Also, MS has been doing this in Internet Explorer for some time, so a mistyped URL goes to an "MSN Search" branded page. So, MS will probably try to solve this problem, so they get their brand name awareness campaign back!
(Actually MSN Sucks and no one uses it despite that).
It's interesting, that the VeriSign page has a Terms of Use. I don't think they legally can require me to abide by SHIT if I got their because of a wildcard, e.g. they trapped me into getting there, not because I intended to go there. And a privacy policy? I didn't _intend_ to access their server, so I don't think I have to grant them rights to do whatever the hell they want with my info or whatever, if I don't want to.
Oh, your poor friends! Actually one of the reasons people like buying music is because they have a nice shiny case to put on their shelf in a "library". Don't laugh, I'm serious!
And books, unlike music that has fallen out of favor, actually WILL be looked at every so once in a while.
I think SOMEONE was listed in an actual lawsuit that was actually filed. On the other hand, it's plausible the RIAA fined her $2000 and agreed to forfeit the penalty if: 1. She does not disclose that she paid nothing, so other people are scared too. 2. She says she doesn't want to hurt the ARTISTS. Not the RIAA. This is the RIAA propaganda line - the artists are hurt by p2p music copying.
There is no way in hell any judge would have required a girl and single mom living in public housing to pay as much as $2000, especially with how skillfully the girl said she thought it was legal because of confusion about paying anyway. So the RIAA would have lost, with a dangerous precident. I think SOMEONE was helping this girl and her mom with what to say. Maybe FOX news, but someone, made it more dramatic, guiding her with what to say, offering to pay her defense fund, and paying her settlement fee.
Dude, you have serious brain damage if you think MS is no worse than 98% of the other software companies. This person is just sharing his point of view, which most of us agree, that MS software just plain sucks.
Software made by computer scientists who know what they're doing, not some second-rate copy-cate ala Microsoft, is the way to go.
Actually, you can EMBED things remotely in programs like PageMaker, an old program. If the filename specified is on a network drive (e.g. "\\ASIANPC\Cool.gif" and if the network is all the way around the world - say in ASIA - you have remote embedding.
Nothing new here but we're probably oversimplefying the patent, whic hI haven't read.
They should pay a small deposit to some "insurance" fund that pays you for the price of the book if it's stolen. Actually that wouldn't work too well because of fraud (people claiming their book was stolen when it wasn't really etc.) but it's a nice thought...
I'm guessing they're going to go out of business long before they have an oportunity to prove anything in court. Maybe someone (who has money or whatever) should file a PERSONAL lawsuit against one of the executives.
Here's some phone numbers you can call to tell them how you feel:
Call John Medved at 1-801-932-5404.
Or, you can leave a message at 1-801-932-5800 if you call after 5:30 PM (SCO time - e.g. bogus-time). Finally, call a customer service representative at 1-800-726-8649 and say you want to buy a license for Linux. Give them a fake credit card number or whatever, and a fake name. But call from a payphone if you call the 800 # since they can see your caller ID info even if your phone is blocked if you call an 800 #. Use a dial-around for the long distance #'s or a phone card or do that *72 or whatever it is thing...
Have fun!
I still believe that Red Hat SHOUDLN'T have sued SCO.
I'm guessing that IBM will help pay Red Hat for the lawsuit. Probably IBM was worried about how it would look if IBM were to sue SCO since SCO has already filed suit against IBM. Then it would appear to be a countersuit; this way, Red Hat is defending itself.
Of course, probably Microsoft is footing the bill for SCO's lawsuits and propaganda... boy oh boy is the SCO stock ever going to CRASH! Bam! Wham! The real question is if we can somehow drag down Microsoft with SCO...
Actally, lots of apartments offer wireless internet access, probably under the name of the landlord. So who gets the subpena? Bwhahahhaha.
Now you know what to do if the rent's too high.
Seriously, dorms etc. are increasingly offering wireless internet access and people just plug in a wireless modem to their "home" PC in their dorm room. It doesn't need to be a laptop...
