Bingo! The conspiracy isn't aimed at replacing the RIAA with another monopolistic organization. The point of the nefarious plan is to build a communication system that can't be monopolized and controlled. So you and your friends can make your own recordings directly available to your audience under whatever terms you prefer.
Recall that the DoD's original requirements were for a system with redundant paths, and the ability to automatically determine routes. The idea was that as long as there exists a data path between two machines, the routine software will discover the path and deliver the packets. As John Gilmor has been quoted as saying, the Net treats censorship as packet damage and routes around it.
All those people who are setting up their own web sites do "distribute" their music are following the scenario. And some of them are making money this way. They're just not sharing their money with the big corporations.
The only thing that can stop this is if the corporations can take control and prevent you from putting your own stuff online. They are trying, of course, and we can all hope that they'll fail.
>... and government should all be free to set their own policies regarding what sorts of software they will acquire and use.
I'd object to this. Governments should be required to use only software that is amenable to public examination. Otherwise the citizens will have no control over or access to their government's data.
We can see this clearly in the new voting equipment that's being installed in parts of Florida. They've bought equipment that contains closed, proprietary software. Citizens can't validate the outcome of elections using this software. Attempting to do so may even be illegal, under the DMCA. So anyone who can bribe the software vendors can control the election.
In general, people should be free but governments shouldn't. Governments should be accountable to their citizens. Proprietary software would be a major barrier to such accountability.
> You know you don't like it. You should leave. But where will you live?
When I faced this question a few decades ago, I did what a few thousand other young musicians with good math grades did: I went into computers. In particular, I got mixed up with communications software. We've spent the past quarter century building the recording industry's coffin.
If you think I'm kidding, ask a few "internet" programmers. You'll have a lot of trouble finding even one who isn't an amateur musician. Given the choice of a living making music, most of them would have jumped at it. But that choice wasn't available to us. So we built another kind of communication system.
This wasn't an accident. In high school, I understood full well that I'd have to be a total idiot (or an addicted gambler, which amounts to the same thing) to go into music as a profession. Only the owners of the recording companies made any money then and now. The top-selling bands couldn't live off their royalties.
And if you think the development of RIAA-killing software is an accident, go to the usenet archives and google for the topic. You'll find lots of discussion of how and why this was going to put music (and other information) back in the hands of the people who create it.
We haven't won yet. The political system and the courts could still take it all away from us and hand control of the Internet to the fat cats. But we will have tried.
The main battle now, actually, is to prevent the growing stranglehold on the "last mile" by the merged cable/phone companies. The best chance there is for all of you to go out and buy lots of wireless hardware. If we get the Net redundantly connected this way, there's no way they will be able to block the data path between artists and audience.
And look seriously at using IPv6. The commercial gang hasn't noticed it yet. It provides a great arena for unmoderated development. It includes encryption at the packet level, so they can't track what you're doing. By the time they wake up and try to take control, we can have a "distribution" system that they can't kill.
>... during the first and last two weeks of each semester, I see my bandwidth get killed...
So what we need is a project to do "p2p" file sharing efficiently.
The huge network "overhead" of kazaa, gnutella, and others has been well documented. And it's sorta silly. We obviously need a project to do it with very little overhead.
While we're at it, the software should include the port number as part of the address, so it can't be stopped by blocking specific ports.
The administration assumes that if you are using PSP you are making illegal copies. Very few people record their own music. So few people do this that it's not worth taking into consideration. If you are using P2P, they will assume that you're guilty of copyright violations, and it will be up to you to prove yourself innocent.
Also, it has been pointed out that you're at a school that gets a lot of money from the movie and recording industries. If you are allowed to distribute your own music without first signing it over to a recording company, you will shoot down the whole reason that those companies exist.
This is what it's all about, dummy. The Internet is providing artists like you with a new channel to your audience. That channel isn't under the control of the recording industry. You don't have to sign over the rights to your music to distribute it on the Internet. This is one of the things that the RIAA is trying to stop. They've realized that if they don't stop it, they'll be out of business.
