"So Tivo sucks because it allows you to skip past the
commercials?"
There's a difference between fast-forwarding through a commercial and completely skipping it. With my Tivo, I've been known to go back and watch commercials that catch my eye (with the added benefit that a lower level of "advertising fatigue" makes me more intent when I do watch an ad).
In this case, Gator would be like the latest lawsuit-laden ReplayTV units which feature an automatic commercial jump that almost completely removes the commercials from the broadcast. Even then, Gator's still a step worse in that it's mostly doing its activities without user awareness.
"Imagine a 3rd-party system which keeps track of the audio fingerprint for a known "good" copy of a song. Then somebody could fingerprint their version of the song through the 3rd-party verification system."
The spoofers could still send the fingerprint of the good version before sending the bad version. Unless the service does several individual fingerprints on different parts of the mp3, the client would have to download the entire thing before being able to determine whether or not it's bad.
Even better, the presence of the database could serve as an authoritative source for filtering copyright protected content from P2P networks. If the RIAA can point to the "Good Musickeeping" database as a means of reliably determining what a song is, they can use legal muscle to get P2P networks to check against it.
What're you talking about? The article clearly states, "it would forbid those holders from employing tactics that would damage or destroy pirates' own computer systems."
Sounds like all the RIAA is doing is offering up crap to people who ask for their songs. (And I'm sure someone will want to make the obvious joke about there being no difference, so I'm beating you to the punch.)
"Pop quiz: Who do I get to sue? Who do I get to sue?"
No one. If you'd read the article, you'd know that it appears to be a bad content and/or slow download DoS, not your typical "ping flood"-type DoS. In short, your neighbor will be downloading songs that aren't what he was looking for, it'll take him longer, and your bandwidth will be just fine.
"Who's to say that my garage band's copyrighted work isn't being pirated, we'd betterd DoS them to make sure"
Try re-reading the article. All it's saying is that you can offer up a fake version of "(your garage band)-(your hit).mp3". It's not carte blanche to take down the P2P server or even other users sharing your file.
It appears like this only makes it permissible for copyright holders to set up decoy songs. So it'd no longer be illegal (it was illegal before?) for them to put up mp3s with the names of RIAA-protected artists that're really just noise. In short, no big deal, as far as I can tell.
Everyone who has already knee-jerked at the Slashdot summary and decided that this means the RIAA can start ping-flooding people on P2P networks needs to read the article.
"the internet means piracy, which means profits go down. at least
that is the 'company line'. actually the real reason is the record
companies like the CONTROL they have over radio."
While you use the notion of control to further the concept of record
companies selectively promoting artists, I'd like to propose a
slightly different control -- control over which part of an artist's
work gets shared.
In the realm of Internet copyright infringement, there's nothing to
restrict the sharer from offering up an entire album. As connection
speeds rise, harddrives get bigger, P2P technologies mature, and audio
standards get more efficient, it's only going to get easier for people
to get entire albums quickly and easily. Throw a CD burner into the
mix, and you've severely undercut the desirability of the store-bought
product.
But really, if it's all about the RIAA trying to restrict what acts
get exposure then all someone has to do is create a service that
provides free exposure for any material that the copyright holder has
granted redistribution permission for. The RIAA can say "Don't share
Metallica songs." The RIAA can't say "Don't share 'Erasmus Darwin
Sings the Blues'."
The only tricky part is coming up with a technical solution that
provides enough accountability in the case of someone attempting to
use it illegally. By being able to explicitly defer accountability on
to someone else (and not trying to play the accountability shell game
that the P2P services tended to enjoy), I believe you could build a
service that promoted new artists and one which wouldn't give the RIAA
legitimate ground on which to complain.
Try using both a CD burner to pirate a music CD and a photocopier to
pirate a book. If you have any moral qualms over doing this, you can
immediately destroy the duplicate -- we're doing this just to
understand a point.
