Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Google, Prince, Bayesian
Please confirm, over. After reports that the People's Republic of China was blocking access to Google, an anonymous reader writes: "I'm working in China, and for the last 3 days Google and some other sites were not accessible. But since even sending SMS to europe didn't work I don't think it was censoring, more like routing problems of some sort. Anyway, Google is back and reports of slashdot blocking are also overrated :)"
Cradle of Democracy, or Regular Cradle? Many readers have written to point out that, just like they promised to in March, the government of Greece has gone ahead and banned electronic games. xlurker, for instance, writes "In an unbelievable move the Greek government has banned all public play of computer games with enactment of law 3037/2002. An english translation of it can be read here. This has been reported in the Greek newspaper Kathimerini and recently confirmed in detail at the German Heise site (Google translation). The law encompasses all appliances that play games, as ludicrous this sounds, it spans from cells ph ones and computers to gameboys and consoles. Greek internet cafes are protesting and international gaming events are being cancelled and relocate d. The bill was passed as a last ditch effort by the government to combat gambling. Thousands of Greek citizens have protested the blanket anti-gaming law. Online petitions can be found here and at the Greek Net Cafe site."
Welcome to your new email account. In addition to the Bayesian spam filter for Qmail mentioned in a previous Slashback, an anonymous reader writes "An article here talked about using statistical methods to classify spam (and perhaps other mail) automatically. A real implementation of this has been released (currently beta) here that acts as a POP3 proxy and works with any mail client. It inserts an X-Text-Classification: header in each mail message containing a classification of the mail into any of a number of classes that the user defines. The code is mostly Perl and an LGPL library so although the current version is for Windows it will work on other platforms and the author is asking for suggestions and testers."
Yes, I'd like to be paid in unlucky-pop-star weights, please. 21mhz writes "Reuters reports: Russia's space agency has scrapped 'N Sync singer Lance Bass's plans to join an October space mission after the U.S. pop star failed to meet payment deadlines. More details from AP. The guys that do real stuff at ISS will get an extra cargo package the weight of the unlucky pop singer."
And Lo, eleven shall have been selected, and it is so. AmateurHuman writes "After two delays, Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, have announced that the first stage of the New Fantasy Setting Search is completed. Eleven out of 11,000 entries were selected. Good job to those lucky eleven!"
Slashdot is not responsible for the content of external links. ttyp writes "We've all seen Janis Ian's opinions about P2P and the RIAA but, man, does Prince take it to a new level! Check out the artist's commentary A Nation of Thieves wherein Prince wonders, 'How long, however, b4 a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, 2 leave the system 4 good? How long b4 a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and r careful not 2 get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long b4 a critical mass of art lovers get 2gether 2 provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the xisting system artistically irrelevant?' Also check out the links to other commentaries on this page."
A Cnet article regarding the story explains that "The blanket ban was decided in February after the government admitted it was incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines.", so since Greek authorities are too stupid to tell the difference between Teris and a Poker machine, no one gets to play anything?
The stupidity involved in this law is beyond comprehension.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Any other Bayesian spam filters?
I may have missed a few here and there, or gotten some wrong. I just did a dozen search and replaces or so...
Yeesh. If you have something worthwhile to say, then say it in language everyone can understand. Moron.
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Something happened on the way to the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started "converging" and "shareholder value" became far more important than customer service and respect for company employees ever managed to b. Compensation packages for company executives hit the stratosphere - while holding them accountable for their company's results became nearly impossible.
These executives are indeed very naive if they think that people haven't noticed.
People are noticing that something isn't quite right - that something is indeed very wrong. After a decade during which the stock market gained apparent respectability as a legitimate, sensible form of investing, the recent slew of huge corporate scandals reveals that it is still what it has always been: a sick place where neurotic, puerile gamblers get their kicks off the backs of millions of "anonymous" workers and individuals, who have no control over what happens to their hard-earned retirement savings.
