Let's say you're a 14 year old kid and you're running a pirated copy of windows vs. a legal copy of linux....you recommend using windows because you're familiar with it.
Anyone who ever ran both OS would know better than to pirate Windoze.
A few slashdot users not buying DRM stuff? How much money will that make them lose... $10? maybe $20?
That's a good question. There are some 500,000 slashdot readers. If this costs the RIAA an average of 2 CDs per user per year, they will notice. They might lie about the reasons, but that won't keep them from losing lots of money they never deserved.
They might end up doing like AOL, bombing everyone with CDs that no one will ever use. I expect to find Costello CDs in open fields one day. At least the AOL CD contained a browser and a client that might be useful. It's doubtful that many people will corrupt their computers with DRM crap.
First it will let you hear those two silly songs four times. What will it do then? Delete all "infringing" material?
...its pretty apparent that DRM and Palladium are coming to a computer near you.
No, it is not.
If Slashdot is going to be posting Y.A.S.O.D.R.M.(yet another story on drm). Maybe they could actually do something positive and once a week post about the ongoing efforts to combat it. You know like "this week X happened", and have it be a ongoing thing.
The fight begins with information. Slashdot has been great at documenting abuse and potential abuse. They have also been good enough to report news of those who are doing something besides reporting, and they make it all available at zero cost. What larger impact can anyone have besides telling everyone?
Now I know some of you are saying Slashdot is a "news service" and shouldn't get involved. But gimma a break Slashdot is hardly unbiased and there is obviously no "journalism code" being followed. Amost every submission is heavily biased.
Huh? what do you want to do besides complain about Slashdot? Why don't YOU start a group and then submit a story about it? Then you might end up with that site or even do some good.
...things like DRM and Palladium need to be stopped now.
That's true, thanks for caring, don't buy that shit.
Though you can bet that your processor is gonna be way too slow to run any future apps so you should probably start hoarding software too.
Athlon 650, XP 1300, two k6/2 450s and enough for my wife and I to sit out the comming Paladium failure. As for hording, you should see all the Debian CDs I got sitting on the shelf, wink! If ever I get out from under bogus cable restrictions, I'll be happy to be a local mirror for software that does not suck so much processor that it does not work. My Debian installs have actually gotten smaller and faster in the last year. Tied togeter with simple ssh X fowarding, I won't feel an increase in processing demand if it ever comes.
"abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" covers your right to author and share code. Any judge who knows both programing and English will agree.
More bothersome is the prospect of resricted manufacturing of computing equipment. By rigging environmental and other laws, governments can assure that only one or two companies will be able to make chips and general purpose computing machines. Those companies will then colude with said government to make sure that no free computing platoform is made. If that happens your rights will be practically useless.
Just look at the broadcasting and music industry, empty spectrum exists due to broadcast fees of $500,000/year.
The USC policy regarding student use of USC computing resources clearly states that a student who reproduces or distributes copyrighted materials in electronic form without permission from the material's owner may be removed from the USC computer system and face further disciplinary action.
and:
Organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) can and do monitor P2P users, obtaining "snapshots" of the users' Internet protocol addresses, the files they are downloading or uploading from their P2P directories, the time that downloading occurs, and the Internet service provider (ISP) through which the files travel. (Gathering this information is not a violation of the users' privacy rights, because the user has voluntarily made his or her P2P directory available for public file sharing.)
The unavoidable conclusion is that USC will listen to the RIAA and kick students of the school networks if they claim infringment.
The potential for abuse is manifest, despite the proported condern from student privacy. Students without access to computing resources may not be able to complete assingments and so the ban ammounts to expulsion. Will the University just take someone else's word for such a serious charge and punishment? It looks like the process could short circuit many student protections all for the sake of the lowest form of publicaion in the world, pop music.
Their definition of copyright violation is a bit out of wack too:
Copyright infringement occurs whenever you make a copy of any copyrighted work - songs, videos, software, cartoons, photographs, stories, novels - without purchasing that copy from the copyright owner, or obtaining permission some other way.
Bullshit. My copies of my property are my business and are covered by fair use. Republication is a violation of copyright and reasonable numbers of coppies do not constitute a republication.
Factual errors like this from a major university are disturbing. If they don't get it, who will? Are the same idiots who wrote this letter in charge of prsecuting students? Great!
