>I personally do not want my cellular number to be made available so easily.
Which is why the cellular carriers will probably let you classify your cellphone number as unlisted/unpublished once the numbers are available via 411... Though "unlisting" your number carries a monthly charge, of course! Don't worry, the telcos will always find a new way to charge^Wsatisfy you.
Carter said making an example of a few college students could go a long way toward bringing home the message that sharing and duplicating copyrighted materials is wrong.
"Sometimes it takes the shock value of someone actually being punished," Carter said. "In this particular instance it might also send a message to these kids that are operating on these networks that, 'Hey, I better stop.'"
Students would learn quickly that copying even one album is not worth the potential punishment, he said.
So he wants to punish "a few" students in the hopes of deterring the rest of them? Sorry, it's not going to work. As the article mentions, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of college students engaging in file sharing. Putting "a few" of them in prison isn't going to deter the remainder; instead, those who aren't among the unfortunate "few" will think what everyone else is thinking: "they might bust a few people, but they won't bust me."
Filesharing is, in my opinion, much like speeding. A whole hell of a lot of people do it, and only a small percentage ever get caught or have to face the music, so to speak. When more than half of drivers are doing 70 in a 55, and only 1 in 5,000 are pulled over and given a ticket, there is no deterrent! Similarly, if you've got hundreds of thousands of students sharing files illegally, and you only punish "a few" of them, that's not going to discourage the rest of them.
The idea that "they won't bust me" is always going to be prevalent. Either we put them all in jail for committing these horrible felonies, or we don't bother busting any of them.
...but the name and logo absolutely need to be changed. Google has gone after sites using their likeness in the past (not that they have much choice, they've got to do this otherwise they may lose protection).
Roogle as it stands is actually pretty functional. It's also extremely fast, especially considering it just got posted to Slashdot. FYI: "privacy" is another term which yields interesting results and is not listed among their suggestions. Oddly enough, the first match is entitled "Google's Privacy Problems."
Whenever congress (or state legislatures) pass a law that is later found to be unconstitutional, public funds must be used to reimburse all legal costs that were incurred in bringing the suit and having the unconstitutional law found to be unconstitutional.
In other words, taxpayers will have to pay twice for every stupid law that makes it through? Remember, public funds are paying for the legislators' salaries, the upkeep of the Capitol buildings, etc. The entire process of passing a law which is later found unconstitutional is already a financial burden borne by taxpayers.
If you want to double your income tax, fine by me, but I'd rather not.
I used to pull from alt.control and alt.test and pull news server that looked like a FQDN and then ping tested them. Then it tried to connect and do a test. I then used them as my 'private news server'. Still, you wanna be careful doing this...
If anyone's interested in open news servers without doing the probing themselves, check out NewzBot. The site tracks a database of news servers accessible to the public. You can even search to see which servers carry a particular group. There aren't as many "big" servers (30K+ groups) as there used to be, but if your ISP's server misses an article, chances are you'll find a server at NewzBot that has it.
I don't think these analogies are really accurate. Of course it's perfectly legal to build your own bicycle, sew your own clothes, and (in some places) brew your own ale. It's also legal to go down to your local music shop, buy a guitar, and make your own music. In all of these cases you're making a creation of your own, using resources you obtained legitimately. You aren't "taking anything away" from anyone or any company.
What it's not legal to do is hop onto someone else's bicycle parked on the sidewalk and ride away, stuff a pair of Levi's up your shirt on the way out of the department store, or walk out of the gas station with a few Colt 45s. And whether we like it or not, it's also generally not legal to share music.
"You cannot say it is not related to children when you use cartoon figures. It's obvious children will gamble with this product," Steinberg said. "There should be no cartoon figures in any form of gambling."
Since when are children the only people who like cartoon characters? It seems like the assumption is being made that cartoons only appeal to children, and (as many here know) that's inaccurate.
Seems like there would be some legal issues with this as CT has state laws against on-line gambling. Most states do, for that matter.
