Well, your analogy isn't really complete. AFAIK, the DVD people aren't claiming that the DeCSS is illegal in and of itself, but that it's illegal because it:
1) contains a trade secret
2) was reverse-enginnered illegally (by violating the Xing license agreement)
By contrast, the rifle-modification information was (presumably) not obtained illegally.
As for the Supreme Court hearing this case, I'd consider that unlikely...they hear around 75 to 100 cases per year out of around 6000 that are appealed to them. Your chances of having an appeal heard are exceptionally bad.
Ok, so this was created in order to play DVD's on Linux, and it just so happens to work for windows as well.
Actually, that's not correct. The initial release of DeCSS was a windows-only binary, which would rip DVDs to huge MPEGs or some other non-encrypted format. Only later was the code released and ported to Linux, where it began to be used as part of the LiViD project to create a DVD player for Linux.
This history of DeCSS could make claiming the reverse engineering exception difficult...
Minor detail, but there's no Greek Orthodox calendar. The Greek Orthodox Church has used the western calendar for the past hundred years or so. I think the Russian and Serbian Orthodox Churches are the only ones left using the old calendar...
You make it sound like the choice is between hiring more teachers or building better facilities and between providing more bandwidth to the dorm rooms.
How about instead choosing to have both, and save the extra money by not building that new football stadium?
Well, yes, you can already configure the port used for client-to-client data transfers (the actual mp3 downloading), but the actual connection to the napster server requires you to connect to server.napster.com on port 8875, which then passes you off to another napster server on either port 4444, 5555, 6666, or 7777. With Open Source servers using any port and being from any domain, you won't be able to block them (while, now you can just block the 5 ports and/or *.napster.com)
Well, you can limit bandwidth by user or subnet, but I'm not sure how well service-based allocation will work. Are you going to do it by port? Since many programs can be configured to use any port they wish, how will this work?
Killing Napster right now was only easy because of the way it's designed. With Open Source napster servers already being developed, you'll no longer be able to just block connections to *.napster.com, and since they're open source they can be configured to use any port.
Hmm, that's odd. I would think it'd take way too much CPU to filter the contents of every connection to see whether it's an FTP connection or some other sort of connection. The students could still serve mp3s over an HTTP server, or through IRC XDCC fservs, or through a number of other ways, so this isn't solving the problem.
In light of the recent blocking of Napster, this seems to be becoming a common practice. However, it seems to me that it isn't really a good approach. Bandwidth problems could be solved by limiting students' actual bandwidth, but blocking known high-bandwidth sites seems unlikely to be very successfull. Sure, it'll cut down on some of the traffic, but it doesn't stop people from running FTP servers (on a non-standard port if you block port 21), and it doesn't stop people from visiting any of the other thousands of high-bandwidth sites you haven't blocked. Heck, it doensn't even stop them from visiting the sites you *have* blocked - they just have to go through a proxy server to get there.
I agree, I'd rather not have Daylight Savings time to begin with. I'm just saying that since the vast majority of Internet users do have Daylight Savings time, the posting of time on the internet should reflect this.
Europe and the United States use DST (and the switch is very nearly coordinated). Europe and the United States also form the overwhelming majority of internet users.
And my "ranting" wasn't moderated up, my posts start by 2 at default since my Karma is over 30 (it's around 70). Go bitch at malda@slashdot.org if you dislike this.
When the rest of the world think of USA they think Arrogance; the USA think that the world IS the USA; heck they even refer to it as America?
A lot of other languages refer to the USA as America as well. Greeks, for example, call it "Ameriki," not "Enomenes Polities Ths Amerikis."
Excuse me but USA is only 1/12 of the worlds pop; please show a little bit of inclusiveness especially when talking on the NET which is a global community.
You seem to have contradicted yourself there. On the one hand you're talking about the net, and on the other hand you quote total population statistics, which are completely irrelevant. Since we are talking about the internet, the proportion of internet users who are Americans is important, not the proportion of total humans who are Americans. People who don't have internet access obviously do not count in this, since they really don't care what time zones we use in our internet discussions. The US forms a substantially larger proportion than 1/12 of the Internet. I'd be surprised if it was less than 1/2, when you count users.
