Don't we have freedom of the press in this country? I would consider the new design of Apple's computers newsworthy, and so would Apple, judging from the fact that they issue press releases on the topic. It seems to me that reporting news, in defiance of a corporations time table for it, is not wrong, nor illegal.
Everyone is talking about the legal protections afforded trade secrets, but what about the legal protections afforded the press? Don't informational websites have a right to publish newsworthy information?
It seems there are other ways to stop that kind of behaviour. Company guidelines clearly defining what sites are unacceptable to visit are one way. That seems a lot less severe than blocking many useful sites. Also, in a public place, like a school or library, where access to information is the stated goal, this kind of software seems really out of place.
Like Frank Zappa once said about censorship, it's like chopping off your head to cure dandruff. There are better ways to solve this problem.
The industry may "have spent vast sums and years of effort preparing to develop legitimate commercial acceptance by consumers to pay for digital downloads of music." But I don't see any sort of service actually available. Where can I pay for and download music on the internet?
Liquid Audio's site seems to include old-timers looking to get the last bit of mileage out of their catalog, or bands you've never heard of. Heck, that site is more like what Napster is trying to portray itself as. Truth is, you can't find the most popular hits of today on any "legitimate" website.
It's been said before, but the RIAA is just shooting itself in the foot. They need to be working with Napster or creating their own on-line music distribution/sharing system.
People would be willing to pay for Napster or a similiar service. People see the value in what they are getting. The RIAA should be taking advantage of this. But they are determined to squash online music distribution because of piracy fears. Ironically, this means that the only place people can trade music online is at a site that enables copyright infringement.
Okay, GameBoy came out in '89, making it 11 year old technology. And you have to speed up your Palm's processor to make it play GameBoy games? Granted, there is emulation overhead, but you'd think that in the intervening 10 years, the technological advances in handheld processing would make "overclocking" your Palm unnecessary. Did Nintendo design their hardware that much better?
I don't think there is a "culture" exactly. A lot of us make our living working with MS products, so I guess that makes our future tied to theirs to a degree. But lots people have already made switches, from, say, Novelle to NT. So it can't be that hard to make a change to an OS that is in demand in the market place. I have no MS loyalty other than the fact that NT skills are in demand right now.
I think Microsoft's move here is more geared toward politicians. If MS can point to FIN as a semi-independent group (I can't imagine even MS could say it was independent with a straight face) with industry people behind it (like VAR's or MCSE's) they could persuade some pols to take their side.
Okay, so it's not infinite. But if you could get transmitters and recievers sensitive enough to deal in hertz, that would still open up huge amounts of the spectrum for use.
Yeah, isn't the spectrum analog? Like, how fine can you split the frequencies? I'm no physicist, and I don't fully understand the principles, but I had an experience that illustrates the situation.
When I was a kid, my dad had a radio-controlled airplane. He flew it a lot for a couple years, then put it up in the attic. 15 years later, I got it out and went to use it. I found that in the intervening years, the frequencies allotted for radio controlled planes had changed. They were a lot finer, so they took up less space in the whole spectrum. I had to get a new transmitter for the plane that was more sensitive and broadcast on a narrower frequency.
It seems that theoretically, better recievers and transmitters could be developed constantly, splitting the frequencies more and more finely. How much room is there between 98.5 and 98.6 on the FM dial? It's infinite. There is 98.55, 98.555, 98.5555, etc. It depends on the sensitivity of the equipment.
If your ISP starts killing your packets, change ISP's. I wouldn't think an ISP like that is going to stay in business very long anyway.
This sounds great now, but I worry about down the road. What happens when the RIAA gets some tech ignorant judge to rule that major ISP's have to use this kind of thing, in order to protect the recording industries intellectual property. It may sound far-fetched, but so does patenting hyper-links and being held liable for linking to a site with DeCSS, and those things happened.
Still, the internet is all about file sharing. Hell, a web-page is a file. And it seems that it wouldn't take to much to hack something up that would confuse the filtering software. But for the average user, getting around this might be more difficult. Thankfully, that scenario is all hypothetical now.
It's kind of whacked that that is the image, because the reality is the exact opposite. The PS2 has lackluster games and a serious problem with anti-aliasing. Dreamcast has a lot of crap titles, which has always been a problem with Sega, but it has quite a few spectacular ones as well. Games like Shen Mue, Crazy Taxi, and Resident Evil:Code Veronica are gorgeous and have no equivilant on the PS2. Maybe by the time it's released in America, the PS2 will have some decent games, but for now, the Japanese consumers have it right: PS2 is a good DVD player and not much else. And Sega has a great product that is getting ignored.
