Most people I know here in the UK are simply installing VMs on their machines and having them connect to P2P and Usenet services via VPNs. I'm not sure whether DPI would be able to detect what they're downloading, but it would seem at least pretty difficult to do so. Bitorrent over I2P is also starting to speed up now too with more users (well, to the point where you can probably download an 8Gig movie file in about 7 days).
So, we now need to choose between an oligopoly (relatively unregulated) and "government takeover" (unspecified regulation).
I don't trust either side right now....
Look to the way television evolved: in the US, it was seen as too big for government to run, so it went to the oligopolies. In the UK, it was seen as too big for the private sector to run, so it went to the government (until ITV came along at least).
Oligopolies will mean the net turns into an ad-infested worthless mess where every mouse click has to be monetised. What will government mean for it?
I mean this is cool and all, it's a neat discovery... but I think the whole concept of anti virus software is critically flawed and has become completely ineffective.
Exactly. In fact, that's probably been the case since pretty much the coming of domestic broadband made botnets and related activity so huge. Really, I've not run any AV on my machine under my control since about 2001. I just make sure I'm using as little Microsoft software as possible, don't visit "strange" sites (outside of a VM at least!), and generally ignore any unexpected email attachments sent by anyone at all (and I strip out all executables at the mail gateway). That sounds like a lot of work, but I hardly notice it.
Now, some have said "How do you know you're not p0wned!??" Well, maybe I am. The trouble is, even with AV software running, you can't answer that question either.
I'm trying hard to think of a nation that likes the US... Israel maybe? Even the "special relationship" between the US and the UK is now dead, apparently.
A British electrical engineer once told me that when he was in college they said one of the biggest mistakes of all time in their field was the UK domestic power plug (BS 1363). While it was designed by some of the brightest engineering minds of the day to be as safe as possible, it's caused more domestic injuries than any other plug design ever.
Why? Because the engineers never thought about what happened when the plug was left in a "safe" state, unplugged and on the floor. As such, the upturned pins inflict nasty puncture wounds when accidentally stepped on, and have provided a steady stream of visits to accident & emergency wards (and likely some deaths) ever since.
After all if a hacker/malware causes downtime less often than the vendor's screw-ups, why use the vendor's product?
You should probably also add the number of times that an attack has got past the product. I remember ExploreZip and the "I love you" virus bringing our network down within months of each othe. We were paying top dollar for protection that didn't work.
Then your problem, like Chomsky's, may be that you assume that everyone is stupid and easily influenced except you. Could you be wrong about this?
In order to prove that people aren't stupid and easily influenced, you need to show where they are getting information about stuff that allows them to form a balanced opinion. Of course people aren't stupid, but without information, they are powerless and therefore easily led. That, in essence, is Chomksy's argument.
Or do you have a different way of looking at reality (or logic, for that matter)?
It is a big internet. Not everything needs to be on wikipedia. That isn't its purpose.
So what is its purpose then, exactly? And who are you to decide what kind of information it should have? Wikipedia's format is very good for documenting neologisms. Why should people be made to use a different site just because some people have a notion of what is "wrong" and what is "right" in the semantics of certain words we use? Come to that, as there is no clear definition of "neologism" (coined less than 10 years ago? 100 years ago?) you may well do more harm than good in excluding them.
Internet is a proper noun by the way and spelt with a capital eye. Show it the respect you owe it.
_What is it_ with people who dislike the documentation of neologisms on Wikipedia? Where else are you going to be able to find out what a word like "gynoid" means (which I'd never heard of before now)?
If anything, I'd favour the deletion of all non-neologised terms from Wikipedia on the grounds that nobody needs to know what a "table" is or read about Abraham Lincoln because they can always go out and buy a damn book.
The sheer irony of people calling for articles to be deleted because they are neologisms on the one hand, while praising Wikipedia on the other for being a fountain of contemporary knowledge on the other, is just beyond all understanding.
OK, I've downloaded some kids programme episode "World of Happy" and a documentary "Who Needs Fathers?" - both look fine and both report as 832x468 (flashvhigh).
Given the fact that nobody on this thread has been able to give an actual example of a file that *doesn't* work, I think I'm having to conclude that nothing is broken.
