Re:Annoying security leads to circumvention
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
they just annoyed me and i worked around it...
You sure did. You worked around it by creating a secure tunnel to just your home. I'd say that's quite a bit more secure than the RSA key. Which you have to admit, isn't really DEFEATING the security
Interesting, though, how much work you had to do to get around it, and you KNOW the system. A hacker would have to be pretty fucking determined to to what you did, and pretty sneaky not to get caught doing it.
The problem with computer security is not that keys are not complex enough. It's that people expect one key should be able to do everything, which is just silly. Do you have one key for your car, your house, your bank box, your office, your post box and your ATM card? Or is several dozen keys, maybe on a few different rings?
My user password at work is "fries". No punctuation, no nothing. I feel completely comfortable telling you this, as there is absolutely nothing you can do with this information other than read my spam email.
Or by using a database API that does more than just pass a big string of SQL. I think it's hilarious that people are actually taking the time to code warnings about what characters can and can't go into a password, when they should really just be using a better database layer. It doesn't matter if the JDBC command syntax shaves.1 ms off your round trip if you're wasting a page generation to tell users they can't use a password, and then waiting for another submission.
There's performance, and then there's complete idiocy. Building strings of SQL based on user input without processing it or wrapping it is the latter.
Calling "Intelligent Design" a respected theory for the creation of the universe is like calling "just hucking the ball down the lane without looking" a respected theory for bowling.
If you ignore any of the important aspects of evolution that actually help us in other fields of biology, and only look at evolution as a means to the end of explaining what we're doing here, then yes, ID is great. So's strict creationism. So's scientology, for that matter. All of them offer a nice story to go along with the pure science of creature a becomes creature b, etc.
But the point of evolution is not to explain a possibility of why we're here. That will always be a function of philosophies like ID and creationism in general. ID doesn't prove anything, so as a scientific model of the universe it's pretty useless. The purpose of evolutionary theory is to explain how we got here, and where we're going based on that. It doesn't matter if the process of evolution was initiated by a natural series of events or an intelligent system, because the end result is the same. In other words, it doesn't matter if we were DESIGNED to be here, or if we're a complete fluke of a completely random system. Improbability is not impossibility: the fact that we are here proves that we can be here, and any arguments about how unlikely a coincidence our existance just make for pleasant conversation.
ID is simply an effort to explain away what we don't know yet by attributing it to a spiritual entity. It's trying to find a place for God in a gradually decreasing window of the unknown. As a materialist, I feel that this is dangerous thinking. I'd rather find the underlying cause and study it than write it off as the hand of God. After all, just because you know how a process works doesn't make it any more miraculous. You know how babies are made, right? Still impress you? It impresses the shit out of me.
As for free will, you're once again talking about a philosophical issue. There's no way science can prove "free will" without first asserting what can or can not be attributed to it.
I mean they don't call chemists in the pharmaceuticals field "drug dealers" do they?
No. But they don't call pushers "Pharmacutical Distributors," either. This proves my damn point, man. To 90% of the world a "Hacker" is a criminal, a "programmer" is a job. So the majority of news outlets use the term "Hacker" to refer to criminals. Even if we "own" it, we still have no power to dictate how THEY understand it. As for "Hacker" being a professional term, I would have to say most of the professional programmers I know would be upset if you used the term. Many of the system administrators I know would be flattered, but then they don't do real programming anyway...so it's probably wishful thinking.
Do they call demolitions experts "terrorists?" What if they started calling the Palestinian suicide bombers "explosives experts" and inextricably linked the two professions
This is symantical syntax. Obviously anybody who can build and set a bomb is a demolitions expert (though one might argue you don't acquire too much expertise as a suicide bomber...waste of time, really). And obviously anybody who attacks your country using a terror activity (defined as "violence committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting demands") is going to be referred to as a terrorist. Doesn't mean you can't be both.
