Someone I know had every computer in his home taken for suspicion of child porn. It took a few months but he finally got everything back and no charges were ever filed. They conceded nothing was found and that the open wifi hotspot of his house along a major roadway was probably to blame.
The worse part? The feds kept saying, in his face, "We've found child porn on your computer. How do you explain it." He had been in law enforcement for years and he was shocked at the outright blatant lies told to him about this 'evidence'. No files were found, they just lied.
On the BBC website there's an interview with the student who was held over an alleged "Al Quada Training Manual" (which originated from a website run by the US Government). He describes a similar kind of interrorgation. He was also critial of the police involved failing to carry out a proper investigation. Effectivly an innocent person was subjected to abuse because the police apparently didn't do the job they are paid to do.
destroyed of all things ! I personally think they should explode and kill all the occupants of the premises where said hardware is located. Or maybe geotargetting coupled with a tactical nuke or so, sure the collateral damage would be large, but nothing is too much in protecting that precious IP.
An alternative possibility would be to target anywhere the senator or his computer could possibly be...
I've often wondered if an intelligence test before a vote would be a good thing and I've decided against that, but such a test administered before being able to take public office would be a very good thing.
Would it not be better to administer this before they became a candidate. Probably also with preventing convicted felons standing for office and (especially in the US) a test of patriotism, with automatic deportation if they are more interested in the wellbeing of another country.
from http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2003/06/59305
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested Tuesday that people who download copyright materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed.
But Hatch himself is using unlicensed software on his official website, which presumably would qualify his computer to be smoked by the system he proposes.
The article also says that Continental Airlines has also pirated the same software. Also in both cases there appear to have been hacking of the software to try and disguise that this is the fact. The latter strongly implies that those responsible knew that what they were doing was wrong. Something which would typically be expected to increase the liability. No doubt the usual double standard will prevail of going after people downloading popular entertainment, whilst ignoring large corporations who are making lots of money as a result of infringing copyright. Politicans being hurt by laws they advocate is all too rare. Which is a great pity since Gordon Brown being locked up for 41 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds might not be a bad thing:)
Progress is made by shared invention. Once upon a time invention sharing was universal but progress was slow.
Because transport and communications were slow, expensive or both. e.g. whilst the Roman army had telecommunication systems the average Roman citizen did not.
Then we had copyrights and patents and the intent of these was to encourage investment in invention by granting a temporary monopoly on it. That worked for a while.
It's actually quite hard to test this, let alone prove this.
Economic interests have spoiled this by extending the monopoly into eternity and twisting the word invention to absurdity.
Even if you can make a case for a certain amount of copyright being positive. That dosn't imply that more copyright equates to better. There are plenty of situations where "too much" is actually worst than "too little". The same chemical can be both an "essential nutrient" and a "deadly poison". Once you extend copyright beyond half the median human life span it may as well be infinite anyway.
If I'm a plumber, and don't work weekends, you don't have the right to force me to work weekends because that's what you would prefer. As a plumber I sell my wages. if a content producer sells licenses to his work, you are no more entitled to dictate what licenses he sells than you are to tell the plumber when he should work. It's their content, not yours.
The important difference is that you don't get to tell people that they can't use another plumber. Also your work is intrinsically scarce. The economics of plumbing would change if it were trivially easy to magic up an arbitary number of plumbers.
It's a puff-piece, something to make Joe Public think that what the MAFIAA is doing is a legitimate way to identify offenders,
A bit like censorware producers claiming that their block lists are at least "reviewed" by humans. Even though it's typically possible to find "overblocking" characteristic of machines in such products.
and to make them think that their methods are so technologically complex that they can't be wrong.
Whereas anyone from a science/technology background will realise that the more complex a system, the more likely it is to generate errors...
Out of curiosity, what if they found out through the fingerprinting that it was NOT a song they hold the copyright to, do they then report themselves for copyright infringement?
Of course not, these people are world class hypocrits.
And how large is the fractions of files they download something they don't hold the copyright to? 1%? 50%? Something else?
It would also be interesting to know what the false positive rate is for their "fingerprinting"...
