Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: DRM, MPAA, ADSL
It's not evil, but just in case... gmr2048 writes "Sony seems to have heard the commotion. They have offered a "Service Pack" to uninstall the DRM Rootkit. From the announcement: 'This Service Pack removes the cloaking technology component that has been recently discussed in a number of articles published regarding the XCP Technology used on SONY BMG content protected CDs. This component is not malicious and does not compromise security. However to alleviate any concerns that users may have about the program posing potential security vulnerabilities, this update has been released to enable users to remove this component from their computers.'"
Obviously they have never heard the adage about deep pockets. Dieppe writes "The MPAA is at it again. This time they're suing a grandfather who didn't cave into the $4,000 blackmail offer for movie downloads his grandson downloaded from iMesh. Four movies in total, and they already owned 3 out of 4 with the grandson deleting them soon after download. This time the MPAA wants "as much as $600,000" in damages. The article also claims that "illegal downloading" costs the industry $5.4 billion per year. Not sure where the MPAA comes up with these figures."
Longer life and no charge time. It doesn't come easy writes "A press release from A123Systems announces another new lithium-ion battery technology that promises to deliver unprecedented performance (according to them). The technology is suppose to deliver 10 times the cycle life and 5 times the power over conventional lithium technology, and only require 5 minutes to recharge to 90% capacity. This is certainly not the first breakthrough for lithium based batteries that has been promised. I wonder if there is a patent lawsuit in the making?"
Fast net connection, but only if you live nearby. conJunk writes "The BBC is running an article about the ADSL2+ that touted a 24MB/s net connection. It seems that this number in fact only holds up if you live across the street from the service provider."
Always read the fine print. JeremyWall writes "The recent Netflix class action settlement has a catch. While it is nice that the average subscriber will be upgraded for one month for free, if you read the fine print in section 4.2 of the long form [PDF Warning] of the settlement you find that you will be automatically charged for the higher subscription going forward. If you don't opt back out when you get their email, you are gonna get charged from then on. If you opt in for the settlement - check your email box regularly!"
Know when to hold and know when to fold. psykocrime writes "According to a recent press release SGI stock has been delisted by the New York Stock Exchange, as a result of falling below the NYSE's minimum share price." SGI, the former darling of the high-tech world, has been in trouble for a while, perhaps this is really the end.
From their ass! They pulled it right out.
24mbit/sec? Sounds like "across the street from the provider" has suddenly become prime nerd real estate, beats the hell out of lakefront housing any day!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Leave it up to the MPAA to go after a grandfather. Where is the accountability for this group? Who do we direct our hatred at?
Let's give the fuckers a name, and a face. No more of this MPAA, let people know who is behind it, which artists are in cahoots with this. Then we'll see how much we can really cost the industry.
The real question about the Sony "service pack" is whether it removes the entire software program, leaves anything behind, or simply replaces the old rootkit with one that's harder to detect and remove.
So to uninstall this mess, they want me to go to a web site, hosted by the company who wrote the spyware/rootkit, and run an activeX control. Hahahahaha.
This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me channel Nancy Regan, and "Just Say NO!".
The actual speeds usually ends up around 16-18Mbits, but we've had 24Mbit available here a long time. And, yeah, it's also ADSL2+
Only works in IE.
How about a full exchange of that CD for a new one without the DRM and the rootkit?
I hope someone sues them just to get such an exchange program going.
The original email that I got from Netflix is taken nearly word-for-word from the settlement, but leaves out this tasty tidbit: ...the upgraded service shall renew automatically (following an email reminder) at the end of the upgraded month at Netflix's regular subscription rate for the upgraded program, unless and until the Class Member cancels the service or modifies his or her subscription.
I probably clicked to indicate that I read the full version at some point, but it's a seven page document and I suspect most people rely on the summaries of long legal documents, we not being lawyers.
I'm gonna count on them to send me a nice, clear email at the end of the month. We'll see. Usually they've been pretty good, but I know some Netflix subscribers have been unhappy.
