Before you jump on the patent office, it's important to realize that they are understaffed & underfunded - Rambus (intel & sony) have more lawyers doing a single patent application than the USPTO's entire staff. Go to their web site and read their complaint - they aren't even getting to keep the money they make in fees! from their site:
"All of our revenues, projected to be 1.2 billion dollars in fiscal year 2001, are paid as fees by the knowledge-based high-tech leaders and individual entrepeneurs who rely on us to help them flourish in this economy. We are no burden to the American taxpayer. Moreover, we use activity-based cost management principles. Our fee revenues relate directly to the work we do. We do not "have a surplus" or "make profit".
The proposed mark would seriously impair our ability to effectively manage our operations and provide our customers with the quality products and services they expect and deserve.
well guys, you're not even doing that NOW.
Since the mark would fund us at 900 million dollars, or about 25% less than the the total fees paid by our customers, we would be forced to make significant modifications to our operations.
i don't blame the uspto one bit for the insanity that is our patent system. i blame the whores in washington who are giving in to lobbying pressure to underfund the patent system.
ESR can yell at them all he likes. maybe he can talk them into denying patents they don't have time to read, rather than granting them. of course, if they do that, they'll probably have to start having bake sales to buy lunch as of the next year's budget.
The entire program of systematic persecution of a large section of society who choose to enjoy themselves in a way that harms nobody is a true testament to the methods by which even Constiutional "protection" can be subverted in the name of the "greater good".
Read: "who choose to enjoy themselves in a way that harms nobody"
Recollect: some illegal drugs are: heroin and pcp.
Interpret: therefore, we can interpret the above as: heroin addiction is enjoyed in a way that harms nobody. pcp is enjoyed in a way that harms nobody.
Recall: Jimi Hendrix choking on his own vomit. The end of Sublime. Trainspotting. My brother.
React: It's about the death toll. It's about people DYING. It's about watching people you love die, slowly. It's about pain, and suffering, and loss.
"This is the first time that a submarine, operating at submerged depth and speed, has been able to communicate without giving away its position by raising an antenna or surfacing."
Instead, the submarine gave away it's position by screaming a whole bunch of digital noise loud enough to make every sea mammal within 4 miles go deaf.
One of the longest running free-speech issues on the Net has been between the Church of Scientology and the numerous CoS debunking sites such as Xenu.net. The CoS has vigorously pursued anyone who publishes their secret processes on the internet - they are ruthless, fearless, and most importantly to anyone meaning to host something offshore, they have a NAVY (and Tom Cruise to boot!) If you are truly sovereign, then along with the rights of a sovereign nation come the responsiblities - such as defending yourself from intruders. One of the first groups to seek refuge on your haven will be the Scientology resistance, and you will soon be pitted against Ron's Navy.
Which brings me to my question: Do you have any plans on implementing true physical countermeasures, such as phased-array radar, anti-aircraft weaponry, and hardened gun emplacements?
"A day earlier, another source in the Offspring camp said that if Napster issued a cease and desist order, it would "expose a huge hypocrisy.""
I'm beginning to think Metallica has a point. It's not that peer-to-peer file sharing is wrong. It's that a multi million dollar VC-funded corporation designed to create proprietary peer-to-peer file sharing software is wrong. Napster isn't a front corporation for a bunch of innovative software engineers... it's just a company trying to sell other people's music for free. if we're going to smack the recording industry in the face hard enough to get their attention, we need a truly distributed system, with proxying, encryption, and random port selection, so you can't profile it. So rather than sitting around on slashdot bitching about it, let's go write some code for gnutella!
Rats, it's only a trademark. When I read the cover story, I was thinking: At last! I can patent the smell of body odor! Then I could sue everyone at the gym with BO. That would teach the bastards to shower.
