Correct me if I am missing something here, but isn't it a no-no to put your legally ripped-from-cd tracks into your "share" directory for others to copy?
Except that the original piece says "Next, all media on the machine is cataloged, and
the full list is sent back to the RIAA headquarters (through specially
crafted requests over the p2p networks)". No restrictions to either a) that actually being made available to share or b) that which might actually have some connection to the RIAA in the first place.
The Berman Bill has not become law, and under the USA Patriot Act, Hacking can be considered terrorism.
Even if it was law it would only protect the RIAA if they only hacked machines in the US. Which wouldn't be easy to do. Imagine how silly the US government would look refusing an extradtion request for a "terrorist suspect" too.
When the player is exploited, a few things happen. First, all p2p-serving
software on the machine is infected, which will allow it to infect other
hosts on the p2p network. Next, all media on the machine is cataloged, and
the full list is sent back to the RIAA headquarters (through specially
crafted requests over the p2p networks), where it is added to their records
and stored until a later time, when it can be used as evidence in criminal
proceedings against those criminals who think it's OK to break the law
Those criminals would be known as "GOBBLES Security" and "The RIAA". Neither of which are law enforcement bodies. If a real law enforcement body were to do this they would typically need a warrent and to conduct any examination under controlled conditions. If evidence is not gathered and examined under strictly controlled conditions then it will be thrown out of any criminal court. The standard for a criminal court is "proof beyond reasonable doubt". Data supposedly gathered by an illegal (in some parts of the world terrorist) worm. Simply isn't fit to be presented in a criminal case. It is simply illegaly gathered, unverifiable data, without anything to connect it with anyone the crooks who created it might like to accuse of anything.
Acutally it's even more onerous than that. AFAIK in most/all states, some portion of the sales tax is decided by the individual county or even city where the goods are sold.
When it comes to purchases over the internet you have the issue of "where is the seller?" It could be where the retalier has their office, where their servers are physically located or even where the goods wind up being shipped from.
Presumably any proposed internet tax would invert this so the seller would have to collect sales for the city/county/state of the purchaser.
You have a similar problem in working out where the purchaser is.
I wouldn't just blame Hollywood. Australia is as active a member of copyright conventions as most of the world (Berne, WIPO, etc.), and while it may not go as far as American law it is clear that much the same activity violates Australian law.
Were these treaties created mainly by nation states or mainly by transnational publishing corporations. "Hollywood" is hardly, in practice, confined to California, USA.
As I understand it (and I haven't really studied it so I could be wrong), this was mostly an unintentional consequence of the huge influx of American immigrants. Quite simply, the ratio of Americans to native Hawaiians was so huge, that it was just inevitable that it would become a U.S. state.
Very similar to the way in which China treats Tibet... Anyway had the US complied with it's treaty obligations this would have been irrelevent.
I'm curious. I'd like to ask an old Hawaiian: Are you better off now than you were 50 years ago? Hawaii has more and higher paying jobs, more technology, higher per capita, better roads, better transportation (airports, boats), better weather forecasting (important for such secluded islands), better seismography,
What makes you think they wouldn't have achived this on their own? The Hawaiian Kingdom was doing perfectly well as a modern country before the US decided to take over.
and all the constitutional rights, freedoms, and privileges that go along with being a part of the free-est and most powerful nation on earth.
Considering that the Hawaiian Contitution grants more or less the same rights and freedoms as the US Consitution there is hardly anything to gain. In the process Hawaiian citizens lost the ability to self govern and the international community lost a valued member.
The U.S. has not acquired any land since Hawaii was added as a state almost half a century ago, and that was just a few volcanic islands in the middle of nowhere.
After first obliterating the islands' government. Following a model China (somewhat sucessfully) and Iraq (without sucess) attempted to emulate. The US has also tried several times to turn Puerto Rico into a US state, absolutly no chance of it becoming an independent country.
However, all countries are packed with people that do not even think about thinking about bigger pictures than their own backyards... and hence they just follow whatever their gov. says about anything further then their own backyard.