*sigh* This is exactly the sort of game that always seems to come out of class-action lawsuits, which is why I ignore most of the ones that come my way. This one seemed chintzy, but not evil. "What could it hurt?" I figured when I saw it.
Now I know. Thanks, Jeremy Wall.
I'm just a bit curious... Does the patch keep the rootkit permanently disabled and removed? It seems to me that if we put a deviant Sony CD back into our computer that the rootkit would just be reinstalled. Then do we have to run the patch again? This is rediculous. I've do not intend on purchasing any music that has the SONY lable on it. This to me is just plain stupid. What gives Sony the right to install deviant software on "MY" pc and then make it stealth so that I don't know it's there. As far as I'm concerned I think that's the lowest a company can go. That's stooping to the level of those bastard red headed step children Spammers/Spyware installer/Virus/worm pushing assholes.
I'm to the point now watching this rediculous attempt from Sony to attach it's controls on something that I purchase the rights to use/listen/backup and trying to enforce through deviant means. What is this rootkit supposed to do!? They just wanted to install it for the Hell Of It? Nope, it's supposed to reinforce their stupid DRM bullshit and keep me from listening to the music that I paid for. I'm to the end of my rope. I think that there needs to be a group or mutiple groups put together that should purposefully break what Sony is trying to do. I've been years out of the programming/Computer industry and thus lack the skills to do it, but I think that we should form Anti-DRM, anti-Sony groups to demolish the protection that they put on their stupid CD's. I will not from this day forward purchase anymore music from Sony until they drop their Bullshit practices. I call for a Boycot of Sony's Music. I'm not sure what one man can start, but I'll be damned if I'm going to stand around any longer and watch Sony impose itself on me! They want me to buy their shit, then they want to enforce by deviance their policy, and after all that they hijack my PC for WHo knows what! Ahhh! Time for a Revolution. I love my PS2, but am refusing to play it again until SONY stops all this Bullshit! No more video games purchased either. Damn you Sony! Leave me the Hell alone! Stay off of my Computer and my CD's! Damn you!
With that said, I feel somewhat better, but am still disturbed deep inside that they would have to stoop to that level to try and enforce their protection. Maybe they don't realize that as the sound comes out of the speakers it can be recorded with a MIC and pirated that way, or through LINE OUT. Damn them. Rant Over.Generation Trance: What generation are you?
Obviously they want the largest figure possible to get the politicians in a spin ("OMG! We're not getting the tax on $5.4b!"), so factoring in relative prices of the media in different markets is probably fudged, and a cant towards the more profitable of the three options is quite likely. The mere possibility of the fourth option, that someone will have downloaded the file just because it didn't cost them anything and wouldn't otherwise have seen it the film before it hit the TV screen, if at all, almost certainly isn't going to be a factor of course.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Say WHAT? ... I ... This.... WOW.
I cannot belive that they can say this. They released a rootkit, bloody damn general purpose rootkit, and it doesn't comprimise security? IT HIDES AN ENTIRE SUBSET OF FILE NAMES! With this rootkit installed, ANY file or folder starting with $sys$ is immmedately hidden from the Windows API. People are already using it to hide hacks for WoW. What happens if someone distributes a trojan, tells them to run Sony's rootkit to make sure they don't get caught by Warden, and the thing disappears and the user never knows the better.
Sony screwed up beyond reproach with this, and that comment just makes me scream.
Ohmigod, a grandfather? How dare they? Grandfathers should obviously be immune to all lawsuits. Grandfathers are always nice, and we all know that nobody should be able to sue nice people. I say Grandfathers should be allowed to download all the movies, music, and porn they can get their liver-spotted hands on.
Find free books.
As has been noted by many others before on the MPAA and RIAA, they don't necessarily want just money (although of course, they want that too), they want CONTROL. By controlling distribution channels, they guarantee profitability in perpetuity. So, the real way to hurt them is to use their attempts at control as fuel for the very revolution they are trying to quash.