I read the license yesterday, and I thought that perhaps it was, as he claims, designed for people using their pictures, screenshots, etc from the website on fan websites. But I couldn't tell for sure. The wording was quite confusing.
The part that threw me was the inclusion of the phrase "as well as your use of Apogee's various games (collectively, the "Property")". "Property" is not subject to as many restrictions in the license as "Trademarks, logos, images and service marks (the "Marks")" but it was very confusing to me exactly to which restrictions it was subject.
I didn't notice any posts yesterday that picked up on this, so the distinction is not clear to a lot of other people besides myself. But Mr. Miller has my sympathy. Apogee has opened up their screenshots, logos and icons for use in fan sites, with none of this "George Lucas owns your material" crap. And given the vitriol I've witnessed by/. posters, I can imagine the volume and tone of the email he must be receiving. He tried to do something nice for the fans, but the execution left much to be desired. For that, he is having to spend a few days in the furnace.
This was the line that intrigued me the most as well. One of the things that is so scary about the MPAA's actions is that they are trying to control the entire distribution pipe. By implementing region code lockouts, and controlling who gets to license DVD technology, they could theoretically squelch any indepent artists.
In years to come, if DVD's should replace VHS, the MPAA could keep indepependent filmakers from releasing anything on DVD except through them, on their terms. Guys who make the movie of their dreams and then go around selling video tapes of it out of their van or off their website could be shut down. It gets even scarier with audio DVD's on the horizon. Garage bands would be unable to record and distribute music on the most popular platform, without the blessing of the industry.
Maybe this is an Orwellian nightmare that could never come to pass in reality, but right now the MPAA is trying to make linking illegal. I don't think it's unreasonable to ascribe other sinister maschinations to them.
There have been enough well-publicized problems with internet email that everyone with a brain knows they are not secure. Doesn't everyone just use thier hotmail accounts to enter on website forms, so they don't get spammed so much?
Saying "hotmail has security holes" is like saying the sky is blue.
Well, back in my day, when we used abucuses (abucii?)and such, we'd send our programs off to be typed onto punch cards, then we'd get them back and we'd send them off to be actually run and then we'd get them back and our program hadn't worked! So we'd have to walk two miles to the mainframe in deep snow. Uphill! And there was none of this MTV crap back then, either.
When Michael Lyle, chief technical officer of Internet-security firm Recourse Technologies Inc., first accused Mafiaboy of the attacks,(just a couple weeks after they happened) he based it on chat-room talk. People were very skeptical then, and I recall someone making similiar claims - that they had impersonated the DoS perpetrator in chat rooms.
It appears the RCMP don't have much more. Maybe the arrest was just so they could search his computer for evidence, because from what's been reported in the press, there isn't any real hard evidence against him.
It's also illegal to sell used video tapes and video games in Japan
That's odd. When I lived in Japan 4 years ago, I got all my games in used game stores.
Not only that, but at the university I attended, Proffessors photocopied the texts and handed them out to the students so we wouldn't have to buy the books. There were shops where you could rent CD's, with copious supplies of blank tapes and MD's for taping the rentals. I don't know if it's because I was living in a rural area or what, but protection of IP and copyright material didn't seem oppressive at all.
Instead of being a herald to the *new and better* way of doing things that we as the most intelligent minds of our times could offer, this comes across as nothing better than a frat-house beer party
Are you serious? Being a "herald to the new and better way" has it's time and place, but so does enjoying yourself and hanging out with people with similiar interests. Is a frat-house beer party for geeks so bad? Man, I bet you are a lot of fun to hang out with.
This is not the first time that Ticketmaster has sued someone for deep linking. But the simple solution, rather than a lawsuit, would be to make it a "closed site". You could restrict access to internal web pages to people that haven't logged on, much the way that the NY Times does it. You never see/. link directly to a story on their site, and it's not because they were sued.
This whole lawsuit has seemed very silly to me, as there are simple technical solutions that could be put in place to solve the problem. Ticket master has been working hard to change the way the web works, and not in a good way.
Davies argument is one that many Christians, myself included, use to support their belief. That is, God must exist, because he has felt God touch his life. Davies has felt the presence of God through his exploration of physics.
This is an argument that has been around for a long time. Many people say they see evidence of God in the beauty of nature around them, or in the miracle of the birth of a child, or in the peace that prayer brings them. Is this so different than seeing the hand of God in the structure of the universe? Is this any more "reasoned"?
