There's a difference between paying $10/hour on a business trip and it actually being worth $10/hour. And really, its not worth that.
Many hotels charge $12 per day, and we all know hotels like to stick it to you on the extras. If you use the room service menu to estimate an "exchange rate", then a day of wi-fi is worth roughly a cheeseburger, so the actual value is closer to $5/day for wifi.
I can understand paying $10 for an hour of access in "emergency" situations (like if your plane gets delayed and you have to kill some time;), but I wouldn't want to be depending on such a service for regular use. Starbucks would provide a much better service, and attract more customers, offering free wi-fi with purchase, and it would cost them just a few lattes.
Actually, you could stand to lose a lot more than you invest.
The bad part of shorting happens if the stock goes up instead of down. When you short, you're basically borrowing shares from someone and selling them at today's price. At some point, you need to return those shares, meaning you have to buy some at the market price sometime in the future. If the stock price has dropped by the time you get called, woohoo! you win!
However if by some stroke of legistative fuckitude SCO wins their lawsuit and the stock price goes up further, anyone who shorted the stock will be screwed, no matter how many Linux licenses you suck out of Darl's, uh... you get the idea.
No, it was a typo in comparison. I believe the implication was that SCO had a similar typo (the assignment = instead of the comparitor ==) when they compared their source with linux source and found millions of infringing lines.
Maybe you don't, but your carrier might. Qwest (or whoever) could take your analog call and digitize it at the CO, route it over IP to the destination CO, then pump it back out analog. Its cheaper for them.
There are also companies like Vonage, who provide phone service over your broadband connection. Some of my friends recently dropped their landline and now use Vonage over their cablemodem. They pay a flat fee ($40 i think) for all calls, including long distance.
Another reasonable interpretation is that the owners of the wires that support the internet cannot dictate what content is sent across them. That is a good thing.
I do disagree with your example of unreasonable human beings. That judge was not an misinterpreting the law. He knew what it meant. He didn't agree with it, he challenged it, and he lost. I applaud his integrity, even though I disagree with his stance.
Laws are not the final word. Congress can pass all the poorly-written, ineffective laws they want, but they still have to stand up in court when challenged.
Yeah, its a very interesting distinction, and a loophole that will still allow most telecoms to sue spammers, even under this law.
What do SBC DSL customers pay for? Is it the 5 free email accounts or the 10MB free web space? No, those are free. They pay for the telecommunications service that connects them to the internet. So SBC is excluded from being able to sue spammers by this law.
But anyone with an @sbcglobal.net email address is a consumer of SBC's Internet Access Services. Woohoo! SBC can sue again!
Re:how I see it...
on
Who Is An ISP?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think the "does not include telecommunications" bit, along with the list of things is worded in order to exclude organizations that merely provide the bandwidth or physical connection.
The rewording in the grandparent is inaccurate. Removing the list changes the meaning dramatically from "providers of content services" (or something like that) to "providers of connections".
The non-Gov't entities that are allowed to sue spammers under this law are those that provide the higher level services (email, web, etc) that run on the Internet, rather than those that actually run the Internet itself.
In other words, SBC can't sue spammers over the amount of data sent over their wires (ie. SBC acting as a telecom), though they could sue over spam being sent to @sbcglobal.net users (ie. SBC acting as an ISP).
Re:Consumers
on
Who Is An ISP?
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· Score: 2, Informative
IANA Economist, but if I recall from my few Econ classes in college, and "economic good" doesn't necessarily mean that you pay for them. It has more to do with scarcity and "opportunity costs" than with money. Here's a definition:
ECONOMIC GOOD: A tangible item produced with society's limited resources for the purpose of satisfying wants and needs. As a general notion, the phrase economic good also commonly includes intangible services produced with society's limited resources for the purpose of satisfying wants and needs. A synonymous term for economic good is scarce good.
So if you spend your (scarce) time setting up a server (resources) to provide email and web services for your family (satisfying their want or need), then it is an economic good. If you family uses those services, then they are consumers. So I guess that makes you the provider of an Internet Access Service.
Re:What about a simple home page?
on
Who Is An ISP?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's all up to interpretation, but simply having a web page somewhere probably doesn't qualify. If the page is hosted on.mac or geocities, then surely they are the Internet Access Service, not you.
If you have your own server (or probably even a hosted domain on a shared server at Rackspace, or wherever), and you host email, web, etc on it for yourself and your family, then you could probably argue pretty convincingly that you are an Internet Access Service. In that case, Rackspace is merely providing you with a connection to the internet, while you are providing the actual services.
So the only question is if your family counts as "consumers" (which I think they do).
