I have a UK broadband connection, with an 8128Kb sync. My last provider implemented throttling, so my speed at weekends dropped to 512K on average, and down to sub-200 regularly. One day I hit 62K. That's when I left.
People have been saying the same thing about PC gaming vs consoles for years, yet it's still alive and kicking (no thanks to DRM though), with some studios still sticking purely to PC gaming.
The thing about casual gamers is they're fickle. They'll go out and buy a wii for wii fit, and maybe get one or two others, but they're not going out and buying a game a month like the hardcore gamers.
There's big profits in casual gamers at the moment because the budgets are low and it's a largely untapped market, so there's a big surge of demand. Once that market eventually gets saturated, profits will drop due to the sheer competition - how many party games can the market sustain at once purely off casual gamers?
There will continue to be a market for AAA titles aimed at the hardcore crowd, just as there's a range of films from the mass-market summer action flick, to the niche arty cult hit - and as long as there's a market, and profit to be made, there will be companies willing to make games for it and make a profit doing so.
I don't give a damn how good it turns out to be (or not), there's absolutely no way I'm getting suckered twice. If it has the same securom DRM with install limits and online activation as Bioshock 1, there's no way in hell I'm buying it.
On the other hand, there's the schadenfreude we derive from seeing Jack finally get his comeuppance.
After years and years of thinking 'surely THIS time', it's really satisfying for the court system to catch on to what us gamers have seen all this time - that he's an utter loon who besmirches the name of anything he's a part of.
I don't know about you, but in this case, I'm really glad to see that justice has finally been done.
Your OEM key will work perfectly fine with 64-bit vista business, though once used it is tied to the hardware. You'll just need to beg, borrow or steal a 64 bit disc.
I just store all my documents on a linux server, and back that up using the usual methods:)
For the local image itself - I tend to do a backup after doing a clean install + apps - I've an older copy of acronis trueimage I use from cd/usb boot for dumping, and paragon partition manager for juggling partitions (I dual/triple boot a lot). As I don't keep anything important on the local os drive (things like steam/games go on a separate partition), I tend to just blow it away and go back to clean image or reinstall.
Though I've just seen paragon have got a free drive snapshot program for home users, backup express - given I like their other software, I think I might check it out.
It would be a good idea, but the only announced free upgrade so far is for vista users who buy a new OEM pc after July 1, OEMs will be able to offer a windows 7 upgrade voucher program, similar to the xp -> vista one they did before vista launched.
There will also be paid-for upgrade versions of 7 that allow upgrades from XP or vista (no doubt using the 'installed on harddisk' check pioneered with vista), so the odds of microsoft making them free to download alas seems remote.
The other reason is that service providers are under no obligation to put material back up when served with a counter-notice - often, they just delete it completely, and sometimes cancel the account entirely. If the original poster wants it back up, they need to repost it from scratch, sometimes with a new account.
Even if the work would be defensible under fair use (incidental snippet of background music in a video, some building background in a photo), people don't bother because it wasn't that important to them anyway, and it's certainly not worth going to court over. They will however, feel contrained from posting new material in case they get slapped down again. Others who hear about the slapdowns will refrain from posting things that, while perfectly legal, might incur DMCA notices and account terminations.
This is the chilling effect of DMCA notices, because it's biased towards taking material down, even if it's not infringing. There's no penalty for issuing DMCA notices for stuff you know damn well isn't infringing (such as it only shares a few letters in common in the filename!), only for misrepresenting yourself as the copyright owner or his agent of the work you actually claim is infringed.
The DMCA assumes notices will only be issued for items that are clearly infringing with no fair use defence, to save companies having to go to court over cases they'd surely win.
Instead, it's turned into a free-for-all where the copyright cartels are slapping down anything that even vaguely sounds similar to their works, and having defacto lost, people generally aren't prepared to fight over it, especially if it means going to court with a multi-billion company over some youtube video.
The only people likely to send a counter-notice are those who have a vested interest in their material staying up, i.e. other authors selling material mistakenly flagged.
Your analogy is flawed somewhat, as most people still prefer paper books to ebooks, but lets ignore that for the moment.
Look at the Baen Free Library - the authors themselves put up books for free download, in a variety of DRM-free formats. Every time an author does this, they see massive spikes in sales of their other books, *including* the book they put up for free. They also sell ebooks via webscriptions - and you know what? Those *also* see spikes in sales. They like libraries, and they like people lending their books around - they'd rather be read than forgotten, and getting someone to like your existing work makes them more likely to buy future works. Compare and contrast to the games industry, for example, which treats legal 2nd hand sales like copyright infringement, with DRM etc to prevent it if at all possible (steam, I'm looking at you too)
The truth is with publishing is there's very little long-tail. Unless you're a mega author, The sales you get in the first year are pretty much the vast majority of the money you'll ever make from that title. The trick is to get more people interested in your work in the first place, so that they go on to buy your back catalog.