Copy protection isn't suppose to stop hackers from stealing the games, it's suppose the slow them down long enough for the first few weeks to sales to pass which are extremely important to a game. A good example off the top of my head is the delay between Doom 3 being sold in the US and in the UK.
Alternativly this is a good example of a publisher shooting themselves in the foot.
It was downloaded in the UK on bit torrent over 3 million times or something before it even came out in England, are you (not parent) seriously telling me these people weren't going to buy it when it came out if there wasn't a free download?
If there isn't a "legitimate source" available then it's very likely that there would be some "lost sales". This kind of behaviour is effectivly telling your customers that their money is no good because they are not in the right part of the planet... If you are stupid enough to turn away potential customers then you have only yourself to blame.
...the people which will copy your software for free, would they buy your software otherwise ? I have got the feeling that most of the time the answer is a loud : NO.
This is something which those who consider any infringement a "lost sale" just don't get.
hen i was younger we casually copied a lot of software which needed decoder ring/manual or whatnot (dutifully de-constructed, copied, and reconstructed) would ANY of us swapping those soft have bought it ? No. Maybe we would have bought 1 , maybe 2 , but not the quantity we copied.
There's even a question of if such piracy could lead to more sales...
Really, the only similarity between today's software industry and a manufacturing industry is that the design is done up front, and then the design costs are recouped by selling lots of copies. But that's not an inherent aspect of programming at all; it's an artifact of the attempt to force software into a manufacturing model which doesn't really apply.
Not even all software is written this way anyway. Plenty is produced via the purely tertiary approach of "I want software to do X. How much will it cost?". It's only a subset of proprietary software which has decided to take a psudo-secondary approach.
i was looking at a completely broken business model to present to class. thanks. the problem with political campaigns? it's a gamble. that's okay for a campaign, but not for my dollars going toward a product the consumer wants. Businesses are about getting money up front to fund production of a product, then selling it at the market bearable price to recoup your costs. Customers don't like gambling away their product purchasing dollars.
Many business models involve gambling. The "pay for something then attempt to make money from it" certainly does. Remember also that stock markets involve nothing except gambling.
For an example of how this works, look at political campaign web sites. Millions of people make small contributions that add up to millions of dollars, and they're not even guaranteed anything in return! Setting up a similar system for the development of software, music, etc. would be straightforward
You also have lotteries and betting on sporting events.
But they'd rather charge for copies than for the labor of game design... probably because they want to "strike it rich" if the game becomes a runaway hit.
If it dosn't they stand to loose a lot of money. For this business model to work your "hits" have to more than cover your "misses". Depending on the exact ratio this may mean that the "hits" have to be extremely profitable for the business to just break even.
How about a company willing to sell, at a reasonable price, just to recoup the massive cost needed to build the software in the first place? Just saying that replication and distribution costs are close to zero is only counting a very small part of the total cost.
There may or may not be enough potential customers for that to happen. (As well as it also being perfectly possible that whilst there might be sufficent potential customers the rate of sale might be insufficent to pay your overheads in the time you have.) That is always going to be the situation when you first pay for a product (and it's means of production) then go looking for customers. It dosn't especially matter what that product might be.
there is much more than just the development cost to consider...marketing/advertising, support, distribution, duplication, packaging, paying the rent and utilities, R&D for enhancements, return on equity for the investors, etc.
There are two options either you make sure that you have money from customers (or at least a contractual obligation for payment) before you spend the money or you hope that sales will at least cover your costs. The latter is always going to be a risk (for any kind of business), thus typically a company would produce several different products with the hope of making an overall profit even if some of those make a loss.
The only games that don't get cracked, are the ones that nobody cares about. Even Daikatana was cracked... Copy protection is no longer a cat and mouse game, because the cat has ten thousand claws and a million eyes - you just can't escape it.
The only known way to win here is "don't be the mouse".
The pathetic thing about it all, is that software developers pay big bucks for this protection software that doesn't even work. Oh, I mean sure it works, for the first four hours until someone releases a crack.
But the cost dosn't end there. Since the supplier still has to handle enquiries due to the "copy protection" breaking things for their customers.
In most cases there's a patch available before the game is even officially released, thanks to inside leaks and pre-stocked retail outlets.
As well as review copies.
