Aren't there wide differences in the interfaces and characteristics of these systems?
For example, I enjoyed Baldur's Gate II on Windows 98SE. I don't know that I'd enjoy it on a PDA without some heavy alterations that a crossplatform toolkit won't be able to handle -- changing the resolution, shrinking the binary footprint, or matching the color depth appropriately come to mind. Can a game designed for a PDA interest people on a Playstation 2?
It's a cool idea, and maybe where it will really shine is in developing things like MMORPG clients, but I guess my point is that programming for compatibility means that you (probably) won't get the most out of any platform you're designing for... and games are the one thing we expect to push our hardware to its limit these days.
I'd imagine that they'll at least add enough multiplayer puzzles to it to make it worthwhile. Most people I know who had a computer with a CD-ROM played Myst, and this would be an excellent opportunity to hook the ones who really got into it.
It would be interesting to see what this kind of technology could do for Myst as well. Perhaps they could combine randomly-generated Myst-like puzzles with MMORPG gameplay to liven up MMORPG a bit as well?
However, with an IDE we can create self-executable modules. With NWN, it is a prerequisite for anybody who intends to enjoy one of my Lego-type creations to have their own copy of NWN to use it (which they have hopefully paid for instead of stolen). The more modules there are floating around out there, whether for fee or for free, the more attractive NWN becomes as a product.
It's Quake 101.
Of course a lot of work goes into creating NWN; it's a spectacular product. But a lot of work goes into Microsoft Windows, too, and the owner of that particular piece of work seems satisfied charging per-update rather than royalties for every piece of software that graces the platform. It's not about (shouldn't be about) the relative simplicity of the people creating with your product against the complexity of the work your programmers put into the product. Rather, it should be about finding a marketing system that works for the company.
On a tangentially-related note, The Sims is still fetching $40 in the stores after all these months (years?). Why is that, and is there something to that marketing plan that Bioware could tap into by encouraging a user community of cost and no-cost add-ons to the original product... which is reasonably groundbreaking at this time?
Thank you for airing our concerns with Infogrames. I'm hoping this turns out for the best; I've been looking forward to the title for a long time, and it does look like it will be every bit worth the wait.
Hello, and thank you for coming to Slashdot to address our concerns. I appreciate that you take enough interest in your work to come into the community and talk with us, and I hope that you'll take my comment to heart without offense as none is intended.
I've been quite concerned lately with the direction EULAs have been taking, and with some of the decisions being made at the leading companies in the game industry in particular. I would like to address two provisions in your EULA that could perpetuate or create new restrictions on players and hopefully persuade you to reconsider them.
One thing that troubles me is that your company is attempting to establish editorial control over the content users might wish to create and distribute.
How am I or anyone else to know whether or not a package we labor over for days (to release for free to your other customers, natch) is going to meet with your company's standards? What risk does your company really incur if it permits customers generate whatever they desire with the toolset (and deal with the law themselves if they violate it)? More importantly, what liabilities has your company taken on now that it has more or less declared itself the policeman for all content generated with its tools? I know that the ISPs lobbied their asses off to avoid that kind of responsibility; are you sure you guys want it?
The second thing that concerns me is that with this EULA your company is attempting to create rights for itself to its customers' work. It's suspicious even if you only intend to use it to create a 'best-of' pack to distribute with Neverwinter Nights when sales of the original slow down (and, hey, I personally think that it'd be pretty cool to have happen with my work, but I'd at least appreciate an e-mail -- the Linux folk aren't demanding a copy of your software just because you're running it on their server, are they?) I'm comfortable with the idea that you don't want me or anyone else to sell modules I create for a profit, as I understand you'd probably prefer to license your engine for such things, but the statements in the EULA are excessively broad if this is all your company really wants to accomplish.
Whether or not you actually intend to exert this control, the perceived threat in this clause is enough that I wouldn't risk creating content for your game, and given the impact I believe it will have on the amount of quality content available for download I'd probably have second thoughts about buying it to begin with. I certainly don't think that any of you are out to screw us, but then again I never thought that Blizzard would punish their loyal fans either. I recognize that overbroad EULAs have become one of the hallmarks of the game industry from the big players, but I sincerely hope that, as an expression of goodwill to those of us who plan to line up at the stores to spend our hard-earned money on your game the minute it leaves the truck, you will have the courage to break with that way of thinking enough to rewrite the EULA to protect our interests with the same enthusiasm as you have protected your own.
What corporation that you know of would you believe to be so altruistic that if it managed to work itself into a position like Microsoft's it wouldn't use its power just as ruthlessly?
