And with all the sympathy for the EFF and the fine work they're doing I just can't muster any empathy for the Grokster folks.
The supreme courts decision is a sound one. Those folks tried to freeload on the work of others and only thought of the "non-infringing use [ha!ha!]" when they where dragged to court.
Let me add that the direction copyright legislation is taking worldwide and specifically in the US is appaling, but that doesn't make it right to get rich quick on the expense of others.
Even if those others are such a depicable, rotten and corrupt organization as the RIAA.
I agree with just about every word you wrote, except this sentence:
I certainly do not want to be held to what I said then and I certainly don't want to be held to what I say right now 5 years from now.
Approaching my middle fourties I sure as hell did and say some shit, of which I'm not proud of. Nevertheless I stand by everything I said, ever!
That does certainly not mean that I wouldn't and haven't changed even strong opinions during the cause of my life. And it most certainly doesn't mean that I should be trialed for an act I perform now for things I said in the past.
In Mr. Cohens case I see it like this: The guy is a genius who graced the networked world with a real invention. This can and is put to a lot of good uses and it helps to save a lot of resources. And this has fuck all to do with anything that Mr. Cohen said seven years ago. Unfortunatelly the highly paid spin meisters will abuse this to the advantage of their masters.
Where I'm coming from: The right to free speech and free exchange of ideas is arguably our most precious right, but it demands the responsibility to stand behind what we say. That doesn't necessarily mean that anonymity doesn't have its place, but that's a whole other can of worms.
On a totally off topic side note: I want to publicly thank all librarians anywhere for being the most active and important guardians of this freedom.
So I could be sued (successfully) for copyright infringement even though I do not know that I am committing copyright infringement, *cannot* know that I am, and in fact do not have intentions to do so, either? Scary.
Yes this is correct and it is scary.
What's even more scary is the direction in which copyright laws are transforming. Kenneth Lay, ex-Enron CEO, will in all likeliness not spend one day in jail (yes: that's wild ass speculation on my side), while 12 year old teenies are supposed to be fined $150'000 per movie downloaded.
Something is severly, badly screwed with the direction copyright laws are taking, worldwide.
I do not condone wide spread, systematic coyright enfringement. I'd even wager that the Supreme Courts Grokster decision is sound. But that doesn't mean that the direction of copyright laws has even a resemblence of balance or reason.
I'm equally not a lawyer, but at least regarding the US you are unfortunately wrong.
In the US copyright is a so called strict liability law. This means that despite your intent to infringe on somebodies copyrights you get punished if you get sued; ignorant or not.
Intent may (or should) impact the severity of the punishment, but it's punishable nevertheless.
Other countries, as you state correctly, may differ.
You got that exactly right and it pisses me off to now end.
You can either have a tax on blank media for when ol' CaptainZapp transfers his or his friends CDs to more portable MP3 CDs or you can have copy protection on your media. But you can't have it both ways you fucking hypocrites!
The typical fine only punishes the poor. If you make enough money, paying a fine because you parked your car in a much more convenient place that happened to be a "no parking" zone is probably no big deal.
Thatswhy some countries, most notably Finland sets the amount of a fine relative to the earning power of the (er! for lack of a better word) criminal.
At 46 miles an hour, he didn't set any land speed records. But Nokia executive Anssa Vanjoki could set the record for the costliest ever speeding ticket--a $103 000 fine. He was fined for speeding on a motorcycle in a 31 mph zone on an island near Helsinki last October, chief police inspector Olli Yliskoski said.
More seriously, it makes good sense to me that they were retaining data for research purposes. They'd be irresponsible not to
Erm! They where explicitely prohibited by the credit card companies to retain this data. In addition (and to the best of my knowledge) it's an absolute no!no! to retain the security code at all.
What really, really pisses me off is that music swappers actually get jail time (at least when the entertainment leeches have their say) while absolutely nothing is bound to happen with those smelly wankers responsible for this gaffe, which affects far more people, alas the common man and a few ripped off merchants only.
You yanks have your judical priorities in a true, sorry disarray.
Hmm, not bad your method. But I think it can be improved for the benefit of the country, G^d and everyone:
Have hardcore spammers piss on the key logger thingie. This is specifically effective when the key logger thingie is close to the power supply thingie.
Nah, not really. You see it's cheaper for Citibank not having to bother with such inconvenient struggles as encryption and confidentiality or even [ghasp] an in-house courrier service for confidential material and as long they don't even get a slap on the wrist why should they care in the first place? Such unbelievable negligent behavior seems to make good business sense nowadays.
