Debian's actively working on getting packages GnuPG-signed. Once that's in place, compromising the server from which the packages are retrieved won't be sufficient.
What do you use Freenet for? Somebody, please answer the question!!
At the moment, not a whole lot. Some people apparently like to post inflammatory or politically incorrect comments to the authors of popular Freesites (like Content of Evil); and because the submission of this information is anonymous, they can say outrageous things without as much worry that someone in dark sunglasses will come knocking on their door tomorrow.
But it's rather easy to imagine some of the possible uses for Freenet. Consider a web comic. Most web comics are published daily, or N times per week where N is between 1 and 6. In order to do so, the comic author has to have a place to host the comic, for which he or she probably pays a monthly fee. The more popular the comic is, the more bandwidth the author will have to pay for. The current models of financing this business/hobby are advertisements, merchandise, and requests for donations. Most web comics are doing at least two of these; many do all three.
Now, consider what would happen if a web comic were published on Freenet instead of the World Wide Web. One of the most popular sites in Freenet, Content of Evil, is published by someone claiming to be a dial-up user! You don't have to pay bandwidth costs for Freenet publication. In fact, the more popular your site is, the better.
The "daily update" nature of most Freenet sites lends itself perfectly to web comics, which are also updated daily. (If you miss a day, your site will be unreachable for that day, but astute readers will know how to get yesterday's edition.)
I don't know of anyone who's using Freenet for such a purpose; I don't even know of anyone who's considering it yet. Freenet's not really stable enough for such an undertaking yet. It's also a bit newbie-unfriendly; most of the people who draw comics aren't geeky enough to understand Freenet's CHK, KSK, SSK, etc., let alone that insane "encode the date in hexadecimal" thing.
But there may come a day when Freenet is fast and stable, and it's relatively easy for an end-user to understand how to publish a Freenet site. (There is a fair amount of documentation floating around now; it varies in quality and up-to-dateness.) When that happens, a great number of assumptions that we take for granted may be overturned.
Some guy kept attempting to upload 45 songs across my poor 56k connection all at once. I found the only quick solution to keep him from doing so was to stop the giFT daemon altogether.
You could have used ipchains, iptables, packet filter or whatever your operating system uses for firewall controls to block his IP address.
Wonder if this could be applied to getting hold of a copy of a broadcast programme you would not otherwise be able to see for some months even years...
I doubt it, very strongly. If that were so, then I could just time-shift downloaded Ogg and MP3 files from the distant future where their copyright term has expired and they're public domain. "But, Your Honor, these phonorecords will enter the public domain in 2097, assuming no more retroactive copyright extension laws are passed in the next 95 years! So I just time-shifted it, and I downloaded it early!"
Why isn't the public making a fuss? Why, at a time when the most basic principal of society-the right to know-is being turned into a criminal act, isn't there an army of outrage fighting to protect the free flow of human creativity?
A public outcry is useless if there is no one to hear it.
It has been demonstrated over and over again, especially in the last 5 years, that Congress and the courts hold the "rights" of corporations to continue doing business in higher regard than the Rights of the people. They do not care about us; and in fact, if we attempt to exercise our Rights in any visible way, we are arrested. Ask Jon Johansen. Ask Dmitry Sklyarov.
The battleground has changed. We can no longer fight our battles in the open, using the due process of Law, because the Law has been corrupted by money. So we fight in the darkness. Our file transfers are private and secret, just like their back-room deals, their bribes (they call it "lobbying"), and their good-ol'-boy networking.
Morpheus is one of the most popular downloads in the history of cyberspace. Users have retrieved more than 40 million copies since July.
If that isn't "the public making a fuss", then what is it?
That Ernest dude is dead. He won't be contributing to science and the useful arts any time soon. So why should his works still be copyrighted? In what way does the public at large benefit from a continued monopoly on the distribution of his fisherman story?
Re:What happened to the MP3 Pro spec?
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
MP3Pro is mostly a marketing ploy. It has a 10 kHz lowpass filter, and then tries to reconstruct the upper frequencies based on harmonic extrapolation of the lower frequencies. This may be somewhat useful for low bitrates (say, under 80 kbps, for use in portable players). But the irreversible loss of audio quality makes this an inappropriate codec for the kinds of uses that I (at least) prefer: namely, files sitting on my hard drive on my desktop computer.
