That would be a tough call for the big ISPs. Much as they hate heavy downloading the unfortunate reality is that millions of customers buy broadband for that reason... Comcast and the telcos would lose mucho business if they simply kowtowed to the media outfits. That's why that haven't caved in to date (oh sure, Comcast an AT&T roll over on IP logs, but this packet forging of Comcast's is a matter of saving upstream costs not stopping copyright infringement.)
So, the ISPs would have to be offered something in return for their co-operation. Let's face it: the threat of a lawsuit doesn't frighten the big boys, remember how the RIAA tried that with Verizon and got their collective ass handed to them on a platter. Frankly, I'm not sure what the the media companies could give the big ISPs in return for shafting their customer base to the point of not having one.
Obviously you understand that but I will bet dollars to doughnuts that the vast majority of Facebook users believe they have the power to remove that information permanently with a few mouse clicks. They don't. And if the Feds come looking for information such barriers don't matter much... if the data is available the company will be required to produce it, and with a National Security Letter nobody will ever know.
Oh I know, it's all a matter of risk vs. reward: personally I don't think that social networking is worth the risk. As a determinedly middle-class American with all the financial obligations that implies, I try to keep my privacy as best I can. I have too much too lose, if I were ever victimized by an identity thief. There's always some risk when doing anything online, of course, but there's no reason to make oneself into an easy target.
Ultimately, what you're saying is that large, personal music collections are going to make it harder and harder to sell more music. Oh sure, over the decades people have accumulated enormous libraries of music in vinyl or CD form... but that's just not the same as a portable MP3 player with fifty or sixty gigs worth of music in it. I don't need to keep shoving plastic discs into a slot: I can just say "surprise me" and receive an essentially endless flow of music that I happen to like because I put it there. Once you have a significant number of songs readily available at the press of a button, the need to keep buying music isn't so great. I think the studios are really competing against large, portable collections of music.
They want so much info it's obvious they plan to spam you or sell it to someone who will.
What amazes me is that people actually give accurate personal information to people and companies that have no business even asking for it. On those occasions when I take an online survey of some kind, I'll be as honest and accurate as I can when it comes to questions relevant to their products or my satisfaction with said products... but anything about me personally I simply manufacture out of thin air. They aren't entitled to know anything about me that I don't care to give them. Period.
With Microsoft, maybe it is time to delete anything personal from the site.
If you already put anything on Facebook that really shouldn't be there, it is far too late to take it down now. People don't seem to grasp the Ollie North effect: just because you "deleted" something doesn't mean it was removed from existence. Google won't even guarantee that it can permanently delete anything, and any major site is going to retain archived records for an indefinite period, which means it can still be distributed and sold to others long after you officially "deleted" it.
This just proves that it can be done on consumer-grade equipment, which means someone else will figure it out soon and release the details. So I wouldn't say that Slysoft is part of the problem, exactly, but until someone else cracks it (or, for that matter, cracks their crack!) they're just capitalizing on the market for decryption software. Just good business sense, I'd say. More power to 'em.
What's important is "casual acquisition", and as long as even one guy can crack the protection there is no significant barrier possible to casual acquisition.
True enough, at the current state of the art, network-wise. So... if you were a big media company what would you do?
Well now that's certainly true. I think they tend to listen to high-tech snake-oil salesmen, rather than talking to people who really know how the technology works.
The alternate route is to simply make copying hard enough to deter most people
That's not an alternate route for the studios... that is the route! From the early Macrovision anti-VHS-copying technique to Blu-Ray, the idea has never been to have an unbreakable protection system. They just want to eliminate casual copying, and to that end good old CSS does just fine, when you get right down to it..
I'm glad to see that you have confidence that the courts will put paid to their little scheme. It does seem like the judiciary is running more interference than it used to.
Since I have never met anyone in the real world other than people on the RIAA payroll who say such things I really wonder who he or it works for.
