You want us to believe that the best way to hurt the RIAA is to give them even more money... Sure, whatever.
A boycott will work great, they'll lose some money, panic and blame everyone, maybe win a few lawsuits, and they'll keep losing money. And either they'll wise up till people no-longer want to boycott them or they'll go the way of the dinosaur.
Shelf space isn't limited anymore, neither is vinyl. Promotion and studio space are all that're needed and those are getting cheaper every day. It's getting a lot easier to produce a studio-quality CD master these days. The RIAA is no longer the only way, and soon they won't even be a way.
Don't give them any money.
If you want to buycott something, rush out and buy from the indies. That way they'll still lose, but market research will show that CD sales in general are up.
Not that it'll matter, they'll lie. They buy judges and politicians, what's to stop them from blatantly lying? At most they say "Ack, that one PR guy was wrong, we'll fire him." You can't expect truth from an organization like that, they're fighting for their life. They can fake up all the market research they want to show anything they want.
So, not buying from them isn't going to hurt them, instead we should buy from them?
Not going to happen. Being able to pick and choose my music and directly support my favorite bands has changed the way I shop for music. I'll gladly pay for music, but only when it goes to the people who made it.
The RIAA isn't ever getting a cent of my money. Not because I'm actively boycotting them, but because I'm not going to buy music that they'll be selling, or in a way that they'll be selling.
Sure, they can lie and say that the drop in their sales is due to a bunch of things beyond their control, like evil hax0r d00d5 warezing songs, but they'll be wrong. They're going out of business slowly but surely because they're obsolete and they fear change. Nobody mourns the lack of buggy-whip companies in a world with cars. Nobody will mourn the lack of a physical media distributor in a world without physical media.
They can bitch and they can whine, but they're irrelevant. They can sue visible entities like Napster, but they can never touch me or the millions like me. Their SDMI initiative won't fly, it's simply another piece of incompatible hardware with stupid proprietary limits. Yawn. I'll keep doing business as I am now, buying MP3s directly or buying CDs from artists I support and MP3ing them. The only way I'll stop this will be to upgrade to a better free and open format when one comes along.
Don't boycott the RIAA, ignore them. They're obsolete and pointless.
But whatever you do, do *not* support them in any way. Don't "buycott"! What a fucking stupid idea... it's like sending Microsoft an extra few bucks when buying Windows, to support them in legal battles. You wouldn't have thought of trying to end Aparthied by *supporting* the old South African government!? It's a ridiculous idea. If you want the RIAA to go away, act like they already have.
The basic controls of M64, in an open field, were okay, and it had some funky stuff like the triple-jump and wall-bounce. The problem was the camera and how it would swing around you. The same problem that Tomb Raider had... stand next to a wall and the camera swings away to a completely useless position.
The problem with Maria is that the controls are relative to what's shown on the screen, not relative to Mario... So when the camera swings away, your controls change.
Console games seem so dull, like going back to Bard's Tale or Might and Magic, where you fight stacks of monsters. The graphics might get better, but the magic and combat system are just as shallow as they were back then.
And console RPGs tend to be so low on the interection scale... Zelda 64 had like 200 or so text responses from enemies and every time you came back to an area it was exactly like it was before. Yawn.
Mario 64 (and most other crappy 2d->3d copies) have probably the worst controls ever invented.
Ugh, console games are pretty crappy when compared to what you can get on a PC.
Sure, a ton of PC games suck, but there are ones that are masterpieces. Sure they may inspire tons of crappy clones, but who cares if the original game is good.
What sucks is when people copy the crap, just because it's got cute marketable characters, etc.
And the problem isn't that the article is talking about future extentions to Mozilla, it's that it's talking about them like they're part of the main functionality of it... That's what prompts the flames to finish the browser first, from people who think they're taking a browser coder and making them work on useless office funcitonality.
Gecko, the rendering engine, seems fairly stable, and has been for a while. Some complex pages give it trouble still but it's well known which ones. Then means that if you want to use XUL to write an application front-end for whatever, be it a Galaga/Galaxian clone, or an office suite, using Mozilla code *is* a good way of going about it.
We should be hearing about tons of apps using Mozilla components, and doing things less relevant to a browser than an office suite... That's why Mozilla was written that way, the only problem is when some idiot thinks that just because Mozilla is open source, they're going to want to incorporate all wacky unfinished projects into the main browser...
Great post, almost exactly what I was going to say...
He's a fucking idiot if he thinks Gnutella helps child molestors and if he doesn't think that, he's a lying sack of shit.
He doesn't have a fucking clue about the technology. SDMI has nothing to do with his audio compression experience and he didn't invent anything, digital watermarking has been around since the 80s... I went to a conference in the early 90s where Xerox was showing off technology to watermark copies so they could be tracked back to the original copier, even after being photographed and scanner or photocopied in several older photocopiers first.
