If you can make it hard enough to do so that only a minority of people have the savvy to do it, you can track them down and ass rape them.
Ask any of the bunch of warez pirates who got caught recently in a global operation. I'm not condoning warez piracy, just pointing out that sneering in contempt at these crazy laws is a great way to have yourself promoted to the top of the Least Patriotic Americans list.
if [Disney] think SSSCA is merely "moderate", I'd hate to imagine what they *really* want.
Mandatory neural implants, so they can encrypt the content until it reaches your brain. Wonderful control, plus it allows you to identify the traitors and baby raping pirates because they're the ones still using external MP3 or DVD players.
Come back in 50 years and we'll laugh about how wrong I was.
The entire article reads like a blowjob for the RIAA and MPAA
I think most of us accept that blowjobs have played a large part in recent (i.e. post hunter-gatherer) politics. What's scary is that we accept it, on the basis that Our Guy might be a corrupt, morally bankrupt scumbag, but at least he's not a stinking Republican or Democrat or (god help us) Libertarian.
Why does it matter if you're one or the other? This is a federal issue. In fact, it's pretty much an international issue, as any US standard will be de facto global. And a voter? Bah. What if you voted for the other guy (or gal, although there's at most three women on this list)? More significant to say that you're not a voter, but this could be the issue that decides you, for or against them.
call today to register your opposition to this proposed bill
Mmm. But seriously, the MPAA can offer roofied starlets, truckloads of soft money, and safe jobs for idiot nephews. What have we got to offer? What have we got to threaten with? 90% of political incumbents are reelected. We accept that they're corrupt, and we no longer even care (en masse).
You keep up the polite lobbying, I'm going to keep plugging away at the civil disobedience angle. History shows that to have a pretty good record of success.
We trust the people enough to sell lethal firearms to anybody who walks in off of the street [...] We trust the people enough to let a soccer mom drive a 3-ton truck with no special training. [...] But we don't trust the people enough to let them have a general-purpose computer.
Let's play spot the difference. Scenarios 2 involves a public, easy to understand announcement. "We were shocked to discover that women have twice as many driving accidents per mile as men [true, incidentally] and so have banned soccer moms from driving behemoth vehicles". Uproar! Unsustainable. The effect is immediate and visible, there's no way to weasel around it.
Scenario 1: "Anyone can have guns! Except criminals, even those with spent convictions. Or those associating with criminals. Or complete whackos who want weapons that could only be used for slaying dozens of kiddies [or for forming "an effective militia", which is what the second amendment actually says]. Or evil baby raping terrorists, and so on. But not you. We like you." Already happened, we just didn't notice. There's enough wriggle room and "we're not after you [yet]" involved to sneak it through inch by inch.
Scenario 3: "For your protection and convenience, we have upgraded the security on all digital devices sold in the USA.". Ba-boom. It's done. It's even true - from a certain point of view. By the time Joe Sixpack realises (if he ever does) that he was scammed, it's post facto, and bills don't get taken off the books. That's not what Congress and the Senate are for. They're for adding new laws, because new laws are good for, well, lawyers. 50% of both Congress and the Senate are members of the American Bar Association. Do the maths.
If Google started charging tomorrow, suppose it's $5 a month, would I lose respect for them and would I pay for it? [...] Yes I would pay for it because their content is valuable to me
I agree that Google is the only service that I would consider paying for, because it's so powerful and so clean.
Only, after considering it, I wouldn't really, because I could get the functionality (plus adverts that my hosts file filters out anyway) via one of the idiots already licensing their technology and hoping to pay for it through hosting auctions, or selling semi-sentient sock puppets, or whatever.
To sell a service on the internet you need this:
Your service has to have "respect" (mindshare, in weasel terms). Google has genuine respect. Slashdot has, er, mindshare.
You have to be selling shinola, not shit.
Nobody else can be giving away shit.
It's those last two that provide the problem. It's not necessary for you to be the only shinola vendor, but neither is that sufficient for you to be able to charge. Given the choice between paying for shinola, or getting free shit, I know which way most of us (be honest) would jump.
In all honesty, I think that if Google started charging and stopped licensing its technology, making it a pay-for-shinola versus free-shit proposition, I would go back to using the pre-Google Inktome licensees and putting up with the banners. Sad but true.
Yes, I know that makes me part of the problem, but I honestly believe that the idea of commercial content on the internet was doomed from the get-go, and that we should enjoy the ride while we can, then go on about the Golden Age to our grandkids who'll be sharing ASCII porn over port 80 on their 100GB/s down, 9.6Kb/s up ADSL modems.
Offer people a good product, at the price the market is willing to bear, and they will buy it.
Unless there's an equally slick and well packaged alternative available for free exactly one click away. Been on the 'net recently? It simply doesn't map well to any other model or analogy: there's a very low cost of entry for suppliers, no expectation of payment by consumers, and it's a transparent market, so you can't obfuscate your charges like long distance phone companies do.;-)
The only analogy that springs to mind is a huge and ongoing flea market, in one massive field, with free admission for everyone. Unless you are the only seller with shinola, and everyone else is selling shit, you can't charge, because your customers will just wander off. Hell, even if you are the only one selling genuine shinola, there's so many other stalls giving away "shinola-like" products that your customers might just wander off and never find their way back.
What's my solution? Give up trying to make money on the 'net, stupid. But hell, as long as greedy and ignorant venture capitalists are prepared to throw good money after bad in wonderful follies like Slashdot, I'm happy to go to their stall. When it bows to the inevitable and shuts up shop (or starts charging, which is effectively the same), there will still be plenty of other equally daft vendors opening up free stalls. And if there isn't, well, I was never paying anything, so I haven't lost anything, other than my investment in whoring karma.
People who say that we should expect to pay to support sites like Slashdot are rather missing the point. The whole model of commercial sites is doomed, unless they're genuine retaillers like Amazon. High quality non-retail sites are simply fuckedcompanies from the get-go, and the sooner we all admit that (quietely), the sooner we can get back to lapping up the benefits of spending money from rich, greedy, ignorant venture capitalists, and enjoying the lovely short lived ride. It's going to be over soon, and you and I (if we're being honest) just aren't going to pay for another go on it.
the big problem with your theory is that you can't copy toothbrushes
It's not a perfect analogy, but the lesson is about supply and demand. How about telling people how to make mouthwash for 2 roubles a gallon then? That's "replacing the retail channels".
