The Berman bill, ensured a copyright owner would not be liable for "disabling, interfering with, blocking, diverting, or otherwise impairing the unauthorized distribution, display, performance, or reproduction of his or her copyrighted work on a publicly accessible peer-to-peer file trading network, if such impairment does not, without authorization, alter, delete, or otherwise impair the integrity of any computer file or data residing on the computer of a file trader."
Am I simply tired, or does the above statement seem to say that independant artists can beat on the RIAA if the RIAA attempts to block distribution of their works via P2P networks? After all, the independant artists own their own copyrights and can therefore distribute their works however they like...
I'd have gone after the photographer too. According to the news article I just looked up, Ms Aniston has been very careful to avoid topless photos, and (IMHO) the paparazzi dipshit that invaded her privacy should have been bankrupted for it. Similarly for the bastard(s) that chased Princess Diana's car, until the crash. OK, so maybe the driver was drunk, but he didn't expect to be on duty, and probably wouldn't have driven too fast or recklessly if he hadn't had paparazzi climbing up his exhaust. String 'em up, I say...
Another article, or maybe the same one, says that she joins the growing ranks of celebs that are fighting back. Another one of them in Arnold Schwartzenegger, and ya gotta wonder, what kind of moron would invade *his* privacy?? He's probably the nicest guy in the world, but he *looks* like he'd rip off your camera-hand at the shoulder and beat you to death with the soggy end. I know I wouldn't want to piss him off...:)
Moving swiftly back to the topic, though, the punishment for unauthorised entry into a computer system ought to mirror that for unauthorised entry to anything else. I.e. if you crack into a military computer you should expect to have tanks tearing up your lawn and stormtroopers sliding down ropes out of helicopters to drag you off to a secure base for interrogation and never mind the phone call. On the other hand, reading web pages by guessing the links (featured recently) is pretty much like walking past a house, glancing over the picket fence and seeing someone masturbating on the front porch - slapped wrist for looking, maybe, but nothing more.
Someone else said it - "We already have laws against unauthorised entry. Why should computers be different, just because the entry isn't physical, as in climbing-through-a-window?"
I don't suppose dye-bombs would be strictly legal, but if the purple- or green-dyed, bat-wielding idiot tried to prosecute, you'd have him pretty much saying to the judge, "Well, yer Honor, when I whacked his mailbox with my baseball bat..."
You might get away with a very loud siren, though, if you could convince the judge that it was for alerting you to incoming mail...
What if someone's trying to crack the security on your life support computer? I think something like this may have happened, where some script kiddie broke into a hospital computer and actually endangered critical care patients.
In society we all have an expectation of privacy. That right is supported in common law.
...unless you happen to be a celebrity and the peeping-tom is a "news" reporter. If you're famous, it's perfectly alright for a "public has the right to know" news reporter to fly over your house and photograph you as you sunbathe nude on your own property behind your 15-foot high brick wall.
Isn't that pretty much what happened to Jennifer Aniston not so very long ago? She was sunbathing topless on her own property behind a normally-adequate privacy fence, and some asshole climbed a fence and took photos. She sued, claiming her right to privacy was violated, but somehow the case against the publishers fell apart because some other publisher had already published the photos. I'd have been telling the judge, "they're next, yer Honor, and we'll be seeking punitive damages that will put them out of business."
It doesn't seem like the original photographer was sued under peeping tom laws, but rather that the publishers who were going to print the photos were sued for breach of privacy.
Suppose I've got a Win98 PC running Linux in a Bochs x86 emulator. Would I be expected to fork over money for the virtual cpu, or the real cpu? What if I run several copies of Bochs at the same time?
Seriously, who counts how many cpus I'm running Linux on?
I've got a couple of PCs at home that mostly run Win98, but sometimes run Linux, and some at work too. OK, so maybe the Business Software Alliance could come around demanding to see what I'm running at home, but they won't get within 100yards of where I work. Secure underground bunkers with multiple card-access locks on the grounds of an airport. I must admit it would be kind of funny to watch the Pinkerton rent-a-cops call out Homeland Security to detain the BSA goons...
