Isn't part of the idea behind being a middleman like those organizations represented by the RIAA to create value for the folks that would want to work with you? It seems that the RIAA is acting less like a shrewd trader than Conan the Barbarian defending a hill-fort.
What a shame, when the RIAA's members still hold all the keys to making a real music filesharing system without shitting on *anyone*.
The most valuable thing on the Internet is information- but since there's so much of it (and so much of it is of such abysmal quality,) the second most valuable thing is the ability to know what is crap and what isn't.
There's a lot of music on Napster/Gnutella/etc. But a lot of it is damaged or truncated- or just of really low quality (in the case of Gnutella there's no way to tell this before you download it.) Even if it's high quality, the situation is "here today, gone tomorrow". A person who has a particular thing has to be online and connected to a distributed file sharing service for his files to exist at all, and even for us with DSL or cable, it's not the best idea for us to leave it on all the time! Even if someone has a file, they could be on a 56k modem, so a DSL user would end up very frustrated indeed! Furthermore, certain things are extremely difficult to find in any case. Once you leave the mid-80s to present day pop spectrum, pickings get really thin.
The music industry could cure all of these woes. They could create a subscription-based service that offers digital copies of music files of any quality you desire, out of their entire holdings of music. Anything a label puts out could be up there to sample. At any time, not just when jesus99 or whoever happens to log in and have Napster up. And once you're downloading, you could be linked directly to purchase information. Information about the bands' history, related bands in the same genre, and even the ability to watch for concerts and other appearances would be offered.
Let's say, for example, I downloaded Apoptygma Berzerk's "Non Stop Violence", from their "7" album. The service would mention to me that they have a recent album, called "Welcome to Earth", and perhaps I would like to hear that, too? And look, their tour will be in my city in a month! And right on the banner for their tour is a mention that VNV Nation is touring with them. Let's check them out...
Even if everyone just gets their files from this service and, say, trades them on Napster afterwards, the inherent disadvantages of client to client distributed file sharing will make the official service a clear winner.
This is the kind of connectivity that seems to be floating off in the future somewhere, that no one can really get together for some reason I can't guess.
But it's all here already. This service is like MP3.com, the Winamp minibrowser, Amazon.com, and Ticketmaster all rolled into one. And guess what, all these individual companies would be in on this scheme, and life would be happier for them, too. They would finally have the Internet presence that everyone is questioning them about. And guess what? They wouldn't have to fuck with SDMI or other pointless copy protection pipe dreams- they would simply out-service the competition! And isn't that what real business is about?
Or so I was lead to believe by all I'd ever read in any book. So I was lead to believe by my experiences in business.
But the RIAA seems to believe that its members would not best be served by organizing for good business- instead, it thinks that the way to do business in the information age is standing on top of a tower, wearing studded leather and carrying a two-handed sword.
The biggest problem with any cryptosystem is at either end. Any cryptosystem assumes that both the sender and the receiver can be trusted, because the system is useless unless someone encrypts the stuff on one end and decrypts it on the other.
With secure DVDs, the untrusted individual is the receiver, who, despite the untrusted nature of himself and his equipment, requires the means to decrypt the information to make use of it! So, all you need is a player that's a bit... out of kilter... (witness the proliferation of DVD players that ignore region encoding) and the jig is up.
Opera has not only the ability to block third party cookies and describe the nature of incoming cookies, but it can also block by server, and it makes a distinction between "allow cookies from all servers" and "don't allow third party"- you can set them both at the same time. Thus, the properties of each cookie transaction are far more controlled than what this IE extension will offer.
And oh yeah, you can block referrer logging and automatic redirection... and new browser windows can be banished to an MDI taskbar without ever appearing to block your view!
... but if they've overwritten that area they show with the NIST logo once, that's some rather serious degradation from just one pass- and therefore, 5 or so passes ought to do the job.
Why do we even have TLDs at all? Due to the phenomenon you mention, they don't mean anything (with the exception of.edu,.gov, and.mil anyway...)
Amazon.com is going to have amazon.* ten seconds after these come out- so why bother?
The logical action would be to allow registration of domains without TLDs. Since domains are replicated globally all the time, why do we need TLDs? This also removes the "gotta catch 'em all" syndrome that currently exists with TLDs. I could just get.fogwood if I wanted to, and screw the.org after it. Domain names are primarily mnemonics anyhow- so why don't we remove the extra, meaningless designation on the end?