About once every... oh, 10 minutes... someone asks for a tool to convert MP3 to Ogg.
Do NOT convert MP3 to Ogg! Converting (transcoding) between lossy codecs only makes the quality horrible -- the artifacts interact in unpredictable ways. It's like faxing a photocopy of a fax.
Rip your CDs with Exact Audio Copy (win32) or cdparanoia (Linux, et al.). Encode them with oggenc (or LAME if you need MP3 for portable devices). Share them with your friends.
People don't want easy accessible music; they want free music.
Of course we do. Who wouldn't want free stuff?
But there's more to it than that. A lot more.
First of all, we want to be able to hear the music in the first place. Have you tried listening to commercial radio lately? For how long? The simple fact is that if we want to hear something that's been mentioned by a friend (either in "real life" or online), we can't get it from the radio. Radio doesn't play anything that anyone would ever recommend to anyone else. It's simply a marketing arm of the record companies trying to increase sales of the Pop-Star-of-The-Month.
Let's say I tell you how much I loved Tori Amos's third album Boys For Pele. Are you going to rush to the store and buy it based on that recommendation? Probably not. You'll at least want to hear it for yourself first.
So what choices does that give you?
Turn on the local alternative radio station and wait for them to play Tori. Hah! The last time I heard anything I'd describe as "alternative" on the radio was about 5 years ago. There aren't any "alternative" format stations in Cleveland now. There's one station that plays Limp Bizkit rap/metal, but nothing that plays "adult alternative" like Tori or REM. Nothing.
Turn on MTV and wait for them to play Tori. A-HAHAHA! See above. And below.
Turn on M2. What M2? Where is it on my cable channel list? Oh yeah, it's not there. If MTV wanted me to hear music, they'd play some fucking music instead of "reality shows". They wouldn't have moved all the music to a different channel that nobody actually gets. They'd just play music on MTV, and then put all the crap TV on the other station. But that's not what they want to do -- they don't want to play music any more. They want to show crap, because they think crap generates more money for them. Maybe it does -- but it's sure as hell not my money that they're pulling in.
Find samples on CDNOW or some other online vendor. This is sometimes feasible, but your chances of getting a sample of decent length (e.g., a whole song) are pretty low. The samples also tend to be low quality recordings. But the worst problem here is that they tend to be shackled in one or more ways. They may require you to submit an email address so they can spam you. Or they may require you to turn on Javascript and cookies. Or they may disallow access from non-Microsoft web browsers. Or they may release samples only in Microsoft/Real media formats (Real Audio, WMA, etc.). So you can't play them on Linux, even if you can download them in the first place, which is problematic.
You could buy a CD, listen to it a few times, and then return it to the store. Most stores don't let you do this. And even if you did, you're costing the store money for your own convenience. It's basically dishonest, and real people will be hurt by your actions. That makes it wrong.
You could find a copy of the song on an independent promotional site (what you're calling "pirate") and download it and listen to it. The problem here is that you might not find the song, and you might not be able to get it quickly (independent music promoters tend to have low-bandwidth upstream Internet links, like cable modems) or reliably (cable modems, dial-up). The ripping or the encoding (or both) might be flawed, or low-quality.
You could find a friend in meatspace who has the CD, and ask him or her to let you borrow it, or to make a copy for you. This has the obvious drawback that it only works if you happen to know someone who has the CD.
Which of these have the greatest likelihood of letting you hear the music? Probably the last two. Which have the greatest likelihood of leading to a monetary transaction between you and the artist? Well, none of them, so let me rephrase. Which of them have the greatest chance of getting you to send money to the record company who, in theory, passes money on to the artist? Probably #5: if you buy a CD from the store, all you have to do to "make a purchase" is keep it instead of returning it. But #6 is also good: if you like that Ogg file you downloaded, you might decide to buy a CD.
You sure as hell aren't going to be enriching the artist or the record company if you follow any of the first 3 models. And #4 is potluck, and your odds have gotten worse over time. #7 will depend on whether you got a cassette copy from your friend, or a burned CD, or whether you just borrowed his CD with the intention of returning it. If you got a burned CD copy, you may just keep that instead of buying your own.
