I'm sure nobody at Google works for free either. But Viacom wants Google to do its dirty work for free: examining video clips, digging up the relevant copyright information, contacting the owner of the copyright to determine whether it should be posted to YouTube or not, and removing the offending clips.
Remember that while each media corporation is under the misguided assumption that they are the only folks who own the copyright on content, in truth, there are lots of clips on Google/YouTube that the copyright owner has posted legitimately, and many more clips where the copyright owner is unknown or cannot be located. Viacom wants to shift the burden of filling out DMCA takedown requests to Google, despite the fact that Congress (miraculously) realized that a hosting provider should not be responsible for vetting every piece of content that a user posts to their service.
Viacom is in a far better position to take care of everything that comes before the deletion of actual infringing content. They are aware of what material they own the copyright to, they already know who owns the copyright on that material, and they already know that they don't want it on YouTube. They also have a legal remedy - a DMCA takedown notice - for having such material removed.
If Google has to vet all of its content to make sure that Viacom doesn't hold the copyright, then they can't just stop with Viacom's content. They can't even stop with every ??AA member company's content. No, they have to establish the wishes of the copyright owner for every single piece of material on their site. And if Google loses, then every website that provides hosting space and shows advertising alongside it - Angelfire? Geocities? - has to do the same thing.
That's why the DMCA requires takedown notices, that's why it absolves hosting providers of responsibility for vetting material that their users post to their services, and that's why Google is in the clear and Viacom will be ponying up their legal fees in a few years' time.
It was indeed Ben Franklin, and for all his usual wisdom, he was full of crap when he said that. We trade freedom for safety every day. Traffic regulations make it safer to be on the roads, but we have to stay below the speed limit and stop at all those pesky traffic lights. We go through security at airports to detect all those bombs that none of us are carrying, in the hopes that nobody will carry a bomb onto a plane. We limit the firearms we can use and the situations we can use them in, in hopes that it will protect us from shooting ourselves in self-defense. Municipalities can search your home as part of a building safety inspection, and they can get a search warrant if you bar them entry, even lacking probable cause. And don't forget to buckle up. It's the law.
Now, that's the state we were in before the Patriot Act, and you didn't hear a massive outcry then. That's 300 million people who apparently deserve neither freedom nor safety.
This card might be great if you never watch Plain Old Cable Television. But who bothers with a HTPC that can't record TV as well?
We're still waiting for CableLabs to stop fellating the movie industry and license someone to make a PCI-based CableCard reader. I mean, I'd subscribe to digital cable service today, if I could tune it and record it on my PVR PC without needing to tape an IR emitter to the front of a set-top tuner.
Who can tell? Maybe half of them fail five minutes after you first plug it in, and the other half fail ten million hours later. Maybe only a very few fail within the first five years, and the failures start picking up after that. Nobody can tell from this figure, which is pure marketroid-speak without any practical application.
I realize that bashing the administration and anybody who's linked with them in any way is the "in thing" to do (thank you, Jon Stewart), but there are zillions of sites out there for posting and discussing this sort of thing. It's not tech, it's not fantasy, it's plain old generic business being posted for plain old political reasons. So why is it here?
Re:I just hope Tron is still in there
on
Inside the Machine
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· Score: 1
Oh, yeah? Well, I wonder how he'd take to working in a pocket calculator.
Most state representatives are not professional politicians. They do their service at the statehouse for a few months out of the year, and for the rest of their time, they have a real job. It takes five minutes of this representative's time to write this bill, and another minute of their legislature's time to vote for it (most state legislatures handle their voting instantly rather than having protracted voting times like Congress does) to honor an astronomer from their state, so I don't see a problem.
"Defective by Design" doesn't mean that something has a design that happens to be defective. It refers to products that are, from the ground up, designed to be defective, intentionally and specifically. Sucking at software design is completely different from writing your software correctly and putting in DRM to make it less functional.
The term "Defective by Design" was specifically invented to describe products containing DRM, where the usability of the product is intentionally compromised in order to protect the profits of a third party.
Yes, Microsoft has a lot of DRMed software, with Vista being the granddaddy of them all, but not everything Microsoft makes is defective by design. And in this particular case, the defect appears to be a bug rather than intentional anyway. So, please, save the "defectivebydesign" tag for situations where it's really warranted. Sure, it may be an amusing term, but when you use it where it doesn't apply, it waters down its meaning for the situation it was intended to be applied to: DRM.
