And just think, either the RIAA will have to pay you a truckload of money, or it will set a precident basically relieving anyone of legal liability for files they have downloaded.
And in the latter case, what the hell does that actually mean? That doesn't mean that uploading copyrighted materials would be relieved of legal liability.
As far as I know, every RIAA action thus far has been against people who illegally offered copyrighted material for upload (from Napster to the latest rounds of cases). The RIAA has never, in court, argued that downloading is illegal, only the upload portion of the transaction. A precedent declaring downloading to be legal would, in the scheme of things, mean absolutely nothing.
I'm not aware of ANY MUA or MTA that will accept an IP address in the To: field.
Then you're ignorant. Although no MTA will do this by default, it's trivial to make it accept mail addressed to an IP. In the case of my MTA, Postfix, it's a simple matter of setting the mydestination parameter. Postfix will also deliver to user@ip.add.re.ss. The Unix mail command and mutt are both MUA's that will happily allow addressing to user@ip.add.re.ss.
I've found that rather than requiring a reverse DNS lookup on the connecting IP, I get equally effective results by doing an A record lookup and seeing if the IP matches.
Well, it wouldn't necessarily be a 1:1 exchange. It could be a simple case of IBM offers $5/share to buy out SCO and the board and shareholders agree to sell their shares to IBM.
The problem with that is that those emails are considered legal notices and so forth. Essentially, you block at your own risk, that risk being that, since you nuked the notice, you fail to comply with the applicable laws.
I'm assuming they're using DMCA provisions in the letter, which basically means take the host down or you take responsibility for any infringements committed by that host. The RIAA then inventories what infringements are going on and sends a snail mail courier to the president of the university bearing a lawsuit for megabucks. The president gets pissed, and you'll end up getting fired.
Oh, that's the most effective thing the RIAA could do. Forget suing users. Convince universities (especially Unis) and maybe a cable ISP or two to cap uploads at 2GB per month in their base packages, which would effectively force users on those nets to disable uploading or throttle uploading to 500 bytes/second, forcing more of the upload traffic onto users on non-capped providers.
Because of the bandwidth spike on the non-capped providers, more of those will start to implement capping of some sort, or those sharing will see how much of their bandwidth is being eaten up by KaZaa et al and deactivate their sharing. The end result is that most of the uploading will be done by people who are leasig dedicated servers hooked up to T3's. These are naturally easier to go after (and there's a lot fewer of them).
Napster was also about the stupidest company in the history of companies. They openly promoted that this was being used for copyright violation (as in publishing the screenshots of searches for infringing material on their website). If they could argue that they had no knowledge of specific infringing activities, then they probably would have been cleared, and the RIAA would have to go back to getting users banned.
Would a dating service for people on the net be "frowned upon" by DCA? I hope not. But even if it is, don't let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.
Josh, know what you're talking about before you post. MySQL (the company which does the vast majority of development of MySQL) offers a variety of levels of support and consulting, regardless of the number of systems that you admin. For $48,000/year, you get:
Access to the entire development team 24x7x365, with a guaranteed response within 30 minutes
Ability to request developers by name
Just about every issue is supported (from APIs to configuration to OS, kernel, library, and filesystem dependencies to custom compiles, to recovery, to tuning and so on)
this says: "I just used this file sharing service to illegally copy a song - and if I want to, I can sue you for it." In previous suits, the RIAA has said things to the tune of: "Since you didn't own copyright to this and my computer made a copy, regardless of whether or not I own copyright, the file isn't legally mine." Or, translation: "I committed a crime to prove your guilt."
You fucking dolt.
The RIAA almost certainly has permission from the copyright holder to download that song, in which case it's not breaking the law. If Lars Ulrich (well, technically E/M Ventures) grants you permission to download every Metallica song in the catalog from KaZaa, you're not committing any copyright violations (if you share it out, though, you're breaking copyright law, unless you're granted permission to do that, also).
