I wonder what the legal standing of this story is, documenting actions which have been done under the auspices of the Patriot Act. I'm glad Slashdot posted it, in any case.
This sort of thing sickens me, metaphorically and physically.
Basically, yes, some are good for some things; others, for other things, and this usually centers around error tolerance- of the data you want transferred, and of your connection method.
Firewire, for instance, has error-checking and error-correction built into its spec (it'd be smarter about errors than, say, WIFI). You can build in the same with other protocols but you take a bigger performance and output hit and firewire might end up as more fundamentally reliable regardless. Some protocols do better with broadcast mediums as well.
Someday perhaps we'll standardize on one wireless protocol when we've enough over-the-air bandwidth and processing power as to make tradeoffs trivial, but that day has not yet come.
First off, many P2P networks are smart enough to easily defeat this attack. Reputation tracking alone, out of several technologies already implimented to prevent this attack, is almost enough. The news here is not about the technology used, it's the patent itself.
With that said, this is then a barrier to entry for Overpeer, MediaDefender, and like companies- either they convince these folks to license this technology or they'll probably face a lawsuit (depending on whether they're infringing currently, which is probable).
So yeah, this is good news for P2P filesharing specifically, and P2P networks in general, as being a network disrupter is probably more costly because of this patent.
The courts, however, might rule that one cannot patent things such as this-- there's little-to-no qualitative difference between folks patenting this and me patenting a method for a DDOS or patenting a method used in a computer virus. Depending on the judge, they may be in for a surprise if their patent goes to court.
Some of the issues the article raises (little money to purchase home equipment for software development) hit FOSS developers harder, but the majority of the article seems really applicable to all of the African software industry, especially small-scale software developers using any software license.
Slightly misleading spin, but very interesting information.
"Retroactive price hikes... now possible under the DMCA!"
The DMCA may be a terrible, terrible thing, but it doesn't legalize *everything* a geek hates. Anything resembling a retroactive price hike would bring lawsuits and are not obviously legal under the DMCA.
Yes, it's horrendous, but no, it doesn't make things normally illegal, legal. It 'just' makes certain normally legal things illegal.
I'd recommend reading the Register's take on the story rather than the Post's: it has more facts right and doesn't have a flashing Howard Stern advert. Anyway, Steve Jobs also mentioned the issue in a recent iTunes conference call- here's what he said (credit goes to www.macrumors.com):
"But in any event, most of the albums on iTunes are priced at $9.99 and below and, no, they're not creeping up. There's always a few that are a little higher than you can go in and pull out, but they're very, very competitive and we see in the future the prices of the albums coming down, not going up, because that's what it's going to take to sell more albums and it's in everybody's best interest to do so."
So, it's definitely a label vs apple thing. Anyone know who would get the extra money from the price hike, and in what proportions?
p.s. The journalism in the Washington Post is just "great". I quote, "Apple's willingness to allow some singles to be priced higher than 99 cents indicates the company feels empowered by its current success in the download market and sees a chance to boost profits from the sales of digital music."
Where'd they get this information, you may ask? Did they perhaps pull it out of thin air? Immediately preceeding this, "Spokespersons for the major record companies declined to comment. A spokesperson for iTunes was not available for comment."
I won't say that maybe Apple isn't doing all it could on security holes- I will mention that I've never heard of a mac worm, a root exploit that's actually been carried out against a mac, and so forth. But maybe there's some sort of story about Apple being a little behind on patches occasionally.
However, with all due respect to Techworld and the author, this is really a pathetic attempt at a story. Biases half-truths, no principle of charity (regardless of Apple's good record of *actual* security exploits- not the whole story, but a major part of it) with a comparison to Windows security where somehow Microsoft comes out on top, no hard figures, a poor understanding of security as a whole, and, though it may be a low blow, not very good prose (it seems rushed- i.e. one statement is "Apple's half-hearted effort to these holes can be found here." There's really no proof (hard or soft) for any of the assertions in the article.
In conclusion, there's really really nothing to see here.
It wouldn't be a question of whether Slashdot would decide to turn over requested information to the FBI or not.
They would. I can't imagine they'd feel good about it, but anyone would in that position.
