The Taliban was a horrible regime, but they were not a threat in any way to the immediate security of the US.
Are you insane or just plain dumb?!
The Taleban provided both moral, financial and military support to a terrorist group (Al-Queda) that attacked US military (Pentagon) and civilian targets (WTC) without provocation or warning, killing thousands. Following the attack the Taleban refused to hand over the remaining terrorists hiding in their country, futher supporting the terrorists and thus proving that they form an alliance with the group that attacked the US, which makes them part in the war the Taleban started/declared by attacking the US.
Remember that an attack on the military of another nation is a declaration of war in itself, and the Taliban clearly supported the actions of Al-Queda both before and after the attack, thus they declared war on the US. I hardly find it surprising that the US responded by taking the war they were forced into back to Afghanistan.
Any regime/country actively waging war on the US is clearly a threat to the security of the US! - I think we're actually around the definition of 'threat to the security' here.
There is a huge difference between opposing certain policies of a government and attempting to overthrow it.
That certainly depends on the way this opposition is manifested!
If you do it by writing readers letters to newspapers or directly to your congressman, or participate in a peaceful demonstration that respects law and order - the diffence is huge and clear.
If you do it through 'civil disobedience' (another word for rampant lawbreaking usually including violence), I don't see any difference at all.
The use of lawbreaking by a violent mob is a major threat to any society and the reaction by the society must be equally major and severe in order to defend itself. This sentence is IMHO too lean.
First of all, yes it almost definitely hurts the sales of the canned crap that sells millions of copies off of a name, not the quality of the music, and people download and find out, gasp, it's crap and they don't buy the album. BUT, on the flipside, what about the thousands of bands who could never afford marketing who are now being exposed on a level unprecented in history to millions around the world for free?
And what about the many people (I'm one of those) that use downloaded music as real samples (listen-before-you-buy) for stuff either impossible to evaluate from a 30 second crappy sample from the beginning of the song which is what mostly is available on the net, or stuff only available from small suppliers that don't offer listening facilities or samples. If I like what I hear, especially after several listens, I buy the single. If I also like the other songs on the album the same way, I buy that as well. If not then I delete the stuff I downloaded and forget about it. I think that's fair enough as I don't keep anything I haven't paid for.
Without the availability of these decent quality full length 'samples', I'd not have bought most of the stuff I evaluated this way. One song heard somewhere doesn't qualify neither the single nor the album for a buy. Far from it. I want to know that the song is representative of the qualities of the album (or the album is worth it in other ways) before I buy it. Normally I'd listen in the record shop but they far from carry every record in the world and then other means are nessesary if I'm to continue buying music. There's simply too much crap and too many one-hit-wonders out there.
It is not considered "fair use" to distribute entire songs, albums, movies, and other forms of copyrighted material publicly and in their entirety without the copyright holder's consent. It is against the law to distribute copyrighted material without the copyright holder's consent.
Basically I can violate copyrights under the fair use clause if nobody makes money directly from the violation (like selling pirated materials) and the copyright holder doesn't lose any income from it. Or if it's for educational purposes.
Now, the problem is that RIAA, MPAA and similar organisations for decades have managed to convince the world that every pirated song/movie/program is a lost sale, and thus that filesharing of copyrighted material is grand theft. But this is a huge and very dangerous lie because research has shown that while some people indeed only download and never buy, most people buy later (using the downloaded material as samples) or would buy if the material was available for sale somewhere (the rare stuff). This research actually proved that in some areas filesharing actually increased sales, not the other way around.
But sales of music are decreasing you say? - Well, the research (sources anyone?) did include a poll asking people how much music they buy and in particular if they bought less why they did that. The answer was not filesharing as RIAA argues, but mainly two other reasons:
Money. Music too expensive or the economy too bad
Supply. The stuff on sale isn't worth the cost - or it just plain sucks
Funny, but both these are to a large extent 'fixable' by the RIA and their members... But they'd rather save face and complain, harrass, subpoena, prosecute and eliminate all their critics and the 'rogue' market they've created. Go figure.
I'll add one thing. I'm getting tired of/., the EFF, et. al. calling it "sharing" or "swapping". It's neither. It's only sharing or swapping if you have the rights to it. Otherwise, it's illegal (with certain small exceptions).
It is sharing/swapping and it may be illegal, but the issue is whether it should be illegal. Sure the law (especially the DMCA) may call it that but that's a flaw of the law, not the users or the P2P-networks.
Let's do a small example. I own a recording on LP. I do have a tape copy of it (still legal to make) but I don't have a tape deck at work, nor a record player, but I have my computer. Now I find my favourite track from that LP on a P2P-network and download that in order to play it at work... SLAM! - that is illegal for me to do, despite the fact that I've already paid for that song at the record shop and everything. How stupid is that?! - I can legally just sample the tape and create the MP3 from that and it'll still be legal for me. Mind you, I'm never allowed to share this MP3 with anyone else and that's fine with me.
Why am I not allowed to make a copy of something I've paid for, for my own use?
No, the law is wrong and I'd rather respect the much basic law that that I bought and paid for is mine to do with as I please.
Please note that's talking about music that I've already paid for. I'm not talking about new stuff because that may be theft provided that the user never pays anything for it. I'd call it borrowing when it comes to beating the labels at the teasing game and use a downloaded copy of a song until it becomes available in the shops.
Let's do a practical example. About a week ago the english singer Dido released a new single (the first in years) entitled "White Flag" to the radio stations which began playing it right away. Now I want that single because I'm a huge fan and I already own (bought and paid for) all her other stuff, including rare stuff, so I went to my local retailer right away and was told that the single won't hit the shelves until mid-September, 5-6 weeks away! - It's so insanely stupid that they still try to play that teasing game (creating a feeding frenzy thus boosting the sales at the release) and I simply refuse to play along.
So does a lot of other people it seems because my local retailer told me that none of the other major releases caused any kind of frenzy despite months of teasing. Madonna's "American Life" single hardly moved when it came out and is already on sale. The reason is of course P2P-network filesharing because people have downloaded and listened to the song for a long time and grown tired of it when the official release finally comes around. I'm sure the Madonna single would have sold much better is it was available in the shops right from the start. And the same thing will probably happen to the Dido single unfortunately, and it's too bad because Dido didn't have anything to do with that stupid release policy.
