a. When you change your MAC address it does not change the number burned into the card. It's only changed in the host configuration which is checked by device drivers before the card is physically checked. I'm sure XP will directly read the hardware.
b. Making a key generator for MS products has been difficult to date. Chances are it will take a long time before one is made for XP.
Lots of people (I would say the majority of Internet users) are still on dial-up too, they get a new IP address everytime they dial in. It's not like a social security number.
Or people will just stick with their win98 boxes or NT or 2K or whatever and never upgrade. I think the only revenue MS will see from this is from pre-activated new boxes. I for one would rather use an old os than that.
The way most protections work like this is on installation, hardware is accessed to compute a "request key". You can then tell this "request key" to a person on the phone who will type it into their super secret decoder ring and give you back a "response key" to activate the software. Change hardware and the "request key" changes therefore the "response key" changes also. I am using software like this now, and it is a complete pain in the ass, but because we NEED the software must comply. I agree with everyone though, this type of licensing stinks.
Huge difference. With a blank CD or tape you can make ONE copy to give to someone else. It is arguable that many more blank CD's are sold for legal purposes than for illegal. At work we use them for backups and go through a ton. At home I use them under fair use for copies of CD's that I own to take in the car. Lose one or scratch it all up and no problem, make another. With Napster the sole purpose is to share with other people. Not a single copy as with tapes or CD's but thousands of people. If I stood on a street corner and gave out 10,000 copies of a Metallica CD you would bet that a lawyer would come down on me. That is a MAJOR difference. Sure Napster has a legitimate business in file sharing. Several new companies are on the rise that will take advantage of this in a legal way. Napster from it's inception was about sharing copyrighted music. Now it's paying the price.
I guess I really didn't mean they deserve it in the regard that we should all go out and rip them off, I meant that they shouldn't be crying about it if it has happened. If they are on the internet selling stuff then at least the minimum of precautions should be taken against getting ripped off. I am only saying that this is a known vulnerability and should be well-known to anyone using and especially writing shopping cart software. This type of vulnerability should not have happened in the first place.
Do you write code for web sites? It is REALLY not that hard to implement and is REALLY foolish not to. I wouldn't dream of writing this kind of code for someone else. What you say is correct, people shouldn't do this kind of stuff, but the fact is they will and it's somebody's job (in some cases mine) to make sure it doesn't happen.
This vulnerability has been around for a while. The linked article is from October of last year and I remember seeing this at least a year ago. If this is still happening it is nobody's fault except the vendor that sells the shopping cart software. It is unbelievable that this is still happening.
If people continue to circumvent Napster's filters, this will force the court to simply shut them down. Napster already lost in court, their only hope is to remain open long enough to figure out how to make money with their service. If they cannot comply with the courts rulings of filtering copyrighted material the court will just pull the plug on the whole thing.
Actually, no they didn't use de-encoding technology. They opened a shared file on your drive with a name that looks just like their song with a few letters rearranged. No decoding there.
Absolutely right. And add to that eventually Napster 2 will suffer the fate of all.coms, make money or go away. If you can't pay for yourself you will run out of money and shut down. If you can't make enough money to make people who put their sweat into it to make it what it is rich, they will leave for somewhere that will pay "what they deserve" and you will shut down. So eventually you need to make money. You start to sell the stuff. You start to promote certain artists so you can "maximize your profits". You enter into contracts with some artists to "help" them break into the business and "maximize your profits". You hire some whiz bang business people to effectively run your business. Maybe you go the dot com route and do an IPO and then have shareholders to please. Then you have just another record label. One more company trying to make money between the artist and the consumer. They will NOT survive simply by giving away free stuff and pissing off the artists they are trying to make money from.
The real problem will be when they have to defend themselves. Sealand probably has no treaties with other nations to help in their defense, and if they piss off enough countries whose to say that some 'renegade' pirates or terrorists or something decide to come in and take over? Or even better, England could declare war and just take it back. I don't think there would be much of a struggle.
If you read the history, this is the case. I don't recall the exact details but it goes something like this. Sealand is in International waters outside of Englands territory. It was abandoned years ago and the current tenants started living there. Somewhere in Englands laws it says something to the effect that if a territory is abandoned for so long, it is no longer England's and this is where the loophole is. It is past that time period so legally (by England's own laws) it is not theirs any more. England has tried to increase the amount of water they own off their shore to include Sealand, but legal experts say that it is too late, Sealand is it's own country. They have to go to court to decide and England doesn't want to press it for fear of looking foolish if they lose.