I wouldn't bank on HPQ any more than I'd bank on, say, Sun, IBM, Apple, or AOL/Time-Warner. It just doesn't seem like fairly treating the customer fits into the computer industry, particularly if you look at the prevalence of horrible EULAs, copy protection, and the number of hardware companies rolling in these digital-rights schemes. Honestly, you don't believe that they'd tighten the screws on us as soon as Microsoft was unseated? Or do you think we'll have a Plan B (Linux) by then?
Programs exist to do this sort of thing, but given that ActiveX controls seem to require a GUID (globally-unique identifier) to operate you could try to track these down in the registry and remove them. You of course run a good risk of breaking things this way...
I'm not running Windows, so I don't remember where it stashes the GUIDs for lookup. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes might be a place to start, or you could wade through all the links an "ActiveX registry" search on Google will get you in order to find something more adequate.
Unfortunately, the logical next step is to make encryption illegal...
Really, once decyphering 'protection' measures is illegal, what use does business have for encryption, anyway?
Re:Support the community
on
WineX 2.0
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Hear, hear. Also, buy games for Linux from people who go out on a limb to develop them. I haven't heard of any of them threatening lawsuits under the DMCA, and you know they appreciate your business because we can all use something to eat from time to time.
I don't recall the media covering the DMCA, and that was pretty damn sensational. I know that they dumb it down quite a bit because they think we're all stupid in America, and toss in lots of news about the music and movie industries and hype issues for the same reason, but they've definitely dropped the ball rather conveniently on issues at times that would paint their owners in a bad light.
The linked article mentions that selling Mandrake company shares directly to users isn't feasible for a couple of reasons, but if Mandrake hypothetically got a wild hair and decided to do an offering in the U.S. what kind of hoops would they have to jump through setting it up?
For what it's worth, I recall seeing a demo of this where they mentioned that watermarking was part of the features, though it was a year or two ago and it seemed more about identifying copyright on images in the wild (web pages? porn?) than it was about preventing copies from being made in the first place.
I'm currently fed up with what I'll call sneakware, that's pre-installed software on my 2 yr old laptop which has woken up and installed software and changed default settings. I caught Adobe Photo Deluxe changing itself when I went to edit some photos. I can't even figure out how to stop it, short of yanking the phone cord out of the modem when it goes to connect to websites. Bastards.
You might have tried something like this already, but if not download or buy a package that monitors programs that try to access anything through TCP/IP and warns you when a program is trying to do something you haven't authorized over the network. Tiny Personal Firewall has worked out pretty well for me and is free for home use. It works in most cases, unless the application has a legit reason to use a particular port and also uses it for something you wouldn't expect. Adobe Photo Deluxe doesn't sound like it'd fit into that category, however...
Isn't using VNC with an X->X connection just adding overhead to what X can do natively?
BTW: I've had good results with using The X Window System under Cygwin on Windows 98 to do a MS->X connection using XDMCP on the local network... might be worth trying out if you want an alternative to VNC MS->X.
This page, specifically the "Conditions for DRM Signatures" section, probably represents what Microsoft means by implement. In layman's terms (the only way I can fit this in a paragraph): it sounds more like the drivers will have to be written to support it, these drivers will be stamped by a Microsoft seal of approval, and only drivers with the special seal will be permitted to play audio that is marked with a 'play only on trusted devices' flag. The hardware will need to support certain features that the driver can toggle, such as digital audio output from the card, but I'd imagine that such cards could support both Microsoft's DRM model and a standard interface that other operating systems could use without modification to their drivers.
I still don't understand what the big deal is about the difference between a digitally-perfect copy of a piece of audio being illegally duplicated and disseminated through the Internet and a one-off analog copy of a piece of audio being illegally duplicated and disseminated through the Internet, but I guess I can see where DRM would be a very profitable venture if one can convince others of its usefulness. It's not like it really matters if their userbase doesn't want it, anyway.
I would have prefaced that statement with something to the effect that just because I'm listing examples doesn't mean that the list is exhaustive, that the examples given are somehow more egregious than the examples not given in their pursuit of legislation that runs counter to my perception of what the Slashdot audience would prefer, and that the order of the examples that are given is not intended to suggest a sliding level of complicity in achieving the passage of said legislation. However, my hope was that the average Slashdot participant would be reading my comment with the above assumptions in mind so I wouln't need to unnecessarily burden them with a definition of the context my comment should be read in. Additionally, I anticipated that a thought like yours might pop into some readers' minds after seeing my comment, and that is why I added the phrase 'or any of the other companies who have made it clear which side of the digital rights and DMCA fence they are on'.
