The virus affects Outlook, specifically a machine that has Windows Scripting Host that would enable the script to run. Of course, any platform that doesn't have the ability to run the script is affected.
I don't understand all the gloating on the part of the Linux community though. I understand that this is only affecting users of Microsoft products, specifically Outlook, but so what?
Outlook is a decent program for e-mailing. That Microsoft decided to make it more "feature-rich" so that it can let you view interactive HTML e-mail messages has its good points and bad points. Maybe some people (notably non-technical people who like looking at pretty pictures, which is a lot of e-mail users these days) want that kind of functionality.
And technically, it would still do some damage if it was another e-mail client on a machine that is capable of executing a VBScript file. Most e-mail programs will allow you to double-click to open the script file. The culprit here is the WSH. Yes, it's Microsoft's fault that it happened, but not for lack of trying to bring a more feature-rich product to consumers.
You're not going to tell me that if Linux offered similar functionalities of Outlook and WSH, that there wouldn't be a problem? You could always program around it at fix it, but then again, so could Microsoft, if they'd just be a little bit more careful, things like this wouldn't happen.
I liked the article, pretty clear and balanced. It made me think, though, about a couple of things.
Open Source is good for both developers and users alike. It's good for developers when they need to write programs or applications and might need to know how certain things work, or if they need to change or extend certain things in the open source software. It's good for users because of all the common reasons that we hear about all the time, about how it is secure because a backdoor would be spotted and how bugs can be spotted easily because the source is available.
But the story also talked about how someone in IT decided to use open source software, sometimes without knowledge of their supervisors and the company at large, to provide a solution. While it sounds like heroics, it also trigger thoughts of potential problems.
Imagine if one of these guys was a programmer who was able to put in a backdoor in the software source that was consequently compiled and put into production. Granted, someone with that kind of access would have other ways of putting in backdoors, not just in programs. But I think that to some extent this may be an issue. Companies may buy software from closed source vendors secure in the knowledge that at least the software doesn't have backdoors in it that was put in by someone who may have specific interest in doing so to break the company's security.
Put another way, if there's a security problem like a backdoor, it's better that it's a disinterested third-party than an employee who may or may not remain within the company, and many times, may even end up at a rival company. Besides, with a backdoor, who's liable? If it's closed source, it's obvious. With open source, there wouldn't be backdoors, but depending on the company's policy, there may be backdoors put in that they wouldn't know about, sometimes they wouldn't even know who might have put it in.
Granted, the potential of such a scenario is small if the company's IT policies are consistent and clear and actions well-documented. But, I still think that such things can and may have happened, and it's due to the availability of source.
So all I'm saying is, the company must decide clearly what they are going to do and strictly enforce it. If better solutions are available, they should be clear about all the possibilities. Politics, of course, will just throw it off completely. But IT professionals 'sneaking' open-source into their company just doesn't jive too well with me, even if the open source philosophy produces superior software.
Re:It's far too early for this
on
Quantum Project
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· Score: 2
I don't think it's way before it's time. Mostly, I think that people need to start poking at this kind of stuff before it IS time to do this. Not that it will succeed, but will give us a good idea of what kind of problems we may anticipate and what expectations we may have when we finally have the broadband access available down the road (in a few years). As it is, I'm sure many people will be able to pay for and download the file.
The pricing is pretty good, though a bit on the high end, I think. And who better to do this kind of project than someone who doesn't have anything to prove because he's already had a great career, like John Cleese?
The more significant thing, as always, though, is that they are able to offer it directly to us, cutting the middle-man. Why can't Metallica understand this?
If artists (including movie producers and directors) want to sell their work, they can do it without having to go through a giant corporation that does production, promotion and marketing, manufacturing and reproduction, and distribution, all at the same time. They should be able to select from smaller companies that do only one thing each. This way, they can cut down on their costs, have more control over their works, and be able to offer their works at a lower price for the consumers, and therefore, possibly, build a larger fan-base.