We still learn what music we want to hear from the Radio and from MTV; we just use P2P technology to get it cheaper/for free
And that would suggest more sharing would lead to lower sales. The figures don't back that up. They rather suggest that sharing follows and supplements retail sales of high quality originals, just like it's done since reel-to-reel copies of vinyl.
P2P should be replacing the advertising channels. Instead it's trying to replace the retail channels. And that really is illegal.
One of us has been smoking too much crack. When the fuck did "replacing a retail channel" become illegal? When were markets legally protected? Don't anti-trust laws exist to stop that? Didn't the Napster judge just give some scathing comments about the music business running a cartel on distribution?
What is illegal is making copies of copyrighted material. I don't dispute that for a second. But we have to keep this totally separate from the market arguments. The RIAA likes to imply that the sanctity of existing channels is inviolate and god given. They trot this out and go on the offensive to avoid answering the simple question of when they're going to change their model to direct, cheap, convenient sales of single tracks. "Because that's the way it's always been, and we have to put all of our resorces into preserving the status quo and quoshing all alternatives" is not an answer, and they have no legal or moral grounds for demanding that hard copy sales must increase year-on-year simply because that's the way they want to supply them. Sheesh.
The RIAA continues to harp on declining profits and the disasterous effects of Napster and other P2P sites because their agenda, I think, from day one has been to get some sort of legislation that gives them the power of a Federal agency, while maintaining their for-profit status [...] Their releases make liberal use of the words, such as "piracy" and "illegal."
You forgot to mention that they are protecting the National Economy (ergo, the Free Market, ergo the Free World), and (in the case of the MPAA) they're beseiged by filthy foreign pirates flooding the country with stolen DVD's and such.
I agree with you absolutely, and have done since about 1995, when them DMCA was just a glint in a crack addled lobbyist's eye. Back then, this was crazy talk. When the DMCA passed, we gasped and laughed and thought it would never stand, and largely missed the point that the DMCA was never the final goal, just a means to generate very public failed attempts to stop the Evil Pirates. We couldn't imagine anything worse than the DMCA, so we (largely) assumed that this was as bad as it could get, and that we could beat the DMCA by fighting it.
Then the SSSCA arrived, put a toe in the water, and slunk off to wait for the propaganda to soften us up. I think that was the catalyst that prompted a lot of people to realise the long term plan.
Hear this clearly: the music industry lobbyists aren't stupid. Greedy, ruthless, soulless. But not stupid. They know they can't control the market given current technology. They know they can't stop street corner swapping by making street corners (P2P services) illegal. The goal from day 1 has been to demonstrate that they can't control it, because of that pesky old assumption of innocence thing.
So, here comes the SSSCA. While we debate whether the DMCA was too far, the lobbyists whisper in their bought politicians' ears that the debate is really how much further should we go?. If we let people have hardware that allows them to copy data, of course they're going to copy it. I mean, politicians are corrupt and greedy, record industry lobbyists are corrupt and greedy, so everybody must be corrupt and greedy. Offer a roofied starlet to a Senator, and the question isn't "Should I fuck her up the ass?", it's "Can I fuck her up the ass without getting caught?". Why should Joe Public be different?
I personally think that the RIAA must be really pissed off with P2P figures right now. I mean, they never intended to win the case against Napster. The whole idea was to show that it was unwinnable, that they needed extra powers. Their lawyers got out of hand, and forgot the goal. And now we see that P2P figures match CD sales. They can't spin it otherwise. They want to show P2P taking off while sales plummet, but we just stupidly keep on buying the CD's when there's anything decent to buy, and only sharing music when it's worth sharing. Damn our honesty!
Oh, what's the use? We've been over this so many times. Our politicians are so endemically corrupt that we've stopped even caring. The SSSCA will be bought and forced on us before Joe Sixpack knows what's happening. A small core of us will say "Told you so," but that'll be cold comfort.
Hey ho. Buy the biggest drives you can, while you can. Stock up on blank CD's and DVD's. Enjoy our brief Golden Age of being given the choice of "easy and cheap but criminal" or "restrictive and expensive but legal" music purchases, before it becomes a choice between expensive crippleware or nothing. Hey fucking ho.
Just last week a sorority girl told me - " I love downloading music, I haven't bought any cds since I got the computer"... you have to remember Slashdot is geared towards the geeky type. Many of us like buying the cds to support the artist and just to get the nice labeling and pamphlet inside it.
Fully fledged bastard of a good point. The amazing thing is that there is any debate about this at all on fora like Slashdot. For the majority of people, it's simply not wrong. If it were wrong, it would be hard to do, or there would be a threat of punishment. It isn't and there isn't, so it must be OK, right? Or, like, The Authorities would stop it, or something (assuming they even get that far in their thought processes).
And yet... and yet... the metrics don't support that. We see P2P use and CD sales rise and fall in unison. We (being geeks) assume that the P2P sharing drives enthusiasm for buying CD's. The RIAA selectively misrepresents the figures to "prove" that sharing kills sales.
Is there a simpler answer?
That there is no cause-effect from sharing to sales? That it's all the other way around, just like it's been for the past fifty years or so? When there's a lot of good music around, CD sales go up, and that drives extra traffic in P2P sharing. When the music sucks, sales drop, and people don't even care enough to share.
Both the RIAA and the geek brigade have agenda to show that P2P drives sales (down and up respectively), but (anecdotes aside) there's no direct evidence to support that. Perhaps CD purchasers are buying music using the same criteria that they have for the past fifty some years: does it suck? How much does it cost? Do I want my own good quality CD, or a shitty MP3/analogue tape/reel to fucking reel copy from my friend?
Anecdotes aside, copying has always been extra to shelf sales. The figures seem to indicate that's still the case. People who are going to buy music are still buying it, even though they don't have to.
Why do we get defensive every time the RIAA trots out the "falling sales, evil pirates, end of civilisation as we know it" line?