When you're done, you should notice some substantial differences in
cost, effort required, and quality of the resulting copies between the
CD burner and the photocopier. Those are more than enough to make the
latter infeasible for most piracy uses.
Does the Xbox even have the hardware necessary to do the Tivo thing? Assuming that Microsoft already has a TV tuner and a means of encoding/decoding the television stream, you'd still need to worry about the 10 gig harddrive -- that sucks by PVR standards.
And then there's still getting programming data (which I suppose you could scrape from an online television guide site), writing all the software, and having to worry about having your Xbox on (and not playing games) when you want to record a show.
"Don't look for music online, unless you're willing to obtain it
illegally."
Call me crazy, but I was under the impression that just as you can find both legally and illegally distributed software online and just as you can find both legally and illegally distributed books online, you can find both legally and illegally distributed music online.
Mp3.com comes to mind as a place where you can download legally distributed music for free. Emusic.com appears to be legally distributing mp3s for a fee.
I'm sure the music traded on venues such as Kazaa or IRC is more likely to be illegally distributed, but to characterize all online music as being illegal is absurd.
"it's the shoppers, the family-values crowd. They aren't as small a
minority as you might think. They are the 15% who don't buy magazines
(TIME, Rolling Stone, whatever) that offend them."
You're mistakenly assuming that all Wal-mart customers are people who
shop their because they share the same family-value belief. There are
many other reasons why people might shop at Wal-mart including price,
convenience, and selection.
Linux emulation of Windows is making some impressive strides, but we
all know that claim was a bit out there. Hell people commented on it
back in the original story. John Q. Enduser wouldn't have been happy
when his random, off-the-shelf Windows software didn't run on his new
Lindows box.
And yet despite that, we've already got plenty of people raising the
possibility that it's due to evil legal manuevering by Microsoft.
Sometimes I wonder just how paranoid some of the Slashdotters out
there really are.
(Disclaimer: I'm secretly receiving money, women, and youth
rejuvenation treatments from Microsoft in exchange from posting
pro-Microsoft comments here. I've also been instructed to bribe both
RMS and Linus into joining our organization.)
"What's the difference though, if the second is exactly the same?"
Because when we're talking about a beam of light, the notion of analyzing it, transmitting the information, and reproducing the original seems more like television than teleportation.
Like most of the non-hoax science stories on Slashdot that relate to fantastic-sounding possibilities (teleportation, time travel, etc.), this is most likely a breakthrough of some sort but not nearly as cool as the summary makes it sound.
Getting to the subject of destroying an object and creating an exact duplicate, it's a hazy issue. I understand how I'd theoretically be the same person if you were to reproduce me at the most detailed level, but I'm still nervous about potential problems with it.
For example, should the destruction of the original me fail, there are suddenly two of me in the Universe, each with a full claim to being me and each slightly different (based on the brief experiences that occur after the duplication). One interesting exploration of this scenario was featured in James Patrick Kelly's story, "Think Like a Dinosaur".
I have a feeling that the emulation capabilities will always be in the realm of "kinda sorta, if you fiddle with it maybe, but not really". Unlike a computer geek (who generally has a compelling reason to stay booted into Linux), I suspect most regular consumers who want to run Windows-based programs would be better off paying for Windows. They don't have an investment in the free-software clause (except for an appreciation for software that's free-as-in-beer), and the gains from Linux's stability would most likely be overshadowed by the problems introduced during emulation.
But I do see a very important market for these machines as grown-up versions of Internet appliances. If all someone wants to do is surf the web, send email, and do word processing, they can get away with native Linux applications. At $299, that's not a bad deal for someone who just doesn't care about the functionality that's not as easily available under Lindows.
"bnetd offered to work with them to implement a key check. Blizzard
didn't want to do it though."
bnetd's open source. That'd make disabling the key-check trivial,
making it fairly useless. And if Blizzard were to work with bnetd at
any point, they'd have a much weaker position as far as trying to get
bnetd eliminated goes.
