The interesting thing about these levies is that the money spent by the consumer doesn't necessarily vanish into thin air.
While this has yet to be tested in courts, what consumers get in exchange for the levy is permission to make copies of music for personal purposes. In other words, it legalises the _download_ of MP3s for which you don't own the cd or other media. This is, after all, what the levy is compensating artists for.
However, it does not legalize the _distribution_ of copyrighted works. Hence you're in the clear if you only download, but not make anything available from P2P networks. An interesting compromise.
Canada has not yet signed the WIPO treaties which would be breached by the compromise reached by the copyright board. Naturally, copyright holders argue that this is a mis-interpretation of the law, and that we should be both paying the levy AND barred from copying for personal purposes.
Compare the Canadian Copyright Act to the Australian Copyright Act, and you find that the consumer comes out far ahead in the Great White (as in snow, not culture) North. In Australia, making a backup copy of music that you've purchased is a technical (but again untested) breach of the Copyright Act.
In the end, I'll take a $25-$200 once-off levy over not having permission to copy CD's that I've purchased, or being subjected to the DMCA, or being subjected to the WIPO treaties any day. As an added bonus, artists who have limited distribution of their works (i.e. the Little Guys) see some of this cash. This helps the economy a lot more than slowing down the sales of portable music devices.
FYI, as someone who designs systems for a large-ish ISP, I would rather people get their linux distro from our mirror server..torrent just cannot match the serving power for our customer base, and certainly not the economics.
The fetching of linux distro ISO's is often used to justify BT, but the author's own notes point to suprnova, which has trackers to very little content that is licensed for free re/distribution.
And yes, the mirror is big and powerful, and has all major linux and *bsd's, with some minor ones too.
Nevertheless, I'll now keep an eye for.torrent tracker data in the DNS servers. It'll be interesting to see the result.
Sure, port-based filtering may work, but what would truly be required to reply with potential legal order is protocol based filtering, where each packet is opened, and checked to see if it's carring data for a known P2P protocol.
Some implementations: -http://www.lowth.com/p2pwall/ (OSS) -http://www.allot.com/html/products_netenfo rcer_en terprise.shtm (commercial)
P2P is a special problem for ISPs in Australia, where unmetered traffic plans are just recently making a comeback in the market. Note that these are specifically not _unlimited_ plans in the full sense of the word.
The first generation of unmetered plans died off when P2P first arrived on the market - ISPs assumed that the average consumer would only use so much bandwidth, which is crazily expensive here versus the US - think $0.01-0.15/MB, compared to $1/GB in the US. And so unmetered plans vanished almost overnight - many ISPs just folded for lack of funds to pay the bandwidth costs.
Then in early 2003, they made a comeback, somewhat related to an increased hardware spend on routers that had the CPU to spare to apply all sorts of traffic shaping. Now most plans come with the stipulation that the first 1-5GB/mo will be delivered without intereference, then, depending on the ISP, the connection will be throttled to ensure that it is always profitable. Users that don't like this (and there are many, check out http://whirlpool.net.au/ for a long list of whinging comments) can still opt for plans where all traffic beyond an intial free allotment is billed.
On metered plans, customers don't tend to use much excess after one big month of leaving their, or their childen's, or their employees, P2P software running amock. $0.10/MB equals a lot of legitimately purchased movie tickets, CDs, software, and DVDs, and very quickly so.
Now back to the ARIA article in question. ISPs should not have to care about the contents of the traffic on their wires, similarly as telcos should not have to care if you're chatting with your mother or neighbourhood pusher.
The ARIA has shown itself to agree with this in principle, as long as ISPs cooperate with them should customers decide to use their services to host ARIA licensed content without authorization.
Unfortunately, what has happened is that some ISPs have been caught blurring the line between their actions and customers. This is what the ARIA wants to avoid, for example: -ISPs running internal, customer access only, or hidden/secret servers that host copyrighted content to which the ISP and its users don't have licenses to -ISP staff have allowed close friends to run servers relying on the ISPs infratructure to do the same as listed above.
Nothing proposed is outrageous so far. It's a balance. I don't think that we should be implementing protocol based filtering, but I do think that content should not be used without license. Pay up, or use content that's licensed for free distribution. Heck, you just might find a lot of that on your ISP's mirror server - most of which are in unmetered for customers in Australia.
PR Newswire: "No Free Lunch - Or Free Linux"
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IBM Puts Pressure On SCO
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· Score: 2, Informative
And now to balance things off from SCO's perspective. Never clueing in on the possibility that some companies pay their employees to produce some Software Libre. There's a balance out there between proprietary and OSS. You pick what best suits you, or your business model... but probably not a *nix that just now claims PAM as a feature.
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Darl McBride, SCO Group CEO, to Deliver CDXPO Keynote Titled 'There's No Free Lunch - Or Free Linux' 08:32 EST Wednesday, Nov 05, 2003
LINDON, Utah, Nov. 5/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The SCO(R) Group (SCO) (Nasdaq: SCOX), the owner of the UNIX operating system, today announced that Chief Executive Officer Darl McBride, will deliver a keynote address at the Enterprise IT Week/Computer Digital Expo (CDXPO) conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, November 18 at 5:00 p.m. The conference and keynote will take place at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/19990421/SCOLO GO )
In his address titled "There's No Free Lunch -- Or Free Linux," McBride will present his perspectives on the prospects of free industries, SCO's suit against IBM, and why intellectual property must be protected in a digital age.
"The Internet created -- and creatively destroyed -- great wealth. It also created a culture legitimizing intellectual property theft," said McBride. "When you defend intellectual property, you speak an unpleasant truth. People don't like to hear unpleasant truths. The alternative to this fight, however, is the death of an industry and thousands of jobs lost."
McBride will also explore how the information technology industry - software, hardware, networking and services -- depends on money passing from one hand to another, asserting that the livelihood of engineers and developers rests on paid models, even as those developers donate time to free projects such as Linux. McBride will lay out his assertion that without paid software, there would be little or no free software. At the conclusion of his keynote, McBride will be available for media questions.
McBride's keynote will be followed by a Town Hall discussion moderated by Jack Powers, conference chairman of Enterprise IT Week and director of the International Informatics Institute.
You'll note that many ISPs run bind 8.x , but there is no standardized patch out there for the 8.x's.
Unfortunately, I'll wait for a proper patch, or until I have enough time to hammer out some decent code before disabling SiteFinder, and liberating my mail servers.
I spent a month travelling in Iran last December. I have a few observations that may surprise some:
1- Internet access is unfiltered, from what I could tell. From pr0n to sites advocating political dissent, people where happy to show me that things weren't blocked in Internet cafes. Since most people access the net from these cafes, they benefit from a layer of anonymity assuming that they can afford the $0.50-0.80us/hour rates.
2- The government is a complex machine. THE PEOPLE VOTE for their elected representative. Mr Khatami, the current president is a reformist. However, he cannot push reforms through too fast for a host of reasons, the first being that the country's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khameini holds veto power over all decisions made by the elected government. Khameini also controls the military and the police. The conservatives, on their part, cannot block all reform, for the knowledge that reformists get violent if there's no progress. The end result is a country that's slowly moving towards reform. Conservatives think things are moving too fast, reformists think things are moving too slowly, but most people agree that the last thing the country needs is another war or revolution - far too many people die then. From my visit, I'm steadfast in my opinion that Iran will sort itself out on it's own, but it will take time. Sort of like Turkey, which has gone from an Islamic Monarchy in the 1910's to a democratic state today.
