Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Salon, Privacy, Pricedrops
Circumventing the upsell, but not all of it. Responding to the recent post about cable service a la carte, alta writes "I got a response from Jane Black (who wrote the original article) and she said slashdot jumped the gun. You can not pick and choose which channel you want. You can just choose to get basic limited and premium without getting the 2 steps in between. Here's the actual piece of law:
"Buy-through of other tiers prohibited - A cable operator may not require the subscription to any tier other than the basic service tier required by paragraph (7) as a condition of access to video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis. A cable operator may not discriminate between subscribers to the basic service tier and other subscribers with regard to the rates charged for video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis.Read it all here. Here's what Jane said:
'But please make sure you understand the rule (Slashdot's headline was misleading indeed.) You can't just choose which channels you want. The new rule says that you can get basic (the network and cspan etc) plus HBO/Starz/Showtime *without* having to buy the standard package as well. If you want AMC, Lifetime, whatever, you still need to buy the whole package. Make sense?'If you still need it, you can find more about the law here. Just type 543 in the "Section" field. The citation is: Section 623(b)(8) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended. Found at volume 47 of the US Code Section 543(b)(8)"
The Salon dilemma. A Slashdot post last week reported that Salon was in serious financial trouble, and had dropped its premium section and instituted giant ads. Salon has now moved to over-the-counter trading. "While we valued the prestige of a NASDAQ listing, this move to the OTC market should not affect our core business," says Salon's president and CEO in the story. Update: 11/26 00:42 GMT by J : One correction: Salon has not dropped its premium section.
Dole, or Hormel? MacAndrew writes "As briefly discussed in slashdot a few weeks ago, Senator-elect Elizabeth Dole has been sued by a constituent who received eight unsolicited emails from her. He claims $100 damages including "emotional distress for having received spam from someone who should know better." Salon has now published an article focusing on the critical political versus commercial speech aspect of the case. Courts have recognized political speech as the innermost circle of free speech protection, and groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation believe spam laws that interfere with it may be not just unwise but unconstitutional."
Surely, someone's wallet will end up fat. In reaction to the recent story about provisions of the DMCA being used to prevent the posting of post-Thanksgiving sales prices from large retailers, Brian McWilliams writes "I finished up my story about FatWallet after you posted that link on Slashdot. Might help explain some stuff."
Well, we thought this here panopticon would be a nice idea ... McLuhanesque writes "DARPA has posted the architecture for their Total Information Awareness Systems , the uber-database that purports to suck in every scrap of electronic information about everyone, mix in some Human ID at a Distance technology, among other stuff, and profile ... well, just about everyone. More of their proposed fun and games are listed here." And Declan McCullagh writes: "Just posted the transcript of the Pentagon news briefing (worth a read) on Politech. Note this is on the TIA program, not 'eDNA.'
$10,000 is nothing to sneeze at. The idea of buying code into the world of Free software (aka code Ransom, as mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago) is drawing interest. waxed writes "FreePepper is an effort to collect enough money to purchase the source code for the multiplatform text editor Pepper from its author, Maarten Hekkelman, who has ceased development of it and re-release it under a BSD-style license. Donations may be made via PayPal or cheque."
This kind of crap is exactly what it would take to make me cancel my account with my ISP and do everything by paper again. Big step backwards. Yeah, I know, they have all the dirt by other channels anyway, but why make it easy?
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Check out Byte's current situation.
Hey man, I agree with you about all of this, and there have been days recently with all of the malarky passing into law where I almost felt the urge to chuck it all - and live like it was 1975 - paper and all. But by the time they manage to get this huge bureacratic behometh to do this type of dirty work we could very likely see a massive decentralized ad-hoc and an emerging phenomona called Smart Mobs and anonymous surfing provided by Hacktivismo, censorship-free and anonymous information via Freenet, open spectrum and finally perhaps anonymous digital cash from Yodel Bank.
Planet P - Liberation With Technology.
www.enthea.org
Yeah, I'm still not sure how they are playing the DMCA or even copyright card despite reading amany articles on this.
IANAL of course. But my confusion stems from knowing a little about some past coypright cases.
See, if the Wal-Mart spokesman Mr. Williams actually did say to the extent 'its sales circulars consist of a "compilation of prices" and that the data contained therein "is very much copyrightable"', and that's an official stance, that's sorta a shot in the foot for them. Compilations are copyrightable if the compilation extends some creativity in the nature of the compilation. Most compilations are copyrighted because the original works included are still under copyright; not because of the nature of the compilation unless there was some special layout. Where do I get this from? The Feist vs. Rural Telephone case. It showed that white pages in phone books are facts which are not copyrightable.
Other case law extends this further, again involving telephone directories. Hell, yellow pages in one circuit is not considered copyrightable. Addresses, phone numbers, business descriptions are not. So how can a price by copyrightable?
