So if I illegally download 10,000 songs, and only get caught on one, I should only be punished with a fee of $3.00 for my wanton violation of US copyright law?
The sad thing is I know SOMEONE will answer with "Yes", because they have no interest in what the law demands, they simply dont like copyright.
Calling copyright stealing IMPLIES a right to profit where none exists.
They took a product and gained the full benefits of a sale, without payment to or permission from owner. Forcing them to pay for a license seems like a good start to "making things right".
Youre also ignoring that each instance of infringement / theft / whatever you want to call it lowers the actual value of the product by making further infringement more desirable and accessible.
But in the digital world, a sale does not mean that the original is lost; it simply transfers a copy from owner to buyer. Infringement is a very good analogue to theft in the physical world: the product was received and in all ways the "theft" resembled a sale except that payment was not rendered and the vendor gave no consent.
I dont see why it is unreasonable to charge for the license, as the offender has been using a license without paying for it, and this DOES cause the value of said software to decrease.
You are right that it is not technically, legally, theft; but most arguments around that line really boil down to "I dont think infringement should be punished because I am anti-copyright". I wont accuse you of that, but its one of the reasons theres so much argument over this.
Its semantics. The point of most of the arguments like the one youre making seem to be "it doesnt hurt the seller", which is incorrect. When you take software you didnt pay for, you lower its value-- why should your friend buy Adobe Photoshop 13 when he knows you got it for free?
One only has to consider the unwillingness of many people to pay $0.99 for a song that they really want because of the ease of just taking it to see how such an effect works.
Things arent as simple as you make them. In a world with infringement and piracy, the existence of limewire and counterfeit copies reduces the value of a piece of software, as does each instance pirated software. Im not sure how youd quantify something like that, though.
Ducks, "great software" from Microsoft, google sucks, etc
If you cant recognize that Microsoft has made SOME great products, then youre either ignorant or a fanboy, and probably both. Examples: Exchange, Outlook, Excel, Visio (FINALLY there is a worthy competitor in Gliffy), Win7 (Hows gnome3 / Unity treating you?), etc.
Im just not sold on the whole Phone 7. Minimal isnt something MS does well; most of their products include the kitchen sink.
And given how many exploits are propgated by ads and server hacks of well trusted sites (facebook, drudge, etc, have all been sources of ad-viruses), it gives a false sense of security. Ive had many a user convinced that they could never get a virus because of the sites they visited; they got one, and browser history showed facebook, and I had to explain how virus distribution works to them.
Best way to set your users free from having to think about such things: uninstall Java JRE, uninstall Acrobat reader (and install Foxit), update flash, get them using Chrome. Their browser will autoupdate, and there wont be any plugin 0-days to exploit.
You have to give some credit to the cleverness of Cisco / Linksys. After the debacle of the WRT54G being the most wildly popular router ever and the basis for DD-WRT (which got tons of people buying those routers), they realized their mistakes of making a great router OS based on proven work. They vowed that NEVER AGAIN would a router be so popular that people would give two craps about the OS on it.
Hence the lowering of the RAM and flash on subsequent WRT54G generations. But it didnt work! People kept buying them, and using DD-WRT! This was unacceptable, and so they moved to a new OS written in India that NOONE could possibly love (as its interface didnt even work right in IE), and changed to the WRT54G2.
Since then, phenomenal progress has been made in curbing enthusiasm for Linksys products. There are still those who care about their products, but Cisco Indian engineers are working feverishly to tidy up even those loose ends.
Sorry for double reply: to answer your question, imagine the situation where you are installing an Explorer extension which loads a DLL or some such. Explorer UAC prompt goes off, you authorize it. Later, you get a nasty virus that tries to alter the Explorer process, and then from that process initiate some file changes. The wrong thing to do would be for UAC to see explorer.exe, technically unmodified on disk, requesting changes and being pre-authorized. The right thing to do, as with sudo / su, is to require authorization for each change that requires administrative privileges.
They do this with GPOs. You can set paths where prorgam execution is permitted / denied (denied on desktop and downloads, allowed in %programfiles%), and can even use hash-thumbprints to identify whitelisted apps.
Ive never used the thumbprint feature, but I have seen a sneaky virus use it.
UAC is not useless at all. Without UAC, there are many types of installer that simply would not work on Windows 7 due to missing permissions; UAC allows those programs, instead of silently failing, to request permissions to do so.
