"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini. (from Encyclopedia Italiana, Giovanni Gentile, editor).
Yup. you hit the nail right on the head.
And this is justified by saying that downloading music and movies online hurts the economy.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The amount of people who only download music and movies and don't buy them can't be very high. First off, only 50% of the households in the U.S. have computers in the first place. Secondly, it's hard to believe that all of those 50% use a file sharing system. After all, only, what? 10% or of those have broadband connections? I mean downloading the stuff over a 56K modem connection takes an excruciating amount of time. And what percentage of those don't buy music or movies and exclusively use stuff they got off the net? Personally, my purchase of movies and music has *increased*, not decreased since I got broadband and started using file sharing services.
And, why would the FBI investigate this stuff? Last I checked, copyright violation was a civil, not a criminal matter. Violation of copyright is not theft anyway. Check with the U.S. copyright office. They do not consider it theft.
Why do we need this government interference in our lives? Why should the RIAA and the MPAA dictate our lives? What happened to our constitutionally limited republic?
I'm sick of this. I'm about ready to move to some country that has smaller government and less governmental interference in my life. Anybody got any suggestions?
Potentially losing a life? While, yes, there is a statstically higher chance that you will die in a car crash the faster you are travelling (duh), saying that speeding kills is a bit misleading.
Speed differential is what kills. When the 55 mph national speed limit was lifted, believe it or not, traffic accidents went *down*, not *up*. The reason is that when the speed limit was 55 mph, the people that are doing 80 now were doing 80 then. It is the speed differential that is the problem. Although there are and have always been a majority of people doing about 75-80 mph on I-696, there will always be that minority, afraid of getting a ticket, who will stick to the speed limit. There will be more accidents with differential of 20-25 mph, vs. a differential of 10-15 mph -- it only makes sense if you think about.
Your'e doing 80, and you encounter a guy doing 55. It's going to take you far longer and take far more distance to break down to his speed, vs. someone doing 65. You get the picture, I'm sure.
Of course, there will always be a**holes that do 120 on the freeway... so it's a matter of what's reasonable. There's a theory that goes something like that you can only realistically set the speed limit 20% below what 80% of the people will do or something like that or people will just blatantly ignore the speed limit. Anybody else remember this theory from the Reasonable Drivers Unanimous (RDU) website (now down, I think)?
Yeah...I had my hands on one not too long ago and decided to donate it to a local old technology museum. Pretty simple, and you could probably easily put a AT or ATX form-factor motherboard into one.
The pictures show that the mini-itx board takes up alost no space at all inside the thing.
As the article points out, the *look* was more important to the guy than the functionality. If you look at the small keyboard on top of the Atari 800 in the picture on the Mini-ITX site, I think you'll find that that keyboad would probably have fit fine. But as the guy points out, it wouldn't have looked right. Or at least not to him anyway.
That depends on the level of networking and computer knowledge the traders have.
*I* could (and have) done stuff like this without getting nailed to the wall, with hardly a trace in the system logs.
As for my other posts, as other people pointed out in my thread, there does exist software like ReAIM that allows for transparent proxying and server-level logging to a database that would be absolutely acceptable for use in your industry (or any others) I'm sure. My point wasn't to say "yeah, I know what I'm talking about" my point was to say that the task of logging is hardly daunting to smart technical people who put their brains to work. If instant messaging has a practical business case in an organization such as yours, then the company *will* spend a little money implementing transparent proxying for the purposes of logging.
If not, they'll firewall off the ports and bust people going through the http proxy.
That same logic can be applied to any technology in any organization in any industry.
In April, Mercer said, the company obtained many more names of possible future defendants in what he described as a "virtual raid" in which 18 computer servers were seized. They were being used to host 63 pirate Web sites operated in the U.S. and Canada," he said. The largest site the company hit was "Decoder News." It had 23,400 subscribers -- people who paid for access to gain the latest software before hacking into the DirecTV system.
Let me get this straight. People *paid money* to a *web site* that provided access (or perhaps information on) software to crack the DirecTV system so that they could get free DirecTV programming? If you're going to invest *that* much time, energy, and yes, even money into cracking DirecTV codes, um, why not just pay DirecTV the money they want and be *done* with it?
To be fair, this is a little different than P2P file sharing, which requires very little effort on the part of the 'pirates', but their legal tactics *are* quite relevant.
Yes! You're following my point. However, the same is true for P2P. They're threatening to take to court, what? 4? How many cases will they win? All 4? Maybe, maybe not. How many *millions* are using P2P file sharing clients? As someone else said, I didn't get a letter, did you?
So your average penalty drop is comparable -- at least at this point in the game.
That's true in theory. But look at what's out there in the real world. Let's take speeding for example.
