The scary part is that they can probably not only get away with it, but they will probably come out looking like righteous heroes. Companies will squeal about the prices, Microsoft will drop the prices down to the point where those companies will no longer be pressured to use alternative software, and the media will make a lot of noise about how great Microsoft is for doing this, what nice guys they really are, and how they do listen to their customers, and how they can't be a monopoly because they do drop their prices blah blah blah. The public sucks all that stuff up, the companies (and people) will buy MS software, MS will still have huge margins, and the only real winners will be MS. MS apologists often argue that MS "vision" was to make software cheap, and that they succeeded because they were "the only ones who realised that software should be cheap". What baloney. I for one am glad that Microsoft software is getting more expensive, because it may help people realise that they're getting gouged and that they only reason they're coughing up is a dependency. But as you say.. MS can still use this as a playing card. Sad.
What I don't understand about everyone getting upset is that end users install the dang thing
End-users don't knowingly install these things, they are distributed quite literally as trojans. For example, image archives from sites like desktopgirls.com are distributed as.exe installation programs, and if you install these, the parasiteware quietly installs itself with neither the users knowledge nor consent. I tried this myself not too long ago just to check. 99% of people are either not savvy enough to realise what is going on, or they are way too trusting and naive. How else could some of these otherwise never-heard-of companies claim to have installation rates as high as 2 million?
"And they are starting to understand that they must accept some advertising in order to support free content on the Net."
This reasoning by itself, I can understand. There is just one problem with it - I don't see the part where I am "supported" for the free content I provide.. it would seem that eZula is going to get money for "supporting" the 'free content I provide and pay for on my website. How is this "supporting" free content then? Is eZula going to send me some money for each hit their advertisers get from links they inserted into my web page? Of course not. So how can they argue that their TopText software is "supporting free content" in *any* way? They're just riding off the success of other people's websites, literally, like parasites.. in fact, TAKING AWAY advertising revenue that those site owners might have gotten from their own adverts, as site owners would get fewer hits. This is thusly damaging to free content providers.
"Mr. Scarfo's lawyers have argued that the technology resembles a wiretap, and that using the logger without going through the relatively stringent requirements of a full wiretap order may have violated Mr. Scarfo's constitutional rights. But they say that they cannot know for sure unless they know how the logger works"
I don't understand how the mechanism whereby it works can make any difference on whether or not it should qualify as a "wiretapping device". I mean, it doesn't matter how it works, one thing remains the same - it records your keystrokes. Doesn't matter if it uses tin cans with string, EM signatures or if its just a modified keyghost type device - its functionality is the same. Surely it is or isn't a "wiretapping device" based purely on its functionality, rather than how it does its job? Any decision based on anything other than that seems like just a legal technicality/loophole. "Oh.. this keylogger is a keyghost device, so its not a wiretap, but this one is just special software, so it is"??? If thats how they're deciding, thats downright scary.
A keylogger is a keylogger is a keylogger. It was either legal, or it wasn't (given the FBI's reaction to being asked to disclose how it works, its easy to tell which one).
Anyway, it doesn't make sense to me, what am I missing here?
I'm fully aware of how TCP works.. I don't understand how thats relevant? Or were you replying to the other reply? Looks like a reply to my post by the layout, but I'm not sure..
Anyway, I wasn't thinking about if people initiate connections to you, in which case you'd obviously have to have a listening port with software behind it that willingly receives data. I was thinking more of cases such as e.g. newsgroups, or maybe email, e.g. if somebody emails me (without request) some child porn or some pirated song, *you* initiate the TCP/IP connection to the POP3 port (110).. so in this situation if the ISP scans the content, it seems like the *recipient* will be held liable for receiving the illegal content (perhaps even implicated in child pornography trade). So in Telek's example, it might be more something like someone spamming child porn to hundreds of people by email (perhaps chained through some anonymous remailers to protect themselves, if they know what they're doing).
Another example might be if I set up some offline news reader (e.g. Agent, or a Linux-based spooler) to download content of some of the, er, binary newsgroups.. I could easily end up having "downloaded" copyrighted files (or perhaps child porn, people post all sorts of things to the wrong ng's). What this is saying is that the IPS's can hold you liable just for having downloaded that, even if you delete ("shred", if you know what you're doing:)offending files immediately. Or perhaps someone posts a Metallica song on an mp3 ng but labels it under the name of an actually legal song.. supposing this softare could detect thats its a metallica song (even if it can't, I'm sure it will be possible within the next 20 years to do it), you could easily be falsely labelled by the system as a pirate.
