I mean, this article is all about preserving SeanBaby.com and all the sites like it. And then you guys go and set Phasers on Full, and unleash the firehose of the Slashdot Effect(tm) DDOS!!
I bet the SeanBaby server is cowering in a corner somewhere, rocking back and forth, queitly echo-ing, "Think of a happy place, think of a happy place..."
I don't know if that mail still has the woman's phone number at the end, but when I got it, it did.
The number was at Los Alamos national laboratory, and I decided that with my shiny new cell-phone with free long distance I would call the number.
Haha, much to my surprise, the woman picked up the phone, and I asked her if the email was true. She said it was and asked me to take the number off the mail if I sent it to anyone, because ever since that mail had gone out her phone had been ringing off the hook.
Re:Some people WANT their stuff downloaded...
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The End of Innovation?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
They don't own their record, Capitol does...
Why is this? Because of a loophole in copyright law that allows these records to be recorded as "hired works". A "hired work" is when someone asks you to write a song for them about x, y or z, etc., not when a record label says they will distribute your music.
An entire underground music community existed before Napster and will exist afterwards, sport.
Yes, and will the community get as much exposure with such a huge potential distribution method turned off for them? Read my other posts on this thread if you want to know how I feel about Napster (inc.).
No, they don't represent artists, and they've never claimed to.
Why then is that a major benefit listed by record labels when trying to sign independent artists?
You would do yourself a lot of good to actually educate yourself about the music industry.
Most of the above-mentioned independent artists which I reference are friends of mine, describing to me the trouble they have. Oh, and owners of small record labels which aren't part of the RIAA. As for protesting business practices, the only way to do that effectively is to put someone out of business. When the business practices go hand-in-hand with the law, there is little place to protest.
But that would take some foresight and empathy for the greater social welfare
The greater social welfare? Whose welfare? Just as there was an independent music community before the Internet, there was a flourishing music community before the Recording Industry.
When laws can be bought, social welfare goes out the window. And as for "Libertarian feelings", in what way are the opinions I've expressed here Libertarian? Private property is greatly espoused in the Libertarian philosophy. It would make more sense if you called my opinions (in this case at least) Commie-leftist propaganda.
As I've suggested elsewhere on this thread, you should read Thomas Jefferson's deliberation on copyright. It was intended to be a limited monopoly granted to an individual for a limited period of time. Individual. Limited. It was to encourage innovation. I don't see current copyright law and current recording industry business practices encouraging innovation in any way.
I support the artists that I listen to. I do not necessarily support their record companies. I also buy their records if I have the money. The problem is that I don't often have the money because their record companies jack the prices so much that I can't afford to buy records.
For me specifically, this usually means that I listen to free music (meaning music that is given away rather than music that I can take). Most people are not this principled (haha, I just called myself principled!! Will the wonders never cease?). Therefore they pirate the music.
You should read Thomas Jefferson's letters regarding copyright, which he termed as a "monopoly" given to an individual for a limited period of time. To an INDIVIDUAL. For a LIMITED period of time.
From an ethics perspective, you are correct. The little guy's interests do need to be balanced with those of society at large. Relatively few artists do not object to their concerts being recorded.
However, from a pragmatics perspective, these people are dinosaurs and will become extinct (or perhaps adapt?) sooner or later. Hopefully they won't bring the rest of society down with them.
For one, I think it is terrible that most bands discourage bootlegging. For one, it is legal. Bootlegs are not copyrighted to the band or their label. Also, I would think that anyone who buys or trades bootlegs of a band has already bought all their records and also shells out major dollars to see their concerts.
Now for the ethics vs. pragmatics part. It doesn't matter what people *should* do. It matters what they *actually* do. Laws work in two circumstances. The first is where people by and large agree with the law, and act along those lines. The second is when people are forced into compliance. Normally this should not be a problem in a free society, because the laws would represent what most people want, so most people will not break the law. It is only when laws do not represent the will of the people that most people break them.
I would suggest that the current status quo in copyright law is not the will of the people at large, but the will of the large people. The ones who have the money want to keep it, so they pass laws (err, lobby for laws, the distinction eluded me for a moment) to protect their interests.
Granted, challenging the law itself is the last resort of the desperate when trying to defend themselves legally, but I believe it applies very well in this case.
1. I was referring to the second part of the post where he talked about the fact that no one used Napster for legitimate purposes.
2. I was merely pointing out with these examples that the will of the artists was not being done. This also makes me see the problem with that fact that the record company holds the copyright under the "hired works" loophole in copyright law.
Also, for 2, DMB concert recordings are not copyrighted works, and therefore should not be stopped from being published.
3. The little guy artists don't lose anything they already had (at least not anything physical). They lose the chance to have anything (e.g. a fan base, record sales). To me this is such a fine distinction as to make the distinction meaningless.
I understand the intention behind your post, and don't disagree with most parts per se (except that the little guys don't lose by not having their music heard as a result of record companies trying to protect their copyrights). I still think that there are many things the record companies choose to ignore to preserve a known source of income.
There are market forces at work here. There is enough of a demand for this pirated music that I think it definitely shows that the record companies are doing something wrong from a business perspective. They are charging too much for their records and it is starting to hurt them. Rather than lower prices as market forces might dictate, they resort to litigation.