It's currently illegal for me to drive 80 mph on I-696 in Michigan. In fact, if I get caught, it'll cost me at least $100 or so. That's a lot of money. Speeding to work every morning saves me -- what? 5 minutes? If I'm late to work by 5 minutes, I don't make so much an hour that it's going to cost me $100. It would be much more sensible economically to be 5 minutes (and receive a resulting 15-minute dock in pay) than to pay $100 in fines (or spend half a day to a full day off of work fighting it in court)
Does that stop me? Does that stop the other thousands of drivers on I-696? The *average* speed on I-696 is 80 MPH, while the speed limit on I-696 is 65. I'd say that despite the fact that penalty generally greatly exceeds the benefits (in nearly all cases as I-696 is pretty much a commuter's freeway so speeding is not going to save the average traveller much time really), most people still speed.
The RIAA shouldn't target me, the person breaking the copyright law! They should target the software which allows me to pirate without even trying.
Okay, then they should target The Apache Foundation for Apache, Microsoft for it's IIS product, AOL/TW for it's AOL Instant Messenger software, basically anybody that makes anything that uses TCP/IP and/or UDP to do file transfers. Which would be pretty much the entire software industry.
Those crooks that make software! Software should be illegal! People shouldn't use computers! We should only have special purpose devices dedicated to viewing content. General purpose computers make pirating too easy.
They can't take *everyone* to court. They'll make an example out of these few and it'll stop some of the people, but the majority of p2p file shareing of music and movies and such will continue as usual because users will be secure in the knowledge that RIAA/MPAA can't spend a gazillion dollars chasing everyone down. It's like trying to kill all the mosquitos in the forest with a fly swatter.
The Atari itself, if it were working, would undoubtedly have some sort of circuitry that would take the keyboard inputs and stuff them into a buffer of some sort. One would have to know the format of this buffer (ASCII characters maybe?) and then convert them into PS/2 scancodes and stuff those into the ITX's keyboard controller chip. This would undoubtedly require some kind of specialized chip. I'm not a hardware hacker, so I wouldn't be able to do it, but I know people who *would* and I at least understand the theory, or I think I do anyway. (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm completely talking out my ass.)
Did you happen to notice the Commodore PET ITX computer on the Mini-ITX site, where the original poster undoubtedly got this article? That's *almost* as retro as a PDP-11.
Yeah, but a lot of former AOLies are getting broadband and they aren't getting from AOL. They're getting it from their cable company. And they use Internet Explorer because that's what they're told to use by the cable company.
That's not difficult. I used to work for a company that does this. There are companies that make reel-to-reel recorders specifically for the purpose of being hooked through a PBX phone system so that it can record all incoming and outgoing calls made on specific extensions (or all extensions you if specify it that way I suppose)
re: the guy talking about remote desktop, etc... That might work at some firms, but I'd imagine most of the bigger firms are really, really locked down.
How locked down? PuTTY can do SSH through any HTTP proxy server that allows CONNECT (which most of them if you want to support SSL). And it can use SSH's X11 forwarding capabilities. So setup a Linux box on a cablemodem at home, ssh into it and start launching X applications (i.e., gaim).
Now you're thinking. See what I mean? Put a smart IT staff to work, and the solutions just start pouring out. As I said, there are no daunting technical issues here.
As you said, they have the ability to log it on a client level. Imagine a company with 500 000 machines. Are you going to collect logs from each and every one every single day?? Even if you saved the logs on a network drive, do you want 500 000 different files per day?
Scripting. Simply produce a script that processes the logs and concatenates them into one big log. That's part of the process of integration that I mentioned. And not even General Motors as 500,000 machines (I used to work there, so I know), and most brokerages are fall smaller than General Motors.
How much money? Most companies due new builds of their standard clients every 18 months or so anyway. The time to integrate and test a locked-down IM config that ensures that logging happens is very small compared to the time it takes to install and integrate major apps, like, oh say, Microsoft Office or Lotus Notes, and it could happen has part of the standard build, meaning the actual costs are spread out so thin as to be almost non-existant. It would take an admin maybe -- what? -- an hour or two to implement this? If that?
That's what IT staff are for. That's why you use standardized builds of client PCs. The IT staff does the integration work to ensure that things like logging occur. The standardized configs make sure that everything works and that users can't change it.
What daunting technical issues? Nearly every instant messaging client has the ability to always log conversations. Simply standardize the clients that can be used, make sure that conversations are logged, and lock down the configs so that brokers can't change them. I see no daunting technical issues here.
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"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini. (from Encyclopedia Italiana, Giovanni Gentile, editor).
Yup. you hit the nail right on the head.