I didn't include Microsoft in my list of companies because I didn't want people to get the idea that I was just talking about console manufacturers, which they might think after seeing three in a row, and because the "Microsoft Is Evil" mantra is stuck in everybody's head already; no need for me to bring them up, especially when even people who don't like Microsoft are getting worn out on the Microsoft-bashing.
But no, you shouldn't buy your consoles from Microsoft either if DRM or UCITA isn't your thing (BTW: did they club anybody using the DMCA yet?) A good deal of entertainment is still to be had on the Dreamcast, which is cheap as hell nowadays, and if you really need a recent console fix buy everything you can used -- games in particular -- and buy peripherals from anyone but the manufacturer of the console. I'd be bored as hell if I quit buying anything that made profit for an entity backing digital rights management, the DMCA, the SSSCA, or the UCITA, so I just cut back my purchases of those goods some and sought alternative sources of entertainment such as reading and game development. Hasn't killed me yet.
I think the reason nobody's standing up for their rights is because we all remember the time in elementary school when 'everybody was going to' whip a paper airplane at the teacher's desk at 2:15 and there was one doofus who, when the time finally came, actually did it. Most of us throught it was pretty funny watching him get sent to the office too. So you can see where the one-man geek revolution would get kind of awkward.
Besides, as much as some in here bitch about the SSSCA and the DMCA, the true strength of their conviction is really shown when they line up to the MPAA trough every couple of weeks. Or buy hardware from Sony, Nintendo, Toshiba, IBM, or any of the other companies who have made it clear which side of the digital rights and DMCA fence they are on. Tell people that all you have to do is stop spending money on certain things, or hell, even just cut back their movie spending, and they'll respond like you just asked them to amputate a limb.
Look, we can't even convince the people who are supposedly clued about the whole problem (Slashdot) -- what possible chance is there to make the problem and solution clear to people to struggle to understand the evening news? +1 Insightful to you.
They had a couple of sentences from Jason Catlett of Junkbusters in the article (he almost always makes an appearance when a reporter is looking for quotes on privacy flaps), but more info on the matter -- including an open letter from Mr. Catlett to eBay -- is to be had from the Junkbusters news page.
Also mentioned on the page but not related is the fact that J.C. Penney will start sharing customer information from their catalog buyer file unless they call 1-800-204-3334 or e-mail privacy@jcpenneyeservices.com to opt-out.
It's kind of funny that this was brought up today; it reminds me of something
that I was just discussing with a friend not too long ago.
It seems that back in the late 1800's in America (I mention this for those/.ers who don't happen to live in the U.S.) there was this saloon in the
West that was kind of a run-down, ramshackle joint that was frequented by
a few loyal patrons and not too many others. I think it was California, but
it could have been Oregon or someplace similar -- well, the location isn't
really relevant to the story but if you're really interested you might
be able to dig a bit on Google to find out. Basically, while the saloon
didn't go out of its way to publicize itself to out-of-towners (not much
point given that it was in a fairly remote area) it managed to do a fairly
steady trade despite the occasional brawl that caused property damage and
the persistent requests from a particular fellow for free drinks.
More nights than not, the proprietor of the saloon would watch this drunk
come wandering in through the doors, sit down, and lay a line on him about
how he's trying to pull things together and how he'd just make enough to
keep himself in beans and couldn't the bartender just pour him a shot or
two to fuzz the edges and whatnot. And again, more nights than not, the
bartender would take pity on the poor guy and pull out the whiskey.
Now, this went on for some time, and while the bartender was an easy mark
even he had his limit. So one night, after the bartender already gave the
fellow three shots on the house, he decides to cut the guy off.
"Look," he says, "while I'm really sorry to hear that things still aren't
working out for you I don't think that I can keep giving you free
drinks. I've got to make ends meet too, you know."
So the drunk says, "I don't suppose you've got anything I can do to get
another drink tonight?"
The proprietor, not particularly wanting the fellow to hang around all
night and certainly not expecting him to take him up on his proposition,
says "Well, you see that spittoon over there? If you take a swig out of
that I suppose I could give you a drink to wash it down."
No sooner did he finish his last sentence than the drunk walked over to
the spittoon and heft it off of the floor. Before the bartender could
stop him, the fellow put the rim to his lips, tipped the bottom of the
metal container up into the air, and began to swallow. To the bartender's
dismayal, the guy continued to slowly chug the thick contents of the
spittoon. When he had finally gulped the final remnants of the container,
he threw it to the ground, wiped off his lips with his shirt cuff, and
gagged, "So, do I get the drink?"
