Those vampire/zombie/etc things are games? I thought they were pain-in-the-arse sig-links with no purpose other than to direct lots of people to an advert-infested site and to make some forum users disguise their links as something interesting.
If those are the "social network games" the article is talking about then screw the economics and the decision making, just kill the things now!
I guess they were in a night club, which somewhat affects logic, but they say:
the left hand side of the brain which is more logical and better at deciphering verbal information
and then say:
They obtained significantly more cigarettes when they made their request in a person's right ear compared with their left.
What part of giving away one of your cigarettes to some cheap-ass bum who can't afford their own is logical? Unless, I guess, they had a hot woman asking guys, at which point they'll be hoping that a simple cigarette now leads to the need for more later...
It's not necessarily more dangerous on a single case, but it'll be far more prevalent and people think far less of going at ludicrous speeds when there is far too much traffic on the road than they would of doing something so obviously distracting as watching TV on the go. That, to me, makes it a bigger danger in general than something that already comes with warnings that it isn't safe to do it.
Depends where you put the device (although if it is a built-in SatNav then you don't exactly have many options there!) I was thinking of a standard SatNav that you let the kids have in the back seat.
Eaxctly - I want them to ring so that I don't have to listen to tinny, fuzzy, crackling "songs" as people's ringtones. It'd be even better if it could then be followed up by law suits against all the idiots who play songs through their phones and just wander down the street with some horribly tinny dance/charts track playing away for everyone to hear.
Re:TV while drivin is Darwin Award worthy...
on
Watch TV On Your Satnav
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Exactly what I was thinking - there's a use case where you know your route but only want to carry one device and so entertain the other passengers by using it as the TV rather than using the SatNav (which you may need later) as a navigation device.
Yeah, people watching TV while driving is a problem, but there are far more prevalent problems that'll cause just as many accidents: people doing 100Mph+ on Motorways with warnings of queuing ahead, people not indicating, people on mobile phones, etc.
It claims it was blocked because of a robotst.txt file but, ironically, if you say "okay then, show me the robots.txt file" it says:
No archived versions of the page you requested are available. If the page is still available on the Internet, we will begin archiving it during our next crawl.
Has it even been up long enough for web.archive.org to catch it?
Point 28 of Chapter 4 is probably the most relevant:
For that reason the Government will also provide for backstop powers for Ofcom to place additional conditions on ISPs aimed at reducing or preventing online copyright infringement by the application of various technical measures. In order to provide greater certainty for the development of commercial agreements, the Government proposes to specify in the legislation what these further measures might be; namely: Blocking (Site, IP, URL), Protocol blocking, Port blocking, Bandwidth capping (capping the speed of a subscriber's Internet connection and/or capping the volume of data traffic which a subscriber can access); Bandwidth shaping (limiting the speed of a subscriber's access to selected protocols/services and/or capping the volume of data to selected protocols/services); Content identification and filtering- or a combination of these measures.
That seems to say "we may bring in laws to give Ofcom the power to force any of the following:... protocol blocking...". The next points say that it'll be conditional on other measures (like making legit content easier to get) not being successful in reducing copyright infringement, but it still leaves you with an official report saying "we may legislate that specific protocols are blocked", which would take out legitimate uses along with illegitimate/illegal uses.
The worst section (which hasn't been highlighted yet) is on pg119:
Reuse - the right to record
The market for recording equipment is growing, and forecasts suggest that consumers are increasingly turning to time-shifted and non-linear viewing.
Industry participants argue that consumers should pay for a 'right to copy', reimbursing the copyright holder for the privilege of (a) retaining a recording of the material, and (b) being able to watch the material outside of the linear broadcast window....
Government will keep this issue under review and will invite Ofcom to assess the cost/benefit and framework required for the introduction of 're-use' fees for private copying and format shifting.
WTF? They're actually accepting the industry's argument that we should not only be paying to watch TV but also paying extra to record it as well, despite the fact that "time-shifting" is covered in copyright legislation already as an allowed fair use!
If you think it's such a problem then make it a criminal offence. Don't force ISPs to do it for you.
