Well, seeing as this story is about the previous ruling being struck down (today) as opposed to an interim stay on the order being granted (5/15), it would seem that GOD_ALMIGHTY is looking a bit GOD_ALSTUPID right about now.
The shaking radiates in waves from the epicenter (which is deep in the earth, to boot), so there is rarely as much shaking at the epicenter as in surrounding cities. It's just that common epicenters get the side effect of skewed roads and cracked foundations from the fault motion.:)
Steganography is encoding something in another medium so as not to alter the carrier medium, like a watermark. What Aphex Twin did was to use a piece of software that converts graphics to sound (x, y, z = time, frequency, and intensity/volume) via an Inverse Fast-Fourier Transform. There is no encoding involved, the picture *is* the sound that you hear. Big difference.
The capability to deal with this already exists in Windows since Windows 95. If you've used the OS and ever uninstalled some random program, you might have come across a dialog box saying that the registry doesn't have a record of any other installed apps using a particular library, and whether you'd like to delete it. Sure they can have shared libraries for Microsoft components, but if they're not being used, then they can be zapped. This could foster more innovation if, say, someone took it upon themselves to design a better helpfile rendering engine. Simplistically, this is tantamount to replacing 'more' with 'less' in UNIXland.
I mean really, Microsoft has a huge R&D department (and budget), certainly they can come up with a good shared library management scheme that includes the ability to remove Microsoft's own libraries if the user wants to. And another thing, why can't Netscape take IE's place in HTML help? Do you know something we don't, or are you telling us that the sky may fall?
Why do people keep getting stuck on shortsighted speculation on what the demo would actually comprise? The point is not that "Embedded NT" should become the retail version of Windows, the point is that the modularity is possible. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to stipulate that it is infinitely impossible to cut the interdependencies in Windows (9x, 2k, XP), which is apparently not the case since they've already gone ahead and constructed an industrial version of this very idea. Perhaps the states realize that it wouldn't be as pretty as they'd like it to be, but it's certainly conceivable that the ability to install software - to take one missing feature - could be added to the existing modular codebase. And yes, applications might require rewrites, but it's nobody's contention that the changeover would be happening tomorrow.
Use a FreeBSD gateway machine with DUMMYNET. FreeBSD can be configured so that it: a) doesn't have to replace the existing firewall; and b) is invisible so it doesn't show up on traceroutes. This is so that clueful users are not tipped off in a way that lets them complain like pornhounds on a free NNTP service. DUMMYNET will let you set up bandwidth policies based on (groups of) IPs, ports, and more. Client subnets can have full bandwidth on port 80, but the gateway can shut them down to 28.8 on the P2P ports. The possibilities are really open in a situation like this, and any junk computer can be used.
I agree that this is the real story here. Microsoft isn't withdrawing their witnesses because their case is going so well, but because many of their witnesses are failing them badly. Can you imagine how juicy the testimony from Richard Fade, Head of OEM, would be? They're sick of giving the states free ammo.
Most likely because NIST members are not party-affiliated. These standards are being recognized as sources of pork, and it's a Congressperson's job to get involved in economic issues.
This is one of the reasons why customer support is so awful with high-tech products. In order to deal with the complexity, the companies have to simplify the situations in which they spend time helping customers. The troubleshooting scripts that the reps use are not designed to find out how they can help you, they are designed to find out if there's anything about your setup that they don't support. Said another way, tech support is not designed to help you, it is designed to determine how *not* to help you. This is the entire goal, which you will know if you've ever had a real problem. Real problems take much much longer to help with (days, weeks....), so to eliminate costs, the Customer Support architects try to eliminate as many ways of helping as possible.
Heh, I'm sure that conversation is from a verbatim transcript!
I also like how you draw no distinction between adware and spyware. If you don't go out of your way to tell the user what is being installed and what it does (if any additional functionality than what the 'parent' installation is for), then you are installing a trojan horse. Since you don't deign to say which company you work for, I'll take my examples from the majority of malware purveyors: the notification is buried in the EULA, if it's there at all. Line 45? Line 1284? How much of the Microsoft Office EULA did you read when you installed it? How about the OS EULA? "People like you" know full and well how often EULAs are read, because you don't read them either. This can be used against the user, requiring them to ask their government representatives for help or to turn to software like Ad-Aware when this fact is abused.
