I can't honestly see the porn industry being keen to acquire lots of juvenile customers with stolen credit cards, either. They'll end up eating the chargeback, not to mention the fact that the PR would be pretty horrific.
It's not a question of whether or not they should supply it - it's whether they're ALLOWED to supply it. If this kind of filtering was applied to books, libraries would be banned from offering books by Chaucer, Henry Miller etc etc...
The obvious flaw in this analogy is that libraries (and other public bodies) are funded by the public, for the public, where slashdot is a privately run company.
If they want to use the mod system any way they like that's entirely their prerogative.
I would have thought the porn industry would be almost completely uninterested in trying to lure "young customers", as young customers very rarely have credit cards.
Did you have Half Life installed at all before starting Steam up? If not, what sort of connection are you on?
45 seconds of "normal" broadband (around 50 kbytes/sec) comes out to about 2.25 Mb of content - Doom was larger than that, so forgive me if I'm a little sceptical that Half Life can be retrieved that rapidly.
If not, what exactly was being retrieved here - the CS 1.4 upgrade? If so, did you have CS 1.3 installed already, or was this a full download? In either case, 45 seconds would be impressive - the CS 1.3 full installer was around 100 Mb, and the CS 1.1 to 1.3 updater was about 35 Mb.
ITV's premium channels also show ads, though. In addition, ITV digital shows non ITV pay content, such as Sky One, Sky Moviemax, Sky Premier. Since Sky is ITV Digital's number one competitor, some people have theorised that ITVD might not be terribly upset at Sky losing revenue due to pirate cards.
The other argument, of course, is that ITVD might be allowing people to get away with pirate viewing to build marketshare, at which point they'll start beefing up the encryption techniques to shut down pirates. Sadly moving to a wholly secure model would probably require changing the encryption method, which would obsolete all current decoders (iirc). This is unlikely to happen.
Quick summary for US readers - Canal+ (the french cable TV channel) uses SECA encryption, which is also used by ITV Digital (formerly OnDigital), the UK's terrestrial digital provider. Terrestrial digital is basically digital TV transmitted over the airwaves.
The choice of SECA was considered unwise when OnDigital selected it, as SECA was already at that point known to be broken. Naturally, pirate cards started circulating shortly afterwards. The smart cards now sell for as little as 10 pounds (about 15 dollars) and card programmers can be obtained for about three times that allowing people to keep up to date.
At the moment, the UK has an arms race between ITV Digital and the pirates. ITV Digital will start broadcasting "ECMs" which exploit weaknesses in the pirate cards to cause them to crash (so they can't display TV). The pirates promptly fix their cards and release the new version, at which point it starts over again. There are several competing pirate codes around, and new versions are being released almost weekly.
There is a rumour that ITV Digital are less diligent than they need to be in tracking down and killing pirate cards, as these cards increase their marketshare against that of Sky (Murdoch's satellite TV company, the dominant "extra" TV company in the UK). This would be a tactic reminiscent of the way that pirate installations of Windows / DOS made those operating systems the standard in the past - whether there's any truth in the rumours is obviously uncertain, however.
Anyone interested in more information should consider the newsgroups uk.tech.digital-tv and uk.tech.digital-tv.crypt, although be warned that those groups are infested with pirates, script kiddies and the usual crop of 14 year old flamers!:)
PC Gamer can be undependable, true, but they're also prepared to slate games. When Sin came out, they roundly condemmned it due to the slow loading times, even though that was later patched.
More recently, the current issue gives a truly awful review to "Command and Conquer: Renegade" - and the review is followed by 5, full page adverts for that game. Clearly in this case purchasing large quantities of ads didn't help the review.
Well, unless it was even worse than they said... *shudder*
Only Trillian v0.7x affected?
on
AOL vs. Trillian
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Trillian is a very nice client - we use it almost exclusively here at work, as it lets us keep in contact with people using multiple IM platforms, and also doesn't ram ads down our throats.
