The easiest way to describe the difference between steganography as it is used digitally and what is described by the article is that in stegenography the data you are hiding is distributed across the image or audio file you are hiding the data in. Using the method described in the article, every bit that is sent across the connection contains the value of the original message and the value of the noise. When you subtract the noise, you end up with the original message.
If you have 10 kilobytes of data to send, using stegenography, you may have to distribute that 10 kbytes across 1 or more megabytes of documents. Using noise encryption, you are only sending 10 kbytes of data.
Of course there is noting saying that you can not combine methods.
I do seem seem to recall Tom Clancy using a variation on this idea in several of his novels, where the CIA burns two CDs giving an agent one, and keeping one at the agency. The agent encrypts his message using a tool that destructively reads the CD as it is encoding the message. The CIA gets the encoded message and destructively reads their own CD to decode the message. The source for the two CDs is a cosmic ray counter, or something like that.
Reading the excerpted portion of the licence, suggests that MS might even consider a KVM switch to be out of bounds. Can someone come up with another interpretation of "... to permit any Device to use, access, display, or run other executable software residing on the Workstation Computer..."
Personally I think this is streaching the interpretation of the licence agreement, but then I refuse to run XP in any case, so it doesn't directly affect me yet.
As I have heard it defined, the point of the GPL is to allow the user to improve the product for his or her own purposes, and one of those purposes may very well (but is not required to) be to make that code available to others.
If I buy a Zero10 printer, and don't like the fact that the default drivers for that printer embed little 'x's where ever there is a contrast edge, then if the drivers were developed under the GPL, Zero10 would be requrired to provide me the source code, at my request, and at the cost of the media upon which it is distributed plus a nominal fee for the time required to produce the source code, and I could modify that code.
If I decide to re-distribute the modified code, which replaced the little 'x's with little 'o's, I would also have to provide the modified source code.
Observations...
Eproms and EEproms are not strictly Roms. I would suggest that if your going to develop firmware code (on re-programmable media, including eproms and eeproms) that you will need to be prepared to provide source code if you include GPL sourced code in the media. You should be safe with Proms, but I am not as sure.
Software in embeded systems may be developed as a gpl licenced product, but is not likely to be re-distributed. Dishwashers, refrigerators, ovens, stoves, washers and dryers, tv's, vcr's, and DVD players may all have GPL code inn use, but it is the very rare individual indeed who would consider buying one, and re-distributing it with a modified executable in it.
Am I wrong to assume that if the software does not require an EULA, it doesn't really matter what licence it was written under?
I can just see the EULA with my next microwave oven... The software included with this product does not have any gaurantees as to the sutability of it with respect to the expected uses of the product it is included with. This software may or may not cause your slice of pizza to become warmer that it was in the refrigerator you removed it from, at a rate greater than or less than what would be achived by leaving it on your back porch. The bar code reader may optionally and without involving the user spontaniously order healthy food through your local varient of webvan upon your passing a pizza box across it. We will not be held responsible for your oven tempreture droping after you put the cake in, the stove burning the cream of mushroom soup, or your freezer defrosting your ice-cream, even if you have an 802.11b sniffer trace showing that said commands originated with this device.
IIRC each store maintains it's own stock based in part on what it believes it can sell. The chain as a whole does sell several models of CB rigs, however the stores near me, not having sold any lately have moved into 49mhz, frs, and other equipment. I suspect I would be just as likely to find a 10 meter rig locally, as I personally know at least two Hams in the area, but I would havee to spend quite a bit of time watching for CB antenas in the area, that are not on trucks.
But that may be just my neck of the woods. Your local RS is probably provisioned differently.
who originally petitioned the FCC to allocate a segment of spectrum specifically for unlicenced usage?
I don't recall if they were part of a group of companies, or acted on their own, but I seem to recall that they were looking for the bandwidth to support products like WiFi.
I would suspect that they, along with Motorola, Intell, a whole slew of network card manufacturers, Intersill, and many other groups would be interested in the arguments and will probably be responding.
As far as licenced/unlicenced goes, it could run either way. CB-Radio was a licenced set of spectrum when it was first popularized. When the FCC realized that they had not way to control the spectrum, it became unlicenced. Now you can still find radios, but you generally have to go hunting for them. I don't recall the last time I saw one at my local radio shack to tell the truth. Truck stops are a different matter.