Why don't we respond with: "Yeah, sales are down, and it's your fault, you soulless reptiles. What the fuck are you going to do about it? I hate your over engineered muzak, and the dead eyed meat puppets that mime to it, and your old fashioned distribution system, and the fact that most of the cost of an album goes to weaels in marketing and legal, up the noses of desparately unhappy borderline morons in G-strings, or in <strike>bribes </strike> campaign contributions. Fix it, and fix it now, or get the hell out of the way and let someone else have a go at supplying the demand rather than trying to control it through an abusive monopoly."
I have to admit that for the first time I began to believe the music industry had a point about piracy when I saw a grey haired woman pushing 60 in the coffee shop talking to her friend about all the music she'd downloaded on the weekend using Kaaza.
Pop quiz (pun intended):
How much had did that lady spend on music last year before discovering Kazaa?
If your answer was "zero", explain how the RIAA can have "lost" any money from her non purchases this year.
You know, when the Soviet Union was coming apart from within, and they finally admitted that it was farcical to try and control demand for products, we all nodded smugly and went "Uh huh, but of course". We laughed at the notion that you can decide how many and what color of cheap plastic toothbrushes to make five years in advance, on the basis that people will only demand the shoddy, expensive products that you produce.
Strangely, we blithely ignored the fact that the same model was alive and well in the USA with music. A (de facto) single huge conglomerate decided how many albums we would buy, and the "artists", the content, and the price, all in advance. They expected that demand would match the predetermined supply.
And then we learned the Soviet lesson. Street vendors started selling toothbrushes more cheaply than the state shops. Some of them were even better quality than (gasp) the cheap plastic state approved ones. It was illegal, but they were massively popular. And over here, we started to see guys on the corner giving music away. It was illegal, sure, but it was undeniably popular. We, the People wanted it.
Strangely, the Russians (nee Soviets) adapted. They deregulated. They said to the toothbrush sellers "Go ahead, supply the demand. Come in out of the cold, run the shops, pay taxes. Everybody wins."
We haven't got there yet. We're still at the stage of trying to stamp out street corner trading by making street corners illegal. It's farcical, and it will look increasingly so with hindsight. We need to take a look at the Russian model: if you criminalise demand, all you are doing is spending a lot of time, effort and money into turning a lot of people into criminals. Far better to bring it in out of the cold, ask We, the People what we actually want, and come to a fair compromise.
Please don't respond with the childish "We want free music, so there can't be any compromise.". Russians want free toothbrushes, but they're happy to settle for paying for convenient access to a wider choice of better toothbrushes. Similarly, we want free music, but at the moment, our choice is free music, expensive CD's, or a tiny selection of expensive and crippled digital tracks. Give us the opportunity to buy only the tracks we want, in high quality, without idiotic content control, and without paying for the priveledge of having them marketed to us, and we might find out that we actually still like buying music after all.
First, this is an EBM story. Why link to a 2nd hand
report that has a link to the primary source right on the page?
Second, it's spurious: "An Intel workstation roadmap secured by EBN" strongly implies that this is not an official Intel announcement.
Third, while it's not such a huge deal for Intel, it's a huge furry deal for Rambus Inc., the well known firm of lawyers. Rambus Inc. is a public company, and as such has an obligation to announce significant events effecting future earnings. "A spokeswoman for Rambus Inc. said she couldn't comment on new Intel workstation chipsets supporting DDR, and referred all questions to Intel" simply doesn't cut it. Rambus Inc. might be greedy lying parasites, but they're surely not stupid enough to sit on information that they must - must - have known about prior to this (alleged) policy change.
Given that Rambus Inc. share price rose 22% yesterday based on the news that Intel had adopted the 533Mhz FSB to support RDRAM, the SEC will no doubt be having a good, long look at their disclosures and these "yes we will/no we won't" announcements, and asking who exactly is releasing them, and who is benefitting from the share fluctuations.
Let's hold fire on this until it's been confirmed by both Intel and Rambus Inc. Please. Pretty please.
Re:CA unemployment myths vs realities: my own stor
on
OddTod Laid Low by the Law
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Myth 6: The benefits system has any kind of internal consistency.
Reality:
Welfare office: OK, let's see. From your description of your domestic situation, I have to record that you are living with a partner as man and wife. As she is a full time student, our procedure says that she must claim benefits for you as a dependent partner. You are therefore not elegible to receive separate unemployment benefit, even though you are attending higher education for fewer than 16 hours per week while actively seeking work.
Me: Uh, but wait, to claim married student benefits, we have to provide a marriage certificate, at least three years old. But we're not actually married. So, what should we do?
Welface office: (looking around) OK. Off the record, I recommend you lie to us and say you're sleeping on the couch. Then we can lie about you living together as man and wife, and you can get unemployment benefit while you look for work. Also, don't tell us that you're attending higher education part time, as it just creates more paperwork for us while cutting you exactly zero slack.
Me: So, basically you're saying that the system is screwed, you know it's screwed, and the best way to obtain the benefits that it's honestly intended to deliver is to lie and scam it?
Welfare office: Pretty much.
Me: Well, ok then. By the way, I'm doing some irregular teaching assistant work that brings in the occasional $30 or so. How do I declare that?
Welfare office: I'm sorry, I seem to have gone temporarily deaf.
I was pretty young and naieve then, you can tell. The trouble was that I didn't understand that the system is set up to support binary states: In work. Out of work. Nothing in the middle, no gray areas. You practically have to lie through your teeth (with the state's tacit collusion) to get enough to live on, and at some point when you get a job that pays a living wage, you're expected to stop lying.
Trouble is, once you get used to the idea that pretty much everybody in the benefits system is involved in a huge scam (and that the benefits office colludes out of compassion), it begs the question: at what point exactly does it become wrong to lie, when at $1 a week less, it was OK?
the price and the size of the water-cooled notebook PC will remain about the same. Power consumption will also be approximately equal, Uchiyama says. However, the water cooling system should have a life cycle that is 1.7 times longer than an air-cooled system
So... they don't make any extra profit (probably less for an identical retail price), there's no extended battery life (so how is this "more efficient"?), and the only benefit is that it (apparently) lives longer than an air cooled system, a fairly intangible benefit even for a corporate purchaser, given that by the time the air cooling system is likekly to give out, the laptop will have moved so far down the corporate food chain that it will probably have long since been "recycled" by a sticky fingered employee.
