It's fairly obvious that only Napster will play back the encrypted mp3s. Sucks to be winamp. And of COURSE there will be no way to play these on alternate OS's....
Don't think you will get away with it. Many have
tried and gotten caught. You will be exposed as
a law breaker and thief.
I don't know, can you point to one place which gives information on people getting caught with GPL'd code in a closed-source program?
I ask because CONSTANTLY it comes up that people say, "Maybe this will be the legal test of the GPL" blahblahblah... From comments like these, it sounds like there has NOT been such a case yet.
There's a distinct difference between q3a and Diablo2. In the former, you don't build up your character over time, and in the latter you do. Thus if you are killed in q3a, you may get another death on your record, but nothing else. In Diablo 2 (hardcore) if you die, you start over from the beginning, potentially losing hundreds of hours spent creating and building your character. I won't try to claim that the game is an RPG, in fact I hate it when it is called such. But there is a true loss of time and abilities when the character is killed off, so I think your comparison to q3a/ut is slightly off-kilter.
Oh don't get me wrong, buying stuff like this is kinda crazy. But if they have the money and nothing else to spend it on, they should be able to, and they shouldn't have to worry about Blizzard rolling back the clock and causing problems like this.
A lot more people were not affected by this than were, there's no reason to cause them problems just to "make it right."
As for doing it character by character... There was a bug awhile back that was considerably less widespread than this one that caused characters to be deleted completely. Blizzard would restore them for you if you email the account name, realm and character name. Unfortunately you were in for about a 2-3 week wait per character.
Battle.net uses *obscurity* to implement it's security. It seems to trust the client too much. Worse yet it seems that a simple logic flaw has cost Blizzard it's reputation.
I disagree here. Have you played the game? You can't do anything in the game without the client asking the server to make sure it's ok. It's probably the single biggest reason lag is a problem in the game. You can't even pick up an object from your inventory without asking the server if it's ok (and you can't drop it either, making for problems if you're holding an item and need to run away quickly).
As far as how they implement their security... what, by having it closed source? There are other closed-source forms of security, would you call those "obscurity"? This is a bug in the battlenet servers. It could be corrected client-side by making a check, although that could probably be hacked to change it back. It *should* be correctable on the server side, but they haven't done it yet.
You're kidding, right? Roll back a few weeks? If they try to do this on a character by character basis, they're going to take forever to do it and waste tons of man-hours and money. If they do it overall, they're going to have a LOT of pissed off users who advanced their characters over the past few weeks. Not to mention people who bought items for real money having problems....
And I guess lasting half a year without any cheating incidents is pretty good, compared to most other online games.
But there were other "cheating" incidents. Two major ones come to mind. In the first, characters were able to go "hostile" on another character from anywhere in the game. Normally you can only go hostile on another character if you are in town (where you can't attack) thus preventing a quick hostility + attack to surprise kill players.
The second hack increased running/walking speed tremendously by exploiting a feature in the game's frame rate code. This in general was not a major problem until people used it to go hostile in town and then run and kill someone.
The problem with the new hack is that it's not done in-game. The "hack" is just a bug in the server code that lets a player jump into another player's character, then join games and play as that character without ever typing in a password. At first all that happened was that characters were losing all their items (read a few threads at the lurker lounge or in the forums of www.diabloii.net) but then characters started dying. That's when the REAL uproar happened.
Frankly this disgusts me. It's one thing to use legitimate, in game features to attack, kill and steal, it's quite another to exploit a bug to do it covertly. And don't expect Blizzard to do anything about it, there have been lots of scamming and other Bad Things (tm) going on for awhile now, and even though they *could* disable specific CD keys from Battle.net, they apparently refuse to do so.
Stronger encryption isn't the answer either, incidentally, since it's a bug in the server code (or, so says the forums).
And yes, I know where governments come from. But see, I'm an American in Polish government. I don't have any clue how their system is set up. I don't even know whether it's a republic, a dictatorship, etc. And I bet that 90% of the people who have been posting about this atrocity are just like me in these respects.
People here get so caught up in defending Linux that they forget that there's a world outside it.
Feel free to moderate this as flamebait, I'm sure you will.
We, as thinking, rational people, have to stand on the fact that morality and ethics are universal, and that what's "true" for one country, MUST be "true" for another. I'm so sick of this relativistic bullshit. Right is right, and wrong is wrong - just because a population/country has a history of statist oppression doesn't mean that "it's OK for them".
Then what is right? Is taxation in any form right? Why? If taxation is wrong, what makes it wrong? Why is one form of government right when another is wrong? And why is the taxation of free software a universal wrong (not that you explicitly said it was, but that was certainly the implication).
