Actually, a small portion of the license fee goes to ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5... Also, while advertising mostly pays for the programming on these channels, the actual broadcast infrastructure is funded by the license payer. All the terrestrial/freeview channels are transmitted over the same physical infrastructure, through the same masts etc.
Actually, all we know for sure is that they added new features to it (the ability to run on xp) or fixed a bug depending how you look at it. They could have done this with a legitimately purchased version. I know a lot of people who buy legitimate games but run them all with nocd cracks.
Because catering for the masses is most profitable. Producing a high end product that costs more to produce but only nets you an additional 2-3% revenue isnt worth it, especially if you sell the higher quality version at a corresponding higher price, which could result in you alienating more of the average users than the number of high end users you gain.
And then having to explain that to end users.. It also doesn't help users of mobile devices who have to use the telco's outbound mailserver, with SPF i can add the telco's mailserver to the allowed list easily.
"Correction: It exists because people are cheap, and will pay exactly zero if they can get away with it. I like your post, it's full of missteps I see often in slashdot posts. For instance:"
Yes, people will pay zero if they can get away with it - Welcome to capitalism.
"The expense ISN'T in the distribution. It's in the initial production but recouped at distribution time."
And there you have a flawed business model, that simply cannot exist in an open market.
"So only physical things have value? Anything that can be copied easily has a value of zero? Please, go tell all the artists and production companies out there that their work is worthless, please."
Yes, welcome to capitalism. Artists have existed for thousands of years, long before it was even possible to make recordings of music or live performances, and they got along just fine. They actually had to work for their money, rather than producing one work and reaping benefit from it endlessly. Very few people got into it for the money, they got into it because they enjoyed making music, or acting. And many of their works are still being enjoyed today, and reproduced freely... Just look at shakespeare. The artificial ability to perform once, and make millions of dollars selling copies of that performance attracts lazy and greedy individuals who have little or no talent, and no real passion for anything other than the acquisition of money. Stop letting such people have an easy ride, and support the real artists who want to perform and have you enjoy their performance.
As for cinemas being a bad environment, there you have an opportunity, go make a better cinema.
American idol is different, television works differently, and you can make recordings from your television to watch later anyway. Television provides entertainment, and intersperses this with advertisements that pay for the TV company to acquire the content. If the content were cheaper, you could have more movies and less ads. TV also provides useful services like news. Infact, many movies make all their money from being sold to various TV stations, they dont get sold on DVD nor shown in a cinema.
If your in a position to MITM, you can often force the clients down to using LM auth unless that's been explicitely disabled... It's also very poorly documented, most third party implementations of ntlm suffer from several common misunderstandings of the protocol, which are sometimes exploitable.
Arent the windows "ipsec" policies just filtering rules? Or do they actually encrypt/authenticate the traffic in some way? Either way, i've hardly ever seen anyone bother.
As for the hashing, it's relatively weak and fast to crack compared to other comparable authentication methods, it's unsalted for instance which is why rainbow tables work.
It's been going on for a lot longer than that, actually... A lot of games on the Amiga required code wheels or that you entered some text from a particular point in the game's manual... Being a kid, i often lost the manual or the codewheel in amongst all the other junk i had, so i quickly found out that pirate copies didn't suffer from this inconvenience.
Similarly, floppies would easily get damaged, so i always made backups for my own use, some copy protected games prevented me from doing that so if i damaged the disks i lost the game, again pirate copies never prevented me making backup copies (and the replacement cost was lower anyway).
Finally, games that could be installed to HD but still required that you have the original media, completely defeat the purpose of installing to HD... It also makes such games impractical for me to play on my laptop (i work away a lot, and like to keep some games installed to play when im sitting in a hotel bored)... Again, nocd cracks help me here, while legitimate buyers suffer.
I would buy games, but as a pirate i get a better experience.