Some problems with this.
1) Anyone ever heard of the fan giving out on a laptop?
2) Wouldn't it be more cost efficient to put in a 50 cent (manufacturing cost) fan rather than a 35 cent one?
3) Why would a manufacturer want to extend the lifetime of their kit? To sell less kit? Riiiiiight.
Technology for technology's sake? This is a demo unit, and is smells to me like some R&D czar trying to garner some media interest in a dying project. It's nice technology, but it seems largely pointless.
At a local level, my local civic amenities centre has finally started taking sorted refuse... but when pressed (again and again and again) they finally admitted that - with the exception of lead-acid batteries - it all goes to landfill. Glass, card, paper, everything. They can't give it away, not even to burn as fuel. The sorting is just to build up a reliable supply in case someone can be persuaded to recycle some of it in the future. YMMV, and I truly hope that it does.
My point (now that I'm finally getting to it) is that recycling is a feel-good crock. Unless you actually know for a fact that the components you hand over are going to find their way back into the manufacturing chain - and without being stripped out by unprotected third world labor - then the best thing you can do with old equipment is re-use it. A Pentium-anything with at least 16Mb of RAM will never be obsolete, because you can use it as a DSL router. You don't even need a monitor, if you use an OS that supports a serial console. In fact, you don't want to use a "modern" system, because they just turn more electricity into heat, for exactly zero extra useful work.
If you absolutely can't find a use for it, then sure, give it to schools or colleges (and if they won't take it even to pass on to students, ask them why not). Sell it for chump change in your local paper. Give it away in your local paper, or at yard sales. The one thing I wouldn't recommend is the (semi fatuous) method of leaving it lying around with a "free" sign on it. Yes, you'll probably be rid of it, but the taker will most likely toss it in a dumpster once they find out nobody wants to buy old hardware.
What you claim to do is a disgrace to all those who practice true civil disobedience
History by Mel Gibson. Actual history is replete with examples of those who contributed to civil disobedience anonymously, and gave moral support to those who were prepared to stand up and take the big risks.
Declining to pay taxes to the British crown during the American revolution was common theft at the time, right? I'm not sure how that's significantly different from someone refusing to pay the Movie Tax, a significant part of which goes to "royalty", e.g. movie stars, producers, and bought policians, most of whom are thoroughly corrupt in every moral and legal sense.
I'm not suggesting that we should celebrate the anoymously disobedient, just that we shouldn't flame them.
This is not civil disobedience, it is common thievery
The instigators of the American revolution were common (pun intented) traitors.
The civil war tramped all over property rights and turned brother against brother.
Speakeasies were both illegal and immoral.
Coloured rights protestors were thugs and vandals.
Anti-Vietnam draft dodgers were... well, insert your own pejorative term from the period. Cowardly traitors?
The single lesson: society changes. Morality changes. Legality changes. Most protestors are technically wrong when they start out, and are only viewed as having the moral high ground when they win and write the history books.
Every time those in power no longer agree with the populace, civil disobedience or armed insurrection follows. Read some history.
You should be fighting for fair-use, and reductions of copyight protection terms, not blatently fueling the flames of oppression
The poster was quite clear: this is quite deliberate civil disobedience. If you check your history (US in particular), you will find that significant changes in society come about through mass civil disobedience or armed insurrection, not through debate or polite lobbying by individuals. War of Independence, Civil War, anti-slavery, anti-prohibition, coloured rights, anti-Vietnam draft protests. All of these involved large groups of people who stood up and said "Boo sucks to the law", and we got a better society out of it.
98.7% of car owners would like other car owners to take public transport (note: humour, but it's funny because it's true)
The British climate is not conducive to relying on two wheel transport, either powered or unpowered.
The British climate is not conducive to waiting at vandalised bus stops or train stations for busses and trains that are often late or cancelled.
Public transport is a lottery in the UK. Anyone who tells you that it's fast and reliable means fast and reliable on their particular route, and nothing else. Trains are routinely cancelled because of strikes, leaves on the line, or the infamous "wrong kind of snow". Bus routes change randomly. Competition means that services from rival companies that are supposed to alternate e.g. every fifteen minutes often arrive racing each other every half hour. Suburban-urban or urban-urban commuting is possible, but my own suburban-suburban commuting choice is ten miles and fifteen minutes by car, or fifty miles and over two hours by two busses and two trains. Work through the environmental effect of that.
Anyone who tells you that you should move closer to your job is living in some strange 1950's world where you have a job for life (or for more than two years, which has been my average as a software engineer). Enter the real world of mortgages and house-hunting and gazumping (sellers verbally agreeing to sell, then reneging in favour of a higher bidder at the last moment, legal in England and Wales), and see how you feel about driving an extra ten miles as opposed to uprooting yourself every two years, which incidentally screws your credit rating.
In the UK we already pay a fixed annual license fee of approximately $150, plus very nearly $5 a gallon for gasoline. Despite this, we still have abominably heavy traffic in some areas at some times. Raising the cost of using cars simply isn't working. People will pay almost anything and put up with long delays to retain their cars, including crippling fuel taxes (that hurt rural areas most) and parking fees, including levees on parking on your employers grounds. This proposal directly targets specific areas and periods of congestion. You will (effectively) be billed for sitting in traffic jams. In fact, this would be an extreme way of implementing it: the slower you go, the more you get charged. Yes, this sucks. That's the idea. If you don't like it, find another route, or wait half an hour, find another job, or move.
We have to do something. Better public transport is a prerequisite, but it's not enough, because no matter how good we make it, it will still suck compared to driving your own car. As of 2003, London looks like implementing a £5 ($7.50) a day charge on cars entering the city, no exceptions, no excuses, using the existing OCR traffic monitoring network.
The security hole is this: bnetd is open source. I release a patch removing all your nifty security passthrough code.
Gnnn, I'll type this slowly. That's not a security hole, which is what Blizzard are claiming. Read what they said.