Yet this is the place that most company executives feel is much more important to watch than the actual people for whom they produce their goods and services. This is the place where the fate of thousands of employees is decided every day by people staring at computer monitors showing ever-changing, meaningless lists of numbers and charts. And if you happen to personally hold shares in a company that has just announced that it is "restructuring" in order to improve its bottom-line and thus increase its "shareholder value", don't kid urself: When the company is talking about "shareholders", it's not talking about you and your measly couple of thousands of shares. It's only talking about big shareholders - i.e. other companies that own a more significant share of its market value.
This is a world where "hostile takeovers" and government-approved "mergers" are feeding a never-ending cycle of fewer and fewer executives wielding more and more power on a multinational scale. Soon enough, the "World Company" and George Orwell's 1984 will no longer be the stuff of satire or fiction - but prophetic descriptions of a very real "New World Order" gradually unfolding before our eyes.
A Little History
Let's start with a simple list: America Online, Time, Life, Warner Bros., Fortune, Elektra, Sports Illustrated, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Cinemax, Entertainment Weekly, New Line Cinema, In Style, Warner/Chappell Music, Time Warner Cable, WBN, ICQ, Warner Music Group, Netscape, People, Reprise, Rhino, Atlantic, WEA, TNT, MapQuest, WinAmp, In Demand, Erato, Moviefone, Road Runner, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (AOL Time Warner).
And another one: Universal Music Group, Verve, Nathan, Canal+, Impulse!, Cegetel, USA Networks, Decca, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Barclay, Armand Colin, L'Express, Universal Studios, Larousse, Sierra, MP3.com, MCA Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cineplex, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Vivendi Universal).
And yet another one: Disney, ABC, ESPN, Hyperion, Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, A&E, The History Channel, E! Entertainment, RTL-2, Buena Vista, Mr. Showbiz, Wall of Sound, Mammoth Records, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Walt Disney).
Need we say more? See for yourself... There's already only 7 of these corporate giants in total - and how long will it be before there are even fewer?
It all began innocently enough. Young entrepreneurs in the early 20th century started up new companies with a mix of creative ambition and business acumen. Then these companies grew bigger and bigger, and whatever entrepreneurial vision was present at their birth became more and more diluted and less and less relevant. Then corporate accountants suggested merging with or taking over other companies - and it all became an all-too-real game of Monopoly.
Then the Internet and "new technologies" came about, and the accountants' next big idea was convergence - i.e. the merging of "content" providers and "access" providers in order to control everything from the inception of a "cultural product" to its ultimate consumption by the unsuspecting masses.
The Art of Manipulation
It is easy to guess what got lost along the way... Creativity. Artistry. Independence. Critical objectivity. Uncontrolled access. The ability to "break thru" cultural barriers. Cultural diversity. Innovation. Freedom. Real music. Real art.
Juggling between art and commerce is a delicate balance at the best of times... and these are definitely NOT the best of times.
So now we have a so-called magazine "reporting" on the latest new blockbuster movie with a 10-page, full-color spread - as if the reporters weren't aware that the same company that produced the movie also owns their magazine... Yes, this is still called a "magazine". These are still called "reporters". And this is still called "journalism"... And yet millions of people are gleefully letting themselves be had.
Maybe we should stop calling this "art", or even "entertainment" for that matter - for what is so entertaining about being involved in a collective hallucination? Maybe we should start calling it what it really is, i.e. unfettered MANIPULATION.
In 1995, Clear Channel Communications owned 43 radio stations. Now it owns more than 1,200 - and its army of so-called "independent promoters" are letting legalized payola dictate what you get (or rather don't get) to hear on the radio.
Everywhere you look, the story is the same: more and more money, less and less choice, less and less freedom of access, fewer and fewer companies. How far will this have to go before a big shift in people's attitude causes this commercial hubris to collapse onto itself and implode?
Power Struggles
The first major cracks in this highly concentrated corporate world have, of course, already begun to appear, in what has been making the headlines in the past few months, i.e. shady accounting practices involving enormous amounts of money - enough to shake the economy of the most powerful nation of the world. And the hysterical stock markets have of course been swayed by this news, at the expense of tens of thousands of workers worldwide and millions of small investors who thought that their holdings had nowhere to go but up.
