I am very surprised that RIAA would have agreed to them having to supply filenames to block. Sounds very impractical for them.
The RIAA didn't agree to anything. This is part of the court order. And you can understand why... if Sony says "Remove Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man" and there's a copy that someone has which is inexplicably mislabeled (both in the file name and the ID3 tag) "Weird Al Yankovic - Dancing Queen", it's absurd for Napster to be expected to recognize it without being explicitly told about it.
What I'm curious about is the status of bootleg remixes and bootleg live versions. When Joe Basement Producer makes a megamix of Pink Floyd (on Capitol) and Underworld (on TVT), who needs to contact Napster? Capitol? TVT? Joe Basement Producer?
It makes sense that web-only stations should pay the same as ether-only stations, which this ruling demands. But it looks like they've also ruled that web-and-ether stations have to pay twice as much either alone, which doesn't make sense. If they don't pay different fees depending on how many people can listen to their EM signal, why should they pay different fees if more people can pick up their signal other ways?
The Java Nuclear Clause (example: Age of Kings): Perhaps the most humorous line sometimes found in EULAs has to do with
protecting the developer from concerns about Java being an unreliable programming language. Occasionally, Microsoft EULAs, as well
as those of other companies, have featured language like this, found in Age of Kings: "Java technology is not fault tolerant and is not
designed, manufactured or intended for use or resale as on-line control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe
performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life
support machines, or weapons systems, in which the failure of Java technology could lead directly to death, personal injury or severe
physical or environmental damage." One presumes this was a clause from another kind of software EULA that somehow occasionally
slips into game agreements: concerns that the most recent Chernobyl problems were somehow caused by a Mongol Feudal Age rush are
probably overstated.
Personally, "java nuclear" sounds to me like a damn fine cup of coffee.;-)
On the subject of "weapons systems", wouldn't a failure be more likely to prevent death than cause it?!
Heh. These science guys can count stars up to a
billion... where are they when we wanna count a
few ballots?
Of course, any scientist will tell you that a margin of 537 out of 6 million is in the noise. Poisson error on 6 million is 2450. You can beat that down by sqrt(N) if you recount N times... so we need to recount the votes 21 times before the result becomes significant.;-)
Looks to me like it would be useful only for detecting stuff that was downloaded from a "legitimate" source (are there any?)
and put unchanged onto Napster.
The reason you're seeing this come from Emusic and not The Big Five(tm) is that Emusic are a legitimate source of digital music. Unless people go to the effort of purposely modifying the mp3 files they get from Emusic before putting them in their Napster directory, the files will be identical.
Before now, there's never been any reason anyone would go to that effort. But now, I suspect you will see lots of utilities that flip some number of random bits in a file to destroy the signature.
Incidentally, there are plenty of other legitimate sources, and they're growing by the day. The majority are band's own websites... often an exclusive remix or a live version of a song. As a current example, the official Nine Inch Nails site contains two tracks that were not put on the new remix album "Things Falling Apart".
He mentions that a digisig is less secure than a normal sig because the person does not have to read
what he/she is signing. Well, isnt this also the case with normal sigs? How many of you read the contract
when you joined your local video club?
That's not the point. The point is, whether you read it or not, we know you intended to sign the video club contract. You had it in your hands and chose to sign it. We can't prove that you intended to sign a digitally-signed message.
The computer is not a trusted environment. Well, if you dont trust your machine, then thats your own
problem. I trust mine, because I take care of it remaining trusted.
But do you trust the program that computes your digital signature? I think this is one of the applications where having access to the source is vital. Maybe it would be even better if the algorithm were very easy to implement, so everyone could roll their own signing program and be absolutely certain that it was kosher?
I think the most interesting aspect of this is that the RIAA members are no longer united. Now instead of all the majors against each other, we have BMG fighting on one side. It's going to be hard for the RIAA as a legal entity to attack Napster if Napster is partly owned by BMG.
