Type D) where a parent takes a picture of their child in a pretty standard situation, and has it developed, and then people decide that it's child porn.
I can't seem to find the story now, but there was a woman who took a picture of her child breast feeding, and it was deemed pornographic and they were arrested. Last I heard, the charges had been dropped, but CPS still wouldn't give their kids back...
I've seen the term `head geek' before -- it referred to the leader or alpha geek. I'm not sure how I'd apply it to Mr Wheaton, though.
It's neat that Wil has `geek' tendancies, and it's not often that celebrities have blogs (but becoming more common), but he has much to learn before we can dub him `head-geek'.
Unless he's locked in a closet with my grandma and a tricorder, of course:)
In the Michigan case, Oppenheim said, the student ran a network offering more than 650,000 music files for downloading, in addition to 1,866 songs from his own personal collection.
he himself [the defendant] is copying and distributing hundreds of sound recordings over his system
(that text is from the RIAA's complaint.) If true, then he was actually offering mp3 songs for download.
This analysis does not cover the possible direct infringement --
Direct infringement carries a presumption of harm, but we have to wait for the findings of fact to be issued to make a determination of the extent of that harm (and this paper does not consider those direct infringement issues.)
But apparantly he was accused of direct infringement as well. I don't know how accurate this accusation is, but it was certainly made.
Peng's site, dubbed "wake," only appeared responsible for about 27,000 infringements by others, he said. But the Princeton sophomore also is accused of offering hundreds of MP3 song files for illegal downloading.
Perhaps I'm not understanding correctly, but weren't there mp3s *on his box* available for downloading? Unless they were all ok for distribution (certainly possible, but unlikely) wouldn't this qualify as `distributing mp3s himself' ?
The friggin' thing is how to be sure that sendmail's author imagined all parallel excution scenarios and has coded accordingly.
Are you sure about that?
If the OS is properly done, the userlevel applications shouldn't have to worry about if the box has multiple cpus or just one. If something works with one cpus and fails with multiple cpus, then either 1) the OS isn't doing it's job right or 2) there's some subtle timing bug in the (application) code that would probably eventually fail on the right single cpu box -- that it doesn't fail on a single cpu box is just... (bad) luck.
(kernel level stuff is a TOTALLY different issue.)
Unclear. People participate enthusiastically in pyramid schemes that will never make money, even if the participants don't realize it. I would guess that at least some spammers make money.
Remember a few years back when Rodona Garst's (a notorious spammer) computer was broken into? ICQ logs and such were taken from her computer, and they were very interesting reading -- and she seemed to make pretty good money spamming, and even had a team of people spamming for her.
I suspect that it's pretty easy to make money spamming if you've got half a brain and some programming experience. You could write your own simple address-collection and spam-blasting programs in under a day, and then all you need is to find some customers -- and apparantly they're out there.
If you're clueless and you spend a few hundred on somebody's CD of email addresses, and a few more hundred on a CD of spam software and don't know anything more about your computer than how to click on things, then you're right -- you're just going to make other spammers rich and not yourself -- and it's obvious that spammers are perfectly happy to prey upon other would-be spammers.
There's definately a lot of `spam MLM' (MLM = Multi Level Marketing) going on -- but unlike your traditional MLM, there is money to be made outside of the MLM. Kind of like Amway -- yes, it's a MLM but they do sell a real product.
Great. First we have the trojan that
downloads kiddie porn (has anyone else ever heard of this one?)
I suspect that we weren't given the whole story.
What seems much more likely is that some trojan was installed on this person's computer that allowed an attacker to take control -- nothing more (and there's a lot of such trojans out there.) Then the attacker took control and put the porn onto the computer, perhaps so it could be distributed, or perhaps just to see if he could get this guy in trouble, or shock him when he found it -- who knows?
It's certainly possible to write a trojan that looks for kiddie porn, but there's plenty of other more plausable explanations that fit the (limited) information that we have as well.
Hell. It's possible that the `trojan' installed merely pulls images off of Usenet and saves them to the hard disk for the attacker to collect later, and it just happened that somebody had posted some kiddie porn to Usenet so this program captured it -- so there's six thousand `normal porn' images, and three `kiddie porn' images on the disk. Who knows?