Count the downloads, maybe? Nope, that won't work either. I've downloaded some distros I've never used, and I've seen burned copies of downloads passed around and copied by multiple people.
So, again, who counts how many cpus any given person is running Linux on? My boxes at home are behind a firewall doing NAT and hiding all the usual ports, so good luck fingerprinting that...
Information technology, despite its relative youth, has been far slower to approach gender equality than...
Statements like that make me cringe... Generally such statements are soon followed by "investigations into discrimination" and "affirmative action policies".
Of course, everybody on the planet ought to know by now that if girls don't feel like doing something (such as going into IT, with long hours, no overtime, etc) then all the policies ever written ain't gonna make them change their minds. And that's perfectly fine with me.
What really irritates me are the idiots that set rules like, "you must employ equal ratios of men, women, white, black, yellow, straight, gay, able-bodied, disabled, etc", because rules like that can lead to companies being forced to lower job requirements to be able to attract the correct ratios.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that there aren't any "men, women, white, black, yellow, straight, gay, able-bodied, disabled, etc" smart enough to hold down good IT jobs, I'm saying that just because not enough minorities are employed may mean that the rules are fucked up... It doesn't necessarily mean that employers are deliberately discouraging minorities, or anything sinister like that.
Of course, there are almost certainly some employers that do discriminate, but there are cases where that's absolutely necessary. For example, a person confined to an electric wheelchair probably didn't ought to be a liontamer... Similarly, a blind person might have a lot of difficulty working with microscopes in a lab...
I'd write to the various Congresscritters and ask them to delay the do-not-call list while studying ways to mutate it into a please-call-me-list
Before you flame me, think about it for a minute. If you're walking down the street, do I have the right to stop you while I try to sell you something? I don't think so. What I can do is put up a booth (local laws permitting) and hope you stop because you find it interesting. Telesales is exactly like that. You're at home, eating dinner or whatever, and the phone rings. The telesales company is betting that you'll stop whatever you're doing and pick it up.
And before anyone says it, TV ads are not the same. The TV equivalent of telesales would be where the TV suddenly turns itself on, or switches the channel, in order to show an ad.
Opting-out is complete bat puckey and whoever invented it needs a serious whack with a cluestick. It should be opt-in, and none of that "you indicated to one of our affiliates that you wanted to receive ads" crap either... That's just salesdroid-speak for "we copied their list in return for giving them ours"...
Better start reading those EULAs (Phone co, ISP, M$, whatever) carefully - before long there'll be a paragraph that reads:
"By using this product I hereby drop my name from all national and state do-not-call lists and will expect to get annoying phone calls and email at all times of day or night."
How about some kind of ID transponder chip implanted in your hand? Readable up to an inch away, should work through gloves too. That would also put paid to the "what if you don't happen to have your magic gun-enabling ring" argument...
Who said anything about length of play? I'm talking about DVDs, CDs, etc that you buy and hand over to the central entertainment system. It would maybe rip it to disk to avoid having to have a large DVD/CD jukebox, but only keep it as long as the original was available to verify. RFID tag, maybe? Dunno...
So, if you buy one copy of, say, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, you get 3 or more DVDs (depending on which version you bought). The system would let you play the main movie DVD in the living room, then "pause and transfer" to another room, such as the kitchen. Switch rooms as often as you like. Play one of the other DVDs from the set at the same time in yet another room - which is currently legal, surprisingly...:)
Time would be wasted in exactly the same way as for any DVD, CD, casette or vinyl record that you currently own.
Yep, sue the folks that claim NASA didn't put men on the moon.
What the "no, they didn't go" idiots are doing is spreading libellous remarks, defaming the character of the many good, honest folks who made the moon missions possible. People died to make the missions possible.
If criminals in prison can sue the state for "not giving them access to sports facilities", or for "interfering with their freedom of religion by not allowing them to have live chickens to sacrifice" (both Readers Digest stories from several years ago), then surely NASA can shake enough dollars out of the money tree to nail those idiots to the floor... Wasn't it recently said that that NASA were going to shell out $15M to get a book written and published refuting the nay-sayers? That would be a good war-chest...