Even licenced bandwidth is not immune to private interests. LPFM was attempting to licence low power transmitters so that your school, city/county council, or club could set up a radio station for people in the community to listen to as they found it interesting. By low power we are talking in the 2-5 watt range. When NPR came down against it, complaining that the channel separation authorized in the lpfm licences were too low, the possibility faded.
These are just my oppinions and personal observations. I could be wrong.
I was thinking that for every e-mail address in a spammers distribution list, they should loose one cubic millimeter of an arbitrary organ, skin being the first to work with. If there is an insufficient supply, then the excess should be extracted from relatives, significant others, etc.
Then again, maybe I just don't like spammers...
I am not advocating, defending, or arguing against the decisions that people in the military make. I never was in a position to really advise anyone in what software should be used. My experience was as one of the people using the software.8-10 years ago.
From a user perspective, I have a job that has to be done now. Not when you get around to writing software to support my job. The decisions about what software to start putting on systems were made several years before OpenOffice was even considered as a project.
Considering the interest the NSA has taken in Linux, I would honestly be surprised if there was not several dozen hackers in the military looking through the source code for OpenOffice and providing contributions. They may even be doing so as part of their occupational specialty, though I would be more inclined to suspect that it was being done after hours.
As there is major awareness of problems with the Microsoft Software, and others including Cisco, I am further inclined to suspect that ther are several people in reasonably high positions who are willing to advocate moving to open source. They may even be doing that right now.
At the same time, they are going to be fighting the same arguments from non-open source advocates that any open source advocate faces in the buisness world. In some cases they will have a harder time of it as well. That is because the military likes a single look and feel to things. So, will they standardize on KDE, or Gnome? Or something else?
If handled properly, this could be the entry point for Linux on the desktop to gain market share. If the military uses it, you are probably going to see more businesses convert to it as reservists see it's capabilities. As more businesses convert because of the reservists, you will see more companies selling computers with Linux and Open Office as standard builds.
I think that is part of the idea behind building the new tunnel. Right now the two tunnels that are serving NY are fully utilized. If you shut down one for maintenance the demands are too high to be provided by the remaining tunnel.
The third tunnel (from what I recall) has a capacity more than twice the combined capacity of the two existing tunnells. Or rather will have when it is completed. I do not recall the date that it was started, but with a 55 year build out time, even assuming a 10% ahead of schedule rate (which I suspect is high, and is subject to change over the years to come) I doubt that it will be finished in time to provide more than additional capacity when it is completed.
Then again, I could be wrong. These are my own opinions.
Actually two other software pattents do show the effectiveness of pattenting software. PKZip and the RSA public key encryption process were pattented. I suspect that Phil Katz got a pattent for PKZip as a result of the headaches he went through with his ARC compression process.
As a result of the pattents on RSA encryption, there was an added expense if you wanted to market a product in the US that used RSA encryption, up until the pattent expired recently. The problem for a lot of people was the fact that the libraires for the freeware PGP products in the US could not include any of the code for RSA. There was not licencing agreement that would have been reachable.
I was just thinking back on why this might be a problem for the military in general.
Havng had some experience as an admin in the Army, amoungst some other experiences, I feel comfortable with the asertion that from the perspective of a software user, the millitary is no different than any major corporate entity.
While they do have hardware and software than most corporations do not have, the same can be said for GM, Sabre, and Citicorp.
Yet for most day to day operational stuff, admins, supply people, and more and more mechanics are using off the shelf software to support their job.
Part of this is cost savings. Even at inflated dod prices, it costs them less to purchase Office than it does to write their own office suite. For situations that do not require hardened computers, it is cheaper to buy off the shelf than to custom order.
That doesn't mean that these systems require any less security than corporate systems do, or even that they need more security, though that is arguable. However the implications of a hacked PC that manages where soldiers are going to be stationed, or what parts are in inventory, or what grade screw belongs on that part of the engine, are a bit different for computers in the military than they are for a corporate office. Likewise for whether that order makes it to the server in a timely manner. For a buisness, it means money. For the Military it also means money, but it can also mean lives, or battles.
-Rusty
Hmm sort of like only allowing a Sony VCR to communicate with a Sony TV if the TV is informed of the serial number of the Sony VCR, yet the Sony VCR will interoperate quite well with the Toshiba TV, so Sony decides it is time to sue Toshiba....
First of all, I have not played on either server. However your argument strikes me as missing some points.
