I think what we're asking is: what is a reasonable interpretation of this? Can you ROT13 something and claim DMCA protection? Or could you just "tOgGlE CaPiTaLiSaTiOn" or perhaps "redro eht esrever" or something equally as silly?
That "effectively" looks like yet another example of lawyers (50% of both Houses are members of the American Bar Association) making more work for their own kind by introducing extraneous and nebulous terms, either deliberate or through an appaling lack of foresight ("A well ordered militia...").
I can recommend this as a read. I challenged the author on a few points over on K5, and he responded intelligently and eruditely. This isn't the usual Angry Young Guy fare, but a reasoned and reasonable lament for the genuine aspiration to freedom and democracy in the USA, with some very practical suggestions about what to do about it. Read it, ponder it, act on it.
I sincerely hope the EFF will be able to put a responsible face on digital copying and fair use issues, and will not end up looking like amoral war3z kidd33z
Sure, they could lie about the most prevalant use of P2P, or they could just keep pushing for Sony decision to be applied here: that even though most use of P2P (at the moment) is infringing, there is a substantial non-infringing use, which is enough to justify not banning the technology, and if copyright holders want to profit from the technology, they are free to do so as they did (big time) with VCR's after they finally lost the case and had to stop whinging about them.
There's no need to take the moral high ground here, just keep reciting the precedent and challenge the ??AA to prove why it should be otherwise for P2P.
C.f. the overheard conversation in Return to Castle Wolfenstein:
German 1: "How do ve defuse this thing?"
German 2: "Cut ze red wire. Or is the ze green? Hold on vhile I get ze manual."
German 1: "Ach, it doesn't matter, ze all look grey to me anyvay." [BOOM]
It's funny, until you ask the Institute of Electrical Engineers (largely composed of caucasian men) whether they require their members to be able to distinguish wiring colours. Go on, ask them.;-)
Um, you can sue a restaurant where the food tastes lousy, or (more relevantly) if it's not what they described on the menu, if they charge you for it before you have a chance to see or taste it, and if they then refuse to remedy it. Once they have your money, they have an obligation to deliver what they promised, and if they refuse to do so, the courts are your final resort.
Indeed, who needs billions of bogomips of processing when you have a deaf guy and a lesbian to notice the one signal that really matters. Wait, wasn't there a token black guy as well? And do we need a golden haired child, or was that the lesbian as a kid? Oh god, I can't remember! It's hopeless, I tell you, hopeless, there are too many variables.
I wanted a dedicated gaming box, so I put together a system with a Celeron 400 and a Voodoo3. Sure, it only plays games at 5fps and it cost twice as much as a PS2, Xbox or Gamecube, but it runs Linux. I said it runs Linux!
Sigh. I get the essential coolness of hacking things together, but this is such a poor solution that I really can't see it as anything other than a big fat waste of time and money.
Well... can this system do any of those things in its current form? No, it can't, and if your answer is that it could do them with $X extra hardware, then that's an entirely different debate.
tivo.com says you need a subscription, tivo.co.uk say if offers "limited functionality". Got a link that shows that it won't offer minimal functionality (high quality record, playback, pause) which is still more than this kludge offers?
But my point is that even with hacked client, the client/server model was paranoid enough to prevent it from being a game-wrecker. There was only so much that a hacked client could do, i.e. some info-borg features like showing cloakers (but still with very limited information and use) and auto-aiming of weapons which was often counterproductive.
Who am I talking to, BTW? I can be contacted at postmaster@&.org for chats and reminiscing.
That could have funded US defence needs for over a whole month. And if you think I'm joking, you need to spend some more time investigating what your taxes are actually being spent on.
Netrek figured this out about fifteen years ago. The source is open, so it was assumed from day 1 that clients couldn't be trusted. Attempts at client authentication were added later, but those were add ons (and could be and were subverted), they weren't the prime means of preventing cheating.
The strength of the Netrek model is that the game was designed from its infancy to send exactly and only the information that each client needs to display what it's supposed to be displaying. For example, cloaked units are supposed to be shown as unidentified contacts and on the galactic window only, with erratic position and irregular updates. One of the first things a hacked client developer will do is to display them on the tactical window as well, and there's nothing that the design can do to stop that. Also, it's not perfect; an ID is sent for the cloaked units, so the client can show what they really are. However, the server does only send irregular updates, and it flat out lies about the position, heading and speed of the unit, so the client can only show so much.
One of the most controversial design decisions involved torpedo weapons. The servers sends "start" and "end" packets, but instead of sending speed and heading and letting the client handle movement of the weapon, it sends regular "position" updates, with a jitter built in. This increases the bandwidth requirement significantly, but it means that the client doesn't know the exact speed and heading of the weapon, so can't make an easy calculation about how to dodge it.
