They come and go very quickly. Shutting something down legally is a tremendous hassle. You have to go to a judge and get a court order to do it. You have to find the ISP responsible for hosting it, assuming its in a jurisdiction you can get a hold of. You have to get the ISP to pay attention to you in the first place.
It's probably a few hours of work, and then 30 seconds later the same site appears elsewhere. Marking it as "phishing" in a database doesn't have any due process protections, but it's not as severe as shutting it down.
I'm talking about length, not strength. Steel is within a single order of magnitude in terms of strength. Nanotubes strong enough for the purpose have been made only a few millimeters long, and that's 10 orders of magnitude too small.
Fair use is an undeniably important plank of copyright law. Critics like CEA sometimes lose sight of the fact that record labels and other copyright owners are as dependent on fair use as consumers. A healthy and robust fair use doctrine is critical to us, since so much of what we create is built on the art that came before.
The question is what each side considers "fair". They're hitting CEA for being on the side of free file sharing (by backing Grokster), which does not sound even vaguely like the intent of fair use to me.
The middle ground here is hard to find. The only ways I know of to prevent file sharing also prevent things that are certainly fair use (backing things up, playing on other media, making compilations, etc.)
So we've got a scenario pitting two sets of rights against each other, and two entities arguing that the compromise should be entirely in their favor. Unsurprisingly, it happens to be the way that makes each side thinks makes them the most money (the CEA selling more players, the RIAA selling more music).
Looks like the elevator scientists will get this one solved before liftoff.
You betcha they will. Compared to the problem of running a cable tens of thousands of miles straight up, and strong enough not to tear under its own weight, this sounds downright trivial. We're still a dozen orders of magnitude off.
Number of the Beast is definitely not his best work. I'm totally sympathetic with tearing it in half. But if you've read Stranger and Moon is a Harsh Mistress, then you've read most of his best stuff. If it's not to your taste, I really wouldn't try to change your mind.
The thing to notice about Heinlein is that he's really more of an ideas guy than a character guy. There are at least two others you might consider reading: Time Enough for Love and Starship Troopers. The former is really a collection of short stories, and in his short stories he gets to do the speculative-sci-fi without his failures as a character writer becoming too apparent. The latter is more in the vein of Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which is really about political systems with a sci-fi frame.
If the short stories appeal to you, his future-history series has some interesting entries. Technologically they're way out of date, but they have a good deal of pulp appeal, and a few of them are genuinely touching.
So what's to like about Heinlein? He had some interesting thoughts on politics, with some nice foresight into the way technology would allow changes in society. That's very classically sci-fi. He spans that period from early pulp to the beginnings of sci-fi with real literary merit, with Stranger as a kind of pinnacle from a literary standpoint. If nothing else, Stranger was incredibly influential at the time, though I'm sure it seems outdated today. (I haven't read it in years.)
My own tastes run to his middle works. His early pulpy stuff is often too juvenile, and the sexual liberation that he examined in Stranger became rambling and unfocused in everything after that. (Though his finale, To Sail Beyond The Sunset, struck me as a remarkable throwback and a fitting capstone to his works.) Try Time Enough for Love and Starship Troopers; at the very least as light sci-fi you should be able to read them pretty quickly.
The main target for installing Vista on old computers is in offices where they don't want to pay to upgrade the hardware, but want to keep a uniform OS environment for simplicity's sake. They buy the upgrade in bulk, so it's not quite as expensive a proposition as it sounds.
There will also be some home users who will want the new games available only for Vista, or perhaps want the security promises MS is making.
There's another brand-new market for Windows in its non-OEM form: Apple Intel computers. Obviously it's not a terribly large market, but Parallels and Bootcamp give some people a reason to actually buy Windows retail and install it, rather than have it pre-loaded by an OEM.
Unless he's a copyright lawyer, he may be out of his depth. Fair use law is incredibly messy, with a whole stack of conflicting precedents.
In general, however, I gather that brevity is insufficient. To be fair use it has to be incorporated into a larger work, with significant value added. If he'd used the clip as part of a documentary he'd be on more solid ground.