The value of AOL Time Warner's stock is now a quarter of what it was at the time of the merger between AOL and Time Warner, and this decline forced the company to take a $54 billion writedown earlier this year. And now it too is being investigated about its accounting practices. The story at Vivendi Universal is similar. Disney shares are near an 8-year low. And there is little doubt in people's mind that the problems are similar everywhere, in every big conglomerate that has become utterly out of touch with the reality of everyday work and the essence of human creativity.
In addition, people also realize all too well that governments have little - if any - power left when it comes to regulating these multinational monsters. Governments have much more power when it comes to regulating the lives of ordinary, law-abiding citizens - and they use and abuse this power as a way to distract people's attention from how much control the conglomerates have over what we get to hear, watch, read, eat, drink, buy, and generally experience as "free" citizens of the world.
One of the areas where this struggle is most acutely felt is, of course, the online world - a sprawling, anarchic community that is still in its infancy and whose exponential development in the last decade took everyone by surprise. And nothing exemplifies the struggle between government, big business, and individual rights better than the highly controversial issue of "peer-to-peer" file sharing and its many digital variations.
A Nation of Thieves?
Will the media/technology giants recover from the latest stock market slump? They probably will - but at what cost? In all likelihood, the cost will be more "restructuring", more layoffs, more executive shuffles and golden parachutes, causing even further alienation from their own employees and customers. And this, in turn, will further encourage the very behaviors that they claim are illegal and want punished by criminal law - all the while preserving their own impunity as they continue to carelessly flounder a capital that they do not own.
Napster may have gone bankrupt and become a closed chapter in the Internet's short history, but its death is by no means a reflection of a decline in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, quite the contrary. If anything, P2P has grown even further - but since it's becoming totally decentralized, there is no easy way to measure its significance.
What is for sure, however, is that, in spite of its many claims to the contrary, the recording industry has yet to provide evidence that P2P is actually detrimental to music making as an artistic endeavor, and even as a commercial venture. It is worth remembering, for example, that sales of music CDs actually increased when Napster was at its peak, and declined after Napster was abruptly shut down. Even economists who thought that file sharing "should be" hurting the recording industry are now expressing their doubts, based on what they say is simply not happening.
More importantly, many well-respected artists have sided with Internet users against corporate greed and actually use the Internet to promote alternative ways to distribute their music and reach out to a non-captive, legitimate audience of authentic music lovers.
This does not mean, of course, that all forms of file sharing are equally innocuous. There is little doubt that, when people use the Internet as a substitute for radio, i.e. as a way to discover new music, it can help promote the work of artists. But when a young junior high school student downloads tracks off the Internet and makes CD-R copies of them that he then sells for $5 in the schoolyard, it hurts sales of the original CD and it's disrespectful of the artist - regardless of how small a cut of the actual CD price the artist actually gets after all the executives and the middlemen in the recording industry have taken their piece of the pie.
Still, can we really go as far as to say that digital technology is creating a "nation of thieves" who no longer recognize the just value of art?
Protecting the Product
It is worth noting, to begin with, that the recording industry itself is far from having distinguished itself by recognizing the true value of art. Instead, it has consistently fought to be allowed to deprive many artists of their most fundamental rights. It has allowed popular artists to go bankrupt even though their albums were selling by the millions. It has reduced the artists' cut of the album sales pie to a ridiculously small portion of the actual income generated by these sales. It has consistently pushed commercial musical products at the expense of real musical artistry.
This hardly entitles the recording industry to lecture anyone about recognizing the just value of art.
It is also interesting to note that the cultural products that seem to be the primary concern of the industry giants are those that are already the most popular ones, and that things such as CD copy protection are being experimentally used mostly with items that will sell millions regardless of whether they are copy-protected or not.
So are most citizens really being completely disrespectful of the value of art and the need to provide appropriate compensation to the artists for their works? We've said it before and we'll say it again: the rise of digital technology and peer-to-peer file sharing has little to do with people's intrinsic respect for art and artists, and everything to do with the cynical attitude of big industry conglomerates, which have consistently pushed for more and more commercial, highly profitable products at the expense of authentic art and respect for artists.
