There will be tons of boring dialog consiting of wooden actors and tons of soul-less computer generated aliens used to replicate the puppet mastery of 70s. The love between the princess and anakin will be completely fabricated and unrealistic. Probably using the tired forbidden love motif we have all seen before. Scenes with Jarjar will be minimized (obvious point) given the negative feedback from episode I. There will be another unbelievable car chase scene to prove that anakin is a greatest starfighter pilot ever. ho-hum. There will be another intense lightsaber duel with a gimmic like the dual bladed light saber seen in episode one. We will learn more about yoda demistifing the character making him/her/it less interesting IMHO.
Why bother to post this when you've obviously downloaded the movie on VCD already?;-)
Yes, every one of these is absolutely true. Not to mention a lot of inside jokes, namely, at least 3 hands being cut off, and a "i've got a bad feeling about this" which will cause one mighty cheering from the audience.:-)
However, you left out that there's also a goodly chunk of plot to make you go "oohhhh.. now I get it" and a couple of reversals in the plot to leave you wondering how ep3 will tie it together. I've got some ideas on how it'll play out, namely that there's going to have to be one mighty betrayal other than Anakin becoming James Earl Jones, and that all the Jedi are going to get totally blindsided by it to the extent that the vast majority of them get the quick trip to the other side...
All in all, it's worth watching. But yeah, you get complainers no matter what you do. At least JarJar only talks three times and those are mercifully short.
I think the point may be that TIVO *does* collect user selection and programming data.
Yes, they do, anonymously. This order goes even beyond that, in that a unique ID will be assigned to each users data. Tivo is capable of doing that, agreed, but they do not and their privacy policy forbids them from doing that without the user's explicit consent...
This is a heavy blow to privacy, and probably illegal according to the 5th amendment. I sincerely hope they tell the judge to fuck off and take it to a higher court somehow. Stupid legal system.:P
Tivo is obviously headed in the same basic direction. There's a reason the new Series 2 units have USB ports (and unoffical support for USB->Ethernet dongles in the software).
Yes, well, whether they can or not seems irrelevant. SonicBlue claims they couldn't and the judge simply said for them to write code that could, and to do it within 60 days.
Assuming some idiot judge ordered them to do it, then it can be done. Or the people who don't do it get shut down. So the law sucks. Nothing new there.
For one thing, I don't forsee "the people vs. the military" if it became necessary to take out the US government. For one thing, the military is made up of the people. I highly doubt that the majority of military personel would be willing to use military weapons on US citizens.
Secondly, violent crime does not decrease as the number of guns goes down. Quite the opposite in fact, depending on which studies you look at. It's far from proven either way, admittedly.
The art of revolution may have changed, I agree. But if it really came to the point where revolution became necessary, I think the infrastructure would have also toppled to the point where a firearm, even a handgun, would be a damned important thing to have.
Those are separated. The ID is sent to determine if it's a valid subscription, true, but it is not sent with the data.
It sends the data using HTTP POSTs to Tivo's servers. Basically, it's as if I submitted two web forms, one with my serial and another with my viewing data. The only way to correlate those two bits of info is by noticing that they were sent at around the same time (sequentially, in fact). However, with 300k subscribers calling in daily and only 86k seconds in the day, it's a bit difficult (read: impossible) to backtrack from the access logs to determine who sent what when.
Wrong. TiVo's data is keyed to the ID of your TiVo unit, which is unique.
Wrong. The ID of your unit is not sent with the anonymous data that Tivo collects. Check the Tivo Underground for more details on how to examine the data yourself.
I mean, it's fairly obvious that they need this info to prove that users skip commercials and send shows to each other, but I fail to see how this makes either of those activities illegal... Yes, it's poor form that the judge ordered this data gathering, but I don't see that it makes much of a difference to the bad guys case.
Most legal understandings of the second amendment allude to that right as being the right for the country to build and maintain a military; not your personal right to own a gun.
The language in the Constitution is not difficult to read. It's easy to understand. And every word of the Bill of Rights details things that the government *cannot* do. The 2nd Amendment is the assurance that the government cannot take away your weaponry.
Why is this so important? Because if it become neccessary to remove the government by force, the citizenry needs the weaponry to do it. Remember, these guys just got through fighting a war with their government and winning their independance. They knew exactly how important weapons can be in the hands of the common man. Don't think it's not true today. It is. The right man in the right place with the right weapon can topple any regime.
The purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to keep the power of the government under the people's final control. Period.
I know of several stores that use wireless point-of-sale systems. Most now use 802.11b. Not one of them uses WEP. I went war driving one time and found several stores networks. No WEP. Some obvious SSID's.