I always thought a speaker should just use his own gender all the time to keep it simple. My grammar coach begged to differ. He said, if a person was to use examples in the hypothetical, she should switch back and forth between genders so as to obscure the issue to the point of being a non issue. Using 'they' is right out because it requires a tense change (though it's not necessarily wrong...i mean, if people are writing their books for an audience, they should expect more than one person will read it. However, this whole s/he and 'he or she' business is just absurd. It's needless obfuscation for the sake of appeasement to a segment that is just as easily served by other methods. Like completely depersonalizing examples and referring to the group as an "it."
As long as the papers say things like "Hackers Wage Cyberwar On Yahoo," you haven't got a perfectly good word. Give it up. Unless you intend to use it in a fully ironic sense, the way west coast rappers use the term Gangster, "Hacker" is a dead term that's only going to get you in trouble.
My advice? Either convince the 377 million people who speak english as their primary language that "hacker" is an honorific term, or pick a different word to identify yourself with.
You want a word that describes somebody who does anything with any technology aside from its expected purpose. Hacker is an ill suited term for this, as it has the forementioned negative definitions, and it also implies by its nature that the activities involved are necessarily invasive and destructive. I have performed a number of these "hacks," such as cutting holes in a computer case to improve airflow, and I'm not at all proud of them. That's like being proud of not changing the oil in your car.
I think the role you are talking about is better termed a "Tinkerer." No negative connotations, and no limitations.
Well, it's not like we OWN the word hacker. Language is decided by the majority, by common use, not by initial definition. If it were, a "faggot" would still be a pile of sticks and "spam" would still be a moderately disgusting tinned meat product. If 9/10 of the world use this word in an offensive context, we should stop using it unless we want to get strange looks -- it's certainly easier than trying to educate all these people on how we want them to use it, as if we had some authority in the matter. "Coder" is a word which is pretty similar (same number of syllables, same intended meaning) without any of the associated negatives.
And there are many. Besides the obvious abuse of the term to mean "Computer Intruder or software virus manufacturer," there's also a construment among programmers (mostly older guys) that a hacker is a seat-of-the-pants programmer who aims only to finish a single task as quickly as possible, bullocks to good coding practices, documentation, correct tabbing, spaghetti code and poor design. A "hack" is a piece of code that is poorly thought out, poorly executed, or otherwise sloppily written.
Is this really the kind of definition we want to give ourselves, simple because we think the Tech Model Railroad Club was a pretty cool organization? Referring to Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds as "Kernel Hackers" when the folks working on the NT Kernel are called "Software Engineers" leaves a pretty broad disparity between their abilities by definition in the minds of most non-technical people, a disparity which is not refelected in their actual abilities. I think the OSS and Linux communties are really trying to lift themselves out of their perception as wild systems written by cowboy programmers. One step of that may be dropping the ill-advised, grudging use of "Hacker" as an honorific.
What about "tuner?" It's another sweet word, and if you've seen Dark City, it's got some neat conotations...
I've seen plenty of evidence that Albert Einstein wrote his initial papers on general relativity based on conversations with his wife. Kennedy's famous book "Profiles in Courage" was written by a team of his staff to which he signed his name. A lot of people think some of Shakespearre's best lines were introduced by his editors. Edison's light bulb was the result of dozens of lab assistants testing hundreds of different types of filaments in various conditions.
It's easier to remember one name than a dozen. But there have been very few ANYTHINGS made by one "loner genious" who had no outside assistance or review.
Um. Where in the universe are you ever going to have your iTunes files in a format that doesn't already have your name and email address around it somewhere?
You can only use them on PCs, Macs and iPods YOU have access to. Get access to the AAC files and you already have access to the PC, with all your documents, web histories, password chains...
1) You're right. We need a new word to describe an activity that reduces a person or company's profits by spreading their products without their consent. I know, let's use THEFT! It may take a few years for the dictionary people to catch up to what everybody except some slashdot rules lawyers realizes: copying something digitally does not become a right merely because it is easy. Killing is easy, too.
2) So...what you're saying is we have 5 companies in the music industry, and there's no competition between them? That's the most absurd thing I have ever heard, and I'm not even a libertarian. I agree that they may be enjoying a wide degree of collusion on CD prices, we'll see how Universal's $9.99 initiative works out. As for writing laws to protect musicians from people distributing music for free...well, sure that helps the RIAA members, but it doesn't exactly hurt the indies, either. Look to the world of hip-hop, where the taping culture is more massive than it ever was for rock music, and you discover that a LOT of artists who are popular on tape find themselves unable to sell records because they've been so heavily bootlegged. Taking away these artists' rights to spite the Big 5 is not helpful!