Especially if they get all their information from government/corporate media sources.
The clever thing the USA Regime has done is to fool it's own citizens into thinking thats its not authoritarian like other evil authoritarians. You see, they have worked that letting you say anything you like doesn't really hurt them, in fact, it keeps you thinking that everything is cool, so you you dont RISE UP.
IIRC the USA is at the top of the list of "proportion of population held in jail".
The USA is the most powerful nation on earth economically and militarily. It is the support which the USA gives to other evil regimes that makes the USA the most authoritarian regime in the world.
With the vast bulk of the US population being in utter ignorance of what the US government tends to do with their power.
The fact that the U.S government tolerates this form of making your opinions public, for now, does not overshadow the fact that the US and UK's actions towards Iraq, for now, will bear great harm towards innocent civilians.
Wrong tense, the USAF and RAF bombed civilians in Zi Qar and Missan on Friday.
While it's all too chic right now to bag on the US and the UK for their positions on the upcoming war on Iraq, the Patriot Act, and other debatable topics, I hope everyone takes a deep breath and realizes that the very fact that we are debating these topics proves the openness of these societies. The problems come when topics cease to be discussed. Especially when when they become taboo or even attempting to raise them leads to ad-hominum attacks.
Anyone who gives serious thought about lumping the US in with these authoritarian dictatorships has obviously never been to said countries.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are US allies; the US played a part in creating the situation in Vietnam; a fairly major part in removing domocracy from Iran and continues to treat Cuba as some kind of major threat. Whilst the US may or may not be an authoritarian dictatorship (a point of some contention) over the last 50 or so years the US has both put in place and supported plenty of authoritarian governments.
When I worked as a mechanic my boss hired a kid fresh out of school. He had at least 20 certifications, the poor guy couldn't do anything with out $20,000 worth of test equipment. We worked on a commission of 60%, this guy couldn't make $100.00 per week because he was only ceritfied to use equipment that most shops won't have. One time, I watched him try to remove the lugnuts from an old Dodge for 15 minutes until I felt sorry for him and told him they were lefthanded threads. He had never seen a left hand lugnut before. Certification my ass.
He never though to try turning them the other way. Sounds like he failed his certificate for initutive.
The whole object of repairing a client's system is to AVOID data loss. Yeah, RRR means you can treat all repairs the same, so it's faster and easier for the tech (and likely the better course in some corporate environments), but it sure is not my idea of good customer service for a personal system.
In a corporate environment any user data being stored on a workstation probably shouldn't have been there in the first place. Whereas SOHO users don't tend to have proper file servers.
Whereas with a personal computer, gods know what random things the customer does to it after your back is turned -- after all, the hapless computer's software is all instantly available to anyone who touches the keyboard. And it's truly amazing what a cat walking on the keyboard can delete.
Certainly with Windows or other single user type systems. Yet plenty of people want to claim that this is a good thing...
Whereas with a computer, if the tech messes up, it can produce a lot of inconvenience or cost a business money, but outside of medical-control situations, it's not likely to kill anyone. (And one would hope that whoever sets up mission-critical systems is exceedingly fussy about who touches the system, certified or not.)
I wasn't happy to find out that DVDs were encrypted and locked down regionally. Dont the movie studios want the money of consumers, regardless of where they live and what they use to watch movies?
Partly it's an attempt to emulate the characteristics of film and video tape, partly they think they can make more money by chopping up the market in whatever way they see fit.
For something like DRM to really work, you would need to go in and make custom hardware so that users are unable to pull information that is headed in its direction.
Which wouldn't work either, since in order for the content to be any use at all it must eventually end up as a signal usable by human sense organs.
There's a few problems here, and they are all with the grey areas. DRM is about more than stopping free music distribution, its about tracking, new distribution models
In practice the aim appears more to enforce current distribution models.
and giving some contols / rights to manage the rights of those that work - skilfully - to create the content.
If that were the case then musicans would be calling for DRM, to use on demo tapes, etc.
