I agree with you about this not being a big deal. At this point it's just between two parties who both want to make money off a domain.
I don't know a whole lot about the "Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act", but according to Wikipedia:
In determining whether the domain name registrant has a bad faith intent to profit, a court may consider many factors, including nine that are outlined in the statute:
1 Registrant’s trademark or other intellectual property rights in the domain name; 2 Whether the domain name contains the registrant’s legal or common name; 3 Registrant’s prior use of the domain name in connection with the bona fide offering of goods or services; 4 Registrant’s bona fide noncommercial or fair use of the mark in a site accessible by the domain name; 5 Registrant’s intent to divert customers from the mark owner’s online location that could harm the goodwill represented by the mark, for commercial gain or with the intent to tarnish or disparage the mark; 6 Registrant’s offer to transfer, sell, or otherwise assign the domain name to the mark owner or a third party for financial gain, without having used the mark in a legitimate site; 7 Registrant’s providing misleading false contact information when applying for registration of the domain name; 8 Registrant’s registration or acquisition of multiple domain names that are identical or confusingly similar to marks of others; and 9 Extent to which the mark in the domain is distinctive or famous.[11]
Point by point...
1) Kneen has no relevant trademark as far as I know 2) The domain does not relate to his name 3) Kneen has not apparently used the domain commercially 4) The domain is not in use currently other than a redirect to his primary web site 5) I see no reason to think Kneen was trying to divert customers 6) Kneen may not have contacted the plaintiff, but he openly lists the site for sale on his own page. He has not, by all appearances, used the domain for a legitimate site. However, Office Space Solutions made some kind of offer to Kneen that he didn't like, giving weight to the argument that Kneen is trying to sell the domain at a profit. 7) Kneen has not tried to hide his identity 8) Kneen owns confusing domains related to Twitter and FTPAnywhere and possibly with some others I'm not familiar with. 9) The domain name is somewhat distinctive in my estimation, but not famous.
These items are not comprehensive and the courts are obviously free to consider whatever criteria they wish. Knowing how some similar cases have gone in the past, in my layman's opinion, I expect he will loose if this goes to court, but it probably wont get that far. Regardless of any potential fraudulent action by Office Space Solutions, the two parties will almost assuredly settle out of court for an undisclosed sum of money and the Internet will march on.
According to Kneen's web site, http://www.jasonified.com/doma..., workbetter.com is for sale. He currently has it redirecting to his primary domain name, www.jasonified.com. After looking at the list of domains he owns, including many that are Twitter related, he looks a lot like a cybersquatter.
It's too bad no one has come up with a way for companies to denote what mail servers are legitimate senders on behalf of their domains...
All sarcasm aside, SPF records are easy to configure. If you (and by "you" I mean anyone reading this. I'm not directing this comment at the parent poster.) are responsible in any way for managing email for an organization, make sure the domain's SPF records are configured. Chances are your email or DNS service provider has an easy to use tool for writing the TXT record for you. Then, look into DKIM and DMARC once your SPF records are set. DEMARC has a nice reporting feature to alert you when your return addresses are being spoofed.
Code words don't exist, but I'm convinced that tech support staffs keep notes on who knows what they are doing and who doesn't. After a few years at one job and having to call Dell every few months for warranty hardware replacements my calls to tech support got shorter and easier. It got to the point where it took about 10 minutes, after navigating the phone tree and waiting in the queue, for me to confirm my identity, answer a few questions, and having them send out a replacement part.
True, but it would not take them nearly as long to check your odometer after notifying you by mail that "You have been selected by random to have your odometer reading verified by an authorized agent of the Oregon Bureau of Motor Vehicles. You are required by law to present your vehicle at the designated BMV location on a Monday, Thursday, or alternate Saturday between the hours of 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM (weather permitting) not more than 30 days before the title holders birthday, prior to having your license tags renewed."
Your math is off by an order of magnitude. Assuming 30 mpg, the use tax would be about 1.5 cents per mile, not 30 cents per mile. 20,000 miles would cost you about $300 in taxes.