If the spammer had two braincells to rub together to figure that one out, would they be in the spam business to begin with?
Possibly. Spammers do seem to make money, don't they? And there are many intelligent people out there who like money. Smart people do morally wrong things to make money just like dumb people do.
The way to stop spam is to remove the profit motive. PEOPLE NEED TO STOP BUYING STUFF THAT THEY GET SPAMMED ABOUT! Once they stop, people will stop paying spammers to advertise their wares, and the spammers will then stop spamming.
Yes, most spammers do seem pretty stupid. But if it makes money, and it's not illegal, many people, even smart people, have no problems with doing it even if it's morally reprehensible.
in the UK at least, we pay a additional fee whenever we buy blank cassettes, either music or video, that go to support the music industry from 'illegal' copying onto them.
The US has similar fees as well. Some are mandated by law (like the DAT tax) and others (some of the money you pay for analog media goes to the RIAA and similar organizations, for example) seem to be more of an industry agreement.
(I've heard about the latter (analog) issue from people in the music industry, but have never actually seen anything more definate. Can anybody corroborate or disprove it?)
They could even actually ban telnet, http, and ftp, too.
They used to do that (sort of. They didn't ban the traffic, they just didn't route it.) If you don't recall, AOL started as a glorified BBS and only later did they add email, then Usenet, then WWW and other Internet services.
The first I noticed it was March 27th (and I don't email my dad @ AOL that often, so it probably happened even before that...)
The original message was received at Thu, 27 Mar 2003 13:35:36 -0600 from dougmc@localhost
----- Transcript of session follows -----... while talking to mailin-03.mx.aol.com.:
550-The IP address you're using to connect to AOL is either open to the
550-free relaying of e-mail, is serving as an open proxy, or is a dynamic
550-(residential) IP address. AOL cannot accept further e-mail
550-transactions from your server until either your server is closed to free
550-relaying/proxy, or your ISP removes your IP address from their list of
550-dynamic IP addresses. For additional information, please visit
550 http://postmaster.info.aol.com.... while talking to mailin-04.mx.aol.com.:
192khz sampling and compression do not fit together.
As long as you restrict yourself to lossy compression schemes, you may be correct (it's still a controversial subject, of course.) However, you may not have noticed this, but the person you responded to mentioned *both* lossy and lossless compression.
(Of course, he did incorrectly suggest that lossless compression requires having the entire stream at once, which is patently incorrect. Obviously he's never heard of gzip or bzip2 -- both of which are lossless and compress streams block by block -- but aren't that great at compressing audio streams. There's more on various lossless audio-specific compression programs here.)
Note that even lossy compression is not always bad. mp3s and Oggs at 128Kbit/s may not be CD quality, but they're pretty good -- and yet it's compressed by a 12:1 factor! Increasing the bit rates will reduce your compression factor, but will increase the quality.
Jpeg files are lossy, yet with higher quality factors the quality is so high that you can't even tell the difference with your own eyes.
An audiophile may not be at all happy with 128Kbit/s mp3 files, but as you increase the bit rate, there's likely to be a place where he can't tell the difference between the lossy compression and the original. (Of course, depending on how strongly he hates lossy compression schemes, he may never actually admit it.)
At that point, what matters is the compression ratio compared to what you could get with a lossless compresser.
You wouldn't want to use a lossy compression scheme for compressing the studio masters (you should always do your mixing and such with no compression or lossless compression), but if the quality is good enough, it may be perfectly ok for the final distribution of the music, even for the audiophiles. 128 Kbit/s mp3s don't cut it, but that doesn't mean that `mp3 sucks!'.
Re:These tanks could be an interesting choice...
on
Tiny RC Tanks That Fight
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Another fun thing would be rc planes with guns similar to those on these tanks. Imagine a fighter duel between a P-58 Mustang and a Zero, or an Me bf 109 and a Spitfire...
When you start doing R/C planes, you soon realize that there's three things you can have --
looks just like a real (scale) plane
flies well
is relatively inexpensive and easy to make
Pick any two!
Even so, some people do do R/C combat with scale models... but it's a lot of work making the planes and keeping them flying:)
R/C plane combat is certainly done. Some is done with infrared `guns', like this,
some is done trying to cut a ribbon trailing behind the other plane, and some is done by literally trying to bump the other plane out of the sky.