An over-broad system that labels *too many* people as pirates, "just in case", is a bad idea.. the US justice system is anyway supposed to be based on the principle of preferring to let guilty people walk free rather than letting innocent people rot, if there is uncertainty. Same should apply with anti-piracy detection software, it shouldn't detect over-broadly, as it currently does (see this article http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/23/pirat e/index.html for example). Any "automatic" detection software should be used with much caution. My web host recently had their fraud-detection software lock out a valid customer by accident.. this sort of thing is going to happen a lot more and more in future.. to what extent should police etc be relying on such software?
Society shouldn't put too much faith in these things.
Or are they just going to scan what SITES you visit, and then ASSUME you're pirating
My site used to be hosted at Geocities. I had some OS software on my site available for download in.zip and.gz format. Beginning some months back, whenever users clicked on these files, they would be directed to a page that proclaimed in large bold writing "Piracy". Needless to say, I was not amused. I'm now paying for my hosting, and am much happier.
Something else bothers me about this whole "scanning for copyrighted material" thing.. a user might not necessarily know that some file is copyrighted until *after* they've downloaded it (although in most cases its obvious, it isn't always). Even if the user deletes the offending file(s) immediately when they realise, they'll still be flagged by the system as a pirate, and possibly lose their access because of it.
Actually to restrict that to just Mozilla wouldn't be fair, as there are quite a few browsers available on Linux, e.g. Opera, Netscape, Konqueror, lynx etc. So lets just make that "Linux browsers", which would be more relevant to your specific argument, that Linux isn't up to scratch in web support.
Hmm.. alrighty.. heres a small challenge for you. Please provide us with a list of no less than two sites ("loads of sites" implies plural, so one is not good enough) that would not be accessible and/or usable by Mozilla on Linux. Your examples must be of USEFUL sites that a school would typically need to access.
That was the "research" that mainly prompted all the media attention. It was dubious research, and was never re-inforced by any subsequent research. Most people today will laugh at the idea that comics might cause widespread juvenile delinquency. Maybe one or two isolated cases might occur, but I doubt anything that doesn't qualify as a statistical outlier.
The way the whole comics things panned out was interesting.. the effective result was a self-censorship of sorts.. an organization was created ("Comic Magazine Association of America") to which cartoonists could voluntarily submit their works to, which provided a "kid-friendly" "stamp of approval". This resulted in newspapers which only carried "approved" comics and publishers which would only publish "approved" comics. Anything other than "kid-friendly" soon found itself struggling to get published at all. The end result was very politically-correct sanitized comics in mainstream media, something which eventually give rise to the underground comics movement around the 60's. The medium was very polarized - very sanitised on the mainstream side, and very sultry, adult content on the underground side. If you pick up a newspaper today, the results are still evident (family circus anyone?)
Given the existing parallels, it will be interesting to see how the video game violence issue pans out.
Was it by any chance this company: http://www.5dt.com/? Chances are it was.. there aren't more than a small handful of companies here doing this line of work. Anyway, I work for 5DT, so perhaps I could offer a little more background. We do mostly use DirectX, but we have developed a Software Development Kit for our own use that provides an abstraction of a generic 3D renderer. Behind this abstraction we have both Direct3D and OpenGL implementations. This allows our software to run using both OpenGL and Direct3D. The main reasons we have done this is (a) possible portability in future, should we need to sell systems using OpenGL, (b) Direct3D programming is clunky and difficult, and it is counter-productive if most of our programmers have to learn it, and lastly (c) by supporting both, we ensure the process has resulted in a "good abstraction". Using such an abstraction provides for easier/faster learning curves and more stable, robust software. So we now only really need one programmer dedicated to knowing all the ins and outs of Direct3D, the other programmers can focus more on the important stuff - the application development. Creating this SDK has allowed us to have much faster application development times, as well as having more robust software.
