I hate to be the 6th or 7th person to say this, but you didn't seem to pick up on what has been said above. You really want to look at the internet Junkbuster which allows you to set certain domains as cookie-providers and all others are banned.
It sets itself up as a proxy on your computer, and you have to configure netscape or IE to route through it, but it runs in the background and doesn't slow you down. It also hides the more obvious identification gizmos thrown at servers every time you request a page, and can be configured to prevent certain banners from loading (you get a broken image icon if it's just an image, and a "junkbusters" message if its in a layer).
It's free, it's small, it's simple and it seems to be making lots of people happy, although I don't use it because it disagrees with some of the proprietary software on my work computer.
I don't understand the MPAA - and I don't mean that I don't understand greed, I mean their argument doesn't work logically for me.
Putting aside for a minute the finer points of law, freedom, the Constitution (which doesn't apply on this side of the Atlantic anyway) and all the rest of the very valid points made to date on this subject.....
We have had VHS for many years, and the VHS market is very lucrative. A great deal of good films are made and a certain amount are surely pirated, but in essence, we have two points, one is protected by law, established practice and common sense, and the other is borne out as evidenced by the behaviour of the major film-making companies over time:
1. We can copy our own purchases. No-one is allowed to stop us making copies of work that we have legitimately purchased provided we don't go round selling or exchanging or giving those copies away. (Please don't drown me in the legal rephrasing of what I just said - I know the law but I'm trying to remain in cleartext here).
2. The various companies that make up the MPAA have been making interesting and lucrative profits from the sale of videotapes for many years. It is well known that many films that bomb disastarously at the movies end up breaking even or better by virtue of video rentals and sales. The presence of a certain number of illegitimate copies has not prevented the market from being lucrative, and even though it is child's play to make copies of videotapes, sales have remained buoyant and even grown year-on-year.
The arrival of CSS on DVD is an attempt to reverse the current ability that people have to make copies, but to make it illegal to make copies presupposes the purpose of the individual making them, and that has been covered in a previous case where it was clearly established that people had a legal right to make copies for their own purposes.
Now I know that almost everyone reading this already knew all of that, but for some reason, it never seems to come across clearly in the articles that I read on this subject. People allude to it, journalists almost certainly know it if they have been doing their research, and yet the point is never clearly made.
That pisses me off, because it's a freedom that I want protected, even if I don't use it for films, because I have every intention of making digital quality audio compilations for my car and my walkman/discman/whatever.
I wouldn't be suprised if later on they realized that proactively blocking sites was too cumbersome (picking and choosing which sites to block)
They probably attach more value to knowing who's surfing what so they can do something about it than just blocking content. If everything goes through a proxy, they can tell which way most of it is going. Without going to paranoid extremes and imagining dawn raids on alleged internet subversives, I find that the possibility that they are cataloguing hits to sites and probably matching names to surfers more worrying than just the blocking of content.
I'd heard it before, several times, but when I saw it in print, I realised that I hadn't fully appreciated the extent of the sabotage inflicted on the so-called "secure" transmission protocols exported from the States.
This bit on Workfactor Reduction Fields in the European Parliament report that was referred to in the article came as a blow - even though I knew it to be true already.
Just for my peace of mind, could a few technically competent individuals please reassure me once again about how secure my 4096-bit PGP key is please?
It's all the more interesting when you think that the valuation of all the internet stocks rely upon the continued growth of internet commerce, and that relies on people sending credit card information over the internet. I find it hard to believe that the current versions of the browsers do not have back doors built into them.
As i understand it, this will no longer do the trick for most people. All of us have one or two sites we're members of that we enjoy using. For example, Freeserve are my ISP and their front page has a doubleclick ad on it.
Now if I delete my cookies, then log back into Freeserve or another "doubleclick associate", even if they're not displaying doubleclick ads to me, the next time I do see a doubleclick ad, the doubleclick server will recognise an associates cookie in my cookies.txt file and go and ask that associate who I am. At that point, they can link up everything they learn about me now to all the knowledge they have accumulated in the past. This is why connecting that database has removed the privacy from internet surfing.
For privacy, you have to shun all cookies forever, and sites like Yahoo, the Motley Fool and Slashdot require cookies in order for their system to remember you're a member.
I doubt that the court will agree with you that digital video is actually a "program". I think that it will decide that video is simply data that can be handled under the first part of the law, but not under the later parts (that you quoted).
It's not the DVD Video that was reverse engineered. It's the ROM-based software in the DVD Decoder that actually decodes the DVD in the first place, so under the provisions of the Act, it remains legal to reverse-engineer that, create a program (called DeCSS) that provides inter-operability with Linux, and distribute it.
just because you don't ride the train doesn't mean there's not a monopoly over the rails.
You're right - "I use Linux" was a bad example, but nevertheless, I think they will get away with saying that they do not have a monopoly over Operating Systems.
I suppose, using your analogy, I *do* use the rails, just not in their trains, so they do not have a monopoly over the rails. But that's a bit weak.
To be cynical (and I think it's quite accurate in this particular example): Regardless of whether or not they have an effective monopoly over the OS market, the point is arguable enough that the person with the better lawyers will win, and MS can afford the lawyers.
. If their flames are met with a barrage of protest, criticism or ridicule, they'll take notice. At the very least, hostile environments will become an issue.
This already happens, the problem is one person is throwing a barrage of ridicule out at another, and the other is responding in kind - a flame war in the truest sense.
Who decides who was right to flame the other, because basically a barrage of criticism is just group flamethrowing. What we've got is one idiot posting something abusive, then someone will reply with something suitably put-down-ish, and then all hell will break loose, with individuals complaining about their right to express whatever, and self-righteous flamers flaming the original poster and thinking that it's legit because they did something wrong first.