Here's a link to coverage of the study at reciprocal.com, the company that funded it. Here's a link to the the actual study in pdf form by a consulting firm called "Entertainment Marketing Solutions" And here, finally, is the Mission Statement for reciprocal.com:
Reciprocal provides comprehensive business-to-business secure e-commerce services for digital content distribution over the Internet. Our services include Digital Rights Management (DRM) applications and clearinghouse solutions that enable e-commerce for all forms of digital content including audio, text, graphics, software, images and video via the Internet or other networks.
We protect your intellectual property on the Internet and make it easy for you to securely and flexibly package, sell, and distribute digital content. And we provide consumers with the ability to easily access, pay for, and consume your protected digital content.
Hey, Slashdot Readers... how do YOU spell "Conflict of Interest" ?
The Progressive Policy Institute is a "thinktank" branch of the Democratic Leadership Council. The Democratic Leadership Council is paid for by a funding organization called "The Third Way Foundation". I couldn't find out who their sponsors were, but who their politicians are is pretty evident:
"With the help of Chairman Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Vice Chairman Governor Roy Romer (D-CO), the DLC is putting its ideas into action at the local, state, and national levels"
They publish a magazine, The New Democrat, and their leader, Al From, is an old time, connected, Friend of Bill. This is, in short, a Democratic (donkey-style) initiative. The DLC's main agenda points appear to be Gun Control and Internet Control. Here are their stated goals: "Renewing our democracy by challenging the special interests and returning power to citizens and local institutions."
So remember, as stated above, one of their major goals is to empower citizens to defeat the special interests.
And here, in the case of Napster, is what they think, and what they hope to achieve:
"Digital audio technology and the Internet have combined to take music piracy to a new level. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a music industry trade group, estimates that piracy of physical music products, cassettes, and compact discs costs the industry nearly $5 billion in sales worldwide every year"
Ok, so the special interest (the RIAA) is getting ripped off by people promoting their music, and despite explosive growth, it isn't growing explosively enough.
They continue:
This provision [the DMCA] has been extremely important for phone companies, search engines such as Yahoo, and for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as America Online, which faced the possibility of being sued whenever one of its customers transmitted a pirated song."5" But because Congress suffers from a severe lack of 18-year-old computer whizzes, it could not anticipate technological breakthroughs that have fostered "service providers" such as Napster, whose users must provide their own connections to the Internet and whose "service" is used almost exclusively for song piracy.
To some, it may seem inevitable that high-tech digital pirates will always stay one step ahead of the law, and even countervailing technology to prevent online theft
Ok, so they didn't anticipate peer-to-peer distributed networks (um, the WEB)... that's fine. Here's the change they advocate (remember, their goal is to empower the people:
We believe the DMCA should be amended to hold Napster, its users, and similar services accountable for copyright violations while maintaining protections from liability for service providers that are innocent bystanders to digital piracy. The amendment should:
require service providers, as a condition to qualifying for the liability limitation under the DMCA, to collect personally identifiable and verifiable information from their users;
set a concrete time frame for the " notice and take down" process; and
allow the courts the flexibility to grant injunctions against service providers that are primarily used for online piracy.
Yep, that's how they're gonna give power to the people. By pointing the finger at the providers of peer-to-peer distributed networking software. And by requiring service providers to get verifiable information on their users. How you say, um... Anonymous Coward? Slashdot will no longer qualify for DMCA protection.
What's the solution? Make it peer-to-peer encrypted file sharing software open-source (like gnutella), and publish it anonymously. Write your congressman, and tell him you don't feel very empowered by people who don't understand the internet attempting to create policy for it. And most of all, realize that Gun Control and Internet Control are powerful steps towards a police state - and that the democratic party is sponsoring them. I'll leave you with their comment about us:
While some "cyberlibertarians" might think that cyberspace is a government-free zone that can operate without any rules, we believe differently. Theft of intellectual property is just as wrong if done on the Internet as it is on a Xerox machine or VCR.
Do any of you believe what they're telling you you believe? I don't.
I remember when I had an apple II, it didn't tell time nearly as well. Now Macintosh has an ANALOG CLOCK. Wow. Now that they've finished that, maybe they can work on a journaling file system. Sweet.
