A lot of people have crazy delusions that secret agencies live in some far off technical wonderhome, where all communications are encrypted with some super 733t MD67 algorithm never before seen by any other person in the world, all access is controlled by handprint and retinal scan identification and everyone walks around with James Bond gadgets in their pockets. It's just not so. These people live and work in normal offices and normal homes and deal with the same crappy, bug-ridden and insecure hardware and software that the rest of us do. It's probably a bit better than your normal corporate office, but not by much.
Well I don't think they have any super leet encryption, but I do expect them to be smart enough to encrypt anything sensitive. According to the article many of the documents this guy obtained were things that most definitely should have been encrypted. I think a good question is why this agent was sending this stuff unsecured, and if he was disciplined for allowing a security breach to occur. (Face it, since he didn't encrypt the documents and passed them over a monitorable network he's partially responsible.)
I have not looked at this exploit more than superficially so I am unsure if the media player will always open the page in IE, or if setting Firefox as your default browser will save you. I also do not know with what privilege level IE connects, at a guess I would think it is as you with the lowest security setting for that page, but it could be your default, or connect as "root." Someone also mentioned that there is a setting to disable this, but it does not seem to work.
There was an article about this earlier because a contractor of the RIAA/MPAA started this mess (check out my last journal entry, it links the article). According to that article WMP always uses IE, ignoring system browser preferences. This isn't too surprising as most MS software does this, apparently MS can't handle the concept of someone wanting to use software from anyone but them.
China has "got to start putting people in jail" to show it is serious about cracking down on widespread counterfeiting and piracy that costs U.S. companies billions of dollars in lost sales every year, a top Bush administration official said.
Why should China want to stifle it's own economy just to please Bush?
Better yet why should we be telling China to throw more people in jail when we also complain about them throwing people who disagree with them in jail? (I'm talking about political prisoners, wasn't sure how to word that.)
I can't answer all your specific questions but want to offer a few words of advice. The most important one is to take it at your own pace. Don't take too heavy a course load just to graduate sooner, an extra semester or two is a small price to pay for keeping your sanity and you'll also learn better when you're not as pressured.
Also, don't be afraid to audit courses. If you don't feel you remember something well enough to take the graduate classes in it, by all means audit the lower level course to refresh your memory.
The final thing I can tell you is to expect classes to be tough, to throw things at you and leave you to figure out the messy details. I took a graduate level Networking class as part of my BS program and the instructor gave us a final project (40% of the grad) that involved simulating some of the proposed protocols and stuff. We were left to figure out how to do it, we could use a network simulator, or take another route. I ended up writing code to implement gateway routing protcol. It was a dummy program that just took in the messages as specified in the RFC and responded properly but didn't do any actual routing. I got an A on the project and the course.
The reason I bring this up is because most of the actual graduate students in the class complained the whole semester about the project. I took other graduate level courses where similar things occurred. The professors expect you to not need as much handholding so be prepared for it. Don't complain, it'll just annoy the professor, just figure out a way to get it done. The professor for that Networking course told me later on (I ended up doing a fellowship at his lab the following summer) that he did that on purpose. He expected us to be able to find the way to get it to work on our own, that was actually part of the project grade. Consider it a trial by fire.:)
I'd also recommend you take the time to really get to know your professors, make friends with them if you can. It'll help you out down the line. For me I was able to go straight from graduation into grad school with a very nice GRA position that paid extroidinarily well (about $20k a year) because I made friends with a couple of professors. If you hope to get a PhD in the future having professors you're friends with will be almost vital.
By law June 2005 is the last month any equipment can be made to ignore broadcast flags.
This is the new standard whether we like it or not since many dvd makers will be fined if they do not include the drm.
Yes the law mandates equipment not ignore the broadcast flag, but I don't recall it mandating new MEDIA that are incompatible with existing drives.
As far as accepting it, I suspect this is going to be one of those issues that gets enough of the general public pissed to get something done. When suddenly hundreds of thousands of DVD+-RW drives in computers, DVD players, and DVD Recorders stop functioning as they have in the past because the blank media was broken, people aren't just going to shrug and say "well, time to toss that one in the trash and blow some more money." They're going want to know why it was deliberately broken and to prevent "indiscrimanate copying" ain't going to cut it with the average Joe. Think about it, exactly how many people do you know that actually support blacking out football games? Now do you think they're going to support new media making their existing equipment useless in the name of protecting blacking out football games and such? No, they're going to get madder.
What really gets me is the bit about the new media will cost slighly more. Why? This is apparently not a huge change, plants are ramped up for massive production of blank DVDs of both -R and +R already. It doesn't say this extra money will be a compulsary license either. Looks to me as if we're going to get both DRM'd media that breaks all our existing equipment, AND an HP "intellectual property" tax added to license this grand DRM scheme.
I guess Carly was tired of Bill Gates being hated more than she was or something. This just sounds truly wrong on so many levels. We only have one hope, traditionally the hardware companies making the actual players/burners/drives fight these things. The reason they do is to prevent just such a scenario as this article presents. While hardware manufacturers want to sell more, they've realized that having their existing stuff stop functioning, for whatever reason, will taint their brand in the minds of consumers. With all the consolidation this may not work though, as the same company sells the hardware as sells the content (movies/TV).
While this is generally laughed at by the slashdot community we still need to consider that Joe Sixpack pretty much sees it the same way. Not that he minds downloading free music and pr0n but ultimatly he does see it as theft.
I think you need to spend more time around some Joe Sixpack users. I spent the better part of two years stuck working in Electronics at Wal-mart (at least I had a job, sucky as it was) and the attitude towards downloading music is anything but "it's theft". Most people found it simpler to buy a CD since they weren't completely comfortable with their computers and/or were worried about evil hackers taking over their computers if they tried file sharing. (This group tends to skew higher in age, 40s+ generally, but there are exceptions.)
The next group is the "I heard this song I liked and thought I'd see if I could get a copy while I was buying groceries/getting my oil changed/etc." This is the group that the music industry is driving into piracy. These folks are generally younger (teens to 30s), technologically savvy (no problems or worries doing filesharing) and just wanting some music they like. What they generally FIND is an antagonistic retail approach created by the music industry (not Wal-mart, flawed as they may be). The biggest example of this was when Kid Rock did a duet with some female pop star. A LOT of people liked that song, and only that song. Tons of folks came in looking for it. They had two choices, buy a full album, or a CD single of Kid Rock singing the song with a different person. The near universal response? "Fuck it, I'll just go download it."
The thing is this wasn't said with an attitude of "crap, now I need to go break the law to get this", it was an attitude of "well what I want's on the Internet, I'll get it there." I'd say fewer than 1% even thought about the fact they were openly stating they were going to go commit a crime. This is the same group of people that'll ask you if they can copy their CDs using whatever object they're interested in. They'll ask openly how/where to get free music/movies online (they state it this way, they seem to have no comprehension that it's actually illegally free), ask what software they need to copy CDs/DVDs/etc. Ultimately their only real motivation to stop by to buy the CD was they were already at the store so it was convenient. If the thought had occurred to them elsewhere downloading would likely have been their first choice.
For completion there's a few more groups. The "buying albums for gifts" and the shoplifters. Those four cover most of the CD shoppers you'll see in your average Wal-mart at least.
Re:"do no evil" vs "nonprofit"?
