I'm sure the folks over at Encyclopedia Britannica are yielding only their highly objective, unbiased opinion on the matter... this is somewhat reminiscent of a certain large software company's "Get the Facts" campaign against a competing family of operating systems.
That's got to be the most interesting spin on voting with your wallet I've seen in this thread. Leave it to me to miss the obvious: direct gain/loss of political party donations. I have to say, though, it would take a lot of people following your lead to make an impact. Any chance of you getting on the evening news with that message?:)
I couldn't agree more. On any given weekend in Atlanta you can see at least four different live shows by popular local bands. These guys usually have "day jobs" and perform because they have a genuine love for music, not because they're just dying to make it big on the scene. Would they like to be able to support themselves performing full-time? Sure. Are many of these bands starting to explore new ways of promoting themselves online? Yep. Will some of them turn their sound into a real success story. I bet on it.
Until then, I'll be right there with you buying CDs from bands at shows. I'll take a home-burned disc that represents something new to me over a mass-produced coaster any day.
It has everything to do with reality. I'm putting my money where my mouth is: I can't remember the last time I bought *anything* from a major label. I don't buy DVDs, either. For that matter, I don't even really listen to pop radio anymore... college radio is fine by me. Are you saying that you'll die without buying CDs produced by major labels? Damn dude, go read a book or something.
Do you have any idea how much independently produced music is available online? It's pretty mind-blowing. Sure, for the most part I'm not getting that ultra-studio-edited sound, but I don't really want that anyhow. Variety and lyrical talent count for more in my book.
As for corporations and their bad business practices, I really couldn't care less about corporate activities from a moral standpoint, until those activities start to have a significant negative effect on my civil liberties. Up to that point, they can do whatever the hell they want, screw artists all day long, whatever... because the artist signed the deal in the first place. And before you try to say the poor artist had no choice (they would starve without the labels), I preemptively call "bullshit" on grounds that for many artists, music is about the message as opposed the megabucks. Nobody forces anybody to earn a living producing tunes; people make their own career choices in a free society.
Let's keep the society free enough that people still have that option in the future.
Use all means necessary to prevent this sort of behavior from becoming acceptable (i.e. "just the way things are") in Canada. Support independent recording artists and smaller labels who don't engage in draconian contract measures. Don't buy the mass-produced, pop culture oriented crap that's on sale at your local Huge Media Outlet. All you're doing is feeding the legal budget of the lobbying arms of major recording labels.
Support other creative artists who choose to license their work under Creative Commons style licenses. My personal policy for one site I manage is that all article content must be CC licensed.
Most importantly, tell people about your views. Ordinary people on the street. People you work with. Anybody, everybody. You enjoy a system of government where you're allowed to speak your mind... that's sort of a "use it or lose it" proposition in my opinion.
Does this mean you should stop contacting your elected officials. Hell, no. But take your personal, proactive action of your own instead of just waiting around for your elected leadership to make good decisions for you.
Quoth the headline: "Los Alamos has a checkered security history"...
Hey, where I work we don't talk like that. I interpret that to be a politically correct, human resources filtered, public official sanctioned version of the statement: "They're about as secure as a hooker's panties on New Years Eve in Times Square."
To hell with the analogy to AOL's "walled garden", I envision some more akin to a burning garden if a major security incident were to occur after widespread adoption of this platform for single-signon functionality. This is the same reason I have always been opposed to Microsoft's ambitions for using their Passport system for wide authentication; my objections had very little to do with my political opinion of Microsoft (which isn't terribly high, but that's beside the point). Diversity in any system is good for competition, and limits the damage any one exploit can cause.
I just thought of another analogy. An artist sues a man for giving away free photocopies of her artwork. At the man's trial, the prosecutor decides to push for $222,000 in damages, and somehow gets the judgement. The man appeals on grounds of unconstitutionally harsh treatment, but the court system says "who knows how many people could have seen the photocopies of the lady's artwork, depriving her of revenues owed" and upholds the judgement.
Does that make any more sense than what's going on here?