Btw obviously rob's "gf" doesn't mean "girlfriend" but rather "gnashing fiend". Everyone has a few demons lurking somewhere (:
And so it goes that the light at the end of your tunnel is just a gleam from the RIAA's pile of gold...
Lars: Wow, those are tough questions! Publicist: You don't have to think too hard, Lars. RIAA lawyer: Here Lars, sniff up. Lars: SSSNNNIIIFFF! Gosh, thanks, I feel better now.
LARS! You used to bootleg your favorite bands! I used to bootleg you! WHY DID YOU GO AND SELL OUT!?
"We are prepared to move forward with the misappropriation of trade secrets claim," said Molly Smith, spokeswoman for Sony Computer Entertainment America.
This is consistent with their position in favor of banning/suing deCSS, banning/suing mp3 companies, and forcing their engineers to committ sepuku (sp?) if consumers figure out ways to use sony products in accordance with US fair use policy.
i wish they'd just stuck to the freakin walkman, myself.
They only have a windows solution right now. They've hired a mac guy. Their job openings include "open source project manager" http://jobs.zeroknowledge.com/jobs/jobdesc.html? jc=950031145 you do the math.
Of course Yahoo is going to roll over and give away user profiles - everyone does.
If you want to protect your privacy, change your isp.
www.zeroknowledge.com - the world's only encrypted anonymous ISP. There is NO WAY to trace you whatsoever. Zeroknowledge can't even trace you when you're using their servers - and you're encrypted and routed through 3 countries first. A legal nightmare.
I use zeroknowledge and I post with impunity.
They sell a total privacy solution too - complete with information on how to protect yourself from places like yahoo.
Everyone please remember to change your.sig line to the information Microsoft has asked us to remove (and remember that it comes from a public domain help manual):
"You can open self extracting archives using PKZIP25.EXE or unrar" - censored by Microsoft.
I have read the entire DMCA. IANAL, but I HAVE READ THE ENTIRE DMCA.
While they may have a point about some anonymous coward posting the entire trade secret, their complaint against posting instructions to bypass the EULA is TOTALLY WITHOUT MERIT.
"Comments Containing Instructions on How to Bypass the End User License Agreement and Extract the Specification:"
I mean, if you don't know that you can extract a self extracting zip file with pkzip, you don't read slashdot anyway. DUH. For those not up to date with the thread, what they're referring to is this:
1) Micros~1 posts a "trade secret" inside a zip file that they turn into a.exe file (self extracting zip). the.exe requires you to view and click through a license agreement. 2) Some user on slashdot points out that if you just unzip the file, you don't have to agree to the license.
This information is not a microsoft trade secret. As a matter of fact, it's in the PKZIP manual and help file(s)! THE INFORMATION THEY ARE REQUESTING THAT SLASHDOT REMOVE IS PUBLIC DOMAIN INFORMATION FROM THE HELP FILE OF A FREE UTILITY. IT DOCUMENTS A LEGITIMATE AND INTENDED USE OF A LONG STANDING SOFTWARE PRODUCT.
If microsoft didn't know that users didn't have to read their stupid license agreement to see that file, that's ignorance on their part, not malice on ours.
Consider the problem the napster community is facing: NetPD is crawling them with a robot and recording what they have.
Image if Napster, or GNUtella, or whichever client, had an apparatus whereby each node could pose a question before offering its list of files. Each user of each node would come up with their own question. Here's an example:
Question: How many digits are on a human hand? Answer: 5
or
Question: What is the abbreviation for Music Television? Answer: MTV
common sense questions like this wouldn't ever stop a human, but imagine trying to write a crawler robot that could answer questions like this 350,000 times.
i want to support music artists. i don't think that giving them 1/2 of a cent on a $17 dollar album, the other 16.99 of which goes to viacom, an international conglomerate which manufactures bands like in sync and lame content like MTV, as well as pours billions into industry gestapo firms like the RIAA - counts as supporting them. i want to buy $5 albums of which the artists get $3. I want to do it online. napster is just a way to force that change on a system that has been fucking us for so long it doesn't know how to do anything else.
