Go for it. I think that one of the things that brings out the assholes on the Net is that they think there'll be no consequences for their actions. They think they'll never get caught. A rude awakening every now and then is a good thing.
I see lots of people pointing out why this isn't fair or just won't work. Well, there is a comment period here, so file comments. No, I'm not niave enough to think that this will get turned around because of a few comments, but what these comments will do is lay the supporting groundwork for the inevitable lawsuits that will follow the implementation of the rules. What these suits will allege is that these rules are impossible to follow and/or that they are crafted to force Webcasters off the air. So if you believe that, file a comment. Take the rules, one by one, and explain the problem with each of them. No opinions, just facts. If you believe that the rules are impossible to implement, lay out the reasons. If you think they are financially destructive, use hard numbers. If you want to argue that the rules go above and beyond what the underlying law requires, spell it out, point for point. Remember, there will be lawsuits over this, and these comments will be used in court.
If the FTC is really serious about going after spam, then we need to give them our support. More than that, we need to make them do their job with this. If most spam is fraudulent, and if most spam is sent by a relatively small group of people, then it stands to reason that getting rid of these hard-core spammers will go a long way toward reducing the spam problem.
Now don't get me wrong here. I'm not naive enough to believe that this is going to be easy. Spammers are slippery little worms, and stopping them for good won't be easy. However, there's nothing like a court order to give someone an attitude adjustment.
So here's the deal. The FTC wants to receive spam at uce@ftc.gov, so send it. My guess is that they like getting all spam, but bear in mind that they don't have jurisdiction over spam per se, just spam selling fraudulent goods and services. This is something they can latch onto and run with because they are empowered to stop fraud. If you send, be sure to include full headers so messages can be tracked back to the source. That way, if a spammer hops from ISP to ISP, it may be possible to construct a pattern that can be used to find and nail him.
As I said, I don't count on this to work, but if the FTC really is serious, then let's give them the evidence they need to bust some balls.
You're absolutely right. I can't count the number of WD hard drives I've seen fail in the past few years. Pieces of shit, no doubt about it. But this is just in line with the general crappiness of hardware in the last few years. I got a monitor in 1995 that had dark spots on the screen. Returned it for a good one. Got another monitor in late 1999 that had its convergence shot to hell, replaced it with another one where half the screen was a lovely shade of purple. And don't even get me started on shitty modems. God, I've had to try to support those things. How anyone expects to get a stable connection out of something they paid $10 for is beyond me. And once these pieces of shit get to consumers, who has to support them? The modem makers? Yeah, right. You're lucky to find any kind of support phone number for many of the low-end vendors. Nope, the ISPs get to take these calls. Ditto for Internet Explorer and Windows's network components. MS makes the cash off these programs, yet when they start flaking out, the providers get the calls, not MS. And to return to hardware for a minute, has anyone actually had a successful tech support call with a motherboard maker? I have a friend who was only able to get someone to speak with him after calling the board maker's office in Taiwan. Luckily, he speaks Chinese.
I really must say that the state of computer support these days just plain sucks. And speaking of HP, a friend's mom bought one of those things a few weeks ago. She was having modem problems so my friend called HP. The tech had her open the case and find the modem. He had her pull it out, then told her to...and I'm not making this up...plug it back into the big green thing that everything is plugged into. When she replied, "You mean the motherboard?" he said, "Is that what it's called? Oh cool!"
What you might try is to bring this issue up on news.admin.net-abuse.email and see if you can get things straightened out. If you go this route, have all your information in order, including your mail server name and IP, the time period in which it was open, what blacklists you were added to and which ones you're stuck on, and, most importantly, the date you got things fixed.
If you've never been in NANAE before, keep in mind that the people there are, by and large, very nice folks who are genuinely interested in solving the spam problem and not persecuting anyone who doesn't deserve it. Don't jump in there with flamethrowers blasting away. Just state your problem clearly and ask if anyone can help you out. If you're running a clean server now, you'll find all the help you'll need.
What you're proposing has already been thought of. It's called a Teergrube. What it does is hold the spammer's SMTP connection open for as long as possible, appearing to slowly accept mail, but in reality doing nothing but wasting the spammer's time. You can do a Usenet search on that term to get more information. Here's an FAQ that may help you out. The post I pulled the link from is several years old, so you may want to look for something more up to date.
