While they say all sorts of nice things about nice things about "freedom of expression" and abhorence of censorship, the policy does little to protect such things and everything to retain power for the university. After the nice preamble, the policy quickly turns to a cut and paste of nasty older "user responsibilities" such as don't let anyone else abuse your account. Their privacy statement is essentially, we respect your privacy until we feel that we should violate it.
The most disturbing bits relate to software itself. Their policies revert to the most restrictive license applicable as they claim to respect all licenses specifically, "3. Installing, copying, distributing or using software in violation of: copyright and/or software agreements.", which then points to the above linked acceptable use policy. Does this mean that the Unviersity of Maryland will enforce M$ Front Page's ban on saying bad things about M$ with Front Page? Will they enforce M$'s ban on VPN? They just might, as their acceptable use page while mentioning shareware and public domain software makes no mention of free software.
I'm not sure what kind of community they want to build, but I am sure I don't want to be in it, nor would I want my tax dollars spent on such an organization if I lived there. Shame on you UM. You either don't get it or you don't want to.
The three R's for today are Readin, Riten, and Ranting.
Where the fsck did the people who ran these business get their degrees? I mean, for god's sake, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if your company is 2 billion in debt maybe you shouldn't pay like 50 million to liscense a stadium (titan's adelphia stadium). Or perhaps you shouldn't get those $100,000 sun boxen. Always a favourite of mine - listening to all this super expensive brand-new equipment these companies have. Ebay anyone?
The people who run these companies are NOT going bankrupt pilfering them. If you have kept up with this Adelphia story you might have noticed that the owners gave themselves $2,000,000,000 loans and that kind of thing to subsidise their livestyles.
As Dogbert once said, "I can't tell you what I'm going to do with the company's assets, but it rhymes with villiage."
Next time, Read before you Rant stuff that ain't right.
I'm not sure what they have in common either. Arn't you glad the big five music publishers can make lots of money off the works of both? If there were no copyrights in their present form, and people were not so damn greedy, I might be able to download a nice recording of both instead of being forced to endure endless cycles of the latter.
You must be smoking some powerful stuff if you think Mozart, Bach, Beetoven or Vivaldi would mind if the Girl Scouts of America sang their tunes. Yet the RIAA sued the Girls Scouts for singing "America the Beautiful" around the capfire. The RIAA won. Hmmm, it seems to be a matter of intent that makes the difference between that world and this one. Ever knew a piper that told other pipers that they could not play his tunes? Yet that's what the RIAA would have you believe. The RIAA's use of technology is perverse. You would think that we would all have more for less now that publishing is so cheap. Instead we have less and less for more and more.
There's only one thing I can agree with about this thread. Popular music should not be duplicated.
Cox did this to me too. The technician who installed the modem said cable was part of the subscription, as did the contract. Six months passed before I got a cable ready TV and plugged it in. Six months later, two big dudes knocked at my door and extorted $12/month out of me for "basic" cable. This was done despite the contract I showed them and still own. I moved and stopped paying for the worthless basic cable, which was essentially local broadcast, the shopping channel and the Catholic channel. The tecnician was happy to cut to pieces the cables splitters already in my attic when he installed the new lines. I miss the Catholic channel and Cox came back and charged me an extra $15/month for a fixed IP address.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THERE IS NO COPMETITION. Baton Rouge granted Cox an exclusive franchise years ago. BellSouth, far from being punished for not living up to it's mandated DSL requirements, was granted the ability to put long distance competitors out of business as well. If that joker Lieberman wants to promot broadband he can start by enforcing the law and it's intent.
Additionally, the folks thinking they can squeeze $40/month out of all those "thieves" are out of their minds. People who plug a wire in their house to the back of their TV are NOT THIEVES. Most of them, like me, would never, ever, pay an additional $40 a month for better reception of public broadcasts. Yet that's what they estimate they are "losing" every month. Do the math and see what I mean. They think they can get you hooked to that shit. Nope, it's just not worth it. $40/month goes a long way at the video store and, gasp, the movie theater itself.
That's true but beside the point. M$ is going away as their performance suffers from all their old sins. If they don't change anything soon, they will be gone. If they can change things up, just a little, they can then force it down people's throats with their monopoly channels.
They can use their monopoly power to push their version of Linux or BSD all they want. Now that we see M$ junk running faster under WineX than native they might just drop another CD into their distro. That CD would be Red Hat or equivalent. With all the work that others have done, they would not have to modify any of the source on that disk. Let's face it, M$ is not a monopoly because they have superior software. They are a monopoly becuase they dumped product, changed file formats, blew around interfaces, and rigged marketing deals with big computer vendors that put others out of bussines. They can use the same stuff with ANY software if they add a few propriatory extensions. They may lose some control of device interfaces, but that's happening already.
