Perhaps they could, I've no idea. Perhaps disabling the service screws with something else, as a poster above me suggests, in which case this sounds reminiscent of Win9x supposedly being designed around Internet Explorer.
It raises a vaguely interesting question of how modular an OS should be. I don't suppose many people would argue that the Windows file system should be replaceable with GoogleFS, but indexing sounds less integral than that.
Basically, I have food poisoning, no sleep and no real clue what my own point is, so if anyone can squeeze any meaning of my comments please let me know what it is. Ta.
My understanding is that Google want MS to provide a way for the average user to turn off the MS indexing, to avoid unnecessarily consuming resources by running search engines from both Google and MS side by side. By 'average user' they mean someone who isn't familiar with tinkering around in the services widget.
Behind every Marketing person with an idea, there is a programmer that has to implement it.
Behind every Marketing person with an idea there's a project manager gritting his teeth, pulling on his knuckledusters and preparing equal doses of coffee and sedatives for the programmers. And he's probably speed-reading the old classic: "No, We're Not Going to Rewrite our Corporate Website Entirely in Flash, Because it's a Stupid Fucking Idea and You're Retarded For Suggesting it. Again."
An IT technician, with a grudge, working at the *AA? Or maybe someone realised that they made a mistake in the investigative process and don't want to admit it? Or perhaps an overly enthusiastic 'bounty hunter' was involved, if such people in TFA really do exist. In any event, as far as I'm aware the typical ISP log will show, at best, that they were able to transfer packets of data between my computer and theirs. I doubt that any ISP will be logging the packets themselves.
It appears to come down to "You can trust us - why would we make this up?" Well, for the reasons above, off the top of my head, and probably for lots of better ones too. I do accept your point, but I'm not seeing any reason why their testimony should be granted the same weight as that of a law enforcement agency.
The RIAA waves a piece of paper and says "Look, at 11:28 on March 23rd 2007 Zaphod was making 'Stairway to Heaven' available for downloading on the Bittorrent network".
Zaphod: "Err, no, I wasn't."
RIAA: "Yes you did, we have a piece of paper!"
Zaphod: "Give me ten seconds and I can show you a piece of paper saying anything you like."
RIAA: "We have database logs and screenshots!"
Zaphod: "Give me five minutes with a computer and I'll show you database logs and screenshots of anything you like."
RIAA: "We have bizarrely detailed logs from your ISP showing that we downloaded a file from your computer at 11:29 on March 23rd 2007!."
Zaphod: "Yes, it was a picture of me buggering your mother."
RIAA: "..."
Really, I don't understand why the *AA's 'evidence' in these matters is relevant, let alone compelling. Do they have some sort of infallible tool for proving exactly what files Zaphod had on his computer?
It's a very strange point altogether. For any subject X, some company is going to have more information about X than any other company in the world. It's inevitable, unless you somehow manage to enforce some sort of weird inter-company information-sharing law.
The following is a question I posted to another forum after reading this article. It's a genuine dilemma I've been pondering for a while now. I fully expect to get boiled alive for even asking the question, but any input will be appreciated.
-----
You may be aware that the UK leads the world with a billion CCTV cameras on every street corner. Various countries are pondering the adoption of mandatory ID cards. I've just been reading a Slashdot article about Microsoft's proposal to identify users from their browsing history. People have suggested a comprehensive crime-fighting fingerprint database.
I'm opposed to these things. The problem is that I'm having trouble explaining to myself why, precisely, it's a bad thing to have Big Brother watching me. And basing my opinion on a vague premonition of dread is pissing me off.
Whenever a measure such as those above is suggested, newspaper articles will invariably mention objections from civil liberties campaigners. I like civil liberties and am inclined to instinctively agree with those who campaign for them. But comments like "If you're not doing anything wrong, why do you care?" are simultaneously smug, irritating and difficult to torpedo convincingly. Three arguments spring to mind:
1) The government shouldn't know any more about you than it absolutely needs to.
I agree with that. The problem is that it seems reasonable to assume that an extreme surveillance society which logs the activity of you, your car, your browsing, your shopping, your library borrowing, your finances and everything else would have an easier time of it in identifying criminals. Does that constitute a reasonable need, and why or why not? This argument is rather abstract and arbitrary for my comfort.
2) Unscrupulous government officials could abuse the information.
Hard to argue with that one, and no doubt abuses would occur, but it seems paranoid to reject the whole deal on those grounds given the cost/benefit ratio.
3) It wouldn't work properly, would be insecure, and would be a colossal waste of money.
I agree, given the UK's track record in large IT projects, but that's an implementation problem rather than a philosophical objection.
Can anyone give me any other specific, compelling argument against the surveillance society which doesn't rely on an axiom that it's an inherently bad thing? Because this is annoying the hell out of me.
