He damns all platforms except the one he's pushing with faint praise, with every one having a show stopper problem. The one he's pushing is perfect, with no problems at all, which in the real world is bullshit.
And that's ignoring the fact that the entire premise is nonsense. Without knowing where the hobbyist programmer is coming from and what they're trying to achieve to claim one mobile platform is better than another is vacuous, the sort of content free nonsense that marketers push every day.
Another clue is where he has a problem with the GNU/Linux license but has no problem at all with the far more restrictive M$ license, while pushing the BSD license as an alternative. It's standard M$ marketing tactics to push the BSD license instead of GNU. Unfortunately for M$, for most users both the GNU and BSD licenses are streets ahead of the average M$ license.
And the icing on the cake? The word "Live" in blog heading.
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Integrated software = marketing buzzword for "we own all the pieces" = we own you.
They think supporting linux desktops is too expensive to be profitable.
And that's why we've got all the lying astroturf trying to mold perceptions here.
The fact, not the fiction those astroturfers and others are spouting, is that the major and minor app's that have been ported to both Windows and Linux are an existence proof that porting between the environments is not as big a deal as they are implying.
Practically every single "fact" those astrotufers are pushing is highly exaggerated. Different linux distributions? Open Office, one of the largest and most complicated applications around, doesn't seem to have problem. They have precisely 3 binary downloads for Intel Linux and and 2 for Intel Windows- with Java runtime(W+L), without java runtime (W+L) and debian (L). Changing kernel versions? Standards conforming digital cameras have no problem, they're using a USB memory driver (gosh, they're using standards! What a concept!). Level 1 support is impossible? Fine, don't offer it but for a standards conforming product it's no big deal to write a script that will eliminate all hardware problems and many software problems. Won't be fantastically profitable? So what, they might make a minor profit and they're establishing a market and creating mindshare all over the world. Companies create loss leaders and support and grow niche markets all the time for a host of different reasons including good will and/or mindshare and Windows/Vista/whatever-it's-called-this-week isn't going to be with us forever.
End of discussion.
M$ would certainly like it if the discussion ended there.
Next question!
Yes, we definitely don't want people thinking about alternatives.
Sorry to be harsh, but I'm not going to bother replying. Your post is a incoherent mess, full of half-truths, truthiness and fill. Pretty much every sentence in it is either factually incorrect, an arbitrary assumption, logically inconsistent or not responding to the points they purport to respond to. I'd suggest you learn about logical fallacies and logical argument in general. Ideally, learn about the scientific method also.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Well the main reason is the consumer's willingness to pay.
True.
But record labels also need to recoup their investments and one "successful" artist has to pay for many "unsucceful" artists.
False. Lets not describe their wholesale corruption with anything so nice as "recouping their investments". These people are thieves; with everything from illegal payola and artists contracts to massive overcharging for technical services and "lost" royalties. They lie about royalties, they lie about production costs, they lie about how much they assist the artist and they lie about how heavily the "successful" artists subsidize the unsuccessful artists.
Just like hollywood accountants they claim to be losing money on most artists but basically, just like spammers, they never stop lying. Any claims like you've just made about unsuccessful artists being subsidized should be ignored unless there's exceptionally strong evidence proving the claims.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
Yes, if you assume that the only active protection is a 1:1 URL-to-badness mapping.
No, that's a false assumption. Hashes don't just have to be of URL's, they can be for all sorts of things including parts of URL's as you've noted, keywords on page etc. The public key encryption literature provides a large body of techniques for proving and matching things while still providing security and privacy.
Would "informed consent" including checking the box next to "tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery," then ticking the radio button next to "Check by asking [_______] about each site I visit" and selecting Google? (As opposed to either not ticking the "tell me" box or choosing the first radio button, "check using a downloaded list of suspected sites."
Better than some others however "Check by asking [Google] about each site I visit" (Incidentally google is by default the only alternative) is vastly different from "Send all the URL's you access to Google to be checked for forgery and incidentally also used for marketing purposes and matched with your email etc. etc.". Most users wouldn't realize that the former implies the latter. From a technical point of view it doesn't anyway as I've already noted above.
If you go out of your way to agree to let me do something, my doing it is not evil.
But that's the point, the user did not agree for the URL to be sent to google. They agreed that the URL be checked by google and nothing more. They did not agree for the URL to be stored, and they did not agree for the URL to be analyzed for anything except checking for forgery at that moment in time. They did not agree for the URL be used for any other purpose at all and until Google explicitly states, in writing and legally committing themselves, that either they're never going to do any of those things or alternatively get informed consent from the user to do those things then it is evil. Oh, and getting consent from the Firefox developers is not a substitute for getting consent from the user.