This is all documented well enough in other places, including previous/. articles. Go google for them a bit...
In any case, something that I still don't see answered is: Am I vulnerable if my apache isn't using ssl?
Now, ssl is probably useful (if not mandatory) for most commercial web sites. But for a small site that's just making a few files available via http, is there any reason to upgrade something that you are probably not using? And if my server is using ssl without my knowledge, how would I know?
I find no answer to this, only dire warnings and insults to everyone who doesn't upgrade instantly. So am I being conned here?
Well, as an American citizen, I really shouldn't, because our "leaders" have told us in no uncertain terms that if we try to blame America, we'll be classified as terrorists. So not only does the corporate media ignore the real explanations, but a serious attempt has been made to intimidate Americans who might be able to explain it all.
If you want to know, you should check out the many things that have been written by the citizens of the poorer parts of the world. There is no shortage of explanations for why someone would want to do such things. There is a lot of documentation on the behavior of American government and corporations over the past century. It's hardly secret. And it's not restricted to Americans; Europeans share the blame about equally. Terrorism is nothing new. If you don't understand, you just haven't been paying attention.
One nice thing about the Internet is that it's difficult for the authorities in the relatively open countries to censor news and history. The information is out there; go look for it.
The biggest problem for me is that about once a week I go to a rehearsal that is in a building in downtown Boston that's close to the Hancock building. For those not familiar with it, this is one of the tallest buildings in Boston. For the past year, barriers have blocked all the parking spaces for the blocks around the Hancock, and the result is an even more serious parking shortage than usual in the area. It's a good deal for the commercial parking lots, though.
Cute story: I couple of months back, I was walking past the Hancock, close to a small group of people who were obviously from out of town. One woman asked why all the barriers were in the street. A man replied "They're to keep people from flying planes into the building." Without missing a beat, another guy said "Looks like it worked!"
The Onion isn't the only gang to manage to find humor in the situation.
What I want to know is why none of the browsers and mail readers seem to come with a ROT13 codec any more. This use to be a common feature of a lot of text-viewing programs, but it seem to have quietly gone away.
Yeah, I can cut and paste into my own little perl one-liner that does the job. But it was sorta cool to have a menu tool or hotkey that did the job. Now, not even mozilla seems to have it.
(I'd love to be proven wrong about mozilla. What's the CTRL-Foo key that does it?;-)
>... as the old adage goes, an attacker with physical access already has you owned.
Oh, I dunno about that. We've already seen a number of reports about people who got their laptop back after a theft, apparently because it was running linux or *BSD. The thiefs couldn't get past the login screen, so they trashed it or left it lying somewhere, and whoever found it called the phone number on the sticker.
Granted, this might not stop your expert unix hacker. But most laptop thefts are by petty thiefs who are pretty much computer illiterate, as are the guys who fence them. With Windows or Macs, they can turn it on, try a few things to verify that it runs ok, and it's in the pipeline. With a unix-like system, they can't get in, they conclude that it's unusable, and they toss it.
Your typical laptop thief only gets a hundred bucks or so for the machine. It's not worth a great deal of effort to break through security to verify that you're not buying a fancy-looking brick. So login+password is plenty secure for the typical theft.
> That's like paying homage to a Crucifix to represent the death of a person Crucified...
Actually, a closer parallel would be to form things (a group of people, the layout of a church, the shape of a garden) to honor someone who was crucified.
The RIAA and MPAA were based on the idea that they are cartels that had near-total control over the distribution media. This means that if you or I, as artists, wanted to get seen/heard by people, we had to use their distribution. They could enforce "standard" contracts on us that gave them all the profits and the rights to our art. You had a choice: Hand it over to them to distribute, or don't see it distributed.
They are now in a panic because the Internet provides a new distribution channel that (partially) obsoletes their cartel. This is the whole source of the IP and IRM fuss. They are struggling to find a way to prevent us from getting our art to audiences via this new medium that they (so far) can't control.