I don't know quite how it stands in the US, but in England the defamers have to provide, in court, sufficient evidence to prove that what was said or written was factual, or face the consequences. If you flat out say someone is lying about something, and can't prove it, you're in deep shit.
At the very least you're made to publicly retract the statements, and often pay damages on top.
Come to think of it, that might be a good strategy - make 'em prove NASA didn't go to the Moon. The definitive way to prove it would be to go to the locations NASA visited and photograph the lack of footprints, the empty space where the landers are sitting, etc. Not only would NASA be vindicated, they'd get a moonshot funded by the idiots who claim they didn't go...
Sadly, though, that will never happen as long as vendors continue to get away with selling you the same license over and over again so that you can access the product on different media.
It would indeed be great to buy (the right to watch) a movie on a DVD, and for little or no extra cost, be able to copy it to video tape to watch elsewhere in the house. For such a future to exist, all your entertainment media systems would have to talk to each other to determine that any given "license" wasn't being used in more places in your house than you have licenses for.
Better yet, instead of multiple DVD, VCR and CD players around the house, have a central server that "checks out" a movie to the living room TV and won't allow it to play in the bedroom until it finishes, or stops, in the living room.
That was just a tongue-in-cheek example that most people here have heard of. In practise, the pop-up ad merchants are probably in more danger of a DDOS attack by some script kiddies they piss off...
Even so, if 100,000 d.net machines just sucked down the ad content once a day without looking at it, it would put a dent in the advertisers pocketbook. Most d.net systems connect to the d.net key server, directly or via an HTTP proxy. That gives them the path to hit the 'evil ad engine of the day'...
I belive you'll find that verbal contracts have been upheld in courts of law...
In essence a contract boils down to "consumer pays money, vendor provides a service". It matters not whether the "service" is a plate of food, cable TV, perfume, underwear, gasoline, etc.
You buy food, the vendor is obligated to provide something edible. You buy gasoline, the gas station is obligated to provide a substance that your vehicle can convert into motion.
In this case, people are paying for ISP services. If the ISP Terms of Service say "thou shalt not run a server", then the consumers doing so are breaking the rules.
But in the end, the bottom line is this: just as a restaurant can refuse to serve you if you're not wearing shirt and shoes, the ISP is not obligated to take your money and provide the service in return. Never mind whether your TOS says 'servers are OK', or 'MP3 sharing is OK', or even 'here's how to share pirated movies'. If they don't like you for any reason, they can cut you off and maybe even issue a partial refund based on how much of the current month you lose. End of story, you're history... Suck it up and stop whining.
How many tens of thousands of distributed.net users are now idle since they finally cracked the RC5 challenge? Maybe this would be a good project for them... I think it would certainly be more worthwhile than brute-force cracking encryption.
As someone else suggested, throttle down the connection to a few bytes a second to maximize the hit on the server. I can think of at least one tool that work out-of-the-box, and it would be fairly trivial to write something to connect to a port and read bytes slowly...
Oh, sorry, did I say that out loud? Wups...:)
Re:Whatever happened to smart advertising?
on
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
·
· Score: 2
...No, the advertising business does *not* understand Internet. Had they done that, they would have done a lot more targeted advertising, to people who WANTED it, and perhaps even used some effort to build up interesting web-sites related to the field they operated in....
Wasn't there recently (as in some months ago) a story about advertisers and stores getting together to create a humongous database that would tie together stuff like your IP address, the web pages you visit, stuff you buy online, etc?? As I recall, there was a rather vocal reaction to that...
If such a thing happened, it would be able to target any given PC with specific ads. The problem then is that those of us with multiple PCs behind NAT-enabled routers would almost certainly start getting ads aimed at other users in the house, probably with unwanted results... Imagine your wife being presented with that organ-enlargement ad you checked out last week, or guys getting feminine hygiene ads...
...is that those miniature in-the-ear earphones produce high pressure sound waves really close to the eardrum, which eventually leads to hearing degradation.
