I think you've spent a lot of time studying the subject, and don't want to admit to yourself that the time was wasted...
I haven't actually. I took some classes in college. I've read some books. My undergraduate degree and professional training are not in philosophy. Anyone with a high-school education could pick up an equivalent background in philosophy if they were so inclined.
... because there aren't really any answers and the questions can be fairly clearly presented, even to lay people, by a movie that spends most of its time on Kung-Fu. Philosophy is a whole bunch of speculating about answerless questions. Anyone can do it.
I agree that anyone can talk about philosophical questions. I don't agree that it doesn't make any difference whether you know anything about philosophy. You can have a better discussion if you've thought about the questions extensively and if you can recognize some obvious mistakes that people have made in the past.
Even if you assume you are capable of perceiveing reality, you cannot be sure you actually are. This is an interesting idea, which you can think about for as long as you want, and even write big, hard to understand books about (despite the fact that it's not very hard to understand), but eventually you should get on with your life, because unless someone offers you the red and blue pills, it just doesn't matter.
That's not an unreasonable argument. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a book called "On Certainty" making a very similar argument against Cartesian philosophy. You might like to read it; it's probably at your local Barnes & Noble. You might also like to read what other people have had to say about in response to that argument, or about what the implications of that argument might be. But I don't think "The Matrix," entertaining as it is, moves the discussion forward at all.
I don't demean it; if someone wants to pick up Descartes after seeing "The Matrix," more power to them, and likewise to someone who picks up the Biblical Archaeology Review after seeing "Raiders." All I'm trying to do is say in a very nice way what another commentator says here.
IIRC, Tolkein made up Elvish (well, of course he did, but this is the significant bit:) based on bits of archaic Celtic or Germanic languages. There's no reason they had to use Elvish in the film, but I think it's generally a good thing that popular filmakers don't assume that they have to make everything as simple as possible. That having been said, I don't think LOTR makes any kind of meaningful comment on linguistics -- it's just window dressing.
Plato's allegory of the cave is, just that, an allegory, a made-up story to explain a metaphysical hypothesis. You wouldn't ever ask your philosophy professor, "So where is this cave? Is it near here? Have you ever been there?"
To the extent that there is a "philosophical source" for "The Matrix," it's probably Descartes' "Meditations On First Philosophy":
I will suppose, then,... that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity...
"The Matrix" goes on to ask, "What if we went after the demon? Could we kick its ass?"
You may not be surprised to learn that Descartes does not address this question.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the film a lot, and look forward to the sequels, but there's no more philosophy in the film than that. It's window dressing for a sci-fi martial arts picture.
Not actually having taken a philosophy class myself, I thought the first Matrix was fairly thought-provoking, and I assumed it derived much of its material from preexisting philosophical sources.
You would be equally correct in assuming that the notion of a virtual reality world created and maintained by a computer-based intelligence reflects actual work done by artificial intelligence researchers. Which is to say, you wouldn't be correct at all.
[D]oes attending one or more philosophy classes always turn a person into an elitist asshole, or only some?
Well, curiously enough, it does make you think you know more about philosophy. I don't mean to be an "elitist asshole" here, but if you pick up even a short history of Western philosophy (e.g., the books by Kenny or Magee), you'll see that people have been thinking really hard about philosophical questions for a very long time, and that "The Matrix" doesn't address those questions in anything other than a superficial way. That's not to say that it's a bad film, or that popular films in general should entirely avoid addressing complicated subjects. (I don't know anything about medieval linguistics, but I thought it was pretty cool when the characters in "The Two Towers" started talking in subtitled Elvish.) But in the end, "The Matrix" is about philosophy to about the same extent that "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" is about archaeology, which is to say not very much at all.
It's not clear to me that Amazon is enforcing these patents through license fees or otherwise. I suspect that it is doing like IBM and building up a library of patents so that it can't be strongarmed by someone else. (I.e., "You think we're infringing your patent? Are you sure you don't infringe one of our many patents?") Long story short, if the USPTO isn't going to be reasonable, Amazon has to protect itself.
