Well, the article and the Slashdot intro are a little vague about how exactly this erodes our rights against unreasonable search. The PATRIOT act expanded wire-tapping rules for the FBI in anti-terrorist investigations. They no longer have to get warrants to tap the phone of suspected terrorists. Well, once they start tapping a suspected terrorist's phone, they might hear some stuff about another type of crime, that doesn't involve terrorism. The PATRIOT act only exempts terrorist activities from requiring a warrant. The secret court originally said that information about non-terrorist crimes gathered through the terrorist-only wire taps could not be used by law enforcement. This ruling overturns that decision.
The implications are scary. Essentially, the FBI no longer needs a warrant to tap anyone's phone. They can say there is a suspected link to terrorism, whether there is or not, and get a wire tap. If it turns out there was no terrorist threat, that's okay, they can still use any evidence in court or in an investigation. It is a huge loophole. There are no procedures in place to make sure that this privilege is not abused, and given the excess of law enforcement in the past, it is not a stretch to imagine just such a thing happening.
So I went and read the original letters, in response to which the EPIC letter was written. One was from "America's creative community," that is, the RIAA, MPAA, National Music Publishers Association, and the Songwriters Guild of America. The other letter was from the presidents of various acedemic organizations, like the Association of American Universities, and similiarly named organisations.
The first letter uses the term piracy quite liberally, while the second discusses "the inappropriate use of campus facilities to disseminate copywritten materials."
The bromide comes from fire retardant coating on the plastic. This thing uses a fire retardant that is silicone based, and mixed in with the actual plastic.
Also, the computer doesn't contain any lead, barium, boron, cobalt, or any of another 32 toxic chemicals found in regular computers. I don't think that includes the hard drive or CD-ROM, though.
A press release with a lot more details than the product page is here.
From the press release: In addition, the PowerMate eco is also made of NuCycle(TM) plastic - an NEC patented plastic that is 100% recyclable. NuCycle is made of polycarbonate resin mixed with a special, flame-retardant silicone compound. Other computer plastics have flame retardant brominated coatings applied, which do retard flames, but produce harmful gases in the process. NuCycle's flame retardant is non-toxic and built-in, requiring no toxic coating.
After all of high-quality, super-fun-to-play Simpsons games, I'm very excited about this.
Re:Am I the only one that has found this useful?
on
No More WHOIS scams?
·
· Score: 2
Yes, and a webmaster can get useful info from Internet citizens from time to time. Stuff like "hey moron, you have an open mail proxy that spammers are using," or "hey you clueless jackass, you've been infected by code red, better patch!"
What is really needed is a spam filter, not an anonymizer.
I seriously doubt that there are a ton of mad bombers out there gunning for you. If that were the case, we'd see a lot more violence related to online games.
That said, it really only takes one nutcase, so maybe you're better off being paranoid.
While it's true that actual people won't get jack, Microsoft will end up paying millions. It's hard to say how much individual users were hurt. If Microsoft wasn't forcing OEM's to pay for licenses for every computer sold, regardless of whether or not it was equipped with Windows, how much did that bump up actual prices? I think that number would be low, as most people wanted computers with Windows. But it did hurt the market for alternate OS's, and that in turn allowed Microsoft to charge whatever it felt like, and that is hard to quantify.
So, customers get a coupon, lawyers get millions, and, perhaps most importantly, Microsoft has to pay millions. It's an imperfect sort of justice for a very complicated "crime", but it is a sort of justice.
I remember reading Douglas Copeland's book Microserfs, back in 1996. One character writes a script that translates normal text into Prince-speak, replacing to and too with 2, you with u, etc.
Is the spam for Taiwanese products, or just routed through open mail relays in Taiwan? If it's the latter, we could certainly outlaw using spam as a marketing tool for US entrepeneurs. If your company or home business sends out spam from Taiwan to US computers, you would still be breaking the law.