Talal Shamoon is lying, purely to hurt other technologies for his own personal gain. If he feels otherwise, let the bastard show up and post in his own defense.
Fuck, I hate people like that, rotten to the core.
Re:I read every line of that trial, my prediction.
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NYT On DeCSS Case
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· Score: 2
Great, I wouldn't mind something like LIVID with a CSS license. It'd be an open source player with closed-source modules. You could remove their closed-source modules and put DeCSS in its place. All the code to play the MPEG stream, etc, would be there, all you'd need to do would be remove their code for decrypting the disks and locking certain controls...
And because the control locking code gets its information from the decryption code, you'd just not implement the part where it tells the player to not allow skipping this track...
I got into DVD decryption when I bought The Mummy and Sixth Sense, both of which come with forced commercials. I swore at that point that I wouldn't buy another DVD until there was a player that ignored those restrictions. Until then, I was neutral or anti DVD-piracy, but now, I figure whatever the MPAA gets, they deserve. If they'd made CSS to stop piracy and nothing more, then I'd side with them, but they used it for this stupid zone control, and to force people to watch trailers and adds... Now I'm turning my friends onto things like DeCSS (in the form of Vobdec and FlaskMPEG, etc). The only issue is the freedom to use the media we own in the fashion we desire.
(If anyone is going to reply and say "You don't own it...", smack yourself upside your head. The only proponents of that belief are the studios themselves. like the only companies saying EULAs are binding are the software companies.)
I don't really see much use for the term 'cracker'. Perhaps if you were talking about a bunch of hackers and wanted to distinguish between them, indicating one who was more interested in system breaking than other hackerly pursuits, sure, but for general use, just saying 'hacker' indicates better than you're talking about someone with knowledge of the guts of a system.
If I was to look for a distinction to be made it'd be between hackers (people who know what they're doing) and script-kiddies (people who use canned programs without understanding them). But even still, I realize it's not a useful distinction to most people, you'd only specify when the difference was important, for instance if your computer had been compromised, or you were looking to compromise a computer... If you wanted to close out an attacker it'd be different if you thought they had no technical knowledge, in which case you'd simply block whatever root-kit they used and then clean up later. To block out a master hacker you'd have to consider that they may have written many back doors, all new, and that they may have told the system to play 'clean' for a while then connect to another invaded computer to download a new set of backdoors... It'd be a completely different battle depending on who you faced.
What I hate is when you get clueless tech support people who don't believe the customer can do anything right, they don't believe you when you narrow anything down and at best make you go through every step with them on the phone and at worst, simply ignore your information.
I've talked to a *huge* range of tech support people. One guy, a CS Major, helped me with an interpreter I was writing in C while we were waiting for another machine to reboot. And another guy didn't know that Windows used the.CAB files to store system files... That was funny, this MCSE graduate was thanking me for telling him how to extract files from CABs... (before Winzip did it..)
But it's more than the tech skills, both of those guys were helpful because they helped me narrow down the problem, from both ends at once.
Once I called a guy at my cable-co's tech support and he told me to reinstall Windows because I couldn't connect... Idiot didn't listen to me saying my friend on the same segment was unable to connect and that I thought it was a DHCP server... Lo and behold, I call back and the next tech support guy says "Oh yeah, we lost the DHCP server... go static with the last IP it gave you, you've got a fairly long lease, it'll be fixed in a few hours." Big difference between that and reinstalling the OS... (Isn't it sad that not only is it the most-recommended treatment for Windows, but it's often the right thing to do...)
Anyways, I think the ability to listen to the customer is very important, anything else and you might as well just be listening to an automated message listing the correct settings.
So there was only a market for 90% of the CDs that his label had produced. Someone would get sick of his music and sell it faster than new fans would want to buy it...
Doesn't sound like used CD stores were putting him out of business, sounds like pathetic music was putting him out of business.
Better an army of script kiddies get ahold of exploits and use them to DDoS each other off the net for a week or so than to have some motivated and really knowledgable types have years to plan their attacks using unfixed holes.
Script kiddies, simply because of their numbers, can't keep secrets. Once a program to root some webserver becomes known, they'll use it to put up a brag sheet, or to run an IRC bot, or something stupid. This means the problem is going to get the attention of the admin, or someone calling the admin to report a DDoS...
I'd much rather that Amazon.com be rooted by a script kiddy posting a brag sheet, or perhaps DoSing EBay for refusing to list his Ultima Online character, than for it to be subtly cracked by someone stealing credit information.
Similarly, we say that in the old days, nobody had to lock their houses because there weren't thieves everywhere. But that means that if someone wanted to get into your house at night for a more devious purpose, they could.
Like it or not, bugs won't be fixed till they're exploited in a public way. I'd rather that way be a bunch of stupid kids playing with scripts than millions of dollars being stolen. Similarly, if there was a problem with a certain type of door lock, I'd rather hear about them being recalled after thousands of minor B&Es instead of just a couple rapes or other serious crimes.