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Defining Google
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· Score: 1
Although I'm already a huge gmail fan, you might hav e noticed that hotmail has 2 gig storage on thier freemail acounts?
Someone else pointed out that's just for the paying folks (250MB for freebies), but I'm frankly not sure a free terrabyte would get me to use that interface again, especially after Gmail's. It's so bloated, and huge, and annoying, and.... well Microsofty.:) Google's definitely got Microsoft beat when it comes to web interfaces, I'll take simpler looking and quicker loading over fancy, flashy and slow any day!
Re:"do no evil" vs "nonprofit"?
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Defining Google
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Like GMail and POP3. You see, 1GB webmail with text ads based on contents of email, all fine and clear. But a non-crippling POP3 that lets you avoid the ads?
Where's the catch?
I don't think there is one, I believe they put in the POP3 access for all the geeks who had requested it, most of the general population won't know what POP3 is, or care, they'll continue to use the web-based interface.
I also suspect they're betting on people buying into the concept of having E-mail/storage/etc. available anywhere they can get a network connection. I know I'm still using Gmail's web interface and have no plans to change. I actually like the interface (first time I've ever said that about a web-based E-mail client) and having things centralized has proven to be quite useful for me. I'm frankly hoping they're planning to offer more things like it, maybe a calendar program. (Actually I could probably find a free one of those if I'd every remember to take the time to look.)
1) There is no better time to point out the effects of a technology than when it is being used during a crisis! In 5 years (assuming there isn't another crisis of this magnitude) people will largely forget about ham radio and its function especially as an emergency communications network. Now is a GREAT time to launch a PR campaign of awareness and information about the art and hobby of ham radio. (if you notice though I didn't mention BPL in my article because I didn't want it to be the main focus of things). I guarentee you that thousands, if not millions, are exceptionally appreciative of ham radio at the moment.
And I agree, but as I said "And yes, BPL is bad, and can/will interfere with HAM, but there are better ways to point this out than to completely ignore both the tragedy and what good these students, and other amateur HAM operators have been able to do since the tragedy occured." A vastly different point than everyone seems to have taken it as, I did NOT say we shouldn't be discussing BPL's problems, I just said there were a lot of posters doing it in such a way as to detract from the article's main points (that HAM radio operators were doing a great service, especially the college kids who went there to help set up some stations and got caught in the middle, and that it was a horrible tragedy). From what you say above you agree with me, but apparently my writing skills suck since no one seems to be able to read that one damn sentence I wrote correctly. Pardon me if I'm peeved, but the accusations of karma-whoring and troll mods have really not gone over well, seeing as neither was anywhere near my intention and I feel that my intentions are actually clear when you take the time to read what I actually wrote.
2) A lot of/.'ers have already posted their sympathy and condolences about this tragic situation. Don't believe me?
I never said they hadn't, please feel free to point out where I did if you feel that I actually did so.
3) This is/. We are about technology and technical things. Discussing communication technology, people who use it, methodology, functionality, and even the human side of it is perfectly within the realm of informative speech.
And I don't disagree, I've read fascinating discussions about how nuclear bombs work, amoung other things on here. However most of the articles I'd just seen posted were of the "BPL's the spawn of satan, and this disaster proves that if we don't stop it all tomorrow the world will end" variety. OK, not exactly like that, but if you look through earlier posts (mostly buried in normal thread view now), that's a fairly decent summation of many of them. When you're talking about technology in the face of 100,000+ deaths, you should at least have some respect for the dead, something that was sorely lacking when I posted. The posts were coming across as less truly worried about the problems of BPL than as an excuse for the poster to complain about something they didn't like. Really I got the feeling from many posts that they really didn't care about BPL all that much either way, it was just a way to get an early post without actually saying "First Post!"
And the trolls, well, frankly that pushed me over the top. Who in the hell thinks it's fun to troll in a topic discussing issues surrounding a tragedy that's killed 100,000 people and counting? I just, well I just can't understand nor handle that real well right now. It quite frankly makes me sick and ashamed of humanity and slashdot. I'll probably get over it in a few days, but right now it's rather overwhelming. I should note I'm no stranger to this stuff, having been online since 1992, but as I said, the trolls had managed to reach new lows.
4) I bet that the doctors and EMTs over in that area are discussing their professional and technical perspectives of the disaster among their collegues. Why? Because they want to learn and exchange information. So are
Reading through the relatively few comments so far (especially few for a/. topic), it's really sad how many people are still trolling and/or taking time to trumpet things like how bad BPL (Broadband over PowerLines) is. Folks this is a tragedy that's so far killed more than 100,000 people. We still don't have enough knowledge of the areas hit to even know if that number represents a goodly portion of deaths, or if it's just the start of a number that will reach truly staggering proportions. I noticed in the article that the quake that started this has been reclassified as a 9 on the Richter scale, that's about as bad as a quake can get, the scale classifies 9 and greater as "rare greats", that occur roughly once in any 20 year period. It's only.5 below the worst quake on record, the Chilean Quake in 1960 and that one only killed 3000 people. This quake/tsunami combo's surpassed that by a VERY large margin already.
And yes, BPL is bad, and can/will interfere with HAM, but there are better ways to point this out than to completely ignore both the tragedy and what good these students, and other amateur HAM operators have been able to do since the tragedy occured.
So maybe my post is a bit off-topic, but I find it very disturbing that folks will focus on things like this when a tragedy occurs, especially the trolls. Think about what you're saying, and think about what it says about you before you click that submit button. (And yes, I know this is the Internet, and particularly/., but some of the trolls especially have managed to sink to new lows this time.)
What do you care more for... being able to read slashdot faster on BroadBand, or the lives of innocent little children? Easy enough question, to those of you who aren't terminally selfish.
You had a decent comment going until the bolded part. First of all the whole "it's for the children" argument's gotten pretty tainted in years past with Congress having used it to excuse how many different censorship acts in its name? At least two or three, all never got to take effect because of legal actions, all were ruled unconstitutional.
Secondly a lot more people than just children died and were injured in this tragedy. Are we really supposed to ignore everyone who dies that's an adult simply because they're not a kid? That's a pretty weird set of standards if you think that way.
Ultimately though, your quote sounds more like you're trolling for responses (of any kind) than like you really care about either issue. Considering the sheer enormity of lives lost so far, that says a lot of things about you, and they aren't terribly good things either.
Hence, there's always a need to make PCs faster, and given a network computer, the easiest way to make it a shitload faster is by adding a hard disk, installing the software locally, and removing the network latency delays.
And don't underestimate those latency delays. I've been working on a project at work that involves deploying some Arcview-based software. I just recently got to a point where I was ready to start testing it on a production system. When moving project files over, I forgot to edit them first (they're just text files pointing to various themes and telling what size to display, what part, etc.) so a couple ended up pointing to what was a network drive on the production system. Now the network drive was on a dedicated Linux box, on a private network segment with the production machine, on it's own 100Mbps Netgear Switch. No other traffic. The files were on that server since it's intended to be a backup server, so the project loaded just fine.
Well, except anytime you moved the view around at all it took 10-15 seconds to redraw the screen. It was completely unusable, even just trying to lookup an address off a street theme took too long to be of any use. And this on a brand new PC with a 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM. Turned out it was the network latency. Personally I was a bit shocked, if it'd been on full network with lots of traffic it'd have made some sense, but here it was essentially isolated and was getting full-duplex 100baseT on both machines.