3- America's allies in the Middle East, such as the United Arab Emirates (spent 2 weeks there), do have filters, and nasty ones at that. There is only one ISP in the UAE, the governements, and it filters lots. I could frequently reach a blocked site when following links in slashdot stories, and there's nothing that you can do about getting those sites unblocked. The government of the UAE is a big-time monarchy, but is Open for Business. Will the proxy be available to the UAE? I don't think so.
4- Iran isn't as isolated as you would think, and a lot of this is due to the Internet and the availability of cheap international phone calls. For example, I was in the city of Qom, some 180km south of Tehran on the 17th of December. This is the conservative hub of the country. Ayatollah Khomeini was born and operated from there, and the city is home to the important Shiite shrine of Fatimeh's tomb. Through a long sequence of happenstance events, I found myself touring a school, and was amused when a teacher gave a copy of The Two Towers on vcd to the vice-principal who was showing me around. Information flows...
Iran does still leave a lot to be desired, but people seem generally happy, the standard of education is high, and there's universal medicare for citizens... but most medical drugs have to be purchased from smugglers because of some country's trade embargo. Certainly the lifting of the later wourld be a much better perceived sign of goodwill than an unnecessary proxy.
In 1991, Pei Wei created Viola. It supported extensible plugins prior to 1994.
My objection to most software patents stands. If you're doing something that an expert would consider to be an obvious extension to the current state of the art, you don't have something patentable.
Having recently moved to Australia from Canada, I was:
(1) Surprised to see that all inbound calls, text, and airtime were free on my mobile plan. (2) My outbound costs were ~6x greater than before (au$0.60/min vs cnd$0.10/min) (3) My text sending costs were lowered. (4) There was no charge for flagfall. But now fsck'ing Vodafone plans to change that. (Australia is one of the few countries where the cost of telecom seems to rise. Yech)
From a quick look into the situation, you pay nothing to receive SMS everywhere but North America.
But, you certainly pay to send SMS, which is a sure deterrent to Spam.
Hence, switch to a sender-pays model. Problem solved if the cost to send exceeds expected revenue from spamming. If current e-mail response rates (1%) hold, it'll be a non-issue.
I'd love to hear of countries outside Canada/US where there are charges to receive SMS though. That would blow this theory out of the water.
The reader will note that for the purpose of copyright infringement, actions that are not specifically allowed are considered to be infringing. Making.mp3's out of legally purchased CDs is technically an infringement, as it is not listed in the permissives, and not explicitly endorsed by (most) content producers.
I quote from the above: "Infringement of copyright can happen when works - such as paintings, books, computer software, films and music - are reproduced without permission from the copyright owners."
Vannevar Bush thought of a lot of this in his July 1945 article to Atlantic Monthly As We May Think .
Now, we may have it. Of course, he wasn't really a gadget man per se, nor were technology and gadgets his driving force. Founder of the NSF, he saw technology as an enabler to furthering the human condition, improving it's access to information, ultimately making us smarter...
Will this do it? No, but we'll be able to walk around for a bit and show how cool it is to have a $2000 wearables rig strapped to us that doesn't overfill a fanny pack.
And now for a comment from someone who knows...
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Speeding up Evolution
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· Score: 5, Interesting
... my girlfriend does, she's working on a Ph.D. in skeletal muscle physiology. I cede my keyboard. -------
While IGF-1 does wonderful things in mice, don't look for it at your local store or spam e-mail. Whatever people are selling in the spam shops isn't IGF-1, or anything remotely related to it. The real stuff is approximately $25 000 (US) per gram, which will treat 25 mice for a month, or one human for a day.
The problem with gene therapy is that it isn't available "now or soon", as stated in the article. The problem is that when the gene is injected, only a very small percentage of the muscle cells will express it. This means that delivery of the gene is very inefficient.
Adding onto this, there will be an immune response to the gene or the vector delivering the gene. This means that it won't hang around very long.
Next, there is a massive area to deliver to (all your skeletal muscle). And no efficient mechanism by which to accomplish this.
Basically, gene therapy is far from being a reality, let alone a mass market one that you could afford. To worry about gene doping at any Olympics in the forseable future is exceedingly premature.
The reason you can alter genes in mice is that their eggs can be manipulated in vitro . The manipulated eggs are artificially fertilized and injected into a pseudo-pregnant female. And while with this approach, only one cell has to be targetted, it still takes many many many months to create a transgenic mouse that expresses the proper genotype. Once that's done, you have to breed them - that's a lot of ass work for post-docs and PhD students.
...via Bell Canada's Virtual Private Network Enterprise (VPNe)system. Bell's VPNe uses Cisco Multiprotocol Label Switching technology to allow private networks to be created out of Bell's national IP structure.
How sweet will this be for Cisco marketing? But seriously, a properly designed MPLS network would be great for this. Congestion? Drop/delay all that !&#@(!* Kazaa traffic from those hardly profitable home DSL users in other classes.
As an aside, this will help usher in an era where engineers in the comms/networking/internet fields can once again see need and value for membership in professional engineering organizations, such as the PEO in Ontario. You don't want someone that only has a knack for networking to setup this type of environment. You want someone with the knack, the theoretical education, sufficient experience, AND legal liability for their design and implementation to pull this off.
Now, if only I could get to sending in my EIT papers...
I am not a lawyer, but Michael Geist certainly is. He authored a paper discussing the application of jurisdiction on the Internet, which can be found here. This comment is based on my interpretation of this paper. Again, IANAL.
The precedents set so far do not seem to clearly indicate what would happen if an offshore webcaster began filling the void left by the stations that were effectively shut down by the recent CARP ruling.
However, the RIAA could probably argue for jurisdiction in some American court if said webcaster did not go through a few steps to ensure that it's audience was not American. Indeed, the courts will probably weigh heavily on the interpretaton of the webcaster's intent, target audience, and the effect of their service (If, at the end of the day, it's still easy for most Americans to receive service from said webcaster without licence fees being paid to the RIAA, said webcaster would probably be in for a rough ride).
The only way a foreign webcaster could fight this would probably be to execute an origin check, say with a combination of IP address identification/localization, a clickwrap agreement, and even probably an offline check such as a credit card number (for the billing address)
Net result? American audiences would still be left without access to these offshore webcasters. Such measures need not be 100% effective though, as it seems that the courts will accept that this is near impossible. Nevertheless, it would probably have to be shown that a concerted effort was made to block 90-95% of the American audience.
What if the webcaster ignores this and proceeds? The US courts, due to the lack of a defending opinion from the webcaster, would probably rule that jurisdiction applies. The RIAA would get a monetary judgement, probably for estimated licensing fees outstanding + legal costs, and try to have it recognized by the webcaster's local courts. The local courts would once again have to decide if jurisdiction applies. Even if they decide in favour of the webcaster, the webcaster's executive, and any funds/financing they have would have to avoid US control for the remainder of their lives. Not an enviable position.
So, I don't recommend trying to circumvent by attempting to operate outside the USA, IF a webcaster indends to target a US audience. My advice would be to stick to the basics, and support this bill. Call your congresperson, etc.
Global Crossing? Oh, I guess not. KPNQwest? Nope. Ride the Dark Light. Teleglobe? Oops. Spent all their cash. Williams? The big-oil mothership didn't bail them.
SprintLink? Hummm... - No major accounting scandal, so far. - Only a few layoffs (what, 10-20% since.bust?) - They have ca$h - They have links to most places where you'd like to send traffic to. - Maybe a bit less bandwidth than their competition, but what use is a handfull of 0c-192s if you're not using more than a couple of OC-48s?
While Worldcom won't erase itself just yet - heck, it seems to have good chances of survival, there'll always be an option, or someone willing to pick up the slack - without overspending to do so.
