Not much point. I doubt you'd be able to flood them personally without a lot of outside help (or a zombie bot network), and all I think you'd get from other people is an apathetic "why should I bother?"
People tried something like this with ad-refreshing pages a few years back, with the thoughts of driving up the ad costs of "evil" companies. I once tried letting one of those go in a background window, and all I did was clog the hell out of my network connection. I lost interest after about three minutes, especially since there was no direct benefit to me.
Ken also passed away over six years ago. His login still works. Someday I'd like to see what happens when they finally put marketing data together for him.
This is what I overheard at that meeting: "Who knew that dead guys clicked on more Toyota SUV ads than anything else? Let's try posting some of those above-the-urinal ads in the casket lids, see if we can get the count up for the Subaru market, too."
Woo hoo! I now own the rights to "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable"! Crank up the phone, Maw, we're callin' us a fancy city lawyer and suing ourselfs any site that gets slashdotted!
Barcodes aren't the greatest answer, as they are vulnerable to spoofing.
Imagine two barcodes that look like this:
| || |l| || |11| | |||
12345
and this:
| || || |l| |11| | |||
12345
Both look like barcodes (please forgive the characters used to dodge the lameness filter.) Both have HRIs (human readable interfaces) beneath them. But one is a forgery, and actually scans to the value 13245. Unless the person with the barcode scanner is actively verifying the numbers match (or is verifying other aspects of the document) the forgery is just as good to the laser beam as the original.
The RFID tags are at least harder to forge, but provide weaker security in that they can be intercepted or surreptitiously read. Contact-based chips (a la Smartcards) would have been the best choice in terms of security, but probably much more costly in terms of hardware maintenance of the readers (cleaning, static electricity, etc.)
That's all I had to say, but the lameness filter is making me add extra lines to make up for the junk characters. Perhaps I should have switched more bytes to exclamation points or ones or lower case Ls, that probably would have helped make up the difference. I suppose the wonderful ascii artists of the past few years have frightened Slash code into assuming that any graphic is too graphic.
I assume the GP meant to say it this way: "Nobody is using RFID exclusively for inventory control" which is a correct statement. 'Inventory control' is the retailer's phrase meaning "shoplifting detectors", and if all you're interested in is stopping shoplifting, resonance tags (Checkpoint, et al) are a fraction of the price of RFID tags. All the stores using RFID that I'm familiar with are using it for much more than inventory control: logistics and transportation, warehousing, stock replenishment, and point of sale. (Although I will agree that Walmart's use has been focused primarily on high-value shoplifted items such as Gillette razor refills.)
And not all chipped car keys use RFID. Some keys use the Dallas Semiconductor 1-wire technology, and require electrical contact to work. They can't be jammed by this little device.
They don't have to. It's already illegal to use one for shoplifting in Minnesota, and I assume that most states have similar laws. All they have to do when they find one in your pocket is accuse you of trying to shoplift. Not only is the device itself pretty strong evidence, but you get 3 bonus years in jail if you're convicted.
The same thing happened here in Minneapolis in the mid 1990s. As I recall, some homeless people had built a fire under a bridge, and it destroyed a couple of conduits mounted beneath the bridge deck. The conduits held the main fibers of US West connecting Minneapolis to the backbone, blacking out the city. Apparently US West was unaware that their backup fiber providers leased space beneath the same physical bridge as their own fibers.
Since then, more carriers have installed more fibers. I don't know if carriers ever sit down and compare "bottlenecks" but I doubt that a single point of failure remains here.
As far as the Africa thing you pointed out, it's a case of a single application being down because the required servers were offline. It's certainly not a reflection of weakness with "the internet" but with that corporation's architectural design -- if they were dealing with a mission critical application, why didn't they have geographically diverse redundant data centers? The answer could have been "money" or it could have been "inexperience". Either way, the internet didn't fail the people in Africa, WorldCom failed their subscribers (there's a news flash.) It's a huge difference.
XFire works by dynamically loading a custom Layered Service Provider (LSP), which is essentially a hook in the network chain. It recognizes certain processes, hosts and ports and sends this info to the XFire servers. So if foo.exe is in my process table, and the XFire LSP detects a network connection to 1.2.3.4 on port 5678, my XFire profile and my online buddies are instantly told "John is playing Foo, and he's on server 1.2.3.4 on port 5678." It's a really slick system, I used it a lot back when I played more online games.
