Well, I'm sure you already have it in mind, but keep an eye out for any arguments you can raise that will haunt them in future cases. They'll either fight them vigorously or cut their losses and run, I suspect.
Not that you haven't already done that. You may see it as ordinary, but even things as simple as recovering those legal fees made them try to flee from that one case, so I have to consider that at least somewhat clever, without the insidious tone that word might take when applied to some of their tactics... Anyhow, it's my thinking that the more such things you can pile against them, the better, both for your current clients and the future clients I hope you never have to represent (due to the RIAA not suing people, that is--I hope your practice itself does well).
I didn't mean anything unethical by "maneuvers", BTW. I know you wouldn't so much as consider such things from everything of yours I've seen so far. I rather had in mind ordinary things like discrediting the processes by which they currently gather "evidence" so that they actually do something resembling what I think of as due diligence from a technical perspective. Or perhaps clever means to counter their more insidious dirty legal tricks.
The idea being to make sure they sue only those people whose infringement they can reliably prove, instead of grabbing random IPs they think are suspicious, following a dubious trail, and suing whoever it leads them to even if that makes no sense at all without considering whether they might have misinterpreted anything along the way.
Well, SCO gets around things like that by "accidentally" posting improperly redacted documents and then quickly withdrawing them, but I know you're the honest type of lawyer, not the other sort. Moreover, it doesn't even seem to help SCO because absolutely no one appears to care what that stupid email or whatever they want to leak says, even if they seem to be getting away with it:] Frankly, I feel it's more likely to blow smoke and cover up a few things they might have leaked to certain media types Groklaw already thoroughly discredited the reporting of...
Instead, I wonder. I don't suppose you'd be able to use your knowledge in future cases versus them? For example, offering to assist whoever their attorney is in some way so as to import your knowledge into it without having to actually disclose what you know to anyone else. Or are there ethical rules against such things that I wouldn't know about? I'm sure that such things have been thought up before, though, so there probably is some rule regarding that.
On a completely different tact, if their arguments can be shown to be frivolous, is the hope of sanction very high? I suspect not, given just how much rope I've seen extended to SCO that they may hang themselves with it, even if lately they have at least been required to pay something back via estoppel. I wish you the best of luck in using such maneuvers against them--I know you've already done a few things like that which gave them pause whereas losing any individual case would not:]
Can you subpoena MediaSentry directly then? I suppose you know the legal process far better than I do, but we both can see them squirming here and I don't doubt that we both have a bad gut feeling. I have this feeling that some of your answers may lie in subpoenas against third parties (e.g. the ISP, etc.), too.
Maybe I've been watching too many detective shows of late, but a strange idea occurs to me with their contract and wanting it to be privileged... What if MediaSentry is paid a percentage of how much the RIAA makes from litigation?
In theory, that might raise some ethical issues if something like that got out. Sure, that's only speculation, but if it were something like that, I can't imagine it playing well in front of a jury even supposing it to be 100% ethical and legal in the eyes of the Court.
They're just playing so many dirty tricks here by my reckoning... I can't help but wonder if there aren't a few ways you can do to make prosecution more difficult for them in the future. I guess you're doing some of that now; I remember at least one time they were chided by a judge for defrauding the state of proper filing fees by bringing a ton of subpoenas at the same ISP all in one bundle, etc. I liked that argument--I think that the type of judge who might not care that the defendant feels terrorized by lawsuits might still listen if it were the state being defrauded.
Conversely, I'd be fearful of the reverse--not being able to get a good expert witness to counter them and having them bamboozle some tech-clueless judge into thinking that their infringement detection programs are infallible such that their conclusions can just be rubber stamped in the future.
Of course, I'm sure they're savvy to such things, so I have to worry... Please be your most careful in legal research and process; I fear you're up against some real bastards who won't give you any quarter. I've seen too many such things in the unrelated cases brought by BS&F on behalf of SCO:/
As for the software, yes, it's total BS. There's no way any sensible person can trust unaudited software. If you have the time, software talent, and a clear screenshot that exposes enough of its functionality, it probably wouldn't be difficult to make a sham version of the program (and not just the screenshots) that pretends to do anything you want. It would be awesome if you could demonstrate something like that in front of the court (and even better, GPL a copy of the sham program).
Even if they're not using it to lie, though, I can certainly imagine plenty of reasons you'd be better off not knowing why they won't want to make anything about it public. If I'm right, please do your utmost to get every possible scrap of information into the public record. It will help to undermine their reign of terror.
> The typical Slashdot poster scarcely understands the distinction between civil and criminal law. Rules of Evidence? The conduct of pre-trial dispositions? The impeachment of expert witnesses? Give me a break.
He needs technical advice about where the weak points of the technical testimony lie. Technical matters are our turf, making use of them is his.
The very foundation that there has been sharing at all is shaky (screenshots? a letter from the ISP with NO indication of what process & software they use or how they identify the accounts??? come on!). I suppose they use some custom software, and they want us to just trust them when they stand to gain a lot from suing people from infringement, but we have no source code, no idea what their network setup is like, etc.?
Others have questioned his belief that there wasn't a wireless router in the way. A good point would be to find out about *their* network architecture and see if that could've changed anything, too. I wouldn't take their word for anything, nor assume that any bit of their technical analysis was any good. Especially not if he's just some old DOS guru in the days of Windows. Windows networking has long had screwball elements to it of various sorts.