I'd much rather see the developers save their money, get rid of the copy protection and let their products thrive on their own merits.
Alternativly they could spend that money in something which will improve their product.
Not everyone copies games, and those that do, will not buy games. If one game is deemed "uncrackable", the warez kiddie will simply find some other game to play.
Most likely the game they will be playing will be "be the first to prove that statement wrong"!
Companies that care about their customers won't fault you for losing something. If someone buys my game 10 years ago, loses their key, forgets their email address and forgets when they bought it, and formats their PC they can STILL get a fresh copy of the game just by emailing me and proving they are the guy/gal in my database by knowing stuff like their full name and address.
If I can do that as a one man company, why can't all games companies?
Because the smaller the company the more they tend to care about not annoying their customers.
There are discussions and fears about the production of non-nitrate based explosives. However this would require that a terrorist prepare a non-trivial reaction in a confined space over an extended period of time. I would like to think someone would notice if a toilet is occupied for the many hours necessary to complete the production or that certainly the fumes would be noticed.
Worst case senario, from the terrorist's POV, would be an explosion which caused non fatal injury.
And that, my friend, is why I say there are no terrorists. I feel justified in classifying terrorists as 'guys who want to get onto planes with weapons to hijack them and crash them into buildings' because that's what the TSA and most of America classifies them as.
But you might be able to find people prepared to bomb abortion and shoot doctors. But there appears to be a great reluctance to call anti-abortionists (and "animal-rights" people) "terrorists". Even when that's what their behaviour says.
But do we get a reasonable analysis of the threat and a reasonable security response?
Probably becuase such a response is likely to be "quiet" possibly even counterintuitive to the average person and especially to the average politican. The latter wants something they can make a big fuss about, even if it's worst than useless.
No, we get blanket bans that are the equivalent of swatting flies with a 4X8 sheet of plywood.
Which would be less deadly to any flying insects than a folded newspaper.
Perhaps the difference between me and the common terrorist, is I fully realize the fact that killing a few thousand people won't change a damned thing. How many tens of millions have died in Africa, or South America ? They're in no better shape than they were a century ago.
It may well matter exactly who you kill. e.g. wiping out the US Congress would probably have a bigger effect than killing the same number of random office workers.
Perhaps I'm confused, but what he said made perfect sense. There are NO terrorists. As described, when they get on a plane, they are simply passengers with the correct credentials to fly.
Terrorists are very rare, those using planes as anything other than a means of transport are only a subset of these.
They are merely tourists when they wander around the lake that is your water supply dropping little vials of poison.
This movie plot is rather more likely than anything involving aviation. Yet terrorists poisoning drinking water is much less common than contamination due to human error.
You might as well be talking about the capabilities of magical elves since by definition, you will NOT know where a terrorist is going to strike.
With the number of possible targets (and "movie plots") being so large that you can't cover them all.
That is sort of the point. You can guess, you can try to predict based on historical events, but since the 9/11 event was a one-off (as far as I know) it is STUPID to believe that this is the new and improved international terrorist mode of operation. Did I say stupid? Sorry, I meant FUCKING STUPID!! with lots of exclamatory punctuation marks.
A "magical elf" may only need to make a few modifications to negate preventative action. Anyway there just arn't enough data points to predict anything.
For anyone that needs some schooling, terrorists, the originals, were the government. It has come to be used to describe those that would strike fear in an enemy with little use of resources, and attacks on the civilian population.
With governments still being involved in supporting terrorism.
One who utilizes the systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve political objectives, while disguised as a civilian non-combatant. The use of a civilian disguise while on operations exempts the perpetrator from protection under the Geneva Conventions, and consequently if captured they are liable for prosecution as common criminals.
Supporting terrorists gives governments a case for "denyability" especially in the case of an attack against either their own citizens or "friendlies". It's also the case that many governments want to treat "terrorists" as anything other than "common criminals".
Slashdot Mirror
Selling placebos as the real thing, or drugs that may contain the real thing (but in doses that are dangerous) is still illegal.
Yet there dosn't appear to be much law enforcement effort going into dealing with this. Even though there must be quite a trail of evidence involved.
