As far as I know there isn't somewhere that I can go to buy lyrics and have part of the sale go to artists or a recording company. Based on that, how can lyric sites possibly be depriving anyone of income?
Also, isn't the performance of the song the "work" which is copyrighted? Something tells me that I'm not likely to lose a court case in which I am being charged for READING lyrics in public without permission. But what do I know? IANAL and don't understand things that go contrary to logic and common sense.
The FBI has made recommendations to companies to NOT hire ex-black hats. (Specifically I heard this from Special Agent Bowling from the Milwaukee, WI field office.)
It comes down to a matter of motivation. What basic principal motivated them to be a black hat in the first place?
Greed - What happens if they get a better offer from someone else while working for you in exchange for hacking one of your customers?
Revenge - What happens when you manage to piss this employee off... or one of your customers does? Any reason to beleive they won't try to take revenge now if they did in the past?
Curiosity - What happens when she becomes curious about aspects of your systems or a customer's system where she isn't granted access?
Excitement - Will only hacking systems he is told to hack, and only to the extent he is told to go be enough of a thrill for him?
Ego - Will your ex-BH be able to resist the temptation to prove they are better than you or your customer's security staff?
Regardless of the motivation, an ex-blackhat has already shown themselves to willing to "give in" to temptations to commit illegal acts. One of the things security consultants are selling to their customers is peace of mind and a sense of safety. Will customers feel "safe" knowing you have a black-hat hacker on staff... even if they are "reformed?"
In studies, the white-hat hackers typically are found to be motivated more by a sense of right and wrong or of "doing good" than by the things listed above. This type of motivation doesn't really pose much of a risk to a business. At least not unless they are doing something illegal or unethical themselves and are worried about a whistle-blower.
Agreed. NAT and maybe port-forwarding has seriously reduced the need for more addresses. The Dot-Com crash freed up a bunch more too IMHO. Where I work we run over 2000 client systems through a single IP address.
Even mid-sized to fairly large organizations can get away with a surprisingly small number of IPs for those servers/services which just HAVE to be Internet visible.
Considering that most broadband ISP user agreements forbid servers of any kind, most non-commercial users don't actually need their own Internet-routable IP address either... unless they run some kind of p2p app (which would be forbidden by half the ISPs anyhow.)
That is exactly why I switched to gandi.net for my registrar. In reviews they appeared to have the best terms. All the terms seem very reasonable and I especially like the first item:
"The Client owns the Domain Name registered. Gandi simply acts on the Client's
behalf..."
A bunch of other registrars like to claim ownership of the domain and just "let you use it" during your contract. But then also reserve the right to take the domain away from you if they choose.
Ok, the fact that it typically costs US $10-$13/yr (depending on exchange rates) is nice too. Domains I've registered through them have always showed up in WHOIS within an hour or so and DNS started working within 24.
Whatever you do, if you don't like the 300 page TOS you just agreed to, I would immediately transfer your domain to some other registrar with a better TOS. Most registrars charge you for a one year contract when you transfer to them, but they add an extra year to your current domain expiration... basically making the transfer free.
If you want a feature and no one else is doing it... you're pretty much responsible for doing it yourself. If you can't write code, sorry.
Or pay someone who can write code. Or at least be extra curtious to any developers you ask to add the feature. No matter how nicely you ask, be prepred for them to say "Sorry, that is not a priority." and be a grown up about it when they do.
If there are enough people who want the same changes you want, maybe you can convince them all to kick in a few $. If you are paying a developer then, (and only then,) you have a right to dictate what features they code.
I mean, after all, they make the original product that is copied and sold. And of course at skyscraper prices for legal copies the insentive to buy bootleg is pretty high.
I guess that means GNU is anti-terrorist since it removes the monitary motivation.
PS.. I hope some arm of the US government doesn't come knocking on my door and throw me in the slammer for treason because I installed MS-Word without a license at home. (Theoretical of course... my hard drive hasn't even seen MS-Word thanks to OpenOffice.)
In our case, because RedHat v6.2 is the ONLY Linux OS our software vendor supports (for a key software package we rely on.) Changing software really isn't an option.