One interesting thing is that the new AIM blocks only seem to affect Trillian v0.7x - some of our users still using v0.6x are still working fine, whereas us early adopters are having to update rapidly.
Luckily, the newest (v0.721) build includes an auto update function, so keeping up to date is likely to be much easier in the future. Bear in mind that there's a limit to how much AOL can do to break the protocols, as they don't want to shut out all of their previous clients.
Actually, Apple has been selling unix based servers for years, well before OS X Server.
They used to sell some Apple-badged AIX boxes, which admittedly weren't really macs, but prior to that (back in the early nineties) they actually had their own version of unix, A/UX. It was truly bizarre, an Apple desktop (circa system 6 or so) with a terminal window in it to actually get at the system.
I used to admin a couple of these things, they were unusual, but they worked. The weirdest things were the manuals - all standard Apple typesetting, but detailing how to use "ls" and "cd"...
Pay per view already works quite nicely in some niche markets - specifically, where users don't have any other way of getting access to that specific information.
For any other kind of site, forget it. As long as any sites can still make money with a "free" service, who is going to use one that charges? The only way "penny per page" would become viable would be if everybody did it, and that's not going to happen.
Twelve karma points for the first person to write a Perl script that scrolls a Jon Katz article onto this thing. What better way to teach those MIT geeks that there are some places the Internet just doesn't belong?
Personally, I'd say the crapper was precisely where Jon Katz articles belong...:)
I could be wrong, but the article strongly suggests that this ONLY BANS SPAM FOR FINANCIAL SERVICES... not all spam. It comments that a Europe-wide policy on spam in general will be debated next year.
I actually rip my entire collection to a server, categorise them into groups, and then stream them back into my stereo. This is a hell of a low nicer than individual CDs, as my entire collection is on tap instantly, and I can easily run out random playlists in certain genres if I feel like listening to "random noisy guitars" for a few hours.
I virtually never download mp3s, because the quality is too low for my tastes, and the few tracks I have heard (and liked) online I've ended up buying the CD so I can rip them myself.
If you really believe that the only people affected by this are "cash-poor students" then you haven't thought about the issues. There are plenty of legitimate reasons why this will piss people off, not just limited to my own case.
I must admit, I gave into the hype and bought the first Harry Potter book. It was... okay, I guess. I was expecting something a lot more complex, though, and I was disappointed - it reminded me more of Enid Blyton than anything else.
When I was a kid, I was reading things like Robert Westall, John Wyndham, Ursula K LeGuin, Diana Wynne Jones... maybe it's just nostalgia, but Harry Potter doesn't seem like it's even in the same league as those old classics.
There are children's authors who deserve a Hugo (Roald Dahl springs to mind, as well as some of those listed above) but I suspect this award was given due to popularity, and the cynical side of my nature suspects that at least part of that popularity is due to their safe, harmless nature.
An Apache module which automatically inserted noise into JPEG images to simulate steganographically hidden messages is a good idea...
The problem is that it would corrupt any real steganographically hidden messages in the images, hence rendering images a bit of an unreliable mechanism for storing hidden text...;)
Dislaimer: I'm not an encryption expert by any stretch of the imagination...
This is an interesting idea, but surely any good encryption produces an output which is indistinguishable from random noise. So, how can the algorithms mentioned in the article (which is interesting, but rather short on facts...) distinguish between the noise added by a steganographically embedded encrypted message and the noise caused by a slightly underspecced A to D converter?
I'm honestly curious... has anyone got any links to a more detailed report on this?
Actually, Apple will never sell a $499 PC purely because that would be too cheap. Jobs wants Apple to remain a "premium" brand, like Sony. Therefore, no budget models.
Sorry, but I disagree. If Felten had pulled the seminar with no prompting, saying "Oh, I can't publish in case I get sued", that might have been perceived as a deliberate dive.
