Unless they authorized the uploader to distribute the files, then it isn't a legal upload, no matter who is downloading it.
They did. An agent of the lawful owner of a copyrighted work asked another party to make a copy of that work on the owner's behalf. That's about as legal as you can possibly get.
I don't think that's going to stand up. Undercover cops buy drugs and the state doesn't have to prosecute them for buying them. Why couldn't investigators "illegally" download copyrighted material and still have it considered infringing on the part of the defendant, but not be prosecuted?
Sharing music is not inherently illegal. Copyright violation only exists when a copy is made without authorization of the copyright owner or some special circumstances (fair use, media shifting, etc.). If a copyright owner or their agent transfers a song, no violation has occurred. Contrast with a drug deal which is always against the law.
If you hate MS for being closed, am I to take it that you hate Apple more as they are even more closed than MS?
Why do you assume that I hate Microsoft? For that matter, why do you assume I like Apple? Life's too short to have an emotional reaction to a corporation, of all the dumb things. You can approve or disapprove of their actions without having feelings about them.
Sorry, I should have clarified: the Lodge is most active, but York Rite is the most active of the Mason-only appendant bodies. I think - since I haven't exactly been going to their meetings.
Oh, it's plenty terrifying ("The Grand Custodian is coming to test proficiency when?!?"), but I've been enjoying it. Should I be offered the chance, I'd like to do it again some day when I have more time to really get into it.
I'm a Mason (and in fact the master of my Lodge), but I don't know a whole lot about the appendant bodies. York Rite is the locally active group and I've been interested in it. Unfortunately, with four kids from 11 months to 8 years old, I'm not sure my wife would tolerate many more time commitments.:-)
It was only after Sun started losing market to Linux that they started embracing open source.
I have an SS5 with Solaris 7 on a shelf at home. Yeah, I know that Sun used to be a very closed shop, but they saw the light (heh! I'm funny!) quite a while back.
Freemasonry Lodges and The Vatican are sworn enemies and have many times declared the other as a menace to mankind and such.
That's incorrect in theory and in practice. Officially, Freemasons have no position on any church. Unofficially, my own lodge has Catholic members. While it's my understanding that the church disapproves of us, that's entirely one-sided.
Looks like I picked a good time to think about joining, huh? I'd never heard about it being Christian-only, though (although that makes historical sense). Is that true?
When you put it into the context of the history of Java, it is not all that far fetched.
Yes it is. Sun has a track record of working closely with Free Software projects for quite a few years now. You almost expect Sun to release the code to major projects now (not "expect" as in thinking they owe it, but "expect" as in "I wouldn't be surprised if..."), as they've done with OpenOffice, ZFS, and even Solaris.
Microsoft released some fonts once, then later changed their minds.
I would be infinitely more surprised in Microsoft opening anything interesting than I would in Sun doing the same.
What are you all doing on your computers? If you read these posts you would think that the average slashdotter was planning to overthrow one (or more likely all) governments on a regular basis.
If there is one universal quality among geeks, it's an irresistable attraction to problem solving. It doesn't matter if the problem is even one that we want someone to solve; we still try to figure it out.
"How would you overthrow the government?"
"How would you assassinate someone?"
"How would you rob a bank?"
"How would you sent untraceable messages to the NSA?"
It's not that we'd actually do those things, but that we can't help trying to figure how we'd go about it. That's just the way geeks are constructed. Tell us something is difficult or impossible and something drives us to prove you wrong.
For what it's worth, there are military people who sit around and try to figure out how to attack American cities. The idea is that if we can figure it out, then maybe an enemy could as well. I mention this as an example of where this mindset is considered valuable and useful, and not creepy like most non-geeks would think if they read this post. ("That 'Just Some Guy' fella? He wants to make bombs!")
Sure, there are pitfalls waiting for the unwary, but they're all well documented if you know where to look.