How do you support a censorware company after this sort of fallout? X-Stop knows how. Don't target educational institutions. They have an excuse for showing meaningful content. Target corporations. Hey, pretty much 95% of the Internet is non-productive, right? So it's actually a benefit to these corporations to decimate their Internet access. Check out these statistics. http://www.xstop.com/statistics/index.ht ml Businesses are more vulnerable to FUD than anything else, since most of them depend upon abstraction and statistics to exist.
Do you read my posts at all before you answer? Otherwise, where the hell did you get this "idea":
I'm just taking the logical conclusion of what you're saying (that is, that Free PCs are fine and dandy because they're getting everyone on the Net, even though they come with more than the recommended daily allowance of corporate data control.) The idea of corporate-controlled endpoints leads to a corporate-controlled experience, which is not beneficial.
And WTF do you think will make the net "accessible to all", then? Do you think this is happening all by itself?
So you like the idea that Virgin or Coca-Cola or Disney or whoever has direct hardware control over what the user sees, through the so-called "portal"?
I've got no problem with the free PC- but perhaps a little more oversight is needed to make sure that it's libre as well as gratis.
It'll never happen, of course- you say so yourself:)
Duh-- imposing licensing on corporations, not real people. Remember, legally, a corporation is a fake person, with all the rights that people have. Stupid, isn't it? Somehow people nowadays accept it as "natural".
Of course, all of this means that the problem is much deeper, anyway: we need to stop treating corporations as people.
Ah! Now you hit the heart of the matter.
I'll agree there- a corporation is an agglomeration of resources, and shouldn't have any more rights than a cardboard box or a cargo container.
But you tell me what kind of corporation would sit still for emasculation?
No sir! The dollars would fly, and the legislation would die.
Bullshit. Some imaginable legislation would help; some other imaginable legislation wouldn't. Saying "legislation won't help us" is nothing but private totalitarian minarchist propaganda. Please be aware of this fact when you consider saying something like this again.
What's your idea of the imaginable legislation that would help? The only sort of legislation that I can picture coming out of a government workgroup is one that puts clamps on what I can throw over a stream, and leaves those with more money than me free to do whatever they would like.
Again, if legislation is created that is designed to keep news corporations in a box without harming my freedom to send out anything I'd like, then I'm all for it. But you can't have a discussion like this without a touch of realism- and that touch tells me that such a thing is extremely unlikely to happen. Quite frankly, I don't think such a thing is within the imagination of a legislative body, and nor do I think they would understand it if you explained it to them.
Calling corporate propaganda "informational resources" is doublespeak.
Feel free to call it "dogshit", I was just trying to keep from being profane for once.
Normally, I swear like Wesley Willis. If you'd like me to do that, I can:)
And you totally elude my point, anyway. Look at the browsing habits of the typical net user, not some 1337 slashbot, please.
What kind of licensing could possibly affect the habits of the typical net user in a positive manner?
Your rhetoric about "true nature of govermental inference" just evades the point. There are two kinds of things you need to distinguish: what governments do, and what governments should do. When you separate these, all is clear enough.
I know what the government should be doing. I watch it do the exact opposite every day.
As the net grows, expect less and less ISPs providing web space with basic subscription (natural cost-cutting move in a competitive market), and more and more concentration of the ISP market in a few companies. All which mean that the ratio of non-corporate content on the net will decrease, and that same content will be far less visible and hard to find for the average user. It's happening already.
What sort of licensing do you suggest that will keep the corporations in their box, without putting me at a disadvantage? I'd love to hear it- I hate corporatization as much as you do. I just don't think this sort of thing is the way to fight it.
I was assuming licensing that respects the interest of the public. You are otherwise right.
That is a *very dangerous assumption*, given the general government attitude toward corporate interests, which you yourself mention.
You are absolutely out of touch with what the average net user is doing nowadays.
As I said above, it is our duty to inform others, and attempt to fight this. Licensing is unlikely to solve this problem- it is most likely to make it worse.