There's the question of what basis the RIAA has for going after this lady's son. What makes them think it had to be a relative, instead of a neighbor for example? If it's not him, do they have a right to go after everyone who's visited her that month!? Just where does that line of reasoning end? (Okay, that's more of a legal question, but it's certainly one I'd wave in front of the judge! Hopefully they won't just allow them to beat down all the doors in the neighborhood looking for infringers.)
So I guess the problem is that this matter crosses lines. He needs our technical help. We need his legal help. So let's work together here?
At least some of us technical geek types read both here & Groklaw thanks to SCO's escapades.
I may have helped draw at least some over there, with all those stories about SCO I summarized from Groklaw and posted here back at the peak of things, although Groklaw was already very well-established by then:]
Information assurance? Well, there's something right there. First, go over his published work. Now compare the standards he writes of for this assurance to what the RIAA has actually done.
I'll give you 99.9% odds that the two won't match very well. Given the number of misidentifications the RIAA has already made...
Please note that the more you can manage to require of them in this case, the higher the costs will be for them to persecute people in the future--nothing makes programmers less productive than a whole bunch of crazy legal requirements:]
And like I said before, get him to authenticate inauthentic screenshots. If you can get a digital copy of the file, or just a good programmer/artist to make a mock-up of their application, you shouldn't have much trouble making convincing fakes. Especially if you run them off as photocopies to hide any slight imperfections like the font being misaligned by a few pixels, etc. Just pay attention to quality--you CAN do it perfectly if you try hard enough, but if you don't, you'll use the wrong font, shift it off by a few pixels, etc.
You say that like I don't try to:] I suppose I do straddle the boarders of letting myself get too weighed down by crap, but I get poison ASAP... if I don't die trying. The bigger problem is running out of HP, though I guess that's why you said speed helps.
As for genocide, well, I grant that it's about a half step above cheating, but after polypiling I have abcghmqrtvLMNPRTUVYZ; genocided with that unfinished wizard of mine. I have to think that geno is still a net gain for survivability if you take it far enough:]
The only annoying things about genociding too much are that H & D are great for items (provided you at least have disintegration resist... which isn't too hard for me since I usually have reflection by then with MR from the spare quest artifacts... what? after what I geno'd you can't be surprised to know that I have all the good neutral artifacts courtesy of the castle wand). Having a spare b?genocide isn't a bad escape method, either, in some cases. An uncursed one too, for that matter.
The biggest problem I can see is a somewhat increased chance to meet the nasty &s when there's little else to generate. But that mses of polypiling usually leaves me with inedible corpses and such. Given that I know ID as a wizard, it's not so bad to ID eggs until you find some cockatrice eggs and those damned &s become trivial. Stone + striking and they vanish. Only the three riders remain a challenge at that point... but not so much that I'd wade through 80,000 messages of "The snake misses you." just to avoid genociding a and S by then:]
* Screenshots are unreliable. They're easy to fake. I suggest you have a few fakes on hand. * Thus, the chain of evidence *IS* the evidence and the only evidence. Make sure you know EVERY detail about it. * You can't really prove which person was at the computer without something else to corroborate it, only the owner of the computer.
These are the biggest apparent gaps. You need to know everything about them and to dump as much as you can into the public record for us. You also need to document all the "I don't know" answers, because those will be the ones where you might hurt them the most.
Therefore, you should question him in detail on at least the following points:
* How are the screenshots taken. Who has access to them? What's the chain of evidence? How and where are all of these things stored? Are they stored in a secure manner? How would you know if they were altered? - Make doctored screenshots. Have him "authenticate" the fakes. Bonus points if you do this in front of the jury. Double bonus if the infringing IP is that of riaa.com, sony.com or similar. WARNING: This is a public site. He may VERY well be reading this.
* Describe, in detail, the exact process by which you find those allegedly infringing upon your copyrights. Be methodical. You want to know the exact version of the OS they're running (not just "win XP" or "various"). You want to know EVERY program they use, even if it's MS Paint. You want them to produce the source code of any custom programs for analysis by outside experts. You want to know about any known flaws. You want to see any and all release or design notes, ESPECIALLY any bugs, source/versioning control, changelogs, etc. You want to know which exact version of their custom program found the infringement for this case. That does NOT let them off the hook on letting you examine prior versions or newer versions--old bugs DO stick around even when they've been "fixed" and you need to see both newer and older versions. I.E. if the bug has been fixed twice, you know it was there in the interim. Yes, they may put out protective orders and whatnot, but the more information about this you can get into the public record, the more they'll squirm and the more we'll reveal the sloppiness they're hiding. And I know they have things to hide, unless they're so clueless as not to know their own weaknesses. You can work both alternatives to your advantage.
