Many isp's wouldnt notice until the end of the month when their traffic usage bill came and was massively higher than expected, this gives the spammer a good few weeks atleast.
I dont really believe this. I think that this sort of ISPs went extinct long ago. In fact I think ISPs who do not drop forged packets (like yours) are part of the spammer ecosystem and actively collude with the criminals because the spammers actually buy bandwidth from them in huge volumes. That is far more likely explanation. Clueless ISPs at this stage of the game are quickly pruned from the gene pool by hackers and script kiddies. You are forgetting that the hordes of pimple-faced teenage idiots out there with unlimited time on their hands are also scanning for holes, and there is far greater number of them then the spammers. I think ISPs like yours are not dropping forged packets from their clients as a cover for their cooperation with the few huge spammer accounts they have hidden somewhere off the books. I think people should compile a list of these ISPs and make it publically known so that everyone knows where the major part of the blame should be placed.
Right! But it isn't a faraday cage if you let the internal thing you are trying to protect touch the surface. You've defeated the purpose!
You dont even have it to touch as I mentioned, a mere proximity will be enough since the gap if small enough will act as a capacitor which passes through RF. Anyhow, I didnt defeat it, since the whole insane idea of RF tags and tinfoil flaps is a product of some seriously bad crack to begin with. Just off the top of my head I can think of many ways of abusing it while at the same time I can think of many much cheaper and more secure ways such as (gasp!) cryptographic signing and barcodes to allow machine reading. Even if you insist on a chip, a traditional full-contact smart-card chip or even an optical, laser activated equivalent of the RF system if you absolutely must. This whole thing is yet another Halliburton-style boondogle/corporate-charity for the admiring corporate "backers" of the elected officials. Much as the whole "war on terror, drugs, imorrality, alcohol, name your strawman here" is.
Furthermore, along the same line of thought, the simplest form of "disabling" the RF chip inside the passport wold be to simply "short" its antena when not in use, say a tab one has to pull out to activate the thing.
I think you are correct. Further proof of this would be rather simple. If the cage is not grounded, and if the antenna of whatever is inside makes contact with it (or is close enough to form a hi-frequency passage via the capacitance of the gap) the cage would in effect become an extension of the antenna of the device inside.
As for "a completely clueless large scale ISP", well, I didn't want to mention Worldcom/MCI/UUNET by name...:^)
You will excuse me if I dont believe you when you tell me there are many large ISPs (or any ISPs for that matter) left who do not drop packets from forged source addresses at the first router. This might have been all the fun and games back in 1995 but not now.
All your packets (including TCP handshake packets) do go to the proper IP address on some DSL or dialup line.
Which is contradictory to what the parent said: "even on those who block port 25". If all the packets with port 25 are dropped at the router, this wont work since the DSL/dialup address wont get any.
This whole shtick would depend on a hole in the ISP port 25 blocking whereby they block outgoing but not incoming traffic. Then you would have an application routing from port 25 to port xyz to your spam server which in turn would pick it up at xyz and return forged packets with the return address of the DSL/dialup box. Again, no ISP who blocks 25 right will be vulnerable to this. Also many ISPs will drop the forged packets since the initial routers will be aware of the forgery, i.e. a packet claiming to be from "200.100.50.1" comes from "100.101.102.103" etc.
If this ever happened to you it means that they found a completely clueless large scale ISP to hook up their big pipe to and that wont last till the next morning.
(They use tricks like asymetric routing to spoof the source of a TCP connection. They can make it look like a huge amount of spam is coming from a dial-up connection on an ISP with outgoing port 25 blocked.;^)
This is not possible unless they compromised a router in front that network. And most ISP routers these days will not accept any source routing. This is an urban legend if anything. Also, attributing mystical, supernatural powers to a group of low-life scum only makes it more appealing for other sociopathic misfits to choose that "career". Are you one of them?
Your view of how IP should not exist simply is not compatible with capitalist industry
To the contrary, it is the present scenario that undermines the foundations of captitalism because that socio-economic system is based on trade of goods and labour, one of the cornerstones of which is the concept of "private property". While originally a good intentioned attempt to promote innovation, the "Intellectual Property" laws not only dilute the meaning of real property but also are primarily used as anti-competetive mechanism and thus contrary to tennents of free-market. It does not matter whichever way you slice it, "Intellectual Property" goes counter to the interests of humanity and works instead for a small group of very greedy and selfish people. That is what I refered to when using the word "evil".
I have no problems with the creator of something putting whatever license they want on something. There are two reasons for this: a) they created it, b) I am not compelled to license it. Half Life 2 is hardly unique, there are many games you can buy and own outright (subject to whatever IP laws you have in your country, which you may not agree with).
