Best Buy *does* install it for you. Admittedly, they charge an additional $150, but hey, we're still less than The Microsoft OS price (sans installation!) here. No muss, no fuss, no Microsoft.
It's amazing to me how often you anti-Microsoft fanbois will flip-flop as soon as something comes along that looks like it might actually do what you've been bitching about needing done for years. "Giant Electronic Bra", you're now in the same category with the jerkwad from a few months back who was bitching about Windows users coming over to Linux and "fucking up the gene pool" of users.
For a decade and a half, you've been screaming each year about how this might be the year of Linux on the desktop. Now that it's actually upon us, you're whining about the distribution channels? What is wrong with you?!?
The drive-by-wire cars were discontinued (rejected) because of the lack of feedback; the driver felt disconnected from the driving. It appears that we humans like to have something push back when we do stuff.
I wish I could find the article again where I read that, I hate not citing things.
I appreciate the pointers, but it really isn't an issue. I come home from work, turn on my pc, wait 30 seconds, log in, then I go make a plate of food and/or change out of my work clothes. I am typically greeted a few minutes later by the announcement that Avast has updated itself, usually just before I sit down to start playing whatever time-wasting interactive activity I'm playing this week. It's not in the way, and the only time it's really annoying is if I leave my pc on all day (meaning that it gets a second update when I'm not expecting it), and happen to be watching a movie when it goes off (when I have the volume cranked so I can hear the movie).
Like I said, it's such a small issue, I won't bother fixing it. To be honest, a more pressing concern in my mind is "Why does most, if not all, DVD playing software for Windows seem to have a volume deficiency, requiring me to crank the volume to maximum if I want to sit on the couch instead of at my desk?"
Hmmm. expecting someone corporate to be held properly accountable for misdeeds these days?
Unfortunately, you are all too accurate in your assessment. If this were some kid in the 'burbs, there'd have been feds all over his neighborhood in days, if not hours. Corporations nowadays seem to have some sort of built-in immunity to ethics and accountability. The fact that it's extremely difficult to nail someone's ass to the wall for a corporation's misdeeds might have something to do with that.
Hmm. Now that I think about it, that seems to be an issue with the governmental structure, too.
I'm not going to say he wasn't a weasel... but the particular anecdote you were expressing was painting him in a bad light, when it didn't (in my mind, at least) need to.
And to be honest, I kinda liked Clinton. Seems to me we were doing a bit better under his administration than we are nowadays, not to mention that it appears the worst thing he did while in office was to get caught getting head from a chubby intern... unlike certain oil barons I could mention (and their children).
JPG has been a vulnerability in many pieces of software, there's stuff all over the net about it. Not that I've ever actually seen it "in the wild", mind you, but it is apparently an attack vector. It appears to be yet another buffer exploit.
What I'm trying to figure out why it's acceptable in Slashdot eyes to fake your user agent to get to a web site that otherwise won't let you in (a la many Opera users and online banking) for completely arbitrary reasons, but somehow when a company is doing it, it becomes unacceptable? The two aren't perfect parallels, I grant you, but still, it's laughable watching the anger here on this.
It's not about the user agent for me... it's about the DDoS. Smaller websites are getting knocked offline by this crap. Hell, Slashdot has had a 6% traffic spike.
I don't have any idea how many hits per day Slashdot gets, but I would estimate it as frikkin huge, and I know I wouldn't want 6% of their traffic landing on my site...
It's not the users' fault that AVG have gone and screwed the pooch.
I, for one, hope to see AVG go down in flames as they are sued into oblivion by the majority of websites inconvenienced by this distributed denial of service attack against the internet itself.
Sorry, but even a novice coder would know better than to have code that even pings an address, much less sends a text request for a large amount of text. Not in an application with a couple million users.
Personally, I don't see this as any different than the bot-nets that were all the rage a few years ago on irc. It seems to me that anyone inconvenienced by this attack should be calling the feds. Certainly anyone whose server was knocked down should be.
Civil court is fun (show me the money!), but this is criminal. Someone needs to have their sunlight taken away.
I've seen two suggestions: 1. vigilantism - embed a miniture iframe with a google search for 100 pages from their site in your site's footer and hurt them back ( they have to pay someone else ). I find this is a rather distasteful approach, ethically.
2.create some form of RBL list of user ip's that are using AVG and bounce them to a page with instructions on why and how to disable it. Which is just silly, really.
Or just bounce them from whatever they were *trying* to view to a page that explains that they are being banned from the site due to abuse, and explain why.
If enough people suddenly can't use the internet because their Antivirus providers are a bunch of ass hats, that should hit AVG in the pocketbook much harder than the bandwidth-hogging "vigilantism" approach laid out in "1", above.
I fully expect to see someone at AVG go to jail, anyway, (DDoS is a federal offense, and this is criminal negligence, at best). This will hopefully make them more wary of distributing fantastically broken code in the future.
Sorry if I seem like a hard ass, but it's not like this was an unforeseeable consequence of their actions.
Honestly, your post was kind of stupid and reactionary, and wasn't really worth replying to, but since it was also hyperbolic and wrong I decided I'd tell you.
How's this for reactionary? YOU ARE AN IDIOT. Since you were being hyperbolic and wrong, I thought I'd tell you.
