Welp, my letter to Hillary Clinton has already been fired off. Not that my letter alone will do anything, but it's time for people to at least do something, anything at all to try to put a stop to crap like this under the guise of the DMCA. Write to your congress-people, donate to the EFF and ACLU, vote for candidates based on their stances on technology issues rather than their standing in Hollywood... I mean whatever. Get the movement started, for god's sake. This is getting completely out of hand at this point. The USSR is alive and kicking when it's a "felony" to talk about using the shift key on your keyboard. (No Soviet Russia jokes please - I am being totally serious.)
As someone who is currently wrestling with Redhat 9.0 in an effort to wean himself off of Windows... I'd say MS will have an effective monopoly for some time to come.
I'm going to burn a bit of my karma on an OT post just to help out a RH9 brutha. Do yourself a favor and download the atrpm's kickstart of Apt. Then get Synaptic to go with it. It'll change your whole outlook on RH9 and Linux in general. Seriously, unless you're a real techie who wants to get his hands dirty, there's no need to really ever deal with the command line again, and no need to mess with dependencies either. I just did a dist-upgrade last night and what would have taken hours a year ago took me literally five minutes. The importance of these two applications together has really been understated by a lot of people in the Linux community; for desktop users I think they're pretty essential. Should be default packages in every desktop distro.
The best part of this whole thing is watching this poor guy's site counter shoot up. Was at 131 when I got there - now at 584 two minutes later. I'm watching the Slashdot effect in action in front of my own eyes!
I have to wonder how long until people start to realize that for truly critical (read millions of dollars) work, you're best off having the production machines OFFLINE.
It would be a pain in the ass only being able to code on one machine, but even something as simple as a KVM switch would make it tolerable.
Pain in the ass?? Try impossible. How do you think game programming works, anyway? One guy sitting there plugging away on his work machine from 9-5? Bzzzzt. Sorry, try again. I say this as someone who works in the industry for a fairly large publisher who will remain nameless.
HL2 is a large, big-budget game with a lot of code, a lot of staff, and a tight production schedule. Some people seem to live in this fantasy-land where PC games are still coded by individual hackers locked away in their basement. Well, welcome to the real world, where dozens of people need to work on the same code in near real-time, and where work continues even while coders are out of the office or in fact out of the country.
I don't know that all of this code needed to be on one machine that was net accessible. There's probably something that could have been done to segment it among separate machines on separate VPN's, which then could have been combined to compile and run whenever a build was needed. So yes, Valve could have probably taken better precautions. But the answer is not to put all of the code on a single, closed machine - that simply doesn't work in real life. The code - at least some of it at a time - needs to be net accessible for a company in the business of making games to function these days.
It was revealed today that a third of the code was stolen, so maybe Valve actually was taking some sorts of precautions - maybe it was separated into three segments on three different machines. But that probably was not enough.
You can look at Valve's security as a whole, and maybe you will find holes that should have been plugged, but simply saying "the code should not have been net accessible!" is just not realistic.
An Autorun will be effective against the vast majority of Windows and Mac users.
This doesn't matter. Who cares if you lock out all those people that aren't technically savvy enough to really use their computers to begin with? These people probably couldn't figure out how to even get on Kazaa anyway.
If you can't even lock out those who know well enough to use the shift key, or to simply disable auto-run to begin with (as the author rightly points out many people have already done), then there is absolutely no hope of keeping this music off of file-sharing networks, or out of black-market pirate CD rings. All this is doing is locking out people who don't need to be locked out, and keeping the music easily accessible to those who (in the record industry's eyes) do need to be locked out. It is therefore completely ineffective and arguably counterproductive.
In fact, it's no better than the pen trick on the old schemes. I mean, if you didn't read Slashdot or CDfreaks or whatever, you'd have had no idea that that worked either. The average consumer probably still knows nothing of the pen trick. But the fact that people who generally do a lot of copying did find out about it made that copy protection method completely useless to the record labels. The whole point is to stop people from copying (and sharing), not to punish those who just want to listen to their CD's (much as it seems otherwise so much of the time).
About the only good thing I could see coming out of this (for the record industry) is a conditioning among average consumers to begin to accept DRM. Over a long period of time, that may change prevailing attitudes among the public. But it won't stop people from copying that want to copy and know anything at all about PC's, which has to be the end goal of all this in the minds of the RIAA and their cohorts.
It's not just individual application updates. It's groupware version management. Try having five different people in a team working on a file that's going to be used for both print and web with Adobe's current suite of apps. It's a nightmare. If things work the way they describe it in the above article, seamlessly letting all members of a team work on the same file, this upgrade will be a godsend.
Don't forget, graphic design is not just freelancers working on small projects from home, or l33td00dz who just want the latest "professional" program to "design" wallpapers for deskmod.com. It's also part of every business out there, and in the corporate world it's generally teams of people working on the same documents. This upgrade should hopefully finally bring Adobe's products in line with that reality.
"If the issue is a non-issue, why don't they indemnify their customers?"
Backwards. If the issue is a non-issue, why would IBM indemnify their customers? It's like asking IBM to indemnify a customer against tripping and falling because they fail to tie their shoe. It has nothing to do with IBM or the software/services the customer is being sold, so why would IBM indemnify their customers against it? IBM is not an insurance company.
It's all just FUD by Sun, but it always amazes me how these guys around the industry can spew this nonsense that's not only wrong, but completely irrelevant and, well, nonsensical. There's just no logic behind it at all; you look at it and go "huh?" Really makes you wonder what it takes to succeed in business. Seems to be more luck than anything; it's obviously not brains. And luck only lasts so long.
