Why is it that in america its absolutely fine for people to own high-power rapid fire chain guns, but not afew lines of code? Lets say for example (ignoring the fact that encryption is free speech anyway) that theres a war and everyone needs to "bear arms", wouldn't encryption count as a weapon to allow people to communicate without the enemy hearing? so whats the problem? Just because its newer technology shouldnt make a difference. If the bill of rights was written when bows and arrows were a common weapon would guns be illigal because they are much more hi-tech? If they were then people would be saying "hey thats not fair, when we have to bear arms we'll have bows and arrows and the enemy will have guns!"!
And another thing while im at it. If hacking (basically doing anything you like with a computer) was protected under the first amendment (im not saying it would be good or bad, just speculating). Eg. if it was decided that "anything involving bits on a computer was just information and thus speech" then what would happen? companies would go mad from hackers and beef up their security - probably employing allot more hackers to help them. (thats more jobs).
Why is accessing a remote computer without permission an offence? if that machine is connected to a network that you have legal physical access to then isnt it up to them to secure it? Unless your sending 25,000 volts down a line (which should be physical damage), digital breaking and entering is not the same as physical breaking and entering. Every door has a bigger hammer that can knock it down, every bolt has a sharper cutter that can slice it. However a properly secured system should be able to take any pattern of 1's and 0's and be able to survive until it gets that "correct" sequence (which can be too long to brute force), unlike a door which just cant be secured like that.
Ok, this is slightly off topic, im just trying to understand why we have laws regarding what you can do with 1's and 0's
Im interested - what do the people who do these record attempts send? is it specially formed test-data to analyse packet errors or do they all sit down and make a list of the porn and warez they want from geniva?
I dont hate any religion or people because of it, i didnt even say that. Not everyone in America is religious and i think you'll find not everyone is comfortable with Bush, religion or not. Bush and his belief that God is on the side of america and they are good against evil has worried members of his own religion and you simply cant define good against evil like that the situation is not as simple. Basically what it boils down to is if you are president or judge, you have to be impartial and leave your personal views at the door, be they a hate of instant coffee or a love of god, and thats what the bill of rights says.
In britain we have none. State school is pretty unbiased i think and public/private (i.e not free) schools do whatever, but i think if they started forcing people to recite stuff or be one religion there would be outrage.
How? "your either with us or your with the pedophiles" George Bush is such a wonderful source, his quotes will be with us for years to come. Id wonder more how he managed to get all his friends in the supreme court.. oh wait thats allowed isnt it.. and its not biased opinion because they are the supreme judges so they are totally impartial, especially impartial to non-republicans;)
your half right, your logic would have worked better, but their idea was to stick all the 'evil' sites onto an erm '.not-kids' domain and make the rest kid safe
Instead of passing stupid free speech infringing censorship laws and suddenly deciding that chat-rooms are bad, why not just keep kids off the internet. Its never going to be enforcable to censor web-sites outside america and barely enforcable inside, it only takes one site for some one to see it and if you've seen one hardcore-goatsex scene, you've really seen them all, the laws are really pointless and do more harm than good. If your worried about kids, just keep them offline or supervise them its pretty simple.
For fucks sake! your president talks about god all the time and half his voters and party think hes gods gift, do you not think this slightly more of an issue? Do you not think he might have a slight vested interest or biased opinion leading to violation of the bill of rights? Does this mean that if the court decides that 'under god' shouldnt be there then Bush should go? well i can kill the suspense now and tell you that the mostly-friends-of-bush supreme court will be deciding in favour of god.
This was one of the most active slashdot stories? Ok, not being american my logic would go something like this:
Should it be compulsory for students (or anyone) to pledge allegiance?: No
Should it have "under god"? or is that religion in the state?: Its up to whoever is saying it, Yes it is if its said in connection with the state
Should people therefore be banned from pledging allegiance or banned from using the "under god bit"?: WTF? No!
Any dispute?
