The general consensus is that if they didn't have to filch if off a store shelf, it's morally a-ok, and this mentality pervades every college campus I've ever been to.
Stealing is wrong, yes. It is dishonest. However, breaking that law that prohibits stealing is not wrong. It is the action itself, not the legality of it, that decides right and wrong. What I am trying to say is, the act of breaking the law itself is definitely not wrong.
Ignoring the fact that stealing has nothing to do with copyright, the current copyright laws are corrupt and have little to do with its purpose: to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. In fact, it now does the opposite. I would argue that breaking copyright law is not wrong, and, in fact, perhaps it is even our duty to break it. Now before someone says "so it's ok to break copyright law, but not ok to violate the GPL?", I will say this: breaking the rules set by the GPL is not wrong because it is illegal but because you are taking away someone else's freedom. You are hurting your neighbor. That is why breaking copyleft is wrong.
Except, I guess, for the statement "there's no such thing as absolute truth"? In that case, it should be "There is exactly one absolute truth." But then, why only one?
If a lossily compressed result is perceptually indistinguishable from the uncompressed input, then the compression can be declared to be transparent
The input need not be perfectly preserved: it doesn't need to be the "same as the source". For a Vorbis encoded audio file that is transparent, you would not be able to tell the difference between the FLAC version and the Vorbis version (perceptually indistinguishable). Yet the FLAC version is so much larger.
that quality level will vary from person to person - hence the only universal definition of "transparent" is lossless.
My perception of transparency is nowhere near lossless, so FLAC is definitely expensive for me. The Vorbis -q6 setting really is transparent for human listeners (try it sometime), and FLAC files are still about 5 times larger than these -q6 Vorbis files.
Don't get me wrong. FLAC has its uses. But, if I need to store 10,000 music files on my computer, I am going to use Vorbis rather than FLAC. I could see FLAC being useful for scientific data. MP3 and Vorbis are designed for human hearing. The lossy compression may remove important components of the data if it is being used for something other than human listening.
Bandwidth is still an issue. Connection speeds don't increase like hard drive sizes. There is also the cost, which remains the same: the quality difference between a transparent Vorbis encoded file and FLAC is zero, but the FLAC file is almost 10 times bigger. Even for slightly less than transparent quality, that tiny quality difference costs nearly 10 times the file size.
EncFS does all the work for you. You can either go with the default settings or you can choose "paranoid mode" and it cranks everything to the max. Example,
$ encfs/tmp/enc/tmp/raw
Creating new encrypted volume. Please choose from one of the following options: enter "x" for expert configuration mode, enter "p" for pre-configured paranoia mode, anything else, or an empty line will select standard mode. ?>
Standard configuration selected.
Configuration finished. The filesystem to be created has the following properties: Filesystem cipher: "ssl/blowfish", version 2:1:1 Filename encoding: "nameio/block", version 3:0:1 Key Size: 160 bits Block Size: 512 bytes Each file contains 8 byte header with unique IV data. Filenames encoded using IV chaining mode.
Now you will need to enter a password for your filesystem. You will need to remember this password, as there is absolutely no recovery mechanism. However, the password can be changed later using encfsctl.
encrypt your data you choose to store online with them
I can think of at least one interesting way to set this up using FUSE. Once this service becomes available, someone writes a FUSE filesystem for it. Then you use encfs to mount an encrypted filesystem on top of the mounted gdrive. Viola! Mount a gdrive locally and hide its contents from Google too.
A good point, but it didn't say that the second crossing would be the last time. It was probably just noting that there will be two crossings in 2008. Maybe it will cross the third time in 2009.
Since this is/., you are probably right anyway.:-P
Yep, as far as I know, there has been only one comment ever removed from Slashdot. It was removed because some AC posted material copyrighted by those crazy Scientology fucktards. You know how they are. There was nothing Slashdot could do about it, so for that you must blame both Scientology and the US government (for unjust copyright laws), not Slashdot.
Yep, you are right. I haven't been keeping up to date with it. All the info is on Wikipedia. He wrote something called DeDRMS that gets keys from the Apple servers for decryption. He never actually broke the encryption, meaning the keys always need to be fetched, but he reverse-engineered the encryption algorithm.
As for this being "open DRM", it fails at doing what DRM is intended: keeping users from directly accessing decrypted media (the user isn't supposed to access the keys). With this system, which is already built into VLC so that you can see the code, all the information on fetching the key and decrypting the media file is freely available. A user could use that information, or maybe even VLC itself, to easily access the original DRM-free media.
This is a good thing, as Digital Restrictions Management is evil.
Richard Stallman is famous for being very careful when he makes predictions. They always seem to turn out to be true. But, in one of his interviews, the interviewer's cell phone rang and RMS said "Will you please turn off your tracking device?". (sorry, couldn't find a link) He went on to talk about cell phones being used by the government to track people.
