People who distribute patented software without acquiring the suitable license are liable, at least in the USA. The same for people that distribute means to circumvent copy protection measures. That's why distros can't do that, unless they restricted who can use their software, but then that would be a violation of GPL (and the Free Software spirit in general). So, that's not an option.
That is only a problem for countries that enforce software patents, that is, IIRC, the USA. If he admits that Linux is better than the alternative, but he feels somehow constrained by the warnings and restrictions, he can either vote with his money (that he does) and buy a software that doesn't "put him off", or vote with his feet and move from the country that imposes such restrictions on him. He can also join the choir and try to change this absurd legislation that allows people to patent algorithms instead of implementations, but I'm trying to keep it real, for once.
More likely it is another publicity stunt, to make their work to look more "legitimate", to get more people to side with them (the "I may not agree with what you say, but would defend to death your right to say it" crowd), to generalize even more the feeling that Mac users are dangerous fanboys disconnected with the reality, etc.
The only thing easier than to make threats to people on the Internet is to fake threats to oneself on the Internet. We got plenty of these drama queens in the nineties, hopefully this is not a trend that will come back.
These criminals are giving a "smarter" * use for the enormous potential that these hundred thousands of homogeneous (or similar enough) connected machines have than most companies out there does. It is time for 1) Microsoft and its users get their act straight and work on better security for they machines and 2) someone to realize the incredible potential of all this "dark" bandwidth and processing power and give it a good use. Criminals are showing it is possible, all it need is some legitimate application.
* Smart but immoral and illegal. I, for one, don't condone nor endorse their actions, and think they are nothing but vile criminals
lowering bit rates, playing jingles over the music, cross-fading songs. How long before they are backed into using these techniques?
That can be really annoying. I remember listening to over the air radio in Brasil, in the middle nineties. FM radios were beginning to consolidate, and to cave into the pressure of the Majors, they began with this annoying habit to cut the music, crossfade into the other, to play the station jingle over three times over the song right over the catchy chorus. The list goes on and on.
Today, it is impossible to listen to radio there, not because of all these problems, but because payola there is rampant, and if you are lucky, you get to listen the same 50 songs over and over and over again. Once I recorded 24 hours of radio programming, and I was able to identify a group of 8 songs (I can remember the exact number) that played at least 4 times that particular day, and one that played every 2 hours. That was a special spot on the programming called "the song of the week", played every two hours, every day, for 7 days. The other radios had a similar sport, with variations in the name ("the best of the week, the hit of the week"). It is a mafia, and it is not exclusive on U.S.
Payola killed the radio star, and the internet will kill the payola star. Well, at least one man can dream.
The more we progress, the more we stay at the same place. Lookup the Cycle of Reincarnation on the jargon file, we are switching from thick clients to thin clients and back since the mainframes, and will continue switching as long as computing power, bandwidth and resource demand grow at different rates, leading to an asymmetric relation among those three factors.
Release (or cite, if it is external) the specs for the standard of the file format, along with the protocol used to communicate with the DRMd server, and preferentially a stripped down player with source code for reference and let the developers make their own players for their own platforms. It is possible to have security (DRM, for all that matters) and openness at the same time and, if it was not possible, security through obscurity would not solve the DRM problem, as CSS and the HD-DVD keys debacle proved.
Unless he actually recorded the movie and distributed the movie for profit, thus being criminal copyright infringment, that is a little bit harsh for such "victimless crime". Supposing he was successful in recording the movie and distributed it without the copyright owner permission, and the copyright owner found out and sued for damages, the financial penalty would probably be bigger, but without the jail time.
I'm not very fan of this kind of deterrent law, that makes the penalty for attempt haesher than the penalty for the actual infringement.
Lookup Kerckhoffs' principle. Security through obscurity is a widely debated subject going all back to the 19 century, when it concerns to cryptography, and sooner than that, in the locksmith circles, and it is more or less a consensus that it is not only ineffective but terribly dangerous, because "every secret create a potential failure point".