Given that, I can't imagine running even something as simple as Word or Excel over a consumer broadband connection. I'd have to take a coffee break between screen refreshes.
With Windows XX out of the picture, the only reason for backups at all will be catastrophic disk failure. Hard drives are so cheap, that I'm wondering why Gateway and Dell aren't offering machines with 2 identical drives, and mirroring on by default. One dies, customer gets a new one, and it rebuilds the mirror. No backup.
Well I don't understand why they don't just quietly do it, but I DO understand why they don't do it and advertise it. While it is unusual to have two catastrophic hard drive failures in a short period of time, the liklihood of this goes up when you have a machine that's not treated well physically. If your first hard drive in the array died because your teenager got pissed when they got fragged playing Doom3 online and kicked the machine, there's a damn good chance the second one will meet a similar fate before the replacement arrives.
Now, let's say the computer manufacturer had hyped up this mirroring as a way to never have data loss. Well now you have catastrophic loss, everything in fact, unless you want to pay a fortune to retrieve whatever's left on the heads that weren't scratched to pieces. Sure it's not the manufacturer's fault, but even if they WIN, they're likely to end up in court over it. And this is a situation that's likely to crop up in a lot of homes, younger kids too may knock machines over while they're running by accident, your dog might, etc. No company's nuts enough to even hint at guaranteed data backup given all the variables out there.
As a ISP helpdesk technician, I personally don't want to support some webtv bullshit. And the people that run the company I work for, make it policy to support as little as possible. When someone wants to connect their playstation 2, technically, I'm not supposed to help them (but honest to god, no matter how weird the machine is that someone wants to connect, it's always 100 times easier than windows is).
And honestly this is why a lot of people hate their ISP and leave for another one. I mean, your company's policy is to support as little as possible? Frankly that's customer antagonistic, your company probably loses more customers thanks to that policy than they realize. I haven't had to call tech support in years, but if I ran into a "it's our policy to support nothing but Windows" shit, I'd advise whomever I was helping to cancel their account immediately and go elsewhere. Good companies don't make policies like this, bad companies do. Given my experiences with past ISPs, I wouldn't be surprised to learn you work for Earthlink, that sounds like how they treated me when I was a customer. Everything was the customer's fault, even if you were calling to tell them the mail server had stopped responding. (And you could reach everything else on the net, just the mail server wouldn't respond, so it wasn't my fault.)
What should click in their brains? That they should only allow users to operate on one piece of proprietary software/hardware, and never ever allow them to upgrade? I'll set up a windows box for you, and i'm betting if I dont ever let you change it in any way - it will still be working just fine many years down the line. Just a hunch.
You're dead on there, and this is why Windows problems are more on consumer machines than well run business ones. I worked for one department within a university a few years back as the Sysadmin. I was basically it for tech support in the department, and while having to run policies through faculty committees, I basically made the rules.
As we went into the first computer upgrade cycle for staff machines since I had taken over, I got the policy changed to remove admin access from all staff (not faculty mind you, that's a lot trickier to pull off, but this was a starting point). Of course they weren't happy about it, having had admin access for years, but the policy stuck. As their new machines were configured, I went to a lot of trouble to make sure they had the apps they wanted (as long as they weren't spyware or other stuff that had no place on a business computer), and that everything worked for a non-privledged domain user login.
After about 2 weeks, the complaints dissapeared. In a month, it switched to compliments and increased productivity. Our two main department secretaries went from having to have viruses cleaned off weekly (this was even WITH Norton running managed) and daily reboots to basically never having to reboot the machines at all.
So for those that don't believe a windows machine can have good uptimes and work well, I've done the case study already, and two of the folks in the study had previously exhibited an absolutely stunning ability to fubar a machine beyond all belief. When they didn't have the privledges to do that anymore, the machine worked just fine, AND they got more work done. Everyone was happy.
Now personally I have to reboot every couple of weeks at least, and do a reinstall every year and a half or so, but I'm brutal to computers. I run on average a good 20 apps at once, switching back and forth as I need to. I do this on everything, not just Windows, and frankly Linux, the *BSDs, and even Solaris can't handle me. I'm still the only graduate of my University's CS dept. who managed to crash the Solaris lab machines without any root privledges, and I did it more than once. I even have to reboot my linux machines at least monthly.
Bottom line, no OS can handle either idiots (who continously click on the same damned E-mail attachements to get reinfected over and over) or major multi-taskers very well. They're not designed to be abused, when they are, they respond in ways that weren't anticipated.
Re:Keeping it simple: answer to all astroturf post
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LokiTorrent vs. MPAA
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· Score: 1
They've established that they can control what's posted, and they've established that they do control what's posted. That puts them in a much weaker defensive position compared to Grokster and Kazaa. There's a very good chance that they're going to get nailed to the wall in court.
And they've established through enforcing it that they're trying to stay legal. They check against a list of names of content they have been told no user is authorized to post a torrent for. If the copyright holder hasn't given them a list and asked them to remove and blacklist those items, how is that Lokitorrent's fault? The MPAA could have simply sent them a list of every movie their members have a copyright on and asked they be removed and blacklisted. Since they didn't do so, we'll never know what would have happened. But if they had and Lokitorrents had removed all of them and continued to ban any new uploads according to policy, they'd have not been breaking the law.
What you fail to realize here is the copyright owner has a job to do too. They can't expect every soul on this planet to know they own movies x, y & z and studiously make sure they never let anyone do anything with them. When they're made aware of copyright infringement happening, they have to notify the proper people to request it be stopped.
Lokitorrents probably falls into the common carrier clauses of the DMCA, since they do not host the actual content themselves. The DMCA requires a takedown notice to be sent prior to taking legal action. It also sets out how that takedown must be formatted (for one thing it has to list every file/link considered infringing, it cannot say "our copyrighted works" and count since that doesn't provide the needed info for the carrier to act) and it must be sent to the proper address specified by the carrier for DMCA notices. If the carrier doesn't remove the links/files within a certain time frame, then, and ONLY then, can the copyright holder file suit.
In this case the MPAA filed suit first, this case may not make it very far, as unless they've bought the judge out, it very well may get thrown out on the grounds that they failed to comply with the DMCA rules prior to filing suit. At that point the MPAA would have to issue that takedown notice, list every link/file that is infringing, and if Lokitorrents takes them down, they can't sue. If anything new shows up (that wasn't on the site at the time of the previous notice) they send another, and so on.
You don't seem to be trolling, but you either have no clue how the DMCA works, or you have a great love for the MPAA. ISPs are constantly sent DMCA takedown notices because of illegal content hosted on THEIR servers by their users, yet they aren't illegal. I could go stick up some nice illegal Mp3s on my webspace my ISP provides, and the RIAA can't sue my ISP right off and claim they're responsible. Lokitorrents doesn't actually have the illegal content hosted on their servers!
Besides, I can go to Google and do this search and I'm taken to a page where I can now download torrents of illegal content. So by your reasoning (Google can control what's in their search results, they remove links because of DMCA takedown notices regularly, search for Scientology to see, they'll tell you links have been removed), Google is illegal and the MPAA should be filing suit against them ASAP!