However, the *real* question is, what data could they turn over, if requested- i.e. what do they collect, and what pre-emptive measures do they take against this FBI action (for instance, they could only keep certain data for 24 hours before deleting it... or 6 hours. Or whatever).
I think the parent is a good comment. I think what it says is perfectly logical.
*However*, mainly only techies keep backups, and most musicians are not techies in the true sense of the word.
One could say that techies learn to keep backups because sometimes computers crash, but honestly I don't think it's learned thing- it's more of a personality thing. I mean, I kept backups of lots of things before I ever got into technology. It's a way of thinking.
So, before we berate the poor musical n00b who didn't keep a backup, let's hold the flames. It would have been the smart thing to do, but not everyone is born a techie (un/very)fortunately.
Lawrence Lessig has quite a convincing argument for 'freeing' spectrum- in short (and not giving it the justice it deserves- he says it better in 'The Future of Ideas'), a lack of regulation (both legal and 'structural' regulation- i.e. the internet isn't structurally regulated whereas the phone system is, being centrally regulated) worked absolute wonders for the Internet. If the internet wasn't end-to-end and open, it'd be a shadow of what it is now.
So, basically, he believes that the spectrum is a medium which could be much like the internet, given protocols and standards that allowed things to connect using it.
As something somewhat like the internet would be much more useful than something like the phone system in the long run, I think the real news here, rather than there being a US-Japan spectrum spat, is that countries are squabbling over how to miserly regulate the spectrum in the first place.
The predicted cause for this is that everything inside the IPM case is connected to the case with flexible rubber-like stuff, *except* the headphone jack (which is connected rigidly- standard practice for headphone jacks but unfortunate here).
Repeated stress on the case, then, puts stress on the headphone jack and eventually it may lead to the audio problems expressed at iPodlounge.
This should be an extremely easy fix for future IPM revisions, and I'd imagine Apple will be taking care of their customers.
As a sidenote, I had an iBook's logic board fail out of warranty due to a manufacturing flaw and I called Apple on I heard that Apple the flaw- they sent me a box, postage prepaid, in which to send my iBook back, repaired it, and sent it back to me. No money out of my pocket. Very cool.
Re:Software bug was just one part of bigger proble
on
Tracking the Blackout Bug
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I agree that there's more to this than just one line of code, as some folks seem to believe- I think referring to it as 'one bug' is rather misleading.
As well refer to the things leading up to WWII as 'one problem'.
I think this would work if one takes into account some already-implimented p2p features- mainly the ability to rate a file/thing for completeness or quality.
If someone passes bogus news, they get a bad reputation. More importantly, if someone consistently passes 'good' news, they get a good reputation and lots of folks download their news.
Like another poster suggested, news releases could be GPG-signed so that 1. Known-good news sources could be identified, and 2. Mean folks couldn't change the news the known-good folks wrote.
I get the feeling that you have two or more contradictory ideas of what Philosophy is, if you think that Philosophy is both "endless soul-searching and argument over subtle nuance" and the cause for "The greatest breakthroughs in science"--
I think you've some good thoughts but it's rather confusing- what's the main point of your comment?
You read Slashdot and don't understand how peoples' fair-use rights can be stepped on? I don't buy that. Yes, sometimes standing up for my fair-use rights sometimes makes it so others can't excersize their right to financially rape me. I'm ok with this.
I'm guessing you aren't from America and hence my example of disobedience being the only meaningful option (slavery) wasn't meaningful to you. You say people should "obey the law but proactively lobby for change"- civil disobedience *is* lobbying for change.
Anyway, like you say, we're both probably being a bit stubborn in our beliefs and this discussion might not get us anywhere. I do think, though, that situations can exist where breaking the law *is* the moral high ground (or, at least in this situation, not necessarilly the moral low ground as you've implied).
I'm not going to apologize for my morality. Perhaps you like to take whatever options corporate america (or where ever you're from) gives you, but I don't.
I suppose if you were a slave, you'd still think 'Oh, well, I guess this might suck but I don't want to break the law- anything but that!'? I'm not in that situation, but I feel my fair-use rights, which are important to me, are being stepped on in some contexts. So I will do something about it, law be damned, until it's better.
Maybe if more people took action for what they believed in (yes, even if it breaks the law- just keep it relatively benign), the world would be a better place.