The other place M$ can go is out of business. The only thing that can save them is unconstitutional law. Failing that, they are done. Would this be one of those lean years I read about M$ "smothing" proffits on, or have they just not had a reasonable product since 98? How many of you would recomend win2000? XP? don't make me laugh. Oh my, so many many lean years. How many can they take before the entire ponzi falls down on them? All of that anti-competitive spagetti code has told on them.
I'm waiting for TFTs or their replacement to be cheap enough to replace my desk surface. It will be nice to go back to just writing on to sheets of paper, even if the sheets are virtual and my writing is captured by some kind of Graphiti translator. Ah yes, three by four foot window maker sessions would be nice.
While the GPL is a legal licensing agreement, the BSA is not likely to enforce it. At least one of their member companies, Microsoft, is working to discredit and eliminate the GPL. The Business Software Aliance seeks to deny users of their software rights that the General Public License is designed to protect: to run software as you please, to modify that software to meet your needs, to share your improvements with your friends, and to alow others to do as much with your improvents. BSA members base their whole marketing model on locking their users and their work into systems which they can not run without continuing to pay fees. The BSA raids businesses even school systems in attempts to find "pirate" coppies of their members software. They have yet to bother people for using free software, though they would like to make that illegal.
When BSA members "steal" GPLed software, they are clear copyright violators. BSA member companies have very restrictive licenses they force on their users and almost never grant them the above mentioned freedoms, which is all that would be required for them to take advantage of the vast pool of superior software now available. It does not take much to comply, but BSA members are not known for doing much for their users.
Most people would call BSA member companies hypocrites for using GPLed code. Assides from calling the GPL unAmerican, Comunist and other silly things, the BSA likes to portray itself as the programer's friend. They say that software copyright complience is the only thing that creates a financial reward for the programer and that sofware would not exist without that reward. Their use of GPLed code shows the lie of all the billions of dollars of propaganda they generate every year. It would be great if BSA member companies would use the GPL and GPLed code, but they tell me other things.
As a former Boy Scout, yes in America, I can say that the BSA's policies have little to do with the Oath I took. That's why the original joke was funny. Self reliance was a Boy Scout core value. I don't complain about the BSA's attempts to make people comply with their goofey licenses. I don't need them or their crappy software.
They are more likely to make a profit if they would provide something better than others for less money. I suggest to you that their sagging bottom line reflects other poor decision making like this. Fast browser, dedicated propriatory box phone, no services service is a loser.
8. Elimination of "vanity" hostnames. Soon we will all have hostnames like h000102030405.ne.client2.attbi.com instead of nice names like vanity.mediaone.net. I suppose it helps them to discorouge people from running services on their machines.
Cox no longer has any names for their modems. You are a number. Services are explicitly prohibited. Only port 21 is left open to incomming requests because AOL's instant messenger needs it, so you can run ftp in a normal fashion. No, they don't want you to run ftp, but they have yet to cut me off for my little read only site.
In an ideal world, my ISP would give me connectivity and I ALONE would be resopnsible for the things I served. In this stupid world we live in, my ISP offers me ten megs of hard drive space, censors it, and makes themselves responsible for the content. Stupid them? The more burnt they get, the more restrictive they will be.
Nasty indeed. Why would anyone use flash after this? Sorry, just not worth it. Think I'm going to download that junk, become root, and install that shit? Nope. With intent like that, I'm not even interested in a free client that can talk to flash. Serve me nice little pictures, please. An animated gif, if you must, but there is no need for goofey propriatory extentions. Sites that hand me "flash/applicationX" don't see much of me.
Well, you know that his bots were M$ boxes. Rember this highly informative areticle? Nothing else has as many or uniformly available exploits as the pool of M$ junk that litters the world. The article would have done better to point that out instead of refering to "computers", then smearing "non comercial" software by inserting it into the unquoted ruling.
If it was not the judge who banned "non comercialy available" software, then it was the article that put the sinister spin on tools, "not normal". As you pointed out, we don't have the wording of his ruling so we can't tell. I don't like the inference in either case.
My money is on the article. The whole thing was more a lowbrow detective story than it was a technology piece. Note how the author explained how it was possible to tell html packets but email was harder. Huh? plain text email hard to sniff? OK. Seems like the detective had a better grip on things than the author, but really the whole set up was not too sophisticated. The RCMP just happened to overhear this scrpt kiddie in the IRC nest set up to spy on people.
We can hope the judgement was more sensible. In general, your rights end on conviction. In the US, felons are not alowed to own firearms or vote and can legally be kept from positions of trust and influence. The idea is that a felon has proved untrustworthy. Maphia boy may very well have been banned from owning or using computers at all. Then again, there would be some justice to forcing him to view the world though MS internet exploder and AOL for the rest of his life. No telnet, ftp or compilers for you, kiddie! Ha ha ha!