It'd be nice if Microsoft and other big companies would try to fix the bugs as they were reported, but that's unlikely. As long as they can just ignore them, hoping they don't cause problems, and maybe fix it in the next release, they will. We *need* to cause a fuss about each and every exploit so that 'they' have to do something.
As long as it's cheaper to hide behind EULAs (and bribe politicians to pass fucking stupid laws like the UCITA) there's no reason for them to actually fix bugs unless there's enough of a fuss that people might stop buying the product.
90% of the (exploitable) bugs in Windows are in the networking code and the scripting code. It doesn't matter if there's a bug in an installer because a malicious attacker can't run the installer without having already gained control of the machine.
Sure, Windows will *never* be bug free, and it's silly to expect that it will. Especially when you consider all the things that people think of as parts of windows, from the essential like ScanDisk and the Networking to the mundane like Solitaire...
But, if the OS is well designed, a program like Solitaire could never take out the whole OS when it crashed, so it could be dealt with seperately. Only the core system would need to be rock stable, the rest could be restarted easily. (Beos's networking dies on me every now and then (I'm breaking the rules using two identical network cards) which is annoying, but I can restart it with the click of a button, unlike in MS where I have to reboot.)
Once the system is stable and can't be crashed by a badly written solitaire game, you go on to bug-fix the important parts, the external programs, those that deal with the outside world.
Your HTML renderer, your network stack, your scripting, those need to be locked down.
A smart designer can tell what parts of the system need to be secure and which don't. If the attacker could only get to one bug by already having exploited a larger bug (crash solitaire by using a buffer overflow in networking to execute arbitrary local commands) then the one bug is fairly minor.
Microsoft could secure Windows, at least as much so as BeOS or any other non-multiuser OS, with a little work but they refuse, because it's easier to only fix what has to be fixed.
I agree with the person who said that bugs in products from companies like Microsoft who don't fix the bugs until they make the news, should be made public without warning them... That way they take the biggest credibility hit.
Mu_Cow's point was that the AC posted *before* him, so in browsing you should see that before his post. The only reason you wouldn't would be if you were sorting by score or were only reading +1 and higher posts... If you are, you shouldn't be moderating.
Not even then, you already own the program so the click-through can't offer you anything, thus it's not a valid contract.
It's also invalid because of extortion, they're trying to get you to 'agree' despite your wishes. If you click 'No', you don't get to use the software you bought and paid for. If there was 'Agree' 'Disagree' and 'Cancel Install' where the first two installed just the same, then it *might* be binding, if the EULA as offered granted you any benefits you didn't already have the right to.
Right, the GPL/BSDL/etc are binding, if you enter into the agreemnt, because they give you something above and beyond normal legal rights if you agree. Regular EULAs try to take away right without offering anything (and without offering you a way to say 'No, install the software without any additional licenses') so they're invalid and completely ignorable.
And yes, you can do *everything* (legally, not physically) with software that you can with a book. You don't need to look at the license unless you want to do something normally prohibited by law (such as make copies, etc.)
You're allowed to take a magic marker and modify your book, you're similarly allowed to take a crack and modify your software. To tell someone how to modify a book you say "Ok, on page 83 where it says "Fourscore and seven..." start to cross out those words. To tell someone how to modify software you say "0C42A3 bytes in, where it says 0x23 0xAC 0xA5, change those three bytes to 0xEA..." That's fair use, using a small ammount of copyrighted material to describe it.
The DMCA steps on some of these right, not only is it an unfair law, but like with the UCITA they stepped over the bounds into bribery to get it passed and (it appears) in trying to defend it.
Not true. The EULAs Microsoft uses have no power. The RIAA and MPAA could claim the same things, but they wouldn't have any more legal weight than when Microsoft does it.
The only exception to this is the UCITA which isn't a law in any place worth living and is a documented case of bribery. (There was an NYTimes article back when the UCITA was first passed in one state that documented the payoffs to a few elected officials, both as campaign donations and as other barely legit things.)
You can ignore the UCITA, it wouldn't stand up in small claims court, let alone the Supreme court...
The reason GPL/BSDL/etc licenses are valid and EULAs aren't is that the GPL/BSDL/etc licenses give you something in exchange for your agreement to be bound by more restrictions.
With the GPL, you have no right to distribute a GPLed file under copyright law. The only way to get that right is to agree to the license which grants you all the distribution rights you want, as long as you do it their way.
The EULAs try to restrict your actions, but they don't offer you anything in return so you have no reason to accept (and even if you do, it's not a binding contract.)
A contract needs to have consideration (something for you) for both parties and consent.