In any case I therefore borrowed the new Dido song from a P2P-network and I'll pay for it when I can. Yes, the will to pay is there but right now I simply can't pay for it no matter what. I've got the money in hand and I'm in the retailers shop but the single isn't there to buy! - Stupid, isn't it?
So, using a P2P-network is far from always theft. Sometimes it's a tool to make things work, and if that means to bend a few rules (laws) so be it. I know I paid or will pay for my stuff, so my conscience is clean. I just don't accept the tyrrany of the labels.
Now back to the 3:36 mins of bliss from Dido that her label forced me to borrow instead of buying...
"I will go down with this ship,
I won't put my hands up and surrender.
There will be no white flag above my door." -- Dido, "White Flag"
The RIAA's fight against music sharing is becoming increasingly desperate,
Well, this brings to mind the famous 'principle' of the best defense being an offence...
What if EFF and all the other anti-RIAA organisations arranged a massive world-wide share-n-download-it-all campaign where billions of people shared gazillion of files all over the place?
That way the RIAA would be completely drowned out and wouldn't have the slightest chance of making as much as a tiny dent and the P2P-networks would offer so much music (and movies - take that MPAA!) that the legitimate business would be hit so hard that the RIAA actually would be financially unable to continue the fight. That way they'd be replaced with someone else that would work with the P2P-networks, not against them, in order to find a solution that everybody relevant (musicians and users) could live with.
If the RIAA set out to kill off P2P-networks because they're used for pirating, we'll set out to kill off RIAA because they're violating civil rights, terrorising innocent people with obscene threats and false accusations... It's that simple.
Sure, RIAA claims to have legitimate purposes but so do P2P-networks. If they don't respect that, neither will we. They opened the can of worms and they asked to be bitten - so let them. Let the war begin...:-)
Technology today makes it possible for smaller or new artists to actually record, produce and distribute their music themselves without the need for huge funds and thus without a major label. If we cut out the 100% mark-up that the RIAA's greed has created, retail prices would be cut in half, and a lot more people would be able to afford to buy their music. Add to that the likely quality of the music released. Most of the stuff put out by major labels today are so boringly identical and tasteless due to the focus on profits. Releases financed by the bands themselves would be much more innovative simply because the 'does-it'sell' filter would be gone, and the music would be sold on its quality, not the cleverness of its marketing campaign.
Yes, the RIAA is a bane to musicians and the art they create. It's all about the money and the RIAA cannot get enough. That must stop and RIAA must go.
The scourge of modern day society! - It seems like every type of law enforcement all over the world are joining forces in the battle cry of: "We want our lives to be easier! - We don't want to do old fashioned police work anymore. If only the net also could catch the criminals physically we'd be doing alright!"
Come on you morons! - Most crimes only hurt someone in real life and that's where you catch the criminals red handed. If you want to catch a pedophile, go for the the violation of the child or the user buying the videos/pictures. This all happens in real life and thus doesn't require a computer to track and solve, only good old fashioned legwork. Damned lazy cops! - Drop those dougnuts and get off your asses! - There's real policework to be done out there!
And 'internet havens'... We're talking about freedom of expression and freedom from censorship here. If it means that some pedophiles can email anonymously so be it. Words in themselves can't hurt anyone. If they touch a child, they'll have to do so in real life and that's where the law has to work. Prevent it preferably or use the physical evidence to convict the violator. I mean, the pedophiles are almost always already known to the authorities for lesser offences, so all there is to it is to monitor them closely when they have any kind of contact with children (and remove their own children if they have any - prevention is a good thing in this) and bust them if they step out of line. Simplicity itself!
And no, I don't have a 'free' email. Never had a use for one, and they have too many ads (did you think they were free?). But I respect the need for some people to be able to use such a thing to avoid the spyware at work or the prying eyes of family or the authorities. It is imperative that people can find a way to speak truly free without having to pay for this privilege.
Besides, this plan to use this payment as a means to get personal identification of the payee won't work because if it were to happen we'll simply see the advent of 'anonymous re-payers', services that for a fee pay for the services on behalf of their customers that only they know the identity of. So if the authorities want to find the identity of 'bigfelon@freemail.com' through the money trail, they'll only hit the re-payer who can be located in a place in the world where no supoena that force them to release the true identity of this user. Thus we've only created a new lucrative business and the electronic paper trail will be even harder to follow.
Just drop it. It won't work and you'll be digging your own grave even deeper.
Why wasn't this message posted in YRO? - After all, we're talking about adding tracing capabilities and logging to services that are used by billions of people not under any suspicion or investigation of any kind. Why the end of catching a pedophile or two justify going all big brother on all the innocent users?
The site itself is a circumvention device. It's only purpose is to facilitate the distribution of specific information on illegal exploits of a proprietary network.
No, information itself cannot be owned or a device for anything. It is a representation of free speech. Note that this case doesn't involve confidential trade secrets or similar. There's nothing illegal happening until someone actually uses the codes, schematics or tools that may or may not have passed through that site. And that might even be legal for Canadians because it's highly doubtful that anyone can be said to steal something from nothing as DirectTV doesn't have a commercial presence where the site is located, thus the merchandise actually doesn't exist in Canada - or at least has no value for the company there.
What would be even more interesting than that would be if people actually went to the trouble of understanding the issues before firing away!
That's a pretty stupid comment from someone who doesn't even want to be named... As to understanding the issues, I'm willing to bet that I know the issues at least as well as you do, especially the futile fight against the ignorant people of SPEWS. Nobody seems to be able (or willing) to understand these basic facts:
A contract cannot contain terms not relating to the services it covers. You cannot demand that the customer behaves in a certain way elsewhere on the net.
A customer not violating the terms of a contract cannot be terminated without incurring a heavily penalty that a small ISP never can be be expected to be able to afford.
You can and will be listed by SPEWS even if you only provide other services than spam-related stuff to alledged spammers, for instance bandwidth for non-spamvertised streaming or payment services. Any business deal will get you listed!
This all means that you can end up listed by SPEWS and not being able to do anything about it, short of winning the lottery and use that money to pay off the inevetable lawsuit from the alledged spammers when you terminate them without due course.
