Wow, then i couldn't send out ANY mail from a domain i manage, since our hosting provider doesn't do SMTP from customers (they just accept incoming mail to the domain and either POP3 or forward it) and we don't have the cash to get a mail machine somewhere.
Well, yes, I think this is the way it should work. If we were to design a protocol from scatch, surely that would be how we would do it. Hosting providers like yours would simply not be allowed. Due to historical reasons, we have to accept that some people will be in your situation though.
If only the ISPs would just go after the spammers, instead of treating us all like criminals... What if the USPS would refuse to accept your mail unless you put your current address on it, as opposed to your P.O. Box, or your work address, or your friend's address when she's over at your house and needs to send a letter, etc.? But most people are too clueless about the Internet to care, or are too blinded by the "Spam is evil! Death to spam at all costs!" mantra to notice...
I completely agree with you on this point. It should be the responsibility of the mail recipient to set the rules. It is simple enough to simply refuse mail which is sent with a from an address which does not match the relay server. It is completely trivial to block 99.9999% of unsolicited email. Simply block all email which is not using a From: address from which you have solicited email. But this of course is not what people want. People want to allow unsolicited email, but not unsolicited commercial email. Well, short of AI, you just ain't gonna get that. So you better settle for blacklists.
Because 90% of the SMTP mail that doesn't relay through the ISP mail server is spam?
I bet the same percentage of traffic through verizon's relay which does not have a from of verizon.com is a forgery.
Personally, 100% of the SMTP mail I send out does not relay through verizon.com, and is not spam. I know that doesn't disprove your 90% figure, but I would be personally affected by a port blocking measure and would seriously oppose it.
Mail from adomain.com should go through the SMTP server of adomain.com, since only that server has any ability to check the validity of that address. Actually, I'm not convinced that there aren't SMTP servers that enforce this restriction. Blocking 25 would not let you send mail to those systems from your vanity domain.
Bah.. it could be worse. You could not be able to recieve mail directly AT ALL.
I use roadrunner, and they block all incoming ports below 1025, including 25, in an attempt to stop "bandwidth hogs."
It is worse than that. Where I am, Verizon monitors your incoming traffic and your outgoing traffic, and if you get an incoming connection which exceeds a certain bandwidth level, they drop your entire connection. I am completely unable to run a server of any kind including for experimental purposes.
Fortunately I'm not on Verizon, but if I were I'd be pitching a fit. Nothing to see? What if I want my mail to be from my hotmail account but I also want to use my browsers email program to compose? I like reading my email on hotmail because I don't have to download anything, buy I like to compose on my browser becasue hotmails sucks.
I am on Verizon DSL, and I do exactly this, for exactly the reason you describe. I also use my own SMTP server, using POP before SMTP to send email from my own domain. I never use @verizon.com, and I never use Verizon's SMTP server. As long as they don't block outbound SMTP, things will be fine for me (and you'll always be able to send hotmail since that uses HTTP over port 80).
In decrypting the above and posting it here, I am violating the law of the USA.
What law? Certainly not criminal law, since you did not do it "willfully and for the purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain. In fact, you can't even be sued for under civil law, since no one was injured by your violation. Further, there was an implicit license to "decrypt", and the measure does not "in the ordinary course of its operation,
[require] the application of information, or a process or a
treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain
access to the work."
As I understand the law, making threats of lawsuits that you do not actually intend to follow through on in order to bully someone into doing what you want is a criminal offense. Isn't it?
Yeah but lying to the public and telling them you weren't going to sue when you were isn't.
As the attorney quoted in the Reuters' article said, "this will be the test case."
Wonderful, so we get a Russian "hacker" to test the DMCA. The jury is just going to love him.
I think there is a STRONG argument to be made that, in order to trigger the protection granted in the statute, a "technological means of protection" must be reasonably secure. Without this limitation, DMCA is patently unconstitutional because it is overly-broad.
Do Russian citizens temporarily visiting the country even get protection under the constitution? This could be problematic.
This case almost makes me wish I was still practicing law so I could defend it. Hell, I'd do it pro bono!
