It's an interesting change in the equation involving security and freedom
Welcome to Politics. Where people use just about anything to get what they want, with absolutely no respect for anyone else. For example, if a noteable shooting happens, the anti-gun lobby will sieze on that incident and use it to push their own agenda. Just like the incidents on Sept 11 are being used to push for these systems. They are not a reaction to any potential terrorist threat, certain people have been wanting these things for years. They are merely manipulating the public into thinking that it is neccessary. Democracy starts to fail when the government has the power to manipulate the public.
Do you think the souls who perished that day would be happy about the increasingly hypocritical "Land of the Free" turning into a police state? Where all your movements and communications are logged for all time? Where you are afraid to critizise the governent because it will increase your "terrorist rating" score on some automated system? Is that what "USA" means nowadays?
I am sorry, my American cousins, but your country is sliding down the crapper big time. It no longer stands for what it's supposed to, and it is a complete mockery of your constitution.
The article comments that the Irish are concerned about the possible damage to trade and tourism that would result from the reintroduction of visa requirements.
So I guess I'll be needing a visa, then...
Or, you could just not go there anymore. Their loss, it's their tourist industry.
I doubt <snip> that Iraq will have enough connected systems to really do any good.
That's because we have been DOSing them for the last ten years already. A DOS from a ping flood or an air strike has pretty much the same effect, although it's a bit easier to reboot a crashed server than try to dig it out of the crater.
I think the term originally comes from Television, where you can get Blacker than Black, as the actual signal level for black is higer than the absolute lowest value. Ever done the calibration where you have to lower/raise the brighness so that a black areas is the same colour as the background? There is a test image and a description of the process here.
Highly recommended if you like things to be "just right";-) Most folk have their TV set very wrongly and don't realise it, usually because they have the settings up in the shop to make it stand out from the other ones.
If you are interested in this sort of thing, and have a home cinema set up, I highly recommend the Video Essentials DVD, which explains everything about setting your system up to be perfect. No, I don't work for them!
It says nothing about technology being bad. If you look past the fact that they are machines and see them as a people you can see many elements of some of the biggest fuckups in human history. The number of references to these were staggering. Off the top of my head (after just seeing it once), I got the following:
Surpressing other "peoples" civil rights for your own benefits.
The right to self-determination.
Slavery (obvious pyramid reference)
Trade sanctions against a country just because they are successful or you don't like them.
Inability to accept or listen to someone because they are different.
Attemping to surpress a people using force will come back and bite you.
They are undoubtably more in there that I missed.
I could cite a dozen references to each of these in the past 100 years alone. So called "modern society" in the west is guilty of most of them, some we are doing right now! Mainly, I thought the short was about how we repeat the same mistakes again and again and never seem to learn. With what is going on in the world at the moment, it's clear that we haven't learned a thing from history.
But nowhere was it implied that technology is "bad". At the most it was a futuristic negative utopia (1984, Brazil, Blade Runner), and it's clear that future human society will be utilising more and more technology, so it goes without saying that AI/machines will feature in it.
Watch it again, this time viewing the machines as people, sort of a "working class" society.
I gotta say, it was one of the most thought provoking things I've seen in a while. Very impressed, and normally I'm not remotely interested in Anime.
They were firing from an inconspicious hole in the trunk of a car.
And? The fact is that the same car would be present at all the incidents. You couldn't make it easier, identifying the same person at each shooting would be harder.
Don't get me wrong, I'm one of the biggest privacy nuts out there, but there are some cases where surveilence is useful. My beef is with live systems, but I'm not too concerned with ones where footage can be reviewed to follow up a genuine crime.
Implement face-recognition technology, they will feel my wrath!!;-)
a wireless transmitter and modify it to detect military radar.
Detecting military, or any other radar is pretty damn easy. Radar is like a torch in a dark forest, the user uses the relected waves to see things. However, someone at the other end of the forest will be able to see the wave source long before the user detects them with it. People have been doing this for quite some time now.