I'll second that. A thorough interview would also be nice. If this guy successfully crushes BT's suit, as seems very possible, he's definitely going to be making the rounds in the tech media. He might even get some nice words from John C. Dvorak.
If the studios want it to work, they'll simply stop making regular DVDs and only sell these. If the disc is designed to decay after a limited time, as seems to be the case, then it won't necessarily be a limitation that can be overcome, unless you can figure out how to stop the deterioration. As for ripping, I saw an article the other day describing the studios' desire to get watermarking into their DVDs and coerce drive makers to build drives that won't rip or burn a watermarked disc.
As we all know, someone will most likely find a way around all this, but this isn't aimed at computer geeks; it's aimed at the mass market, where people aren't going to be so technically savvy. It's also a nice strategy for going after rental revenue. If this really takes off, then the movie rental chains lose rental revenue, and that money goes to the studios instead.
My guess: Unless the studios stop making regular DVDs, this will not take off in a big way. If they do stop, they're going to piss a lot of people off. Will those people knuckle under and buy? Who knows.
So what you're saying is that if I want my copyrighted book protected, then I shouldn't place copies in libraries? Is that right? I mean, libraries are public places. Or, if I publish a magazine full of copyrighted pictures, then someone has the right to scan them into their computer and post them on the Net? Or if you post some interesting content on your Web site, I can come in and take that content, transfer it to my site, represent it as being mine, and make money off it? Just wait until someone does one of these things to you, then you can decide who the dumbass really is.
I think you're right. Doing a Traceroute seems to indicate that the ping times go way up as the data is crossing the Pacific. It's on HiNet's network, with a router in Palo Alto, if the name is correct on the reverse DNS. When it leaves there bound for Taiwan, that's when ping times really go up. Anyone know about HiNet's network topology?
There are several reasons he doesn't like it. First, in order for it to work, the program has to be buffered into the machine, which means it isn't live anymore. Second, listeners complained that it was too hard to listen to because natural pauses are eliminated.
Also, it wasn't his network that was doing it; it was individual radio stations, at least that's my understanding.
Depends on what he means by "modifying". It's common practice for job seekers to rearrange their resumes to better suit the position they're applying for. If, for instance, they're applying tor a sales job, but all their recent jobs have been non-sales, but they do have sales experience in the past, a resume organized along functional lines would be appropriate. If, however, they want to show length of employment in recent positions, and those positions fit what the recruiter is looking for, a chronologically-oriented resume would be best.
It sucks that this is necessary, but recruiters won't take the time to read an entire resume. I was told that if they don't see something that interests them in the first 15 seconds, they'll toss it and move on, so if what they're looking for isn't near the top, you can kiss that job goodbye.
I really have to marvel at this guy's ability to totally destroy his own career. I mean, even my parents, who've never been online without my presence, know what spam is and how repulsive it is. Did this joker not have a clue, or did he delude himself into believing he'd actually get hired by someone? I've heard for a long time that spammers have this warped belief that there's nothing wrong with what they're doing. I've mostly written it off in favor of the view that they know what they're doing is wrong but just don't care. I still think most all of them are aware, but maybe there are a few true idiots out there who just don't get it. Well, we now know there's at least one of them. Either that, or he has a screw loose somewhere, as several folks theorized when this topic was originally posted. As messed up as that sounds, it could very well be the case. Whatever it is, I'd love to get his resume so I could tell him what I think of his qualifications. I'd also have the pleasure of passing it along to some friends at a few hardware and telecom companies, for their amusement.
I wouldn't necessarily blame that on the company. What spammers will often do is launch a dictionary attack against a mail server. This is when they send spam to every possible combination of letters and numbers that has a decent chance of being an e-mail address. Many of the e-mails will bounce, but some will get through. If your address was at all common (the username wasn't complete gibberish), that could have been what happened. Now granted, most spammers won't want to see the bounces--they'll just insert a fake return address, but the ones actively building e-mail lists might, especially if they have a mailbox big enough to receive them and some software to weed through them and delete them from their list of possible addresses. And once your address has been confirmed as good, then you'll get more and more spam. Lovely, isn't it?