OK, before someone else says it, yes hearing aids are exactly like that, so they must be safe... Well, have you ever been next to someone who's wearing headphones and playing some kind of personal hifi (mp3, cassette, cd, radio) loud enough for it to be heard 3 feet away? That's way, way louder than a hearing aid...
My father couldn't hear low frequency sounds, mainly due to the noise inside the tank he was driving around Europe in 1944, and being parked under the gun-line when there was a constant barrage going on.
Wheeee!! At last there'll be jobs for everyone! How else does the Administration think they're gonna analyse the flood of false reports such as the one generated when they see.sigs that contain things like:
Ah, I get it now - Jon's being hammered for trying to watch DVD's he owned on a computer he owned running an OS he downloaded.
So, next question - didn't Jon also download the original CSS code-breaking program? Couple of guys in Belgium or Germany or somewhere wrote it, if I recall. Maybe they could get him on illegal munitions trafficking too. Oh wait, that's the USA's crazy law, classifying encryption products as munitions. Nevermind...:)
I don't imagine anyone's caught those dudes yet? No, of course not - they're hackers that go by pseudonyms so nobody can find them and they're probably waaay more dangerous than a teenage boy...
Slashdot Mirror
Am I simply tired, or does the above statement seem to say that independant artists can beat on the RIAA if the RIAA attempts to block distribution of their works via P2P networks? After all, the independant artists own their own copyrights and can therefore distribute their works however they like...
No way! "Gullible" is in my dictionary - i just looked to make sure!
Another article, or maybe the same one, says that she joins the growing ranks of celebs that are fighting back. Another one of them in Arnold Schwartzenegger, and ya gotta wonder, what kind of moron would invade *his* privacy?? He's probably the nicest guy in the world, but he *looks* like he'd rip off your camera-hand at the shoulder and beat you to death with the soggy end. I know I wouldn't want to piss him off... :)
Moving swiftly back to the topic, though, the punishment for unauthorised entry into a computer system ought to mirror that for unauthorised entry to anything else. I.e. if you crack into a military computer you should expect to have tanks tearing up your lawn and stormtroopers sliding down ropes out of helicopters to drag you off to a secure base for interrogation and never mind the phone call. On the other hand, reading web pages by guessing the links (featured recently) is pretty much like walking past a house, glancing over the picket fence and seeing someone masturbating on the front porch - slapped wrist for looking, maybe, but nothing more.
Someone else said it - "We already have laws against unauthorised entry. Why should computers be different, just because the entry isn't physical, as in climbing-through-a-window?"
You might get away with a very loud siren, though, if you could convince the judge that it was for alerting you to incoming mail...
What if someone's trying to crack the security on your life support computer? I think something like this may have happened, where some script kiddie broke into a hospital computer and actually endangered critical care patients.
...unless you happen to be a celebrity and the peeping-tom is a "news" reporter. If you're famous, it's perfectly alright for a "public has the right to know" news reporter to fly over your house and photograph you as you sunbathe nude on your own property behind your 15-foot high brick wall.
Isn't that pretty much what happened to Jennifer Aniston not so very long ago? She was sunbathing topless on her own property behind a normally-adequate privacy fence, and some asshole climbed a fence and took photos. She sued, claiming her right to privacy was violated, but somehow the case against the publishers fell apart because some other publisher had already published the photos. I'd have been telling the judge, "they're next, yer Honor, and we'll be seeking punitive damages that will put them out of business."
It doesn't seem like the original photographer was sued under peeping tom laws, but rather that the publishers who were going to print the photos were sued for breach of privacy.
Suppose I've got a Win98 PC running Linux in a Bochs x86 emulator. Would I be expected to fork over money for the virtual cpu, or the real cpu? What if I run several copies of Bochs at the same time?
I've got a couple of PCs at home that mostly run Win98, but sometimes run Linux, and some at work too. OK, so maybe the Business Software Alliance could come around demanding to see what I'm running at home, but they won't get within 100yards of where I work. Secure underground bunkers with multiple card-access locks on the grounds of an airport. I must admit it would be kind of funny to watch the Pinkerton rent-a-cops call out Homeland Security to detain the BSA goons...
