I wonder why this story wasn't consider Newsworthy for Nerds when I submitted it in the same Slashdot category 10 days ago?
*Grumble. Whine.* Methinks maybe Hemos is prejudiced agaist Coyotes and in favour of Wolves.
Anyway, I am glad to see that at least they finally did see fit to post the story even if someone else gets the credit for the submission. This is a very practical and important step in preparing for the eventual (and hopefully inevitible) human journeying to Mars.
The last time humans ventured out of near Earth orbit over a GENERATION ago. It is something one can only read about in the history books, not something in today's news. Come on, let's get back out there!
I would go howl at the moon now, but it's not out tonight, so... I guess I'll just go and howl.
Beyond the aspect of hyperlinking to ads or other commercial features, this situation raises some question about inserting hyperlinks into reprinted copyrighted text.
Take for example an an article by Bruce Sterling. Most of the writings on that site are described as "literary freeware". The acceptable use policy points out that copyright is retained by the author, but permission is granted for unlimited copying and distribution in any media for non-commercial uses only.
So the non-commercial clause would clearly rule out links to ads or e-commerce "services" such as Deja.com is offering. But what about other links?
The acceptable use policy also forbids altering the text. So if I reprint one of his articles on my website, that is fine. But what if he makes a mention of, say, NASA. Would I be forbidden from linking that word to the NASA website?
Is adding a hyperlink to a word truly "altering the text"? The sentence still reads the same as the author wrote it. Perhaps it is in the same way that adding italics can alter the text. What about a reverse situation: taking an article from the web that contains hyperlinks and printing it on paper for distribution, but not including URLs. Would that count as altering the text?
If I printed out an article for distribution but added footnotes connected to certain words, would that be permissible? I would think it probably would if I made clear that the footnotes were my own and not the original author. Likewise if I inserted commentary into the article.
So then how to create hyperlinks in the original article but to indicate that they are not part of the original article? Putting them as footers to the text is awkward. Putting them in a sidebar puts them closer to the original word but still doesn't provide the direct intuitive connection that linking the actual word provides. Perhaps the link could take the reader to an intermediate page with a disclaimer that then auto redirects after a few seconds to a target page.
This is a new situation in copyright brought about by the nature of the web. Perhaps there needs to be a new "fair use" created here: the right to add non-commercial hyperlinks to a reprinted article.
...this would protect Andover from anything that Slashdot has.
Probably not, since Andover actually owns Slashdot. By its ownership, Andover has the potential to control what content appears on Slashdot and thus would share some legal liability for the content. I think this ruling has more to do with ISPs who are hosting unrelated third party websites. They have no power to control the content and therefore (as this judge rightly ruled) they should bear no liability.
Punto.com? Run that through babelfish and it sounds suspiciously close to the name of this website. Methinks they are trying to confuse the readers of Slashdot and steal their business by infringing on their god given trademark rights. Just because it is in a different language is no excuse. It still means the same thing.
Roblimo, I think perhaps you had better notify Andover.net's squadron of lawyers so they can start composing nastygrams to send to these trademark pirates.
There has been some concern of late here about American fugutives coming to Canada in order to be spared from having to face a US death penalty. However the prospect of American corporations doing the same is somewhat unsettling.
It's a good thing that Microsoft is staying put and facing the music. I would really hate to see Canada become the Mos Eisley of the corporate world with lawless excutives roaming the streets.
A note about posting as extrans: it seems that that and the "plain text" posting options have been switched since posting as plain text will activate any HTML in your comments.
The Le Monde article comments that the US considers cybercriminality to be a case of natianal defense as well as protecting economic ineterests. Before they start organizing some gung-ho international cybergestapo to go after miscreants, they should start by actually building up their cyberDEFENSES. A good place to start would be by reading this article from the intelligence analysis website, Stratfor.com, which looks at the implications of most of the computerized world being "overwhelmingly dependent upon a single computer operating system that is exceedingly vulnerable to even simple attacks."
If a teenager with little talent can shut down major websites with DDoS attacks or corrupt computer files with a simple script, imagine what a foreign intelligence agency could do. As the article says, "the real threat from rogue states won't be nuclear attack, but cyber attack. Rogue states won't launch nuclear attack for fear of the counterattack. But how do we retaliate against a virus attack? We depend on computers. They don't."
It seems that a much more effecient way of protecting yourselves would be to prevent as much damage from happening as possible instead of just sending the troops after someone after the damage has already happened.