Can you support your post with something?
A lot of people seem to think this is happening in the US. It isn't. If you'd read the article, it clearly states that this is happening in Poland.
That said, who are we (as Americans, probably the majority of the readers on Slashdot) to say how another government should be run? They are coming from a different background, they have a different history, they have different laws. The cry of "Free software should be free!" can be heard from everyone in here, but that's a very culturocentric (doubt that's even a word) perspective.
The US and your culture...they are not the end-all be-all.
Know if it runs OS2, or BeOS? I'm saying this simply as an exercise, its funny that we immediately attempt to get windows on this thingy before anything else.
Actually it ran Linux and Dos first.
But seriously, there's a much greater market for running Windows than BeOS and other such OS's. We may not like it, but it's true.
Well, Microsoft did write OS2, but that's beside the point, alright!!??
Interesting... however one of the things Wine says it will NEVER implement is vxd support. So any M$ product that requires access of a vxd, even trivially, could have pretty bad implications for Wine.
It's hard to document "common sense" but lawyers make it a requirement. Most people -- one would assume -- know their coffee is hot. So when you sterilize yourself in a hideous coffee accident, you get to sue McDonalds because they didn't put a flashing neon sign on the cup to the effect of "Hey, dumbass! This coffee is freakin' hot."
To be fair, it wasn't so much that the coffee was scalding hot as that it was so hot that it melted the bottom of the cup off, thus spilling the coffee and causing severe burns. The liability in terms of not mentioning that the coffee was hot was a side effect and a spin that McDonald's put on the story, to partially discredit the person this happened to and to make it look like THEY were the ones that justice failed.
VBS is good just as any scripting language is good. You can script in it. I won't go as far as to say it's as good as Perl or other scripting languages, but it's used for similar purposes. Inherently, VBScript isn't bad. It's no worse than any other scripting languate. The problem is a combination of things, mostly OS and OS settings.
(IDG) -- People who intentionally spread a computer virus face a seven-year prison sentence and a $15,000 fine in Pennsylvania after Governor Tom. Ridge signed a new bill into law May 26.
Also keep in mind that the artists usually don't get most of the money from cd sales, unless they are really big time.
Could this be because they have a record contract, which often states that the record company will give them some amount of money in exchange for the rights to distribute their music? And then they give small royalties to the band. SOMEONE has to pay for it, right? I mean, you hear "Oh it only costs 1 dollar to make a cd." but you have to pay for the recording time and equipment, plus you don't know how much a CD is going to sell, particularly with bands/artists who are making their first albums. Not to mention they pretty much have the right to charge whatever they want for CDs...if you must complain, complain about the people that buy "overpriced cds" and thus propogate those horrendus prices!
Come on guys, this is ridiculas. Napster was created with the SOLE purpose of trading illegal mp3s. Yeah yeah, the guy says he created it to share legal mp3s blahblahblah whatever, it's easy to say that when faced with a lawsuit.
And even if he did intend to share only legal mp3s, there's no way he thought that no one would share illegal mp3s with this system. Come on, nearly 95% of all mp3s shared are copywritten without the express permission to redistribute. If he really thought no one would do this he is a fool.
And then you fault the RIAA for protecting their interests? If you were on their board you'd be doing the same damn thing. If you think the laws suck, work to change them, hell, even a little civil disobedience is ok now and then, but don't act like the RIAA is committing some grave injustice in suing Napster.
How could it be? It is a device that allows the *playback* of MP3 files. It has nothing to do with recording MP3s.
Exactly...
99%+ of the MP3s in existance out there are created by ripping the mp3 track from a CD. On a home computer. RIAA says this is illegal, plain and simple. That means using this thing is probably illegal too, according to RIAA.
This is where the problem lies. This device can CERTAINLY be used to legitimately stream mp3s which fit the RIAA's definition of Legal (that is, mp3s which were originally distributed in the mp3 format, for example). And since this device does not apparently encode mp3s in any way shape or form, I can't see how it would be illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you think the client would have to be able to unprotect the protection in order to, say, PLAY the mp3?
It's fairly obvious that only Napster will play back the encrypted mp3s. Sucks to be winamp. And of COURSE there will be no way to play these on alternate OS's....
Ok normally I don't complain because I could see how the occasional topic could get posted twice. But THREE times?
That's where I draw the line and say that the editing/posting around here has gone to hell...
Feel free to mod this down, I'm just in a bitchy mood.
Don't think you will get away with it. Many have
tried and gotten caught. You will be exposed as
a law breaker and thief.