Oh, and terminating this alledged spammer will no in any way affect the amount of spam sent out, so the blackmailing from SPEWS is all for nothing.
What would be much more interesting is a lawsuit from the ISPs that gets hit by the punitive overlisting (the 'escalated listing') that SPEWS and SpamHaus practices.
These affect in most cases upwards of 99% completely innocent customers of the victimized ISPs, who in some cases don't even host the spam emailers or the spamvertised sites; they are simply providing 'other services' (payment services, bandwidth for steaming etc.) for companies that may be using spam elsewhere in other parts of their business, and yet they get branded 'Spamhaus!' and gets blacklisted.
As there is absolute no additional spam-stopping effect of this overlisting, its only purpose seem to be to blackmail the ISPs to stop a non-spam-related business relationship with companies that SPEWS/SpamHaus disapproves of in order to exact revenge or similar stupid action.
The 99% innocent victims are being pressured to switch ISP, which may result in multi-million dollar expenses (like when they need to move all their servers elsewhere) that nobody but themselves can possibly be expected to cover, and sometimes the ISP even demands damages for prematurely terminated contracts.
As these blacklists are part of the de-facto standard blacklist published by osirusoft, a listing by SPEWS/SpamHaus practically guarantees severe email connectivity problems, which makes it effectively a sender block, not just a receiving block. This means that this type of listing actually prevents millions of innocent users from sending mail, despite the fact that they've never sent anything remotely like spam, and probably hates spam as much as everybody else.
Last time I checked blackmail was very much illegal and it would be good to see how the legal system judges this practice, especially considering that most people have no idea that their ISP may be preventing them from receiving email from ordinary people who are unfortunate enough to have an ISP that's being victimized by a SPEWS/SpamHaus overlisting, despite clearly not being a source of spam.
Now they've found another way to make us pay for stuff that's only nessesary because they want total control and the power to make some people feel important.
We've heard about RIAA making up glued discmans and similar stupid things to prevent reviewers from ripping the preview CDs and putting them on the net before public release. We've also heard about MPAA effectually strip-searching reviewers to make sure they don't carry recording devices into a preview show, and now they want to invest time and money in developing means of making it impossible to make a viewable recording of these shows.
Who's paying for this? You and me!
Does it work? - Nope. Never did, never will. It an arms race that'll never be won.
I think it's about time RIAA and MPAA sat down and realized that they'll never be able to prevent this and therefore plain and simple stop doing these pre-release things altogether. Or limit them to no more than a few days ahead of the public release. - That way the pirates won't have much time to make their copy and the impact on sales will be much less. Of course this means that all the VIPs will have to wait just like everybody else...
And I know that won't do much good for overseas spammers and so on, but perhaps it will increase the cost of doing business.
Actually it will do a lot of good - because a federal law should allow for going after the advertiser, and the advertiser is much more often within legal reach.
Without business the spammers themselves will go out of business. Of course that isn't as fun as taking those stupid spammers to the cleaners, and then some...:-)
Why doesn't anyone mention Google censorship? - Oh wait... I'm doing that right now!:-)
The very fact that Google gives in to any kind of censorship is very sad, especially the fact that they're not admitting it openly. There is no reason at all why Google should comply in any way, shape or form to foreign government 'requests' (orders) to make certain materials harder to find. Google should always attempt to be as complete as possible, including whatever its spiders find.
It's very simple: If a government doesn't want its people to look for something, educate the people! - Don't try to find half-assed ways to implement censorship through bullying or technical means. Yes, information still wants to be free. All of it actually.
The reason why it isn't illegal is that there's no legal obligation to provide an opt-out for spam in the first place. Spam isn't illegal.
Actually spam is illigal, at least in most of EU which also is a marketplace for this company and their application. Now, the trouble is that if you consent to receive something it isn't spam, and the method used here will unfortunately provide the consent because the option is there and you can uncheck it.
Damaging a rogue ISP's users is the solution, not the problem. If we didnt' punish these ignorant subscribers they would continue supporting spammers. Every subscriber to a spam-friendly ISP is voting with their dollars - for spam.
Yes, this is true - if the world was black and white... But I know of at least one ISP which has been SPEWS-listed due to the fact that they host hosting companies that host freehosting-providers that host an endless stream of small companies that gets replaced as quickly as they get kicked out for spamming. But to the outside user it looks like - at best - the freehosting company spams, or the hosting company (the customer of the ISP) is responsible. But still the ISP gets blacklisted because there's a constant flow of complaints against the same set of IP-addresses. Even though all compaints are responded to and the spammer kicked out quickly and efficiently, they (SPEWS) still list the ISP at level 1. The ISP could try to kick their customer out but they are not at fault either because all 'rules' are being followed and spammers are terminated quickly, so the result would be a major business boom for lawyers which the ISP would loose. So what is there to do but to sit back and enjoy being blacklisted by SPEWS.
If only SPEWS had sensible people that were reachable through normal means, it would be okay because then they'd understand the problem and realize that the rules are indeed being followed. But you can only contact SPEWS through the usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email and I have yet to see a single remove-me message directed at SPEWS there that wasn't ridiculed in the extreme and of course ignored by SPEWS.
What SPEWS is really saying is that the ISP is responsible for what a customer of a customer of a customer of theirs is doing, and that is actually equivivalent to punishing the entire population of a state because there is one person after another within a town within a county within that state that commits a crime. Real life doesn't work like that and yet the criminals are punished - one by one, but still...
I think it's about time that SPEWS get off their high horse and face the real life. Blacklisting these ISPs may help stop some spam but it is overkill in the worst degree, and it certainly isn't fair, especially when there's essentially ZERO means of appealing their listings.
The problem is it's being addressed on a national level. That won't stop the African scam artists "whose money is tied up" - hopefully their oppressors will beat them in the face with a rusty camshaft - or the Chinese wishes of good fortune and prosperity that I was continually getting from some shitty company selling latex products until I finally decided to blackhole China from my mailserver.
Actually those spams are few and far between... My daily load of about 100 spams these days consists mostly of english language ads for US-related products and services (despite that my address ends in.dk and thus clearly (or most likely) isn't in the US). They are often sent through non-US relays or from non-US spam-services, but the advertiser is US-based and thus can be prosecuted under US law - and that's where the action should be. At the end of the day it really comes down to a US company exchanging a piece of junk for cash and that can be stopped.