A lot of artists are doing exactly what you suggest. A lot of them are doing okay. But none of them is doing as well as a moderately popular artist working for the Big 5. There's still little economic incentive to go indy. Luckily, the social incentives of being able to control your own music are so big that the Big 5 will soon find themselves unable to get anybody but B list artists. That doesn't mean that the A list indies are going to suddenly think theft of their music (call it copying if you like, asshole, call it gardening if it makes you feel better, it's still illegal at best and cruel at least) is ok.
My point it that "live shows" are not the solution to the problem of albums being ripped and duplicated. There is no "solution" other than scaring the shit out of musioc theives until they give up.
Of course, it may not be that big a "problem." In which cases the "solution" is overkill. I'm not a music industry analyst and neither are you.
Joy: Being able to listen to any of my songs the second it occurs to me Sorrow: having to "authorize" myself to listen to music that I love
Solution: Burn a fucking CD and listen to that. No DRM.
Joy: sharing my favorite songs with my friends Sorrow: Having to spend hrs giving friends tech support dealing with work arounds to stupid DRM measures that make them feel lost
Solution: Bring your laptop to their house, join their subnet. They can browse anything in your iTunes library. Of course they can't download and keep it forever, but if they did that then they'd never buy it, and your favorite artists would have to quit the business.
Joy: finding new music that I love Sorrow: fearing getting busted for checking out someone's recomendation
Solution: There are many. Transworld music is installing listening booths at all of its stores allowing you to pick up and play any song you want to off any of your discs. There's also a 30 second preview on every song on iTunes (4 minutes for eBooks) and several services that let you stream an unlimited amount of any song you like. Then there's the complicated low tech method we've been using since the Jazz days: BORROW YOUR GODDAMN FRIENDS COPIES.
Solution: Lighten the fuck up. I'd like you to walk up to any artist after a show and explain to them why you feel you deserve to download their music without restrictions or limitations because you promise if you like it you'll pay them. Greed may drive Metallica, but it sure as shit doesn't drive the tens of thousands of independent artists whose music is also being stolen on the internet, who do not have the exposure to make up for lost sales, and who do not have the time, position or energy to fight the people spreading their art without so little as a link to their website. Not everything about controlling music is about money. One of my favorite boston artists, Edan, wrote a song called "Emcees Smoke Crack." It has spread all over KaZaa, and not one track even has Edan listed as the damn artist. So this cat has to work at Home Depot while people wonder when "MC Smoke Crack" is gonna come to their local club. The first thing you learn when you have to live full time as an artist is that if you don't get PAID, you don't LIVE as an artist.
Joy: Cracking the shit out of IP Sorrow: It's come to this: having to justify it to the stupid Slashdot consumers
Solution: Intellectual Property is only a joke when you have never come up with your own. Try making something useful yourself and see how fucking sanctimonious you are about other people abusing it. Then maybe you'll quit stroking your peter over some utopia where nobody gets paid to create and you can just do whatever you want with it. I used to make kickass sandcastles at the beach, but people kept letting their kids kick them own the second I stepped away. What you're suggesting is a world full of crushed sandcastles.
Uh, how the fuck are you going to track somebody using a DRM file downloaded to their hard drive the first time they buy it? Your slashdot account is far more heinous. Shit, the TCP/IP protocol gives you more information than the goddamn license file, which is essentially a meaningless public key based off your email address.
Yeah. And when duplication of property has the same economic ramifications as theft of property, it should carry the same penalty. A lot of really talented musicians have been fucked by bootleggers...hell, J-live's first record was so heavily bootlegged that his record label wouldn't even release it. Instead, they released him from his contract. And this was just tapes in 1995!
Word. The dumbest features ever thunk up by man are all tied to Javascript...the images that swirl around your cursor, preventing you from clicking on links. The script which loads everything at the same time, which means you wait forever for the one broken image. Cascading menus that don't disappear. Or do disappear, just as you are about to click on them.