BTW, I'm using the --get switch on get_iplayer, I've not tried streaming, if that's significant or not.
"Are these get_iplayer and flvstreamer packages shipped in Canonical hosted repositories? What patches are applied in the packages?"
I got get_iplayer using "sudo apt-get install get-iplayer" in Ubuntu 9.10. I think it may have been from the Boxee repositories though, since I'm running Boxee.
I'm a bit confused by this. TFA is talking about how the author of get_iplayer is ceasing development of it in protest at the BBC's DRM actions (the clue being in the title "get_iplayer dropped in response to BBC’s lack of support for open source"). It doesn't say get_iplayer doesn't work any more, or that the BBC have prevented its use.
Indeed, I just installed it (on Ubuntu) and it appears to work just fine - I have a nicely encoded file of some quite funny children's programme that's apparently completely free of any DRM.
Except that in the US we do not have a lot of censorship.
Well that's the thing - how do you know? indeed, if you *did* know that there was a significant degree of censorship, then it wouldn't be censorship in the first place, would it?
Here's a crash course in strategy vs tactics. Wikileaks isn't pulling some teenage prank solely for the purpose of seeing people in power with their pants down. In order to actually make a long-term difference to society, you need to play a long game by allowing your adversaries to respond in a way that allows you to be agile. By announcing ahead of time, Wikileaks can observe patterns of reaction which allows them to optimise the way in which they reveal the payload for maximum effect and minimal risk to themselves. At the very least, it's better to reveal several smaller scandals and live to fight another day then to blow the lid on a massive issue only to be totally silenced for all time.
Because algorithms just get plucked out of thin air, right?
Translation:
"I think algorithms are difficult to create. Anything that's difficult to create and used to make money needs protecting by patent. Therefore, software and business methods patents are legitimate."
Because the US patent system is perfect, right?
Listen - I don't disagree that algorithms are difficult to create. But if you're going to argue that position to legitimise their patentability, at least provide a means by which patent trolling can be avoided. I think you find you can't. Moreover, not being able to prevent such trolling does far more damage to the economy and creativity overall than simply disallowing software patents (as they do in Europe).
I feel like this is more of an issue with people not understanding what metadata is and what it can do for them rather than an issue of people liking paper.
Exactly. And what everyone who loves paper forgets to tell you is that paper records also have habit of regularly disappearing for decades due to be mis-filed. Same old same old.
Amen to that! I die inside every single time I have to contract with an outside supplier. I swear it must take me at least two hours just to trudge around the office, get the feggin' signatures on the paperwork, scan them, splice the scans into the documents and then send email out to the (usually clueless) supplier with instructions to do the same. Cross fingers and hope they come back OK.
The alternative is to do it my snail mail. Oh yeah - that's really snappy when I'm in London, the CEO is in Dallas and the contractor is in Hong Kong. Three weeks later and we might be able to do business...
There must be a good reason for this since it was done in a socialist paradise.
On what possible measure could anyone, in their right mind or with a nanosecond's consideration of the facts, think that SWITZERLAND - of all places! - is a "socialist paradise"??
They've been the most capitalistic country on earth since about 1720! Most Swiss I've met are like Ayn Rand! Do they even have any government-run social institutions? They're not even a member of the EU!
That's got to be the funniest post on/. I've seen all week.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people I know here in the UK are simply installing VMs on their machines and having them connect to P2P and Usenet services via VPNs. I'm not sure whether DPI would be able to detect what they're downloading, but it would seem at least pretty difficult to do so. Bitorrent over I2P is also starting to speed up now too with more users (well, to the point where you can probably download an 8Gig movie file in about 7 days).
So, we now need to choose between an oligopoly (relatively unregulated) and "government takeover" (unspecified regulation).
I don't trust either side right now ....
Look to the way television evolved: in the US, it was seen as too big for government to run, so it went to the oligopolies. In the UK, it was seen as too big for the private sector to run, so it went to the government (until ITV came along at least).
Oligopolies will mean the net turns into an ad-infested worthless mess where every mouse click has to be monetised. What will government mean for it?
I mean this is cool and all, it's a neat discovery... but I think the whole concept of anti virus software is critically flawed and has become completely ineffective.