Read carefully. Its not that those of us running mail servers only to non-consumers (ie. ourselves?) aren't affected. Instead its that those of us... do not qualify to sue for damages.
It means that unless you have "consumers" using your "Internet access service", you're powerless against the spammers according to this law.
ONLY the goverment and "Internet Access Services" may sue for damages. So let's all play lawyer and figure out how to interpret that to include us!
if you log in as root, no one knows who you really are. if you "sudo bash", that command gets logged, and its still possible to determine who you really are.
personally I try to avoid using "sudo bash", because its too easy to screw something up when you're root. but sometimes I get lazy.
I would have to disagree with your premise, though if you modify it slightly it would be true:
People are demonstrating that the music industry is producing music worth owning, just that not all of the music is worth what they are currently charging for it.
The success of the iTunes Music Store, and others, show that when the price is right, people will buy.
Skip that. Current CD sales show that people are still buying lots and lots and lots of CDs. Look at the Billboard charts. CDs are still selling like mad. The RIAA's own statistics show that the decrease in sales corresponds with the recession and a reduction in the number of new releases. They are engineering their own "losses" in order to make it appear that there is a problem.
I have no problem paying a fair price for a CD. I do have a problem buying products from companies who treat me like a criminal with no justification.
The BofA in Palo Alto has an ATM with a headphone jack on it, but no headphones provided. I'm not quite sure how they expect blind people to find it, though.
This article wasn't about a company not applying patches. It was about an internet worm getting into an ATM, a place that previously was thought to be safe, since it was apparently not connected to the internet. True it got there because someone didn't apply a patch, but it still got there.
Diebold's security problems go way beyond unapplied patches. According to reports, the database files storing voting record are not even password protected. Diebold secretly applies their own patches to their voting boxes without the authorization or validation required by voting officials. The vote counts are unreliable and unauditable. Based on the poor practices they have with voting machines, who knows what they do with ATMs. Their response to the voting machien inquiries was to issue cease and decist letters to the people posting the memos detailing their actions; a coverup.
This isn't just about Diebold not applying security patches. Its yet another instance where they have had an apparently lax attitude about security in situations where security is most important. And this is a company who's name is built on security. People who don't know better will and do trust them based solely on their name.
We are trusting them with our money, and with our elections, and they are asking us to turn the other cheek when they screw up.
Fortunately it doesn't seem like anything bad happened with THIS worm on the ATMs. The worm got there by accident and only tried to spread. Next time, the worm may be smarter.
The **AA have been developing digital media for a long time, and they have absolutely no control over people illegally giving it away.
Most music CDs do not have any sort of DRM. The recording industry has been selling perfect digital copies with no protection whatsoever (until recently, and still only in isolated cases) since 1982. In that time, and even in recent years, there have been lots and lots of platinum albums.
DVDs do have some copy-protection in the CSS encryption. But we all know how weak that is. Still DVDs sell like crazy.
Restrictive DRM only serves to remind the honest consumer that Industry does not trust them. The real "pirates" (Yarrr!) will find ways around DRM and sell illegal copies forever. Practically every DRM scheme released so far has been broken, some using high-tech devices like a Sharpie, or the Shift key.
If you were a media executive, would you waste money developing and marketing a DRM method that will most likely be quickly defeated?
Music downloaded from iTunes can be played on up to 3 different computers, which need to be "authorized" with the ITMS.
I have 6 Macs in my house: my laptop, my wife's laptop, a computer in the office, one in the TV room, and 2 imacs in the basement. I have iTunes sharing so I can listen to my music anywhere in the house.
That is, all of my music EXCEPT the stuff I legally purchased through the ITMS. I can only listen to it in one of 3 places. I can probably unauthorize one computer to authorize another, but that will quickly become annoying. More than likely, I'll end up burning it all to CD, then rip back to mp3 so I can listen throughout my house. At this point, I'm better off using ITMS to preview, then make my purchases at Amazon if I want a whole CD.
I'm not pirating music. I'm not sharing it on p2p services. I just happen to own and use more computers than the ITMS anticipated. Their "loosest and least intrusive DRM system" is getting in my way.
The worm got into the machines because of Windows. It didn't necessarily matter whose applications were running on top of it. But in this case, there was a security patch available that could have blocked the worm. Microsoft fixed that bug.
Maybe its a coincidence that it was a Diebold machine, but it was Diebold's fault that the available security patch wasn't installed on those systems. It doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling about Diebold systems, whether its their ATMs or their voting machines.
Do you KNOW otherwise? Have you read about Diebold's voting machines? The ones that store stuff in MS Access databases without even password protection? Have you seen the inner workings of the ATMs to know that they have further security?