Surely that's part of the problem - it already is a criminal offence to do most of the things that the government wants to cover with laws like this. Copyright infringement is already a crime, just not one with a particularly high punishment and so personal instances (e.g. BitTorrent usage for MP3s) isn't prosecuted much.
I hope you're right, but I think you might be a bit optimistic. Even if the Labour government (or at least Brown in charge of Labour) doesn't have long left then there's always another government just around the corner (probably Conservative, minor possibility of Lib Dems). Whoever is in charge is always going to screw things up in the same ways and fail to understand exactly the same things, especially with big industry groups leaning on them and selling lies like "all file sharing is illegal" and "we should be able to live like fat cats for decades off one song - letting people actually own what they buy and do what they want with it is putting us poor people out of business".
We face the prospect of losing this great technology even when we're doing nothing illegal.
And all because the government doesn't understand the technology. Just don't tell them that printers, pen and paper, tape recorders, VCRs, DVD recorders and computers in general can copy content without permission and that Royal Mail can be used to distribute it or we'll be out of technology and out of communication!
I'd have thought the British Computer Society should be advising the government on these kinds of things, but I guess the music industry must shout louder.
According to the article, the government is going to be getting the ISPs to do their dirty work for them, whatever we have as an RIAA/MPAA equivalent, and the police:
it will "place an obligation on ISPs to maintain records of the most frequent offenders, which would allow rights holders to take targeted legal action against these infringers."
Sounds like they're making the ISPs track down the sharers so that the rights holders can just cherry-pick from a list. Sounds like a bad situation for the ISPs to get in to with things like "common carrier" statuses.
Finally, ISPs will be roped in to protect copyright material, restricting bandwidth to known filesharers, and even blocking access to certain protocols entirely.
Again, looks like the ISPs aren't just going to be "carriers" any more. Could be quite a bad precedent (for the ISPs, at least). Also, what's the betting that a) the protocol blocks will be a blanket ban on BitTorrent, meaning that legitimate downloads (like Linux ISOs) will also be affected and b) they'll do it in such a way that's easily circumventable?
They want everyone to have high speed Internet access to a) let them view information on Government webistes more easily and b) so that they can go "look - we're improving the nation and bringing our communications technology up to date". Beyond that it depends what they intend to do with protocol blocking - they may allow legal filesharing to continue (e.g. Linux distros) but they might be stupid (this is the Government, after all) and blanket ban filesharing because of copyright infringement.
Chances are it'll be closer to what I get from Sky for free as part of their "See, Speak, Surf" package: 2Mb/s and a 2GB/mo cap. 2Mb/s seems fast enough for everything I do (the round-trip response seems to be the longest part at times!) and somewhere around 2GB isn't unreasonable for most people's usage (I run a few websites on top of normal browsing, but the only times I think I have gone over were downloading Linux Live CDs).
High-speed broadband for everyone is a great idea, but when people are still making do with 56K dial-up then we're not exactly going to have the government jumping to give us Japan and South Korean equivalent networks, are we?
You don't get the trend for following celebrities? When you follow them you, like, get to, like, be their friend and say you're, like, friends with them and everything...
Hang on, no, you get to "follow them". That'd make you sound more like a stalker! I suspect the lives of celebrities are about as interesting as every other person I know - i.e. not. I'm quite happy with my own life, thank you very much, without trying to follow someone else's life.
Did you even read that comment? I did read the link, hence my wording. I'll try it again with emphasis in case it wasn't clear:
I'd probably "diss" them as well for considering spying on you with Phorm.
The fact that they were even considering it was enough to make one of my co-workers move to another ISP, and I can't say I blame him.
AFAIK BT are doing the same thing, so it isn't surprising that they want people to pay more for actually using their bandwidth - it would mean they'd get paid to provide the bandwidth to the BBC servers, paid by the customer for their account and paid by Phorm to spy on their customers.
* People will grumble because all prices (including the lowest packages) go up, the UK Government will decide that it doesn't meet their "everyone must have broadband" requirement and legislate to make BT upgrade the infrastructure to something closer to what Japan has
Or is that overly optimistic for any government we might get in the UK (Labour or Conservatives)?:D
I'm surprised that BT even has a 21st Century Network. Given what South Korea and Japan had, I thought we were still stuck on a 20th Century Network here in the UK.