Actually the US and Europe change at approximately the same time (within a week of each other). Sure, some places don't change at all, but they form an extremely small percentage of internet users. Kenya doesn't change, but either does Arizona. Arizona is in the US and we still don't make special accomodations for them, so this isn't some sort of US snobbery thing.
Perhaps, but the majority of the internet's population (or close to it) does in fact live in the US.
Anyway, the reason time zones are given like this is because GMT sucks. Half the year I'm GMT -0600 and half the year I'm GMT -0500, and i can't remember which is which. If you give me a point of reference that switches daylight savings time along with everybody else, I'll use that. However, the way it is, I'd rather you give me the time in, say, CET (Central European Time) than in GMT - at least I know I'm always -0700 from CET.
That's what I was wondering when I saw it. I don't remember the release of 2.3.32, or 2.3.38, or 2.3.39, or any other development kernel being posted as news here, so I figured there must be something special about 2.3.40. Apparently not.
As regards the injunction and harm done, I think what the original poster was getting at (or if not, what I'm going to get at) is that the judge seems to consider the possible financial harm done to the DVD manufacturers to be the most important factor, and claims "truly minimal" harm is caused to the defendants through restriction of their speech.
This is what I'd disagree with. Restricting speech through an injunction should, IMHO, be used extremely sparingly, since in effect you are denying somebody the right to say something before it has been proven in court that they did not have that right. If the defendants do in fact prevail in court, what the injunction will have done is temporarily suspended their First Amendment rights. I personally find this to be much more "harmful" than some possible financial losses. IANAL, but I was under the impression that the courts tended to follow this as well, only restricting speech through injunctions if it appears almost certain that the plaintiff will win and will suffer irreperable harm if the injunction is not granted. This court seems to not have followed that.
Well, I personally am not that interested in Mitnick himself, but the various factors surrounding his imprisonment and trial do interest me quite a bit.
He spent four years in jail without being convicted of a crime. This is partially because his lawyer was forced to waive his rights to a speedy trial. There were several million pages of evidence presented by the government, and Mitnick was given one part-time lawyer (whom the court refused to pay extra to give him more time to sift through the pile of evidence) and extremely limited access to a law library (and no access to computers). If he didn't waive his rights to a speedy trial, he'd have to waive his right to a fair trial. Forcing him to give up one or the other of his constitutional rights is obviously not something that should be allowed.
The damages claimed by the various companies also raises the issue of the financial cost of piracy, an issue discussed on slashdot in the past in other stories. Several companies claimed that since Mitnick obtained the source code to their operating systems and software, they had sustained a loss equal to the entire cost of development of the software and any future projected sales. This is obviously extremely innacurate (but common practice among the various anti-piracy groups). There's also the interesting fact that these millions of dollars of supposed losses were not reported to stockholders, as required under SEC regulations.
Finally, there's the issue of computer-use restrictions on parole. Many people, including myself, feel that these are wrong, and certainly counter-productive. Rather than keeping him from engaging in computer-related crime again, they will be more likely to remove his chances for employment and force him into crime to make money. His skills are computer-related, and even if he were to go for a job that wasn't directly computer-related, nearly all jobs these days use computers in one way or another.
Anyway, these, and some other assorted reasons, are why I, and I suspect many other slashdotters, care about Mitnick, despite the fact that he's a relatively uninteresting hax0r d00d in and of himself.
Regardless of whether a minor can enter a contract or not, a minor still has to follow all applicable laws. Even without Microsoft's EULA, pirating software is illegal (copyright violation). So while Microsoft may not be able to prosecute for breach of contract, they could very well get the kid for simple copyright violation.
As for the GPL, it seems safe to me. If the minor is not able to enter into the contract, the minor simply has no right to distribute the software, and would be in violation of copyright if he/she did so.
Well, it really depends on the person. You are correct that mp3 is just audio warez for some people. If somebody downloads full albums of bands they like and then burns them to a CD-R, this is obviously simple piracy. It's not particularly an mp3 problem though - it's the exact same thing as borrowing a friend's CD and burning it to a CD-R.