"People used a modified version of bnetd to play the WC3 beta, not
really because of a lack of key checking, but because that was they
only way they could play the game since it wasn't even for sale
yet."
...and the reason it was the only way they could play the game is
because bnetd didn't check keys and they didn't have a valid beta key.
Blizzard obviously wanted to limit the scope of the initial beta, and
they also managed to (delibrately?) break bnetd interoperability with
some of the patches. If I were in their shoes, I'd do the same given
the difficulties in game-balancing a 5-way RTS and a tendency for
people to judge a game based on problems during the beta. I've
already seen a couple people decide that they aren't interested in the
game based on their experiences with the warezed beta, despite the
possibility that the issues that bothered them have been resolved.
"Don't support Blizzard's dirty tactics, download the game on your
local p2p network !"
That's especially ironic, given that the Blizzard tactics seemed to nicely coincide with massive piracy of the Warcraft III beta. They went after bnetd during a period where it seemed like quite a few people were using it primarily for its lack of a CD key check (as opposed to its legitimate usage as a means of creating alternative online gaming communities with better performance).
"What work or addition of extra value does a "label" actually do to
the resultant CD at the end of the day? Given that I believe the
answer is "stuff-all","
Sounds like you're living in an idealistic, fairy tale world where you don't have to worry about financing, marketing, promotion, distribution, and all those other things that're unfortunate necessities in the real world. You don't just magically jump from "I have a good song." to "Profit." -- there's that mysterious step 2 in-between.
Hell, even in the case of the recently mentioned fightcloud.com (a service selling CDs from unsigned artists for just "shipping and handling"; artists received a modest cut of the sale), the artists' main interest still seemed to be in getting signed by a real label.
"it should be possible to measure the number of cell phones at a
particular location by tracking the amount of radion signals without
knowing anything about the signal's contents."
Yeah, but there's a big difference between knowing that every 3
minutes for the past 30 minutes, there's been approximately 10 cell
phones at intersection X and knowing that the same 10 cell phones have
been stuck at intersection X for the past 30 minutes. One just
implies an average of 10 cell phone users worth of traffic through the
area while the other implies an actual traffic stop.
"You could try to keep a MD5 of the user's char on a server at compare at runtime."
I think you misunderstood my point. Character data for the game world would continue to be hosted on the Mythic server. However, Mythic would send a copy of the savegame file for the plaintiff to him. They would then remove that savegame from the server.
The result is that the plaintiff has a copy of his character's data (i.e. the information that is the basis of the lawsuit), but the character's data no longer exists on the Mythic server and thus no longer exists in the Mythic game world. The plaintiff would have all the bits that made up his or her character, but it'd be utterly worthless as said bits would no longer affect anything.
The beauty of it is that it underscores the entire problem of the suit. The suit wasn't about knowing or copying certain data or even owning an exclusive copy of certain data, but rather about insisting that the certain data exist in a very specific place on Mythic-owned server. Since attempting to control someone else's server in that manner is somewhat ludicrous, the complain was disguished in the form of data ownership. But if that were the case, Mythic could merely hand over the data and wash its hands of the matter as I've explained above.
"An EULA held up in court, despite the fact that no one ever signed anything"
It's more than just that, however. This is a case about Mythic asserting its right to control data on its own servers that're the indirect reflection of the user's interaction with the game.
Personally, I think the simplest solution would be if Mythic had decided to just provide the person with the virtual data that he was so worried about. The catch, however, is that they'd cease hosting it on their servers. So the plaintiff would have a copy of his character data, but it would no longer be part of the game.
"Or simply like others making the decision easier for you as to what is or is not correct."
Not "correct" but rather "likely to be worth my limited time". It's also the same reason I read Slashdot rather than independently searching through the sites that Slashdot draws its material from.
The Internet serves as the perfect example of an easily accessible content distribution system. Anyone can get their message out to quite a few readers provided they're willing to invest a couple bucks in the process.
