My brother and sister both use Kazaa as their mp3 players. They don't seem to comprehend (at 15 and 17) that they don't have to, even though I have told them on many occasions that they have alternatives. They don't understand that Kazaa is just using windows media player. They don't understand that they can play their "kazaa mp3s" in a non-kazaa program (as if their were some digital wrapper around the files preventing them from using other programs).
If people can't understand that they have options when they are told about them, how can you expect someone to understand they have options when they don't have a big brother breathing down their necks telling them better?
Just because you know better doesn't mean that everybody does.
MIT does have a wireless network in some of the buildings and has DHCP set up, but one cannot register for the DHCP without an Athena (MIT's computer network) account. I'm not sure how easy it is for a non-student to get an account, but assuming nobody is forging MAC addresses, the network admins probably know who is connected to the network at any given time.
In any case, a stranger can't just walk onto campus and plug in (unless he happens to have forged the MAC address of a student). The best he will get is a web page telling him that if he wants DHCP, he has to enter his Athena user name and password and wait 10 minutes for everything to get entered into the system.
MIT does not have public terminals, and it doesn't have strange people browsing the network...except for the students.
"In May 2000, Hummer Winblad invested about $13 million in Napster and took control of its business and legal liabilities, with [Hank] Barry [general partner of Hummer Winblad] assuming an interim CEO role."
I agree that the lawsuit seems wrong on several levels, but I think the record companies could argue that Hummer Winblad did participate directly in Napster's actions.
"By the time of its close, Napster had contributed to billions of separate acts of copyright infringement, according to Monday's complaint. The record labels are seeking punitive damages of no less than $150,000 per violation of copyright, among other awards."
So at a minimum, this is two-billion times $150 thousand, or $300 trillion! And you thought asking $97 billion from college students was bad...
I think the point was not that "MIT and unix rox0r w00t!" but more that there are ways to avoid problems like this. Had they implemented a system like the one at MIT, a software based attack would have been much harder, if even feasable at all.
To say, "No, you mentioned unix and MIT so therefore you must be a zealot and cannot have a point," is stupid. Saying that the useage of computers is irrelevent in this case is just as ignorant. The point of the story was not just to say crime happens. By alerting people to specific kinds of crime, people know to be cautous or to look for ways to avoid being victomized. For example, if the article was about someone using a defect in a specific brand of lock to break into houses and steal things, would you claim that the story isn't about locks or defects but instead only about a thief and his breaking and entering? I should hope not. More likely, you would check to make sure that you weren't using that kind of lock and if you were, you'd replace it to make sure you weren't vulnerable. Just because there is a theif does not mean that the general problem and solutions to it must be ignored.
That is not quite the argument. It is more like this:
According to a theory, c=3. Also, we can reason that in the theory a=2b+c. This gives c=a-2b. However, we can measure a=15 and b=6. That gives us that our measurements do not conflict with the theory. Had our measurments been that b=4, we would know that our theory was wrong.
I don't think that the question is whether this should be legal. The question is if evidence gathered in this way should be admissable in court. While this isn't the same as the cops taking evidence from your house without a warrent, you do have to worry about the accuracy of the technique and whether it should be allowed in court. They mention in the article about going in and digitally removing "interference" like weaves of fibre. Who is to say that the removal technique is good enough to recover the fingerprint exactly? What if the removal process adds/subtracts features from the fingerprint itself to the point that it appears to be a match but might not be?
It seems to be a useful technique for gathering evidence to find a suspect, but I'm not sure that I'd want it to be key evidence for a conviction.
The point of a boycott wouldn't be to say, "Movies and cd's cost too much! I demand you charge us less." There are political issues involved. Its about protesting initiatives like making congress require that every computer has DRM and that circumventing it labels you a terrorist.
If the only issue was that their prices were so unreasonably high that people felt the need to call for a boycott, nobody would be buying their stuff in the first place.
A boycott just to protest their profits would be as useless as it is absurd.