Someone I know had every computer in his home taken for suspicion of child porn. It took a few months but he finally got everything back and no charges were ever filed. They conceded nothing was found and that the open wifi hotspot of his house along a major roadway was probably to blame.
The worse part? The feds kept saying, in his face, "We've found child porn on your computer. How do you explain it." He had been in law enforcement for years and he was shocked at the outright blatant lies told to him about this 'evidence'. No files were found, they just lied.
On the BBC website there's an interview with the student who was held over an alleged "Al Quada Training Manual" (which originated from a website run by the US Government). He describes a similar kind of interrorgation. He was also critial of the police involved failing to carry out a proper investigation. Effectivly an innocent person was subjected to abuse because the police apparently didn't do the job they are paid to do.
destroyed of all things ! I personally think they should explode and kill all the occupants of the premises where said hardware is located. Or maybe geotargetting coupled with a tactical nuke or so, sure the collateral damage would be large, but nothing is too much in protecting that precious IP.
An alternative possibility would be to target anywhere the senator or his computer could possibly be...
I've often wondered if an intelligence test before a vote would be a good thing and I've decided against that, but such a test administered before being able to take public office would be a very good thing.
Would it not be better to administer this before they became a candidate. Probably also with preventing convicted felons standing for office and (especially in the US) a test of patriotism, with automatic deportation if they are more interested in the wellbeing of another country.
from http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2003/06/59305
:)
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested Tuesday that people who download copyright materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed.
But Hatch himself is using unlicensed software on his official website, which presumably would qualify his computer to be smoked by the system he proposes.
The article also says that Continental Airlines has also pirated the same software. Also in both cases there appear to have been hacking of the software to try and disguise that this is the fact. The latter strongly implies that those responsible knew that what they were doing was wrong. Something which would typically be expected to increase the liability.
No doubt the usual double standard will prevail of going after people downloading popular entertainment, whilst ignoring large corporations who are making lots of money as a result of infringing copyright.
Politicans being hurt by laws they advocate is all too rare. Which is a great pity since Gordon Brown being locked up for 41 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds might not be a bad thing
Progress is made by shared invention. Once upon a time invention sharing was universal but progress was slow.
Because transport and communications were slow, expensive or both. e.g. whilst the Roman army had telecommunication systems the average Roman citizen did not.
Then we had copyrights and patents and the intent of these was to encourage investment in invention by granting a temporary monopoly on it. That worked for a while.
It's actually quite hard to test this, let alone prove this.
Economic interests have spoiled this by extending the monopoly into eternity and twisting the word invention to absurdity.
Even if you can make a case for a certain amount of copyright being positive. That dosn't imply that more copyright equates to better. There are plenty of situations where "too much" is actually worst than "too little". The same chemical can be both an "essential nutrient" and a "deadly poison".
Once you extend copyright beyond half the median human life span it may as well be infinite anyway.
If I'm a plumber, and don't work weekends, you don't have the right to force me to work weekends because that's what you would prefer. As a plumber I sell my wages. if a content producer sells licenses to his work, you are no more entitled to dictate what licenses he sells than you are to tell the plumber when he should work. It's their content, not yours.
The important difference is that you don't get to tell people that they can't use another plumber. Also your work is intrinsically scarce. The economics of plumbing would change if it were trivially easy to magic up an arbitary number of plumbers.
It's a puff-piece, something to make Joe Public think that what the MAFIAA is doing is a legitimate way to identify offenders,
A bit like censorware producers claiming that their block lists are at least "reviewed" by humans. Even though it's typically possible to find "overblocking" characteristic of machines in such products.
and to make them think that their methods are so technologically complex that they can't be wrong.
Whereas anyone from a science/technology background will realise that the more complex a system, the more likely it is to generate errors...
They did try and get into university internal networks though : "MPAA College Toolkit Raises Privacy, Security Concerns"
Using software which they had "pirated". Thus showing everyone exactly what kind of hypocrits they are.
Out of curiosity, what if they found out through the fingerprinting that it was NOT a song they hold the copyright to, do they then report themselves for copyright infringement?
Of course not, these people are world class hypocrits.
And how large is the fractions of files they download something they don't hold the copyright to? 1%? 50%? Something else?