What AVG is doing is illegal, and I hope they get sued into oblivion by each and every one of the sites suffering due to their ignorance and malice. I want to see whoever was ultimately responsible for this fiasco doing some hard time under the computer fraud and abuse act.
FACT: A distributed denial of service attack is a federal offense.
It's free as in beer, it auto-updates itself (seems like daily, or more often), and the only downside is the audio alert when it updates ("VIRUS DATABASE HAS BEEN UPDATED!" is shouted from your speakers). I should probably look for that option at some point, but it's so small an issue, I've never bothered.
When Clinton said "I did not have sex with that woman" he was telling the truth - under a very narrow definition of "sex".
You left out the part where the definition was given to him by the accusers, when he asked for clarification of the question. The way you say it, it makes him out to be some sort of weasel.
From what I am reading (I know, WTF am I doing actually R'ing TFA?), this isn't encryption in any sense of the word. It's hash comparison using random data. The blocks of data are not, in any way, related to the "stored" data. From what I can understand, a hash is generated using XOR against a random file block, based on some portion of the file you are "uploading". These blocks are then stored all over the place, and reused if they match someone else's (and it would seem they must, eventually... 128k is not an overwhelmingly huge address space). Each "node" (storage place) has its own unique identifier, and the blocks stored on it are referenced by other nodes to "store" the "inserted" data in the OFF.
From what I'm reading, this is either a really cool method of using up all those extra few gigs of space on everyone's hard drives (although "inserted" files triple in size, according to the wiki) which has nothing to do with copyright stuff (assuming you're not sharing the locator info), or this is just one more hoop to jump through in an attempt to keep the MAFIA (Movie And Film Industries of America) from noticing that your Brittney Spears collection is growing again. If the former, it's less than ideal. If the latter... well, at least Deep Packet Inspection (is that like a colonscopy for data?) won't be able to tell that you're pulling down mixes of "Oops I did it again" again. And, as other posters have stated... if you can show that the data you downloaded is actually a linux ISO and a video of you playing with your new dog in your own back yard, why does it matter that you can also convert it into a copy of that new blockbuster movie?
Obfuscation of a ubiquitous behavior seems like a poor solution, too. If the majority of people are doing it, why is it still a legal issue?
On the other hand, the wiki has this bit about how game patches could be distributed using just a little more bandwidth than the executable itself. I'm wondering if that's per download, or if it's a one-time bandwidth chunk.
In summary, the concept of a global network of data storage is pretty neat, but I think we will find in the end that this particular implementation is flawed... assuming it doesn't turn out to be just a hack to hide illegal activites from the authorities. Paradigm-changing new tech I'm interested in. Arms race, not so much. Fight copyright, not enforcement.
"why else would you post the instructions to make a bomb if you didn't intend people to know thus be able to act on it?"
If you had read the article I linked, you would have seen several reasons for giving someone instructions on how to build a bomb without expecting them to blow something up.
same argument the RIAA makes, different subject matter. works in RIAA kangaroo courts, but doesn't work here? oh please!
Ok, I have an issue. I don't understand what you meant by that. Please clarify, so I can tell whether it was supposed to somehow be a response to what I said in the parent post.
Not sure what religion has to do with this economics question.
Then you didn't read my post. I was pointing out the flaw in your argument, where you said that Imaginary Property was something that we made up, and so it did not need to be "believed in" in order to be considered real. In case I didn't make myself clear:
I disagree.
As for your questions...
Do you have an alternate proposal for incentivizing content creators?
If not, do you believe that software/books/movies/songs/etc. will be created by individuals for no compensation? Or by companies for no compensation?
When I was growing up, artists and musicians did what they did for the love of the music/art. Metallica went on MTV and said they would never make a music video because they "weren't in it for the money." Now they've alienated their fanbase by suing them for giving away their music, and they're pissed off about the lack of money in the equation. Nevermind that they went on TV in front of millions of people and lied. Seems to me that the artists need to figure out which way they're trying to be, and stick to it once they've chosen. This, of course, is just anecdotal evidence and meandering ranting, and is also totally off topic. Get off my lawn!
Back to the issue at hand.
Yes, I have an "alternate proposal" for "incentivizing content creators". I like to call it "cut out the middlemen who do no work, maximize your profits without raking your customers over the coals, and stop pinching everyone's wallets while whining about how you don't make any money because you only get 1% of the profit of each CD sold". It involves content creators posting their content for the world to enjoy, and asking for (non-specific amounts of) money. (As an aside, I'm typically insulted when people tell me I have to donate a specific amount of money. If I want to give you 50 cents for a single song, I should be able to. Don't tell me I have to give you $5 and take the whole disk!)
If this "economic model" seems surprising to you, then it would seem I need to point out to you that several big names are already doing it, as you can see with a little googling on the subject. To get you started, allow me to offer the following as potential search terms: "Nine Inch Nails", "Radiohead", "donation", "free music" It may interest you to learn that the results from these attempts have been successful (or at least, that's what I read). You may also be interested in Jonathan Coulton, who seems to be making quite a decent living by giving his stuff away for free.