I disagree. In a wider philosophical context, there is no such thing as "intellectual property". For it to be so, information would have to possess certain physical attributes such as non-transferable uniqueness. People however see it fit for profit motives to try and treat information as such. In the context of existing (and by necessity illogical and internally inconsistent) laws one thinks of "licensing" information. If the authors (or precisely either original sources of that combination of bits i.e. artists; or its first copiers - i.e. scientists) were to be able to impose any restrictions they see fit, it would quickly lead to an unsustainable situation whereby some critical parts of infrastructure of human thought are someone's "property".
Your "pragmatic" view is the root of all sorts of evil. This approach separates the parts of information "trade" that are more reconciled with the traditional trade of physical goods and sets up a framework to deal with it in a similar manner.
Unfortunately, from that point others build complex structures to deal with other aspects of this problem which in short order results in wacky patents on "business processes" and copyrights on DNA sequences. So while you "don't agree with much of the actual IP law that exists (e.g. lengths of copyrights) and I have many problems with the patent systems currently being distorted" you should realize that the "pragmatic" approach to things less obviously insane such as software licensing is the direct cause of these. The system as a whole is unsustainable. Information, be it a string of numbers, DNA sequence, a song or a piece of software cannot be "traded" or "licensed" because of the nature of it and most western societies live in denial of this simple fact, constructing volumes of fantasy legal castles on sand in order to make impossible happen.
I went on in many other threads on./ many about how the patronage system for arts and public academia are the only ways to maintain sanity for the future generations but I am not in the mood to go over all those points here again.
Without some recognition of IP and copyright you can't have a GPL. Nor does it attempt to do away with copyright or have any kind of "viral" properties. That is hubris. It is a simple agreement to share all of the code in a project under the same rules.
GPL uses the concept of IP the same way a prisoner would use his cell's window bar to tie a rope on which to lower himself down to freedom. If IP laws would not exist, neither would GPL. And yes it is "viral" in the sense that it abhors any license that promotes IP protections. Note how the advertising clause of BSD is not compatible with GPL. Even going as far as to demand printable attribution is a type of enforcement of IP "rights" and thus incompatible.
This of course is not true of many other licenses, but GPL is indeed very political about its aims. RMS was always an activist and GPL reflects that. I personally like GPL very much because RMS and I think alike in this regard.
I would hope that could be expressed as "theft of IP", but that's a silly little argument that isn't worth our time.
Quite to the contrary. This is the very essence of the argument. IP cannot be stolen, as I mentioned, because of the way universe works: information lacks required attributes to be "private property". This is also the front-line of the battle of proponents of "IP" who seek to obscure and hide this fundamental fact.
Either way they are going against the wishes of Valve for how their creation should interact with the public, which is at best unfair and at worst illegal
If I were, I would probably cheer for the corporations instead of fighting them. You are making dangerous assumptions.
This means that I am not particularly interested in your excuses - I'm already well aware of the problem of corporate influence and control of the United States government
The way you expressed yourself was only clear to you. You probably do not realise this so let me explain:
More of the "corporation run the country" bullshit.
indicates that you are equating "corporations run the country" to "bullshit"
No kidding.
implies that you strongly believe the above to be very true and you are sarcastic about it.
Your chosen method of expressing yourself is ambiguous and rather obnoxious. If it is true of many anti-Bush people, it is no wonder that religious nuts are able to out-reason you.
Err, no. My comment about wanting "something for nothing" refers to people wanting to avoid paying for something they are supposed to *pay* for.
It was not expressed in that manner. Even if it was however, it assumes the following things: that Intellectual Property concept is valid and accepted by everyone, that the methods of receiving "payment" for their labour used by Valve is valid, that they do actually deserve "payment" as opposed to donations or patronage grants, that the laws that govern "trade" of bits of data are sane, that Valve has rights well beyond those of applicaple to trade of physical objects, that conversly the consumer is deprived of rights in this new "commerce" he would have otherwise and that people do not have moral and ethical obligation to oppose all these things. "Supposed to pay for" is an assumption based on you not doing any thinking as to underlying principles. It is only a prevailing custom, backed up by illogical laws based on some rather shakey principles that people pay for software. Berating them for not doing so requires of you do defend the whole system.
I was patronizing indeed, I think it was pretty clear my original post was clearly directed at the expense of idiots who tried to *steal* (ie get "something for nothing") Half Life 2.
The term "steal" is applicable only to physical objects. What you are referring to is a dogma, adhered to by some, called "copyright infringement". It assumes that there is such a thing as a "right to copy" that can be granted or revoked.
People who abide by the FOSS licenses are getting a very good deal and should be encouraged.