It'll all degenerate into a "but he started it" situation. Maybe A.C.s should start calling CmdrTaco "Mum" or something, at least it would give him the moral authority to send people to their rooms.
You're implying hypocrisy where there is none. (At least from me!)
I for one hate it when a large company squashes a small but legitimate company by using it's trademark rights. That's old news and we all know where we stand on that.
On the other hand, if Microsoft decide to tread heavily on "www.microsoftexperts.com" because it's really a fanatsy website promoting illicit massage in Seattle, I'm not going to stop them. In fact, I think it's their right - it's an abuse of the name, and whilst the legalese for this is, "Erodes the built-up goodwill of the brand name", the translation is really, "I built a respectable product and you're abusing it's name and that pisses me off." I can understand that point of view and I will disagree with anyone criticising Microsoft for shutting down the site in this example. (PS It is a ficticious example and I am not an MS fan/employee so please get your rottweiler off my leg).
Linus clearly states that where a precise use of the trademark is requested he has no problem authorising it, in fact, authorisation may not even be required. This is a good thing.
If I start up a company that works in the Linux community or supports Linux users, I don't want to find that my Virtual next door neighbour with a very similar address is actually the internet equivalent of a brothel with the same brand name as me if I think this will cause me to lose customers or the ability to keep my company afloat.
If I had shares in any company, I'd be somewhat peeved at the existence of unrelated companies calling themselves the same thing as me, if their existence had a negative impact on the potential future of the company I am a part-owner of. I think that's a legitimate attitude, and where the law allows it, I'll encourage the management of my company to go do something about it. I want my customers to know what they're getting.
In Linux's case, the brand name is owned by Linus, but his attitude to it makes it as if it was owned by the community. He allows us all to use it as we wish providing it takes nothing away from others. I like that, I think it should be encouraged.
enabling communications so transparently, effortlessly, and safely, that people feel/free/ so say what they mean
I think that the reason people feel free to say what they want is because the communications are not transparent. The veil of anonymity rarely, if ever, gets lifted. Most people go by pseudonyms, meaning that even those who don't post as A.Coward are nevertheless effectively invisible. If you don't have to stand by your opinions, it always makes it that much easier to give all the thoughts and emotions that others would find offensive (probably because they are offensive) a voice.
I think there's an audience effect here too. Slashdot's Karma is an extreme example, but in general, individuals are aware that a very large number of people could potentially read their message, and the arguments therefore often degenerate into point scoring. All too often you find someone making a really good point, and people trying to get kudos by following up on it with meaningless precisions and additional bits of technical trivia that are irrelevant to the point the original poster was trying to make.
All that does is make the original poster look semi-ignorant because someone followed-up with a short message correcting some irrelevant details. You see this all the time, and you have to wonder why people avoid the main point of the argument and post a useless correction - I believe it's this point scoring ethos: "If I can contradict or correct someone who's written such a good post, then people will think I'm cooler than they are."
Ok, so I'm exagerrating a little, but it's the general emotion the poster is feeling that I'm referring to, not the specific dialog.
They not "will achieve", they "had achieved", if we talk about Windows market.
Is Windows a market or a product? They claim that the Operating System market is not their monopoly, and they're right - I use Linux. Windows is not a market as such, just a specific GUI wrapped around an Operating System with a bunch of embedded/associated software. (not 100% accurate, but it'll do).
On the other hand, what we have is a market for OSs where the most high-margin section of the market is tied to Windows. This is not because they have the ability to squash competitors with anti-competitive practices (although they do have this ability). They used their market power (possibly illegally) in the past to establish their market position, but at the moment, any company wanting to set up a few hundred workstations for employees from financial accountants to marketeers will inevitably buy PCs with pre-loaded Windows. This is because all of their suppliers, all of their customers and all of their subcontractors will also use Windows, and will want to exchange files with them. It's because when they get consultants in, the employees have to be able to work with the consultants on the same software. It's because the accounting software they want to use comes on Windows, not Linux, because the manufacturer of that software knows that Windows is the only sigificant market when it comes to large volumes of sales. It's because there is a very large pool of Windows-aware skilled individuals out there, and computer literacy is important when you are recruiting.
Nothing would please me more than to see Linux begin to erode the mountain that is Microsoft's entrenched market position, but there is a long road ahead.
This columnist is staying true to his beliefs, and he's doing it in a fair way. He simply believes Microsoft has temporarily gone astray, and hopes the success of Linux will lead the company back onto the path of greatness.
I agree. The point of the article seems to be that Linux will be good for Windows because given the way M!crosoft now focus on litigation and marketing, their software standards are slipping. He thinks that the existence of Linux will provide the kind of competition that will turn M!crosoft into a company that produces reliable, stable, user-friendly, high-powered, value-adding software (enough with the buzzwords, I know) that actually lives up to it's marketing hype.
He's right. The more successful Linux is, the more likely it is to provoke it's competitors into raising their standard and evolving their software into something far better than 3.1, 95 or 98. Win2000 (although I know very little about it) seems to be the first step in that direction. Linux will have to become more user friendly, and will have to support more hardware etc etc etc, because the better it gets, the more it's competitors will try to compete with it.
Every strength that Linux has, from stability to the versatility of it's X-Windows GUI, is probably already the focus of a Windows project team deciding how to best surpass that particular feature in Windows 2001. No matter what you think of M!crosoft, they're a powerful company that's used to competing on a difficult playing field. Their tactics aren't always totally above the belt, but don't let that lull you into believing that they can't produce some very good products when provoked into proper competition. They're not nice, but they're not incompetent either.
There are so many stories like this. I can't help thinking that people are really desperate for something like this to be true. The Commercial Writer/Journalist types just can't seem to leave the subject alone, the fiction writers who touch upon the subject get cult followings with fans who reach levels of delusion where they begin to believe it to be true, and all of a sudden, if you don't believe in the "conspiracy", you're obviously either on their side or mind-numbingly stupid.
