I tell ya, the quality of Slashdot has really gone downhill. My only post in a few weeks has generated three utterly clueless responses, all anonymous... is this some new form of targeted trolling, or are you jackasses just committed to ignoring big chunks of the posts you reply to?
I can understand your bitching about corporate users wanting to have non-NAT access, but do you think complaints are unwarranted even when it's an ISP that insists on NAT, and there isn't viable competition to that ISP (as was the case with DSL in the UK a while back)?
Here are some excerpts from my post. Salient pieces are italicized.
If I may rant for a moment, complaints about firewalled
(non-NATed) machines just piss me off.
NAT is an acceptible excuse for designing this kind of insecurity into a protocol, I guess...
First, a P2P application that needs to connect two NATed peers can just use a third, non-NATed peer as a relay. This is what Mojo Nation does, and it works and scales fine.
Second, it seems to me that the popularity of NAT is related to the infancy DSL is in right now; once serious competition between DSL providers sets in, I predict we'll see DSL modems that can easily hook several machines with real IP addresses to the net. We might have to use a better PPPoe, or wait for IPv6 to give us the address space, but then again we might not (if we can put a man on the moon...)
If I may rant for a moment, complaints about firewalled (non-NATed) machines just piss me off. If your sysadmin won't put a hole in the firewall for your favorite P2P application, it's because said sysadmin doesn't want any machine in the known universe to be able to communicate with your machine and possibly crack any insecure software you may be running -- like P2P software. That's the point; few crackers run servers and wait for crackable clients to connect, and so firewalled machines are reasonably safe from outside attack. P2P software that allows by-request outgoing connections opens a large and invisible hole in any firewall; worse, you don't need to do any detectable scanning to find out that machine X is running something crackable. NAT is an acceptible excuse for designing this kind of insecurity into a protocol, I guess, but I would raise hell if I were an admin and caught one of my users sneaking around my firewall.
Of course, if I were an admin, I'd forge email to users from their friends containing an attachment called NOEMAILFORYOU.EXE; I may be in the minority here. (Cut to big white letters on a black screen, alternating: "What did I tell you not to do?" "No email for you." "What did I tell you not to do?" "No email for you...")
In the case that something awful happens (the president-elect turns out to be psycho after the election, we've elected the Anti-Christ, or god forbid they die in a
plane crash, etc...) the electors don't HAVE to go with the people's vote... they can break ranks and vote whichever way they want to. Remember, a candidate needs
50% of the electoral college to win, or else it goes to the House of Representatives - so in the case of a close election, a few defecting electors can change the
process drastically. Not what we want to happen in a normal election, but it's there as a safety.
Many states now have laws saying that the electors have to vote for the candidate they are "supposed" to vote for, sometimes on penalty of criminal charges.
I don't believe they can just walk in and check.. but just like the police, if they have probable cause, they can.
IANAL, but my understanding is that in the US, "probable cause" is what is necessary to get a warrant, not what is necessary to go without a warrant. The cops cannot legally search anything without a warrant except under very special circumstances (such as that you grant them permission); they can, however, make an arrest based on something they saw without conducting a search.
This may have been what you meant by "can't decide" etc; regardless:
I saw a deeply interesting bit (can't remember where... salon?) that said that Nader handing Gore's victory to Bush was exactly the right thing to happen. The gist is that the Democratic party gets slapped in the face with the fact that they've got to appeal to potential Green voters now. Voila; we now have terrific pressure on a major political party to adopt popular planks from the "fringe" party's platform, instead of just sticking with the taxes/health care/social security trifecta. Nader could wind up giving this country a two-party system again simply by getting 2% of this election's vote, if the parties realize that they've got to be at least a little bit honest with the voters if they don't want to get a few percent of their votes shaved away.
I definitely would have reconsidered swapping my vote if I'd heard this argument before I agreed to the swap... I, too, swapped my Pennsylvania vote (Browne in this case) for a Gore vote.
I particularly liked the electorate committee's (or whatever it's called) commentary on CNN... every member that I saw, the commentary went basically like this:
CNN newsdroid: So we see that although the popular vote is clearly in favor of Gore, the electoral college race actually comes down to only a few thousand Florida voters. We'll go now to Joe Whatsis for some further commentary.
Committee member: Well, first let me point out that you guys have been completely and unforgivably irresponsible with your coverage thus far.
CNN newsdroid: Well, we made it clear that these projections blah blah blah.
Committee member: Bullshit. You said Gore won Florida, and then you told everybody that Bush won the election, and you fucked up a couple other states, too. You shouldn't even pretend to be a respectable news organization. You might well have botched the whole election.