And worst of all, blocking the right mouse button (or as I like to call it, "the button i use to navigate the fucking internet") in the name of "copyright protection." Every time I see this monstrosity, I download all of the images from the site, stick them in a zip file, and email it to the webmaster. "Your copyright protection didn't work. Neither did the mouse button I use to open links in a new window. One of these things can be easily fixed."
Hmm. So they'll let you pay them to tell you what HP products to buy.
Don't their salesmen already do this for free?
[Das walks into HP lunch counter] Dasmb: Hi, I'm hungry. Lunch: You should buy a turkey sub. Dasmb: OK, that sounds good. Lunch: Alright, that'll be $130 Dasmb: [gurgling noise] Lunch: Well, one hour minimum of sandwich consulting at $125 per hour, $5 for the sandwich. Dasmb: I shall take my business to McDonalds! Lunch: Whatever man. They'll just tie you into Big Macs. Our sandwiches are agile, they move at the speed of hunger. Either way, you still owe us $125.
Then again, I once had a mechanic try to charge me $55 for saying my tires needed air. He does pretty good business because everybody assumes a guy with dirty hands would never lie about car parts.
Microsoft APIs ARE well understood. Just check out AllApis.net. Or read the documentation on msdn which is also free. Or buy any of the hundreds of books on the subject. Or ask on any of the numerous #winprog IRC channels. Or newsgroups.
Despite Linus' FUD, there are plenty of people who know what's going on in the "Black Box" world of Windows API. They may not know the code works on a line by line basis, but there are dozens of Dan Applemans ready to tell you exactly what is going to happen to your data during and after an API call.
Slashdot Mirror
they just annoyed me and i worked around it...
You sure did. You worked around it by creating a secure tunnel to just your home. I'd say that's quite a bit more secure than the RSA key. Which you have to admit, isn't really DEFEATING the security
Interesting, though, how much work you had to do to get around it, and you KNOW the system. A hacker would have to be pretty fucking determined to to what you did, and pretty sneaky not to get caught doing it.
The problem with computer security is not that keys are not complex enough. It's that people expect one key should be able to do everything, which is just silly. Do you have one key for your car, your house, your bank box, your office, your post box and your ATM card? Or is several dozen keys, maybe on a few different rings?
My user password at work is "fries". No punctuation, no nothing. I feel completely comfortable telling you this, as there is absolutely nothing you can do with this information other than read my spam email.
Or by using a database API that does more than just pass a big string of SQL. I think it's hilarious that people are actually taking the time to code warnings about what characters can and can't go into a password, when they should really just be using a better database layer. It doesn't matter if the JDBC command syntax shaves .1 ms off your round trip if you're wasting a page generation to tell users they can't use a password, and then waiting for another submission.
There's performance, and then there's complete idiocy. Building strings of SQL based on user input without processing it or wrapping it is the latter.
What, and you think mitochondria ain't sexy?
You haven't seen the mitochondria I have. Woo Woo!
Calling "Intelligent Design" a respected theory for the creation of the universe is like calling "just hucking the ball down the lane without looking" a respected theory for bowling.
If you ignore any of the important aspects of evolution that actually help us in other fields of biology, and only look at evolution as a means to the end of explaining what we're doing here, then yes, ID is great. So's strict creationism. So's scientology, for that matter. All of them offer a nice story to go along with the pure science of creature a becomes creature b, etc.
But the point of evolution is not to explain a possibility of why we're here. That will always be a function of philosophies like ID and creationism in general. ID doesn't prove anything, so as a scientific model of the universe it's pretty useless. The purpose of evolutionary theory is to explain how we got here, and where we're going based on that. It doesn't matter if the process of evolution was initiated by a natural series of events or an intelligent system, because the end result is the same. In other words, it doesn't matter if we were DESIGNED to be here, or if we're a complete fluke of a completely random system. Improbability is not impossibility: the fact that we are here proves that we can be here, and any arguments about how unlikely a coincidence our existance just make for pleasant conversation.