I read a good book on the subject which I think should be recommended reading to all conspiracy/"aliens on earth"/"unproven scientific hypothesis" buffs out there : Carl Sagan, "The Demon Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark". Although there's plenty in there to disagree with, he makes some excellent logical points of how incredible science already is without having to invent hypotheses based upon almost negligable circumstancial evidence, with no scientific rigor, and convincing ourselves it's true.
In this case, we go from "bacteria can survive acceleration and radiation" to "therefore life may have originated on Mars", (Ok, and the circumstances make it possible). The ability to survive such extreme conditions is probably why it survived on Earth in the first place. They choose to focus on the most fantastic possibilities, how are we to maintain our scientific objectivity when those who are our "proxies" and report the science to us focus on the aspects of the discoveries that are the closest to our fantasies and fail to report any other possible explantions for their discoveries before they have even begun the task of elimination.
Ok, perhaps I'm being a bit extreme here, but I just think we should rule out the probable and the likely before we start believing in the highly improbable, even if the fantasy stories sell so well.
It's been discontinued for a while now. And it was the subject of a lawsuit not too long ago because someone claimed that the dance was copyrighted or something. They're showing the one with the horses in the waves at the beach and the surfers now.
If you want to see a good millenium-fever type movie, go and see Strange Days with Ralph Feinnes. It's excellent.
And since it didn't pretend to be in some way factual, you can go and see it without jumping out of your skin every time someone in a suit wants to ask you a couple of questions.
the FBI/DEA/BATF et. al. should be presumed guilty until proven innocent, especially against someone with a politically unpopular view.
This is precisely what should be avoided. We should always be prepared to extend the same priviledgesin terms of judgement to others as we expect to be extended to us, be they individuals or organisations, governmental or otherwise. Otherwise we are nothing but hypocrites.
The "get a warrant" approach is the traditional "you're the FBI therefore I hate you until you are sent on a mission from God himself" approach, but you're ignoring the point of my post. I'll repeat it : look at it from their point of view.
You're looking at legal rights to free speech, let's also look at legal responsibilities of the FBI. If they are aware that a level of hysteria is building around a phenomenon such as this video, and they do nothing, or they have to put up with civil lack of co-operation and are delayed beyond 31st December as a consquence, and a riot breaks out on Times Square provoked or not by this information, what will the post-mortem of the event look like? Let's take another traditional "everything is the FBIs fault" approach: The FBI were aware that a certain uncertain number of people were concerned by their belief that something nasty was going to happen on Times Square on New Years. They did nothing, pleading "constitutional inability to act". Only two conclusions are possible:
1. It was their fault because they should have done something. But you've already discounted that argument because you disagree with giving them the power to do something about it in the first place by denying them any information whatsoever, so for all they know. it really is a plot!
2. They didn't have the necessary power to prevent it. This is something we would want prevented in future. Therefore we give them the power to prevent it in the future. So by standing up so obnoxiously and uncooperatively for your civil rights, you've actually managed to reduce them by demonstrating that their misuse can lead to civil unrest for no apparent reason, and cause the potential loss of life.
Either way, the protagonists of the film still come off as the bad guys and the FBI still come across as the people working in the dark with no information trying to prevent a potential catastrophe, with no cooperation from a group of people disseminating falsehoods whilst claiming they are the truth.
On a related point, isn't misrepresentation a crime of some sort in the States? If you claim you believe something came from the army, and it didn't, and you knew it didn't, is that not in some way prosecutable? What about inciting to riot?
I read through most of the text of the link, and it seems to me that the FBI were worried not by the film itself but by the phone calls thehad received from people believing the film to be real.
Given the way the events are described (by the plaintiff), they imply but do not state that the FBI were heavy-handed. They also illustrate that the FBI gave the plaintiffs every opportunity to set their minds at rest, and instead the plaintiffs first failed to call when they said they would, then got attorneys to call on their behalf without their having been accused of anything.
If the FBI had a genuine concern given the telephone calls they had received, then the plaintiffs could have set their minds at rest. The easy answer to the question "where did you get the tape" is, "I made it, it's fictional". The easy solution to the problem was to indicate that this was a work of fiction on the front page.
The plaintiff compares his film genre to "War of the Worlds", and everyone knows that that caused serious panic. From the FBI's point of view, if that lopoked like it was going to reoccur, I can understand why they would want to put a stop to it.
Before I get flamed into oblivion - I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but in my honest opinion, the information we need hasn't been provided. We really need to know how heavy-handed and aggressive the FBI were, and all we have are statements telling us how 'worried' the plaintiffs were, not the exact words or even a decent level of detail regarding what they were threatened with. Is it possible they just overreacted to being called by the FBI?
To what extent is it irresponsible to imply that this tape depicting incited civil violence on Times Square originated in the military when that isn't true?
I'm a French-speaking Belgian, and I'll wager the average Frenchman or Belgian speaks much better English than his/her English-speaking counterpart speaks French.
Let's keep to the topic and avoid racist comments from the relative comfort of cowardly anonymity. They're not doing this because they're French, they're doing it because they're idiots, and if they are allowed to get away with it, so will everyone else, which means every company, no matter what language they speak, will be filing lawsuits based on the results of search engines.
PS. Don't use BabelFish to translate stuff into French unless you know enough French to check the output, it makes lots of silly mistakes.
PPS. I can't believe someone moderated the previous post up as being funny.
Disclaimer : What follows may be interpreted by some as pro-Microsoft. I will not be held responsible for loss of hair, premature senility or any loss of earnings arising from unconsciousness due to anxiety attacks.
I'm all for more competition, and I agree with dsplat that Microsoft should be allowed to compete in this sector. Just because Priceline defined the market niche doesn't mean that they have exclusive access to it.