So by my reckoning, downloading "pirate" music is at least the second-best money-making promotional model there is (or possibly the best) for the type of music that isn't played on commercial radio and MTV.
And that's at least 99% of all the music in the world.
If you're going to pirate something, at least admit to yourself that you're ripping off someone, not a victimized consumer standing up his rights.
If you're going to troll slashdot users, at least admit to yourself that you're a tool of the record companies and their hired public relations psychologists. And that you're helping them rip off 99% of the musicians in the world by systematically destroying all but the 1% who achieve "Star" status and therefore simply die poor instead of flat broke.
If you'd rather help artists, then donate money directly to them, or buy CDs straight from the artists instead of through the record companies (for the artists who are able to do that).
1) logging to paper; so the cracker can't totally erase his trail
That doesn't require lpd. Just add the line printer's device name as an additional target in syslog.conf.
Or run a teletype console, and log everything important to the console. (I've actually seen a setup that used that. In production. In 1996.)
Even if you do use the Unix print spooling subsystem on your firewall, you should not have the lpd port (515/tcp) open on the public network interface(s).
I was wondering where Grimoire went, myself. www.grimoire.net is still bringing up a French Yahoo! page (has been for about a year now). If anyone has Grimoire news, I'd love to see it.
cruise missiles being shot out of the sky... by archers.
That one's a reviewer blunder. The cruise missile was in transit along the ground (being moved from one city to another). Cruise missiles caught in the open like that have 0 defense, so virtually any unit can kill them.
Wouldn't it be a better idea for today's PC game development shops to distribute their own customized OS' with their games
This has been tried before. Some of the really old games, like Wizardry < VI, ship on a floppy diskette. The system requirement says "100% IBM compatible computer", XXX kB RAM, etc. You boot from the floppy, and the game loads.
I've seen a few people talking about bootable Linux-based CD/games that would work the same way. The problem here is the astronomical complexity of the "PC" hardware platform, with thousands upon thousands of different cards for video, sound, networking; SCSI vs. IDE; ATAPI vs. proprietary CD-ROM interfaces; etc. Your game would have to support all of that.
Also, people do not like to reboot their systems to play a game. If playing Civ3 meant I had to give up the rest of my Linux desktop (including xmms playing music for me), my distributed.net client, etc., then the cost (hassle) of playing the game may be too high.
The reason VBR isn't popular is because you have to have more than half a clue to use it. The default for most MS-Windows ripper+encoder programs is 128kbps CBR MP3. (Although quite a few are now defaulting to 64kbps or 128kbps WMA.)
(And judging from the number of people here who are saying that they "rip" at 128 or 160 or whatever bitrate, it seems that even slashdot has been invaded by these Windows users....)
Dual-booting isn't a very good option for gaming, because it means all your services that you run in Linux go down -- no more DNS, no more SMTP, no more Apache, etc.
It's far better to buy a second computer.
Re:Mojo Nation and other swarming apps
on
Shirky On P2P
·
· Score: 1
Freenet 0.4 will also support splitfiles/swarming. Eventually....
Re:Not really - Client / Server communications...
on
Shirky On P2P
·
· Score: 2
For instance, you don't send email to someone directly - instead you send it to you server, which then talks to another server,
I don't do it that way -- I run my own mail services on my own Unix systems, with a static IP.
and the end client downloads the email from the server
If someone's using dial-up, that's their problem. I have no control over the messages once they're handed to the MX.
Here are two reasons why some users will want to switch to Ogg Vorbis:
It's free. (Game developers won't have to pay patent license fees to use Ogg Vorbis in their games.)
It sounds considerably better than MP3 at the same bitrate.
For me, the second one was the killer. Try it yourself! Pick a challenging piece, and encode it with LAME and Ogg Vorbis at the same bitrate, listen to both files, and see which sounds better.
"Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software.
"I'm talking about major label recording contracts."
The volume level of a directly ripped audio file also varies -- it's not just a D-A-D conversion issue. The actual recording level of a CD isn't "standardized".