Re:Former Marine/Army general would have been best
on
Rumsfeld Stepping Down
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· Score: 1
Actually, the job may be best filled by a bureaucrat. The SoD job is the interface between the civilian government and the military. The actual strategy should be designed by the generals and admirals in the Joint Chiefs, who are the actual war planners. For that reason the law requires that it be a civilian who hasn't served in 10 years.
The SoD's job is not to handle wars but to handle warfare policy on behalf of the President. The line between the two is fuzzy, and Rumsfeld often overruled the military advice from his generals whose job it was to know better. But in general, the job really is managerial rather than military.
Optimally it's both, just as you'd love for a programmer's boss to be at least as skilled in programming as the programmer. But it's rare to find somebody who straddles the lines well.
Slashdot has a couple of extra things going for it:
* A "lameness filter" which excludes certain posts (ill-defined and probably continually changing to keep up)
* A 20-second rule which prevents you from blasting the board
* Moderation, which puts anonymous posts in a place most people don't read anyway. They may be there and you don't see them.
That's still not sufficient for some jackass not to at least try, especially since the audience is so large. It may not be worth the trouble, since Slashdotters are rather sensitive to spam and have even lower response rates than the rest of the world.
In each of these cases, you have to have some way to discover the computer you want to use. Depending on the IP address for that is tricky, since it's generally impractical to pass around even dotted-quads, much less the longer IPv6 addresses.
So there's some well-known rendezvous. For servers, it's DNS. For games, it's usually some web site. The same goes for peer-to-peer communications: you use some well-known site (tracker) to serve as your initial point of contact, and once you can provide it a port to get through your NAT. It's almost like expanding the address out to 48 bits (32 bit addressing + 16 bits for the port). The protocol is more complicated, but it's really not anything end users notice.
I'll concur that dynamic DNS is a terrible hack for things that depend on servers. Relatively few people do that; few enough that they can be given a static IP. But for games and other peer-to-peer communications you really won't depend on the IPv6 features anyway.
I'm all for gradually shifting to IPv6, because it has to be done sooner or later and so sooner is better than later. New opportunities may arise that nobody's thought of yet. But I really don't think that people are going to find many advantages to themselves in the near term.
You're trying to hold back the ocean with a broom on this one. Spam works only because the margins are so small. The emails are essentially free because they're using somebody else's computer to do the work. So it takes only a trivial response rate to make it worth their trouble to annoy every single person on the planet. (Well, at least the 20% or so of them with net access.)
It is astonishing that anybody with an IQ high enough to operate a computer would buy v1@.gra, but the fact is the bell curve goes way, way off to the left. Experience is the best teacher, so I hope whoever that dipstick is he at least won't do it twice. It's not very fast, but I don't know how you educate somebody that dumb in the first place.
Meantime, we're going to have to spend time and money getting the crap out of our own inboxes, and diverting that money to education projects is going to be aggravating in the short run with no guarantee of help in the long run.
It seems an odd thing for Verizon to do. I'm sure it's not the first time they've been asked by somebody to censor something they didn't like, but the fact is that if they actually did they'd be inundated with requests.
I don't think that Verizon actually wants to be an internet censor. It's more work for them, and it doesn't serve any of Verizon's corporate goals.
Even odder, and unmentioned in the summary, is that the group is apparently part of a reality TV series funded by NBC. They supposedly complained about the stalker behavior. It Epifora any worse than Myspace for that?
I think that somebody got punk'd here. It might be Verizon, but I suspect that it's Guidemag.com.
I'm not sure how to value costs of creation in a world without the artificial scarcity that distribution used to provide. A record that goes gold is presumably "worth" millions of dollars, in that under the old scheme people were willing to pay $10-$10 for a million copies to own a physical printing of it. No matter how the means of distribution change, that was the fair market value for that song since that's what people were willing to pay. It may actually have been worth more; perhaps they'd have sold 20% more copies for 10% less. But it's worth at least that much.
