"have a couple of universally available databases, one of email
addresses which have expressed a wish not to receive any automated
email,"
The problem with that is that people can use that database to spam
people. Sure you propose a second blacklist database to catch those
offenders, but I don't think that'd be significantly different from
the blacklists of today.
My alternative would be to make the opt-out database contain md5
hashes of the addresses of people who don't wish to receive mail.
That way 'bob@example.com' can submit his address as
'4b9bb80620f03eb3719e0a061c14283d'. The only people who know that
'bob@example.com' is even in the database are those who already have
his email address and can md5 it themself.
As an added bonus, you can even implement rudimentary wildcard
support. This would require the bulk of the effort to be done
client-side, however. The client would have to md5 each possible
wildcard entry that it is looking for ('*@example.com',
'b*@example.com', 'bo*@example.com', 'bob*@example.com'), so things
might get a little tricky. You would be limited in what form of
wildcard was supported, unless you want the number of entries to check
to become unwieldy. Also, you could also include wildcards on the
host side, but again it would require carefully enumerating all the
supported wildcards. Finally, you'd have to come up with an escaping
scheme to make sure that the wildcard character doesn't clash with
valid email addresses.
"In the vast majority of cases, the library has 1 copy of the book,
and you're the only one interested in it (at least that
month)."
It depends on the book. If the demand for a book is great, either the
library has to buy more copies, people have to buy their own copies,
or people have to wait. Because the library is ineffective when it
comes to popular books, people tend to use them only for older, less
popular works. These also tend to be works that're "past their prime"
from a money-making standpoint, as well.
In the Napster-like cases, EVERYTHING is up for grabs.
Furthermore, the more popular a song is, the easier it'll be to find
it. Hot new single topping the charts? You'll be able to download it
from a dozen or more users.
"Look at libraries! how dare we napsterize the publishing industry
like that."
Nice straw man. With a library, the number of overall copies of a given work never varies from what was purchased. If people don't want to wait for a popular item to be available or if people want to hold on to the work, they have to purchase their own copies. With Napster, a single purchased CD can be converted into files that're concurrently possessed and used by hundreds or thousands of people.
"I would argue that the likelihood of someone guessing
"8juep001@sneakemail.com" as a valid address is much lower than some
sleazy company not holding your E-mail address with sufficient
security to prevent harvesting."
While spammers obviously do name guessing and such, that isn't
necessarily the case here. The poster who you originally replied to
mentioned creating a hotmail account and checking it from cybercafes
in Portugal. The poster then began to receive Portugese language
spams.
Now if this had been an attack purely on the server, I doubt the spams
would've coincided with the country that that person was visiting.
Instead, it seems to point to the address being harvested by the
cybercafe or the cybercafe's ISP, neither of whom would be suspects
under regular circumstances.
Throughout this, the only security lapse on the part of the company
you've labelled as being sleazy is that they didn't use encryption for
email address submission. And while it sounds good for them to
implement as much security as possible, it's hard to justify the extra
effort when SMTP requires that the address goes back out over the wire
in plaintext format, anyway.
"And why should it cost hundreds of dollars when it's cheaper to
produce a CD then it is to produce a paper book?"
I think you've got it all wrong. Burning pre-existing data on a CD is
cheap. Producing a CD -- going from an empty source repository to the
finished CD that you buy in the store -- that's what takes money. A
novel is the end-result of a year (or less) of effort by a single
person. Most commercial software is the end-result of a year or more
of work by an entire team of highly skilled people.
Except that in this case, the problem seems to be people sniffing your
email address rather than receiving in directly. Knowing who you gave
a compromised address to doesn't help you any if it's an eavesdropping
third-party who compromises it. Even worse, it may cause you to
erroneously suspect an innocent party of giving out your address.
"Now I hope that a USA Citizen tells them that they are encouraging
something that is outlawed by the DMCA."