It would also be interesting to know what the false positive rate is for their "fingerprinting"...
Copy protection isn't suppose to stop hackers from stealing the games, it's suppose the slow them down long enough for the first few weeks to sales to pass which are extremely important to a game. A good example off the top of my head is the delay between Doom 3 being sold in the US and in the UK.
Alternativly this is a good example of a publisher shooting themselves in the foot.
It was downloaded in the UK on bit torrent over 3 million times or something before it even came out in England, are you (not parent) seriously telling me these people weren't going to buy it when it came out if there wasn't a free download?
If there isn't a "legitimate source" available then it's very likely that there would be some "lost sales". This kind of behaviour is effectivly telling your customers that their money is no good because they are not in the right part of the planet... If you are stupid enough to turn away potential customers then you have only yourself to blame.
...the people which will copy your software for free, would they buy your software otherwise ? I have got the feeling that most of the time the answer is a loud : NO.
This is something which those who consider any infringement a "lost sale" just don't get.
hen i was younger we casually copied a lot of software which needed decoder ring/manual or whatnot (dutifully de-constructed, copied, and reconstructed) would ANY of us swapping those soft have bought it ? No. Maybe we would have bought 1 , maybe 2 , but not the quantity we copied.
There's even a question of if such piracy could lead to more sales...
Really, the only similarity between today's software industry and a manufacturing industry is that the design is done up front, and then the design costs are recouped by selling lots of copies. But that's not an inherent aspect of programming at all; it's an artifact of the attempt to force software into a manufacturing model which doesn't really apply.
Not even all software is written this way anyway. Plenty is produced via the purely tertiary approach of "I want software to do X. How much will it cost?". It's only a subset of proprietary software which has decided to take a psudo-secondary approach.
i was looking at a completely broken business model to present to class. thanks. the problem with political campaigns? it's a gamble. that's okay for a campaign, but not for my dollars going toward a product the consumer wants. Businesses are about getting money up front to fund production of a product, then selling it at the market bearable price to recoup your costs. Customers don't like gambling away their product purchasing dollars.
Many business models involve gambling. The "pay for something then attempt to make money from it" certainly does. Remember also that stock markets involve nothing except gambling.
For an example of how this works, look at political campaign web sites. Millions of people make small contributions that add up to millions of dollars, and they're not even guaranteed anything in return! Setting up a similar system for the development of software, music, etc. would be straightforward
You also have lotteries and betting on sporting events.
But they'd rather charge for copies than for the labor of game design... probably because they want to "strike it rich" if the game becomes a runaway hit.
If it dosn't they stand to loose a lot of money. For this business model to work your "hits" have to more than cover your "misses". Depending on the exact ratio this may mean that the "hits" have to be extremely profitable for the business to just break even.
How about a company willing to sell, at a reasonable price, just to recoup the massive cost needed to build the software in the first place? Just saying that replication and distribution costs are close to zero is only counting a very small part of the total cost.
There may or may not be enough potential customers for that to happen. (As well as it also being perfectly possible that whilst there might be sufficent potential customers the rate of sale might be insufficent to pay your overheads in the time you have.) That is always going to be the situation when you first pay for a product (and it's means of production) then go looking for customers. It dosn't especially matter what that product might be.
there is much more than just the development cost to consider...marketing/advertising, support, distribution, duplication, packaging, paying the rent and utilities, R&D for enhancements, return on equity for the investors, etc.
There are two options either you make sure that you have money from customers (or at least a contractual obligation for payment) before you spend the money or you hope that sales will at least cover your costs. The latter is always going to be a risk (for any kind of business), thus typically a company would produce several different products with the hope of making an overall profit even if some of those make a loss.
The only games that don't get cracked, are the ones that nobody cares about. Even Daikatana was cracked... Copy protection is no longer a cat and mouse game, because the cat has ten thousand claws and a million eyes - you just can't escape it.
The only known way to win here is "don't be the mouse".
The pathetic thing about it all, is that software developers pay big bucks for this protection software that doesn't even work. Oh, I mean sure it works, for the first four hours until someone releases a crack.
But the cost dosn't end there. Since the supplier still has to handle enquiries due to the "copy protection" breaking things for their customers.