Going without support really isn't either. It's hard enough to get them to admit that any problem we have is with their software. Throw in an unsupported OS and you can be sure that it will almost always be the "cause" of the problem when something goes wrong.
Last I heard they were planning to start supporting RedHat advanced server sometime near the end of the year. So it looks like we'll probably be on 2.2 until nearly 2004.
What I wonder is this - did Google ever just ask the site to take it down nicely? Did they just go straight to the cease-and-desist order?
Sure it would be great if everybody would "ask nicely first" instead of going right to legal papers, but a polite phone call doesn't leave a trail. Sending the C&D leaves a nice paper trail you can point to later in court as efforts to enforce your trademark.
So I would say it probably wasn't a matter of being mean or vindictive or being "dicks." It was probably something they had to do. It would still be cool to find out that a friendly call was made explaining why the C&D was in the mail.
Type your phone # in google as it is (ie: 555-555-5555), if you are listed it's going to show who you are and where you live.
That's all well and good, but how often do you put your phone number on your usenet posts? Do you give it to every web server you visit?
<sarcasm>Wouldn't it be wonderful if every server you visited for any reason could result in somone getting your home phone #? Maybe it's just the server operator looking at their web logs, or maybe it's somebody in between sniffing network traffic. Of course it would make it easier to get that snobby girl's phone number from down the block. Just set up a web site and get her to go to it somehow. Wow, what a wonderful tool for stalkers.</sarcasm>
But I guess if you want to have a contoversial political discussion with someone else, you bettter use some type of anonamyzer for all your e-mail and other Internet correspondance.
BTW, my phone number is unlisted, so at least in my case that google search would be pretty pointless.
True, however, you fail to set any sort of legal precedent. If it can be shown that you knew about the violations it may be harder to win that specific case and therefore harder to set a precedent.
IANAL, however, I do know that precedent is powerful in legal cases - at least in the US.
...I fail to see how fighting these battles is at all productive.
Like others have said.. violations of the GPL have to be fought. If you fail to enforce the license then it soon becomes meaningless and you loose the ability to enforce it later.
Having an enforceable GPL is important. Many of the programmers who choose to use the GPL license or work on GPL licensed code would be lost if GPL turned out to be un-enforceable.
Personally I have no interest in spending a few hundred hours working with a group of programmers writing code only to see a company come around, grab it up, change a few things and perhaps change the output to a proprietary format. Then they start selling it and it becomes very popular but they keep the code to themselves.
Wouldn't that be great? Now not only are they making money off our original effort, but we can't even take advantage of the new product without paying. Heck, we can't even make our original program use their file format without risking breaking the law (DMCA.)
So even though we did nearly all the work we all would have to pay someone else in order to be compatible with the version that "everybody else" was using.
With GPL (if it is enforceable,) the company would have to release their changes back as GPL as well. Now we don't have to worry about suddenly needing to pay for what we worked on and gave to the world as free.
As far as wasting time fighting instead of coding goes... that is exactly why a lot of GPL programmers have assigned copyright of their software to third parties like the FSF.
I'm not too interested in watching my neighbors window to catch the flick he's rented (though in mirror image.) I am more interested in the fact that windows which act as speakers will probably make sleeping next door a bit harder.
But then again maybe I wouldn't care if I lived in a neighborhood of $1.5 million homes.
In that case, couldn't you do the experement behind some barrior that would only allow light to pass through? Then at least you would know that either light itself or heat at the gong side caused the sound. (And not sound waves caused by the flash or heating of the air at the flash.)
Of course I suppose you still haven't proven whether it was the surface heating or light anyhow.
It seems to me that the hardware manufacturers who actually want to sell to the Linux crowd would be upset. Maybe we can put pressure on them to put pressure on PCI_SIG. After all, money talks loudest doesn't it?
Everybody seems to be forgetting that not every organization has tons of money available. Like most school districts, our technology budget is extremely tight and getting tighter every year.
With the assistance of our student Technology intern (a HS senior) I recently built a 1TB Lunix storage server for about $5k. It uses a 3Ware IDE switch, has 7 180Gb drives for storage and an 8th drive as a hot spare.