I never really liked Napster, the company. But Napster, the phenomenon, is here to stay, and the record companies need to find a way to deal with it.
Some people WANT their stuff downloaded...
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The End of Innovation?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The Offspring tried to release their entire new album (I forget the title) on their website. For free. What happened? Their record company shut them down. Thousands of artists release their material online, for example: mp3.com, besonic.com, djcentral.com, and countless others. Dave Matthews Band encourages trading of bootlegs of their concerts online. Many smaller record companies (not affiliated with the RIAA) also like the exposure they get by having their work available for download online, and encourage it.
When they shut Napster down, you couldn't trade your recordings of Dave Matthews concerts unless the files were named undescriptively (read: uselessly). Many smaller artists were/are finding that their music is NO LONGER available for download over Napster. This is exposure they *depend* on.
Not all copyright holders are the RIAA. I've said this before and so have many others, but I will say it again. The RIAA represent themselves, and their own bottom line. They do not represent the artists. They think they represent all of music, when in reality they are crushing the "little guy" who is so important to musical innovation (eek, I actually used that word?!?) to preserve the status quo.
Most, if not all, broadband providers prohibit running servers from home accounts
Definitely not all. MediaOne (now AT@T Broadband) never prohibited it. I understand your reasoning, but if you chek the TOS, many companies do not explicitly prohibit running your own server, and some even explicitly permit it.
What AT&T (at least the Roadrunner service) prohibited was duplication of their services. You weren't allowed to run as an ISP, and they also reserved the right to shut you down if you used up too much bandwidth. You weren't allowed to run a commercial web-server, because they sold web hosting.
I don't disagree with their decision, as inconvenient as it is for me. I can just have my webserver listen to a port that is not 80. I don't even know if MS IIS supports this, but luckily I'm not running IIS.
Think about it this way: if the virus was actually eating enough bandwidth and resources to affect the general home user experience, they would get complaints from those users. Maybe they will open the ports back up. Ha. that kind of stuff never happens. oh well... guess I have to look for a new ISP (maybe speakeasy.net, even though ovad is going belly up...)
Okay, he did mention the most of the right files and all. Still, he managed to install FreeBSD without ever looking at "sysinstall"?
He wasn't talking about installing. Everyone knows that initial network configuration is made easy in the install. He was talking about migrating to and from different network environments. For that the only good way I know is to write scripts that modify/etc/rc.conf, etc. I'd be willing to bet that is how Apple implemented their "Locations" feature. This would be something for The BSD folks (and Linux distros, fot hat matter) to look at. Maybe more Linux than BSD because it's more oriented toward the desktop, and hence laptops.
I don't know why I'm bothering to reply to an AC, but maybe you'll read it.:-)
I do not believe copyright law is in itself wrong. However I *do* think that it has been severely distorted over the years to a point where it is no longer recognizeable to those who first wrote the law. Copyright law was intended to last a short time, no more than 20 or so years. As it stands it lasts much longer than that.
As far as fair use goes, eBooks prevents copying and unauthorized access. Part of fair use is not just that i may make unlimited copies for myself, but also that I may use the copyrighted material in any way i see fit. eBook also stopped people from using the copyrighted material in text-to-voice and other playback methods. If these people want to use these methods they must break the law (as established by the DMCA).
I also believe that the GPL is kind of a "fight fire with fire". Use their tools against them to achieve our goals. Admit it, the GPL is almost the anti-copyright.
As far as the "free speech" argument goes, I wasn't saying that users of elcomsoft's software were exercises free speech rights by distributing copyrighted material, i was saying that sklyarov was exercising free speech rights by writing his software.
When coding becomes illegal... only outlaws will code.;-)
1.... When he came to the US he was in the US jurisdiction.
So if I am a woman and show my face, post *pictures* of it on the Internet (avaiable to Afghanistani people), and I go to Afghanistan (where I remember to cover my face), am I then prosecutable under Afghanistani law? Riiiiggghhht....
2.... You copying it isn't the illegal part. Breaking their protection IS. as much as we all hate it.
If I need to break the protection to copy it, or use it in a manner suitable to *me* (i.e. playing a DVD on Linux, putting a bok through text-to-speech software), how can it be illegal? Fine, put the protection there, I don't like it but it's your prerogative. When I buy the copyrighted material and I obey the copyright to the letter (by not distributing the copyrighted material), breaking the protection should not be an issue.
I won't argue against 3., that is my view but I certainly respect others for theirs.
..."Free Speech" is fine and good but too many people hide behind it....If code is free speech we should be able to to copy any code we want and use it however we see fit.
People don't "hide" behind their civil rights, they defend them. If I have a right to say whatever I want I am *damned* if I let you stop me. And as for copying code at will, that is what copyright law was invented for in the first place!! If the code is copyrighted then NO, you canNOT copy whenever you want to. However, you can WRITE whatever you want to. When someone stops you from doing that, there is a definite problem.
