I don't see any way that this is a dangerous turn of events. It's a little bit lame, but you can't fault someone for driving web traffic to their site. Is the security community really gaining anything by banning them from The Spot on the net to find out security information, simply because of this?
This is why open source will continue to become more effective. Like the article says, despite the demise of the parent company, this project is continuing on.
Unlike thousands of other projects started by startups that go bankrupt once the VC comes out, this one actually has the chance to go somewhere and continue to be useful to people.
Hopefully more programmers that have taken a personal interest in their projects can encourage their companies to do the same.
That way, if the company is just going to keel over anyway, at least the world gets something out of it.
Re:why abandonware doesn't work like you want it t
on
Warez and Abandonware
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· Score: 1
If you ever grow up and work at a real company, you'll understand.
I think the bright side of this is that it shows that the FBI does not have the ability to break strong encryption.
Unless this is a massive FBI troll to make people BELIEVE that they don't have this ability, of course.
Or, maybe this is a conspiracy by the FBI to make people THINK they have the ability to crack encryption by making what appears to be an obvious move to convince everyone they DONT have the ability.
I think you're making some claims that don't seem to be backed by common knowledge. I'd like to be the first to welcome you to the year 2000, where 24/7 internet connections are not that rare in the US.
Yes, perhaps the percentage of unix users that have a 24/7 connection and leave their machines on all day is larger than the percentage of windows users, but the total number of unix users versus the total number of windows users that do so is still going to be smaller.
Companies like @Home and all the major DSL providers have the majority of their customers as windows users.
If you think I'm wrong, find some numbers, I'd love to see them.
Since I know lots of you will be whining about this, I thought I'd toss in my two cents.
The reason they are only using Windows seems pretty obvious to me. Windows has the largest desktop marketshare, and I'm willing to bet that the majority of people who have signed up at that site are actually running Windows.
So, logistically, if they really intend to be churning out projects in the future, it makes sense. It takes much less time to develop for a single platform per project.
What this also means to me is that depending on the size of the project, different pools of machines will be used.
Most of SDMI that is being tested is per-sale-watermarking. That means, you buy a song online and supposedly there's something hidden in the audio waves that uniquely identifies it to you. Something that should be almost impossible to find and remove.
So all some mp3 release group would have to do to steal the music is make the watermark tie to someone else.
Since the theory is to sell it online, which in this world means it has to be done quickly, do you really think they're going to require more information from you than your credit card number and billing address?
Credit Card numbers get stolen every day. People buy things with them all the time. Some of them get caught. So, the record company finds out someone is distributing a copyrighted song. They expend the effort to track the person who purchased that song down. And they track it down to a credit card that was cancelled as stolen a week after the purchase.
It's not that hard to be untraceable over the Internet, if you really want to spend the time to do it. So all they would have is a dead-end credit card number and some IP Addresses to some machine in North Korea.
That'll stop music theft. Sure.
So, music release groups of tomorrow will be doing something a little more illegal than they are now: credit card fraud, various electronic crimes...
But has that ever been enough to stop all the young kids that make up most of these scenes? The 14 year old script kitty with a credit card list he stole from a porn site?
So they manage to lock some kid up for doing something dumb and the music he released is still out there.
Did you miss the sentence before the section you quoted? He wasn't talking about signed drivers being crippling, he was talking about the removal of full duplex capabilities from soundcards being crippling.
How massive is this blackhole compared to others? Is this impressive in any way besides that it's neat that they were able to 'prove' that there's a blackhole at the center of our galaxy?
I think we, as a community, should spread news of these kind of activities as far and as wide as possible.
This isn't as good of an example as something like DeCSS, but eventually, big business will have to notice that every new technology they come out with gets hacked.
Eventually they will run out of Time, Will and PR to prosecute hobbyists. Eventually, this will help us retain our freedom.
Think about it, if every protection method they make gets cracked just for fun, and they prosecute the hell out of everyone who participates, eventually the PR damage will be extensive.