ID is simply an effort to explain away what we don't know yet by attributing it to a spiritual entity. It's trying to find a place for God in a gradually decreasing window of the unknown. As a materialist, I feel that this is dangerous thinking. I'd rather find the underlying cause and study it than write it off as the hand of God. After all, just because you know how a process works doesn't make it any more miraculous. You know how babies are made, right? Still impress you? It impresses the shit out of me.
As for free will, you're once again talking about a philosophical issue. There's no way science can prove "free will" without first asserting what can or can not be attributed to it.
I mean they don't call chemists in the pharmaceuticals field "drug dealers" do they?
No. But they don't call pushers "Pharmacutical Distributors," either. This proves my damn point, man. To 90% of the world a "Hacker" is a criminal, a "programmer" is a job. So the majority of news outlets use the term "Hacker" to refer to criminals. Even if we "own" it, we still have no power to dictate how THEY understand it. As for "Hacker" being a professional term, I would have to say most of the professional programmers I know would be upset if you used the term. Many of the system administrators I know would be flattered, but then they don't do real programming anyway...so it's probably wishful thinking.
Do they call demolitions experts "terrorists?" What if they started calling the Palestinian suicide bombers "explosives experts" and inextricably linked the two professions
This is symantical syntax. Obviously anybody who can build and set a bomb is a demolitions expert (though one might argue you don't acquire too much expertise as a suicide bomber...waste of time, really). And obviously anybody who attacks your country using a terror activity (defined as "violence committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting demands") is going to be referred to as a terrorist. Doesn't mean you can't be both.
I always thought a speaker should just use his own gender all the time to keep it simple. My grammar coach begged to differ. He said, if a person was to use examples in the hypothetical, she should switch back and forth between genders so as to obscure the issue to the point of being a non issue. Using 'they' is right out because it requires a tense change (though it's not necessarily wrong...i mean, if people are writing their books for an audience, they should expect more than one person will read it. However, this whole s/he and 'he or she' business is just absurd. It's needless obfuscation for the sake of appeasement to a segment that is just as easily served by other methods. Like completely depersonalizing examples and referring to the group as an "it."
It's also a shitty golfer. Though they have the stupidest term ever -- 'Duffer' -- so they don't need to be stealing ours, too.
As long as the papers say things like "Hackers Wage Cyberwar On Yahoo," you haven't got a perfectly good word. Give it up. Unless you intend to use it in a fully ironic sense, the way west coast rappers use the term Gangster, "Hacker" is a dead term that's only going to get you in trouble.
My advice? Either convince the 377 million people who speak english as their primary language that "hacker" is an honorific term, or pick a different word to identify yourself with.
Not according to the DVD titles, subtitles, or the script, all of which refer to it as "Tuning."
But then, I can't expect anybody with a website as shitty as yours to understand spoken English.
You want a word that describes somebody who does anything with any technology aside from its expected purpose. Hacker is an ill suited term for this, as it has the forementioned negative definitions, and it also implies by its nature that the activities involved are necessarily invasive and destructive. I have performed a number of these "hacks," such as cutting holes in a computer case to improve airflow, and I'm not at all proud of them. That's like being proud of not changing the oil in your car.
I think the role you are talking about is better termed a "Tinkerer." No negative connotations, and no limitations.
Well, it's not like we OWN the word hacker. Language is decided by the majority, by common use, not by initial definition. If it were, a "faggot" would still be a pile of sticks and "spam" would still be a moderately disgusting tinned meat product. If 9/10 of the world use this word in an offensive context, we should stop using it unless we want to get strange looks -- it's certainly easier than trying to educate all these people on how we want them to use it, as if we had some authority in the matter. "Coder" is a word which is pretty similar (same number of syllables, same intended meaning) without any of the associated negatives.
And there are many. Besides the obvious abuse of the term to mean "Computer Intruder or software virus manufacturer," there's also a construment among programmers (mostly older guys) that a hacker is a seat-of-the-pants programmer who aims only to finish a single task as quickly as possible, bullocks to good coding practices, documentation, correct tabbing, spaghetti code and poor design. A "hack" is a piece of code that is poorly thought out, poorly executed, or otherwise sloppily written.