That's a little different problem though. That is happening IN the Philippines. Sure from OUR legal standpoint it hurts our artists and businesses, but the whole process of distribution is on there soil. MP3's can be downloaded from anywhere any number of times. There is very little cost setting up distribution (you don't have to have a physical disk for each copy) so a 14 year old with a cable connection can give away thousands of copies.
Considering most ISP's have budgets slightly less than governments I think your right, they would make the most likely target. And it would probably be wiser for them to drop a connection than to go to court for who knows how long.
I agree. My-mp3.com did have an ethical business model. If you have already purchased a copy of the music, you should be able to get it in any format similar to the way software used to work in the old days. Bought it on 5 1/4 disks? Buy it on 3 1/2 for 5 bucks plus shipping. Now these were $50 games so the 5$ was really cheap compared to the original cost. There should be some type of similar system for all IP. I really think you should be able to buy CD's at a huge discount if you have it on cassette or Vinyl. However in Napster's it's really just a pirate tool with a big budget.
When it will show is when bandwidth gets great enough that you can download and burn a copy at the same time in a total of 3 or 4 minutes. When that is a reality you can bet there will be point and click software to go with it. Download a scan of the cover art and your good to go. There would be NO reason to buy a CD. I think that mp3 downloads are theft and don't have a collection, but if it got to that I would definitely download music over buying it. It would be dumb not to. Granted, the technology is not there yet. That's why we have not seen any music sales decreases, but it will be soon enough.
The overhead of stamping out CD's, manufacturing the packaging and shipping the completed CD's to the retailer is a very small amount of the CD's price. Cutting that out won't bring down the cost of music. The problem right now is pricing it at the rate of $4.80 per hour is that they will sell it exactly once and then everyone will get it free of charge from their favorite ftp site, newsgroup or currently, Napster. The million dollar problem is how to prevent that from happening and when they can they will jump all over digital distribution if they can make money at it.
If they didn't have a say in the production of music, for example, do you think CD's could cost $15-20? No way, CD's would cost $5. Same goes for soda... if it wasn't for new competition, soda prices would've continued to rise. Even though they have stopped raising soda prices, the cost of production is disgustingly low in comparison to price. I argue that this is caused by the monopolist grip the soda industry had on production until the early 1990's.
The reason that production costs are so different from selling price isn't just all profit. They have to pay for multi-million dollar superbowl ads and celebrity endorsements and all that so us consumers can know the difference between "pepsi" and "coke". As for record companies, they also have the marketing dollars plus all the artists that are produced that sell 10 cd's during their lifetime. I'm not saying that they are not making money hand over fist, but you can't just look at cost of production to calculate a selling price.
I really doubt Van Gogh had problems with a bunch of leet kidz sending his work all over the world while he was trying to sell them. He didn't get rich because his paintings were not valuable until after his death. I think that it is the artists choice how to distribute their songs. If they prefer to give away mp3's more power to them, but if they want to sell them pressed into cd's then that is their right. I am also not saying that without copyrights we wouldn't have art, just alot less.
The purpose is not allowing the artist to get rich off his writings - that is a necessary part of the promotion of the copyrighted material.
The purpose is to allow them to make money from their work and to get rich if the work is good. That is what promotes the progress of science and the arts. If all artists and scientists gave all of their work away for free, there would be alot fewer artists and scientists. Especially the talented/smart ones because they would be doing something else that did allow them to put food on the table.
I somewhat agree. In work environments, virus checkers are a must. There is too much to lose in productivity and important files to risk not having a virus scanner. At home, I never run one. I don't have what I would consider "irreplaceable" (well ok, my save games would cause a little frustration at being lost, but they are only games) files at home and I don't like the performance hit and bugs that running a virus scanner causes. I have lost a motherboard due to CIH at home. Fried a bios on an older motherboard and the disk. I could get the disk back, but not the motherboard. At work just last month I received an e-mail from a client that had a virus in it. Their scanners were not up to date and it had infected about 5 computers. That was from opening an e-mail from a trusted source. It sometimes happens, you just need to assess the risk.
I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, but it's kind of funny to see everyone up in arms about this. Lots of people are upset about THEM getting into YOUR stuff and giving it away(personal info), but you don't mind YOU getting THEIR stuff and giving it away. Anyone using Napster for sharing files that are in the public-domain (ie not copywritten) I apologize.
