Yes, I would get all angry about the removal on that basis alone. It depends on the wording of the advertisement and how the trademark device(s) is/are used. If there is any misrepresentation of what the trademark device(s) refer to, then it is infringement. If the trademark is also used in a way to attract views to the ad, it might be as well. The accusation of terrorism would have nothing to do with trademark law. If the trademark device(s) was only used as a way to precisely refer to the trademark owner, then it is proper use.
The problem with Google's policy is not whether they ban something that is legal, but rather, their process to handle it. If Google chose to ban all references using a trademark, then so be it... their servers, their rules. The problem is that what they are doing is allowing the trademark owners to selectively filter the legal uses of the trademark. That basically comes down to a non-uniform policy implementation that is out of their control. While even this isn't illegal, it is a bad idea, and this itself could end up harming Google when more businesses figure out ways to use this as a method to make ad banning requests based on trivial references.
One major reason a PC is so slow to boot is the totally free-wheeling nature of attached devices. There's actually too much liberty to do bad things in device hardware. In some cases, probes to see if a certain specific device is present can cause some other device to go into a locked up state. PCs also have the complication that interrupts don't really identify the device in the same terms as how you access the device. This means we have to do things like timed waits in device probes. Ideally we should be able to discover all the devices in a computer within a millisecond for as many as 100 devices.
We need a whole new system level (as opposed to CPU level) architecture. We need to have a uniform device address range for all devices, and a uniform set of basic commands for all devices. Then all devices in the same class (storage devices are one class, network interfaces is another class, etc) to have a common set of commands to operate the normally expected functions of that device class.
And we really don't need a BIOS, or at least not much of one. A simple switch that lets us select between 2 flash areas to load at reset or power on would handle almost all cases. And even that's not necessary if we choose to run a stripped down boot selector program from flash that lets us select other flash areas to load. That combined with a hardware based "JTAG over USB" protocol to store new flash images when no present ones work (maybe when an on-mainboard or rear-access switch enables it) would provide any needed recovery capability.
And why can't we have gigabytes of flash? I bought a 2GB SD card the other day for $20. Can't they put that on the mainboard? An SD slot would not only provide for a lot of capacity (way more than what you get on a CDROM), but also a means to stop writing, and a means to swap out bad flash or reload it in another computer.
I have been working on a description document for a new architecture. It's not ready, yet, or I would post it here. But I'll try to speed it up.
That royalty payment says that NOVELL "BELIEVES" that Linux contains MS IP, even though there has been no proof of such a claim.
Can you provide any kind of supporting evidence to back up a statemenent like that? Note that public statements are not necessarily such evidence, as they could just as easily be a form of untruths just as much as the statements that come from Microsoft.
There are many other reasons Novell may have chosen to make such payments. One of them may be that they are simply afraid of being the first target, and thus have to endure all the costs of fighting a legal civil battle (because they know all too well that in the USA, even if you have committed no tort at all, you end up paying to defend yourself with no assurance that you can ever recover that money, as well as they money lost by not having the defense costs to invest in other things). Another may be that their customers simply wanted that kind of assurance out of their own unfounded fear.
That doesn't mean that I support Novell having done this. I'm just saying that you are jumping to conclusions, and I believe they are false, as well.
Don't forget that the stats for Vista include all those PCs sold with Vista where the buyer had no choice. If you were to limit the samplings to only the cases where the buyer had a genuine choice of OS, including no pressure by the sales people to go with one over another, then the stats might mean something about market preference. Even if it was just a choice between Vista and XP, then the stats would at least be indicative of the true preferance of the market for a particuler version of Windows. Instead, what these stats tell us is more about the financial benefits to Microsoft and Apple (or the lack thereof in the latter case), since this is based on actual sales (however it is coerced), rather than actual choice.
The theory led Gary Huffnagle, a University of Michigan internal medicine and microbiology professor, to wonder about the value of another body part that is often yanked: "I'll bet eventually we'll find the same sort of thing with the tonsils."
Use an external hard drive instead of the internal hard drive for any content you don't want others to know about. It can be unplugged when not needed. It can just "disappear" if they come looking for your files.
