Hardly. SDMI is crap. MP3 is not crap but is a very useful format. MP3.com used Sony's recordings without permission, so they're being forced to pay royalties for these recordings in the future. The format is unaffected.
I for one would not want the world to know my DSL IP addresses. (Static, but it doesn't really matter, as dynamic addresses are around for a few hours, long enough for a bad guy to attack them). So I don't share, because I'm afraid someone might catch me with my shields down.
If the DMCA is upheld by the Supreme Court, which is clearly what this is leading to, then we may find ourselves with a severely limited First Amendment. As you noted:
The UTTERLY FRIGHTENING thing is that Kaplan held that DeCSS WAS speech!
If DeCSS is speech that used to be constitutionally protected, but now a prior restraint is permitted, then we have enabled a wide range of censorship, not only by corporate entities such as MPAA/RIAA but anyone else with money and power.
The open source DVD player (Thank you!) uses a brute force attack against CSS to unlock the disc.
This is an interesting approach that hasn't really been considered, at least in the 1000s of/. comments. Processing power is getting way cheap, so over time this would get better and better!
Do you have a link to the brute-force attack tool? Is this part of LiViD?
Well, I own a shirt, and I don't think I'd sell it to the MPAA for any price. If they were required to pay what the market will bear for the shirts, that would be interesting indeed!
gave out a horrible squealing sound whenever you charged the battery. Tech support replaced it two separate times. Now the screen has a weird yellow blotch in the top right corner.
Piece of crap. But my current PB (1yr old G3) is fabulous.
About 1.5 years ago. That time as well, it was to clear out some inventory and also get the Exploding PowerBooks (tm) out of the installed base and into the dumpster, where they most definitely belong. I still have a 5300 and may sell it to someone wanting to take advantage of this...
Since SBC uses an ATM fabric all the way out to their DSL modems, it is possible to assign priority to different types of
traffic.
Yes, but it is much more difficult to distinguish by TCP application at the ATM client device, typically a dumb bridge. You can, and some carriers do, prioritize "business" over "individual" traffic, but this is by PVC, not by application (NNTP/SMTP/HTTP/Napster).
Definitely call them. SBC is the parent company of Pac Bell, so perhaps you were notified that your Pac Bell service is now provided by SBC, but I would think that you could switch to another LATA1 ISP. (Pac Bell/SBC of course offers service in all LATAs; this was the list of other non-PB/SBC ISPs, for the alphabet soup fan.)
Actually, a/30 would work for a routed connection with one usable IP (the other three are for the network, broadcast, and premises router) but this is highly wasteful of IPs as 3 of 4 aren't used. So it's best to use a bridged connection with DHCP (my preference) or PPPoE, to assign only one IP per user.
Contrast with DHCP, where (apparently)
anyone with a valid DSL line can grab multiple addresses.
Not necessarily. Some gateway routers (e.g. Redback) can be configured to only allow one IP per location. I think PPPoE is really for authentication of another sort (more accountability for abuse) but I've always thought that the user experience is too much of a pain. Authentication is useful, but if a customer is abusing the service, you can always kill their line at the gateway.
I have never understood the purpose of PPPoE. Why in the name of God Almighty would you make ALWAYS-ON service look like DIAL-UP? As Bob Metcalfe said years ago, dial-up is an abomination that needs to be wiped out, not something to be emulated.
So they ARE capping the speed of the newsgroups. Probably because they didn't allocate enough server capacity, and dsl users are hitting the binaries groups with a bit too much vigor...
On the suit, though, did they ever advertise guaranteed throughput for news?
You can say shut up and get another ISP. As noted in some of the other posts here, there are lots of ISPs providing DSL service in most markets.
The way they do this (I work an ISP offering DSL, so I'm familiar with this) is that the ISP connects high-speed ATM circuits (typically DS3) to a local or regional network maintained by the local carrier. ATM traffic is aggregated on these local/regional networks to reach this point. From the connection point, the ISP may further aggregate ATM traffic (or not), but ultimately all the ATM virtual circuits terminate on an ISP router. This router is then connected to the ISP backbone.
From the backbone router, traffic is mixed in with 100s of other service types. It may be prioritized or throttled by service (@Home does this); it may be subject to IP or ATM QOS; it may get stuck in public peering; or it may flow freely. Any of these factors, most of which have to do with sufficient capacity being provisioned, may get in the way of good service at the backbone level.
A "good" ISP allocates sufficient IP backbone capacity, and has good peering arrangements with other ISPs, minimizing latency, hops, and packet loss. A "good" LEC (either ILEC or CLEC) allocates sufficient regional ATM capacity to get cell loss damn near zero. A "bad" carrier doesn't sufficiently anticipate demand, or oversubscribes the hell out of it, and you get slow service.
In this particular case, I would suspect that SBC.net isn't smart enough to throttle capacity at the mail or news servers (though I suppose they could, using Packeteer or some such). It's much more likely that these servers themselves have a poor connection to the SBC.net backbone, and congestion is causing delays.
So does the suit have merit? Unclear. Unless SBC advertised a guaranteed service speed for the mail and news services, I would doubt it, but IANAL (and IAAISP) so take this with a big shaker of salt.
It does make their Bandwidth Hogs commercial look kinda stupid, though.
seems to work. Restaurants & stores pay ASCAP a flat rate, ASCAP has some formula to pay artists, the end-user is blissfully unaware of the details. Note that ASCAP has not involved itself in this suit...