In my state, if a traffic signal is not working it is to be treated as a 4-way stop. For all intents and purposes, a dead red is not a working traffic signal as far as a bicyclist is concerned..
How can they guarantee that now? What about all of the people who commute across state borders, or who leave near a state where the gas is cheaper than in their own state?
Why even go high tech? Every year I have to renew my license tags on my birthday. Just report the odometer reading then and pay the appropriate taxes at that time. In my state with my car it works out to about 1.5 cents per mile. At that rate, I'd pay about $180. Maybe less if they slanted it by weight of vehicle, charging commercial trucks more and passenger cars less. It could be abused, sure, but odometer readings can be reported at time of sale or, depending on where you live, when the car has to go in for emissions testing. Random spot checks could be done as well at the bureau of motor vehicles. It would not take more than 5 minutes for an employee to check an odometer.
I'm seriously considering a Neo Smartpen for my own uses. It's under 200 bucks and will be good enough to digitize and organize my handwriting and doodles. I've been logging phone calls and jotting notes in lab books for over a decade, and this looks like a very reasonable way for me to continue to work the way I have been and turn my notes into searchable documentation. The down side is that it requires their special paper, so arbitrary sized work spaces won't be possible.
Furthermore, I would argue that bypassing the Sony rootkit is not a felony under the DCMA because, by my reading of section B below, the Sony rootkit does not "effectively control access to a work" because audio CDs with this DRM scheme will work perfectly adequately in a CD player, or Linux or Mac computers where the rootkit can not execute. Since the rootkit is not required to operate to gain access to the work under most circumstance, bypassing it should not be illegal under the special circumstance of playing the CD on a Windows PC.
Section 103 (17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1)) of the DMCA states:
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
The Act defines what it means in Section 1201(a)(3):
(3) As used in this subsection—
(A) to "circumvent a technological measure" means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
(B) a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Where in the long list of notes you linked does it say Edward Felten was "arrested"? Everything there is in reference to a civil suite in regards to him and his team publishing details on weaknesses in audio watermarking, which has nothing to do with the Sony rootkit debacle. Civil suits are not the same as criminal preosecutions, and you don't get arrested just because someone sues you.
Felten's Wikipedia page has references to his involvement with the rootkit investigation, but no mention of arrests. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... Sony was on the receiving end of many civil actions for that SNAFU. There were a lot of jokes at the time of arresting people for selling Sharpie markers as DRM circumvention tools.
It likely doesn't scale linearly. It comes down to how requests are queued at the routers. Chances are that the routers at your ISP use FIFO (First In First Out) queuing because it's cheap and efficient. On an over-saturated link that will mean each requester will get roughly equal shares of the available bandwidth. The neighbor paying for a 10 Mb link will get about the same throughput as the neighbor paying for 100 Mb.
No, that's not how it works... at all. If you are paying your ISP for 25 Mb and you only get 10 Mb at prime time it's not because your connection is too slow, it is because there is a bottleneck at your ISP. Upgrade to 2 GB if you want, you will still only get 10 Mb at prime time.
More than likely it's "I am not enough of a videophile to own a 1080p television." And that's exactly where I am. With a family, two cars, and only one income of any significance, I have better things to spend my money on than a TV when my existing 32-inch 720p television is still in working order.
It reminds me of the two or three years when I'd hear people complain about the fancy new HD cable channels not looking any better on their 15 year old Sony Trinitron.
While you are right that 10/10 is not enough for some use cases, it is sufficient for the great majority of people and a good baseline. Netflix at the highest bit-rate is only about 6 megabit. 10Mb would allow a comfortable amount of headroom. Simultaneous streams would work, just with a minor reduction in video quality. But as they say "The better is the enemy of the good". I'd rather see a movement to good serviceable bandwidth being universally available than an insistence on 25Mb if it takes three times longer to roll out.