From the article summary: "...because it's unknown how many other users accessed the files in the KaZaA share in question and committed further acts of copyright infringement."
Sure, people can debate all day long about how much she should or shouldn't be held liable for given her infringing activities. But how the hell can you use other people's possible, but admittedly unverified activities which might have resulted from something you did to exact additional punishment on the "offender?"
Let's say I'm not paying attention and run over someone's cat. Am I now liable for the possible, but unverifiable, increase in the rodent population in my neighborhood, and consequently liable for potential damages in hospital bills for a contagious disease which might be spread by some lucky rat?
Someone's being prosecuted for stuff that may or may not have happened, and may or may not ever happen, but nonetheless is regarded as damaging in the eyes of the courts. Wow.
I'm completely in agreement with respect to a software license's "ability" to restrict what you can and can't do personal-use-wise with something you've already purchased. I've violated all sorts of terms of software licensing related to the number of "backup or archival copies" I'm allowed to make, along with other varied and ridiculous stipulations. BTW, I enjoyed the post on wayward women:).
Just pick written (whether hardcopy of digital in nature) materials provided under the right license, in the same way that you'd pick software based on the license. Support licensing models designed to ensure your freedom to act as you would prefer with respect to the material, and discourage others from supporting opposing licensing models. Of course, if someone really wants to release their work under a restrictive license, there's nothing to stop them. There's also nothing to stop another community of people from absorbing the knowledge contained within the material, rewording it in a new and original form, and releasing that new material with the same message to the public at large.
This doesn't help you for works which are valued purely for their artistic merit, but I don't buy CDs anymore because I don't want to support a corrupt recording industry. I have found new artists whose works aren't so heavily "regulated," so to speak.
I stand informed:). Thank you for the info, trotting off to Wikipedia now to learn more. I routinely amaze myself with how much I don't know about history.
Support authors who publish their content using Creative Commons style licenses. What little writing I do is published using CC licenses, Wikipedia is moving to CC, and I never would have even heard of Cory Doctorow years ago (still one of my favorites) if not for CC.
I'm considering licensing the majority of the content on my educational resources site under a CC license. Seriously, support these kinds of effort at (1) making high-quality published works accessible to a broader audience, and (2) supporting authors who are willing to try new business models to earn a living.
Bell was first to the patent office, which in retrospect, is all that really mattered. Draw your own conclusions in the "lessons learned" department...
It's just an economic reality that if you want any sort of service, you're going to pay something for it. How much you pay is decided by two factors: (1) how valuable the market thinks the service is, and (2) how heavily/often you want to use the service. If a person wants to pay less, they either opt for a lower level of service (think basic el cheapo home phone land-line service) which includes fewer features/benefits, or they opt for a more expensive category of service and simply use it less.
The market is constantly changing, though. In various American metropolitan markets (including Atlanta) you can purchase a phone from MetroPCS and pay ~$35 per month for unlimited local and long distance service, with no contract. Additional features are a few bucks more per month, but still relatively cheap. Flat rate, no contract. I expect to see a lot more of this sort of service in the near future. For my part, I'm on "the new AT&T" in Connecticut.
From the tone of your post, I'd almost think you were advocating increased government regulation of telecommunications markets, instead of allowing new business models and technology decide the way of things. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.
Dear heavens, next thing you know this guy will be telling us that the War on Drugs is doomed to failure for economic reasons as well! Oh well, at least the feds^H^H^H^Hanti-spam companies are turning a buck.
As evidenced in politics, provided the "few" make enough noise and communicate amongst themselves efficiently, they can definitely have an influence over issues that have long-term impact. An unfortunate side effect is the fact that this works both ways...
I think you're missing the point of my post. It's one thing to say that researchers should be responsible and "play by the rules." If a researcher's intent is to turn a profit through abuse of statistical data, that's bad. If a researcher's aim is to expose how an unethical person would be able to turn a profit through misuse of the data, that's entirely different (i.e. the difference between security researchers and crackers). We need researchers to point out flaws in data sources, to prevent abuse of the system.