Why, because Beijing is upset that it still hasn't been able to stamp out all of the post-1949 resistance to its style of governance?
Let's take a look at this "non-country", it has: - a democratically elected government, that does not answer to Beijing. (Although this isn't said too loudly or too often, as it tends to provoke "Military Exercises" involving very obvious missiles and whatnot off the coast of Taiwan, courtesy of Beijing. Fear will make Taiwain's populace willingly fall under the mainland's rule... that's worked many a time in history. ) - its own army, one that does not play nice with Beijing's - its own multilateral and bilateral accords with other nations, where possible. Often they are not invited to multinational talks because of other countries desire not to upset Beijing with yet another reminder that this "province" is not even remotely under its control - a press that is permitted to publish an opinion piece that is not aligned with the ruling party's line. Something that does not occur a bit further north of the "province".
The attempt to exert an iron grip, and to endlessly repeat to your populace that a country is a provice does not make it so. Similarly, the endless repetition that a province is a country also does not make it so. People decide, either with their voices or their (dis)obedience.
Now that Capitalists are permitted to join China's Communist party (I know, those two are supposed to be diametrically opposed), the party should have begun to place itself on a 20-to-100 year plan to fully democratize its governance (do it too fast, and you get Russia - criminal elements always adapt the fastest) once it re-acquired Hong Kong. Looks like the old boys never change their ways, regardless of where they're in power...
Ok, first, I don't work for the IEEE, but I am a member, and have had a couple of discussions with the Institute's current President w.r.t. legal issues in the past. Nevertheless, I'm not speaking for or on behalf of the IEEE here.
The IEEE isn't exactly a rich organization. They exist to promote research, education, & the development of standards in the Electronics/Electrical/Computer/Software engineering fields. This is their main concern. They wish to distance themselves from any possible liability because one large lawsuit, whether just or not, could bankrupt the entire organization. This is why they probably aren't taking a stand against the DMCA - holding themselves blameless is the lesser evil.
The IEEE takes the same approach with their code of Ethics. The code is a recommendation, one which many groups have worked hard to meticulously craft. Nevertheless, the IEEE cannot back up someone who is coming under legal fire for abiding by their Code of Ethics' principles. The reason is again that any large organization/corporation with deeper pockets than theirs could wipe them out, and then all the greater good that the IEEE accomplishes would be lost due to an attempt to stand their ground for one minuscule portion of what they represent.
While the DMCA stands as a law in the USA, the IEEE will respect it. There are many other organizations and people (& hopefully you, the Slashdot reader) who can fight the DMCA with much less risk. Support the EFF, or it's variant in your country. Spend a few hours working on any government initiated review of Copyright law, if this is happening in your country. Win the big fight, and non-profits like the IEEE will lift the restrictions that they are legally obligated to enforce.
After finishing a first pass through the consultation paper, I must admit that I am impressed at the depth of the inquiry that the authors made into the ramifications of copyright within the Canadian society. The consultation system does work - and is one of the few venues where an individual's comments will be presented in the same light as those of a national/international conglomerate's. For those that doubt this, Bell Canada (ex-monopolist, still the bearer of most local telephone service sold in Ontario and Quebec) recently wished to force all customers to pay $2.80/mo for Touch Tone service. Many people (esp. seniors) have had their phone lines prior to the introduction of Touch Tone, and have no desire or use for the service it provides. Public consultation (and outcry) put a quick end to Bell's plans.
For the purposes of this post, it should be noted that I am Canadian (that has an eerie beer commercial feel to it, for those that are familiar with the Molson product & ad campaigns), live in Toronto (motto: Open for Business, everything else has lower priority), and make a living by being part of the IP network engineering team at one of the country's largest telcos. I am not an expert on any of the material that follows, I simply wish to voice an opinion based on my observations of the political climate and the government's goals.
Basically, the Canadian government is, and probably always will be, faced with a dilemma: How is culture to be protected within a global community? This must be understood before tackling the issue of copyrights in a digital age.
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There is a longstanding principle in Canadian government to encourage the citizenry to preserve their cultural identity, regardless of origin. Yes, the ability to communicate in English or French is key to participating in Canadian society, but once this is achieved, the hope is that cultural history/identity will be preserved. The idea is that the resulting diversity will promote innovation within all fields, whether it be political, social, technological, etc. Sure, this leads to interesting problems, such as a Mennonite community in Quebec that believes the Bible not only permits but requires the enforcement of children's discipline via corporal punishment with a stick ("he who spares the rod, hates the child", or something to that effect). Culture and religion said yes, public opinion said no, and the law was vague - physical discipline is acceptable if it is not excessive, but there exists no definition as to what exactly is meant by "excessive".
With culture in mind, the Canadian government understands that it must work with other world governments in order to promote trade, peace, democracy, amongst many other things. Hence international agreements regarding trade, tariffs, peace[keeping|making|promoting], environmental preservation, and in this case, copyrights.
Finding and keeping the balance between culture and the international community is a constant point of contention, especially where Canada's relationship with the United States is concerned. The US has ten times Canada's population. American culture and the products thereof (esp. television and radio programming, movies and printed literature) form the majority of the cultural content available in Canada. From a content producer's point of view, this is great - two countries, one version of the product - or so it would be if not for those pesky cultural protection laws. When abroad, I've been surprised by how many times I was told that the US and Canada should just be one country (read: the United States should get 1 to 12 extra states). This is not a popular Canadian desire, and to encourage popular opinion to remain this way, cultural protection laws aid Canadian content producers by legislating that television and that major American magazines (Sports Illustrated, and Time, for example) carry a certain percentage of Canadian produced content. Are these laws the optimal approach? No. Furthermore, in the age of NAFTA, fierce court battles rage around the legality of such laws, but they have managed to persevere so far by adapting to new mediums and technologies.
A quick way to compare the Canadian and American style of government is to compare the countries' mottos which are, respectively, "Peace, Order and Good Government" for the north, "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" for the south. The first is oriented towards collective rights, while the second is oriented towards individual rights. For example, Canadians do not have an explicit right to free speech per se, but rather freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression. The government reserves the ability to limit speech in cases where it sees fit. This allows the enactment of Hate Crimes laws that can block or impede the dissemination of Hate literature. Obviously, the potential exists to increase the restriction of speech in a "slippery slope" fashion, this is why restrictions must be very carefully calculated and imposed, with the Supreme Court, and not the government acting as the highest level of recourse as to what speech can and cannot be blocked.
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This brings me back to the issue of copyright, and for Slashdot readers, the issue of the legal protection of technical measures. On one hand, the government is aware of the wording and requirements of the WIPO treaties, which are quite favourable towards individual entities (RIAA, MPAA, Publisher's Association, etc.) wishing to outlaw the research and distribution of technologies that circumvent "effective" technological measures of content copyright protection (another grey area? Is ROT13 "effective"? Some would argue that any attempt to technologically protect content is effective, others that only the state-of-the-art [128bit or more encryption, for now] can be considered as such). On the other hand, the Canadian government is worried that DMCA-style prohibitions will "[override] the traditional contours of copyright protection that emphasize a balance between the rights of creators and the interests of users". Of note, the principle of fair use, the integration of material within the public domain once the protection afforded to copyrighted material expires, and the preservation of academic freedoms are of concern. Take the example of material falling within the public domain. Current content protection schemes do not have an expiry date. A suggestion is that a way around this would be to allow the use of technological content protection circumvention methods to transfer expired copyright material into the public domain.
