transferred domains away from defendants who were acting in good faith (read: cybersquatting)
How do you come up with this interpretation of 'in good faith'? That phrase would suggest to me that someone had registered the domain name for their own use, not to 'squat' on it.
If it's true that Adobe has managed to get a patent on the 'tabbed widget', then the real culprit in this story is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. They've been making some absolutely insane calls in the software area, and it's about time Congress looked into it. Either the P&TO needs to start recruiting examiners who know what they're doing, or the law itself needs to be rewritten to clarify what is and is not patentable.
I hate to have to be the one that breaks this to you, but reporters (sic) are the laziest human beings on the face of the earth. Couple that with having to come up with new material on deadline each day, and you get 'news by press release'. My best friend handles PR as a consultant to a number of corporations, and she's opened my eyes as to how all that 'news' really gets there. Apart from the stuff that gets generated by planes falling out of the sky and whatnot, most everything you see comes from some flack putting it out there. At best, a reporter might call to verify a fact or two, and, if feeling extra ambitious, might even check with a separate source for a more complete slant. But, to a surprising extent, they're regurgitation machines, particularly in the business arena.
And then, the RIAA/MPAA/anti-piracy-goons will be able to flood the system with anti-votes for copyrighted material.
Surely a danger. But, as the old 60's song says, "they have the guns, but we've got the numbers...". I think the RIAA would have its hands full fielding a large enough force to overcome the millions of people and millions of files involved. If I recall how Freenet works (anyone who wants to chime in here with better info, feel free), it boils down to a 'one-IP-one-vote' sort of system, so any attempt at an automated attack would require a Class A address segment for the RIAA to use (which I wouldn't put past them). And if they really tried this sort of attack, perhaps something like the MAPS 'blackhole list' could be used to thwart them. (Anyone else notice how this measure/countermeasure scenario starts to resemble actual warfare? Hmmm. Wonder what a surplus Nike missile sells for these days.:-)
One of the areas of vulnerability Freenet has (one which it shares with Gnutella) is that it's possible to post bogus stuff (like fake MP3s containing anti-piracy messages, for example) in an effort to pollute the stream, so to speak. Clarke has said that he wants to eventually implement an 'anti-vote' (my terminology - I've forgotten his term for it) so that users who discover one of these files can demote it and cause it to eventually disappear. I hope that he can get that mechanism working before Freenet gets too widely used. Otherwise, I'm afraid that an organized effort to gum it up will result in a lot of bogus files with high 'popularity', causing them to persist for quite a while.
I don't buy the "write your congressperson" solution. They aren't passing laws at random, waiting to receive opinions from their consituents.
I thought that was exactly the point I was making: in the absense of any direction from the people whom they supposedly represent, they're going to follow the lead of whoever is going to get them reelected. I agree they're not passing laws at random: the [RIAA | PETA | NRA | Teamsters] are writing the laws for them to pass.
Congressman Bob is offered $100,000 from a corporation to vote to pass a law. He is shown polls that suggest 70% of his constituents favor this law. He receives a letter from a voter arguing that he should vote against it. What do you think he does?
Probably votes for it. Picture this: Congressman Bob is offered $100,000 from a corporation to vote to pass a law. He is shown polls that suggest 70% of his constituents favor this law. He receives 200 letters from his constituents detailing their opposition to it. He gets 85 phone calls from constituents and businesses opposed. He gets 28 office visits from representatives of the "We're Against This Crap" group. He'll at least think twice before voting in favor, especially if this has happened in the past and he's had these folks then oppose him in the next election. Sure, you won't win every time, but you can count on losing if you don't even try.
We need campaign finance reform, and we need to pay close attention to the candidates we vote for, rather than not voting, or even worse, voting for a candidate you know little about.