Let me give you a parallel. Let's say CompanyX makes an operating system, and discovers that it has a critical flaw that allows remote privilege escalation. CompanyX decides to keep that information private, and takes their sweet time developing and releasing a patch for the issue. Meanwhile, system administrators aren't even aware that there's an issue, and some unethical piece of shit cracker releasing a rootkit that exploits the vulnerability. If the sysadmins were aware of the problem, they could have at least taken measures to protect the weak point (turn off the service, etc) until a suitable patch was available. Instead their boxes are p0wned by some script kiddie in Eastern Europe (no offense to anyone of Eastern European descent, just happens that most crack attempts on my servers have been originating from there recently).
We need companies who provide volumes of statistical data to researchers to take strong measures to prevent misuse of the data, and we need researchers focused on analyzing statistical correlations between disparate data sets to continue to publicize weaknesses in scrubbing algorithms that could be used to "broaden the scope" of anyalysis in improper ways.
Given the material you've just presented, I concede that I need to educate myself more on the topic before I discuss it further. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction!
If my guess is right, the scans are almost certain to be almost completely automated, at least for the "first stage." Then again, Google has some incredibly smart people working for them, and my hope is that secondary analysis of the results would prevent inappropriate blocking of benign sites.
Quoth the poster: "Google's efforts will not affect how skilled hackers get access to malware."
It may not stop skilled crackers from gaining access to rootkit builders, trojan generators, etc, but if implemented properly it will definitely help identify sites actively hosting pages designed to exploit things like browser vulnerabilities to compromise user machines. Less fodder for the botnets is a good thing in my book.
I wonder if this system will affect listings in Google for small security firms who publish "proof of concept" demonstrations of new exploits. Could this lead to an unintentional (?) block of such firms' research products?
I guess Comcast figures they're not really blocking your traffic, since you can always just restart your download and try again without any initial interference on their part... kinda like "sure, you can drive the rental car all weekend, but the gas pedal might not work on occassion."
Slashdot Mirror
If Wikipedia strikes them down now, they shall become more powerful than you can imagine.
I'm sure the folks over at Encyclopedia Britannica are yielding only their highly objective, unbiased opinion on the matter... this is somewhat reminiscent of a certain large software company's "Get the Facts" campaign against a competing family of operating systems.
That's got to be the most interesting spin on voting with your wallet I've seen in this thread. Leave it to me to miss the obvious: direct gain/loss of political party donations. I have to say, though, it would take a lot of people following your lead to make an impact. Any chance of you getting on the evening news with that message? :)
I couldn't agree more. On any given weekend in Atlanta you can see at least four different live shows by popular local bands. These guys usually have "day jobs" and perform because they have a genuine love for music, not because they're just dying to make it big on the scene. Would they like to be able to support themselves performing full-time? Sure. Are many of these bands starting to explore new ways of promoting themselves online? Yep. Will some of them turn their sound into a real success story. I bet on it.
Until then, I'll be right there with you buying CDs from bands at shows. I'll take a home-burned disc that represents something new to me over a mass-produced coaster any day.
It has everything to do with reality. I'm putting my money where my mouth is: I can't remember the last time I bought *anything* from a major label. I don't buy DVDs, either. For that matter, I don't even really listen to pop radio anymore... college radio is fine by me. Are you saying that you'll die without buying CDs produced by major labels? Damn dude, go read a book or something.
Do you have any idea how much independently produced music is available online? It's pretty mind-blowing. Sure, for the most part I'm not getting that ultra-studio-edited sound, but I don't really want that anyhow. Variety and lyrical talent count for more in my book.
As for corporations and their bad business practices, I really couldn't care less about corporate activities from a moral standpoint, until those activities start to have a significant negative effect on my civil liberties. Up to that point, they can do whatever the hell they want, screw artists all day long, whatever... because the artist signed the deal in the first place. And before you try to say the poor artist had no choice (they would starve without the labels), I preemptively call "bullshit" on grounds that for many artists, music is about the message as opposed the megabucks. Nobody forces anybody to earn a living producing tunes; people make their own career choices in a free society.