Despite answering in the affirmative (and with proof!) and thus excusing myself from the "bonus questions", I will continue in this monologue, answering your second and third questions, too. Please note that the emphasis is mine.
The answers are simple and undeniable. Yes, I believe that software, books, movies, songs, etc. are being created by individuals for no direct financial compensation. Yes, I believe that software, books, movies, songs, etc. are being created by companies for no direct financial compensation. As proof, I offer up open source software (Linux, for example; The Apache Software Foundation, for another), free books (check out the Baen Free Library, or Project Gutenberg), free movies, free music, and the beginnings of an economic model that depends on having products and services that have more than just a financial value to the consumers and producers... which raises the questio
As a matter of fact, if you give someone a set of instructions for building a bomb with the intent of the recipient building a bomb with them, you can be fined $250,000 and spend 20 years in jail.
"IP" isn't something to believe in as if it exists on it's own. We made it up. But we made it up for a reason.
Are you claiming that there is a religion out there somewhere that wasn't "made up"? Truth be told, they were even "made up for a reason"... controlling the populace is a strong reason.
To continue my anti-religion analogy, think about the following... Q: What do you call a religion without followers? A: Mythology.
From what I've heard though, ATI/AMD isn't releasing their optimized drivers. They're releasing open source reference drivers. Yeah, like they're not going to be optimized in the open-source community. I'm looking forward to the day when the lightbulb comes on, and they outsource *all* their software development to the open-source community. All it would take is to implement a simple instruction set between the hardware and software, and then let the open-source community have the software end. Given the chance to tinker with a high-powered graphics card, I don't know many hackers who wouldn't *immediately* begin looking at it with higher framerates for their favorite game in mind, or producing better (higher-fps or higher-quality) video output from their favorite media player.
I don't think you understand. We didn't buy the printer for an Ubuntu box and find that it didn't work. We installed Ubuntu as dual-boot on a Windows PC and found that the existing Lexmark printer wouldn't work under Linux. I think you missed the point of the post you replied to. It said
one thing linux users can do is to buy things that don't work to return them to the vendor. When vendors will be tired of that, they will ask manufacturers to make drivers. I understood that to mean that we should go and purchase printers, "discover" that they don't work under Linux, and return them as defective because they do not function in our "OS of choice". This generates a loss for the vendor/distributor, which will either result in the vendor complaining to the manufacturer about their product's (lack of) compatibility, or will result in the vendor hitting the manufacturer in the pocketbook by ceasing to carry their products. Either way, it makes waves and gets our point across, without costing us anything in the end, as we get refunded the purchase price when we return the "defective" product.
Microsoft products don't force you to use more Microsoft products I'll guess you're not using Exchange (show me a F/OS piece of software that fully utilizes exchange without requiring OWA, and I'll give you a cookie), or surfing Microsoft's website looking for docs on their.NET framework ("Install Silverlight!" every third click, not to mention a signal-to-noise ratio of at least 4 to 1 in the docs themselves).
I'll guess you're also not running any of their server products (Active Directory, anyone?), or their web development environment (Apache doesn't do ASP, ya know).
If everyone would just leave Microsoft alone they'll likely destroy themselves - look at Vista. Well, that sounds all well and good, but Vista seems to have cleaned its act up quite a bit. The truth is, Vista is shaping up to be a decent OS, if you can ignore the graceless and ignorant "because they can" UI changes. I'm not saying it's the best out there, and I'd still rather use Ubuntu, but I'm getting a bit anti-Microsoft in my old age.
What it comes down to is this: Microsoft has the dominating market share, so they really can't lose. In addition, if Microsoft goes under (not likely, but walk down this path with me, if you would), so do all of their operating systems, office products, etc. That anti-piracy activation feature is also a dead-man switch. Don't believe me? Perform your yearly re-installs without any internet, and see how long you can use your system before it requires you to activate it before you can even log in (hint: 30 days).
I'm all for bashing Microsoft, but a little research goes a long way towards increasing one's credibility. Better luck with your FUD next time.
Your entire impassioned rant against my judgement and character, allegedly because I thought this scenario was a matter of life and death, was in fact based on a profound misunderstanding on your part.
Aha! Now I see my misunderstanding. I now stand corrected. We do appear to agree that this is not a matter of life and death. It appears we disagree on whether an imperfect solution is acceptable, based on life-or-death issues, though. To me, an imperfect solution is acceptable in a life-or-death issue only if "wasting" time coming up with a better solution would exacerbate the issue. In my opinion, a life-or-death scenario is the only situation where anything less than a perfect solution is acceptable. With (and because of) this reasoning, I believe we have entirely too many laws on the books, especially in today's surveillance society. I don't believe there is a single adult in the world who can truthfully say that they have not broken a law, ever. We have all jaywalked, or littered, or exceeded a speed limit, or committed any number of other infractions. Some municipalities have made it illegal to spit on the sidewalk on Sundays. Any other day of the week is fine, but not Sunday. Why?!?
But I digress.
It seems to me that the only thing we agree on when referring to this subject (consorship) is that this particular instance is not a matter of life and death. I think my main problem with this proposed solution is that it is censorship, followed closely by the issue that it is not a solution, not even a stopgap measure. If someone were to attempt to view pornographic material consisting of underage subjects, this would slow them down a little... assuming it was their first attempt to access it via the internet.
