Did y'all already forget...
Last week NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Al Jazeera one of his top priorities from President Obama is to reach out to Muslim countries.
If Obama won't allow NASA to stay on-focus, the Senate should cut the funding.
He didn't have any alternative; SpamHaus didn't show. The judge isn't allowed to take sides or consider evidence that wasn't presented.
If this wasn't the case, you would never be able to successfully sue for redress; the other side could simply fail to show up.
As bizarre as it seems, the USPS reply is just part of the normal "discovery" process. They're treating this as a lawsuit, and ensuring they have requested all relevant information. GameFly does not have to answer all the questions; they can respond to each question with answers such as:
This is too broad (or general)
This is irrelevant
Please explain your justification for requiring this
Such answers do not generally prejudice the outcome, but they would preclude GameFly from providing that data later to back up their case. The strategy is a bit of harassement but a lot of information gathering.
That's not necessarily even close to true. I've set up networks both in the U.K. and the U.S. (And Switzerland,etc.) Your "ISP" agreement depends very much on the type of account, and even then is negotiable. My U.S. account at home is a five-static-IP "business" account; I can do anything I want with it but am responsible for the mail servers, etc. And while the ISP formally blocks mail server ports for their "residential" accounts, their "business" accounts to the same locations can do anything.
This is not due to, but rather despite, where I live. My "business" is at least five linear miles (and close to 8 driven) from the nearest office building. There's only two "businesses" within 4 miles - a "general store" and a golf course.
Don't assume that all ISP agreements are alike.
I disagree with the apparent editorial tone of the post, where he says:
It should be perfectly possible to "share" Wi-Fi while using WPA or WPA2 security measures at the same time."
I and many of my friends have two access points - a secured one with MAC filtering that provides access to the LAN and data, and an open one for the internet. At least where most of us are at, houses are far enough apart and far enough away from the street that this does not pose any real risk, and adds a lot of convenience.
Everything has a cost. More security is not always a good thing.
Read the initiative. R71 isn't about marriage. It's "everything but marriage". And, oddly, it only covers same-sex couples and couples over age 62; it's oddly biased against young straight couples that want domestic benefits without incurring the federal marriage tax!
However, this is a troubling new way for a big company to crush a small one... "Give me your technology for free, or I'll rewrite it and then give it to the world for free." It sounds a bit like Microsoft.
Does it now? What source has Microsoft rewritten and released?
Actually, I was thinking that Riverbank sounded like Microsoft... tightly controlling the terms away from true freedom. Nokia donated development effort to get around that. Why do you consider only some freedom good?
Microsoft now says that they had already been on the path for several months toward releasing the software under GPLv2 before Kroah-Hartman got in touch.
Yeah, right.
I believe Microsoft on this one... because IF they hadn't already been working on a GPL source release, the MS response to legal threats and letters is to dig in their heels. When I was at Microsoft (I'm feeling much better now!), legal would have us avoid doing anything that looked like agreeing with the premise of such a letter, which means we weren't allowed to comply with the letter request once it hit legal until legal drew up contracts and such, even if the same actions were already in our development plans..
This is near-and-dear to my heart because I recently had to design reduced-security per market research. The product is all about security, and yet the sales research showed that security was inconvenient, both to the user and to their corporate I.T. staff, and served as a significant barrier to sales. Never mind that every review said this is the most secure thing out there - that only gets you in the door. So we had to reduce physical security, reduce creation security and reduce password complexity requirements.
The disconnect between sales and science is enormous.
For programs I write for myself, including an open-source encryption program for cellphones and desktops, I have for years simply provided a checkbox so the user can decide whether to mask the password. I can't stand masking on my cellphone, and rather doubt it's at that big a risk.
I'm beginning to think that retinal scans are the way to go. At least then the user always has their key on them.
Ah, the magic of/.'s self-referencing community. Where the open-source philosophy is assumed to be canon over law and evidence.
Please, can anybody post a link to a court ruling that specified email spam as "bandwidth theft"? Despite the posts here about that, the closest I'm aware of are:
CAN-Spam violations... but while this constrains commercial email content, it never mentions bandwidth. And technically it more prohibited forging headers and using open relays than it did unsolicited commercial email; there were too many exceptions to the latter.