I know that mp3.com would like to convince otherwise, but essentially, it's a personalized jukebox version of a radio. It plays music, though now individualized, from a centralized source. I think that their basic premise was flawed, that somehow because a person owned a CD, then the music on that CD should then be available to that person whereever. It's definitely a copyright problem. If they just didn't pretend that it isn't a personalized radio/jukebox, got the artists' permissions, get/use advertising to pay the artists per play, then I don't think they would have had this problem.
Also, since I never used their service, I couldn't find out whether the MP3s that they were sending out were good quality (near CD) or broadcast quality (like radio)? I'd think somewhere in-between might be a good compromise - not allowing the best quality to be freely downloadable and stored. True fans/audiophiles would go and buy the CDs (I know, in order to get the music, you have to have already owned the CD, but in my proposition, they wouldn't have to).
I think that something like what they were providing would have been a very valuable service that even the recording industry would have liked. I just think their approach was wrong.
Thank you for pointing it out. It makes sense, of course, what you said. It is entrapment. But I guess what I was thinking (though I wasn't clear to myself on the thought of using the usage pattern as evidence) was that the government can use this as a kind of 'perimeter' alert?
Meaning, if they start keeping track of patterns of a large number of users who visit their sites, they may be tipped off on specific persons' activities and investigate further. Of course, this is likely to be illegal as well, as it will violate some kind privacy law. They would need to show a reason to track the usage in the first place, rather than using the tracked usage pattern data as the reason to start investigating.
So definitely, I agree that while the government could not create and opportunity and induce people to commit crimes, I think they may (though I don't necessarily say they should) use the honeypot tactic just to get some lists of people to watch, perhaps.
But the people working at the PTO are not us, nor are they Linux users (even if some are, you can't take it for granted) whether they use debian or any distro that uses RPM. Maybe as far as the PTO is concerned, it IS novel.
The PTO employs a bunch of low paid (relatively speaking) workers to do the work, as compared to the wealthy patent attorneys who would know better and get paid tons more money because they do know better.
The best people to work at the PTO would be the patent attorneys in conjunction with specialists. But these people can get paid more elsewhere, why would they work there?
I remember a slashdot article awhile back about creating honeypots for script kiddies to hack so that their methods can be learned and used in the future to bolster the security arsenal. I wonder how many site are on the web right now that does the exact same thing, but instead of for hacking or script kiddies, for everything else?
I know there have been FBI sting operations for piracy and stuff like that, but being that the Internet is so uncontrollable, and we know the proliferation of illegal activities such as MP3 swapping, software piracy and porn is so rampant, I'd think that a large part of law enforcement's plans are to setup such honeypots to just keep track of demographic information on individuals who are prone to participate in certain kinds of illicit activities. I could imagine that the government could run some of the most successful porn sites, etc. to keep tabs on would be offenders.
In fact, Napster can be one such honeypot, and by the look of the thing with Metallica, has been used as such to some degree.
Isn't this something we need to be concerned with?
Look, I'm very simple-minded, I'll admit that right now. The way I see this is as follows:
1. Corporations are bottom-line oriented. They want to make money. That means that they will cut cost where they can, make as much money as they can, at the same time pushing the legal envelope as far as they can. The only thing that prevents them from way overcharging is the free-market, unless there's a monopoly or a cartel of some sort.
2. Corporations that control the media are powerful because they are the gatekeepers of information and popular culture. They influence how people think, act, and buy. Until the advent of the Internet, they had very dominant control over the media distribution channels. Media, of course, being things like TV, radio, publishing, CDs, etc. They come between advertisers who want to sell products and/or services to make money and the rest of us. They also have control over editorial content and therefore filter and dictate what we see, hear, and read.
3. AOL Time-Warner is obviously in the category of a media company. When media companies start acting on each other funny things happen. They are competing against each other, but have to follow some fairness rules that the government has set up.
