This could be a great opportunity for understanding and discussion. Istead, the slashdot community has latched on to the combined theme of religion and pornography and has used the opportunity to heap derision and ridicule on a group of people simply because they think differently.
I believe it is. The comments I've read so far have been reflective of widely varied opinions. I don't read comments hoping to find all opinions on one side or another. I come here to read all sides of the issue and hopefully have my own opinions and views challenged. It's called healthy discussion. And if slashdot comments only reflected one side of the debate, I'd probably stop visiting altogether. Nobody's demanding tolerance or compliance with one set of views or another.
Note that your submission got a +4, and there are plenty of like-minded contributors who got +5's. So, down off the pulpit, please;)
to prosecute something that is essentially a tort? Is copyright infringement a criminal offence in Australia? I don't believe it is in Canada, which, as I understand it, follows as close to British Common Law as Australia. Are the police now acting on behalf of the music industry?
If someone, say, breaches a contract I have with them, I can't just call the police, have them arrested and have their assets seized. It's up to me to hire a lawyer, serve them with papers, get subpoenas, etc, etc.
I'm not sure server whitelists are the way to go either. I don't think it's worked out all that well for IRC.
If I had the time, inclination, and mandate, I would set up some sort of interface so that users could opt into server side black/whitelists (think TCP wrappers) so that spam could be rejected as it tries to come into the server rather than as it passes to the client via POP. Create a web interface so users can maintain their lists, and store them in a mysql table. Write a little perl to validate the from: against the black/whitelist during the initial SMTP conversation, and Bob's your uncle.
It is my feeling from years of dealing with SMTP, POP and SPAM issues that SMTP is basically unfixable due to the fact that changes to the standard that could be used control spam would require almost instantaneous universal adoption. Any attempts at maintaining backward compatibility, by their very nature, would leave gaping holes for spammers to crawl through.
The trouble is, even if you build a magical new standard for mail transport and delivery that solves the spam problem, you have to somehow convince the world to phase out SMTP. Maybe the promise of a spam free internet would be motivation enough, but somehow I doubt it.
Unfortunately, the only real way to secure information is to store it in an encrypted form such that the key needed to decrypt the information is physically separated from the machine which contains the data. However, many websites currently use the "key under the doormat" approach to security, which in theory is no better than storing the data unencrypted and hoping that no one hacks into the system and sees it.
Or don't have the data to begin with. In a former life, I worked for an ISP who does some online sales for small and medium businesses. The product they were using was an off-the-shelf e-commerce product with a SQL server on the back end to store product and transaction information.
I didn't have oversight of the project but I was asked (due to my role as unix and network admin) to modify some perl scripts that control the tax calculation. At some point, I became aware that the product, by default, was set to retain customers' names, addresses, and credit card numbers with expiry dates! I expressed my concern to the person managing the project but it was made clear that I shouldn't be concerned because it is a commercial project and is quite secure.
A few weeks later, I was asked by the technical lead on the project to allow access through the firewall to UDP and TCP SQL ports on the ecommerce box for one of our partners. The technical lead wasn't sure about the exact addresses that should be allowed so I was directed to open the ports up to ALL external addresses. A few days after that, I did some routine security checks and found the SQL box had a blank SA password.
Even after explaining the danger of retaining credit card numbers in a server with no System Administrator password, with SQL ports open to the entire world, it still didn't quite sink in. Apparently I was overreacting and trying to embarass the technical project's technical lead, and trying to make her look bad.
I don't work there anymore, thank God.
I'm no technophobe, but I have been leery of internet credit card transactions since that experience. At the end of the day, you are could be entrusting your financial information to people who are either too stupid (careless? naive?)or too apathetic to appreciate the seriousness of the decisions they are making.
It is infantile, but you have to understand that a lot of these "geeks" have been marginalized for being different, smart. When that trait becomes something of value, the natural human reaction is payback for all those years of teasing and towel-snapping and spitballs and humiliation.
Now who's cool? Now you need my help huh?? Tell me how stupid you are. Tell me!! TELL ME YOU'RE A MORON!!!
Calm down. You don't have some basic humanitarian right to listen to popular music.