Free illegal online stuff suffers from this too. The latest and greatest is where all the seeders are; try getting old or obscure stuff on the pirate bay, and you'll see that the field is littered with dead torrents, the seeders long having since gone away. That's somewhere that sellers have a niche; use the latest free stuff (which you don't even have to pay bandwidth for!) as a loss leader for your other works, which you sell, easily and DRM free. Convenience has value too - itunes thrives in a world where they're competiting with free, because it's more easily available, better catalogued, and because people are generally good and want to pay artists if they can. Those that won't pay, were *never your customers in the first place* so worrying about them is simply wasting your effort.
Hell, radio and TV has survived a good long time giving it all away for free, and doing adverts alongside it. the BBC iplayer (paid for by existing TV licences) and Hulu (adverts) are two examples of taking their existing model and doing it online. OK, you might be able to go and get the ad-free version online too, but if it's right *there* and fast and convenient, loads of people will put up with ads and go to the original source.
But ultimately, this is all irrelevent. lets imagine this freemazon, a giant library of all the published works of mankind, from the banal comedy to the greatest works of visual and written arts of history. Every book, film, TV, piece of music ever written available free to be enjoyed and to enlighten the public for all time, for them to draw inspiration from and create their own works.
I have a better name for it. The Public Domain. What copyright is FOR. We want this wonderful, amazing Public Domain for the benefit of the public. Lets create an incentive for people to create works and put them out there for everyone to enjoy. Copying is hard since you need a printing press, so we'll put the incentive there - you can be the only one allowed to print your works for a limited time, make some money, then it goes in the public domain. The public give something up (copyright is a limit on free speech; without copyright I'd just be using my free speech rights to say what I like, even if it is sharing something you wrote) and they get something back in return.
Copyright is supposed to be about the richness of the public domain; it's an incentive mechanism to get works into it. Now though, it's like a feudal system; serfs do all the work, and the barons take all the works themselves, and the serfs if they're lucky get to keep a fraction for their own benefit, while the general public only get what the barons allow them to have.
Copyright is the new feudal system; artists slave away for virtually no gain, and the public is robbed of its public domain with
Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were sentenced to a year in jail each. They were also ordered to pay 30m kronor total ($3.6m) in damages. The damages were awarded to a number of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and Columbia Pictures. The news was broken early by Peter Sunde aka brokep via twitter, from a "trustworthy source".
A round-up of the arguments in court has already been discussed on slashdot, and the BBC has some thoughts on what happens next.
The site itself is on servers outside Sweden, and has sufficient funds to remain operational for some time. In combination with the appeal against the verdict already pledged by the men, the site itself should remain operational for now.
And write off the investment in games he's already made? In many cases, that investment is significantly higher than the cost of the console itself.
And yes, the 360 is pretty shoddy hardware, especially the cooling design, but at least it's cheap. I could buy a new 360 every single year, and it would still work out cheaper than the money I used to spend on my gaming PC keeping it up to date.
A friend of mine had graphical glitches on his original gen before it finally red ringed out of warranty - he's tried the 3rd party xclamp kits, plus reheating to remelt the solder, but it's only a partial repair - he's had to resort to running the DVD drive outside the case and ziptying a 120mm fan directly on the GPU heatsink to stop it falling over.
So is it linux's fault when some odd bit of hardware isn't supported? No, we blame the vendor for crappy hardware and not writing the drivers, and tell users to go buy properly supported hardware. We're paying the hardware vendors for proper drivers. Having OS drivers built-in is a bonus, but many of those are written by the vendor in the first place.
Nvidia didn't have fully working vista drivers for months - for a while, they didn't have any vista drivers at all for the 7 series after launch, only the brand new 8 series. Creative took well over a year to release a driver that didn't crackle on nforce motherboards for the x-fi cards.
As a result, my next graphics card purchase was ATI. my next motherboard chipset wasn't nforce, and creative will never get my money again.
I think that was traditional british sarcasm at the MP going to the body with the most knowledge on Phorm for an answer - Phorm itself.
Reminds me of a tech support joke:
There's a man hovering over a field in a hot-air balloon. He spys another man walking down below, and calls out: 'Hello there - I don't suppose you can tell me where I am? I'm lost!' The reply is shouted back, 'Why yes - you're floating in a hot-air balloon above a field of corn.' The man, somewhat disgruntled, shouts back, 'Let me guess - you work in tech support. Your answer was absolutely technically correct, but utterly useless to me.' The man below yells back, 'And you must be in management - you don't know where you are, or where you're going, but now it's my fault.'
