Are we now to believe that a form letter generated by Share-O-Stop software can threaten an ISP into cutting off someone's service? Does the MPAA really think they can get away with this?!
See, the thing about P2P was that it was so incredibly distributed that it would be impossible for the MPAA to sue all of us... but now, it looks like they're trying. As we've learned, the threat of legal action can frequently be as effective as actual legal action, at a fraction of the price.
I can't believe they're using bullying tactics like this. What bastards. Maybe there's some kind of threatening form letter we can send to something the MPAA depends on, to cause them a great deal of meaningless trouble? Anyone have any ideas?
The problem would be---what makes the rating system any more trustworthy than the files themselves? Remember, both eBay and Slashdot have centralized control, a metasystem above the individual users.
Such a metasystem, in a P2P environment, would need to be decentralized and yet trustworthy. (It's must not be as easy for a spoofing client to say "I'm trustworthy" as it is for them to say "I have files to share! Download my pustulent VBS payload!".) This is a complex research question, to which there's no one simple answer. A lot of people are trying, though... see some of the threads on this story for good links on the subject.
Please. If the corps employed black hats for any reason, do you think they'd admit it? Unless there's firm evidence to link the corp to the attack---which there's no reason for them to leave---there's no way to touch 'em. Bastards.
You've noticed this too? Is there any trend to the IPs of machines sharing these? Are they all at sony.com or something? (Hey, they could be grievously stupid...) In any case, perhaps some provider like Gnucleus could provide a realtime ban-list of this kind of abuse. Centralizing this information wouldn't have any legal ramifications, and while it's a flawed, stopgap solution, it would work, at least for a while.
I wonder if those results are virii or something. I usually just filter them out by requiring filesizes about 100k...
Have you noticed the "[searchterms] free bangbus passes.htm" and.url files you get sometimes? I think it's just spammers doing some of this, and not the actual media industries.
No, no, the cap is for off-campus traffic. Sorry, I should have made that clearer. Monitoring on-campus traffic would be both futile and extraordinarily difficult...
I tend to use oth.net (for ratio FTP sites), and gnucleus in a pinch. Both seem to get pretty decent speeds pretty much all of the time... the problem with gnucleus tends to be that no one is sharing with decent speed; I've gotten 200k/s on a weekday if fortune smiles and someone on a fat pipe is sharing what I want.
(For those not in the know: Phynd searches and indexes public SMB shares.)
Phynd? Please. Let me enumerate the flaws.
Windws filesharing is wonky on Linux. Whoever's fault this is, it's enough to make it a pain in the ass for me to use, certainly to share. Gnutella is cross-platform.
It puts strain on the servers. If someone has a popular file, fifteen leeching bastards will line up to watch it directly off their machine. Net result: the person running the server wants to actually use their machine, so they stop running it. With gnutella, connections can be limited to a certain number.
There's no real benefit to running a server. With gnutella, running a client (usually) means running a server.
Phynd was certainly useful in its day, but that day is past. Technically, it's a lovely solution. Socially, it doesn't float.
Yeah, it pretty much kills P2P. At UConn, where we're capped at 5GB/week up and down combined, no one shares anymore. It's kinda saddening, 'cause pirates are really good, kind, giving people at heart... but not when the administration steps on their sack for sharing.
It makes people into vicious, miserly bastards. Free the bandwidth!
The cable provider in my area put up billboards---yes, billboards---for cable internet, when they have no cable internet. When will it be around? Dunno. Call back in six bloody months. Real soon now, honest.
What kind of morons run these broadband providers? Is there any other industry that gets away with this kind of customer abuse?
The University of Connecticut (at least the Storrs campus) caps residential users to 5GB/any seven-day period, and drops us to 56k for seven days if we violate that. Do it three times in a semester, and we're at 56k for the rest of it.
It sucks terribly---it's made utter bastards of all of us. It costs us to help people out (the 5GB limit is combined up/down), so we don't share. We're a bunch of bastard misers who sit on #imp-iso all day, hoping a server will clear up so we can leech at 200k/s.