And turning off UAC basically says "yes, please abandon the principle of least privilege!"
I have seen a number of computers running 7 that Ive seen get viruses, but the user did not have the admin password for the UAC prompt that appeared. This meant that the virus couldnt do jack, and was removed in about 3 minutes with a autorun cleanup tool like Autoruns. UAC is like the old runas, but far far more capable, compatible, and useful.
Im also of the opinion that the 1040 EZ Tax form needs to be gotten rid of, and that companies like HR Block need to disappear. If youre too stupid to understand the intracacies of the tax system, why, you have no business making money in the US.
And I think going to a doctor is practically cheating. If you cant suture your own injuries, you really have no room to complain when you get an injury at all.
Life sure is good for those of us who are experts in every field.
* WiFi is wireless. Most hackers are more apt to hack from a coffee shop across the street with a nice 1-Watt WiFi radio/9+db antenna than try to gain physical access. You have to physically intrude into the network in order to get ethernet access
The problem is, youre looking at the best case scenarios for each, and I would agree-- on a hardened network with a managed switch and security policies in place, a wired solution can be more secure. But in an average scenario, wired setups are horribly vulnerable to ARP sniffing, DHCP spoofing, inserting a tap between wall jack and workstation, etc. No authentication is needed for ANY of those-- your attacker doesnt even need authorization, just physical access, which is terribly easy in 90% of offices and homes.
On the other hand, WPA2 exposes itself to a much wider audience, but demands authorization, and has proven security. Good luck cracking WPA2-AES 16 character passwords with aircrack-ng, its gonna be a while.
WPA2-PSK has absolutely no affect on ARP spoofing, poisoning, or other methods of running man-in-the-middle attacks.
It does in the sense that anyone and any device that wants to perform those attacks must have the key.
WPA2-PSK uses a shared key. It is not 802.1x....all communications in the clear...
I was under the mistaken impression that WPA2 PSK performed a secure session key exchange, which is apparently not the case; I should have not specified PSK in particular. The fact remains, WPA2 has more built-in security than a bog-standard Cat5 connection, which is incredibly trivial to tap.
Also, I'd like to point out that using WPA2-PSK does NOT secure your HTTP connections like HTTPS -- they are still subject to eavesdropping if someone is within your internal network, or, if they are at your ISP, or any intermediary network in between
It protects it from node to AP, whereas ethernet provides no such security. Imagine if you will, two networks-- one, all hops are cat5 (and no ipsec), and the other, all hops are WPA2 AES w/ strong password (mixed alphanumeric 30 characters).
Which would you say is more susceptible to an MITM attack? The one with no authentication or encryption built into the physical layer, or the one with?
The 'clever people believed it' argument, is inherantly rubbish. Someone can be brilliant and still be wrong in other matters. Experts are not always right, and are branded experts by other people, who can be wrong themselves.
Arguments from Authority are as strong as the authorities they cite. Lewis was a scholar of medieval literature and a professor at Oxford; Dawkins among other things, studies animal (and human) behavior, and is a fellow at Oxford. Both, I think, are more qualified to make statements on what behavior is inherent / natural to humans than either you or I.
Since neither of us has the resources to do the research ourselves (unless you happen to be an anthropologist by profession), it makes sense to fall back on their work. I found this Wikipedia article which lists a plethora of thinkers on this subject; none seem to espouse the position that religion is taught. For example, Freud described religion as "instinctual", surmising that it comes from childhood neurosis or repressions (not that it is taught). Others describe it as a coping mechanism that people come to ourselves. One suggests that it is a result of some evolutionary left-over.
You can cry "appeal to authority", but then I would ask to see your credentials, and remind you of the "confidence" principle I discussed in our other thread-- that all these men agree with all their expertise, despite their fundamental disagreements elsewhere, lends a great deal of credibility to their claims; and that it meshes with the reality I see (knowing friends who were raised in atheistic homes, and came to a realization of God independently in their 20s) reinforces it all the more.
As to your definition of Atheism, No, this is a pure misconception. The very source you quote goes on to say 'Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist.'
Denying X is the same as the affirmation of "not X". In a chain of reasoning, if you arrive at "X must be false", it is equivocal to "Not X is true".
Another person. Come on, if you can't see Religion's potential as a tool for control and keeping order, then you are short-sighted.