Wasn't there a game a few years ago that had every NFL team going back to 1921, so you could put the 1950 Cleveland Browns against the 1996 New England Patriots, playing by the AFL rules of the 1960's?
IIRC, the game sucked (horrible play, horrible graphics, and unstable), but why doesn't someone take the concept?
We could finally settle who the greatest running back in history was (my money's on either Barry Sanders or Jim Brown)!
But seriously, do you really have to have the likeness of NBA players to enjoy a basketball arcade game?
Some players like that, others don't. I personally like building the NFL Europe teams in Madden into Super Bowl winners. Yes, I actually won a ring with Danny Wuerffel...;o)
The back yard (or whatever it's called) sports series became successful without any licensed playas, didn't it?
IIRC, there were successful Backyard Sports games that did license players names and images. They did an NFL game, for instance, that featured cartoonish likenesses of a younger Drew Bledsoe, Jerry Rice, and Barry Sanders.
Maybe Rockstar could do a strategy spinoff of the GTA series, where you're the mobster (forget his name... it's been a year since I last played), assigning missions and such. Hmmm...
Shit I know people who bitched ceaslessly about them for a decade. They won't move, never.
How many people is that?
The facts of the matter are:
AOL is hemorrhaging subscribers. Maybe people you know aren't among those leaving. It is apparent that others are, however.
Dial-up ISPs like Earthlink and MSN are seeing membership declines to less of a degree (in percentage terms) than AOL. They also heavily promote (and presumably offer) some type of spam-blocking with their services. I know from experience that Earthlink uses various blackhole lists (at the very least the dynamic IP blacklist).
Considering that growth in the number of new Internet subscribers has slowed to a trickle over the past couple of years, and that few cable/DSL customers go back to dial-up, it is reasonable to conclude that whatever new customers Earthlink and MSN are attracting, most of them are coming from another dial-up provider. AOL being the largest of these providers, it is reasonable to conjecture that the plurality of the new customers are from AOL.
AOL is simply acting to keep people from running to ISPs that prominently advertise spam-blocking.
However, the phone company, the water company, and the gas company are monopolies (either de jure or de facto). If by Time Warner, you're referring to AOLTW's cable assets, then they're in the same boat. As a rule, monopolies do not give a shit about pleasing their customers.
However, AOL is not a monopoly. While the ISP sector is not as competitive as it once was, it's not that difficult to switch ISPs (especially in the dialup space). AOL has an interest to please their customers to prevent them from jumping to other ISPs. This in turn allows them to have a manageable predictable cash-flow.
Actually, most spam I'm getting now is through what appear to be DSL, cable or other high-speed connections. Dial-up spamming is a thing of the past. Why? Because of the fact that you can't do that much spamming through dialup, because it's not always on and it's not that fast.
Consider this. A spam is say 5Kbytes. Thus it's 40Kbits. Luser is running an open relay on his dialup connection. Each spam takes at least 2 seconds to send (because at least 80Kbits of traffic is generated). So anyone running an open relay that is being used continuously to send spam would find that their connection is useless. Now, this doesn't cover the case where the dialup user is intentionally spamming. But even then, there aren't likely to be many left, because of the speed and connection-dropping issues.
Contrast this with a cable or DSL connection. Even the slowest types of these connections at least double the spamsending capacity, and the open-relay can eat all the upstream bandwidth, thanks to their highly asymmetric nature, which makes detection of the openrelay by the user less likely. In addition, there's a lot fewer cases of a user getting kicked on these services. In the intentional case, the spammer, knowing that they have quadrupled the number of spams they can send (and thus quadruple their billings for spams sent) for a fairly insignificant increase in connection costs.
I strongly suspect that the explosion in spamming tracks the explosion in consumer high-speed connections very closely. I further suspect that the latter is causing the former.