I think the main problem here is how to combine the two versions. Do you have them both said at once and risk the whole class going un-synced? or do you do one and then the other, with the other set of kids covering their ears when they're not doing theirs? Or do you do it at the same time but have the non-god kids go silent for the under god bit?.. OR do you separate the kids into two rooms? or do you have them in the same room and just use sound-masking technology to stop them hearing each-other?
These are the sort of tough questions that America must answer. I mean god forbid a court room was actually used to discuss something usefull like, i dunno, the rogue president that keeps bombing things. Im honestly not trolling, im totally serious here - how many times has George Bush's sanity been discussed in a court? and is the pledge of allegiance more important than most other issues around today?
Oh the dilemma, you want the PHB to know enough to not come up with stupid ideas and expect you to implement them, but you want them to not know enough to interfere with your BOFH activities...
True but the latest release loads allot quicker, still makes me want to hit something though:( Apart from that its excellent, I dont even bother using pirate MS Office anymore!
If Apple ported to Intel it might help get users away from Windows. At the moment the only two OS's that most people know of are Windows and Apple. Apple also runs more of the apps (native) that most people (for some reason) need - photoshop & MS office. If people moved to OSX it would be less of a jump to go from there to another *nix OS like Linux.
I think its safe to say that if they cant manage after 6 generations and god-knows how many years to properly implement a standard that like HTML and CSS*, which lets face it is not exactly quantum physics, then their security is probably not going to be rock solid.
I wish they had lost this market to someone else like they lost the web-server market, because frankly they cant make IE work. How many years do you need to implement a text based information formatting language? Its still riddled with the most irritating bugs because they do not understand the standard and they dont understand CSS and what it could potentially do if it was supported by them. Mozilla or Opera both rock and i havnt used IE as my default browser for 3 years.
Now they just need to fix their CSS support which disgaceful and is giving web-designers headaches all around the world. Looking at the specs you can see how easy life would be if IE supported even half a dozen more css properties and fixed a few bugs. It almost makes CSS useless. No browser has got it perfect, but IE takes the piss, sometimes they dont even bother supporting something in their own way let alone to W3C specs!
This is because the government and its agencies do not work on an impartial basis. If some grumpy old senator decides hes fed-up with telemarketers then he will try and make life hard. It works on who is friends with who and who is being bribed by who, they live in their own little fantasy world and govern the outside the way they please.
Its Animal Farm (George Orwell) all over again. A system starts well and slowly merges into a pointless corruption devoired by endless new ammendments. It happened with Napster (sell out) and its starting to happen with Kazaa. Its even happening with the Bill of Rights, you have free speech anymore? well yeah you can still say fuck.. but you cant say "shift key" and dont even try saying "im going to kill George Bush"! If Kazaa gets out of hand it will be time to start a new system (or switch to Gnutella) and then that will start to fade too (yes Gnutella) it will become the new target of the RIAA and slowly things will fall apart.
This is all a side track before the real target of corporations and governments around the world gets full attention: the internet. And once thats bogged down with so many laws you need 10 licenses from the government and MS to run a web-server, the computer itself will be targeted (TCPA etc.) and people will have to start building their own computers (hopefully chip fab will be availiable to the masses by then;) And if we're all still alive by then and the police havnt raided us for non-DRM'd computer hardware and un-licensed daemons we might still be able to download some bloody music.
I wasnt even aware of this new law until i read the post! I havnt seen a single bit of media attention here apart from one tiny register article. Even dimitry skylarov got attention here.I just hope they will make this more public before the 31st when it goes into effect and i hope that everyone does their absolute best to spread every bit of DRM circumnavigation around as much as they can while its still legal and screw over as many companies as possible.
Its things like this that make me want to bitch-slap the queen and get her to do something about it.. even if its just erm.. making the beafeters run around. We need a leader who takes no crap from the EU and the US and we need to nuke someone now, i dont care who, just as long as i dont have to live in a country where i will be arrested for wearing a decss t-shirt. And isnt this violating the human rights/free speech laws?
Who here feels more comfortable buying digital data than buying a "real" physical object? Personally i just dont feel right paying money for anything thats not physical so i dont. Whatever people say about copying digital content is still stealing or whatever companies try and do to push this new business model it wont change me and (i hope) other people feel the same? I know its stupid but if thats the way people feel then its not a good idea to go down that line of business.
