Adding the note that it may be false will likely make many people believe it's false, whether that's the case or not. People generally follow other people's opinions, or are at least strongly influenced by them.
Even if you're sure something is true but it's tagged as "potentially false" then at the very least it will seed doubts.
No doubt, these drones will be more and more automatic, where commands from their human controllers become more and more abstract. Maybe now they're being flown like an RC aircraft, soon it'll be "go to this location, launch bomb to hit that location", or "fly search patterns in this area and shoot anything that doesn't respond to your coded signals out of the sky".
And so, step by step, we enter the era of robotic warfare. No matter how often the various militaries and politicians pledge that this will not happen.
The summary doesn't do this, it just states "If there's one thing that distinguishes humans from other animals, it's our ability to use language", moving on to mentioning the skill of conversation. That are things that are not totally unique to humans, other species can communicate in that way as well. But just being able to use language is not enough; it's abstract language that's really unique to humans.
Things that really do set us apart are very different. One thing that I really can't think of an animal equivalent is how much we care about our looks, and then specifically about how other people see us. Clothes, make-up, haircuts, shaving, etc. all go that way: we care about how we look because we care about how other people see us. Other animals may show off their bodies, like peacock males showing off their massive tail feathers to a female; I can't think of any example where an animal deliberately decorates its body to impress others of its species.
There are many more animals that are known to communicate through sound, some rather sophisticated. Various whales and dolphins are known to use different calls, some primates, even some species of bat are believed to exchange information such as where to find food through sounds. Calls are also a common way of parents finding their children when living in big groups. Of course it's not as advanced as human speech, and almost certainly not useful to communicate about abstract topics. To me, it is a form of speech nonetheless.
“technological protection measure” means any effective technology, (...)
Now one could very well argue that DeCSS has rendered the technology ineffective. Would be interesting to know what the court thinks of such an argument.
If so, people would never play blackjack or roulette as both games are designed to give the house a slight advantage of about 2%. This means that given enough hands, you always lose about 2% of your bet, leaving you with about 98% of the amount you started with.
However many players do not play that many hands. They play 5, 10, maybe 100 hands. In that situation the spread is much greater - and that's what punters hope for. To get one of those hands that gives them a big win, before they get all the hands that give them losses. That is also the exact reason why people do sometimes win big in a casino, and the casino still makes money.
Then there is the question, what is considered "hacking of a digital lock"?
After installing DeCSS on my Linux PC well over a decade ago when I still had a working DVD player, I didn't notice the lock. Was it really still there? Is it really a lock? To view a.jpg image I also need some special software to decode it for me and display it on my screen.
Even after decoding CSS, you still have to decode the MPEG to be able to send it to a screen for display. Most players do both steps in one go, without a single bit of user interaction. It is as if there is no locking going on. Some players will even conveniently ignore "unskippable" locks on promos and so that are sometimes put at the start of a DVD.
Now imagine you got some DVD or BluRay, and want to make a copy of it. You go online, and surely in moments you find a piece of software that can do just that for you, fully transparent. Are you still, legally speaking, in the process of "hacking a digital lock"? Many users may not even know it's encrypted - they pop it in their BluRay player, and it just plays. They put it in their computer, and their ripping tool just rips it as someone else already figured out how to read the content. To the user it is exactly the same as if this encryption never was there in the first place.
Technically, it's not theft if he wrote all those articles himself.
Close, but not correct: "it's not 'theft' if he owned the copyright on those articles, or has a license to distribute them".
Having written something yourself doesn't mean you own the copyright on it: e.g. if a journalist writes an article for the newspaper he works for, the copyright usually goes to the newspaper. Another situation where you may not distribute your own stuff, is if you write something, and then license it on exclusive basis to someone. Though in this case it may actually be breach of contract rather than breach of copyright.
In both cases, however, the author should be very well aware of what he may or may not do with his own work.
I'd expect from a company that claims to be the crusader for copyright to understand it.
The part they infringed upon is easy to understand (downloading and redistribution of stuff they find online, exactly what many lawsuits are fought over, and specifically what they always tell the public is not OK to do), so misunderstanding the matter is indeed not likely. So it's likely the first: they don't give a damn.