You say: Let's face some facts, there are probably more "forgotten" Linux servers than Windows ones, simply because Linux can run unattended for months at a time and Windows cannot
I say Windows is a POS because you can't run it unattened.
You say: I await your wrath for being reasonable.
I'm still waiting for you to be reasonable. Until then, I'll just have to be helpful.
If you define suck for me, I'll be able to tell you which OS sucks more. If suck is defined as requiring constant maintenance, periodic expensive "upgrades", monthly email viruses, worms and other dirty critters due to less than best security practices, hiding and denying exlpoit information, months between exploits and "patches", well Windows is the winner. All that sucks jagged rocks.
The other small difference between Windows and Linux as operating systems: The one hundred billions other exploits that all M$ boxes have in software that should not be running on a server, can't be removed from the server, and show up as headlines every freaking month. Why, pray tell, should a server run a GUI or a browser ALL THE TIME? I know, it's a small difference that the average user might not notice in terms of privacy, stability and security. That would be because the average user does not run a stable secure and privacy protecting operating system and has no idea of what it would be like to not be asked by tech support, "have you tried rebooting your computer?"
By the way, who says this attack won't affect Apache on Windows, Sun, True Unix, etc?
"You looked at your network settings, you should reboot your computer now."
Will Help Kill the Free Internet.
on
The Porn Of Napster
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Yooo-hooo, where are your morals people? What's all this BS about business models and market share? We're talking about porn. It's the next best thing to slavery that's still legal. We don't want to promote it as freedom or one of the good things free markets can do for you.
No one wants to be a whore! It's vile exploitation and porn is it's ultimate extension. People pose for those pictures when they have run out of hope and self respect. Think about this hapening to your mother, sister or daughter.
The internet was not designed for this. It was designed to share computing resources and information, not to sell crap. Those who look at this as a good thing smear all the other causes they are associated with.
I'm laughing at you. You say that Samba was not an adequate solution for your problem:
We had a task for a particular client, which boiled down to a fileserver with a big shared folder for images (photos).
OK, my fortune 500 company bought exactly that solution to that problem and it works as well as our buggy W2K and NT boxes let it. Some of the advantages include real file permisions and other security goodies you will never see on a crappy M$ box.
I'm sorry that you had a hard time setting the thing up, but I'm supprised that you let him try before demonstrating it to you. After all, YOU with your seniority should have known better. Or did you just want to let the newbie fail so that you could keep on keeping on without having to learn something new for a while longer? Hmmmm, set up! Did you keep installing M$ "security" patches that change everything on the M$ side? Great work!
It's nice of you to troll about Samba, free software, "zelots", and other things that are troubling you, but what has this got to do with the the topic of M$ exploits again? Nothing? No, both deal with the difficulties of making things M$ do what they should and not do what they should not do. You say:
I just hate my options being slowly limited as people in the 'industry' line up on one side of the imaginary fence of the other.
I say that the interoperability problems are all on the M$ side of the fence. You know, the folks who are using software patents to keep others from being able to write onto NTFS. The same people who continue to force inferior and mangled "standards" instead of using readily availble free file formats. I could go on, but it bores me to think of all the money it takes to work with M$ junk.
M$ says, "Microsoft says an attacker would have to know the exact file name to be stolen and its location. But many critical files -- an address book or saved e-mails, for example -- are usually in obvious or predictable places on every Microsoft Windows computer."
You say, "The vulnerability is actually a lot more serious than the AP and bugtraq posts reveal. There is actually a way to skip the last step where the victim returns the bugged file."
I'm more inclined to believe you. What's to keep the bug maker from making a macro that gets directory listings and attaching that file the first time? Heck, a good macro could search all files with keywords and get them.
People using M$ are fools, and people using Word for information storage and exchange are insane. The new W2K license gives M$ the "right" to search your computer. Word everyone the same "right". Why would anyone use either?
Oh yes! This is so typical! Reading further into the MSNBC article we see the usual M$ respone, blame the user:
While Verisign actually performed the authorizations, Dunne blamed the reseller, Online Data, for the incident. She said the company issued poor passwords to its customers.
"We encourage resellers to assign strong passwords. The issue here appears to be the nature of passwords assigned to merchants," she said.