Not that it makes much difference to me - I'm on Sky's free 2Mbps and 2GB/mo broadband and haven't overused it in any given month enough to be told to stop. 99% of TV is crap as it is, why bother wasting time streaming it or downloading it?
And if you don't make the movements that big then you're relying on people's perception of where they've moved the thing without them having instant feedback as to what they did, and most people's perception of their movement of a pen (with feedback) is a hell of a lot more accurate of their perception of the relative position they moved a lump of plastic in the air. Even if you alter it and do it on a surface (so doing it horizontally and making it effectively like a mouse) you're just going to end up scratching it or having the same "not quite the right place" effect that a lot of users get.
Use a pen or similar for your interface and you get instant feedback of what you just did. Start moving the phone around and either a) your accelerometers are so accurate that you're forever triggering the wrong input or b) they're accurate enough but you can't be sure what you wrote because your only feedback (the screen) is moving as well.
But hey, without ways of making people look silly while inputting data, where would we get our ideas for SciFi?
The story title doesn't help. I was expecting exactly that kind of functionality - some mobile phone with a large screen (like the iPhone and other touch-screen devices where the screen is most of the front of the phone) that could write in mid-air as you waved it side-to-side by using the accelerometer to determine where it was and what part it needed to display.
It'd have been a more interesting use if it was that, rather than making you wave your hand around like an idiot to show "we can get input from accelerometers and combine the values to draw lines".
In what specific was is it wrong? If your game needs to contact an activation server before letting you play because it is a digital download, or if the only way to get a game is from a download server (which may or may not still exist in three, five or ten years time) then they sure as hell can lock you out of the software you bought and 'own'.
If I own a game on CD/DVD then I own it. I can install it when I want, where I want. I can even (and I've done it recently) play a 14 year old game without having to worry about whether the activation server will have vanished. Whether or not I can play the game is entirely in my hands.
If I buy it through Steam or other DRMed download systems then I don't own it. I've got a binary copy (possibly - it depends whether Steam and the like will download an installer you can backup or whether they all work as "install from the Net), but that copy activates itself through a server that I have to assume will a) be contactable and b) still exist. Whether or not I can play a game I bought and own is entirely at the whim of the network/publisher/activation or authentication server provider.
You do realise you're still leaving yourself vulnerable there, don't you? If any of your data is copied to/tmp then it'll be unencrypted. Even if it is deleted from/tmp it might still be recoverable. Just encrypting/home seems a bit like locking your front door but leaving your back door open.
As for not putting it on desktop machines, it depends on how concerned you are. We've got to do it at work, and it is probably good to do it at home in case you ever sell your HDD (it'll make sure that the data can't be recovered). Servers are normally in a secure enough place that they don't need it, and it'd probably screw a remote reboot if you can't enter your password!
Yep, we use it at work (it was mandated recently that we must encrypt and that Linux can use FDE). I was going to switch from F10 to openSuse but openSuse 11.1 doesn't support FDE yet, only individual partition encryption, (apparently it is in the works for 11.2) and so I went to F11 preview. Tick one box on install, give it a password and off you go.
Ubuntu does support it as well, but it is on the "alternative" disk rather than the standard disk. I don't know much more than that, though, because I've never felt the need to install it. Some of the other guys in my office use it, though.
Lost the CD - that's your own stupid fault for not being careful. Have the company lose/close the server - that's completely out of your control and can deprive you of something you purchased (see all the people with Yahoo and, I think, Walmart music who either lost or nearly lost all the music they paid for).
CDs and DVDs are just like any other physical item - you buy them, you own them, they're your responsibility to look after. Or are you suggesting that your mobile phone/PDA/books/external hard drive/remotes should also be on a DRMed rental service where you can get a replacement if you're stupid enough to lose it, but it can be removed from you at any time? What about the next stage of your OS (which Microsoft is already working towards) so that Microsoft (or another OS maker) can lock you out of your machine by accident/malice/disappearing servers?