RICO and Iowa's anti-spam law were used by Robert Kramer/CIS Internet when his ISP was flooded. The reason the court used RICO is because Kramer could not prove any actual damages, which sort-of argues that clogged bandwidth is not stolen bandwidth. Note that CIS Internet's problems aren't over anyhow; most of the spam sent through them has forged headers, which are already illegal by CAN-Spam.
The anti junk fax law predicated on the land lines and fax paper both being commodities with cost and without effective screening available. Spam does not fall into that category.
The anti cell phone marketing call rule (which the Do Not Call list has somewhat obsoleted) was similarly based; cell users pay "per call" (or per-minute, even on a plan) while U.S. land lines tend to receive unlimited calls free. Again, email doesn't work that way.
Lastly, your system does not have to accept emails. You can reject by server, for example.
In short, spam is illegal when it consists of forged headers, obscured paths or violates the content rules, but it doesn't appear to ever be considered illegal for "stealing bandwidth".
Any counter examples?
Trouble is, your rules only apply to dedicated and determined attackers. Security through obscurity works against the vast majority of potential attacks. Rule #1 should be:
Any time a slashdotter tries to impose a rule on reality, assume reality has it right.
Too many of you think that you can train or fix developers. Some of us are well-rounded, but stop and think for a moment... the same things that CREATE great developers - utter focus on logic and machines, great spatial/coding skills, analysis, concentration to the exclusion of all physical - also creates anti-social people.
If these guys had social skills and rewarding interactions with normal people to begin with, they wouldn't have become great developers.
'Josh' is hyperbolistic, but I've had a hard time teaching some of my programmers that showering regularly and not picking their nostrils in a meeting are important. They listen, but they can't really implement it. And then they wonder why they are career-ladder-limited. But if we keep them away from the other kind of people, it's all okay.
Spiegel screwed up; the trick isn't to fix Josh, but to hire a team better able to work in the realm between Josh and the customers. Even Spiegel admits that losing him cost the company a lot of time and money. Maybe the company should have dumped Spiegel and found someone willing to work between Josh and the humans.
If open source is capable of replacing your work, you've been resting on your laurels. I've been involved in a lot of open source including some of my own projects. Profit is purely in innovation and in providing something open source can't. Some examples:
Very complex or tricky code that took a lot of investing time to code and test. For a year or so you will have a time-to-market advantage on that, but eventually if you don't keep it moving forward, open source will catch up.
Projects requiring expensive trials or regulatory processes... such as medical or avionics. The barrier to entry there is that a lot of monetary investment and structure (for auditing) are needed; these are two things open source doesn't do well.
Projects requiring or benefiting from partnerships, such as perhaps supporting Verizon wireless (or Blackberry) devices at the carrier level. Again, this requires structure, money and time, but then serves as a barrier to entry. And again, eventually open source projects will figure a way around the barrier (probably around the carrier requirement in this case.)
So the trick is to support open source, especially as it then allows the hobbyists to extend your product while still protecting your advantage, but push into areas that have a barrier against being purely commodity.
It's worked for me.
OK, newsworthy, but really, it (WMP-imposed DRM on rips) is just an ignorance tax. Yeah, it will impact users who don't bother learning better, but that's true of the limitations of Internet Explorer, Notepad, and anything else that essentially comes with the P.C.
So our take shouldn't be "Microsoft is evilly imposing DRM", but rather "Microsoft is yet again giving both us Open Source types and other commercial enterprises another huge opportunity". If they still have a monopoly, it's not for lack of openings in the armor!
I've seen such contracts frequently. In every case, I simply rule-out (scratch through) those lines. And sign the resulting contract. I have NEVER had it become an issue or come back for negotiation; it has always been accepted.
I believe, as do many anti-DRM activists, that the average person is more than willing to pay a fair price for anything they want or need, they do not need to be forced to do the right thing
Belief is usually required when not supported by facts or reality.
Years ago one of my programs was selected by PC Magazine as one of their top 5 freeware/shareware utilities for that year. I made mine fully functional, donations appreciated. I got three, ever. But I regularly ran into people who used it all the time and even recognized my name and gushed about it when introduced to me, plus it wound up on all sorts of those utility discs you used to be able to buy for $5 at computer shows, without me ever being contacted by the CD publishers or the users. I never made a big deal about it, but it did tell me a lot about people.
Perhaps people need not be forced to do the right thing, but if not at least actively propelled and urged, evidence is they won't.
I favor protection of my rights, obviously. I favor making archival copies. I also favor reality over holding my breath until Utopia appears. And the reality is that the article wasn't about your rights!