Let's keep the society free enough that people still have that option in the future.
Use all means necessary to prevent this sort of behavior from becoming acceptable (i.e. "just the way things are") in Canada. Support independent recording artists and smaller labels who don't engage in draconian contract measures. Don't buy the mass-produced, pop culture oriented crap that's on sale at your local Huge Media Outlet. All you're doing is feeding the legal budget of the lobbying arms of major recording labels.
Support other creative artists who choose to license their work under Creative Commons style licenses. My personal policy for one site I manage is that all article content must be CC licensed.
Most importantly, tell people about your views. Ordinary people on the street. People you work with. Anybody, everybody. You enjoy a system of government where you're allowed to speak your mind... that's sort of a "use it or lose it" proposition in my opinion.
Does this mean you should stop contacting your elected officials. Hell, no. But take your personal, proactive action of your own instead of just waiting around for your elected leadership to make good decisions for you.
Quoth the headline: "Los Alamos has a checkered security history" ...
Hey, where I work we don't talk like that. I interpret that to be a politically correct, human resources filtered, public official sanctioned version of the statement: "They're about as secure as a hooker's panties on New Years Eve in Times Square."
I could be wrong, of course.
To hell with the analogy to AOL's "walled garden", I envision some more akin to a burning garden if a major security incident were to occur after widespread adoption of this platform for single-signon functionality. This is the same reason I have always been opposed to Microsoft's ambitions for using their Passport system for wide authentication; my objections had very little to do with my political opinion of Microsoft (which isn't terribly high, but that's beside the point). Diversity in any system is good for competition, and limits the damage any one exploit can cause.
I just thought of another analogy. An artist sues a man for giving away free photocopies of her artwork. At the man's trial, the prosecutor decides to push for $222,000 in damages, and somehow gets the judgement. The man appeals on grounds of unconstitutionally harsh treatment, but the court system says "who knows how many people could have seen the photocopies of the lady's artwork, depriving her of revenues owed" and upholds the judgement.
Does that make any more sense than what's going on here?
From the article summary: "...because it's unknown how many other users accessed the files in the KaZaA share in question and committed further acts of copyright infringement."
Sure, people can debate all day long about how much she should or shouldn't be held liable for given her infringing activities. But how the hell can you use other people's possible, but admittedly unverified activities which might have resulted from something you did to exact additional punishment on the "offender?"
Let's say I'm not paying attention and run over someone's cat. Am I now liable for the possible, but unverifiable, increase in the rodent population in my neighborhood, and consequently liable for potential damages in hospital bills for a contagious disease which might be spread by some lucky rat?
Someone's being prosecuted for stuff that may or may not have happened, and may or may not ever happen, but nonetheless is regarded as damaging in the eyes of the courts. Wow.
I'm completely in agreement with respect to a software license's "ability" to restrict what you can and can't do personal-use-wise with something you've already purchased. I've violated all sorts of terms of software licensing related to the number of "backup or archival copies" I'm allowed to make, along with other varied and ridiculous stipulations. BTW, I enjoyed the post on wayward women :).
Just pick written (whether hardcopy of digital in nature) materials provided under the right license, in the same way that you'd pick software based on the license. Support licensing models designed to ensure your freedom to act as you would prefer with respect to the material, and discourage others from supporting opposing licensing models. Of course, if someone really wants to release their work under a restrictive license, there's nothing to stop them. There's also nothing to stop another community of people from absorbing the knowledge contained within the material, rewording it in a new and original form, and releasing that new material with the same message to the public at large.
This doesn't help you for works which are valued purely for their artistic merit, but I don't buy CDs anymore because I don't want to support a corrupt recording industry. I have found new artists whose works aren't so heavily "regulated," so to speak.
At least here on Slashdot, everybody just comments, nobody reads.
Not only did I read, but I repeated and replied as well.
I stand informed :). Thank you for the info, trotting off to Wikipedia now to learn more. I routinely amaze myself with how much I don't know about history.
Support authors who publish their content using Creative Commons style licenses. What little writing I do is published using CC licenses, Wikipedia is moving to CC, and I never would have even heard of Cory Doctorow years ago (still one of my favorites) if not for CC.