* Describe how the ISP identifies the person associated with the IP. You may actually have to subpoena the ISP on this point, I suspect they'll just produce the letter and say that that's sufficient. It's not. We both know that even if the IP belonged to a computer using their internet service, they don't have any idea who's at the screen at any given time, only which account is active. And even this may be unreliable. You NEED to get every last detail about how they log the IPs leased out, how they associate them with their customers, where the data is stored, how long it is stored for, who has access to it, on what computers it's stored, how reliable those computers are (e.g. any records of maintenance, program changes or downtime), etc. You're the lawyer here. You know better than I how important being methodical in discovery is, and every detail may be significant. I suspect they'll have trouble producing everything. Records may not exist for some things, but this is also important--every gap is a gap in their chain of evidence. It takes only one broken link to destroy a chain... Get EVERY detail you can from this into the record and make sure it gets sealed or redacted as little as possible. All these details about software, hardware, and the human processes that work with them are of vital importance to us for technical analysis, just like case law, venue and precedents are to your case. Even the programs they don't use directly, like antivirus or firewall software may be important, not to mention the topology of thei
> I am, however, frequently annoyed by their mediocrity, and unbelievably frustrated that someone doesn't have the balls to start a company dedicated to making an absolutely, positively 100%-compatible Windows clone based on a Unix-like operating system.
I wish! Do you have ANY idea what that requires? Okay, so Novell is sorta working in that direction (although they're going to have trouble from both sides), and there's Wine, but we both know that neither of them are going to be able to get past all of the following roadblocks:
A) Non-standard standards. Microsoft doesn't implement any standard correctly. They ARE the de facto "standard" and many bits of hardware / drivers do ugly, nasty just-so things to work with Windows. Even Microsoft can't manage 100% backwards compatibility. Thus, even where things should be standard, they aren't. Worse, half the time the code is the standard, as with Word. My theory of the excessive bloat of Office is that each new version effectively includes most of the code of prior versions for compatibility purposes. And it still doesn't work right. Yes, the OpenOffice folks have done great work. The Samba people have done great work. The Wine people have done great work. But I don't think we can call them 100% (even if their work is probably a better copy than the originals in many respects).
B) Software patents. As others have pointed out, the way these things are described, they patent every way to get from point A to point B. It's not like a machine, where you can rework a few gears or something, when they patent stupid crap like double-clicking you CAN'T do what Microsoft does any more, whether it was obvious or not. Perhaps its only the US that's screwed in this regard for now, but lobbyists are at work even now trying to bring these laws to "parity" (i.e. screw over all the other countries, too). It is my sincere hope that they learn from our mistakes rather than repeating them:( Those in Europe or anywhere else being screwed over by these legal exports have my sincere apologies for this mess.
C) Dirty tricks. If you've read any of the anti-trust trials against Microsoft and read any of the Microsoft emails they were forced to produce in discovery, you might have some idea about how they treat competition. Currently, they're working to divide the Free Software community, working to cause legal problems and hurdles for the software (see point B) including "innocuous" terms like forbidding sub-licensing (prevents a user from transferring the software to others, allows Microsoft to kill such software by cutting off the source at any later time), patent "protection" (again, creates non-transferable legal rights... making it so that the software can be later discontinued), and probably other tricks I don't know of yet.
In other words, Microsoft's manipulation of the market remains as the primary reason no one can yet manage this, although people still are working on ways to supplant them. Of course it's unreasonable to expect them to go quietly and to just give up the monopoly position they fought so hard to get, but it does pretty well prevent anyone from being able to realize that dream of yours.
After all, if we could do that *perfectly*, well... I suspect we'd have managed quite a few more migrations by now than we have already. Even if we had to claim that it was a "new version of Windows" to get our users to use it:-)
No, I don't think that they'll hold to it forever. I suspect that once the founders are gone, things will erode until that motto will go the way of the dinosaur except for its PR function.
That said, based on what they're *doing* (and not what they're merely saying), they're at least making a reasonable effort to live up to an ideal, and that's a hell of a lot more than I can say for any other corp.
In other words, I'll retain some loyalty to Google so long as it shows some loyalty to us. Like I said, they'll probably let us down someday and that'll be the time to ditch them, but at the same time, it's stupid not to enjoy the good while it lasts.
Re:Anyone know the changelog?
on
VLC 0.8.6 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Their poor site is half dead but here's the changelog they put up:
Building on feedback from the 29 million downloads of VLC media player 0.8.5, we bring you version 0.8.6 with many bugfixes, as well as a couple of new features we think you will truly enjoy. Highlights of the new features and improvements:
* Support for Windows Media Video 9 and VC-1
* Support for VP5/VP6 and Flash video
* Support for TTA and WavPack Lossless audio
* Much improved H.264 support
* Preliminary DVR-ms, MXF support
* Shoutcast TV support
* Windows unicode fixes
* Apple Remote support
* Apple Fullscreen controller
* Universal Binary
Like I pointed out, progressive taxes are the only fair ones. Because one pays out of their fat and another from their livelihood.
I'll wait for you to complain that I skipped answering the rest of your post after you did that to mine, though:]
Etymology of monster:
c.1300, "malformed animal, creature afflicted with a birth defect," from O.Fr. monstre, from L. monstrum "monster, monstrosity, omen, portent, sign," from root of monere "warn" (see monitor). Abnormal or prodigious animals were regarded as signs or omens of impending evil. Extended c.1385 to imaginary animals composed of parts of creatures (centaur, griffin, etc.). Meaning "animal of vast size" is from 1530; sense of "person of inhuman cruelty or wickedness" is from 1556. In O.E., the monster Grendel was an aglæca, a word related to aglæc "calamity, terror, distress, oppression."