Which, I'd imagine, is precisely why this computer game doesn't connect to the internet. Diane Patterson from the CT state lottery summed it up in the article: "To have Internet gambling you have to be on the Internet."
I wonder if the traffic can be correlated back to the actual number of "transactions" that are being done on the Internet? Like when I visit a website, a lot of the traffic (large banners, pop-up, etc) aren't really what I am doing or after.
Is this simply a bandwith increase or are we talking about more real transactions? Probablly a bit of both...
I'm sure it's a bit of both, but from my own experience, I really think the majority of the "growth" is the ever-increasing size of websites.
One example I like to use is uo.stratics.com. Check out how this site looked a few years ago, courtesy of the Wayback Machine. It was about a 60KB download even then, but it's grown extensively since. I just saved the current version of the site as a "Web archive, single file" (.mht) in Internet Explorer, and it comes out to 491KB. That's without the two Flash ads - I have IE set not to load that junk, and it didn't save in the.mht, either.
So, over the course of 4 years or so, a page that was once about 60KB is now >500KB if you add in the Flash banners. Is it any wonder that internet traffic keeps doubling, when the sizes of common web destinations keep increasing so much?
World of Spectrum is denying external links to the "correspondence" page based upon referer. The direct link in the submission does not work, you have to visit it from within their site.
"If pro is the opposite of con, what's the opposite of progress?"
If nothing else, I have to laugh at the proposed name (DMCRA). It's a poignant acronym, with just the right amount of "ha-ha" expected. Once again we have the pols battling it out against each other, with the target result being to counteract each other. For once, I hope this is achieved. To counter the DMCA with the DMCRA would raise my spirits for sure.
Thank you, Rep. Boucher, for raising a subtle yet interpretable middle finger to the DMCA (and for your other clueful work). If ever I meet you, I owe you a drink, and that's a promise:)
6 Retailers Plan Venture to Sell Music on the Web By LAURA M. HOLSON
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 26 -- Six of the largest music retailers plan to announce on Monday that they are joining forces to sell music that can be downloaded from the Web.
The retailing group, called Echo, consists of Best Buy, the nation's No. 1 electronics retailer; Tower Records; the Virgin Entertainment Group; Wherehouse Entertainment; Hastings Entertainment; and Trans World Entertainment, which operates the FYE store chain. The six retail companies will each own an equity stake in Echo that together will make them majority owners.
The new effort is motivated in part by the two-year decline in compact disc sales that has forced recording companies to cut costs and lay off employees and has damaged music retailers, too. Wherehouse Entertainment, for one, announced last week that it was filing for bankruptcy protection from its creditors, in part because of lackluster CD sales. And earlier this month, Best Buy announced that it would close 107 stores.
Like the recording companies, music retailers are searching for new sources of revenue. Vinyl albums and cassette tapes have nearly disappeared in recent years, leaving retailers with the CD as their main option for selling music. But a proliferation of free music-swapping services on the Internet has led to a decline in CD sales. According to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks album sales, 681 million were sold in 2002, down from 785 million in 2000.
"Obviously, there has been a lot of talk in the last three years and there have been a lot of failures," said Dan Hart, the chief executive of Echo, referring to earlier attempts by legitimate Web sites to sell music online. "But we see this as an inflection point. Retailers are saying, `This is the time to do it.' "
Mr. Hart said that Echo hoped to get licenses from the recording companies to distribute their music through the retail chains' own Web sites. In November, the Universal Music Group, which is owned by Vivendi Universal, began to distribute 43,000 of its songs through major retail and music Web sites, like Best Buy and Circuit City, for 99 cents a song or $9.99 an album. That total has since grown to 60,000.
Liquid Audio, a company that has developed technology meant to allow the secure sale of music online, has rights to 350,000 songs for downloading, but also has deep financial problems. The company agreed last week to sell some of its assets to the music distributor Anderson Merchandisers for $3.2 million as part of its liquidation.