That's typically in the source and changelogs of a known-working crypto app, where you get stuff like "this blocks on Sun hardware" or "this fixes a data-exposing race condition on Linux prior to 2.6.14p23". Like another poster suggested, read "Practical Cryptography". It's clearly, obviously, utterly possible to write solid crypto code. In theory. In practice, there are a million and one gotchas that make it extremely difficult to get right.
For a good primer on encryption pick up Bruce Scheiner's Applied Cryptography. You can also find a lot of resources online, like wikipeida, though those articles can get a bit technical. I hope that you can learn that encryption can be utilized by almost any competent programmer, and that it is not the program you should distrust, but rather third parties. That is, after all, the heart of encryption, knowing who and what to trust and giving everyone else hell.
I think you need to re-read it. What I took away from the book is that even if the crypto library is perfect, even good programmers are likely to screw up its usage. For example, see the recent Debian SSH mixup. That guy wasn't an idiot, but made a subtle yet completely fatal mistake.
No, I don't trust the program. Unless it's been heavily vetted like GPG (or OpenSSL as you mentioned), I assume that it has a subtle vulnerability that makes it worthless. If you don't feel the same, then I doubt whether you actually read "Applied Cryptography".
The problem here is that the program doing the encrypting on your computer, which comes from Hushmail, is not the same program that they provide the (trustable) source code for.
The other problem is that it's not GPG. Honestly, there is no way I'd trust any other file crypto software today. Why should I? GPG is there and works and people use it. Anything else is just rolling dice.
This is maybe the one area where I don't think there's a lot of room for options. Crypto is almost unbelievably hard to get right, and the odds of more than a tiny handful of programs pulling it off is slim. Putting all of your eggs in one basket is risky, but I'd rather trust one titanium roll cage of a basket than 100 made out of tin foil and rusty nails.
What does admitting wrong actually accomplish? Nothing. There's more value from working to establish real equality than from more pointless hand-wringing.
"Your ethnicity is a handicap, so here's your cripple check."
I hate that. Here's an official government pity check because you are inherently less able than me.
What is wrong with saying "Sorry, folks, but the world is a real place and sometimes fucked up shit happens. Deal with it." and letting the chips fall where they may?
I think I came across overly harsh above, and it's not like I don't know that we screwed over the native people pretty badly. After all this time, though, nothing good comes from dwelling on it. Nothing. Let's give the new generation a clean slate.
As a result of affirmative action, "minority" people are becoming less equipped to compete on a level playing field.
If anything, why not bonuses? Finish college and get a check for $10,000 or something. Give incentives for excellence, not endorsement of giving up.
Screw that. Europeans came to America, kicked some butt, and won it. That's what happens all over the world. I bet the Navaho conquered some neighboring territory at one point or another. Think they sat around crying and feeling guilty for it? Of course not. Get over that stupid idea of reparations - for anything. Should some guy who came from India last week be on the hook for something that happened a few hundred years ago? Just white people? Just people from families here more than 150 years old?
Want to really treat Native Americans right? Dump this broken, unworkable, and racist notion of sovereign territories inside our country and immediately repatriate all of them. Navaho no more - they're now Americans. That means they'd get the same protection as everyone else which is a far cry better than what they have now, and be done with this destructive separatist attitude once and for all.
Programmers tend to think that any law which can't be expressed in Perl (or Python or whatever) is too ambiguous to be useful. This is, however, not how things actually work.
No. It's just that we're acutely aware of how freakin' hard it is to explain exactly what you want without making any mistakes. When programmers forget a detail, we call it a bug. When politicians do the same, we call it a loophole.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless they authorized the uploader to distribute the files, then it isn't a legal upload, no matter who is downloading it.
They did. An agent of the lawful owner of a copyrighted work asked another party to make a copy of that work on the owner's behalf. That's about as legal as you can possibly get.
Well, OK, distribution. That was implicit in the "making a copy" step in the context of this conversation.
I don't think that's going to stand up. Undercover cops buy drugs and the state doesn't have to prosecute them for buying them. Why couldn't investigators "illegally" download copyrighted material and still have it considered infringing on the part of the defendant, but not be prosecuted?