I'm not convinced this lady was "guilty as hell". Technically speaking, the court did not find her "guilty" at all; they found "for the plaintiff" in a civil trial, and specified compensation. She did not get a jail term. But what is important here is that unlike a criminal trial where "guilty" requires convincing proof "beyond reasonable doubt", a civil trial does not. They only need a "preponderance of the evidence". Basically they found that "she probably caused the damage"... so they have ruined her life.
Did she actually share music? I think she probably did. I'm not certain, because there are definite areas of doubt about some of the evidence. The outcome is not unexpected in our "big money buys the verdict" civil court system.
But this is about a whole lot more than her case. This is about the kinds of tactics used by the RIAA in other suits and threats. This is about arrogance of big corporations. Right now they have ONE win... barely won with not particularly strong evidence. In other cases they have lost or are losing. And where is the evidence to show they actually suffered the damage they asked for? They are just making up numbers.
An even bigger picture shows that the industry has also set its sights on even more ways to get even more money out of people. They don't want you to have any fair use rights at all. They want you to have to buy a separate copy for every media you might use the music through. They want you to not only pay for new media if you damage what you have, they even want you to pay the intellectual costs (payments to artists, producers, marketing, etc), yet again, just to replace the media (and to be sure of this they want to outlaw fair use, personal copying, etc).
These are a bunch of hyper greedy bastards. Sure, the theft from stealing via online sharing is wrong. But that is just a small loss compared to what they ultimately want to get out of people. This is an industry that needs to fall; and the sooner the better.
Suppose there is a fire in your storage facility and your CD collection becomes a bunch of charred goo. Or maybe it gets broken into and stolen (that happened to me, once). Are you now going to erase your ripped collection? Or are you going re-buy all those CDs again (you better have them insured)?
This is old technology where writing a 0 really was a 0. Now days that is not how the data is written. The way data is written today to achieve very high densities involves scrambling the bit stream and using group coding methods to ensure precise clocking at all bits. It also involves multi-level data encoding. If that 0.0294 was readable at a low level of electronics, then you could have encoded 5 bits in a 1 bit spot with 32 discrete levels of 0.0 for 0, 0.032258 for 1, 0.064516 for 2, 0.096774 for 3, 0.129032 for 4, 0.16129 for 5, 0.193548 for 6, 0.225806 for 7, 0.258065 for 8, 0.290323 for 9, 0.322581 for 10, 0.354839 for 11, 0.387097 for 12, 0.419355 for 13, 0.451613 for 14, 0.483871 for 15, 0.516129 for 16, 0.548387 for 17, 0.580645 for 18, 0.612903 for 19, 0.645161 for 20, 0.677419 for 21, 0.709677 for 22, 0.741935 for 23, 0.774194 for 24, 0.806452 for 25, 0.83871 for 26, 0.870968 for 27, 0.903226 for 28, 0.935484 for 29, 0.967742 for 30, and 1.0 for 31... and quintupled your capacity.
No. The counseling does not cost $700... at least not everywhere. There are some places to get it entirely free. Many others offer it for around $25.
You can do it entirely by telephone, too (I believe it requires about 90 minutes). I've heard of cases where people's situation is so clear cut, that there is no option but bankruptcy, and no cause for them to change the way they manage money (for example a million dollar hospital bill for someone that has no hope of having near that much money in 10 years), that the counselors end up discussing the bankruptcy for about 10 minutes and spend teh other 80 minutes shooting the breeze.
The bankruptcy changes were meant to drive more people who otherwise completely discharge debts that might have been able to pay over the next few years, to estblish payment plans instead. But it actually backfired. Most of the people that would be affected by this to change direction in bankruptcy are instead just holding off and not doing anything (not filing and not paying bills). So there's actually less being collected, now. And a great many of them will be worse off in a couple years and qualify to discharge, anyway. It's just another case of big evil corporations run by executives that have no clue using their bought and paid for congress pawns to create new legislation that won't achieve anything.
People are stealing music. There's no doubt about it. The problem is the industry either thinks such stealing represents their entire loss, or they are just trying to spin it that way to gain pity from Congress, and get more intrusive laws passed so they can later on rape us by requiring a separate copy be purchased for each room of our homes.