I don't see how this is the case. If you're only notifying the
company that makes the product (as was requested by the advisor), then
you aren't DISTRIBUTING a circumvention device.
"I guess he didn't want to be identified because he makes such
gross generializations about everybody... not everybody steals music
(I don't)."
Are you delusional? The person quoted seems to only making a
generalization about the script kiddies that DoSed the site. That you
would compare the RIAA making a generalization about people engaged in
a criminal activity to other forms of stereotyping and prejudice is
absurd.
If you were engaged in the DoS attack against the RIAA but don't steal
music, I'm sure the RIAA will happily issue a formal apology to you.
Just send them a polite letter explaining the situation, and be sure
to include your return address so they can respond.
Re:Media Addiction is really just Entertainment
on
Borrowing ROMs
·
· Score: 2
"These are things that are being taken away (or at least they are TRYING to take them away)."
I think it's more that they're collateral damage in the battle against piracy. You've got people screaming for fair use and then turning around and "loaning" multiple copies to a few thousand of their closest "friends" on P2P services.
Re:Is a cartridge an access control device
on
Borrowing ROMs
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"But does a form factor and a pin assignment count as copy
protection?"
All Nintendo has to do is say that it was intended as such. As an
added bonus, the catridge format had the advantage of being a fairly
effective form of copy protection, especially in a non-emulated
context. Sure it was bypassable, but the mechanisms for bypassing
cartridge-based protection tended to be fairly elaborate. In
contrast, the Dreamcast protection was almost non-existent (with an
unmodified Dreamcast being able to boot cracked, burned games) and the
Playstation's protection was a bit better (requiring a mod chip).
Re:Media Addiction is really just Entertainment
on
Borrowing ROMs
·
· Score: 2
"We're pissed off because they are trying to sell us things we
want, without giving us full control over those things after we've
purchased them."
Interesting point. Would you be willing really be willing to purchase a movie under that system? Take, for instance, Lord of the Rings (which you mentioned in your post as appreciating). Adding a modest 4% profit to its cost, we come up with $113 million. Plus an extra few bucks for the media it comes on.
There's a reason why companies merely sell licenses to a copy of a work rather than the work itself -- it'd be too expensive otherwise. The alternative is that our legal system allows a company to create a work and then (possibly) recover the cost of that work from the people who wants copies of it. But you aren't buying the work itself, because you (for values of "you" covering the majority of people in the world) don't have that much money.
Re:Changes the dynamic of the business
on
Borrowing ROMs
·
· Score: 2
"The library has no way of ensuring the borrowing deletes the
installed copy after he/she is done checking it out."
True. But this case is slightly different. The "library" in this
case is actively bypassing the manufacturer-produced copy protection
(the console format) and is providing it to the end-user with their
own protection method of unknown quality. Should the "library's"
replacement copy protection turn out to be inferior to the original
protection, they at least partially facilitated the piracy.
Re:Changes the dynamic of the business
on
Borrowing ROMs
·
· Score: 2
"Yeah, look at the whining by authors about Amazon selling used
books."
Yes, but the authors were actively referring people to Amazon, only to
have Amazon switch it to a sale that wasn't netting the author a
regular royalty. Amazon may be free to sell used books, but authors
are also free to pick and choose which book sellers they promote.
I think this is the key point. Can Italian law authorize the Italian
Police to access a resource owned by a person in Italy (who is
probably a citzen), when that resource is located outside the country?
It's my contention that the answer would be yes, simply because the
intangible concept of owning the site resides within the owner
himself, which would allow for jurisdiction.
"A reboot is "only slightly more convenient" than a system
restore?"
Assuming that you've good a nice, current filesystem backup that you
can send over the network to reimage the machine, sure. I think the
same people who would jump through the hoops of setting up this
dual-access harddrive are the same people who would have an existing,
easy solution on hand, anyway.