There are myriad arguments to be made, even on this one topic. Who decides whether the subjects are underage? The Christian Bible makes references to people getting married and having children just after puberty, or in some cases, before. This is a 2,000 year old document which millions of people base their morals on. Of course, it also says to stone people to death in the street, while simultaneously telling us to love our neighbors. The point I'm trying to make here is that different cultures have different ideas of "underage". To be honest, even the United States government can't decide at what point a person is an adult. We can't vote until we're 18, we can't drink until we're 21, but we can pilot a 2 ton weapon at speeds in excess of 60 mph as early as 15.
Again, this is an entirely separate issue, and I will try to steer my thoughts back to the topic at hand.
Allowing censorship in this instance opens the door to allowing third parties (in this case, not even the government!) to censor the media we consume. It's bad enough having to sift through spam (and if we're going to censor anything, let's start with that!) without having to wonder what information we aren't receiving, due to someone else attempting to guide our moral compass. I will say it again, in case anyone wants to take this out of context: I do not want to see kiddie porn. I also do not believe that someone who does want to see kiddie porn is going to be stymied by something as simple as a DNS hack.
Allowing a third party to censor this would be ridiculous. Thinking that this would be OK is absurd. It immediately brings to mind the question, "What else do we not know about due to someone's interference?", and suggests other queries, such as "Why should we trust someone else's judgement about whether or not we should view any particular media?", or "If this is so important, why is a corporation handling it instead of the government?" Disclaimer for those just tuning in: I am not suggesting the government should handle this, and am in fact radically opposed to censorship of any kind, for any reason.
susano_otter: If I attacked your character, I apologize. I feel very strongly about this subject, and may have let my
I'll reply here to another portion of your post that I find disagreeable.
You said:
Just because something only has a 99% success rate, that doesn't automatically mean we're on a slippery slope to a 1% success rate, or even an 80% success rate.
As others have pointed out, this doesn't (and won't) have anything near a 90% success rate. To be completely honest, I would be surprised if it has anything approaching even a 30% success rate. This is like saying "because drugs are sold on this street, we're going to remove access to this street." This does nothing for the crack houses on the next block, the college student growing marijuana in his dorm room, or the bar on the corner; it sure as hell doesn't stop the addict from craving his fix. In addition, the hair salon that happens to be on the same street is shut down, simply for being in the wrong location (This is my reference to the sites that get shut down because someone got them on 'The List', regardless of their actual content).
If it's not going to be effective, and it's going to have dire consequences, why should we accept it in the first place?
This is a "do nothing about the actual 'issue' while setting a precedent for removing access to 'objectionable' material" response. "Think of the children!" is not an acceptable reason in my mind for anything, especially not when it removes my freedom of choice.
No, that doesn't mean I want to visit kiddie porn sites. It means I'm afraid of setting a precedent that makes it acceptable to remove my access to anything that someone else thinks is objectionable, regardless of its legality. How long after we restrict/remove access to kiddie porn do you think it will be before our right to access legal content is interfered with? How would you feel if someone removed WebMD from the DNS registers, because "it's bad for the doctors if people diagnose themselves"? What if you couldn't visit wal-mart.com (or any online retailer, for that matter) because the local township felt it was "a threat to the local businesses" for you to shop online? Where does the censorship stop? At what point do you get upset that information is being restrained? When it affects *you*, it's too late. ("First they came...")
Allow me to climb up on this soapbox, for a moment. This would set a precedent for censoring all forms of media. If they can control what we're allowed to view on the internet, why not control what books we're allowed to read? Which games we're allowed to play? What movies we can watch? Where does it stop?
I'll tell you where it stops: It doesn't. That's what the "slippery slope" argument is all about. Look at what the United States has done in the name of "The War on Terror"; They've become international (and domestic!) terrorists, and are now hated and feared by every other nation in the world. Shall we emulate this behavior, and see how divided we can force our world to be?
Censorship is evil. I'm sorry, I can't soften that blow at all. Truth be told, I can't shout it strongly enough. Censorship has banned great literary works for a number of reasons, many of them economical, all of them ludicrous. Legendary works have been banned in the past, such as Dr Seuss's "The Lorax" (it 'criminalized the forest industry'); "Farenheit 451" (ironically, a book on censorship, book-burning, and Big Brother); The Christian Bible (burned a guy at the stake for translating it to English!); "The Call of the Wild", by Jack London (who hasn't read this in high school? It was required reading where I grew up. Damn fine read, too.) Both "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain, "Gone with the Wind" (and i *do* give damn), "Gulliver's Travels" (little people are offensive? It was denounced as wicked and obscene), "Hamlet", "King Lear", "Twelfth Night" (for crying out loud, even Shakespeare?!?), "Little house on the Prairie" was on TV for years, "The Lion, the Wit
Ironically, you missed my point even while making it for me.
Please re-read my post. I think that if you give it careful consideration, you will realize that I agree with you, and that the only knee jerking here is yours. I re-read your post, as you asked. I also re-read the thread leading to it, to make sure I wasn't missing some nuance of context.