It's sorta odd--the DMCA argument is being used to squash a consumer pricing site but a side reason being that their leak tips off their competitors so that they can adjust prices. Uhh, they should be more worried about the leaks--in all honesty, if it's getting out to regular web sites, if you have a spy section in a company (which many companies do), you're going to know the prices anyways.
Who wants to bet at least one of these companies screams "See! The leaks to the internet caused us to lose millions in sales. That's why our holiday season sales are down!" to their Congressman.
There are parts of London where the ground rents are still priced in pepper corns.
At one time pepper being a valuable spice worth more than its weight in gold was used as currency. So a peppercorn is still legal tender in the UK and other common law countries.
As such a peppercorn is commonly used as a rent in cases where land is essentially being gifted but for various reasons cannot be given or sold. For example Christ Church College Oxford is build on land owned by Christ Church, given to them under a covenant that prevents sale. So the land is actually leased to CCC on a 499 year lease with a rent (due to expire soon!). I don't know the amount in the CCC case but in similar transactions a peppercorn per year is used.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Something I found interesting: He has an existing offer for $10K on the table and is willing to let the open source community buy it out for $11K...
What if they only raise $3K and the current buyer withdraws? Was this a bad move? Didn't he just lose $7K?
or what if the current buyer decides that since the OSS community can't pony up that much money, they adjust their offer down to $5K?
Maybe he should put the source up on ebay...
Here are some choice excerpts from that Pentagon briefing on TIA, for the lazy, with the bullshit cut out. Obviously, you can read the original if you prefer.
... What are the privacy issues ... ?
Q:
Aldridge: There are no privacy issues.
Q: Can you run over the transactions again? It sounds like every time I would enter or a citizen would enter a credit card, any banking transaction, any medical -- I go see my doctor, any prescription, all of those things become part of this database -- right? -- hypothetically?
Aldridge: Hypothetically they would...
Q: Every time they use a telephone, that call enters the database. And if it is voice recognition, for example, then that enters the database, hypothetically, right?
Aldridge: Hypothetically, yes.
When this goes into effect, the credit cards go. The checkbook goes. The ATM card goes. No more video rentals. The cellphone goes. Everything I e-mail out will be encrypted, though I expect that I'll use e-mail a lot less.
Sucks to live in a Republican America.
-Waldo Jaquith
Senator John Ashcroft - evidently no relation to the daemon obsessed (or is that possessed?) Attorney General of the same name.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
While I think that the prices in cataloge should not be copyrightable (While the layout can).
.0001% ?
Simply list stores in order of increasing price without listing the actual price. If necessary list the item price as a percentage of the RRP.
eg:
Crap portable stereo
Walmart - 1 (75%)
K-mart - 2 (74.67%)
Bestbuy - 3 (74.66%)
It doesn't take a lot of coding to dynamically adjust the precision until all prices are unique (Where they are). And well lets face it, even on $300 does it matter if you are out by
Ehhh, not really. First and most importantly, you don't pay the post office to deliver mail to you -- the sender pays. Spam is therefore like someone sending you junk mail COD. How long do you think that would last?
... At a guess, charging one cent per spam message would probably pay my entire ISP bill and then some.
Second, it's worth remembering that junk mail actually saves you money. Everyone bitches about the cost of stamps (with some justification) but the fact is that, at least in the US, the Postal Service is largely subsidized by junk mail. Without it, the cost of first-class mail would be considerably higher. So, if spammers had to pay my ISP to send me stuff, and I got a discount on my bill because of it, I wouldn't be nearly so hostile
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If you look at the graphic illustration on the IAO site you will se a interesting entity called "Corporate Memory" witch feeds the system with data (togheter with the entities "Transactional Data", "Biomethric Data" and "Intel Data") The first thing i asscoiate with "Corporate Memory" is customer profiles. Ergo; this system institues a collabaration with the big corporations; Wal-Mart, MS, Visa, Banks, Airlines etc.
l
From the IAO site about TIA:
"can automatically queue analysts based on partial pattern matches and has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist attacks"
Ergo it will work if someone travels from Saudia Arabia to US, start taking flying lessons and then buys airline tickets to NY or buying fertilizers.
But if someone buys a warhead in some former Russian repiblic, ships it (with a non-US transport company) via Hong Kong togheter with hardware from China to California and then create a mayhem, the system will not work.
[Legal disclaimer: I have no intensions of doing something like that. ]**
This system is plain stupid an it will *never* work against a terrorist with a working brain.
Im not an expert in data-mining, but i have heard that it *is* difficault. And most corporations use static data from a couple of databases to create simple customer profiles. This system, TIA, is trying to catch a moving target and the predict future behavior. And if someone really want to avoid getting stamped as an terrorist, they wont follow the patterns that the system expects a terrorist to follow.
More info from the Pentagon briefing:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-04186.htm
**People probably need to start inserting these to avoid getting their own profile in this system...
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Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.