I cant really see an advantage for most books to be digital? Its unlikely that you'll want a search feature for most books, and if you do it could always be done on the net with a digital version. Ok it saves paper, but then hybrid cars save oil and people still drive their hungry SUVs. It saves space too, but most books are only slightly bigger than a dvd case and you still take them around with you. To make an ebook reader work it will have to have a damn good interface because people are fussy over what they sit for hours reading on.
The ironic thing (which SunnComm probably realises) is that if they did take it to court the press would obviously have to mention "the shift key" in their articles and news reports which itself would be a DMCA violation. Even if the American press were barred from saying it, you can bet your ass a foriegn press would have a feild-day with it, skylarov got quite abit of foreign coverage (over here in the UK atleast) and bashing American law and politics is a hot ticket right now! Its in SunnComms best interests to keep damn quiet about this, they should be bribing the student to keep quiet too.
Its one thing suing over DeCSS (don't get me wrong, im totally not on the DMCA's side) but its another thing when the "circumnavigation" can be described in the sentence "hold down the shift key".
The staff at SunnComm speak the most bull-shit ive ever heard from one place, even Bush and Blair are more credible. Its just not possible to express in words how useless their product is, i think the only thing i could use it for is a new adjective "to be sunncomm" to describe uselessness. - Thats completely sunncomm. He's sunncomm lets fire him. Its sunncomm, were stuck here.
Actually if you load up the original slashdot story on the CD's release and search for autoplay you will find that someone beat him to it in revealing a work-around. This is certainly a freedom of speech restriction, maybe it will lead to a new craze: instead of first-post - first-violation, where everyone trys to be the first to say a DMCA violating circumnavigation method;)
They knew full well that their system did not work and unless they are total idiots they knew full well that Windows could by-pass installing the software by disabling auto-run or with the shift key. Its a documented feature of Windows which has many legitimate uses - especially for bypassing the execution of malicious code (which this is). This company relied on some stupid executives not having a clue about the technology (or lack of) so that they could sell it. This is like sales people telling a little kid that their product is 'magic'. Now someone has said the obvious which most people are going to know already or have friends tell them with-in a week. Hes being targeted as a scapegoat because its much easier for a massive company with $$ worth of lawyers to have one little grad students ass rather than they do their legal obligation and sue every single person in America who has spread this rumour - YES! SunnComm must sue everyone who has told a friend that the shift key will bypass the DRM and every friend thats passed it on to another friend. Infact they must sue Microsoft for documenting and designing this feature and they must sue who-ever puts the little shift keys on key-boards. If they dont then they are not upholding their moral duty and are allowing criminals to go free!
Nice to know slashdot had a part in dropping their stock 20%;) do they wanna have a piece of us? come on SunnComm come and sue me, you want my address?
When you say 'RIAA' or 'Record Label', who here thinks of the pigs in animal farm sitting in a sky-scraper office snorting coke? Now thats a bad image, the problem is that they dont care, why should they? Most people don't know or care who the RIAA is or what label signs what artist, they just go and buy their CDs. The label is a tiny little logo on the case. Even free-range eggs get more consumer attention. If people were made more aware of what labels were doing what and sold what then they would be more answerable to their actions. Labels dont matter, artists matter. With most other goods, the company behind them matters allot, people recognise and favour brands with food, airlines, isp's, mobiles, most electronics, cars, and clothes. Thats why skoda actually had to bother to improve their image or no-one would buy their cars. If people cared about record labels' reputations and what they did you would hear conversations like
"hey yo, you got the new 50 cent album man?"
"dude no way! im not gettin no BMG record! all their stuff is shit and u see what they did to that little girl?"
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that in america its absolutely fine for people to own high-power rapid fire chain guns, but not afew lines of code? Lets say for example (ignoring the fact that encryption is free speech anyway) that theres a war and everyone needs to "bear arms", wouldn't encryption count as a weapon to allow people to communicate without the enemy hearing? so whats the problem? Just because its newer technology shouldnt make a difference. If the bill of rights was written when bows and arrows were a common weapon would guns be illigal because they are much more hi-tech? If they were then people would be saying "hey thats not fair, when we have to bear arms we'll have bows and arrows and the enemy will have guns!"!
