That actually makes Apple less of a threat: a list of files is a lot less incriminating than a physical file uploaded by you to the server that they are apparently already scanning (to de-dupe as you put it.)
I think the point is Lala wasn't a honeypot. Neither is Amazon's already running Music Locker service apparently, and people aren't saying anything like this about Google's upcoming service. So what makes iCloud so special ?
There's no evidence such a deal exists or would be advantageous to Apple and yes, I contend it would be on pretty shaky ground legally. Probably the best evidence so far that no such deal exists is that there have been no reports of such actions concerning Amazon's Music Locker service. Unless... they are just waiting for the best moment to strike (!), I won't buy your real estate but I have a very nice tinfoil hat for you.
You assume they will scan the files themselves as opposed to just the iTunes database, as they already do for the "Genius" mix function in iTunes. Actively scanning files for illegal files, then reporting them to a third party sounds pretty illegal to me, doesn't that violate the US fourth amendment or does that only apply to government ?
a) Who cares what Apple thinks or their brand (in context of this discussion). If the RIAA or one of it's members files suit and gets access to music stored in iCloud in discovery, Apple has to obey the law.
On what basis would they sue ? They wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
b) If 90% of Apple's customers use iCloud for storing pirated music, that will be a problem with the business plan, unless you are right about some legal/license arrangement existing in advance.
Apple has indeed signed agreements with all major record labels prior to launching this service. Further more only songs that don't exist in the iTunes catalogue will get uploaded, the rest will just be made available for download to you. Now have a look at the iTunes catalogue, whatever is not in there I probably bought legally because it's going to be relatively obscure.
c) Assume nothing. It would be wise to read the contract, terms of service and any license agreement between the labels, RIAA and Apple before putting yourself and your family at risk. Personally, I hope Apple has got a solution on this. If not, then I'd rather not be left out in the wind like iPhone developers are right now (see Lodsys).
Reading the terms is never a bad idea. And you seem to have missed that Apple has developer's backs on the Lodsys situation. Unlike Google which has been silent on the matter despite its developers also being targeted.
Would Apple be legally obliged to look for such a watermark, if not why the hell would they ? Also no song will be uploaded that exists in the iTunes catalogue so they'd have to scan the songs on the disk for the watermark (might be legally dubious) as opposed to just scanning the local iTunes database which is a lot faster.
Record companies have to subpoena information like that due to privacy laws and such, how much they offer Apple is irrelevant. They would have no justification to offer the courts for said subpoenas.
I wouldn't keep my entire savings in Bitcoins but there's nothing wrong with having small amounts even though it isn't legal tender. It's equivalent to having a giftcard or an iTunes credit. It is understood that it can only be redeemed under certain circumstances.
No, the "haters" are people who understand that currencies which cannot be used to legally settle debts
What does that mean ? It's not legal tender, sure, but you can use it to settle some debts with persons who accept it.
and whose design inevitably leads to a deflationary trend should be avoided.
What's inherently deflationary about it ? Are you arguing new bitcoins aren't generated fast enough ?
Bitcoin is not even a fiat currency, since it was not created by a government (see: definition of fiat currency).
Fiat currency does not have to be issued by a government. Wikipedia :
"The term fiat money has been defined variously as:
- any money declared by a government to be legal tender.[3]
- state-issued money which is neither legally convertible to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.[4]
- money without intrinsic value.[5]"
It's OK though, you can continue to assume that we live in a world where everyone either supports Bitcoin or thinks we should run back to the gold standard.
Relax. I'm not even a bitcoin proponent, I was just observing that there's a lot of this "gold coins under the mattress" nutbaggery around these days and something like Bitcoin becoming popular would be anathema to them.
Y'know, I consider BitCoins pretty much just a nice idea, at this point, with plenty of problems and no real value (beyond speculation).
That said, the number of people who bother actually posting just to tell us how much they dislike them, in response to even the slightest, even humorous (in this case) mention of BTC... Just wow.
Makes me lean toward taking them a bit more seriously - No one hates on Linden dollars or even Facebook credits.
The haters are probably gold bugs who also like to rant about the worthlessness of fiat currency. There's a lot of that about these days.
Killed a lot fewer people. 12 million killed in death camps vs. a couple hundred thousand by the two bombs. But then, nobody seems to cry about the fire bombing of Japanese cities, which killed far more people, mostly civilians.
