In order for that to happen, there would have to be major growth capital in the industrialized economies. And since all the capital in those countries is headed for a split between inbred halfwit CEO-noblesse and offshore labor markets in countries so poverty stricken people will beg to work for a nickel a day, those economies are going to sink long before they'd have a chance to evolve into a robot-centric workforce.
Besides, robot fast food workers? Why buy robots when you can just hire teenagers and force them to work unlimited unpaid overtime, while they get shelled out minimum wage for the 10 hours a week they work on paper?
Which is why he won't veto if it gets to him. A veto override is a political catastrophe for a president. Plus in this case, if his evil FCC machinations went over so poorly that even his own party shut him down on the issue, he'd never hear the end of how he's bought and sold in the next election. Which he shouldn't anyways, but nobody has the brains or balls to make an issue of it.
It's not even just that now. The latest rendition of Bugbear would send out an infected file named after a file on the computer it was sending from. I imagine the next generation mailers will check send records, or even incorporate spyware code, and mail themselves out using names of files the user sent recently, or selectively infect shared files to get loose on the network. For computers to be useful you have to have some level of trust, and as worms become smarter they can more easily exploit that fact.
We need to stop stressing prevention quite so much and start dealing with what happens when a virus does get through.
Given this is on Slashdot I'm guessing we're talking IT departments here. So instead of walking out, take advantage of your position. Use the computers to set up a website that advertises your department staff to other companies. Then, once you've lined up jobs at competitors, you can leave en masse. Don't forget that the best form of revenge before leaving is always to do a mass install of Kazaa on the whole corporate net and fill up the computers with Metallica and Dr Dre rips, then send an anonymous complaint to the RIAA.
From a posterior-covering perspective the university doesn't need to appeal to a broad spectrum of tastes. The RIAA is the bunch suing over music downloads. License their music and they can't sue any more, at least not at the university level. Since it's virtually unheard of for a non-RIAA label or artist to sue, the university has indemnified itself from suit at the student body's expense. Furthermore, the intelligent students who do want RIAA music will get it via the licensed service, and use Kazaa for everything else, covering their own tails as well.
But this would be a commercial service. All the **AA's see is the licensing fee from the various music download pay services. So the way to look at this from their perspective is that they could actually force an entire college student body to subscribe to one of those pay services. Just think how much they'd love to be able to forcibly enroll tens of thousands of people in Pressplay.
Now, I'm sure this won't stop piracy. But it would cut down on bellyaching if the university crippled out-of-network bandwidth to stop P2P. And a lot of students would at least cut down on external network usage and piracy, both costly for the school, if they had already paid for a service in their student fees. Especially if it's a student designed service that would almost certainly include a more Itunes-like spectrum of user rights.
So overall this would be good for the colleges, because they could cut down on external bandwidth and not have to keep an army of lawyers and IT guys employed keeping them from getting frivolous **AA suits. And its good for the music industry, because they get a lot of people to pay them for download services. It's somewhat damaging for the students, but they always get the short end of the stick in these matters.
Re:what you are fearing...
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 1
On the contrary. Most people are thinking things that most people, including the ones thinking those things, would call sick and demented all the time. The ability to read minds wouldn't correct human behavior, it would erase the thin veneer of total BS we call human civilization. It's only by saying obvious falsehoods like "I respect her for her mind," "I'm fulfilled by my job and life," and "Boy honey, this meatloaf is great!" that we make human interaction tolerable. As soon as we all know that we all want to boff every hottie that walks by, that we all hate our job and wish we could have grown up to be a superhero like we dreamed about as kids, and that frankly the meatloaf was par at best but that's okay because we were expecting it and had a snack at the bar after work while drinking away the disappointment of our fat housewife sibling and male cheerleader offspring, not to mention that blonde waitress is on Tuesdays...
Well, life is gonna get real interesting. Elvis descending from thesky in a giant death robot and meting out cleansing fire on the unbelievers interesting. Not sure if it's a good or bad thing really.
Software makers aren't liable when people use their software for criminal purposes, without their knowledge, involvement, or consent? But, but, I thought the DMCA fixed all that, so that anyone could be guilty of anything as long as the **AA said so?!?!? What did they blow all that bribe money on then?!?!?
