Calling this a bluff is sort of pointless. Think about it: The bill was signed in 1996--not even by the current president, for God's sake. This isn't a threat from the RIAA, it's something c|net dredged up because it was a slow news day.
The law is perfectly reasonable; it's unfortunate that the type of completely unreasonable use of it you describe is almost inevitable. It would be nice if the statute had some clause specifying that the retail value is the value at the time of the supposed piracy.
If legitimate downloaders like the/.er above get really, really lucky, maybe some liberal judge will set that as a precedent...but seeing as how the wealthier side of a legal dispute seems to get their pick of judges, that seems unlikely.
Meanwhile, I'll continue with my completely illegal activities.
What if I use an FTP server to share my files and don't let people upload? Then I can go on using LimeWire to download things as long as I don't use it to share files, right?
That way, when I'm sharing, I'm not doing it in return for more copyrighted material...though I'm still depending on others to do so if I want to continue to download stuff.
The only hole I see in this is that it'll be hard to get files on LimeWire if I'm not sharing anything, because people don't like to share with leeches. If there's a legal hole anyone can think of, I'd like to hear it...'cause I'm nervous.
According to that site, it's listing the max uptimes for the servers over the servers' entire lifetimes...and then it lists the most recently reported operating system.
In other words, it's entirely possible that that OS X system achieved such amazing uptime before it had OS X. The same can be said of the Windoze 2000 server.
My mouse has 108 buttons...it's so hard to move that they didn't even bother putting a ball or a laser or anything in it...there's even a button for each letter and all the punctuation...the buttons are even labeled...they have to be, cause there's so many i would forget what they do otherwise...one row looks like this:
aoeuidhtns
When will people learn? Mice are for pointing, keyboards are for the complicated stuff. Power users can make do with keyboard shortcuts (as I do) or get a mouse with more buttons; for the basic users, the fewer buttons on the pointing device, the better--and that means that one button should be the default, since the people who need more are the ones who know how to get more.
Of course, that won't help all problems... [Approximate transcript of helping my grandpa learn to use Microsoft Office 98 over the phone follows]
"Did you install it?" "Yes..." "Okay, the icon should be somewhere in your hard drive. Double-click the Macintosh HD icon..." [five minutes later, still haven't found the suite on his HD] "Okay, is the CD still in the drive from when you installed it?" "What CD?" "The CD the software is on. The CD that came in the box." [opening the box for the first time] "Oh, there's a CD in there!"
Wanted to tell him to RTFM...he hadn't even thought of that...
You make a good point. I think the government should mandate that all systems' UIs are as pretty as the OS is stable and usable. That way, MS would have to make the next version of Windows ugly and junky-looking, and Linux would get a much-needed face-lift. Then people would know not to buy Windows!
Of course, then Mac OS X could stay pretty much as it is...and people still wouldn't buy Macs.
(Not a troll...I'm a Mac user from way back, love the platform...)
This is remarkably similar to your response to Pilferer's comment.
You know, if you read the article, and find that everyone eles disagrees with you on how to interpret it, that probably isn't a sign that you're the only one who read it. It's more likely a sign that you misinterpreted it and should take another look at it.
A mind is like a parachute; it only functions when it's open.
That's a damned good reason to keep HTML support turned off in your mail program.
Luckily, Apple's Mail program allows this to be turned off. I'm not sure if Outlook or Entourage does, but I consider this feature a major selling point of an email client.
I don't think he's a moron, and I bet he read the article.
The point of the comment to which you replied was that since spam generally has a lot of HTML, a lot of the same strings, such as "<b>" and "<a href=" will appear again and again, both in the corpus and in the test message. The extra occurrences of these strings in the spam corpus will help the test message to compress better if it's spam. If it's not spam, it generally won't be HTML, so it won't contain all those tags and their occurrence in the corpus won't cause it to compress more.
That's odd, perhaps the New York Times got their info wrong (wouldn't be the first time) or I remembered the story wrong (also wouldn't be the first time). Or maybe they only switched to Macs for certain purposes which don't have any overlap with the computers you use. But I definitely remember reading something in the Times a couple years ago about a branch of the military switching to the Mac, and I could have sworn they said it was the Army.
I meant that the original intent was to be idle for a while and then do lots of damage, not that the exploit as it happened will actually accomplish this.
From this page it's clear the author of the worm could have used it to execute absolutely any code he wished with the same level of privilege given to MSSQL on any given server (how much privilege that usually is, I don't know).