And this is justified by saying that downloading music and movies online hurts the economy.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The amount of people who only download music and movies and don't buy them can't be very high. First off, only 50% of the households in the U.S. have computers in the first place. Secondly, it's hard to believe that all of those 50% use a file sharing system. After all, only, what? 10% or of those have broadband connections? I mean downloading the stuff over a 56K modem connection takes an excruciating amount of time. And what percentage of those don't buy music or movies and exclusively use stuff they got off the net? Personally, my purchase of movies and music has *increased*, not decreased since I got broadband and started using file sharing services.
And, why would the FBI investigate this stuff? Last I checked, copyright violation was a civil, not a criminal matter. Violation of copyright is not theft anyway. Check with the U.S. copyright office. They do not consider it theft.
Why do we need this government interference in our lives? Why should the RIAA and the MPAA dictate our lives? What happened to our constitutionally limited republic?
I'm sick of this. I'm about ready to move to some country that has smaller government and less governmental interference in my life. Anybody got any suggestions?
Potentially losing a life? While, yes, there is a statstically higher chance that you will die in a car crash the faster you are travelling (duh), saying that speeding kills is a bit misleading.
Speed differential is what kills. When the 55 mph national speed limit was lifted, believe it or not, traffic accidents went *down*, not *up*. The reason is that when the speed limit was 55 mph, the people that are doing 80 now were doing 80 then. It is the speed differential that is the problem. Although there are and have always been a majority of people doing about 75-80 mph on I-696, there will always be that minority, afraid of getting a ticket, who will stick to the speed limit. There will be more accidents with differential of 20-25 mph, vs. a differential of 10-15 mph -- it only makes sense if you think about.
Your'e doing 80, and you encounter a guy doing 55. It's going to take you far longer and take far more distance to break down to his speed, vs. someone doing 65. You get the picture, I'm sure.
Of course, there will always be a**holes that do 120 on the freeway... so it's a matter of what's reasonable. There's a theory that goes something like that you can only realistically set the speed limit 20% below what 80% of the people will do or something like that or people will just blatantly ignore the speed limit. Anybody else remember this theory from the Reasonable Drivers Unanimous (RDU) website (now down, I think)?
Yeah...I had my hands on one not too long ago and decided to donate it to a local old technology museum. Pretty simple, and you could probably easily put a AT or ATX form-factor motherboard into one.
The pictures show that the mini-itx board takes up alost no space at all inside the thing.
You could have just said "YHBT. YHL. HAND." ;)
As the article points out, the *look* was more important to the guy than the functionality. If you look at the small keyboard on top of the Atari 800 in the picture on the Mini-ITX site, I think you'll find that that keyboad would probably have fit fine. But as the guy points out, it wouldn't have looked right. Or at least not to him anyway.
That depends on the level of networking and computer knowledge the traders have.
*I* could (and have) done stuff like this without getting nailed to the wall, with hardly a trace in the system logs.
As for my other posts, as other people pointed out in my thread, there does exist software like ReAIM that allows for transparent proxying and server-level logging to a database that would be absolutely acceptable for use in your industry (or any others) I'm sure. My point wasn't to say "yeah, I know what I'm talking about" my point was to say that the task of logging is hardly daunting to smart technical people who put their brains to work. If instant messaging has a practical business case in an organization such as yours, then the company *will* spend a little money implementing transparent proxying for the purposes of logging.
If not, they'll firewall off the ports and bust people going through the http proxy.
That same logic can be applied to any technology in any organization in any industry.
Interesting...
;)
In April, Mercer said, the company obtained many more names of possible future defendants in what he described as a "virtual raid" in which 18 computer servers were seized. They were being used to host 63 pirate Web sites operated in the U.S. and Canada," he said. The largest site the company hit was "Decoder News." It had 23,400 subscribers -- people who paid for access to gain the latest software before hacking into the DirecTV system.
Let me get this straight. People *paid money* to a *web site* that provided access (or perhaps information on) software to crack the DirecTV system so that they could get free DirecTV programming? If you're going to invest *that* much time, energy, and yes, even money into cracking DirecTV codes, um, why not just pay DirecTV the money they want and be *done* with it?
To be fair, this is a little different than P2P file sharing, which requires very little effort on the part of the 'pirates', but their legal tactics *are* quite relevant.
Thanks, that was a good article.
Yes! You're following my point. However, the same is true for P2P. They're threatening to take to court, what? 4? How many cases will they win? All 4? Maybe, maybe not. How many *millions* are using P2P file sharing clients? As someone else said, I didn't get a letter, did you?
So your average penalty drop is comparable -- at least at this point in the game.
That's true in theory. But look at what's out there in the real world. Let's take speeding for example.