Verizon has realized that they have a real opportunity here: They are part of a cartel that in most of the world has a monopoly over telecomm, including the Internet. If they can get into a position of controlling both the communications and the content, then they will have total control over all the world's information except the relics on hard copy in libraries. The RIAA and MPAA will be dead, but to distribute your art, you'll have to get a license from whoever controls your Internet connection. Verizon is volunteering for this position, and hoping that by publicly attacking the RIAA and MPAA, the world's artists will support them.
If you don't believe this, read their TOS. You aren't allowed to run your own web server. That is, if you have an Internet connection through them, you can't use it to distribute your own work. You are required to use their web servers. They are, of course, in a position to strictly control what is on their own machines
> "method of extending cellular communications" - a cell phone not in range of a cell tower instead merely connects to the nearest other cell phone which is in range and uses it as a relay for the call. I'm sure this idea has been thought of, but has it been patented yet?
This is, of course the basic design of the ChaosNet that was in use at MIT during the 80's (and is still in use by some MIT hackers).
Of course, the way the US Patent Office works these days, this doesn't prevent you from registering the idea as a patent and suing MIT for using it.
(One could argue that the RIP protocol also did this back in the 80's, but I suppose that's far too sophisticated for the USPTO to understand, so you're still safe applying for your patent.)
Um, wasn't this announced on the Internet? Isn't the Internet world-wide?
So how is it the fault of the organizers (to use the term somewhat loosely) if people in other parts of the world ignored the event or decided not to take part?
Of course, in parts of the world, people don't have pickup trucks loaded with electronics. But where were the folks in Europe, Japan and Australia?
Maybe next time, it just needs a bit more publicity, and we can get an idea of how wireless is coming along in the rest of the world.
As a long-time "amateur" musician who has made a lot of recordings and kept all the rights by not signing any contracts, my main worry about all this is: The RIAA are once again trying to prevent me from making my own recordings of my own music. They tried this when they tried blocking other recording media such as cassettes, and they lost. But in today's corporate-dominated world, I keep worrying that they might succeed the next time.
The "Digital Rights Management" software seems to me to be an attempt to do the same thing. If this succeeds, I'll have to get a license (probably from Microsoft) to record and listen to my own music on my own machines.
Is there anything we can do to prevent this? Or are we facing a world in which all music, even my own private music, will be owned by the corporations?
Uh, I've had a Kyocera smartphone for somewhat over a year now, and it has an IR LED on its end. This is because it's also a Palm Pilot, and they all have IR LEDs. Most of them can now be turned into phones, too; mine just came packaged that way.
So far I haven't seen any "remote control" software available for download. I guess they skipped over such important things, and spent their time on lesser ideas like wireless IP, a browser, email, and so on.
Maybe they'll turn into remote controls next year. When they do, I don't think I'll get the software, though.
Re:The word is treason (Well, not really...)
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
> giving them Aid and Comfort
Y'know, I've never seen such terms defined. They certainly aren't defined in the US Constitution. I suspect that one of the current administration's interpretations of this is:
If you say something that any "Enemy" likes, you have just given Aid and Comfort to them, so you are a traitor. Presumably all they need is to find one "Enemy" who likes the preceding sentence, in order to classify me as a terrorist and a traitor.
Furthermore, as the John Walker Lindh case shows, this may be applied retroactively. When he joined up with the Taliban, the US government was giving them financial aid, in the amounts of millions of $$ per year. So they obviously weren't an Enemy then. Later, when the Taliban became an Enemy, a citizen who had joined them when they were allies suddenly found himself a traitor.
Lately it has become clear that one can become a traitor and terrorist by contributing to international relief organizations. So don't do that any more, unless you don't mind being tossed in prison for a long time.
Well, my first important experience was with a number of apps that had a strong dependence on the exact time. My code worked until some time in March, when all hell broke loose. I tracked it down to a widespread "off by one hour" problem on several platforms. I did a quick check with the java newsgroup, and found that every year, when DST went into effect, there were a rash of similar problems.