It seems a malicious user could still attempt to serve defaced pages
off of a ram disk on the compromised machine. Yes, a reboot will fix
the problem, but that's only slightly more convenient than restoring a
compromised system from backups. Furthermore, I suspect that the
read-only harddrive would encourage admins to become lazier with
regard to applying server patches, since the system would be perceived
as "secure".
"A public school system in a country that values democracy and free
speech filters its web access,"
Not only that, but the school library doesn't carry back issues of
Playboy. Someone should write to Congress and protest this egregious
oversight. It's clear that their failure to carry this fine literary
magazine is part of a draconian effort to silence its political
messages.
"Filters in schools are put in place primarily to prevent students
from accidentally accessing some content that the parents may sue
over."
Accidentally? Bull. If that were the case, then the filtering
software would allow the student the option of immediately overriding
it. If, say, a student were surfing Slashdot and accidentally clicked
on a hidden porn link, they'd get a window explaining that the site is
blocked for sexual content. Then they'd click a confirmation button
(or even have to type out "allow site" to prevent accidental clicks),
and they'd be able to surf the site. But that's not how it works.
"Now you could say "Trademarks and Patents are two different things" but they are really aren't."
I think the reason why patent holders don't have to immediately prosecute is that patents are considered less readily visible than trademarks. For example, if another company opens a burger chain named "McDonalds", a lot of people are going to notice. If, on the other hand, a company infringes on McDonalds' (made up) patent for cooking a hamburger for 98.742 seconds, it might take awhile for it to become known.
In short, it takes 30 seconds to find out what someone is publically calling themself, but it can take considerably longer to reverse engineer one of their products. IP protection/enforcement laws seem to reflect this disparity.
That being said, I do think that something has to be done about people pulling the submarine patent non-sense. But I still think you'd be doing a disservice to treat this IP identically, as there are differences. Heck, even the length that the IP exists is different in both cases (as patents need to have a fixed life while trademarks should continue as long as the manufacturer makes the product; there's no compelling reason to suddenly declare that anyone can make a car called a Ford simply because it's been XX years since Ford began using the trademark).
"Is it just the framerate or is there something else?"
I think it was a combination of framerate and definition. The 3D accelerated stuff just wasn't as fuzzy.
And I had forgotten about GLquake. I didn't have a 3D card until Quake II was the hot thing out, and GLquake was hackish enough that I didn't bother with it.
"a game doesn't stop being fun because newer games come out with flashier graphics!"
Funny you should say this with respect to a 3D first-person shooter. They're one of the few cases where there was an undeniable, pressing need for better graphics -- reducing motion sickness.
Back in the Wolf3D days, I could barely play for half an hour before becoming ill. Quake was a little better. But it wasn't until the 3D accelerated FPS games that I could play such games non-stop (hooray for being able to blow a weekend on TFC).
"The counter is simple. You simply don't have a right to profit."
That doesn't really work. I'm still violating the GPL if a give away a binary-only release of a piece of GPL'd software. On the other hand, I can theoretically profit off selling a piece of GPL'd software, as long as I make the source available and don't try and prohibit redistriubtion.
"The point is that filesharing isn't evil, as the RIAA seems to try
to make it sound."
You've lost me. The RIAA has primarily villified P2P filesharing services, which tend to use the horde effect to make it difficult to identify and stop individual copyright violators. The example this point uses is just a website serving up files in compliance with the copyright holder's licensing demands (specifically, "You can stream these 3 files from your website."). I don't see how that changes the filesharing issue at all.
"Which would you rather give money to?"
Funny you should mention freeware versus nagware. I don't have the
details handy, but I seem to recall a study mentioned on Slashdot
about how the more obnoxious a shareware program was, the higher the
registration rate.
"What's this? You can share your music AND make money. And I
thought the RIAA was telling the truth."
Way to quote it out of context. The text you're quoting is with
respect to sharing 3 songs on the Washington Post site. 3 songs that
were chosen by the copyright holder (presumably the band, given that
they're unsigned). Not their entire album. Not whatever 3 songs a
random P2P user chooses.