It's hard to trust the NYT article, because they obviously have a dog in the fight. I'd like more information about two things.
The suit is being filed in federal court. Is this normal for cases of libel? Does the federal government provide remedies for someone being called a racist? If it is normal, then it would be right for the case to be held close to the person supposedly grieved.
Second, why does this not apply to dead tree news or broadcast news? The article mentioned some bull about no paper circulation. I imagine that 99.99% of all PCs in the area don't get this newspaper either. You would think that anyone anywhere can "access" any form of news.
Many of us are missing the big point when we look at copyright. Publishing interests are quick to jump on music "pirating" as a gross example of how new technology threatens publishing. Details of how long copyright protection last are good to think about, but the fundamental issue that should be considered when discussing copyright laws is the purpose of publishing and the reason we have laws to encourage such things.
The purpose of publishing is to share uncommon and excellent material with the public. Traditional publishers did their best to collect such material and make some reasonable facsimille available to as many people as possible. Once it was difficult and expensive to do that, so laws were made in the US to grant publishers a time limited (14 years) exclusive franchise to the work.
Todays publishers seek to do just the opposite. Today information, especially recorded music, is easy to share. Printed material, books, letters, and all manner of information is CREATED in digital forms now. So what's a publisher to do? Well, if your the music industry you take common material and prevent people from sharing it without paying them. Hideous new encryption technologies are being applied to music, movies and even books, which can not be deciphered without approved reading software which will not work forever. The publishers will keep the information and sell it to you each time you want it. The net result is the destruction of the public domain. Information once preserved by publishering will now be destroyed by it. Once publication becomes unprofitable, the publisher is likely to neglect it. Unlike previous ages, no monks will be able to come to the rescue.
Adkinson claims that competition will come to the resuce, but he is mistaken or lying. Publication and tellecomunications have become very consolidated. GE, Westinghouse, Disney, Sony and the federal governement essentially own broadcasting in the US. The list of companies providing internet service continues to collapse and we will be left with very few soon enough, all perfectly willing to collude with publishers in the vain hope of making a buck. Your voice will not be heard and you will not enjoy the works that others wish to share.
Music is a good example of this trend. What could be more common and less excellent than the "popular" music we hear on artificailly scare airwaves? Anyone can sing, most people have belonged to one kind of band or another, and generally the results are as good or better than top 40. How is it that all that work gets condensed to a National Standard Record store? Recent court decisions agains companies like MP3.com show that the big five music publishers of the world will not relinquish their cartel and the law will support them. Information is already being lost. The Bono copyright extention act to 75 years covers most of all recorded music. How many original works are perishing with their media right now? Early Jazz and other American art forms will be about as well preserved as the libraries of antiquity, sorted random and slim, instead of preserved as the original recorders wished. In the end, however, music is much less important than other published works, such as scientific papers, text books, even fiction and art work.
Proposed publishing methods do not contribute to the public good and are not worthy of public expendatures to protect.
Tell me I'm wrong, please. The senate form has this code:
function MM_jumpMenu(targ,selObj,restore)
That's not a Microsoft_Menue is it? I did not see the Front Page advert, but it looks like front page bloat.
The front page EULA forbids use of front page in the pulication of anti-microsoft material. This is something I mentioned in passing in my comment before I checked the page source. If you take that statement as anti-microsoft, the page is now not in complience with M$ EULA and must be taken down and all coppies destroyed. I love irony.
You really don't want to upgrade, since the new SP1 will make your WinXP unusable
If XP has all the stability of w2k, nt, 98, 95, and 3.1, by all means you should upgrade. Try this wink, and never worry about "piracy" again. Yo-ho, yo-ho, a Disney life for me.
You still be able to use your current pirated version just fine.
Really? Didn't Cullian say "Basically we're freezing their computer where it is," ? I've got several M$ hard drives like that. You know, won't boot. No, they were not pirated. Most of them have been reformatted to Debian and the computers work much better that way. The infamous instability of M$ OS is wholly the fault of M$.
Don't confuse unpleasant truth with FUD.
1. All M$ EULA have a unilateral temination clause where M$ may terminate your license to use their OS and demand that you destroy all the coppies of "thier" software that you own.
2. XP EULA explictly gives M$ permision to inspect your computer at will and replace "components and modules". This simply augments the BSA way of doing things: on foot. That's innovation for you. It's not about "piracy", they want you to use their software, it's about control.
3. XP has hardware checkers and what not that attempt to detect coppies to other computers. This will mainly be a nuisance to legitimate users who change their software.
So, they said they would, they built the tools to make sure they could, they even made it so they would when they did not mean to. Do you think they don't mean to now with that 40MB "patch"?