However, in this case, the RIAA sent him a letter strongly suggesting that they'd take legal action if he continued, whatever they're now trying to say. As far as I can see, that's like someone being pushed.
Yeah, I know the long article said that. But I thought it was worth saying over here... after all, how many slashdot readers are ever going to read the full article?:)
Besides, the headline ("YOU CAN'T RECORD MP3S UNDER WINXP! MICROSOFT ARE EVIL! EVIL, I TELL YOU!") was certainly misleading. If slashdot aren't careful, they'll get a reputation for bias.:)
I'd love to know how this is going to be accomplished. Prevent Windows Media Player from playing mp3s / recording over a certain bitrate? Sure. Prevent another mp3 player from doing this? How, exactly?
All an mp3 ripper does is convert one set of data (uncompressed audio) to another kind of data (compressed audio). I can't see how they can detect this.
The answer is that Microsoft are saying that they'll limit the quality of recordings made using the built in software, not those made on Windows XP. Use something else to encode / your mp3s, and you're fine.
I'd mention the fact that this story could have been written more carefully, but that's getting cliched.;)
Affect hardware sales?
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 5
There are three kinds of people buying Apple computers. There are the OS interface junkies who love the "look and feel" of the interface. There are the media workers who buy Apple simply because it's still the industry standard in that field, in the same way that office workers invariably use MS Office. Finally, there are those who have been seduced by coloured, translucent plastic.
If OS X for x86 was available, I'd be willing to bet that a large proportion of the first two groups would immediately jump ship over to cheaper hardware. Mac OS hardware is nice (The G4 is a great chip) but being realistic, price is king.
The question, therefore, is whether the increased revenue in OS sales would compensate for the losses in hardware revenues. Personally, I'm not sure.
When it comes down to it, though, Apple won't listen to what we say. Pretty much every major decision will depend on what Steve thinks, and I don't think Steve likes the idea of open hardware - historically, he's shown himself to be very sensitive to physical appearance (the original mac classic, the iMac, the cube) and I suspect that he just doesn't want his lovely OS X running on ugly grey boxes.:)
(Cue announcement from Apple tomorrow about OS X for x86, just to prove me wrong...)
Well, sort of fair. The problem with uniform setups is that it favours players who have a setup similar to the "uniform" one at home.
For example, suppose all of the machines in your lab have mouse acceleration turned off. You've just given a big advantage to players who have it turned off at home, because trying to switch from accelerated to non-accelerated (or vice versa) in a FPS takes a while to adjust.
The next question is how far you let people "customise" the settings prior to playing. Do you let them redefine keys? Change the mouse sensitivity? Change the brightness on the monitor? Install their favourite aliases?
Slashdot Mirror
I can't honestly see the porn industry being keen to acquire lots of juvenile customers with stolen credit cards, either. They'll end up eating the chargeback, not to mention the fact that the PR would be pretty horrific.
It's not a question of whether or not they should supply it - it's whether they're ALLOWED to supply it. If this kind of filtering was applied to books, libraries would be banned from offering books by Chaucer, Henry Miller etc etc...
The obvious flaw in this analogy is that libraries (and other public bodies) are funded by the public, for the public, where slashdot is a privately run company.
If they want to use the mod system any way they like that's entirely their prerogative.
I would have thought the porn industry would be almost completely uninterested in trying to lure "young customers", as young customers very rarely have credit cards.
Sorry, could you expand on this?
Did you have Half Life installed at all before starting Steam up? If not, what sort of connection are you on?
45 seconds of "normal" broadband (around 50 kbytes/sec) comes out to about 2.25 Mb of content - Doom was larger than that, so forgive me if I'm a little sceptical that Half Life can be retrieved that rapidly.
If not, what exactly was being retrieved here - the CS 1.4 upgrade? If so, did you have CS 1.3 installed already, or was this a full download? In either case, 45 seconds would be impressive - the CS 1.3 full installer was around 100 Mb, and the CS 1.1 to 1.3 updater was about 35 Mb.