The sad thing is this just means there is gonna be a new Super-Mega-DMCA around the corner that will outlaw transmitting any data via a computer network or some such. If the courts aren't going to do what the guys with money, errr, the "people" want, the legislature will just have to do it for them.
When the Pressplay 6 month, $30 subscription deal came up I thought I'd test the waters of legal music d/ling. And what it showed me is that anything the RIAA signs off on is going to be a complete fraud, a waste of money, and ultimately a failure. They can stop blaming Kazaa, their own suits have cost them more money than trading ever could.
It's like asking whether the terrorists are smart or the airline security is lazy. People have to get on airplanes, there's a limited amount you can do to determine if someone's a terrorist.
An OS has to allow code execution. For most of the neato features people demand in new OS's, they even have to allow remote code execution, even by third parties that may or may not be identifiable. They have to read file information. They have to do any number of things that could be used as an attack, because what the attacker wants to do is something you might want to do too.
I saw Palladium mentioned in another thread, but that won't help here. Even with Palladium, there is going to be a limit on how well the computer can differentiate between you wanting to execute code and you inadvertantly executing code, and the current Palladium system isn't even designed to address the issue if the code is local. I would say a more effective means would be to have some sort of password protection on certain actions, especially if it can be varied by the user. If there is no way to, for instance, run a format command without getting a little popup window explaining what you are about to do and having the user manually respond with a password, with no switches of any kind to bypass it, it takes the sails out of a lot of vulnerability exploitation. Likewise for net access, or many settings changes. It would be annoying, yes, but it would be a lot more secure, and if you felt you were secure without it you could turn it off.
Eventually though, we're going to have to actually attack the problem. You can't stop all computer exploits. You can't stop all virii. We need to track a lot of the script kiddies and hackers behind these things down instead of hoping they adapt slower than McAfee and Symantec. At the moment, there is virtually no risk in malicious hacking, because nobody is out looking to catch you, and even if they are the chances of getting caught and punished are slim. That needs to change more than we need to look for magical compuers that always know whether you want to run code or it's an accident.
The twitchy part is, even most people who rip their own music these days get the ID tags via some free database site, and those often take submissions. How hard would it be for somebody to just submit a bunch of malicious ID tags for popular albums?
Of course now that the big companies are going to get hit by the law they bribed through, they'll be ordering their employees in the various branches of government to shut this thing down right quick-like.
I just wish he'd sue for something like a trillion dollars then "leak" the story to some rabid attack dog psuedojournalist (O'Reilly would jump at it in half a minute). It would be nice to see some major media coverage of the DMCA and its effects on legitimate enterprise. Sadly, since the same three and a half guys who own all the music, movies, TV, radio, books, newspapers, and senators also own CNN and Fox, that won't be happening.
Given these attacks, maybe it's time to shift the DNS model to something more distributed. Say a P2P network of all the DNS servers, which would feature client side intelligent load balancing (ie it only queries past your ISP's DNS when it needs to). It wouldn't take a whole lot, since it only needs to be capable of a very minute series of transactions. You could throw in CRC codes and a verification system if people wanted to be extra paranoid about it.
Of course, ultimately you have to have some sort of root server. But in a distributed model, they could be essentially insulated from DOS attacks, because they just need to get the master list out to a few systems for it to propagate all over. There could be a redundant distribution mechanism whereby the root servers send the list out through normal channels, but also send it to some randomly selected servers by phone call as a backup. At that stage hosing the root servers (or more accurately their connections, I doubt anyone is gonna ping one of those things to lockup) would not only be difficult and dangerous, but pointless. You cut off its connection via the internet, but the list still gets out and immediately spreads to so many DNS servers you couldn't possibly shut them all down, and you would have to shut down most of the world's DNS servers to have any impact on users.
Ultimately it wouldn't change things too much, since we're already pretty insulated from these attacks. But it does have a nice "just in case" factor to prevent some megaworm or Y2k-style OS-pervasive glitch from knocking us on our butts. And it would take the wind out of the sails for a bunch of the script kiddies (and the odd genuine hacker) out there trying to crash the net, which is almost worht it in and of itself.