However, from this disassembly of the worm it's also clear that, as written, it's incapable of anything other than self-propagation. My speculations were unfounded.
I don't even know what the sun looks like anymore.
Yeah, I live in Michigan and haven't seen the sun in a while either...though maybe I would see it more often if I didn't stay up till 4:30 reading/. and not get out of bed till 3:30 p.m., only to stay in my dorm room even then and read/. some more.
However, I suspect this new worm's ("Bill's Tapeworm" as I heard another slashdotter call it) DDoS payload was a side-effect and likely accidental.
Perhaps the worm was really just trying to replicate itself and not meaning to do any damage yet...because that comes later.
Does anyone know if this worm offers its creators a way to do damage later? Maybe the goal last night was to infect a bunch of servers that would be put to use in a more permanently damaging way later on. After all, the slowdowns last night lasted mere hours and served only to make sysadmins sit up and take notice, and improve security--maybe the slowdowns were completely unintentional and unexpected. Mayhaps the ultimate goal was to use the worm to destroy the records in the databases, rather than just take out the databases temporarily.
I don't know, maybe some people get a kick out of an attack that gets lots of press but has no lasting effect--but it seems more logical to me to assume that the perp was going for a more permanent slowdown/loss of data.
Remember that the attack only affected MS servers, and MS has plenty of enemies. If the attack had wiped out the transaction, inventory and employee records of thousands of companies, people might actually think twice about using MS products in the future.
I'm not terribly knowledgable about these things and don't know if the worm could have been put to such a use had it managed to go unnoticed last night, so correct me if I'm wrong on that (though this being/., I'm sure someone will "correct" me even if I'm right).
You just know that whoever did this is a/.er, and has been for a long time.
This is such a huge community of technically-savvy people, even if most of us are ligitimate users--from lowly personal FTP site administrators to professional sysadmins for major corporations--some among us are the type who crave attention and/or power by any means, including bringing down the Internet in its entirety for a few hours.
I suppose we can't start seeing one another as suspects, though. As is the case with actual terrorism (I agree with other posters who argue that this isn't real terrorism), that type of reaction would be exactly what the perpetrators are hoping for.
Yes, TCPA can also be used to build DRM. No, no one should criticize TCPA for having a potential application that is undesirable, because TCPA essentially provides features that are desirable.
Yes, the OS formerly known as Palladium can be used to build DRM. Yes, it should be criticized for this.
The difference is that TCPA is not owned by MS, it's created by 200-odd different companies and, as an open standard, owned by no one. If someone builds an implementation of TCPA that makes DRM feasible, we can choose not to buy it--therefore they won't, because nobody wants to put millions of dollars into R&D on a product that's guaranteed not to sell.
Microsoft, on the other hand, will certainly build DRM into the OS formerly known as Palladium. They have no reason not to, because as history has shown time and again, people are lemmings who will follow MS anywhere, even into a system as ludicrously restrictive as DRM. Their friends in the record and movie industry, on the other hand, will love (==pay) them for embracing DRM.
Besides, the OS formerly known as Palladium is built in such a way as to make DRM very much a possibility, whereas if you've read the recent/., you know that TCPA wasn't built with DRM in mind and therefore supports it in only an ineffective way.
Why does that whole comment remind me unnervingly of the government in the book 1984?
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. (Full text here. Quote is from chapter 5.)
As I've said before, we need to get the lizards and aliens out of office or we'll all be wishing we lived in a country as free as Iraq.
That's the third time I've posted my URL to/.. The first time, I got an average of 300k/sec upstream for the next 15 or so hours--and Louise held up just fine. The second time, the entire Internet crashed an hour later.
What do you make of that? I say, best two out of three!
Sheesh, I thought my university's Residential Computing department was to blame. They've been pretty damned unreliable all year, but if everybody's having this problem I guess it's not their fault.
So the Internet, which is supposedly impervious to a nuclear barrage, has succumbed to a simple attack from some moderately skilled hacker(s). Amazing how much more damaging sheer traffic volume can be than a physical destruction of the network, eh?
At least people will soon be able to continue downloading things like this. (Beware, it's > 3 gigs--a long download from my slow connection!)
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I say, go here for all your musical needs.
I thought till now that if there was a draft I would move to Canada...now I've changed my mind. Switzerland it is.
I have no idea how the government is set up, but if I can vote and feel that my vote actually makes a difference, that's good enough for me.
Of course, then there's the obstacle of becoming a Swiss citizen to think about...how does one go about this, just out of curiosity?
Funny, but to be fair, it's entirely possible he doesn't have a /. account and doesn't care to make one.