Personally, I'm making due with 1.5 Mb x 384 Kb. I'm not out in the country either, but I'm just a little too far from the DSLAM for any faster DSL and my cable company's Internet service is notoriously unstable in my neighborhood. It's slow, but workable for most of what I need. Streaming video works fine as long as I limit it to standard definition. 10/10 Mb would make a lot of things more feasible for me, especially cloud backups, which are not doable with my current 384 Kb upload speed. 25/25? Sure it would be nice, but not essential, and not the quantum leap that 10/10 Mb would be.
Cable TV can't lower their bills much -- the licensing fees for the premium cable networks are spiraling out of control.
This is why I think cable companies SHOULD move to a la carte programming options. If they can show a cable network that only 2% of their customer base is willing to pay $2.50 per month to subscribe to their channel, then maybe the price should come down a little.
As all of this shakes out, I don't believe the cable companies will be the big losers. After all, they own the physical wires that will be used to deliver content to the customer. In whatever form that is, the cable companies will be in a position to monetize that position. What is more likely is that a good two thirds of cable networks will out and out disappear, and no one will care. Broadcast medium is still effective for some kinds of content, so networks showing current event programming, news, live events, and the handful of TV programs that garner millions of simultaneous viewers will still broadcast over traditional mediums. If they want to survive, cable networks should stop burdening themselves with trying to fill time with reruns and infomercials and focus on producing good original content they can sell to the likes of Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, and local cable companies for video on demand delivery.
How can companies TWC and Comcast continue to thrive?
You gave me a idea. TWC and Comcast could make an effort to provide reliable Internet connection speeds and cable TV service at reasonable prices, honor their contractual and regulatory obligations, and improve customer support. It's just crazy enough to work!
This is a very simple situation. Comcast is a huge company leveraging its position as Internet gateway for approximately 20 million subscribers to get cash from others trying to provide services to those customers. In particular, they targeted Netflix because it competes with Comcast's cable TV and video on demand services.
Capacity was never the problem. The interfaces required to upgrade Comcast's interface with Cogent cost a few thousand dollars. Cogent offered to give Comcast those interfaces for free. Netfilx also offered Comcast free caching servers and a royalty free direct peering agreement that would have slashed congestion on the Comcast-Cogent interconnects and reduced both of their costs dramatically. Comcast wasn't interested.
What Comcast wanted was payola to allow Netflix access to Comcast's subscriber base. Comcast didn't care if that came in the form of Netflix using a CDN (Content Delivery Network), who pay Comcast for interconnects, or for direct payments from Netflix. They just wanted their pound of flesh.
Incidentally, in 2014 Netflix made about 267 million dollars in profit. Comcast made over 8 billion. I don't know what Netfilx is paying Comcast, but it can't be more than a drop in the bucket that is Comcast's approximately 69 billion dollar annual revenue. I suspect this was more about hurting Netflix than it is about protecting their bottom line.
I really don't see many cases where a RAID array is better than a drive like this, especially considering Intel's reputation and reliability ($100 256GB SSDs aren't going to be the best fault tolerant ones...).
I've gotten burned by an Intel SSD. The Intel 320's data loss bug bit me, and that was on a drive that had the firmware patch to fix the flaw.
Never trust a single drive. RAID array is always better because it give you a chance to recover from a disk failure. Then back that RAID array to external storage. Then back up the essential data to off-site storage. With this drive, buy two and do a software RAID-1. With write speed like this you will never notice the performance drop-off.
The connection it provided was stable and consistent as an internet connection, and they were very good about the SLA and were on top of outages. They were honestly the best ISP I've ever dealt with. But, we never used it for voice. I imagine they would not have been able to get away with that set up if we had wanted to use it for voice as well.
I felt a little ripped off when I saw how they were presenting us the T1 connection. I would have rather purchased internet access via bonded DSL lines than the pseudo T1 that we got, but it was not available to us at the time. I blame the local telco. I asked the phone company technician about it and he told me that they had basically stopped running T1 local loops whenever they could.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you about this not being a big deal. At this point it's just between two parties who both want to make money off a domain.