If the majority disagrees with the law, then surely the law is wrong, not the people.
Really, this is pretty much the case with copyright though. Copyright is established by legislation, not considered a natural right (at least here in the US). If nobody wants copyright anymore, then there's no reason for it to exist. If people don't want copyright to apply to music, there's no reason why it should. I don't think we've reached that stage, but it seems the direction we're headed in.
Yeah, there have been a few security flaws of late that didn't cause problems with XP. So I guess that's one good point for me since I upgraded when my last computer blew out (almost literally, my apartment complex needs severe rewiring). Then there's spider solitaire. Then there's...
Oh wait, that's it. Mildly increased security and spider solitaire. Well worth the cost of the OS.
Well this is a press site as far as legalities go. The press publishes information before it gets released all the time.
Now if they published images of the flyers, THAT might be infringement. But to take information from those flyers, and release it to the public as a service in a press venue is no different than the press talking about the accusations against Fox News in the new Woodward book.
I've written them all, and sent descriptions of the story with links to CNN.com and Washingtonpost.com. I doubt it'll do any good, but it never hurts to try. Maybe if enough people write in the norms will actually hear about what the DMCA is really all about.
Okay, so those don't seem to work with cut and paste. Sigh.
It only took me a couple minutes, you can find the contact forms/emails on those sites too. Let them know what you think.
Slashdot Mirror
A press statement hours later, delivered by phone to CNN from the head of the company, went as follows:
R TS"
"Yes, we plan on enforcing our intellectual property rights against government computers and OHGODSTOPSHOOTINGMEITHURTSITHURTSOHSWEETJESUSITHU
Anyone else hoping SCO's rights get upheld now? Cause intellectual property laws would be off the books in a week and the RIAA would be SOL.
Don't worry, it won't be the last =(
Kindergarten learns about kids!
In order for that to happen, there would have to be major growth capital in the industrialized economies. And since all the capital in those countries is headed for a split between inbred halfwit CEO-noblesse and offshore labor markets in countries so poverty stricken people will beg to work for a nickel a day, those economies are going to sink long before they'd have a chance to evolve into a robot-centric workforce.
Besides, robot fast food workers? Why buy robots when you can just hire teenagers and force them to work unlimited unpaid overtime, while they get shelled out minimum wage for the 10 hours a week they work on paper?
Which is why he won't veto if it gets to him. A veto override is a political catastrophe for a president. Plus in this case, if his evil FCC machinations went over so poorly that even his own party shut him down on the issue, he'd never hear the end of how he's bought and sold in the next election. Which he shouldn't anyways, but nobody has the brains or balls to make an issue of it.
It's not even just that now. The latest rendition of Bugbear would send out an infected file named after a file on the computer it was sending from. I imagine the next generation mailers will check send records, or even incorporate spyware code, and mail themselves out using names of files the user sent recently, or selectively infect shared files to get loose on the network. For computers to be useful you have to have some level of trust, and as worms become smarter they can more easily exploit that fact.
We need to stop stressing prevention quite so much and start dealing with what happens when a virus does get through.
Given this is on Slashdot I'm guessing we're talking IT departments here. So instead of walking out, take advantage of your position. Use the computers to set up a website that advertises your department staff to other companies. Then, once you've lined up jobs at competitors, you can leave en masse. Don't forget that the best form of revenge before leaving is always to do a mass install of Kazaa on the whole corporate net and fill up the computers with Metallica and Dr Dre rips, then send an anonymous complaint to the RIAA.
Silence man! You never know when Ashcroft's searchbots are listening!
From a posterior-covering perspective the university doesn't need to appeal to a broad spectrum of tastes. The RIAA is the bunch suing over music downloads. License their music and they can't sue any more, at least not at the university level. Since it's virtually unheard of for a non-RIAA label or artist to sue, the university has indemnified itself from suit at the student body's expense. Furthermore, the intelligent students who do want RIAA music will get it via the licensed service, and use Kazaa for everything else, covering their own tails as well.