Exactly. In fact, that's probably been the case since pretty much the coming of domestic broadband made botnets and related activity so huge. Really, I've not run any AV on my machine under my control since about 2001. I just make sure I'm using as little Microsoft software as possible, don't visit "strange" sites (outside of a VM at least!), and generally ignore any unexpected email attachments sent by anyone at all (and I strip out all executables at the mail gateway). That sounds like a lot of work, but I hardly notice it.
Now, some have said "How do you know you're not p0wned!??" Well, maybe I am. The trouble is, even with AV software running, you can't answer that question either.
Stop giving money to nations that don't like us!
I'm trying hard to think of a nation that likes the US... Israel maybe? Even the "special relationship" between the US and the UK is now dead, apparently.
A British electrical engineer once told me that when he was in college they said one of the biggest mistakes of all time in their field was the UK domestic power plug (BS 1363). While it was designed by some of the brightest engineering minds of the day to be as safe as possible, it's caused more domestic injuries than any other plug design ever.
Why? Because the engineers never thought about what happened when the plug was left in a "safe" state, unplugged and on the floor. As such, the upturned pins inflict nasty puncture wounds when accidentally stepped on, and have provided a steady stream of visits to accident & emergency wards (and likely some deaths) ever since.
After all if a hacker/malware causes downtime less often than the vendor's screw-ups, why use the vendor's product?
You should probably also add the number of times that an attack has got past the product. I remember ExploreZip and the "I love you" virus bringing our network down within months of each othe. We were paying top dollar for protection that didn't work.
Will their shareholders feel the same way when Ubisoft titles have the reputation of being flaky, hard to play, and prone to technical malfunction?
Well, it worked for AOL until they sold out, didn't it? In business, there is no real "forever".
Then your problem, like Chomsky's, may be that you assume that everyone is stupid and easily influenced except you. Could you be wrong about this?
In order to prove that people aren't stupid and easily influenced, you need to show where they are getting information about stuff that allows them to form a balanced opinion. Of course people aren't stupid, but without information, they are powerless and therefore easily led. That, in essence, is Chomksy's argument.
Or do you have a different way of looking at reality (or logic, for that matter)?
It is a big internet. Not everything needs to be on wikipedia. That isn't its purpose.
So what is its purpose then, exactly? And who are you to decide what kind of information it should have? Wikipedia's format is very good for documenting neologisms. Why should people be made to use a different site just because some people have a notion of what is "wrong" and what is "right" in the semantics of certain words we use? Come to that, as there is no clear definition of "neologism" (coined less than 10 years ago? 100 years ago?) you may well do more harm than good in excluding them.
Internet is a proper noun by the way and spelt with a capital eye. Show it the respect you owe it.
It's also a worthless neologism article on wikipedia.
_What is it_ with people who dislike the documentation of neologisms on Wikipedia? Where else are you going to be able to find out what a word like "gynoid" means (which I'd never heard of before now)?
If anything, I'd favour the deletion of all non-neologised terms from Wikipedia on the grounds that nobody needs to know what a "table" is or read about Abraham Lincoln because they can always go out and buy a damn book.
The sheer irony of people calling for articles to be deleted because they are neologisms on the one hand, while praising Wikipedia on the other for being a fountain of contemporary knowledge on the other, is just beyond all understanding.
OK, I've downloaded some kids programme episode "World of Happy" and a documentary "Who Needs Fathers?" - both look fine and both report as 832x468 (flashvhigh).
Given the fact that nobody on this thread has been able to give an actual example of a file that *doesn't* work, I think I'm having to conclude that nothing is broken.
BTW, I'm using the --get switch on get_iplayer, I've not tried streaming, if that's significant or not.
Until now, I'd never heard of Newzbin. Now I know about this "usenet" thing you speak of, I will investigate.
"Are these get_iplayer and flvstreamer packages shipped in Canonical hosted repositories? What patches are applied in the packages?"
I got get_iplayer using "sudo apt-get install get-iplayer" in Ubuntu 9.10. I think it may have been from the Boxee repositories though, since I'm running Boxee.
Here's what ffmpeg reports from the file I've downloaded using flashvhigh:
Duration: 01:01:06.02, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1534 kb/s
Stream #0.0(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 832x468, 25 tbr, 50 tbn, 100 tbc
Stream #0.1(und): Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16
I'm using FLVStreamer v1.8e
Maybe I should download another one to see if this isn't some bizarre DRM fluke?