EULAs don't have consent because you don't know about the license when you buy it. Even if you know there will be one, it's not presented as part of the sale, so it's void. They also force you to 'agree' to use the product you legally paid for, this extortion means you didn't actually consent to the contract, you just said so to be able to use the product. They don't have any consideration for the end user because that user already paid for the right (or it was paid on their behalf) to use the software. They are legally entitled to it. To offer them the right to use it is like offering someone the legal right to drink a Coke(tm) that they legally purchased... irrelevant, because they already have that right. To offer a contract giving them this right is pointless and as such, the contract is void.
EULAs *could* be valid, *if* you told the sales person you wanted to buy a package, they bring out the contract, explain it, and then in trade for cash, let you use the software in certain ways only.
As it stands however, EULAs aren't valid. You can click 'I Agree' all you wish, you aren't agreeing to anything, just clicking 'Next'...
In fact, something ammusing is that licenses that 'allow' your software to do something, like buying windows NT and finding out it'll only server a 5-user network, aren't required. You can legally crack that software and do whatever you want with it, as long as you don't copy copyrighted material.
(ie, if it's a registry hack to make NT server more machines, it's legal. If you have to copy binaries from a 25-user license, it's not legal.)
This means that cracking software to remove restrictions like only serving a certain number of users, or requiring the CD, is perfectly legal.
Re:Napsters is a Service, not a Product
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Two-Faced Napster?
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· Score: 2
It'd be as if someone came up to you and said "I'm looking to meet a tall redhed." You might assume he's looking for a prostitute, but he my also be looking for his sister...
Napster can't really tell the legality of certain files, "Metallica - Enter Sandman.mp3" and "Garage Band - Enter Sandman (Metallica cover).mp3" will both show up during an search on "Metallica"...
The service has a valid use that doesn't depend on piracy. The piracy may overwhelm this valid use, but that's not their problem, as long as they don't specifically get involved in piracy and take minimal steps to stop those users who are identified as pirates.
And by reading this message, I claim that you agree to my licensing agreement which forces you to (blah blah blah).
Of course, this isn't a valid license, neither is the license with a DVD movie.
1) You bought the disk, the license tries to offer you the right to play it which you already own, thus the license doesn't offer you any consideration - invalid license.
2) The license isn't brought to your attention before the purchase - invalid license.
You are bound by copyright laws because those are applied in blanket fashion to *all* copyrightable works. The only way for copyright protection to not apply is for the author to give away the right.
DVD Licenses might be valid if the disk performed properly without the license, but if you agreed to it, they'd ship you a movie poster, or something. This way you'd have a valid contract.
Anyways, they lie, as do software companies, when they claim they have tons and tons of rights and that you *must* agree, etc. It's nothing but lies, you can click 'I Agree' all day and it's not binding.
(The only exception is in places where the legislators have been bribed to pass the UCITA, but those places suck anyways.)
Nor is there a railgun in Quake3, but if you use a proxy bot to shoot railgun slugs at another nonexistant player, that's cheating...
If you don't play by the same rules as everyone else, it's not a fair game.
(Why was Neo a hero? He wasn't good at anything, he simply had a magical power (as far as people in the sim could tell). He didn't actually do anything based on actual skill, he auto-trained for things, basically, using scripts... Yay, what a hero... Whoa!)
I have no idea that King's fans will avoid screwing it up, they want it to succeed. But it'd pretty easy to set up something to download the book from a bunch of different IPs. And I'm sure someone will, eventually, just to fuck stuff up.
The fact that 78% of serious fans obeyed King isn't suprising. I'm not a fan and I didn't download, because I wanted to give it the best chance, but there are people out there who don't just not care, but actively care, about ruining everyone else's fun.
Oh sure, like picking up the phone and hearing a busy signal isn't going to be weird. If that happened, I'd call the phone company and report something broken.
'Just like an advertisment on TV', sure, except that TV shows are free, the phone and voice mail are payed for already.
I'd support a complete ban on any unsolicited commercial calling, and a $500 fine or something hefty to back it up. With jail time for anyone found repeat offending.
There was a funny story of vigilantism in a community newspaper a while back (East Vancouver paper, dunno which one, 'bout a year ago.) where the manager at a telemarketing firm was kidnapped after work, driven out of town, dumped out and beaten senseless.
Supposedly he was told while it was happening (he was blindfolded and tied) that it was because the office he managed kept call the person (the assailant) back and being rude when asked to not call in the future.
They told him that if the office didn't shut down, they'd break his back the next time.
Was a bit hunt for the guy, didn't hear that he'd ever been caught, or anything about the telemarketer.
Can't say I feel a lot of sympathy... When I was just out a school I worked, for two days, as a telemarketer. The boss was dishonest, they sold magazines and no matter which ones you picked, they sent you (and billed for) the same ones. They instructed people to harrass people on cell phones to make them buy, because many people would pay just to get you off the phone, no being strong-willed enough to hang up.
I quit that and never looked back... anyone making money in that business is a crook, plain and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Yawn! Go away RIAA troll.