In the past, our OpenGL support lagged a little behind the Direct3D support - previous iterations of our software were Direct3D only, and the main reason in the beginning for this was a decision to try stick to Microsoft standards wherever possible (trust me, this was not my decision:) (See my website for my own opinion of DirectX) Anyway, our OpenGL support is now on about the same level as the Direct3D support, so all of our new applications work interchangable with both.
From the perspective of our clients, most of them couldn't be bothered if the software uses OpenGL or Direct3D - they just want the software to work. From a performance perspective, we've found that both OpenGL and Direct3D are extremely similar, there is no real advantage for clients to use any particular one. Interestingly enough though, when using dynamic texture techniques (procedural textures / texture caching), we've found that on Windows2000, Direct3D has some horrible performance problems (becomes very jerky), while OpenGL remains smooth. We've never had clients that insisted on one over the other (OpenGL/D3D) though.
We also use other components of DirectX for input and sound. For networking we use sockets (DirectPlay is a waste of time, tried it), although for that too we have our own abstraction layers, thus allowing our software to be more potentially cross-platform, should a client require a different platform. Pretty much all our clients up until now have used Windows.
D3D is technically in the lead, but using GL extensions makes up for this.
Its true, DirectX will be run reliably on cheap Windows boxes. But so will OpenGL. We primarily use nVidia cards, on which both are supported. However, this wasn't the case when we first made the decisions - when we first made the decisions to go with Direct3D, mainstream 3D acceleration had only just started to take off, and the future of OpenGL looked a little wobbly at that stage - acceleration support for OpenGL on mainstream cards was almost non-existent in the beginning, while most card manufacturers *were* getting D3D support. This was the main reason for the decision back then. This reasoning is no longer true, generally support for GL and D3D are very similar, but our software is anyway now structured such that both are as easy to use.
One other main reason to focus on D3D? Its "safer" - Microsoft is most likely to be around ten years from now. The future of OpenGL (and of SGI itself) has looked a little wobbly in the past, and although better now, still isn't as assured).
"Ironically, then, precisely at the time when both the Executive and Legislative branches of government are agitating for a reduction of gratuitous (and maybe non-gratuitous) violence in the media, the U.S. has been on a five-year downward trend in violence statistics. According to FBI crime statistics, both violent crimes (including murder) and property crimes are down substantially, in all regions of the country, both urban and rural. Some drops are very dramatic. For example, between 1993 and 1997 murder in Los Angeles dropped 48%. In Boston it dropped 56%. Divorce is down, marriages are up. Teenage pregnancies have dropped, unemployment is down. Moreover, recent government reports tell us that the number of weapons brought to high schools has dramatically declined" (http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/sfischo/violenc e.html
Note that this is IN SPITE OF both increased amounts of violence in the media over the last ten years and a large increase in the number of children who spend a lot of time playing violent games. And it is additionally in spite of computer games being, as you say, "more seductive" and "more involving".
I'm afraid your view of a "downhill slide into violence and depravity" is not reflected in real statistics. More likely its just a popular view that you've adopted - possibly the usual jaded cynicisms that people get as they age.. the "when I was young kids were sweet and innocent, but kids today have no respect and don't read anymore, and society is going to the dogs" syndrome. In all likelihood, the "serious problem" you refer to is just perception. Society has always been violent. A few hundred years ago, for example, it was normal to take your kids on a "family outing" to see public executions (hangings or even beheadings) in the town square. That was normal then, but most people I know would think that todays 'precious fragile children' would be irreperably psychologically damaged by something like that.
Anyway, there is a lack of correlation between your gloom-and-doom viewpoint and real-world statistics. Such widespread negative perceptions are probably more likely the result of mainstream media focusing disproportionately on horrible, but statistically highly unlikely events, such as Columbine.
Have any of you ever heard that gaming causes violence apart from dubious research projects that started showing up after Columbine ?
In the 50's, there was a lot of media noise and "parent scare" about how comic books caused "juvenile delinquency". Some comics were even banned [1]. This whole violence-in-video-games thing is just history repeating itself.
[1] Pogo, by Walt Kelly, Volume 11, ISBN 1-56097-339-0. Choice quote.. "with comic book censorship now a fact in Hartford, I look forward to an immediate drop in the crime rate in that fair city" (William Gaines, founder of MAD).
