Not sure about sensationalist. It's misleading. Deliberately so. But I don't see it as malicious. You need to read the article to work out what it's about, and headlines are there to draw you into the article. Ultimately it's just a very dry joke. Not one that will have you rolling on the floor, but something that should have people chuckling as they understand the context.
Hey. Allow them some artistic licence. It's amusing that her first reaction to something that in retrospect is so useful was annoyance, and arranging the headline this way illustrates this a lot better than a strictly accurate one would.
I tried making a perpetual motion machine, but it just kept getting faster and faster. I mean what use is a device that creates free energy? And it's just damn irritating when the fundamental laws of physics stop applying.
Well, that's more of a legal matter than a moral matter. As for morality, Amazon have every right to ask their customers to return the items or pay what they should have. Anything more than that and it becomes a lot more difficult to side with them.
What happens if you quote a price of $0? As far as I understand, for a contract to be formed, both sides need to receive something of value. If you offer something for free, then it's a gift, and different rules apply.
Morally? Well, a lot of people would have known it was a mistake and said nothing to see if they could get away with it. Others would have heard about this mistake and deliberately made an order to take advantage of it.
Maybe it is Amazon's fault, and it's hardly hurt them significantly, but I have to agree that at least some of the customers are in a morally grey area at least.
Lets suppose we call it cooking instead. Does that make it right? What if we call it murder? Is it suddenly worse? If I call my car a Ferrarri, will it go faster?
Quite clearly, unless you have an extremely strong view that copryright is evil, what the guy did was wrong. For many reasons. But what we call it is just a name.
Google's motto is "don't be evil". Abusing their power in this way because of a disagreement with a legal judgement would be stretching the concept of "not evil" a little.
Ultimately, if you put enough effort into it you could fake someone to any level of detail. You may have to pay someone to change their name if no person with that name exists, but it can be done.
Thank you for the excellent summary of how AACS works.
As far as I understand it, this hack gets the VUK. Now, I'm guessing that this will only work for any disc that the specific software player will play. It's simply that the hacker now know where to look in memory for the key. This is quite nice because it means that if they keep the player that produced the key secret, the AACS people can't revoke the key for a specific player (because they don't know which one was compromised). It also means that for any other software player, they have a reference code so they know where it's stored, or where the pointer is, or where the pointer to the pointer is...
It's basically about established practice. We've pretty much established right and wrong when copying a book. As a rule, you don't do it. In many countries, libraries and schools have a licencing agreement that allows photocopying. With TV shows it's considered perfectly acceptable to copy an entire show. Audio mix tapes are usually considered acceptable or explictely legal.
On the web, caching search engines have been in existence for a lot longer than expiring content has been around. It's established that search engines are a neccesity, and that robots.txt is the way to opt-out. When you do business in a new arena, it makes sense that the existing rules of the arena should apply.
Yes it is different. In most countries, unauthorised distribution carries much heavier penalties than unauthorised possession (which may indeed have no penalty atttached at all).
People have a set price of X that they think something is worth. X will usually be a round number. Some people will buy an item if the value is less than X, others will buy it if it is less than or equal to X. By going for the round number, you exclude all those people who will only pay less than X.
They agree with MS that they can use any MS licence, and MS can use any of theirs. This doesn't mean they're acknowledging that any of this code is covered by a patent. They can redistribute it under the terms of the GPL until told otherwise. If it turns out that something is patented, then they can't distribute it, because the GPL says so. But on the other hand, neither could anyone else if that happened.
As far as I'm concerned, Freedom of Speech is just that. Being free to speak. People are generally flexible about the scope of speech, but the concern here is freedom. If I don't allow you to publish what you wish to say on my property, I am not offering freedom of speech. If I do, I am offering freedom of speech.
I don't believe most of those who are criticising believe there is any legal obligation or legal right to freedom of speech on private property. They simply think that it is unethical behaviour for a private company to pick and choose what they consider acceptable when they suggest they're offerning a public forum.
Expecting free speech protection from a private entitity is a bit absurd.
No it isn't. Many private entities permite it. Get a livejournal account with the username "I_Hate_LJ". Post complaints about livejournal there. The chances are, they'll be quite happy that you're expressing yourself.
If a Mall were to object to a legitimate protest, they have every legal right. But it makes them look pretty bad, and if I did want to protest, I'd make sure they looked as bad as possible by stopping my legitimate complaints.
Freedom is speech is not the First Amendment. It's a basic ethical principle. An example is Slashdot. I can be as insulting as I want to Slashdot, Slashdot's owners, slashdot's users, and the worst that will happen is that I get modded down. This has nothing to do with the my consitutional rights.
And I have every right to publicly criticise those organisations that don't extend freedom of speech to me.
Slashdot Mirror
They wrote the rules.
It's childish, but at least tit-for-tat retribution points out the hypocrisy.
Eviolution is wrong. We were all created as part of an experiment by aliens. The experiment has since been abandoned.
This argument is consistent with Intelligent Design. I wonder if the ID proponents would be happy about that being taught in schools.