1. Jurisdiction: He wrote the program in Russia, complying with Russian law. He works for a Russian company. The company sells the product, not him. This product is *legal* under Russian law. It's not just a case of Russian "hackers" getting away with something because of shoddy law-enforcement in their country, it's actually *allowed*. Furthermore, the software which his circumvents is *ILLEGAL* in Russia (because it does not have provision for making a backup copy of the data it uses).
2. Fair Use: What fair use?;-) This has been beaten to death, but I must mention it simply because it is so compelling. I am allowed to copy things for my own personal use. You can try to stop me with anti-copying measures, but if I succeed there is nothing you can do about it. Which means that a device that allows me to do this cannot be illegal. (this is all supposing that fair use rights have not been summarily thrown out the window by the DMCA).
3. Punish the crime, not the tool. This is my own personal opinion, but I think the US could really look to this when making laws. I can kill someone with a ballpoint pen, and it would still be murder. I could also do this with a gun, a knife or just about anything. It is the murder that is the crime, not the gun (or pen, etc.). I know many do not agree with me on this, but we need to draw the line somewhere. Making extra penalities for commiting a crime with a certain weapon or possessing a weapon that enables you to commit crimes is simply stupid. Similarly, just because I have the tools to commit copyright infringement doesn't mean I will do it. I used to download songs from Napster that I already owned on CD just because it was a pain to rip them all.
4. Code is Speech. If you claim that it is not, please explain how RSA encryption was exported as a book, or how DeCSS can be printed on a T-shirt. Anything that can be written in a book or on a T-shirt is speech, and is protected (as long as it isn't a death-threat or a threat to national security).
5. The DMCA sucks.:-) The above are most of the reasons. It is a law that was passed after huge lobbying efforts by enormous corporations for one purpose only: their own bottom line. It was not passed to protect the artists or writers, give me a break. It was passed to protect the publishers. They need to get the message that if widespread pirating is being done, they need to focus on quality of service and ease of distribution. Why didn't the VCR kill television or movies? Because it is easier to pay for cable and a better experience to go to the movies. Plus you can RENT tapes. As long as a CD costs $18 there will be a poor college kid trying to pirate it because he DOESN'T HAVE THAT MUCH MONEY.
Those are most of the reasons I could think of off the top of my head.
Okay, I don't know the specifics of how the program operates. From gnu.org:
By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs.
I take this to mean that if the programs are seperate executables which communicate via normal inter-program communication methods or shared files (although shared memory is a totally different animal), then the program is fine.
How does the NuSphere software violate this? Does it make function calls or is it compiled with the GPLed code? Or is it simply a program that is performs some system tasks which the GPLed code then uses?
I'm not trying to give you a hard time, I'd genuinely like to know what part is violated.
For example, I think that I have an account on a school computer, when in fact I do not. This could be because there are multiple computers at the school and I simply logged in at the wrong one. If I attempt to log in at this computer it will "affect or impair" its operation by using its resources to deny my login. I am then prosecutable under this law and subject to the whims of the school administration, system admitstrators, and the District Attorney.
--snip--
Aside from that I recommend you write your senators; include your address (to prove constituency), and use snail mail! They don't pay nearly as much attention to email, even from constituents.
This does not sound like GPL infringement on NuSphere's part. From the article:
NuSphere says there are two components to Gemini ? a Table Handler and a Storage Engine. The Table Handler source code has been GPL since NuSphere MySQL Advantage started shipping in April.
The source code to the Gemini Storage Engine, which is also included in Advantage and Pro Advantage, wasn?t GPL?d until the day before yesterday. Previously, Storage Engine was only available under a commercial license.
IANAL, etc. etc. ad infinitum, but if NuSphere's description of the product is correct, this does not sound like it violates the GPL in any way. As long as they release the code for the GPLed programs they should be in the clear. The GPL doesn't say you can't release software that works with the GPLed code, just that you can't release software that uses the GPLed code. That includes library calls, but does not include interaction between programs (e.g. through signals, semaphores, etc.).
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong (because if I am I'd like to know how it actually *does* work). As far as the domain name "hijack", unless MySQL actually tradmarked the MySQL name rather than just the logo, I think they have no ground to stand on. The article does not mention whether this is the case or not.
Wow, I guess it sounds like I'm flaming MySQL something heavy. I really have nothing against them, and think they make a great product; I just think they are most likely wrong in this case (assuming that the information I have is correct).
Back in High School, I was in an AP US History class where we had to turn in weekly papers about various topics in history. I had long suspected that the teacher for the course did not actually read the papers we turned in. I figured he scanned the papers for key words and phrases, made sure that a certain number of pertinant ones were present, and then gave us a grade which he thought appropriate according to the rest of our grades.
Inevitably there came a time when I had forgotten to write the paper the night before, so I had to use the study hall I had before the class to type up a quick paper. Now YMMV, but I find it very difficult to type more than 2 coherent pages in the space of half an hour or so. The requirement was much longer than the time I had to write it.
The obvious answer: do not type coherent pages. I wrote out the inroduction and conclusion paragraphs and the first and last sentence of each other paragraph. I then proceeded to fill in between with utter nonsense, including some capitalized, italicized, sized up a half point, or otherwise emphasized key words and phrases.
I got the same grade on that paper as on all the others.