Ironically, I don't think I missed your point, and surprisingly enough, I don't think we agree on this subject. It appears to me, actually, that we are on opposite sides of this particular fence. Correct me if I am mistaken, but it looks to me like you are arguing that this censorship is a good thing, and I don't agree with that at all.
Allow me to make myself clear.
My arguments against censorship are simply "where does it stop?" and "how does this do anything about the core issue?"
Further, I would like to ask "what ever happened to policing your own actions, instead of asking someone else to make sure the world is safe for you?" and while we're on the subject, "what makes you think the world is (or even should be) safe?"
Slashdot Mirror
Guess it's time for you to learn to read (TFA).
Best Buy *does* install it for you. Admittedly, they charge an additional $150, but hey, we're still less than The Microsoft OS price (sans installation!) here. No muss, no fuss, no Microsoft.
It's amazing to me how often you anti-Microsoft fanbois will flip-flop as soon as something comes along that looks like it might actually do what you've been bitching about needing done for years. "Giant Electronic Bra", you're now in the same category with the jerkwad from a few months back who was bitching about Windows users coming over to Linux and "fucking up the gene pool" of users.
For a decade and a half, you've been screaming each year about how this might be the year of Linux on the desktop. Now that it's actually upon us, you're whining about the distribution channels? What is wrong with you?!?
You make me want to pick you up and shake you.
The drive-by-wire cars were discontinued (rejected) because of the lack of feedback; the driver felt disconnected from the driving. It appears that we humans like to have something push back when we do stuff.
I wish I could find the article again where I read that, I hate not citing things.
I appreciate the pointers, but it really isn't an issue. I come home from work, turn on my pc, wait 30 seconds, log in, then I go make a plate of food and/or change out of my work clothes. I am typically greeted a few minutes later by the announcement that Avast has updated itself, usually just before I sit down to start playing whatever time-wasting interactive activity I'm playing this week. It's not in the way, and the only time it's really annoying is if I leave my pc on all day (meaning that it gets a second update when I'm not expecting it), and happen to be watching a movie when it goes off (when I have the volume cranked so I can hear the movie).
Like I said, it's such a small issue, I won't bother fixing it. To be honest, a more pressing concern in my mind is "Why does most, if not all, DVD playing software for Windows seem to have a volume deficiency, requiring me to crank the volume to maximum if I want to sit on the couch instead of at my desk?"
Hmmm. expecting someone corporate to be held properly accountable for misdeeds these days?
Unfortunately, you are all too accurate in your assessment. If this were some kid in the 'burbs, there'd have been feds all over his neighborhood in days, if not hours. Corporations nowadays seem to have some sort of built-in immunity to ethics and accountability. The fact that it's extremely difficult to nail someone's ass to the wall for a corporation's misdeeds might have something to do with that.
Hmm. Now that I think about it, that seems to be an issue with the governmental structure, too.
I'm not going to say he wasn't a weasel... but the particular anecdote you were expressing was painting him in a bad light, when it didn't (in my mind, at least) need to.
And to be honest, I kinda liked Clinton. Seems to me we were doing a bit better under his administration than we are nowadays, not to mention that it appears the worst thing he did while in office was to get caught getting head from a chubby intern... unlike certain oil barons I could mention (and their children).
The first time through, I read that as avg_free_stfu.exe
That is all.
Erm... CSS and image files can install a virus?
As a matter of fact, yes.
JPG has been a vulnerability in many pieces of software, there's stuff all over the net about it. Not that I've ever actually seen it "in the wild", mind you, but it is apparently an attack vector. It appears to be yet another buffer exploit.
CSS can load Javascript, yes? Nuf sed.
What I'm trying to figure out why it's acceptable in Slashdot eyes to fake your user agent to get to a web site that otherwise won't let you in (a la many Opera users and online banking) for completely arbitrary reasons, but somehow when a company is doing it, it becomes unacceptable? The two aren't perfect parallels, I grant you, but still, it's laughable watching the anger here on this.
It's not about the user agent for me... it's about the DDoS. Smaller websites are getting knocked offline by this crap. Hell, Slashdot has had a 6% traffic spike.
I don't have any idea how many hits per day Slashdot gets, but I would estimate it as frikkin huge, and I know I wouldn't want 6% of their traffic landing on my site...
It's not the users' fault that AVG have gone and screwed the pooch.
I, for one, hope to see AVG go down in flames as they are sued into oblivion by the majority of websites inconvenienced by this distributed denial of service attack against the internet itself.
Sorry, but even a novice coder would know better than to have code that even pings an address, much less sends a text request for a large amount of text. Not in an application with a couple million users.
Personally, I don't see this as any different than the bot-nets that were all the rage a few years ago on irc. It seems to me that anyone inconvenienced by this attack should be calling the feds. Certainly anyone whose server was knocked down should be.
Civil court is fun (show me the money!), but this is criminal. Someone needs to have their sunlight taken away.
I've seen two suggestions:
1. vigilantism - embed a miniture iframe with a google search for 100 pages from their site in your site's footer and hurt them back ( they have to pay someone else ). I find this is a rather distasteful approach, ethically.
2.create some form of RBL list of user ip's that are using AVG and bounce them to a page with instructions on why and how to disable it. Which is just silly, really.
