Clueless people deserve it.
It's not just going to be the clueless... even those running AV software won't be protected from a super-fast-moving virus...
I don't think anybody can launch a Hollywood-movies-on-demand without having the cable companies on board. They can place servers closer to their users, and have the advantage of being able to allocate more bandwidth to themselves on their cable systems. They're going to have an advantage over any outside provider...
Yes, it can be used as a piracy tool, but really the argument for this isn't really any different than the one for DeCSS. This can be, and very much is, a tool for fair use.
Unfortunately, the proponents of DeCSS failed to convince the courts that it should be legal to destribute. Therefore, it's highly likely DMCA takedown notices are headed to anybody who dares mirrors the software.
That's true only if all DRM is concidered offensive. FairPlay, in the way Apple is using it, conveys more allowed use than the other forms of DRM, which makes it possible for somepeople who dislike WMA to like FairPlay.
Yes, but releasing this tool into the wild certainly would damage Apple's ability to claim it has an effective DRM solution when they talk to the RIAA.
This program wasn't released. It escaped into the wild and was quickly recaptured.
Try following the download link... SourceForge has apparently decided to pull the program. All you'll get is a 404 Error from whatever mirror you select.
This program is going to be quite the hot patato. It's DeCSS all over again... No USA web provider is going to be willing to host it for very long since it's going to be clearly on the wrong side of the DMCA.
Interesting position. How is rearranging the bits of something I own "vandalism"? How is this not a perfect example of fair use?
Because the DMCA took exactly this kind of tool out of the fair use category years ago. "Fair" in morality doesn't have to equate to "fair use" as defined by the law...
Yep, but that also means that PlayFair is about to become another DMCA-powered third rail of software. Don't bother mirroring this program unless you can afford the lawsuit... SourceForge's going to have a tough call to make soon.
Why is SourceForge allowing this kind of project on their site? This is purely a copyright-protection defeating program, and what's more, it's defeating one of the most liberal copyright-protection schemes in existance.
I'd hope SourceForge will be smart enough to delete this program rather than risk losing the site over it...
This thing proves brags that the "information wants to be free" concept will doom absolutely any music protection scheme, because somebody's bound to figure out how the thing works. They're right, and FairPlay has just bit the dust as a secure format.
Of course, you have to credit Apple for trying to build what they have, and maybe they'll be able to weather this storm because afterall, DVDs are still standing despite the existance of DeCSS. Maybe this will blow over and iTMS can stay in business... but this certainly isn't going to help.
Only the cover sheet (which represnts the cover, page one, the last page, and back cover) needs to be localized for this stunt. There are single-machine printers that could run this off in a matter of a few hours. We're only talking 40,000 impressions here, there's no need to print any locations that don't have a copy headed there.
The rest of the magazine cna be printed as normal, and just inserted into each cover sheet.
One-to-one advertising has existed for years. During the dot-com bubble I worked for a company that specialized in doing it.
Really, it's just a matter that you don't usually realize that something you're reading has been customized to you because you don't have somebody else's copy to hold next to it, and the changing of content often subtile enough not to scare you, unlike this one where the customization screams out that it's just for you.
If you're in the USA, you can see your own address plotted for yourself by TerraServer at this page here. The version that the magazine is using is likely a higher resolution source that they had to pay for. These guys even have pictures over "Area 51".
The magazine's trick here really isn't that hard... in that for every subscriber they of course have an address, and adresseses can be converted to geographic coordinates using the same technology MapQuest has had for years. It's just a matter of getting a satellite photo that shows that coordinate as the center point, and applying the circling to the image. After that, it's just a typical variable printing job.
Modern printing technologies make it very easy for a 40,000-subscriber magazine to send out a different cover to each and every subscriber. It's just a matter of doing a 40,000 page run of each of the "customized" sets of pages with the image database available, and then the common pages can be wrapped around after printing them the typical way. Here's the homepage for VIPP, Xerox's technology for doign such "variable data" printing jobs on its industrial class printing products.
Claiming that Green had decided to leave Sun two months agao is not a direct contradiction to the claim that he left over the recently announced settlement with Microsoft. For all well know, the talks leading to that deal could have been going on for months, and Green certainly would have had inside access to how they were going.
Can anybody explain to me how somebody quitting over Sun's decision to work with Microsoft actually brings Java closer to being open source? Sorry to burst a bubble, but on the face of it, Sun's getting further from considering that...
WHO CARES? Ya know? So what if people bought new cars mysteriously
Buying a new car with money that they can't figure out where it came from doesn't per se mean that you owe more taxes... but it certainly indicates that you're more likely to have cheated than the average person. It's perfectly fair for that to be a component in a formula when they decide whom it will be most profitable to audit...
Customers of EV1servers.net (of SCO license fame) have been dealing with the Texas tax authorites for a while now. The state requires that EV1 charge more than 7% in Texas state taxes since when we rent a server, we're renting physical property in Texas.