So those sanctions against Russia target the wrong products!
The purpose of sanctions is to hurt the government rather than the common people. I don't think there are many people that depend on typewriters nowadays, so banning the export of typewriters and their supplies to Russia would paralyse the government while leaving the common people alone. As an added bonus, it'd have a much smaller effect on European farmers than the current boycotts have.
This is not going against free trade, at all. This is free trade: part of free trade is that the seller is allowed to choose who to sell to. Free trade agreements are agreements between governments, to not put any restrictions on the trade by businesses.
When buying on a streaming service, the copyright holder has a say on who/where this service may sell a license to. After all, if you play a show on Netflix, they effectively sell you a license to watch it, and the rights holder has the right to put restrictions on its sale to Netflix - and if Netflix breaks that contract, to stop selling to Netflix altogether.
The Australian or US governments do not put any additional restrictions on the sale. Neither government levies import/export taxes on the trade. Netflix is fully allowed to sell in Australia under Australian law - it's just that their content suppliers don't let them.
If Netflix is not doing it, they risk losing all their content - and with it their whole business. It's not foolish from their pov, it's just what they have to do to keep their business alive.
"Moreover, the law now also limits potential liability for Internet users for non-commercial infringement, capping damages at C$5,000 for all infringements. While that is not insignificant, it does mean that threats of tens of thousands of dollars in liability for unauthorized downloading are unfounded".
That is per rights holder. If you've downloaded 10 works from one rights holder, they can get no more than $5k. However if you've downloaded 10 works from 10 different rights holders, you may end up on the receiving end of ten law suits, with total potential fine of $50k. Both amounts not counting legal costs.
Easy enough to make this mistake, and not realising it.
Develop something that needs Amazon S3 access, and put it on GitHub. It's easy enough to forget about removing your keys before doing a git commit, putting them on GitHub.
Next time maybe you do remember to do so; possibly not realising your first mistake. The keys remain available in previous versions of your software, and you'll never see this old version until you happen to do a rollback to exactly that revision. Rollbacks don't happen too often; to that specific version even less; and then you still have to look at the bit of code that has the keys and realise it's coming from the rollback.
Others that may download your updated (keyless) version also won't notice your keys are on GitHub, after all they're hidden in an older version, which you never see unless specifically requesting it.
What makes matters worse: with this bot it may take just minutes for your keys to be copied and put in use. TFS mentions just five minutes for that to have happened. Maybe it's specifically looking for new commits?
Anyway, easy enough to make such a mistake and not realising it. As such there are many AWS secret keys out there, that are still valid (owner doesn't realise they're out there so won't revoke them), and that are just waiting to be found and put into use.
That hackers defeated the security, doesn't necessarily mean it was easy to do so.
As I understand it, it was related to social engineering - they managed to get their hands on actual user accounts and passwords, so could log in tot the network the intended way. There is nothing that stops a hacker the moment they have valid credentials, credentials that are meant to give access.
Any network is by nature vulnerable as it is designed to allow people to get in. Without that option, the network would be useless for any practical use. The trick is to make sure only give access to people you want to be able to access it, and find a way to make it impossible for others to impersonate those people. And that's hard - really hard.
They'd kill themselves - the current slow but steady rise in the RMB is hard enough on their central bank already (as it means a steady decline in the value of their main asset: their massive USD holdings).
Any work you create is copyrighted; however, it's unenforceable unless registered, assuming you live in the US.
And that's also not true. It's not a prerequisite to register copyrights for it to be enforceable. Having it registered however does make it a lot easier to enforce later.
About 95% of the people in this world do not live in the US, and will not register their copyrights in the US, yet the material they produce is fully copyright protected in the US under US copyright law.
Most of the software created by individuals and released under the GPL is not registered either. That doesn't make the GPL any less valid or applicable.
There is a difference between reporting, and wholesale redistribution. Reporting is fair use, but that's not happening (much). Wholesale redistribution is certainly not fair use, and Sony can indeed claim such redistribution violates copyright.