Opting out is done via browser based cookie according to the ISPs that have implemented it so far. Every single browser you use on every single pc on every single account will have to be opted out manually, and re-opted out every time with changes.
*All* webtraffic you send via your ISP (that's not say, in a vpn) will go through phorm's systems at the ISP, overhead and all. If there's an opt-out cookie set, they suppposedly ignore that traffic for classification purposes. They also supposedly ignore personally identifiable information like bank websites, but that's bound to have flaws.
My guess is that, even with an opt-out mechanism, Phorm will make it sufficiently intrusive to opt-out so that people will eventually tire of opting out and will find themselves opted-in.
Yes, I believe that's the idea.
Here's the diagram of how phorm supposedly works, by basically masquerading as the website you actually want.
Note, the UID assigned to you does not come from a local cookie in the initial request - it's assigned by phorm. They then give you a tracking cookie based on your UID or the opt-out cookie, process the request and dump it to the profiler (where it's used or not based upon the opt-out) then remove the tracking cookie at the end. Next request, they give you a new tracking cookie based upon your phorm ID - the phorm ID itself is assigned outside the cookie mechanism, so can't be user account/browser based.
Because the users are a commodity for the ISP to sell to advertisers. What, you thought this was for YOUR benefit?
Why doesn't each of your family members have a seperate account on the machine? AFAIK from previous statements, it doesn't use a local browser cookie for tracking (too easy to mess with), only for opt-out - I believe it's based upon IP/mac address outbound; if you're all behind a single NAT router, it'll combine you all together.
While it's indeed worrying what phorm means for privacy and the ability of third parties to snoop on our traffic without our knowledge, I don't think what you're worrying about is the problem.
Phorm doesn't replace adverts already in place on websites. What it does do is this:
User A goes to website W. Phorm listens in on this, records it and classifies that user as a website-W sort of person - phorm pays your ISP to let them do this.
User A goes to website X. They have phorm-supplied ad bars. User A now sees an advert, on site X, intended to appeal to website-W sort of people, so that User A is more likely to click on it and give website X their kickback for the clickthrough.
User B sits down at the keyboard afterwards, and visits website Y with phorm ad bars. They get adverts based upon websites W and X, and get a nasty surprise based upon user A's interesting hobbies.
User B then goes to website Z, with normal ad-bars, and gets their website-Z approved adverts as usual.
User A comes back, and gets adverts based upon websites X,Y and Z and also gets a bit of a surprise.
User's A and B have their privacy violated, websites X and Y, with their targeted adverts, get more clickthroughs, and phorm makes a crapton of money as the middleman, website Z sobs at their low clickthroughs with ordinary ads and buys phorm advert bars.
This is the pernicious thing; it's targeted advertising based upon your whole browsing history, so that if you go to golf sites a lot, you'll start seeing a lot more golf adverts, even on non-golf sites. Or horse porn adverts, if that's what your other family members get up to.
Opting-out is done on a per-browser per-machine cookie basis; and even if you opt-out, your data still passes through phorm's systems, they just 'don't act on it'. That plus the trials they did at BT without telling anybody about them is frankly disgusting.
Google only records what information you give them when you use their services directly; when you search on google or use gmail or the like. The EULA for the service explains what is done with your data. This is explicitly allowed under the Data Protection Act (as it should be - otherwise apache logs would be illegal!) once you leave their site though, the logging ends.
Phorm collects detailed information on all your browsing traffic without your knowledge or consent, and then shares it with third parties, again without your knowledge or consent - take the BT trial, where people didn't even know it was running, let alone opt-in.
There's a good argument that Phorm breaches the Regulation of Investigatory Powers act here; as a non-governmental body (i.e. not specifically authorised to intercept traffic) they don't have the right to intercept and record the traffic of users without it being explicitly opt-in - it can even be argued that such recording requires the opt-in of both parties, i.e. the websites that people visit need to agree too.
Depending on what they do with the data specifically, and who it gets passed to, they may well be in breach of the Data Protection Act too.
ISPs have to record certain communications information under the Interception Modernisation Program, to be provided upon request to local and national governmental bodies. Phorm definitely doesn't qualify under that either.
Now we see why the government has been going to so much effort to make RULAs valid contracts; now they can lock up suspected terrorists for 20 years for EULA violation, without having to prove any of that tricky stuff.
Just like they nailed Al Capone for tax fraud, they'll nail Bin Laden for buying Rick Astley tracks on iTunes...
He then arranged with the hosting company in January to keep the account open until the end of his existing pre-paid term - an agreement that was then broken with no warning when they killed his account and dumped all his domains back to deNIC as originally threatened, and prevented him from moving them to another registrar.