"You can have the bottle!" exclaimed the bartender, immediately
pouring the first shot. "But tell me, why did you swallow the whole damn thing? You only needed to swig it to earn the drink."
The drunk replies: "It was all one long string."
BTW: This Troll Tuesday post is a nominee in the Most Stealthy and
Best Payload categories for the World Troll Awards 2002. Please show
your support for the event by composing an extremely offensive or
provocative message and submitting it to this site for review. While
any place will probably get your message seen, be advised that posting
near the top of an article will help your odds. Also, frequency counts;
submit early and submit often, and we'll see -you- at the Awards.
That really sucks. I don't have any bulletproof solutions for you, but the following idea might help you to cut back on the problem:
Create a web page under the domain explaining the situation. If you get any bounce messages from undeliverables from the spammer's run, include a link to a copy of one of them. Add links to websites with more information on tracing headers and advice on dealing with spam, and perhaps suggest to the visitor that they call a legislator or two about the issue. Then, in your WHOIS record, add the URL to the page with a short blurb calculated to get the reader to visit the page rather than disturbing you with a phone call. "Did you receive spam appearing to come from this domain? Please read this for more information." or something along those lines.
I hope this helps. I doubt it will do much to stop the hate e-mail, but for me the worst part of the whole matter would be having people calling on the phone. I already don't like the idea of putting real contact information into WHOIS records, and somehow your situation doesn't make me feel any better about it.
I think that printCafe (one of the companies mentioned in the article) is actually going after FuckedCompany (which wasn't), so it's a bigger bummer than you might have thought...
I'm not overly thrilled with the DMCA either. However, I really don't understand the parent's position. One type of speech arguably could be used to facilitate the commission of a crime. And most if not all US states do have laws against supplying training to people knowing that training will be used for criminal purposes. OTOH, so-called "hate crimes" laws (of the Euro flavor) mostly criminalize speech on the basis of "It makes someone feel bad and tries to assuage our guilt over the Nazis/Fascists/Vichy/et cetera."
I'm not clear about which position you don't understand, so I'll try to rehash my thoughts in a different way.
Many seem to feel that free speech in the USA means or should mean that you can say whatever you want. The grandparent to your post has noted that Europe is restricting speech over its wires by prohibiting the transmission of racist content. The poster then makes light of the priorities in America (which are indeed screwed up) because our legislators have seen fit to pass a bill that effectively restricts our speech in regards to certain technical content while racist content is still permitted to exist. The poster's comment also stated that because America runs the DNS system we shouldn't be surprised that other countries want jurisdiction over the Internet.
I don't know whether the poster is upset at our priorities because he/she feels that we should have the same restrictions and laws as Europe (which seems to be a common complaint from Europeans, though I don't know where the poster hails from) or because of the inherent hypocracy of touting free speech and indicting Skylarov with the same mouth. I wanted to address both possibilities, which is probably why my real position sounded conflicted. My position, which I didn't really mention in the post because I only wanted to address the technical side of things, is that hate crime legislation is redundant and unnecessary in the U.S. If someone murders someone else, does the race of the victim really matter in determining the severity of the crime? What about battery? Or repeated harassment? If we think the punishments are too weak in the cases where these crimes cross racial lines, they're too weak when they don't. Hate crime legislation categorizes people in a world where we need to think of each other as equals. It achieves what it is seeking to prevent.
Could hate crime statutes criminalize mere speech? Of course; we've got other laws on the books that do as well. For example, using speech as a mechanism to get someone fired from their job on false pretenses is and should be illegal because it is going from the realm of disseminating ideas and concepts to the realm of actively causing harm to someone in particular (think libel and slander). Both the DMCA and hate crime legislation dance on the line between these two realms. One might say that, however distasteful, a holocaust denial website should be permitted to exist because the creator has a right to speak his mind; that censorship in the past has proven to be a detriment to the sharing of culture and knowledge and that you have to take the bad with the good. On the other hand, someone else would state that such a site is a harassment to a group who have endured misery on a scale most of us can only imagine. My point is that the apparent lack of priorities in the American system is really a symptom of the complexity of resolving the conflict of interest between free speech and anti-racism/pro-corporate agendas (corporations are making more headway against the First Amendment because their lobbyists are better funded). My position is that we need to be a lot more careful about telling people what they can't think and what they can't say because while we're supposedly doing this to bolster freedom (irony, that) it paves the way towards having a naive and unopinionated population that is just as capable of supporting evil as it is of good because it doesn't know any better.