Cheers.
Tim.
ITV's premium channels also show ads, though. In addition, ITV digital shows non ITV pay content, such as Sky One, Sky Moviemax, Sky Premier. Since Sky is ITV Digital's number one competitor, some people have theorised that ITVD might not be terribly upset at Sky losing revenue due to pirate cards.
The other argument, of course, is that ITVD might be allowing people to get away with pirate viewing to build marketshare, at which point they'll start beefing up the encryption techniques to shut down pirates. Sadly moving to a wholly secure model would probably require changing the encryption method, which would obsolete all current decoders (iirc). This is unlikely to happen.
You're talking about the encryption on analog Canal+. This story is about the digital encryption (SECA) which you certainly can't beat by squinting.
:)
Although enough alcohol and eyestrain might induce pornographic hallucinations.
Quick summary for US readers - Canal+ (the french cable TV channel) uses SECA encryption, which is also used by ITV Digital (formerly OnDigital), the UK's terrestrial digital provider. Terrestrial digital is basically digital TV transmitted over the airwaves.
:)
The choice of SECA was considered unwise when OnDigital selected it, as SECA was already at that point known to be broken. Naturally, pirate cards started circulating shortly afterwards. The smart cards now sell for as little as 10 pounds (about 15 dollars) and card programmers can be obtained for about three times that allowing people to keep up to date.
At the moment, the UK has an arms race between ITV Digital and the pirates. ITV Digital will start broadcasting "ECMs" which exploit weaknesses in the pirate cards to cause them to crash (so they can't display TV). The pirates promptly fix their cards and release the new version, at which point it starts over again. There are several competing pirate codes around, and new versions are being released almost weekly.
There is a rumour that ITV Digital are less diligent than they need to be in tracking down and killing pirate cards, as these cards increase their marketshare against that of Sky (Murdoch's satellite TV company, the dominant "extra" TV company in the UK). This would be a tactic reminiscent of the way that pirate installations of Windows / DOS made those operating systems the standard in the past - whether there's any truth in the rumours is obviously uncertain, however.
Anyone interested in more information should consider the newsgroups uk.tech.digital-tv and uk.tech.digital-tv.crypt, although be warned that those groups are infested with pirates, script kiddies and the usual crop of 14 year old flamers!
PC Gamer can be undependable, true, but they're also prepared to slate games. When Sin came out, they roundly condemmned it due to the slow loading times, even though that was later patched.
More recently, the current issue gives a truly awful review to "Command and Conquer: Renegade" - and the review is followed by 5, full page adverts for that game. Clearly in this case purchasing large quantities of ads didn't help the review.
Well, unless it was even worse than they said... *shudder*
Trillian is a very nice client - we use it almost exclusively here at work, as it lets us keep in contact with people using multiple IM platforms, and also doesn't ram ads down our throats.
One interesting thing is that the new AIM blocks only seem to affect Trillian v0.7x - some of our users still using v0.6x are still working fine, whereas us early adopters are having to update rapidly.
Luckily, the newest (v0.721) build includes an auto update function, so keeping up to date is likely to be much easier in the future. Bear in mind that there's a limit to how much AOL can do to break the protocols, as they don't want to shut out all of their previous clients.
Actually, Apple has been selling unix based servers for years, well before OS X Server.
They used to sell some Apple-badged AIX boxes, which admittedly weren't really macs, but prior to that (back in the early nineties) they actually had their own version of unix, A/UX. It was truly bizarre, an Apple desktop (circa system 6 or so) with a terminal window in it to actually get at the system.
I used to admin a couple of these things, they were unusual, but they worked. The weirdest things were the manuals - all standard Apple typesetting, but detailing how to use "ls" and "cd"...
Pay per view already works quite nicely in some niche markets - specifically, where users don't have any other way of getting access to that specific information.