First of all, Napster is a distributed, peer-to-peer network. Other than the fact that nodes can come up and down pretty rapidly, and change IPs, it resembles the Web of HTTP servers in its distributed peer-to-peer nature. The napster on-the-wire protocol can surely be reverse engineered pretty easily. So what does NetPD have? Same thing altavista has.
NetPD has a "spider/crawler/robot" for napster.
They have 10 employees, so it's probably not very sophisticated. Lets assume they have a flat file entry for every node, keyed by it's IP address, containining a list of all the files on that node. Their next step is to run it against a text filter. cat flatfile | grep "master of puppets" , etc. any hits they get on metallica song names puts that entry into a "hit list".
I'm strongly of the opinion that that is the quality of the data they are presenting. There is no way in hell they have actually downloaded metallica songs from 350,000 people and run any kind of statistical or acoustic wave matching software to in fact make sure that that which is advertised as metallica actually IS. It's theoretically possible that 250,000 of those people are offering the theme to the mickey mouse show and renaming the file Metallica Album.mp3. If this ever actually gets litigated the defendants will have to pick apart this point - but of course this is a scare tactic, and never meant to go that far.
What's the solution?
So what's the next step for napster or open source peer-to-peer distributed networks? Simple. A challenge-response protocol, like the one that msgto.com runs. When you connect to a napster node, you have to pass a simple test that only a human can figure out. Change the test weekly. If you don't think this strategy can work, look at the success of other challenge response protocols such as RADIUS, and check out www.msgto.com. This will stop those damn crawlers dead in their tracks.
Or, just use a PPP pool. I mean all they claim to have is 350k IP's, they say that in their press release. So what if the user at SLIP-POOL-121.SOMESTUPIDISP.DEMON.UK ran napster some night. good luck finding out who that was!
also think about napster behind www.zeroknowledge.com. Good luck netPD! suckers.
last week: bill gates meets bill clinton at the white house. this week: justice department leaning against MS breakup.
so the microsoft timeline is: 4 years of setup 2 weeks of takedown +$100 million of campaign finance for gore +$? to clinton's wallet 0$ to competitors and consumers damaged.
reminds me of the tobacco takedown: 6 years of setup 4 months of takedown hillary clinton's brother AND trent lott's brother BOTH signed as lead attorneys for $68 million apiece 2 months before settlement $40 billion of tobacco money to lawyers, 0$ to smokers
steve case is a smart cookie - when the setup began on intel he paid up quick and fast. the longer the setup, the bigger the takedown.
oh well, it was nice while it lasted. i almost believed in it.
While reading Microsoft's history of www.microsoft.com...
Did you notice that Microsoft's picture of the first Microsoft web server ever also shows the first pioneering implementation of Microsoft's proven PTKAMRFA remote administration tool, still the only remote administration option to ship with Windows NT to this day?
(PTKAMRFA: Put The Keyboard And Monitor Really Far Away (tm) (c) )
Some linux people seem to think that telnet or ssh is superior but they're just stupid longhairs.
If you are farmiliar with Star Trek, this movie will make you laugh till you cry. I highly recommend it, it's worth the full theatre price and then some.
Of course, I really should back this up with some examples, but to do that would be to create spoilers (I can't open source the movie!). So you'll have to take this on faith.
It's a brilliantly written, brilliantly acted comedy, and the second best movie I've seen all year. go see it.