Anderson, which is the music distributor for Wal-Mart Stores, also wants to be a distributor of downloadable music in retail outlets. That could eventually put Anderson in competition with Echo, but Mr. Hart said Echo was not opposed to working with Anderson.
In fact, Mr. Hart said he expected the pressures facing all parts of the music businesses -- including distributors, retailers and recording companies -- to motivate them all to work together to find a viable alternative to piracy. "People are saying, `Let's make it work on a real level,' " he said.
Such cooperation in online music ventures would have been unthinkable two years ago as retailers and music companies were at odds about how to best approach online music sales. More than a years ago, music labels embarked on their own online efforts, but so far they have received less than rave reviews.
Now, though, the music companies and the retailers need each other more than ever. Recording companies make the music, but it is retailers who know their customers. "Retail has always been about more than simply selling CD's," said Jerry Comstock, the chief executive of Wherehouse Entertainment. "We are in the customer relationship business."
Under Echo's plan, once the group received the necessary licenses, the partners would market their services together and separately. Efforts might include promotions like "Buy a compact disc, get a free download." The retailers could also enable customers to download music in stores using portable devices, like the Apple iPod. "No one has really marketed these services," Mr. Hart of Echo said.
But some analysts suggest that no matter how much creative and marketing muscle is behind such efforts, they will not catch on unless the music is priced right. The average cost of a compact disc, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, the lobbying group which represents recording companies, is $14.21. Many critics say that is expensive when compared with other media, like DVD's, which offer loads of extra features and programming.
"Any opportunity retailers have to find additional revenue in a time of falling sales is a positive," said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. "Yet we continue to think that pricing has to come down to get pirates off of the free sites and onto legitimate ones."
If I'm selling a combination weight loss drug/mail order bride/penis enlarger/cable descrambler for only three payments of $49.99 in such a manner that every spam blocker in the world filters me, logically I'm only being filtered by people who know better than to buy my "product," thus not irritating them, in effect helping to slow regulation, and I don't loose touch with any significant chunk of my target demographic.
This would make sense if the only people implementing spam filters were end users. Unfortunately, the logic breaks down when you consider that some ISPs do the filtering on behalf of their customers. It breaks down further when you factor in the number of situations in which a) the customer might not even know that the filtering is happening, or b) the customer blindly trusts the ISP's filtering system.
Take Yahoo, for example. They're a popular webmail service and they also do spam filtering to some extent on inbound email. I would say that, in general, people who use Yahoo mail are not necessarily the type of people who "know better" than to buy spamvertised products. That's not a slam on Yahoo, nor on the people who use Yahoo mail, it's just the way the demographics work out. The ratio of ripe targets to clued-in antispammers is simply better at Yahoo than it is on other domains.
To that end, Yahoo's spam filters aren't helping the spammers any. A spammer's goal is to get his ad in front of as many potential targets as possible, and Yahoo is full of potential targets. But if Yahoo's filters catch the spammer's message and route it straight to everyone's Bulk Mail folder, there's (thousands|millions) of "targets" who will never see the message.
So no, I can't agree that filtering helps the spammers any, at least not the big spammers who are after volume. There's probably a bit of "collateral assistance" in that people who would report the spam may never see it, but I'd say that benefit is cancelled out by the number of possible targets lost to filters.
I'm a pasty-white geek type, so I don't typically watch sporting events. OK, maybe some hockey now and then in the hopes that someone gets his teeth knocked out by a puck moving at 90mph or his jugular severed by an errant ice skate on live TV, resulting in copious amounts of blood. OK, so I watch NASCAR, too, for the wrecks. I don't normally watch football, though, it just never interested me.
But... A commercial for X-Men 2? Will the lovely Anna Paquin be in the sequel? Will she be in the commercial? Sigh, now I'll have to watch in order to find out. Damn advertisers, they figured out how to make a geek watch football!!