I have some CDs that are very "quiet", and I have to turn up the volume when I play them back (most of these are classical, and are recorded with a lower volume because the greater dynamic range requires it).
On the other hand, I have some CDs that are recorded at a much higher volume level than everything else. One example of this is Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- this disc is recorded at a higher volume than any of the other RHCP discs I have, and also higher than just about any other pop/rock music I have. The volume level is high both when playing it in a normal CD player, and when playing back ripped audio files. Compressing to MP3 or Ogg doesn't change this.
And ogg vorbis? With a name that rolls off the tounge like that, I'm sure it'll be a household name in no time. "Hey mommy I want an ogg vorbis player for xmas?" Riight.
"Mommy, I want an MPEG audio layer III player for Christmas!"
Also note that both "Emm-Pee-Three" and "Ogg Vohr-Biss" have 3 syllables. Neither is inherently easier to say than the other. And besides, Ogg Vorbis is named after characters from Terry Pratchett! How much cooler can you get than that?;-)
Re:Only one person needs to do it
on
MP3Pro Released
·
· Score: 2
So suppose MS releases a whole album in WMA format.
Slashdot Mirror
Wal-Mart CDs are damaged in a different way, though. Wal-Mart censors the music they sell.
I can always set up a daemon to grab it, handle the overflows, plot it using rddtool,
You mean like this? By the way, rrdtool handles the overflow for you.
Debian's actively working on getting packages GnuPG-signed. Once that's in place, compromising the server from which the packages are retrieved won't be sufficient.
What do you use Freenet for? Somebody, please answer the question!!
At the moment, not a whole lot. Some people apparently like to post inflammatory or politically incorrect comments to the authors of popular Freesites (like Content of Evil); and because the submission of this information is anonymous, they can say outrageous things without as much worry that someone in dark sunglasses will come knocking on their door tomorrow.
But it's rather easy to imagine some of the possible uses for Freenet. Consider a web comic. Most web comics are published daily, or N times per week where N is between 1 and 6. In order to do so, the comic author has to have a place to host the comic, for which he or she probably pays a monthly fee. The more popular the comic is, the more bandwidth the author will have to pay for. The current models of financing this business/hobby are advertisements, merchandise, and requests for donations. Most web comics are doing at least two of these; many do all three.
Now, consider what would happen if a web comic were published on Freenet instead of the World Wide Web. One of the most popular sites in Freenet, Content of Evil, is published by someone claiming to be a dial-up user! You don't have to pay bandwidth costs for Freenet publication. In fact, the more popular your site is, the better.
The "daily update" nature of most Freenet sites lends itself perfectly to web comics, which are also updated daily. (If you miss a day, your site will be unreachable for that day, but astute readers will know how to get yesterday's edition.)
I don't know of anyone who's using Freenet for such a purpose; I don't even know of anyone who's considering it yet. Freenet's not really stable enough for such an undertaking yet. It's also a bit newbie-unfriendly; most of the people who draw comics aren't geeky enough to understand Freenet's CHK, KSK, SSK, etc., let alone that insane "encode the date in hexadecimal" thing.
But there may come a day when Freenet is fast and stable, and it's relatively easy for an end-user to understand how to publish a Freenet site. (There is a fair amount of documentation floating around now; it varies in quality and up-to-dateness.) When that happens, a great number of assumptions that we take for granted may be overturned.
Some guy kept attempting to upload 45 songs across my poor 56k connection all at once. I found the only quick solution to keep him from doing so was to stop the giFT daemon altogether.
You could have used ipchains, iptables, packet filter or whatever your operating system uses for firewall controls to block his IP address.
Wonder if this could be applied to getting hold of a copy of a broadcast programme you would not otherwise be able to see for some months even years...
I doubt it, very strongly. If that were so, then I could just time-shift downloaded Ogg and MP3 files from the distant future where their copyright term has expired and they're public domain. "But, Your Honor, these phonorecords will enter the public domain in 2097, assuming no more retroactive copyright extension laws are passed in the next 95 years! So I just time-shifted it, and I downloaded it early!"
Why isn't the public making a fuss? Why, at a time when the most basic principal of society-the right to know-is being turned into a criminal act, isn't there an army of outrage fighting to protect the free flow of human creativity?