Everyone has some kind of justification, I bet these criminals had some as well. They did not want to work, found the system easy to exploit, and wanted free money... what better reason is there really? Sure, they are "innocent until proven guilty" I suppose.
As others have pointed out, most of this is just talk, an intellectual exercise. After all this is a use of technology, and it's interesting to think about how you'd go about it if you were so inclined.
But there's another side you missed that's even more important to note. If none of the "good" guys take the time to think about how they would get lower prices, steal merchandise, etc. then stores wouldn't be able to try to defend themselves ahead of time. Every store I ever worked at in the past, from a lowly Revco (CVS nowadays) up to K-mart and Wal-mart cover loss prevention in training, and how do they train you on it? They show you how it's done. They show you how people will stuff things in a purse or backpack hoping you won't notice. The show you how people may swap UPCs, so you should watch the prices and description, they show you that they'll try to switch signs around, and so on. Does that make the folks doing the training criminals because they tell us how shoplifters work, and in the process how you can shoplift?
I think the best thing to do it go to a walmart and just sticker random items, so that random people are buying the altered items.
If this type of fraud becomes more commonplace that will start happening, not on purpose, but by accident.
Right now you'll notice cashiers check inside items like purses/backpacks/coolers/etc. to see if anything's inside. 99% of the time when you find something, the customer didn't put it there, and it's obvious (you can tell when someone's pretending to be shocked). Crooks will stick things in them, then something scares them, they think they were seen or something and ditch the item. It gets put back up eventually, no one thinks to look in it when put out returns, and eventually a perfectly innocent customer gets mortally embarassed. The same thing would happen with the UPCs, crook sticks it on, gets spooked, and it ends up getting bought by an unsuspecting customer later on.
I wish you were at my Wal-Mart. I bought 5 boxes of.45ACP earlier this year, and when I got home one box had magically transformed into.40S&W. (IOW, the clerk stuck the wrong box in the bag and I didn't notice) I took it back and was told that they couldn't accept ammo for a return or exchange and that it was a "federal law" (translation: we don't want to do it).
They didn't lie, but it's probably state, not federal. Here where I am (TN), the state prohibits ammo from being returned after 24 (or 48 one, I forget which) hours. If it's even 1 second past that limit, the clerk could go to jail for taking it back. The system in fact is programmed to enforce this, and even management can NOT override it. When it comes to guns and ammo stuff the laws are really rigid in some states, more lenient in others.
The reason I know this is I worked at the local Wal-mart up till last March, and I did service desk for a while. We had a guy bring back some ammo he wanted to swap, but he came in 6 hours past the return deadline. He wasn't happy, but there was simply nothing we could do. He called corporate from the service desk phone, they told him the same thing: "It's the law, we can't take it back, we're sorry. All we can tell you is call your congressman and complain that they made that the law." In fact he finally got fed up and was going to just leave it and we couldn't let him do that either, he had to take it back out of the store with him, also state law. I never worked sporting goods, but I seem to recall hearing that we can't even donate ammo brought in under the time limit to be swapped to police, it has to be sent off to be destroyed.
So don't blame Wal-mart on that one, they certainly have their problems, but refusing refunds the same day isn't something they do without damned good reason.
I'm not an RIAA shill -- I even built a site to combat them -- but I do believe that copyrights, trademarks, and even patents have some legitmate use. If someone wants to copyright an easy-to-reproduce comic strip, or an easy-to-copy song, we should respect that. Telling the artists to move on to selling t-shirts is a lame alternative to simply insisting that copyrights expire quickly. How we in the USA will stop the corps from extending copyright forever, I cannot guess. But that's a better, more ethical solution.
I understand what you're saying but no matter how good it sounds, reality has to be faced and they adapt or go under. If they can't make any money off the actual creative work any longer, and they still wish to make a living, they're going to have to find a way to do that. That's the main problem with the RIAA and MPAA right now, they're refusing to accept the reality of the situation and adapt and find a way to make money that allows all the P2P downloading to still occur.
And what's most pathetic is they've been through this before. The music industry's been through the sheet music to piano roll changeover (that was when compulsary licenses were first created). Then they went from the live entertainment to radio changeover. Then from radio to phonographs. Then phonographs to cassette tapes. The switch to CD didn't seem to bother them much, until recent years when CD burners became more prevalent. They've survived all those changes though, they need to figure out how to adapt to the new ones.
The video industry's been through the whole VCR revolution, with MPAA head Jack Valenti infamously claiming that the VCR would destroy the whole movie industry overnight. We've all seen how horribly they made out thanks to the VCR.
The thing is times change, and content creators have to change with them. It may not be pleasant to them, but no one person, or corporation, can stop societal changes. A whole lot of people lost jobs when the automobile wiped out the whole buggy and buggy whip industry, but none of us thinks we should have prevented the automobile from moving forward, why do some people think we should stop the digital media revolution from moving forward? Personally I can think of ways that the RIAA/MPAA could make money off this, but they don't want to change. Sure wish I could get into a position to implement my ideas, and profit from them until the next revolutions makes them obsolete. (Which will inevitably happen, it's just matter of how long until it does.)
Sure, books and videos can also be pirated, but until they're as easily accessible as music is via an iPod or something similar, there's still money to be made. Hell, most bands make their money on tour from t-shirt sales.
Books have been quite easily accesible for many years thanks to public libraries, yet the publishing business still thrives. Things might change a bit when a good portable E-book reader comes along, but I doubt it'll be as drastic. Most people prefer holding a book to read and prefer owning a copy so they don't have to worry about late fees.
Since you know it's against state law, send a copy of the article along to your state Attorney General's office asking them to look into the actions of this company. They may very well be able to file suit against them without a definite victim, or at least file suit to get an injunction forcing Overpeer to make sure they don't distribute any of these files to people in Minnesota. Since it's nearly impossible to filter out just by state, that would make them have to stop it completely or risk heavy fines.
Oh yeah, and write Overpeer to let them know about the law and that you're contacting your state AG about what they're doing. Might as well let them sweat a little while they wait to see what happens.:)
It isn't a virus. It doesn't propagate itself, a human has to issue the command. In other words, no damage is done unless you make a concious decision to use a file whose origin you can't verify. Whose fault is that?
Many early computer viruses are exactly as you describe. They didn't propogate themselves (those are called worms), and the user had to run them. They're still viruses, and you can go to jail for them under many state and federal laws. So your argument doesn't hold up at all.
As for who's fault it is? It's Overpeer's and the RIAA/MPAA's faults if they requested it. We send virus and worm writers to jail even if it was the idiots running attachments in E-mails entitled "I Love You" that caused it to spread. Legally this is quite clear, the creator of the virus/worm/trojan is the responsible party.
How about not using P2P for piracy*? That might be a start...
And what if I'm using it to download a legal file and Overpeer's goofed and mistakenly put one of their lovely trojans out named as a legal file? Moot point for me, I only use Bittorrent for Linux ISOs and none of the other P2P stuff, but even if a person is using P2P for copyright infringement, it doesn't give Overpeer and the RIAA/MPAA the right to break the law. They know this too, as they got a bill introduced a year or two back that would have given them the right to attack computers sharing music/movies without permission. This is the same damned thing, so why would it be legal now when that bill never got passed into law?
The problem is that the only people with standing to make a legal complaint about this practice (i.e., sue them) are people who have downloaded the files and had damages caused to them from the spyware being installed.