Is this really the kind of definition we want to give ourselves, simple because we think the Tech Model Railroad Club was a pretty cool organization? Referring to Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds as "Kernel Hackers" when the folks working on the NT Kernel are called "Software Engineers" leaves a pretty broad disparity between their abilities by definition in the minds of most non-technical people, a disparity which is not refelected in their actual abilities. I think the OSS and Linux communties are really trying to lift themselves out of their perception as wild systems written by cowboy programmers. One step of that may be dropping the ill-advised, grudging use of "Hacker" as an honorific.
What about "tuner?" It's another sweet word, and if you've seen Dark City, it's got some neat conotations...
I've seen plenty of evidence that Albert Einstein wrote his initial papers on general relativity based on conversations with his wife. Kennedy's famous book "Profiles in Courage" was written by a team of his staff to which he signed his name. A lot of people think some of Shakespearre's best lines were introduced by his editors. Edison's light bulb was the result of dozens of lab assistants testing hundreds of different types of filaments in various conditions.
It's easier to remember one name than a dozen. But there have been very few ANYTHINGS made by one "loner genious" who had no outside assistance or review.
Um. Where in the universe are you ever going to have your iTunes files in a format that doesn't already have your name and email address around it somewhere?
You can only use them on PCs, Macs and iPods YOU have access to. Get access to the AAC files and you already have access to the PC, with all your documents, web histories, password chains...
Take off the tin hat, jeez you people are dumb.
1) You're right. We need a new word to describe an activity that reduces a person or company's profits by spreading their products without their consent. I know, let's use THEFT! It may take a few years for the dictionary people to catch up to what everybody except some slashdot rules lawyers realizes: copying something digitally does not become a right merely because it is easy. Killing is easy, too.
2) So...what you're saying is we have 5 companies in the music industry, and there's no competition between them? That's the most absurd thing I have ever heard, and I'm not even a libertarian. I agree that they may be enjoying a wide degree of collusion on CD prices, we'll see how Universal's $9.99 initiative works out. As for writing laws to protect musicians from people distributing music for free...well, sure that helps the RIAA members, but it doesn't exactly hurt the indies, either. Look to the world of hip-hop, where the taping culture is more massive than it ever was for rock music, and you discover that a LOT of artists who are popular on tape find themselves unable to sell records because they've been so heavily bootlegged. Taking away these artists' rights to spite the Big 5 is not helpful!
A lot of artists are doing exactly what you suggest. A lot of them are doing okay. But none of them is doing as well as a moderately popular artist working for the Big 5. There's still little economic incentive to go indy. Luckily, the social incentives of being able to control your own music are so big that the Big 5 will soon find themselves unable to get anybody but B list artists. That doesn't mean that the A list indies are going to suddenly think theft of their music (call it copying if you like, asshole, call it gardening if it makes you feel better, it's still illegal at best and cruel at least) is ok.
People don't steal albums that suck, dumbass. Troll somebody else!
My point it that "live shows" are not the solution to the problem of albums being ripped and duplicated. There is no "solution" other than scaring the shit out of musioc theives until they give up.
Of course, it may not be that big a "problem." In which cases the "solution" is overkill. I'm not a music industry analyst and neither are you.
Joy: Being able to listen to any of my songs the second it occurs to me
Sorrow: having to "authorize" myself to listen to music that I love
Solution: Burn a fucking CD and listen to that. No DRM.
Joy: sharing my favorite songs with my friends
Sorrow: Having to spend hrs giving friends tech support dealing with work arounds to stupid DRM measures that make them feel lost
Solution: Bring your laptop to their house, join their subnet. They can browse anything in your iTunes library. Of course they can't download and keep it forever, but if they did that then they'd never buy it, and your favorite artists would have to quit the business.
Joy: finding new music that I love
Sorrow: fearing getting busted for checking out someone's recomendation
Solution: There are many. Transworld music is installing listening booths at all of its stores allowing you to pick up and play any song you want to off any of your discs. There's also a 30 second preview on every song on iTunes (4 minutes for eBooks) and several services that let you stream an unlimited amount of any song you like. Then there's the complicated low tech method we've been using since the Jazz days: BORROW YOUR GODDAMN FRIENDS COPIES.