In digging around in TFM, I eventually noticed the remark that the internal clock was kept in local time. An "Aha!" went off in my brain. Since I've worked with network time a lot, I instantly understood why they hadn't gotten it right in several years, and why they probably never would. Anyone who has ever worked much with clocks in multiple time zones understands why you don't use local time internally.
Anyhow, I switched my code to perl, and had no further time problems. I checked a couple times in the next few years, and found the same problems being discussed in the java fora.
This actually had very little to do with Microsoft. The java spec apparently required local time internally. Granted, Microsoft didn't fix this egregious error, but you can hardly blame them.
So I haven't tried java for some years now. I wonder if they've figured out how to solve their clock problems?
Yeah, I saw all sorts of claims back then that there "shouldn't be a problem any more". But simple observations showed that there were still problems. And for a network language, it's critical that the problems be fixed in ALL RELEASES. If not, as a programmer I have to assume that they are broken in any specific client's libraries. So even if Sun and others were to fix them in their libraries, bad clock routines in the MS java libraries would suffice to make java time calculations unusable everywhere.
Please note that the *.com sites are newcomers to the Internet. It was only a year or two back that the number of *.com sites passed the number of *.edu sites. And this claim is even highly dubious, because a lot of commercial sites have hundreds or thousands of names for a handful of machines. Most.edu sites have just one or occasionally two names per machine.
Also, the.edu sites are typically have a lot more information available to visitors than commercial sites. Most commercial sites use most of the disk space for accounting information which is not available to web clients. Their online product information is typically small. But educational sites typically make all but the most recent in-progress pages available to users.
So the educational part of the web is in fact a lot larger than the commercial part.
If you only look at.com sites, and judge the Internet by that, you are guilty of an egregious misreading of what it's all about.
Also, note that scientific publications are rapidly going online. A few now exist only in electronic form. Both economics and ease of use are pushing for this change. This is probably the most "educational" information you can find anywhere.
(One could argue that some of the pr0n sites qualify as "educational", but maybe I won't go there right now.;-)
It's true that Verizon and other American telephone companies have successfully gotten themselves classified as "information services", as a way of avoiding laws that require them to offer their lines to all customers. However, they argue on the other side of their mouths,too. In the recent interview about the Verizon VP about the DMCA, we see the argument:
The content community would like to expand the scope of the DMCA to have the service provider block infringing sites that are not located on our network and to use digital rights management tools to stop peer-to-peer transmissions. But these infringements occur on the users' hard drives, not (on) our networks. We're just a conduit....
So they don't need to provide lines to competitors, on the grounds that they are an information service, not a telecommunications service. But they shouldn't be held responsible for the data going across their lines, because they are a conduit, not an information supplier.
With government "regulation" like this, there's no surprise that the customers and competitors are all losing.
> Just like security cameras in a department store or bank. There is normally no trouble, so nobody looks at the tapes.
Here in the USA, there have been quite a few news reports of the fuss when people discover the hidden "security" cameras in rest rooms and dressing rooms.
If you believe those tapes are only used when there is some sort of trouble, you don't understand the real motive for installing them.
"Hey, there's trouble in dressing room 3." "What sort of trouble?" "This chick walked in carring several swimsuits." "Ooh! We've gotta make sure there's nothing illegal going on in there."
Some time in the early 90's, someone calculated that if the trend at the time continued, by 2020 three quarters of the world's population would be Elvis imitators.
> So basically the coders on Linux then get NOTHING?
Hmmm... Every linux box I've ever used had things like cvs, gdb, strace, etc. And if they're not there, you can download them from the archives for free. The gcc compiler is free, as are languages like perl, tcl and python. I've developed lots of software on linux over the past decade, and neither I nor my employers have paid for the development software.
Well, one place they insisted on using ClearCase. That's *expensive* - and impossible to use right.
Slashdot Mirror
> Do you mean the internet in general?
Bingo! The conspiracy isn't aimed at replacing the RIAA with another monopolistic organization. The point of the nefarious plan is to build a communication system that can't be monopolized and controlled. So you and your friends can make your own recordings directly available to your audience under whatever terms you prefer.
