I wouldn't call a piece of software that permits legal fair use to be "black hat".
Anything that violates a terms of service IS NOT LEGAL. The penality is civil rather than criminal and rarely enforced, but there is a punishment assigned for doing that in laws, making those things are against the law.
If a piece of software does something that the TOS says it can't do, it is illegal software from the moment it's coded. That fits black hat's definition.
I remind you that there is both a gutter on the left and a gutter on the right of the lane to keep things fair. Go off too far in either direction and there are no pins for you to hit, nor ability to come back and hit the pins.
The RIAA is for the most part suing people who they really think have stolen from them something that the law says they're allowed to sell. If that's true, that's most definitely unfair play and worthy of a correction too.
That only happens if there's a court-approved settlement before the verdict. If the "California Class Members" masively refuse such a settlement and chose to press forward with the trial, it could be the kind of verdict that bankrupts or at least puts a large dent in a megacompany.
Some people like to say that the USA is the home of pure capitalism. However, that's an oversimplification of how our system really functions. I'd rather call it capitalism with gutters on either side of the bowling lane so that when something starts to go off course in a bad way, the law kicks in and makes sure that the bad shot both fails to score, and also cannot go further off course so that it impacts the scores on other lanes.
Microsoft has been on the edge of falling into the gutter for quite awhile, and there's been a lot of people who so far have come close to pushing them in. This is yet another tale in a continuing series of stories about projects that have the potential to just do it this time.
Microsoft has brought some amazing things into the world of computing, but they are far from perfect and in no way deserve to have all of the business power they have successfully amassed. We have to depend on our justice system to take some of that power back from Microsoft and return it into the available pool for everybody else to draw from in order to adjust the situation in a way that corrects for effects of misdeeds done in the past.
I wish them luck... it's about the time market forces delivered us working and cool IT products again.
Funny, but totally impossible. In order for any bot to crawl somebody's GMail disk space, that bot would need that user's GMail passwords. Sorry, I don't trust a scum-bot with the ability to send e-mail as me. Do you?
Whatever interface-ripping this tool uses, it's clear that it is dependant on GMail having the interface that it has today still operational. Google could very easily "break" this program simply by adding some clutter to it's currently pristine user interface.
This really is an action by one kid that could ruin the sandbox for everybody...
3) Google installs a filter that detects people using GMail in that way and closes such accounts with out warning, since such people have violated the TOS that has been clearly posted since the start. Affected people go crying to Google wanting un-backed-up data back, but Google declares that was "your problem".
Black hat hacking is clearly causing white hat hackers to lose toys these days...
Take the XM-PCR case as an example. XM clearly went out of their way to provide an easy-to-hack-with-a-computer model of their devices. However, they provided that model with the unspoken proviso that it must be used ethically.
Along comes a programmer with script-kiddie level skills who makes an automatic MP3 maker program that uses that device. That alone would have been fine by XM. However, that programmer decides to try to make a quick buck out of his work by selling it for $20 a copy. Furthermore, once media attention discovers his program, he raises the price.
That's the kind of thing that awakens the sleeping RIAA, and the RIAA orders XM to send the programmer a legal nastygram in order to show that he is approching the limits of an untested area of law. Of course, Slashdot groupthink blames XM for the letter and calls for a boycott.
Please people... RTFM before you start hacking anything. Especially, follow what the device makers tell you not to do, and don't try to seek direct obvious profits from your hacking.
We're seeing far to many cases of one black hat who comes up with the "forbiden hack" that causes a company that puts out a hack-friendly device to wish they never had and want to take the hacking tools they gave the world back. Can't we be nice to the suppliers of such devices so that such devices keep coming out?
The bully to boycott is the usual Slashdot foe called the RIAA.
XM is simply the name on the letter he got with the threat because they are a victim of the same bully, and the RIAA demanded that XM send him that threatening letter with their signature on it.
As far as we can tell, he took the meaningless legal threat as meaningless, and threw the letter away. The threatened lawsuit still hasn't come and most likely never will. "No harm, no foul" applies. All they've really done is send him a note that has him talking to his own lawyer, which is something anybody who releases an RIAA-unfriendly tool should do on a regular basis before they do something that really merits a lawsuit by mistake.
You shouldn't boycott XM for simply relaying an empty RIAA threat. Afterall, they've had to had a lot of guts to stand up to the RIAA and release a product with so much capability to be exploited in an RIAA-unfriendly way. Their main competitor does not offer such a product, afterall.