Regardless of the legal merits of Verizon's claims, and they seem specious to me at best, just the threat of possible expensive legal action is enough to stop the the list. Even if Mr. Lurker fought and won his case, he would spend a lot of time and money doing so. And yes, there is a chance that he might have his money returned to him with a favorable ruling, but that is a gamble. Freedom of speech is a constitutional right, unless you're a regular person and the corporation that wants to shut you up has a lot of pricey lawyers.
I posted this before, but I find it is relevant to so much that I see on/. Emmanuel Goldstein, writing in the summer 2001 issue of 2600 magazine, said:
"The injustice takes on an even more serious tone when it no longer seems to matter whether or not you're found guilty. or innocent - whether you win or lose. If you're even brought into the game, you lose regardless of whether or not you win.... Every time we find ourselves in a court of law, we seem to have lost by default, something even a victory can't seem to change. Not that we don't relish the idea of standing up to any of the bullies who put us through this hell. But every time we do, it costs us and not just financially. We have to devote tremendous resources into the act of simply defending who we are and what we've been doing for all these years."
It's easy to see how someone who doesn't live to fight the good fight, someone who just wants to post some cool stuff he figured out, would give up rather than take on the hassle of proving the obvious - that he has every right to do his thing.
Yeah, it's hard to tell when you cross the line between immoral and illegal. Spamming is just immoral, securites fraud is illegal. But what is spamming messages that are securities fraud? I guess Rodona found out.
Okay, that "clean room" stuff is bullshit. You shouldn't really talk about stuff when you don't understand it.
Having just said that, let me expound on a subject which I don't really know too well. The famous clean room example that everyone knows is Compaq's version of IBM's PC BIOS. That didn't have anything to do with patents. IBM didn't have a patent on BIOS's. Their implementation of their BIOS was a trade secret.
A patent actually requires you to make public the way your invention works. For that, you get a monopoly on the product for 17 years. You don't get a monopoly on your invention until someone else comes up with it independently, you get it for 17 years.
The way I read it, this is a patent for what Double-click has been doing for 4 years.
This will put ads on newspaper websites.
It will try to make placement relevant. For example, ads for financial services would be placed on web pages from a newspaper's website's financial section, or inforamtion about a company's San Francisco store would be included with the ad that goes with a page from the San Francisco Chronicle.
It would centralize billing arrangements, for example, you would pay Global Networks once for advertising instead of making deals with 50 seperate newspapers.
It would customize the size of ads to each newspaper website's adspace specifications.
It would track page views and click-throughs.
So, already Double-click does the central billing and usage tracking. Almost all ad-serving websites use one of a couple standard sizes, making resizing unnecessary. The only thing useful about this patent that has not already been in widespread use for years is the targeted content based on the site or page. (Double-click's targeted ads are based on a web surfer's use patterns).
The specificity of newspaper websites makes this patent pretty limited. I don't see them making a lot of money off of it unless the internet advertising market rebounds and the current ad model changes significantly. Still, eographically targeted ads are something that advertisers have wanted to be able to do for a while. The nature of the internet makes it difficult. It's hard to tell where a paticular person lives. Using geographically centered sites like newspapers might be a good model for pulling off this trick.
I wonder if this is not a way for Global Networks to bump their stock price, by advertising the fact that they have patent portfolio.
The key phrase is "a derivative advertisement," which means that the original ad image is modified depending on the site and page on which it is displayed. It's a more complicated than an IMG tag.
Sklyarov's case was something entirely different. He didn't commit any crime, he only sold a tool that could be used to commit a crime. Arresting Sklyarov was like arresting someone for selling a kitchen knife.
Actually, under the DCMA, he did commit a crime. It is a crime to sell or even distribute a program that can be used to circumvent any type of copy protection. What we got up in arms about is not that Sklyarov was a Russian who was arrested in the US because of something he did in Russia. What we got up in arms about was how messed up the DCMA is. It criminalized selling the kitchen knife.