The rest - like the Nigerian scams - can be stopped via Interpol and similar because it's scams and against the law. They just need to get off their asses and start chasing these guys.
Wow! - That's a lot of cash wasted on something vulnarable to plain secrecy disclosure!
Off the top of my head, here's an algorithm for free that'll work and be fairly uncrackable, at least at a first glance:
Encrypt each channel using a public key system. Each user receives on a special encrypted digital channel a new key for each subscribed channel every day. These keys are transmitted in encrypted form so they need a valid card key to be decrypted.
In order to crack this a pirate will need access to a valid card key (which can be disabled centrally of course by simply not encrypting for it) in order to receive and decrypt a new key for each channel daily in order to continue to decrypt the broadcast on that channel. Or to brute-force it on a daily basis... Distribution of the daily channel decryption keys is possible of course but who wants the bother of updating your card (via the internet or similar) every single day?
And all algorithms can be public with no ill effects as all keys are machine generated and the central ones (the channel keys) changed frequently.
No sympathy for those that distribute trade secrets. Intellectual property is far too valuable to ignore cases like this.
If the essense of the system is the secrecy of the protective algorithms, there's nothing intellectual about it. It's plain stupid and stupidual property is not protected in any way.
Trade secrets are not about protecting your intellectual property (patent and copyright laws do that) but about power and control. Don't forget the DVD CSS case where the issue is the power of the owner to decide who or what the 'secret algorithm' (CSS) is used for. They explicitly refused to allow any Linux/Unix player to use it (perhaps due to a pact with the Big Devil (M$)?), and the community reacted by forcing the issue and reverse-engineering the algorithm. Had they released it to be used in Linux/Unix players, any abuse of it for plain descrambling and copying of DVDs would be a simple case of piracy. But they went for the confrontation because they wanted to excercise their power and control. Stupid move.
The fact that this is listed under YRO is some laughable shit. Committing a crime is committing a crime.
Read that again. So you're saying that violating certain laws is just a crime while violating others is more or less a duty for/. readers?
The issue here is not the fact that he stole the information, but that he made it public for free (his 'right' to do so). In case you've been in a coma these past few decades a central issue in the nerd population is the primary creed of the Cyberpunk Movement: "Information wants to be free". This is why we fight for the right to disclose the DVD CSS algorithm, the right to both publicize and access websites featuring certain kinds of information and so on.
This case is about the right to make public information that will enable people to use it to show that if you create a system with Bad Security (protected only by secrecy) you deserve to have it broken and your business ruined as a worst case scenario. What they need is to develop a system in public and have gazillions of eager nerds trying to crack it, and when it is mature enough to survive that, use it. Until then, base your business on something else, like mass subscriptions through dirt-cheap fees and an appeal to have a clean conscience. Or some nice strict enforcement the old-fashioned way (inspections, raids etc.). Don't be lazy and only go through technological channels and stupid laws to get your profits.
It was a good thing to do (make information free), although he should have laboured to stay anonymous so nobody could come after him. That was indeed a stupid thing to do.
Much more plainly stupid is the attempt by DirecTV to use 'secrets' to prevent cable piracy. Either make the technology secure even with full disclosure or make a good conscience so cheap to acquire (keep cable prices dirt cheap) that people will prefer that to the risk of prosecution in the event of getting caught. Horrible pay-per-view fees and huge subscription fees are The Wrong Way (tm) to go.
What he did is just as illegal as if I'd stolen a bunch of information on Magellan's tracking software to distribute or use for my company's navigation software.
No, as I read the article he made the information free, not sold it in any way for profit. The purpose was obviously to let the secrets out, not make money in any way.
What he did was obviously a breach of confidence but I doubt anyone should even be charged for industrial espionage when it comes to just revealing so-called secrets to the general public.
In my (old cyberpunk) mind, what he did was both justifiable and right. Security by obscurity (or secrecy) in any way is nothing but a very bad excuse for lack of talent in the R&D departments. Systems that depend on nothing but 'secrets' deserve to be cracked and broken, then circumvented and made obsolete. Cases like the DVD CSS spring to mind. Stupid in the extreme. Open Source, anyone?
Instead of wasting billions making it hard to steal cable, they should rather go for enforcement. Just like they did here in Denmark when it came to bars showing pay-per-view sports events without paying the special fee per guest. They simply checked to see which bars had registered to pay and visited those that didn't. If the game was on, a hefty fine was issued (and their general subscription closed). Simple and effective.
Get a hair cut. Dress neatly in clean clothes that are not from the previous decade. Bathe! Frequently! And brush your God damned teeth, at least twice a day!!!
What has fashion to do with it? - I'm a sysadm and I dress in the clothes I find comfortable and as most current fashion is both expensive, weird and not suitable for the work of a sysadm which often involves running extra cables under raised floors, mounting gear in racks and other maintanance tasks which quickly will ruin any kind of 'nice clothing'.
I do bathe daily (who doesn't?) and I never liked the Unabomber-look so I keep my hair short and my face clean-shaven. Obviously I also brush my teeth just like everybody else and I have yet to meet anyone in the sysadm ranks who doesn't.
Please keep your prejudices elsewhere! - Sysadms are usually just practical about how they look. Sorry if that rarely involves looking like a fashion model, but that's real life for you.
One question. Say some geniuses developed a perfect protocol immune to spam, yet just as practical and easy to use as SMTP for all good people. Would MS Outlook/Express support this protocol by default?
Probably not. MS have ignored, altered, sabotaged, circumvented or misinterpreted just about standard and protocol out there, usually ending up with an inferior product by the way.
Actually any system which just slowed down the speed of sent messages would work.. say if every SMTP server only allowed a host to send 1 message every ten seconds.. or some similar accounting scheme.
It's called tarpitting and your mailserver is likely to support it even now! - If you only send single SMTP-messages every time you send out anything (using the CC or BCC mechanisms for group mails) you'll never know the difference but a spammer using it would hit a serious wall.
Now, trouble is that the big spammers have their own mailservers and they're likely to deliver only one message at a time to your mailbox, so it won't work there.