Frankly, I think you're being a bit narrow-minded and pushing your morality onto others.
I disagree that "StarROM's success/demise will have any effect on the liability of people who illegally obtain copyrighted ROMs," though I get your point.
You're quite correct that StarROM is "just a distribution outlet" that "does not hold any copyrights to the ROMs".
What you seem to be missing is that the courts have shown a tendency to protect secondary markets- meaning, if this business model succeeds *there is a secondary market to be legally protected*.
Implying, of course, that the abandonware defence will no longer be as valid, and the original creator of the ROM will get basically squat (the middleman gets all the money in this). I'm all for encouraging and rewarding creators, but **This does not do that**.
Yes, I think this is bad. Yes, I buy things I think deserve buying and No, I don't buy things I use but don't think are worth my money. This also has nothing to do with this argument- thanks for nothing for your STFU PIRATE! ending remark.
"fooling humans into thinking that they are having a conversation with another human" *is* a step towards "doing [something] to produce artificial intelligence."
You say it's an illusion-- true. However, as people push the edges of the illusion, the Bot coders will be forced to more ingenious in mimicing human responses.
And as they mimic human responses better, there's a chance that they'll stumble across one of those 'intuitive leaps' you mentioned.
Thirty years from now, we'll clearly see how this helped. Now, we can only trust in the logic I outlined- and I think it's pretty solid.
As the POWER arcitecture is in reverse-ENDIAN order from the x86 arictecture, and to my knowledge, the x86 cannot switch order on the fly, I believe...
Such an emulator would necessarily be dog-slow compared to the real thing.
Comments from folks who understand more of the Arstechnica processor guides than I?
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what the legal standing of this story is, documenting actions which have been done under the auspices of the Patriot Act. I'm glad Slashdot posted it, in any case.
This sort of thing sickens me, metaphorically and physically.
RD
Basically, yes, some are good for some things; others, for other things, and this usually centers around error tolerance- of the data you want transferred, and of your connection method.
Firewire, for instance, has error-checking and error-correction built into its spec (it'd be smarter about errors than, say, WIFI). You can build in the same with other protocols but you take a bigger performance and output hit and firewire might end up as more fundamentally reliable regardless. Some protocols do better with broadcast mediums as well.
Someday perhaps we'll standardize on one wireless protocol when we've enough over-the-air bandwidth and processing power as to make tradeoffs trivial, but that day has not yet come.
RD
Such generalizations can be dangerous. I, for instance, enjoyed the story.
RD
First off, many P2P networks are smart enough to easily defeat this attack. Reputation tracking alone, out of several technologies already implimented to prevent this attack, is almost enough. The news here is not about the technology used, it's the patent itself.
With that said, this is then a barrier to entry for Overpeer, MediaDefender, and like companies- either they convince these folks to license this technology or they'll probably face a lawsuit (depending on whether they're infringing currently, which is probable).
So yeah, this is good news for P2P filesharing specifically, and P2P networks in general, as being a network disrupter is probably more costly because of this patent.
The courts, however, might rule that one cannot patent things such as this-- there's little-to-no qualitative difference between folks patenting this and me patenting a method for a DDOS or patenting a method used in a computer virus. Depending on the judge, they may be in for a surprise if their patent goes to court.
RD
Some of the issues the article raises (little money to purchase home equipment for software development) hit FOSS developers harder, but the majority of the article seems really applicable to all of the African software industry, especially small-scale software developers using any software license.
Slightly misleading spin, but very interesting information.
RD
"Retroactive price hikes... now possible under the DMCA!"
The DMCA may be a terrible, terrible thing, but it doesn't legalize *everything* a geek hates. Anything resembling a retroactive price hike would bring lawsuits and are not obviously legal under the DMCA.
Yes, it's horrendous, but no, it doesn't make things normally illegal, legal. It 'just' makes certain normally legal things illegal.
RD
I'd recommend reading the Register's take on the story rather than the Post's: it has more facts right and doesn't have a flashing Howard Stern advert. Anyway, Steve Jobs also mentioned the issue in a recent iTunes conference call- here's what he said (credit goes to www.macrumors.com):
"But in any event, most of the albums on iTunes are priced at $9.99 and below and, no, they're not creeping up. There's always a few that are a little higher than you can go in and pull out, but they're very, very competitive and we see in the future the prices of the albums coming down, not going up, because that's what it's going to take to sell more albums and it's in everybody's best interest to do so."