They make a good point in that article. If you know your stuff, you ain't gonna be working on phone tech support. Quite often, the guy on the other end of the phone knows no more (usually less) than you do about the product. They have a wide selection of resources on the product that might help though.
Putting those resources online to let you solve your own problems really is the better solution.
Series 2 Tivo branded standalone boxes are exclusive to Best Buy and buying from Tivo directly, but other manufacturers are not. There will be other brand names (Philips, Sony, etc) coming out at some future point.
Oh, and Tivo does have a hidden skip 30 seconds feature. Hit Select Play Select Three Zero Select on the remote while watching any recording and voila, the Skip To End button is now a 30 second skip. Do it again to turn it back off.
D-Tivo's have always gotten their guide data over the satellite feed.
And they get it continually, not just at the 2am-5am special thing. That special thing (which was added in 2.5) is a feed for software updates, Tivolution Magazine, showcases, etc.
To answer the original question, G-Guide does *not* contain anywhere nearly as much info as the Tivo downloads. You can see part of the info the Tivo gets on the Standalone by looking at a show description screen and pressing ENTER (with 2.5 or up). That's quite a chunk of data on a lot of shows.
In essence, all guide systems work based off the data from one of two providers: Tribune Media Services or TVGuide. Neither shows all the data they have on their websites. Tribune puts quite a lot of it on their website at www.zap2it.com. Some more of it (notably First Run Date) can be found thru Yahoo's online listings (which come from the TMS sources).
All that data is used by the unit for some function or another. Trying to use a different source is fine, but you will lose some functionality. Without First Run Date, for example, you lose the "first run only" recording feature.
Because Tivo is made up of people that "get it".
on
TiVo Series 2 Review
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Slashdot readers, overall smart people who respect the freedom for the individual but also never lose sight of the importance of community efforts (e.g. open source, space exploration), should reject technology that phones home to report on your viewing behavior and just maks it easier for people to grow dumb scumsucking the televion spoonfeed.
It's not like that, or at least it only looks like that from a superficial point of view.
a) Tivo groks privacy. They have a truly comprehensive privacy policy (unlike anything I've ever seen by a company) that details exactly what the unit does/doesn't do. And they really do stick to it (as Tivo hackers like myself have actually discovered by reading the source). So it records my preferences anonymously, only by zip code. That's okay with me. If it wasn't, then they offer an opt-out that really does work (they set a variable on your box so the data doesn't get sent at all). Cool.
b) PVR tech. actually doesn't make you watch more TV, but more in less time. It frees you from the scheduling of TV. I don't have to watch network drivel at night, instead I can enjoy stuff that it recorded during the day that I'd normally miss (okay, mostly anime type cheesy stuff, but that's just me). And since I *know* that my box will grab my shows, I can turn the tube off and read a book without worrying about missing anything I want to see. I no longer am glued to the tube, instead I go out and do other things, and still watch my shows (in half the time too, since I skip the fluff and the ads).
After reading the First Amended Complaint, I see a wrinkle nobody mentioned before. EULA violation. According to this, the EULA states (in section 11) that if they agreed to the EULA, they are forbidden from emulating the networking features of the games in question.
Also, according to section 17, they claim code theft because the BnetD emulator copies the results of a bug in the username/password authentication portion of battle.net. Well.. depends on the bug, but that doesn't necessarily state that they copied code from battle.net. They may have simply copied the protocol. Anyway, how did they get access to that code? Seems fishy to me.
The whole profit thing is a sidetrack and not really the crux of the matter. The crux of the matter is where they think that BnetD uses their source code.
Story recap: - BnetD reverse engineered the protocol (*not the code!*) used by Battle.Net. - Using this, they created BnetD, which simply emulates battle.net. They entirely wrote their own code to do this. - They went along just fine until the Warcraft3 beta was leaked. - Being as the software was open source, someone else took BnetD, added support for the leaked beta, and created WarForge. - BnetD gets the crap sued out of them.
So, where does profit come into this? Answer: it doesn't, it's some moron Vivendi rep trying to screw with your head.
BnetD does not use any of Battle.Net's source. It's a totally legal hack, reverse engineering the protocol. They didn't even need to analyse the source of the games themselves, just the protocol. Any fool with a sniffer can see the packets, after all. After that it's a matter of trial and error.
So, given that they didn't use any of the source code from any of Battle.Net's stuff.. It's perfectly legal for them to sell it and make a profit.
