People who spend their time in any debate making personal comments about the opposition instead of countering their arguments are sure to lose the debate. You can see this in politics in any country. You would see this in any high-school class debate. And you may see it in the great Linux versus Microsoft debate.
What is needed is a united front from the Linux side. To do this, Linux people need to employ marketing people and spin doctors. While we may ordinarily be wary of such people, they have their uses and we should employ them if they can be of benefit to us.
Whenever Microsoft announces a Great New Product, the people on the Linux side can best devastate Microsoft's marketing efforts by pointing out the weaknesses in the Microsoft offering and how Linux products can overcome these weaknesses.
Imagine that Linux and Microsoft are ships in a naval battle. To sink Microsoft, make your shots count.
Microsoft products are expensive. Linux products are far more cost-effective. Wham!
Microsoft products have restrictive licence agreements. Linux products have more lenient software licenses. Wham!
Microsoft products tend to be overintegrated and this makes them unstable. Linux products don't take integration too far and are more stable as a result. Wham!
A few telling broadsides like that fired from the Linux ship and the Microsoft product is dead in the water and doomed to sink. In naval combat, you don't waste your ammunition firing warning shots across the bows of the enemy ship. You take aim at the ship and try to sink it.
* Ping flood. They would need a lot of pigeons for this.
* Send an e-mail.
* Serve a web page.
* DOS attack! Just release a LOT of pigeons at the same time, most with SYN packets.
* Read news.
* Increase the bandwidth by attacking a mini-CDROM to each pigeon.
--
Shouldn't royalties go to the COMPOSERS?
on
Ring-Tone Royalties
·
· Score: 5
Coppin said record labels are entitled to 7.5 cents for each download of a ring tone that uses copyrighted material....
Um, NO. The recording industry trades in music recordings, not music compositions. If I was to purchase the sheet music for the Brandenburg concerto and put an excerpt on a mobile phone, I owe the recording industry NOTHING. Same happens if I was to purchase sheet music for "Hey Jude" by Paul McCartney, or something else recent. The only person to whom I would owe money is the composer. The recording industry cannot claim royalties from anyone for making their own performances from the original, legally-purchased sheet music.
In my opinion, these are the important words in AlphaOne's post:
sell your information without your consent
Read it again, and you will understand the issue.
I have started calling the practice of selling personal information without consent data piracy or information piracy. Effectively, the companies are stealing your private information and making a profit from it.
It's just like software piracy, except for one important difference. Software pirates are often individuals, and the victims are often large corporations. Data pirates are often corporations, and the victims are individuals. Only large corporations have the finances to lobby effectively for law changes. So it's no surprise that software piracy is illegal but data piracy is not.
Corporations consider the sale of "address lists" to be an "accepted practice". Of course, software pirates would also call the piracy of software an "accepted practice". Having the criminals define what is acceptable behaviour is not very reliable.
Let's not mince words here. The definition of "piracy" in the modern corporate world is usually taken to mean making a profit by selling something that doesn't belong to you. So isn't the sale of someone else's personal details without their knowledge or consent piracy in the strictest definition of the term?
The biggest irony is that the MPAA and the RIAA are pirates because they sell their customer information.
In today's Internet, large bandwidth providers connect to backbones and purchase bandwidth. They then sell this bandwidth to smaller customers such as ISP's, who in turn sell to customers. Typically, ISP's and the like only have one bandwidth provider. How many ISP's do YOU use?
A lot of these business transactions mean that the organisation of the Internet, far from being organised like a spiderweb, is organised more like a tree in many places. So if one node fails, everything downstream loses connectivity.
I think this would be a cool idea for a party. The clock rolls over to 1G from 999999999 on the 9th day of the 9th month of the millenium. How cool's that? The 9/9/01 is a Sunday, so it's even kind enough to be on a weekend.