I agree with libel and slander laws, anti-stalking laws, anti-harrassment laws, and the spirit of the DMCA, provided that all would be so carefully worded that there can be no doubt about the intent to harm in the speech or actions of those who violate the laws, but when the legislation is so sloppily constructed as to threaten to ruin the lives of someone who gets careless with his insults (Idaho case, see below) or permit publishers to sidestep our fair use rights with legislation merely intended to protect their works from exploitation it's just wrong.
The First Amendment has been so important to the foundation of our society in the U.S. that we shouldn't start stripping it down now just because we're fat, dumb, and happy and don't think we need to be as free anymore. Many of the problems people have with just thinking for themselves nowadays is because they get information spoonfed from CNN or Fox and think that's the whole story. The flow of information and concepts are being restricted to a couple of chokepoints where everything judged to be unsavory or unnewsworthy is filtered out and no matter where you go you get the same four pieces of news for the day with slightly different spins on them. That's before we even get started with the speech-limiting laws.
I've always viewed the Internet as an excellent way of importing freedom. In my case, I can visit news sites and talk with citizens in foreign countries to find out what the hell is really going on out there. So when each country starts deciding the rules for the rest of us, I get a bit nervous. Yes, that applies to when the U.S. does it every bit as much as it does to when Germany, Australia, or France does it. You mentioned the DMCA, which by the way is largely a codification of international law (WIPO), but I'm even more worried about the potential impact of certain provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act on the rest of the world. International cooperation and a laissez-faire attitude is what helped build the Internet, and I think that the aggregation of unpalatable laws from every country involved in handling its traffic will only serve to tear it down.
I usually cite sources, BTW, but I got lazy in my last post. You can read more about the Idaho case involving Lonny Rae here. This is from August of this year, and while I'm sure there will be more to this story it hasn't happened yet. The latest thing I could find on it was a rethoric-packed plea from his lawyer for support in the beginning of September here saying that it was going to trial in three weeks, but I haven't seen anything about it since. My guess is that media attention to this case will pick up again either when it goes to trial or when a verdict is announced, but I don't think the law has been overturned yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Are they in talks to merge the SimFranchise with Clue?
Obviously, we will need to handle games using this technology with care. :)
For example, I enjoyed Baldur's Gate II on Windows 98SE. I don't know that I'd enjoy it on a PDA without some heavy alterations that a crossplatform toolkit won't be able to handle -- changing the resolution, shrinking the binary footprint, or matching the color depth appropriately come to mind. Can a game designed for a PDA interest people on a Playstation 2?
It's a cool idea, and maybe where it will really shine is in developing things like MMORPG clients, but I guess my point is that programming for compatibility means that you (probably) won't get the most out of any platform you're designing for... and games are the one thing we expect to push our hardware to its limit these days.
It would be interesting to see what this kind of technology could do for Myst as well. Perhaps they could combine randomly-generated Myst-like puzzles with MMORPG gameplay to liven up MMORPG a bit as well?
It's Quake 101.
Of course a lot of work goes into creating NWN; it's a spectacular product. But a lot of work goes into Microsoft Windows, too, and the owner of that particular piece of work seems satisfied charging per-update rather than royalties for every piece of software that graces the platform. It's not about (shouldn't be about) the relative simplicity of the people creating with your product against the complexity of the work your programmers put into the product. Rather, it should be about finding a marketing system that works for the company.
On a tangentially-related note, The Sims is still fetching $40 in the stores after all these months (years?). Why is that, and is there something to that marketing plan that Bioware could tap into by encouraging a user community of cost and no-cost add-ons to the original product... which is reasonably groundbreaking at this time?
(Neverwinter forum discussion here).
I've been quite concerned lately with the direction EULAs have been taking, and with some of the decisions being made at the leading companies in the game industry in particular. I would like to address two provisions in your EULA that could perpetuate or create new restrictions on players and hopefully persuade you to reconsider them.
One thing that troubles me is that your company is attempting to establish editorial control over the content users might wish to create and distribute. How am I or anyone else to know whether or not a package we labor over for days (to release for free to your other customers, natch) is going to meet with your company's standards? What risk does your company really incur if it permits customers generate whatever they desire with the toolset (and deal with the law themselves if they violate it)? More importantly, what liabilities has your company taken on now that it has more or less declared itself the policeman for all content generated with its tools? I know that the ISPs lobbied their asses off to avoid that kind of responsibility; are you sure you guys want it?