4. What worries me most is that giant megacongloerates that owns several different kinds of media channels that is so powerful that it can afford to coerce its clients (the advertisers, or other media companies) to follow its own set of rules. It can be more powerful than the government because it controls what information goes out to the audience/consumers, it creates the direction for popular culture. In effect, it charges companies to sell their ideas to us, it controls what we see, hear and read, it tells us what we should spend our money on, and we should be glad to pay them for telling us to do this. It even tells us how to think and what to laugh, cry and get mad at.
Corporatism of old is different from corporatism of new, simply because the communication channels have well extended their reach into every household. Media corporatism is a dangerous force to be reckon with, I'd imagine. Now that the Internet and the massive communication infrastructure has gotten up to a good start, I think we as consumers need to be very wary of the media corporatism that will rise.
Good thing we always have subversive elements in the society that prevent use from becoming mindless zombies following the whims of media conglomerates.
This is either a mistake or off topic - but the thing about the gelatins being non-vegetarians is true - but what I've read about it was that it's collagen that's present in the skin of animals that is made into gelatin. The way I heard it, it was the skin (not the outer hide, but the parts underneath that) that is boiled, reduced and somehow processed into powdered form. To get an idea of what I'm talking about, you could get a pork shoulder and boil it for a long time, then letting the liquid cool off, it will set into geletin.
The good thing is that there are many other vegetarian sources for gelatin, such as agar agar.
The cameras and DVD and MP3 transmitters are their "hotter" technologies. They also have a couple of other items, such as motion sensors and light switches and electrical outlet stuff that can be controlled remotely. It'd be great for mobility limited handicapped people. Here's a link you can take a look at.
FYI, I thought the same thing you did, until I checked out the site a little more. Pretty cool stuff that they do.
I've noticed that Jon Katz does this in the past. I forget which story it was that I first noticed this. He actually lifts entire quotes from other sources without ever citing them. I found it a little disturbing at first, but then thought that since it's not real journalism anyway, he'll probably get away with it (not that it's right even if it's not real journalism). Some guidelines for citations might be in order for Jon.
I think Jon needs to be more concise also. Is he getting paid by the word or something?
I nominate Jon Katz to go deliver his rant to Metallica.
Both Napster users and Metallica are guilty. Napster users for blatant piracy of copyrighted material, and Metallica for being so self-righteously reactive (not necessarily a bad thing). I think that Metallica could have handled this a little bit better, and some of the things said and done is just not well thought out.
The Internet, MP3, Napster - these are things that grew out of people's desires. Does that say that we are a society of criminals? No. Maybe people are just tired of paying so much to all the middle-layer entities taking such big cuts of the money that people were willing to pay their favorite artists, not the record labels and/or distributors and managers and agents and such.
Maybe people are tired of large corporate entities controlling what they can see/hear/consume and how much they are getting charged for it.
Metallica and artists have to remember, it's not about them, it's about us, the people, the fans. Without us, they are absolutely nothing. The problem I have with Lars/Metallica is simply that they have gotten too full of themselves. I believe that they should get paid for their work, after all, work is work and you should get paid for it. But maybe they should watch and listen a little more. If lots of their fans are downloading their music instead of buying their CDs, they should ask themselves, why are they doing that? Do the fans think that our music is not worth shelling out $15-$18/CD? Are our fans a bunch of thiefs? Maybe something else can be done to work with the fans rather against the fans?
No matter what Metallica says, the Napster users who download their music are most likely fans of their music. To take the actions they have taken is definitely fighting against their own fans. I'm not saying what the Napster users are doing is right, I'm just saying it's certainly within Metallica's power to overlook such things and possibly work out a solution that would be more ideal.
This whole fiasco just says to me that Metallica (and Lars specifically) is greedy and egocentric, and not that they are fighting for what's due them.
According to the article, they hired the firm to track data for Napster and got the info just like that over one weekend. I remember that someone made the Napster protocol available online as well. So most likely, they used that protocol information to get the Napster users list?