My personal policy on blacklists (I am opposed to the centralized blacklists, as they pose too many ethical problems) is this: if I receive a spam through the server I run, I blacklist the entire netblock of the IP that connected to my server. I've blocked over 15/16s in China and Korea. To allow legitimate communications, the rejection bounce includes a note that to communicate with this host, please email..." with the address being one that is not handled by this server.
Slashdot Mirror
Plz rate (5, Insightful). K thx.
Thank you, Good Sir!
I found that article enlightening. May I subscribe to your newsletter?
And in the latter case, what the hell does that actually mean? That doesn't mean that uploading copyrighted materials would be relieved of legal liability.
As far as I know, every RIAA action thus far has been against people who illegally offered copyrighted material for upload (from Napster to the latest rounds of cases). The RIAA has never, in court, argued that downloading is illegal, only the upload portion of the transaction. A precedent declaring downloading to be legal would, in the scheme of things, mean absolutely nothing.
Then you're ignorant. Although no MTA will do this by default, it's trivial to make it accept mail addressed to an IP. In the case of my MTA, Postfix, it's a simple matter of setting the mydestination parameter. Postfix will also deliver to user@ip.add.re.ss. The Unix mail command and mutt are both MUA's that will happily allow addressing to user@ip.add.re.ss.
I've found that rather than requiring a reverse DNS lookup on the connecting IP, I get equally effective results by doing an A record lookup and seeing if the IP matches.
Good thing you remembered the l and s in "Blaster"...
...when the next version of Enlightenment and Duke Nukem Forever ship with IPv6 support.
Well, it wouldn't necessarily be a 1:1 exchange. It could be a simple case of IBM offers $5/share to buy out SCO and the board and shareholders agree to sell their shares to IBM.
...or do the stock quotes at the bottom of the article provide the best commentary on this issue?
The problem with that is that those emails are considered legal notices and so forth. Essentially, you block at your own risk, that risk being that, since you nuked the notice, you fail to comply with the applicable laws.
I'm assuming they're using DMCA provisions in the letter, which basically means take the host down or you take responsibility for any infringements committed by that host. The RIAA then inventories what infringements are going on and sends a snail mail courier to the president of the university bearing a lawsuit for megabucks. The president gets pissed, and you'll end up getting fired.
Is blocking RIAA spam worth getting fired over?
Oh, that's the most effective thing the RIAA could do. Forget suing users. Convince universities (especially Unis) and maybe a cable ISP or two to cap uploads at 2GB per month in their base packages, which would effectively force users on those nets to disable uploading or throttle uploading to 500 bytes/second, forcing more of the upload traffic onto users on non-capped providers.
Because of the bandwidth spike on the non-capped providers, more of those will start to implement capping of some sort, or those sharing will see how much of their bandwidth is being eaten up by KaZaa et al and deactivate their sharing. The end result is that most of the uploading will be done by people who are leasig dedicated servers hooked up to T3's. These are naturally easier to go after (and there's a lot fewer of them).
Now if only the *AA had the brains to do it...
The US doesn't have loser-pays, although you can sue someone for your legal fees...
Napster was also about the stupidest company in the history of companies. They openly promoted that this was being used for copyright violation (as in publishing the screenshots of searches for infringing material on their website). If they could argue that they had no knowledge of specific infringing activities, then they probably would have been cleared, and the RIAA would have to go back to getting users banned.
Best part:
After which Britney (well, her managers) will sue you for misuse of her name...
Josh, know what you're talking about before you post. MySQL (the company which does the vast majority of development of MySQL) offers a variety of levels of support and consulting, regardless of the number of systems that you admin. For $48,000/year, you get:
Does Oracle match that for the price?
Then it's up to whoever ownd the mistitled song to sue them.
You fucking dolt.
The RIAA almost certainly has permission from the copyright holder to download that song, in which case it's not breaking the law. If Lars Ulrich (well, technically E/M Ventures) grants you permission to download every Metallica song in the catalog from KaZaa, you're not committing any copyright violations (if you share it out, though, you're breaking copyright law, unless you're granted permission to do that, also).