On the other hand, if by 'national defense', they mean making the world safe for the MPAA by going after Norwegian teenagers, then perhaps they have a point.
Credit certainly must given to IDG's lawyers for their politeness. However just because they are polite doesn't mean that one should simply acquiesce. Particularly when the lawyers are wrong in their beliefs about the alleged infringement.
Trademark law specifically excludes non-commercial use of trademarked words, as has been pointed out in other posts in this discussion. So while IDG's request was polite, it certainly was not reasonable. The website owners were clearly within their rights to refuse it.
If you are walking down the street and someone comes up to you and politely requests that you hand over you wallet and all your vauables, should you comply? Or would you be justified in telling them to get lost?
>Yeah, right. Does that apply to your girlfriend as well?
Yes, it most certainly does.
proprietary - from Latin proprietas meaning property
She is certainly not my property. I don't own her. What century are you living in?
[adjective] used, made, or marketed by one having the exclusive legal right
Good Lord, do you take me for a pimp?!!! I didn't make her - her parents did that, but they don't own her either. Exclusive legal right to use her? I thinking using people is rather repugnant. And as far as exclusivity goes, she is a free person and if she decided she would rather be with someone else, that is her choice. It might hurt me, but I would respect it. However, she has stayed with me for over 9 years so far and things are still going quite well, so I feel no fear of losing her.
You are welcome to try to woo her away from me if you wish, but I doubt you would get very far. She has already shown that she prefers guys who are mature, intelligent, and respect women as human beings.
[The Internet is] big, it's unorganized, and its users are simply unable to wade through it all to find interesting information that satisfies their needs.
I don't know what warped dimension these guys are living in, but I find ads to be the least interesting thing on the Internet. And my information needs rarely have anything to do with purchasing products or services.
Until now, the only way reach end-users through all that clutter has been to bombard them with banner ads. And, as today's declining click-through rates show, this approach got old fast.
Again they assume advertising messages are more important to people than the actual content of web pages. All that stuff is just "clutter". And banner ads are "old" because people find them annoying. Targeting them won't make them any less so. A telemarketer who interupts my dinner trying to sell me something I might be interested in is no less irksome than one with a product I don't care about.
We have developed a revolutionary infrastructure-based content delivery platform that enhances users' online Internet experience by delivering highly personalized, custom-tailored information right to their desktops.
What information? And how will it appear on my screen? Are random web pages going to pop up in my browser that they think I might be interested in?
More likely "information" is their euphemism for ads. So how are these going to appear on my computer? When I read Slashdot, will they be substituting their ads for the ones Andover puts on the pages? Or will there be boxes popping up on my screen flashing ads and disrupting what I am trying to read? Will my ISP insist that I must use their specially customized version of Netscape 6.5 with a special window to dispay the content they think I ought to be reading?
It all sounds like a marketers wet dream to track all the interests of individuals in order to target the ads, but I am unable to see how they are going to deliver them. Substituting ads on a page would upset site owners who would probably sue. Pop ups will annoy subscribers and probably lose business for the ISPs. Special browsers with ad windows are already in use by "free" ISPs; why would anyone want to pay even a "discounted" rate for same thing they can get for free?
"Content providers, such as advertising organizations, can harness the power of the Internet to send highly-targeted, rich media messages directly to the audiences they desire."
The language of this statement makes want to puke (advertising = "rich media messages" ??!!) These people are so out of touch with real life and real people it is quite scary. There is no way I would want people like this to be tracking my private online activities.
...are you listening? We know you read Slashdot. Or do you only read the DeDSS threads? The stuff applies to you in spades.
" Marketing sees the consumer as the enemy."
Imagine trying to jail your own customers, who have paid good money to buy your product, simply because they want to access their purchases in ways you don't approve. If this isn't treating your customers as enemies, I don't know what is.
And as you may have notice from reading Slashdot, there is a conversation going on. Your customers are talking to each other. Among other things, they are talking about how you are treating them like enemies. And Slashdot isn't the only place this conversation is happening.
Also, its not just about DeCSS anymore. Its also about things like region coding. Notice how sales of models of DVD players that can bypass the region codes are booming? Your customers know what they want and they are all talking to each other.
While you and your battalions of lawyers work feverishly in your vain attempt to stick your finger into the leaks in the CSS dyke, the conversation grows louder. And there is nothing, NOTHING you can do to quiet it.
Unless you listen, and particate, honestly.