They need to make their money back somewhere. If you can sucker console gamers in with £45+RRP games when PCs are closer to £30RRP then why not make them pay more for other things as well? They're obviously willing to do it;)
You're one of those terrible, terrible people who the Games Industry complained about, aren't you? One of those poor misguided suck...foo...'consumers' who thinks that just because you bought it and there's legislation (in the US at least) that gives you certain rights when you purchase something then you should be able to do what you like with it, making a profit, a profit, without sharing any of it back to the poor, deserving and penniless publisher that let you have it in the first place.
Yeah, I agree, give me the physical copy any day rather than yet more digital downloads. Ditto with things like Steam - some people rave about it, but even ignoring the bandwidth required I wouldn't want to trust its invasive and ingrained DRM solution that relies on remote servers, meaning I can't re-sell it and could lose it at any time.
Slashdot Mirror
Those vampire/zombie/etc things are games? I thought they were pain-in-the-arse sig-links with no purpose other than to direct lots of people to an advert-infested site and to make some forum users disguise their links as something interesting.
If those are the "social network games" the article is talking about then screw the economics and the decision making, just kill the things now!
I guess they were in a night club, which somewhat affects logic, but they say:
and then say:
What part of giving away one of your cigarettes to some cheap-ass bum who can't afford their own is logical? Unless, I guess, they had a hot woman asking guys, at which point they'll be hoping that a simple cigarette now leads to the need for more later...
Does that mean that Christianity has nothing to worry about, because no-one is ever going to listen to that devil who sits on their left shoulder? ;)
It's not necessarily more dangerous on a single case, but it'll be far more prevalent and people think far less of going at ludicrous speeds when there is far too much traffic on the road than they would of doing something so obviously distracting as watching TV on the go. That, to me, makes it a bigger danger in general than something that already comes with warnings that it isn't safe to do it.
Depends where you put the device (although if it is a built-in SatNav then you don't exactly have many options there!) I was thinking of a standard SatNav that you let the kids have in the back seat.
Eaxctly - I want them to ring so that I don't have to listen to tinny, fuzzy, crackling "songs" as people's ringtones. It'd be even better if it could then be followed up by law suits against all the idiots who play songs through their phones and just wander down the street with some horribly tinny dance/charts track playing away for everyone to hear.
Exactly what I was thinking - there's a use case where you know your route but only want to carry one device and so entertain the other passengers by using it as the TV rather than using the SatNav (which you may need later) as a navigation device.
Yeah, people watching TV while driving is a problem, but there are far more prevalent problems that'll cause just as many accidents: people doing 100Mph+ on Motorways with warnings of queuing ahead, people not indicating, people on mobile phones, etc.
It claims it was blocked because of a robotst.txt file but, ironically, if you say "okay then, show me the robots.txt file" it says:
Has it even been up long enough for web.archive.org to catch it?
Point 28 of Chapter 4 is probably the most relevant:
That seems to say "we may bring in laws to give Ofcom the power to force any of the following: ... protocol blocking...". The next points say that it'll be conditional on other measures (like making legit content easier to get) not being successful in reducing copyright infringement, but it still leaves you with an official report saying "we may legislate that specific protocols are blocked", which would take out legitimate uses along with illegitimate/illegal uses.
The worst section (which hasn't been highlighted yet) is on pg119:
WTF? They're actually accepting the industry's argument that we should not only be paying to watch TV but also paying extra to record it as well, despite the fact that "time-shifting" is covered in copyright legislation already as an allowed fair use!
Surely that's part of the problem - it already is a criminal offence to do most of the things that the government wants to cover with laws like this. Copyright infringement is already a crime, just not one with a particularly high punishment and so personal instances (e.g. BitTorrent usage for MP3s) isn't prosecuted much.
I hope you're right, but I think you might be a bit optimistic. Even if the Labour government (or at least Brown in charge of Labour) doesn't have long left then there's always another government just around the corner (probably Conservative, minor possibility of Lib Dems). Whoever is in charge is always going to screw things up in the same ways and fail to understand exactly the same things, especially with big industry groups leaning on them and selling lies like "all file sharing is illegal" and "we should be able to live like fat cats for decades off one song - letting people actually own what they buy and do what they want with it is putting us poor people out of business".