Missles like the HARM use radar emissions to target in on the objective, much like I described with the torch. Ideal for taking our SAM stations.
When it comes to front line fighting, the military tries to limit emissions on their equipment. So much so, most modern planes don't use their radar most of the time. This is where AWACs comes in; the massive radar dome on top of that beast can pick up things from long away, better than any set on a fighter. The data from the radar is shared with the fighters, who get the benefit without any emissions of their own. The goal of Stealth technology is to have less than zero emissions, that is, don't give any of your own out, and absorb and redirect any radar that is pointed at you.
What is more worrying to me is the ability for the consumer equipment to automatically shut down if there is a military user on the same band. How easy can you make a DOS attack?
And what I find very enticing is to use a similar detection system, this time watching for normal emissions from police vehicles. Especially the traffic ones! I'm not talking about looking out for speed detection stuff, by that point it's too late. There must be something that their radio/GPS or any of the other new cool toys they have that is out there, waiting to be detected!;-)
not only Bulger, but the Brick Lane/Brixton/Admiral Duncan bomber.
And someone like the Washinton Sniper would be caught after days not weeks. No more hunting down arabs in white vans based on bad and inconsistent eyewitness reports.
Yeah right. This is the most sensible thing I've seen from the industry on this matter. It acknowledges the fact that you simply cannot take on the whole world when it comes to p2p. You aren't going to stop BILLIONS of people from doing something. Any attempt to is pretty much a waste of time and money, throwing good money after bad.
Copyright law exists to prevent others from profiting from work that is not their own. The idea satisfies that perfectly without making provisions that simply cannot be kept. It's the way it should be.
It also provides something else very useful to the consumer. Freedom. By ensuring that all p2p systems are not-for-profit, we remove these from industry control. As seen with radio, control of the distribution channels is a negative as far as the consumer is concerned. A world with community controlled software is much better than anything the industry would allow us to have.
Re:Remember in the good ole days
on
Infinite Games?
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· Score: 1
the mental image of a caveman taking credit card numbers from people to look at his cave wall
Don't worry, you won't get billed. It's for "age verification purposes only".;-)
(Just be sure to check your monthly bill though!)
Re:Remember in the good ole days
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't go so far as to say profit was the motive though.
Since man has been able to draw on cave walls, he's been drawing naked women. Then came along oil & canvas, sculpture, the printing press, glossy magazines, "what the butler saw" moving pictures, adult theaters, phone sex lines, home video, and lately the internet. Porn was right in each from the early days.
Frankly, I'm not surprised at anything that comes out of the porn industry! Except for maybe "Backdoor Sluts 9"...
Some nice folks at Stanford are also creating a different flavor of network backup called rdiff-backup.
Yes, it looks like a great solution, I've been looking into this lately. The only downside is that the remote system can access and change your data as it's not encrypted. The actual communication of the data can be wrapped in SSL or through a SSH tunnel, so that part is secure.
You can only use it amongst people you trust, for non-personal data storage (unlike the linked article). I am presently trying to persude a friend to implement this, or possibly rsync to back-up my large media drive.
With rsync however, we get another advantage...we both can access and add to the data store, with confidence that the data is pretty safe. Who needs p2p when you have all your friends media available to you as well as your own?;-) Get a new album, it gets copied across at some point during the night.
Rule of thumb: Never install anything while browsing when it pops up and says "Hi install me for extra wizzy things!!!".
Always good advice. Try explaining it to your 50+ year old aunt who just "bought a copy of the internet" for her PC though.
It scares me to think of how many people out there have this sort of thing lurking on their system, and they aren't ever aware that it's possible to do.
Forget all this tech elitism, we should try and protect the unwashed from this. Perhaps a good application for those spud guns in Germany...didn't someone say they were based in Hungary? What's the range on those things?:-)
HINT: it has something to do with who writes the letter/music.
