You posted your comment as the "obvious solution" to:
Given the vast number of home users MS has, this would seem to make sense. Really, how many *average* home users know what ports their programs use? Further, how many of those customers will want to fight with their firewall to get things working before they get frustrated and just turn it off?
The primary problem being that users do not know what to allow and what not to allow. It doesn't matter if the software lists ports or program names, people will still permit everything. Software subterfuge in this instance means that when people permit bad activity, they will feel good about doing it.
This confusion is why in a non-managed situation such as an average user's home, outbound blocking doesn't make much sense. They simply don't know or care enough to make the right decisions. Those that do, will have the technical know how to enable outbound blocking themselves. The rest will see it as an annoyance, which may even be detrimental because it may make the term firewall synomous with "makes it not work"
The obvious solution to users clicking through popups to permit activity is not more detailed popups.
You know, if you haven't read the article why would you assume he's saying something that's impossible instead of assuming you must not be getting it?
The concept is pretty simple here. Most people who commute realize that at different times of the day there is less traffic than at other times in the day. The amount of traffic has an effect on the amount of time it takes to get from one point to another. Most people who commute say things like, well if I leave at 4:00pm it takes me 20 minutes to get home. If I leave at 5:00pm it takes me 40 minutes. If I leave at 6:00pm it takes me 30 minutes.
All this guy did was record what time he left and what time he arrived and then correlated the data across different days and different times of the year. In addition he factored in student holidays. He just did a more rigorous examination of the casual observations everyone else makes and concluded that leaving 30 minutes later than normal results in spending the least amount of time in the car.
He in no way said that a person who leaves earlier won't arrive at their destination earlier. You see, that would be stupid.
Actually a lot of DVD players do this now. They don't allow you to Fast Forward the FBI warning, some even goes as far to not allow you to hit menu or fast forward through ads on the dvd.
A link to synaptic may be great for debian and ubuntu. Other distro's require at least a little work to get apt setup.
As far as naming goes, I'd wager most people do not know what Nero is. Most of the users I work with do not. Winamp is known because it was/is enormously successful and was the best way to play mp3s for a long time.
The difference here is that there are licensed players for Windows which means that Dell will sell you a copy of PowerDVD when you buy the machine. I think there would be serious legal issues with Dell installing a linux distro that uses a non-licensed player. It may be they would address this issue by developing a licensed player before they shipped a distro. This is certainly not an insurmountable problem, I just used it as an example of something simple that Linux cannot currently do out of the box that a user is going to expect to have work.
Finally your argument does nothing to address the software shortfall, which is really the biggest hurdle for wide linux adoption.
By this statement, even Windows doesn't compete. It can't run Mac Software. And oddly enough, thats a bigger concern to most Mac users.
Where did I say Windows had to run everything (i.e. mac software?). Furthermore what software available for mac doesn't have some sort of equivalent under Windows? Finally, I said that Linux lacks alternatives to many purchasable software. I never said the mac did. Although it does for gaming.
Honestly, I got my 65 yr old mom using Linux and she can't tell the difference.
She must not play too many modern games.
For the vast majority of average users, they'd never really notice. All they want is to be able to use the computer the same way they could before.
Which if they play any games they will not be able to do. Furthermore other common programs like quicken (gnucash isn't even close) aren't available either.
If not being able to play games was an issue, Macs would never sell.
How much marketshare does Apple have in the desktop market again?
I said novices...you know people who aren't very familiar with computers and are new to linux? You can't make the argument that Linux is easy because it's all point and click...you know launching oo.org, running firefox, checking that email with evolution, etc and then have non point and click instructions to perform other basic tasks like dvd playback.
Let's look at your instructions from a novice point of view.
In gentoo: I'm already using gentoo duh... I don't see any emerge icons. A totem? Native American's made those...what does a totem have to do with DVD playback?
FC/RH: rpm? Is that like RTFM? I see you're talking about those totems again. What's livna? What do I need again?