Read the wikipedia article, it is enlightening and very insightful.
In my case, at least, everything of that goes, and I never hear about. The same goes for the rest of mankind, except for the tiny percentage of the population that read these blogs, tiny even if only tech savvy people is considered. Who are those bloggers and why are they considered important to deserve front page on Slashdot?
Another poster put it better a couple of posts above, this is no different from a corn flakes company creating a contest in the lines of "write an essay with the word 'crunchy' and win such and such prize'", and getting 10 years old children to publish their essays. They will do for the prize, even if they hate that particular brand of flakes.
The joke is on whoever blindly believes in anything written by those bloggers, or by any other blogger, or anything written on the Internet, for all that matters. But bloggers, blah, a bunch of self-important people that touts their own (and each other) horns and manage to convince some gullible people that their opinion is any better than the guy next seat on the bus.
A lot of P2P applications even uses http in one phase or another of its execution, what is the case of bittorrent clients communication with trackers, that is done over using http requests.
What they might be implying is that the so called "legitimate" traffic (casual WWW surfing) is outpacing filesharing. Ironically, this growing is due the popularization of tools that allow users to share the files via www, tools like Youtube and Flickr (and pornotube, *cough*) that they would share via P2P applications like Kazaa, Napster or IMesh.
Bottom line is: people don't care about the tools, but about the use they do to the tools. Nothing to see here, move along.
People can host copyrighted material without the owner permission. People can host themselves dancing like idiots. ThePirateBay, youtube et. al. will accept both. It is up to the copyright owner to protect their assets. That's what the law says, and that's how the world works. Can't blame the tools, people is that should be held accountable.
Someone could go to the store, buy a Playboy Mag, scan in every image and post it to the site and everyone else could download the pics for free if they new the URL and of they go. So all the money playboy paid the model, the photography crew, the editors, the printers, poof. (...) How is supporting hosting of their images for no monetary fee 'free speech'
That is a nice Straw Man you have there. You are confusing availability of technological resource with intention. Libraries have photocopiers and, nowadays, CD burners. Anyone can enter, scan a copyrighted book, copy a copyrighted CD or DVD, whatever they want. Do that implies that the library is supporting copyright infringement?
The same stands for barely the entire Internet. Copyrighted text never flow so fast around multiple sources, most of the times, without the explicit consent of the copyright owner. Everytime someone posts the entire content of an article here on Slashdot for our commodity (lazy slashdotters don't like to RTFA), it is copyright infringement too. That doesn't mean that Slashdot is supporting copyright infringement either.
The world has changed, and the availability of tools should not and will not be restricted just because some people will misuse those tools.
In Brazil, we have two saying about this:
1) "O olho do dono é que engorda o gado", that (roughly) translates as "The owner's eye fattens the livestock".
and
2) "Quando o chefe senta o empregado deita", that translates as "When the boss sits, the employee lies down".
Most successful business out there, no matter if small or big, have the owner in a position of both control and supervision.
A married couple went to the hospital to have their baby delivered. Upon their arrival, the doctor said he had invented a new machine that would transfer a portion of the mother's labor pain to the father. He asked if they were willing to try it out. They were both very much in favor of it. The doctor set the pain transfer to 10% for starters, explaining that even 10% was probably more pain than the father had ever experienced before. But as the labor progressed, the husband felt fine and asked the doctor to go ahead and bump it up a notch. The doctor then adjusted the machine to 20% pain transfer. The husband was still feeling fine. The doctor checked the husband's blood pressure and was amazed at how well he was doing. At this point they decided to try for 50%. The husband continued to feel quite well. Since the pain transfer was obviously helping out the wife considerably, the husband encouraged the doctor to transfer ALL the pain to him. The wife deliverer a healthy baby with virtually no pain. She and her husband were ecstatic.