Other people actually find out about music from mp3s. I was not a Nine Inch Nails fan until a friend sent me several of their mp3s a few years back...now i have 8 of their CDs. They obviously didn't lose money from my piracy of their songs. 99.99% of the bands on mp3.com would have absolutely no album sales if it weren't for mp3. Would I have bought a Painted Blue album if it weren't for finding their mp3s there? Of course not - I wouldn't even have known they existed.
There's also a fairly large contingent of "semi-legal" mp3s, nearly the exact same thing as CD- and tape-based bootlegs. Live shows, rare recordings, unreleased demo tapes, etc., all circulate in mp3 just as they did on bootlegs before. This is probably technically piracy, but in almost all the cases the material is unavailable from a "legitimate" source, so there is no revenue loss by the artist (or the record label).
You can add an additional IDE controller card if you want more than 4 IDE devices. You're not limited to the two IDE controllers (with 2 devices each) that come on most motherboards.
I agree that UseNet is better than a web-based forum, but it still seems to be somewhat badly designed to me. If anybody still remembers FidoNet and the other BBS echomail networks, that's more what my idea of a well-designed discussion forum is. All messages in the forum were public, but could optionally be addressed to a user. That was I could go through and look for all replies that were to my messages or any messages written specifically to me, and then when I had more time go through and read the others. With UseNet the only way to do this is to remember which threads I've posted to and read those first (and then I still have to read the whole thread, I can't read just the replies to my posts first).
Any ideas where to find a similarly-designed setup on the internet, now that FidoNet seems to be extremely close to dead?
The article didn't even mention *bsd being superior to Linux, it just mentioned that FreeBSD was undergoing a code freeze in anticipation of the 4.0 release. It seems somebody is being a bit defensive...
Not necessarily. Recently there was a guy that got caught in New York who had been scanning people's cards twice - once on the cash register for the purchase, once through a reader attached to his Palm Pilot which saved the numbers. Apparently he did this for several months (and got several thousand credit card numbers) before somebody noticed he was scanning their card twice and not providing a good enough explanation.
Sure, this is an isolated incident, but so is the CDUniverse crack.
Why should @Home block 31337, a perfectly good TCP and UDP port simply because some people run the default configuration of Back Orifice on it? There are other legitimate uses for that port (such as the semi-hidden faster port on some IRC servers), and the Back Orifice problem should be fixed by getting people to not get themselves trojaned in the first place, not by disabling attempts to scan for already-installed trojans.
And actually, I'll have to disagree with you concerning our general conversation. I do believe it's a parents perogative to require a child to do X. If they don't want to do X then they can find another roof to live under. (that's my political philosophy). Personally however, I wouldn't mind my children reading infidels.org with my knowledge (so that I could explain my POV, etc.)
Well, that would work except that in all but a few extreme cases, it isn't possible for a child to find another roof to live under. A child under 18 cannot legally decide to move out unless they have a really good reason that would convince a judge.
[obOT] Children shouldn't have computers or TV's in their rooms anyways. Monitoring of their activities is a parents duty. [/obOT]
Well, I'd agree with you about the rooms thing, if only to keep them from staying up 24/7 online or watching TV. I'd also agree about the monitoring TV thing, and computers for younger children, but I'm not so sure about a parent monitoring every website his or her 15-17-year-old visits. There are some things that teenagers want to read about that they don't feel like sharing with their parents or explaining to them, and not everything that parents disapprove of is inherently bad. I know I certainly went to some sites when i was that age that my parents would have disapproved of, but they trusted me enough not to monitor my access, and I don't think it ended up harming me (quite the opposite, in fact).
Well, I can't say I wouldn't attempt to explain to them why I'm not religious (you assumed correctly). I don't have a problem with this (since I'd probably do it myself), and I wouldn't have a problem with a fundamentalist Baptist parent attempting to explain to their child why they think theirs is the One True God and why they should continue in that philosophy.
What I do have a problem with is forcing a child to conform to a parent's idealogies. Many religious parents would be upset if their child were found reading Nietzche, and would restrict their access to such forums as infidels.org or alt.atheism. This is don't agree with, and is something I wouldn't do from the other side - I wouldn't forbid a child from reading the Bible, Christian philosophy, or attending church.