Sharing music is not inherently illegal. Copyright violation only exists when a copy is made without authorization of the copyright owner or some special circumstances (fair use, media shifting, etc.). If a copyright owner or their agent transfers a song, no violation has occurred. Contrast with a drug deal which is always against the law.
If you hate MS for being closed, am I to take it that you hate Apple more as they are even more closed than MS?
Why do you assume that I hate Microsoft? For that matter, why do you assume I like Apple? Life's too short to have an emotional reaction to a corporation, of all the dumb things. You can approve or disapprove of their actions without having feelings about them.
Sorry, I should have clarified: the Lodge is most active, but York Rite is the most active of the Mason-only appendant bodies. I think - since I haven't exactly been going to their meetings.
Oh, it's plenty terrifying ("The Grand Custodian is coming to test proficiency when?!?"), but I've been enjoying it. Should I be offered the chance, I'd like to do it again some day when I have more time to really get into it.
I'm a Mason (and in fact the master of my Lodge), but I don't know a whole lot about the appendant bodies. York Rite is the locally active group and I've been interested in it. Unfortunately, with four kids from 11 months to 8 years old, I'm not sure my wife would tolerate many more time commitments. :-)
It was only after Sun started losing market to Linux that they started embracing open source.
I have an SS5 with Solaris 7 on a shelf at home. Yeah, I know that Sun used to be a very closed shop, but they saw the light (heh! I'm funny!) quite a while back.
Freemasonry Lodges and The Vatican are sworn enemies and have many times declared the other as a menace to mankind and such.
That's incorrect in theory and in practice. Officially, Freemasons have no position on any church. Unofficially, my own lodge has Catholic members. While it's my understanding that the church disapproves of us, that's entirely one-sided.
Looks like I picked a good time to think about joining, huh? I'd never heard about it being Christian-only, though (although that makes historical sense). Is that true?
Case in point: the most important Catholic theologian for the first 1200 years of Western Church history, Saint Augustine, was black.
Oh, please. Wikipedia shows that he was white. And also a hippo.
The point is that Microsoft is "your worst enemy", not Miguel's.
It's well known that Miguel applied for a job at Microsoft. He's said so.
It occurs to me that we've all been operating under the assumption that he didn't get it.
When you put it into the context of the history of Java, it is not all that far fetched.
Yes it is. Sun has a track record of working closely with Free Software projects for quite a few years now. You almost expect Sun to release the code to major projects now (not "expect" as in thinking they owe it, but "expect" as in "I wouldn't be surprised if..."), as they've done with OpenOffice, ZFS, and even Solaris.
Microsoft released some fonts once, then later changed their minds.
I would be infinitely more surprised in Microsoft opening anything interesting than I would in Sun doing the same.
By all means, suggest to us a way to encrypt a website that doesn't involve SSL.
He never said that SSL wasn't meant for encrypting web pages, but that encryption isn't the only thing it's good for.
What are you all doing on your computers? If you read these posts you would think that the average slashdotter was planning to overthrow one (or more likely all) governments on a regular basis.
If there is one universal quality among geeks, it's an irresistable attraction to problem solving. It doesn't matter if the problem is even one that we want someone to solve; we still try to figure it out.
"How would you overthrow the government?"
"How would you assassinate someone?"
"How would you rob a bank?"
"How would you sent untraceable messages to the NSA?"
It's not that we'd actually do those things, but that we can't help trying to figure how we'd go about it. That's just the way geeks are constructed. Tell us something is difficult or impossible and something drives us to prove you wrong.
For what it's worth, there are military people who sit around and try to figure out how to attack American cities. The idea is that if we can figure it out, then maybe an enemy could as well. I mention this as an example of where this mindset is considered valuable and useful, and not creepy like most non-geeks would think if they read this post. ("That 'Just Some Guy' fella? He wants to make bombs!")
Sure, there are pitfalls waiting for the unwary, but they're all well documented if you know where to look.