Slashdot Mirror
Before you jump on the patent office, it's important to realize that they are understaffed & underfunded - Rambus (intel & sony) have more lawyers doing a single patent application than the USPTO's entire staff. Go to their web site and read their complaint - they aren't even getting to keep the money they make in fees! from their site:
"All of our revenues, projected to be 1.2 billion dollars in fiscal year 2001, are paid as fees by the knowledge-based high-tech leaders and individual entrepeneurs who rely on us to help them flourish in this economy. We are no burden to the American taxpayer. Moreover, we use activity-based cost management principles. Our fee revenues relate directly to the work we do. We do not "have a surplus" or "make profit".
The proposed mark would seriously impair our ability to effectively manage our operations and provide our customers with the quality products and services they expect and deserve.
well guys, you're not even doing that NOW.
Since the mark would fund us at 900 million dollars, or about 25% less than the the total fees paid by our customers, we would be forced to make significant modifications to our operations.
i don't blame the uspto one bit for the insanity that is our patent system. i blame the whores in washington who are giving in to lobbying pressure to underfund the patent system.
ESR can yell at them all he likes. maybe he can talk them into denying patents they don't have time to read, rather than granting them. of course, if they do that, they'll probably have to start having bake sales to buy lunch as of the next year's budget.
The entire program of systematic persecution of a large section of society who choose to enjoy themselves in a way that harms nobody is a true testament to the methods by which even Constiutional "protection" can be subverted in the name of the "greater good".
Read: "who choose to enjoy themselves in a way that harms nobody"
Recollect: some illegal drugs are: heroin and pcp.
Interpret:
therefore, we can interpret the above as:
heroin addiction is enjoyed in a way that harms nobody.
pcp is enjoyed in a way that harms nobody.
Recall: Jimi Hendrix choking on his own vomit. The end of Sublime. Trainspotting. My brother.
React: It's about the death toll. It's about people DYING. It's about watching people you love die, slowly. It's about pain, and suffering, and loss.
Ponder...
Slashdot groupthink had convinced me that MS never creates anything original... hmm... must think... *smoke* brian overheating...
brian is overheating? poor brian. maybe he should go jump in a lake.
"This is the first time that a submarine, operating at submerged depth and speed, has been able to communicate without giving away its position by raising an antenna or surfacing."
Instead, the submarine gave away it's position by screaming a whole bunch of digital noise loud enough to make every sea mammal within 4 miles go deaf.
yay for progress?
now our lonely sailors can get UUencoded porn spam from newsgroups, even four miles underwater!
That should really help with their seamen problem?
One of the longest running free-speech issues on the Net has been between the Church of Scientology and the numerous CoS debunking sites such as Xenu.net. The CoS has vigorously pursued anyone who publishes their secret processes on the internet - they are ruthless, fearless, and most importantly to anyone meaning to host something offshore, they have a NAVY (and Tom Cruise to boot!) If you are truly sovereign, then along with the rights of a sovereign nation come the responsiblities - such as defending yourself from intruders. One of the first groups to seek refuge on your haven will be the Scientology resistance, and you will soon be pitted against Ron's Navy.
Which brings me to my question: Do you have any plans on implementing true physical countermeasures, such as phased-array radar, anti-aircraft weaponry, and hardened gun emplacements?
"A day earlier, another source in the Offspring camp said that if Napster issued a cease and desist order, it would "expose a huge hypocrisy.""
I'm beginning to think Metallica has a point. It's not that peer-to-peer file sharing is wrong. It's that a multi million dollar VC-funded corporation designed to create proprietary peer-to-peer file sharing software is wrong. Napster isn't a front corporation for a bunch of innovative software engineers... it's just a company trying to sell other people's music for free. if we're going to smack the recording industry in the face hard enough to get their attention, we need a truly distributed system, with proxying, encryption, and random port selection, so you can't profile it. So rather than sitting around on slashdot bitching about it, let's go write some code for gnutella!
just a thought,
-mwalker
Rats, it's only a trademark. When I read the cover story, I was thinking:
At last! I can patent the smell of body odor!
Then I could sue everyone at the gym with BO. That would teach the bastards to shower.
sigh, foiled again.
Here's a link to coverage of the study at reciprocal.com, the company that funded it.