Although not true of all FOSS licences, GPL in particular was designed as a countermeasure to legal systems based on "right to copy". It is a legal weapon designed using the very framework of "Intellectual Property" to destroy that concept. RMS does not believe in "right to copy" and GPL is a clever trick to combat that ideology. In essence you are using a system which resulted from an effort to fight the very thing you believe so strongly in.
Oh yes, dont you hate all those stupid people who dare to highlight a particularly cretinous parts of your post to reply to. How dare they!?
Tell me, does being so woefully incapable of defending your point without making things up and applying them to me actually physically HURT, or is just a deep, emotional emptiness caused by your general ignorance?
Since it requires spelling out for you: you believe that corporate takover of our society is "bullshit", ergo I wish that you wake up one day a corporate slave. It is rather simple no?
Oh yes, I did fail to reply to the "blah blah blah" part. Ok. Here goes:
Blah Blah Blah
An excellent and well reasoned point, this one. Not to mention very articulate. Bravo.
I find your choice of handle particularly appropriate in this instance.:)
There is an old saying: "He who pays the piper calls the tune." It means that if you create something you are at liberty to license it as you see fit. The creators of Linux chose the GPL as the license. SuSE, in turn, offers a free version of SuSE 9.0, which is their right, also under the GPL.
So you see Steam made HL2 and they said you had to PAY for the right to use it, that's their right, they created it. And you went around that. That's your problem. And you deserved the spanking you and 19,999 other people just got for being assholes.
I am not sure what you are blabbering about.
a) I was not locked out, I simply returned HL2 after I discovered it used Steam to try to shackle me, and it was blowing up on top of that. It was long before the 20k account problem
b) your comment has nothing to do with my reply to the previous poster who is full of himself and believes in "do as I say, dont do as I do" since he is berating people for wanting "something for nothing" while he is merilly using free software such as Linux.
and c) I reveived no "spanking", in fact Valve did get it from me since I took my money elsewhere.
The developers of my OS didn't ask me for money,... Don't get up on any kind of high horse about me freeloading please....*nobody* has the right to bitch about that user. etc
It was you who stated earlier that people are "idiots" for wanting "something for nothing". I called your bluff and no amount of explaining will do away with it. You got something for nothing, even if you are coming with all sorts of stories how you are a great, indispensable helper to FOSS.
Care to try again?
Ther is no need to try again. Your original statement was patronizing and like any hypoctritical preacher you are guilty of "do as I say, dont do as I do". And you got caught. Simple as that.
So, while I sit here and chuckle at the boneheads who thought they could get something for nothing
And you are saying this while using Linux? How much did you pay its developers? This attitude is precisely what bothers me about these self-appointed "moralists" here. Most of them are guilty of getting "something for nothing" when it suits them and yet they will lob snarly insults from their high horses whenever they feel someone does the same thing in a way they find not to their liking. Get off Linux and buy duly licensed Windows XP. Stay back from any FOSS because it is "something for nothing".
I personally admire FOSS people and despise the likes of Valve. I remember days when Doom was a "shareware" game and yet ID Games made vast sums of money on it. That was the days before blind greed took over and people like you got to display their smug, ignorant and totally unjustified attitudes about "piracy".
It's not a matter of "common sense". It's a matter of "until someone challenges it, that's the way it is - deal".
Myself and many others have been "challenging" this "Intellectual Property" BS for a long time now. It is not a matter of challenge but a matter of brute force. The people who managed to usurp control over the legal processes in most industrialized countries, that is the corporations, are making laws that benefit them primarilly. It will take a serious political power shift before this will come to an end, and that will only occur if the public becomes less ignorant and willing to accept the corporate propaganda as fact. The way things are at the moment, with corporations running news and education, it will be a long time in coming.
It is frightening how many people here are willing to take side of a company whose "product" amounts to inconsequential enterntainment fluff and yet who deems itself important enough to take away people's rights for the dubious priviledge of playing their "game". This Valve/Steam thing is in my opinion but a taste of far worse excesses to come culminating in total removal of any rights consumers have and granting all rights to the corporations as the only "citizens" of consequence. Perheaps then a sccessful "challenge" will be made if it is not too late.
And twenty years of software sales says you're wrong
I am too tired to join this Valve/Steam fray, especially that I had my fight in it already, days ago, even before this 20k account fiasco hit the fan. But this particularly illogical part of your argument caught my eye. Someone on./ here has a great sig, something to the effect of "Lets eat more shit! After all millions of flies cannot be wrong!"
You should ponder this in light of countless times in our history when far worse stupidities were accepted as "common sense" for far longer then 20 years by millions of people. Popularity and longevity of something does not have a slightest bearing on its validity and morality.
Well, I would guess that Valve made no guarantees that the product you purchased will work. So why would they owe you something, since they specifically said that the product might not work as advertised?