If the censorware system blocks all domains that have porn in them, the porn may not be at the top level of the domain, and
so looking at the top level of the domain could make it apear as if it was not a porn site when it did have adult content on it. For
example: I'm sure that there is some porn somewhere on Earthlink.net, so if a system blocked Earthlink.net, they could
technically be blocking porn, even if you went to www.earthlink.net it would not appear to be a porn site.
If the filter software blocks http://www.earthlink.net/ because there is porn at http://www.earthlink.net/some/random/page/pornomat ic.html, I think most people would consider that to be a real error.
On the other hand, if they block http://www.randomsexsite.com/ when there's no actual porn on the home page, only on every single link from the home page, I think most people would say that's not an error.
But if you look at the Peacfire studies themselves, they make it clear that there are no gray cases... they were all clearly porn or not.
Of course looking at false negatives (not blocking a site that does containt porn) would be useful, but that is a time consuming
analysis. It would require a Peacefire worker to look at each of the nearly 1000 unblocked sites and determine if they
contained porn.
The review they did is pretty easy. The only had to review the 5-50 sites that were actually blocked.
True, and that's obviously why they did it. And they can certainly discover some interesting and useful facts by doing just that. Still, given that one of their main conclusions is "SurfWatch didn't go through each of these 1000 sites by hand", it'd be even more powerful if they could say "... but we did.":-)=
Maybe these companies should be thinking twice about basing a business on trying to create software to do a task that, as you've just pointed out, is pretty hopeless (all issues of whether it's a good idea or not aside).
And they should definitely be thinking twice before making claims about personally checking each URL which can easily be demonstrated to be false.
The electoral college is broken. You can win an election without getting a majority because of it.
That's not a problem. If the US made more than a pretense at having more than two political parties, this would be the natural state of affairs, and works fine.
What might be a problem is if you got the majority of the votes but lost the electoral college fraction. Which is certainly possible in the electoral college system, but is much less likely.
What bothers me more is that there is no prize for coming second. If you get 35% or 10% of the vote, you don't get 35% or 10% of the influence over the executive branch.
I'd like to see a search engine which 'profiles' an individual user in an attempt to improve search results. And that segues nicely into the
next paragraph:
Ideas like this exist to some extent, but unfortunately all the ones I've seen are of the targetted advertisement variety (gross..). It seems
any kind of profiling ability eventually ends up being used for ads. Are there any search engines out there that keep track of preferences
like this, becoming more accurate over time, and without any pornographic vampire junk mail distributors lurking in the background?
If the profiling is done well, and you're getting pornographic vampire junk mail, then you must be fond of pornographic vampires!;-)
This response wasn't taking issue with Moody's conclusion. Instead, it demonstrated that Moody
made a naive mistake by adding up all of the stats for all of the Linux distributions.
Very true. Very stupid mistake on Moody's part.
The Linux aggregate score shows Linux has *less* security bugs than NT.
That does not logically follow (although it's probably true). As was pointed out by many people yesterday, the total number of listed security problems is a very poor proxy for system security. Even if Moody's numbers had been right, his argument was flawed, and you're using the exact same argument now. Without taking into account the severity of the bugs, the fraction of bugs which are likely to be found, and the speed at which bugs are fixed (all of which vary wildly from OS to OS), a small difference in the number of reported bugs is not statistically relevant.
You get 50 starts of any office app and then it stops working. When you call them you end up arguing with a
typical drone that doesn't comprehend the idea that you might have to reformat and reinstall their OS every few
months.
That seems particularly ironic given that the standard MS tech support answer for many problems is "reinstall".:-b
First, a word of support... yes, there are good bands on mp3.com believe it or not.:-)= Generally a good way of finding them is to find a channel dedicated to a genre you like and listen to it. A couple of artists I've discovered on mp3.com that I really like are Lizette& and Ian Gibson.
BUT: I don't recommend buying CDs through mp3.com. Why? Sound quality. The audio on mp3.com CDs are 128kbps mp3s and have noticable mp3 artifacts. If you see an mp3.com CD that you want to buy, I recommend contacting the artist directly and asking them if you can get a real 44.1/16 CD from their original audio files.