Cory's argument is that because of DRM, protected by the DMCA, iTunes puts Apple disproportionately in charge of their devices by preventing labels selling music for it directly. But that's just not true. It only stands up if you assume that AAC (the iTunes/Apple format) is the only format supported on the iPod, or that all tracks on iPods come from iTunes. But all iPods play MP3 files. And most podcasts are in MP3, which strongly implies that users do not feel constrained to AAC/iTunes files.
I don't know how Cory became an RIAA schill, but his whole argument is predicated on DRM being a requisite to selling music on the iPod. In short, despite his headline, he is arguing not that DRM is bad, but that single-source DRM is bad. Nobody but Sony is preventing Sony from selling their music hits in MP3 format.
If you think the European courts are more protective of individual privacy than the U.S. courts, you're sadly out-of-touch. Maybe it just makes a good sound-bite for you on this issue, but in general the privacy rights in the U.S. far exceed those in Europe. This is more a showdown over jurisdiction, sort-of a states-rights type battle between larger entities.
For this to be a "privacy" issue, you would have to start with the presumption that non-citizens have a RIGHT to come into the U.S. (Granted, these days many people start with that presumption.) If instead it is a revocable priviledge, then this isn't a privacy issue. It's simply a cost of being allowed into the country.
In my efforts to avoid Windows Media Player and switch from Quinntessential (which is free but closed and I figured perhaps long-in-the-tooth), I recently tried VLC on my living room laptop. It did so poorly with media from network shares that I installed both WinAmp and Quinntessential to see if there was a networking problem I wasn't diagnosing. Nope. VLC simply couldn't play the files cleanly while the other two could.
This wasn't a problem with files from the internet, but those tend to be downloaded locally before playback.
I hope you don't think that the "no space" argument is made-up. It's quite true that just about any DVD with a DTS track has terrible-looking video.
Not even remotely true. Most Superbit releases (Columbia) have fantastic video and a fantastic DTS track. They don't have extras like interviews, "Making Of..." and games. The space issue is real, but it's not a trade-off of video vs. DTS; it's a trade-off of the best movie experience vs. cramming lots of non-movie pieces in.
I'll take the Superbit+DTS, thankyouverymuch.
You can't be serious. Securing your machines is only worth $100?
That's a logical fallacy. You're confusing the cost of recovering with the cost of securing. We know we can secure it for several hundred dollars, using a WatchGuard for example, or perhaps $100-ish using a Zone Alarm or similar.
How much is having fire worth to you? Probably a nearly-infinite amount, since it empowered/enabled civilization. But that doesn't mean that a matchbook or lighter are worth a large amount of money, even if they would have allowed you to conquer the world 10,000 years ago!
I didn't consider the article bad, though perhaps shallow. But the/. tag was misleading; he never mentioned coolness or hipness, etc. Which is just as well, because my view of the Mac does not include "cool", any more than my view of unkempt beards or of Birkenstocks does.
Maybe, maybe not. I'm considering one for a different set of uses:
Carry around a large HD with archives of my various systems
Be able to play any of my large CD library tunes in my car, wife's car or rental car (using FM Modulator)
As a PVR when travelling, for playback of recorded content in the hotel room (e.g. exercise videos, favorite shows)
Long intercontinental flights, since the movies only change monthly and I often flight more often than that.
Sure, it's no iPod replacement, but do we really need another iPod replacement? The AV700 would be more useful for my needs, which don't include jogging or lots of normal walking with it.
I agree with the concerns about the odds stacked against the buyer. And the seller. I've had a few bad deals on eBay, but they did get resolved. So why the effort?
I'm not mainstream. The musicial instrument I play is hard to find, but there's a good selection on eBay over a typical month. I listen to albums not generally for sale in the U.S. or even via Amazon, and enjoy off-beat movies. I don't use eBay a lot, but it's very handy when I do. And while there have been some issues, the damage is largely under control. The ability to find an item at all is more valuable than eliminating the risk, because even if the items were available locally, their lack of mass appeal would result in much much higher prices.
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Did y'all already forget... Last week NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Al Jazeera one of his top priorities from President Obama is to reach out to Muslim countries. If Obama won't allow NASA to stay on-focus, the Senate should cut the funding.