I have met such people in the real world, but they are generally uninformed and believe what little they've heard in the news about these issues (usually media company disinformation.) Nobody with more than a cursory understanding of the facts should be able to rationalize defending these creeps, and nobody whose spent much time on Slashdot reading threads like this one can reasonably be considered "uninformed."
whether Gates & Co. believe they're running some sort of quasi-governmental taxing authority. The arrogance is beyond belief, really it is. They certainly feel entitled to a cut of the purchase price of every PC sold.
Are you truly saying you think this person hasn't shared music illegally over p2p?
Who knows. Who cares? Maybe he shared his entire MP3 collection but you see, that isn't the issue. This is about the methods the RIAA uses to determine if a particular individual is guilty of copyright infringement. That's been the sticking point all along, and the reason so many knowledgeable Slashdotters are against those people. Does modern copyright need major reform? Yes. Does that change the fact that it's the current law of the land? Nope. Nobody really argues that around here. Most of us do, it appears, believe that people should be judged guilty based upon actual evidence, not gut feelings, and not some attack lawyer's manufactured "proof." Nor should we be subject to the music industry's need to make examples out of us, regardless of our actual guilt. Don't excuse the RIAA's behavior: these are a bunch of bad dudes and they really need to have the shit kicked out of them (ah, in the legal sense, of course.)
Let's face it, the RIAA's "evidence" (and I use the term loosely) appears to have been deemed insufficient. It's about goddamned time! Seems to me the judge did the right thing: he told them to come back when they could prove it, which is something that I wish more judges had been doing the past few years. What, you mean their "evidence" is too weak? Won't hold up in court? Gee, that's too bad. Good thing we have judges and laws I guess, to help us sort this stuff out.
RIAA attorneys have been getting away with a lot of questionable proceedings (and outright lying to the court, any court) and I'm hoping maybe the judiciary is finally catching on. That's the only way we'll put a stop to this.
I remember when ATI was about as open as you could get. Around 1988-1990 I was writing drivers for every available video chipset I could get my hands on (it was for a DOS-based industrial testing system I was selling at the time.) I wrote code for Tseng Labs ET4000, Trident, a variety of ATI boards, even implemented a VESA interface... but by far the best support I received at the time was from ATI. Tseng sent me a tech manual for the chip (register layouts, etc.) but left me to figure out the implementation details. Okay, not great but better than nothing which is what I got from Trident: had to figure that one out by reverse-engineering a video game. ATI, on the other hand, just because I said I was a programmer, sent me a giant 3-ring binder chock full of juicy documentation and sample code for all their current offerings, along with several 5 1/4" diskettes with text files of the sample code in multiple languages (including MASM, which I happened to be using at the time.) For free, I might add.
Guess which card was best supported by my application? Guess which card ended up in most of the systems we shipped? Back then ATI seemed to understand that they were a hardware company and that, well, a sale is a sale, and people that help you make sales are a good thing! The problem came in when 3D chipsets started coming out: everybody got on the "intellectual property" bandwagon and getting anything out of those people became like pulling teeth with a pair of rusty pliers. Admittedly, that's because Windows began taking over from DOS as the major consumer-level operating system out there, and Windows afforded a degree of device-independence that DOS never had, VESA notwithstanding.
Had there been a vibrant market for other desktop operating systems for the past fifteen years or so, that would probably have been different, but Microsoft's monopoly gives hardware vendors the option to keep everything a secret and still make money.
Italy wants to "censor" the Internet, do they? I guess they've forgotten that the United States already "controls" the Internet, and since we're the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free there's no way we're gonna let the do it, so there.
Wow, you live in Fredneck? I used to live in Rockville, about 35 years ago. It was a bit different then... we were a tiny little town in the middle of a plain.