Or just bounce them from whatever they were *trying* to view to a page that explains that they are being banned from the site due to abuse, and explain why.
If enough people suddenly can't use the internet because their Antivirus providers are a bunch of ass hats, that should hit AVG in the pocketbook much harder than the bandwidth-hogging "vigilantism" approach laid out in "1", above.
I fully expect to see someone at AVG go to jail, anyway, (DDoS is a federal offense, and this is criminal negligence, at best). This will hopefully make them more wary of distributing fantastically broken code in the future.
Sorry if I seem like a hard ass, but it's not like this was an unforeseeable consequence of their actions.
Honestly, your post was kind of stupid and reactionary, and wasn't really worth replying to, but since it was also hyperbolic and wrong I decided I'd tell you.
How's this for reactionary? YOU ARE AN IDIOT. Since you were being hyperbolic and wrong, I thought I'd tell you.
What AVG is doing is illegal, and I hope they get sued into oblivion by each and every one of the sites suffering due to their ignorance and malice.
I want to see whoever was ultimately responsible for this fiasco doing some hard time under the computer fraud and abuse act.
FACT: A distributed denial of service attack is a federal offense.
FACT: This is criminal negligence, at best.
Nuf sed.
Is there a good AV software package that is free and up to date and doesn't suck ass?
Avast has served me well for several years now.
It's free as in beer, it auto-updates itself (seems like daily, or more often), and the only downside is the audio alert when it updates ("VIRUS DATABASE HAS BEEN UPDATED!" is shouted from your speakers). I should probably look for that option at some point, but it's so small an issue, I've never bothered.
When Clinton said "I did not have sex with that woman" he was telling the truth - under a very narrow definition of "sex".
You left out the part where the definition was given to him by the accusers, when he asked for clarification of the question. The way you say it, it makes him out to be some sort of weasel.
From what I am reading (I know, WTF am I doing actually R'ing TFA?), this isn't encryption in any sense of the word. It's hash comparison using random data. The blocks of data are not, in any way, related to the "stored" data. From what I can understand, a hash is generated using XOR against a random file block, based on some portion of the file you are "uploading". These blocks are then stored all over the place, and reused if they match someone else's (and it would seem they must, eventually... 128k is not an overwhelmingly huge address space). Each "node" (storage place) has its own unique identifier, and the blocks stored on it are referenced by other nodes to "store" the "inserted" data in the OFF.
From what I'm reading, this is either a really cool method of using up all those extra few gigs of space on everyone's hard drives (although "inserted" files triple in size, according to the wiki) which has nothing to do with copyright stuff (assuming you're not sharing the locator info), or this is just one more hoop to jump through in an attempt to keep the MAFIA (Movie And Film Industries of America) from noticing that your Brittney Spears collection is growing again. If the former, it's less than ideal. If the latter... well, at least Deep Packet Inspection (is that like a colonscopy for data?) won't be able to tell that you're pulling down mixes of "Oops I did it again" again. And, as other posters have stated... if you can show that the data you downloaded is actually a linux ISO and a video of you playing with your new dog in your own back yard, why does it matter that you can also convert it into a copy of that new blockbuster movie?
Obfuscation of a ubiquitous behavior seems like a poor solution, too.
If the majority of people are doing it, why is it still a legal issue?
On the other hand, the wiki has this bit about how game patches could be distributed using just a little more bandwidth than the executable itself. I'm wondering if that's per download, or if it's a one-time bandwidth chunk.
In summary, the concept of a global network of data storage is pretty neat, but I think we will find in the end that this particular implementation is flawed... assuming it doesn't turn out to be just a hack to hide illegal activites from the authorities. Paradigm-changing new tech I'm interested in. Arms race, not so much. Fight copyright, not enforcement.
"why else would you post the instructions to make a bomb if you didn't intend people to know thus be able to act on it?"
If you had read the article I linked, you would have seen several reasons for giving someone instructions on how to build a bomb without expecting them to blow something up.
same argument the RIAA makes, different subject matter.
works in RIAA kangaroo courts, but doesn't work here? oh please!
Ok, I have an issue. I don't understand what you meant by that. Please clarify, so I can tell whether it was supposed to somehow be a response to what I said in the parent post.
Not sure what religion has to do with this economics question.
Then you didn't read my post. I was pointing out the flaw in your argument, where you said that Imaginary Property was something that we made up, and so it did not need to be "believed in" in order to be considered real. In case I didn't make myself clear:
I disagree.
As for your questions...
Do you have an alternate proposal for incentivizing content creators?
If not, do you believe that software/books/movies/songs/etc. will be created by individuals for no compensation? Or by companies for no compensation?
When I was growing up, artists and musicians did what they did for the love of the music/art. Metallica went on MTV and said they would never make a music video because they "weren't in it for the money." Now they've alienated their fanbase by suing them for giving away their music, and they're pissed off about the lack of money in the equation. Nevermind that they went on TV in front of millions of people and lied. Seems to me that the artists need to figure out which way they're trying to be, and stick to it once they've chosen. This, of course, is just anecdotal evidence and meandering ranting, and is also totally off topic. Get off my lawn!
Back to the issue at hand.