Same here. I canceled it in November in preparation of a move. I've moved, and I really don't want it back. OK, I'd like a few channels like CNN, TV Land, Sci-Fi, TechTV, etc., but the rest could disappear for all I care. Actually, I stay informed on current events via the Net and radio, so I really don't need TV news. If I really wanted that, I could catch a stream of BBC World. Much better than CNN and not even on American cable anyway. I still watch DVDs when my girlfriend comes over, but at least there I choose the stuff I want to see. I'm not really sure that I'm ever going back to cable. Maybe I will, but I don't miss it too much.
Perhaps I'm a tiny minority, but the programmers had better be a little concerned about people like me because I used to watch TV, and now I really don't, and if I notice others getting frustrated with copy controls, I'll suggest they curtail their viewing as well. There are alternatives to television, now more so than ever, and making it harder for people to watch what they want is only going to drive them toward these other activities.
Yeah, I think I kinda liked it, too, although, at the time, anything related to tech or sci-fi was almost guaranteed to get me as a viewer. And you're right, his sidekick was Cursor.
And as long as we're on the subject of shows on DVD, "Otherworld" would be a good candidate. There were only eight episodes, and it was bizarre enough to get a cult following of sorts. I know that some people hated it, but I was a fan. Oh yeah, and what about "Wizards and Warriors"? I wonder if many people even remember that one from almost 20 years ago.
I seem to recall a "making of" special that aired on TV about the time the film was released. Is that the one that's included, or is this a new one?
And how many folks here remember "Automan"? A TRON ripoff, if there ever was one, at least for SFX.
Oh yeah, if you have the original DVD, check out the plot summary on the back cover. Read closely, and you should get a chuckle out of the error you find there. Wait..., maybe it isn't an error.:)
As others have said, it's a restriction on the form of delivery. Here's an example. Suppose I decide to promote my business by writing my advertisement on your front door using some substance that is easily removed with very little effort. The ad will easily wash off, and it doesn't harm your door, but you could still prosecute me for vandalism, no matter what the content of my message is.
Now let's take that concept in a slightly different and more practical direction. Telemarketers are by law prohibited from leaving messages on answering machines. I won't attempt to conclusively say I know the reasoning of this, but I would guess that it came out of a belief that a person sets up an answering machine to get messages of a personal nature, not to deliver ads for someone else. The owner of the machine bears the cost of the equipment and the effort of maintaining it, and an advertiser brings no useful benefit to the table. In addition, the machine's capacity is limited, so any ad takes away space that could be used for personal messages.
Now let's extend the argument to advertising on fax machines, which is also illegal. The same basic principles apply here, except we're dealing with a printed page instead of a recorded message.
Then there's e-mail. The use of resources is still there, since messages require bandwidth to move and disk space to store, costs that are unwillingly borne by the recipient or the recipient's ISP, which then passes the costs along to its subscribers. Additionally, spam wastes time, both the time of recipients and the time of ISPs who are forced to deal with clogged mail servers and angry subscribers. And since mail servers have a limited capacity and mail accounts therefore must have quotas, every spam message takes up space that could be used to store a message someone wanted to get. And spammers bring no benefits to the table. If they offered free Internet access in exchange for ads (i.e. Juno, NetZero, etc.), it would be a fair deal, since only those who wanted these services would get the ads.
Finally, if you ask the people who are fighting spam, they'll tell you that they have nothing against advertising. In fact, they hold up opt-in lists, where people voluntarily sign up to receive messages, as a successful model for advertisers. If you want ads, you can sign up for as many lists as you want until your mailbox bursts at the seams. If you don't want to see these ads, you don't sign up. It's an issue of delivery and consumer choice, not freedom of speech.
If you think that the reason they couldn't play track 1 is because the track count went up by one, ask Patrick Norton about it. I've corresponded with TechTV people several times before, including Patrick, I think, and they do write back. From seeing a couple of episodes of TSS while at my parents' house, they seem to be pretty jazzed about breaking the copy protection, although they were debating whether to release the info because of the DMCA. My guess is they'd be willing to follow up and look at various angles of this.