While it has been shown that training at altitude helps an athelete compete at altitude, I don't believe there is much evidence showing that training at altitude helps performance at sea level. So, while training in Denver would help an athelete compete at the Mexico City Olympics, it wouldn't offer significant advantages at the LA Olympics.
Nike is trying to solve a problem they helped create. Marathon running is very demanding on the body. Many experts say that a person can't run more than 2 competitive marathons per year without seeing a degradation in performance. It just takes too long for the body to recover.
Nike and the fitness industry in general, capatilized on the salad days of US marathoning in the 70's and early 80's, promoting it and profiting from its popularity. One thing that happened was that marathon racing (and other track and field sports) became quasi-professional. Athletes were allowed to accept prize and appearance money, and if it was laundered through a "training fund," they would still be eligible for the Olympics as an amateur. Nike was one of the big corporate sponsors who supplied the prize money.
For the top marathoners, it became profitable to run 4 or 5 marathons a year. Just showing up meant a paycheck. This type of schedule quickly started taking its toll, and US marathoners stopped being competitive on the world stage. As US atheletes' performance dropped, the sport's popularity nosedived as well, and marathon running has never recovered.
The unwashed masses, AOLer's and such, are already excluded from voting in ICANN's elections by ignorance. Most people on AOL, WebTV, MSN, et al, don't even know there is an ICANN, let alone what it does or that it holds elections.
If you are savvy enough to be aware of the elections, that pretty much means you are informed enough to vote on them.
Which is not to say that there couldn't be problems with the security-through-obscurity approach (a massive publicity campaign by an evil corporate entity, a "vote here" check box at your AOL log-in screen or something). But whether or not someone may have abused the system is something we will never know, because the system was never given a chance to work.
First, they just refused to hold the elections of "at large" board members.
Then they reduced the number of the "at large" board members.
Then, they instigated a messed-up "registration" system, so it became very difficult for anyone to be eligible to vote.
Then, after they finally do hold these messed up elections, and a couple outsiders do manage to get into the club, they thwart every move of those members, including refusing to show ICANN budget documents to some of the people who are ostensibly reponsible for said budget.
This final blow is simply a fait accompli. ICANN has effectively kept the internet-using public from having any say in their doings from the get -go.
telling big business they can do whatever they want is like telling a 15 year old boy he can watch whatever he wants on late night cable
Except that when a 15 year old watches soft core porn on cable, it doesn't cost tens of thousands of people their jobs or their retirement investments.
It's been out for a couple years
on
MP3 for Gameboy
·
· Score: 2
The SongPro for GameBoy has been around since late 2000. It was originally called the SongBoy, but Nintendo sued for trademark infringement and they changed the name.
This is the same company, and pretty much the same product, only in a version for the GameBoy Advance. I would expect to see similiar market penetration for the GBA model as there was for the original. Which was negligible, in case everyone's lack of knowledge of the earlier product hasn't made that point.
Your right. If the FBI says he was going to blow things up and kill people, I guess he should rot in jail without a trial. He could stay in a cell next to Wen Ho Lee. I just hope that the FBI doesn't think that you are considering doing something bad.
Jose Padilla, the "dirty bomb" suspect, is a US citizen. He has been placed in military custody as an "enemy combatant." He was placed in military custody, because in order to keep him in police custody, law enforcement must charge him with a crime and present evidence of it. They are unable or unwilling to do so, so they are doing an end-run around the constitution.
Perhaps thousands (the justice department won't say) of non-US citizens are being held without being charged with any crime. The justice department's secrecy on the issue, and its trampling of Mr. Padilla's constitutional rights, could lead one to wonder if more US citizens are in custody without due process.
Okay, "general overview of IT industry" is really vague, and I don't think one book could cover it. But if you are not a CS major, and are coming from almost no computer experience, then what are you doing on/. Seriously, an A+ certification study guide is very helpful if you don't know the difference between SCSI and ATI, or Cat 5 from a phone cable.