Going SCSI for this would have required 2 additional drives for the same storage and would have added another $8000 to the price tag. This project would never have been approved if it were going to be over $13,000.
IDE-RAID systems definately have their place. At 7200k RPM, they certainly aren't as fast as 10K drives, but our application falls well within the transfer and seek specs possible with the 3Ware card.
That's with educational prices on the software and quite probably a nice volume discount on the RAM.
Yep, that's right.
Is that information common knowlage? Would MS support know the solution, especially since it involves 3 different MS products in combination?
I'm sure it's not, and based on my experience with MS tech support I highly doubt they would have been able to be of any assistance. It certainly isn't on the knowledge base nor in a search of USENET. Even enabling auditing on the system didn't help pinpoint the fix. I just know from experience that a lot of apps (including MS apps) require unreasonable rights to the \WINNT folder so eventually I tried that and it fixed things.
I'd love to know why a regular user runing a user-space appliation needs write access to a system folder and some system-folder files.
It's a shame your post is far enough down the list that it will barely be read and a shame this one is going to be buried even deeper. Oh well.
I just want to get some facts "on the record" about the state of tech and computers in the US as well. Budgets for tech in U.S. schools are tight and getting tighter. We have about 1500 computers in our district, and like most schools are lucky if we have better than 1 tech per 300 PCs. (Actually many schools are at a 500:1 ratio!)
Most schools can not afford to upgrade their versions of Windows or MS-Office yearly. Maybe we should take up MS on their new licensing scheme? Lets see in our district that would be around $45,000/year for Windows alone (got to count the iMacs because they **could** run Windows so you have to pay for a license!) My.. what a bargain.
Of course, after about 3 years we couldn't run the newest stuff on the existing PCs anyhow because it will require 3Ghz processors with 512Mb RAM minimum. I'm sure some of non-techs or newcomers to support think I'm exaggerating. We upgraded to MS-Office 2000 recently. Did I mention that it cost over $40,000 in licenses and required purchasing an additional $20,000 worth of RAM because some of the older PCs couldn't run it?)
I have to believe that everyone who says "where are you going to get support for open source" is not supporting technology in a school. Just TRY to get support for MS or Novell. Oh, you can do it, but you'll pay as much as $400 per incident and are just as likely to discover the solution yourself while waiting for the 3rd or 4th callback.
I wish my support woes were limited to Linux. My latest support call for Linux was replacing a 100Mhz Pentium web proxy server who's hard drive croaked. Previous uptime was 450 days, a reboot because it was acting flaky and I feared it might crash (it never did) followed by 350 days. Gee.. one reboot in 800 days then a failed hard drive? I wish all my tech problems were so bad.
Hell, I spent less time on that server in over two years AND it's replacement than I did just tonight trying to get MS Organizational Charts to work in MS-Office 2000 under Win-NT and Win-2000. (By the way, the fix is to give all your users change rights to the c:\WINNT directory and some of the files in it. yeah.. security by design.. sure.)
Guess I'll stop ranting now. If it were up to me we'd switch out all of our Microsoft and Novell software for Linux/open-source stuff. I truly believe that would free up at least one of our techs. That person could spend time with teachers doing one-on-one training to make sure they knew how everything worked and tailoring the system to work WITH the teacher and not get in their way.
But no.. I'm sure it's much better to stick with the status-quo and spend all of our time just trying to keep it all running. Hopefully the teachers will just figure it out on their own and hopefully the students will just learn. Yeah, the MS-based school is definitely the way to go.
If you want to inpire creativity and exploration, you owe it to them to move to Linux. The only thing you'll likely have to worry about is getting all the games working. Getting them all to work may be less of an issue than you expect it to be though so I don't think that should stop you.
I just set my kids up on Linux. When I got my new PC, I set up my old box as a Linux PC and gave it to my son/daughter. OpenOffice has worked just fine for them for school work. In fact it works better than MS-Word for spanish homework for my daughter. She finds it much easier to compose foreign language characters using it than using Word at school.