Actually, Hop-On Wireless, the first company rolling these out, claims to encourage recycling of them on their product page. You get refunded a deposit if you return the phone to a retailer instead of tossing it. Whether people will do this is anyone's guess.
Still, I like the product concept here. It definitely fills a niche. For instance, my parents live in a very rural area, so if their car breaks down, they could be stuck there for a long while before someone comes along. They're retired and don't want to pay for cell service, but they really could use one for emergencies. This would suit them nicely. They could keep it in the car and only use it for an emergency.
But to return to the original point of the article, I think it brings to the surface a crucial issue in our society: whether people have a right to communicate anonymously. I think they do. The government has no right to expect every one of our utterances to be tagged and logged for its perusal. The small amount of security that may only possibly be gained is far outweighed by the loss of freedom. Not a direct loss in the sense of criminalizing speech, but an indirect loss brought on by a chilling effect that will set in when people decline to say unpopular things because of a fear of who might be listening. Even if such information wasn't used in a legal proceeding, there is a greater risk that it would be used to indimidate, embarrass, and blackmail. It's been done many times before, and it will most certainly be done again.
A friend of mine has said he thinks that many people aren't ready, in an evolutionary sense, for the complexities of the Internet and computers. I don't know if I agree with that, but I sure do know that many people have little idea what tools to use on the Net in order to accomplish a goal. At an ISP I worked for, I had a guy call up and ask why he couldn't receive an engineering drawing from someone by e-mail. I asked him how big it was, and he said about 20 MB. He also said that he'd want to be swapping files like this on a daily basis. I told him that our mail servers didn't allow messages that big to be stored, and I also said that it'd take forever to transfer them over the connection he had (dial-up). He then got a little bent out of shape, as if this was somehow something that I should be able to fix for him. I suggested that he could use FTP, but the transfer would still be slow as hell. No, FTP was no good because e-mail was easier, and he wanted to know why he couldn't do it with e-mail. When I explained that the Internet's e-mail system was designed around 30 years ago and was never intended for sending 20 MB files, I think he began to understand.
I really think that many Internet users haven't a clue as to how the technology works. They seem to liken it in many ways to magic. When they do things within their narrow scope of semi-understanding, they can manage, but when something new and/or unexpected presents itself, they're lost. Worse, many of them seem to be content with that low level of understanding. When a problem happens, no matter how minor, they run to their service provider rather than try to educate themselves. I realize that ISPs should provide support, but you don't see the cable company telling people how to change channels on their TVs or program their VCRs. These are things you're expected to figure out for yourself. It should be the same with computers. If someone is going to spend a large sum of money on one, it would seem that they'd want to know how to use it. As for viruses, you'd think that they'd want to be at least a little clueful, if only to prevent them from losing all their data or from infecting their grandmother's machine. At least, you'd think they would...
I'm just waiting for a truly destructive worm to come along, something that spreads as fast as the ones we've seen lately but that totally hoses a machine after it's moved along to other users. I'm not saying I want to see this happen--I don't, but we all know it will, sooner or later. Maybe after an attack like that, at least some of the clueless will educate themselves.
NEWS.COM has an interesting quote from David Perry of Trend Micro. He says, "Every time enough time goes by that people forget to be wary of these things, it pops up again. Apparently, we have to resign ourselves to the fact that education doesn't work."
How sad...but true. It's almost like that quote on the (I believe) CDW commercial, where the woman tells the IT manager something to the effect of, "I opened that virus just like you told us not to."
All it takes is a little dilligence, and these things would be far less of a problem. Not even real dilligence, just less stupidity on the part of users. I mean, a person would have to be living in a cave not to have heard about Melissa, I Love You, Code Red, SirCam, etc. When is it going to sink in that you shouldn't open unexpected e-mail attachments?
Oh, BTW, the original post stated that this thing is mostly non-destructive. I'm not so sure I'd agree with that assessment. If this thing is stripping out virus scanners and firewalls, it's opening up a machine for other types of attacks. I'd be a little concerned about that.
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Go for it. I think that one of the things that brings out the assholes on the Net is that they think there'll be no consequences for their actions. They think they'll never get caught. A rude awakening every now and then is a good thing.