What's the difference? People can still write music. All that's changed is that a bunch of middlemen are no longer going to get fat from the practice. In the real world, it is extremely rare for the band to profit from music sales. The music creators aren't getting harmed, except maybe the talentless ones that rely on heavy promotion and heavy silicon implants to make those sales.
Branching off on this analogy, how about a magazine? The web has cost a lot of magazine sales, as people don't need to pay to read (e.g.) reviews of consumer items. Are they persuing legal claims to score some income by taxation of the web? Are they looking for taxation of the paper that may be used to print out those articles? Of course not, the magazines saw what was happening, adapted, created web-based departments and looked at ways of profiting from that. They come up with advertising, premium content and affliate programs. Good on them!
Why should the music industry get any special breaks because they missed the boat? Welcome to the real world. Evolve or die.
OK, so my earlier comparison wasn't 100% accurate, but when is an analogy ever that complete? My main point was that new technologies come along that render old ones obselete. Some companies have business plans based on those old systems. Why should the legal system offer them any protection?
Ultimatly, the legal system and the government are supposed to look out for the needs of the people. Keeping music expensive and limiting the distribution to a few select companies who already have a history of abusing power is not representing the need of the people.
Yeah, so I will fucking declare your salary to be an art and not profit and therefore it must be shared among all of us.
I don't create music, nor any other art. I provide a service to my company. Most true musicians are not in it for the money, many have a message that they'd like to get through to people and choose music as the medium. Those who dream of having hit singles and being filthy rich are trapped in a system that simply doesn't exist and this dilusion belongs in the past.
Why are you upset about US having these laws around?
Because they are anti-progress laws. When the printing press was invented, the scribes and the church had laws passed against it. When the motorcar was invented, some countries had a human walk 60 yards in front with a red flag. The horse industry was behind that.
So, where are you going to stand in the next 5 years when the telcos start to attack IP telephony? Because it's no different to this debate.
"Objection, your honour. Why?. Because it's damning to my business model."
Perhaps because majority of content you are interested in comes from that place?
Nope, most of the music I listen to comes from small UK bands/groups that have no illusions of getting rich from it. They enjoy the creative process, and take pleasure from the pleasure that their fans have while listening to it.
Fucking freeloader
p2p is about sharing. You missed the point it seems. If anything, the music industry are the only freeloaders in this argument. There is no need for them. Get over it.
Thank god you are completely powerless idiot whose only way to make any sort of mark or anything is to whine on a thrid rate site.
You know nothing about me, besides the intentionally anonymous name I hide behind. Surely it is you who is the idiot...making assumptions about someone you don't know?
Anyways, what are you doing reading a "third rate site"? If you don't like it, leave. If you disagree, post an inteligent response reasoning your thinking.
Or, perhaps you have no satisfying interests in the real world, so you manifest your feelings of hate and rejection on the web? Ahh, shame.
Lucky you. Here in the UK, there is a law saying you must provide your decrytion keys/passwords to the relevant authorites when asked. And it's illegal to tell anyone. It's not illegal to say you haven't been asked yet, so I am OK. For now.
I'd be surprised if several other contries didn't have similar provisions. At the very least, it won't look good for you in court if you refuse. The old "what have you got to hide?" argument. If you are hiding mp3s and DivX, they'd accuse you of having kiddy porn and you'd have to open it up to prove you didn't have any, if you wanted to live in your home town again.
Re:As outlandish as Sharman's desires may seem...
on
Kazaa Fights Back
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I hope they start paying some royalty to the starving artists
LOL, are you trying to be funny? You know that the artist will see little of these royalties. It would probably be similar to the amount they get per-CD, that is, not much.
Trade embargos and the like from different countries can spark a nation's government into shaping up surprisingly fast.
No one is going to start a trade embargo over devices to copy Britany records. There are far more essential and profitable trades going on between countries. Why jepordise that just because they won't implement the same laws as you WRT digital media?