So pack those beers, grab the munchies, set up a *n?x computer with a BIG display showing the countdown and invite all your appreciative geek friends over. Forget the end of the millenium; the stupids celebrated it a year too early anyway. This is the REAL once-in-a-lifetime event....
Based on the experience of a friend of mine, I advise those with home networks to back up their systems, or at least back up critical configuration files.
His home router crashed and burned. Well, not quite, there weren't flames, but about all he could salvage from the very dead computer was the floppy drive. He spent a couple of days reconfiguring a new router, and he wishes he had backed up the configuration.
If the rules are the players must guess simultaneously, but not necessarily at a specific time, then we can bend the rules slightly and win 87.5% of the time with 3 players.
Here's my strategy.
When the 3 hats are distributed, one of the players yells "NOW". then, each player that can see 2 RED hats guesses BLUE. Otherwise all players pass. If all hats are RED, we lose at this point, otherwise we will eventually win.
Then, if all players pass, we have new information. That information is: "There is no more than 1 RED Hat". So, we co-ordinate another guess. Someone yells "NOW" again. Then, everyone that can see one RED hat correctly guesses "BLUE".
If all players pass again, new information is obtained: "There are NO red hats". Then, after someone co-ordinates the guesses again, all players can guess "BLUE" and be right.
The generalised solution has a failure rate of 1/2^N, where N is the number of players. For 15 players, the chance of failure with this strategy is 1/32768, far better than the 1/16 for the simpler strategy in the article.
This problem is similar to the "Three Philosophers" problem that was mentioned in Scientific American some years ago. In this one, three philosophers are aleep under a tree, and a bird soils the foreheads of all of them. When they wake, they all start laughing at each other. Then one suddenly stops laughing. Why?
States can ignore Federal laws (by passing their own variants)
You are incorrect. According to the Constitution of Australia, if a State has a law that is in conflict with a Federal law, the Federal law overrides the State law. If you're Australian, remember the recent mandatory sentencing debate? There are also some areas where states are constitutionally prohibited from passing laws. States cannot have their own armed forces, for example.
A better idea would be to cache recent requests. If there's a lot of requests for X bytes starting at Y, then this can be cached. I can see *cough* evil-monopolistic-corporation *cough* AOL thwarting this approach with random X and Y. This would also break prehashing.
Let's assume that the md5 server is up and running and happily providing the correct bytes. What's the next step that AOL will take? Will they figure out which version of AIM is being used and compel all users of that version to upgrade? Will they block that version? Will it be necessary to store multiple versions of AIM to combat this? Will they put another buffer overflow hack into AIM?
Oh, what a shame. You trialled a new beta of the software. But it had a bug in it that sent the MD5 sum continuously in a flood when it received the checksum request. This bug crashed the AOL server. The bug is proving so hard to find, but with 10,000 beta testers, you can't contact them all to get rid of the bug. Oh, you didn't put the bug in there intentionally, did you? Oh, of course you didn't, no programmer would do that....
And anything that can be done in software can be done in hardware. I can see some hardware hacker or cracker using a soldering iron and strategically-placed pieces of wire to defeat copy-protection using a 15-year-old CD player. There's probably a place where they can attach wires to intercept the raw data from a "copy-protected" CD. And once that happens, bye-bye copy protection.
It seems that US companies are moving towards an economic model that can best be described as corporate feudalism, where all employees are serfs with many obligations and few rights. If nothing is done about it now, in 20 years, employees will not be able to leave any company to work elsewhere without good reason.
Perhaps such a grim future can be averted if all employees affected by this sort of agreement joined forces so that they can lobby lawmakers, perhaps as the lobbying equivelant of a class action lawsuit. Or perhaps even *gasp* a union for current employees. The law needs to be changed so that employees retain their right to earn a living.
What the legislative goal should be is a balance. Employers should be able to protect their trade secrets. However, a strict time limit of 12 months should apply, and employees who are hindered from working elsewhere as a consequence should receive full pay from their former employer.