I see lots of people pointing out why this isn't fair or just won't work. Well, there is a comment period here, so file comments. No, I'm not niave enough to think that this will get turned around because of a few comments, but what these comments will do is lay the supporting groundwork for the inevitable lawsuits that will follow the implementation of the rules. What these suits will allege is that these rules are impossible to follow and/or that they are crafted to force Webcasters off the air. So if you believe that, file a comment. Take the rules, one by one, and explain the problem with each of them. No opinions, just facts. If you believe that the rules are impossible to implement, lay out the reasons. If you think they are financially destructive, use hard numbers. If you want to argue that the rules go above and beyond what the underlying law requires, spell it out, point for point. Remember, there will be lawsuits over this, and these comments will be used in court.
If the FTC is really serious about going after spam, then we need to give them our support. More than that, we need to make them do their job with this. If most spam is fraudulent, and if most spam is sent by a relatively small group of people, then it stands to reason that getting rid of these hard-core spammers will go a long way toward reducing the spam problem.
Now don't get me wrong here. I'm not naive enough to believe that this is going to be easy. Spammers are slippery little worms, and stopping them for good won't be easy. However, there's nothing like a court order to give someone an attitude adjustment.
So here's the deal. The FTC wants to receive spam at uce@ftc.gov, so send it. My guess is that they like getting all spam, but bear in mind that they don't have jurisdiction over spam per se, just spam selling fraudulent goods and services. This is something they can latch onto and run with because they are empowered to stop fraud. If you send, be sure to include full headers so messages can be tracked back to the source. That way, if a spammer hops from ISP to ISP, it may be possible to construct a pattern that can be used to find and nail him.
As I said, I don't count on this to work, but if the FTC really is serious, then let's give them the evidence they need to bust some balls.
You're absolutely right. I can't count the number of WD hard drives I've seen fail in the past few years. Pieces of shit, no doubt about it. But this is just in line with the general crappiness of hardware in the last few years. I got a monitor in 1995 that had dark spots on the screen. Returned it for a good one. Got another monitor in late 1999 that had its convergence shot to hell, replaced it with another one where half the screen was a lovely shade of purple. And don't even get me started on shitty modems. God, I've had to try to support those things. How anyone expects to get a stable connection out of something they paid $10 for is beyond me. And once these pieces of shit get to consumers, who has to support them? The modem makers? Yeah, right. You're lucky to find any kind of support phone number for many of the low-end vendors. Nope, the ISPs get to take these calls. Ditto for Internet Explorer and Windows's network components. MS makes the cash off these programs, yet when they start flaking out, the providers get the calls, not MS. And to return to hardware for a minute, has anyone actually had a successful tech support call with a motherboard maker? I have a friend who was only able to get someone to speak with him after calling the board maker's office in Taiwan. Luckily, he speaks Chinese.
I really must say that the state of computer support these days just plain sucks. And speaking of HP, a friend's mom bought one of those things a few weeks ago. She was having modem problems so my friend called HP. The tech had her open the case and find the modem. He had her pull it out, then told her to...and I'm not making this up...plug it back into the big green thing that everything is plugged into. When she replied, "You mean the motherboard?" he said, "Is that what it's called? Oh cool!"
What you might try is to bring this issue up on news.admin.net-abuse.email and see if you can get things straightened out. If you go this route, have all your information in order, including your mail server name and IP, the time period in which it was open, what blacklists you were added to and which ones you're stuck on, and, most importantly, the date you got things fixed.
If you've never been in NANAE before, keep in mind that the people there are, by and large, very nice folks who are genuinely interested in solving the spam problem and not persecuting anyone who doesn't deserve it. Don't jump in there with flamethrowers blasting away. Just state your problem clearly and ask if anyone can help you out. If you're running a clean server now, you'll find all the help you'll need.
What you're proposing has already been thought of. It's called a Teergrube. What it does is hold the spammer's SMTP connection open for as long as possible, appearing to slowly accept mail, but in reality doing nothing but wasting the spammer's time. You can do a Usenet search on that term to get more information. Here's an FAQ that may help you out. The post I pulled the link from is several years old, so you may want to look for something more up to date.