Honestly, I see them as being more likely to rent it out to you. That is, keep paying us or we deactivate your Vista XP 2010 install... I suppose they might offer "services" too, but I really expect them to be more likely to sell you the service of not crippling your computer for a fee.
Still, I'm interested to see how some of these activation features will work out in Vista. How long before worms evolve to hold computers for ransom, too? Microsoft has apparently built that in as a "feature" already, and there's the BitLocker scheme, too... when Microsoft builds in all the tools to hold the user for ransom, what's to stop a greedy worm-making bastard from doing the same thing by hacking those tools?
Hell, it should be easy enough to fool Vista into thinking someone's version is pirated when it's not, and offer to sell them a crack of some kind for half of what Microsoft would charge to reactivate you...
> Here's how you save the world: > 1. Global education with a solid core of scientific method, basic logic and critical thinking skills. > 2. Free access to all known forms off birth control. > 3. Bust up the organized religions. Seriously, we have GOT to wean humanity off that shit. It's like every problem in the world > can be traced back to some religious text or another.
Silly me. I'd have tried to make sure that all the world could have clean water, nutritious food, shelter, and security from other people trying to kill or harm them. Or possibly other such useless things, instead of trying to preach atheism to them all as you do in #3.
Besides, I Mao and Stalin already tried your method, especially #3, suppressing religion and purging (executing) millions. How did that work out, again?
Or haven't you figured out yet that when people make a scapegoat for all the ills in the world out of some group of people that they become monsters? Do you even know about the Christians in ancient Rome, burnt "witches" in early America, Jews and Roma in the early 20th century, all those people purged by Mao and Stalin... the list is quite long; I can't do it justice.
Both religious and atheistic reasons can be used to scapegoat people; neither is the root of this problem. The fire of hatred reaching something like a flashover point, however, is...
> I'm always mystified by the people who, thinking that 'economic darwinism' is a Bad Thing, advocate 'economic creationism' in its stead. The reason why phrases like 'Social Justice' cause me to react is that they're used by the Clever Kids to try to redefine, and thus win, arguments.
No argument you can't win by throwing in a dig at religion, huh?:] I mean, it's not like that was some lame attempt at making people stop thinking critically and go "creationism is bad! I'll believe this other guy!" or something. Then again, it seems oddly appropriate to have you posting such a thing with a name like "The Monster"...
It's not "economic creationism" anyhow. More like "economic cooperation." Or perhaps I should call it an intelligent design?:] After all, the Prisoner's Dilemma of game theory shows that cooperation that punishes a lack of cooperation (e.g. strategies like Tit-for-Tat) are dominant over most ranges, secure against invasion unless perhaps they stop punishing noncooperation, and actually strictly better for all participants. Oddly, this is why the GPL works--it refuses to cooperate with anyone who will not reciprocate. If you don't share your improvements, you can't have ours. BSD is nicer, perhaps even freer, on some level, but vulnerable to 'invasion', in game theory terms, by those who refuse to share alike. Not that the people who use that license care about such things, and they're free not to care.
So it's not like you can say that cooperation is somehow unreasonable or illogical. It's convenient--too convenient--to suppose that everyone who doesn't have much doesn't work hard. Frankly, in every factory I've seen, those who have the least and make the least work the most.
So as for how just things like income taxes are, I'd like to point out that, frankly, the poor pay more in taxes than the rich, even if the dollar amounts are lesser. True, we exclude the very bottom levels from being taxed, but even for an average income person, the few thousand dollars paid have a very real affect on their lives. One pays with extra fat, the other gives of their livelihood. Such things can be the difference between being stuck in a dead-end job because your paycheck just won't stretch far enough no matter how many hours you toil at the factory, no matter how thin you stretch the budget, nor how many days you spend eating easy mac or ramen each year. For the rich, those funds that don't go to the tax preparer mean little more than, at most, cutting your vacation in Paris down from four weeks to three. If there's injustice in this, I do not think it's on their side.
And if you think otherwise, tant pis. C'est la vie.
You're right. I don't really know the motivation either--I cringe every time I hear the justifications people come up with for their greed, especially when they quote someone like Ayn Rand. It makes my blood boil to hear people come out with such twisted notions of "liberty" that are just flimsy pretexts to excuse attitudes that should never be acceptable.
It's disturbing, though. Because while I really do care about others, I find it nearly impossible to care about the people who spout such nonsense. And yet, perhaps that goes back to game theory? In the repeated version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, it's to everyone's advantage to punish anyone who refuses to cooperate for any reason. In fact, any population which does NOT punish greedy bastards in that game will invariably be overrun by them, even though it's to everyone's advantage to cooperate all the time...
Ironic, huh? That game is so often studied because it so resembles real life greed and real life situations. So although their justification is allegedly logical, it breaks down because their strategy of greed isn't dominant. Of course, I suppose I should qualify that... cooperation will, in fact, lose out if it's snuffed out to below some threshold and there aren't any people willing to band together and cooperate enough to form a critical mass of people working together. Alternatively, there are problems when we get down to an effectively non-repeat game because almost everyone is unknown to us--people we'll never see or care about again. Of course, I'm hardly the first person to notice something like that...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm sure you already have it in mind, but keep an eye out for any arguments you can raise that will haunt them in future cases. They'll either fight them vigorously or cut their losses and run, I suspect.