That's typically in the source and changelogs of a known-working crypto app, where you get stuff like "this blocks on Sun hardware" or "this fixes a data-exposing race condition on Linux prior to 2.6.14p23". Like another poster suggested, read "Practical Cryptography". It's clearly, obviously, utterly possible to write solid crypto code. In theory. In practice, there are a million and one gotchas that make it extremely difficult to get right.
I'll gladly do it from now on, even if it banishes legit mailings. It's not my problem!
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen: the asshole who ruins good things for everyone.
For a good primer on encryption pick up Bruce Scheiner's Applied Cryptography. You can also find a lot of resources online, like wikipeida, though those articles can get a bit technical. I hope that you can learn that encryption can be utilized by almost any competent programmer, and that it is not the program you should distrust, but rather third parties. That is, after all, the heart of encryption, knowing who and what to trust and giving everyone else hell.
I think you need to re-read it. What I took away from the book is that even if the crypto library is perfect, even good programmers are likely to screw up its usage. For example, see the recent Debian SSH mixup. That guy wasn't an idiot, but made a subtle yet completely fatal mistake.
No, I don't trust the program. Unless it's been heavily vetted like GPG (or OpenSSL as you mentioned), I assume that it has a subtle vulnerability that makes it worthless. If you don't feel the same, then I doubt whether you actually read "Applied Cryptography".
Skipped that chapter, huh?
The problem here is that the program doing the encrypting on your computer, which comes from Hushmail, is not the same program that they provide the (trustable) source code for.
The other problem is that it's not GPG. Honestly, there is no way I'd trust any other file crypto software today. Why should I? GPG is there and works and people use it. Anything else is just rolling dice.
This is maybe the one area where I don't think there's a lot of room for options. Crypto is almost unbelievably hard to get right, and the odds of more than a tiny handful of programs pulling it off is slim. Putting all of your eggs in one basket is risky, but I'd rather trust one titanium roll cage of a basket than 100 made out of tin foil and rusty nails.
What does admitting wrong actually accomplish? Nothing. There's more value from working to establish real equality than from more pointless hand-wringing.
"Your ethnicity is a handicap, so here's your cripple check."
I hate that. Here's an official government pity check because you are inherently less able than me.
What is wrong with saying "Sorry, folks, but the world is a real place and sometimes fucked up shit happens. Deal with it." and letting the chips fall where they may?
I think I came across overly harsh above, and it's not like I don't know that we screwed over the native people pretty badly. After all this time, though, nothing good comes from dwelling on it. Nothing. Let's give the new generation a clean slate.
As a result of affirmative action, "minority" people are becoming less equipped to compete on a level playing field.
If anything, why not bonuses? Finish college and get a check for $10,000 or something. Give incentives for excellence, not endorsement of giving up.
It is one of the biggest scams alive today.
So, how are you on Indian casinos?
Screw that. Europeans came to America, kicked some butt, and won it. That's what happens all over the world. I bet the Navaho conquered some neighboring territory at one point or another. Think they sat around crying and feeling guilty for it? Of course not. Get over that stupid idea of reparations - for anything. Should some guy who came from India last week be on the hook for something that happened a few hundred years ago? Just white people? Just people from families here more than 150 years old?
Want to really treat Native Americans right? Dump this broken, unworkable, and racist notion of sovereign territories inside our country and immediately repatriate all of them. Navaho no more - they're now Americans. That means they'd get the same protection as everyone else which is a far cry better than what they have now, and be done with this destructive separatist attitude once and for all.
Programmers tend to think that any law which can't be expressed in Perl (or Python or whatever) is too ambiguous to be useful. This is, however, not how things actually work.
No. It's just that we're acutely aware of how freakin' hard it is to explain exactly what you want without making any mistakes. When programmers forget a detail, we call it a bug. When politicians do the same, we call it a loophole.
Maybe Intel would rather compete with one company than 100?
There wasn't anything in the Inq links, and I'll be damned if I'm looking for breasts in EE Times.