Maybe we should send Jack Valenti and the heads of the major studios some complimentary copies of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
The only question that I have is whether it is GPL'd "enough" - as far as I have heard, the customary copy of the GPL didn't come with the software, and there was only a one-line notice that it was GPL'd. Is that really enough to ensure protection?
This is something I've been wondering about. Is it necessary to quote to all the GPL boilerplate in order to have a binding GPL licence on a piece of software? The GPL is a standard piece of text that is well documented in many places on the Internet and I'm sure it has made its way into legal textbooks by now as well. Shouldn't it be enough to simply make reference to it and state that it is applicable to this program? Its not like there are different GPLs out there that might cause confusion. GPL is GPL.
By comparison, when you put a copyright notice on something, all you need is the word "copyright" or the © symbol. There is no requirement to quote the copyright act.
t doesn't matter how lame my TPM is. If I encrypt something by XORing it with the the string "12345", it is illegal for you to produce a program which decrypts it.
Does this mean the rot13 decoder in my newsreader program is now illegal?
...or does the Caldera logo look like a giant Mickey Mouse casting a shadow over the world. The first time I saw it, I though it was some sinister new logo for the Disney® Corporation.
I think you're describing a rather old phenomenon, namely scientific communities. The entire peer-reviewed, status-based, publication-driven phenomenon of science is just a mechanism for sharing knowledge and giving status based (more or less) on contributions to it.
Before the Net, basic research was done in relative isolation until one had verifiable results, then one wrote a paper which was then submitted to a journal. The journal would then take several months while the submission was passed around to its panel members to be vetted. Finally the paper would be printed up in the journal and sent out by snail mail to subscribers. Only then would the knowledge enter the general knowledge base of the research world. The whole life cycle for the generation and re-incorporation of new ideas would take many months, even years.
With the Internet, ideas are shared daily, even hourly. This greatly accelerates the cycle of knowledge being reincorporated into the knowledge base. The ideas may be not be as well developed as they would be in a formal research paper submission, but since there are usually many other researchers in the world working along the same lines of inquiry, this early sharing of ideas-in-progress means that they can be peer reviewed as the research develops. Thus, erroneous insights can be dismissed much sooner, saving many months of wasted research time, and valuable insights are distributed to other researchers much sooner, enchancing the value of their own efforts.
I guess I didn't make it clear in my original post: it is not knowledge sharing itself that is new in the Internet. You are right in that it is an old phonemenon. What is different with the Internet is the way knowledge is shared. Ideas, when freed from physical means of transfer, travel much faster. Instead of being peer reviewed by a small group over months, there are now peered reviewed by a large group over days. ("To a large group of programmers, all bugs are shallow.") Also, the linking nature of the Internet fosters a culture where idea sharing becomes a natural course of action.
"Knowledge sharing is something that will enhance culture. If you know more stuff, you can spread this knowledge, and like a multiplier effect, add knowledge to the knowledge base"
The Digital Age is not just an age of smart machines but of humans who, through networks, can combine their intelligence, knowledge, and creativity for breakthroughs in the creation of wealth and social development. Just as networking distributes and integrates computer processing - the network becomes the computer - so inter-networking should be able to distribute and integrate human intelligence to achieve a new form of organizational consciousness. The N-Gen may be the first generation to network intellect for problem solving and innovation...
This is something that I have been anticipating since I saw the Internet first begin to expand beyond the academic world and into the mainstream in the early 1990's. The early Internet created a networking of knowledge among researchers that spurred a rapid increase in the pace of technological development throughout the 70's and 80's and continues today. Now the same knowledge sharing enabled by the Internet has spread to the rest of the world.
For the kids growing up today, the Internet is not a novelty, it is their environment. Being immersed in this environment, they accept its inherent properties as natural and subconsciously apply them in their view of the rest of the world. Just as a webpage without hyperlinks is only of limited use, so too is unshared knowledge. In the view of the "N-Generation", everything is connected, and it is this interconnectedness that magnifies the power of any given thing.
This phenomenon of power through knowledge sharing should be quite recognizable to most readers of Slashdot. After all, where would Linux be today if Linus had not shared his ideas with other programmers, and other programmer had not in turn shared their ideas? The entire Open Source movement and its rise to prominence these days is directly attributable to same principle.
It should not come as any surprise then that knowledge sharing will have the same profound effect in changing the nature of business enterprises. As this new generation matures, you can expect to see the same forces being applied to solving social problems.
Knowlege networking has the same synergistic properties as computer networking. Watch over the next decade as people all around the world become part of an enormous Human Beowulf Cluster. It will be quite interesting.