My big plan for the fall is to set up an on-campus Gnutella network, probably using Gnucleus. It'll probably involve flyering the campus like mad, and hoping people sign on. I know I'll be sharing about 50GB over Fast Ethernet... mmm, good. Does anyone have any for-dummies instructions for setting up or using this kind of thing? Any experience with the same?
Nuh-uh. DVD standard is 720x480. SVCD is 480x480 (at least for NTSC). The allowed bitrate ranges are different, too. (And, of course, SVCD is free of all that CSS nonsense.)
You can't just copy off 700MB of MPEG-2 from a DVD; it has to be re-encoded. The formats are quite different.
If you burn DVD-format video to a CD, it's called a "cDVD". SVCDs are entirely different.
Before you get on your libertarian high horse, stop pretending that there are no other government interventions at work here. When you get all riled up that the government is "willing to use force, or hire someone else to use force, against someone whose only relevant action has been" to reverse-engineer a popular file format, or to duplicate a copyrighted work, then you can start beating the drum about forcing file formats open.
And anyway, if the formats weren't copyrightable, the companies would still have the option of keeping them a trade secret. Force is not necessarily implied anywhere here, unlike in the DMCA, which provides no alternatives for the users---if you're blind and want to listen to an eBook, say, tough noogies.
But then again, you seem to be shilling for the corporations instead of the users.
Anyone remember the Rotary Rocket? It was another venture in the same vein, only NASA started giving away the market they were trying to sell to. A real shame, too, because they had some really, really nifty ideas. They even had a test flight before they suddenly found themselves bankrupt.
Googling for Rotary Rocket leads me here, but there is, I'm sure, some better source.
Is there some entropic reason why light cannot be turned into electricity? We know about heat, but not about light. Is there even somewhere to start with the whole S=k ln W thing? I asked a couple of physics professors around here, but no one really seemed to know. I think it might be an open research topic. Someone should do a bunch of math on the subject.
Because some idiot decided that there needed to be 3600 seconds in an hour, and so using a 100W device for an hour somehow uses 360kJ of energy.
If your target audience uses a calculator to get fifty percent of a hundred, you don't want to inflict our silly Sumerian time scale on them. (Was it the Sumerians who did the base-sixty nonsense? Or was that the Babylonians?)
What, he didn't prove that he was a serious director with A Simple Plan? It was a critically acclaimed, gripping drama about the banality of evil, the polar opposite of Army of Darkness, yet just as high-quality.
And now he's showing that his range extends even further. Ah, our man Sam---is there anything he can't do?
Spiderman's strength comes not just from his mad wack superpowers, but from his strength of character. "With great power comes great responsibility." That he chooses to use his powers for good and not evil is a display of his character.
The superpowers are just a vehicle for telling the story about the man. Any great fantasy or sci-fi is really about people.
As for Piltdown man---it was eventually shown to be wrong. Science can be wrong---then theories are rewritten and reconsidered, and new hypotheses are proposed.
If the research you refer to has merit, good for him. (I'm not an earth-scientist; I'll trust the judgment of those journals.) Showing that the earth is young (though there are a lot of other thing that would seem to show an older earth, like radioactivity-dating or stars more than five thousand light-years away) doesn't show that the earth was created by a superhero from outer space.
The reason why creation science gives me the creepies is because it picks a full-blown story and looks for evidence to support it, so that "earth is young!" means "superhero from outer space!". Religion and science do not mix, and any attempt to make them do so destroys the credibility of both components.
I mean, I take a few issues with the young-earth theory, too, but I can't refute any of that, not being an expert.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh-oh.
Are we now to believe that a form letter generated by Share-O-Stop software can threaten an ISP into cutting off someone's service? Does the MPAA really think they can get away with this?!
See, the thing about P2P was that it was so incredibly distributed that it would be impossible for the MPAA to sue all of us... but now, it looks like they're trying. As we've learned, the threat of legal action can frequently be as effective as actual legal action, at a fraction of the price.
I can't believe they're using bullying tactics like this. What bastards. Maybe there's some kind of threatening form letter we can send to something the MPAA depends on, to cause them a great deal of meaningless trouble? Anyone have any ideas?
--grendel drago
He appears to have a bunch of GIFs. Should he be using open-source PNGs? For shame, Taco!
--grendel drago
Did anyone figure out what kind of software was used for the graph layout? Was it all done manually?