You want us to believe that the best way to hurt the RIAA is to give them even more money... Sure, whatever.
A boycott will work great, they'll lose some money, panic and blame everyone, maybe win a few lawsuits, and they'll keep losing money. And either they'll wise up till people no-longer want to boycott them or they'll go the way of the dinosaur.
Shelf space isn't limited anymore, neither is vinyl. Promotion and studio space are all that're needed and those are getting cheaper every day. It's getting a lot easier to produce a studio-quality CD master these days. The RIAA is no longer the only way, and soon they won't even be a way.
Don't give them any money.
If you want to buycott something, rush out and buy from the indies. That way they'll still lose, but market research will show that CD sales in general are up.
Not that it'll matter, they'll lie. They buy judges and politicians, what's to stop them from blatantly lying? At most they say "Ack, that one PR guy was wrong, we'll fire him." You can't expect truth from an organization like that, they're fighting for their life. They can fake up all the market research they want to show anything they want.
So, not buying from them isn't going to hurt them, instead we should buy from them?
Not going to happen. Being able to pick and choose my music and directly support my favorite bands has changed the way I shop for music. I'll gladly pay for music, but only when it goes to the people who made it.
The RIAA isn't ever getting a cent of my money. Not because I'm actively boycotting them, but because I'm not going to buy music that they'll be selling, or in a way that they'll be selling.
Sure, they can lie and say that the drop in their sales is due to a bunch of things beyond their control, like evil hax0r d00d5 warezing songs, but they'll be wrong. They're going out of business slowly but surely because they're obsolete and they fear change. Nobody mourns the lack of buggy-whip companies in a world with cars. Nobody will mourn the lack of a physical media distributor in a world without physical media.
They can bitch and they can whine, but they're irrelevant. They can sue visible entities like Napster, but they can never touch me or the millions like me. Their SDMI initiative won't fly, it's simply another piece of incompatible hardware with stupid proprietary limits. Yawn. I'll keep doing business as I am now, buying MP3s directly or buying CDs from artists I support and MP3ing them. The only way I'll stop this will be to upgrade to a better free and open format when one comes along.
Don't boycott the RIAA, ignore them. They're obsolete and pointless.
But whatever you do, do *not* support them in any way. Don't "buycott"! What a fucking stupid idea... it's like sending Microsoft an extra few bucks when buying Windows, to support them in legal battles. You wouldn't have thought of trying to end Aparthied by *supporting* the old South African government!? It's a ridiculous idea. If you want the RIAA to go away, act like they already have.
The basic controls of M64, in an open field, were okay, and it had some funky stuff like the triple-jump and wall-bounce. The problem was the camera and how it would swing around you. The same problem that Tomb Raider had... stand next to a wall and the camera swings away to a completely useless position.
The problem with Maria is that the controls are relative to what's shown on the screen, not relative to Mario... So when the camera swings away, your controls change.
Ugh.
Console games seem so dull, like going back to Bard's Tale or Might and Magic, where you fight stacks of monsters. The graphics might get better, but the magic and combat system are just as shallow as they were back then.
And console RPGs tend to be so low on the interection scale... Zelda 64 had like 200 or so text responses from enemies and every time you came back to an area it was exactly like it was before. Yawn.
Mario 64 (and most other crappy 2d->3d copies) have probably the worst controls ever invented.
Ugh, console games are pretty crappy when compared to what you can get on a PC.
Sure, a ton of PC games suck, but there are ones that are masterpieces. Sure they may inspire tons of crappy clones, but who cares if the original game is good.
What sucks is when people copy the crap, just because it's got cute marketable characters, etc.
And the problem isn't that the article is talking about future extentions to Mozilla, it's that it's talking about them like they're part of the main functionality of it... That's what prompts the flames to finish the browser first, from people who think they're taking a browser coder and making them work on useless office funcitonality.
Gecko, the rendering engine, seems fairly stable, and has been for a while. Some complex pages give it trouble still but it's well known which ones. Then means that if you want to use XUL to write an application front-end for whatever, be it a Galaga/Galaxian clone, or an office suite, using Mozilla code *is* a good way of going about it.
We should be hearing about tons of apps using Mozilla components, and doing things less relevant to a browser than an office suite... That's why Mozilla was written that way, the only problem is when some idiot thinks that just because Mozilla is open source, they're going to want to incorporate all wacky unfinished projects into the main browser...
Great post, almost exactly what I was going to say...
He's a fucking idiot if he thinks Gnutella helps child molestors and if he doesn't think that, he's a lying sack of shit.
He doesn't have a fucking clue about the technology. SDMI has nothing to do with his audio compression experience and he didn't invent anything, digital watermarking has been around since the 80s... I went to a conference in the early 90s where Xerox was showing off technology to watermark copies so they could be tracked back to the original copier, even after being photographed and scanner or photocopied in several older photocopiers first.