Do you really think you would be qualified for such a case? Perhaps you would, I don't know you. Copyright issues, constitutional issues, import issues, almost certainly going to be other issues regarding the fact that he wasn't a citizen of the US and the item in question is legal in Russia. Then again, you might not even want to argue that way, since there is no evidence that the software was even imported. It may well have been downloaded from a US source after coming to the states. The first priority of the lawyer needs to be to defend the defendant from jail time, not to set precedent. If he can afford it, he should get a nice expensive lawyer who is willing to consult with EFF lawyers and other interested parties, but keeps his best interests as the top priority. I read the complaint, and it looks like they need to go after ElcomSoft Co. Ltd., not Dmitry Sklyarov. There is no evidence that he personally "imported, offered to the public, provided, and otherwise trafficked" anything. But hey, you're the lawyer, maybe there is precedent for an employee of a foreign company being arrested for the actions of his company which were done outside the US. But anyway, if IWAL, which I'm not, and I was assigned to this case, I'd try to get the matter ruled as insufficient evidence before before attacking the law itself.
Gnot to gnitpick, but the gnext gnaming convention is gno gnicer...
Word(TM). Windows(TM) doesn't Exchange(TM) any letters in the names of their Works(TM).
They Access(TM) a Word(TM) directly out of the dictionary sitting on the Bookshelf(TM) in their
Office(TM). They've made a lot of Money(TM) doing that, and their Outlook(TM) for the future
is even better. A lot better than the Outlook(TM) for Me(TM), anyway.
Although no one would care if you weren't trading them on Napster, a digital copy of a digital work is ONLY legal if it made using media for which royalties have been paid and on a device that implements SCMS.
The law says:
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.
rgmoore says:
That certainly seems to suggest that there is a loophole written into the law that says that personal, non-commercial use of such devices is specifically allowed. There is also no mention that the rule is changed if the recording is switched from one format to another, so this applies not only to copying from one CD to another but also to converting CDDA tracks to MP3s so that you can play them on your portable MP3 player.
If you look at the definition of digital audio recording device/medium, you will see that hard drives do not fall under that definition. Monkeydo is perfectly right that the Audio Home Recording Act does not protect against copying which doesn't occur on AHRA media or devices. While Monkeydo argues and, it is my layman opinion that it need not be both. But recording MP3s to your hard drive is not specifically legal, absent making an ephemeral recording for broadcast or library purposes (hint: you probably don't apply). None of this has anything to do with fair use though. I doubt there's a precedent for such fair use, because I doubt anyone has ever been sued for making a backup for non-commercial purposes, but it is again my layman opinion that backups for non-commercial purposes fall under fair use. Look at the 4 criteria. 1 (noncommercial) is filled pretty much unconditionally. 2 (nature) is published and pretty easy to obtain and won't affect the judgement for most music. 3 (amount) is complete but this has not stopped findings of fair use in the past. 4 (effect on potential market) is arguably met completely, but surely the copyright holder will argue that they want to protect the potential market for mp3 versions of their music, as a separate market. This is the part where the sleezy lawyers from each side will probably argue the most. I am not one of them, so I'll leave the final judgement up to you.
So I should be able to create a cookie called, say, Nilli Wafers, and market them under the brand Nabisci, because Nabisco didn't register these particular variations on their trademarks?
Yes. If you confuse the consumer into buying an inferior product by pretending to be a different company, you should be charged with fraud, not trademark infringement.
What we need is not smaller payments (micropayments) but bigger (or "chunkier") content. If I could pay $10-15/month to a central authority and know that I would have free reign to reload/. all day, a metered number of posts at k5, and get my daily online comics as required, I'd jump at the chance to support my favorite sites. But I don't want to follow the recording industry system and subsidize sites that I can't stand with my $10. My contribution has to go to the sites I actually want to support, and the user has to be able to specify that they want to be able to read some sites in an unlimited manner, read others in a limited manner (I only need so many Google searches per week, but I do need them), and specify that others will only be hit once per day, etc.
Sounds like AOL. About $10-15 a month on top of what you'd pay for a pure dialup (in fact, BYOA is $9.95/month). Central authority. And the money is redistributed to the content providers based on the amount of traffic they get.
Of course, AOL takes the biggest chunk, and is starting to tightly control who provides the content (read Time-Warner), but that's how it was in the good ol' (remember Motley Fool) days.
