to take up the plan NEM abruptly dropped under its new ownership."
Okay, your sad story has encouraged me to show you how I see the people behind the faceless corporations...
Jack Valenti drew the curtains closed in the DVD CCA and MPAA war room. He smiled that Congress charming smile he was known to use to get his way on Capitol Hill. "So, is everyone clear on what we're doing and why we're doing it?"
A naive young executive spoke up, "I understand that we are trying to criminalize the use of unlicensed reverse engineered DVD players. It cuts into our licensing profits and it's bad for business. However, I'm confused by some of our tactics. I mean, we keep telling the press that deCSS allows the creation of copies of DVDs, but people can already do that. Another thing, people are allowed to do that, the Berne convention, fair use and all that. Isn't this just kicking up dust clouds that obscure our main issue?"
"Well, I understand what you are saying, but you have to understand that this is bigger than just CSS," Jack said, causing one of the cowled figures from the DVD CCA to hiss.
"Now, now, my friends," he said, glancing nervously at the DVD CCA council, "We all admire the fine work you've done, just hear me out ok?"
"We don't want unlicensed DVD players to exist for a few reasons. The first, of course, is the licensing fee, but in reality, that's chump change. Regional coding, you see, is where the real money is. Say we release a movie in the US. Well, that's all well and good, but there is a huge market in India that can't afford to pay as much as the US market can. We can make a profit from that country, but we have to knock some bucks off the price. Now, in a free market," here Jack pauses as the sinister assembly in the room chuckles, "an enterprising entrepreneur could buy up cheap DVDs in India, and sell them in the US, bleah! With regional coding, we can maximize our profits on a per region basis! Oh, and of course, we can release mature versions of movies in other parts of the world where they think of us Americans as a bunch of Puritans, but still keep the FFV (Fanatics for Family Values) folks happy."
"But, Mr. Valenti," said the young executive, "This is all interesting, but it's got nothing to do with copying."
"Sorry, went off on a tangent, there, and your right," he paused, "Do you know what else maximizes profits? I'll tell you what, selling people the same thing, over and over and over again. It's huge! Now, you may not know this, it's top secret, but look at this."
Mr. Valenti pulls out a tiny, coin sized disk, "This is the future, it can hold every Spielberg, Lucas and Tarentino movie ever made just on this one disk. Not that we'll do that, of course," he chuckled, "But we are going to be switching to these in about five years, just like we switched from tape to DVD. By that time, we're going to need to have changed the law so you can't copy materials for personal use. I mean do you know how difficult it is to produce new content? That'll sell? It takes a huge effort, but when you have content that's proven popular, like, say, The Wizard of Oz you don't want people to pay for it once and never buy it again!"
"Tapes were a fine media, know why?" he asked, "'Cause they decay over time, with viewing, and everthing else. Pretty soon, that copy of It's a Wonderful Life is all worn out, and Joe Sixpack has to buy another copy if he wants to watch it... well, when it isn't showing fifty times on TV. With DVDs, decay isn't as certain. Oh, a good scratch will take it out, and these baby's," he shows one of the new decaying coating DVDs, "rot away just as well as video tape, thanks for that Fred," a sinister black cloaked figure nods slightly at the praise.
"Where was I? Oh, but what if Johnny Lunchpail could make a perfect copy of that great Mr. Potter movie... love the way he got to keep the money... huh? What then? I'll tell you what!"
Jack shook with rage, even the sinister DVD CCA people backed off slightly, "We could never sell it to him again, that's what! He'd own it! Well, what we are out to do here is change the concept of ownership itself. The unwashed masses will never own our movies! They'll just have possession for a temporary time! When DVD players go out of style, we stop letting people make them, pretty soon those saps have to rebuy their whole video collection! Technology always advances, and when it stops, we'll find a way! We'll change a nut or a cog inside, and the old disks won't work, heh, heh heh.... they'll never be safe!"
"Oh... right, and we have to stop casual piracy, because that's just awful," here, Jack gave a broad wink to the young executive. "Now, let's close the meeting with a rousing song, provided for us by the good folks at Disney," Michael Eisner grinned at Jack.
The droning voices of the assembled began to sing:
o/~ Yo, ho, Yo ho, a pirates life for me
We'll ravage and pillage and won't give a hoot
Drink up me hearties, yo ho! o/~
I really feel sorry for these people, don't you?