It's currently illegal for me to drive 80 mph on I-696 in Michigan. In fact, if I get caught, it'll cost me at least $100 or so. That's a lot of money. Speeding to work every morning saves me -- what? 5 minutes? If I'm late to work by 5 minutes, I don't make so much an hour that it's going to cost me $100. It would be much more sensible economically to be 5 minutes (and receive a resulting 15-minute dock in pay) than to pay $100 in fines (or spend half a day to a full day off of work fighting it in court)
Does that stop me? Does that stop the other thousands of drivers on I-696? The *average* speed on I-696 is 80 MPH, while the speed limit on I-696 is 65. I'd say that despite the fact that penalty generally greatly exceeds the benefits (in nearly all cases as I-696 is pretty much a commuter's freeway so speeding is not going to save the average traveller much time really), most people still speed.
See my point?
The RIAA shouldn't target me, the person breaking the copyright law! They should target the software which allows me to pirate without even trying.
Okay, then they should target The Apache Foundation for Apache, Microsoft for it's IIS product, AOL/TW for it's AOL Instant Messenger software, basically anybody that makes anything that uses TCP/IP and/or UDP to do file transfers. Which would be pretty much the entire software industry.
Those crooks that make software! Software should be illegal! People shouldn't use computers! We should only have special purpose devices dedicated to viewing content. General purpose computers make pirating too easy.
C'mon...you don't REALLY think that do you?
They can't take *everyone* to court. They'll make an example out of these few and it'll stop some of the people, but the majority of p2p file shareing of music and movies and such will continue as usual because users will be secure in the knowledge that RIAA/MPAA can't spend a gazillion dollars chasing everyone down. It's like trying to kill all the mosquitos in the forest with a fly swatter.
But you can get it from here.
Also more on the story here.
Note the Ethernet setup the C64 uses. It's a specialized cartridge designed for the C64's cassette player! Wayyyy cool!
The Atari itself, if it were working, would undoubtedly have some sort of circuitry that would take the keyboard inputs and stuff them into a buffer of some sort. One would have to know the format of this buffer (ASCII characters maybe?) and then convert them into PS/2 scancodes and stuff those into the ITX's keyboard controller chip. This would undoubtedly require some kind of specialized chip. I'm not a hardware hacker, so I wouldn't be able to do it, but I know people who *would* and I at least understand the theory, or I think I do anyway. (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm completely talking out my ass.)
Did you happen to notice the Commodore PET ITX computer on the Mini-ITX site, where the original poster undoubtedly got this article? That's *almost* as retro as a PDP-11.
Yeah, but a lot of former AOLies are getting broadband and they aren't getting from AOL. They're getting it from their cable company. And they use Internet Explorer because that's what they're told to use by the cable company.
And the default search engine in IE, anyone?
Better yet, let's rename PCI to PCI-Express and keep PCI-Express as PCI-Express, and then we'll all have PCI-Express. ;)
I do it all the time. ;) Of course you need an X server running on your PC, such as Hummingbird eXceed or XFree86/CygWin...
All phone calls are recorded (not sure how)
That's not difficult. I used to work for a company that does this. There are companies that make reel-to-reel recorders specifically for the purpose of being hooked through a PBX phone system so that it can record all incoming and outgoing calls made on specific extensions (or all extensions you if specify it that way I suppose)
re: the guy talking about remote desktop, etc... That might work at some firms, but I'd imagine most of the bigger firms are really, really locked down.
How locked down? PuTTY can do SSH through any HTTP proxy server that allows CONNECT (which most of them if you want to support SSL). And it can use SSH's X11 forwarding capabilities. So setup a Linux box on a cablemodem at home, ssh into it and start launching X applications (i.e., gaim).
Now you're thinking. See what I mean? Put a smart IT staff to work, and the solutions just start pouring out. As I said, there are no daunting technical issues here.
As you said, they have the ability to log it on a client level. Imagine a company with 500 000 machines. Are you going to collect logs from each and every one every single day?? Even if you saved the logs on a network drive, do you want 500 000 different files per day?
Scripting. Simply produce a script that processes the logs and concatenates them into one big log. That's part of the process of integration that I mentioned. And not even General Motors as 500,000 machines (I used to work there, so I know), and most brokerages are fall smaller than General Motors.
How much money? Most companies due new builds of their standard clients every 18 months or so anyway. The time to integrate and test a locked-down IM config that ensures that logging happens is very small compared to the time it takes to install and integrate major apps, like, oh say, Microsoft Office or Lotus Notes, and it could happen has part of the standard build, meaning the actual costs are spread out so thin as to be almost non-existant. It would take an admin maybe -- what? -- an hour or two to implement this? If that?
That's what IT staff are for. That's why you use standardized builds of client PCs. The IT staff does the integration work to ensure that things like logging occur. The standardized configs make sure that everything works and that users can't change it.
What daunting technical issues? Nearly every instant messaging client has the ability to always log conversations. Simply standardize the clients that can be used, make sure that conversations are logged, and lock down the configs so that brokers can't change them. I see no daunting technical issues here.
Kinda makes you wonder if either A) Scott Adams knew about this already or B) Scott Adams reads Slashdot...