The second thing that concerns me is that with this EULA your company is attempting to create rights for itself to its customers' work. It's suspicious even if you only intend to use it to create a 'best-of' pack to distribute with Neverwinter Nights when sales of the original slow down (and, hey, I personally think that it'd be pretty cool to have happen with my work, but I'd at least appreciate an e-mail -- the Linux folk aren't demanding a copy of your software just because you're running it on their server, are they?) I'm comfortable with the idea that you don't want me or anyone else to sell modules I create for a profit, as I understand you'd probably prefer to license your engine for such things, but the statements in the EULA are excessively broad if this is all your company really wants to accomplish.
Whether or not you actually intend to exert this control, the perceived threat in this clause is enough that I wouldn't risk creating content for your game, and given the impact I believe it will have on the amount of quality content available for download I'd probably have second thoughts about buying it to begin with. I certainly don't think that any of you are out to screw us, but then again I never thought that Blizzard would punish their loyal fans either. I recognize that overbroad EULAs have become one of the hallmarks of the game industry from the big players, but I sincerely hope that, as an expression of goodwill to those of us who plan to line up at the stores to spend our hard-earned money on your game the minute it leaves the truck, you will have the courage to break with that way of thinking enough to rewrite the EULA to protect our interests with the same enthusiasm as you have protected your own.
I wouldn't bank on HPQ any more than I'd bank on, say, Sun, IBM, Apple, or AOL/Time-Warner. It just doesn't seem like fairly treating the customer fits into the computer industry, particularly if you look at the prevalence of horrible EULAs, copy protection, and the number of hardware companies rolling in these digital-rights schemes. Honestly, you don't believe that they'd tighten the screws on us as soon as Microsoft was unseated? Or do you think we'll have a Plan B (Linux) by then?
I'm not running Windows, so I don't remember where it stashes the GUIDs for lookup. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes might be a place to start, or you could wade through all the links an "ActiveX registry" search on Google will get you in order to find something more adequate.
I see nothing but bad things coming of this idea. The recursion alone makes my head ache.
Really, once decyphering 'protection' measures is illegal, what use does business have for encryption, anyway?
Hear, hear. Also, buy games for Linux from people who go out on a limb to develop them. I haven't heard of any of them threatening lawsuits under the DMCA, and you know they appreciate your business because we can all use something to eat from time to time.
I don't recall the media covering the DMCA, and that was pretty damn sensational. I know that they dumb it down quite a bit because they think we're all stupid in America, and toss in lots of news about the music and movie industries and hype issues for the same reason, but they've definitely dropped the ball rather conveniently on issues at times that would paint their owners in a bad light.
The linked article mentions that selling Mandrake company shares directly to users isn't feasible for a couple of reasons, but if Mandrake hypothetically got a wild hair and decided to do an offering in the U.S. what kind of hoops would they have to jump through setting it up?
For what it's worth, I recall seeing a demo of this where they mentioned that watermarking was part of the features, though it was a year or two ago and it seemed more about identifying copyright on images in the wild (web pages? porn?) than it was about preventing copies from being made in the first place.
You might have tried something like this already, but if not download or buy a package that monitors programs that try to access anything through TCP/IP and warns you when a program is trying to do something you haven't authorized over the network. Tiny Personal Firewall has worked out pretty well for me and is free for home use. It works in most cases, unless the application has a legit reason to use a particular port and also uses it for something you wouldn't expect. Adobe Photo Deluxe doesn't sound like it'd fit into that category, however...
BTW: I've had good results with using The X Window System under Cygwin on Windows 98 to do a MS->X connection using XDMCP on the local network... might be worth trying out if you want an alternative to VNC MS->X.
I still don't understand what the big deal is about the difference between a digitally-perfect copy of a piece of audio being illegally duplicated and disseminated through the Internet and a one-off analog copy of a piece of audio being illegally duplicated and disseminated through the Internet, but I guess I can see where DRM would be a very profitable venture if one can convince others of its usefulness. It's not like it really matters if their userbase doesn't want it, anyway.
I didn't include Microsoft in my list of companies because I didn't want people to get the idea that I was just talking about console manufacturers, which they might think after seeing three in a row, and because the "Microsoft Is Evil" mantra is stuck in everybody's head already; no need for me to bring them up, especially when even people who don't like Microsoft are getting worn out on the Microsoft-bashing.
But no, you shouldn't buy your consoles from Microsoft either if DRM or UCITA isn't your thing (BTW: did they club anybody using the DMCA yet?) A good deal of entertainment is still to be had on the Dreamcast, which is cheap as hell nowadays, and if you really need a recent console fix buy everything you can used -- games in particular -- and buy peripherals from anyone but the manufacturer of the console. I'd be bored as hell if I quit buying anything that made profit for an entity backing digital rights management, the DMCA, the SSSCA, or the UCITA, so I just cut back my purchases of those goods some and sought alternative sources of entertainment such as reading and game development. Hasn't killed me yet.