Notice how regioning makes it (for practical purposes) impossible for USians to mail-order e.g. European/region 2 movies, TV shows, etc., over the internet, for absolutely no good reason?
No good reason from the customers' POV. A very good reason for the distributors, given that there is a formalised system for repeat showings of TV programms (so they can wring every possible drop of advertising revenue out) which simply does not exist elsewhere on the planet.
I agree -- but he *can* design the hammer to be incompatible with any but his own nails, and then punish any modification of the hammer to work with non-approved nails
Except that anyone who tried the latter would be laughed out of court... When you buy a hammer it's yours to do what you like with.
DHCP==stupid for cable modem and DSL users. Static IP should be the default for "always on" services like these. What benefit is there by using dynamic IPs? You have X number of DSL/cable customers who are online all the time,
Or at least you *could* have every customer connected at once.
If you're going to use DHCP then just have static assignments. This is one holdover from dialup ISPs that really drives me nuts. With dialup yes, dynamic assignments make sense since X number of IP addresses in a pool could be assigned to X*10 number of users over the course of a week, etc.
You can impliment static IP addressing with dialups. Dynamic IP assignment can mean that you need fewer IP addresses than customers.
That means _waste_ cellulose. Such as corn fibers, not the corn iteself, or pulp/wood chip byproducts from the milling/cardboard industries, and "waste" crops such as bagasse in Louisiana that grow in swamp land.
Even domestic garbage would do the trick, as long as you can effectivly remove plastics and metals. One problem with methanol/ethanol is that you need to use energy for distilation to produce a usable fuel.
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Correct me if I am missing something here, but isn't it a no-no to put your legally ripped-from-cd tracks into your "share" directory for others to copy?
Except that the original piece says "Next, all media on the machine is cataloged, and the full list is sent back to the RIAA headquarters (through specially crafted requests over the p2p networks)". No restrictions to either a) that actually being made available to share or b) that which might actually have some connection to the RIAA in the first place.
The Berman Bill has not become law, and under the USA Patriot Act, Hacking can be considered terrorism.
Even if it was law it would only protect the RIAA if they only hacked machines in the US. Which wouldn't be easy to do. Imagine how silly the US government would look refusing an extradtion request for a "terrorist suspect" too.
When the player is exploited, a few things happen. First, all p2p-serving software on the machine is infected, which will allow it to infect other hosts on the p2p network. Next, all media on the machine is cataloged, and the full list is sent back to the RIAA headquarters (through specially crafted requests over the p2p networks), where it is added to their records and stored until a later time, when it can be used as evidence in criminal proceedings against those criminals who think it's OK to break the law
Those criminals would be known as "GOBBLES Security" and "The RIAA". Neither of which are law enforcement bodies. If a real law enforcement body were to do this they would typically need a warrent and to conduct any examination under controlled conditions. If evidence is not gathered and examined under strictly controlled conditions then it will be thrown out of any criminal court.
The standard for a criminal court is "proof beyond reasonable doubt". Data supposedly gathered by an illegal (in some parts of the world terrorist) worm. Simply isn't fit to be presented in a criminal case. It is simply illegaly gathered, unverifiable data, without anything to connect it with anyone the crooks who created it might like to accuse of anything.
Acutally it's even more onerous than that. AFAIK in most/all states, some portion of the sales tax is decided by the individual county or even city where the goods are sold.
When it comes to purchases over the internet you have the issue of "where is the seller?" It could be where the retalier has their office, where their servers are physically located or even where the goods wind up being shipped from.
Presumably any proposed internet tax would invert this so the seller would have to collect sales for the city/county/state of the purchaser.
You have a similar problem in working out where the purchaser is.
Since this is an Australian ISP, why the reference to US laws. The US laws cannont be used in Australia.
Most likely because they are sending out a form letter.
I wouldn't just blame Hollywood. Australia is as active a member of copyright conventions as most of the world (Berne, WIPO, etc.), and while it may not go as far as American law it is clear that much the same activity violates Australian law.