Trade works both ways. If (for example) the USA was to embargo imports from country A, then you can be sure that country A will stop importing anything from the USA. Where's the sense in that? It will harm more businesses than it benefits. If the government passes that, it's more corruped by the green of the RIAA than we thought.
Re:Wake up and smell the plot
on
Kazaa Fights Back
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Hearing about someone sharing files on Kazaa being busted will most certainly have the same effect as the cop busting the person in the lead on the highway
Nope, it won't do anything. The same thought was behind harsh anti-drug sentancing, and it made no difference. Anyone can still get pot, anytime.
What will happen is that it will be quasi-legal; technically illegal but it's just your own bad luck if you become the one-in-a-million patsy.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to Politics. Where people use just about anything to get what they want, with absolutely no respect for anyone else. For example, if a noteable shooting happens, the anti-gun lobby will sieze on that incident and use it to push their own agenda. Just like the incidents on Sept 11 are being used to push for these systems. They are not a reaction to any potential terrorist threat, certain people have been wanting these things for years. They are merely manipulating the public into thinking that it is neccessary. Democracy starts to fail when the government has the power to manipulate the public.
Do you think the souls who perished that day would be happy about the increasingly hypocritical "Land of the Free" turning into a police state? Where all your movements and communications are logged for all time? Where you are afraid to critizise the governent because it will increase your "terrorist rating" score on some automated system? Is that what "USA" means nowadays?
I am sorry, my American cousins, but your country is sliding down the crapper big time. It no longer stands for what it's supposed to, and it is a complete mockery of your constitution.
So I guess I'll be needing a visa, then...
Or, you could just not go there anymore. Their loss, it's their tourist industry.
Yeah, but it was shot down in flames due to some pretty major grass roots opposition that sprung up overnight against it.
Of course, they called it an "Entitlement Card". Don't ya just love the Newspeak?
That's because we have been DOSing them for the last ten years already. A DOS from a ping flood or an air strike has pretty much the same effect, although it's a bit easier to reboot a crashed server than try to dig it out of the crater.
Yeah, but it's not as funny as it used to be... ;-)
Under Darwinian Evolution, that is not good for the geek!
Perhaps Redhat realises this, and are trying to get the next generation hooked earlier... ;-)
I hope that episode gets banned from TV.
It wouldn't be a first. The New York one is pretty much banned...
:-)
I think the term originally comes from Television, where you can get Blacker than Black, as the actual signal level for black is higer than the absolute lowest value. Ever done the calibration where you have to lower/raise the brighness so that a black areas is the same colour as the background? There is a test image and a description of the process here.
Highly recommended if you like things to be "just right" ;-) Most folk have their TV set very wrongly and don't realise it, usually because they have the settings up in the shop to make it stand out from the other ones.
If you are interested in this sort of thing, and have a home cinema set up, I highly recommend the Video Essentials DVD, which explains everything about setting your system up to be perfect. No, I don't work for them!
Were we watching the same film?
It says nothing about technology being bad. If you look past the fact that they are machines and see them as a people you can see many elements of some of the biggest fuckups in human history. The number of references to these were staggering. Off the top of my head (after just seeing it once), I got the following:
They are undoubtably more in there that I missed.
I could cite a dozen references to each of these in the past 100 years alone. So called "modern society" in the west is guilty of most of them, some we are doing right now! Mainly, I thought the short was about how we repeat the same mistakes again and again and never seem to learn. With what is going on in the world at the moment, it's clear that we haven't learned a thing from history.
But nowhere was it implied that technology is "bad". At the most it was a futuristic negative utopia (1984, Brazil, Blade Runner), and it's clear that future human society will be utilising more and more technology, so it goes without saying that AI/machines will feature in it.
Watch it again, this time viewing the machines as people, sort of a "working class" society.
I gotta say, it was one of the most thought provoking things I've seen in a while. Very impressed, and normally I'm not remotely interested in Anime.
Ditto for the poor unfortunate residents of Scunthorpe, England.
Just as well there isn't a "Clearyourbillsvile" or "Enlargeyourpenis Avenue" anywhere!