Now, when I saw this, I was thinking, "I doubt it. He has got to be wrong about this one. This is just tinfoil-hat stuff." But it turns out Stallman was right all along... again.
I use pidgin-encryption with Jabber every day. The Jabber connection is secure to the server (SSL/TLS I think? maybe just for login?), but this provides end-to-end privacy on top of that. I have convinced three friends (three different operating systems total), including my fiancee, to use it. It works very well and transparently once you have the keys set up. Initially, we checked the key fingerprints over the phone.
However, nobody I communicate with by e-mail uses PGP.:-(
The fact that soemthing [sic] is legal doesn't make it ethical.
The fact that something is illegal doesn't make it unethical. I don't believe copyright infringement is unethical.
Sharing with your neighbor is not unethical.
I am pretty sure that his program doesn't do any decryption. It let's the original software decrypt the music and his program just peeks into the memory and yanks out the decrypted song.
These are kids who should know better, and are committing lots of infringement (and worse than that, think it's OK).
Is copyright infringement wrong? Along the same lines: is drinking alcohol on the day before your 21st birthday wrong? Assuming you say yes, why are these wrong? Is the act of breaking a law wrong? What happens when there are two contradicting laws?
Legal/illegal and right/wrong are two very different beasts that have little to do with each other. If copyright infringement is wrong, then sharing with your neighbor must be wrong too.
Here is a demo to show you that your parent post was indeed correct. Suppose you are using 4 bits per sample. For example,
0011 3 1100 12 0101 5 1000 8 1111 15 0001 1
Suppose you have compressed the dynamic range of the audio, causing you to use only high values. Say all samples will be above 7.
1111 15 1000 8 1100 12 1110 14 1011 11 1100 12
Notice something? The MSB is always 1. When we encode these samples we can toss this bit and assume that it is always 1 when we go to decode the signal. This is effectively compressed as the great-grandparent said. If we compress the dynamic range of the original audio we are throwing out data (that last bit). It is lossy compression, causing a reduction in quality.
Note the careful wording. As a sibling post said, by compressing the dynamic range you stop using all of the bits in your samples. This means that you can achieve pretty good lossy compression by tossing these rarely used bits. The data on the CD is not actually compressed (the extra unused bits are still there), so it simulates compression.
Hitchcock's Rope appears to be one single long continuous shot. There actually are a couple cuts, which you can spot if you look for them. They are carefully hidden by clever camera movements. But, to the audience, it appears as a single shot with one scene.
In fact, this movie is based on a play that isn't broken into scenes either. (Maybe it is a metaphor for the name "Rope"?)
Anyway, one continuous scene like that can be exhausting to watch. I am glad that this isn't common.
Slashdot Mirror
Stealing is wrong, yes. It is dishonest. However, breaking that law that prohibits stealing is not wrong. It is the action itself, not the legality of it, that decides right and wrong. What I am trying to say is, the act of breaking the law itself is definitely not wrong.
Ignoring the fact that stealing has nothing to do with copyright, the current copyright laws are corrupt and have little to do with its purpose: to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. In fact, it now does the opposite. I would argue that breaking copyright law is not wrong, and, in fact, perhaps it is even our duty to break it. Now before someone says "so it's ok to break copyright law, but not ok to violate the GPL?", I will say this: breaking the rules set by the GPL is not wrong because it is illegal but because you are taking away someone else's freedom. You are hurting your neighbor. That is why breaking copyleft is wrong.
In Soviet Russia, government controls business.
Maybe he was talking about the price of the truck?
Except, I guess, for the statement "there's no such thing as absolute truth"? In that case, it should be "There is exactly one absolute truth." But then, why only one?
From Wikipedia:
If a lossily compressed result is perceptually indistinguishable from the uncompressed input, then the compression can be declared to be transparentThe input need not be perfectly preserved: it doesn't need to be the "same as the source". For a Vorbis encoded audio file that is transparent, you would not be able to tell the difference between the FLAC version and the Vorbis version (perceptually indistinguishable). Yet the FLAC version is so much larger.
that quality level will vary from person to person - hence the only universal definition of "transparent" is lossless.My perception of transparency is nowhere near lossless, so FLAC is definitely expensive for me. The Vorbis -q6 setting really is transparent for human listeners (try it sometime), and FLAC files are still about 5 times larger than these -q6 Vorbis files.
Don't get me wrong. FLAC has its uses. But, if I need to store 10,000 music files on my computer, I am going to use Vorbis rather than FLAC. I could see FLAC being useful for scientific data. MP3 and Vorbis are designed for human hearing. The lossy compression may remove important components of the data if it is being used for something other than human listening.
Bandwidth is still an issue. Connection speeds don't increase like hard drive sizes. There is also the cost, which remains the same: the quality difference between a transparent Vorbis encoded file and FLAC is zero, but the FLAC file is almost 10 times bigger. Even for slightly less than transparent quality, that tiny quality difference costs nearly 10 times the file size.