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Well, your analogy isn't really complete. AFAIK, the DVD people aren't claiming that the DeCSS is illegal in and of itself, but that it's illegal because it:
1) contains a trade secret
2) was reverse-enginnered illegally (by violating the Xing license agreement)
By contrast, the rifle-modification information was (presumably) not obtained illegally.
As for the Supreme Court hearing this case, I'd consider that unlikely...they hear around 75 to 100 cases per year out of around 6000 that are appealed to them. Your chances of having an appeal heard are exceptionally bad.
Ok, so this was created in order to play DVD's on Linux, and it just so happens to work for windows as well.
Actually, that's not correct. The initial release of DeCSS was a windows-only binary, which would rip DVDs to huge MPEGs or some other non-encrypted format. Only later was the code released and ported to Linux, where it began to be used as part of the LiViD project to create a DVD player for Linux.
This history of DeCSS could make claiming the reverse engineering exception difficult...
Minor detail, but there's no Greek Orthodox calendar. The Greek Orthodox Church has used the western calendar for the past hundred years or so. I think the Russian and Serbian Orthodox Churches are the only ones left using the old calendar...
You make it sound like the choice is between hiring more teachers or building better facilities and between providing more bandwidth to the dorm rooms.
How about instead choosing to have both, and save the extra money by not building that new football stadium?
Well, yes, you can already configure the port used for client-to-client data transfers (the actual mp3 downloading), but the actual connection to the napster server requires you to connect to server.napster.com on port 8875, which then passes you off to another napster server on either port 4444, 5555, 6666, or 7777. With Open Source servers using any port and being from any domain, you won't be able to block them (while, now you can just block the 5 ports and/or *.napster.com)
Well, you can limit bandwidth by user or subnet, but I'm not sure how well service-based allocation will work. Are you going to do it by port? Since many programs can be configured to use any port they wish, how will this work?
Killing Napster right now was only easy because of the way it's designed. With Open Source napster servers already being developed, you'll no longer be able to just block connections to *.napster.com, and since they're open source they can be configured to use any port.
Hmm, that's odd. I would think it'd take way too much CPU to filter the contents of every connection to see whether it's an FTP connection or some other sort of connection. The students could still serve mp3s over an HTTP server, or through IRC XDCC fservs, or through a number of other ways, so this isn't solving the problem.
In light of the recent blocking of Napster, this seems to be becoming a common practice. However, it seems to me that it isn't really a good approach. Bandwidth problems could be solved by limiting students' actual bandwidth, but blocking known high-bandwidth sites seems unlikely to be very successfull. Sure, it'll cut down on some of the traffic, but it doesn't stop people from running FTP servers (on a non-standard port if you block port 21), and it doesn't stop people from visiting any of the other thousands of high-bandwidth sites you haven't blocked. Heck, it doensn't even stop them from visiting the sites you *have* blocked - they just have to go through a proxy server to get there.
I agree, I'd rather not have Daylight Savings time to begin with. I'm just saying that since the vast majority of Internet users do have Daylight Savings time, the posting of time on the internet should reflect this.
Europe and the United States use DST (and the switch is very nearly coordinated). Europe and the United States also form the overwhelming majority of internet users.
And my "ranting" wasn't moderated up, my posts start by 2 at default since my Karma is over 30 (it's around 70). Go bitch at malda@slashdot.org if you dislike this.
When the rest of the world think of USA they think Arrogance; the USA think that the world IS the USA; heck they even refer to it as America?
A lot of other languages refer to the USA as America as well. Greeks, for example, call it "Ameriki," not "Enomenes Polities Ths Amerikis."
Excuse me but USA is only 1/12 of the worlds pop; please show a little bit of inclusiveness especially when talking on the NET which is a global community.
You seem to have contradicted yourself there. On the one hand you're talking about the net, and on the other hand you quote total population statistics, which are completely irrelevant. Since we are talking about the internet, the proportion of internet users who are Americans is important, not the proportion of total humans who are Americans. People who don't have internet access obviously do not count in this, since they really don't care what time zones we use in our internet discussions. The US forms a substantially larger proportion than 1/12 of the Internet. I'd be surprised if it was less than 1/2, when you count users.