And? The fact is that the same car would be present at all the incidents. You couldn't make it easier, identifying the same person at each shooting would be harder.
Don't get me wrong, I'm one of the biggest privacy nuts out there, but there are some cases where surveilence is useful. My beef is with live systems, but I'm not too concerned with ones where footage can be reviewed to follow up a genuine crime.
Implement face-recognition technology, they will feel my wrath!! ;-)
Detecting military, or any other radar is pretty damn easy. Radar is like a torch in a dark forest, the user uses the relected waves to see things. However, someone at the other end of the forest will be able to see the wave source long before the user detects them with it. People have been doing this for quite some time now.
Missles like the HARM use radar emissions to target in on the objective, much like I described with the torch. Ideal for taking our SAM stations.
When it comes to front line fighting, the military tries to limit emissions on their equipment. So much so, most modern planes don't use their radar most of the time. This is where AWACs comes in; the massive radar dome on top of that beast can pick up things from long away, better than any set on a fighter. The data from the radar is shared with the fighters, who get the benefit without any emissions of their own. The goal of Stealth technology is to have less than zero emissions, that is, don't give any of your own out, and absorb and redirect any radar that is pointed at you.
What is more worrying to me is the ability for the consumer equipment to automatically shut down if there is a military user on the same band. How easy can you make a DOS attack?
And what I find very enticing is to use a similar detection system, this time watching for normal emissions from police vehicles. Especially the traffic ones! I'm not talking about looking out for speed detection stuff, by that point it's too late. There must be something that their radio/GPS or any of the other new cool toys they have that is out there, waiting to be detected! ;-)
And someone like the Washinton Sniper would be caught after days not weeks. No more hunting down arabs in white vans based on bad and inconsistent eyewitness reports.
And what if you end up with an audio file of 4 mins, 33 seconds?
Yeah right. This is the most sensible thing I've seen from the industry on this matter. It acknowledges the fact that you simply cannot take on the whole world when it comes to p2p. You aren't going to stop BILLIONS of people from doing something. Any attempt to is pretty much a waste of time and money, throwing good money after bad.
Copyright law exists to prevent others from profiting from work that is not their own. The idea satisfies that perfectly without making provisions that simply cannot be kept. It's the way it should be.
It also provides something else very useful to the consumer. Freedom. By ensuring that all p2p systems are not-for-profit, we remove these from industry control. As seen with radio, control of the distribution channels is a negative as far as the consumer is concerned. A world with community controlled software is much better than anything the industry would allow us to have.
Don't worry, you won't get billed. It's for "age verification purposes only". ;-)
(Just be sure to check your monthly bill though!)
Since man has been able to draw on cave walls, he's been drawing naked women. Then came along oil & canvas, sculpture, the printing press, glossy magazines, "what the butler saw" moving pictures, adult theaters, phone sex lines, home video, and lately the internet. Porn was right in each from the early days.
Frankly, I'm not surprised at anything that comes out of the porn industry! Except for maybe "Backdoor Sluts 9"...
Yes, it looks like a great solution, I've been looking into this lately. The only downside is that the remote system can access and change your data as it's not encrypted. The actual communication of the data can be wrapped in SSL or through a SSH tunnel, so that part is secure.
You can only use it amongst people you trust, for non-personal data storage (unlike the linked article). I am presently trying to persude a friend to implement this, or possibly rsync to back-up my large media drive.
With rsync however, we get another advantage...we both can access and add to the data store, with confidence that the data is pretty safe. Who needs p2p when you have all your friends media available to you as well as your own? ;-) Get a new album, it gets copied across at some point during the night.
Always good advice. Try explaining it to your 50+ year old aunt who just "bought a copy of the internet" for her PC though.
It scares me to think of how many people out there have this sort of thing lurking on their system, and they aren't ever aware that it's possible to do.