But Rante said the merchant was to blame for not changing its password often enough.
"All of us need to change our passwords," Rante said. "We issue a starter password just like most companies do. We strongly urge the merchant to go in and change their password. This merchant failed to change their password and they were hacked.
So remember that kiddies, you are RESPONSIBLE for your password and any foul deed commited when someone breaks the crummy buggy crap software that accepts it! So clueless. The software was inadequate and those inadequacies obviously aided criminals. The criminal is at fault, but the maker of the software deserves blame for protecting against an obvious event.
What else would Online Data be running? Duh, the validation sofware saw nothing unusual in 140,000 $5.07 transactions? OK. Here, Mr. Vendor, just use this super secret closed software that we promisse will be safe and secrure because no one has ever auditied or validated it. Weeee! Another fine "product" to run on the world's most secure platform.
The "no copy" weenies are new. Look at the back of old pictures. Many simply ask for attribution when making coppies, if a studio is marked at all. The very idea is ugly.
It's worse than you think, however. Many of the weenies who don't let you copy the images you buy don't keep your negatives forever. That's right, they throw away your negatives in three to five years. Only you and your desendents will value those pictures, but the garbage man gets the real source. If you find out your photographer did this to you, will you feel cheated? It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. No studio lasts forever. The case is exactly like abandon ware, except it's personal.
Who cares how much money the photographer has, this is a matter of greed, stupidity and incompetence. The article is correct in asserting that the art is in the composition and work done to capture the event, NOT the mechanical copy of the results. Photographers who simply charge what their time is worth up front and then give the results to the person paying it will do better than those that purse their lips at relatives who take their own inferior pictures. That's an honest deal. Dicking people around and trying to keep them from making said inferior coppies is a waste of time that agrivates the client. If the photographer's work is not noticibly better than the relatives, the photographer sucks. Photographers have a right to suck, but no one has to hire them. Those driven out of business might reconsider their business model, do something to showcase their skills, or simply stay out of business. When you hang your sign up and charge people money for your services, you had better know your stuff and please your client. People who please people make money and always will. Those who don't waste their time and other's money.
I'm glad that a company is thinking of the customer at all. Its about time.
A company that does not satisfy it's customers is soon bankrupt.
What needs to be done is more people seriously thinking of DRM models that are good but flexable on a Personal level.
Why? Why do I need to have your software on my computer. Fuck off, I don't want your "content" and I don't need your software.
Its going to come, one way or another, so the best course of action is to attempt to develope one that is "Fair". If it means that you cant send your DVD you ripped over the net, Fine, you cant do it, but maybe it can be written so that you can Fairly RIP your DVD to a Video Disk that you can view on your LAPtop that for some reason doesnt have a DVD player.
What's going to come? Don't get your hopes up. DRM will give you nothing but pay per play, regardless of the promises made now.
Are there any Open Source projects thinking about DRM?
I hope not. People should be paid to be whores. Why would anyone donate their time to help out big media companies? What benifit would anyone making free software gain from preventing their users from sharing their software? Duh.
Free people have no need for your "protection" Digital publishing makes it possible for me to share without cost to myself. My photos are as free as the view whence they come. My songs as free as my breath. Why bother with it? Get out more and see some real views and sing some real songs with real people.
You no more need DRM than you need canned "entertianment". Don't surrender your first ammendment rights to free speech and press for something so trivial.
And if people are using the advertising-supported versions of those programs, there is even more traffic generated as the ads are "pushed" at the user.
It's amazing but true that the same thing can be said of advertising-supported web pages. It seems that an amazing amount of bandwith is taken up by advertisments and images I did not request. Indeed, as much as 90% of all bandwith used by comercial sites is composed of such "network chatter" as X-10 suggesting I check out the girl next door who just lost 90 pounds on the ginsing diet. And it blinks. All that just to get about four kilobytes of text and four kilobytes of image that I actually want to see. The ratio over conventional media is reversed: on the internet, most content is crap, whereas in conventional media all the content is crap.
Bandwith must be conserved on the internet so more crap we don't want can be pushed on more of us.
You're familiar with modern wind technology, correct? Large blades, turning slowly. Certainly some birds might smack into them (the same way they do to buildings and cars), but we're not talking about the little, fast-moving windmills of the 1970s and 80s.