Without IP enforcement, it's difficult to extract that price for the song, because once it reaches a copyable medium, there's no reason for anybody to pay anything at all for it. The artist can probably make money in other ways, but the value of the recording itself has gone to essentially zero. It's worth whatever you can get somebody to pay you for that first copy, or what you can get for performing live.
Many artists would create for no pay whatsoever, and will continue to do so. Without the IP encouraging big businesses to over-promote certain artists, those others may have a bigger slice of people's attention, if not their dollars.
I can't quantify how many talented artists will pursue other tasks because there's no hope of getting rich off of it, or even of finding enormous audiences without the backing of a major label hoping to get rich off of them. It would be ludicrous to claim that art will be seriously damaged by this, and it might even be helped.
But I wouldn't completely denigrate those who make a living off of copyrights these days. Owning the copyright on a song may be free money, but composing and recording it requires years of training. Years they put in with the idea of getting rich off of them, and for which the market demonstrates that there is considerable money to be spent.
What does it mean for something to be public first, and "only secondarily as an asset"? The executive summary calls for "Assisting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and individual creators to better utilise the IP system, by creating cheaper routes to enforcing IP rights" and also "Providing better legal protection to ensure that consumers... can pursue non-commercial objectives without fear of recrimination."
Those sound at odds to me. The record labels/movie studios don't care that you're not making a profit by distributing their music/movies P2P. They care that a whole bunch of people have it but didn't buy it, and that they're not making a profit. Do they get to enforce their IP rights or don't they?
If you tell them that it's now completely legal to distribute their content as long as it's "non-commercial", that dramatically changes their entire business. Fine with me, but don't try to tell me that it's not anti-business. New businesses will spring up, and we may well all be better off for it, but you're legally killing off the old ones or forcing them to completely alter their models.
You can't have your cake and eat it too on this one. Either I own the distribution rights, or I don't; telling me that my distribution rights come second is as good as saying I don't have them. Feel free to tell the RIAA/MPAA where to stuff themselves, but don't piss on their heads and tell yourself it's raining on them.
I know that many hard-right blogs were full of accusations of Democratic voter fraud. Not necessarily with vote-switching, but with intimidation, encouraging illegal immigrants and felons to vote, etc. There was also that bit in 2000 with Gore trying to stop Florida from counting late-arriving military absentee ballots. So I'd be surprised if there weren't accusations of actual vote-switching as well.
Not trying to take a stance against Democrats here; I'm a Democrat myself. But if they're missing the accusations of fraud against the Democrats then they're only telling half the story; the accusations must at least be debunked.
It's unfortunate, however, that with that much spam you can't hope to scan your inbox for false-positives. I used to, and now I just hope that there isn't any, or that they'll re-send if it was important.
Even if a domain registrar were to change their business model to prevent this, it would only take one unscrupulous registrar to sell the domain names. ICANN could force policy on the registrars and yank the license of anybody caught selling near-miss domain names, but the blanket policy they'd have to introduce would both miss a lot of phishing-oriented names and keep people from getting some valid names.
A more market-oriented approach would be to have the individual registrars establish policies. Then have a phishing toolkit, the the one in Firefox 2 or the Google or Netcraft toolbars, take note of the registrar. If it sees that the domain is registered via a registrar known to take phishing names, take that into account when you see a domain name that looks phishy, and increase the likelihood of warning the user.
That'll just move the arms race to the phishers trying to get names registered through trusted registrars, but at least the problem is in the hands of people motivated to keep the phishers out in order to keep their good rating among the anti-phishing toolkit makers.
Intelligence influences policy, so intelligence has always been politicized, since well before the founding of the United States. Check out what Sir Francis Walsingham told Elizabeth I four hundred years ago, and I'm sure it goes back much further than that.
Slashdot Mirror
They come and go very quickly. Shutting something down legally is a tremendous hassle. You have to go to a judge and get a court order to do it. You have to find the ISP responsible for hosting it, assuming its in a jurisdiction you can get a hold of. You have to get the ISP to pay attention to you in the first place.