But this would be a commercial service. All the **AA's see is the licensing fee from the various music download pay services. So the way to look at this from their perspective is that they could actually force an entire college student body to subscribe to one of those pay services. Just think how much they'd love to be able to forcibly enroll tens of thousands of people in Pressplay.
Now, I'm sure this won't stop piracy. But it would cut down on bellyaching if the university crippled out-of-network bandwidth to stop P2P. And a lot of students would at least cut down on external network usage and piracy, both costly for the school, if they had already paid for a service in their student fees. Especially if it's a student designed service that would almost certainly include a more Itunes-like spectrum of user rights.
So overall this would be good for the colleges, because they could cut down on external bandwidth and not have to keep an army of lawyers and IT guys employed keeping them from getting frivolous **AA suits. And its good for the music industry, because they get a lot of people to pay them for download services. It's somewhat damaging for the students, but they always get the short end of the stick in these matters.
On the contrary. Most people are thinking things that most people, including the ones thinking those things, would call sick and demented all the time. The ability to read minds wouldn't correct human behavior, it would erase the thin veneer of total BS we call human civilization. It's only by saying obvious falsehoods like "I respect her for her mind," "I'm fulfilled by my job and life," and "Boy honey, this meatloaf is great!" that we make human interaction tolerable. As soon as we all know that we all want to boff every hottie that walks by, that we all hate our job and wish we could have grown up to be a superhero like we dreamed about as kids, and that frankly the meatloaf was par at best but that's okay because we were expecting it and had a snack at the bar after work while drinking away the disappointment of our fat housewife sibling and male cheerleader offspring, not to mention that blonde waitress is on Tuesdays...
Well, life is gonna get real interesting. Elvis descending from thesky in a giant death robot and meting out cleansing fire on the unbelievers interesting. Not sure if it's a good or bad thing really.
Heh, I can't wait to see that fight.
RIAA lawyer: "Your honor, these records show that Microsoft knowingly aided and abetted.."
Bill Gates: "Shut your pie hole loser, or I'll beat you with this stack of hundred dollar bills."
RIAA lawyer: "Your honor, I object to this treatment!"
Judge: "I believe Mr. Gates told you to shut your pie hole counsel."
Software makers aren't liable when people use their software for criminal purposes, without their knowledge, involvement, or consent? But, but, I thought the DMCA fixed all that, so that anyone could be guilty of anything as long as the **AA said so?!?!? What did they blow all that bribe money on then?!?!?
The sad thing is this just means there is gonna be a new Super-Mega-DMCA around the corner that will outlaw transmitting any data via a computer network or some such. If the courts aren't going to do what the guys with money, errr, the "people" want, the legislature will just have to do it for them.
When the Pressplay 6 month, $30 subscription deal came up I thought I'd test the waters of legal music d/ling. And what it showed me is that anything the RIAA signs off on is going to be a complete fraud, a waste of money, and ultimately a failure. They can stop blaming Kazaa, their own suits have cost them more money than trading ever could.
It's like asking whether the terrorists are smart or the airline security is lazy. People have to get on airplanes, there's a limited amount you can do to determine if someone's a terrorist.
An OS has to allow code execution. For most of the neato features people demand in new OS's, they even have to allow remote code execution, even by third parties that may or may not be identifiable. They have to read file information. They have to do any number of things that could be used as an attack, because what the attacker wants to do is something you might want to do too.
I saw Palladium mentioned in another thread, but that won't help here. Even with Palladium, there is going to be a limit on how well the computer can differentiate between you wanting to execute code and you inadvertantly executing code, and the current Palladium system isn't even designed to address the issue if the code is local. I would say a more effective means would be to have some sort of password protection on certain actions, especially if it can be varied by the user. If there is no way to, for instance, run a format command without getting a little popup window explaining what you are about to do and having the user manually respond with a password, with no switches of any kind to bypass it, it takes the sails out of a lot of vulnerability exploitation. Likewise for net access, or many settings changes. It would be annoying, yes, but it would be a lot more secure, and if you felt you were secure without it you could turn it off.