Very true, not just in Japan but Dresden too.
Besides, with the atomic bombs, it's not so simple. I think the deciding factor was that only 1.2% of soldiers at Iwo Jima surrendered, the rest fought to their deaths in a bitter battle, in the name of their emperor. If it came to that on the Japanese islands, the country and people of Japan probably wouldn't exist as we know it today if an invasion was required to secure an end to the war.
I think the accepted version of history these days is that Japan was ready to surrender but with terms and the US would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender so the bombs got used. Me, I'm just glad the germans folded before the bomb was finished so Europe wasn't bombed.
From History Of Computing Project: "The company established what was then called the Entry Systems Division, located in Boca Raton, Florida, to develop the new system. This small group consisted of 12 engineers and designers under the direction of Don Estridge; the team's chief designer was Lewis Eggebrecht. The division developed IBM's first real PC. (IBM considered the 5100 system, developed in 1975, to be an intelligent programmable terminal rather than a genuine computer, even though it truly was a computer.)"
And $20,000 is hardly "personal", the Lisa was half that 10 years later and still spectacularly bombed.
No one at RIM is dumb enough to trust Apple, Google or Microsoft. If they went that way it'd be just be a matter of time before they were replaced by one of those companies' own service or became no more than one of many competing services on an OS they couldn't control. The likes of Apple certainly wouldn't allow an application to hook so deep into the OS to allow things like remote wipe, Android would necessitate development of many different tweaks for all the different hardware/OS version/operator combinations (death by a million pinpricks) and nobody ever came out on top trusting MS.
IBM put the first real personal computer on the market. Yes, prior to that I could have gone to the electronic store and bought the parts.
The only people who call this a personal computer are idiot geeks who will go to any stupid pedantry and verbal trick to 'be right' and 'know more'. If the altair counts, then you must consider the Kenbak-1. So I win the internet.
From wikipedia : "The original line of PCs were part of an IBM strategy to get into the small personal computer market then dominated by the Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, Tandy Corporation's TRS-80s, and various CP/M machines.[2]"
Yes, a bit hypocritical to just lay the blame at IBM's feet too. The US has a long history of doing business with criminal regimes from banana republics, to the nazi's, to apartheid South Africa, to regimes like Saudi Arabia today.
Well, you had Mozilla who had spent years rewriting their code only to push out a bloated hulk. Then Phoenix came along and basically wrote a light-weight shell on top of the browser engine and threw out all unnecessary non browser crap. Not very revolutionary (though a great browser at the time.) In facts the parts Mozilla pushed as being most revolutionary, like XUL, are the ones that really failed. I think if you look at real innovation in the browser space you'll find it either at the client side with AJAX, HTML5 (started by a consortium of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software), but especially Apple taking KHTML and using it to create webkit which spread everywhere. It's hard to imagine mobile browsing today without Webkit. So kudos to the KDE team for that.
my interests are particularly in filesystems and virtualisation and they are where Linux tends to be up there with or ahead of the leaders.
With respect, what open source filesystems do you actually find in the datacenter ? I look at our unix infrastructure and I see : VxFS, JFS2 and Zfs, in that order. As to virtualisation, IBM have been doing hypervisors for decades and I think they still take the lead by implementing such things as micro-partitioning, dynamic reconfiguration and live migration of virtual machines. Of course I'm not a researcher, but looking at what's out there in the field.
I'll agree with the developer tools where FOSS is traditionally very strong. The rest were basically reimplementation of software that had stagnated and where open source software could catch up. Unix had stagnated so Linux was able to grow into a replacement for some use cases, firefox caught up because IE development had all but halted, relational databases are ancient tech, etc. I'm not complaining BTW, I use open sourced software literally every day both professionally and privately. I just wish there was more original thinking going on then "let's do what everyone else is doing with a 2-to-5 year lag.
Basically the whole internet infrastructure was developed before there was even a FOSS movement as such, I count it more as proto-OSS. But yes, that was a rare instance of open sourced software taking the lead and look where it got us ! I just which the big brains did things like that more often.
Slashdot Mirror
How quaint !
That actually makes Apple less of a threat: a list of files is a lot less incriminating than a physical file uploaded by you to the server that they are apparently already scanning (to de-dupe as you put it.)