But LSPs are frequently subverted by worms and viruses, as they provide a great opportunity to sniff your network traffic for passwords and accounts, or to silently prevent your computer from contacting your anti-virus vendor. And because the mechanism is really obscure, ordinary users don't have much of a chance of encountering LSP-based malware and removing it.
UAC is right in warning the operator that a XFire is loading an LSP. But it would be difficult to make XFire work in any other way without the active cooperation of every game vendor, and most of them would rather hook up with an IM company that's willing to pay for the interface.
"Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson (google for it) is far and away his best work, IMHO. It set the hook deeper and faster than any other book I've read. But you'll probably want to read it fairly soon; the cultural references are still quite funny, but are beginning to feel a bit dated.
With a strong encryption standard, any restaurant could take any card -- assuming your available balance was high enough, of course. We could easily get to the point where "which card" is always only a matter of personal choice, since every restaurant would take every card.
What's worse, though, is Visa could certainly have implemented SET and remained relevant through continued aggressive marketing. As consumers, we collectively are pretty damn stupid. Sponsor the OoOoOlympics every few years and people will line up to eat out of your hands no matter what you're selling.
I still maintain that Visa is responsible for killing advances in credit security, rather than their current wrong-headed PCI approach to "enhance" them.
A decade ago, Mastercard came up with the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol. This protocol cryptographically ensured the security of credit card data, and was designed to be implemented in hardware at the retailers. Each one of those PIN pads is capable of participating in the SET protocol.
Visa killed it, because it rendered them irrelevant.
Visa itself isn't a credit lender. Visa is a commercialized industry group, very similar to the RIAA, providing a common badge to paste on the front of thousands of banks, and a common mode of operation for those banks. When you get a Visa card, it looks and acts like any credit card from any of the member banks. That's important because you (and the merchants you shop at) trust that if your card has a Visa logo that it will be honored. Back in the late 70s, that was vitally important because most credit commerce was conducted off-line. But now that we have ubiquitous electronic networks and everyone authorizes credit cards before accepting them, that logo means almost nothing. Now, it's a question of "does the merchant trust that they'll get paid?" The Visa logo lets the cashier know that his store does (or does not) trust the bank on the other end of the transaction. It assures the merchant that yes, this Visa member bank will pay them. But with a fully online transaction, the payment could happen automatically and securely. The merchant wouldn't care where the card came from, since the authorization went directly to the customer's bank, and their bank transferred their money instantly before the customer even walked out the door. There would be no need for intermediaries to skim their transaction fees for operating a special bank-only network, as the secured transactions themselves could take place over any public network.
This would have killed Visa. Instead, they swept SET under the rug and we've been dealing with phony cards and ID theft ever since. Now, they have a program called PCI-CISP, and it's used by Visa to deflect the blame to the merchants for leaking stolen data.
The cost of downloaded music by all logic should be below the half of what the CD of the same stuff costs.
You are only looking at a fraction of the actual costs. How do you know what Apple's costs are, vs. the costs incurred by a physical distribution company? The costs are not just for the physical media and distribution, or the network bandwidth, iTMS development and hosting costs, but also the negotiated per-title royalties that must be paid. The labels get their cut, and that's probably the most expensive component of the price.
And even after all that, sure, Apple's costs may be lower. But Apple's prices are apparently higher by your measure, and I think that's why you're complaining.
You see, there's this funny idea called 'Capitalism'. Capitalism pretty much means "if you want to sell a product at whatever price you want to sell it, go for it. If you make money, congratulations. If you lose money, tough." The corollary to that is "if you want something and are willing to pay the asked-for price, you can buy it. If you are unwilling to pay that price, you can try to negotiate a new lower price, shop elsewhere, or go without."
So if you think a DRM-free song is worth only $0.25, why not write to Apple and ask them to sell you that song for $0.25? If they're unwilling to negotiate with you, then you are free to go to another source and pay their asking price. Otherwise, contact the record labels yourself and start a music distribution business of your own, set your prices at $0.25, and make lots of money. Let us know how that works out for you.
I loved this line from TFA, regarding Chris Hughes controlling his Roomba with a Wiimote: "She's hoping the invention means the house will now stay cleaner."
Personally I think part of the problem big box retailers have is that carrying music requires a finger on the pulse of what is relevant. Nowadays, with so many one hit or one album for a week wonders, that isnt possible for most big retailers (that havent seemed to have caught on to the volatility of the music scene).