But there's a catch. 99% of the stuff on the Internet is sheer, unadulterated, mind-numbing crap. That "anyone" I mentioned in the previous paragraphs includes everyone from people who think aLtErNaTiNg cApS makes you cool to people who think "a lot" is one word. Some kind of filter is nice.
"Most writers actually do not make the majority of money from writing."
That may be true. However, as producing books becomes less profitable for publishers, they're more likely to cut back the number of books they publish to the revenue-heavy ones. So even someone writing purely for the thrill of having other people enjoy their work will have a harder time getting published.
"And where do they keep the code or key to the safe?"
If it's the main safe, there would presumably be several trusted individuals with the key or combination. That's quite different compared to the password used on a project done by a single person.
But it doesn't really matter. Cracking a safe is relatively easy compared to attempting to recover the password from a proprietary application.
"This is no different than Microsoft releasing a bunch of fake Linux patches to discredit Linux."
...and that's A-OK under the GPL. As long as they keep it open source and take care not to violate trademarks, they could even create a kernel patch that automatically crashes the system after 10 minutes.
But all this is irrelevant, since unlike the P2P songs in question, the distribution of Linux isn't primarily based on violating copyright laws.
"It is true that open source applications, being openly available
on the internet and distributed in the same manner, are susceptible to
backdooring and trojaning."
It doesn't even have to be malicious. Awhile ago, the original author
of cfingerd was heavily criticized for making a finger daemon that
insisted on running as root. His response to such criticism was to
simply abandon the project.
When holes were inevitably found in cfingerd, there was no one
maintaining the project and thus no easy way to get it fixed short of
someone actually adopting the project. In the absence of a caretaker,
the last buggy version continued to live on in open source mirrors for
quite a while.
From what I understand, the project was eventually continued and
cleaned up, but the interim had a dead, unsafe piece of code sitting
right next to its safer/more maintained breathren. At least with
commercial code, the EOL'd stuff is usually explicitly EOL'd. On the
other hand, in a non-source provided context, you're still beholden to
the vendor for patches. But I believe in this case, the group is
advocating commercial code that comes with the source.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between fast-forwarding through a commercial and completely skipping it. With my Tivo, I've been known to go back and watch commercials that catch my eye (with the added benefit that a lower level of "advertising fatigue" makes me more intent when I do watch an ad).
In this case, Gator would be like the latest lawsuit-laden ReplayTV units which feature an automatic commercial jump that almost completely removes the commercials from the broadcast. Even then, Gator's still a step worse in that it's mostly doing its activities without user awareness.
The spoofers could still send the fingerprint of the good version before sending the bad version. Unless the service does several individual fingerprints on different parts of the mp3, the client would have to download the entire thing before being able to determine whether or not it's bad.
Even better, the presence of the database could serve as an authoritative source for filtering copyright protected content from P2P networks. If the RIAA can point to the "Good Musickeeping" database as a means of reliably determining what a song is, they can use legal muscle to get P2P networks to check against it.
Sounds like all the RIAA is doing is offering up crap to people who ask for their songs. (And I'm sure someone will want to make the obvious joke about there being no difference, so I'm beating you to the punch.)
No one. If you'd read the article, you'd know that it appears to be a bad content and/or slow download DoS, not your typical "ping flood"-type DoS. In short, your neighbor will be downloading songs that aren't what he was looking for, it'll take him longer, and your bandwidth will be just fine.
Try re-reading the article. All it's saying is that you can offer up a fake version of "(your garage band)-(your hit).mp3". It's not carte blanche to take down the P2P server or even other users sharing your file.
Everyone who has already knee-jerked at the Slashdot summary and decided that this means the RIAA can start ping-flooding people on P2P networks needs to read the article.
While you use the notion of control to further the concept of record companies selectively promoting artists, I'd like to propose a slightly different control -- control over which part of an artist's work gets shared.