It's true that the end result is a digital MP3 file. However, whenever anything passes through the "analog hole", the DMCA becomes meaningless. Standard copyright law of course is still in play, but all of the uglyness of the DMCA only talks about digital works, and once it's analog it's definitely not digital anymore.:)
Overstatement. There is no actual lawsuit, only the threat of one. Your comments are well taken should there be an actual punch/lawsuit, but we are only talking about a threatened lawsuit.
It's different because you have no right to physically harm him, and to threaten to do so causes him undue emotional pain so that's illegal too.
They, however, have a right to sue him at any time. I in fact could sue you right now if I felt like it... oh, I have no chance of winning such a lawsuit because I have no idea what it would be about, but our system doesn't have much if any penality for filing a worthless lawsuit, so threatening to file a worthless lawsuit certainly doesn't merit any penality.
Before you jump for Sirius, just notice that XM put out a piece of hardware that is surprisingly easy to control by homebrew code, and also outputs audio in the form of an easily recordable analog line out wire. I don't know of any Sirius unit that is similar to the XM PCR unit.
They haven't sued the guy, they've just had their lawyer send a nasty-worded letter that the software writer correctly knew he could ignore. So far they've just gone through the motions of being upset without actually doing anything to harm the guy.
It sounds like Dish Network is willing to travel into a legal uncharted area that DirecTV and TiVo aren't willing to test. You can't pause any of DirecTV's Music Choice offerings with a DirecTiVo unit. There's a well documented work-around to record the music channels by typing a channel name into a auto-recording wish-list, but directly hitting the record button leads to an error message saying that the recording feature is not available "at this time"... hinting that it's a block TiVo could very easily lift if the legal environment makes it clear that it's safe to do so.
A: They can't legally sell the XM service into Canada because their channels don't have anywhere close to meeting the CanCon the CRTC would impose on them. They'll likely never even bother to seek permission.
B: XM's satellite signals are aimed towards the USA because, well, nearly all signal they send outside of the US borders would be a total waste of energy. They could legally paint all of Canada with signal with a broad beam that also hits part of the USA thanks to the "we'll tolerate each other's signal splashes" deal between the nations, but since they'll never be allowed to openly sell up there, they might as well direct their signal to where paying customers actually will be.
Somehow, I think XM knows that there's no copyright law being broken. They're just going through the motions so that they can claim they did with the RIAA goes asking them how they let this happen...
I wouldn't be surprised if the music licensing powers will start to contractually require XM to somehow "muck" the start/end of all songs by having some sort of DJ chatter or station identifier sounder play to make sure that at least the seconds at the edge of the song are disturbed from being a "perfect" copy of the song.
Unfortunately for us, the RIAA lawyers consider the Sony Betamax case a mistake by the Supreme Court that they one day hope to get reversed. It's about time fair use got an affirmative law behind it rather than relying on common law traditions that aren't quite as binding as a real law.
I'd be very worried for the sake of our TiVos if there is a law against this...
Because all this software does is timeshift the analog output of a digital content reciever. Sure, there's a little concern that it creates the files in a non-encrypted format so that it can be shared, but any TV capture device can do the same. Really, there's not much difference between this setup and having a DVR connected to a DirecTV box. It's the same thing, automated control of the reciever and then recording the output.
The XM PCR revolution is in full effect. Across the XM Nation, we're excited to see independent developers creating fantastic new versions of the XM PCR software for a wide range of platforms including Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows.
So they want people to come up with creative software to use the XM PCR unit, but just not this way?...
There really isn't much hacking involved in making this application.
The XM-PCR device is an XM tuner that is controled by USB, but returns its audio to the PC by the line in port on a soundcard. The audio is digital comming off the XM signal, but it's analog by the time it leaves the black box. So, all the computer needs to do is activate a recorder on the line in port and away it goes...
There's drivers on the XM site for Windows, Mac and Linux. They're actively encuraging development, so it's not surprising somebody would come up with this idea.
It's also lead to an interesting counter-trend out of Hollywood... they're now putting out the "unrated edition" DVD for movies that had to get some scenes cut to qualify for the lower MPAA rating. The American Pie movie series comes to mind as an example of just such a case.
Effectively, two cuts of such movies end up on the DVD marketplace, and the consumer decides how offensive they want the movie to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Justice is the concept of seeing to it that what deserves to be happening, happen.
I wouldn't call a piece of software that permits legal fair use to be "black hat".
