...shutting down recent lyrics sites, that is. After the big fuss made over lyrics.ch, I was surprised to be able to consistently find the lyrics to songs I've heard on the radio by simply searching Google. Many times, the places I'd find lyrics hosted lyrics for thousands of songs. What took them so long in shutting down these massive sites?
I don't really understand it. Unlike mp3s, I can't see lyrics downloads doing anything but boosting sales. Nevertheless, posting lyrics violates copyright and it is within their rights to try to get these places shut down.
I would think that boycotting the products themselves would be fairly useless. You'd need to boycott the stores that use (passive) RFID.
When people say "RFID" they usually mean "passive RFID" which requires an external energy source in order to transmit. That external energy comes from the gates you walk through when you exit the store. So the RFID tag is only transmitting for a very brief period of time as you're leaving the store--then, presumably, it sits in your home, completely unused.
Active RFID would be more of a health risk (even if it's extremely minimal) but is more expensive because it requires its own power. Active RFID would continue to transmit until the battery died, meaning long after you've left the store, you're being hit with radiation. Now it's extremely small, and the amount of radiation you'll absorb decreases exponentially as you move away from the object, so it's probably a non-issue with most items.
Except that's not stealing, that's copyright infringement. There are other factors, such as, "I know that I will never purchase this Brittany Spears album, so if I download it, they aren't losing any money."
The bill mandating a 55mph speed limit had nothing to do with safety and everything to do with conserving fuel. There was this energy crisis around that time, you see.
If the homebrew scene doesn't take off at all, be it through architecture changes or security measures, then the machine has less value in my eyes. The only reason to buy one now, at the highest retail price it will ever be at, is to avoid future security measures that could prevent modding. I'm just not willing to take the chance that the homebrew scene will be big enough to warrant owning one AND that the security will increase later on to preclude modding altogether.
Incidentally, that I have these opinions sort of exhibits the fact that I'm not interested in piracy. A pirate would want a first generation box because anti-piracy measures will probably be less robust. And piracy will almost certainly exist even if the homebrew scene itself never really takes off.
The multiprocessing development aspect will certainly be interesting to watch. I hope this propels game developers into utilizing SMP more than they currently do.
It's true that early consoles are more likely to have security flaws, however I'm just not willing to early-adopt a 360. The cost is a bit high, in my opinion, and there's really no indication that there will be a good selection of homebrew apps for it.
One of the things that made the original Xbox so great was that it is based on the x86 architecture. Porting applications to it is very easy, and as such, you got great software projects like XBMC for considerably less work than if you had to port it all by hand. What's more, codec support is improved because of the architecture. Emulators for other systems was also a bit easier for this same reason.
With the new, incompatible architecture, porting existing projects to the 360 will likely take quite a bit more effort. Emulation in particular, which often makes use of assembler instructions, may be a long time coming. We also don't know enough about the security on the 360--it may be that mods will have to be specific to each unit, making said mods more costly and possibly more dangerous (easier to screw up the installation).
I'll definitely be following the scene and watching the progress, but for now, I can't justify that kind of expenditure for this gamble.
As I understand it, the company was getting no return on the GPL investment. That is, they weren't receiving many, if any, patches from their users. And what's worse, their competitors were taking their ideas and innovations and using them in their own products.
I like having the source available to me, but some people aren't in it for the humanitarian aspect. The owners saw no benefit for releasing the code under the GPL and were having some detremints, so they stopped.
Is freenet really usable for piracy, though? Last I check (admittedly a while back) there wasn't even a search mechanism.
Anyway, things like this and tor will probably be legislated away (more civilized countries than the US have required massive logs be kept from anyone acting as a service provider--tor and freenet certainly fall into the service category).
1) The port [range] could be user-configurable rather than random, meaning the user could change ports if their current range is blocked.
2) True, but anonymity wasn't the point of the original post. The point was creating a p2p network that is impossible to shut down.
3) You seem to want anonymity as per #2. It will be hard to implement any sort of karma system without tying it to identity, which can eventually be tied to an IP at the ISP level.
4) There have been p2p networks with similar premises in the past. One was GNUtella (or just had a client by that name, perhaps). You have to have the address of someone on the network in order to connect. That's simply a fact of life in a system like this. So you gotta join a chatroom, look on a webpage, check usenet, or just have a friend on the network to connect the first time.