And another thing while im at it. If hacking (basically doing anything you like with a computer) was protected under the first amendment (im not saying it would be good or bad, just speculating). Eg. if it was decided that "anything involving bits on a computer was just information and thus speech" then what would happen? companies would go mad from hackers and beef up their security - probably employing allot more hackers to help them. (thats more jobs).
Why is accessing a remote computer without permission an offence? if that machine is connected to a network that you have legal physical access to then isnt it up to them to secure it? Unless your sending 25,000 volts down a line (which should be physical damage), digital breaking and entering is not the same as physical breaking and entering. Every door has a bigger hammer that can knock it down, every bolt has a sharper cutter that can slice it. However a properly secured system should be able to take any pattern of 1's and 0's and be able to survive until it gets that "correct" sequence (which can be too long to brute force), unlike a door which just cant be secured like that.
Ok, this is slightly off topic, im just trying to understand why we have laws regarding what you can do with 1's and 0's
Im interested - what do the people who do these record attempts send? is it specially formed test-data to analyse packet errors or do they all sit down and make a list of the porn and warez they want from geniva?
I dont hate any religion or people because of it, i didnt even say that. Not everyone in America is religious and i think you'll find not everyone is comfortable with Bush, religion or not. Bush and his belief that God is on the side of america and they are good against evil has worried members of his own religion and you simply cant define good against evil like that the situation is not as simple. Basically what it boils down to is if you are president or judge, you have to be impartial and leave your personal views at the door, be they a hate of instant coffee or a love of god, and thats what the bill of rights says.
In britain we have none. State school is pretty unbiased i think and public/private (i.e not free) schools do whatever, but i think if they started forcing people to recite stuff or be one religion there would be outrage.
How? "your either with us or your with the pedophiles" George Bush is such a wonderful source, his quotes will be with us for years to come. Id wonder more how he managed to get all his friends in the supreme court.. oh wait thats allowed isnt it.. and its not biased opinion because they are the supreme judges so they are totally impartial, especially impartial to non-republicans ;)
your half right, your logic would have worked better, but their idea was to stick all the 'evil' sites onto an erm '.not-kids' domain and make the rest kid safe
Instead of passing stupid free speech infringing censorship laws and suddenly deciding that chat-rooms are bad, why not just keep kids off the internet. Its never going to be enforcable to censor web-sites outside america and barely enforcable inside, it only takes one site for some one to see it and if you've seen one hardcore-goatsex scene, you've really seen them all, the laws are really pointless and do more harm than good. If your worried about kids, just keep them offline or supervise them its pretty simple.
For fucks sake! your president talks about god all the time and half his voters and party think hes gods gift, do you not think this slightly more of an issue? Do you not think he might have a slight vested interest or biased opinion leading to violation of the bill of rights? Does this mean that if the court decides that 'under god' shouldnt be there then Bush should go? well i can
kill the suspense now and tell you that the mostly-friends-of-bush supreme court will be deciding in favour of god.
George Bush states that atheists are not citizens or patriots
Bush puts God on his side
George Bush Invites God to School
America Attacked Iraq, Because God Told George Bush To
President George "W" Bush: God's Man for This Hour
Is George W. Bush God?s President?
Bush announces war with plea for God's blessing
The United States is not a nation under any god
Your president seems to have other ideas about that..
This was one of the most active slashdot stories? Ok, not being american my logic would go something like this:
Should it be compulsory for students (or anyone) to pledge allegiance?: No
Should it have "under god"? or is that religion in the state?: Its up to whoever is saying it, Yes it is if its said in connection with the state
Should people therefore be banned from pledging allegiance or banned from using the "under god bit"?: WTF? No!
Any dispute?