(Hmm.. a/. post with actual references.. how unique)
Slashdot Mirror
The scary part is that they can probably not only get away with it, but they will probably come out looking like righteous heroes. Companies will squeal about the prices, Microsoft will drop the prices down to the point where those companies will no longer be pressured to use alternative software, and the media will make a lot of noise about how great Microsoft is for doing this, what nice guys they really are, and how they do listen to their customers, and how they can't be a monopoly because they do drop their prices blah blah blah. The public sucks all that stuff up, the companies (and people) will buy MS software, MS will still have huge margins, and the only real winners will be MS. MS apologists often argue that MS "vision" was to make software cheap, and that they succeeded because they were "the only ones who realised that software should be cheap". What baloney. I for one am glad that Microsoft software is getting more expensive, because it may help people realise that they're getting gouged and that they only reason they're coughing up is a dependency. But as you say .. MS can still use this as a playing card. Sad.
What I don't understand about everyone getting upset is that end users install the dang thing
End-users don't knowingly install these things, they are distributed quite literally as trojans. For example, image archives from sites like desktopgirls.com are distributed as .exe installation programs, and if you install these, the parasiteware quietly installs itself with neither the users knowledge nor consent. I tried this myself not too long ago just to check. 99% of people are either not savvy enough to realise what is going on, or they are way too trusting and naive. How else could some of these otherwise never-heard-of companies claim to have installation rates as high as 2 million?
"And they are starting to understand that they must accept some advertising in order to support free content on the Net."
This reasoning by itself, I can understand. There is just one problem with it - I don't see the part where I am "supported" for the free content I provide .. it would seem that eZula is going to get money for "supporting" the 'free content I provide and pay for on my website. How is this "supporting" free content then? Is eZula going to send me some money for each hit their advertisers get from links they inserted into my web page? Of course not. So how can they argue that their TopText software is "supporting free content" in *any* way? They're just riding off the success of other people's websites, literally, like parasites .. in fact, TAKING AWAY advertising revenue that those site owners might have gotten from their own adverts, as site owners would get fewer hits. This is thusly damaging to free content providers.
The article says:
"Mr. Scarfo's lawyers have argued that the technology resembles a wiretap, and that using the logger without going through the relatively stringent requirements of a full wiretap order may have violated Mr. Scarfo's constitutional rights. But they say that they cannot know for sure unless they know how the logger works"
I don't understand how the mechanism whereby it works can make any difference on whether or not it should qualify as a "wiretapping device". I mean, it doesn't matter how it works, one thing remains the same - it records your keystrokes. Doesn't matter if it uses tin cans with string, EM signatures or if its just a modified keyghost type device - its functionality is the same. Surely it is or isn't a "wiretapping device" based purely on its functionality, rather than how it does its job? Any decision based on anything other than that seems like just a legal technicality/loophole. "Oh .. this keylogger is a keyghost device, so its not a wiretap, but this one is just special software, so it is"??? If thats how they're deciding, thats downright scary.
A keylogger is a keylogger is a keylogger. It was either legal, or it wasn't (given the FBI's reaction to being asked to disclose how it works, its easy to tell which one).
Anyway, it doesn't make sense to me, what am I missing here?
I'm fully aware of how TCP works .. I don't understand how thats relevant? Or were you replying to the other reply? Looks like a reply to my post by the layout, but I'm not sure ..
.. I could easily end up having "downloaded" copyrighted files (or perhaps child porn, people post all sorts of things to the wrong ng's). What this is saying is that the IPS's can hold you liable just for having downloaded that, even if you delete ("shred", if you know what you're doing :)offending files immediately. Or perhaps someone posts a Metallica song on an mp3 ng but labels it under the name of an actually legal song .. supposing this softare could detect thats its a metallica song (even if it can't, I'm sure it will be possible within the next 20 years to do it), you could easily be falsely labelled by the system as a pirate.
.. the US justice system is anyway supposed to be based on the principle of preferring to let guilty people walk free rather than letting innocent people rot, if there is uncertainty. Same should apply with anti-piracy detection software, it shouldn't detect over-broadly, as it currently does (see this article http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/23/pirat e/index.html for example). Any "automatic" detection software should be used with much caution. My web host recently had their fraud-detection software lock out a valid customer by accident .. this sort of thing is going to happen a lot more and more in future .. to what extent should police etc be relying on such software?