Spend more money on "independent" filmmakers and musicians. Listen to more live music. Tell people why they should do the same (they've given us tons of ammo). Spread the music and films via P2P when the creators allow it. If you are a musician or filmmaker, see if you can do it without the studio and use the net to find your audience.
Thinking about profits and money is short term thinking, which many Slashdotters accuse the MPAA and RIAA of. I don't think they are actually that stupid.
"But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
The article gives a name. Ms. Kori Bernards, vice president of corporate communications for MPAA.
Let's take a time out for a brief lesson on how the world works. People have some money. People give a little of this money to lawyers. Lawyers give some of the money that they get to politicians. Politicians pass laws requiring you to give more of your money to the people who gave a little of their money to the lawyers. A positive feedback loop. It continues to grow until (1) people kill the politicians, or (2) people kill the lawyers. This is how the world works.
The MPAA (or any group with money to pay for politicians) will continue to extort your money from you until you either (1) kill the lawyers yourself, or (2) pay someone to do it for you.
When the entertainment lawyers collectively realize that they personally will suffer as a direct result of their applying their professional expertise to the topic of randomly selecting someone who watches a movie or listens to a music recording and demanding thousands of dollars, then this shit will stop. Until then, it will continue.
Be real, this is America in the 21st century. The corporations own the three branches of government, the military, the media, the police, and damn near everything else. NONE of these avenues is open any more for a systematic redress of grievances.
What else is left?
I can not and will not in good faith condone murder in either a public or private forum. What I can say is that, from a historical perspective, violence is the fastest, cheapest, and most effective way to either institute social change ( for better or worse ) or to seek redress from injustice.
There are alternatives to violence. Reread the works of Dr. Martin Luther King or Gandhi for powerful accounts of effective alternatives. Nonviolent tactics did work against far more dangerous and evil enemies than the entertainment industry. Perhaps the newer communications tools such as the web can be used to organize effective boycotts and other tools of social change.
Nevertheless, you asked for a name and you now have it.
I have a bunch of SGI machines that I use where I work:
2x 8 processor Onyx2s
1x 8 processor Origin 300
1x 8 processor Origin 2200
1x 32 processor Origin 350
1x 4 processor Prism
3x 1 processor Octane2s
and I hate them all with a passion. I've been fighting with software installation on the older Origin 2200 (8 400MHz processors, 6GB of RAM). SGI's crap compiler can't bootstrap gcc 4.0.2, their versions of common Unix tools like grep, etc., suck (forcing you to upgrade to the GNU versions, if their stupid compiler can build them), and IRIX has been at release 6.5 since 1998 or something. Sure, they want you to move to their new Linux-based Prism machines, and I've got one of those, too. Yippee, Itanics! What a super swell processor! I have an 8 processor Origin 300 where the total power consumption of all 8 processors is less than the consumption of 1 of the Itanics! See also, the poor code produced by gcc for this processor.
So, anyway. Upgrading SGIs sucks, their hardware is immensely fragile, its very persnickety about its environment (god forbid the temperature in the room not be in the 60s), licensing all their tools is hellish, their debugger is ancient and decrepit, my tech is a retard who tried to cable together the Origin 300 incorrectly and I had to fix it for him, and get this -- 8GB of RAM for an Origin 300 cost $25,000. That's right: $25k. You know what it is: it's PC3200 with some goddamn proprietary bullshit thrown in so you have to order your parts from SGI.
I'm glad you're dying. You've made every misstep possible: lets sell Windows NT machines! You sell Fuels in regular ATX cases with rockin' 800MHz processors that start at something like $10k. Your video offerings, once your strong suit, suck -- all you offer is older ATI cards in crap configurations -- $40k for two cards since I needed a new node (didn't buy it, duh).