A few weeks ago, my 11 year old son surprised me by asking me to show him how to use the "black screen" that I often use. He was talking about the command line. I started him off with a beginner's online tutorial because I thought I might have trouble being basic enough.
Soon it turned out that what he prefered was to chat with me online and try stuff as I told him what to do. I showed him how he could type the name of a game to run it. He is facinated by the shell and the fact that he feels like he has more control (instead of the computer being in control.)
Last night I asked him if he wanted me to switch back to Windows now so he could run some of the games he has complained about not working under Linux. He said he'd rather keep Linux and learn how to do more on it now.
What more could a dad want? Switch to Linux. I bet you won't regret it and your kids will appreciate it in the long run.
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Also, isn't the performance of the song the "work" which is copyrighted? Something tells me that I'm not likely to lose a court case in which I am being charged for READING lyrics in public without permission. But what do I know? IANAL and don't understand things that go contrary to logic and common sense.
It comes down to a matter of motivation. What basic principal motivated them to be a black hat in the first place?
- Greed - What happens if they get a better offer from someone else while working for you in exchange for hacking one of your customers?
- Revenge - What happens when you manage to piss this employee off... or one of your customers does? Any reason to beleive they won't try to take revenge now if they did in the past?
- Curiosity - What happens when she becomes curious about aspects of your systems or a customer's system where she isn't granted access?
- Excitement - Will only hacking systems he is told to hack, and only to the extent he is told to go be enough of a thrill for him?
- Ego - Will your ex-BH be able to resist the temptation to prove they are better than you or your customer's security staff?
Regardless of the motivation, an ex-blackhat has already shown themselves to willing to "give in" to temptations to commit illegal acts. One of the things security consultants are selling to their customers is peace of mind and a sense of safety. Will customers feel "safe" knowing you have a black-hat hacker on staff... even if they are "reformed?"In studies, the white-hat hackers typically are found to be motivated more by a sense of right and wrong or of "doing good" than by the things listed above. This type of motivation doesn't really pose much of a risk to a business. At least not unless they are doing something illegal or unethical themselves and are worried about a whistle-blower.
Even mid-sized to fairly large organizations can get away with a surprisingly small number of IPs for those servers/services which just HAVE to be Internet visible.
Considering that most broadband ISP user agreements forbid servers of any kind, most non-commercial users don't actually need their own Internet-routable IP address either... unless they run some kind of p2p app (which would be forbidden by half the ISPs anyhow.)
I think it was going to but MS had already copyrighted most evil [tm] including the evil bit... so the task group was forced to drop it.
"The Client owns the Domain Name registered. Gandi simply acts on the Client's behalf..."
A bunch of other registrars like to claim ownership of the domain and just "let you use it" during your contract. But then also reserve the right to take the domain away from you if they choose.
Ok, the fact that it typically costs US $10-$13/yr (depending on exchange rates) is nice too. Domains I've registered through them have always showed up in WHOIS within an hour or so and DNS started working within 24.
Whatever you do, if you don't like the 300 page TOS you just agreed to, I would immediately transfer your domain to some other registrar with a better TOS. Most registrars charge you for a one year contract when you transfer to them, but they add an extra year to your current domain expiration... basically making the transfer free.
Or pay someone who can write code. Or at least be extra curtious to any developers you ask to add the feature. No matter how nicely you ask, be prepred for them to say "Sorry, that is not a priority." and be a grown up about it when they do.
If there are enough people who want the same changes you want, maybe you can convince them all to kick in a few $. If you are paying a developer then, (and only then,) you have a right to dictate what features they code.
I guess that means GNU is anti-terrorist since it removes the monitary motivation.
PS.. I hope some arm of the US government doesn't come knocking on my door and throw me in the slammer for treason because I installed MS-Word without a license at home. (Theoretical of course... my hard drive hasn't even seen MS-Word thanks to OpenOffice.)
In our case, because RedHat v6.2 is the ONLY Linux OS our software vendor supports (for a key software package we rely on.) Changing software really isn't an option.