Of course, if you assume, like Vivendi appears to be doing, that they stole the code or that they are using their code, then yeah, BnetD would be in the shit. But they say they are not, I believe them (as I've analysed protocols before), and thus I think BnetD will win, assuming they can afford counsel.
I am a christian. I was raised in a christian household. I grew up in the California version of the bible-belt. But I've never met anyone who even remotely resembles these turkeys. Not even the nutbags on the Patriot Network or JT Chick come close.
Yes, this is a hoax. But it's too close to reality to be called a "parody".
Take a trip to Alabama, Georgia.. heck, even as far north as Kentucky. At least 10-20% of the population wouldn't find this sort of thing funny at all. Really. I know hordes of people who think *exactly* like this. I have personally seen people show the "chmod 666" fears when I was showing them how to use unix-like systems. And I have seen one person switch to a non-unix system because she found out her computer was "infested with daemons" from her sysadmin.
You may think you know fundies, but trust me brother, you don't know fundies.
I'm very interested in the evidence for this. If your source is Tivo, do they specifically say this or merely imply it?
Two sources. One is Tivo's privacy policy, which probably only implies that.
However, the second source is the source itself. Hack yourself a shell on the serial port and take a look at the dialing scripts. If the status of the box is set to "OptedOut" then the remote keypress data is wiped, not sent. Makes no sense for them to spend time sending something they can't use anyway.. saves them modem fees. The debug log is sent, but there's nothing of consequence in there anyway.
Wrong. If you opt out, the data, including the remote press data, never leaves your box.
Even if you don't opt out, the data is sanitized of any identifying marks before it leaves your box. The privacy foundation makes incorrect conclusions based on flawed methodology.
Slashdot Mirror
There will be tons of boring dialog consiting of wooden actors and tons of soul-less computer generated aliens used to replicate the puppet mastery of 70s.
;-)
:-)
The love between the princess and anakin will be completely fabricated and unrealistic. Probably using the tired forbidden love motif we have all seen before.
Scenes with Jarjar will be minimized (obvious point) given the negative feedback from episode I.
There will be another unbelievable car chase scene to prove that anakin is a greatest starfighter pilot ever. ho-hum.
There will be another intense lightsaber duel with a gimmic like the dual bladed light saber seen in episode one.
We will learn more about yoda demistifing the character making him/her/it less interesting IMHO.
Why bother to post this when you've obviously downloaded the movie on VCD already?
Yes, every one of these is absolutely true. Not to mention a lot of inside jokes, namely, at least 3 hands being cut off, and a "i've got a bad feeling about this" which will cause one mighty cheering from the audience.
However, you left out that there's also a goodly chunk of plot to make you go "oohhhh.. now I get it" and a couple of reversals in the plot to leave you wondering how ep3 will tie it together. I've got some ideas on how it'll play out, namely that there's going to have to be one mighty betrayal other than Anakin becoming James Earl Jones, and that all the Jedi are going to get totally blindsided by it to the extent that the vast majority of them get the quick trip to the other side...
All in all, it's worth watching. But yeah, you get complainers no matter what you do. At least JarJar only talks three times and those are mercifully short.
It was translated. The links to the original versions are at the very top of the article.
Unfortunately, the links are down, so, google cache time!
Original Response
Original Microsoft FUD Letter
Both are in Spanish, BTW.
I think the point may be that TIVO *does* collect user selection and programming data.
:P
Yes, they do, anonymously. This order goes even beyond that, in that a unique ID will be assigned to each users data. Tivo is capable of doing that, agreed, but they do not and their privacy policy forbids them from doing that without the user's explicit consent...
This is a heavy blow to privacy, and probably illegal according to the 5th amendment. I sincerely hope they tell the judge to fuck off and take it to a higher court somehow. Stupid legal system.
Tivo is obviously headed in the same basic direction. There's a reason the new Series 2 units have USB ports (and unoffical support for USB->Ethernet dongles in the software).
Where does he get those wonderful toys?
Yes, well, whether they can or not seems irrelevant. SonicBlue claims they couldn't and the judge simply said for them to write code that could, and to do it within 60 days.
Assuming some idiot judge ordered them to do it, then it can be done. Or the people who don't do it get shut down. So the law sucks. Nothing new there.
For one thing, I don't forsee "the people vs. the military" if it became necessary to take out the US government. For one thing, the military is made up of the people. I highly doubt that the majority of military personel would be willing to use military weapons on US citizens.
Secondly, violent crime does not decrease as the number of guns goes down. Quite the opposite in fact, depending on which studies you look at. It's far from proven either way, admittedly.
The art of revolution may have changed, I agree. But if it really came to the point where revolution became necessary, I think the infrastructure would have also toppled to the point where a firearm, even a handgun, would be a damned important thing to have.