Does anybody else think that maybe Napster should have built in some kind of encryption or scrambling, so that something like this can't happen so easily?
I would just stop using Napster and go with something less centralized and a little more secure.
Do you mean that corporate entities, because they don't act with a single consciousness of an individual, are more analogous to automata? Meaning, as a collective, because it is not acting out one person's will, it cannot make conscious decisions about moral and ethical issues? (I guess I'm not quite sure I understand).
But I think you bring up a good point - corporations are created for the best interest of itself. And it is composed of shareholders who have vested interest. One of the main features of the corporation is limited individual liabilities, right? So the individuals are not responsible for the liabilities of the corporation, and by the same token, the individuals are not responsible for the "evils" that the company does in pursuit of increasing the bottom line, right? Because they are not only not responsible for the company's liabilities, they are also not responsible for the companies moral and/or ethical conducts.
But someone must be the target in the company, and it's usually the CEO of the company (e.g. Bill Gates, Microsoft). Perhaps we will villanize the CEO as the figurehead representative of the company's moral conscience. But as the CEO, he is obligated to put the bottom line on top, it is his responsibility to the shareholders. So who's evil, if anybody is to be called evil at all?
Yes, the meaning is quite different in the Bible version. I wonder how well that verse survived after all the translations throughout history though. I wonder what it originally said.
I agree more with the Bible version though. But money is like the company - amoral. It is neither evil nor good. It is a tool, a medium, an energy, if you will. And it could be used for good or evil - and that also largely depends on how you define such concepts.
But with the Bible version of the quote, you'll have to agree that companies ARE evil - because their reason for being is the bottom-line - meaning, the corporation, though emotionless and amoral, by its very agenda for existence, is evil because it "loves" money. This kind of throws off the original post about companies not being evil, doesn't it?
Right, companies are amoral. They care only about the bottom line (i.e. making money), so unless you believe in the adage that "money is the root of all evil", companies are not inherently evil.
More and more companies will open source their products, and the Open Source community can point to it as a sign of victory. But I'm not sure that it would be because of the reason that the Open Source community wants, or maybe I'm just being naive, a very good possibility.
The Open Source movement is very much like the Patent system in some ways. It begins as a great idea and then the companies start poking at it, using it, "enhancing" it, then you end up with something you are not quite sure about.
Companies may now be embracing Open Source not because it is superior philosophically or technically, but it's just better PR and good business. So in the end, it's always about the bottom line of the company. It's not about the users or innovators. It's about companies' bottom lines. And if it happens to be better for users and be good business as well, great!
So what I'm getting at is, what is the spirit of Open Source anyway? Is it to grow to a point where the companies can use it as a selling point to improve their bottom line? Or is it some other ideal? Or more likely, maybe it's somewhere in between?
Well, no. Like I said, the actual cost of producing and promoting the CD is not high enough to justify the cost - and that's why I believe that a lot of that money is going towards "lining the pockets of a few very rich people - not necessarily the artists"
A lot of the money that consumers spend are buying into the image that the music industry "create" of the actual artists anyway. The artists are often not like what the record labels promote them to be anyway. Then there's also a matter of production, of artists who create and artists who perform, and artists who do both.
Napster and Gnutella are different in that Napster controls the database, right? With Gnutella, anybody can run a server, right?
My take on this is that at a subconscious level, Napster wants to become a distribution channel for music. The music industry is struggling against this, of course, but they may actually embrace Napster if Napster agrees to become a legitimate distribution channel. After all, Napster has central control over the database. Gnutella, then, is vastly more dangerous because it's not a an entity and centralized database that can be controlled.
I don't think that Napster becoming a distribution channel would actually work, but it would seem that with a large user base, they have significant power. What the music industry should really worry about is something like Gnutella, if they are really concerned about piracy.