I don't have to have downloaded it or been infected to send the information in the articles to my state attorney general's office along with a request that they look into the legality of what Overture is doing under our state's law. In fact I am doing this and wrote Overture to inform them I was.
I'd recommend everyone do so, particularly if you live in the state Overture is based in and/or incorporated in. If it's illegal in your state, your AG's probably not going to look too highly on Overture doing this, and if they get enough letters they may file suit on behalf of the state. I'm sure NY's AG would just love to go after this, he certainly is no fan of corporations behaving badly.:)
It would be pretty funny seeing someone suing the MPAA for infecting their computers. After all, there're laws for that matter.
I don't use P2P (beyond Bittorrent for Linux ISOs) so I can't directly, but I can send the information in the article along to my state attorney's general office with a request that they check to see if this company's actions violate state laws about computer viruses/trojans/worms. In fact I wrote Overture a nice letter telling them that I was doing so and that I felt they should know about it.
Not sure if it'll have any effect, but it'd be hilarious to see several state's AGs suddenly sue Overture (and if we're really lucky the RIAA/MPAA) over this. I wouldn't feel any pity for them either, they've already earned any lawsuits they get.
Slashdot Mirror
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A lot of people have crazy delusions that secret agencies live in some far off technical wonderhome, where all communications are encrypted with some super 733t MD67 algorithm never before seen by any other person in the world, all access is controlled by handprint and retinal scan identification and everyone walks around with James Bond gadgets in their pockets. It's just not so. These people live and work in normal offices and normal homes and deal with the same crappy, bug-ridden and insecure hardware and software that the rest of us do. It's probably a bit better than your normal corporate office, but not by much.
Well I don't think they have any super leet encryption, but I do expect them to be smart enough to encrypt anything sensitive. According to the article many of the documents this guy obtained were things that most definitely should have been encrypted. I think a good question is why this agent was sending this stuff unsecured, and if he was disciplined for allowing a security breach to occur. (Face it, since he didn't encrypt the documents and passed them over a monitorable network he's partially responsible.)-
At first, I got "Nothing to see here"
... but Paris Hilton? Sounds like that guy had plenty to see ;-)
Nah, everyone's already seen plenty of Paris Hilton, a few grainy cell phone camera shots aren't worth anything.-
I have not looked at this exploit more than superficially so I am unsure if the media player will always open the page in IE, or if setting Firefox as your default browser will save you. I also do not know with what privilege level IE connects, at a guess I would think it is as you with the lowest security setting for that page, but it could be your default, or connect as "root." Someone also mentioned that there is a setting to disable this, but it does not seem to work.
There was an article about this earlier because a contractor of the RIAA/MPAA started this mess (check out my last journal entry, it links the article). According to that article WMP always uses IE, ignoring system browser preferences. This isn't too surprising as most MS software does this, apparently MS can't handle the concept of someone wanting to use software from anyone but them.-
China has "got to start putting people in jail" to show it is serious about cracking down on widespread counterfeiting and piracy that costs U.S. companies billions of dollars in lost sales every year, a top Bush administration official said.
Better yet why should we be telling China to throw more people in jail when we also complain about them throwing people who disagree with them in jail? (I'm talking about political prisoners, wasn't sure how to word that.)Why should China want to stifle it's own economy just to please Bush?
Also, don't be afraid to audit courses. If you don't feel you remember something well enough to take the graduate classes in it, by all means audit the lower level course to refresh your memory.
The final thing I can tell you is to expect classes to be tough, to throw things at you and leave you to figure out the messy details. I took a graduate level Networking class as part of my BS program and the instructor gave us a final project (40% of the grad) that involved simulating some of the proposed protocols and stuff. We were left to figure out how to do it, we could use a network simulator, or take another route. I ended up writing code to implement gateway routing protcol. It was a dummy program that just took in the messages as specified in the RFC and responded properly but didn't do any actual routing. I got an A on the project and the course.
The reason I bring this up is because most of the actual graduate students in the class complained the whole semester about the project. I took other graduate level courses where similar things occurred. The professors expect you to not need as much handholding so be prepared for it. Don't complain, it'll just annoy the professor, just figure out a way to get it done. The professor for that Networking course told me later on (I ended up doing a fellowship at his lab the following summer) that he did that on purpose. He expected us to be able to find the way to get it to work on our own, that was actually part of the project grade. Consider it a trial by fire. :)
I'd also recommend you take the time to really get to know your professors, make friends with them if you can. It'll help you out down the line. For me I was able to go straight from graduation into grad school with a very nice GRA position that paid extroidinarily well (about $20k a year) because I made friends with a couple of professors. If you hope to get a PhD in the future having professors you're friends with will be almost vital.
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By law June 2005 is the last month any equipment can be made to ignore broadcast flags.
Yes the law mandates equipment not ignore the broadcast flag, but I don't recall it mandating new MEDIA that are incompatible with existing drives.This is the new standard whether we like it or not since many dvd makers will be fined if they do not include the drm.
As far as accepting it, I suspect this is going to be one of those issues that gets enough of the general public pissed to get something done. When suddenly hundreds of thousands of DVD+-RW drives in computers, DVD players, and DVD Recorders stop functioning as they have in the past because the blank media was broken, people aren't just going to shrug and say "well, time to toss that one in the trash and blow some more money." They're going want to know why it was deliberately broken and to prevent "indiscrimanate copying" ain't going to cut it with the average Joe. Think about it, exactly how many people do you know that actually support blacking out football games? Now do you think they're going to support new media making their existing equipment useless in the name of protecting blacking out football games and such? No, they're going to get madder.
What really gets me is the bit about the new media will cost slighly more. Why? This is apparently not a huge change, plants are ramped up for massive production of blank DVDs of both -R and +R already. It doesn't say this extra money will be a compulsary license either. Looks to me as if we're going to get both DRM'd media that breaks all our existing equipment, AND an HP "intellectual property" tax added to license this grand DRM scheme.
I guess Carly was tired of Bill Gates being hated more than she was or something. This just sounds truly wrong on so many levels. We only have one hope, traditionally the hardware companies making the actual players/burners/drives fight these things. The reason they do is to prevent just such a scenario as this article presents. While hardware manufacturers want to sell more, they've realized that having their existing stuff stop functioning, for whatever reason, will taint their brand in the minds of consumers. With all the consolidation this may not work though, as the same company sells the hardware as sells the content (movies/TV).
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While this is generally laughed at by the slashdot community we still need to consider that Joe Sixpack pretty much sees it the same way. Not that he minds downloading free music and pr0n but ultimatly he does see it as theft.
I think you need to spend more time around some Joe Sixpack users. I spent the better part of two years stuck working in Electronics at Wal-mart (at least I had a job, sucky as it was) and the attitude towards downloading music is anything but "it's theft". Most people found it simpler to buy a CD since they weren't completely comfortable with their computers and/or were worried about evil hackers taking over their computers if they tried file sharing. (This group tends to skew higher in age, 40s+ generally, but there are exceptions.)The next group is the "I heard this song I liked and thought I'd see if I could get a copy while I was buying groceries/getting my oil changed/etc." This is the group that the music industry is driving into piracy. These folks are generally younger (teens to 30s), technologically savvy (no problems or worries doing filesharing) and just wanting some music they like. What they generally FIND is an antagonistic retail approach created by the music industry (not Wal-mart, flawed as they may be). The biggest example of this was when Kid Rock did a duet with some female pop star. A LOT of people liked that song, and only that song. Tons of folks came in looking for it. They had two choices, buy a full album, or a CD single of Kid Rock singing the song with a different person. The near universal response? "Fuck it, I'll just go download it."