I don't know, can you point to one place which gives information on people getting caught with GPL'd code in a closed-source program?
I ask because CONSTANTLY it comes up that people say, "Maybe this will be the legal test of the GPL" blahblahblah... From comments like these, it sounds like there has NOT been such a case yet.
Erik
There's a distinct difference between q3a and Diablo2. In the former, you don't build up your character over time, and in the latter you do. Thus if you are killed in q3a, you may get another death on your record, but nothing else. In Diablo 2 (hardcore) if you die, you start over from the beginning, potentially losing hundreds of hours spent creating and building your character. I won't try to claim that the game is an RPG, in fact I hate it when it is called such. But there is a true loss of time and abilities when the character is killed off, so I think your comparison to q3a/ut is slightly off-kilter.
Oh don't get me wrong, buying stuff like this is kinda crazy. But if they have the money and nothing else to spend it on, they should be able to, and they shouldn't have to worry about Blizzard rolling back the clock and causing problems like this.
A lot more people were not affected by this than were, there's no reason to cause them problems just to "make it right."
As for doing it character by character... There was a bug awhile back that was considerably less widespread than this one that caused characters to be deleted completely. Blizzard would restore them for you if you email the account name, realm and character name. Unfortunately you were in for about a 2-3 week wait per character.
I wasn't logged in. *shrug*
I'd gladly have retracted my version of the AC post if it was possible.
Battle.net uses *obscurity* to implement it's security. It seems to trust the client too much. Worse yet it seems that a simple logic flaw has cost Blizzard it's reputation.
I disagree here. Have you played the game? You can't do anything in the game without the client asking the server to make sure it's ok. It's probably the single biggest reason lag is a problem in the game. You can't even pick up an object from your inventory without asking the server if it's ok (and you can't drop it either, making for problems if you're holding an item and need to run away quickly).
As far as how they implement their security... what, by having it closed source? There are other closed-source forms of security, would you call those "obscurity"? This is a bug in the battlenet servers. It could be corrected client-side by making a check, although that could probably be hacked to change it back. It *should* be correctable on the server side, but they haven't done it yet.
You're kidding, right? Roll back a few weeks? If they try to do this on a character by character basis, they're going to take forever to do it and waste tons of man-hours and money. If they do it overall, they're going to have a LOT of pissed off users who advanced their characters over the past few weeks. Not to mention people who bought items for real money having problems....
Hmm... didn't MEAN to post anonymously...
And I guess lasting half a year without any cheating incidents is pretty good, compared to most other online games.
But there were other "cheating" incidents. Two major ones come to mind. In the first, characters were able to go "hostile" on another character from anywhere in the game. Normally you can only go hostile on another character if you are in town (where you can't attack) thus preventing a quick hostility + attack to surprise kill players.
The second hack increased running/walking speed tremendously by exploiting a feature in the game's frame rate code. This in general was not a major problem until people used it to go hostile in town and then run and kill someone.
The problem with the new hack is that it's not done in-game. The "hack" is just a bug in the server code that lets a player jump into another player's character, then join games and play as that character without ever typing in a password. At first all that happened was that characters were losing all their items (read a few threads at the lurker lounge or in the forums of www.diabloii.net) but then characters started dying. That's when the REAL uproar happened.
Frankly this disgusts me. It's one thing to use legitimate, in game features to attack, kill and steal, it's quite another to exploit a bug to do it covertly. And don't expect Blizzard to do anything about it, there have been lots of scamming and other Bad Things (tm) going on for awhile now, and even though they *could* disable specific CD keys from Battle.net, they apparently refuse to do so.
Stronger encryption isn't the answer either, incidentally, since it's a bug in the server code (or, so says the forums).
Am I going to regret having seen it?
In a word: yes.
Someone REALLY needs to teach this man how to cackle maniacally.
Dangit, meant to change the subject!:
u k.co/gol/tm.htm+life+turing+machine&hl=en
The link appears to be dead, but not in Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.rendell.
The link appears to be dead, but not in Google:u k.co/gol/tm.htm+life+turing+machine&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.rendell.
First off, I am American, incidentally..
And yes, I know where governments come from. But see, I'm an American in Polish government. I don't have any clue how their system is set up. I don't even know whether it's a republic, a dictatorship, etc. And I bet that 90% of the people who have been posting about this atrocity are just like me in these respects.
People here get so caught up in defending Linux that they forget that there's a world outside it.
Feel free to moderate this as flamebait, I'm sure you will.