Someone here once compared XP to a blimp ride with adverts stapled to his face. I got to see the beast first hand the other day. The other fellow forgot the handcuffs, gag, ball and chain you get to wear on that ride and that you don't get to chose the destination. It was very difficult to use and will be a real turn off to anyone buying a new computer.
A buck for an mp3? That makes the average 20 song CD cost $20. Wow, I get all that digital goodness and? Nothing. Tell me the MP3 (now crushed) quality is as good or better than the usual CD format. Tell me that this is somehow better than mp3.com that used to let artists give their music away for free to promote themselves and sell their CDs with normal audio files and MP3s and a nice little box and cover art. I suppose I could burn my mp3s onto a CD and put it in a box for safe keeping and draw a picture on it and then it would be as nice. Nope.
I feel like a kid who had all his toys stolen by a bully, who was told he was a bad person for protesting, and now I should be happy to get that toy back, all mangled beat and ruined. Yeah.
>In fact, I've got a hunch that a lot of these guys will turn out to be great Macromedia customers in a few years once they've honed their skills on the cracked version, and enter the real world of web page design where they can A) Afford the software and B) Write it off as a tax deduction.
Just imagine if all those people got together and made a free program of their own from freely available code pieces. Too bad they enable those who would leave them without control of their computers instead. All that time searching and binary editing and for what? Do you really want to learn how to build an advert filled site that tracks user's search patterns for some big cheezy company?
For those of you who doubt my sincerity or sanity, here are some threads that lead to an awful Orwellian world. Wonderful new technology which provides tremendous improvements in comunications and publication and could greatly enhance privacy is being thwarted and perverted by unAmerican laws and greedy corporate interests:
Senator Holling's bill, obsensibly to "protect" music and movie publishers, is the final piece of the above puzzle. It gives government the ability to make good on their claims correspondence and information that might otherwise get away from them. It is the ring that binds all of the above and places control firmly in the hands of those who create and approve of the "security" software.
In a fourth amendment framework, you will NOT be secure in your home and personal effects. The government is able to search said effects WITHOUT reasonable cause presented before witnesses in a court of law.
Under such a coercive environment people will obviously NOT be able to say what they think and free speech is lost. Senator Holling's bill has the potential to further that goal by installing censor ware on all digital devices. Why not? Protect music today, public decency and order tomorrow. A little optical character recognition software is all it would take to apply this to photocopiers and other devices in the future. All other rights are lost when the first amendment is thus destroyed.
You can't do this kind of thing to an educated population, so propaganda is pouring forth to reduce privacy expectations of an increasingly ignorant population. Particularly sinister is the notion that somehow digital comunications are insecure and will be monitored. Beyond that, knowledge itself is under attack. What better place to censor things than the local library? Publishers hate libraries too these days. According to the last article, sharing information without paying is a violation of copyright, even reading the book out loud. If you have enough money to buy your own books, you are still out of luck as copyrith law treatens your ability to use your books when and how you please. What, you think publishers will continue the vastly expensive practice of printing on paper? The MPAA has shown them the way to pay per play and shifting formats will insure that you won't be able to access the work later anyway even if you are a very clever lawbreaker. Is that dumb enough for you? I don't need to prove the well known continued decline of national test performance or the lessing expectations of privacy that have been foist on us by the regulated public shcools. It's working!
Whew! That's a lot of reading, but you have to admit that it encompasses much more than pop music, "Plannet of the Apes" and other disposable entertainments. The pieces of the puzzle are all there. We can see where it's going and what's driving it without understanding programing concepts. Just imagine your paper books, TV, and pencil behaved as your DVDs, digiCam and word processor do. Then imagine it getting much worse.
When it all get's too much for you, just comfort yourself with the somewhat archaic, and disregarded text of the Bill of Rights. You don't think I'm sitting here at three AM becuse I don't have anything better to do, do you? I'm doing this because I love my country. OK, I am insane and I can't think of anything better to do.
In fighting all of this nasty DRM, it's often necessary to translate the problem for people who don't care one bit about Free Software...We need them more than they need us, even when they don't understand everything we would like.
No appologies needed, Mr. Perens, I'm happy to have your input. Indeed, you have helped form my thoughts on such matters.
We do need to explain the issue and we do need brave people like Jane. I'm embarrased to have called her a ninny and admit I was angry when did it. I fear that equating software freedom to embeded consumer devices and watching movies trivializes the issue and makes it less important to the very people we need to influence.
The core issue is simple: with free software, the user understands and controls the computer they own. All other software encroches on this ownership and control to one extent or another. Jane, a journalist, understands the importance of free speech and she should understand the implications of government mandated software on all tools of publication.