People do get emtional when it comes to music. Music has always been an emotional thing for humanity. Please don't over-simplify the situation by trying to treat music as a commodity. It isn't.
3) Clearly defined download limits. Recently an Emusic user was banned for downloading 200 albums in 3 days as an "unlimited" subscriber. No hard cap was set in the TOS agreement, and if I were hypothetically using a service like this, I would want to be very clear on just how "unlimited" my downloading abilities were.
As a former ISP technical manager, I know the dangers of saying "unlimited" but not really meaning it. The problem is: how do you define unlimited without including the jerks who you know will just say "ok, just give me two of everything...and three of whatever she's having over there"? Seriously, you can't go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and take a whole damn steam tray, no matter how much you want to be Homer.
Bandwidth is expensive and you have to draw the line somewhere. Should they stop touting it as unlimited and simply put a high (but reasonable) limit on it? Like 300 tracks per month?
Most *my* bandwidth goes to downloading, not uploading.
Consider this, though. When you download, it only downloads until you get the whole file. When you make files available for upload, it never finishes until you remove the file or stop it from being available. Folks with 24/7 connectivity, I suppose, could be responsible for consumption of a very considerable chunk of outgoing bandwidth.
They're doing a fine job of killing off their customer base all on their own. All we have to do is sit back and watch it happen.
Here's the thing. Most people are not aware of the issues surrounding copyright infringement and filesharing. My Dad (one of the least technologically minded people I've ever met) knows how to use Kazaa and burn a CD. He also buys CDs. Now, when he buys a CD and it won't play in some or all of his players, he's not going to understand why. First he'll try to take it back to the store. If they don't take it back, he's going to be angry that he paid $20 for a CD that he can't use. First thing he'll probably do is download the tracks he wants to listen to. Secondly, he's going to think twice about that experience the next time he considers buying a CD at the store. I believe that will be the case for the average consumer.
While the truth is that they are actively pursuing copy protection, which is their right, I find the overly hostile and confrontational content of the letter incredibly dubious.
There are basic human rights, and there are constutional rights (in most countries) but I would stop short of saying what these guys are doing is within their rights. They may be free to do so until a court makes them stop, but there are plenty of instances where we tell manufacturers what forms their products can take if they wish to sell them to the public.
I'm hoping Philips has something to say on the matter as well.
It is my beleif that we will see less and less of these players that have the capabilites of manipulation as DRM locks down in a deathgrip to hold onto its business model. Sad but true.
saying it doesn't make it so. Look at the great products out there right now, today. Just a couple of years ago you couldn't get a DVD player that would play discs from outside your region. Today you can get players that will do burned CDs, MP3s, burned VCDs, OGG...hell, there was a review on slashdot a few days ago of a device that has a hard drive and a DVD burner.
Consumers are telling big tech what they want, and big tech is going to build it no matter what Hollywood says unless the US enacts some strong legislation to the contrary. Want to make a difference? Write your politicians. And, above all, visit your local Sony Store (or other retailer) and tell them what features you want and tell them *why* you will never buy their regional-encoding-encumbered, macrovision-havin, no-burned-cd-playin, no-fast-forwarding-thru-the-intro player.
I'm not sure that argument entirely works. What the public wants will rise in popularity and therefore accessibility...ie, supply/demand. Isn't that what a free market is all about?
The problem is the musicians work for the RIAA member companies. Those member companies want you to buy what they want you to buy, not necessarily what the public itself decides it wants.
By the way, isn't the RIAA a trust?
3 a : a property interest held by one person for the benefit of another b : a combination of firms or corporations formed by a legal agreement; especially : one that reduces or threatens to reduce competition
We do not recommend the models we tested from Noise Magic, PC-World and Maxtron, as none of these models offer any safety overload protection (auto cutout) and their capacitors explode with an audible "bang!" well short of their maximum rated output.
I don't know if this is the case with these power supplies or not, but some transformers are loaded to go "bang!" when they exceed tolerances so that they don't melt and fuse shut and start a fire.
Just how would you act if your store was being looted?
I really don't think it's as simple as that. When someone loots a store, they are depriving the owner of "real property". That owner no longer has the physical goods to sell anymore.