SuSE: I did that and now it says DVD playback is disabled. In fact unless 10.1 (I haven't tried it yet) is different YaST will only install official packages, and the official xine package most certainly doesn't have dvd playback support.
Because games move consoles not the other way around. People buy consoles because games they want to play come out for that console.
How many xboxes would Microsoft sell if when you went to the game store, there was nothing but ps2 games? Similarly software moves computers. Think of Linux, Windows, and OS X like xbox, ps2, and gamecube. When you go to the software store, what platform do you see 100% of the software for?
It's not a matter of people getting upset because their computers don't run everything. People would get upset because their computers would not run anything. Consumers get it. You do not.
The key words in the parent's post are "run all software". People are going to be upset when they realize they can't use their purchased software and can't use any of the software (like say games) that is available in their software store.
There simply are not viable linux choices for all the commercially available software that people buy out there.
It's not just that either. For example, most linux distro's do not ship with the ability to play dvds since there no licensed dvd player for linux. Try it. Install a full copy of suse or redhat for a novice user and tell them to get dvd support working. See if they succeed. In the unlikely event that they do, see if they feel using Linux was worth the hassle.
Essentially if there's something you cannot do after performing a full install of a given distro, it will not be easy for a novice user to figure out. Unfortunately in a closed source world these things are many.
Just because it's in google's best interest doesn't mean its in your worst interest. I prefer targeted ads that present me with products I may want. In addition, if Google actually had the ability/inclination/resources to notify the local bar that they should stock what I want that'd be awesome.
Google using your information to better market products to you benefits both Google and you.
Re:Big Brother will know your schedule
on
Google Calendar
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· Score: 1
Oh man...yahoo has georeferenced time sensitive data (i.e. a calendar) too. They also have data based on your consumer product utilization rates (i.e. shopping)! Yahoo also can spy on all your digital person to person correspondence (i.e. groups and mail). They also have a customizable page for viewing various world events of interest reported on by media outlets (i.e. news). Not only that but through their system, where they track the minute by minute change in volume and price of modern corporate finance (i.e. stocks), they see what other companies you're interested in and sell all the data they collect to them!
Wooooo.....
You know what's fucked up? Thinking google is fucked up for providing the same free services other companies do, while thinking that calling a calendar "georeferenced, time sensitive data" is not.
Using additional words and syllables to describe a common thing does not make that thing more scary. Furthermore no one is forcing you to use google at all. If you choose to use google, you can provide them with as much or as little data as you wish. As of yet they haven't done anything real evil with the data they collect (unlike other companies which just roll over when the government asks them for something). If you are concerned, use common sense and don't use google to search for child porn, froogle to find enriched uranium, or their calendar and gmail to plan your next terrorist attack and you'll do alright.
In college in the late 90's I used to go to the movies all the time. At AMC a normal ticket was $5 and a student ticket was $3.50. The theatre started the previews at the listed movie time and 15 minutes later the movie started.
I no longer go to movies because now it currently costs me $10 at the AMC (student tickets are $9) for a ticket to go to a movie. In addition some bastard executive somewhere realized that since they have a captive audience they should show you full screen annoying ads (oh and the anti piracy ads...brilliant showing those to people who are paying). These start at the movie start time and go for 30 minutes. Then the previews start. The movie doesn't start until 45 minutes after the listed time. I'd show up later, but no one else will and you can't get a seat.
The ridiculous increase in movie prices (they've gone up a lot more than inflation has) and the ads have all but stopped me from going (I go to maybe one movie a year).
The fact of the matter is people don't like to feel cheated when they pay for something, and I'm sorry but when I pay $10 (or $3.50 for that matter) to see 45 minutes of ads for a 90 minute (this is more ads then shown on TV for pete's sake) movie I feel cheated and annoyed. The sad thing is it won't be long before I'm "old" and younger people going to the movies won't even realize that there was time when they didn't crap all over you with ads and waste your time because they realize you're a captive audience.