I'm prepared to cut Google some slack on their marketing activities because unlike some marketing companies they do provide some decent value in return like a search engine, maps etc. however in today's ridiculously intrusive, deceptive and outright fraudulent marketing world, and information being power, Thomas Jefferson's "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" is now more true than ever.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
I doubt the Demonoid server is connected to an atomic clock and providing time services to the rest of the network.
Running an NTP server is an indication of nothing more than a professional administrator who wants accurate time on that machine. It's not inconsistent with the other results in the slightest.
It depends on the configuration but a common default for clients of distant time services is to act as an ntp server also. A server needs to run on the client so that round trip packet times to the distant time service can be tracked over time and compensated for and it's easy to provide time for the local subnet while it's doing that.
I'm running an NTP server on my desktop machine right now to get accurate time. In my opinion any ISP and shared system administrator not using NTP or a GPS clock to get accurate time is being unprofessional.
I would say that someone who assumes a certain explanation is correct based only on running Nmap against a host in a different country is probably not quite as knowledgeable in the field of network administration as they may think.
The problem here is less one of malice and more one of poor timing.
No, it's why this "feature", without configurability, was there in the first place. His justification is dubious and given his track record he should be cut little slack.
I phrased it badly. Your post implied that all financial crimes, including those associated with copyright violation, are very bad, and all should attract large penalties. I was arguing that it's more complicated than that; like at the moment where we have large scale unlicensed copying going on while still having a high degree of confidence in the money supply and only certain wealthy individuals threatened.
To put it another way; the total amount of money in circulation is rather large. To significantly compromise confidence in that money supply a significant fraction of it has to be threatened. Small scale financial crimes don't fit that definition and so shouldn't attract significant penalties. Granted, it's more complicated than that with "confidence" being a rather hard thing to measure however I feel the basic idea applies.
Could you please elaborate how illegal copying creates enormous value for society?
I didn't say that it did, just that it could potentially do so.
As an example just say a vendor sells a piece of software for $100 that 1000 customers can afford and derive $110 of benefit from it. That's $100,000 of benefit to the vendor and net $10,000 to the customers. The usual win-win of a free market.
However, maybe there are a million people who could derive $10 or more benefit from the software. Obviously they're not going pay $100 for $10 of benefit but if they pirate for $0 they derive $10,000,000 of benefit while the vendor gets $0. The copiers also get added value that vendors deny e.g. lack of DRM, gain in installation flexibility and increase in security due to less dependence on the vendor. The vendor can't price the software at $5 to get those million customers because the transaction costs are too high and because they won't give any option to the customer which decreases their net income. I'm using the phrase "transaction costs" in the broad sense of all overheads associated with each copy including marketing, DRM, paying third parties etc.
The vendor may want to sell different versions of the software at different price points. That may increase their income somewhat but transaction costs mean that it's probably not going to increase the overall value to society much. Commercial vendors and those who like DRM severely underestimate the value of being able to freely copy software as and when needed and how important the difference between $0 and $1 is.
In addition if the vendor is a monopoly with sufficient price control they will price at a fraction less than what it is worth for each and every customer. Meaning the net value to all customers approaches zero and it's not win-win but win-neutral. Still creating value but creating it in only one place, the vendor. As social theorists and economists have noted this may or may not be a bad thing depending on how much of a social class difference it creates (large differences lead to social instability) and how well the vendor recycles that extra income, the theory being that because the vendor was able to create a valuable product in the first place they should best be able to make use of that extra income. If they use that extra income to compete negatively, (e.g. by pulling the potential competitors down with bought law or by using marketing to drown out alternative points of view), this is a bad thing. If they use the extra income to compete positively (e.g. by creating better products) that's probably a good thing however it depends on opportunity costs, that is how much value others, including both customers and competitors, could have created if they'd got the extra income that went to the monopoly. It's almost always the case that a monopoly, even when competing positively, becomes wasteful with the concentration of wealth and adds little marginal value, less than what the competitors and customers could've done with the same money. This shifts the illegal copying balance even further with wide scale copying potentially creating even more net value than it might o
It's kinda hard to verify URL's if you don't compare them to a massive database.
Stop spreading misinformation. URL verification can be done with hashes and other techniques that do not invade privacy. See other posts. There is no technical reason why they need to see the URL.
It's only marketers trying to unethically and deceptively invade people's privacy that want this.
Is anyone surprised? How is it evil?
It's invading a person's privacy for no good reason. Only a marketing parasite would think otherwise.
The evil would only come from the data being misused.
No, the evil comes from the data being taken without informed consent.
Obviously they NEED the data, or rather, the dudes running the database need it.
Wrong.
That's not the evil part.
Because there's no contract controlling what happens to the private information, and because there is no technical reason to collect the private information, it is evil.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Hanged over a copyright law? That's a bit extreme.
This is a law affecting 30,000,000+ people. Not as extreme as it might be.
She's a dirty politician, and should never be employed again as anything more involved than burger flipper,
Agreed.
but let's cut the hyperbole.
Not quite as hyperbolic as you suggest. Some people/companies will be making millions off this law.
That's the problem with the law. A stroke of the pen and millions of people are affected. Hopefully positively but all too often negatively. The law is a single point of failure for the entire country. Companies and others take advantage of that.
And yes, I'm Canadian.
Doesn't mean much. For all we know you're working for the CRIA.;-)
This isn't news. ANY anti-phishing tool that checks to see if a page is a phishing site is going to have to send it SOMEWHERE...
Please stop spreading misinformation. As other posters have noted using hashes and downloads means the page doesn't have to be sent anywhere.
It's mainly lying vendors trying to cover up their unethical behavior that claim it is necessary to send pages.
or did you think that they were just going to be able to magically download a tiny file on your computer that would just 'know' all the phishing sites?
Straw man. There are other possibilities as other posters have noted.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
The hard part is getting a leak reproduced on a developer's machine. If the developer doesn't visit the same sites as you, or doesn't use the same extension as you, he/she might not hit the same leaks.
Yes and no. If I was a Firefox developer I'd be asking bug reporters to submit screen dumps of the windows Firefox/Help/About Mozilla Firefox, Tools/Addons and History/Show sidebar. That gives an unambiguous and easily created description of the environment that triggers the bug. I would definitely not ask users to manually list environment characteristics as firefox developers are currently asking users to do; users will prioritize the wrong things and often get it wrong anyway. This doesn't include configuration information but should cover the majority of cases.
However, having said that, there are circumstances where it is hard to reproduce the bug. Memory corruption is one previously mentioned. Another is race conditions caused by the timing of user interaction and/or net etc. Some of these could be caught with timestamps on memory allocation (though a performance hit) but many will not.
One frustrating thing about this is that fixing memory leaks is relatively easy. To have any memory leak is unnecessary and a sign of a mediocre programmer.
To find a memory leak just instrument the memory allocator. See what's left when you exit the program and that's your memory leak.
There are several commercial/freeware packages that will do this or just roll your own. This will catch all memory leaks that aren't caused by memory corruption, including ones created by threads, addons and interpreted code. You can even use it with a garbage collector to see why certain blocks of memory aren't being freed by the collector. It has an overhead but not a major one and on a fast development machine it's easily usable, particularly if you're able to take advantage of a second CPU.
The firefox developers should create a beta build with instrumented memory allocation. Better yet make it part of the standard build (it's small) and enable it with a configuration option. The instrumentation could be made quite sophisticated with arena's, snapshots, tagged allocations and the like but even a basic calling PC log would be a big win.
Memory corruption is a different ballgame. For that you need to do much more sophisticated instrumentation that will catch bounds violations and unallocated pointer access. Possible, but can cause the program to run so much slower that it becomes impractical to do on a large scale. Should still be done occasionally though just to see what obvious, easily fixed violations are occurring.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
What, so if I say anything that you don't think is sufficiently anti-MS I'm being paid by MS to say it?
I fucking wish.
Didn't say they all were, just a large percentage. You'll always get people following the crowd. That's a large part of why astroturfers do what they do.
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I love the free market zealots who think monopoly is a good thing.
The reasons for having harsh punishments for such crimes are all similar: It is a kind of crime which is very destructive for society as a whole.
No it isn't. It's destructive to those who have lots of money.
And your implied claim that illegal copying is very destructive for society as a whole is silly. If anything it's the reverse, with illegal copying being a great boon to society at large, creating enormous value for billions of people.
Very unlike financial fraud where a small group of people benefit at the expense of wider society in what is usually a zero sum game.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Playing on the idea of the noble savage not needing copyright law is disingenuous
Pretending that current copyright law is the only alternative, and bring in irrelevant nonsense like "noble savage", is a lot more disingenuous.
and completely neglects the main issue -
The main issue being to encourage the most efficient and cost effective creation, dissemination and use of ideas. Nothing more. Copyright, as it is currently implemented, appears to be increasingly useless in the efficient creation, dissemination and use of large classes of ideas.
mass production or copies at prices low enough to make a creator's work a significant part of the cost of the copy.
A limited argument that becomes increasingly unsustainable in a population of billions where the originator can copy just as efficiently as anybody else and also has the advantage of being the first and being authentic, which a lot of people care about.
There are many reasons why people create art and content. In a population of billions it is a statistical certainty that it will happen regardless of the state of copyright law. People like to create, it is often it's own reward. The copyright distribution cartels like to pretend that copyright is the only reason to create. As usual they're lying.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
but don't forget about the original author and his family who really are entitled to compensation
Don't worry. They're worth millions.
for the children... is jacked up
True;-) We really should stop manufacturing property privileges for people who don't deserve it.
The major groups who've benefited from and inflated traditional copyright have been publishers and distributers, not authors. Publishers and distributers are adding less and less value every year so the value of copyright should adjusted to match that reality and they should dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
... The Amiga could do a perfectly usable GUI with a 7MHz M68k,...
Agreed. Modern GUI's are bloated beyond belief, often being slower than the Amiga GUI on 2+ orders of magnitude faster hardware.
Unfortunately however that's what we're stuck with for now and that's why text mode, even simulated text mode like modern vi uses (avoiding slow window operations), may be a good choice for some applications.
Some people have what I feel is a prejudice against text mode applications however if they're serious about it they should really give up text full stop. Nobody's going to do that right now as text is still the best tool we have for many problems and GUI decoration is simply not relevant. I can see one day in the future where there's no such thing as written text, it's all computer mediated video's, sound and graphics, but we're nowhere near there yet.
So why is it astroturfing when people disagree with you?
No, it's astroturfing when people derive financial benefit, direct or indirect, and not just from being directly paid, from pretending to be grass roots and not giving their true affiliations. Nothing to do with whether they disagree with anybody or not.
Can you provide some specific evidence of comments here that are paid for?
Of course not. Marketers aren't stupid, they're not going to leave any evidence lying around around if they can help it. There's huge circumstantial evidence however. It's quite amazing how many posters pop out of the woodwork when any story appears that might threaten M$'s $40,000,000,000+ per year revenue stream.
M$ has been repeatedly caught astroturfing in the past and the recent M$OOXML ISO vote stacking and dodgy M$OOXML standard show they still have alley cat ethics.
Software, the only industry on the planet which has strong popular support for a private monopoly. Yeah, suurrre.
How could you possibly claim that a market dominated by one entity is not a free market?
A technicality. A free market means freedom to choose. By definition domination by one entity that can manipulate the market to their advantage means there is less choice.
There are degrees of freedom. The closer we are to a perfect market the better for everybody except the monopoly.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Many of the comments on this story have been written by lying astroturfers. Lots of misdirection, irrelevant issues and noise to drown out substantial argument; deliberately confusing standards with monopolies, pretending installation time has something to do with it and many other deceptive arguments.
Fact is, If the free market was operating correctly then forcing M$ to unbundle wouldn't affect anything; pricing and consumer choices would already be optimal and no harm would be done.
However, M$ fights unbundling tooth and nail (just look at the astroturfers here!) because the know damn well they have an unfair advantage because of it and they want to maintain their advantage and monopoly.
One of the prerequisites of a functioning free market is informed consumer choices. In part that requires price visibility plus the technical knowledge and ability to choose. M$ wants none of that.
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I love the free market zealots who think monopoly is a good thing.
The choice of Text based UI versus GUI is also silly. A well designed GUI app is just as usable via keyboard as a text one, it's just a different presentation framework.
No, on the same hardware a GUI will be slower than text based. If throughput is needed that can be a problem. I've seen countless businesses switch from text based to GUI frameworks and experience drastic slowdowns as a result.
Sometimes the problem can be fixed by throwing more hardware at it but often it's intrinsic to the GUI desktop paradigm; GUI's try to be all things to all people and that often means it's sub-optimal for special purpose, high throughput applications. e.g. One of the main reasons vi is still used despite it's bizarre command set is because it is still far faster than any of the GUI alternatives.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
He damns all platforms except the one he's pushing with faint praise, with every one having a show stopper problem. The one he's pushing is perfect, with no problems at all, which in the real world is bullshit.
And that's ignoring the fact that the entire premise is nonsense. Without knowing where the hobbyist programmer is coming from and what they're trying to achieve to claim one mobile platform is better than another is vacuous, the sort of content free nonsense that marketers push every day.
Another clue is where he has a problem with the GNU/Linux license but has no problem at all with the far more restrictive M$ license, while pushing the BSD license as an alternative. It's standard M$ marketing tactics to push the BSD license instead of GNU. Unfortunately for M$, for most users both the GNU and BSD licenses are streets ahead of the average M$ license.
And the icing on the cake? The word "Live" in blog heading.
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Integrated software = marketing buzzword for "we own all the pieces" = we own you.
They think supporting linux desktops is too expensive to be profitable.
And that's why we've got all the lying astroturf trying to mold perceptions here.
The fact, not the fiction those astroturfers and others are spouting, is that the major and minor app's that have been ported to both Windows and Linux are an existence proof that porting between the environments is not as big a deal as they are implying.
Practically every single "fact" those astrotufers are pushing is highly exaggerated. Different linux distributions? Open Office, one of the largest and most complicated applications around, doesn't seem to have problem. They have precisely 3 binary downloads for Intel Linux and and 2 for Intel Windows- with Java runtime(W+L), without java runtime (W+L) and debian (L). Changing kernel versions? Standards conforming digital cameras have no problem, they're using a USB memory driver (gosh, they're using standards! What a concept!). Level 1 support is impossible? Fine, don't offer it but for a standards conforming product it's no big deal to write a script that will eliminate all hardware problems and many software problems. Won't be fantastically profitable? So what, they might make a minor profit and they're establishing a market and creating mindshare all over the world. Companies create loss leaders and support and grow niche markets all the time for a host of different reasons including good will and/or mindshare and Windows/Vista/whatever-it's-called-this-week isn't going to be with us forever.
End of discussion.
M$ would certainly like it if the discussion ended there.
Next question!
Yes, we definitely don't want people thinking about alternatives.
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Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
Sorry to be harsh, but I'm not going to bother replying. Your post is a incoherent mess, full of half-truths, truthiness and fill. Pretty much every sentence in it is either factually incorrect, an arbitrary assumption, logically inconsistent or not responding to the points they purport to respond to. I'd suggest you learn about logical fallacies and logical argument in general. Ideally, learn about the scientific method also.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Well the main reason is the consumer's willingness to pay.
True.
But record labels also need to recoup their investments and one "successful" artist has to pay for many "unsucceful" artists.
False. Lets not describe their wholesale corruption with anything so nice as "recouping their investments". These people are thieves; with everything from illegal payola and artists contracts to massive overcharging for technical services and "lost" royalties. They lie about royalties, they lie about production costs, they lie about how much they assist the artist and they lie about how heavily the "successful" artists subsidize the unsuccessful artists.
Just like hollywood accountants they claim to be losing money on most artists but basically, just like spammers, they never stop lying. Any claims like you've just made about unsuccessful artists being subsidized should be ignored unless there's exceptionally strong evidence proving the claims.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
Yes, if you assume that the only active protection is a 1:1 URL-to-badness mapping.
No, that's a false assumption. Hashes don't just have to be of URL's, they can be for all sorts of things including parts of URL's as you've noted, keywords on page etc. The public key encryption literature provides a large body of techniques for proving and matching things while still providing security and privacy.
Would "informed consent" including checking the box next to "tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery," then ticking the radio button next to "Check by asking [_______] about each site I visit" and selecting Google? (As opposed to either not ticking the "tell me" box or choosing the first radio button, "check using a downloaded list of suspected sites."
Better than some others however "Check by asking [Google] about each site I visit" (Incidentally google is by default the only alternative) is vastly different from "Send all the URL's you access to Google to be checked for forgery and incidentally also used for marketing purposes and matched with your email etc. etc.". Most users wouldn't realize that the former implies the latter. From a technical point of view it doesn't anyway as I've already noted above.
If you go out of your way to agree to let me do something, my doing it is not evil.
But that's the point, the user did not agree for the URL to be sent to google. They agreed that the URL be checked by google and nothing more. They did not agree for the URL to be stored, and they did not agree for the URL to be analyzed for anything except checking for forgery at that moment in time. They did not agree for the URL be used for any other purpose at all and until Google explicitly states, in writing and legally committing themselves, that either they're never going to do any of those things or alternatively get informed consent from the user to do those things then it is evil. Oh, and getting consent from the Firefox developers is not a substitute for getting consent from the user.
I'm prepared to cut Google some slack on their marketing activities because unlike some marketing companies they do provide some decent value in return like a search engine, maps etc. however in today's ridiculously intrusive, deceptive and outright fraudulent marketing world, and information being power, Thomas Jefferson's "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" is now more true than ever.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
I doubt the Demonoid server is connected to an atomic clock and providing time services to the rest of the network.
Running an NTP server is an indication of nothing more than a professional administrator who wants accurate time on that machine. It's not inconsistent with the other results in the slightest.
It depends on the configuration but a common default for clients of distant time services is to act as an ntp server also. A server needs to run on the client so that round trip packet times to the distant time service can be tracked over time and compensated for and it's easy to provide time for the local subnet while it's doing that.
I'm running an NTP server on my desktop machine right now to get accurate time. In my opinion any ISP and shared system administrator not using NTP or a GPS clock to get accurate time is being unprofessional.
I would say that someone who assumes a certain explanation is correct based only on running Nmap against a host in a different country is probably not quite as knowledgeable in the field of network administration as they may think.
Hmmmm. ;-)
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Stop using tab characters in your code!
The problem here is less one of malice and more one of poor timing.
No, it's why this "feature", without configurability, was there in the first place. His justification is dubious and given his track record he should be cut little slack.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.
I phrased it badly. Your post implied that all financial crimes, including those associated with copyright violation, are very bad, and all should attract large penalties. I was arguing that it's more complicated than that; like at the moment where we have large scale unlicensed copying going on while still having a high degree of confidence in the money supply and only certain wealthy individuals threatened.
To put it another way; the total amount of money in circulation is rather large. To significantly compromise confidence in that money supply a significant fraction of it has to be threatened. Small scale financial crimes don't fit that definition and so shouldn't attract significant penalties. Granted, it's more complicated than that with "confidence" being a rather hard thing to measure however I feel the basic idea applies.
Could you please elaborate how illegal copying creates enormous value for society?
I didn't say that it did, just that it could potentially do so.
As an example just say a vendor sells a piece of software for $100 that 1000 customers can afford and derive $110 of benefit from it. That's $100,000 of benefit to the vendor and net $10,000 to the customers. The usual win-win of a free market.
However, maybe there are a million people who could derive $10 or more benefit from the software. Obviously they're not going pay $100 for $10 of benefit but if they pirate for $0 they derive $10,000,000 of benefit while the vendor gets $0. The copiers also get added value that vendors deny e.g. lack of DRM, gain in installation flexibility and increase in security due to less dependence on the vendor. The vendor can't price the software at $5 to get those million customers because the transaction costs are too high and because they won't give any option to the customer which decreases their net income. I'm using the phrase "transaction costs" in the broad sense of all overheads associated with each copy including marketing, DRM, paying third parties etc.
The vendor may want to sell different versions of the software at different price points. That may increase their income somewhat but transaction costs mean that it's probably not going to increase the overall value to society much. Commercial vendors and those who like DRM severely underestimate the value of being able to freely copy software as and when needed and how important the difference between $0 and $1 is.
In addition if the vendor is a monopoly with sufficient price control they will price at a fraction less than what it is worth for each and every customer. Meaning the net value to all customers approaches zero and it's not win-win but win-neutral. Still creating value but creating it in only one place, the vendor. As social theorists and economists have noted this may or may not be a bad thing depending on how much of a social class difference it creates (large differences lead to social instability) and how well the vendor recycles that extra income, the theory being that because the vendor was able to create a valuable product in the first place they should best be able to make use of that extra income. If they use that extra income to compete negatively, (e.g. by pulling the potential competitors down with bought law or by using marketing to drown out alternative points of view), this is a bad thing. If they use the extra income to compete positively (e.g. by creating better products) that's probably a good thing however it depends on opportunity costs, that is how much value others, including both customers and competitors, could have created if they'd got the extra income that went to the monopoly. It's almost always the case that a monopoly, even when competing positively, becomes wasteful with the concentration of wealth and adds little marginal value, less than what the competitors and customers could've done with the same money. This shifts the illegal copying balance even further with wide scale copying potentially creating even more net value than it might o
It's kinda hard to verify URL's if you don't compare them to a massive database.
Stop spreading misinformation. URL verification can be done with hashes and other techniques that do not invade privacy. See other posts. There is no technical reason why they need to see the URL.
It's only marketers trying to unethically and deceptively invade people's privacy that want this.
Is anyone surprised? How is it evil?
It's invading a person's privacy for no good reason. Only a marketing parasite would think otherwise.
The evil would only come from the data being misused.
No, the evil comes from the data being taken without informed consent.
Obviously they NEED the data, or rather, the dudes running the database need it.
Wrong.
That's not the evil part.
Because there's no contract controlling what happens to the private information, and because there is no technical reason to collect the private information, it is evil.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Hanged over a copyright law? That's a bit extreme.
This is a law affecting 30,000,000+ people. Not as extreme as it might be.
She's a dirty politician, and should never be employed again as anything more involved than burger flipper,
Agreed.
but let's cut the hyperbole.
Not quite as hyperbolic as you suggest. Some people/companies will be making millions off this law.
That's the problem with the law. A stroke of the pen and millions of people are affected. Hopefully positively but all too often negatively. The law is a single point of failure for the entire country. Companies and others take advantage of that.
And yes, I'm Canadian.
Doesn't mean much. For all we know you're working for the CRIA. ;-)
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.
This isn't news. ANY anti-phishing tool that checks to see if a page is a phishing site is going to have to send it SOMEWHERE...
Please stop spreading misinformation. As other posters have noted using hashes and downloads means the page doesn't have to be sent anywhere.
It's mainly lying vendors trying to cover up their unethical behavior that claim it is necessary to send pages.
or did you think that they were just going to be able to magically download a tiny file on your computer that would just 'know' all the phishing sites?
Straw man. There are other possibilities as other posters have noted.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Amazing how often vendors claim that the same transaction is a sale, a rent or a license depending on what maximizes their revenue stream.
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
The hard part is getting a leak reproduced on a developer's machine. If the developer doesn't visit the same sites as you, or doesn't use the same extension as you, he/she might not hit the same leaks.
Yes and no. If I was a Firefox developer I'd be asking bug reporters to submit screen dumps of the windows Firefox/Help/About Mozilla Firefox, Tools/Addons and History/Show sidebar. That gives an unambiguous and easily created description of the environment that triggers the bug. I would definitely not ask users to manually list environment characteristics as firefox developers are currently asking users to do; users will prioritize the wrong things and often get it wrong anyway. This doesn't include configuration information but should cover the majority of cases.
However, having said that, there are circumstances where it is hard to reproduce the bug. Memory corruption is one previously mentioned. Another is race conditions caused by the timing of user interaction and/or net etc. Some of these could be caught with timestamps on memory allocation (though a performance hit) but many will not.
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Keep your options open!
The title of the linked to article is "Mod Chip Seller Sentenced to Jail Time".
Repeating: he got time for illegally selling copies of software, not mod chips. The above article title is deceptive, apparently deliberately so.
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
One frustrating thing about this is that fixing memory leaks is relatively easy. To have any memory leak is unnecessary and a sign of a mediocre programmer.
To find a memory leak just instrument the memory allocator. See what's left when you exit the program and that's your memory leak.
There are several commercial/freeware packages that will do this or just roll your own. This will catch all memory leaks that aren't caused by memory corruption, including ones created by threads, addons and interpreted code. You can even use it with a garbage collector to see why certain blocks of memory aren't being freed by the collector. It has an overhead but not a major one and on a fast development machine it's easily usable, particularly if you're able to take advantage of a second CPU.
The firefox developers should create a beta build with instrumented memory allocation. Better yet make it part of the standard build (it's small) and enable it with a configuration option. The instrumentation could be made quite sophisticated with arena's, snapshots, tagged allocations and the like but even a basic calling PC log would be a big win.
Memory corruption is a different ballgame. For that you need to do much more sophisticated instrumentation that will catch bounds violations and unallocated pointer access. Possible, but can cause the program to run so much slower that it becomes impractical to do on a large scale. Should still be done occasionally though just to see what obvious, easily fixed violations are occurring.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
What, so if I say anything that you don't think is sufficiently anti-MS I'm being paid by MS to say it?
I fucking wish.
Didn't say they all were, just a large percentage. You'll always get people following the crowd. That's a large part of why astroturfers do what they do.
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I love the free market zealots who think monopoly is a good thing.
The reasons for having harsh punishments for such crimes are all similar: It is a kind of crime which is very destructive for society as a whole.
No it isn't. It's destructive to those who have lots of money.
And your implied claim that illegal copying is very destructive for society as a whole is silly. If anything it's the reverse, with illegal copying being a great boon to society at large, creating enormous value for billions of people.
Very unlike financial fraud where a small group of people benefit at the expense of wider society in what is usually a zero sum game.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
"counterfeit trafficking" is not "selling mod chips". You're being dishonest pretending it is.