Slashdot Mirror
a. When you change your MAC address it does not change the number burned into the card. It's only changed in the host configuration which is checked by device drivers before the card is physically checked. I'm sure XP will directly read the hardware.
b. Making a key generator for MS products has been difficult to date. Chances are it will take a long time before one is made for XP.
Lots of people (I would say the majority of Internet users) are still on dial-up too, they get a new IP address everytime they dial in. It's not like a social security number.
Or people will just stick with their win98 boxes or NT or 2K or whatever and never upgrade. I think the only revenue MS will see from this is from pre-activated new boxes. I for one would rather use an old os than that.
The way most protections work like this is on installation, hardware is accessed to compute a "request key". You can then tell this "request key" to a person on the phone who will type it into their super secret decoder ring and give you back a "response key" to activate the software. Change hardware and the "request key" changes therefore the "response key" changes also. I am using software like this now, and it is a complete pain in the ass, but because we NEED the software must comply. I agree with everyone though, this type of licensing stinks.
Huge difference. With a blank CD or tape you can make ONE copy to give to someone else. It is arguable that many more blank CD's are sold for legal purposes than for illegal. At work we use them for backups and go through a ton. At home I use them under fair use for copies of CD's that I own to take in the car. Lose one or scratch it all up and no problem, make another. With Napster the sole purpose is to share with other people. Not a single copy as with tapes or CD's but thousands of people. If I stood on a street corner and gave out 10,000 copies of a Metallica CD you would bet that a lawyer would come down on me. That is a MAJOR difference. Sure Napster has a legitimate business in file sharing. Several new companies are on the rise that will take advantage of this in a legal way. Napster from it's inception was about sharing copyrighted music. Now it's paying the price.
I guess I really didn't mean they deserve it in the regard that we should all go out and rip them off, I meant that they shouldn't be crying about it if it has happened. If they are on the internet selling stuff then at least the minimum of precautions should be taken against getting ripped off. I am only saying that this is a known vulnerability and should be well-known to anyone using and especially writing shopping cart software. This type of vulnerability should not have happened in the first place.
Do you write code for web sites? It is REALLY not that hard to implement and is REALLY foolish not to. I wouldn't dream of writing this kind of code for someone else. What you say is correct, people shouldn't do this kind of stuff, but the fact is they will and it's somebody's job (in some cases mine) to make sure it doesn't happen.
This vulnerability has been around for a while. The linked article is from October of last year and I remember seeing this at least a year ago. If this is still happening it is nobody's fault except the vendor that sells the shopping cart software. It is unbelievable that this is still happening.
If people continue to circumvent Napster's filters, this will force the court to simply shut them down. Napster already lost in court, their only hope is to remain open long enough to figure out how to make money with their service. If they cannot comply with the courts rulings of filtering copyrighted material the court will just pull the plug on the whole thing.
Actually, no they didn't use de-encoding technology. They opened a shared file on your drive with a name that looks just like their song with a few letters rearranged. No decoding there.
Absolutely right. And add to that eventually Napster 2 will suffer the fate of all .coms, make money or go away. If you can't pay for yourself you will run out of money and shut down. If you can't make enough money to make people who put their sweat into it to make it what it is rich, they will leave for somewhere that will pay "what they deserve" and you will shut down. So eventually you need to make money. You start to sell the stuff. You start to promote certain artists so you can "maximize your profits". You enter into contracts with some artists to "help" them break into the business and "maximize your profits". You hire some whiz bang business people to effectively run your business. Maybe you go the dot com route and do an IPO and then have shareholders to please. Then you have just another record label. One more company trying to make money between the artist and the consumer. They will NOT survive simply by giving away free stuff and pissing off the artists they are trying to make money from.
The real problem will be when they have to defend themselves. Sealand probably has no treaties with other nations to help in their defense, and if they piss off enough countries whose to say that some 'renegade' pirates or terrorists or something decide to come in and take over? Or even better, England could declare war and just take it back. I don't think there would be much of a struggle.
If you read the history, this is the case. I don't recall the exact details but it goes something like this. Sealand is in International waters outside of Englands territory. It was abandoned years ago and the current tenants started living there. Somewhere in Englands laws it says something to the effect that if a territory is abandoned for so long, it is no longer England's and this is where the loophole is. It is past that time period so legally (by England's own laws) it is not theirs any more. England has tried to increase the amount of water they own off their shore to include Sealand, but legal experts say that it is too late, Sealand is it's own country. They have to go to court to decide and England doesn't want to press it for fear of looking foolish if they lose.