For the guy that thinks it's a hoax simply contact the Georgia State Attorney's Office or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the lead Agent in charge of the year and half investigation that he said it took him to determine that running this Distributed.net client is a felony offense as outlined by the Computer administrators at the school and the State is Bob Stanley, the GBI office number is 770-987-9168.
The Law Firm of my Lawyer is 770-564-1600. My Attorney is David Joyner
The charges are from the 1999 Georgia Computer Crime code book Volume 14 Title 16-9-91 to 93 Pages 669 to 672.
If you AREN'T doing it for political or philosophical reason, but are merely getting the best tools for the job, there are better inexpensive/free, (closed source) tools, so use those.
I don't get it. If open source isn't better, why would anyone want to use it for political or philosophical reasons? It certainly doesn't hurt anyone to use closed source (freeware) programs.
Personally, I try to use as much open source software as is reasonable, even though I run Windows 2000. Actually, the reason I run Win2K is the same reason I run IE instead of Mozilla. I can't stand Mozilla, and I can't stand Linux as a desktop machine. But open source certainly does have a number of *practical* advantages. For one thing, you have much more assurance that there are no secret backdoors. Open source is generally more compatible with extensions and plugins. Future versions of open source software are likely to always be free. Open source is more likely to be cross platform.
Bottom line is that the amount of openness of software is a feature. It's not a black and white issue. I chose MSN Messenger over AOL Instant Messenger solely because MSN Messenger had an open protocol. Has nothing to do with politics or philosophy, I simply prefer using an instant messaging service which I can write a bot for. Eventually I hope someone will write a good open source client for it. That hasn't happened yet, though.
For those of you willing to dive head first into the open source movement, more power to you. Every 6 months or so I decide to give Linux a shot. Usually it takes about 6 months for Win2k to get so corrupted I have to reinstall it, so I install Linux for a week or so, and get so frustrated with it that I go back to Win2k. Maybe someday...
Wait until the next internet boom and IPO. You'll get a few billion in funding, and as long as you don't do any marketing and don't hire too many programmers, that should be enough to pay for the servers, just off the interest. Write the program well, use as little bandwidth and processing power as possible, and you should be able to survive for a long time.
Why the hell is a question which has been asked many many times on the front page, while the story about the BSA that would actually interest most of us is hidden off in Ask Slashdot?
Hmm, take a look at the top of your screen. See that ad for cheap rack units? VA Linux has tons and tons of rack mounted hardware they have to get rid of, and they're obviously trying to drum up interest in people buying this stuff up for home use.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the DCMA?
Wow, then i couldn't send out ANY mail from a domain i manage, since our hosting provider doesn't do SMTP from customers (they just accept incoming mail to the domain and either POP3 or forward it) and we don't have the cash to get a mail machine somewhere.
Well, yes, I think this is the way it should work. If we were to design a protocol from scatch, surely that would be how we would do it. Hosting providers like yours would simply not be allowed. Due to historical reasons, we have to accept that some people will be in your situation though.
If only the ISPs would just go after the spammers, instead of treating us all like criminals... What if the USPS would refuse to accept your mail unless you put your current address on it, as opposed to your P.O. Box, or your work address, or your friend's address when she's over at your house and needs to send a letter, etc.? But most people are too clueless about the Internet to care, or are too blinded by the "Spam is evil! Death to spam at all costs!" mantra to notice...
I completely agree with you on this point. It should be the responsibility of the mail recipient to set the rules. It is simple enough to simply refuse mail which is sent with a from an address which does not match the relay server. It is completely trivial to block 99.9999% of unsolicited email. Simply block all email which is not using a From: address from which you have solicited email. But this of course is not what people want. People want to allow unsolicited email, but not unsolicited commercial email. Well, short of AI, you just ain't gonna get that. So you better settle for blacklists.
Is this entirely Verizon's fault? No. Is this entirely my university's fault? No.
Nope, it's the fault of whoever invented SMTP. It's such a stupid system, as far as protecting against spam.
Because 90% of the SMTP mail that doesn't relay through the ISP mail server is spam?
I bet the same percentage of traffic through verizon's relay which does not have a from of verizon.com is a forgery.
Personally, 100% of the SMTP mail I send out does not relay through verizon.com, and is not spam. I know that doesn't disprove your 90% figure, but I would be personally affected by a port blocking measure and would seriously oppose it.