I'll second that. A thorough interview would also be nice. If this guy successfully crushes BT's suit, as seems very possible, he's definitely going to be making the rounds in the tech media. He might even get some nice words from John C. Dvorak.
If the studios want it to work, they'll simply stop making regular DVDs and only sell these. If the disc is designed to decay after a limited time, as seems to be the case, then it won't necessarily be a limitation that can be overcome, unless you can figure out how to stop the deterioration. As for ripping, I saw an article the other day describing the studios' desire to get watermarking into their DVDs and coerce drive makers to build drives that won't rip or burn a watermarked disc.
As we all know, someone will most likely find a way around all this, but this isn't aimed at computer geeks; it's aimed at the mass market, where people aren't going to be so technically savvy. It's also a nice strategy for going after rental revenue. If this really takes off, then the movie rental chains lose rental revenue, and that money goes to the studios instead.
My guess: Unless the studios stop making regular DVDs, this will not take off in a big way. If they do stop, they're going to piss a lot of people off. Will those people knuckle under and buy? Who knows.
So what you're saying is that if I want my copyrighted book protected, then I shouldn't place copies in libraries? Is that right? I mean, libraries are public places. Or, if I publish a magazine full of copyrighted pictures, then someone has the right to scan them into their computer and post them on the Net? Or if you post some interesting content on your Web site, I can come in and take that content, transfer it to my site, represent it as being mine, and make money off it? Just wait until someone does one of these things to you, then you can decide who the dumbass really is.
I think you're right. Doing a Traceroute seems to indicate that the ping times go way up as the data is crossing the Pacific. It's on HiNet's network, with a router in Palo Alto, if the name is correct on the reverse DNS. When it leaves there bound for Taiwan, that's when ping times really go up. Anyone know about HiNet's network topology?
They aren't allowed to have commercials.
True, but those underwriting messages are looking more and more like commercials.
There are several reasons he doesn't like it. First, in order for it to work, the program has to be buffered into the machine, which means it isn't live anymore. Second, listeners complained that it was too hard to listen to because natural pauses are eliminated.
Also, it wasn't his network that was doing it; it was individual radio stations, at least that's my understanding.
Depends on what he means by "modifying". It's common practice for job seekers to rearrange their resumes to better suit the position they're applying for. If, for instance, they're applying tor a sales job, but all their recent jobs have been non-sales, but they do have sales experience in the past, a resume organized along functional lines would be appropriate. If, however, they want to show length of employment in recent positions, and those positions fit what the recruiter is looking for, a chronologically-oriented resume would be best.
It sucks that this is necessary, but recruiters won't take the time to read an entire resume. I was told that if they don't see something that interests them in the first 15 seconds, they'll toss it and move on, so if what they're looking for isn't near the top, you can kiss that job goodbye.
I haven't, either, but I'm still hopeful.
I really have to marvel at this guy's ability to totally destroy his own career. I mean, even my parents, who've never been online without my presence, know what spam is and how repulsive it is. Did this joker not have a clue, or did he delude himself into believing he'd actually get hired by someone? I've heard for a long time that spammers have this warped belief that there's nothing wrong with what they're doing. I've mostly written it off in favor of the view that they know what they're doing is wrong but just don't care. I still think most all of them are aware, but maybe there are a few true idiots out there who just don't get it. Well, we now know there's at least one of them. Either that, or he has a screw loose somewhere, as several folks theorized when this topic was originally posted. As messed up as that sounds, it could very well be the case. Whatever it is, I'd love to get his resume so I could tell him what I think of his qualifications. I'd also have the pleasure of passing it along to some friends at a few hardware and telecom companies, for their amusement.
I'd guess he's either already spammed the folks in Brazil and pissed them off, or he soon will.
I wouldn't necessarily blame that on the company. What spammers will often do is launch a dictionary attack against a mail server. This is when they send spam to every possible combination of letters and numbers that has a decent chance of being an e-mail address. Many of the e-mails will bounce, but some will get through. If your address was at all common (the username wasn't complete gibberish), that could have been what happened. Now granted, most spammers won't want to see the bounces--they'll just insert a fake return address, but the ones actively building e-mail lists might, especially if they have a mailbox big enough to receive them and some software to weed through them and delete them from their list of possible addresses. And once your address has been confirmed as good, then you'll get more and more spam. Lovely, isn't it?