The economic model that has been applied to cases like this is always the same - the incumbent (that would be Priceline) have the chance to establish a significant competitive advantage through experience by going as far down the learning curve as they can, as fast as they can, for that period of time in which they are the only company in the niche. They have a chance to build a real brand name for themselves and negotiate excellent arrangements with parallel businesses since they are the only ones in the market.
When competitors come in, the incumbent should protect their market share by being more competitive and by paying their employees enough to prevent competitors from "jumping" the learning curve by poaching experts.
More and more, we seem to find that just because something is done on the internet means that people feel justified in patenting entire business sectors. Some of them potentially extremely profitable. This is to the consumer's detriment.
Competition is cool - I checked out lastminute.com, priceline.com and expedia.com for my trip home this Xmas. Expedia came up with the cheapest ticket by far. This has nothing to do with copying other people's business, but with negotiating better arrangements with air travel suppliers. Are we actually saying that Expedia should not be allowed to offer me that ticket over the internet because another company thought of using that medium first? Where does that leave me? Patents exist to allow companies to recoup development and R&D costs, not to fleece customers and generate extraordinary profits. Having to buy a more expensive ticket because other companies are not allowed to offer that ticket price over the medium I am using is anti-consumer, anti-competitive and economically retarded.
Of course I didn't use the "name your price" model, but had I used that, it would have been a question of who had the least expensive tickets, and Priceline may still have lost. The next step is to allow robots to pick the cheapest flight prices across all internet suppliers and present those to me - then the consumer really would have near-perfect information and the tables would, in effect, be turned. The airlines would have to bid each other down for passengers, rather than passengers bidding each other up for tickets. Cool.
I work in the UK, and I for one hate the fact that a very large chunk of my salary goes to income tax - then what's left seems to get divided between Council Tax (residential), Road Tax, Value Added Tax, Fuel Tax and so on. Then when I die, they take between 40 and 60% of what is left in inheritance tax, depending on which country I happen to be a resident in at the time. So on a gut level, seeing that so much of the money I earn actually goes to the government, I have a very allergic reaction to taxes in general.
I agree that a "long hard look" at taxes and spending would be a good thing - but I wouldn't go into the discussion from an individualist point of view, saying that taxes need to be cut - I'd go in from an economists point of view, looking for the ideal amount of spending on those things that add the most value to the economy and the people. If in the end that means taxing less, so much the better, if not, then the money will be spent on something more worthwhile (and hopefully more efficiently).
On the other hand, I'm not as cynical about what that tax is spent on as many of the people on Slashdot seem to be. Whilst I enjoy a good consipracy theory as much as the next man, I can't say that I really think the government exists to exploit me (possibly with the help of LGM). I look around me here in the UK or in my native country in Europe, and I see a lot of good things being done with the money earned from taxes. I find that your point of view is expressed a little too strongly... I don't pay tax on my online shopping, shouldn't I then be free from sales tax when I buy in a regular store? If not, why?
Taxes are collected at the point of sale because as far as the budget for the state is concerned, that money is needed. If they stop taxing there, they have to either tax elsewhere or cease spending somewhere, and since they're never going to get agreement on what they ought to cut/tax, it's not a realistic option for them. That previous sentence can be debated forever as we could go through all the different taxes and areas of government spending and debate them all - the point I'm making isn't what's right or what's wrong, but that agreement will never be reached, so from a politician's point of view, it's not a can of worms they really want to open as it's not worth their while.
That having been said, how can it be considered fair to continue taxing non-internet shoppers whilst not taxing those who shop online. It would create a price disparity between online and physical stores and the owners of bricks-and-mortar businesses would have a very real complaint in terms of who is getting a favourable treatment - it's a hidden subsidy to online stores.
In the end of course, as in all things related to taxes, businesses will simply relocate to those areas which have favourable tax legislation in place, or shoppers will buy out-of-state so that they avoid in-state taxes. The problem will seem to go away, or it'll get accepted as the status quo, even if the government or states do nothing to solve it. It's another example of how the internet is making us re-think previously well-established rules.
If eBay want to claim trespass whenever they get connected to by someone who wants to use their information for profit, then they should become a Closed User Group, and require registration before showing potential customers any details of auction bids or available items. Many sites already do this.
I know this would be a blow to their business, but you have to be straight about things like this. If you want the privacy afforded by required registration and password protection, then implement and enforce it - the technology is there and if you have the ability to create an online bidding site, they you have the ability to password protect it from unauthorised access. Then you can claim unauthorised access. You can't claim unauthorised access (trespass) without having at least designed a system that attempts to enforce it - and I don't mean a wordly legal disclaimer at the bottom of each page.
I really hope eBay lose this one - not through any dislike of them - they're web pioneers and I respect that - but because I think that in this case, they aren't playing fair.
What do you mean "No debate needed"?
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Planet Gattaca
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· Score: 2
Heated debate, or debate at all, is not what is needed...
Eh? What are you on about? Setting the actual subject matter aside for a moment and looking at any scientific advance we have made in the past, or are making at the moment, public debate among groups such as/. is exactly what is needed.
Encryption and those technologies that allow eavesdropping raise major issues in the field of privacy, and I consider myself extremely lucky to be part of a debate in which I benefit from the input of many who know so much more about it than I do. Even from my technically less competent standpoint, I have ethical and social input into the conversation. Privacy is just one example.
Coming back now to the matter in hand, we've got in the first few minutes of this article's existence, a bunch of statements that provoke thought, a couple of scare stories and a bunch of neanderthals posting "first-post" and flamebait nonsense.
This article is heavily biased towards the "it's such a terrible idea" side of the argument that it doesn't really provide a solid base for the discussion and it's provoked a bunch of criticisms of Jon Katz, this is not really a good thing, because it distracts from the debate.