At lots of cafes and at many Universities, wireless internet access, which is available for free to everyone, and is anonymous, is becoming increasingly popular.
If someone gives an IP address, date, time, and FastTrack user name, the school can't tell who the user is.
First of all, all it will take is a virus that creates the appearance of sharing lots of files - which does not require knowledge of proprietary fasttrack details - to deter the RIAA.
Secondly, all you need to do is download KazaaLite. The RIAA can't get a list of your files with KazaaLite, but you can still share files. Also other programs do the same thing.
Finally, the RIAA is illegally invading people's privacy PRIOR to having the authority to do so. They are (probably) creating supernodes, watching what people search for, and when there is a match found, logging both the person with the file and the person downloading it.
This way, the person with the file can be connected to, to get a list of all the files they have. This can be done only when it isn't disabled via some tweak that can be downloaded, or via KazaaLite.
A series of proxies should be sufficient to confuse them.
But because of the way the RIAA does there deeds, which are illegal but relegated to a third party that they can claim not to know how they do their illegal work, it is possible to deter them.
For example, we can create false reports of hits: someone searches for "Your Song" and when your node finds a hit it can claim to have found another hit from another source, with the same file, and that hit can be fake. This is sufficient to keep people from downloading copyrighted files.
Instead, the RIAA has chosen to attempt a "shock and awe" tactic, which ultimately will fail, as long as just one person (or organization) does not settle out of court. It's tempting to settle for $10,000 when you're allegedly charged with $100 million, but I think that if you are found guilty, a judge would find you not guilty, since the RIAA's evidence was illegally obtained.
I think it's a (non-free) proxy that doesn't keep logs. Not exactly an "open" proxy but still.
Don't want to pay to play?
The Nullsoft WASTE program shows the way - only share with people in your ring, hide behind a ring, etc. And only "trust" people that you have downloaded from before with success; EARN your credit-ability rating, e.g. trustworthyness.
By the way, even this is legally murky. For example, suppose I "wire tap" the RIAA's house and feed the conversations through a computer that determines if he's streaming my music through his telephone. As long as I don't look at the data being streamed, am I wiretapping? What if all I look at is the output of the computer program, which tells me YES or NO and if YES, tells me which of my songs he is stealing?
You say, "that's illegal - you can't wiretap somebody." But both the RIAA and the US DOD have a different interpreation, which, at least for the DOD, may be valid - I doubt it's valid for the RIAA though.
The DOD position - according to me - is this: lots of network traffic goes through government nodes. They can run a program on those nodes that feeds the data to data mining software, and they can even record it, provided they don't LOOK AT it.
Then suppose they catch a terrorist. They then can go back through the recorded data, and find out what the terrorist was doing on the net before they were caught. Maybe they only learn their identity retroactively - with recorded data, it's no problem.
They can even retroactively learn the encryption password or crack the code via a power series expansion of an equation and simultaneous equation solver cryptographic attack.
Now they justify storing other people's data by using the interpretation, that it's necessary to catch the terrorists to store EVERYONE's data and hence it is necessary for national security; furthermore they only LOOK at data retroactively, after a court order.
But how do they know when to get that court order? Data mining software can "look" at the data - for the sole purpose of determining whether or not they're a terrorist. So, is that an invasion of privacy if an AI (neural network data mining) looks at non-terrorists' data?
If the DOD thinks the answer is no, it probably is.
But the RIAA has a different interpretation of the law than the US DOD. Furthermore the one doing the privacy invasion - which is done PRIOR to identifying someone who is trading files and is hence done for everyone, not just people trading their music - is allowed by the DMCA, I think, only for the actual copyright holder.
As I said in the parent, the RIAA isn't the copyright holder and no contract agreement that makes them "effectively" the copyright holder grants them the DMCA's powers to (according to their interpretation) invade privacy.
I think that the RIAA is making supernodes and tricking someone who is sharing files to hopping onto their "local" supernode so they can spy on them and see what they download. Then they check to see if it's anything probably owned by one of their shareholders. If it is, they flag it.