I think the point is Lala wasn't a honeypot. Neither is Amazon's already running Music Locker service apparently, and people aren't saying anything like this about Google's upcoming service. So what makes iCloud so special ?
There's no evidence such a deal exists or would be advantageous to Apple and yes, I contend it would be on pretty shaky ground legally. Probably the best evidence so far that no such deal exists is that there have been no reports of such actions concerning Amazon's Music Locker service. Unless ... they are just waiting for the best moment to strike (!), I won't buy your real estate but I have a very nice tinfoil hat for you.
You assume they will scan the files themselves as opposed to just the iTunes database, as they already do for the "Genius" mix function in iTunes. Actively scanning files for illegal files, then reporting them to a third party sounds pretty illegal to me, doesn't that violate the US fourth amendment or does that only apply to government ?
a) Who cares what Apple thinks or their brand (in context of this discussion). If the RIAA or one of it's members files suit and gets access to music stored in iCloud in discovery, Apple has to obey the law.
On what basis would they sue ? They wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
b) If 90% of Apple's customers use iCloud for storing pirated music, that will be a problem with the business plan, unless you are right about some legal/license arrangement existing in advance.
Apple has indeed signed agreements with all major record labels prior to launching this service. Further more only songs that don't exist in the iTunes catalogue will get uploaded, the rest will just be made available for download to you. Now have a look at the iTunes catalogue, whatever is not in there I probably bought legally because it's going to be relatively obscure.
c) Assume nothing. It would be wise to read the contract, terms of service and any license agreement between the labels, RIAA and Apple before putting yourself and your family at risk. Personally, I hope Apple has got a solution on this. If not, then I'd rather not be left out in the wind like iPhone developers are right now (see Lodsys).
Reading the terms is never a bad idea. And you seem to have missed that Apple has developer's backs on the Lodsys situation. Unlike Google which has been silent on the matter despite its developers also being targeted.
Would Apple be legally obliged to look for such a watermark, if not why the hell would they ? Also no song will be uploaded that exists in the iTunes catalogue so they'd have to scan the songs on the disk for the watermark (might be legally dubious) as opposed to just scanning the local iTunes database which is a lot faster.
Record companies have to subpoena information like that due to privacy laws and such, how much they offer Apple is irrelevant. They would have no justification to offer the courts for said subpoenas.
I wouldn't keep my entire savings in Bitcoins but there's nothing wrong with having small amounts even though it isn't legal tender. It's equivalent to having a giftcard or an iTunes credit. It is understood that it can only be redeemed under certain circumstances.
No, the "haters" are people who understand that currencies which cannot be used to legally settle debts
What does that mean ? It's not legal tender, sure, but you can use it to settle some debts with persons who accept it.
and whose design inevitably leads to a deflationary trend should be avoided.
What's inherently deflationary about it ? Are you arguing new bitcoins aren't generated fast enough ?
Bitcoin is not even a fiat currency, since it was not created by a government (see: definition of fiat currency).
Fiat currency does not have to be issued by a government. Wikipedia :
"The term fiat money has been defined variously as:
- any money declared by a government to be legal tender.[3]
- state-issued money which is neither legally convertible to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.[4]
- money without intrinsic value.[5]"
It's OK though, you can continue to assume that we live in a world where everyone either supports Bitcoin or thinks we should run back to the gold standard.
Relax. I'm not even a bitcoin proponent, I was just observing that there's a lot of this "gold coins under the mattress" nutbaggery around these days and something like Bitcoin becoming popular would be anathema to them.
I like it better like this, I would've hated to give MS credit for firing a bunch of the overpaid freeloading bastards.
No this will be used as the excuse for that kind of legislation. Big difference.
Y'know, I consider BitCoins pretty much just a nice idea, at this point, with plenty of problems and no real value (beyond speculation).
That said, the number of people who bother actually posting just to tell us how much they dislike them, in response to even the slightest, even humorous (in this case) mention of BTC... Just wow.
Makes me lean toward taking them a bit more seriously - No one hates on Linden dollars or even Facebook credits.
The haters are probably gold bugs who also like to rant about the worthlessness of fiat currency. There's a lot of that about these days.
Killed a lot fewer people. 12 million killed in death camps vs. a couple hundred thousand by the two bombs. But then, nobody seems to cry about the fire bombing of Japanese cities, which killed far more people, mostly civilians.