It's about time that such criminally negligent entities, such as Citibanks senior management - the fish stinks from the head, as we German speakers say - get slapped really, really hard; possibly even looking at actual jail time. But that's unlikely since they probably bribed enough politicos for such a thing never to happen.
Maybe an EU comission (Citibank is doing business in Europe) should start to ask a few really, really hard questions under threat of suspension of their banking license. Not that shit doesn't happen here, but privacy of the population seems to have a significant higher value here, then a few bucks saved by business.
I can only talk for Switzerland, but imagine that other Euro countries are comparable.
The car owner gets the fine. He has the option of paying up within 30 days, no questions asked. The process is (in theory) anonymous. I.e. the owner doesn't get registered for a traffic violation.
He has two other options:
Dispute the charge. Then the whole thing goes to court, where the photos will be produced. Since a photo is virtually always taken from the front the owner is SOL. This options is hugely more costly then just paying the fine.
On the back side of the fine is a form, which you can fill out, indicating who drove the car. You sign this form and if you lie then you're in even worse trouble then when you really take it to court.
Of course if it's a really bad violation (i.e. more then 25 km/h above limit within city limits, more then 1.5 seconds after the light turned red) you'll be talking to a judge either way.
Before cameras took your picture from both sides this was actually a usable defense. "A relative of mine drove it" and since you're not legally obliged to tattle on relatives this actually works. Now, if there's only one camera it's invariably in front.
The moral of the story is don't make a phone call if you run a red light or speed.
he fact that GATSO cameras take pictures of the rear of the vehicle means that it is probably difficult to use this excuse anyway as it doesn't clearly show the driver anyway.
We have those cameras for decades and the "I didn't drive, but I won't tell you who" was a time tested defense, which actually worked, since you are legallally not obliged to name the person, if its a direct relative.
The problem was easily solved: Most cameras now take your picture from both sides. If not the picture is always taken from the front.
Which is a double whammy if you're in the process of conducting a phone call without a hands free set. But then again it's good news for bikers:)
eg, camera bought 10 years ago didn't work this way
I don't think so. The city of Zurich uses red light (and speed) cameras for more then two decades and they always took two shots.
They have to, because if you stopped immediately, alas slightly in front of the sensors this is not a finable offense. The second foto is required to prove that the car/bike actually hit the red light.
Same reason for speed. Any damn technical device can claim that you where running Main Street with 220 mph. If you have two time stamped pictures however from a (calibrated) camera then you're just up shit creek with a "this thing is faulty" defense.
BTW: You don't get the fotos (privacy protection reasons, mainly) unless you challenge the fine.
What stuns me is that breathelyzer tests are actually admittable evidence.
In those sticks of the world where I come from breathelyzers are only used in case of suspicion. If the test proves positive then the cops will require a piss/blood sample, taken by a doctor or a nurse. This is the only permissable evidence in court
Of course you can refuse to pee into a yoghurt cup. That won't help you much, though since evading an ordered blood test is considered an admission of guilt and might get you slapped with additional fines for evading the procedure.
I'm not sure how this is applied throughout the rest of Europe, but my guess is that sentenses are based on _actual_ evidence and not on a machine of which its manufacturers assures us "that it works".
I am a big open source fan, but I can't disagree with this. Most open source applications are built as replacements for commercial applications.
So what exactly was it that products like sendmail, bind, apache, etc where copying from the closed source world? It also seems that Internet Explorer starts to rip off features, which where introduced with open source browsers. (Safe for Opera, but it was Firefox' success which finally convinced MS of tabed browsing and the implementation has yet to be seen).
I'd wager that the internet would be a duller place, would it solely be reliant on such engineering gems lik IIS and Exchange (which came later in the first place).
When I worked in FOREX software development for a Swiss bank from '87 - 90 I made a very different experience.
There was no way for any developer to get your hands on real customer data. You had to physically access the data center passing a couple of guarded security doors. Of course this would not happen unless you had proper authorization. You could not take any briefcase or even an envelope into the data center. It was absolutely verboten to take out even a scrap of paper and it's needless to say that a USB stick doesn't do you a lot of good with a Unisys 1100 and dumb terminals. The sytsems where completely isolated from the developer environment, which in itself was pretty well secured. Needless to say that every access was loged and provided strictly on a need to know basis.