The former employer is gaining the benefit of reduced competition, so they should be made to pay for it. The former employer can easily afford this because no employer ever pays full price for the cost of labour. Like all tradable commodities, labour is always purchased wholesale and sold retail.
Such noncompete clauses should apply only for 12 months, or the former employer stops paying the employee, whichever is the lesser. And of course, an employer wouldn't need to pay a former employee who finds unrelated work to gain the protection of a noncompete clause.
It would then be in the best interest for employers to help former employees to find unrelated work, because they would not have to pay them to sit idle, and they have less competition. The employee wins as well, because they can pursue new challenges instead of vegetating for 12 months.
Yeah, MIT's hacks sure make our effort of putting a roll of tickertape in an airvent at uni pale in comparison.
The airvent was a 4 metre tall ground-level duct that was the main outlet to the airconditioning at a uni in Melbourne. A small slot in the side of the concrete pipe permitted the entry of small objects like boxes of confetti, computer cards and rolls of tickertape. These unauthorised wind-tunnel experiments proved to be great fun and fairly harmless.
Biotech researchers have made mice that glow in the dark, thanks to jellyfish genes and gene-splicing technology. All that one needs to do is make a few of these mice and put them in a cage somewhere.
If you could add a few other lifeforms, it could be a really interesting display.
The state-of-the-art may not yet have advanced to the point where this can be done easily outside biotech companies, but it's likely that such a hack can be possible by 2010.
We should get the EFF to donate funds to representatives who display such obvious enlightenment. If they get elected, they can spread that enlightenment far and wide, particularly within the government where it is so badly needed. That means we should donate more to the EFF so that they can support representatives in this manner.
Or maybe we use H4X0R 5P33K to encode the filenames.
Metallica would become M374111C4
Greatest Hits would become 6R347357 H175
RIAA would become 14M3R2
and so on.
One could get the number of possible ASCII characters down to 64, thus making a basic compression algorithm possible. Then, to decode the data, those obscure compressions can be run through a program using an algorithm that converts them into plausible words. This algorithm could even be patented to screw up the legal system further for the RIAA.
The more we abuse the system, the more likely the flaws will be exposed.
I tend to screw up the census in Australia when it happens every five years. I can't help it. I was born in the same week of August on which the census is usually taken in Australia. So some years, I'm 4 years older than the last census, and some years I'm 6 years older.
On two of the last three censuses, census night fell on my birthday. I wish I had taken the opportunity to make life interesting for the census staff by going out and getting drunk or something, then not coming home that night.
Macrovision filters are now illegal in Australia, because macrovision is a "copy protection technology" and such filters are "circumvention devices" within the meaning of the amended Copyright Act.
Washington is a town with very, very few technical people advising the top levels of decision-makers. In an era where technology has such an impact on our economy, that is dangerous. Most of the senior people are lawyers and economists with little knowledge of science and technology. They get their information largely from the few technical people on their staffs and from hordes of lobbyists.
Given the recent insanity with changes to Australian copyright law, other ill-conceived legislative changes and the lack of action against spam, and it becomes evident that Canberra has the same lack of technical expertise advising Cabinet, Parliament and the major political parties as the U.S.
I have just added this to my signature for all outgoing business mail:
"Permission is granted under the Copyright Act 1968 (as amended to 4 March 2001) to forward this messages to other recipients within your company. This waiver is required because forwarding email without the owner's written permission is now illegal under the Copyright Act."
This avoids any problems if I accidentally leave off a vital recipient (which happens all the time), alerts other companies to the problem, and acts as a mild protest.
Slashdot Mirror
People who spend their time in any debate making personal comments about the opposition instead of countering their arguments are sure to lose the debate. You can see this in politics in any country. You would see this in any high-school class debate. And you may see it in the great Linux versus Microsoft debate.
What is needed is a united front from the Linux side. To do this, Linux people need to employ marketing people and spin doctors. While we may ordinarily be wary of such people, they have their uses and we should employ them if they can be of benefit to us.