CNN Newsdroid: But--
Committee member: Look, I can listen to an eighty-watt college radio station for days on end and never have to hear, "Oops, we lied" even once. You guys knew that half the country was watching, and you lied twice about the same state. If people knew enough not to trust you, it would have been fine, but you had a responsibility to provide accurate election coverage, and you displayed all the maturity and judgement of a pornographic website. If you could have popped up another TV full of advertising every time someone changed the channel, you would have. This president will be appointing supreme court justices, and your ratings were more important to you than the Nader supporters in western states who were voting based on what you said. You have just defined a new low for television respectibility. The callous self-interest you displayed tonight is worse than professional wrestling, worse than Howard Stern, and worse than Jerry Springer. It's worse than subliminal advertising. It physically disgusts me.
CNN Newsdroid: Well--
Committee member: But enough about that. The electoral college...
2) put linux on all the machines, and let them come in (this is my favorite)
If you do this, make sure you're using KDE's "Windows 95" theme, for maximum fuck-you value. It's also quite a good theme -- I'm still waiting, though, to see how cool your average MS weenie thinks KDE is if he thinks it's a beta version of "Windows X"...
The grim days of the early 21st century decay into the horror of the Meme Wars as the competing belief systems make a promiscuous advance across the minds of the planet until they come into open conflict, using humans as puppets or mercenaries. Beyond human life and death, the memes themselves evolve, becoming their own entity. The mind-viruses, the unfolding war and the effects of final victory on Earth for a single meme are all well developed and ably related.
Now I don't mean to knock the book, but it sounds like this is old news to me. The crusades, the red scare, the holocaust... seems to me like half the wars in history have been made possible by self-replicating and self-perpetuating belief systems, indepedent of the best interests of the poor bastards doing the fighting.
So how do you feel about the war on drugs?
Re:Pulleth The Other One, it hath Bells On
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 2
Doom-saying is all fun and games, but please do try and stay within the bounds of reality...
I agree with you an I hope that you're right, but remember that reality has very little to do with what happens inside a courtroom that has a technology case on its hands.
That's not what I was getting... I'm in Pittsburgh, and I was getting port 139 queries from DC and New York, not even within 8 bits of being on the same subnet. The Baltimore city paper has an
article that says that IP-scanners on port 139 are getting popular with the kind of haX0r who's not even 31337 enough to know about rootkits. I wish the article had been a bit more forceful about placing the blame for this "exploit" squarely on Microsoft's flabby shoulders, but I guess I should be happy they mentioned that MS was to blame at all.
Yah, I got my DSL yesterday, and since then I've seen six bunches of SYNs on port 139 (Windows file sharing) bounce off my firewall... it's kind of the "looking for change in phone booths" of cracking.
I respect your talent and trust that you know more and have thought more about the issues involved here, and so I apologize in advance for this flame. If you haven't gotten tired of dealing with ranting/.-hippies, I'd appreciate hearing what you think of all this:
My take is that the SDMI is an evil thing, a thing that should not happen, and a stupid thing from the companies' perspective. I hold all the companies who haven't yet said "screw this; we're going to go work on a revenue model that might work" responsible for that choice. You can't give someone music and deny them the ability to copy it. You can't. You never will be able to again. They'll stick a microphone up to the thing they listen to, they'll encode it as MP3s, and they'll put it on Freenet, or Gnutella, or Mojo Nation, or whatever the next and even better system is. There is no longer such a thing as "secure music." I allow for the possibility that, if you throw enough money, enough brains, and enough industrial and political muscle at the problem, you might be able to get secure, uncopyable digital music, in which case only people with good speakers will be able to get MP3s of Napster quality out of it. Regardless of what the right thing to do is, regardless of what would protect the artists' rights best, regardless of your or my personal stance on copyright, this outcome is a done deal. It's already happened; there simply is no way to stop people from trading MP3s on the internet, watermarked or not. That's a fact.
The whole thing is stupid, and doomed to failure. The RIAA in particular is so hidebound and arrogant that they can't see that.
Now this watermarking idea that the SDMI is having rammed down its throats by the RIAA is particularly doomed to failure. Not only is it impossible for the above reasons, it will piss off the consumers royally. People who don't care about Napster because they can't figure out how to use it will get pissed, because they'll have to go through all this bullshit, buying new equipment at the very least, just to listen to the next Blink 182 album, and they love Blink 182. A lot of them will stop listening to the Top 40 checklist. Not only that, it'll get cracked, quickly, and completely (you know more about this than I do:-), and millions, maybe billions, of the RIAA's money will go straight down the toilet.
