However, it might be illegal: in Canada we pay a levy on all recordable media which goes towards paying artists for copies of music made (even if you use the disc for data!).
Not only that, but more fundamental (and I wish people would bring this up more often) -- this service violates Fair Use in Copyright law. Sure, the material I purchase is copyrighted but by introducing platform, client, and copy/burn quotas my rights under Fair Use are being taken away.
As far as I'm concerned, DRM format pay-for-music services are in the same boat as copy protected CDs (with all sorts of media errors and other weird glitches trying to prevent copying) -- they are BROKEN products that violate my right to freely make copies for personal use.
"Puretracks.com is available to Canadian residents only."
Not that I (a Canadian) will be using it. That is, not until they provide media files that I can copy and listen in any place, unrestricted. There must be no platform dependence or stupid client software requirements. I'm paying for the music after all...
I was pretty impressed by ftp.mozilla.org, although you don't get your download immediately a better client (like wget) will retry the different IP addresses available in the pool. These are the hosts in ftp.mozilla.org. Kudos to these universities, and the ISC for contributing their bandwidth...
I run my own small business (let's me run things however the fuck I want to)... and I wanted to point out that curses etc in emails etc can be useful because they are part of language! Filter them out, and you lose some meaning or emotion in the communication.
For instance, if I get an email from a customer telling me: "your software is fucking terrible!" then I know this is really bad. If I read instead, "your software is gosh darn poor" then this carries somewhat less force.
You see what I'm getting at? There's nothing innately bad about certain words. Jesus doesn't have a mini-stroke whenever he hears someone mouth off. So I prefer to read unadulterated text if I can.
Since students and academic folk are poor anyway, and nobody wants to steal from Microsoft, tell others at your school or university about OpenOffice.org.
I've convinced a couple professors to link to the projects from their web page. Hell, I learned about OpenOffice from school myself. It's a great place to spread awareness of this Office alternative.
It's nice to increasingly see these types of news stories reported in the media. It impresses upon people the cost of spam -- administrative expense, increased bandwidth usage, lost productivity, etc.
Yet would you believe that spammers themselves think they're not doing anything wrong? Many of them, like this guy think they're legitimate business people. They think there is nothing immoral, destructive, or un-neighborly about spam.
And you think it's just a weird coincidence that virus traffic and spam are both on the rise? This lends more credibility to the growing concern among mail administrators, myself included, that spammers are setting up major worldwide spam injection networks using viruses.
Microsoft currently has complete market dominance over Office products, but excellent alternatives do exist. Tell your friends and coworkers about them!
OpenOffice.org is completely free, and has the word processor, spreadsheet, draw, presentation etc. you'll need to get the same functionality as MS Office. It also loads MS files quite well, even PowerPoint. This is the only office product I use for all my educational and business needs.
Corel WordPerfect Office is also a great product, and even has a downloadable trial version. I've always thought WordPerfect is one of the best word processors out there because of its reveal codes feature...
At my university, I've convinced several professors to mention OpenOffice on their web pages so students know that free office products do exist -- and OpenOffice can make PDFs, too. Now MS can be happy too because people no longer need to steal copies of their product!
Check out this draft of a distributed server blocklist system. Spammers are increasingly using P2P technology to gain a one-up on the spam fighters; they use a distributed base from which to launch spam and DDoS attacks against popular blocklists such as monkeys.com, SPEWS, and relays.osirusoft.com.
The dhttp-bl system as described could use a secure and easily deployable P2P system to establish strong blacklists/blocklists that are not vulnerable to DDoS attacks.
Ah, but what happens when your ISP won't let you? I live on campus at my college, but use my email address from my ISP at home.
This is again covered. The page that explains to admins how to set up their domains for this type of anti-spoof protection also instructs them to set up SMTP AUTH(entication). This protocol allows a client, from any networ, to authenticate itself to the ISP and say "I'm your customer". The ISP's mail server will then accept your mail.
I have cable. I also run my own mail server. If that's implemented, then no mail server will receive my mail because my residential cable IP won't be allowed to send mail from my ISP's netblock
Not really. First, mail servers likely won't accept/reject mail solely on this criteria. This SPF compliance metric will just join many other anti-abuse metrics already employed.