I think the main problem here is how to combine the two versions. Do you have them both said at once and risk the whole class going un-synced? or do you do one and then the other, with the other set of kids covering their ears when they're not doing theirs? Or do you do it at the same time but have the non-god kids go silent for the under god bit?.. OR do you separate the kids into two rooms? or do you have them in the same room and just use sound-masking technology to stop them hearing each-other?
These are the sort of tough questions that America must answer. I mean god forbid a court room was actually used to discuss something usefull like, i dunno, the rogue president that keeps bombing things. Im honestly not trolling, im totally serious here - how many times has George Bush's sanity been discussed in a court? and is the pledge of allegiance more important than most other issues around today?
Oh the dilemma, you want the PHB to know enough to not come up with stupid ideas and expect you to implement them, but you want them to not know enough to interfere with your BOFH activities...
True but the latest release loads allot quicker, still makes me want to hit something though :( Apart from that its excellent, I dont even bother using pirate MS Office anymore!
If Apple ported to Intel it might help get users away from Windows. At the moment the only two OS's that most people know of are Windows and Apple. Apple also runs more of the apps (native) that most people (for some reason) need - photoshop & MS office. If people moved to OSX it would be less of a jump to go from there to another *nix OS like Linux.
I think its safe to say that if they cant manage after 6 generations and god-knows how many years to properly implement a standard that like HTML and CSS*, which lets face it is not exactly quantum physics, then their security is probably not going to be rock solid.
I wish they had lost this market to someone else like they lost the web-server market, because frankly they cant make IE work. How many years do you need to implement a text based information formatting language? Its still riddled with the most irritating bugs because they do not understand the standard and they dont understand CSS and what it could potentially do if it was supported by them. Mozilla or Opera both rock and i havnt used IE as my default browser for 3 years.
*Their CSS support is making me pull my hair out
Now they just need to fix their CSS support which disgaceful and is giving web-designers headaches all around the world. Looking at the specs you can see how easy life would be if IE supported even half a dozen more css properties and fixed a few bugs. It almost makes CSS useless. No browser has got it perfect, but IE takes the piss, sometimes they dont even bother supporting something in their own way let alone to W3C specs!
This is because the government and its agencies do not work on an impartial basis. If some grumpy old senator decides hes fed-up with telemarketers then he will try and make life hard. It works on who is friends with who and who is being bribed by who, they live in their own little fantasy world and govern the outside the way they please.
Its Animal Farm (George Orwell) all over again. A system starts well and slowly merges into a pointless corruption devoired by endless new ammendments. It happened with Napster (sell out) and its starting to happen with Kazaa. Its even happening with the Bill of Rights, you have free speech anymore? well yeah you can still say fuck.. but you cant say "shift key" and dont even try saying "im going to kill George Bush"! If Kazaa gets out of hand it will be time to start a new system (or switch to Gnutella) and then that will start to fade too (yes Gnutella) it will become the new target of the RIAA and slowly things will fall apart.
;) And if we're all still alive by then and the police havnt raided us for non-DRM'd computer hardware and un-licensed daemons we might still be able to download some bloody music.
This is all a side track before the real target of corporations and governments around the world gets full attention: the internet. And once thats bogged down with so many laws you need 10 licenses from the government and MS to run a web-server, the computer itself will be targeted (TCPA etc.) and people will have to start building their own computers (hopefully chip fab will be availiable to the masses by then
In future i'll circumnavigate my auto-correcter...
Death to the corporate infidels!
I wasnt even aware of this new law until i read the post! I havnt seen a single bit of media attention here apart from one tiny register article. Even dimitry skylarov got attention here.I just hope they will make this more public before the 31st when it goes into effect and i hope that everyone does their absolute best to spread every bit of DRM circumnavigation around as much as they can while its still legal and screw over as many companies as possible.
Its things like this that make me want to bitch-slap the queen and get her to do something about it.. even if its just erm.. making the beafeters run around. We need a leader who takes no crap from the EU and the US and we need to nuke someone now, i dont care who, just as long as i dont have to live in a country where i will be arrested for wearing a decss t-shirt. And isnt this violating the human rights/free speech laws?