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
My favorite quote from the day was a shocked murmur that some of the attendees were wearing 'tradesmen trousers' (Jeans to you and me).
threadeds blog
Are people here actually interested in this idea? I'll look into Massachusetts law on starting a non-profit (I'm an MIT student, so I'm Boston based) and the investment club work. Obviously we'd need a web site with online discussions to handle it.
My Linux box (I'm bringing it back up next week) could host it... it doesn't use 90% of it's resources... I use it for play...
I think that I can use the MIT network for non-profits, just not for-profit businesses, but I'll check.
If you are interested, e-mail me at scorpion@mit.edu, and tell me, roughly, how much you would contribute. If it looks substantial, I'll look into the paperwork. I just made a donation to the McCain election fund, so my cash for "causes" is low, but I'd put the time in (and maybe $100 or so of my own money) to get this up and running.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to the name for this endeavor?
Note: most of these companies have multi-billion dollar capitalizations. Even if only 30% of stock holders (including big money) vote their proxies, a $1b companies has $300m dollars worth of voting stock. That means that we'd need $150m to get a majority. OTOH, the ability to buy 1 share in each of these companies would be minimal, and would give the rights to attend the meetings.
So I guess the goal would be either:
A) raise enough money to buy 1 share in each company plus cover travel costs to speak at meetings
B) raise enough money to get awareness, then raise enough money to actually buy real chunks of the companies... you'd only need to buy one at a time...
However, I think that the potential for launching a hostile take-over of these companies is nil, and most companies elect the Board as a slate so you can't even push all your votes for one person on the board... however, it would be a neat experiment.
If you are interested: e-mail scorpion@mit.edu
I've just finished reading the transcript of the application for an injunction against the distribution of DeCSS, and I've got to say the defence really looked fairly weak. The laws that the plantiffs are pursuing seem to be deliberately aimed at the sort of software that DeCSS is, and the way it was manufactured.
The incredible uprising against the supression of this information really had better be as a demonstration against the way they treated Jon and his father (and does anyone actually have even a second hand account of that ordeal?), because the legal situation looks very very cut and dried.
Despite what any linux zealots might like to think, the case is being made purely against the production of software that is "primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls the access to a work"
In a purely legal sense, the judge very quickly, and I think justifiably, knocked back every single defence that was put forth, because none of them actually related to the case that had been presented.
We can all rave on forever about how this is an example of repression of a "small entity" (to quote the above article) by a "Big Business", but really, you can't abjure responsibility by attributing personalities to the opposing sides. Calling Big Business "BB" reduces those companies to a nameless, faceless force, thus making them emminently more suitable as a target for hatred, while simultaneously personalising the "small entity" by calling them "a son and his father" evokes sympathy.
If you actually stop for a millisecond and take note of these things, and think about reversing them, you might get a different image.
A father and his son today were finally forced to take legal action against a Big Business that had illegally bypassed the security measures on their product, known as 'DVD's. The father and son had developed their encryption to protect the content of these distributed DVDs in line with various US and international laws. Their livelihood is founded on the security of this data, and so they had to take steps to prevent it becoming publicly accessible.
As it became clear that this Big Business had deliberately circumvented their protection system, in order to use these DVDs on their internal platform of choice, as opposed to the platforms for which it was available, they took steps to prevent the circulation of the code which allowed this circumvention.
As information of this prevention attempt became available, the Big Business immediately took steps to widely distribute the code in an attempt thwart any restrictions the courts might impose. It has been speculated that the genie might never be put back in the bottle due to this deliberate action, which was frequently accompanied with rude or abusive comments: "Jon and his father are cock suckers!"
(Don't forget, Big Business is run by People too, it even employs some)
---
I mean give me a break. Any time we hear of big corporations trying to use loopholes in the law to escape from obvious infringements, we get all narky, but when it's some 'father and his son', it's suddenly a human rights issue.
Yes, I can see that the purchasing of that DVD should entitle you to view the information stored therein. However, I don't think that the fact there is no player for linux justifies the creation and distribution of source code that is obviously intended only to break DVD encryption.
All these script kiddies are just rabid about anything that might undermine some Big Business, so as soon as they see something like that, are they thinking "Oh good, now I can use linux to play my DVDs"? Hell no. They're thinking "SCREW YOU Big Business! I'm going to copy and distribute as many DVDs as I like now, hahahahaha!"
---
Having said all that, I still do think that there are some fairly serious issues here in regards to production of code, and whether it forms a part of 'speech' in terms of 'free', and whether it should be protected as such. I think that producing code is an expression of human ingenuity, an advance in the field of human endeavour, whatever that code might do, and however small that advance may be.