The stocks involved typically have such low volume that they may not even trade at all some days. Once the IPO is complete, the CEO probably doesn't give a rat's ass if his or her stock gets halted for a few days.
Why not just do the sensible thing [sadly in this case] and either buy out Vonage, or license the patents to them.
For the same reason that the ??AA companies don't just buy out other companies that are making use of their content: those companies threaten their entire archaic business model and force them to make costly changes to their infrastructure that they otherwise would be able to put off for years or even decades. It's far cheaper to sue another company to put them out of business than it is to buy them out and dismantle them.
Of course, in the case of the ??AA, they have the added risk of losing control over the artists, whereas in the telecoms' case, they only get to screw people over in one direction (the customer) instead of both ways.
Most of the questions asked in the deposition won't come in handy at this particular trial, but it's quite possible that those details may come in handy at other trials, or even to discredit the expertise of this expert witness.
8400 half-hour slots divided among dozens of radio stations and hundreds of days in the year amounts to practically never knowing when and where the broadcasters are going to play something other than the Mafiaa-dictated playlists.
It's a bogus argument anyway, for at least three reasons.
One, you could be running a hacked version of Kazaa that attempts to check the IP address of the publicly-seen device (e.g., your router's IP address) and then reports* it in its transmitted data.
Two, you could have a second network device in your computer and assign that device the same IP address that your ISP assigns to your router. If you configure the network devices in the proper order, Kazaa will report* the IP address of the second network device, even though it's not connected to anything.
Three, you can have a machine on a privately-routed network have a non-"private" (i.e., non-10.x.x.x and non-192.168.x.x) IP address. The only problem is that whatever subnet you count as being internal to that network can't be accessed on the public network, but in most cases, this won't cause a practical problem.
In other words, if the IP address my ISP assigns to my router is 4.2.2.2, I can also assign 4.2.2.2 to a computer that is NAT'ed through the router. If I then run Kazaa on that machine, it will report* its IP address as being 4.2.2.2, which happens to match the IP address that my router has as seen from the Internet. This defeats Jacobson's argument that when these IP addresses match, it is always because the device holding the IP address is a computer and not a router. It also defeats the argument that when the IP addresses match, the device holding the IP address is the same device running Kazaa.
You're not supposed to do it according to convention, and many storebought routers won't let you do it, but it's definitely possible. It does require some expertise to set up this way, though.
(* This is assuming that Kazaa does, in fact, include the local machine's IP address as part of its transmitted data.)
It could also be distressingly misleading if, for example, file sharing was taking place on that IP address when it was assigned to someone else, and shortly thereafter, the computer being examined had received that IP address and successfully re-requested it every time after that.
They need to have a sit-down with their marketing
on
500-in-1 Electronics Kits?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...guy. From the Amazon blurb:
We went one step beyond our 300 in one lab kit! Yes, 500 in one, PLUS comprehensive learning course manuals!
Come on, everyone knows that one step above 300 is 301. Doesn't "we went 200 steps beyond our 300-in-one lab kit" sound more impressive?
Anyway, I had one of those old stick-wire-in-spring kits back in the day, and it claimed a whopping 50 projects, ranging from basic instruction on concepts like resistance on up to basic crystal and transistor radio. A bit basic in terms of theory, but frighteningly close in scope to the hands-on experience I got while earning my degree in EE years later.
If you're a bit more hardcore, you can probably do better with some modular breadboard (you can buy build-it-yourself kits that include complete instructions for the power supply), a good electronics textbook, a multimeter, and a local electronics hobby shop. Avoid Radio Shack like the plague, and ask the EE department at your local university if they have any recommendations for where to buy discrete parts.
EQ2 has had a similar service for a while now, and Vanguard went into release recently with such a service. Those services allow you to disable parts of the info that's displayed, however.
Since there is supposed to be no original research on Wikipedia and articles are only supposed to include facts cited from verifiable primary sources, it doesn't matter whether the editors of Wikipedia are Nobel-prize-winning physicists, illegal aliens, or baby killers. The person's arguments don't enter into it, because those arguments aren't filtered through the person's credentials, but through Wikipedia policy.
If you see a situation where this isn't true, be bold and make an effort to correct the problem.