Interestingly enough, most property rentals in Texas are not taxed. There's a special category in their tax laws for the renting of computers... this is almost purely a tax aimed strictly at out-of-staters who can't vote the Texas legislators who created this tax out of office.
This is an interesting catch about claiming adjustments from prior years from the IRS, like taking up the offer of a tax firm to redo your last year's taxes. If you end up subtracting something from your IRS return, you might get some money back. However, since your taxes paid to the IRS just went down, that might end up reducing the ammount deducted from your state taxes, and create a new liabilty there that's already past-due for a couple years....
too late! it already exists and is called Alternative Minimum Tax
The problem is, the typical tax rates have always been upscaled to compensate for inflation, however the AMT's formula never has. Therefore, the AMT system that was designed to catch the "rich" is starting to bite into the "middle class".
There were also a lot of cases during the dot-com bubble where people got stock that was worth a lot of money as of the moment it was handed to them, however by the end of the year the company had gone to zero and disappeared. The AMT treats it as income at the moment they got it, even though most of these people didn't even have the chance to sell the stock until it had already taken a dive. The net result is that "paper multimilionaires" who never got to touch their money get hit with a seven-figure AMT bill... And taxes are one thing bankruptcy cannot make go away. These people are doomed to never be able to own anything in their own name again.
How long before they can audit out-of-state store records to see if their citizenry have been shopping in NH and not volunteering to pay the tax?
It could take forever. See, the problem is that Massachusetts can't order a store in New Hampshire to hand over anything. The state's authority kinda ends at the border.
New Hampshire has no interest in collecting the info and handing it over to Massacusetts tax authorites because that would be spending their resources for no return to themselves. Afterall, Massachusetts handing the same info back to New Hampshire wouldn't get anything acomplished because there's no sales tax in NH.
This is the same cat-and-mouse game that is happening any time somebody buys out of state to avoid sales tax over the Internet.
The only way these cross border taxes could be collected is if the Federal goverment got involved, but they're reluctant to do that until state sales tax laws are standardized. There are too many quirks in each state's tax laws, such as disagreement over at what point "packaged food" becomes "ready-to-eat" food which often is the line between one tax rate and another. So, until that situation is settled, that solution is closed.
States without a sales tax are just fine working off of property and income taxes. New Hampshire doesn't even have an income tax, their government is almost purely funded by property taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
Clueless people deserve it. It's not just going to be the clueless... even those running AV software won't be protected from a super-fast-moving virus...
I don't think anybody can launch a Hollywood-movies-on-demand without having the cable companies on board. They can place servers closer to their users, and have the advantage of being able to allocate more bandwidth to themselves on their cable systems. They're going to have an advantage over any outside provider...
Unfortunately, being a fair-use-prohibition-defeating program doesn't make the program legal...
So... burn a CD... that work-around has been known ever since this came out!
Yes, it can be used as a piracy tool, but really the argument for this isn't really any different than the one for DeCSS. This can be, and very much is, a tool for fair use.
Unfortunately, the proponents of DeCSS failed to convince the courts that it should be legal to destribute. Therefore, it's highly likely DMCA takedown notices are headed to anybody who dares mirrors the software.
That's true only if all DRM is concidered offensive. FairPlay, in the way Apple is using it, conveys more allowed use than the other forms of DRM, which makes it possible for somepeople who dislike WMA to like FairPlay.
Yes, but releasing this tool into the wild certainly would damage Apple's ability to claim it has an effective DRM solution when they talk to the RIAA.
This program wasn't released. It escaped into the wild and was quickly recaptured.
Try following the download link... SourceForge has apparently decided to pull the program. All you'll get is a 404 Error from whatever mirror you select.
This program is going to be quite the hot patato. It's DeCSS all over again... No USA web provider is going to be willing to host it for very long since it's going to be clearly on the wrong side of the DMCA.
Interesting position. How is rearranging the bits of something I own "vandalism"? How is this not a perfect example of fair use?
Because the DMCA took exactly this kind of tool out of the fair use category years ago. "Fair" in morality doesn't have to equate to "fair use" as defined by the law...
Yep, but that also means that PlayFair is about to become another DMCA-powered third rail of software. Don't bother mirroring this program unless you can afford the lawsuit... SourceForge's going to have a tough call to make soon.
Why is SourceForge allowing this kind of project on their site? This is purely a copyright-protection defeating program, and what's more, it's defeating one of the most liberal copyright-protection schemes in existance.
I'd hope SourceForge will be smart enough to delete this program rather than risk losing the site over it...
This thing proves brags that the "information wants to be free" concept will doom absolutely any music protection scheme, because somebody's bound to figure out how the thing works. They're right, and FairPlay has just bit the dust as a secure format.
Of course, you have to credit Apple for trying to build what they have, and maybe they'll be able to weather this storm because afterall, DVDs are still standing despite the existance of DeCSS. Maybe this will blow over and iTMS can stay in business... but this certainly isn't going to help.