Thats just stupid. I think the lawsuit is innapropriate.
HD manufacturers always measuered their disks like that.
No, they did not. You young'uns probably don't remember it, but the first hard drive I ever owned was 10MB - 10240KB, on the dot (give or take a few bytes).
The binary switchover happened as a marketing scheme sometime between 100MB and 1GB - it was at one of those two milestones, as one of the major manufacturers wanted bragging rights getting there first, as I recall. Since then, all sorts of revisionist history has been written claiming that 1GB was really 1,000MB all along when it plain and simply is not true.
Look, whatever the dictionary tells you "giga" means, this is a technical term that means something else in the computer world, and has always meant something else in the computer world. The same way that words like "token ring" don't mean the same thing in PC land as they do in real life. If you bought a "token ring adapter" from Cisco and opened the box to find a device that allowed you to slip a Cracker Jack box toy ring over your finger, would you not feel a bit deceived?
Exactly. The problem however, is when pilots (or air controllers) rely on instruments they believe to be accurate and have no way of knowing whether this is true. In some instrument landing system (ILS) landings, it is virtually impossible to land without the instruments or verify all the parameters.
This is why they call them "instrument landings", and without them we wouldn't be able to fly in bad weather at all. A good percentage of all flights are flown under instrument flight rules and there's no higher incidence of accidents during bad weather as during good weather (at least not in countries with modern airline fleets).
All instruments have backups that take measurements in a different way than the primary instruments (all modern commercial planes have both radar and standard altimeters, for example). Some of them have so much redundancy that pilots forget how to use the backup instruments, and this in itself has been responsible for a few accidents.
Instrument flight in itself is not the problem, and pilots are trained, and trained well, in what to do if and when their instruments fail (and instrument failure is fairly common - planes are even allowed to take off with certain instruments broken). The problem is, as always, the human factor, and at times human behavior will cause a completely avoidable crash that would at first glance seem to be the fault of poor or broken instrumentation. In fact I can't even recall a crash that could be fully blamed on broken instruments - unless a pilot literally loses everything (which would entail a complete electronics failure and simultaneous failure of various physical sensors on the outside of the aircraft linked with old-style analog backup instruments), he or she is trained in how to fly and land that plane.
Linux, Windows, and other OS are not designed almost spacifically to trade copyrighted material. Kazaa is, and there is the difference.
Have you ever used Kazaa? Doesn't sound like it. It's a P2P application, nothing more, nothing less. It is not a Napster clone; it can be used to share Word documents, pdf's, executables, plain text files, Linux distributions, whatever the heck you want. Music is just *one* thing that can be shared with it, and there is no specific feature built into the software that in any way enables or encourages you to share anything copyrighted. Kazaa lets the user assume the responsibility for maintaining copyright, and that's as it should be.
And please, spare everyone the lame argument that Kazaa is "just" a generic file trading app.
An argument has two sides. This is not an argument, it's a simple fact. Accept it or don't; your choice. Some people still believe the world is flat too. I share plenty of files on Kazaa and not a single one of them is a copyrighted song or movie file.
It's always the public's choice whether or not to break the law. There's nothing stopping me from snapping the neck of the next person I pass on the street, for example. What you seem to be expecting would be the equivalent of some sort of physical arm restraint for all pedestrians. This is not the concept on which our society (or in fact any society, even totalitarian ones) is based.
How a piece of software is used by users is, as always, up to the users. I can use Windows itself (or Linux) for good or evil too. That doesn't mean we should be building in restraints to only allow us to do a certain set of things the government (or worse, some unaccountable industry trade organization) thinks is ok for us to do.
Nor do I. I don't know what's up with Slashdot lately; this is a tech news site, not a script kiddie site. We're not here to learn from famous crackers or to congratulate each other for taking big sites down. Crackers are criminals and they need to be punished. They do cause damage. The implication in the comments at the head of this are that this guy didn't really do anything wrong and so should get off... just like the 18 year old "kid" who got busted for the MSBlaster virus variant a couple weeks ago, at which time I read similarly ignorant and even stupid comments here.
The NY Times is 2 products; an offline and an online newspaper. You knock the online version out and you've killed half the products the company offers. Advertisers need to be repaid, workers have to be paid even though they can't do any work, etc. And you're going to lose a certain number of readers to other sites, some temporarily, others permanently. I agree that the numbers here do not seem unreasonable at all.
But then I shouldn't need to explain why crackers should go to jail. This is Slashdot, we should all understand this stuff already. There's no reason why a tech news site should favor crackers over commercial internet interests; it's all tech, it's just that one side of the issue here happens to be criminal.
My company's web sites have been the victim of numerous DoS attacks (no, I do not work for SCO - I work for a company you guys like, though I don't really want to say which), which while using different methods amount to the same thing this guy did - it's all denial of service, and it does cost companies money. I have absolutely no sympathy for this guy and hope he gets the book thrown at him.
Could some fine ex-Atari employee please release the ROMs for Marble Man (Marble Madness II), so it could be emulated for the PC? I don't see any reason to withhold the ROMs at this point in the game. I can't see anyone profiting, etc.
No? Granted, MMII isn't there (MM1 is) but publishers release stuff like this all the time. The ROMs are not public domain and the games are still commercially viable when packaged like this. Publishers occasionally even put out previously unreleased stuff on compilations (such as the Activision Classics compilation released a little while ago, and also soon for GBA).
You couldn't say the Pope is the ultimate judge of whether a convicted killer lives or dies, for example - that's up to the Supreme Court, according to the Constitution.