My greatest concerns in this area lie with the preponderance of advertising content being dumped on individuals by means of "free PC" type services, with the portal of choice being mandated by the hardware provider. This might be an area for government regulation, seeing as it creates a physical limitation, not unlike that of conventional broadcast.
Attacking the source of the media is not the way to go- working to protect the individual's point of access is.
They are certainly easier to ignore on the net. This situation is disappearing, though. Each day, as the net grows and more people get on it, the megacorps get more and more influence over it.
All the more reason for those who care about its freedom to get out and start gathering their own information. Compete on the ground, where the sky can't touch you. Legislation (which is likely to be corporate-biased anyhow) isn't going to help us.
The traditional media is not yet gone. The traditional media are very important, and they are the traditional media. They leverage this power to dominate the net. Think about all the ads for websites you've seen on TV, the papers or billboards.
What about them? They are simply advertisements for yet another informational resource of theirs that I won't bother seeing unless I feel it's necessary. I do have a choice in the matter once I get my browser going:)
The government defends the interests of the corps. They will not do such a thing. Hell, in the US, governments are forcing TV programs made by corporate owned entities, and full of advertisements, on the schools.
So wait. You say that the government won't defend our right to think, but will bend over backwards to make sure everyone's voice is heard on the Internet? It would appear that the true nature of governmental interference is pro-corporate in both cases- licensing will be used to defend the interests of those with the money to pursue them.
Slashdot Mirror
Witness the plethora of ad-supported software.
Give this guy a nickel, he knows what he's talking about.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
like in "Armageddon: The Musical".
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
Isn't part of the idea behind being a middleman like those organizations represented by the RIAA to create value for the folks that would want to work with you? It seems that the RIAA is acting less like a shrewd trader than Conan the Barbarian defending a hill-fort.
What a shame, when the RIAA's members still hold all the keys to making a real music filesharing system without shitting on *anyone*.
The most valuable thing on the Internet is information- but since there's so much of it (and so much of it is of such abysmal quality,) the second most valuable thing is the ability to know what is crap and what isn't.
There's a lot of music on Napster/Gnutella/etc. But a lot of it is damaged or truncated- or just of really low quality (in the case of Gnutella there's no way to tell this before you download it.) Even if it's high quality, the situation is "here today, gone tomorrow". A person who has a particular thing has to be online and connected to a distributed file sharing service for his files to exist at all, and even for us with DSL or cable, it's not the best idea for us to leave it on all the time! Even if someone has a file, they could be on a 56k modem, so a DSL user would end up very frustrated indeed! Furthermore, certain things are extremely difficult to find in any case. Once you leave the mid-80s to present day pop spectrum, pickings get really thin.
The music industry could cure all of these woes. They could create a subscription-based service that offers digital copies of music files of any quality you desire, out of their entire holdings of music. Anything a label puts out could be up there to sample. At any time, not just when jesus99 or whoever happens to log in and have Napster up. And once you're downloading, you could be linked directly to purchase information. Information about the bands' history, related bands in the same genre, and even the ability to watch for concerts and other appearances would be offered.
Let's say, for example, I downloaded Apoptygma Berzerk's "Non Stop Violence", from their "7" album. The service would mention to me that they have a recent album, called "Welcome to Earth", and perhaps I would like to hear that, too? And look, their tour will be in my city in a month! And right on the banner for their tour is a mention that VNV Nation is touring with them. Let's check them out...
Even if everyone just gets their files from this service and, say, trades them on Napster afterwards, the inherent disadvantages of client to client distributed file sharing will make the official service a clear winner.
This is the kind of connectivity that seems to be floating off in the future somewhere, that no one can really get together for some reason I can't guess.
But it's all here already. This service is like MP3.com, the Winamp minibrowser, Amazon.com, and Ticketmaster all rolled into one. And guess what, all these individual companies would be in on this scheme, and life would be happier for them, too. They would finally have the Internet presence that everyone is questioning them about. And guess what? They wouldn't have to fuck with SDMI or other pointless copy protection pipe dreams- they would simply out-service the competition! And isn't that what real business is about?
Or so I was lead to believe by all I'd ever read in any book. So I was lead to believe by my experiences in business.
But the RIAA seems to believe that its members would not best be served by organizing for good business- instead, it thinks that the way to do business in the information age is standing on top of a tower, wearing studded leather and carrying a two-handed sword.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
I'd really love to see it- I am always in the market for new grassroots propaganda to pass around :)
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
Look at it this way- Napster is likely to force the first real discussion of intellectual property of the Internet age.