They do this via a third party that they pretend not to know how they do their magic so once it is revealed they can claim to have been victimized by that company.
That third party is illegally protecting rights that are not its own, but the rights of the songs' actual copyright holders. It is the copyright holders, not the company used by the RIAA (or, I think, the RIAA itself) that the DMCA applies to.
The universities don't know, but should be told, these things.
(Also "spoofing" and other illegal tricks are possible. Spoofing essentially involves connecting to a port to download a file while pretending to be someone else. It's illegal, and the RIAA has publicly called spoofing to mean fake file sharing - which is unrelated).
Probably we need special laws to protect ourselves from the RIAA - and I think a unique interpretation of existing laws may fit the bill.
If you want to piss the RIAA off, flood p2p networks with fake files (in your My Shared Folder) like Madonna did. They'll find them on your harddrive. Prove in court they were all fakes. Tada.
Actually it's not really easy, at present, to legally find out who's downloading what. There is so-called packet sniffing, e.g. spying on users' access to the net, then you can see who's downloaded from someone else; or you can make a bunch of fake files and look to see who downloads it, which misses a lot of users.
Or, you can search for something and look at the list of search results: people who have the file (are offering it). You can do this legally.
Once you get a person's IP address, you can contact their ISP, and try to force them to disclose user's names. This only happens rarely, e.g. Verizon, and it is THOSE users being sued by this - not anyone who's using p2p now.
Of course there is a way around all this: using a proxy. Search google for MultiProxy (but the legality of using open proxies is questionable).
Then, they can't go after you too easilly. One alternative is the anonymizer - search google for it - it's a proxy you pay for that claims not to keep logs.
If a proxy is used, the RIAA gets the IP of the proxy serving files - and they can't force the proxy to disclose the user's names with a given IP at a given time, because they (I think) don't keep track of that!
Of course proxies introduce another issue. Proxies know who you are (they know your real IP), _and_ they can spy on you legally, to tell what you do. What if the RIAA bought the anonymizer?
Here's what you need to know: a REAL slot machine probably has a clock in it. Then, they can base their randomization sequence (it's called randomizing) on the time at which the machine was powered on - down to the millisecond.
On the other hand, if you remove the battery from the clock and then put it back in and reboot, it will perform identically each time you turn it on.
This is, in effect, what the emulator does, IMHO. Probably the emulated clock does not use the date/time of the PC the emulator is running on, but instead it considers it to be e.g. January 1, 1980 at midnight each time you start the emulation.
Now the clock hardware is likely not accessed directly by the program at any time except when the program first starts up. This is what PCs do. Then, they keep track of how many milliseconds they have been running, and store in RAM the current time based on how long they've been running and what the date/time was when the machine was powered on.
This is done because it's faster to access RAM than accessing external hardware, which you have to wait for.
If you save the state and then restore it, the "date/time" stored in RAM will be identical, so of course, an identical random sequence will occurr. This is because computers are "deterministic."
On the other hand, Super Mario Bros. 3 accesses the hardware each time you run their fruit gambling program, so if you save the state there and then restore it, you get different results.
Nevertheless, there the programs can be considered from a certain point of view, to cheat, although it isn't fraudulent but is probably legal.
Here's the dilema: if you count on the laws of statistics being in your favor, there will occationally be strings of customer wins costing you $10 million in 1 day just because there's a certain chance of tha thappening - and there's even a small chance of costing you more than that.
So it's reasonable for them to limit the odds so that at the end of the day they are guarenteed to be ahead, albeight possibly only a little.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, MS has been doing this in Internet Explorer for some time, so a mistyped URL goes to an "MSN Search" branded page. So, MS will probably try to solve this problem, so they get their brand name awareness campaign back!
(Actually MSN Sucks and no one uses it despite that).
It's interesting, that the VeriSign page has a Terms of Use. I don't think they legally can require me to abide by SHIT if I got their because of a wildcard, e.g. they trapped me into getting there, not because I intended to go there. And a privacy policy? I didn't _intend_ to access their server, so I don't think I have to grant them rights to do whatever the hell they want with my info or whatever, if I don't want to.