Part of the issue is that if a random worm can get into the ATM, a worm carrying dangerous payload (like one that installs a driver to capture keypresses and data being printed to receipts) could also find its way in.
The other part is that we really don't know what goes on inside an ATM. We know we enter a PIN, and money comes out the little slot, but really its a black box. We don't know that there are many levels of security. We don't know if our accounts are safe, even if the underlying operating system is compromised.
We do know that some new ATMs which run on Windows XP were compromised. So what will Diebold and Microsoft and our banks do to convince us that everything is still OK?
ATMs run bloated operating systems for the same reasons that certain web browsers can read email. Because it's possible.;)
At some point someone thought it would be really cool to have ATMs with 10" color screens and speakers, so it can show commercials while you wait for your mugger.
They also seem to be moving away from the keypad. I had the unfortunate experience of using a touch-screen ATM the other day. The touchscreen was horribly calibrated (probably due to the thickness of the glass, and it was probably calibrated by someone kneeling in front of it, instead of standing up). I had to poke aroud each button for a while, then eventually gave up and used the keypad below when i could).
Its probably also driven by companies like Diebold who want to keep selling the latest and greatest machines to the banks. And since usability and security are not driving new sales, they boxes have to look "cooler" to sell.
Top/Bottom could be confusing depending on the physical installation.
What if, instead, they just call them "The one plugged into the connector-thingy at the very end of the cable" and "The one plugged into the connector-thingy in the middle of the cable". Then have the punk-bitch who complained be assigned the task of re-labelling all the existing drives by hand.
I think you're just agreeing with what you quoted.
People buying from the iTunes store know they're getting restricted music files. But they know what they are paying for, and are still willing to pay it.
People buying copy-protected CDs are not getting what they expect. They think they're buying a regular CD, just like good consumers do, but they get home and it won't play in their PC. Or it will try to install rights management software on their PC. Or any number of things the RIAA thinks are cool, but actually aren't.
While iTunes is perhaps giving you less than you deserve, it is giving you exactly what you pay for. If Apple tells you up front, "give us 99 cents and we'll screw you", and you give them 99 cents, you can hardly blame them when you get screwed.
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There's a difference between paying $10/hour on a business trip and it actually being worth $10/hour. And really, its not worth that.
;), but I wouldn't want to be depending on such a service for regular use. Starbucks would provide a much better service, and attract more customers, offering free wi-fi with purchase, and it would cost them just a few lattes.
Many hotels charge $12 per day, and we all know hotels like to stick it to you on the extras. If you use the room service menu to estimate an "exchange rate", then a day of wi-fi is worth roughly a cheeseburger, so the actual value is closer to $5/day for wifi.
I can understand paying $10 for an hour of access in "emergency" situations (like if your plane gets delayed and you have to kill some time
Actually, you could stand to lose a lot more than you invest.
The bad part of shorting happens if the stock goes up instead of down. When you short, you're basically borrowing shares from someone and selling them at today's price. At some point, you need to return those shares, meaning you have to buy some at the market price sometime in the future. If the stock price has dropped by the time you get called, woohoo! you win!
However if by some stroke of legistative fuckitude SCO wins their lawsuit and the stock price goes up further, anyone who shorted the stock will be screwed, no matter how many Linux licenses you suck out of Darl's, uh... you get the idea.
No, it was a typo in comparison. I believe the implication was that SCO had a similar typo (the assignment = instead of the comparitor ==) when they compared their source with linux source and found millions of infringing lines.
It would explain a lot.
Maybe you don't, but your carrier might. Qwest (or whoever) could take your analog call and digitize it at the CO, route it over IP to the destination CO, then pump it back out analog. Its cheaper for them.
There are also companies like Vonage, who provide phone service over your broadband connection. Some of my friends recently dropped their landline and now use Vonage over their cablemodem. They pay a flat fee ($40 i think) for all calls, including long distance.
Another reasonable interpretation is that the owners of the wires that support the internet cannot dictate what content is sent across them. That is a good thing.
I do disagree with your example of unreasonable human beings. That judge was not an misinterpreting the law. He knew what it meant. He didn't agree with it, he challenged it, and he lost. I applaud his integrity, even though I disagree with his stance.
Laws are not the final word. Congress can pass all the poorly-written, ineffective laws they want, but they still have to stand up in court when challenged.
Yeah, its a very interesting distinction, and a loophole that will still allow most telecoms to sue spammers, even under this law.
What do SBC DSL customers pay for? Is it the 5 free email accounts or the 10MB free web space? No, those are free. They pay for the telecommunications service that connects them to the internet. So SBC is excluded from being able to sue spammers by this law.