Suppose, however, that you wanted to play with a group of friends. Should you go to all the other servers and make characters there to find out what you like and *then* start playing with your friends? Or perhaps you should make a character and delete it and make another and delete it and make another and delete it and make another and delete it and then decide that you liked your second character the most?
Yes, I did find that quote to be rather interesting. However, I thought the lines right before it were more profound.
"...the new design is required to harness the increased security features of Longhorn, which Enderle said are embodied in Microsoft's "Palladium"-branded trustworthy-computing initiative.
It would seem that Microsoft cannot write a secure OS, so they are forced to rely on hardware.
"Neither Linux nor Unix ties the operating system to hardware," he said. The way he puts it, you'd almost think it was a good thing.
I don't demand that the government stop all terrorist activity, just the terrorist activity that it participates in (through either covert ops, funding, or otherwise).
If searchking was the ONLY site to be affected, then their argument that google had deliberately done this to hurt them and their business would appear to be true. I don't think searchking had a very good business model, but I still think that if they were the only ones hit by the change, they might have a [bad] case.
It reminds me slightly of how AOL used to take measures to keep unauthorized clients off the network (and then the libraries would get rewritten so that peopole could get back on). People didn't like when they did that. If AOL had been adding functionality/improvements it would have been one thing, but they were deliberately doing it to prevent people from accessing the network. It was within their right to do, but some people would argue that it wasn't nice.
Now, if google had made the change to only affect searchking, it would have been deliberately hurting searchking's [sleezy] business. Now, while it would seem within google's right to do this, I do think that there might be merit to the argument that if one business deliberately took direct action to harm another, the first business can be held accountable. Its not a very solid argument given the specifics of the case, but it almost seems to hold water.
Of coursse, since google didn't make changes to their pagerank system which soley targeted searchking, this isn't even an issue.
Due to the high value associated with PR, Massa claims in his lawsuit that the purposeful reduction of SearchKing and its related web sites' rankings has damaged the company's reputation and diminished its value.
If SearchKing had been the only site whose pagerank changed, I might say they had a case. Unfortunately, several sites had their rankings changed by the new algorithm. It doesn't appear to have been a systematic attack directed only at him.
The following quote made me burst out laughing: Massa explained [...], "High PageRanks don't come easily. The webmaster had to do a lot of work to get enough people linking to him to give him that ranking. They deserve to be paid for that effort."
They found a way to cheat the system and cause google to give results that overvalue their pagerank, and it took effort to implement it for new pages. Because cheating the system isn't easy, they deserve to be paid? I just don't get it.
I'm a math major (and in highschool I was oft a math contest winner), so I guess its fitting that I scored a 24. Now I can diagnose myself as slightly autistic, but not dabilitatinly so. Perhaps the next time my mother complains that I'm antisocial, I can use my autism as an excuse! Of course, I am pretty sure that even if she believed me, she would tell me to get off the computer and go play outside anyways... *sigh*
"Heh, we're so web-savv"Heh, we're so web-savvy, we just dumped 160Kb of unformatted crap on our website" y, we just dumped 160Kb of unformatted crap on our website"
Actually, if you had bothered to read the document, you would have seen that multiple (two) lines are in bold. Thats not *quite* unformatted:-)
Assuming everything in the article is to be believed (and that I understood what he was trying to say correctly), copyright holders can only take technical measures to stop the distribution of a file if it doesn't interfere with the distribution of the other files and doesn't cause any (much?) harm to the computer and doesn't affect the stability of the network or the ISP. To be quite honest, I'm not even sure this is technologicly feasable. If they aren't allowed to root my box, how are they supposed to stop me from sharing a single file?
The only explination I can come up with is that either Berman thinks that it is feasable for the RIAA et al to do this, or he doesn't think its feasable but feels obligated to pass useless legislation for people who I assume are compaign donors.
Of course, if it is possible to stop the sharing of a single file, remotely, without taking drastic measures, then I want to know how...
As an academic institution, USC's purpose is to promote and foster the creation of intellectual property.
Wasn't there once a time when the purpose of an academic institution was to foster an enviornment in which its students could learn and grow and come up with ideas that would benefit the world? Now, they are just reduced to trying to make intelectual property? Has the world really become that greedy, short sited, and capitalistic that not even our schools are safe?