Wasn't there a game a few years ago that had every NFL team going back to 1921, so you could put the 1950 Cleveland Browns against the 1996 New England Patriots, playing by the AFL rules of the 1960's?
IIRC, the game sucked (horrible play, horrible graphics, and unstable), but why doesn't someone take the concept?
We could finally settle who the greatest running back in history was (my money's on either Barry Sanders or Jim Brown)!
The court probably ruled that Kahn never granted the Bundesliga the right to license his likeness.
Some players like that, others don't. I personally like building the NFL Europe teams in Madden into Super Bowl winners. Yes, I actually won a ring with Danny Wuerffel... ;o)
IIRC, there were successful Backyard Sports games that did license players names and images. They did an NFL game, for instance, that featured cartoonish likenesses of a younger Drew Bledsoe, Jerry Rice, and Barry Sanders.
Maybe Rockstar could do a strategy spinoff of the GTA series, where you're the mobster (forget his name... it's been a year since I last played), assigning missions and such. Hmmm...
How many people is that?
The facts of the matter are:
Considering that growth in the number of new Internet subscribers has slowed to a trickle over the past couple of years, and that few cable/DSL customers go back to dial-up, it is reasonable to conclude that whatever new customers Earthlink and MSN are attracting, most of them are coming from another dial-up provider. AOL being the largest of these providers, it is reasonable to conjecture that the plurality of the new customers are from AOL.
AOL is simply acting to keep people from running to ISPs that prominently advertise spam-blocking.
However, the phone company, the water company, and the gas company are monopolies (either de jure or de facto). If by Time Warner, you're referring to AOLTW's cable assets, then they're in the same boat. As a rule, monopolies do not give a shit about pleasing their customers.
However, AOL is not a monopoly. While the ISP sector is not as competitive as it once was, it's not that difficult to switch ISPs (especially in the dialup space). AOL has an interest to please their customers to prevent them from jumping to other ISPs. This in turn allows them to have a manageable predictable cash-flow.
Use your brain, idiot.
Uh...
LZW is a lossless algorithm, and it's the only algorithm supported by GIF, so how could GIF be lossy?
Actually, most spam I'm getting now is through what appear to be DSL, cable or other high-speed connections. Dial-up spamming is a thing of the past. Why? Because of the fact that you can't do that much spamming through dialup, because it's not always on and it's not that fast.
Consider this. A spam is say 5Kbytes. Thus it's 40Kbits. Luser is running an open relay on his dialup connection. Each spam takes at least 2 seconds to send (because at least 80Kbits of traffic is generated). So anyone running an open relay that is being used continuously to send spam would find that their connection is useless. Now, this doesn't cover the case where the dialup user is intentionally spamming. But even then, there aren't likely to be many left, because of the speed and connection-dropping issues.
Contrast this with a cable or DSL connection. Even the slowest types of these connections at least double the spamsending capacity, and the open-relay can eat all the upstream bandwidth, thanks to their highly asymmetric nature, which makes detection of the openrelay by the user less likely. In addition, there's a lot fewer cases of a user getting kicked on these services. In the intentional case, the spammer, knowing that they have quadrupled the number of spams they can send (and thus quadruple their billings for spams sent) for a fairly insignificant increase in connection costs.
I strongly suspect that the explosion in spamming tracks the explosion in consumer high-speed connections very closely. I further suspect that the latter is causing the former.
My personal policy on blacklists (I am opposed to the centralized blacklists, as they pose too many ethical problems) is this: if I receive a spam through the server I run, I blacklist the entire netblock of the IP that connected to my server. I've blocked over 15 /16s in China and Korea. To allow legitimate communications, the rejection bounce includes a note that to communicate with this host, please email..." with the address being one that is not handled by this server.