The big box retailers have buyers who do indeed keep up with music, but on a more regional level. They have lots of other problems to overcome, too:
Lead time: it can take 13 weeks or more for a buying decision to result in new products on the shelves. 13 weeks is the antithesis of volatility, but it's the result of the heavyweight distribution chain process. Once the buying decision is made, the order is placed, the product is manufactured in China, it's put on a boat to L.A., it sits on a dock awaiting customs, it's trucked to a packager and custom packaged (anti-theft labels and/or big plastic don't-steal-me frames), it's trucked to a store's distribution center, it's sorted and put on trucks bound for stores, received in the store and eventually placed on the shelf. If the timing is carelessly handled in those 13 weeks a band can disappear off the radio, leaving you with crappy inventory that you've got to mark down and sell at a loss.
When you buy for 1000 stores, you have to purchase in large quantities so every store gets stock. Small labels without high production capacity are at a disadvantage. Labels don't pay to keep 100,000 copies of "Childish Intentions" in a warehouse hoping that some big-box store will buy them, they are manufactured only when an order is placed.
Shelf space is at a premium. Whatever department you purchase for, you are responsible for maintaining the corporate average in sales-per-square-foot. Slip to the bottom of that pile and you're looking for a new job, so taking risks has to be compensated for by having lots of popular artists that are reliable sales. That means lots of music that sounds just like you've already heard before, performed by bands that already sell discs.
Finding artists that are popular across a wide geographically diverse audience. Big box retailers are divided into regions. As you indicated, with a thousand stores no buyer take the pulse of a thousand individual music scenes, so they aim for the center of their region. Ship lots of country and western to the southeast, maybe more grunge to the northwest, or whatever the sales trends indicate.
Price pressure (aka the "Walmart Effect") means that no big box is going to pay $11.00 wholesale for a disk to list at $12.00. A small band or label may not be able to manufacture and ship discs for less than $5.00 each, but a big-box may not be willing to pay more than that.
So in a perverse twist of fate, the 13 week lead time of the big box buyers can end up *driving* the Billboard charts. The record labels ship all their new albums out to the big-box buyers. The buyers make their decisions based on what they think will sell, and manufacturing ramps up. Meanwhile, the labels look at the orders for whatever discs they just sold, and plan to ship promo copies to the radio stations to coincide with the arrival of the product on store shelves. 13 weeks after a corporate buyer says "I think this will sell", you hear it on the radio.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the buyers at the big-box retailers do indeed care about their music, but they are expected to make profitable choices, and that means they have to limit the amount of "risky" or "experimental" music they offer.
Oops, I'm very sorry, I wrongly accused Jack of being the head of the wrong branch of the MAFIAA. He was the head of the MPAA, not the RIAA. Different group, slightly lesser evils. I think he'll only qualify for Bolgia 5, which is reserved for barrators.
What I should have pointed out is that "don't play along" is harder to ignore when he was lobbying for you to pay a blank VCR tape tax, because you're a thief who is only going to record something copyrighted on it. He's the same guy who told this to the U.S. Senate: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Just in case you thought Slashdotters had the copyright on hyperbolic statements. And he helped shove lovely DRM down all our throats, so now my expensive HDTV set blanks out every few hours because of a hiccup in the HDCP stream coming from the cable company's official box.
If you don't like industry encroachment...then don't play along.
Oh, were it that simple for someone like Patti Santangelo, the mother who was taken to court for acts of piracy that she wasn't committing, or Tanya Anderson,, the disabled mother who was unaware that her 10 year old daughter may have been downloading music, yet was dragged into court she couldn't afford for an old fashioned shakedown. As a matter of fact, just start looking at the cases on Recording Industry vs. People, and consider what kind of human would gleefully drive such an industry.
It's easy to say all this "just say no" stuff, but only because you haven't been wrongly accused. Follow even a few of these cases, and Valenti stands out as a man so exceedingly greedy that he stands out at the head of a group of a thousand greedy labels. Dante reserved the eighth circle of hell for those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil, and Jack himself appears to qualify for Bolgia 8, where fraudulent advisors are encased in individual flames. Break out the marshmallows, Virgil.
As long as they're all MPAA-certified-genuine DVDs, his body will be at peace because you already paid for them.
Now, if you were to send him copies of your movies, or better yet, copies of your friends' movies, we might want to attach magnets to his body, mount coils in the coffin, and use the spinning to generate enough electricity to power The Pirate Bay for the next year.
Slashdot Mirror
People tried something like this with ad-refreshing pages a few years back, with the thoughts of driving up the ad costs of "evil" companies. I once tried letting one of those go in a background window, and all I did was clog the hell out of my network connection. I lost interest after about three minutes, especially since there was no direct benefit to me.