It has been used that way, as has secularism. Curiously enough in China they are currently suppressing religions-- all of them-- and pushing raw humanist secularism to control their population. Neither fact is really all that relevant.
People who were already adults would never accept such a belief if there were no inclination. You indicate that it is taught at birth, but that it is used as a control mechanism, which leaves the question of who got the parents to go along with it to begin with, if they had no ingrained inclination to religion and the supernatural.
But really, this isnt my place to argue: People from Dawkins to Lewis would disagree with you; and would say that man does indeed have a predisposition to the supernatural (Dawkins words, actually). I could, if I took the time, pull up a large list of experts who disagree. There is nothing illogical, per say, about you disagreeing, but I personally will err on the side that has the fanatical atheist agreeing with the believer, each experts in their own field.
Because Atheism isn't believing anything - it's saying "I don't know".
Atheism is a belief that there is no God, or hairsplittingly near enough. Let us not argue semantics, any statement that indicates that Christianity is wrong is a statement of belief in its own right-- you believe in the falsity of another proposition.
WPA2-PSK is, I would argue, more secure than bog-standard wired ethernet. Wired ethernet is trivial to tap with a laptop with a USB-ethernet port bridged to its internal NIC. Its also possible to tap by simply capturing the EM emissions from the line. ARP poisoning could also trivially reveal plaintext passwords, and what sites you visit.
With properly set up wifi, on the other hand, every communication is encrypted, HTTPS or not. Im not sure as Ive never tried, but I do not believe that you can arp-poison a wifi connection that has been secured with WPA2.
Of course you can throw in IPsec, but you can do that regardless of the physical layer involved.
Slashdot Mirror
why not say 3x at least and at most.
So if I illegally download 10,000 songs, and only get caught on one, I should only be punished with a fee of $3.00 for my wanton violation of US copyright law?
The sad thing is I know SOMEONE will answer with "Yes", because they have no interest in what the law demands, they simply dont like copyright.
Calling copyright stealing IMPLIES a right to profit where none exists.
They took a product and gained the full benefits of a sale, without payment to or permission from owner. Forcing them to pay for a license seems like a good start to "making things right".
Youre also ignoring that each instance of infringement / theft / whatever you want to call it lowers the actual value of the product by making further infringement more desirable and accessible.
But in the digital world, a sale does not mean that the original is lost; it simply transfers a copy from owner to buyer. Infringement is a very good analogue to theft in the physical world: the product was received and in all ways the "theft" resembled a sale except that payment was not rendered and the vendor gave no consent.
I dont see why it is unreasonable to charge for the license, as the offender has been using a license without paying for it, and this DOES cause the value of said software to decrease.
You are right that it is not technically, legally, theft; but most arguments around that line really boil down to "I dont think infringement should be punished because I am anti-copyright". I wont accuse you of that, but its one of the reasons theres so much argument over this.
Its semantics. The point of most of the arguments like the one youre making seem to be "it doesnt hurt the seller", which is incorrect. When you take software you didnt pay for, you lower its value-- why should your friend buy Adobe Photoshop 13 when he knows you got it for free?
One only has to consider the unwillingness of many people to pay $0.99 for a song that they really want because of the ease of just taking it to see how such an effect works.
Things arent as simple as you make them. In a world with infringement and piracy, the existence of limewire and counterfeit copies reduces the value of a piece of software, as does each instance pirated software. Im not sure how youd quantify something like that, though.
Ducks, "great software" from Microsoft, google sucks, etc
If you cant recognize that Microsoft has made SOME great products, then youre either ignorant or a fanboy, and probably both. Examples: Exchange, Outlook, Excel, Visio (FINALLY there is a worthy competitor in Gliffy), Win7 (Hows gnome3 / Unity treating you?), etc.
Im just not sold on the whole Phone 7. Minimal isnt something MS does well; most of their products include the kitchen sink.
Thats not what the term means, but if you want to just make up definitions, thats fine I guess.
what about command options passed to a cmd.exe shell?
What you consider to be a "minor reduction in security" would be the one and only hole exploiters would care about to bypass it.
Potential whoosh detected....
And given how many exploits are propgated by ads and server hacks of well trusted sites (facebook, drudge, etc, have all been sources of ad-viruses), it gives a false sense of security. Ive had many a user convinced that they could never get a virus because of the sites they visited; they got one, and browser history showed facebook, and I had to explain how virus distribution works to them.