No, no, no. That's precisely my point. My point is that the artists may not know of an alternative or is not willing to forego the service the the music labels provide. The only way they know of to make more money is to go with a music label that can help sell a lot of records. A small percentage of a very big pie is better than s large percentage of a microscopic pie, meaning even though a lot of the money from the proceeds of the sales of their work goes to the middle layers, they still get more than they would otherwise.
I'm not saying CDs cost that much because they have to - I'm sayin CDs cost that much because we are all led to believe - both artists and consumers - that they have to cost that much, that the middle layers are absolutely essential.
Music artists will be worried about piracy, although many of them probably do not want to inflame the issue and alienate some of their largest potential audience members. It is precisely because Metallica is pretty comfortable from all the record albumns that they sold the they can afford to do this. They have a point in saying simply this: "We have a right to get paid for our work".
The music/recording industry have always been there to control and run everything, including making sure that the artists "get paid for their work". Of course, the problem is that the artists don't get the majority of the proceeds from record sales. The music industry does. The music industry and the artists alike are concerned about potential widespread (implicitly endorsed by general population - if you've used napster to download a copyrighted work, you've implicitly endorsed it) piracy.
We complain about high prices that are charged for these CDs and some point to it as a reason for Napster's popularity - that if CDs were cheaper, we'd buy more of them, and Napster and/or piracy would not be so relevant. But the high prices are from the music/recording labels. They have high overhead in terms of promotions, distributions and so on. They have to spend all that money to promote the albumns so that they can sell more and pay everybody. Of course, a lot of the money line the pockets of a few very rich people too - not necessarily the artist either.
Until there's a way that artists can be paid for their work without having to charge a lot of money for their works because they have to pay for all the music/recording label's work, artists will worry about piracy. After all, this is their livelihood too.
Very simple: Deny, deny, deny. They are not going to weaken their stand in any way, because any sign of hesitation or capitulation will be translated as admitting guilt. If you were Microsoft, you are NOT going to admit you're guilty, even if you know you are. Basically, they are taking the "never surrender/go down fighting" mentality, and they should.
Let me put it this way, if they allow for a hint that they might have done "a little wrong", then people will jump up and down and say "see? you even admit it yourself that you did the wrong thing". If Microsoft show any sign of weakness, it will be devoured quickly into oblivion.
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I don't understand all the gloating on the part of the Linux community though. I understand that this is only affecting users of Microsoft products, specifically Outlook, but so what?
Outlook is a decent program for e-mailing. That Microsoft decided to make it more "feature-rich" so that it can let you view interactive HTML e-mail messages has its good points and bad points. Maybe some people (notably non-technical people who like looking at pretty pictures, which is a lot of e-mail users these days) want that kind of functionality.
And technically, it would still do some damage if it was another e-mail client on a machine that is capable of executing a VBScript file. Most e-mail programs will allow you to double-click to open the script file. The culprit here is the WSH. Yes, it's Microsoft's fault that it happened, but not for lack of trying to bring a more feature-rich product to consumers.
You're not going to tell me that if Linux offered similar functionalities of Outlook and WSH, that there wouldn't be a problem? You could always program around it at fix it, but then again, so could Microsoft, if they'd just be a little bit more careful, things like this wouldn't happen.
I believe it's Multi-Processor.
Open Source is good for both developers and users alike. It's good for developers when they need to write programs or applications and might need to know how certain things work, or if they need to change or extend certain things in the open source software. It's good for users because of all the common reasons that we hear about all the time, about how it is secure because a backdoor would be spotted and how bugs can be spotted easily because the source is available.
But the story also talked about how someone in IT decided to use open source software, sometimes without knowledge of their supervisors and the company at large, to provide a solution. While it sounds like heroics, it also trigger thoughts of potential problems.
Imagine if one of these guys was a programmer who was able to put in a backdoor in the software source that was consequently compiled and put into production. Granted, someone with that kind of access would have other ways of putting in backdoors, not just in programs. But I think that to some extent this may be an issue. Companies may buy software from closed source vendors secure in the knowledge that at least the software doesn't have backdoors in it that was put in by someone who may have specific interest in doing so to break the company's security.
