Napster really just opened the floodgates. MP3s have been huge for a very long time, and Napster merely made it very easy to distribute and obtain MP3's, increasing everyone's collections. Now that the music trading is so prevelant, do they think that this flow of it will stop? There are amazing numbers of MP3s out there, and people are all too happy to let people dip into their stash for access to someone else's.
Pulling Napster out of the picture this late in the game is not going to have the effect they want. The river will merely find a new path, and this time the path won't be a single set of servers, or one company that people are dependant upon for MP3s. This time the water will flow in many directions, over many very distributed and varying forms of trading that we've been building all this time.
It will be so distributed that they will have no hope of stemming the flow. They may have done much better by riding Napster--- leaving it functioning until they can work a way to encourage Napster to work in their favor. And instead they shoot themselves in the foot. By removing our need to depend on Napster, they're giving up all chance of controlling where and how we get our MP3s.
And now, suppose the Napster CEO comes on the webcast and delivers his rallying cry? Stand up against the monster RIAA that wants to take away your music. Why should we? The RIAA is doing nothing but forcing us to make the next step... leave behind the central, haltable, stoppable location in favor of many other means which are harder to trace and much harder to prevent.
Napster was just a step. By shutting down Napster now, the RIAA is just ensuring that we take the next one.
If the public has its way, that last step will be on the heads of the once immortal recording industry.
I literally just started taking a liking to the site, and was really getting into the atmosphere they had. I'm quite disappointed (yet again) that we're going to have to fight off people doing this sort of thing for fun.
One possibility is to turn off his 'Anonymous Hero' functionality for the time-being. Rusty's site has email verification for new accounts; should the spammer start manufacturing email accounts it may be easier to track him down, and even if not, you can delay the auto-verification emails to once an hour. It's also likely easier to add a 5-post a day limit to a particular account than it is to an anonymous user.
Another temporary solution would be to only allow logged-in users to post/submit as Anonymous Heros. A bit backwards, but combined with the items above, could make it easier to track down the yucksters and reduce spam in the meantime.
These temporary measures are certainly not ideal, but tough times call for tough measures. These work better on kuro5hin than they would on a bigger site like slashdot. Hopefully they will frustrate the spammers long enough that they can grow up, or at least let the site exist in a 'police-state' while they come up with more savvy protection.
Does the response ask any questions relevant to why Slashdot should not remove illegally posted copyrighted materials from its site?
Hypothetical situation:
Slashdot users post comments copyrighted by themselves.
Slashdot begins publishing those comments in a book without asking for permission from those copyright holders.
Slashdot users, for whatever reason, informs Slashdot/Andover of the infringement and requests action be taken.
Slashdot responds by asking about the trade secrecy in the posts, and what proprietary protections the posters had in place.
Trade secrecy has nothing to do with the protections they are granted quite simply in copyright law. I think it's fun and all to divert the topic to something semi-related, and it definitely seems like a tactic that might work if there was some sort of grey area here. But this doesn't sound like such an open and honest way to respond, as I'd expect from our friends from Slashdot. I'm sick of Microsoft and the others using misdirection tactics, so it's a bit sad to see that no one these days is above the behaviour.
Our shop runs 3 helpdesk techs for 200 users. Perhaps possible because about half of those are very experienced developers, though each may have 2-3 workstations.
We run perhaps 7 Solaris boxes, and have 0 techs dedicated to them.
Slashdot Mirror
This salon article has a somewhat similar perspective on this.
Napster really just opened the floodgates. MP3s have been huge for a very long time, and Napster merely made it very easy to distribute and obtain MP3's, increasing everyone's collections. Now that the music trading is so prevelant, do they think that this flow of it will stop? There are amazing numbers of MP3s out there, and people are all too happy to let people dip into their stash for access to someone else's.
Pulling Napster out of the picture this late in the game is not going to have the effect they want. The river will merely find a new path, and this time the path won't be a single set of servers, or one company that people are dependant upon for MP3s. This time the water will flow in many directions, over many very distributed and varying forms of trading that we've been building all this time.
It will be so distributed that they will have no hope of stemming the flow. They may have done much better by riding Napster--- leaving it functioning until they can work a way to encourage Napster to work in their favor. And instead they shoot themselves in the foot. By removing our need to depend on Napster, they're giving up all chance of controlling where and how we get our MP3s.
And now, suppose the Napster CEO comes on the webcast and delivers his rallying cry? Stand up against the monster RIAA that wants to take away your music. Why should we? The RIAA is doing nothing but forcing us to make the next step... leave behind the central, haltable, stoppable location in favor of many other means which are harder to trace and much harder to prevent.
Napster was just a step. By shutting down Napster now, the RIAA is just ensuring that we take the next one.
If the public has its way, that last step will be on the heads of the once immortal recording industry.
I literally just started taking a liking to the site, and was really getting into the atmosphere they had. I'm quite disappointed (yet again) that we're going to have to fight off people doing this sort of thing for fun.
One possibility is to turn off his 'Anonymous Hero' functionality for the time-being. Rusty's site has email verification for new accounts; should the spammer start manufacturing email accounts it may be easier to track him down, and even if not, you can delay the auto-verification emails to once an hour. It's also likely easier to add a 5-post a day limit to a particular account than it is to an anonymous user.
Another temporary solution would be to only allow logged-in users to post/submit as Anonymous Heros. A bit backwards, but combined with the items above, could make it easier to track down the yucksters and reduce spam in the meantime.
These temporary measures are certainly not ideal, but tough times call for tough measures. These work better on kuro5hin than they would on a bigger site like slashdot. Hopefully they will frustrate the spammers long enough that they can grow up, or at least let the site exist in a 'police-state' while they come up with more savvy protection.
Sounds like what www.pagein.com was trying to do.
Hypothetical situation:
- Slashdot users post comments copyrighted by themselves.
- Slashdot begins publishing those comments in a book without asking for permission from those copyright holders.
- Slashdot users, for whatever reason, informs Slashdot/Andover of the infringement and requests action be taken.
- Slashdot responds by asking about the trade secrecy in the posts, and what proprietary protections the posters had in place.
Trade secrecy has nothing to do with the protections they are granted quite simply in copyright law. I think it's fun and all to divert the topic to something semi-related, and it definitely seems like a tactic that might work if there was some sort of grey area here. But this doesn't sound like such an open and honest way to respond, as I'd expect from our friends from Slashdot. I'm sick of Microsoft and the others using misdirection tactics, so it's a bit sad to see that no one these days is above the behaviour.-Rezand
Our shop runs 3 helpdesk techs for 200 users. Perhaps possible because about half of those are very experienced developers, though each may have 2-3 workstations.
We run perhaps 7 Solaris boxes, and have 0 techs dedicated to them.
"The Almighty Buck" is sorted according to its actual topic name: "Money".