Go ahead and cry for user-hostile business models to be accepted without question, but know that it's not the user's responsibility to provide you with surreptitious income. Consider it civil disobedience against obfuscated EULAs.
There used to be a time when you could call up the phone company and get a person on the other end. No so anymore. Software companies are falling into line with other industries who have realized that fixed-costs are the easiest to trim. As profits gets slim, customer service gets slashed. Charming to the least.
It's not circumvention if the server no longer requires it. Think about it: The CD check is used by Blizzard servers to authenticate clients. Fine. If you want to play on Blizzard's servers, you need to have a valid CD Key. If you use some mechanism to fool Blizzard's servers into thinking that you have a valid key when you don't, then you are circumventing their checks and are conceivably in violation of the DMCA.
Now, if someone should create a server which allows all of the functionality of the Blizzard server *without* including a CD check, then this isn't circumvention. The clients do not require a unique CD key in order to play standalone (if there is a standalone mode, i don't know), so there is nothing in the server which is circumventing any existing functionality in the client. Think about it, Vivendi/Blizzard will have to convince the court that Bnetd is in violation of the DMCA for not including a particular feature.
So the onus is upon them to describe how leaving something out of a simulation (Bnetd is a Blizzard server-simulator) qualifies as a circumvention. If anything, Bnetd can argue pretty strongly that they are enabling interoperability. Sure, it's interoperability between warezed copies, but if warezed clients are the problem, then that's Vivendi/Universal's problem (though they'd probably be able to get the court to sympathize unless bnetd was proactive in heading them off at the pass).
Did it ever occur to you that some people care about things that you don't? Of course it's a TV show, but it's a TV show that a lot of people happen to like. Perhaps you can't relate to enjoying the twists in a story, but for long time fans it is something that they are capable of appreciating, and something that the writers use their craft to portray. Quit being a wet blanket.
It has nothing to do with respect or trading functionality for CPU cycles, it has to do with this malware being a big marketing experiment. Marketing is about manipulating the desires of potential customers, and straightforwardness and honesty is antithetical to manipulation.
This is the kind of thinking ahead that advocates need to learn. Some schmuck figures out how to patent DNA, and so as long as DNA is defined as personal information (there's a bio argument there someplace, methinks) anything in between DNA and faceless information will be fair game. Patents are the blueprints of all western capitalist business models (well, and copyright...which sits atop both patents and no-longer-patented concepts). There has to be a way to head them off at the pass the way they've painted personal information into a corner.
So, perhaps what we need to find out is: How can an individual make it so their personal information is considered to be Intellectual Property? I suppose you'd have to not give it up voluntarily, but maybe there's something there.:)
Hah, well since Andersen Accounting is getting off scot free in the Enron disaster, I'd say we have a long way to go before we achieve parity (surveillance requires a court order, bait-cars do not). There's a huge difference between one person not being able to get to work because their car was stolen, and 1,000 people not being able to get to work because their job was thrown away by some shady executive.
You sure don't see many technological innovations being directed at automated crimefighting in boardrooms. Those boardmembers sure hate the idea that someone would inconvenience them by taking their stupid car, though.
The line is drawn at concepts. You yourself say that there are two elements in this bill to address a concern. The legislator's job is to deal with bills, of which I think we both can agree that it's possible to split this one into two. It's the *politician's* job to alleviate the concern that you mention, which the "one law at a time" concept is designed to address. Focusing on concerns rather than the laws is the way that bad laws are passed and the corrupt prevail. It certainly is much easier to get the same fame from fewer votes, each of which hides a multitude of backscratching reacharounds.
Better still, if they had the principles they say they do, they would sue Gateway for Contributory Infringement. Perhaps they can get a precedent for "Inciting to Infringe".
Slashdot Mirror
Well, seeing as this story is about the previous ruling being struck down (today) as opposed to an interim stay on the order being granted (5/15), it would seem that GOD_ALMIGHTY is looking a bit GOD_ALSTUPID right about now.