It's probably a few hours of work, and then 30 seconds later the same site appears elsewhere. Marking it as "phishing" in a database doesn't have any due process protections, but it's not as severe as shutting it down.
I'm talking about length, not strength. Steel is within a single order of magnitude in terms of strength. Nanotubes strong enough for the purpose have been made only a few millimeters long, and that's 10 orders of magnitude too small.
How about, from this article:
Fair use is an undeniably important plank of copyright law. Critics like CEA sometimes lose sight of the fact that record labels and other copyright owners are as dependent on fair use as consumers. A healthy and robust fair use doctrine is critical to us, since so much of what we create is built on the art that came before.
The question is what each side considers "fair". They're hitting CEA for being on the side of free file sharing (by backing Grokster), which does not sound even vaguely like the intent of fair use to me.
The middle ground here is hard to find. The only ways I know of to prevent file sharing also prevent things that are certainly fair use (backing things up, playing on other media, making compilations, etc.)
So we've got a scenario pitting two sets of rights against each other, and two entities arguing that the compromise should be entirely in their favor. Unsurprisingly, it happens to be the way that makes each side thinks makes them the most money (the CEA selling more players, the RIAA selling more music).
Looks like the elevator scientists will get this one solved before liftoff.
You betcha they will. Compared to the problem of running a cable tens of thousands of miles straight up, and strong enough not to tear under its own weight, this sounds downright trivial. We're still a dozen orders of magnitude off.
Number of the Beast is definitely not his best work. I'm totally sympathetic with tearing it in half. But if you've read Stranger and Moon is a Harsh Mistress, then you've read most of his best stuff. If it's not to your taste, I really wouldn't try to change your mind.
The thing to notice about Heinlein is that he's really more of an ideas guy than a character guy. There are at least two others you might consider reading: Time Enough for Love and Starship Troopers. The former is really a collection of short stories, and in his short stories he gets to do the speculative-sci-fi without his failures as a character writer becoming too apparent. The latter is more in the vein of Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which is really about political systems with a sci-fi frame.
If the short stories appeal to you, his future-history series has some interesting entries. Technologically they're way out of date, but they have a good deal of pulp appeal, and a few of them are genuinely touching.
So what's to like about Heinlein? He had some interesting thoughts on politics, with some nice foresight into the way technology would allow changes in society. That's very classically sci-fi. He spans that period from early pulp to the beginnings of sci-fi with real literary merit, with Stranger as a kind of pinnacle from a literary standpoint. If nothing else, Stranger was incredibly influential at the time, though I'm sure it seems outdated today. (I haven't read it in years.)
My own tastes run to his middle works. His early pulpy stuff is often too juvenile, and the sexual liberation that he examined in Stranger became rambling and unfocused in everything after that. (Though his finale, To Sail Beyond The Sunset, struck me as a remarkable throwback and a fitting capstone to his works.) Try Time Enough for Love and Starship Troopers; at the very least as light sci-fi you should be able to read them pretty quickly.
The main target for installing Vista on old computers is in offices where they don't want to pay to upgrade the hardware, but want to keep a uniform OS environment for simplicity's sake. They buy the upgrade in bulk, so it's not quite as expensive a proposition as it sounds.
There will also be some home users who will want the new games available only for Vista, or perhaps want the security promises MS is making.
There's another brand-new market for Windows in its non-OEM form: Apple Intel computers. Obviously it's not a terribly large market, but Parallels and Bootcamp give some people a reason to actually buy Windows retail and install it, rather than have it pre-loaded by an OEM.
Unless he's a copyright lawyer, he may be out of his depth. Fair use law is incredibly messy, with a whole stack of conflicting precedents.
In general, however, I gather that brevity is insufficient. To be fair use it has to be incorporated into a larger work, with significant value added. If he'd used the clip as part of a documentary he'd be on more solid ground.
Actually, the job may be best filled by a bureaucrat. The SoD job is the interface between the civilian government and the military. The actual strategy should be designed by the generals and admirals in the Joint Chiefs, who are the actual war planners. For that reason the law requires that it be a civilian who hasn't served in 10 years.