You point out that the servers provide matchmaking services only. Ok, I have seen similar arguments before. Other people are saying that play with the blizzard supported server is affected by a slow server, a server that is regularly hacked, a sserver that is buggy, etc. which they subsequently report is not a problem on the bnetd server. Could it be that what you see as trivial requirements on the part of the server are not as trivial as you think, and are not being met on the authorized server?
As a hint, the slowness being reported may very well be a result of a buggy server that has been hacked so that new or returning users have to spend an unusually long time waiting to connect to another player. The server may have been hacked so that players with unmodified games get linked up to players with modified games. The bugs could be preventing people from connecting with the server at all, making the server appear to be unreliable. All of this presumes that the server has been hacked, or is buggy, or is slow, or is unreliable. Since I have not played on it, I am not a good judge of the situation.
As for the CD-Key portion, let me see if I have this right. Playing this game stand alone does not require a CD-Key. If it did then a player would never get as far as requesting a connection to a server. This means that the CD-Key authentication is built into the server, not the game, or it is built into the part of the game that connects to the server. As people are currently able to play the game through a server that does not require a CD-Key, the authentication code must reside on servers that players have to have the CD-Key to play on.
So people setting up competing servers will need one of two things: access to the code that can validate CD-Keys, or access to a service provided by the game manufacturer which can provide authentication of CD-Keys. As the server does not already authenticate CD-Keys on it's own, I suspect that the code for authentication is propritary, and the game manufacturer is not going to make it available. Since there has been no complaint indicated that competing servers are not using an authentication service provided by the manufacturer, I can suppose that this does not exist either.
As there have already been at least three links to websites that will provide CD-Keys in responses to the article, it can reasonably be assumed that CD-Keys are no more proof of ownership than a copy of the upc, or the upc number.
From what I read, your arguments do not stand up.
Then again, it's only my opinion, I am happy with the prospect that I may be wrong.
You may be interested in using something like http://www.quickbrowse.com/ they can e-mail you a collection of web pages, as one message.
The two things that would concern me are the fact that I have not figured out how to get evolution to sync e-mail to my palm, and qb pages look like they contian a lot of graphics. Not shure how that will work on Palms.
I use a PalmOS platform that does not have a wireless tranciever (I can pick up a bluetooth sled for it, but I would have to add bluetooth to one of my systems to make use of that, more expense...)
What AvantGo provides is a mechanism for me to pull down content off the internet, i.e. newspapers, magazines, C|Net, Heavens-above, and the like, and review it when I am someplace where it does not make sense to pull out my laptop. Say on the bus, or a train to or from work, where I really do not want to spend five minutes bringing up the laptop, and another couple of minutes before my stop shutting things down.
I am sure that there are other places where it makes sense. Sure I could pull this kind of stuff up on a cell phone via WAP, but if I sync first thing in the morning as I get up, by the time I leave the house, I will have far more information than I can go through on the ride to work, and I am not paying Verizon or AT&T 10 cents a minute to view that content.
Hey, it's just my opinion, I am sure you have your own. I could be wrong.
-Rusty
Asside from the fact that wireless (via cell modem for example) would cost too much, and WiFi just doesn't provide the needed coverage, neither of these possibilities are much help for people using AvantGo to pull down pages from "free" sites.
Personally I suspect that this will do more to hurt AvantGo, than it will the sites they are going to start blocking. If you have been relying upon AvantGo to pull down some specific web site, how likely are you to petition that web site to buy into being distributed across AvantGo. There are alternative MAL servers out there, though it may take a bit of work to find one.
Then again, that's just my opinion... I could be wrong.
-Rusty
My take on it is that the RIAA feels that the quality of audio in streaming is at least twice as good as the quality over the air (on average) and listeners listening over the internet are more likely to be actively interested than people listening over the air in their car, while making dinner, etc.
Additionally I suspect that they feel that it would be eaiser to make a reasonable copy of a song that is streaming than it is to record something off the air.
Those two factors combined suggest that the RIAA considers strreaming of audio to be a more valuable method of distributing content.
In my own personall view, it is easier for me to listen to a streamed brodcast where I work than it is to try to listen to any radio off the air when I am at work. This does not mean that I spend any more attention on it than I would on a radio, in fact I would probably be less inclined to listen for contests, as any time limited responses would be affected by buffering of the signal.
But then that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
The easiest way to describe the difference between steganography as it is used digitally and what is described by the article is that in stegenography the data you are hiding is distributed across the image or audio file you are hiding the data in. Using the method described in the article, every bit that is sent across the connection contains the value of the original message and the value of the noise. When you subtract the noise, you end up with the original message.