The thing is this wasn't said with an attitude of "crap, now I need to go break the law to get this", it was an attitude of "well what I want's on the Internet, I'll get it there." I'd say fewer than 1% even thought about the fact they were openly stating they were going to go commit a crime. This is the same group of people that'll ask you if they can copy their CDs using whatever object they're interested in. They'll ask openly how/where to get free music/movies online (they state it this way, they seem to have no comprehension that it's actually illegally free), ask what software they need to copy CDs/DVDs/etc. Ultimately their only real motivation to stop by to buy the CD was they were already at the store so it was convenient. If the thought had occurred to them elsewhere downloading would likely have been their first choice.
For completion there's a few more groups. The "buying albums for gifts" and the shoplifters. Those four cover most of the CD shoppers you'll see in your average Wal-mart at least.
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Although I'm already a huge gmail fan, you might hav e noticed that hotmail has 2 gig storage on thier freemail acounts?
Someone else pointed out that's just for the paying folks (250MB for freebies), but I'm frankly not sure a free terrabyte would get me to use that interface again, especially after Gmail's. It's so bloated, and huge, and annoying, and.... well Microsofty.-
Like GMail and POP3. You see, 1GB webmail with text ads based on contents of email, all fine and clear. But a non-crippling POP3 that lets you avoid the ads?
I don't think there is one, I believe they put in the POP3 access for all the geeks who had requested it, most of the general population won't know what POP3 is, or care, they'll continue to use the web-based interface.Where's the catch?
I also suspect they're betting on people buying into the concept of having E-mail/storage/etc. available anywhere they can get a network connection. I know I'm still using Gmail's web interface and have no plans to change. I actually like the interface (first time I've ever said that about a web-based E-mail client) and having things centralized has proven to be quite useful for me. I'm frankly hoping they're planning to offer more things like it, maybe a calendar program. (Actually I could probably find a free one of those if I'd every remember to take the time to look.)
And I agree, but as I said "And yes, BPL is bad, and can/will interfere with HAM, but there are better ways to point this out than to completely ignore both the tragedy and what good these students, and other amateur HAM operators have been able to do since the tragedy occured." A vastly different point than everyone seems to have taken it as, I did NOT say we shouldn't be discussing BPL's problems, I just said there were a lot of posters doing it in such a way as to detract from the article's main points (that HAM radio operators were doing a great service, especially the college kids who went there to help set up some stations and got caught in the middle, and that it was a horrible tragedy). From what you say above you agree with me, but apparently my writing skills suck since no one seems to be able to read that one damn sentence I wrote correctly. Pardon me if I'm peeved, but the accusations of karma-whoring and troll mods have really not gone over well, seeing as neither was anywhere near my intention and I feel that my intentions are actually clear when you take the time to read what I actually wrote.
I never said they hadn't, please feel free to point out where I did if you feel that I actually did so.
And I don't disagree, I've read fascinating discussions about how nuclear bombs work, amoung other things on here. However most of the articles I'd just seen posted were of the "BPL's the spawn of satan, and this disaster proves that if we don't stop it all tomorrow the world will end" variety. OK, not exactly like that, but if you look through earlier posts (mostly buried in normal thread view now), that's a fairly decent summation of many of them. When you're talking about technology in the face of 100,000+ deaths, you should at least have some respect for the dead, something that was sorely lacking when I posted. The posts were coming across as less truly worried about the problems of BPL than as an excuse for the poster to complain about something they didn't like. Really I got the feeling from many posts that they really didn't care about BPL all that much either way, it was just a way to get an early post without actually saying "First Post!"
And the trolls, well, frankly that pushed me over the top. Who in the hell thinks it's fun to troll in a topic discussing issues surrounding a tragedy that's killed 100,000 people and counting? I just, well I just can't understand nor handle that real well right now. It quite frankly makes me sick and ashamed of humanity and slashdot. I'll probably get over it in a few days, but right now it's rather overwhelming. I should note I'm no stranger to this stuff, having been online since 1992, but as I said, the trolls had managed to reach new lows.
And yes, BPL is bad, and can/will interfere with HAM, but there are better ways to point this out than to completely ignore both the tragedy and what good these students, and other amateur HAM operators have been able to do since the tragedy occured.
So maybe my post is a bit off-topic, but I find it very disturbing that folks will focus on things like this when a tragedy occurs, especially the trolls. Think about what you're saying, and think about what it says about you before you click that submit button. (And yes, I know this is the Internet, and particularly /., but some of the trolls especially have managed to sink to new lows this time.)
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What do you care more for
... being able to read slashdot faster on BroadBand, or the lives of innocent little children? Easy enough question, to those of you who aren't terminally selfish.
You had a decent comment going until the bolded part. First of all the whole "it's for the children" argument's gotten pretty tainted in years past with Congress having used it to excuse how many different censorship acts in its name? At least two or three, all never got to take effect because of legal actions, all were ruled unconstitutional.Secondly a lot more people than just children died and were injured in this tragedy. Are we really supposed to ignore everyone who dies that's an adult simply because they're not a kid? That's a pretty weird set of standards if you think that way.
Ultimately though, your quote sounds more like you're trolling for responses (of any kind) than like you really care about either issue. Considering the sheer enormity of lives lost so far, that says a lot of things about you, and they aren't terribly good things either.
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Hence, there's always a need to make PCs faster, and given a network computer, the easiest way to make it a shitload faster is by adding a hard disk, installing the software locally, and removing the network latency delays.
And don't underestimate those latency delays. I've been working on a project at work that involves deploying some Arcview-based software. I just recently got to a point where I was ready to start testing it on a production system. When moving project files over, I forgot to edit them first (they're just text files pointing to various themes and telling what size to display, what part, etc.) so a couple ended up pointing to what was a network drive on the production system. Now the network drive was on a dedicated Linux box, on a private network segment with the production machine, on it's own 100Mbps Netgear Switch. No other traffic. The files were on that server since it's intended to be a backup server, so the project loaded just fine.Well, except anytime you moved the view around at all it took 10-15 seconds to redraw the screen. It was completely unusable, even just trying to lookup an address off a street theme took too long to be of any use. And this on a brand new PC with a 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM. Turned out it was the network latency. Personally I was a bit shocked, if it'd been on full network with lots of traffic it'd have made some sense, but here it was essentially isolated and was getting full-duplex 100baseT on both machines.
Given that, I can't imagine running even something as simple as Word or Excel over a consumer broadband connection. I'd have to take a coffee break between screen refreshes.
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With Windows XX out of the picture, the only reason for backups at all will be catastrophic disk failure. Hard drives are so cheap, that I'm wondering why Gateway and Dell aren't offering machines with 2 identical drives, and mirroring on by default. One dies, customer gets a new one, and it rebuilds the mirror. No backup.