Recall that the DoD's original requirements were for a system with redundant paths, and the ability to automatically determine routes. The idea was that as long as there exists a data path between two machines, the routine software will discover the path and deliver the packets. As John Gilmor has been quoted as saying, the Net treats censorship as packet damage and routes around it.
All those people who are setting up their own web sites do "distribute" their music are following the scenario. And some of them are making money this way. They're just not sharing their money with the big corporations.
The only thing that can stop this is if the corporations can take control and prevent you from putting your own stuff online. They are trying, of course, and we can all hope that they'll fail.
> ... and government should all be free to set their own policies regarding what sorts of software they will acquire and use.
I'd object to this. Governments should be required to use only software that is amenable to public examination. Otherwise the citizens will have no control over or access to their government's data.
We can see this clearly in the new voting equipment that's being installed in parts of Florida. They've bought equipment that contains closed, proprietary software. Citizens can't validate the outcome of elections using this software. Attempting to do so may even be illegal, under the DMCA. So anyone who can bribe the software vendors can control the election.
In general, people should be free but governments shouldn't. Governments should be accountable to their citizens. Proprietary software would be a major barrier to such accountability.
> You know you don't like it. You should leave. But where will you live?
When I faced this question a few decades ago, I did what a few thousand other young musicians with good math grades did: I went into computers. In particular, I got mixed up with communications software. We've spent the past quarter century building the recording industry's coffin.
If you think I'm kidding, ask a few "internet" programmers. You'll have a lot of trouble finding even one who isn't an amateur musician. Given the choice of a living making music, most of them would have jumped at it. But that choice wasn't available to us. So we built another kind of communication system.
This wasn't an accident. In high school, I understood full well that I'd have to be a total idiot (or an addicted gambler, which amounts to the same thing) to go into music as a profession. Only the owners of the recording companies made any money then and now. The top-selling bands couldn't live off their royalties.
And if you think the development of RIAA-killing software is an accident, go to the usenet archives and google for the topic. You'll find lots of discussion of how and why this was going to put music (and other information) back in the hands of the people who create it.
We haven't won yet. The political system and the courts could still take it all away from us and hand control of the Internet to the fat cats. But we will have tried.
The main battle now, actually, is to prevent the growing stranglehold on the "last mile" by the merged cable/phone companies. The best chance there is for all of you to go out and buy lots of wireless hardware. If we get the Net redundantly connected this way, there's no way they will be able to block the data path between artists and audience.
And look seriously at using IPv6. The commercial gang hasn't noticed it yet. It provides a great arena for unmoderated development. It includes encryption at the packet level, so they can't track what you're doing. By the time they wake up and try to take control, we can have a "distribution" system that they can't kill.
> ... during the first and last two weeks of each semester, I see my bandwidth get killed ...
...
So what we need is a project to do "p2p" file sharing efficiently.
The huge network "overhead" of kazaa, gnutella, and others has been well documented. And it's sorta silly. We obviously need a project to do it with very little overhead.
While we're at it, the software should include the port number as part of the address, so it can't be stopped by blocking specific ports.
Stop complaining, and start programming
Others have given the clues:
/. articles. Go google for them a bit ...
The administration assumes that if you are using PSP you are making illegal copies. Very few people record their own music. So few people do this that it's not worth taking into consideration. If you are using P2P, they will assume that you're guilty of copyright violations, and it will be up to you to prove yourself innocent.
Also, it has been pointed out that you're at a school that gets a lot of money from the movie and recording industries. If you are allowed to distribute your own music without first signing it over to a recording company, you will shoot down the whole reason that those companies exist.
This is what it's all about, dummy. The Internet is providing artists like you with a new channel to your audience. That channel isn't under the control of the recording industry. You don't have to sign over the rights to your music to distribute it on the Internet. This is one of the things that the RIAA is trying to stop. They've realized that if they don't stop it, they'll be out of business.