Guess what? This is the exact same thing that RIAA acts do, too.
Take, for example, Linkin Park. They're big right now, they're signed
with Warner Bros. Records, they're on the radio a lot, they're showing
up on MTV. You don't get much more RIAA than that.
Yet on mp3.com, they've got their own page
with FOUR songs available for anyone to download. That's a
whole song more than the band interviewed by Roblimo. But still, it
comes back to the fact that it's 4 songs that the copyright holder
chose to release. It's only the songs they pick, and it's certainly
not the entire CD.
Arguing that giving away a few songs from a CD validates unrestricted
P2P filesharing is like arguing that a free demo of the first few
levels of a game validates piracy. It's up to the copyright holder to
decide how much freebie/give-away advertising to use to promote the
product before it starts to cut into sales.
"Could it be that local bands can afford to share a few songs since
it is very unlikely that many people have ripped their entire
CD."
I'll go one step further than that. I suspect that most local bands
are so starved for exposure, that they'd be willing to sell their CDs
at (distribution) cost, if they were guaranteed a large enough
audience. P2P sharing is essentially doing just that.
Of course at some point, the opportunity cost of giving away
all their work will exceed the benefit. Unfortunately, P2P
sharing doesn't give them the option to cut back on what gets shared.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that is that people can use that database to spam people. Sure you propose a second blacklist database to catch those offenders, but I don't think that'd be significantly different from the blacklists of today.
My alternative would be to make the opt-out database contain md5 hashes of the addresses of people who don't wish to receive mail. That way 'bob@example.com' can submit his address as '4b9bb80620f03eb3719e0a061c14283d'. The only people who know that 'bob@example.com' is even in the database are those who already have his email address and can md5 it themself.
As an added bonus, you can even implement rudimentary wildcard support. This would require the bulk of the effort to be done client-side, however. The client would have to md5 each possible wildcard entry that it is looking for ('*@example.com', 'b*@example.com', 'bo*@example.com', 'bob*@example.com'), so things might get a little tricky. You would be limited in what form of wildcard was supported, unless you want the number of entries to check to become unwieldy. Also, you could also include wildcards on the host side, but again it would require carefully enumerating all the supported wildcards. Finally, you'd have to come up with an escaping scheme to make sure that the wildcard character doesn't clash with valid email addresses.
It depends on the book. If the demand for a book is great, either the library has to buy more copies, people have to buy their own copies, or people have to wait. Because the library is ineffective when it comes to popular books, people tend to use them only for older, less popular works. These also tend to be works that're "past their prime" from a money-making standpoint, as well.
In the Napster-like cases, EVERYTHING is up for grabs. Furthermore, the more popular a song is, the easier it'll be to find it. Hot new single topping the charts? You'll be able to download it from a dozen or more users.
Nice straw man. With a library, the number of overall copies of a given work never varies from what was purchased. If people don't want to wait for a popular item to be available or if people want to hold on to the work, they have to purchase their own copies. With Napster, a single purchased CD can be converted into files that're concurrently possessed and used by hundreds or thousands of people.
While spammers obviously do name guessing and such, that isn't necessarily the case here. The poster who you originally replied to mentioned creating a hotmail account and checking it from cybercafes in Portugal. The poster then began to receive Portugese language spams.
Now if this had been an attack purely on the server, I doubt the spams would've coincided with the country that that person was visiting. Instead, it seems to point to the address being harvested by the cybercafe or the cybercafe's ISP, neither of whom would be suspects under regular circumstances.
Throughout this, the only security lapse on the part of the company you've labelled as being sleazy is that they didn't use encryption for email address submission. And while it sounds good for them to implement as much security as possible, it's hard to justify the extra effort when SMTP requires that the address goes back out over the wire in plaintext format, anyway.