Mail from adomain.com should go through the SMTP server of adomain.com, since only that server has any ability to check the validity of that address. Actually, I'm not convinced that there aren't SMTP servers that enforce this restriction. Blocking 25 would not let you send mail to those systems from your vanity domain.
Bah.. it could be worse. You could not be able to recieve mail directly AT ALL.
I use roadrunner, and they block all incoming ports below 1025, including 25, in an attempt to stop "bandwidth hogs."
It is worse than that. Where I am, Verizon monitors your incoming traffic and your outgoing traffic, and if you get an incoming connection which exceeds a certain bandwidth level, they drop your entire connection. I am completely unable to run a server of any kind including for experimental purposes.
Fortunately I'm not on Verizon, but if I were I'd be pitching a fit. Nothing to see? What if I want my mail to be from my hotmail account but I also want to use my browsers email program to compose? I like reading my email on hotmail because I don't have to download anything, buy I like to compose on my browser becasue hotmails sucks.
I am on Verizon DSL, and I do exactly this, for exactly the reason you describe. I also use my own SMTP server, using POP before SMTP to send email from my own domain. I never use @verizon.com, and I never use Verizon's SMTP server. As long as they don't block outbound SMTP, things will be fine for me (and you'll always be able to send hotmail since that uses HTTP over port 80).
Also the Constitution is (for now) in the public domain.
Well, I thought of that, but since it was a compilation of the constution plus various quotes it probably could be copyrighted.
Of course they purchased password cracking software. They had to get evidence.
In decrypting the above and posting it here, I am violating the law of the USA.
What law? Certainly not criminal law, since you did not do it "willfully and for the purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain. In fact, you can't even be sued for under civil law, since no one was injured by your violation. Further, there was an implicit license to "decrypt", and the measure does not "in the ordinary course of its operation, [require] the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work."
You can't get sued for decoding ROT-13. At least, if you did get sued for it it would get thrown out of court.
As I understand the law, making threats of lawsuits that you do not actually intend to follow through on in order to bully someone into doing what you want is a criminal offense. Isn't it?
Yeah but lying to the public and telling them you weren't going to sue when you were isn't.
I think that it's a good think that posts are not edited before posting (except occasionally for brevity).
Umm, good point, except look again... They did fix it. They may not be edited before posting, but they sure are edited after posting.
As the attorney quoted in the Reuters' article said, "this will be the test case."
Wonderful, so we get a Russian "hacker" to test the DMCA. The jury is just going to love him.
I think there is a STRONG argument to be made that, in order to trigger the protection granted in the statute, a "technological means of protection" must be reasonably secure. Without this limitation, DMCA is patently unconstitutional because it is overly-broad.
Do Russian citizens temporarily visiting the country even get protection under the constitution? This could be problematic.
This case almost makes me wish I was still practicing law so I could defend it. Hell, I'd do it pro bono!
Do you really think you would be qualified for such a case? Perhaps you would, I don't know you. Copyright issues, constitutional issues, import issues, almost certainly going to be other issues regarding the fact that he wasn't a citizen of the US and the item in question is legal in Russia. Then again, you might not even want to argue that way, since there is no evidence that the software was even imported. It may well have been downloaded from a US source after coming to the states. The first priority of the lawyer needs to be to defend the defendant from jail time, not to set precedent. If he can afford it, he should get a nice expensive lawyer who is willing to consult with EFF lawyers and other interested parties, but keeps his best interests as the top priority. I read the complaint, and it looks like they need to go after ElcomSoft Co. Ltd., not Dmitry Sklyarov. There is no evidence that he personally "imported, offered to the public, provided, and otherwise trafficked" anything. But hey, you're the lawyer, maybe there is precedent for an employee of a foreign company being arrested for the actions of his company which were done outside the US. But anyway, if IWAL, which I'm not, and I was assigned to this case, I'd try to get the matter ruled as insufficient evidence before before attacking the law itself.
Be sure to ROT-13 it. I'm sure he can figure it out, but the cops won't.
No, Bob(TM) would have realized that the company name is Microsoft(TM), not Windows(TM) before hitting submit.
That would prevent them from using the network's resources, but they could still make the radio band of the wireless network unusable.
Somehow I'm guessing law enforcement could get involved at that point.