This is all documented well enough in other places, including previous
In any case, something that I still don't see answered is: Am I vulnerable if my apache isn't using ssl?
Now, ssl is probably useful (if not mandatory) for most commercial web sites. But for a small site that's just making a few files available via http, is there any reason to upgrade something that you are probably not using? And if my server is using ssl without my knowledge, how would I know?
I find no answer to this, only dire warnings and insults to everyone who doesn't upgrade instantly. So am I being conned here?
Well, as an American citizen, I really shouldn't, because our "leaders" have told us in no uncertain terms that if we try to blame America, we'll be classified as terrorists. So not only does the corporate media ignore the real explanations, but a serious attempt has been made to intimidate Americans who might be able to explain it all.
If you want to know, you should check out the many things that have been written by the citizens of the poorer parts of the world. There is no shortage of explanations for why someone would want to do such things. There is a lot of documentation on the behavior of American government and corporations over the past century. It's hardly secret. And it's not restricted to Americans; Europeans share the blame about equally. Terrorism is nothing new. If you don't understand, you just haven't been paying attention.
One nice thing about the Internet is that it's difficult for the authorities in the relatively open countries to censor news and history. The information is out there; go look for it.
The biggest problem for me is that about once a week I go to a rehearsal that is in a building in downtown Boston that's close to the Hancock building. For those not familiar with it, this is one of the tallest buildings in Boston. For the past year, barriers have blocked all the parking spaces for the blocks around the Hancock, and the result is an even more serious parking shortage than usual in the area. It's a good deal for the commercial parking lots, though.
Cute story: I couple of months back, I was walking past the Hancock, close to a small group of people who were obviously from out of town. One woman asked why all the barriers were in the street. A man replied "They're to keep people from flying planes into the building." Without missing a beat, another guy said "Looks like it worked!"
The Onion isn't the only gang to manage to find humor in the situation.
What I want to know is why none of the browsers and mail readers seem to come with a ROT13 codec any more. This use to be a common feature of a lot of text-viewing programs, but it seem to have quietly gone away.
;-)
Yeah, I can cut and paste into my own little perl one-liner that does the job. But it was sorta cool to have a menu tool or hotkey that did the job. Now, not even mozilla seems to have it.
(I'd love to be proven wrong about mozilla. What's the CTRL-Foo key that does it?
> ... as the old adage goes, an attacker with physical access already has you owned.
Oh, I dunno about that. We've already seen a number of reports about people who got their laptop back after a theft, apparently because it was running linux or *BSD. The thiefs couldn't get past the login screen, so they trashed it or left it lying somewhere, and whoever found it called the phone number on the sticker.
Granted, this might not stop your expert unix hacker. But most laptop thefts are by petty thiefs who are pretty much computer illiterate, as are the guys who fence them. With Windows or Macs, they can turn it on, try a few things to verify that it runs ok, and it's in the pipeline. With a unix-like system, they can't get in, they conclude that it's unusable, and they toss it.
Your typical laptop thief only gets a hundred bucks or so for the machine. It's not worth a great deal of effort to break through security to verify that you're not buying a fancy-looking brick. So login+password is plenty secure for the typical theft.
> That's like paying homage to a Crucifix to represent the death of a person Crucified...
...
Actually, a closer parallel would be to form things (a group of people, the layout of a church, the shape of a garden) to honor someone who was crucified.
I think some people have done that
The RIAA and MPAA were based on the idea that they are cartels that had near-total control over the distribution media. This means that if you or I, as artists, wanted to get seen/heard by people, we had to use their distribution. They could enforce "standard" contracts on us that gave them all the profits and the rights to our art. You had a choice: Hand it over to them to distribute, or don't see it distributed.
...
They are now in a panic because the Internet provides a new distribution channel that (partially) obsoletes their cartel. This is the whole source of the IP and IRM fuss. They are struggling to find a way to prevent us from getting our art to audiences via this new medium that they (so far) can't control.