But anyone with an @sbcglobal.net email address is a consumer of SBC's Internet Access Services. Woohoo! SBC can sue again!
I think the "does not include telecommunications" bit, along with the list of things is worded in order to exclude organizations that merely provide the bandwidth or physical connection.
The rewording in the grandparent is inaccurate. Removing the list changes the meaning dramatically from "providers of content services" (or something like that) to "providers of connections".
The non-Gov't entities that are allowed to sue spammers under this law are those that provide the higher level services (email, web, etc) that run on the Internet, rather than those that actually run the Internet itself.
In other words, SBC can't sue spammers over the amount of data sent over their wires (ie. SBC acting as a telecom), though they could sue over spam being sent to @sbcglobal.net users (ie. SBC acting as an ISP).
IANA Economist, but if I recall from my few Econ classes in college, and "economic good" doesn't necessarily mean that you pay for them. It has more to do with scarcity and "opportunity costs" than with money. Here's a definition:
ECONOMIC GOOD:
A tangible item produced with society's limited resources for the purpose of satisfying wants and needs. As a general notion, the phrase economic good also commonly includes intangible services produced with society's limited resources for the purpose of satisfying wants and needs. A synonymous term for economic good is scarce good.
So if you spend your (scarce) time setting up a server (resources) to provide email and web services for your family (satisfying their want or need), then it is an economic good. If you family uses those services, then they are consumers. So I guess that makes you the provider of an Internet Access Service.
It's all up to interpretation, but simply having a web page somewhere probably doesn't qualify. If the page is hosted on .mac or geocities, then surely they are the Internet Access Service, not you.
If you have your own server (or probably even a hosted domain on a shared server at Rackspace, or wherever), and you host email, web, etc on it for yourself and your family, then you could probably argue pretty convincingly that you are an Internet Access Service. In that case, Rackspace is merely providing you with a connection to the internet, while you are providing the actual services.
So the only question is if your family counts as "consumers" (which I think they do).
Read carefully. Its not that those of us running mail servers only to non-consumers (ie. ourselves?) aren't affected. Instead its that those of us... do not qualify to sue for damages.
It means that unless you have "consumers" using your "Internet access service", you're powerless against the spammers according to this law.
ONLY the goverment and "Internet Access Services" may sue for damages. So let's all play lawyer and figure out how to interpret that to include us!
ya know, if you read the article, all of those same fixes are listed.
while it was perhpas irresponsible of him to detail the exploit (especially right before a holiday), it was nice that he gave the workaround.
Subtle difference:
if you log in as root, no one knows who you really are. if you "sudo bash", that command gets logged, and its still possible to determine who you really are.
personally I try to avoid using "sudo bash", because its too easy to screw something up when you're root. but sometimes I get lazy.
I would have to disagree with your premise, though if you modify it slightly it would be true:
People are demonstrating that the music industry is producing music worth owning, just that not all of the music is worth what they are currently charging for it.
The success of the iTunes Music Store, and others, show that when the price is right, people will buy.
Skip that. Current CD sales show that people are still buying lots and lots and lots of CDs. Look at the Billboard charts. CDs are still selling like mad. The RIAA's own statistics show that the decrease in sales corresponds with the recession and a reduction in the number of new releases. They are engineering their own "losses" in order to make it appear that there is a problem.
I have no problem paying a fair price for a CD. I do have a problem buying products from companies who treat me like a criminal with no justification.
Actually, its like punishing the air through which the rock flew.
The BofA in Palo Alto has an ATM with a headphone jack on it, but no headphones provided. I'm not quite sure how they expect blind people to find it, though.
This article wasn't about a company not applying patches. It was about an internet worm getting into an ATM, a place that previously was thought to be safe, since it was apparently not connected to the internet. True it got there because someone didn't apply a patch, but it still got there.
Diebold's security problems go way beyond unapplied patches. According to reports, the database files storing voting record are not even password protected. Diebold secretly applies their own patches to their voting boxes without the authorization or validation required by voting officials. The vote counts are unreliable and unauditable. Based on the poor practices they have with voting machines, who knows what they do with ATMs. Their response to the voting machien inquiries was to issue cease and decist letters to the people posting the memos detailing their actions; a coverup.
This isn't just about Diebold not applying security patches. Its yet another instance where they have had an apparently lax attitude about security in situations where security is most important. And this is a company who's name is built on security. People who don't know better will and do trust them based solely on their name.
We are trusting them with our money, and with our elections, and they are asking us to turn the other cheek when they screw up.
Fortunately it doesn't seem like anything bad happened with THIS worm on the ATMs. The worm got there by accident and only tried to spread. Next time, the worm may be smarter.