And if bnetd servers don't use the Blizzard authentication servers, then it's no worse than it is now, and Blizzard get to take the moral high ground. Perhaps they could consider going after individual servers, rather than the project itself. You know, police the crime, not the tools? Old fashioned notion, I know.
First, the servers would have to keep in sync (I suspect that they do this already, to allow multiple servers to authenticate) to prevent re-use of keys across different servers.
Yup, I'll bet pennies to pounds that there are already separate authentication servers internally. All we want is for them to be made public.
Second, it costs Blizzard extra money to support someone else's framework, with very little visible benefit to them.
The only cost is in extra bandwidth for the key/response packets going to bnetd servers. Compare that to the savings in Battle.net packets it buys them and it starts looking like a pretty good deal. It doesn't put any more strain on their network, as those servers should be up 24/365 anyway.
Look, Blizzard claim that they care about stopping piracy, and providing an enjoyable gaming experience. They can enable both of those by helping the bnetd project help them. I wouldn't even mind if they were honest about it, and just closed bnetd down "Because we can.". Actually, that's their first point. What aggravates me is that they go on to lie through their teeth about the technicalities of it. I prefer honest thugs to backstabbing weasels any day.
If the rogue bnetd server just happens not to be able to contact battlenet, what then?
Same as now: it throws away the key packet and doesn't authenticate. Blizzard is no worse off. It also adds a little more incentive to keep 100% uptime on the authentication servers, if not the whole of Battle.net.
What would be the backwards-compatability implications if Blizzard were to change?
None. The change is all at the Battle.net server end; instead of the main servers doing the authentication themselves, they querys the authentication servers like anyone else.
It's actually possible (likely?) that this already happens internally, but what we're talking about it moving the authentication servers to a different netblock and publicising where they are. That's really all it would take to call bnetd's bluff and get some metrics on the scale of piracy that's actually going on due to bnetd.
Make this offer to blizzard : the bnetd supplies the server game code, but passes the authentication off to a Blizzard-run server....
I suggest that you and the moderators read Blizzard's response. Blizzard have already declined to support this because they claim it might compromise their encryption and security.
Two things:
This is a lie.
bnetd could do it anyway, but it would be in Blizzard's best interests to make it easier.
Go search for my other comments in here to find out why.
However, if I were consulting for Blizzard, I would probably recommend that they not do such a thing because (a) it wouldn't do any good, people would just hack the verification code out of bnetd
That's not a technical issue, that's an assumption of guilt issue. Blizzard have nothing to lose by setting up independent authentication servers, and everything to gain. If nobody uses them, they lose nothing, and they gain some metrics that back up their opinion that bnetd is all about piracy.
and (b) there have been lots of interesting oracle-based attacks on ciphers in the past, and while none are known for the current crop of strong block ciphers, new discoveries may happen at any time
Not really getting you. All that the bnetd servers would be doing would be passing on packets that they are already receiving. There need be no disclosure or hints of the key encryption scheme. The only thing bnetd could be doing with knowing is the format of the Battlenet server "yes/no" reply to the key packet, but that would be trivial to sniff.
Can you explain further how splitting off the authentication would be a risk? Bear in mind that bnetd servers could go through the whole process today, sending on all packets from the client until they reach the authentication reply from the server, it's just counterproductive for them to do so as they aim to be independent of the flakey Battlenet servers.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can make it hard enough to do so that only a minority of people have the savvy to do it, you can track them down and ass rape them.
Ask any of the bunch of warez pirates who got caught recently in a global operation. I'm not condoning warez piracy, just pointing out that sneering in contempt at these crazy laws is a great way to have yourself promoted to the top of the Least Patriotic Americans list.
Mandatory neural implants, so they can encrypt the content until it reaches your brain. Wonderful control, plus it allows you to identify the traitors and baby raping pirates because they're the ones still using external MP3 or DVD players.
Come back in 50 years and we'll laugh about how wrong I was.
I think most of us accept that blowjobs have played a large part in recent (i.e. post hunter-gatherer) politics. What's scary is that we accept it, on the basis that Our Guy might be a corrupt, morally bankrupt scumbag, but at least he's not a stinking Republican or Democrat or (god help us) Libertarian.
Why does it matter if you're one or the other? This is a federal issue. In fact, it's pretty much an international issue, as any US standard will be de facto global. And a voter? Bah. What if you voted for the other guy (or gal, although there's at most three women on this list)? More significant to say that you're not a voter, but this could be the issue that decides you, for or against them.
Mmm. But seriously, the MPAA can offer roofied starlets, truckloads of soft money, and safe jobs for idiot nephews. What have we got to offer? What have we got to threaten with? 90% of political incumbents are reelected. We accept that they're corrupt, and we no longer even care (en masse).
You keep up the polite lobbying, I'm going to keep plugging away at the civil disobedience angle. History shows that to have a pretty good record of success.
... by making all of your existing hardware obselete overnight. For your convenience and protection!
Let's play spot the difference. Scenarios 2 involves a public, easy to understand announcement. "We were shocked to discover that women have twice as many driving accidents per mile as men [true, incidentally] and so have banned soccer moms from driving behemoth vehicles". Uproar! Unsustainable. The effect is immediate and visible, there's no way to weasel around it.
Scenario 1: "Anyone can have guns! Except criminals, even those with spent convictions. Or those associating with criminals. Or complete whackos who want weapons that could only be used for slaying dozens of kiddies [or for forming "an effective militia", which is what the second amendment actually says]. Or evil baby raping terrorists, and so on. But not you. We like you." Already happened, we just didn't notice. There's enough wriggle room and "we're not after you [yet]" involved to sneak it through inch by inch.
Scenario 3: "For your protection and convenience, we have upgraded the security on all digital devices sold in the USA.". Ba-boom. It's done. It's even true - from a certain point of view. By the time Joe Sixpack realises (if he ever does) that he was scammed, it's post facto, and bills don't get taken off the books. That's not what Congress and the Senate are for. They're for adding new laws, because new laws are good for, well, lawyers. 50% of both Congress and the Senate are members of the American Bar Association. Do the maths.
I agree that Google is the only service that I would consider paying for, because it's so powerful and so clean.