Verizon has realized that they have a real opportunity here: They are part of a cartel that in most of the world has a monopoly over telecomm, including the Internet. If they can get into a position of controlling both the communications and the content, then they will have total control over all the world's information except the relics on hard copy in libraries. The RIAA and MPAA will be dead, but to distribute your art, you'll have to get a license from whoever controls your Internet connection. Verizon is volunteering for this position, and hoping that by publicly attacking the RIAA and MPAA, the world's artists will support them.
If you don't believe this, read their TOS. You aren't allowed to run your own web server. That is, if you have an Internet connection through them, you can't use it to distribute your own work. You are required to use their web servers. They are, of course, in a position to strictly control what is on their own machines
It's really hard to be too paranoid here
> "method of extending cellular communications" - a cell phone not in range of a cell tower instead merely connects to the nearest other cell phone which is in range and uses it as a relay for the call. I'm sure this idea has been thought of, but has it been patented yet?
This is, of course the basic design of the ChaosNet that was in use at MIT during the 80's (and is still in use by some MIT hackers).
Of course, the way the US Patent Office works these days, this doesn't prevent you from registering the idea as a patent and suing MIT for using it.
(One could argue that the RIP protocol also did this back in the 80's, but I suppose that's far too sophisticated for the USPTO to understand, so you're still safe applying for your patent.)
Um, wasn't this announced on the Internet? Isn't the Internet world-wide?
So how is it the fault of the organizers (to use the term somewhat loosely) if people in other parts of the world ignored the event or decided not to take part?
Of course, in parts of the world, people don't have pickup trucks loaded with electronics. But where were the folks in Europe, Japan and Australia?
Maybe next time, it just needs a bit more publicity, and we can get an idea of how wireless is coming along in the rest of the world.
As a long-time "amateur" musician who has made a lot of recordings and kept all the rights by not signing any contracts, my main worry about all this is: The RIAA are once again trying to prevent me from making my own recordings of my own music. They tried this when they tried blocking other recording media such as cassettes, and they lost. But in today's corporate-dominated world, I keep worrying that they might succeed the next time.
The "Digital Rights Management" software seems to me to be an attempt to do the same thing. If this succeeds, I'll have to get a license (probably from Microsoft) to record and listen to my own music on my own machines.
Is there anything we can do to prevent this? Or are we facing a world in which all music, even my own private music, will be owned by the corporations?
Uh, I've had a Kyocera smartphone for somewhat over a year now, and it has an IR LED on its end. This is because it's also a Palm Pilot, and they all have IR LEDs. Most of them can now be turned into phones, too; mine just came packaged that way.
So far I haven't seen any "remote control" software available for download. I guess they skipped over such important things, and spent their time on lesser ideas like wireless IP, a browser, email, and so on.
Maybe they'll turn into remote controls next year. When they do, I don't think I'll get the software, though.
> giving them Aid and Comfort
Y'know, I've never seen such terms defined. They certainly aren't defined in the US Constitution. I suspect that one of the current administration's interpretations of this is:
If you say something that any "Enemy" likes, you have just given Aid and Comfort to them, so you are a traitor. Presumably all they need is to find one "Enemy" who likes the preceding sentence, in order to classify me as a terrorist and a traitor.
Furthermore, as the John Walker Lindh case shows, this may be applied retroactively. When he joined up with the Taliban, the US government was giving them financial aid, in the amounts of millions of $$ per year. So they obviously weren't an Enemy then. Later, when the Taliban became an Enemy, a citizen who had joined them when they were allies suddenly found himself a traitor.
Lately it has become clear that one can become a traitor and terrorist by contributing to international relief organizations. So don't do that any more, unless you don't mind being tossed in prison for a long time.
Well, my first important experience was with a number of apps that had a strong dependence on the exact time. My code worked until some time in March, when all hell broke loose. I tracked it down to a widespread "off by one hour" problem on several platforms. I did a quick check with the java newsgroup, and found that every year, when DST went into effect, there were a rash of similar problems.