Here's a link to the the actual study in pdf form by a consulting firm called "Entertainment Marketing Solutions"
And here, finally, is the Mission Statement for reciprocal.com:
Reciprocal provides comprehensive business-to-business secure e-commerce
services for digital content distribution over the Internet. Our services
include Digital Rights Management (DRM) applications and clearinghouse
solutions that enable e-commerce for all forms of digital content including
audio, text, graphics, software, images and video via the Internet or other
networks.
We protect your intellectual property on the Internet and make it easy for
you to securely and flexibly package, sell, and distribute digital content.
And we provide consumers with the ability to easily access, pay for, and
consume your protected digital content.
Hey, Slashdot Readers... how do YOU spell "Conflict of Interest" ?
"With the help of Chairman Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Vice Chairman Governor Roy Romer (D-CO), the DLC is putting its ideas into action at the local, state, and national levels"
They publish a magazine, The New Democrat, and their leader, Al From, is an old time, connected, Friend of Bill. This is, in short, a Democratic (donkey-style) initiative. The DLC's main agenda points appear to be Gun Control and Internet Control. Here are their stated goals:
"Renewing our democracy by challenging the special interests and returning power to citizens and local institutions."
So remember, as stated above, one of their major goals is to empower citizens to defeat the special interests.
And here, in the case of Napster, is what they think, and what they hope to achieve:
"Digital audio technology and the Internet have combined to take music piracy to a new level. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a music industry trade group, estimates that piracy of physical music products, cassettes, and compact discs costs the industry nearly $5 billion in sales worldwide every year"
Ok, so the special interest (the RIAA) is getting ripped off by people promoting their music, and despite explosive growth, it isn't growing explosively enough.
They continue:
This provision [the DMCA] has been extremely important for phone companies, search engines such as Yahoo, and for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as America Online, which faced the possibility of being sued whenever one of its customers transmitted a pirated song."5" But because Congress suffers from a severe lack of 18-year-old computer whizzes, it could not anticipate technological breakthroughs that have fostered "service providers" such as Napster, whose users must provide their own connections to the Internet and whose "service" is used almost exclusively for song piracy.
To some, it may seem inevitable that high-tech digital pirates will always stay one step ahead of the law, and even countervailing technology to prevent online theft
Ok, so they didn't anticipate peer-to-peer distributed networks (um, the WEB)... that's fine. Here's the change they advocate (remember, their goal is to empower the people:
We believe the DMCA should be amended to hold Napster, its users, and similar services accountable for copyright violations while maintaining protections from liability for service providers that are innocent bystanders to digital piracy. The amendment should:
Yep, that's how they're gonna give power to the people. By pointing the finger at the providers of peer-to-peer distributed networking software. And by requiring service providers to get verifiable information on their users. How you say, um... Anonymous Coward? Slashdot will no longer qualify for DMCA protection.
What's the solution? Make it peer-to-peer encrypted file sharing software open-source (like gnutella), and publish it anonymously. Write your congressman, and tell him you don't feel very empowered by people who don't understand the internet attempting to create policy for it. And most of all, realize that Gun Control and Internet Control are powerful steps towards a police state - and that the democratic party is sponsoring them. I'll leave you with their comment about us:
While some "cyberlibertarians" might think that cyberspace is a government-free zone that can operate without any rules, we believe differently. Theft of intellectual property is just as wrong if done on the Internet as it is on a Xerox machine or VCR.
Do any of you believe what they're telling you you believe? I don't.
I remember when I had an apple II, it didn't tell time nearly as well. Now Macintosh has an ANALOG CLOCK. Wow. Now that they've finished that, maybe they can work on a journaling file system. Sweet.
Btw obviously rob's "gf" doesn't mean "girlfriend" but rather "gnashing fiend". Everyone has a few demons lurking somewhere (:
METALLICA: MASTERED LITTLE PUPPETS
And so it goes that the light at the end of your tunnel is just a gleam from the RIAA's pile of gold...