A public outcry is useless if there is no one to hear it.
It has been demonstrated over and over again, especially in the last 5 years, that Congress and the courts hold the "rights" of corporations to continue doing business in higher regard than the Rights of the people. They do not care about us; and in fact, if we attempt to exercise our Rights in any visible way, we are arrested. Ask Jon Johansen. Ask Dmitry Sklyarov.
The battleground has changed. We can no longer fight our battles in the open, using the due process of Law, because the Law has been corrupted by money. So we fight in the darkness. Our file transfers are private and secret, just like their back-room deals, their bribes (they call it "lobbying"), and their good-ol'-boy networking.
Morpheus is one of the most popular downloads in the history of cyberspace. Users have retrieved more than 40 million copies since July.
If that isn't "the public making a fuss", then what is it?
That Ernest dude is dead. He won't be contributing to science and the useful arts any time soon. So why should his works still be copyrighted? In what way does the public at large benefit from a continued monopoly on the distribution of his fisherman story?
MP3Pro is mostly a marketing ploy. It has a 10 kHz lowpass filter, and then tries to reconstruct the upper frequencies based on harmonic extrapolation of the lower frequencies. This may be somewhat useful for low bitrates (say, under 80 kbps, for use in portable players). But the irreversible loss of audio quality makes this an inappropriate codec for the kinds of uses that I (at least) prefer: namely, files sitting on my hard drive on my desktop computer.
About once every... oh, 10 minutes... someone asks for a tool to convert MP3 to Ogg.
Do NOT convert MP3 to Ogg! Converting (transcoding) between lossy codecs only makes the quality horrible -- the artifacts interact in unpredictable ways. It's like faxing a photocopy of a fax.
Rip your CDs with Exact Audio Copy (win32) or cdparanoia (Linux, et al.). Encode them with oggenc (or LAME if you need MP3 for portable devices). Share them with your friends.
OK, I'll take the bait.
People don't want easy accessible music; they want free music.
Of course we do. Who wouldn't want free stuff?
But there's more to it than that. A lot more.
First of all, we want to be able to hear the music in the first place. Have you tried listening to commercial radio lately? For how long? The simple fact is that if we want to hear something that's been mentioned by a friend (either in "real life" or online), we can't get it from the radio. Radio doesn't play anything that anyone would ever recommend to anyone else. It's simply a marketing arm of the record companies trying to increase sales of the Pop-Star-of-The-Month.
Let's say I tell you how much I loved Tori Amos's third album Boys For Pele. Are you going to rush to the store and buy it based on that recommendation? Probably not. You'll at least want to hear it for yourself first.
So what choices does that give you?
Which of these have the greatest likelihood of letting you hear the music? Probably the last two. Which have the greatest likelihood of leading to a monetary transaction between you and the artist? Well, none of them, so let me rephrase. Which of them have the greatest chance of getting you to send money to the record company who, in theory, passes money on to the artist? Probably #5: if you buy a CD from the store, all you have to do to "make a purchase" is keep it instead of returning it. But #6 is also good: if you like that Ogg file you downloaded, you might decide to buy a CD.
You sure as hell aren't going to be enriching the artist or the record company if you follow any of the first 3 models. And #4 is potluck, and your odds have gotten worse over time. #7 will depend on whether you got a cassette copy from your friend, or a burned CD, or whether you just borrowed his CD with the intention of returning it. If you got a burned CD copy, you may just keep that instead of buying your own.
So by my reckoning, downloading "pirate" music is at least the second-best money-making promotional model there is (or possibly the best) for the type of music that isn't played on commercial radio and MTV.
And that's at least 99% of all the music in the world.
If you're going to pirate something, at least admit to yourself that you're ripping off someone, not a victimized consumer standing up his rights.
If you're going to troll slashdot users, at least admit to yourself that you're a tool of the record companies and their hired public relations psychologists. And that you're helping them rip off 99% of the musicians in the world by systematically destroying all but the 1% who achieve "Star" status and therefore simply die poor instead of flat broke.
If you'd rather help artists, then donate money directly to them, or buy CDs straight from the artists instead of through the record companies (for the artists who are able to do that).