The **AA have been developing digital media for a long time, and they have absolutely no control over people illegally giving it away.
Most music CDs do not have any sort of DRM. The recording industry has been selling perfect digital copies with no protection whatsoever (until recently, and still only in isolated cases) since 1982. In that time, and even in recent years, there have been lots and lots of platinum albums.
DVDs do have some copy-protection in the CSS encryption. But we all know how weak that is. Still DVDs sell like crazy.
Restrictive DRM only serves to remind the honest consumer that Industry does not trust them. The real "pirates" (Yarrr!) will find ways around DRM and sell illegal copies forever. Practically every DRM scheme released so far has been broken, some using high-tech devices like a Sharpie, or the Shift key.
If you were a media executive, would you waste money developing and marketing a DRM method that will most likely be quickly defeated?
I second that, and offer my real-world example:
Music downloaded from iTunes can be played on up to 3 different computers, which need to be "authorized" with the ITMS.
I have 6 Macs in my house: my laptop, my wife's laptop, a computer in the office, one in the TV room, and 2 imacs in the basement. I have iTunes sharing so I can listen to my music anywhere in the house.
That is, all of my music EXCEPT the stuff I legally purchased through the ITMS. I can only listen to it in one of 3 places. I can probably unauthorize one computer to authorize another, but that will quickly become annoying. More than likely, I'll end up burning it all to CD, then rip back to mp3 so I can listen throughout my house. At this point, I'm better off using ITMS to preview, then make my purchases at Amazon if I want a whole CD.
I'm not pirating music. I'm not sharing it on p2p services. I just happen to own and use more computers than the ITMS anticipated. Their "loosest and least intrusive DRM system" is getting in my way.
The worm got into the machines because of Windows. It didn't necessarily matter whose applications were running on top of it. But in this case, there was a security patch available that could have blocked the worm. Microsoft fixed that bug.
Maybe its a coincidence that it was a Diebold machine, but it was Diebold's fault that the available security patch wasn't installed on those systems. It doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling about Diebold systems, whether its their ATMs or their voting machines.
Do you KNOW otherwise? Have you read about Diebold's voting machines? The ones that store stuff in MS Access databases without even password protection? Have you seen the inner workings of the ATMs to know that they have further security?
Part of the issue is that if a random worm can get into the ATM, a worm carrying dangerous payload (like one that installs a driver to capture keypresses and data being printed to receipts) could also find its way in.
The other part is that we really don't know what goes on inside an ATM. We know we enter a PIN, and money comes out the little slot, but really its a black box. We don't know that there are many levels of security. We don't know if our accounts are safe, even if the underlying operating system is compromised.
We do know that some new ATMs which run on Windows XP were compromised. So what will Diebold and Microsoft and our banks do to convince us that everything is still OK?
ATMs run bloated operating systems for the same reasons that certain web browsers can read email. Because it's possible. ;)
At some point someone thought it would be really cool to have ATMs with 10" color screens and speakers, so it can show commercials while you wait for your mugger.
They also seem to be moving away from the keypad. I had the unfortunate experience of using a touch-screen ATM the other day. The touchscreen was horribly calibrated (probably due to the thickness of the glass, and it was probably calibrated by someone kneeling in front of it, instead of standing up). I had to poke aroud each button for a while, then eventually gave up and used the keypad below when i could).
Its probably also driven by companies like Diebold who want to keep selling the latest and greatest machines to the banks. And since usability and security are not driving new sales, they boxes have to look "cooler" to sell.
You should avoid referring to them whenever possible. If you do have to utter one of those terms, you should whisper.
Top/Bottom could be confusing depending on the physical installation.
What if, instead, they just call them "The one plugged into the connector-thingy at the very end of the cable" and "The one plugged into the connector-thingy in the middle of the cable". Then have the punk-bitch who complained be assigned the task of re-labelling all the existing drives by hand.
They play in Augusta, GA, not LA County.
;)
Besides, who in the South has ever been offended by the terms "master" and "slave"
I think you're just agreeing with what you quoted.
People buying from the iTunes store know they're getting restricted music files. But they know what they are paying for, and are still willing to pay it.
People buying copy-protected CDs are not getting what they expect. They think they're buying a regular CD, just like good consumers do, but they get home and it won't play in their PC. Or it will try to install rights management software on their PC. Or any number of things the RIAA thinks are cool, but actually aren't.
While iTunes is perhaps giving you less than you deserve, it is giving you exactly what you pay for. If Apple tells you up front, "give us 99 cents and we'll screw you", and you give them 99 cents, you can hardly blame them when you get screwed.
I don't think I'm being apologetic at all.