Besides, as much as some in here bitch about the SSSCA and the DMCA, the true strength of their conviction is really shown when they line up to the MPAA trough every couple of weeks. Or buy hardware from Sony, Nintendo, Toshiba, IBM, or any of the other companies who have made it clear which side of the digital rights and DMCA fence they are on. Tell people that all you have to do is stop spending money on certain things, or hell, even just cut back their movie spending, and they'll respond like you just asked them to amputate a limb.
Look, we can't even convince the people who are supposedly clued about the whole problem (Slashdot) -- what possible chance is there to make the problem and solution clear to people to struggle to understand the evening news? +1 Insightful to you.
Also mentioned on the page but not related is the fact that J.C. Penney will start sharing customer information from their catalog buyer file unless they call 1-800-204-3334 or e-mail privacy@jcpenneyeservices.com to opt-out.
It seems that back in the late 1800's in America (I mention this for those /.ers who don't happen to live in the U.S.) there was this saloon in the
West that was kind of a run-down, ramshackle joint that was frequented by
a few loyal patrons and not too many others. I think it was California, but
it could have been Oregon or someplace similar -- well, the location isn't
really relevant to the story but if you're really interested you might
be able to dig a bit on Google to find out. Basically, while the saloon
didn't go out of its way to publicize itself to out-of-towners (not much
point given that it was in a fairly remote area) it managed to do a fairly
steady trade despite the occasional brawl that caused property damage and
the persistent requests from a particular fellow for free drinks.
More nights than not, the proprietor of the saloon would watch this drunk come wandering in through the doors, sit down, and lay a line on him about how he's trying to pull things together and how he'd just make enough to keep himself in beans and couldn't the bartender just pour him a shot or two to fuzz the edges and whatnot. And again, more nights than not, the bartender would take pity on the poor guy and pull out the whiskey.
Now, this went on for some time, and while the bartender was an easy mark even he had his limit. So one night, after the bartender already gave the fellow three shots on the house, he decides to cut the guy off.
"Look," he says, "while I'm really sorry to hear that things still aren't working out for you I don't think that I can keep giving you free drinks. I've got to make ends meet too, you know."
So the drunk says, "I don't suppose you've got anything I can do to get another drink tonight?"
The proprietor, not particularly wanting the fellow to hang around all night and certainly not expecting him to take him up on his proposition, says "Well, you see that spittoon over there? If you take a swig out of that I suppose I could give you a drink to wash it down."
No sooner did he finish his last sentence than the drunk walked over to the spittoon and heft it off of the floor. Before the bartender could stop him, the fellow put the rim to his lips, tipped the bottom of the metal container up into the air, and began to swallow. To the bartender's dismayal, the guy continued to slowly chug the thick contents of the spittoon. When he had finally gulped the final remnants of the container, he threw it to the ground, wiped off his lips with his shirt cuff, and gagged, "So, do I get the drink?"
"You can have the bottle!" exclaimed the bartender, immediately pouring the first shot. "But tell me, why did you swallow the whole damn thing? You only needed to swig it to earn the drink."
The drunk replies: "It was all one long string."
BTW: This Troll Tuesday post is a nominee in the Most Stealthy and Best Payload categories for the World Troll Awards 2002. Please show your support for the event by composing an extremely offensive or provocative message and submitting it to this site for review. While any place will probably get your message seen, be advised that posting near the top of an article will help your odds. Also, frequency counts; submit early and submit often, and we'll see -you- at the Awards.
Create a web page under the domain explaining the situation. If you get any bounce messages from undeliverables from the spammer's run, include a link to a copy of one of them. Add links to websites with more information on tracing headers and advice on dealing with spam, and perhaps suggest to the visitor that they call a legislator or two about the issue. Then, in your WHOIS record, add the URL to the page with a short blurb calculated to get the reader to visit the page rather than disturbing you with a phone call. "Did you receive spam appearing to come from this domain? Please read this for more information." or something along those lines.
I hope this helps. I doubt it will do much to stop the hate e-mail, but for me the worst part of the whole matter would be having people calling on the phone. I already don't like the idea of putting real contact information into WHOIS records, and somehow your situation doesn't make me feel any better about it.
I think that printCafe (one of the companies mentioned in the article) is actually going after FuckedCompany (which wasn't), so it's a bigger bummer than you might have thought...