(Playing devil's advocate.) Your mail server doesn't accept only mail with proper identification. It accepts all mail. The access is complete when the mail is accepted. What you or your mail server does with it after that point (processing, storing, delivering) is your business. You could just delete it all if you liked.
Would be interesting to hear Prof. Kerr's view on this question.
If this guys recommendations are followed and made into law, it sounds to me like spam would finally be made into a criminal offense.
(Clarification: Kerr isn't promoting these laws; they're on the books, and he's suggesting a way of interpreting them.)
I don't think spamming that defeats your filters is unauthorized access. The access is complete as soon as your mail server accepts the message, which it will do whether or not the message will ultimately satisfy the filters. What your mail server does with it afterward by way of filters is your business.
Even if you used a slightly broader definition of "access," it seems to me that you'd have trouble showing that someone intentionally bypassed your mail filters, the exact forms of which are presumably not public. (Although it's possible intent could be inferred: a subject line like "Look at my naked e_l_b_o_w fskldfjs" -- substitute any body part you like for "elbow" -- seems to assume that there are particular filters to be bypassed.)
Criminal law has been almost exclusively a law of statutes for a very long time. California eliminated common law crimes in 1873; many other states have also done so.
There is no federal common law of crimes, and pretty much no federal common law of any sort outside of a few narrowly defined areas (e.g., admiralty and maritime law).
Why you think that common law (unwritten, a tradition embedded in thousands of precedential cases contained in law reporters that few public libraries have) is necessarily better for the "average Joe" than civil law (statutes available online for anyone who cares to read them) is not clear.
Proposal: To accommodate spoilage, dirty jokes, etc., Slashcode should allow commenters to use a HTML-ish ROT13 tag when commenting. When submitted, the ROT13 tag would ROT13 the tagged text and add a ALT link that would show the decrypted text when mouseovered.
(ROT13: encryption scheme under which A becomes M, B becomes N, etc. and vice versa. Not good for actual encryption; it is the online equivalent of placing something in an unsealed envelope marked "open only if you want to see what this says." It's hot fuvg, in my opinion.)
Prof. Kerr points out that a number of statutes criminalize "unauthorized access" to a computer, but that there has been little attention to what that means. He proposes that "access" be broadly defined (to include basically any kind of interaction with a computer) but that "unauthorized" or "without authorization" be narrowly defined.
In particular, he distinguishes two kinds of "authorization": (1) "code"-based authorization, where computer code limits the scope of user control of the computer, like when a computer requires a password for use, and (2) "contract"-based authorization, where a contract or license limits the scope of user control, like your contract with your ISP.
He argues that for purposes of criminal statutes, only access that circumvents "code"-based authorization should be deemed "unauthorized" access. Otherwise, you could potentially be deemed a criminal for violating the terms of use of a web site.
He notes that there are cases in which unauthorized access in the contract sense seems tantamount to criminal conduct. Suppose you delete key files from your employer's computer: you have code-based authority (the password that lets you log on) but not contract-based authority (presumably you understand that your employer expects you not to maliciously delete files). He suggests that those types of acts should be separately dealt with (e.g., under the statutes forbidding intentional damage to computer systems, or with new legislation).
(Note:: Before anyone posts that the above analysis is too simplistic or otherwise wrong, read Kerr's actual, excellent article, which is far more detailed than this summary. He may have already anticipated your question, or your objection might arise from some confusion inadvertently generated by my summary. )
When the very existence of OSS is anti-formalism, how do you declare someone as "qualified" or not?
The very existence of OSS is not anti-formalism. In particular, OSS relies very heavily on one particular formalism, the GPL.
When there's no qualifying process, there's no restrictions on who can declare themselves qualified.
We still have the social convention that words have meaning to fall back on. I can declare myself the king of Wisconsin and the greatest hitter who ever lived, and there is no "qualifying process" which gives anyone a legitimate claim to either title, but that doesn't mean no one can remark that my claim is inaccurate.
Well, no. It's not as strong as it could be or ought to be, but someone has to sniff and crunch your packets for a good long time (there's a spam subject line if I ever heard one) to break WEP.