When they got home, the mailman was dead on the porch.
You certainly didn't RTFA. They sold an upgraded (and expensive) package for her promising HD channels but now they are wanting her to upgrade again to another more expensive package in order to get the *real* HD channels. That's the traditional bait and switch, and it doesn't matter if it is TV, medical treatment or a piece of soggy wet paper, it is outright fraud.
They didn't say it was "terrorism" just that it is like it. It is you who seems unclear about the definition as you say "People discussing ways to blow things up is not terrorism" but then refer to terrorism as meaning "organised violence".
I'm not unclear about the definition, and I didn't referred to terrorism as "organized violence". I said "I'm against terrorism and every kind of organized violence" as a disclaimer to dispel any interpretation that I could be endorsing or condoning violence when I mention that "disguised people shooting at soldiers in the battlefield is not terrorism". Notice that anywhere in my post I attempted to define terrorism or attribute a meaning to it. I only mentioned what terrorism is not.
That being, most of your post is nothing but a weakly constructed straw man.
I stand by what I said. There is not "original meaning" for terrorism that includes use of minor threats (like lawsuits, ground up misbehaving kids, whatever) to intimidate a person (our group of people) in order to achieve an objective. Check the etymology of the world, to understand that terrorism must both be systematic and, as the root of the word implies, terrifying.
No, it is not anything near terrorism. Extortion, racketeering, blackmailing, maybe. But terrorism is a completely different thing. It is because this kind of mislabeling, claiming anything that aims to scare people to be "terrorism", that is so easy for governments all over the world to take away everyone's rights with the excuse of combating it. RIAA blackmailing people is not like terrorism. People discussing ways to blow things up is not terrorism. Disguised people shooting at soldiers in the battlefield is not terrorism.
I'm as much against RIAA tactics as everyone else. Also, I'm against terrorism and every kind of organized violence. But let's call a spade a spade, all right? Everytime someone misuse the word "terrorism", god kills a kitten and the terrorists win.
There is nothing like media pitting two public figures against one another and, consequently, pitting supporters and detractors against each other, in order to generate some cheap polemic to exploit for some 15 minutes. Nothing to see here, move along.
Well, you have to keep in mind that, even considering swap, hard drives by the time didn't have that much space, although they occupied a lot of it. Take a look at this comparison, a 5.25" 111 MB MFM drive against a 2.5" 6495 MB IDE drive. I remember running Windows 95 on a Pentium MMX 133MHz with a 256 MB HD and 8 MB RAM. I even managed to install Windows 98 on it, but it was a big mistake, as Win 98 SE hadn't been released yet and the first version (as most O.S. that come out Redmond since ever) was miserably buggy.
Time passes, and nowadays a cellphone has more power than that machine. That's progress.
Slashdot Mirror
People who distribute patented software without acquiring the suitable license are liable, at least in the USA. The same for people that distribute means to circumvent copy protection measures. That's why distros can't do that, unless they restricted who can use their software, but then that would be a violation of GPL (and the Free Software spirit in general). So, that's not an option.
That is only a problem for countries that enforce software patents, that is, IIRC, the USA. If he admits that Linux is better than the alternative, but he feels somehow constrained by the warnings and restrictions, he can either vote with his money (that he does) and buy a software that doesn't "put him off", or vote with his feet and move from the country that imposes such restrictions on him. He can also join the choir and try to change this absurd legislation that allows people to patent algorithms instead of implementations, but I'm trying to keep it real, for once.
More likely it is another publicity stunt, to make their work to look more "legitimate", to get more people to side with them (the "I may not agree with what you say, but would defend to death your right to say it" crowd), to generalize even more the feeling that Mac users are dangerous fanboys disconnected with the reality, etc.
The only thing easier than to make threats to people on the Internet is to fake threats to oneself on the Internet. We got plenty of these drama queens in the nineties, hopefully this is not a trend that will come back.