What is clear is that whilst it is very unlikely that comparisons such as "Gattaca" are spot-on, they serve to illustrate the kind of fears that some individuals may have.
Personally, I don't think we're doing ourselves any favours by using Frankenstein's Monster and Gattaca as references in this discussion, because they shape the way we think, and we end up debating how close or far from reality they might be, what a logical extension of the storylines might lead to, and how terrible that really is. Much more interesting would be a less hysterical discussion of the pros, cons, benefits and costs of the use of such technology, steering clear where possible (at least at first) of comparisons with deities from various religions and panic attacks regarding races of clones genetically engineered to buy from Microsoft etc. I'd have hoped that a site whose tagline is "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" would be capable of
1. Seeing with excitement the possibilities of such technology. 2. Coherently arguing the case for and against without resorting to religion. 3. Not leaping to the worst possible conclusion every time. 4. Providing clear informed discussion on the real, tangible and likely risks.
Sorry if that sounds combative, it isn't meant to be, but most of the articles I initially read either criticised the original author, or leaped so far to one side or the other of the argument as to add very little other than a little more panic to the debate. Apologies to the two or three very notable exceptions.
They sent you 5 dollars and you treated it as spam? Admittedly you're not going to buy much for $5, but when Amazon sent me $10 to spend a few months ago, I spent it on a book I would have bought from somewhere else because it was cheaper with $10 off, even if I had to get it shipped surface from the USA to the UK! The only downside was the 4 week wait!
Behaviour & style determine if you're a criminal
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Caught Before the Act
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Slashdot Mirror
It sets itself up as a proxy on your computer, and you have to configure netscape or IE to route through it, but it runs in the background and doesn't slow you down. It also hides the more obvious identification gizmos thrown at servers every time you request a page, and can be configured to prevent certain banners from loading (you get a broken image icon if it's just an image, and a "junkbusters" message if its in a layer).
It's free, it's small, it's simple and it seems to be making lots of people happy, although I don't use it because it disagrees with some of the proprietary software on my work computer.
Putting aside for a minute the finer points of law, freedom, the Constitution (which doesn't apply on this side of the Atlantic anyway) and all the rest of the very valid points made to date on this subject.....
We have had VHS for many years, and the VHS market is very lucrative. A great deal of good films are made and a certain amount are surely pirated, but in essence, we have two points, one is protected by law, established practice and common sense, and the other is borne out as evidenced by the behaviour of the major film-making companies over time:
1. We can copy our own purchases. No-one is allowed to stop us making copies of work that we have legitimately purchased provided we don't go round selling or exchanging or giving those copies away. (Please don't drown me in the legal rephrasing of what I just said - I know the law but I'm trying to remain in cleartext here).
2. The various companies that make up the MPAA have been making interesting and lucrative profits from the sale of videotapes for many years. It is well known that many films that bomb disastarously at the movies end up breaking even or better by virtue of video rentals and sales. The presence of a certain number of illegitimate copies has not prevented the market from being lucrative, and even though it is child's play to make copies of videotapes, sales have remained buoyant and even grown year-on-year.
The arrival of CSS on DVD is an attempt to reverse the current ability that people have to make copies, but to make it illegal to make copies presupposes the purpose of the individual making them, and that has been covered in a previous case where it was clearly established that people had a legal right to make copies for their own purposes.
Now I know that almost everyone reading this already knew all of that, but for some reason, it never seems to come across clearly in the articles that I read on this subject. People allude to it, journalists almost certainly know it if they have been doing their research, and yet the point is never clearly made.
That pisses me off, because it's a freedom that I want protected, even if I don't use it for films, because I have every intention of making digital quality audio compilations for my car and my walkman/discman/whatever.
They probably attach more value to knowing who's surfing what so they can do something about it than just blocking content. If everything goes through a proxy, they can tell which way most of it is going. Without going to paranoid extremes and imagining dawn raids on alleged internet subversives, I find that the possibility that they are cataloguing hits to sites and probably matching names to surfers more worrying than just the blocking of content.
This bit on Workfactor Reduction Fields in the European Parliament report that was referred to in the article came as a blow - even though I knew it to be true already.
Just for my peace of mind, could a few technically competent individuals please reassure me once again about how secure my 4096-bit PGP key is please?
It's all the more interesting when you think that the valuation of all the internet stocks rely upon the continued growth of internet commerce, and that relies on people sending credit card information over the internet. I find it hard to believe that the current versions of the browsers do not have back doors built into them.
Now if I delete my cookies, then log back into Freeserve or another "doubleclick associate", even if they're not displaying doubleclick ads to me, the next time I do see a doubleclick ad, the doubleclick server will recognise an associates cookie in my cookies.txt file and go and ask that associate who I am. At that point, they can link up everything they learn about me now to all the knowledge they have accumulated in the past. This is why connecting that database has removed the privacy from internet surfing.
For privacy, you have to shun all cookies forever, and sites like Yahoo, the Motley Fool and Slashdot require cookies in order for their system to remember you're a member.
DoubleClick's Privacy Policy.
Information Collected in the Process of Delivering an ad by DoubleClick
Doub leClick "Opt-Out" Option (how-to)
info@doubleclick.net email address
It's not the DVD Video that was reverse engineered. It's the ROM-based software in the DVD Decoder that actually decodes the DVD in the first place, so under the provisions of the Act, it remains legal to reverse-engineer that, create a program (called DeCSS) that provides inter-operability with Linux, and distribute it.
Or am I wrong?
You're right - "I use Linux" was a bad example, but nevertheless, I think they will get away with saying that they do not have a monopoly over Operating Systems.
I suppose, using your analogy, I *do* use the rails, just not in their trains, so they do not have a monopoly over the rails. But that's a bit weak.