Only the cover sheet (which represnts the cover, page one, the last page, and back cover) needs to be localized for this stunt. There are single-machine printers that could run this off in a matter of a few hours. We're only talking 40,000 impressions here, there's no need to print any locations that don't have a copy headed there.
The rest of the magazine cna be printed as normal, and just inserted into each cover sheet.
One-to-one advertising has existed for years. During the dot-com bubble I worked for a company that specialized in doing it. Really, it's just a matter that you don't usually realize that something you're reading has been customized to you because you don't have somebody else's copy to hold next to it, and the changing of content often subtile enough not to scare you, unlike this one where the customization screams out that it's just for you.
If you're in the USA, you can see your own address plotted for yourself by TerraServer at this page here. The version that the magazine is using is likely a higher resolution source that they had to pay for. These guys even have pictures over "Area 51".
The magazine's trick here really isn't that hard... in that for every subscriber they of course have an address, and adresseses can be converted to geographic coordinates using the same technology MapQuest has had for years. It's just a matter of getting a satellite photo that shows that coordinate as the center point, and applying the circling to the image. After that, it's just a typical variable printing job.
Modern printing technologies make it very easy for a 40,000-subscriber magazine to send out a different cover to each and every subscriber. It's just a matter of doing a 40,000 page run of each of the "customized" sets of pages with the image database available, and then the common pages can be wrapped around after printing them the typical way. Here's the homepage for VIPP, Xerox's technology for doign such "variable data" printing jobs on its industrial class printing products.
Claiming that Green had decided to leave Sun two months agao is not a direct contradiction to the claim that he left over the recently announced settlement with Microsoft. For all well know, the talks leading to that deal could have been going on for months, and Green certainly would have had inside access to how they were going.
Can anybody explain to me how somebody quitting over Sun's decision to work with Microsoft actually brings Java closer to being open source? Sorry to burst a bubble, but on the face of it, Sun's getting further from considering that...
-You don't have to post on Slashdot.
-You don't have to have a website.
-You don't have to link to your website from your Slashdot profile or posts.
That'd be nearly impossible, since they have no way of telling whether a cash-paying customer is from MA or NH.
Furthermore, it'd be destructive to the economy if such stores chose to leave the state and shut down their stores...
WHO CARES? Ya know? So what if people bought new cars mysteriously Buying a new car with money that they can't figure out where it came from doesn't per se mean that you owe more taxes... but it certainly indicates that you're more likely to have cheated than the average person. It's perfectly fair for that to be a component in a formula when they decide whom it will be most profitable to audit...
Customers of EV1servers.net (of SCO license fame) have been dealing with the Texas tax authorites for a while now. The state requires that EV1 charge more than 7% in Texas state taxes since when we rent a server, we're renting physical property in Texas.
Interestingly enough, most property rentals in Texas are not taxed. There's a special category in their tax laws for the renting of computers... this is almost purely a tax aimed strictly at out-of-staters who can't vote the Texas legislators who created this tax out of office.
This is an interesting catch about claiming adjustments from prior years from the IRS, like taking up the offer of a tax firm to redo your last year's taxes. If you end up subtracting something from your IRS return, you might get some money back. However, since your taxes paid to the IRS just went down, that might end up reducing the ammount deducted from your state taxes, and create a new liabilty there that's already past-due for a couple years....
too late! it already exists and is called Alternative Minimum Tax
The problem is, the typical tax rates have always been upscaled to compensate for inflation, however the AMT's formula never has. Therefore, the AMT system that was designed to catch the "rich" is starting to bite into the "middle class".
There were also a lot of cases during the dot-com bubble where people got stock that was worth a lot of money as of the moment it was handed to them, however by the end of the year the company had gone to zero and disappeared. The AMT treats it as income at the moment they got it, even though most of these people didn't even have the chance to sell the stock until it had already taken a dive. The net result is that "paper multimilionaires" who never got to touch their money get hit with a seven-figure AMT bill... And taxes are one thing bankruptcy cannot make go away. These people are doomed to never be able to own anything in their own name again.
How long before they can audit out-of-state store records to see if their citizenry have been shopping in NH and not volunteering to pay the tax?
It could take forever. See, the problem is that Massachusetts can't order a store in New Hampshire to hand over anything. The state's authority kinda ends at the border.
New Hampshire has no interest in collecting the info and handing it over to Massacusetts tax authorites because that would be spending their resources for no return to themselves. Afterall, Massachusetts handing the same info back to New Hampshire wouldn't get anything acomplished because there's no sales tax in NH.
This is the same cat-and-mouse game that is happening any time somebody buys out of state to avoid sales tax over the Internet.
The only way these cross border taxes could be collected is if the Federal goverment got involved, but they're reluctant to do that until state sales tax laws are standardized. There are too many quirks in each state's tax laws, such as disagreement over at what point "packaged food" becomes "ready-to-eat" food which often is the line between one tax rate and another. So, until that situation is settled, that solution is closed.
States without a sales tax are just fine working off of property and income taxes. New Hampshire doesn't even have an income tax, their government is almost purely funded by property taxes.