I think you've got it all wrong. Burning pre-existing data on a CD is cheap. Producing a CD -- going from an empty source repository to the finished CD that you buy in the store -- that's what takes money. A novel is the end-result of a year (or less) of effort by a single person. Most commercial software is the end-result of a year or more of work by an entire team of highly skilled people.
Except that in this case, the problem seems to be people sniffing your email address rather than receiving in directly. Knowing who you gave a compromised address to doesn't help you any if it's an eavesdropping third-party who compromises it. Even worse, it may cause you to erroneously suspect an innocent party of giving out your address.
I don't see how this is the case. If you're only notifying the company that makes the product (as was requested by the advisor), then you aren't DISTRIBUTING a circumvention device.
Are you delusional? The person quoted seems to only making a generalization about the script kiddies that DoSed the site. That you would compare the RIAA making a generalization about people engaged in a criminal activity to other forms of stereotyping and prejudice is absurd.
If you were engaged in the DoS attack against the RIAA but don't steal music, I'm sure the RIAA will happily issue a formal apology to you. Just send them a polite letter explaining the situation, and be sure to include your return address so they can respond.
I think it's more that they're collateral damage in the battle against piracy. You've got people screaming for fair use and then turning around and "loaning" multiple copies to a few thousand of their closest "friends" on P2P services.
All Nintendo has to do is say that it was intended as such. As an added bonus, the catridge format had the advantage of being a fairly effective form of copy protection, especially in a non-emulated context. Sure it was bypassable, but the mechanisms for bypassing cartridge-based protection tended to be fairly elaborate. In contrast, the Dreamcast protection was almost non-existent (with an unmodified Dreamcast being able to boot cracked, burned games) and the Playstation's protection was a bit better (requiring a mod chip).
Interesting point. Would you be willing really be willing to purchase a movie under that system? Take, for instance, Lord of the Rings (which you mentioned in your post as appreciating). Adding a modest 4% profit to its cost, we come up with $113 million. Plus an extra few bucks for the media it comes on.
There's a reason why companies merely sell licenses to a copy of a work rather than the work itself -- it'd be too expensive otherwise. The alternative is that our legal system allows a company to create a work and then (possibly) recover the cost of that work from the people who wants copies of it. But you aren't buying the work itself, because you (for values of "you" covering the majority of people in the world) don't have that much money.
True. But this case is slightly different. The "library" in this case is actively bypassing the manufacturer-produced copy protection (the console format) and is providing it to the end-user with their own protection method of unknown quality. Should the "library's" replacement copy protection turn out to be inferior to the original protection, they at least partially facilitated the piracy.
Yes, but the authors were actively referring people to Amazon, only to have Amazon switch it to a sale that wasn't netting the author a regular royalty. Amazon may be free to sell used books, but authors are also free to pick and choose which book sellers they promote.
I think this is the key point. Can Italian law authorize the Italian Police to access a resource owned by a person in Italy (who is probably a citzen), when that resource is located outside the country? It's my contention that the answer would be yes, simply because the intangible concept of owning the site resides within the owner himself, which would allow for jurisdiction.
Assuming that you've good a nice, current filesystem backup that you can send over the network to reimage the machine, sure. I think the same people who would jump through the hoops of setting up this dual-access harddrive are the same people who would have an existing, easy solution on hand, anyway.
It seems a malicious user could still attempt to serve defaced pages off of a ram disk on the compromised machine. Yes, a reboot will fix the problem, but that's only slightly more convenient than restoring a compromised system from backups. Furthermore, I suspect that the read-only harddrive would encourage admins to become lazier with regard to applying server patches, since the system would be perceived as "secure".
Not only that, but the school library doesn't carry back issues of Playboy. Someone should write to Congress and protest this egregious oversight. It's clear that their failure to carry this fine literary magazine is part of a draconian effort to silence its political messages.