When you trade music online you're not taking anything away, you're creating more copies. Nobody is deprived of their real property. It actually lacks one of the fundamental principles that makes a free market economy work - scarcity of goods. I suspect they have known this for some time and they've been creating false scarcity in the form of distribution control.
So in order to convince me that there should be strong measures against trading copyrighted materials you're going to have to convince me of financial harm suffered on the part of the infringed party, or financial benefit on the part of the infringer.
Vicarious infringement doesn't hold much water either. By that reasoning, we should be suing the phone company because they're enabling criminals to defraud people with illegal telemarketing scams. Filesharing services ARE used for substantial non-infringing uses too so I don't accept that making them illegal makes any more sense than making CDRs illegal.
It's impractical for them to go after actual traders, that's true. There are millions of us. I suspect the other large barrier that keeps them from suing Joe User is that they can't prove harm. How do you prove that someone who downloaded a certain track would otherwise have bought the entire CD if it wasn't available online? You can't because it's just not generally true.
Not only have they not proven harm, they get revenue from the sale of blanks as a piracy tax.
So until someone is able to prove that any of this is actually harming the members of the RIAA, please don't allow anyone to blur the line between real property and data. There is a huge difference.
Aren't the RIAA and MPAA legally considered "trusts"? From m-w.com:
3 b : a combination of firms or corporations formed by a legal agreement; especially : one that reduces or threatens to reduce competition
Of course I'm not a lawyer but could someone who's closer to one than me add some insight as to why these aren't illegal trusts per the US anti-trust legislation?
Slashdot Mirror
This could be a great opportunity for understanding and discussion. Istead, the slashdot community has latched on to the combined theme of religion and pornography and has used the opportunity to heap derision and ridicule on a group of people simply because they think differently.
I believe it is. The comments I've read so far have been reflective of widely varied opinions. I don't read comments hoping to find all opinions on one side or another. I come here to read all sides of the issue and hopefully have my own opinions and views challenged. It's called healthy discussion. And if slashdot comments only reflected one side of the debate, I'd probably stop visiting altogether. Nobody's demanding tolerance or compliance with one set of views or another.
Note that your submission got a +4, and there are plenty of like-minded contributors who got +5's. So, down off the pulpit, please
to prosecute something that is essentially a tort? Is copyright infringement a criminal offence in Australia? I don't believe it is in Canada, which, as I understand it, follows as close to British Common Law as Australia. Are the police now acting on behalf of the music industry?
If someone, say, breaches a contract I have with them, I can't just call the police, have them arrested and have their assets seized. It's up to me to hire a lawyer, serve them with papers, get subpoenas, etc, etc.
on how long it takes for the source to be disseminated through Kazaa?
MWAHAHAHA...all their base are belong to us!
I'm not sure server whitelists are the way to go either. I don't think it's worked out all that well for IRC.
If I had the time, inclination, and mandate, I would set up some sort of interface so that users could opt into server side black/whitelists (think TCP wrappers) so that spam could be rejected as it tries to come into the server rather than as it passes to the client via POP. Create a web interface so users can maintain their lists, and store them in a mysql table. Write a little perl to validate the from: against the black/whitelist during the initial SMTP conversation, and Bob's your uncle.
It is my feeling from years of dealing with SMTP, POP and SPAM issues that SMTP is basically unfixable due to the fact that changes to the standard that could be used control spam would require almost instantaneous universal adoption. Any attempts at maintaining backward compatibility, by their very nature, would leave gaping holes for spammers to crawl through.
The trouble is, even if you build a magical new standard for mail transport and delivery that solves the spam problem, you have to somehow convince the world to phase out SMTP. Maybe the promise of a spam free internet would be motivation enough, but somehow I doubt it.
Unfortunately, the only real way to secure information is to store it in an encrypted form such that the key needed to decrypt the information is physically separated from the machine which contains the data. However, many websites currently use the "key under the doormat" approach to security, which in theory is no better than storing the data unencrypted and hoping that no one hacks into the system and sees it.
Or don't have the data to begin with. In a former life, I worked for an ISP who does some online sales for small and medium businesses. The product they were using was an off-the-shelf e-commerce product with a SQL server on the back end to store product and transaction information.