Someone should sue them, or something.
Bullshit. If MS is on the committee, it's MS' committee and everyone else is there for the ride.
Oh, your poor friends! Actually one of the reasons people like buying music is because they have a nice shiny case to put on their shelf in a "library". Don't laugh, I'm serious!
And books, unlike music that has fallen out of favor, actually WILL be looked at every so once in a while.
I think SOMEONE was listed in an actual lawsuit that was actually filed. On the other hand, it's plausible the RIAA fined her $2000 and agreed to forfeit the penalty if:
1. She does not disclose that she paid nothing, so other people are scared too.
2. She says she doesn't want to hurt the ARTISTS. Not the RIAA. This is the RIAA propaganda line - the artists are hurt by p2p music copying.
There is no way in hell any judge would have required a girl and single mom living in public housing to pay as much as $2000, especially with how skillfully the girl said she thought it was legal because of confusion about paying anyway. So the RIAA would have lost, with a dangerous precident. I think SOMEONE was helping this girl and her mom with what to say. Maybe FOX news, but someone, made it more dramatic, guiding her with what to say, offering to pay her defense fund, and paying her settlement fee.
Just my theory for the day.
Dude, you have serious brain damage if you think MS is no worse than 98% of the other software companies. This person is just sharing his point of view, which most of us agree, that MS software just plain sucks.
Software made by computer scientists who know what they're doing, not some second-rate copy-cate ala Microsoft, is the way to go.
Basic timeline:
...
1. Caldera goes bankrupt
Now they're trying to change it to this:
1. Caldera goes bankrupt.
a. Sells out, changes name to SCO
b. Threatens IBM
c. Threatens Linux Users
d.
But in the end, they're done for.
Actually, you can EMBED things remotely in programs like PageMaker, an old program. If the filename specified is on a network drive (e.g. "\\ASIANPC\Cool.gif" and if the network is all the way around the world - say in ASIA - you have remote embedding.
Nothing new here but we're probably oversimplefying the patent, whic hI haven't read.
They should pay a small deposit to some "insurance" fund that pays you for the price of the book if it's stolen. Actually that wouldn't work too well because of fraud (people claiming their book was stolen when it wasn't really etc.) but it's a nice thought...
GetRight does this. Yes, I found out because it refused to work after I downloaded the first thing from net net ... same with MusicMatch.
Hah...
I'm guessing they're going to go out of business long before they have an oportunity to prove anything in court. Maybe someone (who has money or whatever) should file a PERSONAL lawsuit against one of the executives.
Here's some phone numbers you can call to tell them how you feel: Call John Medved at 1-801-932-5404. Or, you can leave a message at 1-801-932-5800 if you call after 5:30 PM (SCO time - e.g. bogus-time). Finally, call a customer service representative at 1-800-726-8649 and say you want to buy a license for Linux. Give them a fake credit card number or whatever, and a fake name. But call from a payphone if you call the 800 # since they can see your caller ID info even if your phone is blocked if you call an 800 #. Use a dial-around for the long distance #'s or a phone card or do that *72 or whatever it is thing... Have fun!
Here's a WHOIS phone # you can call...bwahahha:
801-932-5800
Have fun and feel free to call in the middle of the night or whenever it's convenient for you!
Goddamnit, don't make the /. code start reverse DNS'ing IP's. That's the IP of goatse.cx, I learned the hard way. Icccck.
I'm guessing that IBM will help pay Red Hat for the lawsuit. Probably IBM was worried about how it would look if IBM were to sue SCO since SCO has already filed suit against IBM. Then it would appear to be a countersuit; this way, Red Hat is defending itself.
Of course, probably Microsoft is footing the bill for SCO's lawsuits and propaganda... boy oh boy is the SCO stock ever going to CRASH! Bam! Wham! The real question is if we can somehow drag down Microsoft with SCO...
Actally, lots of apartments offer wireless internet access, probably under the name of the landlord. So who gets the subpena? Bwhahahhaha.
Now you know what to do if the rent's too high.