The Netrek model is replete with decisions like this. There are a few snafus (like the cloaked ship ID), but in general there is very little that a client can display that it's not supposed to. And believe me, I tried.
The reason for this tight design is simple if you think about it. Netrek, like XPilot and Xfire, was originally an X-display game. The server handled both mechanics and display. When Netrek moved to a TCP(later UDP)/IP based model, that model was preserved and the server took on a lot of responsibility for culling information that each client shouldn't know.
It never fails to amaze me that commercial games developers never seem to learn the lessons that open source projects can teach them. I know (from bitter experience) that there's a huge rush to get results on screen, but hey, guys, do it right, don't do it twice.
I would like formally to apply for the role of "low level drone" in the Cult of Wheaton. I struggled against it, but to no avail. You epitomise all that is great and good in geekness. Please, let me join your Army of Dorkness, that I may contribute in a small way to your elevation to Spod Emperor. What is thy bidding, my master?
And the scary bit is... I'm not joking. Wil is one seriously self aware guy, and I'm prepared to do a bit of chanting and genuflecting in his cause.
The majority of humans on earth can find enough food quite easily. The exceptions are visible and pitiful, but they are exceptions.
The problem (depending on your point of view) is that for many of them there's little point in doing more work than is necessary to eat, because they don't have access to markets that provide the juicy consumer goods or expensive treat-the-symptoms pharmaceticals that we're lucky enough to have access to.
In other words, if you take a Yanomami and her 4 hour work / 20 hour leisure day in the rainforest, and transplant her to the city then she has to work 10 or 12 hours a day to pay for her apartment and refridgerator and save up for a TV. I'm not saying that's inherently bad, just that you shouldn't confuse lack of possessions with being on the verge of starvation.
Well, quite. What - exactly - are the benefits of Palladium to various users?
Gary Gamer: Zilch. Gary wants performance, not security. He very likely also wants to be able to run hacked games (pirated or benign no-cd hacks).
Harry Homebody: Less potential for picking up nasties. But Microsoft could fix that right now by taking Outlook Express out of promiscuous mode.
Karl Cubicle: Same as Harry Homebody. There's no direct benefit for Karl.
Iris IT: Sure, she can lock systems down properly and stop Karl from installing his toys, but she can do that right now if she knows her stuff. Likewise for the virii protection, same as Harry and Karl.
Colin CEO: Score! There's one big benefit for Colin; he can send out documents that self destruct and cover his tracks. Ask Enron and Worldcom about the benefits of that.
Synopsis: there's only one type of user that will benefit from Palladium. Fortunately, that's the type that owns and controls everything, including IT budgets and politicians. Oh goody.
"Neither Linux nor Unix ties the operating system to hardware," [Enderle] said.
I had to read this twice to realise that Enderle means that in a negative way. Dear god. The individual words make sense, but we're clearly not speaking the same language.
This just confirms that Microsoft's vision for future PC's really is nothing more than super-X-boxen, running only Microsoft apps. Or, app singular. And if there's a single app handling everything, it has to handle everything, so is there room for any third party software?
Further, given that the X-box is Microsoft branded right now, I wonder when Dell et al will start to wonder if Microsoft will be happy with trusting third parties to build their new toy. After all, it's all about trust, right? At what point will Microsoft decide - and start telling Joe Public - that a "Microsoft PC" is more trustworthy than an identical box built by Dell?
I surely hope I wouldn't be able to call my new product "Sun Network Management Administrator"
Why would you do that when you probably mean to call it "Solaris Network Management Administrator", which describes what it is rather than passing off who made it. Similarly "Windows Gadget" is descriptive and very different from "Microsoft Gadget". Your example is badly flawed.
Lets look at ratios. Three dupes from slashdot, thirteen thousand, four hundred and twelve dupes from idiots bitching about slashdot duping. It's hard to bitch about duping AND be taken seriously, when the bitch is a dupe. Atleast the stories are more interesting...
All stories are user submitted, user edited, and user voted on. Even the site owner has to go through voting to get meta stories accepted. All users can moderate all comments all the time.
I hope for their own sake that they brought CRC checksums of each file with them and that they can connect those to the actual transfer of the p2p user
Why? It will be a civil case, not a criminal one. If Denmark follows the US and UK then the standard of proof will be "balance of probabilities", not "beyond all reasonable doubt".
Frankly, all they'll have to prove beyond doubt is that these people are users of Kazaa. After that, the balance of probability is that they are content raping leeches (aka freedom loving subversives, pick your own spin for the same activities). For every person that screams about their fair uses of P2P on Slashdot, there are hundreds? thousands? millions? of people who just don't care, and probably haven't even thought about what they're doing. Hey, if it was wrong, somebody would make them stop, right?