The shaking radiates in waves from the epicenter (which is deep in the earth, to boot), so there is rarely as much shaking at the epicenter as in surrounding cities. It's just that common epicenters get the side effect of skewed roads and cracked foundations from the fault motion. :)
Steganography is encoding something in another medium so as not to alter the carrier medium, like a watermark. What Aphex Twin did was to use a piece of software that converts graphics to sound (x, y, z = time, frequency, and intensity/volume) via an Inverse Fast-Fourier Transform. There is no encoding involved, the picture *is* the sound that you hear. Big difference.
The capability to deal with this already exists in Windows since Windows 95. If you've used the OS and ever uninstalled some random program, you might have come across a dialog box saying that the registry doesn't have a record of any other installed apps using a particular library, and whether you'd like to delete it. Sure they can have shared libraries for Microsoft components, but if they're not being used, then they can be zapped. This could foster more innovation if, say, someone took it upon themselves to design a better helpfile rendering engine. Simplistically, this is tantamount to replacing 'more' with 'less' in UNIXland.
I mean really, Microsoft has a huge R&D department (and budget), certainly they can come up with a good shared library management scheme that includes the ability to remove Microsoft's own libraries if the user wants to. And another thing, why can't Netscape take IE's place in HTML help? Do you know something we don't, or are you telling us that the sky may fall?
Why do people keep getting stuck on shortsighted speculation on what the demo would actually comprise? The point is not that "Embedded NT" should become the retail version of Windows, the point is that the modularity is possible. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to stipulate that it is infinitely impossible to cut the interdependencies in Windows (9x, 2k, XP), which is apparently not the case since they've already gone ahead and constructed an industrial version of this very idea. Perhaps the states realize that it wouldn't be as pretty as they'd like it to be, but it's certainly conceivable that the ability to install software - to take one missing feature - could be added to the existing modular codebase. And yes, applications might require rewrites, but it's nobody's contention that the changeover would be happening tomorrow.
Use a FreeBSD gateway machine with DUMMYNET. FreeBSD can be configured so that it: a) doesn't have to replace the existing firewall; and b) is invisible so it doesn't show up on traceroutes. This is so that clueful users are not tipped off in a way that lets them complain like pornhounds on a free NNTP service. DUMMYNET will let you set up bandwidth policies based on (groups of) IPs, ports, and more. Client subnets can have full bandwidth on port 80, but the gateway can shut them down to 28.8 on the P2P ports. The possibilities are really open in a situation like this, and any junk computer can be used.
I agree that this is the real story here. Microsoft isn't withdrawing their witnesses because their case is going so well, but because many of their witnesses are failing them badly. Can you imagine how juicy the testimony from Richard Fade, Head of OEM, would be? They're sick of giving the states free ammo.
Most likely because NIST members are not party-affiliated. These standards are being recognized as sources of pork, and it's a Congressperson's job to get involved in economic issues.
This is one of the reasons why customer support is so awful with high-tech products. In order to deal with the complexity, the companies have to simplify the situations in which they spend time helping customers. The troubleshooting scripts that the reps use are not designed to find out how they can help you, they are designed to find out if there's anything about your setup that they don't support. Said another way, tech support is not designed to help you, it is designed to determine how *not* to help you. This is the entire goal, which you will know if you've ever had a real problem. Real problems take much much longer to help with (days, weeks....), so to eliminate costs, the Customer Support architects try to eliminate as many ways of helping as possible.
Heh, I'm sure that conversation is from a verbatim transcript!
I also like how you draw no distinction between adware and spyware. If you don't go out of your way to tell the user what is being installed and what it does (if any additional functionality than what the 'parent' installation is for), then you are installing a trojan horse. Since you don't deign to say which company you work for, I'll take my examples from the majority of malware purveyors: the notification is buried in the EULA, if it's there at all. Line 45? Line 1284? How much of the Microsoft Office EULA did you read when you installed it? How about the OS EULA? "People like you" know full and well how often EULAs are read, because you don't read them either. This can be used against the user, requiring them to ask their government representatives for help or to turn to software like Ad-Aware when this fact is abused.
Go ahead and cry for user-hostile business models to be accepted without question, but know that it's not the user's responsibility to provide you with surreptitious income. Consider it civil disobedience against obfuscated EULAs.