Oh, and games that rely on an online subscription to be playable should be downloadable for free, or obtainable for nominal cost... It makes no sense to rip people off on buying the media when you need to buy an ongoing subscription anyway, and giving the game away with a nominal single player "practice" mode but needing a subscription to be fully playable might encourage users... Especially if you can offer a short term subscription, to see if you like it. I wont plunk down full price for world of warcraft on the off chance i might enjoy it, but i'd be perfectly happy to pay for a month's subscription. If i dont like it, i can cancel it.
"Because for the first time, virtually any copyrighted work can be perfectly copied at the click of a button, and distributed with close to zero effort. Without DRM, you could make a fully perfect copy of an HD movie in less than an hour. Prior to mass-market digital technology, it took a lot of time and/or a lot of money to make a copy of something, and that copy was almost certainly going to be of lesser quality, and distribution beyond people you have physical contact with was quite expensive and/or time consuming."
So your saying that, new technology exists which makes distribution of content much cheaper... And yet content producers want to charge the same or more for this cheaper to distribute content? While also restricting the customer more than they did with earlier distrbution methods? It looks like their business model is becoming obsolete, and theyre just trying to shore it up by restricting their own customers.
Why not sell a product/service that cannot be easily reproduced, such that your actually providing value for money... Movies shown in a cinema spring to mind, the cost of a cinema size screen and sound system is beyond the means of most people. And then there's live concerts for music. You cant clone a live concert, because you cannot produce exact replicas of the artists (yet?) and the cost of setting up a bootleg cinema would be too high to be worth the hassle. If you want to sell movies on dvd, they need to be priced such that copying them is not viable, and yes that is possible. Movie companies have access to factories where DVDs are mass produced at a cost of 1 or 2 cents each, no pirate group would be able to obtain blank media that cheaply, let alone the time and effort needed to write to it.
In short, piracy only exists because the original media is disproportionately priced compared to its production cost. DRM exists not as a solution to piracy, but as a method to wring more money out of their paying customers.
I wouldnt exactly called NTLM a secure form of authentication, or even a remotely well designed one. Plus that means you need to expose all the overly complex rpc and netbios services to the network, and there really is a whole mess of code implementing those functions. Plenty of scope for more security vulnerabilities to be found in those thousands of lines of code.
On the other hand, SSH is relatively small, it's authentication and encryption is tried and tested, so you only expose a relatively small footprint to the network. Anything else can be piped over it, and done in the same way it would have been done locally.
Re:Win98 interface, obsoleted but hardly gone...
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Pimp Your XP
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· Score: 1
They werent so much logical places, you were just used to where to find them... The windows 98 interface was terrible, that said, xp and vista are actually worse. No multiple workspaces, klunky window list at the bottom of the screen (completely breaks down when you have loads of apps open), inconsistent keyboard shortcuts (in a dos window or other terminal based app ctrl+c is interrupt, in a gui app it's cut). It's designed for people who want to run one app at once, shut it down and then select another. The start menu is also horrendous, programs/$VENDORNAME/$PROGRAMNAME/$PROGRAM is terrible (although this isnt really microsoft's fault) i often forget the vendor name and spend ages looking for a program... Programs should be split into categories according to what they do, like kde does.
I believe that's exactly what most cybercafes do... They take a cut of the profit, and let strangers poke at their windows boxes... And they always end up diseased.
Re:If only there was...
on
Pimp Your XP
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· Score: 1
Windows 2000 and all later versions have been capable of translucency, i believe it's even hardware accelerated... You just need a program to turn it on, because very few programs use it by default.
Re:That's all very well...
on
Pimp Your XP
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· Score: 1
Run the 64bit version of XP... that has plenty of hardware incompatibilities to go round.
SPF breaks "vanity forwarding" as described in that site, but surely if *you* set up a forwarding service you can whitelist or special case that service, since the forwarding service will only be sending mail to you. If you configure it as a forwarding service on your mailserver, and you trust that service, then your mailserver can compare the spf records against the headers added by the forwarding service instead of the actual address the connection came from.