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
Playing on the idea of the noble savage not needing copyright law is disingenuous
Pretending that current copyright law is the only alternative, and bring in irrelevant nonsense like "noble savage", is a lot more disingenuous.
and completely neglects the main issue -
The main issue being to encourage the most efficient and cost effective creation, dissemination and use of ideas. Nothing more. Copyright, as it is currently implemented, appears to be increasingly useless in the efficient creation, dissemination and use of large classes of ideas.
mass production or copies at prices low enough to make a creator's work a significant part of the cost of the copy.
A limited argument that becomes increasingly unsustainable in a population of billions where the originator can copy just as efficiently as anybody else and also has the advantage of being the first and being authentic, which a lot of people care about.
There are many reasons why people create art and content. In a population of billions it is a statistical certainty that it will happen regardless of the state of copyright law. People like to create, it is often it's own reward. The copyright distribution cartels like to pretend that copyright is the only reason to create. As usual they're lying.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
but don't forget about the original author and his family who really are entitled to compensation
Don't worry. They're worth millions.
for the children ... is jacked up
True ;-) We really should stop manufacturing property privileges for people who don't deserve it.
The major groups who've benefited from and inflated traditional copyright have been publishers and distributers, not authors. Publishers and distributers are adding less and less value every year so the value of copyright should adjusted to match that reality and they should dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Agreed. Modern GUI's are bloated beyond belief, often being slower than the Amiga GUI on 2+ orders of magnitude faster hardware.
Unfortunately however that's what we're stuck with for now and that's why text mode, even simulated text mode like modern vi uses (avoiding slow window operations), may be a good choice for some applications.
Some people have what I feel is a prejudice against text mode applications however if they're serious about it they should really give up text full stop. Nobody's going to do that right now as text is still the best tool we have for many problems and GUI decoration is simply not relevant. I can see one day in the future where there's no such thing as written text, it's all computer mediated video's, sound and graphics, but we're nowhere near there yet.
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Stop using tab characters in your code!
So why is it astroturfing when people disagree with you?
No, it's astroturfing when people derive financial benefit, direct or indirect, and not just from being directly paid, from pretending to be grass roots and not giving their true affiliations. Nothing to do with whether they disagree with anybody or not.
Can you provide some specific evidence of comments here that are paid for?
Of course not. Marketers aren't stupid, they're not going to leave any evidence lying around around if they can help it. There's huge circumstantial evidence however. It's quite amazing how many posters pop out of the woodwork when any story appears that might threaten M$'s $40,000,000,000+ per year revenue stream.
M$ has been repeatedly caught astroturfing in the past and the recent M$OOXML ISO vote stacking and dodgy M$OOXML standard show they still have alley cat ethics.
Software, the only industry on the planet which has strong popular support for a private monopoly. Yeah, suurrre.
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Is your company ethical?
How could you possibly claim that a market dominated by one entity is not a free market?
A technicality. A free market means freedom to choose. By definition domination by one entity that can manipulate the market to their advantage means there is less choice.
There are degrees of freedom. The closer we are to a perfect market the better for everybody except the monopoly.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Many of the comments on this story have been written by lying astroturfers. Lots of misdirection, irrelevant issues and noise to drown out substantial argument; deliberately confusing standards with monopolies, pretending installation time has something to do with it and many other deceptive arguments.
Fact is, If the free market was operating correctly then forcing M$ to unbundle wouldn't affect anything; pricing and consumer choices would already be optimal and no harm would be done.
However, M$ fights unbundling tooth and nail (just look at the astroturfers here!) because the know damn well they have an unfair advantage because of it and they want to maintain their advantage and monopoly.
One of the prerequisites of a functioning free market is informed consumer choices. In part that requires price visibility plus the technical knowledge and ability to choose. M$ wants none of that.
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I love the free market zealots who think monopoly is a good thing.
The choice of Text based UI versus GUI is also silly. A well designed GUI app is just as usable via keyboard as a text one, it's just a different presentation framework.
No, on the same hardware a GUI will be slower than text based. If throughput is needed that can be a problem. I've seen countless businesses switch from text based to GUI frameworks and experience drastic slowdowns as a result.
Sometimes the problem can be fixed by throwing more hardware at it but often it's intrinsic to the GUI desktop paradigm; GUI's try to be all things to all people and that often means it's sub-optimal for special purpose, high throughput applications. e.g. One of the main reasons vi is still used despite it's bizarre command set is because it is still far faster than any of the GUI alternatives.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.