Yep, they do. You have to be willing to get their newsletter, but that's no problem because they only seem to send it once every few weeks.
Still, I agree with the original poster. Getting a domain is the best way to go.
Same here. I canceled it in November in preparation of a move. I've moved, and I really don't want it back. OK, I'd like a few channels like CNN, TV Land, Sci-Fi, TechTV, etc., but the rest could disappear for all I care. Actually, I stay informed on current events via the Net and radio, so I really don't need TV news. If I really wanted that, I could catch a stream of BBC World. Much better than CNN and not even on American cable anyway. I still watch DVDs when my girlfriend comes over, but at least there I choose the stuff I want to see. I'm not really sure that I'm ever going back to cable. Maybe I will, but I don't miss it too much.
Perhaps I'm a tiny minority, but the programmers had better be a little concerned about people like me because I used to watch TV, and now I really don't, and if I notice others getting frustrated with copy controls, I'll suggest they curtail their viewing as well. There are alternatives to television, now more so than ever, and making it harder for people to watch what they want is only going to drive them toward these other activities.
Yeah, I think I kinda liked it, too, although, at the time, anything related to tech or sci-fi was almost guaranteed to get me as a viewer. And you're right, his sidekick was Cursor.
And as long as we're on the subject of shows on DVD, "Otherworld" would be a good candidate. There were only eight episodes, and it was bizarre enough to get a cult following of sorts. I know that some people hated it, but I was a fan. Oh yeah, and what about "Wizards and Warriors"? I wonder if many people even remember that one from almost 20 years ago.
I seem to recall a "making of" special that aired on TV about the time the film was released. Is that the one that's included, or is this a new one?
And how many folks here remember "Automan"? A TRON ripoff, if there ever was one, at least for SFX.
Oh yeah, if you have the original DVD, check out the plot summary on the back cover. Read closely, and you should get a chuckle out of the error you find there. Wait..., maybe it isn't an error. :)
As others have said, it's a restriction on the form of delivery. Here's an example. Suppose I decide to promote my business by writing my advertisement on your front door using some substance that is easily removed with very little effort. The ad will easily wash off, and it doesn't harm your door, but you could still prosecute me for vandalism, no matter what the content of my message is.
Now let's take that concept in a slightly different and more practical direction. Telemarketers are by law prohibited from leaving messages on answering machines. I won't attempt to conclusively say I know the reasoning of this, but I would guess that it came out of a belief that a person sets up an answering machine to get messages of a personal nature, not to deliver ads for someone else. The owner of the machine bears the cost of the equipment and the effort of maintaining it, and an advertiser brings no useful benefit to the table. In addition, the machine's capacity is limited, so any ad takes away space that could be used for personal messages.
Now let's extend the argument to advertising on fax machines, which is also illegal. The same basic principles apply here, except we're dealing with a printed page instead of a recorded message.
Then there's e-mail. The use of resources is still there, since messages require bandwidth to move and disk space to store, costs that are unwillingly borne by the recipient or the recipient's ISP, which then passes the costs along to its subscribers. Additionally, spam wastes time, both the time of recipients and the time of ISPs who are forced to deal with clogged mail servers and angry subscribers. And since mail servers have a limited capacity and mail accounts therefore must have quotas, every spam message takes up space that could be used to store a message someone wanted to get. And spammers bring no benefits to the table. If they offered free Internet access in exchange for ads (i.e. Juno, NetZero, etc.), it would be a fair deal, since only those who wanted these services would get the ads.
Finally, if you ask the people who are fighting spam, they'll tell you that they have nothing against advertising. In fact, they hold up opt-in lists, where people voluntarily sign up to receive messages, as a successful model for advertisers. If you want ads, you can sign up for as many lists as you want until your mailbox bursts at the seams. If you don't want to see these ads, you don't sign up. It's an issue of delivery and consumer choice, not freedom of speech.
If you think that the reason they couldn't play track 1 is because the track count went up by one, ask Patrick Norton about it. I've corresponded with TechTV people several times before, including Patrick, I think, and they do write back. From seeing a couple of episodes of TSS while at my parents' house, they seem to be pretty jazzed about breaking the copy protection, although they were debating whether to release the info because of the DMCA. My guess is they'd be willing to follow up and look at various angles of this.