Accidentally? Bull. If that were the case, then the filtering software would allow the student the option of immediately overriding it. If, say, a student were surfing Slashdot and accidentally clicked on a hidden porn link, they'd get a window explaining that the site is blocked for sexual content. Then they'd click a confirmation button (or even have to type out "allow site" to prevent accidental clicks), and they'd be able to surf the site. But that's not how it works.
I think the reason why patent holders don't have to immediately prosecute is that patents are considered less readily visible than trademarks. For example, if another company opens a burger chain named "McDonalds", a lot of people are going to notice. If, on the other hand, a company infringes on McDonalds' (made up) patent for cooking a hamburger for 98.742 seconds, it might take awhile for it to become known.
In short, it takes 30 seconds to find out what someone is publically calling themself, but it can take considerably longer to reverse engineer one of their products. IP protection/enforcement laws seem to reflect this disparity.
That being said, I do think that something has to be done about people pulling the submarine patent non-sense. But I still think you'd be doing a disservice to treat this IP identically, as there are differences. Heck, even the length that the IP exists is different in both cases (as patents need to have a fixed life while trademarks should continue as long as the manufacturer makes the product; there's no compelling reason to suddenly declare that anyone can make a car called a Ford simply because it's been XX years since Ford began using the trademark).
I think it was a combination of framerate and definition. The 3D accelerated stuff just wasn't as fuzzy.
And I had forgotten about GLquake. I didn't have a 3D card until Quake II was the hot thing out, and GLquake was hackish enough that I didn't bother with it.
Funny you should say this with respect to a 3D first-person shooter. They're one of the few cases where there was an undeniable, pressing need for better graphics -- reducing motion sickness.
Back in the Wolf3D days, I could barely play for half an hour before becoming ill. Quake was a little better. But it wasn't until the 3D accelerated FPS games that I could play such games non-stop (hooray for being able to blow a weekend on TFC).
That doesn't really work. I'm still violating the GPL if a give away a binary-only release of a piece of GPL'd software. On the other hand, I can theoretically profit off selling a piece of GPL'd software, as long as I make the source available and don't try and prohibit redistriubtion.
You've lost me. The RIAA has primarily villified P2P filesharing services, which tend to use the horde effect to make it difficult to identify and stop individual copyright violators. The example this point uses is just a website serving up files in compliance with the copyright holder's licensing demands (specifically, "You can stream these 3 files from your website."). I don't see how that changes the filesharing issue at all. "Which would you rather give money to?"
Funny you should mention freeware versus nagware. I don't have the details handy, but I seem to recall a study mentioned on Slashdot about how the more obnoxious a shareware program was, the higher the registration rate.
Way to quote it out of context. The text you're quoting is with respect to sharing 3 songs on the Washington Post site. 3 songs that were chosen by the copyright holder (presumably the band, given that they're unsigned). Not their entire album. Not whatever 3 songs a random P2P user chooses.
Guess what? This is the exact same thing that RIAA acts do, too. Take, for example, Linkin Park. They're big right now, they're signed with Warner Bros. Records, they're on the radio a lot, they're showing up on MTV. You don't get much more RIAA than that.
Yet on mp3.com, they've got their own page with FOUR songs available for anyone to download. That's a whole song more than the band interviewed by Roblimo. But still, it comes back to the fact that it's 4 songs that the copyright holder chose to release. It's only the songs they pick, and it's certainly not the entire CD.
Arguing that giving away a few songs from a CD validates unrestricted P2P filesharing is like arguing that a free demo of the first few levels of a game validates piracy. It's up to the copyright holder to decide how much freebie/give-away advertising to use to promote the product before it starts to cut into sales.
I'll go one step further than that. I suspect that most local bands are so starved for exposure, that they'd be willing to sell their CDs at (distribution) cost, if they were guaranteed a large enough audience. P2P sharing is essentially doing just that.
Of course at some point, the opportunity cost of giving away all their work will exceed the benefit. Unfortunately, P2P sharing doesn't give them the option to cut back on what gets shared.