Those are separated. The ID is sent to determine if it's a valid subscription, true, but it is not sent with the data.
It sends the data using HTTP POSTs to Tivo's servers. Basically, it's as if I submitted two web forms, one with my serial and another with my viewing data. The only way to correlate those two bits of info is by noticing that they were sent at around the same time (sequentially, in fact). However, with 300k subscribers calling in daily and only 86k seconds in the day, it's a bit difficult (read: impossible) to backtrack from the access logs to determine who sent what when.
Wrong. TiVo's data is keyed to the ID of your TiVo unit, which is unique.
Wrong. The ID of your unit is not sent with the anonymous data that Tivo collects. Check the Tivo Underground for more details on how to examine the data yourself.
Give it time. 3.0 is coming out and TivoWeb is still undergoing modifications.
I mean, it's fairly obvious that they need this info to prove that users skip commercials and send shows to each other, but I fail to see how this makes either of those activities illegal... Yes, it's poor form that the judge ordered this data gathering, but I don't see that it makes much of a difference to the bad guys case.
From the article:
The court ruling also requires SonicBlue to track individual users -- not by name, but through ``unique identification numbers.''
This goes further than what Tivo does, as Tivo sends no unique ID with the data it collects. Wholly anonymous.
Most legal understandings of the second amendment allude to that right as being the right for the country to build and maintain a military; not your personal right to own a gun.
The language in the Constitution is not difficult to read. It's easy to understand. And every word of the Bill of Rights details things that the government *cannot* do. The 2nd Amendment is the assurance that the government cannot take away your weaponry.
Why is this so important? Because if it become neccessary to remove the government by force, the citizenry needs the weaponry to do it. Remember, these guys just got through fighting a war with their government and winning their independance. They knew exactly how important weapons can be in the hands of the common man. Don't think it's not true today. It is. The right man in the right place with the right weapon can topple any regime.
The purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to keep the power of the government under the people's final control. Period.
I know of several stores that use wireless point-of-sale systems. Most now use 802.11b. Not one of them uses WEP. I went war driving one time and found several stores networks. No WEP. Some obvious SSID's.
This setup is *extremely* commonplace.
They make a good point in that article. If you know your stuff, you ain't gonna be working on phone tech support. Quite often, the guy on the other end of the phone knows no more (usually less) than you do about the product. They have a wide selection of resources on the product that might help though.
Putting those resources online to let you solve your own problems really is the better solution.
Series 2 Tivo branded standalone boxes are exclusive to Best Buy and buying from Tivo directly, but other manufacturers are not. There will be other brand names (Philips, Sony, etc) coming out at some future point.
Oh, and Tivo does have a hidden skip 30 seconds feature. Hit Select Play Select Three Zero Select on the remote while watching any recording and voila, the Skip To End button is now a 30 second skip. Do it again to turn it back off.
D-Tivo's have always gotten their guide data over the satellite feed.
And they get it continually, not just at the 2am-5am special thing. That special thing (which was added in 2.5) is a feed for software updates, Tivolution Magazine, showcases, etc.
To answer the original question, G-Guide does *not* contain anywhere nearly as much info as the Tivo downloads. You can see part of the info the Tivo gets on the Standalone by looking at a show description screen and pressing ENTER (with 2.5 or up). That's quite a chunk of data on a lot of shows.
In essence, all guide systems work based off the data from one of two providers: Tribune Media Services or TVGuide. Neither shows all the data they have on their websites. Tribune puts quite a lot of it on their website at www.zap2it.com. Some more of it (notably First Run Date) can be found thru Yahoo's online listings (which come from the TMS sources).
All that data is used by the unit for some function or another. Trying to use a different source is fine, but you will lose some functionality. Without First Run Date, for example, you lose the "first run only" recording feature.
Mirror of the MPEG is here: flash.mpeg
Slashdot readers, overall smart people who respect the freedom for the individual but also never lose sight of the importance of community efforts (e.g. open source, space exploration), should reject technology that phones home to report on your viewing behavior and just maks it easier for people to grow dumb scumsucking the televion spoonfeed.