Now i run an ISP with a large number of customer domains, so it's in my interest to minimise the number of forgeries.
SPF may have its flaws, but its easy to implement for your domain and significantly cuts down on the forged mail purporting to come from your domain.
Domainkeys on the other hand, requires you to append a signature to every outbound mail in order to be effective. This would require me to modify my outbound mailserver, in itself not a serious problem. I would also need a patch that supports multiple private keys, since my outbound servers support multiple domains. Then we have users who sometimes use other servers for sending mail, for instance i have several hosting customers who use their own isp's local server to send mail because their isp blocks outbound port 25 connections (to prevent spam drones). The only way i could get round this, is to run an smtp server on a nonstandard port for them to use, but try explaining that to end users. Then you have things like blackberry users, who use their telco's blackberry service to send mail from their domain. I doubt it will be easy to get their telco to add domainkeys support and their own private key to their outbound mail servers.
Well, as new sites and servers are created you'd assume that new dns records would be created for them too, so while your there editing your dns records you can update the spf too.
All previous version of UT came out for linux as well, usually on the same media too. You think 2007 will? Or will they drop linux support? If it still supports linux, then thats one more reason vista is unnecessary.
And like all the versions of Civ before it, there will be a mac version.... If you really want to buy a computer to play civ5, get a mac. I run civ4 very nicely on mine
This is actually perfectly reasonable and useful, unlike the NT4 cert that required the network be disconnected... Most important government systems are on their own networks, and sit inside datacenters where only a small subset of authorized staff have physical access.
The police exist to protect the people, not business... They should concentrate on crimes that affect the people, and put crimes that only affect the profit margins of business on the back burner, especially when, in the case of copyright infringement, there are no direct losses. Who's to say how many of the pirate copies would have resulted in actual sales anyway? A business can afford to lose a few thousand dollars of sales, but the average guy on the street cant afford to lose his $200 TV. Similarly, violent crime can result in people being killed or injured, copyright infringement doesnt. The job of the police is to protect and serve (the people), the primary goal should be to protect the people from crime that directly harms them. If anything, the police should be spending far less time dealing with copyright infringement cases, and more time catching pedophiles and the like. If big business doesnt like it, then they can donate large sums of money to the police so that they have sufficient resources to deal with serious crimes, and then some resources left over to help corporations keep their profits high.
Come up with something that can't be easily/affordably cloned (like a hardware product), or: Sell my easily cloned product at such a price point that it wouldnt be financially viable to undercut it.
But you dont even need to steal the signature... If you stole the card, then you have a copy of it right there on the back. If you cloned the card there is no signature, so you just make one up yourself. Not that merchants ever compare what you write on the receipt to the back of the card. At least with a pin, you need to get it correct or the transaction fails (tho in some cases they will assume you forgot your pin and default back to a signature anyway)
Entering a PIN has been required in mainland europe for a long time, and in the UK for the past couple of years... It's much better than a signature, but still not foolproof... Many people do not cover their hand as they enter their pin, and it's possible for a bad merchant (or one of their staff) to modify or replace the pin terminal. With a stolen card, it's not hard to clone an approximation of the signature on the back, and since noone's signature ever looks the same twice it's easy to get merchants to accept it. And that assumes the merchant even looks at the back of the card... At the few places i've had to sign a transaction recently, i simply made a random mark which never looked anything like the other random mark on the back of the card. With a cloned card it's even easier, just sign the back of it yourself before you start abusing it.
In all honesty, a signature is a completely useless and redundant method. I get asked to sign stuff (forms etc) all the time, and always do it completely randomly, or in some cases ask someone else to do it for me. Noone ever notices or cares.
But if your product can be so easily copied, then your business model is flawed... It will only work at all with government interference to prop up your flawed business model. In a purely open market, you'd be forced to compete hard.