Forget all this tech elitism, we should try and protect the unwashed from this. Perhaps a good application for those spud guns in Germany...didn't someone say they were based in Hungary? What's the range on those things? :-)
What's the difference? People can still write music. All that's changed is that a bunch of middlemen are no longer going to get fat from the practice. In the real world, it is extremely rare for the band to profit from music sales. The music creators aren't getting harmed, except maybe the talentless ones that rely on heavy promotion and heavy silicon implants to make those sales.
Branching off on this analogy, how about a magazine? The web has cost a lot of magazine sales, as people don't need to pay to read (e.g.) reviews of consumer items. Are they persuing legal claims to score some income by taxation of the web? Are they looking for taxation of the paper that may be used to print out those articles? Of course not, the magazines saw what was happening, adapted, created web-based departments and looked at ways of profiting from that. They come up with advertising, premium content and affliate programs. Good on them!
Why should the music industry get any special breaks because they missed the boat? Welcome to the real world. Evolve or die.
OK, so my earlier comparison wasn't 100% accurate, but when is an analogy ever that complete? My main point was that new technologies come along that render old ones obselete. Some companies have business plans based on those old systems. Why should the legal system offer them any protection?
Ultimatly, the legal system and the government are supposed to look out for the needs of the people. Keeping music expensive and limiting the distribution to a few select companies who already have a history of abusing power is not representing the need of the people.
I don't create music, nor any other art. I provide a service to my company. Most true musicians are not in it for the money, many have a message that they'd like to get through to people and choose music as the medium. Those who dream of having hit singles and being filthy rich are trapped in a system that simply doesn't exist and this dilusion belongs in the past.
Why are you upset about US having these laws around?
Because they are anti-progress laws. When the printing press was invented, the scribes and the church had laws passed against it. When the motorcar was invented, some countries had a human walk 60 yards in front with a red flag. The horse industry was behind that.
So, where are you going to stand in the next 5 years when the telcos start to attack IP telephony? Because it's no different to this debate.
"Objection, your honour. Why?. Because it's damning to my business model."
Perhaps because majority of content you are interested in comes from that place?
Nope, most of the music I listen to comes from small UK bands/groups that have no illusions of getting rich from it. They enjoy the creative process, and take pleasure from the pleasure that their fans have while listening to it.
Fucking freeloader
p2p is about sharing. You missed the point it seems. If anything, the music industry are the only freeloaders in this argument. There is no need for them. Get over it.
Thank god you are completely powerless idiot whose only way to make any sort of mark or anything is to whine on a thrid rate site.
You know nothing about me, besides the intentionally anonymous name I hide behind. Surely it is you who is the idiot...making assumptions about someone you don't know?
Anyways, what are you doing reading a "third rate site"? If you don't like it, leave. If you disagree, post an inteligent response reasoning your thinking.
Or, perhaps you have no satisfying interests in the real world, so you manifest your feelings of hate and rejection on the web? Ahh, shame.
I'd be surprised if several other contries didn't have similar provisions. At the very least, it won't look good for you in court if you refuse. The old "what have you got to hide?" argument. If you are hiding mp3s and DivX, they'd accuse you of having kiddy porn and you'd have to open it up to prove you didn't have any, if you wanted to live in your home town again.
LOL, are you trying to be funny? You know that the artist will see little of these royalties. It would probably be similar to the amount they get per-CD, that is, not much.
No one is going to start a trade embargo over devices to copy Britany records. There are far more essential and profitable trades going on between countries. Why jepordise that just because they won't implement the same laws as you WRT digital media?
Trade works both ways. If (for example) the USA was to embargo imports from country A, then you can be sure that country A will stop importing anything from the USA. Where's the sense in that? It will harm more businesses than it benefits. If the government passes that, it's more corruped by the green of the RIAA than we thought.
Nope, it won't do anything. The same thought was behind harsh anti-drug sentancing, and it made no difference. Anyone can still get pot, anytime.
What will happen is that it will be quasi-legal; technically illegal but it's just your own bad luck if you become the one-in-a-million patsy.