Ding! Maybe that's the real issue: Do timed, limited-access exams have any place in a modern curriculum? Maybe it is time to abandon that historical mechanism.
Definitely. I never could understand the validity of a high-pressure, stress-inducing 2 hour session of answering questions as a true test of what I had learned in 3 and a half months of study. What I have learned is what I have learned, and a better measure of that is how well I can utilized it under real world conditions. A traditional exam setting is about as far from a real world simulation as you can get.
The artificiality of the exam situation is highly suspect as a measure of an individual's true knowledge and their ability to apply that knowledge. It also represents the failure of schools to do true QA on their main product, educating people.
It would be much better to monitor students throughout the duration of the course and grade them on their overall progress.
The Dead Media Project has been on the go for over 3 years now and the list of items has become quite long. Here is the accumulated Master-List of Dead Media.
On Saturday, Wired News featured an interview with Bruce Sterling in mp3 format. In it he talks about Dead Media and other subjects.
Re:Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!
on
Database Nation
·
· Score: 3
What needs to be done is [...] intentional pollution of the gathered data. Once the gathering of unreliable data becomes more costly than profitable, it will stop. If it costs more to filter and refilter dirty data than to simply ask for voluntary opt-in, then the data farmers will do the 'economical' thing.
I whole heartedly agree with this strategy. It is extremely difficult to get laws for protection of privacy passed when most politicians are in the pockets of corporate interests. The best way to fight corporations is in the area that is most sacred to their cold little hearts: profits.
There are many opportunities to contribute to database pollution. When a website insists you fill out a form before allowing you to download their "free" offering, use made up data. I read recently that it is estimated that about 50% of such data currently collected is false. Some companies, such a Realplayer are particularly odious, demanding all sorts of personal info before letting you install the software. In their database, my name is "Off, F*ck" (without the *).
In the physical world, avoid stores that require customer cards for sale prices when possible. If that is not practical then make up a phony identity on your application. I shopped at Safeway for years and took advantage of their weekly specials. Then one day I walked in and they told me I had to divulge all my personal info before they would let me buy anything at a sale price. I eventually got a card, but they think my name is J. Mxyptlk. (It's amusing to watch the cashier try to read my name off the receipt so she can "thank" me.)
A friend who used to work in the credit card centre for a large bank once advised that you should apply frequently for credit cards. Use your real name but all the other data such as income, marital status, occupation, etc. should be different on each one. After a while, there will be so much contradictory information in your file, data miners won't know what to believe about you.
A manufacuturer makes a DVD player that allows you to play discs from any zone and sales sky rocket. Other mfgs, needing to compete, also make their players to play any zone. Pretty soon "Any Zone Play" becomes a standard selling feature on all DVD players. So even if MPAA continues its practice of zone ecrypting its products, it is all moot.
So here we have a customer and (foreign) retailer rebellion that will lead to the defeat of the zoning scheme. It's easy to see the supermarket's concern: it stands to lose sales to Internet orders from the US. Of course, once some entrepreneur in India or Zimbabwe starts up an Internet DVD sales site, even North Americans will be flocking to buy Any Zone players and US and Canadian retailers will be demanding and end to zoning.
How did this come about? Did the MPAA forget to put a restriction in the DVD licence forbidding makers to allow any zone playing? Or was there some loophole in the wording that allows the players to be switchable manually, but perhaps not automatically?
And what is the MPAA going to do about it? Are the going to take the manufacturers to court to try to stop them? Even if they have grounds based on the DVD licence, might they risk having the whole scheme challenged as violating international trade laws?
And how does this situation affect the DeCSS fiacso? With zoning being made moot, is there any point to even needing a licence to make a player? Even if the ulterior motive is to get a precedent ruling on a DMCA reverse engineering situation, this mooting of region coding would seem to take some strength out their prima facie arguments of the sacredness of their disc encryption.
I don't know what is in the bill and hopefully some lawyer type will post a synopsis shortly, and we can all have a discussion of its merits.
However this guy's webpage is poor departure point for this debate. As has already been pointed out, the layout is atrocious. In addition, he rants on about this horrible bill and how it was passed and that it is bad for all of us, especially our children(?!?). But nowhere in his incoherent gibberish does he give any examples of what exactly he thinks is wrong with the bill.
And his suggestions on how to handle this situation? (partially hidden under the graphic) He puts up a couple of sound clips of movie dialogue of people recommending nuclear strikes as the best option for solving their problems. Real fscking mature.