What's next, they'll start having the Olsen Twins host golf?
"Super Bowl" is a trademark of the National Football League. This is why most radio and TV ads you hear and see relating to the Super Bowl don't use the official name, but instead call it something like the "Big Game."
Now when I'm in a public place and some idiot's cellphone starts blasting his favorite ringtone at 300 decibels, I don't have to sit there and take it... I can just frag him!
And the lawsuits are already being filed...
on
Peephole Displays
·
· Score: 5, Funny
A student at Berkeley has come up with a novel approach for navigating small handheld displays. In effect the display is a "peephole" into a much larger information area.
In other news, the X10 corporation, makers of stealthy spy cameras and ubiquitous web adverts, announced today that they are filing a patent infringement lawsuit against an unnamed Berkeley student. Said the CEO, "peepholes are our market and this is a clear case of infringement!"
>Maybe they are planning to kill off the technology
Nah, they're just testing a new strategy in vaporware... Let everyone know it's not going to materialize first, then the investors can't possibly be upset when it's late!;)
Did you know you'd get caught?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
My question, in a nutshell: Did you know that you were going to get caught?
I guess what I'm most curious about is whether you knew the risks and took them anyway, or whether you thought you were covering your tracks and that the risks were minimal. It would be interesting to know if you knew you'd eventually get busted or whether you thought you were relatively "safe" from discovery.
Whats next? All toilets should have built in Radiation generators to ensure no DNS can be recovered after you take a dump, because god knows the goverment has DNS tracers in every toilet in the US And can track your movements by them..
I'd hate to be the poor schmuck whose job it is to track the "movements" I leave behind in public toilets...
Slashdot Mirror
>I personally do not want my cellular number to be made available so easily.
Which is why the cellular carriers will probably let you classify your cellphone number as unlisted/unpublished once the numbers are available via 411... Though "unlisting" your number carries a monthly charge, of course! Don't worry, the telcos will always find a new way to charge^Wsatisfy you.
Filesharing is, in my opinion, much like speeding. A whole hell of a lot of people do it, and only a small percentage ever get caught or have to face the music, so to speak. When more than half of drivers are doing 70 in a 55, and only 1 in 5,000 are pulled over and given a ticket, there is no deterrent! Similarly, if you've got hundreds of thousands of students sharing files illegally, and you only punish "a few" of them, that's not going to discourage the rest of them.
The idea that "they won't bust me" is always going to be prevalent. Either we put them all in jail for committing these horrible felonies, or we don't bother busting any of them.
>IMHO There's no such thing as a "Stunning Display of Hipocracy" anymore...
You apparently haven't seen Rosie O'Donnell lately...
...but the name and logo absolutely need to be changed. Google has gone after sites using their likeness in the past (not that they have much choice, they've got to do this otherwise they may lose protection).
Roogle as it stands is actually pretty functional. It's also extremely fast, especially considering it just got posted to Slashdot. FYI: "privacy" is another term which yields interesting results and is not listed among their suggestions. Oddly enough, the first match is entitled "Google's Privacy Problems."
If you want to double your income tax, fine by me, but I'd rather not.
I don't think these analogies are really accurate. Of course it's perfectly legal to build your own bicycle, sew your own clothes, and (in some places) brew your own ale. It's also legal to go down to your local music shop, buy a guitar, and make your own music. In all of these cases you're making a creation of your own, using resources you obtained legitimately. You aren't "taking anything away" from anyone or any company.
What it's not legal to do is hop onto someone else's bicycle parked on the sidewalk and ride away, stuff a pair of Levi's up your shirt on the way out of the department store, or walk out of the gas station with a few Colt 45s. And whether we like it or not, it's also generally not legal to share music.
Duplicate Slashdot Story.
How 'bout some changes to Slashcode so that story submissions containing URLs from past stories are flagged as "HEY, PROLLY A DUPE!" to the editors...