There where also specific restrictions in the front office. For example: A normal teller could not look at accounts owned by bank employees without proper authorization from personel. PC's where never resold and the hard disks where shredded.
Yeah, it was a pretty restrictive environment and pissed us off on occasion. Searching through wades of data in a dark, cool and not very pleasent data center in a fortified building for hours on end isn't everybodies idea of fun. The difference with all that shit currently going on with US financial companies is probably that revealing bank customer data in Switzerland - intentional or not - is a criminal offense and the consequence is not just just the obligation to write a whoopsie, sorry letter, but actual jail time
Except that rebooting a computer takes around 2 minutes (maybe more if it's a heavy server. Restarting the DBMS (which is already cached in RAM, remember)
What database engine are you referring to? Most industrial strength database servers manage their cache themselves and when the server goes down, the cache of the database server is reinitialized from scratch.
In most cases a database server will indeed boot faster then the entire server, but the opposite is also possible. A database server deserving it's name has to do a host of recovery operations. When you're unlucky and it either crashed, or was shut down immediately recovery can take hours
Or could it be that you're talking out of your arse and don't have an actual clue whatsoever?
Not bollocks. Unfortunately, also not 50. Basically, you can bring back one box for personal consumption, if you're traveling legally as a US citizen. (this information true as of Jan. 2001 - if it has changed since then, I'm probably wrong)
Umm, actually I was wrong and per August 2004 you can legally import zilch, permit or not. This is straight from the the source (sorry, PDF). I quote:
There is now an across the board ban on the importation into the United States of Cuban-origin cigars and other Cuban-origin tobacco products, as well as most other products of Cuban origin. This prohibition extends to such products acquired in Cuba, irrespective of whether a traveler is licensed by OFAC to engage in Cuba travelrelated transactions, and to such products acquired in third countries by any U.S. traveler, including purchases at duty free shops. Importation of these Cuban goods is prohibited whether the goods are purchased directly by the importer or given to the importer as a gift. Similarly, the import ban extends to Cuban-origin tobacco products offered for sale over the Internet or through the catalog mail purchases. Prior to August 1, 2004, persons returning to the United States who were licensed under the Regulations to engage in Cuba travel-related transactions were authorized by general license to import up to $100 worth of Cuban merchandise as accompanied baggage. Cuban tobacco and alcohol products were included in that general license. That general license was removed from the Regulations.
But yeah, you can most certainly get them from a reliable oversea source, just not legally.
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The supreme courts decision is a sound one. Those folks tried to freeload on the work of others and only thought of the "non-infringing use [ha!ha!]" when they where dragged to court.
Let me add that the direction copyright legislation is taking worldwide and specifically in the US is appaling, but that doesn't make it right to get rich quick on the expense of others.
Even if those others are such a depicable, rotten and corrupt organization as the RIAA.
If you try really, really hard you can close the door on Jehovas Witnesses.
or an HTTP server
I really don't want to be a Windows apologist. But that one's about as simple as downloading Apache and double clicking an icon.
While I agree that installing OSX stuff (incl. X11, and I'm impressed) on my sweeties Power Book, this statement is pure hyperbole.
I certainly do not want to be held to what I said then and I certainly don't want to be held to what I say right now 5 years from now.
Approaching my middle fourties I sure as hell did and say some shit, of which I'm not proud of. Nevertheless I stand by everything I said, ever!
That does certainly not mean that I wouldn't and haven't changed even strong opinions during the cause of my life. And it most certainly doesn't mean that I should be trialed for an act I perform now for things I said in the past.
In Mr. Cohens case I see it like this: The guy is a genius who graced the networked world with a real invention. This can and is put to a lot of good uses and it helps to save a lot of resources. And this has fuck all to do with anything that Mr. Cohen said seven years ago. Unfortunatelly the highly paid spin meisters will abuse this to the advantage of their masters.
Where I'm coming from: The right to free speech and free exchange of ideas is arguably our most precious right, but it demands the responsibility to stand behind what we say. That doesn't necessarily mean that anonymity doesn't have its place, but that's a whole other can of worms.
On a totally off topic side note: I want to publicly thank all librarians anywhere for being the most active and important guardians of this freedom.
Thank you very much!
That was Swiss German.
Yes this is correct and it is scary.