Man, I wish more companies would do this. I would happily switch banks to one that doesn't sell my name and address to every junk mail shop and phone solicitor on the planet. My privacy is something that, in a perfect world, would be respected by default, but here in the real world, I would gladly pay a premium for that respect. I think this is a real untapped market. I'd love for it to catch on both on the web and in the brick and mortar world.
In the end, there will have to be people with guns to enforce any sort of procedure of eliminating private property.
In the beginning, in the US at least, it was violence that did away with a form of communism. The native americans didn't have any concept of land ownership, until homesteaders put fences around their farms and solidiers with guns kept the natives away.
Also, couldn't democracy be considered violent in this respect, as in, "you'll have to come at me with guns before I start obeying your democratically derived laws against doing what I want to do?" Or capitalism: "You'll have to come at me with guns before I'll stop using warez and pay full price on this crappy shrink licensed software."
Any society, whether founded on capitalism, communsim, socialism, etc, eventually has to enforce it's agreed upon rules. I imagine the level of violence involved in accomplishing this varies, but it would exist at some level in any system.
Uhh, I know this site says it's *news* for nerds. But can't an article be posted for it's conversation generating ability, rather than it's timeliness? This article could be a jumping off point for some interesting discussion, regardless of how fresh it is.
Seems that a local gardening store specializes in hydroponic equipment. This type of equipment is sometimes used by people who grow illegal pot, so the police stake out the store. They follow the customers home, then check thier electric bills to see if there is any unusual activity that might indicate grow light use. The suspicous activity here is the legal act of shopping in a store that sells legal products, that might possibly be used for criminal activities.
But couldn't just about any product be used for illegal activities? Would buying bolt cutters from a hardware store be considered suspicous ? Would visiting a hacker(cracker) website ? Would being black and driving a nice car?
I am really afraid of what the government would consider suspicous. Law enforcement is made up of people, and people have their own predjudices. I'm wary of giving anyone in power free reign to act on their predjudices. It's kind of hard to define the line between valid suspicions and harrasment, but these FBI files show the government can often be clearly on the wrong side of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't we have freedom of the press in this country? I would consider the new design of Apple's computers newsworthy, and so would Apple, judging from the fact that they issue press releases on the topic. It seems to me that reporting news, in defiance of a corporations time table for it, is not wrong, nor illegal.
Everyone is talking about the legal protections afforded trade secrets, but what about the legal protections afforded the press? Don't informational websites have a right to publish newsworthy information?
It seems there are other ways to stop that kind of behaviour. Company guidelines clearly defining what sites are unacceptable to visit are one way. That seems a lot less severe than blocking many useful sites. Also, in a public place, like a school or library, where access to information is the stated goal, this kind of software seems really out of place.
Like Frank Zappa once said about censorship, it's like chopping off your head to cure dandruff. There are better ways to solve this problem.
The industry may "have spent vast sums and years of effort preparing to develop legitimate commercial acceptance by consumers to pay for digital downloads of music." But I don't see any sort of service actually available. Where can I pay for and download music on the internet?
Liquid Audio's site seems to include old-timers looking to get the last bit of mileage out of their catalog, or bands you've never heard of. Heck, that site is more like what Napster is trying to portray itself as. Truth is, you can't find the most popular hits of today on any "legitimate" website.
It's been said before, but the RIAA is just shooting itself in the foot. They need to be working with Napster or creating their own on-line music distribution/sharing system.
People would be willing to pay for Napster or a similiar service. People see the value in what they are getting. The RIAA should be taking advantage of this. But they are determined to squash online music distribution because of piracy fears. Ironically, this means that the only place people can trade music online is at a site that enables copyright infringement.
Okay, GameBoy came out in '89, making it 11 year old technology. And you have to speed up your Palm's processor to make it play GameBoy games? Granted, there is emulation overhead, but you'd think that in the intervening 10 years, the technological advances in handheld processing would make "overclocking" your Palm unnecessary. Did Nintendo design their hardware that much better?
I don't think there is a "culture" exactly. A lot of us make our living working with MS products, so I guess that makes our future tied to theirs to a degree. But lots people have already made switches, from, say, Novelle to NT. So it can't be that hard to make a change to an OS that is in demand in the market place. I have no MS loyalty other than the fact that NT skills are in demand right now.
I think Microsoft's move here is more geared toward politicians. If MS can point to FIN as a semi-independent group (I can't imagine even MS could say it was independent with a straight face) with industry people behind it (like VAR's or MCSE's) they could persuade some pols to take their side.
Okay, so it's not infinite. But if you could get transmitters and recievers sensitive enough to deal in hertz, that would still open up huge amounts of the spectrum for use.