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The Taliban was a horrible regime, but they were not a threat in any way to the immediate security of the US.
Are you insane or just plain dumb?!
The Taleban provided both moral, financial and military support to a terrorist group (Al-Queda) that attacked US military (Pentagon) and civilian targets (WTC) without provocation or warning, killing thousands. Following the attack the Taleban refused to hand over the remaining terrorists hiding in their country, futher supporting the terrorists and thus proving that they form an alliance with the group that attacked the US, which makes them part in the war the Taleban started/declared by attacking the US.
Remember that an attack on the military of another nation is a declaration of war in itself, and the Taliban clearly supported the actions of Al-Queda both before and after the attack, thus they declared war on the US. I hardly find it surprising that the US responded by taking the war they were forced into back to Afghanistan.
Any regime/country actively waging war on the US is clearly a threat to the security of the US! - I think we're actually around the definition of 'threat to the security' here.
There is a huge difference between opposing certain policies of a government and attempting to overthrow it.
That certainly depends on the way this opposition is manifested!
If you do it by writing readers letters to newspapers or directly to your congressman, or participate in a peaceful demonstration that respects law and order - the diffence is huge and clear.
If you do it through 'civil disobedience' (another word for rampant lawbreaking usually including violence), I don't see any difference at all.
The use of lawbreaking by a violent mob is a major threat to any society and the reaction by the society must be equally major and severe in order to defend itself. This sentence is IMHO too lean.
First of all, yes it almost definitely hurts the sales of the canned crap that sells millions of copies off of a name, not the quality of the music, and people download and find out, gasp, it's crap and they don't buy the album. BUT, on the flipside, what about the thousands of bands who could never afford marketing who are now being exposed on a level unprecented in history to millions around the world for free?
And what about the many people (I'm one of those) that use downloaded music as real samples (listen-before-you-buy) for stuff either impossible to evaluate from a 30 second crappy sample from the beginning of the song which is what mostly is available on the net, or stuff only available from small suppliers that don't offer listening facilities or samples. If I like what I hear, especially after several listens, I buy the single. If I also like the other songs on the album the same way, I buy that as well. If not then I delete the stuff I downloaded and forget about it. I think that's fair enough as I don't keep anything I haven't paid for.
Without the availability of these decent quality full length 'samples', I'd not have bought most of the stuff I evaluated this way. One song heard somewhere doesn't qualify neither the single nor the album for a buy. Far from it. I want to know that the song is representative of the qualities of the album (or the album is worth it in other ways) before I buy it. Normally I'd listen in the record shop but they far from carry every record in the world and then other means are nessesary if I'm to continue buying music. There's simply too much crap and too many one-hit-wonders out there.
Wrong! - Go check the law!
Here for instance: Title 17 of United States Code, Section 107: "Fair Use"
Basically I can violate copyrights under the fair use clause if nobody makes money directly from the violation (like selling pirated materials) and the copyright holder doesn't lose any income from it. Or if it's for educational purposes.
Now, the problem is that RIAA, MPAA and similar organisations for decades have managed to convince the world that every pirated song/movie/program is a lost sale, and thus that filesharing of copyrighted material is grand theft. But this is a huge and very dangerous lie because research has shown that while some people indeed only download and never buy, most people buy later (using the downloaded material as samples) or would buy if the material was available for sale somewhere (the rare stuff). This research actually proved that in some areas filesharing actually increased sales, not the other way around.
But sales of music are decreasing you say? - Well, the research (sources anyone?) did include a poll asking people how much music they buy and in particular if they bought less why they did that. The answer was not filesharing as RIAA argues, but mainly two other reasons:
Money. Music too expensive or the economy too bad
Supply. The stuff on sale isn't worth the cost - or it just plain sucks
Funny, but both these are to a large extent 'fixable' by the RIA and their members... But they'd rather save face and complain, harrass, subpoena, prosecute and eliminate all their critics and the 'rogue' market they've created. Go figure.
I'll add one thing. I'm getting tired of /., the EFF, et. al. calling it "sharing" or "swapping". It's neither. It's only sharing or swapping if you have the rights to it. Otherwise, it's illegal (with certain small exceptions).
It is sharing/swapping and it may be illegal, but the issue is whether it should be illegal. Sure the law (especially the DMCA) may call it that but that's a flaw of the law, not the users or the P2P-networks.
Let's do a small example. I own a recording on LP. I do have a tape copy of it (still legal to make) but I don't have a tape deck at work, nor a record player, but I have my computer. Now I find my favourite track from that LP on a P2P-network and download that in order to play it at work... SLAM! - that is illegal for me to do, despite the fact that I've already paid for that song at the record shop and everything. How stupid is that?! - I can legally just sample the tape and create the MP3 from that and it'll still be legal for me. Mind you, I'm never allowed to share this MP3 with anyone else and that's fine with me.
Why am I not allowed to make a copy of something I've paid for, for my own use?
No, the law is wrong and I'd rather respect the much basic law that that I bought and paid for is mine to do with as I please.
Please note that's talking about music that I've already paid for. I'm not talking about new stuff because that may be theft provided that the user never pays anything for it. I'd call it borrowing when it comes to beating the labels at the teasing game and use a downloaded copy of a song until it becomes available in the shops.
Let's do a practical example. About a week ago the english singer Dido released a new single (the first in years) entitled "White Flag" to the radio stations which began playing it right away. Now I want that single because I'm a huge fan and I already own (bought and paid for) all her other stuff, including rare stuff, so I went to my local retailer right away and was told that the single won't hit the shelves until mid-September, 5-6 weeks away! - It's so insanely stupid that they still try to play that teasing game (creating a feeding frenzy thus boosting the sales at the release) and I simply refuse to play along.
So does a lot of other people it seems because my local retailer told me that none of the other major releases caused any kind of frenzy despite months of teasing. Madonna's "American Life" single hardly moved when it came out and is already on sale. The reason is of course P2P-network filesharing because people have downloaded and listened to the song for a long time and grown tired of it when the official release finally comes around. I'm sure the Madonna single would have sold much better is it was available in the shops right from the start. And the same thing will probably happen to the Dido single unfortunately, and it's too bad because Dido didn't have anything to do with that stupid release policy.