Talal Shamoon is lying, purely to hurt other technologies for his own personal gain. If he feels otherwise, let the bastard show up and post in his own defense.
Fuck, I hate people like that, rotten to the core.
Great, I wouldn't mind something like LIVID with a CSS license. It'd be an open source player with closed-source modules. You could remove their closed-source modules and put DeCSS in its place. All the code to play the MPEG stream, etc, would be there, all you'd need to do would be remove their code for decrypting the disks and locking certain controls...
And because the control locking code gets its information from the decryption code, you'd just not implement the part where it tells the player to not allow skipping this track...
I got into DVD decryption when I bought The Mummy and Sixth Sense, both of which come with forced commercials. I swore at that point that I wouldn't buy another DVD until there was a player that ignored those restrictions. Until then, I was neutral or anti DVD-piracy, but now, I figure whatever the MPAA gets, they deserve. If they'd made CSS to stop piracy and nothing more, then I'd side with them, but they used it for this stupid zone control, and to force people to watch trailers and adds... Now I'm turning my friends onto things like DeCSS (in the form of Vobdec and FlaskMPEG, etc). The only issue is the freedom to use the media we own in the fashion we desire.
(If anyone is going to reply and say "You don't own it...", smack yourself upside your head. The only proponents of that belief are the studios themselves. like the only companies saying EULAs are binding are the software companies.)
I don't really see much use for the term 'cracker'. Perhaps if you were talking about a bunch of hackers and wanted to distinguish between them, indicating one who was more interested in system breaking than other hackerly pursuits, sure, but for general use, just saying 'hacker' indicates better than you're talking about someone with knowledge of the guts of a system.
If I was to look for a distinction to be made it'd be between hackers (people who know what they're doing) and script-kiddies (people who use canned programs without understanding them). But even still, I realize it's not a useful distinction to most people, you'd only specify when the difference was important, for instance if your computer had been compromised, or you were looking to compromise a computer... If you wanted to close out an attacker it'd be different if you thought they had no technical knowledge, in which case you'd simply block whatever root-kit they used and then clean up later. To block out a master hacker you'd have to consider that they may have written many back doors, all new, and that they may have told the system to play 'clean' for a while then connect to another invaded computer to download a new set of backdoors... It'd be a completely different battle depending on who you faced.
Yeah, narrowing things down is essential.
.CAB files to store system files... That was funny, this MCSE graduate was thanking me for telling him how to extract files from CABs... (before Winzip did it..)
... go static with the last IP it gave you, you've got a fairly long lease, it'll be fixed in a few hours." Big difference between that and reinstalling the OS... (Isn't it sad that not only is it the most-recommended treatment for Windows, but it's often the right thing to do...)
What I hate is when you get clueless tech support people who don't believe the customer can do anything right, they don't believe you when you narrow anything down and at best make you go through every step with them on the phone and at worst, simply ignore your information.
I've talked to a *huge* range of tech support people. One guy, a CS Major, helped me with an interpreter I was writing in C while we were waiting for another machine to reboot. And another guy didn't know that Windows used the
But it's more than the tech skills, both of those guys were helpful because they helped me narrow down the problem, from both ends at once.
Once I called a guy at my cable-co's tech support and he told me to reinstall Windows because I couldn't connect... Idiot didn't listen to me saying my friend on the same segment was unable to connect and that I thought it was a DHCP server... Lo and behold, I call back and the next tech support guy says "Oh yeah, we lost the DHCP server
Anyways, I think the ability to listen to the customer is very important, anything else and you might as well just be listening to an automated message listing the correct settings.
Microsoft didn't release source code and encourage everyone else to make the same changes and/or suggest new ones.
So there was only a market for 90% of the CDs that his label had produced. Someone would get sick of his music and sell it faster than new fans would want to buy it...
Doesn't sound like used CD stores were putting him out of business, sounds like pathetic music was putting him out of business.
Better an army of script kiddies get ahold of exploits and use them to DDoS each other off the net for a week or so than to have some motivated and really knowledgable types have years to plan their attacks using unfixed holes.
Script kiddies, simply because of their numbers, can't keep secrets. Once a program to root some webserver becomes known, they'll use it to put up a brag sheet, or to run an IRC bot, or something stupid. This means the problem is going to get the attention of the admin, or someone calling the admin to report a DDoS...
I'd much rather that Amazon.com be rooted by a script kiddy posting a brag sheet, or perhaps DoSing EBay for refusing to list his Ultima Online character, than for it to be subtly cracked by someone stealing credit information.
Similarly, we say that in the old days, nobody had to lock their houses because there weren't thieves everywhere. But that means that if someone wanted to get into your house at night for a more devious purpose, they could.
Like it or not, bugs won't be fixed till they're exploited in a public way. I'd rather that way be a bunch of stupid kids playing with scripts than millions of dollars being stolen. Similarly, if there was a problem with a certain type of door lock, I'd rather hear about them being recalled after thousands of minor B&Es instead of just a couple rapes or other serious crimes.