The readers of Business Week should also care about the implications of Holling's work. Free speech and privacy have very real practical effects on business. Without free speech, there can be no real journalism. It's hard to make plans without an accurate view of the world. It's also hard to do business without privacy. Business men, more than others care that third parties may monitor their communications and other information that would put them at a competitive disadvantage.
I have not seen others voicing these concerns on this thread. Hopefully, someone will do so more politely and forecfully.
I commend your efforts to educate the world. It is obvious that Jane learned much from you. It is also obvious, howerver, that our enemies are loud, missleading and painting themselves as victims as they encroach on our rights.
My message is simple and I will repeat it as clearly as I can in the face of numbing details. DRM is un-American. In real life, I'm just a simple but more polite.
I wonder if Jane might speak up for herself. Are you out there? My appologies for rudeness, arrogance and what not.
-Twitter, one of 500,000+ slashdotters reading and commenting this little article.
Wow. Have you considered writing a letter to Business Week stating all of this?
See the above peer rated post. It has a better chance of being read than one of hundreds of pieces of paper shoveled through the mail. I'll bet Jane sees it, and hope that it helps. I'm a little embarassed of calling her a "ninny" for insulting my "religion" but, oh well, such is publication.
Further reflection demands this clarification:
Sharing, openeness and collaboration are good, natural and to be encouraged. They are necessary conditions for their goal: freedom and control. Without knowledge of the workings of your computer, you have no control. Without a community of honest programers sharing code you can have no practical knowledge of those workings. You will either build everything yourself and lose the advantages of peer review, or you can find a reasonable community of users to join. The four simple software freedoms are designed to give users knowledge and control of what their computers are doing. Senator Hollings bills, the DCMA, and other bad laws are diametrically opposed to this goal as they are designed to give control to unknown third parties.
Slashdot Mirror
While they say all sorts of nice things about nice things about "freedom of expression" and abhorence of censorship, the policy does little to protect such things and everything to retain power for the university. After the nice preamble, the policy quickly turns to a cut and paste of nasty older "user responsibilities" such as don't let anyone else abuse your account. Their privacy statement is essentially, we respect your privacy until we feel that we should violate it.
The most disturbing bits relate to software itself. Their policies revert to the most restrictive license applicable as they claim to respect all licenses specifically, "3. Installing, copying, distributing or using software in violation of: copyright and/or software agreements.", which then points to the above linked acceptable use policy. Does this mean that the Unviersity of Maryland will enforce M$ Front Page's ban on saying bad things about M$ with Front Page? Will they enforce M$'s ban on VPN? They just might, as their acceptable use page while mentioning shareware and public domain software makes no mention of free software.
I'm not sure what kind of community they want to build, but I am sure I don't want to be in it, nor would I want my tax dollars spent on such an organization if I lived there. Shame on you UM. You either don't get it or you don't want to.
Where the fsck did the people who ran these business get their degrees? I mean, for god's sake, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if your company is 2 billion in debt maybe you shouldn't pay like 50 million to liscense a stadium (titan's adelphia stadium). Or perhaps you shouldn't get those $100,000 sun boxen. Always a favourite of mine - listening to all this super expensive brand-new equipment these companies have. Ebay anyone?
The people who run these companies are NOT going bankrupt pilfering them. If you have kept up with this Adelphia story you might have noticed that the owners gave themselves $2,000,000,000 loans and that kind of thing to subsidise their livestyles.
As Dogbert once said, "I can't tell you what I'm going to do with the company's assets, but it rhymes with villiage."
Next time, Read before you Rant stuff that ain't right.
Madona's Like a Virgin.
I'm not sure what they have in common either. Arn't you glad the big five music publishers can make lots of money off the works of both? If there were no copyrights in their present form, and people were not so damn greedy, I might be able to download a nice recording of both instead of being forced to endure endless cycles of the latter.
You must be smoking some powerful stuff if you think Mozart, Bach, Beetoven or Vivaldi would mind if the Girl Scouts of America sang their tunes. Yet the RIAA sued the Girls Scouts for singing "America the Beautiful" around the capfire. The RIAA won. Hmmm, it seems to be a matter of intent that makes the difference between that world and this one. Ever knew a piper that told other pipers that they could not play his tunes? Yet that's what the RIAA would have you believe. The RIAA's use of technology is perverse. You would think that we would all have more for less now that publishing is so cheap. Instead we have less and less for more and more.
There's only one thing I can agree with about this thread. Popular music should not be duplicated.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THERE IS NO COPMETITION. Baton Rouge granted Cox an exclusive franchise years ago. BellSouth, far from being punished for not living up to it's mandated DSL requirements, was granted the ability to put long distance competitors out of business as well. If that joker Lieberman wants to promot broadband he can start by enforcing the law and it's intent.