Now the interesting thing is going to be (if this ever gets challenged in court): who owns the copyright over those e-mails? Is it Sony as employer, or are it the individual authors of those e-mails? The received e-mails are certainly not copyright Sony, the copyright on those is owned by those who sent them to Sony employees.
In principle, everything falls under copyright. Even these comments. However by posting it on a public board, we implicitly give Slashdot permission to redistribute it. An e-mail I send to the feedback section of a newspaper also comes with the implicit permission to print and redistribute it in the newspaper. An e-mail one sends to Sony or someone else, however, does normally not have such a permission - it's hard to argue implicit permission to redistribute. This sidestepping the obvious privacy related to e-mail, which is generally meant to be read by the recipient(s) only.
Most scientists work for scientific institutions (universities, research companies) where their employer has a license for all to read those journals. Just like the old university libraries where you could find all these journals in print. To these people there is not much of a hindrance and the digital availability may make exchange of ideas actually easier than it was before.
They do however keep curious bystanders out - people who have an interest in science but are not working in the field. This are the same people that did not have easy access to the journals (unless they'd hop on their bike and cycle over to their local university's library - assuming there even was one nearby). For these people access hasn't worsened much, but definitely hasn't improved either.
All in all I can't really agree with them hindering the exchange of information, though they could very well make it a lot easier - for example by making everything older than say a year or a few years free to access, leaving the latest and greatest to those that are willing (and capable) to pay for it.
Somehow these journals need to be paid for their work. Peer review is not free, publishing is not free. Just putting it all out on the Internet for free is not a viable business model, as is proven by the many pay-to-publish crap journals discussed here many times recently.
Slashdot Mirror
Would be lovely to study. It must be at least as elegant and sophisticated as the root system of a small tree.
It's probably to do with a difference in standards.
UK: violent crime is someone bumping too hard into someone else on the street.
US: unless someone is killed, it doesn't even make the statistics.
So that ratio of London 7 vs New York 1 sounds about right.
Adding the note that it may be false will likely make many people believe it's false, whether that's the case or not. People generally follow other people's opinions, or are at least strongly influenced by them.
Even if you're sure something is true but it's tagged as "potentially false" then at the very least it will seed doubts.
No doubt, these drones will be more and more automatic, where commands from their human controllers become more and more abstract. Maybe now they're being flown like an RC aircraft, soon it'll be "go to this location, launch bomb to hit that location", or "fly search patterns in this area and shoot anything that doesn't respond to your coded signals out of the sky".
And so, step by step, we enter the era of robotic warfare. No matter how often the various militaries and politicians pledge that this will not happen.
The summary doesn't do this, it just states "If there's one thing that distinguishes humans from other animals, it's our ability to use language", moving on to mentioning the skill of conversation. That are things that are not totally unique to humans, other species can communicate in that way as well. But just being able to use language is not enough; it's abstract language that's really unique to humans.
Things that really do set us apart are very different. One thing that I really can't think of an animal equivalent is how much we care about our looks, and then specifically about how other people see us. Clothes, make-up, haircuts, shaving, etc. all go that way: we care about how we look because we care about how other people see us. Other animals may show off their bodies, like peacock males showing off their massive tail feathers to a female; I can't think of any example where an animal deliberately decorates its body to impress others of its species.
There are many more animals that are known to communicate through sound, some rather sophisticated. Various whales and dolphins are known to use different calls, some primates, even some species of bat are believed to exchange information such as where to find food through sounds. Calls are also a common way of parents finding their children when living in big groups. Of course it's not as advanced as human speech, and almost certainly not useful to communicate about abstract topics. To me, it is a form of speech nonetheless.
So... how to know which of the hundreds of Google results is the real source of a piece of software?
“technological protection measure” means any effective technology, (...)
Now one could very well argue that DeCSS has rendered the technology ineffective. Would be interesting to know what the court thinks of such an argument.
If so, people would never play blackjack or roulette as both games are designed to give the house a slight advantage of about 2%. This means that given enough hands, you always lose about 2% of your bet, leaving you with about 98% of the amount you started with.