1) logging to paper; so the cracker can't totally erase his trail
That doesn't require lpd. Just add the line printer's device name as an additional target in syslog.conf.
Or run a teletype console, and log everything important to the console. (I've actually seen a setup that used that. In production. In 1996.)
Even if you do use the Unix print spooling subsystem on your firewall, you should not have the lpd port (515/tcp) open on the public network interface(s).
I was wondering where Grimoire went, myself. www.grimoire.net is still bringing up a French Yahoo! page (has been for about a year now). If anyone has Grimoire news, I'd love to see it.
cruise missiles being shot out of the sky... by archers.
That one's a reviewer blunder. The cruise missile was in transit along the ground (being moved from one city to another). Cruise missiles caught in the open like that have 0 defense, so virtually any unit can kill them.
Wouldn't it be a better idea for today's PC game development shops to distribute their own customized OS' with their games
This has been tried before. Some of the really old games, like Wizardry < VI, ship on a floppy diskette. The system requirement says "100% IBM compatible computer", XXX kB RAM, etc. You boot from the floppy, and the game loads.
I've seen a few people talking about bootable Linux-based CD/games that would work the same way. The problem here is the astronomical complexity of the "PC" hardware platform, with thousands upon thousands of different cards for video, sound, networking; SCSI vs. IDE; ATAPI vs. proprietary CD-ROM interfaces; etc. Your game would have to support all of that.
Also, people do not like to reboot their systems to play a game. If playing Civ3 meant I had to give up the rest of my Linux desktop (including xmms playing music for me), my distributed.net client, etc., then the cost (hassle) of playing the game may be too high.
The reason VBR isn't popular is because you have to have more than half a clue to use it. The default for most MS-Windows ripper+encoder programs is 128kbps CBR MP3. (Although quite a few are now defaulting to 64kbps or 128kbps WMA.)
(And judging from the number of people here who are saying that they "rip" at 128 or 160 or whatever bitrate, it seems that even slashdot has been invaded by these Windows users....)
Dual-booting isn't a very good option for gaming, because it means all your services that you run in Linux go down -- no more DNS, no more SMTP, no more Apache, etc.
It's far better to buy a second computer.
Freenet 0.4 will also support splitfiles/swarming. Eventually....
For instance, you don't send email to someone directly - instead you send it to you server, which then talks to another server,
I don't do it that way -- I run my own mail services on my own Unix systems, with a static IP.
and the end client downloads the email from the server
If someone's using dial-up, that's their problem. I have no control over the messages once they're handed to the MX.
Here are two reasons why some users will want to switch to Ogg Vorbis:
For me, the second one was the killer. Try it yourself! Pick a challenging piece, and encode it with LAME and Ogg Vorbis at the same bitrate, listen to both files, and see which sounds better.
It seems that what the record companies are doing is a whole lot closer to the spirit of "pirating"
Courtney Love agrees with you!
The volume level of a directly ripped audio file also varies -- it's not just a D-A-D conversion issue. The actual recording level of a CD isn't "standardized".
I have some CDs that are very "quiet", and I have to turn up the volume when I play them back (most of these are classical, and are recorded with a lower volume because the greater dynamic range requires it).
On the other hand, I have some CDs that are recorded at a much higher volume level than everything else. One example of this is Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- this disc is recorded at a higher volume than any of the other RHCP discs I have, and also higher than just about any other pop/rock music I have. The volume level is high both when playing it in a normal CD player, and when playing back ripped audio files. Compressing to MP3 or Ogg doesn't change this.
And ogg vorbis? With a name that rolls off the tounge like that, I'm sure it'll be a household name in no time. "Hey mommy I want an ogg vorbis player for xmas?" Riight.
"Mommy, I want an MPEG audio layer III player for Christmas!"
Also note that both "Emm-Pee-Three" and "Ogg Vohr-Biss" have 3 syllables. Neither is inherently easier to say than the other. And besides, Ogg Vorbis is named after characters from Terry Pratchett! How much cooler can you get than that? ;-)
So suppose MS releases a whole album in WMA format.
Bill Gates singing Start Me Up?
About a year or two ago, I sent a suggestion to MP3.com about adding a Firefly-like listener feedback system. They never responded.