If this had been posted in Slashdot threads, it would immediately been tagged as Flamebait and ignore by all. Instead it gets posted as a story so we can all rush out and read the page.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder why this story wasn't consider Newsworthy for Nerds when I submitted it in the same Slashdot category 10 days ago?
*Grumble. Whine.* Methinks maybe Hemos is prejudiced agaist Coyotes and in favour of Wolves.
Anyway, I am glad to see that at least they finally did see fit to post the story even if someone else gets the credit for the submission. This is a very practical and important step in preparing for the eventual (and hopefully inevitible) human journeying to Mars.
The last time humans ventured out of near Earth orbit over a GENERATION ago. It is something one can only read about in the history books, not something in today's news. Come on, let's get back out there!
I would go howl at the moon now, but it's not out tonight, so... I guess I'll just go and howl.
Trickster Coyote
Beyond the aspect of hyperlinking to ads or other commercial features, this situation raises some question about inserting hyperlinks into reprinted copyrighted text.
Take for example an an article by Bruce Sterling. Most of the writings on that site are described as "literary freeware". The acceptable use policy points out that copyright is retained by the author, but permission is granted for unlimited copying and distribution in any media for non-commercial uses only.
So the non-commercial clause would clearly rule out links to ads or e-commerce "services" such as Deja.com is offering. But what about other links?
The acceptable use policy also forbids altering the text. So if I reprint one of his articles on my website, that is fine. But what if he makes a mention of, say, NASA. Would I be forbidden from linking that word to the NASA website?
Is adding a hyperlink to a word truly "altering the text"? The sentence still reads the same as the author wrote it. Perhaps it is in the same way that adding italics can alter the text. What about a reverse situation: taking an article from the web that contains hyperlinks and printing it on paper for distribution, but not including URLs. Would that count as altering the text?
If I printed out an article for distribution but added footnotes connected to certain words, would that be permissible? I would think it probably would if I made clear that the footnotes were my own and not the original author. Likewise if I inserted commentary into the article.
So then how to create hyperlinks in the original article but to indicate that they are not part of the original article? Putting them as footers to the text is awkward. Putting them in a sidebar puts them closer to the original word but still doesn't provide the direct intuitive connection that linking the actual word provides. Perhaps the link could take the reader to an intermediate page with a disclaimer that then auto redirects after a few seconds to a target page.
This is a new situation in copyright brought about by the nature of the web. Perhaps there needs to be a new "fair use" created here: the right to add non-commercial hyperlinks to a reprinted article.
Trickster Coyote
...this would protect Andover from anything that Slashdot has.
Probably not, since Andover actually owns Slashdot. By its ownership, Andover has the potential to control what content appears on Slashdot and thus would share some legal liability for the content. I think this ruling has more to do with ISPs who are hosting unrelated third party websites. They have no power to control the content and therefore (as this judge rightly ruled) they should bear no liability.
Punto.com? Run that through babelfish and it sounds suspiciously close to the name of this website. Methinks they are trying to confuse the readers of Slashdot and steal their business by infringing on their god given trademark rights. Just because it is in a different language is no excuse. It still means the same thing.
Roblimo, I think perhaps you had better notify Andover.net's squadron of lawyers so they can start composing nastygrams to send to these trademark pirates.
;-]
There has been some concern of late here about American fugutives coming to Canada in order to be spared from having to face a US death penalty. However the prospect of American corporations doing the same is somewhat unsettling.
It's a good thing that Microsoft is staying put and facing the music. I would really hate to see Canada become the Mos Eisley of the corporate world with lawless excutives roaming the streets.
A note about posting as extrans: it seems that that and the "plain text" posting options have been switched since posting as plain text will activate any HTML in your comments.
The Le Monde article comments that the US considers cybercriminality to be a case of natianal defense as well as protecting economic ineterests. Before they start organizing some gung-ho international cybergestapo to go after miscreants, they should start by actually building up their cyberDEFENSES. A good place to start would be by reading this article from the intelligence analysis website, Stratfor.com, which looks at the implications of most of the computerized world being "overwhelmingly dependent upon a single computer operating system that is exceedingly vulnerable to even simple attacks."
If a teenager with little talent can shut down major websites with DDoS attacks or corrupt computer files with a simple script, imagine what a foreign intelligence agency could do. As the article says, "the real threat from rogue states won't be nuclear attack, but cyber attack. Rogue states won't launch nuclear attack for fear of the counterattack. But how do we retaliate against a virus attack? We depend on computers. They don't."