One aspect of this is that the numbers have no meaning. If 1,000,000,000 copies of music are shared in a given week, that does NOT mean 1,000,000,000 CDs could have otherwise been sold. I dare say the vast majority of what is downloaded from p2p networks represents music that would never have been bought, anyway, had the network not been available. Many people have more music than they could possibly buy in a lifetime of average income, or even listen to all of in a lifetime. There is no valid argument anywhere that could claim all that music represents lost CD sales. Yet that is how the industry likes to add it up based on the stats of what is being downloaded.
Also, lots of downloaded music is actually driving CD sales. Being able to sample the music from the big media companies is still grossly misfunctional. It works so much better over p2p networks. People hear something they like on p2p then go buy the CD (in store or online) to get a good quality version (which may not be available in the future because of so much effort to DRM everything).
And of course a lot of other non-sales are the result of the declining product quality (technical and artistic), as well as a greater economic spread between haves and have-nots (especially those in teens and early twenties, who generally have nothing much left after buying a computer and getting broadband).
It depends on your definition of network. On many DHCP based broadband services, you can discover the MAC address of neighbors by pinging them directly. Then wait for them to "power off for the day" and take over their MAC address with their IP. Providers are working on trying to prevent this, and are having some successes. But it is not a big priority for them because such spoofing only affects a limited amount of their service. I used this method through a friend's cable modem a few years ago.
If it is the case her IP address was spoofed this way, the culprit would be using a computer in her neighborhood somewhere, depending on the provider's topology. It may be a neighbor, or someone that 0wn3d a neighbor computer.
There are also other methods someone could cause her computer to be open and exchanging music. Whether anyone does that through Kazaa, I cannot say. But a lot of things are possible, and what was written in the article about the trial suggests that not all of them were shown to not be possible in her case. The real problem, though, is that in a civil trial, "beyond all reasonable doubt" is not the measure used; it is "a preponderance of the evidence" (which means that your life can still be ruined by a big evil corporation even though doubts about your "guilt" are clear and obvious, as long as the courts operate this way). IMHO, the measure should be changed to "beyond all reasonable doubt" in civil cases brought against individuals by (big evil) corporations.
First, I am not going to do anything with some arbitrary address posted by someone I do not know... especially not when posted by someone posting on Slashdot as Anonymous Coward.
Second, not every situation offers the opportunity to spoof an IP address. In part it depends on how your ISP configures the network. Are you using DHCP or PPPoE? Are you using a provider supplied router? Is your IP address ever inactive when you turn things off? Even if your situation is spoofable, the ability to do that may be limited to neighbors on the same DSLAM.
The ability to spoof some IP address does not mean the ability to spoof any address anyone may suggest. There are many different methods. You choose the right one for the situation. Not every situation offers the opportunity. You take what you can get when you can't get just anything you want.
So I suggest you do some more learning about the actual methods.
Please pay closer attention to the distinction between "format" and "full format". The latter writes over every sector on the disk. Tell me where the "erased data still" exists on the drive after a FULL format?
Yes, by all means make your own music. Write music and share it with friends. Play music for friends. Let them play your music. You play theirs. Record it. Upload it. Make CD-R's and sell them here.
The record cartels want to control music. Don't let them have yours.
I've been on a jury twice before. I'm actually on call this month, as well (really). I did, and if I serve again in this call, will, collect my full employment salary, and reimburse my employer what I was paid for the jury duty. Additionally, as before (in another state I lived in at the time), parking and traveling expense are covered.
In the two juries I was on before, most of the jurors were actual quite intelligent. OTOH, had I been called to this case (not so since I don't live in that state), the RIAA would most likely have used an option to remove me from the jury panel once they knew that I knew the truth about computers, and especially if they found out that not only did I know that IP spoofing could be done, that I have actually done in in several instances. I'm sure they would also have had me removed if they knew I was the real Skapare (16644) on Slashdot.
Sure, this was certainly a "convenient" coincidence. But the question is, WHY did she replace it? I've replaced THREE hard drives during the time period of this case... because the drives DIED! Now I don't know whether that was her story or not. But things like this do happen.
Now if she wanted to destroy evidence, she could have just done a full format of the drive (if her computer knowledge was sufficient to know that). What would hurt her most in my eyes, though, was claiming the date was before the notice, if the proof that it happened afterwards was genuine. Of course maybe it died before and was replaced afterwards. If lawyers would have properly dug that out (and maybe they did), then the jury should know. If she lied, that's what likely sunk her case.