It's theoretically not illegal for the MPAA to use those clandestinely gathered emails as evidence in their own separate case - they can't be sued for obtaining them.
Think whisteblowers; even if the evidence they gather is done by secretly dumping off their boss's email and then passing it to the FBI, the company doesn't get to sue the FBI for privacy violation to have the evidence supressed.
Of course, Torrent Spy/Justin Bunnel could have sued Robert Anderson directly for breach of contract, illegal access of company resources or whatever.
Now, whether the MPAA *should* have the same protection as law enforcement, and whether their illegal private dicks *should* have the same protections as whistleblowers when setting people up is a different set of questions altogether.
If they charged what it actualy *cost*, I'd be happy with that. The problem is, they charge WAY in excess of that. If you look at what you're charged per byte for servers in datacentres, it can easily be a factor of 1000 less than what I'm paying for the same amount of traffic on a metered service in the UK (as they all are for less than £100). OK, there's some additional overhead for the last-mile service to the home, and the backhaul to the ADSL POPs, but the difference is simply extortionate.
Note, I don't blame the ISPs per se, here - BT's prices for bandwidth to the ISP are the reason it's so damn expensive. ISPs who have their own infrastructure in the exchanges, or BT's much lower price for those exchanges which have been upgraded to ADSL2 show that BT are squarely to blame for broadband being so expensive and slow outside city centres in the UK.
Hell, I just have to go down to France to see how it can and should be in my country.
So because the wind will do it eventually, we should grind down all the mountains in the hunt for minerals? We should strip mine the earth, pollute the seas and rivers with toxic materials and kill all the animals for food? Other predators kill all they want, so we should too?
Not all change is good. While good (for humans) can come from change, sometimes the bad outweighs the good.
Ignoring the long-term costs to the environment for short term benefits is what leads to air pollution causing asthma and respiratory diseases, heavy metal toxicity in our food supply and loss of species diversity and sustainability through over-fishing and habitat destruction, not to mention our energy-heavy society that's causing increasingly damaging climate change.
Science-driven environmentalism is just long-term planning, for the benefit of the human race instead of its detriment.
If your telephone exchange hasn't been switched to ADSL2 yet (60% of exchanges), and providers like sky or O2 haven't put their own gear in your exchange (any non-city exchange), then the ADSL Max packages via BT resellers are a lot more like Time Warner's, due to BT's bandwidth reseller charges being a lot higher for Max users than 21CN ADSL2 customers.
Truly unlimited packages are £80-£100 a month on 8Mb Max, while you can get 100-150 GB quotas combination of peak and offpeak for £35 a month.
Yes, you can get 'unlimited' offpeak quotas cheaply, such as enta.net resellers, but the thottling and heavy-user flagging systems are incredibly heavy handed.
£22 a month on non-LLU ADSL Max will get you about 40GB total.
The UK basically has a digital divide right now; densely packed urban exchanges have a selection of competing providers offering high bandwidth, high quota, low cost packages. Suburban and rural exchanges have limited choice, high costs and rediculously low quotas.
They stopped doing that with vista, alas. With the upgrade versions of that, you need a visible install on the local hard-drive of the eligible OS you're upgrading from (I presume it checks for certain system files). Once you passed that check, you can blow away the XP partition and install vista clean as part of the install, or set up a dualboot install alongside.
One way round this is to install the upgrade version twice; install it once in 'trial mode', i.e. without a key, then use THAT install as the basis for the install-with-key to then blow away the original and install as an upgrade.
Note, you can't register a trial clean install of vista with an upgrade key post install; it won't accept it unless it was installed AS an upgrade, either in-place or during the DVD boot install.
If you want to upgrade in place, then you run the installer from inside the old OS as before.
Oh COME ON. I know the feds have a bad rap on slashdot, but now you're accusing them of being back-scratching goons on behalf of AT&T?
"Court documents show it's all part of an alleged massive fraud scheme against AT&T and Verizon."
It's right there in the frikkin article. Large scale fraud is indeed the purview of the FBI, no conspiracy required.
Though now I'll get modded down for this won't I. I better come up with some ludicrous conspiracy scheme instead.
Verizon and AT&T did what they were told by our government overlords, and were protected. These companies didn't hand over their VOIP logs to the NSA like good little citizens, and now they have to pay. No doubt those records are on their way to the NSA right now! I bet they're looking for records of terrorist activies, and will just end up poring over the comm logs of honest upstanding americans, and sticking something on them when they don't find anything. And of course none of the mainstream media are covering it, they're in on it!
Slashdot Mirror
I have a UK broadband connection, with an 8128Kb sync. My last provider implemented throttling, so my speed at weekends dropped to 512K on average, and down to sub-200 regularly. One day I hit 62K. That's when I left.
People have been saying the same thing about PC gaming vs consoles for years, yet it's still alive and kicking (no thanks to DRM though), with some studios still sticking purely to PC gaming.
The thing about casual gamers is they're fickle. They'll go out and buy a wii for wii fit, and maybe get one or two others, but they're not going out and buying a game a month like the hardcore gamers.
There's big profits in casual gamers at the moment because the budgets are low and it's a largely untapped market, so there's a big surge of demand. Once that market eventually gets saturated, profits will drop due to the sheer competition - how many party games can the market sustain at once purely off casual gamers?
There will continue to be a market for AAA titles aimed at the hardcore crowd, just as there's a range of films from the mass-market summer action flick, to the niche arty cult hit - and as long as there's a market, and profit to be made, there will be companies willing to make games for it and make a profit doing so.
I don't give a damn how good it turns out to be (or not), there's absolutely no way I'm getting suckered twice. If it has the same securom DRM with install limits and online activation as Bioshock 1, there's no way in hell I'm buying it.
On the other hand, there's the schadenfreude we derive from seeing Jack finally get his comeuppance.
After years and years of thinking 'surely THIS time', it's really satisfying for the court system to catch on to what us gamers have seen all this time - that he's an utter loon who besmirches the name of anything he's a part of.
I don't know about you, but in this case, I'm really glad to see that justice has finally been done.
Your OEM key will work perfectly fine with 64-bit vista business, though once used it is tied to the hardware. You'll just need to beg, borrow or steal a 64 bit disc.
I just store all my documents on a linux server, and back that up using the usual methods :)
For the local image itself - I tend to do a backup after doing a clean install + apps - I've an older copy of acronis trueimage I use from cd/usb boot for dumping, and paragon partition manager for juggling partitions (I dual/triple boot a lot). As I don't keep anything important on the local os drive (things like steam/games go on a separate partition), I tend to just blow it away and go back to clean image or reinstall.
Though I've just seen paragon have got a free drive snapshot program for home users, backup express - given I like their other software, I think I might check it out.
It would be a good idea, but the only announced free upgrade so far is for vista users who buy a new OEM pc after July 1, OEMs will be able to offer a windows 7 upgrade voucher program, similar to the xp -> vista one they did before vista launched.
There will also be paid-for upgrade versions of 7 that allow upgrades from XP or vista (no doubt using the 'installed on harddisk' check pioneered with vista), so the odds of microsoft making them free to download alas seems remote.
The other reason is that service providers are under no obligation to put material back up when served with a counter-notice - often, they just delete it completely, and sometimes cancel the account entirely. If the original poster wants it back up, they need to repost it from scratch, sometimes with a new account.
Even if the work would be defensible under fair use (incidental snippet of background music in a video, some building background in a photo), people don't bother because it wasn't that important to them anyway, and it's certainly not worth going to court over. They will however, feel contrained from posting new material in case they get slapped down again. Others who hear about the slapdowns will refrain from posting things that, while perfectly legal, might incur DMCA notices and account terminations.
This is the chilling effect of DMCA notices, because it's biased towards taking material down, even if it's not infringing. There's no penalty for issuing DMCA notices for stuff you know damn well isn't infringing (such as it only shares a few letters in common in the filename!), only for misrepresenting yourself as the copyright owner or his agent of the work you actually claim is infringed.
The DMCA assumes notices will only be issued for items that are clearly infringing with no fair use defence, to save companies having to go to court over cases they'd surely win.
Instead, it's turned into a free-for-all where the copyright cartels are slapping down anything that even vaguely sounds similar to their works, and having defacto lost, people generally aren't prepared to fight over it, especially if it means going to court with a multi-billion company over some youtube video.
The only people likely to send a counter-notice are those who have a vested interest in their material staying up, i.e. other authors selling material mistakenly flagged.
Your analogy is flawed somewhat, as most people still prefer paper books to ebooks, but lets ignore that for the moment.
Look at the Baen Free Library - the authors themselves put up books for free download, in a variety of DRM-free formats. Every time an author does this, they see massive spikes in sales of their other books, *including* the book they put up for free. They also sell ebooks via webscriptions - and you know what? Those *also* see spikes in sales. They like libraries, and they like people lending their books around - they'd rather be read than forgotten, and getting someone to like your existing work makes them more likely to buy future works. Compare and contrast to the games industry, for example, which treats legal 2nd hand sales like copyright infringement, with DRM etc to prevent it if at all possible (steam, I'm looking at you too)
The truth is with publishing is there's very little long-tail. Unless you're a mega author, The sales you get in the first year are pretty much the vast majority of the money you'll ever make from that title. The trick is to get more people interested in your work in the first place, so that they go on to buy your back catalog.
Free illegal online stuff suffers from this too. The latest and greatest is where all the seeders are; try getting old or obscure stuff on the pirate bay, and you'll see that the field is littered with dead torrents, the seeders long having since gone away. That's somewhere that sellers have a niche; use the latest free stuff (which you don't even have to pay bandwidth for!) as a loss leader for your other works, which you sell, easily and DRM free. Convenience has value too - itunes thrives in a world where they're competiting with free, because it's more easily available, better catalogued, and because people are generally good and want to pay artists if they can. Those that won't pay, were *never your customers in the first place* so worrying about them is simply wasting your effort.
Hell, radio and TV has survived a good long time giving it all away for free, and doing adverts alongside it. the BBC iplayer (paid for by existing TV licences) and Hulu (adverts) are two examples of taking their existing model and doing it online. OK, you might be able to go and get the ad-free version online too, but if it's right *there* and fast and convenient, loads of people will put up with ads and go to the original source.
But ultimately, this is all irrelevent. lets imagine this freemazon, a giant library of all the published works of mankind, from the banal comedy to the greatest works of visual and written arts of history. Every book, film, TV, piece of music ever written available free to be enjoyed and to enlighten the public for all time, for them to draw inspiration from and create their own works.
I have a better name for it. The Public Domain. What copyright is FOR. We want this wonderful, amazing Public Domain for the benefit of the public. Lets create an incentive for people to create works and put them out there for everyone to enjoy. Copying is hard since you need a printing press, so we'll put the incentive there - you can be the only one allowed to print your works for a limited time, make some money, then it goes in the public domain. The public give something up (copyright is a limit on free speech; without copyright I'd just be using my free speech rights to say what I like, even if it is sharing something you wrote) and they get something back in return.
Copyright is supposed to be about the richness of the public domain; it's an incentive mechanism to get works into it. Now though, it's like a feudal system; serfs do all the work, and the barons take all the works themselves, and the serfs if they're lucky get to keep a fraction for their own benefit, while the general public only get what the barons allow them to have.
Copyright is the new feudal system; artists slave away for virtually no gain, and the public is robbed of its public domain with
Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were sentenced to a year in jail each. They were also ordered to pay 30m kronor total ($3.6m) in damages. The damages were awarded to a number of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and Columbia Pictures. The news was broken early by Peter Sunde aka brokep via twitter, from a "trustworthy source".
A round-up of the arguments in court has already been discussed on slashdot, and the BBC has some thoughts on what happens next.
The site itself is on servers outside Sweden, and has sufficient funds to remain operational for some time. In combination with the appeal against the verdict already pledged by the men, the site itself should remain operational for now.
And write off the investment in games he's already made? In many cases, that investment is significantly higher than the cost of the console itself.
And yes, the 360 is pretty shoddy hardware, especially the cooling design, but at least it's cheap. I could buy a new 360 every single year, and it would still work out cheaper than the money I used to spend on my gaming PC keeping it up to date.
A friend of mine had graphical glitches on his original gen before it finally red ringed out of warranty - he's tried the 3rd party xclamp kits, plus reheating to remelt the solder, but it's only a partial repair - he's had to resort to running the DVD drive outside the case and ziptying a 120mm fan directly on the GPU heatsink to stop it falling over.
So is it linux's fault when some odd bit of hardware isn't supported? No, we blame the vendor for crappy hardware and not writing the drivers, and tell users to go buy properly supported hardware. We're paying the hardware vendors for proper drivers. Having OS drivers built-in is a bonus, but many of those are written by the vendor in the first place.
Nvidia didn't have fully working vista drivers for months - for a while, they didn't have any vista drivers at all for the 7 series after launch, only the brand new 8 series. Creative took well over a year to release a driver that didn't crackle on nforce motherboards for the x-fi cards.
As a result, my next graphics card purchase was ATI. my next motherboard chipset wasn't nforce, and creative will never get my money again.
I think that was traditional british sarcasm at the MP going to the body with the most knowledge on Phorm for an answer - Phorm itself.
Reminds me of a tech support joke:
There's a man hovering over a field in a hot-air balloon. He spys another man walking down below, and calls out:
'Hello there - I don't suppose you can tell me where I am? I'm lost!'
The reply is shouted back,
'Why yes - you're floating in a hot-air balloon above a field of corn.'
The man, somewhat disgruntled, shouts back,
'Let me guess - you work in tech support. Your answer was absolutely technically correct, but utterly useless to me.'
The man below yells back,
'And you must be in management - you don't know where you are, or where you're going, but now it's my fault.'
Opting out is done via browser based cookie according to the ISPs that have implemented it so far. Every single browser you use on every single pc on every single account will have to be opted out manually, and re-opted out every time with changes.
*All* webtraffic you send via your ISP (that's not say, in a vpn) will go through phorm's systems at the ISP, overhead and all. If there's an opt-out cookie set, they suppposedly ignore that traffic for classification purposes. They also supposedly ignore personally identifiable information like bank websites, but that's bound to have flaws.
My guess is that, even with an opt-out mechanism, Phorm will make it sufficiently intrusive to opt-out so that people will eventually tire of opting out and will find themselves opted-in.
Yes, I believe that's the idea.
Here's the diagram of how phorm supposedly works, by basically masquerading as the website you actually want.
Note, the UID assigned to you does not come from a local cookie in the initial request - it's assigned by phorm. They then give you a tracking cookie based on your UID or the opt-out cookie, process the request and dump it to the profiler (where it's used or not based upon the opt-out) then remove the tracking cookie at the end. Next request, they give you a new tracking cookie based upon your phorm ID - the phorm ID itself is assigned outside the cookie mechanism, so can't be user account/browser based.
Why doesn't it pay the user?
Because the users are a commodity for the ISP to sell to advertisers. What, you thought this was for YOUR benefit?
Why doesn't each of your family members have a seperate account on the machine?
AFAIK from previous statements, it doesn't use a local browser cookie for tracking (too easy to mess with), only for opt-out - I believe it's based upon IP/mac address outbound; if you're all behind a single NAT router, it'll combine you all together.
Hey, I didn't design the thing.
So what you're saying is I should move to Denmark?
While it's indeed worrying what phorm means for privacy and the ability of third parties to snoop on our traffic without our knowledge, I don't think what you're worrying about is the problem.
Phorm doesn't replace adverts already in place on websites. What it does do is this:
User A goes to website W.
Phorm listens in on this, records it and classifies that user as a website-W sort of person - phorm pays your ISP to let them do this.
User A goes to website X. They have phorm-supplied ad bars. User A now sees an advert, on site X, intended to appeal to website-W sort of people, so that User A is more likely to click on it and give website X their kickback for the clickthrough.
User B sits down at the keyboard afterwards, and visits website Y with phorm ad bars. They get adverts based upon websites W and X, and get a nasty surprise based upon user A's interesting hobbies.
User B then goes to website Z, with normal ad-bars, and gets their website-Z approved adverts as usual.
User A comes back, and gets adverts based upon websites X,Y and Z and also gets a bit of a surprise.
User's A and B have their privacy violated, websites X and Y, with their targeted adverts, get more clickthroughs, and phorm makes a crapton of money as the middleman, website Z sobs at their low clickthroughs with ordinary ads and buys phorm advert bars.
This is the pernicious thing; it's targeted advertising based upon your whole browsing history, so that if you go to golf sites a lot, you'll start seeing a lot more golf adverts, even on non-golf sites. Or horse porn adverts, if that's what your other family members get up to.
Opting-out is done on a per-browser per-machine cookie basis; and even if you opt-out, your data still passes through phorm's systems, they just 'don't act on it'. That plus the trials they did at BT without telling anybody about them is frankly disgusting.
Google only records what information you give them when you use their services directly; when you search on google or use gmail or the like. The EULA for the service explains what is done with your data. This is explicitly allowed under the Data Protection Act (as it should be - otherwise apache logs would be illegal!) once you leave their site though, the logging ends.
Phorm collects detailed information on all your browsing traffic without your knowledge or consent, and then shares it with third parties, again without your knowledge or consent - take the BT trial, where people didn't even know it was running, let alone opt-in.
There's a good argument that Phorm breaches the Regulation of Investigatory Powers act here; as a non-governmental body (i.e. not specifically authorised to intercept traffic) they don't have the right to intercept and record the traffic of users without it being explicitly opt-in - it can even be argued that such recording requires the opt-in of both parties, i.e. the websites that people visit need to agree too.
Depending on what they do with the data specifically, and who it gets passed to, they may well be in breach of the Data Protection Act too.
ISPs have to record certain communications information under the Interception Modernisation Program, to be provided upon request to local and national governmental bodies. Phorm definitely doesn't qualify under that either.
Now we see why the government has been going to so much effort to make RULAs valid contracts; now they can lock up suspected terrorists for 20 years for EULA violation, without having to prove any of that tricky stuff.
Just like they nailed Al Capone for tax fraud, they'll nail Bin Laden for buying Rick Astley tracks on iTunes...
He then arranged with the hosting company in January to keep the account open until the end of his existing pre-paid term - an agreement that was then broken with no warning when they killed his account and dumped all his domains back to deNIC as originally threatened, and prevented him from moving them to another registrar.
It's theoretically not illegal for the MPAA to use those clandestinely gathered emails as evidence in their own separate case - they can't be sued for obtaining them.
Think whisteblowers; even if the evidence they gather is done by secretly dumping off their boss's email and then passing it to the FBI, the company doesn't get to sue the FBI for privacy violation to have the evidence supressed.
Of course, Torrent Spy/Justin Bunnel could have sued Robert Anderson directly for breach of contract, illegal access of company resources or whatever.
Now, whether the MPAA *should* have the same protection as law enforcement, and whether their illegal private dicks *should* have the same protections as whistleblowers when setting people up is a different set of questions altogether.
If they charged what it actualy *cost*, I'd be happy with that. The problem is, they charge WAY in excess of that. If you look at what you're charged per byte for servers in datacentres, it can easily be a factor of 1000 less than what I'm paying for the same amount of traffic on a metered service in the UK (as they all are for less than £100). OK, there's some additional overhead for the last-mile service to the home, and the backhaul to the ADSL POPs, but the difference is simply extortionate.
Note, I don't blame the ISPs per se, here - BT's prices for bandwidth to the ISP are the reason it's so damn expensive. ISPs who have their own infrastructure in the exchanges, or BT's much lower price for those exchanges which have been upgraded to ADSL2 show that BT are squarely to blame for broadband being so expensive and slow outside city centres in the UK.
Hell, I just have to go down to France to see how it can and should be in my country.
So because the wind will do it eventually, we should grind down all the mountains in the hunt for minerals? We should strip mine the earth, pollute the seas and rivers with toxic materials and kill all the animals for food? Other predators kill all they want, so we should too?
Not all change is good. While good (for humans) can come from change, sometimes the bad outweighs the good.
Ignoring the long-term costs to the environment for short term benefits is what leads to air pollution causing asthma and respiratory diseases, heavy metal toxicity in our food supply and loss of species diversity and sustainability through over-fishing and habitat destruction, not to mention our energy-heavy society that's causing increasingly damaging climate change.
Science-driven environmentalism is just long-term planning, for the benefit of the human race instead of its detriment.
If your telephone exchange hasn't been switched to ADSL2 yet (60% of exchanges), and providers like sky or O2 haven't put their own gear in your exchange (any non-city exchange), then the ADSL Max packages via BT resellers are a lot more like Time Warner's, due to BT's bandwidth reseller charges being a lot higher for Max users than 21CN ADSL2 customers.
Truly unlimited packages are £80-£100 a month on 8Mb Max, while you can get 100-150 GB quotas combination of peak and offpeak for £35 a month.
Yes, you can get 'unlimited' offpeak quotas cheaply, such as enta.net resellers, but the thottling and heavy-user flagging systems are incredibly heavy handed.
£22 a month on non-LLU ADSL Max will get you about 40GB total.
The UK basically has a digital divide right now; densely packed urban exchanges have a selection of competing providers offering high bandwidth, high quota, low cost packages. Suburban and rural exchanges have limited choice, high costs and rediculously low quotas.
They stopped doing that with vista, alas. With the upgrade versions of that, you need a visible install on the local hard-drive of the eligible OS you're upgrading from (I presume it checks for certain system files). Once you passed that check, you can blow away the XP partition and install vista clean as part of the install, or set up a dualboot install alongside.
One way round this is to install the upgrade version twice; install it once in 'trial mode', i.e. without a key, then use THAT install as the basis for the install-with-key to then blow away the original and install as an upgrade.
Note, you can't register a trial clean install of vista with an upgrade key post install; it won't accept it unless it was installed AS an upgrade, either in-place or during the DVD boot install.
If you want to upgrade in place, then you run the installer from inside the old OS as before.
Oh COME ON. I know the feds have a bad rap on slashdot, but now you're accusing them of being back-scratching goons on behalf of AT&T?
"Court documents show it's all part of an alleged massive fraud scheme against AT&T and Verizon."
It's right there in the frikkin article. Large scale fraud is indeed the purview of the FBI, no conspiracy required.
Though now I'll get modded down for this won't I. I better come up with some ludicrous conspiracy scheme instead.
Verizon and AT&T did what they were told by our government overlords, and were protected. These companies didn't hand over their VOIP logs to the NSA like good little citizens, and now they have to pay. No doubt those records are on their way to the NSA right now! I bet they're looking for records of terrorist activies, and will just end up poring over the comm logs of honest upstanding americans, and sticking something on them when they don't find anything. And of course none of the mainstream media are covering it, they're in on it!
There, that should do it.