Gnot to gnitpick, but the gnext gnaming convention is gno gnicer...
Word(TM). Windows(TM) doesn't Exchange(TM) any letters in the names of their Works(TM). They Access(TM) a Word(TM) directly out of the dictionary sitting on the Bookshelf(TM) in their Office(TM). They've made a lot of Money(TM) doing that, and their Outlook(TM) for the future is even better. A lot better than the Outlook(TM) for Me(TM), anyway.
Blue Screen of Death
So I should be able to create a cookie called, say, Nilli Wafers, and market them under the brand Nabisci, because Nabisco didn't register these particular variations on their trademarks?
Yes. If you confuse the consumer into buying an inferior product by pretending to be a different company, you should be charged with fraud, not trademark infringement.
What we need is not smaller payments (micropayments) but bigger (or "chunkier") content. If I could pay $10-15/month to a central authority and know that I would have free reign to reload /. all day, a metered number of posts at k5, and get my daily online comics as required, I'd jump at the chance to support my favorite sites. But I don't want to follow the recording industry system and subsidize sites that I can't stand with my $10. My contribution has to go to the sites I actually want to support, and the user has to be able to specify that they want to be able to read some sites in an unlimited manner, read others in a limited manner (I only need so many Google searches per week, but I do need them), and specify that others will only be hit once per day, etc.
Sounds like AOL. About $10-15 a month on top of what you'd pay for a pure dialup (in fact, BYOA is $9.95/month). Central authority. And the money is redistributed to the content providers based on the amount of traffic they get.
Of course, AOL takes the biggest chunk, and is starting to tightly control who provides the content (read Time-Warner), but that's how it was in the good ol' (remember Motley Fool) days.
"Thank you everyone,
For the guy that thinks it's a hoax simply contact the Georgia State Attorney's Office or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the lead Agent in charge of the year and half investigation that he said it took him to determine that running this Distributed.net client is a felony offense as outlined by the Computer administrators at the school and the State is Bob Stanley, the GBI office number is 770-987-9168.
The Law Firm of my Lawyer is 770-564-1600. My Attorney is David Joyner
The charges are from the 1999 Georgia Computer Crime code book Volume 14 Title 16-9-91 to 93 Pages 669 to 672.
David"
If you AREN'T doing it for political or philosophical reason, but are merely getting the best tools for the job, there are better inexpensive/free, (closed source) tools, so use those.
I don't get it. If open source isn't better, why would anyone want to use it for political or philosophical reasons? It certainly doesn't hurt anyone to use closed source (freeware) programs.
Personally, I try to use as much open source software as is reasonable, even though I run Windows 2000. Actually, the reason I run Win2K is the same reason I run IE instead of Mozilla. I can't stand Mozilla, and I can't stand Linux as a desktop machine. But open source certainly does have a number of *practical* advantages. For one thing, you have much more assurance that there are no secret backdoors. Open source is generally more compatible with extensions and plugins. Future versions of open source software are likely to always be free. Open source is more likely to be cross platform.
Bottom line is that the amount of openness of software is a feature. It's not a black and white issue. I chose MSN Messenger over AOL Instant Messenger solely because MSN Messenger had an open protocol. Has nothing to do with politics or philosophy, I simply prefer using an instant messaging service which I can write a bot for. Eventually I hope someone will write a good open source client for it. That hasn't happened yet, though.
For those of you willing to dive head first into the open source movement, more power to you. Every 6 months or so I decide to give Linux a shot. Usually it takes about 6 months for Win2k to get so corrupted I have to reinstall it, so I install Linux for a week or so, and get so frustrated with it that I go back to Win2k. Maybe someday...
Wait until the next internet boom and IPO. You'll get a few billion in funding, and as long as you don't do any marketing and don't hire too many programmers, that should be enough to pay for the servers, just off the interest. Write the program well, use as little bandwidth and processing power as possible, and you should be able to survive for a long time.
Why the hell is a question which has been asked many many times on the front page, while the story about the BSA that would actually interest most of us is hidden off in Ask Slashdot?
Hmm, take a look at the top of your screen. See that ad for cheap rack units? VA Linux has tons and tons of rack mounted hardware they have to get rid of, and they're obviously trying to drum up interest in people buying this stuff up for home use.