And all because the government doesn't understand the technology. Just don't tell them that printers, pen and paper, tape recorders, VCRs, DVD recorders and computers in general can copy content without permission and that Royal Mail can be used to distribute it or we'll be out of technology and out of communication!
I'd have thought the British Computer Society should be advising the government on these kinds of things, but I guess the music industry must shout louder.
According to the article, the government is going to be getting the ISPs to do their dirty work for them, whatever we have as an RIAA/MPAA equivalent, and the police:
Sounds like they're making the ISPs track down the sharers so that the rights holders can just cherry-pick from a list. Sounds like a bad situation for the ISPs to get in to with things like "common carrier" statuses.
Again, looks like the ISPs aren't just going to be "carriers" any more. Could be quite a bad precedent (for the ISPs, at least). Also, what's the betting that a) the protocol blocks will be a blanket ban on BitTorrent, meaning that legitimate downloads (like Linux ISOs) will also be affected and b) they'll do it in such a way that's easily circumventable?
They want everyone to have high speed Internet access to a) let them view information on Government webistes more easily and b) so that they can go "look - we're improving the nation and bringing our communications technology up to date". Beyond that it depends what they intend to do with protocol blocking - they may allow legal filesharing to continue (e.g. Linux distros) but they might be stupid (this is the Government, after all) and blanket ban filesharing because of copyright infringement.
Chances are it'll be closer to what I get from Sky for free as part of their "See, Speak, Surf" package: 2Mb/s and a 2GB/mo cap. 2Mb/s seems fast enough for everything I do (the round-trip response seems to be the longest part at times!) and somewhere around 2GB isn't unreasonable for most people's usage (I run a few websites on top of normal browsing, but the only times I think I have gone over were downloading Linux Live CDs).
High-speed broadband for everyone is a great idea, but when people are still making do with 56K dial-up then we're not exactly going to have the government jumping to give us Japan and South Korean equivalent networks, are we?
You don't get the trend for following celebrities? When you follow them you, like, get to, like, be their friend and say you're, like, friends with them and everything...
Hang on, no, you get to "follow them". That'd make you sound more like a stalker! I suspect the lives of celebrities are about as interesting as every other person I know - i.e. not. I'm quite happy with my own life, thank you very much, without trying to follow someone else's life.
Did you even read that comment? I did read the link, hence my wording. I'll try it again with emphasis in case it wasn't clear:
The fact that they were even considering it was enough to make one of my co-workers move to another ISP, and I can't say I blame him.
AFAIK BT are doing the same thing, so it isn't surprising that they want people to pay more for actually using their bandwidth - it would mean they'd get paid to provide the bandwidth to the BBC servers, paid by the customer for their account and paid by Phorm to spy on their customers.
You missed an option:
* People will grumble because all prices (including the lowest packages) go up, the UK Government will decide that it doesn't meet their "everyone must have broadband" requirement and legislate to make BT upgrade the infrastructure to something closer to what Japan has
Or is that overly optimistic for any government we might get in the UK (Labour or Conservatives)? :D
I'd probably "diss" them as well for considering spying on you with Phorm.
I'm surprised that BT even has a 21st Century Network. Given what South Korea and Japan had, I thought we were still stuck on a 20th Century Network here in the UK.
Not that it makes much difference to me - I'm on Sky's free 2Mbps and 2GB/mo broadband and haven't overused it in any given month enough to be told to stop. 99% of TV is crap as it is, why bother wasting time streaming it or downloading it?
And if you don't make the movements that big then you're relying on people's perception of where they've moved the thing without them having instant feedback as to what they did, and most people's perception of their movement of a pen (with feedback) is a hell of a lot more accurate of their perception of the relative position they moved a lump of plastic in the air. Even if you alter it and do it on a surface (so doing it horizontally and making it effectively like a mouse) you're just going to end up scratching it or having the same "not quite the right place" effect that a lot of users get.