The issue with graphics (to me) is that sometimes it seems that a producer spends more time on graphics than gameplay. It makes sense, in some ways. When you read about a game in a magazine or online article, you don't get to try out the gameplay, you just see screenshots. Oh, the reviewer might mention bad gameplay, but that's secondhand. Your only firsthand impression of the game is the screenies.
I'd rather have better, more involved gameplay than flashy graphics. In an ideal world, I'd have both--but it's just not as common as focusing on one or the other and really excelling.
I still fire up Nethack periodically. Admittedly, I use the ASCII version over any graphical version, but that's just familiarity. It's much easier for me to see the & and go, "Oh, demon." than to look at the tile and wonder what it is.
Although Linksys was the beginning of running non-standard flash on off-the-shelf wireless routers, it is far from the pinnacle.
My money's on the Asus WL-500G Deluxe Why? because although it does not have 8 megs of flash, it has USB ports. Two of them, if I'm not mistaken. With the OpenWRT project, you can actually include the USB mass storage driver and plug a flash device (or a USB hard drive, I suppose) into this thing and have just about all the storage space you could want.
Of course, you can do this with NFS on other routers, but that requires that the network is up and that the other machine is up. This is a simpler, safer solution, particularly if you want access to the filesystem immediately after bootup.
The best G model you can buy (2.0 rev. XH) has 4megs flash and might have 32megs of ram enabled, though some of them only enable 16. All GS models except the new 4.0 have 8megs flash and 32megs of ram.
It looks like the 4.0 GS is "crippled" in the same way as the 5.0 G boxes. Half of each type of memory and it looks like it may use the new OS, too.
The argument is certainly flawed, but other than the basic premise, everything he says is true. And it's an important point.
People tout the openness of Open Source by saying that you can go in and change anything. Imagine saying that to your manager, who then says, "Great. Let's get RedHat." Somewhere along the line, you have to make a tiny modification to support some odd piece of hardware, and suddenly your support contract is worth less than the paper it isn't printed on. What is he going to think of your Open Source when something essential breaks that you can't fix and Red Hat/won't/ fix?
Open is good. But you should use the right tool for the job. If that tool is Linux, you use Linux. If that tool is Windows, you use Windows. Where I work, we even have an old OS/2 machine running--why? Because it works and there is no need to fix it.
It would seem that if they cannot sift through the information that efficiently, then it will simply make it easier for real criminals to hide in all the noise.
Whether or not it should is subjective. However shoplifters can be fined more than the value of the item they attempted to steal, and they are often put in jail, to boot. So if you're suggesting, perhaps, that copyright infringement law is going beyond similar laws, you'd be mistaken.
You'll note that they aren't being sued for downloading (now matter how much Slashdot and the media would like you to believe that). The movies were reshared, probably automatically by the iMesh software. It is the sharing that got them into trouble, and it should be pretty obvious that whether or not they owned the movies has no bearing on damages in that regard.
The content owners know about this already. Two, maybe three years ago, I heard about a massive piracy ring going by the name of SD6 that operated on IRC and USENET. Seems that some of their members started getting C&Ds and other legal threats from the content owners, and they shut down their entire USENET group (knowing full well, of course, that the group itself would not disappear--but they apparently stopped all USENET operations).
So they know it's there. If they aren't actively working to stop it now, it's probably because your average user isn't going to be able to download thousands of messages, reassemble them into files, and (if it's a movie file) reassemble THOSE into the mpeg. Bittorrent is much easier as it's a single installation and then just clicky-clicky on the link to start downloading your file.
I'm sure they'll go after USENET eventually, after they've dealt with all the larger threats. But for now, I imagine you are safe. They may go after this company that seems to be caching and indexing the files, but I doubt they'll go after USENET itself for awhile yet.
Also, if someone really wants to get into your laptop, it's a lot easier to force you to give up your key with biometrics. Rather than torturing you to get you to reveal a password, they just have to cut off your thumb. Probably won't even bother asking if you'd mind unlocking it.
Slashdot Mirror
Then I have to ask... who moderates the metamoderators?
Why would they? They aren't working with the author, they just happen to be (presumably free) webpage hosting sites.
Now that the algorithm is known, they could block registration for those names, but that's getting into some potential DoS problems.
...shutting down recent lyrics sites, that is. After the big fuss made over lyrics.ch, I was surprised to be able to consistently find the lyrics to songs I've heard on the radio by simply searching Google. Many times, the places I'd find lyrics hosted lyrics for thousands of songs. What took them so long in shutting down these massive sites?