Now I can link cultural protection to the legal protection of technical measures. The Canadian government realises that, as it stands, the Internet is an incredible medium for the open exchange of (cultural) ideas. Anyone can post and access content on the Internet, and do so very affordably. Since a lot of this content relies on fair use provisions of copyrighted material, the government is concerned that a reformed Copyright Law could severely impede smaller (normally local) producers while protecting larger (normally of national/international scale) content producers. Since larger content producers are normally associated with more homogeneous content in greater volumes, the tendency is to produce material for an assimilated (American) culture as opposed to material for a multicultural (Canadian) culture.
Hence, reformed Copyright law must take into account Canadian cultural protection laws. Therein lies Canada's greatest hope of avoiding the slippery slope towards Richard Stallman's "Right To Read" dystopia by while preserving the principles of fair use, and protecting the work of content producers who choose to request payment for the use of their content.
I will now go to work on a submission to Copyright Reform Consultation, and urge all Canadians to do the same. Democracy only works if you do.
The current DSL pricing scheme is a child of the late 90's Internet boom. Everyone was thinking that products & services other than raw 'net access would be bundled with the service. Most notably, Video On Demand and "Virtual Shopping Pleasure"-type services. Hence it made sense to sell DSL as a loss leader for $40 - $50/mo because MAYBE, just maybe, another $40-50 of extra services could be tacked on.
Well, for the better part of North America, those other services haven't surfaced. On the contrary, telcos & large ISP's have learned that DSL is maintenance intensive, and that they can't convince residential customers to shell out $300-600 for the CPE - which must be practically given away. By the time your $40-50/mo customer is set up, you don't stand a chance at breaking even for 6-12months.
But wait, we've just established connectivity! What about the other Internet Services?
Well, you'll want some nice fat OC3->OC12 pipes in order to deliver content at >56k speeds between 7pm-11pm (peak time). Well, UUnet will sell you an OC3 for $100k/mo, or you can go for the somewhat cheaper SprintLink. Whatever pipe is purchased, you can bet that it's going to be oversubscribed to death: think NO MORE than $2-5/mo/cust for the bandwidth, that's 10kbps/cust if everyone requested something simultaneously. As you can see, a fat pipe gets you a hell of a lot less mileage than it did with dial-up.
And, of course, you have to shell out for mail, web, and news servers.
But the killer is still SUPPORT. Many others have mentionned this, but it's a fact of life. The average user is an idiot. But when he/she pays $20/mo more than they did for dial up, they'll expect much better service - the sort of stuff that's practically unseen, with short hold times and stoned technicians that will actually take the time to explain things after you've called 12 times in 3 days.
My point in all of this: WHY WOULD A COMPANY WANT TO PUT THEMSELVES THROUGH THIS HELL? I just don't get it. Sure I love cheap high speed access, but I'm not paying enough for it. Consider this:
You can get a business customer to pay you $200+/mo for essentially the same service that is sold to residential users for $40-50/mo. Along with this extra money, a business will also:
- buy the cpe/router/whatever.
- probably have someone on staff who's at least somewhat technically saavy. This translates into far less tech support calls.
- use the net for e-mail, maybe a bit of e-commerce, and a lot of websurfing. Much less potential to max out the bandwidth for MP3's, movies, warez, and the latest distro's ISO's.
So there you have it. If you were a telco/isp and could fill your DSLAM with $40-50 with a pain in the arse customers, or $200+ with a low maintenance customer. Which would you choose? Obviously the later. How will you improve things so that you don't become the next Northpoint? Jack up your price, reduce your quality of service, AND HOPE TO HELL THAT RESIDENTIAL CUSTOMERS CANCEL THEIR ACCOUNTS. Hence freeing up space in the DSLAM for immediate, real revenue. This is (North) America after all.
Phew... I've been wanting to get this off my chest for a while. And yes, I do feel much better now.
All Mastercard was concerned with is the preservation of their trademark... with no mention that the subject matter could be slanderous.
Who wants to bet that this thing was found by a search script? Potentially automatically generating the cease&decist?
If: find ": $xx" 1-5 times, followed by "there are some things in life that money can't buy, for everything else, there's Mastercard", then send(cease_n_decist)
Think of how much the law firm could bill Mastercard for the work done by such a script! "Yeah Bob, we worked 10000 hours to protect your trademarks on the web this month, at $500/hour that's a cool $5M."
Further diversion from my subject:
Cost of Mastercard lawyer to come up with the idea for a script: $5000 (conservative estimate)
Cost to get a high school/college/university student to set it up: $500
Monthly revenue to the firm: $5 000 000
Partnership in the firm: priceless
There are some things in life that money can't buy, for everything else there's "moderate down".
And I *still* think that allowing one word to be trademarked, "PRICELESS", is ludicrous. I wish I had $billions to facilitate my ideas/ideology/dictatorship of the world!
"Screw the Feds, they are lazy they won't trace me back that far. Plus I got *67 on, they'll need subpoenas to, and a ton of tracing to even get close to me."
I'm pretty sure *67 doesn't work on some ISDN/PRI Lines (which many ISP's used). I know for a fact it didn't work at a local ISP here (I tested it personally).
The "hacker/cracker/bad guy's" comment made me laugh uncontrollably for a few minutes. Having recovered from the initial shock at the stupidity of his comment, I'll share a bit of info as to how hard one would have to dig to find out who he was, or at least where he was calling from:
Note: I work for a national telco/isp, the combination of which greatly helps this process.
1. Find just one of spam boy's emails originating from his "phished" account. The message's headers will be more than pleased to provide you with time stamps.
2. Take the time stamps and userid, and compare them to the logs in the authentication servers (tacacs or radius, normally). These logs should, unless morons setup the system, indicate which NAS (network access server, the box you dial into) was used to logon to the ISP. The NAS should have sent a string to a syslog with connection speed (upstream/downstream), dialed number, and originating number.
3. You *will* have the originating number even if *67 was used. This is because *67 is a feature set for end users which can be disabled/masked, whereas the originating number received on an ISDN PRI has been provided by SS7 signaling, and is mandatory to the system's proper functionning.
4. With the originating number, the local telco will provide the line's physical address. This is assuming that a police officer/investigator/detective makes the request. Of course, there are many free number-to-address directories on the net that could provide this data.
5. All of the above requires about a day, depending on the size of the log files that have to be searched through, and the short delay in getting info from local telcos (they do move quickly if the right person asks).
All this to say that if these guys are getting away with their crimes for the time being, good for them. However, some "cyber crime" unit will eventually do a sweep, grab all of the above info for a bunch of small time operators in a given city, and shut them down. Yee-haw.
Did anyone else notice that bad guy #1 only spent 2 hours at his girlfriend's place for dinner? Not much time...
Is Missle Defence Technology Relevant? Necessary?
on
Laser-equipped 747
·
· Score: 2
This is what upsets me about any missile defence program dreamed up by the US Military:
1. They are designed to shoot down missiles from "rogue states", all of which are showing increasing signs of political stability (Iran and North Korea are often quoted).
2. Launching a missile at the US, regardless of the choice of device in the tip, is suicide. Send a scud, and all your launchers will be destroyed. Send a nuke, and say goodbye to your country.
3. Does the high technology match the threat? In Somalia, high tech was no match for a pickup truck with a machine gun mount in the back. Recently, in Yemen(?) a destroyer was almost sunk by a small boat packed with explosives and guided by suicide bombers. How will missile defense deal with a suitcase nuke? How will nose mounted laser deal with a missile heading for it's lower back end?
4. Why risk scrapping nuclear anti-proliferation treaties which forbid the development of missile killers such as a missile shield or a laser-747? The last thing the world needs is the renewed nationalist and isolationist tendencies that would result from an arms race. Both Russia and China have made great strides towards the open market, and towards more equitable treatment of their citizens since those treaties were signed. It makes sense: if you're not using most of your resources on defense/offense, you can better your society.