Count the downloads, maybe? Nope, that won't work either. I've downloaded some distros I've never used, and I've seen burned copies of downloads passed around and copied by multiple people.
So, again, who counts how many cpus any given person is running Linux on? My boxes at home are behind a firewall doing NAT and hiding all the usual ports, so good luck fingerprinting that...
Statements like that make me cringe... Generally such statements are soon followed by "investigations into discrimination" and "affirmative action policies".
Of course, everybody on the planet ought to know by now that if girls don't feel like doing something (such as going into IT, with long hours, no overtime, etc) then all the policies ever written ain't gonna make them change their minds. And that's perfectly fine with me.
What really irritates me are the idiots that set rules like, "you must employ equal ratios of men, women, white, black, yellow, straight, gay, able-bodied, disabled, etc", because rules like that can lead to companies being forced to lower job requirements to be able to attract the correct ratios.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that there aren't any "men, women, white, black, yellow, straight, gay, able-bodied, disabled, etc" smart enough to hold down good IT jobs, I'm saying that just because not enough minorities are employed may mean that the rules are fucked up... It doesn't necessarily mean that employers are deliberately discouraging minorities, or anything sinister like that.
Of course, there are almost certainly some employers that do discriminate, but there are cases where that's absolutely necessary. For example, a person confined to an electric wheelchair probably didn't ought to be a liontamer... Similarly, a blind person might have a lot of difficulty working with microscopes in a lab...
I'd write to the various Congresscritters and ask them to delay the do-not-call list while studying ways to mutate it into a please-call-me-list
Before you flame me, think about it for a minute. If you're walking down the street, do I have the right to stop you while I try to sell you something? I don't think so. What I can do is put up a booth (local laws permitting) and hope you stop because you find it interesting. Telesales is exactly like that. You're at home, eating dinner or whatever, and the phone rings. The telesales company is betting that you'll stop whatever you're doing and pick it up.
And before anyone says it, TV ads are not the same. The TV equivalent of telesales would be where the TV suddenly turns itself on, or switches the channel, in order to show an ad.
Opting-out is complete bat puckey and whoever invented it needs a serious whack with a cluestick. It should be opt-in, and none of that "you indicated to one of our affiliates that you wanted to receive ads" crap either... That's just salesdroid-speak for "we copied their list in return for giving them ours"...
Better start reading those EULAs (Phone co, ISP, M$, whatever) carefully - before long there'll be a paragraph that reads:
"By using this product I hereby drop my name from all national and state do-not-call lists and will expect to get annoying phone calls and email at all times of day or night."
How about some kind of ID transponder chip implanted in your hand? Readable up to an inch away, should work through gloves too. That would also put paid to the "what if you don't happen to have your magic gun-enabling ring" argument...
So, if you buy one copy of, say, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, you get 3 or more DVDs (depending on which version you bought). The system would let you play the main movie DVD in the living room, then "pause and transfer" to another room, such as the kitchen. Switch rooms as often as you like. Play one of the other DVDs from the set at the same time in yet another room - which is currently legal, surprisingly... :)
Time would be wasted in exactly the same way as for any DVD, CD, casette or vinyl record that you currently own.
Wait a minute - by "handle", do you mean "defeat" or "assist in propagating"?
What the "no, they didn't go" idiots are doing is spreading libellous remarks, defaming the character of the many good, honest folks who made the moon missions possible. People died to make the missions possible.
If criminals in prison can sue the state for "not giving them access to sports facilities", or for "interfering with their freedom of religion by not allowing them to have live chickens to sacrifice" (both Readers Digest stories from several years ago), then surely NASA can shake enough dollars out of the money tree to nail those idiots to the floor... Wasn't it recently said that that NASA were going to shell out $15M to get a book written and published refuting the nay-sayers? That would be a good war-chest...
I don't know quite how it stands in the US, but in England the defamers have to provide, in court, sufficient evidence to prove that what was said or written was factual, or face the consequences. If you flat out say someone is lying about something, and can't prove it, you're in deep shit.