Well somebody just has, and if these people are smart, they'll pay up now. It's not a good risk for any individual to stand up to this. It'll take somebody very dumb, brave and/or rich to fight it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what we're asking is: what is a reasonable interpretation of this? Can you ROT13 something and claim DMCA protection? Or could you just "tOgGlE CaPiTaLiSaTiOn" or perhaps "redro eht esrever" or something equally as silly?
That "effectively" looks like yet another example of lawyers (50% of both Houses are members of the American Bar Association) making more work for their own kind by introducing extraneous and nebulous terms, either deliberate or through an appaling lack of foresight ("A well ordered militia...").
I can recommend this as a read. I challenged the author on a few points over on K5, and he responded intelligently and eruditely. This isn't the usual Angry Young Guy fare, but a reasoned and reasonable lament for the genuine aspiration to freedom and democracy in the USA, with some very practical suggestions about what to do about it. Read it, ponder it, act on it.
...must really be annoying him.
He's a publicity whore. So shush. Just shush now.
Sure, they could lie about the most prevalant use of P2P, or they could just keep pushing for Sony decision to be applied here: that even though most use of P2P (at the moment) is infringing, there is a substantial non-infringing use, which is enough to justify not banning the technology, and if copyright holders want to profit from the technology, they are free to do so as they did (big time) with VCR's after they finally lost the case and had to stop whinging about them.
There's no need to take the moral high ground here, just keep reciting the precedent and challenge the ??AA to prove why it should be otherwise for P2P.
Google reckons that "Congenital color vision deficiency overwhelmingly affects more men than women. About 10 million men in the United States (7% of the male population) have a color vision deficiency compared to 0.4% of women. Caucasian men experience the highest prevalence of this disorder." et al.
Try a colour vision deficiency test yourself.
C.f. the overheard conversation in Return to Castle Wolfenstein:
It's funny, until you ask the Institute of Electrical Engineers (largely composed of caucasian men) whether they require their members to be able to distinguish wiring colours. Go on, ask them. ;-)
Um, you can sue a restaurant where the food tastes lousy, or (more relevantly) if it's not what they described on the menu, if they charge you for it before you have a chance to see or taste it, and if they then refuse to remedy it. Once they have your money, they have an obligation to deliver what they promised, and if they refuse to do so, the courts are your final resort.
Indeed, who needs billions of bogomips of processing when you have a deaf guy and a lesbian to notice the one signal that really matters. Wait, wasn't there a token black guy as well? And do we need a golden haired child, or was that the lesbian as a kid? Oh god, I can't remember! It's hopeless, I tell you, hopeless, there are too many variables.
I wanted a dedicated gaming box, so I put together a system with a Celeron 400 and a Voodoo3. Sure, it only plays games at 5fps and it cost twice as much as a PS2, Xbox or Gamecube, but it runs Linux. I said it runs Linux!
Sigh. I get the essential coolness of hacking things together, but this is such a poor solution that I really can't see it as anything other than a big fat waste of time and money.
Well... can this system do any of those things in its current form? No, it can't, and if your answer is that it could do them with $X extra hardware, then that's an entirely different debate.
tivo.com says you need a subscription, tivo.co.uk say if offers "limited functionality". Got a link that shows that it won't offer minimal functionality (high quality record, playback, pause) which is still more than this kludge offers?
Whoops, I meant mailto:postmaster@< my name>.org, and see also http://www.< my name>.org
But my point is that even with hacked client, the client/server model was paranoid enough to prevent it from being a game-wrecker. There was only so much that a hacked client could do, i.e. some info-borg features like showing cloakers (but still with very limited information and use) and auto-aiming of weapons which was often counterproductive. Who am I talking to, BTW? I can be contacted at postmaster@&.org for chats and reminiscing.
That could have funded US defence needs for over a whole month. And if you think I'm joking, you need to spend some more time investigating what your taxes are actually being spent on.
Netrek figured this out about fifteen years ago. The source is open, so it was assumed from day 1 that clients couldn't be trusted. Attempts at client authentication were added later, but those were add ons (and could be and were subverted), they weren't the prime means of preventing cheating.
The strength of the Netrek model is that the game was designed from its infancy to send exactly and only the information that each client needs to display what it's supposed to be displaying. For example, cloaked units are supposed to be shown as unidentified contacts and on the galactic window only, with erratic position and irregular updates. One of the first things a hacked client developer will do is to display them on the tactical window as well, and there's nothing that the design can do to stop that. Also, it's not perfect; an ID is sent for the cloaked units, so the client can show what they really are. However, the server does only send irregular updates, and it flat out lies about the position, heading and speed of the unit, so the client can only show so much.