Second, if you run your domain there is no problem to begin with. The receiving mail server will look up your personal domain name and probably find no SPF record to begin with. End of story.
The only problem might be if you want to use your mail server to send messages using your ISP's domain as the sender's field. Now that might indeed look like abuse. The solution would be to send mail carrying your ISP's domain name through your ISP's mail server.
I remember reading about this system "back in the day" when it was just a gleam in some nerd's eye. It is a good idea, from the perspective of protecting YOUR OWN domain from being abused. Doesn't mean you still won't get spam that abuses other domains that don't use this technology.
As someone who hosts my sites from a dynamic IP address, I certainly hope this system can be dynamic-IP friendly... I would like to protect my own little domain as much as I can.
Between that and bottle-rocket wars, it's a wonder one of us didn't lose an eye.
We've got a friend (we call him bottle rocket Brian) who had a bottle rocket go off in a beer bottle he was holding at the time. The explosive fell inside the bottle and went off in his hand, cutting his face rather badly. He has scars, but is fine. Don't drink and fire off explosives!
It all has to do with companies and industry associations getting too large, monopolistic, and powerful. The RIAA, MPAA etc. have a powerful government lobby and are big backers of the DMCA.
So I'd say the problem is that industry associations are being allowed to become too powerful, and are being allowed to influence our (let's face it, weak) governments.
But you know what's going to happen, and I'm going to just laugh and laugh when the shit hits the fan... while the US and EU can no longer innovate in technology, because industries are making anything even remotely interesting "illegal"... Asia is going to completely take over technology, and the western economy is going to suffer.
Anti-spammers figured out what's going on this summer (see news.admin.net-abuse.email). These numerous Windows worms we're seeing are in fact trial software deployments (funded by major spammers) that are in the process of setting up an anonymous, distributed worldwide spam injection network.
You may mistakenly believe, as I did in the past, that spammers are just a bunch of unemployed losers that sit around late night bulk mailing ads for scams. It turns out that in fact they're well funded losers engaged in such a lucrative industry that they can afford to hire good programmers.
The series of windows worms we've seen this year had preset expiry dates -- ending each of the carefully released wild tests. The most recent versions (swen) have very efficient SMTP engines built-in; these are not amateur projects.
Thanks to Microsoft's monopoly of operating systems, spammers can easily deploy software around the world that relays spam. swen demonstrated the power of this software; many people were DDoS'd off the net. I alone received over 40,000 emails carrying the worm.
There's a frequent mistake made by techies/geeks/hobbyists -- they might think that a company is guided by altruism. But when all's said and done, company decisions are motivated by profit. The primary concern is for money and the potential to make more money.
IBM may certainly do things along the way that benefit society and community, and they should be applauded for such actions.
They also boosted the memory limitation of Notepad so that it can open files larger than 60 kilobytes
That limitation was due to the inherent maximum capacity of 'edit controls' (64 K) in the Win95 stream of operating systems. Windows NT 4.0, though as old as Windows 95, never had such Notepad limitations.
I hope this doesn't have the "Digital Audio" logo on it, which would incorrectly imply that this is in fact an Audio CD. Such discs violate Philips' RedBook (Audio CD) format
If you buy a CD and discover some sort of idiotic copy protection on it, return it to your vendor as DEFECTIVE. If the product claims to be an Audio CD and has copy protection in the form of encryption, unreadable tracks, etc. it is violating the specification and is defective.
Either that, or false advertising. Either way it's grounds for making a complaint and getting your money back (I have done this at Future Shop, had to see the Manager).
But we love Apple's iTunes $.99 a song deal, and most of us intellies are probably yearning for such a service for windows/linux. well guess what - that requires DRM
I disagree. Services that offer you high quality music downloads DO NOT require DRM -- that's just what we're being lead to believe by the commercial music industry lobby. They are making it law that these things require DRM; this is why I'm really resenting this new shift.
They will keep lobbying government and spreading heir advertising, and eventually people will believe that yes they need DRM in order to "properly" view videos, listen to music, and read documents.