In all cases, even when you're not trying to, the planes tend to collide quite often. So you need planes that are very resiliant, and that usually means that they aren't going to be scale models of anything -- instead, you concentrate on them flying reasonably well and being tough.
Heather Newman's column in Saturday's paper erroneously described the theoretical maximum amount for which the Recording Industry Association of America was suing Michigan Technological University student Joseph Nievelt. The total should have been $97.8 billion.
Only 98 billion dollars? Carry on!
(I still wonder if they'll take a check. Or how about PayPal?)
It's mostly legal, but highly unethical, since it involves cost-shifting and most of times hijacking open relays and other unsecured resources to send out that crap.
A minor nit -- spamming, at least in most of the US, is legal, yes. `Hijacking open relays and other unsecured resources' is for the most part *not* legal.
Nobody is going to go after you for relaying a few emails through a server. But when you relay thousands of emails through a server, it becomes a denial of service attack and people DO occasionally get prosecuted for these.
And `other unsescured resources' often means exploiting security holes in a system, and that's definately illegal too.
No. Per year [cia.gov]. People might quote GDP growth per quarter (but even then the rate is often "annualised") but I've never seen anyone quote GDP per quarter.
Oops. You're right. They kept giving GNP by the quarter, so I assumed...
Under section 103 of the patent statute, if the claimed subject matter would have been "obvious" to a hypothetical "person of ordinary skill" in the relevant art(s) at the time the inventor invented it, then the claim cannot be patented. [35 USC 103]
As I understood it, a layperson knew something of the art in question, but wasn't a master. Looking it up now, maybe it doesn't even mean that. You may be closer than my statement to the truth:)
Either way, the patent office doesn't seem to apply this rule very often. How about the patent for `method of exercising a feline with a beam of coherent light' or whatever the name was? My two year old daughter could figure that out.
The idea that an idea that is obvious now was not obvious before is hard to grasp for most people -- otherwise you wouldn't hear "Why didn't I think of that?!" so often.
Agreed. However, JPEG encoding isn't so obvious even now. Yes, it's ubiquitous, but not many of the people who use it could describe how it works internally. The XOR cursor, that's obvious. JPEG compression is much more complicated.
Though looking at the news article in question, none of the patents they list seem to cover JPEG compression directly at all -- only certain ideas dealing with digital cameras. But maybe one of them deals with using JPEG compression in a digital camera -- and if so, that would fall under the category of `take somebody else's patent, and patent an obvious use of it.'
The patent system is increasingly under abuse, and the US Patent office will allow anything through.
As much as I agree with you, I'm not sure that this idea really apply here. If the patent in question expires next year, that means it was granted in 1987 or earlier. When JPEG encoding first `came out', it was pretty revolutionary, and probably even fit the `not obvious to the layperson' rule that the patent office so often ignores. If the original creator of the JPEG process is the one who patented it, then I'd say it's a valid patent. (of course, if he agreed not to enforce it so it could become an ISO standard, that's another matter.)
Though what seems to happen more often is that somebody comes up with something clever, and may or may not patent it. Then somebody else comes along, and either patents the original idea (if not patented) or patents it being used in all kinds of obvious ways (like `doing X... on a computer' was pretty popular a few years ago.)
Patent reform wouldn't be nearly so important if the patent office could simply follow it's own rules -- i.e. checking for prior art, and disallowing patents on things that are `obvious to the layperson'.
Clearly you have not taken statistics courses,
it is impossible for 50% of the population to be above average, because they will be the average at whatever point they are in time, so technically you cant have 50% of people above average, as the average will be higher and those people will become the new average.
Obviously you never took a statistics class either.
Suppose that you have 100 individuals. 99 of these people have an income of 100 dollars/day. The other one person makes only 50 dollars/day. Looks like 99% of the people have `above average income'. (In case you were wonderng, average means `mean', not `median' and not `mode'.)
You're assuming a bell curve distribution. While this assumption may be correct much of the time, especially in real life, stop throwing around words like `impossible' when they don't apply.
(Either that, or you think that `average' means `median'. Of coruse, for a bell curve distribution, mean, median and mode are all the same thing.)