Were these treaties created mainly by nation states or mainly by transnational publishing corporations. "Hollywood" is hardly, in practice, confined to California, USA.
As I understand it (and I haven't really studied it so I could be wrong), this was mostly an unintentional consequence of the huge influx of American immigrants. Quite simply, the ratio of Americans to native Hawaiians was so huge, that it was just inevitable that it would become a U.S. state.
Very similar to the way in which China treats Tibet... Anyway had the US complied with it's treaty obligations this would have been irrelevent.
I'm curious. I'd like to ask an old Hawaiian: Are you better off now than you were 50 years ago? Hawaii has more and higher paying jobs, more technology, higher per capita, better roads, better transportation (airports, boats), better weather forecasting (important for such secluded islands), better seismography,
What makes you think they wouldn't have achived this on their own? The Hawaiian Kingdom was doing perfectly well as a modern country before the US decided to take over.
and all the constitutional rights, freedoms, and privileges that go along with being a part of the free-est and most powerful nation on earth.
Considering that the Hawaiian Contitution grants more or less the same rights and freedoms as the US Consitution there is hardly anything to gain. In the process Hawaiian citizens lost the ability to self govern and the international community lost a valued member.
The U.S. has not acquired any land since Hawaii was added as a state almost half a century ago, and that was just a few volcanic islands in the middle of nowhere.
After first obliterating the islands' government. Following a model China (somewhat sucessfully) and Iraq (without sucess) attempted to emulate. The US has also tried several times to turn Puerto Rico into a US state, absolutly no chance of it becoming an independent country.
I'm not a Muslim, but I think that the real reason for this is that Islam forbids idol worship.
This is also why Mosques are decorated with calligraphy and geometric shapes.
It is against the religion to have pictures or idols of Allah (maybe there are exceptions that I'm missing).
"Allah" means "God", you could hardly make a picture of God even if you wanted to.
However, all countries are packed with people that do not even think about thinking about bigger pictures than their own backyards... and hence they just follow whatever their gov. says about anything further then their own backyard.
Especially if they get all their information from government/corporate media sources.
The clever thing the USA Regime has done is to fool it's own citizens into thinking thats its not authoritarian like other evil authoritarians. You see, they have worked that letting you say anything you like doesn't really hurt them, in fact, it keeps you thinking that everything is cool, so you you dont RISE UP.
IIRC the USA is at the top of the list of "proportion of population held in jail".
The USA is the most powerful nation on earth economically and militarily. It is the support which the USA gives to other evil regimes that makes the USA the most authoritarian regime in the world.
With the vast bulk of the US population being in utter ignorance of what the US government tends to do with their power.
Actually the people who has most to win in an Iraq war is the US oil companies who expect to be able to drill for oil in the after-the-war-Iraq.
You mean drilling new wells will be cheaper than putting out the fires on the old ones?
The fact that the U.S government tolerates this form of making your opinions public, for now, does not overshadow the fact that the US and UK's actions towards Iraq, for now, will bear great harm towards innocent civilians.
Wrong tense, the USAF and RAF bombed civilians in Zi Qar and Missan on Friday.
While it's all too chic right now to bag on the US and the UK for their positions on the upcoming war on Iraq, the Patriot Act, and other debatable topics, I hope everyone takes a deep breath and realizes that the very fact that we are debating these topics proves the openness of these societies.
The problems come when topics cease to be discussed. Especially when when they become taboo or even attempting to raise them leads to ad-hominum attacks.
Anyone who gives serious thought about lumping the US in with these authoritarian dictatorships has obviously never been to said countries.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are US allies; the US played a part in creating the situation in Vietnam; a fairly major part in removing domocracy from Iran and continues to treat Cuba as some kind of major threat.
Whilst the US may or may not be an authoritarian dictatorship (a point of some contention) over the last 50 or so years the US has both put in place and supported plenty of authoritarian governments.