Additionally, the folks thinking they can squeeze $40/month out of all those "thieves" are out of their minds. People who plug a wire in their house to the back of their TV are NOT THIEVES. Most of them, like me, would never, ever, pay an additional $40 a month for better reception of public broadcasts. Yet that's what they estimate they are "losing" every month. Do the math and see what I mean. They think they can get you hooked to that shit. Nope, it's just not worth it. $40/month goes a long way at the video store and, gasp, the movie theater itself.
That's true but beside the point. M$ is going away as their performance suffers from all their old sins. If they don't change anything soon, they will be gone. If they can change things up, just a little, they can then force it down people's throats with their monopoly channels.
The other place M$ can go is out of business. The only thing that can save them is unconstitutional law. Failing that, they are done. Would this be one of those lean years I read about M$ "smothing" proffits on, or have they just not had a reasonable product since 98? How many of you would recomend win2000? XP? don't make me laugh. Oh my, so many many lean years. How many can they take before the entire ponzi falls down on them? All of that anti-competitive spagetti code has told on them.
I'm waiting for TFTs or their replacement to be cheap enough to replace my desk surface. It will be nice to go back to just writing on to sheets of paper, even if the sheets are virtual and my writing is captured by some kind of Graphiti translator. Ah yes, three by four foot window maker sessions would be nice.
When BSA members "steal" GPLed software, they are clear copyright violators. BSA member companies have very restrictive licenses they force on their users and almost never grant them the above mentioned freedoms, which is all that would be required for them to take advantage of the vast pool of superior software now available. It does not take much to comply, but BSA members are not known for doing much for their users.
Most people would call BSA member companies hypocrites for using GPLed code. Assides from calling the GPL unAmerican, Comunist and other silly things, the BSA likes to portray itself as the programer's friend. They say that software copyright complience is the only thing that creates a financial reward for the programer and that sofware would not exist without that reward. Their use of GPLed code shows the lie of all the billions of dollars of propaganda they generate every year. It would be great if BSA member companies would use the GPL and GPLed code, but they tell me other things.
As a former Boy Scout, yes in America, I can say that the BSA's policies have little to do with the Oath I took. That's why the original joke was funny. Self reliance was a Boy Scout core value. I don't complain about the BSA's attempts to make people comply with their goofey licenses. I don't need them or their crappy software.
Now, piss off.
They are more likely to make a profit if they would provide something better than others for less money. I suggest to you that their sagging bottom line reflects other poor decision making like this. Fast browser, dedicated propriatory box phone, no services service is a loser.
Cox no longer has any names for their modems. You are a number. Services are explicitly prohibited. Only port 21 is left open to incomming requests because AOL's instant messenger needs it, so you can run ftp in a normal fashion. No, they don't want you to run ftp, but they have yet to cut me off for my little read only site.
In an ideal world, my ISP would give me connectivity and I ALONE would be resopnsible for the things I served. In this stupid world we live in, my ISP offers me ten megs of hard drive space, censors it, and makes themselves responsible for the content. Stupid them? The more burnt they get, the more restrictive they will be.
Under your matress?
Protect the pubic domain!
-Sorry, I could not resist.
Nasty indeed. Why would anyone use flash after this? Sorry, just not worth it. Think I'm going to download that junk, become root, and install that shit? Nope. With intent like that, I'm not even interested in a free client that can talk to flash. Serve me nice little pictures, please. An animated gif, if you must, but there is no need for goofey propriatory extentions. Sites that hand me "flash/applicationX" don't see much of me.
Well, you know that his bots were M$ boxes. Rember this highly informative areticle? Nothing else has as many or uniformly available exploits as the pool of M$ junk that litters the world. The article would have done better to point that out instead of refering to "computers", then smearing "non comercial" software by inserting it into the unquoted ruling.
My money is on the article. The whole thing was more a lowbrow detective story than it was a technology piece. Note how the author explained how it was possible to tell html packets but email was harder. Huh? plain text email hard to sniff? OK. Seems like the detective had a better grip on things than the author, but really the whole set up was not too sophisticated. The RCMP just happened to overhear this scrpt kiddie in the IRC nest set up to spy on people.
We can hope the judgement was more sensible. In general, your rights end on conviction. In the US, felons are not alowed to own firearms or vote and can legally be kept from positions of trust and influence. The idea is that a felon has proved untrustworthy. Maphia boy may very well have been banned from owning or using computers at all. Then again, there would be some justice to forcing him to view the world though MS internet exploder and AOL for the rest of his life. No telnet, ftp or compilers for you, kiddie! Ha ha ha!
The suit is being filed in federal court. Is this normal for cases of libel? Does the federal government provide remedies for someone being called a racist? If it is normal, then it would be right for the case to be held close to the person supposedly grieved.