To be cynical (and I think it's quite accurate in this particular example): Regardless of whether or not they have an effective monopoly over the OS market, the point is arguable enough that the person with the better lawyers will win, and MS can afford the lawyers.
I just realised: that's really depressing.
This already happens, the problem is one person is throwing a barrage of ridicule out at another, and the other is responding in kind - a flame war in the truest sense.
Who decides who was right to flame the other, because basically a barrage of criticism is just group flamethrowing. What we've got is one idiot posting something abusive, then someone will reply with something suitably put-down-ish, and then all hell will break loose, with individuals complaining about their right to express whatever, and self-righteous flamers flaming the original poster and thinking that it's legit because they did something wrong first.
It'll all degenerate into a "but he started it" situation. Maybe A.C.s should start calling CmdrTaco "Mum" or something, at least it would give him the moral authority to send people to their rooms.
I for one hate it when a large company squashes a small but legitimate company by using it's trademark rights. That's old news and we all know where we stand on that.
On the other hand, if Microsoft decide to tread heavily on "www.microsoftexperts.com" because it's really a fanatsy website promoting illicit massage in Seattle, I'm not going to stop them. In fact, I think it's their right - it's an abuse of the name, and whilst the legalese for this is, "Erodes the built-up goodwill of the brand name", the translation is really, "I built a respectable product and you're abusing it's name and that pisses me off." I can understand that point of view and I will disagree with anyone criticising Microsoft for shutting down the site in this example. (PS It is a ficticious example and I am not an MS fan/employee so please get your rottweiler off my leg).
Linus clearly states that where a precise use of the trademark is requested he has no problem authorising it, in fact, authorisation may not even be required. This is a good thing.
If I start up a company that works in the Linux community or supports Linux users, I don't want to find that my Virtual next door neighbour with a very similar address is actually the internet equivalent of a brothel with the same brand name as me if I think this will cause me to lose customers or the ability to keep my company afloat.
If I had shares in any company, I'd be somewhat peeved at the existence of unrelated companies calling themselves the same thing as me, if their existence had a negative impact on the potential future of the company I am a part-owner of. I think that's a legitimate attitude, and where the law allows it, I'll encourage the management of my company to go do something about it. I want my customers to know what they're getting.
In Linux's case, the brand name is owned by Linus, but his attitude to it makes it as if it was owned by the community. He allows us all to use it as we wish providing it takes nothing away from others. I like that, I think it should be encouraged.
I think that the reason people feel free to say what they want is because the communications are not transparent. The veil of anonymity rarely, if ever, gets lifted. Most people go by pseudonyms, meaning that even those who don't post as A.Coward are nevertheless effectively invisible. If you don't have to stand by your opinions, it always makes it that much easier to give all the thoughts and emotions that others would find offensive (probably because they are offensive) a voice.
I think there's an audience effect here too. Slashdot's Karma is an extreme example, but in general, individuals are aware that a very large number of people could potentially read their message, and the arguments therefore often degenerate into point scoring. All too often you find someone making a really good point, and people trying to get kudos by following up on it with meaningless precisions and additional bits of technical trivia that are irrelevant to the point the original poster was trying to make.
All that does is make the original poster look semi-ignorant because someone followed-up with a short message correcting some irrelevant details. You see this all the time, and you have to wonder why people avoid the main point of the argument and post a useless correction - I believe it's this point scoring ethos: "If I can contradict or correct someone who's written such a good post, then people will think I'm cooler than they are."
Ok, so I'm exagerrating a little, but it's the general emotion the poster is feeling that I'm referring to, not the specific dialog.
Is Windows a market or a product? They claim that the Operating System market is not their monopoly, and they're right - I use Linux. Windows is not a market as such, just a specific GUI wrapped around an Operating System with a bunch of embedded/associated software. (not 100% accurate, but it'll do).
On the other hand, what we have is a market for OSs where the most high-margin section of the market is tied to Windows. This is not because they have the ability to squash competitors with anti-competitive practices (although they do have this ability). They used their market power (possibly illegally) in the past to establish their market position, but at the moment, any company wanting to set up a few hundred workstations for employees from financial accountants to marketeers will inevitably buy PCs with pre-loaded Windows. This is because all of their suppliers, all of their customers and all of their subcontractors will also use Windows, and will want to exchange files with them. It's because when they get consultants in, the employees have to be able to work with the consultants on the same software. It's because the accounting software they want to use comes on Windows, not Linux, because the manufacturer of that software knows that Windows is the only sigificant market when it comes to large volumes of sales. It's because there is a very large pool of Windows-aware skilled individuals out there, and computer literacy is important when you are recruiting.
Nothing would please me more than to see Linux begin to erode the mountain that is Microsoft's entrenched market position, but there is a long road ahead.
I agree. The point of the article seems to be that Linux will be good for Windows because given the way M!crosoft now focus on litigation and marketing, their software standards are slipping. He thinks that the existence of Linux will provide the kind of competition that will turn M!crosoft into a company that produces reliable, stable, user-friendly, high-powered, value-adding software (enough with the buzzwords, I know) that actually lives up to it's marketing hype.
He's right. The more successful Linux is, the more likely it is to provoke it's competitors into raising their standard and evolving their software into something far better than 3.1, 95 or 98. Win2000 (although I know very little about it) seems to be the first step in that direction. Linux will have to become more user friendly, and will have to support more hardware etc etc etc, because the better it gets, the more it's competitors will try to compete with it.
Every strength that Linux has, from stability to the versatility of it's X-Windows GUI, is probably already the focus of a Windows project team deciding how to best surpass that particular feature in Windows 2001. No matter what you think of M!crosoft, they're a powerful company that's used to competing on a difficult playing field. Their tactics aren't always totally above the belt, but don't let that lull you into believing that they can't produce some very good products when provoked into proper competition. They're not nice, but they're not incompetent either.