Seriously, dorms etc. are increasingly offering wireless internet access and people just plug in a wireless modem to their "home" PC in their dorm room. It doesn't need to be a laptop...
At lots of cafes and at many Universities, wireless internet access, which is available for free to everyone, and is anonymous, is becoming increasingly popular.
If someone gives an IP address, date, time, and FastTrack user name, the school can't tell who the user is.
Ta - da.
Probably all the "stolen" code is in the 2.4.x kernel since that's all SCO says their UnixWare license holds them harmless to.
Here's what I think.
First of all, all it will take is a virus that creates the appearance of sharing lots of files - which does not require knowledge of proprietary fasttrack details - to deter the RIAA.
Secondly, all you need to do is download KazaaLite. The RIAA can't get a list of your files with KazaaLite, but you can still share files. Also other programs do the same thing.
Finally, the RIAA is illegally invading people's privacy PRIOR to having the authority to do so. They are (probably) creating supernodes, watching what people search for, and when there is a match found, logging both the person with the file and the person downloading it.
This way, the person with the file can be connected to, to get a list of all the files they have. This can be done only when it isn't disabled via some tweak that can be downloaded, or via KazaaLite.
A series of proxies should be sufficient to confuse them.
But because of the way the RIAA does there deeds, which are illegal but relegated to a third party that they can claim not to know how they do their illegal work, it is possible to deter them.
For example, we can create false reports of hits: someone searches for "Your Song" and when your node finds a hit it can claim to have found another hit from another source, with the same file, and that hit can be fake. This is sufficient to keep people from downloading copyrighted files.
Instead, the RIAA has chosen to attempt a "shock and awe" tactic, which ultimately will fail, as long as just one person (or organization) does not settle out of court. It's tempting to settle for $10,000 when you're allegedly charged with $100 million, but I think that if you are found guilty, a judge would find you not guilty, since the RIAA's evidence was illegally obtained.
See: http://www.anonymizer.com/
I think it's a (non-free) proxy that doesn't keep logs. Not exactly an "open" proxy but still.
Don't want to pay to play?
The Nullsoft WASTE program shows the way - only share with people in your ring, hide behind a ring, etc. And only "trust" people that you have downloaded from before with success; EARN your credit-ability rating, e.g. trustworthyness.
Just some thoughts.
By the way, even this is legally murky. For example, suppose I "wire tap" the RIAA's house and feed the conversations through a computer that determines if he's streaming my music through his telephone. As long as I don't look at the data being streamed, am I wiretapping? What if all I look at is the output of the computer program, which tells me YES or NO and if YES, tells me which of my songs he is stealing?
You say, "that's illegal - you can't wiretap somebody." But both the RIAA and the US DOD have a different interpreation, which, at least for the DOD, may be valid - I doubt it's valid for the RIAA though.
The DOD position - according to me - is this: lots of network traffic goes through government nodes. They can run a program on those nodes that feeds the data to data mining software, and they can even record it, provided they don't LOOK AT it.
Then suppose they catch a terrorist. They then can go back through the recorded data, and find out what the terrorist was doing on the net before they were caught. Maybe they only learn their identity retroactively - with recorded data, it's no problem.
They can even retroactively learn the encryption password or crack the code via a power series expansion of an equation and simultaneous equation solver cryptographic attack.
Now they justify storing other people's data by using the interpretation, that it's necessary to catch the terrorists to store EVERYONE's data and hence it is necessary for national security; furthermore they only LOOK at data retroactively, after a court order.
But how do they know when to get that court order? Data mining software can "look" at the data - for the sole purpose of determining whether or not they're a terrorist. So, is that an invasion of privacy if an AI (neural network data mining) looks at non-terrorists' data?
If the DOD thinks the answer is no, it probably is.
But the RIAA has a different interpretation of the law than the US DOD. Furthermore the one doing the privacy invasion - which is done PRIOR to identifying someone who is trading files and is hence done for everyone, not just people trading their music - is allowed by the DMCA, I think, only for the actual copyright holder.