Couple that with a nice book on network administration like those mentioned above or Essential System Administration from O'Reilly (also available in Windows flavor) and you can give yourself a nice introduction to the IS side of things and make yourself much more useful at the helpdesk.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the article and the Slashdot intro are a little vague about how exactly this erodes our rights against unreasonable search. The PATRIOT act expanded wire-tapping rules for the FBI in anti-terrorist investigations. They no longer have to get warrants to tap the phone of suspected terrorists. Well, once they start tapping a suspected terrorist's phone, they might hear some stuff about another type of crime, that doesn't involve terrorism. The PATRIOT act only exempts terrorist activities from requiring a warrant. The secret court originally said that information about non-terrorist crimes gathered through the terrorist-only wire taps could not be used by law enforcement. This ruling overturns that decision.
The implications are scary. Essentially, the FBI no longer needs a warrant to tap anyone's phone. They can say there is a suspected link to terrorism, whether there is or not, and get a wire tap. If it turns out there was no terrorist threat, that's okay, they can still use any evidence in court or in an investigation. It is a huge loophole. There are no procedures in place to make sure that this privilege is not abused, and given the excess of law enforcement in the past, it is not a stretch to imagine just such a thing happening.
So I went and read the original letters, in response to which the EPIC letter was written. One was from "America's creative community," that is, the RIAA, MPAA, National Music Publishers Association, and the Songwriters Guild of America. The other letter was from the presidents of various acedemic organizations, like the Association of American Universities, and similiarly named organisations.
The first letter uses the term piracy quite liberally, while the second discusses "the inappropriate use of campus facilities to disseminate copywritten materials."
The bromide comes from fire retardant coating on the plastic. This thing uses a fire retardant that is silicone based, and mixed in with the actual plastic.
Also, the computer doesn't contain any lead, barium, boron, cobalt, or any of another 32 toxic chemicals found in regular computers. I don't think that includes the hard drive or CD-ROM, though.
A press release with a lot more details than the product page is here.
From the press release:
In addition, the PowerMate eco is also made of NuCycle(TM) plastic - an NEC patented plastic that is 100% recyclable. NuCycle is made of polycarbonate resin mixed with a special, flame-retardant silicone compound. Other computer plastics have flame retardant brominated coatings applied, which do retard flames, but produce harmful gases in the process. NuCycle's flame retardant is non-toxic and built-in, requiring no toxic coating.
After all of high-quality, super-fun-to-play Simpsons games, I'm very excited about this.
Yes, and a webmaster can get useful info from Internet citizens from time to time. Stuff like "hey moron, you have an open mail proxy that spammers are using," or "hey you clueless jackass, you've been infected by code red, better patch!"
What is really needed is a spam filter, not an anonymizer.
I seriously doubt that there are a ton of mad bombers out there gunning for you. If that were the case, we'd see a lot more violence related to online games.
That said, it really only takes one nutcase, so maybe you're better off being paranoid.
While it's true that actual people won't get jack, Microsoft will end up paying millions. It's hard to say how much individual users were hurt. If Microsoft wasn't forcing OEM's to pay for licenses for every computer sold, regardless of whether or not it was equipped with Windows, how much did that bump up actual prices? I think that number would be low, as most people wanted computers with Windows. But it did hurt the market for alternate OS's, and that in turn allowed Microsoft to charge whatever it felt like, and that is hard to quantify.
So, customers get a coupon, lawyers get millions, and, perhaps most importantly, Microsoft has to pay millions. It's an imperfect sort of justice for a very complicated "crime", but it is a sort of justice.
I remember reading Douglas Copeland's book Microserfs, back in 1996. One character writes a script that translates normal text into Prince-speak, replacing to and too with 2, you with u, etc.
Is the spam for Taiwanese products, or just routed through open mail relays in Taiwan? If it's the latter, we could certainly outlaw using spam as a marketing tool for US entrepeneurs. If your company or home business sends out spam from Taiwan to US computers, you would still be breaking the law.
