As KaZaA has proven it can shut clients out of the network (when it turned off the original Morpheus client), it runs afoul of the court's language in this opinion (IMHO), as by controlling that network they make a material contribution to the infringing activity. Now, all the RIAA or MPAA has to do is start issuing "realtime C&D letters" (if such a thing exists and technologically, there's no reason why it couldn't) to satisfy the "knowledge" prong of the contributory infringement test... It's a pretty good roadmap for how to go after KaZaA successfully, though it's also an interesting "vindication" (right word?) of Gnutella, etc.
1. They did issue a subpeona, per the DMCA; they did not file a lawsuit. Without using the DMCA, a lawsuit would be required. If the DMCA applies (which is what this opinion was all about), just a subpeona is needed.
2. The 4th Amendment protects against GOVERNMENT intrusions into your houses, papers, and effects. Doesn't apply to private action, such as RIAA and/or Verizon. Only if a state agent was the one doing the searching. Even at that, by operating KaZaA or whatever, you've broadcast the information publically - looking at it is not an unreasonable search any more than a cop driving past your house and seeing the cocaine bagging operation you were running just inside the bay window of your living room would be. Finally, the IP address information and subscription logs are being maintained by your ISP, not by you; a prosecutor (for example) does not need a search warrant to obtain that information, just a subpeona.
The power's concentrated in the hands of the copyright holders, who have the money and the control. The DMCA was passed because they wanted it; the Verizon motion was decided this way because they wanted it... http://www.geocities.com/digitalmilleniumla w/
It was passed by the House at 3:00am this morning.
I committed to the switch yesterday.
on
Flirting With Mac OS X
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Read all about it on my blog. A quick look at my resume will tell you I'm a Linux fan from way back, but I like what Apple has done... A UNIX for all intents and purposes, with lots of mainstream applications (Office should I choose to sell my soul even further, Photoshop and Premiere, the Macromedia Flash authoring tool, Warcraft III). All without using WineX (none of my PCs are fast enough to run WineX, though they're fast enough for everything else I do), or jumping through hoops. I used to love fiddling with Linux distros; now I'm working full time, consulting as a PHP/Perl programmer, and in law school, so I just don't have time. Hence, MacOS X...
Pedantic, no one is from Czechoslovakia anymore.
It's been almost a decade since that country split
into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It was in
a few papers. Maybe you heard about it.:)
I'm sorry, but I can't take seriously a site that claims it was under fire for being "progressive" and for creating the stir they claim it was causing, when it's that badly written. (That is, if the current "explanation" page is indicative of the site as a whole.) I can understand being shaken up by what happened, but the word choice, etc., evident on the site - well, it's like running fingernails along a blackboard to anyone who's educated and has a command of the English (or, if you prefer, American) language. I always thought intelligence, or at least the ability to come off as a polished writer or orator, was essential for raising awareness. (Evidenced by Martin Luther King, Jr., others.) But I digress.
Who wants $300 to run rsync?! If it's bandwidth they're worried about, burn the site to CD-R and mail it; total cost, $5.
Hmm. I posted this also, with more of the relevant legal facts. Since mine was rejected
but Hemos' made it, I'll repeat myself here.
This case does not establish precedent. It
is binding only upon the plaintiff and defendent.
The federal district courts (by the way, there
are three federal districts in California) are
considered trial courts. From there, the case can
be appealed to the federal circuit court (9th
circuit includes California), and from there to
the U.S. Supreme Court. Only if the U.S. Supreme
Court agrees to hear the case and returns an
opinion is it binding nationally. If the federal
circuit court upholds the district court's opinion,
it's binding to those federal districts that fall within the circuit.
But not on the states themselves. States are bound
by their own appeals and supreme courts, and by the
U.S. Supreme Court, but not by the federal district or
circuit courts. Think hierarchy.
The FBI is allowed to "spy" on American citizens,
through proper channels. It's the NSA and the CIA who aren't supposed to eavesdrop on internal communication.
From the CIA's charter: "the Agency shall have no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions" 50 USCS 403-3
The NSA's charter is similar, though I can't find it (suspect I'm not meant to).