If you have 10 kilobytes of data to send, using stegenography, you may have to distribute that 10 kbytes across 1 or more megabytes of documents. Using noise encryption, you are only sending 10 kbytes of data.
Of course there is noting saying that you can not combine methods.
I do seem seem to recall Tom Clancy using a variation on this idea in several of his novels, where the CIA burns two CDs giving an agent one, and keeping one at the agency. The agent encrypts his message using a tool that destructively reads the CD as it is encoding the message. The CIA gets the encoded message and destructively reads their own CD to decode the message. The source for the two CDs is a cosmic ray counter, or something like that.
Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
More like $500 for vnc....
Reading the excerpted portion of the licence, suggests that MS might even consider a KVM switch to be out of bounds. Can someone come up with another interpretation of "... to permit any Device to use, access, display, or run other executable software residing on the Workstation Computer ..."
Personally I think this is streaching the interpretation of the licence agreement, but then I refuse to run XP in any case, so it doesn't directly affect me yet.
After all, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
As I have heard it defined, the point of the GPL is to allow the user to improve the product for his or her own purposes, and one of those purposes may very well (but is not required to) be to make that code available to others.
If I buy a Zero10 printer, and don't like the fact that the default drivers for that printer embed little 'x's where ever there is a contrast edge, then if the drivers were developed under the GPL, Zero10 would be requrired to provide me the source code, at my request, and at the cost of the media upon which it is distributed plus a nominal fee for the time required to produce the source code, and I could modify that code.
If I decide to re-distribute the modified code, which replaced the little 'x's with little 'o's, I would also have to provide the modified source code.
Observations...
Eproms and EEproms are not strictly Roms. I would suggest that if your going to develop firmware code (on re-programmable media, including eproms and eeproms) that you will need to be prepared to provide source code if you include GPL sourced code in the media. You should be safe with Proms, but I am not as sure.
Software in embeded systems may be developed as a gpl licenced product, but is not likely to be re-distributed. Dishwashers, refrigerators, ovens, stoves, washers and dryers, tv's, vcr's, and DVD players may all have GPL code inn use, but it is the very rare individual indeed who would consider buying one, and re-distributing it with a modified executable in it.
Am I wrong to assume that if the software does not require an EULA, it doesn't really matter what licence it was written under?
I can just see the EULA with my next microwave oven... The software included with this product does not have any gaurantees as to the sutability of it with respect to the expected uses of the product it is included with. This software may or may not cause your slice of pizza to become warmer that it was in the refrigerator you removed it from, at a rate greater than or less than what would be achived by leaving it on your back porch. The bar code reader may optionally and without involving the user spontaniously order healthy food through your local varient of webvan upon your passing a pizza box across it. We will not be held responsible for your oven tempreture droping after you put the cake in, the stove burning the cream of mushroom soup, or your freezer defrosting your ice-cream, even if you have an 802.11b sniffer trace showing that said commands originated with this device.
Then again, I could be wrong....
-Rusty
IIRC each store maintains it's own stock based in part on what it believes it can sell. The chain as a whole does sell several models of CB rigs, however the stores near me, not having sold any lately have moved into 49mhz, frs, and other equipment. I suspect I would be just as likely to find a 10 meter rig locally, as I personally know at least two Hams in the area, but I would havee to spend quite a bit of time watching for CB antenas in the area, that are not on trucks.
But that may be just my neck of the woods. Your local RS is probably provisioned differently.
Then again I could be wrong...
-Rusty
who originally petitioned the FCC to allocate a segment of spectrum specifically for unlicenced usage?
I don't recall if they were part of a group of companies, or acted on their own, but I seem to recall that they were looking for the bandwidth to support products like WiFi.
I would suspect that they, along with Motorola, Intell, a whole slew of network card manufacturers, Intersill, and many other groups would be interested in the arguments and will probably be responding.
As far as licenced/unlicenced goes, it could run either way. CB-Radio was a licenced set of spectrum when it was first popularized. When the FCC realized that they had not way to control the spectrum, it became unlicenced. Now you can still find radios, but you generally have to go hunting for them. I don't recall the last time I saw one at my local radio shack to tell the truth. Truck stops are a different matter.