I didn't have oversight of the project but I was asked (due to my role as unix and network admin) to modify some perl scripts that control the tax calculation. At some point, I became aware that the product, by default, was set to retain customers' names, addresses, and credit card numbers with expiry dates! I expressed my concern to the person managing the project but it was made clear that I shouldn't be concerned because it is a commercial project and is quite secure.
A few weeks later, I was asked by the technical lead on the project to allow access through the firewall to UDP and TCP SQL ports on the ecommerce box for one of our partners. The technical lead wasn't sure about the exact addresses that should be allowed so I was directed to open the ports up to ALL external addresses. A few days after that, I did some routine security checks and found the SQL box had a blank SA password.
Even after explaining the danger of retaining credit card numbers in a server with no System Administrator password, with SQL ports open to the entire world, it still didn't quite sink in. Apparently I was overreacting and trying to embarass the technical project's technical lead, and trying to make her look bad.
I don't work there anymore, thank God.
I'm no technophobe, but I have been leery of internet credit card transactions since that experience. At the end of the day, you are could be entrusting your financial information to people who are either too stupid (careless? naive?)or too apathetic to appreciate the seriousness of the decisions they are making.
no - "its" is the posessive form of "it"
the dog ate its own puke
"it's" is a contraction of "it" and "is"
Look at that dog! It's eating puke!
It is infantile, but you have to understand that a lot of these "geeks" have been marginalized for being different, smart. When that trait becomes something of value, the natural human reaction is payback for all those years of teasing and towel-snapping and spitballs and humiliation.
Now who's cool? Now you need my help huh?? Tell me how stupid you are. Tell me!! TELL ME YOU'RE A MORON!!!
*twitch*
I need a coffee.
He also openly called on the cable companies and Hollywood to sue the PVR companies for copyright infringement.
They already are. See also what device owners are doing to help. Donate and help the EFF give Hollywood a black eye when it comes to fighting PVR technology.
Calm down. You don't have some basic humanitarian right to listen to popular music.
People do get emtional when it comes to music. Music has always been an emotional thing for humanity. Please don't over-simplify the situation by trying to treat music as a commodity. It isn't.
3) Clearly defined download limits. Recently an Emusic user was banned for downloading 200 albums in 3 days as an "unlimited" subscriber. No hard cap was set in the TOS agreement, and if I were hypothetically using a service like this, I would want to be very clear on just how "unlimited" my downloading abilities were.
As a former ISP technical manager, I know the dangers of saying "unlimited" but not really meaning it. The problem is: how do you define unlimited without including the jerks who you know will just say "ok, just give me two of everything...and three of whatever she's having over there"? Seriously, you can't go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and take a whole damn steam tray, no matter how much you want to be Homer.
Bandwidth is expensive and you have to draw the line somewhere. Should they stop touting it as unlimited and simply put a high (but reasonable) limit on it? Like 300 tracks per month?
Most *my* bandwidth goes to downloading, not uploading.
Consider this, though. When you download, it only downloads until you get the whole file. When you make files available for upload, it never finishes until you remove the file or stop it from being available. Folks with 24/7 connectivity, I suppose, could be responsible for consumption of a very considerable chunk of outgoing bandwidth.
They're doing a fine job of killing off their customer base all on their own. All we have to do is sit back and watch it happen.
Here's the thing. Most people are not aware of the issues surrounding copyright infringement and filesharing. My Dad (one of the least technologically minded people I've ever met) knows how to use Kazaa and burn a CD. He also buys CDs. Now, when he buys a CD and it won't play in some or all of his players, he's not going to understand why. First he'll try to take it back to the store. If they don't take it back, he's going to be angry that he paid $20 for a CD that he can't use. First thing he'll probably do is download the tracks he wants to listen to. Secondly, he's going to think twice about that experience the next time he considers buying a CD at the store. I believe that will be the case for the average consumer.
It's basic human psychology:
Rip. Mix. Burn. Share. Happy. Fun. Positive.
Buy. Pay. Broken? Confused. Annoyed. Angry. Negative.
It's been said before: desperate industries who consider their customers to be the enemy need to find a better business model.
While the truth is that they are actively pursuing copy protection, which is their right, I find the overly hostile and confrontational content of the letter incredibly dubious.