This is what I overheard at that meeting: "Who knew that dead guys clicked on more Toyota SUV ads than anything else? Let's try posting some of those above-the-urinal ads in the casket lids, see if we can get the count up for the Subaru market, too."
And if my luck holds out, I'll own "404" next.
Imagine two barcodes that look like this:
| || |l| || |11| | |||
12345
and this:
| || || |l| |11| | |||
12345
Both look like barcodes (please forgive the characters used to dodge the lameness filter.) Both have HRIs (human readable interfaces) beneath them. But one is a forgery, and actually scans to the value 13245. Unless the person with the barcode scanner is actively verifying the numbers match (or is verifying other aspects of the document) the forgery is just as good to the laser beam as the original.
The RFID tags are at least harder to forge, but provide weaker security in that they can be intercepted or surreptitiously read. Contact-based chips (a la Smartcards) would have been the best choice in terms of security, but probably much more costly in terms of hardware maintenance of the readers (cleaning, static electricity, etc.)
That's all I had to say, but the lameness filter is making me add extra lines to make up for the junk characters. Perhaps I should have switched more bytes to exclamation points or ones or lower case Ls, that probably would have helped make up the difference. I suppose the wonderful ascii artists of the past few years have frightened Slash code into assuming that any graphic is too graphic.
And not all chipped car keys use RFID. Some keys use the Dallas Semiconductor 1-wire technology, and require electrical contact to work. They can't be jammed by this little device.
They don't have to. It's already illegal to use one for shoplifting in Minnesota, and I assume that most states have similar laws. All they have to do when they find one in your pocket is accuse you of trying to shoplift. Not only is the device itself pretty strong evidence, but you get 3 bonus years in jail if you're convicted.
It's mercury . It could be molten cold magma!
And here's the Google Maps view (from the Wikipedia article)
Since then, more carriers have installed more fibers. I don't know if carriers ever sit down and compare "bottlenecks" but I doubt that a single point of failure remains here.
As far as the Africa thing you pointed out, it's a case of a single application being down because the required servers were offline. It's certainly not a reflection of weakness with "the internet" but with that corporation's architectural design -- if they were dealing with a mission critical application, why didn't they have geographically diverse redundant data centers? The answer could have been "money" or it could have been "inexperience". Either way, the internet didn't fail the people in Africa, WorldCom failed their subscribers (there's a news flash.) It's a huge difference.
But LSPs are frequently subverted by worms and viruses, as they provide a great opportunity to sniff your network traffic for passwords and accounts, or to silently prevent your computer from contacting your anti-virus vendor. And because the mechanism is really obscure, ordinary users don't have much of a chance of encountering LSP-based malware and removing it.
UAC is right in warning the operator that a XFire is loading an LSP. But it would be difficult to make XFire work in any other way without the active cooperation of every game vendor, and most of them would rather hook up with an IM company that's willing to pay for the interface.
"Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson (google for it) is far and away his best work, IMHO. It set the hook deeper and faster than any other book I've read. But you'll probably want to read it fairly soon; the cultural references are still quite funny, but are beginning to feel a bit dated.
What's worse, though, is Visa could certainly have implemented SET and remained relevant through continued aggressive marketing. As consumers, we collectively are pretty damn stupid. Sponsor the OoOoOlympics every few years and people will line up to eat out of your hands no matter what you're selling.
A decade ago, Mastercard came up with the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol. This protocol cryptographically ensured the security of credit card data, and was designed to be implemented in hardware at the retailers. Each one of those PIN pads is capable of participating in the SET protocol.
Visa killed it, because it rendered them irrelevant.
Visa itself isn't a credit lender. Visa is a commercialized industry group, very similar to the RIAA, providing a common badge to paste on the front of thousands of banks, and a common mode of operation for those banks. When you get a Visa card, it looks and acts like any credit card from any of the member banks. That's important because you (and the merchants you shop at) trust that if your card has a Visa logo that it will be honored. Back in the late 70s, that was vitally important because most credit commerce was conducted off-line. But now that we have ubiquitous electronic networks and everyone authorizes credit cards before accepting them, that logo means almost nothing. Now, it's a question of "does the merchant trust that they'll get paid?" The Visa logo lets the cashier know that his store does (or does not) trust the bank on the other end of the transaction. It assures the merchant that yes, this Visa member bank will pay them. But with a fully online transaction, the payment could happen automatically and securely. The merchant wouldn't care where the card came from, since the authorization went directly to the customer's bank, and their bank transferred their money instantly before the customer even walked out the door. There would be no need for intermediaries to skim their transaction fees for operating a special bank-only network, as the secured transactions themselves could take place over any public network.