If you're hoping campaign finance reform is the salvation, you're going to be disappointed. To implement the controls that the advocates want, any CFR is going to have to trod so harshly on the First Amendment that the Supreme Court will toss out those provisions attempting to limit third-party spending. Don't forget that we came to the present situation thru an earlier CFR that placed such restrictive limits on how much can be donated to a candidate that they're now full-time whores for campaign cash. Campaign money is a force of nature and will always find a path to the candidate.
What in my posting makes you think I don't take my own advice? You bet I write. And phone. And visit. I even donate big bucks to some of them (and that definitely gets your calls returned). And, by-the-by, nothing in what I said could be considered a gripe. I was pointing out to the poster (and anyone else interested) what needs to happen if change is going to be effected. I also made no presumptions on whether or not the reader was active, hence my opener: How many letters have you written your representatives lately? If the answer is 'none' then you have your answer as to the source of the problem.
Ah yes. I had the same situation with C. My favorite was the guy who knew Fortran and hated C, so he used the preprocessor to, in effect, create his own Fortran-like language. (My God, now I'm going to have nightmares about that one tonight)
I was always a fan of the Obfuscated C contest (my fave category was 'abuse of the preprocessor'), but have to say these contests have their downside. They're used by language Nazis as arguments for why its a bad idea to use the language involved. "How can you consider using a language that's so crappy that people can write inpenetrable code with it?" is the usual harangue. (To which I always responded that any language can be abused in this fashion. Then I'd shoot them with my Nerf gun.)
How many letters have you written your representatives lately? If the answer is 'none' then you have your answer as to the source of the problem. Absent input from us, of course they're going to sell out to corporations/unions/pressure groups. They give them money and/or voting blocs. Having worked for a politician in the past, I can tell you that one letter from a constituent, as long as its rational, carries a lot of weight. If you organize and get a group to write a bunch of letters, believe me, you get noticed. So, if you want to stick it to the RIAA or "The Man" in general, start writing. And better yet, gather together a group of like-minded individuals and put out a barrage. Griping on SlashDot, while possibly therapeutic, is just like flushing your opinions down the toilet.
They're catching major flak from the vary artists they're 'representing' and saw the handwriting on the wall: it's going to happen no matter what. So, when you see the crowd headed off in some direction, get in front of them so that you can 'lead'. That way, you can at least have some influence on the outcome. Otherwise, you'll end up with something really unpalatable. First rule of politics.
Reno said the university experts will have "total access" to any information they need to conduct their review.
I hope this means that the source code is included in that promise. Until I got to this part of the article, I had envisioned the FBI dumping a set of software specs on some professor's desk and saying, "here's the design, so begin your 'review'". I'm also somewhat suspicious that the FBI will give the work to some outfit that depends on lots of federal government grants and contracts, which will call their objectivity into question. Law enforcement knows exactly which friendly judges to go to to get a warrant, so what makes academia any different?
Quite frankly, I'd ignore this part of the policy. The first thing I'd do after signing up with this service is install an inexpensive router (Linksys makes one that looks good) and set its firewall functions to exclude all connections originated from the outside. This is for your own protection (my router detects several 'port scans' a day - people looking for a vulnerable machine), but it also permits you to hook up any number of computers to their service indetectably. The router looks like the computer to them, and it will act as the proxy for all of the machines you hook up to it. If they give you any attitude about using a router (short of coming out and looking, they shouldn't be able to tell it's there), tell them you're protecting yourself with a hardware firewall and that if forced to directly connect your computer, you'll hold them responsible for the consequences of any outside attack on it.
What I find problematic about these alarmist diatribes is that they're filled with declarative statements but no evidence to support the thesis. I'd be more willing to buy into the arguments if the author would offer some statistics or other proof. For instance, the percentage of research funded by "global corporations" versus government, versus private donation now as opposed to in the past. The author is also guilty of begging the question when assuning that it's self-evident that "Corporatism" is bad. If it is, then there should be no problem telling me why. Overall, my feeling at the end of the article was, "So?".