Now, if this guy is using his fake credentials to get a job, money, media attention, or whatever else, then there's a problem, but I agree with Jimbo in the context of Wikipedia on this one - as long as his adminship was based on his activity on Wikipedia and his efforts to uphold Wikipedia's policies, Wikipedia should be blind to his real-world foibles.
The key defense here is open wireless access points. Many campuses are going wireless on their own, but the ones that aren't probably have quite a few people setting up their own access points so they can use their computers in their dorm lounge, balcony, yard, or wherever. If anybody can access it, then the RIAA has no proof that the registered user of the IP address is actually sharing files, and in fact, the person may actually not be sharing files at all.
Okay, so this software requires a decryption key in order to work. By default, it doesn't include a key, and you have to enter it yourself. So, as shipped, it does not circumvent an encryption system, because it can't decrypt a ham sandwich if it doesn't have the key. Now, if you are licensed to use the decryption, then you will have a key that you can type in, and then this software will work. If you have a key that you're not licensed to use, then that's on you, not the author of the software.
What this means is that the content cabal is asserting that they are the only ones with the right to encrypt using AACS by virtue of the fact that they are the only ones who can license others to decrypt using AACS. If I decide I want to encrypt something with AACS, I'm going to need a player that decrypts it. I don't need the content cabal's sacred keys - I just need the keys that I generate to decrypt my own work. This software provides the mechanism for applying my keys to my content.
In other words, if there's an "intellectual property" issue here, it's not copyright, and therefore, not DMCA-related. There may be applicable patents being violated here, though, which is how the content cabal keeps a strangehold on implementations of AACS (and CSS) to ensure that they fulfill their draconian content control functions like region codes and UOP.
I think both Sam & Max and Uru Live were specially negotiated deals. Gametap gets their producers' names in the credits and such. There's another episodic game they're producing whose name I can't remember.
Most likely, what they're talking about here is similar to how a lot of indie games get released on multiple online stores, each of which slaps its own DRM on the front to let you try the game for an hour or so. In this case, instead of getting an hour to try a game and then having to buy it, the game would be available to play as much as you want as long as you're subscribing to Gametap.
In any case, much as it's fun to bash behemoth media megacorps like Time Warner (Gametap's parent), I'm glad that Gametap is giving these games a chance to shine.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the best uptime I've had on my MythTV PVR is around 200 days. I blame the power company for that one.
I'm sure nobody at Google works for free either. But Viacom wants Google to do its dirty work for free: examining video clips, digging up the relevant copyright information, contacting the owner of the copyright to determine whether it should be posted to YouTube or not, and removing the offending clips.
Remember that while each media corporation is under the misguided assumption that they are the only folks who own the copyright on content, in truth, there are lots of clips on Google/YouTube that the copyright owner has posted legitimately, and many more clips where the copyright owner is unknown or cannot be located. Viacom wants to shift the burden of filling out DMCA takedown requests to Google, despite the fact that Congress (miraculously) realized that a hosting provider should not be responsible for vetting every piece of content that a user posts to their service.
Viacom is in a far better position to take care of everything that comes before the deletion of actual infringing content. They are aware of what material they own the copyright to, they already know who owns the copyright on that material, and they already know that they don't want it on YouTube. They also have a legal remedy - a DMCA takedown notice - for having such material removed.
If Google has to vet all of its content to make sure that Viacom doesn't hold the copyright, then they can't just stop with Viacom's content. They can't even stop with every ??AA member company's content. No, they have to establish the wishes of the copyright owner for every single piece of material on their site. And if Google loses, then every website that provides hosting space and shows advertising alongside it - Angelfire? Geocities? - has to do the same thing.
That's why the DMCA requires takedown notices, that's why it absolves hosting providers of responsibility for vetting material that their users post to their services, and that's why Google is in the clear and Viacom will be ponying up their legal fees in a few years' time.
It was indeed Ben Franklin, and for all his usual wisdom, he was full of crap when he said that. We trade freedom for safety every day. Traffic regulations make it safer to be on the roads, but we have to stay below the speed limit and stop at all those pesky traffic lights. We go through security at airports to detect all those bombs that none of us are carrying, in the hopes that nobody will carry a bomb onto a plane. We limit the firearms we can use and the situations we can use them in, in hopes that it will protect us from shooting ourselves in self-defense. Municipalities can search your home as part of a building safety inspection, and they can get a search warrant if you bar them entry, even lacking probable cause. And don't forget to buckle up. It's the law.