I'm considering licensing the majority of the content on my educational resources site under a CC license. Seriously, support these kinds of effort at (1) making high-quality published works accessible to a broader audience, and (2) supporting authors who are willing to try new business models to earn a living.
Bell was first to the patent office, which in retrospect, is all that really mattered. Draw your own conclusions in the "lessons learned" department...
It's just an economic reality that if you want any sort of service, you're going to pay something for it. How much you pay is decided by two factors: (1) how valuable the market thinks the service is, and (2) how heavily/often you want to use the service. If a person wants to pay less, they either opt for a lower level of service (think basic el cheapo home phone land-line service) which includes fewer features/benefits, or they opt for a more expensive category of service and simply use it less.
The market is constantly changing, though. In various American metropolitan markets (including Atlanta) you can purchase a phone from MetroPCS and pay ~$35 per month for unlimited local and long distance service, with no contract. Additional features are a few bucks more per month, but still relatively cheap. Flat rate, no contract. I expect to see a lot more of this sort of service in the near future. For my part, I'm on "the new AT&T" in Connecticut.
From the tone of your post, I'd almost think you were advocating increased government regulation of telecommunications markets, instead of allowing new business models and technology decide the way of things. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.
Dear heavens, next thing you know this guy will be telling us that the War on Drugs is doomed to failure for economic reasons as well! Oh well, at least the feds^H^H^H^Hanti-spam companies are turning a buck.
As evidenced in politics, provided the "few" make enough noise and communicate amongst themselves efficiently, they can definitely have an influence over issues that have long-term impact. An unfortunate side effect is the fact that this works both ways...
I think you're missing the point of my post. It's one thing to say that researchers should be responsible and "play by the rules." If a researcher's intent is to turn a profit through abuse of statistical data, that's bad. If a researcher's aim is to expose how an unethical person would be able to turn a profit through misuse of the data, that's entirely different (i.e. the difference between security researchers and crackers). We need researchers to point out flaws in data sources, to prevent abuse of the system.
Let me give you a parallel. Let's say CompanyX makes an operating system, and discovers that it has a critical flaw that allows remote privilege escalation. CompanyX decides to keep that information private, and takes their sweet time developing and releasing a patch for the issue. Meanwhile, system administrators aren't even aware that there's an issue, and some unethical piece of shit cracker releasing a rootkit that exploits the vulnerability. If the sysadmins were aware of the problem, they could have at least taken measures to protect the weak point (turn off the service, etc) until a suitable patch was available. Instead their boxes are p0wned by some script kiddie in Eastern Europe (no offense to anyone of Eastern European descent, just happens that most crack attempts on my servers have been originating from there recently).
We need companies who provide volumes of statistical data to researchers to take strong measures to prevent misuse of the data, and we need researchers focused on analyzing statistical correlations between disparate data sets to continue to publicize weaknesses in scrubbing algorithms that could be used to "broaden the scope" of anyalysis in improper ways.
Given the material you've just presented, I concede that I need to educate myself more on the topic before I discuss it further. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction!
If my guess is right, the scans are almost certain to be almost completely automated, at least for the "first stage." Then again, Google has some incredibly smart people working for them, and my hope is that secondary analysis of the results would prevent inappropriate blocking of benign sites.
Quoth the poster: "Google's efforts will not affect how skilled hackers get access to malware."
It may not stop skilled crackers from gaining access to rootkit builders, trojan generators, etc, but if implemented properly it will definitely help identify sites actively hosting pages designed to exploit things like browser vulnerabilities to compromise user machines. Less fodder for the botnets is a good thing in my book.
I wonder if this system will affect listings in Google for small security firms who publish "proof of concept" demonstrations of new exploits. Could this lead to an unintentional (?) block of such firms' research products?
I guess Comcast figures they're not really blocking your traffic, since you can always just restart your download and try again without any initial interference on their part... kinda like "sure, you can drive the rental car all weekend, but the gas pedal might not work on occassion."