I don't really understand it. Unlike mp3s, I can't see lyrics downloads doing anything but boosting sales. Nevertheless, posting lyrics violates copyright and it is within their rights to try to get these places shut down.
It's not close enough, if you read my example.
And it's not taking. Taking something that isn't yours is stealing. You're copying.
I would think that boycotting the products themselves would be fairly useless. You'd need to boycott the stores that use (passive) RFID.
When people say "RFID" they usually mean "passive RFID" which requires an external energy source in order to transmit. That external energy comes from the gates you walk through when you exit the store. So the RFID tag is only transmitting for a very brief period of time as you're leaving the store--then, presumably, it sits in your home, completely unused.
Active RFID would be more of a health risk (even if it's extremely minimal) but is more expensive because it requires its own power. Active RFID would continue to transmit until the battery died, meaning long after you've left the store, you're being hit with radiation. Now it's extremely small, and the amount of radiation you'll absorb decreases exponentially as you move away from the object, so it's probably a non-issue with most items.
Except that's not stealing, that's copyright infringement. There are other factors, such as, "I know that I will never purchase this Brittany Spears album, so if I download it, they aren't losing any money."
Get your facts straight.
The bill mandating a 55mph speed limit had nothing to do with safety and everything to do with conserving fuel. There was this energy crisis around that time, you see.
Oh, and Richard Nixon signed the bill. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon
Well I said in my opinion :)
If the homebrew scene doesn't take off at all, be it through architecture changes or security measures, then the machine has less value in my eyes. The only reason to buy one now, at the highest retail price it will ever be at, is to avoid future security measures that could prevent modding. I'm just not willing to take the chance that the homebrew scene will be big enough to warrant owning one AND that the security will increase later on to preclude modding altogether.
Incidentally, that I have these opinions sort of exhibits the fact that I'm not interested in piracy. A pirate would want a first generation box because anti-piracy measures will probably be less robust. And piracy will almost certainly exist even if the homebrew scene itself never really takes off.
The multiprocessing development aspect will certainly be interesting to watch. I hope this propels game developers into utilizing SMP more than they currently do.
It's true that early consoles are more likely to have security flaws, however I'm just not willing to early-adopt a 360. The cost is a bit high, in my opinion, and there's really no indication that there will be a good selection of homebrew apps for it.
One of the things that made the original Xbox so great was that it is based on the x86 architecture. Porting applications to it is very easy, and as such, you got great software projects like XBMC for considerably less work than if you had to port it all by hand. What's more, codec support is improved because of the architecture. Emulators for other systems was also a bit easier for this same reason.
With the new, incompatible architecture, porting existing projects to the 360 will likely take quite a bit more effort. Emulation in particular, which often makes use of assembler instructions, may be a long time coming. We also don't know enough about the security on the 360--it may be that mods will have to be specific to each unit, making said mods more costly and possibly more dangerous (easier to screw up the installation).
I'll definitely be following the scene and watching the progress, but for now, I can't justify that kind of expenditure for this gamble.
As I understand it, the company was getting no return on the GPL investment. That is, they weren't receiving many, if any, patches from their users. And what's worse, their competitors were taking their ideas and innovations and using them in their own products.
I like having the source available to me, but some people aren't in it for the humanitarian aspect. The owners saw no benefit for releasing the code under the GPL and were having some detremints, so they stopped.
Is freenet really usable for piracy, though? Last I check (admittedly a while back) there wasn't even a search mechanism.
Anyway, things like this and tor will probably be legislated away (more civilized countries than the US have required massive logs be kept from anyone acting as a service provider--tor and freenet certainly fall into the service category).
1) The port [range] could be user-configurable rather than random, meaning the user could change ports if their current range is blocked.
2) True, but anonymity wasn't the point of the original post. The point was creating a p2p network that is impossible to shut down.
3) You seem to want anonymity as per #2. It will be hard to implement any sort of karma system without tying it to identity, which can eventually be tied to an IP at the ISP level.
4) There have been p2p networks with similar premises in the past. One was GNUtella (or just had a client by that name, perhaps). You have to have the address of someone on the network in order to connect. That's simply a fact of life in a system like this. So you gotta join a chatroom, look on a webpage, check usenet, or just have a friend on the network to connect the first time.
