>How can they possible justify a settlement of this size.
It's a punishment. They did something illegal and should be punished. It's the same way that when a person is caught doing insider trading, the SEC fines them an amount greater than what they actually made in the deal as a punishment.
As long as the accused prostrate themselves before the RIAA, fuzzy precedents like this will become as established as any other rule of law
I think this is wrong. It is only by court ruling can it set legal prescendence. Second of all, what is the point of battling the RIAA if what you are doing is illegal? There is no way that this could be argued out of court. Remember, they are distributing pirated materials [within their employees].
A copyrighted material by any other means is still copyrighted. The issue here isn't that MP3s aren't illegal (we MUST get this fact straight), but rather the content of the MP3 files are illegal. The song itself is pirated.
Everyone, face it. The days of the free internet is over. It has not been and will not be economically sound for content providers to just give you content for free. Why must the CNN and the NYTimes of the world give you free content if you have to pay for the same content, if not in a more difficult to handle fashion, offline [$0.75/NYTime or $30/month as part of a packaged cable fee for CNN] The ad revenue model only works when the people that are marketing their products can achieve a measurable result of the ads effectiveness. This just isn't true in the current state of the Internet.
Now consider this for a second. [Don't just disclaim it as a wild off the wall analysis]. Let's just say that you are a frequent diner to a fine restaurant. Because you are such a frequent customer, the maitre'd knows you personally and greets you immediately giving you personal attention. He gives you your favorite table and because you typically spends upwards of $200 for dinner, he gives you a bottle of your favorite wine complimentary of the house. [Note: he knows your favorite wine because that's what you order every time prior].
Now let's consider another scenario. This is your first time at this restaurant. You made a reservation, but as usual, they overbooked. You have to wait. The hostess stuffs you into the corner table right by the kitchen. And treats you like everyone else.
This is the difference between a company tracking your site usage (or internet usage) vs a scenario where your usage is never tracked. My contention is that by giving up a little bit of your information, you are getting a more customized service with value added. It provides for a greater user experience.
So what's a scenario of this happening online? Suppose that you are shopping for a car. You use the internet to browse through all the Ford Mustangs. You go to ford.com and read up on the new Mustang. You read some reviews on the Mustang and you browse through car dealership sites for Ford Mustangs. You look up the Trade In price on Blue Book. Now that the system knows that you are shopping for Mustangs, sites can customize their ads to your needs. Imagine going to the Kelley's Blue Book site and seeing an ad for a Mustang on sale at carday.com and because they know that you are a serious buyer, they offer you $500 off the list price and because they have rough demographics on the type of person that you are, they give you a good deal on financing [all within the ad] Now all you have to do is click on the Ad and you'll be ready to buy.
Now, let's look at this:
You win in terms of the fact that you get sites or ads customized to your needs.
The advertiser wins in terms of they are getting recordable results from their ads
Alright, before you think that I'm crazy..I was once a skeptic. What changed my mind was Dan Rosen, the CEO of CNet.com was our guest lecturer for my b-school class and this was the stuff that he was talking about. What you have to remember is this: people can opt-out of this tracking buy turning off your cookies. But what you lose is that added value provided it. Without your cookie, the only thing that they could use to track is your IP address, and in many cases, this is dynamic, so each time you will start anew.
I would like to see a system where one must opt in and the companies who sell your information must compensate you to some extent.
Hmm..so you're saying you are willing to pay for the content that you read also? You are using their information, why aren't they being compensated for it?
How do you expect a free website to maintain its business by selling untargetted ads? The current ad model does not work and will not work. But unless people are willing to pay subscriptions to access websites, they need some type of way to stay alive.
Difference is..when someone trips on the power cable, this one doesn't lose all of its data. Whereas try doing that in a computer lab during finals week and see if your data in DRAM is gone. I think I remember seeing that Google was using stuff like this for their storage rather than HDD.
3) Less educated users (RHN is mostly tech-oriented people whereas Kazaa is typically teenagers and college students)
4) Many leave it on whether or not they are actually using it, not realizing the ramifications of this.
Until one day all the DDoS attacks shut down all your root name servers and a good chunk of the backend routers. I guess you should suffer also [through the lack of a usuable internet] because you didn't do anything about this before it happend.
Not to run around and shout the sky is falling or anything. This is potentially a major problem. When a company's business plan focuses on tricking the user to install their application, you know they care relatively little about security or the damage that they can do.