Because that is a cop-out. That was the main reason laws were put in place in the early 20th century because many manufacturers were using that excuse to con millions of people out of a lot of money. In more enlightened times gone by, protecting the consumer from unscrupulous "businessmen" was something governments did. Today the con-men are running the show and claim that because something is on a "computer" or "digital", the "old" rules of commerce do not apply. If this keeps up you will have no recourse if your car's tires blow up because someone decided to not put in any reinforcement to save "costs" and then had "fine print" on the inside of the rim disavowing any liability.
My little crusade with Valve is a part of a larger issue of changing rules of commerce to disadvantage the consumers and thus pervert the whole capitalist society into some sort of corporate-feudalism.
Electronic Boutique for example no longer refunds money on opened software (I had to have words with management about HL2 and I was rather convincing, but I would assume that was an exception). I can see that this system was prone to abuse but the alternative of "all sales final, buyer beware" on something that changes the conditions of the "sale" after you open it and find onerous EULAs is not acceptable either. Something has to be done with this stuff because not only the Intellectual Property is starting to get truly frightening with myriads of contradictory and illogical laws being drafted to allow for its trade but also the cavalier attitudes about corporate rights beating the consumer ones are starting to propagate to other industries. This is something even Jefferson had serious concerns about when he was putting the lines about patents and copyrights into US Constitution and would probably find the current system insane.
To keep things in perspective, Valve would make the same amount of money without Steam being required for "authorization" because the whole "piracy" issue is overblown to the 10th power and a lot of people are willing to pay for stuff even if it is not copy protected (as I was until they pissed me off). Suffice to say that ID Games used to make a lot of money on "shareware, payment-optional based on your conscience", Doom and the like. I will keep on buying other games as long as their makers dont fall into the trap of treating me as a thief. The anti-piracy measures are really an expression of corporate greed. Since prior to their introduction a lot of companies made a lot of money, the only explanation is that they want to "squeeze" the last drops of money out of the poor consumer-cows. And they go about it with an unhealthy sadistic streak, calculating that as they raise the hoops ever higher we will just learn to jump higher for out treats like trained animals do.
There is even more to this, but let me finish thus: Steam was the last straw that broke the camel's back in regards to PC Games for me, a spyware forced-online "authentication" system for single-player games is the red line I wont cross.
It's "moot" Dumbass. M-o-o-t. It means irrelevant. Like your feelings on IP.
"Mute" means silent. Like you oughta be.
Great, not only is he an authority on what other people should do with their time and money, now he is going to police the way they speak. Did you shoot many of those insolent subhumans who fail to obey your commands in the back of their heads, Herr SS-Sturmmann?
You do know that your undies are all tied up over a video game, don't you? Valve is a video game company. You are a person who likes HL2. The rest of the world seems to get along okay without getting this worked up. Why can't you?
Go visit the Steam forums and see for yourself. A good chunk of "the rest of the world" is seriously pissed off too.
You are not welcome to break laws you don't think are right. And no reasonable person buys your rationale either. So if you're going to pirate a game because you don't want to pay for it, then go ahead, but don't try to convince us you're right to do it. You're not.
Your opinion is one of many, dont pretend to be any sort of ultlimate authority on this since you are not. I stated my position and nowhere did I claim that this is a universal way to solve the problem. On the other hand you and a good number of other self-appointed "moralists" are trying to hammer me into sumbiting to your world view. Unless you come up with fair ways of restoring the balance of power between consumers and corporate game makers, you might as well give up for all the succes you are going to have.
I just wasted several minutes of my life reading your comments. I was expecting insightful comments, but all I got was whining! And that means that you owe me money!
You didnt purchase anything from me, nor I did make any false representations before the sale. Point mute.
I strongly object to Steam on the basis of its overbearing DRM but even I was about to cut Valve slack. In retrospect I also got lured by shiney beeds to part with my rights. The technical difficulties were the cold shower that got me to start thinking "what the hell am I doing?!!".
Slashdot crowd is particularly hypocritical, they whine and complain about DRM here and there, are afraid of Open Source dying because of DRM hardware, agree with me when I talk about "Intellectual Property" leading to things like lincese fees on kids who had "gene therapy" etc.
But when a push comes to shove and a game... a game! company does all the evil stuff they oppose, they rush to its defense because its "coool man!" and "they like worked 5 years on it!" (never you mind that our ancestors worked for millenia to get us the rights we have today). So on one side a computer game, an inconsequential piece of enterntainemt fluff and on the other side fundamental rights we have as sentient beings. Guess which one Slashdot crowd picks over which. How are they going to say no to Monsanto when they want to charge "per use" on genetic material?!