If you're using Windows, download and install PDFCreator. It'll let you print as PDF from any application ala Acrobat, but free. If you're talking about a scriptable way of doing this, use html2ps and then run ps2pdf from the ghostscript package.
Right, because the user is going to make informed decisions and choose not to run the thing after clicking through a million of these popups everytime they've installed something in the past.
I agree extensions should be shown, and I agree users should by default have non privileged accounts.
However, forcing the user to click through popups and having them add specific permissions to each executable is not the solution. I don't claim to know what the solution is, but I do know that popups and security warnings simply do not work. Only people who know what they are doing know what they mean. Unfortunately this is the same group of people who do not need them.
Maybe we could start with hardware/software that doesn't permit exploitable buffer overflows (we've got that now, we should be using it). In addition Microsoft should not allow untrusted data to be available to the inner workings of the OS via Internet Explorer.
Nothing is going to keep people from running stuff they shouldn't run. However, we can at least attempt to cut down on the things that run as a result of crappy code. Stupid things like the WMF vulnerability and buffer overflows should not even be problems anymore.
Actually I believe Windows is a bit more difficult.
Under Linux you'll be pretty safe if you use the default firewall settings on an install and run your package updater after install and set it to auto update.
Under Windows you have to do the above, and then try to manipulate it into allowing you to run as a non admin user (something it doesn't do by default). In fact locking down Windows in this manner is a bit of a pain, and it's even more of a pain when you want to install something or run stupid software that, due to the Windows defaults, expects administrator access.
Measuring security is diffucult but I can't help thinking the Linux community is becoming a bit complacent about security.
I don't see this at all. As far as I can tell, major security problems in Linux seem to get fixed a lot faster than ones in Windows. In addition we have a much better firewall than what comes with Windows. We have stuff like SELinux if you really want to lock stuff down, and much better software raid support if you want to protect your data.
I doubt the RIAA is spending significant efforts to deal with a single file on a given shared drive. I imagine they are after the shitloads of pirate bootlegs on P2P systems designed to trade shitloads of movies and music. Putting a load of ripped movies or stack of albums up and making it available to a huge number of people on the Internet is the issue. Creating a fake scenario where "one file was on your PC within your house so you could access it from downstairs" is a strawman argument and rather tired.
It's not just one file, but my entire music collection. I have no idea what the RIAA is going to spend significant efforts on and frankly it doesn't matter. Simply having copyrighted material in a shared folder online where no one copied it should not be a punishable offense.
No, having a camera is not shoplifting. I can agree with the obvious. Sneaking a video camera into a theater is a crime in some places (and prosecuted most places) because, like the P2P upload directory, there is no other reasonable purpose for it. I find it personally annoying to think I'd have to hide a camcorder and risk getting hassled if I were to decide to watch a movie on a day that I happened to be using one, but I'm not too retarded to understand why theaters are getting painfully strict about it, given how little respect bootleggers demonstrate by throwing movies up the day they come out.
Where is taking a camcorder into a theater a crime? In many places it is illegal to film the movie, and yes the theater may kick you out if you try to bring in a camera (kinda like if you try to sneak food in). Bringing in a camera or food for that matter, however, is in most places if not all legal.
Yeah actually you are; look up liability. Or leave your keys in your car and learn to hate cops after you get a ticket when reporting it stolen. Actions taken by somebody after stealing your car are wholly unrelated.
I looked this up. This mostly refers to people who leave their car idling and go inside somewhere, didn't find much about people who leave the keys in the car say overnight or something. In most cases you'll pay impound and towing fees, some places may give you a ticket. The fines in most cases seemed pretty low. Not that big of a deal, and a very minor crime at most.
My original comment didn't mention leaving the keys in the car though (which can be dangerous). It was about leaving your door unlocked. I'm not sure where you live, but I know that's not a crime in any place I've ever lived nor should it be.