Slashdot Mirror
Type D) where a parent takes a picture of their child in a pretty standard situation, and has it developed, and then people decide that it's child porn.
I can't seem to find the story now, but there was a woman who took a picture of her child breast feeding, and it was deemed pornographic and they were arrested. Last I heard, the charges had been dropped, but CPS still wouldn't give their kids back ...
Though perhaps IE makes up over 90% of the browser market ... but it's certainly not 100%.
It's neat that Wil has `geek' tendancies, and it's not often that celebrities have blogs (but becoming more common), but he has much to learn before we can dub him `head-geek'.
Unless he's locked in a closet with my grandma and a tricorder, of course :)
This analysis does not cover the possible direct infringement --
But apparantly he was accused of direct infringement as well. I don't know how accurate this accusation is, but it was certainly made.According to this --
Perhaps I'm not understanding correctly, but weren't there mp3s *on his box* available for downloading? Unless they were all ok for distribution (certainly possible, but unlikely) wouldn't this qualify as `distributing mp3s himself' ?If the OS is properly done, the userlevel applications shouldn't have to worry about if the box has multiple cpus or just one. If something works with one cpus and fails with multiple cpus, then either 1) the OS isn't doing it's job right or 2) there's some subtle timing bug in the (application) code that would probably eventually fail on the right single cpu box -- that it doesn't fail on a single cpu box is just ... (bad) luck.
(kernel level stuff is a TOTALLY different issue.)
I suspect that it's pretty easy to make money spamming if you've got half a brain and some programming experience. You could write your own simple address-collection and spam-blasting programs in under a day, and then all you need is to find some customers -- and apparantly they're out there.
If you're clueless and you spend a few hundred on somebody's CD of email addresses, and a few more hundred on a CD of spam software and don't know anything more about your computer than how to click on things, then you're right -- you're just going to make other spammers rich and not yourself -- and it's obvious that spammers are perfectly happy to prey upon other would-be spammers.
There's definately a lot of `spam MLM' (MLM = Multi Level Marketing) going on -- but unlike your traditional MLM, there is money to be made outside of the MLM. Kind of like Amway -- yes, it's a MLM but they do sell a real product.
What seems much more likely is that some trojan was installed on this person's computer that allowed an attacker to take control -- nothing more (and there's a lot of such trojans out there.) Then the attacker took control and put the porn onto the computer, perhaps so it could be distributed, or perhaps just to see if he could get this guy in trouble, or shock him when he found it -- who knows?
It's certainly possible to write a trojan that looks for kiddie porn, but there's plenty of other more plausable explanations that fit the (limited) information that we have as well.
Hell. It's possible that the `trojan' installed merely pulls images off of Usenet and saves them to the hard disk for the attacker to collect later, and it just happened that somebody had posted some kiddie porn to Usenet so this program captured it -- so there's six thousand `normal porn' images, and three `kiddie porn' images on the disk. Who knows?
The way to stop spam is to remove the profit motive. PEOPLE NEED TO STOP BUYING STUFF THAT THEY GET SPAMMED ABOUT! Once they stop, people will stop paying spammers to advertise their wares, and the spammers will then stop spamming.
Yes, most spammers do seem pretty stupid. But if it makes money, and it's not illegal, many people, even smart people, have no problems with doing it even if it's morally reprehensible.
I guess if you think that's better than a sed or awk script of a few lines to fix 100 files, well, more power to you!
They use about 1/4th as much power (they're still pretty inefficient as far as flourescent bulbs go) and last much longer.
And best of all, they're available NOW! (go get a 4 pack at Home Depot for $7.99.)
(I've heard about the latter (analog) issue from people in the music industry, but have never actually seen anything more definate. Can anybody corroborate or disprove it?)
Read about The September that never ended !
The first I noticed it was March 27th (and I don't email my dad @ AOL that often, so it probably happened even before that ...)