In digging around in TFM, I eventually noticed the remark that the internal clock was kept in local time. An "Aha!" went off in my brain. Since I've worked with network time a lot, I instantly understood why they hadn't gotten it right in several years, and why they probably never would. Anyone who has ever worked much with clocks in multiple time zones understands why you don't use local time internally.
Anyhow, I switched my code to perl, and had no further time problems. I checked a couple times in the next few years, and found the same problems being discussed in the java fora.
This actually had very little to do with Microsoft. The java spec apparently required local time internally. Granted, Microsoft didn't fix this egregious error, but you can hardly blame them.
So I haven't tried java for some years now. I wonder if they've figured out how to solve their clock problems?
Yeah, I saw all sorts of claims back then that there "shouldn't be a problem any more". But simple observations showed that there were still problems. And for a network language, it's critical that the problems be fixed in ALL RELEASES. If not, as a programmer I have to assume that they are broken in any specific client's libraries. So even if Sun and others were to fix them in their libraries, bad clock routines in the MS java libraries would suffice to make java time calculations unusable everywhere.
Please note that the *.com sites are newcomers to the Internet. It was only a year or two back that the number of *.com sites passed the number of *.edu sites. And this claim is even highly dubious, because a lot of commercial sites have hundreds or thousands of names for a handful of machines. Most .edu sites have just one or occasionally two names per machine.
.edu sites are typically have a lot more information available to visitors than commercial sites. Most commercial sites use most of the disk space for accounting information which is not available to web clients. Their online product information is typically small. But educational sites typically make all but the most recent in-progress pages available to users.
.com sites, and judge the Internet by that, you are guilty of an egregious misreading of what it's all about.
;-)
Also, the
So the educational part of the web is in fact a lot larger than the commercial part.
If you only look at
Also, note that scientific publications are rapidly going online. A few now exist only in electronic form. Both economics and ease of use are pushing for this change. This is probably the most "educational" information you can find anywhere.
(One could argue that some of the pr0n sites qualify as "educational", but maybe I won't go there right now.
It's true that Verizon and other American telephone companies have successfully gotten themselves classified as "information services", as a way of avoiding laws that require them to offer their lines to all customers. However, they argue on the other side of their mouths,too. In the recent interview about the Verizon VP about the DMCA, we see the argument:
...
The content community would like to expand the scope of the DMCA to have the service provider block infringing sites that are not located on our network and to use digital rights management tools to stop peer-to-peer transmissions. But these infringements occur on the users' hard drives, not (on) our networks. We're just a conduit.
So they don't need to provide lines to competitors, on the grounds that they are an information service, not a telecommunications service. But they shouldn't be held responsible for the data going across their lines, because they are a conduit, not an information supplier.
With government "regulation" like this, there's no surprise that the customers and competitors are all losing.
> Just like security cameras in a department store or bank. There is normally no trouble, so nobody looks at the tapes.
Here in the USA, there have been quite a few news reports of the fuss when people discover the hidden "security" cameras in rest rooms and dressing rooms.
If you believe those tapes are only used when there is some sort of trouble, you don't understand the real motive for installing them.
"Hey, there's trouble in dressing room 3." "What sort of trouble?" "This chick walked in carring several swimsuits." "Ooh! We've gotta make sure there's nothing illegal going on in there."
> And next week, we talk about people who hang signs in their window, but don't want people looking at them.
Yeah, and then we'll have a discussion of the publishers who have decided to start suing people who use page numbers in bibliographies.
Some time in the early 90's, someone calculated that if the trend at the time continued, by 2020 three quarters of the world's population would be Elvis imitators.
So what are the errror bars on these graphs? It seems likely that they include both asymptotes.
> So basically the coders on Linux then get NOTHING?
... Every linux box I've ever used had things like cvs, gdb, strace, etc. And if they're not there, you can download them from the archives for free. The gcc compiler is free, as are languages like perl, tcl and python. I've developed lots of software on linux over the past decade, and neither I nor my employers have paid for the development software.
;-)
Hmmm
Well, one place they insisted on using ClearCase. That's *expensive* - and impossible to use right.
(Hey, that might get me a flamebait rating.