That's because you are one of those people who can only understand the theft of media, and your own IP, but not the IP of anyone else. If you burned a pirate collection of music to a CD-R and designed fancy liner notes for it as a gift, and somebody stole the CD-R from you, and copied the liner notes you created to mass distribute it, I bet you'd be unhappy about both the CD going missing and that somebody ripped off your ideas.
What you can't seem to understand is that I'm not advocating theft of IP. You seem to think it should be a crime for someone to leave copyrighted material on an open share regardless of whether anyone copied it and without regard to whether or not the user was attempting to distribute it. It's not that black and white.
In order to get someone for copyright infringement you should have to prove that the person was intentionally making that content available for the purpose of distribution or that they knew the material was being copied and did nothing, or that the person had unlicensed material in their possession.
It should not be enough that the material was just there. This is what the article is discussing and where I disagree with the RIAA and apparently you.
A Windows box's C$ share with a blank admin password and Internet access... Bullshit. Such a machine would be committing so much crime in the area of spam/phishing/virus distribution that the RIAA probably won't be your biggest problem.
Machines don't commit crimes...um...there are tons of these shall we say unsecured machines out there.
Copyright infringement does do harm. Is it okay to steal from Walmart? If so, then we can agree to disagree. I've copied stuff, I jaywalk, I speed, and I've defrauded Walmart before, but that does not make them not wrong or not prosecutable, even if they are fairly minor things that didn't kill anybody.
Putting a file on a shared drive is not copyright infringement. Putting one there with intent to distribute maybe, but simply putting it there is not.
Fair use outweighs practical ability of anyone to commit a crime.
Fair use says I can put a copy of a music file on shared drive so that I can access it from another computer in my house...or at my office. You are assuming that because I have a file on a shared drive, it is my intent to commit a crime. That is an assumption we should not be making.
It is. Same as one could be prosecuted for putting clothes in your handbag at a clothing store.
No it is illegal to film a movie, not to possess a camera. Having a camera with me is not the same as putting clothes in a handbag at the store. It is sad you can't tell the difference.
In some places you can be charged with leaving your keys in your car (after your car is stolen, bummer!), because you are actively being irresponsible and facilitating a crime, even if it was only because you are exercising poor judgement. It makes more work for the cops. Hardly connected to the issue at hand tho.
If I leave my keys in the car I am not facilitating a crime. Now if a kid comes along, drives off in the car, and hits someone or something that is a crime and is also a different matter.
To tie in the RIAA argument, if you had reams of printed IP that didn't belong to you, and you left it laying in piles on your yard, and were publishing new copies as fast as people could come by and take copies, well, you'd be distributing content that didn't belong to you, wouldn't you?
No, not if I didn't intend for people to take the piles and treated people who came on my yard as a trespassers as soon as I found out they were there. I would instead say people were -stealing- my piles of paper with printed IP on it.
And what argument is there to support distributing content that is not yours to distribute? Is it hard to discern the difference between putting bootleg stuff in a shared folder, and having a shared folder? Or serving up stuff that is not bootleg? Jesus what idiocy!
Simply putting something in a shared folder is not distribution. Someone has to copy it first. Windows by default comes with all of your drives shared. Is it that inconceivable that someone could have a blank admin password and no firewall? Do you really think that should be a crime?
Your previous arguments (kiddy porn, B&E, pointing a gun at someone) all involve things that in most cases harm people. Try these arguments instead:
Should it be illegal to have photocopiers in libraries? Should it be illegal to install Microsoft Office using a cd burner? Should it be illegal to posess a video camera at a movie screening? Should it be illegal to leave your door unlocked? What about doing so and leaving a sign that says your door is unlocked? Should it be illegal for stores to leave stuff out where shoplifters can get at it?
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You posted your comment as the "obvious solution" to:
Given the vast number of home users MS has, this would seem to make sense. Really, how many *average* home users know what ports their programs use? Further, how many of those customers will want to fight with their firewall to get things working before they get frustrated and just turn it off?
The primary problem being that users do not know what to allow and what not to allow. It doesn't matter if the software lists ports or program names, people will still permit everything. Software subterfuge in this instance means that when people permit bad activity, they will feel good about doing it.