It's inertia that does it. When the wind blows fast at your farm, all is well. Your windmills turn, regardless of size, and do their job. When the wind stops, the windmills don't. They keep turning as they wind down, creating local air circulation loops which can suck in bald eagals!
It's part of the trade off. Sure, one pass might not kill a bird. It's a statistical thing, many passes by many birds kills a few. The more windmills you make, the more birds you kill. There are dead birds in California and other nutty places where people are willing to pay 4 cents per kilowatt hour to generate electricity. Go visit the windmill FAQ where they tell you that windmills cost as much as "scrubbed" coal. Barf, nuclear power costs half that and natural gas is less on average.
Today, according to the Danish electrical power companies, the energy cost to society (the social cost) per kilowatt-hour of electricity from wind is the same as for new coal-fired power stations fitted with smoke scrubbing equipment, i.e. around 0.04 USD per kWh for an average European site.
Ouch! What idiot would think of burning coal? Blech! A sky full of nasty brown stuff is what you get, unless you use "newer" "smart coal" technology Al Gore tried to push a while back which was really a revival of 1920's coal gassification. What to do with the open strip mines or dead underground miners is not answered by that nor is what to do with all the ash developed. The only thing dependable is the cost.
Four cents per kilo-watt is twice the cost of nuclear or natural gas power. Who out there wants to double their electric bill tomorrow? Great, just go with wind power. The more distributed your electricity generation, the higher your costs. It's a sad fact of life that everything needs to be maintained and that costs money. Why is it that people turn their backs on cheap, clean, proven and reliable power sources?
Others have pointed out how full of shit the article is and how Digital Rights Management is nothing more than Digital Rights Denial, censorship and a naked power grab. There's nothing in M$ crap I want or need. Paladium, backed by law, will force me off computers alltogether and you too unless you trust M$ as the owner of all your information.
The fairness of the article is another story. Was it fair to quote Dave Farber as supporting Paladium, "If we're going to get content on the 'Net, somehow we're going to have to reward the people who put it on there," ? I doubt it. He's a member of the EFF and no one paid him to put HIS web page up. Yet the article quotes him as above and then mixes that up with Pladium as if it had his blessing.
Is it fair to portray the whole debate as one over "protecting" crap like movies and mass produced music on set top boxes? No, it's not but that's what the silly article does. By confusing many trivial things with more serious issues the article makes it look like free software and privacy advocates are simply paranoid. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth is that powerful corporate intersts are proposing the most unAmerican set of laws ever. Paladium and other "secure" computing platforms pushed by law will result in the most powerful censorship system ever devised by any tyrant ever. All future communications will be electronic. "Secure" computing will insure that all electronic publications will be controled. As the means already exist for document control when needed and those means can be used without coersion, the goals of new "secure" computing laws can not be as stated. Journalists who don't realize this have not done their homework and are incapable of presenting anything in a "fair and balanced" manner.
I'm not a consumer, I'm a citizen. Whenever you see an article about "consumer rights" you know the author is an idiot.
The local Bell owns the database of DSL availability. They can tell other DSL providers that there is no availability when there is.
BellSouth did this to me. I moved less than mile and lost DSL over it, without even changing phone numbers! I was first told that DSL was unavailable. This state lasted for two months. I killed my Telocity account. Next thing you know, a friendly BellSouth rep calls me to sell me DSL service! Great, I called Telocity and asked for them to reactivate my account - I still had my old modem and everything ready. Nope, BellSouth had still not closed my old account so I could not open up a new one AND I had to send back the old modem. By the time all that happened, DSL was no longer available again and has not been available for more than a year. I suspect that it never will be available until all DSL competitors are out of business and DSL is viewed as hoplessly slow and obsolete. Silly Bells. They will sit on their network and prevent people from using it until it is worthless. This is a blatant violation of federal law.
I now have a cable modem with blocked incoming http and mail ports. Federal law, however, does not require the cable folks to do much more than broadcast local TV stations. Suck. When will US lawmakers get a clue about what they are holding back?
Hmmmm, you seem to be out of touch with many recent improvements and are confused.
If you don't like emacs or vi you can always use any of the fine editors from Gnome, KDE, Abi, Sun and others that mimic and improve on the user interface of popular M$ based editors.