Not that you haven't already done that. You may see it as ordinary, but even things as simple as recovering those legal fees made them try to flee from that one case, so I have to consider that at least somewhat clever, without the insidious tone that word might take when applied to some of their tactics... Anyhow, it's my thinking that the more such things you can pile against them, the better, both for your current clients and the future clients I hope you never have to represent (due to the RIAA not suing people, that is--I hope your practice itself does well).
I didn't mean anything unethical by "maneuvers", BTW. I know you wouldn't so much as consider such things from everything of yours I've seen so far. I rather had in mind ordinary things like discrediting the processes by which they currently gather "evidence" so that they actually do something resembling what I think of as due diligence from a technical perspective. Or perhaps clever means to counter their more insidious dirty legal tricks.
The idea being to make sure they sue only those people whose infringement they can reliably prove, instead of grabbing random IPs they think are suspicious, following a dubious trail, and suing whoever it leads them to even if that makes no sense at all without considering whether they might have misinterpreted anything along the way.
Well, SCO gets around things like that by "accidentally" posting improperly redacted documents and then quickly withdrawing them, but I know you're the honest type of lawyer, not the other sort. Moreover, it doesn't even seem to help SCO because absolutely no one appears to care what that stupid email or whatever they want to leak says, even if they seem to be getting away with it :] Frankly, I feel it's more likely to blow smoke and cover up a few things they might have leaked to certain media types Groklaw already thoroughly discredited the reporting of...
:]
Instead, I wonder. I don't suppose you'd be able to use your knowledge in future cases versus them? For example, offering to assist whoever their attorney is in some way so as to import your knowledge into it without having to actually disclose what you know to anyone else. Or are there ethical rules against such things that I wouldn't know about? I'm sure that such things have been thought up before, though, so there probably is some rule regarding that.
On a completely different tact, if their arguments can be shown to be frivolous, is the hope of sanction very high? I suspect not, given just how much rope I've seen extended to SCO that they may hang themselves with it, even if lately they have at least been required to pay something back via estoppel. I wish you the best of luck in using such maneuvers against them--I know you've already done a few things like that which gave them pause whereas losing any individual case would not
Can you subpoena MediaSentry directly then? I suppose you know the legal process far better than I do, but we both can see them squirming here and I don't doubt that we both have a bad gut feeling. I have this feeling that some of your answers may lie in subpoenas against third parties (e.g. the ISP, etc.), too.
:/
Maybe I've been watching too many detective shows of late, but a strange idea occurs to me with their contract and wanting it to be privileged... What if MediaSentry is paid a percentage of how much the RIAA makes from litigation?
In theory, that might raise some ethical issues if something like that got out. Sure, that's only speculation, but if it were something like that, I can't imagine it playing well in front of a jury even supposing it to be 100% ethical and legal in the eyes of the Court.
They're just playing so many dirty tricks here by my reckoning... I can't help but wonder if there aren't a few ways you can do to make prosecution more difficult for them in the future. I guess you're doing some of that now; I remember at least one time they were chided by a judge for defrauding the state of proper filing fees by bringing a ton of subpoenas at the same ISP all in one bundle, etc. I liked that argument--I think that the type of judge who might not care that the defendant feels terrorized by lawsuits might still listen if it were the state being defrauded.
Conversely, I'd be fearful of the reverse--not being able to get a good expert witness to counter them and having them bamboozle some tech-clueless judge into thinking that their infringement detection programs are infallible such that their conclusions can just be rubber stamped in the future.
Of course, I'm sure they're savvy to such things, so I have to worry... Please be your most careful in legal research and process; I fear you're up against some real bastards who won't give you any quarter. I've seen too many such things in the unrelated cases brought by BS&F on behalf of SCO
As for the software, yes, it's total BS. There's no way any sensible person can trust unaudited software. If you have the time, software talent, and a clear screenshot that exposes enough of its functionality, it probably wouldn't be difficult to make a sham version of the program (and not just the screenshots) that pretends to do anything you want. It would be awesome if you could demonstrate something like that in front of the court (and even better, GPL a copy of the sham program).
Even if they're not using it to lie, though, I can certainly imagine plenty of reasons you'd be better off not knowing why they won't want to make anything about it public. If I'm right, please do your utmost to get every possible scrap of information into the public record. It will help to undermine their reign of terror.
> The typical Slashdot poster scarcely understands the distinction between civil and criminal law. Rules of Evidence? The conduct of pre-trial dispositions? The impeachment of expert witnesses? Give me a break.
He needs technical advice about where the weak points of the technical testimony lie. Technical matters are our turf, making use of them is his.
The very foundation that there has been sharing at all is shaky (screenshots? a letter from the ISP with NO indication of what process & software they use or how they identify the accounts??? come on!). I suppose they use some custom software, and they want us to just trust them when they stand to gain a lot from suing people from infringement, but we have no source code, no idea what their network setup is like, etc.?
Others have questioned his belief that there wasn't a wireless router in the way. A good point would be to find out about *their* network architecture and see if that could've changed anything, too. I wouldn't take their word for anything, nor assume that any bit of their technical analysis was any good. Especially not if he's just some old DOS guru in the days of Windows. Windows networking has long had screwball elements to it of various sorts.