I fear that this battle is lost and we should get ready for smuggled-in, illegal as dope DRM-free computer hardware bought from a back of a truck because these masses of utter lemmings are going to give up everything their ancestors fought for in exchange for shiney coasters containing a pile of dimples used to make the computer produce images that mesmerize the so-called "educated people" like snake can mesmerize its prey. Valve is making money hand over fist and I am sure they dont miss me. They probably are pissed off at the "pirated" copies because, you know, if it werent for the "pirates" they would have sold 3 copies of HL2 for every man, woman, child and dog on the surface of the globe. Valve is in my book firmly in the "enemy of human kind" camp at this point.
On a funny note: the hereo of HL2, Dr. Freeman, battles an evil totalitarian government called the Combine to bring freedom to human kind... talk about irony. The Valve people are working hard to bring the Combine about. I bet they are laughing hard at the poor suckers who buy their stuff. Sigh.
No one is going to care though, there are 10,000s of people playing the game...maybe 100,000s. And you couldn't figure it out...but somehow your skills are worth $120...right.
It has nothing to do with me "figuring it out" and everything to do with their servers eating the CD-KEY and then their support not responding. That is 100% failure on their part and 0% on my end. But hey, other people got lucky/exhibited unlimited patience/felt that a game is worth days of effort to activate etc. I am not other people. I value myself but some are willing to sell their souls for glass beeds. To each their own.
Slashdot Mirror
I dont really believe this. I think that this sort of ISPs went extinct long ago. In fact I think ISPs who do not drop forged packets (like yours) are part of the spammer ecosystem and actively collude with the criminals because the spammers actually buy bandwidth from them in huge volumes. That is far more likely explanation. Clueless ISPs at this stage of the game are quickly pruned from the gene pool by hackers and script kiddies. You are forgetting that the hordes of pimple-faced teenage idiots out there with unlimited time on their hands are also scanning for holes, and there is far greater number of them then the spammers. I think ISPs like yours are not dropping forged packets from their clients as a cover for their cooperation with the few huge spammer accounts they have hidden somewhere off the books. I think people should compile a list of these ISPs and make it publically known so that everyone knows where the major part of the blame should be placed.
You dont even have it to touch as I mentioned, a mere proximity will be enough since the gap if small enough will act as a capacitor which passes through RF. Anyhow, I didnt defeat it, since the whole insane idea of RF tags and tinfoil flaps is a product of some seriously bad crack to begin with. Just off the top of my head I can think of many ways of abusing it while at the same time I can think of many much cheaper and more secure ways such as (gasp!) cryptographic signing and barcodes to allow machine reading. Even if you insist on a chip, a traditional full-contact smart-card chip or even an optical, laser activated equivalent of the RF system if you absolutely must. This whole thing is yet another Halliburton-style boondogle/corporate-charity for the admiring corporate "backers" of the elected officials. Much as the whole "war on terror, drugs, imorrality, alcohol, name your strawman here" is.
Furthermore, along the same line of thought, the simplest form of "disabling" the RF chip inside the passport wold be to simply "short" its antena when not in use, say a tab one has to pull out to activate the thing.
I think you are correct. Further proof of this would be rather simple. If the cage is not grounded, and if the antenna of whatever is inside makes contact with it (or is close enough to form a hi-frequency passage via the capacitance of the gap) the cage would in effect become an extension of the antenna of the device inside.
You will excuse me if I dont believe you when you tell me there are many large ISPs (or any ISPs for that matter) left who do not drop packets from forged source addresses at the first router. This might have been all the fun and games back in 1995 but not now.
Which is contradictory to what the parent said: "even on those who block port 25". If all the packets with port 25 are dropped at the router, this wont work since the DSL/dialup address wont get any.
This whole shtick would depend on a hole in the ISP port 25 blocking whereby they block outgoing but not incoming traffic. Then you would have an application routing from port 25 to port xyz to your spam server which in turn would pick it up at xyz and return forged packets with the return address of the DSL/dialup box. Again, no ISP who blocks 25 right will be vulnerable to this. Also many ISPs will drop the forged packets since the initial routers will be aware of the forgery, i.e. a packet claiming to be from "200.100.50.1" comes from "100.101.102.103" etc.
If this ever happened to you it means that they found a completely clueless large scale ISP to hook up their big pipe to and that wont last till the next morning.
This is not possible unless they compromised a router in front that network. And most ISP routers these days will not accept any source routing. This is an urban legend if anything. Also, attributing mystical, supernatural powers to a group of low-life scum only makes it more appealing for other sociopathic misfits to choose that "career". Are you one of them?
To the contrary, it is the present scenario that undermines the foundations of captitalism because that socio-economic system is based on trade of goods and labour, one of the cornerstones of which is the concept of "private property". While originally a good intentioned attempt to promote innovation, the "Intellectual Property" laws not only dilute the meaning of real property but also are primarily used as anti-competetive mechanism and thus contrary to tennents of free-market. It does not matter whichever way you slice it, "Intellectual Property" goes counter to the interests of humanity and works instead for a small group of very greedy and selfish people. That is what I refered to when using the word "evil".