Not sure about sensationalist. It's misleading. Deliberately so. But I don't see it as malicious. You need to read the article to work out what it's about, and headlines are there to draw you into the article. Ultimately it's just a very dry joke. Not one that will have you rolling on the floor, but something that should have people chuckling as they understand the context.
Hey. Allow them some artistic licence. It's amusing that her first reaction to something that in retrospect is so useful was annoyance, and arranging the headline this way illustrates this a lot better than a strictly accurate one would.
I tried making a perpetual motion machine, but it just kept getting faster and faster. I mean what use is a device that creates free energy? And it's just damn irritating when the fundamental laws of physics stop applying.
Well, that's more of a legal matter than a moral matter. As for morality, Amazon have every right to ask their customers to return the items or pay what they should have. Anything more than that and it becomes a lot more difficult to side with them.
What happens if you quote a price of $0? As far as I understand, for a contract to be formed, both sides need to receive something of value. If you offer something for free, then it's a gift, and different rules apply.
Morally? Well, a lot of people would have known it was a mistake and said nothing to see if they could get away with it. Others would have heard about this mistake and deliberately made an order to take advantage of it.
Maybe it is Amazon's fault, and it's hardly hurt them significantly, but I have to agree that at least some of the customers are in a morally grey area at least.
Yes. I agree with you there.
Lets suppose we call it cooking instead. Does that make it right? What if we call it murder? Is it suddenly worse? If I call my car a Ferrarri, will it go faster?
Quite clearly, unless you have an extremely strong view that copryright is evil, what the guy did was wrong. For many reasons. But what we call it is just a name.
No. But getting taking it upon yourself to punish those you disagree with is evil. And accepting legal judgements stoically is not evil.
Google's motto is "don't be evil". Abusing their power in this way because of a disagreement with a legal judgement would be stretching the concept of "not evil" a little.
Then they hired an actor.
Ultimately, if you put enough effort into it you could fake someone to any level of detail. You may have to pay someone to change their name if no person with that name exists, but it can be done.
I'm sure the story ended on a cliffhanger. Or am I getting confused here? Does anyone have a copyright infringing mirror of this?
Yeah. In comics, death is the least permanant injury.
Thank you for the excellent summary of how AACS works.
As far as I understand it, this hack gets the VUK. Now, I'm guessing that this will only work for any disc that the specific software player will play. It's simply that the hacker now know where to look in memory for the key. This is quite nice because it means that if they keep the player that produced the key secret, the AACS people can't revoke the key for a specific player (because they don't know which one was compromised). It also means that for any other software player, they have a reference code so they know where it's stored, or where the pointer is, or where the pointer to the pointer is...
What's called robots.txt?
I thought that was simply a file that told search engines what to spider.
It's basically about established practice. We've pretty much established right and wrong when copying a book. As a rule, you don't do it. In many countries, libraries and schools have a licencing agreement that allows photocopying. With TV shows it's considered perfectly acceptable to copy an entire show. Audio mix tapes are usually considered acceptable or explictely legal.
On the web, caching search engines have been in existence for a lot longer than expiring content has been around. It's established that search engines are a neccesity, and that robots.txt is the way to opt-out. When you do business in a new arena, it makes sense that the existing rules of the arena should apply.
Yes it is different. In most countries, unauthorised distribution carries much heavier penalties than unauthorised possession (which may indeed have no penalty atttached at all).
It's rational behaviour.
People have a set price of X that they think something is worth. X will usually be a round number. Some people will buy an item if the value is less than X, others will buy it if it is less than or equal to X. By going for the round number, you exclude all those people who will only pay less than X.
They're more subtle than that.
They agree with MS that they can use any MS licence, and MS can use any of theirs. This doesn't mean they're acknowledging that any of this code is covered by a patent. They can redistribute it under the terms of the GPL until told otherwise. If it turns out that something is patented, then they can't distribute it, because the GPL says so. But on the other hand, neither could anyone else if that happened.
I was killed by a gazebo!
Well, since we're arguing semantics....
As far as I'm concerned, Freedom of Speech is just that. Being free to speak. People are generally flexible about the scope of speech, but the concern here is freedom. If I don't allow you to publish what you wish to say on my property, I am not offering freedom of speech. If I do, I am offering freedom of speech.
I don't believe most of those who are criticising believe there is any legal obligation or legal right to freedom of speech on private property. They simply think that it is unethical behaviour for a private company to pick and choose what they consider acceptable when they suggest they're offerning a public forum.
Expecting free speech protection from a private entitity is a bit absurd.
No it isn't. Many private entities permite it. Get a livejournal account with the username "I_Hate_LJ". Post complaints about livejournal there. The chances are, they'll be quite happy that you're expressing yourself.
If a Mall were to object to a legitimate protest, they have every legal right. But it makes them look pretty bad, and if I did want to protest, I'd make sure they looked as bad as possible by stopping my legitimate complaints.
Freedom is speech is not the First Amendment. It's a basic ethical principle. An example is Slashdot. I can be as insulting as I want to Slashdot, Slashdot's owners, slashdot's users, and the worst that will happen is that I get modded down. This has nothing to do with the my consitutional rights.
And I have every right to publicly criticise those organisations that don't extend freedom of speech to me.