Going without support really isn't either. It's hard enough to get them to admit that any problem we have is with their software. Throw in an unsupported OS and you can be sure that it will almost always be the "cause" of the problem when something goes wrong.
Last I heard they were planning to start supporting RedHat advanced server sometime near the end of the year. So it looks like we'll probably be on 2.2 until nearly 2004.
Sure it would be great if everybody would "ask nicely first" instead of going right to legal papers, but a polite phone call doesn't leave a trail. Sending the C&D leaves a nice paper trail you can point to later in court as efforts to enforce your trademark.
So I would say it probably wasn't a matter of being mean or vindictive or being "dicks." It was probably something they had to do. It would still be cool to find out that a friendly call was made explaining why the C&D was in the mail.
<sarcasm>Wouldn't it be wonderful if every server you visited for any reason could result in somone getting your home phone #? Maybe it's just the server operator looking at their web logs, or maybe it's somebody in between sniffing network traffic. Of course it would make it easier to get that snobby girl's phone number from down the block. Just set up a web site and get her to go to it somehow. Wow, what a wonderful tool for stalkers.</sarcasm>
But I guess if you want to have a contoversial political discussion with someone else, you bettter use some type of anonamyzer for all your e-mail and other Internet correspondance.
BTW, my phone number is unlisted, so at least in my case that google search would be pretty pointless.
True, however, you fail to set any sort of legal precedent. If it can be shown that you knew about the violations it may be harder to win that specific case and therefore harder to set a precedent.
IANAL, however, I do know that precedent is powerful in legal cases - at least in the US.
Like others have said.. violations of the GPL have to be fought. If you fail to enforce the license then it soon becomes meaningless and you loose the ability to enforce it later.
Having an enforceable GPL is important. Many of the programmers who choose to use the GPL license or work on GPL licensed code would be lost if GPL turned out to be un-enforceable.
Personally I have no interest in spending a few hundred hours working with a group of programmers writing code only to see a company come around, grab it up, change a few things and perhaps change the output to a proprietary format. Then they start selling it and it becomes very popular but they keep the code to themselves.
Wouldn't that be great? Now not only are they making money off our original effort, but we can't even take advantage of the new product without paying. Heck, we can't even make our original program use their file format without risking breaking the law (DMCA.)
So even though we did nearly all the work we all would have to pay someone else in order to be compatible with the version that "everybody else" was using.
With GPL (if it is enforceable,) the company would have to release their changes back as GPL as well. Now we don't have to worry about suddenly needing to pay for what we worked on and gave to the world as free.
As far as wasting time fighting instead of coding goes... that is exactly why a lot of GPL programmers have assigned copyright of their software to third parties like the FSF.
But then again maybe I wouldn't care if I lived in a neighborhood of $1.5 million homes.
For steps to lock some preferences in Mozilla and/or Phoenix, take a look at this post on the seul-edu mailing list.
then could we start charging car thieves with violation o f the DMCA for bypassing the car's security mechanisms?
In that case, couldn't you do the experement behind some barrior that would only allow light to pass through? Then at least you would know that either light itself or heat at the gong side caused the sound. (And not sound waves caused by the flash or heating of the air at the flash.)
Of course I suppose you still haven't proven whether it was the surface heating or light anyhow.
It seems to me that the hardware manufacturers who actually want to sell to the Linux crowd would be upset. Maybe we can put pressure on them to put pressure on PCI_SIG. After all, money talks loudest doesn't it?
With the assistance of our student Technology intern (a HS senior) I recently built a 1TB Lunix storage server for about $5k. It uses a 3Ware IDE switch, has 7 180Gb drives for storage and an 8th drive as a hot spare.
Going SCSI for this would have required 2 additional drives for the same storage and would have added another $8000 to the price tag. This project would never have been approved if it were going to be over $13,000.
IDE-RAID systems definately have their place. At 7200k RPM, they certainly aren't as fast as 10K drives, but our application falls well within the transfer and seek specs possible with the 3Ware card.
Yep, that's right.
Is that information common knowlage? Would MS support know the solution, especially since it involves 3 different MS products in combination?