And that's what will get us where we need to be.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
The RIAA's members are perfectly happy without Internet revenue at the moment.
The moment and the past are the only times they can appreciate, as they are only masters in their own history.
The independent labels can, as always, get fucked. They're used to it, hell, they're so loose you don't even need to work them up now.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
It is worth the wait to sing to the lovely recorder call for hold people.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
The biggest problem with any cryptosystem is at either end. Any cryptosystem assumes that both the sender and the receiver can be trusted, because the system is useless unless someone encrypts the stuff on one end and decrypts it on the other.
With secure DVDs, the untrusted individual is the receiver, who, despite the untrusted nature of himself and his equipment, requires the means to decrypt the information to make use of it! So, all you need is a player that's a bit... out of kilter... (witness the proliferation of DVD players that ignore region encoding) and the jig is up.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
There needs to be a way to say "I bought this album because of MP3" when you go to the record store.
*sigh*
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
Wasn't he a heroin addict once?
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
As has been mentioned above, "misuse of company resources" is an easy thing to fire people on, because everyone does it in some way or another.
So, this leaves other general misdeeds/corporate political maneuverings to shoulder the blame.
Quite truthfully, such a place is somewhere I'd rather not work in.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
Opera has not only the ability to block third party cookies and describe the nature of incoming cookies, but it can also block by server, and it makes a distinction between "allow cookies from all servers" and "don't allow third party"- you can set them both at the same time. Thus, the properties of each cookie transaction are far more controlled than what this IE extension will offer.
And oh yeah, you can block referrer logging and automatic redirection... and new browser windows can be banished to an MDI taskbar without ever appearing to block your view!
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
... but if they've overwritten that area they show with the NIST logo once, that's some rather serious degradation from just one pass- and therefore, 5 or so passes ought to do the job.
But that's just my seriously uninformed guess.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
Why do we even have TLDs at all? Due to the phenomenon you mention, they don't mean anything (with the exception of .edu, .gov, and .mil anyway...)
.fogwood if I wanted to, and screw the .org after it. Domain names are primarily mnemonics anyhow- so why don't we remove the extra, meaningless designation on the end?
Amazon.com is going to have amazon.* ten seconds after these come out- so why bother?
The logical action would be to allow registration of domains without TLDs. Since domains are replicated globally all the time, why do we need TLDs? This also removes the "gotta catch 'em all" syndrome that currently exists with TLDs. I could just get
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
How do you support a censorware company after this sort of fallout? X-Stop knows how.
Don't target educational institutions. They have an excuse for showing meaningful content.
Target corporations. Hey, pretty much 95% of the Internet is non-productive, right? So it's actually a benefit to these corporations to decimate their Internet access.
Check out these statistics.
http://www.xstop.com/statistics/index.ht ml
Businesses are more vulnerable to FUD than anything else, since most of them depend upon abstraction and statistics to exist.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
Should have said that at the beginning. Could have saved us all a little typing :)
:)
Corporate goat-fuckers! Poisoning the well of truth with their bullshit, turning imagination and creative effort into feces and dust.
Hee
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
Do you read my posts at all before you answer? Otherwise, where the hell did you get this "idea":
I'm just taking the logical conclusion of what you're saying (that is, that Free PCs are fine and dandy because they're getting everyone on the Net, even though they come with more than the recommended daily allowance of corporate data control.) The idea of corporate-controlled endpoints leads to a corporate-controlled experience, which is not beneficial.
But you knew that already, yes?
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
You lack heart. You would not make a good revolutionary. People like you should do some serious rethinking of your values.
:)
Nah, I just know the territory. Can't win without it, just ask Sun Tzu
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
And WTF do you think will make the net "accessible to all", then? Do you think this is happening all by itself?
:)
So you like the idea that Virgin or Coca-Cola or Disney or whoever has direct hardware control over what the user sees, through the so-called "portal"?
I've got no problem with the free PC- but perhaps a little more oversight is needed to make sure that it's libre as well as gratis.