Whenever Microsoft announces a Great New Product, the people on the Linux side can best devastate Microsoft's marketing efforts by pointing out the weaknesses in the Microsoft offering and how Linux products can overcome these weaknesses.
Imagine that Linux and Microsoft are ships in a naval battle. To sink Microsoft, make your shots count.
Microsoft products are expensive. Linux products are far more cost-effective. Wham!
Microsoft products have restrictive licence agreements. Linux products have more lenient software licenses. Wham!
Microsoft products tend to be overintegrated and this makes them unstable. Linux products don't take integration too far and are more stable as a result. Wham!
A few telling broadsides like that fired from the Linux ship and the Microsoft product is dead in the water and doomed to sink. In naval combat, you don't waste your ammunition firing warning shots across the bows of the enemy ship. You take aim at the ship and try to sink it.
--
* Ping flood. They would need a lot of pigeons for this.
* Send an e-mail.
* Serve a web page.
* DOS attack! Just release a LOT of pigeons at the same time, most with SYN packets.
* Read news.
* Increase the bandwidth by attacking a mini-CDROM to each pigeon.
--
Coppin said record labels are entitled to 7.5 cents for each download of a ring tone that uses copyrighted material....
Um, NO. The recording industry trades in music recordings, not music compositions. If I was to purchase the sheet music for the Brandenburg concerto and put an excerpt on a mobile phone, I owe the recording industry NOTHING. Same happens if I was to purchase sheet music for "Hey Jude" by Paul McCartney, or something else recent. The only person to whom I would owe money is the composer. The recording industry cannot claim royalties from anyone for making their own performances from the original, legally-purchased sheet music.
--
In my opinion, these are the important words in AlphaOne's post:
sell your information without your consent
Read it again, and you will understand the issue.
I have started calling the practice of selling personal information without consent data piracy or information piracy. Effectively, the companies are stealing your private information and making a profit from it.
It's just like software piracy, except for one important difference. Software pirates are often individuals, and the victims are often large corporations. Data pirates are often corporations, and the victims are individuals. Only large corporations have the finances to lobby effectively for law changes. So it's no surprise that software piracy is illegal but data piracy is not.
Corporations consider the sale of "address lists" to be an "accepted practice". Of course, software pirates would also call the piracy of software an "accepted practice". Having the criminals define what is acceptable behaviour is not very reliable.
Let's not mince words here. The definition of "piracy" in the modern corporate world is usually taken to mean making a profit by selling something that doesn't belong to you. So isn't the sale of someone else's personal details without their knowledge or consent piracy in the strictest definition of the term?
The biggest irony is that the MPAA and the RIAA are pirates because they sell their customer information.
--
In today's Internet, large bandwidth providers connect to backbones and purchase bandwidth. They then sell this bandwidth to smaller customers such as ISP's, who in turn sell to customers. Typically, ISP's and the like only have one bandwidth provider. How many ISP's do YOU use?
A lot of these business transactions mean that the organisation of the Internet, far from being organised like a spiderweb, is organised more like a tree in many places. So if one node fails, everything downstream loses connectivity.
--
I think this would be a cool idea for a party. The clock rolls over to 1G from 999999999 on the 9th day of the 9th month of the millenium. How cool's that? The 9/9/01 is a Sunday, so it's even kind enough to be on a weekend.
So pack those beers, grab the munchies, set up a *n?x computer with a BIG display showing the countdown and invite all your appreciative geek friends over. Forget the end of the millenium; the stupids celebrated it a year too early anyway. This is the REAL once-in-a-lifetime event....
--
Based on the experience of a friend of mine, I advise those with home networks to back up their systems, or at least back up critical configuration files.
His home router crashed and burned. Well, not quite, there weren't flames, but about all he could salvage from the very dead computer was the floppy drive. He spent a couple of days reconfiguring a new router, and he wishes he had backed up the configuration.