For any other kind of site, forget it. As long as any sites can still make money with a "free" service, who is going to use one that charges? The only way "penny per page" would become viable would be if everybody did it, and that's not going to happen.
Personally, I'd say the crapper was precisely where Jon Katz articles belong... :)
(Sorry, couldn't resist...)
I could be wrong, but the article strongly suggests that this ONLY BANS SPAM FOR FINANCIAL SERVICES... not all spam. It comments that a Europe-wide policy on spam in general will be debated next year.
I virtually never download mp3s, because the quality is too low for my tastes, and the few tracks I have heard (and liked) online I've ended up buying the CD so I can rip them myself.
If you really believe that the only people affected by this are "cash-poor students" then you haven't thought about the issues. There are plenty of legitimate reasons why this will piss people off, not just limited to my own case.
When I was a kid, I was reading things like Robert Westall, John Wyndham, Ursula K LeGuin, Diana Wynne Jones... maybe it's just nostalgia, but Harry Potter doesn't seem like it's even in the same league as those old classics.
There are children's authors who deserve a Hugo (Roald Dahl springs to mind, as well as some of those listed above) but I suspect this award was given due to popularity, and the cynical side of my nature suspects that at least part of that popularity is due to their safe, harmless nature.
The problem is that it would corrupt any real steganographically hidden messages in the images, hence rendering images a bit of an unreliable mechanism for storing hidden text... ;)
This is an interesting idea, but surely any good encryption produces an output which is indistinguishable from random noise. So, how can the algorithms mentioned in the article (which is interesting, but rather short on facts...) distinguish between the noise added by a steganographically embedded encrypted message and the noise caused by a slightly underspecced A to D converter?
I'm honestly curious... has anyone got any links to a more detailed report on this?
Actually, Apple will never sell a $499 PC purely because that would be too cheap. Jobs wants Apple to remain a "premium" brand, like Sony. Therefore, no budget models.
That's easily fixed. Just buy four of them and arrange them in a square... ;)
However, in this case, the RIAA sent him a letter strongly suggesting that they'd take legal action if he continued, whatever they're now trying to say. As far as I can see, that's like someone being pushed.
Besides, the headline ("YOU CAN'T RECORD MP3S UNDER WINXP! MICROSOFT ARE EVIL! EVIL, I TELL YOU!") was certainly misleading. If slashdot aren't careful, they'll get a reputation for bias. :)
All an mp3 ripper does is convert one set of data (uncompressed audio) to another kind of data (compressed audio). I can't see how they can detect this.
The answer is that Microsoft are saying that they'll limit the quality of recordings made using the built in software, not those made on Windows XP. Use something else to encode / your mp3s, and you're fine.
I'd mention the fact that this story could have been written more carefully, but that's getting cliched. ;)
If OS X for x86 was available, I'd be willing to bet that a large proportion of the first two groups would immediately jump ship over to cheaper hardware. Mac OS hardware is nice (The G4 is a great chip) but being realistic, price is king.
The question, therefore, is whether the increased revenue in OS sales would compensate for the losses in hardware revenues. Personally, I'm not sure.
When it comes down to it, though, Apple won't listen to what we say. Pretty much every major decision will depend on what Steve thinks, and I don't think Steve likes the idea of open hardware - historically, he's shown himself to be very sensitive to physical appearance (the original mac classic, the iMac, the cube) and I suspect that he just doesn't want his lovely OS X running on ugly grey boxes. :)
(Cue announcement from Apple tomorrow about OS X for x86, just to prove me wrong...)
For example, suppose all of the machines in your lab have mouse acceleration turned off. You've just given a big advantage to players who have it turned off at home, because trying to switch from accelerated to non-accelerated (or vice versa) in a FPS takes a while to adjust.
The next question is how far you let people "customise" the settings prior to playing. Do you let them redefine keys? Change the mouse sensitivity? Change the brightness on the monitor? Install their favourite aliases?
Cheers,
Contact.