Still, word flunks when put to the test. Any tool requires familiarity and the more complex the tool the more there is to learn. Given the same amount of training, an emacs or vi user will be able to do more and better than a word user.
As for installs, you must not be aware of dselct, gno-rpm, apt-get or up2date. What can be easier than dialog and mouse driven software that connects to the net to find and install new software without dependency conflicts? If M$ did as well, I might never have discovered the goodness of free software.
They can't. Their business model is over. Gone, poof, just like that. Only bad laws can save them now.
The RIAA understands that people won't all chose the same 40 songs if they could see what's really available. That means that the five music publishers will have a hard time making money mass producing music.
Print publishers understand that the web offers more current and more informative news and entertinment than they can put on paper. This means they won't be able to make NYT best sellers or the NYT itself on paper.
Telcoms realize that they won't be able to charge per minute if they don't own all the physical media between people's houses and prevent all other technology.
The government understands that it won't be able to control public opinion if public opinion is not controled by five music publishers, three or four broadcasters, API/UPI, and three or four "independent" news services.
This is why you pay more now than ever for telcom, your cable company prevents you from running "servers" and there is little hope laws will be reasonable. Lots of people will lose their corner offices, but someone else will take their places and there will be fewer of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who ever ran both OS would know better than to pirate Windoze.
That's a good question. There are some 500,000 slashdot readers. If this costs the RIAA an average of 2 CDs per user per year, they will notice. They might lie about the reasons, but that won't keep them from losing lots of money they never deserved.
They might end up doing like AOL, bombing everyone with CDs that no one will ever use. I expect to find Costello CDs in open fields one day. At least the AOL CD contained a browser and a client that might be useful. It's doubtful that many people will corrupt their computers with DRM crap.
First it will let you hear those two silly songs four times. What will it do then? Delete all "infringing" material?
No, it is not.
If Slashdot is going to be posting Y.A.S.O.D.R.M.(yet another story on drm). Maybe they could actually do something positive and once a week post about the ongoing efforts to combat it. You know like "this week X happened", and have it be a ongoing thing.
The fight begins with information. Slashdot has been great at documenting abuse and potential abuse. They have also been good enough to report news of those who are doing something besides reporting, and they make it all available at zero cost. What larger impact can anyone have besides telling everyone?
Now I know some of you are saying Slashdot is a "news service" and shouldn't get involved. But gimma a break Slashdot is hardly unbiased and there is obviously no "journalism code" being followed. Amost every submission is heavily biased.
Huh? what do you want to do besides complain about Slashdot? Why don't YOU start a group and then submit a story about it? Then you might end up with that site or even do some good.
That's true, thanks for caring, don't buy that shit.
Athlon 650, XP 1300, two k6/2 450s and enough for my wife and I to sit out the comming Paladium failure. As for hording, you should see all the Debian CDs I got sitting on the shelf, wink! If ever I get out from under bogus cable restrictions, I'll be happy to be a local mirror for software that does not suck so much processor that it does not work. My Debian installs have actually gotten smaller and faster in the last year. Tied togeter with simple ssh X fowarding, I won't feel an increase in processing demand if it ever comes.
More bothersome is the prospect of resricted manufacturing of computing equipment. By rigging environmental and other laws, governments can assure that only one or two companies will be able to make chips and general purpose computing machines. Those companies will then colude with said government to make sure that no free computing platoform is made. If that happens your rights will be practically useless.
Just look at the broadcasting and music industry, empty spectrum exists due to broadcast fees of $500,000/year.
Or to prevent you from listening to anything else. That's the point and perpetuator of media monopoly, isn't it?
No, I won't.
=:>
From a previous post:
The USC policy regarding student use of USC computing resources clearly states that a student who reproduces or distributes copyrighted materials in electronic form without permission from the material's owner may be removed from the USC computer system and face further disciplinary action.
and:
Organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) can and do monitor P2P users, obtaining "snapshots" of the users' Internet protocol addresses, the files they are downloading or uploading from their P2P directories, the time that downloading occurs, and the Internet service provider (ISP) through which the files travel. (Gathering this information is not a violation of the users' privacy rights, because the user has voluntarily made his or her P2P directory available for public file sharing.)