When I worked as a mechanic my boss hired a kid fresh out of school. He had at least 20 certifications, the poor guy couldn't do anything with out $20,000 worth of test equipment. We worked on a commission of 60%, this guy couldn't make $100.00 per week because he was only ceritfied to use equipment that most shops won't have. One time, I watched him try to remove the lugnuts from an old Dodge for 15 minutes until I felt sorry for him and told him they were lefthanded threads. He had never seen a left hand lugnut before. Certification my ass.
He never though to try turning them the other way. Sounds like he failed his certificate for initutive.
The whole object of repairing a client's system is to AVOID data loss. Yeah, RRR means you can treat all repairs the same, so it's faster and easier for the tech (and likely the better course in some corporate environments), but it sure is not my idea of good customer service for a personal system.
In a corporate environment any user data being stored on a workstation probably shouldn't have been there in the first place. Whereas SOHO users don't tend to have proper file servers.
Whereas with a personal computer, gods know what random things the customer does to it after your back is turned -- after all, the hapless computer's software is all instantly available to anyone who touches the keyboard. And it's truly amazing what a cat walking on the keyboard can delete.
:)
Certainly with Windows or other single user type systems.
Yet plenty of people want to claim that this is a good thing...
Whereas with a computer, if the tech messes up, it can produce a lot of inconvenience or cost a business money, but outside of medical-control situations, it's not likely to kill anyone. (And one would hope that whoever sets up mission-critical systems is exceedingly fussy about who touches the system, certified or not.)
See USS Yorktown
I wasn't happy to find out that DVDs were encrypted and locked down regionally. Dont the movie studios want the money of consumers, regardless of where they live and what they use to watch movies?
Partly it's an attempt to emulate the characteristics of film and video tape, partly they think they can make more money by chopping up the market in whatever way they see fit.
For something like DRM to really work, you would need to go in and make custom hardware so that users are unable to pull information that is headed in its direction.
Which wouldn't work either, since in order for the content to be any use at all it must eventually end up as a signal usable by human sense organs.
There's a few problems here, and they are all with the grey areas. DRM is about more than stopping free music distribution, its about tracking, new distribution models
In practice the aim appears more to enforce current distribution models.
and giving some contols / rights to manage the rights of those that work - skilfully - to create the content.
If that were the case then musicans would be calling for DRM, to use on demo tapes, etc.
Notice how regioning makes it (for practical purposes) impossible for USians to mail-order e.g. European/region 2 movies, TV shows, etc., over the internet, for absolutely no good reason?
No good reason from the customers' POV. A very good reason for the distributors, given that there is a formalised system for repeat showings of TV programms (so they can wring every possible drop of advertising revenue out) which simply does not exist elsewhere on the planet.
I agree -- but he *can* design the hammer to be incompatible with any but his own nails, and then punish any modification of the hammer to work with non-approved nails
Except that anyone who tried the latter would be laughed out of court... When you buy a hammer it's yours to do what you like with.
DHCP==stupid for cable modem and DSL users. Static IP should be the default for "always on" services like these. What benefit is there by using dynamic IPs? You have X number of DSL/cable customers who are online all the time,
Or at least you *could* have every customer connected at once.
If you're going to use DHCP then just have static assignments. This is one holdover from dialup ISPs that really drives me nuts. With dialup yes, dynamic assignments make sense since X number of IP addresses in a pool could be assigned to X*10 number of users over the course of a week, etc.
You can impliment static IP addressing with dialups. Dynamic IP assignment can mean that you need fewer IP addresses than customers.
And natural gas is primarily methane, so if we run out of other supplies, we can start piping cows.
It's also produced by landfill sites.
That means _waste_ cellulose. Such as corn fibers, not the corn iteself, or pulp/wood chip byproducts from the milling/cardboard industries, and "waste" crops such as bagasse in Louisiana that grow in swamp land.
Even domestic garbage would do the trick, as long as you can effectivly remove plastics and metals.
One problem with methanol/ethanol is that you need to use energy for distilation to produce a usable fuel.