Haha.. My best friend used to work in a boiler factory and tested electrical ciruits in boilers all day long. In order to do that you use a small electrical current through the ciruit. When I paged him (his pager was on vibrate) he would always think he had been electrocuted, because they felt almost identical.
I don't know which is funnier, the fact that they feel so similar, or the fact that he electrocuted himself regularly enough that the first thing he thought of when his pager went off was electrocution.
I'm not one of the usual Katz-bashers on slashdot, but there are some fundamental problems with this article which could have been easily solved by research.
Number 1, I *did* here about this study on my local news radio station. This is not a geeky radio station in the least. Most of the ads are for retirement homes and hair-replacement treatments.
Number 2, if you look at the study (or even at any of the half decent articles *about* the study) you will find that this study did not deal with plain old gamers, it surveyed *competetive* gamers in regional and national championships. This makes a HUGE difference. I used to play Magic: The Gathering (ugh... don't even get me started on money wasting) fairly competetively, and there is a very big difference between competetive players and non. The big time players were totally focused, ruthless, and had many enormously complex strategies which they implemented without batting an eye.
When you add up those two problems, there isn't really much to write about anymore. To give Jon Katz some credit, the local news-radio station didn't mention the fact that they were all cometetive gamers either. This in itself makes spinning the "suppression" of this study as an anti-gamer sentiment even sillier.
People fear what they do not understand, and there is nothing harder to understand than someone who is really brilliant. It's not that they are richer, or better schooled. They just plain do stuff better, and learn faster. When there is no direct beneficial impact, they public's reaction will usually be fear and loathing. Galileo. Jews in Europe throughout the middle-ages (kept as advisers but publicly shunned). Geeks.
I was actually assuming a system where the connection was closed by default. Anything else would be silly (after all, why wouldn't people just switch isps then?).
I was thinking more along the lines of a piece of proxy software that allows you onto a whole network of proxies. i.e. I have a connection to blah.com, but not blargh.com or xyz.com. I set up this proxy software so others can access my blah.com and I can access their blargh.com and xyz.com.
If you perpetuate this by a few generations, you get a system not unlike the original Internet.
What is stopping users from using anonymous proxies?
Someone sets up an ad-based anonymous proxy server in one of the paid-for ISPs, and everyone can access the site. Am I missing something here? How do they stop this from happening on a large scale? This just doesn't seem like it'd be a very effective business model. If your payment scheme is annoying enough, people will try to circumvent it.
Think of a shared network of encrypted anonymous proxies, where everyone on the network lets everyone else on the network use their bandwidth in exchange for being a part of the network. Kind of like a grass-roots organized effort to combat silliness in pricing schemes (e.g. Napster or Gnutella).
Oh yeah, that's basically what the Internet was supposed to be in the first place. Silly me. The only way I could see this working is if somehow (miraculously) the costs of an Internet connection did not go up significantly as a result.
When will businesses be clueful?
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· Score: 2
"Piracy, for example, goes away almost magically, since the network is closed and files are designated for printing, not for viewing on a handheld device or PC."
Ha ha ha ha ha! Yes, because we all know that files that are designated for printing cannot possibly be viewed by any other process. Forget about that whole Postscript language that any decent printer uses. And all the drivers that convert other printers' format to postscript.
And the network is "closed"? Come on now, you'd think people would have learned by now that any network that is open to anyone is not closed. It is extremely unlikely that they would not use the Internet for this, and also unlikely that they would use a VPN. And even if they did use a VPN, you can spoof members' VPN connections without much trouble, all it takes is one machine that is less secure than the rest.
I was about to propose a system where the publishers used a PKI to encrypt books so they'd only be unlockable with a private key, or maybe even a private key *card* (kind of like a book club card or something). But even those can be spoofed. However, if they put enough into making the system tamper resistant it might be cost-prohibitive to spoof. Kind of like the reason no one tries to counterfeit U.S. quarters: if you make the machines smart enough so they don't accept 2 cent washers instead, the system works because it's not worth it to copy them. So tamper-resistant book-club type cards might work for this system. But I bet they won't use anything that easy, so they will go out of business quickly just like all the rest of the people who try to make money off this stuff.
You are correct. I didn't mean to imply that it was "hard" as in NP, but only that it is generally considered a "hard" problem by the mathematical community. The fastest known algorithm is exponential, and it looks to stay that way for at least quite some time.
You are ignoring Quantum Cryptography, where Quantum methods are used to encrypt data.
That's what "unbreakable (by the laws of physics) encryption" is.
Luckily, this looks like it will be possible much sooner than actual quantum factorization engines. It only requires one qubit, and has been successfully demonstrated. Hopefully someone will develop a method that does not need line of sight photon transfers. Although, when I think about it, that's integral to the encryption method.
The whole thing with quantum cryptography is that it virtually eliminates the value of mathmatically based encryption algorithms. There is no present algorithm using superposition to generate even stronger encryption, and I'm not even sure if it would be mathematically possible to develop one.
The only safe encryption methods will be the ones that use the properties of the quanta themselves. Hopefully someone will find a way to finagle a PKI out of that, or we go back into the Dark Ages of encryption.
IANAPhysicist (at least not yet), but there are a lot of things that people, like the one who wrote this article, do not understand about quantum computing.