Considering some of the crap I read here daily (not referring to your comment), that's understandable.
Calling this a bluff is sort of pointless. Think about it: The bill was signed in 1996--not even by the current president, for God's sake. This isn't a threat from the RIAA, it's something c|net dredged up because it was a slow news day.
The law is perfectly reasonable; it's unfortunate that the type of completely unreasonable use of it you describe is almost inevitable. It would be nice if the statute had some clause specifying that the retail value is the value at the time of the supposed piracy.
/.er above get really, really lucky, maybe some liberal judge will set that as a precedent...but seeing as how the wealthier side of a legal dispute seems to get their pick of judges, that seems unlikely.
If legitimate downloaders like the
Meanwhile, I'll continue with my completely illegal activities.
What if I use an FTP server to share my files and don't let people upload? Then I can go on using LimeWire to download things as long as I don't use it to share files, right?
That way, when I'm sharing, I'm not doing it in return for more copyrighted material...though I'm still depending on others to do so if I want to continue to download stuff.
The only hole I see in this is that it'll be hard to get files on LimeWire if I'm not sharing anything, because people don't like to share with leeches. If there's a legal hole anyone can think of, I'd like to hear it...'cause I'm nervous.
According to that site, it's listing the max uptimes for the servers over the servers' entire lifetimes...and then it lists the most recently reported operating system.
In other words, it's entirely possible that that OS X system achieved such amazing uptime before it had OS X. The same can be said of the Windoze 2000 server.
My mouse has 108 buttons...it's so hard to move that they didn't even bother putting a ball or a laser or anything in it...there's even a button for each letter and all the punctuation...the buttons are even labeled...they have to be, cause there's so many i would forget what they do otherwise...one row looks like this:
aoeuidhtns
When will people learn? Mice are for pointing, keyboards are for the complicated stuff. Power users can make do with keyboard shortcuts (as I do) or get a mouse with more buttons; for the basic users, the fewer buttons on the pointing device, the better--and that means that one button should be the default, since the people who need more are the ones who know how to get more.
Of course, that won't help all problems...
[Approximate transcript of helping my grandpa learn to use Microsoft Office 98 over the phone follows]
"Did you install it?"
"Yes..."
"Okay, the icon should be somewhere in your hard drive. Double-click the Macintosh HD icon..."
[five minutes later, still haven't found the suite on his HD]
"Okay, is the CD still in the drive from when you installed it?"
"What CD?"
"The CD the software is on. The CD that came in the box."
[opening the box for the first time] "Oh, there's a CD in there!"
Wanted to tell him to RTFM...he hadn't even thought of that...
You make a good point. I think the government should mandate that all systems' UIs are as pretty as the OS is stable and usable. That way, MS would have to make the next version of Windows ugly and junky-looking, and Linux would get a much-needed face-lift. Then people would know not to buy Windows!
Of course, then Mac OS X could stay pretty much as it is...and people still wouldn't buy Macs.
(Not a troll...I'm a Mac user from way back, love the platform...)
This is remarkably similar to your response to Pilferer's comment.
You know, if you read the article, and find that everyone eles disagrees with you on how to interpret it, that probably isn't a sign that you're the only one who read it. It's more likely a sign that you misinterpreted it and should take another look at it.
A mind is like a parachute; it only functions when it's open.
That's a damned good reason to keep HTML support turned off in your mail program.
Luckily, Apple's Mail program allows this to be turned off. I'm not sure if Outlook or Entourage does, but I consider this feature a major selling point of an email client.
I don't think he's a moron, and I bet he read the article.
The point of the comment to which you replied was that since spam generally has a lot of HTML, a lot of the same strings, such as "<b>" and "<a href=" will appear again and again, both in the corpus and in the test message. The extra occurrences of these strings in the spam corpus will help the test message to compress better if it's spam. If it's not spam, it generally won't be HTML, so it won't contain all those tags and their occurrence in the corpus won't cause it to compress more.
That's odd, perhaps the New York Times got their info wrong (wouldn't be the first time) or I remembered the story wrong (also wouldn't be the first time). Or maybe they only switched to Macs for certain purposes which don't have any overlap with the computers you use. But I definitely remember reading something in the Times a couple years ago about a branch of the military switching to the Mac, and I could have sworn they said it was the Army.
I meant that the original intent was to be idle for a while and then do lots of damage, not that the exploit as it happened will actually accomplish this.
From this page it's clear the author of the worm could have used it to execute absolutely any code he wished with the same level of privilege given to MSSQL on any given server (how much privilege that usually is, I don't know).