I can imagine a conversation at the university:
Dean: How much intelectual property has your class deveoloped this week? Professor: I'm afraid they haven't come up with anything patentable or profitable. Dean: They had better come up with something soon that we can use. Your tenure is riding on it!
I could understand your point if it were the RIAA or MPAA going after the pirates, but that is not the case. What if AT&T or Cox or some other cable provider said "If you use a P2P program and we catch you, you lose your net connectiobn." Would you still be supporting it? I don't think ISPs should be policing their users. Cap their bandwidth. Cap thier monthly usage. Hell, even block the ports they use for their P2P'ing if their useage on those ports is excessive. However I don't think that they should be policing the content and I don't think that they should be completely cutting off the net access.
We want the RIAA/MPAA to go after the users instead of the technology and ISPs. It matter who is going after the users...
Considering that links you click from a cached copy end up being the real links and not links to cached coppies (and that stuff like adds still end up showing up), I'm not sure I see how this is a similar comparison at all.
Also, I don't believe I've heard many cases of people complaining because their own content is cached on google. I've heard people complain because other people's content is cached there (and those people don't want the other people's content to be on the web at all). For example, the scientologiests or the german railroad. However, in any case, I have NEVER heard people complain that google makes it clear that you are using their cached copy instead of the website's copy. That is, sir, until I read your post.
Microsoft has enough money and enough clout that something like this getting implemented is a real possiblity. Switching over to a different OS might be feasable for some people, but for the vast majority of users, it is not. If palladium is implemented and microsoft does succeed with it, what will happen?
Since we will lose alot of interoperability, the computing world will be split into microsoft and non-microsoft which end up roughly indipendent from eachother. As I see it, there are three possibilities depending upon how deeply the hardware manufacturers and government get invoved. Either those who use microsoft are cut off from those who don't use microsoft, those who use x86 are forced to use microsoft (or at least their authentication system), or it becomes illegal not to use the system and everybody is forced into microsoft's death grip. None of these possibilities are very appealing.
The only way things won't completely suck is if this is never implemented, but if they have as much industry support (and presure from the bill formerly known as SSSCA) as I think they do, then the outlook doesn't look good. That is why microsoft's power should be limited, why they should be punished, and why they need to be monitored to prevent them from doing things that are anti-competitive (even if not overtly so). That is why I hope that, in the end, MS recieves at least a slap on the wrist from the antitrust suit, if not something slightly more meaningful. Of course, with Bush in the white house, I have serious doubts...if only more people realized that just because something is good for a big company doesn't mean that it is neccesarily the best thing for the economy or the citizens of the country...*sigh*
...if they didn't waste so much time and money trying to prevent copyright infringement they'd be so wealthy the could just rely on the honor system.
They are allready so wealthy that they could just rely on the honor system. However, not only do they want control but if they (and more importantly, their advertisers) truely beieve that if unchecked pirary will grow uncontrolably, then people won't be as willing to pay as much to advertise on TV and so they will no longer be as rich as they are.
If I even hear someone say "That's just like MS," then you're too young to remember when an OS used to cost $300. Most people don't even "pay" for Windows.
If I'm not mistaken, if you buy a full version of a MS OS (instead of an upgrade version) they still charge about $300.
I think some of the stuff they have done (charging OEMs even for computers where windows isnt't installed, charging OEMs more if they choose to allow alternate operating systems on their computers) is just as bad, if not worse then some of what Enron did.
Still, what microsoft is doing is using shady accounting to artificially inflate their stock price. You might say its creating shareholder value, but that shareholder value comes from more people buying more stock because they are riding a speculative bubble. If the company is leaking money, the investors should know it.
If you are planning on sending your kids to college on someone's stock, shouldn't you have a clear indication of how the company is actually doing?
Should being a monopoly and having lots of cash in the bank negate your respobsibilities to keep your shareholders informed of your finances?