In any case I therefore borrowed the new Dido song from a P2P-network and I'll pay for it when I can. Yes, the will to pay is there but right now I simply can't pay for it no matter what. I've got the money in hand and I'm in the retailers shop but the single isn't there to buy! - Stupid, isn't it?
So, using a P2P-network is far from always theft. Sometimes it's a tool to make things work, and if that means to bend a few rules (laws) so be it. I know I paid or will pay for my stuff, so my conscience is clean. I just don't accept the tyrrany of the labels.
Now back to the 3:36 mins of bliss from Dido that her label forced me to borrow instead of buying...
"I will go down with this ship,
I won't put my hands up and surrender.
There will be no white flag above my door." -- Dido, "White Flag"
The RIAA's fight against music sharing is becoming increasingly desperate,
:-)
Well, this brings to mind the famous 'principle' of the best defense being an offence...
What if EFF and all the other anti-RIAA organisations arranged a massive world-wide share-n-download-it-all campaign where billions of people shared gazillion of files all over the place?
That way the RIAA would be completely drowned out and wouldn't have the slightest chance of making as much as a tiny dent and the P2P-networks would offer so much music (and movies - take that MPAA!) that the legitimate business would be hit so hard that the RIAA actually would be financially unable to continue the fight. That way they'd be replaced with someone else that would work with the P2P-networks, not against them, in order to find a solution that everybody relevant (musicians and users) could live with.
If the RIAA set out to kill off P2P-networks because they're used for pirating, we'll set out to kill off RIAA because they're violating civil rights, terrorising innocent people with obscene threats and false accusations... It's that simple.
Sure, RIAA claims to have legitimate purposes but so do P2P-networks. If they don't respect that, neither will we. They opened the can of worms and they asked to be bitten - so let them. Let the war begin...
Technology today makes it possible for smaller or new artists to actually record, produce and distribute their music themselves without the need for huge funds and thus without a major label. If we cut out the 100% mark-up that the RIAA's greed has created, retail prices would be cut in half, and a lot more people would be able to afford to buy their music. Add to that the likely quality of the music released. Most of the stuff put out by major labels today are so boringly identical and tasteless due to the focus on profits. Releases financed by the bands themselves would be much more innovative simply because the 'does-it'sell' filter would be gone, and the music would be sold on its quality, not the cleverness of its marketing campaign.
Yes, the RIAA is a bane to musicians and the art they create. It's all about the money and the RIAA cannot get enough. That must stop and RIAA must go.
They want their jobs to be easier.
The scourge of modern day society! - It seems like every type of law enforcement all over the world are joining forces in the battle cry of: "We want our lives to be easier! - We don't want to do old fashioned police work anymore. If only the net also could catch the criminals physically we'd be doing alright!"
Come on you morons! - Most crimes only hurt someone in real life and that's where you catch the criminals red handed. If you want to catch a pedophile, go for the the violation of the child or the user buying the videos/pictures. This all happens in real life and thus doesn't require a computer to track and solve, only good old fashioned legwork. Damned lazy cops! - Drop those dougnuts and get off your asses! - There's real policework to be done out there!
And 'internet havens'... We're talking about freedom of expression and freedom from censorship here. If it means that some pedophiles can email anonymously so be it. Words in themselves can't hurt anyone. If they touch a child, they'll have to do so in real life and that's where the law has to work. Prevent it preferably or use the physical evidence to convict the violator. I mean, the pedophiles are almost always already known to the authorities for lesser offences, so all there is to it is to monitor them closely when they have any kind of contact with children (and remove their own children if they have any - prevention is a good thing in this) and bust them if they step out of line. Simplicity itself!
And no, I don't have a 'free' email. Never had a use for one, and they have too many ads (did you think they were free?). But I respect the need for some people to be able to use such a thing to avoid the spyware at work or the prying eyes of family or the authorities. It is imperative that people can find a way to speak truly free without having to pay for this privilege.
Besides, this plan to use this payment as a means to get personal identification of the payee won't work because if it were to happen we'll simply see the advent of 'anonymous re-payers', services that for a fee pay for the services on behalf of their customers that only they know the identity of. So if the authorities want to find the identity of 'bigfelon@freemail.com' through the money trail, they'll only hit the re-payer who can be located in a place in the world where no supoena that force them to release the true identity of this user. Thus we've only created a new lucrative business and the electronic paper trail will be even harder to follow.
Just drop it. It won't work and you'll be digging your own grave even deeper.
Why wasn't this message posted in YRO? - After all, we're talking about adding tracing capabilities and logging to services that are used by billions of people not under any suspicion or investigation of any kind. Why the end of catching a pedophile or two justify going all big brother on all the innocent users?
If that isn't YRO-material, I don't know!
The site itself is a circumvention device. It's only purpose is to facilitate the distribution of specific information on illegal exploits of a proprietary network.
No, information itself cannot be owned or a device for anything. It is a representation of free speech. Note that this case doesn't involve confidential trade secrets or similar. There's nothing illegal happening until someone actually uses the codes, schematics or tools that may or may not have passed through that site. And that might even be legal for Canadians because it's highly doubtful that anyone can be said to steal something from nothing as DirectTV doesn't have a commercial presence where the site is located, thus the merchandise actually doesn't exist in Canada - or at least has no value for the company there.
Yes, information still wants to be free...
That's a pretty stupid comment from someone who doesn't even want to be named... As to understanding the issues, I'm willing to bet that I know the issues at least as well as you do, especially the futile fight against the ignorant people of SPEWS. Nobody seems to be able (or willing) to understand these basic facts:
- A contract cannot contain terms not relating to the services it covers. You cannot demand that the customer behaves in a certain way elsewhere on the net.
- A customer not violating the terms of a contract cannot be terminated without incurring a heavily penalty that a small ISP never can be be expected to be able to afford.
- You can and will be listed by SPEWS even if you only provide other services than spam-related stuff to alledged spammers, for instance bandwidth for non-spamvertised streaming or payment services. Any business deal will get you listed!
This all means that you can end up listed by SPEWS and not being able to do anything about it, short of winning the lottery and use that money to pay off the inevetable lawsuit from the alledged spammers when you terminate them without due course.Oh, and terminating this alledged spammer will no in any way affect the amount of spam sent out, so the blackmailing from SPEWS is all for nothing.