I'm trying to create a project to automagically do some basic graph layout (and ideally export to PS/PDF or PNG) from a PHP script.
I'm sure that was hand-tweaked, but has anyone found any graph layout tools for Linux? Free ones, or at least free-for-educational use, that is.
--grendel drago
Okay, I'm going to have to ask you to back up that polar bears/vitamin A thing. Extraordinary claims and all that jazz.
--grendel drago
The problem would be---what makes the rating system any more trustworthy than the files themselves? Remember, both eBay and Slashdot have centralized control, a metasystem above the individual users.
Such a metasystem, in a P2P environment, would need to be decentralized and yet trustworthy. (It's must not be as easy for a spoofing client to say "I'm trustworthy" as it is for them to say "I have files to share! Download my pustulent VBS payload!".) This is a complex research question, to which there's no one simple answer. A lot of people are trying, though... see some of the threads on this story for good links on the subject.
--grendel drago
Please. If the corps employed black hats for any reason, do you think they'd admit it? Unless there's firm evidence to link the corp to the attack---which there's no reason for them to leave---there's no way to touch 'em. Bastards.
--grendel drago
You've noticed this too? Is there any trend to the IPs of machines sharing these? Are they all at sony.com or something? (Hey, they could be grievously stupid...) In any case, perhaps some provider like Gnucleus could provide a realtime ban-list of this kind of abuse. Centralizing this information wouldn't have any legal ramifications, and while it's a flawed, stopgap solution, it would work, at least for a while.
.url files you get sometimes? I think it's just spammers doing some of this, and not the actual media industries.
I wonder if those results are virii or something. I usually just filter them out by requiring filesizes about 100k...
Have you noticed the "[searchterms] free bangbus passes.htm" and
--grendel drago
fat's full of stem cells
That's quite an extraordinary claim. Would you please back that up with a reference of some kind?
--grendel drago
No, no, the cap is for off-campus traffic. Sorry, I should have made that clearer. Monitoring on-campus traffic would be both futile and extraordinarily difficult...
I tend to use oth.net (for ratio FTP sites), and gnucleus in a pinch. Both seem to get pretty decent speeds pretty much all of the time... the problem with gnucleus tends to be that no one is sharing with decent speed; I've gotten 200k/s on a weekday if fortune smiles and someone on a fat pipe is sharing what I want.
--grendel drago
(For those not in the know: Phynd searches and indexes public SMB shares.)
Phynd? Please. Let me enumerate the flaws.
Windws filesharing is wonky on Linux. Whoever's fault this is, it's enough to make it a pain in the ass for me to use, certainly to share. Gnutella is cross-platform.
It puts strain on the servers. If someone has a popular file, fifteen leeching bastards will line up to watch it directly off their machine. Net result: the person running the server wants to actually use their machine, so they stop running it. With gnutella, connections can be limited to a certain number.
There's no real benefit to running a server. With gnutella, running a client (usually) means running a server.
Phynd was certainly useful in its day, but that day is past. Technically, it's a lovely solution. Socially, it doesn't float.
--grendel drago
Yeah, it pretty much kills P2P. At UConn, where we're capped at 5GB/week up and down combined, no one shares anymore. It's kinda saddening, 'cause pirates are really good, kind, giving people at heart... but not when the administration steps on their sack for sharing.
It makes people into vicious, miserly bastards. Free the bandwidth!
--grendel drago
Amen, man!
The cable provider in my area put up billboards---yes, billboards---for cable internet, when they have no cable internet. When will it be around? Dunno. Call back in six bloody months. Real soon now, honest.
What kind of morons run these broadband providers? Is there any other industry that gets away with this kind of customer abuse?
--grendel drago
"Every" company---you mean like one? 'Cause that's all it takes... it's called a monopoly, and that's one of the big problems with 'em.
--grendel drago
The University of Connecticut (at least the Storrs campus) caps residential users to 5GB/any seven-day period, and drops us to 56k for seven days if we violate that. Do it three times in a semester, and we're at 56k for the rest of it.
It sucks terribly---it's made utter bastards of all of us. It costs us to help people out (the 5GB limit is combined up/down), so we don't share. We're a bunch of bastard misers who sit on #imp-iso all day, hoping a server will clear up so we can leech at 200k/s.