Anything that violates a terms of service IS NOT LEGAL. The penality is civil rather than criminal and rarely enforced, but there is a punishment assigned for doing that in laws, making those things are against the law.
If a piece of software does something that the TOS says it can't do, it is illegal software from the moment it's coded. That fits black hat's definition.
I remind you that there is both a gutter on the left and a gutter on the right of the lane to keep things fair. Go off too far in either direction and there are no pins for you to hit, nor ability to come back and hit the pins.
The RIAA is for the most part suing people who they really think have stolen from them something that the law says they're allowed to sell. If that's true, that's most definitely unfair play and worthy of a correction too.
That only happens if there's a court-approved settlement before the verdict. If the "California Class Members" masively refuse such a settlement and chose to press forward with the trial, it could be the kind of verdict that bankrupts or at least puts a large dent in a megacompany.
Some people like to say that the USA is the home of pure capitalism. However, that's an oversimplification of how our system really functions. I'd rather call it capitalism with gutters on either side of the bowling lane so that when something starts to go off course in a bad way, the law kicks in and makes sure that the bad shot both fails to score, and also cannot go further off course so that it impacts the scores on other lanes.
Microsoft has been on the edge of falling into the gutter for quite awhile, and there's been a lot of people who so far have come close to pushing them in. This is yet another tale in a continuing series of stories about projects that have the potential to just do it this time.
Microsoft has brought some amazing things into the world of computing, but they are far from perfect and in no way deserve to have all of the business power they have successfully amassed. We have to depend on our justice system to take some of that power back from Microsoft and return it into the available pool for everybody else to draw from in order to adjust the situation in a way that corrects for effects of misdeeds done in the past.
I wish them luck... it's about the time market forces delivered us working and cool IT products again.
I know of no RAID system that can recover from the sudden loss of all disks involved in the same moment without data loss.
Funny, but totally impossible. In order for any bot to crawl somebody's GMail disk space, that bot would need that user's GMail passwords. Sorry, I don't trust a scum-bot with the ability to send e-mail as me. Do you?
Whatever interface-ripping this tool uses, it's clear that it is dependant on GMail having the interface that it has today still operational. Google could very easily "break" this program simply by adding some clutter to it's currently pristine user interface.
This really is an action by one kid that could ruin the sandbox for everybody...
3) Google installs a filter that detects people using GMail in that way and closes such accounts with out warning, since such people have violated the TOS that has been clearly posted since the start. Affected people go crying to Google wanting un-backed-up data back, but Google declares that was "your problem".
Black hat hacking is clearly causing white hat hackers to lose toys these days...
Take the XM-PCR case as an example. XM clearly went out of their way to provide an easy-to-hack-with-a-computer model of their devices. However, they provided that model with the unspoken proviso that it must be used ethically.
Along comes a programmer with script-kiddie level skills who makes an automatic MP3 maker program that uses that device. That alone would have been fine by XM. However, that programmer decides to try to make a quick buck out of his work by selling it for $20 a copy. Furthermore, once media attention discovers his program, he raises the price.
That's the kind of thing that awakens the sleeping RIAA, and the RIAA orders XM to send the programmer a legal nastygram in order to show that he is approching the limits of an untested area of law. Of course, Slashdot groupthink blames XM for the letter and calls for a boycott.
Please people... RTFM before you start hacking anything. Especially, follow what the device makers tell you not to do, and don't try to seek direct obvious profits from your hacking.
We're seeing far to many cases of one black hat who comes up with the "forbiden hack" that causes a company that puts out a hack-friendly device to wish they never had and want to take the hacking tools they gave the world back. Can't we be nice to the suppliers of such devices so that such devices keep coming out?
The bully to boycott is the usual Slashdot foe called the RIAA.
XM is simply the name on the letter he got with the threat because they are a victim of the same bully, and the RIAA demanded that XM send him that threatening letter with their signature on it.
As far as we can tell, he took the meaningless legal threat as meaningless, and threw the letter away. The threatened lawsuit still hasn't come and most likely never will. "No harm, no foul" applies. All they've really done is send him a note that has him talking to his own lawyer, which is something anybody who releases an RIAA-unfriendly tool should do on a regular basis before they do something that really merits a lawsuit by mistake.
You shouldn't boycott XM for simply relaying an empty RIAA threat. Afterall, they've had to had a lot of guts to stand up to the RIAA and release a product with so much capability to be exploited in an RIAA-unfriendly way. Their main competitor does not offer such a product, afterall.