Large newspapers are noticably starting to slide towards the poor-little-napster angle in their articles.
Slashdot Mirror
The xbox has 64 megs of ram. How is microsoft code supposed to run on it?
-lb
Unlike thousands of other projects started by startups that go bankrupt once the VC comes out, this one actually has the chance to go somewhere and continue to be useful to people.
Hopefully more programmers that have taken a personal interest in their projects can encourage their companies to do the same.
That way, if the company is just going to keel over anyway, at least the world gets something out of it.
-lb
Unless this is a massive FBI troll to make people BELIEVE that they don't have this ability, of course.
Or, maybe this is a conspiracy by the FBI to make people THINK they have the ability to crack encryption by making what appears to be an obvious move to convince everyone they DONT have the ability.
Yeah.
Yes, perhaps the percentage of unix users that have a 24/7 connection and leave their machines on all day is larger than the percentage of windows users, but the total number of unix users versus the total number of windows users that do so is still going to be smaller.
Companies like @Home and all the major DSL providers have the majority of their customers as windows users.
If you think I'm wrong, find some numbers, I'd love to see them.
-lb
The reason they are only using Windows seems pretty obvious to me. Windows has the largest desktop marketshare, and I'm willing to bet that the majority of people who have signed up at that site are actually running Windows.
So, logistically, if they really intend to be churning out projects in the future, it makes sense. It takes much less time to develop for a single platform per project.
What this also means to me is that depending on the size of the project, different pools of machines will be used.
-lb
As far as windows can tell everything is legit. You could hack up the Linux surrounding it to let you do whatever you want.
But I still don't think they would make their player disable full-duplex, people would hate using it, I'd think.
The only way they'll get this accepted is if they make it as painless as possible for people.
-lb
There are dozens of legal, open source AIM clients.
This is just somewhere in between creating your own client and using theirs. I don't see what the problem is.
The code is running on your machine.
-lb
So all some mp3 release group would have to do to steal the music is make the watermark tie to someone else.
Since the theory is to sell it online, which in this world means it has to be done quickly, do you really think they're going to require more information from you than your credit card number and billing address?
Credit Card numbers get stolen every day. People buy things with them all the time. Some of them get caught. So, the record company finds out someone is distributing a copyrighted song. They expend the effort to track the person who purchased that song down. And they track it down to a credit card that was cancelled as stolen a week after the purchase.
It's not that hard to be untraceable over the Internet, if you really want to spend the time to do it. So all they would have is a dead-end credit card number and some IP Addresses to some machine in North Korea.
That'll stop music theft. Sure.
So, music release groups of tomorrow will be doing something a little more illegal than they are now: credit card fraud, various electronic crimes...
But has that ever been enough to stop all the young kids that make up most of these scenes? The 14 year old script kitty with a credit card list he stole from a porn site?
So they manage to lock some kid up for doing something dumb and the music he released is still out there.
How ... effective.
Did you miss the sentence before the section you quoted? He wasn't talking about signed drivers being crippling, he was talking about the removal of full duplex capabilities from soundcards being crippling.
How massive is this blackhole compared to others? Is this impressive in any way besides that it's neat that they were able to 'prove' that there's a blackhole at the center of our galaxy?
So how is this for a compromise - if you are contemplating buying the AOL service, you should leave the ads on, so it can constantly tempt you.
If you're a hardcore zealot, like most of the people here, you were never going to buy AOL Access anyway, so you might as well turn the ads off. :)
-lb
This isn't as good of an example as something like DeCSS, but eventually, big business will have to notice that every new technology they come out with gets hacked.
Eventually they will run out of Time, Will and PR to prosecute hobbyists. Eventually, this will help us retain our freedom.
Think about it, if every protection method they make gets cracked just for fun, and they prosecute the hell out of everyone who participates, eventually the PR damage will be extensive.
Large newspapers are noticably starting to slide towards the poor-little-napster angle in their articles.
Keep it up!
-lb
*rimshot*
-lb