I read a good book on the subject which I think should be recommended reading to all conspiracy/"aliens on earth"/"unproven scientific hypothesis" buffs out there : Carl Sagan, "The Demon Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark". Although there's plenty in there to disagree with, he makes some excellent logical points of how incredible science already is without having to invent hypotheses based upon almost negligable circumstancial evidence, with no scientific rigor, and convincing ourselves it's true.
In this case, we go from "bacteria can survive acceleration and radiation" to "therefore life may have originated on Mars", (Ok, and the circumstances make it possible). The ability to survive such extreme conditions is probably why it survived on Earth in the first place. They choose to focus on the most fantastic possibilities, how are we to maintain our scientific objectivity when those who are our "proxies" and report the science to us focus on the aspects of the discoveries that are the closest to our fantasies and fail to report any other possible explantions for their discoveries before they have even begun the task of elimination.
Ok, perhaps I'm being a bit extreme here, but I just think we should rule out the probable and the likely before we start believing in the highly improbable, even if the fantasy stories sell so well.
It's been discontinued for a while now. And it was the subject of a lawsuit not too long ago because someone claimed that the dance was copyrighted or something. They're showing the one with the horses in the waves at the beach and the surfers now.
And since it didn't pretend to be in some way factual, you can go and see it without jumping out of your skin every time someone in a suit wants to ask you a couple of questions.
This is precisely what should be avoided. We should always be prepared to extend the same priviledgesin terms of judgement to others as we expect to be extended to us, be they individuals or organisations, governmental or otherwise. Otherwise we are nothing but hypocrites.
The "get a warrant" approach is the traditional "you're the FBI therefore I hate you until you are sent on a mission from God himself" approach, but you're ignoring the point of my post. I'll repeat it : look at it from their point of view.
You're looking at legal rights to free speech, let's also look at legal responsibilities of the FBI. If they are aware that a level of hysteria is building around a phenomenon such as this video, and they do nothing, or they have to put up with civil lack of co-operation and are delayed beyond 31st December as a consquence, and a riot breaks out on Times Square provoked or not by this information, what will the post-mortem of the event look like? Let's take another traditional "everything is the FBIs fault" approach: The FBI were aware that a certain uncertain number of people were concerned by their belief that something nasty was going to happen on Times Square on New Years. They did nothing, pleading "constitutional inability to act". Only two conclusions are possible:
1. It was their fault because they should have done something. But you've already discounted that argument because you disagree with giving them the power to do something about it in the first place by denying them any information whatsoever, so for all they know. it really is a plot!
2. They didn't have the necessary power to prevent it. This is something we would want prevented in future. Therefore we give them the power to prevent it in the future. So by standing up so obnoxiously and uncooperatively for your civil rights, you've actually managed to reduce them by demonstrating that their misuse can lead to civil unrest for no apparent reason, and cause the potential loss of life.
Either way, the protagonists of the film still come off as the bad guys and the FBI still come across as the people working in the dark with no information trying to prevent a potential catastrophe, with no cooperation from a group of people disseminating falsehoods whilst claiming they are the truth.
On a related point, isn't misrepresentation a crime of some sort in the States? If you claim you believe something came from the army, and it didn't, and you knew it didn't, is that not in some way prosecutable? What about inciting to riot?
Given the way the events are described (by the plaintiff), they imply but do not state that the FBI were heavy-handed. They also illustrate that the FBI gave the plaintiffs every opportunity to set their minds at rest, and instead the plaintiffs first failed to call when they said they would, then got attorneys to call on their behalf without their having been accused of anything.
If the FBI had a genuine concern given the telephone calls they had received, then the plaintiffs could have set their minds at rest. The easy answer to the question "where did you get the tape" is, "I made it, it's fictional". The easy solution to the problem was to indicate that this was a work of fiction on the front page.
The plaintiff compares his film genre to "War of the Worlds", and everyone knows that that caused serious panic. From the FBI's point of view, if that lopoked like it was going to reoccur, I can understand why they would want to put a stop to it.
Before I get flamed into oblivion - I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but in my honest opinion, the information we need hasn't been provided. We really need to know how heavy-handed and aggressive the FBI were, and all we have are statements telling us how 'worried' the plaintiffs were, not the exact words or even a decent level of detail regarding what they were threatened with. Is it possible they just overreacted to being called by the FBI?
To what extent is it irresponsible to imply that this tape depicting incited civil violence on Times Square originated in the military when that isn't true?
Let's keep to the topic and avoid racist comments from the relative comfort of cowardly anonymity. They're not doing this because they're French, they're doing it because they're idiots, and if they are allowed to get away with it, so will everyone else, which means every company, no matter what language they speak, will be filing lawsuits based on the results of search engines.
PS. Don't use BabelFish to translate stuff into French unless you know enough French to check the output, it makes lots of silly mistakes.
PPS. I can't believe someone moderated the previous post up as being funny.
I'm all for more competition, and I agree with dsplat that Microsoft should be allowed to compete in this sector. Just because Priceline defined the market niche doesn't mean that they have exclusive access to it.
The economic model that has been applied to cases like this is always the same - the incumbent (that would be Priceline) have the chance to establish a significant competitive advantage through experience by going as far down the learning curve as they can, as fast as they can, for that period of time in which they are the only company in the niche. They have a chance to build a real brand name for themselves and negotiate excellent arrangements with parallel businesses since they are the only ones in the market.
When competitors come in, the incumbent should protect their market share by being more competitive and by paying their employees enough to prevent competitors from "jumping" the learning curve by poaching experts.
More and more, we seem to find that just because something is done on the internet means that people feel justified in patenting entire business sectors. Some of them potentially extremely profitable. This is to the consumer's detriment.