So, it's definitely a label vs apple thing. Anyone know who would get the extra money from the price hike, and in what proportions?
p.s. The journalism in the Washington Post is just "great". I quote,
"Apple's willingness to allow some singles to be priced higher than 99 cents indicates the company feels empowered by its current success in the download market and sees a chance to boost profits from the sales of digital music."
Where'd they get this information, you may ask? Did they perhaps pull it out of thin air? Immediately preceeding this, "Spokespersons for the major record companies declined to comment. A spokesperson for iTunes was not available for comment."
Nice.
I won't say that maybe Apple isn't doing all it could on security holes- I will mention that I've never heard of a mac worm, a root exploit that's actually been carried out against a mac, and so forth. But maybe there's some sort of story about Apple being a little behind on patches occasionally.
However, with all due respect to Techworld and the author, this is really a pathetic attempt at a story. Biases half-truths, no principle of charity (regardless of Apple's good record of *actual* security exploits- not the whole story, but a major part of it) with a comparison to Windows security where somehow Microsoft comes out on top, no hard figures, a poor understanding of security as a whole, and, though it may be a low blow, not very good prose (it seems rushed- i.e. one statement is "Apple's half-hearted effort to these holes can be found here." There's really no proof (hard or soft) for any of the assertions in the article.
In conclusion, there's really really nothing to see here.
RD
At the time of this post there were 200 comments, and 30 of them were rated +5, very few of them were +3 or +4.
Ideally moderation separates the good stuff from the bad-- and this fails just as bad if everything is rated 0 than if everything is rated +5.
I know folks might be saying a lot of good things, but try to separate the *really* good stuff from the *sort-of* good stuff with mod points.
Make the mod system work better. Create less mediocre +5s
(attached to this comment because I think it's better than +5s higher up on the page)
RD
It wouldn't be a question of whether Slashdot would decide to turn over requested information to the FBI or not.
They would. I can't imagine they'd feel good about it, but anyone would in that position.
However, the *real* question is, what data could they turn over, if requested- i.e. what do they collect, and what pre-emptive measures do they take against this FBI action (for instance, they could only keep certain data for 24 hours before deleting it... or 6 hours. Or whatever).
RD
I think the parent is a good comment. I think what it says is perfectly logical.
*However*, mainly only techies keep backups, and most musicians are not techies in the true sense of the word.
One could say that techies learn to keep backups because sometimes computers crash, but honestly I don't think it's learned thing- it's more of a personality thing. I mean, I kept backups of lots of things before I ever got into technology. It's a way of thinking.
So, before we berate the poor musical n00b who didn't keep a backup, let's hold the flames. It would have been the smart thing to do, but not everyone is born a techie (un/very)fortunately.
RD
The Russian astronaut that's going to be stuck on the space station because of the Register's unfounded skepticism is going to be pissed.
Ok.
Lawrence Lessig has quite a convincing argument for 'freeing' spectrum- in short (and not giving it the justice it deserves- he says it better in 'The Future of Ideas'), a lack of regulation (both legal and 'structural' regulation- i.e. the internet isn't structurally regulated whereas the phone system is, being centrally regulated) worked absolute wonders for the Internet. If the internet wasn't end-to-end and open, it'd be a shadow of what it is now.
So, basically, he believes that the spectrum is a medium which could be much like the internet, given protocols and standards that allowed things to connect using it.
As something somewhat like the internet would be much more useful than something like the phone system in the long run, I think the real news here, rather than there being a US-Japan spectrum spat, is that countries are squabbling over how to miserly regulate the spectrum in the first place.
RD
The predicted cause for this is that everything inside the IPM case is connected to the case with flexible rubber-like stuff, *except* the headphone jack (which is connected rigidly- standard practice for headphone jacks but unfortunate here).
Repeated stress on the case, then, puts stress on the headphone jack and eventually it may lead to the audio problems expressed at iPodlounge.
This should be an extremely easy fix for future IPM revisions, and I'd imagine Apple will be taking care of their customers.