Ugh, this is what I get for typing in a rush - the above is not at all what I meant to say. The Supreme Court decides issues of interpretation of law, such as death penalty cases, and their decisions can be used as precedent. They do not generally decide sentencing for criminals, nor is it their job to do so. Sorry about the confusion.
The first amendment does NOT state that God should be kept out of government affairs.
This clause, however, does:
Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Note also that it does not restrict state governments in this area at all.
Again, the above clause does. Any law based on religion passed by a state government must be consistent and not conflict with the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. You cannot, therefore, pass a law that says, for example, that you cannot take the Lord's name in vain, as that violates the First Amendment.
This should be obvious but your comments force me to point it out once again. Most laws I could think of based on religion that aren't also based on common morality (ie. "thou shalt not kill") would conflict with the Constitution in some way. You couldn't say the Pope is the ultimate judge of whether a convicted killer lives or dies, for example - that's up to the Supreme Court, according to the Constitution. This clause was partly (or possibly mainly) intended to promote separation of church and state.
Because it's very simple for them to check the country of origin of any credit card. If the bank portion of the card doesn't match a US bank then, well... It's not a US credit card.
So what? My wife is from Japan and her only credit card is Japanese. She is also a legal New York resident with a New York driver's license. I would think there has to be some sort of law regarding discrimination against immigrants in this manner - isn't there? Can someone enlighten me on this?
Doing a CC check is no way to tell country of residency. At the same time, I would bet Apple has no mechanism set up to verify residency in other ways (say, by faxing in relevant documents to an 800 number - though this still seems discriminatory). Can someone shed some light on whether or not there are legal requirements involved here and what, if anything, Apple really does to check residency beyond a CC check? Anyone actually gone through the process who's in a similar situation to my wife's?
The sad thing is they'll fail to catch the original Blaster author so they'll throw the book at this kid for the whole Blaster thing.
This seems to be the prevailing sentiment here and honestly, it's making you all look like a bunch of script kiddies, or at the very least script kiddie sympathizers.
Fact is this 18 year old "kid" (actually, adult in this country) committed a crime if he wrote this virus variant and distributed it. While he's still innocent until proven guilty, I fail to see how it's "sad" to get any virus writer - big or small - out of the virus writing business.
This is the way law enforcement works. You can't catch everybody who commits a crime, and if you don't show that you're actively enforcing the law, there will be more criminals. Study after study after study have shown this to be the absolute truth. Even if they don't catch the writer of the original Blaster, catching this guy and making an example out of him - as well as any other virus writers they no doubt will catch in the future - will act as something of a deterrent. You're all operating under the assumption that this guy is a small-fry writing viruses in his spare time - you think it's worth it to a guy like that to risk jail time? No, and this will cause others like him to think twice.
Obvious analogy - when there aren't any cops around, I see a lot of people run red lights. When there is a cop stationed at an intersection, I see nobody running red lights. Funny how that works.
And if his punishment is harsh, so what? If he's found guilty, he's a criminal. He deserves whatever he gets at that point. People need to take responsibility for their own actions and realize that their actions have consequences, both for the people they directly affect (ie. those infected by this variant of the Blaster virus) and for themselves. You'd think Slashdot readers would have a little more grasp of this concept than most (being open-source advocates), but it appears this may not be the case.
the state Supreme Court ruled that property and trade secrets rights outranked free speech rights in this case.'"
If this is in fact what they said, it'll never hold up. Freedom of speech is the First Amendment to the US Constitution (for those of you who don't live here). It cannot be "outranked" by property and trade secrets rights. No state or federal law can "outrank" the Constitution of the United States.
The article may have misinterpreted the decision, but if that indeed was the decision, it will be overturned.
"Wow, taken to the extreme, the exploitation of their systems could have caused a train collision and injury or death to hundreds of Maryland and Virginia commuters."
I think that's a little far-fetched, and almost amounts to fear-mongering. At best, it displays ignorance of how modern rail systems work. When the signals fail, the trains simply stop - engineers don't look at a broken signal and say "well, gee, I hope there's nobody in front of me, full speed ahead!" In fact, on most modern equipment the braking is automatic when signals fail. I don't know exactly how modern the system is in Maryland, but at the very least there would be a regulation that all trains come to a halt in the event of signal failure. They certainly would not go speeding around without knowing if there's another train occupying the same block.
Collisions can and do occur even when the signals are working properly - it takes time to stop a speeding train. But assuming positioning is all correct to begin with and everybody's following proper speed limits before the signals go out, there should be no problem stopping a train in time once the signals do fail.
I think you might be missing something: Check here.
The codec itself is not adware supported. It appears the only thing they've changed is the layout of their downloads page - they've de-emphasized the free codec download, but it's still there.
Re:Two schools of thought about blackouts...
on
Blackout Week Continues
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Can we also cease with the melodramatic "biggest blackout ever" crap. Sure, it may have affected the most people, but the power was only out ~24 hours or so. Ice storms have taken the power down for a longer length of time.
Not to 50 million people, they haven't. An ice storm taking out power to even 500,000 people for 3 or 4 days is nothing compared to what happened last week. Yes, this was "The biggest blackout ever" in North America and I don't think it's at all melodramatic to say that. It will easily cost the most money of any blackout ever, it affected by far the most people and it was longer than 24 hours - in NYC it was 29 hours (and about 48 hours before the subways came back), in Detroit and Cleveland even longer, and Cleveland didn't have clean water until yesterday.
This was huge. No, millions of people did not die, so yes, let's keep it in perspective. It was no 9/11, it was no WWII. But it was a major economic event, and it will affect our economy as well as our governmental policy (hopefully) for years to come.