One example I like to use is uo.stratics.com. Check out how this site looked a few years ago, courtesy of the Wayback Machine. It was about a 60KB download even then, but it's grown extensively since. I just saved the current version of the site as a "Web archive, single file" (.mht) in Internet Explorer, and it comes out to 491KB. That's without the two Flash ads - I have IE set not to load that junk, and it didn't save in the
So, over the course of 4 years or so, a page that was once about 60KB is now >500KB if you add in the Flash banners. Is it any wonder that internet traffic keeps doubling, when the sizes of common web destinations keep increasing so much?
World of Spectrum is denying external links to the "correspondence" page based upon referer. The direct link in the submission does not work, you have to visit it from within their site.
Here is a mirror.
This reminds me of the old quote,
:)
"If pro is the opposite of con, what's the opposite of progress?"
If nothing else, I have to laugh at the proposed name (DMCRA). It's a poignant acronym, with just the right amount of "ha-ha" expected. Once again we have the pols battling it out against each other, with the target result being to counteract each other. For once, I hope this is achieved. To counter the DMCA with the DMCRA would raise my spirits for sure.
Thank you, Rep. Boucher, for raising a subtle yet interpretable middle finger to the DMCA (and for your other clueful work). If ever I meet you, I owe you a drink, and that's a promise
6 Retailers Plan Venture to Sell Music on the Web
By LAURA M. HOLSON
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 26 -- Six of the largest music retailers plan to announce on Monday that they are joining forces to sell music that can be downloaded from the Web.
The retailing group, called Echo, consists of Best Buy, the nation's No. 1 electronics retailer; Tower Records; the Virgin Entertainment Group; Wherehouse Entertainment; Hastings Entertainment; and Trans World Entertainment, which operates the FYE store chain. The six retail companies will each own an equity stake in Echo that together will make them majority owners.
The new effort is motivated in part by the two-year decline in compact disc sales that has forced recording companies to cut costs and lay off employees and has damaged music retailers, too. Wherehouse Entertainment, for one, announced last week that it was filing for bankruptcy protection from its creditors, in part because of lackluster CD sales. And earlier this month, Best Buy announced that it would close 107 stores.
Like the recording companies, music retailers are searching for new sources of revenue. Vinyl albums and cassette tapes have nearly disappeared in recent years, leaving retailers with the CD as their main option for selling music. But a proliferation of free music-swapping services on the Internet has led to a decline in CD sales. According to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks album sales, 681 million were sold in 2002, down from 785 million in 2000.
"Obviously, there has been a lot of talk in the last three years and there have been a lot of failures," said Dan Hart, the chief executive of Echo, referring to earlier attempts by legitimate Web sites to sell music online. "But we see this as an inflection point. Retailers are saying, `This is the time to do it.' "
Mr. Hart said that Echo hoped to get licenses from the recording companies to distribute their music through the retail chains' own Web sites. In November, the Universal Music Group, which is owned by Vivendi Universal, began to distribute 43,000 of its songs through major retail and music Web sites, like Best Buy and Circuit City, for 99 cents a song or $9.99 an album. That total has since grown to 60,000.
Liquid Audio, a company that has developed technology meant to allow the secure sale of music online, has rights to 350,000 songs for downloading, but also has deep financial problems. The company agreed last week to sell some of its assets to the music distributor Anderson Merchandisers for $3.2 million as part of its liquidation.
Anderson, which is the music distributor for Wal-Mart Stores, also wants to be a distributor of downloadable music in retail outlets. That could eventually put Anderson in competition with Echo, but Mr. Hart said Echo was not opposed to working with Anderson.
In fact, Mr. Hart said he expected the pressures facing all parts of the music businesses -- including distributors, retailers and recording companies -- to motivate them all to work together to find a viable alternative to piracy. "People are saying, `Let's make it work on a real level,' " he said.