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My brother and sister both use Kazaa as their mp3 players. They don't seem to comprehend (at 15 and 17) that they don't have to, even though I have told them on many occasions that they have alternatives. They don't understand that Kazaa is just using windows media player. They don't understand that they can play their "kazaa mp3s" in a non-kazaa program (as if their were some digital wrapper around the files preventing them from using other programs).
If people can't understand that they have options when they are told about them, how can you expect someone to understand they have options when they don't have a big brother breathing down their necks telling them better?
Just because you know better doesn't mean that everybody does.
Just because the tracking software has to be rebooted 3 times a day does not mean that it doesn't work while it is running.
MIT does have a wireless network in some of the buildings and has DHCP set up, but one cannot register for the DHCP without an Athena (MIT's computer network) account. I'm not sure how easy it is for a non-student to get an account, but assuming nobody is forging MAC addresses, the network admins probably know who is connected to the network at any given time.
In any case, a stranger can't just walk onto campus and plug in (unless he happens to have forged the MAC address of a student). The best he will get is a web page telling him that if he wants DHCP, he has to enter his Athena user name and password and wait 10 minutes for everything to get entered into the system.
MIT does not have public terminals, and it doesn't have strange people browsing the network...except for the students.
They weren't just investors, though.
From the article:
"In May 2000, Hummer Winblad invested about $13 million in Napster and took control of its business and legal liabilities, with [Hank] Barry [general partner of Hummer Winblad] assuming an interim CEO role."
I agree that the lawsuit seems wrong on several levels, but I think the record companies could argue that Hummer Winblad did participate directly in Napster's actions.
"By the time of its close, Napster had contributed to billions of separate acts of copyright infringement, according to Monday's complaint. The record labels are seeking punitive damages of no less than $150,000 per violation of copyright, among other awards."
So at a minimum, this is two-billion times $150 thousand, or $300 trillion! And you thought asking $97 billion from college students was bad...
I think the point was not that "MIT and unix rox0r w00t!" but more that there are ways to avoid problems like this. Had they implemented a system like the one at MIT, a software based attack would have been much harder, if even feasable at all.
To say, "No, you mentioned unix and MIT so therefore you must be a zealot and cannot have a point," is stupid. Saying that the useage of computers is irrelevent in this case is just as ignorant. The point of the story was not just to say crime happens. By alerting people to specific kinds of crime, people know to be cautous or to look for ways to avoid being victomized. For example, if the article was about someone using a defect in a specific brand of lock to break into houses and steal things, would you claim that the story isn't about locks or defects but instead only about a thief and his breaking and entering? I should hope not. More likely, you would check to make sure that you weren't using that kind of lock and if you were, you'd replace it to make sure you weren't vulnerable. Just because there is a theif does not mean that the general problem and solutions to it must be ignored.
It might just be banned on the sidewalks, but who in their right mind is going to ride one (at 12mph) in the middle of the streets?
That is not quite the argument. It is more like this:
According to a theory, c=3. Also, we can reason that in the theory a=2b+c. This gives c=a-2b. However, we can measure a=15 and b=6. That gives us that our measurements do not conflict with the theory. Had our measurments been that b=4, we would know that our theory was wrong.
Well, I thought it was a funy coincidence.
I don't think that the question is whether this should be legal. The question is if evidence gathered in this way should be admissable in court. While this isn't the same as the cops taking evidence from your house without a warrent, you do have to worry about the accuracy of the technique and whether it should be allowed in court. They mention in the article about going in and digitally removing "interference" like weaves of fibre. Who is to say that the removal technique is good enough to recover the fingerprint exactly? What if the removal process adds/subtracts features from the fingerprint itself to the point that it appears to be a match but might not be?
It seems to be a useful technique for gathering evidence to find a suspect, but I'm not sure that I'd want it to be key evidence for a conviction.
The point of a boycott wouldn't be to say, "Movies and cd's cost too much! I demand you charge us less." There are political issues involved. Its about protesting initiatives like making congress require that every computer has DRM and that circumventing it labels you a terrorist.
If the only issue was that their prices were so unreasonably high that people felt the need to call for a boycott, nobody would be buying their stuff in the first place.