Re:People have too much time on their hands
on
GameBoy Web Server
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· Score: 2
I mean, I guess it's cool, but what have you proved? You can write a TCP/IP stack for some processor on some platform? Yeah, we all _know_ that can be done, but, why waste your time doing something useless? It's not like someone is going to throw out their NT or Linux server and replace with a GameBoy Advance or Lego brick anytime soon
Quite true that this is useless to you/the world, but to him, the person that did this, he has learned a great deal. I mean, what have you done? what "valuable" asset have you produced? [I'm not saying this to say that you are worthless, but to point out that big things tend to start out small. Look at Napster for example, I don't think Shawn Fanning sat down one day and decided to make an P2P app to turn the record industry on its head...]
In addition, it just shows that the same thing that all these bloated programs/os's that we have out there can be done on a rather small device with limited hardware. I remember back in the days when the ultimate thing was to be able to design a graphic intense demo using only 640K. I keep seeing it all the time and it's just getting worse. Lazy coders and uneducated programmers don't bother writing code that can be done with 25% less lines or 25% less resources just because right now there's no need. The hardware is far ahead of the software demands. This typically leads to bloat.
It just gives further example...that just because there is legistlation stating that something shouldn't be done here in the US, it doesn't stop it from actually happening somewhere in the world...even in the US. Take for example RIAA/MPAA attack on MP3s/DivX...It's still going to happen whether it's legal or not.
How cool would it be to add different skins to your instrument panel? I mean, the new high end cars nowadays have digital instrument panels..It could be done.
But the question is..would you like your mission critical web server to do this? Who is responsible if the upgrade conflicts with an unique configuration for a certain company...
Think about this.. The CIA, undercover as a journalist, presents an enemy, we'll say Osama, a nice gold watch. They then can track where he goes and in fact target a cruise missile at the GPS signal. Nice huh?
Has anyone successfully found Microsoft accountable for broken software? Or CA? Or any software vendor for that matter?
Actually, for large corporations, MS and CA and a number of large software companies build out custom versions of the softwares than the ones that you buy at the computer store. In addition, they sometimes post MS Consultants onsite to deal specifically with that one client. For clients with 1000+ worldwide installation, they would want to keep you very happy.
That's like saying that gravity is unfair...P vs NP is a fundamental theory within computer science. Can't really argue that because it doesn't go your way, it's not fair..:-)
/. 'd already..
on
He Writes Back
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
doh! Hey did anyone notice the time on this article. Where is/. based? On the EST it's only 6:47, but all these articles are comments are saying 7:40... Just wondering if there is an error with the system time on/.
If PayPal loses your money, they are still held liable. Let's look at it this way, if I give you my wallet to hold while I'm playing basketball and you lose it, you are still responsible for paying me back. Just because you are not a bank and just because there are no regulations on a friend holding a friends wallet, doesn't mean that you can get off with stealing my money. Now in terms of PayPal, if they were to take your money, it constitutes fraud. You can get your money back through court.
Now, according to what you are saying about the lack of regulations, the thousands of people in the class action lawsuit have no basis to sue because "there are no regulations?" Try telling that to them. A criminal offense is still a criminal offense regardless of whether there is a regulating body over that exact action. Regulations are there to further limit already set regulations regarding an action.
Secondly, up until a year ago there were no regulations on online banks. But places like Citibank, Charles Schwab, and others have had online presence for many years. Are you saying that since there is no regulations on "online banks" these online banking portals were unsafe and unregulated? No! They are still regulated from the brick and mortar standpoint. Regulations should not change because of the shift to a new platform or technology. A good regulation would be wide enough to cover current and future technologies.
> The CC companies did all sorts of thing when they started to have merchants feal comfortable with the risk.
Quite true. But in the beginning, a whole lot of people were hesitant about using Credit Cards, the same way that people have been hestitant about purchasing online. I think places like PayPal has done a good deal to ease people into the PayPal idea. It is just that they are going to lose some public faith in light of the recent incidents. But in the next couple of years, I'm sure you will see more and more people using companies like PayPal
Now the question is, what is MoneyGram (the wire transfer service). Isn't this to some effect what PayPal does? They allow people to send money to each other and hold it until the recipient picks it up. The regulations that deal with this type of service should be used on PayPal also.