From my point of view, this is an unqualified success. This is grounds for dancing in the streets. I loved it when I finally started to believe that they were going to try to go through with it. It was a veritable vision of the future: everyone hates SDMI, everyone hates the RIAA, and the RIAA takes a bath. All the companies that had the balls the tell the SDMI to go fuck themselves and work on revenue models that work find themselves with lots of new customers.
The SDMI is obviously doomed to failure, barring the institution of a copyright-enforcement police state the likes of which makes 1984 look chickenshit. If Sony can't figure that out, fuck 'em. If Sony wants to try to take my fair use rights away because they think that'll make it work, good. Fuck 'em. It won't work, and they'll look stupid and lose money trying. That is the biggest reason I wanted this watermarking nonsense to go as far as it could.
No, we are not helping SDMI restrict fair use by making them (and everyone else) aware of weaknesses in the system. Keeping mum about ways to circumvent the system will hurt everyone, as a flawed SDMI in deployment hurts everyone a lot more than no SDMI at all.
It only hurts companies that choose to participate. If whatever godawful crap SDMI comes up with actually makes it to market, I want it to be as weak as possible. I want it cracked hours after the first SDMI-compliant players hit the shelves. I want companies to go out of business because they spent money on making their devices SDMI-compliant. They deserve it, for backing such a lame-brained, anti-consumer, technological impossibility.
And what about users? A circumventable system on your portable devices may not stop people with the right utilities from making copies, but it will forever get in the way and generally annoy the heck out of people. This is also okay for you? Acceptible losses, friendly fire, if it will help you teach SDMI a lesson?
The right utilities? What, like a fucking microphone? Yeah, it'll be a pain in the ass, but we're not talking about Viet Nam here. It's the magic of the free market: If it's a pain in the ass, people will hate it, and it'll die. Plus, as a bonus, all the music that at least one person can digitally copy will go on Mojo Nation anyway, and we won't lose a single Backstreet Boys B-side. In the meantime, somebody who's figured out that people can copy music now and worked out a way to make money anyway will make millions. Yes, that is perfectly okay for me. What I'm afraid of is that at some point, these rapacious bastards might wise up. The small but clueful voices in the SDMI might finally get it through the RIAA's adamantine heads that they should at least pretend to be on the side of the consumer, and they might come up with something that wouldn't get a freshman business major laughed out of class, and we might still be listening to Britney Spears thirty years from now.
The RIAA won't give up on this. If they do, they die. They'll try to beat Napster until they die, and I won't like what they come up with. It won't be on my side. It won't be on anybody's side. It'll be a plan to preserve a profit model that simply doesn't work anymore, at the expense of the music consumer. It might be lobbying congress to make MP3s illegal. It might be CDs uniquely keyed to the buyer's identity, so if your CD winds up on the net you wind up in jail.
It will be a greedy, rapacious plot to fuck the American consumer out of his or her money and freedom, and every clue the RIAA gets means a little bit more clueful a greedy, rapacious plot. They're evil, they're clever in their way, they're very, very powerful, and they prefer massive force to insightful change. It's the way they've been doing business for decades, and being heavily under attack in an arena they don't understand isn't going to make them any nicer. Now I don't personally care; I've got enough John Lee Hooker tracks on my HD to last me quite a while, and every time I convince myself to check out the great new indie band, I hate it, and I rip another Dylan album. But I wholeheartedly believe that the RIAA and its bastard child the SDMI can do nothing but harm to the American people, and I want them to lose money, lose mindshare, lose political clout, and gradually die an ungraceful death while being made fun of on the internet. I think a horribly flawed SDMI sounds like a great start, and I sincerely hope that they're arrogant enough still to go on with this thing.
This is a deliberate advertising tactic... it's a kind of symbiosis. The thinking in brief is that if most of the commercials are saying either "X is better than Y" or "Y is better than X," then consumers will start to assume that X and Y are the best and second best products out there, and both products will encounter wild success.
It was pioneered by some genius who was selling laundry detergent in the fifties or sixties... the dude simply had his one company make two different "brands" of detergent and bought ads for each of them advertising aggresively against the other. It worked like a charm, and he got rich.
Carver believes that by forgoing the prize they may not be required to sign any nondisclosure agreements.
The group doesn't believe watermarks are useless -- but merely inadequate for this kind of project. As Craver puts it, "We are not out to get the recording industry; if our results can help anyone develop a better security system, we're happy."