5. Most importantly, this is incredibly expensive. $60B for a missile defense shield, $1.6B for the 747's... Wouldn't the American people prefer improved schools, healthcare, or even tax cuts? All of these pay a much higher social dividend... unless you're a company/person involved in military R&D.
I apologize if this seems like a rant, but the above issues never seem to be addressed by the proponents of anti-missile systems... and darn would I ever like an answer!
Slashdot Mirror
The interesting thing about these levies is that the money spent by the consumer doesn't necessarily vanish into thin air.
While this has yet to be tested in courts, what consumers get in exchange for the levy is permission to make copies of music for personal purposes. In other words, it legalises the _download_ of MP3s for which you don't own the cd or other media. This is, after all, what the levy is compensating artists for.
However, it does not legalize the _distribution_ of copyrighted works. Hence you're in the clear if you only download, but not make anything available from P2P networks. An interesting compromise.
Canada has not yet signed the WIPO treaties which would be breached by the compromise reached by the copyright board. Naturally, copyright holders argue that this is a mis-interpretation of the law, and that we should be both paying the levy AND barred from copying for personal purposes.
Compare the Canadian Copyright Act to the Australian Copyright Act, and you find that the consumer comes out far ahead in the Great White (as in snow, not culture) North. In Australia, making a backup copy of music that you've purchased is a technical (but again untested) breach of the Copyright Act.
In the end, I'll take a $25-$200 once-off levy over not having permission to copy CD's that I've purchased, or being subjected to the DMCA, or being subjected to the WIPO treaties any day. As an added bonus, artists who have limited distribution of their works (i.e. the Little Guys) see some of this cash. This helps the economy a lot more than slowing down the sales of portable music devices.
FYI, as someone who designs systems for a large-ish ISP, I would rather people get their linux distro from our mirror server. .torrent just cannot match the serving power for our customer base, and certainly not the economics.
.torrent tracker data in the DNS servers. It'll be interesting to see the result.
The fetching of linux distro ISO's is often used to justify BT, but the author's own notes point to suprnova, which has trackers to very little content that is licensed for free re/distribution.
And yes, the mirror is big and powerful, and has all major linux and *bsd's, with some minor ones too.
Nevertheless, I'll now keep an eye for
Sure, port-based filtering may work, but what would truly be required to reply with potential legal order is protocol based filtering, where each packet is opened, and checked to see if it's carring data for a known P2P protocol.
o rcer_en terprise.shtm (commercial)
Some implementations:
-http://www.lowth.com/p2pwall/ (OSS)
-http://www.allot.com/html/products_netenf
P2P is a special problem for ISPs in Australia, where unmetered traffic plans are just recently making a comeback in the market. Note that these are specifically not _unlimited_ plans in the full sense of the word.
The first generation of unmetered plans died off when P2P first arrived on the market - ISPs assumed that the average consumer would only use so much bandwidth, which is crazily expensive here versus the US - think $0.01-0.15/MB, compared to $1/GB in the US. And so unmetered plans vanished almost overnight - many ISPs just folded for lack of funds to pay the bandwidth costs.
Then in early 2003, they made a comeback, somewhat related to an increased hardware spend on routers that had the CPU to spare to apply all sorts of traffic shaping. Now most plans come with the stipulation that the first 1-5GB/mo will be delivered without intereference, then, depending on the ISP, the connection will be throttled to ensure that it is always profitable. Users that don't like this (and there are many, check out http://whirlpool.net.au/ for a long list of whinging comments) can still opt for plans where all traffic beyond an intial free allotment is billed.
On metered plans, customers don't tend to use much excess after one big month of leaving their, or their childen's, or their employees, P2P software running amock. $0.10/MB equals a lot of legitimately purchased movie tickets, CDs, software, and DVDs, and very quickly so.
Now back to the ARIA article in question. ISPs should not have to care about the contents of the traffic on their wires, similarly as telcos should not have to care if you're chatting with your mother or neighbourhood pusher.
The ARIA has shown itself to agree with this in principle, as long as ISPs cooperate with them should customers decide to use their services to host ARIA licensed content without authorization.
Unfortunately, what has happened is that some ISPs have been caught blurring the line between their actions and customers. This is what the ARIA wants to avoid, for example:
-ISPs running internal, customer access only, or hidden/secret servers that host copyrighted content to which the ISP and its users don't have licenses to
-ISP staff have allowed close friends to run servers relying on the ISPs infratructure to do the same as listed above.
Nothing proposed is outrageous so far. It's a balance. I don't think that we should be implementing protocol based filtering, but I do think that content should not be used without license. Pay up, or use content that's licensed for free distribution. Heck, you just might find a lot of that on your ISP's mirror server - most of which are in unmetered for customers in Australia.
And now to balance things off from SCO's perspective. Never clueing in on the possibility that some companies pay their employees to produce some Software Libre. There's a balance out there between proprietary and OSS. You pick what best suits you, or your business model... but probably not a *nix that just now claims PAM as a feature.
/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The SCO(R) Group (SCO) (Nasdaq: SCOX), the owner of the UNIX operating system, today announced that Chief Executive Officer Darl McBride, will deliver a keynote address at the Enterprise IT Week/Computer Digital Expo (CDXPO) conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, November 18 at 5:00 p.m. The conference and keynote will take place at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.
O GO )
---
Darl McBride, SCO Group CEO, to Deliver CDXPO Keynote Titled 'There's No Free Lunch - Or Free Linux'
08:32 EST Wednesday, Nov 05, 2003
LINDON, Utah, Nov. 5
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/19990421/SCOL
In his address titled "There's No Free Lunch -- Or Free Linux," McBride will present his perspectives on the prospects of free industries, SCO's suit against IBM, and why intellectual property must be protected in a digital age.
"The Internet created -- and creatively destroyed -- great wealth. It also created a culture legitimizing intellectual property theft," said McBride. "When you defend intellectual property, you speak an unpleasant truth. People don't like to hear unpleasant truths. The alternative to this fight, however, is the death of an industry and thousands of jobs lost."
McBride will also explore how the information technology industry - software, hardware, networking and services -- depends on money passing from one hand to another, asserting that the livelihood of engineers and developers rests on paid models, even as those developers donate time to free projects such as Linux. McBride will lay out his assertion that without paid software, there would be little or no free software. At the conclusion of his keynote, McBride will be available for media questions.
McBride's keynote will be followed by a Town Hall discussion moderated by Jack Powers, conference chairman of Enterprise IT Week and director of the International Informatics Institute.
Has anyone tracked down a backport of the delegation-only patch for bind 8.x?
So far, all I've got is unofficial patches, which will not be run on production systems.
You'll note that many ISPs run bind 8.x , but there is no standardized patch out there for the 8.x's.
Unfortunately, I'll wait for a proper patch, or until I have enough time to hammer out some decent code before disabling SiteFinder, and liberating my mail servers.
I spent a month travelling in Iran last December. I have a few observations that may surprise some:
1- Internet access is unfiltered, from what I could tell. From pr0n to sites advocating political dissent, people where happy to show me that things weren't blocked in Internet cafes. Since most people access the net from these cafes, they benefit from a layer of anonymity assuming that they can afford the $0.50-0.80us/hour rates.