This confusion is why in a non-managed situation such as an average user's home, outbound blocking doesn't make much sense. They simply don't know or care enough to make the right decisions. Those that do, will have the technical know how to enable outbound blocking themselves. The rest will see it as an annoyance, which may even be detrimental because it may make the term firewall synomous with "makes it not work"
The obvious solution to users clicking through popups to permit activity is not more detailed popups.
Norton does that now. How does this change anything? There's no rule that says software can't use its name to lie about its purpose.
True, but the feature requested was "deny only once". I do not believe Norton does that, and I could see some potential uses for that feature.
You know, if you haven't read the article why would you assume he's saying something that's impossible instead of assuming you must not be getting it?
The concept is pretty simple here. Most people who commute realize that at different times of the day there is less traffic than at other times in the day. The amount of traffic has an effect on the amount of time it takes to get from one point to another. Most people who commute say things like, well if I leave at 4:00pm it takes me 20 minutes to get home. If I leave at 5:00pm it takes me 40 minutes. If I leave at 6:00pm it takes me 30 minutes.
All this guy did was record what time he left and what time he arrived and then correlated the data across different days and different times of the year. In addition he factored in student holidays. He just did a more rigorous examination of the casual observations everyone else makes and concluded that leaving 30 minutes later than normal results in spending the least amount of time in the car.
He in no way said that a person who leaves earlier won't arrive at their destination earlier. You see, that would be stupid.
Actually a lot of DVD players do this now. They don't allow you to Fast Forward the FBI warning, some even goes as far to not allow you to hit menu or fast forward through ads on the dvd.
A link to synaptic may be great for debian and ubuntu. Other distro's require at least a little work to get apt setup.
As far as naming goes, I'd wager most people do not know what Nero is. Most of the users I work with do not. Winamp is known because it was/is enormously successful and was the best way to play mp3s for a long time.
The difference here is that there are licensed players for Windows which means that Dell will sell you a copy of PowerDVD when you buy the machine. I think there would be serious legal issues with Dell installing a linux distro that uses a non-licensed player. It may be they would address this issue by developing a licensed player before they shipped a distro. This is certainly not an insurmountable problem, I just used it as an example of something simple that Linux cannot currently do out of the box that a user is going to expect to have work.
Finally your argument does nothing to address the software shortfall, which is really the biggest hurdle for wide linux adoption.
By this statement, even Windows doesn't compete. It can't run Mac Software. And oddly enough, thats a bigger concern to most Mac users.
Where did I say Windows had to run everything (i.e. mac software?). Furthermore what software available for mac doesn't have some sort of equivalent under Windows? Finally, I said that Linux lacks alternatives to many purchasable software. I never said the mac did. Although it does for gaming.
Honestly, I got my 65 yr old mom using Linux and she can't tell the difference.
She must not play too many modern games.
For the vast majority of average users, they'd never really notice. All they want is to be able to use the computer the same way they could before.
Which if they play any games they will not be able to do. Furthermore other common programs like quicken (gnucash isn't even close) aren't available either.
If not being able to play games was an issue, Macs would never sell.
How much marketshare does Apple have in the desktop market again?
Thanks genius.
I said novices...you know people who aren't very familiar with computers and are new to linux? You can't make the argument that Linux is easy because it's all point and click...you know launching oo.org, running firefox, checking that email with evolution, etc and then have non point and click instructions to perform other basic tasks like dvd playback.
Let's look at your instructions from a novice point of view.
In gentoo:
I'm already using gentoo duh... I don't see any emerge icons. A totem? Native American's made those...what does a totem have to do with DVD playback?
FC/RH:
rpm? Is that like RTFM? I see you're talking about those totems again. What's livna? What do I need again?
SuSE:
I did that and now it says DVD playback is disabled. In fact unless 10.1 (I haven't tried it yet) is different YaST will only install official packages, and the official xine package most certainly doesn't have dvd playback support.