First off; the "size" doesn't really matter. A lot of the article focuses on how the qubits will be XYZ times smaller than modern implementations of regular bits. Well, of course they will be!! The whole thing about quantum computing is that it uses the properties of a single atom; if the infrasturucture were much bigger than that it wouldn't make much sense.
Almost as an aside, the article mentions the superpositioning of 1 and 0. This is HUGE. So what, you might say, what difference is it if a bit can hold a little more information? Think of this: Take 8 qubits. If these were normal bits they would be able to hold any one number from 00 to FF. When you have 8 qubits, they can hold ALL the numbers from 00 to FF. So you can run algorithms on all the numbers at once rather than just one at a time.
Of course, it can only return one number at a time (meaning it might contain both numbers, but when you test to see which number it holds it will return one or the other). There are ways to get around this, though. In the mid 90s Peter Shor at IBM developed an algorithm for prime factorization in polynomial time using qubits. Normally prime factorization is an exponential (or "hard") problem. RSA and almost all widely used public encryption algorithms rely on prime factorization for their security. This is important stuff.
Some proposals for quantum computing use the "tunneling" method described in the article, but my hopes are with the NMR crowd. This seems the most promising using current technology.
And as far as being able to buy this stuff at Radio Shack; I would be very surprised if that happened any time remotely soon. Think about it this way: unbreakable (by the laws of physics) encryption, and virtually instantaneous cracking of encryption, just for starters? Hmm, I can't think of any super-powerful world governments who would want to get their hands on that and keep it away from anyone else...
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, this article is all about preserving SeanBaby.com and all the sites like it. And then you guys go and set Phasers on Full, and unleash the firehose of the Slashdot Effect(tm) DDOS!!
I bet the SeanBaby server is cowering in a corner somewhere, rocking back and forth, queitly echo-ing, "Think of a happy place, think of a happy place..."
The number was at Los Alamos national laboratory, and I decided that with my shiny new cell-phone with free long distance I would call the number.
Haha, much to my surprise, the woman picked up the phone, and I asked her if the email was true. She said it was and asked me to take the number off the mail if I sent it to anyone, because ever since that mail had gone out her phone had been ringing off the hook.
Why is this? Because of a loophole in copyright law that allows these records to be recorded as "hired works". A "hired work" is when someone asks you to write a song for them about x, y or z, etc., not when a record label says they will distribute your music.
An entire underground music community existed before Napster and will exist afterwards, sport.
Yes, and will the community get as much exposure with such a huge potential distribution method turned off for them? Read my other posts on this thread if you want to know how I feel about Napster (inc.).
No, they don't represent artists, and they've never claimed to.
Why then is that a major benefit listed by record labels when trying to sign independent artists?
You would do yourself a lot of good to actually educate yourself about the music industry.
Most of the above-mentioned independent artists which I reference are friends of mine, describing to me the trouble they have. Oh, and owners of small record labels which aren't part of the RIAA. As for protesting business practices, the only way to do that effectively is to put someone out of business. When the business practices go hand-in-hand with the law, there is little place to protest.
But that would take some foresight and empathy for the greater social welfare
The greater social welfare? Whose welfare? Just as there was an independent music community before the Internet, there was a flourishing music community before the Recording Industry.
When laws can be bought, social welfare goes out the window. And as for "Libertarian feelings", in what way are the opinions I've expressed here Libertarian? Private property is greatly espoused in the Libertarian philosophy. It would make more sense if you called my opinions (in this case at least) Commie-leftist propaganda.
As I've suggested elsewhere on this thread, you should read Thomas Jefferson's deliberation on copyright. It was intended to be a limited monopoly granted to an individual for a limited period of time. Individual. Limited. It was to encourage innovation. I don't see current copyright law and current recording industry business practices encouraging innovation in any way.
For me specifically, this usually means that I listen to free music (meaning music that is given away rather than music that I can take). Most people are not this principled (haha, I just called myself principled!! Will the wonders never cease?). Therefore they pirate the music.
You should read Thomas Jefferson's letters regarding copyright, which he termed as a "monopoly" given to an individual for a limited period of time. To an INDIVIDUAL. For a LIMITED period of time.
However, from a pragmatics perspective, these people are dinosaurs and will become extinct (or perhaps adapt?) sooner or later. Hopefully they won't bring the rest of society down with them.
For one, I think it is terrible that most bands discourage bootlegging. For one, it is legal. Bootlegs are not copyrighted to the band or their label. Also, I would think that anyone who buys or trades bootlegs of a band has already bought all their records and also shells out major dollars to see their concerts.
Now for the ethics vs. pragmatics part. It doesn't matter what people *should* do. It matters what they *actually* do. Laws work in two circumstances. The first is where people by and large agree with the law, and act along those lines. The second is when people are forced into compliance. Normally this should not be a problem in a free society, because the laws would represent what most people want, so most people will not break the law. It is only when laws do not represent the will of the people that most people break them.
I would suggest that the current status quo in copyright law is not the will of the people at large, but the will of the large people. The ones who have the money want to keep it, so they pass laws (err, lobby for laws, the distinction eluded me for a moment) to protect their interests.