Translation: "It'll never work. You guys are fucked. Keep the money."
stealing applications has nearly as much potential. obviously at some point programmers need to get paid. but do you think that adobe or microsoft pay progammers nearly enough? even if you make 200 thousand a year hacking away in redmond, it's nothing compared to the money MS makes off your labor. imagine if all applications development were shareware based. developers could reap the fruits of their labors much more directly. it's not too different than big corporate farming versus small organic farming. small organic farmers actually earn MORE than by being a part of some huge corporate farming collective that buys their crops too cheaply. a small nimble software company that operated on a shareware model, could compete effectively and make more money for the individuals. because they were relying on a shareware model, they wouldn't have to worry about distribution costs and their small size would allow them to be price comptetive.
I agree with your outlook... the world would be a better place if all software were free software, honor-system shareware, or contracted service programming.
Stealing software, though, isn't the way to go about it... regardless of how much bullshit has become attached to the concept of "intellectual property," I still feel a strong ethical obligation to honor the author's wishes as regards what I do with his or her stuff. Remember that the same copyright laws that stop Cheapbytes from burning Win2k CDs stop Microsoft (in theory) from stealing GPLed code for their own commercial gain, or re-packaging and selling shareware to people too uninformed to know better. I don't think it's my place to force MS's programmers to work in small shareware shops, if they want to work for an evil monolithic closed-source company that pays well... particularly because it doesn't get me anywhere. I've got a Free OS, web browser, and development environment, and three CDs and an internet full of any other software I might need, all with the source code included... why would I challenge the same copyright laws that protect my code against corporate misuse, just so I could get my hands on a handful of buggy, unmodifiable nonsense?
Shit, man, the revolution's over. We won. BSD and Linux work better for me, and I believe very strongly that the people behind them should have their IP respected by the community at large. That means I also have to respect the IP that went into Windows, which is not a problem for me -- not that I'll respect the license my buddy "agreed to" and refrain from installing an illegal copy of the OS he already bought so his computer'll work again, but that I equate installing one Word CD on ten computers with including "just a little bit" of a GPLed driver in a closed-source product.
There's enough information out there that actually is free that there's very little cause to tread on the wishes of the guy who stayed after hours to make your computer run properly.
Howsis for irony: After writing a pretty blatant piece of karma-whoring about how much better Free software is than all that other crap, I click on "Preview," only to discover that Mozilla has suffered some sort of obscure brain damage and is unable to complete my request. Let's see if "Submit" works...
Do you want your company's trade secrets disclosed? Not really. That's why reverse engineering is not a good thing.
This may be a troll, but I've seen people make the same point seriously... this kind of reasoning really bothers me. Do I want some guy who just got out of prison dating my sister? Hell no. But it shouldn't be illegal. Now go write "trade secrets are not patents" on the blackboard fifty times.
Now I know that IBM is a bunch of kneebiters for not taking the semi-simple steps that it would have taken to make the site accesible to the blind and lynx-using among us, and I sincerely sympathize with Mr. Maguire's plight, but... what about jurisdiction? A common complaint on Slashdot (one that I agree with) is that France has no right to tell Yahoo! what to do, the US has no right to tell Norwegians what to do, and in general, that you have no legal recourse if what you downloaded doesn't agree with your local standards, unless the server or poster is violating his, her, or its local law. The Olympics cater to an international audience, obviously, but that doesn't mean they have to obey any Canadian laws about English vs. French content-balancing.
In addition, while I strenuously support the widespread accessibility of web sites by the blind, I think any law, Australian or otherwise, that requires sites to structure their content politely is a bad law -- because I think that laws should be the same for the big and little guys; if the IOC should be sued for this, then so should tastynipple.com, as well as my personal website, and I think that making my website accessible to the blind should be a personal and voluntary decision by me.
I can see an excellent argument that the IOC, as a business, should have to provide accessibility (as businesses do) but I shouldn't have to (as my home doesn't), but I still don't buy it. Slashdot is definitely a business site, and I'm very glad that they're blind-friendly, but I honestly don't think that they should be legally obligated to be so, because, no matter how good and just the law, it represents yet another legal pocketknife hacking away at the fundamental principles ("My machine? My rules.") that made the net a win in the first place.
Ob-IP-Rant: Of course, this would all be easier if it were legal to set up a blind-friendly site that served olympics.com's content... when's that Sealand thing going up?
FBI Guy #2: "What? We don't have a warrant! We can't possibly look at that information."
(they laugh)
Use encryption, use encryption, use encryption. Short of sniffing people's email and posting it on the web ("What? You had no expectation of privacy."), how can we convince the average AOLer that this is something he has to do?
Firstly, methinks it a bit dangerous to say that you can't intelligently debate these issues unless you believe that Napster is out-and-out theft... but that debate is not this debate.