What would be much more interesting is a lawsuit from the ISPs that gets hit by the punitive overlisting (the 'escalated listing') that SPEWS and SpamHaus practices.
These affect in most cases upwards of 99% completely innocent customers of the victimized ISPs, who in some cases don't even host the spam emailers or the spamvertised sites; they are simply providing 'other services' (payment services, bandwidth for steaming etc.) for companies that may be using spam elsewhere in other parts of their business, and yet they get branded 'Spamhaus!' and gets blacklisted.
As there is absolute no additional spam-stopping effect of this overlisting, its only purpose seem to be to blackmail the ISPs to stop a non-spam-related business relationship with companies that SPEWS/SpamHaus disapproves of in order to exact revenge or similar stupid action.
The 99% innocent victims are being pressured to switch ISP, which may result in multi-million dollar expenses (like when they need to move all their servers elsewhere) that nobody but themselves can possibly be expected to cover, and sometimes the ISP even demands damages for prematurely terminated contracts.
As these blacklists are part of the de-facto standard blacklist published by osirusoft, a listing by SPEWS/SpamHaus practically guarantees severe email connectivity problems, which makes it effectively a sender block, not just a receiving block. This means that this type of listing actually prevents millions of innocent users from sending mail, despite the fact that they've never sent anything remotely like spam, and probably hates spam as much as everybody else.
Last time I checked blackmail was very much illegal and it would be good to see how the legal system judges this practice, especially considering that most people have no idea that their ISP may be preventing them from receiving email from ordinary people who are unfortunate enough to have an ISP that's being victimized by a SPEWS/SpamHaus overlisting, despite clearly not being a source of spam.
Now they've found another way to make us pay for stuff that's only nessesary because they want total control and the power to make some people feel important.
We've heard about RIAA making up glued discmans and similar stupid things to prevent reviewers from ripping the preview CDs and putting them on the net before public release. We've also heard about MPAA effectually strip-searching reviewers to make sure they don't carry recording devices into a preview show, and now they want to invest time and money in developing means of making it impossible to make a viewable recording of these shows.
Who's paying for this? You and me!
Does it work? - Nope. Never did, never will. It an arms race that'll never be won.
I think it's about time RIAA and MPAA sat down and realized that they'll never be able to prevent this and therefore plain and simple stop doing these pre-release things altogether. Or limit them to no more than a few days ahead of the public release. - That way the pirates won't have much time to make their copy and the impact on sales will be much less. Of course this means that all the VIPs will have to wait just like everybody else...
And I know that won't do much good for overseas spammers and so on, but perhaps it will increase the cost of doing business.
:-)
Actually it will do a lot of good - because a federal law should allow for going after the advertiser, and the advertiser is much more often within legal reach.
Without business the spammers themselves will go out of business. Of course that isn't as fun as taking those stupid spammers to the cleaners, and then some...
Why doesn't anyone mention Google censorship? - Oh wait... I'm doing that right now! :-)
The very fact that Google gives in to any kind of censorship is very sad, especially the fact that they're not admitting it openly. There is no reason at all why Google should comply in any way, shape or form to foreign government 'requests' (orders) to make certain materials harder to find. Google should always attempt to be as complete as possible, including whatever its spiders find.
It's very simple: If a government doesn't want its people to look for something, educate the people! - Don't try to find half-assed ways to implement censorship through bullying or technical means. Yes, information still wants to be free. All of it actually.
Read more about Google censorship here
The reason why it isn't illegal is that there's no legal obligation to provide an opt-out for spam in the first place. Spam isn't illegal.
Actually spam is illigal, at least in most of EU which also is a marketplace for this company and their application. Now, the trouble is that if you consent to receive something it isn't spam, and the method used here will unfortunately provide the consent because the option is there and you can uncheck it.
Damaging a rogue ISP's users is the solution, not the problem. If we didnt' punish these ignorant subscribers they would continue supporting spammers. Every subscriber to a spam-friendly ISP is voting with their dollars - for spam.
Yes, this is true - if the world was black and white... But I know of at least one ISP which has been SPEWS-listed due to the fact that they host hosting companies that host freehosting-providers that host an endless stream of small companies that gets replaced as quickly as they get kicked out for spamming. But to the outside user it looks like - at best - the freehosting company spams, or the hosting company (the customer of the ISP) is responsible. But still the ISP gets blacklisted because there's a constant flow of complaints against the same set of IP-addresses. Even though all compaints are responded to and the spammer kicked out quickly and efficiently, they (SPEWS) still list the ISP at level 1. The ISP could try to kick their customer out but they are not at fault either because all 'rules' are being followed and spammers are terminated quickly, so the result would be a major business boom for lawyers which the ISP would loose. So what is there to do but to sit back and enjoy being blacklisted by SPEWS.
If only SPEWS had sensible people that were reachable through normal means, it would be okay because then they'd understand the problem and realize that the rules are indeed being followed. But you can only contact SPEWS through the usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email and I have yet to see a single remove-me message directed at SPEWS there that wasn't ridiculed in the extreme and of course ignored by SPEWS.
What SPEWS is really saying is that the ISP is responsible for what a customer of a customer of a customer of theirs is doing, and that is actually equivivalent to punishing the entire population of a state because there is one person after another within a town within a county within that state that commits a crime. Real life doesn't work like that and yet the criminals are punished - one by one, but still...
I think it's about time that SPEWS get off their high horse and face the real life. Blacklisting these ISPs may help stop some spam but it is overkill in the worst degree, and it certainly isn't fair, especially when there's essentially ZERO means of appealing their listings.
The problem is it's being addressed on a national level. That won't stop the African scam artists "whose money is tied up" - hopefully their oppressors will beat them in the face with a rusty camshaft - or the Chinese wishes of good fortune and prosperity that I was continually getting from some shitty company selling latex products until I finally decided to blackhole China from my mailserver.
.dk and thus clearly (or most likely) isn't in the US). They are often sent through non-US relays or from non-US spam-services, but the advertiser is US-based and thus can be prosecuted under US law - and that's where the action should be. At the end of the day it really comes down to a US company exchanging a piece of junk for cash and that can be stopped.