There's the question of what basis the RIAA has for going after this lady's son. What makes them think it had to be a relative, instead of a neighbor for example? If it's not him, do they have a right to go after everyone who's visited her that month!? Just where does that line of reasoning end? (Okay, that's more of a legal question, but it's certainly one I'd wave in front of the judge! Hopefully they won't just allow them to beat down all the doors in the neighborhood looking for infringers.)
So I guess the problem is that this matter crosses lines. He needs our technical help. We need his legal help. So let's work together here?
At least some of us technical geek types read both here & Groklaw thanks to SCO's escapades.
:]
I may have helped draw at least some over there, with all those stories about SCO I summarized from Groklaw and posted here back at the peak of things, although Groklaw was already very well-established by then
> and he knows a few things about networking. In fact, he has a (questionable) patent on sending TCP RST packets as a way to do an inline firewall.
Interesting. Isn't that essentially how the "Great Firewall of China" works? Curious.
Information assurance? Well, there's something right there. First, go over his published work. Now compare the standards he writes of for this assurance to what the RIAA has actually done.
:]
I'll give you 99.9% odds that the two won't match very well. Given the number of misidentifications the RIAA has already made...
Please note that the more you can manage to require of them in this case, the higher the costs will be for them to persecute people in the future--nothing makes programmers less productive than a whole bunch of crazy legal requirements
And like I said before, get him to authenticate inauthentic screenshots. If you can get a digital copy of the file, or just a good programmer/artist to make a mock-up of their application, you shouldn't have much trouble making convincing fakes. Especially if you run them off as photocopies to hide any slight imperfections like the font being misaligned by a few pixels, etc. Just pay attention to quality--you CAN do it perfectly if you try hard enough, but if you don't, you'll use the wrong font, shift it off by a few pixels, etc.
You say that like I don't try to :] I suppose I do straddle the boarders of letting myself get too weighed down by crap, but I get poison ASAP... if I don't die trying. The bigger problem is running out of HP, though I guess that's why you said speed helps.
:]
:]
As for genocide, well, I grant that it's about a half step above cheating, but after polypiling I have abcghmqrtvLMNPRTUVYZ; genocided with that unfinished wizard of mine. I have to think that geno is still a net gain for survivability if you take it far enough
The only annoying things about genociding too much are that H & D are great for items (provided you at least have disintegration resist... which isn't too hard for me since I usually have reflection by then with MR from the spare quest artifacts... what? after what I geno'd you can't be surprised to know that I have all the good neutral artifacts courtesy of the castle wand). Having a spare b?genocide isn't a bad escape method, either, in some cases. An uncursed one too, for that matter.
The biggest problem I can see is a somewhat increased chance to meet the nasty &s when there's little else to generate. But that mses of polypiling usually leaves me with inedible corpses and such. Given that I know ID as a wizard, it's not so bad to ID eggs until you find some cockatrice eggs and those damned &s become trivial. Stone + striking and they vanish. Only the three riders remain a challenge at that point... but not so much that I'd wade through 80,000 messages of "The snake misses you." just to avoid genociding a and S by then
> The issue is that Google is biased, and people who use Google should know that when they do searches, so they aren't being duped.
:]
Good to know. Now, where can I find an unbiased search engine for comparison?
--
Tip: This is sarcasm, not an actual tip.
That would tend to make it less of a threat, then. But I still wonder if there isn't some way to turn this into a remote exploit.
Obviously, we know several things:
* Screenshots are unreliable. They're easy to fake. I suggest you have a few fakes on hand.
* Thus, the chain of evidence *IS* the evidence and the only evidence. Make sure you know EVERY detail about it.
* You can't really prove which person was at the computer without something else to corroborate it, only the owner of the computer.
These are the biggest apparent gaps. You need to know everything about them and to dump as much as you can into the public record for us. You also need to document all the "I don't know" answers, because those will be the ones where you might hurt them the most.
Therefore, you should question him in detail on at least the following points:
* How are the screenshots taken. Who has access to them? What's the chain of evidence? How and where are all of these things stored? Are they stored in a secure manner? How would you know if they were altered?
- Make doctored screenshots. Have him "authenticate" the fakes. Bonus points if you do this in front of the jury. Double bonus if the infringing IP is that of riaa.com, sony.com or similar. WARNING: This is a public site. He may VERY well be reading this.
* Describe, in detail, the exact process by which you find those allegedly infringing upon your copyrights. Be methodical. You want to know the exact version of the OS they're running (not just "win XP" or "various"). You want to know EVERY program they use, even if it's MS Paint. You want them to produce the source code of any custom programs for analysis by outside experts. You want to know about any known flaws. You want to see any and all release or design notes, ESPECIALLY any bugs, source/versioning control, changelogs, etc. You want to know which exact version of their custom program found the infringement for this case. That does NOT let them off the hook on letting you examine prior versions or newer versions--old bugs DO stick around even when they've been "fixed" and you need to see both newer and older versions. I.E. if the bug has been fixed twice, you know it was there in the interim. Yes, they may put out protective orders and whatnot, but the more information about this you can get into the public record, the more they'll squirm and the more we'll reveal the sloppiness they're hiding. And I know they have things to hide, unless they're so clueless as not to know their own weaknesses. You can work both alternatives to your advantage.