Toder has also suggested that computer hacking or IP spoofing could as explanations. Spoofing is someone pretending to be somebody else by taking over their IP address.
But an expert witness disagreed.
"My opinion is that it did not happen," Doug Jacobson, an Iowa State University professor and computer security expert, testified. "Making IP spoofing work is extremely complicated. Pretending to be somebody else at the same time they're on the Internet is almost impossible to carry out.''
Excuse me??? I have done this. I have successfully spoofed IP address several times. It's easy in many cases. This so called expert is most certainly no expert at all.
There are some other things that sure make it look like she might be guilty. But this (trying to downplay the real possibility of IP spoofing), is not one of them. Time for an investigation at ISU.
Toder spent much of his 20-minute closing argument going over and disputing evidence presented by the plaintiffs. He referred to the recording industry's star witness, Iowa State University professor and computer security expert Doug Jacobson, as a "hired gun," with a financial incentive in this case.
"He was making up things as he went along," Toder said. "I respectfully ask you to reject all the testimony of Dr. Jacobson."
It is too bad that the jury did not get to hear the truth in this case. I don't know who all might be lying. But I definitely know at least one person who either lied about the technology or lied about his qualifications.
I admit that I don't know the details of the Blu-Ray media technology. But if the following feature is not already present, what's to prevent it from being added on later? A small portion of the inner circle of the disk could have a ring of recordable dye embedded in it. It wouldn't need to be fancy, and wouldn't need to even have CDROM level of data density (this only needs a few hundred or a couple thousands bits). What it would do is if there is nothing yet recorded on that space, record it with the serial number of the player, encrypted with a key found in a special file on the disk. Then it loops back to initialization state again and re-reads the data. If the data it reads matches what it would record, then it plays the disk. If not, it won't play it.
Players that don't have the feature implemented at all will be able to play disks already bound to another player. But do you really know if they have this feature? If they don't today, what about new players tomorrow? The future players that add this feature will be able to distinguish between disks that don't have this feature and disks that should have this feature by whether or not a "bindkey" file exists in the disk filesystem. If it exists, but the data ring is not present (because someone managed to permanently laser it off), recording it and later reading it back will fail, and at best the player goes into a loop continuously trying to record it.
Slashdot Mirror
... it supports ECC DDR3 at 1333 and TWO Xeon quad core processors all in an ATX form factor.
Yes, I would get all angry about the removal on that basis alone. It depends on the wording of the advertisement and how the trademark device(s) is/are used. If there is any misrepresentation of what the trademark device(s) refer to, then it is infringement. If the trademark is also used in a way to attract views to the ad, it might be as well. The accusation of terrorism would have nothing to do with trademark law. If the trademark device(s) was only used as a way to precisely refer to the trademark owner, then it is proper use.
The problem with Google's policy is not whether they ban something that is legal, but rather, their process to handle it. If Google chose to ban all references using a trademark, then so be it ... their servers, their rules. The problem is that what they are doing is allowing the trademark owners to selectively filter the legal uses of the trademark. That basically comes down to a non-uniform policy implementation that is out of their control. While even this isn't illegal, it is a bad idea, and this itself could end up harming Google when more businesses figure out ways to use this as a method to make ad banning requests based on trivial references.
So where can I get these in the USA?
... Vista?
One major reason a PC is so slow to boot is the totally free-wheeling nature of attached devices. There's actually too much liberty to do bad things in device hardware. In some cases, probes to see if a certain specific device is present can cause some other device to go into a locked up state. PCs also have the complication that interrupts don't really identify the device in the same terms as how you access the device. This means we have to do things like timed waits in device probes. Ideally we should be able to discover all the devices in a computer within a millisecond for as many as 100 devices.
We need a whole new system level (as opposed to CPU level) architecture. We need to have a uniform device address range for all devices, and a uniform set of basic commands for all devices. Then all devices in the same class (storage devices are one class, network interfaces is another class, etc) to have a common set of commands to operate the normally expected functions of that device class.