I don't know a whole lot about the "Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act", but according to Wikipedia:
In determining whether the domain name registrant has a bad faith intent to profit, a court may consider many factors, including nine that are outlined in the statute:
1 Registrant’s trademark or other intellectual property rights in the domain name;
2 Whether the domain name contains the registrant’s legal or common name;
3 Registrant’s prior use of the domain name in connection with the bona fide offering of goods or services;
4 Registrant’s bona fide noncommercial or fair use of the mark in a site accessible by the domain name;
5 Registrant’s intent to divert customers from the mark owner’s online location that could harm the goodwill represented by the mark, for commercial gain or with the intent to tarnish or disparage the mark;
6 Registrant’s offer to transfer, sell, or otherwise assign the domain name to the mark owner or a third party for financial gain, without having used the mark in a legitimate site;
7 Registrant’s providing misleading false contact information when applying for registration of the domain name;
8 Registrant’s registration or acquisition of multiple domain names that are identical or confusingly similar to marks of others; and
9 Extent to which the mark in the domain is distinctive or famous.[11]
Point by point...
1) Kneen has no relevant trademark as far as I know
2) The domain does not relate to his name
3) Kneen has not apparently used the domain commercially
4) The domain is not in use currently other than a redirect to his primary web site
5) I see no reason to think Kneen was trying to divert customers
6) Kneen may not have contacted the plaintiff, but he openly lists the site for sale on his own page. He has not, by all appearances, used the domain for a legitimate site. However, Office Space Solutions made some kind of offer to Kneen that he didn't like, giving weight to the argument that Kneen is trying to sell the domain at a profit.
7) Kneen has not tried to hide his identity
8) Kneen owns confusing domains related to Twitter and FTPAnywhere and possibly with some others I'm not familiar with.
9) The domain name is somewhat distinctive in my estimation, but not famous.
These items are not comprehensive and the courts are obviously free to consider whatever criteria they wish. Knowing how some similar cases have gone in the past, in my layman's opinion, I expect he will loose if this goes to court, but it probably wont get that far. Regardless of any potential fraudulent action by Office Space Solutions, the two parties will almost assuredly settle out of court for an undisclosed sum of money and the Internet will march on.
According to Kneen's web site, http://www.jasonified.com/doma..., workbetter.com is for sale. He currently has it redirecting to his primary domain name, www.jasonified.com. After looking at the list of domains he owns, including many that are Twitter related, he looks a lot like a cybersquatter.
It's too bad no one has come up with a way for companies to denote what mail servers are legitimate senders on behalf of their domains...
All sarcasm aside, SPF records are easy to configure. If you (and by "you" I mean anyone reading this. I'm not directing this comment at the parent poster.) are responsible in any way for managing email for an organization, make sure the domain's SPF records are configured. Chances are your email or DNS service provider has an easy to use tool for writing the TXT record for you. Then, look into DKIM and DMARC once your SPF records are set. DEMARC has a nice reporting feature to alert you when your return addresses are being spoofed.
Code words don't exist, but I'm convinced that tech support staffs keep notes on who knows what they are doing and who doesn't. After a few years at one job and having to call Dell every few months for warranty hardware replacements my calls to tech support got shorter and easier. It got to the point where it took about 10 minutes, after navigating the phone tree and waiting in the queue, for me to confirm my identity, answer a few questions, and having them send out a replacement part.
True, but it would not take them nearly as long to check your odometer after notifying you by mail that "You have been selected by random to have your odometer reading verified by an authorized agent of the Oregon Bureau of Motor Vehicles. You are required by law to present your vehicle at the designated BMV location on a Monday, Thursday, or alternate Saturday between the hours of 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM (weather permitting) not more than 30 days before the title holders birthday, prior to having your license tags renewed."
Yes. I worked with a 3com phone system that ran on bare Ethernet.
Your math is off by an order of magnitude. Assuming 30 mpg, the use tax would be about 1.5 cents per mile, not 30 cents per mile. 20,000 miles would cost you about $300 in taxes.
In my state, if a traffic signal is not working it is to be treated as a 4-way stop. For all intents and purposes, a dead red is not a working traffic signal as far as a bicyclist is concerned..