What's even more scary is the direction in which copyright laws are transforming. Kenneth Lay, ex-Enron CEO, will in all likeliness not spend one day in jail (yes: that's wild ass speculation on my side), while 12 year old teenies are supposed to be fined $150'000 per movie downloaded .
Something is severly, badly screwed with the direction copyright laws are taking, worldwide.
I do not condone wide spread, systematic coyright enfringement. I'd even wager that the Supreme Courts Grokster decision is sound. But that doesn't mean that the direction of copyright laws has even a resemblence of balance or reason.
In the US copyright is a so called strict liability law. This means that despite your intent to infringe on somebodies copyrights you get punished if you get sued; ignorant or not.
Intent may (or should) impact the severity of the punishment, but it's punishable nevertheless.
Other countries, as you state correctly, may differ.
You can either have a tax on blank media for when ol' CaptainZapp transfers his or his friends CDs to more portable MP3 CDs or you can have copy protection on your media. But you can't have it both ways you fucking hypocrites!
Now stöp insülting us germän späkers, you insensitive clöd!
Thatswhy some countries, most notably Finland sets the amount of a fine relative to the earning power of the (er! for lack of a better word) criminal.
Here's a link providing examples. I quote:
At 46 miles an hour, he didn't set any land speed records. But Nokia executive Anssa Vanjoki could set the record for the costliest ever speeding ticket--a $103 000 fine. He was fined for speeding on a motorcycle in a 31 mph zone on an island near Helsinki last October, chief police inspector Olli Yliskoski said.
Erm! They where explicitely prohibited by the credit card companies to retain this data. In addition (and to the best of my knowledge) it's an absolute no!no! to retain the security code at all.
What really, really pisses me off is that music swappers actually get jail time (at least when the entertainment leeches have their say) while absolutely nothing is bound to happen with those smelly wankers responsible for this gaffe, which affects far more people, alas the common man and a few ripped off merchants only.
You yanks have your judical priorities in a true, sorry disarray.
Have hardcore spammers piss on the key logger thingie. This is specifically effective when the key logger thingie is close to the power supply thingie.
Not to break your enthusiasm, but when you need an industry strength database engine Sybase can do better then that.
Their flagship product is available completely free of charge for the Linux platform.
Free as in beer that is and some restrictions apply:
- A maximum of 1 engine (CPU) configurable
- Maximum data storage of 5GB
- Maximum 2GB of total memory configured
Else then that you're completely free to use it in a productive environment and for a lot of such environments the restrictions are quite adequate.And no, I don't work for them (since 1999), but still think it's a good product.
Nah, not really. You see it's cheaper for Citibank not having to bother with such inconvenient struggles as encryption and confidentiality or even [ghasp] an in-house courrier service for confidential material and as long they don't even get a slap on the wrist why should they care in the first place? Such unbelievable negligent behavior seems to make good business sense nowadays.
It's about time that such criminally negligent entities, such as Citibanks senior management - the fish stinks from the head, as we German speakers say - get slapped really, really hard; possibly even looking at actual jail time. But that's unlikely since they probably bribed enough politicos for such a thing never to happen.
Maybe an EU comission (Citibank is doing business in Europe) should start to ask a few really, really hard questions under threat of suspension of their banking license. Not that shit doesn't happen here, but privacy of the population seems to have a significant higher value here, then a few bucks saved by business.
The car owner gets the fine. He has the option of paying up within 30 days, no questions asked. The process is (in theory) anonymous. I.e. the owner doesn't get registered for a traffic violation.
He has two other options:
- Dispute the charge. Then the whole thing goes to court, where the photos will be produced. Since a photo is virtually always taken from the front the owner is SOL. This options is hugely more costly then just paying the fine.
- On the back side of the fine is a form, which you can fill out, indicating who drove the car. You sign this form and if you lie then you're in even worse trouble then when you really take it to court.
Of course if it's a really bad violation (i.e. more then 25 km/h above limit within city limits, more then 1.5 seconds after the light turned red) you'll be talking to a judge either way.Before cameras took your picture from both sides this was actually a usable defense. "A relative of mine drove it" and since you're not legally obliged to tattle on relatives this actually works. Now, if there's only one camera it's invariably in front.
The moral of the story is don't make a phone call if you run a red light or speed.
We have those cameras for decades and the "I didn't drive, but I won't tell you who" was a time tested defense, which actually worked, since you are legallally not obliged to name the person, if its a direct relative.
The problem was easily solved: Most cameras now take your picture from both sides. If not the picture is always taken from the front.