Didn't see that. You're wrong though. Games are not a niche market.
t ory=7563
For example:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?s
5 million subscribers, and that's just a single game. I think more people game than you realize.
Because games move consoles not the other way around. People buy consoles because games they want to play come out for that console.
How many xboxes would Microsoft sell if when you went to the game store, there was nothing but ps2 games? Similarly software moves computers. Think of Linux, Windows, and OS X like xbox, ps2, and gamecube. When you go to the software store, what platform do you see 100% of the software for?
It's not a matter of people getting upset because their computers don't run everything. People would get upset because their computers would not run anything. Consumers get it. You do not.
You're missing gaming from your list. While there are games for the mac, there are a lot for the pc.
The key words in the parent's post are "run all software". People are going to be upset when they realize they can't use their purchased software and can't use any of the software (like say games) that is available in their software store.
There simply are not viable linux choices for all the commercially available software that people buy out there.
It's not just that either. For example, most linux distro's do not ship with the ability to play dvds since there no licensed dvd player for linux. Try it. Install a full copy of suse or redhat for a novice user and tell them to get dvd support working. See if they succeed. In the unlikely event that they do, see if they feel using Linux was worth the hassle.
Essentially if there's something you cannot do after performing a full install of a given distro, it will not be easy for a novice user to figure out. Unfortunately in a closed source world these things are many.
Just because it's in google's best interest doesn't mean its in your worst interest. I prefer targeted ads that present me with products I may want. In addition, if Google actually had the ability/inclination/resources to notify the local bar that they should stock what I want that'd be awesome.
Google using your information to better market products to you benefits both Google and you.
Oh man...yahoo has georeferenced time sensitive data (i.e. a calendar) too. They also have data based on your consumer product utilization rates (i.e. shopping)! Yahoo also can spy on all your digital person to person correspondence (i.e. groups and mail). They also have a customizable page for viewing various world events of interest reported on by media outlets (i.e. news). Not only that but through their system, where they track the minute by minute change in volume and price of modern corporate finance (i.e. stocks), they see what other companies you're interested in and sell all the data they collect to them!
Wooooo.....
You know what's fucked up? Thinking google is fucked up for providing the same free services other companies do, while thinking that calling a calendar "georeferenced, time sensitive data" is not.
Using additional words and syllables to describe a common thing does not make that thing more scary. Furthermore no one is forcing you to use google at all. If you choose to use google, you can provide them with as much or as little data as you wish. As of yet they haven't done anything real evil with the data they collect (unlike other companies which just roll over when the government asks them for something). If you are concerned, use common sense and don't use google to search for child porn, froogle to find enriched uranium, or their calendar and gmail to plan your next terrorist attack and you'll do alright.
Even worse, the paper indicates that the people know some of them will be fake.
The sample chapter does not. I'm not sure if that means the eBook doesn't, but I'd be inclined to think it doesn't from the sample.
6. The movie theatre experience sucks.
In college in the late 90's I used to go to the movies all the time. At AMC a normal ticket was $5 and a student ticket was $3.50. The theatre started the previews at the listed movie time and 15 minutes later the movie started.
I no longer go to movies because now it currently costs me $10 at the AMC (student tickets are $9) for a ticket to go to a movie. In addition some bastard executive somewhere realized that since they have a captive audience they should show you full screen annoying ads (oh and the anti piracy ads...brilliant showing those to people who are paying). These start at the movie start time and go for 30 minutes. Then the previews start. The movie doesn't start until 45 minutes after the listed time. I'd show up later, but no one else will and you can't get a seat.
The ridiculous increase in movie prices (they've gone up a lot more than inflation has) and the ads have all but stopped me from going (I go to maybe one movie a year).
The fact of the matter is people don't like to feel cheated when they pay for something, and I'm sorry but when I pay $10 (or $3.50 for that matter) to see 45 minutes of ads for a 90 minute (this is more ads then shown on TV for pete's sake) movie I feel cheated and annoyed. The sad thing is it won't be long before I'm "old" and younger people going to the movies won't even realize that there was time when they didn't crap all over you with ads and waste your time because they realize you're a captive audience.