It seems that a much more effecient way of protecting yourselves would be to prevent as much damage from happening as possible instead of just sending the troops after someone after the damage has already happened.
On the other hand, if by 'national defense', they mean making the world safe for the MPAA by going after Norwegian teenagers, then perhaps they have a point.
20 years ago I used to drive a hack. Then I became somewhat of a computer hacker. Now I am a hack writer.
Hacking has always been my life.
Credit certainly must given to IDG's lawyers for their politeness. However just because they are polite doesn't mean that one should simply acquiesce. Particularly when the lawyers are wrong in their beliefs about the alleged infringement.
Trademark law specifically excludes non-commercial use of trademarked words, as has been pointed out in other posts in this discussion. So while IDG's request was polite, it certainly was not reasonable. The website owners were clearly within their rights to refuse it.
If you are walking down the street and someone comes up to you and politely requests that you hand over you wallet and all your vauables, should you comply? Or would you be justified in telling them to get lost?
Yes, it most certainly does.
proprietary - from Latin proprietas meaning property
She is certainly not my property. I don't own her. What century are you living in?
[adjective] used, made, or marketed by one having the exclusive legal right
Good Lord, do you take me for a pimp?!!!
I didn't make her - her parents did that, but they don't own her either.
Exclusive legal right to use her? I thinking using people is rather repugnant. And as far as exclusivity goes, she is a free person and if she decided she would rather be with someone else, that is her choice. It might hurt me, but I would respect it. However, she has stayed with me for over 9 years so far and things are still going quite well, so I feel no fear of losing her.
You are welcome to try to woo her away from me if you wish, but I doubt you would get very far. She has already shown that she prefers guys who are mature, intelligent, and respect women as human beings.
I wonder if they would send out some literature?
From Predictive Networks product information page:
[The Internet is] big, it's unorganized, and its users are simply unable to wade through it all to find interesting information that satisfies their needs.
I don't know what warped dimension these guys are living in, but I find ads to be the least interesting thing on the Internet. And my information needs rarely have anything to do with purchasing products or services.
Until now, the only way reach end-users through all that clutter has been to bombard them with banner ads. And, as today's declining click-through rates show, this approach got old fast.
Again they assume advertising messages are more important to people than the actual content of web pages. All that stuff is just "clutter". And banner ads are "old" because people find them annoying. Targeting them won't make them any less so. A telemarketer who interupts my dinner trying to sell me something I might be interested in is no less irksome than one with a product I don't care about.
We have developed a revolutionary infrastructure-based content delivery platform that enhances users' online Internet experience by delivering highly personalized, custom-tailored information right to their desktops.
What information? And how will it appear on my screen? Are random web pages going to pop up in my browser that they think I might be interested in?
More likely "information" is their euphemism for ads. So how are these going to appear on my computer? When I read Slashdot, will they be substituting their ads for the ones Andover puts on the pages? Or will there be boxes popping up on my screen flashing ads and disrupting what I am trying to read? Will my ISP insist that I must use their specially customized version of Netscape 6.5 with a special window to dispay the content they think I ought to be reading?
It all sounds like a marketers wet dream to track all the interests of individuals in order to target the ads, but I am unable to see how they are going to deliver them. Substituting ads on a page would upset site owners who would probably sue. Pop ups will annoy subscribers and probably lose business for the ISPs. Special browsers with ad windows are already in use by "free" ISPs; why would anyone want to pay even a "discounted" rate for same thing they can get for free?
"Content providers, such as advertising organizations, can harness the power of the Internet to send highly-targeted, rich media messages directly to the audiences they desire."
The language of this statement makes want to puke (advertising = "rich media messages" ??!!) These people are so out of touch with real life and real people it is quite scary. There is no way I would want people like this to be tracking my private online activities.
...are you listening? We know you read Slashdot. Or do you only read the DeDSS threads? The stuff applies to you in spades.
" Marketing sees the consumer as the enemy."
Imagine trying to jail your own customers, who have paid good money to buy your product, simply because they want to access their purchases in ways you don't approve. If this isn't treating your customers as enemies, I don't know what is.
And as you may have notice from reading Slashdot, there is a conversation going on. Your customers are talking to each other. Among other things, they are talking about how you are treating them like enemies. And Slashdot isn't the only place this conversation is happening.