I wasn't making a distinction between failures due to acts of God versus people shutting off Napster because they want to play Quake at max speed. The end result is pretty much the same: you have to hunt again and start over. I'm not assessing blame or criticizing anyone here. I actually love the whole Napster concept. I just think that human as well as systemic factors make a centralized distribution model more sensible for for-pay material.
In a related matter, one thing that passed through my mind when I read the story was: if a group of people were really ticked off at a big media corporation, one tactic employed could be to put together phoney 'movies' and trick people into wasting the time to download them. If widely-enough done, this would undermine the confidence in the system and constitute a serious attack.
Why in hell would a major company (i.e. we're not talking garage bands here) that wants to distribute content legally want to use the Napster model, particularly for HUGE content? More than half of my Napster downloads fail, and they're only 3-4 megabytes. What's going to happen when they're 100 or 1000 times that big? And why would you want to make your customers have to go hunting for your products and hope that someone just happens to have them available at the time? If you're distributing content legally and therefore have no reason to fear being sued, wouldn't it make far more sense to put the content on some nice, fast, highly-connected servers at a well-known place and just let people ftp them in peace?
You have to sign up for the list, and then reply to a confirming email to verify that you're you and that you want on the list. Otherwise, your 'sign up' can be a forgery by someone else.
It's clear that MAPS is engaged in a take-no-prisoners battle with some of its opponents. For instance, here they say, "However, not only has Big Star management adamantly refused to do so, Michael Kofman, Big Star's Director of Marketing and Business Development, stated that he would forge subscriptions to lists operated by his competitors in the name of MAPS staff if Big Star was not removed from the RBL." What's really surprising is someone being dumb enough to announce this upfront. Put this in the "what were they thinking?" category.
Slashdot Mirror
transferred domains away from defendants who were acting in good faith (read: cybersquatting)
How do you come up with this interpretation of 'in good faith'? That phrase would suggest to me that someone had registered the domain name for their own use, not to 'squat' on it.
What werer you using to obtain this definition? Looks like a useful tool.
If it's true that Adobe has managed to get a patent on the 'tabbed widget', then the real culprit in this story is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. They've been making some absolutely insane calls in the software area, and it's about time Congress looked into it. Either the P&TO needs to start recruiting examiners who know what they're doing, or the law itself needs to be rewritten to clarify what is and is not patentable.
I hate to have to be the one that breaks this to you, but reporters (sic) are the laziest human beings on the face of the earth. Couple that with having to come up with new material on deadline each day, and you get 'news by press release'. My best friend handles PR as a consultant to a number of corporations, and she's opened my eyes as to how all that 'news' really gets there. Apart from the stuff that gets generated by planes falling out of the sky and whatnot, most everything you see comes from some flack putting it out there. At best, a reporter might call to verify a fact or two, and, if feeling extra ambitious, might even check with a separate source for a more complete slant. But, to a surprising extent, they're regurgitation machines, particularly in the business arena.
Hey, just havin' some fun. Nothing like tweaking someone's favorite language to raise the ole blood pressure. If you like LISP, feel free to enjoy it.
Check my other reply about this.
I'm still waiting for my eyeballs to uncross after reading my last LISP progrem.
... full of parens"
[Begin Also Spach Zarathustra theme music] "My God, it's , it's
And then, the RIAA/MPAA/anti-piracy-goons will be able to flood the system with anti-votes for copyrighted material.
...". I think the RIAA would have its hands full fielding a large enough force to overcome the millions of people and millions of files involved. If I recall how Freenet works (anyone who wants to chime in here with better info, feel free), it boils down to a 'one-IP-one-vote' sort of system, so any attempt at an automated attack would require a Class A address segment for the RIAA to use (which I wouldn't put past them). And if they really tried this sort of attack, perhaps something like the MAPS 'blackhole list' could be used to thwart them. (Anyone else notice how this measure/countermeasure scenario starts to resemble actual warfare? Hmmm. Wonder what a surplus Nike missile sells for these days. :-)
Surely a danger. But, as the old 60's song says, "they have the guns, but we've got the numbers
One of the areas of vulnerability Freenet has (one which it shares with Gnutella) is that it's possible to post bogus stuff (like fake MP3s containing anti-piracy messages, for example) in an effort to pollute the stream, so to speak. Clarke has said that he wants to eventually implement an 'anti-vote' (my terminology - I've forgotten his term for it) so that users who discover one of these files can demote it and cause it to eventually disappear. I hope that he can get that mechanism working before Freenet gets too widely used. Otherwise, I'm afraid that an organized effort to gum it up will result in a lot of bogus files with high 'popularity', causing them to persist for quite a while.