These criminals are giving a "smarter" * use for the enormous potential that these hundred thousands of homogeneous (or similar enough) connected machines have than most companies out there does. It is time for 1) Microsoft and its users get their act straight and work on better security for they machines and 2) someone to realize the incredible potential of all this "dark" bandwidth and processing power and give it a good use. Criminals are showing it is possible, all it need is some legitimate application.
* Smart but immoral and illegal. I, for one, don't condone nor endorse their actions, and think they are nothing but vile criminals
Today, it is impossible to listen to radio there, not because of all these problems, but because payola there is rampant, and if you are lucky, you get to listen the same 50 songs over and over and over again. Once I recorded 24 hours of radio programming, and I was able to identify a group of 8 songs (I can remember the exact number) that played at least 4 times that particular day, and one that played every 2 hours. That was a special spot on the programming called "the song of the week", played every two hours, every day, for 7 days. The other radios had a similar sport, with variations in the name ("the best of the week, the hit of the week"). It is a mafia, and it is not exclusive on U.S.
Payola killed the radio star, and the internet will kill the payola star. Well, at least one man can dream.
And imagine how secure the computing world would be ... if Microsoft had a monopoly on virus creation.
The more we progress, the more we stay at the same place. Lookup the Cycle of Reincarnation on the jargon file, we are switching from thick clients to thin clients and back since the mainframes, and will continue switching as long as computing power, bandwidth and resource demand grow at different rates, leading to an asymmetric relation among those three factors.
Actually, that's not the case.
Release (or cite, if it is external) the specs for the standard of the file format, along with the protocol used to communicate with the DRMd server, and preferentially a stripped down player with source code for reference and let the developers make their own players for their own platforms. It is possible to have security (DRM, for all that matters) and openness at the same time and, if it was not possible, security through obscurity would not solve the DRM problem, as CSS and the HD-DVD keys debacle proved.
I think it would be more likely that the next headlines would read: Google maps satellite suddenly stop working over China.
Unless he actually recorded the movie and distributed the movie for profit, thus being criminal copyright infringment, that is a little bit harsh for such "victimless crime". Supposing he was successful in recording the movie and distributed it without the copyright owner permission, and the copyright owner found out and sued for damages, the financial penalty would probably be bigger, but without the jail time.
I'm not very fan of this kind of deterrent law, that makes the penalty for attempt haesher than the penalty for the actual infringement.
And by sooner I mean earlier. God damned foreign language and its traps!
Lookup Kerckhoffs' principle. Security through obscurity is a widely debated subject going all back to the 19 century, when it concerns to cryptography, and sooner than that, in the locksmith circles, and it is more or less a consensus that it is not only ineffective but terribly dangerous, because "every secret create a potential failure point".
Read the wikipedia article, it is enlightening and very insightful.
In my case, at least, everything of that goes, and I never hear about. The same goes for the rest of mankind, except for the tiny percentage of the population that read these blogs, tiny even if only tech savvy people is considered. Who are those bloggers and why are they considered important to deserve front page on Slashdot?
Another poster put it better a couple of posts above, this is no different from a corn flakes company creating a contest in the lines of "write an essay with the word 'crunchy' and win such and such prize'", and getting 10 years old children to publish their essays. They will do for the prize, even if they hate that particular brand of flakes.
The joke is on whoever blindly believes in anything written by those bloggers, or by any other blogger, or anything written on the Internet, for all that matters. But bloggers, blah, a bunch of self-important people that touts their own (and each other) horns and manage to convince some gullible people that their opinion is any better than the guy next seat on the bus.
A lot of P2P applications even uses http in one phase or another of its execution, what is the case of bittorrent clients communication with trackers, that is done over using http requests.
What they might be implying is that the so called "legitimate" traffic (casual WWW surfing) is outpacing filesharing. Ironically, this growing is due the popularization of tools that allow users to share the files via www, tools like Youtube and Flickr (and pornotube, *cough*) that they would share via P2P applications like Kazaa, Napster or IMesh.