2- The government is a complex machine. THE PEOPLE VOTE for their elected representative. Mr Khatami, the current president is a reformist. However, he cannot push reforms through too fast for a host of reasons, the first being that the country's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khameini holds veto power over all decisions made by the elected government. Khameini also controls the military and the police. The conservatives, on their part, cannot block all reform, for the knowledge that reformists get violent if there's no progress. The end result is a country that's slowly moving towards reform. Conservatives think things are moving too fast, reformists think things are moving too slowly, but most people agree that the last thing the country needs is another war or revolution - far too many people die then. From my visit, I'm steadfast in my opinion that Iran will sort itself out on it's own, but it will take time. Sort of like Turkey, which has gone from an Islamic Monarchy in the 1910's to a democratic state today.
3- America's allies in the Middle East, such as the United Arab Emirates (spent 2 weeks there), do have filters, and nasty ones at that. There is only one ISP in the UAE, the governements, and it filters lots. I could frequently reach a blocked site when following links in slashdot stories, and there's nothing that you can do about getting those sites unblocked. The government of the UAE is a big-time monarchy, but is Open for Business. Will the proxy be available to the UAE? I don't think so.
4- Iran isn't as isolated as you would think, and a lot of this is due to the Internet and the availability of cheap international phone calls. For example, I was in the city of Qom, some 180km south of Tehran on the 17th of December. This is the conservative hub of the country. Ayatollah Khomeini was born and operated from there, and the city is home to the important Shiite shrine of Fatimeh's tomb. Through a long sequence of happenstance events, I found myself touring a school, and was amused when a teacher gave a copy of The Two Towers on vcd to the vice-principal who was showing me around. Information flows...
Iran does still leave a lot to be desired, but people seem generally happy, the standard of education is high, and there's universal medicare for citizens... but most medical drugs have to be purchased from smugglers because of some country's trade embargo. Certainly the lifting of the later wourld be a much better perceived sign of goodwill than an unnecessary proxy.
My objection to most software patents stands. If you're doing something that an expert would consider to be an obvious extension to the current state of the art, you don't have something patentable.
This is slashdot at it's best.
Thanks for bringing a major utility of these modules to my (and others') attention.
Having recently moved to Australia from Canada, I was:
(1) Surprised to see that all inbound calls, text, and airtime were free on my mobile plan.
(2) My outbound costs were ~6x greater than before (au$0.60/min vs cnd$0.10/min)
(3) My text sending costs were lowered.
(4) There was no charge for flagfall. But now fsck'ing Vodafone plans to change that. (Australia is one of the few countries where the cost of telecom seems to rise. Yech)
From a quick look into the situation, you pay nothing to receive SMS everywhere but North America.
But, you certainly pay to send SMS, which is a sure deterrent to Spam.
Hence, switch to a sender-pays model. Problem solved if the cost to send exceeds expected revenue from spamming. If current e-mail response rates (1%) hold, it'll be a non-issue.
I'd love to hear of countries outside Canada/US where there are charges to receive SMS though. That would blow this theory out of the water.
For the curious, you can download (.pdf, .rtf):
the original act plus revisions
the copyright act amendment, known as the Digital Agenda
The reader will note that for the purpose of copyright infringement, actions that are not specifically allowed are considered to be infringing. Making .mp3's out of legally purchased CDs is technically an infringement, as it is not listed in the permissives, and not explicitly endorsed by (most) content producers.
More specifically, you can check another government site to learn what they interpret copyright infringement as.
I quote from the above: "Infringement of copyright can happen when works - such as paintings, books, computer software, films and music - are reproduced without permission from the copyright owners."
Ignorance of the law is no excuse..
Now, we may have it. Of course, he wasn't really a gadget man per se, nor were technology and gadgets his driving force. Founder of the NSF, he saw technology as an enabler to furthering the human condition, improving it's access to information, ultimately making us smarter...
Will this do it? No, but we'll be able to walk around for a bit and show how cool it is to have a $2000 wearables rig strapped to us that doesn't overfill a fanny pack.
... my girlfriend does, she's working on a Ph.D. in skeletal muscle physiology. I cede my keyboard.
-------
While IGF-1 does wonderful things in mice, don't look for it at your local store or spam e-mail. Whatever people are selling in the spam shops isn't IGF-1, or anything remotely related to it. The real stuff is approximately $25 000 (US) per gram, which will treat 25 mice for a month, or one human for a day.
The problem with gene therapy is that it isn't available "now or soon", as stated in the article. The problem is that when the gene is injected, only a very small percentage of the muscle cells will express it. This means that delivery of the gene is very inefficient.
Adding onto this, there will be an immune response to the gene or the vector delivering the gene. This means that it won't hang around very long.
Next, there is a massive area to deliver to (all your skeletal muscle). And no efficient mechanism by which to accomplish this.
Basically, gene therapy is far from being a reality, let alone a mass market one that you could afford. To worry about gene doping at any Olympics in the forseable future is exceedingly premature.
The reason you can alter genes in mice is that their eggs can be manipulated in vitro . The manipulated eggs are artificially fertilized and injected into a pseudo-pregnant female. And while with this approach, only one cell has to be targetted, it still takes many many many months to create a transgenic mouse that expresses the proper genotype. Once that's done, you have to breed them - that's a lot of ass work for post-docs and PhD students.
From the article...
...via Bell Canada's Virtual Private Network Enterprise (VPNe)system. Bell's VPNe uses Cisco Multiprotocol Label Switching technology to allow private networks to be created out of Bell's national IP structure.
How sweet will this be for Cisco marketing? But seriously, a properly designed MPLS network would be great for this. Congestion? Drop/delay all that !&#@(!* Kazaa traffic from those hardly profitable home DSL users in other classes.
As an aside, this will help usher in an era where engineers in the comms/networking/internet fields can once again see need and value for membership in professional engineering organizations, such as the PEO in Ontario. You don't want someone that only has a knack for networking to setup this type of environment. You want someone with the knack, the theoretical education, sufficient experience, AND legal liability for their design and implementation to pull this off.
Now, if only I could get to sending in my EIT papers...
The precedents set so far do not seem to clearly indicate what would happen if an offshore webcaster began filling the void left by the stations that were effectively shut down by the recent CARP ruling.
However, the RIAA could probably argue for jurisdiction in some American court if said webcaster did not go through a few steps to ensure that it's audience was not American. Indeed, the courts will probably weigh heavily on the interpretaton of the webcaster's intent, target audience, and the effect of their service (If, at the end of the day, it's still easy for most Americans to receive service from said webcaster without licence fees being paid to the RIAA, said webcaster would probably be in for a rough ride).
The only way a foreign webcaster could fight this would probably be to execute an origin check, say with a combination of IP address identification/localization, a clickwrap agreement, and even probably an offline check such as a credit card number (for the billing address)
Net result? American audiences would still be left without access to these offshore webcasters. Such measures need not be 100% effective though, as it seems that the courts will accept that this is near impossible. Nevertheless, it would probably have to be shown that a concerted effort was made to block 90-95% of the American audience.
What if the webcaster ignores this and proceeds? The US courts, due to the lack of a defending opinion from the webcaster, would probably rule that jurisdiction applies. The RIAA would get a monetary judgement, probably for estimated licensing fees outstanding + legal costs, and try to have it recognized by the webcaster's local courts. The local courts would once again have to decide if jurisdiction applies. Even if they decide in favour of the webcaster, the webcaster's executive, and any funds/financing they have would have to avoid US control for the remainder of their lives. Not an enviable position.
So, I don't recommend trying to circumvent by attempting to operate outside the USA, IF a webcaster indends to target a US audience. My advice would be to stick to the basics, and support this bill. Call your congresperson, etc.
Global Crossing? Oh, I guess not.
.bust?)
KPNQwest? Nope. Ride the Dark Light.
Teleglobe? Oops. Spent all their cash.
Williams? The big-oil mothership didn't bail them.
