Slashdot Mirror
US Fed Gov. Says All Music Downloads Are Theft
BenEnglishAtHome writes "Nearly all US government employees and contractors are subject to
mandatory annual information security briefings. This year the official briefing flatly states that
all downloaded music is stolen. The occasionally breathless tone of the briefing and the various minor errors contained therein are funny but the real eye-opener is a 'secure the building' exercise where employees stumble across security problems and resolve them. According to the material, the correct response to an employee who is downloading music is to shout 'That's stealing!' No mention is made of more-free licenses, public domain works, or any other legitimate download. If this were a single agency or department that had made a mistake in their training material it might not be so shocking. But this is a government-wide training package that's being absorbed by hundreds of thousands of federal employees, both civilian and military. If you see a co-worker downloading music, they're stealing. Period. Who woulda thunk it? Somebody should mirror this. Who wants to bet that copies will become hard to find if clued-in technogeeks take notice and start making noise?" Warning: this site gives a whole new meaning to "Flash heavy."
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
If you're downloading music at work, it probably is stealing...
...of company time. And given that my taxes are paying these people's salaries (that is, you and I are "the company"), I'd really rather them not. Granted, I do wish that they would convey correct information, and I don't expect government workers to go zombie-like through the day without taking a break now and then, but still, I am glad that rampant goofing off in this particular manner is discouraged.
Thanks for the link, but I like the flash site. The website has audio, so while you are instructed not to download music (hey, spoken word is a type of art/music), you are in fact downloading music.
THAT'S STEALING!
I remember when I recorded my band in the living room and copied the cd to my computer. When iTunes told me I didn't have the required rights to make a cd copy I quit using iTunes.
I've been using iTunes for at least six years and I've never had it tell me I didn't have permissions to burn music no matter WHERE it came from.
And the RIAA bought congress critters for cheap!
Otherwise you'd see the gov't suing RIAA and friends for the payola-by-proxy currently going on.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Eurasia?
That's not entire true, and not everyone agrees with you.
The company I work for makes CBT courses like what you see here, and the military is one of our clients. We don't get broad open contracts, we have to bid and compete for them, and the scope of work is limited to the CBT that we're creating. The prices the military pays are the same prices that corporations pay (in fact, we even discount the military's price because they've been so consistent in giving us work).
And, finally, I'll add that our company has won several training industry awards (including [especially] for work we've done for the military), and we employ a staff of highly-qualified writers and artists. You can sit there and say the government spends too much money to get sub-par "pieces of crap" without detailing what exactly your "plenty of first-hand experience" is, but quality is all about the vendor. If you choose a good vendor, you get a good product. If you choose a sub-par piece of crap vendor, then you get a sub-par piece of crap product. And this comes from my own experience of working for a government vendor that produces exactly the type of thing you're critiquing (although the CBT in question is not ours).
Sorry if that influences your mod, but I don't think you're as insightful as you would like others to believe.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I would never suggest something so stupid. Just look at the USPS and the Interstate System. Wonderful examples of utter failure. Imagine if we let private companies build and control our essential infrastructure instead. We'd be so much better off!
Great Intellect...
But suddenly I say: and some people want this same government in charge of our military and now I'll be modded troll into oblivion.
Fixed that for ya. Oh wait, still a dumb thing to say...?
The government is a very large and diverse group of people. Some of those people do legitimately deserve to be criticized, but many, many, many of them do not. They do their jobs daily and with excellence, often for little compensation.
To infer that the government would be bad at managing health care because of a single instance of idiotic training materials is an example of woefully poor logic...
But suddenly I say: and some people want this same government in charge of our healthcare and now I'll be modded troll into oblivion.
I think the problem is that private care is too efficient. If the contract says you can't throw pre-existing conditions to the curb then I'm all for it.
Its really impossible to use capitalism with a health care system because in order to make the most profit you have to deny people healt hcare and that, as we see, does not not work that well.