Put another way, if there's a security problem like a backdoor, it's better that it's a disinterested third-party than an employee who may or may not remain within the company, and many times, may even end up at a rival company. Besides, with a backdoor, who's liable? If it's closed source, it's obvious. With open source, there wouldn't be backdoors, but depending on the company's policy, there may be backdoors put in that they wouldn't know about, sometimes they wouldn't even know who might have put it in.
Granted, the potential of such a scenario is small if the company's IT policies are consistent and clear and actions well-documented. But, I still think that such things can and may have happened, and it's due to the availability of source.
So all I'm saying is, the company must decide clearly what they are going to do and strictly enforce it. If better solutions are available, they should be clear about all the possibilities. Politics, of course, will just throw it off completely. But IT professionals 'sneaking' open-source into their company just doesn't jive too well with me, even if the open source philosophy produces superior software.
The pricing is pretty good, though a bit on the high end, I think. And who better to do this kind of project than someone who doesn't have anything to prove because he's already had a great career, like John Cleese?
The more significant thing, as always, though, is that they are able to offer it directly to us, cutting the middle-man. Why can't Metallica understand this?
If artists (including movie producers and directors) want to sell their work, they can do it without having to go through a giant corporation that does production, promotion and marketing, manufacturing and reproduction, and distribution, all at the same time. They should be able to select from smaller companies that do only one thing each. This way, they can cut down on their costs, have more control over their works, and be able to offer their works at a lower price for the consumers, and therefore, possibly, build a larger fan-base.
Wasn't Philips one of the companies involved in the creation of DVD?
Also, since I never used their service, I couldn't find out whether the MP3s that they were sending out were good quality (near CD) or broadcast quality (like radio)? I'd think somewhere in-between might be a good compromise - not allowing the best quality to be freely downloadable and stored. True fans/audiophiles would go and buy the CDs (I know, in order to get the music, you have to have already owned the CD, but in my proposition, they wouldn't have to).
I think that something like what they were providing would have been a very valuable service that even the recording industry would have liked. I just think their approach was wrong.
No, I mean work solely as examiners, and quit their job as patent attorneys. Like I said, who would do that?
Meaning, if they start keeping track of patterns of a large number of users who visit their sites, they may be tipped off on specific persons' activities and investigate further. Of course, this is likely to be illegal as well, as it will violate some kind privacy law. They would need to show a reason to track the usage in the first place, rather than using the tracked usage pattern data as the reason to start investigating.
So definitely, I agree that while the government could not create and opportunity and induce people to commit crimes, I think they may (though I don't necessarily say they should) use the honeypot tactic just to get some lists of people to watch, perhaps.
The PTO employs a bunch of low paid (relatively speaking) workers to do the work, as compared to the wealthy patent attorneys who would know better and get paid tons more money because they do know better.
The best people to work at the PTO would be the patent attorneys in conjunction with specialists. But these people can get paid more elsewhere, why would they work there?
I know there have been FBI sting operations for piracy and stuff like that, but being that the Internet is so uncontrollable, and we know the proliferation of illegal activities such as MP3 swapping, software piracy and porn is so rampant, I'd think that a large part of law enforcement's plans are to setup such honeypots to just keep track of demographic information on individuals who are prone to participate in certain kinds of illicit activities. I could imagine that the government could run some of the most successful porn sites, etc. to keep tabs on would be offenders.
In fact, Napster can be one such honeypot, and by the look of the thing with Metallica, has been used as such to some degree.
Isn't this something we need to be concerned with?
1. Corporations are bottom-line oriented. They want to make money. That means that they will cut cost where they can, make as much money as they can, at the same time pushing the legal envelope as far as they can. The only thing that prevents them from way overcharging is the free-market, unless there's a monopoly or a cartel of some sort.