Joy: art, technology, freedom
Sorrow: greedy fuckers; the constant vigilance freedom requires
Solution: Lighten the fuck up. I'd like you to walk up to any artist after a show and explain to them why you feel you deserve to download their music without restrictions or limitations because you promise if you like it you'll pay them. Greed may drive Metallica, but it sure as shit doesn't drive the tens of thousands of independent artists whose music is also being stolen on the internet, who do not have the exposure to make up for lost sales, and who do not have the time, position or energy to fight the people spreading their art without so little as a link to their website. Not everything about controlling music is about money. One of my favorite boston artists, Edan, wrote a song called "Emcees Smoke Crack." It has spread all over KaZaa, and not one track even has Edan listed as the damn artist. So this cat has to work at Home Depot while people wonder when "MC Smoke Crack" is gonna come to their local club. The first thing you learn when you have to live full time as an artist is that if you don't get PAID, you don't LIVE as an artist.
Joy: Cracking the shit out of IP
Sorrow: It's come to this: having to justify it to the stupid Slashdot consumers
Solution: Intellectual Property is only a joke when you have never come up with your own. Try making something useful yourself and see how fucking sanctimonious you are about other people abusing it. Then maybe you'll quit stroking your peter over some utopia where nobody gets paid to create and you can just do whatever you want with it. I used to make kickass sandcastles at the beach, but people kept letting their kids kick them own the second I stepped away. What you're suggesting is a world full of crushed sandcastles.
Uh, how the fuck are you going to track somebody using a DRM file downloaded to their hard drive the first time they buy it? Your slashdot account is far more heinous. Shit, the TCP/IP protocol gives you more information than the goddamn license file, which is essentially a meaningless public key based off your email address.
Yeah. And when duplication of property has the same economic ramifications as theft of property, it should carry the same penalty. A lot of really talented musicians have been fucked by bootleggers...hell, J-live's first record was so heavily bootlegged that his record label wouldn't even release it. Instead, they released him from his contract. And this was just tapes in 1995!
Yeah. Nobody steals those on the internet *cough*etree *cough* *cough*
Word. The dumbest features ever thunk up by man are all tied to Javascript...the images that swirl around your cursor, preventing you from clicking on links. The script which loads everything at the same time, which means you wait forever for the one broken image. Cascading menus that don't disappear. Or do disappear, just as you are about to click on them.
And worst of all, blocking the right mouse button (or as I like to call it, "the button i use to navigate the fucking internet") in the name of "copyright protection." Every time I see this monstrosity, I download all of the images from the site, stick them in a zip file, and email it to the webmaster. "Your copyright protection didn't work. Neither did the mouse button I use to open links in a new window. One of these things can be easily fixed."
What about Yarmulke Linux? Too semetic?
Hmm. So they'll let you pay them to tell you what HP products to buy.
Don't their salesmen already do this for free?
[Das walks into HP lunch counter]
Dasmb: Hi, I'm hungry.
Lunch: You should buy a turkey sub.
Dasmb: OK, that sounds good.
Lunch: Alright, that'll be $130
Dasmb: [gurgling noise]
Lunch: Well, one hour minimum of sandwich consulting at $125 per hour, $5 for the sandwich.
Dasmb: I shall take my business to McDonalds!
Lunch: Whatever man. They'll just tie you into Big Macs. Our sandwiches are agile, they move at the speed of hunger. Either way, you still owe us $125.
Then again, I once had a mechanic try to charge me $55 for saying my tires needed air. He does pretty good business because everybody assumes a guy with dirty hands would never lie about car parts.
Microsoft APIs ARE well understood. Just check out AllApis.net. Or read the documentation on msdn which is also free. Or buy any of the hundreds of books on the subject. Or ask on any of the numerous #winprog IRC channels. Or newsgroups.
Despite Linus' FUD, there are plenty of people who know what's going on in the "Black Box" world of Windows API. They may not know the code works on a line by line basis, but there are dozens of Dan Applemans ready to tell you exactly what is going to happen to your data during and after an API call.