... to get arbitrary files on a memory card? I don't know about you, but *I* don't have anything like that. Will a small industry be created selling pre-altered memory cards?
You can use a SharkPort, as it says on the web site. These are tough to find and are no longer made, but follow the link on that web site to the XPort, which does the same thing (and in fact probably is the same thing).
These things have existed for a long time. I got my SharkPort maybe 6 months after the PS2 was launched.
As a New Yorker, I can assure you the city was 100% dark on Thursday night. The fact that it looks brighter on the satellite view than Ottawa or even Toronto could be for a number of reasons but is most likely due to nothing more than population density - more cars (and their headlights), more people outside (using flashlights, or other light sources to light up local areas), and more businesses with backup power in a smaller amount of space. Most of the light I see on that image from the NY area is on what I know are the major roadways, particularly the NJ Turnpike. The electricity itself, though, was out to 100% of the city. Ottawa wasn't hit any harder than NYC.
As for info on the power grid getting into "the wrong hands", this isn't some sort of national secret. It's not classified information. Some of the security methods used to protect individual plants or other parts of the power grid are not made public, but anyone who watches The Discovery Channel on a fairly regular basis probably has as good an idea of how the power grid works as would be needed to bring part of it down. The method of the failure this time (3 high power transmission lines failing simultaneously, causing an overload) seems remarkably similar to what happened in 1965. Which in itself is pretty ridiculous - this wasn't supposed to happen again. Any terrorist could plant a few bombs at the base of some of these high tension wire towers and bring the system down if this is all it takes - this is not something that would require declassifying information to figure out.
And I don't agree with those who say this is not a dangerous thing. I was one of the millions of New Yorkers who had to walk home over one of our river crossings on Thursday. Imagine a coordinated attack involving first taking out the power to the northeast, followed by any one of the following:
An aerosol anthrax attack from the air on the millions of people who had taken to the street.
One or more intentional crashings of small learjet-sized airplanes (probably the biggest they could get away with now) and/or helicopters into the major bridges as millions of people used them to cross the rivers.
The smuggling of nuclear and/or radiological devices into major cities as power is off to the newly-installed radiation detectors scattered around inner cities.
Those are just a few examples - I'm sure there are many more that terrorists have already thought of. It is very dangerous for power to be completely out in any major city, let alone the northeast - nobody is able to get any news or announcements (land and cel phones were down on Thursday, and even the news outlets not knocked off the air were relying on those who could get through on phones for information), emergency calls cannot be made, emergency vehicles cannot get through streets choked by pedestrians, police and fire departments cannot communicate with their bases, hospitals have to rely on minimal power from backup generators, etc.
Until we heard definitively that this was not a terrorist act on Thursday, everyone in this city was very nervous - I was surely not the only one who thought it could be a setup for something larger. After all, we've been through this before - both large-scale power outages and large-scale terror attacks. Once we were told that it definitely was not terrorism, that's when the partying started - but until that point, there was what I consider to be a perfectly justified fear in the voice of pretty much everyone I talked to.
Society, by expressing its will via a democratic government, has the right to determine how property -- intellectual and physical -- is used, but society does not have the right to assume or transfer ownership of an individual's property.
No? Tell that to all the people who were evicted by the government (landlords and tenants alike) when the WTC was built. That's just one example.
Skip down to the part about eminent domain if you must.
PS. Emulator is *NOT* a substitute for a classic arcade game.
No, but I think you're missing the point. How many working I, Robot machines do you think there are in the world? Not many. This was the first 3D arcade game ever made; it needs to be preserved. This is about history, not just video games. Eventually, with the passage of time everything stops working - it's just a matter of how long it takes. With this near-perpetual copyright we've got in this country these days it's possible that some game companies will sit on their IP, doing nothing with it, while all of the old arcade machines/cartridges/CD-ROM's rot and eventually die. With no copies of the original game available any longer, the games will be lost.
That's a worst case scenario that I don't believe will happen to most games precisely because there are so many people out there skirting the law with emulators. There are emulators for pretty much every major classic console and a good 95% or so of all arcade games. But that still leaves a small percentage of both home and arcade machines unaccounted for, and without good ROM dumps from those games, they can and will eventually be forgotten and lost to time in a way none of us ever thought mass-produced digital data could be. We always seem to just assume that anything put out there by a major corporation these days will just always be out there forever wether they still want it to be or not - that's not the case.
There need to be people out there who are actively trying to preserve at the very least the most important games in their original forms - that doesn't skirt anyone's IP, and it will keep the games available for when copyright runs out (fat chance at the rate we're going) or for when the company finally does put the IP in public domain (which doesn't happen very often, for reasons I'll get to in a sec). And I don't mean doing something like putting an old arcade cabinet in the corner and playing it; I mean buying up old machines, in as close to their original condition as possible, restoring them to like-new condition, and then keeping them that way. Right now there are only a few people doing this, and they're generally looked down upon by the gaming literati because "games were meant to be played" rather than stored for posterity. That's true, of course, but we're at the point in time when we do need the equivalent of real video game museums, in the same way we have television, radio and film museums already.
I have been trying to do this in a limited way but I don't have an unlimited budget to do it. I have about 30 classic game consoles, all in their original boxes, some in new condition, some in as close to it as I could find them. They've all been meticulously cleaned and, when necessary, repaired. I keep them stored in their boxes and remove them to play only every once in a while. I do the same with individual cartridges. Of course, I don't keep these things in a hermetically sealed room or anything so they're still exposed to the elements, but I do what I can in my own small way.