Actually the US and Europe change at approximately the same time (within a week of each other). Sure, some places don't change at all, but they form an extremely small percentage of internet users. Kenya doesn't change, but either does Arizona. Arizona is in the US and we still don't make special accomodations for them, so this isn't some sort of US snobbery thing.
Perhaps, but the majority of the internet's population (or close to it) does in fact live in the US.
Anyway, the reason time zones are given like this is because GMT sucks. Half the year I'm GMT -0600 and half the year I'm GMT -0500, and i can't remember which is which. If you give me a point of reference that switches daylight savings time along with everybody else, I'll use that. However, the way it is, I'd rather you give me the time in, say, CET (Central European Time) than in GMT - at least I know I'm always -0700 from CET.
That's what I was wondering when I saw it. I don't remember the release of 2.3.32, or 2.3.38, or 2.3.39, or any other development kernel being posted as news here, so I figured there must be something special about 2.3.40. Apparently not.
As regards the injunction and harm done, I think what the original poster was getting at (or if not, what I'm going to get at) is that the judge seems to consider the possible financial harm done to the DVD manufacturers to be the most important factor, and claims "truly minimal" harm is caused to the defendants through restriction of their speech.
This is what I'd disagree with. Restricting speech through an injunction should, IMHO, be used extremely sparingly, since in effect you are denying somebody the right to say something before it has been proven in court that they did not have that right. If the defendants do in fact prevail in court, what the injunction will have done is temporarily suspended their First Amendment rights. I personally find this to be much more "harmful" than some possible financial losses. IANAL, but I was under the impression that the courts tended to follow this as well, only restricting speech through injunctions if it appears almost certain that the plaintiff will win and will suffer irreperable harm if the injunction is not granted. This court seems to not have followed that.
Well, I personally am not that interested in Mitnick himself, but the various factors surrounding his imprisonment and trial do interest me quite a bit.
He spent four years in jail without being convicted of a crime. This is partially because his lawyer was forced to waive his rights to a speedy trial. There were several million pages of evidence presented by the government, and Mitnick was given one part-time lawyer (whom the court refused to pay extra to give him more time to sift through the pile of evidence) and extremely limited access to a law library (and no access to computers). If he didn't waive his rights to a speedy trial, he'd have to waive his right to a fair trial. Forcing him to give up one or the other of his constitutional rights is obviously not something that should be allowed.
The damages claimed by the various companies also raises the issue of the financial cost of piracy, an issue discussed on slashdot in the past in other stories. Several companies claimed that since Mitnick obtained the source code to their operating systems and software, they had sustained a loss equal to the entire cost of development of the software and any future projected sales. This is obviously extremely innacurate (but common practice among the various anti-piracy groups). There's also the interesting fact that these millions of dollars of supposed losses were not reported to stockholders, as required under SEC regulations.
Finally, there's the issue of computer-use restrictions on parole. Many people, including myself, feel that these are wrong, and certainly counter-productive. Rather than keeping him from engaging in computer-related crime again, they will be more likely to remove his chances for employment and force him into crime to make money. His skills are computer-related, and even if he were to go for a job that wasn't directly computer-related, nearly all jobs these days use computers in one way or another.
Anyway, these, and some other assorted reasons, are why I, and I suspect many other slashdotters, care about Mitnick, despite the fact that he's a relatively uninteresting hax0r d00d in and of himself.
Regardless of whether a minor can enter a contract or not, a minor still has to follow all applicable laws. Even without Microsoft's EULA, pirating software is illegal (copyright violation). So while Microsoft may not be able to prosecute for breach of contract, they could very well get the kid for simple copyright violation.
As for the GPL, it seems safe to me. If the minor is not able to enter into the contract, the minor simply has no right to distribute the software, and would be in violation of copyright if he/she did so.
Well, it really depends on the person. You are correct that mp3 is just audio warez for some people. If somebody downloads full albums of bands they like and then burns them to a CD-R, this is obviously simple piracy. It's not particularly an mp3 problem though - it's the exact same thing as borrowing a friend's CD and burning it to a CD-R.