My alma mater, Johnston, was about the best I could hope for. To graduate, you have to draft a Grad Contract, which then has to be negotiated with and approved by a panel of faculty and students. Classes can be customized through contracting, and independent studies or one-off classes can be built and facilitated by students, so you can focus on exactly what you want to learn.
My Grad Contract was Information Systems and Media Production, and I had a job waiting for me at Columbia Tristar Interactive at graduation (May 2000). (CTI is now Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment.) I taught myself or learned UNIX, networking, Adobe Premiere / Photoshop, live theater, film and video techniques, etc. But... I was also "railroaded" into classes I wouldn't have taken, but I'm glad I did, like Shakespeare, Images of Women in Literature, Wine & Opera, etc.
So, I feel I got an education that prepared me for the first ten years, but left me "educated" enough to survive in "society."
Johnston is one example; there are other schools that were part of the now-defunct AHEN (Alternative Higher Education Network):
AHEN's website.
has had smartcard technology for quite some time.
Their civilization has yet to crumble because of
it. A friend of mine was working on the Java
code for a certain smartcard implementation while
he was at RSA, and though he was never able to
reveal specifics, he didn't feel it was too
sinister. Corporate yes, and therefore sinister
to most, but not anymore so than the rest of
today's world...
Perhaps someone who was at the HAL workshop can give the hacker's perspective?
The movies won't "erase themselves," but they
will require a key, and they key will have
roughly the same characteristics as a video
rental from Blockbuster. Obviously, we're looking
at broadband distribution, and at typical
broadband speeds, it's about an hour to pull
down a movie (for instance, on my home DSL I
routinely get 140K/sec transfers, which would
require around 73 minutes to pull down a 600MB
movie).
I'd imagine students (many of whom don't have
televisions, but have computers and campus
Ethernet on T1-or-better circuits) and business
travellers will adopt. I recently took my VAIO on a trip, and watched two movies. Running DVDs, the battery
would have given out shortly after the first title. Playing Real Media from the hard drive,
and I was at 50% used at the end of the trip.
I think there's a market. So too does my employer =) Probably not a/. market, where
MPEG4 ("DiVX") seems to run rampant. But...
Comments attributed to VPs within the company
indicate that Sony (who originated the MovieFly
concept; the other studios came on-board after
the fact) understands the risk of the DRM being
compromised...
The University had their system (Ultrix, running on a MicroVAX 3100), we built ours. We had to rely on them for connectivity, which kept us somewhat chastened, but we set up our own servers (first UnixWare, then Linux) and built our own network. The other dorms were jealous; they didn't (and still don't) have Ethernet connectivity, and analog phone lines are few and far between.
We had an accessible webserver for students and faculty, dial-up connections to PPP (the University eventually allowed their dial-in users, previously locked into their crummy menu system and 'pine' / 'lynx,' access to our SLIRP login via 8-bit rsh), shell accounts, etc. But nothing mission-critical was running on our servers, per se. (The faculty had their own SLIP connections, via TIA on a Sun box.)
Our network was for students (and some faculty), by students, and it was a great way to learn. You can only do so much on your own box, with your own mistakes to fix. But when someone else can't get to their POP box, and you have to dig in and figure out the problem and fix, it's very educational.
It's all about choice; if you don't trust the student admins, don't use the student box. =) Personally (and this was reinforced through experience) I trusted our student system more than the professionally administered system. Our downtime was lower, we never lost an email, and we admins weren't inclined to snoop through people's home directories looking for "naughty" stuff.
Actually, my Z505 (specifically, the PCG-Z505R) runs Linux really well. Even the onboard sound is supported, natively, by the kernel (insmod nm256.o). The only thing that doesn't work is the lame Rockwell HCF PCI winmodem, but a PCMCIA card does that trick just as well. I've only got a PCMCIA CD-ROM drive, though, so this might prove dodgy. I installed RH 6.2 originally by copying over the CD-ROM into the Win98 partition (using the OS it shipped with, and installing Linux into the blank partition they give you for "video"). But I don't have a Win98 partition anymore. =)
Question... RedHat 6.2 claims "Generic service failover support. High availability support is no longer available only for web and ftp servers. Now you can have virtually guaranteed service from any of your servers including mail, pcp, and dns."