* Describe how the ISP identifies the person associated with the IP. You may actually have to subpoena the ISP on this point, I suspect they'll just produce the letter and say that that's sufficient. It's not. We both know that even if the IP belonged to a computer using their internet service, they don't have any idea who's at the screen at any given time, only which account is active. And even this may be unreliable. You NEED to get every last detail about how they log the IPs leased out, how they associate them with their customers, where the data is stored, how long it is stored for, who has access to it, on what computers it's stored, how reliable those computers are (e.g. any records of maintenance, program changes or downtime), etc. You're the lawyer here. You know better than I how important being methodical in discovery is, and every detail may be significant. I suspect they'll have trouble producing everything. Records may not exist for some things, but this is also important--every gap is a gap in their chain of evidence. It takes only one broken link to destroy a chain... Get EVERY detail you can from this into the record and make sure it gets sealed or redacted as little as possible. All these details about software, hardware, and the human processes that work with them are of vital importance to us for technical analysis, just like case law, venue and precedents are to your case. Even the programs they don't use directly, like antivirus or firewall software may be important, not to mention the topology of thei
> Let's hope he gets eaten by a grue
... :]
A grue? You been quaffing too many potions of hallucination?? I'm far more worried about getting eaten by those damned a's and q's
I'm just glad I finally know what the "make your time" part of the "you have no chance to survive make your time" means, now :]
Now if only the rest of that made any sense...
I haven't read the details of this exploit, but doesn't the javascript alert() function usually call MessageBox() on Windows?
If it's just the text inside the message box that they need to screw with, this could be pretty easily exploited by any random website...
> I am, however, frequently annoyed by their mediocrity, and unbelievably frustrated that someone doesn't have the balls to start a company dedicated to making an absolutely, positively 100%-compatible Windows clone based on a Unix-like operating system.
:( Those in Europe or anywhere else being screwed over by these legal exports have my sincere apologies for this mess.
:-)
I wish! Do you have ANY idea what that requires? Okay, so Novell is sorta working in that direction (although they're going to have trouble from both sides), and there's Wine, but we both know that neither of them are going to be able to get past all of the following roadblocks:
A) Non-standard standards. Microsoft doesn't implement any standard correctly. They ARE the de facto "standard" and many bits of hardware / drivers do ugly, nasty just-so things to work with Windows. Even Microsoft can't manage 100% backwards compatibility. Thus, even where things should be standard, they aren't. Worse, half the time the code is the standard, as with Word. My theory of the excessive bloat of Office is that each new version effectively includes most of the code of prior versions for compatibility purposes. And it still doesn't work right. Yes, the OpenOffice folks have done great work. The Samba people have done great work. The Wine people have done great work. But I don't think we can call them 100% (even if their work is probably a better copy than the originals in many respects).
B) Software patents. As others have pointed out, the way these things are described, they patent every way to get from point A to point B. It's not like a machine, where you can rework a few gears or something, when they patent stupid crap like double-clicking you CAN'T do what Microsoft does any more, whether it was obvious or not. Perhaps its only the US that's screwed in this regard for now, but lobbyists are at work even now trying to bring these laws to "parity" (i.e. screw over all the other countries, too). It is my sincere hope that they learn from our mistakes rather than repeating them
C) Dirty tricks. If you've read any of the anti-trust trials against Microsoft and read any of the Microsoft emails they were forced to produce in discovery, you might have some idea about how they treat competition. Currently, they're working to divide the Free Software community, working to cause legal problems and hurdles for the software (see point B) including "innocuous" terms like forbidding sub-licensing (prevents a user from transferring the software to others, allows Microsoft to kill such software by cutting off the source at any later time), patent "protection" (again, creates non-transferable legal rights... making it so that the software can be later discontinued), and probably other tricks I don't know of yet.
In other words, Microsoft's manipulation of the market remains as the primary reason no one can yet manage this, although people still are working on ways to supplant them. Of course it's unreasonable to expect them to go quietly and to just give up the monopoly position they fought so hard to get, but it does pretty well prevent anyone from being able to realize that dream of yours.
After all, if we could do that *perfectly*, well... I suspect we'd have managed quite a few more migrations by now than we have already. Even if we had to claim that it was a "new version of Windows" to get our users to use it
No, I don't think that they'll hold to it forever. I suspect that once the founders are gone, things will erode until that motto will go the way of the dinosaur except for its PR function.
That said, based on what they're *doing* (and not what they're merely saying), they're at least making a reasonable effort to live up to an ideal, and that's a hell of a lot more than I can say for any other corp.
In other words, I'll retain some loyalty to Google so long as it shows some loyalty to us. Like I said, they'll probably let us down someday and that'll be the time to ditch them, but at the same time, it's stupid not to enjoy the good while it lasts.
I thought that all-natural kitten huffing was PETA approved? :]
Or have they changed that recently?
Wish I knew how to make shuffle default to off
I'll wait for you to complain that I skipped answering the rest of your post after you did that to mine, though
Etymology of monster:
> Did I say we should execute millions? Did I say we should scapegoat people?