Yeah, I agree... just give me the damn pipe and don't you worry about what I use it for, because it's none of your goddamn business. I also have no interest in using Comcast's email services (for oh-so-many reasons) so I switched to using No-IP.com's alternate port SMTP. Works great, inexpensive, and would probably solve your problem. I still poll Comcast's POP3 mailbox just to receive any notifications and whatnot, but I haven't sent or received any mail through Comcast for years. I also found a Web site hosting company that allows me to point their system's MX records directly at my in-house mail server. No polling! Damn fast too. I've been on the phone with someone in the process of sending me a message, and as soon as they click SEND it pops into my inbox.
True when taken literally, however Verizon and others have received millions in tax breaks (if not outright investment) for fiber over the last decade.
Not millions, billions. Billions. And I still have crappy broadband! So I agree... they've taken enough public money that they should have no right to interfere with our traffic. Obviously, what's actually legal for them to get away with depends upon, well, what the law says, and the telcos are damn good at getting laws bent in their direction. There's a reason they fought so hard to be allowed to operate so-called "data services" without the regulatory/QOS burden of the common carrier (even though many ISPs are also telephone companies and vice-versa.) In retrospect, that was probably a mistake.
I call them Comcastaway, Comcastoff, or ComcastdownintothedepthsofHades... in any event they're a schlock outfit. I used to have a 4 mbit/sec symmetric connection under @Home, and that was damn near ten years ago. Truly useful broadband, in fact. AT&T Broadband took it over and cut me back to 1.5 mbit/sec with a 30 kbit/sec backchannel. Things are much better though, under Comcast. Now I have an asymmetric connection with "no server" restrictions (hah! as if if 80 kbits/sec makes for much of a server), hidden bandwidth caps and now the bastards are deliberately forging TCP headers and corrupting legitimate traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be a tough call for the big ISPs. Much as they hate heavy downloading the unfortunate reality is that millions of customers buy broadband for that reason ... Comcast and the telcos would lose mucho business if they simply kowtowed to the media outfits. That's why that haven't caved in to date (oh sure, Comcast an AT&T roll over on IP logs, but this packet forging of Comcast's is a matter of saving upstream costs not stopping copyright infringement.)
So, the ISPs would have to be offered something in return for their co-operation. Let's face it: the threat of a lawsuit doesn't frighten the big boys, remember how the RIAA tried that with Verizon and got their collective ass handed to them on a platter. Frankly, I'm not sure what the the media companies could give the big ISPs in return for shafting their customer base to the point of not having one.
Obviously you understand that but I will bet dollars to doughnuts that the vast majority of Facebook users believe they have the power to remove that information permanently with a few mouse clicks. They don't. And if the Feds come looking for information such barriers don't matter much ... if the data is available the company will be required to produce it, and with a National Security Letter nobody will ever know.
Oh I know, it's all a matter of risk vs. reward: personally I don't think that social networking is worth the risk. As a determinedly middle-class American with all the financial obligations that implies, I try to keep my privacy as best I can. I have too much too lose, if I were ever victimized by an identity thief. There's always some risk when doing anything online, of course, but there's no reason to make oneself into an easy target.
Ultimately, what you're saying is that large, personal music collections are going to make it harder and harder to sell more music. Oh sure, over the decades people have accumulated enormous libraries of music in vinyl or CD form ... but that's just not the same as a portable MP3 player with fifty or sixty gigs worth of music in it. I don't need to keep shoving plastic discs into a slot: I can just say "surprise me" and receive an essentially endless flow of music that I happen to like because I put it there. Once you have a significant number of songs readily available at the press of a button, the need to keep buying music isn't so great. I think the studios are really competing against large, portable collections of music.
What they can do about that I don't really know.
They want so much info it's obvious they plan to spam you or sell it to someone who will.
... but anything about me personally I simply manufacture out of thin air. They aren't entitled to know anything about me that I don't care to give them. Period.
What amazes me is that people actually give accurate personal information to people and companies that have no business even asking for it. On those occasions when I take an online survey of some kind, I'll be as honest and accurate as I can when it comes to questions relevant to their products or my satisfaction with said products
NBC Chief Slamming Apple
... certainly his thought processes are completely divorced from reality.