Now, that's the state we were in before the Patriot Act, and you didn't hear a massive outcry then. That's 300 million people who apparently deserve neither freedom nor safety.
This card might be great if you never watch Plain Old Cable Television. But who bothers with a HTPC that can't record TV as well?
We're still waiting for CableLabs to stop fellating the movie industry and license someone to make a PCI-based CableCard reader. I mean, I'd subscribe to digital cable service today, if I could tune it and record it on my PVR PC without needing to tape an IR emitter to the front of a set-top tuner.
Their loss, I suppose.
It's black, shiny, small, round, smelly, warm, and each pound of it weighs over ten thousand pounds.
Who can tell? Maybe half of them fail five minutes after you first plug it in, and the other half fail ten million hours later. Maybe only a very few fail within the first five years, and the failures start picking up after that. Nobody can tell from this figure, which is pure marketroid-speak without any practical application.
What is this, Slashdot or Daily Kos?
I realize that bashing the administration and anybody who's linked with them in any way is the "in thing" to do (thank you, Jon Stewart), but there are zillions of sites out there for posting and discussing this sort of thing. It's not tech, it's not fantasy, it's plain old generic business being posted for plain old political reasons. So why is it here?
Oh, yeah? Well, I wonder how he'd take to working in a pocket calculator.
That figure doesn't tell me jack. What I want to know is if I order 100 of these things, how many of them will fail just after the warranty expires?
Most state representatives are not professional politicians. They do their service at the statehouse for a few months out of the year, and for the rest of their time, they have a real job. It takes five minutes of this representative's time to write this bill, and another minute of their legislature's time to vote for it (most state legislatures handle their voting instantly rather than having protracted voting times like Congress does) to honor an astronomer from their state, so I don't see a problem.
"Defective by Design" doesn't mean that something has a design that happens to be defective. It refers to products that are, from the ground up, designed to be defective, intentionally and specifically. Sucking at software design is completely different from writing your software correctly and putting in DRM to make it less functional.
The term "Defective by Design" was specifically invented to describe products containing DRM, where the usability of the product is intentionally compromised in order to protect the profits of a third party.
Yes, Microsoft has a lot of DRMed software, with Vista being the granddaddy of them all, but not everything Microsoft makes is defective by design. And in this particular case, the defect appears to be a bug rather than intentional anyway. So, please, save the "defectivebydesign" tag for situations where it's really warranted. Sure, it may be an amusing term, but when you use it where it doesn't apply, it waters down its meaning for the situation it was intended to be applied to: DRM.
The stocks involved typically have such low volume that they may not even trade at all some days. Once the IPO is complete, the CEO probably doesn't give a rat's ass if his or her stock gets halted for a few days.
Why not just do the sensible thing [sadly in this case] and either buy out Vonage, or license the patents to them.
For the same reason that the ??AA companies don't just buy out other companies that are making use of their content: those companies threaten their entire archaic business model and force them to make costly changes to their infrastructure that they otherwise would be able to put off for years or even decades. It's far cheaper to sue another company to put them out of business than it is to buy them out and dismantle them.
Of course, in the case of the ??AA, they have the added risk of losing control over the artists, whereas in the telecoms' case, they only get to screw people over in one direction (the customer) instead of both ways.
Most of the questions asked in the deposition won't come in handy at this particular trial, but it's quite possible that those details may come in handy at other trials, or even to discredit the expertise of this expert witness.
8400 half-hour slots divided among dozens of radio stations and hundreds of days in the year amounts to practically never knowing when and where the broadcasters are going to play something other than the Mafiaa-dictated playlists.
It's a bogus argument anyway, for at least three reasons.
One, you could be running a hacked version of Kazaa that attempts to check the IP address of the publicly-seen device (e.g., your router's IP address) and then reports* it in its transmitted data.
Two, you could have a second network device in your computer and assign that device the same IP address that your ISP assigns to your router. If you configure the network devices in the proper order, Kazaa will report* the IP address of the second network device, even though it's not connected to anything.
Three, you can have a machine on a privately-routed network have a non-"private" (i.e., non-10.x.x.x and non-192.168.x.x) IP address. The only problem is that whatever subnet you count as being internal to that network can't be accessed on the public network, but in most cases, this won't cause a practical problem.