While they don't mention database servers specifically, "Generic service" indicates that they've figured out some way (probably similar to watchdog coupled with some form of ARP spoofing) to fail a down server over gracefully. Which leaves data replication.<P>
Would this work in conjunction with a simple mirror program? What I'm thinking of is... <P>
A small daemon that runs (and listens) on the 'master' box. When a database connection is initiated it reads the commands sent by the client and sends them on to the 'master' database server, and again to a secondary server.<P>
Both the master and secondary server have current copies of the data, and then leave the actual failover to whatever RedHat has concocted (still downloading the.iso, so this may or may not make sense).
I'll throw in my $.02 on blocking Napster, being one of the "evil admins" who has done so. We felt no heat, we heard from no lawyers. We simply found that our single T1 (feeding a small private University of 2500 students and faculty) had become saturated. Almost completely. The day we blocked Napster we saw our traffic plunge from 165Kbps average down to our pre-Napster level of 40Kbps. The 'net came back; we could once again browse, etc. It was crawling without the block in place (e.g., took 30 seconds+ to load/. over a T1).
Too, blocking Napster doesn't have anything to do with blocking our users from accessing free music. We watched Napster traffic; the predominant use was for swapping illegal copies of copyrighted material. Anyone who doubts this is welcome to take a look at the traffic analysis I did using sniffit. I don't know all of the bands captured, so I can't authoritatively state that every instance was that of illegal activity, but it looks to be the lion's share. (Unless Korn, the Backstreet Boys, etc., are suddenly quite altrustic.)
Finally, while I can't speak to tying media to one platform, the "clause making it illegal to thwart copyright protection methods through the use of software or hardware" does nothing to prevent the free exchange of legal, non-copy-protected content. The garage band can upload their material free of copy protection, and the 'net generation can still do its thing. (www.mp3.com) What it *does* do is make illegal the practice of 'cracking,' from which it seems nothing is immune. (Found a copy of Quark XPress installed on one of our lab computers the other day. It had been 'cracked' - the "crack" program was still in the directory with the executable - presumably to bypass the dongle copy protection.)
I'm not saying every conceivable instance of these technologies has been used for ill. Just the vast majority of them, in my experience. For every laudable example of someone cracking DVD encryption so titles can be watched under Linux, I can point to fifty warez sites (addresses snagged by our proxy server) where the latest key generators and crack utilities for the hottest software are kept.
I'm no huge fan of big business / corporate interests. But illegal is illegal. If I were, say, Adobe (a common target), I'd be pretty peeved if you were tossing around free copies of software I sold for $500. If your livelihood depended on sales of that software title, you'd probably be pretty peeved, too.
Slashdot Mirror
As KaZaA has proven it can shut clients out of the network (when it turned off the original Morpheus client), it runs afoul of the court's language in this opinion (IMHO), as by controlling that network they make a material contribution to the infringing activity. Now, all the RIAA or MPAA has to do is start issuing "realtime C&D letters" (if such a thing exists and technologically, there's no reason why it couldn't) to satisfy the "knowledge" prong of the contributory infringement test... It's a pretty good roadmap for how to go after KaZaA successfully, though it's also an interesting "vindication" (right word?) of Gnutella, etc.
Discuss?
1. They did issue a subpeona, per the DMCA; they did not file a lawsuit. Without using the DMCA, a lawsuit would be required. If the DMCA applies (which is what this opinion was all about), just a subpeona is needed.
2. The 4th Amendment protects against GOVERNMENT intrusions into your houses, papers, and effects. Doesn't apply to private action, such as RIAA and/or Verizon. Only if a state agent was the one doing the searching. Even at that, by operating KaZaA or whatever, you've broadcast the information publically - looking at it is not an unreasonable search any more than a cop driving past your house and seeing the cocaine bagging operation you were running just inside the bay window of your living room would be. Finally, the IP address information and subscription logs are being maintained by your ISP, not by you; a prosecutor (for example) does not need a search warrant to obtain that information, just a subpeona.
Go back to school.