This site suggests that you need the packet traffic generated by 500 person-hours of heavy network usage to break WEP. I use my network about 10 hours a week. Accordingly, if I change my password once every few months -- that is, once every 100-200 hours of network use -- I avoid the nightmare scenario of someone printing 500 copies of goat-man to my color printer.
If anyone has any information that suggests WEP is weaker than that, I'd be happy to hear about it.
>>If the spammer had two braincells to rub together to figure that one out, would they be in the spam business to begin with?
Possibly. Spammers do seem to make money, don't they?
Unclear. People participate enthusiastically in pyramid schemes that will never make money, even if the participants don't realize it. I would guess that at least some spammers make money. But I would also guess that a lot of spammers are people with free or very-low-cost internet access and lots of free time (e.g., university students in formerly-Communist and Third World countries) who believe that they will make money spamming, but who will never see any actual return on their time. It would be interesting to know the actual facts, but I doubt there's any way of knowing for sure.
Concur on the Jones book. By way of comparison to chess, Jones lays out the big points quickly and easily (chess: bring out your material quickly; try not to move a pawn twice; watch for pins, forks and skewers, and similar material) whereas Sklansky assumes a great deal and is better appreciated by persons who have played a few hundred thousand hands (chess: an encyclopedia of openings).
localroger's comment is mostly right. I would note that the principle of limited liability is not universal and that there are at least some corporate enterprises which do not limit liability. Lloyd's of London, the British insurance house that will insure pretty much anything, is one example: the "names" (investors) of Lloyd's are on the hook up to their last dimes.
There have been non-frivolous proposals to abolish limited liability for corporations. See, for example, Henry Hansmann, and Reinier Kraakman, "Toward Unlimited Liability for Corporate Torts," 100 Yale L.J. 1879 (1991). The obvious potential problem is how one hales geographically dispersed shareholders into court. For more information, Google like so.
The animal known as "wire fraud" is a criminal violation of federal law. It's not a thing Joe Citizen can sue for. (Similarly "mail fraud.")
You can sue for garden-variety fraud under state law, but you have to have been actually defrauded (i.e., you actually believed some false statement and were damaged by relying on it). If you know you're being lied to, you haven't been defrauded.
The theft isn't of a thing, it's of a right. If I copy an album, I am appropriating to myself the right of the performer to decide how and on what terms he/she will permit copies of that recording to be made. Likewise, if I showed up at your precinct on election day pretending I was you and cast a vote, then I stole your vote, even though you didn't lose any tangible thing.
You can argue that the performer shouldn't have such a broad right to decide how and on what terms copies are made (and there are limits on that right, e.g., fair use and the right to make copies for one's own personal use). But there's no debate about whether, under current law, artists have that broad right.
(There is no single "legal definition" of theft under American law. Many states don't use the word in their penal code; they call it "larceny" or something else depending on the circumstances.)
It's actually available on Amazon.com. Moral of the story: If you will provide your product in a reasonably businesslike way, Amazon will distribute it for you, god bless their patent-happy little hearts. It's also available through at least some record stores, though probably not the record store at your local mall (unless it's a big one like Tower, HMV or Virgin).
Well, sure it's theft. The question is who benefits from worrying about it.
F'r'instance, I bet that every time a fan A makes his/her friend B a copy of an Alison Krauss album, B buys, on average, 2 more Alison Krauss albums. (Yes, she's that good; she's nothing like the "country" music you hear on a generic Clear Channel country radio station.) Alison Krauss has been making records for 17 years, since she was 15 years old. If you are Alison Krauss or her record label (Rounder), you are interested in building a fan base for the next thirty-odd years of her career, not trying to squeeze every dollar out of 15 minutes of fame. The odd fan burning a CD for a pal is just giving her and Rounder free advertising. Anything other than a warehouse cranking out hundreds of copies really isn't going to be a problem.