In most cases there's a patch available before the game is even officially released, thanks to inside leaks and pre-stocked retail outlets.
As well as review copies.
I'd much rather see the developers save their money, get rid of the copy protection and let their products thrive on their own merits.
Alternativly they could spend that money in something which will improve their product.
Not everyone copies games, and those that do, will not buy games. If one game is deemed "uncrackable", the warez kiddie will simply find some other game to play.
Most likely the game they will be playing will be "be the first to prove that statement wrong"!
Companies that care about their customers won't fault you for losing something. If someone buys my game 10 years ago, loses their key, forgets their email address and forgets when they bought it, and formats their PC they can STILL get a fresh copy of the game just by emailing me and proving they are the guy/gal in my database by knowing stuff like their full name and address.
If I can do that as a one man company, why can't all games companies?
Because the smaller the company the more they tend to care about not annoying their customers.
Yes, and those guys shooting at me in Afghanistan were all peaceful farmers and herdsmen defending their homeland from the imperialist invaders!
Was your tourist visa up to date and were you dressed as a tourist?
There are discussions and fears about the production of non-nitrate based explosives. However this would require that a terrorist prepare a non-trivial reaction in a confined space over an extended period of time. I would like to think someone would notice if a toilet is occupied for the many hours necessary to complete the production or that certainly the fumes would be noticed.
Worst case senario, from the terrorist's POV, would be an explosion which caused non fatal injury.
And that, my friend, is why I say there are no terrorists. I feel justified in classifying terrorists as 'guys who want to get onto planes with weapons to hijack them and crash them into buildings' because that's what the TSA and most of America classifies them as.
But you might be able to find people prepared to bomb abortion and shoot doctors. But there appears to be a great reluctance to call anti-abortionists (and "animal-rights" people) "terrorists". Even when that's what their behaviour says.
But do we get a reasonable analysis of the threat and a reasonable security response?
Probably becuase such a response is likely to be "quiet" possibly even counterintuitive to the average person and especially to the average politican. The latter wants something they can make a big fuss about, even if it's worst than useless.
No, we get blanket bans that are the equivalent of swatting flies with a 4X8 sheet of plywood.
Which would be less deadly to any flying insects than a folded newspaper.
Perhaps the difference between me and the common terrorist, is I fully realize the fact that killing a few thousand people won't change a damned thing. How many tens of millions have died in Africa, or South America ? They're in no better shape than they were a century ago.
It may well matter exactly who you kill. e.g. wiping out the US Congress would probably have a bigger effect than killing the same number of random office workers.
Perhaps I'm confused, but what he said made perfect sense. There are NO terrorists. As described, when they get on a plane, they are simply passengers with the correct credentials to fly.
Terrorists are very rare, those using planes as anything other than a means of transport are only a subset of these.
They are merely tourists when they wander around the lake that is your water supply dropping little vials of poison.
This movie plot is rather more likely than anything involving aviation. Yet terrorists poisoning drinking water is much less common than contamination due to human error.
You might as well be talking about the capabilities of magical elves since by definition, you will NOT know where a terrorist is going to strike.
With the number of possible targets (and "movie plots") being so large that you can't cover them all.
That is sort of the point. You can guess, you can try to predict based on historical events, but since the 9/11 event was a one-off (as far as I know) it is STUPID to believe that this is the new and improved international terrorist mode of operation. Did I say stupid? Sorry, I meant FUCKING STUPID!! with lots of exclamatory punctuation marks.
A "magical elf" may only need to make a few modifications to negate preventative action. Anyway there just arn't enough data points to predict anything.
For anyone that needs some schooling, terrorists, the originals, were the government. It has come to be used to describe those that would strike fear in an enemy with little use of resources, and attacks on the civilian population.
With governments still being involved in supporting terrorism.
One who utilizes the systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve political objectives, while disguised as a civilian non-combatant. The use of a civilian disguise while on operations exempts the perpetrator from protection under the Geneva Conventions, and consequently if captured they are liable for prosecution as common criminals.
Supporting terrorists gives governments a case for "denyability" especially in the case of an attack against either their own citizens or "friendlies". It's also the case that many governments want to treat "terrorists" as anything other than "common criminals".