Also, its not just about DeCSS anymore. Its also about things like region coding. Notice how sales of models of DVD players that can bypass the region codes are booming? Your customers know what they want and they are all talking to each other.
While you and your battalions of lawyers work feverishly in your vain attempt to stick your finger into the leaks in the CSS dyke, the conversation grows louder. And there is nothing, NOTHING you can do to quiet it.
Unless you listen, and particate, honestly.
Maybe we should send Jack Valenti and the heads of the major studios some complimentary copies of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
Could this thing be fought through judicious use of database pollution?
1. Gather together a group of people who are also concerned about this Orwellian nightmare.
2. Get some copies of the school yearbook and divide up the pages among the group.
3. Now start phoning on the toll-free snitch line and call in the name of every single student in the school.
With the database clogged with all those names, profiling becomes extremely difficult if not impossible.
4. Repeat the process until they shut down this moronic program.
This is something I've been wondering about. Is it necessary to quote to all the GPL boilerplate in order to have a binding GPL licence on a piece of software? The GPL is a standard piece of text that is well documented in many places on the Internet and I'm sure it has made its way into legal textbooks by now as well. Shouldn't it be enough to simply make reference to it and state that it is applicable to this program? Its not like there are different GPLs out there that might cause confusion. GPL is GPL.
By comparison, when you put a copyright notice on something, all you need is the word "copyright" or the © symbol. There is no requirement to quote the copyright act.
Does this mean the rot13 decoder in my newsreader program is now illegal?
Seriously.
Before the Net, basic research was done in relative isolation until one had verifiable results, then one wrote a paper which was then submitted to a journal. The journal would then take several months while the submission was passed around to its panel members to be vetted. Finally the paper would be printed up in the journal and sent out by snail mail to subscribers. Only then would the knowledge enter the general knowledge base of the research world. The whole life cycle for the generation and re-incorporation of new ideas would take many months, even years.
With the Internet, ideas are shared daily, even hourly. This greatly accelerates the cycle of knowledge being reincorporated into the knowledge base. The ideas may be not be as well developed as they would be in a formal research paper submission, but since there are usually many other researchers in the world working along the same lines of inquiry, this early sharing of ideas-in-progress means that they can be peer reviewed as the research develops. Thus, erroneous insights can be dismissed much sooner, saving many months of wasted research time, and valuable insights are distributed to other researchers much sooner, enchancing the value of their own efforts.
I guess I didn't make it clear in my original post: it is not knowledge sharing itself that is new in the Internet. You are right in that it is an old phonemenon. What is different with the Internet is the way knowledge is shared. Ideas, when freed from physical means of transfer, travel much faster. Instead of being peer reviewed by a small group over months, there are now peered reviewed by a large group over days. ("To a large group of programmers, all bugs are shallow.") Also, the linking nature of the Internet fosters a culture where idea sharing becomes a natural course of action.
The Digital Age is not just an age of smart machines but of humans who, through networks, can combine their intelligence, knowledge, and creativity for breakthroughs in the creation of wealth and social development. Just as networking distributes and integrates computer processing - the network becomes the computer - so inter-networking should be able to distribute and integrate human intelligence to achieve a new form of organizational consciousness. The N-Gen may be the first generation to network intellect for problem solving and innovation...
This is something that I have been anticipating since I saw the Internet first begin to expand beyond the academic world and into the mainstream in the early 1990's. The early Internet created a networking of knowledge among researchers that spurred a rapid increase in the pace of technological development throughout the 70's and 80's and continues today. Now the same knowledge sharing enabled by the Internet has spread to the rest of the world.
For the kids growing up today, the Internet is not a novelty, it is their environment. Being immersed in this environment, they accept its inherent properties as natural and subconsciously apply them in their view of the rest of the world. Just as a webpage without hyperlinks is only of limited use, so too is unshared knowledge. In the view of the "N-Generation", everything is connected, and it is this interconnectedness that magnifies the power of any given thing.
This phenomenon of power through knowledge sharing should be quite recognizable to most readers of Slashdot. After all, where would Linux be today if Linus had not shared his ideas with other programmers, and other programmer had not in turn shared their ideas? The entire Open Source movement and its rise to prominence these days is directly attributable to same principle.
It should not come as any surprise then that knowledge sharing will have the same profound effect in changing the nature of business enterprises. As this new generation matures, you can expect to see the same forces being applied to solving social problems.
Knowlege networking has the same synergistic properties as computer networking. Watch over the next decade as people all around the world become part of an enormous Human Beowulf Cluster. It will be quite interesting.