The unavoidable conclusion is that USC will listen to the RIAA and kick students of the school networks if they claim infringment.
The potential for abuse is manifest, despite the proported condern from student privacy. Students without access to computing resources may not be able to complete assingments and so the ban ammounts to expulsion. Will the University just take someone else's word for such a serious charge and punishment? It looks like the process could short circuit many student protections all for the sake of the lowest form of publicaion in the world, pop music.
Their definition of copyright violation is a bit out of wack too:
Copyright infringement occurs whenever you make a copy of any copyrighted work - songs, videos, software, cartoons, photographs, stories, novels - without purchasing that copy from the copyright owner, or obtaining permission some other way.
Bullshit. My copies of my property are my business and are covered by fair use. Republication is a violation of copyright and reasonable numbers of coppies do not constitute a republication.
Factual errors like this from a major university are disturbing. If they don't get it, who will? Are the same idiots who wrote this letter in charge of prsecuting students? Great!
I say Windows is a POS because you can't run it unattened.
You say: I await your wrath for being reasonable.
I'm still waiting for you to be reasonable. Until then, I'll just have to be helpful.
If you define suck for me, I'll be able to tell you which OS sucks more. If suck is defined as requiring constant maintenance, periodic expensive "upgrades", monthly email viruses, worms and other dirty critters due to less than best security practices, hiding and denying exlpoit information, months between exploits and "patches", well Windows is the winner. All that sucks jagged rocks.
By the way, who says this attack won't affect Apache on Windows, Sun, True Unix, etc?
"You looked at your network settings, you should reboot your computer now."
No one wants to be a whore! It's vile exploitation and porn is it's ultimate extension. People pose for those pictures when they have run out of hope and self respect. Think about this hapening to your mother, sister or daughter.
The internet was not designed for this. It was designed to share computing resources and information, not to sell crap. Those who look at this as a good thing smear all the other causes they are associated with.
We had a task for a particular client, which boiled down to a fileserver with a big shared folder for images (photos).
OK, my fortune 500 company bought exactly that solution to that problem and it works as well as our buggy W2K and NT boxes let it. Some of the advantages include real file permisions and other security goodies you will never see on a crappy M$ box.
I'm sorry that you had a hard time setting the thing up, but I'm supprised that you let him try before demonstrating it to you. After all, YOU with your seniority should have known better. Or did you just want to let the newbie fail so that you could keep on keeping on without having to learn something new for a while longer? Hmmmm, set up! Did you keep installing M$ "security" patches that change everything on the M$ side? Great work!
It's nice of you to troll about Samba, free software, "zelots", and other things that are troubling you, but what has this got to do with the the topic of M$ exploits again? Nothing? No, both deal with the difficulties of making things M$ do what they should and not do what they should not do. You say:
I just hate my options being slowly limited as people in the 'industry' line up on one side of the imaginary fence of the other.
I say that the interoperability problems are all on the M$ side of the fence. You know, the folks who are using software patents to keep others from being able to write onto NTFS. The same people who continue to force inferior and mangled "standards" instead of using readily availble free file formats. I could go on, but it bores me to think of all the money it takes to work with M$ junk.
You say, "The vulnerability is actually a lot more serious than the AP and bugtraq posts reveal. There is actually a way to skip the last step where the victim returns the bugged file."
I'm more inclined to believe you. What's to keep the bug maker from making a macro that gets directory listings and attaching that file the first time? Heck, a good macro could search all files with keywords and get them.
People using M$ are fools, and people using Word for information storage and exchange are insane. The new W2K license gives M$ the "right" to search your computer. Word everyone the same "right". Why would anyone use either?
While Verisign actually performed the authorizations, Dunne blamed the reseller, Online Data, for the incident. She said the company issued poor passwords to its customers.
"We encourage resellers to assign strong passwords. The issue here appears to be the nature of passwords assigned to merchants," she said.
But Rante said the merchant was to blame for not changing its password often enough.
"All of us need to change our passwords," Rante said. "We issue a starter password just like most companies do. We strongly urge the merchant to go in and change their password. This merchant failed to change their password and they were hacked.
So remember that kiddies, you are RESPONSIBLE for your password and any foul deed commited when someone breaks the crummy buggy crap software that accepts it! So clueless. The software was inadequate and those inadequacies obviously aided criminals. The criminal is at fault, but the maker of the software deserves blame for protecting against an obvious event.