No, but you spent all your time saying we should 'save the world' by preaching at people about how to live instead of helping them stay alive.
Honestly, I see them as being more likely to rent it out to you. That is, keep paying us or we deactivate your Vista XP 2010 install... I suppose they might offer "services" too, but I really expect them to be more likely to sell you the service of not crippling your computer for a fee.
Still, I'm interested to see how some of these activation features will work out in Vista. How long before worms evolve to hold computers for ransom, too? Microsoft has apparently built that in as a "feature" already, and there's the BitLocker scheme, too... when Microsoft builds in all the tools to hold the user for ransom, what's to stop a greedy worm-making bastard from doing the same thing by hacking those tools?
Hell, it should be easy enough to fool Vista into thinking someone's version is pirated when it's not, and offer to sell them a crack of some kind for half of what Microsoft would charge to reactivate you...
> Here's how you save the world:
> 1. Global education with a solid core of scientific method, basic logic and critical thinking skills.
> 2. Free access to all known forms off birth control.
> 3. Bust up the organized religions. Seriously, we have GOT to wean humanity off that shit. It's like every problem in the world
> can be traced back to some religious text or another.
Silly me. I'd have tried to make sure that all the world could have clean water, nutritious food, shelter, and security from other people trying to kill or harm them. Or possibly other such useless things, instead of trying to preach atheism to them all as you do in #3.
Besides, I Mao and Stalin already tried your method, especially #3, suppressing religion and purging (executing) millions. How did that work out, again?
Or haven't you figured out yet that when people make a scapegoat for all the ills in the world out of some group of people that they become monsters? Do you even know about the Christians in ancient Rome, burnt "witches" in early America, Jews and Roma in the early 20th century, all those people purged by Mao and Stalin... the list is quite long; I can't do it justice.
Both religious and atheistic reasons can be used to scapegoat people; neither is the root of this problem. The fire of hatred reaching something like a flashover point, however, is...
> I'm always mystified by the people who, thinking that 'economic darwinism' is a Bad Thing, advocate 'economic creationism' in its stead. The reason why phrases like 'Social Justice' cause me to react is that they're used by the Clever Kids to try to redefine, and thus win, arguments.
:] I mean, it's not like that was some lame attempt at making people stop thinking critically and go "creationism is bad! I'll believe this other guy!" or something. Then again, it seems oddly appropriate to have you posting such a thing with a name like "The Monster" ...
:] After all, the Prisoner's Dilemma of game theory shows that cooperation that punishes a lack of cooperation (e.g. strategies like Tit-for-Tat) are dominant over most ranges, secure against invasion unless perhaps they stop punishing noncooperation, and actually strictly better for all participants. Oddly, this is why the GPL works--it refuses to cooperate with anyone who will not reciprocate. If you don't share your improvements, you can't have ours. BSD is nicer, perhaps even freer, on some level, but vulnerable to 'invasion', in game theory terms, by those who refuse to share alike. Not that the people who use that license care about such things, and they're free not to care.
No argument you can't win by throwing in a dig at religion, huh?
It's not "economic creationism" anyhow. More like "economic cooperation." Or perhaps I should call it an intelligent design?
So it's not like you can say that cooperation is somehow unreasonable or illogical. It's convenient--too convenient--to suppose that everyone who doesn't have much doesn't work hard. Frankly, in every factory I've seen, those who have the least and make the least work the most.
So as for how just things like income taxes are, I'd like to point out that, frankly, the poor pay more in taxes than the rich, even if the dollar amounts are lesser. True, we exclude the very bottom levels from being taxed, but even for an average income person, the few thousand dollars paid have a very real affect on their lives. One pays with extra fat, the other gives of their livelihood. Such things can be the difference between being stuck in a dead-end job because your paycheck just won't stretch far enough no matter how many hours you toil at the factory, no matter how thin you stretch the budget, nor how many days you spend eating easy mac or ramen each year. For the rich, those funds that don't go to the tax preparer mean little more than, at most, cutting your vacation in Paris down from four weeks to three. If there's injustice in this, I do not think it's on their side.
And if you think otherwise, tant pis. C'est la vie.
You're right. I don't really know the motivation either--I cringe every time I hear the justifications people come up with for their greed, especially when they quote someone like Ayn Rand. It makes my blood boil to hear people come out with such twisted notions of "liberty" that are just flimsy pretexts to excuse attitudes that should never be acceptable.
It's disturbing, though. Because while I really do care about others, I find it nearly impossible to care about the people who spout such nonsense. And yet, perhaps that goes back to game theory? In the repeated version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, it's to everyone's advantage to punish anyone who refuses to cooperate for any reason. In fact, any population which does NOT punish greedy bastards in that game will invariably be overrun by them, even though it's to everyone's advantage to cooperate all the time...
Ironic, huh? That game is so often studied because it so resembles real life greed and real life situations. So although their justification is allegedly logical, it breaks down because their strategy of greed isn't dominant. Of course, I suppose I should qualify that... cooperation will, in fact, lose out if it's snuffed out to below some threshold and there aren't any people willing to band together and cooperate enough to form a critical mass of people working together. Alternatively, there are problems when we get down to an effectively non-repeat game because almost everyone is unknown to us--people we'll never see or care about again. Of course, I'm hardly the first person to notice something like that...