Lars: Wow, those are tough questions!
Publicist: You don't have to think too hard, Lars.
RIAA lawyer: Here Lars, sniff up.
Lars: SSSNNNIIIFFF! Gosh, thanks, I feel better now.
LARS! You used to bootleg your favorite bands! I used to bootleg you! WHY DID YOU GO AND SELL OUT!?
you're unforgiven. i'm no longer a fan.
"We are prepared to move forward with the misappropriation of trade secrets claim," said Molly Smith, spokeswoman for Sony Computer Entertainment America.
This is consistent with their position in favor of banning/suing deCSS, banning/suing mp3 companies, and forcing their engineers to committ sepuku (sp?) if consumers figure out ways to use sony products in accordance with US fair use policy.
i wish they'd just stuck to the freakin walkman, myself.
They only have a windows solution right now.? jc=950031145
They've hired a mac guy.
Their job openings include "open source project manager"
http://jobs.zeroknowledge.com/jobs/jobdesc.html
you do the math.
actually they're working on a mac solution. i know because i know the guy they hired. and he's good. expect mac in under 4 months.
Of course Yahoo is going to roll over and give away user profiles - everyone does.
If you want to protect your privacy, change your isp.
www.zeroknowledge.com - the world's only encrypted anonymous ISP. There is NO WAY to trace you whatsoever. Zeroknowledge can't even trace you when you're using their servers - and you're encrypted and routed through 3 countries first. A legal nightmare.
I use zeroknowledge and I post with impunity.
They sell a total privacy solution too - complete with information on how to protect yourself from places like yahoo.
Everyone please remember to change your .sig line to the information Microsoft has asked us to remove (and remember that it comes from a public domain help manual):
"You can open self extracting archives using PKZIP25.EXE or unrar" - censored by Microsoft.
I have read the entire DMCA.
.exe file (self extracting zip). the .exe requires you to view and click through a license agreement.
IANAL, but I HAVE READ THE ENTIRE DMCA.
While they may have a point about some anonymous coward posting the entire trade secret, their complaint against posting instructions to bypass the EULA is TOTALLY WITHOUT MERIT.
"Comments Containing Instructions on How to Bypass the End User License Agreement and Extract the Specification:"
I mean, if you don't know that you can extract a self extracting zip file with pkzip, you don't read slashdot anyway. DUH. For those not up to date with the thread, what they're referring to is this:
1) Micros~1 posts a "trade secret" inside a zip file that they turn into a
2) Some user on slashdot points out that if you just unzip the file, you don't have to agree to the license.
This information is not a microsoft trade secret. As a matter of fact, it's in the PKZIP manual and help file(s)! THE INFORMATION THEY ARE REQUESTING THAT SLASHDOT REMOVE IS PUBLIC DOMAIN INFORMATION FROM THE HELP FILE OF A FREE UTILITY. IT DOCUMENTS A LEGITIMATE AND INTENDED USE OF A LONG STANDING SOFTWARE PRODUCT.
If microsoft didn't know that users didn't have to read their stupid license agreement to see that file, that's ignorance on their part, not malice on ours.
morons.
Consider the problem the napster community is facing: NetPD is crawling them with a robot and recording what they have.
Image if Napster, or GNUtella, or whichever client, had an apparatus whereby each node could pose a question before offering its list of files. Each user of each node would come up with their own question. Here's an example:
Question: How many digits are on a human hand?
Answer: 5
or
Question: What is the abbreviation for Music Television?
Answer: MTV
common sense questions like this wouldn't ever stop a human, but imagine trying to write a crawler robot that could answer questions like this 350,000 times.
i want to support music artists. i don't think that giving them 1/2 of a cent on a $17 dollar album, the other 16.99 of which goes to viacom, an international conglomerate which manufactures bands like in sync and lame content like MTV, as well as pours billions into industry gestapo firms like the RIAA - counts as supporting them. i want to buy $5 albums of which the artists get $3. I want to do it online. napster is just a way to force that change on a system that has been fucking us for so long it doesn't know how to do anything else.