--
If the rules are the players must guess simultaneously, but not necessarily at a specific time, then we can bend the rules slightly and win 87.5% of the time with 3 players.
Here's my strategy.
When the 3 hats are distributed, one of the players yells "NOW". then, each player that can see 2 RED hats guesses BLUE. Otherwise all players pass. If all hats are RED, we lose at this point, otherwise we will eventually win.
Then, if all players pass, we have new information. That information is: "There is no more than 1 RED Hat". So, we co-ordinate another guess. Someone yells "NOW" again. Then, everyone that can see one RED hat correctly guesses "BLUE".
If all players pass again, new information is obtained: "There are NO red hats". Then, after someone co-ordinates the guesses again, all players can guess "BLUE" and be right.
The generalised solution has a failure rate of 1/2^N, where N is the number of players. For 15 players, the chance of failure with this strategy is 1/32768, far better than the 1/16 for the simpler strategy in the article.
This problem is similar to the "Three Philosophers" problem that was mentioned in Scientific American some years ago. In this one, three philosophers are aleep under a tree, and a bird soils the foreheads of all of them. When they wake, they all start laughing at each other. Then one suddenly stops laughing. Why?
--
States can ignore Federal laws (by passing their own variants)
You are incorrect. According to the Constitution of Australia, if a State has a law that is in conflict with a Federal law, the Federal law overrides the State law. If you're Australian, remember the recent mandatory sentencing debate? There are also some areas where states are constitutionally prohibited from passing laws. States cannot have their own armed forces, for example.
--
A better idea would be to cache recent requests. If there's a lot of requests for X bytes starting at Y, then this can be cached. I can see *cough* evil-monopolistic-corporation *cough* AOL thwarting this approach with random X and Y. This would also break prehashing.
Let's assume that the md5 server is up and running and happily providing the correct bytes. What's the next step that AOL will take? Will they figure out which version of AIM is being used and compel all users of that version to upgrade? Will they block that version? Will it be necessary to store multiple versions of AIM to combat this? Will they put another buffer overflow hack into AIM?
--
Evil mode on.
....
Oh, what a shame. You trialled a new beta of the software. But it had a bug in it that sent the MD5 sum continuously in a flood when it received the checksum request. This bug crashed the AOL server. The bug is proving so hard to find, but with 10,000 beta testers, you can't contact them all to get rid of the bug. Oh, you didn't put the bug in there intentionally, did you? Oh, of course you didn't, no programmer would do that
Evil mode off.
--
The mechanical hit counter is a great illustration of the Slashdot effect. Every 5 seconds, the number goes up by 30 or so each time:
540905
540937
540970
541000
541031
541064
541096
541128
... so who's pingflooding it?
--
Maybe you should buy an MP3 player, rip all the good tracks into MP3's, store them on one or two CD's, and just take the MP3 CD's to school.
--
And anything that can be done in software can be done in hardware. I can see some hardware hacker or cracker using a soldering iron and strategically-placed pieces of wire to defeat copy-protection using a 15-year-old CD player. There's probably a place where they can attach wires to intercept the raw data from a "copy-protected" CD. And once that happens, bye-bye copy protection.
Unless of course it's all done on a chip....
--
It seems that US companies are moving towards an economic model that can best be described as corporate feudalism, where all employees are serfs with many obligations and few rights. If nothing is done about it now, in 20 years, employees will not be able to leave any company to work elsewhere without good reason.
Perhaps such a grim future can be averted if all employees affected by this sort of agreement joined forces so that they can lobby lawmakers, perhaps as the lobbying equivelant of a class action lawsuit. Or perhaps even *gasp* a union for current employees. The law needs to be changed so that employees retain their right to earn a living.
What the legislative goal should be is a balance. Employers should be able to protect their trade secrets. However, a strict time limit of 12 months should apply, and employees who are hindered from working elsewhere as a consequence should receive full pay from their former employer.