Anyway, I wasn't thinking about if people initiate connections to you, in which case you'd obviously have to have a listening port with software behind it that willingly receives data. I was thinking more of cases such as e.g. newsgroups, or maybe email, e.g. if somebody emails me (without request) some child porn or some pirated song, *you* initiate the TCP/IP connection to the POP3 port (110).. so in this situation if the ISP scans the content, it seems like the *recipient* will be held liable for receiving the illegal content (perhaps even implicated in child pornography trade). So in Telek's example, it might be more something like someone spamming child porn to hundreds of people by email (perhaps chained through some anonymous remailers to protect themselves, if they know what they're doing).
Another example might be if I set up some offline news reader (e.g. Agent, or a Linux-based spooler) to download content of some of the, er, binary newsgroups
An over-broad system that labels *too many* people as pirates, "just in case", is a bad idea
Society shouldn't put too much faith in these things.
Or are they just going to scan what SITES you visit, and then ASSUME you're pirating
My site used to be hosted at Geocities. I had some OS software on my site available for download in .zip and .gz format. Beginning some months back, whenever users clicked on these files, they would be directed to a page that proclaimed in large bold writing "Piracy". Needless to say, I was not amused. I'm now paying for my hosting, and am much happier.
Something else bothers me about this whole "scanning for copyrighted material" thing .. a user might not necessarily know that some file is copyrighted until *after* they've downloaded it (although in most cases its obvious, it isn't always). Even if the user deletes the offending file(s) immediately when they realise, they'll still be flagged by the system as a pirate, and possibly lose their access because of it.
Actually to restrict that to just Mozilla wouldn't be fair, as there are quite a few browsers available on Linux, e.g. Opera, Netscape, Konqueror, lynx etc. So lets just make that "Linux browsers", which would be more relevant to your specific argument, that Linux isn't up to scratch in web support.
Hmm .. alrighty .. heres a small challenge for you. Please provide us with a list of no less than two sites ("loads of sites" implies plural, so one is not good enough) that would not be accessible and/or usable by Mozilla on Linux. Your examples must be of USEFUL sites that a school would typically need to access.
Happy searching, I look forward to the results.
Wow.. interesting code. And scary. Who could have written this stuff and kept a straight face?
That was the "research" that mainly prompted all the media attention. It was dubious research, and was never re-inforced by any subsequent research. Most people today will laugh at the idea that comics might cause widespread juvenile delinquency. Maybe one or two isolated cases might occur, but I doubt anything that doesn't qualify as a statistical outlier.
The way the whole comics things panned out was interesting .. the effective result was a self-censorship of sorts .. an organization was created ("Comic Magazine Association of America") to which cartoonists could voluntarily submit their works to, which provided a "kid-friendly" "stamp of approval". This resulted in newspapers which only carried "approved" comics and publishers which would only publish "approved" comics. Anything other than "kid-friendly" soon found itself struggling to get published at all. The end result was very politically-correct sanitized comics in mainstream media, something which eventually give rise to the underground comics movement around the 60's. The medium was very polarized - very sanitised on the mainstream side, and very sultry, adult content on the underground side. If you pick up a newspaper today, the results are still evident (family circus anyone?)
Given the existing parallels, it will be interesting to see how the video game violence issue pans out.
Was it by any chance this company: http://www.5dt.com/? Chances are it was .. there aren't more than a small handful of companies here doing this line of work. Anyway, I work for 5DT, so perhaps I could offer a little more background. We do mostly use DirectX, but we have developed a Software Development Kit for our own use that provides an abstraction of a generic 3D renderer. Behind this abstraction we have both Direct3D and OpenGL implementations. This allows our software to run using both OpenGL and Direct3D. The main reasons we have done this is (a) possible portability in future, should we need to sell systems using OpenGL, (b) Direct3D programming is clunky and difficult, and it is counter-productive if most of our programmers have to learn it, and lastly (c) by supporting both, we ensure the process has resulted in a "good abstraction". Using such an abstraction provides for easier/faster learning curves and more stable, robust software. So we now only really need one programmer dedicated to knowing all the ins and outs of Direct3D, the other programmers can focus more on the important stuff - the application development. Creating this SDK has allowed us to have much faster application development times, as well as having more robust software.