It'd be nice if Microsoft and other big companies would try to fix the bugs as they were reported, but that's unlikely. As long as they can just ignore them, hoping they don't cause problems, and maybe fix it in the next release, they will. We *need* to cause a fuss about each and every exploit so that 'they' have to do something.
As long as it's cheaper to hide behind EULAs (and bribe politicians to pass fucking stupid laws like the UCITA) there's no reason for them to actually fix bugs unless there's enough of a fuss that people might stop buying the product.
90% of the (exploitable) bugs in Windows are in the networking code and the scripting code. It doesn't matter if there's a bug in an installer because a malicious attacker can't run the installer without having already gained control of the machine.
Sure, Windows will *never* be bug free, and it's silly to expect that it will. Especially when you consider all the things that people think of as parts of windows, from the essential like ScanDisk and the Networking to the mundane like Solitaire...
But, if the OS is well designed, a program like Solitaire could never take out the whole OS when it crashed, so it could be dealt with seperately. Only the core system would need to be rock stable, the rest could be restarted easily. (Beos's networking dies on me every now and then (I'm breaking the rules using two identical network cards) which is annoying, but I can restart it with the click of a button, unlike in MS where I have to reboot.)
Once the system is stable and can't be crashed by a badly written solitaire game, you go on to bug-fix the important parts, the external programs, those that deal with the outside world.
Your HTML renderer, your network stack, your scripting, those need to be locked down.
A smart designer can tell what parts of the system need to be secure and which don't. If the attacker could only get to one bug by already having exploited a larger bug (crash solitaire by using a buffer overflow in networking to execute arbitrary local commands) then the one bug is fairly minor.
Microsoft could secure Windows, at least as much so as BeOS or any other non-multiuser OS, with a little work but they refuse, because it's easier to only fix what has to be fixed.
I agree with the person who said that bugs in products from companies like Microsoft who don't fix the bugs until they make the news, should be made public without warning them... That way they take the biggest credibility hit.
Mu_Cow's point was that the AC posted *before* him, so in browsing you should see that before his post. The only reason you wouldn't would be if you were sorting by score or were only reading +1 and higher posts... If you are, you shouldn't be moderating.
Not even then, you already own the program so the click-through can't offer you anything, thus it's not a valid contract.
It's also invalid because of extortion, they're trying to get you to 'agree' despite your wishes. If you click 'No', you don't get to use the software you bought and paid for. If there was 'Agree' 'Disagree' and 'Cancel Install' where the first two installed just the same, then it *might* be binding, if the EULA as offered granted you any benefits you didn't already have the right to.
Right, the GPL/BSDL/etc are binding, if you enter into the agreemnt, because they give you something above and beyond normal legal rights if you agree. Regular EULAs try to take away right without offering anything (and without offering you a way to say 'No, install the software without any additional licenses') so they're invalid and completely ignorable.
..." start to cross out those words. To tell someone how to modify software you say "0C42A3 bytes in, where it says 0x23 0xAC 0xA5, change those three bytes to 0xEA..." That's fair use, using a small ammount of copyrighted material to describe it.
And yes, you can do *everything* (legally, not physically) with software that you can with a book. You don't need to look at the license unless you want to do something normally prohibited by law (such as make copies, etc.)
You're allowed to take a magic marker and modify your book, you're similarly allowed to take a crack and modify your software. To tell someone how to modify a book you say "Ok, on page 83 where it says "Fourscore and seven
The DMCA steps on some of these right, not only is it an unfair law, but like with the UCITA they stepped over the bounds into bribery to get it passed and (it appears) in trying to defend it.
Not true. The EULAs Microsoft uses have no power. The RIAA and MPAA could claim the same things, but they wouldn't have any more legal weight than when Microsoft does it.
The only exception to this is the UCITA which isn't a law in any place worth living and is a documented case of bribery. (There was an NYTimes article back when the UCITA was first passed in one state that documented the payoffs to a few elected officials, both as campaign donations and as other barely legit things.)
You can ignore the UCITA, it wouldn't stand up in small claims court, let alone the Supreme court...
The reason GPL/BSDL/etc licenses are valid and EULAs aren't is that the GPL/BSDL/etc licenses give you something in exchange for your agreement to be bound by more restrictions.
... irrelevant, because they already have that right. To offer a contract giving them this right is pointless and as such, the contract is void.
With the GPL, you have no right to distribute a GPLed file under copyright law. The only way to get that right is to agree to the license which grants you all the distribution rights you want, as long as you do it their way.
The EULAs try to restrict your actions, but they don't offer you anything in return so you have no reason to accept (and even if you do, it's not a binding contract.)
A contract needs to have consideration (something for you) for both parties and consent.