I disagree. In a wider philosophical context, there is no such thing as "intellectual property". For it to be so, information would have to possess certain physical attributes such as non-transferable uniqueness. People however see it fit for profit motives to try and treat information as such. In the context of existing (and by necessity illogical and internally inconsistent) laws one thinks of "licensing" information. If the authors (or precisely either original sources of that combination of bits i.e. artists; or its first copiers - i.e. scientists) were to be able to impose any restrictions they see fit, it would quickly lead to an unsustainable situation whereby some critical parts of infrastructure of human thought are someone's "property".
Your "pragmatic" view is the root of all sorts of evil. This approach separates the parts of information "trade" that are more reconciled with the traditional trade of physical goods and sets up a framework to deal with it in a similar manner.
Unfortunately, from that point others build complex structures to deal with other aspects of this problem which in short order results in wacky patents on "business processes" and copyrights on DNA sequences. So while you "don't agree with much of the actual IP law that exists (e.g. lengths of copyrights) and I have many problems with the patent systems currently being distorted" you should realize that the "pragmatic" approach to things less obviously insane such as software licensing is the direct cause of these. The system as a whole is unsustainable. Information, be it a string of numbers, DNA sequence, a song or a piece of software cannot be "traded" or "licensed" because of the nature of it and most western societies live in denial of this simple fact, constructing volumes of fantasy legal castles on sand in order to make impossible happen.
I went on in many other threads on ./ many about how the patronage system for arts and public academia are the only ways to maintain sanity for the future generations but I am not in the mood to go over all those points here again.
Without some recognition of IP and copyright you can't have a GPL. Nor does it attempt to do away with copyright or have any kind of "viral" properties. That is hubris. It is a simple agreement to share all of the code in a project under the same rules.
GPL uses the concept of IP the same way a prisoner would use his cell's window bar to tie a rope on which to lower himself down to freedom. If IP laws would not exist, neither would GPL. And yes it is "viral" in the sense that it abhors any license that promotes IP protections. Note how the advertising clause of BSD is not compatible with GPL. Even going as far as to demand printable attribution is a type of enforcement of IP "rights" and thus incompatible.
This of course is not true of many other licenses, but GPL is indeed very political about its aims. RMS was always an activist and GPL reflects that. I personally like GPL very much because RMS and I think alike in this regard.
I would hope that could be expressed as "theft of IP", but that's a silly little argument that isn't worth our time.
Quite to the contrary. This is the very essence of the argument. IP cannot be stolen, as I mentioned, because of the way universe works: information lacks required attributes to be "private property". This is also the front-line of the battle of proponents of "IP" who seek to obscure and hide this fundamental fact.
Either way they are going against the wishes of Valve for how their creation should interact with the public, which is at best unfair and at worst illegal
That would indicate that you are sarcastically expressing your deep doubt about something. As in: "The sky is green? No Kidding?"
Again: it's called reading comprehension.
No it is called "an inability to express oneself clearly".
If I were, I would probably cheer for the corporations instead of fighting them. You are making dangerous assumptions.
This means that I am not particularly interested in your excuses - I'm already well aware of the problem of corporate influence and control of the United States government
The way you expressed yourself was only clear to you. You probably do not realise this so let me explain:
More of the "corporation run the country" bullshit.
indicates that you are equating "corporations run the country" to "bullshit"
No kidding.
implies that you strongly believe the above to be very true and you are sarcastic about it.
Your chosen method of expressing yourself is ambiguous and rather obnoxious. If it is true of many anti-Bush people, it is no wonder that religious nuts are able to out-reason you.
It was not expressed in that manner. Even if it was however, it assumes the following things: that Intellectual Property concept is valid and accepted by everyone, that the methods of receiving "payment" for their labour used by Valve is valid, that they do actually deserve "payment" as opposed to donations or patronage grants, that the laws that govern "trade" of bits of data are sane, that Valve has rights well beyond those of applicaple to trade of physical objects, that conversly the consumer is deprived of rights in this new "commerce" he would have otherwise and that people do not have moral and ethical obligation to oppose all these things. "Supposed to pay for" is an assumption based on you not doing any thinking as to underlying principles. It is only a prevailing custom, backed up by illogical laws based on some rather shakey principles that people pay for software. Berating them for not doing so requires of you do defend the whole system.
I was patronizing indeed, I think it was pretty clear my original post was clearly directed at the expense of idiots who tried to *steal* (ie get "something for nothing") Half Life 2.