Best way to set your users free from having to think about such things: uninstall Java JRE, uninstall Acrobat reader (and install Foxit), update flash, get them using Chrome. Their browser will autoupdate, and there wont be any plugin 0-days to exploit.
As near as I can tell, the word cult has come to mean "an ideology I do not like".
Unfortunately, the word has a specific meaning, and its not that, nor is it "religion".
That DMCA that slashdot hates so much already has a safe harbor provision.
You have to give some credit to the cleverness of Cisco / Linksys. After the debacle of the WRT54G being the most wildly popular router ever and the basis for DD-WRT (which got tons of people buying those routers), they realized their mistakes of making a great router OS based on proven work. They vowed that NEVER AGAIN would a router be so popular that people would give two craps about the OS on it.
Hence the lowering of the RAM and flash on subsequent WRT54G generations. But it didnt work! People kept buying them, and using DD-WRT! This was unacceptable, and so they moved to a new OS written in India that NOONE could possibly love (as its interface didnt even work right in IE), and changed to the WRT54G2.
Since then, phenomenal progress has been made in curbing enthusiasm for Linksys products. There are still those who care about their products, but Cisco Indian engineers are working feverishly to tidy up even those loose ends.
Sorry for double reply: to answer your question, imagine the situation where you are installing an Explorer extension which loads a DLL or some such. Explorer UAC prompt goes off, you authorize it. Later, you get a nasty virus that tries to alter the Explorer process, and then from that process initiate some file changes. The wrong thing to do would be for UAC to see explorer.exe, technically unmodified on disk, requesting changes and being pre-authorized. The right thing to do, as with sudo / su, is to require authorization for each change that requires administrative privileges.
They do this with GPOs. You can set paths where prorgam execution is permitted / denied (denied on desktop and downloads, allowed in %programfiles%), and can even use hash-thumbprints to identify whitelisted apps.
Ive never used the thumbprint feature, but I have seen a sneaky virus use it.
UAC is not useless at all. Without UAC, there are many types of installer that simply would not work on Windows 7 due to missing permissions; UAC allows those programs, instead of silently failing, to request permissions to do so.
And turning off UAC basically says "yes, please abandon the principle of least privilege!"
I have seen a number of computers running 7 that Ive seen get viruses, but the user did not have the admin password for the UAC prompt that appeared. This meant that the virus couldnt do jack, and was removed in about 3 minutes with a autorun cleanup tool like Autoruns. UAC is like the old runas, but far far more capable, compatible, and useful.
I agree!
Im also of the opinion that the 1040 EZ Tax form needs to be gotten rid of, and that companies like HR Block need to disappear. If youre too stupid to understand the intracacies of the tax system, why, you have no business making money in the US.
And I think going to a doctor is practically cheating. If you cant suture your own injuries, you really have no room to complain when you get an injury at all.
Life sure is good for those of us who are experts in every field.
* WiFi is wireless. Most hackers are more apt to hack from a coffee shop across the street with a nice 1-Watt WiFi radio/9+db antenna than try to gain physical access. You have to physically intrude into the network in order to get ethernet access
The problem is, youre looking at the best case scenarios for each, and I would agree-- on a hardened network with a managed switch and security policies in place, a wired solution can be more secure. But in an average scenario, wired setups are horribly vulnerable to ARP sniffing, DHCP spoofing, inserting a tap between wall jack and workstation, etc. No authentication is needed for ANY of those-- your attacker doesnt even need authorization, just physical access, which is terribly easy in 90% of offices and homes.
On the other hand, WPA2 exposes itself to a much wider audience, but demands authorization, and has proven security. Good luck cracking WPA2-AES 16 character passwords with aircrack-ng, its gonna be a while.
WPA2-PSK has absolutely no affect on ARP spoofing, poisoning, or other methods of running man-in-the-middle attacks.
It does in the sense that anyone and any device that wants to perform those attacks must have the key.
WPA2-PSK uses a shared key. It is not 802.1x....all communications in the clear...
I was under the mistaken impression that WPA2 PSK performed a secure session key exchange, which is apparently not the case; I should have not specified PSK in particular. The fact remains, WPA2 has more built-in security than a bog-standard Cat5 connection, which is incredibly trivial to tap.