Actually those spams are few and far between... My daily load of about 100 spams these days consists mostly of english language ads for US-related products and services (despite that my address ends in
The rest - like the Nigerian scams - can be stopped via Interpol and similar because it's scams and against the law. They just need to get off their asses and start chasing these guys.
$25 million?
Wow! - That's a lot of cash wasted on something vulnarable to plain secrecy disclosure!
Off the top of my head, here's an algorithm for free that'll work and be fairly uncrackable, at least at a first glance:
Encrypt each channel using a public key system. Each user receives on a special encrypted digital channel a new key for each subscribed channel every day. These keys are transmitted in encrypted form so they need a valid card key to be decrypted.
In order to crack this a pirate will need access to a valid card key (which can be disabled centrally of course by simply not encrypting for it) in order to receive and decrypt a new key for each channel daily in order to continue to decrypt the broadcast on that channel. Or to brute-force it on a daily basis...
Distribution of the daily channel decryption keys is possible of course but who wants the bother of updating your card (via the internet or similar) every single day?
And all algorithms can be public with no ill effects as all keys are machine generated and the central ones (the channel keys) changed frequently.
Won't this work?
No sympathy for those that distribute trade secrets. Intellectual property is far too valuable to ignore cases like this.
If the essense of the system is the secrecy of the protective algorithms, there's nothing intellectual about it. It's plain stupid and stupidual property is not protected in any way.
Trade secrets are not about protecting your intellectual property (patent and copyright laws do that) but about power and control. Don't forget the DVD CSS case where the issue is the power of the owner to decide who or what the 'secret algorithm' (CSS) is used for. They explicitly refused to allow any Linux/Unix player to use it (perhaps due to a pact with the Big Devil (M$)?), and the community reacted by forcing the issue and reverse-engineering the algorithm. Had they released it to be used in Linux/Unix players, any abuse of it for plain descrambling and copying of DVDs would be a simple case of piracy. But they went for the confrontation because they wanted to excercise their power and control. Stupid move.
The fact that this is listed under YRO is some laughable shit. Committing a crime is committing a crime.
/. readers?
Read that again. So you're saying that violating certain laws is just a crime while violating others is more or less a duty for
The issue here is not the fact that he stole the information, but that he made it public for free (his 'right' to do so). In case you've been in a coma these past few decades a central issue in the nerd population is the primary creed of the Cyberpunk Movement: "Information wants to be free". This is why we fight for the right to disclose the DVD CSS algorithm, the right to both publicize and access websites featuring certain kinds of information and so on.
This case is about the right to make public information that will enable people to use it to show that if you create a system with Bad Security (protected only by secrecy) you deserve to have it broken and your business ruined as a worst case scenario. What they need is to develop a system in public and have gazillions of eager nerds trying to crack it, and when it is mature enough to survive that, use it. Until then, base your business on something else, like mass subscriptions through dirt-cheap fees and an appeal to have a clean conscience. Or some nice strict enforcement the old-fashioned way (inspections, raids etc.). Don't be lazy and only go through technological channels and stupid laws to get your profits.
It was a good thing to do (make information free), although he should have laboured to stay anonymous so nobody could come after him. That was indeed a stupid thing to do.
Much more plainly stupid is the attempt by DirecTV to use 'secrets' to prevent cable piracy. Either make the technology secure even with full disclosure or make a good conscience so cheap to acquire (keep cable prices dirt cheap) that people will prefer that to the risk of prosecution in the event of getting caught. Horrible pay-per-view fees and huge subscription fees are The Wrong Way (tm) to go.
What he did is just as illegal as if I'd stolen a bunch of information on Magellan's tracking software to distribute or use for my company's navigation software.
No, as I read the article he made the information free, not sold it in any way for profit. The purpose was obviously to let the secrets out, not make money in any way.
What he did was obviously a breach of confidence but I doubt anyone should even be charged for industrial espionage when it comes to just revealing so-called secrets to the general public.
In my (old cyberpunk) mind, what he did was both justifiable and right. Security by obscurity (or secrecy) in any way is nothing but a very bad excuse for lack of talent in the R&D departments. Systems that depend on nothing but 'secrets' deserve to be cracked and broken, then circumvented and made obsolete. Cases like the DVD CSS spring to mind. Stupid in the extreme. Open Source, anyone?
Instead of wasting billions making it hard to steal cable, they should rather go for enforcement. Just like they did here in Denmark when it came to bars showing pay-per-view sports events without paying the special fee per guest. They simply checked to see which bars had registered to pay and visited those that didn't. If the game was on, a hefty fine was issued (and their general subscription closed). Simple and effective.
Note to future sysadmins:
Get a hair cut.
Dress neatly in clean clothes that are not from the previous decade.
Bathe! Frequently!
And brush your God damned teeth, at least twice a day!!!
What has fashion to do with it? - I'm a sysadm and I dress in the clothes I find comfortable and as most current fashion is both expensive, weird and not suitable for the work of a sysadm which often involves running extra cables under raised floors, mounting gear in racks and other maintanance tasks which quickly will ruin any kind of 'nice clothing'.
I do bathe daily (who doesn't?) and I never liked the Unabomber-look so I keep my hair short and my face clean-shaven. Obviously I also brush my teeth just like everybody else and I have yet to meet anyone in the sysadm ranks who doesn't.
Please keep your prejudices elsewhere! - Sysadms are usually just practical about how they look. Sorry if that rarely involves looking like a fashion model, but that's real life for you.
One question. Say some geniuses developed a perfect protocol immune to spam, yet just as practical and easy to use as SMTP for all good people. Would MS Outlook/Express support this protocol by default?
Probably not. MS have ignored, altered, sabotaged, circumvented or misinterpreted just about standard and protocol out there, usually ending up with an inferior product by the way.
Actually any system which just slowed down the speed of sent messages would work.. say if every SMTP server only allowed a host to send 1 message every ten seconds.. or some similar accounting scheme.
It's called tarpitting and your mailserver is likely to support it even now! - If you only send single SMTP-messages every time you send out anything (using the CC or BCC mechanisms for group mails) you'll never know the difference but a spammer using it would hit a serious wall.
Now, trouble is that the big spammers have their own mailservers and they're likely to deliver only one message at a time to your mailbox, so it won't work there.