Lewis isn't saying that the two are technologically or ethically similar; he's saying that the effect they have on the marketplace is similar. They're both popular, seemingly legal technologies which grant so much freedom to the consumer as to endanger the continued existence of the producer. Both of the producers in question are more powerful than most countries' governments, though, and will not fade into obselecence gracefully. He points out that we haven't seen shit yet, and I think he's right.
This is why I like Lewis -- although he is intelligent and has a good understanding of geek issues, he is at heart a businessman, and so he offers an extremely fresh point of view. Read "Liar's Poker" and "The New New Thing." You won't regret it.
This notion that C is 100% efficient and gives you 100% performance just isn't true. There's a great interview with Brian Kernighan in which he addresses this issue. He said, yeah, the whole optimizing-compiler, writing high-level code while still keeping the speed of assembly thing was a really goofy idea, and was really more of a marketing thing. He says, in effect, "we could never make a compiled language competitive with assembly's efficiency, and we haven't." Here's the inventor of the language saying that neither optimization nor the efficiency it supposedly provides exists.
Gosling never said anything about marketing, and he never said that purity and portability didn't exist (for some tasks). Two outright lies by Goodhew. What Gosling said was that some tasks are portable, and some aren't, and Java can handle both of them appropriately. Summarizing this as "Java is not portable, and never has been," is also a lie. Do you think Gosling would be happy with the summary Goodhew gives?
This notion that Java is 100% pure and gives you 100% portability
just isn't true. There's a great interview with James Gosling on IBM's developer
works site in which he directly addresses this issue. He said, yeah, the whole
right-once-run-anywhere, 100%-pure-thing was a really goofy idea, and was more
of a marketing thing. He says, in effect, "We didn't think we'd ever be able to deliver
all that, and basically we haven't." Here's the inventor of the language saying that
neither purity nor portability exists.
And here's the quote he seems to be referring to, with plenty of context and not "in effect:"
Gosling: Well, that's really what all of Java is -- a glue layer that tries to make "write once, run everywhere" as
close to true as it can be. The usual places where there are hard problems that you really can't get around are
things like cell phones -- a cell phone doesn't have a mouse. Although some of them do -- they have little
joystick mice.
developerWorks: So while you're driving, you can be mousing around.
Gosling: Yeah, actually a bunch of the Japanese I-phones have mice on them. It's a little joystick, you just steer
the mouse around, and you push down harder to click the mouse. You can dial a phone that way. Those mice
usually feel kind of hokey, although they're the only ones that really work for doing games.
Not everything is a point of sale terminal, not everything is doing real-time stuff, not everything has a television
tuner on it. There are all these APIs for environmental things, and they're going to be there, or they're not going
to be there. We can do an awful lot to try to make devices as equivalent as possible and situations as equivalent
as possible.
There are some things that it's impossible to paper over, like the fact that your screen is only 100 pixels on a
side; it is what it is. You can do all kinds of stuff with transformation matrices to scale things down,
anti-aliasing, but if you take a great big screen and scale it down to 100x100, what you end up with is a bunch
of mush. The underlying application really has to know something about the resolution of the screen. That kind of
difference from place to place is pretty much unavoidable.
Other kinds of differences, like what kind of CPU you've got, what kind of network connectivity you've got (as
long as you've got network connectivity), anything that you can make look equivalent, we've worked really hard
to make it look equivalent. It makes the transportability of software a whole lot easier.
The perfect goal of "write once, run anywhere, anything runs on anything" is just goofy. You're never going to
run some piece of weather modeling software on a toaster [laughs]. And you wouldn't want to. So there are
some scale and capability limits. But within that, you can do an awful lot to make sure that if somebody wants to
read a file, it looks the same everywhere reading a file makes sense.
It's sort of like cars. They all have steering wheels. It's not like you get into some cars and they have steering
wheels, and some cars have joysticks, and some cars have foot pedals. That kind of situation, which did actually
once exist, was goofy. So things have gotten a lot easier.
In other words, Goodhew is lying to make Java look bad. I find the use of "in effect" to enclose Goodhew's misleading summary in quotations, as if it was a direct quote from Gosling, particularly disgusting.
Now I'm sure this is covered in some FAQ somewhere, but I've never seen it. IANAL, as will become obvious. Aren't software licenses optional? I know that you're free to refuse the GPL, in which case you have exactly the rights granted to you by copyright. It seems logical to assume that the same is true of MS licenses, in which case fair use would provide that an individual is free to install his copy of Windows 2000 on as many computers as he wants, as long as he's the only one who uses those machines.
Has the legal status of software licenses even been decided in court? If not, this here sounds like a hell of a good test case to me.