If you're using Windows, download and install PDFCreator. It'll let you print as PDF from any application ala Acrobat, but free. If you're talking about a scriptable way of doing this, use html2ps and then run ps2pdf from the ghostscript package.
Well I don't know. According to the MPAA and the RIAA, we have more piracy and probably more pirates than every before.
Right, because the user is going to make informed decisions and choose not to run the thing after clicking through a million of these popups everytime they've installed something in the past.
I agree extensions should be shown, and I agree users should by default have non privileged accounts.
However, forcing the user to click through popups and having them add specific permissions to each executable is not the solution. I don't claim to know what the solution is, but I do know that popups and security warnings simply do not work. Only people who know what they are doing know what they mean. Unfortunately this is the same group of people who do not need them.
Maybe we could start with hardware/software that doesn't permit exploitable buffer overflows (we've got that now, we should be using it). In addition Microsoft should not allow untrusted data to be available to the inner workings of the OS via Internet Explorer.
Nothing is going to keep people from running stuff they shouldn't run. However, we can at least attempt to cut down on the things that run as a result of crappy code. Stupid things like the WMF vulnerability and buffer overflows should not even be problems anymore.
Actually I believe Windows is a bit more difficult.
Under Linux you'll be pretty safe if you use the default firewall settings on an install and run your package updater after install and set it to auto update.
Under Windows you have to do the above, and then try to manipulate it into allowing you to run as a non admin user (something it doesn't do by default). In fact locking down Windows in this manner is a bit of a pain, and it's even more of a pain when you want to install something or run stupid software that, due to the Windows defaults, expects administrator access.
Measuring security is diffucult but I can't help thinking the Linux community is becoming a bit complacent about security.
I don't see this at all. As far as I can tell, major security problems in Linux seem to get fixed a lot faster than ones in Windows. In addition we have a much better firewall than what comes with Windows. We have stuff like SELinux if you really want to lock stuff down, and much better software raid support if you want to protect your data.
I doubt the RIAA is spending significant efforts to deal with a single file on a given shared drive. I imagine they are after the shitloads of pirate bootlegs on P2P systems designed to trade shitloads of movies and music. Putting a load of ripped movies or stack of albums up and making it available to a huge number of people on the Internet is the issue. Creating a fake scenario where "one file was on your PC within your house so you could access it from downstairs" is a strawman argument and rather tired.
It's not just one file, but my entire music collection. I have no idea what the RIAA is going to spend significant efforts on and frankly it doesn't matter. Simply having copyrighted material in a shared folder online where no one copied it should not be a punishable offense.
No, having a camera is not shoplifting. I can agree with the obvious. Sneaking a video camera into a theater is a crime in some places (and prosecuted most places) because, like the P2P upload directory, there is no other reasonable purpose for it. I find it personally annoying to think I'd have to hide a camcorder and risk getting hassled if I were to decide to watch a movie on a day that I happened to be using one, but I'm not too retarded to understand why theaters are getting painfully strict about it, given how little respect bootleggers demonstrate by throwing movies up the day they come out.
Where is taking a camcorder into a theater a crime? In many places it is illegal to film the movie, and yes the theater may kick you out if you try to bring in a camera (kinda like if you try to sneak food in). Bringing in a camera or food for that matter, however, is in most places if not all legal.
Yeah actually you are; look up liability. Or leave your keys in your car and learn to hate cops after you get a ticket when reporting it stolen. Actions taken by somebody after stealing your car are wholly unrelated.
I looked this up. This mostly refers to people who leave their car idling and go inside somewhere, didn't find much about people who leave the keys in the car say overnight or something. In most cases you'll pay impound and towing fees, some places may give you a ticket. The fines in most cases seemed pretty low. Not that big of a deal, and a very minor crime at most.