Regardless of the legal merits of Verizon's claims, and they seem specious to me at best, just the threat of possible expensive legal action is enough to stop the the list. Even if Mr. Lurker fought and won his case, he would spend a lot of time and money doing so. And yes, there is a chance that he might have his money returned to him with a favorable ruling, but that is a gamble. Freedom of speech is a constitutional right, unless you're a regular person and the corporation that wants to shut you up has a lot of pricey lawyers.
/. Emmanuel Goldstein, writing in the summer 2001 issue of 2600 magazine, said:
I posted this before, but I find it is relevant to so much that I see on
"The injustice takes on an even more serious tone when it no longer seems to matter whether or not you're found guilty. or innocent - whether you win or lose. If you're even brought into the game, you lose regardless of whether or not you win....
Every time we find ourselves in a court of law, we seem to have lost by default, something even a victory can't seem to change. Not that we don't relish the idea of standing up to any of the bullies who put us through this hell. But every time we do, it costs us and not just financially. We have to devote tremendous resources into the act of simply defending who we are and what we've been doing for all these years."
It's easy to see how someone who doesn't live to fight the good fight, someone who just wants to post some cool stuff he figured out, would give up rather than take on the hassle of proving the obvious - that he has every right to do his thing.
Yeah, it's hard to tell when you cross the line between immoral and illegal. Spamming is just immoral, securites fraud is illegal. But what is spamming messages that are securities fraud? I guess Rodona found out.
Okay, that "clean room" stuff is bullshit. You shouldn't really talk about stuff when you don't understand it.
Having just said that, let me expound on a subject which I don't really know too well. The famous clean room example that everyone knows is Compaq's version of IBM's PC BIOS. That didn't have anything to do with patents. IBM didn't have a patent on BIOS's. Their implementation of their BIOS was a trade secret.
A patent actually requires you to make public the way your invention works. For that, you get a monopoly on the product for 17 years. You don't get a monopoly on your invention until someone else comes up with it independently, you get it for 17 years.
- This will put ads on newspaper websites.
- It will try to make placement relevant. For example, ads for financial services would be placed on web pages from a newspaper's website's financial section, or inforamtion about a company's San Francisco store would be included with the ad that goes with a page from the San Francisco Chronicle.
- It would centralize billing arrangements, for example, you would pay Global Networks once for advertising instead of making deals with 50 seperate newspapers.
- It would customize the size of ads to each newspaper website's adspace specifications.
- It would track page views and click-throughs.
So, already Double-click does the central billing and usage tracking. Almost all ad-serving websites use one of a couple standard sizes, making resizing unnecessary. The only thing useful about this patent that has not already been in widespread use for years is the targeted content based on the site or page. (Double-click's targeted ads are based on a web surfer's use patterns).The specificity of newspaper websites makes this patent pretty limited. I don't see them making a lot of money off of it unless the internet advertising market rebounds and the current ad model changes significantly. Still, eographically targeted ads are something that advertisers have wanted to be able to do for a while. The nature of the internet makes it difficult. It's hard to tell where a paticular person lives. Using geographically centered sites like newspapers might be a good model for pulling off this trick.
I wonder if this is not a way for Global Networks to bump their stock price, by advertising the fact that they have patent portfolio.
The key phrase is "a derivative advertisement," which means that the original ad image is modified depending on the site and page on which it is displayed. It's a more complicated than an IMG tag.
Sklyarov's case was something entirely different. He didn't commit any crime, he only sold a tool that could be used to commit a crime. Arresting Sklyarov was like arresting someone for selling a kitchen knife.
Actually, under the DCMA, he did commit a crime. It is a crime to sell or even distribute a program that can be used to circumvent any type of copy protection. What we got up in arms about is not that Sklyarov was a Russian who was arrested in the US because of something he did in Russia. What we got up in arms about was how messed up the DCMA is. It criminalized selling the kitchen knife.
While it has been shown that training at altitude helps an athelete compete at altitude, I don't believe there is much evidence showing that training at altitude helps performance at sea level. So, while training in Denver would help an athelete compete at the Mexico City Olympics, it wouldn't offer significant advantages at the LA Olympics.