Yes, I have an "alternate proposal" for "incentivizing content creators". I like to call it "cut out the middlemen who do no work, maximize your profits without raking your customers over the coals, and stop pinching everyone's wallets while whining about how you don't make any money because you only get 1% of the profit of each CD sold". It involves content creators posting their content for the world to enjoy, and asking for (non-specific amounts of) money.
(As an aside, I'm typically insulted when people tell me I have to donate a specific amount of money. If I want to give you 50 cents for a single song, I should be able to. Don't tell me I have to give you $5 and take the whole disk!)
If this "economic model" seems surprising to you, then it would seem I need to point out to you that several big names are already doing it, as you can see with a little googling on the subject. To get you started, allow me to offer the following as potential search terms:
"Nine Inch Nails", "Radiohead", "donation", "free music"
It may interest you to learn that the results from these attempts have been successful (or at least, that's what I read). You may also be interested in Jonathan Coulton, who seems to be making quite a decent living by giving his stuff away for free.
Despite answering in the affirmative (and with proof!) and thus excusing myself from the "bonus questions", I will continue in this monologue, answering your second and third questions, too. Please note that the emphasis is mine.
The answers are simple and undeniable. Yes, I believe that software, books, movies, songs, etc. are being created by individuals for no direct financial compensation. Yes, I believe that software, books, movies, songs, etc. are being created by companies for no direct financial compensation. As proof, I offer up open source software (Linux, for example; The Apache Software Foundation, for another), free books (check out the Baen Free Library, or Project Gutenberg), free movies, free music, and the beginnings of an economic model that depends on having products and services that have more than just a financial value to the consumers and producers... which raises the questio
As a matter of fact, if you give someone a set of instructions for building a bomb with the intent of the recipient building a bomb with them, you can be fined $250,000 and spend 20 years in jail.
It's been like that for over a decade now.
http://chemistry.about.com/library/weekly/aa021003a.htm
"IP" isn't something to believe in as if it exists on it's own. We made it up. But we made it up for a reason.
Are you claiming that there is a religion out there somewhere that wasn't "made up"? Truth be told, they were even "made up for a reason"... controlling the populace is a strong reason.
To continue my anti-religion analogy, think about the following...
Q: What do you call a religion without followers?
A: Mythology.
- nuf sed
I know I would.
--
Reading comprehension ftw!
I'll guess you're also not running any of their server products (Active Directory, anyone?), or their web development environment (Apache doesn't do ASP, ya know). If everyone would just leave Microsoft alone they'll likely destroy themselves - look at Vista. Well, that sounds all well and good, but Vista seems to have cleaned its act up quite a bit. The truth is, Vista is shaping up to be a decent OS, if you can ignore the graceless and ignorant "because they can" UI changes. I'm not saying it's the best out there, and I'd still rather use Ubuntu, but I'm getting a bit anti-Microsoft in my old age.
What it comes down to is this: Microsoft has the dominating market share, so they really can't lose. In addition, if Microsoft goes under (not likely, but walk down this path with me, if you would), so do all of their operating systems, office products, etc. That anti-piracy activation feature is also a dead-man switch. Don't believe me? Perform your yearly re-installs without any internet, and see how long you can use your system before it requires you to activate it before you can even log in (hint: 30 days).
I'm all for bashing Microsoft, but a little research goes a long way towards increasing one's credibility. Better luck with your FUD next time.
So, how hard would it be to load a stripped linux kernel into the firmware of a laser printer, and push an ssh proxy?
I mean, if the printers are gonna get blamed anyways...
Your entire impassioned rant against my judgement and character, allegedly because I thought this scenario was a matter of life and death, was in fact based on a profound misunderstanding on your part.
Aha! Now I see my misunderstanding. I now stand corrected. We do appear to agree that this is not a matter of life and death. It appears we disagree on whether an imperfect solution is acceptable, based on life-or-death issues, though. To me, an imperfect solution is acceptable in a life-or-death issue only if "wasting" time coming up with a better solution would exacerbate the issue. In my opinion, a life-or-death scenario is the only situation where anything less than a perfect solution is acceptable. With (and because of) this reasoning, I believe we have entirely too many laws on the books, especially in today's surveillance society. I don't believe there is a single adult in the world who can truthfully say that they have not broken a law, ever. We have all jaywalked, or littered, or exceeded a speed limit, or committed any number of other infractions. Some municipalities have made it illegal to spit on the sidewalk on Sundays. Any other day of the week is fine, but not Sunday. Why?!?
But I digress.
It seems to me that the only thing we agree on when referring to this subject (consorship) is that this particular instance is not a matter of life and death. I think my main problem with this proposed solution is that it is censorship, followed closely by the issue that it is not a solution, not even a stopgap measure. If someone were to attempt to view pornographic material consisting of underage subjects, this would slow them down a little... assuming it was their first attempt to access it via the internet.
There are myriad arguments to be made, even on this one topic. Who decides whether the subjects are underage? The Christian Bible makes references to people getting married and having children just after puberty, or in some cases, before. This is a 2,000 year old document which millions of people base their morals on. Of course, it also says to stone people to death in the street, while simultaneously telling us to love our neighbors. The point I'm trying to make here is that different cultures have different ideas of "underage". To be honest, even the United States government can't decide at what point a person is an adult. We can't vote until we're 18, we can't drink until we're 21, but we can pilot a 2 ton weapon at speeds in excess of 60 mph as early as 15.