(:
First of all, Napster is a distributed, peer-to-peer network. Other than the fact that nodes can come up and down pretty rapidly, and change IPs, it resembles the Web of HTTP servers in its distributed peer-to-peer nature. The napster on-the-wire protocol can surely be reverse engineered pretty easily. So what does NetPD have? Same thing altavista has.
NetPD has a "spider/crawler/robot" for napster.
They have 10 employees, so it's probably not very sophisticated. Lets assume they have a flat file entry for every node, keyed by it's IP address, containining a list of all the files on that node. Their next step is to run it against a text filter. cat flatfile | grep "master of puppets" , etc. any hits they get on metallica song names puts that entry into a "hit list".
I'm strongly of the opinion that that is the quality of the data they are presenting. There is no way in hell they have actually downloaded metallica songs from 350,000 people and run any kind of statistical or acoustic wave matching software to in fact make sure that that which is advertised as metallica actually IS. It's theoretically possible that 250,000 of those people are offering the theme to the mickey mouse show and renaming the file Metallica Album.mp3. If this ever actually gets litigated the defendants will have to pick apart this point - but of course this is a scare tactic, and never meant to go that far.
What's the solution?
So what's the next step for napster or open source peer-to-peer distributed networks? Simple. A challenge-response protocol, like the one that msgto.com runs. When you connect to a napster node, you have to pass a simple test that only a human can figure out. Change the test weekly. If you don't think this strategy can work, look at the success of other challenge response protocols such as RADIUS, and check out www.msgto.com. This will stop those damn crawlers dead in their tracks.
Or, just use a PPP pool. I mean all they claim to have is 350k IP's, they say that in their press release. So what if the user at SLIP-POOL-121.SOMESTUPIDISP.DEMON.UK ran napster some night. good luck finding out who that was!
also think about napster behind www.zeroknowledge.com. Good luck netPD! suckers.
last week: bill gates meets bill clinton at the white house.
this week: justice department leaning against MS breakup.
so the microsoft timeline is:
4 years of setup
2 weeks of takedown
+$100 million of campaign finance for gore
+$? to clinton's wallet
0$ to competitors and consumers damaged.
reminds me of the tobacco takedown:
6 years of setup
4 months of takedown
hillary clinton's brother AND trent lott's brother BOTH signed as lead attorneys for $68 million apiece 2 months before settlement
$40 billion of tobacco money to lawyers, 0$ to smokers
steve case is a smart cookie - when the setup began on intel he paid up quick and fast. the longer the setup, the bigger the takedown.
oh well, it was nice while it lasted. i almost believed in it.
Mr. Katz, before reviewing a movie, please make sure you know what the name of the movie is.
This one is called Man on the Moon
The movie you reviewed, Man in the Moon, was made in 1960. And it wasn't nearly as funny.
While reading Microsoft's history of www.microsoft.com...
Did you notice that Microsoft's picture of the first Microsoft web server ever also shows the first pioneering implementation of Microsoft's proven PTKAMRFA remote administration tool, still the only remote administration option to ship with Windows NT to this day?
(PTKAMRFA: Put The Keyboard And Monitor Really Far Away (tm) (c) )
Some linux people seem to think that telnet or ssh is superior but they're just stupid longhairs.
Welcome to 1999:
First, the web admin 403-forbids the site 10 minutes after slashdot links to it.
An hour later the server, http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/, is completely crashed.
Pinging confucius.eng.buffalo.edu [128.205.25.7] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
If you are farmiliar with Star Trek, this movie will make you laugh till you cry. I highly recommend it, it's worth the full theatre price and then some.
Of course, I really should back this up with some examples, but to do that would be to create spoilers (I can't open source the movie!). So you'll have to take this on faith.
It's a brilliantly written, brilliantly acted comedy, and the second best movie I've seen all year. go see it.