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Actually, a small portion of the license fee goes to ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5...
Also, while advertising mostly pays for the programming on these channels, the actual broadcast infrastructure is funded by the license payer. All the terrestrial/freeview channels are transmitted over the same physical infrastructure, through the same masts etc.
Actually, all we know for sure is that they added new features to it (the ability to run on xp) or fixed a bug depending how you look at it.
They could have done this with a legitimately purchased version.
I know a lot of people who buy legitimate games but run them all with nocd cracks.
Because catering for the masses is most profitable.
Producing a high end product that costs more to produce but only nets you an additional 2-3% revenue isnt worth it, especially if you sell the higher quality version at a corresponding higher price, which could result in you alienating more of the average users than the number of high end users you gain.
And then having to explain that to end users..
It also doesn't help users of mobile devices who have to use the telco's outbound mailserver, with SPF i can add the telco's mailserver to the allowed list easily.
"Correction: It exists because people are cheap, and will pay exactly zero if they can get away with it. I like your post, it's full of missteps I see often in slashdot posts. For instance:"
Yes, people will pay zero if they can get away with it - Welcome to capitalism.
"The expense ISN'T in the distribution. It's in the initial production but recouped at distribution time."
And there you have a flawed business model, that simply cannot exist in an open market.
"So only physical things have value? Anything that can be copied easily has a value of zero? Please, go tell all the artists and production companies out there that their work is worthless, please."
Yes, welcome to capitalism.
Artists have existed for thousands of years, long before it was even possible to make recordings of music or live performances, and they got along just fine. They actually had to work for their money, rather than producing one work and reaping benefit from it endlessly. Very few people got into it for the money, they got into it because they enjoyed making music, or acting. And many of their works are still being enjoyed today, and reproduced freely... Just look at shakespeare.
The artificial ability to perform once, and make millions of dollars selling copies of that performance attracts lazy and greedy individuals who have little or no talent, and no real passion for anything other than the acquisition of money. Stop letting such people have an easy ride, and support the real artists who want to perform and have you enjoy their performance.
As for cinemas being a bad environment, there you have an opportunity, go make a better cinema.
American idol is different, television works differently, and you can make recordings from your television to watch later anyway. Television provides entertainment, and intersperses this with advertisements that pay for the TV company to acquire the content. If the content were cheaper, you could have more movies and less ads. TV also provides useful services like news.
Infact, many movies make all their money from being sold to various TV stations, they dont get sold on DVD nor shown in a cinema.
If your in a position to MITM, you can often force the clients down to using LM auth unless that's been explicitely disabled...
It's also very poorly documented, most third party implementations of ntlm suffer from several common misunderstandings of the protocol, which are sometimes exploitable.
Arent the windows "ipsec" policies just filtering rules? Or do they actually encrypt/authenticate the traffic in some way? Either way, i've hardly ever seen anyone bother.
As for the hashing, it's relatively weak and fast to crack compared to other comparable authentication methods, it's unsalted for instance which is why rainbow tables work.
It's been going on for a lot longer than that, actually...
A lot of games on the Amiga required code wheels or that you entered some text from a particular point in the game's manual... Being a kid, i often lost the manual or the codewheel in amongst all the other junk i had, so i quickly found out that pirate copies didn't suffer from this inconvenience.
Similarly, floppies would easily get damaged, so i always made backups for my own use, some copy protected games prevented me from doing that so if i damaged the disks i lost the game, again pirate copies never prevented me making backup copies (and the replacement cost was lower anyway).
Finally, games that could be installed to HD but still required that you have the original media, completely defeat the purpose of installing to HD... It also makes such games impractical for me to play on my laptop (i work away a lot, and like to keep some games installed to play when im sitting in a hotel bored)... Again, nocd cracks help me here, while legitimate buyers suffer.
I would buy games, but as a pirate i get a better experience.