However many players do not play that many hands. They play 5, 10, maybe 100 hands. In that situation the spread is much greater - and that's what punters hope for. To get one of those hands that gives them a big win, before they get all the hands that give them losses. That is also the exact reason why people do sometimes win big in a casino, and the casino still makes money.
Then there is the question, what is considered "hacking of a digital lock"?
After installing DeCSS on my Linux PC well over a decade ago when I still had a working DVD player, I didn't notice the lock. Was it really still there? Is it really a lock? To view a .jpg image I also need some special software to decode it for me and display it on my screen.
Even after decoding CSS, you still have to decode the MPEG to be able to send it to a screen for display. Most players do both steps in one go, without a single bit of user interaction. It is as if there is no locking going on. Some players will even conveniently ignore "unskippable" locks on promos and so that are sometimes put at the start of a DVD.
Now imagine you got some DVD or BluRay, and want to make a copy of it. You go online, and surely in moments you find a piece of software that can do just that for you, fully transparent. Are you still, legally speaking, in the process of "hacking a digital lock"? Many users may not even know it's encrypted - they pop it in their BluRay player, and it just plays. They put it in their computer, and their ripping tool just rips it as someone else already figured out how to read the content. To the user it is exactly the same as if this encryption never was there in the first place.
Technically, it's not theft if he wrote all those articles himself.
Close, but not correct: "it's not 'theft' if he owned the copyright on those articles, or has a license to distribute them".
Having written something yourself doesn't mean you own the copyright on it: e.g. if a journalist writes an article for the newspaper he works for, the copyright usually goes to the newspaper. Another situation where you may not distribute your own stuff, is if you write something, and then license it on exclusive basis to someone. Though in this case it may actually be breach of contract rather than breach of copyright.
In both cases, however, the author should be very well aware of what he may or may not do with his own work.
I'd expect from a company that claims to be the crusader for copyright to understand it.
The part they infringed upon is easy to understand (downloading and redistribution of stuff they find online, exactly what many lawsuits are fought over, and specifically what they always tell the public is not OK to do), so misunderstanding the matter is indeed not likely. So it's likely the first: they don't give a damn.
So those sanctions against Russia target the wrong products!
The purpose of sanctions is to hurt the government rather than the common people. I don't think there are many people that depend on typewriters nowadays, so banning the export of typewriters and their supplies to Russia would paralyse the government while leaving the common people alone. As an added bonus, it'd have a much smaller effect on European farmers than the current boycotts have.
This is not going against free trade, at all. This is free trade: part of free trade is that the seller is allowed to choose who to sell to. Free trade agreements are agreements between governments, to not put any restrictions on the trade by businesses.
When buying on a streaming service, the copyright holder has a say on who/where this service may sell a license to. After all, if you play a show on Netflix, they effectively sell you a license to watch it, and the rights holder has the right to put restrictions on its sale to Netflix - and if Netflix breaks that contract, to stop selling to Netflix altogether.
The Australian or US governments do not put any additional restrictions on the sale. Neither government levies import/export taxes on the trade. Netflix is fully allowed to sell in Australia under Australian law - it's just that their content suppliers don't let them.
If Netflix is not doing it, they risk losing all their content - and with it their whole business. It's not foolish from their pov, it's just what they have to do to keep their business alive.
"Moreover, the law now also limits potential liability for Internet users for non-commercial infringement, capping damages at C$5,000 for all infringements. While that is not insignificant, it does mean that threats of tens of thousands of dollars in liability for unauthorized downloading are unfounded".
That is per rights holder. If you've downloaded 10 works from one rights holder, they can get no more than $5k. However if you've downloaded 10 works from 10 different rights holders, you may end up on the receiving end of ten law suits, with total potential fine of $50k. Both amounts not counting legal costs.
You will only get warning letters if you're downloading copyrighted stuff that:
Using encryption and built-in blacklists (of known monitoring sites) will help a lot.
So the race is on for torrent client developers to make it even harder to track who's downloading what.
Easy enough to make this mistake, and not realising it.
Develop something that needs Amazon S3 access, and put it on GitHub. It's easy enough to forget about removing your keys before doing a git commit, putting them on GitHub.