Well I don't understand why they don't just quietly do it, but I DO understand why they don't do it and advertise it. While it is unusual to have two catastrophic hard drive failures in a short period of time, the liklihood of this goes up when you have a machine that's not treated well physically. If your first hard drive in the array died because your teenager got pissed when they got fragged playing Doom3 online and kicked the machine, there's a damn good chance the second one will meet a similar fate before the replacement arrives.Now, let's say the computer manufacturer had hyped up this mirroring as a way to never have data loss. Well now you have catastrophic loss, everything in fact, unless you want to pay a fortune to retrieve whatever's left on the heads that weren't scratched to pieces. Sure it's not the manufacturer's fault, but even if they WIN, they're likely to end up in court over it. And this is a situation that's likely to crop up in a lot of homes, younger kids too may knock machines over while they're running by accident, your dog might, etc. No company's nuts enough to even hint at guaranteed data backup given all the variables out there.
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As a ISP helpdesk technician, I personally don't want to support some webtv bullshit. And the people that run the company I work for, make it policy to support as little as possible. When someone wants to connect their playstation 2, technically, I'm not supposed to help them (but honest to god, no matter how weird the machine is that someone wants to connect, it's always 100 times easier than windows is).
And honestly this is why a lot of people hate their ISP and leave for another one. I mean, your company's policy is to support as little as possible? Frankly that's customer antagonistic, your company probably loses more customers thanks to that policy than they realize. I haven't had to call tech support in years, but if I ran into a "it's our policy to support nothing but Windows" shit, I'd advise whomever I was helping to cancel their account immediately and go elsewhere. Good companies don't make policies like this, bad companies do. Given my experiences with past ISPs, I wouldn't be surprised to learn you work for Earthlink, that sounds like how they treated me when I was a customer. Everything was the customer's fault, even if you were calling to tell them the mail server had stopped responding. (And you could reach everything else on the net, just the mail server wouldn't respond, so it wasn't my fault.)-
What should click in their brains? That they should only allow users to operate on one piece of proprietary software/hardware, and never ever allow them to upgrade? I'll set up a windows box for you, and i'm betting if I dont ever let you change it in any way - it will still be working just fine many years down the line. Just a hunch.
You're dead on there, and this is why Windows problems are more on consumer machines than well run business ones. I worked for one department within a university a few years back as the Sysadmin. I was basically it for tech support in the department, and while having to run policies through faculty committees, I basically made the rules.As we went into the first computer upgrade cycle for staff machines since I had taken over, I got the policy changed to remove admin access from all staff (not faculty mind you, that's a lot trickier to pull off, but this was a starting point). Of course they weren't happy about it, having had admin access for years, but the policy stuck. As their new machines were configured, I went to a lot of trouble to make sure they had the apps they wanted (as long as they weren't spyware or other stuff that had no place on a business computer), and that everything worked for a non-privledged domain user login.
After about 2 weeks, the complaints dissapeared. In a month, it switched to compliments and increased productivity. Our two main department secretaries went from having to have viruses cleaned off weekly (this was even WITH Norton running managed) and daily reboots to basically never having to reboot the machines at all.
So for those that don't believe a windows machine can have good uptimes and work well, I've done the case study already, and two of the folks in the study had previously exhibited an absolutely stunning ability to fubar a machine beyond all belief. When they didn't have the privledges to do that anymore, the machine worked just fine, AND they got more work done. Everyone was happy.
Now personally I have to reboot every couple of weeks at least, and do a reinstall every year and a half or so, but I'm brutal to computers. I run on average a good 20 apps at once, switching back and forth as I need to. I do this on everything, not just Windows, and frankly Linux, the *BSDs, and even Solaris can't handle me. I'm still the only graduate of my University's CS dept. who managed to crash the Solaris lab machines without any root privledges, and I did it more than once. I even have to reboot my linux machines at least monthly.
Bottom line, no OS can handle either idiots (who continously click on the same damned E-mail attachements to get reinfected over and over) or major multi-taskers very well. They're not designed to be abused, when they are, they respond in ways that weren't anticipated.
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They've established that they can control what's posted, and they've established that they do control what's posted. That puts them in a much weaker defensive position compared to Grokster and Kazaa. There's a very good chance that they're going to get nailed to the wall in court.
And they've established through enforcing it that they're trying to stay legal. They check against a list of names of content they have been told no user is authorized to post a torrent for. If the copyright holder hasn't given them a list and asked them to remove and blacklist those items, how is that Lokitorrent's fault? The MPAA could have simply sent them a list of every movie their members have a copyright on and asked they be removed and blacklisted. Since they didn't do so, we'll never know what would have happened. But if they had and Lokitorrents had removed all of them and continued to ban any new uploads according to policy, they'd have not been breaking the law.What you fail to realize here is the copyright owner has a job to do too. They can't expect every soul on this planet to know they own movies x, y & z and studiously make sure they never let anyone do anything with them. When they're made aware of copyright infringement happening, they have to notify the proper people to request it be stopped.
Lokitorrents probably falls into the common carrier clauses of the DMCA, since they do not host the actual content themselves. The DMCA requires a takedown notice to be sent prior to taking legal action. It also sets out how that takedown must be formatted (for one thing it has to list every file/link considered infringing, it cannot say "our copyrighted works" and count since that doesn't provide the needed info for the carrier to act) and it must be sent to the proper address specified by the carrier for DMCA notices. If the carrier doesn't remove the links/files within a certain time frame, then, and ONLY then, can the copyright holder file suit.
In this case the MPAA filed suit first, this case may not make it very far, as unless they've bought the judge out, it very well may get thrown out on the grounds that they failed to comply with the DMCA rules prior to filing suit. At that point the MPAA would have to issue that takedown notice, list every link/file that is infringing, and if Lokitorrents takes them down, they can't sue. If anything new shows up (that wasn't on the site at the time of the previous notice) they send another, and so on.
You don't seem to be trolling, but you either have no clue how the DMCA works, or you have a great love for the MPAA. ISPs are constantly sent DMCA takedown notices because of illegal content hosted on THEIR servers by their users, yet they aren't illegal. I could go stick up some nice illegal Mp3s on my webspace my ISP provides, and the RIAA can't sue my ISP right off and claim they're responsible. Lokitorrents doesn't actually have the illegal content hosted on their servers!
Besides, I can go to Google and do this search and I'm taken to a page where I can now download torrents of illegal content. So by your reasoning (Google can control what's in their search results, they remove links because of DMCA takedown notices regularly, search for Scientology to see, they'll tell you links have been removed), Google is illegal and the MPAA should be filing suit against them ASAP!
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Everyone has some kind of justification, I bet these criminals had some as well. They did not want to work, found the system easy to exploit, and wanted free money... what better reason is there really? Sure, they are "innocent until proven guilty" I suppose.
As others have pointed out, most of this is just talk, an intellectual exercise. After all this is a use of technology, and it's interesting to think about how you'd go about it if you were so inclined.But there's another side you missed that's even more important to note. If none of the "good" guys take the time to think about how they would get lower prices, steal merchandise, etc. then stores wouldn't be able to try to defend themselves ahead of time. Every store I ever worked at in the past, from a lowly Revco (CVS nowadays) up to K-mart and Wal-mart cover loss prevention in training, and how do they train you on it? They show you how it's done. They show you how people will stuff things in a purse or backpack hoping you won't notice. The show you how people may swap UPCs, so you should watch the prices and description, they show you that they'll try to switch signs around, and so on. Does that make the folks doing the training criminals because they tell us how shoplifters work, and in the process how you can shoplift?