The only reason to buy an SGI in the last five years or so is because of the good realtime performance of IRIX: I can sustain 16us interrupt times pretty much forever. But that's it. I'm not paying $130k for another slow-ass computer without even a damn video card for a console. And I don't need to: Ingo Molnar's realtime patches are coming along, and my quad Opteron box wipes the floor with the Origin and cost, oh yeah: $19,992 including shipping, and $7k of that is pimpin' SCSI disks.
Yay for your death! Ding dong, bitches.
I sure hope it is
This time the MPAA wants "as much as $600,000" in damages. ... Not sure where the MPAA comes up with these figures."
17 USC 504(c)(2) is where.
There are two types of damages available in a copyright infringement suit: actual and statutory. The plaintiff gets to pick which one he wants. The maximum possible statutory damages are $150,000 per work willfully infringed. In this case there are apparently four works. 4 times $150,000 is $600,000.
Of course, they would need to not only prove infringement, but that the infringement was willful. Furthermore, that only results in the court being able to award any amount it feels appropriate, within the range of $750 - $150,000 per work. The amount awarded may well be less than the amount sought.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Send Sony some feedback about their DRM software: http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/form11.html I sure did.
IAAL working in IP and media law and I take strong exception to your attitude. Lawyers are not the cause of this problem. Lawyers are paid money to argue for their clients interests (or perceived interests). If the MPAA pays money to a good lawyer and gives them instructions, that lawyer goes and researches the law, determines what tactics will be effective, and ASKS THE CLIENT FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS. It is the client who decides to go ahead and sue a grandfather for $400K, and the client who decides to lobby Washington.
If you want to obliquely suggest killing any group of people because you think this will solve the problem I suggest you review and include (in reverse order):
4. Artists who continue to participate in the corrupt entertainment industry
3. The MPAA for ruthlessly trying to protect its own profits and interests
2. Politicians for being so pathetically weak that they can be bought and sold like prostitutes
1. Yourself and everyone else who does not fall into 4, 3 or 2 but who (a) funds the MPAA and the artists by buying their crap, (b) funds the politicians with their taxes, and (c) allows the politicians to get away with it by being politically disengaged and reelecting them all the time.
Do not blame lawyers. In my experience most lawyers tend to be more sympathetic to the views of people like us who are unhappy with these stupid laws and stupid lawsuits than they are to the views of organisations like the MPAA. Most lawyers I know think that the DMCA and its international equivalents are idiotic and outrageously biased, for example. But lawyers are part of an adversarial system, and their duty is to represent the interests of those who retain them to the best of their abilities. So instead of attacking lawyers, why not pony up some cash for your beliefs and help the EFF or someone like that get their own kick ass legal team.
I am so sick of people who bitch about the corporations owning everything but ignore the fact that the corporations only have as much power as you, the consumer, gives them. And I am SO SICK of people bashing lawyers, who tend to be progressive, intelligent, and politically and socially engaged individuals (real lawyers, not ambulance chasers).
Read Pynchon.
Don't forget they stopped using the cool cube logo, too.
Managers and clients don't want to see an effete little "sgi," that hardly inspires confidence.
Where's the logo that booms, "Damn straight, I AM graphics?"
I disagree that it would be unethical to refuse a case from the MPAA. We're not talking about defending a person accused of a gruesome murder who is most likely bound for death row. If lawyers refused a case like that, I could understand someone saying they are unethical.
/ bagaric_full.jsp/
But the cab rank rule doesn't apply in the United States.
In the United States and elsewhere, the general rule is that there is no duty for lawyers to accept work, except where the professional association or a court assigns them to the client. According to the International Code of Ethics of the International Bar Association, 'Lawyers shall at any time be free to refuse to handle a case, unless it is assigned by a competent body'.[62] While the cab rank rule does not apply in the United States, it has a strong foundation so far as barristers are concerned in England[63] and Australia.
http://www.law.qut.edu.au/about/ljj/editions/v3n2
We're talking about an organization made up of one of the richest industries in America suing its own customers for even more money. While I don't agree with the concept of people downloading full movies, you have to wonder if the lawyers who take these cases are thinking with wallets when their firm gets the call from the **AA.
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