One of the most controversial design decisions involved torpedo weapons. The servers sends "start" and "end" packets, but instead of sending speed and heading and letting the client handle movement of the weapon, it sends regular "position" updates, with a jitter built in. This increases the bandwidth requirement significantly, but it means that the client doesn't know the exact speed and heading of the weapon, so can't make an easy calculation about how to dodge it.
The Netrek model is replete with decisions like this. There are a few snafus (like the cloaked ship ID), but in general there is very little that a client can display that it's not supposed to. And believe me, I tried.
The reason for this tight design is simple if you think about it. Netrek, like XPilot and Xfire, was originally an X-display game. The server handled both mechanics and display. When Netrek moved to a TCP(later UDP)/IP based model, that model was preserved and the server took on a lot of responsibility for culling information that each client shouldn't know.
It never fails to amaze me that commercial games developers never seem to learn the lessons that open source projects can teach them. I know (from bitter experience) that there's a huge rush to get results on screen, but hey, guys, do it right, don't do it twice.
I would like formally to apply for the role of "low level drone" in the Cult of Wheaton. I struggled against it, but to no avail. You epitomise all that is great and good in geekness. Please, let me join your Army of Dorkness, that I may contribute in a small way to your elevation to Spod Emperor. What is thy bidding, my master?
And the scary bit is... I'm not joking. Wil is one seriously self aware guy, and I'm prepared to do a bit of chanting and genuflecting in his cause.
Boll, and further, ocks.
The majority of humans on earth can find enough food quite easily. The exceptions are visible and pitiful, but they are exceptions.
The problem (depending on your point of view) is that for many of them there's little point in doing more work than is necessary to eat, because they don't have access to markets that provide the juicy consumer goods or expensive treat-the-symptoms pharmaceticals that we're lucky enough to have access to.
In other words, if you take a Yanomami and her 4 hour work / 20 hour leisure day in the rainforest, and transplant her to the city then she has to work 10 or 12 hours a day to pay for her apartment and refridgerator and save up for a TV. I'm not saying that's inherently bad, just that you shouldn't confuse lack of possessions with being on the verge of starvation.
Well, quite. What - exactly - are the benefits of Palladium to various users?
Synopsis: there's only one type of user that will benefit from Palladium. Fortunately, that's the type that owns and controls everything, including IT budgets and politicians. Oh goody.
I had to read this twice to realise that Enderle means that in a negative way. Dear god. The individual words make sense, but we're clearly not speaking the same language.
This just confirms that Microsoft's vision for future PC's really is nothing more than super-X-boxen, running only Microsoft apps. Or, app singular. And if there's a single app handling everything, it has to handle everything, so is there room for any third party software?
Further, given that the X-box is Microsoft branded right now, I wonder when Dell et al will start to wonder if Microsoft will be happy with trusting third parties to build their new toy. After all, it's all about trust, right? At what point will Microsoft decide - and start telling Joe Public - that a "Microsoft PC" is more trustworthy than an identical box built by Dell?
That Phoenix changes its name to "Windows of Perception" or something similar
Why would you do that when you probably mean to call it "Solaris Network Management Administrator", which describes what it is rather than passing off who made it. Similarly "Windows Gadget" is descriptive and very different from "Microsoft Gadget". Your example is badly flawed.
Lets look at ratios. Three dupes from slashdot, thirteen thousand, four hundred and twelve dupes from idiots bitching about slashdot duping. It's hard to bitch about duping AND be taken seriously, when the bitch is a dupe. Atleast the stories are more interesting ...
www.kuro5hin.org
All stories are user submitted, user edited, and user voted on. Even the site owner has to go through voting to get meta stories accepted. All users can moderate all comments all the time.
And yes, it does scale.
Is the last thing you hear the ping of death?
According to government records the only names not yet trademarked are Popplers and Zitsels.
Or how about "Sosumi Browser"?
Why? It will be a civil case, not a criminal one. If Denmark follows the US and UK then the standard of proof will be "balance of probabilities", not "beyond all reasonable doubt".
Frankly, all they'll have to prove beyond doubt is that these people are users of Kazaa. After that, the balance of probability is that they are content raping leeches (aka freedom loving subversives, pick your own spin for the same activities). For every person that screams about their fair uses of P2P on Slashdot, there are hundreds? thousands? millions? of people who just don't care, and probably haven't even thought about what they're doing. Hey, if it was wrong, somebody would make them stop, right?
Well somebody just has, and if these people are smart, they'll pay up now. It's not a good risk for any individual to stand up to this. It'll take somebody very dumb, brave and/or rich to fight it.