Oops, you got me there. But yeah, definitely prefer the expanded memory on the earlier units :)
The issue with graphics (to me) is that sometimes it seems that a producer spends more time on graphics than gameplay. It makes sense, in some ways. When you read about a game in a magazine or online article, you don't get to try out the gameplay, you just see screenshots. Oh, the reviewer might mention bad gameplay, but that's secondhand. Your only firsthand impression of the game is the screenies.
I'd rather have better, more involved gameplay than flashy graphics. In an ideal world, I'd have both--but it's just not as common as focusing on one or the other and really excelling.
I still fire up Nethack periodically. Admittedly, I use the ASCII version over any graphical version, but that's just familiarity. It's much easier for me to see the & and go, "Oh, demon." than to look at the tile and wonder what it is.
Although Linksys was the beginning of running non-standard flash on off-the-shelf wireless routers, it is far from the pinnacle.
My money's on the Asus WL-500G Deluxe Why? because although it does not have 8 megs of flash, it has USB ports. Two of them, if I'm not mistaken. With the OpenWRT project, you can actually include the USB mass storage driver and plug a flash device (or a USB hard drive, I suppose) into this thing and have just about all the storage space you could want.
Of course, you can do this with NFS on other routers, but that requires that the network is up and that the other machine is up. This is a simpler, safer solution, particularly if you want access to the filesystem immediately after bootup.
The best G model you can buy (2.0 rev. XH) has 4megs flash and might have 32megs of ram enabled, though some of them only enable 16. All GS models except the new 4.0 have 8megs flash and 32megs of ram.
It looks like the 4.0 GS is "crippled" in the same way as the 5.0 G boxes. Half of each type of memory and it looks like it may use the new OS, too.
Reference:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware
The argument is certainly flawed, but other than the basic premise, everything he says is true. And it's an important point.
/won't/ fix?
People tout the openness of Open Source by saying that you can go in and change anything. Imagine saying that to your manager, who then says, "Great. Let's get RedHat." Somewhere along the line, you have to make a tiny modification to support some odd piece of hardware, and suddenly your support contract is worth less than the paper it isn't printed on. What is he going to think of your Open Source when something essential breaks that you can't fix and Red Hat
Open is good. But you should use the right tool for the job. If that tool is Linux, you use Linux. If that tool is Windows, you use Windows. Where I work, we even have an old OS/2 machine running--why? Because it works and there is no need to fix it.
It would seem that if they cannot sift through the information that efficiently, then it will simply make it easier for real criminals to hide in all the noise.
Whether or not it should is subjective. However shoplifters can be fined more than the value of the item they attempted to steal, and they are often put in jail, to boot. So if you're suggesting, perhaps, that copyright infringement law is going beyond similar laws, you'd be mistaken.
Almost every "hit" has a single CD. Thus, before iTunes even, people need not waste money on filler--they can buy the single song they want.
You'll note that they aren't being sued for downloading (now matter how much Slashdot and the media would like you to believe that). The movies were reshared, probably automatically by the iMesh software. It is the sharing that got them into trouble, and it should be pretty obvious that whether or not they owned the movies has no bearing on damages in that regard.
The content owners know about this already. Two, maybe three years ago, I heard about a massive piracy ring going by the name of SD6 that operated on IRC and USENET. Seems that some of their members started getting C&Ds and other legal threats from the content owners, and they shut down their entire USENET group (knowing full well, of course, that the group itself would not disappear--but they apparently stopped all USENET operations).
So they know it's there. If they aren't actively working to stop it now, it's probably because your average user isn't going to be able to download thousands of messages, reassemble them into files, and (if it's a movie file) reassemble THOSE into the mpeg. Bittorrent is much easier as it's a single installation and then just clicky-clicky on the link to start downloading your file.
I'm sure they'll go after USENET eventually, after they've dealt with all the larger threats. But for now, I imagine you are safe. They may go after this company that seems to be caching and indexing the files, but I doubt they'll go after USENET itself for awhile yet.
Any evidence of this? Seems like a strange tactic for posting non-infringing material.
Too bad Gummi bears defeat fingerprint scanners.
Also, if someone really wants to get into your laptop, it's a lot easier to force you to give up your key with biometrics. Rather than torturing you to get you to reveal a password, they just have to cut off your thumb. Probably won't even bother asking if you'd mind unlocking it.