Again, this is an entirely separate issue, and I will try to steer my thoughts back to the topic at hand.
Allowing censorship in this instance opens the door to allowing third parties (in this case, not even the government!) to censor the media we consume. It's bad enough having to sift through spam (and if we're going to censor anything, let's start with that!) without having to wonder what information we aren't receiving, due to someone else attempting to guide our moral compass. I will say it again, in case anyone wants to take this out of context: I do not want to see kiddie porn. I also do not believe that someone who does want to see kiddie porn is going to be stymied by something as simple as a DNS hack.
Allowing a third party to censor this would be ridiculous. Thinking that this would be OK is absurd. It immediately brings to mind the question, "What else do we not know about due to someone's interference?", and suggests other queries, such as "Why should we trust someone else's judgement about whether or not we should view any particular media?", or "If this is so important, why is a corporation handling it instead of the government?" Disclaimer for those just tuning in: I am not suggesting the government should handle this, and am in fact radically opposed to censorship of any kind, for any reason.
susano_otter:
If I attacked your character, I apologize. I feel very strongly about this subject, and may have let my
You said:
Just because something only has a 99% success rate, that doesn't automatically mean we're on a slippery slope to a 1% success rate, or even an 80% success rate.
As others have pointed out, this doesn't (and won't) have anything near a 90% success rate. To be completely honest, I would be surprised if it has anything approaching even a 30% success rate. This is like saying "because drugs are sold on this street, we're going to remove access to this street." This does nothing for the crack houses on the next block, the college student growing marijuana in his dorm room, or the bar on the corner; it sure as hell doesn't stop the addict from craving his fix. In addition, the hair salon that happens to be on the same street is shut down, simply for being in the wrong location (This is my reference to the sites that get shut down because someone got them on 'The List', regardless of their actual content).
If it's not going to be effective, and it's going to have dire consequences, why should we accept it in the first place?
This is a "do nothing about the actual 'issue' while setting a precedent for removing access to 'objectionable' material" response. "Think of the children!" is not an acceptable reason in my mind for anything, especially not when it removes my freedom of choice.
No, that doesn't mean I want to visit kiddie porn sites. It means I'm afraid of setting a precedent that makes it acceptable to remove my access to anything that someone else thinks is objectionable, regardless of its legality. How long after we restrict/remove access to kiddie porn do you think it will be before our right to access legal content is interfered with? How would you feel if someone removed WebMD from the DNS registers, because "it's bad for the doctors if people diagnose themselves"? What if you couldn't visit wal-mart.com (or any online retailer, for that matter) because the local township felt it was "a threat to the local businesses" for you to shop online? Where does the censorship stop? At what point do you get upset that information is being restrained? When it affects *you*, it's too late. ("First they came...")
Allow me to climb up on this soapbox, for a moment. This would set a precedent for censoring all forms of media. If they can control what we're allowed to view on the internet, why not control what books we're allowed to read? Which games we're allowed to play? What movies we can watch? Where does it stop?
I'll tell you where it stops: It doesn't. That's what the "slippery slope" argument is all about. Look at what the United States has done in the name of "The War on Terror"; They've become international (and domestic!) terrorists, and are now hated and feared by every other nation in the world. Shall we emulate this behavior, and see how divided we can force our world to be?
Censorship is evil. I'm sorry, I can't soften that blow at all. Truth be told, I can't shout it strongly enough. Censorship has banned great literary works for a number of reasons, many of them economical, all of them ludicrous. Legendary works have been banned in the past, such as Dr Seuss's "The Lorax" (it 'criminalized the forest industry'); "Farenheit 451" (ironically, a book on censorship, book-burning, and Big Brother); The Christian Bible (burned a guy at the stake for translating it to English!); "The Call of the Wild", by Jack London (who hasn't read this in high school? It was required reading where I grew up. Damn fine read, too.) Both "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain, "Gone with the Wind" (and i *do* give damn), "Gulliver's Travels" (little people are offensive? It was denounced as wicked and obscene), "Hamlet", "King Lear", "Twelfth Night" (for crying out loud, even Shakespeare?!?), "Little house on the Prairie" was on TV for years, "The Lion, the Wit
Please re-read my post. I think that if you give it careful consideration, you will realize that I agree with you, and that the only knee jerking here is yours. I re-read your post, as you asked. I also re-read the thread leading to it, to make sure I wasn't missing some nuance of context.
Ironically, I don't think I missed your point, and surprisingly enough, I don't think we agree on this subject. It appears to me, actually, that we are on opposite sides of this particular fence. Correct me if I am mistaken, but it looks to me like you are arguing that this censorship is a good thing, and I don't agree with that at all.
Allow me to make myself clear.
My arguments against censorship are simply "where does it stop?" and "how does this do anything about the core issue?"
Further, I would like to ask "what ever happened to policing your own actions, instead of asking someone else to make sure the world is safe for you?" and while we're on the subject, "what makes you think the world is (or even should be) safe?"
Life's not fair. Get a helmet.