And we really don't need a BIOS, or at least not much of one. A simple switch that lets us select between 2 flash areas to load at reset or power on would handle almost all cases. And even that's not necessary if we choose to run a stripped down boot selector program from flash that lets us select other flash areas to load. That combined with a hardware based "JTAG over USB" protocol to store new flash images when no present ones work (maybe when an on-mainboard or rear-access switch enables it) would provide any needed recovery capability.
And why can't we have gigabytes of flash? I bought a 2GB SD card the other day for $20. Can't they put that on the mainboard? An SD slot would not only provide for a lot of capacity (way more than what you get on a CDROM), but also a means to stop writing, and a means to swap out bad flash or reload it in another computer.
I have been working on a description document for a new architecture. It's not ready, yet, or I would post it here. But I'll try to speed it up.
Can you provide any kind of supporting evidence to back up a statemenent like that? Note that public statements are not necessarily such evidence, as they could just as easily be a form of untruths just as much as the statements that come from Microsoft.
There are many other reasons Novell may have chosen to make such payments. One of them may be that they are simply afraid of being the first target, and thus have to endure all the costs of fighting a legal civil battle (because they know all too well that in the USA, even if you have committed no tort at all, you end up paying to defend yourself with no assurance that you can ever recover that money, as well as they money lost by not having the defense costs to invest in other things). Another may be that their customers simply wanted that kind of assurance out of their own unfounded fear.
That doesn't mean that I support Novell having done this. I'm just saying that you are jumping to conclusions, and I believe they are false, as well.
Don't forget that the stats for Vista include all those PCs sold with Vista where the buyer had no choice. If you were to limit the samplings to only the cases where the buyer had a genuine choice of OS, including no pressure by the sales people to go with one over another, then the stats might mean something about market preference. Even if it was just a choice between Vista and XP, then the stats would at least be indicative of the true preferance of the market for a particuler version of Windows. Instead, what these stats tell us is more about the financial benefits to Microsoft and Apple (or the lack thereof in the latter case), since this is based on actual sales (however it is coerced), rather than actual choice.
From TFA:
And what about the foreskin?
Use an external hard drive instead of the internal hard drive for any content you don't want others to know about. It can be unplugged when not needed. It can just "disappear" if they come looking for your files.
Financial institutions just love to grant credit to people just emerging from bankruptcy. There are good reasons to do this:
I'm not convinced this lady was "guilty as hell". Technically speaking, the court did not find her "guilty" at all; they found "for the plaintiff" in a civil trial, and specified compensation. She did not get a jail term. But what is important here is that unlike a criminal trial where "guilty" requires convincing proof "beyond reasonable doubt", a civil trial does not. They only need a "preponderance of the evidence". Basically they found that "she probably caused the damage" ... so they have ruined her life.
Did she actually share music? I think she probably did. I'm not certain, because there are definite areas of doubt about some of the evidence. The outcome is not unexpected in our "big money buys the verdict" civil court system.
But this is about a whole lot more than her case. This is about the kinds of tactics used by the RIAA in other suits and threats. This is about arrogance of big corporations. Right now they have ONE win ... barely won with not particularly strong evidence. In other cases they have lost or are losing. And where is the evidence to show they actually suffered the damage they asked for? They are just making up numbers.
An even bigger picture shows that the industry has also set its sights on even more ways to get even more money out of people. They don't want you to have any fair use rights at all. They want you to have to buy a separate copy for every media you might use the music through. They want you to not only pay for new media if you damage what you have, they even want you to pay the intellectual costs (payments to artists, producers, marketing, etc), yet again, just to replace the media (and to be sure of this they want to outlaw fair use, personal copying, etc).
These are a bunch of hyper greedy bastards. Sure, the theft from stealing via online sharing is wrong. But that is just a small loss compared to what they ultimately want to get out of people. This is an industry that needs to fall; and the sooner the better.
Suppose there is a fire in your storage facility and your CD collection becomes a bunch of charred goo. Or maybe it gets broken into and stolen (that happened to me, once). Are you now going to erase your ripped collection? Or are you going re-buy all those CDs again (you better have them insured)?