I like the comment on business models, emphasis added:
[T]he real value is in creating intellectual property, a service. If the service is
good, you leave a tip. Again, companies like Red Hat are bringing this model back into play. (The
reason Red Hat has been so much more successful than, say, Caldera Systems (Nasdaq:
CALD), is that Red Hat sees what it does as a service, and Caldera sees its intellectual property
as a product it can control.)
The Napster parallel is quite relevant. Napster, MP3.com, et al. are services that provide value to the user (aggregation) and the artist (distribution), and can certainly be tweaked to also provide $. So the publisher gets cut out - disintermediated, to use an overused Katzism, which is exactly what should happen.
Napster just seems to me a feeding frenzy for people who want a free ride.
No, Napster is a feeding frenzy for people who want their music immediately. Polls show that people would pay for it. I would certainly pay for it, provided it were available on MY terms (either all-you-can-eat for $19.95/mo, or $1/mp3, and MP3s, not that SDMI shit). No "legit" source exists, and nature/technology abhor vacuums, so Napster is what results. This is good news for everyone but the lawyers; why should the public wait for them to catch up??
Slashdot Mirror
No, you put your Slashdot in my Windows!
W & S: Perfect together.
Hardly. SDMI is crap. MP3 is not crap but is a very useful format. MP3.com used Sony's recordings without permission, so they're being forced to pay royalties for these recordings in the future. The format is unaffected.
sulli
The UTTERLY FRIGHTENING thing is that Kaplan held that DeCSS WAS speech!
If DeCSS is speech that used to be constitutionally protected, but now a prior restraint is permitted, then we have enabled a wide range of censorship, not only by corporate entities such as MPAA/RIAA but anyone else with money and power.
This case scares me more every day.
sulli
This is an interesting approach that hasn't really been considered, at least in the 1000s of /. comments. Processing power is getting way cheap, so over time this would get better and better!
Do you have a link to the brute-force attack tool? Is this part of LiViD?
sulli
sulli
sulli
Sigh.
sulli
Piece of crap. But my current PB (1yr old G3) is fabulous.
sulli
sulli
Yes, but it is much more difficult to distinguish by TCP application at the ATM client device, typically a dumb bridge. You can, and some carriers do, prioritize "business" over "individual" traffic, but this is by PVC, not by application (NNTP/SMTP/HTTP/Napster).
sulli
sulli
sulli
Not necessarily. Some gateway routers (e.g. Redback) can be configured to only allow one IP per location. I think PPPoE is really for authentication of another sort (more accountability for abuse) but I've always thought that the user experience is too much of a pain. Authentication is useful, but if a customer is abusing the service, you can always kill their line at the gateway.
sulli
sulli
DHCP is much better.
sulli
It's not how big a pipe you have, it's how you use it.
On the suit, though, did they ever advertise guaranteed throughput for news?
sulli
sulli
The way they do this (I work an ISP offering DSL, so I'm familiar with this) is that the ISP connects high-speed ATM circuits (typically DS3) to a local or regional network maintained by the local carrier. ATM traffic is aggregated on these local/regional networks to reach this point. From the connection point, the ISP may further aggregate ATM traffic (or not), but ultimately all the ATM virtual circuits terminate on an ISP router. This router is then connected to the ISP backbone.
From the backbone router, traffic is mixed in with 100s of other service types. It may be prioritized or throttled by service (@Home does this); it may be subject to IP or ATM QOS; it may get stuck in public peering; or it may flow freely. Any of these factors, most of which have to do with sufficient capacity being provisioned, may get in the way of good service at the backbone level.
A "good" ISP allocates sufficient IP backbone capacity, and has good peering arrangements with other ISPs, minimizing latency, hops, and packet loss. A "good" LEC (either ILEC or CLEC) allocates sufficient regional ATM capacity to get cell loss damn near zero. A "bad" carrier doesn't sufficiently anticipate demand, or oversubscribes the hell out of it, and you get slow service.
In this particular case, I would suspect that SBC.net isn't smart enough to throttle capacity at the mail or news servers (though I suppose they could, using Packeteer or some such). It's much more likely that these servers themselves have a poor connection to the SBC.net backbone, and congestion is causing delays.
So does the suit have merit? Unclear. Unless SBC advertised a guaranteed service speed for the mail and news services, I would doubt it, but IANAL (and IAAISP) so take this with a big shaker of salt.
It does make their Bandwidth Hogs commercial look kinda stupid, though.
sulli
sulli
[T]he real value is in creating intellectual property, a service. If the service is good, you leave a tip. Again, companies like Red Hat are bringing this model back into play. (The reason Red Hat has been so much more successful than, say, Caldera Systems (Nasdaq: CALD), is that Red Hat sees what it does as a service, and Caldera sees its intellectual property as a product it can control.)
The Napster parallel is quite relevant. Napster, MP3.com, et al. are services that provide value to the user (aggregation) and the artist (distribution), and can certainly be tweaked to also provide $. So the publisher gets cut out - disintermediated, to use an overused Katzism, which is exactly what should happen.
sulli
No, Napster is a feeding frenzy for people who want their music immediately. Polls show that people would pay for it. I would certainly pay for it, provided it were available on MY terms (either all-you-can-eat for $19.95/mo, or $1/mp3, and MP3s, not that SDMI shit). No "legit" source exists, and nature/technology abhor vacuums, so Napster is what results. This is good news for everyone but the lawyers; why should the public wait for them to catch up??
sulli
Now just where the #@$*#@ did you see that? Certainly not on their announcements page.
Last time I checked, they were being sued to get shut down. MP3.com has entered into arrangements with certain labels, not Napster.
Sheesh.
sulli
There was something else before that, with a totally unrelated title - it was clearly disinformation. Anyone remember what it was?
sulli