In the past, our OpenGL support lagged a little behind the Direct3D support - previous iterations of our software were Direct3D only, and the main reason in the beginning for this was a decision to try stick to Microsoft standards wherever possible (trust me, this was not my decision :) (See my website for my own opinion of DirectX) Anyway, our OpenGL support is now on about the same level as the Direct3D support, so all of our new applications work interchangable with both.
From the perspective of our clients, most of them couldn't be bothered if the software uses OpenGL or Direct3D - they just want the software to work. From a performance perspective, we've found that both OpenGL and Direct3D are extremely similar, there is no real advantage for clients to use any particular one. Interestingly enough though, when using dynamic texture techniques (procedural textures / texture caching), we've found that on Windows2000, Direct3D has some horrible performance problems (becomes very jerky), while OpenGL remains smooth. We've never had clients that insisted on one over the other (OpenGL/D3D) though.
We also use other components of DirectX for input and sound. For networking we use sockets (DirectPlay is a waste of time, tried it), although for that too we have our own abstraction layers, thus allowing our software to be more potentially cross-platform, should a client require a different platform. Pretty much all our clients up until now have used Windows.
D3D is technically in the lead, but using GL extensions makes up for this.
Its true, DirectX will be run reliably on cheap Windows boxes. But so will OpenGL. We primarily use nVidia cards, on which both are supported. However, this wasn't the case when we first made the decisions - when we first made the decisions to go with Direct3D, mainstream 3D acceleration had only just started to take off, and the future of OpenGL looked a little wobbly at that stage - acceleration support for OpenGL on mainstream cards was almost non-existent in the beginning, while most card manufacturers *were* getting D3D support. This was the main reason for the decision back then. This reasoning is no longer true, generally support for GL and D3D are very similar, but our software is anyway now structured such that both are as easy to use. One other main reason to focus on D3D? Its "safer" - Microsoft is most likely to be around ten years from now. The future of OpenGL (and of SGI itself) has looked a little wobbly in the past, and although better now, still isn't as assured).
"Ironically, then, precisely at the time when both the Executive and Legislative branches of government are agitating for a reduction of gratuitous (and maybe non-gratuitous) violence in the media, the U.S. has been on a five-year downward trend in violence statistics. According to FBI crime statistics, both violent crimes (including murder) and property crimes are down substantially, in all regions of the country, both urban and rural. Some drops are very dramatic. For example, between 1993 and 1997 murder in Los Angeles dropped 48%. In Boston it dropped 56%. Divorce is down, marriages are up. Teenage pregnancies have dropped, unemployment is down. Moreover, recent government reports tell us that the number of weapons brought to high schools has dramatically declined" (http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/sfischo/violenc e.html
Note that this is IN SPITE OF both increased amounts of violence in the media over the last ten years and a large increase in the number of children who spend a lot of time playing violent games. And it is additionally in spite of computer games being, as you say, "more seductive" and "more involving".
I'm afraid your view of a "downhill slide into violence and depravity" is not reflected in real statistics. More likely its just a popular view that you've adopted - possibly the usual jaded cynicisms that people get as they age .. the "when I was young kids were sweet and innocent, but kids today have no respect and don't read anymore, and society is going to the dogs" syndrome. In all likelihood, the "serious problem" you refer to is just perception. Society has always been violent. A few hundred years ago, for example, it was normal to take your kids on a "family outing" to see public executions (hangings or even beheadings) in the town square. That was normal then, but most people I know would think that todays 'precious fragile children' would be irreperably psychologically damaged by something like that.
Anyway, there is a lack of correlation between your gloom-and-doom viewpoint and real-world statistics. Such widespread negative perceptions are probably more likely the result of mainstream media focusing disproportionately on horrible, but statistically highly unlikely events, such as Columbine.
Have any of you ever heard that gaming causes violence apart from dubious research projects that started showing up after Columbine ?
In the 50's, there was a lot of media noise and "parent scare" about how comic books caused "juvenile delinquency". Some comics were even banned [1]. This whole violence-in-video-games thing is just history repeating itself.
[1] Pogo, by Walt Kelly, Volume 11, ISBN 1-56097-339-0. Choice quote .. "with comic book censorship now a fact in Hartford, I look forward to an immediate drop in the crime rate in that fair city" (William Gaines, founder of MAD).
(Hmm .. a /. post with actual references .. how unique)