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I think the best thing to do it go to a walmart and just sticker random items, so that random people are buying the altered items.
If this type of fraud becomes more commonplace that will start happening, not on purpose, but by accident.Right now you'll notice cashiers check inside items like purses/backpacks/coolers/etc. to see if anything's inside. 99% of the time when you find something, the customer didn't put it there, and it's obvious (you can tell when someone's pretending to be shocked). Crooks will stick things in them, then something scares them, they think they were seen or something and ditch the item. It gets put back up eventually, no one thinks to look in it when put out returns, and eventually a perfectly innocent customer gets mortally embarassed. The same thing would happen with the UPCs, crook sticks it on, gets spooked, and it ends up getting bought by an unsuspecting customer later on.
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I wish you were at my Wal-Mart. I bought 5 boxes of
.45ACP earlier this year, and when I got home one box had magically transformed into .40S&W. (IOW, the clerk stuck the wrong box in the bag and I didn't notice) I took it back and was told that they couldn't accept ammo for a return or exchange and that it was a "federal law" (translation: we don't want to do it).
They didn't lie, but it's probably state, not federal. Here where I am (TN), the state prohibits ammo from being returned after 24 (or 48 one, I forget which) hours. If it's even 1 second past that limit, the clerk could go to jail for taking it back. The system in fact is programmed to enforce this, and even management can NOT override it. When it comes to guns and ammo stuff the laws are really rigid in some states, more lenient in others.The reason I know this is I worked at the local Wal-mart up till last March, and I did service desk for a while. We had a guy bring back some ammo he wanted to swap, but he came in 6 hours past the return deadline. He wasn't happy, but there was simply nothing we could do. He called corporate from the service desk phone, they told him the same thing: "It's the law, we can't take it back, we're sorry. All we can tell you is call your congressman and complain that they made that the law." In fact he finally got fed up and was going to just leave it and we couldn't let him do that either, he had to take it back out of the store with him, also state law. I never worked sporting goods, but I seem to recall hearing that we can't even donate ammo brought in under the time limit to be swapped to police, it has to be sent off to be destroyed.
So don't blame Wal-mart on that one, they certainly have their problems, but refusing refunds the same day isn't something they do without damned good reason.
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I'm not an RIAA shill -- I even built a site to combat them -- but I do believe that copyrights, trademarks, and even patents have some legitmate use. If someone wants to copyright an easy-to-reproduce comic strip, or an easy-to-copy song, we should respect that. Telling the artists to move on to selling t-shirts is a lame alternative to simply insisting that copyrights expire quickly. How we in the USA will stop the corps from extending copyright forever, I cannot guess. But that's a better, more ethical solution.
I understand what you're saying but no matter how good it sounds, reality has to be faced and they adapt or go under. If they can't make any money off the actual creative work any longer, and they still wish to make a living, they're going to have to find a way to do that. That's the main problem with the RIAA and MPAA right now, they're refusing to accept the reality of the situation and adapt and find a way to make money that allows all the P2P downloading to still occur.And what's most pathetic is they've been through this before. The music industry's been through the sheet music to piano roll changeover (that was when compulsary licenses were first created). Then they went from the live entertainment to radio changeover. Then from radio to phonographs. Then phonographs to cassette tapes. The switch to CD didn't seem to bother them much, until recent years when CD burners became more prevalent. They've survived all those changes though, they need to figure out how to adapt to the new ones.
The video industry's been through the whole VCR revolution, with MPAA head Jack Valenti infamously claiming that the VCR would destroy the whole movie industry overnight. We've all seen how horribly they made out thanks to the VCR.
The thing is times change, and content creators have to change with them. It may not be pleasant to them, but no one person, or corporation, can stop societal changes. A whole lot of people lost jobs when the automobile wiped out the whole buggy and buggy whip industry, but none of us thinks we should have prevented the automobile from moving forward, why do some people think we should stop the digital media revolution from moving forward? Personally I can think of ways that the RIAA/MPAA could make money off this, but they don't want to change. Sure wish I could get into a position to implement my ideas, and profit from them until the next revolutions makes them obsolete. (Which will inevitably happen, it's just matter of how long until it does.)
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Sure, books and videos can also be pirated, but until they're as easily accessible as music is via an iPod or something similar, there's still money to be made. Hell, most bands make their money on tour from t-shirt sales.
Books have been quite easily accesible for many years thanks to public libraries, yet the publishing business still thrives. Things might change a bit when a good portable E-book reader comes along, but I doubt it'll be as drastic. Most people prefer holding a book to read and prefer owning a copy so they don't have to worry about late fees.Oh yeah, and write Overpeer to let them know about the law and that you're contacting your state AG about what they're doing. Might as well let them sweat a little while they wait to see what happens. :)
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It isn't a virus. It doesn't propagate itself, a human has to issue the command. In other words, no damage is done unless you make a concious decision to use a file whose origin you can't verify. Whose fault is that?
Many early computer viruses are exactly as you describe. They didn't propogate themselves (those are called worms), and the user had to run them. They're still viruses, and you can go to jail for them under many state and federal laws. So your argument doesn't hold up at all.As for who's fault it is? It's Overpeer's and the RIAA/MPAA's faults if they requested it. We send virus and worm writers to jail even if it was the idiots running attachments in E-mails entitled "I Love You" that caused it to spread. Legally this is quite clear, the creator of the virus/worm/trojan is the responsible party.
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How about not using P2P for piracy*? That might be a start...
And what if I'm using it to download a legal file and Overpeer's goofed and mistakenly put one of their lovely trojans out named as a legal file? Moot point for me, I only use Bittorrent for Linux ISOs and none of the other P2P stuff, but even if a person is using P2P for copyright infringement, it doesn't give Overpeer and the RIAA/MPAA the right to break the law. They know this too, as they got a bill introduced a year or two back that would have given them the right to attack computers sharing music/movies without permission. This is the same damned thing, so why would it be legal now when that bill never got passed into law?-
The problem is that the only people with standing to make a legal complaint about this practice (i.e., sue them) are people who have downloaded the files and had damages caused to them from the spyware being installed.
I don't have to have downloaded it or been infected to send the information in the articles to my state attorney general's office along with a request that they look into the legality of what Overture is doing under our state's law. In fact I am doing this and wrote Overture to inform them I was.I'd recommend everyone do so, particularly if you live in the state Overture is based in and/or incorporated in. If it's illegal in your state, your AG's probably not going to look too highly on Overture doing this, and if they get enough letters they may file suit on behalf of the state. I'm sure NY's AG would just love to go after this, he certainly is no fan of corporations behaving badly. :)
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It would be pretty funny seeing someone suing the MPAA for infecting their computers. After all, there're laws for that matter.
I don't use P2P (beyond Bittorrent for Linux ISOs) so I can't directly, but I can send the information in the article along to my state attorney's general office with a request that they check to see if this company's actions violate state laws about computer viruses/trojans/worms. In fact I wrote Overture a nice letter telling them that I was doing so and that I felt they should know about it.Not sure if it'll have any effect, but it'd be hilarious to see several state's AGs suddenly sue Overture (and if we're really lucky the RIAA/MPAA) over this. I wouldn't feel any pity for them either, they've already earned any lawsuits they get.