Granted, challenging the law itself is the last resort of the desperate when trying to defend themselves legally, but I believe it applies very well in this case.
2. I was merely pointing out with these examples that the will of the artists was not being done. This also makes me see the problem with that fact that the record company holds the copyright under the "hired works" loophole in copyright law.
Also, for 2, DMB concert recordings are not copyrighted works, and therefore should not be stopped from being published.
3. The little guy artists don't lose anything they already had (at least not anything physical). They lose the chance to have anything (e.g. a fan base, record sales). To me this is such a fine distinction as to make the distinction meaningless.
I understand the intention behind your post, and don't disagree with most parts per se (except that the little guys don't lose by not having their music heard as a result of record companies trying to protect their copyrights). I still think that there are many things the record companies choose to ignore to preserve a known source of income.
There are market forces at work here. There is enough of a demand for this pirated music that I think it definitely shows that the record companies are doing something wrong from a business perspective. They are charging too much for their records and it is starting to hurt them. Rather than lower prices as market forces might dictate, they resort to litigation.
I never really liked Napster, the company. But Napster, the phenomenon, is here to stay, and the record companies need to find a way to deal with it.
When they shut Napster down, you couldn't trade your recordings of Dave Matthews concerts unless the files were named undescriptively (read: uselessly). Many smaller artists were/are finding that their music is NO LONGER available for download over Napster. This is exposure they *depend* on.
Not all copyright holders are the RIAA. I've said this before and so have many others, but I will say it again. The RIAA represent themselves, and their own bottom line. They do not represent the artists. They think they represent all of music, when in reality they are crushing the "little guy" who is so important to musical innovation (eek, I actually used that word?!?) to preserve the status quo.
Definitely not all. MediaOne (now AT@T Broadband) never prohibited it. I understand your reasoning, but if you chek the TOS, many companies do not explicitly prohibit running your own server, and some even explicitly permit it.
What AT&T (at least the Roadrunner service) prohibited was duplication of their services. You weren't allowed to run as an ISP, and they also reserved the right to shut you down if you used up too much bandwidth. You weren't allowed to run a commercial web-server, because they sold web hosting.
I don't disagree with their decision, as inconvenient as it is for me. I can just have my webserver listen to a port that is not 80. I don't even know if MS IIS supports this, but luckily I'm not running IIS.
Think about it this way: if the virus was actually eating enough bandwidth and resources to affect the general home user experience, they would get complaints from those users. Maybe they will open the ports back up. Ha. that kind of stuff never happens. oh well... guess I have to look for a new ISP (maybe speakeasy.net, even though ovad is going belly up...)
He wasn't talking about installing. Everyone knows that initial network configuration is made easy in the install. He was talking about migrating to and from different network environments. For that the only good way I know is to write scripts that modify /etc/rc.conf, etc. I'd be willing to bet that is how Apple implemented their "Locations" feature. This would be something for The BSD folks (and Linux distros, fot hat matter) to look at. Maybe more Linux than BSD because it's more oriented toward the desktop, and hence laptops.
I do not believe copyright law is in itself wrong. However I *do* think that it has been severely distorted over the years to a point where it is no longer recognizeable to those who first wrote the law. Copyright law was intended to last a short time, no more than 20 or so years. As it stands it lasts much longer than that.
As far as fair use goes, eBooks prevents copying and unauthorized access. Part of fair use is not just that i may make unlimited copies for myself, but also that I may use the copyrighted material in any way i see fit. eBook also stopped people from using the copyrighted material in text-to-voice and other playback methods. If these people want to use these methods they must break the law (as established by the DMCA).
I also believe that the GPL is kind of a "fight fire with fire". Use their tools against them to achieve our goals. Admit it, the GPL is almost the anti-copyright.
As far as the "free speech" argument goes, I wasn't saying that users of elcomsoft's software were exercises free speech rights by distributing copyrighted material, i was saying that sklyarov was exercising free speech rights by writing his software.
When coding becomes illegal... only outlaws will code. ;-)
So if I am a woman and show my face, post *pictures* of it on the Internet (avaiable to Afghanistani people), and I go to Afghanistan (where I remember to cover my face), am I then prosecutable under Afghanistani law? Riiiiggghhht....
2. ... You copying it isn't the illegal part. Breaking their protection IS. as much as we all hate it.
If I need to break the protection to copy it, or use it in a manner suitable to *me* (i.e. playing a DVD on Linux, putting a bok through text-to-speech software), how can it be illegal? Fine, put the protection there, I don't like it but it's your prerogative. When I buy the copyrighted material and I obey the copyright to the letter (by not distributing the copyrighted material), breaking the protection should not be an issue.
I won't argue against 3., that is my view but I certainly respect others for theirs.
People don't "hide" behind their civil rights, they defend them. If I have a right to say whatever I want I am *damned* if I let you stop me. And as for copying code at will, that is what copyright law was invented for in the first place!! If the code is copyrighted then NO, you canNOT copy whenever you want to. However, you can WRITE whatever you want to. When someone stops you from doing that, there is a definite problem.
It isn't explaining how to circumvent that is made illegal by the DMCA, it's distributing the "device".