There used to be a time when you could call up the phone company and get a person on the other end. No so anymore. Software companies are falling into line with other industries who have realized that fixed-costs are the easiest to trim. As profits gets slim, customer service gets slashed. Charming to the least.
They aren't the best resolution, but IBM made (makes?) tons of 9" VGA's for POS systems. They aren't hard to find.
And some chump like this kid is just the perfect person to use to deal with this once and for all.
The thing is that this would be the perfect opportunity *not* to settle and to get a trial judgement on them.
It's not circumvention if the server no longer requires it. Think about it: The CD check is used by Blizzard servers to authenticate clients. Fine. If you want to play on Blizzard's servers, you need to have a valid CD Key. If you use some mechanism to fool Blizzard's servers into thinking that you have a valid key when you don't, then you are circumventing their checks and are conceivably in violation of the DMCA.
Now, if someone should create a server which allows all of the functionality of the Blizzard server *without* including a CD check, then this isn't circumvention. The clients do not require a unique CD key in order to play standalone (if there is a standalone mode, i don't know), so there is nothing in the server which is circumventing any existing functionality in the client. Think about it, Vivendi/Blizzard will have to convince the court that Bnetd is in violation of the DMCA for not including a particular feature.
So the onus is upon them to describe how leaving something out of a simulation (Bnetd is a Blizzard server-simulator) qualifies as a circumvention. If anything, Bnetd can argue pretty strongly that they are enabling interoperability. Sure, it's interoperability between warezed copies, but if warezed clients are the problem, then that's Vivendi/Universal's problem (though they'd probably be able to get the court to sympathize unless bnetd was proactive in heading them off at the pass).
Plus, he's not evil (which is some tongue-in-cheek joke to him, obviously). He's just inconsiderate. Plain insensitive.
Did it ever occur to you that some people care about things that you don't? Of course it's a TV show, but it's a TV show that a lot of people happen to like. Perhaps you can't relate to enjoying the twists in a story, but for long time fans it is something that they are capable of appreciating, and something that the writers use their craft to portray. Quit being a wet blanket.
It has nothing to do with respect or trading functionality for CPU cycles, it has to do with this malware being a big marketing experiment. Marketing is about manipulating the desires of potential customers, and straightforwardness and honesty is antithetical to manipulation.
This is the kind of thinking ahead that advocates need to learn. Some schmuck figures out how to patent DNA, and so as long as DNA is defined as personal information (there's a bio argument there someplace, methinks) anything in between DNA and faceless information will be fair game. Patents are the blueprints of all western capitalist business models (well, and copyright...which sits atop both patents and no-longer-patented concepts). There has to be a way to head them off at the pass the way they've painted personal information into a corner.
So, perhaps what we need to find out is: How can an individual make it so their personal information is considered to be Intellectual Property? I suppose you'd have to not give it up voluntarily, but maybe there's something there. :)
Hah, well since Andersen Accounting is getting off scot free in the Enron disaster, I'd say we have a long way to go before we achieve parity (surveillance requires a court order, bait-cars do not). There's a huge difference between one person not being able to get to work because their car was stolen, and 1,000 people not being able to get to work because their job was thrown away by some shady executive.
You sure don't see many technological innovations being directed at automated crimefighting in boardrooms. Those boardmembers sure hate the idea that someone would inconvenience them by taking their stupid car, though.
The line is drawn at concepts. You yourself say that there are two elements in this bill to address a concern. The legislator's job is to deal with bills, of which I think we both can agree that it's possible to split this one into two. It's the *politician's* job to alleviate the concern that you mention, which the "one law at a time" concept is designed to address. Focusing on concerns rather than the laws is the way that bad laws are passed and the corrupt prevail. It certainly is much easier to get the same fame from fewer votes, each of which hides a multitude of backscratching reacharounds.
Better still, if they had the principles they say they do, they would sue Gateway for Contributory Infringement. Perhaps they can get a precedent for "Inciting to Infringe".
Now, unless you can show that IRC is NOT providing a forum for such activities, your post is, for all practical purposes, useless.
Yet another poster who needs to be beaten with the cluestick...badly. You can't prove a negative.