If people do not feel enough guilt to prevent them from making digital copies of the latest episode of a popular TV show or hit pop song, it is precisely because the industry giants have succeeded in making these works purely commercial products, with little or no consideration for their actual artistic value. It is precisely because these companies have been consistently promoting commercial products at the expense of artistic works.
The fact that actual works of art still manage to seep thru the cracks of this huge profit-driven industry does not change anything about the fundamental equations that have been driving and still drive the industry, today more than ever - i.e. that art = money, artists = money-makers, and art lovers = consumers.
As a simple example of how little music is valued as an art form by the industry, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of music ever recorded is currently available - and, of this 20 percent, what proportion is actually readily available to music lovers? What proportion is not the current 100 top albums on the SoundScan charts?
It simply appears that the instinctive reaction of the lover of art (be it music, TV shows, movies, or other forms of art) is such that, if the industry has no respect for his or her identity as an appreciator of art, then he or she has no reason to have any respect for the industry as a purveyor of art. By making digital copies of so-called cultural products, many people are not demonstrating their lack of respect for art and for artists, but are expressing - consciously or not - their frustration with the way the entertainment industry profits from art at the expense of both art makers and art lovers.
The consumers of the commercial products of the entertainment industry are only as cynical as the industry has deliberately made them, by dumbing down their products, by exploiting artists, by making profit-driven choices and decisions, and by providing their own kind with obscene compensations and legal impunity that are completely out of touch with the real world of ordinary people.
Don't Get It Twisted
That being said, the whole debate about file sharing and digital piracy is, most of all, a convenient way for industry conglomerates to deflect attention from their own shady business practices and dubious alliances.
for example, it is worth noting that the Warner Music Group is heavily involved in the recording industry's fight against piracy, but that its own parent company, AOL Time Warner, is directly benefiting from file sharing, as a provider of Internet access to millions of Internet users worldwide. When AOL Time Warner repeatedly flaunts its ever-increasing number of members (34 million and counting) and the billions of hours that they spend online, is there any doubt that a good part of this growth involves the "unlawful" exchange of computer files at the detriment of recording artists?
In other words, the real "thieves" are not necessarily those that are currently getting the blame... Rather than a "nation of thieves", the current situation looks, to us, much more like an "elite of thieves".
And the real victims of this thievery are very much, as usual, the recording artists themselves, who will never get their share of AOL's profits as an Internet access provider, even though these profits are partly based on the content that they originally provided. And the real victims also include authentic music lovers, who already suffer from restricted access to the full range of music that they would like to explore, and who are also likely to suffer from technological restrictions that will soon prevent them from making legitimate copies of the works that they have lawfully purchased for their own enjoyment.
Make no mistake: the entertainment industry (including TV, movies and music) might be big, but the technology industry is even bigger. Remember that it is AOL that bought Time Warner, and not the other way around. Remember that Sony makes much more money in electronics and computer equipment than it does in record sales...
If the technology industry ends up implementing technological limitations that prevent users from lawfully enjoying their purchases - as it is threatening to do - the beneficiaries will not be the artists whose works are thus being allegedly "protected". And it will certainly not be the art lovers whose enjoyment of art will thus be restricted. No, it will simply b, once again... the industry conglomerates, who will have yet another generation of incompatible media and devices to sell to us under the guise of "technological improvement".
Conclusion
The technology and entertainment industries are simply to big for us to expect any overnight changes. The industry giants will continue to do their best to deflect people's attention away from their own wrongdoings and to blame falling profits and commercial failures on piracy at the same time that they are encouraging their customers to adopt the very technologies that make piracy possible. Artists will continue to be lured by unrealistic promises and contracts with big numbers and lots of small print.
How long, however, before a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, to leave the system for good? How long before a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and are careful not to get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long before a critical mass of art lovers get together to provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the existing system artistically irrelevant?
It all depends on us - and it all depends on you.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Come to think of it, a Princelizer would be a fun Perl hack. Kind of like the Sweedish Chef apps, but converts text into Prince's goofball way of using single-character phonetic replacements of sylables until u want 2 beat him 2 death with his own 4skin, and then party like it's 1999.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
IIRC, the Minneapolis Star Tribune used that weird symbol for his name fairly consistantly (even though it fucked up their printing process a little). The St. Paul Pioneer press with with the "TAFKAP" option. Both papers did call him "the Artist" on occation, but only in the context of an article where the meaning would be obvious.