This is old technology where writing a 0 really was a 0. Now days that is not how the data is written. The way data is written today to achieve very high densities involves scrambling the bit stream and using group coding methods to ensure precise clocking at all bits. It also involves multi-level data encoding. If that 0.0294 was readable at a low level of electronics, then you could have encoded 5 bits in a 1 bit spot with 32 discrete levels of 0.0 for 0, 0.032258 for 1, 0.064516 for 2, 0.096774 for 3, 0.129032 for 4, 0.16129 for 5, 0.193548 for 6, 0.225806 for 7, 0.258065 for 8, 0.290323 for 9, 0.322581 for 10, 0.354839 for 11, 0.387097 for 12, 0.419355 for 13, 0.451613 for 14, 0.483871 for 15, 0.516129 for 16, 0.548387 for 17, 0.580645 for 18, 0.612903 for 19, 0.645161 for 20, 0.677419 for 21, 0.709677 for 22, 0.741935 for 23, 0.774194 for 24, 0.806452 for 25, 0.83871 for 26, 0.870968 for 27, 0.903226 for 28, 0.935484 for 29, 0.967742 for 30, and 1.0 for 31 ... and quintupled your capacity.
No. The counseling does not cost $700 ... at least not everywhere. There are some places to get it entirely free. Many others offer it for around $25.
You can do it entirely by telephone, too (I believe it requires about 90 minutes). I've heard of cases where people's situation is so clear cut, that there is no option but bankruptcy, and no cause for them to change the way they manage money (for example a million dollar hospital bill for someone that has no hope of having near that much money in 10 years), that the counselors end up discussing the bankruptcy for about 10 minutes and spend teh other 80 minutes shooting the breeze.
The bankruptcy changes were meant to drive more people who otherwise completely discharge debts that might have been able to pay over the next few years, to estblish payment plans instead. But it actually backfired. Most of the people that would be affected by this to change direction in bankruptcy are instead just holding off and not doing anything (not filing and not paying bills). So there's actually less being collected, now. And a great many of them will be worse off in a couple years and qualify to discharge, anyway. It's just another case of big evil corporations run by executives that have no clue using their bought and paid for congress pawns to create new legislation that won't achieve anything.
People are stealing music. There's no doubt about it. The problem is the industry either thinks such stealing represents their entire loss, or they are just trying to spin it that way to gain pity from Congress, and get more intrusive laws passed so they can later on rape us by requiring a separate copy be purchased for each room of our homes.
One aspect of this is that the numbers have no meaning. If 1,000,000,000 copies of music are shared in a given week, that does NOT mean 1,000,000,000 CDs could have otherwise been sold. I dare say the vast majority of what is downloaded from p2p networks represents music that would never have been bought, anyway, had the network not been available. Many people have more music than they could possibly buy in a lifetime of average income, or even listen to all of in a lifetime. There is no valid argument anywhere that could claim all that music represents lost CD sales. Yet that is how the industry likes to add it up based on the stats of what is being downloaded.
Also, lots of downloaded music is actually driving CD sales. Being able to sample the music from the big media companies is still grossly misfunctional. It works so much better over p2p networks. People hear something they like on p2p then go buy the CD (in store or online) to get a good quality version (which may not be available in the future because of so much effort to DRM everything).
And of course a lot of other non-sales are the result of the declining product quality (technical and artistic), as well as a greater economic spread between haves and have-nots (especially those in teens and early twenties, who generally have nothing much left after buying a computer and getting broadband).
But there is true stealing, too.
It depends on your definition of network. On many DHCP based broadband services, you can discover the MAC address of neighbors by pinging them directly. Then wait for them to "power off for the day" and take over their MAC address with their IP. Providers are working on trying to prevent this, and are having some successes. But it is not a big priority for them because such spoofing only affects a limited amount of their service. I used this method through a friend's cable modem a few years ago.
If it is the case her IP address was spoofed this way, the culprit would be using a computer in her neighborhood somewhere, depending on the provider's topology. It may be a neighbor, or someone that 0wn3d a neighbor computer.
There are also other methods someone could cause her computer to be open and exchanging music. Whether anyone does that through Kazaa, I cannot say. But a lot of things are possible, and what was written in the article about the trial suggests that not all of them were shown to not be possible in her case. The real problem, though, is that in a civil trial, "beyond all reasonable doubt" is not the measure used; it is "a preponderance of the evidence" (which means that your life can still be ruined by a big evil corporation even though doubts about your "guilt" are clear and obvious, as long as the courts operate this way). IMHO, the measure should be changed to "beyond all reasonable doubt" in civil cases brought against individuals by (big evil) corporations.