I also recommend telling mp3.com that you're doing this, so maybe they'll change their policy and allow artists to upload 44.1/16 files for the CDs in addition to the mp3s that can be downloaded.
Second, who's to say the aliens use the EM spectrum the way we do? Maybe on their planet light was the best way of communicating due to magnetic interference.
Light and "the EM spectrum" are the same thing.
Here's another thought - try looking at ULTRA-LOW FREQUENCIES.. if someone was trying to talk to us, they'd want to be sure a galaxy wasn't in the way. We're scanning in.. what... the gigahertz range? Signals deteriorate muuuuch quicker when they're higher in frequency.
First, compared to most astronomical radiation, SETI looks at pretty low frequency.
Second, and more importantly, the reason they look where they do is that the biggest signpost in the EM spectrum is the 21cm spin-flip line of neutral hydrogen. 21 cm = 1.4 GHz. If you want people to find your signal, you need to put it somewhere recognizable, and the 21cm line is by far the most obvious feature in the low-frequency EM spectrum.
Slashdot Mirror
The RIAA didn't agree to anything. This is part of the court order. And you can understand why... if Sony says "Remove Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man" and there's a copy that someone has which is inexplicably mislabeled (both in the file name and the ID3 tag) "Weird Al Yankovic - Dancing Queen", it's absurd for Napster to be expected to recognize it without being explicitly told about it.
What I'm curious about is the status of bootleg remixes and bootleg live versions. When Joe Basement Producer makes a megamix of Pink Floyd (on Capitol) and Underworld (on TVT), who needs to contact Napster? Capitol? TVT? Joe Basement Producer?
[TMB]
2001-03-27 16:43:02
Okay, this is silly... the lameness filter won't let me just post that without some real text.
I think you're thinking about OpenBSD.
[TMB]
It makes sense that web-only stations should pay the same as ether-only stations, which this ruling demands. But it looks like they've also ruled that web-and-ether stations have to pay twice as much either alone, which doesn't make sense. If they don't pay different fees depending on how many people can listen to their EM signal, why should they pay different fees if more people can pick up their signal other ways?
[TMB]
Best section of the article...
Personally, "java nuclear" sounds to me like a damn fine cup of coffee. ;-)
On the subject of "weapons systems", wouldn't a failure be more likely to prevent death than cause it?!
[TMB]
Doug, you're a theorist in training... you're not supposed to know about mirrors! ;-)
-Jer.
Of course, any scientist will tell you that a margin of 537 out of 6 million is in the noise. Poisson error on 6 million is 2450. You can beat that down by sqrt(N) if you recount N times... so we need to recount the votes 21 times before the result becomes significant. ;-)
[TMB]
The reason you're seeing this come from Emusic and not The Big Five(tm) is that Emusic are a legitimate source of digital music. Unless people go to the effort of purposely modifying the mp3 files they get from Emusic before putting them in their Napster directory, the files will be identical.
Before now, there's never been any reason anyone would go to that effort. But now, I suspect you will see lots of utilities that flip some number of random bits in a file to destroy the signature.
Incidentally, there are plenty of other legitimate sources, and they're growing by the day. The majority are band's own websites... often an exclusive remix or a live version of a song. As a current example, the official Nine Inch Nails site contains two tracks that were not put on the new remix album "Things Falling Apart".
[TMB]
That's not the point. The point is, whether you read it or not, we know you intended to sign the video club contract. You had it in your hands and chose to sign it. We can't prove that you intended to sign a digitally-signed message.
But do you trust the program that computes your digital signature? I think this is one of the applications where having access to the source is vital. Maybe it would be even better if the algorithm were very easy to implement, so everyone could roll their own signing program and be absolutely certain that it was kosher?
[TMB]
.npo.pro? What exactly does it mean to be professionally non-profit?
[TMB]
.tm is the code for Turkmenistan.
[TMB]
I believe that I'll get thrown in jail if I try to vote, given that I'm not a US citizen. ;-)
[TMB]
I think the most interesting aspect of this is that the RIAA members are no longer united. Now instead of all the majors against each other, we have BMG fighting on one side. It's going to be hard for the RIAA as a legal entity to attack Napster if Napster is partly owned by BMG.