There are basic human rights, and there are constutional rights (in most countries) but I would stop short of saying what these guys are doing is within their rights. They may be free to do so until a court makes them stop, but there are plenty of instances where we tell manufacturers what forms their products can take if they wish to sell them to the public.
I'm hoping Philips has something to say on the matter as well.
It is my beleif that we will see less and less of these players that have the capabilites of manipulation as DRM locks down in a deathgrip to hold onto its business model. Sad but true.
saying it doesn't make it so. Look at the great products out there right now, today. Just a couple of years ago you couldn't get a DVD player that would play discs from outside your region. Today you can get players that will do burned CDs, MP3s, burned VCDs, OGG...hell, there was a review on slashdot a few days ago of a device that has a hard drive and a DVD burner.
Consumers are telling big tech what they want, and big tech is going to build it no matter what Hollywood says unless the US enacts some strong legislation to the contrary. Want to make a difference? Write your politicians. And, above all, visit your local Sony Store (or other retailer) and tell them what features you want and tell them *why* you will never buy their regional-encoding-encumbered, macrovision-havin, no-burned-cd-playin, no-fast-forwarding-thru-the-intro player.
I remember when WordPerfect was thoroughly entrenched in the private, public, and legal sectors. Maybe that would've been a better analogy.
yeah
Who owns the results of UD projects, though? I'm not donating processor cycles so that some multinational can patent the cure for cancer.
How do we use this to take down the RIAA/MPAA?
I'm not sure that argument entirely works. What the public wants will rise in popularity and therefore accessibility...ie, supply/demand. Isn't that what a free market is all about?
The problem is the musicians work for the RIAA member companies. Those member companies want you to buy what they want you to buy, not necessarily what the public itself decides it wants.
By the way, isn't the RIAA a trust?
3 a : a property interest held by one person for the benefit of another b : a combination of firms or corporations formed by a legal agreement; especially : one that reduces or threatens to reduce competition
What happened to all the American trust busters?
However, the majority of people don't know how to reset their MAC addresses.
I bet the sorts of people they're trying to stop do.
We do not recommend the models we tested from Noise Magic, PC-World and Maxtron, as none of these models offer any safety overload protection (auto cutout) and their capacitors explode with an audible "bang!" well short of their maximum rated output.
I don't know if this is the case with these power supplies or not, but some transformers are loaded to go "bang!" when they exceed tolerances so that they don't melt and fuse shut and start a fire.
Waitaminnit...are they selling Penis Mightiers??!??
I live in Canada and I commute 30 miles a day in a car. Let's compare average snowfalls some time.
Just how would you act if your store was being looted?
I really don't think it's as simple as that. When someone loots a store, they are depriving the owner of "real property". That owner no longer has the physical goods to sell anymore.
When you trade music online you're not taking anything away, you're creating more copies. Nobody is deprived of their real property. It actually lacks one of the fundamental principles that makes a free market economy work - scarcity of goods. I suspect they have known this for some time and they've been creating false scarcity in the form of distribution control.
So in order to convince me that there should be strong measures against trading copyrighted materials you're going to have to convince me of financial harm suffered on the part of the infringed party, or financial benefit on the part of the infringer.
Vicarious infringement doesn't hold much water either. By that reasoning, we should be suing the phone company because they're enabling criminals to defraud people with illegal telemarketing scams. Filesharing services ARE used for substantial non-infringing uses too so I don't accept that making them illegal makes any more sense than making CDRs illegal.
It's impractical for them to go after actual traders, that's true. There are millions of us. I suspect the other large barrier that keeps them from suing Joe User is that they can't prove harm. How do you prove that someone who downloaded a certain track would otherwise have bought the entire CD if it wasn't available online? You can't because it's just not generally true.
Not only have they not proven harm, they get revenue from the sale of blanks as a piracy tax.
So until someone is able to prove that any of this is actually harming the members of the RIAA, please don't allow anyone to blur the line between real property and data. There is a huge difference.
Aren't the RIAA and MPAA legally considered "trusts"? From m-w.com:
3 b : a combination of firms or corporations formed by a legal agreement; especially : one that reduces or threatens to reduce competition
Of course I'm not a lawyer but could someone who's closer to one than me add some insight as to why these aren't illegal trusts per the US anti-trust legislation?