The term "steal" is applicable only to physical objects. What you are referring to is a dogma, adhered to by some, called "copyright infringement". It assumes that there is such a thing as a "right to copy" that can be granted or revoked.
People who abide by the FOSS licenses are getting a very good deal and should be encouraged.
Although not true of all FOSS licences, GPL in particular was designed as a countermeasure to legal systems based on "right to copy". It is a legal weapon designed using the very framework of "Intellectual Property" to destroy that concept. RMS does not believe in "right to copy" and GPL is a clever trick to combat that ideology. In essence you are using a system which resulted from an effort to fight the very thing you believe so strongly in.
Tell me, does being so woefully incapable of defending your point without making things up and applying them to me actually physically HURT, or is just a deep, emotional emptiness caused by your general ignorance?
Since it requires spelling out for you: you believe that corporate takover of our society is "bullshit", ergo I wish that you wake up one day a corporate slave. It is rather simple no?
Oh yes, I did fail to reply to the "blah blah blah" part. Ok. Here goes:
Blah Blah Blah
An excellent and well reasoned point, this one. Not to mention very articulate. Bravo.
I am not sure what you are blabbering about.
a) I was not locked out, I simply returned HL2 after I discovered it used Steam to try to shackle me, and it was blowing up on top of that. It was long before the 20k account problem
b) your comment has nothing to do with my reply to the previous poster who is full of himself and believes in "do as I say, dont do as I do" since he is berating people for wanting "something for nothing" while he is merilly using free software such as Linux.
and c) I reveived no "spanking", in fact Valve did get it from me since I took my money elsewhere.
It is clearly bullshit to you. Very well then, I wish you a rather rude awakening when it is too late.
It was you who stated earlier that people are "idiots" for wanting "something for nothing". I called your bluff and no amount of explaining will do away with it. You got something for nothing, even if you are coming with all sorts of stories how you are a great, indispensable helper to FOSS.
Care to try again?
Ther is no need to try again. Your original statement was patronizing and like any hypoctritical preacher you are guilty of "do as I say, dont do as I do". And you got caught. Simple as that.
And you are saying this while using Linux? How much did you pay its developers? This attitude is precisely what bothers me about these self-appointed "moralists" here. Most of them are guilty of getting "something for nothing" when it suits them and yet they will lob snarly insults from their high horses whenever they feel someone does the same thing in a way they find not to their liking. Get off Linux and buy duly licensed Windows XP. Stay back from any FOSS because it is "something for nothing".
I personally admire FOSS people and despise the likes of Valve. I remember days when Doom was a "shareware" game and yet ID Games made vast sums of money on it. That was the days before blind greed took over and people like you got to display their smug, ignorant and totally unjustified attitudes about "piracy".
Myself and many others have been "challenging" this "Intellectual Property" BS for a long time now. It is not a matter of challenge but a matter of brute force. The people who managed to usurp control over the legal processes in most industrialized countries, that is the corporations, are making laws that benefit them primarilly. It will take a serious political power shift before this will come to an end, and that will only occur if the public becomes less ignorant and willing to accept the corporate propaganda as fact. The way things are at the moment, with corporations running news and education, it will be a long time in coming.
It is frightening how many people here are willing to take side of a company whose "product" amounts to inconsequential enterntainment fluff and yet who deems itself important enough to take away people's rights for the dubious priviledge of playing their "game". This Valve/Steam thing is in my opinion but a taste of far worse excesses to come culminating in total removal of any rights consumers have and granting all rights to the corporations as the only "citizens" of consequence. Perheaps then a sccessful "challenge" will be made if it is not too late.
I am too tired to join this Valve/Steam fray, especially that I had my fight in it already, days ago, even before this 20k account fiasco hit the fan. But this particularly illogical part of your argument caught my eye. Someone on ./ here has a great sig, something to the effect of "Lets eat more shit! After all millions of flies cannot be wrong!"
You should ponder this in light of countless times in our history when far worse stupidities were accepted as "common sense" for far longer then 20 years by millions of people. Popularity and longevity of something does not have a slightest bearing on its validity and morality.
Because that is a cop-out. That was the main reason laws were put in place in the early 20th century because many manufacturers were using that excuse to con millions of people out of a lot of money. In more enlightened times gone by, protecting the consumer from unscrupulous "businessmen" was something governments did. Today the con-men are running the show and claim that because something is on a "computer" or "digital", the "old" rules of commerce do not apply. If this keeps up you will have no recourse if your car's tires blow up because someone decided to not put in any reinforcement to save "costs" and then had "fine print" on the inside of the rim disavowing any liability.
My little crusade with Valve is a part of a larger issue of changing rules of commerce to disadvantage the consumers and thus pervert the whole capitalist society into some sort of corporate-feudalism.