On the other hand, if you have a record company built on promoting one-hit wonders, and someone burns a CD of your current artist's album -- well, it's likely that there won't be 2 more albums to buy by that artist. (Not to be mean: Britney Spears is charming in her way and nice to look at, but I really can't imagine that she is going to record 10 albums in her career.)
The upshot is that major labels pushing top-40 singles benefit a lot from cracking down on copyright infringement; indy labels and serious musicians, not so much.
AirSnort requires approximately 5-10 million encrypted packets to be gathered. Once enough packets have been gathered, AirSnort can guess the encryption password in under a second.
Interesting link. AirSnort is not quite ready for prime time the way NetStumbler is, but it appears not to be terribly far away.
I would point out that the FAQ suggests that on average, a moderately busy network -- 4 persons surfing the Net continuously during business hours -- would take about 16 days to generate enough packets to permit cracking the encryption. Doing some rough math, that's about 500 hours of person-surfing. My home network generates maybe 10 hours of person-surfing a week, so it would take on average 50 weeks of continuous monitoring to crack my password, assuming that someone was inclined to devote that much time to the project. That suggests I should change my password every 3-6 months, but it doesn't suggest that WEP is so weak that wireless is a bad idea for me.
... I guess I take security a little more seriously than most.
I wouldn't necessarily say that, although I would say that you feel you need more security than most people do to get to your comfort level. There's nothing unreasonable about that.
The odds of your living near someone with the inclination and expertise to break your WEP -- which is not a staggering level of expertise, but above the script kiddie level -- is very, very small. I'm not aware that there are any programs in circulation that cryptologically unsophisticated people can use to bang away at their neighbor's WEP encryption. (I'm thinking of programs remotely comparable in ease of use to NetStumbler, which if you don't know it is a program that tells you how many wireless networks people are using within range of your antenna, what their station IDs are and a some other things.) Indeed, I'm not aware that there have been any reports of WEP having been broken outside of lab experiments, although I suppose we can't know that it's never happened.
It may well be that you wouldn't be comfortable with any wireless networking regardless of the encryption scheme used. However, using WEP is a level of magnitude stronger than what most people use to protect their personal possessions and private information, and so people shouldn't automatically reject it on the grounds that it's "broken."
So far as I could tell, I'd need to set up a full encrypted VPN on the wireless section. MACs can be spoofed, the built-in WEP is apparently a joke, etc. etc. If I didn't want to get cracked, or hand my bandwidth to any passing spammer, a VPN would be the only way.
The "WEP is a joke" meme has some natural selection coming to it. Is WEP not as strong as it probably should have been? Yes. But you have to spend hours if not days of computer time crunching packets to break WEP encryption. Someone with sufficient motivation could do that, but it's not the kind of thing that just anyone could do, and it's definitely not the kind of thing that can be done on a laptop in a few minutes by someone wardriving through your neighborhood.
And what's the payoff for all that work? Free, slow internet access if you park next to my house, until I catch you. Also, you can print nasty messages on my network attached printer, and you can look at the shared folders on my desktop if I've left it on (i.e., my vacation pictures). Who would bother?
Obviously, if you have deeply confidential stuff exposed on your network -- e.g., you're a lawyer or CPA and you share client files across your office network -- WEP might not be strong enough. But for home use, it's no more a "joke" than the lock on your car door: hardly impenetrable, but it will deter wrongdoers.
Or am I wise to just put in the Cat5 and have much faster speeds... ?
If your broadband source is DSL or cable modem, it's likely that that will be the bottleneck in your connection, not wireless. If you've got dual T3s coming into your house, by all means lay wire.
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I haven't actually. I took some classes in college. I've read some books. My undergraduate degree and professional training are not in philosophy. Anyone with a high-school education could pick up an equivalent background in philosophy if they were so inclined.
I agree that anyone can talk about philosophical questions. I don't agree that it doesn't make any difference whether you know anything about philosophy. You can have a better discussion if you've thought about the questions extensively and if you can recognize some obvious mistakes that people have made in the past.
Even if you assume you are capable of perceiveing reality, you cannot be sure you actually are. This is an interesting idea, which you can think about for as long as you want, and even write big, hard to understand books about (despite the fact that it's not very hard to understand), but eventually you should get on with your life, because unless someone offers you the red and blue pills, it just doesn't matter.