SprintLink? Hummm...
- No major accounting scandal, so far.
- Only a few layoffs (what, 10-20% since
- They have ca$h
- They have links to most places where you'd like to send traffic to.
- Maybe a bit less bandwidth than their competition, but what use is a handfull of 0c-192s if you're not using more than a couple of OC-48s?
While Worldcom won't erase itself just yet - heck, it seems to have good chances of survival, there'll always be an option, or someone willing to pick up the slack - without overspending to do so.
Money, can't live without it.
Threats are as convincing as blatant lies.
Why, because Beijing is upset that it still hasn't been able to stamp out all of the post-1949 resistance to its style of governance?
Let's take a look at this "non-country", it has:
- a democratically elected government, that does not answer to Beijing. (Although this isn't said too loudly or too often, as it tends to provoke "Military Exercises" involving very obvious missiles and whatnot off the coast of Taiwan, courtesy of Beijing. Fear will make Taiwain's populace willingly fall under the mainland's rule... that's worked many a time in history. )
- its own army, one that does not play nice with Beijing's
- its own multilateral and bilateral accords with other nations, where possible. Often they are not invited to multinational talks because of other countries desire not to upset Beijing with yet another reminder that this "province" is not even remotely under its control
- a press that is permitted to publish an opinion piece that is not aligned with the ruling party's line. Something that does not occur a bit further north of the "province".
The attempt to exert an iron grip, and to endlessly repeat to your populace that a country is a provice does not make it so. Similarly, the endless repetition that a province is a country also does not make it so. People decide, either with their voices or their (dis)obedience.
Now that Capitalists are permitted to join China's Communist party (I know, those two are supposed to be diametrically opposed), the party should have begun to place itself on a 20-to-100 year plan to fully democratize its governance (do it too fast, and you get Russia - criminal elements always adapt the fastest) once it re-acquired Hong Kong. Looks like the old boys never change their ways, regardless of where they're in power...
The IEEE isn't exactly a rich organization. They exist to promote research, education, & the development of standards in the Electronics/Electrical/Computer/Software engineering fields. This is their main concern. They wish to distance themselves from any possible liability because one large lawsuit, whether just or not, could bankrupt the entire organization. This is why they probably aren't taking a stand against the DMCA - holding themselves blameless is the lesser evil.
The IEEE takes the same approach with their code of Ethics. The code is a recommendation, one which many groups have worked hard to meticulously craft. Nevertheless, the IEEE cannot back up someone who is coming under legal fire for abiding by their Code of Ethics' principles. The reason is again that any large organization/corporation with deeper pockets than theirs could wipe them out, and then all the greater good that the IEEE accomplishes would be lost due to an attempt to stand their ground for one minuscule portion of what they represent.
While the DMCA stands as a law in the USA, the IEEE will respect it. There are many other organizations and people (& hopefully you, the Slashdot reader) who can fight the DMCA with much less risk. Support the EFF, or it's variant in your country. Spend a few hours working on any government initiated review of Copyright law, if this is happening in your country. Win the big fight, and non-profits like the IEEE will lift the restrictions that they are legally obligated to enforce.
For the purposes of this post, it should be noted that I am Canadian (that has an eerie beer commercial feel to it, for those that are familiar with the Molson product & ad campaigns), live in Toronto (motto: Open for Business, everything else has lower priority), and make a living by being part of the IP network engineering team at one of the country's largest telcos. I am not an expert on any of the material that follows, I simply wish to voice an opinion based on my observations of the political climate and the government's goals.
Basically, the Canadian government is, and probably always will be, faced with a dilemma: How is culture to be protected within a global community? This must be understood before tackling the issue of copyrights in a digital age.
***
There is a longstanding principle in Canadian government to encourage the citizenry to preserve their cultural identity, regardless of origin. Yes, the ability to communicate in English or French is key to participating in Canadian society, but once this is achieved, the hope is that cultural history/identity will be preserved. The idea is that the resulting diversity will promote innovation within all fields, whether it be political, social, technological, etc. Sure, this leads to interesting problems, such as a Mennonite community in Quebec that believes the Bible not only permits but requires the enforcement of children's discipline via corporal punishment with a stick ("he who spares the rod, hates the child", or something to that effect). Culture and religion said yes, public opinion said no, and the law was vague - physical discipline is acceptable if it is not excessive, but there exists no definition as to what exactly is meant by "excessive".
With culture in mind, the Canadian government understands that it must work with other world governments in order to promote trade, peace, democracy, amongst many other things. Hence international agreements regarding trade, tariffs, peace[keeping|making|promoting], environmental preservation, and in this case, copyrights.
Finding and keeping the balance between culture and the international community is a constant point of contention, especially where Canada's relationship with the United States is concerned. The US has ten times Canada's population. American culture and the products thereof (esp. television and radio programming, movies and printed literature) form the majority of the cultural content available in Canada. From a content producer's point of view, this is great - two countries, one version of the product - or so it would be if not for those pesky cultural protection laws. When abroad, I've been surprised by how many times I was told that the US and Canada should just be one country (read: the United States should get 1 to 12 extra states). This is not a popular Canadian desire, and to encourage popular opinion to remain this way, cultural protection laws aid Canadian content producers by legislating that television and that major American magazines (Sports Illustrated, and Time, for example) carry a certain percentage of Canadian produced content. Are these laws the optimal approach? No. Furthermore, in the age of NAFTA, fierce court battles rage around the legality of such laws, but they have managed to persevere so far by adapting to new mediums and technologies.
A quick way to compare the Canadian and American style of government is to compare the countries' mottos which are, respectively, "Peace, Order and Good Government" for the north, "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" for the south. The first is oriented towards collective rights, while the second is oriented towards individual rights. For example, Canadians do not have an explicit right to free speech per se, but rather freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression. The government reserves the ability to limit speech in cases where it sees fit. This allows the enactment of Hate Crimes laws that can block or impede the dissemination of Hate literature. Obviously, the potential exists to increase the restriction of speech in a "slippery slope" fashion, this is why restrictions must be very carefully calculated and imposed, with the Supreme Court, and not the government acting as the highest level of recourse as to what speech can and cannot be blocked.
***
This brings me back to the issue of copyright, and for Slashdot readers, the issue of the legal protection of technical measures. On one hand, the government is aware of the wording and requirements of the WIPO treaties, which are quite favourable towards individual entities (RIAA, MPAA, Publisher's Association, etc.) wishing to outlaw the research and distribution of technologies that circumvent "effective" technological measures of content copyright protection (another grey area? Is ROT13 "effective"? Some would argue that any attempt to technologically protect content is effective, others that only the state-of-the-art [128bit or more encryption, for now] can be considered as such). On the other hand, the Canadian government is worried that DMCA-style prohibitions will "[override] the traditional contours of copyright protection that emphasize a balance between the rights of creators and the interests of users". Of note, the principle of fair use, the integration of material within the public domain once the protection afforded to copyrighted material expires, and the preservation of academic freedoms are of concern. Take the example of material falling within the public domain. Current content protection schemes do not have an expiry date. A suggestion is that a way around this would be to allow the use of technological content protection circumvention methods to transfer expired copyright material into the public domain.
Now I can link cultural protection to the legal protection of technical measures. The Canadian government realises that, as it stands, the Internet is an incredible medium for the open exchange of (cultural) ideas. Anyone can post and access content on the Internet, and do so very affordably. Since a lot of this content relies on fair use provisions of copyrighted material, the government is concerned that a reformed Copyright Law could severely impede smaller (normally local) producers while protecting larger (normally of national/international scale) content producers. Since larger content producers are normally associated with more homogeneous content in greater volumes, the tendency is to produce material for an assimilated (American) culture as opposed to material for a multicultural (Canadian) culture.