I'm not clear about which position you don't understand, so I'll try to rehash my thoughts in a different way.
Many seem to feel that free speech in the USA means or should mean that you can say whatever you want. The grandparent to your post has noted that Europe is restricting speech over its wires by prohibiting the transmission of racist content. The poster then makes light of the priorities in America (which are indeed screwed up) because our legislators have seen fit to pass a bill that effectively restricts our speech in regards to certain technical content while racist content is still permitted to exist. The poster's comment also stated that because America runs the DNS system we shouldn't be surprised that other countries want jurisdiction over the Internet.
I don't know whether the poster is upset at our priorities because he/she feels that we should have the same restrictions and laws as Europe (which seems to be a common complaint from Europeans, though I don't know where the poster hails from) or because of the inherent hypocracy of touting free speech and indicting Skylarov with the same mouth. I wanted to address both possibilities, which is probably why my real position sounded conflicted. My position, which I didn't really mention in the post because I only wanted to address the technical side of things, is that hate crime legislation is redundant and unnecessary in the U.S. If someone murders someone else, does the race of the victim really matter in determining the severity of the crime? What about battery? Or repeated harassment? If we think the punishments are too weak in the cases where these crimes cross racial lines, they're too weak when they don't. Hate crime legislation categorizes people in a world where we need to think of each other as equals. It achieves what it is seeking to prevent.
Could hate crime statutes criminalize mere speech? Of course; we've got other laws on the books that do as well. For example, using speech as a mechanism to get someone fired from their job on false pretenses is and should be illegal because it is going from the realm of disseminating ideas and concepts to the realm of actively causing harm to someone in particular (think libel and slander). Both the DMCA and hate crime legislation dance on the line between these two realms. One might say that, however distasteful, a holocaust denial website should be permitted to exist because the creator has a right to speak his mind; that censorship in the past has proven to be a detriment to the sharing of culture and knowledge and that you have to take the bad with the good. On the other hand, someone else would state that such a site is a harassment to a group who have endured misery on a scale most of us can only imagine. My point is that the apparent lack of priorities in the American system is really a symptom of the complexity of resolving the conflict of interest between free speech and anti-racism/pro-corporate agendas (corporations are making more headway against the First Amendment because their lobbyists are better funded). My position is that we need to be a lot more careful about telling people what they can't think and what they can't say because while we're supposedly doing this to bolster freedom (irony, that) it paves the way towards having a naive and unopinionated population that is just as capable of supporting evil as it is of good because it doesn't know any better.
I agree with libel and slander laws, anti-stalking laws, anti-harrassment laws, and the spirit of the DMCA, provided that all would be so carefully worded that there can be no doubt about the intent to harm in the speech or actions of those who violate the laws, but when the legislation is so sloppily constructed as to threaten to ruin the lives of someone who gets careless with his insults (Idaho case, see below) or permit publishers to sidestep our fair use rights with legislation merely intended to protect their works from exploitation it's just wrong.
The First Amendment has been so important to the foundation of our society in the U.S. that we shouldn't start stripping it down now just because we're fat, dumb, and happy and don't think we need to be as free anymore. Many of the problems people have with just thinking for themselves nowadays is because they get information spoonfed from CNN or Fox and think that's the whole story. The flow of information and concepts are being restricted to a couple of chokepoints where everything judged to be unsavory or unnewsworthy is filtered out and no matter where you go you get the same four pieces of news for the day with slightly different spins on them. That's before we even get started with the speech-limiting laws.
I've always viewed the Internet as an excellent way of importing freedom. In my case, I can visit news sites and talk with citizens in foreign countries to find out what the hell is really going on out there. So when each country starts deciding the rules for the rest of us, I get a bit nervous. Yes, that applies to when the U.S. does it every bit as much as it does to when Germany, Australia, or France does it. You mentioned the DMCA, which by the way is largely a codification of international law (WIPO), but I'm even more worried about the potential impact of certain provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act on the rest of the world. International cooperation and a laissez-faire attitude is what helped build the Internet, and I think that the aggregation of unpalatable laws from every country involved in handling its traffic will only serve to tear it down.
I usually cite sources, BTW, but I got lazy in my last post. You can read more about the Idaho case involving Lonny Rae here. This is from August of this year, and while I'm sure there will be more to this story it hasn't happened yet. The latest thing I could find on it was a rethoric-packed plea from his lawyer for support in the beginning of September here saying that it was going to trial in three weeks, but I haven't seen anything about it since. My guess is that media attention to this case will pick up again either when it goes to trial or when a verdict is announced, but I don't think the law has been overturned yet.