The SoD's job is not to handle wars but to handle warfare policy on behalf of the President. The line between the two is fuzzy, and Rumsfeld often overruled the military advice from his generals whose job it was to know better. But in general, the job really is managerial rather than military.
Optimally it's both, just as you'd love for a programmer's boss to be at least as skilled in programming as the programmer. But it's rare to find somebody who straddles the lines well.
Slashdot has a couple of extra things going for it:
* A "lameness filter" which excludes certain posts (ill-defined and probably continually changing to keep up)
* A 20-second rule which prevents you from blasting the board
* Moderation, which puts anonymous posts in a place most people don't read anyway. They may be there and you don't see them.
That's still not sufficient for some jackass not to at least try, especially since the audience is so large. It may not be worth the trouble, since Slashdotters are rather sensitive to spam and have even lower response rates than the rest of the world.
Doesn't that cool down the ballast water? So you need additional energy input to keep the fresh water at 100C, yes?
They didn't tell you that "Green" stands for Get Republicans Elected Every November?
In each of these cases, you have to have some way to discover the computer you want to use. Depending on the IP address for that is tricky, since it's generally impractical to pass around even dotted-quads, much less the longer IPv6 addresses.
So there's some well-known rendezvous. For servers, it's DNS. For games, it's usually some web site. The same goes for peer-to-peer communications: you use some well-known site (tracker) to serve as your initial point of contact, and once you can provide it a port to get through your NAT. It's almost like expanding the address out to 48 bits (32 bit addressing + 16 bits for the port). The protocol is more complicated, but it's really not anything end users notice.
I'll concur that dynamic DNS is a terrible hack for things that depend on servers. Relatively few people do that; few enough that they can be given a static IP. But for games and other peer-to-peer communications you really won't depend on the IPv6 features anyway.
I'm all for gradually shifting to IPv6, because it has to be done sooner or later and so sooner is better than later. New opportunities may arise that nobody's thought of yet. But I really don't think that people are going to find many advantages to themselves in the near term.
You're trying to hold back the ocean with a broom on this one. Spam works only because the margins are so small. The emails are essentially free because they're using somebody else's computer to do the work. So it takes only a trivial response rate to make it worth their trouble to annoy every single person on the planet. (Well, at least the 20% or so of them with net access.)
It is astonishing that anybody with an IQ high enough to operate a computer would buy v1@.gra, but the fact is the bell curve goes way, way off to the left. Experience is the best teacher, so I hope whoever that dipstick is he at least won't do it twice. It's not very fast, but I don't know how you educate somebody that dumb in the first place.
Meantime, we're going to have to spend time and money getting the crap out of our own inboxes, and diverting that money to education projects is going to be aggravating in the short run with no guarantee of help in the long run.
It seems an odd thing for Verizon to do. I'm sure it's not the first time they've been asked by somebody to censor something they didn't like, but the fact is that if they actually did they'd be inundated with requests.
I don't think that Verizon actually wants to be an internet censor. It's more work for them, and it doesn't serve any of Verizon's corporate goals.
Even odder, and unmentioned in the summary, is that the group is apparently part of a reality TV series funded by NBC. They supposedly complained about the stalker behavior. It Epifora any worse than Myspace for that?
I think that somebody got punk'd here. It might be Verizon, but I suspect that it's Guidemag.com.
I'm not sure how to value costs of creation in a world without the artificial scarcity that distribution used to provide. A record that goes gold is presumably "worth" millions of dollars, in that under the old scheme people were willing to pay $10-$10 for a million copies to own a physical printing of it. No matter how the means of distribution change, that was the fair market value for that song since that's what people were willing to pay. It may actually have been worth more; perhaps they'd have sold 20% more copies for 10% less. But it's worth at least that much.
Without IP enforcement, it's difficult to extract that price for the song, because once it reaches a copyable medium, there's no reason for anybody to pay anything at all for it. The artist can probably make money in other ways, but the value of the recording itself has gone to essentially zero. It's worth whatever you can get somebody to pay you for that first copy, or what you can get for performing live.