My original comment didn't mention leaving the keys in the car though (which can be dangerous). It was about leaving your door unlocked. I'm not sure where you live, but I know that's not a crime in any place I've ever lived nor should it be.
That's because you are one of those people who can only understand the theft of media, and your own IP, but not the IP of anyone else. If you burned a pirate collection of music to a CD-R and designed fancy liner notes for it as a gift, and somebody stole the CD-R from you, and copied the liner notes you created to mass distribute it, I bet you'd be unhappy about both the CD going missing and that somebody ripped off your ideas.
What you can't seem to understand is that I'm not advocating theft of IP. You seem to think it should be a crime for someone to leave copyrighted material on an open share regardless of whether anyone copied it and without regard to whether or not the user was attempting to distribute it. It's not that black and white.
In order to get someone for copyright infringement you should have to prove that the person was intentionally making that content available for the purpose of distribution or that they knew the material was being copied and did nothing, or that the person had unlicensed material in their possession.
It should not be enough that the material was just there. This is what the article is discussing and where I disagree with the RIAA and apparently you.
A Windows box's C$ share with a blank admin password and Internet access... Bullshit. Such a machine would be committing so much crime in the area of spam/phishing/virus distribution that the RIAA probably won't be your biggest problem.
Machines don't commit crimes...um...there are tons of these shall we say unsecured machines out there.
Copyright infringement does do harm. Is it okay to steal from Walmart? If so, then we can agree to disagree. I've copied stuff, I jaywalk, I speed, and I've defrauded Walmart before, but that does not make them not wrong or not prosecutable, even if they are fairly minor things that didn't kill anybody.
Putting a file on a shared drive is not copyright infringement. Putting one there with intent to distribute maybe, but simply putting it there is not.
Fair use outweighs practical ability of anyone to commit a crime.
Fair use says I can put a copy of a music file on shared drive so that I can access it from another computer in my house...or at my office. You are assuming that because I have a file on a shared drive, it is my intent to commit a crime. That is an assumption we should not be making.
It is. Same as one could be prosecuted for putting clothes in your handbag at a clothing store.
No it is illegal to film a movie, not to possess a camera. Having a camera with me is not the same as putting clothes in a handbag at the store. It is sad you can't tell the difference.
In some places you can be charged with leaving your keys in your car (after your car is stolen, bummer!), because you are actively being irresponsible and facilitating a crime, even if it was only because you are exercising poor judgement. It makes more work for the cops. Hardly connected to the issue at hand tho.
If I leave my keys in the car I am not facilitating a crime. Now if a kid comes along, drives off in the car, and hits someone or something that is a crime and is also a different matter.
To tie in the RIAA argument, if you had reams of printed IP that didn't belong to you, and you left it laying in piles on your yard, and were publishing new copies as fast as people could come by and take copies, well, you'd be distributing content that didn't belong to you, wouldn't you?
No, not if I didn't intend for people to take the piles and treated people who came on my yard as a trespassers as soon as I found out they were there. I would instead say people were -stealing- my piles of paper with printed IP on it.
You assume the file in question is a copy of the original media, what if it is the original media?
And what argument is there to support distributing content that is not yours to distribute? Is it hard to discern the difference between putting bootleg stuff in a shared folder, and having a shared folder? Or serving up stuff that is not bootleg? Jesus what idiocy!
Simply putting something in a shared folder is not distribution. Someone has to copy it first. Windows by default comes with all of your drives shared. Is it that inconceivable that someone could have a blank admin password and no firewall? Do you really think that should be a crime?
Your previous arguments (kiddy porn, B&E, pointing a gun at someone) all involve things that in most cases harm people. Try these arguments instead:
Should it be illegal to have photocopiers in libraries?
Should it be illegal to install Microsoft Office using a cd burner?
Should it be illegal to posess a video camera at a movie screening?
Should it be illegal to leave your door unlocked? What about doing so and leaving a sign that says your door is unlocked?
Should it be illegal for stores to leave stuff out where shoplifters can get at it?