No problemo. This discussion has reminded me that I should go call my Congressbeing; I'm sure he's wondering why he hasn't heard from me in a week :-).
I don't buy the "write your congressperson" solution. They aren't passing laws at random, waiting to receive opinions from their consituents.
I thought that was exactly the point I was making: in the absense of any direction from the people whom they supposedly represent, they're going to follow the lead of whoever is going to get them reelected. I agree they're not passing laws at random: the [RIAA | PETA | NRA | Teamsters] are writing the laws for them to pass.
Congressman Bob is offered $100,000 from a corporation to vote to pass a law. He is shown polls that suggest 70% of his constituents favor this law. He receives a letter from a voter arguing that he should vote against it. What do you think he does?
Probably votes for it. Picture this: Congressman Bob is offered $100,000 from a corporation to vote to pass a law. He is shown polls that suggest 70% of his constituents favor this law. He receives 200 letters from his constituents detailing their opposition to it. He gets 85 phone calls from constituents and businesses opposed. He gets 28 office visits from representatives of the "We're Against This Crap" group. He'll at least think twice before voting in favor, especially if this has happened in the past and he's had these folks then oppose him in the next election. Sure, you won't win every time, but you can count on losing if you don't even try.
We need campaign finance reform, and we need to pay close attention to the candidates we vote for, rather than not voting, or even worse, voting for a candidate you know little about.
If you're hoping campaign finance reform is the salvation, you're going to be disappointed. To implement the controls that the advocates want, any CFR is going to have to trod so harshly on the First Amendment that the Supreme Court will toss out those provisions attempting to limit third-party spending. Don't forget that we came to the present situation thru an earlier CFR that placed such restrictive limits on how much can be donated to a candidate that they're now full-time whores for campaign cash. Campaign money is a force of nature and will always find a path to the candidate.
What in my posting makes you think I don't take my own advice? You bet I write. And phone. And visit. I even donate big bucks to some of them (and that definitely gets your calls returned). And, by-the-by, nothing in what I said could be considered a gripe. I was pointing out to the poster (and anyone else interested) what needs to happen if change is going to be effected. I also made no presumptions on whether or not the reader was active, hence my opener:
How many letters have you written your representatives lately? If the answer is 'none' then you have your answer as to the source of the problem.
Nah. Forth is the most obfuscated language ever. Closely followed by LISP and APL.
Absolutely not. I deny it. Uh-uh. Nope.
Ah yes. I had the same situation with C. My favorite was the guy who knew Fortran and hated C, so he used the preprocessor to, in effect, create his own Fortran-like language. (My God, now I'm going to have nightmares about that one tonight)
I was always a fan of the Obfuscated C contest (my fave category was 'abuse of the preprocessor'), but have to say these contests have their downside. They're used by language Nazis as arguments for why its a bad idea to use the language involved. "How can you consider using a language that's so crappy that people can write inpenetrable code with it?" is the usual harangue. (To which I always responded that any language can be abused in this fashion. Then I'd shoot them with my Nerf gun.)
How many letters have you written your representatives lately? If the answer is 'none' then you have your answer as to the source of the problem. Absent input from us, of course they're going to sell out to corporations/unions/pressure groups. They give them money and/or voting blocs. Having worked for a politician in the past, I can tell you that one letter from a constituent, as long as its rational, carries a lot of weight. If you organize and get a group to write a bunch of letters, believe me, you get noticed. So, if you want to stick it to the RIAA or "The Man" in general, start writing. And better yet, gather together a group of like-minded individuals and put out a barrage. Griping on SlashDot, while possibly therapeutic, is just like flushing your opinions down the toilet.