2. Corporations that control the media are powerful because they are the gatekeepers of information and popular culture. They influence how people think, act, and buy. Until the advent of the Internet, they had very dominant control over the media distribution channels. Media, of course, being things like TV, radio, publishing, CDs, etc. They come between advertisers who want to sell products and/or services to make money and the rest of us. They also have control over editorial content and therefore filter and dictate what we see, hear, and read.
3. AOL Time-Warner is obviously in the category of a media company. When media companies start acting on each other funny things happen. They are competing against each other, but have to follow some fairness rules that the government has set up.
4. What worries me most is that giant megacongloerates that owns several different kinds of media channels that is so powerful that it can afford to coerce its clients (the advertisers, or other media companies) to follow its own set of rules. It can be more powerful than the government because it controls what information goes out to the audience/consumers, it creates the direction for popular culture. In effect, it charges companies to sell their ideas to us, it controls what we see, hear and read, it tells us what we should spend our money on, and we should be glad to pay them for telling us to do this. It even tells us how to think and what to laugh, cry and get mad at.
Corporatism of old is different from corporatism of new, simply because the communication channels have well extended their reach into every household. Media corporatism is a dangerous force to be reckon with, I'd imagine. Now that the Internet and the massive communication infrastructure has gotten up to a good start, I think we as consumers need to be very wary of the media corporatism that will rise.
Good thing we always have subversive elements in the society that prevent use from becoming mindless zombies following the whims of media conglomerates.
The good thing is that there are many other vegetarian sources for gelatin, such as agar agar.
FYI, I thought the same thing you did, until I checked out the site a little more. Pretty cool stuff that they do.
I think Jon needs to be more concise also. Is he getting paid by the word or something?
Both Napster users and Metallica are guilty. Napster users for blatant piracy of copyrighted material, and Metallica for being so self-righteously reactive (not necessarily a bad thing). I think that Metallica could have handled this a little bit better, and some of the things said and done is just not well thought out.
The Internet, MP3, Napster - these are things that grew out of people's desires. Does that say that we are a society of criminals? No. Maybe people are just tired of paying so much to all the middle-layer entities taking such big cuts of the money that people were willing to pay their favorite artists, not the record labels and/or distributors and managers and agents and such.
Maybe people are tired of large corporate entities controlling what they can see/hear/consume and how much they are getting charged for it.
Metallica and artists have to remember, it's not about them, it's about us, the people, the fans. Without us, they are absolutely nothing. The problem I have with Lars/Metallica is simply that they have gotten too full of themselves. I believe that they should get paid for their work, after all, work is work and you should get paid for it. But maybe they should watch and listen a little more. If lots of their fans are downloading their music instead of buying their CDs, they should ask themselves, why are they doing that? Do the fans think that our music is not worth shelling out $15-$18/CD? Are our fans a bunch of thiefs? Maybe something else can be done to work with the fans rather against the fans?
No matter what Metallica says, the Napster users who download their music are most likely fans of their music. To take the actions they have taken is definitely fighting against their own fans. I'm not saying what the Napster users are doing is right, I'm just saying it's certainly within Metallica's power to overlook such things and possibly work out a solution that would be more ideal.
This whole fiasco just says to me that Metallica (and Lars specifically) is greedy and egocentric, and not that they are fighting for what's due them.
Does anybody else think that maybe Napster should have built in some kind of encryption or scrambling, so that something like this can't happen so easily?
I would just stop using Napster and go with something less centralized and a little more secure.
But I think you bring up a good point - corporations are created for the best interest of itself. And it is composed of shareholders who have vested interest. One of the main features of the corporation is limited individual liabilities, right? So the individuals are not responsible for the liabilities of the corporation, and by the same token, the individuals are not responsible for the "evils" that the company does in pursuit of increasing the bottom line, right? Because they are not only not responsible for the company's liabilities, they are also not responsible for the companies moral and/or ethical conducts.