Hence, reformed Copyright law must take into account Canadian cultural protection laws. Therein lies Canada's greatest hope of avoiding the slippery slope towards Richard Stallman's "Right To Read" dystopia by while preserving the principles of fair use, and protecting the work of content producers who choose to request payment for the use of their content.
I will now go to work on a submission to Copyright Reform Consultation, and urge all Canadians to do the same. Democracy only works if you do.
... and $39.95 isn't enough.
The current DSL pricing scheme is a child of the late 90's Internet boom. Everyone was thinking that products & services other than raw 'net access would be bundled with the service. Most notably, Video On Demand and "Virtual Shopping Pleasure"-type services. Hence it made sense to sell DSL as a loss leader for $40 - $50/mo because MAYBE, just maybe, another $40-50 of extra services could be tacked on.
Well, for the better part of North America, those other services haven't surfaced. On the contrary, telcos & large ISP's have learned that DSL is maintenance intensive, and that they can't convince residential customers to shell out $300-600 for the CPE - which must be practically given away. By the time your $40-50/mo customer is set up, you don't stand a chance at breaking even for 6-12months.
But wait, we've just established connectivity! What about the other Internet Services?
Well, you'll want some nice fat OC3->OC12 pipes in order to deliver content at >56k speeds between 7pm-11pm (peak time). Well, UUnet will sell you an OC3 for $100k/mo, or you can go for the somewhat cheaper SprintLink. Whatever pipe is purchased, you can bet that it's going to be oversubscribed to death: think NO MORE than $2-5/mo/cust for the bandwidth, that's 10kbps/cust if everyone requested something simultaneously. As you can see, a fat pipe gets you a hell of a lot less mileage than it did with dial-up.
And, of course, you have to shell out for mail, web, and news servers.
But the killer is still SUPPORT. Many others have mentionned this, but it's a fact of life. The average user is an idiot. But when he/she pays $20/mo more than they did for dial up, they'll expect much better service - the sort of stuff that's practically unseen, with short hold times and stoned technicians that will actually take the time to explain things after you've called 12 times in 3 days.
My point in all of this: WHY WOULD A COMPANY WANT TO PUT THEMSELVES THROUGH THIS HELL? I just don't get it. Sure I love cheap high speed access, but I'm not paying enough for it. Consider this:
You can get a business customer to pay you $200+/mo for essentially the same service that is sold to residential users for $40-50/mo. Along with this extra money, a business will also:
- buy the cpe/router/whatever.
- probably have someone on staff who's at least somewhat technically saavy. This translates into far less tech support calls.
- use the net for e-mail, maybe a bit of e-commerce, and a lot of websurfing. Much less potential to max out the bandwidth for MP3's, movies, warez, and the latest distro's ISO's.
So there you have it. If you were a telco/isp and could fill your DSLAM with $40-50 with a pain in the arse customers, or $200+ with a low maintenance customer. Which would you choose? Obviously the later. How will you improve things so that you don't become the next Northpoint? Jack up your price, reduce your quality of service, AND HOPE TO HELL THAT RESIDENTIAL CUSTOMERS CANCEL THEIR ACCOUNTS. Hence freeing up space in the DSLAM for immediate, real revenue. This is (North) America after all.
Phew... I've been wanting to get this off my chest for a while. And yes, I do feel much better now.
All Mastercard was concerned with is the preservation of their trademark... with no mention that the subject matter could be slanderous.
Who wants to bet that this thing was found by a search script? Potentially automatically generating the cease&decist?
If: find ": $xx" 1-5 times, followed by "there are some things in life that money can't buy, for everything else, there's Mastercard", then send(cease_n_decist)
Think of how much the law firm could bill Mastercard for the work done by such a script! "Yeah Bob, we worked 10000 hours to protect your trademarks on the web this month, at $500/hour that's a cool $5M."
Further diversion from my subject:
Cost of Mastercard lawyer to come up with the idea for a script: $5000 (conservative estimate)
Cost to get a high school/college/university student to set it up: $500
Monthly revenue to the firm: $5 000 000
Partnership in the firm: priceless
There are some things in life that money can't buy, for everything else there's "moderate down".
And I *still* think that allowing one word to be trademarked, "PRICELESS", is ludicrous. I wish I had $billions to facilitate my ideas/ideology/dictatorship of the world!
I'm pretty sure *67 doesn't work on some ISDN/PRI Lines (which many ISP's used). I know for a fact it didn't work at a local ISP here (I tested it personally).
The "hacker/cracker/bad guy's" comment made me laugh uncontrollably for a few minutes. Having recovered from the initial shock at the stupidity of his comment, I'll share a bit of info as to how hard one would have to dig to find out who he was, or at least where he was calling from:
Note: I work for a national telco/isp, the combination of which greatly helps this process.
1. Find just one of spam boy's emails originating from his "phished" account. The message's headers will be more than pleased to provide you with time stamps.
2. Take the time stamps and userid, and compare them to the logs in the authentication servers (tacacs or radius, normally). These logs should, unless morons setup the system, indicate which NAS (network access server, the box you dial into) was used to logon to the ISP. The NAS should have sent a string to a syslog with connection speed (upstream/downstream), dialed number, and originating number.
3. You *will* have the originating number even if *67 was used. This is because *67 is a feature set for end users which can be disabled/masked, whereas the originating number received on an ISDN PRI has been provided by SS7 signaling, and is mandatory to the system's proper functionning.
4. With the originating number, the local telco will provide the line's physical address. This is assuming that a police officer/investigator/detective makes the request. Of course, there are many free number-to-address directories on the net that could provide this data.
5. All of the above requires about a day, depending on the size of the log files that have to be searched through, and the short delay in getting info from local telcos (they do move quickly if the right person asks).
All this to say that if these guys are getting away with their crimes for the time being, good for them. However, some "cyber crime" unit will eventually do a sweep, grab all of the above info for a bunch of small time operators in a given city, and shut them down. Yee-haw.
Did anyone else notice that bad guy #1 only spent 2 hours at his girlfriend's place for dinner? Not much time...
This is what upsets me about any missile defence program dreamed up by the US Military:
1. They are designed to shoot down missiles from "rogue states", all of which are showing increasing signs of political stability (Iran and North Korea are often quoted).
2. Launching a missile at the US, regardless of the choice of device in the tip, is suicide. Send a scud, and all your launchers will be destroyed. Send a nuke, and say goodbye to your country.
3. Does the high technology match the threat? In Somalia, high tech was no match for a pickup truck with a machine gun mount in the back. Recently, in Yemen(?) a destroyer was almost sunk by a small boat packed with explosives and guided by suicide bombers. How will missile defense deal with a suitcase nuke? How will nose mounted laser deal with a missile heading for it's lower back end?
4. Why risk scrapping nuclear anti-proliferation treaties which forbid the development of missile killers such as a missile shield or a laser-747? The last thing the world needs is the renewed nationalist and isolationist tendencies that would result from an arms race. Both Russia and China have made great strides towards the open market, and towards more equitable treatment of their citizens since those treaties were signed. It makes sense: if you're not using most of your resources on defense/offense, you can better your society.
5. Most importantly, this is incredibly expensive. $60B for a missile defense shield, $1.6B for the 747's ... Wouldn't the American people prefer improved schools, healthcare, or even tax cuts? All of these pay a much higher social dividend... unless you're a company/person involved in military R&D.
I apologize if this seems like a rant, but the above issues never seem to be addressed by the proponents of anti-missile systems... and darn would I ever like an answer!