Oh, and games that rely on an online subscription to be playable should be downloadable for free, or obtainable for nominal cost... It makes no sense to rip people off on buying the media when you need to buy an ongoing subscription anyway, and giving the game away with a nominal single player "practice" mode but needing a subscription to be fully playable might encourage users... Especially if you can offer a short term subscription, to see if you like it.
I wont plunk down full price for world of warcraft on the off chance i might enjoy it, but i'd be perfectly happy to pay for a month's subscription. If i dont like it, i can cancel it.
"Because for the first time, virtually any copyrighted work can be perfectly copied at the click of a button, and distributed with close to zero effort. Without DRM, you could make a fully perfect copy of an HD movie in less than an hour. Prior to mass-market digital technology, it took a lot of time and/or a lot of money to make a copy of something, and that copy was almost certainly going to be of lesser quality, and distribution beyond people you have physical contact with was quite expensive and/or time consuming."
So your saying that, new technology exists which makes distribution of content much cheaper...
And yet content producers want to charge the same or more for this cheaper to distribute content? While also restricting the customer more than they did with earlier distrbution methods? It looks like their business model is becoming obsolete, and theyre just trying to shore it up by restricting their own customers.
Why not sell a product/service that cannot be easily reproduced, such that your actually providing value for money... Movies shown in a cinema spring to mind, the cost of a cinema size screen and sound system is beyond the means of most people. And then there's live concerts for music.
You cant clone a live concert, because you cannot produce exact replicas of the artists (yet?) and the cost of setting up a bootleg cinema would be too high to be worth the hassle.
If you want to sell movies on dvd, they need to be priced such that copying them is not viable, and yes that is possible. Movie companies have access to factories where DVDs are mass produced at a cost of 1 or 2 cents each, no pirate group would be able to obtain blank media that cheaply, let alone the time and effort needed to write to it.
In short, piracy only exists because the original media is disproportionately priced compared to its production cost. DRM exists not as a solution to piracy, but as a method to wring more money out of their paying customers.
I wouldnt exactly called NTLM a secure form of authentication, or even a remotely well designed one.
Plus that means you need to expose all the overly complex rpc and netbios services to the network, and there really is a whole mess of code implementing those functions. Plenty of scope for more security vulnerabilities to be found in those thousands of lines of code.
On the other hand, SSH is relatively small, it's authentication and encryption is tried and tested, so you only expose a relatively small footprint to the network. Anything else can be piped over it, and done in the same way it would have been done locally.
They werent so much logical places, you were just used to where to find them...
The windows 98 interface was terrible, that said, xp and vista are actually worse. No multiple workspaces, klunky window list at the bottom of the screen (completely breaks down when you have loads of apps open), inconsistent keyboard shortcuts (in a dos window or other terminal based app ctrl+c is interrupt, in a gui app it's cut). It's designed for people who want to run one app at once, shut it down and then select another.
The start menu is also horrendous, programs/$VENDORNAME/$PROGRAMNAME/$PROGRAM is terrible (although this isnt really microsoft's fault) i often forget the vendor name and spend ages looking for a program... Programs should be split into categories according to what they do, like kde does.
I believe that's exactly what most cybercafes do...
They take a cut of the profit, and let strangers poke at their windows boxes... And they always end up diseased.
Windows 2000 and all later versions have been capable of translucency, i believe it's even hardware accelerated... You just need a program to turn it on, because very few programs use it by default.
Run the 64bit version of XP... that has plenty of hardware incompatibilities to go round.
SPF breaks "vanity forwarding" as described in that site, but surely if *you* set up a forwarding service you can whitelist or special case that service, since the forwarding service will only be sending mail to you. If you configure it as a forwarding service on your mailserver, and you trust that service, then your mailserver can compare the spf records against the headers added by the forwarding service instead of the actual address the connection came from.
Now i run an ISP with a large number of customer domains, so it's in my interest to minimise the number of forgeries.