As a sidenote, I had an iBook's logic board fail out of warranty due to a manufacturing flaw and I called Apple on I heard that Apple the flaw- they sent me a box, postage prepaid, in which to send my iBook back, repaired it, and sent it back to me. No money out of my pocket. Very cool.
I agree that there's more to this than just one line of code, as some folks seem to believe- I think referring to it as 'one bug' is rather misleading.
As well refer to the things leading up to WWII as 'one problem'.
I think this would work if one takes into account some already-implimented p2p features- mainly the ability to rate a file/thing for completeness or quality.
If someone passes bogus news, they get a bad reputation. More importantly, if someone consistently passes 'good' news, they get a good reputation and lots of folks download their news.
Like another poster suggested, news releases could be GPG-signed so that
1. Known-good news sources could be identified, and
2. Mean folks couldn't change the news the known-good folks wrote.
RD
One might say that's not terribly different than what some news organizations already do.
I get the feeling that you have two or more contradictory ideas of what Philosophy is, if you think that Philosophy is both "endless soul-searching and argument over subtle nuance" and the cause for "The greatest breakthroughs in science"--
I think you've some good thoughts but it's rather confusing- what's the main point of your comment?
RD
You read Slashdot and don't understand how peoples' fair-use rights can be stepped on? I don't buy that. Yes, sometimes standing up for my fair-use rights sometimes makes it so others can't excersize their right to financially rape me. I'm ok with this.
I'm guessing you aren't from America and hence my example of disobedience being the only meaningful option (slavery) wasn't meaningful to you. You say people should "obey the law but proactively lobby for change"- civil disobedience *is* lobbying for change.
Anyway, like you say, we're both probably being a bit stubborn in our beliefs and this discussion might not get us anywhere. I do think, though, that situations can exist where breaking the law *is* the moral high ground (or, at least in this situation, not necessarilly the moral low ground as you've implied).
Top of the day,
RD
What's it to you?
I'm not going to apologize for my morality. Perhaps you like to take whatever options corporate america (or where ever you're from) gives you, but I don't.
I suppose if you were a slave, you'd still think 'Oh, well, I guess this might suck but I don't want to break the law- anything but that!'? I'm not in that situation, but I feel my fair-use rights, which are important to me, are being stepped on in some contexts. So I will do something about it, law be damned, until it's better.
Maybe if more people took action for what they believed in (yes, even if it breaks the law- just keep it relatively benign), the world would be a better place.
Frankly, I think you're being a bit narrow-minded and pushing your morality onto others.
RD
I disagree that "StarROM's success/demise will have any effect on the liability of people who illegally obtain copyrighted ROMs," though I get your point.
You're quite correct that StarROM is "just a distribution outlet" that "does not hold any copyrights to the ROMs".
What you seem to be missing is that the courts have shown a tendency to protect secondary markets- meaning, if this business model succeeds *there is a secondary market to be legally protected*.
Implying, of course, that the abandonware defence will no longer be as valid, and the original creator of the ROM will get basically squat (the middleman gets all the money in this). I'm all for encouraging and rewarding creators, but **This does not do that**.
Yes, I think this is bad. Yes, I buy things I think deserve buying and No, I don't buy things I use but don't think are worth my money. This also has nothing to do with this argument- thanks for nothing for your STFU PIRATE! ending remark.
By implication, are folks who violate copyright by downloading various roms more legally liable if StarROMs' business model succeeds?
I'd imagine so, and I don't like it.
p.s. all STFU Pirate!!!!! replies will be ignored as missing the point.
"fooling humans into thinking that they are having a conversation with another human" *is* a step towards "doing [something] to produce artificial intelligence."
You say it's an illusion-- true. However, as people push the edges of the illusion, the Bot coders will be forced to more ingenious in mimicing human responses.
And as they mimic human responses better, there's a chance that they'll stumble across one of those 'intuitive leaps' you mentioned.
Thirty years from now, we'll clearly see how this helped. Now, we can only trust in the logic I outlined- and I think it's pretty solid.
RD
As the POWER arcitecture is in reverse-ENDIAN order from the x86 arictecture, and to my knowledge, the x86 cannot switch order on the fly, I believe...
Such an emulator would necessarily be dog-slow compared to the real thing.
Comments from folks who understand more of the Arstechnica processor guides than I?
"White Van"