As for the IP rights of these old games, a lot of people seem to feel they're abandonware and that they're entitled to simply take them. I will confess to being a big MAME fan myself but I also can see it from the eyes of the publishers. These games are not abandonware, as articles like this ought to tell you. And games are not only simply re-released periodically, they're also continuously updated (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, etc.), so that IP is certainly valuable. But it would be a shame if those same IP rights were responsible for the loss of some of these classic games to history.
Slashdot Mirror
Welp, my letter to Hillary Clinton has already been fired off. Not that my letter alone will do anything, but it's time for people to at least do something, anything at all to try to put a stop to crap like this under the guise of the DMCA. Write to your congress-people, donate to the EFF and ACLU, vote for candidates based on their stances on technology issues rather than their standing in Hollywood... I mean whatever. Get the movement started, for god's sake. This is getting completely out of hand at this point. The USSR is alive and kicking when it's a "felony" to talk about using the shift key on your keyboard. (No Soviet Russia jokes please - I am being totally serious.)
As someone who is currently wrestling with Redhat 9.0 in an effort to wean himself off of Windows... I'd say MS will have an effective monopoly for some time to come.
I'm going to burn a bit of my karma on an OT post just to help out a RH9 brutha. Do yourself a favor and download the atrpm's kickstart of Apt. Then get Synaptic to go with it. It'll change your whole outlook on RH9 and Linux in general. Seriously, unless you're a real techie who wants to get his hands dirty, there's no need to really ever deal with the command line again, and no need to mess with dependencies either. I just did a dist-upgrade last night and what would have taken hours a year ago took me literally five minutes. The importance of these two applications together has really been understated by a lot of people in the Linux community; for desktop users I think they're pretty essential. Should be default packages in every desktop distro.
The best part of this whole thing is watching this poor guy's site counter shoot up. Was at 131 when I got there - now at 584 two minutes later. I'm watching the Slashdot effect in action in front of my own eyes!
I have to wonder how long until people start to realize that for truly critical (read millions of dollars) work, you're best off having the production machines OFFLINE.
It would be a pain in the ass only being able to code on one machine, but even something as simple as a KVM switch would make it tolerable.
Pain in the ass?? Try impossible. How do you think game programming works, anyway? One guy sitting there plugging away on his work machine from 9-5? Bzzzzt. Sorry, try again. I say this as someone who works in the industry for a fairly large publisher who will remain nameless.
HL2 is a large, big-budget game with a lot of code, a lot of staff, and a tight production schedule. Some people seem to live in this fantasy-land where PC games are still coded by individual hackers locked away in their basement. Well, welcome to the real world, where dozens of people need to work on the same code in near real-time, and where work continues even while coders are out of the office or in fact out of the country.
I don't know that all of this code needed to be on one machine that was net accessible. There's probably something that could have been done to segment it among separate machines on separate VPN's, which then could have been combined to compile and run whenever a build was needed. So yes, Valve could have probably taken better precautions. But the answer is not to put all of the code on a single, closed machine - that simply doesn't work in real life. The code - at least some of it at a time - needs to be net accessible for a company in the business of making games to function these days.
It was revealed today that a third of the code was stolen, so maybe Valve actually was taking some sorts of precautions - maybe it was separated into three segments on three different machines. But that probably was not enough.
You can look at Valve's security as a whole, and maybe you will find holes that should have been plugged, but simply saying "the code should not have been net accessible!" is just not realistic.
An Autorun will be effective against the vast majority of Windows and Mac users.
This doesn't matter. Who cares if you lock out all those people that aren't technically savvy enough to really use their computers to begin with? These people probably couldn't figure out how to even get on Kazaa anyway.
If you can't even lock out those who know well enough to use the shift key, or to simply disable auto-run to begin with (as the author rightly points out many people have already done), then there is absolutely no hope of keeping this music off of file-sharing networks, or out of black-market pirate CD rings. All this is doing is locking out people who don't need to be locked out, and keeping the music easily accessible to those who (in the record industry's eyes) do need to be locked out. It is therefore completely ineffective and arguably counterproductive.
In fact, it's no better than the pen trick on the old schemes. I mean, if you didn't read Slashdot or CDfreaks or whatever, you'd have had no idea that that worked either. The average consumer probably still knows nothing of the pen trick. But the fact that people who generally do a lot of copying did find out about it made that copy protection method completely useless to the record labels. The whole point is to stop people from copying (and sharing), not to punish those who just want to listen to their CD's (much as it seems otherwise so much of the time).
About the only good thing I could see coming out of this (for the record industry) is a conditioning among average consumers to begin to accept DRM. Over a long period of time, that may change prevailing attitudes among the public. But it won't stop people from copying that want to copy and know anything at all about PC's, which has to be the end goal of all this in the minds of the RIAA and their cohorts.
Cool move. I've also opted out of TV (3 years) and radio (10 years) due to them both sucking big time. I have so much more time these days :-)
I read an article about you the other day. You seem like a pretty cool guy.
This doesn't sound that amazing. What's newsworthy about this?
This.
It's not just individual application updates. It's groupware version management. Try having five different people in a team working on a file that's going to be used for both print and web with Adobe's current suite of apps. It's a nightmare. If things work the way they describe it in the above article, seamlessly letting all members of a team work on the same file, this upgrade will be a godsend.
Don't forget, graphic design is not just freelancers working on small projects from home, or l33td00dz who just want the latest "professional" program to "design" wallpapers for deskmod.com. It's also part of every business out there, and in the corporate world it's generally teams of people working on the same documents. This upgrade should hopefully finally bring Adobe's products in line with that reality.