I've no idea what your financial position is. You could most likely get a job teaching whatever subject you fancy, though that may be impractical without a good chunk of cash set aside.
Or perhaps try a different area of IT? Move into or out of project management, business analysis, development, pre-sales, testing (well, you never know), technical authoring. Or perhaps change the environment: if you're used to working in huge companies try a small start-up or niche software house.
It expects profits for the year to fall short about ten cents, hitting a high of $1.20 as opposed to the expected $1.31.
Even I manage to make more than $1.31 profit in a year. They're clearly just not trying. On the positive side, perhaps they can make up the difference with a quick hoover down the back of the sofa.
It may be worth a shot. Make it $500k and spend the revenue on teaching people to look in the bottom-left corner of their browser to check that '.bank' is at the end of the URL.
Better yet, make it $5m. Well, why not? It's a negligible amount of money to all but the tiniest banks, and vanishingly small when compared to the cost of phishing attacks. May not be much use to your local small-town bank, if such a thing still exists, but I doubt that they're going to be a major target of international fraudsters anyway.
Of course it's not fool-proof, but that doesn't mean that the idea is worthless.
...doesn't sound very bright. Or, more likely, they're perfectly bright and it's me that's stupid. Given that they have no grounds on which to sue anyone and that they're no doubt perfectly aware of that, what's the plan?
I would assume that it's a move to appease an outraged populace, except that the populace don't appear to be too outraged and the government's going to look rather foolish and impotent when they fail to accomplish anything.
...but is there something a bit mental about Utah politicians? They seem to crop up in the headlines doing all sorts of demented crap. Do they put lead in the water supply down there?
One of the ideas they've trotted out is that of PC and XBox gamers competing. I'm not sure how that's going to work, as the average keyboard/mouse player will have a massive advantage over the average console player. I can imagine some sort of horrible handicapping system for the PC players, which doesn't sound like fun.
I think the problem is that most news tends to be either neutral or bad. There's not much value in "ten people didn't die today when a minibus didn't fly off the road into a crowd of cheerleaders". I think, as well, that the bad news has more of an impact: I reckon that the average negative story is more depressing than a positive story is uplifting.
On a related note, this story reminds me (albeit on a rather more significant scale) of the time my boss asked me to evaluate a shitty bit of workflow software. When I handed him my report he suggested that I should include more positive points to make it 'balanced'. When I explained that the software didn't actually have anything at all going for it and that my report was therefore 100% balanced, I was told to include some positives anyway.
I'd like to know how many of these events are committed with firearms purchased within a few days of the shooting. While I understand the reasonable motives for wanting to own a gun, I can't think of any non-scary reason why someone would need one right now.
No, really. I modified Shareaza to log all incoming requests to a database. I can show you a table containing audit records with any arbitrary IP address and file name you like.
The RIAA would most likely deny any such thing and claim that I just typed any old shit into my database table. Which is fine, and accurate, but they'd better not then turn around and say that their own 'evidence' holds any more weight than mine. Same goes for any other industry body or publisher out there.
The monthly fee is to perform a search of what people have been saying about you. If you find something you don't like you can ask them to perform a 'destroy' on that particular item, which incurs an additional fee of $29.95.
You pay the $29.95 to Reputation Defender even if they fail to remove the item. Legal avenues "may" incur a further fee. I expect that their business model is to harvest lots of monthly payments from paranoid people and supplement them with overpriced one-off fees for intimidating web site owners.
the laws they are taking about are to protect a man who wanted to emulate the West as much as possible
One of those laws being that we in the west are free to criticise and ridicule individuals as we see fit. No doubt the man in question would be the first to insist that no law should be enacted to protect him from such criticism.
I don't see it being a problem, though I cheerfully admit to ignorance of European trading law. If Apple UK sells you a song you're presumably buying it from the UK, irrespective of your physical location. Here's how I see it:
Apple UK will sell certain songs to anyone in Europe, with availability and price set according to contracts negotiated for the UK market. Apple Germany will sell certain songs to anyone in Europe, with availability and price set according to contracts negotiated for the German market. Apple Italy will sell...etc.
The labels might not like the fact that some EU citizens are buying outside their home market, but I don't see what they can do about it. Refuse to give anyone a licence to sell their music? I don't see that working for very long, though as far as I'm concerned they're welcome to give it a shot.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps they could, I've no idea. Perhaps disabling the service screws with something else, as a poster above me suggests, in which case this sounds reminiscent of Win9x supposedly being designed around Internet Explorer.
It raises a vaguely interesting question of how modular an OS should be. I don't suppose many people would argue that the Windows file system should be replaceable with GoogleFS, but indexing sounds less integral than that.