[TMB]
If the filter software blocks http://www.earthlink.net/ because there is porn at http://www.earthlink.net/some/random/page/pornomat ic.html, I think most people would consider that to be a real error.
On the other hand, if they block http://www.randomsexsite.com/ when there's no actual porn on the home page, only on every single link from the home page, I think most people would say that's not an error.
But if you look at the Peacfire studies themselves, they make it clear that there are no gray cases... they were all clearly porn or not.
[TMB]
True, and that's obviously why they did it. And they can certainly discover some interesting and useful facts by doing just that. Still, given that one of their main conclusions is "SurfWatch didn't go through each of these 1000 sites by hand", it'd be even more powerful if they could say "... but we did." :-)=
[TMB]
Maybe these companies should be thinking twice about basing a business on trying to create software to do a task that, as you've just pointed out, is pretty hopeless (all issues of whether it's a good idea or not aside).
And they should definitely be thinking twice before making claims about personally checking each URL which can easily be demonstrated to be false.
[TMB]
That's not a problem. If the US made more than a pretense at having more than two political parties, this would be the natural state of affairs, and works fine.
What might be a problem is if you got the majority of the votes but lost the electoral college fraction. Which is certainly possible in the electoral college system, but is much less likely.
What bothers me more is that there is no prize for coming second. If you get 35% or 10% of the vote, you don't get 35% or 10% of the influence over the executive branch.
[TMB]
If the profiling is done well, and you're getting pornographic vampire junk mail, then you must be fond of pornographic vampires! ;-)
[TMB]
Very true. Very stupid mistake on Moody's part.
That does not logically follow (although it's probably true). As was pointed out by many people yesterday, the total number of listed security problems is a very poor proxy for system security. Even if Moody's numbers had been right, his argument was flawed, and you're using the exact same argument now. Without taking into account the severity of the bugs, the fraction of bugs which are likely to be found, and the speed at which bugs are fixed (all of which vary wildly from OS to OS), a small difference in the number of reported bugs is not statistically relevant.
[TMB]
That seems particularly ironic given that the standard MS tech support answer for many problems is "reinstall". :-b
Remember... you can't spell masochist without MS!
[TMB]
As a matter of fact, many of us do have working arcade games. In this case, Defender, which takes up a prominant place in our living room. :-)=
At my last job, there was an original Joust machine in the kitchen for blowing off steam.
Next wrong stereotype?
[TMB]
First, a word of support... yes, there are good bands on mp3.com believe it or not. :-)= Generally a good way of finding them is to find a channel dedicated to a genre you like and listen to it. A couple of artists I've discovered on mp3.com that I really like are Lizette& and Ian Gibson.
BUT: I don't recommend buying CDs through mp3.com. Why? Sound quality. The audio on mp3.com CDs are 128kbps mp3s and have noticable mp3 artifacts. If you see an mp3.com CD that you want to buy, I recommend contacting the artist directly and asking them if you can get a real 44.1/16 CD from their original audio files.
I also recommend telling mp3.com that you're doing this, so maybe they'll change their policy and allow artists to upload 44.1/16 files for the CDs in addition to the mp3s that can be downloaded.
[TMB]
What version are you using? There were serious bugs up to 1.3.9, but 1.3.9 and 1.3.10 (current version) both have worked for me without crashing.
[TMB]
Light and "the EM spectrum" are the same thing.
First, compared to most astronomical radiation, SETI looks at pretty low frequency.
Second, and more importantly, the reason they look where they do is that the biggest signpost in the EM spectrum is the 21cm spin-flip line of neutral hydrogen. 21 cm = 1.4 GHz. If you want people to find your signal, you need to put it somewhere recognizable, and the 21cm line is by far the most obvious feature in the low-frequency EM spectrum.
[TMB]
Er... that is, I lost a factor of 2. I should have come up with "256kbps MP3s are 4 times bigger than the equivalent 44.1/16 raw audio" instead of 2.
:-(
Still half-asleep apparently.
[TMB]