It's not like that, or at least it only looks like that from a superficial point of view.
a) Tivo groks privacy. They have a truly comprehensive privacy policy (unlike anything I've ever seen by a company) that details exactly what the unit does/doesn't do. And they really do stick to it (as Tivo hackers like myself have actually discovered by reading the source). So it records my preferences anonymously, only by zip code. That's okay with me. If it wasn't, then they offer an opt-out that really does work (they set a variable on your box so the data doesn't get sent at all). Cool.
b) PVR tech. actually doesn't make you watch more TV, but more in less time. It frees you from the scheduling of TV. I don't have to watch network drivel at night, instead I can enjoy stuff that it recorded during the day that I'd normally miss (okay, mostly anime type cheesy stuff, but that's just me). And since I *know* that my box will grab my shows, I can turn the tube off and read a book without worrying about missing anything I want to see. I no longer am glued to the tube, instead I go out and do other things, and still watch my shows (in half the time too, since I skip the fluff and the ads).
The guy posts by the name of DAvenger.
WHOIS info on radlight.com:
Agentura Sociologickych Expertiz (template COCO-1106387)
davenger@radlight.net
Pusta 7
Bratislava 4, SK 841 04 SK
Admin Contact:
Machacek Ladislav (COCO-1227589) machacek@stonline.sk
+421 2 65422859 (FAX) +421 2 65422859
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Machacek Ladislav (COCO-1227590) machacek@stonline.sk
+421 2 65422859
CORE Registrar: CORE-71
Record last modified: 2002-03-14 08:29:54 UTC by CORE-71
Record created: 2001-08-23 11:29:58 UTC by CORE-71
Record expires: 2003-08-23 05:27:49 UTC
Domain servers in listed order:
ns1.tera-byte.com
ns2.tera-byte.com
Database last updated on 2002-04-24 21:44:27 UTC
After reading the First Amended Complaint, I see a wrinkle nobody mentioned before. EULA violation. According to this, the EULA states (in section 11) that if they agreed to the EULA, they are forbidden from emulating the networking features of the games in question.
Also, according to section 17, they claim code theft because the BnetD emulator copies the results of a bug in the username/password authentication portion of battle.net. Well.. depends on the bug, but that doesn't necessarily state that they copied code from battle.net. They may have simply copied the protocol. Anyway, how did they get access to that code? Seems fishy to me.
The whole profit thing is a sidetrack and not really the crux of the matter. The crux of the matter is where they think that BnetD uses their source code.
Story recap:
- BnetD reverse engineered the protocol (*not the code!*) used by Battle.Net.
- Using this, they created BnetD, which simply emulates battle.net. They entirely wrote their own code to do this.
- They went along just fine until the Warcraft3 beta was leaked.
- Being as the software was open source, someone else took BnetD, added support for the leaked beta, and created WarForge.
- BnetD gets the crap sued out of them.
So, where does profit come into this? Answer: it doesn't, it's some moron Vivendi rep trying to screw with your head.
BnetD does not use any of Battle.Net's source. It's a totally legal hack, reverse engineering the protocol. They didn't even need to analyse the source of the games themselves, just the protocol. Any fool with a sniffer can see the packets, after all. After that it's a matter of trial and error.
So, given that they didn't use any of the source code from any of Battle.Net's stuff.. It's perfectly legal for them to sell it and make a profit.
Of course, if you assume, like Vivendi appears to be doing, that they stole the code or that they are using their code, then yeah, BnetD would be in the shit. But they say they are not, I believe them (as I've analysed protocols before), and thus I think BnetD will win, assuming they can afford counsel.
I am a christian. I was raised in a christian household. I grew up in the California version of the bible-belt. But I've never met anyone who even remotely resembles these turkeys. Not even the nutbags on the Patriot Network or JT Chick come close.
Yes, this is a hoax. But it's too close to reality to be called a "parody".
Take a trip to Alabama, Georgia.. heck, even as far north as Kentucky. At least 10-20% of the population wouldn't find this sort of thing funny at all. Really. I know hordes of people who think *exactly* like this. I have personally seen people show the "chmod 666" fears when I was showing them how to use unix-like systems. And I have seen one person switch to a non-unix system because she found out her computer was "infested with daemons" from her sysadmin.
You may think you know fundies, but trust me brother, you don't know fundies.
I'm very interested in the evidence for this. If your source is Tivo, do they specifically say this or merely imply it?
Two sources. One is Tivo's privacy policy, which probably only implies that.
However, the second source is the source itself. Hack yourself a shell on the serial port and take a look at the dialing scripts. If the status of the box is set to "OptedOut" then the remote keypress data is wiped, not sent. Makes no sense for them to spend time sending something they can't use anyway.. saves them modem fees. The debug log is sent, but there's nothing of consequence in there anyway.
Wrong. If you opt out, the data, including the remote press data, never leaves your box.
Even if you don't opt out, the data is sanitized of any identifying marks before it leaves your box. The privacy foundation makes incorrect conclusions based on flawed methodology.