2. Fair Use: What fair use? ;-) This has been beaten to death, but I must mention it simply because it is so compelling. I am allowed to copy things for my own personal use. You can try to stop me with anti-copying measures, but if I succeed there is nothing you can do about it. Which means that a device that allows me to do this cannot be illegal. (this is all supposing that fair use rights have not been summarily thrown out the window by the DMCA).
3. Punish the crime, not the tool. This is my own personal opinion, but I think the US could really look to this when making laws. I can kill someone with a ballpoint pen, and it would still be murder. I could also do this with a gun, a knife or just about anything. It is the murder that is the crime, not the gun (or pen, etc.). I know many do not agree with me on this, but we need to draw the line somewhere. Making extra penalities for commiting a crime with a certain weapon or possessing a weapon that enables you to commit crimes is simply stupid. Similarly, just because I have the tools to commit copyright infringement doesn't mean I will do it. I used to download songs from Napster that I already owned on CD just because it was a pain to rip them all.
4. Code is Speech. If you claim that it is not, please explain how RSA encryption was exported as a book, or how DeCSS can be printed on a T-shirt. Anything that can be written in a book or on a T-shirt is speech, and is protected (as long as it isn't a death-threat or a threat to national security).
5. The DMCA sucks. :-) The above are most of the reasons. It is a law that was passed after huge lobbying efforts by enormous corporations for one purpose only: their own bottom line. It was not passed to protect the artists or writers, give me a break. It was passed to protect the publishers. They need to get the message that if widespread pirating is being done, they need to focus on quality of service and ease of distribution. Why didn't the VCR kill television or movies? Because it is easier to pay for cable and a better experience to go to the movies. Plus you can RENT tapes. As long as a CD costs $18 there will be a poor college kid trying to pirate it because he DOESN'T HAVE THAT MUCH MONEY.
Those are most of the reasons I could think of off the top of my head.
By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs.
I take this to mean that if the programs are seperate executables which communicate via normal inter-program communication methods or shared files (although shared memory is a totally different animal), then the program is fine.
How does the NuSphere software violate this? Does it make function calls or is it compiled with the GPLed code? Or is it simply a program that is performs some system tasks which the GPLed code then uses?
I'm not trying to give you a hard time, I'd genuinely like to know what part is violated.
--snip--
For example, I think that I have an account on a school computer, when in fact I do not. This could be because there are multiple computers at the school and I simply logged in at the wrong one. If I attempt to log in at this computer it will "affect or impair" its operation by using its resources to deny my login. I am then prosecutable under this law and subject to the whims of the school administration, system admitstrators, and the District Attorney.
--snip--
Aside from that I recommend you write your senators; include your address (to prove constituency), and use snail mail! They don't pay nearly as much attention to email, even from constituents.
NuSphere says there are two components to Gemini ? a Table Handler and a Storage Engine. The Table Handler source code has been GPL since NuSphere MySQL Advantage started shipping in April. The source code to the Gemini Storage Engine, which is also included in Advantage and Pro Advantage, wasn?t GPL?d until the day before yesterday. Previously, Storage Engine was only available under a commercial license.
IANAL, etc. etc. ad infinitum, but if NuSphere's description of the product is correct, this does not sound like it violates the GPL in any way. As long as they release the code for the GPLed programs they should be in the clear. The GPL doesn't say you can't release software that works with the GPLed code, just that you can't release software that uses the GPLed code. That includes library calls, but does not include interaction between programs (e.g. through signals, semaphores, etc.).
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong (because if I am I'd like to know how it actually *does* work). As far as the domain name "hijack", unless MySQL actually tradmarked the MySQL name rather than just the logo, I think they have no ground to stand on. The article does not mention whether this is the case or not.
Wow, I guess it sounds like I'm flaming MySQL something heavy. I really have nothing against them, and think they make a great product; I just think they are most likely wrong in this case (assuming that the information I have is correct).
Inevitably there came a time when I had forgotten to write the paper the night before, so I had to use the study hall I had before the class to type up a quick paper. Now YMMV, but I find it very difficult to type more than 2 coherent pages in the space of half an hour or so. The requirement was much longer than the time I had to write it.
The obvious answer: do not type coherent pages. I wrote out the inroduction and conclusion paragraphs and the first and last sentence of each other paragraph. I then proceeded to fill in between with utter nonsense, including some capitalized, italicized, sized up a half point, or otherwise emphasized key words and phrases.
I got the same grade on that paper as on all the others.
I don't know which is funnier, the fact that they feel so similar, or the fact that he electrocuted himself regularly enough that the first thing he thought of when his pager went off was electrocution.
Number 1, I *did* here about this study on my local news radio station. This is not a geeky radio station in the least. Most of the ads are for retirement homes and hair-replacement treatments.
Number 2, if you look at the study (or even at any of the half decent articles *about* the study) you will find that this study did not deal with plain old gamers, it surveyed *competetive* gamers in regional and national championships. This makes a HUGE difference. I used to play Magic: The Gathering (ugh... don't even get me started on money wasting) fairly competetively, and there is a very big difference between competetive players and non. The big time players were totally focused, ruthless, and had many enormously complex strategies which they implemented without batting an eye.