Slashdot Mirror
"A troll is someone who, upon discovering that no one likes them, decides to pretend that it's on purpose."
Go fuck yourself.
Here are some excerpts from my post. Salient pieces are italicized.
Any questions?
Second, it seems to me that the popularity of NAT is related to the infancy DSL is in right now; once serious competition between DSL providers sets in, I predict we'll see DSL modems that can easily hook several machines with real IP addresses to the net. We might have to use a better PPPoe, or wait for IPv6 to give us the address space, but then again we might not (if we can put a man on the moon...)
If I may rant for a moment, complaints about firewalled (non-NATed) machines just piss me off. If your sysadmin won't put a hole in the firewall for your favorite P2P application, it's because said sysadmin doesn't want any machine in the known universe to be able to communicate with your machine and possibly crack any insecure software you may be running -- like P2P software. That's the point; few crackers run servers and wait for crackable clients to connect, and so firewalled machines are reasonably safe from outside attack. P2P software that allows by-request outgoing connections opens a large and invisible hole in any firewall; worse, you don't need to do any detectable scanning to find out that machine X is running something crackable. NAT is an acceptible excuse for designing this kind of insecurity into a protocol, I guess, but I would raise hell if I were an admin and caught one of my users sneaking around my firewall.
Of course, if I were an admin, I'd forge email to users from their friends containing an attachment called NOEMAILFORYOU.EXE; I may be in the minority here. (Cut to big white letters on a black screen, alternating: "What did I tell you not to do?" "No email for you." "What did I tell you not to do?" "No email for you...")
Many states now have laws saying that the electors have to vote for the candidate they are "supposed" to vote for, sometimes on penalty of criminal charges.
IANAL, but my understanding is that in the US, "probable cause" is what is necessary to get a warrant, not what is necessary to go without a warrant. The cops cannot legally search anything without a warrant except under very special circumstances (such as that you grant them permission); they can, however, make an arrest based on something they saw without conducting a search.
I saw a deeply interesting bit (can't remember where... salon?) that said that Nader handing Gore's victory to Bush was exactly the right thing to happen. The gist is that the Democratic party gets slapped in the face with the fact that they've got to appeal to potential Green voters now. Voila; we now have terrific pressure on a major political party to adopt popular planks from the "fringe" party's platform, instead of just sticking with the taxes/health care/social security trifecta. Nader could wind up giving this country a two-party system again simply by getting 2% of this election's vote, if the parties realize that they've got to be at least a little bit honest with the voters if they don't want to get a few percent of their votes shaved away.
I definitely would have reconsidered swapping my vote if I'd heard this argument before I agreed to the swap... I, too, swapped my Pennsylvania vote (Browne in this case) for a Gore vote.
CNN newsdroid: So we see that although the popular vote is clearly in favor of Gore, the electoral college race actually comes down to only a few thousand Florida voters. We'll go now to Joe Whatsis for some further commentary.
Committee member: Well, first let me point out that you guys have been completely and unforgivably irresponsible with your coverage thus far.
CNN newsdroid: Well, we made it clear that these projections blah blah blah.
Committee member: Bullshit. You said Gore won Florida, and then you told everybody that Bush won the election, and you fucked up a couple other states, too. You shouldn't even pretend to be a respectable news organization. You might well have botched the whole election.
CNN Newsdroid: But--
Committee member: Look, I can listen to an eighty-watt college radio station for days on end and never have to hear, "Oops, we lied" even once. You guys knew that half the country was watching, and you lied twice about the same state. If people knew enough not to trust you, it would have been fine, but you had a responsibility to provide accurate election coverage, and you displayed all the maturity and judgement of a pornographic website. If you could have popped up another TV full of advertising every time someone changed the channel, you would have. This president will be appointing supreme court justices, and your ratings were more important to you than the Nader supporters in western states who were voting based on what you said. You have just defined a new low for television respectibility. The callous self-interest you displayed tonight is worse than professional wrestling, worse than Howard Stern, and worse than Jerry Springer. It's worse than subliminal advertising. It physically disgusts me.
CNN Newsdroid: Well--
Committee member: But enough about that. The electoral college...
So how do you feel about the war on drugs?
That's not what I was getting... I'm in Pittsburgh, and I was getting port 139 queries from DC and New York, not even within 8 bits of being on the same subnet. The Baltimore city paper has an article that says that IP-scanners on port 139 are getting popular with the kind of haX0r who's not even 31337 enough to know about rootkits. I wish the article had been a bit more forceful about placing the blame for this "exploit" squarely on Microsoft's flabby shoulders, but I guess I should be happy they mentioned that MS was to blame at all.