I'm sure it's not, and based on my experience with MS tech support I highly doubt they would have been able to be of any assistance. It certainly isn't on the knowledge base nor in a search of USENET. Even enabling auditing on the system didn't help pinpoint the fix. I just know from experience that a lot of apps (including MS apps) require unreasonable rights to the \WINNT folder so eventually I tried that and it fixed things.
I'd love to know why a regular user runing a user-space appliation needs write access to a system folder and some system-folder files.
It's a shame your post is far enough down the list that it will barely be read and a shame this one is going to be buried even deeper. Oh well.
I just want to get some facts "on the record" about the state of tech and computers in the US as well. Budgets for tech in U.S. schools are tight and getting tighter. We have about 1500 computers in our district, and like most schools are lucky if we have better than 1 tech per 300 PCs. (Actually many schools are at a 500:1 ratio!)
Most schools can not afford to upgrade their versions of Windows or MS-Office yearly. Maybe we should take up MS on their new licensing scheme? Lets see in our district that would be around $45,000/year for Windows alone (got to count the iMacs because they **could** run Windows so you have to pay for a license!) My.. what a bargain.
Of course, after about 3 years we couldn't run the newest stuff on the existing PCs anyhow because it will require 3Ghz processors with 512Mb RAM minimum. I'm sure some of non-techs or newcomers to support think I'm exaggerating. We upgraded to MS-Office 2000 recently. Did I mention that it cost over $40,000 in licenses and required purchasing an additional $20,000 worth of RAM because some of the older PCs couldn't run it?)
I have to believe that everyone who says "where are you going to get support for open source" is not supporting technology in a school. Just TRY to get support for MS or Novell. Oh, you can do it, but you'll pay as much as $400 per incident and are just as likely to discover the solution yourself while waiting for the 3rd or 4th callback.
I wish my support woes were limited to Linux. My latest support call for Linux was replacing a 100Mhz Pentium web proxy server who's hard drive croaked. Previous uptime was 450 days, a reboot because it was acting flaky and I feared it might crash (it never did) followed by 350 days. Gee.. one reboot in 800 days then a failed hard drive? I wish all my tech problems were so bad.
Hell, I spent less time on that server in over two years AND it's replacement than I did just tonight trying to get MS Organizational Charts to work in MS-Office 2000 under Win-NT and Win-2000. (By the way, the fix is to give all your users change rights to the c:\WINNT directory and some of the files in it. yeah.. security by design.. sure.)
Guess I'll stop ranting now. If it were up to me we'd switch out all of our Microsoft and Novell software for Linux/open-source stuff. I truly believe that would free up at least one of our techs. That person could spend time with teachers doing one-on-one training to make sure they knew how everything worked and tailoring the system to work WITH the teacher and not get in their way.
But no.. I'm sure it's much better to stick with the status-quo and spend all of our time just trying to keep it all running. Hopefully the teachers will just figure it out on their own and hopefully the students will just learn. Yeah, the MS-based school is definitely the way to go.
If you want to inpire creativity and exploration, you owe it to them to move to Linux. The only thing you'll likely have to worry about is getting all the games working. Getting them all to work may be less of an issue than you expect it to be though so I don't think that should stop you. I just set my kids up on Linux. When I got my new PC, I set up my old box as a Linux PC and gave it to my son/daughter. OpenOffice has worked just fine for them for school work. In fact it works better than MS-Word for spanish homework for my daughter. She finds it much easier to compose foreign language characters using it than using Word at school. A few weeks ago, my 11 year old son surprised me by asking me to show him how to use the "black screen" that I often use. He was talking about the command line. I started him off with a beginner's online tutorial because I thought I might have trouble being basic enough. Soon it turned out that what he prefered was to chat with me online and try stuff as I told him what to do. I showed him how he could type the name of a game to run it. He is facinated by the shell and the fact that he feels like he has more control (instead of the computer being in control.) Last night I asked him if he wanted me to switch back to Windows now so he could run some of the games he has complained about not working under Linux. He said he'd rather keep Linux and learn how to do more on it now. What more could a dad want? Switch to Linux. I bet you won't regret it and your kids will appreciate it in the long run.