Basically, I have food poisoning, no sleep and no real clue what my own point is, so if anyone can squeeze any meaning of my comments please let me know what it is. Ta.
My understanding is that Google want MS to provide a way for the average user to turn off the MS indexing, to avoid unnecessarily consuming resources by running search engines from both Google and MS side by side. By 'average user' they mean someone who isn't familiar with tinkering around in the services widget.
Behind every Marketing person with an idea, there is a programmer that has to implement it.
Behind every Marketing person with an idea there's a project manager gritting his teeth, pulling on his knuckledusters and preparing equal doses of coffee and sedatives for the programmers. And he's probably speed-reading the old classic: "No, We're Not Going to Rewrite our Corporate Website Entirely in Flash, Because it's a Stupid Fucking Idea and You're Retarded For Suggesting it. Again."
According to the article, Flash is used for video footage because it compresses well and their outbound bandwidth is tiny.
There may be better ways of doing it, and I'm not sure why the whole site has to be Flash, but the decision wasn't completely arbitrary.
An IT technician, with a grudge, working at the *AA? Or maybe someone realised that they made a mistake in the investigative process and don't want to admit it? Or perhaps an overly enthusiastic 'bounty hunter' was involved, if such people in TFA really do exist. In any event, as far as I'm aware the typical ISP log will show, at best, that they were able to transfer packets of data between my computer and theirs. I doubt that any ISP will be logging the packets themselves.
It appears to come down to "You can trust us - why would we make this up?" Well, for the reasons above, off the top of my head, and probably for lots of better ones too. I do accept your point, but I'm not seeing any reason why their testimony should be granted the same weight as that of a law enforcement agency.
I don't really get it.
The RIAA waves a piece of paper and says "Look, at 11:28 on March 23rd 2007 Zaphod was making 'Stairway to Heaven' available for downloading on the Bittorrent network".
Zaphod: "Err, no, I wasn't."
RIAA: "Yes you did, we have a piece of paper!"
Zaphod: "Give me ten seconds and I can show you a piece of paper saying anything you like."
RIAA: "We have database logs and screenshots!"
Zaphod: "Give me five minutes with a computer and I'll show you database logs and screenshots of anything you like."
RIAA: "We have bizarrely detailed logs from your ISP showing that we downloaded a file from your computer at 11:29 on March 23rd 2007!."
Zaphod: "Yes, it was a picture of me buggering your mother."
RIAA: "..."
Really, I don't understand why the *AA's 'evidence' in these matters is relevant, let alone compelling. Do they have some sort of infallible tool for proving exactly what files Zaphod had on his computer?
I have nothing useful to add; just wanted to say in lieu of mod points that your post cracked me up. Well played, that man.
It's a very strange point altogether. For any subject X, some company is going to have more information about X than any other company in the world. It's inevitable, unless you somehow manage to enforce some sort of weird inter-company information-sharing law.
The following is a question I posted to another forum after reading this article. It's a genuine dilemma I've been pondering for a while now. I fully expect to get boiled alive for even asking the question, but any input will be appreciated.
-----
You may be aware that the UK leads the world with a billion CCTV cameras on every street corner. Various countries are pondering the adoption of mandatory ID cards. I've just been reading a Slashdot article about Microsoft's proposal to identify users from their browsing history. People have suggested a comprehensive crime-fighting fingerprint database.
I'm opposed to these things. The problem is that I'm having trouble explaining to myself why, precisely, it's a bad thing to have Big Brother watching me. And basing my opinion on a vague premonition of dread is pissing me off.
Whenever a measure such as those above is suggested, newspaper articles will invariably mention objections from civil liberties campaigners. I like civil liberties and am inclined to instinctively agree with those who campaign for them. But comments like "If you're not doing anything wrong, why do you care?" are simultaneously smug, irritating and difficult to torpedo convincingly. Three arguments spring to mind:
1) The government shouldn't know any more about you than it absolutely needs to. I agree with that. The problem is that it seems reasonable to assume that an extreme surveillance society which logs the activity of you, your car, your browsing, your shopping, your library borrowing, your finances and everything else would have an easier time of it in identifying criminals. Does that constitute a reasonable need, and why or why not? This argument is rather abstract and arbitrary for my comfort.
2) Unscrupulous government officials could abuse the information. Hard to argue with that one, and no doubt abuses would occur, but it seems paranoid to reject the whole deal on those grounds given the cost/benefit ratio.
3) It wouldn't work properly, would be insecure, and would be a colossal waste of money. I agree, given the UK's track record in large IT projects, but that's an implementation problem rather than a philosophical objection.
Can anyone give me any other specific, compelling argument against the surveillance society which doesn't rely on an axiom that it's an inherently bad thing? Because this is annoying the hell out of me.