However all of us know that right now we do not require any sort of digital 'rights' management in order to enjoy any of these forms of media. I still firmly believe that there is nothing illegal about making casual copies of media.
Every place you would ever refer to "trusted" computing, use the phrase "restricted computing" instead.
I like this idea: it's both technically accurate (after all, we currently have unfettered digital rights) and has the ability to make an impression on the general public. Read up on restricted computing (that page has lots of references), and also read this description to learn about some of the implications of placing ultimate trust in (whose?) hands.
I don't particularly care what Linus thinks. As both a Windows and UNIX programmer, an Electrical Engineer, and an academic I think that in the long term 'trusted computing' will prove to be to the detriment of society. Here's a nice reference so you can read up on the issue.
We can all help spread awarenes sof what's going. I suggest emailing your friends and getting this simple message across:
"Digital Rights Management" offers the end user, or consumer no real advantage. They will NOT see more functionality by installing D/RM; in fact they will see
less functionality. There is nothing 'broken' with their computer.
In fact, the scary part might be... not only is their computer not broken, but PCs today might be much more functional than those of 10 years in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but more fundamental (and I wish people would bring this up more often) -- this service violates Fair Use in Copyright law. Sure, the material I purchase is copyrighted but by introducing platform, client, and copy/burn quotas my rights under Fair Use are being taken away.
As far as I'm concerned, DRM format pay-for-music services are in the same boat as copy protected CDs (with all sorts of media errors and other weird glitches trying to prevent copying) -- they are BROKEN products that violate my right to freely make copies for personal use.I run my own small business (let's me run things however the fuck I want to)... and I wanted to point out that curses etc in emails etc can be useful because they are part of language! Filter them out, and you lose some meaning or emotion in the communication.
For instance, if I get an email from a customer telling me: "your software is fucking terrible!" then I know this is really bad. If I read instead, "your software is gosh darn poor" then this carries somewhat less force.
You see what I'm getting at? There's nothing innately bad about certain words. Jesus doesn't have a mini-stroke whenever he hears someone mouth off. So I prefer to read unadulterated text if I can.
Since students and academic folk are poor anyway, and nobody wants to steal from Microsoft, tell others at your school or university about OpenOffice.org.
I've convinced a couple professors to link to the projects from their web page. Hell, I learned about OpenOffice from school myself. It's a great place to spread awareness of this Office alternative.
It's nice to increasingly see these types of news stories reported in the media. It impresses upon people the cost of spam -- administrative expense, increased bandwidth usage, lost productivity, etc.
Yet would you believe that spammers themselves think they're not doing anything wrong? Many of them, like this guy think they're legitimate business people. They think there is nothing immoral, destructive, or un-neighborly about spam.
And you think it's just a weird coincidence that virus traffic and spam are both on the rise? This lends more credibility to the growing concern among mail administrators, myself included, that spammers are setting up major worldwide spam injection networks using viruses.
Microsoft currently has complete market dominance over Office products, but excellent alternatives do exist. Tell your friends and coworkers about them!
- OpenOffice.org is completely free, and has the word processor, spreadsheet, draw, presentation etc. you'll need to get the same functionality as MS Office. It also loads MS files quite well, even PowerPoint. This is the only office product I use for all my educational and business needs.
- Corel WordPerfect Office is also a great product, and even has a downloadable trial version. I've always thought WordPerfect is one of the best word processors out there because of its reveal codes feature...
At my university, I've convinced several professors to mention OpenOffice on their web pages so students know that free office products do exist -- and OpenOffice can make PDFs, too. Now MS can be happy too because people no longer need to steal copies of their product!What a land we live in... we're all free, so long as we're not suspected of being against the government. Fantastic.
i.e. we ain't free peeps, sorry.Check out this draft of a distributed server blocklist system. Spammers are increasingly using P2P technology to gain a one-up on the spam fighters; they use a distributed base from which to launch spam and DDoS attacks against popular blocklists such as monkeys.com, SPEWS, and relays.osirusoft.com.