A boycott just to protest their profits would be as useless as it is absurd.
Suppose, however, that you wanted to play with a group of friends. Should you go to all the other servers and make characters there to find out what you like and *then* start playing with your friends? Or perhaps you should make a character and delete it and make another and delete it and make another and delete it and make another and delete it and then decide that you liked your second character the most?
Yes, I did find that quote to be rather interesting. However, I thought the lines right before it were more profound.
"...the new design is required to harness the increased security features of Longhorn, which Enderle said are embodied in Microsoft's "Palladium"-branded trustworthy-computing initiative.
It would seem that Microsoft cannot write a secure OS, so they are forced to rely on hardware.
"Neither Linux nor Unix ties the operating system to hardware," he said.
The way he puts it, you'd almost think it was a good thing.
I don't demand that the government stop all terrorist activity, just the terrorist activity that it participates in (through either covert ops, funding, or otherwise).
If searchking was the ONLY site to be affected, then their argument that google had deliberately done this to hurt them and their business would appear to be true. I don't think searchking had a very good business model, but I still think that if they were the only ones hit by the change, they might have a [bad] case.
It reminds me slightly of how AOL used to take measures to keep unauthorized clients off the network (and then the libraries would get rewritten so that peopole could get back on). People didn't like when they did that. If AOL had been adding functionality/improvements it would have been one thing, but they were deliberately doing it to prevent people from accessing the network. It was within their right to do, but some people would argue that it wasn't nice.
Now, if google had made the change to only affect searchking, it would have been deliberately hurting searchking's [sleezy] business. Now, while it would seem within google's right to do this, I do think that there might be merit to the argument that if one business deliberately took direct action to harm another, the first business can be held accountable. Its not a very solid argument given the specifics of the case, but it almost seems to hold water.
Of coursse, since google didn't make changes to their pagerank system which soley targeted searchking, this isn't even an issue.
Due to the high value associated with PR, Massa claims in his lawsuit that the purposeful reduction of SearchKing and its related web sites' rankings has damaged the company's reputation and diminished its value.
If SearchKing had been the only site whose pagerank changed, I might say they had a case. Unfortunately, several sites had their rankings changed by the new algorithm. It doesn't appear to have been a systematic attack directed only at him.
The following quote made me burst out laughing:
Massa explained [...], "High PageRanks don't come easily. The webmaster had to do a lot of work to get enough people linking to him to give him that ranking. They deserve to be paid for that effort."
They found a way to cheat the system and cause google to give results that overvalue their pagerank, and it took effort to implement it for new pages. Because cheating the system isn't easy, they deserve to be paid? I just don't get it.
I'm a math major (and in highschool I was oft a math contest winner), so I guess its fitting that I scored a 24. Now I can diagnose myself as slightly autistic, but not dabilitatinly so. Perhaps the next time my mother complains that I'm antisocial, I can use my autism as an excuse! Of course, I am pretty sure that even if she believed me, she would tell me to get off the computer and go play outside anyways... *sigh*
"Heh, we're so web-savv"Heh, we're so web-savvy, we just dumped 160Kb of unformatted crap on our website"
:-)
y, we just dumped 160Kb of unformatted crap on our website"
Actually, if you had bothered to read the document, you would have seen that multiple (two) lines are in bold. Thats not *quite* unformatted
Assuming everything in the article is to be believed (and that I understood what he was trying to say correctly), copyright holders can only take technical measures to stop the distribution of a file if it doesn't interfere with the distribution of the other files and doesn't cause any (much?) harm to the computer and doesn't affect the stability of the network or the ISP. To be quite honest, I'm not even sure this is technologicly feasable. If they aren't allowed to root my box, how are they supposed to stop me from sharing a single file?
The only explination I can come up with is that either Berman thinks that it is feasable for the RIAA et al to do this, or he doesn't think its feasable but feels obligated to pass useless legislation for people who I assume are compaign donors.
Of course, if it is possible to stop the sharing of a single file, remotely, without taking drastic measures, then I want to know how...