That's not an unreasonable argument. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a book called "On Certainty" making a very similar argument against Cartesian philosophy. You might like to read it; it's probably at your local Barnes & Noble. You might also like to read what other people have had to say about in response to that argument, or about what the implications of that argument might be. But I don't think "The Matrix," entertaining as it is, moves the discussion forward at all.
I don't demean it; if someone wants to pick up Descartes after seeing "The Matrix," more power to them, and likewise to someone who picks up the Biblical Archaeology Review after seeing "Raiders." All I'm trying to do is say in a very nice way what another commentator says here.
IIRC, Tolkein made up Elvish (well, of course he did, but this is the significant bit:) based on bits of archaic Celtic or Germanic languages. There's no reason they had to use Elvish in the film, but I think it's generally a good thing that popular filmakers don't assume that they have to make everything as simple as possible. That having been said, I don't think LOTR makes any kind of meaningful comment on linguistics -- it's just window dressing.
To the extent that there is a "philosophical source" for "The Matrix," it's probably Descartes' "Meditations On First Philosophy":
I will suppose, then, ... that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity ...
"The Matrix" goes on to ask, "What if we went after the demon? Could we kick its ass?"
You may not be surprised to learn that Descartes does not address this question.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the film a lot, and look forward to the sequels, but there's no more philosophy in the film than that. It's window dressing for a sci-fi martial arts picture.
You would be equally correct in assuming that the notion of a virtual reality world created and maintained by a computer-based intelligence reflects actual work done by artificial intelligence researchers. Which is to say, you wouldn't be correct at all.
[D]oes attending one or more philosophy classes always turn a person into an elitist asshole, or only some?
Well, curiously enough, it does make you think you know more about philosophy. I don't mean to be an "elitist asshole" here, but if you pick up even a short history of Western philosophy (e.g., the books by Kenny or Magee), you'll see that people have been thinking really hard about philosophical questions for a very long time, and that "The Matrix" doesn't address those questions in anything other than a superficial way. That's not to say that it's a bad film, or that popular films in general should entirely avoid addressing complicated subjects. (I don't know anything about medieval linguistics, but I thought it was pretty cool when the characters in "The Two Towers" started talking in subtitled Elvish.) But in the end, "The Matrix" is about philosophy to about the same extent that "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" is about archaeology, which is to say not very much at all.
It's not clear to me that Amazon is enforcing these patents through license fees or otherwise. I suspect that it is doing like IBM and building up a library of patents so that it can't be strongarmed by someone else. (I.e., "You think we're infringing your patent? Are you sure you don't infringe one of our many patents?") Long story short, if the USPTO isn't going to be reasonable, Amazon has to protect itself.
Whatever you do, don't suggest that distinction to a LISP programmer.
Would be interesting to hear Prof. Kerr's view on this question.
(Clarification: Kerr isn't promoting these laws; they're on the books, and he's suggesting a way of interpreting them.)
I don't think spamming that defeats your filters is unauthorized access. The access is complete as soon as your mail server accepts the message, which it will do whether or not the message will ultimately satisfy the filters. What your mail server does with it afterward by way of filters is your business.
Even if you used a slightly broader definition of "access," it seems to me that you'd have trouble showing that someone intentionally bypassed your mail filters, the exact forms of which are presumably not public. (Although it's possible intent could be inferred: a subject line like "Look at my naked e_l_b_o_w fskldfjs" -- substitute any body part you like for "elbow" -- seems to assume that there are particular filters to be bypassed.)
There is no federal common law of crimes, and pretty much no federal common law of any sort outside of a few narrowly defined areas (e.g., admiralty and maritime law).
Why you think that common law (unwritten, a tradition embedded in thousands of precedential cases contained in law reporters that few public libraries have) is necessarily better for the "average Joe" than civil law (statutes available online for anyone who cares to read them) is not clear.