The thing was, Warner held the rights to the name "Prince" for the duration of his contract (even though he went by that name before he even began his career at WB). By changing it to a symbol with no pronounciation, his fans would still call him "Prince", even though he never, ever directly told them to in any media events. Notice how the first album relased with that symbol-name had, as its first single, a song where he shouts, over and over, "my name is Prince". That's all he ever wanted to be called.
And now you probably know more about TAFKATAFKAP (as I like to call him), than you ever cared to.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
He has often written like that in the past. See his songs "I Would Die 4 U", "Money Don't Matter 2 Night", and "Nothing Compares 2 U."
Whatever you have to say about his method of communcating, there is no doubt that he is an extrememly intelligent man and a musical prodigy.
He has long been outspoken against the current state of the recording industry, and I am always glad to hear what he was to say about things.
I am writing this from Xi'an in Shaanxi Province, China. Google stopped working several days ago and still doesn't work. Going to a different IP address works though. So it might be a feeble attempt at blocking or a routing problem.
aCC
here is the news report on a major chinese news site, this site used to be neutrally, but it then has been controlled by China government, yes, i don't have the evidence to prove that it is "semiofficial", but it really is. i don't have much time, so i can only translate the main point of this report:
To purify the Internet, some search engine has been banned "without day"
obvioursly, the un-controlled "carpet searching" sometimes is really a "dust collector", it may leads the user to those illegal site and page, and since its server is oversea, so our country has no "supervision" with it. that's quite reasonable to ban those search engine.
yes, it doesn't mention google, but everybody know who it is.
and then, why there are some people think it's a rumor, think it's a "technical problem". the reason is google is still accessible thru some IP address. and many mirror is not banned (in case you dunno the heading chinese on that mirror site, that's "I NEED Google"). so it's quite understandable as "DNS failure" or something like this. why mirror is not banned? one possible reason is the dictator himself has no knowledge about internet, the banning was executed by operator, the operator's responsibility is to show the dictator: "look, www.google.com is not accessible". yea, some operators are still human being, that's why we in China can still access google thru some mirror.
confirm over...
(is this a confirmation to the fact, or a confirmation to the rumor? i bet those naive people who think CCP is not that bad will never give up this quesiton.
see my another post about this
September 1st is the Greek equivalent of April 1st.
The online greek newspaper I saw had this dated Sept 3. Just follow the links, or use google. This is too huge to be a prank. Numerous websites all over greece and the world. Online PDF's with the full text of the law. English translations. Legal analysis. Petitions. More.
They had people rigging PacMan machines with payouts. The dopey politians couldn't figure out how to close all the loopholes so they just decided to go mosquito hunting with shotguns. It's not like any of them play electonic games.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I found several things I wasn't expecting when I looked into this.
First off, the link provided is not to its (PopFile's) homepage, or a page that indirectly refers to PopFile's homepate, or even to the latest version of the software! I had to do a google search to find the real homepage
Secondly, the program is not Free Software, or even OpenSource. No source distribution is available, and the readme on it clearly states his intention to charge for access to executables once it makes it out of beta. The charge is quite nominal, but there are oodles of other proprietary email filters out there, so I don't see why this one is special enough to rate a Slashdot plug.
Thirdly, there's no evidence I can find that this uses Perl, as stated. There's no
Fourthly, there's similarly no proof I can find that Popfile uses any kind of advanced statistical modelling. That would be a strong suspicion, considering its user interface. But the sources aren't available, and the author makes absolutely no mention of his methods. I'm guessing this was purposely done to lessen the odds of someone making a free (or non-free) workalike. This would be OK if he at least had some kind of statisical study of its effectiveness, but there is none of that either. If you want to have any clue as to how well it will work, your only recourse is to download it and try it out for a while.
Personally, I think folks should be very leery about downloading and installing a closed-source program written by some random guy they don't know. There's no reason to believe that this guy isn't acutally collecting email addresses himself using the software. It unlikely, but possible.