Who here feels more comfortable buying digital data than buying a "real" physical object? Personally i just dont feel right paying money for anything thats not physical so i dont. Whatever people say about copying digital content is still stealing or whatever companies try and do to push this new business model it wont change me and (i hope) other people feel the same? I know its stupid but if thats the way people feel then its not a good idea to go down that line of business.
I cant really see an advantage for most books to be digital? Its unlikely that you'll want a search feature for most books, and if you do it could always be done on the net with a digital version. Ok it saves paper, but then hybrid cars save oil and people still drive their hungry SUVs. It saves space too, but most books are only slightly bigger than a dvd case and you still take them around with you. To make an ebook reader work it will have to have a damn good interface because people are fussy over what they sit for hours reading on.
The ironic thing (which SunnComm probably realises) is that if they did take it to court the press would obviously have to mention "the shift key" in their articles and news reports which itself would be a DMCA violation. Even if the American press were barred from saying it, you can bet your ass a foriegn press would have a feild-day with it, skylarov got quite abit of foreign coverage (over here in the UK atleast) and bashing American law and politics is a hot ticket right now! Its in SunnComms best interests to keep damn quiet about this, they should be bribing the student to keep quiet too.
Its one thing suing over DeCSS (don't get me wrong, im totally not on the DMCA's side) but its another thing when the "circumnavigation" can be described in the sentence "hold down the shift key".
The staff at SunnComm speak the most bull-shit ive ever heard from one place, even Bush and Blair are more credible. Its just not possible to express in words how useless their product is, i think the only thing i could use it for is a new adjective "to be sunncomm" to describe uselessness. - Thats completely sunncomm. He's sunncomm lets fire him. Its sunncomm, were stuck here.
Actually if you load up the original slashdot story on the CD's release and search for autoplay you will find that someone beat him to it in revealing a work-around. This is certainly a freedom of speech restriction, maybe it will lead to a new craze: instead of first-post - first-violation, where everyone trys to be the first to say a DMCA violating circumnavigation method ;)
They knew full well that their system did not work and unless they are total idiots they knew full well that Windows could by-pass installing the software by disabling auto-run or with the shift key. Its a documented feature of Windows which has many legitimate uses - especially for bypassing the execution of malicious code (which this is). This company relied on some stupid executives not having a clue about the technology (or lack of) so that they could sell it. This is like sales people telling a little kid that their product is 'magic'. Now someone has said the obvious which most people are going to know already or have friends tell them with-in a week. Hes being targeted as a scapegoat because its much easier for a massive company with $$ worth of lawyers to have one little grad students ass rather than they do their legal obligation and sue every single person in America who has spread this rumour - YES! SunnComm must sue everyone who has told a friend that the shift key will bypass the DRM and every friend thats passed it on to another friend. Infact they must sue Microsoft for documenting and designing this feature and they must sue who-ever puts the little shift keys on key-boards. If they dont then they are not upholding their moral duty and are allowing criminals to go free!
;) do they wanna have a piece of us? come on SunnComm come and sue me, you want my address?
Nice to know slashdot had a part in dropping their stock 20%
When you say 'RIAA' or 'Record Label', who here thinks of the pigs in animal farm sitting in a sky-scraper office snorting coke? Now thats a bad image, the problem is that they dont care, why should they? Most people don't know or care who the RIAA is or what label signs what artist, they just go and buy their CDs. The label is a tiny little logo on the case. Even free-range eggs get more consumer attention. If people were made more aware of what labels were doing what and sold what then they would be more answerable to their actions. Labels dont matter, artists matter. With most other goods, the company behind them matters allot, people recognise and favour brands with food, airlines, isp's, mobiles, most electronics, cars, and clothes. Thats why skoda actually had to bother to improve their image or no-one would buy their cars. If people cared about record labels' reputations and what they did you would hear conversations like
"hey yo, you got the new 50 cent album man?"
"dude no way! im not gettin no BMG record! all their stuff is shit and u see what they did to that little girl?"
People want to sit in a cinema and watch LOTR for 10 hours? seriously? sometimes i am either ashamed to be a geek or wonder if i really am one.