Definitely. I never could understand the validity of a high-pressure, stress-inducing 2 hour session of answering questions as a true test of what I had learned in 3 and a half months of study. What I have learned is what I have learned, and a better measure of that is how well I can utilized it under real world conditions. A traditional exam setting is about as far from a real world simulation as you can get.
The artificiality of the exam situation is highly suspect as a measure of an individual's true knowledge and their ability to apply that knowledge. It also represents the failure of schools to do true QA on their main product, educating people.
It would be much better to monitor students throughout the duration of the course and grade them on their overall progress.
The parent comment to this has a Score:6 rating. Is there a new moderation system in effect, or is this just a glitch? Inquiring minds want to know.
On Saturday, Wired News featured an interview with Bruce Sterling in mp3 format. In it he talks about Dead Media and other subjects.
What needs to be done is [...] intentional pollution of the gathered data. Once the gathering of unreliable data becomes more costly than profitable, it will stop. If it costs more to filter and refilter dirty data than to simply ask for voluntary opt-in, then the data farmers will do the 'economical' thing.
I whole heartedly agree with this strategy. It is extremely difficult to get laws for protection of privacy passed when most politicians are in the pockets of corporate interests. The best way to fight corporations is in the area that is most sacred to their cold little hearts: profits.
There are many opportunities to contribute to database pollution. When a website insists you fill out a form before allowing you to download their "free" offering, use made up data. I read recently that it is estimated that about 50% of such data currently collected is false. Some companies, such a Realplayer are particularly odious, demanding all sorts of personal info before letting you install the software. In their database, my name is "Off, F*ck" (without the *).
In the physical world, avoid stores that require customer cards for sale prices when possible. If that is not practical then make up a phony identity on your application. I shopped at Safeway for years and took advantage of their weekly specials. Then one day I walked in and they told me I had to divulge all my personal info before they would let me buy anything at a sale price. I eventually got a card, but they think my name is J. Mxyptlk. (It's amusing to watch the cashier try to read my name off the receipt so she can "thank" me.)
A friend who used to work in the credit card centre for a large bank once advised that you should apply frequently for credit cards. Use your real name but all the other data such as income, marital status, occupation, etc. should be different on each one. After a while, there will be so much contradictory information in your file, data miners won't know what to believe about you.
Hmmm. A little extrapolation...
A manufacuturer makes a DVD player that allows you to play discs from any zone and sales sky rocket. Other mfgs, needing to compete, also make their players to play any zone. Pretty soon "Any Zone Play" becomes a standard selling feature on all DVD players. So even if MPAA continues its practice of zone ecrypting its products, it is all moot.
So here we have a customer and (foreign) retailer rebellion that will lead to the defeat of the zoning scheme. It's easy to see the supermarket's concern: it stands to lose sales to Internet orders from the US. Of course, once some entrepreneur in India or Zimbabwe starts up an Internet DVD sales site, even North Americans will be flocking to buy Any Zone players and US and Canadian retailers will be demanding and end to zoning.
How did this come about? Did the MPAA forget to put a restriction in the DVD licence forbidding makers to allow any zone playing? Or was there some loophole in the wording that allows the players to be switchable manually, but perhaps not automatically?
And what is the MPAA going to do about it? Are the going to take the manufacturers to court to try to stop them? Even if they have grounds based on the DVD licence, might they risk having the whole scheme challenged as violating international trade laws?
And how does this situation affect the DeCSS fiacso? With zoning being made moot, is there any point to even needing a licence to make a player? Even if the ulterior motive is to get a precedent ruling on a DMCA reverse engineering situation, this mooting of region coding would seem to take some strength out their prima facie arguments of the sacredness of their disc encryption.
I don't know what is in the bill and hopefully some lawyer type will post a synopsis shortly, and we can all have a discussion of its merits.
However this guy's webpage is poor departure point for this debate. As has already been pointed out, the layout is atrocious. In addition, he rants on about this horrible bill and how it was passed and that it is bad for all of us, especially our children(?!?). But nowhere in his incoherent gibberish does he give any examples of what exactly he thinks is wrong with the bill.
And his suggestions on how to handle this situation? (partially hidden under the graphic) He puts up a couple of sound clips of movie dialogue of people recommending nuclear strikes as the best option for solving their problems. Real fscking mature.
If this had been posted in Slashdot threads, it would immediately been tagged as Flamebait and ignore by all. Instead it gets posted as a story so we can all rush out and read the page.
Sheesh.