Which is a double whammy if you're in the process of conducting a phone call without a hands free set. But then again it's good news for bikers :)
I don't think so. The city of Zurich uses red light (and speed) cameras for more then two decades and they always took two shots.
They have to, because if you stopped immediately, alas slightly in front of the sensors this is not a finable offense. The second foto is required to prove that the car/bike actually hit the red light.
Same reason for speed. Any damn technical device can claim that you where running Main Street with 220 mph. If you have two time stamped pictures however from a (calibrated) camera then you're just up shit creek with a "this thing is faulty" defense.
BTW: You don't get the fotos (privacy protection reasons, mainly) unless you challenge the fine.
In those sticks of the world where I come from breathelyzers are only used in case of suspicion. If the test proves positive then the cops will require a piss/blood sample, taken by a doctor or a nurse. This is the only permissable evidence in court
Of course you can refuse to pee into a yoghurt cup. That won't help you much, though since evading an ordered blood test is considered an admission of guilt and might get you slapped with additional fines for evading the procedure.
I'm not sure how this is applied throughout the rest of Europe, but my guess is that sentenses are based on _actual_ evidence and not on a machine of which its manufacturers assures us "that it works".
From testing it on my own box: Most definitely yes.
Provided that you have enough RAM, you can use the
knoppix toram
boot option.
It may take a minute longer to boot, but you won't hear back from your CD drive.
So what exactly was it that products like sendmail, bind, apache, etc where copying from the closed source world? It also seems that Internet Explorer starts to rip off features, which where introduced with open source browsers. (Safe for Opera, but it was Firefox' success which finally convinced MS of tabed browsing and the implementation has yet to be seen).
I'd wager that the internet would be a duller place, would it solely be reliant on such engineering gems lik IIS and Exchange (which came later in the first place).
There was no way for any developer to get your hands on real customer data. You had to physically access the data center passing a couple of guarded security doors. Of course this would not happen unless you had proper authorization. You could not take any briefcase or even an envelope into the data center. It was absolutely verboten to take out even a scrap of paper and it's needless to say that a USB stick doesn't do you a lot of good with a Unisys 1100 and dumb terminals. The sytsems where completely isolated from the developer environment, which in itself was pretty well secured. Needless to say that every access was loged and provided strictly on a need to know basis.
There where also specific restrictions in the front office. For example: A normal teller could not look at accounts owned by bank employees without proper authorization from personel. PC's where never resold and the hard disks where shredded.
Yeah, it was a pretty restrictive environment and pissed us off on occasion. Searching through wades of data in a dark, cool and not very pleasent data center in a fortified building for hours on end isn't everybodies idea of fun. The difference with all that shit currently going on with US financial companies is probably that revealing bank customer data in Switzerland - intentional or not - is a criminal offense and the consequence is not just just the obligation to write a whoopsie, sorry letter, but actual jail time
What database engine are you referring to? Most industrial strength database servers manage their cache themselves and when the server goes down, the cache of the database server is reinitialized from scratch.
In most cases a database server will indeed boot faster then the entire server, but the opposite is also possible. A database server deserving it's name has to do a host of recovery operations. When you're unlucky and it either crashed, or was shut down immediately recovery can take hours
Or could it be that you're talking out of your arse and don't have an actual clue whatsoever?
Umm, actually I was wrong and per August 2004 you can legally import zilch, permit or not. This is straight from the the source (sorry, PDF). I quote:
There is now an across the board ban on the importation into the United States of Cuban-origin cigars and other Cuban-origin tobacco products, as well as most other products of Cuban origin. This prohibition extends to such products acquired in Cuba, irrespective of whether a traveler is licensed by OFAC to engage in Cuba travelrelated transactions, and to such products acquired in third countries by any U.S. traveler, including purchases at duty free shops. Importation of these Cuban goods is prohibited whether the goods are purchased directly by the importer or given to the importer as a gift. Similarly, the import ban extends to Cuban-origin tobacco products offered for sale over the Internet or through the catalog mail purchases. Prior to August 1, 2004, persons returning to the United States who were licensed under the Regulations to engage in Cuba travel-related transactions were authorized by general license to import up to $100 worth of Cuban merchandise as accompanied baggage. Cuban tobacco and alcohol products were included in that general license. That general license was removed from the Regulations.
But yeah, you can most certainly get them from a reliable oversea source, just not legally.
I agree; it's a crying shame!