It'll never happen, of course- you say so yourself
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
Sounds cool to me. Then you can be treated to the pidgin German of my real name :)
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
Duh-- imposing licensing on corporations, not real people. Remember, legally, a corporation is a fake person, with all the rights that people have. Stupid, isn't it? Somehow people nowadays accept it as "natural".
Of course, all of this means that the problem is much deeper, anyway: we need to stop treating corporations as people.
Ah! Now you hit the heart of the matter.
I'll agree there- a corporation is an agglomeration of resources, and shouldn't have any more rights than a cardboard box or a cargo container.
But you tell me what kind of corporation would sit still for emasculation?
No sir! The dollars would fly, and the legislation would die.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
Bullshit. Some imaginable legislation would help; some other imaginable legislation wouldn't. Saying "legislation won't help us" is nothing but private totalitarian minarchist propaganda. Please be aware of this fact when you consider saying something like this again.
:)
What's your idea of the imaginable legislation that would help? The only sort of legislation that I can picture coming out of a government workgroup is one that puts clamps on what I can throw over a stream, and leaves those with more money than me free to do whatever they would like.
Again, if legislation is created that is designed to keep news corporations in a box without harming my freedom to send out anything I'd like, then I'm all for it. But you can't have a discussion like this without a touch of realism- and that touch tells me that such a thing is extremely unlikely to happen. Quite frankly, I don't think such a thing is within the imagination of a legislative body, and nor do I think they would understand it if you explained it to them.
Calling corporate propaganda "informational resources" is doublespeak.
Feel free to call it "dogshit", I was just trying to keep from being profane for once.
Normally, I swear like Wesley Willis. If you'd like me to do that, I can
And you totally elude my point, anyway. Look at the browsing habits of the typical net user, not some 1337 slashbot, please.
What kind of licensing could possibly affect the habits of the typical net user in a positive manner?
Your rhetoric about "true nature of govermental inference" just evades the point. There are two kinds of things you need to distinguish: what governments do, and what governments should do. When you separate these, all is clear enough.
I know what the government should be doing. I watch it do the exact opposite every day.
This concerns me.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
As the net grows, expect less and less ISPs providing web space with basic subscription (natural cost-cutting move in a competitive market), and more and more concentration of the ISP market in a few companies. All which mean that the ratio of non-corporate content on the net will decrease, and that same content will be far less visible and hard to find for the average user. It's happening already.
What sort of licensing do you suggest that will keep the corporations in their box, without putting me at a disadvantage? I'd love to hear it- I hate corporatization as much as you do. I just don't think this sort of thing is the way to fight it.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
I was assuming licensing that respects the interest of the public. You are otherwise right.
That is a *very dangerous assumption*, given the general government attitude toward corporate interests, which you yourself mention.
You are absolutely out of touch with what the average net user is doing nowadays.
As I said above, it is our duty to inform others, and attempt to fight this. Licensing is unlikely to solve this problem- it is most likely to make it worse.
My greatest concerns in this area lie with the preponderance of advertising content being dumped on individuals by means of "free PC" type services, with the portal of choice being mandated by the hardware provider. This might be an area for government regulation, seeing as it creates a physical limitation, not unlike that of conventional broadcast.
Attacking the source of the media is not the way to go- working to protect the individual's point of access is.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
They are certainly easier to ignore on the net. This situation is disappearing, though. Each day, as the net grows and more people get on it, the megacorps get more and more influence over it.
:)
All the more reason for those who care about its freedom to get out and start gathering their own information. Compete on the ground, where the sky can't touch you. Legislation (which is likely to be corporate-biased anyhow) isn't going to help us.
The traditional media is not yet gone. The traditional media are very important, and they are the traditional media. They leverage this power to dominate the net. Think about all the ads for websites you've seen on TV, the papers or billboards.
What about them? They are simply advertisements for yet another informational resource of theirs that I won't bother seeing unless I feel it's necessary. I do have a choice in the matter once I get my browser going
The government defends the interests of the corps. They will not do such a thing. Hell, in the US, governments are forcing TV programs made by corporate owned entities, and full of advertisements, on the schools.
So wait. You say that the government won't defend our right to think, but will bend over backwards to make sure everyone's voice is heard on the Internet? It would appear that the true nature of governmental interference is pro-corporate in both cases- licensing will be used to defend the interests of those with the money to pursue them.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow