No, not distribute, but you can download an 'upgraded' copy, technically.
There's simple gray area of law... nobody's ever been sued for being the downloader in such a situatioin as far as we know.
But this is in part why the RIAA's facination is with the uploaders rather than the downloaders. It's a lot easier to get the evidence to prove that somebody was offering something for download that they didn't have the right to do so with, than to have get the evidence to prove that somebody downloaded that thing.
In any case, whoever's offering that "upgraded" copy for you to get is going to be breaking the law. At least the concept of "reciept of stolen property" is one thing that hasn't fully attached to so called "intellectual property".
If this is based on fingerprinting technology it would be pretty trivial to cutoff the Type 1 and Type 2 tags, reverse the content and stick'em back on. Reverse the process after downloading. Of course you could always UUencode the song and add a zip extension to it or a multitude of other tricks to hide what your doing.
Yep. This might be effective in blocking the known P2P protocols... but even the slightest level of change would create a new protocol that'd send this thing for a loop. It's slow the spread of copyright violations, but it won't stop it.
If a company puts GPL'd code in their (closed) product, they save the money they otherwise would have had to spend to pay programmers to write equivalent code. If you copy music, you save the money you otherwise would have had to spend to buy it at a store. These are more similar than you seem to be willing to acknowledge.
Yep, it's all about preventing money transfers. And therefore this thing known as an "economy" grinds to a halt... stuff stops being made and we decend into anarchy...
If they've got software that can "name that tune" as it passes by in MP3... isn't that the holy grail for legalizing P2P?
All it would take is some authorizing legislation, and every time a P2P song passes through the toll booth, a few pennies (quanity specified in the law) get transfered to the song owner. Those pennies can either be asorbed by the ISP as part of their service, or they can pass it along to the customer as part of their bill.
There you go. If it can block it, it can log it too...
Oh, the old "We'll just build a WiFi Mesh to get around that..." line. Why does that always get modded up to +5, despite the fact that it never actually gets built?
Posting this concept on Slashdot is easy. Doing it is a whole different matter. Your neighbors don't likely know how to properly set up their own WiFi, never mind getting it to behave as a router for public traffic going by. Besides, the RIAA will just shut down the filesharers on this system by doing some WarDriving with a lawyer in the backseat...
Mod the parrent down as a troll... nothing to see here.
it will also stop legal song downloads. The software blocks anything that's copyrighted, whether you already own the song in another format or not.
Uhm... no. That's not a legal download. That's a rationalization that some people have tried to claim, but it's not exactly one the courts have confirmed. You can format-shift your own copy of a song, but you can't take somebody else's copy of a song you happen to own a copy of in another format.
Unless you're the copyright holder, you don't really "own the song", you own a "copy of the song" that you're allowed to use. If all you've done is just buy the overpriced CD, you're still not allowed to distribute a copy of your copy under any conditions...
This is proof that open source works. We can all imagine what would happen if M$ released a product like this. Wireless is insecure enough without M$ INsecurity initiatives to make it worse.
Sorry, GNU/troll. This doesn't prove much of anything about open source.
Due to NDA restrictions on some of the underlying code, the author of Netstumbler can't publish the source code under GPL or any other license or without one. He has the right to publish the software as a complied binary, but we're never going to see the source of NetStumbler.
Not to mention, Google's likely going to compress the whole database, using smaller byte-strings to stand for commonly-used longer words. In order for that to work, you can't really scramble each account with a different key...
The GMail software marks a message as Spam, and you shortly thereafter clear out your Spam folder after looking at that message and not overriding the decloration that it was Spam.
Now, the delete process totally dis-associates the mail with your account, however, to the Spam blocker this was a learning experience it rather not lose... so it keeps a copy of that message as a message the user certified as Spam just in case something similar to that message ever passes by again.
Not exactly a privacy violation, but it does prevent your e-mail from ever being completely trashed...
Just because the masses (morons) are constantly giving it away, does not mean we should continue to do it. I'm all for the use of gmail. Sounds great to me, but I'd like to be able to delete old emails permanently if I should choose to do so. What's wrong with that?
Because rarely in Information Technology does "Delete" really mean "purge this beyond recognition from the system right now!" We all know that in most modern OSes, "Delete" just sends the file to a holding bin from which it can be "Undeleted". When we mistakenly delete something at the office, it can often still be recovered from a backup tape or backup server.
So, it's no surprise that Google's going to be using some caching, indexing, and mirroring that's going to be a little bit slow on the uptake when somebody hits delete... it'd be rather hard for them to run GMail without doing things that way. I highly doubt they want to keep every e-mail that "passes through" and then gets deleted. Still, they're not going to make you any promise as for how long your delete request will take to process, just so that they're on the safe side should something ever go wrong they won't be caught breaking their promise.
Why does everybody take the most paranoid view when interpreting a pretty friendly privacy policy?
As far as I can tell, Gmail's biggest problem is this: "Dear son, your grandma died suddenly. Details on the funeral ASAP. Call me." On the right hand side, google text ads hawking caskets, flowers, funeral homes. It's tacky, to say the least, and I have little respect for people who are willing to let ads into their private lives to this degree.
Google's proven smart about this kind of thing in the past. Ads that don't get at least a.5% clickthrough rate aren't welcome on Google's search engine... and a 1% CTR is demanded for ads that want to be displayed elsewhere on Google's network.
I'm pretty sure that non-socially-acceptable ads will get thrown out of GMail. If people don't want to hear from any sponsor in a certain situation, GMail will react and not show ads when that situation comes up in the future.
Google AdSense takes the policy that when it doesn't have any likely-to-be-clicked ads to show, it mails in PSAs or lets the webmaster do something else with the space. They don't randomly guess four ads from the database in a random effort, they just mail it in.
So, the only way casket ads will show up in an e-mail thread about the death of grandma will be if people are actually clicking on such ads...
Because Google would end up needing that key in order to compose the HTML page that's going to be sent to you, even if that page is going to be sent over HTTPS.
In short, what's the difference between storing it on the server compressed or plaintext... Google still can decrypt it any time they feel like it, you just have to trust them not peek either way you go.
Not to mention, the fears are that Google is going to be the one doing the peeking, or at least handing over the goods to the government. What good is encryption when Google still needs to have the keys?
But don't keep repeating the cliched "don't use it" credo. It isn't really as simple as that.
Actually, it is. If you're not prepared to trust Google handling e-mail, just who exactly are you going to trust? You don't own an end-to-end wire leading to anybody else in the world. You're just going to have to trust that your ISP or your phone company isn't tapping your connections.
Google's got a rather straight-forward privacy policy posted, and they've even clarified it with an FAQ to try to calm the extraordinary fears over GMail. If you don't still trust Google to do what they say they're going to do... you don't particularly belong on the Internet. How do you know that Carnivore isn't capturing every packet being sent to you right now under some PATRIOT Act secret warrant signed personaly by John Ashcroft?
I think stations are required to crossfade over the songs... all of the Music Choice on DirecTV do that for every single song they play, some of which are hard stops or hard starts that don't lend themselves nicely to it.
In part that's because the station isn't quite broadcasting an "ID3 tag", the technical term is Radio Data System (RDS) which lets them transmit a freetext field to be displayed... which means a station's format for that is not standardized, and they're free to flash up promotional messages that have nothing to do with the song currently being played. There is no "start of song" or "end of song" indicator being transmitted at all...
So long as it remains a complex and unreliable setup, it's not really that much of a threat. If you get 90% of a song, but the starting and ending segments are mucked up by a station liner, the RIAA isn't going to mind, there's still enough incentive to want to buy a "clean" copy.
Not to mention, recording the analog out of a DirecTV box or another sound card sounds pretty clean as long as you've got good wires...
Analog copies aren't as lossy as they used to be, especially when you're recording a source that did most of its travelling digitally until the last moment.
Most "radio stations", including the all-music channels on digital cable or DirecTV and Dish tend to muck up the starting and ending of songs with at least a crossfade between the songs if not a liner or DJ chatter over the song.
However, couldn't software recognize the same song being played repeatedly by a station... and then identify the actual layers within the overlaps by what's found in all instances. In the end, it could take 8 hours of music in, and give back the 25 or so songs the station played more than once nice and clean.
Ohh... would the RIAA hate that. No distribution, just the recording of a legal broadcast.
Actually, for a small monthly fee you can have the nearly the whole world of RIAA music streaming at you by request.
$9.95 a month to Real Rhapsody will get you access to Real's entire library of 500,000ish songs in Real's streaming format, and $9.95 a month to the new Napster will get you access to Napster's library of 500,000ish songs in Windows Media format. In both cases, they've yet to establish a limit as to how many streams you can get per month.
Clearly, there's a rather gaping hole if you're able to save either of those sets of streams into any non-DRMed format.
One of Akamai's hidden talents basically safely oversubscribe their systems because there's no way all of their customers can be at their peak resource usage at the same. Web usage is in part a zero-sum game... if thousands of people are running to their computer after being invited the same URL by a Super Bowl commercial, it's safe to assume that those thousands of people are not hitting CNN.com. Sure, some people not interested in the game might be at CNN's site, but they're not going to be part of the throng headed to the advertised site.
They don't really need to have enough systems so that every site can have its peak usage all at once. They just need to be able to absorb their market share of the entire World Wide Web activity at any given moment. They don't particularlly care which site you hit... they know that any spike at one is most likely going to come at the expense of other sites, and that they run a good chunk of those sites that are going to have the corrisponding decreases in traffic. They're basically assured that almost nobody downloads an iTunes song and watches a TechTV video clip at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not distribute, but you can download an 'upgraded' copy, technically.
There's simple gray area of law... nobody's ever been sued for being the downloader in such a situatioin as far as we know.
But this is in part why the RIAA's facination is with the uploaders rather than the downloaders. It's a lot easier to get the evidence to prove that somebody was offering something for download that they didn't have the right to do so with, than to have get the evidence to prove that somebody downloaded that thing.
In any case, whoever's offering that "upgraded" copy for you to get is going to be breaking the law. At least the concept of "reciept of stolen property" is one thing that hasn't fully attached to so called "intellectual property".
If this is based on fingerprinting technology it would be pretty trivial to cutoff the Type 1 and Type 2 tags, reverse the content and stick'em back on. Reverse the process after downloading. Of course you could always UUencode the song and add a zip extension to it or a multitude of other tricks to hide what your doing.
Yep. This might be effective in blocking the known P2P protocols... but even the slightest level of change would create a new protocol that'd send this thing for a loop. It's slow the spread of copyright violations, but it won't stop it.
If a company puts GPL'd code in their (closed) product, they save the money they otherwise would have had to spend to pay programmers to write equivalent code. If you copy music, you save the money you otherwise would have had to spend to buy it at a store. These are more similar than you seem to be willing to acknowledge.
Yep, it's all about preventing money transfers. And therefore this thing known as an "economy" grinds to a halt... stuff stops being made and we decend into anarchy...
If they've got software that can "name that tune" as it passes by in MP3... isn't that the holy grail for legalizing P2P?
All it would take is some authorizing legislation, and every time a P2P song passes through the toll booth, a few pennies (quanity specified in the law) get transfered to the song owner. Those pennies can either be asorbed by the ISP as part of their service, or they can pass it along to the customer as part of their bill.
There you go. If it can block it, it can log it too...
Oh, the old "We'll just build a WiFi Mesh to get around that..." line. Why does that always get modded up to +5, despite the fact that it never actually gets built?
Posting this concept on Slashdot is easy. Doing it is a whole different matter. Your neighbors don't likely know how to properly set up their own WiFi, never mind getting it to behave as a router for public traffic going by. Besides, the RIAA will just shut down the filesharers on this system by doing some WarDriving with a lawyer in the backseat...
Mod the parrent down as a troll... nothing to see here.
it will also stop legal song downloads. The software blocks anything that's copyrighted, whether you already own the song in another format or not.
Uhm... no. That's not a legal download. That's a rationalization that some people have tried to claim, but it's not exactly one the courts have confirmed. You can format-shift your own copy of a song, but you can't take somebody else's copy of a song you happen to own a copy of in another format.
Unless you're the copyright holder, you don't really "own the song", you own a "copy of the song" that you're allowed to use. If all you've done is just buy the overpriced CD, you're still not allowed to distribute a copy of your copy under any conditions...
I find it interesting that it isn't opensource.
Not all programers drank the GNU/Kool-aid.
This is proof that open source works. We can all imagine what would happen if M$ released a product like this. Wireless is insecure enough without M$ INsecurity initiatives to make it worse.
Sorry, GNU/troll. This doesn't prove much of anything about open source.
Due to NDA restrictions on some of the underlying code, the author of Netstumbler can't publish the source code under GPL or any other license or without one. He has the right to publish the software as a complied binary, but we're never going to see the source of NetStumbler.
Look at these side effects from being slashdotted so often...
Since I released NetStumbler 0.3.30, I have experienced birth, death, illness, new job, and increased bandwidth costs.
Well, at least Slashdot causes one of them. I'm pretty sure about the others too...
Since when did Security-By-Shotgun become part of the 802.11 standards?
Not to mention, Google's likely going to compress the whole database, using smaller byte-strings to stand for commonly-used longer words. In order for that to work, you can't really scramble each account with a different key...
Picture this situation...
The GMail software marks a message as Spam, and you shortly thereafter clear out your Spam folder after looking at that message and not overriding the decloration that it was Spam.
Now, the delete process totally dis-associates the mail with your account, however, to the Spam blocker this was a learning experience it rather not lose... so it keeps a copy of that message as a message the user certified as Spam just in case something similar to that message ever passes by again.
Not exactly a privacy violation, but it does prevent your e-mail from ever being completely trashed...
Just because the masses (morons) are constantly giving it away, does not mean we should continue to do it.
I'm all for the use of gmail. Sounds great to me, but I'd like to be able to delete old emails permanently if I should choose to do so. What's wrong with that?
Because rarely in Information Technology does "Delete" really mean "purge this beyond recognition from the system right now!" We all know that in most modern OSes, "Delete" just sends the file to a holding bin from which it can be "Undeleted". When we mistakenly delete something at the office, it can often still be recovered from a backup tape or backup server.
So, it's no surprise that Google's going to be using some caching, indexing, and mirroring that's going to be a little bit slow on the uptake when somebody hits delete... it'd be rather hard for them to run GMail without doing things that way. I highly doubt they want to keep every e-mail that "passes through" and then gets deleted. Still, they're not going to make you any promise as for how long your delete request will take to process, just so that they're on the safe side should something ever go wrong they won't be caught breaking their promise.
Why does everybody take the most paranoid view when interpreting a pretty friendly privacy policy?
As far as I can tell, Gmail's biggest problem is this: "Dear son, your grandma died suddenly. Details on the funeral ASAP. Call me." On the right hand side, google text ads hawking caskets, flowers, funeral homes. It's tacky, to say the least, and I have little respect for people who are willing to let ads into their private lives to this degree.
.5% clickthrough rate aren't welcome on Google's search engine... and a 1% CTR is demanded for ads that want to be displayed elsewhere on Google's network.
Google's proven smart about this kind of thing in the past. Ads that don't get at least a
I'm pretty sure that non-socially-acceptable ads will get thrown out of GMail. If people don't want to hear from any sponsor in a certain situation, GMail will react and not show ads when that situation comes up in the future.
Google AdSense takes the policy that when it doesn't have any likely-to-be-clicked ads to show, it mails in PSAs or lets the webmaster do something else with the space. They don't randomly guess four ads from the database in a random effort, they just mail it in.
So, the only way casket ads will show up in an e-mail thread about the death of grandma will be if people are actually clicking on such ads...
Because Google would end up needing that key in order to compose the HTML page that's going to be sent to you, even if that page is going to be sent over HTTPS.
In short, what's the difference between storing it on the server compressed or plaintext... Google still can decrypt it any time they feel like it, you just have to trust them not peek either way you go.
Not to mention, the fears are that Google is going to be the one doing the peeking, or at least handing over the goods to the government. What good is encryption when Google still needs to have the keys?
But don't keep repeating the cliched "don't use it" credo. It isn't really as simple as that.
Actually, it is. If you're not prepared to trust Google handling e-mail, just who exactly are you going to trust? You don't own an end-to-end wire leading to anybody else in the world. You're just going to have to trust that your ISP or your phone company isn't tapping your connections.
Google's got a rather straight-forward privacy policy posted, and they've even clarified it with an FAQ to try to calm the extraordinary fears over GMail. If you don't still trust Google to do what they say they're going to do... you don't particularly belong on the Internet. How do you know that Carnivore isn't capturing every packet being sent to you right now under some PATRIOT Act secret warrant signed personaly by John Ashcroft?
I think stations are required to crossfade over the songs... all of the Music Choice on DirecTV do that for every single song they play, some of which are hard stops or hard starts that don't lend themselves nicely to it.
In part that's because the station isn't quite broadcasting an "ID3 tag", the technical term is Radio Data System (RDS) which lets them transmit a freetext field to be displayed... which means a station's format for that is not standardized, and they're free to flash up promotional messages that have nothing to do with the song currently being played. There is no "start of song" or "end of song" indicator being transmitted at all...
So long as it remains a complex and unreliable setup, it's not really that much of a threat. If you get 90% of a song, but the starting and ending segments are mucked up by a station liner, the RIAA isn't going to mind, there's still enough incentive to want to buy a "clean" copy.
Not to mention, recording the analog out of a DirecTV box or another sound card sounds pretty clean as long as you've got good wires...
Analog copies aren't as lossy as they used to be, especially when you're recording a source that did most of its travelling digitally until the last moment.
Most "radio stations", including the all-music channels on digital cable or DirecTV and Dish tend to muck up the starting and ending of songs with at least a crossfade between the songs if not a liner or DJ chatter over the song.
However, couldn't software recognize the same song being played repeatedly by a station... and then identify the actual layers within the overlaps by what's found in all instances. In the end, it could take 8 hours of music in, and give back the 25 or so songs the station played more than once nice and clean.
Ohh... would the RIAA hate that. No distribution, just the recording of a legal broadcast.
Actually, for a small monthly fee you can have the nearly the whole world of RIAA music streaming at you by request.
$9.95 a month to Real Rhapsody will get you access to Real's entire library of 500,000ish songs in Real's streaming format, and $9.95 a month to the new Napster will get you access to Napster's library of 500,000ish songs in Windows Media format. In both cases, they've yet to establish a limit as to how many streams you can get per month.
Clearly, there's a rather gaping hole if you're able to save either of those sets of streams into any non-DRMed format.
Nope... actually 100x1. It's a color ramp, so each of the 100 pixel is a different color. There's no way any pallet-based scheme can compress that.
One of Akamai's hidden talents basically safely oversubscribe their systems because there's no way all of their customers can be at their peak resource usage at the same. Web usage is in part a zero-sum game... if thousands of people are running to their computer after being invited the same URL by a Super Bowl commercial, it's safe to assume that those thousands of people are not hitting CNN.com. Sure, some people not interested in the game might be at CNN's site, but they're not going to be part of the throng headed to the advertised site.
They don't really need to have enough systems so that every site can have its peak usage all at once. They just need to be able to absorb their market share of the entire World Wide Web activity at any given moment. They don't particularlly care which site you hit... they know that any spike at one is most likely going to come at the expense of other sites, and that they run a good chunk of those sites that are going to have the corrisponding decreases in traffic. They're basically assured that almost nobody downloads an iTunes song and watches a TechTV video clip at the same time.