IANAP, but sounds like this guy is dissociating in some way
With Microsoft, maybe it is time to delete anything personal from the site.
If you already put anything on Facebook that really shouldn't be there, it is far too late to take it down now. People don't seem to grasp the Ollie North effect: just because you "deleted" something doesn't mean it was removed from existence. Google won't even guarantee that it can permanently delete anything, and any major site is going to retain archived records for an indefinite period, which means it can still be distributed and sold to others long after you officially "deleted" it.
This just proves that it can be done on consumer-grade equipment, which means someone else will figure it out soon and release the details. So I wouldn't say that Slysoft is part of the problem, exactly, but until someone else cracks it (or, for that matter, cracks their crack!) they're just capitalizing on the market for decryption software. Just good business sense, I'd say. More power to 'em.
What's important is "casual acquisition", and as long as even one guy can crack the protection there is no significant barrier possible to casual acquisition.
... if you were a big media company what would you do?
True enough, at the current state of the art, network-wise. So
They live in a fantasy world.
Well now that's certainly true. I think they tend to listen to high-tech snake-oil salesmen, rather than talking to people who really know how the technology works.
The alternate route is to simply make copying hard enough to deter most people
... that is the route! From the early Macrovision anti-VHS-copying technique to Blu-Ray, the idea has never been to have an unbreakable protection system. They just want to eliminate casual copying, and to that end good old CSS does just fine, when you get right down to it..
That's not an alternate route for the studios
I'm glad to see that you have confidence that the courts will put paid to their little scheme. It does seem like the judiciary is running more interference than it used to.
Since I have never met anyone in the real world other than people on the RIAA payroll who say such things I really wonder who he or it works for.
I have met such people in the real world, but they are generally uninformed and believe what little they've heard in the news about these issues (usually media company disinformation.) Nobody with more than a cursory understanding of the facts should be able to rationalize defending these creeps, and nobody whose spent much time on Slashdot reading threads like this one can reasonably be considered "uninformed."
Huh ... I didn't realize that Japan was getting back into explosives research.
whether Gates & Co. believe they're running some sort of quasi-governmental taxing authority. The arrogance is beyond belief, really it is. They certainly feel entitled to a cut of the purchase price of every PC sold.
Are you truly saying you think this person hasn't shared music illegally over p2p?
Who knows. Who cares? Maybe he shared his entire MP3 collection but you see, that isn't the issue. This is about the methods the RIAA uses to determine if a particular individual is guilty of copyright infringement. That's been the sticking point all along, and the reason so many knowledgeable Slashdotters are against those people. Does modern copyright need major reform? Yes. Does that change the fact that it's the current law of the land? Nope. Nobody really argues that around here. Most of us do, it appears, believe that people should be judged guilty based upon actual evidence, not gut feelings, and not some attack lawyer's manufactured "proof." Nor should we be subject to the music industry's need to make examples out of us, regardless of our actual guilt. Don't excuse the RIAA's behavior: these are a bunch of bad dudes and they really need to have the shit kicked out of them (ah, in the legal sense, of course.)
Let's face it, the RIAA's "evidence" (and I use the term loosely) appears to have been deemed insufficient. It's about goddamned time! Seems to me the judge did the right thing: he told them to come back when they could prove it, which is something that I wish more judges had been doing the past few years. What, you mean their "evidence" is too weak? Won't hold up in court? Gee, that's too bad. Good thing we have judges and laws I guess, to help us sort this stuff out.
RIAA attorneys have been getting away with a lot of questionable proceedings (and outright lying to the court, any court) and I'm hoping maybe the judiciary is finally catching on. That's the only way we'll put a stop to this.