Second, why does this not apply to dead tree news or broadcast news? The article mentioned some bull about no paper circulation. I imagine that 99.99% of all PCs in the area don't get this newspaper either. You would think that anyone anywhere can "access" any form of news.
The purpose of publishing is to share uncommon and excellent material with the public. Traditional publishers did their best to collect such material and make some reasonable facsimille available to as many people as possible. Once it was difficult and expensive to do that, so laws were made in the US to grant publishers a time limited (14 years) exclusive franchise to the work.
Todays publishers seek to do just the opposite. Today information, especially recorded music, is easy to share. Printed material, books, letters, and all manner of information is CREATED in digital forms now. So what's a publisher to do? Well, if your the music industry you take common material and prevent people from sharing it without paying them. Hideous new encryption technologies are being applied to music, movies and even books, which can not be deciphered without approved reading software which will not work forever. The publishers will keep the information and sell it to you each time you want it. The net result is the destruction of the public domain. Information once preserved by publishering will now be destroyed by it. Once publication becomes unprofitable, the publisher is likely to neglect it. Unlike previous ages, no monks will be able to come to the rescue.
Adkinson claims that competition will come to the resuce, but he is mistaken or lying. Publication and tellecomunications have become very consolidated. GE, Westinghouse, Disney, Sony and the federal governement essentially own broadcasting in the US. The list of companies providing internet service continues to collapse and we will be left with very few soon enough, all perfectly willing to collude with publishers in the vain hope of making a buck. Your voice will not be heard and you will not enjoy the works that others wish to share.
Music is a good example of this trend. What could be more common and less excellent than the "popular" music we hear on artificailly scare airwaves? Anyone can sing, most people have belonged to one kind of band or another, and generally the results are as good or better than top 40. How is it that all that work gets condensed to a National Standard Record store? Recent court decisions agains companies like MP3.com show that the big five music publishers of the world will not relinquish their cartel and the law will support them. Information is already being lost. The Bono copyright extention act to 75 years covers most of all recorded music. How many original works are perishing with their media right now? Early Jazz and other American art forms will be about as well preserved as the libraries of antiquity, sorted random and slim, instead of preserved as the original recorders wished. In the end, however, music is much less important than other published works, such as scientific papers, text books, even fiction and art work.
Proposed publishing methods do not contribute to the public good and are not worthy of public expendatures to protect.
function MM_jumpMenu(targ,selObj,restore)
That's not a Microsoft_Menue is it? I did not see the Front Page advert, but it looks like front page bloat.
The front page EULA forbids use of front page in the pulication of anti-microsoft material. This is something I mentioned in passing in my comment before I checked the page source. If you take that statement as anti-microsoft, the page is now not in complience with M$ EULA and must be taken down and all coppies destroyed. I love irony.
If XP has all the stability of w2k, nt, 98, 95, and 3.1, by all means you should upgrade. Try this wink, and never worry about "piracy" again. Yo-ho, yo-ho, a Disney life for me.
Really? Didn't Cullian say "Basically we're freezing their computer where it is," ? I've got several M$ hard drives like that. You know, won't boot. No, they were not pirated. Most of them have been reformatted to Debian and the computers work much better that way. The infamous instability of M$ OS is wholly the fault of M$.
Don't confuse unpleasant truth with FUD.
1. All M$ EULA have a unilateral temination clause where M$ may terminate your license to use their OS and demand that you destroy all the coppies of "thier" software that you own.
2. XP EULA explictly gives M$ permision to inspect your computer at will and replace "components and modules". This simply augments the BSA way of doing things: on foot. That's innovation for you. It's not about "piracy", they want you to use their software, it's about control.
3. XP has hardware checkers and what not that attempt to detect coppies to other computers. This will mainly be a nuisance to legitimate users who change their software.
So, they said they would, they built the tools to make sure they could, they even made it so they would when they did not mean to. Do you think they don't mean to now with that 40MB "patch"?
Someone here once compared XP to a blimp ride with adverts stapled to his face. I got to see the beast first hand the other day. The other fellow forgot the handcuffs, gag, ball and chain you get to wear on that ride and that you don't get to chose the destination. It was very difficult to use and will be a real turn off to anyone buying a new computer.
I feel like a kid who had all his toys stolen by a bully, who was told he was a bad person for protesting, and now I should be happy to get that toy back, all mangled beat and ruined. Yeah.
Just imagine if all those people got together and made a free program of their own from freely available code pieces. Too bad they enable those who would leave them without control of their computers instead. All that time searching and binary editing and for what? Do you really want to learn how to build an advert filled site that tracks user's search patterns for some big cheezy company?