... while talking to mailin-03.mx.aol.com.: ... while talking to mailin-04.mx.aol.com.:
The original message was received at Thu, 27 Mar 2003 13:35:36 -0600
from dougmc@localhost
----- Transcript of session follows -----
550-The IP address you're using to connect to AOL is either open to the
550-free relaying of e-mail, is serving as an open proxy, or is a dynamic
550-(residential) IP address. AOL cannot accept further e-mail
550-transactions from your server until either your server is closed to free
550-relaying/proxy, or your ISP removes your IP address from their list of
550-dynamic IP addresses. For additional information, please visit
550 http://postmaster.info.aol.com.
(Of course, he did incorrectly suggest that lossless compression requires having the entire stream at once, which is patently incorrect. Obviously he's never heard of gzip or bzip2 -- both of which are lossless and compress streams block by block -- but aren't that great at compressing audio streams. There's more on various lossless audio-specific compression programs here.)
Note that even lossy compression is not always bad. mp3s and Oggs at 128Kbit/s may not be CD quality, but they're pretty good -- and yet it's compressed by a 12:1 factor! Increasing the bit rates will reduce your compression factor, but will increase the quality.
Jpeg files are lossy, yet with higher quality factors the quality is so high that you can't even tell the difference with your own eyes.
An audiophile may not be at all happy with 128Kbit/s mp3 files, but as you increase the bit rate, there's likely to be a place where he can't tell the difference between the lossy compression and the original. (Of course, depending on how strongly he hates lossy compression schemes, he may never actually admit it.)
At that point, what matters is the compression ratio compared to what you could get with a lossless compresser.
You wouldn't want to use a lossy compression scheme for compressing the studio masters (you should always do your mixing and such with no compression or lossless compression), but if the quality is good enough, it may be perfectly ok for the final distribution of the music, even for the audiophiles. 128 Kbit/s mp3s don't cut it, but that doesn't mean that `mp3 sucks!'.
looks just like a real (scale) plane
flies well
is relatively inexpensive and easy to make
Pick any two!
Even so, some people do do R/C combat with scale models ... but it's a lot of work making the planes and keeping them flying :)
R/C plane combat is certainly done. Some is done with infrared `guns', like this, some is done trying to cut a ribbon trailing behind the other plane, and some is done by literally trying to bump the other plane out of the sky.
In all cases, even when you're not trying to, the planes tend to collide quite often. So you need planes that are very resiliant, and that usually means that they aren't going to be scale models of anything -- instead, you concentrate on them flying reasonably well and being tough.
Oh. Looks like it was a typo ...
From here --
Only 98 billion dollars? Carry on!(I still wonder if they'll take a check. Or how about PayPal?)
Nobody is going to go after you for relaying a few emails through a server. But when you relay thousands of emails through a server, it becomes a denial of service attack and people DO occasionally get prosecuted for these.
And `other unsescured resources' often means exploiting security holes in a system, and that's definately illegal too.
So now they want almost 10x the GNP for the year!
So the RIAA is suing for an *estimated* (the $98T figure is an estimate, don't forget that) 2x the US's annual GNP.
I wonder if they'll take a check :)
Either way, the patent office doesn't seem to apply this rule very often. How about the patent for `method of exercising a feline with a beam of coherent light' or whatever the name was? My two year old daughter could figure that out.
Though looking at the news article in question, none of the patents they list seem to cover JPEG compression directly at all -- only certain ideas dealing with digital cameras. But maybe one of them deals with using JPEG compression in a digital camera -- and if so, that would fall under the category of `take somebody else's patent, and patent an obvious use of it.'
Though what seems to happen more often is that somebody comes up with something clever, and may or may not patent it. Then somebody else comes along, and either patents the original idea (if not patented) or patents it being used in all kinds of obvious ways (like `doing X ... on a computer' was pretty popular a few years ago.)
Patent reform wouldn't be nearly so important if the patent office could simply follow it's own rules -- i.e. checking for prior art, and disallowing patents on things that are `obvious to the layperson'.
Suppose that you have 100 individuals. 99 of these people have an income of 100 dollars/day. The other one person makes only 50 dollars/day. Looks like 99% of the people have `above average income'. (In case you were wonderng, average means `mean', not `median' and not `mode'.)
You're assuming a bell curve distribution. While this assumption may be correct much of the time, especially in real life, stop throwing around words like `impossible' when they don't apply.
(Either that, or you think that `average' means `median'. Of coruse, for a bell curve distribution, mean, median and mode are all the same thing.)