The dhttp-bl system as described could use a secure and easily deployable P2P system to establish strong blacklists/blocklists that are not vulnerable to DDoS attacks.
Not really. First, mail servers likely won't accept/reject mail solely on this criteria. This SPF compliance metric will just join many other anti-abuse metrics already employed.
Second, if you run your domain there is no problem to begin with. The receiving mail server will look up your personal domain name and probably find no SPF record to begin with. End of story.
The only problem might be if you want to use your mail server to send messages using your ISP's domain as the sender's field. Now that might indeed look like abuse. The solution would be to send mail carrying your ISP's domain name through your ISP's mail server.
I remember reading about this system "back in the day" when it was just a gleam in some nerd's eye. It is a good idea, from the perspective of protecting YOUR OWN domain from being abused. Doesn't mean you still won't get spam that abuses other domains that don't use this technology.
As someone who hosts my sites from a dynamic IP address, I certainly hope this system can be dynamic-IP friendly... I would like to protect my own little domain as much as I can.
If only there was a service I could pay $15 for a download of the movie (~800 MB divx) off fast, reliable servers...
Did you know that "Duke Nukem" character in the PC game "Duke Nukem 3D" was based on Bruce Campbell's Evil Dead character? "Hail to the king, baby!"
Of course, Bruce Campbell was in the classic Army of Darkness too!!
It all has to do with companies and industry associations getting too large, monopolistic, and powerful. The RIAA, MPAA etc. have a powerful government lobby and are big backers of the DMCA.
So I'd say the problem is that industry associations are being allowed to become too powerful, and are being allowed to influence our (let's face it, weak) governments.
But you know what's going to happen, and I'm going to just laugh and laugh when the shit hits the fan... while the US and EU can no longer innovate in technology, because industries are making anything even remotely interesting "illegal"... Asia is going to completely take over technology, and the western economy is going to suffer.
Anti-spammers figured out what's going on this summer (see news.admin.net-abuse.email). These numerous Windows worms we're seeing are in fact trial software deployments (funded by major spammers) that are in the process of setting up an anonymous, distributed worldwide spam injection network.
You may mistakenly believe, as I did in the past, that spammers are just a bunch of unemployed losers that sit around late night bulk mailing ads for scams. It turns out that in fact they're well funded losers engaged in such a lucrative industry that they can afford to hire good programmers.
The series of windows worms we've seen this year had preset expiry dates -- ending each of the carefully released wild tests. The most recent versions (swen) have very efficient SMTP engines built-in; these are not amateur projects.
Thanks to Microsoft's monopoly of operating systems, spammers can easily deploy software around the world that relays spam. swen demonstrated the power of this software; many people were DDoS'd off the net. I alone received over 40,000 emails carrying the worm.
Except an all-out-spamwar to break out in 2004.
There's a frequent mistake made by techies/geeks/hobbyists -- they might think that a company is guided by altruism. But when all's said and done, company decisions are motivated by profit. The primary concern is for money and the potential to make more money.
IBM may certainly do things along the way that benefit society and community, and they should be applauded for such actions.
I hope this doesn't have the "Digital Audio" logo on it, which would incorrectly imply that this is in fact an Audio CD. Such discs violate Philips' RedBook (Audio CD) format
If you buy a CD and discover some sort of idiotic copy protection on it, return it to your vendor as DEFECTIVE. If the product claims to be an Audio CD and has copy protection in the form of encryption, unreadable tracks, etc. it is violating the specification and is defective.
Either that, or false advertising. Either way it's grounds for making a complaint and getting your money back (I have done this at Future Shop, had to see the Manager).
I disagree. Services that offer you high quality music downloads DO NOT require DRM -- that's just what we're being lead to believe by the commercial music industry lobby. They are making it law that these things require DRM; this is why I'm really resenting this new shift.
They will keep lobbying government and spreading heir advertising, and eventually people will believe that yes they need DRM in order to "properly" view videos, listen to music, and read documents.
However all of us know that right now we do not require any sort of digital 'rights' management in order to enjoy any of these forms of media. I still firmly believe that there is nothing illegal about making casual copies of media.