Even licenced bandwidth is not immune to private interests. LPFM was attempting to licence low power transmitters so that your school, city/county council, or club could set up a radio station for people in the community to listen to as they found it interesting. By low power we are talking in the 2-5 watt range. When NPR came down against it, complaining that the channel separation authorized in the lpfm licences were too low, the possibility faded.
These are just my oppinions and personal observations. I could be wrong.
-Rusty
I was thinking that for every e-mail address in a spammers distribution list, they should loose one cubic millimeter of an arbitrary organ, skin being the first to work with. If there is an insufficient supply, then the excess should be extracted from relatives, significant others, etc. Then again, maybe I just don't like spammers...
I beg your pardon, this looks like the same level of Inovation microsoft has been doing since Day one.
port basic
buy qdos
borrow from Apple and Xerox
borrow from BSD
borrow from open source.
....
-Rusty
Will they do my homework for me as well?
I am not advocating, defending, or arguing against the decisions that people in the military make. I never was in a position to really advise anyone in what software should be used. My experience was as one of the people using the software.8-10 years ago.
From a user perspective, I have a job that has to be done now. Not when you get around to writing software to support my job. The decisions about what software to start putting on systems were made several years before OpenOffice was even considered as a project.
Considering the interest the NSA has taken in Linux, I would honestly be surprised if there was not several dozen hackers in the military looking through the source code for OpenOffice and providing contributions. They may even be doing so as part of their occupational specialty, though I would be more inclined to suspect that it was being done after hours.
As there is major awareness of problems with the Microsoft Software, and others including Cisco, I am further inclined to suspect that ther are several people in reasonably high positions who are willing to advocate moving to open source. They may even be doing that right now.
At the same time, they are going to be fighting the same arguments from non-open source advocates that any open source advocate faces in the buisness world. In some cases they will have a harder time of it as well. That is because the military likes a single look and feel to things. So, will they standardize on KDE, or Gnome? Or something else?
If handled properly, this could be the entry point for Linux on the desktop to gain market share. If the military uses it, you are probably going to see more businesses convert to it as reservists see it's capabilities. As more businesses convert because of the reservists, you will see more companies selling computers with Linux and Open Office as standard builds.
Then again I'm probably dreaming.
-Rusty
I think that is part of the idea behind building the new tunnel. Right now the two tunnels that are serving NY are fully utilized. If you shut down one for maintenance the demands are too high to be provided by the remaining tunnel.
The third tunnel (from what I recall) has a capacity more than twice the combined capacity of the two existing tunnells. Or rather will have when it is completed. I do not recall the date that it was started, but with a 55 year build out time, even assuming a 10% ahead of schedule rate (which I suspect is high, and is subject to change over the years to come) I doubt that it will be finished in time to provide more than additional capacity when it is completed.
Then again, I could be wrong. These are my own opinions.
-Rusty
Actually two other software pattents do show the effectiveness of pattenting software. PKZip and the RSA public key encryption process were pattented. I suspect that Phil Katz got a pattent for PKZip as a result of the headaches he went through with his ARC compression process.
As a result of the pattents on RSA encryption, there was an added expense if you wanted to market a product in the US that used RSA encryption, up until the pattent expired recently. The problem for a lot of people was the fact that the libraires for the freeware PGP products in the US could not include any of the code for RSA. There was not licencing agreement that would have been reachable.
-Rusty
I was just thinking back on why this might be a problem for the military in general. Havng had some experience as an admin in the Army, amoungst some other experiences, I feel comfortable with the asertion that from the perspective of a software user, the millitary is no different than any major corporate entity. While they do have hardware and software than most corporations do not have, the same can be said for GM, Sabre, and Citicorp. Yet for most day to day operational stuff, admins, supply people, and more and more mechanics are using off the shelf software to support their job. Part of this is cost savings. Even at inflated dod prices, it costs them less to purchase Office than it does to write their own office suite. For situations that do not require hardened computers, it is cheaper to buy off the shelf than to custom order. That doesn't mean that these systems require any less security than corporate systems do, or even that they need more security, though that is arguable. However the implications of a hacked PC that manages where soldiers are going to be stationed, or what parts are in inventory, or what grade screw belongs on that part of the engine, are a bit different for computers in the military than they are for a corporate office. Likewise for whether that order makes it to the server in a timely manner. For a buisness, it means money. For the Military it also means money, but it can also mean lives, or battles. -Rusty
Hmm sort of like only allowing a Sony VCR to communicate with a Sony TV if the TV is informed of the serial number of the Sony VCR, yet the Sony VCR will interoperate quite well with the Toshiba TV, so Sony decides it is time to sue Toshiba....