In the realm of Internet copyright infringement, there's nothing to restrict the sharer from offering up an entire album. As connection speeds rise, harddrives get bigger, P2P technologies mature, and audio standards get more efficient, it's only going to get easier for people to get entire albums quickly and easily. Throw a CD burner into the mix, and you've severely undercut the desirability of the store-bought product.
But really, if it's all about the RIAA trying to restrict what acts get exposure then all someone has to do is create a service that provides free exposure for any material that the copyright holder has granted redistribution permission for. The RIAA can say "Don't share Metallica songs." The RIAA can't say "Don't share 'Erasmus Darwin Sings the Blues'."
The only tricky part is coming up with a technical solution that provides enough accountability in the case of someone attempting to use it illegally. By being able to explicitly defer accountability on to someone else (and not trying to play the accountability shell game that the P2P services tended to enjoy), I believe you could build a service that promoted new artists and one which wouldn't give the RIAA legitimate ground on which to complain.
When you're done, you should notice some substantial differences in cost, effort required, and quality of the resulting copies between the CD burner and the photocopier. Those are more than enough to make the latter infeasible for most piracy uses.
And then there's still getting programming data (which I suppose you could scrape from an online television guide site), writing all the software, and having to worry about having your Xbox on (and not playing games) when you want to record a show.
Call me crazy, but I was under the impression that just as you can find both legally and illegally distributed software online and just as you can find both legally and illegally distributed books online, you can find both legally and illegally distributed music online.
Mp3.com comes to mind as a place where you can download legally distributed music for free. Emusic.com appears to be legally distributing mp3s for a fee.
I'm sure the music traded on venues such as Kazaa or IRC is more likely to be illegally distributed, but to characterize all online music as being illegal is absurd.
You're mistakenly assuming that all Wal-mart customers are people who shop their because they share the same family-value belief. There are many other reasons why people might shop at Wal-mart including price, convenience, and selection.
And yet despite that, we've already got plenty of people raising the possibility that it's due to evil legal manuevering by Microsoft. Sometimes I wonder just how paranoid some of the Slashdotters out there really are.
(Disclaimer: I'm secretly receiving money, women, and youth rejuvenation treatments from Microsoft in exchange from posting pro-Microsoft comments here. I've also been instructed to bribe both RMS and Linus into joining our organization.)
Because when we're talking about a beam of light, the notion of analyzing it, transmitting the information, and reproducing the original seems more like television than teleportation.
Like most of the non-hoax science stories on Slashdot that relate to fantastic-sounding possibilities (teleportation, time travel, etc.), this is most likely a breakthrough of some sort but not nearly as cool as the summary makes it sound.
Getting to the subject of destroying an object and creating an exact duplicate, it's a hazy issue. I understand how I'd theoretically be the same person if you were to reproduce me at the most detailed level, but I'm still nervous about potential problems with it.
For example, should the destruction of the original me fail, there are suddenly two of me in the Universe, each with a full claim to being me and each slightly different (based on the brief experiences that occur after the duplication). One interesting exploration of this scenario was featured in James Patrick Kelly's story, "Think Like a Dinosaur".
But I do see a very important market for these machines as grown-up versions of Internet appliances. If all someone wants to do is surf the web, send email, and do word processing, they can get away with native Linux applications. At $299, that's not a bad deal for someone who just doesn't care about the functionality that's not as easily available under Lindows.
bnetd's open source. That'd make disabling the key-check trivial, making it fairly useless. And if Blizzard were to work with bnetd at any point, they'd have a much weaker position as far as trying to get bnetd eliminated goes.
"People used a modified version of bnetd to play the WC3 beta, not really because of a lack of key checking, but because that was they only way they could play the game since it wasn't even for sale yet."
That's especially ironic, given that the Blizzard tactics seemed to nicely coincide with massive piracy of the Warcraft III beta. They went after bnetd during a period where it seemed like quite a few people were using it primarily for its lack of a CD key check (as opposed to its legitimate usage as a means of creating alternative online gaming communities with better performance).