Yah, I got my DSL yesterday, and since then I've seen six bunches of SYNs on port 139 (Windows file sharing) bounce off my firewall... it's kind of the "looking for change in phone booths" of cracking.
My take is that the SDMI is an evil thing, a thing that should not happen, and a stupid thing from the companies' perspective. I hold all the companies who haven't yet said "screw this; we're going to go work on a revenue model that might work" responsible for that choice. You can't give someone music and deny them the ability to copy it. You can't. You never will be able to again. They'll stick a microphone up to the thing they listen to, they'll encode it as MP3s, and they'll put it on Freenet, or Gnutella, or Mojo Nation, or whatever the next and even better system is. There is no longer such a thing as "secure music." I allow for the possibility that, if you throw enough money, enough brains, and enough industrial and political muscle at the problem, you might be able to get secure, uncopyable digital music, in which case only people with good speakers will be able to get MP3s of Napster quality out of it. Regardless of what the right thing to do is, regardless of what would protect the artists' rights best, regardless of your or my personal stance on copyright, this outcome is a done deal. It's already happened; there simply is no way to stop people from trading MP3s on the internet, watermarked or not. That's a fact. The whole thing is stupid, and doomed to failure. The RIAA in particular is so hidebound and arrogant that they can't see that.
Now this watermarking idea that the SDMI is having rammed down its throats by the RIAA is particularly doomed to failure. Not only is it impossible for the above reasons, it will piss off the consumers royally. People who don't care about Napster because they can't figure out how to use it will get pissed, because they'll have to go through all this bullshit, buying new equipment at the very least, just to listen to the next Blink 182 album, and they love Blink 182. A lot of them will stop listening to the Top 40 checklist. Not only that, it'll get cracked, quickly, and completely (you know more about this than I do :-), and millions, maybe billions, of the RIAA's money will go straight down the toilet.
From my point of view, this is an unqualified success. This is grounds for dancing in the streets. I loved it when I finally started to believe that they were going to try to go through with it. It was a veritable vision of the future: everyone hates SDMI, everyone hates the RIAA, and the RIAA takes a bath. All the companies that had the balls the tell the SDMI to go fuck themselves and work on revenue models that work find themselves with lots of new customers.
The SDMI is obviously doomed to failure, barring the institution of a copyright-enforcement police state the likes of which makes 1984 look chickenshit. If Sony can't figure that out, fuck 'em. If Sony wants to try to take my fair use rights away because they think that'll make it work, good. Fuck 'em. It won't work, and they'll look stupid and lose money trying. That is the biggest reason I wanted this watermarking nonsense to go as far as it could.
It only hurts companies that choose to participate. If whatever godawful crap SDMI comes up with actually makes it to market, I want it to be as weak as possible. I want it cracked hours after the first SDMI-compliant players hit the shelves. I want companies to go out of business because they spent money on making their devices SDMI-compliant. They deserve it, for backing such a lame-brained, anti-consumer, technological impossibility. The right utilities? What, like a fucking microphone? Yeah, it'll be a pain in the ass, but we're not talking about Viet Nam here. It's the magic of the free market: If it's a pain in the ass, people will hate it, and it'll die. Plus, as a bonus, all the music that at least one person can digitally copy will go on Mojo Nation anyway, and we won't lose a single Backstreet Boys B-side. In the meantime, somebody who's figured out that people can copy music now and worked out a way to make money anyway will make millions. Yes, that is perfectly okay for me. What I'm afraid of is that at some point, these rapacious bastards might wise up. The small but clueful voices in the SDMI might finally get it through the RIAA's adamantine heads that they should at least pretend to be on the side of the consumer, and they might come up with something that wouldn't get a freshman business major laughed out of class, and we might still be listening to Britney Spears thirty years from now.The RIAA won't give up on this. If they do, they die. They'll try to beat Napster until they die, and I won't like what they come up with. It won't be on my side. It won't be on anybody's side. It'll be a plan to preserve a profit model that simply doesn't work anymore, at the expense of the music consumer. It might be lobbying congress to make MP3s illegal. It might be CDs uniquely keyed to the buyer's identity, so if your CD winds up on the net you wind up in jail. It will be a greedy, rapacious plot to fuck the American consumer out of his or her money and freedom, and every clue the RIAA gets means a little bit more clueful a greedy, rapacious plot. They're evil, they're clever in their way, they're very, very powerful, and they prefer massive force to insightful change. It's the way they've been doing business for decades, and being heavily under attack in an arena they don't understand isn't going to make them any nicer. Now I don't personally care; I've got enough John Lee Hooker tracks on my HD to last me quite a while, and every time I convince myself to check out the great new indie band, I hate it, and I rip another Dylan album. But I wholeheartedly believe that the RIAA and its bastard child the SDMI can do nothing but harm to the American people, and I want them to lose money, lose mindshare, lose political clout, and gradually die an ungraceful death while being made fun of on the internet. I think a horribly flawed SDMI sounds like a great start, and I sincerely hope that they're arrogant enough still to go on with this thing.