I wonder what changed their minds.
They're catching major flak from the vary artists they're 'representing' and saw the handwriting on the wall: it's going to happen no matter what. So, when you see the crowd headed off in some direction, get in front of them so that you can 'lead'. That way, you can at least have some influence on the outcome. Otherwise, you'll end up with something really unpalatable. First rule of politics.
Reno said the university experts will have "total access" to any information they need to conduct their review.
I hope this means that the source code is included in that promise. Until I got to this part of the article, I had envisioned the FBI dumping a set of software specs on some professor's desk and saying, "here's the design, so begin your 'review'". I'm also somewhat suspicious that the FBI will give the work to some outfit that depends on lots of federal government grants and contracts, which will call their objectivity into question. Law enforcement knows exactly which friendly judges to go to to get a warrant, so what makes academia any different?
Quite frankly, I'd ignore this part of the policy. The first thing I'd do after signing up with this service is install an inexpensive router (Linksys makes one that looks good) and set its firewall functions to exclude all connections originated from the outside. This is for your own protection (my router detects several 'port scans' a day - people looking for a vulnerable machine), but it also permits you to hook up any number of computers to their service indetectably. The router looks like the computer to them, and it will act as the proxy for all of the machines you hook up to it. If they give you any attitude about using a router (short of coming out and looking, they shouldn't be able to tell it's there), tell them you're protecting yourself with a hardware firewall and that if forced to directly connect your computer, you'll hold them responsible for the consequences of any outside attack on it.
What I find problematic about these alarmist diatribes is that they're filled with declarative statements but no evidence to support the thesis. I'd be more willing to buy into the arguments if the author would offer some statistics or other proof. For instance, the percentage of research funded by "global corporations" versus government, versus private donation now as opposed to in the past. The author is also guilty of begging the question when assuning that it's self-evident that "Corporatism" is bad. If it is, then there should be no problem telling me why. Overall, my feeling at the end of the article was, "So?".
I wasn't making a distinction between failures due to acts of God versus people shutting off Napster because they want to play Quake at max speed. The end result is pretty much the same: you have to hunt again and start over. I'm not assessing blame or criticizing anyone here. I actually love the whole Napster concept. I just think that human as well as systemic factors make a centralized distribution model more sensible for for-pay material.
In a related matter, one thing that passed through my mind when I read the story was: if a group of people were really ticked off at a big media corporation, one tactic employed could be to put together phoney 'movies' and trick people into wasting the time to download them. If widely-enough done, this would undermine the confidence in the system and constitute a serious attack.
Why in hell would a major company (i.e. we're not talking garage bands here) that wants to distribute content legally want to use the Napster model, particularly for HUGE content? More than half of my Napster downloads fail, and they're only 3-4 megabytes. What's going to happen when they're 100 or 1000 times that big? And why would you want to make your customers have to go hunting for your products and hope that someone just happens to have them available at the time? If you're distributing content legally and therefore have no reason to fear being sued, wouldn't it make far more sense to put the content on some nice, fast, highly-connected servers at a well-known place and just let people ftp them in peace?
You have to sign up for the list, and then reply to a confirming email to verify that you're you and that you want on the list. Otherwise, your 'sign up' can be a forgery by someone else.
It's clear that MAPS is engaged in a take-no-prisoners battle with some of its opponents. For instance, here they say, "However, not only has Big Star management adamantly refused to do so, Michael Kofman, Big Star's Director of Marketing and Business Development, stated that he would forge subscriptions to lists operated by his competitors in the name of MAPS staff if Big Star was not removed from the RBL." What's really surprising is someone being dumb enough to announce this upfront. Put this in the "what were they thinking?" category.