Didn't they say the same thing about credit cards years ago? Now how many people are using credit cards? In the same analogy, CC company is telling the merchants, I promise to pay you later if you give my client the merchandise now. What recourse do you have that the CC company will pay? In the same way with PayPal, if a company decides to reneg on its promises, it constitutes fraud. A company like paypal or Mastercard or Visa is not going to get up and walk away with your money without some type of legal ramifications chasing after them.
Slashdot Mirror
>How can they possible justify a settlement of this size.
It's a punishment. They did something illegal and should be punished. It's the same way that when a person is caught doing insider trading, the SEC fines them an amount greater than what they actually made in the deal as a punishment.
I think this is wrong. It is only by court ruling can it set legal prescendence. Second of all, what is the point of battling the RIAA if what you are doing is illegal? There is no way that this could be argued out of court. Remember, they are distributing pirated materials [within their employees].
A copyrighted material by any other means is still copyrighted. The issue here isn't that MP3s aren't illegal (we MUST get this fact straight), but rather the content of the MP3 files are illegal. The song itself is pirated.
IANAL
Everyone, face it. The days of the free internet is over. It has not been and will not be economically sound for content providers to just give you content for free. Why must the CNN and the NYTimes of the world give you free content if you have to pay for the same content, if not in a more difficult to handle fashion, offline [$0.75/NYTime or $30/month as part of a packaged cable fee for CNN] The ad revenue model only works when the people that are marketing their products can achieve a measurable result of the ads effectiveness. This just isn't true in the current state of the Internet.
Now consider this for a second. [Don't just disclaim it as a wild off the wall analysis]. Let's just say that you are a frequent diner to a fine restaurant. Because you are such a frequent customer, the maitre'd knows you personally and greets you immediately giving you personal attention. He gives you your favorite table and because you typically spends upwards of $200 for dinner, he gives you a bottle of your favorite wine complimentary of the house. [Note: he knows your favorite wine because that's what you order every time prior].
Now let's consider another scenario. This is your first time at this restaurant. You made a reservation, but as usual, they overbooked. You have to wait. The hostess stuffs you into the corner table right by the kitchen. And treats you like everyone else.
This is the difference between a company tracking your site usage (or internet usage) vs a scenario where your usage is never tracked. My contention is that by giving up a little bit of your information, you are getting a more customized service with value added. It provides for a greater user experience.
So what's a scenario of this happening online? Suppose that you are shopping for a car. You use the internet to browse through all the Ford Mustangs. You go to ford.com and read up on the new Mustang. You read some reviews on the Mustang and you browse through car dealership sites for Ford Mustangs. You look up the Trade In price on Blue Book. Now that the system knows that you are shopping for Mustangs, sites can customize their ads to your needs. Imagine going to the Kelley's Blue Book site and seeing an ad for a Mustang on sale at carday.com and because they know that you are a serious buyer, they offer you $500 off the list price and because they have rough demographics on the type of person that you are, they give you a good deal on financing [all within the ad] Now all you have to do is click on the Ad and you'll be ready to buy.
Now, let's look at this:
Alright, before you think that I'm crazy..I was once a skeptic. What changed my mind was Dan Rosen, the CEO of CNet.com was our guest lecturer for my b-school class and this was the stuff that he was talking about. What you have to remember is this: people can opt-out of this tracking buy turning off your cookies. But what you lose is that added value provided it. Without your cookie, the only thing that they could use to track is your IP address, and in many cases, this is dynamic, so each time you will start anew.
Hmm..so you're saying you are willing to pay for the content that you read also? You are using their information, why aren't they being compensated for it?
How do you expect a free website to maintain its business by selling untargetted ads? The current ad model does not work and will not work. But unless people are willing to pay subscriptions to access websites, they need some type of way to stay alive.
Even then, Cray cannot sell them to many countries because of legal restrictions...
Difference is..when someone trips on the power cable, this one doesn't lose all of its data. Whereas try doing that in a computer lab during finals week and see if your data in DRAM is gone. I think I remember seeing that Google was using stuff like this for their storage rather than HDD.
3) Less educated users (RHN is mostly tech-oriented people whereas Kazaa is typically teenagers and college students) 4) Many leave it on whether or not they are actually using it, not realizing the ramifications of this.
Until one day all the DDoS attacks shut down all your root name servers and a good chunk of the backend routers. I guess you should suffer also [through the lack of a usuable internet] because you didn't do anything about this before it happend.
Not to run around and shout the sky is falling or anything. This is potentially a major problem. When a company's business plan focuses on tricking the user to install their application, you know they care relatively little about security or the damage that they can do.