That's my rant.
It was pioneered by some genius who was selling laundry detergent in the fifties or sixties... the dude simply had his one company make two different "brands" of detergent and bought ads for each of them advertising aggresively against the other. It worked like a charm, and he got rich.
Kinda like the US elections, eh?
Stealing software, though, isn't the way to go about it... regardless of how much bullshit has become attached to the concept of "intellectual property," I still feel a strong ethical obligation to honor the author's wishes as regards what I do with his or her stuff. Remember that the same copyright laws that stop Cheapbytes from burning Win2k CDs stop Microsoft (in theory) from stealing GPLed code for their own commercial gain, or re-packaging and selling shareware to people too uninformed to know better. I don't think it's my place to force MS's programmers to work in small shareware shops, if they want to work for an evil monolithic closed-source company that pays well... particularly because it doesn't get me anywhere. I've got a Free OS, web browser, and development environment, and three CDs and an internet full of any other software I might need, all with the source code included... why would I challenge the same copyright laws that protect my code against corporate misuse, just so I could get my hands on a handful of buggy, unmodifiable nonsense?
Shit, man, the revolution's over. We won. BSD and Linux work better for me, and I believe very strongly that the people behind them should have their IP respected by the community at large. That means I also have to respect the IP that went into Windows, which is not a problem for me -- not that I'll respect the license my buddy "agreed to" and refrain from installing an illegal copy of the OS he already bought so his computer'll work again, but that I equate installing one Word CD on ten computers with including "just a little bit" of a GPLed driver in a closed-source product. There's enough information out there that actually is free that there's very little cause to tread on the wishes of the guy who stayed after hours to make your computer run properly.
Howsis for irony: After writing a pretty blatant piece of karma-whoring about how much better Free software is than all that other crap, I click on "Preview," only to discover that Mozilla has suffered some sort of obscure brain damage and is unable to complete my request. Let's see if "Submit" works...
In addition, while I strenuously support the widespread accessibility of web sites by the blind, I think any law, Australian or otherwise, that requires sites to structure their content politely is a bad law -- because I think that laws should be the same for the big and little guys; if the IOC should be sued for this, then so should tastynipple.com, as well as my personal website, and I think that making my website accessible to the blind should be a personal and voluntary decision by me.
I can see an excellent argument that the IOC, as a business, should have to provide accessibility (as businesses do) but I shouldn't have to (as my home doesn't), but I still don't buy it. Slashdot is definitely a business site, and I'm very glad that they're blind-friendly, but I honestly don't think that they should be legally obligated to be so, because, no matter how good and just the law, it represents yet another legal pocketknife hacking away at the fundamental principles ("My machine? My rules.") that made the net a win in the first place.
Ob-IP-Rant: Of course, this would all be easier if it were legal to set up a blind-friendly site that served olympics.com's content... when's that Sealand thing going up?
FBI Guy #2: "What? We don't have a warrant! We can't possibly look at that information."
(they laugh)
Use encryption, use encryption, use encryption. Short of sniffing people's email and posting it on the web ("What? You had no expectation of privacy."), how can we convince the average AOLer that this is something he has to do?
This is the first time I've seen a troll on the front page.
Lewis isn't saying that the two are technologically or ethically similar; he's saying that the effect they have on the marketplace is similar. They're both popular, seemingly legal technologies which grant so much freedom to the consumer as to endanger the continued existence of the producer. Both of the producers in question are more powerful than most countries' governments, though, and will not fade into obselecence gracefully. He points out that we haven't seen shit yet, and I think he's right.
This is why I like Lewis -- although he is intelligent and has a good understanding of geek issues, he is at heart a businessman, and so he offers an extremely fresh point of view. Read "Liar's Poker" and "The New New Thing." You won't regret it.
Gosling never said anything about marketing, and he never said that purity and portability didn't exist (for some tasks). Two outright lies by Goodhew. What Gosling said was that some tasks are portable, and some aren't, and Java can handle both of them appropriately. Summarizing this as "Java is not portable, and never has been," is also a lie. Do you think Gosling would be happy with the summary Goodhew gives?
Has the legal status of software licenses even been decided in court? If not, this here sounds like a hell of a good test case to me.