I stand corrected - it's 1 hour 1 minute 6 seconds long. Dunno where I got 45mins from.
"You simply cannot be downloading from iPlayer."
Care to guess where I am downloading from then? And for bonus points: why the fuck would I be lying about it??
"strace -e open -f get_iplayer --get 859 |& grep rtmp" says nothing at all. I'm using v2.41 of get_iplayer if that's any help.
I notice a comment in the source that says:
# rtmpdump/flvstreamer version detection e.g. 'RTMPDump v1.5' or 'FLVStreamer v1.7a'
I have flvstreamer installed - would that be a clue?
I've not got rtmpdump installed to the best of my knowledge (at least, there's no file containing that name on my system). I've just tried this:
get_iplayer --get --modes=flashvhigh 859
Which gets a pretty large (670Mb) Flash file containing a 45-min episode of Top Gear which I assume that's hi-res (it looks it).
So again - works for me using a pretty much default install of Ubuntu 9.10.
This "news" is 18 days old.
So? It needs discussing. Does the fact that it didn't happen yesterday change its significance?
I'm a bit confused by this. TFA is talking about how the author of get_iplayer is ceasing development of it in protest at the BBC's DRM actions (the clue being in the title "get_iplayer dropped in response to BBC’s lack of support for open source"). It doesn't say get_iplayer doesn't work any more, or that the BBC have prevented its use.
Indeed, I just installed it (on Ubuntu) and it appears to work just fine - I have a nicely encoded file of some quite funny children's programme that's apparently completely free of any DRM.
Except that in the US we do not have a lot of censorship.
Well that's the thing - how do you know? indeed, if you *did* know that there was a significant degree of censorship, then it wouldn't be censorship in the first place, would it?
Just sayin'
Which means they're idiots. Seriously.
This gets modded as "insightful"??
Here's a crash course in strategy vs tactics. Wikileaks isn't pulling some teenage prank solely for the purpose of seeing people in power with their pants down. In order to actually make a long-term difference to society, you need to play a long game by allowing your adversaries to respond in a way that allows you to be agile. By announcing ahead of time, Wikileaks can observe patterns of reaction which allows them to optimise the way in which they reveal the payload for maximum effect and minimal risk to themselves. At the very least, it's better to reveal several smaller scandals and live to fight another day then to blow the lid on a massive issue only to be totally silenced for all time.
Because algorithms just get plucked out of thin air, right?
Translation:
"I think algorithms are difficult to create. Anything that's difficult to create and used to make money needs protecting by patent. Therefore, software and business methods patents are legitimate."
Because the US patent system is perfect, right?
Listen - I don't disagree that algorithms are difficult to create. But if you're going to argue that position to legitimise their patentability, at least provide a means by which patent trolling can be avoided. I think you find you can't. Moreover, not being able to prevent such trolling does far more damage to the economy and creativity overall than simply disallowing software patents (as they do in Europe).
I feel like this is more of an issue with people not understanding what metadata is and what it can do for them rather than an issue of people liking paper.
Exactly. And what everyone who loves paper forgets to tell you is that paper records also have habit of regularly disappearing for decades due to be mis-filed. Same old same old.
Amen to that! I die inside every single time I have to contract with an outside supplier. I swear it must take me at least two hours just to trudge around the office, get the feggin' signatures on the paperwork, scan them, splice the scans into the documents and then send email out to the (usually clueless) supplier with instructions to do the same. Cross fingers and hope they come back OK.
The alternative is to do it my snail mail. Oh yeah - that's really snappy when I'm in London, the CEO is in Dallas and the contractor is in Hong Kong. Three weeks later and we might be able to do business...
There must be a good reason for this since it was done in a socialist paradise.
On what possible measure could anyone, in their right mind or with a nanosecond's consideration of the facts, think that SWITZERLAND - of all places! - is a "socialist paradise"??
They've been the most capitalistic country on earth since about 1720! Most Swiss I've met are like Ayn Rand! Do they even have any government-run social institutions? They're not even a member of the EU!
That's got to be the funniest post on /. I've seen all week.