Only, after considering it, I wouldn't really, because I could get the functionality (plus adverts that my hosts file filters out anyway) via one of the idiots already licensing their technology and hoping to pay for it through hosting auctions, or selling semi-sentient sock puppets, or whatever.
To sell a service on the internet you need this:
It's those last two that provide the problem. It's not necessary for you to be the only shinola vendor, but neither is that sufficient for you to be able to charge. Given the choice between paying for shinola, or getting free shit, I know which way most of us (be honest) would jump.
In all honesty, I think that if Google started charging and stopped licensing its technology, making it a pay-for-shinola versus free-shit proposition, I would go back to using the pre-Google Inktome licensees and putting up with the banners. Sad but true.
Yes, I know that makes me part of the problem, but I honestly believe that the idea of commercial content on the internet was doomed from the get-go, and that we should enjoy the ride while we can, then go on about the Golden Age to our grandkids who'll be sharing ASCII porn over port 80 on their 100GB/s down, 9.6Kb/s up ADSL modems.
Unless there's an equally slick and well packaged alternative available for free exactly one click away. Been on the 'net recently? It simply doesn't map well to any other model or analogy: there's a very low cost of entry for suppliers, no expectation of payment by consumers, and it's a transparent market, so you can't obfuscate your charges like long distance phone companies do. ;-)
The only analogy that springs to mind is a huge and ongoing flea market, in one massive field, with free admission for everyone. Unless you are the only seller with shinola, and everyone else is selling shit, you can't charge, because your customers will just wander off. Hell, even if you are the only one selling genuine shinola, there's so many other stalls giving away "shinola-like" products that your customers might just wander off and never find their way back.
What's my solution? Give up trying to make money on the 'net, stupid. But hell, as long as greedy and ignorant venture capitalists are prepared to throw good money after bad in wonderful follies like Slashdot, I'm happy to go to their stall. When it bows to the inevitable and shuts up shop (or starts charging, which is effectively the same), there will still be plenty of other equally daft vendors opening up free stalls. And if there isn't, well, I was never paying anything, so I haven't lost anything, other than my investment in whoring karma.
People who say that we should expect to pay to support sites like Slashdot are rather missing the point. The whole model of commercial sites is doomed, unless they're genuine retaillers like Amazon. High quality non-retail sites are simply fuckedcompanies from the get-go, and the sooner we all admit that (quietely), the sooner we can get back to lapping up the benefits of spending money from rich, greedy, ignorant venture capitalists, and enjoying the lovely short lived ride. It's going to be over soon, and you and I (if we're being honest) just aren't going to pay for another go on it.
It's not a perfect analogy, but the lesson is about supply and demand. How about telling people how to make mouthwash for 2 roubles a gallon then? That's "replacing the retail channels".
And that would suggest more sharing would lead to lower sales. The figures don't back that up. They rather suggest that sharing follows and supplements retail sales of high quality originals, just like it's done since reel-to-reel copies of vinyl.
One of us has been smoking too much crack. When the fuck did "replacing a retail channel" become illegal? When were markets legally protected? Don't anti-trust laws exist to stop that? Didn't the Napster judge just give some scathing comments about the music business running a cartel on distribution?
What is illegal is making copies of copyrighted material. I don't dispute that for a second. But we have to keep this totally separate from the market arguments. The RIAA likes to imply that the sanctity of existing channels is inviolate and god given. They trot this out and go on the offensive to avoid answering the simple question of when they're going to change their model to direct, cheap, convenient sales of single tracks. "Because that's the way it's always been, and we have to put all of our resorces into preserving the status quo and quoshing all alternatives" is not an answer, and they have no legal or moral grounds for demanding that hard copy sales must increase year-on-year simply because that's the way they want to supply them. Sheesh.
You forgot to mention that they are protecting the National Economy (ergo, the Free Market, ergo the Free World), and (in the case of the MPAA) they're beseiged by filthy foreign pirates flooding the country with stolen DVD's and such.
I agree with you absolutely, and have done since about 1995, when them DMCA was just a glint in a crack addled lobbyist's eye. Back then, this was crazy talk. When the DMCA passed, we gasped and laughed and thought it would never stand, and largely missed the point that the DMCA was never the final goal, just a means to generate very public failed attempts to stop the Evil Pirates. We couldn't imagine anything worse than the DMCA, so we (largely) assumed that this was as bad as it could get, and that we could beat the DMCA by fighting it.
Then the SSSCA arrived, put a toe in the water, and slunk off to wait for the propaganda to soften us up. I think that was the catalyst that prompted a lot of people to realise the long term plan.
Hear this clearly: the music industry lobbyists aren't stupid. Greedy, ruthless, soulless. But not stupid. They know they can't control the market given current technology. They know they can't stop street corner swapping by making street corners (P2P services) illegal. The goal from day 1 has been to demonstrate that they can't control it, because of that pesky old assumption of innocence thing.
So, here comes the SSSCA. While we debate whether the DMCA was too far, the lobbyists whisper in their bought politicians' ears that the debate is really how much further should we go?. If we let people have hardware that allows them to copy data, of course they're going to copy it. I mean, politicians are corrupt and greedy, record industry lobbyists are corrupt and greedy, so everybody must be corrupt and greedy. Offer a roofied starlet to a Senator, and the question isn't "Should I fuck her up the ass?", it's "Can I fuck her up the ass without getting caught?". Why should Joe Public be different?
I personally think that the RIAA must be really pissed off with P2P figures right now. I mean, they never intended to win the case against Napster. The whole idea was to show that it was unwinnable, that they needed extra powers. Their lawyers got out of hand, and forgot the goal. And now we see that P2P figures match CD sales. They can't spin it otherwise. They want to show P2P taking off while sales plummet, but we just stupidly keep on buying the CD's when there's anything decent to buy, and only sharing music when it's worth sharing. Damn our honesty!
Oh, what's the use? We've been over this so many times. Our politicians are so endemically corrupt that we've stopped even caring. The SSSCA will be bought and forced on us before Joe Sixpack knows what's happening. A small core of us will say "Told you so," but that'll be cold comfort.