The power's concentrated in the hands of the copyright holders, who have the money and the control. The DMCA was passed because they wanted it; the Verizon motion was decided this way because they wanted it...a w/
http://www.geocities.com/digitalmilleniuml
It was passed by the House at 3:00am this morning.
Read all about it on my blog. A quick look at my resume will tell you I'm a Linux fan from way back, but I like what Apple has done... A UNIX for all intents and purposes, with lots of mainstream applications (Office should I choose to sell my soul even further, Photoshop and Premiere, the Macromedia Flash authoring tool, Warcraft III). All without using WineX (none of my PCs are fast enough to run WineX, though they're fast enough for everything else I do), or jumping through hoops. I used to love fiddling with Linux distros; now I'm working full time, consulting as a PHP/Perl programmer, and in law school, so I just don't have time. Hence, MacOS X...
Pedantic, no one is from Czechoslovakia anymore. :)
It's been almost a decade since that country split
into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It was in
a few papers. Maybe you heard about it.
I'm sorry, but I can't take seriously a site that claims it was under fire for being "progressive" and for creating the stir they claim it was causing, when it's that badly written. (That is, if the current "explanation" page is indicative of the site as a whole.) I can understand being shaken up by what happened, but the word choice, etc., evident on the site - well, it's like running fingernails along a blackboard to anyone who's educated and has a command of the English (or, if you prefer, American) language. I always thought intelligence, or at least the ability to come off as a polished writer or orator, was essential for raising awareness. (Evidenced by Martin Luther King, Jr., others.) But I digress.
Who wants $300 to run rsync?! If it's bandwidth they're worried about, burn the site to CD-R and mail it; total cost, $5.
Hmm. I posted this also, with more of the relevant legal facts. Since mine was rejected
but Hemos' made it, I'll repeat myself here.
This case does not establish precedent. It
is binding only upon the plaintiff and defendent.
The federal district courts (by the way, there
are three federal districts in California) are
considered trial courts. From there, the case can
be appealed to the federal circuit court (9th
circuit includes California), and from there to
the U.S. Supreme Court. Only if the U.S. Supreme
Court agrees to hear the case and returns an
opinion is it binding nationally. If the federal
circuit court upholds the district court's opinion,
it's binding to those federal districts that fall within the circuit.
But not on the states themselves. States are bound
by their own appeals and supreme courts, and by the
U.S. Supreme Court, but not by the federal district or
circuit courts. Think hierarchy.
The FBI is allowed to "spy" on American citizens,
through proper channels. It's the NSA and the CIA who aren't supposed to eavesdrop on internal communication.
From the CIA's charter: "the Agency shall have no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions" 50 USCS 403-3
The NSA's charter is similar, though I can't find it (suspect I'm not meant to).
My Grad Contract was Information Systems and Media Production, and I had a job waiting for me at Columbia Tristar Interactive at graduation (May 2000). (CTI is now Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment.) I taught myself or learned UNIX, networking, Adobe Premiere / Photoshop, live theater, film and video techniques, etc. But... I was also "railroaded" into classes I wouldn't have taken, but I'm glad I did, like Shakespeare, Images of Women in Literature, Wine & Opera, etc.
So, I feel I got an education that prepared me for the first ten years, but left me "educated" enough to survive in "society."
Johnston is one example; there are other schools that were part of the now-defunct AHEN (Alternative Higher Education Network): AHEN's website.
Perhaps someone who was at the HAL workshop can give the hacker's perspective?
The movies won't "erase themselves," but they
/. market, where
will require a key, and they key will have
roughly the same characteristics as a video
rental from Blockbuster. Obviously, we're looking
at broadband distribution, and at typical
broadband speeds, it's about an hour to pull
down a movie (for instance, on my home DSL I
routinely get 140K/sec transfers, which would
require around 73 minutes to pull down a 600MB
movie).
I'd imagine students (many of whom don't have
televisions, but have computers and campus
Ethernet on T1-or-better circuits) and business
travellers will adopt. I recently took my VAIO on a trip, and watched two movies. Running DVDs, the battery
would have given out shortly after the first title. Playing Real Media from the hard drive,
and I was at 50% used at the end of the trip.
I think there's a market. So too does my employer =) Probably not a
MPEG4 ("DiVX") seems to run rampant. But...