But someone must be the target in the company, and it's usually the CEO of the company (e.g. Bill Gates, Microsoft). Perhaps we will villanize the CEO as the figurehead representative of the company's moral conscience. But as the CEO, he is obligated to put the bottom line on top, it is his responsibility to the shareholders. So who's evil, if anybody is to be called evil at all?
I agree more with the Bible version though. But money is like the company - amoral. It is neither evil nor good. It is a tool, a medium, an energy, if you will. And it could be used for good or evil - and that also largely depends on how you define such concepts.
But with the Bible version of the quote, you'll have to agree that companies ARE evil - because their reason for being is the bottom-line - meaning, the corporation, though emotionless and amoral, by its very agenda for existence, is evil because it "loves" money. This kind of throws off the original post about companies not being evil, doesn't it?
More and more companies will open source their products, and the Open Source community can point to it as a sign of victory. But I'm not sure that it would be because of the reason that the Open Source community wants, or maybe I'm just being naive, a very good possibility.
The Open Source movement is very much like the Patent system in some ways. It begins as a great idea and then the companies start poking at it, using it, "enhancing" it, then you end up with something you are not quite sure about.
Companies may now be embracing Open Source not because it is superior philosophically or technically, but it's just better PR and good business. So in the end, it's always about the bottom line of the company. It's not about the users or innovators. It's about companies' bottom lines. And if it happens to be better for users and be good business as well, great!
So what I'm getting at is, what is the spirit of Open Source anyway? Is it to grow to a point where the companies can use it as a selling point to improve their bottom line? Or is it some other ideal? Or more likely, maybe it's somewhere in between?
A lot of the money that consumers spend are buying into the image that the music industry "create" of the actual artists anyway. The artists are often not like what the record labels promote them to be anyway. Then there's also a matter of production, of artists who create and artists who perform, and artists who do both.
Napster and Gnutella are different in that Napster controls the database, right? With Gnutella, anybody can run a server, right?
My take on this is that at a subconscious level, Napster wants to become a distribution channel for music. The music industry is struggling against this, of course, but they may actually embrace Napster if Napster agrees to become a legitimate distribution channel. After all, Napster has central control over the database. Gnutella, then, is vastly more dangerous because it's not a an entity and centralized database that can be controlled.
I don't think that Napster becoming a distribution channel would actually work, but it would seem that with a large user base, they have significant power. What the music industry should really worry about is something like Gnutella, if they are really concerned about piracy.
I'm not saying CDs cost that much because they have to - I'm sayin CDs cost that much because we are all led to believe - both artists and consumers - that they have to cost that much, that the middle layers are absolutely essential.
The music/recording industry have always been there to control and run everything, including making sure that the artists "get paid for their work". Of course, the problem is that the artists don't get the majority of the proceeds from record sales. The music industry does. The music industry and the artists alike are concerned about potential widespread (implicitly endorsed by general population - if you've used napster to download a copyrighted work, you've implicitly endorsed it) piracy.
We complain about high prices that are charged for these CDs and some point to it as a reason for Napster's popularity - that if CDs were cheaper, we'd buy more of them, and Napster and/or piracy would not be so relevant. But the high prices are from the music/recording labels. They have high overhead in terms of promotions, distributions and so on. They have to spend all that money to promote the albumns so that they can sell more and pay everybody. Of course, a lot of the money line the pockets of a few very rich people too - not necessarily the artist either.
Until there's a way that artists can be paid for their work without having to charge a lot of money for their works because they have to pay for all the music/recording label's work, artists will worry about piracy. After all, this is their livelihood too.
They are not going to weaken their stand in any way, because any sign of hesitation or capitulation will be translated as admitting guilt. If you were Microsoft, you are NOT going to admit you're guilty, even if you know you are. Basically, they are taking the "never surrender/go down fighting" mentality, and they should.
Let me put it this way, if they allow for a hint that they might have done "a little wrong", then people will jump up and down and say "see? you even admit it yourself that you did the wrong thing". If Microsoft show any sign of weakness, it will be devoured quickly into oblivion.
Yup, that's the one! Thanks!