I know that there's a limited number of people you can put on the ignore list
Really? I don't see why; filtering is presumably performed on the client. How much memory does a few dozen (or even a few thousand) UIDs take up?
I've no idea what your financial position is. You could most likely get a job teaching whatever subject you fancy, though that may be impractical without a good chunk of cash set aside.
Or perhaps try a different area of IT? Move into or out of project management, business analysis, development, pre-sales, testing (well, you never know), technical authoring. Or perhaps change the environment: if you're used to working in huge companies try a small start-up or niche software house.
It expects profits for the year to fall short about ten cents, hitting a high of $1.20 as opposed to the expected $1.31.
Even I manage to make more than $1.31 profit in a year. They're clearly just not trying. On the positive side, perhaps they can make up the difference with a quick hoover down the back of the sofa.
It may be worth a shot. Make it $500k and spend the revenue on teaching people to look in the bottom-left corner of their browser to check that '.bank' is at the end of the URL.
Better yet, make it $5m. Well, why not? It's a negligible amount of money to all but the tiniest banks, and vanishingly small when compared to the cost of phishing attacks. May not be much use to your local small-town bank, if such a thing still exists, but I doubt that they're going to be a major target of international fraudsters anyway.
Of course it's not fool-proof, but that doesn't mean that the idea is worthless.
...doesn't sound very bright. Or, more likely, they're perfectly bright and it's me that's stupid. Given that they have no grounds on which to sue anyone and that they're no doubt perfectly aware of that, what's the plan?
I would assume that it's a move to appease an outraged populace, except that the populace don't appear to be too outraged and the government's going to look rather foolish and impotent when they fail to accomplish anything.
...but is there something a bit mental about Utah politicians? They seem to crop up in the headlines doing all sorts of demented crap. Do they put lead in the water supply down there?
One of the ideas they've trotted out is that of PC and XBox gamers competing. I'm not sure how that's going to work, as the average keyboard/mouse player will have a massive advantage over the average console player. I can imagine some sort of horrible handicapping system for the PC players, which doesn't sound like fun.
You will be surprised to know that O(1) is really too good not to have any side-effects on fairness to all tasks.
No I won't, because I don't know what the hell it means.
Hah! In your face, Taco!
I think the problem is that most news tends to be either neutral or bad. There's not much value in "ten people didn't die today when a minibus didn't fly off the road into a crowd of cheerleaders". I think, as well, that the bad news has more of an impact: I reckon that the average negative story is more depressing than a positive story is uplifting.
On a related note, this story reminds me (albeit on a rather more significant scale) of the time my boss asked me to evaluate a shitty bit of workflow software. When I handed him my report he suggested that I should include more positive points to make it 'balanced'. When I explained that the software didn't actually have anything at all going for it and that my report was therefore 100% balanced, I was told to include some positives anyway.
That would be an awesome job! Where do I apply?
I'd like to know how many of these events are committed with firearms purchased within a few days of the shooting. While I understand the reasonable motives for wanting to own a gun, I can't think of any non-scary reason why someone would need one right now.
No, really. I modified Shareaza to log all incoming requests to a database. I can show you a table containing audit records with any arbitrary IP address and file name you like.
The RIAA would most likely deny any such thing and claim that I just typed any old shit into my database table. Which is fine, and accurate, but they'd better not then turn around and say that their own 'evidence' holds any more weight than mine. Same goes for any other industry body or publisher out there.
The monthly fee is to perform a search of what people have been saying about you. If you find something you don't like you can ask them to perform a 'destroy' on that particular item, which incurs an additional fee of $29.95.
You pay the $29.95 to Reputation Defender even if they fail to remove the item. Legal avenues "may" incur a further fee. I expect that their business model is to harvest lots of monthly payments from paranoid people and supplement them with overpriced one-off fees for intimidating web site owners.
the laws they are taking about are to protect a man who wanted to emulate the West as much as possible
One of those laws being that we in the west are free to criticise and ridicule individuals as we see fit. No doubt the man in question would be the first to insist that no law should be enacted to protect him from such criticism.
I don't see it being a problem, though I cheerfully admit to ignorance of European trading law. If Apple UK sells you a song you're presumably buying it from the UK, irrespective of your physical location. Here's how I see it:
Apple UK will sell certain songs to anyone in Europe, with availability and price set according to contracts negotiated for the UK market. Apple Germany will sell certain songs to anyone in Europe, with availability and price set according to contracts negotiated for the German market. Apple Italy will sell...etc.
The labels might not like the fact that some EU citizens are buying outside their home market, but I don't see what they can do about it. Refuse to give anyone a licence to sell their music? I don't see that working for very long, though as far as I'm concerned they're welcome to give it a shot.
2983KL99( "Invoke demonic portal on Saturn", "???" )
I don't care if it was a joke; I'm using this idea everywhere.