(ROT13: encryption scheme under which A becomes M, B becomes N, etc. and vice versa. Not good for actual encryption; it is the online equivalent of placing something in an unsealed envelope marked "open only if you want to see what this says." It's hot fuvg, in my opinion.)
In particular, he distinguishes two kinds of "authorization": (1) "code"-based authorization, where computer code limits the scope of user control of the computer, like when a computer requires a password for use, and (2) "contract"-based authorization, where a contract or license limits the scope of user control, like your contract with your ISP.
He argues that for purposes of criminal statutes, only access that circumvents "code"-based authorization should be deemed "unauthorized" access. Otherwise, you could potentially be deemed a criminal for violating the terms of use of a web site.
He notes that there are cases in which unauthorized access in the contract sense seems tantamount to criminal conduct. Suppose you delete key files from your employer's computer: you have code-based authority (the password that lets you log on) but not contract-based authority (presumably you understand that your employer expects you not to maliciously delete files). He suggests that those types of acts should be separately dealt with (e.g., under the statutes forbidding intentional damage to computer systems, or with new legislation).
(Note:: Before anyone posts that the above analysis is too simplistic or otherwise wrong, read Kerr's actual, excellent article, which is far more detailed than this summary. He may have already anticipated your question, or your objection might arise from some confusion inadvertently generated by my summary. )
The very existence of OSS is not anti-formalism. In particular, OSS relies very heavily on one particular formalism, the GPL.
When there's no qualifying process, there's no restrictions on who can declare themselves qualified.
We still have the social convention that words have meaning to fall back on. I can declare myself the king of Wisconsin and the greatest hitter who ever lived, and there is no "qualifying process" which gives anyone a legitimate claim to either title, but that doesn't mean no one can remark that my claim is inaccurate.
Warning to Zoop: if there is further public discussion of Project Sbarro, your security clearance will be withdrawn.
Well, no. It's not as strong as it could be or ought to be, but someone has to sniff and crunch your packets for a good long time (there's a spam subject line if I ever heard one) to break WEP.
This site suggests that you need the packet traffic generated by 500 person-hours of heavy network usage to break WEP. I use my network about 10 hours a week. Accordingly, if I change my password once every few months -- that is, once every 100-200 hours of network use -- I avoid the nightmare scenario of someone printing 500 copies of goat-man to my color printer.
If anyone has any information that suggests WEP is weaker than that, I'd be happy to hear about it.
Possibly. Spammers do seem to make money, don't they?
Unclear. People participate enthusiastically in pyramid schemes that will never make money, even if the participants don't realize it. I would guess that at least some spammers make money. But I would also guess that a lot of spammers are people with free or very-low-cost internet access and lots of free time (e.g., university students in formerly-Communist and Third World countries) who believe that they will make money spamming, but who will never see any actual return on their time. It would be interesting to know the actual facts, but I doubt there's any way of knowing for sure.
Concur on the Jones book. By way of comparison to chess, Jones lays out the big points quickly and easily (chess: bring out your material quickly; try not to move a pawn twice; watch for pins, forks and skewers, and similar material) whereas Sklansky assumes a great deal and is better appreciated by persons who have played a few hundred thousand hands (chess: an encyclopedia of openings).
There have been non-frivolous proposals to abolish limited liability for corporations. See, for example, Henry Hansmann, and Reinier Kraakman, "Toward Unlimited Liability for Corporate Torts," 100 Yale L.J. 1879 (1991). The obvious potential problem is how one hales geographically dispersed shareholders into court. For more information, Google like so.
You can sue for garden-variety fraud under state law, but you have to have been actually defrauded (i.e., you actually believed some false statement and were damaged by relying on it). If you know you're being lied to, you haven't been defrauded.
You can argue that the performer shouldn't have such a broad right to decide how and on what terms copies are made (and there are limits on that right, e.g., fair use and the right to make copies for one's own personal use). But there's no debate about whether, under current law, artists have that broad right.
(There is no single "legal definition" of theft under American law. Many states don't use the word in their penal code; they call it "larceny" or something else depending on the circumstances.)