EULAs don't have consent because you don't know about the license when you buy it. Even if you know there will be one, it's not presented as part of the sale, so it's void. They also force you to 'agree' to use the product you legally paid for, this extortion means you didn't actually consent to the contract, you just said so to be able to use the product. They don't have any consideration for the end user because that user already paid for the right (or it was paid on their behalf) to use the software. They are legally entitled to it. To offer them the right to use it is like offering someone the legal right to drink a Coke(tm) that they legally purchased
EULAs *could* be valid, *if* you told the sales person you wanted to buy a package, they bring out the contract, explain it, and then in trade for cash, let you use the software in certain ways only.
As it stands however, EULAs aren't valid. You can click 'I Agree' all you wish, you aren't agreeing to anything, just clicking 'Next'...
In fact, something ammusing is that licenses that 'allow' your software to do something, like buying windows NT and finding out it'll only server a 5-user network, aren't required. You can legally crack that software and do whatever you want with it, as long as you don't copy copyrighted material.
(ie, if it's a registry hack to make NT server more machines, it's legal. If you have to copy binaries from a 25-user license, it's not legal.)
This means that cracking software to remove restrictions like only serving a certain number of users, or requiring the CD, is perfectly legal.
It'd be as if someone came up to you and said "I'm looking to meet a tall redhed." You might assume he's looking for a prostitute, but he my also be looking for his sister...
Napster can't really tell the legality of certain files, "Metallica - Enter Sandman.mp3" and "Garage Band - Enter Sandman (Metallica cover).mp3" will both show up during an search on "Metallica"...
The service has a valid use that doesn't depend on piracy. The piracy may overwhelm this valid use, but that's not their problem, as long as they don't specifically get involved in piracy and take minimal steps to stop those users who are identified as pirates.
And by reading this message, I claim that you agree to my licensing agreement which forces you to (blah blah blah).
Of course, this isn't a valid license, neither is the license with a DVD movie.
1) You bought the disk, the license tries to offer you the right to play it which you already own, thus the license doesn't offer you any consideration - invalid license.
2) The license isn't brought to your attention before the purchase - invalid license.
You are bound by copyright laws because those are applied in blanket fashion to *all* copyrightable works. The only way for copyright protection to not apply is for the author to give away the right.
DVD Licenses might be valid if the disk performed properly without the license, but if you agreed to it, they'd ship you a movie poster, or something. This way you'd have a valid contract.
Anyways, they lie, as do software companies, when they claim they have tons and tons of rights and that you *must* agree, etc. It's nothing but lies, you can click 'I Agree' all day and it's not binding.
(The only exception is in places where the legislators have been bribed to pass the UCITA, but those places suck anyways.)
Nor is there a railgun in Quake3, but if you use a proxy bot to shoot railgun slugs at another nonexistant player, that's cheating...
If you don't play by the same rules as everyone else, it's not a fair game.
(Why was Neo a hero? He wasn't good at anything, he simply had a magical power (as far as people in the sim could tell). He didn't actually do anything based on actual skill, he auto-trained for things, basically, using scripts... Yay, what a hero... Whoa!)
I have no idea that King's fans will avoid screwing it up, they want it to succeed. But it'd pretty easy to set up something to download the book from a bunch of different IPs. And I'm sure someone will, eventually, just to fuck stuff up.
The fact that 78% of serious fans obeyed King isn't suprising. I'm not a fan and I didn't download, because I wanted to give it the best chance, but there are people out there who don't just not care, but actively care, about ruining everyone else's fun.
Oh sure, like picking up the phone and hearing a busy signal isn't going to be weird. If that happened, I'd call the phone company and report something broken.
'Just like an advertisment on TV', sure, except that TV shows are free, the phone and voice mail are payed for already.
I'd support a complete ban on any unsolicited commercial calling, and a $500 fine or something hefty to back it up. With jail time for anyone found repeat offending.
Yeah, they'll protect you, for a fee, from other attorneys.
Nice service, but when the Italian guys offer it, we call it a protection racket.
There was a funny story of vigilantism in a community newspaper a while back (East Vancouver paper, dunno which one, 'bout a year ago.) where the manager at a telemarketing firm was kidnapped after work, driven out of town, dumped out and beaten senseless.
Supposedly he was told while it was happening (he was blindfolded and tied) that it was because the office he managed kept call the person (the assailant) back and being rude when asked to not call in the future.
They told him that if the office didn't shut down, they'd break his back the next time.
Was a bit hunt for the guy, didn't hear that he'd ever been caught, or anything about the telemarketer.
Can't say I feel a lot of sympathy... When I was just out a school I worked, for two days, as a telemarketer. The boss was dishonest, they sold magazines and no matter which ones you picked, they sent you (and billed for) the same ones. They instructed people to harrass people on cell phones to make them buy, because many people would pay just to get you off the phone, no being strong-willed enough to hang up.
I quit that and never looked back... anyone making money in that business is a crook, plain and simple.