He didn't have any alternative; SpamHaus didn't show. The judge isn't allowed to take sides or consider evidence that wasn't presented. If this wasn't the case, you would never be able to successfully sue for redress; the other side could simply fail to show up.
Such answers do not generally prejudice the outcome, but they would preclude GameFly from providing that data later to back up their case. The strategy is a bit of harassement but a lot of information gathering.
That's not necessarily even close to true. I've set up networks both in the U.K. and the U.S. (And Switzerland,etc.) Your "ISP" agreement depends very much on the type of account, and even then is negotiable. My U.S. account at home is a five-static-IP "business" account; I can do anything I want with it but am responsible for the mail servers, etc. And while the ISP formally blocks mail server ports for their "residential" accounts, their "business" accounts to the same locations can do anything. This is not due to, but rather despite, where I live. My "business" is at least five linear miles (and close to 8 driven) from the nearest office building. There's only two "businesses" within 4 miles - a "general store" and a golf course. Don't assume that all ISP agreements are alike.
It should be perfectly possible to "share" Wi-Fi while using WPA or WPA2 security measures at the same time."
I and many of my friends have two access points - a secured one with MAC filtering that provides access to the LAN and data, and an open one for the internet. At least where most of us are at, houses are far enough apart and far enough away from the street that this does not pose any real risk, and adds a lot of convenience. Everything has a cost. More security is not always a good thing.
Read the initiative. R71 isn't about marriage. It's "everything but marriage". And, oddly, it only covers same-sex couples and couples over age 62; it's oddly biased against young straight couples that want domestic benefits without incurring the federal marriage tax!
However, this is a troubling new way for a big company to crush a small one... "Give me your technology for free, or I'll rewrite it and then give it to the world for free." It sounds a bit like Microsoft.
Does it now? What source has Microsoft rewritten and released? Actually, I was thinking that Riverbank sounded like Microsoft... tightly controlling the terms away from true freedom. Nokia donated development effort to get around that. Why do you consider only some freedom good?
Microsoft now says that they had already been on the path for several months toward releasing the software under GPLv2 before Kroah-Hartman got in touch.
Yeah, right.
I believe Microsoft on this one... because IF they hadn't already been working on a GPL source release, the MS response to legal threats and letters is to dig in their heels. When I was at Microsoft (I'm feeling much better now!), legal would have us avoid doing anything that looked like agreeing with the premise of such a letter, which means we weren't allowed to comply with the letter request once it hit legal until legal drew up contracts and such, even if the same actions were already in our development plans..
The disconnect between sales and science is enormous.
For programs I write for myself, including an open-source encryption program for cellphones and desktops, I have for years simply provided a checkbox so the user can decide whether to mask the password. I can't stand masking on my cellphone, and rather doubt it's at that big a risk.
I'm beginning to think that retinal scans are the way to go. At least then the user always has their key on them.
Note that CIS Internet's problems aren't over anyhow; most of the spam sent through them has forged headers, which are already illegal by CAN-Spam.
In short, spam is illegal when it consists of forged headers, obscured paths or violates the content rules, but it doesn't appear to ever be considered illegal for "stealing bandwidth". Any counter examples?
Rule #1 is: Security through obscurity isn't.
Trouble is, your rules only apply to dedicated and determined attackers. Security through obscurity works against the vast majority of potential attacks. Rule #1 should be:
Any time a slashdotter tries to impose a rule on reality, assume reality has it right.
Too many of you think that you can train or fix developers. Some of us are well-rounded, but stop and think for a moment... the same things that CREATE great developers - utter focus on logic and machines, great spatial/coding skills, analysis, concentration to the exclusion of all physical - also creates anti-social people. If these guys had social skills and rewarding interactions with normal people to begin with, they wouldn't have become great developers. 'Josh' is hyperbolistic, but I've had a hard time teaching some of my programmers that showering regularly and not picking their nostrils in a meeting are important. They listen, but they can't really implement it. And then they wonder why they are career-ladder-limited. But if we keep them away from the other kind of people, it's all okay. Spiegel screwed up; the trick isn't to fix Josh, but to hire a team better able to work in the realm between Josh and the customers. Even Spiegel admits that losing him cost the company a lot of time and money. Maybe the company should have dumped Spiegel and found someone willing to work between Josh and the humans.
So the trick is to support open source, especially as it then allows the hobbyists to extend your product while still protecting your advantage, but push into areas that have a barrier against being purely commodity. It's worked for me.