Competition is cool - I checked out lastminute.com, priceline.com and expedia.com for my trip home this Xmas. Expedia came up with the cheapest ticket by far. This has nothing to do with copying other people's business, but with negotiating better arrangements with air travel suppliers. Are we actually saying that Expedia should not be allowed to offer me that ticket over the internet because another company thought of using that medium first? Where does that leave me? Patents exist to allow companies to recoup development and R&D costs, not to fleece customers and generate extraordinary profits. Having to buy a more expensive ticket because other companies are not allowed to offer that ticket price over the medium I am using is anti-consumer, anti-competitive and economically retarded.
Of course I didn't use the "name your price" model, but had I used that, it would have been a question of who had the least expensive tickets, and Priceline may still have lost. The next step is to allow robots to pick the cheapest flight prices across all internet suppliers and present those to me - then the consumer really would have near-perfect information and the tables would, in effect, be turned. The airlines would have to bid each other down for passengers, rather than passengers bidding each other up for tickets. Cool.
I agree that a "long hard look" at taxes and spending would be a good thing - but I wouldn't go into the discussion from an individualist point of view, saying that taxes need to be cut - I'd go in from an economists point of view, looking for the ideal amount of spending on those things that add the most value to the economy and the people. If in the end that means taxing less, so much the better, if not, then the money will be spent on something more worthwhile (and hopefully more efficiently).
On the other hand, I'm not as cynical about what that tax is spent on as many of the people on Slashdot seem to be. Whilst I enjoy a good consipracy theory as much as the next man, I can't say that I really think the government exists to exploit me (possibly with the help of LGM). I look around me here in the UK or in my native country in Europe, and I see a lot of good things being done with the money earned from taxes. I find that your point of view is expressed a little too strongly... I don't pay tax on my online shopping, shouldn't I then be free from sales tax when I buy in a regular store? If not, why?
Taxes are collected at the point of sale because as far as the budget for the state is concerned, that money is needed. If they stop taxing there, they have to either tax elsewhere or cease spending somewhere, and since they're never going to get agreement on what they ought to cut/tax, it's not a realistic option for them. That previous sentence can be debated forever as we could go through all the different taxes and areas of government spending and debate them all - the point I'm making isn't what's right or what's wrong, but that agreement will never be reached, so from a politician's point of view, it's not a can of worms they really want to open as it's not worth their while.
That having been said, how can it be considered fair to continue taxing non-internet shoppers whilst not taxing those who shop online. It would create a price disparity between online and physical stores and the owners of bricks-and-mortar businesses would have a very real complaint in terms of who is getting a favourable treatment - it's a hidden subsidy to online stores.
In the end of course, as in all things related to taxes, businesses will simply relocate to those areas which have favourable tax legislation in place, or shoppers will buy out-of-state so that they avoid in-state taxes. The problem will seem to go away, or it'll get accepted as the status quo, even if the government or states do nothing to solve it. It's another example of how the internet is making us re-think previously well-established rules.
I know this would be a blow to their business, but you have to be straight about things like this. If you want the privacy afforded by required registration and password protection, then implement and enforce it - the technology is there and if you have the ability to create an online bidding site, they you have the ability to password protect it from unauthorised access. Then you can claim unauthorised access. You can't claim unauthorised access (trespass) without having at least designed a system that attempts to enforce it - and I don't mean a wordly legal disclaimer at the bottom of each page.
I really hope eBay lose this one - not through any dislike of them - they're web pioneers and I respect that - but because I think that in this case, they aren't playing fair.
Eh? What are you on about? Setting the actual subject matter aside for a moment and looking at any scientific advance we have made in the past, or are making at the moment, public debate among groups such as /. is exactly what is needed.
Encryption and those technologies that allow eavesdropping raise major issues in the field of privacy, and I consider myself extremely lucky to be part of a debate in which I benefit from the input of many who know so much more about it than I do. Even from my technically less competent standpoint, I have ethical and social input into the conversation. Privacy is just one example.
Coming back now to the matter in hand, we've got in the first few minutes of this article's existence, a bunch of statements that provoke thought, a couple of scare stories and a bunch of neanderthals posting "first-post" and flamebait nonsense.
This article is heavily biased towards the "it's such a terrible idea" side of the argument that it doesn't really provide a solid base for the discussion and it's provoked a bunch of criticisms of Jon Katz, this is not really a good thing, because it distracts from the debate.
What is clear is that whilst it is very unlikely that comparisons such as "Gattaca" are spot-on, they serve to illustrate the kind of fears that some individuals may have.
Personally, I don't think we're doing ourselves any favours by using Frankenstein's Monster and Gattaca as references in this discussion, because they shape the way we think, and we end up debating how close or far from reality they might be, what a logical extension of the storylines might lead to, and how terrible that really is. Much more interesting would be a less hysterical discussion of the pros, cons, benefits and costs of the use of such technology, steering clear where possible (at least at first) of comparisons with deities from various religions and panic attacks regarding races of clones genetically engineered to buy from Microsoft etc. I'd have hoped that a site whose tagline is "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" would be capable of
1. Seeing with excitement the possibilities of such technology.
2. Coherently arguing the case for and against without resorting to religion.
3. Not leaping to the worst possible conclusion every time.
4. Providing clear informed discussion on the real, tangible and likely risks.
Sorry if that sounds combative, it isn't meant to be, but most of the articles I initially read either criticised the original author, or leaped so far to one side or the other of the argument as to add very little other than a little more panic to the debate. Apologies to the two or three very notable exceptions.
They sent you 5 dollars and you treated it as spam? Admittedly you're not going to buy much for $5, but when Amazon sent me $10 to spend a few months ago, I spent it on a book I would have bought from somewhere else because it was cheaper with $10 off, even if I had to get it shipped surface from the USA to the UK! The only downside was the 4 week wait!
Ha! Thank you! I now feel a little less paranoid.