Comments attributed to VPs within the company
indicate that Sony (who originated the MovieFly
concept; the other studios came on-board after
the fact) understands the risk of the DRM being
compromised...
Why string? Why not just use fish tape?
The University had their system (Ultrix, running on a MicroVAX 3100), we built ours. We had to rely on them for connectivity, which kept us somewhat chastened, but we set up our own servers (first UnixWare, then Linux) and built our own network. The other dorms were jealous; they didn't (and still don't) have Ethernet connectivity, and analog phone lines are few and far between.
We had an accessible webserver for students and faculty, dial-up connections to PPP (the University eventually allowed their dial-in users, previously locked into their crummy menu system and 'pine' / 'lynx,' access to our SLIRP login via 8-bit rsh), shell accounts, etc. But nothing mission-critical was running on our servers, per se. (The faculty had their own SLIP connections, via TIA on a Sun box.)
Our network was for students (and some faculty), by students, and it was a great way to learn. You can only do so much on your own box, with your own mistakes to fix. But when someone else can't get to their POP box, and you have to dig in and figure out the problem and fix, it's very educational.
It's all about choice; if you don't trust the student admins, don't use the student box. =) Personally (and this was reinforced through experience) I trusted our student system more than the professionally administered system. Our downtime was lower, we never lost an email, and we admins weren't inclined to snoop through people's home directories looking for "naughty" stuff.
http://ebhon.jnst.uor.edu
YMMV.
crankyspice
Actually, my Z505 (specifically, the PCG-Z505R) runs Linux really well. Even the onboard sound is supported, natively, by the kernel (insmod nm256.o). The only thing that doesn't work is the lame Rockwell HCF PCI winmodem, but a PCMCIA card does that trick just as well. I've only got a PCMCIA CD-ROM drive, though, so this might prove dodgy. I installed RH 6.2 originally by copying over the CD-ROM into the Win98 partition (using the OS it shipped with, and installing Linux into the blank partition they give you for "video"). But I don't have a Win98 partition anymore. =)
While they don't mention database servers specifically, "Generic service" indicates that they've figured out some way (probably similar to watchdog coupled with some form of ARP spoofing) to fail a down server over gracefully. Which leaves data replication.<P>
Would this work in conjunction with a simple mirror program? What I'm thinking of is... <P>
A small daemon that runs (and listens) on the 'master' box. When a database connection is initiated it reads the commands sent by the client and sends them on to the 'master' database server, and again to a secondary server.<P>
Both the master and secondary server have current copies of the data, and then leave the actual failover to whatever RedHat has concocted (still downloading the
Too, blocking Napster doesn't have anything to do with blocking our users from accessing free music. We watched Napster traffic; the predominant use was for swapping illegal copies of copyrighted material. Anyone who doubts this is welcome to take a look at the traffic analysis I did using sniffit. I don't know all of the bands captured, so I can't authoritatively state that every instance was that of illegal activity, but it looks to be the lion's share. (Unless Korn, the Backstreet Boys, etc., are suddenly quite altrustic.)
Finally, while I can't speak to tying media to one platform, the "clause making it illegal to thwart copyright protection methods through the use of software or hardware" does nothing to prevent the free exchange of legal, non-copy-protected content. The garage band can upload their material free of copy protection, and the 'net generation can still do its thing. (www.mp3.com) What it *does* do is make illegal the practice of 'cracking,' from which it seems nothing is immune. (Found a copy of Quark XPress installed on one of our lab computers the other day. It had been 'cracked' - the "crack" program was still in the directory with the executable - presumably to bypass the dongle copy protection.)
I'm not saying every conceivable instance of these technologies has been used for ill. Just the vast majority of them, in my experience. For every laudable example of someone cracking DVD encryption so titles can be watched under Linux, I can point to fifty warez sites (addresses snagged by our proxy server) where the latest key generators and crack utilities for the hottest software are kept.
I'm no huge fan of big business / corporate interests. But illegal is illegal. If I were, say, Adobe (a common target), I'd be pretty peeved if you were tossing around free copies of software I sold for $500. If your livelihood depended on sales of that software title, you'd probably be pretty peeved, too.