The cameras and microphones are on. Your correspondence will be violated by your government, as will your phone calls without judicial supervision. Your XP EULA gives Microsoft rights to search all of your documents. Recent legislation gives the governemnt unprecedented ability to collect computer records, most damningly they lay claim to all computer records collected by the above mentioned spyware.
Senator Holling's bill, obsensibly to "protect" music and movie publishers, is the final piece of the above puzzle. It gives government the ability to make good on their claims correspondence and information that might otherwise get away from them. It is the ring that binds all of the above and places control firmly in the hands of those who create and approve of the "security" software.
In a fourth amendment framework, you will NOT be secure in your home and personal effects. The government is able to search said effects WITHOUT reasonable cause presented before witnesses in a court of law.
Under such a coercive environment people will obviously NOT be able to say what they think and free speech is lost. Senator Holling's bill has the potential to further that goal by installing censor ware on all digital devices. Why not? Protect music today, public decency and order tomorrow. A little optical character recognition software is all it would take to apply this to photocopiers and other devices in the future. All other rights are lost when the first amendment is thus destroyed.
You can't do this kind of thing to an educated population, so propaganda is pouring forth to reduce privacy expectations of an increasingly ignorant population. Particularly sinister is the notion that somehow digital comunications are insecure and will be monitored. Beyond that, knowledge itself is under attack. What better place to censor things than the local library? Publishers hate libraries too these days. According to the last article, sharing information without paying is a violation of copyright, even reading the book out loud. If you have enough money to buy your own books, you are still out of luck as copyrith law treatens your ability to use your books when and how you please. What, you think publishers will continue the vastly expensive practice of printing on paper? The MPAA has shown them the way to pay per play and shifting formats will insure that you won't be able to access the work later anyway even if you are a very clever lawbreaker. Is that dumb enough for you? I don't need to prove the well known continued decline of national test performance or the lessing expectations of privacy that have been foist on us by the regulated public shcools. It's working!
Whew! That's a lot of reading, but you have to admit that it encompasses much more than pop music, "Plannet of the Apes" and other disposable entertainments. The pieces of the puzzle are all there. We can see where it's going and what's driving it without understanding programing concepts. Just imagine your paper books, TV, and pencil behaved as your DVDs, digiCam and word processor do. Then imagine it getting much worse.
When it all get's too much for you, just comfort yourself with the somewhat archaic, and disregarded text of the Bill of Rights. You don't think I'm sitting here at three AM becuse I don't have anything better to do, do you? I'm doing this because I love my country. OK, I am insane and I can't think of anything better to do.
No appologies needed, Mr. Perens, I'm happy to have your input. Indeed, you have helped form my thoughts on such matters.
We do need to explain the issue and we do need brave people like Jane. I'm embarrased to have called her a ninny and admit I was angry when did it. I fear that equating software freedom to embeded consumer devices and watching movies trivializes the issue and makes it less important to the very people we need to influence.
The core issue is simple: with free software, the user understands and controls the computer they own. All other software encroches on this ownership and control to one extent or another. Jane, a journalist, understands the importance of free speech and she should understand the implications of government mandated software on all tools of publication.
The readers of Business Week should also care about the implications of Holling's work. Free speech and privacy have very real practical effects on business. Without free speech, there can be no real journalism. It's hard to make plans without an accurate view of the world. It's also hard to do business without privacy. Business men, more than others care that third parties may monitor their communications and other information that would put them at a competitive disadvantage.
I have not seen others voicing these concerns on this thread. Hopefully, someone will do so more politely and forecfully.
I commend your efforts to educate the world. It is obvious that Jane learned much from you. It is also obvious, howerver, that our enemies are loud, missleading and painting themselves as victims as they encroach on our rights.
My message is simple and I will repeat it as clearly as I can in the face of numbing details. DRM is un-American. In real life, I'm just a simple but more polite.
I wonder if Jane might speak up for herself. Are you out there? My appologies for rudeness, arrogance and what not.
-Twitter, one of 500,000+ slashdotters reading and commenting this little article.
See the above peer rated post. It has a better chance of being read than one of hundreds of pieces of paper shoveled through the mail. I'll bet Jane sees it, and hope that it helps. I'm a little embarassed of calling her a "ninny" for insulting my "religion" but, oh well, such is publication.
Further reflection demands this clarification:
Sharing, openeness and collaboration are good, natural and to be encouraged. They are necessary conditions for their goal: freedom and control. Without knowledge of the workings of your computer, you have no control. Without a community of honest programers sharing code you can have no practical knowledge of those workings. You will either build everything yourself and lose the advantages of peer review, or you can find a reasonable community of users to join. The four simple software freedoms are designed to give users knowledge and control of what their computers are doing. Senator Hollings bills, the DCMA, and other bad laws are diametrically opposed to this goal as they are designed to give control to unknown third parties.