First of all, I have not played on either server. However your argument strikes me as missing some points.
You point out that the servers provide matchmaking services only. Ok, I have seen similar arguments before. Other people are saying that play with the blizzard supported server is affected by a slow server, a server that is regularly hacked, a sserver that is buggy, etc. which they subsequently report is not a problem on the bnetd server. Could it be that what you see as trivial requirements on the part of the server are not as trivial as you think, and are not being met on the authorized server?
As a hint, the slowness being reported may very well be a result of a buggy server that has been hacked so that new or returning users have to spend an unusually long time waiting to connect to another player. The server may have been hacked so that players with unmodified games get linked up to players with modified games. The bugs could be preventing people from connecting with the server at all, making the server appear to be unreliable. All of this presumes that the server has been hacked, or is buggy, or is slow, or is unreliable. Since I have not played on it, I am not a good judge of the situation.
As for the CD-Key portion, let me see if I have this right. Playing this game stand alone does not require a CD-Key. If it did then a player would never get as far as requesting a connection to a server. This means that the CD-Key authentication is built into the server, not the game, or it is built into the part of the game that connects to the server. As people are currently able to play the game through a server that does not require a CD-Key, the authentication code must reside on servers that players have to have the CD-Key to play on.
So people setting up competing servers will need one of two things: access to the code that can validate CD-Keys, or access to a service provided by the game manufacturer which can provide authentication of CD-Keys. As the server does not already authenticate CD-Keys on it's own, I suspect that the code for authentication is propritary, and the game manufacturer is not going to make it available. Since there has been no complaint indicated that competing servers are not using an authentication service provided by the manufacturer, I can suppose that this does not exist either.
As there have already been at least three links to websites that will provide CD-Keys in responses to the article, it can reasonably be assumed that CD-Keys are no more proof of ownership than a copy of the upc, or the upc number.
From what I read, your arguments do not stand up.
Then again, it's only my opinion, I am happy with the prospect that I may be wrong.
-Rusty
The two things that would concern me are the fact that I have not figured out how to get evolution to sync e-mail to my palm, and qb pages look like they contian a lot of graphics. Not shure how that will work on Palms.
-Rusty
I use a PalmOS platform that does not have a wireless tranciever (I can pick up a bluetooth sled for it, but I would have to add bluetooth to one of my systems to make use of that, more expense...) What AvantGo provides is a mechanism for me to pull down content off the internet, i.e. newspapers, magazines, C|Net, Heavens-above, and the like, and review it when I am someplace where it does not make sense to pull out my laptop. Say on the bus, or a train to or from work, where I really do not want to spend five minutes bringing up the laptop, and another couple of minutes before my stop shutting things down. I am sure that there are other places where it makes sense. Sure I could pull this kind of stuff up on a cell phone via WAP, but if I sync first thing in the morning as I get up, by the time I leave the house, I will have far more information than I can go through on the ride to work, and I am not paying Verizon or AT&T 10 cents a minute to view that content. Hey, it's just my opinion, I am sure you have your own. I could be wrong. -Rusty
Asside from the fact that wireless (via cell modem for example) would cost too much, and WiFi just doesn't provide the needed coverage, neither of these possibilities are much help for people using AvantGo to pull down pages from "free" sites. Personally I suspect that this will do more to hurt AvantGo, than it will the sites they are going to start blocking. If you have been relying upon AvantGo to pull down some specific web site, how likely are you to petition that web site to buy into being distributed across AvantGo. There are alternative MAL servers out there, though it may take a bit of work to find one. Then again, that's just my opinion... I could be wrong. -Rusty
My take on it is that the RIAA feels that the quality of audio in streaming is at least twice as good as the quality over the air (on average) and listeners listening over the internet are more likely to be actively interested than people listening over the air in their car, while making dinner, etc.
Additionally I suspect that they feel that it would be eaiser to make a reasonable copy of a song that is streaming than it is to record something off the air.
Those two factors combined suggest that the RIAA considers strreaming of audio to be a more valuable method of distributing content.
In my own personall view, it is easier for me to listen to a streamed brodcast where I work than it is to try to listen to any radio off the air when I am at work. This does not mean that I spend any more attention on it than I would on a radio, in fact I would probably be less inclined to listen for contests, as any time limited responses would be affected by buffering of the signal.
But then that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
-Rusty