It's actually available on Amazon.com. Moral of the story: If you will provide your product in a reasonably businesslike way, Amazon will distribute it for you, god bless their patent-happy little hearts. It's also available through at least some record stores, though probably not the record store at your local mall (unless it's a big one like Tower, HMV or Virgin).
F'r'instance, I bet that every time a fan A makes his/her friend B a copy of an Alison Krauss album, B buys, on average, 2 more Alison Krauss albums. (Yes, she's that good; she's nothing like the "country" music you hear on a generic Clear Channel country radio station.) Alison Krauss has been making records for 17 years, since she was 15 years old. If you are Alison Krauss or her record label (Rounder), you are interested in building a fan base for the next thirty-odd years of her career, not trying to squeeze every dollar out of 15 minutes of fame. The odd fan burning a CD for a pal is just giving her and Rounder free advertising. Anything other than a warehouse cranking out hundreds of copies really isn't going to be a problem.
On the other hand, if you have a record company built on promoting one-hit wonders, and someone burns a CD of your current artist's album -- well, it's likely that there won't be 2 more albums to buy by that artist. (Not to be mean: Britney Spears is charming in her way and nice to look at, but I really can't imagine that she is going to record 10 albums in her career.)
The upshot is that major labels pushing top-40 singles benefit a lot from cracking down on copyright infringement; indy labels and serious musicians, not so much.
Interesting link. AirSnort is not quite ready for prime time the way NetStumbler is, but it appears not to be terribly far away.
I would point out that the FAQ suggests that on average, a moderately busy network -- 4 persons surfing the Net continuously during business hours -- would take about 16 days to generate enough packets to permit cracking the encryption. Doing some rough math, that's about 500 hours of person-surfing. My home network generates maybe 10 hours of person-surfing a week, so it would take on average 50 weeks of continuous monitoring to crack my password, assuming that someone was inclined to devote that much time to the project. That suggests I should change my password every 3-6 months, but it doesn't suggest that WEP is so weak that wireless is a bad idea for me.
I wouldn't necessarily say that, although I would say that you feel you need more security than most people do to get to your comfort level. There's nothing unreasonable about that.
The odds of your living near someone with the inclination and expertise to break your WEP -- which is not a staggering level of expertise, but above the script kiddie level -- is very, very small. I'm not aware that there are any programs in circulation that cryptologically unsophisticated people can use to bang away at their neighbor's WEP encryption. (I'm thinking of programs remotely comparable in ease of use to NetStumbler, which if you don't know it is a program that tells you how many wireless networks people are using within range of your antenna, what their station IDs are and a some other things.) Indeed, I'm not aware that there have been any reports of WEP having been broken outside of lab experiments, although I suppose we can't know that it's never happened.
It may well be that you wouldn't be comfortable with any wireless networking regardless of the encryption scheme used. However, using WEP is a level of magnitude stronger than what most people use to protect their personal possessions and private information, and so people shouldn't automatically reject it on the grounds that it's "broken."
The "WEP is a joke" meme has some natural selection coming to it. Is WEP not as strong as it probably should have been? Yes. But you have to spend hours if not days of computer time crunching packets to break WEP encryption. Someone with sufficient motivation could do that, but it's not the kind of thing that just anyone could do, and it's definitely not the kind of thing that can be done on a laptop in a few minutes by someone wardriving through your neighborhood.
And what's the payoff for all that work? Free, slow internet access if you park next to my house, until I catch you. Also, you can print nasty messages on my network attached printer, and you can look at the shared folders on my desktop if I've left it on (i.e., my vacation pictures). Who would bother?
Obviously, if you have deeply confidential stuff exposed on your network -- e.g., you're a lawyer or CPA and you share client files across your office network -- WEP might not be strong enough. But for home use, it's no more a "joke" than the lock on your car door: hardly impenetrable, but it will deter wrongdoers.
Or am I wise to just put in the Cat5 and have much faster speeds ... ?
If your broadband source is DSL or cable modem, it's likely that that will be the bottleneck in your connection, not wireless. If you've got dual T3s coming into your house, by all means lay wire.