Yeah, isn't the spectrum analog? Like, how fine can you split the frequencies? I'm no physicist, and I don't fully understand the principles, but I had an experience that illustrates the situation.
When I was a kid, my dad had a radio-controlled airplane. He flew it a lot for a couple years, then put it up in the attic. 15 years later, I got it out and went to use it. I found that in the intervening years, the frequencies allotted for radio controlled planes had changed. They were a lot finer, so they took up less space in the whole spectrum. I had to get a new transmitter for the plane that was more sensitive and broadcast on a narrower frequency.
It seems that theoretically, better recievers and transmitters could be developed constantly, splitting the frequencies more and more finely. How much room is there between 98.5 and 98.6 on the FM dial? It's infinite. There is 98.55, 98.555, 98.5555, etc. It depends on the sensitivity of the equipment.
How much Jar Jar merchandise will still be gathering dust on store shelves before this one hits the theater...
If your ISP starts killing your packets, change ISP's. I wouldn't think an ISP like that is going to stay in business very long anyway.
This sounds great now, but I worry about down the road. What happens when the RIAA gets some tech ignorant judge to rule that major ISP's have to use this kind of thing, in order to protect the recording industries intellectual property. It may sound far-fetched, but so does patenting hyper-links and being held liable for linking to a site with DeCSS, and those things happened.
Still, the internet is all about file sharing. Hell, a web-page is a file. And it seems that it wouldn't take to much to hack something up that would confuse the filtering software. But for the average user, getting around this might be more difficult. Thankfully, that scenario is all hypothetical now.
It's kind of whacked that that is the image, because the reality is the exact opposite. The PS2 has lackluster games and a serious problem with anti-aliasing. Dreamcast has a lot of crap titles, which has always been a problem with Sega, but it has quite a few spectacular ones as well. Games like Shen Mue, Crazy Taxi, and Resident Evil:Code Veronica are gorgeous and have no equivilant on the PS2. Maybe by the time it's released in America, the PS2 will have some decent games, but for now, the Japanese consumers have it right: PS2 is a good DVD player and not much else. And Sega has a great product that is getting ignored.
I read the license yesterday, and I thought that perhaps it was, as he claims, designed for people using their pictures, screenshots, etc from the website on fan websites. But I couldn't tell for sure. The wording was quite confusing.
/. posters, I can imagine the volume and tone of the email he must be receiving. He tried to do something nice for the fans, but the execution left much to be desired. For that, he is
The part that threw me was the inclusion of the phrase "as well as your use of Apogee's various games (collectively, the "Property")". "Property" is not subject to as many restrictions in the license as "Trademarks, logos, images and service marks (the "Marks")" but it was very confusing to me exactly to which restrictions it was subject.
I didn't notice any posts yesterday that picked up on this, so the distinction is not clear to a lot of other people besides myself. But Mr. Miller has my sympathy. Apogee has opened up their screenshots, logos and icons for use in fan sites, with none of this "George Lucas owns your material" crap. And given the vitriol I've witnessed by
having to spend a few days in the furnace.
This was the line that intrigued me the most as well. One of the things that is so scary about the MPAA's actions is that they are trying to control the entire distribution pipe. By implementing region code lockouts, and controlling who gets to license DVD technology, they could theoretically squelch any indepent artists.
In years to come, if DVD's should replace VHS, the MPAA could keep indepependent filmakers from releasing anything on DVD except through them, on their terms. Guys who make the movie of their dreams and then go around selling video tapes of it out of their van or off their website could be shut down. It gets even scarier with audio DVD's on the horizon. Garage bands would be unable to record and distribute music on the most popular platform, without the blessing of the industry.
Maybe this is an Orwellian nightmare that could never come to pass in reality, but right now the MPAA is trying to make linking illegal. I don't think it's unreasonable to ascribe other sinister maschinations to them.
There have been enough well-publicized problems with internet email that everyone with a brain knows they are not secure. Doesn't everyone just use thier hotmail accounts to enter on website forms, so they don't get spammed so much?
Saying "hotmail has security holes" is like saying the sky is blue.
Well, back in my day, when we used abucuses (abucii?)and such, we'd send our programs off to be typed onto punch cards, then we'd get them back and we'd send them off to be actually run and then we'd get them back and our program hadn't worked! So we'd have to walk two miles to the mainframe in deep snow. Uphill! And there was none of this MTV crap back then, either.