Many artists would create for no pay whatsoever, and will continue to do so. Without the IP encouraging big businesses to over-promote certain artists, those others may have a bigger slice of people's attention, if not their dollars.
I can't quantify how many talented artists will pursue other tasks because there's no hope of getting rich off of it, or even of finding enormous audiences without the backing of a major label hoping to get rich off of them. It would be ludicrous to claim that art will be seriously damaged by this, and it might even be helped.
But I wouldn't completely denigrate those who make a living off of copyrights these days. Owning the copyright on a song may be free money, but composing and recording it requires years of training. Years they put in with the idea of getting rich off of them, and for which the market demonstrates that there is considerable money to be spent.
What does it mean for something to be public first, and "only secondarily as an asset"? The executive summary calls for "Assisting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and individual creators to better utilise the IP system, by creating cheaper routes to enforcing IP rights" and also "Providing better legal protection to ensure that consumers ... can pursue non-commercial objectives without fear of recrimination."
Those sound at odds to me. The record labels/movie studios don't care that you're not making a profit by distributing their music/movies P2P. They care that a whole bunch of people have it but didn't buy it, and that they're not making a profit. Do they get to enforce their IP rights or don't they?
If you tell them that it's now completely legal to distribute their content as long as it's "non-commercial", that dramatically changes their entire business. Fine with me, but don't try to tell me that it's not anti-business. New businesses will spring up, and we may well all be better off for it, but you're legally killing off the old ones or forcing them to completely alter their models.
You can't have your cake and eat it too on this one. Either I own the distribution rights, or I don't; telling me that my distribution rights come second is as good as saying I don't have them. Feel free to tell the RIAA/MPAA where to stuff themselves, but don't piss on their heads and tell yourself it's raining on them.
Does anybody else find it vaguely ironic that the report itself, with its "public first-private second" model costs £9.95?
Please don't feed the trolls.
I know that many hard-right blogs were full of accusations of Democratic voter fraud. Not necessarily with vote-switching, but with intimidation, encouraging illegal immigrants and felons to vote, etc. There was also that bit in 2000 with Gore trying to stop Florida from counting late-arriving military absentee ballots. So I'd be surprised if there weren't accusations of actual vote-switching as well.
Not trying to take a stance against Democrats here; I'm a Democrat myself. But if they're missing the accusations of fraud against the Democrats then they're only telling half the story; the accusations must at least be debunked.
All of the complaints were about Democrat votes being switched to Republican, none went the other way.
Does that say more about the nature of the political parties, or about the nature of the people putting together the documentary?
It's unfortunate, however, that with that much spam you can't hope to scan your inbox for false-positives. I used to, and now I just hope that there isn't any, or that they'll re-send if it was important.
Yes, thank you. Scammers make money; idiots who listen to scammers lose money.
Even if a domain registrar were to change their business model to prevent this, it would only take one unscrupulous registrar to sell the domain names. ICANN could force policy on the registrars and yank the license of anybody caught selling near-miss domain names, but the blanket policy they'd have to introduce would both miss a lot of phishing-oriented names and keep people from getting some valid names.
A more market-oriented approach would be to have the individual registrars establish policies. Then have a phishing toolkit, the the one in Firefox 2 or the Google or Netcraft toolbars, take note of the registrar. If it sees that the domain is registered via a registrar known to take phishing names, take that into account when you see a domain name that looks phishy, and increase the likelihood of warning the user.
That'll just move the arms race to the phishers trying to get names registered through trusted registrars, but at least the problem is in the hands of people motivated to keep the phishers out in order to keep their good rating among the anti-phishing toolkit makers.
As a matter of fact, somebody has. BBC article.
Conclusion: you can make 4-6% per day on this, which is an astonishing sum of money. Slashdot discussed it at the time.
Intelligence influences policy, so intelligence has always been politicized, since well before the founding of the United States. Check out what Sir Francis Walsingham told Elizabeth I four hundred years ago, and I'm sure it goes back much further than that.