Bottom line is: people don't care about the tools, but about the use they do to the tools. Nothing to see here, move along.
People can host copyrighted material without the owner permission. People can host themselves dancing like idiots. ThePirateBay, youtube et. al. will accept both. It is up to the copyright owner to protect their assets. That's what the law says, and that's how the world works. Can't blame the tools, people is that should be held accountable.
The same stands for barely the entire Internet. Copyrighted text never flow so fast around multiple sources, most of the times, without the explicit consent of the copyright owner. Everytime someone posts the entire content of an article here on Slashdot for our commodity (lazy slashdotters don't like to RTFA), it is copyright infringement too. That doesn't mean that Slashdot is supporting copyright infringement either.
The world has changed, and the availability of tools should not and will not be restricted just because some people will misuse those tools.
Just to upload this video.
.. You are a Pirate!!!!
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
In Brazil, we have two saying about this: 1) "O olho do dono é que engorda o gado", that (roughly) translates as "The owner's eye fattens the livestock". and 2) "Quando o chefe senta o empregado deita", that translates as "When the boss sits, the employee lies down". Most successful business out there, no matter if small or big, have the owner in a position of both control and supervision.
A married couple went to the hospital to have their baby delivered. Upon their arrival, the doctor said he had invented a new machine that would transfer a portion of the mother's labor pain to the father. He asked if
they were willing to try it out. They were both very much in favor of it. The doctor set the pain transfer to 10% for starters, explaining that even 10% was probably more pain than the father had ever experienced before.
But as the labor progressed, the husband felt fine and asked the doctor to go ahead and bump it up a notch. The doctor then adjusted the machine to 20% pain transfer. The husband was still feeling fine. The doctor checked
the husband's blood pressure and was amazed at how well he was doing. At this point they decided to try for 50%. The husband continued to feel quite well. Since the pain transfer was obviously helping out the wife considerably, the husband encouraged the doctor to transfer ALL the pain to him. The wife deliverer a healthy baby with virtually no pain. She and her husband were ecstatic.
When they got home, the mailman was dead on the porch.
You certainly didn't RTFA. They sold an upgraded (and expensive) package for her promising HD channels but now they are wanting her to upgrade again to another more expensive package in order to get the *real* HD channels. That's the traditional bait and switch, and it doesn't matter if it is TV, medical treatment or a piece of soggy wet paper, it is outright fraud.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. The war is over, Blue Ray won. Sad.
That being, most of your post is nothing but a weakly constructed straw man.
I stand by what I said. There is not "original meaning" for terrorism that includes use of minor threats (like lawsuits, ground up misbehaving kids, whatever) to intimidate a person (our group of people) in order to achieve an objective. Check the etymology of the world, to understand that terrorism must both be systematic and, as the root of the word implies, terrifying.
I'm as much against RIAA tactics as everyone else. Also, I'm against terrorism and every kind of organized violence. But let's call a spade a spade, all right? Everytime someone misuse the word "terrorism", god kills a kitten and the terrorists win.
There is nothing like media pitting two public figures against one another and, consequently, pitting supporters and detractors against each other, in order to generate some cheap polemic to exploit for some 15 minutes. Nothing to see here, move along.
Well, you have to keep in mind that, even considering swap, hard drives by the time didn't have that much space, although they occupied a lot of it. Take a look at this comparison, a 5.25" 111 MB MFM drive against a 2.5" 6495 MB IDE drive. I remember running Windows 95 on a Pentium MMX 133MHz with a 256 MB HD and 8 MB RAM. I even managed to install Windows 98 on it, but it was a big mistake, as Win 98 SE hadn't been released yet and the first version (as most O.S. that come out Redmond since ever) was miserably buggy.
Time passes, and nowadays a cellphone has more power than that machine. That's progress.