Quite true that this is useless to you/the world, but to him, the person that did this, he has learned a great deal. I mean, what have you done? what "valuable" asset have you produced? [I'm not saying this to say that you are worthless, but to point out that big things tend to start out small. Look at Napster for example, I don't think Shawn Fanning sat down one day and decided to make an P2P app to turn the record industry on its head...]
In addition, it just shows that the same thing that all these bloated programs/os's that we have out there can be done on a rather small device with limited hardware. I remember back in the days when the ultimate thing was to be able to design a graphic intense demo using only 640K. I keep seeing it all the time and it's just getting worse. Lazy coders and uneducated programmers don't bother writing code that can be done with 25% less lines or 25% less resources just because right now there's no need. The hardware is far ahead of the software demands. This typically leads to bloat.
It just gives further example...that just because there is legistlation stating that something shouldn't be done here in the US, it doesn't stop it from actually happening somewhere in the world...even in the US. Take for example RIAA/MPAA attack on MP3s/DivX...It's still going to happen whether it's legal or not.
How cool would it be to add different skins to your instrument panel? I mean, the new high end cars nowadays have digital instrument panels..It could be done.
But the question is..would you like your mission critical web server to do this? Who is responsible if the upgrade conflicts with an unique configuration for a certain company...
People should not have to be forced to upgrade.
Hmm..I dunno, how would I be able to strafe, change weapons, and jump using this thing...There goes CounterStrike for me.. :-)
he he .. April Fools, right? he he (nervous laughter as I switch over to K5) :-)
CmdrTaco, you rock! (today is April 1st right?)
Think about this.. The CIA, undercover as a journalist, presents an enemy, we'll say Osama, a nice gold watch. They then can track where he goes and in fact target a cruise missile at the GPS signal. Nice huh?
Actually the Navy Battleships computer system is running WinNT. Again, these aren't off the shelf WinNT, but pretty customized versions of it.
Johnia Machine is definitely the way to go...
That's like saying that gravity is unfair...P vs NP is a fundamental theory within computer science. Can't really argue that because it doesn't go your way, it's not fair.. :-)
doh! Hey did anyone notice the time on this article. Where is /. based? On the EST it's only 6:47, but all these articles are comments are saying 7:40... Just wondering if there is an error with the system time on /.
I think the keyword here is "well-documented"
> what happens if Paypal looses you money?
If PayPal loses your money, they are still held liable. Let's look at it this way, if I give you my wallet to hold while I'm playing basketball and you lose it, you are still responsible for paying me back. Just because you are not a bank and just because there are no regulations on a friend holding a friends wallet, doesn't mean that you can get off with stealing my money. Now in terms of PayPal, if they were to take your money, it constitutes fraud. You can get your money back through court.
Now, according to what you are saying about the lack of regulations, the thousands of people in the class action lawsuit have no basis to sue because "there are no regulations?" Try telling that to them. A criminal offense is still a criminal offense regardless of whether there is a regulating body over that exact action. Regulations are there to further limit already set regulations regarding an action.
Secondly, up until a year ago there were no regulations on online banks. But places like Citibank, Charles Schwab, and others have had online presence for many years. Are you saying that since there is no regulations on "online banks" these online banking portals were unsafe and unregulated? No! They are still regulated from the brick and mortar standpoint. Regulations should not change because of the shift to a new platform or technology. A good regulation would be wide enough to cover current and future technologies.
> The CC companies did all sorts of thing when they started to have merchants feal comfortable with the risk.
Quite true. But in the beginning, a whole lot of people were hesitant about using Credit Cards, the same way that people have been hestitant about purchasing online. I think places like PayPal has done a good deal to ease people into the PayPal idea. It is just that they are going to lose some public faith in light of the recent incidents. But in the next couple of years, I'm sure you will see more and more people using companies like PayPal
Now the question is, what is MoneyGram (the wire transfer service). Isn't this to some effect what PayPal does? They allow people to send money to each other and hold it until the recipient picks it up. The regulations that deal with this type of service should be used on PayPal also.
Didn't they say the same thing about credit cards years ago? Now how many people are using credit cards? In the same analogy, CC company is telling the merchants, I promise to pay you later if you give my client the merchandise now. What recourse do you have that the CC company will pay? In the same way with PayPal, if a company decides to reneg on its promises, it constitutes fraud. A company like paypal or Mastercard or Visa is not going to get up and walk away with your money without some type of legal ramifications chasing after them.