Other people actually find out about music from mp3s. I was not a Nine Inch Nails fan until a friend sent me several of their mp3s a few years back...now i have 8 of their CDs. They obviously didn't lose money from my piracy of their songs. 99.99% of the bands on mp3.com would have absolutely no album sales if it weren't for mp3. Would I have bought a Painted Blue album if it weren't for finding their mp3s there? Of course not - I wouldn't even have known they existed.
There's also a fairly large contingent of "semi-legal" mp3s, nearly the exact same thing as CD- and tape-based bootlegs. Live shows, rare recordings, unreleased demo tapes, etc., all circulate in mp3 just as they did on bootlegs before. This is probably technically piracy, but in almost all the cases the material is unavailable from a "legitimate" source, so there is no revenue loss by the artist (or the record label).
You can add an additional IDE controller card if you want more than 4 IDE devices. You're not limited to the two IDE controllers (with 2 devices each) that come on most motherboards.
I agree that UseNet is better than a web-based forum, but it still seems to be somewhat badly designed to me. If anybody still remembers FidoNet and the other BBS echomail networks, that's more what my idea of a well-designed discussion forum is. All messages in the forum were public, but could optionally be addressed to a user. That was I could go through and look for all replies that were to my messages or any messages written specifically to me, and then when I had more time go through and read the others. With UseNet the only way to do this is to remember which threads I've posted to and read those first (and then I still have to read the whole thread, I can't read just the replies to my posts first).
Any ideas where to find a similarly-designed setup on the internet, now that FidoNet seems to be extremely close to dead?
The article didn't even mention *bsd being superior to Linux, it just mentioned that FreeBSD was undergoing a code freeze in anticipation of the 4.0 release. It seems somebody is being a bit defensive...
Not necessarily. Recently there was a guy that got caught in New York who had been scanning people's cards twice - once on the cash register for the purchase, once through a reader attached to his Palm Pilot which saved the numbers. Apparently he did this for several months (and got several thousand credit card numbers) before somebody noticed he was scanning their card twice and not providing a good enough explanation.
Sure, this is an isolated incident, but so is the CDUniverse crack.
Why should @Home block 31337, a perfectly good TCP and UDP port simply because some people run the default configuration of Back Orifice on it? There are other legitimate uses for that port (such as the semi-hidden faster port on some IRC servers), and the Back Orifice problem should be fixed by getting people to not get themselves trojaned in the first place, not by disabling attempts to scan for already-installed trojans.
And actually, I'll have to disagree with you concerning our general conversation. I do believe it's a parents perogative to require a child to do X. If they don't want to do X then they can find another roof to live under. (that's my political philosophy). Personally however, I wouldn't mind my children reading infidels.org with my knowledge (so that I could explain my POV, etc.)
Well, that would work except that in all but a few extreme cases, it isn't possible for a child to find another roof to live under. A child under 18 cannot legally decide to move out unless they have a really good reason that would convince a judge.
[obOT] Children shouldn't have computers or TV's in their rooms anyways. Monitoring of their activities is a parents duty. [/obOT]
Well, I'd agree with you about the rooms thing, if only to keep them from staying up 24/7 online or watching TV. I'd also agree about the monitoring TV thing, and computers for younger children, but I'm not so sure about a parent monitoring every website his or her 15-17-year-old visits. There are some things that teenagers want to read about that they don't feel like sharing with their parents or explaining to them, and not everything that parents disapprove of is inherently bad. I know I certainly went to some sites when i was that age that my parents would have disapproved of, but they trusted me enough not to monitor my access, and I don't think it ended up harming me (quite the opposite, in fact).
Well, I can't say I wouldn't attempt to explain to them why I'm not religious (you assumed correctly). I don't have a problem with this (since I'd probably do it myself), and I wouldn't have a problem with a fundamentalist Baptist parent attempting to explain to their child why they think theirs is the One True God and why they should continue in that philosophy.
What I do have a problem with is forcing a child to conform to a parent's idealogies. Many religious parents would be upset if their child were found reading Nietzche, and would restrict their access to such forums as infidels.org or alt.atheism. This is don't agree with, and is something I wouldn't do from the other side - I wouldn't forbid a child from reading the Bible, Christian philosophy, or attending church.