Nike is trying to solve a problem they helped create. Marathon running is very demanding on the body. Many experts say that a person can't run more than 2 competitive marathons per year without seeing a degradation in performance. It just takes too long for the body to recover.
Nike and the fitness industry in general, capatilized on the salad days of US marathoning in the 70's and early 80's, promoting it and profiting from its popularity. One thing that happened was that marathon racing (and other track and field sports) became quasi-professional. Athletes were allowed to accept prize and appearance money, and if it was laundered through a "training fund," they would still be eligible for the Olympics as an amateur. Nike was one of the big corporate sponsors who supplied the prize money.
For the top marathoners, it became profitable to run 4 or 5 marathons a year. Just showing up meant a paycheck. This type of schedule quickly started taking its toll, and US marathoners stopped being competitive on the world stage. As US atheletes' performance dropped, the sport's popularity nosedived as well, and marathon running has never recovered.
The unwashed masses, AOLer's and such, are already excluded from voting in ICANN's elections by ignorance. Most people on AOL, WebTV, MSN, et al, don't even know there is an ICANN, let alone what it does or that it holds elections.
If you are savvy enough to be aware of the elections, that pretty much means you are informed enough to vote on them.
Which is not to say that there couldn't be problems with the security-through-obscurity approach (a massive publicity campaign by an evil corporate entity, a "vote here" check box at your AOL log-in screen or something). But whether or not someone may have abused the system is something we will never know, because the system was never given a chance to work.
- First, they just refused to hold the elections of "at large" board members.
- Then they reduced the number of the "at large" board members.
- Then, they instigated a messed-up "registration" system, so it became very difficult for anyone to be eligible to vote.
- Then, after they finally do hold these messed up elections, and a couple outsiders do manage to get into the club, they thwart every move of those members, including refusing to show ICANN budget documents to some of the people who are ostensibly reponsible for said budget.
This final blow is simply a fait accompli. ICANN has effectively kept the internet-using public from having any say in their doings from the get -go.telling big business they can do whatever they want is like telling a 15 year old boy he can watch whatever he wants on late night cable
Except that when a 15 year old watches soft core porn on cable, it doesn't cost tens of thousands of people their jobs or their retirement investments.
The SongPro for GameBoy has been around since late 2000. It was originally called the SongBoy, but Nintendo sued for trademark infringement and they changed the name.
This is the same company, and pretty much the same product, only in a version for the GameBoy Advance. I would expect to see similiar market penetration for the GBA model as there was for the original. Which was negligible, in case everyone's lack of knowledge of the earlier product hasn't made that point.
Your right. If the FBI says he was going to blow things up and kill people, I guess he should rot in jail without a trial. He could stay in a cell next to Wen Ho Lee. I just hope that the FBI doesn't think that you are considering doing something bad.
Jose Padilla, the "dirty bomb" suspect, is a US citizen. He has been placed in military custody as an "enemy combatant." He was placed in military custody, because in order to keep him in police custody, law enforcement must charge him with a crime and present evidence of it. They are unable or unwilling to do so, so they are doing an end-run around the constitution .
Perhaps thousands (the justice department won't say) of non-US citizens are being held without being charged with any crime. The justice department's secrecy on the issue, and its trampling of Mr. Padilla's constitutional rights, could lead one to wonder if more US citizens are in custody without due process.
Okay, "general overview of IT industry" is really vague, and I don't think one book could cover it. But if you are not a CS major, and are coming from almost no computer experience, then what are you doing on /. Seriously, an A+ certification study guide is very helpful if you don't know the difference between SCSI and ATI, or Cat 5 from a phone cable.
Couple that with a nice book on network administration like those mentioned above or
Essential System Administration from O'Reilly (also available in Windows flavor)
and you can give yourself a nice introduction to the IS side of things and make yourself much more useful at the helpdesk.