SPF may have its flaws, but its easy to implement for your domain and significantly cuts down on the forged mail purporting to come from your domain.
Domainkeys on the other hand, requires you to append a signature to every outbound mail in order to be effective. This would require me to modify my outbound mailserver, in itself not a serious problem. I would also need a patch that supports multiple private keys, since my outbound servers support multiple domains.
Then we have users who sometimes use other servers for sending mail, for instance i have several hosting customers who use their own isp's local server to send mail because their isp blocks outbound port 25 connections (to prevent spam drones). The only way i could get round this, is to run an smtp server on a nonstandard port for them to use, but try explaining that to end users.
Then you have things like blackberry users, who use their telco's blackberry service to send mail from their domain. I doubt it will be easy to get their telco to add domainkeys support and their own private key to their outbound mail servers.
Well, as new sites and servers are created you'd assume that new dns records would be created for them too, so while your there editing your dns records you can update the spf too.
All previous version of UT came out for linux as well, usually on the same media too. You think 2007 will? Or will they drop linux support?
If it still supports linux, then thats one more reason vista is unnecessary.
And like all the versions of Civ before it, there will be a mac version.... If you really want to buy a computer to play civ5, get a mac. I run civ4 very nicely on mine
try taspring, it's very similar and has a supreme commander type mod i think...
This is actually perfectly reasonable and useful, unlike the NT4 cert that required the network be disconnected...
Most important government systems are on their own networks, and sit inside datacenters where only a small subset of authorized staff have physical access.
He was running a genuine copy of Ubuntu Linux, no pirated software on his box...
The police exist to protect the people, not business...
They should concentrate on crimes that affect the people, and put crimes that only affect the profit margins of business on the back burner, especially when, in the case of copyright infringement, there are no direct losses. Who's to say how many of the pirate copies would have resulted in actual sales anyway?
A business can afford to lose a few thousand dollars of sales, but the average guy on the street cant afford to lose his $200 TV. Similarly, violent crime can result in people being killed or injured, copyright infringement doesnt.
The job of the police is to protect and serve (the people), the primary goal should be to protect the people from crime that directly harms them.
If anything, the police should be spending far less time dealing with copyright infringement cases, and more time catching pedophiles and the like. If big business doesnt like it, then they can donate large sums of money to the police so that they have sufficient resources to deal with serious crimes, and then some resources left over to help corporations keep their profits high.
Come up with something that can't be easily/affordably cloned (like a hardware product), or:
Sell my easily cloned product at such a price point that it wouldnt be financially viable to undercut it.
But you dont even need to steal the signature...
If you stole the card, then you have a copy of it right there on the back.
If you cloned the card there is no signature, so you just make one up yourself.
Not that merchants ever compare what you write on the receipt to the back of the card.
At least with a pin, you need to get it correct or the transaction fails (tho in some cases they will assume you forgot your pin and default back to a signature anyway)
Entering a PIN has been required in mainland europe for a long time, and in the UK for the past couple of years...
It's much better than a signature, but still not foolproof... Many people do not cover their hand as they enter their pin, and it's possible for a bad merchant (or one of their staff) to modify or replace the pin terminal.
With a stolen card, it's not hard to clone an approximation of the signature on the back, and since noone's signature ever looks the same twice it's easy to get merchants to accept it. And that assumes the merchant even looks at the back of the card... At the few places i've had to sign a transaction recently, i simply made a random mark which never looked anything like the other random mark on the back of the card.
With a cloned card it's even easier, just sign the back of it yourself before you start abusing it.
In all honesty, a signature is a completely useless and redundant method. I get asked to sign stuff (forms etc) all the time, and always do it completely randomly, or in some cases ask someone else to do it for me. Noone ever notices or cares.
But if your product can be so easily copied, then your business model is flawed... It will only work at all with government interference to prop up your flawed business model. In a purely open market, you'd be forced to compete hard.