This would have killed Visa. Instead, they swept SET under the rug and we've been dealing with phony cards and ID theft ever since. Now, they have a program called PCI-CISP, and it's used by Visa to deflect the blame to the merchants for leaking stolen data.
Just goes to prove that nobody is 100% evil.
You are only looking at a fraction of the actual costs. How do you know what Apple's costs are, vs. the costs incurred by a physical distribution company? The costs are not just for the physical media and distribution, or the network bandwidth, iTMS development and hosting costs, but also the negotiated per-title royalties that must be paid. The labels get their cut, and that's probably the most expensive component of the price.
And even after all that, sure, Apple's costs may be lower. But Apple's prices are apparently higher by your measure, and I think that's why you're complaining.
You see, there's this funny idea called 'Capitalism'. Capitalism pretty much means "if you want to sell a product at whatever price you want to sell it, go for it. If you make money, congratulations. If you lose money, tough." The corollary to that is "if you want something and are willing to pay the asked-for price, you can buy it. If you are unwilling to pay that price, you can try to negotiate a new lower price, shop elsewhere, or go without."
So if you think a DRM-free song is worth only $0.25, why not write to Apple and ask them to sell you that song for $0.25? If they're unwilling to negotiate with you, then you are free to go to another source and pay their asking price. Otherwise, contact the record labels yourself and start a music distribution business of your own, set your prices at $0.25, and make lots of money. Let us know how that works out for you.
Be sure to let us know how that works out.
R U GONG 2 TEH PRTAY? *banned*
OMG NA SHEZ A BICH! *banned*
SES NOT A BICH! U SUKC! *banned*
I guess I'm not saying it would be all bad, mind you ...
[ The Slashdot lameness filter must be Iranian, BTW. ]
The big box retailers have buyers who do indeed keep up with music, but on a more regional level. They have lots of other problems to overcome, too:
So in a perverse twist of fate, the 13 week lead time of the big box buyers can end up *driving* the Billboard charts. The record labels ship all their new albums out to the big-box buyers. The buyers make their decisions based on what they think will sell, and manufacturing ramps up. Meanwhile, the labels look at the orders for whatever discs they just sold, and plan to ship promo copies to the radio stations to coincide with the arrival of the product on store shelves. 13 weeks after a corporate buyer says "I think this will sell", you hear it on the radio.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the buyers at the big-box retailers do indeed care about their music, but they are expected to make profitable choices, and that means they have to limit the amount of "risky" or "experimental" music they offer.
What I should have pointed out is that "don't play along" is harder to ignore when he was lobbying for you to pay a blank VCR tape tax, because you're a thief who is only going to record something copyrighted on it. He's the same guy who told this to the U.S. Senate: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Just in case you thought Slashdotters had the copyright on hyperbolic statements. And he helped shove lovely DRM down all our throats, so now my expensive HDTV set blanks out every few hours because of a hiccup in the HDCP stream coming from the cable company's official box.
Oh, were it that simple for someone like Patti Santangelo, the mother who was taken to court for acts of piracy that she wasn't committing, or Tanya Anderson,, the disabled mother who was unaware that her 10 year old daughter may have been downloading music, yet was dragged into court she couldn't afford for an old fashioned shakedown. As a matter of fact, just start looking at the cases on Recording Industry vs. People, and consider what kind of human would gleefully drive such an industry.
It's easy to say all this "just say no" stuff, but only because you haven't been wrongly accused. Follow even a few of these cases, and Valenti stands out as a man so exceedingly greedy that he stands out at the head of a group of a thousand greedy labels. Dante reserved the eighth circle of hell for those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil, and Jack himself appears to qualify for Bolgia 8, where fraudulent advisors are encased in individual flames. Break out the marshmallows, Virgil.
Hah. You're far too late. This thread was already Godwin'd after only 22 minutes and 30 posts.
I'm glad they screen the comments before they're posted. I'd be sad if any of the internet vitriol was to actually make it to his family.
Or does that spoil the sad sarcasm of your post?
Now, if you were to send him copies of your movies, or better yet, copies of your friends' movies, we might want to attach magnets to his body, mount coils in the coffin, and use the spinning to generate enough electricity to power The Pirate Bay for the next year.
Screening nothing but Adam Sandler movies. After all, he's not there for the entertainment.