"If the issue is a non-issue, why don't they indemnify their customers?"
Backwards. If the issue is a non-issue, why would IBM indemnify their customers? It's like asking IBM to indemnify a customer against tripping and falling because they fail to tie their shoe. It has nothing to do with IBM or the software/services the customer is being sold, so why would IBM indemnify their customers against it? IBM is not an insurance company.
It's all just FUD by Sun, but it always amazes me how these guys around the industry can spew this nonsense that's not only wrong, but completely irrelevant and, well, nonsensical. There's just no logic behind it at all; you look at it and go "huh?" Really makes you wonder what it takes to succeed in business. Seems to be more luck than anything; it's obviously not brains. And luck only lasts so long.
Thats just stupid. I think the lawsuit is innapropriate.
HD manufacturers always measuered their disks like that.
No, they did not. You young'uns probably don't remember it, but the first hard drive I ever owned was 10MB - 10240KB, on the dot (give or take a few bytes).
The binary switchover happened as a marketing scheme sometime between 100MB and 1GB - it was at one of those two milestones, as one of the major manufacturers wanted bragging rights getting there first, as I recall. Since then, all sorts of revisionist history has been written claiming that 1GB was really 1,000MB all along when it plain and simply is not true.
Look, whatever the dictionary tells you "giga" means, this is a technical term that means something else in the computer world, and has always meant something else in the computer world. The same way that words like "token ring" don't mean the same thing in PC land as they do in real life. If you bought a "token ring adapter" from Cisco and opened the box to find a device that allowed you to slip a Cracker Jack box toy ring over your finger, would you not feel a bit deceived?
Exactly. The problem however, is when pilots (or air controllers) rely on instruments they believe to be accurate and have no way of knowing whether this is true. In some instrument landing system (ILS) landings, it is virtually impossible to land without the instruments or verify all the parameters.
This is why they call them "instrument landings", and without them we wouldn't be able to fly in bad weather at all. A good percentage of all flights are flown under instrument flight rules and there's no higher incidence of accidents during bad weather as during good weather (at least not in countries with modern airline fleets).
All instruments have backups that take measurements in a different way than the primary instruments (all modern commercial planes have both radar and standard altimeters, for example). Some of them have so much redundancy that pilots forget how to use the backup instruments, and this in itself has been responsible for a few accidents.
Instrument flight in itself is not the problem, and pilots are trained, and trained well, in what to do if and when their instruments fail (and instrument failure is fairly common - planes are even allowed to take off with certain instruments broken). The problem is, as always, the human factor, and at times human behavior will cause a completely avoidable crash that would at first glance seem to be the fault of poor or broken instrumentation. In fact I can't even recall a crash that could be fully blamed on broken instruments - unless a pilot literally loses everything (which would entail a complete electronics failure and simultaneous failure of various physical sensors on the outside of the aircraft linked with old-style analog backup instruments), he or she is trained in how to fly and land that plane.
Linux, Windows, and other OS are not designed almost spacifically to trade copyrighted material. Kazaa is, and there is the difference.
Have you ever used Kazaa? Doesn't sound like it. It's a P2P application, nothing more, nothing less. It is not a Napster clone; it can be used to share Word documents, pdf's, executables, plain text files, Linux distributions, whatever the heck you want. Music is just *one* thing that can be shared with it, and there is no specific feature built into the software that in any way enables or encourages you to share anything copyrighted. Kazaa lets the user assume the responsibility for maintaining copyright, and that's as it should be.
And please, spare everyone the lame argument that Kazaa is "just" a generic file trading app.
An argument has two sides. This is not an argument, it's a simple fact. Accept it or don't; your choice. Some people still believe the world is flat too. I share plenty of files on Kazaa and not a single one of them is a copyrighted song or movie file.
It's always the public's choice whether or not to break the law. There's nothing stopping me from snapping the neck of the next person I pass on the street, for example. What you seem to be expecting would be the equivalent of some sort of physical arm restraint for all pedestrians. This is not the concept on which our society (or in fact any society, even totalitarian ones) is based.
How a piece of software is used by users is, as always, up to the users. I can use Windows itself (or Linux) for good or evil too. That doesn't mean we should be building in restraints to only allow us to do a certain set of things the government (or worse, some unaccountable industry trade organization) thinks is ok for us to do.
No I don't get the 'wink'.
Nor do I. I don't know what's up with Slashdot lately; this is a tech news site, not a script kiddie site. We're not here to learn from famous crackers or to congratulate each other for taking big sites down. Crackers are criminals and they need to be punished. They do cause damage. The implication in the comments at the head of this are that this guy didn't really do anything wrong and so should get off... just like the 18 year old "kid" who got busted for the MSBlaster virus variant a couple weeks ago, at which time I read similarly ignorant and even stupid comments here.
The NY Times is 2 products; an offline and an online newspaper. You knock the online version out and you've killed half the products the company offers. Advertisers need to be repaid, workers have to be paid even though they can't do any work, etc. And you're going to lose a certain number of readers to other sites, some temporarily, others permanently. I agree that the numbers here do not seem unreasonable at all.
But then I shouldn't need to explain why crackers should go to jail. This is Slashdot, we should all understand this stuff already. There's no reason why a tech news site should favor crackers over commercial internet interests; it's all tech, it's just that one side of the issue here happens to be criminal.
My company's web sites have been the victim of numerous DoS attacks (no, I do not work for SCO - I work for a company you guys like, though I don't really want to say which), which while using different methods amount to the same thing this guy did - it's all denial of service, and it does cost companies money. I have absolutely no sympathy for this guy and hope he gets the book thrown at him.