Sounds like you're living in an idealistic, fairy tale world where you don't have to worry about financing, marketing, promotion, distribution, and all those other things that're unfortunate necessities in the real world. You don't just magically jump from "I have a good song." to "Profit." -- there's that mysterious step 2 in-between.
Hell, even in the case of the recently mentioned fightcloud.com (a service selling CDs from unsigned artists for just "shipping and handling"; artists received a modest cut of the sale), the artists' main interest still seemed to be in getting signed by a real label.
Yeah, but there's a big difference between knowing that every 3 minutes for the past 30 minutes, there's been approximately 10 cell phones at intersection X and knowing that the same 10 cell phones have been stuck at intersection X for the past 30 minutes. One just implies an average of 10 cell phone users worth of traffic through the area while the other implies an actual traffic stop.
I think you misunderstood my point. Character data for the game world would continue to be hosted on the Mythic server. However, Mythic would send a copy of the savegame file for the plaintiff to him. They would then remove that savegame from the server.
The result is that the plaintiff has a copy of his character's data (i.e. the information that is the basis of the lawsuit), but the character's data no longer exists on the Mythic server and thus no longer exists in the Mythic game world. The plaintiff would have all the bits that made up his or her character, but it'd be utterly worthless as said bits would no longer affect anything.
The beauty of it is that it underscores the entire problem of the suit. The suit wasn't about knowing or copying certain data or even owning an exclusive copy of certain data, but rather about insisting that the certain data exist in a very specific place on Mythic-owned server. Since attempting to control someone else's server in that manner is somewhat ludicrous, the complain was disguished in the form of data ownership. But if that were the case, Mythic could merely hand over the data and wash its hands of the matter as I've explained above.
It's more than just that, however. This is a case about Mythic asserting its right to control data on its own servers that're the indirect reflection of the user's interaction with the game.
Personally, I think the simplest solution would be if Mythic had decided to just provide the person with the virtual data that he was so worried about. The catch, however, is that they'd cease hosting it on their servers. So the plaintiff would have a copy of his character data, but it would no longer be part of the game.
Not "correct" but rather "likely to be worth my limited time". It's also the same reason I read Slashdot rather than independently searching through the sites that Slashdot draws its material from.
The Internet serves as the perfect example of an easily accessible content distribution system. Anyone can get their message out to quite a few readers provided they're willing to invest a couple bucks in the process.
But there's a catch. 99% of the stuff on the Internet is sheer, unadulterated, mind-numbing crap. That "anyone" I mentioned in the previous paragraphs includes everyone from people who think aLtErNaTiNg cApS makes you cool to people who think "a lot" is one word. Some kind of filter is nice.
That may be true. However, as producing books becomes less profitable for publishers, they're more likely to cut back the number of books they publish to the revenue-heavy ones. So even someone writing purely for the thrill of having other people enjoy their work will have a harder time getting published.
If it's the main safe, there would presumably be several trusted individuals with the key or combination. That's quite different compared to the password used on a project done by a single person.
But it doesn't really matter. Cracking a safe is relatively easy compared to attempting to recover the password from a proprietary application.
But all this is irrelevant, since unlike the P2P songs in question, the distribution of Linux isn't primarily based on violating copyright laws.
It doesn't even have to be malicious. Awhile ago, the original author of cfingerd was heavily criticized for making a finger daemon that insisted on running as root. His response to such criticism was to simply abandon the project.
When holes were inevitably found in cfingerd, there was no one maintaining the project and thus no easy way to get it fixed short of someone actually adopting the project. In the absence of a caretaker, the last buggy version continued to live on in open source mirrors for quite a while.
From what I understand, the project was eventually continued and cleaned up, but the interim had a dead, unsafe piece of code sitting right next to its safer/more maintained breathren. At least with commercial code, the EOL'd stuff is usually explicitly EOL'd. On the other hand, in a non-source provided context, you're still beholden to the vendor for patches. But I believe in this case, the group is advocating commercial code that comes with the source.