Hey ho. Buy the biggest drives you can, while you can. Stock up on blank CD's and DVD's. Enjoy our brief Golden Age of being given the choice of "easy and cheap but criminal" or "restrictive and expensive but legal" music purchases, before it becomes a choice between expensive crippleware or nothing. Hey fucking ho.
Fully fledged bastard of a good point. The amazing thing is that there is any debate about this at all on fora like Slashdot. For the majority of people, it's simply not wrong. If it were wrong, it would be hard to do, or there would be a threat of punishment. It isn't and there isn't, so it must be OK, right? Or, like, The Authorities would stop it, or something (assuming they even get that far in their thought processes).
And yet... and yet... the metrics don't support that. We see P2P use and CD sales rise and fall in unison. We (being geeks) assume that the P2P sharing drives enthusiasm for buying CD's. The RIAA selectively misrepresents the figures to "prove" that sharing kills sales.
Is there a simpler answer?
That there is no cause-effect from sharing to sales? That it's all the other way around, just like it's been for the past fifty years or so? When there's a lot of good music around, CD sales go up, and that drives extra traffic in P2P sharing. When the music sucks, sales drop, and people don't even care enough to share.
Both the RIAA and the geek brigade have agenda to show that P2P drives sales (down and up respectively), but (anecdotes aside) there's no direct evidence to support that. Perhaps CD purchasers are buying music using the same criteria that they have for the past fifty some years: does it suck? How much does it cost? Do I want my own good quality CD, or a shitty MP3/analogue tape/reel to fucking reel copy from my friend?
Anecdotes aside, copying has always been extra to shelf sales. The figures seem to indicate that's still the case. People who are going to buy music are still buying it, even though they don't have to.
Why do we get defensive every time the RIAA trots out the "falling sales, evil pirates, end of civilisation as we know it" line?
Why don't we respond with: "Yeah, sales are down, and it's your fault, you soulless reptiles. What the fuck are you going to do about it? I hate your over engineered muzak, and the dead eyed meat puppets that mime to it, and your old fashioned distribution system, and the fact that most of the cost of an album goes to weaels in marketing and legal, up the noses of desparately unhappy borderline morons in G-strings, or in <strike>bribes </strike> campaign contributions. Fix it, and fix it now, or get the hell out of the way and let someone else have a go at supplying the demand rather than trying to control it through an abusive monopoly."
Oh wait, I just said it.
Pop quiz (pun intended):
How much had did that lady spend on music last year before discovering Kazaa?
If your answer was "zero", explain how the RIAA can have "lost" any money from her non purchases this year.
You know, when the Soviet Union was coming apart from within, and they finally admitted that it was farcical to try and control demand for products, we all nodded smugly and went "Uh huh, but of course". We laughed at the notion that you can decide how many and what color of cheap plastic toothbrushes to make five years in advance, on the basis that people will only demand the shoddy, expensive products that you produce.
Strangely, we blithely ignored the fact that the same model was alive and well in the USA with music. A (de facto) single huge conglomerate decided how many albums we would buy, and the "artists", the content, and the price, all in advance. They expected that demand would match the predetermined supply.
And then we learned the Soviet lesson. Street vendors started selling toothbrushes more cheaply than the state shops. Some of them were even better quality than (gasp) the cheap plastic state approved ones. It was illegal, but they were massively popular. And over here, we started to see guys on the corner giving music away. It was illegal, sure, but it was undeniably popular. We, the People wanted it.
Strangely, the Russians (nee Soviets) adapted. They deregulated. They said to the toothbrush sellers "Go ahead, supply the demand. Come in out of the cold, run the shops, pay taxes. Everybody wins."
We haven't got there yet. We're still at the stage of trying to stamp out street corner trading by making street corners illegal. It's farcical, and it will look increasingly so with hindsight. We need to take a look at the Russian model: if you criminalise demand, all you are doing is spending a lot of time, effort and money into turning a lot of people into criminals. Far better to bring it in out of the cold, ask We, the People what we actually want, and come to a fair compromise.
Please don't respond with the childish "We want free music, so there can't be any compromise.". Russians want free toothbrushes, but they're happy to settle for paying for convenient access to a wider choice of better toothbrushes. Similarly, we want free music, but at the moment, our choice is free music, expensive CD's, or a tiny selection of expensive and crippled digital tracks. Give us the opportunity to buy only the tracks we want, in high quality, without idiotic content control, and without paying for the priveledge of having them marketed to us, and we might find out that we actually still like buying music after all.
First, this is an EBM story. Why link to a 2nd hand report that has a link to the primary source right on the page?
Second, it's spurious: "An Intel workstation roadmap secured by EBN" strongly implies that this is not an official Intel announcement.
Third, while it's not such a huge deal for Intel, it's a huge furry deal for Rambus Inc., the well known firm of lawyers. Rambus Inc. is a public company, and as such has an obligation to announce significant events effecting future earnings. "A spokeswoman for Rambus Inc. said she couldn't comment on new Intel workstation chipsets supporting DDR, and referred all questions to Intel" simply doesn't cut it. Rambus Inc. might be greedy lying parasites, but they're surely not stupid enough to sit on information that they must - must - have known about prior to this (alleged) policy change.
Given that Rambus Inc. share price rose 22% yesterday based on the news that Intel had adopted the 533Mhz FSB to support RDRAM, the SEC will no doubt be having a good, long look at their disclosures and these "yes we will/no we won't" announcements, and asking who exactly is releasing them, and who is benefitting from the share fluctuations.
Let's hold fire on this until it's been confirmed by both Intel and Rambus Inc. Please. Pretty please.
Myth 6: The benefits system has any kind of internal consistency.
Reality:
I was pretty young and naieve then, you can tell. The trouble was that I didn't understand that the system is set up to support binary states: In work. Out of work. Nothing in the middle, no gray areas. You practically have to lie through your teeth (with the state's tacit collusion) to get enough to live on, and at some point when you get a job that pays a living wage, you're expected to stop lying.
Trouble is, once you get used to the idea that pretty much everybody in the benefits system is involved in a huge scam (and that the benefits office colludes out of compassion), it begs the question: at what point exactly does it become wrong to lie, when at $1 a week less, it was OK?