Imagine you would a private military, police force, fire department.
They'd only go out and help when there is a profit to be made. A lot of crime and houses burn down simply because its not cost effective to stop everything.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
You're basically saying 'it's not flash heavy' and then going on to state why it uses flash. If it uses flash heavily, that's flash heavy - that they have a reason for it being flash heavy is basically irrelevant.
Taken completely out of context and brought to a heightened level of irrational literal interpretation, the summary is accurate. However...........
"According to the material, the correct response to an employee who is downloading music is to shout 'That's stealing!' The actual question in the slideshow/training abomination is along the lines of your fellow co-worker calls you over and says "look bra, I found a site with free music, lol im leet". There are 4 answers to choose from:
1. I'd rather download the music from home - -email me the link. (I would choose this, and tell my coworker that he could get in trouble doing this at work, anywhere from wasting company time, committing criminal acts at work (if it is actually some sort of pirate site, and lets be honest freely available music is mostly (but not entirely) not worth my time) or at worst inviting security problems into the workplace computer.
2. "Is it safe to download?" Umm, if you have to ask then you don't know already (or have a hunch at least) and are trusting some random Jim Bom on this.
3. "Since we're on our lunch hour, I see no harm. HEre's my thumb drie!" Obviously the wrong answer with the thumb drive part added in for extra obviousness
4. "That's stealing." Ok, so they simplified the answer from "that is probably stealing, who owns the distribution rights to these songs you are getting from this website? If the owners of the publishing rights do not consent to giving away these materials freely then a crime is being committed, otherwise it is ok to access this site but not from work, because of the above reasons".
I took this.....I dont know what you'd call it, class, course, button masher until I get to the print certificate screen, because it was required of me where I work. Most of the info for securing information systems in this presentation is solid and correct for the USER side of things, i.e. things the everday user of a computer on a network can and should do to minimize (not eliminate as that is not possible) security breaches at their particular Department of Defense associated workplace. Now excuse me, I need to go participate in the lynching of my co-worker that downloaded the newest whatever is popular pop song at work.
A PowerPoint presentation document can also be on the web and have an URL, but it doesn't make it a website.
I am from Minneapolis. I remember when that bridge fell, I was scared to death. I've got a couple dozen friends who cross that bridge twice a day. Scared the hell out of everybody.
It's not good when a bridge falls down. Bridges shouldn't fall down. But as far as such things go, that bridge went down exactly the way it was designed to, straight down and in big contiguous blocks, and emergency plans were executed promptly, heroically, and correctly. I don't know where you're from, but we get shit done around here. We don't fuck around.
Thirteen people lost their lives that day. That's the largest single tragedy in my city in as long as I can remember. I in no way make light of that loss.
But hundreds of people lived. Hundreds. A bridge full of people in the middle of evening rush. A school bus full of kids. 60 of them. God, I remember watching the news, watching that bus. I'm not a guy easily swayed to emotion, but Jesus Christ, 60 kids. Everyone in this city paced in front of their TV and chewed their nails and prayed for those kids.
And every single one lived. They lived when they could have died. They lived because emergency response and government agencies did their job.
"A state bridge on an Interstate highway over a county river between two banks of a city... we didn't have one problem." -Rocco Forte, city Emergency Preparedness Director
Initially, design and construction was predicted to take a year and a half, and news reports called that hopelessly optimistic. One year and nineteen days worth of seven-day work weeks later, months ahead of schedule, millions of dollars under budget, the new I-35W bridge was opened to the public. It is truly one of the most beautiful pieces of civic engineering in the upper midwest.
Your post is ignorant in the extreme and incredibly offensive not simply to the people that were there that day, but to the literally thousands of municipal, county, state, and federal employees, not to mention private agencies and contractors, whose diligence, civic devotion, and amazing work not only mitigated what could have been an exponentially worse disaster, but as an encore created one of the first truly great pieces of American engineering of the 21st century.
So fuck you.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!