When Michael Lyle, chief technical officer of Internet-security firm Recourse Technologies Inc., first accused Mafiaboy of the attacks,(just a couple weeks after they happened) he based it on chat-room talk. People were very skeptical then, and I recall someone making similiar claims - that they had impersonated the DoS perpetrator in chat rooms.
It appears the RCMP don't have much more. Maybe the arrest was just so they could search his computer for evidence, because from what's been reported in the press, there isn't any real hard evidence against him.
It's also illegal to sell used video tapes and video games in Japan
That's odd. When I lived in Japan 4 years ago, I got all my games in used game stores.
Not only that, but at the university I attended, Proffessors photocopied the texts and handed them out to the students so we wouldn't have to buy the books. There were shops where you could rent CD's, with copious supplies of blank tapes and MD's for taping the rentals. I don't know if it's because I was living in a rural area or what, but protection of IP and copyright material didn't seem oppressive at all.
With their recent story on demons that possess hard drives, ghosts who frequent chat rooms, government trained monkeys on AOL, and even anexpose on bank privacy abuses on the internet, the Weekly World News is fast becoming the definitive resource for IT professionals everywhere.
/. ?
Their timely reporting has already saved some people's souls, now it is saving people's lives. Could it be the next
Instead of being a herald to the *new and better* way of doing things that we as the most intelligent minds of our times could offer, this comes across as nothing better than a frat-house beer party
Are you serious? Being a "herald to the new and better way" has it's time and place, but so does enjoying yourself and hanging out with people with similiar interests. Is a frat-house beer party for geeks so bad? Man, I bet you are a lot of fun to hang out with.
This is not the first time that Ticketmaster has sued someone for deep linking. But the simple solution, rather than a lawsuit, would be to make it a "closed site". You could restrict access to internal web pages to people that haven't logged on, much the way that the NY Times does it. You never see /. link directly to a story on their site, and it's not because they were sued.
This whole lawsuit has seemed very silly to me, as there are simple technical solutions that could be put in place to solve the problem. Ticket master has been working hard to change the way the web works, and not in a good way.
Davies argument is one that many Christians, myself included, use to support their belief. That is, God must exist, because he has felt God touch his life. Davies has felt the presence of God through his exploration of physics.
This is an argument that has been around for a long time. Many people say they see evidence of God in the beauty of nature around them, or in the miracle of the birth of a child, or in the peace that prayer brings them. Is this so different than seeing the hand of God in the structure of the universe? Is this any more "reasoned"?
Man, I wish more companies would do this. I would happily switch banks to one that doesn't sell my name and address to every junk mail shop and phone solicitor on the planet. My privacy is something that, in a perfect world, would be respected by default, but here in the real world, I would gladly pay a premium for that respect. I think this is a real untapped market. I'd love for it to catch on both on the web and in the brick and mortar world.
In the end, there will have to be people with guns to enforce any sort of procedure of eliminating private property.
In the beginning, in the US at least, it was violence that did away with a form of communism. The native americans didn't have any concept of land ownership, until homesteaders put fences around their farms and solidiers with guns kept the natives away.
Also, couldn't democracy be considered violent in this respect, as in, "you'll have to come at me with guns before I start obeying your democratically derived laws against doing what I want to do?"
Or capitalism: "You'll have to come at me with guns before I'll stop using warez and pay full price on this crappy shrink licensed software."
Any society, whether founded on capitalism, communsim, socialism, etc, eventually has to enforce it's agreed upon rules. I imagine the level of violence involved in accomplishing this varies, but it would exist at some level in any system.
Uhh, I know this site says it's *news* for nerds. But can't an article be posted for it's conversation generating ability, rather than it's timeliness? This article could be a jumping off point for some interesting discussion, regardless of how fresh it is.
I just read an article in the local Seattle paper yesterday on this topic. Its at http://www.seattlep-i.com/local/pot141. shtml.
Seems that a local gardening store specializes in hydroponic equipment. This type of equipment is sometimes used by people who grow illegal pot, so the police stake out the store. They follow the customers home, then check thier electric bills to see if there is any unusual activity that might indicate grow light use. The suspicous activity here is the legal act of shopping in a store that sells legal products, that might possibly be used for criminal activities.
But couldn't just about any product be used for illegal activities? Would buying bolt cutters from a hardware store be considered suspicous ? Would visiting a hacker(cracker) website ? Would being black and driving a nice car?
I am really afraid of what the government would consider suspicous. Law enforcement is made up of people, and people have their own predjudices. I'm wary of giving anyone in power free reign to act on their predjudices. It's kind of hard to define the line between valid suspicions and harrasment, but these FBI files show the government can often be clearly on the wrong side of it.