So... they don't make any extra profit (probably less for an identical retail price), there's no extended battery life (so how is this "more efficient"?), and the only benefit is that it (apparently) lives longer than an air cooled system, a fairly intangible benefit even for a corporate purchaser, given that by the time the air cooling system is likekly to give out, the laptop will have moved so far down the corporate food chain that it will probably have long since been "recycled" by a sticky fingered employee.
Some problems with this.
Technology for technology's sake? This is a demo unit, and is smells to me like some R&D czar trying to garner some media interest in a dying project. It's nice technology, but it seems largely pointless.
Ah, recycling. What a noble concept. I wonder when (if ever) we're going to start doing it?
"Recycled" US computers typically end up as Chinese landfill.
At a local level, my local civic amenities centre has finally started taking sorted refuse... but when pressed (again and again and again) they finally admitted that - with the exception of lead-acid batteries - it all goes to landfill. Glass, card, paper, everything. They can't give it away, not even to burn as fuel. The sorting is just to build up a reliable supply in case someone can be persuaded to recycle some of it in the future. YMMV, and I truly hope that it does.
My point (now that I'm finally getting to it) is that recycling is a feel-good crock. Unless you actually know for a fact that the components you hand over are going to find their way back into the manufacturing chain - and without being stripped out by unprotected third world labor - then the best thing you can do with old equipment is re-use it. A Pentium-anything with at least 16Mb of RAM will never be obsolete, because you can use it as a DSL router. You don't even need a monitor, if you use an OS that supports a serial console. In fact, you don't want to use a "modern" system, because they just turn more electricity into heat, for exactly zero extra useful work.
If you absolutely can't find a use for it, then sure, give it to schools or colleges (and if they won't take it even to pass on to students, ask them why not). Sell it for chump change in your local paper. Give it away in your local paper, or at yard sales. The one thing I wouldn't recommend is the (semi fatuous) method of leaving it lying around with a "free" sign on it. Yes, you'll probably be rid of it, but the taker will most likely toss it in a dumpster once they find out nobody wants to buy old hardware.
History by Mel Gibson. Actual history is replete with examples of those who contributed to civil disobedience anonymously, and gave moral support to those who were prepared to stand up and take the big risks.
Declining to pay taxes to the British crown during the American revolution was common theft at the time, right? I'm not sure how that's significantly different from someone refusing to pay the Movie Tax, a significant part of which goes to "royalty", e.g. movie stars, producers, and bought policians, most of whom are thoroughly corrupt in every moral and legal sense.
I'm not suggesting that we should celebrate the anoymously disobedient, just that we shouldn't flame them.
Incidentally, what's your contribution?
The instigators of the American revolution were common (pun intented) traitors.
The civil war tramped all over property rights and turned brother against brother.
Speakeasies were both illegal and immoral.
Coloured rights protestors were thugs and vandals.
Anti-Vietnam draft dodgers were... well, insert your own pejorative term from the period. Cowardly traitors?
The single lesson: society changes. Morality changes. Legality changes. Most protestors are technically wrong when they start out, and are only viewed as having the moral high ground when they win and write the history books.
Every time those in power no longer agree with the populace, civil disobedience or armed insurrection follows. Read some history.
The poster was quite clear: this is quite deliberate civil disobedience. If you check your history (US in particular), you will find that significant changes in society come about through mass civil disobedience or armed insurrection, not through debate or polite lobbying by individuals. War of Independence, Civil War, anti-slavery, anti-prohibition, coloured rights, anti-Vietnam draft protests. All of these involved large groups of people who stood up and said "Boo sucks to the law", and we got a better society out of it.
An excellent summary. Some cultural points:
Gnnn, I'll type this slowly. That's not a security hole, which is what Blizzard are claiming. Read what they said.
And if bnetd servers don't use the Blizzard authentication servers, then it's no worse than it is now, and Blizzard get to take the moral high ground. Perhaps they could consider going after individual servers, rather than the project itself. You know, police the crime, not the tools? Old fashioned notion, I know.
Yup, I'll bet pennies to pounds that there are already separate authentication servers internally. All we want is for them to be made public.
The only cost is in extra bandwidth for the key/response packets going to bnetd servers. Compare that to the savings in Battle.net packets it buys them and it starts looking like a pretty good deal. It doesn't put any more strain on their network, as those servers should be up 24/365 anyway.
Look, Blizzard claim that they care about stopping piracy, and providing an enjoyable gaming experience. They can enable both of those by helping the bnetd project help them. I wouldn't even mind if they were honest about it, and just closed bnetd down "Because we can.". Actually, that's their first point. What aggravates me is that they go on to lie through their teeth about the technicalities of it. I prefer honest thugs to backstabbing weasels any day.
Same as now: it throws away the key packet and doesn't authenticate. Blizzard is no worse off. It also adds a little more incentive to keep 100% uptime on the authentication servers, if not the whole of Battle.net.
None. The change is all at the Battle.net server end; instead of the main servers doing the authentication themselves, they querys the authentication servers like anyone else.
It's actually possible (likely?) that this already happens internally, but what we're talking about it moving the authentication servers to a different netblock and publicising where they are. That's really all it would take to call bnetd's bluff and get some metrics on the scale of piracy that's actually going on due to bnetd.
I suggest that you and the moderators read Blizzard's response. Blizzard have already declined to support this because they claim it might compromise their encryption and security.
Two things:
Go search for my other comments in here to find out why.
That's not a technical issue, that's an assumption of guilt issue. Blizzard have nothing to lose by setting up independent authentication servers, and everything to gain. If nobody uses them, they lose nothing, and they gain some metrics that back up their opinion that bnetd is all about piracy.
Not really getting you. All that the bnetd servers would be doing would be passing on packets that they are already receiving. There need be no disclosure or hints of the key encryption scheme. The only thing bnetd could be doing with knowing is the format of the Battlenet server "yes/no" reply to the key packet, but that would be trivial to sniff.
Can you explain further how splitting off the authentication would be a risk? Bear in mind that bnetd servers could go through the whole process today, sending on all packets from the client until they reach the authentication reply from the server, it's just counterproductive for them to do so as they aim to be independent of the flakey Battlenet servers.