Could some fine ex-Atari employee please release the ROMs for Marble Man (Marble Madness II), so it could be emulated for the PC? I don't see any reason to withhold the ROMs at this point in the game. I can't see anyone profiting, etc.
No? Granted, MMII isn't there (MM1 is) but publishers release stuff like this all the time. The ROMs are not public domain and the games are still commercially viable when packaged like this. Publishers occasionally even put out previously unreleased stuff on compilations (such as the Activision Classics compilation released a little while ago, and also soon for GBA).
You couldn't say the Pope is the ultimate judge of whether a convicted killer lives or dies, for example - that's up to the Supreme Court, according to the Constitution.
Ugh, this is what I get for typing in a rush - the above is not at all what I meant to say. The Supreme Court decides issues of interpretation of law, such as death penalty cases, and their decisions can be used as precedent. They do not generally decide sentencing for criminals, nor is it their job to do so. Sorry about the confusion.
The first amendment does NOT state that God should be kept out of government affairs.
This clause, however, does:
Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Note also that it does not restrict state governments in this area at all.
Again, the above clause does. Any law based on religion passed by a state government must be consistent and not conflict with the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. You cannot, therefore, pass a law that says, for example, that you cannot take the Lord's name in vain, as that violates the First Amendment.
This should be obvious but your comments force me to point it out once again. Most laws I could think of based on religion that aren't also based on common morality (ie. "thou shalt not kill") would conflict with the Constitution in some way. You couldn't say the Pope is the ultimate judge of whether a convicted killer lives or dies, for example - that's up to the Supreme Court, according to the Constitution. This clause was partly (or possibly mainly) intended to promote separation of church and state.
Because it's very simple for them to check the country of origin of any credit card. If the bank portion of the card doesn't match a US bank then, well... It's not a US credit card.
So what? My wife is from Japan and her only credit card is Japanese. She is also a legal New York resident with a New York driver's license. I would think there has to be some sort of law regarding discrimination against immigrants in this manner - isn't there? Can someone enlighten me on this?
Doing a CC check is no way to tell country of residency. At the same time, I would bet Apple has no mechanism set up to verify residency in other ways (say, by faxing in relevant documents to an 800 number - though this still seems discriminatory). Can someone shed some light on whether or not there are legal requirements involved here and what, if anything, Apple really does to check residency beyond a CC check? Anyone actually gone through the process who's in a similar situation to my wife's?
The sad thing is they'll fail to catch the original Blaster author so they'll throw the book at this kid for the whole Blaster thing.
This seems to be the prevailing sentiment here and honestly, it's making you all look like a bunch of script kiddies, or at the very least script kiddie sympathizers.
Fact is this 18 year old "kid" (actually, adult in this country) committed a crime if he wrote this virus variant and distributed it. While he's still innocent until proven guilty, I fail to see how it's "sad" to get any virus writer - big or small - out of the virus writing business.
This is the way law enforcement works. You can't catch everybody who commits a crime, and if you don't show that you're actively enforcing the law, there will be more criminals. Study after study after study have shown this to be the absolute truth. Even if they don't catch the writer of the original Blaster, catching this guy and making an example out of him - as well as any other virus writers they no doubt will catch in the future - will act as something of a deterrent. You're all operating under the assumption that this guy is a small-fry writing viruses in his spare time - you think it's worth it to a guy like that to risk jail time? No, and this will cause others like him to think twice.
Obvious analogy - when there aren't any cops around, I see a lot of people run red lights. When there is a cop stationed at an intersection, I see nobody running red lights. Funny how that works.
And if his punishment is harsh, so what? If he's found guilty, he's a criminal. He deserves whatever he gets at that point. People need to take responsibility for their own actions and realize that their actions have consequences, both for the people they directly affect (ie. those infected by this variant of the Blaster virus) and for themselves. You'd think Slashdot readers would have a little more grasp of this concept than most (being open-source advocates), but it appears this may not be the case.
the state Supreme Court ruled that property and trade secrets rights outranked free speech rights in this case.'"
If this is in fact what they said, it'll never hold up. Freedom of speech is the First Amendment to the US Constitution (for those of you who don't live here). It cannot be "outranked" by property and trade secrets rights. No state or federal law can "outrank" the Constitution of the United States.
The article may have misinterpreted the decision, but if that indeed was the decision, it will be overturned.
"Wow, taken to the extreme, the exploitation of their systems could have caused a train collision and injury or death to hundreds of Maryland and Virginia commuters."
I think that's a little far-fetched, and almost amounts to fear-mongering. At best, it displays ignorance of how modern rail systems work. When the signals fail, the trains simply stop - engineers don't look at a broken signal and say "well, gee, I hope there's nobody in front of me, full speed ahead!" In fact, on most modern equipment the braking is automatic when signals fail. I don't know exactly how modern the system is in Maryland, but at the very least there would be a regulation that all trains come to a halt in the event of signal failure. They certainly would not go speeding around without knowing if there's another train occupying the same block.
Collisions can and do occur even when the signals are working properly - it takes time to stop a speeding train. But assuming positioning is all correct to begin with and everybody's following proper speed limits before the signals go out, there should be no problem stopping a train in time once the signals do fail.
I think you might be missing something: Check here.
The codec itself is not adware supported. It appears the only thing they've changed is the layout of their downloads page - they've de-emphasized the free codec download, but it's still there.
Can we also cease with the melodramatic "biggest blackout ever" crap. Sure, it may have affected the most people, but the power was only out ~24 hours or so. Ice storms have taken the power down for a longer length of time.