At the very least you're made to publicly retract the statements, and often pay damages on top.
Come to think of it, that might be a good strategy - make 'em prove NASA didn't go to the Moon. The definitive way to prove it would be to go to the locations NASA visited and photograph the lack of footprints, the empty space where the landers are sitting, etc. Not only would NASA be vindicated, they'd get a moonshot funded by the idiots who claim they didn't go...
It would indeed be great to buy (the right to watch) a movie on a DVD, and for little or no extra cost, be able to copy it to video tape to watch elsewhere in the house. For such a future to exist, all your entertainment media systems would have to talk to each other to determine that any given "license" wasn't being used in more places in your house than you have licenses for.
Better yet, instead of multiple DVD, VCR and CD players around the house, have a central server that "checks out" a movie to the living room TV and won't allow it to play in the bedroom until it finishes, or stops, in the living room.
Or host your uploads on an offshore server...
Even so, if 100,000 d.net machines just sucked down the ad content once a day without looking at it, it would put a dent in the advertisers pocketbook. Most d.net systems connect to the d.net key server, directly or via an HTTP proxy. That gives them the path to hit the 'evil ad engine of the day'...
In essence a contract boils down to "consumer pays money, vendor provides a service". It matters not whether the "service" is a plate of food, cable TV, perfume, underwear, gasoline, etc.
You buy food, the vendor is obligated to provide something edible. You buy gasoline, the gas station is obligated to provide a substance that your vehicle can convert into motion.
In this case, people are paying for ISP services. If the ISP Terms of Service say "thou shalt not run a server", then the consumers doing so are breaking the rules.
But in the end, the bottom line is this: just as a restaurant can refuse to serve you if you're not wearing shirt and shoes, the ISP is not obligated to take your money and provide the service in return. Never mind whether your TOS says 'servers are OK', or 'MP3 sharing is OK', or even 'here's how to share pirated movies'. If they don't like you for any reason, they can cut you off and maybe even issue a partial refund based on how much of the current month you lose. End of story, you're history... Suck it up and stop whining.
As someone else suggested, throttle down the connection to a few bytes a second to maximize the hit on the server. I can think of at least one tool that work out-of-the-box, and it would be fairly trivial to write something to connect to a port and read bytes slowly...
Oh, sorry, did I say that out loud? Wups... :)
Wasn't there recently (as in some months ago) a story about advertisers and stores getting together to create a humongous database that would tie together stuff like your IP address, the web pages you visit, stuff you buy online, etc?? As I recall, there was a rather vocal reaction to that...
If such a thing happened, it would be able to target any given PC with specific ads. The problem then is that those of us with multiple PCs behind NAT-enabled routers would almost certainly start getting ads aimed at other users in the house, probably with unwanted results... Imagine your wife being presented with that organ-enlargement ad you checked out last week, or guys getting feminine hygiene ads...
Hmmm, maybe there's a lawsuit lurking in there...
OK, before someone else says it, yes hearing aids are exactly like that, so they must be safe... Well, have you ever been next to someone who's wearing headphones and playing some kind of personal hifi (mp3, cassette, cd, radio) loud enough for it to be heard 3 feet away? That's way, way louder than a hearing aid...
My father couldn't hear low frequency sounds, mainly due to the noise inside the tank he was driving around Europe in 1944, and being parked under the gun-line when there was a constant barrage going on.
bomb, explosive, nuclear, terrorist, encryption
Just kidding, Dubya!!
Or "defused" by a robot with a bolt gun...
"OS/2 on a PS/2 - Half an operating system on half a computer"...
So, next question - didn't Jon also download the original CSS code-breaking program? Couple of guys in Belgium or Germany or somewhere wrote it, if I recall. Maybe they could get him on illegal munitions trafficking too. Oh wait, that's the USA's crazy law, classifying encryption products as munitions. Nevermind... :)
I don't imagine anyone's caught those dudes yet? No, of course not - they're hackers that go by pseudonyms so nobody can find them and they're probably waaay more dangerous than a teenage boy...