Business at the speed of stupid.
What else would Online Data be running? Duh, the validation sofware saw nothing unusual in 140,000 $5.07 transactions? OK. Here, Mr. Vendor, just use this super secret closed software that we promisse will be safe and secrure because no one has ever auditied or validated it. Weeee! Another fine "product" to run on the world's most secure platform.
It's worse than you think, however. Many of the weenies who don't let you copy the images you buy don't keep your negatives forever. That's right, they throw away your negatives in three to five years. Only you and your desendents will value those pictures, but the garbage man gets the real source. If you find out your photographer did this to you, will you feel cheated? It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. No studio lasts forever. The case is exactly like abandon ware, except it's personal.
Who cares how much money the photographer has, this is a matter of greed, stupidity and incompetence. The article is correct in asserting that the art is in the composition and work done to capture the event, NOT the mechanical copy of the results. Photographers who simply charge what their time is worth up front and then give the results to the person paying it will do better than those that purse their lips at relatives who take their own inferior pictures. That's an honest deal. Dicking people around and trying to keep them from making said inferior coppies is a waste of time that agrivates the client. If the photographer's work is not noticibly better than the relatives, the photographer sucks. Photographers have a right to suck, but no one has to hire them. Those driven out of business might reconsider their business model, do something to showcase their skills, or simply stay out of business. When you hang your sign up and charge people money for your services, you had better know your stuff and please your client. People who please people make money and always will. Those who don't waste their time and other's money.
MSCEs look and act like programers. Sometimes they can be lead into the light. Sometimes they can't. It's hard to tell. Beware.
A company that does not satisfy it's customers is soon bankrupt.
What needs to be done is more people seriously thinking of DRM models that are good but flexable on a Personal level.
Why? Why do I need to have your software on my computer. Fuck off, I don't want your "content" and I don't need your software.
Its going to come, one way or another, so the best course of action is to attempt to develope one that is "Fair". If it means that you cant send your DVD you ripped over the net, Fine, you cant do it, but maybe it can be written so that you can Fairly RIP your DVD to a Video Disk that you can view on your LAPtop that for some reason doesnt have a DVD player.
What's going to come? Don't get your hopes up. DRM will give you nothing but pay per play, regardless of the promises made now.
Are there any Open Source projects thinking about DRM?
I hope not. People should be paid to be whores. Why would anyone donate their time to help out big media companies? What benifit would anyone making free software gain from preventing their users from sharing their software? Duh.
Free people have no need for your "protection" Digital publishing makes it possible for me to share without cost to myself. My photos are as free as the view whence they come. My songs as free as my breath. Why bother with it? Get out more and see some real views and sing some real songs with real people.
You no more need DRM than you need canned "entertianment". Don't surrender your first ammendment rights to free speech and press for something so trivial.
And if people are using the advertising-supported versions of those programs, there is even more traffic generated as the ads are "pushed" at the user.
It's amazing but true that the same thing can be said of advertising-supported web pages. It seems that an amazing amount of bandwith is taken up by advertisments and images I did not request. Indeed, as much as 90% of all bandwith used by comercial sites is composed of such "network chatter" as X-10 suggesting I check out the girl next door who just lost 90 pounds on the ginsing diet. And it blinks. All that just to get about four kilobytes of text and four kilobytes of image that I actually want to see. The ratio over conventional media is reversed: on the internet, most content is crap, whereas in conventional media all the content is crap.
Bandwith must be conserved on the internet so more crap we don't want can be pushed on more of us.
It's inertia that does it. When the wind blows fast at your farm, all is well. Your windmills turn, regardless of size, and do their job. When the wind stops, the windmills don't. They keep turning as they wind down, creating local air circulation loops which can suck in bald eagals!
It's part of the trade off. Sure, one pass might not kill a bird. It's a statistical thing, many passes by many birds kills a few. The more windmills you make, the more birds you kill. There are dead birds in California and other nutty places where people are willing to pay 4 cents per kilowatt hour to generate electricity. Go visit the windmill FAQ where they tell you that windmills cost as much as "scrubbed" coal. Barf, nuclear power costs half that and natural gas is less on average.