Such cooperation in online music ventures would have been unthinkable two years ago as retailers and music companies were at odds about how to best approach online music sales. More than a years ago, music labels embarked on their own online efforts, but so far they have received less than rave reviews.
Now, though, the music companies and the retailers need each other more than ever. Recording companies make the music, but it is retailers who know their customers. "Retail has always been about more than simply selling CD's," said Jerry Comstock, the chief executive of Wherehouse Entertainment. "We are in the customer relationship business."
Under Echo's plan, once the group received the necessary licenses, the partners would market their services together and separately. Efforts might include promotions like "Buy a compact disc, get a free download." The retailers could also enable customers to download music in stores using portable devices, like the Apple iPod. "No one has really marketed these services," Mr. Hart of Echo said.
But some analysts suggest that no matter how much creative and marketing muscle is behind such efforts, they will not catch on unless the music is priced right. The average cost of a compact disc, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, the lobbying group which represents recording companies, is $14.21. Many critics say that is expensive when compared with other media, like DVD's, which offer loads of extra features and programming.
"Any opportunity retailers have to find additional revenue in a time of falling sales is a positive," said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. "Yet we continue to think that pricing has to come down to get pirates off of the free sites and onto legitimate ones."
Take Yahoo, for example. They're a popular webmail service and they also do spam filtering to some extent on inbound email. I would say that, in general, people who use Yahoo mail are not necessarily the type of people who "know better" than to buy spamvertised products. That's not a slam on Yahoo, nor on the people who use Yahoo mail, it's just the way the demographics work out. The ratio of ripe targets to clued-in antispammers is simply better at Yahoo than it is on other domains.
To that end, Yahoo's spam filters aren't helping the spammers any. A spammer's goal is to get his ad in front of as many potential targets as possible, and Yahoo is full of potential targets. But if Yahoo's filters catch the spammer's message and route it straight to everyone's Bulk Mail folder, there's (thousands|millions) of "targets" who will never see the message.
So no, I can't agree that filtering helps the spammers any, at least not the big spammers who are after volume. There's probably a bit of "collateral assistance" in that people who would report the spam may never see it, but I'd say that benefit is cancelled out by the number of possible targets lost to filters.
http://www.nic.mil/dodnic. No, I didn't go poking around. If you've got bigger balls than I, perhaps you can link to the supposed admin area...
I'm a pasty-white geek type, so I don't typically watch sporting events. OK, maybe some hockey now and then in the hopes that someone gets his teeth knocked out by a puck moving at 90mph or his jugular severed by an errant ice skate on live TV, resulting in copious amounts of blood. OK, so I watch NASCAR, too, for the wrecks. I don't normally watch football, though, it just never interested me.
But... A commercial for X-Men 2? Will the lovely Anna Paquin be in the sequel? Will she be in the commercial? Sigh, now I'll have to watch in order to find out. Damn advertisers, they figured out how to make a geek watch football!!
What's next, they'll start having the Olsen Twins host golf?
"Super Bowl" is a trademark of the National Football League. This is why most radio and TV ads you hear and see relating to the Super Bowl don't use the official name, but instead call it something like the "Big Game."
Now when I'm in a public place and some idiot's cellphone starts blasting his favorite ringtone at 300 decibels, I don't have to sit there and take it... I can just frag him!
>Maybe they are planning to kill off the technology
;)
Nah, they're just testing a new strategy in vaporware... Let everyone know it's not going to materialize first, then the investors can't possibly be upset when it's late!
My question, in a nutshell: Did you know that you were going to get caught?
I guess what I'm most curious about is whether you knew the risks and took them anyway, or whether you thought you were covering your tracks and that the risks were minimal. It would be interesting to know if you knew you'd eventually get busted or whether you thought you were relatively "safe" from discovery.
Yikes!
/. stories...
Looks like someone must have gotten ahold of CmdrTaco's recently discarded hard drive and recovered the links to old
You'd think Taco would have at least used some sort of freespace wiping utility!