We, as thinking, rational people, have to stand on the fact that morality and ethics are universal, and that what's "true" for one country, MUST be "true" for another. I'm so sick of this relativistic bullshit. Right is right, and wrong is wrong - just because a population/country has a history of statist oppression doesn't mean that "it's OK for them". Then what is right? Is taxation in any form right? Why? If taxation is wrong, what makes it wrong? Why is one form of government right when another is wrong? And why is the taxation of free software a universal wrong (not that you explicitly said it was, but that was certainly the implication). Can you support your post with something?
A lot of people seem to think this is happening in the US. It isn't. If you'd read the article, it clearly states that this is happening in Poland.
That said, who are we (as Americans, probably the majority of the readers on Slashdot) to say how another government should be run? They are coming from a different background, they have a different history, they have different laws. The cry of "Free software should be free!" can be heard from everyone in here, but that's a very culturocentric (doubt that's even a word) perspective.
The US and your culture...they are not the end-all be-all.
Know if it runs OS2, or BeOS? I'm saying this simply as an exercise, its funny that we immediately attempt to get windows on this thingy before anything else.
Actually it ran Linux and Dos first.
But seriously, there's a much greater market for running Windows than BeOS and other such OS's. We may not like it, but it's true.
Well, Microsoft did write OS2, but that's beside the point, alright!!??
I thought IBM wrote OS/2.
Interesting... however one of the things Wine says it will NEVER implement is vxd support. So any M$ product that requires access of a vxd, even trivially, could have pretty bad implications for Wine.
It's hard to document "common sense" but lawyers make it a requirement. Most people -- one would assume -- know their coffee is hot. So when you sterilize yourself in a hideous coffee accident, you get to sue McDonalds because they didn't put a flashing neon sign on the cup to the effect of "Hey, dumbass! This coffee is freakin' hot."
To be fair, it wasn't so much that the coffee was scalding hot as that it was so hot that it melted the bottom of the cup off, thus spilling the coffee and causing severe burns.
The liability in terms of not mentioning that the coffee was hot was a side effect and a spin that McDonald's put on the story, to partially discredit the person this happened to and to make it look like THEY were the ones that justice failed.
VBS is good just as any scripting language is good. You can script in it. I won't go as far as to say it's as good as Perl or other scripting languages, but it's used for similar purposes. Inherently, VBScript isn't bad. It's no worse than any other scripting languate. The problem is a combination of things, mostly OS and OS settings.
(IDG) -- People who intentionally spread a computer virus face a seven-year prison sentence and a $15,000 fine in Pennsylvania after Governor Tom. Ridge signed a new bill into law May 26.
Key word is *INTENTIONALLY*.
Also keep in mind that the artists usually don't get most of the money from cd sales, unless they are really big time.
Could this be because they have a record contract, which often states that the record company will give them some amount of money in exchange for the rights to distribute their music? And then they give small royalties to the band.
SOMEONE has to pay for it, right? I mean, you hear "Oh it only costs 1 dollar to make a cd." but you have to pay for the recording time and equipment, plus you don't know how much a CD is going to sell, particularly with bands/artists who are making their first albums.
Not to mention they pretty much have the right to charge whatever they want for CDs...if you must complain, complain about the people that buy "overpriced cds" and thus propogate those horrendus prices!
Come on guys, this is ridiculas. Napster was created with the SOLE purpose of trading illegal mp3s. Yeah yeah, the guy says he created it to share legal mp3s blahblahblah whatever, it's easy to say that when faced with a lawsuit.
And even if he did intend to share only legal mp3s, there's no way he thought that no one would share illegal mp3s with this system. Come on, nearly 95% of all mp3s shared are copywritten without the express permission to redistribute. If he really thought no one would do this he is a fool.
And then you fault the RIAA for protecting their interests? If you were on their board you'd be doing the same damn thing. If you think the laws suck, work to change them, hell, even a little civil disobedience is ok now and then, but don't act like the RIAA is committing some grave injustice in suing Napster.
Ah, but the fans they're "pissing off" are pirating the music ANYWAY. Pissing THEM off probably won't hurt their record sales....
How could it be? It is a device that allows the *playback* of MP3 files. It has nothing to do with recording MP3s.
Exactly...
99%+ of the MP3s in existance out there are created by ripping the mp3 track from a CD. On a home computer. RIAA says this is illegal, plain and simple. That means using this thing is probably illegal too, according to RIAA.
This is where the problem lies. This device can CERTAINLY be used to legitimately stream mp3s which fit the RIAA's definition of Legal (that is, mp3s which were originally distributed in the mp3 format, for example). And since this device does not apparently encode mp3s in any way shape or form, I can't see how it would be illegal.