Also, I'd like to point out that using WPA2-PSK does NOT secure your HTTP connections like HTTPS -- they are still subject to eavesdropping if someone is within your internal network, or, if they are at your ISP, or any intermediary network in between
It protects it from node to AP, whereas ethernet provides no such security. Imagine if you will, two networks-- one, all hops are cat5 (and no ipsec), and the other, all hops are WPA2 AES w/ strong password (mixed alphanumeric 30 characters).
Which would you say is more susceptible to an MITM attack? The one with no authentication or encryption built into the physical layer, or the one with?
You can buy TV dinners and easy food like eggs, sweets, coke, etc. Theyre all cheap and a terrible diet to live on.
Sleep, dietary fiber, lots of water, etc all can help with weight loss.
1996 Pentiums didnt run at 1ghz. And theyre stacking this up against Core2s, which are hardly Pentium class.
The 'clever people believed it' argument, is inherantly rubbish. Someone can be brilliant and still be wrong in other matters. Experts are not always right, and are branded experts by other people, who can be wrong themselves.
Arguments from Authority are as strong as the authorities they cite. Lewis was a scholar of medieval literature and a professor at Oxford; Dawkins among other things, studies animal (and human) behavior, and is a fellow at Oxford. Both, I think, are more qualified to make statements on what behavior is inherent / natural to humans than either you or I.
Since neither of us has the resources to do the research ourselves (unless you happen to be an anthropologist by profession), it makes sense to fall back on their work. I found this Wikipedia article which lists a plethora of thinkers on this subject; none seem to espouse the position that religion is taught. For example, Freud described religion as "instinctual", surmising that it comes from childhood neurosis or repressions (not that it is taught). Others describe it as a coping mechanism that people come to ourselves. One suggests that it is a result of some evolutionary left-over.
You can cry "appeal to authority", but then I would ask to see your credentials, and remind you of the "confidence" principle I discussed in our other thread-- that all these men agree with all their expertise, despite their fundamental disagreements elsewhere, lends a great deal of credibility to their claims; and that it meshes with the reality I see (knowing friends who were raised in atheistic homes, and came to a realization of God independently in their 20s) reinforces it all the more.
As to your definition of Atheism, No, this is a pure misconception. The very source you quote goes on to say 'Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist.'
Denying X is the same as the affirmation of "not X". In a chain of reasoning, if you arrive at "X must be false", it is equivocal to "Not X is true".
My mistake-- those numbers are at full load, not idle. That certainly doesnt help intel at all.
Another person. Come on, if you can't see Religion's potential as a tool for control and keeping order, then you are short-sighted.
It has been used that way, as has secularism. Curiously enough in China they are currently suppressing religions-- all of them-- and pushing raw humanist secularism to control their population. Neither fact is really all that relevant.
People who were already adults would never accept such a belief if there were no inclination. You indicate that it is taught at birth, but that it is used as a control mechanism, which leaves the question of who got the parents to go along with it to begin with, if they had no ingrained inclination to religion and the supernatural.
But really, this isnt my place to argue: People from Dawkins to Lewis would disagree with you; and would say that man does indeed have a predisposition to the supernatural (Dawkins words, actually). I could, if I took the time, pull up a large list of experts who disagree. There is nothing illogical, per say, about you disagreeing, but I personally will err on the side that has the fanatical atheist agreeing with the believer, each experts in their own field.
Because Atheism isn't believing anything - it's saying "I don't know".
Atheism is a belief that there is no God, or hairsplittingly near enough. Let us not argue semantics, any statement that indicates that Christianity is wrong is a statement of belief in its own right-- you believe in the falsity of another proposition.
Wikipedia makes this simple:
In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.
The term our society uses for the "i dont know" position is "agnosticism", presumably from the greek gnosis, meaning "without knowledge".
WPA2-PSK is, I would argue, more secure than bog-standard wired ethernet. Wired ethernet is trivial to tap with a laptop with a USB-ethernet port bridged to its internal NIC. Its also possible to tap by simply capturing the EM emissions from the line. ARP poisoning could also trivially reveal plaintext passwords, and what sites you visit.
With properly set up wifi, on the other hand, every communication is encrypted, HTTPS or not. Im not sure as Ive never tried, but I do not believe that you can arp-poison a wifi connection that has been secured with WPA2.
Of course you can throw in IPsec, but you can do that regardless of the physical layer involved.