I remember when ATI was about as open as you could get. Around 1988-1990 I was writing drivers for every available video chipset I could get my hands on (it was for a DOS-based industrial testing system I was selling at the time.) I wrote code for Tseng Labs ET4000, Trident, a variety of ATI boards, even implemented a VESA interface ... but by far the best support I received at the time was from ATI. Tseng sent me a tech manual for the chip (register layouts, etc.) but left me to figure out the implementation details. Okay, not great but better than nothing which is what I got from Trident: had to figure that one out by reverse-engineering a video game. ATI, on the other hand, just because I said I was a programmer, sent me a giant 3-ring binder chock full of juicy documentation and sample code for all their current offerings, along with several 5 1/4" diskettes with text files of the sample code in multiple languages (including MASM, which I happened to be using at the time.) For free, I might add.
Guess which card was best supported by my application? Guess which card ended up in most of the systems we shipped? Back then ATI seemed to understand that they were a hardware company and that, well, a sale is a sale, and people that help you make sales are a good thing! The problem came in when 3D chipsets started coming out: everybody got on the "intellectual property" bandwagon and getting anything out of those people became like pulling teeth with a pair of rusty pliers. Admittedly, that's because Windows began taking over from DOS as the major consumer-level operating system out there, and Windows afforded a degree of device-independence that DOS never had, VESA notwithstanding.
Had there been a vibrant market for other desktop operating systems for the past fifteen years or so, that would probably have been different, but Microsoft's monopoly gives hardware vendors the option to keep everything a secret and still make money.
only another hundred million left to go.
Italy wants to "censor" the Internet, do they? I guess they've forgotten that the United States already "controls" the Internet, and since we're the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free there's no way we're gonna let the do it, so there.
Know Any Hardware Needing Better Linux Support?
Pretty much any Windows PC, I'd say.
Wow, you live in Fredneck? I used to live in Rockville, about 35 years ago. It was a bit different then ... we were a tiny little town in the middle of a plain.
... just give me the damn pipe and don't you worry about what I use it for, because it's none of your goddamn business. I also have no interest in using Comcast's email services (for oh-so-many reasons) so I switched to using No-IP.com's alternate port SMTP. Works great, inexpensive, and would probably solve your problem. I still poll Comcast's POP3 mailbox just to receive any notifications and whatnot, but I haven't sent or received any mail through Comcast for years. I also found a Web site hosting company that allows me to point their system's MX records directly at my in-house mail server. No polling! Damn fast too. I've been on the phone with someone in the process of sending me a message, and as soon as they click SEND it pops into my inbox.
Yeah, I agree
True when taken literally, however Verizon and others have received millions in tax breaks (if not outright investment) for fiber over the last decade.
... they've taken enough public money that they should have no right to interfere with our traffic. Obviously, what's actually legal for them to get away with depends upon, well, what the law says, and the telcos are damn good at getting laws bent in their direction. There's a reason they fought so hard to be allowed to operate so-called "data services" without the regulatory/QOS burden of the common carrier (even though many ISPs are also telephone companies and vice-versa.) In retrospect, that was probably a mistake.
Not millions, billions. Billions. And I still have crappy broadband! So I agree
How did I get a flamebait out of that and you got an "informative"?
Somebody with mod points is doing some damn good drugs.
I call them Comcastaway, Comcastoff, or ComcastdownintothedepthsofHades ... in any event they're a schlock outfit. I used to have a 4 mbit/sec symmetric connection under @Home, and that was damn near ten years ago. Truly useful broadband, in fact. AT&T Broadband took it over and cut me back to 1.5 mbit/sec with a 30 kbit/sec backchannel. Things are much better though, under Comcast. Now I have an asymmetric connection with "no server" restrictions (hah! as if if 80 kbits/sec makes for much of a server), hidden bandwidth caps and now the bastards are deliberately forging TCP headers and corrupting legitimate traffic.
Pathetic.
Maybe ... but at this point if I were offered a choice between the rights of "citizen" vs. the rights of "corporation" I'd pick the latter.
Seriously, if I hadn't been told what the song was I don't know if I'd have been able to recognize it. "Unintelligible" is right.