It's true that the end result is a digital MP3 file. However, whenever anything passes through the "analog hole", the DMCA becomes meaningless. Standard copyright law of course is still in play, but all of the uglyness of the DMCA only talks about digital works, and once it's analog it's definitely not digital anymore. :)
the people bringing this lawsuit
Overstatement. There is no actual lawsuit, only the threat of one. Your comments are well taken should there be an actual punch/lawsuit, but we are only talking about a threatened lawsuit.
It's different because you have no right to physically harm him, and to threaten to do so causes him undue emotional pain so that's illegal too.
They, however, have a right to sue him at any time. I in fact could sue you right now if I felt like it... oh, I have no chance of winning such a lawsuit because I have no idea what it would be about, but our system doesn't have much if any penality for filing a worthless lawsuit, so threatening to file a worthless lawsuit certainly doesn't merit any penality.
A company can demand anything it wants to demand. Doesn't mean they'll get it...
Before you jump for Sirius, just notice that XM put out a piece of hardware that is surprisingly easy to control by homebrew code, and also outputs audio in the form of an easily recordable analog line out wire. I don't know of any Sirius unit that is similar to the XM PCR unit.
They haven't sued the guy, they've just had their lawyer send a nasty-worded letter that the software writer correctly knew he could ignore. So far they've just gone through the motions of being upset without actually doing anything to harm the guy.
It sounds like Dish Network is willing to travel into a legal uncharted area that DirecTV and TiVo aren't willing to test. You can't pause any of DirecTV's Music Choice offerings with a DirecTiVo unit. There's a well documented work-around to record the music channels by typing a channel name into a auto-recording wish-list, but directly hitting the record button leads to an error message saying that the recording feature is not available "at this time"... hinting that it's a block TiVo could very easily lift if the legal environment makes it clear that it's safe to do so.
A: They can't legally sell the XM service into Canada because their channels don't have anywhere close to meeting the CanCon the CRTC would impose on them. They'll likely never even bother to seek permission.
B: XM's satellite signals are aimed towards the USA because, well, nearly all signal they send outside of the US borders would be a total waste of energy. They could legally paint all of Canada with signal with a broad beam that also hits part of the USA thanks to the "we'll tolerate each other's signal splashes" deal between the nations, but since they'll never be allowed to openly sell up there, they might as well direct their signal to where paying customers actually will be.
Somehow, I think XM knows that there's no copyright law being broken. They're just going through the motions so that they can claim they did with the RIAA goes asking them how they let this happen...
I wouldn't be surprised if the music licensing powers will start to contractually require XM to somehow "muck" the start/end of all songs by having some sort of DJ chatter or station identifier sounder play to make sure that at least the seconds at the edge of the song are disturbed from being a "perfect" copy of the song.
Unfortunately for us, the RIAA lawyers consider the Sony Betamax case a mistake by the Supreme Court that they one day hope to get reversed. It's about time fair use got an affirmative law behind it rather than relying on common law traditions that aren't quite as binding as a real law.
I'd be very worried for the sake of our TiVos if there is a law against this...
Because all this software does is timeshift the analog output of a digital content reciever. Sure, there's a little concern that it creates the files in a non-encrypted format so that it can be shared, but any TV capture device can do the same. Really, there's not much difference between this setup and having a DVR connected to a DirecTV box. It's the same thing, automated control of the reciever and then recording the output.
From the XM site itself...
The XM PCR revolution is in full effect. Across the XM Nation, we're excited to see independent developers creating fantastic new versions of the XM PCR software for a wide range of platforms including Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows.
So they want people to come up with creative software to use the XM PCR unit, but just not this way?...
There really isn't much hacking involved in making this application.
The XM-PCR device is an XM tuner that is controled by USB, but returns its audio to the PC by the line in port on a soundcard. The audio is digital comming off the XM signal, but it's analog by the time it leaves the black box. So, all the computer needs to do is activate a recorder on the line in port and away it goes...
There's drivers on the XM site for Windows, Mac and Linux. They're actively encuraging development, so it's not surprising somebody would come up with this idea.
It's also lead to an interesting counter-trend out of Hollywood... they're now putting out the "unrated edition" DVD for movies that had to get some scenes cut to qualify for the lower MPAA rating. The American Pie movie series comes to mind as an example of just such a case.
Effectively, two cuts of such movies end up on the DVD marketplace, and the consumer decides how offensive they want the movie to be.