My big plan for the fall is to set up an on-campus Gnutella network, probably using Gnucleus. It'll probably involve flyering the campus like mad, and hoping people sign on. I know I'll be sharing about 50GB over Fast Ethernet... mmm, good. Does anyone have any for-dummies instructions for setting up or using this kind of thing? Any experience with the same?
--grendel drago
Nuh-uh. DVD standard is 720x480. SVCD is 480x480 (at least for NTSC). The allowed bitrate ranges are different, too. (And, of course, SVCD is free of all that CSS nonsense.)
You can't just copy off 700MB of MPEG-2 from a DVD; it has to be re-encoded. The formats are quite different.
If you burn DVD-format video to a CD, it's called a "cDVD". SVCDs are entirely different.
--grendel drago
The italicized words are from whoever mailed in the story. The editors don't write them. Sheesh, is this really so complicated?
Before you get on your libertarian high horse, stop pretending that there are no other government interventions at work here. When you get all riled up that the government is "willing to use force, or hire someone else to use force, against someone whose only relevant action has been" to reverse-engineer a popular file format, or to duplicate a copyrighted work, then you can start beating the drum about forcing file formats open.
And anyway, if the formats weren't copyrightable, the companies would still have the option of keeping them a trade secret. Force is not necessarily implied anywhere here, unlike in the DMCA, which provides no alternatives for the users---if you're blind and want to listen to an eBook, say, tough noogies.
But then again, you seem to be shilling for the corporations instead of the users.
--grendel drago
I'm in a "Computer Science and Engineering" program; we have to take a couple of EE courses in addition to the regular CS workload.
One of the classes (third-year) was "Signals and Systems", which had us calculating Fourier series and transforms by hand.
So, ha.
--grendel drago
Anyone remember the Rotary Rocket? It was another venture in the same vein, only NASA started giving away the market they were trying to sell to. A real shame, too, because they had some really, really nifty ideas. They even had a test flight before they suddenly found themselves bankrupt.
Googling for Rotary Rocket leads me here, but there is, I'm sure, some better source.
--grendel drago
Is there some entropic reason why light cannot be turned into electricity? We know about heat, but not about light. Is there even somewhere to start with the whole S=k ln W thing? I asked a couple of physics professors around here, but no one really seemed to know. I think it might be an open research topic. Someone should do a bunch of math on the subject.
References, anyone?
--grendel drago
Because some idiot decided that there needed to be 3600 seconds in an hour, and so using a 100W device for an hour somehow uses 360kJ of energy.
If your target audience uses a calculator to get fifty percent of a hundred, you don't want to inflict our silly Sumerian time scale on them. (Was it the Sumerians who did the base-sixty nonsense? Or was that the Babylonians?)
--grendel drago
What, he didn't prove that he was a serious director with A Simple Plan? It was a critically acclaimed, gripping drama about the banality of evil, the polar opposite of Army of Darkness, yet just as high-quality.
And now he's showing that his range extends even further. Ah, our man Sam---is there anything he can't do?
--grendel drago
Okay, someone missed the point.
Spiderman's strength comes not just from his mad wack superpowers, but from his strength of character. "With great power comes great responsibility." That he chooses to use his powers for good and not evil is a display of his character.
The superpowers are just a vehicle for telling the story about the man. Any great fantasy or sci-fi is really about people.
--grendel drago
As for Piltdown man---it was eventually shown to be wrong. Science can be wrong---then theories are rewritten and reconsidered, and new hypotheses are proposed.
If the research you refer to has merit, good for him. (I'm not an earth-scientist; I'll trust the judgment of those journals.) Showing that the earth is young (though there are a lot of other thing that would seem to show an older earth, like radioactivity-dating or stars more than five thousand light-years away) doesn't show that the earth was created by a superhero from outer space.
The reason why creation science gives me the creepies is because it picks a full-blown story and looks for evidence to support it, so that "earth is young!" means "superhero from outer space!". Religion and science do not mix, and any attempt to make them do so destroys the credibility of both components.
I mean, I take a few issues with the young-earth theory, too, but I can't refute any of that, not being an expert.
--grendel drago