Today, according to the Danish electrical power companies, the energy cost to society (the social cost) per kilowatt-hour of electricity from wind is the same as for new coal-fired power stations fitted with smoke scrubbing equipment, i.e. around 0.04 USD per kWh for an average European site.
Ouch! What idiot would think of burning coal? Blech! A sky full of nasty brown stuff is what you get, unless you use "newer" "smart coal" technology Al Gore tried to push a while back which was really a revival of 1920's coal gassification. What to do with the open strip mines or dead underground miners is not answered by that nor is what to do with all the ash developed. The only thing dependable is the cost.
Four cents per kilo-watt is twice the cost of nuclear or natural gas power. Who out there wants to double their electric bill tomorrow? Great, just go with wind power. The more distributed your electricity generation, the higher your costs. It's a sad fact of life that everything needs to be maintained and that costs money. Why is it that people turn their backs on cheap, clean, proven and reliable power sources?
The fairness of the article is another story. Was it fair to quote Dave Farber as supporting Paladium,
"If we're going to get content on the 'Net, somehow we're going to have to reward the people who put it on there," ? I doubt it. He's a member of the EFF and no one paid him to put HIS web page up. Yet the article quotes him as above and then mixes that up with Pladium as if it had his blessing.
Is it fair to portray the whole debate as one over "protecting" crap like movies and mass produced music on set top boxes? No, it's not but that's what the silly article does. By confusing many trivial things with more serious issues the article makes it look like free software and privacy advocates are simply paranoid. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth is that powerful corporate intersts are proposing the most unAmerican set of laws ever. Paladium and other "secure" computing platforms pushed by law will result in the most powerful censorship system ever devised by any tyrant ever. All future communications will be electronic. "Secure" computing will insure that all electronic publications will be controled. As the means already exist for document control when needed and those means can be used without coersion, the goals of new "secure" computing laws can not be as stated. Journalists who don't realize this have not done their homework and are incapable of presenting anything in a "fair and balanced" manner.
I'm not a consumer, I'm a citizen. Whenever you see an article about "consumer rights" you know the author is an idiot.
BellSouth did this to me. I moved less than mile and lost DSL over it, without even changing phone numbers! I was first told that DSL was unavailable. This state lasted for two months. I killed my Telocity account. Next thing you know, a friendly BellSouth rep calls me to sell me DSL service! Great, I called Telocity and asked for them to reactivate my account - I still had my old modem and everything ready. Nope, BellSouth had still not closed my old account so I could not open up a new one AND I had to send back the old modem. By the time all that happened, DSL was no longer available again and has not been available for more than a year. I suspect that it never will be available until all DSL competitors are out of business and DSL is viewed as hoplessly slow and obsolete. Silly Bells. They will sit on their network and prevent people from using it until it is worthless. This is a blatant violation of federal law.
I now have a cable modem with blocked incoming http and mail ports. Federal law, however, does not require the cable folks to do much more than broadcast local TV stations. Suck. When will US lawmakers get a clue about what they are holding back?
If you don't like emacs or vi you can always use any of the fine editors from Gnome, KDE, Abi, Sun and others that mimic and improve on the user interface of popular M$ based editors.
Still, word flunks when put to the test. Any tool requires familiarity and the more complex the tool the more there is to learn. Given the same amount of training, an emacs or vi user will be able to do more and better than a word user.
As for installs, you must not be aware of dselct, gno-rpm, apt-get or up2date. What can be easier than dialog and mouse driven software that connects to the net to find and install new software without dependency conflicts? If M$ did as well, I might never have discovered the goodness of free software.
They can't. Their business model is over. Gone, poof, just like that. Only bad laws can save them now.
Print publishers understand that the web offers more current and more informative news and entertinment than they can put on paper. This means they won't be able to make NYT best sellers or the NYT itself on paper.
Telcoms realize that they won't be able to charge per minute if they don't own all the physical media between people's houses and prevent all other technology.
The government understands that it won't be able to control public opinion if public opinion is not controled by five music publishers, three or four broadcasters, API/UPI, and three or four "independent" news services.
This is why you pay more now than ever for telcom, your cable company prevents you from running "servers" and there is little hope laws will be reasonable. Lots of people will lose their corner offices, but someone else will take their places and there will be fewer of them.