Actually, Hop-On Wireless, the first company rolling these out, claims to encourage recycling of them on their product page. You get refunded a deposit if you return the phone to a retailer instead of tossing it. Whether people will do this is anyone's guess.
Still, I like the product concept here. It definitely fills a niche. For instance, my parents live in a very rural area, so if their car breaks down, they could be stuck there for a long while before someone comes along. They're retired and don't want to pay for cell service, but they really could use one for emergencies. This would suit them nicely. They could keep it in the car and only use it for an emergency.
But to return to the original point of the article, I think it brings to the surface a crucial issue in our society: whether people have a right to communicate anonymously. I think they do. The government has no right to expect every one of our utterances to be tagged and logged for its perusal. The small amount of security that may only possibly be gained is far outweighed by the loss of freedom. Not a direct loss in the sense of criminalizing speech, but an indirect loss brought on by a chilling effect that will set in when people decline to say unpopular things because of a fear of who might be listening. Even if such information wasn't used in a legal proceeding, there is a greater risk that it would be used to indimidate, embarrass, and blackmail. It's been done many times before, and it will most certainly be done again.
A friend of mine has said he thinks that many people aren't ready, in an evolutionary sense, for the complexities of the Internet and computers. I don't know if I agree with that, but I sure do know that many people have little idea what tools to use on the Net in order to accomplish a goal. At an ISP I worked for, I had a guy call up and ask why he couldn't receive an engineering drawing from someone by e-mail. I asked him how big it was, and he said about 20 MB. He also said that he'd want to be swapping files like this on a daily basis. I told him that our mail servers didn't allow messages that big to be stored, and I also said that it'd take forever to transfer them over the connection he had (dial-up). He then got a little bent out of shape, as if this was somehow something that I should be able to fix for him. I suggested that he could use FTP, but the transfer would still be slow as hell. No, FTP was no good because e-mail was easier, and he wanted to know why he couldn't do it with e-mail. When I explained that the Internet's e-mail system was designed around 30 years ago and was never intended for sending 20 MB files, I think he began to understand.
I really think that many Internet users haven't a clue as to how the technology works. They seem to liken it in many ways to magic. When they do things within their narrow scope of semi-understanding, they can manage, but when something new and/or unexpected presents itself, they're lost. Worse, many of them seem to be content with that low level of understanding. When a problem happens, no matter how minor, they run to their service provider rather than try to educate themselves. I realize that ISPs should provide support, but you don't see the cable company telling people how to change channels on their TVs or program their VCRs. These are things you're expected to figure out for yourself. It should be the same with computers. If someone is going to spend a large sum of money on one, it would seem that they'd want to know how to use it. As for viruses, you'd think that they'd want to be at least a little clueful, if only to prevent them from losing all their data or from infecting their grandmother's machine. At least, you'd think they would...
I'm just waiting for a truly destructive worm to come along, something that spreads as fast as the ones we've seen lately but that totally hoses a machine after it's moved along to other users. I'm not saying I want to see this happen--I don't, but we all know it will, sooner or later. Maybe after an attack like that, at least some of the clueless will educate themselves.
NEWS.COM has an interesting quote from David Perry of Trend Micro. He says, "Every time enough time goes by that people forget to be wary of these things, it pops up again. Apparently, we have to resign ourselves to the fact that education doesn't work."
How sad...but true. It's almost like that quote on the (I believe) CDW commercial, where the woman tells the IT manager something to the effect of, "I opened that virus just like you told us not to."
All it takes is a little dilligence, and these things would be far less of a problem. Not even real dilligence, just less stupidity on the part of users. I mean, a person would have to be living in a cave not to have heard about Melissa, I Love You, Code Red, SirCam, etc. When is it going to sink in that you shouldn't open unexpected e-mail attachments?
Oh, BTW, the original post stated that this thing is mostly non-destructive. I'm not so sure I'd agree with that assessment. If this thing is stripping out virus scanners and firewalls, it's opening up a machine for other types of attacks. I'd be a little concerned about that.