How can they guarantee that now? What about all of the people who commute across state borders, or who leave near a state where the gas is cheaper than in their own state?
Why even go high tech? Every year I have to renew my license tags on my birthday. Just report the odometer reading then and pay the appropriate taxes at that time. In my state with my car it works out to about 1.5 cents per mile. At that rate, I'd pay about $180. Maybe less if they slanted it by weight of vehicle, charging commercial trucks more and passenger cars less. It could be abused, sure, but odometer readings can be reported at time of sale or, depending on where you live, when the car has to go in for emissions testing. Random spot checks could be done as well at the bureau of motor vehicles. It would not take more than 5 minutes for an employee to check an odometer.
Everyone except Myron Aub.
I'm seriously considering a Neo Smartpen for my own uses. It's under 200 bucks and will be good enough to digitize and organize my handwriting and doodles. I've been logging phone calls and jotting notes in lab books for over a decade, and this looks like a very reasonable way for me to continue to work the way I have been and turn my notes into searchable documentation. The down side is that it requires their special paper, so arbitrary sized work spaces won't be possible.
http://www.neosmartpen.com/?
Furthermore, I would argue that bypassing the Sony rootkit is not a felony under the DCMA because, by my reading of section B below, the Sony rootkit does not "effectively control access to a work" because audio CDs with this DRM scheme will work perfectly adequately in a CD player, or Linux or Mac computers where the rootkit can not execute. Since the rootkit is not required to operate to gain access to the work under most circumstance, bypassing it should not be illegal under the special circumstance of playing the CD on a Windows PC.
Section 103 (17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1)) of the DMCA states:
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
The Act defines what it means in Section 1201(a)(3):
(3) As used in this subsection—
(A) to "circumvent a technological measure" means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
(B) a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Where in the long list of notes you linked does it say Edward Felten was "arrested"? Everything there is in reference to a civil suite in regards to him and his team publishing details on weaknesses in audio watermarking, which has nothing to do with the Sony rootkit debacle. Civil suits are not the same as criminal preosecutions, and you don't get arrested just because someone sues you.
Felten's Wikipedia page has references to his involvement with the rootkit investigation, but no mention of arrests. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... Sony was on the receiving end of many civil actions for that SNAFU. There were a lot of jokes at the time of arresting people for selling Sharpie markers as DRM circumvention tools.
.... The guy who published that information was arrested for "providing tools for circumvention of DRM".....
Link or it didn't happen.
It likely doesn't scale linearly. It comes down to how requests are queued at the routers. Chances are that the routers at your ISP use FIFO (First In First Out) queuing because it's cheap and efficient. On an over-saturated link that will mean each requester will get roughly equal shares of the available bandwidth. The neighbor paying for a 10 Mb link will get about the same throughput as the neighbor paying for 100 Mb.
No, that's not how it works... at all. If you are paying your ISP for 25 Mb and you only get 10 Mb at prime time it's not because your connection is too slow, it is because there is a bottleneck at your ISP. Upgrade to 2 GB if you want, you will still only get 10 Mb at prime time.
More than likely it's "I am not enough of a videophile to own a 1080p television." And that's exactly where I am. With a family, two cars, and only one income of any significance, I have better things to spend my money on than a TV when my existing 32-inch 720p television is still in working order.
It reminds me of the two or three years when I'd hear people complain about the fancy new HD cable channels not looking any better on their 15 year old Sony Trinitron.
While you are right that 10/10 is not enough for some use cases, it is sufficient for the great majority of people and a good baseline. Netflix at the highest bit-rate is only about 6 megabit. 10Mb would allow a comfortable amount of headroom. Simultaneous streams would work, just with a minor reduction in video quality. But as they say "The better is the enemy of the good". I'd rather see a movement to good serviceable bandwidth being universally available than an insistence on 25Mb if it takes three times longer to roll out.