The former employer is gaining the benefit of reduced competition, so they should be made to pay for it. The former employer can easily afford this because no employer ever pays full price for the cost of labour. Like all tradable commodities, labour is always purchased wholesale and sold retail.
Such noncompete clauses should apply only for 12 months, or the former employer stops paying the employee, whichever is the lesser. And of course, an employer wouldn't need to pay a former employee who finds unrelated work to gain the protection of a noncompete clause.
It would then be in the best interest for employers to help former employees to find unrelated work, because they would not have to pay them to sit idle, and they have less competition. The employee wins as well, because they can pursue new challenges instead of vegetating for 12 months.
--
Yeah, MIT's hacks sure make our effort of putting a roll of tickertape in an airvent at uni pale in comparison.
The airvent was a 4 metre tall ground-level duct that was the main outlet to the airconditioning at a uni in Melbourne. A small slot in the side of the concrete pipe permitted the entry of small objects like boxes of confetti, computer cards and rolls of tickertape. These unauthorised wind-tunnel experiments proved to be great fun and fairly harmless.
--
Biotech researchers have made mice that glow in the dark, thanks to jellyfish genes and gene-splicing technology. All that one needs to do is make a few of these mice and put them in a cage somewhere.
If you could add a few other lifeforms, it could be a really interesting display.
The state-of-the-art may not yet have advanced to the point where this can be done easily outside biotech companies, but it's likely that such a hack can be possible by 2010.
--
If that's the case, he needs your contributions.
We should get the EFF to donate funds to representatives who display such obvious enlightenment. If they get elected, they can spread that enlightenment far and wide, particularly within the government where it is so badly needed. That means we should donate more to the EFF so that they can support representatives in this manner.
--
Or maybe we use H4X0R 5P33K to encode the filenames.
Metallica would become M374111C4
Greatest Hits would become 6R347357 H175
RIAA would become 14M3R2
and so on.
One could get the number of possible ASCII characters down to 64, thus making a basic compression algorithm possible. Then, to decode the data, those obscure compressions can be run through a program using an algorithm that converts them into plausible words. This algorithm could even be patented to screw up the legal system further for the RIAA.
The more we abuse the system, the more likely the flaws will be exposed.
--
I tend to screw up the census in Australia when it happens every five years. I can't help it. I was born in the same week of August on which the census is usually taken in Australia. So some years, I'm 4 years older than the last census, and some years I'm 6 years older.
On two of the last three censuses, census night fell on my birthday. I wish I had taken the opportunity to make life interesting for the census staff by going out and getting drunk or something, then not coming home that night.
--
Macrovision filters are now illegal in Australia, because macrovision is a "copy protection technology" and such filters are "circumvention devices" within the meaning of the amended Copyright Act.
Stupid government. Bring on the election.
--
Nope, just a bunch of clueless, out-of-touch politicians that will probably be voted out of office at this year's federal election....
--
Here's the link at the ninemsn web site:s p)
New law won't punish forwarding e-mails (http://news.ninemsn.com.au/sci_tech/story_9424.a
--
Washington is a town with very, very few technical people advising the top levels of decision-makers. In an era where technology has such an impact on our economy, that is dangerous. Most of the senior people are lawyers and economists with little knowledge of science and technology. They get their information largely from the few technical people on their staffs and from hordes of lobbyists.
Given the recent insanity with changes to Australian copyright law, other ill-conceived legislative changes and the lack of action against spam, and it becomes evident that Canberra has the same lack of technical expertise advising Cabinet, Parliament and the major political parties as the U.S.
--
I have just added this to my signature for all outgoing business mail:
"Permission is granted under the Copyright Act 1968 (as amended to 4 March 2001) to forward this messages to other recipients within your company. This waiver is required because forwarding email without the owner's written permission is now illegal under the Copyright Act."
This avoids any problems if I accidentally leave off a vital recipient (which happens all the time), alerts other companies to the problem, and acts as a mild protest.
--