As it stands though, that code is illegal, it was produced illegally and it is intended for a purely illegal use. I for one won't defend it.
B.
There are several things that need to change in order for this Battle to be less uphill. For starters, I think people need to stop using "Hacker" anywhere near the word "DVD". I know that the word has been misappopriated to mean someone who breaks into computers, but whenever the general public hears the words "Hacker", "DVD", and "circumvent copy protection", they'll immediately draw the wrong conclusion. They'll think "bunch of freakish computer outlaws came up with a way to Pirate DVD's" not "normal people who want to watch the DVD's they legally buy or rent on something other than windows". The whole issue should be changed from a "Hacker" thing to a Linux thing.
Second, I think the multi-billion dollar ipo linux company's need to put their muscle into this conflict, not just make a few token donations to the EFF. Big businesses have no problem coercing people who threaten their interests. With Red Hat and VA technically being big businesses (who have something at stake if we can't have dvd with our linux) they should do everything barring murder to force the movie companys to stand down. Though it's not likely it'll happen, it would be cool if Bob Young did a hostile takover of movie studio then fired the board of directors, just to make a point.
Another third hand that should be played is the justice department's anti-trust suit against Microsoft. The linux community should argue to the government that by refusing to let people have DVD players that work with Linux, a serious challenger to Microsoft's dominance is crippled. And Microsoft, given the chance, *will* beat the the fact that Linux can't play DVD's (even if it is because of a stupid legal reason) over the linux community's head.
A fourth and final card that should be played is the fact that more and more movie studios are using linux to render their scenes. It would be good publicity to show a list of movies put out by these major studios that have used beowulf clusters to cheaply render their CG scenes. Basically, show the government and the public that by preventing Linux's progress, the movie studios are biting the hand that feeds them. While it would legally do nothing, it would be a good PR move.
Share prices are mostly based upon perception. The hack needs to take that into account. Going along and voting means very little - you're reacting to them. We have to make them react to us.
Who are they? The BB Execs/Directors and Institutional holdings.
If we proposed a motion we would easily be outvoted. So, the hack is never going to be a numbers game.
In New Zealand, we are entitled to register a proxy vote for companies we hold voting class shares in. That is, we can nominate any person to attend the meetings, vote and ask questions in general business.
There is no need to have a fund to manage the shares, we just have to nominate that X is our representative, and they are going to attend the meeting and act on behalf of us for our shareholding.
I imagine this should be possible in the US, without having to use the afore-mentioned fund manager.
Sample Hack. DVD - why notThe hack needs to be concerned, informative, and non-confrontational. Remember, we hold shares in the company and are not trying to destroy it, but make sure that our future returns are protected. ;)
And DVD has never faced a bigger threat than now...
"Any other general business?"
"Mr Chairman, I would like to raise a matter that is of great concern to the stakeholders I represent."
"A couple of months ago, a small group of dedicated engineers, software developers and security experts banded together with the goal of creating an open source, hardware and software solution for the distribution of digital media.
Their goal is to provide one secure, free and recognised standard for the physical distribution of large quantities of digital media.
This system, once complete, will not have any zoning issues, will use publicly available secure encryption algorithms, and all the required source will be available for implementation on any hardware/software platform that there is time, interest and intent.
There will be no licensing fees for this distribution system.
Already a large number of small entertainment companies have pledged not only support for the Open Source Storage Device (OSSD), but have also provided much capital required for the ongoing development of this solution.
George Lucas has been quoted as saying 'We finally have a secure digital solution that we trust - Star Wars II will be one of the first OSSD discs released.'
This is hot on the heals of the popularity of MP4, which has now steamrollen over SDMI, providing an open source, yet secure solution for digital media management. And with the plethora of different devices available for playback these days, MP4 runs on almost everything.
We have some questions that we would like to ask, as we are extremely concerned that this could have a drastic effect on our DVD player revenues, along with associated products namely the music, movies and software you sell.
1/ Do you perceive OSSD to be a threat to our DVD business?
2/ What actions have you taken to mitigate and prepare for the introduction of OSSD?
3/ Have you considered adopting OSSD?
4/ What effect upon our returns do you think the introduction of OSSD will have?
I note that DVD associated revenue has jumped in the most recent quarter to 15% of all quarterly revenue. We believe that OSSD is a significant risk to future cashflow and returns.
Thank you for allowing us to raise our concerns."
How would that hack go?
Cheers
RedIguana
Cheers