However, from this disassembly of the worm it's also clear that, as written, it's incapable of anything other than self-propagation. My speculations were unfounded.
Mod this comment up, this is informative.
If you don't comply, I will bombard you network with...one meeellion packets!
I don't even know what the sun looks like anymore.
/. and not get out of bed till 3:30 p.m., only to stay in my dorm room even then and read /. some more.
Yeah, I live in Michigan and haven't seen the sun in a while either...though maybe I would see it more often if I didn't stay up till 4:30 reading
I need to get out more!
However, I suspect this new worm's ("Bill's Tapeworm" as I heard another slashdotter call it) DDoS payload was a side-effect and likely accidental.
/., I'm sure someone will "correct" me even if I'm right).
Perhaps the worm was really just trying to replicate itself and not meaning to do any damage yet...because that comes later.
Does anyone know if this worm offers its creators a way to do damage later? Maybe the goal last night was to infect a bunch of servers that would be put to use in a more permanently damaging way later on. After all, the slowdowns last night lasted mere hours and served only to make sysadmins sit up and take notice, and improve security--maybe the slowdowns were completely unintentional and unexpected. Mayhaps the ultimate goal was to use the worm to destroy the records in the databases, rather than just take out the databases temporarily.
I don't know, maybe some people get a kick out of an attack that gets lots of press but has no lasting effect--but it seems more logical to me to assume that the perp was going for a more permanent slowdown/loss of data.
Remember that the attack only affected MS servers, and MS has plenty of enemies. If the attack had wiped out the transaction, inventory and employee records of thousands of companies, people might actually think twice about using MS products in the future.
I'm not terribly knowledgable about these things and don't know if the worm could have been put to such a use had it managed to go unnoticed last night, so correct me if I'm wrong on that (though this being
Of course it's the Navy...the Army switched to Macs a while back (2001 I believe) so they wouldn't have such silly security problems.
You just know that whoever did this is a /.er, and has been for a long time.
This is such a huge community of technically-savvy people, even if most of us are ligitimate users--from lowly personal FTP site administrators to professional sysadmins for major corporations--some among us are the type who crave attention and/or power by any means, including bringing down the Internet in its entirety for a few hours.
I suppose we can't start seeing one another as suspects, though. As is the case with actual terrorism (I agree with other posters who argue that this isn't real terrorism), that type of reaction would be exactly what the perpetrators are hoping for.
Yes, TCPA can also be used to build DRM. No, no one should criticize TCPA for having a potential application that is undesirable, because TCPA essentially provides features that are desirable.
/., you know that TCPA wasn't built with DRM in mind and therefore supports it in only an ineffective way.
Yes, the OS formerly known as Palladium can be used to build DRM. Yes, it should be criticized for this.
The difference is that TCPA is not owned by MS, it's created by 200-odd different companies and, as an open standard, owned by no one. If someone builds an implementation of TCPA that makes DRM feasible, we can choose not to buy it--therefore they won't, because nobody wants to put millions of dollars into R&D on a product that's guaranteed not to sell.
Microsoft, on the other hand, will certainly build DRM into the OS formerly known as Palladium. They have no reason not to, because as history has shown time and again, people are lemmings who will follow MS anywhere, even into a system as ludicrously restrictive as DRM. Their friends in the record and movie industry, on the other hand, will love (==pay) them for embracing DRM.
Besides, the OS formerly known as Palladium is built in such a way as to make DRM very much a possibility, whereas if you've read the recent
Why does that whole comment remind me unnervingly of the government in the book 1984?
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. (Full text here. Quote is from chapter 5.)
As I've said before, we need to get the lizards and aliens out of office or we'll all be wishing we lived in a country as free as Iraq.
That's the third time I've posted my URL to /.. The first time, I got an average of 300k/sec upstream for the next 15 or so hours--and Louise held up just fine. The second time, the entire Internet crashed an hour later.
What do you make of that? I say, best two out of three!
Why do people make posts like this? Mod this guy down!
Sheesh, I thought my university's Residential Computing department was to blame. They've been pretty damned unreliable all year, but if everybody's having this problem I guess it's not their fault.
So the Internet, which is supposedly impervious to a nuclear barrage, has succumbed to a simple attack from some moderately skilled hacker(s). Amazing how much more damaging sheer traffic volume can be than a physical destruction of the network, eh?
At least people will soon be able to continue downloading things like this. (Beware, it's > 3 gigs--a long download from my slow connection!)