Not to 50 million people, they haven't. An ice storm taking out power to even 500,000 people for 3 or 4 days is nothing compared to what happened last week. Yes, this was "The biggest blackout ever" in North America and I don't think it's at all melodramatic to say that. It will easily cost the most money of any blackout ever, it affected by far the most people and it was longer than 24 hours - in NYC it was 29 hours (and about 48 hours before the subways came back), in Detroit and Cleveland even longer, and Cleveland didn't have clean water until yesterday.
This was huge. No, millions of people did not die, so yes, let's keep it in perspective. It was no 9/11, it was no WWII. But it was a major economic event, and it will affect our economy as well as our governmental policy (hopefully) for years to come.
You can use a SharkPort, as it says on the web site. These are tough to find and are no longer made, but follow the link on that web site to the XPort, which does the same thing (and in fact probably is the same thing).
These things have existed for a long time. I got my SharkPort maybe 6 months after the PS2 was launched.
As for info on the power grid getting into "the wrong hands", this isn't some sort of national secret. It's not classified information. Some of the security methods used to protect individual plants or other parts of the power grid are not made public, but anyone who watches The Discovery Channel on a fairly regular basis probably has as good an idea of how the power grid works as would be needed to bring part of it down. The method of the failure this time (3 high power transmission lines failing simultaneously, causing an overload) seems remarkably similar to what happened in 1965. Which in itself is pretty ridiculous - this wasn't supposed to happen again. Any terrorist could plant a few bombs at the base of some of these high tension wire towers and bring the system down if this is all it takes - this is not something that would require declassifying information to figure out.
And I don't agree with those who say this is not a dangerous thing. I was one of the millions of New Yorkers who had to walk home over one of our river crossings on Thursday. Imagine a coordinated attack involving first taking out the power to the northeast, followed by any one of the following:
Those are just a few examples - I'm sure there are many more that terrorists have already thought of. It is very dangerous for power to be completely out in any major city, let alone the northeast - nobody is able to get any news or announcements (land and cel phones were down on Thursday, and even the news outlets not knocked off the air were relying on those who could get through on phones for information), emergency calls cannot be made, emergency vehicles cannot get through streets choked by pedestrians, police and fire departments cannot communicate with their bases, hospitals have to rely on minimal power from backup generators, etc.
Until we heard definitively that this was not a terrorist act on Thursday, everyone in this city was very nervous - I was surely not the only one who thought it could be a setup for something larger. After all, we've been through this before - both large-scale power outages and large-scale terror attacks. Once we were told that it definitely was not terrorism, that's when the partying started - but until that point, there was what I consider to be a perfectly justified fear in the voice of pretty much everyone I talked to.
Society, by expressing its will via a democratic government, has the right to determine how property -- intellectual and physical -- is used, but society does not have the right to assume or transfer ownership of an individual's property.
No? Tell that to all the people who were evicted by the government (landlords and tenants alike) when the WTC was built. That's just one example.
Skip down to the part about eminent domain if you must.
PS. Emulator is *NOT* a substitute for a classic arcade game.
No, but I think you're missing the point. How many working I, Robot machines do you think there are in the world? Not many. This was the first 3D arcade game ever made; it needs to be preserved. This is about history, not just video games. Eventually, with the passage of time everything stops working - it's just a matter of how long it takes. With this near-perpetual copyright we've got in this country these days it's possible that some game companies will sit on their IP, doing nothing with it, while all of the old arcade machines/cartridges/CD-ROM's rot and eventually die. With no copies of the original game available any longer, the games will be lost.
That's a worst case scenario that I don't believe will happen to most games precisely because there are so many people out there skirting the law with emulators. There are emulators for pretty much every major classic console and a good 95% or so of all arcade games. But that still leaves a small percentage of both home and arcade machines unaccounted for, and without good ROM dumps from those games, they can and will eventually be forgotten and lost to time in a way none of us ever thought mass-produced digital data could be. We always seem to just assume that anything put out there by a major corporation these days will just always be out there forever wether they still want it to be or not - that's not the case.
There need to be people out there who are actively trying to preserve at the very least the most important games in their original forms - that doesn't skirt anyone's IP, and it will keep the games available for when copyright runs out (fat chance at the rate we're going) or for when the company finally does put the IP in public domain (which doesn't happen very often, for reasons I'll get to in a sec). And I don't mean doing something like putting an old arcade cabinet in the corner and playing it; I mean buying up old machines, in as close to their original condition as possible, restoring them to like-new condition, and then keeping them that way. Right now there are only a few people doing this, and they're generally looked down upon by the gaming literati because "games were meant to be played" rather than stored for posterity. That's true, of course, but we're at the point in time when we do need the equivalent of real video game museums, in the same way we have television, radio and film museums already.
I have been trying to do this in a limited way but I don't have an unlimited budget to do it. I have about 30 classic game consoles, all in their original boxes, some in new condition, some in as close to it as I could find them. They've all been meticulously cleaned and, when necessary, repaired. I keep them stored in their boxes and remove them to play only every once in a while. I do the same with individual cartridges. Of course, I don't keep these things in a hermetically sealed room or anything so they're still exposed to the elements, but I do what I can in my own small way.
As for the IP rights of these old games, a lot of people seem to feel they're abandonware and that they're entitled to simply take them. I will confess to being a big MAME fan myself but I also can see it from the eyes of the publishers. These games are not abandonware, as articles like this ought to tell you. And games are not only simply re-released periodically, they're also continuously updated (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, etc.), so that IP is certainly valuable. But it would be a shame if those same IP rights were responsible for the loss of some of these classic games to history.