As Satan once put it: "Without evil there can be no good, so it must be good to be evil sometimes."
EncFS does all the work for you. You can either go with the default settings or you can choose "paranoid mode" and it cranks everything to the max. Example,
Just had to hit enter, then make up a password.
I can think of at least one interesting way to set this up using FUSE. Once this service becomes available, someone writes a FUSE filesystem for it. Then you use encfs to mount an encrypted filesystem on top of the mounted gdrive. Viola! Mount a gdrive locally and hide its contents from Google too.
The reason is to satisfy all the dried-up prunes who yell "think of teh childrens".
A good point, but it didn't say that the second crossing would be the last time. It was probably just noting that there will be two crossings in 2008. Maybe it will cross the third time in 2009.
Since this is
Just as John Gilmore says, "How many of you have broken no laws this month?"
Yep, as far as I know, there has been only one comment ever removed from Slashdot. It was removed because some AC posted material copyrighted by those crazy Scientology fucktards. You know how they are. There was nothing Slashdot could do about it, so for that you must blame both Scientology and the US government (for unjust copyright laws), not Slashdot.
Yep, you are right. I haven't been keeping up to date with it. All the info is on Wikipedia. He wrote something called DeDRMS that gets keys from the Apple servers for decryption. He never actually broke the encryption, meaning the keys always need to be fetched, but he reverse-engineered the encryption algorithm.
As for this being "open DRM", it fails at doing what DRM is intended: keeping users from directly accessing decrypted media (the user isn't supposed to access the keys). With this system, which is already built into VLC so that you can see the code, all the information on fetching the key and decrypting the media file is freely available. A user could use that information, or maybe even VLC itself, to easily access the original DRM-free media.
This is a good thing, as Digital Restrictions Management is evil.
Richard Stallman is famous for being very careful when he makes predictions. They always seem to turn out to be true. But, in one of his interviews, the interviewer's cell phone rang and RMS said "Will you please turn off your tracking device?". (sorry, couldn't find a link) He went on to talk about cell phones being used by the government to track people.
Now, when I saw this, I was thinking, "I doubt it. He has got to be wrong about this one. This is just tinfoil-hat stuff." But it turns out Stallman was right all along... again.
I use pidgin-encryption with Jabber every day. The Jabber connection is secure to the server (SSL/TLS I think? maybe just for login?), but this provides end-to-end privacy on top of that. I have convinced three friends (three different operating systems total), including my fiancee, to use it. It works very well and transparently once you have the keys set up. Initially, we checked the key fingerprints over the phone.
However, nobody I communicate with by e-mail uses PGP. :-(
The fact that something is illegal doesn't make it unethical. I don't believe copyright infringement is unethical. Sharing with your neighbor is not unethical.
I am pretty sure that his program doesn't do any decryption. It let's the original software decrypt the music and his program just peeks into the memory and yanks out the decrypted song.
Is copyright infringement wrong? Along the same lines: is drinking alcohol on the day before your 21st birthday wrong? Assuming you say yes, why are these wrong? Is the act of breaking a law wrong? What happens when there are two contradicting laws?
Legal/illegal and right/wrong are two very different beasts that have little to do with each other. If copyright infringement is wrong, then sharing with your neighbor must be wrong too.
Type "google" into the search and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky". It is a recursive experience!
Here is a demo to show you that your parent post was indeed correct. Suppose you are using 4 bits per sample. For example,
Suppose you have compressed the dynamic range of the audio, causing you to use only high values. Say all samples will be above 7.
Notice something? The MSB is always 1. When we encode these samples we can toss this bit and assume that it is always 1 when we go to decode the signal. This is effectively compressed as the great-grandparent said. If we compress the dynamic range of the original audio we are throwing out data (that last bit). It is lossy compression, causing a reduction in quality.
Note the careful wording. As a sibling post said, by compressing the dynamic range you stop using all of the bits in your samples. This means that you can achieve pretty good lossy compression by tossing these rarely used bits. The data on the CD is not actually compressed (the extra unused bits are still there), so it simulates compression.
From Wikipedia: "A Compact Disc or CD is an optical disc used to store digital data."
With a CD, your music is digital.
Ever notice that you don't see the little CD logo on your CDs anymore? That's why: they don't conform to Redbook.
Hitchcock's Rope appears to be one single long continuous shot. There actually are a couple cuts, which you can spot if you look for them. They are carefully hidden by clever camera movements. But, to the audience, it appears as a single shot with one scene.
In fact, this movie is based on a play that isn't broken into scenes either. (Maybe it is a metaphor for the name "Rope"?)
Anyway, one continuous scene like that can be exhausting to watch. I am glad that this isn't common.