Use a pen or similar for your interface and you get instant feedback of what you just did. Start moving the phone around and either a) your accelerometers are so accurate that you're forever triggering the wrong input or b) they're accurate enough but you can't be sure what you wrote because your only feedback (the screen) is moving as well.
But hey, without ways of making people look silly while inputting data, where would we get our ideas for SciFi?
The story title doesn't help. I was expecting exactly that kind of functionality - some mobile phone with a large screen (like the iPhone and other touch-screen devices where the screen is most of the front of the phone) that could write in mid-air as you waved it side-to-side by using the accelerometer to determine where it was and what part it needed to display.
It'd have been a more interesting use if it was that, rather than making you wave your hand around like an idiot to show "we can get input from accelerometers and combine the values to draw lines".
In what specific was is it wrong? If your game needs to contact an activation server before letting you play because it is a digital download, or if the only way to get a game is from a download server (which may or may not still exist in three, five or ten years time) then they sure as hell can lock you out of the software you bought and 'own'.
If I own a game on CD/DVD then I own it. I can install it when I want, where I want. I can even (and I've done it recently) play a 14 year old game without having to worry about whether the activation server will have vanished. Whether or not I can play the game is entirely in my hands.
If I buy it through Steam or other DRMed download systems then I don't own it. I've got a binary copy (possibly - it depends whether Steam and the like will download an installer you can backup or whether they all work as "install from the Net), but that copy activates itself through a server that I have to assume will a) be contactable and b) still exist. Whether or not I can play a game I bought and own is entirely at the whim of the network/publisher/activation or authentication server provider.
You do realise you're still leaving yourself vulnerable there, don't you? If any of your data is copied to /tmp then it'll be unencrypted. Even if it is deleted from /tmp it might still be recoverable. Just encrypting /home seems a bit like locking your front door but leaving your back door open.
As for not putting it on desktop machines, it depends on how concerned you are. We've got to do it at work, and it is probably good to do it at home in case you ever sell your HDD (it'll make sure that the data can't be recovered). Servers are normally in a secure enough place that they don't need it, and it'd probably screw a remote reboot if you can't enter your password!
Yep, we use it at work (it was mandated recently that we must encrypt and that Linux can use FDE). I was going to switch from F10 to openSuse but openSuse 11.1 doesn't support FDE yet, only individual partition encryption, (apparently it is in the works for 11.2) and so I went to F11 preview. Tick one box on install, give it a password and off you go.
Ubuntu does support it as well, but it is on the "alternative" disk rather than the standard disk. I don't know much more than that, though, because I've never felt the need to install it. Some of the other guys in my office use it, though.
Lost the CD - that's your own stupid fault for not being careful. Have the company lose/close the server - that's completely out of your control and can deprive you of something you purchased (see all the people with Yahoo and, I think, Walmart music who either lost or nearly lost all the music they paid for).
CDs and DVDs are just like any other physical item - you buy them, you own them, they're your responsibility to look after. Or are you suggesting that your mobile phone/PDA/books/external hard drive/remotes should also be on a DRMed rental service where you can get a replacement if you're stupid enough to lose it, but it can be removed from you at any time? What about the next stage of your OS (which Microsoft is already working towards) so that Microsoft (or another OS maker) can lock you out of your machine by accident/malice/disappearing servers?
They need to make their money back somewhere. If you can sucker console gamers in with £45+RRP games when PCs are closer to £30RRP then why not make them pay more for other things as well? They're obviously willing to do it ;)
You're one of those terrible, terrible people who the Games Industry complained about, aren't you? One of those poor misguided suck...foo...'consumers' who thinks that just because you bought it and there's legislation (in the US at least) that gives you certain rights when you purchase something then you should be able to do what you like with it, making a profit, a profit, without sharing any of it back to the poor, deserving and penniless publisher that let you have it in the first place.
Yeah, I agree, give me the physical copy any day rather than yet more digital downloads. Ditto with things like Steam - some people rave about it, but even ignoring the bandwidth required I wouldn't want to trust its invasive and ingrained DRM solution that relies on remote servers, meaning I can't re-sell it and could lose it at any time.