Personally, I'm making due with 1.5 Mb x 384 Kb. I'm not out in the country either, but I'm just a little too far from the DSLAM for any faster DSL and my cable company's Internet service is notoriously unstable in my neighborhood. It's slow, but workable for most of what I need. Streaming video works fine as long as I limit it to standard definition. 10/10 Mb would make a lot of things more feasible for me, especially cloud backups, which are not doable with my current 384 Kb upload speed. 25/25? Sure it would be nice, but not essential, and not the quantum leap that 10/10 Mb would be.
Cable TV can't lower their bills much -- the licensing fees for the premium cable networks are spiraling out of control.
This is why I think cable companies SHOULD move to a la carte programming options. If they can show a cable network that only 2% of their customer base is willing to pay $2.50 per month to subscribe to their channel, then maybe the price should come down a little.
As all of this shakes out, I don't believe the cable companies will be the big losers. After all, they own the physical wires that will be used to deliver content to the customer. In whatever form that is, the cable companies will be in a position to monetize that position. What is more likely is that a good two thirds of cable networks will out and out disappear, and no one will care. Broadcast medium is still effective for some kinds of content, so networks showing current event programming, news, live events, and the handful of TV programs that garner millions of simultaneous viewers will still broadcast over traditional mediums. If they want to survive, cable networks should stop burdening themselves with trying to fill time with reruns and infomercials and focus on producing good original content they can sell to the likes of Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, and local cable companies for video on demand delivery.
How can companies TWC and Comcast continue to thrive?
You gave me a idea. TWC and Comcast could make an effort to provide reliable Internet connection speeds and cable TV service at reasonable prices, honor their contractual and regulatory obligations, and improve customer support. It's just crazy enough to work!
This is a very simple situation. Comcast is a huge company leveraging its position as Internet gateway for approximately 20 million subscribers to get cash from others trying to provide services to those customers. In particular, they targeted Netflix because it competes with Comcast's cable TV and video on demand services.
Capacity was never the problem. The interfaces required to upgrade Comcast's interface with Cogent cost a few thousand dollars. Cogent offered to give Comcast those interfaces for free. Netfilx also offered Comcast free caching servers and a royalty free direct peering agreement that would have slashed congestion on the Comcast-Cogent interconnects and reduced both of their costs dramatically. Comcast wasn't interested.
What Comcast wanted was payola to allow Netflix access to Comcast's subscriber base. Comcast didn't care if that came in the form of Netflix using a CDN (Content Delivery Network), who pay Comcast for interconnects, or for direct payments from Netflix. They just wanted their pound of flesh.
Incidentally, in 2014 Netflix made about 267 million dollars in profit. Comcast made over 8 billion. I don't know what Netfilx is paying Comcast, but it can't be more than a drop in the bucket that is Comcast's approximately 69 billion dollar annual revenue. I suspect this was more about hurting Netflix than it is about protecting their bottom line.
Here are some sources backing up the facts and figures.
http://www.marketwatch.com/inv...
http://www.marketwatch.com/inv...
https://gigaom.com/2013/11/11/...
http://www.multichannel.com/ne...
http://www.practicalecommerce....
I really don't see many cases where a RAID array is better than a drive like this, especially considering Intel's reputation and reliability ($100 256GB SSDs aren't going to be the best fault tolerant ones...).
I've gotten burned by an Intel SSD. The Intel 320's data loss bug bit me, and that was on a drive that had the firmware patch to fix the flaw.
Never trust a single drive. RAID array is always better because it give you a chance to recover from a disk failure. Then back that RAID array to external storage. Then back up the essential data to off-site storage. With this drive, buy two and do a software RAID-1. With write speed like this you will never notice the performance drop-off.
The cabling wouldn't be much of a mess if if you use something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
The connection it provided was stable and consistent as an internet connection, and they were very good about the SLA and were on top of outages. They were honestly the best ISP I've ever dealt with. But, we never used it for voice. I imagine they would not have been able to get away with that set up if we had wanted to use it for voice as well.
I felt a little ripped off when I saw how they were presenting us the T1 connection. I would have rather purchased internet access via bonded DSL lines than the pseudo T1 that we got, but it was not available to us at the time. I blame the local telco. I asked the phone company technician about it and he told me that they had basically stopped running T1 local loops whenever they could.