That's a little different problem though. That is happening IN the Philippines. Sure from OUR legal standpoint it hurts our artists and businesses, but the whole process of distribution is on there soil. MP3's can be downloaded from anywhere any number of times. There is very little cost setting up distribution (you don't have to have a physical disk for each copy) so a 14 year old with a cable connection can give away thousands of copies.
Considering most ISP's have budgets slightly less than governments I think your right, they would make the most likely target. And it would probably be wiser for them to drop a connection than to go to court for who knows how long.
I agree. My-mp3.com did have an ethical business model. If you have already purchased a copy of the music, you should be able to get it in any format similar to the way software used to work in the old days. Bought it on 5 1/4 disks? Buy it on 3 1/2 for 5 bucks plus shipping. Now these were $50 games so the 5$ was really cheap compared to the original cost. There should be some type of similar system for all IP. I really think you should be able to buy CD's at a huge discount if you have it on cassette or Vinyl. However in Napster's it's really just a pirate tool with a big budget.
When it will show is when bandwidth gets great enough that you can download and burn a copy at the same time in a total of 3 or 4 minutes. When that is a reality you can bet there will be point and click software to go with it. Download a scan of the cover art and your good to go. There would be NO reason to buy a CD. I think that mp3 downloads are theft and don't have a collection, but if it got to that I would definitely download music over buying it. It would be dumb not to. Granted, the technology is not there yet. That's why we have not seen any music sales decreases, but it will be soon enough.
The overhead of stamping out CD's, manufacturing the packaging and shipping the completed CD's to the retailer is a very small amount of the CD's price. Cutting that out won't bring down the cost of music. The problem right now is pricing it at the rate of $4.80 per hour is that they will sell it exactly once and then everyone will get it free of charge from their favorite ftp site, newsgroup or currently, Napster. The million dollar problem is how to prevent that from happening and when they can they will jump all over digital distribution if they can make money at it.
If they didn't have a say in the production of music, for example, do you think CD's could cost $15-20? No way, CD's would cost $5. Same goes for soda... if it wasn't for new competition, soda prices would've continued to rise. Even though they have stopped raising soda prices, the cost of production is disgustingly low in comparison to price. I argue that this is caused by the monopolist grip the soda industry had on production until the early 1990's.
The reason that production costs are so different from selling price isn't just all profit. They have to pay for multi-million dollar superbowl ads and celebrity endorsements and all that so us consumers can know the difference between "pepsi" and "coke". As for record companies, they also have the marketing dollars plus all the artists that are produced that sell 10 cd's during their lifetime. I'm not saying that they are not making money hand over fist, but you can't just look at cost of production to calculate a selling price.
I really doubt Van Gogh had problems with a bunch of leet kidz sending his work all over the world while he was trying to sell them. He didn't get rich because his paintings were not valuable until after his death. I think that it is the artists choice how to distribute their songs. If they prefer to give away mp3's more power to them, but if they want to sell them pressed into cd's then that is their right. I am also not saying that without copyrights we wouldn't have art, just alot less.
Hehe I coded my newlines as "b" instead of "br". Oops.
The purpose is not allowing the artist to get rich off his writings - that is a necessary part of the promotion of the copyrighted material. The purpose is to allow them to make money from their work and to get rich if the work is good. That is what promotes the progress of science and the arts. If all artists and scientists gave all of their work away for free, there would be alot fewer artists and scientists. Especially the talented/smart ones because they would be doing something else that did allow them to put food on the table.
I somewhat agree. In work environments, virus checkers are a must. There is too much to lose in productivity and important files to risk not having a virus scanner. At home, I never run one. I don't have what I would consider "irreplaceable" (well ok, my save games would cause a little frustration at being lost, but they are only games) files at home and I don't like the performance hit and bugs that running a virus scanner causes. I have lost a motherboard due to CIH at home. Fried a bios on an older motherboard and the disk. I could get the disk back, but not the motherboard. At work just last month I received an e-mail from a client that had a virus in it. Their scanners were not up to date and it had infected about 5 computers. That was from opening an e-mail from a trusted source. It sometimes happens, you just need to assess the risk.
>> Is Napster doing anything about this?
Yeah, they're trying to make money.
I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, but it's kind of funny to see everyone up in arms about this. Lots of people are upset about THEM getting into YOUR stuff and giving it away(personal info), but you don't mind YOU getting THEIR stuff and giving it away. Anyone using Napster for sharing files that are in the public-domain (ie not copywritten) I apologize.