In other words, if the IP address my ISP assigns to my router is 4.2.2.2, I can also assign 4.2.2.2 to a computer that is NAT'ed through the router. If I then run Kazaa on that machine, it will report* its IP address as being 4.2.2.2, which happens to match the IP address that my router has as seen from the Internet. This defeats Jacobson's argument that when these IP addresses match, it is always because the device holding the IP address is a computer and not a router. It also defeats the argument that when the IP addresses match, the device holding the IP address is the same device running Kazaa.
You're not supposed to do it according to convention, and many storebought routers won't let you do it, but it's definitely possible. It does require some expertise to set up this way, though.
(* This is assuming that Kazaa does, in fact, include the local machine's IP address as part of its transmitted data.)
It could also be distressingly misleading if, for example, file sharing was taking place on that IP address when it was assigned to someone else, and shortly thereafter, the computer being examined had received that IP address and successfully re-requested it every time after that.
Anyway, I had one of those old stick-wire-in-spring kits back in the day, and it claimed a whopping 50 projects, ranging from basic instruction on concepts like resistance on up to basic crystal and transistor radio. A bit basic in terms of theory, but frighteningly close in scope to the hands-on experience I got while earning my degree in EE years later.
If you're a bit more hardcore, you can probably do better with some modular breadboard (you can buy build-it-yourself kits that include complete instructions for the power supply), a good electronics textbook, a multimeter, and a local electronics hobby shop. Avoid Radio Shack like the plague, and ask the EE department at your local university if they have any recommendations for where to buy discrete parts.
EQ2 has had a similar service for a while now, and Vanguard went into release recently with such a service. Those services allow you to disable parts of the info that's displayed, however.
186,282.397 miles per second; it's the law.
And it's a good thing, too. Have you checked your gas mileage at 0.9c lately?
Since there is supposed to be no original research on Wikipedia and articles are only supposed to include facts cited from verifiable primary sources, it doesn't matter whether the editors of Wikipedia are Nobel-prize-winning physicists, illegal aliens, or baby killers. The person's arguments don't enter into it, because those arguments aren't filtered through the person's credentials, but through Wikipedia policy.
If you see a situation where this isn't true, be bold and make an effort to correct the problem.
Now, if this guy is using his fake credentials to get a job, money, media attention, or whatever else, then there's a problem, but I agree with Jimbo in the context of Wikipedia on this one - as long as his adminship was based on his activity on Wikipedia and his efforts to uphold Wikipedia's policies, Wikipedia should be blind to his real-world foibles.
The key defense here is open wireless access points. Many campuses are going wireless on their own, but the ones that aren't probably have quite a few people setting up their own access points so they can use their computers in their dorm lounge, balcony, yard, or wherever. If anybody can access it, then the RIAA has no proof that the registered user of the IP address is actually sharing files, and in fact, the person may actually not be sharing files at all.
Okay, so this software requires a decryption key in order to work. By default, it doesn't include a key, and you have to enter it yourself. So, as shipped, it does not circumvent an encryption system, because it can't decrypt a ham sandwich if it doesn't have the key. Now, if you are licensed to use the decryption, then you will have a key that you can type in, and then this software will work. If you have a key that you're not licensed to use, then that's on you, not the author of the software.
What this means is that the content cabal is asserting that they are the only ones with the right to encrypt using AACS by virtue of the fact that they are the only ones who can license others to decrypt using AACS. If I decide I want to encrypt something with AACS, I'm going to need a player that decrypts it. I don't need the content cabal's sacred keys - I just need the keys that I generate to decrypt my own work. This software provides the mechanism for applying my keys to my content.
In other words, if there's an "intellectual property" issue here, it's not copyright, and therefore, not DMCA-related. There may be applicable patents being violated here, though, which is how the content cabal keeps a strangehold on implementations of AACS (and CSS) to ensure that they fulfill their draconian content control functions like region codes and UOP.
I think both Sam & Max and Uru Live were specially negotiated deals. Gametap gets their producers' names in the credits and such. There's another episodic game they're producing whose name I can't remember.
Most likely, what they're talking about here is similar to how a lot of indie games get released on multiple online stores, each of which slaps its own DRM on the front to let you try the game for an hour or so. In this case, instead of getting an hour to try a game and then having to buy it, the game would be available to play as much as you want as long as you're subscribing to Gametap.
In any case, much as it's fun to bash behemoth media megacorps like Time Warner (Gametap's parent), I'm glad that Gametap is giving these games a chance to shine.