Next time maybe you do remember to do so; possibly not realising your first mistake. The keys remain available in previous versions of your software, and you'll never see this old version until you happen to do a rollback to exactly that revision. Rollbacks don't happen too often; to that specific version even less; and then you still have to look at the bit of code that has the keys and realise it's coming from the rollback.
Others that may download your updated (keyless) version also won't notice your keys are on GitHub, after all they're hidden in an older version, which you never see unless specifically requesting it.
What makes matters worse: with this bot it may take just minutes for your keys to be copied and put in use. TFS mentions just five minutes for that to have happened. Maybe it's specifically looking for new commits?
Anyway, easy enough to make such a mistake and not realising it. As such there are many AWS secret keys out there, that are still valid (owner doesn't realise they're out there so won't revoke them), and that are just waiting to be found and put into use.
Agreed. It's Iraq, Saddam Hussein and his WMDs all over again.
Not a shred of verifiable evidence given - we just have to believe what those in power say - and accept more death and destruction.
That hackers defeated the security, doesn't necessarily mean it was easy to do so.
As I understand it, it was related to social engineering - they managed to get their hands on actual user accounts and passwords, so could log in tot the network the intended way. There is nothing that stops a hacker the moment they have valid credentials, credentials that are meant to give access.
Any network is by nature vulnerable as it is designed to allow people to get in. Without that option, the network would be useless for any practical use. The trick is to make sure only give access to people you want to be able to access it, and find a way to make it impossible for others to impersonate those people. And that's hard - really hard.
They'd kill themselves - the current slow but steady rise in the RMB is hard enough on their central bank already (as it means a steady decline in the value of their main asset: their massive USD holdings).
Registration is not necessary, but it does make things a lot easier if you indeed have to defend a copyright.
Any work you create is copyrighted; however, it's unenforceable unless registered, assuming you live in the US.
And that's also not true. It's not a prerequisite to register copyrights for it to be enforceable. Having it registered however does make it a lot easier to enforce later.
About 95% of the people in this world do not live in the US, and will not register their copyrights in the US, yet the material they produce is fully copyright protected in the US under US copyright law.
Most of the software created by individuals and released under the GPL is not registered either. That doesn't make the GPL any less valid or applicable.
There is a difference between reporting, and wholesale redistribution. Reporting is fair use, but that's not happening (much). Wholesale redistribution is certainly not fair use, and Sony can indeed claim such redistribution violates copyright.
Now the interesting thing is going to be (if this ever gets challenged in court): who owns the copyright over those e-mails? Is it Sony as employer, or are it the individual authors of those e-mails? The received e-mails are certainly not copyright Sony, the copyright on those is owned by those who sent them to Sony employees.
In principle, everything falls under copyright. Even these comments. However by posting it on a public board, we implicitly give Slashdot permission to redistribute it. An e-mail I send to the feedback section of a newspaper also comes with the implicit permission to print and redistribute it in the newspaper. An e-mail one sends to Sony or someone else, however, does normally not have such a permission - it's hard to argue implicit permission to redistribute. This sidestepping the obvious privacy related to e-mail, which is generally meant to be read by the recipient(s) only.
Most scientists work for scientific institutions (universities, research companies) where their employer has a license for all to read those journals. Just like the old university libraries where you could find all these journals in print. To these people there is not much of a hindrance and the digital availability may make exchange of ideas actually easier than it was before.
They do however keep curious bystanders out - people who have an interest in science but are not working in the field. This are the same people that did not have easy access to the journals (unless they'd hop on their bike and cycle over to their local university's library - assuming there even was one nearby). For these people access hasn't worsened much, but definitely hasn't improved either.
All in all I can't really agree with them hindering the exchange of information, though they could very well make it a lot easier - for example by making everything older than say a year or a few years free to access, leaving the latest and greatest to those that are willing (and capable) to pay for it.
Somehow these journals need to be paid for their work. Peer review is not free, publishing is not free. Just putting it all out on the Internet for free is not a viable business model, as is proven by the many pay-to-publish crap journals discussed here many times recently.