OK, newsworthy, but really, it (WMP-imposed DRM on rips) is just an ignorance tax. Yeah, it will impact users who don't bother learning better, but that's true of the limitations of Internet Explorer, Notepad, and anything else that essentially comes with the P.C.
So our take shouldn't be "Microsoft is evilly imposing DRM", but rather "Microsoft is yet again giving both us Open Source types and other commercial enterprises another huge opportunity". If they still have a monopoly, it's not for lack of openings in the armor!
I've seen such contracts frequently. In every case, I simply rule-out (scratch through) those lines. And sign the resulting contract. I have NEVER had it become an issue or come back for negotiation; it has always been accepted.
You'll never know until you try.
Years ago one of my programs was selected by PC Magazine as one of their top 5 freeware/shareware utilities for that year. I made mine fully functional, donations appreciated. I got three, ever. But I regularly ran into people who used it all the time and even recognized my name and gushed about it when introduced to me, plus it wound up on all sorts of those utility discs you used to be able to buy for $5 at computer shows, without me ever being contacted by the CD publishers or the users. I never made a big deal about it, but it did tell me a lot about people.
Perhaps people need not be forced to do the right thing, but if not at least actively propelled and urged, evidence is they won't.
I favor protection of my rights, obviously. I favor making archival copies. I also favor reality over holding my breath until Utopia appears. And the reality is that the article wasn't about your rights!
Cory's argument is that because of DRM, protected by the DMCA, iTunes puts Apple disproportionately in charge of their devices by preventing labels selling music for it directly. But that's just not true. It only stands up if you assume that AAC (the iTunes/Apple format) is the only format supported on the iPod, or that all tracks on iPods come from iTunes. But all iPods play MP3 files. And most podcasts are in MP3, which strongly implies that users do not feel constrained to AAC/iTunes files.
I don't know how Cory became an RIAA schill, but his whole argument is predicated on DRM being a requisite to selling music on the iPod. In short, despite his headline, he is arguing not that DRM is bad, but that single-source DRM is bad. Nobody but Sony is preventing Sony from selling their music hits in MP3 format.
If you think the European courts are more protective of individual privacy than the U.S. courts, you're sadly out-of-touch. Maybe it just makes a good sound-bite for you on this issue, but in general the privacy rights in the U.S. far exceed those in Europe. This is more a showdown over jurisdiction, sort-of a states-rights type battle between larger entities.
For this to be a "privacy" issue, you would have to start with the presumption that non-citizens have a RIGHT to come into the U.S. (Granted, these days many people start with that presumption.) If instead it is a revocable priviledge, then this isn't a privacy issue. It's simply a cost of being allowed into the country.
In my efforts to avoid Windows Media Player and switch from Quinntessential (which is free but closed and I figured perhaps long-in-the-tooth), I recently tried VLC on my living room laptop. It did so poorly with media from network shares that I installed both WinAmp and Quinntessential to see if there was a networking problem I wasn't diagnosing. Nope. VLC simply couldn't play the files cleanly while the other two could.
This wasn't a problem with files from the internet, but those tend to be downloaded locally before playback.
I didn't consider the article bad, though perhaps shallow. But the /. tag was misleading; he never mentioned coolness or hipness, etc. Which is just as well, because my view of the Mac does not include "cool", any more than my view of unkempt beards or of Birkenstocks does.
- Carry around a large HD with archives of my various systems
- Be able to play any of my large CD library tunes in my car, wife's car or rental car (using FM Modulator)
- As a PVR when travelling, for playback of recorded content in the hotel room (e.g. exercise videos, favorite shows)
- Long intercontinental flights, since the movies only change monthly and I often flight more often than that.
Sure, it's no iPod replacement, but do we really need another iPod replacement? The AV700 would be more useful for my needs, which don't include jogging or lots of normal walking with it.I agree with the concerns about the odds stacked against the buyer. And the seller. I've had a few bad deals on eBay, but they did get resolved. So why the effort?
I'm not mainstream. The musicial instrument I play is hard to find, but there's a good selection on eBay over a typical month. I listen to albums not generally for sale in the U.S. or even via Amazon, and enjoy off-beat movies. I don't use eBay a lot, but it's very handy when I do. And while there have been some issues, the damage is largely under control. The ability to find an item at all is more valuable than eliminating the risk, because even if the items were available locally, their lack of mass appeal would result in much much higher prices.