Wasn't there once a time when the purpose of an academic institution was to foster an enviornment in which its students could learn and grow and come up with ideas that would benefit the world? Now, they are just reduced to trying to make intelectual property? Has the world really become that greedy, short sited, and capitalistic that not even our schools are safe?
I can imagine a conversation at the university:
Dean: How much intelectual property has your class deveoloped this week?
Professor: I'm afraid they haven't come up with anything patentable or profitable.
Dean: They had better come up with something soon that we can use. Your tenure is riding on it!
I could understand your point if it were the RIAA or MPAA going after the pirates, but that is not the case. What if AT&T or Cox or some other cable provider said "If you use a P2P program and we catch you, you lose your net connectiobn." Would you still be supporting it? I don't think ISPs should be policing their users. Cap their bandwidth. Cap thier monthly usage. Hell, even block the ports they use for their P2P'ing if their useage on those ports is excessive. However I don't think that they should be policing the content and I don't think that they should be completely cutting off the net access.
We want the RIAA/MPAA to go after the users instead of the technology and ISPs. It matter who is going after the users...
Considering that links you click from a cached copy end up being the real links and not links to cached coppies (and that stuff like adds still end up showing up), I'm not sure I see how this is a similar comparison at all.
Also, I don't believe I've heard many cases of people complaining because their own content is cached on google. I've heard people complain because other people's content is cached there (and those people don't want the other people's content to be on the web at all). For example, the scientologiests or the german railroad. However, in any case, I have NEVER heard people complain that google makes it clear that you are using their cached copy instead of the website's copy. That is, sir, until I read your post.
Microsoft has enough money and enough clout that something like this getting implemented is a real possiblity. Switching over to a different OS might be feasable for some people, but for the vast majority of users, it is not. If palladium is implemented and microsoft does succeed with it, what will happen?
Since we will lose alot of interoperability, the computing world will be split into microsoft and non-microsoft which end up roughly indipendent from eachother. As I see it, there are three possibilities depending upon how deeply the hardware manufacturers and government get invoved. Either those who use microsoft are cut off from those who don't use microsoft, those who use x86 are forced to use microsoft (or at least their authentication system), or it becomes illegal not to use the system and everybody is forced into microsoft's death grip. None of these possibilities are very appealing.
The only way things won't completely suck is if this is never implemented, but if they have as much industry support (and presure from the bill formerly known as SSSCA) as I think they do, then the outlook doesn't look good. That is why microsoft's power should be limited, why they should be punished, and why they need to be monitored to prevent them from doing things that are anti-competitive (even if not overtly so). That is why I hope that, in the end, MS recieves at least a slap on the wrist from the antitrust suit, if not something slightly more meaningful. Of course, with Bush in the white house, I have serious doubts...if only more people realized that just because something is good for a big company doesn't mean that it is neccesarily the best thing for the economy or the citizens of the country...*sigh*
...if they didn't waste so much time and money trying to prevent copyright infringement they'd be so wealthy the could just rely on the honor system.
They are allready so wealthy that they could just rely on the honor system. However, not only do they want control but if they (and more importantly, their advertisers) truely beieve that if unchecked pirary will grow uncontrolably, then people won't be as willing to pay as much to advertise on TV and so they will no longer be as rich as they are.
If I even hear someone say "That's just like MS," then you're too young to remember when an OS used to cost $300. Most people don't even "pay" for Windows.
If I'm not mistaken, if you buy a full version of a MS OS (instead of an upgrade version) they still charge about $300.
I think some of the stuff they have done (charging OEMs even for computers where windows isnt't installed, charging OEMs more if they choose to allow alternate operating systems on their computers) is just as bad, if not worse then some of what Enron did.
Still, what microsoft is doing is using shady accounting to artificially inflate their stock price. You might say its creating shareholder value, but that shareholder value comes from more people buying more stock because they are riding a speculative bubble. If the company is leaking money, the investors should know it.
If you are planning on sending your kids to college on someone's stock, shouldn't you have a clear indication of how the company is actually doing?
Should being a monopoly and having lots of cash in the bank negate your respobsibilities to keep your shareholders informed of your finances?