First, I am not going to do anything with some arbitrary address posted by someone I do not know ... especially not when posted by someone posting on Slashdot as Anonymous Coward.
Second, not every situation offers the opportunity to spoof an IP address. In part it depends on how your ISP configures the network. Are you using DHCP or PPPoE? Are you using a provider supplied router? Is your IP address ever inactive when you turn things off? Even if your situation is spoofable, the ability to do that may be limited to neighbors on the same DSLAM.
The ability to spoof some IP address does not mean the ability to spoof any address anyone may suggest. There are many different methods. You choose the right one for the situation. Not every situation offers the opportunity. You take what you can get when you can't get just anything you want.
So I suggest you do some more learning about the actual methods.
Or better yet, keep "collection" files on separate hard drives (like those USB external drives, which I have 6 of).
Please pay closer attention to the distinction between "format" and "full format". The latter writes over every sector on the disk. Tell me where the "erased data still" exists on the drive after a FULL format?
Yes, by all means make your own music. Write music and share it with friends. Play music for friends. Let them play your music. You play theirs. Record it. Upload it. Make CD-R's and sell them here.
The record cartels want to control music. Don't let them have yours.
I've been on a jury twice before. I'm actually on call this month, as well (really). I did, and if I serve again in this call, will, collect my full employment salary, and reimburse my employer what I was paid for the jury duty. Additionally, as before (in another state I lived in at the time), parking and traveling expense are covered.
In the two juries I was on before, most of the jurors were actual quite intelligent. OTOH, had I been called to this case (not so since I don't live in that state), the RIAA would most likely have used an option to remove me from the jury panel once they knew that I knew the truth about computers, and especially if they found out that not only did I know that IP spoofing could be done, that I have actually done in in several instances. I'm sure they would also have had me removed if they knew I was the real Skapare (16644) on Slashdot.
Sure, this was certainly a "convenient" coincidence. But the question is, WHY did she replace it? I've replaced THREE hard drives during the time period of this case ... because the drives DIED! Now I don't know whether that was her story or not. But things like this do happen.
Now if she wanted to destroy evidence, she could have just done a full format of the drive (if her computer knowledge was sufficient to know that). What would hurt her most in my eyes, though, was claiming the date was before the notice, if the proof that it happened afterwards was genuine. Of course maybe it died before and was replaced afterwards. If lawyers would have properly dug that out (and maybe they did), then the jury should know. If she lied, that's what likely sunk her case.
From TFA:
Excuse me??? I have done this. I have successfully spoofed IP address several times. It's easy in many cases. This so called expert is most certainly no expert at all.
There are some other things that sure make it look like she might be guilty. But this (trying to downplay the real possibility of IP spoofing), is not one of them. Time for an investigation at ISU.
It is too bad that the jury did not get to hear the truth in this case. I don't know who all might be lying. But I definitely know at least one person who either lied about the technology or lied about his qualifications.
I admit that I don't know the details of the Blu-Ray media technology. But if the following feature is not already present, what's to prevent it from being added on later? A small portion of the inner circle of the disk could have a ring of recordable dye embedded in it. It wouldn't need to be fancy, and wouldn't need to even have CDROM level of data density (this only needs a few hundred or a couple thousands bits). What it would do is if there is nothing yet recorded on that space, record it with the serial number of the player, encrypted with a key found in a special file on the disk. Then it loops back to initialization state again and re-reads the data. If the data it reads matches what it would record, then it plays the disk. If not, it won't play it.
Players that don't have the feature implemented at all will be able to play disks already bound to another player. But do you really know if they have this feature? If they don't today, what about new players tomorrow? The future players that add this feature will be able to distinguish between disks that don't have this feature and disks that should have this feature by whether or not a "bindkey" file exists in the disk filesystem. If it exists, but the data ring is not present (because someone managed to permanently laser it off), recording it and later reading it back will fail, and at best the player goes into a loop continuously trying to record it.
... better dummies like they do on Myth Busters.
... Apple has registered a trademark on the word "brick" and plans DMCA takedowns of anyone infringing on their new precious intellectual property.