Electronic Boutique for example no longer refunds money on opened software (I had to have words with management about HL2 and I was rather convincing, but I would assume that was an exception). I can see that this system was prone to abuse but the alternative of "all sales final, buyer beware" on something that changes the conditions of the "sale" after you open it and find onerous EULAs is not acceptable either. Something has to be done with this stuff because not only the Intellectual Property is starting to get truly frightening with myriads of contradictory and illogical laws being drafted to allow for its trade but also the cavalier attitudes about corporate rights beating the consumer ones are starting to propagate to other industries. This is something even Jefferson had serious concerns about when he was putting the lines about patents and copyrights into US Constitution and would probably find the current system insane.
To keep things in perspective, Valve would make the same amount of money without Steam being required for "authorization" because the whole "piracy" issue is overblown to the 10th power and a lot of people are willing to pay for stuff even if it is not copy protected (as I was until they pissed me off). Suffice to say that ID Games used to make a lot of money on "shareware, payment-optional based on your conscience", Doom and the like. I will keep on buying other games as long as their makers dont fall into the trap of treating me as a thief. The anti-piracy measures are really an expression of corporate greed. Since prior to their introduction a lot of companies made a lot of money, the only explanation is that they want to "squeeze" the last drops of money out of the poor consumer-cows. And they go about it with an unhealthy sadistic streak, calculating that as they raise the hoops ever higher we will just learn to jump higher for out treats like trained animals do.
There is even more to this, but let me finish thus: Steam was the last straw that broke the camel's back in regards to PC Games for me, a spyware forced-online "authentication" system for single-player games is the red line I wont cross.
Great, not only is he an authority on what other people should do with their time and money, now he is going to police the way they speak. Did you shoot many of those insolent subhumans who fail to obey your commands in the back of their heads, Herr SS-Sturmmann?
Go visit the Steam forums and see for yourself. A good chunk of "the rest of the world" is seriously pissed off too.
You are not welcome to break laws you don't think are right. And no reasonable person buys your rationale either. So if you're going to pirate a game because you don't want to pay for it, then go ahead, but don't try to convince us you're right to do it. You're not.
Your opinion is one of many, dont pretend to be any sort of ultlimate authority on this since you are not. I stated my position and nowhere did I claim that this is a universal way to solve the problem. On the other hand you and a good number of other self-appointed "moralists" are trying to hammer me into sumbiting to your world view. Unless you come up with fair ways of restoring the balance of power between consumers and corporate game makers, you might as well give up for all the succes you are going to have.
You didnt purchase anything from me, nor I did make any false representations before the sale. Point mute.
I strongly object to Steam on the basis of its overbearing DRM but even I was about to cut Valve slack. In retrospect I also got lured by shiney beeds to part with my rights. The technical difficulties were the cold shower that got me to start thinking "what the hell am I doing?!!".
Slashdot crowd is particularly hypocritical, they whine and complain about DRM here and there, are afraid of Open Source dying because of DRM hardware, agree with me when I talk about "Intellectual Property" leading to things like lincese fees on kids who had "gene therapy" etc.
But when a push comes to shove and a game... a game! company does all the evil stuff they oppose, they rush to its defense because its "coool man!" and "they like worked 5 years on it!" (never you mind that our ancestors worked for millenia to get us the rights we have today). So on one side a computer game, an inconsequential piece of enterntainemt fluff and on the other side fundamental rights we have as sentient beings. Guess which one Slashdot crowd picks over which. How are they going to say no to Monsanto when they want to charge "per use" on genetic material?!
I fear that this battle is lost and we should get ready for smuggled-in, illegal as dope DRM-free computer hardware bought from a back of a truck because these masses of utter lemmings are going to give up everything their ancestors fought for in exchange for shiney coasters containing a pile of dimples used to make the computer produce images that mesmerize the so-called "educated people" like snake can mesmerize its prey. Valve is making money hand over fist and I am sure they dont miss me. They probably are pissed off at the "pirated" copies because, you know, if it werent for the "pirates" they would have sold 3 copies of HL2 for every man, woman, child and dog on the surface of the globe. Valve is in my book firmly in the "enemy of human kind" camp at this point.
On a funny note: the hereo of HL2, Dr. Freeman, battles an evil totalitarian government called the Combine to bring freedom to human kind... talk about irony. The Valve people are working hard to bring the Combine about. I bet they are laughing hard at the poor suckers who buy their stuff. Sigh.
It has nothing to do with me "figuring it out" and everything to do with their servers eating the CD-KEY and then their support not responding. That is 100% failure on their part and 0% on my end. But hey, other people got lucky/exhibited unlimited patience/felt that a game is worth days of effort to activate etc. I am not other people. I value myself but some are willing to sell their souls for glass beeds. To each their own.