When you add up those two problems, there isn't really much to write about anymore. To give Jon Katz some credit, the local news-radio station didn't mention the fact that they were all cometetive gamers either. This in itself makes spinning the "suppression" of this study as an anti-gamer sentiment even sillier.
People fear what they do not understand, and there is nothing harder to understand than someone who is really brilliant. It's not that they are richer, or better schooled. They just plain do stuff better, and learn faster. When there is no direct beneficial impact, they public's reaction will usually be fear and loathing. Galileo. Jews in Europe throughout the middle-ages (kept as advisers but publicly shunned). Geeks.
I was thinking more along the lines of a piece of proxy software that allows you onto a whole network of proxies. i.e. I have a connection to blah.com, but not blargh.com or xyz.com. I set up this proxy software so others can access my blah.com and I can access their blargh.com and xyz.com.
If you perpetuate this by a few generations, you get a system not unlike the original Internet.
Someone sets up an ad-based anonymous proxy server in one of the paid-for ISPs, and everyone can access the site. Am I missing something here? How do they stop this from happening on a large scale? This just doesn't seem like it'd be a very effective business model. If your payment scheme is annoying enough, people will try to circumvent it.
Think of a shared network of encrypted anonymous proxies, where everyone on the network lets everyone else on the network use their bandwidth in exchange for being a part of the network. Kind of like a grass-roots organized effort to combat silliness in pricing schemes (e.g. Napster or Gnutella).
Oh yeah, that's basically what the Internet was supposed to be in the first place. Silly me. The only way I could see this working is if somehow (miraculously) the costs of an Internet connection did not go up significantly as a result.
Ha ha ha ha ha! Yes, because we all know that files that are designated for printing cannot possibly be viewed by any other process. Forget about that whole Postscript language that any decent printer uses. And all the drivers that convert other printers' format to postscript.
And the network is "closed"? Come on now, you'd think people would have learned by now that any network that is open to anyone is not closed. It is extremely unlikely that they would not use the Internet for this, and also unlikely that they would use a VPN. And even if they did use a VPN, you can spoof members' VPN connections without much trouble, all it takes is one machine that is less secure than the rest.
I was about to propose a system where the publishers used a PKI to encrypt books so they'd only be unlockable with a private key, or maybe even a private key *card* (kind of like a book club card or something). But even those can be spoofed. However, if they put enough into making the system tamper resistant it might be cost-prohibitive to spoof. Kind of like the reason no one tries to counterfeit U.S. quarters: if you make the machines smart enough so they don't accept 2 cent washers instead, the system works because it's not worth it to copy them. So tamper-resistant book-club type cards might work for this system. But I bet they won't use anything that easy, so they will go out of business quickly just like all the rest of the people who try to make money off this stuff.
You are correct. I didn't mean to imply that it was "hard" as in NP, but only that it is generally considered a "hard" problem by the mathematical community. The fastest known algorithm is exponential, and it looks to stay that way for at least quite some time.
That's what "unbreakable (by the laws of physics) encryption" is.
Luckily, this looks like it will be possible much sooner than actual quantum factorization engines. It only requires one qubit, and has been successfully demonstrated. Hopefully someone will develop a method that does not need line of sight photon transfers. Although, when I think about it, that's integral to the encryption method.
The whole thing with quantum cryptography is that it virtually eliminates the value of mathmatically based encryption algorithms. There is no present algorithm using superposition to generate even stronger encryption, and I'm not even sure if it would be mathematically possible to develop one.
The only safe encryption methods will be the ones that use the properties of the quanta themselves. Hopefully someone will find a way to finagle a PKI out of that, or we go back into the Dark Ages of encryption.
First off; the "size" doesn't really matter. A lot of the article focuses on how the qubits will be XYZ times smaller than modern implementations of regular bits. Well, of course they will be!! The whole thing about quantum computing is that it uses the properties of a single atom; if the infrasturucture were much bigger than that it wouldn't make much sense.
Almost as an aside, the article mentions the superpositioning of 1 and 0. This is HUGE . So what, you might say, what difference is it if a bit can hold a little more information? Think of this: Take 8 qubits. If these were normal bits they would be able to hold any one number from 00 to FF. When you have 8 qubits, they can hold ALL the numbers from 00 to FF. So you can run algorithms on all the numbers at once rather than just one at a time.
Of course, it can only return one number at a time (meaning it might contain both numbers, but when you test to see which number it holds it will return one or the other). There are ways to get around this, though. In the mid 90s Peter Shor at IBM developed an algorithm for prime factorization in polynomial time using qubits. Normally prime factorization is an exponential (or "hard") problem. RSA and almost all widely used public encryption algorithms rely on prime factorization for their security. This is important stuff.
Some proposals for quantum computing use the "tunneling" method described in the article, but my hopes are with the NMR crowd. This seems the most promising using current technology.
And as far as being able to buy this stuff at Radio Shack; I would be very surprised if that happened any time remotely soon. Think about it this way: unbreakable (by the laws of physics) encryption, and virtually instantaneous cracking of encryption, just for starters? Hmm, I can't think of any super-powerful world governments who would want to get their hands on that and keep it away from anyone else...