Eventually though, we're going to have to actually attack the problem. You can't stop all computer exploits. You can't stop all virii. We need to track a lot of the script kiddies and hackers behind these things down instead of hoping they adapt slower than McAfee and Symantec. At the moment, there is virtually no risk in malicious hacking, because nobody is out looking to catch you, and even if they are the chances of getting caught and punished are slim. That needs to change more than we need to look for magical compuers that always know whether you want to run code or it's an accident.
The twitchy part is, even most people who rip their own music these days get the ID tags via some free database site, and those often take submissions. How hard would it be for somebody to just submit a bunch of malicious ID tags for popular albums?
Exactly, or a DNA strand, or a
Err, hold on, I'll be right back.
What?!?! GeneCorp? I've never even heard of GeneCoOHMYGODITHURTS!!! HELP MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Of course now that the big companies are going to get hit by the law they bribed through, they'll be ordering their employees in the various branches of government to shut this thing down right quick-like. I just wish he'd sue for something like a trillion dollars then "leak" the story to some rabid attack dog psuedojournalist (O'Reilly would jump at it in half a minute). It would be nice to see some major media coverage of the DMCA and its effects on legitimate enterprise. Sadly, since the same three and a half guys who own all the music, movies, TV, radio, books, newspapers, and senators also own CNN and Fox, that won't be happening.
Given these attacks, maybe it's time to shift the DNS model to something more distributed. Say a P2P network of all the DNS servers, which would feature client side intelligent load balancing (ie it only queries past your ISP's DNS when it needs to). It wouldn't take a whole lot, since it only needs to be capable of a very minute series of transactions. You could throw in CRC codes and a verification system if people wanted to be extra paranoid about it.
Of course, ultimately you have to have some sort of root server. But in a distributed model, they could be essentially insulated from DOS attacks, because they just need to get the master list out to a few systems for it to propagate all over. There could be a redundant distribution mechanism whereby the root servers send the list out through normal channels, but also send it to some randomly selected servers by phone call as a backup. At that stage hosing the root servers (or more accurately their connections, I doubt anyone is gonna ping one of those things to lockup) would not only be difficult and dangerous, but pointless. You cut off its connection via the internet, but the list still gets out and immediately spreads to so many DNS servers you couldn't possibly shut them all down, and you would have to shut down most of the world's DNS servers to have any impact on users.
Ultimately it wouldn't change things too much, since we're already pretty insulated from these attacks. But it does have a nice "just in case" factor to prevent some megaworm or Y2k-style OS-pervasive glitch from knocking us on our butts. And it would take the wind out of the sails for a bunch of the script kiddies (and the odd genuine hacker) out there trying to crash the net, which is almost worht it in and of itself.
Yeah, there have been a few security flaws of late that didn't cause problems with XP. So I guess that's one good point for me since I upgraded when my last computer blew out (almost literally, my apartment complex needs severe rewiring). Then there's spider solitaire. Then there's...
Oh wait, that's it. Mildly increased security and spider solitaire. Well worth the cost of the OS.
Well this is a press site as far as legalities go. The press publishes information before it gets released all the time. Now if they published images of the flyers, THAT might be infringement. But to take information from those flyers, and release it to the public as a service in a press venue is no different than the press talking about the accusations against Fox News in the new Woodward book.
I've written them all, and sent descriptions of the story with links to CNN.com and Washingtonpost.com. I doubt it'll do any good, but it never hurts to try. Maybe if enough people write in the norms will actually hear about what the DMCA is really all about.
Okay, so those don't seem to work with cut and paste. Sigh. It only took me a couple minutes, you can find the contact forms/emails on those sites too. Let them know what you think.
Wal*Mart
Target
Best Buy
Staples
That's the list for those who skipped the article. The websites for contacting them that I found were:
http://www.walmartstores.com/wmstore/wmstores/Ho mePage.jsp?template=OnlineForm.jsp
http://www.target.com/exec/obidos/handle-generic -form/ref=ref-tag/601-9021845-6802517?action=next% 2dpage&target=help%2fself%2dservice%2demail%2dform %2ehtml&display=sug&browse=1039412%20&method=GET+
http://www.bestbuy.com/infoCenter/ContactUs/CRGe neral.asp
(No online contact to the Best Buy corporate office, but this is pretty close).
http://www.staples.com/help/contact/Contact.asp? Type=other_quest