As I said in the parent, the RIAA isn't the copyright holder and no contract agreement that makes them "effectively" the copyright holder grants them the DMCA's powers to (according to their interpretation) invade privacy.
I think that the RIAA is making supernodes and tricking someone who is sharing files to hopping onto their "local" supernode so they can spy on them and see what they download. Then they check to see if it's anything probably owned by one of their shareholders. If it is, they flag it.
They do this via a third party that they pretend not to know how they do their magic so once it is revealed they can claim to have been victimized by that company.
That third party is illegally protecting rights that are not its own, but the rights of the songs' actual copyright holders. It is the copyright holders, not the company used by the RIAA (or, I think, the RIAA itself) that the DMCA applies to.
The universities don't know, but should be told, these things.
(Also "spoofing" and other illegal tricks are possible. Spoofing essentially involves connecting to a port to download a file while pretending to be someone else. It's illegal, and the RIAA has publicly called spoofing to mean fake file sharing - which is unrelated).
Probably we need special laws to protect ourselves from the RIAA - and I think a unique interpretation of existing laws may fit the bill.
What about all the people that use proxies to share files like spammers use?
Lots of cafe's have open proxies (or you can set one up there, yourself), I think.
If you want to piss the RIAA off, flood p2p networks with fake files (in your My Shared Folder) like Madonna did. They'll find them on your harddrive. Prove in court they were all fakes. Tada.
Actually it's not really easy, at present, to legally find out who's downloading what. There is so-called packet sniffing, e.g. spying on users' access to the net, then you can see who's downloaded from someone else; or you can make a bunch of fake files and look to see who downloads it, which misses a lot of users.
Or, you can search for something and look at the list of search results: people who have the file (are offering it). You can do this legally.
Once you get a person's IP address, you can contact their ISP, and try to force them to disclose user's names. This only happens rarely, e.g. Verizon, and it is THOSE users being sued by this - not anyone who's using p2p now.
Of course there is a way around all this: using a proxy. Search google for MultiProxy (but the legality of using open proxies is questionable).
Then, they can't go after you too easilly. One alternative is the anonymizer - search google for it - it's a proxy you pay for that claims not to keep logs.
If a proxy is used, the RIAA gets the IP of the proxy serving files - and they can't force the proxy to disclose the user's names with a given IP at a given time, because they (I think) don't keep track of that!
Of course proxies introduce another issue. Proxies know who you are (they know your real IP), _and_ they can spy on you legally, to tell what you do. What if the RIAA bought the anonymizer?
Here's what you need to know: a REAL slot machine probably has a clock in it. Then, they can base their randomization sequence (it's called randomizing) on the time at which the machine was powered on - down to the millisecond.
On the other hand, if you remove the battery from the clock and then put it back in and reboot, it will perform identically each time you turn it on.
This is, in effect, what the emulator does, IMHO. Probably the emulated clock does not use the date/time of the PC the emulator is running on, but instead it considers it to be e.g. January 1, 1980 at midnight each time you start the emulation.
Now the clock hardware is likely not accessed directly by the program at any time except when the program first starts up. This is what PCs do. Then, they keep track of how many milliseconds they have been running, and store in RAM the current time based on how long they've been running and what the date/time was when the machine was powered on.
This is done because it's faster to access RAM than accessing external hardware, which you have to wait for.
If you save the state and then restore it, the "date/time" stored in RAM will be identical, so of course, an identical random sequence will occurr. This is because computers are "deterministic."
On the other hand, Super Mario Bros. 3 accesses the hardware each time you run their fruit gambling program, so if you save the state there and then restore it, you get different results.
Nevertheless, there the programs can be considered from a certain point of view, to cheat, although it isn't fraudulent but is probably legal.
Here's the dilema: if you count on the laws of statistics being in your favor, there will occationally be strings of customer wins costing you $10 million in 1 day just because there's a certain chance of tha thappening - and there's even a small chance of costing you more than that.
So it's reasonable for them to limit the odds so that at the end of the day they are guarenteed to be ahead, albeight possibly only a little.