Very true, not just in Japan but Dresden too.
Besides, with the atomic bombs, it's not so simple. I think the deciding factor was that only 1.2% of soldiers at Iwo Jima surrendered, the rest fought to their deaths in a bitter battle, in the name of their emperor. If it came to that on the Japanese islands, the country and people of Japan probably wouldn't exist as we know it today if an invasion was required to secure an end to the war.
I think the accepted version of history these days is that Japan was ready to surrender but with terms and the US would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender so the bombs got used. Me, I'm just glad the germans folded before the bomb was finished so Europe wasn't bombed.
From History Of Computing Project: "The company established what was then called the Entry Systems Division, located in Boca Raton, Florida, to develop the new system. This small group consisted of 12 engineers and designers under the direction of Don Estridge; the team's chief designer was Lewis Eggebrecht. The division developed IBM's first real PC. (IBM considered the 5100 system, developed in 1975, to be an intelligent programmable terminal rather than a genuine computer, even though it truly was a computer.)"
And $20,000 is hardly "personal", the Lisa was half that 10 years later and still spectacularly bombed.
Meanwhile the fact that IBM machines were used in the development of a weapon that could kill about 140,000 people at once is uncontroversial.
Be honest, you made that comment just because of the humor in a grammar nazi pointing out the error in "nazi's" didn't you ?
No one at RIM is dumb enough to trust Apple, Google or Microsoft. If they went that way it'd be just be a matter of time before they were replaced by one of those companies' own service or became no more than one of many competing services on an OS they couldn't control. The likes of Apple certainly wouldn't allow an application to hook so deep into the OS to allow things like remote wipe, Android would necessitate development of many different tweaks for all the different hardware/OS version/operator combinations (death by a million pinpricks) and nobody ever came out on top trusting MS.
IBM put the first real personal computer on the market. Yes, prior to that I could have gone to the electronic store and bought the parts.
The only people who call this a personal computer are idiot geeks who will go to any stupid pedantry and verbal trick to 'be right' and 'know more'.
If the altair counts, then you must consider the Kenbak-1. So I win the internet.
From wikipedia : "The original line of PCs were part of an IBM strategy to get into the small personal computer market then dominated by the Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, Tandy Corporation's TRS-80s, and various CP/M machines.[2]"
Yes, a bit hypocritical to just lay the blame at IBM's feet too. The US has a long history of doing business with criminal regimes from banana republics, to the nazi's, to apartheid South Africa, to regimes like Saudi Arabia today.
Educational institution or some kind of web hosting company ?
Well, you had Mozilla who had spent years rewriting their code only to push out a bloated hulk. Then Phoenix came along and basically wrote a light-weight shell on top of the browser engine and threw out all unnecessary non browser crap. Not very revolutionary (though a great browser at the time.) In facts the parts Mozilla pushed as being most revolutionary, like XUL, are the ones that really failed. I think if you look at real innovation in the browser space you'll find it either at the client side with AJAX, HTML5 (started by a consortium of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software), but especially Apple taking KHTML and using it to create webkit which spread everywhere. It's hard to imagine mobile browsing today without Webkit. So kudos to the KDE team for that.
my interests are particularly in filesystems and virtualisation and they are where Linux tends to be up there with or ahead of the leaders.
With respect, what open source filesystems do you actually find in the datacenter ? I look at our unix infrastructure and I see : VxFS, JFS2 and Zfs, in that order. As to virtualisation, IBM have been doing hypervisors for decades and I think they still take the lead by implementing such things as micro-partitioning, dynamic reconfiguration and live migration of virtual machines. Of course I'm not a researcher, but looking at what's out there in the field.
I'll agree with the developer tools where FOSS is traditionally very strong. The rest were basically reimplementation of software that had stagnated and where open source software could catch up. Unix had stagnated so Linux was able to grow into a replacement for some use cases, firefox caught up because IE development had all but halted, relational databases are ancient tech, etc. I'm not complaining BTW, I use open sourced software literally every day both professionally and privately. I just wish there was more original thinking going on then "let's do what everyone else is doing with a 2-to-5 year lag.
Basically the whole internet infrastructure was developed before there was even a FOSS movement as such, I count it more as proto-OSS. But yes, that was a rare instance of open sourced software taking the lead and look where it got us ! I just which the big brains did things like that more often.